“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"
