Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in
Book cover

Precarious Labour and the Contemporary Novel pp 189–232Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

Indian Call Centres and the National Idea

  • Chapter
  • First Online:

Abstract

This chapter considers Chetan Bhagat’s One Night @ Call Center (2005), Neelesh Misra’s Once Upon a Timezone (2006), Arivand Adiga’s The White Tiger (2008), Anish Trivedi’s Call Me Dan (2010), Brinda S. Narayan’s Bangalore Calling (2011), Bharati Mukherjee’s Miss New India (2011) and Kris Yonzone’s Confessions of a Call Centre Worker (2013) as examples of the Indian call-centre novel. By exploring how these texts present the practices of imitation surrounding call-centre work it suggests the range of perspectives on Indian neoliberalism that have been produced by the boom in English-language novels in India. Exploring ideas such as youth, tradition and modernity it suggests that the confident forms of Indian neoliberalism projected through popular novels are undercut by the presentation of class-inequality in the literary novel.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.

Chapter
USD   29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD   79.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD   99.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info
Hardcover Book
USD   99.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Learn about institutional subscriptions

References

  • Adiga, Aravind. 2008. The White Tiger. London: Atlantic Books.

    Google Scholar 

  • Ahmad, Aijaz. 1995. The Politics of Literary Postcoloniality. Race & Class 36 (3): 1–20.

    Google Scholar 

  • Aneesh, A. 2006. Virtual Migration: The Programming of Globalization. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bagchi, Amitabha. 2012. The Householder. New Dehli: Fourth Estate.

    Google Scholar 

  • Banerjee, Debdas, and Michael Goldfield (eds.). 2008. Labour, Globalization and the State: Workers, Women and Migrants Confront Neoliberalism. London and New York: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bhabha, Homi K. 1994. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bhagat, Chetan. 2005. One Night @ Call Center. New Delhi: Rupa & Co.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bhagat, Chetan. 2012. What Young India Wants: Selected Essays and Columns. New Delhi: Rupa.

    Google Scholar 

  • Choudhury, Chandrahas. 2008. On Aravind Adiga’s the White Tiger. In The Middle Stage: Essays on Indian and world literature, May 12 2008 [cited 2014]. Available from http://middlestage.blogspot.co.uk/2008/05/double-darkness-of-aravind-adigas-white.html.

  • Connell, Liam. 2010. E-Terror: Computer Viruses, Class and Transnationalism in Transmission and One Night @ the Call Center. Journal of Postcolonial Writing 46 (3–4): 279–290.

    Google Scholar 

  • Dasgupta, Rana. 2006. Tokyo Cancelled. London: Harper Perennial.

    Google Scholar 

  • Dayal, Samir. 2007. Geography Isn’t History: Agency in the Indian Call Centre. In Global Babel: Questions of Discourse and Communication in a Time of Globalization, ed. Samir Dayal and Margueritte Murphy, 64–105. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Ganguly, Sumit, and Rahul Mukherji. 2011. India Since 1980. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Gilbert, Helen. 1994. De-Scribing Orality: Performance and the Recuperation of Voice. In De-Scribing Empire: Post-Colonialism and Textuality, ed. Chris Tiffin, and Alan Lawson, 98–111. London: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Glover, David, and Scott McCracken (eds.). 2012. The Cambridge Companion to Popular Fiction. Cambridge: Cambrdige University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Grifiths, Garath. 1994. The Myth of Authenticity: Representation, Discourse and Social Practice. In De-Scribing Empire: Post-Colonialism and Textuality, ed. Chris Tiffin and Alan Lawson, 70–85. London: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gupta, Suman. 2012. Indian ‘Commerical’ Fiction in English, the Publishing Industry, and Youth Cutlure. Economic and Political Weekly 46 (5): 46–53.

    Google Scholar 

  • Haiven, Max. 2014. Cultures of Financialization: Fictitious Capital in Popular Culture and Everyday Life. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Higgins, Charlotte. 2008. Aravind Adiga Wins Booker Prize with the White Tiger. The Guardian, 15 October 3.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hyman, Jeff, and Abigail Marks. 2008. Frustrated Ambitions: The Reality of Balancing Work and Life for Call Centre Employees. In Out of Balance or Just out of Bounds? Analysing the Realtionship between Work and Life, ed. Chris Warhurst, Doris Ruth Eikhof, and Axel Haundschild, 191–209. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

    Google Scholar 

  • Jeffcoat, John. 2006. Outsourced. ShadowCatcher Entertainment.

    Google Scholar 

  • Jeffries, Stuart. 2008. Roars of Anger, October 16. Available from http://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/oct/16/booker-prize.

  • Kala, Advatia. 2007. Almost Single. New Dehli: Haper Collins India.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kapoor, Mini. 2014. The Age of Bhagat: What Makes Chetan Bhagat the One-Man Industry and Change Agent That He Is. India Today [cited 7 November 2014]. Available from http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/chetan-bhagat-novel-half-girlfriend-two-million-copies-set-to-roll-off-press/1/379631.html.

  • Korte, Barbara. 2010. Can the Indigent Speak? Poverty Studies, the Postcolonial and the Global Appeal of Q & a and the White Tiger. Connotations 20 (2–3): 293–312.

    Google Scholar 

  • Lazarus, Neil. 1993. Disavowing Decolonization: Fanon, Nationalism, and the Problematic of Representation in Current Theories of Colonial Discourse. Research in African Literatures 24 (4): 69–98. doi:10.2307/3820255.

  • Loomba, Ania. 1998. Colonialism/Postcolonialism. London: Routledge.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • McCracken, Scott. 1998. Pulp: Reading Popular Fiction. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • McKinsey, Global Institute. 2003. Offshoring: Is It a Win-Win Game? San Francisco: McKinsey & Company, Inc.

    Google Scholar 

  • McMillin, Divya C. 2006. Outsourcing Identities: Call Centres and Cultural Transformation in India. Economic and Political Weekly 41 (3): 235–241. doi:10.2307/4417702.

    Google Scholar 

  • Misra, Neelesh. 2006. Once Upon a Timezone. New Dehli: Harper Collins Publisher India.

    Google Scholar 

  • Moretti, Franco. 1987. The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture. London: Verso.

    Google Scholar 

  • Mukherjee, Bharati. 2011. Miss New India. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

    Google Scholar 

  • Nadeem, Shehzad. 2011. Dead Ringers: How Outsourcing Is Changing the Way Indians Understand Themselves. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Narayan, Brinda S. 2011. Bangalore Calling. ed. Kindle. Gurgaon: Hachette India.

    Google Scholar 

  • Nath, Vandana. 2011. Aesthetic and Emotional Labour through Stigma: National Identity Management and Racial Abuse in Offshored Indian Call Centres. Work, Employment & Society 25 (4): 709–725. doi:10.1177/0950017011419726.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Neilson, Brett, and Ned Rossiter. 2008. Precarity as a Political Concept, or, Fordism as Exception. Theory, Culture & Society 25 (7–8): 51–72. doi:10.1177/0263276408097796.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Poster, Winifred R. 2007. Who’s on the Line? Indian Call Center Agents Pose as Americans for U.S.-Outsourced Firms. Industrial Relations 46 (2): 271–304. doi:10.1111/j.1468-232X.2007.00468.x.

    Google Scholar 

  • Ratnam, Mani. 2007. Guru. Madras Talkies.

    Google Scholar 

  • Ravishankar, M.N., Shan L. Pan, and Michael D. Myers. 2013. Information Technology Offshoring in India: A Postcolonial Perspective. European Journal of Information Systems 22 (4): 387–402. doi:10.1057/ejis.2012.32.

  • Sharrad, Paul. 2013. Desirable or Dysfunctional? Family in Recent Indian English-Language Fiction. South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 36 (1): 123–133. doi:10.1080/00856401.2012.703793.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Shohat, Ella. 1992. Notes on the Postcolonial. Social Text 31/32: 99–113

    Google Scholar 

  • Shurmer-Smith, Pamela. 2000. India: Globalization and Change. London: Arnold.

    Google Scholar 

  • Stoddard, Katy. 2012. Booker Prize 2012: Sales for All the Winners and the 2012 Shortlist, Including Hilary Mantel. The Guardian [cited 7 November 2014]. Available from http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2012/oct/10/booker-prize-2012-winners-sales-data.

  • Subrahmanyam, Sanjay. 2008. Diary. London Review of Books 30 (21): 42–43.

    Google Scholar 

  • Suneetha. 2011. How Bangalore Calling Was Written. Techgoss [cited 09th August 2016]. Available from http://www.techgoss.com/Story/455S11-How-Bangalore-Calling-was-written.aspx.

  • Tharoor, Shahi. 2014. Shahi Tharoor | Know Me [cited 4 December 2014]. Available from http://www.shashitharoor.in/know-me.php.

  • Thorne, Matt. 1999. Eight Minutes Idle. London: Sceptre.

    Google Scholar 

  • Tickell, Alex. 2015. Driving Pinky Madam (and Mudering Mr Ashok): Social Justice and Domestic Service in Aravind Adiga’s the White Tiger. In Reworking Postcolonialism: Globalisation, Labour and Rights, ed. Pavan Kumar Malreddy, Birte Heidemann, Ole Birk Laursen, and Janet Wilson, 150–164. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

    Google Scholar 

  • Trehan, Madhu. 2012. Madhu Kidnaps Chetan Bhagat: It Takes Courage to Break Away from the Norm and Take a Huge Risk of Not Being Considered a “Good” Writer… Newslaundry.com [cited 4 December 2014]. Available from http://www.newslaundry.com/2012/02/14/madhu-kidnaps-chetan-bhagat/.

  • Trivedi, Anish. 2010. Call Me Dan. New Delhi: Penguin Books.

    Google Scholar 

  • Williams, Steve, Harriet Bradley, Ranji Devadason, and Mark Erickson. 2013. Globalization and Work. Cambridge: Polity.

    Google Scholar 

  • World Bank. 2015. GDP Per Capita (Current US$), 2 April. Available from http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD.

  • Yonzone, Kris. 2013. Confessions of a Call Centre Worker. New Delhi: Rupa.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Brighton, Brighton, UK

    Liam Connell

Authors
  1. Liam Connell
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Liam Connell .

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2017 The Author(s)

About this chapter

Cite this chapter

Connell, L. (2017). Indian Call Centres and the National Idea. In: Precarious Labour and the Contemporary Novel. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63928-4_6

Download citation

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation