Living and Praying in The Code

ETHICS OF SCALE: RELOCATING POLITICS
AFTER LIBERATION
Living and Praying in the Code:

The Flexibility and Discipline
of Indian Information
Technology Workers (ITers)
in a Global Economy
Sareeta Amrute
University of Washington
Abstract
This paper uses Jean Comoroffs argument in Body of Power, Spirit of
Resistance to reflect on the changing nature of religious practice in the contemporary world. It draws on Comaroffs method, which situates religion
in a complex social, economic, and political field that is itself in the process
of unfolding. Using Hindu practices among Indian IT workers in the diaspora as a case in point, the paper suggests that the forms of techo-scientific
labor that IT workers are involved in demands certain types of religious
practice that discipline mind and body. At the same time, engaging in those
practices opens up challenges to dominant tropes around religious belief
and worker disposition, since it creates critical spaces for reflection in the
Anthropological Quarterly, Vol. 83, No. 3, pp. 519550, ISSN 0003-549. 2010 by the Institute for Ethnographic
Research (IFER) a part of the George Washington University. All rights reserved.
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Living and Praying in the Code: The Flexibility and Discipline of Indian
Information Technology Workers (ITers) in a Global Economy
gap between religious practices, technological work, and the ideologies of

transnational and national technological economies. [Keywords: India,
Germany, Hinduism, Information Technology, practice]
he rhythm of Jean Comaroffs Body of Power, Spirit of Resistance is

given by the and, the not only, the also; the book follows a mode of
inquiry that refuses binaries, instead seeking to examine cultural conjunctions. The and marks the measure of the argument, allowing analyses
to build on one another, avoiding origins and endpoints, and instead
emphasizing how, in all social life, we take what is given us and re-form
it, we make reconstructions of existing reconstructions (1985:214).
Indeed, Body of Power offers us reconstruction in a double senseit is
both what Tshidi practitioners do when they remake orthodox Christianity
within colonialisms contours, and it is what Comaroff is doing when she
shapes the historical and ethnographic record to show how Zionism
comes over time now to reinforce, now to upend colonial domination.
Though mine is a study of Hindu religious worship among Indian
Information Technology workers employed abroad, I have found the
method of historical, ethnographic and political analysis that Comaroff
develops useful in making my arguments. It allows me to shift from thinking about the conjunction between religion and programming to focus
on religious practices and discourses as sites where diasporic and transnational Indian IT work is embodied. I focus on how Hindu religious traditions become available to ongoing reconstruction, continually subject to
reinterpretation and new mobilizations within prevailing economic and
social forces as Hindu coders shift from one place to another.
In what follows, an historical argument shows how programming is
attached to the developmental discourses of the Indian nation and how
Hinduism is re-imagined as part of, rather than preceding, the identity of
the nation-state. These two sets of relations, one between national identity and science and technology, and the other between national and religious identity, form the nexus in which programmers remake and reimagine Hindu practices. Most of the programmers who work in IT both
in India and abroad are Hindu, upper caste, and upper class, a sociological fact that can be traced to the prevalence of elite groups in Indias
Institutes of Technology (IITs) and on the whole, across the university system, itself a legacy of postcolonial national policies that privileged tech520
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no-scientific advancement over redistribution of opportunities as the

motor which would allow India to catch up with the west (Deshpande
2004). At the same time, in the United States and in Europe, Indian IT
workers are sought-after because they can fill gaps in domestic labor
markets and provide just-in-time labor for industries organized around
project-based work. The labor of Indian IT workers is often understood
in relation to inherited Orientalist tropes around Hindus (Inden 1990) as
capable of abstraction and asceticism. From both the vector of their integration in global economies and their attachment to the Indian nation
through developmentalist discourses, IT workers find that Hindu practices become sites of embodiment for both discipline within and critiques of these discourses.
Comaroff does not begin her analysis with religion as an object of
study but rather with religious practices. Her analysis begins with the
forms of mediation alive in the world of the Tshidi, the dynamics between
colonial power and subject, between First and Third worlds, between
oppression and resistance. The Churches of Zion, so argues Comaroff, are
best understood, and indeed become objects for analysis, because of the
crucial role they play in channeling and organizing forms of consciousness
that are resistant to hegemonies, particularly those constituted by industrial capitalism in South Africa. The study of religion then, in Comaroffs
work is linked to reconstructions of the political-economic terrain. This
strand of thought in her writing is echoed in the title of the bookthere
is no easy categorization possible for religious practice as either resistance
or domination. Resistance is formed out of the material trappings of
hegemony, and hegemony by necessity remains incomplete (Williams
1977). This processual approach to religion becomes more pronounced
over the course of the argument of Body of Power, as the earlier division
between structure and practice gives way to conjunctural histories that
produce long standing structures (254). Hindu practices among IT workers
can be approached in a way that highlights how prayer is linked to work,
national ideologies and the development of an ethics of migration. Within
the domain of Indian IT, workers often marshal the idea of appropriate
action and equilibrium to produce new conjunctures between right action
(dharma) and the conditions of labor in a global, high skilled economy.
In the years following the publication of Body of Power, the anthropological study of religion has been developed in ways that stress the complicated interdependencies between secular and religious thought (Asad
521
2003); the co-development of European religious movements and colonial

governance (Viswanathan 1998); and, especially in the South Asian context, the categorization of practices as distinct religions both by British
power and anti-colonial nationalist thought (Dirks 2001, van der Veer
2002). In the case of Hindu and Muslim worlds, the study of religion
through ethnography emerged as a particularly valuable tool in understanding the emergence of fundamentalisms and their complicated relationships to political formations (see especially Hanson 1999, Rajagopal
2001, Devji 2005, Mahmood 2008b). These latter works direct our attention to the way religious thought shapes and refigures national public
spheres through forms of mediation that express contradiction: contradiction between gender role and universal ethics (Mahmood 2005), between
secular and religious statehood (Hansen 1999), and transnational and
national forms of authority (Devji 2005, Rajagopal 2001). Especially when
applied to diasporic religious practices, a term explained below, the study
of religious practice seems to take those practices as straightforward
extension of underlying conjunctions between politics and capital. It is no
doubt true that the struggle of migrants is to reproduce their religious
culture in a foreign environment, and that networks of right-wing religious groups may tap into those politics of belonging (van der Veer
2002:183). Yet, for the Indian IT workers I discuss below, this does not
exhaust or even occupy their main struggle around the politics of
Hinduism. They are occupied with another way of practice, one that arises out of the nexus between Hindu practice and capital flow and in a different mode, offers up a critique of that very nexus.
In 2002, I traveled to Berlin, Germany to begin a project on the
European elaboration of the Indian Information Technology diaspora.
Meeting the protagonists of this story, whom I named Meenaxi Ravi,
Bipin, Rajeshwari and Mohan, along with many other ITers working as
software engineers on short-term visa contracts, caused me to wonder
how people inhabit categories that seem so fixed as to predetermine their
aspirations, ethical practices, and historical imaginaries. Over multiple
trips to Europe in the following years, I began to rethink the relationship
between technology and religion in the context of Indian computing.
I argue that the question of techno-scientific and religious practice
might best be thought of in terms of how they are being reconstituted in
relation to one another and in relationship to formations of value creation that we sometimes group under the term globalization. Just as
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Neeladri Bhattacharya reminds us to think through the mutual articulation of the religious and the political (2008:65), so too does it seem necessary to unpack mutual formation of the scientific and the religious without collapsing one into the other. The terms by which these young
computer programmers collectively are named (Indian ITers, Indian IT
workers) in discussions about new technologies and the changing nature
of work is itself a token of this process, demarcating an uneven fit
between the shape of new kinds of economies and subjects and the persons called on to work them. I take and reuse this lumpy name as a symptom of a peculiar dynamism in the current moment, a moment when the
form that the relationship of Hinduism, new technologies, and economic
formations is in the process of congealing.
Chris Fuller and Haripriya Narasimhan described the transnational
spaces of labor that Indian IT workers occupy. What they described for
workers in Chennai applies to the conditions of work in Germany, with the
telling exception that instead of working five days, most Indian IT workers I knew worked six, and worked between 50 and 60 hours a week
instead of the 40 to 50 described by Fuller and Narasimhan (2007:126):
Pressure to meet deadlines is also common and extra hours are then
expected, from men and women alike. Most work is done by teams
of software engineers, together with a few domain specialists, who
are supervised by project managers a teams size can vary from a
handful to a hundred or so, and some team members may be working abroad on-site, while others stay in India. Almost all staff work in
modern, open-plan offices and team members, male and female,
work closely together. [] Very importantly, major IT firms are universally understood to be part of a global industry, not just an Indian
one [] on-site overseas project assignments, lasting several months
or even a year or two, are a normal part of working life.
Aneesh Aneesh furthers the argument about the global nature of work
in Indian IT by suggesting that outsourcing and onsite work need to be
considered part of the same mechanisms of creating mobility and flexibility in technology-driven companies (2006). While working abroad, Indian
IT workers, as those I interviewed often told me, become part of other circuits of Indian belonging, especially for those that are part of ongoing
conversations around the status of the Indian state, Hindu religious prac523
tices, and the nature of the privileges and costs of working abroad. This
makes Indian ITers diasporic;that is, they rely on the link between
Hinduism and work established through the discursive practices of IT. At
the same time, diasporic imaginaries can be marshaled to criticize this
link and part of state and capital based hegemonies.
To anticipate my later argument, I suggest that ITers, rather than adhering to a strict definition of Hinduness or abandoning religion completely,
are involved in calibrating practices and beliefs in a manner that affords a
critique of the conditions of their labor. These acts of calibration are often
understood according to the idea of appropriateness. Ritual calibration for
practicing Hindus has long been thought of as both a form of intervention
into life and world and as a deontic imperative to produce symmetry
between a person and her surroundings (Eck 1996, Babb 1986). Doubtless
established connections between correct personhood and appropriate
action are at work here, but so too are supplementary practices of appropriateness informed by conditions of migration and work. Hinduism allows
a relationship to the work of programming that is twofold. On the one
hand, practices of prayer and meditation produce in the IT worker the kind
of concentration that their work requires; on the other, ritual practices can
transform the work that they do into the spiritual supports of family,
nation, and belonging. Here, Comaroffs arguments about the relationship
between leisure, prayer, and work are particularly salient, as she shows how
the elaborations on dress and performance practiced by the Tshidi both prepare them for industrialized work and function as a source of opposition to
that very co-option. Beyond showing how Hinduism helps tie terrains of
global capital and knowledge such as Information Technology together to
workers from South Asia and how it is used in everyday life to protect working subjects from being overrun by the demands of work and life abroad, I
also show towards the end of this essay how Hinduism and public life in an
Indian diaspora are being reformulated by subjects who are working and
living in between the demands and pleasures of high technology and of kinship, nationality, and personal devotion. To make these interrelated arguments, I first weave together the history of coding and computers in India
and the recent development of Hindu nationalism to demonstrate how,
while they have different origins, they are under particular historical circumstances made to be commensurable.
In the study of Hinduism, it is often difficult to identify what the standard religious practices could be in general, as Hindu practice varies
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widely by region, time period, class, and caste. In the case of Hindu
Indian IT workers, there is no identifiable sect or church that all who can
be classified as this type of worker belong to; it is more accurate to say
that they have a series of practices that have similar form and a series of
ritual events that mark public sites of belief (Novetzke 2008). What is
more, and among the group of ITers I observed, they all participate in
these events together, forming a shifting public helping shape belief. As
Comaroff points out, the task for the writer is to pay attention to the distinctive confluence of local and global factors, how its iconic forms and
practical implications are to be understood in terms of a particular peoples journey, bearing in mind that, while that journey might be similar
to expeditions elsewhere in the first and third worlds, neither the point of
departure nor the route taken are ever identical (1985: 254). I examine
the emergence of physical and discursive spaces as site where religious
practice can be linked to work in ways that move beyond the overdetermined tropes of Orientalism in the service of production. Modifying this
sentiment slightly, public shapings of Hindu practice mark them as events
pitched at once at different ethical scales (see Shipley, this volume).
Here, I consider how to account for peripheralization itself, and how to
account for a kind of globalism that incorporates into its workings the
very religious practices that, in her analysis, formed a backbone of resistance to neocolonial market penetration. I ask not whether the practices
of Hindu Indian ITers are or are not a form of resistance, but what exactly might they be making themselves resistant to? Rather than question
whether or not they occupy a space on the periphery, I ask, how can they
be both so needed and so marginal at the same time? Finally, this essay
takes on the prickly question of the role of religion in an age of technology, arguing neither for its demise nor for its resurrection, but showing
how internet technology workcoding, programming, making information flowbecomes interwoven with a reconstructed form of Hinduism
for Hindu IT workers from India.
Indian National Spaces and the Rise of IT

The rise of Hindu-only movements in Indiaoften called Hindu nationalist or BJP politics after the coalition of smaller parties that came to power
as the Bharatiya Janata Party in 1998, is roughly concurrent with the rise
of Indias computer industry.
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The first computer scientists emerging from India were graduates of the
Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), a family of state-funded math and
science colleges created in the early 1950s. These institutes were part of a
larger plan for the newly independent nation in which scientific study and
educational advancement were supports for Indias economic, social, and
political stability. Over the course of the next three decades the focus in IIT
engineering classes began to shift away from mechanical and civil projects
and towards computing, in keeping with trends at other similar institutes
in the United States and Europe (Saxenian 2002, Heitzman 2004, Nilekani
2008). At the same time, and in response to Cold War politics that made
India reliant on US and Soviet expertise, Indian government scientists
began developing mainframe computers while IIT graduates were
employed in increasing numbers to develop software and applications for
computers used in military and business within India. During the decades
following Independence (1950s through the 1980s), Indian schools of higher education developed significant levels of expertise in software development because of the government ban on importing small electronics (such
as refrigerators and computers), which led to a home-grown industry of
software applications designed to run on domestically produced machines.
When in the early 1990s India removed restrictions on imports for
small-scale electronics and loosened regulations governing foreign ownership of firms operating within the country, Indian computer scientists
were poised to enter the emergent international IT (information technology) market in strength, and in two ways that would become increasingly important as time went onas software experts employable in the
burgeoning competitive zones of Silicon Valley and Route 128 (Boston),
and as members first of research and development teams and then of
service units for US firms located in Bangalore and Pune. Both of these
areas benefited from the kinds of skills that engineers within India had
developed within the protected environment provided by government
import substitution policiesprogramming and coding skills, as opposed
to hardware design for example, could be transferred and adapted to
meet the needs of multinational software and services firms (Patibandla,
Kapur, and Peterson 2000).
As Indian ITers made their way into chains of migration through the
United States and then increasingly England, Western Europe and
Australia, they became a second or even third waveafter the doctors,
engineers, and research scientists that preceded themof Indian profes526
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sional, upper class and high caste immigrants. And, as trained computer
programmers formed pools of qualified labor in Indian cities, they became
a reliable source of coding and expertise in the third world that would
later develop into the global trade in computer-related services done on
contract basis called outsourcing (Aneesh 2006, Xiang 2007).
Over the same span of time, Hindutva, or Hinduness was emerging as a
cornerstone of popular politics. Voters began to mobilize around the imaginary of a Hindu nation and Hindus as the rightful heirs to the economic
value of India, now under threat from internal or external Muslim enemies. Reasons for the popularity of Hindutva were manifold, and included among them increasing alienation of a middle and lower-middle class
Hindi speaking (and other vernaculars including Marathi and Gujarati)
population from the English reading upper class public, the ability of
Hindu nationalist groups to provide goods and services on a neighborhood level for underprivileged classes, and the savvy use by the BJP and
other Hindutva parties of mass mediated technologies, especially television (see Rajagopal 2001, Hansen 2001, Nandy 1998). What voters found
appealing in these parties was a new combination of social programs and
moral pronouncements emphasizing traditional and exclusionary
Hindu moralities, themselves painstakingly constructed; coupled with an
aggressive pursuit of new forms of wealth, money and prosperity for the
parties loyal followers.
The rise of Indian IT and the rise of Hindutva can be read as local manifestations of the janus-faced nature of neoliberal globalizationat the
same moment that middle class Hindu Indian subjects began to imagine
their futures as expanding because of increased access to world markets
and the flow of investment moving towards India through IT, the suspicion, often correct, that these capital flows may be difficult to manage
and contain began to be displaced onto a population long considered
alien. In this context, Hinduism became both the vehicle to protect
India and one to help Indians solidifythrough both practices and ideologies equating Hinduism with particular sets of skillstheir place in the
multinational world of (IT) labor.
This combination of spiritual fervor and economic gain characterizes
the emergent attitude of many religious institutions towards new economic formations. It also goes a long way, in my opinion, in explaining
their intuitive appeal. If there is new money to be had, then that new
money seems more elusive than ever because it circulates more widely,
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quickly and loosely than before. Divine means may, indeed, be the best
suited to catch these uncanny forms of materiality. Yet, as Indian programmers discovered, there is a different catch in marshalling religiously
derived characteristics in work abroad. The stories of ITers were peppered
with accounts of glass ceilings and culturo-religious assumptions, where
the personal ambition of a worker was constrained by the purported
inborn characteristics that accompanied Hindu programmerswhat
Povinelli called being caught in a genealogical, community-bound grid
(Povinelli 2006). Conversations among IT workers discussed how to
respond to questions like Why do Hindus worship monkeys? or Whats
the significance of the color red? All agreed that providing convincing
answers to these questions shored up the authenticity and therefore the
brand of Indian programmers. Recognition of the limiting affects of a
homogeneous definition of Hinduism, as I discuss below, contributed to
the reworking of Hindu practice and rhetoric in the IT diaspora.
Over the course of the 1990s and into the new millennium, programmers also were swept up in new transnational migrations as they responded to temporary contract work and some long-term employment opportunities in the technology industries of the United States, Europe, and
Australia. During the same period, the politics of religion in India brought
about the rise of the Hindu fundamentalist BJP party, which came into
power in 1998. For the underclasses, this meant party-sponsored access
to basic goods and services such as health care and sanitation (Hansen
2001). For the middle classes, it meant increased representation in national politics especially through languages and the symbolics of Hindu
mythology (Rajagopal 2001), and for that section of the middle classes
that was upwardly mobile, it meant opening the national market to multinational companies and making India modern in an age when modernity
was best expressed through, not against, culture. This last impulse, as will
become evident, was not due to an internal or eternal need to maintain
an Indian identityalthough it was often voiced in those terms (Das
2002)but rather was itself a condition of the newly globalizing market
because value on this market was and continues to be assigned according
to constructed notions of gender, race, age, and ethnicity. In all of this, as
many thoughtful commentators have written, Muslim Indians became the
remainder and the reason for Indias lack of success; they were blamed as
competitors for limited goods, as backward persons needing remedy,
and as internal threats to the nation with outside funding (Appadurai
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2006). All of this heated rhetoric led to the now infamous mass killings
and riots that preceded the fall of the BJP from power in 2004.
The BJP was ousted from power in the 2004 elections that ushered in
Manmohan Singh as prime minister after Sonia Gandhi stepped aside as
leader of the winning Congress Party. This result was widely seen as a surprise and the reasons for the BJP loss are still being debated. The Congress
Party continued to be successful in the recent 2009 elections. These
changes in the Indian political scene all count towards the backdrop
against which Indian IT workers engage with the practices and discourses
of Hinduism. One of the legacies of the Hindutva movements for these
programmers is to undo the binary between secular, scientific and development discourses and the discourses of religious right and duty. Of
course, this binary never really existed as starkly opposed in action, but
Hindu practices have moved squarely within the domain of public and
political culture. The next section turns to the relationship between
transnational IT migration and changing definitions of India.
Out-migration and New Definitions of India

As the domestic software economy grew, and as migration out of India
continued, Indias middle class began to shift, at first in aspiration and
imaginary, and then in terms of patterns of consumption and political
affiliation (Mazzarella 2003). The avenues of upward mobility along which
people inside and outside India traveled began to converge. Government
jobs, long the staple of middle class families within India, were replaced
with jobs in the private sector, most crucially, jobs in computing, IT, and
related services. As happened all over the developing world, the late
1980s and 1990s saw the very industries that nationalist, protectionist
economies nourished incorporated into loosely moored industrial formations that touched down in many parts of the world concurrently, the
most obvious examples of this phenomenon being perhaps the formation
of Export Processing Zones in China and the proliferation of maquilladoras in towns along the U.S.-Mexican border (see Ong 2006; Salzinger 2003).
In India, the move towards multi and transnational economic formations in the computer industry was triggered at first by IMF-induced fiscal
adjustments in 1991, devaluing the rupee and then quickly following the
opening of domestic markets to foreign goods (including computers) on
the one hand and foreign ownership of firms operating in Indian (such as
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software companies) on the other (Saxenian 2004). Complicating the relationship between nation, technology, and economy still further was the
change traceable to the same decades in the definition of the Indian citizenry. As the national economy began to spread outside the political
boundaries of India, the idea of belonging that bound a citizen to her
place began to shift, and the Indian citizen received its supplement
through the figure of the diasporic and the non-resident Indian.
Serious out-migration from India began with the shipment of indentured servants as replacements for the emancipated slaves of the
Caribbean, South Africa and Indian Ocean islands from Calcutta, Bombay,
and Madras (Lal 1983, Tinker 1974). Closer to the current moment, the
first wave of Indian professionals and working class migrants entered the
United States and Britain in large numbers after the Second World War.
Yet the term diaspora as applied to South Asian populations is definitively of more recent provenance. It may be said of Indian IT professionals
that they were the first wave to migrate from India having the term diaspora firmly affixed to their passports, rather than, like those who came
before them, having to be retrospectively baptized with the term.
Diaspora, a term of address (Edwards 2006), has for South Asia a
simultaneous double-birth. It names both a complex poetics of postnationalist belonging and a claim of ownership by the Indian nation-state
on its ostensibly most productive membersIT and other professional
workers. And, just as this double-birth is both a mode of national hegemony and an escape from the container of the nation, so too its religious referent (Gilroy 1991). Sikhs and Tamils, two groups defined by ethnicity and
religion, were the first groups to be baptized diasporas according to the
principle of extra-national belonging, and their battles against the Indian
and Sri Lankan national regimes respectively were carried out from abroad
as well as from within these two countries (Axel 2001, Jeganathan and
Ismail 1995). Yet, the idea of a diasporic identity, in the sense of transcending a single national boundary, and opposed to national identity in its very
articulation, was quickly adapted to the needs of a developing nation in a
multinational economic environment. The Indian (or more broadly,
depending on context, South Asian) diaspora became then a bifurcated,
contradictory placeholder, at once the rallying cry for a post-national form
of belonging, and a descriptor binding out-migrants through moral compunction and an imaginary of continuity sans location to the national community of India (Ho 2006). Without going into detail about the contortions
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required to fold out-migrants into the Indian national imaginary, it is clear

that the formation we are talking about here is a product of a specific set
of historical circumstances, especially the redefinition of nation in an age
of multinational economies, accomplished in a powerful way through the
reconstruction of the diasporic Indian as a model citizen. For political parties in India, including the BJP, Hinduism became in this schema an organizing concept that, despite long-held religious prohibitions against leaving
Bharat (India), could be reconstructed as a basic identity transcending
place and time (Kelly and Kaplan 2007).
New-found forms of connectivity arising from Internet technologies
and other electronically mediated forms of communication enabled much
of this widespread national and transnational affiliation. These forms of
connectivity fueled the building of Hindu chauvinist political parties and
interest groups through creating online Hindutva publics and by channeling funds into projects both in India and abroad (Matthew and Prasad
2000). The spread of these technologies also gave rise to the mobile
Indian worker (Aneesh 2006, Xiang 2007, Fuller and Narasimhan 2007).
The link between the two is not necessarily fixed a priori. Just as there
were many ways that Christianity was taken up by populations in the
South Africa described by Comaroff, there are multiple ways Hinduism is
taken up by diasporic members of Hindu communities. As will be discussed below, the practices of Hinduism that IT workers engage in is shot
through with recognitions of the way their labor is mobilized abroad and
at the same time tries to fold that labor into other kinds of projects, especially ones that can be critical of a Hinduism as used as a shield to mask
conditions of greed and exploitation. The creation of critical distance
through Hindu practice is not altogether capable of separation from the
conditions that feed a Hindu diaspora in its other forms. The very construction of the ideal Indian and Hindu worker, while it may be a false
image and is sometimes recognized as such, is also the very condition
through which Indian citizens maintain, at least in part, their privileged
status as mobile, highly salaried Indian IT workers.
An Economy of Techno-Signs
In the years after 1947, a relationship was established between technoscience and the nation-state in India that in many ways underwent a similar construction to the relationship between religion and the Indian
531
nation state. Both religion and science became touchstones for refiguring institutions of government as cleansed of the negative associations of
the colonial era. Techno-science and religion gained purchase as universal sources of ethics and morality by being oriented towards the democratic goals of an independent nation-state. As an episteme belonging
squarely to the European Enlightenment, science and technology was a
standard bearer of British, then Indian governmentality, as Gyan
Prakashs seminal work has shown. In the post-independence, post-colonial formation of science and technology, scientific methods were meant
to purify institutions of governance of their colonial taints (Prakash
1999, Gupta 1998). At issue was whether techno-science could exist free
of the structures of colonial science: could a more scientific mode of
governance be a more just one? This continued and ongoing ambivalence
in the inheritance of science and technology has, in Abrahams terms,
made a fetish of national sciences and their corresponding technological, military, and now economic applications, both covering up and
revealing the underlying contradictions of state power. In post-independence India, governance was supported by continual interaction with
what had been relegated, at the level of ideology, to the pure, cultural
substrate of the nation, defined as religious tradition and as the undifferentiated populace. This separation was marked deeply by caste and
class differences, and it fell to upper caste, educated elites to become
patrons of the nation and its people (Hansen 1999).
This suggests that science and religion in the first few decades after
Indian independence were part of a parallel construction of state power,
rather than being opposed to one another. Both served to remake a state
distanced from the politics of colonial control. Religion created spaces for
the expression of cultural nationalisms, while techno-science did so by
demonstrating how the state could be in the service of, rather than in the
business of oppressing, the people. Science and national interest were
never fully separated in India but were linked through a discourse of ethical purity, as was national interest and religion. Of course, both these
unstable constructions yielded results much different than their stated
intents. The exercise of demonstrations of technological and scientific
prowess, especially when linked to demonstrating the force of state
power, and of piety, especially in the illustration of individual charisma,
enabled and masked the oppression of marginalized and minority communities (Abraham 1999, Gupta 1998).
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The celebrated history of 20th and 21st century Indian computing

can be understood as part of this emerging circulation of economies, cultural ideologies, and forms of postcolonial nationalism. Beginning in the
1950s, Indian military and government computing began to assemble scientists to build mainframe computers, although at many turns, the computing program relied on hardware from foreign companies such as IBM.
Investment in computing increased dramatically during Indira Gandhis
term as prime minister, in an effort to insulate military technologies
within India from the politics of the Cold War. Indeed, computing technologies took on a national, independent, and patriotic sheen especially
in relation to nuclear and other military technologies through the 1970s
and 1980s precisely because they were seen as a necessary tool in the
making of, for example, Indias atomic bomb (Abraham 1999). Through
the growth of an international market in software and business services,
computing emerged in the 1980s as an independent field of scientific
investigation with applications in commerce. Concomitantly, firms in
Silicon Valley and elsewhere began hiring Indian engineers in high numbers to fill their programming ranks, even while they began to move
their research and development operations to Indian cities, the most
important innovator being Texas Instruments in 1985 (Aneesh 2006,
Nilekani 2009, Patibanda 2000).
As business models began to shift towards multi-sited production, arguments began to be restructured to fit the new working and selling environment, and Indian ITers began to be sold to increasingly worried audiences
as not only cheaper but more flexible, more docile, better at math, and in
generally, temperamentally, socially, and spiritually better suited to the
long, abstract work of building code. IT and Indiaa happy confluence of
inborn talentand the need for it was how the argument enthusiastically
was pitched in the boardrooms of western conglomerates and in the chambers of the Lok Sabha. The assertion of a chain of Hindu supremacy dating
back to Vedic times, especially in math, science, and medicine on the part
of Hindutva boosters mingled with the residue of sixties-era revivals of
India spirituality in Europe and the United States to create a strong bond
between the Indian ITers ability to code uncomplainingly and the traditional Hindu-Indian values of anti-materialism, overcoming obstacles and
asceticism. On the west coasts of the United States and India, in the halls
of government in Delhi and Washington, in the German headquarters of
SAP and other IT centers, hoary arguments about the otherworldly asceti533
cism of Hinduism were resuscitated and altered to fit the strictures of the
IT workplace, consigning Indian ITers to the back office and making international mobility a condition of employment.
The association of religious institutions with particular forms of affect
and interiority is not new. At the end of the 19th century, Max Weber
penned a treatise on the qualities of Hindu-Buddhist thought he believed
to be at heart inimical to the rise of capitalism. Otherworldy, ascetic and
caste-bound, the Eastern subject would not be the bearer of a spirit
directed towards the rational ordering of persons and things. At the end
of the 20th and beginning of the 21st century, those otherworldly qualities quicken the fantasy of the perfect Information Technology worker. In
the dreams of many a business manager, the Indian software engineer
springs fully formed from an IIT or other Indian bastion of math and science, his spirituality intact. He, although the IT worker may be increasingly imagined as she, works for long hours in a perfect symbiosis
between human and machine, producing profitable abstractions and caring little about paychecks. The ascetic spirituality of the programmer is
meant to fill the coffers of the West with the spoils of digital labor. And
importantly, unlike the truculent, unionized factory worker, the engineer does not have to be forced to work hard for little pay. Because of
her nonmaterial, non-selfish and math-oriented spirituality, she is naturally inclined to do so.
How are we to understand this particular reemergence of an old
abstraction? One way is to pronounce the Protestant ethic ailing and to
diagnose a Hindu-Buddhist-Muslim-Sikh-Taoist-Confucian Ethic as the new
heart of contemporary capitalism. This line has been taken up over the
past three decades with enthusiasm, until an economic crash coupled
with the feint of corruption and mismanagement seems to remind everybody, if only temporarily, of the interconnectedness and unevenness of
things. It might then be a good time then to think in general about
realignments of religion and science happening in many parts of the
world, among them the United States and South Asia. As I have alluded to
above, the alignment of Hindu math and science with success in programming does not animate capitalism per se, but a particular internationally
distributed division of labor within it. Islamic science, as much as it is
enunciated, does not do the same work because it marks the limits of toleration and because it is not hooked into a particular diasporic subject of
science, like the high class, high caste Hindu programmer.
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Religious Practice among Overseas Hindu Coders

As mentioned at the outset, Indian ITers, unlike the Tshidi that Comaroff
studies, are neither an ethnic group nor of one religion, nor are they of a
particular sub-sect of one religion, like the church of Zion. While Body of
Power focuses on the church, I focus instead on how IT workers come to
form their own set of practices in response to conditions of working programming jobs in diaspora. For Hindu Indian ITers, affiliation with a particular sect is not the mode of social change, but rather engaging with a
public discourse generated around Hinduism, calibrating personal practice to the demands of that public discourse, and using both to push for
reformations in the relationship between religion and rule are the means
through which Hinduism, nation, and technology jostle against each
other and become the fertile ground for making meaning of the fastpaced economic, social, and political change.
The relationship that Indian IT workers develop to religious practice is
motivated by class interests. IT workers are often considered part of, if not
paradigmatic of, Indian middle class formations. This middle class, which is
not necessarily best described through income level or percentage of the
population (Deshpande 2004), may to a certain degree be described as aspirational, that is, as sharing a certain relationship between the present and
the future that should be marked out by an increased standard of living and
access to consumer goods (Fernandes 2006). Yet, as Fuller and Narasimhan
point out, the material investments that aspiration takes depends very
much on where in the new middle class subjects are located. For IT workers, those investments take the form of expenditures on education and
housing rather than in desire directed at tangible consumer goods (Fuller
and Narashiman 2007:135). Even more so does this attitude hold among IT
workers who are on short-term contracts overseas. Among the IT workers
whom I interviewed in Germany, there was considerable effort spent on
economizing and saving for the future. Estimates provided in interviews
suggest that about one third of yearly earnings was saved, with some portion of that money being sent home or used to bring relatives to Germany
for short term stays, or financing the education of brothers or sisters,
cousins and in-laws. Biao Xiang (2007) found similar familial and corporate
earnings strategies at work in his study of Indian IT workers in Australia. He
connects these strategies to long-extant practices of dowry, arranged marriage, and caste discrimination, which all collude to produce pressure on
overseas ITers to accumulate the capital and status associated with stays
535
abroad. Surely the global circuits of work involved in IT perpetuate and

even exacerbate existing modes of social and economic exclusions. At the
same time, the discussions around appropriate religious practice undertaken by IT workers abroad can be critical of some kinds of exclusion because
of the way those very chains of labor work themselves out in practice.
Religion and economy increasingly begin to map out the same space of
labor for IT workers. As I described above, the critique of state-driven economic reason that religious practice provides in the context of postcolonial
India can also be marshaled to critique this very overlap between religious
practice and techno-economies.
Those among ITers who are Hindu share a particular disposition that,
like members of the church of Zion, both set them apart from and cause
them to collude with what they term orthodoxy, which in this context
means adherence to the Vedic rules and rituals of their parents generation. (Orthodoxy is not the same as the fundamentalism but can sometimes overlap. I make this point to suggest that the discussion on
Hinduism and technology has focused justly but too exclusively on
Hindutva.) The Indian ITers with whom I did fieldwork between 2002 and
2004 were all from Hindu upper caste families. Their families had middle
class professions, including government jobs, running agriculture operations, and bank work. They were young, all born in the late 1970s and
1980s. As a group, they practiced Hindu rituals on a daily and on a holiday basis. Although they did not live in Indiathe group I was working
with was stationed in Berlin, Germanythey arranged their apartments
in the manner of middle-class homes in large India cities. Each apartment
was shared by more people than is standard for houses in Western
Europe, either by married couples or by roommates of the same gender.
A typical flat would be divided into a front sitting room and a shared bedroom. The bedroom would have a bed and wardrobe for each resident,
sometimes if the space was small, beds would be bunked on top of one
another. The front room would have chairs and other kinds of seating
arranged around the sides of the room, and in some cases a coffee table,
and in the corner a phone line or personal computer.
The flat as a scene of action in their story of Hinduism and information technology is set against the background of the politics and racial
imaginaries of Western Europe and Germany, where the previous postwar history of guest-worker (gastarbeiter) programs has left behind both
a large Turkish population (including both Turkish immigrants and their
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descendants, who because of German immigration law are eligible for

German citizenship by birth only if born after 2001), and a strong link
between race, migration, and types of labor (since most German guestworkers were employed in construction). As I found out, this makes
Germany an especially good place to study the conjunction between
ideas and practices of Hinduism, racial identity, and the forms of labor
demanded in the practice of multinational IT, since in Germany the link
between culture and spirituality is an index of race-based characteristics,
and kinds of work is in some respects both more concrete and more
taken for granted in public discourse.
During fieldwork, I noticed that the sitting room is the focus of the
house when entertaining visitors and the social life of these Indian
ITers is to a great degree made up of visits to one anothers houses.
Many evenings, they and I would sit around the sitting room sipping
hot tea out of flimsy plastic cups, and the conversations would go
round, in what Dipesh Chakrabarty referred to in the Bengali contexts
as adda, the practice of getting friends together for long, informal and
unrigorous conversation (2000:181). The sitting room, discussed in
more depth below, was a key mediating space between the Hinduism
practiced by these ITers and the other established and available repertoire of religious practices, especially orthodoxy and the practices of
governmental Hinduism. Chakrabarty is surely right in his argument for
adda as one answer to the conundrum of dwelling in modernity. But
the substance and sites of the modern and the home change from place
to place and time to time. The adda of the sitting room is one of those
places for the development of alternative religious practices that might
be overlooked if meaning, symbols, and spaces of religion are defined
in advance of investigation. As I will argue below, Hindu ITers recognize Hindu essentialist rhetoricas deployed both by Indian organs of
state and by overseas CEOsas belonging squarely in modernity, that
is, as part of the clutch of factors that bind them to a certain mode of
being, which through their own practices of worship they both uphold
and try to upend.
The regularity of daily worship among these ITers is sporadic, some
pray at a home altar every day, some almost never. Yet they all congregate at the largest apartment on special occasions, or to observe particular courses of prayer to achieve specific ends. The house deities are most
often kept in the kitchen, past the sitting room. In most apartments, a
537
Ganesh murti (figure/image) resided in the kitchen or on a table near the

bed. Most houses have a special area for the altar, often near the stove,
supporting one main deity and then murtis of other deities and saints. In
most apartments, the main deity is Ganesha, the elephant-headed god
widely considered a remover of obstacles. Prayers in the morning and the
evening are said to ask for success, to bless meals, and to remember relatives and loved ones far away. In all these acts of daily piety, there is little discernable difference between what goes on in the homes of young
Indian ITers and practices of Hindu worship among the middle classes I
have observed in India and the United States, including in my own family. Yet, as ITers often pointed out to me, there is another layer to collective prayer among this group of young people who are not family but who,
nevertheless, engage in forms of fictive kinship through celebration and
prayer togetherin other words, daily piety helps form them into a provisional household. Their acts of daily piety are part of a leisure time
away from the stresses of the IT workplace. Leisure time as spent in prayer
is a complex affair. It is a mode of creating a place beyond the reach of
business and bringing the situation of being in diaspora back into the fold
of being within India. In this sense, daily prayer is a ritual that transforms
the value of everyday work into the currency of familial, national and cultural value by creating another framework beyond the office in which
work can be understood.
The role of women, who are also programmers or workers in IT, is particularly important in creating a parallel system of values that articulates
with the world of coding. They were often the figures most intent on
maintaining worship on a daily basis, and were involved, with the assistance of men, in preparing food, altars, and coordinating events for festival days. Here, women programmers take on a well-established role as
maintainers of a system of social reproduction that allows Indian ITers to
enter the workforce replenished and renewed (Dube 2001). It would be a
mistake however to simply say that women are consigned to double-duty
as wage earners in the global economy and as preservers of the patterns
of leisure and religious worship that help make Hindu IT workers. For
many women, taking an active role in religious discourse, debate and
practice in the diaspora is a way of reshaping gender roles and reforging
links between themselves, work and leisure time that is antithetical to
the practices of their mothers and grandmothers. This too is a reconstruction, as asserting themselves social time and space outside of work
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makes them important, indeed indispensable figures in the life of adda,

being overseas yet connected to home and in the constitution of Hindu
Indian IT culture. At the same time however, it does indeed bind them to
particular forms of energy expenditure and effort in the world of cosmopolitan India ITa bind that can slip, if they are not vigilant, into the allencompassing role of being an overseas mother to Indian programmers (Gal and Kligman 2000, Parrenas 2001).
If work can be transformed through prayer into the stuff that holds up
the material base of family and of nation, prayer also can be a means of
maintaining the discipline and concentration of mind that work itself
requires. This is particularly true of morning prayers and meditation,
which ITers told me, in addition to being offerings and prayers to God,
also serve the purpose of concentrating and clearing the mind, preparing
it for the abstract work of coding.
The way ITers practice Hinduism is at odds with both the idea of
Hinduism that circulates in the offices of IT in western cities and with
practices that can be called secular and nationalist (Asad 2003, Taylor
2007), as well as with practices of fundamentalist Hinduism, although
they use and reconstruct elements from all of them. To put it briefly and
all too schematically, as technologists trained in nationalist institutes,
they have inherited the notions of science as development, and development as progress towards a version of life as lived in the West. At the
same time, as sojourners in the current global economy, they are subject
to a simplified version of Hinduism and India, one that mistakes the way
ITers are asked to work for their internal disposition, and attributes to
Hindus such traits as an innate ability for long hours, analytical operations, and dislike of materialism. Finally, as part of a generation who
grew up when career aspirations were moving away from the government
sector and towards private enterprise, and middle class ideology was correspondingly moving from state-based to newly liberal forms of national
development, they have been subject to a line of thought that is highly
critical of government. That critical stance has often been used by parties of the right in India to make claims for Hindu national hegemony, a
move that has fostered an ideology that Hindus have a particular relationship to math and science. This is a position that ITers abroad, as discussed below, both rely on as a kind of cultural capital, and resist as part
of a continued critique of inappropriate uses of religious thought in state
power and capital formations.
539
Gurus and Adda as Ways of Reconstructing

a Hindu Public Sphere
The evidence of the way ITers try to reconstruct received practice in
Hinduism are twofold. The first is in the way they use the adda form of
discussion to express their differing practices, the act of discussion itself
being one of the most important means of expressing agency beyond
what their jobs and their allegiance to India requires of them. The second
is in the way that they use personal gurus to guide their religious life. In
the last section of this essay, I will discuss practices of personal devotion
and then return to adda to unpack how a public sphere of discussion
around religion becomes one of the main pillars of establishing alternative practices of Hinduism among ITers abroad.
The idea of a guru or personal teacher has much weight in contemporary Hindu practice (see Narayan 1989). Gurus can have large or small followings, they are often considered saints, they are sometimes cheats and
scoundrels, some live in poverty, many have become rich through the
donations of their followers, establishing vast compounds with fleets of
limousines. The opinion in India about gurus and related spiritual figures
such as sanyasins (world-renouncers) is mixed, with certain gurus the subject of suspicion due to the vast material resources they control and the
miracles they claim to have performed (Narayan 1989). Among the followers of any particular guru there exists the belief that the guru has, if not
the power to do miracles, at least vision, foresight, and a method that can
be taught to devotees as a means of bettering their own lives and attaining mastery over the uncertainties of human existence (enlightenment).
This power and the beneficial aspects of it can be gained, according to a
gurus followers, through being in the gurus presence and then implementing his suggestions in everyday life.
Sri Sri Ravi Shankar is just one example of the kind of guru popular
among the Indian ITers I met. Leader of the Art of Living Foundation,
Shankar has developed a method of meditation and breathing exercises that
he promotes as a way to bring peace and calm to even the most hectic life.
In fact, the Art of Living Foundation runs courses geared to the business
world and especially to those in the Internet economy, while the philanthropic arm of his foundation runs programs for prisoners and initiates
development projects to end violence in war zones (see www.artofliving.org).
For the ITers who follow his teachings, the main purpose of meditation and
breathing exercises is to give them the emotional and moral sustenance they
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need to carve out a space for themselves within the daily press of their jobs.
Following the teachings of Sri Sri Ravi Shankar is a way to establish spacetimes during the day unsaturated with the economic logic of short-term
work contractsa logic which allows the holder of such a contract to harbor
no illusions of advancement in the company that employs her. The globalized sphere of religious practice forms through mutual modes of dependencies, as gurus need followers abroad, and in this particular kind of diaspora guru-shishya (teacher-student) relationships seem to be gaining in
popularity. As previously mentioned, the mediation that goes on before
work, and celebrating festivals on the weekends nevertheless makes ITers
more ready than ever to work long hours in front of computer screens doing
the repetitive duties that other programmers would rather not do.
In fact, although I cannot elaborate fully here, there is a great deal of
overlap between the logic of the code that ITers write during the weekday
and the religion that they practice outside of work. Both have an asymptotic aspectboth prayer and coding are potentially infinitely expandable, the supplicant or coder having a greater deal of control or precision
over the end product the closer she gets to infinity itself, defined as a perfect match between code and process on the one hand and transcendental wisdom (pragyaa, gyaanodhya) on the other. So, when ITers pray, they
are also transmuting the logic of coding onto the logic of prayer (and vice
versa), making for a world in which the horizons of their aspirations are
always just after the next big project and just beyond what is graspable by
human intellect.
Cutting across the increasingly tight interweaving of personal devotion
and time spent in front of a personal computer are practices that open up
a gurus teachings to a wider set of morals and articulations. It is at the
intersection of practices of devotion and talk about devotion, emblematically represented by the threshold between kitchen and sitting room, where
practices that challenge the Hindu orthodoxy emerge. On Indian
Independence day, in August 2004, I observed one such conversation,
where the sitting room became the coffeehouse, and talk emerged that
made Indian ITers Hinduism into a kind of critique of Hindu orthodoxy,
marked for these programmers by strict adherence to Vedic texts and codes.
Over the course of the day, I had accompanied a group of 12 programmers as they celebrated independence, first at the Indian Embassy, and
then at a small Hindu temple in the city. After these two stops, the group
visited with one another in the sitting room of one of the programmers, a
541
woman named Meenaxi. In Meenaxis sitting room, after a pilgrimage of

sorts through the city, the talk turned to the nature of religion and the
validity of miracles. Charting a course through the city of Berlin that began
at its diplomatic core, at the site of power and prestige of an international
capital, they cut away from the center to immerse themselves in an immigrant neighborhood (Kreuzberg) where other, non-Indian, non high-tech
immigrants live, including the Sri Lankan Tamils who settled in Berlin in the
1980s as refugees from the Sri Lankan civil wars and established the Hindu
temple that the ITers visit. Finally, they moved towards their homes, once
again traversing the center of the city on their way, south to north, from one
immigrant neighborhood to another. As they shifted location, they traveled
through sites of displacement, places that they are and yet are not completely a part of, such as the Embassy, the commuter train, and the Sri
Lankan Hindu temple. The conversation they then have in their temporary
home can be read as a commentary on this state of movement and shift,
and an attempt to establish a way to define a public sphere of participation
for ITers both within and against the institutionalized spaces of inclusion
they have been visiting all day long. Rather than thinking of any one of
these spaces as representative of Indian ITers or of the moments of displacement themselves as representative of a community in exile, I think of
the movement itself as marking out a subjectivity that is both privileged
and unprivileged, because unfixed it is wide-ranging and is working out a
way of relating spiritual practice to an idea of politics in an unceasing way.
The significance of this walk for the ITers is that in the course of the day,
many of the geographic sites important to their success as overseas programmersthe embassy, the temple, the urban commercial core of
Berlinhad been seen and experienced. The days events had given them
ample material for reflection on the political, historical, and cultural surrounds that had helped produce the current conditions of their lives.
Sitting in a circle in her living room, in a moment of peace after the
long events of the day, the subject of Tirupati [the most wealthy temple
in India, in the state of Tamil Nadu] came up. I said I had never been
there, but had certainly heard of it. This was to be quite an amazing conversation, and I copied it down in my research notes as best as I could
remember at home. I reproduce the conversation here divided into three
blocks that address three separate themes. The blocks also adhere in a
general way to the flow of conversation as one theme tumbled over into
the next. The talk took place for the most part in English, with side
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translations going on at intervals to clarify points in Telugu or Tamil for

those who missed one of the points of argument said in English.
Speaker 1 (Mohan): After the Vatican, Tirupati has the most money of
all religious institutions.
Speaker 2 (Rajeshwari): There are no dress codes at Tirupati as at other
temples. This ruins the feeling of the place.
Speaker 3 (Praful): They havent gotten so far as to impose dress codes,
but despite this the place is still very auspicious and holy, you get a
good feeling there.
Speaker 4 (Bipin): It is the stone that sweats that makes it special. It is
amazing, but they could also do more to develop natural attractions in
the surrounding areas.
Speaker 2 (Rajeshwari): The stone sweats because of the great deal of
humidity there.
[here, various theories on why the stone sweats are proposed by the various speakers]
Speaker 1 (Mohan): But the scientific minds havent been able to solve
this, how should we be able to solve this now?
In this block of conversation, the speakers map out and index the
conundrums of practicing Hinduism in conjunction with being, as ITers
are, of scientific disposition. Under secular nationalist modes of thinking,
the place of belief, at least for English-educated upper and middle classes was decidedly of secondary importance, behind the more pressing
needs of water, increased agricultural needs, power, and weaponry. The
conversation opens with a set piece about the relationship between what
is often called tradition and modernity, and frames the contradiction as
between belief on the one hand and science on the other. The first speaker, Mohan, suggests a resolution to this conflict by stating that there is
something beyond science that science cannot explain. But as the remaining conversation will show, this idea is not a satisfactory solution, in part
because of the demands being put on ITers by the conditions in which
they work. That is, a limit between science and belief that might correspond to a boundary between public, official action and private faith cannot stand. Instead, the link that is made equally in the halls of the IT
workplace and in the rhetoric of Hindutva demands that religion antedate
science and become its founding principle.
543
During the next segment of talk, Ravi, an engineer training at Potsdam

University, said, I dont believe in God anyway. This started a heated discussion between him and Meenaxi that was joined after a few minutes by
other members of the group. Ravi and Meenaxi emerge in the middle of
this extended conversation as the prime movers of debate; they act as
main debates, the rest of us as chorus, interveners, and listeners.
Meenaxi: Have you even before you were about to take an exam,
asked God to help you? Have you ever said, please God, let me have
a good score?
Ravi: No, I believe in myself, I rely on myself to do well.
Meenaxi: When you were in the hospital, after your operation, didnt
you then ask for God?
Ravi: Yes, I did just then for a minute, but I only think of God, I only
am thinking of that when I think about very big things, like the creation of the universe. I dont understand why people think of God only
when they want to get some good result. I dont think that just
doing puja [prayer] will get you a good result.
Ravi: I do not understand how some people can do puja and then go
out and do bad things. I know what is good and bad, what is wrong and
right. For example, smoking is bad. People who smoke are bad. The
only responsibility is self-responsibility. For example, in Hindi movies,
before the movie starts, they always show a picture of God in order to
bless the film, regardless of the fact that the film contains violence and
all sorts of dirty things.
Speaker 4 (Bipin): But that God is for the success of the enterprise.
Ravi: But why should God make an enterprise successful that includes
bad things?
In this segment of talk, the question of belief quickly shades into the
problem of appropriateness. Here, Ravi references the long tradition in
Indian commerce and government to bookend any enterprise with a
benediction and a prayer. For Ravi, belief has become an involuntary
impulse, invoked for all manner of things whether large or small,
whether moral or immoral. He is wielding the sanctity of religious experience to point out the hypocrisy of his fellow-Indians. His words index
an increasingly explicit vein of critique of Hindu-fundamentalist politics,
in which Hindu religious sentiment is the norm even while scandal, cor544
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ruption, and immorality remain squarely on the political agenda. What

Ravi questions is the way that religion is a part of life even when, according to him, it ought not to be.
This block of conversation brings to light how multilayered discourse on
science, religion and politics isit reaches down into longstanding traditions of Hindu thought, it calls on Gandhian ideas of self-reliance (like the
notion that there is no responsibility but self-responsibility) and it most
importantly neither rejects nor wholly accepts the polar binary of science
and tradition. Rather, reading the conversation as symptomatic of a yet-tobe-worked-out relationship between devotion and the demands of science,
the goal of meandering conversation is to get the balance right so as to
give ITers a degree of control of how their actions impact upon the world.
The conversation then turned to whether scientists believe in God.
Meenaxi: Even great scientists have come to believe. For example, Neil
Armstrong. He says he did not believe in God, but when he landed on
the moon he came to believe. I have the biography here, I can give it
to you [all] to read if you want.
Ravi: Neil Armstrong is not a great scientist.
Meenaxi: Yes, but he did not believe, and then he came to believe!
Even I did not believe until my sister got sick. Then my family started
praying and the doctors said she wouldnt live very long, but now shes
already lived eleven years with her illness.
Bipin: No comment. On that there can be no comment.
Me: Meenaxi, why do you care whether he believes or not?
Meenaxi: No, I dont care, but
Bipin: Ill tell you why, because she doesnt want to look foolish
because she does believe. Thats why she is arguing so hard.
The last segment of talk changes the character of what has come above,
as through my intervention in the discussion and Bipins answer, it is suggested that it was for my benefit that the positions taken were elaborated
so energetically, and that I was a stand-in for an audience of westernminded people (also indexed throughout by the use of English). Here, the
dilemma of an Indian IT workers belief is given full-form. They tarry in a
space between science and religion, recognizing the limits of both, and
trying to occupy a space what Comaroff following Turner called a permanent liminality, characterized by an attempt to heal the immediate
545
sense of estrangement, the loss of self-determination that [Indian ITers]

experience in their everyday world (1985:231).
In the place of strict definitions of Hinduism or the abandonment of
Hindu practices in their entirety, ITers seem to have embarked on a policy of appropriateness, that is, the idea that there Hindu religious practice
needs to be carefully tuned away from either secular nationalist or Hindu
nationalist ideals and towards a mode of practice that enables ITers to
have agency over their own futures. Ironically, the idea of appropriateness is a very old one in Hindu practice (see Daniel 1987), since much of
ritual action is designed to balance out congenital and environmental
defects. Here, this principle of ritual calibration is reconstructed, expanding the very idea of ritual to use ritual as a means of distancing Hindu
practice away from both secular and religio-cultural ways of doing things.
Also, the very idea of the secular is being remade, or perhaps more accurately, the secular is being bound every more tightly to one set of ideas
emanating from the West (including both the degradation of morality
and inadequacy in the face of actually existing phenomena in the world,
such as the health of the body) such that it is no longer available as an
unchallenged platform from which to speak.
The kind of estrangement that IT workers working outside of India
experience cannot be measured in the degree of their immiseration, for
they earn many times more than IT workers at home, nor can it be measured by a universal condition of exile from India, because they more than
other groups of Indian expatriates are courted by the Indian government
to think of themselves, especially in terms of remittances and investments, as still part of India. Their position results from the conditions
under which they work as well as the conditions placed on their moral
being as passes of entry back into the body of the Indian nationin other
words, it is the historical situation in which they find themselves, which is
itself productive of what we call the global economy, that estranges them.
The conversation I reported on above has to be seen in this context. It
is a mode of finding out how to interweave the demands of the workplace
and the demands of home. At stake is not so much whether scientists
should or should not believe, but where, in what quantities and how they
should believe in order to take control of their own destinies. Thus, the
adda is indeed a long meandering form of conversation like the coffeehouse culture described by Habermas and others in their discussion of the
creation of a rational public sphere removed in its ideal form from the
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influence of power (Habermas 1992, Warner 2002). But it is not secular.

Indeed, for Indian ITers who are required by the conditions of their movement around the globe and the recent political history of India to take a
stand on religion, there can be no public discourse without a discourse on
religion. And this, if we were to look at places around the world, is no isolated phenomenon. Everywhere we look, religion has a firm footing in
social life, but everywhere for very particular historical and situational
reasons. In this case, it seems the lasting legacy of the BJP, the one that
outlives its fall from power has been to put religion at the center of
debates on India, including and perhaps especially, on Indian science.
There have of course been other authors who have sought to sediment the
link between math and Indic spirituality before, but in the late 1990s, the
rhetoric of now Hindu skill met with the voracious appetites of a growing
world market fueled by computer technologies, creating a perfect storm
of political conditions in one changing place and a global climate which
sought to parcel out the world into easily defined areas of commerce,
taste, culture and ability. In the early part of the 21st century then, the
struggle has been to modulate these impulses, to find a mode of talking
about religion without giving over to religious talk entirely. This impulse
too finds its correlate in the market, since religious conflict and upscale
computing do not go hand in hand, and investors yet to outsource to India
often site religious strife and abrupt weather as their main reasons for not
doing so (SAP, personal communication).
But for ITers already sojourning abroad, the struggle is primarily one
around self-determination, and the sites in which that struggle takes
place range from the sitting room to the webpage to the Internet chat.
Equally as important, the means of achieving self-determination are not
through rejection of religion but through its careful modulation, a point
often missed in research on IT in India. For, to quote an informant from
a recent article on Bangalore (Kelty 2005), karnatic music is calming,
heavy metal heats the blood. According to this programmer, heavy metal
may be necessary for coding, but there is still karnatic [an Indian tradition of classical based on a twelve-tone scale], the one does not replace
the other. Rather, the two come to rest on the principle of equilibrium, a
principle that has long held a place in Indic thinking, but a reconstruction
partially meeting the demands of the IT workplace. Perhaps it is also
doing this in a way that uncovers paths heading in new directions, directions that may constitute Hindu religious worship as an act of resistance
547
to the too-easy conflation of Hinduism, hard science and capital, as well

as an act of mobilization reconstructing religious groups in the spaces
between congealed definitions, be they Hindu, Muslim or secular.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Research for this paper was supported by the Social Science Research Council and the
Fulbright Foundation. I would like to thank Jesse Shipley, who kindly invited me to
contribute to this volume, Bent Hayes Edwards and Michael Warner for reviewing early
versions of this paper, and the anonymous reviewers of Anthropology Quarterly, who
helped me refine my ideas through their careful and considered comments.
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ETHICS OF SCALE: RELOCATING POLITICS

Living and Praying in the Code:

gap between religious practices, technological work, and the ideologies of

he rhythm of Jean Comaroffs Body of Power, Spirit of Resistance is

no-scientific advancement over redistribution of opportunities as the

2003); the co-development of European religious movements and colonial

Indian National Spaces and the Rise of IT

Out-migration and New Definitions of India

required to fold out-migrants into the Indian national imaginary, it is clear

The celebrated history of 20th and 21st century Indian computing

Religious Practice among Overseas Hindu Coders

abroad. Surely the global circuits of work involved in IT perpetuate and

descendants, who because of German immigration law are eligible for

Ganesh murti (figure/image) resided in the kitchen or on a table near the

makes them important, indeed indispensable figures in the life of adda,

Gurus and Adda as Ways of Reconstructing

woman named Meenaxi. In Meenaxis sitting room, after a pilgrimage of

translations going on at intervals to clarify points in Telugu or Tamil for

During the next segment of talk, Ravi, an engineer training at Potsdam

ruption, and immorality remain squarely on the political agenda. What

sense of estrangement, the loss of self-determination that [Indian ITers]

influence of power (Habermas 1992, Warner 2002). But it is not secular.

to the too-easy conflation of Hinduism, hard science and capital, as well

Living and Praying in the Code

Mathew, Biju. 2000. RemarxByte-Sized Nationalism: Mapping the Hindu Right in

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