New India's Kingdom of Dreams

“You could call it the United States of Gurgaon,” social activist Sanjay Kaul tells a NYT journalist, describing the “new India” city of Gurgaon outside Delhi. Here, Kaul says, “You are on your own.” (NYT 11/6/9)

I first came across a description of Gurgaon – a 25-year-old agglomeration of gleaming corporate towers, sprawling factory cubes and spotless gated residences that are said to exemplify “New India’” and its Kingdom of Dreams (the name of one of Gurgaon’s several theme parks) – after a several month journey in India. It caught my attention because we had stayed with friends who lived in another suburban area not far from Gurgaon itself. At the time, no one mentioned the Kingdom of Dreams.

Now, several months later, I was reading V.S. Naipaul’s description of his late-1980s visit to Calcutta. 

Naipaul writes about being “overpowered” by Calcutta’s smoky and up-turned streets, its wretched water, its dirt and crowds. He continues: “In India, where most people live in such poor conditions, the combination of private squalor and an encompassing squalor outside was quite stupefying. It would have given people not only a low idea of their needs – air, water, space for stretching out – but it must also have given people a low idea of their possibilities, as makers or doers … a low idea of human needs and possibilities.” (India: A Million Mutinies Now)

Calcutta and Gurgaon, the late-1980s and today. The contrasts startled me. The ideals driving Gurgaon also left me wondering about Naipaul’s talk of a “low idea of human needs and possibilities.” I decided to find out more about Gurgaon (a place we travelled very close to but never reached), both as a “city” and as a place that is seen as representing India’s future.

It is true that the ‘encompassing squalor’ Naipaul witnessed still prevails 30 years on. Most Indians do not have access to anything approaching clean water; half do not have functioning (or private) toilets. More than a quarter of all Indians subsist on roughly $1 a day. One in four city dwellers live on less than fifty cents a day. More than half of India’s children are clinically malnourished. At the same time, many Indians living amidst this squalor appear to have an astonishing determination to maintain a kind of influence over, tidiness, even beauty in their immediate and personal lives.

Over these same 30 years, something like islands (too benign and naturalizing a word) of quite another “New India” have emerged. Today the country competes with Singapore and China to produce the most millionaires per minute. Gurgaon is an urban equivalent of this expresslane of wealth and power.

Everything about places like Gurgaon – the towers of glass and concrete, the productivist ethos, the attention to efficient “systems management,” the relatively high levels of earning (then spending), homes filled with the latest décor and technology, the public cleanliness and safety – makes Naipaul’s 1980s “low idea of human needs and possibilities” feel short-sighted, even intractably bleak.

Or does it?   

Real estate marketers call Gurgaon “Millennium City.” Millenium, many millions: the name echoes the astonishing profits realtors have made from the area’s farmlands and the millions more made by companies taking advantage of the combination of national “free market” economics launched in the 1990s by the BJP, the Haryana state government’s corporate-friendly tax policies, and the establishment of Special Economic Zones with their tax breaks and exemptions from hard-sought labour and environmental laws.

Now a megalopolis of 1.5 million people, Gurgaon comprises an ever-expanding urban mass of international call centers, IT engineering outfits and other enormities of free-for-all global capitalism, Indian and otherwise: Alcatel Lucent, Motorola, Ericsson, Panasonic, Mitsubishi, Bank of America, Mocrosoft, Accenture, the soda pop conglomerates, Nestle, Maruti-Susuki, Honda ….

Gurgaon is said to be one of the major “outsourcing and offshoring” centres in the world, and sports the third highest per capita income among India’s cities.

In between the corporate towers (a commercial heap of glass and steel called Cyber City, “a dream when you look up and a nightmare when you look down, or around,” says one IT worker) are over 40 shopping malls (“India’s mall capital”), seven golf courses, several theme parks (including Kingdom of Dreams), many gated housing “compounds” (luxury or close enough), fast food joints, chic coffee houses and opulent restaurants, BMWs and high-end SUVs shimmering in automobile showrooms (local folks added 50,000 cars to India’s roads in 2010).

Gurgaon is also fast becoming a major hub of learning – at least of a certain kind. Institutes, universities and colleges abound, each with “business,” “technology,” “engineering,” and/or “management” somewhere in their names, each cashing in on the huge “market of success aspirants.” The city is also an emerging centre of India’s very profitable “medical tourism” industry.

It’s all breathtaking. Like the material face of capitalism itself, Gurgaon’s monumental, shining presence and its theatre of “progress” are the greatest gestures of self-advertisement one could create. Everything in official Gurgaon gleams: a look-at-me conspicuousness whose very brightness blinds.

But if you can find some way to reduce the dazzle, what turns out to be really striking about Gurgaon is the discovery that this is a city with pretty well no shared, public services: no functioning city-wide sewer or drainage system, no reliable hydro or water, no public sidewalks, no public squares or parks (apart from “industrial parks”), little parking, poor roads, and no community-wide public transportation system. Garbage? – tossed, old India style, along the road or into vacant lots.

“Vacant lots”: perhaps also the most apt way to describe community spaces and services in the Kingdom of Dreams.

A number of India’s own writers say three key factors have led to this public sphere emptiness: India’s new-old self-serving, corrupt political leadership (at all levels of government); a tangled, incompetent and corruptible civic bureaucracy; and the area’s rapid, full-on colonization by global capital with an eye for profit-making tax and labour deals.

In response, each piece of corporate Gurgaon has created its own self-contained “public” services, extending the idea of a managed workforce into a managed life-force. Genpact (“leaders in managing business processes”) is typical, with its own power generators, fleet of taxis, sewage plant, security guards and cleaning staff, medical clinic and ambulance, and post office. Many real estate companies ensure the same “public” services to their gated housing enclaves, places that also feature pricey private schools and sports facilities.

All this has led to Gurgaon becoming an agglomeration of privatized cells or nodes or colonies – resembling the cubicalized work spaces inside the towers. Movement from one to another takes place in corporate taxi fleets. Guards, more and more with weapons, stand at the walls and gates of each cell, alongside signs warning of the risks of walking anywhere “outside.”

The “outside” of glass-and-concrete Gurgaon can be understood as the necessary complement to what Gurgaon is inside. “Outside” is seen as the land of corporate thieves. “Outside” are the secret places of “terrorists” who condemn “Gurgaon” as being all things satanic. Most immediately, though, “outside” is the slums glimpsed through tower and condo windows of Gurgaon, far off because never visited, but also so close.

“Women and children are not encouraged to go outside,” the luxury residential “community” organizer, Mrs Bhalla, tells one journalist. “If they have to walk, they can walk inside. It’s a different world outside the gate.”

Copyright Ruth Fremson/NYT

This “outside” – slum-shantytowns tumbles of makeshift shacks between which gather pools of black sewage water – is home to well over 200,000 migrant workers, people who clean the toilets, cook the meals, guard the gates and chauffeur the engineers and call-centre “agents” in the kingdom proper.

Walk through Chakkarpur, one such shantytown and you meet women standing in line at water pumps, old India style, waiting to fill water jugs between frequent power outages. A local school is charity-run. Houses are brick and tin and scraps. A 2008 visit by a journalist found the government-financed childhood nutrition centre closed and the nearest government hospital empty. Residents talk of harassment by the Gurgaon police.

“Police,” that is, not the kingdom’s security guards. In Gurgaon private security guards outnumber community police four to one, and they live in places like Chakkarpur already! (Chakkarpur’s name might have a kind of prescience. As best I can find out, "Chakkar" in Hindi seems to suggest rounds, round-about-journeys, dizziness, trouble, or confusion.)

The for-profit “Intelligence and Security” industry is another key element of the new India, providing everything from armed guards for housing complexes, banks and luxury item shops, sleuths hired to protect corporate secrets, to contractors working for India’s military and considerable number of “intelligence” agencies. A 2009 New York Times article reported that India’s private security industry was worth $2 billion, adding a million employees in one year to the five million already in the business. That’s 1.3 million more than India’s police and armed forces combined. Private security guards, many of whom are said to be failed police and military try-outs, are the de facto police force for corporate and upper middleclass India.

Gurgaon is home to various “security force” bootcamps as well as a mounting number of “Security Intelligence and Management” outfits. One Indian company recently signed a deal with the Israeli College for Security and Investigations to set up a joint facility in Gurgaon, which sourcesecurity.com enthuses will “produce the best future ready professionals the Indian Security Industry has seen to date.” I have read since that Israeli “security” and military experts are being hired across India’s “intelligence” industry – a good fit, given both country’s experience with the “security” anxieties and needs that accrue in apartheid-like social systems.

“Human needs and possibilities.”

What is people’s work in Gurgaon? Two of the largest employers are call centres (BPO or “business process outsourcing”) and companies that employ “IT engineers.”  A recent Mother Jones article and Siddhartha Deb’s “The Beautiful and the Damned: A Portrait of the New India” are starting points for thinking about both kinds of work and workers.

Call centre “agents” (or “customer care executives” in one company’s jargon) are often recent college graduates. They specialize in calls to particular countries (the U.S., Australia, the U.K.), peddling phone contracts, selling vitamins, raising political party funds, collecting debts, you name it. They might work 10-12 hour shifts (often at night because of time zones) and earn about $2 an hour, $5,000 a year – almost certainly a higher income than many of their parents.

The “business process outsourcing” industry has high employee turn-over. Some are studying part-time, hoping to “move up.” They often describe work as “boring,” as “not doing anything with my life.” They are constantly monitored and must conform to stringent performance evaluation norms. They are also the targets of considerable abuse (or disregard) from people they call. Apparently more than a few have described to interviewers their awareness that they earn more (that their parents, for example) because, within the globalized labour “market,” they are worth less. At the same time, they point to the pay cheques they can send home to families hard-pressed to meet basic needs, or to the pleasures of buying Westernized clothes and the latest “smartphone” – recognizable Westernized payoffs for work-as-boredom.

Critical to their call centre training is the need to “de-Indianize” themselves: unlearn what’s called their “mother tongue influence,” “neutralize” Indian pronunciation and diction and often adopt an on-the-phone Westernized name. One especially successful caller suggests what this feels like: “Sometimes I feel that now I’ve destroyed anything that is the real me ….”

In places like Gurgaon, examples of a curious phenomenon – of identitilessness, emptiness, timelessness, anywhereness – begin to pile up and define a placeless place. An IT engineer in Bangalore,India (a Gurgaon twin) looks out across the towers and condos and says “This could be anywhere.” Call “agents” must ‘destroy’ who they are on the way to becoming the imagined “client” half-way around the world, speaking to them as if they were calling from across town during a ‘normal’ work day, their success measured by how convincing they are at not being where and who and what they are.

Up the ranks are the IT engineers, several of whom are interviewed at length by Deb. Among his findings is the realization that engineering has become a “Brahmin occupation” in the new India: a place of self-conscious caste assertion filled with people who see themselves as possessing an exclusive knowledge “that cannot be shared with commoners.” He quotes a study that undercuts the profession’s (and the media’s) new India-sounding claims that IT jobs depend solely on “merit.” The current crop of engineers are, according to the study, largely urban, middle class and high or middle caste. 

Deb finds many instances of discontent among engineers: anger at not “rising” higher and more quickly, a kind of free-floating resentment towards government (resembling right-wing libertarianism in the West), contempt for those “beneath” them, and support for nationalist and xenophobic Hindu groups.

He also points to how free-marketers and beneficiaries of new India’s Westernization have used the 2000-year-old Bhagavad Gita as an argument for maintaining the hierarchies of caste, wealth and power – seeing “the story of Arjuna throwing aside his moral dilemmas and entering wholeheartedly into the slaughter of the battlefield” as “an endorsement of a militant, aggressive Hinduism.”

Today, twenty or so years of victories are being celebrated. A poll reported in Business Today, pointing to Gurgaon’s “world-class feel,” notes that 59-percent of the city’s “residents” (i.e. the city’s white-collar cubicalized workers) say that Gurgaon gives them “much better jobs that matched their skills compared with other cities.” This response is repeated as if its meaning is self-evident – and something to celebrate. Business Today does not also say that a common term in India for many of these same workers is “cybercoolies,” with its unreconciled mix of irony and sense of debasement.

So where has my reading about Gurgaon – place and symbol – led so far?

No one with any sense of fellow-feeling and justice would begrudge Indians relief from the toil and material insecurity and chaotic social surroundings experienced by so many of their parents and perhaps by themselves as children. I don’t think that’s the issue here. Rather I think the issue is the choices, the futures, the lives Indians are being offered – choices that have been demonstrated to lead in the West right into the dead-ends of obsessive cycles of production and consumption, kinds of work that typically exclude the pleasures of work, and a political economy that devastates natural life and is so heavily dependent on the “security” industry and its recurrent wars.

“Human needs and possibilities.”

It is commonplace in new India and elsewhere to use terms like “modernization,” “development” and “globalization” to describe what Gurgaon represents – at least in its Kingdom of Dreams guise. But these are too naturalized-feel and abstract.

A more accurate term would be “Westernization” in its modern guise, especially given that the social-economic models, the corporate colonizers, the educational ideals and practice, the striking use of (and training in) American idioms and accents, and the productivist-consumerist treadmill is so overwhelmingly at the centre of the history of the modern West’s political economy. The titles blaring from bookstore shelves – “India Arriving,” “India Booms,” “The India Renaissance” – speak to both the need in India to see “Gurgaon” as its very own creation, and, on page to page, the actual modernist Western roots of this creation.

No surprise, then, that Starbucks and Amazon are about to invade India, and that other Western, especially American corporate giants are already there as wholesellers. The Indian government’s recent retreat from a plan to open the country to major American “box stores” seems temporary, just a matter of finding a way for India’s own megacorps to arrange their best cut.

Look at Gurgaon – as discrete place and as emblematic of the new India – and what I see is not a generalized “low idea” (or high) of human needs, but rather the full-on modernist Westernization of “human needs and possibilities.”

At the same time, and in spite of all its hyper-newness – the ‘city’ as labour and spending machine, everyone wired into the latest technogadget – Millenium City also resounds with echoes of feudal India. I think of the old gated districts of Ahmedabad and the fortresses scattered across Rajasthan: the sultans and princes replaced by bureaucratic capitalism, the dependence on benevolence from above, the anxious-to-please servitude from below, the narrow tribal identifications, the culture of competition/battle, the fear of the “outside.”

The call centre “agents” might tell us in the West who we want to be, but the feudal echoes of old-new India tell us who we are.

Writing this post some weeks after leaving India, I remember the many eager, optimistic 20-something Indians we met, on their way to and from this or that “institute” or “university” or “academy,” heads turned toward the promises embedded in the idea of some B.Comm or M.Engineering. They made me feel their excitement and understand something of their aspirations. I wanted to cheer on their hopefulness.

At the same time, only exceptionally – I remember one instance – did they talk about their dreams contributing to any shared value. It is not that they lacked some overly abstracted “higher” sense of human needs and possibilities. It was, rather, that their sense of possibility – new India possibilities – begins and ends with themselves: cubicalized, cellular, “here you are on your own” in the Kingdom of Dreams.

“The Indian market is huge, huge!” a student tells the apparently dumb traveler sitting beside him going south through Kerala. Unlikely that this voice of the New India would be persuaded by any talk of “a low idea of human needs and possibilities.”

Snubbing their noses at Naipaul’s gloom, they could be right, these proud, confident, eager B.Comms, a couple of whom wanted me to know that “India is the world’s future.”  I could feel the fervour in their voices – and a wish to be reassured.

Some sources:

- Jim Yardley,  "In India, Dynamism Wrestles With Dysfunction"
- Andrew Marantz, "My Summer at an Indian Call Center"
- Amelia Gentleman, "Painful truth of call centre cyber coolies"
- "First Indo-Israel training academy collaboration set up in Gurgaon"
- Herather Timmons, "Private guards are the front lines of India's Security"
- Somini Sengupta, "Inside Gate, India's Good Life; Outside, the Servants' Slums"
- Slideshow on "Guagaon: Model City and Cautionary Tale"