Contemporary society in India is marked by the growing importance of consumer culture, fuelled by the rise of disposable incomes in the hands of a huge middle class and increasing availability of a large variety of commodities in the open market, including a growing number of shopping malls. The article examines India’s ‘new middle class’ as an agency of consumption, engaged in a process which seems to be jeopardising long held ideals of self-sufficiency, self-reliance and anti-materialism. After the economic liberalisation of the 1990s, consumer goods appear to have become a crucial basis for redefining status distinctions in Indian society and for negotiating interpersonal and inter-communal relationships within the seemingly antithetical categories of tradition and modernity. As in other forms of globalisation, however, the resulting patterns of change are not simply based on total abolition of older ‘traditional’ structures and their replacement by new patterns. Despite apparent changes in shopping habits and the emergence of blatant consumerism, the older moral tradition continues to oppose rising materialism and individualism, contributing to the limited success of shopping malls.