Abstract
This presentation will consider how North Indians conceptualize Indian identity and how identity is performed at an NGO in a rural setting. The focus will be on the gendered nature of the performance of identity and the feminization of identity. The presentation will draw on ethnographic research with NGO staff members in Rajasthan, India. These staff members’ discourses on the preferred ways Indians and foreigners should act and behave, especially around children, illuminates key markers of Indian identity that are indispensable to their notions of Indian identity. Analysis of these discourses highlights which aspects of identity are impervious to foreign, particularly Western influence and modulation. This paper analyzes these identity markers in relation to economic changes and shifts in North India as a result of economic liberalization and the recent global recession. By doing so, the presentation finds that gendered identity markers and boundaries are ever more salient even as discourses of Indian exceptionalism and imperviousness to outside influence dominate.
