Book Review: Experimental Times

Experimental Times: Startup Capitalism and Feminist Futures in India, by Hemangini Gupta (2024). Oakland, CA: University of California Press.

Hemangini Gupta’s new book Experimental Times examines the emerging culture shaping Bangalore’s transformation into “a startup city.” Set in the early 2010s, the text charts how “startup capitalism” re-organizes the everyday lives of the city’s inhabitants. This includes the conditions under which people work, how they perceive “leisure” and “freedom,” and how they come to understand themselves in the changing city. Beyond startups, Gupta alerts us to the deeper shifts that are occurring in the city’s culture. Gupta argues that the emerging newness of startup culture is built on, and dictated by, older hierarchies of caste, gender, and class. Old social norms and new economic realities intersect in revealing ways, as Bangalore’s emergence as a “world city” reflects and reshapes longstanding socio-economic hierarchies in Indian society.

Chapter One introduces the concept of “startup capitalism,” which serves as the book’s central frame. It is defined as a system which “promises workers conditions of labor that are enjoyable and pleasurable: flexible work hours, the ability to shape work futures, and leisure and fun built into the daily rhythms of work rather than adjacent to them” (3). Gupta’s key contribution is to show how ideas of “flexibility,” “freedom,” and “risk” are unequally distributed, even within the ostensibly horizontal landscape of startups. The book’s methodological approach, called “labor as method,” is described as a “commitment to naming and following as labor a set of apparently discrete practices to show their interrelatedness” (42). This shift seems intuitive, considering that startup culture involves work across informal meetings, online platforms, co-working spaces, late-night events, and domestic milieus. As such, Gupta’s “labor as method” recognizes, and attends to, this fragmentation.

Chapter Two presents the expanded scope of this method, as we “move across sites of gendered labor through different historical periods” (70). The author describes her family history within the city to situate middle-class womanhood in Bangalore. We learn how minor, contingent practices of self-fashioning and “respectability politics” are tied to larger historical shifts in the city. In this chapter, “labor as method” becomes an archival practice as it brings together oral histories, family stories, national history, and present-day fieldwork.

In Chapter Three, Gupta argues that the “entrepreneur” has been consolidated as a figure through “privileges of caste, class, and gender” (24), whose capacity to take risks and move freely across space and time is rooted in upper-caste, middle-class, and masculine histories. This becomes clear when she explains that “risk” is not only socially produced but is also imagined by startup founders and workers as passion and self-realization. Startup capitalism also relies on middle-class publics whose consumption, mobility, and lifestyle produce the “consumer” subject and the demand for distinct living conditions (such as gated residences, fitness communities, and networking circuits). Drawing on Sarah Sharma’s work on temporalities (2013), the chapter reveals how startup capitalism re-organizes time, through round-the-clock networking, multi-time-zone business hours, business accelerators, and “flexible” schedules.

Chapter Four turns to the workplace to argue that startup capitalism produces its own cultural codes that appear emancipatory; however, in practice, they re-inscribe classed, gendered, and caste-marked divisions. At Captivate, the startup firm that is Gupta’s core field site, she identifies two broad classes of workers – elite travel consultants and back-end itinerary makers – and shows how the office demands a very particular habitus from each type. This includes, among other traits, ease with English, an instinct for informality, and the ability to present work as passion. Under this new regime, employees “love” their work because the culture naturalizes entrepreneurial spirit as a precondition of belonging. Work becomes fun, but only for those already equipped with the social and class capital to perform authenticity. “The society of authenticity is a performance society,” as philosopher Chan (2020) reminds us – and the freedoms on offer in Captivate are performed in various ways, including via yoga sessions, running clubs, and work in cafés. The chapter examines how the experience of flexibility is also deeply stratified; it is imagined by the founders of startups as a form of agency and is experienced by elite consultants as class mobility but by non-elite workers as pressure and obligation.

Chapter Five develops “infrastructures of care” by drawing explicitly on AbdouMaliq Simone’s idea of “people as infrastructure” (2004), wherein the city is held together not by formal systems but by the improvisational practices of ordinary people. Gupta extends this insight to the startup office, showing how non-elite workers become the gears that keep Captivate functioning. These are infrastructures that do not look like infrastructure at all, yet they absorb the failures of the company and the city, enabling everyday survival under startup capitalism. What the chapter signals but does not fully pursue, however, is how these emergent infrastructures of care might also be read as projecting a new, more inclusive vision of Bangalore itself.

Chapter Six serves as an archive of aspirations of non-elite workers at Captivate. We learn about the individual journeys and lives of these workers. The chapter develops the notion of “experimental time,” which is defined as experimentation in workers’ “everyday work practice and [their] dreams of the future” (209). In serving clients, the firm’s non-elite workers are shown as practicing their own versions of experimentation that involve a reworking of their future selves and urban possibilities.

Experimental Times offers an important class analysis of contemporary Bangalore, showing how startup capitalism produces new middle-class aspirations even as it deepens the precarity and stratification that underwrite entrepreneurial life. The book’s analysis of the gendered differences in this emerging culture is equally insightful. Its discussion of caste, however, is less developed than those related to class and gender. The text tends to examine caste in absence, through its denial, without dissecting how caste power actively operates in hiring, networking, risk-taking, and other contexts. Simply noting that public life is “already demarcated in and through caste” (80) can conceal the specific mechanisms through which caste shapes the entrepreneurial present and its futures. While it is crucial to recognize that startup capitalism obscures the workings of caste, what is needed is more than the familiar claim that caste is “invisibilized.” Seen this way, Experimental Times can be read as an opening, an invitation, to build a fuller theory of caste and entrepreneurialism for the India of today.

References

Han, Byung-Chul, and Daniel Steuer. 2020. The Disappearance of Rituals: A Topology of the Present. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Sharma, Sarah. 2013. In the Meantime: Temporality and Cultural Politics. Durham: NC: Duke University Press.

Simone, AbdouMaliq. 2004. “People as Infrastructure: Intersecting Fragments in Johannesburg.” Public Culture 16(3): 407-429.