Masculinity, Consumerism and the Post-National Indian City: Streets, Neighbourhoods, Home

Sanjay Srivastava

Jan 2023 · Cambridge University Press

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Imagining the city as a series of interconnected spaces, the book explores how several such connections – between the home and the street, family and public spaces, religious and non-religious contexts, for example – relate to the topic of masculinity. How do men – elite, subaltern, consumers, 'heads' of the family, members of 'Hindu fundamentalist' organisations, readers of pulp fiction and 'footpath pornography', those who admire the 'strong' political leader – move between these spaces, define them and are defined by them? Urbanisation in India is a vibrant site of an extraordinary cultural, social and economic churn, a context of both the consolidation of masculine identities as well as anxieties regarding their place in the city. The book suggests that sustained and in-depth engagements with specific historical and social contexts avoids tendencies to imagine cities as nodes of comparison that frequently generates universal models of urbanism.

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Sanjay Srivastava is an anthropologist and British Academy Global Professor in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at SOAS, University of London. He is also Visiting Research Professor in the Department of Sociology, Shiv Nadar University, Delhi-NCR.