Café Culture in Pune

Description

  The emergence of a visible, commodified leisure culture in the form of cafés, targeted at and appropriated by young adults from the middle class, is a striking phenomenon in the transformation of urban life in India since the economic liberalization in 1991. Café Culture in Pune is an ethnographic snapshot, taken in 2008, tracing the effects of globalization from the perspective of young middle class urbanites in post-liberalization Pune, India. Documenting with meticulous detail their lifeworlds—from clothing to hanging out, friendship, dating, education, and marriage—this work captures new forms of socializing, consumption, self-improvement, and relationship-management. These practices set the young generation apart—the first to grow up with mass-consumerism—as a group in historical time, in relation to other lifeworlds in India, to ‘western’ versions and as a rounded lifeworld in itself.  Rich in ethnographic detail, this work follows the young café culture crowd, which in its practices sought to domesticate ‘the global’ while transcending ‘the local’. They were negotiating to follow their hearts, while preserving strong family bonds and inter-generational dependencies—thus modifying the meaning of being middle class Indians in our contemporary globalized world.

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