Living and Praying in the Code

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ETHICS OF SCALE: RELOCATING POLITICS AFTER LIBERATION

Living and Praying in the Code: The Flexibility and Discipline of Indian Information Technology Workers (ITers) in a Global Economy

Sareeta Amrute

University of Washington

Abstract

This paper uses Jean Comoroff ’s argument in Body of Power, Spirit of

Resistance to reflect on the changing nature of religious practice in the con-

temporary world. It draws on Comaroff ’s method, which situates “religion”

in a complex social, economic, and political field that is itself in the process

of unfolding. Using Hindu practices among Indian IT workers in the diaspo-

ra as a case in point, the paper suggests that the forms of techo-scientific

labor that IT workers are involved in demands certain types of religious

practice that discipline mind and body. At the same time, engaging in those

practices opens up challenges to dominant tropes around religious belief

and worker disposition, since it creates critical spaces for reflection in the

Anthropological Quarterly, Vol. 83, No. 3, pp. 519–550, ISSN 0003-549. © 2010 by the Institute for EthnographicResearch (IFER) a part of the George Washington University. All rights reserved.

Living and Praying in the Code: The Flexibility and Discipline of IndianInformation Technology Workers (ITers) in a Global Economy

520

gap between religious practices, technological work, and the ideologies of

transnational and national technological economies. [Keywords: India,

Germany, Hinduism, Information Technology, practice]

The rhythm of Jean Comaroff ’s Body of Power, Spirit of Resistance is

given by the and, the not only, the also; the book follows a mode of

inquiry that refuses binaries, instead seeking to examine cultural con-

junctions. The and marks the measure of the argument, allowing analyses

to build on one another, avoiding origins and endpoints, and instead

emphasizing how, in all social life, we take what is given us and re-form

it, we make “reconstructions of existing reconstructions” (1985:214).

Indeed, Body of Power offers us reconstruction in a double sense—it is

both what Tshidi practitioners do when they remake orthodox Christianity

within colonialism’s contours, and it is what Comaroff is doing when she

shapes the historical and ethnographic record to show how Zionism

comes over time now to reinforce, now to upend colonial domination.

Though mine is a study of Hindu religious worship among Indian

Information Technology workers employed abroad, I have found the

method of historical, ethnographic and political analysis that Comaroff

develops useful in making my arguments. It allows me to shift from think-

ing about the conjunction between “religion” and programming to focus

on religious practices and discourses as sites where diasporic and transna-

tional Indian IT work is embodied. I focus on how Hindu religious tradi-

tions become available to ongoing reconstruction, continually subject to

reinterpretation and new mobilizations within prevailing economic and

social forces as “Hindu” coders shift from one place to another.

In what follows, an historical argument shows how programming is

attached to the developmental discourses of the Indian nation and how

Hinduism is re-imagined as part of, rather than preceding, the identity of

the nation-state. These two sets of relations, one between national iden-

tity and science and technology, and the other between national and reli-

gious identity, form the nexus in which programmers remake and re-

imagine Hindu practices. Most of the programmers who work in IT both

in India and abroad are Hindu, upper caste, and upper class, a sociolog-

ical fact that can be traced to the prevalence of elite groups in India’s

Institutes of Technology (IITs) and on the whole, across the university sys-

tem, itself a legacy of postcolonial national policies that privileged tech-

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no-scientific advancement over redistribution of opportunities as the

motor which would allow India to “catch up” with the west (Deshpande

2004). At the same time, in the United States and in Europe, Indian IT

workers are sought-after because they can fill gaps in domestic labor

markets and provide just-in-time labor for industries organized around

project-based work. The labor of Indian IT workers is often understood

in relation to inherited Orientalist tropes around Hindus (Inden 1990) as

capable of abstraction and asceticism. From both the vector of their inte-

gration in global economies and their attachment to the Indian nation

through developmentalist discourses, IT workers find that Hindu prac-

tices become sites of embodiment for both discipline within and cri-

tiques of these discourses.

Comaroff does not begin her analysis with ‘religion’ as an object of

study but rather with religious practices. Her analysis begins with the

forms of mediation alive in the world of the Tshidi, the dynamics between

colonial power and subject, between First and Third worlds, between

oppression and resistance. The Churches of Zion, so argues Comaroff, are

best understood, and indeed become objects for analysis, because of the

crucial role they play in channeling and organizing forms of consciousness

that are resistant to hegemonies, particularly those constituted by indus-

trial capitalism in South Africa. The study of “religion” then, in Comaroff ’s

work is linked to reconstructions of the political-economic terrain. This

strand of thought in her writing is echoed in the title of the book—there

is no easy categorization possible for religious practice as either resistance

or domination. Resistance is formed out of the material trappings of

hegemony, and hegemony by necessity remains incomplete (Williams

1977). This processual approach to religion becomes more pronounced

over the course of the argument of Body of Power, as the earlier division

between structure and practice gives way to conjunctural histories that

produce long standing structures (254). Hindu practices among IT workers

can be approached in a way that highlights how prayer is linked to work,

national ideologies and the development of an ethics of migration. Within

the domain of Indian IT, workers often marshal the idea of appropriate

action and equilibrium to produce new conjunctures between right action

(dharma) and the conditions of labor in a global, high skilled economy.

In the years following the publication of Body of Power, the anthropo-

logical study of religion has been developed in ways that stress the com-

plicated interdependencies between secular and religious thought (Asad


522

2003); the co-development of European religious movements and colonial

governance (Viswanathan 1998); and, especially in the South Asian con-

text, the categorization of practices as distinct religions both by British

power and anti-colonial nationalist thought (Dirks 2001, van der Veer

2002). In the case of Hindu and Muslim worlds, the study of religion

through ethnography emerged as a particularly valuable tool in under-

standing the emergence of fundamentalisms and their complicated rela-

tionships to political formations (see especially Hanson 1999, Rajagopal

2001, Devji 2005, Mahmood 2008b). These latter works direct our atten-

tion to the way religious thought shapes and refigures national public

spheres through forms of mediation that express contradiction: contradic-

tion between gender role and universal ethics (Mahmood 2005), between

secular and religious statehood (Hansen 1999), and transnational and

national forms of authority (Devji 2005, Rajagopal 2001). Especially when

applied to diasporic religious practices, a term explained below, the study

of religious practice seems to take those practices as straightforward

extension of underlying conjunctions between politics and capital. It is no

doubt true that “the struggle of migrants is to reproduce their religious

culture in a foreign environment,” and that networks of right-wing reli-

gious groups may tap into those politics of belonging (van der Veer

2002:183). Yet, for the Indian IT workers I discuss below, this does not

exhaust or even occupy their main struggle around the politics of

Hinduism. They are occupied with another way of practice, one that aris-

es out of the nexus between Hindu practice and capital flow and in a dif-

ferent mode, offers up a critique of that very nexus.

In 2002, I traveled to Berlin, Germany to begin a project on the

European elaboration of the Indian Information Technology diaspora.

Meeting the protagonists of this story, whom I named Meenaxi Ravi,

Bipin, Rajeshwari and Mohan, along with many other ITers working as

software engineers on short-term visa contracts, caused me to wonder

how people inhabit categories that seem so fixed as to predetermine their

aspirations, ethical practices, and historical imaginaries. Over multiple

trips to Europe in the following years, I began to rethink the relationship

between technology and religion in the context of Indian computing.

I argue that the question of techno-scientific and religious practice

might best be thought of in terms of how they are being reconstituted in

relation to one another and in relationship to formations of value cre-

ation that we sometimes group under the term “globalization.” Just as

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Neeladri Bhattacharya reminds us to think through “the mutual articula-

tion of the religious and the political” (2008:65), so too does it seem nec-

essary to unpack mutual formation of the scientific and the religious with-

out collapsing one into the other. The terms by which these young

computer programmers collectively are named (Indian ITers, Indian IT

workers) in discussions about new technologies and the changing nature

of work is itself a token of this process, demarcating an uneven fit

between the shape of new kinds of economies and subjects and the per-

sons called on to work them. I take and reuse this lumpy name as a symp-

tom of a peculiar dynamism in the current moment, a moment when the

form that the relationship of Hinduism, new technologies, and economic

formations is in the process of congealing.

Chris Fuller and Haripriya Narasimhan described the transnational

spaces of labor that Indian IT workers occupy. What they described for

workers in Chennai applies to the conditions of work in Germany, with the

telling exception that instead of working five days, most Indian IT work-

ers I knew worked six, and worked between 50 and 60 hours a week

instead of the 40 to 50 described by Fuller and Narasimhan (2007:126):

Pressure to meet deadlines is also common and extra hours are then

expected, from men and women alike. Most work is done by teams

of software engineers, together with a few domain specialists, who

are supervised by project managers’ a team’s size can vary from a

handful to a hundred or so, and some team members may be work-

ing abroad on-site, while others stay in India. Almost all staff work in

modern, open-plan offices and team members, male and female,

work closely together. […] Very importantly, major IT firms are uni-

versally understood to be part of a global industry, not just an Indian

one […] on-site overseas project assignments, lasting several months

or even a year or two, are a normal part of working life.

Aneesh Aneesh furthers the argument about the “global” nature of work

in Indian IT by suggesting that outsourcing and onsite work need to be

considered part of the same mechanisms of creating mobility and flexibil-

ity in technology-driven companies (2006). While working abroad, Indian

IT workers, as those I interviewed often told me, become part of other cir-

cuits of Indian belonging, especially for those that are part of ongoing

conversations around the status of the Indian state, Hindu religious prac-


524

tices, and the nature of the privileges and costs of working abroad. This

makes Indian ITers “diasporic;”that is, they rely on the link between

Hinduism and work established through the discursive practices of IT. At

the same time, diasporic imaginaries can be marshaled to criticize this

link and part of state and capital based hegemonies.

To anticipate my later argument, I suggest that ITers, rather than adher-

ing to a strict definition of Hinduness or abandoning religion completely,

are involved in calibrating practices and beliefs in a manner that affords a

critique of the conditions of their labor. These acts of calibration are often

understood according to the idea of appropriateness. Ritual calibration for

practicing Hindus has long been thought of as both a form of intervention

into life and world and as a deontic imperative to produce symmetry

between a person and her surroundings (Eck 1996, Babb 1986). Doubtless

established connections between correct personhood and appropriate

action are at work here, but so too are supplementary practices of appro-

priateness informed by conditions of migration and work. Hinduism allows

a relationship to the work of programming that is twofold. On the one

hand, practices of prayer and meditation produce in the IT worker the kind

of concentration that their work requires; on the other, ritual practices can

transform the work that they do into the spiritual supports of family,

nation, and belonging. Here, Comaroff’s arguments about the relationship

between leisure, prayer, and work are particularly salient, as she shows how

the elaborations on dress and performance practiced by the Tshidi both pre-

pare them for industrialized work and function as a source of opposition to

that very co-option. Beyond showing how Hinduism helps tie terrains of

global capital and knowledge such as Information Technology together to

workers from South Asia and how it is used in everyday life to protect work-

ing subjects from being overrun by the demands of work and life abroad, I

also show towards the end of this essay how Hinduism and public life in an

Indian diaspora are being reformulated by subjects who are working and

living in between the demands and pleasures of high technology and of kin-

ship, nationality, and personal devotion. To make these interrelated argu-

ments, I first weave together the history of coding and computers in India

and the recent development of Hindu nationalism to demonstrate how,

while they have different origins, they are under particular historical cir-

cumstances made to be commensurable.

In the study of Hinduism, it is often difficult to identify what the stan-

dard religious practices could be in general, as Hindu practice varies

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widely by region, time period, class, and caste. In the case of Hindu

Indian IT workers, there is no identifiable sect or church that all who can

be classified as this type of worker belong to; it is more accurate to say

that they have a series of practices that have similar form and a series of

ritual events that mark public sites of belief (Novetzke 2008). What is

more, and among the group of ITers I observed, they all participate in

these events together, forming a shifting public helping shape belief. As

Comaroff points out, the task for the writer is to pay attention to the “dis-

tinctive confluence of local and global factors, how its iconic forms and

practical implications are to be understood in terms of a particular peo-

ple’s journey,” bearing in mind that, “while that journey might be similar

to expeditions elsewhere in the first and third worlds, neither the point of

departure nor the route taken are ever identical” (1985: 254). I examine

the emergence of physical and discursive spaces as site where religious

practice can be linked to work in ways that move beyond the overdeter-

mined tropes of Orientalism in the service of production. Modifying this

sentiment slightly, public shapings of Hindu practice mark them as events

pitched at once at different ethical scales (see Shipley, this volume).

Here, I consider how to account for peripheralization itself, and how to

account for a kind of globalism that incorporates into its workings the

very religious practices that, in her analysis, formed a backbone of resist-

ance to neocolonial market penetration. I ask not whether the practices

of Hindu Indian ITers are or are not a form of resistance, but what exact-

ly might they be making themselves resistant to? Rather than question

whether or not they occupy a space on the periphery, I ask, how can they

be both so needed and so marginal at the same time? Finally, this essay

takes on the prickly question of the role of religion in an age of technol-

ogy, arguing neither for its demise nor for its resurrection, but showing

how internet technology work—coding, programming, making informa-

tion flow—becomes interwoven with a reconstructed form of Hinduism

for Hindu IT workers from India.

Indian National Spaces and the Rise of IT

The rise of Hindu-only movements in India—often called Hindu national-

ist or BJP politics after the coalition of smaller parties that came to power

as the Bharatiya Janata Party in 1998, is roughly concurrent with the rise

of India’s computer industry.


526

The first computer scientists emerging from India were graduates of the

Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), a family of state-funded math and

science colleges created in the early 1950s. These institutes were part of a

larger plan for the newly independent nation in which scientific study and

educational advancement were supports for India’s economic, social, and

political stability. Over the course of the next three decades the focus in IIT

engineering classes began to shift away from mechanical and civil projects

and towards computing, in keeping with trends at other similar institutes

in the United States and Europe (Saxenian 2002, Heitzman 2004, Nilekani

2008). At the same time, and in response to Cold War politics that made

India reliant on US and Soviet expertise, Indian government scientists

began developing mainframe computers while IIT graduates were

employed in increasing numbers to develop software and applications for

computers used in military and business within India. During the decades

following Independence (1950s through the 1980s), Indian schools of high-

er education developed significant levels of expertise in software develop-

ment because of the government ban on importing small electronics (such

as refrigerators and computers), which led to a home-grown industry of

software applications designed to run on domestically produced machines.

When in the early 1990s India removed restrictions on imports for

small-scale electronics and loosened regulations governing foreign own-

ership of firms operating within the country, Indian computer scientists

were poised to enter the emergent international IT (information technol-

ogy) market in strength, and in two ways that would become increasing-

ly important as time went on—as software experts employable in the

burgeoning competitive zones of Silicon Valley and Route 128 (Boston),

and as members first of research and development teams and then of

service units for US firms located in Bangalore and Pune. Both of these

areas benefited from the kinds of skills that engineers within India had

developed within the protected environment provided by government

import substitution policies—programming and coding skills, as opposed

to hardware design for example, could be transferred and adapted to

meet the needs of multinational software and services firms (Patibandla,

Kapur, and Peterson 2000).

As Indian ITers made their way into chains of migration through the

United States and then increasingly England, Western Europe and

Australia, they became a second or even third wave—after the doctors,

engineers, and research scientists that preceded them—of Indian profes-

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sional, upper class and high caste immigrants. And, as trained computer

programmers formed pools of qualified labor in Indian cities, they became

a reliable source of coding and expertise in the “third world” that would

later develop into the global trade in computer-related services done on

contract basis called outsourcing (Aneesh 2006, Xiang 2007).

Over the same span of time, Hindutva, or Hinduness was emerging as a

cornerstone of popular politics. Voters began to mobilize around the imagi-

nary of a Hindu nation and Hindus as the rightful heirs to the economic

value of India, now under threat from internal or external Muslim “ene-

mies.” Reasons for the popularity of Hindutva were manifold, and includ-

ed among them increasing alienation of a middle and lower-middle class

Hindi speaking (and other vernaculars including Marathi and Gujarati)

population from the English reading upper class public, the ability of

Hindu nationalist groups to provide goods and services on a neighbor-

hood level for underprivileged classes, and the savvy use by the BJP and

other Hindutva parties of mass mediated technologies, especially televi-

sion (see Rajagopal 2001, Hansen 2001, Nandy 1998). What voters found

appealing in these parties was a new combination of social programs and

moral pronouncements emphasizing “ traditional” and exclusionary

Hindu moralities, themselves painstakingly constructed; coupled with an

aggressive pursuit of new forms of wealth, money and prosperity for the

parties’ loyal followers.

The rise of Indian IT and the rise of Hindutva can be read as local man-

ifestations of the janus-faced nature of neoliberal globalization—at the

same moment that middle class Hindu Indian subjects began to imagine

their futures as expanding because of increased access to world markets

and the flow of investment moving towards India through IT, the suspi-

cion, often correct, that these capital flows may be difficult to manage

and contain began to be displaced onto a population long considered

alien. In this context, Hinduism became both the vehicle to “protect”

India and one to help Indians solidify—through both practices and ide-

ologies equating Hinduism with particular sets of skills—their place in the

multinational world of (IT) labor.

This combination of spiritual fervor and economic gain characterizes

the emergent attitude of many religious institutions towards new eco-

nomic formations. It also goes a long way, in my opinion, in explaining

their intuitive appeal. If there is new money to be had, then that new

money seems more elusive than ever because it circulates more widely,


528

quickly and loosely than before. Divine means may, indeed, be the best

suited to “catch” these uncanny forms of materiality. Yet, as Indian pro-

grammers discovered, there is a different catch in marshalling religiously

derived characteristics in work abroad. The stories of ITers were peppered

with accounts of glass ceilings and culturo-religious assumptions, where

the personal ambition of a worker was constrained by the purported

inborn characteristics that accompanied “Hindu” programmers—what

Povinelli called being caught in a genealogical, community-bound grid

(Povinelli 2006). Conversations among IT workers discussed how to

respond to questions like “Why do Hindus worship monkeys?” or “What’s

the significance of the color red?” All agreed that providing convincing

answers to these questions shored up the authenticity and therefore the

“brand” of Indian programmers. Recognition of the limiting affects of a

homogeneous definition of Hinduism, as I discuss below, contributed to

the reworking of Hindu practice and rhetoric in the IT diaspora.

Over the course of the 1990s and into the new millennium, program-

mers also were swept up in new transnational migrations as they respond-

ed to temporary contract work and some long-term employment opportu-

nities in the technology industries of the United States, Europe, and

Australia. During the same period, the politics of religion in India brought

about the rise of the Hindu fundamentalist BJP party, which came into

power in 1998. For the underclasses, this meant party-sponsored access

to basic goods and services such as health care and sanitation (Hansen

2001). For the middle classes, it meant increased representation in nation-

al politics especially through languages and the symbolics of Hindu

mythology (Rajagopal 2001), and for that section of the middle classes

that was upwardly mobile, it meant opening the national market to multi-

national companies and making India modern in an age when modernity

was best expressed through, not against, culture. This last impulse, as will

become evident, was not due to an internal or eternal need to maintain

an Indian identity—although it was often voiced in those terms (Das

2002)—but rather was itself a condition of the newly globalizing market

because value on this market was and continues to be assigned according

to constructed notions of gender, race, age, and ethnicity. In all of this, as

many thoughtful commentators have written, Muslim Indians became the

remainder and the reason for India’s lack of success; they were blamed as

competitors for limited goods, as “backward” persons needing remedy,

and as internal threats to the nation with outside funding (Appadurai

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2006). All of this heated rhetoric led to the now infamous mass killings

and riots that preceded the fall of the BJP from power in 2004.

The BJP was ousted from power in the 2004 elections that ushered in

Manmohan Singh as prime minister after Sonia Gandhi stepped aside as

leader of the winning Congress Party. This result was widely seen as a sur-

prise and the reasons for the BJP loss are still being debated. The Congress

Party continued to be successful in the recent 2009 elections. These

changes in the Indian political scene all count towards the backdrop

against which Indian IT workers engage with the practices and discourses

of Hinduism. One of the legacies of the Hindutva movements for these

programmers is to undo the binary between secular, scientific and devel-

opment discourses and the discourses of religious right and duty. Of

course, this binary never really existed as starkly opposed in action, but

Hindu practices have moved squarely within the domain of public and

political culture. The next section turns to the relationship between

transnational IT migration and changing definitions of India.

Out-migration and New Definitions of India

As the domestic software economy grew, and as migration out of India

continued, India’s middle class began to shift, at first in aspiration and

imaginary, and then in terms of patterns of consumption and political

affiliation (Mazzarella 2003). The avenues of upward mobility along which

people inside and outside India traveled began to converge. Government

jobs, long the staple of middle class families within India, were replaced

with jobs in the private sector, most crucially, jobs in computing, IT, and

related services. As happened all over the developing world, the late

1980s and 1990s saw the very industries that nationalist, protectionist

economies nourished incorporated into loosely moored industrial forma-

tions that touched down in many parts of the world concurrently, the

most obvious examples of this phenomenon being perhaps the formation

of Export Processing Zones in China and the proliferation of maquillado-

ras in towns along the U.S.-Mexican border (see Ong 2006; Salzinger 2003).

In India, the move towards multi and transnational economic forma-

tions in the computer industry was triggered at first by IMF-induced fiscal

adjustments in 1991, devaluing the rupee and then quickly following the

opening of domestic markets to foreign goods (including computers) on

the one hand and foreign ownership of firms operating in Indian (such as


530

software companies) on the other (Saxenian 2004). Complicating the rela-

tionship between nation, technology, and economy still further was the

change traceable to the same decades in the definition of the Indian citi-

zenry. As the national economy began to spread outside the political

boundaries of India, the idea of belonging that bound a citizen to her

place began to shift, and the Indian citizen received its supplement

through the figure of the diasporic and the non-resident Indian.

Serious out-migration from India began with the shipment of inden-

tured servants as replacements for the emancipated slaves of the

Caribbean, South Africa and Indian Ocean islands from Calcutta, Bombay,

and Madras (Lal 1983, Tinker 1974). Closer to the current moment, the

first wave of Indian professionals and working class migrants entered the

United States and Britain in large numbers after the Second World War.

Yet the term diaspora as applied to South Asian populations is definitive-

ly of more recent provenance. It may be said of Indian IT professionals

that they were the first wave to migrate from India having the term “dias-

pora” firmly affixed to their passports, rather than, like those who came

before them, having to be retrospectively baptized with the term.

Diaspora, a “term of address” (Edwards 2006), has for South Asia a

simultaneous double-birth. It names both a complex poetics of post-

nationalist belonging and a claim of ownership by the Indian nation-state

on its ostensibly most productive members—IT and other professional

workers. And, just as this double-birth is both a mode of national hegemo-

ny and an escape from the container of the nation, so too its religious ref-

erent (Gilroy 1991). Sikhs and Tamils, two groups defined by ethnicity and

religion, were the first groups to be baptized diasporas according to the

principle of extra-national belonging, and their battles against the Indian

and Sri Lankan national regimes respectively were carried out from abroad

as well as from within these two countries (Axel 2001, Jeganathan and

Ismail 1995). Yet, the idea of a diasporic identity, in the sense of transcend-

ing a single national boundary, and opposed to national identity in its very

articulation, was quickly adapted to the needs of a developing nation in a

multinational economic environment. The Indian (or more broadly,

depending on context, South Asian) diaspora became then a bifurcated,

contradictory placeholder, at once the rallying cry for a post-national form

of belonging, and a descriptor binding out-migrants through moral com-

punction and an imaginary of continuity sans location to the national com-

munity of India (Ho 2006). Without going into detail about the contortions

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required to fold out-migrants into the Indian national imaginary, it is clear

that the formation we are talking about here is a product of a specific set

of historical circumstances, especially the redefinition of nation in an age

of multinational economies, accomplished in a powerful way through the

reconstruction of the diasporic Indian as a model citizen. For political par-

ties in India, including the BJP, Hinduism became in this schema an organ-

izing concept that, despite long-held religious prohibitions against leaving

Bharat (India), could be reconstructed as a basic identity transcending

place and time (Kelly and Kaplan 2007).

New-found forms of connectivity arising from Internet technologies

and other electronically mediated forms of communication enabled much

of this widespread national and transnational affiliation. These forms of

connectivity fueled the building of Hindu chauvinist political parties and

interest groups through creating online Hindutva publics and by channel-

ing funds into projects both in India and abroad (Matthew and Prasad

2000). The spread of these technologies also gave rise to the mobile

Indian worker (Aneesh 2006, Xiang 2007, Fuller and Narasimhan 2007).

The link between the two is not necessarily fixed a priori. Just as there

were many ways that Christianity was taken up by populations in the

South Africa described by Comaroff, there are multiple ways Hinduism is

taken up by diasporic members of Hindu communities. As will be dis-

cussed below, the practices of Hinduism that IT workers engage in is shot

through with recognitions of the way their labor is mobilized abroad and

at the same time tries to fold that labor into other kinds of projects, espe-

cially ones that can be critical of a Hinduism as used as a shield to mask

conditions of greed and exploitation. The creation of critical distance

through Hindu practice is not altogether capable of separation from the

conditions that feed a “Hindu” diaspora in its other forms. The very con-

struction of the ideal Indian and Hindu worker, while it may be a false

image and is sometimes recognized as such, is also the very condition

through which Indian citizens maintain, at least in part, their privileged

status as mobile, highly salaried Indian IT workers.

An Economy of Techno-Signs

In the years after 1947, a relationship was established between techno-

science and the nation-state in India that in many ways underwent a sim-

ilar construction to the relationship between religion and the Indian


532

nation state. Both religion and science became touchstones for refigur-

ing institutions of government as cleansed of the negative associations of

the colonial era. Techno-science and religion gained purchase as univer-

sal sources of ethics and morality by being oriented towards the demo-

cratic goals of an independent nation-state. As an episteme belonging

squarely to the European Enlightenment, science and technology was a

standard bearer of British, then Indian governmentality, as Gyan

Prakash’s seminal work has shown. In the post-independence, post-colo-

nial formation of science and technology, scientific methods were meant

to “purify” institutions of governance of their colonial taints (Prakash

1999, Gupta 1998). At issue was whether techno-science could exist free

of the structures of colonial science: could a more “scientific” mode of

governance be a more just one? This continued and ongoing ambivalence

in the inheritance of science and technology has, in Abraham’s terms,

made a ‘fetish’ of national sciences and their corresponding technologi-

cal, military, and now economic applications, both covering up and

revealing the underlying contradictions of state power. In post-independ-

ence India, governance was supported by continual interaction with

what had been relegated, at the level of ideology, to the pure, cultural

substrate of the nation, defined as religious tradition and as the undif-

ferentiated populace. This separation was marked deeply by caste and

class differences, and it fell to upper caste, educated elites to become

patrons of the nation and its people (Hansen 1999).

This suggests that science and religion in the first few decades after

Indian independence were part of a parallel construction of state power,

rather than being opposed to one another. Both served to remake a state

distanced from the politics of colonial control. Religion created spaces for

the expression of cultural nationalisms, while techno-science did so by

demonstrating how the state could be in the service of, rather than in the

business of oppressing, “ the people.” Science and national interest were

never fully separated in India but were linked through a discourse of eth-

ical purity, as was national interest and religion. Of course, both these

unstable constructions yielded results much different than their stated

intents. The exercise of demonstrations of technological and scientific

prowess, especially when linked to demonstrating the force of state

power, and of piety, especially in the illustration of individual charisma,

enabled and masked the oppression of marginalized and minority com-

munities (Abraham 1999, Gupta 1998).

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The celebrated history of 20th and 21st century “ Indian” computing

can be understood as part of this emerging circulation of economies, cul-

tural ideologies, and forms of postcolonial nationalism. Beginning in the

1950s, Indian military and government computing began to assemble sci-

entists to build mainframe computers, although at many turns, the com-

puting program relied on hardware from foreign companies such as IBM.

Investment in computing increased dramatically during Indira Gandhi’s

term as prime minister, in an effort to insulate military technologies

within India from the politics of the Cold War. Indeed, computing tech-

nologies took on a national, independent, and patriotic sheen especially

in relation to nuclear and other military technologies through the 1970s

and 1980s precisely because they were seen as a necessary tool in the

making of, for example, India’s atomic bomb (Abraham 1999). Through

the growth of an international market in software and business services,

computing emerged in the 1980s as an independent field of scientific

investigation with applications in commerce. Concomitantly, firms in

Silicon Valley and elsewhere began hiring Indian engineers in high num-

bers to fill their programming ranks, even while they began to move

their research and development operations to Indian cities, the most

important innovator being Texas Instruments in 1985 (Aneesh 2006,

Nilekani 2009, Patibanda 2000).

As business models began to shift towards multi-sited production, argu-

ments began to be restructured to fit the new working and selling environ-

ment, and Indian ITers began to be sold to increasingly worried audiences

as not only cheaper but more flexible, more docile, better at math, and in

generally, temperamentally, socially, and spiritually better suited to the

long, abstract work of building code. IT and India—a happy confluence of

inborn talent—and the need for it was how the argument enthusiastically

was pitched in the boardrooms of western conglomerates and in the cham-

bers of the Lok Sabha. The assertion of a chain of Hindu supremacy dating

back to Vedic times, especially in math, science, and medicine on the part

of Hindutva boosters mingled with the residue of sixties-era revivals of

India spirituality in Europe and the United States to create a strong bond

between the Indian ITer’s ability to code uncomplainingly and the “tradi-

tional” Hindu-Indian values of anti-materialism, overcoming obstacles and

asceticism. On the west coasts of the United States and India, in the halls

of government in Delhi and Washington, in the German headquarters of

SAP and other IT centers, hoary arguments about the otherworldly asceti-


534

cism of Hinduism were resuscitated and altered to fit the strictures of the

IT workplace, consigning Indian ITers to the back office and making inter-

national mobility a condition of employment.

The association of religious institutions with particular forms of affect

and interiority is not new. At the end of the 19th century, Max Weber

penned a treatise on the qualities of Hindu-Buddhist thought he believed

to be at heart inimical to the rise of capitalism. Otherworldy, ascetic and

caste-bound, the Eastern subject would not be the bearer of a spirit

directed towards the rational ordering of persons and things. At the end

of the 20th and beginning of the 21st century, those otherworldly quali-

ties quicken the fantasy of the perfect Information Technology worker. In

the dreams of many a business manager, the Indian software engineer

springs fully formed from an IIT or other Indian bastion of math and sci-

ence, his spirituality intact. He, although the IT worker may be increas-

ingly imagined as “she,” works for long hours in a perfect symbiosis

between human and machine, producing profitable abstractions and car-

ing little about paychecks. The ascetic spirituality of the programmer is

meant to fill the coffers of the West with the spoils of digital labor. And

importantly, unlike the truculent, unionized factory worker, the engi-

neer does not have to be forced to work hard for little pay. Because of

her nonmaterial, non-selfish and math-oriented spirituality, she is natu-

rally inclined to do so.

How are we to understand this particular reemergence of an old

abstraction? One way is to pronounce the Protestant ethic ailing and to

diagnose a Hindu-Buddhist-Muslim-Sikh-Taoist-Confucian Ethic as the new

heart of contemporary capitalism. This line has been taken up over the

past three decades with enthusiasm, until an economic crash coupled

with the feint of corruption and mismanagement seems to remind every-

body, if only temporarily, of the interconnectedness and unevenness of

things. It might then be a good time then to think in general about

realignments of religion and science happening in many parts of the

world, among them the United States and South Asia. As I have alluded to

above, the alignment of Hindu math and science with success in program-

ming does not animate capitalism per se, but a particular internationally

distributed division of labor within it. Islamic science, as much as it is

enunciated, does not do the same work because it marks the limits of tol-

eration and because it is not hooked into a particular diasporic subject of

science, like the high class, high caste Hindu programmer.

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Religious Practice among Overseas Hindu Coders

As mentioned at the outset, Indian ITers, unlike the Tshidi that Comaroff

studies, are neither an ethnic group nor of one religion, nor are they of a

particular sub-sect of one religion, like the church of Zion. While Body of

Power focuses on the church, I focus instead on how IT workers come to

form their own set of practices in response to conditions of working pro-

gramming jobs in diaspora. For Hindu Indian ITers, affiliation with a par-

ticular sect is not the mode of social change, but rather engaging with a

public discourse generated around Hinduism, calibrating personal prac-

tice to the demands of that public discourse, and using both to push for

reformations in the relationship between religion and rule are the means

through which Hinduism, nation, and technology jostle against each

other and become the fertile ground for making meaning of the fast-

paced economic, social, and political change.

The relationship that Indian IT workers develop to religious practice is

motivated by class interests. IT workers are often considered part of, if not

paradigmatic of, Indian middle class formations. This middle class, which is

not necessarily best described through income level or percentage of the

population (Deshpande 2004), may to a certain degree be described as aspi-

rational, that is, as sharing a certain relationship between the present and

the future that should be marked out by an increased standard of living and

access to consumer goods (Fernandes 2006). Yet, as Fuller and Narasimhan

point out, the material investments that aspiration takes depends very

much on where in the “new middle class” subjects are located. For IT work-

ers, those investments take the form of expenditures on education and

housing rather than in desire directed at tangible consumer goods (Fuller

and Narashiman 2007:135). Even more so does this attitude hold among IT

workers who are on short-term contracts overseas. Among the IT workers

whom I interviewed in Germany, there was considerable effort spent on

economizing and saving for the future. Estimates provided in interviews

suggest that about one third of yearly earnings was saved, with some por-

tion of that money being sent home or used to bring relatives to Germany

for short term stays, or financing the education of brothers or sisters,

cousins and in-laws. Biao Xiang (2007) found similar familial and corporate

earnings strategies at work in his study of Indian IT workers in Australia. He

connects these strategies to long-extant practices of dowry, arranged mar-

riage, and caste discrimination, which all collude to produce pressure on

overseas ITers to accumulate the capital and status associated with stays


536

abroad. Surely the global circuits of work involved in IT perpetuate and

even exacerbate existing modes of social and economic exclusions. At the

same time, the discussions around appropriate religious practice undertak-

en by IT workers abroad can be critical of some kinds of exclusion because

of the way those very chains of labor work themselves out in practice.

Religion and economy increasingly begin to map out the same space of

labor for IT workers. As I described above, the critique of state-driven eco-

nomic reason that religious practice provides in the context of postcolonial

India can also be marshaled to critique this very overlap between religious

practice and techno-economies.

Those among ITers who are Hindu share a particular disposition that,

like members of the church of Zion, both set them apart from and cause

them to collude with what they term “orthodoxy,” which in this context

means adherence to the Vedic rules and rituals of their parents’ genera-

tion. (Orthodoxy is not the same as the fundamentalism but can some-

times overlap. I make this point to suggest that the discussion on

Hinduism and technology has focused justly but too exclusively on

Hindutva.) The Indian ITers with whom I did fieldwork between 2002 and

2004 were all from Hindu upper caste families. Their families had middle

class professions, including government jobs, running agriculture opera-

tions, and bank work. They were young, all born in the late 1970s and

1980s. As a group, they practiced Hindu rituals on a daily and on a holi-

day basis. Although they did not live in India—the group I was working

with was stationed in Berlin, Germany—they arranged their apartments

in the manner of middle-class homes in large India cities. Each apartment

was shared by more people than is “standard” for houses in Western

Europe, either by married couples or by roommates of the same gender.

A typical flat would be divided into a front sitting room and a shared bed-

room. The bedroom would have a bed and wardrobe for each resident,

sometimes if the space was small, beds would be bunked on top of one

another. The front room would have chairs and other kinds of seating

arranged around the sides of the room, and in some cases a coffee table,

and in the corner a phone line or personal computer.

The flat as a scene of action in their story of Hinduism and informa-

tion technology is set against the background of the politics and racial

imaginaries of Western Europe and Germany, where the previous post-

war history of guest-worker (gastarbeiter) programs has left behind both

a large Turkish population (including both Turkish immigrants and their

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descendants, who because of German immigration law are eligible for

German citizenship by birth only if born after 2001), and a strong link

between race, migration, and types of labor (since most German guest-

workers were employed in construction). As I found out, this makes

Germany an especially good place to study the conjunction between

ideas and practices of Hinduism, racial identity, and the forms of labor

demanded in the practice of multinational IT, since in Germany the link

between culture and spirituality is an index of race-based characteristics,

and kinds of work is in some respects both more concrete and more

taken for granted in public discourse.

During fieldwork, I noticed that the sitting room is the focus of the

house when entertaining visitors and the social life of these Indian

ITers is to a great degree made up of visits to one another’s houses.

Many evenings, they and I would sit around the sitting room sipping

hot tea out of flimsy plastic cups, and the conversations would go

round, in what Dipesh Chakrabarty referred to in the Bengali contexts

as adda, “ the practice of getting friends together for long, informal and

unrigorous conversation” (2000:181). The sitting room, discussed in

more depth below, was a key mediating space between the Hinduism

practiced by these ITers and the other established and available reper-

toire of religious practices, especially orthodoxy and the practices of

governmental Hinduism. Chakrabarty is surely right in his argument for

adda as one answer to the conundrum of dwelling in modernity. But

the substance and sites of the modern and the home change from place

to place and time to time. The adda of the sitting room is one of those

places for the development of alternative religious practices that might

be overlooked if meaning, symbols, and spaces of religion are defined

in advance of investigation. As I will argue below, Hindu ITers recog-

nize Hindu essentialist rhetoric—as deployed both by Indian organs of

state and by overseas CEOs—as belonging squarely in modernity, that

is, as part of the clutch of factors that bind them to a certain mode of

being, which through their own practices of worship they both uphold

and try to upend.

The regularity of daily worship among these ITers is sporadic, some

pray at a home altar every day, some almost never. Yet they all congre-

gate at the largest apartment on special occasions, or to observe particu-

lar courses of prayer to achieve specific ends. The house deities are most

often kept in the kitchen, past the sitting room. In most apartments, a


538

Ganesh murti (figure/image) resided in the kitchen or on a table near the

bed. Most houses have a special area for the altar, often near the stove,

supporting one main deity and then murtis of other deities and saints. In

most apartments, the main deity is Ganesha, the elephant-headed god

widely considered a remover of obstacles. Prayers in the morning and the

evening are said to ask for success, to bless meals, and to remember rela-

tives and loved ones far away. In all these acts of daily piety, there is lit-

tle discernable difference between what goes on in the homes of young

Indian ITers and practices of Hindu worship among the middle classes I

have observed in India and the United States, including in my own fami-

ly. Yet, as ITers often pointed out to me, there is another layer to collec-

tive prayer among this group of young people who are not family but who,

nevertheless, engage in forms of fictive kinship through celebration and

prayer together—in other words, daily piety helps form them into a pro-

visional household. Their acts of daily piety are part of a leisure time

away from the stresses of the IT workplace. Leisure time as spent in prayer

is a complex affair. It is a mode of creating a place beyond the reach of

business and bringing the situation of being in diaspora back into the fold

of being within India. In this sense, daily prayer is a ritual that transforms

the value of everyday work into the currency of familial, national and cul-

tural value by creating another framework beyond the office in which

work can be understood.

The role of women, who are also programmers or workers in IT, is par-

ticularly important in creating a parallel system of values that articulates

with the world of coding. They were often the figures most intent on

maintaining worship on a daily basis, and were involved, with the assis-

tance of men, in preparing food, altars, and coordinating events for fes-

tival days. Here, women programmers take on a well-established role as

maintainers of a system of social reproduction that allows Indian ITers to

enter the workforce replenished and renewed (Dube 2001). It would be a

mistake however to simply say that women are consigned to double-duty

as wage earners in the global economy and as preservers of the patterns

of leisure and religious worship that help make Hindu IT workers. For

many women, taking an active role in religious discourse, debate and

practice in the diaspora is a way of reshaping gender roles and reforging

links between themselves, work and leisure time that is antithetical to

the practices of their mothers and grandmothers. This too is a recon-

struction, as asserting themselves social time and space outside of work

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makes them important, indeed indispensable figures in the life of adda,

being overseas yet connected to home and in the constitution of Hindu

Indian IT culture. At the same time however, it does indeed bind them to

particular forms of energy expenditure and effort in the world of cosmo-

politan India IT—a bind that can slip, if they are not vigilant, into the all-

encompassing role of being an overseas “mother” to Indian program-

mers (Gal and Kligman 2000, Parrenas 2001).

If work can be transformed through prayer into the stuff that holds up

the material base of family and of nation, prayer also can be a means of

maintaining the discipline and concentration of mind that work itself

requires. This is particularly true of morning prayers and meditation,

which ITers told me, in addition to being offerings and prayers to God,

also serve the purpose of concentrating and clearing the mind, preparing

it for the abstract work of coding.

The way ITers practice Hinduism is at odds with both the idea of

Hinduism that circulates in the offices of IT in western cities and with

practices that can be called secular and nationalist (Asad 2003, Taylor

2007), as well as with practices of fundamentalist Hinduism, although

they use and reconstruct elements from all of them. To put it briefly and

all too schematically, as technologists trained in nationalist institutes,

they have inherited the notions of science as development, and develop-

ment as progress towards a version of life as lived in the West. At the

same time, as sojourners in the current global economy, they are subject

to a simplified version of Hinduism and India, one that mistakes the way

ITers are asked to work for their internal disposition, and attributes to

Hindus such traits as an innate ability for long hours, analytical opera-

tions, and dislike of materialism. Finally, as part of a generation who

grew up when career aspirations were moving away from the government

sector and towards private enterprise, and middle class ideology was cor-

respondingly moving from state-based to newly liberal forms of national

development, they have been subject to a line of thought that is highly

critical of government. That critical stance has often been used by par-

ties of the right in India to make claims for Hindu national hegemony, a

move that has fostered an ideology that Hindus have a particular rela-

tionship to math and science. This is a position that ITers abroad, as dis-

cussed below, both rely on as a kind of cultural capital, and resist as part

of a continued critique of inappropriate uses of religious thought in state

power and capital formations.


540

Gurus and Adda as Ways of Reconstructing

a Hindu Public Sphere

The evidence of the way ITers try to reconstruct received practice in

Hinduism are twofold. The first is in the way they use the adda form of

discussion to express their differing practices, the act of discussion itself

being one of the most important means of expressing agency beyond

what their jobs and their allegiance to India requires of them. The second

is in the way that they use personal gurus to guide their religious life. In

the last section of this essay, I will discuss practices of personal devotion

and then return to adda to unpack how a public sphere of discussion

around religion becomes one of the main pillars of establishing alterna-

tive practices of Hinduism among ITers abroad.

The idea of a guru or personal teacher has much weight in contempo-

rary Hindu practice (see Narayan 1989). Gurus can have large or small fol-

lowings, they are often considered saints, they are sometimes cheats and

scoundrels, some live in poverty, many have become rich through the

donations of their followers, establishing vast compounds with fleets of

limousines. The opinion in India about gurus and related spiritual figures

such as sanyasins (world-renouncers) is mixed, with certain gurus the sub-

ject of suspicion due to the vast material resources they control and the

miracles they claim to have performed (Narayan 1989). Among the follow-

ers of any particular guru there exists the belief that the guru has, if not

the power to do miracles, at least vision, foresight, and a method that can

be taught to devotees as a means of bettering their own lives and attain-

ing mastery over the uncertainties of human existence (enlightenment).

This power and the beneficial aspects of it can be gained, according to a

guru’s followers, through being in the guru’s presence and then imple-

menting his suggestions in everyday life.

Sri Sri Ravi Shankar is just one example of the kind of guru popular

among the Indian ITers I met. Leader of the Art of Living Foundation,

Shankar has developed a method of meditation and breathing exercises that

he promotes as a way to bring peace and calm to even the most hectic life.

In fact, the Art of Living Foundation runs courses geared to the business

world and especially to those in the Internet economy, while the philan-

thropic arm of his foundation runs programs for prisoners and initiates

development projects to end violence in war zones (see www.artofliving.org).

For the ITers who follow his teachings, the main purpose of meditation and

breathing exercises is to give them the emotional and moral sustenance they

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need to carve out a space for themselves within the daily press of their jobs.

Following the teachings of Sri Sri Ravi Shankar is a way to establish space-

times during the day unsaturated with the economic logic of short-term

work contracts—a logic which allows the holder of such a contract to harbor

no illusions of advancement in the company that employs her. The global-

ized sphere of religious practice forms through mutual modes of dependen-

cies, as “gurus need followers abroad,” and in this particular kind of diaspo-

ra guru-shishya (teacher-student) relationships seem to be gaining in

popularity. As previously mentioned, the mediation that goes on before

work, and celebrating festivals on the weekends nevertheless makes ITers

more ready than ever to work long hours in front of computer screens doing

the repetitive duties that other programmers would rather not do.

In fact, although I cannot elaborate fully here, there is a great deal of

overlap between the logic of the code that ITers write during the weekday

and the religion that they practice outside of work. Both have an asymp-

totic aspect—both prayer and coding are potentially infinitely expand-

able, the supplicant or coder having a greater deal of control or precision

over the end product the closer she gets to infinity itself, defined as a per-

fect match between code and process on the one hand and transcenden-

tal wisdom (pragyaa, gyaanodhya) on the other. So, when ITers pray, they

are also transmuting the logic of coding onto the logic of prayer (and vice

versa), making for a world in which the horizons of their aspirations are

always just after the next big project and just beyond what is graspable by

human intellect.

Cutting across the increasingly tight interweaving of personal devotion

and time spent in front of a personal computer are practices that open up

a guru’s teachings to a wider set of morals and articulations. It is at the

intersection of practices of devotion and talk about devotion, emblemati-

cally represented by the threshold between kitchen and sitting room, where

practices that challenge the Hindu orthodoxy emerge. On Indian

Independence day, in August 2004, I observed one such conversation,

where the sitting room became the coffeehouse, and talk emerged that

made Indian ITers Hinduism into a kind of critique of Hindu orthodoxy,

marked for these programmers by strict adherence to Vedic texts and codes.

Over the course of the day, I had accompanied a group of 12 program-

mers as they celebrated independence, first at the Indian Embassy, and

then at a small Hindu temple in the city. After these two stops, the group

visited with one another in the sitting room of one of the programmers, a


542

woman named Meenaxi. In Meenaxi’s sitting room, after a pilgrimage of

sorts through the city, the talk turned to the nature of religion and the

validity of miracles. Charting a course through the city of Berlin that began

at its diplomatic core, at the site of power and prestige of an international

capital, they cut away from the center to immerse themselves in an immi-

grant neighborhood (Kreuzberg) where other, non-Indian, non high-tech

immigrants live, including the Sri Lankan Tamils who settled in Berlin in the

1980s as refugees from the Sri Lankan civil wars and established the Hindu

temple that the ITers visit. Finally, they moved towards their homes, once

again traversing the center of the city on their way, south to north, from one

immigrant neighborhood to another. As they shifted location, they traveled

through sites of displacement, places that they are and yet are not com-

pletely a part of, such as the Embassy, the commuter train, and the Sri

Lankan Hindu temple. The conversation they then have in their temporary

home can be read as a commentary on this state of movement and shift,

and an attempt to establish a way to define a public sphere of participation

for ITers both within and against the institutionalized spaces of inclusion

they have been visiting all day long. Rather than thinking of any one of

these spaces as representative of Indian ITers or of the moments of dis-

placement themselves as representative of a community in exile, I think of

the movement itself as marking out a subjectivity that is both privileged

and unprivileged, because unfixed it is wide-ranging and is working out a

way of relating spiritual practice to an idea of politics in an unceasing way.

The significance of this walk for the ITers is that in the course of the day,

many of the geographic sites important to their success as overseas pro-

grammers—the embassy, the temple, the urban commercial core of

Berlin—had been seen and experienced. The day’s events had given them

ample material for reflection on the political, historical, and cultural sur-

rounds that had helped produce the current conditions of their lives.

Sitting in a circle in her living room, in a moment of peace after the

long events of the day, the subject of Tirupati [the most wealthy temple

in India, in the state of Tamil Nadu] came up. I said I had never been

there, but had certainly heard of it. This was to be quite an amazing con-

versation, and I copied it down in my research notes as best as I could

remember at home. I reproduce the conversation here divided into three

blocks that address three separate themes. The blocks also adhere in a

general way to the flow of conversation as one theme tumbled over into

the next. The talk took place for the most part in English, with “side”

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translations going on at intervals to clarify points in Telugu or Tamil for

those who missed one of the points of argument said in English.

Speaker 1 (Mohan): After the Vatican, Tirupati has the most money of

all religious institutions.

Speaker 2 (Rajeshwari): There are no dress codes at Tirupati as at other

temples. This ruins the feeling of the place.

Speaker 3 (Praful): They haven’t gotten so far as to impose dress codes,

but despite this the place is still very auspicious and holy, you get a

good feeling there.

Speaker 4 (Bipin): It is the stone that sweats that makes it special. It is

amazing, but they could also do more to develop natural attractions in

the surrounding areas.

Speaker 2 (Rajeshwari): The stone sweats because of the great deal of

humidity there.

[here, various theories on why the stone sweats are proposed by the var-

ious speakers]

Speaker 1 (Mohan): But the scientific minds haven’t been able to solve

this, how should we be able to solve this now?

In this block of conversation, the speakers map out and index the

conundrums of practicing Hinduism in conjunction with being, as ITers

are, of scientific disposition. Under secular nationalist modes of thinking,

the place of belief, at least for English-educated upper and middle class-

es was decidedly of secondary importance, behind the more pressing

needs of water, increased agricultural needs, power, and weaponry. The

conversation opens with a set piece about the relationship between what

is often called tradition and modernity, and frames the contradiction as

between belief on the one hand and science on the other. The first speak-

er, Mohan, suggests a resolution to this conflict by stating that there is

something beyond science that science cannot explain. But as the remain-

ing conversation will show, this idea is not a satisfactory solution, in part

because of the demands being put on ITers by the conditions in which

they work. That is, a limit between science and belief that might corre-

spond to a boundary between public, official action and private faith can-

not stand. Instead, the link that is made equally in the halls of the IT

workplace and in the rhetoric of Hindutva demands that religion antedate

science and become its founding principle.


544

During the next segment of talk, Ravi, an engineer training at Potsdam

University, said, “ I don’t believe in God anyway.” This started a heated dis-

cussion between him and Meenaxi that was joined after a few minutes by

other members of the group. Ravi and Meenaxi emerge in the middle of

this extended conversation as the prime movers of debate; they act as

main debates, the rest of us as chorus, interveners, and listeners.

Meenaxi: Have you even before you were about to take an exam,

asked God to help you? Have you ever said, “please God, let me have

a good score?”

Ravi: No, I believe in myself, I rely on myself to do well.

Meenaxi: When you were in the hospital, after your operation, didn’t

you then ask for God?

Ravi: Yes, I did just then for a minute, but I only think of God, I only

am thinking of that when I think about very big things, like the cre-

ation of the universe. I don’t understand why people think of God only

when they want to get some good result. I don’t think that just

doing puja [prayer] will get you a good result.

Ravi: I do not understand how some people can do puja and then go

out and do bad things. I know what is good and bad, what is wrong and

right. For example, smoking is bad. People who smoke are bad. The

only responsibility is self-responsibility. For example, in Hindi movies,

before the movie starts, they always show a picture of God in order to

bless the film, regardless of the fact that the film contains violence and

all sorts of dirty things.

Speaker 4 (Bipin): But that God is for the success of the enterprise.

Ravi: But why should God make an enterprise successful that includes

bad things?

In this segment of talk, the question of belief quickly shades into the

problem of appropriateness. Here, Ravi references the long tradition in

Indian commerce and government to bookend any enterprise with a

benediction and a prayer. For Ravi, belief has become an involuntary

impulse, invoked for all manner of things whether large or small,

whether moral or immoral. He is wielding the sanctity of religious expe-

rience to point out the hypocrisy of his fellow-Indians. His words index

an increasingly explicit vein of critique of Hindu-fundamentalist politics,

in which Hindu religious sentiment is the norm even while scandal, cor-

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ruption, and immorality remain squarely on the political agenda. What

Ravi questions is the way that religion is a part of life even when, accord-

ing to him, it ought not to be.

This block of conversation brings to light how multilayered discourse on

science, religion and politics is—it reaches down into longstanding tradi-

tions of Hindu thought, it calls on Gandhian ideas of self-reliance (like the

notion that there is no responsibility but self-responsibility) and it most

importantly neither rejects nor wholly accepts the polar binary of science

and tradition. Rather, reading the conversation as symptomatic of a yet-to-

be-worked-out relationship between devotion and the demands of science,

the goal of meandering conversation is to get the balance right so as to

give ITers a degree of control of how their actions impact upon the world.

The conversation then turned to whether scientists believe in God.

Meenaxi: Even great scientists have come to believe. For example, Neil

Armstrong. He says he did not believe in God, but when he landed on

the moon he came to believe. I have the biography here, I can give it

to you [all] to read if you want.

Ravi: Neil Armstrong is not a great scientist.

Meenaxi: Yes, but he did not believe, and then he came to believe!

Even I did not believe until my sister got sick. Then my family started

praying and the doctors said she wouldn’t live very long, but now she’s

already lived eleven years with her illness.

Bipin: No comment. On that there can be no comment.

Me: Meenaxi, why do you care whether he believes or not?

Meenaxi: No, I don’t care, but…

Bipin: I’ll tell you why, because she doesn’t want to look foolish

because she does believe. That’s why she is arguing so hard.

The last segment of talk changes the character of what has come above,

as through my intervention in the discussion and Bipin’s answer, it is sug-

gested that it was for my benefit that the positions taken were elaborated

so energetically, and that I was a stand-in for an audience of western-

minded people (also indexed throughout by the use of English). Here, the

dilemma of an Indian IT worker’s belief is given full-form. They tarry in a

space between science and religion, recognizing the limits of both, and

trying to occupy a space what Comaroff following Turner called a “perma-

nent liminality,” characterized by an attempt to “heal the immediate


546

sense of estrangement, the loss of self-determination that [Indian ITers]

experience in their everyday world” (1985:231).

In the place of strict definitions of Hinduism or the abandonment of

Hindu practices in their entirety, ITers seem to have embarked on a poli-

cy of appropriateness, that is, the idea that there Hindu religious practice

needs to be carefully tuned away from either secular nationalist or Hindu

nationalist ideals and towards a mode of practice that enables ITers to

have agency over their own futures. Ironically, the idea of appropriate-

ness is a very old one in Hindu practice (see Daniel 1987), since much of

ritual action is designed to balance out congenital and environmental

defects. Here, this principle of ritual calibration is reconstructed, expand-

ing the very idea of ritual to use ritual as a means of distancing Hindu

practice away from both secular and religio-cultural ways of doing things.

Also, the very idea of the secular is being remade, or perhaps more accu-

rately, the secular is being bound every more tightly to one set of ideas

emanating from the “West” (including both the degradation of morality

and inadequacy in the face of actually existing phenomena in the world,

such as the health of the body) such that it is no longer available as an

unchallenged platform from which to speak.

The kind of estrangement that IT workers working outside of India

experience cannot be measured in the degree of their immiseration, for

they earn many times more than IT workers at home, nor can it be meas-

ured by a universal condition of exile from India, because they more than

other groups of Indian expatriates are courted by the Indian government

to think of themselves, especially in terms of remittances and invest-

ments, as still part of India. Their position results from the conditions

under which they work as well as the conditions placed on their moral

being as passes of entry back into the body of the Indian nation—in other

words, it is the historical situation in which they find themselves, which is

itself productive of what we call the global economy, that estranges them.

The conversation I reported on above has to be seen in this context. It

is a mode of finding out how to interweave the demands of the workplace

and the demands of home. At stake is not so much whether scientists

should or should not believe, but where, in what quantities and how they

should believe in order to take control of their own destinies. Thus, the

adda is indeed a long meandering form of conversation like the coffee-

house culture described by Habermas and others in their discussion of the

creation of a rational public sphere removed in its ideal form from the

547

SAREETA AMRUTE

influence of power (Habermas 1992, Warner 2002). But it is not secular.

Indeed, for Indian ITers who are required by the conditions of their move-

ment around the globe and the recent political history of India to take a

stand on religion, there can be no public discourse without a discourse on

religion. And this, if we were to look at places around the world, is no iso-

lated phenomenon. Everywhere we look, religion has a firm footing in

social life, but everywhere for very particular historical and situational

reasons. In this case, it seems the lasting legacy of the BJP, the one that

outlives its fall from power has been to put religion at the center of

debates on India, including and perhaps especially, on Indian science.

There have of course been other authors who have sought to sediment the

link between math and Indic spirituality before, but in the late 1990s, the

rhetoric of now Hindu skill met with the voracious appetites of a growing

world market fueled by computer technologies, creating a perfect storm

of political conditions in one changing place and a global climate which

sought to parcel out the world into easily defined areas of commerce,

taste, culture and ability. In the early part of the 21st century then, the

struggle has been to modulate these impulses, to find a mode of talking

about religion without giving over to religious talk entirely. This impulse

too finds its correlate in the market, since religious conflict and upscale

computing do not go hand in hand, and investors yet to outsource to India

often site religious strife and abrupt weather as their main reasons for not

doing so (SAP, personal communication).

But for ITers already sojourning abroad, the struggle is primarily one

around self-determination, and the sites in which that struggle takes

place range from the sitting room to the webpage to the Internet chat.

Equally as important, the means of achieving self-determination are not

through rejection of religion but through its careful modulation, a point

often missed in research on IT in India. For, to quote an informant from

a recent article on Bangalore (Kelty 2005), “karnatic music is calming,

heavy metal heats the blood.” According to this programmer, heavy metal

may be necessary for coding, but there is still karnatic [an Indian tradi-

tion of classical based on a twelve-tone scale], the one does not replace

the other. Rather, the two come to rest on the principle of equilibrium, a

principle that has long held a place in Indic thinking, but a reconstruction

partially meeting the demands of the IT workplace. Perhaps it is also

doing this in a way that uncovers paths heading in new directions, direc-

tions that may constitute Hindu religious worship as an act of resistance


548

to the too-easy conflation of Hinduism, hard science and capital, as well

as an act of mobilization reconstructing religious groups in the spaces

between congealed definitions, be they “Hindu,” “Muslim” or “secular.”

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Research for this paper was supported by the Social Science Research Council and theFulbright Foundation. I would like to thank Jesse Shipley, who kindly invited me tocontribute to this volume, Bent Hayes Edwards and Michael Warner for reviewing earlyversions of this paper, and the anonymous reviewers of Anthropology Quarterly, whohelped me refine my ideas through their careful and considered comments.

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