Living and Praying in the Code: The Flexibility and...

Living and Praying in the Code: The Flexibility and Disciplineof Indian Information Technology Workers (ITers) in a GlobalEconomy

Sareeta Amrute

Anthropological Quarterly, Volume 83, Number 3, Summer 2010,pp. 519-550 (Article)

Published by George Washington University Institute for Ethnographic Research

DOI: 10.1353/anq.2010.0002

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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 EconomySareeta AmruteUniversity of Washington

AbstractThis paper uses Jean Comoroff ’s argument in Body of Power, Spirit ofResistance 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 processof 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-scientificlabor that IT workers are involved in demands certain types of religiouspractice that discipline mind and body. At the same time, engaging in thosepractices opens up challenges to dominant tropes around religious beliefand 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.

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

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gap between religious practices, technological work, and the ideologies oftransnational and national technological economies. [Keywords: India,Germany, Hinduism, Information Technology, practice]

The rhythm of Jean Comaroff ’s Body of Power, Spirit of Resistance isgiven 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 analysesto build on one another, avoiding origins and endpoints, and insteademphasizing how, in all social life, we take what is given us and re-formit, we make “reconstructions of existing reconstructions” (1985:214).Indeed, Body of Power offers us reconstruction in a double sense—it isboth what Tshidi practitioners do when they remake orthodox Christianitywithin colonialism’s contours, and it is what Comaroff is doing when sheshapes the historical and ethnographic record to show how Zionismcomes 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 themethod of historical, ethnographic and political analysis that Comaroffdevelops useful in making my arguments. It allows me to shift from think-ing about the conjunction between “religion” and programming to focuson 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 toreinterpretation and new mobilizations within prevailing economic andsocial 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 howHinduism is re-imagined as part of, rather than preceding, the identity ofthe 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 bothin 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’sInstitutes 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 themotor which would allow India to “catch up” with the west (Deshpande2004). At the same time, in the United States and in Europe, Indian ITworkers are sought-after because they can fill gaps in domestic labormarkets and provide just-in-time labor for industries organized aroundproject-based work. The labor of Indian IT workers is often understoodin relation to inherited Orientalist tropes around Hindus (Inden 1990) ascapable of abstraction and asceticism. From both the vector of their inte-gration in global economies and their attachment to the Indian nationthrough 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 ofstudy but rather with religious practices. Her analysis begins with theforms of mediation alive in the world of the Tshidi, the dynamics betweencolonial power and subject, between First and Third worlds, betweenoppression and resistance. The Churches of Zion, so argues Comaroff, arebest understood, and indeed become objects for analysis, because of thecrucial role they play in channeling and organizing forms of consciousnessthat are resistant to hegemonies, particularly those constituted by indus-trial capitalism in South Africa. The study of “religion” then, in Comaroff ’swork is linked to reconstructions of the political-economic terrain. Thisstrand of thought in her writing is echoed in the title of the book—thereis no easy categorization possible for religious practice as either resistanceor domination. Resistance is formed out of the material trappings ofhegemony, and hegemony by necessity remains incomplete (Williams1977). This processual approach to religion becomes more pronouncedover the course of the argument of Body of Power, as the earlier divisionbetween structure and practice gives way to conjunctural histories thatproduce long standing structures (254). Hindu practices among IT workerscan be approached in a way that highlights how prayer is linked to work,national ideologies and the development of an ethics of migration. Withinthe domain of Indian IT, workers often marshal the idea of appropriateaction 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



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2003); the co-development of European religious movements and colonialgovernance (Viswanathan 1998); and, especially in the South Asian con-text, the categorization of practices as distinct religions both by Britishpower and anti-colonial nationalist thought (Dirks 2001, van der Veer2002). In the case of Hindu and Muslim worlds, the study of religionthrough 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, Rajagopal2001, Devji 2005, Mahmood 2008b). These latter works direct our atten-tion to the way religious thought shapes and refigures national publicspheres through forms of mediation that express contradiction: contradic-tion between gender role and universal ethics (Mahmood 2005), betweensecular and religious statehood (Hansen 1999), and transnational andnational forms of authority (Devji 2005, Rajagopal 2001). Especially whenapplied to diasporic religious practices, a term explained below, the studyof religious practice seems to take those practices as straightforwardextension of underlying conjunctions between politics and capital. It is nodoubt true that “the struggle of migrants is to reproduce their religiousculture in a foreign environment,” and that networks of right-wing reli-gious groups may tap into those politics of belonging (van der Veer2002:183). Yet, for the Indian IT workers I discuss below, this does notexhaust or even occupy their main struggle around the politics ofHinduism. 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 theEuropean 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 assoftware engineers on short-term visa contracts, caused me to wonderhow people inhabit categories that seem so fixed as to predetermine theiraspirations, ethical practices, and historical imaginaries. Over multipletrips to Europe in the following years, I began to rethink the relationshipbetween technology and religion in the context of Indian computing.

I argue that the question of techno-scientific and religious practicemight best be thought of in terms of how they are being reconstituted inrelation 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 youngcomputer programmers collectively are named (Indian ITers, Indian ITworkers) in discussions about new technologies and the changing natureof work is itself a token of this process, demarcating an uneven fitbetween 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 theform that the relationship of Hinduism, new technologies, and economicformations is in the process of congealing.

Chris Fuller and Haripriya Narasimhan described the transnationalspaces of labor that Indian IT workers occupy. What they described forworkers in Chennai applies to the conditions of work in Germany, with thetelling exception that instead of working five days, most Indian IT work-ers I knew worked six, and worked between 50 and 60 hours a weekinstead of the 40 to 50 described by Fuller and Narasimhan (2007:126):

Pressure to meet deadlines is also common and extra hours are thenexpected, from men and women alike. Most work is done by teamsof software engineers, together with a few domain specialists, whoare supervised by project managers’ a team’s size can vary from ahandful 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 inmodern, 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 Indianone […] on-site overseas project assignments, lasting several monthsor even a year or two, are a normal part of working life.

Aneesh Aneesh furthers the argument about the “global” nature of workin Indian IT by suggesting that outsourcing and onsite work need to beconsidered part of the same mechanisms of creating mobility and flexibil-ity in technology-driven companies (2006). While working abroad, IndianIT workers, as those I interviewed often told me, become part of other cir-cuits of Indian belonging, especially for those that are part of ongoingconversations around the status of the Indian state, Hindu religious prac-



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tices, and the nature of the privileges and costs of working abroad. Thismakes Indian ITers “diasporic;”that is, they rely on the link betweenHinduism and work established through the discursive practices of IT. Atthe same time, diasporic imaginaries can be marshaled to criticize thislink 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 acritique of the conditions of their labor. These acts of calibration are oftenunderstood according to the idea of appropriateness. Ritual calibration forpracticing Hindus has long been thought of as both a form of interventioninto life and world and as a deontic imperative to produce symmetrybetween a person and her surroundings (Eck 1996, Babb 1986). Doubtlessestablished connections between correct personhood and appropriateaction are at work here, but so too are supplementary practices of appro-priateness informed by conditions of migration and work. Hinduism allowsa relationship to the work of programming that is twofold. On the onehand, practices of prayer and meditation produce in the IT worker the kindof concentration that their work requires; on the other, ritual practices cantransform the work that they do into the spiritual supports of family,nation, and belonging. Here, Comaroff’s arguments about the relationshipbetween leisure, prayer, and work are particularly salient, as she shows howthe elaborations on dress and performance practiced by the Tshidi both pre-pare them for industrialized work and function as a source of opposition tothat very co-option. Beyond showing how Hinduism helps tie terrains ofglobal capital and knowledge such as Information Technology together toworkers 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, Ialso show towards the end of this essay how Hinduism and public life in anIndian diaspora are being reformulated by subjects who are working andliving 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 Indiaand 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 HinduIndian IT workers, there is no identifiable sect or church that all who canbe classified as this type of worker belong to; it is more accurate to saythat they have a series of practices that have similar form and a series ofritual events that mark public sites of belief (Novetzke 2008). What ismore, and among the group of ITers I observed, they all participate inthese events together, forming a shifting public helping shape belief. AsComaroff 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 andpractical implications are to be understood in terms of a particular peo-ple’s journey,” bearing in mind that, “while that journey might be similarto expeditions elsewhere in the first and third worlds, neither the point ofdeparture nor the route taken are ever identical” (1985: 254). I examinethe emergence of physical and discursive spaces as site where religiouspractice can be linked to work in ways that move beyond the overdeter-mined tropes of Orientalism in the service of production. Modifying thissentiment slightly, public shapings of Hindu practice mark them as eventspitched at once at different ethical scales (see Shipley, this volume).

Here, I consider how to account for peripheralization itself, and how toaccount for a kind of globalism that incorporates into its workings thevery religious practices that, in her analysis, formed a backbone of resist-ance to neocolonial market penetration. I ask not whether the practicesof Hindu Indian ITers are or are not a form of resistance, but what exact-ly might they be making themselves resistant to? Rather than questionwhether or not they occupy a space on the periphery, I ask, how can theybe both so needed and so marginal at the same time? Finally, this essaytakes 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 showinghow internet technology work—coding, programming, making informa-tion flow—becomes interwoven with a reconstructed form of Hinduismfor Hindu IT workers from India.

Indian National Spaces and the Rise of ITThe rise of Hindu-only movements in India—often called Hindu national-ist or BJP politics after the coalition of smaller parties that came to poweras the Bharatiya Janata Party in 1998, is roughly concurrent with the riseof India’s computer industry.



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The first computer scientists emerging from India were graduates of theIndian Institutes of Technology (IITs), a family of state-funded math andscience colleges created in the early 1950s. These institutes were part of alarger plan for the newly independent nation in which scientific study andeducational advancement were supports for India’s economic, social, andpolitical stability. Over the course of the next three decades the focus in IITengineering classes began to shift away from mechanical and civil projectsand towards computing, in keeping with trends at other similar institutesin the United States and Europe (Saxenian 2002, Heitzman 2004, Nilekani2008). At the same time, and in response to Cold War politics that madeIndia reliant on US and Soviet expertise, Indian government scientistsbegan developing mainframe computers while IIT graduates wereemployed in increasing numbers to develop software and applications forcomputers used in military and business within India. During the decadesfollowing 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 (suchas refrigerators and computers), which led to a home-grown industry ofsoftware applications designed to run on domestically produced machines.

When in the early 1990s India removed restrictions on imports forsmall-scale electronics and loosened regulations governing foreign own-ership of firms operating within the country, Indian computer scientistswere 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 theburgeoning competitive zones of Silicon Valley and Route 128 (Boston),and as members first of research and development teams and then ofservice units for US firms located in Bangalore and Pune. Both of theseareas benefited from the kinds of skills that engineers within India haddeveloped within the protected environment provided by governmentimport substitution policies—programming and coding skills, as opposedto hardware design for example, could be transferred and adapted tomeet the needs of multinational software and services firms (Patibandla,Kapur, and Peterson 2000).

As Indian ITers made their way into chains of migration through theUnited States and then increasingly England, Western Europe andAustralia, 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 computerprogrammers formed pools of qualified labor in Indian cities, they becamea reliable source of coding and expertise in the “third world” that wouldlater develop into the global trade in computer-related services done oncontract 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 economicvalue 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 classHindi speaking (and other vernaculars including Marathi and Gujarati)population from the English reading upper class public, the ability ofHindu nationalist groups to provide goods and services on a neighbor-hood level for underprivileged classes, and the savvy use by the BJP andother Hindutva parties of mass mediated technologies, especially televi-sion (see Rajagopal 2001, Hansen 2001, Nandy 1998). What voters foundappealing in these parties was a new combination of social programs andmoral pronouncements emphasizing “ traditional” and exclusionaryHindu moralities, themselves painstakingly constructed; coupled with anaggressive pursuit of new forms of wealth, money and prosperity for theparties’ 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 thesame moment that middle class Hindu Indian subjects began to imaginetheir futures as expanding because of increased access to world marketsand the flow of investment moving towards India through IT, the suspi-cion, often correct, that these capital flows may be difficult to manageand contain began to be displaced onto a population long consideredalien. 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 themultinational 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 explainingtheir intuitive appeal. If there is new money to be had, then that newmoney seems more elusive than ever because it circulates more widely,



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quickly and loosely than before. Divine means may, indeed, be the bestsuited to “catch” these uncanny forms of materiality. Yet, as Indian pro-grammers discovered, there is a different catch in marshalling religiouslyderived characteristics in work abroad. The stories of ITers were pepperedwith accounts of glass ceilings and culturo-religious assumptions, wherethe personal ambition of a worker was constrained by the purportedinborn characteristics that accompanied “Hindu” programmers—whatPovinelli called being caught in a genealogical, community-bound grid(Povinelli 2006). Conversations among IT workers discussed how torespond to questions like “Why do Hindus worship monkeys?” or “What’sthe significance of the color red?” All agreed that providing convincinganswers to these questions shored up the authenticity and therefore the“brand” of Indian programmers. Recognition of the limiting affects of ahomogeneous definition of Hinduism, as I discuss below, contributed tothe 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, andAustralia. During the same period, the politics of religion in India broughtabout the rise of the Hindu fundamentalist BJP party, which came intopower in 1998. For the underclasses, this meant party-sponsored accessto basic goods and services such as health care and sanitation (Hansen2001). For the middle classes, it meant increased representation in nation-al politics especially through languages and the symbolics of Hindumythology (Rajagopal 2001), and for that section of the middle classesthat was upwardly mobile, it meant opening the national market to multi-national companies and making India modern in an age when modernitywas best expressed through, not against, culture. This last impulse, as willbecome evident, was not due to an internal or eternal need to maintainan Indian identity—although it was often voiced in those terms (Das2002)—but rather was itself a condition of the newly globalizing marketbecause value on this market was and continues to be assigned accordingto constructed notions of gender, race, age, and ethnicity. In all of this, asmany thoughtful commentators have written, Muslim Indians became theremainder and the reason for India’s lack of success; they were blamed ascompetitors 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 killingsand 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 asleader 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 CongressParty continued to be successful in the recent 2009 elections. Thesechanges in the Indian political scene all count towards the backdropagainst which Indian IT workers engage with the practices and discoursesof Hinduism. One of the legacies of the Hindutva movements for theseprogrammers is to undo the binary between secular, scientific and devel-opment discourses and the discourses of religious right and duty. Ofcourse, this binary never really existed as starkly opposed in action, butHindu practices have moved squarely within the domain of public andpolitical culture. The next section turns to the relationship betweentransnational IT migration and changing definitions of India.

Out-migration and New Definitions of IndiaAs the domestic software economy grew, and as migration out of Indiacontinued, India’s middle class began to shift, at first in aspiration andimaginary, and then in terms of patterns of consumption and politicalaffiliation (Mazzarella 2003). The avenues of upward mobility along whichpeople inside and outside India traveled began to converge. Governmentjobs, long the staple of middle class families within India, were replacedwith jobs in the private sector, most crucially, jobs in computing, IT, andrelated services. As happened all over the developing world, the late1980s and 1990s saw the very industries that nationalist, protectionisteconomies nourished incorporated into loosely moored industrial forma-tions that touched down in many parts of the world concurrently, themost obvious examples of this phenomenon being perhaps the formationof 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 fiscaladjustments in 1991, devaluing the rupee and then quickly following theopening of domestic markets to foreign goods (including computers) onthe one hand and foreign ownership of firms operating in Indian (such as



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software companies) on the other (Saxenian 2004). Complicating the rela-tionship between nation, technology, and economy still further was thechange traceable to the same decades in the definition of the Indian citi-zenry. As the national economy began to spread outside the politicalboundaries of India, the idea of belonging that bound a citizen to herplace began to shift, and the Indian citizen received its supplementthrough 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 theCaribbean, South Africa and Indian Ocean islands from Calcutta, Bombay,and Madras (Lal 1983, Tinker 1974). Closer to the current moment, thefirst wave of Indian professionals and working class migrants entered theUnited 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 professionalsthat they were the first wave to migrate from India having the term “dias-pora” firmly affixed to their passports, rather than, like those who camebefore them, having to be retrospectively baptized with the term.

Diaspora, a “term of address” (Edwards 2006), has for South Asia asimultaneous double-birth. It names both a complex poetics of post-nationalist belonging and a claim of ownership by the Indian nation-stateon its ostensibly most productive members—IT and other professionalworkers. 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 andreligion, were the first groups to be baptized diasporas according to theprinciple of extra-national belonging, and their battles against the Indianand Sri Lankan national regimes respectively were carried out from abroadas well as from within these two countries (Axel 2001, Jeganathan andIsmail 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 veryarticulation, was quickly adapted to the needs of a developing nation in amultinational 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 formof 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 clearthat the formation we are talking about here is a product of a specific setof historical circumstances, especially the redefinition of nation in an ageof multinational economies, accomplished in a powerful way through thereconstruction 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 leavingBharat (India), could be reconstructed as a basic identity transcendingplace and time (Kelly and Kaplan 2007).

New-found forms of connectivity arising from Internet technologiesand other electronically mediated forms of communication enabled muchof this widespread national and transnational affiliation. These forms ofconnectivity fueled the building of Hindu chauvinist political parties andinterest groups through creating online Hindutva publics and by channel-ing funds into projects both in India and abroad (Matthew and Prasad2000). The spread of these technologies also gave rise to the mobileIndian worker (Aneesh 2006, Xiang 2007, Fuller and Narasimhan 2007).The link between the two is not necessarily fixed a priori. Just as therewere many ways that Christianity was taken up by populations in theSouth Africa described by Comaroff, there are multiple ways Hinduism istaken up by diasporic members of Hindu communities. As will be dis-cussed below, the practices of Hinduism that IT workers engage in is shotthrough with recognitions of the way their labor is mobilized abroad andat 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 maskconditions of greed and exploitation. The creation of critical distancethrough Hindu practice is not altogether capable of separation from theconditions 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 falseimage and is sometimes recognized as such, is also the very conditionthrough which Indian citizens maintain, at least in part, their privilegedstatus as mobile, highly salaried Indian IT workers.

An Economy of Techno-SignsIn 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



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nation state. Both religion and science became touchstones for refigur-ing institutions of government as cleansed of the negative associations ofthe 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 belongingsquarely to the European Enlightenment, science and technology was astandard bearer of British, then Indian governmentality, as GyanPrakash’s seminal work has shown. In the post-independence, post-colo-nial formation of science and technology, scientific methods were meantto “purify” institutions of governance of their colonial taints (Prakash1999, Gupta 1998). At issue was whether techno-science could exist freeof the structures of colonial science: could a more “scientific” mode ofgovernance be a more just one? This continued and ongoing ambivalencein 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 andrevealing the underlying contradictions of state power. In post-independ-ence India, governance was supported by continual interaction withwhat had been relegated, at the level of ideology, to the pure, culturalsubstrate of the nation, defined as religious tradition and as the undif-ferentiated populace. This separation was marked deeply by caste andclass differences, and it fell to upper caste, educated elites to becomepatrons of the nation and its people (Hansen 1999).

This suggests that science and religion in the first few decades afterIndian independence were part of a parallel construction of state power,rather than being opposed to one another. Both served to remake a statedistanced from the politics of colonial control. Religion created spaces forthe expression of cultural nationalisms, while techno-science did so bydemonstrating how the state could be in the service of, rather than in thebusiness of oppressing, “ the people.” Science and national interest werenever fully separated in India but were linked through a discourse of eth-ical purity, as was national interest and religion. Of course, both theseunstable constructions yielded results much different than their statedintents. The exercise of demonstrations of technological and scientificprowess, especially when linked to demonstrating the force of statepower, 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” computingcan be understood as part of this emerging circulation of economies, cul-tural ideologies, and forms of postcolonial nationalism. Beginning in the1950s, 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’sterm as prime minister, in an effort to insulate military technologieswithin India from the politics of the Cold War. Indeed, computing tech-nologies took on a national, independent, and patriotic sheen especiallyin relation to nuclear and other military technologies through the 1970sand 1980s precisely because they were seen as a necessary tool in themaking of, for example, India’s atomic bomb (Abraham 1999). Throughthe growth of an international market in software and business services,computing emerged in the 1980s as an independent field of scientificinvestigation with applications in commerce. Concomitantly, firms inSilicon Valley and elsewhere began hiring Indian engineers in high num-bers to fill their programming ranks, even while they began to movetheir research and development operations to Indian cities, the mostimportant 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 audiencesas not only cheaper but more flexible, more docile, better at math, and ingenerally, temperamentally, socially, and spiritually better suited to thelong, abstract work of building code. IT and India—a happy confluence ofinborn talent—and the need for it was how the argument enthusiasticallywas pitched in the boardrooms of western conglomerates and in the cham-bers of the Lok Sabha. The assertion of a chain of Hindu supremacy datingback to Vedic times, especially in math, science, and medicine on the partof Hindutva boosters mingled with the residue of sixties-era revivals ofIndia spirituality in Europe and the United States to create a strong bondbetween the Indian ITer’s ability to code uncomplainingly and the “tradi-tional” Hindu-Indian values of anti-materialism, overcoming obstacles andasceticism. On the west coasts of the United States and India, in the hallsof government in Delhi and Washington, in the German headquarters ofSAP and other IT centers, hoary arguments about the otherworldly asceti-



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cism of Hinduism were resuscitated and altered to fit the strictures of theIT 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 affectand interiority is not new. At the end of the 19th century, Max Weberpenned a treatise on the qualities of Hindu-Buddhist thought he believedto be at heart inimical to the rise of capitalism. Otherworldy, ascetic andcaste-bound, the Eastern subject would not be the bearer of a spiritdirected towards the rational ordering of persons and things. At the endof the 20th and beginning of the 21st century, those otherworldly quali-ties quicken the fantasy of the perfect Information Technology worker. Inthe dreams of many a business manager, the Indian software engineersprings 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 symbiosisbetween human and machine, producing profitable abstractions and car-ing little about paychecks. The ascetic spirituality of the programmer ismeant to fill the coffers of the West with the spoils of digital labor. Andimportantly, unlike the truculent, unionized factory worker, the engi-neer does not have to be forced to work hard for little pay. Because ofher 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 oldabstraction? One way is to pronounce the Protestant ethic ailing and todiagnose a Hindu-Buddhist-Muslim-Sikh-Taoist-Confucian Ethic as the newheart of contemporary capitalism. This line has been taken up over thepast three decades with enthusiasm, until an economic crash coupledwith the feint of corruption and mismanagement seems to remind every-body, if only temporarily, of the interconnectedness and unevenness ofthings. It might then be a good time then to think in general aboutrealignments of religion and science happening in many parts of theworld, among them the United States and South Asia. As I have alluded toabove, the alignment of Hindu math and science with success in program-ming does not animate capitalism per se, but a particular internationallydistributed division of labor within it. Islamic science, as much as it isenunciated, 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 ofscience, like the high class, high caste Hindu programmer.


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Religious Practice among Overseas Hindu CodersAs mentioned at the outset, Indian ITers, unlike the Tshidi that Comaroffstudies, are neither an ethnic group nor of one religion, nor are they of aparticular sub-sect of one religion, like the church of Zion. While Body ofPower focuses on the church, I focus instead on how IT workers come toform 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 apublic discourse generated around Hinduism, calibrating personal prac-tice to the demands of that public discourse, and using both to push forreformations in the relationship between religion and rule are the meansthrough which Hinduism, nation, and technology jostle against eachother 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 ismotivated by class interests. IT workers are often considered part of, if notparadigmatic of, Indian middle class formations. This middle class, which isnot necessarily best described through income level or percentage of thepopulation (Deshpande 2004), may to a certain degree be described as aspi-rational, that is, as sharing a certain relationship between the present andthe future that should be marked out by an increased standard of living andaccess to consumer goods (Fernandes 2006). Yet, as Fuller and Narasimhanpoint out, the material investments that aspiration takes depends verymuch on where in the “new middle class” subjects are located. For IT work-ers, those investments take the form of expenditures on education andhousing rather than in desire directed at tangible consumer goods (Fullerand Narashiman 2007:135). Even more so does this attitude hold among ITworkers who are on short-term contracts overseas. Among the IT workerswhom I interviewed in Germany, there was considerable effort spent oneconomizing and saving for the future. Estimates provided in interviewssuggest 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 Germanyfor short term stays, or financing the education of brothers or sisters,cousins and in-laws. Biao Xiang (2007) found similar familial and corporateearnings strategies at work in his study of Indian IT workers in Australia. Heconnects these strategies to long-extant practices of dowry, arranged mar-riage, and caste discrimination, which all collude to produce pressure onoverseas ITers to accumulate the capital and status associated with stays



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abroad. Surely the global circuits of work involved in IT perpetuate andeven exacerbate existing modes of social and economic exclusions. At thesame time, the discussions around appropriate religious practice undertak-en by IT workers abroad can be critical of some kinds of exclusion becauseof the way those very chains of labor work themselves out in practice.Religion and economy increasingly begin to map out the same space oflabor for IT workers. As I described above, the critique of state-driven eco-nomic reason that religious practice provides in the context of postcolonialIndia can also be marshaled to critique this very overlap between religiouspractice 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 causethem to collude with what they term “orthodoxy,” which in this contextmeans 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 onHinduism and technology has focused justly but too exclusively onHindutva.) The Indian ITers with whom I did fieldwork between 2002 and2004 were all from Hindu upper caste families. Their families had middleclass professions, including government jobs, running agriculture opera-tions, and bank work. They were young, all born in the late 1970s and1980s. 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 workingwith was stationed in Berlin, Germany—they arranged their apartmentsin the manner of middle-class homes in large India cities. Each apartmentwas shared by more people than is “standard” for houses in WesternEurope, 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 oneanother. The front room would have chairs and other kinds of seatingarranged 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 racialimaginaries of Western Europe and Germany, where the previous post-war history of guest-worker (gastarbeiter) programs has left behind botha large Turkish population (including both Turkish immigrants and their


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descendants, who because of German immigration law are eligible forGerman citizenship by birth only if born after 2001), and a strong linkbetween race, migration, and types of labor (since most German guest-workers were employed in construction). As I found out, this makesGermany an especially good place to study the conjunction betweenideas and practices of Hinduism, racial identity, and the forms of labordemanded in the practice of multinational IT, since in Germany the linkbetween culture and spirituality is an index of race-based characteristics,and kinds of work is in some respects both more concrete and moretaken for granted in public discourse.

During fieldwork, I noticed that the sitting room is the focus of thehouse when entertaining visitors and the social life of these IndianITers 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 sippinghot tea out of flimsy plastic cups, and the conversations would goround, in what Dipesh Chakrabarty referred to in the Bengali contextsas adda, “ the practice of getting friends together for long, informal andunrigorous conversation” (2000:181). The sitting room, discussed inmore depth below, was a key mediating space between the Hinduismpracticed by these ITers and the other established and available reper-toire of religious practices, especially orthodoxy and the practices ofgovernmental Hinduism. Chakrabarty is surely right in his argument foradda as one answer to the conundrum of dwelling in modernity. Butthe substance and sites of the modern and the home change from placeto place and time to time. The adda of the sitting room is one of thoseplaces for the development of alternative religious practices that mightbe overlooked if meaning, symbols, and spaces of religion are definedin advance of investigation. As I will argue below, Hindu ITers recog-nize Hindu essentialist rhetoric—as deployed both by Indian organs ofstate and by overseas CEOs—as belonging squarely in modernity, thatis, as part of the clutch of factors that bind them to a certain mode ofbeing, which through their own practices of worship they both upholdand try to upend.

The regularity of daily worship among these ITers is sporadic, somepray 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 mostoften kept in the kitchen, past the sitting room. In most apartments, a



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Ganesh murti (figure/image) resided in the kitchen or on a table near thebed. 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. Inmost apartments, the main deity is Ganesha, the elephant-headed godwidely considered a remover of obstacles. Prayers in the morning and theevening 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 youngIndian ITers and practices of Hindu worship among the middle classes Ihave 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 andprayer together—in other words, daily piety helps form them into a pro-visional household. Their acts of daily piety are part of a leisure timeaway from the stresses of the IT workplace. Leisure time as spent in prayeris a complex affair. It is a mode of creating a place beyond the reach ofbusiness and bringing the situation of being in diaspora back into the foldof being within India. In this sense, daily prayer is a ritual that transformsthe value of everyday work into the currency of familial, national and cul-tural value by creating another framework beyond the office in whichwork 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 articulateswith the world of coding. They were often the figures most intent onmaintaining 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 asmaintainers of a system of social reproduction that allows Indian ITers toenter the workforce replenished and renewed (Dube 2001). It would be amistake however to simply say that women are consigned to double-dutyas wage earners in the global economy and as preservers of the patternsof leisure and religious worship that help make Hindu IT workers. Formany women, taking an active role in religious discourse, debate andpractice in the diaspora is a way of reshaping gender roles and reforginglinks between themselves, work and leisure time that is antithetical tothe 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 HinduIndian IT culture. At the same time however, it does indeed bind them toparticular 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 upthe material base of family and of nation, prayer also can be a means ofmaintaining the discipline and concentration of mind that work itselfrequires. 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, preparingit for the abstract work of coding.

The way ITers practice Hinduism is at odds with both the idea ofHinduism that circulates in the offices of IT in western cities and withpractices that can be called secular and nationalist (Asad 2003, Taylor2007), as well as with practices of fundamentalist Hinduism, althoughthey use and reconstruct elements from all of them. To put it briefly andall 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 thesame time, as sojourners in the current global economy, they are subjectto a simplified version of Hinduism and India, one that mistakes the wayITers are asked to work for their internal disposition, and attributes toHindus such traits as an innate ability for long hours, analytical opera-tions, and dislike of materialism. Finally, as part of a generation whogrew up when career aspirations were moving away from the governmentsector and towards private enterprise, and middle class ideology was cor-respondingly moving from state-based to newly liberal forms of nationaldevelopment, they have been subject to a line of thought that is highlycritical of government. That critical stance has often been used by par-ties of the right in India to make claims for Hindu national hegemony, amove 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 partof a continued critique of inappropriate uses of religious thought in statepower and capital formations.



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Gurus and Adda as Ways of Reconstructing a Hindu Public SphereThe evidence of the way ITers try to reconstruct received practice inHinduism are twofold. The first is in the way they use the adda form ofdiscussion to express their differing practices, the act of discussion itselfbeing one of the most important means of expressing agency beyondwhat their jobs and their allegiance to India requires of them. The secondis in the way that they use personal gurus to guide their religious life. Inthe last section of this essay, I will discuss practices of personal devotionand then return to adda to unpack how a public sphere of discussionaround 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 andscoundrels, some live in poverty, many have become rich through thedonations of their followers, establishing vast compounds with fleets oflimousines. The opinion in India about gurus and related spiritual figuressuch as sanyasins (world-renouncers) is mixed, with certain gurus the sub-ject of suspicion due to the vast material resources they control and themiracles they claim to have performed (Narayan 1989). Among the follow-ers of any particular guru there exists the belief that the guru has, if notthe power to do miracles, at least vision, foresight, and a method that canbe 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 aguru’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 popularamong the Indian ITers I met. Leader of the Art of Living Foundation,Shankar has developed a method of meditation and breathing exercises thathe 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 businessworld and especially to those in the Internet economy, while the philan-thropic arm of his foundation runs programs for prisoners and initiatesdevelopment projects to end violence in war zones (see www.artofliving.org).For the ITers who follow his teachings, the main purpose of meditation andbreathing 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-termwork contracts—a logic which allows the holder of such a contract to harborno 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 inpopularity. As previously mentioned, the mediation that goes on beforework, and celebrating festivals on the weekends nevertheless makes ITersmore ready than ever to work long hours in front of computer screens doingthe repetitive duties that other programmers would rather not do.

In fact, although I cannot elaborate fully here, there is a great deal ofoverlap between the logic of the code that ITers write during the weekdayand 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 precisionover 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, theyare also transmuting the logic of coding onto the logic of prayer (and viceversa), making for a world in which the horizons of their aspirations arealways just after the next big project and just beyond what is graspable byhuman intellect.

Cutting across the increasingly tight interweaving of personal devotionand time spent in front of a personal computer are practices that open upa guru’s teachings to a wider set of morals and articulations. It is at theintersection of practices of devotion and talk about devotion, emblemati-cally represented by the threshold between kitchen and sitting room, wherepractices that challenge the Hindu orthodoxy emerge. On IndianIndependence day, in August 2004, I observed one such conversation,where the sitting room became the coffeehouse, and talk emerged thatmade 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, andthen at a small Hindu temple in the city. After these two stops, the groupvisited with one another in the sitting room of one of the programmers, a



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woman named Meenaxi. In Meenaxi’s sitting room, after a pilgrimage ofsorts through the city, the talk turned to the nature of religion and thevalidity of miracles. Charting a course through the city of Berlin that beganat its diplomatic core, at the site of power and prestige of an internationalcapital, they cut away from the center to immerse themselves in an immi-grant neighborhood (Kreuzberg) where other, non-Indian, non high-techimmigrants live, including the Sri Lankan Tamils who settled in Berlin in the1980s as refugees from the Sri Lankan civil wars and established the Hindutemple that the ITers visit. Finally, they moved towards their homes, onceagain traversing the center of the city on their way, south to north, from oneimmigrant neighborhood to another. As they shifted location, they traveledthrough 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 SriLankan Hindu temple. The conversation they then have in their temporaryhome 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 participationfor ITers both within and against the institutionalized spaces of inclusionthey have been visiting all day long. Rather than thinking of any one ofthese spaces as representative of Indian ITers or of the moments of dis-placement themselves as representative of a community in exile, I think ofthe movement itself as marking out a subjectivity that is both privilegedand unprivileged, because unfixed it is wide-ranging and is working out away 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 ofBerlin—had been seen and experienced. The day’s events had given themample 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 thelong events of the day, the subject of Tirupati [the most wealthy templein India, in the state of Tamil Nadu] came up. I said I had never beenthere, 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 couldremember at home. I reproduce the conversation here divided into threeblocks that address three separate themes. The blocks also adhere in ageneral way to the flow of conversation as one theme tumbled over intothe 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 forthose who missed one of the points of argument said in English.

Speaker 1 (Mohan): After the Vatican, Tirupati has the most money ofall religious institutions.Speaker 2 (Rajeshwari): There are no dress codes at Tirupati as at othertemples. 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 agood feeling there.Speaker 4 (Bipin): It is the stone that sweats that makes it special. It isamazing, but they could also do more to develop natural attractions inthe surrounding areas.Speaker 2 (Rajeshwari): The stone sweats because of the great deal ofhumidity 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 solvethis, how should we be able to solve this now?

In this block of conversation, the speakers map out and index theconundrums of practicing Hinduism in conjunction with being, as ITersare, 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 pressingneeds of water, increased agricultural needs, power, and weaponry. Theconversation opens with a set piece about the relationship between whatis often called tradition and modernity, and frames the contradiction asbetween 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 issomething beyond science that science cannot explain. But as the remain-ing conversation will show, this idea is not a satisfactory solution, in partbecause of the demands being put on ITers by the conditions in whichthey 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 ITworkplace and in the rhetoric of Hindutva demands that religion antedatescience and become its founding principle.



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During the next segment of talk, Ravi, an engineer training at PotsdamUniversity, 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 byother members of the group. Ravi and Meenaxi emerge in the middle ofthis extended conversation as the prime movers of debate; they act asmain 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 havea 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’tyou then ask for God?Ravi: Yes, I did just then for a minute, but I only think of God, I onlyam 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 onlywhen they want to get some good result. I don’t think that justdoing puja [prayer] will get you a good result.Ravi: I do not understand how some people can do puja and then goout and do bad things. I know what is good and bad, what is wrong andright. For example, smoking is bad. People who smoke are bad. Theonly responsibility is self-responsibility. For example, in Hindi movies,before the movie starts, they always show a picture of God in order tobless the film, regardless of the fact that the film contains violence andall 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 includesbad things?

In this segment of talk, the question of belief quickly shades into theproblem of appropriateness. Here, Ravi references the long tradition inIndian commerce and government to bookend any enterprise with abenediction and a prayer. For Ravi, belief has become an involuntaryimpulse, 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 indexan 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. WhatRavi 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 onscience, religion and politics is—it reaches down into longstanding tradi-tions of Hindu thought, it calls on Gandhian ideas of self-reliance (like thenotion that there is no responsibility but self-responsibility) and it mostimportantly neither rejects nor wholly accepts the polar binary of scienceand 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 togive 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, NeilArmstrong. He says he did not believe in God, but when he landed onthe moon he came to believe. I have the biography here, I can give itto 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 startedpraying and the doctors said she wouldn’t live very long, but now she’salready 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 foolishbecause 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 elaboratedso energetically, and that I was a stand-in for an audience of western-minded people (also indexed throughout by the use of English). Here, thedilemma of an Indian IT worker’s belief is given full-form. They tarry in aspace between science and religion, recognizing the limits of both, andtrying to occupy a space what Comaroff following Turner called a “perma-nent liminality,” characterized by an attempt to “heal the immediate



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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 ofHindu practices in their entirety, ITers seem to have embarked on a poli-cy of appropriateness, that is, the idea that there Hindu religious practiceneeds to be carefully tuned away from either secular nationalist or Hindunationalist ideals and towards a mode of practice that enables ITers tohave agency over their own futures. Ironically, the idea of appropriate-ness is a very old one in Hindu practice (see Daniel 1987), since much ofritual action is designed to balance out congenital and environmentaldefects. Here, this principle of ritual calibration is reconstructed, expand-ing the very idea of ritual to use ritual as a means of distancing Hindupractice 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 ideasemanating from the “West” (including both the degradation of moralityand 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 anunchallenged platform from which to speak.

The kind of estrangement that IT workers working outside of Indiaexperience cannot be measured in the degree of their immiseration, forthey 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 thanother groups of Indian expatriates are courted by the Indian governmentto think of themselves, especially in terms of remittances and invest-ments, as still part of India. Their position results from the conditionsunder which they work as well as the conditions placed on their moralbeing as passes of entry back into the body of the Indian nation—in otherwords, it is the historical situation in which they find themselves, which isitself productive of what we call the global economy, that estranges them.

The conversation I reported on above has to be seen in this context. Itis a mode of finding out how to interweave the demands of the workplaceand the demands of home. At stake is not so much whether scientistsshould or should not believe, but where, in what quantities and how theyshould believe in order to take control of their own destinies. Thus, theadda is indeed a long meandering form of conversation like the coffee-house culture described by Habermas and others in their discussion of thecreation of a rational public sphere removed in its ideal form from the


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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 astand on religion, there can be no public discourse without a discourse onreligion. 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 insocial life, but everywhere for very particular historical and situationalreasons. In this case, it seems the lasting legacy of the BJP, the one thatoutlives its fall from power has been to put religion at the center ofdebates on India, including and perhaps especially, on Indian science.There have of course been other authors who have sought to sediment thelink between math and Indic spirituality before, but in the late 1990s, therhetoric of now Hindu skill met with the voracious appetites of a growingworld market fueled by computer technologies, creating a perfect stormof political conditions in one changing place and a global climate whichsought to parcel out the world into easily defined areas of commerce,taste, culture and ability. In the early part of the 21st century then, thestruggle has been to modulate these impulses, to find a mode of talkingabout religion without giving over to religious talk entirely. This impulsetoo finds its correlate in the market, since religious conflict and upscalecomputing do not go hand in hand, and investors yet to outsource to Indiaoften site religious strife and abrupt weather as their main reasons for notdoing so (SAP, personal communication).

But for ITers already sojourning abroad, the struggle is primarily onearound self-determination, and the sites in which that struggle takesplace range from the sitting room to the webpage to the Internet chat.Equally as important, the means of achieving self-determination are notthrough rejection of religion but through its careful modulation, a pointoften missed in research on IT in India. For, to quote an informant froma recent article on Bangalore (Kelty 2005), “karnatic music is calming,heavy metal heats the blood.” According to this programmer, heavy metalmay 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 replacethe other. Rather, the two come to rest on the principle of equilibrium, aprinciple that has long held a place in Indic thinking, but a reconstructionpartially meeting the demands of the IT workplace. Perhaps it is alsodoing this in a way that uncovers paths heading in new directions, direc-tions that may constitute Hindu religious worship as an act of resistance



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to the too-easy conflation of Hinduism, hard science and capital, as wellas an act of mobilization reconstructing religious groups in the spacesbetween 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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