In Conversation With Purnima Mankekar and Akhil Gupta
Following their Friday Seminar, we had the pleasure of interviewing Professors Akhil Gupta and Purnima Mankekar from the University of California, Los Angeles on their new book titled ‘Future Tense: Affective Capitalism and Potentiality in a Transnational Service Industry’. The book explores the lives and work-lives of intimate strangers that make up Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) agents in South India. Since 2000, the BPO industry has grown to employ 700,000 young people in India. These workers spend their nights interacting by phone and online with customers in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and elsewhere.
The calls are not only signifiers of transnational flows of capital, but are also windows between intimate worlds: they are among the tangents of racial affective capitalism. Professors Gupta and Mankekar’s research spanned almost a decade in Bengaluru, where transnational capitalism shapes and is shaped by a historically diverse workforce. The tech parks of the BPOs construct futurities and aspirations that provide critical insights into the imaginaries interwoven with transnational capitalism. This invisible labour is carried out at night, whilst colonial relations are both re-inscribed and altogether forgotten. What image of The West is painted from the end of that telephone line?
Seated comfortably in Professor Banerjee’s office, we sink into the sizable armchairs. Professors Gupta and Mankekar immediately invoke an atmosphere of serenity with their absorbing comments and witty exchanges. This is an opportunity for us to delve into the nitty-gritties of their research and anthropological method, so we begin with their embodied experience of fieldwork.
In your seminar you touched on the corporeal cycles of life in the BPO Centre, and in ‘The Missed Period’ chapter you discuss the direct effect of this on the body. How did it feel going nocturnal with your interlocutors?
Prof Gupta: When we began this project our daughter was six years old, so there was a balance to be struck between the personal and professional. We couldn’t both go off in the middle of the night, so we largely took turns. The companies also couldn't afford for us to be talking to their agents on the shop floor: interviews infringed on labour time. Instead we held interviews off-site, on BPO agents’ days off. Management were actually happy to have us there - for them we might have provided solutions to increase efficiency and reduce worker turnover, and we were happy to share this information as we thought it might improve working conditions, though of course we never shared any personal or identifying information. Before ours, there were a dozen books written on call centres, but almost none of them were done from inside a company. We had to sign NDAs…but quite frankly the kinds of human protocols that we have in anthropology are much stricter than any NDA.
Did you openly approach the companies as researchers, and were they receptive to this?
Prof Mankekar: Most companies were pretty open to it! Interestingly, even some of the managers were themselves curious about our work - they too were asking similar questions about the lives of their workers.
Prof Gupta: They were very interested in how working in call centres changed agents’ lives.
In our courses we have studied neoliberal development extensively, and how in South Asia especially, an entrepreneurial mindset is present in all modern companies. Did you encounter that?
Prof Mankekar: It was manifest in some of the training. Agents were trained to think about their own development as a project, very much in the way that neoliberalism presumes: you know, the whole care of the self model. This might be why there was so much attention paid to demeanour, and what people wore. But it is also true that these neoliberal visions of the self did not seamlessly take over because there continued to be a real commitment to family and the larger community. They were by no means the ideal neoliberal subjects!
Prof Gupta: It did make them entrepreneurial, but it's also an example of when context shapes capitalism; it's not simply the other way round.
BPO centres can be understood as new frontiers of capitalist accumulation, which we have come across in the work of David Harvey, and in a school of relatively modern Marxist anthropology. Where do you position yourselves along the scale of Marxist anthropology?
Prof Mankekar: I think we’re positioned in different places… why don’t you talk about where you sit [to Prof. Gupta], and then I’ll talk about where I sit.
Prof Gupta: What’s distinctive about this project is it brings together discussions of racial capitalism and affective capitalism. For us this was essential following Harvey and others’ particular lack of attention to the logics of race in theories of capitalism.
Prof Mankekar: I was informed by Marxist theorisations of culture - Raymond Williams, Gramsci, Althusser, Stuart Hall - and simultaneously by Women of Colour Feminism in the United States. As somebody who moved to the US from India where our conception of race was very different, it was a real eye opener. Especially in relation to how I, as a woman of colour, was perceived in the classroom, and later when I joined the profession. It was very personal and transformative. This allowed me to truly grasp racial capitalism from a feminist perspective. Working in a centre for Asian-American studies has really allowed me to push back against any Eurocentric, America-centric, or even an Atlanticist notion of race. It allowed me to examine: what does race look like in the Pacific? What does race look like in the context of settler colonialism? It's those two streams that have shaped me as a Marxist.
In the seminar, you talk about the idea of class/caste dynamics in an outsourcing system that seemingly transcends national borders. How do you situate the concept of ‘India Rising’ and nationalism in this situation?
Prof Mankekar: They are very closely linked. This idea of futurity and the future as articulated by call centre agents was very closely linked to India as a rising power. What was powerful for us to see was the suturing of individual aspiration with national aspiration.
Prof Gupta: What was also interesting was how this nationalism existed in an explicitly transnational setting which produced intimate connections between different nations through the agent and the customer. For both the customer and the agent, more strident visions of nationalism don’t necessarily conflict with working for or helping those in another country. They don’t see it as contradictory that you could become a majoritarian Hindu on the one hand, and on the other you’re doing this service work for people who may be re-transcribing colonial relations. It’s a job! They don’t see it as opposing ideologies. I don’t think we found any friction there at all. Only that perhaps agents might be more inclined to be critical of the West.
‘Shantiniketan Express’, Rahul Basu 2023.
Was there a desire on the part of managers and CEO’s to have a homogenised workforce, in trying to think about this concept of ‘One Nation’, beyond religious boundaries?
Prof Mankekar: That’s a really good question! I don’t think that was on the radar of the managers at all. They were living at a cultural moment in which there was linguistic, class and religious conflict. So I think it would have been really naive for management to even think about a unified working body. That was just not on the horizon, and nor was there on the part of the managers a Hindu nationalist agenda. It was not manifest in the training, though it may have been manifest in their particular attitudes toward individuals. It was definitely not on the agenda to construct a kind of universal, ‘Pan Indian Body’. That was happening in other domains, but not necessarily in the BPOs.
Prof Gupta: In Bangalore, people exist in a multilingual and multicultural context. For example, Kannada is the regional language, but it’s only spoken by a third or so of Bangalorians. People are there from all over the country.
Prof Mankekar: It has a history of a polyglot civic life; it’s not a new thing. The city is an actant: it is not outside, it permeates working life.
We were thinking about changing and mutating capitalism: that it doesn’t wipe out existing differences, but instead tends to transform them and be transformed by them. Do you think that the economic boom in India, especially in the tech industry, has been aided by the diversity of India? Is conjugated oppression in some way useful for this kind of capitalism?
Prof Mankekar: That is such a good question… in fact I wish I had pondered this before we wrote the book… I’d have to really think about that. I’ll say that the reason that we ended up in Bangalore is the chief minister had a vision of the area becoming a hub for IT, it was very much part of that regional policy. The history of scientific education and aeronautical engineering made Bangalore hospitable to the IT industry.
‘Untitled’, Rahul Basu 2023.
Prof Gupta: These industries each had their own call centre, and would start BPO’s in buildings adjacent to their IT centres. The places where there are no BPO’s are Chennai and Kerala. Possibly because they had communist governments who were not receptive to trans-national capitalism…..now of course, they are. With China leading the way, everyone is receptive to multi-national capital. When call centres first opened, there was definitely awareness about which kind of accents are desirable, or at least which accents were malleable to be changed. They would call this ‘MTI’ or Mother Tongue Influence.
We want to talk about another kind of mutation or possibility of mutation. We loved that your research was conducted in the span of 10 years, as a lot can change in a decade! So how did developments in technology and involvement of artificiality impact a space where you focus on contrasting tactile and tangible elements through embodiment?
Prof Mankekar: So there came a point in our research when many of these companies were shifting to more automated processes. And that’s when we decided we wanted to stop the research, because we felt there was going to be a change in the way in which this work was occurring, and we didn’t want to spread ourselves too thin. So huge change has occurred, and that’s going to be our next project which is going to be on AI, not AI in BPOs, not AI and labour, but on AI and the algorithmic cultures that are being constructed.
Prof Gupta: Even by the time we stopped our research, there was a lot of machine learning and predictive analytic already happening. Chat boxes etc hadn’t been developed but other stuff was already happening. The CEO of one company told us that when somebody calls his company he can predict the three most likely questions people are going to ask just from the phone number.
It feels like this topic is really related to David Graeber’s ’bullshit jobs’, and how technology supposedly would ease our labour but instead ends up creating new efforts, frustrations and exhaustions. What are your thoughts on this new evolving technology and the possibilities and hopes it creates, and on the changing nature of labour itself for the BPO agents?
Prof Gupta: So one of the ways in which labour had changed for BPO agents already by 2016-17, was that they were being heavily assisted by machine learning and predictive analytics. On their screens they were already getting advice about what they should say next to the caller or what, based on the caller’s profile, they should have said to the caller. 5 years ago this wasn’t the case.
The other thing about these technologies is that they have merged web surfing, chat and calling. So when you are surfing the internet and you are looking at Sainsbury’s site or some shop and you spend more than a few minutes looking at it, depending on whether you had been a high-value customer in the past, the machines track how long you are taking, what you spent in the past and then they drop a balloon saying ‘can I help you?’ on the chat and they move you from one platform to another because they don’t want people to get frustrated by inefficient searching. So they try to help you find it sooner rather than let you get upset by wasting your time. That’s how technology changes the way customers interact with the company.
Prof Mankekar: In fact when I was sitting next to one of the agents, he had two screens. One with the complete profile of the person he was speaking to so he knew what they were like, that they lived alone or had a huge hospital bill so he knew what he was dealing with.
Moving on a bit, we really liked your use of the word futurity in your lecture. It seems that anthropology thinking about conceptualisations of the future is quite a new thing to do, but why do you think it is such an important framework? And also what are your thoughts on the term ‘solastalgia’? It’s a term coined by philosopher Glenn Albrecht, but it’s been used by anthropologists to talk about ontological trauma caused by the lack of agency some people feel when their lived environments are changing very rapidly. It’s used by environmental anthropologists, but we think it can be applied to a lot more as it takes seriously the disruption of having unstable futures and considers that as traumatic.
Prof Manekekar: That’s so interesting, like the opposite of what we argue.
We did summer ethnography projects this year with grants from LSE. Ishani did hers in rural West Bengal [India], Lucy did hers in London, and Nazli in Istanbul. For Ishani, solastalgia was very helpful to understand that for some people, in the context of Adivasi youth, a connection to the past and a more historicised sense of the self was helpful for them to also project themselves into the future. So for the BPO agents, did the fact that many of them migrated and had a disrupted sense of place affect the way they envisioned the future?
Prof Mankekar: I wish we talked to you before we wrote the book! Of course it did, in many ways. That’s why we use the metaphor of mapping. In many ways there was a sense that this kind of dislocation was something that required some kind of ethical map for them to navigate this new unfamiliar space; very daunting spaces that the workers now had to inhabit. So what were the different kinds of ethical mapping that were available to them?
The one we talk about the most is that of relationality, meaning the relations between them, between themselves and their families. This isn’t a romanticised notion of family, but whatever it was, oppressive or not, it provided them with a grid or a map to navigate this extremely new unfamiliar terrain. I guess the difference between how we envisioned this idea and the way you talk about it is that I wouldn’t use the word trauma because I don’t think it was traumatic, but it was for sure dislocating and disorienting. Even if they didn’t migrate physically from another state or another part of India, just the migration from their almost slum-like homes to these high-tech glassy tech parks, that in itself was a dislocating journey. That’s a very dislocating journey that a lot of them make regularly when they come to work. So, what kind of ethical map was available to them to navigate this? Relationality was the main thing, super important.
Our last question is related to Nazli’s fieldwork. Nazli focused on HIV related stigma and testing in everyday spaces, and conceptualised the body something that doesn’t finish with the skin, whose boundaries are blurred, and how health is impacted by fear. So what are the possibilities that thinking about the body in relation to space, or being one with space, provide for anthropological thinking?
Prof Gupta: So Harris Solomon’s book on ‘metabolic living’ explores exactly this question, of how the relationship between the body and the city is a permeable relation, how the city comes into the body and the body inhabits the city in a particular way. He uses the metaphor of metabolic living (metabolism) to think about that. So our way of thinking about it is that the body, the agent and relations are fundamentally spatially and socially expansive. The self is shaped by relations the agent is in, the kind of working conditions they are in, how they care for kin and so forth. We emphasise in the book that this is not about individuals. We don’t stress individualism (and this is how neoliberalism differs), people are entrepreneurial but they are not individuals in the same way.
Prof Mankekar: That’s why the notion of affect is so useful. Because the skin doesn’t enclose the body. For example my body and this chair are constantly interacting with one another: my muscles are being shaped by this chair, it’s not separate from this chair.
So we want to end with a fun question. In the event of an apocalypse, or if you found yourself in an eternal tech park, which three anthropologists - or cobras - would you keep by your side while you try to survive and why?
Prof Mankekar: Hahaha. I’m not sure that’s such a difficult question
Perhaps each other?
Prof Mankekar: Definitely. I also think Sylvia Yanagisako, she has been a mentor to us and very formative in my thinking of family and kinship, so definitively Sylvia. Actually maybe Eric Wolf, from what Akhil has been telling me lately he sounds like an amazing, ethical good human being which I think would be very important to me
Prof Gupta: I would say Amitav Gosh - an anthropologist but novelist mostly. Maybe Catherine Stewart, actually maybe Anne Alison more than Catherine Stewart who doesn’t work on affect per se but whose work has been really wonderful.
Thank you so much for talking to us! It’s been an honour.
Mankekar and Gupta’s book will be published by Duke University Press, Forthcoming 2025.
This interview was joyfully conducted by Ishani Milward-Bose, Lucy Bernard and Nazlı Adıgüzel, transcribed by Iacopo Nassingh and Lucy Bernard.
All images original works by Rahul Basu. More works found here.
Thank you to Professor Mukulika Banerjee for your encouragement.