How Liberalisation Shaped the ‘New Indian Woman’

By Manisha Sahu | America News World
November 24, 2025

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, India stood on the threshold of sweeping cultural change. Liberalisation had opened the country to global markets, new visual cultures, and unprecedented aspirations. It was a period that challenged long-held beliefs about gender, identity, and what it meant to be a woman in a rapidly modernising nation.

Girls Who Spoke in Silence and in Full (Edited by Abhishek Mitra)

Amid these evolving realities, writer and journalist Meera Vijayann offers a deeply reflective account of girlhood in this transformative era in her new book, Girls Who Said Nothing & Everything: Essays on Girlhood (Penguin Random House India). Drawing extensively from personal journals she kept between 1997 and 2008, Vijayann revisits her formative years to document what the idea of the “new Indian woman” symbolised during a time of neoliberal expansion — and what it concealed.

Growing Up in a Rules-Bound World

Raised in Sivakasi, Tamil Nadu, Meera’s childhood unfolded within a tight framework of expectations and unspoken codes. Her parents, both born in the 1960s, grew up in conservative, patriarchal households where women rarely voiced dissatisfaction. Emotional endurance was treated as virtue; silence was an inherited survival technique.

Meera writes candidly about watching the everyday quiet suffering of women around her — grandmothers, aunts, neighbours — who bore the weight of duty and family honour. They navigated marriage, motherhood, and domestic responsibilities with little agency or room for self-definition. “Throughout my life,” she notes, “I was witness to the rage, disillusionment and neglect of generations of women for whom the idea of holding anyone accountable was fraught: it was a shameful thing to do.”

This intergenerational pattern of suppressed emotions shaped Meera’s early understanding of gender and girlhood. But even as her surroundings reinforced traditional roles, the winds of change were beginning to stir across India.

A Boarding School Escape—And an Awakening

Everything shifted for Meera when she left home to attend boarding school from 1994 to 2003. While originally intended simply as an educational opportunity, her time away granted her something far more transformative: space to think, question, and imagine a future beyond the confines of conservative Sivakasi.

At school, she encountered peers from diverse backgrounds, mentors who encouraged curiosity, and a social atmosphere free from the intense scrutiny that governed her home life. This period offered both “respite and reverie,” allowing her to explore her identity more freely.

The contrast between her two worlds—one tightly controlled, the other expansive and modern—mirrored the broader contradictions that young women in India were grappling with at the time. As the country navigated economic reforms, these dualities intensified.

The Rise of the ‘New Indian Woman’

The late 1990s marked the arrival of satellite TV, glossy magazines, global advertising, and a flood of consumer goods. Suddenly, Indian households were exposed to new images of femininity: confident, cosmopolitan, financially independent, and fashion-forward. This figure—often depicted in brand campaigns, sitcoms, and films—came to be known as the “new Indian woman.”

She represented:

Economic empowerment, through participation in the workforce

Sexual agency, within limits palatable to mainstream media

Urban aspirations, embodied through lifestyle and consumption

Modern independence, but without breaking too sharply from cultural norms

For many young girls like Meera, these portrayals were simultaneously inspiring and alienating. They opened possibilities, yet set expectations that were often impossible to meet—especially for women outside metropolitan India.

The “new Indian woman” was often framed through a neoliberal lens: empowered primarily as a consumer, not necessarily as a person with political or social agency. Meera’s writing highlights the tension between these curated media images and the lived realities of women navigating conservative societal structures.

Neoliberalism and the Cost of Aspiration

Meera’s essays delve into how liberalisation changed not only what women could aspire to, but also what they were pressured to become. The rapid pace of economic reform demanded a redefinition of femininity that was modern yet respectable, bold yet compliant, progressive yet rooted.

Young women were encouraged to embrace ambition, but not too much. They were urged to be independent, but only within boundaries—an ethos that created new contradictions and emotional conflicts.

Vijayann’s journals capture this ambivalence poignantly. In one entry, she writes about the thrill of discovering new ways of thinking, only to return home during holidays to find those ideas dismissed as rebellious or inappropriate. The gulf between her internal world and external expectations widened each year.

Media as a Silent Shaper

A critical thread in Vijayann’s narrative is the role of media. The early 2000s saw a boom in beauty pageants, celebrity culture, and advertisements that glamorised modern lifestyles. These media forms shaped public conversations around “freedom” and “empowerment,” but often sidelined deeper structural inequalities.

Girls from small towns and middle-class families, like Meera, consumed these images while living in environments where autonomy remained limited. This mismatch created a sense of cultural displacement—belonging to two worlds but fully fitting into neither.

Her reflections underscore how media helped construct a veneer of progressiveness that didn’t always translate to real change on the ground.

Rewriting Girlhood Through Memory

Girls Who Said Nothing & Everything is as much a personal coming-of-age narrative as it is a cultural commentary on India’s uneven march toward modernity. By revisiting her journals, Meera reconstructs the emotional map of a teenage girl trying to decode a nation in transition.

Her stories illuminate:

– The silent frustrations of young women

– The unspoken rules governing their behaviour

– The slow and uneven shifts in gender norms

– The private rebellions that marked their growth

More importantly, the book challenges the sanitized, media-driven image of the “new Indian woman,” revealing the complexities hidden beneath it.

A Mirror to a Generation

Meera Vijayann’s work speaks to countless women who grew up in the same era—negotiating expectations at home while absorbing the promises of modernity through screens and textbooks. Her voice captures the contradictions of an India trying to reinvent itself, and the emotional labour borne by girls in the process.

As the country continues to debate questions of gender, identity, and progress, her reflections remind us that modernity is not simply about economic growth, but about the freedom to think, question, and evolve.

Her essays are both a testament to resilience and an invitation to re-examine what empowerment truly means.