The Tech Entrepreneurs of Bangalore: Untold Histories of Low-Tech and Caste in a Rising Tech City, 1970s-2000s

• In Event: Technocapitalism, Anticommunism, and Technofascism in Late-Stage US Empire and Beyond

Abstract

The largely upper-caste tech entrepreneurs of Bangalore, a city today known as the Silicon Valley of India, have emerged as key allies of Narendra Modi’s highly publicized “Digital India” campaign—a moniker which signifies the rise of a ‘new India.’ Biometrics, the digitization of bureaucracy, and other innovations of the booming high-tech IT industry are positioned by pundits as of this techno-capitalist utopic vision as the tools to solve social problems and corruption of the ‘old India.’. The ‘old India,’ in Modi’s techno-capitalist imagination, was Jawaharlal Nehru’s supposedly failed postcolonial project of state-led developmentalism. This image of ‘new India', however, is a fantasy, on two counts. First, this emerging technocratic order itself has deep connections with the older regimes of technocracy that took shape under Nehruvian developmentalism. Second, the euphoria over high-tech innovation obscures the precariat—racialized Dalit and lower-caste labor—whose ‘low-tech’ practices have powered these high-tech ‘ecosystems.’
It is well known that Bangalore’s rise in neoliberal India and the attendant growth of global Information Technology, have deepened inequalities and environmental crises in the city, as is the elite and upper caste nature of global Indian IT labor. Underexplored is how Bangalore’s contemporary high-tech avatar is connected to the city’s mid-twentieth-century history of state-led industrialization that centred on indigenously produced or swadeshi machines, skilling, and labor. Much of this project of industrialisation was rooted in ideals of decolonisation through ‘self-reliant’ technologies, but consistently faced with austerity born out of foreign exchange crises and Cold War era politics around technological transfers. The resultant regime of tinkering, modification and repurposing, was not just limited to the machines but also in the development of local subcontracting and outsourcing chains, which would reduce dependence on Western and Soviet technological imports. My paper examines deindustrialisation of the Nehruvian industrial project from the 1990s due to neoliberal reforms, and traces how neoliberal tech entrepreneurship co-opted earlier practices of outsourcing and subcontracting, reorienting them to a racialised material ecology of precariat labor. My paper will trace longer histories of work and politics of subcontracting that have shaped the political economy of tech in the city, focusing on the shifting alliances that have underwritten practices of ‘innovation’ and tech entrepreneurship. In the context of declining stable work, I attempt to better understand how the political economy of the global tech sector strategically deploys and deepens structural inequalities like caste and race.

Author

• Aditi Dey