Routledge Handbook of Indian Transnationalism

Ajaya Sahoo, Bandana Purkayastha, Ajaya K. Sahoo, Bandana Purkayastha, Ajaya Sahoo, Ajaya K. Sahoo, Bandana Purkayastha

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781351612906
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

This book introduces readers to the many dimensions of historical and contemporary Indian transnationalism and the experiences of migrants and workers to reveal the structures of transnationalism and the ways in which Indian origin groups are affected.

The concept of crossing borders emerges as an important theme, along with the interweaving of life in geographic and web spaces. The authors draw from a variety of archives and intellectual perspectives in order to map the narratives of Indian transnationalism and analyse the interplay of culture and structures within transnational contexts. The topics covered range from the history of transnational networks, activism, identity, gender, politics, labour, policy, performance, literature and more. This collection presents a wide array of issues and debates which will reinvigorate discussions about Indian transnationalism.

This handbook will be an invaluable resource for academics, researchers, and students interested in studying South Asia in general and the Indian diaspora in particular.

PART I

Migrants’/workers’ lives

1

GLOBALITY IN EXCEPTIONAL SPACES

Service workers in India’s transnational economy¹

Kiran Mirchandani

Introduction

This chapter focuses on workers who are employed within India’s transnational technology sector. Drawing on interviews with a diverse group of workers, I explore the ways in which workers’ class positions structure their experiences of globality within zones of exception (Ong 2006) and their sense of themselves in relation to global flows of capital. The creation of special economic zones has been a key feature of India’s economic development for decades. Aside from gated residential spaces, securitized shopping malls and exclusive membership based recreational spaces, state-sanctioned special economic zones (SEZs) have proliferated in all major urban areas. In 2005 India passed an Act which stipulates application procedures and corporate benefits related to zones. These include tax holidays, government subsidies and infrastructure incentives to entice multinational firms. Certain labor laws such as the right to engage in collective action are also suspended within zones (Ananthanrayanan 2008, Goldman 2011). Sampat (2010) estimates that by 2010 there were 1046 approved SEZs in India which, despite significant peasant protests and farmer displacements, continue to be depicted as spaces of wealth, development and progress. Of the formally approved SEZs, 60% are in the information technology and information technology-enabled sector (IT/ITES), and zones range in size from as small as six hectares to as large as more than two hundred hectares. This means that there are significant differences between zones, and while some occupy large areas close to old cities and house multiple organizations, others are single-organization zones, developed within existing city spaces. Despite this diversity, while some zones are focused on biotechnology, apparel or gems and a few are multi-product zones, the IT/ITES sector in India dominates the urban landscape of many cities, since close to two-thirds of zones house companies focused on this sector (http://sezindia.nic.in/).

Notwithstanding these differences between special economic zones, much of the literature on exceptional spaces characterizes these sites as bounded systems with internal homogeneity and strong border enforcement, which serves to limit mobility into the zone of those who do not belong. Yet, as ethnographic research on zones has revealed, the building and maintenance of gated communities and special economic zones depends on large numbers of low-wage, precariously employed service and construction workers (Cross 2010) who are part of the group who does not belong and yet are integral to spaces of exception. Despite high fences, the borders of zones are more porous than one would think, because of the constant movement of labor in and out of these spaces. The analysis in this chapter focuses on how special economic zones are themselves microcosms where class discrepancies result in very different experiences of exceptionality for the different groups of workers present.

On exceptional spaces

There has been considerable research on the impact of special economic zones, which have proliferated since the 1960s in many cities around the world. These zones, in countries such as Taiwan, China, the Philippines, Mexico and the Dominican Republic, have historically served as a strategy through which states can attract foreign capital by providing tax havens and corporate incentives to multinational firms. Many countries in Asia, in particular, have embraced zone development. As Sampat notes, by the early 1990s, half of all workers employed in zones lived in Asia (2010). While SEZs were originally focused on manufacturing and assembly, those established in the past two decades have been much more diverse in terms of industry focus. Ong notes that many zones have political and governance structures which are different from the nation within which they exist and that there is significant variation between zones (Ong 2006: 104). In India, some zones house manufacturing and assembly firms in which low-wage workers predominate, while others are occupied by high-tech multinational firms where the country’s elite are employed.

Cross traces worker experiences within one of the oldest free-trade zones in India – Visakhapatnam in Andhra Pradesh – through an ethnography of a diamond-processing factory. Rather than a closed or bounded exceptional space, Cross notes that workers within the zone experience labor insecurity, poor working conditions, low wages and little state protection, much like those who are employed in casual, labor-intensive work in other settings. Given their poor wages, workers rely heavily on informal economies to meet their survival needs, and like in many other settings within India, there is an active informal economy within Visakhapatnam. Cross (2010: 369) argues that while “the economic zones being built across India continue to be imagined and conceptualized as unique territorial, juridical and disciplinary spaces by planners, politicians, activists and social scientists . . . in their everyday operation, the continuities and interconnections of these spaces with the wider economy make them decidedly unexceptional”.

While this may be true of some larger zones within manufacturing sectors, within-zone diversity is significantly more masked within IT/ITES spaces in India. Corporate “campuses” comprise architectural forms designed to draw attention. Well-manicured lawns surround these glass and marble buildings, which have round-the-clock security. Armed guards in spic and span uniforms posted at imposing gates are not an unusual sight. On the inside, buildings are spotlessly clean and air conditioned. All workers are dressed in Western² attire –managers in suits, and housekeepers or security guards in uniforms. All employees and visitors are required to display photo identification. While these transnational spaces may be infrastructure-rich with the look and feel of the most glamorous of Western corporate offices, they are, however, also spaces where labor who occupy a variety of class positions interact. Those employed within spaces of exception in India include not only upper- and middle-class managers, software programers or call-center workers but also cleaners, caterers, drivers and security guards.

In the analysis below, I explore how IT/ITES sites are exceptional spaces where particular notions of globality are enacted. Globality, as distinguished from globalization, focuses on the practices through which workers conceptualize themselves as existing within the world. I explore the ways in which workers occupying different class positions practice forms of “globality” within spaces of exception.

Globality within exceptional spaces

The term “globality,” first used in the mid-80s, can be differentiated from the broader notion of globalization. Schäfer argues that globalization indicates a process of economic, cultural and social expansion across nation states; it has multiple actors, including states, corporations and policies. In contrast, globality is a condition – specifically the “quality of being global.” The concept provides an “analytic snapshot of the extent of discrete global processes at a particular point in time” (2007: 8). Brar and Mukherjee note that the notions of globality and globalization are often conceived in relational terms – that is, one causes, or is the effect of, the other –but that it is more useful to use the notion of globality to signal the open, contingent and uneven social relationships in their localized manifestations. Globality, they note, is a “consequence of multiple causes” (2012: 5). These multiple causes bring about a consciousness of the “world as a single social space” in the context of widespread connectivity (Scholte 2002: 15). In the case of Indian housekeepers, for example, the agrarian crisis, state neoliberalism, the predominance of IT/ITES corporations in the urban landscape and the cleaning needs of transnational corporations converge as factors which led to an influx of labor to the city from smaller neighboring towns.

Globality is achieved through a set of practices – it is the “outcome of the conscious and intentional actions of many individual and collective human actors” (Shaw 2000: 17). Others have used the term “critical globality” to refer to practices through which people become “literate in the workings of capitalism and other forms of power” (Weinbaum and Edwards 2000). This focus on literacy, learning, practice, condition and consciousness differentiates globality from more mainstream notions of globalization, which center on description, critique or celebration of worldwide capitalist expansion.

Some theorists note that this “condition of being global” – or globality – is a middle-class orientation – that is, it is a consciousness which serves as cultural capital for the middle classes (O’Bryne and Hensby 2011). However, I argue that “globality” is practiced by all workers who occupy spaces of exception; low-wage workers in fact also cover significant ideological distance in their daily movement between local spaces and spaces of exception. As a result, globality leads to a questioning of the very notion of class, particularly in relation to nation. Weinbaum and Edwards, for example, argue that globality “allows us to signal the historical shift in the constitution of the notion of class, and to understand the ways in which new class formations are precipitated by processes of globalization that disrupt boundaries of nation-states as economic political units in some ways, reconsolidate them in others, and in so doing catalyze new transnational alliances” (2000: 271).

The notion of globality puts at the forefront, rather than in the background, practices through which people occupying distant geographical locations come to see themselves as connected to one another and simultaneously as part of a “world.” As the discussion below reveals, the notion of this “world” and conceptions of one’s place in it shifts depending on workers’ class positions. Exceptional spaces are spaces of mobility, and rather than a fixed position, class is a continually enacted relational construct. Workers understand their place in the world through interactions with one another and in the context of organizational norms and practices. Working within exceptional spaces of free-trade zones involves, I argue, managing the gaps between the pride of working in an exceptional space and the work process which positions workers as subservient in this space.

Methods

This paper is based on field research conducted in India for more than a decade. It draws on interviews with a diverse set of workers employed in transnational firms and focuses on how they develop notions of workplace globality within spaces of exception. Between 2002 and 2010, I interviewed one hundred middle-class workers who were employed as customer-service agents and managers within India’s transnational technology sector (Mirchandani 2012). These employees felt privileged to work in secure, clean, professional and Westernized organizational spaces where they received perks such as access to transportation, catering and recreational facilities. Many worked at night, which exacerbated the intensity of the continuous, heavily monitored calls which they received, often from abusive customers. Workers’ sense of themselves in relation to the world centered on managing a series of gaps – between customer and local time, between their embodied selves as middle-class Indians and organizational requirements that they practice servitude, and between the pride they felt as workers in an elite space of exception and the work process which was reminiscent of Taylorist factory work. Their sense of being part of a global endeavor involved making sense of hierarchies which structured their interactions: situating them as servers in relation to their clients and employers but simultaneously as people who are served by those required to provide the infrastructure for them to complete their work. In this chapter I provide an account of one worker referred to by the pseudonym Rupa who is typical of those in my sample.

Following the completion of my interviews with call-center workers, I was interested in how such service relations were manifest in global economic relations across class position, so I conducted interviews with drivers, housekeepers and security guards employed within the exceptional spaces of IT/ITES firms. My colleagues (Shruti Tambe and Sanjukta Mukherjee) and I interviewed low-wage service workers employed through contractors at India’s transnational firms (Mirchandani et al. 2020). In this chapter, I trace the ways in which the “condition of being global” is interpreted and learned by one housekeeper – Nabanita – who was employed at a large high-tech firm.

Pride and subservience within India’s zones of exception

In 2002, a story titled “Housekeepers to the World” appeared on the cover of India’s prominent magazine India Today. It was about the spectacular growth of the outsourced customer-service labor force in India. The accompanying image was of a fair woman with Anglo-Saxon features and a headset worn over her hoop earrings. While housekeeping work was often associated with caste stigma, poor wages and poverty, this “housekeeper” looked directly into the camera with a confident and professional smile. She was, like many of the call-center workers I interviewed, proud of her work not only because of its contribution to the Indian economy but also because of the prestige associated with living and working within an exceptional space. Such workers are “housekeepers” not because they engage in cleaning but because they are expected to be subservient and manage the emotional “remains” of Western clients – remains which arise due to their anger towards outsourcing or toward poor customer-service protocols. Call-center executives are also housekeepers, because their work is monitored, routinized and relatively low paid – like many engaged in cleaning industries worldwide.

Call-center workers are, however, not the only housekeepers of the world in transnational corporations. Through contractors, companies hire a large round-the-clock cleaning staff who are charged with the task of maintaining extremely high standards of cleanliness, which set the spaces of transnational firms apart. The exclusive nature of the clean space is part of its attraction of these jobs for customer-service employees. Such “geographies of cleanliness” structure zones of exception in many cities around the world (Tomic et al. 2006: 217). In Chile, like in India, shopping malls are examples of spaces of exclusion, which stand for symbols of the county’s progress and modernity. Not only are large numbers of cleaning workers deployed to keep such spaces, and the corridors between them, clean but also security guards are hired to make sure that “such spaces are out-of-bounds for both those things and those people that would sully the spaces of purity and cleanliness which are taken to represent the modern Chile” (Tomic et al. 2006: 517). In contrast, poorer neighborhoods in Chile have p...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Praise
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction: Indian Transnationalism
• Part I Migrants’/Workers’ Lives
• Part II on Culture and Identities
• Part III Political Engagement in Transnational Spaces
• Part IV Gender and Indian Transnationalism
• Part V on Historic and Contemporary Networks in Transnational Spaces
• Glossary
• Index