Encoding Class

This chapter demonstrates that the long tradition linking technology, elite subjects, and nation building in India is currently being reimagined through a lionization of private individual achievement. Indian coders are heirs to a technocratic discourse that puts them at the vanguard of national development. The chapter tracks how the Indian middle classes became scientists in service to the nation in the Nehruvian period and then how they draw on that legacy in the current moment to advance their privatized scientific projects. Viewed within this framing, short-term work contracts are stepping-stones to both individual and national self-determination. As such, the critique of migration regimes by diasporic Indian programmers is muted by the discourse of technoelite success through individual achievement to which they also subscribe.

This chapter argues that the home is where IT workers’ experiences on the street and in the office are assessed. It uses the variety of activities they engage in at home—eating together, gossip sessions, wide-ranging discussions that go deep into the night—to revisit scholarly understandings of the relationship between work and leisure in neoliberal economies. By and large, Indian programmers do not allow work demands to intrude on leisure time; in fact, they actively resist this. The chapter posits that leisure time is so preserved because it allows programmers to develop a politics of pleasure in the everyday (here called eros), which helps define being middle class. It argues that alternatives to the colonization of leisure by work exist even within neoliberal regimes of work. These alternatives to immaterial labor flourish in the interstices between work as organized by firms and a middle-class imaginary of a good life.