ABSTRACT
Sunil Khilnani argues in The Idea of India (1993) that Bombay and Bangalore are each “an avatar of the contrary potentialities of India’s modernity” and “each manifests an exhaustion of the national imagination” (148). Khilnani fears it has become more advantageous for residents to identify as Maharashtrian or Hindu than Indian in Bombay. In the case of Bangalore, Khilnani imagines its exemplary resident as “the young MBA or software expert” for whom “India is merely one stopping place in a global employment market” (149). If Bombay risks falling into a dangerous parochialism and communalism, a process famously represented by Salman Rushdie in The Moor’s Last Sigh, then Bangalore, according to Khilnani, risks falling prey to a deracinating globalism.
