Nandini Gooptu

Servile Sentinels of the City: Private Security Guards, Organized Informality, and Labour in Interactive Services in Globalized India

Through a study of private security guards in urban India, this paper investigates emerging labour processes in the increasingly dominant private corporate sector of Third World rising economies, in the wake of economic liberalization and globalization. To meet the escalating need for labour in interactive services, a vast cadre of low-paid, casual workers has emerged, working under a regime of organized informality. Recruitment and training here are systematically institutionalized and formalized by private agencies, with the imprimatur of the state, but employment relations remain informal and insecure. The paper examines forms of labour subordination and a culture of servility at the workplace, as well as embodied work and emotional labour that characterize low-end service jobs. The paper shows how workers’ political subjectivity and their perception of class difference and social identity are shaped by cultural and social interaction at work and how these relate to wider democratic politics and citizenship.

“Rights to Stop the Wrong”: Cultural Change and Collective Mobilization—The Case of Kolkata Sex Workers

In the past decade-and-a-half, sex workers in Kolkata (India) red-light districts have involved themselves in a STD–HIV health project and, at the same time, formed an autonomous organization to protest against exploitation and to challenge social norms that ostracize them. This paper examines how this marginalized group, who previously saw themselves as socially alienated victims, came to reinvent themselves as social actors, endowed with a sense of collective rights and capacity. The analytical focus is on the transformation of the worldview and self-perception of sex workers, and on the specific aspects of the development intervention that facilitated this transition. The following elements were found to be most significant: (a) the establishment of an egalitarian organizational culture in the health project; (b) the introduction of a dialogic educational programme; and (c) the development of a culture of political activism among sex workers, animated by a notion of their right to protest against injustice and inequality. The study draws attention to the change of attitudes and identity as the key factor propelling the engagement of the socially excluded and the poor in development processes and public action. By analysing this largely neglected theme in development literature, this paper contributes to debates on the question of participation from a hitherto under-explored perspective.

Urban poverty and the politics of caste and religion in early 20th century North India: Implications for development practice and research

Abstract This paper seeks to bring out the importance of engaging with the themes of religious and ethnic politics in development studies. With case studies from urban north India in the early 20th century, the paper argues that religion and caste are central to both the incidence and conditions of poverty and to the experience of development and change for the poor. The paper shows that with rapid social and economic transformation, various groups of the low caste poor refashioned and reformulated their religious ideas and caste ideologies, in an attempt to construct a political vocabulary and a cognitive framework with which to conceptualize the changing nature of social relations, deprivation, poverty and inequality, as well as to question or challenge them. Drawing lessons from these cases, the paper also advocates the need to take on board the politics of caste and religion, not only as an academic exercise, but also in development practice, instead of ignoring or condemning them as anachronistic and...

Persistence of poverty in India

The chapter describes and analyses panel data for six villages in Tamil Nadu from 1980 to 2005. It deals with agricultural change and soci-economic improvements.

New Spirituality, Politics of Self-empowerment, Citizenship, and Democracy in Contemporary India

India has seen a recent upsurge in spiritual practices promoted by an entrepreneurial breed of leaders and organizations. Their primary preoccupation is not to preach religious faith and belief or to promote ritual practice, but to provide guidance on psychological and physical well-being, happiness, and a healthy lifestyle. They offer strategies for healing and re-energizing, and advocate self-management and self-development as tools of both material advancement and mental contentment. Spiritual practices emphasize individual agency, personal empowerment, and reliance on ones own ‘inner’ resources, and valorize the autonomous, self-governed citizen as the protagonist of a modern and modernizing nation. While being reminiscent of the sacralization of everyday life and the rise of the ‘self-ethic’ in New Age spiritual movements in the West, Hindu versions of new spirituality in India draw upon religious traditions and construct a narrative of laicization of the esoteric and people-centric spirituality, consonant with the prevalent democratic zeitgeist. This article explores the implications of these developments for political subjectivity, religious identity, and notions of citizenship and democracy.

Religious Myths Retold: Masters and Servants in India's Corporate Culture

“The god of strength, Hanuman, to whom people turn to alleviate their pain and sorrows, is now also gaining importance in this world of globalisation as a management guru. Vijay Agrawal has written a book called Sada Safal Hanuman that tells us that Hanuman possesses some of the great qualities needed for management.” With these comments, the newsreader on a popular Hindi-language television channel in India drew attention to the striking new interpretation of a familiar revered figure from Indias greatest Hindu epic. “Mythology was written so that it could be interpreted and used in your daily life.” This is the rationale offered by, Kishore Biyani, chairman of Future Group, Indias supermarket giant, to explain why in his business practice he relies on religious myths, as interpreted by Devdutta Pattanaik, Chief Belief Officer of his company and author of several highly popular books on mythology. Works by Agrawal and Pattanaik represent a growing trend of the interplay of religious belief, management ideas and business practice in contemporary Indias market economy and corporate culture. This is in keeping with a well-documented “cultural turn” in global corporate practice in recent decades, marked by a tendency to invoke religious traditions and cultural belief systems, with a view to defining moral norms and ethical standards that would shape individual conduct, institutional behaviour and organizational practice in business (Calas and Smircich 2003; Browne and Milgram 2009; Nandram and Borden 2010). The extant literature on this subject shows how existing religious and cultural ideas are pressed into the service of business and management. It is, however, insufficiently appreciated that this entanglement of cultural and market imaginaries offers radical new interpretations and seeks to create new corporate sensibilities and subjectivities, which is examined in this chapter. It is now known that with the “cultural turn,” lessons in effective human resource management and authoritative business leadership have been drawn from cultural traditions, including Greek heroic myths, medieval legends of kingship, folkloric sagas of just rule and Islamic religious principles (Koprowski 1983; Kessler and Wong-MingJi 2009; Rudnyckyj 2010). Both the state and private corporations, in many parts of the world, have asserted the superiority, authority and authenticity of indigenous religion and culture as the inspiration for capitalist development and managerial practice.