Economic Globalization in India

I10 2

Views: 289

All Rights Reserved

Copyright © 2010, Common Ground Research Networks, All Rights Reserved

Abstract

In the wake of “tearing down” the Berlin Wall, the process of neo-liberal economic globalization entered into a new phase provoking discussions on the meaning of globalization that contains stark value judgments. The incipient liberalization created considerable interest among the Indian urban middle classes and confident industrialists. However, a contrasting trend soon became evident in the emergence of movements protesting against economic globalization and giving new momentum to the defense of local uniqueness and perceived threat to national identity. The Indian intellectual movement introducing “glocalization” (though not necessarily) provides an example in “hybridity” to testify that economic globalization has always been influenced by an amicable cultural norm that has, throughout ages, been an important mechanism in universalizing particularism as well as the particularization of universalism. Today, economic globalization takes a standardized consumer culture in contrast to both the Hindu scriptural ill-defined economic value systems and neo-Marxist stoic view, which opposes international trade, commerce, and multinational finance. Whereas for the neo-Marxists in India, anti-globalization is a war on wealth, for the nationalists and religious Hindu revivalists, globalization is an attack on swadeshi economic self-reliance, believed to be a spiritual corrective. My study raises and verifies three interconnected issues: First, what have been the cultural urges in ancient and medieval eras in promoting globalization? How do they differ from the current trends? Second, what has been the extent and direction of culture in accelerating global trade links? Last, what are the results of globalization, especially in making poverty worse than before in poverty-stricken modern India?