ABSTRACT
In my Facebook timeline over the past few years, I have noted that many of my Indian friends – executives working for multinational companies, educated professionals, and/or independent entrepreneurs – are uploading holiday pictures of themselves standing before cathedrals, museums, and cafes located in Vienna, London, and Paris. This is certainly a shift in middle-class aspirations. Those of us born in the 1960s, did not grow up in families, regardless of income, who viewed holidays abroad in Europe as a viable option, and these images are yet another signifier of the growing cosmopolitanism of the transnational middle class. Industry insiders have noted that this trend is being, “driven by the country’s middle class” (Heikkila, 2012, p. 2). Not only has domestic travel increased, significantly, but international travel has quadrupled in the past decade. Families are spending on an average of Rs. 50,000 to Rs. 200,000 on family holidays in a country which, according to the International Labor Organization has an average annual income of Rs. 84,000. 1 Such an explosion of international travel underscores another facet of the transnational middle classes’ global aspirations further shoring up a manifest desire to be counted as major actor on the international arena. This expanding globalism is a prominent component of the rapidly morphing social milieu which has formed the context of the gendered interpretation of nationalism that has been the focus of this book.
