Indovation

Innovation and a Global Knowledge Economy in India

T. Birtchnell

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781137027405
• eBook ISBN: 9781137027412
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Development Economics
• Index: Economics

How should we understand the many reports that poverty is the mother of innovation in India? What has the role of austerity been in the development of India's knowledge economy? In this critical study of Indian innovation, or 'Indovation', Thomas Birtchnell explores how the complex mobilities of 'globals' with stakes in India have transformed discourses and imaginaries about innovation in the region. He adopts a critical eye to the notion of Indovation by focusing on the various circuits of globals where India's knowledge economy is concentrated: expertise, entrepreneurship and community. Birtchnell traces the various discourses and counter-discourses around an Indian way of working and illustrates how differences in the international dimensions of austerity allow India's knowledge economy to prosper.

1

Indian Innovation for All

Welcome to Indovation

The 2012 BBC programme Welcome to India illustrates profoundly the region’s incredible and pervasive austerity.¹ This austerity is brought to light through a cast of unforgettable real-life characters on the poverty line in two of India’s megacities. This feature reveals the astonishing conditions of inequality and stratification that are extant in India today. In one case, street children hawk pirated copies of entrepreneur Steve Jobs’s autobiography to motorists at a traffic light at the risk of police beatings. In another, gold panners forage in sewers for mud from goldsmiths’ ablutions and treat it with mercury by hand to extract the gold. Innovation at the base of India’s social pyramid takes place amidst all sorts of austere conditions: endemic tax evasion and corruption; copyright violation and theft; human rights abuse of adults and children; usury and extortion; food, water and energy scarcity; and overpopulation, property theft, forced eviction and dense urban crowding. This is what Series Director and Producer Tom Beard in an interview calls ‘resourcefulness to the extreme’.²

The BBC documentary goes on to suggest that this austere innovation, occurring despite intractable conditions, offers a message to the world about its own future. The world faces overpopulation, financial crisis, resource scarcity and environmental destruction visible in India today: ‘Learning to survive in a crowded world is our biggest challenge, but there is one corner where we are already well on our way to adapting.’³ So if India is to show us one thing, it is that innovation goes on regardless of, and in dialogue with, austerity. Contained within this message is a work ethic mostly at odds with that prevalent in the contemporary developed world: Indians have a work ethic born of simplicity, frugality, parsimony, ingenuity, resilience and, last but not least, desperation. And according to Welcome to India it is adaptable and resourceful survivors with dreams of standards of living only available to a minority in India (and a majority in the rich world) who enact this ethic of austerity on a daily basis.

This ethic of austerity found its way into the limelight in 2010. The chairman of the IPCC, Rajendra Pachauri, made a fascinating remark, when asked about possible social responses to climate change, claiming ‘Innovation and “Indovation” are really the key to taking us forward’.⁴ What he meant was that India’s very low per capita CO₂ emissions and energy use could be a model for those parts of the world where per capita emissions are very high, as in the US, Australia and the UK. Pachauri’s statement is significant because it is evidence of a growing awareness that India’s austerity neither obstructs its future enlightenment nor demonstrates its benighted past.

It is tempting to see this drive for innovation against insurmountable odds as an innate trait of Indians. Surely, this austere innovation demonstrates India’s people are somehow different in their character, entrepreneurial spirit and genius at ‘making do’? Unfortunately, a critical perspective shows such accounts tend to repeat history’s mistakes. What is remarkable is not that the conditions in India have changed dramatically over the last few centuries. Nineteenth-century India was resplendent with austerity and its people were just as skilful at living within their means despite poverty and social stratification. What has changed are the ways Indian people – and in particular their work ethics – are documented, understood, discussed, debated, emulated and celebrated around the world. And the ones leading this reform in discourse are those, as in the nineteenth century, that stand to profit the most from India’s austerity.

It is not hard to see Dickensian austerity, and those who work within its bounds, wherever the eye falls in India. But what goes unseen is how globally mobile individuals, who are set apart from the lived experiences of India’s austerity, but are highly attuned to the discourses around it, utilize this very austerity, sharing it not in experience but in ideology. Connected to India, but active elsewhere, they owe their mobilities to different dimensions of austerity internationally and are exceptional at consolidating their own stakes in these disparities.

These actors and their worldly activities provide the topic of this book, which examines the spread of discourses around Indian innovation arising from the emergence of its globalized knowledge economy from within conditions of austerity. More succinctly this book analyses the role of ‘globals’ (people who are global) in the shift in ideas about India’s regional work ethic from indolence under the British Empire and throughout the twentieth century to Indovation: that poverty has become the mother of innovation.

A benighted past

An advertisement in a 1955 issue of Popular Mechanics magazine noted that indolence and innovation go hand in hand: ‘We Agree … “INVENTORS ARE LAZY PEOPLE”. Take Thomas Edison; tired of gas lamps, he invented electric lights. Or Henry Ford, he’d rather ride than walk – result, the Model “T”.’⁵ Unfortunately, when different cultures meet, perceptions of indolence more often than not obscure innovation. The global financial crisis has proven rich in generalizations about regional indolence, even from respectable sources. Take the example of Greece. Despite admiring Greek culture and inventiveness Tacitus, and many other Ancient Romans, portrayed them as ‘lazy and undisciplined’.⁶ Continuing this heritage the head of the IMF, Christine Lagarde, when interviewed about the EU ‘debt crisis’, criticized ‘all these people in Greece who are trying to escape tax’ even though she receives a tax-free salary.⁷

Yet many people in Greece have responded with their own brand of austere innovation to the austerity measures imposed by the EU. Recent reports of Greece’s local strategies to deal with their ‘debtocracy’ include an alternative to the euro, the ‘tem’ or ‘local alternative unit’.⁸ The system operates through combining digital online networks with local trust networks – skills, odd jobs, market produce, home cooking are freely exchanged without euros or other currency. The system automatically limits debt to 300 tems and savings to 1200 per account to discourage the sorts of marketeering and excess that caused the financial crisis. Braving the hostility of the IMF and EU the Greek Parliament passed a law encouraging these exchange networks as ‘alternative forms of entrepreneurship’ and an innovative response to austerity.⁹

India, like Greece, suffers from a heritage of misinformation about its regional work values arising from the cultural agendas of those coming into contact with the region. Historian William Dalrymple documents a radical shift in the British relationship with India over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In the early period of British life in India, around the turn of the eighteenth century, individuals like James Achilles Kirkpatrick, British Resident at the Court of Hyderabad, integrated convincingly with their hosts and became thoroughly enculturated to the extent of mastering local language and custom, donning Indian dress and taking local wives. But the tolerance of these integrative attitudes underwent a sea change by the time of the fall of Delhi in 1857 due to the emergence of Protestant evangelists such as Reverend Midgely John Jennings, who undertook extensive and aggressive missionary work alongside colonial administrative and military activities.¹⁰

Representatives of the East India Company such as Alexander Dow reported in 1768 on Bengal’s ailing textiles production that ‘Industry cannot be forced upon a people; let them derive advantage from toil, and indolence shall lose its hold’.¹¹ In such reports, this indolence was perceived as a character trait inimitable to India and the tropics.¹² Missionaries as well agreed with these assessments, such as Jean Antoine Dubois, who characterized that the hot climate ‘inclined the native to indolence and ease’¹³ conjecturing that the ‘naturally timid and indolent character of the Hindu’¹⁴ was further ‘aggravated by the climate’¹⁵ and most obvious in the lower castes whose ‘indolent and lazy habits result from the climate’.¹⁶

Working against attempts to encourage development was the ’indolence of the Hindoo to prevent any improvement either in his moral or his physical wants … Look at the country so long part of the British territory. Where are the roads? Where are the bridges?’¹⁷ It was not only colonial commentators who spread these ideas in the popular consciousness, exiles and elites overseas also made their contributions to this ‘social imaginary’¹⁸ with their own first-hand accounts.¹⁹ A certain ‘Tippoo Khan the Younger’ wrote in the eclectic fictional collection The Metropolitan Magazine a poem titled ‘The Musalmani’, about a ‘Mahomedan woman of India’:

What summons now that look of ire?

Is it the madd’ning sense,

That brothers, sisters, friends, and sire,

Are warp’d before a deadly fire, –

Slow-crackling Indolence?²⁰

The trope of indolence was not concurrent among all those who encountered India. The philosopher Voltaire, in vicariously assessing missionaries and travellers’ accounts, interpreted them as instead ‘mildness’ and ‘abstinence’ linked to spirituality.²¹ Despite these contrary interpretations the idea was progressed to an academic audience by the sociologist Max Weber, who explained reports of indolence through the idea of ‘otherworldliness’, a ‘cultural conditioning against economic enterprise’.²² The most famous typology of this dynamic was the attribution of the ‘otherworldliness’ in India to a wider grand theory on global development, contrasting the East to the West. The Weberian notion of indolence remained a popular trope throughout the post-colonial era and played a role in twentieth-century international policy experts’ development reports.²³ While never couched solely as lying in the domain of religion, this pervasive idea has most commonly been linked to attitudinal impacts on development: religious practices, beliefs and values.

The principally significant motive in the context of the history of ideas about India’s values is Puritanism, a brand of austerity thought to be at odds with many of India’s own religious and cultural beliefs. As Weber famously made clear in a footnote to The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism: ‘In fact, the Indian ethic is in this respect the most completely consistent antithesis of the Puritan.’²⁴ Austerity was a key part of the Puritan worldview, but was at odds with the kinds of apparently ‘unproductive’ and ‘indolent’ austerity observed by commentators on India. And so, originally associated with a Puritanical outlook, austerity in India, thought to prevail in spiritual or religious beliefs, came to represent the opposite of a ‘Protestant ethic’ – the view that parsimony, hard work and frugality lead to absolution.

What inspired this discourse in the nineteenth century was not the perceived lack of potential for economic growth but rather the nature of an ‘awakening’ India and the kind of development that might emerge. As missionary Edward Fenton Elwin summarized at this time: ‘India is really waking up, but she is doing so in her own Indian way … And we have got to teach her how to work, because India wide awake, but idle, might easily become a source of great mischief.’²⁵

India was hardly an unproductive place prior to the twentieth century. India in the eighteenth century under the hegemony of the British Empire was one of the two largest economies at the time, accounting for one-third of the world economy.²⁶ If India was a productive economy with much evidence for economic growth, what can explain the questioning of its regional work ethic in such severe terms?

In the middle of the twentieth century two important works diverged from this discourse. The notion of a cultural character of indolence did not convince everyone. Unlike scholars who equated the lack of industry in India to spirituality, Barrington Moore linked what he saw as the ‘docility’ of India’s peasantry to exploitation by the highest castes that collected taxes and rents alongside religious functions within a seamless system. Innovation, far from lacking, was resplendent and the higher castes ‘showed as much entrepreneurial talent or desire for achievement as one could hope to find in the most model Protestant capitalist. But within the framework of Indian society such talents for innovation could only go into pulling the levers of the old repressive system’.²⁷

According to Moore this system was ripe for the taking by the organized central authority of the British who merely took control ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• 1 Indian Innovation for All
• 2 Indomobilities
• 3 Austerity in the Dark Ages
• 4 Austerity in the Spotlight
• 5 Expertise on a Shoestring
• 6 Bare-Bones Entrepreneurship
• 7 Close-Knit Communities
• 8 India: from Indolence to Innovation
• Notes
• References
• Index