Books

REENGINEERING INDIA: Work, Capital, and Class in an Offshore Economy by Carol Upadhya. Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2016.

MAKING NEWS IN GLOBAL INDIA: Media, Publics, Politics by Sahana Udupa. Cambridge University Press, 2015.

NATURE IN THE CITY: Bengaluru in the Past, Present, and Future by Harini Nagendra. Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2016.

BANGALORE’S transformation from an unassuming quiet city best known for its temperate climate into a booming metropolis has been the focus of intense scholarly attention; this is true to the extent that today one can even make a case for ‘Bangalore Studies’ as a discrete field of enquiry. In fact, the Bangalore Research Network regularly organizes workshops specifically on Bangalore Studies where researchers share and discuss their work on different facets of the changing urban landscape. The three books that are the focus of this review respond to very different intellectual concerns and research questions and yet are united by their focus on Bangalore. Therefore, if we were to put together a Bangalore Studies reading list, these books would immediately secure a prominent place on it.

Bangalore’s ascendance as a discernable object of inquiry can be attributed to its rise as a globally embedded hub of software labour and the complex trajectories of urban transformation that have accompanied this process. Carol Upadhya’s book, Reengineering India: Work, Capital, and Class in an Offshore Economy, does the important work of studying the elite corporations and workplaces that have spearheaded India’s post-liberalization economic growth, produced the new middle class and deeply influenced the emergence of new urban conditions. In analysing the corporate cultures, value creating practices and workplace dynamics associated with Bangalore’s software industry, Upadhya makes interventions in scholarship on globalization, political economy and post-reform India.

Given the material and discursive centrality of the IT (information technology) industry, the paucity of scholarship that engages closely with these firms to understand their internal workings is striking. What accounts for the overwhelming success of this sector? Simply pointing to the availability of an English speaking, low cost, skilled workforce in India is insufficient, and this book presents a detailed analysis of precisely ‘how the IT workforce is assembled and deployed.’ (p. 28) One of the key arguments is that so-called ‘extra-economic’ realms are not peripheral but central to the process of value creation in this industry. The careful cultivation of brand images, the delicate management of cultural difference, and the shaping of worker subjectivities are all essential to how firms generate profits. Given that firms are export oriented, where western client corporations represent the lion’s share of their market, firms craft brand images that depend on ‘selling India’ as a modern, business friendly region. In this way, Upadhya’s work challenges ‘economistic’ frameworks and shows the importance of studying symbolic, cultural, and affective arenas of the firm when it comes to understanding their economic success.

The discussion of skill is another example of the face of ‘soft capitalism’ as seen through the lens of this industry. ‘Soft skills’ rather than merely the ‘hard’ or technical skill of programming are an essential component of knowledge work. Individual initiative, self-discipline, familiarity with ‘global culture’, and good communication skills are strategically promoted by corporate workplaces. These factors drive success and are deliberately fostered by global ‘new age’ management regimes that firms embrace.

The large team based workforces that characterize software factories combine the ideal of self-regulation and leadership with systems of hierarchical control that deskill workers. Arguments like this enable the book to detail the contradictory facets of management practice wherein work is simultaneously regulated through fragmentation, self-management and the systematization of tacit knowledge. The contradiction between teamwork as an organizing unit and the concurrent individualization of risk produces tension. What emerges is a fascinating account of how new age corporate philosophies come to be enmeshed with the traditional tenets of ‘scientific management’ (involving the rigid regulation of workflows and worker movements) to cultivate distinct worker-subjects. The broad point the book makes is important: This sector thrives not simply due to the natural abundance of low cost labour or an easy insertion into global supply chains; rather the conditions that undergird the profitability of this industry must be produced and reproduced through a range of mechanisms. One question to consider is what distinguishes how these corporations’ management of ‘culture’ differs from that in the call centre industry, which also engages in similar practices. What is unique about the labour process that is embodied by software firms?

One of the accomplishments of this book is that it interweaves an analysis of new corporate structures and forms of work with an exploration of broader class analysis. The focus on ‘culture’ in its various configurations allows Upadhya to traverse territories beyond the confines of the firm. She studies the way firms put ‘culture’ and located forms of sociality to work while also examining a larger cultural politics of class. Upadhya’s analysis shows that the industry is instrumental in producing and cementing a new middle classness that overlaps with older middle class identities and social structures, while being inflected with new ideals of entrepreneurship, consumption, and global integration.

Another mode through which the analysis moves beyond the firm is via an exploration of the social backgrounds of those who come to be absorbed by the IT workforce and the process of recruitment that is associated with the industry. Upadhya contends with the dual frames of class reproduction and social mobility when examining how the software industry affects broader social structures. She argues that the industry strengthens the economic and social power of the middle class by creating lucrative employment opportunities while also opening up avenues for upward social mobility for engineers from smaller towns and non-elite backgrounds. She then undertakes a close analysis of the manner in which upwardly mobile software engineers interpret, experience, and identify with the culture and lifestyle their occupation affords them. These narratives reveal the factions and fissures within the profession based on class and cultural capital. This book looks closely at the nature of the new economy and in doing so allows the reader to appreciate the city’s centrality to the national discourse on the new era of development and global modernity in India.

With the second book under review, we move from the study of the city’s economy to issues of urban politics. Making News in Global India: Media, Publics, Politics by Sahana Udupa engages with the new phase in Bangalore’s urban history through the prism of the news media. Udupa investigates the diversity of local news cultures as heterogeneous fields of practice to understand their complex interface with urban politics. She treats the domain of journalism as semi-autonomous, one that both shapes and is shaped by a variegated urban terrain. The newsroom appears not simply as a passive platform upon which cultural wars play out but as an active medium through which urban politics is constituted. Two examples from the book illustrate this point. In 2012, a Hindu right wing group attacked a party at homestay in Mangalore to expose the ‘corrupting’ effects of ‘western cultural values’ on urban youth. Videos of this attack flooded the news media as local journalists, having been informed of the impending action, were ready with cameras to capture the event in the most sensationalist way possible. This staged event challenges straightforward notions of representation and reception, for it demonstrates that ‘the news media were at the very heart for how the cultural war was conceived and executed’. (p. 9)

The Times of India (TOI), a publication that not only represents or endorses but also actively constitutes an elite global urbanism defined by modern consumption, a free market orientation and ‘westernized’ cultural tastes, provides another example. Udupa interprets the rise of TOI in Bangalore (a city that previously had allegiances to other papers) not as a reflection of the paper’s success in reading the pulse of a new cosmopolitan audience, but instead as a testimony of its role in co-creating and normalizing a new habitus. She attributes this role to a series of factors, including the subordination of editorial decision-making by the dictates of a new branding department. These organizational shifts and the redefinition of journalistic practices went along with TOI’s attempt at fashioning itself as an agent of civic activism. TOI began to organize citywide campaigns that did not merely ‘give voice’ to the concerns of middle class groups but also created a forum for activism that moulded and concretized otherwise amorphous notions of neoliberal citizenship. Public events organized by the paper were converted into news items reported by journalists who also wore the hat of public relations agents.

Analysing these events and campaigns allows the author to trace the extension of ‘private desire into the public domain of city politics via the intermediary of brand logics’, and thereby show how newspapers become the ‘vehicles of neoliberal urban subjectivity’. (p. 65) Udupa goes onto theorize this form of collaboration and participation in public life in terms of selective, patterned permeations that grant a class of readers and their associations a certain public significance. She details the interconnections between a new brand of civic entrepreneurship, middle class urban aesthetics and corporate leadership, all of which are articulated through the newsroom and its outreach efforts. Guest writers, reader contributions and other methods of inviting news content represent the sort of newsroom innovation that renders the boundaries of the medium porous. This selective porosity is, of course, exclusionary, for it erases large segments of the citizenry who do not fit with the vision of a ‘new India’. What is interesting is the new rhetoric of democratic, interactive news making and the attendant erosion of journalistic authority upon which this rests. (p. 68)

Udupa refrains from presenting a monolithic view of the news media and de-emphasizes TOI’s hegemonic role. In fact, the second half of the book is devoted to theorizing difference via an engagement with English language and Kannada language media and their respective publics. By offering an analysis of bilingual news fields, she shows how Kannada language journalists see themselves as catering to a distinct audience, and hence create narratives that conflict with the global-urban narrative upheld by TOI. By paying attention to caste, language and gender based schisms that separate news making arenas, Udupa is attentive to the strategies that engender multiple, segmented publics. The book presents a relational view of these two antagonistic news cultures, showing how they mutually signify each other and yet are connected by shared ownership structures and journalistic practices.

The Kannada language journalists’ antagonistic outlook toward TOI’s celebration of elite urban cosmopolitanism poses a challenge to the author, one that she alludes to at several junctures. Nevertheless while it is true that Kannada newspapers do puncture the vision of the city espoused by TOI, do they represent a subaltern voice of sorts? Udupa is careful to not romanticize these attacks, as Kannada newspapers often critique the classist bias of the English press by reinforcing other structures of domination that are gendered and caste based as well as often grounded in Hindu-right politics. Yet, the extent to which this resistance represents a disruption to ‘the discursive regimes of global capital’ remains a thorny, open question. (p. 19)

This brings us to Nature in the City by Harini Nagendra, which is also written against the backdrop of Bangalore’s urban transformation. Here we enter the world of urban ecology. Nagendra, an ecologist, charts the destruction and remaking of urban nature that rapid urbanization precipitates. She travels across huge swathes of historical time to understand the contemporary reformulation of human-nature relations in Bangalore. The first chapter opens with a discussion of the region’s topography at the time of the first recorded settlers in the 6th century AD. It goes on to infuse the retelling of Bangalore’s early political history with a consideration of how its natural environment – wetlands, forests and lakes – shaped the movements of armies and the decisions they made. This leads to a discussion of urban expansion during the colonial era and the bifurcation of ‘pete’ (old city) and cantonment. Pete is the Kannada word for town and here connotes the socio-spatial split between the ‘native city’ and the regions developed by the colonial administration. Nagendra is interested in recreating the terrain for the reader, in terms of the extent of tree cover, composition of plantations, types of cultivation and wildlife that defined each major period of the city’s history. As the narrative enters the contemporary era, it focuses on the large-scale changes in land use, the conversion of agricultural land, lakes and green spaces into urban real estate and the tremendous pressures this transformation has put on the city’s water infrastructure. The remaining chapters each revolve around a particular facet of the human-nature relation and the use of space – streets, home gardens, slums, parks, sacred spaces and lakes – as organizing themes.

One of the most striking elements of this book is the impressive array of research methods employed by the author and her team of researchers. Using data from oral histories, interviews, surveys, archives and GIS tools, they are able to create a multidimensional approach that demonstrates the ecological damage wrought by rapid urbanization. Nagendra fleshes out the current urban habitat in terms of the trees, plants, lakes, air, flowers, insects, vegetation, soil and animals that constitute it. She does not place the natural world outside the domain of the social, but instead emphasizes how urban life continues to be organized around and deeply interconnected with nature.

For instance, she examines the many roles that roadside tree cover plays. The researchers conducted interviews with street vendors to illustrate the strong link between tree cover and livelihoods. Tree cover allows fruit and vegetable vendors to preserve their produce, garment sellers to protect the clothes from fading, and flower sellers to prevent flowers from wilting. This section hones in on the story of a particular road and the trees that were destroyed during the construction of the Metro, emphasizing the destruction of informal livelihoods and dwellings that were supported by tree clusters. These testimonies complement their study of the positive environmental impact of trees as measured by the various parameters of air quality; this data demonstrate the stark difference between temperature and air quality in areas with and without street trees. This chapter offers a holistic account of the disruption that ensues when tree felling in the name of ‘development’ becomes normalized in the city.

An account that only lays out the destructive dynamics of the social and ecological fails to capture the continued social dependence on the natural environment. How is this reliance best captured? In mapping the various dimensions of nature in the city, the book refrains from promoting a purely utilitarian view of how nature is ‘used’. Nagendra is attentive to the cultural and symbolic meaning systems that evolve around nature, and collects stories that shed light on the aesthetic and social value that communities derive from and attribute to nature. The biodiversity of parks is important, as is the role of parks as democratic public spaces for recreation and leisure. The book also extensively explains changes in the village forests and sacred groves on the edges of the expanding city, demonstrating their key ecological and socio-cultural importance to rural life-worlds as well as the critical ecological contributions to the watersheds.

While the book is an incredible goldmine of information, at times the reader might wish for a stronger, more fleshed out narrative of urban transformation to anchor the rich details. That said, this book is full of valuable anecdotes, case studies and vignettes that otherwise would be lost forever. For example, the chapter on the city’s changed waterscape and the decay of lakes digs deep into the case of Sampangi lake that was converted into a sports stadium. The lives and livelihood of local communities, intricately tied to the lake and the ecosystem within which it was embedded, were erased from the landscape as ‘the recreational desires of the middle class’ is repeatedly prioritized ‘over the livelihood requirements of the poor’. (p. 178)

In sum, these three books, with their varying focus on the news media, urban nature and the city’s economy, illuminate different but interconnected aspects of Bangalore’s transformation. Together they underscore the pressing political, sociological and ecological issues that are currently at stake.

Devika Narayan

PhD scholar, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis