Ageing, consumption and middle-classness: implications for intergenerational relations in India

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Tannistha Samanta FLAME University, India

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© Author 2024
Online Publication Date:
19 Jul 2024
Pages:
1–16
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Bristol University Press
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Early View
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1332/27528499Y2024D000000024
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In this piece, I use consumption as a lens to argue how urban, middle-class Indians in their middle and later ages are emerging as a distinctive consumer society while rewriting the scripts of growing old in India. This cultural shift is happening at a time when novel modes of ageing are imagined against the backdrop of transnational family arrangements, market-based care and a quest for vitality and autonomy among older Indians, altering the cultural continuities of intergenerational relationships. I show how consumption as a cultural force both expands the expressive capabilities of older persons but, at the same time, imposes disciplinary discourses around the family and social relationships. Overall, I critically reflect on what the ‘downward blurring’ of the ageing self does to the contemporary frameworks of intergenerational relationships in India. I conclude by discussing both the possibility and the (cultural) limit of theories developed in the industrialised West to capture the shifting realities of transitional societies.

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Tannistha Samanta FLAME University, India

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