WORK AND IDENTITY IN INDIA

The complex question of work and identity in India is approached from an anthropological viewpoint, offering the reader a number of leads. F or centuries, for work to confer identity it had to be performed withi n a caste, sect, or the family. Though wage employment now exists, it is considered responsible for all economic ills. The wage employment m odel has only a relative significance in cultures to which the notions of employment and the wage-earner were foreign until colonization, an d where work itself is peripheral to the prevailing value systems and is not seen as the source of social usefulness.