Table Of Content1–800–WORLDS
1–800–WORLDS
THE MAKING OF THE INDIAN CALL
CENTRE ECONOMY
M K
ATHANGI RISHNAMURTHY
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CONTENTS
List of Figures
Acknowledgements
1. A Call Centre Story
2. Trespassers Will Be Recruited
3. Nocturne
4. Eliza Doolittle
5. The Affective Corporation
6. Afterword
References
Index
About the Author
FIGURES
2.1 Recruitment and Publicity Van
2.2 Advertisements and Placement Promises
2.3 Training and Recruitment Consultancies
4.1 Learning to Speak
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
It takes a village. And in this case, many villages across many continents.
Emblematic of the concerns of this book, are the set of transnational
relationships, engagements, and friendships that have sustained its
possibility. As I pontificated upon time-space compression, globalization,
and work—those in my immediate vicinity reminded me about located-
ness, body, and everyday life. The life of this book is also my life across the
United States of America and India, and those that I owe gratitude to, run
the breadth of these nations, and then some.
At The University of Texas at Austin, where I conceptualized the
doctoral study that is at the heart of this book, I owe gratitude above all to
John Hartigan, who believed in the possibilities of this project and
generously steered it through uncertain waters with characteristic candor
and tremendously skillful care. I also thank James Brow, Kamala
Visweswaran, Katie Stewart, and Itty Abraham for their unstinting and ever
pertinent critique, provocation, and support. Never prodding me in any
official capacity, but always available with their vast intellect and generous
resources were Kaushik Ghosh, Kamran Ali, and Martha Selby who I thank
for their warmth and friendship. I would also like to thank Sharmila
Rudrappa, who, in suggesting that I focus on Pune as a particular site for
call centre work, helped provide the scaffolding for this book.
I am terribly fortunate in my fellow travellers who are now scattered
across the world but who have, at various times, generously given their
time, attention, and love and made available home and hearth as and when I
showed up. Among them, I thank Mubbashir Rizvi, Alia Hasan Khan, Azfar
Moin, Faiza Moin, Brenda Sendejo, Elizabeth LeFlore, Shaka McGlotten,
Nick Copeland, Diya Mehra, Reena Patel, Raja Swamy, Can Aciksoz,
Zeynep Korkman, Susy Chavez Herrera, Ken MacLeish, Maryam Kashani,
Halide Velioglu, Ruken Sengul, Siyar Ozsoy, Mohan Ambikapaiker, Keely
Wolf, and Nathan Tabor. I also thank Harmony Siganporia, Mridula Rani,
Peggy Brunache, Jahnavi Phalkey, Roland Wittje, Billy O’Leary, Adriana
Dingman, Alisa Perkins, Sharika Thiranagama, Vivian Newdick, Teresa
Velasquez, Amanda Morrison, Amporn Jirratikorn, Gardner Harris, Kora
Maldonado Goti, Christine Labuski, Heather Teague, Christine Karwoski,
Anand Taneja, Srinath Perur, Raghu Karnad, Vellachi Ramanathan, Gaurav
Mehta, Vidhya Sankarnarayan, Meghana Rao, Preethi Sanjeevi, Aniruddhan
Vasudevan, and Mark Westmoreland for friendship and presence.
This project was birthed in Pune, long before I had any inkling of an
academic future. In this city, I thank Stephen de Souza, Veena Yadav, Kunal
Khosla, Suzanne Fernandes, Senthil Kumaran, Shrikanth Aithala, Yashoda
Joshi, Nikhil Phadke, Jui Tawade, Khushru Irani, and Awanti Seth-
Rabenhoej for being inspirational, intellectual, material, and affective
companions. Special thanks to Gouri Dange for not only providing a roof
over my head when I first arrived on fieldwork but also generously donning
various hats—editor, mentor, and friend—through this process.
At The University of Wisconsin, Madison, I was fortunate to be housed
at The Institute for Research in the Humanities as well as the Department of
Anthropology, for the duration of an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral
Fellowship. I am particularly grateful to Ken George for being a generous,
kind, and inspiring mentor as also to my fellow world citizens, Lee
Friederich and John Nimis, for their engaged presence and vibrant intellect.
I also thank Kirin Narayan, Susan Friedman, Claire Wendland, Tejumola
Olaniyan, Aliko Songolo, Henry Drewal, Mary Rader, and Rob Nixon for
their interest, engagement, and support. My gratitude, also, to my dear
friends and housemates, Sonya Newenhouse, Christina Carlson, and Marta-
Laura Suska, for being exemplars of the good life worth living. And lastly,
life in Madison would have been terribly bleak without the homes and
company of Sana Aiyar and Daniel Ussishkin, themselves stellar
academics, but more importantly, friends-in-arms.
This project was made possible by funding from various grants,
including an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at The University
of Wisconsin, Madison; a Liberal Arts Graduate Research Fellowship, and a
Meyerson Research Grant from The University of Texas at Austin; travel
grants from the South Asia Institute at The University of Texas at Austin; a
National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Grant, and an American
Association of University Women International Dissertation Fellowship.
For their generous support, I am greatly thankful.
The support and vital interlocution provided by many, has nudged along
this manuscript at key moments. I am thankful to Rita Kothari, who invited
me to present an early version of the project’s understanding of language
usage at a conference on Hinglish in 2009, which was subsequently
published as part of an edited volume titled Chutnefying English: The
Cultural Politics of Hinglish;1 this paper has been revisited for Chapter 4,
‘Eliza Doolittle’. I am additionally fortunate to have had invitations to
present at various conferences and workshops, comments and questions
from which helped hone my concerns for this book: The South Asia
Institute at The University of Texas at Austin; Centre for South Asian
Studies at the University of Edinburgh; Annual Meetings of the American
Anthropological Association; The Association for Asian Studies and
International Convention for Asia Scholars Joint Conference; Third
Workshop of Young Scholars from the Global South at the Graduate
Institute of International Studies, Geneva; The Institute for Research in the
Humanities and The Center for South Asia Studies, both at the University
of Wisconsin-Madison; The CSL Colloquium at the Palo Alto Research
Center; The Urban Research and Policy Programme at The National
Institute of Advanced Studies, and The R&D Lecture Series at IIT Madras.
The writing of this manuscript came unstuck, as these things do, multiple
times, and was brought back on track by the brilliance of my cohorts at
various writing workshops and retreats. I am thankful for the writing
seminars offered by Kamala Visweswaran and Katie Stewart at The
University of Texas at Austin, and Dinty W. Moore and Maggie Messitt at
‘The Kenyon Review Workshop for Literary Non-Fiction’. I additionally
thank Wendy Singer for her generous invitation to be a part of the ‘Kenyon
Review Workshops’. Ara Wilson chaired and helmed a workshop and
offered comments on an early chapter draft at The University of Wisconsin-
Madison; I thank her for her generous endorsement of the book. I also thank
Jacob Copeman and Matthew Wolf-Meyer for their kind comments and
support. An invitation from the editors and curators at 3quarksdaily helped
mitigate some of my many writing blocks; I am thankful for the space they
provide and the work they invite. I also thank the two anonymous reviewers
at Oxford University Press, India, who offered productive and detailed
comments on the manuscript. I am also terribly thankful to the editorial
team at Oxford University Press, India, for their patience and support. And
