Living Under the Shadow of Neoliberal 'Reforms': Notes from India

Sailen Routray

Blueberries from Argentina
Photo Credit - commons.wikimedia.org/Petar Milošević

It has been more than three decades since the ‘official’ beginning of neoliberal economic ‘reforms’ in India in 1991. A voluminous amount of literature (primarily from the disciplinary perspective of economics), both popular and scholarly, has been produced on the impact of these reforms. This is in keeping with the overall dominance of economics of the social scientific space in India. 

Perhaps, the socio-cultural impacts of neoliberal reforms in India have not been as adequately studied as they should have been. In this context, all the four volumes under discussion are welcome additions to the scholarly literature as they widen the scope and substance of discussions surrounding neoliberal reforms and their impacts in India.

One can argue that, generally speaking, the critiques of neoliberal reforms in India have not been very nuanced or sophisticated. Perhaps the critiques of the project of neoliberalism in India have been mounted in a general and generic manner. The volumes under discussion are a response to such a state of affairs. These studies ground their discussions surrounding neoliberalism in India in specific sites, concerns and issues, and devote their attention, albeit varyingly and to differing effects, to the ways in which the projects and practices of neoliberal reforms are realized on the ground. 

Arguably, apart from The New India (henceforth TNI), the book by Kanishka Chowdhury, the other three fall into an overall, emerging pattern of describing the social and the political in India. This pattern seems to emerge from an imperative to provide descriptions that are neither celebratory of the ‘benefits’ of the neoliberal turn in public policy nor do they seem to fall into the standard-issue, ‘traditional’, political economic critiques of neoliberalism. The aim seems to be part of a broader anthropological project to trace the emergent, complex history of the neoliberal present in India.

Although, in itself a commendable piece of work, perhaps the least satisfying of these four volumes is TNI by Kanishka Chowdhury. The New India takes on the onus of providing a genealogy of what he terms as ‘the new Indian subject’ (p. 6). He tries to do so by analysing texts such as the Vision Document produced on the eve of the 2004 general elections for the lower house of the Indian parliament by the Hindu nationalist BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party), a special issue on the Indian youth by the news weekly India Today, advertisements, films by filmmakers of Indian origin, billboards, novels and other eclectic material.

A large part of this reviewer’s dissatisfaction with the book stem from the fact that the book sets out to answer very large questions (such as a critique of what the book terms as ‘the new Indian subject’) which it then inadequately answers. Although it is made very clear from the beginning that this book follows a Gramscian framework, how the diverse set of materials (texts?) and interpretations that the author uses congeal for a productive interrogation of the neoliberal project for producing a ‘new India’ is underspecified. Also, the logic of selection of the material is not made very explicit. Despite these minor quibbles, 

TNI manages to point at the ways in which a diverse set of texts and contexts can be invoked for braiding together a critique. From a methodological and theoretical angle the book is ambitious and can be used as an example of how a diverse set of materials can be made to speak to each other. This is perhaps shown the most productively in chapter four of the book that provides a critique of the works of important women film makers of Indian origin who by deploying the language of sexual rights and freedom for women (both Indian women and women of Indian origin) in the framing of their films lead to the occlusion of women’s issues surrounding labour, class and community.

Gender emerges as a key frame for the discussions, either explicitly or implicitly, in the two other books under review as well; in Working the night shift (henceforth WTNS), and in Globalisation and the middle classes in India (henceforth GATMCII). In WTNS gender is at the center of the book’s concerns and engagements. 

As discussed earlier in this essay, the books under review try to position themselves and their arguments as a middle path between celebrating neoliberalism and offering ‘old school’ Marxist/leftwing critiques of neoliberalism. No single sector of the Indian economy has been as iconic of the emergence of the neoliberal new India as the outsourcing industry, especially the call sector industry.

For the champions of neoliberalism, the call center industry is perhaps the best example of the supposedly win-win impact of neoliberal reforms where everyone gains; customers and organisations in the Global North who have access to cheap services, and job-seekers in the Global South who have now access to the kind of well-paying jobs that they did not have earlier. For the critiques of neoliberalism, call center work is the classic example of deracination that converts citizens into cyber coolies.

Into this debate Patel introduces a much welcome nuance by expertly using gender as both a prismatic as well as a focusing device in turns. She argues that despite popular notions, women call center workers’ perceptions and experiences of their work is simultaneously constraining and liberating. For many women it has meant only an increased burden of work, with very little social mobility. 

Concerns surrounding safety and morality of women working in call centers who do night shift work is often a method of reinforcing recodified regimes of patriarchal surveillance. But for some women it has also meant the sort of temporal, social and economic mobility to which they could not have otherwise aspired for or obtained. 

Concerns surrounding gender are also central to the discussions and arguments in GATMCII. In this volume Ganguly-Scrase and Scrase argue that the often celebrated impact of neoliberal reforms in India in consolidating the middle classes by increasing their power and numbers needs to be interrogated. 

Through long-term and intensive fieldwork with middle class people in Kolkata and Siliguri in the East Indian province of West Bengal, they show that although the perceptions of the members of this class might be complex, the story of the ideological hegemony of neoliberal reforms on the middle class in India is not borne out. A large number of middle class people feel being personally worse off than before due to the impact of neoliberal policies.

Central to such perceptions and experiences are issues surrounding women and gender. Whereas many women do not see themselves as having benefitted from the ‘reforms’, they do not necessarily see the changes brought about by neoliberal reforms as having impacted women negatively. In fact, globalised media is perceived by the researched in this study in West Bengal, especially by women, as contributing to spreading the ideology of equity surrounding gender related issues, especially at home. 

These perceptions and experiences also seem to vary across the axis of age; there seems to be a generational gap in women respondents. The older women seem to see the oversexualised representations of women in the mass media, especially in television, as degrading, whereas the younger women do not share this perception.

The access by women to education, work spaces, and other social spaces seems to be central to the project of Bengali modernity. By aligning with this project, neoliberal reforms seem to gain a few adherents amongst the younger generation, especially women. But amongst the general public this hold is, most likely, tenuous. The overall arguments being made by the book are convincing. 

We cannot but agree with Ganguly-Scrase and Scrase that one should be wary about overgeneralising about the middle class in India. Discussions about the size, and the strengths, influences, and perceptions about this class needs to be calibrated with extensive field-based studies. In the face of the ideological encroachment of neoliberalism, the older Bengali ideas about the good life (that of the bhadralok or the ‘gentle folk’ of the Bengali middle classes), as exemplified by the virtues of frugality, restrain, refinement and politeness – seem to linger on.

TNI, WTNS, and GATMCII keep their focus more or less exclusively on urban India, whereas it can perhaps be argued that it is in rural and semi-urban areas that the impacts of neoliberal reforms have been most intensively felt. This focus is symptomatic of human scientific work on India that has increasingly become urban-centric. 

In this context, The anti-politics machine in India (henceforth called TAPMII), by Vasudha Chhotray, through its discussion on decentralised watershed development in rural India interrogates the formulations surrounding the ‘anti-politics’ effects of decentralised programme delivery in the age of apparent ‘resurgent neoliberalism’. 

As is evident by the review of literature offered by Chhotray, discussing prescriptions of new institutionalism (such as decentralisation) that have emerged as a corrective to the perceived failures of neoliberal policies might be more pertinent in the present conjuncture than discussing neoliberalism per se.

By using ethnographic data obtained through rigorous fieldwork in the states of Madhya Pradesh and Andhra Pradesh, Chhotray shows how the institutional framework and culture of politics at the level of the regional state, and the micro-level imbrications at the village level shape the outcomes of the imperatives of decentralised resource management. 

The book also shows that despite the policy prescriptions that aim at depoliticisation (for example, through monolithic understandings of ‘village community’, occlusion of power relations, and dominant bureaucratic imaginaries of ‘participation’ and ‘consent’) progressive outcomes produced through contingencies are also possible.

Like the other books under discussion in this essay, TAPMII also argues for a more nuanced understanding of state, politics and society in India. It shows the resolute regional character of the Indian state as being important in the ways in which the discursive resources of national-level policies are locally utilised, and the ways in which ‘the state’ is perceived and experienced by people in villages in India. 

The book argues through ethnographic data that particular meanings, understandings and characterisations of politics should be unpacked before any arguments about the generalisable effects of anti-political policy prescriptions can be generated. Although Chhotray is aware of the issues surrounding voice and agency in development politics, the book itself sometimes leaves one wanting to hear the voices of the people that the author so capably uses to tell a broader story about the impacts of decentralisation in the countryside of India.

I wish to raise a few issues that are not so much a critique of these four books as they are of the overall frameworks in which social scientific interrogations of neoliberalism in India seem to operate. As already mentioned, the volumes under discussion are welcome additions to the literature, but they tend to lean towards the ‘social’ side of the ‘socio-cultural’. 

We do not, for example, have robust accounts of how cultures of consumption and conviviality have changed due to supposedly radical changes that have taken place under neoliberalism over the last two decades or so. We also do not have theoretical (as opposed to the merely theoretically informed) accounts of the supposedly radical transformations taking place across India. 

But it is unfair to judge books on bases that do not form a part of the mandate of explanation that they take on. All the four books under review add to our knowledge of contemporary India, and can inform debates surrounding the socio-cultural imbrications of neoliberal reforms across the globe.

Note: A slightly different version of this piece was first published in 2014 in the journal Contemporary South Asia 22(2). 

Bibliographic Details

Vasudha Chhotray. 2011. The anti-politics machine in India: state, decentralization and participatory watershed development. London and New York: Anthem Press. xlii + 238 pp., ISBN 9780857287670

Kanishka Chowdhury. 2011. The New India: citizenship, subjectivity, and economic liberalization. New York: Palgrave MacMillan. xii + 246 pp., ISBN 9780230109513

Reena Patel. 2010. Working the night shift: women in India’s call center industry. Hyderabad: Orient BlackSwan. xii + 191 pp., ISBN 9788125042655

Ruchira Ganguly-Scrase and Timothy J. Scrase. 2009. Globalisation and the middle classes in India: the social and cultural impact of neoliberal reforms. New York: Routledge. xii + 194 pp.,   ISBN 9780415596145