Hum Aapke Hain Kaun and the perpetuation of class-marked identities.

Uberoi makes an argument in this articvle about the way in which HAHK played a key role in creating the neoliberal, business-minded upper-class Indian citizen as the safekeeper of Indian tradition, reconciling any contradictions posed by their transnational business involvements and elite social position with a type of intrinsic, from-the-heart Indianness. This speaks to Appadurai's arguement about the anxietioes posed by the era of globalization to ethnicity slipping in and out of national cracks, and the consequent need to create a new national ethnos suitable to the period of neoliberalism.

When I first read this article, I saw it as a hegemonic, oppressive attempt by the Upper classes to retain their dominance, as such I agreed with the kinds of NGO accounts that charge the 'upper classes' and governemnt with jointly victimizing the poor.

However, after re-reading Warner's article, I wonder if the process is as self-conscious as that. It is possible that the upper class discourse is generated out of particular constraints and a view of the public that it wholeheartedly believes, as a public discourse, it is generative of the conditions that produce it. Here both upper and lower classes are victims and agents of a mutually dialectic discourse. The forms of 'whole' and 'dialectic' are both crucial to modern ideology. What does one make then of a person who watches HAHK and leaves unaffected? Are they interpellated or can their conscious resistance to the totalizaing impulse of the whole help them to laugh it off and leave?