Entangled in the imagination: New middle-class apprehensions in an Indian theme park

ethnos, vol. 71:3, sept. 2006 (pp. 390–414) © Routledge Journals, Taylor and Francis, on behalf of the Museum of Ethnography

issn 0014-1844 print/issn 1469-588x online. doi: 10.1080/00141840600902729

Entangled in the Imagination:New Middle-Class Apprehensions in an Indian Theme Park

Minna SääväläUniversity of Helsinki, Finland

abstract By analysing a visit to Ramoji Film City, a theme park in Hyderabad, by a group of youths, this essay examines how transterritorial flows of imagery are socially contextualized by India’s new middle classes. A theme park is a spatial arrangement that incorporates imaginary worlds and makes them available to experience in a con-textless ‘here-and-now’. As such, the theme park is a stage where the fragile identity of India’s new middle classes is put on trial. Despite the appeal of the theme park for potential middle-class visitors, the visitors I followed appeared largely uninspired by the imagery of the far away and past in Film City, and they found it difficult to incorporate their visit to the theme park as a meaningful social practice. The case of Ramoji Film City shows how the social situatedness of the subject determines the significance of the imagination in the transnational world.

keywords Class, status, consumption of leisure, film, India

In recent years, anthropologists have increasingly come to embrace concepts such as the imagination (Appadurai 1996), fantasy (Weiss 2002), phantasm (Favero 2003; Ivy 1995), and simulacra (Baudrillard 1994) in their attempts

to come to grips with a world in flux. These interrelated concepts, which stress the importance of experiencing the spatially and temporally distant Other as immanent and present, have not only influenced the vocabularies of contemporary socio-cultural anthropology; they are also part of the standard fare of post-colonial theory and cultural studies (e.g., Allison 1996; Carrier 1995; Chakrabarty 2000; Gaonkar 2002; Guano 2002; Liechty 2003; Metcalf 2001; Nava 2002; Nederveen Pieterse & Parekh 1995; Žižek 1997). However, sociocultural anthropology possesses superior methodological and analytical means for examining the complex relationship between lived social experience and global, mass-mediated imaginaries.

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391Entangled in the Imagination

ethnos, vol. 71:3, sept. 2006 (pp. 390–414)

This article examines how the imagination colonizes new middle-class reality in India, by analysing the ways middle-class visitors appropriate imaginaries represented in Ramoji Film City, a theme park cum film studio in Hyderabad, India.1 How are flows of imagery contextualized and what is their role in creating meaningful social existence in a new consumer society? How does the concept of the imagination help us to understand the socio-cultural strategies of the new middle classes in the Third World?

The ability and tendency to imagine alternative worlds — to transcend the visible and tangible — is undoubtedly one of the universal features of humankind. The process of signification in itself, the leap from a signifier to the signified, requires the work of the imagination. However, the imagination is said to be assuming new forms and new salience as part of current global processes. Appadurai (1996) argues that the imagination plays a ‘newly significant role’ in the post-electronic world: rather than being relegated to the realm of ritual, art and myth, the imagination has become a collective, social fact in transter-ritorialized, mass-mediated situations (1996 : 5). Ordinary people, more than ritual specialists or charismatic leaders, are engaged in creating mythographies that comprise the basis of new social projects (1996 : 6). The imagination refers both to a new form of transmission and a new consciousness: to the circuit and representation of images that moves through the channels of mass media, and to the transformations of cognition in which dispersed things, persons and regions are imagined as part of a single place (Weiss 2002: 96).

Theme parks are imaginary sites par excellence: places that invite their middle-class visitors to imagine themselves to be somewhere else. As part of a new economy of experience theme parks have mushroomed throughout Asia, where a new sense of leisure and the accumulation of wealth enable people to partake in these celebrations of the imaginary. Only one theme park, in the narrow sense of the term,2 exists in India. In 2000, Ramoji Film City in Hyderabad, a theme park and filming facility, introduced itself in its brochure in the following way:

Ramoji Film City, the land of films & fantasy, where dreams turn to reality. A strong favourite of the film fraternity, the world’s largest Film City is enchanting, enthralling and spellbinding at the same time. Amidst the rocky Deccan landscape, in the heart of Andhra Pradesh, the magic of the make-believe is a heady and engulfing surprise, as you are confronted with the Film City’s splash of colour and charm. Glamorous, surreal and breathtakingly beautiful, its mind-boggling mammoth proportions, scores of unbelievable sets and fantastic landscapes offer more than just a glimpse into the thrilling and exciting world of film and television.

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Grandeur, glamour and professionalism combine to present a fantastic and truly out-of-this-world experience.

Ramoji Film City offers middle-class Indians literally the imaginary and the fantastic, in an ‘out-of-this-world experience’. The motto of Film City is ‘making the magic happen’; expressions such as magic, make-believe, surreal, fantastic and glamour, endeavour to create an impression of an ideal typical manifestation of the utterly globalizing, imaginary and translocal world. Excavating the role this kind of place plays in the social positionings and perceptions of class hierarchy of new middle-class Hyderabadis can help us to deepen our understanding of the contemporary politics of place and iden-tity. The experience of the imaginary simultaneously entices and distresses a new middle-class visitor, and this double reaction manifests a deeper new middle-class anxiety of exclusion and inclusion in traditionally hierarchical contexts in the Third World, such as India.

The New Middle Classes in IndiaNew middle classes have proliferated in India during the last decade, although

still only a minority of around 20 per cent of the population — 200 million people — could be described as middle class on the basis of consumption and educational criteria (Sheth 1999). Indian social organization has experienced deep transformations following economic liberalization at the beginning of the 1990s; international capital has entered this huge, albeit polarized, economy, and both production and consumption have undergone structural changes. Before the 1990s, Indian economic policy was largely based on import substitution and government control of production and sale, whereas for the last decade liberalization has made an unlimited array of goods available to those with purchasing power. Concurrent with the embrace of consumerism, a political conservatism in the form of Hindu nationalism has grown in importance, which is manifested in the political power of Bharatiya Janata Party that ran the coalition government from 1998 till 2004. The phenomenon of the new middle class is pivotal for both the growth of consumerism and the resurgence of politico-religious movements in India (see e.g. van der Veer 1994).

Indian middle classes share structural features with middle classes in other Asian new consumer societies that have been extensively studied during the last decade (e.g. Chua 2000; Kahn 1994; Lett 1998; Liechty 2003; Robison & Goodman 1996; Sen & Stivens 1998). In India, as in other post-colonial Asian societies, the growth of the middle classes has to be ‘located in ma-trices of power associated with modern state formation’ (Kahn 1994:38)

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and to the structural effects of globalization and economic liberalization. To be considered middle-class, a family must have sufficient stable income to engage in mass consumption and secure living quarters in a middle-class residential area, must possess the money and savoir faire to keep up a clean, respectable and ‘suitably fashionable’ (Liechty 2003) profile in public, and must be reasonably educated, preferably in a private school (Liechty 2003; Säävälä 2001; van Wessel 2001).

Middle-class identity does not always imply an upper caste and Hindu background. Although the majority of middle-class Indians are Hindus and come from upper-caste and locally dominant landowning caste backgrounds, a growing proportion of upwardly mobile new middle classes comes from lower-caste groups. New economic opportunities since the 1990s and gov-ernmental preferential policies have created opportunities for social mobility for those administratively labelled as Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and Other Backward Classes (referring to former Untouchables, ‘Tribals’ and Shudras). The social situation of middle-class people of hierarchically low- caste status is particularly fragile, as they have to cross barriers of caste pre-judice. Any division between a lower and an upper middle class therefore has to be situational rather than absolute; old and new, Hindu and other, lower and upper, high-caste and low-caste middle classes are categorizations that cut across each other and create a game board on which the players strive for status and try to create a meaningful sense of belonging. Middle-class Indians form, in other words, a heterogeneous social category. The old middle class with its roots in the colonial administration, the petty bourgeoisie of small entrepreneurs, and the new middle class of civil servants and other white-collar employees are situated in different socio-cultural and economic worlds.

Yet, despite these complications, it still makes sense to speak of ‘the new middle classes’ collectively as a social phenomenon, because they share certain social features on which that identification is based. From a systemic perspective, we could perhaps consider the following as universal character-istics of the middle-class social position: economic and cultural dependency on the elite, modest but increasing opportunities for consumption, concern over education as a mechanism for securing and reinforcing position and wealth, a desire for predictability and certainty in law and government, and access to the information necessary to secure interests (Robison & Goodman 1996:11).

In a society undergoing rapid transformations, the South Asian new middle classes experience their identity ‘in the middle’ as fragile and in need

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of constant reinforcement (van Wessel 2001; Liechty 2003). This fragility derives not only from the unstable society in which they live, but also from the rapid changes that many have experienced in their own families. A considerable number of these upwardly mobile people have rural and/or economically less advantaged roots, which means that they have relatively little social and cultural capital to help support their newly-acquired social positions. In a society such as India, stable income is rarely truly secure and public social security does not exist. Thus the danger of economic hardship and the horror of indebtedness also affect new middle-class consciousness. Because the possession of sufficient economic means is essential for claiming middle-class status, anxiety over wealth and consumption is a general char-acteristic of middle-class mentality (Ortner 1998; Ehrenreich 1990). The ability to secure steady income derives, in turn, from educational and cultural capital that demands perpetual revitalization: the economic and the cultural are mutually reinforcing fields of middle-class prestige.

During my periods of fieldwork in Hyderabad between 1994 and 2005, it was repeatedly brought to my attention that people who live a middle-class life build up their identities largely through negation. They feel a pressing need to constantly stress their moral superiority vis-a-vis the ‘uncivilized’ labouring class (which they call the ‘poor people’, biidawaaLLu in Telugu), the ‘morally corrupt’ elite (called the ‘big people’, goppawaaLLu) as well as the phantasm of the ‘degenerate’ though attractive West (see also Favero 2003; van Wessel 2001; Liechty 2003 on Nepal). This identification through negation is exemplified in a young new middle-class woman’s comments on the manager of her work place, a lingerie shop. The manager was an upper-class woman from a formerly ruling Muslim elite of the region. To Durga, her employee, she was an example of goppawaaLLu, the elite, who have become ‘too Western’ and thus could be considered as morally inferior from the new middle-class viewpoint. Durga saw the manager’s moral dubiousness to be manifested in her living separate from her parents and being a divorcee, wearing too much lipstick, and having extended lunch dates with her male business partners. In Durga’s eyes, she lacked maanam (honour, modesty, sense of respect), that Durga herself considered as the most important aim in life. Despite the negative moral evaluation of her manager’s character, the employee appeared to be mesmerized by her boss, returning to discussions of her actions and manners whenever I met with her. The difference between her boss and herself simultaneously irritated her and helped her to realize positively her own class identity.

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New middle classes search for their position in the midst of constantly evolving social and cultural relations, and consequently their practices are pregnant with conscious and unconscious attempts to cement class status and respectability vis-a-vis the norms of a more stable ‘old’ middle-class public (e.g. Dickey 2002; Säävälä 2001, 2003). These strategies are manifested in dress, religious practice, education, use of language, and other attempts to appear ‘respectable’ in the urban milieu. Emulating the ways of the hierarchically higher in caste terms, especially the Brahmanical ways (called Sanskritization, see e.g. Charsley 1998), still helps to understand some cultural strategies of the upwardly mobile in South India where the Brahmanical model has been prevalent (Srinivas 1989:18); however, prestigious practices do not reflect the traditionalized purity-pollution dialectic alone. Notions of auspiciousness (óubham) (Säävälä 2003) and respectability (maanam) are other important non-economic forms of middle-class status claims.

The context of new middle-class Hyderabadi lives is characterized by the growing influence of migration and media, resembling the way that the Nepali middle class, as described by Liechty (2003), is entangled in a world of mass-mediated popular imagination. However, even if the context of middle-class life appears media-saturated through the use of the internet, watching satellite tv, going to the cinema, reading newspapers and magazines, viewing ads in public spaces, and so on, we still need to delve into actual social life in order to evaluate the importance and meaning of this omnipresence.

The City of HyderabadHyderabad is a city that displays the contradictions of global connectedness.

This south Indian city of over 5 million has undergone a thorough transfor-mation in the last 10 years. The once sleepy and provincial state capital of Andhra Pradesh has become an it hub hosting a growing number of Indian and international companies. Although the city is not truly metropolitan in the sense of Delhi, Kolkata or Mumbai, Hyderabad’s outlook and atmosphere is increasingly similar with its ubiquitous expressways, billboards, cyber cafes, exclusive country clubs and trendy shopping centres. These are considered the insignia of progress, though ethnographic analysis of the way Indians incorporate this new visual cityscape is of recent origin (see e.g. Favero 2003; Sarai reader 2001, 2002; Patel & Masselos 2003; Patel & Thorner 1997). Signs that derive from reference to the socially and spatially distant are ubiquitous for any urban Indian, middle class or otherwise.

India, and especially the south, has become one of the leading exporters

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of professionals to post-industrialized countries. The emigration of it and other professionals from Hyderabad and other parts of Andhra Pradesh to the West or the Gulf states is a growing trend, so much so that every middle-class person can cite at least one, but more commonly several, relatives or friends who have gone abroad to work or study. At the same time, the state of Andhra Pradesh remains an area stricken by drought, poverty, and illiteracy where the bulk of the population lives in rural villages and earns a living from agriculture. Socio-economic polarization shows in the visibly widening gap in the standard of living between the bulk of the population and the emergent middle classes, with their mobile phones, new cars and gated homes.

In Hyderabad, many new middle-class families have a rural landowning caste background. They have managed to improve their economic position and have invested their wealth in the education of their children and in urban real estate (Upadhya 1997). Many middle-class people have migrated to the rapidly growing state capital, which has led to the mushrooming of residential areas around the city. The historically Muslim-oriented old cen-tre, not considered by my middle-class Hyderabadi informants as a ‘decent’ and safe place to live, has consequently experienced a decline. Despite its predominantly Muslim history, the character of Hyderabad has changed drastically in the last decade or two; people born and bred in Hyderabad commonly deplore the fact that migrants from the coastal area culturally dominate it. The spaces of the city are, I will argue, redefined as sources of social identification by the emergent middle class. An important part of this redefinition of social space is the emergence of sites that are largely free from deep-seated regional and religious controversies plaguing the image of Hyderabad. Ramoji Film City is one such site.

An Imaginary Place – Ramoji Film CityPart of the political and economic strategy for drawing national and inter-

national attention to Hyderabad has been the establishment of Ramoji Film City, a film studio that competes in its proportions with Universal Studios in California. Film City was established in 1999 by media mogul Ramoji Rao, the owner of Telugu- and English-language newspapers, tv broadcasting companies and other businesses. Its developers made extensive use of Ame-rican expertise in creating a complex whose facilities and competitive rates would attract crews from beyond India as well, including the U.S. During the term of Chief Minister Chandrababu Naidu, the political leadership laun-ched measures to transform Hyderabad into an economically vibrant centre

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of capitalism and new technology. The vision of Chandrababu Naidu was largely fulfilled, and part of the package was the support that the political and media establishment gave to Film City. Critical appraisals of Film City are practically non-existent, and recent allegations of it having encroached upon 2,000 acres of prime government land without due payment have been dismissed as baseless by the state administration.3

Ramoji Film City is allegedly the world’s largest film studio. An hour by car ( 35 km) from the city centre and a popular destination for day trips, its main function is to offer complete facilities for film and tv production. During the five years of its existence, Film City has grown greatly in popularity among the film fraternity, to the extent that 250 films, both Indian and internatio-nal, were produced in 2003. It employs 7,500 persons and 800,000 visitors passed through its gates in 2002. It is exclusive, with tickets costly 4 and pri-vate transportation almost a necessity — the site is just barely within reach of public transportation. Ramoji Film City has an aura of luxury about it.

Theme parks are loci of global media flows par excellence. They are hete-rotopias, or spatial arrangements that incorporate imaginary worlds to be experienced as part of the ‘here-and-now’. They attract their visitors with the allure of fantasy. Theme parks have mainly been studied as a part of ‘public culture’, manifesting the postmodern condition (Bormann 1998; DeAngelis 1997; van Wert 1995). The American Disneylands have also attracted some anthropological attention (e.g., Fjellman 1992), and Raz’s (1999) sociological study of the Tokyo Disneyland is among the few that represent a theme park holistically in a non-Western frame of reference (see also Brannen 1992). Hendry’s (2001) anthropological study of Japanese and other Asian theme parks is by far the most interesting and thorough study of this issue. Her monograph explores Japanese classifications of display and attitudes towards imitation that integrate such parks into Japanese social historical and linguistic contexts, despite their ‘foreignness’. She explains how, in the Japanese con-text, imitation is not given negative moral value and how learning, pleasure and work are combined in the consumption of leisure in Japanese theme parks. However, as the Japanese context differs drastically from the Indian socio-economic situation, analysis of Indian theme parks must be focussed differently. In Japan, where the majority is middle class, the theme parks do not seem to have the same kind of role in the formation of class distinction as in Ramoji Film City.

My intention here is not to investigate the theme park per se as a postmod-ern phenomenon of late capitalism, but rather to analyse the way the theme

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park is engaged and evaluated within lived social practice. From a bird’s-eye view, theme parks appear to manifest the revelry of the imaginary, the dreams related to the absent, and thus to have a primarily emancipatory role. By providing an ethnography of the theme park ‘from below’ I instead aim to show how the imaginary offered by a theme park may be experienced as burdensome, not as a liberating source of alternative worlds. I argue that the obvious fantasies of the spatially and temporally distant that a theme park offers may be culturally of secondary importance to the new middle class in a developing country and intensely hierarchical society. In the following, I will consider whether the concept of the imagination helps us to understand what it means for new middle-class Hyderabadi youth to visit Ramoji Film City. I would argue that the experience of the imaginary in the theme park is tinged with anxiety because the qualities of the place make it difficult to translate it into meaningful new middle-class social practice.

The Desire for the ExtraordinaryAs Friedman (1994:103) puts it, strategies of consumption can only be

truly grasped when we understand the specific way in which desire is consti-tuted, desire being a dynamic aspect of the formation of personhood. When speaking about desire for certain consumptive practices such as a visit to Ramoji Film City, we are engaged in analysing how the visitors establish and/or maintain their selfhood. More than only a struggle over distinction à la Bourdieu (1986), desire is governed by a complex logic of belonging and difference. In the South Asian context, the majority of new middle-class consumers are trying (at times frantically) to avoid symbolical rejection, to belong, rather than ‘fixing rank’, as there seem to be no winners, only losers, in the game of prestige (Liechty 2003:115). The curious combination of hierarchical South Asian social relations and new class consciousness based on consumption and formal education is reflected in the new middle-class approach to the imagination.

The Indian Film World and Identity PoliticsThe dynamics of desire and belonging manifested by the popularity of Film

City among Hyderabadi new middle classes derive from the socio-cultural and political situation in India. Establishing and maintaining selfhood as a middle-class Indian requires partaking in the mass-mediated imagery that is most vividly expressed by the Indian popular cinema, the direct point of reference in Ramoji Film City. Contemporary popular cinema represents

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both new middle-class self-confidence, and the links it establishes with ho-mogenous aspects of the country’s public culture on the one hand, and global mass culture on the other (Nandy 1998:15). In this sense, cinema exists at the nexus of the global, the national, and the middle class, and renders the film world a fountain of identity politics.

In southern India popular cinema and politics are closely interconnected, and films and film stars are more than mere entertainment (e.g., Dickey 1993; Nandy 1998). Being involved in the film industry often leads to political power, and explains part of the allure of the film world among the general public. Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh both have had long-standing state chief ministers who were famous film stars in their younger days, and Tamil Nadu’s present chief minister Jayalalithaa is a former film heroine as well. The nexus of power, cinema, and the sacred in southern India is intense: film stars are not only glorified, they may even be deified. The late N.T. Rama Rao, a celebrated actor and chief minister in Andhra Pradesh, preferred the film roles of the Hindu gods Rama and Krishna, and he was thought to have acquired divine qualities through these performances which were commonly broadcast on television during his time of office. Local-language cinema is a major medium through which chauvinistic feelings find their expression, and films are produced in all four South Indian languages. The role of the film world as a melting pot of nationalistic feelings, entertainment, religion and political influence explains part of the allure of Ramoji Film City among new middle-class Hyderabadis.

The new middle classes in Hyderabad visit cinemas, although less eagerly than the working class, or view the films on vcrs and dvd players. Going to the cinema often prompted contemptuous remarks by new middle-class people whom I accompanied to movie theatres; they complained about the riff-raff they had to face while queuing for tickets and passing intermissions, despite different ticket ranges that made it possible to keep a distance from the poorest clientele during the show. At the same time, the cinema represents a national unity above linguistic and regional difference, something utterly Indian, that subsumes even a middle-class cinema goer. Within Film City in 2000, this was evidenced, for example, in the use of a number of Indian languages in a guided bus tour around the theme park that most visitors take. The tour guide first inquired which languages were required, making it ap-parent that Film City is a place for the whole multilingual Indian nation and that the film world manifests this unity. In the tour bus, a local Telugu-speak-

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ing visitor would identify with a polyglot Indian new middle-class culture, rather more than with her own regional area or language. The guide’s talk avoided any reference to regional issues, even to regional Telugu cinema, which created a feeling of being in a ‘foreign land’ and at the same time of sharing the imagined Indian nation.

The presence of the film world in Ramoji Film City comes through as a point of reference in the constructions, sites and scenes of which the theme park consists. It is self-evident to visitors that the rationale for this huge theme park derives primarily from the needs of the film industry, and that visitors should be able to appropriate a share of the glamour attached to film making. However, the common visitor only rarely gets a glimpse of an actual filming process. The potential presence of popular film stars is signalled by the strict security measures at the entrance: gates similar to those found in airports lead to the park, and a personal security check with metal detectors is carried out, strengthening an exclusive atmosphere. The geography of Film City reflects the need to protect the film world from the mundane: visitors have to travel a few kilometres by company bus from the gate of entry to reach Film City proper. Thanks to the liminal space between the ‘sanctum sanctorum’ and the entrance, Film City can easily be protected from trespas-sers and onlookers. By these spatial features, Ramoji Film City instructs the visitor of its connection with power and prestige.

Although the direct reference point of Film City is the Indian national film world, its existence per se is largely intelligible as a confluence of global and national influences. The form that Ramoji Film City has taken, and will take, is part of a wider phenomenon in the entertainment industries of following the example of Disney World and Universal Studios (Davis 1996). While the majority of reference points in Film City are culled from Indian history (such as replicas of a Maurian palace and Mughal gardens) or present day India (a railway station, prison, temple and ‘mud villages’ used as stage sets in filming), the ‘foreign’ influence shows directly in a Wild West street complex with saloons and gallows, a replica of a Swiss street and a Chinese pagoda. However, more than ‘global’ connectedness and ‘Western’ imaginary places, Film City constructs an image of an Indian national past and present for the Indian visitor. In this respect the global is relevant to the social experience of Ramoji Film City to the extent that it explains why national identities are becoming increasingly salient in middle-class self-identification.

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Leisure Out of the OrdinaryA trip to Film City reflects the changing idea of leisure among the Indian

middle classes, and thus a new conception of time. Although cinema has been for decades the most popular public mass entertainment, visits to relatives and possibly to religious sites have filled spare time in all social classes. Outings commonly take place in attractive city parks and gardens, though leisure seems to be increasingly commercialized by the emergence of exclusive clubs, restaurants and shopping centres. Activities away from home and the neigh-bourhood have become a defining characteristic of middle-class Hyderabadi life, and a staging ground for egalitarian friendship (Säävälä 2004). Hanging around tea stalls, cinemas and in the streets has long been a common pastime for males of all classes (Favero 2003; Chakrabarty 1999); what is new about new middle-class leisure in South India is that new middle-class girls and women participate in activities away from home, in mixed peer groups and sometimes without their relatives (Osella & Osella 1998). Earlier only working class and hierarchically low caste groups, in addition to some elite families, would consider allowing their women to move outside spheres defined as domestic in this manner. New forms of leisure change the configuration of gender relations and the feminine. Another new feature is the cash required to be part of these leisure activities. Patronizing private clubs, cruising the shopping centres, going to an exclusive iMax cinema theatre, and visiting Ramoji Film City all belong to the same category of ‘consumption of leisure’ that has a growing importance for middle-class self-identification.

This pressing need to partake in new urban topographies was the rationale behind a young friend’s insistence that we found time for a visit to Ramoji Film City in 2000, a year after it was established. Ramoji Film City was frequented by families but also by groups of friends, colleagues, and co-stu-dents. The place was a common topic of discussion among the new middle classes, especially among the youth; not having visited this extraordinary place appeared to raise eyebrows that asked for an explanation. Those who had been there were mostly taciturn about their experience, which further raised curiosity about the place.

Ramoji Film City’s allure is to a large extent based on its exclusivity. Al-though entry is not restricted in the manner of private clubs, a line is drawn between the privileged and the underprivileged, as the entrance fee is high even by middle-class standards. The exclusivity of the place is also evident in the lack of public transportation to the location: Film City lies in the middle of nowhere, amid parched hills at the fringe of the city. It is necessary to

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travel there by a private vehicle — buses pass Film City main gate but no facilities for a bus stand existed in 2000, after a year of operation. Instead, the spacious parking lot in front of the gate is paved with a fine spread of asphalt. The distance between the gates and the site itself, referred to above, creates a sense of expectation and imminent revelation in the visitor. It lifts the experience above the mundane and ordinary. Moreover, Film City has forbidden the construction of any food or drink stalls, which are commonly found in every public space in India, in the vicinity of the gates. Evidently the management would like to isolate the theme park from everything banal, underlining its exclusiveness by keeping its distance from the mundane.

The appeal of the place is nevertheless not simply due to its exclusivity, but undoubtedly reflects its association with the film industry and its glamour, with power, and with the ideas of technological progress, control of crowds and environment, and wealth that are related to the notion of the West in new middle-class Indians’ perspectives (e.g. Gupta 2000:21– 31).

The Imaginary, Distant OtherRamoji Film City directly incorporates imagery of the Other in its film sets

and public spectacles. Moreover, the idea of a theme park as an extension of a filmmakers’ facility is foreign, borrowed from the Universal Studios in the United States, and developed with the help of American consultants (The Loop 2003). Although only a few visitors are aware of the original ‘Universal’ model, in their experience they categorize the place as having features of a ‘foreign land’ and more specifically, as a ‘Western’ site. For our visit, my female friends Amrita and Durga decided to wear what they called ‘Western’ clothes — jeans and long blouses — and they also instructed me to discard my ordinary fieldwork attire of salwar kameez (long shirt and baggy trousers) in favour of slacks and a blouse. They considered Western attire suitable for the visit, and wanted to give a ‘modern’ impression when strolling through the attraction. They were in the habit of wearing jeans to the cinema and sometimes for shopping, although they mostly dressed in salwar kameez, and for festive occasions, in saris. The ‘Western’ image of the place was further strengthened by the fact that the employees were dressed in smart and col-ourful uniforms with caps, reminiscent of McDonald’s employees.

By visiting Ramoji Film City, unquestionably a luxurious and extraordinary setting, a new middle-class Indian partakes of a definitionally modern and cosmopolitan Indianness. As a spatial arrangement, Film City is divorced from the ordinary, both visually and socially, as the ‘streets’ are impeccably

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clean, planned, relatively depopulated, and the public is exclusive. The fourth member of the group, Mohan, who had recently returned from his it studies in Australia, had personal experience of ‘Western’ city streets. For him, the cleanliness of Ramoji Film City, the emptiness of the streets and squares, and absence of street vendors and beggars was akin to a hyperreal image of a ‘Western’ street. He was proud to show me, a ‘Westerner’ by definition, that in the public, even Indians and Hyderabadis could be tidy, calm, reserved, dis-interested, and blasé. He commented: ‘It’s nice here, having no waste around, it’s clean, and no hassle, just like in Australia.’ Mohan’s remark illustrates the way he defined Indian street reality in negative terms, as the absent but dramatic opposite of the ‘Western’ streets in Film City. Thus the dirty and crowded streets of India were an absent but necessary ‘mirror image’ of the West that Mohan saw in Ramoji Film City, which reflected the ‘Indian’ street life as inferior. Paradoxically, this portrayal gave Mohan the opportunity to define himself positively, as a prestigious Indian with a personal relationship with the idealized and desired Other, the West.

The Feeling of UncertaintyDespite the above-mentioned features that rendered Film City an attrac-

tive object of ‘consumption of experience’, the prevailing atmosphere was sullen and oddly reserved for a place designed for entertainment. The grand stage sets and fabulous surroundings aroused surprisingly little enthusiasm in my friends both during a visit and after it, although they had been thrilled by the idea in advance. Amrita, Durga and Mohan restlessly moved around the complexes, and hesitated to trespass on open, largely depopulated areas within the complex as they were unaccustomed to empty spaces. Amrita commented on the absence of people in Film City (it was not a weekend when the attraction is customarily more crowded), and my companions tended to gather close to other visitors, while maintaining barrier, to actual contact in terms of an exchange of small talk. They were most animated during their own filming activities — photographing each other on the steps of the palace and next to a statue, to provide the only tangible testimonies of their having visited this place.

When leaving Film City, we came upon a film crew that was shooting a dance sequence in the middle of the road. My friends were energized with delight — finally they were getting at least a glimpse of the film world in action, although there was no film star in sight, just a group of girls and boys dancing in costumes. The joy created by having witnessed a filming

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scene did not last long, however. Later, on our way back from Film City to Hyderabad, I asked my friends if they had enjoyed the visit. They hesitantly said yes, but they did not express the kind of enthusiasm I anticipated. They could not pinpoint exactly what was wrong with the attraction, but I sug-gest that their uneasiness reflected not only the physical artificiality, but also the social artificiality of the surroundings, being left as they were without coordinates to control the social situation. They were deprived of a potential role as patrons vis-à-vis ‘the poor’ who were absent from Film City, and they faced a ‘purified’ version of street life in which divisions within the privileged classes became their major preoccupation.

Later on at home, when a relative asked Durga about the experience, she admitted that she was disappointed — the place was not as enthralling as she had expected. ‘The gardens were the best,’ was Durga’s assertion. Surprisingly, the elements that were most appealing from a postmodern ‘bird’s-eye per-spective’ — the fantasy-triggering stage sets such as the Chinese pagoda and the Wild West, or replicas of the monuments from Indian history — did not stir my friends’ imagination; instead they had a lukewarm opinion of these glamorous sets. Were they simply unimaginative dullards, untouched by such creative abundance? Durga’s sister, who had also visited the theme park with college friends, shared Durga’s critical view, although she had been reticent about her experience there before our outing. Later I witnessed Durga being more enthusiastic in her descriptions of our trip to her work colleagues, giv-ing the impression of having enjoyed it. She was proud to have visited Film City, and moreover, accompanied by a foreigner and a friend just back from Australia. It appeared that for my informants the opportunity to profit from the social value of a visit to Ramoji Film City was far more important than the actual enjoyment offered by the attraction and its facilities. Durga’s way of presenting inconsistent opinions of the visit illustrates the ambivalence that Ramoji Film City and the imaginaries that it represents create among upwardly mobile middle classes. Despite not finding much enjoyment in Film City, Durga placed great value on the visit as a source of status.

The theme park as a cultural form is a novelty for most middle-class Indians; it is built on a social convention that allows experience to be consumed. This convention is imported from the affluent, post-industrial world, and in itself requires ‘domestication’ (Tobin 1992) or ‘indigenization’ (e.g. Ivy 1995 ). For many visitors to the theme park in Hyderabad, their experiential consumption of Film City is heavily coloured by their social experience in the city, and therefore not straightforward. The Indian visitor struggles to locate Ramoji

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Film City within a culturally meaningful experience by availing herself of the conceptual tools provided by her cultural background. I argue that the stylized sociality of Film City and the absence of ‘the poor’ make it difficult to realize this aim. This double-edged experience in Film City reflects a wider response to global imagery among middle classes in the Third World. When the imagination that is considered essential for middle-class identification in the global context cannot be easily incorporated into part of meaningful social world, this tends to strengthen, as I will show, a feeling of anxiety over one’s social identification, and even a consciousness of marginality.

The Exclusion of ‘the Poor’ and the Dialectics of DifferenceIn Film City, the central features of an Indian city street – namely people,

crowds, and hawkers – are to a large extent missing. This is not only because of the impracticality of moving around on foot in such a huge area and under a parching sun, it is also, more specifically, due to reasons of exclusion: most of India’s teeming life is rigorously excised in the interest of fantasy. Here, visitors mostly use a vehicle, a tour bus, to move around, which highlights the set-like character of the place and its exclusivity, and in areas where people populate the ‘streets’ and ‘squares’, they are all recognizably middle class.

People who were spending time in Ramoji Film City’s vast open spaces appeared to be painfully aware of their presence in an extraordinary setting, and of being watched as much as they watched others. The atmosphere and general demeanour of visitors is similar to the general atmosphere in upmarket shopping centres that I visited in Hyderabad. My companions talked in a restrained manner and the young women, in particular, control-led their gestures closely. The place had an air of a huge stage upon which people had ventured rather unprepared, to be gazed at, and to prove their middle-class identity. Their expressions did not convey a feeling of having much fun — their tone of speech lacked enthusiasm, and no hearty laughter reached my ears during the visit.5 As a public space, the site was alien to Amrita, Durga and Mohan’s ordinary street experience because, in addition to the absence of a teeming crowd, ‘the poor’, as the middle class refer to those socially below them, were missing from the scene.

The role of the ‘poor’ for middle-class social positionings is most evident in the use of domestic servants; the middle-class home, especially those of the upper castes (Frøystad 2003), requires the existence of servants, despite the fact that they are categorized as a threat, both symbolically and materially (Dickey 2000). To be able to employ people, to patronize them, is a sign of

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high status and has a particular meaning in hierarchical caste society as a high-status family can thus allocate polluting and other status-threatening work to lower groups. Moreover, to be engaged in intensive vertical trans-action networks and having many dependants manifests high social value in India (e.g. Raheja 1989; Marriott 1976).

Although entry is restricted, Film City visitors are from different social back-grounds, as the middle class is not a unified entity but comprises people of differing social and economic positions. Some families have been middle class since the colonial period, some have a background in the landowning peasan-try, and some are ‘new new middle class’, like Amrita and Durga with whom I visited the place. The absence of lower social strata creates a situation in which status differences among the middle-class clientele become more visible.

Amrita was studying in a commercial college for a bachelor’s degree, and Durga was a salesgirl in a lingerie boutique in Hyderabad. The young women had a hierarchically low caste, less advantaged middle-class background — their parents were uneducated, skilled labourers while the girls had been educated, and later married into more established middle-class families. They were most acutely insecure with regards recently acquired social status and the danger of being ‘recognized’ as upstarts from low-caste backgrounds (for the low-caste strategies of ‘passing’, see, e.g., Berreman 1972; Osella & Osella 2000:237–240). On the other hand, Mohan, in turn, was from an upper caste and had an unequivocally middle-class background. He had recently returned from Australia after completing an it course and was now searching for a job. Durga and Mohan had become acquainted in Durga’s previous job as a secretary in a small it company whose owners Mohan knew. Their friendship was not of a romantic type; they belonged to a larger circle of friends that spent time together in shopping centres, cafés, cinemas and other outings; they also helped one another financially, emotionally, and by sharing information and contacts. The attitudes of Mohan and the young women towards Film City were somewhat different, reflecting their caste and class backgrounds in that the girls expressed more status anxiety in the surroundings. However, on our way home, Mohan was no more enthusiastic about the visit than Amrita and Durga. The fact that Mohan shared their general disillusionment implies that Durga’s and Amrita’s lack of enthusiasm was not only a reflection of their hierarchically low caste background and status anxiety, but a more general feature of Hyderabadi middle-class social experience.

For Durga and Amrita in particular, Film City engendered uneasiness and a fear of ‘being caught’ if their lowly social origin somehow were revealed

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to others in the way they spoke, walked, dressed or behaved. Middle-class identification takes a higher caste background for granted, leaving those with hierarchically low caste identities, such as Durga and Amrita, anomalous. Amrita and Durga’s parents were skilled labourers who had managed to secure permanent jobs and to educate their daughters. This had led them to an upwardly mobile social track but into a culturally marginal situation.

In a later incident in 2004, I went with Durga and her new husband to a brand new upmarket shopping plaza in Hyderabad. She was out of her socio-cultural depth and the posh surroundings visibly paralysed her. She would not dare to take the escalator when her husband tried to force her to use it: she was at the same time horrified, afraid and ashamed of attracting attention and losing face by making a scene. When leaving the shopping centre behind, her relief was palpable. The situation in a shopping plaza and in Ramoji Film City was similarly laden with a fear of losing face and a desire to show one’s belonging to the privileged class and partaking in the imagery of modern India. In both places, strangers hardly interacted with each other; the sociality of the bazaar was missing and replaced by a hidden mistrust. It was as if these visitors did not know if they should take each other seriously as genuine middle-class people. My companions were in a sense uneasy flâneurs who gazed and were gazed upon and who shared a distanced, voyeuristic urban attitude (Featherstone 1992:274) They were also overstimulated by the flood of new perspectives, uneasy about how to incorporate these perspectives into their own lived experience and constantly fearing being exposed as imposters or intruders.

To enjoy the park as a middle-class spectacle, it is not enough to be able to afford the exorbitant entrance fee; the experience is fully open only to those whose social position engenders a feeling of belonging. Ngai (2003:485) recounts an incident in Shenzhen, China, of dagongmei (women migrant la-bourers from the countryside) visiting a theme park called ‘Window of the World’, that manifests the same kind of class exclusion that plays a role in the experience of Ramoji Film City. Although the factory girls had dressed up in their best jeans and t-shirts and were equipped with cameras in order to mix with the wealthy middle-class clientele, they lost face when recog-nized and even referred to as dagongmei. The commodified spectacle of the theme park stripped naked their class status: ‘The greater the sacrifice the dagongmei must endure to ensure their entrée, the more evident the class boundary and the chasm that has deepened between the urban rich and the rural poor’ (Ngai 2003:485).

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The fear of exposure played, I argue, a central role in the experience my companions had of Film City. It was thus visibly a relief to my theme park co-visitors to return to the smelly, noisy, crowded ordinariness of the Hyderabadi streets. Only back in these familiar streets did they again chat, joke, and relax, in marked distinction to their comportment in Film City where their discourse was restrained and their faces expressionless. I argue, it was the absence of the lower social strata in the theme park that created for them a truly unreal world of fantasy. Ironically, in such a world being middle class did not have a meaning per se because the extremes that normally help define the middle were absent. The borderlines that normally isolate the middle classes as a whole had become blurred, and were replaced by new fractions amongst the privileged: who was an upstart, who was more established middle class, and who truly belonged to the elite. In the space of fantasy, social authenticity ironically became a prime concern.

Burdened by the ImaginationBeing deprived of a sense of direction by the anecdotal use of the exo-

tic and the historical in Ramoji Film City, the social actor with only little middle-class competence quickly feels burdened and even exhausted. This social fatigue was, I argue, evident in the emptiness of Durga and her friends’ faces, as we sat silently on the bus back to the ‘real’ city. After returning to their homes, engaged in the everyday skirmishes over who will fetch water from the tap and worries about how to keep their ‘outing clothes’ tidy until they are exchanged for more sensible ones, Amrita, Durga and Mohan were reabsorbed into the organically social place of the everyday. This allowed them quickly to forget the social anxiety they appeared to have felt so acutely in the Ramoji world of ‘supermodernity’ (Augé 1995), where they had had to perform their middle-class identity and moral superiority to their peers.

In Ramoji Film City, the visitor is faced with an urgent need to consciously attach meaning to the visual world that is offered — very few things are self-evident and they are by definition not part of an organic whole. Although such artificiality may be experienced as a blessing in some contexts, such as in the dance scene my companions witnessed when leaving Film City, the heavy ‘cultural workload’ this produced for my informants was readily visible. Therefore, they hesitated to qualify the visit as ‘nice’ and they consid-ered the aesthetic splendour of the gardens to be the best part of our visit. Only in the gardens, directly referencing the romantic dance scenes in films and the settings of their own outings in city parks, did they find the social

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coherence and rootedness they looked for but which was otherwise absent from Film City. Augé’s (1995) model of supermodernity — an overabundance of events and spaces that urges a constant search for meanings — helps to conceptualize why Durga, Amrita and Mohan were visibly unwelcoming towards the fantastic worlds represented in Film City. Curiosities failed to play a part in any synthesis, they were not integrated with anything. Because social relations in the park were unreal in the absence of ‘the poor’ and the artificial spectacle of the streets and squares, the new middle-class clientele had difficulties in symbolically and socially incorporating the place into a meaningful practice.

Ramoji Film City makes clear the vulnerability of new middle-class iden-tification and tinged my friends’ visit with anxiety. The topography of Film City is like an imaginary map of their laboriously built-up social existence ‘in-between’: it is situated in the middle of no-man’s land, far away from vil-lages and the city proper, and the vulnerable borders are policed to prevent unauthorized intruders — the ‘poor’. Although a map can provide an un- threatening overview of a terrain, in the case of the upwardly mobile middle classes an imaginary map of this kind is more prone to give form to anxiety: it shows the dangers of empty spaces to be crossed, symbols difficult to decipher, and unexplored terrains. The deep-seated ambiguity and anxiety related to new middle-class life in South Asia is vividly described by Liechty (2003) in Kathmandu, where he found in his analysis of the interrelatedness of consumption, mass media and the middle-class youth an ‘anxious unresolv-edness and irresolution’ (2003: 252) that was ‘a systemic incongruence born of modernism and dependence as a state rhetoric; of education, commercial interests, global mass media, and tourism; and of the fantastic interconnec-tions of all of these’ (2003: 238). Similar contradictory reactions that were manifested in the commentary, apprehensions and observed behaviour of my companions during our visit to Ramoji Film City are also described by van Wessel (2001) among her middle-class informants in Baroda, India.

Conclusion: The Uses and Abuses of the ImaginationMultiple forms of reference to the absent come to play a role in middle-

class identification processes. The absence of the proximate Other — the lower classes — in the exclusive Film City makes it difficult to situate ‘middle-class-ness’ during a visit, creating an uneasy atmosphere, especially among those who situate themselves in the lower rungs of the middle class. References to the imagined West, the imagined national past and present, the fantastical

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street, and the film world explain part of the allure of the theme park, while simultaneously rendering the place into a somewhat distressing experience for new middle-class youth. The attraction of the Ramoji Film City is para-doxical. Film City attracts the new middle-class visitor by its connection to the film world of nationalistic and global belonging, high status, and political, and even spiritual, power. And yet, despite this allure, the experience of the theme park appeared to my informants on the whole to have been a negative one. How might one explain this?

The phantasmatic or imaginary constructions of the West, the Indian nation and the middle-class Indian render the theme park an object of desire for a new middle-class visitor. It is a site that has some resemblance to the Janpath Market that is analysed by Favero (2003) as a manifestation of the apparent subjectivity, ineffability, and chaos of global processes. He demonstrates the use of the imaginary in relation to gender and class positioning for his tourist guide informants who loiter about in the market in New Delhi. Favero shows how their social action and discourse use the local and the global, the past and the present, in reciprocally defining India and the West. Favero reveals how the tourist guides appropriate space and become links in the encounter and reciprocal definition of India and the West in this market that appears a confluence of a ‘global traffic of imaginaries’ (Favero 2003:574).

Contrary to the experience of my young new middle-class informants in Ramoji Film City, the tourist guides in Janpath Market succeed in incorp-orating this transnational public space into a meaningful part of their social positionings. Their social practice of being in the market has certain cultural rootedness in the ‘traditional’ form of public male gatherings in India, and the all-male activity of objectifying the women who pass under their gaze in public is clearly a derivative of their taken-for-granted masculine viewpoints. The ethnographic case that Favero presents highlights differences with Ramoji Film City, in which such taken-for-granted socio-cultural forms are largely absent. We see the new middle-class visitor struggling to incorporate some-thing that simply does not have the qualities of a meaningful, rooted practice. This leads into a situation in which the upwardly mobile new middle-class visitor enters Film City for status-seeking reasons, struggles to contextualize the site as a meaningful social practice that would enhance her/his social authenticity, and ends up becoming conscious of the ambiguity of being an upstart, such as was Amrita’s and Durga’s experience.

New middle-class subjects have an ambiguous relationship with mass-mediated imagery: they simultaneously value and desire global and national

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connectedness that secures middle-class belonging, but also suffer from a consciousness of vulnerability, even potential marginality, as a result of their consumption of these imaginaries. The consumer in the theme park is entangled in the imagination — mesmerized and attracted by it but not able to ‘sort it out’, to make it her/his own.

Acknowledgment I would like to express my gratitude to my friends and informants in Hyderabad

for sharing their lives with me during the fieldwork. The editors of Ethnos and two anonymous reviewers provided their constructive criticism that greatly helped in clarifying the argument. Special thanks go to Marie-Louise Karttunen for her in-sightful suggestions and corrections.

Notes 1. The overall research was entitled What money can do: gender, caste and class in urban

India and it is now continuing under the title Indian new middle classes in a compa-rative Asian perspective. The projects are financed by research grants from the Aca-demy of Finland. The material for this essay comes from Hyderabad in 1994– 95, 1999–2000 and 2004.

2. A theme park aims at offering a world of its own, providing the visitor with various services related to a theme such as restaurants, hotels, shops and department stores, visual entertainment, parks, sports activities and the like (Hendry 2001:2).

3. The Hindu October 17, 2004, at www.hinduonnet.com/thehindu/archives.htm. 4. inr 150 (usd 3.30) weekdays and inr 200 (usd 4.40) weekends, per person. 5. Girls and women who express their joy by laughing publicly arouse contempt, so

their lack of laughter and jokes perhaps more exactly reflects normative expecta-tions of ‘proper’ female public behaviour.

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