Brand New Nation

About this book

"In a bid to become an attractive investment destination and the land of limitless opportunity in the global economy, India has undergone a dramatic image makeover over two decades of economic reforms. The "new India" - shorthand for prosperous, techno-friendly, enterprising, middle-class beneficiaries of the gains of economic reforms - signals the spectacular event of transformation that seemingly ruptured the barriers between the first and third worlds. Brand New Nation opens up a new field of inquiry to examine how this "newness" is anticipated, manufactured, and experienced in the postcolony dressed up as an emerging market. What does it even mean for a nation to be transformed into an investment destination for global capital? And when and how did the postcolony come to be perceived as the future of capitalism itself? Ravinder Kaur examines this enchanting moment of transition, which also signifies the euphoric arrival of neuzeit (new time), the epochal threshold that marks India's temporal shift into modernity. If the strange aesthetics of novelty were formed within a play of discontinuities, of tensions between the old and the new, then the ruptured surface was seemingly held together by deep, undisturbed structures of enduring timelessness. Kaur traces the history of this interwoven duality, which has long underpinned the claims of India's constant rebirth as being staged in the enigmatic theatre of timeless past and accelerated future, and the ways in which it continues to manufacture the current imaginary of 21st-century India as a global player"--