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?