Carol Upadhya

Controlling Offshore Knowledge Workers: Power and Agency in India's Software Outsourcing Industry

The paper describes the modes of organisational control employed in the Indian software services outsourcing industry, highlighting the combination of subjective and panoptical managerial techniques. Drawing on ethnographic work in several software services companies in Bangalore, India, it explores the structures of power that operate in these organisations as well as the agency and subjectivity of software workers.

India’s ‘New Middle Class’ and the Globalising City: Software Professionals in Bangalore, India

The chapter draws on a study of software professionals in Bangalore to sketch the cultural orientations and social identity of India’s ‘new middle class’, especially in terms of consumption patterns and lifestyles. It also poses questions about the environmental consciousness of this class through an examination of the globalisation of the city through the agency of IT corporates. By tracing the connections among globalisation, consumption, middle class identity, and political and cultural transformations in the city within the specific context of the software outsourcing industry, the chapter probes the specificities of middle class environmentalism in India and explicates its limitations and possibilities.

Imagining India: Software and the ideology of liberalisation

Abstract Indias successful software outsourcing industry has come to represent the achievements of the liberalisation programme, and accordingly its entrepreneurs have positioned themselves as economic and political leaders of the ‘new India’. This paper explores the cultural politics of liberalisation and globalisation in India by focusing on representations of the software industry that form part of the dominant discourse on liberalisation, and on the ‘imagination’ of Indias future articulated by its leaders. The hegemony of Indias new capitalist class is far from complete, however, given the social divisions and tensions that have been engendered by Indias neoliberal development regime, exemplified by conflicts surrounding the role of the software industry in the aspiring ‘global city’ of Bangalore. The paper explores how, in the context of conflicting social imaginaries, the exclusion of large sections of the urban population from neoliberal development, and a range of resistance movements that have arisen in consequence, the software industry attempts to control representations of itself in order to shore up its ideological power. This analysis points to the elevation of private corporate capital to a new ideological role and (sharply contested) hegemonic position in the Indian polity and cultural economy.

Engineering equality? Education and im/mobility in coastal Andhra Pradesh, India

This article traces the intersections between higher education, social mobility, and the reproduction of inequalities in Coastal Andhra Pradesh, India. It explores the social history, political economy, and culture of education in the region, and the formation of a dominant social imaginary that equates engineering degrees, IT jobs, and migration with social prestige and success. This aspirational culture has shaped mobility strategies across social classes, the educational regime, and government policies aimed at greater inclusion. But state interventions in engineering education have produced contradictory outcomes, creating paths of mobility for some social groups but new modes of marginalisation and immobility for others.

The Hindu Nationalist Sociology of G S Ghurye

This paper situates the thought of G.S. Ghurye within its intellectual and political context in order to reflect on the framing of a sociological discourse about Indian society by the first post-colonial generation of Indian academic sociologists. While Ghurye incorporated the Orientalist rendering of Indian history and society in his work, he turned this discourse around to develop a cultural nationalist sociology that rejects some of the premises of colonial knowledge. However, Ghurye’s brand of sociology, by building itself around a particular understanding of Indian civilisation and ‘Indian culture’, emerges finally as an elaboration on a narrow Hindu/Brahmanical nationalist ideology that advocates cultural unity and nation-building rather than political and economic emancipation.

Provincial Globalization in India: Transregional Mobilities and Development Politics

The movement of people from small towns and villages of India to places outside the country raises a number of questions– about the networks that enable their mobility, the aspirations that motivate them, what they give back to their home regions, and how their provincial home worlds engage with and absorb the consequent transnational flows of money, ideas, influence and care This book analyzes the social consequences of the transmission of migrant resources to provincial places in India. Bringing together case studies from four regions, it demonstrates that these flows are very diverse, are inflected by regional histories of mobility and development, and may reinforce local power structures or instigate social change in unexpected ways. The chapters collected in this volume examine conflicts over migrant-funded education or rural development projects, how migrants from Dalit, Muslim and other marginalized groups use their new wealth to promote social progress or equality in their home regions, and why migrants invest in property in provincial India or return regularly to their ancestral homes to revitalize ritual traditions. These studies also demonstrate that diaspora philanthropy is routed largely through social networks based on caste, community or kinship ties, thereby extending them spatially, and illustrate how migrant efforts to ‘develop’ their home regions may become entangled in local politics or influence state policies This collection of eight original ethnographic field studies develops new theoretical insights into the diverse outcomes of international migration and the influences of regional diasporas within India. These collected studies illustrate the various ways in which migrants remain socially, economical and politically influential in their home regions. The book develops a fresh perspective on the connections between transnational migration and processes of development, revealing how provincial India has become deeply globalized. It will be of interest to academics and students in the fields of anthropology, geography, transnational and diaspora studies, and South Asian studies

Amaravati and the New Andhra: Reterritorialization of a Region

The article explores the cultural politics of regionalism in Coastal Andhra following the bifurcation of Andhra Pradesh through a focus on the planning of a new capital city, Amaravati. The envisioned city embodies an imagination of the state’s future development, in which older signifiers of Andhra identity are sutured with global aspirations. Viewing Amaravati as a symbolic space where Andhra is being reconstituted, the article traces the reterritorialization of the region by a deterritorialized provincial elite through return flows of capital and state-led revitalization of regional identity. While the Amaravati plan reflects broader trends of neoliberal urbanization in India, it is also deeply embedded in regional development aspirations and contestations.

Introduction: Reconsidering the Region in India-Mobilities, Actors and Development Politics

In this introduction to a special issue on ‘Reconsidering the Region in India’, we aim to develop a synthetic and theoretically nuanced account of the multifarious ways in which the idea of region has been imbricated in diverse spatial, political, cultural and socio-economic configurations. We draw from various bodies of anthropological, geographic and historical literature to elaborate on three themes that we believe are central to understanding contemporary processes of region-making in India: trans-regional mobilities and connections; the actors who produce and perform regional imaginaries; and changing regional politics of development.

Book reviews and notices : DAVID WEST RUDNER, Caste and capitalism in colonial India: The Nattukouai Chettiars. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. xviii + 341 pp. Maps, plates, tables, notes, refs., gloss., index

relations and issues like the anti-Mandal controversy is conspicious. The attempts of elite political parties to appropriate Ambedkar’s name (though not necessarily his ideology) for electoral gains and Dalit reaction to this is not addressed, except for a passing mention (p. 79). Similarly, the strategies for mobilisation and the extent to which the Dalits can forge alliances with other progressive fora are not discussed. At this transitional phase, what other primordial identities like gender, language and nationality, might mean to the Dalits is also