Cloning colonialism: Residential development, transnational aspiration, and the complexities of postcolonial India

Within this article, we discuss/unpack a speculative international property development born out of a license agreement between the Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC) and real estate investment company, Anglo Indian. The proposed building of twelve cloned, MCC branded, cricket communities in India-targeted to the consumption-based lifestyles of India's new middle class-is addressed within the context relational to the political, economic, and cultural rationalities of postcolonial India, shifting power dynamics within the international cricket formation, and the associated re-colonisation of cricket-related spaces/bodies. Anglo Indian's proposed communities are understood as part of a complex assemblage of national and global forces and relations (including, but certainly not restricted to): transnational gentrification; urban (re)development; and, revised understandings of historical and geographic connections between places, governance, and the politics of be(long)ing in branded spaces. This analysis explicates how Anglo Indian's idealized community development offers a literal and figurative space for embodied performance of “glocal competence” for consumption-based identity projects of the new Indian middle-class (Brosius, 2010, p. 13) through the somewhat ironic mobilization of colonial spatial logics and cultural aesthetics.