Examining the “Global” Indian Middle Class: Gender and Culture in the Silicon Valley/Bangalore Circuit

The phenomenal growth of India's information technology (IT) industry has produced a transnational class of professionals who are actively engaged in constructing a notion of a new India that is global in scope, yet Indian in essence. The affluent US-based Indian diaspora, along with professionals in India, co-construct a new India. This interaction has been enhanced through growing professional opportunities in India for immigrants who return. Between the software hubs of Silicon Valley and Bangalore, discourses of belonging that emphasise “Indian family values” gain strength through constant circulation. Professional women play a critical role in re-inventing the Indian family and thus, a new kind of “global Indianness”. Drawing from interviews with software engineers in Silicon Valley and Bangalore, this paper argues that a new discourse of belonging to India is a fundamentally gendered one that relies on the ability of professional women to make delicate balances between an “Indian” home life and a “global” professional life. The similarities across contexts of these personal struggles indicate the merging of meanings of Indianness among professional Indians across the globe, suggesting a need for a transnational approach to diaspora studies that is attentive to the dynamics of gender, class and nation.