Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Smitha Radhakrishnan is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Wellesley College.

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APPROPRIATELY INDIAN

Duke University Press

Contents

Acknowledgments............................................................................ixINTRODUCTION On Background.................................................................11. PRIVILEGE Situating India's Transnational Class.........................................252. GLOBAL/INDIAN Cultural Politics in the IT Workplace.....................................533. MERIT Ideologies of Achievement in the Knowledge Economy................................874. INDIVIDUALS Narratives of Embedded Selves...............................................1155. FAMILY Gendered "Balance" and the Everyday Production of the Nation.....................1456. RELIGION When the Private Is Transnational..............................................173CONCLUSION Apolitical Politics.............................................................199Notes......................................................................................207Bibliography...............................................................................215Index......................................................................................227

Chapter One

SITUATING INDIA'S TRANSNATIONAL CLASS

Indian it professionals are privileged through their ability to imagine and live out personal and professional lives in multiple places. This privilege stems from their dominant position in the global economy as well as their material and symbolic privilege within India. The privilege of India's new transnational class is embedded in national/domestic hierarchies, global capitalism, and India's class structure. In this chapter, I examine the multiple layers of it professionals' privilege and power, paying attention to symbolic, material, and economic privileges, while always remaining attentive to the role of geographic mobility in establishing and reinforcing those privileges. The logics of individuality and respectability produced within this matrix of privilege enable the project of culture making analyzed throughout this book.

Locating India's Transnational Class

Bangalore, 2005

Thirty-three years after my father packed his bag in Bangalore, I am seated in a comfortable home in a new suburb of Bangalore, eating a meal with a young family in surroundings not unlike those of my childhood in the United States. Around the perimeter of the large dining table are seated Ram, Shreya, their two children, and Shreya's mother. We eat lentils, vegetables, and rice from Corningware plates as Ram's and Shreya's son angles for his parents' attention as they speak to me. Ram had left India for the United States in 1992, with a degree from a top Indian university in hand and a lucrative job offer from a company in Virginia. He worked for two years, came back to India to marry Shreya in 1994, and returned to the United States, where his career eventually took both of them to Silicon Valley. Like my parents, Ram and Shreya maintained ties to India through their families and their friends. They raised their children to have a strong sense of Indianness and Hindu values but never had any intention of moving back to India. On a trip home in 2003, however, Ram sensed that things in India had changed. Indeed, he began to sense that the better opportunities in terms of career, economic mobility, and lifestyle were not to be found in the United States at all, but, surprisingly, in the very place he had left. More importantly, it seemed to him that he could offer his children a more secure cultural identity in India, rather than the delicate balancing act between "Indian" and "American" he felt they were forced into in the United States.

Bangalore is the beating heart of India's it industry, the most visible city in a short but growing list of Indian it cities that includes Mumbai, Hyderabad, Chennai, Pune, and Gurgaon. Most large multinational technology firms have operations in Bangalore, and the success of multinational capital has dramatically transformed the landscape of the city. In Bangalore, more than practically any other Indian city, the positive effects of the it industry seem pervasive, whether in the crowded mall or the mushrooming tech parks, in the innumerable engineering colleges or the new high-end international airport (see figures 5–7). All of these trends have also made Bangalore the prime location for non-resident Indians (nris) to relocate after several years in the United States.

Ram's and Shreya's decision to relocate to Bangalore stemmed from recognition not only of a changing India, but also of a transformed Bangalore in particular. Once they arrived in Bangalore, they went about making their American-turned-Indian dreams a reality. At the time I spoke with them, they had almost finished constructing their brand-new five-thousand-square-foot home in a residential enclave outside of Bangalore (see figure 8). Their new home is luxurious—far beyond anything they might have afforded in Silicon Valley. Indeed, the move back to India was not, as it might have been in a previous generation, a sacrifice or a step down; rather, it was a step up in every way. In his Bangalore-based job, Ram earns in dollars but spends in rupees, thus converting what would be an upper-middle-class salary in the United States into an even more elite lifestyle in India. Shreya, who had been working a lucrative biotech job in the United States, could afford not to work in India. She took time off to spend with her children before starting a part-time teaching job. Both felt that life in Bangalore took them out of the U.S. "rat race," allowing them more time with their children and extended family. For them, the move back to India underscored their family and cultural values, even as it afforded them a larger house with a more luxurious lifestyle.

Ram's and Shreya's story has become exemplary of India's transnational professional class and unfolds during a distinct moment in the history of India and in the history of the global economic system. My parents were their predecessors—converting a technical education acquired in India into social and geographic mobility that allowed them to live comfortably in the United States while maintaining ties to India from afar. Unlike my parents, however, Ram and Shreya have helped to transform concerns of "brain drain" during my parents' generation into hopeful narratives of "brain circulation," allowing them to participate directly in India's new development trajectory (Saxenian 2005). Indeed, Ram is one among an estimated sixty-thousand transnational Indian professionals who have returned to India since 2000 (Ray 2007). In the Bangalore office or his California-based multinational, he is joined by other transnational colleagues—experienced it professionals like him who have chosen to move back to India after a long stint abroad, or younger folk, who aspire for the opportunity to leave India, even if only to return.

Whatever improvements in lifestyle they might be experiencing, however, Ram and others like him do not choose to be in India solely for economic reasons; rather it is their identification with India as a cultural and spiritual "home" that motivates the decision to return. Ram explained that he wished for his children to experience what he had experienced as a child, growing up in a small semi-rural town in South India. Ram explained that there is...