Introduction
I own a gray nylon sari,Footnote 2 hand-embroidered with swirling threadwork and raised gray beads, and decorated along its border with silver sequins. I bought it from Rabiul Sheikh, an entrepreneur in the sari embroidery industry, from the riverside village of Kulpi.Footnote 3 Kulpi is located in the South 24 Parganas district, about fifty miles from Kolkata. It is a central location from which sari embroidery is spreading across large parts of rural Bengal. The Bengali term for the embroidery industry is zarir kaaj (metallic threadwork). Zarir kaaj refers to the work of hand-embroidering saris with metallic thread, as well as beads, stones, and sequins.Footnote 4
After buying the sari, I watched as Bani, a middle-aged woman from Pathor Protima island, handed Rabiul a large bundle of embroidered saris.Footnote 5 She was returning the saris that she had collected from him a month earlier to be embroidered by family and friends in her village. She had taken two buses and a boat to reach Kulpi, a seven-hour journey. Like Bani, thousands of men, women, and children across South 24 Parganas work in sari embroidery. These saris rarely sell in the villages where they are hand-embroidered. Rather, they are consumed in urban centers, where such embroidery is in demand.
South 24 Parganas stretches from the urban fringes of Kolkata to the Gangetic delta area of the Sundarbans. About 84 percent of the district's population of seven million lives in rural areas, and 37 percent live below the poverty line.Footnote 6 Agriculture, primarily paddy cultivation, and fisheries are the main sources of livelihood, and interestingly, there is no mention of the growth of sari embroidery in the region in recent state reports, pointing to the ways in which the state fails to “see” these forms of rural outsourcing. Land holdings in South 24 Parganas are small, and “more than 85 percent of households are either landless or marginal farmers.”Footnote 7
While state classifications of administered space as “rural” or “urban” can lead to a flattening of diverse and complex places, people I spoke with in South 24 Parganas also described the region as primarily rural and agricultural, listing paddy cultivation, small-scale cultivation of vegetables and betel-nut leaves, shrimp seedling collection, fisheries, sharecropping, daily wage labor, and working in brick kilns as important forms of labor. But people also see zari embroidery as an important and emergent form of work that is supplanting or shifting patterns of agricultural labor. Tapan, a middle-aged embroiderer, said, “In this area, catching shrimp seedlings has reduced. Zari work has increased.” Echoing Tapan's views, Amal Choudhury, a schoolteacher, noted, “There have been many changes here in the last five years ... zari work has brought about a huge change. Most families survive on it here.”
In South 24 Parganas, entrepreneurs, workers, and their saris move back and forth in a nascent and expanding industry that produces embroidered saris to meet new forms of urban consumption in neoliberal India.Footnote 8 The expansion of this industry relies on emergent forms of rural entrepreneurship and labor processes and is facilitated by improved post-liberalization connectivity between rural and urban West Bengal.Footnote 9
I describe this process of the expansion of embroidery into the countryside as “rural outsourcing.” Until the early 2000s, hand-embroidered saris were expensive items sold to an exclusive clientele. They were produced primarily in workshops concentrated in specific areas of certain Indian cities, often specializing in particular embroidering traditions.Footnote 10 In West Bengal, commercial embroidery used to be concentrated in Kolkata neighborhoods, such as Kidderpore, or the neighboring city of Howrah. With a rise in urban demand, since the early 2000s, embroidery expanded to fringe and periurban areas of Kolkata, such as Amtala, and then began a more recent expansion into the Bengal countryside.Footnote 11 While embroidering still continues within the city, urban embroiderers now focus on highly skilled embroidery. Urban workshops produce high-quality work, often on designer or export garments. Low-end embroideryFootnote 12 has been outsourced to rural India. In South 24 Parganas, zarir kaaj is done by men, women, and children, both by people who self-identify as gorib (poor) and those who consider themselves moddhobitto (middle-class). Embroidery work may be undertaken either full- or part-time.
There are many cost advantages to the expansion of zarir kaaj to rural Bengal. First, wages are lower in rural areas than in the city. With a shortage of employment, as well as liquidity in villages, people are willing to work for very low wages. Second, space is at a premium in cities, so outsourcing production to the countryside results in lower setup costs, as many people embroider in their homes or in makeshift workshops. Third, rural work is more dispersed and casual. Informal urban businesses are often required to pay bribes to state agents in order to function. Far from the eyes of the state, decentralized rural production is the kind of informal industry that avoids taxation and other processes of state regulation.Footnote 13
Zarir kaaj is ubiquitous in Kulpi and surrounding villages in South 24 Parganas. People I spoke with variously said that “99 percent,” “almost everyone,” and “most people” either embroidered saris themselves or had a family member who worked in the industry. They said that it was the most widespread source of employment and income in the area. Economists Dipankar Basu and Amit Basole, examining shifts in post-liberalization India, demonstrate that “across size-classes, cultivation now accounts for less than half (46 percent) while wages and non-farm business together account for 50 percent of monthly income of a farmer household.”Footnote 14 Thus, in rural India agriculture is no longer the primary source of income. But the declining importance of agriculture as a source of income is perhaps not surprising when put in historical context.
The growth of rural outsourcing in Bengal since the 2000s and the importance of small industries, such as zari work for agrarian households, can be linked to a longer precolonial history of decentralized manufacturing and rural outwork in India. In the case of textile manufacturing in the precolonial period, both yarn spinning and weaving were undertaken in a dispersed fashion within villages and small towns across large regions (rather than concentrated in urban centers),Footnote 15 which specialized in particular products, both for export and domestic consumption. In Bengal in particular, in 1415, the Ming Chinese ambassador noted that “men and women work in the fields and weave according to the season,”Footnote 16 and, by the seventeenth century, Bengal had become “by far India's largest single manufacturing center and entrepot for world trade.”Footnote 17
Bengal specialized in high-quality cotton and silk fabrics, with production taking place across vast swathes of the countryside, from Malda in North Bengal to Mednipur in the South.Footnote 18 Indeed, participating in “traditional” industries such as textile manufacture was an important source of livelihood in nonurban areas and a hedge against the risks and vagaries of full dependence on agriculture. Many nineteenth-century analyses of textile production in India, from Marx to nationalist accounts, posit that British rule led to the destruction of the industry and the loss of livelihood for millions of Indian artisans. Later studies described a process of deindustrialization (rather than wholesale destruction) that took place in Indian textile manufacturing after the advent of British rule, concluding that colonialism had complex effects on the industry, with some scholars arguing that it had creative, as well as destructive, impacts.Footnote 19
Scholars who support a thesis of deindustrialization explore the “long and protracted process” through which the Indian textile industry began to decline, in waves, with ebbs and flows and important regional differentiations, from the late eighteenth century onward.Footnote 20 One of the most important features of this decline, in Bengal and other manufacturing regions, was the slow extinction of hand-spun yarn in rural areas in the nineteenth century.Footnote 21 The elimination of hand-spinning, while it impacted women in particularly devastating ways, led to large-scale shifts in rural economic life and increased dependence on agriculture as the main source of livelihood. As Nirmala Banerjee argues, “Modernization, as it came to Bengal, was essentially an extremely limited process superimposed by outside forces. In its wake, however, it changed the traditional economy in a material way. In general this meant that workers of the region, both men and women, were made increasingly dependent on agriculture for their livelihood.”Footnote 22 Prasannan Parthasarathi describes a similar situation in the case of South India, where “the loss of spinning would have had a major effect on rural life in South India, especially in the dry areas of the subcontinent, where agriculture was rain-fed, and thus vulnerable to the vagaries of the monsoon.”Footnote 23
Thus, the recently increasing diversification of rural households into various forms of nonagricultural work can be linked back to a longer history of decentralized production that was disrupted after the advent of British rule. Rather than being an entirely “new” form as a result of globalization, it is possible that contemporary rural outsourcing is reviving older forms of decentralized manufacturing after long periods of colonial and postcolonial decline.
In any case, the aggregate-level shifts away from agriculture in contemporary rural India that Basu and Basole describe point to the need to ethnographically study the forms of work that are supplanting agriculture, the processes through which these forms of work are spreading to rural areas, and the understandings that villagers themselves have of these emergent production processes. I argue that in the South 24 Parganas, workers and entrepreneurs involved in sari embroidery articulate positions of ambivalence towards the industry, rather than binary positions of resistance and contestation, on the one hand, or consent and acceptance, on the other.
Globalization and Ambivalence
In the twenty-five years since the liberalization and globalization of India's economy, it has joined other Asian nations that are witnessing transformations of rural space at various scales of acceleration under conditions of late capitalism.Footnote 24 Recent anthropological literature on globalization has critiqued teleological and triumphalist narratives that suggest that global capital everywhere produces similar effects without being altered on the ground through contact with specific histories, politics, and cultures.Footnote 25 In this vein, I examine the engagements of entrepreneurs and workers in the embroidery industry in rural Bengal, focusing on the “frictions” that are constitutive of the process of the accelerated spread of global capital into specific locations.Footnote 26
Anna Tsing argues that globalization unfolds through “‘friction’: the awkward, unequal, unstable and creative qualities of interconnection across difference,”Footnote 27 and reminds us that “friction is not a synonym for resistance.”Footnote 28 Yet many ethnographic studies of the messiness, “stickiness,” and awkward encounters between the global and the local focus on the ways in which global processes are met with resistance, subversion, or contestation, often through the study of important local and transnational social movements.Footnote 29 But less attention has been paid to the roles and positions of entrepreneurs and workers in rural areas who are directly involved in the production of goods for globalized markets. Studies that do not explicitly focus on resistance movements but nonetheless examine the stickiness of capitalist engagements in particular places have also examined the ways in which cultures of globalization can be contested through subversion, humor, irony, and anger.Footnote 30 As Yang points out in her study of the hybridity of economies in rural China, “the older strains of an alternative economic logic in this hybrid are shown not as complementing, adapting to, or serving capitalism's expansion but contesting it and re-channeling its movement toward other ends.”Footnote 31
The study of social movements, resistance, contestation, and subversion is an important intervention in triumphalist accounts of the spread of global capital. But Manichean dualities of contestation or consent are not the only modes of interaction between people living in peripheral areas and the increasing penetration of global capital. What attitudes and processes on the ground, then, facilitate “the increasingly powerful reach of global economic forces into the lives of more and more people throughout the world?”Footnote 32
Drawing on Tsing's insight that friction is not another word for resistance, as well as her call to examine “folk understandings of the global, and the practices with which they are intertwined,”Footnote 33 I argue that the frictions of globalization find expression not just in resistance or contestation, but also in articulated positions of ambivalence toward globalization processes. Among villagers who participate in the sari embroidery industry in South 24 Parganas, I found three scales of ambivalence: first, ambivalence toward the product itself (the embroidered saris); second, ambivalence toward the production process (on the part of both workers and entrepreneurs); and, finally, ambivalence toward the politics of this form of decentralized production.
Zygmunt Bauman describes ambivalence as a state where an object, process, or concept can be assigned to more than one category, and these categories can even be contradictory.Footnote 34 For example, Bauman argues that modernity itself is a “concept fraught with ambiguity” and internal contradictions, based on a duality that oscillates “between freedom and genocide, constantly able to stretch in either direction, spawning at the same time the most horrifying of contemporary dangers and the most effective means of preventing them—the poison and the antidote.”Footnote 35 While Bauman's analysis centers on Western Europe, Sherry Ortner highlights the importance of ambivalence in studies of resistance in the postcolonial world. She argues that resistance studies should avoid ethnographic “thin-ness” and instead reveal the “ambivalences and ambiguities of resistance itself.”Footnote 36 While Ortner argues for the importance of ambivalence within resistance studies, she also suggests that ambivalence as a concept can be explored further outside of the category of resistance, noting “the notion of ambivalence has become central to colonial and post-colonial studies more generally and is worth a paper in itself.”Footnote 37 This article presents an ethnographically grounded study of ambivalence among entrepreneurs and workers who participate in the globalization-related embroidery industry.
It is in contrast to the contestation and resistance to Special-Economic-Zone (SEZ)-based globalization in West Bengal that the ambivalence toward the smaller-scale zari embroidery industry emerged. I conducted fieldwork between the years of 2006 and 2008, a very politically charged time in West Bengal. West Bengal has had the longest-serving, democratically-elected communist government in India. Between the years of 1977 and 2011, the Left-Front coalition government, led by the Communist Party of India (Marxist), CPI(M), continuously held power in the state. Over this time it built powerful and societally pervasive party machinery.Footnote 38
Between the years of 2006 and 2011, the Left-Front's dominance was severely challenged by widespread resistance movements against state-led forced land acquisition for large-scale SEZs in the rural areas of Singur and Nandigram.Footnote 39 Fourteen people were killed as a result of police firing on protestors in Nandigram in March 2007. The violence in Nandigram, the resistance movement against forced land acquisition, and its subsequent fallout is credited with playing a key role in bringing down West Bengal's Left-Front government in the 2011 State Assembly elections, after thirty-four years of rule.
While neither Singur nor Nandigram are located within South 24 Parganas, most people I spoke with there were deeply critical of the CPI(M)'s land-acquisition policies and the violence in Singur and Nandigram. Within South 24 Parganas, Kulpi itself is the proposed site for a controversial port-based SEZ, which has been on hold for more than fifteen years due to difficulties with land acquisition, among other issues.Footnote 40 Many people in Kulpi strongly opposed the port-SEZ, as they believed that this form of infrastructural development would lead to the submerging of their lands, forced evictions, and political violence.
Some people I interviewed in South 24 Parganas directly participated in the anti-CPI(M) Nandigram resistance movement and were members of the Krishi Jomi Rokkha Committee (Committee for the Protection of Farmer's Lands). Those who did not directly support the resistance movement expressed their rejection of the Left Front's SEZ policies through their votes. Indeed, in the landmark 2008 Panchayat elections, South 24 Parganas was one of the first districts in the State to vote out the ruling coalition in favor of the opposition Trinamool Congress.Footnote 41
When it came to SEZ-related policies, many in the South 24 Parganas articulated strong positions of contestation and resistance, which were not present in discussions of the embroidery industry in the region. There emerged a distinct contrast between forceful rejections of large-scale land acquisition policies for industry, and more ambivalent positions towards the sari embroidery industry. I argue that ambivalence is not a transient or unconsidered position of confusion or ambiguity. Rather it is a clearly-articulated and widely-held expression of the contradictory positions that villagers hold towards the embroidery industry.
Consuming Embroidery
In a recent ethnography of Hong Kong's Chungking Mansions, Gordon Mathews argues that while the term “globalization” is often associated with transnational corporations and high-end industries, ““low-end” globalization—the transnational movement of people and goods involving small-scale and often informal capital—is the dominant form of globalization experienced in much of the developing world today.”Footnote 42 Studies of globalization in India have focused on “high-end” processes and industries such as advertising,Footnote 43 information technology,Footnote 44 and urban middle-class identity.Footnote 45 In this article I shift the focus to rural India, examining the village-based production of embroidered saris for a largely urban consumer market within India. Where, then, does the question of globalization come in? A second contribution of this article is that it studies “local producers, but in a global frame” through examining widespread effects of globalization in rural space, which involves production for a domestic, rather than export, market.Footnote 46 The formulation of a “global frame” is particularly helpful here, as such a frame does not have to include a transnational market as the end site of production processes for an industry to be considered deeply affected by the globalization of capital.
Studies of production under conditions of globalization in provincial and rural India have focused on the transformative effects of export-oriented industry on these places, examining production for multinational companies and export markets.Footnote 47 But an equally important effect of globalization in India is the production of commodities for a growing domestic urban consumer market, rather than an export market.Footnote 48 Thus, one can find the enmeshing of the global and the local in rural India not just in the production of items for export markets, but also in the production of goods for a burgeoning domestic middle class whose growth is inextricably linked to the globalization and liberalizationFootnote 49 of India's economy.Footnote 50
Indeed, this domestic market for zari embroidery is inextricably linked to globalization. Emma Tarlo argues that the fashion industry in India expanded greatly in the 1980s due to “increasing social mobility, [and] the rapid expansion of a new middle-class category of consumers.”Footnote 51 Since the globalization and liberalization of India's economy, estimates of the size of India's middle class have placed it at more than 250 million, with great emphasis placed on its continuing growth.Footnote 52 In business discourse, it has become commonplace to note that this burgeoning middle class is ushering in a consumer revolution, set to emerge as the world's fifth-largest consumer market in the next two decades.Footnote 53 Leela Fernandes argues that consumption is a potential means through which aspiring entrants to this “new middle class” can penetrate other barriers that obstruct class mobility, such as language and education.Footnote 54 Consumption practices thus provide means of entry and alleviate anxieties about status and lack of belonging.
Adopting new styles of clothing is a way to signal belonging and status in a new class position.Footnote 55 Thus today's new middle classes display a growing desire for hand-embroidered saris, which were previously available mostly to India's elite. Hand-embroidered designer saris are increasingly popular with film and television stars, and when middle-class Indians see these saris on screen, new forms of demand are produced.Footnote 56 Embroidered saris are then produced in the countryside in cheaper forms for wider consumption.
The availability of a previously high-end item at multiple price points necessitates the differentiation of merchandise, where a US$5 sari can only superficially resemble a US$1,000 one, as the quality of materials that go into them and the conditions under which they are produced are vastly different. To produce expensive designer saris, skilled artisans in urban workshops sew small, high-quality stitches under close monitoring. The cheaper versions are produced in a decentralized manner by lower-skilled producers with less stringent methods of quality control.
Embroidery and Othering
Through the process of rural outsourcing, saris are produced in the Bengal countryside, but are consumed for the most part in urban India. As I studied zari saris, I was struck by the remarkably different attitudes toward these saris displayed by producers and consumers. Chari argues that commodities produced for consumption elsewhere can have meanings that are removed from local knowledge.Footnote 57 While urban consumers buy saris to keep up with trends and for the status they convey, many rural sari producers disavowed these saris as unsuitable forms of attire. At the same time, sari producers expressed approval of the industry itself, saying that it had saved them from daridrota (destitution). While embroidering is seen as a much-needed, though problematic and fraught source of employment, the saris themselves were disapproved of by many of the people involved in producing them. Zari saris are thus an ambivalent and uncertain commodity in rural West Bengal.
The sources of this ambivalence are complex and interrelated. First, there were deep concerns, among both Bengali Hindu and Bengali Muslim embroiderers, about the “cleanliness” of the saris and their unsuitability for regular washing. These concerns are related to both caste-based ideas of purity and pollution, as well as concerns about Bengali identity. As I spoke to both Muslim and Hindu embroiderers about the saris they produced, each seemed to point to an “Other” as the ultimate consumer of these saris. A Hindu worker at an NGO, which promotes embroidery in Kochuberia, told me, “With all this embroidery, they cannot be washed often. Or the embroidery will get ruined. So we [Hindus] cannot wear these. They [Muslims] wear them.” She further commented, “They [Muslims] like shiny things.”
Cloth that cannot be regularly washed produces anxieties about hygiene, which are tied to caste-based rules of purity and pollution. As Sarah Lamb points out, in rural Bengal particularly, many people adhere to caste-based customs relating to the washing of clothes and attempt to emulate a high-caste ideal that they are not always able to practice. For example, after contact with polluting influences, including after defecation and menstruation, many Hindus, particularly women, are expected to change their clothes.Footnote 58 While these rules are not always followed, lower caste groups are less able to adhere to them. While Lamb's fieldwork was conducted in a Brahman-dominated village, her arguments have resonance even in villages with large Muslim populations, as Bengali Muslim embroiderers were also concerned about the washability of the zari saris. As a Muslim entrepreneur in Burrabazar told me, when discussing why the saris are not appropriate for rural Bengal, “Saris with thread-work, sequins, beadwork, daabka, zardozi and stones, these are what we make. You can't wash these when they get dirty.” Bengalis across religious lines believe that zari saris cannot be washed regularly without getting damaged, which makes them an unsuitable form of attire for rural Bengal.
When it comes to the question of who, then, wears these saris, there emerges what I term a “chain of Othering,” where Hindu Bengalis think that Muslim Bengalis wear zari saris because they do not wash their clothes regularly. Yet Muslim Bengalis think that non-Bengali “Others” (Biharis, Marwaris, Punjabis, or Gujaratis) wear zari saris. The consumer of the zari sari for each group is ultimately seen to be an outsider. A few days after the interview in Kochuberia I had lunch at the house of a young Bengali Muslim entrepreneur, Rabiul Sheikh. When I asked who wears zari saris, Rabiul and his father said that villagers do not wear them, rather “city people” do, and Rabiul adds, “o-bangaalee-ra” (non-Bengalis) wear the saris for “parties.” Both Rabiul and his father were wearing soft cotton lungis (sarongs), and his wife, Amina, wore a worn, unadorned maroon cotton sari.
Amina grew up just outside Kolkata, in Amtala, where she wore zari saris for special occasions. After her marriage she moved away from the periurbanity of Amtala to Kulpi, a place where they are seen as an inappropriate form of attire. When I am alone with Amina, she tells me that she likes zari saris, but her husband and father-in-law do not allow her to wear them, even to weddings. While the wearing of zari saris is seen as problematic in rural Bengal, this viewpoint is not monolithic, and there are slippages and divergences regarding the desirability of these saris along gendered lines. Thus Rabiul works in and owes his current prosperity to the embroidery industry, but he does not approve of the women in his family, and in rural areas more generally, wearing the saris he produces. The ambivalence and the disavowal of these saris in rural Bengal is a gendered question with the “traditional” enforced upon the bodies of women.Footnote 59 Anxieties about emergent globalization-related commodities, behaviors, and identities are often expressed on the bodies of women, focusing on what they should or should not wear, and how their sexuality might be controlled.Footnote 60
The appropriate and the traditional attire for women in much of rural Bengal is taanth-er sari (handloom cotton saris). Most women in villages do not wear taanth only, but handloom saris are perhaps more prevalent and popular in Bengal than in other parts of India, where women wear cheaper and hardier “synthetic” saris. Even if it is not worn by rural women every day, taanth is an ideal. Unembellished, unembroidered synthetic saris are acceptable as a cheaper, hardier alternative to taanth. But zari saris, which are shiny, embroidered, and loud, are morally loaded. Zari saris are viewed as inappropriate in rural areas because they are not only seen as unclean, but also are associated with nonrural or non-Bengali “Others,” as seen through the process of the “chain-of-Othering.” They represent forms of impurity, literally, as they cannot be washed, and metaphorically, as forms of urban fashion, with fashion's inextricable ties to sexuality. Influenced by the shiny, sequined, and often diaphanous fashions of Bollywood films and soap operas, they represent a radical departure from the taanth ideal.
Caste rules can run counter to fashion trends in India. The ideal of the taanth sari, and its unique suitability to the regular washing demanded by caste practices of literal and ritual cleanliness across religious lines in rural Bengal, places a negative valence on the zari sari. Many villagers who can afford low-end zari saris choose not to wear them. This is not just a refusal borne of poverty but rather a conscious one based on what is traditional and appropriate for rural India. Within the refusal to wear zari saris is a strand of moral critique of urban sartorial practices. Alfred Gell's ethnography of consumption among Muria Gonds similarly finds that some relatively wealthy Muria Gonds rejected anything but the traditional handloom loincloth. Gell writes of Tiri, the richest man in Manjapur: “It was not that he was trying to look poor ... It was rather that he was determined not to enter into kinds of consumption that would make him out to be a different kind of person than he regarded as morally appropriate, in the evaluations of both his society and himself.”Footnote 61 Rural embroiderers in Bengal similarly refuse to appropriate urban fashions. While they often wear synthetic substitutes, taanth remains the ideal for rural Bengali women. Thus among sari embroiderers there emerges an ambivalent attitude toward the saris: approval of their production, but not of their local consumption.
Ostaagars: Prosperity and Anxiety among Rural Entrepreneurs
People working in sari embroidery are ambivalent not just toward the product itself, but also along a second scale that involves the process of production. The Bengali term ostaagar means “a master artisan or tailor.” But Rabiul Sheikh, the ostaagar from whom I purchased the sari, was not a master artisan, and he rarely embroiders anymore. Ostaagar remains the term that is used for him in the village, and the term that he uses to describe himself. But Rabiul could rightly be called a middleman, an exploiter, a petty capitalist, an entrepreneur, a designer, or a subcontractor—he performs multiple roles. The term ostaagar is outmoded—it cannot capture the complex, shifting nature of his work. I use the story of Rabiul to highlight the ambivalent positions that even beneficiaries of the industry hold toward embroidering. While ostaagars are seeing new opportunity as a result of zari work, they are also made anxious by the risks of participating in flexible labor processes under conditions of globalization.Footnote 62
Rural outsourcing involves the process of subcontracting work to a transient and volatile labor force. Complex distribution chains extend from Kolkata, where wholesalers in Burrabazar source saris out to numerous distributors located in towns like Amtala, which hug fringe areas of the city. These distributors then outsource their saris to another set of ostaagars, who distribute saris, as well as the required sequins, thread, and corresponding designs to workers who do embroidering in their own homes, or in shacks that serve as workshops. Workers work either for piece ratesFootnote 63 or for hourly wages, depending on their level of skill and the specific arrangement with subcontractors. This process of subcontracting produces paths to prosperity for some ostaagars. As Chari argues in his study of the garment industry in Tiruppur, “contracting distributes machines to allow some workers, particularly in garment stitching and manufacture, to make a class leap into small ownership.”Footnote 64 We see a similar process at play in Kulpi, where ostaagars like Rabiul are able to achieve previously unimaginable levels of prosperity. But at the same time, they accept greater risk.
Rabiul's father was a school teacher. For many in rural Bengal, becoming a teacher is a pinnacle of achievement. A teacher has job security and a comparatively high and steady income, commands respect, and often holds political power.Footnote 65 Rabiul's father wanted his son to become a teacher, too, but Rabiul was never interested. After finishing school, Rabiul took a course in air-conditioner repair with a company in Kolkata. But upon finishing his course, he was unable to find employment as a contracted air-conditioner repair technician. He believes he was unable to find a job because he was discriminated against as a Muslim.
Frustrated and angry, he returned to Kulpi. His father then pressured him to apply to nearby colleges for an education degree. Rabiul refused and was determined to start a business of his own. He decided to try his hand at the embroidery industry that was spreading in the region. Learning from an acquaintance, he initially began embroidering saris himself and then began distributing to relatives.
Rabiul's father was initially appalled by his son's choice because in the hierarchy of occupations in Bengal, an ostaagar places below a schoolteacher; the work of the hand is less valued than the work of the mind. Finally resigning himself to the fact that his son was not going to follow in his footsteps, he arranged Rabiul's marriage to Amina, whose uncle was an important ostaagar in Amtala. Amina brought with her valuable knowledge and contacts in the zari industry. Rabiul was able to benefit from his wife's well-established network, which he continues to develop. He deals in several hundred saris a week, and his business is growing. Rabiul's father said, “I used to think he was a good-for-nothing, but now I see he is our future, that he was looking very far ahead.”
In addition to managing a chain of distribution, Rabiul also acts as designer, always on the lookout for the latest fashions, colors, and styles of embroidery. He gets ideas from design magazines, TV, visits to Kolkata, movies, and his imagination. He says the competition can be bested only by staying a step ahead with good designs. According to Rabiul, “There is a lot of money in the business. But there is also risk because the market changes all the time.” Keeping up with changing fashions is thus a source of pressure as well as creativity. Even though Rabiul works in hand embroidery in rural India, he is not concerned with the traditional and the local, but rather with the new and the national. He makes consumer goods that can be sold in urban markets all over India.
Rabiul's ambition and drive are palpable. He is an example of a new kind of rural entrepreneur, middlemen in villages who are taking advantage of India's booming consumer demand to play a part in the production of small-scale goods. Rabiul's income allows him to live an affluent life by village standards, and his new car, a Hyundai Santro, is a symbol of his recently earned status. Ostaagars like Rabiul bring an emerging middle-class consumer lifestyle to villages, while the purchasing power that workers get from their embroidery work also contributes to an increasing circulation of low-end consumer goods within rural areas.
Rabiul's career choices have allowed him a new kind of political space in the village. During its thirty-four years in power, the Left-Front government in Bengal built a powerful party machine. When young people in rural Bengal become teachers—as Rabiul's father wanted for him—they become tied to the ruling party machine.Footnote 66 But by working as an independent operator, tied neither to a party nor a union, Rabiul was able to express his political views and organize more freely. Indeed, his home was strewn with anticommunist propaganda, including a large banner for the main opposition party, the Trinamool Congress (which came to power in 2011). Rabiul's position as a rural entrepreneur—one that is growing increasingly common across the state—allows not just for new consumption practices, but also for a new kind of rural-bourgeois oppositional politics and leadership.
Despite his growing prosperity, Rabiul keenly felt the precariousness of the flexible labor market that he was participating in. His sense of achievement was tempered by a sense of anxiety or insecurity that schoolteachers in Kulpi whom I interviewed, while less prosperous, did not display. Rabiul's trajectory potentially reaches much higher than those of government employees, but it is also fraught with risk. As a designer, Rabiul felt a great deal of pressure to come up with innovative designs that had the inventiveness to keep him one step ahead of the competition. Rabiul also worried about competition from embroidery machines and the risk of wholesalers rejecting saris for imperfections, causing him to bear the losses. The risk of saris being rejected prevents rural ostaagars from moving into more expensive, and more lucrative, forms of embroidery such as zardozi (raised metallic wire embroidery). As Kabir Mondol, an ostaagar from Kulpi told me, “We are not getting the courage to move into the expensive range.”
The story I have presented so far is of ostaagars who have attained material wealth (relatively—they are wealthier than most people in their villages) and its concomitant social and sometimes political status in rural areas.Footnote 67 But ostaagars also live under a cloud of fear. They fear that the industry that they have brought to this particular part of Bengal will be eclipsed through Kolkata's connections to other places with an even cheaper and more pliant labor force. They struggle to keep up with the vagaries of fashion and worry about abrupt, faddish changes in demand—and of embroidered saris going out of style. But most of all, ostaagars fear the disappearance of their trade. They spoke apprehensively of embroidery machines that had recently come into use in the state of Gujarat, which could produce saris of the same quality as Bengali hands. The machines could reportedly even set sequins, and ostaagars believe that they could potentially make the zari business in Bengal obsolete. Zaheer, an ostaagar in Amtala, said, “Where a handmade sari costs Rs. 1,000, a machine can make it for Rs. 200. Within two years the business will get more ruined. The [wage] rate will go down, demand will go down. We are going in that direction.” He added, “We can't compete with the computer. One embroidery machine costs Rs. 70–80 lakh, Footnote 68 but in Gujarat they are buying them. They will start buying them here. Big Marwaris can afford it here, big Marwaris Footnote 69 are buying everything, and small businesses are getting hit.”
In Zaheer's narrative, Marwaris are ultimately held responsible for the uncertainty and risk in the sari embroidery industry. Here again we see a “chain-of-Othering,” where threats to the industry are attributed indiscriminately and problematically to the “non-Bengali” outsider. A quiet, melancholic man, Zaheer seems to be mourning the inevitable demise of the industry. His words have an almost theoretical quality, predicting the eventual supersession of his system, even while it is in a thriving phase: “We can't compete with the computer.” Thus, entrepreneurs in sari embroidery have a conflicted relationship with the industry.
This ambivalence toward production under conditions of globalization has resonance with other industries, demonstrating some of the shared experiences and frictions produced by flexible labor processes in disparate places. An ethnographic focus on workers and entrepreneurs involved in global production highlights awkward engagements and frictions through ambivalence rather than resistance or acceptance. In a study of Turkish carpet weaving, Damla Isik explores the understudied role of middlemen or entrepreneurs in export-oriented industries, concluding, “Carpet manufacturers embraced such flexibility yet, at the same time, remained ambivalent about what it meant for them and for their weaving neighborhoods.”Footnote 70 The Konyan entrepreneurs in Isik's study share similar concerns and ambivalences with ostaagars in Bengal, down to gloomy predictions of the demise of their industry even as it appears to be thriving.Footnote 71
Working in Sari Embroidery
Tapan, a middle-aged embroiderer, says about the industry: “We are surviving on this; this is a business of first-rate cheating.”Footnote 72 For him, the industry provided much-needed work, but it was also based on “cheating” workers. Tapan's father was a sharecropper. For twenty years Tapan worked as an urban construction laborer. He would work in Kolkata for three years, save money, and return to his village because of desher maya (the attractions of home). When the money would run out, he would leave again for Kolkata. He deeply disliked this cycle of backbreaking urban labor. Around 2003, he obtained work building cell-phone towers in the countryside and made “a lot of money,” even though it was very “high-risk” work. After working on the towers, he felt that he was getting old, so he bought a van-rickshaw for his son to ply. Tapan and his wife, daughter, and daughter-in-law then began working in the embroidery industry. Tapan expressed the view that the zari industry, like cell-phone tower work, was an important source of income that “saved” people from daily wage labor in the city. But he also called it a “cheating” industry, based on its low wages and the routine rejection of embroidered saris based on spurious claims of defects. Even his attitude towards ostaagars was explicitly ambivalent. According to Tapan, “Some ostaagars are good. Some are bad ... But wages are too low. But if I leave this line, what will I do?”
Geert De Neve, in his study of carpet-weaving in rural Tamil Nadu, presents a similarly ambivalent position among workers, arguing that “the handlooms provided this rural labor force with a very welcome source of employment at home.”Footnote 73 But De Neve also argues that this is not the full picture, for after workers enumerated the benefits of the carpet-weaving industry, they also described its painful costs—the physical suffering and difficulty involved in weaving and the desire to return to previous agricultural occupations.Footnote 74
A very important effect of outsourced production in rural India is that it allows people to stay in their villages rather than move between village and city as a “footloose” labor force at the bottom of the urban labor pool.Footnote 75 Indeed, many people I spoke with had a strong disregard for Kolkata and saw their ability to work and stay in their own villages as a largely positive effect of rural outsourcing. As Tapan says, “There is no need to leave one's village home now. I have a cemented house and garden and enough to eat.” Rural outsourcing reverses for many an older process of rural to urban migration for work. Instead, urban work, chasing comparative advantage, has moved to rural areas.
It is not only adult embroiderers who express ambivalence towards zarir kaaj. I arranged to interview embroiderers who work in a makeshift workshop in Kulpi. Entering the workshop, I see a room of fourteen children, their ages ranging from about six to fifteen. The children hand-embroider in three groups on three saris, each one stretched taut in sections across a wooden frame.
The children invite me in and ask me to sit down. A boy called Joydeep answers most of my questions, with others piping in from time to time—agreeing, contradicting, adding stories. Joydeep tells me he has been embroidering for more than five years. He learned embroidery by watching his mother and sisters. He says that they embroider at home, but he likes working in the workshop with his friends because he feels lonely in the house. He works seven hours a day, and in the evening another shift begins and other children work another seven hours. The children work six days a week with Sundays off. More and more people are coming into the field, he says, so
the rate is decreasing. One to two years ago it was Rs. 10 (21 cents), at least, for an hour of work. Now it is coming to more like Rs. 7–8 (15–17 cents). This is too little so we want to leave. But I only know how to do zari work. If I could find any other work I would leave this. I left school of my own free will, but also because there was a need. I used to enjoy it initially, but now…
Six of the children in the room said their fathers were unemployed. One had left school and regretted his decision but was unable to go back because no school would admit him. All of them said they had eye problems—their eyes burned and watered from hours of intense concentration on needlework.
The room where they work has windows, a fan, and naked lightbulbs. In one corner is a large flat-screen TV and DVD player. Next to it sits the DVD of Race, a Bollywood hit about horse racing among wealthy Indians in South Africa. The children rent the TV and DVD player from a local video store every Friday. There is no overseer to force the children to work, but if they do not produce what is expected of them, they are paid less than their anticipated hourly wage. They say that there is a lot of “cheating” in the business. While the work itself is exploitative, preventing them from getting an education and wearing out their eyes, their place of work is not oppressive. Joydeep says, “As people live together in a family, we work together like that. We enjoy coming here and seeing each other every day, even though I do not like the work anymore.”
Here we see at play the ambivalence toward the industry and uncertain futures within it, a critique tempered with appreciation, even enjoyment. Several children say they have been working for five or six years. There is a small boy standing near me, and I ask him how long he has been working here. “Oh around five to six years,” he says, echoing his elders. “Ha ha, he's six years old himself,” someone says, and we all laugh. This is hilarious to all of us, to all the children and to me. But inadvertently, through his desire to mimic his elders, he brings something into sharp relief: what is the difference between working from the age of six and working from the age of one?
Embroidered Exploitation
While child labor is illegal in India, ostaagars in the embroidery industry make money off the labor of others through subcontracting, and a majority of them employ children. The growth of the sari industry is deeply troubling because this industry has created new child laborers. These children have not moved from labor of one kind, say agricultural, into embroidery. Prior to the rise of the zari industry, many of these children did not work seven-hour days. Many children used to attend school and may have continued to do so had embroidery not emerged as a tempting source of income. School teachers I interviewed in Kulpi directly attributed the rise in truancy rates to the embroidery industry. By providing them with “pocket money,” embroidery lures children away from accessing even primary education. The penetration of rural outsourcing can lead to the employment of increasing numbers of children, where earlier they may have had nonlaboring or quasi-laboring lives. As embroidering contributes to increased truancy, we see incursions of global capital in rural West Bengal leading to renewed forms of exploitation and regressive social outcomes.
Indeed, the third scale of ambivalence toward the embroidery industry is ambivalence toward the politics of this form of decentralized production. Amal Choudhury, a teacher in Kulpi, discussed its effects:
Because of zari work, truancy and the drop-out rate is also increasing. Parents can make good money if their children work. Children also would rather earn pocket money than come to school. They think, why spend all those years in school when I can earn now? They earn liquid money, which is more important especially because they see class 12 pass students who are not getting jobs and have to start doing zari work only. They think, why spend all those years in school when I can earn now? ... There are markets that are getting bigger here, more shops are coming up, which means that the economy is improving. But along with this, values are getting destroyed. Especially among the earning youngsters, our students, they leave their studies and get money from zari work, working on cell-phone towers. They make money and then they walk in front of the school and smoke in front of us, encourage their friends who are going to school to stop going. They tell them, “earn money like us. What will you do by studying?” They have money, so they don't obey anyone, even their parents. Money is power. And they have become insolent ... So there are psychological and cultural changes along with financial change. With money in their hands they are not thinking of themselves as underdogs anymore, as poor people who need the help of the government or the [communist] party. They see themselves differently now. … This has led to a rapid and radical economic and cultural change.Footnote 76
Choudhury presents zari embroidery as a source of both new opportunity and new exploitation. Another facet of exploitation within the embroidery industry is the attitude of ostaagars toward labor organizing: all the ostaagars interviewed held an unequivocal antiorganizing stance.Footnote 77 As Zaheer said, “There is no union in this business. Whoever attempts to organize, I will stop giving them work. There are many people who want work.” Ostaagars take advantage of the reserve army of workers in rural Bengal to enforce conditions of flexible and transient labor. Workers are anxious about decreases in wages and piece rates. But ostaagars are able to hire and fire workers easily and thus contribute to the extreme precariousness and vulnerability of these forms of outsourced work under conditions of globalization.
Workers in the industry often complained about the exploitative practices of ostaagers, including paying low wages, rejecting worked-on pieces by claiming (unjustly, in the workers' view) that they were damaged, or delaying or defaulting on payments due. Yet worker solidarity in the industry tends to be low, with little to no formal organizing activity within this increasingly important rural labor sector.
Ranajit Guha argues that rebellion requires “for its form and spirit…two closely related practices of corporate behavior, namely, emulation and solidarity.”Footnote 78 That is, solidarity is required for acts of rebellion and resistance against oppression. Yet workers in the zari industry do not identify the industry as a source of wholesale oppression in the first place. Perhaps it is the workers' very ambivalence toward the industry that hampers the development of forms of solidarity. Since workers approve of some aspects of embroidery work and critique others rather than act collectively against the industry, they respond to exploitative practices in often individualized and fragmented ways: through producing lower-quality work, defaulting on returning merchandise, and frequently changing the ostaagars they contract with. Douglas Haynes, in his study of weaving in Western India, notes that even with the growth of wage labor in the industry in the 1930s, there was “no straightforward trend towards class consciousness and a proletarian identity.”Footnote 79 Part of the reason is that the horizontal ties that workers formed with others in similar economic positions were intercut with the vertical ties of kinship, patronage, and dependence that workers shared with their bosses.Footnote 80 Similar forces are at play in sari embroidery in the South 24 Parganas, where workers may be tied to ostaagars through vertical ties of family and patronage. In addition, in the contemporary situation, young male embroiderers, in particular, believe that participating in the industry contains the possibility of mobility, of becoming ostaagars in their own right. Thus they see themselves not just as workers, but as potential bosses.Footnote 81 This identification with ostaagars can also impede solidarity.Footnote 82 Many people I spoke with in Kulpi were also aware of the massive spread of the embroidery industry across Bengal. They articulated an understanding of their work as transient and mobile, and saw their labor as easily replaceable.
Regarding formal organizing, when I referred to his comments about low wages in the industry and asked Tapan about the possibilities of labor organizing and unionization, he was dismissive and cynical, saying, “Union to Poschim Bong-er barota bajiye dilo. Union Kore ki hobe?” (Unions ruined West Bengal. What will be accomplished through unions?) He dismissed my question as naive or foolish, well aware that the embroidery industry depends on low wages and can easily move to new places, as it had recently come to Kulpi. Indeed, after thirty-four years of Communist Party of India Marxist (CPM)-led rule and long histories of militant labor movements in the state, the possibilities of organizing in West Bengal are met with a level of cynicism that I encountered in many people I interviewed, including schoolteachers, embroiderers, and itinerant vendors. Organizing the unorganized is an essential and urgent task in contemporary India. Yet in West Bengal one encounters a culture of cynicism regarding the politics of labor organizing, which is not a new or emergent form of politics in the state. Rather, labor organizing is often seen as part of a long and fraught industrial past, and many workers in Bengal are distinctly disenchanted with its possibilities.
The Ambivalent Politics of Rural Outsourcing
Subcontracting in South Asia mirrors Marxian systems of “putting-out” and “domestic industry.”Footnote 83 Marx describes “domestic industry” as a complement to industrial capitalism. Focusing on lacemaking in nineteenth-century England, he argues that, rather than a wholesale shift to mechanized production, “the system actually prevalent in England is this: The capitalist concentrates a large number of machines on his premises, and then distributes the product of those machines amongst the domestic workers to work it up to its finished form.”Footnote 84 In the embroidery industry, machine-made synthetic saris are likewise finished in people's homes in the countryside. Like Marx's lace-making, sari embroidery is dispersed across a wide geographic area.Footnote 85 It employs large numbers of children who receive no education and who work at an occupation that is “monotonous, eye-straining, and exhausting.”Footnote 86
For Marx, domestic industry is worse than wage labor. Rural and dispersed, it is more exploitative than a factory system. It extracts labor out of children and women, has no regulation, no unionization, and is characterized by physically damaging work for long hours at low wages. Domestic industry continues so long as it is profitable, due to the greater exploitation of the workers. But as competition among producers increases, wages go down and hours go up, until finally “a critical point was reached. The basis of the old method, sheer brutality in the systematic division of labor, no longer sufficed for the extending markets and for the still more rapidly extending competition of the capitalists. The hour of the machine had struck.”Footnote 87 With it, Marx predicted, domestic industry entered the factory system.
Unlike Marx's England, the growth of domestic industry in India is not a step along the way to industrialization. Rather, rural outsourcing emerges in a postindustrial moment at a time when formal factories across India's cities, from Ahmedabad's textile mills to Kolkata's jute mills, have been closing down.Footnote 88 As industrial manufacturing slows, informal small-scale production is booming. There is no determined teleology to its growth in postliberalization India. Rather, domestic industry is the face of manufacturing in much of the country, an extreme form of dispersed and exploitative capitalism with little of organized factory production's promise for worker solidarity and organizing.
Yet perhaps we dishonor the ambivalence that producers in the industry themselves hold toward embroidery work when we focus solely on exploitation. Many workers read this industry in a second, contradictory manner, as a form of opportunity. Rural outsourcing allows people to stay in their villages if they so desire, and forms of subcontracting can lead to social mobility and new class trajectories for workers. While critiquing the creation of new child laborers and the exploitation of workers, workers and entrepreneurs also discuss the opportunities of rural outsourcing, thus articulating ambivalent positions rather than robust critiques.
An alternative, neoliberal reading of outsourcing is provided by one of India's most prominent businessmen. Billionaire Mukesh Ambani heads Reliance Industries, one of India's largest corporations, and he has plans to make India rival China in manufacturing. In contrast to China's model of large-scale, capital-intensive industrial manufacturing, which employs millions of workers, Ambani believes that India's small-scale and fragmented structure may be its strength. Instead of building factories, Ambani envisions Reliance sourcing goods manufactured in rural areas, such as handmade leather sandals from the Sugar Belt and tie-dyed Bandhani saris from Gujarat, for a national or global consumer market.Footnote 89
Ambani says: “The next big thing is: how do you create manufacturing with decentralized employment? The Chinese have got very disciplined top-down systems. We have our bottom-up creative systems.”Footnote 90 Ambani seeks to corporatize and bring under his Reliance Industries the many small-scale “non-corporate” entrepreneurs like Rabiul who operate across rural India—an alarming proposition.Footnote 91
The embroidery industry thus parallels both Marx's description of “domestic industry” as well as Ambani's “bottom-up creative system.” While a Marxian analysis of rural outsourcing sees it as a source of sheer exploitation, a neoliberal perspective views it as a process imbued with great potentiality. These analyses may seem diametrically opposed. Yet participants in the embroidery industry present elements of both analyses—prosperity and degradation, opportunity and exploitation—when articulating positions of ambivalence toward the industry.
Conclusion
Rural outsourcing has linkages with longer histories of dispersed manufacturing in India, which placed workers in advantageous positions by preventing sole dependence on agriculture, diversifying sources of livelihood, and allowing for strong bargaining positions based on caste solidarities.Footnote 92 The question emerges as to whether these possibilities exist in contemporary instances of rural outwork in India.
Is rural outsourcing to be celebrated as a form of production that has generated growth and much-needed employment in rural areas? Is it to be condemned because it is inherently exploitative? The ambivalent positions of workers and entrepreneurs within the embroidery industry in the South 24 Parganas suggest that it is both. This ambivalent stance, which is neither a wholehearted celebration of globalization from entrepreneurs nor a full-on critique from workers, echoes what people engaged in this industry feel about the products they produce and the labor processes through which they produce them.
Bauman argues that ambivalence is a byproduct of the very act of classification. Every act of classification produces ambivalence, which produces the desire to again classify more cogently, which produces again more ambivalence, and so on. Yet being and experience itself are always ambivalent and unclassifiable. Modernity, which is a rationalized desire for order and organization at an unprecedented epistemological and political scale, was “an era of a particularly bitter and relentless war against ambivalence.”Footnote 93 Yet for Bauman, modernity was a quest for an order that could never be fully established. Modernity's inability to fully excise ambivalence even through projects of extreme violence exposes its failure as an epistemological system and a political project. Thus for Bauman living with ambivalence and accepting ambivalence has political significance—the revelation of the impossibility and indeed the undesirability of impermeable and rigid classification.
Thus, the politics of ambivalence is the rejection of totalizing modernity's capacity for unprecedented violence. Yet living-in-ambivalence makes it very difficult to organize, or bring together. Indeed, Bauman argues that the “thorough, adamant and uncompromising privatization of all concerns has been the main factor that has rendered postmodern society so spectacularly immune to systemic critique and radical social dissent with revolutionary potential.”Footnote 94 The impossibility of containing ambivalence thus brings to the fore the fault lines of modernity, but in circumstances where people are unable to act collectively and forge anew. For Bauman, globalization is a postmodern condition, and “postmodernity is a site of opportunity and a site of danger; and it is both for the same reasons.”Footnote 95
Thus Bauman's theorization of ambivalence takes us some of the way toward understanding how processes of globalization can be met, not just with acceptance or resistance, but also with ambivalence. The politics of globalization in out-of-the-way places is not only a politics of acceptance or resistance, opposition, contestation, and critique. If it were, what would explain globalization's spread and reach, or its “stickiness”? Ambivalence partially explains why global capital adheres, but also why it sticks divergently, differentially, and loosely.
