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CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION
On a warm afternoon in November 2009, I walk into a Barista coffee shop in Defence Colony, an upscale neighborhood in south New Delhi. Copies of English-language newspapers litter the tabletops. From the television affixed to the wall comes the muted sound of NDTV: PROFIT, an English-language financial news channel. Around me, college girls in tank tops brush highlighted strands of hair from their eyes as they text furiously on iPhones. A couple flirts over cold coffee, she in a kurti and skinny jeans, he in a button-down with a Ralph Lauren Polo logo. Conversations are in English with the occasional dash of Hindi. “What bakwaas, I told him to meet here at noon,” one of the college girls grumbles. When the waiter appears, I order a small Caffe Americano for 45 rupees – three times the cost of a simple lunch (dal, chapati, vegetable curry) at the dhaba, or makeshift food stall, on the main road nearby.
I am waiting to meet with Nikhil, a 25-year-old man who has worked for five years at American-process call centers. Formerly, Nikhil was a customer service agent, track- ing down defaulting debtors among customers in the United States. Now he works as a trainer in the nearby suburb of Gurgaon, teaching customer service skills at a com- pany that answers technical support calls from internet users in the US. Having inter- viewed over two dozen working trainers since the start of my research, I am learning that this career path, from service agent to trainer, is typical in the business process
“How to Sit, How to Stand”: Bodily Practice and the New Urban Middle Class
Meredith Lindsay McGuire
CHAPTER 6
A Companion to the Anthropology of India, edited by Isabelle Clark-Decès © 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd except for editorial material and organization © 2011 Isabelle Clark-Decès
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118 MEREDITH LINDSAY MCGUIRE
outsourcing (BPO) industry. So, too, is Nikhil’s temptation to go freelance. At our first meeting a week ago, he spoke of a rumor that a prominent Indian restaurant chain is looking to retrain its workforce. If Nikhil were free to bid on the contract, his professional experience would make him a top contender for the job.
Obviously, an Indian restaurant chain has no need for the sort of Voice and Accent workshops that Nikhil regularly teaches at the American-process call center. What does recommend him is his expertise in “personality development and enhancement” (PDE) training. Among call center trainers, PDE serves as an umbrella term for a variety of kinesthetic pedagogies – teaching strategies that focus on bodily movement. PDE trainers believe that changing the way the body moves also changes the way the mind operates. That is, they claim that the cultivation of particular bodily dispositions produces new sorts of mental attitudes. “Attitudinal training,” is how another trainer, Siddharth, explained it to me. When pressed for detail, he added, “You know, how to stand, how to sit, how to talk, how to conduct yourself.”
At American-process call centers, these workshops address how to sit, stand, talk, and conduct oneself with Americans. But in the past few years, PDE training has become increasingly popular outside call centers, in Indian organizations that serve Indian clientele. The trainers whom I interviewed have led workshops for modeling schools, leadership clubs, and various businesses that populate the shopping malls and new entertainment complexes of New Delhi. Many of these businesses are ori- ented toward a sociality premised on practices of conspicuous consumption. That is, PDE trainers are finding work outside the call center in spaces that draw the same crowd as the Barista coffee shop chain: spaces indelibly associated with India’s new middle class.
This kind of urban space is new in both the literal and metaphorical sense. Coffee chains, shopping malls, cineplexes, pizza parlors – all of these first appeared in India in the mid-1990s, and in public discourse, they often serve as a shorthand for the new middle class and the new, postliberalization India (Mankekar 1999). PDE trainers literally teach people how to inhabit – how to move – in these new urban spaces. And as I am learning through my ethnographic fieldwork, these spaces, in turn, also evoke and condition the bodily practices taught by trainers. For example, at Barista, one of the college girls at the table nearby smiles at me when she accidentally catches my eye. In one PDE training manual that I have been given, this sort of eye contact between strangers is highlighted as a skill that may prove difficult for some trainees to acquire, and is also described and endorsed as indicative, and generative, of confidence.
PDE is an explicit intervention at the level of bodily dispositions. Its growing popular- ity in the spaces of the new middle class suggests that these spaces demand some- thing particular of the bodies therein. Much of the extant literature on India’s new middle class focuses on its consumption practices in these spaces: where and what new middle class consumers buy, and how such consumers talk about their purchases. But as the circulation of PDE suggests, new middle class consumption cannot be under- stood in isolation from bodily practice. To work and shop in a new urban space, one must know how to work and shop in it, and this knowledge is neither given nor obvious. In this chapter, I show how this knowledge is embodied knowledge, produced at multiple sites. Through an examination of new urban spaces, explicit programs of bodily training, and cinematic representations of new middle class people and places, I argue that the production of the new middle class entails the production of a new middle class body.
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BODILY PRACTICE AND THE NEW MIDDLE CLASS 119
INDIA’S NEW MIDDLE CLASS
What is the new middle class, and how might an attention to bodily practice advance our understanding of it? Empirically, the new middle class is a slippery category. Any attempt to define precisely its socioeconomic parameters is complicated by the vast disparities in income and educational level within the category of people self-identify- ing as middle class (Oza 2006). This difficulty is not unique to India, of course; schol- ars of class in the United States have noted that the application of this category is so broad that it actually serves to obscure important socioeconomic differences (Rose 1986; Stacey 1998). “Middle classness” is always as much a project or claim as an empirical, socioeconomic category. My informants, for instance, seem personally invested in claiming a new middle class position; they agree that there is a “new” mid- dle class and often cite, as evidence of this class, consumption practices of their own (like shopping monthly for new clothing) that they would not have been able to afford five or ten years ago. At the same time, none of them suggests that they were anything other than “plain old” middle class, so to speak, in the earlier era. That is, while the postliberalization economic boom has made some people wealthier – and also, as I argue below, has engendered a new way of performing middle class subject- hood – it remains debatable whether the total number of people who identify as mid- dle class has grown since the 1980s (Fernandes 2000b).
That said, the empirical difficulties of locating the new middle class coexist with a consistent narrative (both popular and academic) about its birth and nature. The new middle class is broadly understood as that group of affluent English-speaking workers who have benefited from, in the words of economist Gurucharan Das, “the opportu- nities opened by technology and globalization” (2001). Call center workers are iconic members of this new middle class, and not only because they so often are featured in newspaper editorials about the promises and pitfalls of the “new middle class life- style.” By definition, their employment is the result of a series of economic reforms (referred to, in popular parlance, as “liberalization”) that commenced in 1991 and triggered an influx of foreign commodities and multinational companies. These com- panies were eager to take advantage of the untapped middle-class consumer market, but many also established back offices in India to employ the country’s educated English-speakers, whose skills could be more cheaply purchased than that of their Western counterparts (Deutsche Bank Research 2006).
Its forms of employment are not the only key characteristic of the new middle class. The economic reforms and the outsourcing boom that followed are broadly understood to have marked a fundamental shift in the Indian socioeconomic land- scape and the middle class itself. The Indian media often frame liberalization as a final rejection of the model for national development articulated by Prime Minister Nehru in the 1950s, in which industrialization and social programs would be the key engines of Indian modernization. “People at large recognised that the socialist dream was irreparably broken,” one journalist writes of the decision to liberalize (Joshi 2004). In turn, scholars have noted a broad, concomitant shift in citizenly and social values, particularly in regard to constructions of the middle class and its role in the life of the nation (Chatterjee 2004; Mankekar 1999). Through the 1980s, the role of the middle class was closely associated in the popular imagination
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with Nehru’s modernization project. Characterized by an ethos of citizenly solidarity with the poor, middle-class Indians were cast as the agents and overseers of indus- trialization and developmental schemes for rural communities, and also as the guardians of a normative morality that preserved the social fabric of the modern- izing nation (Chatterjee 1993; Fernandes 2000a; Mankekar 1999; Mazzarella 2003; 2005). In this vision, “the urban middle classes were relatively invisible” (Fernandes 2006:37, emphasis added).1 That is, the middle class was not meaning- fully imagined as urban. In its moral dimension, this class was linked intimately to the space of the home, while its role in public life was imagined in terms of the nation. Indeed, middle-class voices often framed themselves as universal or norma- tive voices, able to speak for all of India (Mazzarella, personal communication, October 14, 2008).
Now, however, the economic opportunities afforded by liberalization appear to have given birth to a new kind of middle class – urban, upwardly mobile, character- ized by entrepreneurial drive and aspirational consumption practices (Mazzarella 2005; Fernandes 2006). This middle class is the agent of the Indian nation in a global milieu. Its dexterity in multinational workplaces and its world-class tastes in a global market of consumer goods make it uniquely equipped to “negotiate India’s new relationship with the global economy in both cultural and economic terms” (Fernandes 2000b:90). The denizens of the new middle class are not always glossed as heroic, though; they are also maligned as being “dedicated to shopping malls, hedonist, self-absorbed, secure in their smug cocoons” (Nanda 2007). Their nor- mative values seem to concern the ethics of consumerism rather than morality. They are not the cultivators of a national social order, but of what to wear and where to buy it.
The new middle class therefore is a very different construct from earlier configura- tions. I argue here that it is constituted by consumer and entrepreneurial practices played out in public, and that it can be thought of as performative – comprised, as Leela Fernandes argues, of “a range of representational practices centered around particular characteristics of consumption, style, and social distinction” (2006:141). For instance, new middle class Indians may make coffee at home, but drinking coffee is not, in itself, a new middle class practice. However, by visiting a particular restau- rant (a Barista, or a food court in a mall) to drink coffee, members of this class per- form their class position. Drinking coffee in these open and visible spaces becomes a key practice through which people declare their membership in a new middle class, and thus constitute a new class category.
But while I argue that the new middle class is constituted precisely by such practices, I also propose that consumption is not the only or most useful lens through which to view these practices. If consumers in new urban spaces perform class through the ways in which they consume, then the spread of PDE training in new urban spaces underscores the fact that this performance, like all performances, is constituted by bodily dispositions (Goffman 1959). Moreover, the popularity of PDE training suggests that not all performances or bodily dispositions are considered equally desirable in these spaces. To understand the new middle class, then, we must also examine how people learn to inhabit the spaces in which the new middle class is performed and produced. We must investigate the production of new middle class bodily practice.
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BODILY PRACTICE AND THE NEW MIDDLE CLASS 121
THE BODY AS SOCIAL CONSTRUCT
Anthropological studies of the body encompass a huge range of concerns (see Lock 1993 for a useful overview) but in this brief review, I confine my discussion to five social theorists who have been instrumental in shaping anthropologists’ examinations of how bodies mediate culture. Broadly put, their work illustrates three conceptual approaches to the body as social product: the body in practice; the body as a symbol or metaphor for society; and the body as an apparatus assembled by power and realized through spatial practice (Scheper-Hughes and Lock 1987).
Any anthropology of bodily practice must begin with Marcel Mauss, the first theo- rist to draw attention to the profoundly social nature of bodily movement. Mauss’s uncle, Émile Durkheim, had previously posited (in the highly influential The Elemen- tary Forms of the Religious Life) that the physical body exists in an antagonistic rela- tionship to the social body, its sensual individualism forever troubling the internalized societal ideals that unite us into a singular society. Mauss, conversely, sees all uses of the physical body as wholly social products.
Mauss (1973[1936]) argues that differences in the practices of social groups are neither accidental nor insignificant. For example, he observes that different nationali- ties of people perform the same physical acts (swimming, resting, walking) in very different ways. He calls these different ways of bodily practice “techniques of the body,” and emphasizes how such techniques are always culturally acquired (1973:70). By learning to swim or sleep in a certain way, we are enculturated. Each person’s body, as an assemblage of cultural practices, thus encodes an entire complex of cultural meaning, “assembled for the individual … by all his education, by the whole society to which he belongs, in the place he occupies in it” (1973:76). With this argument, Mauss establishes the body, and bodily practices more particularly, as salient sites for anthropological investigation.
While Mauss mentions the instance of Frenchwomen who emulate the gait of Hol- lywood actresses, he is most interested in those bodily practices acquired without awareness of the profoundly cultural nature of the technique, through unconscious acts of emulation. For instance, an American waiting in line at a ticket counter in a New Delhi railway station might be startled to discover that the person behind him has chosen to stand nearly on his heels. How much distance we maintain from those around us is a bodily practice that is cultural. But without exposure to places where the correct distance is figured differently, few of us would realize that our own notion of the correct distance is not universal. Indeed, most of us cannot recall having been told what the correct distance should be – we simply learned it through watching and mimicking authority figures such as our parents.
Mauss calls this bodily learning process “prestigious imitation” (1973:73). This naturalized or nonexplicit process whereby we unconsciously learn what is proper is also how social authority, more generally, reproduces itself. Mauss’s work thus directs us to examine how the bodily practices cultivated in PDE training programs also cir- culate prestigiously outside training programs – in televisual and cinematic images, and in the actual bodies of trainees once they leave these workshops and visit new urban spaces in the role of consumers. In such spaces, they may serve as unconscious role models to other shoppers.
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Since Mauss, anthropologists have proposed numerous frameworks for understand- ing the body as a social construction. Among those who have studied the symbolic dimensions of the body (Lévi-Strauss 1966; Turner 1969), one of the most influential theorists is Mary Douglas, who famously proposed that the body is a “natural sym- bol” of human societies. That is, we understand and experience our bodies in a way that mirrors our understanding and experience of the society in which we live, and the social categories of this society are reflected in the categories through which we know our bodies. Because the body is the expression of the relationship between the indi- vidual and the social, our bodily practices have much to say about society. In times of crisis, when society is threatened, citizens will subject their own bodies to strict disci- plinary measures. Conversely, Douglas writes, “If there is no concern to preserve social boundaries, I would not expect to find concern with bodily boundaries” (1996[1970]:74).
Our bodies also reveal our perception of our position within society. That is, it is through our bodies – our physical practices and dispositions – that we perform our social position. Douglas gives the example of professional critics, like academics and artists, who may cultivate “a carefully modulated shagginess” in their personal style and a “bodily abandon” that reflects their self-understanding of being outside the mainstream (1996:77). This proposition is helpful when thinking about how train- ers, trainees, and other members of the new middle class comport themselves in various spaces. By attending to their physical demeanor in malls and coffee shops and also in other sorts of spaces (for instance, local markets), we can elucidate how new middle class subjecthood might be differentially articulated within various class- marked contexts.
Douglas’s model insists that body and society cannot be understood apart from each other – and that bodily practices bear an immediate connection to the organization and experience of society. However, although Douglas is careful to state that the relation- ship between the individual body and the social body is mutually productive, her emphasis on the social body often obscures how the sensing, feeling, individual body works to inflect social categories. Indeed, although both Mauss and Douglas imply that power is at work in the transmission of bodily practices, they remain vague on how we might conceptualize the precise relationship between bodily techniques and power.
Anthropologists interested in questions of the body and power often turn to the work of Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, and Michel de Certeau. While the com- plexities of these scholars’ arguments defy brief summaries, all three share a concern with how bodily practices are constituted – given meaning and made intelligible – by relations of power that are encoded in particular spaces and locations. Indeed, they variously argue that our bodily practices reflect not only our society but also our embedded place within a particular configuration of power.
In the work of these theorists, the ways in which our bodily practices locate us so precisely within relations of social power is never reflected upon or explicitly acknowledged. That is, while Mary Douglas argued that a person’s bodily practices express his understanding of his own place within society, our bodily demeanor is not simply the product of our conscious choices and attitudes. Bourdieu (1990) posits that from the moment we are born, we begin to learn and embody a particular class position. The food our parents provide for dinner, the music they play when prepar- ing it, the words they use to speak to us, all shape what Bourdieu calls our habitus.
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BODILY PRACTICE AND THE NEW MIDDLE CLASS 123
Broadly glossed, habitus is the flexible conglomerate of bodily dispositions consti- tuted through the sum total of all our experiences in life – a “system of structured, structuring dispositions … which is constituted in practice and is always oriented towards practical functions” (1990:52). Habitus shapes our actions and perceptions in accordance with our position within the broader framework of social class and power relations. Bodily practices are a constitutive element of habitus; our techniques of the body express our entire upbringing and lifeworld. Moreover, the spaces in which we move accrue meaning through these bodily practices; meanings are never fixed in space itself. But the fact that our practices give meaning to space does not mean that we consciously invest spaces with meaning, or that all spaces are equally available to all forms of practice. Bourdieu’s work thus directs us to consider, among other things, the differential availability of new urban spaces and the differential “success” of PDE training among people who hail from various backgrounds.
Another approach considers the way in which specific sorts of spaces and particular histories of power work to produce our bodily practices. Foucault (1978) argues that in modernity, bodies are produced through institutional discourses that teach us how to think about and know our bodies in particular ways. The bodily practices that we develop are neither natural nor precisely cultural; rather, they are disciplinary tech- niques whereby we render ourselves knowable and legible to the relations of power. Foucault also situates these bodily practices within particular spaces, but these spaces are institutional – organized and imbued by a history of power relations. He gives the example of Bentham’s Panopticon, a prison in which a single guard is able, from his post, to view all of the inmates. Aware of this all-seeing gaze, prisoners discipline them- selves, internalizing the guard’s gaze and behaving compliantly although they have no proof that he is actually watching. They thereby become their own jailers. This theory elucidates how bodily practices bear an unconscious relationship to the operation of power within particular (and particularly organized) spaces.2 It proves helpful in con- ceptualizing how the production of new middle class bodies, and embodied subjec- tivities, must be contextualized in terms of particular spaces and relations of power.
But over and above the structure of space, we must also consider how bodies nego- tiate space. De Certeau (1984) grants an active role to the body in the constitution of space, urging us to consider how subjects tactically maneuver through the city. He introduces the notion of “spatial practice” to capture the negotiations occurring between people (users of space) and the formal organization of space. These negotia- tions may create unplanned connections and facilitate forms of affect unsanctioned by dominant logics or strategies (such as, say, the architect’s plan). They thereby continu- ously remake the meaning of space itself. Now, when considering how a suite of bod- ily practices has spread through a set of spaces marked as new middle class, we must ask not only how these practices are related to the new middle class, but also how these practices relate, work to produce, and are informed by the spaces themselves.
THE INDIAN BODY
While the works of Mauss, Douglas, Bourdieu, Foucault, and de Certeau have proved foundational to anthropological studies of the body, studies of India often draw from very different theoretical lineages to contemplate questions of the body and power.
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Chief among these are the vast literatures on caste and colonial and postcolonial India. Theorists informed by these bodies of work have struggled, then, with a very different sort of question: is the Indian body inherently different from other sorts of bodies? That is, are Indian bodies incommensurable with conceptual categories (e.g. “the individual”) that were developed in European and North American social theory to discuss bodies and subjectivities? Ironically, this question presupposes the possibil- ity of an essentialized Indian body – and this supposition, in turn, precludes full con- sideration of the relations of power that produce different sorts of embodied subjectivities. What often emerges, then, is a basic essentialism that sorts Indian bod- ies into “traditional” and “modern” types, in which “modern” signifies nontraditional or Westernized (and therefore, by implication, inauthentically Indian) bodies.
These essentialized categories have roots within the British colonial project. British colonialists were fascinated with the relationship of caste and bodily practice. Their fascination first generated such rigid classifications of Indian “types.” British civilians in India chronicled and marveled at the complex rules of bodily comportment and purification that devout Hindus followed (Collingham 2001). Various colonial admin- istrations proved no less interested, commissioning detailed ethnographies as official state projects (Cohn 1996). However, as Edward Said (1978) reminds us, such atten- tion is not innocent: the colonial project depends on the continual production of an essential difference between colonizer and colonized. Put more simply, to justify their rule of India, the British first needed to cast Indians as standing in need of British rule. Thus the interest displayed by the British in “Indian bodies” was always, simultane- ously, a project of difference-making that worked to support a notion of Indians and India itself as fundamentally different from the people and civilizations of Europe.
Indeed, histories of colonial India suggest that power struggles between Britons and Indians often took the form of interventions in Indian bodily practice. These interventions, be they in the form of Indian resistance to colonial rule or British technologies of governance, routinely schematized Indian bodies into traditional and modern types. For example, Prakash contends that British programs of inocula- tion, medical treatment, and hygiene extended the colonial administration’s control over the populace by “[dislodging] the body from indigenous beliefs and practices” and resituating it within a configuration of modern subjecthood that made it more accessible to disciplinary techniques of the state (1999:136). Pinney (2004) discusses an explicit project to alter Indian bodily practices and construct a more modern or “universal” Indian subject through the inculcation of new perspectival practices in the arts – new ways of looking at and seeing. Meanwhile, anticolonial struggles co- opted British claims about the “difference” of Indian bodies to construct a more modern, universal sort of body, better able to enter into and help constitute a nation- alist, Indian community. Prakash (1999) offers an example of this in brahmacharya, the discipline of governing bodily desires that was formerly associated with Brahman (high caste, Hindu) students. In response to British rhetoric about the sickliness engendered by Indian bodily practices, Indian nationalists reconfigured and sought to popularize bodily practices of male asceticism. They explicitly argued that specific techniques of the body including the conservation of semen and sexual energy would not only produce a newly vigorous, masculine subject, but also constitute the grounds on which a vital, modern (Hindu) nation could come into being (Gupta 2001; Hansen 1999).
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Whether held by British or Indian subjects, colonial beliefs about the essential nature of the traditional Indian body were politically charged, produced amidst com- plex relations of power that depended on the continual iteration of Indian difference. But even in the postcolonial era, difference retained its allure. In his seminal study of the caste system, Homo Hierarchicus (1980[1966]), Louis Dumont made two claims that have proved extremely influential in framing subsequent studies of the Indian body. First, he argued that the binary of pollution and purity structured the Hindu belief system and, by extension, all of “traditional” Indian society. The dualism of pol- lution and purity thereafter became a key framework for examinations of Hindu soci- ety (Milner 1994). This is not a grossly vulgar framework for studies of Hindu bodies; many Hindu rituals and religious narratives theorize the body in terms of purity or lack thereof (Alter 1992; Holdredge 1998). However, it is an ill-fitting framework for the study of non-Hindu bodies, and bodily practices unmarked by religion.
It also seems troubling that the Indian body has been so routinely subsumed into this larger taxonomy, becoming only one object of interest among many. This ten- dency may stem from Dumont’s second contention: that the category of the indi- vidual, as Western social theorists understand it, does not exist as a meaningful category within traditional Hindu society (Dumont 1980). In Dumontian studies, bodily practices and their meanings are merely pieces of evidence, to be weighted alongside other sorts of (non-bodily) evidence, all of which testify in various ways to a higher or broader conceptual system. That is, such approaches see bodily practices only as reflections of a social order, rather than as the means through which a concep- tual system is assembled and perceived.
Dumont’s proposition has generated vigorous debate among anthropologists (Mines 1994). Many ethnographers have found it helpful when thinking about how their informants discuss and make sense of their own bodies. For instance, in her study of bodies and aging in rural north India, Sarah Lamb discovers that “much of what Bengalis in Mangaldihi perceived and discussed as their ‘bodies’ included wider processes and substances than those directly tangible or limited to their own bodily boundaries. Properties of one person’s body existed in others’ bodies, in the places they lived, and in the objects they owned and handled” (2000:13). In such work, we see that conceptual categories like individualism do not map neatly onto all embodied subjectivities in India. But the mushrooming number of gyms and plastic surgery clin- ics in New Delhi suggests that very different understandings of the body simultane- ously flourish within the nation’s borders.
Here I argue that new middle class practices illustrate the inadequacy of a Dumontian framework for the investigation of embodied subjectivities in contemporary urban India. India’s new middle class is recognized precisely by its members’ strident and visible claims to individuality – their “hedonist, self-absorbed” behavior “in their smug cocoons” (Nanda 2007) and their “uninhibited, pragmatic, and amoral” public displays (Das 2001). The challenge for anthropologists, then, is to resist sorting subjectivities into static categories like “traditional” and “modern,” which assume meaning only in contra- distinction to each other, and in implicit reference to authenticity or its lack. Instead, we should examine the multiple ways in which Indian subjects navigate and constitute their own embodied subjectivities within particular spaces and relations of power.
The new middle class is a complex historical socioeconomic formation. Bodily prac- tices are one key element in the constitution of new middle class subjectivities. Below,
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I analyze how such practices are learned and reproduced in three key sites. First, I consider the concrete sites associated with the new middle class – in particular, the malls and shops where entrepreneurial and consumer ambitions are on display – and I ask how these spaces solicit and condition particular bodily practices. Second, using examples from PDE training manuals and interviews with trainers in the Delhi area, I examine how people conceive and perceive “proper” bodily practice in such spaces. Finally, I discuss less explicit models of new middle class bodily practice through an examination of how popular Hindi films imagine and represent new middle class spaces and bodies therein.
PRODUCING NEW MIDDLE CLASS BODILY PRACTICES
It was Nikhil’s suggestion to meet at Barista, which is lucky for me. Had this choice been mine, it would smack of naive clichés, for Barista is the stereotypical new middle class “cocoon.” Established in 1997, Barista is neither the largest nor oldest national coffee chain in India (both those honors go to Café Coffee Day, which predated Barista by a year). Nevertheless, it regularly pops up in popular media as a shorthand for the “newness” of postglobalization India and its middle class. An Indian com- poser, interviewed about his recent soundtrack, explains: “The challenge was to make Bismil’s poetry accessible to the MTV-Barista generation” (Singh 2009). A journalist reporting on various types of coffee contends, “Barista Lavazza is a part of the new India. And the new Indian Meeting Place” (Muthalaly 2008).
There is certainly something indisputably new about the mission of Barista and its brethren: they are popularizing coffee, traditionally a staple of south Indian diets, in the tea-crazed north. But the “newness” signaled by coffee shops far exceeds this empirical point. A pamphlet distributed by the Coffee Board of India attempts rather weakly to explain how such shops might come to encode the aspirations of a new India: “The coffee pubs in the Indian metros are the social milieu where the bold and the beautiful get together … For the Indian youth, chilling out at a [coffee] pub is more of a lifestyle expression” (Book of Indian Coffee, quoted in Nargundkar 2006).
Lifestyle is an interesting word, here. As I wait for Nikhil (forgetting my Delhi eti- quette, I arrived precisely on time, and therefore too early), I notice an American woman who sits reading on the couch at the back of the room. She introduces herself to me as Lisa, a recent college graduate who has come to Delhi to do volunteer work in a slum community. When asked about Barista, she remarks, “I was kind of sur- prised. It’s basically a Starbucks … the service is kind of slow. But it’s nice to have a place to just sort of chill.”
For an American, the comparison to Starbucks may seem natural. On my first visit to Barista, I made the unconscious assumption that the similarities in products on offer extended to a similarity of practices. Upon entering, I walked down the central aisle, past seated customers to left and right, to the glass counter at the back, where I attempted to place my order. The puzzled cashier asked me to sit down so someone could take my order and then deliver my coffee to me. So Barista may look like Star- bucks, but rarely, if ever, do you find customers queuing at the counter: there is no routine practice in Delhi coffee shops in which commuters pop by for a coffee “to go.”
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Indeed, on my daily visits to various Baristas for my caffeine fix, I have rarely seen anyone sitting alone at a table except for foreigners. It seems that one visits a Barista not to procure coffee so much as to sit and socialize while drinking coffee, and more importantly, to be seen drinking coffee in this place. Ironically, then, these consumers may desire the slow service that Lisa noted!
Perhaps one also visits so one can watch others drink their coffee. When an inter- viewer asked Karan Johar, the Hindi film director, why he chose to set his film about an extramarital affair in New York instead of India, he answered thusly: “You can’t meet in Barista for an affair, but you can meet at a Starbucks, because no one will see you at some discreet Starbucks in New York” (Motwane 2007). Johar’s casual remark actually suggests a key proposition: in Barista and spaces like it, people are always (felt to be) watching. Indeed, walking into the Defence Colony Barista underscores this feeling. The ground floor is long and narrow, with round tables scattered around a central aisle. The glass wall that faces the market proper was recently frosted to obscure the view, but the space nevertheless exerts a unidirectional pull toward the front door. As newcomers enter, customers seated at the small, round tables glance toward the entrance. Those seated with their backs to the door briefly turn around, too. The space feels theatrical, although the frosted front window now clearly announces that the performance is not meant for casual passersby.
Generally speaking, the new urban spaces of Delhi are specifically designed to max- imize this kind of visibility – the visibility of customers to each other. Baristas offer only one example of this; the new shopping complexes in Gurgaon and Delhi offer many others. Ansal Plaza was the first mall to be built in the Delhi area; it is composed of two glass-sided buildings that curve together into the shape of a horseshoe around an outdoor amphitheater where shoppers sit, in pleasant weather, to drink coffee or eat ice cream. Particularly at night, those sitting in the amphitheater have a clear view of consumers strolling from store to store inside the buildings. Since it was constructed in 1999, more than 40 malls have followed in the Delhi area, and increasingly their designs encode a concern for visibility within the interior of the buildings. Large win- dows like Ansal Plaza’s are uncommon; indeed, the exteriors of many malls bear giant advertisements for products and the shops inside, lending them the appearance, from a distance, of misshapen boxes done up in wrapping paper. But of the 14 malls I have visited – each of them either recommended to me or patronized by my informants – all but one feature a central point from which consumers enjoy an expansive view of various floors and shoppers throughout the building. DLF City Centre, the first mall built in Gurgaon (in 2001), may have provided a template in this regard. It consists of three floors wrapped around a central open space, which, on the ground floor, has seating for shoppers who wish to look up. Inevitably there is something for them to look at: shoppers on the second and third floor seem drawn to the railing, where they stand gazing down, up, or across at their fellow consumers.
The architecture of these malls can seem odd to those accustomed to a different, more horizontally oriented mall archetype. When an American expatriate who lives and works in Gurgaon learned that my fieldwork would require me to spend a consid- erable amount of time in the malls around his house, he expressed his pity for me, adding, “Those places are like fishbowls.” His prior referents for malls are those built on a model that first became popular in American suburbs during the 1950s and 1960s. The interior space of these malls mimic the physical plan – and, so architects
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of the time hoped, the feeling of community – popularly associated with main streets in small American towns (Cohen 1996). Typically, such malls have long, winding cor- ridors and benches and greenery scattered throughout the building. Delhi-area malls, conversely, demonstrate an architectural emphasis on verticality and an encompassing visibility provided from a single central point. Thus these spaces do not suggest a concern with the solicitation of communal feeling so much as they solicit perform- ances from those who inhabit them: one is constantly aware, when strolling the cor- ridors of these malls, that others may be watching from a number of directions. As in the Barista, it is important that one is seen consuming, and that one can watch others consume. And the question of what one buys in these spaces thus becomes no more important than the question of how one buys.
Performing one’s belonging in new urban spaces requires mastery of numerous skills.3 It is difficult to move through such malls if one is not accustomed to escalators and elevators. After successfully negotiating movement between floors, shoppers must negotiate how to comport themselves within stores. Regular patrons of music stores like Planet M, or department stores like Shopper’s Stop and Big Bazaar, know that the goods on display are to be browsed at one’s leisure, carried to and tried on in the fit- ting rooms, and then taken to the counter for purchase, by the consumer. Indeed, a call center employee, Anjali, tells me that she prefers to patronize malls instead of local markets because, although the goods may be more expensive, “nobody bothers you in the shops [at malls].” But knowledge of how to shop without someone “bother- ing” you is not obvious to those who have shopped before only at local markets, where shopkeepers dispense products from behind a counter, and oversee customers’ interactions with these products at every point until purchase.
Navigating the vast number of goods on display in stores at shopping malls takes a certain kind of consumer confidence and savvy. One day, I accompanied a trainer named Shena to Select City Walk mall in south Delhi. A group of three women in saris trailed behind us through Pantaloons (an American-style department store), talking among themselves. I made some remark about the unusual drape of one of the wom- en’s saris. Shena said she would wager money they were tourists from some small town. “You can spot these people,” she whispered. “They just stare.” As I continued to watch them, I realized she was right: occasionally the women would touch an item of clothing, but on the whole, they engaged very little with the merchandise, and spent most of their time simply looking. When I saw them later in another section of the mall, they carried no purchases. Financial constraints may have prevented them from purchasing anything. But the formal qualities of new urban spaces also demand particular practices and attitudes from shoppers. Without skill in these practices and attitudes, malls can be difficult and intimidating places in which to shop.
Personality Development and Enhancement modules explicitly teach people in new urban spaces how to embody practices and attitudes appropriate to these spaces. PDE began as a minor aspect of call center training; trainers have explained to me that until 2005 or 2006, it was rarely considered a key part of preprocess training (i.e. training for new recruits). Instead, PDE programs were developed for “problem” workers (those who, after three or six months, continued to fail to meet performance expectations); customer service agents who wished to advance to managerial positions; and managers whose seniority made them likely candidates for overseas business trips. One trainer, Neeraj, shared a telling anecdote about the necessity of PDE for this latter group:
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There have been certain fuck-ups which have happened when Indians travel abroad, certain cultural differences, so those are addressed through personality development … because business could be lost. Like, one particular call center lost a few million dollars because the business development head went for a formal sit-down dinner to the States and picked up the bottle of water instead of pouring it to the glass, yeah, stuck it to his mouth and drank it.
In the last few years, however, PDE training has developed into its own industry, and now constitutes a key skill necessary to find training work outside call centers.
In practice, PDE training includes a range of holistic methods. Some of the more surprising methods mentioned or used by my informants include Alexander Tech- nique,4 free movement, yoga, clowning, role-playing, dance, and even fire-walking. But no matter the actual content of their own PDE modules, trainers justify their pedagogies in terms of the intimate link between mental and bodily practices. That is, they use kinesthetic training to cultivate particular bodily dispositions that produce a new attitude in trainees.
At American-process call centers, PDE training is claimed to engender attitudes (e.g. openness, confidence, and amiability) that help employees establish rapport with American customers. This training often starts with the reification of trainees’ bodily practices as essentially Indian. Training manuals might preface passages on American customs with exercises that ask trainees to brainstorm, individually or in groups, about Indian customs that a foreigner might find surprising or strange. This explicit exercise in objectification might be complemented by modules that elucidate American quali- ties by comparing and contrasting American bodily practice in reference to Indian bodily practice. For example, in a discussion of the American paradigm of profession- alism, the (ostensibly objectionable) intimacy connoted by lengthy intersex eye con- tact in India is contrasted with the respect connoted by steady eye contact between the sexes in the United States. Training programs in call centers therefore build a typology of both American and Indian bodies – but only certain kinds of Indian bodies.
The specificity of this Indianness first reveals itself in the process of deciding whom to hire for call center service agent positions. A trainer for American-process call cent- ers laughingly told me about an employee of a domestic-process call center who wanted a job at one of the better paying, American-process companies. The applicant immediately ruined his chances by introducing himself with the phrase, “Myself, Kamlesh” – a common, colloquial introduction derived from Hindi word order, and glossed by trainers as Indian Variant English rather than the more desirable Standard English. But, the trainer added, that wasn’t all: he entered the room and sat down “like a doodh-waala” [milkman]. His bodily demeanor, as much as his way of speak- ing English, marked him as unfit for employment. The implication that only a par- ticular sort of Indianness is fit for training and employment in call centers was made even more explicit in the description of a course offered by NIIT, a firm that special- izes in training workers for multinational firms. The first goal of their seminar for future customer service agents read: “Overcome Indianism” (NIIT 2006).
Indeed, many trainers perceive it to be harder to coach trainees who do not hail from a major metropolis. One trainer, Gayatri, suggests to me that recruits from out- side the metros are willing to work harder than people from the cities: “His family’s expectations are a lot out of this guy, he’s a very hard worker, he cannot afford to lose a job.” But she also acknowledges that they pose different challenges than trainees
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from the metros, particularly in terms of attitudinal or behavioral training: “He comes from a small place, so [his] thinking is small.” Indeed, the idea that “tier two” recruits are more difficult to train seems to carry the status of a well-known fact among indus- try experts. As one among numerous examples, UTVi news channel ran a report in 2008 that attributed the growing number of complaints received by call centers from American customers to an increase in the number of service agents who do not hail from major cities. An unnamed expert, when interviewed, told the reporter:
To train, you know, somebody from Mumbai compared to training somebody from Surat is again the same issue … there’s going to be a slight variation of quality of the output, to an extent because of Tier Two cities, and the way to address it, if you ask me, is patience. And more investment in terms of training by the organizations. (Sharma and Bharadwaj 2008)
This “problem” of the nonmetro trainee might be glossed as a dearth of that cos- mopolitanism or urbanism that defines the new middle class. Nikhil thus defends the importance, even in American-process call centers, of PDE training over voice and accent: “You send me someone from Meerut,” he says, referring to a small city a few hours outside Delhi. “How he says his R’s, what does it matter? With the right atti- tude, he could say what he liked.” The insufficiently cosmopolitan “attitudes” of Tier Two trainees must be addressed through behavioral training that also operates at the physical level, through the kinesthetic modifications of PDE. The performative aspect of this physical modification is implicit. As Gayatri says when discussing Tier Two recruits, “Maybe we are trying to convert people into something they’re not. Lan- guage is an issue, or, I think somewhere I also feel that you know, if I have had a death in my family, and I go to work, how can I suddenly switch off and be all cheerful?” By implying that PDE training might pose a challenge to Tier Two recruits because they have a more difficult time “switching off” their true feelings, Gayatri underscores the ostensibly urban or cosmopolitan nature of this performance. That is, while call center workers may be iconic new middle class citizens, the production of a call center worker – and of a new middle class subject – apparently entails not just shopping and coffee-drinking, but also the production of a certain sort of new middle class bodily demeanor that enables a whole way of being.
PDE training manuals used outside call centers do not, of course, schematize bod- ily practice into non-Indian and Indian types. However, they do assemble a theory of how bodily practices, detached from the specificity of actual bodies, operationalize particular traits and values. Sections on attitude are complemented by schematic ren- derings of bodily practices and the values to which they correspond. For example, diagrams of the throat illustrate how the voice is produced, while accompanying text describe the physiological causes that correspond with emotional tension and cause the voice to sound “tight” or “hostile” to customers. “If there is tension in the throat, there is tension in the voice, and tension in the air between you [and the customer], too,” reads one manual. Conversely, amiability and confidence are also generated and transmitted to customers through proper posture, breathing, and the relaxation of throat muscles: “If you feel comfortable, the customer will feel comfort- able.” Training manuals used in workshops in new urban spaces seek to cultivate qualities including confidence, assertiveness, composure, and approachability, often glossing these as the constitutive elements of leadership and successful communication.
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These same traits and values also appear regularly within discursive constructions of the new middle class – the entrepreneurs and consumers whose world-class tastes and ambitions will steer India successfully through the perilous terrain of the global mar- ket. PDE training manuals offer a sort of explicit blueprint for how a new middle class subject might be physically assembled.
Ideas of new middle class practice and new urban space are also informed by the circulation of images and ideas about such spaces and the people who patronize them. Literary and journalistic portrayals of call center workers dwell at length on their con- sumption and leisure activities within new urban spaces; for instance, in Chetan Bhagat’s bestselling novel One Night at the Call Center, the employees have dates at the Pizza Hut in a nearby mall and take their mid-shift break at “Bed Lounge and Bar,” where they lie across beds and gulp kamikaze shots to a throbbing soundtrack of “French-African-Indian fusion.” Hindi films also often picture their heroes and heroines in new urban spaces – be they drinking coffee at Barista (e.g. Kya Kool Hain Hum, 2005) or Café Coffee Day (e.g. Fashion, 2008), or, during an outing to the mall, fighting against the evils of smoking (Ghajini, 2009) or vanquishing an evil contract killer (The Killer, 2006). In Mauss’s terms, these images and narratives offer models for prestigious imitation; they shape perceptions of new urban spaces and offer socially authoritative visual cues about how to inhabit these spaces even for audiences that will never enter a PDE workshop, mall, or Barista.
To this end, the most telling representations are those that portray heroes and heroines who do not “belong” in new urban spaces. In What’s your Rashee (2009), Anjali, a girl from a small town, meets her potential suitor, Yogesh, at a coffee shop in an upscale Mumbai hotel. The environment clearly unnerves her. She reacts with physical awkwardness when helped into her chair, looks askance at the ornately folded napkin, and slumps in her seat. In an effort to fit in with her surroundings and meet Yogesh’s expectations, she attempts to speak English, but her ungrammatical sentences confuse her suitor and the waiter. She drinks her cold coffee very quickly and with overstated enthusiasm. Later she tries to smoke a cigarette, but lights the wrong end, and explodes into coughing. Anjali’s inability to perform her belonging in this space registers as a terrible physical awkwardness. Ultimately Yogesh confronts her, and tells her she does need to try to be something that she is not. She then relaxes into a natural and more charming posture, but ultimately Yogesh weds another woman – the thoroughly cosmopolitan Sanjana.
Mumbai Mere Jaan (2008) offers a more pointed critique of the bodily practices demanded by new urban spaces. Thomas, who sells coffee from a makeshift stall on the Mumbai sidewalk, has a fascination with the perfume samplers set out for custom- ers at a local mall. He takes his wife and daughter to the mall, where, after loud protest and the gawking of a security guard, they overcome their fear and board the escalator to the shop. Inside, Thomas’s wife exclaims and points at various items. Understand- ing that there is a particular way to walk through this shop, Thomas instructs her to “Walk quietly, now,” and to cease staring and gesturing so obviously. However, when he picks up the perfume sampler and sprays his underarms, he draws the critical notice of a salesman who recognizes him as the man who “comes every day to spray on perfume for free, and then leaves.” The salesman calls security, and Thomas and his family are driven from the mall at a run, in sharp contrast to the leisurely strolls of the shoppers they pass.
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This episode preys on Thomas’s mind. Later, he begins to call in bomb threats to malls across Mumbai, waiting outside to witness, with evident pleasure, the frantic exit of legitimate mall-goers. In the most striking sequence, he enters a mall shortly before his bomb threat is reported to security. Standing at the railing on the second floor, Thomas looks down into the central space of the mall. As the bomb threat is announced on the loudspeaker, new middle class shoppers abandon their easy loiter- ing and begin to sprint for the exit. But Thomas stands perfectly still. He has taken possession of the visibility inherent in this architectural space to witness and oversee his triumph: the violent alteration of new middle class shoppers’ bodily practices. Thomas has forced these shoppers to run in the same fashion that a working-class street vendor must run when caught in a mall by security. But his moment of victory only underscores the fact that it takes a bomb scare to make such bodily practices acceptable in this space.
CONCLUSION
Since the mid-1990s, India has witnessed the proliferation of malls, multiplexes, cof- fee shops, and other new urban spaces for consumption and leisure, which scholars often have scrutinized for clues about new middle class consumption. I have argued here that the concern for visibility encoded in the architecture of these spaces suggests that such consumption practices should be viewed as performative. That is, being and becoming new middle class is not simply about having the ability and desire to spend money at the local mall. Consumption in new urban spaces also requires mastery of particular physical practices that exhibit one’s knowledge of the “proper” way to shop. Realizing this is as simple as standing by an escalator in an Indian mall. During my fieldwork, I have seen streams of shoppers, bags in hand, step confidently aboard the stairs. But I also have seen visitors approach with visible trepidation, making several abortive half-steps before successfully boarding the escalator (or, in rare instances, turning away entirely) – just as Thomas’s wife and daughter did when boarding the escalator in Mumbai Mere Jaan.
In Mumbai Mere Jaan, Thomas’s daughter and wife shrieked and giggled with fear as they approached the stairs. In real life, those that hesitate to board the escalator do so quietly, often with visible embarrassment. It is not a coincidence, I think, that many of these people also carry no purchases with them. Knowing how to shop in a mall is as much about knowing how to board an escalator as it is about knowing how to exchange money for a product. It is only through the mastery of such bodily practices that one can perform one’s class position within these spaces. Thus one’s discomfort in boarding an escalator betrays far more than mere unfamiliarity with a particular type of equipment. It marks one’s body as incongruous with the very spaces and prac- tices that define the new middle class.
PDE training offers an explicit template for these practices and the assembly of the new middle class body more generally. Training manuals and trainers’ pedagogical ideologies reveal how certain bodily practices encode an entire complex of new mid- dle class values (e.g. cosmopolitanism, confidence, and assertiveness) that are per- ceived to be available only to particular, and particularly sited, bodies. Cinematic and literary representations of the new middle class offer other, frequently complementary
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visions of new middle class spaces and the bodies that belong in these spaces. They also offer stark representations of bodies that do not belong. In the decision of a cof- fee vendor to spray perfume in his armpits, or in a girl’s slumped posture and awkward hesitation as a man pulls out her chair to seat her at a restaurant, we see quite clearly that new middle class spaces demand certain kinds of bodily practices – and that, con- versely, the bodily practices attendant on inhabiting new middle class spaces work to constitute the new middle class itself.
NOTES
1 Under Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi’s limited liberalization reforms and proconsumerist policies, the urban middle class became increasingly visible in public discourse, and aspira- tional consumption began to assume importance as a hallmark of middle-class status (e.g. Fernandes 2000a; 2000b; 2006; Mazzarella 2003; Oza 2006).
2 Foucault’s understanding of bodily practice is premised on a larger theory of modernity, characterized by the emergence of forms of institutional governance and surveillance. In this historical moment, he argues that the body functions as a site for the deliberate cultivation of particular physical attitudes and dispositions that render it amenable to “optimization” through normalizing processes of spatial and temporal organization. In particular reference to the problems of reading a Foucauldian modernity in India, see Pra- kash 1999.
3 The first challenge that confronts the American ethnographer in a New Delhi shopping mall is figuring out which stores are where. Security guards posted throughout the mall rarely know the name or location of any shop outside the immediate vicinity of their posting (which, in itself, seems a telling insight: most security guards cannot afford to shop at the mall, and apparently they do not make a regular practice of strolling freely through the mall, either). Furthermore, most malls usually have only a single shop directory, and finding this directory can take a very long time; no one seems to know what it is or where it might be located. The evident assumption is either that most mall patrons come regularly enough that guidance is not required, or that they have little interest in making quick visits to the mall to patronize a particular shop, but will stroll through the mall and discover shops’ loca- tions for themselves.
4 Alexander Technique is a physical pedagogy premised on the idea that physical and mental dispositions are mutually productive. Practitioners believe that “many different types of underperformance and even ailments, both mental and physical, can be alleviated … by teaching the body musculature to perform differently” (Tinbergen 1991:xiv). Originally developed by an Australian actor in the early twentieth century, it is now disseminated through various licensed training centers the world over.
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