ABSTRACT
Call centres in India remain a perplexing and confusing area of interest. Contradictory and conflicting reports rarely flesh out the nuanced elements of the debate on the effects and impacts of India’s ‘new sunshine sector’ (Chengappa and Goyal 2002: 36) and seem more interested in discussing whether call centre employees should be termed ‘cyber sahibs’ (‘Cyber Coolies or Cyber Sahibs’ 2003) or ‘cyber coolies’ (Remesh 2004). Polarized perspectives inveigle the Indian chattering classes into wondering whether or not globalization (née colonization) is good for India, whilst obfuscating the larger concerns of how such developments alter and transform the social fabric of India in much more subtle and profound ways. Call centres have quite literally rushed India into conversations about globalization, accelerating its processes, breathlessly taking it all in. ‘Globalization’ itself is a problematic term, with varying definitions linking
it to arguments of ‘Empire’ (Hardt and Negri 2000: xiv), the ‘clash of civilizations’ (Huntington 1993) or the much circulated ‘Jihad vs McWorld’ (Barber 1995). It is perhaps most commonly understood as referring to the increasing economic integration and interdependence of countries and the move from traditional to modern societies via a range of specific processes (Featherstone 1995: 87).1 However, the view that globalization produces a Western hegemonic culture that will overwhelm other cultures (Robertson 1995) or that India will suddenly become housekeeper to the world is premature and gives rise to a ‘double apartheid’, the growing disjuncture of the globalization of knowledge and the knowledge of globalization (Appadurai
1999). In this book ‘globalization’ is used in two ways: the first to make reference to a ‘historical epoch, beginning in the 1960s and contemporaneous with postmodernity’ (modernity being an earlier period from 1840 to 1960) (Featherstone and Lash 1995: 5); the second refers to a ‘compression of the world as a whole … an increase in global interdependence and the awareness of that interdependence’ (Friedman 1995: 72). Culture and identity play distinctive roles in understanding globalization
and its processes. Appadurai’s framework for analyzing ‘global disjunctures’ examines the relationship among dimensions or ‘scapes’ of global cultural flows: ‘ethnoscapes’, the ‘landscape of persons who constitute the shifting world in which we live’; ‘technoscapes’, the ‘global configuration of technology’; ‘and ‘mediascapes’, ‘the distribution of electronic capabilities to produce and disseminate information which is generally image centred and narrative based strips of reality’, to name a few (Appadurai 1996: 33-43). Moreover, the global/local dynamic, with its dialectical intersection of ‘presence and absence’ and the interlacing of social events and social relations ‘at distance’ with local contextualities, further problematizes the notion of globalization (Robertson 1995: 26-27), particularly through the axes of culture, ‘habitually inculcated into people over time … sedimented into well worn social routines’ (Featherstone 1995: 5). ‘Culturalism, put simply, is identity politics at the level of the nation state’ (Appadurai 1996: 15), and nowhere is this more evident than in the physical migration of call centre workers across India and their virtual migration abroad. Call centre workers live in both the local and the global in very acute ways,
and their experiences provide a unique perspective on the globalization of India and the ‘cultural interchange process’ (Welsch 1999: 203-04). A veritable explosion of literature on transnationality (Ong 1999), hybridity (Pieterse 1995, 2000) and creolization (Hannerz 1992) has emerged to explore the concept of culture in the discussion of globalization; yet none quite captures the ‘transcultural networks’ and relationships of the call centre workers. ‘Creolization’, the interplay between centre and periphery of transnational cultural flows, illustrates how the influx of culture does not enter into a vacuum or inscribe itself on a tabula rasa but enters into various interactions with already existing meanings and meaningful forms (Hannerz 1992: 118). The mechanics of differentiation, although fast becoming more complex, are also genuinely cultural, no longer complying with geographical or national stipulations. These ‘global cultural flows’ (Appadurai 1996) are particularly relevant when considering the role of the nation-state and global cities, transnationalism, consumption, cinematic societies and the Internet, along with the ways in which they feed into the transformative ethnoscapes, mediascapes and technoscapes shaping the globalization of India. One of the more dominant myths concerning Indian call centres is the
belief that they threaten Indian culture. Whilst there is a good deal of evidence to suggest that this shift is taking place on some levels, there is little to indicate that there is some kind of inevitability to it or that call centres are
single-handedly responsible for changes in contemporary Indian society. Such arguments resonate with concerns that globalization erodes the nation-state and national identity. However, as noted above, national identity is a construct of global cultural flows. Simply put,
a nation consists of a collection of people who have come to believe that they have been shaped by a common past and are destined to share a common future … the belief that closer ties exist among members of the nation than with outsiders.
