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.