| Summary/Abstract |
When, in 1947, India became independent, its archetypal citizen-subject was the farmer; 60 years later it was the software engineer. Increasingly central, rather than marginal, in global economic networks, India’s popular image at the beginning of the twenty-first century is of a postcolonial nation that has successfully used technology to leapfrog over its historical legacy of underdevelopment. This shift in ideal citizen archetypes, from farmer to digital entrepreneur, has brought with it new assumptions about the role of information technology in shaping citizenly behaviour and nationalist subjectivity. This paper reads the contradictory aesthetics of this arrival by interrogating popular technological tropes.
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