Appropriately Indian is an innovative sociological study of Indian IT professionals, mainly women, and the cultural and social changes in post-liberalization India that are revealed by their narratives about their work and personal experiences. Radhakrishnan argues that IT professionals constitute a new transnational class, one that carries great symbolic significance in India.
Drawing on interviews and ethnographic research carried out in Mumbai, Bangalore, Silicon Valley, and South Africa, she maps the discursive processes through which this class has produced a new form of “Indian culture”, one that reconciles the “global” with the “Indian” and so travels well through the bylanes of the global economy. This transnational class and its culture are produced within the workplaces of the IT industry through processes of “cultural streamlining” and the creation of “appropriate difference”, from which they flow into the private sphere of the family. By constructing themselves as both cosmopolitan/global and proponents of traditional Indian values, she suggests, IT women successfully navigate the diverse contradictions of the hierarchies of class and gender within which they are placed by their profession.
Radhakrishnan first traces the formation of this new class out of the existing middle class and through the software boom, highlighting the privileged position of IT professionals due to their highly paid jobs and control over particular forms of symbolic and cultural capital. Next she examines the cultural politics of the IT workplace, in particular the diverse and inchoate articulations and uses of the categories of “global” and “Indian”. Observing corporate practices of cross-cultural training and the efforts of Indian IT companies both to adapt to global corporate culture as well as assert a modernized Indian identity, she shows how the very slipperiness of the “global” allows for a resolution with its opposite, the “Indian”. The author also suggests that the cultural logics of the global/Indian antinomy have created a language through which new ideas of Indian culture are materialized and deployed in everyday life. However, I feel that this discussion does not fully capture the dynamics of the tropes of the “Indian” and “global” and their multiple deployments in these IT spaces. The descriptions also do not fully document employees’ views of these models, nor their likely scepticism about the ideas on Indian culture that are retailed by cross-cultural trainers. While it is now commonplace to ask questions about “resistance”, in this case I believe there is more diversity and friction in these workplace negotiations than it appears in her account.
Chapter 3 looks at the operations of the ideology of “merit” within the IT industry and the contemporary Indian middle class, showing how the idea of individual achievement is promoted by IT companies and largely absorbed by IT professionals. Tracing the origins of this ideology to debates on job reservations in India, Radhakrishnan demonstrates how it is linked to the politics of liberalization as well as to the forging of new “entrepreneurial” subjects for the “knowledge economy”: “Like the logic of ‘the global’, the ideology of merit-based advancement appears to offer a compelling future for India precisely because of the ways in which its articulation in the everyday lives of IT professionals explicitly overlooks the specific conditions of its production in the history of India” (p. 91). Illustrating this theme with IT professionals’ narratives of personal growth and self-actualization, her account suggests that they are fully subjectified by this dominant ideology in imbibing the idea of self-responsibility and individualizing both success and failure. For IT professional women, this means accepting the IT companies’ stance that the workplace is “gender neutral” and internalizing the notion that a failure to move up is due to individual lack of ambition. But are we to believe that IT women are completely taken in by the naturalization of gender differences at work or the idea that career choices are simply “personal”? Examples presented in the book suggest otherwise, yet the implications of these counter-narratives are not fully unpacked.
The fourth chapter takes a closer look at the processes of individualization that are presumed to have accompanied the emergence of these new transnational workspaces. Here Radhakrishnan makes a very convincing argument for a more grounded concept of “embedded individualism”, in which new notions of the self are seen to “take shape against an existing set of local conceptions of personhood, identity, and relationality” (p. 119). While the knowledge economy indeed produces individuals who are self-disciplined and enterprising, the notion of the self that is articulated by IT professionals also emphasizes individual responsibility to family and cultural tradition. The desire for personal achievement through work and career is a key disposition of the Indian transnational class, but one that appears to be at odds with the promotion of an “Indian culture” that emphasizes the collectivity and the family, especially for women.
In chapter 5 Radhakrishnan shows how these new ideas of Indian culture are rendered compatible with individualism through “cultural streamlining”, as women attempt to “balance” work and home. The new ideal of “respectable femininity” that is embodied by most IT professional women is achieved by valorizing both the family and professional accomplishment. Their navigations between work and personal life yield a more cosmopolitan sense of family than is usually found in the Indian middle class, but one that is distinct from the supposed “Western” model. By reconciling the family with professional striving, women are able to assert “appropriate difference” – to lay claim to the global while remaining “Indian”. But in the end women are expected to “prioritize the family” – work must not be allowed to interfere with the performance of expected gender roles.
In a significant discussion of class-making practices, Radhakrishnan shows how women mark their respectability and difference by distinguishing themselves from call centre workers in terms of consumption practices and sexual mores, thereby forging a “unique symbolic position […] in which they incorporate the logics of the knowledge economy into their intimate, everyday lives while reinventing the culture of the nation’ (p. 148). By placing the family at the centre of cultural streamlining, they are able to assert moral superiority vis-à-vis other rising class fractions as well as vis-à-vis the West.
This is a well-written, lucid, and insightful analysis of the multiple intersections of gender, class, globalization, and work in contemporary India, especially at the levels of cultural politics and discourse. Radhakrishnan neatly links the compulsions of India's new global workplaces and the emergence of a new category of highly paid, transnational professionals, with processes of urban class restructuring, the forging of new ideologies within the middle class and the elite, and the social contestations that are emerging around family and gender. However, the author could have developed a more nuanced analysis of “cultural streamlining” and the ideology of “respectable femininity” by drawing more deeply on recent theoretical discussions on subjectivity, power, and agency. Although she writes of negotiations and navigations, the women in her stories appear to be mostly submerged by these subjectifying processes.
Radhakrishnan's informants include rebels and critics of a cultural ideal that places the onus of maintaining Indian culture on women, but most seem to embrace their symbolic and social responsibilities. The ethnographic material does not really illustrate the contradictory strains and demands that are being negotiated, nor does it suggest that women may challenge the binaries and “choices” that are given to them. Also, the overall argument seems to imply that the flow of ideas from the corporate workplace into personal life is itself streamlined, meeting little opposition or obstacles along the way. The slippages, aporia, and fractures that are likely to surface in this context are hinted at but not fully revealed.
For a book that is largely about class (and I appreciate the close attention given to the cultural politics of class formation), processes of class restructuring and the creation of distinction are under-theorized. One problem, common to much of the literature on the Indian middle class, is that the category is used as if it is a free-standing entity that has no particular relation with other classes. Radhakrishnan nicely shows how the new “transnational class” constitutes itself through differentiation from other middle-class fractions, yet many other aspects of class structure and power are neglected. While fully recognizing the elite or solid middle-class status of most of her informants, the complexities of social mobility and class fracturing that mark the IT space are not very visible.
For example, the discussion of the vocabulary of “background” in relation to class identity is revealing, but one would have appreciated a more detailed rendering of the conflicts and tensions of class identity and status that get played out in IT workspaces. Further, because the focus is on women IT professionals, the IT workforce appears to be mostly elite and cosmopolitan – although a few examples of male software engineers from lower-class or small-town backgrounds points to its actual social diversity. As these examples suggest, there is a significant class difference between male and female IT employees, on average, yet Radhakrishnan does not expand on this social feature of the workforce nor its implications for workplace dynamics.
These criticisms notwithstanding, the monograph is a must-read for scholars of contemporary south Asia, globalization, and the sociology of work, class, and gender.
