Enterprise Culture in Neoliberal India

Studies in Youth, Class, Work and Media

Nandini Gooptu

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9781138653344
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134511860
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The promotion of an enterprise culture and entrepreneurship in India in recent decades has had far-reaching implications beyond the economy, and transformed social and cultural attitudes and conduct. This book brings together pioneering research on the nature of India's enterprise culture, covering a range of different themes: workplace, education, religion, trade, films, media, youth identity, gender relations, class formation and urban politics.

Based on extensive empirical and ethnographic research by the contributors, the book shows the myriad manifestations of enterprise culture and the making of the aspiring, enterprising-self in public culture, social practice, and personal lives, ranging from attempts to construct hegemonic ideas in public discourse, to appropriation by individuals and groups with unintended consequences, to forms of contested and contradictory expression. It discusses what is 'new' about enterprise culture and how it relates to pre-existing ideas, and goes on to look at the processes and mechanisms through which enterprise culture is becoming entrenched, as well as how it affects different classes and communities. The book highlights the social and political implications of enterprise culture and how it recasts family and interpersonal relationships as well as personal and collective identity.

Illuminating one of the most important aspects of India's current economic and social transformation, this book is of interest to students and scholars of Asian Business, Sociology, Anthropology, Development Studies and Media and Cultural Studies.

Part I

Discourses and narratives of enterprise culture

1 ‘We are like this only’

Aspiration, jugaad, and love in enterprise culture

Purnima Mankekar

In the 1990s, shortly after the introduction of transnational satellite television in India, a new television network, Channel V, launched a music video programme that cast itself as an indigenous version of MTV. Called VTV, this programme remixed popular Western music with Bollywood songs, accompanied by commentary in a patois of Mumbai slang, Bollywood Hindi, and English. Channel V did not compete for viewers with the hugely popular imported MTV. Instead, it attempted to carve out its own niche: lower-middle-class youth living in cities and small towns who were not fluent in English but who, nevertheless, aspired to become globally-savvy consumers of the new transnational popular cultural texts that were in circulation at the time.

The title of this chapter is taken from the promos for VTV, the tagline for which was ‘We Are Like This Only’. Through humour and the deployment of streetwise language, ‘We Are Like This Only’ sought to herald the arrival on the national (and, eventually, global) stage of new protagonists – lower-middle-class youth living in urban areas who refused to apologize for their lack of fluency in English, lack of social status, or precarious class position. ‘We Are Like This Only’ emblematized the brash self-confidence of a new demographic that marketers and advertisers would later seize upon and term ‘the aspirational classes.’¹ These consumerist desires, and the fantasies of social mobility with which they were conjoined, were frequently at complete variance with the structural positions and struggles of lower-middle-class subjects living in cities and small towns.² Despite these disjunctures – or more likely because of them – in many popular texts (for example, advertisements, television narratives, and films) lower-middle-class youth are represented as the protagonists of a New India poised to assume its place in the world: these young people are valorized as risk-taking, hard working, self-sufficient, willing to pull themselves up by their bootstraps – and driven by an aspiration to make money at any cost.³

As an anthropologist of media, I am concerned with how media produce and represent these characteristics or ‘choices’ as normative, even as they make them available to contestation; more broadly, I am interested in how media shape the formation of subjectivities through their ideological and affective work (Mankekar 1999, 2004, 2008, 2012). It is important to note that VTV was not merely targeting a certain demographic, but recursively constituting it. Elsewhere I have argued that television audiences are not pre-constituted; on the contrary, television hails an audience into being by tapping into desires and predilections salient at a particular historical moment (Mankekar 1999, 2012).⁴ The semantic and grammatical formation of the phrase ‘We are like this only’ implies – and constitutes – a specific enunciative location: that of a particular segment of urban, lower-middle-class youth whose imperfect English indexes their class position but who, nonetheless, unapologetically aspire to upward mobility. Perhaps most significantly ‘We are like this only’ is also what J. L. Austin might term an illocutionary act because of its performance of a campy take-it-or-leave-it attitude on the part of lower-middle-class youth that it both claims to represent and hails into being (1975).⁵ Finally, this phrase evokes ways in which, presumably, lower-middle-class youth may talk back to upper-class elites whose speech patterns enact their access to elite education. In short, ‘We are like this only’ enacts a particular positionality through its performance of defiance, self-confidence, and aspiration.

These youth are also presumed to be driven by their ability to engage in jugaad, a colloquial term connoting the ability to come up with creative solutions that enable one to fulfil one’s aspirations in contexts of scarce resources. In many media representations, young people, perhaps more than children, are represented as symbolizing the futurity of the Indian nation.⁶ ‘We are like this only’ emblematizes the self-constitution of these new protagonists as synecdochic of the self-representation of the nation as it embraces a reconfigured enterprise culture: unapologetic, self-confident, brash – and driven by aspirations to do better than their parents. In celebratory media accounts, this generation of lower-middle-class youth is portrayed as markedly different from both their parents’ generation and their middle-class and upper-class peers, in that their aspiration and capacity for jugaad replace education, job security, and, to some extent, old-fashioned notions of respectability as a pathway to upward mobility.

Specifically, my objective in this chapter is to interrogate the role of popular media, exemplified in the blockbuster Hindi film Band Baaja Baaraat (2010: directed by Maneesh Sharma; produced by Yashraj Films), in the production and circulation of narratives of enterprise culture during a historical moment marked by neoliberal refashionings of success, growth, and progress. As I will argue later, Band Baaja Baaraat valorizes the work ethic, spirit of risk-taking, and self-sufficiency of its lower-middle-class protagonists as they successfully traverse the class-polarized spaces of New Delhi. In addition, I am interested in tracing how contemporary constructions of enterprise culture might be deeply imbricated with discourses of love and romance. In so doing, I engage with scholarship on the relationship between capital, on the one hand, and a domain frequently associated with the private, the subjective, and the intimate: that of romantic love.⁷

Before proceeding with my analysis of Band Baaja Baaraat I need to insist on some important caveats. First, unlike some of my other research on Indian media, the scope of my analysis here is limited, in that it is not a study of the reception of this film. Instead, my objective is to trace how it may have participated in the production of specific discourses about enterprise culture. Second, representations of enterprise culture in recent Hindi films have been varied and heterogeneous, ranging from the valorization of enterprise in films like Guru and Bunty aur Babli, to an unflinching portrayal of its seamy underside in Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye! and Shanghai. And last, but perhaps most important, it is crucial to note that, in analysing representations of enterprise culture in Band Baaja Baaraat, I aim neither to predict nor to analyse the behavioural ‘effects’ of such films. Rather, as I have outlined above, I am interested in how popular films like Band Baaja Baarat represent the co-implication of enterprise culture and specific structures of feeling.

In the next section I will engage in a more detailed analysis of Band Baaja Baaraat’s representations of aspiration, jugaad, and the relationship between commerce and romantic love; for now, let me briefly summarize its plot. Band Baaja Baaraat is about two lower-middle-class protagonists, Shruti Kakkar and Bittoo Sharma, who attend college at Delhi University. Shruti’s ambition is to become a wedding planner. Bittoo, on the other hand, has no goals or ambitions; he falls asleep in class; he roams Delhi University with his buddies, teasing young women. Bittoo is attracted to Shruti but is rebuffed by her because she wants to steer clear of romance so that she can focus on her wedding-planning business. Shortly thereafter, Bittoo impulsively declares to his father that he will start a wedding-planning business. But when he proposes to Shruti that they become business partners, she refuses point-blank. She is concerned that their partnership might develop into a romantic relationship, and she has no time for romance. More importantly, she wishes to adhere to the most important principle of her life and her business: love and business cannot mix (‘jis se vyapaar karo, usse kabhi na pyaar karo’).

But Bittoo is not one to give up so easily, and, through a series of manoeuvres, the two of them are hired by an upper-class wedding planner. Just before the wedding there is a fiasco in the matter of the flower arrangements, and Shruti is blamed and fired. The two of them walk out, partners in their new business. Although their first wedding is in Shruti’s lower-middle-class neighbourhood, Janakpuri, their sights are set on planning weddings in enclaves of the rich and powerful like Sainik Farms: the class-polarized topography of New Delhi provides them with a geographic and aspirational map to plot their plans for upward mobility. Eventually, Bittoo and Shruti hustle their way to organizing a wedding in Sainik Farms and, hence, are able to literally and symbolically traverse the distance from Janakpuri to Sainik Farms. After they successfully pull off this ostentatious and expensive wedding, they celebrate with dancing and champagne. When the celebrations end, aided by a combination of fatigue and alcohol, they end up in each other’s arms and have sex. But Bitto is afraid that Shruti might have fallen in love with him and is concerned that they might have broken the cardinal rule of their business: that love and business cannot mix. He starts to distance himself from her. Her feelings hurt, Shruti terminates their partnership. They each begin their own business, but their individual projects fail miserably.

One day, they are approached by a wealthy hotelier whose spoilt daughter wants them to plan her wedding because she finds their kitschy arrangements exotic and novel. But he will not give them this project unless they work together, because, as he points out, individually they have accomplished nothing but spectacular failure. In the course of planning this wedding, they become friends again and, eventually, reconcile. The film closes with the two of them dancing joyfully at their own wedding.

Enterprise culture and its structures of feeling

A voluminous scholarly literature exists, which demonstrates just how illusory such portrayals of enterprise culture are for millions who struggle to survive in contemporary India (see, for example, Jeffrey et al. 2007). There is absolutely no question that the world depicted in films like Band Baaja Baaraat is a fantasy. That said, we must be wary of the traps inherent in conceptualizing fantasy and reality as binary opposites. I have argued elsewhere that fantasy and reality are co-implicated (Mankekar 2004, 2012). Furthermore, as Zizek points out, fantasy provides the coordinates for desire (1989).⁸ In Band Baaja Baaraat, it is these desires – to make money, become successful, and attain social status – that fuel Shruti and Bittoo’s aspirations and their enthusiastic and energetic adoption of enterprise culture: therefore, to analyse this film in terms of whether or not it reflects reality completely misses the point. And, to reiterate, nor am I interested in evaluating its impact in behaviourist terms: I have no desire to investigate whether, or how many, of its viewers planned to open their own business after watching the film. Instead, I am concerned with how this cinematic text might represent certain desires and aspirations as normative at a particular historical moment, and how these desires and aspirations articulate with discourses of enterprise culture hegemonic at this time.

In steering away from the positivist hubris of establishing a linear relationship between media texts and the behaviour of viewers or spectators, I draw on Raymond Williams’ conceptualization of structures of feeling. In his ground-breaking work, Williams indicates how we may interrogate a work of art in terms of the structures of feeling that it materializes and enacts. He defines structures of feeling as ‘social experiences in solution, as distinct from other social semantic formations which have been precipitated and are more evidently and more immediately available’ (Williams 1978: 133–4, emphasis in original). This framing of structure of feeling problematizes the binary between feeling and thought: as Williams argues, structure of feeling is not ‘feeling against thought, but thought as felt and feeling as thought’ (ibid.: 132).⁹ At the same time, he asserts, ‘We are also defining a social experience which is still in process, often indeed not yet recognized as social but taken to be private, idiosyncratic, and even isolating’ (ibid.).

While the primary unit of analysis in Williams’ theorization of structure of feeling is the literary text, I am interested in how a popular film, Band Baaja Baaraat, materializes structures of feeling which cohere around representations of enterprise culture on two interlinked registers: its aesthetics and its diegesis. In these representations, aspiration and jugaad are deemed critical to an emergent set of ethics promoted by neoliberal renditions of enterprise culture; last but not least, enterprise culture and romantic love are depicted as co-implicated and mutually dependent.

Aspiration

Aspiration is the leitmotif of Band Baaja Baaraat. As the credits roll, we hear what the film-makers have termed the ‘anthem’ of the film: the opening frames consist of a background song which introduces us to the importance of tarkeebain (a Hindi–Urdu word which I have translated as ‘plans’ or ‘schemes’) in the story that is to follow.¹⁰ The song begins: ‘Plans, plans, [we have] so many plans, Plans, plans, we have many plans, we have vivid [colourful] dreams, And we have lots of plans’ (‘Tarkeebein, tarkeebein kitni hai tarkeebein, Tarkeebein, tarkeebein apni hai tarkeebein, Satrangi sapne hai, atrangi tarkeebein’). Inter-cutting frames present the film’s hero and the heroine, foregrounding the similarities in their socio-economic backgrounds. Shruti and Bittoo are students at Delhi University and, for those familiar with this campus, it is evident that they do not attend elite colleges. Their clothes are inexpensive, and they either use cheap public transportation like cycle rickshaws or buses (in Shruti’s case) or, as with Bittoo, ride three to a motorcycle. Nor do they engage in expensive consumption practices: thus, we see them eating at roadside stalls rather than at fancy restaurants. For all the similarity in their class positions, their personalities are very different. When we first see Shruti, she is smiling, her eyes gazing skywards dreamily; in the next frame we see her closely examining some drawings: the suggestion is that she is a dreamer with plans. She is assertive and protective of her dignity: we see her arguing with a cycle rickshaw driver, apparently, over the rate that he has charged her; in another frame we see her retaliating against a man who has tried to grope her as he walks past her. It is evident that Shruti is the one with ambitions and with plans for how she can accomplish her goals, as opposed to Bittoo, who is, at best, a wastrel.

We see signs of Shruti’s no-nonsense commitment to enterprise culture from the start. As she walks past a young couple romancing, she rolls her eyes in disdain; all that she focuses on is the course of action that she needs to follow (the tarkeebein) to realize her dream: that of opening her own business. She is the one with the fire in the belly, the drive and ambition to succeed. As the narrative unfolds, however, Bittoo quickly transforms himself into an enterprising young man who will use his wits to get what he wants, even if it means engaging in unethical behaviour. Shruti has her life planned out and has formulated, in astounding detail, the trajectory that she needs to follow in order to fulfil her ambition: she will begin by assisting successful wedding planners and, once she has acquired the necessary contacts and experience, will branch out on her own. Armed with a folder which details the different kinds of wedding that she will organize (Barbie Theme, Fairy Tale Theme, Circus Theme, etc.), she even has a name for the business that she wants, eventually, to open: Shaadi Mubarak (which may be translated as ‘best wishes on your wedding’).

As they start their business, Shruti and Bittoo have access to neither financial nor cultural capital, but this, rather than discouraging them, generates in them the aspiration to move towards their goals with zeal and ingenuity. They do not pretend to be sophisticated, and the language they speak foregrounds their class positions and lack of cultural capital: neither is able to speak English fluently, but this is never a source of embarrassment to them. For instance, Bittoo is completely unselfconscious about the fact that he mispronounces the word ‘business’ as ‘biness’. And, while her English is marginally better, Shruti speaks a version of Hindi commonly associated with lower-middle-class Delhi residents. Bittoo and Shruti are comfortable with who they are and make no apologies for their lack of sophistication: they are like this only. Yet, they have lofty aspirations: to become Delhi’s most successful wedding planners.

The film represents enterprise culture from the vantage point of its lower-middle-class protagonists and suggests that relatively marginalized youth can aspire to make their place in the new economy via the service industry: the protagonists launch a business that enables them to manage the conspicuous consumptio...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Introduction
• PART I Discourses and narratives of enterprise culture
• PART II Embedding enterprise culture in society
• PART III Contestations and contradictions of enterprise culture
• Bibliography
• Index