ABSTRACT
What began as a research project on the experiences of women working in Delhi’s transnational call centre industry developed into a wider narrative of what happens outside those call centres as well. It wasn’t until the project was well under way that the significance of space and the social relations produced out of spatial contexts emerged. The mutual influences and determinations of home, work and public spaces were acute reminders of what little agency the women possessed, regardless of how independent they were or felt they were. As a brief caveat, this book finds itself articulating a moment; it is tempo-
rally and spatially bound and can only speak to social transformations occurring in Delhi, Gurgaon and Noida from 2002 to 2003. Linking the call centre labour process, the ways in which women construct identities and the impact of working women on socio-spatial contexts, this book finds itself in the midst of an ever-evolving narrative, full of partial and incomplete truths. In endeavouring to privilege women’s voices and contribute to transnational
feminist research, the concepts of agency and identity were used to examine the ways in which women construct both work identities and consumer identities. The call centre labour process, with its virtual migration, allows for the construction of ‘the dialogical self ’ (Chaudhary and Sriram 2001: 380), performed in the ‘third space’ (Butler 1990; Bhabha 1994), the space between utterance and interpretation. The significance of this space is not to be underestimated as employees in transnational call centres transform their work sites into ‘cyber cafés’, with individuals using the Internet at work to connect to people all over the world. The interpretation of their Indian identities in these global contexts is not necessarily reflective of their experiences in everyday life, as they are grounded in an Indian locality; however, they do contribute to the reflexive processes of identity construction. These spaces are constructed over and over again throughout the labour process, in an exchange with every new customer. Each customer brings his or her own understanding of what it means to be ‘Indian’ to the exchange and, through a dialogic process with the call centre worker, constructs a new identity for the employee, similarly to the way the interviewees constructed varying identities for me. In this way, for example, British customers express cultural knowledge of British Asians and
thus through the dialogic process construct an ‘Indian’ identity for the call centre worker that is rooted in a British and British Asian discourse. ‘Dialogical’ exchanges widen the discursive practice of identity construc-
tion, as individuals acquire new ways of articulating self-identity. Numerous examples of online marriage services and websites catering for the needs of the global Indian community, such as Shaadi.com, are increasingly found, indicating a reflexive dialectic contributing to a ‘dialogical self ’ living in the ‘digital diaspora’ (Gajjala 2004). Websites such as BPOShaadi and BPODating, aimed exclusively at arranging relationships and marriages for call centre and BPO workers, are in the process of being re-framed, turning away from the global Indian towards the Indian living in India, in essence localizing a globalizing process. The dialogical self profoundly shapes the process of constructing self-identity,
of narrating a biography and a trajectory from the past to the anticipated future. But it is in the physical world, grounded in the local, that identities take on stronger social meanings. Globalization is not a homogenizing process and there is a lack of evidence
to suggest the universalizing of identity or the emergence of a supranational or ‘global colonial’ identity (Banerjee and Linstead 2001).1 Of greater significance is the knowledge that local and global social processes enable and constrain, so that women are complicit in patriarchal paradigms whilst resisting them. In some ways this book has given women an opportunity to speak for
themselves and discuss the ways in which they negotiate social, cultural and familial expectations in exercising agency and becoming independent. Many voices are included here to demonstrate the conflicts that the women experienced amongst themselves. There is no true image of women call centre workers; rather, there are stories that collude and contradict, and as much as women may be exploited or disempowered by the dominant forces of globalization, so too are they able to see out the spaces within which to articulate their self-identities, ambitions and futures. This book began with the pairing of two quotations from Guardian jour-
nalists, and although Monbiot and Seabrook seem singled out for criticism, this is not the case. These quotations were used to demonstrate the indelible and virile nature of such analyses, so influential that five years on Indian call centre studies continue to focus largely on the exploitative nature of the labour process as opposed to the wider impact that call centres have had on the cities of India. This begs the question as to why the issue is continuously raised by journalists and academics alike. Spivak (1988: 27) has made an excellent argument regarding the troping of
‘white men saving brown women from brown men’, taking issue with claims that place benevolent colonialists alongside the intellectuals who claim to speak for the disempowered. Women call centre workers may speak, but they are misheard and ignored, their actions interpreted through frames of reference that privilege the relationship between India and the UK.
