Durba Chattaraj (2015). Globalization and Ambivalence: Rural Outsourcing in Southern Bengal. International Labor and Working-Class History, 87, pp 111-136. doi:10.1017/S0147547915000022.

!Globalization and Ambivalence: Rural Outsourcing in Southern Bengal

Durba Chattaraj

!Abstract

Studies of globalization in India have focused on high-tech industries, such as call centers in urban areas. But a widespread

effect of the globalization of India's economy is the growth of “rural outsourcing” - the expansion of urban-based industries

into the countryside. Rural outsourcing links to longer histories of decentralized manufacturing in India. This ethnography

of the decentralized industry of sari embroidery in Southern Bengal shows that workers are ambivalent towards it. Among

villagers who participate in the embroidery industry, I found three scales of ambivalence: ambivalence towards the product;

towards the production process; and finally, towards the politics of this form of decentralized production. Ambivalence is

not a transient or uncertain position of confusion or ambiguity. Rather it is a widely-held expression of the dual and

contradictory positions that workers and contractors hold in relation to the industry. I argue that the “frictions” of

globalization find expression not just in resistance or contestation, but also in articulated positions of ambivalence towards

globalization processes.

Introduction

I own a gray nylon sari, hand-embroidered with swirling threadwork and raised gray beads, and decorated along its border 1

with silver sequins. I bought it from Rabiul Sheikh, an entrepreneur in the sari embroidery industry, from the riverside

village of Kulpi. Kulpi is located in the South 24 Parganas district, about fifty miles from Kolkata. It is a central location 2

from which sari embroidery is spreading across large parts of rural Bengal. The Bengali term for the embroidery industry is

zarir kaaj (metallic threadwork). Zarir kaaj refers to the work of hand-embroidering saris with metallic thread, as well as

beads, stones, and sequins. 3

After buying the sari, I watched as Bani, a middle-aged woman from Pathor Protima island, handed Rabiul a large bundle of

embroidered saris. She was returning the saris that she had collected from him a month earlier to be embroidered by family 4

and friends in her village. She had taken two buses and a boat to reach Kulpi, a seven-hour journey. Like Bani, thousands of

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men, women, and children across South 24 Parganas work in sari embroidery. These saris rarely sell in the villages where

they are hand-embroidered. Rather, they are consumed in urban centers, where such embroidery is in demand.

South 24 Parganas stretches from the urban fringes of Kolkata to the Gangetic delta area of the Sundarbans. About 84

percent of the district's population of seven million lives in rural areas, and 37 percent live below the poverty line. 5

Agriculture, primarily paddy cultivation, and fisheries are the main sources of livelihood, and interestingly, there is no

mention of the growth of sari embroidery in the region in recent state reports, pointing to the ways in which the state fails to

“see” these forms of rural outsourcing. Land holdings in South 24 Parganas are small and “more than 85 percent of

households are either landless or marginal farmers.” 6

While state classifications of administered space as “rural” or “urban” can lead to a flattening of diverse and complex

places, people I spoke with in South 24 Parganas also described the region as primarily rural and agricultural, listing paddy

cultivation, small-scale cultivation of vegetables and betel-nut leaves, shrimp seedling collection, fisheries, sharecropping,

daily wage labor and working in brick kilns as important forms of labor. But people also see zari embroidery as an

important and emergent form of work that is supplanting or shifting patterns of agricultural labor. Tapan, a middle-aged

embroiderer said, “In this area, catching shrimp seedlings has reduced. Zari work has increased.” Echoing views, Amal

Choudhury, a schoolteacher noted that, “There have been many changes here in the last five years...zari work has brought

about a huge change. Most families survive on it here.”

In South 24 Parganas, entrepreneurs, workers and their saris move back and forth in a nascent and expanding industry which

produces embroidered saris to meet new forms of urban consumption in neoliberal India. The expansion of this industry 7

relies on emergent forms of rural entrepreneurship and labor processes, and is facilitated by improved post-liberalization

connectivity between rural and urban West Bengal. 8

I describe this process of the expansion of embroidery into the countryside as “rural outsourcing.” Until the early 2000s,

hand-embroidered saris were expensive items sold to an exclusive clientele. They were produced primarily in workshops

concentrated in specific areas of certain Indian cities, often specializing in particular embroidering traditions. In West 9

Bengal, commercial embroidery used to be concentrated in Kolkata neighborhoods such as Kidderpore or the neighboring

city of Howrah. With a rise in urban demand, since the early 2000s, embroidery expanded to fringe and peri-urban areas of

Kolkata such as Amtala, and then began a more recent expansion into the Bengal countryside. While embroidering still 10

continues within the city, urban embroiderers now focus on highly-skilled embroidery. Urban workshops produce high-

quality work, often on designer or export garments. Low-end embroidery has been outsourced to rural India. In South 24 11

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Parganas, zarir kaaj is done by men, women and children, both by people who self-identify as gorib (poor) and those who

consider themselves moddhobitto (middle-class). Embroidery work may be undertaken either full- or part-time.

There are many cost advantages to the expansion of zarir kaaj to rural Bengal. First, wages are lower in rural areas than in

the city. With a shortage of employment, as well as liquidity in villages, people are willing to work for very low wages.

Second, space is at a premium in cities, so outsourcing production to the countryside results in lower setup costs, as many

people embroider in their homes or in makeshift workshops. Third, rural workare more dispersed and unorganized. Informal

urban businesses are often required to pay bribes to state agents in order to function. Far from the eyes of the state,

decentralized rural production of informal industry that avoids taxation and other processes of state regulation. 12

Zarir kaaj is ubiquitous in Kulpi and surrounding villages in South 24 Parganas. People I spoke with variously said that “99

percent,” “almost everyone,” and “most people” either embroidered saris themselves or had a family member who worked

in the industry. They said that it was the most widespread source of employment and income in the area. Economists

Dipankar Basu and Amit Basole, examining shifts in post-liberalization India, demonstrate that “across size-classes,

cultivation now accounts for less than half (46 percent) while wages and non-farm business together account for 50 percent

of monthly income of a farmer household.” Thus, in rural India agriculture is no longer the primary source of income. But 13

the declining importance of agriculture as a source of income is perhaps not surprising when put in historical context.

The growth of rural outsourcing in Bengal since the 2000s, and the importance of small industries such as zari work for

agrarian households, can be linked to a longer pre-colonial history of decentralized manufacturing and rural outwork in

India. In the case of textile manufacturing in the precolonial period, both yarn spinning and weaving were undertaken in a

dispersed fashion within villages and small towns across large regions (rather than concentrated in urban centers), which 14

specialized in particular products, both for export and domestic consumption. In Bengal in particular, in 1415, the Ming

Chinese ambassador noted that “men and women work in the fields and weave according to the season,” and, by the 15

seventeenth century Bengal had become “by far India's largest single manufacturing centre and entrepot for world trade.” 16

Bengal specialized in high-quality cotton and silk fabrics, with production taking place across vast swathes of the

countryside, from Malda in North Bengal to Mednipur in the South. Indeed, participating in “traditional” industries such 17

as textile manufacture was an important source of livelihood in non-urban areas, and a hedge against the risks and vagaries

of full dependence on agriculture. Many nineteenth-century analyses of textile production in India, from Marx to nationalist

accounts, posit that British rule led to the destruction of the industry, and the loss of livelihood for millions of Indian

artisans. Later studies described a process of deindustrialization (rather than wholesale destruction) that took place in Indian

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textile manufacturing after the advent of British rule, concluding that colonialism had complex effects on the industry, with

some scholars arguing that it had creative, as well as destructive, impacts. 18

Scholars who support a thesis of deindustrialization explore the “long and protracted process” through which the Indian

textile industry began to decline, in waves, with ebbs and flows and important regional differentiations, from the late

eighteenth century onwards. One of the most important features of this decline, in Bengal and other manufacturing 19

regions, was the slow extinction of hand-spun yarn in rural areas in the nineteenth century. The elimination of hand-20

spinning, while it impacted women in particularly devastating ways, led to large-scale shifts in rural economic life and

increased dependance on agriculture as the main source of livelihood. As Nirmala Banerjee argues, “Modernization, as it

came to Bengal, was essentially an extremely limited process superimposed by outside forces. In its wake however, it

changed the traditional economy in a material way. In general this meant that workers of the region, both men and women,

were made increasingly dependent on agriculture for their livelihood.” Prasannan Parthasarathi describes a similar 21

situation in the case of South India, where “the loss of spinning would have had a major effect on rural life in South India,

especially in the dry areas of the subcontinent, where agriculture was rain-fed, and thus vulnerable to the vagaries of the

monsoon.” 22

Thus the recently increasing diversification of rural households into various forms of non-agricultural work can be linked

back to a longer history of decentralized production which was disrupted after the advent of British rule. Rather than being

an entirely “new” form as a result of globalization, it is possible that contemporary rural outsourcing is reviving older forms

of decentralized manufacturing after long periods of colonial and post-colonial decline.

In any case, the aggregate-level shifts away from agriculture in contemporary rural India that Basu and Basole describe

point to the need to ethnographically study the forms of work that are supplanting agriculture, the processes through which

these forms of work are spreading to rural areas, and the understandings that villagers themselves have of these emergent

production processes. I argue that in the South 24 Parganas, workers and entrepreneurs involved in sari embroidery

articulate positions of ambivalence towards the industry, rather than binary positions of resistance and contestation, on the

one hand, or consent and acceptance, on the other.

Globalization and Ambivalence

In the twenty-five years since the liberalization and globalization of India's economy, it has joined other Asian

nations that are witnessing transformations of rural space at various scales of acceleration under conditions of late-

capitalism. Recent anthropological literature on globalization has critiqued teleological and triumphalist narratives that 23

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suggest that global capital everywhere produces similar effects without being altered on the ground through contact with

specific histories, politics and cultures. In this vein, I examine the engagements of entrepreneurs and workers in the 24

embroidery industry in rural Bengal, focusing on the “frictions” that are constitutive of the process of the accelerated spread

of global capitalinto specific locations. 25

Anna Tsing argues that globalization unfolds through “'friction': the awkward, unequal, unstable and creative qualities of

interconnection across difference,” and reminds us that “friction is not a synonym for resistance.” Yet many ethnographic 26 27

studies of the messiness, “stickiness” and awkward encounters between the global and the local focus on the ways in which

global processes are met with resistance, subversion, or contestation, often through the study of important local and

transnational social movements. But less attention has been paid to the roles and positions of entrepreneurs and workers in 28

rural areas who are directly involved in the production of goods for globalized markets. Studies which do not explicitly

focus on resistance movements but nonetheless examine the stickiness of capitalist engagements in particular places have

also examined the ways in which cultures of globalization can be contested through subversion, humor, irony and anger. 29

As Yang points out in her study of the hybridity of economies in rural China, “the older strains of an alternative economic

logic in this hybrid are shown not as complementing, adapting to, or serving capitalism's expansion but contesting it and re-

channeling its movement toward other ends.” 30

The study of social movements, resistance, contestation and subversion is an important intervention in triumphalist accounts

of the spread of global capital. But Manichean dualities of contestation or consent are not the only modes of interaction

between people living in peripheral areas and the increasing penetration of global capital. What attitudes and processes on

the ground then facilitate “the increasingly powerful reach of global economic forces into the lives of more and more people

throughout the world?” 31

Drawing on Tsing's insight that friction is not another word for resistance, as well as her call to examine “folk

understandings of the global, and the practices with which they are intertwined,” I argue that the frictions of globalization 32

find expression not just in resistance or contestation, but also in articulated positions of ambivalence towards globalization

processes. Among villagers who participate in the sari embroidery industry in South 24 Parganas, I found three scales of

ambivalence: first, ambivalence towards the product itself (the embroidered saris); second, ambivalence towards the

production process (on the part of both workers and entrepreneurs); and finally, ambivalence towards the politics of this

form of decentralized production.

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Zygmunt Bauman describes ambivalence as a state where an object, process or concept can be assigned to more than one

category, and these categories can even be contradictory. For example, Bauman argues that modernity itself is a “concept 33

fraught with ambiguity” and internal contradictions, based on a duality which oscillates “between freedom and genocide,

constantly able to stretch in either direction, spawning at the same time the most horrifying of contemporary dangers and the

most effective means of preventing them—the poison and the antidote.” While Bauman's analysis centers on Western 34

Europe, Sherry Ortner highlights the importance of ambivalence in studies of resistance in the postcolonial world. She

argues that resistance studies should avoid ethnographic “thin-ness” and instead reveal the “ambivalences and ambiguities

of resistance itself.” While Ortner argues for the importance of ambivalence within resistance studies, she also suggests 35

that ambivalence as a concept can be explored further outside of the category of resistance, noting “the notion of

ambivalence has become central to colonial and post-colonial studies more generally and is worth a paper in itself.” This 36

article presents an ethnographically grounded study of ambivalence among entrepreneurs and workers who participate in the

globalization-related embroidery industry.

It is in contrast to the contestation and resistance to Special-Economic-Zone-(SEZ)-based globalization in West Bengal that

the ambivalence towards the smaller-scale zari embroidery industry emerged. I conducted fieldwork between the years of

2006 and 2008, a very politically charged time in West Bengal. West Bengal has had the longest serving democratically

elected communist government in India. Between the years of 1977 and 2011, the Left-Front coalition government, led by

the Communist Party of India (Marxist), CPI(M), continuously held power in the state. Over this time it built powerful and

societally-pervasive party machinery. 37

Between the years of 2006 and 2011, the Left-Front's dominance was severely challenged by widespread resistance

movements against state-led forced land acquisition for large-scale SEZs in the rural areas of Singur and Nandigram. 38

Fourteen people were killed as a result of police firing on protestors in Nandigram in March 2007. The violence in

Nandigram, the resistance movement against forced land acquisition, and its subsequent fallout is credited with playing a

key role in bringing down West Bengal's Left-Front government in the 2011 State Assembly elections, after thirty-four years

of rule.

While neither Singur nor Nandigram are located within South 24 Parganas, most people I spoke with there were deeply

critical of the CPI(M)'s land acquisition policies and the violence in Singur and Nandigram. Within South 24 Parganas,

Kulpi itself is the proposed site for a controversial port-based SEZ, which has been on hold for more than fifteen years due

to difficulties with land acquisition, among other issues. Many people in Kulpi strongly opposed the port-SEZ, as they 39

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believed that this form of infrastructural development would lead to the submerging of their lands, forced evictions, and

political violence.

Some people I interviewed in South 24 Parganas directly participated in the anti-CPI(M) Nandigram resistance movement,

and were members of the Krishi Jomi Rokkha Committee (Committee for the Protection of Farmer's Lands). Those who did

not directly support the resistance movement expressed their rejection of the Left Front's SEZ policies through their votes.

Indeed, in the landmark 2008 Panchayat elections, South 24 Parganas was one of the first districts in the State to vote out

the ruling coalition in favor of the opposition Trinamool Congress. 40

When it came to SEZ-related policies, many in the South 24 Parganas articulated strong positions of contestation and

resistance, which were not present in discussions of the embroidery industry in the region. There emerged a distinct contrast

between forceful rejections of large-scale land acquisition policies for industry, and more-ambiguous positions towards the

sari embroidery industry. I argue that ambivalence is not a transient or unconsidered position of confusion or ambiguity.

Rather it is a clearly-articulated and widely-held expression of the contradictory positions that villagers hold towards the

embroidery industry.

Consuming Embroidery

In a recent ethnography of Hong Kong's Chungking Mansions, Gordon Mathews argues that while the term globalization is

often associated with transnational corporations and high-end industries, ““low-end” globalization—the transnational

movement of people and goods involving small-scale and often informal capital—is the dominant form of globalization

experienced in much of the developing world today.” Studies of globalization in India have focused on “high-end” 41

processes and industries such as advertising, information technology and urban middle-class identity. In this article I 42 43 44

shift the focus to rural India, examining the village-based production of embroidered saris for a largely urban consumer

market within India. Where then does the question of globalization come in? A second contribution of this article is that it

studies “local producers, but in a global frame” through examining widespread effects of globalization in rural space which

involve production for a domestic rather than export market. The formulation of a “global frame” is particularly helpful 45

here, as such a frame does not have to include a transnational market as the end site of production processes for an industry

to be considered deeply affected by the globalization of capital.

Studies of production under conditions of globalization in provincial and rural India have focused on the transformative

effects of export-oriented industry on these places, examining production for multinational companies and export markets. 46

But an equally important effect of globalization in India is the production of commodities for a growing domestic urban

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consumer market, rather than an export market. Thus one can find the enmeshing of the global and the local in rural India47

—not just in the production of items for export markets, but also in the production of goods for a burgeoning domestic

middle class whose growth is inextricably linked to the globalization and liberalization of India’s economy. 48 49

Indeed, this domestic market for zari embroidery is inextricably linked to globalization. Emma Tarlo argues that the fashion

industry in India expanded greatly in the 1980s due to “increasing social mobility, [and] the rapid expansion of a new

middle-class category of consumers.” Since the globalization and liberalization of India’s economy, estimates of the size 50

of India’s middle class have placed it at more than 250 million, with great emphasis placed on its growth. In business 51

discourse, it has become commonplace to note that this burgeoning middle class is ushering in a consumer revolution, set to

emerge as the world’s fifth-largest consumer market in the next two decades. Leela Fernandes argues that consumption is a 52

potential means through which aspiring entrants to this “new middle class” can penetrate other barriers that obstruct class

mobility, such as language and education. Consumption practices thus provide means of entry and alleviate anxieties about 53

status and lack of belonging.

Adopting new styles of clothing is a way in which to signal belonging and status in a new class position. Thus today’s new 54

middle classes display a growing desire for hand-embroidered saris which were previously available mostly to India's elite.

Hand-embroidered designer saris are increasingly popular with film and television stars, and when middle-class Indians see

these saris on screen, new forms of demand are produced. Embroidered saris are then produced in the countryside in 55

cheaper forms for wider consumption.

The availability of a previously high-end item at multiple price points necessitates the differentiation of merchandise, where

a US$5 sari can only superficially resemble a US$1000 one, as the quality of materials that go into them, and the conditions

under which they are produced are vastly different. To produce expensive designer saris skilled artisans in urban workshops

sew small, high-quality stitches under close monitoring. The cheaper versions are produced in a decentralized manner by

lower-skilled producers with less-stringent methods of quality control.

Embroidery and Othering

Through the process of rural outsourcing, saris are produced in the Bengal countryside, but are consumed for the most part

in urban India. As I studied zari saris, I was struck by the remarkably different attitudes towards these saris displayed by

producers and consumers. Chari argues that commodities produced for consumption elsewhere can have meanings that are

removed from local knowledge. While urban consumers buy saris to keep up with trends and for the status they convey, 56

many rural sari producers disavowed these saris as unsuitable forms of attire. At the same time, sari producers expressed

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approval of the industry itself, saying that it had saved them from daridrota (destitution). While embroidering is seen as a

much-needed, though problematic and fraught source of employment, the saris themselves were disapproved of by many of

the people involved in producing them. Zari saris are thus an ambivalent and uncertain commodity in rural West Bengal.

The sources of this ambivalence are complex and interrelated. First, there were deep concerns, among both Bengali Hindu

and Bengali Muslim embroiderers about the “cleanliness” of the saris and their unsuitability for regular washing. These

concerns are related to both caste-based ideas of purity and pollution, as well as concerns about Bengali identity. As I spoke

to both Muslim and Hindu embroiderers about the saris they produced, each seemed to point to an “Other” as the ultimate

consumer of these saris. A Hindu worker at an NGO which promotes embroidery in Kochuberia told me, “With all this

embroidery, they cannot be washed often. Or the embroidery will get ruined. So we [Hindus] cannot wear these. They

[Muslims] wear them.” She further commented, “They [Muslims] like shiny things.”

Cloth that cannot be regularly washed produces anxieties about hygiene which are tied to caste-based rules of purity and

pollution. As Sarah Lamb points out, in rural Bengal particularly, many people adhere to caste-based customs relating to the

washing of clothes, and attempt to emulate a high-caste ideal that they are not always able to practice. For example, after

contact with polluting influences, including after defecation and menstruation, many Hindus, particularly women, are

expected to change their clothes. While these rules are not always followed, lower caste groups are less able to adhere to 57

them. While Lamb's fieldwork was conducted in a Brahman-dominated village, her arguments have resonance even in

villages with large Muslim populations, as Bengali Muslim embroiderers were also concerned about the washability of the

zari saris. As a Muslim entrepreneur in Burrabazar told me when discussing why the saris are not appropriate for rural

Bengal, “Saris with thread-work, sequins, beadwork, daabka, zardozi and stones, these are what we make. You can't wash

these when they get dirty.” Bengalis across religious lines believe that zZari saris cannot be washed regularly without

getting damaged, which makes them an unsuitable form of attire for rural Bengal.

When it comes to the question of who, then, wears these saris, there emerges what I term a “chain of Othering,” where

Hindu Bengalis think that Muslim Bengalis wear zari saris because they do not wash their clothes regularly. Yet Muslim

Bengalis think that non-Bengali “Others” (Biharis, Marwaris, Punjabis or Gujaratis) wear zari saris. The consumer of the

zari sari for each group is ultimately seen to be an outsider. A few days after the interview in Kochuberia I had lunch at the

house of a young Bengali Muslim entrepreneur, Rabiul Sheikh. When I asked who wears zari saris, Rabiul and his father

said that villagers do not wear them, rather “city people” do, and Rabiul adds, “o-bangaalee-ra” (non-Bengalis) wear the

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saris for “parties.” Both Rabiul and his father are wearing soft cotton lungis (sarongs), and his wife, Amina, wears a worn,

unadorned maroon cotton sari.

Amina grew up just outside Kolkata, in Amtala, where she wore zari saris for special occasions. After her marriage she

moved away from the peri-urbanity of Amtala to Kulpi, a place where they are seen as an inappropriate form of attire. When

I am alone with Amina, she tells me that she likes zari saris, but her husband and father-in-law do not allow her to wear

them, even to weddings. While the wearing of zari saris is seen as problematic in rural Bengal, this viewpoint is not

monolithic, and there are slippages and divergences regarding the desirability of these saris along gendered lines. Thus

Rabiul works in and owes his current prosperity to the embroidery industry, but he does not approve of the women in his

family, and in rural areas more generally, wearing the saris he produces. The ambivalence and the disavowal of these saris in

rural Bengal is a gendered question with the “traditional” enforced upon the bodies of women. Anxieties about emergent 58

globalization-related commodities, behaviors and identities are often expressed on the bodies of women, focusing on what

they should or should not wear, and how their sexuality might be controlled. 59

The appropriate and the traditional attire for women in much of rural Bengal is taanth-er sari (handloom cotton saris). Most

women in villages do not wear taanth only, but handloom saris are perhaps more prevalent and popular in Bengal than in

other parts of India, where women wear cheaper and hardier “synthetic” saris. Even if it is not worn by rural women

everyday, taanth is an ideal. Unembellished, un-embroidered synthetic saris are acceptable as a cheaper, hardier alternative

to taanth. But zari saris, which are shiny, embroidered, and loud, are morally loaded. Zari saris are viewed as inappropriate

in rural areas because they are not only seen as unclean, but also are associated with non-rural or non-Bengali “Others,” as

seen through the process of the “chain-of-Othering.” They represent forms of impurity, literally as they cannot be washed,

and metaphorically as forms of urban fashion, with fashion’s inextricable ties to sexuality. Influenced by the shiny, sequined

and often diaphanous fashions of Bollywood films and soap operas, they represent a radical departure from the taanth ideal.

Caste rules can run counter to fashion trends in India. The ideal of the taanth sari, and its unique suitability to the regular

washing demanded by caste practices of literal and ritual cleanliness across religious lines in rural Bengal, places a negative

valence on the zari sari. Many villagers who can afford low-end zari saris choose not to wear them. This is not just a refusal

borne of poverty but rather a conscious one based on what is traditional and appropriate for rural India. Within the refusal to

wear zari saris is a strand of moral critique of urban sartorial practices. Alfred Gell's ethnography of consumption among

Muria Gonds similarly finds that some relatively wealthy Muria Gonds rejected anything but the traditional handloom

loincloth. Gell writes of Tiri, the richest man in Manjapur: “It was not that he was trying to look poor ... It was rather that he

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was determined not to enter into kinds of consumption that would make him out to be a different kind of person than he

regarded as morally appropriate, in the evaluations of both his society and himself.” Rural embroiderers in Bengal 60

similarly refuse to appropriate urban fashions. While they often wear synthetic substitutes, taanth remains the ideal for rural

Bengali women. Thus among sari embroiderers there emerges an ambivalent attitude towards the saris: approval of their

production, but not of their local consumption.

Ostaagars: Prosperity and Anxiety among Rural Entrepreneurs

People working in sari embroidery are ambivalent not just towards the product itself, but also along a second scale that

involves the process of production. The Bengali term ostaagar means “a master artisan or tailor.” But Rabiul Sheikh, the

ostaagar from whom I purchased the sari, was not a master artisan, and he rarely embroiders anymore. Ostaagar remains

the term that is used for him in the village, and the term that he uses to describe himself. But Rabiul could rightly be called a

middleman, an exploiter, a petty capitalist, an entrepreneur, a designer, or a sub-contractor—he performs multiple roles. The

term ostaagar is outmoded—it cannot capture the complex, shifting nature of his work. I use the story of Rabiul to highlight

the ambivalent positions that even beneficiaries of the industry hold towards embroidering. While ostaagars are seeing new

opportunity as a result of zari work, they are also made anxious by the risks of participating in flexible labor processes

under conditions of globalization. 61

Rural outsourcing involves the process of subcontracting work to a transient and volatile labor force. Complex distribution

chains extend from Kolkata, where wholesalers in Burrabazar source saris out to numerous distributors located in towns like

Amtala which hug fringe areas of the city. These distributors then outsource their saris to another set of ostaagars, who

distribute saris, as well as the required sequins, thread, and corresponding designs to workers who do embroidering in their

own homes, or in shacks that serve as workshops. Workers work either for piece rates or for hourly wages, depending on 62

their level of skill and the specific arrangement with subcontractors. This process of subcontracting produces paths to

prosperity for some ostaagars. As Chari argues in his study of the garment industry in Tiruppur, “contracting distributes

machines to allow some workers, particularly in garment stitching and manufacture, to make a class leap into small

ownership.” We see a similar process at play in Kulpi, where ostaagars like Rabiul are able to achieve previously 63

unimaginable levels of prosperity. But at the same time they accept greater risk.

Rabiul’s father was a school teacher. For many in rural Bengal, becoming a teacher is a pinnacle of achievement. A teacher

has job security and, a comparatively high and steady income, commands respect and often holds political power. Rabiul’s 64

father wanted his son to become a teacher, too, but Rabiul was never interested. After finishing school, Rabiul took a course

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in air-conditioner repair with a company in Kolkata. But upon finishing his course he was unable to find employment as a

contracted air-conditioner repair technician. He believes he was unable to find a job because he was discriminated against as

a Muslim.

Frustrated and angry, he returned to Kulpi. His father then pressured him to apply to nearby colleges for an education

degree. Rabiul refused, and was determined to start a business of his own. He decided to try his hand at the embroidery

industry that was spreading in the region. Learning from an acquaintance, he initially began embroidering saris himself and

then began distributing to relatives.

Rabiul’s father was initially appalled by his son’s choice, because in the hierarchy of occupations in Bengal, an ostaagar

places below a schoolteacher, the work of the hand is less valued than the work of the mind. Finally resigning himself to the

fact that his son was not going to follow in his footsteps, he arranged Rabiul’s marriage to Amina, whose uncle was an

important ostaagar in Amtala. Amina brought with her valuable knowledge and contacts in the zari industry. Rabiul was

able to benefit from his wife’s well-established network, which he continues to develop. He deals in several hundred saris a

week, and his business is growing. Rabiul's father said, “I used to think he was a good-for-nothing, but now I see he is our

future, that he was looking very far ahead.”

In addition to managing a chain of distribution, Rabiul also acts as designer, always on the lookout for the latest fashions,

colors and styles of embroidery. He gets ideas from design magazines, TV, visits to Kolkata, movies, and his imagination.

He says the competition can be bested only by staying a step ahead with good designs. According to Rabiul, “There is a lot

of money in the business. But there is also risk because the market changes all the time.” Keeping up with changing

fashions is thus a source of pressure as well as creativity. Even though Rabiul works in hand embroidery in rural India he is

not concerned with the traditional and the local, but rather with the new and the national. He makes consumer goods that

can be sold in urban markets allover India.

Rabiul’s ambition and drive are palpable. He is an example of a new kind of rural entrepreneur, middlemen in villages who

are taking advantage of India's booming consumer demand to play a part in the production of small-scale goods. Rabiul's

income allows him to live an affluent life by village standards, and his new car, a Hyundai Santro, is a symbol of his

recently-earned status. Ostaagars like Rabiul bring an emerging middle-class consumer lifestyle to villages, while the

purchasing power that workers get from their embroidery work also contributes to an increasing circulation of low-end

consumer goods within rural areas.

!12

Rabiul’s career choices have allowed him a new kind of political space in the village. During its thirty-four years in power,

the Left-Front government in Bengal built a powerful party machine. When young people in rural Bengal become teachers

—as Rabiul's father wanted for him—they become tied to the ruling party machine. But by working as an independent 65

operator, tied neither to a party nor a union, Rabiul was able to express his political views and organize more freely. Indeed,

his home was strewn with anti-communist propaganda, including a large banner for the main opposition party, the

Trinamool Congress (which came to power in 2011). Rabiul’s position as a rural entrepreneur—one that is growing

increasingly common across the state—allows not just for new consumption practices, but also for a new kind of rural-

bourgeois oppositional politics and leadership.

Despite his growing prosperity, Rabiul keenly felt the precariousness of the flexible labor market that he was participating

in. His sense of achievement was tempered by a sense of anxiety or insecurity that schoolteachers in Kulpi whom I

interviewed, while less prosperous, did not display. Rabiul’'s trajectory potentially reaches much higher than those of

government employees, but it is also fraught with risk. As a designer, Rabiul felt a great deal of pressure to come up with

innovative designs that had the inventiveness to keep him one step ahead of the competition. Rabiul also worried about

competition from embroidery machines and the risk of wholesalers rejecting saris for imperfections, causing him to bear the

losses. The risk of saris being rejected prevented rural ostaagars from moving into more expensive, and more lucrative,

forms of embroidery such as zardozi (raised metallic wire embroidery). As Kabir Mondol, an ostaagar from Kulpi told me,

“We are not getting the courage to move into the expensive range.”

The story I have presented so far is of ostaagars who have attained material wealth (relatively they are wealthier than most

people in their villages) and its concomitant social and sometimes political status in rural areas. But ostaagars also live 66

under a cloud of fear. They fear that the industry that they have brought to this particular part of Bengal will be eclipsed

through Kolkata's connections to other places with an even cheaper and more pliant labor force. They struggle to keep up

with the vagaries of fashion and worry about abrupt, faddish changes in demand, and of embroidered saris going out of

style. But most of all,ostaagars fear the disappearance of their trade. They spoke apprehensively of embroidery machines

that had recently come into use in the state of Gujarat, which could produce saris of the same quality as Bengali hands. The

machines could reportedly even set sequins, and ostaagars believe that they could potentially make the zari business in

Bengal obsolete. Zaheer, an ostaagar in Amtala said, “Where a hand-made sari costs Rs. 1000, a machine can make it for

Rs. 200. Within two years the business will get more ruined. The [wage] rate will go down, demand will go down. We are

going in that direction.” Headded, “We can’t compete with the computer. One embroidery machine costs Rs. 70–80 lakh, 67

!13

but in Gujarat they are buying them. They will start buying them here. Big Marwaris can afford it here, big Marwaris are 68

buying everything, and small businesses are getting hit.”

In Zaheer's narrative, Marwaris are ultimately held responsible for the uncertainty and risk in the sari embroidery industry.

Here again we see a “chain-of-Othering,” where threats to the industry are attributed indiscriminately and problematically to

the “non-Bengali” outsider. A quiet, melancholic man, Zaheer seems to be mourning the inevitable demise of the industry.

His words have an almost theoretical quality, predicting the eventual supersession of his system, even while it is in a

thriving phase: “We can’t compete with the computer.” Thus entrepreneurs in sari embroidery have a conflicted relationship

with the industry.

This ambivalence towards production under conditions of globalization has resonance with other industries, demonstrating

some of the shared experiences and frictions produced by flexible labor processes in disparate places. An ethnographic

focus on workers and entrepreneurs involved in global production highlights awkward engagements and frictions through

ambivalence rather than resistance or acceptance. In a study of Turkish carpet-weaving, Damla Isik explores the

understudied role of middlemen or entrepreneurs in export-oriented industries, concluding, “Carpet manufacturers embraced

such flexibility yet, at the same time, remained ambivalent about what it meant for them and for their weaving

neighborhoods.” The Konyan entrepreneurs in Isik's study share similar concerns and ambivalences with Ostaagars in 69

Bengal, down to gloomy predictions of the demise of their industry even as it appears to be a thriving. 70

Working in Sari Embroidery

Tapan, a middle-aged embroiderer, says about the industry: “We are surviving on this; this is a business of first-rate

cheating.” For him, the industry provided much-needed work, but it was also based on “cheating” workers. Tapan's father 71

was a sharecropper. For twenty years Tapan worked as an urban construction laborer. He would work in Kolkata for three

years, save money, and return to his village because of desher maya (the attractions of home). When the money would run

out, he would leave again for Kolkata. He deeply disliked this cycle of backbreaking urban labor. Around 2003, he obtained

work building cell-phone towers in the countryside and made “a lot of money,” even though it was very “high-risk” work.

After working on the towers, he felt that he was getting old, so he bought a van-rickshaw for his son to ply. Tapan and his

wife, daughter, and daughter-in-law then began working in the embroidery industry. Tapan expressed the view that the zari

industry, like cell-phone tower work, was an important source of income that “saved” people from daily wage labor in the

city. But he also called it a “cheating” industry, based on its low wages and the routine rejection of embroidered saris based

!14

on spurious claims of defects. Even his attitude towards ostaagars was explicitly ambivalent. According to Tapan, “Some

ostaagars are good. Some are bad...΅But wages are too low. But if I leave this line, what will I do?”

Geert De Neve, in his study of carpet-weaving in rural Tamil Nadu presents a similarly ambivalent position among workers,

arguing that “the handlooms provided this rural labour force with a very welcome source of employment at home.” But De 72

Neve also argues that this is not the full picture, for after workers enumerated the benefits of the carpet-weaving industry,

they also described its painful costs—the physical suffering and difficulty involved in weaving and the desire to return to

previous agricultural occupations. 73

A very important effect of outsourced production in rural India is that it allows people to stay in their villages rather than

move between village and city as a “footloose” labor force at the bottom of the urban labor pool. Indeed, many people I 74

spoke with had a strong disregard for Kolkata and saw their ability to work and stay in their own villages as a largely

positive effect of rural outsourcing. As Tapan says, “There is no need to leave one's village home now. I have a cemented

house and garden and enough to eat.” Rural outsourcing reverses for many an older process of rural to urban migration for

work. Instead, urban work, chasing comparative advantage, has moved to rural areas.

It is not only adult embroiderers who express ambivalence towards zarir kaaj. I arranged to interview embroiderers who

work in a makeshift workshop in Kulpi. Entering the workshop, I see a room of fourteen children, their ages ranging from

about six to fifteen. The children hand-embroider in three groups on three saris, each one stretched taut in sections across a

wooden frame.

The children invite me in and ask me to sit down. A boy called Joydeep answers most of my questions, with others piping in

from time to time—agreeing, contradicting, adding stories. Joydeep tells me he has been embroidering for more than five

years. He learned embroidery by watching his mother and sisters. He says that they embroider at home, but he likes working

in the workshop with his friends, because he feels lonely in the house. He works seven hours a day, and in the evening

another shift begins and other children work another seven hours. The children work six days a week with Sundays off.

More and more people are coming into the field, he says, so

the rate is decreasing. One to two years ago it was Rs. 10 (21 cents), at least, for an hour of work. Now it is coming to more

like Rs. 7–8 (15–17 cents). This is too little so we want to leave. But I only know how to do zari work. If I could find any

other work I would leave this. I left school of my own free will, but also because there was a need. I used to enjoy it

initially, but now…”

!15

Six of the children in the room said their fathers were unemployed. One had left school and regretted his decision, but was

unable to go back because no school would admit him. All of them said they had eye problems—their eyes burned and

watered from hours of intense concentration on needlework.

The room where they work has windows, a fan, and naked lightbulbs. In one corner is a large flat-screen TV and DVD

player. Next to it sits the DVD of Race, a Bollywood hit about horse racing among wealthy Indians in South Africa. The

children rent the TV and DVD player from a local video store every Friday. There is no overseer to force the children to

work, but if they do not produce what is expected of them, they are paid less than their anticipated hourly wage. They say

that there is a lot of “cheating” in the business. While the work itself is exploitative, preventing them from getting an

education and wearing out their eyes, their place of work is not oppressive. Joydeep says, “As people live together in a

family, we work together like that. We enjoy coming here and seeing each other everyday, even though I do not like the

work anymore.”

Here we see at play the ambivalence towards the industry and uncertain futures within it, a critique tempered with

appreciation, even enjoyment. Several children say they have been working for five or six years. There is a small boy

standing near me, and I ask him how long he has been working here. “Oh around five to six years,” he says, echoing his

elders. “Ha ha, he’s six years old himself,” someone says, and we all laugh. This is hilarious to all of us, to all the children

and to me. But inadvertently, through his desire to mimic his elders, he brings something into sharp relief: what is the

difference between working from the age of six and working from the age of one?

Embroidered Exploitation

While child labor is illegal in India, ostaagars in the embroidery industry make money off the labor of others through

subcontracting, and a majority of them employ children. The growth of the sari industry is deeply troubling because this

industry has created new child laborers. These children have not moved from labor of one kind, say agricultural, into

embroidery. Prior to the rise of the zari industry, many of these children did not work seven hour days. Many children used

to attend school, and may have continued to do so, had embroidery not emerged as a tempting source of income. School

teachers I interviewed in Kulpi directly attributed the rise in truancy rates to the embroidery industry. By providing them

with “pocket money,” embroidery lures children away from accessing even primary education. The penetration of rural

outsourcing can lead to the employment of increasing numbers of children, where earlier they may have had non-laboring or

quasi-laboring lives. As embroidering contributes to increased truancy, we see incursions of global capital in rural West

Bengal leading to renewed forms of exploitation and regressive social outcomes.

!16

Indeed, the third scale of ambivalence towards the embroidery industry is ambivalence towards the politics of this form of

decentralized production. Amal Choudhury, a teacher in Kulpi discussed its effects:

Because of zari work, truancy and the drop-out rate is also increasing. Parents can make good money if their children work.

Children also would rather earn pocket money than come to school. They think, why spend all those years in school when I

can earn now? They earn liquid money, which is more important especially because they see class 12pass students who are

not getting jobs and have to start doing zari work only. They think, why spend all those years in school when I can earn

now? ... There are markets that are getting bigger here, more shops are coming up, which means that the economy is

improving. But along with this, values are getting destroyed. Especially among the earning youngsters, our students, they

leave their studies and get money from zari work, working on cell-phone towers. They make money and then they walk in

front of the school and smoke in front of us, encourage their friends who are going to school to stop going. They tell them,

“earn money like us. What will you do by studying?” They have money, so they don’t obey anyone, even their parents.

Money is power. And they have become insolent ... So there are psychological and cultural changes along with financial

change. With money in their hands they are not thinking of themselves as underdogs anymore, as poor people who need the

help of the government or the [communist] party. They see themselves differently now. ... This has led to a rapid and radical

economic and cultural change. 75

Choudhury presents zari embroidery as a source of both new opportunity and new exploitation. Another facet of

exploitation within the embroidery industry is the attitude of ostaagars towards labor organizing: all the ostaagars

interviewed held an unequivocal anti-organizing stance. As Zaheer said, “There is no union in this business. Whoever 76

attempts to organize, I will stop giving them work. There are many people who want work.” Ostaagars take advantage of

the reserve army of workers in rural Bengal to enforce conditions of flexible and transient labor. Workers are anxious about

decreases in wages and piece rates. But ostaagars are able to hire and fire workers easily, and thus contribute to the extreme

precariousness and vulnerability of these forms of outsourced work under conditions of globalization.

Workers in the industry often complained about the exploitative practices of ostaagers, including paying low wages,

rejecting worked-on pieces by claiming (unjustly in the workers' view) that they were damaged, or delaying or defaulting on

payments due. Yet worker solidarity in the industry tends to be low, with little to no formal organizing activity within this

increasingly important rural labor sector.

Ranajit Guha argues that rebellion requires “for its form and spirit...two closely related practices of corporate behaviour,

namely, emulation and solidarity.” That is, solidarity is required for acts of rebellion and resistance against oppression. Yet 77

!17

workers in the zari industry do not identify the industry as a source of wholesale oppression in the first place. Perhaps it is

the workers' very ambivalence towards the industry that hampers the development of forms of solidarity. Since workers

approve of some aspects of embroidery work, and critique others, rather than act collectively against the industry, they

respond to exploitative practices in often individualized and fragmented ways, through producing lower-quality work,

defaulting on returning merchandise, and frequently changing the ostaagars they contract with. Douglas Haynes, in his

study of weaving in Western India, notes that even with the growth of wage labor in the industry in the 1930s, there was “no

straightforward trend towards class consciousness and a proletarian identity.” Part of the reason is that the horizontal ties 78

that workers formed with others in similar economic positions were intercut with the vertical ties of kinship, patronage, and

dependence that workers shared with their bosses. Similar forces are at play in sari embroidery in the South 24 parganas, 79

where workers may be tied to ostaagars through vertical ties of family and patronage. In addition, in the contemporary

situation, young male embroiderers, in particular, believe that participating in the industry contains the possibility of

mobility, of becoming ostaagars in their own right. Thus they see themselves not just as workers, but as potential bosses. 80

This identification with ostaagars can also impede solidarity. Many people I spoke with in Kulpi were also aware of the 81

massive spread of the embroidery industry across Bengal. They articulated an understanding of their work as transient and

mobile, and saw their labor as easily replaceable.

Regarding formal organizing, when I referred to his comments about low wages in the industry, and asked Tapan about the

possibilities of labor organizing and unionization, he was dismissive and cynical, saying, “Union to Poschim Bong-er barota

bajiye dilo. Union Kore ki hobe?” (Unions ruined West Bengal. What will be accomplished through unions?) He dismissed

my question as naive or foolish, well aware that the embroidery industry depends on low wages and can easily move to new

places, as it had recently come to Kulpi. Indeed, after thirty-four years of Communist Party of India Marxist (CPM)-led rule

and long histories of militant labor movements in the state, the possibilities of organizing in West Bengal are met with a

level of cynicism that I encountered in many people I interviewed, including schoolteachers, embroiderers and itinerant

vendors. Organizing the unorganized is an essential and urgent task in contemporary India. Yet in West Bengal one

encounters a culture of cynicism regarding the politics of labor organizing, which is not a new or emergent form of politics

in the state. Rather, labor organizing is often seen as part of a long and fraught industrial past, and many workers in Bengal

are distinctly disenchanted with its possibilities.

!18

The Ambivalent Politics of Rural Outsourcing

Subcontracting in South Asia mirrors Marxian systems of “putting-out” and “domestic industry.” Marx describes 82

“domestic industry” as a complement to industrial capitalism. Focusing on lacemaking in nineteenthcentury England, he

argues that, rather than a wholesale shift to mechanized production, “the system actually prevalent in England is this: The

capitalist concentrates a large number of machines on his premises, and then distributes the product of those machines

amongst the domestic workers to work it up to its finished form.” In the embroidery industry, machine-made synthetic 83

saris are likewise finished in people’s homes in the countryside. Like Marx's lace-making, sari embroidery is dispersed

across a wide geographic area. It employs large numbers of children who receive no education and who work at an 84

occupation that is “monotonous, eye-straining, and exhausting.” 85

For Marx, domestic industry is worse than wage labor. Rural and dispersed, it is more exploitative than a factory system. It

extracts labor out of children and women, has no regulation, no unionization, and is characterized by physically damaging

work for long hours at low wages. Domestic industry continues so long as it is profitable due to the greater exploitation of

the workers. But as competition among producers increases, wages go down and hours go up, until finally “a critical point

was reached. The basis of the old method, sheer brutality in the systematic division of labor, no longer sufficed for the

extending markets and for the still more rapidly extending competition of the capitalists. The hour of the machine had

struck.” With it, Marx predicted, domestic industry entered the factory system. 86

Unlike Marx's England, the growth of domestic industry in India is not a step along the way to industrialization. Rather,

rural outsourcing emerges in a post-industrial moment, at a time when formal factories across India’s cities, from

Ahmedabad’s textile mills to Kolkata’s jute mills, have been closing down. As industrial manufacturing slows, informal 87

small-scale production is booming. There is no determined teleology to its growth in post-liberalization India. Rather

domestic industry is the face of manufacturing in much of the country, an extreme form of dispersed and exploitative

capitalism with little of organized factory production's promise for worker solidarity and organizing.

Yet perhaps we dishonor the ambivalence that producers in the industry themselves hold towards embroidery work when we

focus solely on exploitation. Many workers read this industry in a second, contradictory, manner, as a form of opportunity.

Rural outsourcing allows people to stay in their villages if they so desire, and forms of subcontracting can lead to social

mobility and new class trajectories for workers. While critiquing the creation of new child laborers, and the exploitation of

workers, workers and entrepreneurs also discuss the opportunities of rural outsourcing, thus articulating ambivalent

positions rather than robust critiques.

!19

An alternative, neoliberal reading of outsourcing is provided by one of India’s most prominent businessmen. Billionaire

Mukesh Ambani heads Reliance Industries, one of India’s largest corporations, and he has plans to make India rival China in

manufacturing. In contrast to China's model of large-scale, capital-intensive industrial manufacturing, which employs

millions of workers, Ambani believes that India’s small-scale and fragmented structure may be its strength. Instead of

building factories, Ambani envisions Reliance sourcing goods manufactured in rural areas, such as handmade leather

sandals from the Sugar Belt and tie-dyed Bandhani saris from Gujarat, for a national or global consumer market. 88

Ambani says: “The next big thing is: how do you create manufacturing with decentralized employment? The Chinese have

got very disciplined top-down systems. We have our bottom-up creative systems.” Ambani seeks to corporatize and bring 89

under his Reliance Industries the many small-scale “non-corporate” entrepreneurs like Rabiul who operate across rural India

—an alarming proposition. 90

The embroidery industry thus parallels both Marx's description of “domestic industry” as well as Ambani’s “bottom-up

creative system.” While a Marxian analysis of rural outsourcing sees it as a source of sheer exploitation, a neoliberal

perspective views it as a process imbued with great potentiality. These analyses may seem diametrically opposed. Yet

participants in the embroidery industry present elements of both analyses—prosperity and degradation, opportunity and

exploitation—when articulating positions of ambivalence toward the industry.

Conclusion

Rural outsourcing has linkages with longer histories of dispersed manufacturing in India, which placed workers in

advantageous positions by preventing sole dependence on agriculture, diversifying sources of livelihood, and allowing for

strong bargaining positions based on caste solidarities. The question emerges as to whether these possibilities exist in 91

contemporary instances of rural outwork in India.

Is rural outsourcing to be celebrated as a form of production that has generated growth and much-needed employment in

rural areas? Is it to be condemned because it is inherently exploitative? The ambivalent positions of workers and

entrepreneurs within the embroidery industry in the South 24 Parganas suggest that it is both. This ambivalent stance, which

is neither a wholehearted celebration of globalization from entrepreneurs, nor a full-on critique from workers, echoes what

people engaged in this industry feel about the products they produce and the labor processes through which they produce

them.

!20

Bauman argues that ambivalence is a byproduct of the very act of classification. Every act of classification produces

ambivalence, which produces the desire to again classify more cogently, which produces again more ambivalence and so on.

Yet being and experience itself is always ambivalent and unclassifiable. Modernity, which is a rationalized desire for order

and organization at an unprecedented epistemological and political scale, was “an era of a particularly bitter and relentless

war against ambivalence.” Yet for Bauman modernity was a quest for an order that could never be fully established. 92

Modernity's inability to fully excise ambivalence even through projects of extreme violence exposes its failure as an

epistemological system and a political project. Thus for Bauman living with ambivalence and accepting ambivalence has

political significance—the revelation of the impossibility and indeed the undesirability of impermeable and rigid

classification.

Thus, the politics of ambivalence is the rejection of totalizing modernity's capacity for unprecedented violence. Yet living-

in-ambivalence makes it very difficult to organize, or bring together. Indeed, Bauman argues that the “thorough, adamant

and uncompromising privatization of all concerns has been the main factor that has rendered postmodern society so

spectacularly immune to systemic critique and radical social dissent with revolutionary potential.” The impossibility of 93

containing ambivalence thus brings to the fore the fault lines of modernity, but in circumstances where people are unable to

act collectively and forge anew. For Bauman, globalization is a postmodern condition, and “postmodernity is a site of

opportunity and a site of danger; and it is both for the same reasons.” 94

Thus Bauman’'s theorization of ambivalence takes us some of the way towards understanding how processes of

globalization can be met not just with acceptance or resistance, but also with ambivalence. The politics of globalization in

out-of-the-way places is not only a politics of acceptance or resistance, opposition, contestation, and critique. If it were,

what would explain globalization's spread and reach, or its “stickiness”? Ambivalence partially explains why global capital

adheres, but also why it sticks divergently, differentially, and loosely.

!

!21

. A sari is a garment of six or nine yards of cloth, commonly worn in the Indian subcontinent. While a sari is one 1

continuous piece of cloth, it is aesthetically divided into separate parts—border, main body, and sari end—often demarcated by separate designs or colors.

. Kulpi refers to a Community Development Block in South 24 Parganas, comprised of fourteen villages or Gram 2

Panchayats (Village Councils), as well as to an individual village within this block named Kulpi. In this article, “"Kulpi refers to the village or Gram Panchayat of Kulpi.

. Ostaagars told me that the beads, thread, and sequins came from Delhi and Uttar Pradesh in North India. The 3

saris were sourced from the state of Gujarat, a major manufacturing hub. One ostaagar described the city of Surat in Gujarat as “the Manchester of India.”

. This article is based on eighteen months of fieldwork conducted along a major highway, NH-117, in South 24 4

Parganas. People who work in zari embroidery were interviewed in Kolkata's wholesale market Burrabazar, Amtala, and in the villages of Kulpi, Kochuberia, Sagar Island Pathar Pratima, and in buses along the highway (see map).

. “District Profile, South 24 Parganas, West Bengal,” Government of West Bengal, http://www.s24pgs.gov.in/s24p/5

index.php (accessed December 23, 2013). In 2014, the Indian government stated that those spending below Rs. 32 (Approximately USD 0.60) per day would be considered poor, in a controversial report that was widely criticized for setting the limit far too low.

. Government of West Bengal, District Human Development Report South 24 Parganas (West Bengal, 2009). 6

http://wbplan.gov.in/HumanDev/DHDR/24%20pgsSouth/Chapter%2003.pdf (accessed January, 26, 2015).

. Neoliberalism in India generally refers to the Indian state’s adoption of New Economic Policies from 1991 7

onwards, “which intensified India’s encounter with global capital.” See Oza, The Making of Neoliberal India, 2. These policies included the privatization of previously state-run industries, greater entry of foreign investment and consumer goods into India, and the opening up of key sectors of the economy to private capital. See Waquar Ahmed, India’s New Economic Policy: A Critical Analysis (New York, 2011); Chatterjee, Democracy and Economic Transformation, Econ43(2008). ; Carol Upadhya, “India’s ‘New Middle Class’ and the Globalising City: Software Professionals in Bangalore,” in The New Middle Classes: Globalizing Lifestyles, Consumerism and Environmental Concern, ed. Lars Meier and Hellmuth Lange (Dordrecht, 2009), 219–36.

. As part of economic liberalization, India’s Motor Vehicles Act and Rules was amended in 1989. See Calcutta 8

State Transport Corporation, Annual Resource Mobilization, Internal Report (Calcutta, 2008). State-reserved bus routes were opened to private operators, and the frequency of buses in South 24 Parganas exponentially increased. During fieldwork in buses, I met embroiderers and workers in similarly outsourced industries, including beedi rolling and paper box-making, who discussed the importance of improved connectivity for their work. While improved connectivity has not caused the growth of this industry, it facilitates its spread along bus networks.

. Similar processes of the rural outsourcing of embroidery are taking place in other parts of India, such as Uttar 9

Pradesh. See Raksha Kumar, “A Tainted Tradition,” The Hindu Sunday Magazine, March 24, 2013. Fifteen years ago, Wilkinson-Weber’s ethnography of chikan embroidery locates it as an urban industry concentrated in the oldest areas of Lucknow. Contrast her study with the claim made in Belkin and Benhamou-Huet's 2009 book on Indian embroidery: “In the villages around Agra and Calcutta, life revolves around the manufacture and trade of embroidery—a frame for making saris stands in nearly every house.” See Aurore Belkin and Judith Benhamou-Huet, 21st-Century Embroidery in India: In their Hands (Munich, 2009), 2.

. I stress “commercial embroidery” here, as opposed to more traditional and regionally-specific embroidery on 10

clothes made for both rural and urban consumption, such as kantha, phulkari or chikan. See Kamaladevi Chattopadhyaya, Indian Embroidery (New Delhi, 1977).

. These saris display a low-skilled and generic form of hand-embroidery which people can learn after a short period 11

of training. Many forms of hand-embroidery have undergone similar “deskilling” processes to meet growing demand. See Wilkinson-Weber, Embroidering Lives.

. In his study of rug production for IKEA in Tamil Nadu, De Neve identifies similar reasons for the outsourcing of 12

work to villages from towns. See De Neve, “Weaving for IKEA,” 93.

. Deepankar Basu and Amit Basole. Relations of Production and Modes of Surplus Extraction in India: Working 13

Paper (Amherst, MA, 2010), 45.

!22

. Important regional centers of textile production included Bengal, the Coromandel Coast, Gujarat and 14

Maharashtra, and parts of North India. See David Washbrook, “The Textile Industry and the Economy of South India” in How India Clothed the World, eds. Giorgio Riello and Tirthankar Roy (Leiden, 2009), 178; and Om Prakash “From Market-Determined to Coercion Based: Textile Manufacturing in Eighteenth-Century Bengal” in How India Clothed the World, 219.

. Richard Eaton, The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier 1204–1760 (New Delhi, 1993), 298.15

. Washbrook, “The Textile Industry,” 178.16

. Nirmala Banerjee, Working Women in Colonial Bengal: Modernization and Marginalization” in Recasting 17

Women: Essays in Colonial History, eds. Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid (New Delhi: Zubaan, 2006), and Prakash, “From Market-Determined to Coercion Based.”

. The Indian textile industry, the decline of Indian manufacturing, and the causes of the divergence are part of a 18

large and extremely complex field of study. The debates within this field certainly cannot be summarized here. Rather the aim is to draw some parallels between older forms of rural outwork and contemporary processes. Some key writings on the history of the Indian textile industry can be found in Tirthankar Roy, Traditional Industry in the Economy of Colonial India (Cambridge, 1999); Riello and Roy, How India Clothed the World; Prasannan Parthasarathi, The Transition to a Colonial Economy (Cambridge, 2001); Rajnarayan Chandavarkar, “Industrialization in India before 1947: Conventional Approaches and Alternative Perspectives,” Modern Asian Studies 19(1984): 623–668; and Douglas Haynes, Small Town Capitalism in Western India (Cambridge, 2012).

. Prasannan Parthasarathi, “Deindustrialization in Nineteenth-Century South India,” in How India Clothed the 19

World, 426.

. Tirthankar Roy, Traditional Industry.20

. Banerjee, “Working Women,” 297.21

. Parthasarathi, Deindustrialization in Nineteenth-Century South India, 434.22

. Erik Harms, Saigon’s Edge: On the Margins of Ho Chi Minh City (Minneapolis, 2011); Anna Tsing, Friction: An 23

Ethnography of Global Connection (Princeton, 2005); Mayfair Mei-hui Yang, “Putting Global Capitalism in Its Place: Economic Hybridity, Bataille, and Ritual Expenditure,” Current Anthropology 41 (2000): 477–509.

. Jackie Assayag and C.J. Fuller, “Introduction” in Globalizing India: Perspectives from Below, ed. Jackie Assayag 24

and C.J. Fuller (London, 2005); Jonathan Inda and Renato Rosaldo, “Introduction: A World in Motion,” in The Anthropology of Globalization, ed. Jonathan Inda and Renato Rosaldo (Malden, MA, 2002), 1–34.; Tsing, Frictions; Sylvia Yanagisako, Producing Culture And Capital: Family Firms In Italy (Princeton, 2002); Yang, “Putting Global Capitalism in its Place.”

. Tsing, Frictions.25

. Ibid., 5.26

. Ibid., 6.27

. Marc Edelman, Peasants against Globalization: Rural Social Movements in Costa Rica (Stanford, 1999); Arturo 28

Escobar, Territories of Difference: Place, Movements, Life, Redes (Durham, NC, 2008).

. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis, 1996); Lisa Lowe and 29

David Lloyd, The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital (Durham, 1997).

. Yang, “Putting Global Capitalism in its Place,” 477.30

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. Priscilla Stone, Angelique Haugerud, and Peter Little, “Commodities and Globalization: Anthropological 31

Perspectives,” in Commodities and Globalization, ed. Angelique Haugerud, Priscilla Stone and Peter D. Little (Lanham, MD, 2000), 1–29.

. Anna Tsing, “Conclusion: The Global Situation,” in The Anthropology of Globalization, ed. Jonathan Inda and 32

Renato Rosaldo (Malden, MA, 2002), 469.

. Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence (Oxford, 1991), 3.33

. Ibid., 52.34

. Sherry Ortner, “Resistance and the Problem of Ethnographic Refusal,” Comparative Studies in Society and 35

History 37 (1995): 190.

. Ibid., 175.36

. Dwaipayan Bhattacharyya, “Of Control and Factions: the Changing ‘Party-Society’ in Rural West Bengal,” 37

Economic and Political Weekly 44 (2009): 59–69.

. The GoWB attempted to acquire over 900 acres of agricultural land in 2006 for Tata Motors Limited (a private 38

multinational corporation) to produce what was billed as India’s cheapest car, the Nano. The factory was never built in West Bengal due to widespread resistance, and was moved to Gujarat. See Rahul Mitra, “What About the People in the ‘People’s Car’?” in Case Studies in Organizational Communication: Ethical Perspectives and Practices, ed. Steve May (Los Angeles, 2012), 119–128. Nandigram was to be the site of a “chemical hub” by Salim Group, an Indonesian MNC. Due to mass protests across the state in 2007 and 2008, and the communist government’s electoral defeat, this project was also abandoned. For more information on Nandigram and SEZ policies in West Bengal, see Gautam Ray, ed., Nandigram and Beyond (Kolkata, 2008).

. “"Kulpi Project to see Green Light Soon,” Business Standard Reporter, July 4, 2011. http://www.business-39

standard.com/article/companies/kulpi-port-project-to-see-green-light-soon-111070400091_1.html (accessed January 26, 2015).

. Tamal Sengupta, “Panchayat Poll Result Trends Indicate Mamata Banerjee’s Sweeping Victory,” Economic Times, 40

July 29, 2013. http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2013-07-29/news/40872345_1_trinamool-congress-zilla-parishads-gram-panchayat (accessed January 26, 2015).

. Gordon Mathews, Ghetto at the Center of the World: Chungking Mansions, Hong Kong (Chicago, 2011), 13, 20.41

. William Mazzarella, Shoveling Smoke: Advertising and Globalization in Contemporary India (Durham, NC, 42

2003).

. Carol Upadhya and A. R. Vasavi, eds., In an Outpost of the Global Economy: Work and Workers in India’s 43

Information Technology Industry (New Delhi, 2008).

. Henrike Donner and Geert De Neve, “Introduction,” in Being Middle Class in India: a Way of Life, ed. Henrike 44

Donner and Geert De Neve (London, 2008).

. Priscilla Stone, Angelique Haugerud and Peter Little, “Commodities and Globalization,” 7.45

. Sharad Chari, Fraternal Capital: Peasant-workers, Self-made Men, and Globalization in Provincial India 46

(Stanford, CA, 2004).

. Atul Kohli, Poverty Amid Plenty in the New India (Cambridge, 2012).47

Assayag and Fuller, Globalizing India; Leela Fernandes, India's New Middle Class: Democratic Politics in an Era of 48

Economic Reform (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006); Kohli, Poverty Amid Plenty; Upadhya and Vasavi, In an Outpost of the Global Economy.

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. Kohli argues that an important difference between economic growth in India and China is that in India production 49

is less export-oriented and is geared toward a large domestic market which has boomed since the liberalization of India’s economy. See Kohli, Poverty Amid Plenty, 220.

. Emma Tarlo, Clothing Matters: Dress and Identity in India (London, 1996), 327.50

. Fernandes, India’s New Middle Class.51

. Diana Farell and Eric Beinhocker, “Next Big Spenders: India’s Middle Class,” Mckinsey Global Institute, 2007, 52

http://www.mckinsey.com/mgi/mginews/bigspenders.asp.

. Fernandes, India's New Middle Class, 35.53

. Tarlo, Clothing Matters, 328; Clare Wilkinson-Weber, Embroidering Lives: Women's Work and Skill in the 54

Lucknow Embroidery Industry (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), 17.

. Mukulika Banerjee and Daniel Miller, The Sari (Oxford, 2003).55

. Chari, Fraternal Capital, 79.56

. Sarah Lamb, White Saris and Sweet Mangoes: Aging, Gender, and Body in North India (Berkeley, CA, 2000), 57

186.

. The importance of saris for Bengali identity can be seen in a landmark 2010 Calcutta High Court ruling allowing 58

female teachers in West Bengal to choose their own clothing. Before that, teachers were expected to wear only saris to school, with multiple cases of teachers being coerced into wearing them. See “Teachers Win Right to Dress,” The Telegraph, May 8, 2010.

. Rupal Oza, The Making of Neoliberal India: Nationalism, Gender, and the Paradoxes of Globalization (New 59

York, 2006).

. Alfred Gell, “Newcomers to the World of Goods: Consumption among the Muria Gonds,” in Sociology and 60

Anthropology of Economic Life I: the Moral Embedding of Economic Action, ed. Veena Das and Ranendra K. Das (New Delhi, 2010), 288.

. Chari, Fraternal Capital; David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford, 2005); Biao Xiang, Global 61

“Body Shopping”: An Indian Labor System in the Information Technology Industry (Princeton, 2007).

. The piece rate in 2008 ranged from US$1.60 per sari for light embroidery to US$20 for heavily embroidered 62

pieces.

. Chari, Fraternal Capital, 127.63

. Arild Ruud, Poetics of Village Politics: The Making of West Bengal’s Rural Communism (New Delhi, 2003).64

. Many teachers I spoke with privately expressed anger over the pressure to attend CPI(M) rallies when they 65

opposed the party, and supported the then-opposition Trinamool Congress. They felt unable to freely express their political views.

. Even among people who are beneficiaries of globalization-dependent industries, positions of ambivalence 66

emerge. Mazzarella, in his study of Indian advertising, highlights the ambivalence of executive informants regarding the “localization of MNC brands” that leads to a “double discourse.” He writes, “It reflected a profound ambivalence on the part of my executive informants, an ambivalence that was experienced as personal and aesthetic as much as it was felt to be professional and strategic.” See Mazzarella, Shoveling Smoke, 251.

. This is somewhere between US$15,000 and US$17,000.67

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. The term Marwari is often used indiscriminately for North Indian merchants in West Bengal. Originally migrants 68

from the Western Indian state of Rajasthan, Marwaris form an important business community in Kolkata. They are often seen as an “Other” and resented as rich outsiders by many Bengalis, in a problematic and exclusionary discourse.

. Damla Isik, “Personal and Global Economies: Male Carpet Manufacturers as Entrepreneurs in the Weaving 69

Neighborhoods of Konya, Turkey,” American Ethnologist 37 (2010): 55.

. Ibid., 53.70

. Embroiderers repeatedly used the English word “cheating” to refer to unfair practices within the industry. The 71

word “cheating” is widely used in Bengal to refer to unethical actions, such as cheating on exams, and also for the practice of adulterating foodstuffs and medications. Many English-language words take on popular meanings within the Bengali vernacular, a process Sudipta Kaviraj examines in his discussion of the term “public” in “Filth and the Public Sphere: Concepts and Practices about Space in Calcutta,” Public Culture 10 (1997): 97.

. Geert De Neve, “Weaving for IKEA in South India: Subcontracting, Labour Markets and Gender Relations in a 72

Global Value Chain,” in Globalizing India: Perspectives from Below, ed. Jackie Assayag and C.J. Fuller (London, 2005), 103.

. Ibid., 104.73

. Jan Breman, Footloose Labour: Working in India’s Informal Economy (Cambridge, 1996); De Neve, “Weaving 74

for IKEA.”

. Some of the “cultural changes” that Choudhury identified were the growth of consumer culture and the increasing 75

penetration of Hindi and Oriya cinema and music at the expense of Bengali media. He also identified a concomitant shift in youth behaviors, describing the growth of a “"premer psychology” (love psychology) where “young people here see all these [Bollywood] love stories, think why can’t I also do love, go around with someone. But this causes problems particularly for girls. Sometimes the cultures cannot mix.”

. The zari industry in Kulpi and in most of South 24 Parganas is unorganized, and there has been little or no union 76

activity within this industry in rural West Bengal. But the state of West Bengal, after thirty-four years of Left-Front rule, has a long history of militant labor movements within formal factories in urban areas. Familiar with labor organizing within the state, ostaagars are unequivocally against unionization within the industry

. Ranajit Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (Durham, NC, 1999), 167.77

. Haynes, Small Town Capitalism, 254.78

. There is a rich literature which critiques the view that class solidarity and ethnic ties are inherently inimical. 79

Parthasarathi notes that in the 1700s weavers’ powerful networks of caste-based solidarity allowed them strong bargaining positions against merchants and kings. See The Transition to a Colonial Economy, 31. Subho Basu argues that caste ties do not always impede the formation of class consciousness; that workers’ politics can be informed by ideas of customary rights; and that solidarity can be bolstered by natal ties. See “The Paradox of the Peasant-Worker: Re-Conceptualizing Workers’ Politics in Bengal 1890–1939,” Modern Asian Studies 42 (2008): 47–74.

. For example, a poor relation of Rabiul's had recently dropped out of school and moved to Bombay against his 80

parents’ wishes. He had “run off” to Bombay in order to learn high-end Zardosi embroidery work, and eventually become an ostaagar dealing in Zardosi embroidery.

. Sharad Chari also notes similar ideas of worker mobility and worker identification with small-capitalist bosses in 81

his study of Tiruppur.

. Basu and Basole, Relations of Production; Chari, Fraternal Capital; De Neve, “Weaving for IKEA.”82

. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume I (London, 1993), 603.83

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. Ibid., 601, 864.84

. Ibid., 597–98.85

. Ibid., 601.86

. Jan Breman and Parthiv Shah, Working in the Mill No More (Amsterdam, 2004).87

. Anand Giridharadas, “Indian to the Core, and an Oligarch,” New York Times, June 15, 2008.88

. Ibid.89

. Partha Chatterjee, “Democracy and Economic Transformation in India,” Economic and Political Weekly 43 90

(2008): 53–62.

I certainly do not seek to celebrate caste-based identity here, but rather to point out 91

that, historically, strong bargaining positions for workers in textile manufacturing were often based on caste and kinship solidarities, rather than non-ascriptive ones.

. Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence, 4.92

. Ibid., 261.93

. Ibid., 262.94

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