Cafe Culture in Pune: Being Young and Middle Class in Urban India

The emergence of a visible commodified leisure culture in the form of cafes, targeted at and appropriated by young adults from the middle classes, is a striking phenomenon in the transformation of urban life in India since the economic liberalization in 1991. Cafe Culture 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 life world - from clothing to hanging out, friendship, dating, education, and marriage - the 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 life worlds in India, to 'Western' versions and as a rounded life world in itself.

Rich in ethnographic detail, this work follows the young cafe culture crowd in its practices domesticating 'the global' while transcending 'the local'. They are seen 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.