Travel Without Arrival
Working in the New South Asia
Sailen Routray
 |
Clockwork of the Holy Cross Church (2019)
Location: Dülmen, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany
Photo Credit - Wikimedia Commons |
I lived
as a doctoral student in North Bangalore for six years, starting from 2005.
Around the time I submitted my thesis, I joined a new university in the city where I worked
as a Senior Lecturer. Its temporary campus was located in the southern
outskirts of the city. I moved from one extremity of the city to the other.
But, the shift was not merely geographical.
Often when using the Yeshwantpur
station near the institute where I was a student, one would often see women wearing
brightly coloured cheap saris pouring out of the trains. After the first few
such instances one realized that these women serviced the large textile
industry that the city is a home to. Although the garment belt of the city
extends through its southern and the western parts, the northern part of the
city where one lived and studied had a good concentration of these as well.
In
contrast, the southern part of the city to which I shifted for work for three and half years, houses the IT and BPO industry that has created the
image of Bangalore as the ‘Silicon Valley of India’. Both the industries employ
comparable number of people and play important roles in the regional and
national economy.
But, it
is the IT-BPO industry that is central to the identity of the city, and
sometimes has been used as a proxy surrounding globalization in India. The
workers in the industry have been variously hailed as vanguards of the new
service industries or India or have been slammed as cyber coolies or worse.
More nuanced and fine-grained studies that can inform our understanding about
this apparently new phenomenon in India have been non-existent till very
recently. But slowly, some studies have started emerging that provide stories
from the ground that help us make sense of the lives of people working in the
industry without taking recourse to tired binaries.
Phone
Clones by Kiran Mirchandani is a welcome addition
to this bourgeoning literature. Based on one hundred interviews with workers in
the cities of New Delhi, Bangalore and Pune, it frames its discussions around
what it terms as ‘authenticity work’. The term authenticity has often been used
in the context of production of art in particular and/or cultural production in
general. But in the context of transnational service work, authenticity refers to
the quality of the service provided, where the worker has to not only imitate
the accent of the American customers but learn their cultural context as well, so that
she can be pitch perfect in what the book calls ‘aesthetic labor’.
Thus,
through a paradoxical process, the Indian transnational service workers are
able to do authenticity work by turning into cultural clones – phone clones. This
aesthetic labour involves not only imitation of accents and learning elements
of American popular culture, but also codes of professionalism,
entrepreneurialism and productivism.
A part of internalizing this code of
professionalism involves dealing with racist abuse from the customers, and an
intense scrutiny of time spent at work. The industry's need for workers to labour at night involves significant dislocations from the
temporality that is naturally coupled with their geographical locations.
For this
reviewer, the principal question around which both Phone Clones and Answer
the Call revolve is this – what are the dynamics of subjectivity that
are at work through the contemporary processes of globalization that make for migration
of services without the migration of the worker. Phone Clone more or
less exclusively focuses on the ways in which transnational service providers
in the BPO industry in India fashion their subjectivities in the services of
global capital.
Answer the Call (Henceforth referred to as ATC) argues
that as the transnational service providers carry the mechanism of space-time
compression quivering on their vocal cords, virtual migration (through time,
through checkered geographies between first and third world zones, and through
virtual spaces between the workers and the customers) is not only crucial for
carrying on their work, it has significant implications for the personal and
cultural subjectivities of the workers and their societies as well.
The authors
of ATC use the concept of ‘orientation’ to argue that the impacts on the
workers and their societies is due to the specific ways in which they start
getting ‘oriented’ towards the social mores and cultural calendar of America
and decoupled from their local time and events. But this time travel has no
arrival in sight.
This process
of virtual migration involves, amongst other things, taking on new names that are light on American
ears and withdrawing affections from those who are close at hand. The authors of ATC argue that this process involves the
interpenetration of America into India, and a certain fraying of the edges of
national identity.
This process produces ruptures between the country’s past and future,
by loosening the glue between generations. New joiners in these sectors often start earning more than
their parents, and often move out to lead independent lives.
These processes also end up producing modern
consuming subjects through objects like expensive mobile phones and company-gifted credit cards. They also produce checkered geographies where
first world zones built to service global capital cut through the labyrinths of
interconnected third world spaces.
Here let
us take a detour and set up a hypothetical example of a serious doctoral student
of American literary fiction in a mid-rung university in a city like Pune or
Hyderabad who is immersed in mid-twentieth century American novels, is working
towards a PhD dissertation on Saul Bellow, teaches American literature to undergraduate
students as a temporary lecturer, and contributes occasional pieces for low
ranking Anglo-American academic journals. He is a service provider of some
sorts (in both national and international markets), works under a neoliberal
regime (temporary job), and is oriented towards a significant aspect of
contemporary American culture.
How do we make sense of the subjectivity of such
a worker? I would want to argue that it’s only when we compare the lives of BPO
workers from Bangalore who are oriented towards Super-bowl with literature
students from Hyderabad who are oriented towards discourse analysis that
insightful and productive explanations, frameworks and theories that illuminate
the experiences of people from the Global South can start emerging.
If the
concerns at hand are forms of work and the subjectivities that are engendered
by labour, perhaps an ‘old’ sector such as textiles provides a good
counterpoint to a relatively new one such as BPO. The book Globalization,
Employment and Mobility (henceforth referred to as GEM) could have provided
such a vantage point, but is unfortunately unable to do so due to its exclusive
quantitative focus.
The book focuses on the textile sector in South Asia and
tells the story of labour reform in important textile countries of the region
such as India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. By detailing the experiences
in these countries through the ten articles collected in the volume, it
demonstrates the variety of experiences of labour law reforms and the impacts
these processes have had over the textile sector in the region.
There seems to be wide intra and inter regional variations regarding labour practices with the
northern and western parts of the region (such as North-West India and
Pakistan) being dominated by male workers whereas in the East and the South
(for example in Bangladesh and Bangalore) women have an important role to play
in production processes.
But we do not have any robust explanations of such
cultural variations. Nor does the volume offer any insights into how the
gendered nature of textile work shapes subjectivities of workers. Perhaps, this
is an unfair critique as the focus of GEM relates to the economics of textile
labour only.
But we
need to urgently understand the ways in which our histories and geographies,
especially of our cities, comingle, and our personal subjectivities and the
images of the cities start over-determining each other. For this to happen, what is perhaps needed in
the present context is an old-fashioned, promiscuous mixing of methods; a
marriage of methods, where hardnosed quantitative analysis, instead of merely
providing the macro-context, illuminates the personal, and where the minutiae
of finely textured qualitative descriptions, instead of just proving nuance,
provide the foundational theoretical and analytical structure for cracking ‘big
data’.
Note: A marginally different version of this piece was first published in 2012 in the academic journal Contemporary South Asia (Volume 25; Issue 4; Pages 456-458) in 2017. The relevant DOI number is: https://doi.org/10.1080/09584935.2016.1234167
Bibliographic Details:
Kiran Mirchandani. 2012. Phone Clones: Authenticity Work in the Transnational Service Economy. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. 174+x pages.
Aimee Carrillo Rowe, Sheena Malhotra, and Kimberlee Pérez. 2011. Answer the Call: Virtual Migration in Indian Call Centres. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. 242+xi pages.
Hiroshi Sato and Mayumi Murayama (Editors). 2008. Globalization, Employment and Mobility: The South Asian Experience. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 319+xiv pages.
