This study of professional software women in urban India examines practices of respectable femininity and discourses of the Indian family to understand the changing and abiding aspects of a seemingly new national culture. Colonial and nationalist constructs of the Indian home, and the middle-class women who protected that home, continue to powerfully shape everyday articulations of national belonging, even as they are transformed through individual negotiations and a global economy. Drawing from extensive interviews and ethnographic work, this paper analyzes the interplay of gender, class, and nation in contemporary urban India as individualized, gendered efforts to accumulate symbolic capital.

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As questions of "knowledge economy" have come to the center of studies of the global political economy, the World Bank and other international organizations have begun promoting "knowledge for development" (K4D) in many postcolonial contexts over the last several years. These strategies toward broad goals of social and economic development presume a neoliberal orientation of the individual towards state and society. Using the example of contemporary urban India, this study examines the unexpected outcomes of imposing and legitimating the neoliberal political rationality that underpins K4D practices at individual and societal levels. Rather than having successfully produced a "new middle class," as touted in media representations of India's success, emphasis on K4D and a knowledge economy in India has had the effect of producing an elite with formidable economic strength, as well as the cultural dominance to re-imagine and negotiate meanings of Indianness. Here, I approach the knowledge economy as a "global assemblage" concretized and specified through the everyday practices of individuals, and aim to critique the assumptions of the knowledge economy by drawing on the articulations of contemporary Indian knowledge professionals.Thomas Friedman (2005), presents India as a quintessential example of success in the knowledge economy. Far from being poorly paid sweatshop workers, Friedman portrays Indian knowledge workers as having cutting-edge skills and an ambitious outlook, able to compete with their counterparts in any part of the world. The book falls in line behind a spate of recent publicity concerning India's success in information technology in the New York Times, Financial Times, the Economist, Business Week, and many other high-profile publications. Most of the publicity projects an image of a "new" India, with the figure of the Indian knowledge professional at its center. Authors writing on the topic associate the success of India's knowledge workers with the progress of India overall -a new path toward broader goals of social and economic development (

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