Book Forum: Janaki Srinivasan on Hemangini Gupta's Experimental Times
As a scholar of the political economy of information technology-based development initiatives, I spent a decade in Bangalore and was in a campus next to first-generation startups, as well as teaching students who wanted to set up startups. As a result, this book resonated with me, from the traffic descriptions to the theory!
Experimental Times provides very nuanced engagement with the women whose friendships Hemangini cultivated. She neither denies the exploitative conditions of startup capitalism, nor the opportunities it seems to present to its workers – even if these are not the opportunities the employers thought they’d get out of it. This resonates with Amrute’s (2022) work on how cognitive labour is embodied, and their discussion of the pleasures which labourers enjoy alongside this cognitive labour. I appreciated the examples in Hemangini’s book of what startup capitalism means in the caste logic of how startups have worked in Bangalore, like the idea of risk-taking; an idea that is new only to the upper caste.
I liked the second part of the book as it helped me to make sense of key injunctions of flexibility, love and experimentation, both in practice and in the words of those who inhabit these spaces of startup capitalism. So, flexibility could mean anything from when to work and where, to challenging colonial mindsets held by others – Hemangini’s interlocutor Sanjay feels that the standardisation and processes in place for him are what make Captivate professional. The idea of infrastructures of care and how the nonelite workers of Captivate supported each other is highlighted, such as dropping things off at home. The book also shines a light on the reasons why there’s an absence of that infrastructure.
Experimental times and seeking pleasure alongside work were not what the founders and elite members of Captivate imagined would happen. The afterwork endeavours where women learn together how to inhabit spaces that weren’t meant for them, such as women’s spaces of consumption or finding life and pleasure outside of their work-life balance.
Finally, I liked that Hemangini left us with a note of hope: beyond care and friendships, through learning about how to navigate these situations provides opportunities for solidarity. In this, Hemangini has solved a syllabus problem for me!
Bibliography
Sareeta Amrute, Encoding Race, Encoding Class, Duke University Press, 2022: https://directory.doabooks.org/handle/20.500.12854/94342
Dr Janaki Srinivasan is an Associate Professor in Digitial South Asian Studies at the Oxford School of Global and Area Studies and the Oxford Internet Institute, and a Governing Body Fellow at St Antony’s College. Her research explores the political economy of information technology-based development initiatives.