ABSTRACT
In many ways, Pratibha is right. Everywhere you look in Delhi you will see the influence of call centres. From signs advertising English-language training to advertisements for employment on posters, call centres have been enormously influential on everyday, urban life. Walking through the markets one can easily distinguish the call centre workers from others. They are talking loudly, laughing, unaware of who is watching them, generally living life with a sense of reckless abandon. But, more importantly, they are shopping. Stalls selling inexpensive jeans and shirts, jewellery, bangles and shoes are filled with employees on their days off, hoping to unburden themselves of some of their hard earned cash. The metropolitan shrines to consumerism and changing patterns of con-
sumption have made pleasure seeking a duty (Lash and Urry 1994) for those who can afford it (see Figure 4.1). As Bourdieu once wrote, consumption is a way of establishing difference, not merely expressing it, and as the call centre workers change the social landscape of the city, so they also change the people who share that social landscape; as is demonstrated by the way the relationship between field and habitus functions to produce agent’s bodies. For Pratibha, the mother of three grown children, transnationalism, rebranding Delhi as a global city, has produced the BTM, bhenji turned mod – from ‘bhenji’, a term of respect meaning older sister, and ‘mod’, short for modern. The term is widely used amongst the middle class in Delhi to mean an older woman trying too hard to be fashionable, a disparaging term that would never be used whilst the woman in question was present. BTM was never used to describe a non-Indian woman, or someone who did not have children. The women labelled BTMs were not particularly fashionable and often it was
their lack of fashion sense that earned them the title. It is a term reserved for women trying to dress and act young, Western and liberal, and judged to be too old for the globalizing shifts transforming Delhi. The use of clothing and dress as ways of identifying women and creating
typologies, as well as women using sartorial strategies to achieve success in their careers, can be seen in many parts of the city. Conscious of the changing perceptions of Indian call centre workers outside India, the women interviewed were also distinctly aware of the changing perception of call centre workers, and women in general, in cosmopolitan or urban spaces within Delhi. The influential ‘mediascapes’ (Appadurai 1996) of ‘Bollywood’, music videos and Indian television programming, along with changing consumption patterns, all contribute to a cultural cosmopolitanism (Delanty 1999) and liberalism found in many Indian cities. The idealizing of Indian women’s roles lies in Hindu mythology and its
pantheon of goddesses, particularly Sita and Drapudi, exemplifying many of the characteristics deplored or desired in women.1 Contemporary practices of sexual segregation are underlined by the mythological and ideological constructs that women are dangerous and must be controlled as their sexuality poses a threat to the social order and can bring dishonour and shame on themselves and their families (Chanda 2004: 221). One of the ways in which this ‘subjugation’ (Foucault 1979: 139) of the body is produced is through a series of interventions and regulatory controls, signifying ‘proper’ behaviour of women and identifying those who belong to a collective and those who do not:
Women are seen as the ‘cultural carriers’ of the collectivity and transmit it to the future generation; being properly controlled in terms of marriage and divorce ensures that children born to these women are not only biologically but also symbolically within the boundaries of the collectivity … at the same time women may participate in ethnic processes in different ways … and develop their own patriarchal bargains.
