UC Press Blog

By Hemangini Gupta, author of Experimental Times: Startup Capitalism and Feminist Futures in India

I was at an Innovation Fair, passing desultorily by stalls advertising funding opportunities and state schemes for entrepreneurship, when a sudden crush of people caught my eye. I walked up to see what was going on and found a young man huddled over a device, showing the crowd of women around him how it worked. “You put the spices in here,” he said, opening a small drawer, “and then you press this button…” – his admiring audience gasped, and this impromptu demonstration of a new cooking robot that can make pasta and one dish curries at the click of a button continued amidst great enthusiasm. 

The cooking robot was one of many innovations that I encountered in Bengaluru, the south-Indian city that is one of India’s technology hubs. For many years Bengaluru was associated with call center work or the outsourced software tasks of maintenance and repair that are essential but underpaid. By the time I began research in the city in 2012, the city was rapidly reinventing itself into a center for global entrepreneurship and innovation.

My new book Experimental Times: Startup Capitalism and Feminist Futures in India is an in-depth ethnography of the remaking of a city and its labor force—from a site of the racialized labor imagined as the past to an imagined technofuture where race, caste, gender and other forms of difference are believed to be insignificant. My fieldwork took me to startup “festivals” teaching entrepreneurship to citizens, accelerator and innovations labs where startup founders mulled over their unique ideas, and to actual workplaces where I labored alongside employees trying to understand this new economy of “startup capitalism.”

I witnessed a continual quest to innovate and introduce technology into everyday work functions. This was not only about using automation to save companies money, although it does that. The drive to embrace technology was also a form of value-making for entrepreneurs—a pathway for elite, uppercaste men in India to index their global mobility and worth, and set themselves apart from the racialized and caste-based labor that they associate with Indian work of the past. 

Meanwhile, working alongside young women workers in an entrepreneurial workplace, I witnessed how the wider turn to startup capitalism is experienced in the everyday. Women in the company where I conducted my fieldwork accepted many of the terms of startup capitalism—to “love what you do,” think of “work as family,” and become entrepreneurial at work. But there is more. As they entered worlds of entrepreneurial work, I found women using opportunities at their company to forge feminist futures— forms of unlikely kinship, uneven but ever-present care, and disobedience to heteronormativity in their pursuits of the momentary pleasures and excitements that the city offered. 

“Experimental times” refers to these varied temporalities—the linear forward-looking time of entrepreneurial value that refuses the caste-based labor of the past and the feminist futures that are cobbled together in everyday moments of fun and pleasure and that rework norms around class, caste, and gendered life. I try not to be too utopian in the book and recognize that there are continued forms of precarity unfolding that make these social relations inevitable and vital. Yet, in their insistence on reworking what labor means and how it is experienced, women workers in Bengaluru offer significant insights into the time, space, and meaning of work under startup capitalism. 

You can also hear and see some of the people I worked with in a series of short video essays made in collaboration with students at Middlebury College and the film-maker Shreya K. here.