Domesticating Markets: Early Years Education and Middle-Class Parenting in India

Abstract

Over the last two decades, much has been written about India’s new middle classes and their lifestyles, but little attention has been paid to the way liberalisation policies and the attending neoliberal ideology is transforming the family. In this chapter I will discuss some of the changes pertaining to the way children are brought up in this social strata based on two decades of fieldwork in Calcutta/Kolkata, India. This chapter provides an ethnographically based perspective on middle-class parenting and argues that where in China extensive government intervention and in Malaysia Islamist agendas frame the reordering of the social world of early childhood under processes of globalisation, in India economic liberalisation and neoliberal ideology shape the same processes. This is the case even where they are introduced as part of a right-wing Hindutva (Hindu way of life) agenda, and they affect middle-class children and their families in multiple ways. More specifically, the chapter shows how the middle-class family becomes a prime site where neoliberal values are reproduced and enacted in relation to new government agendas and economic conditions.