Abstract
Is the Indian IT sector a new frontier of castelessness or one of caste reproduction? This is the question that Marilyn Fernandez sets out to answer in this sociological account of the role of caste in the Indian IT sector. As she tells us, her original project of exploring caste diversity, inclusivity, and discrimination in Indian IT was thwarted by the unwillingness of most within the sector to openly address caste. In the face of such resistance, Fernandez shifted her attention to an examination of the ‘disguised animus’ that underwrites the avowedly caste-neutral policies of the IT sector. This shift in focus also required a shift in method. In a move that perfectly substantiates her argument, she had to give up her original survey questions on caste to ones that would be seen as ‘caste neutral’.
Despite claims to the contrary, Fernandez finds that the Indian IT sector is far from a casteless space. Moreover, it is through the elevation of merit as the sole criterion for entry and evaluation that caste inequality is reproduced. Using a variety of methods, Fernandez shows how the ideology of meritocracy is leveraged to draw hierarchical distinctions between IT and other sectors, and between the private and public sector, in ways that reinforce assumptions about the caste basis of merit. Not only is merit consistently elevated as the reigning principle of selection within Indian IT, it serves as an alibi to justify the underrepresentation of dalits and lower castes who are seen as handicapped, not by structural disadvantages, but by their want of merit.
Many of these insights about the caste underpinnings of Indian meritocracy, the social bases of Indian IT, and dalit and lower caste experiences of discrimination in the private sector are available in other sociological and anthropological scholarship. Indeed, the book offers an exhaustive review of this literature. Fernandez’s contribution is to provide a synthetic overview of the workings of merit as caste discourse in the IT sector as a whole that builds on existing scholarship and on original data gleaned through the use of web surveys, interviews, analysis of newspaper coverage, and national secondary data.
In successive chapters, Fernandez offers us different angles on the world of Indian IT. Chapter 1 documents the pervasiveness of merit as a term and identifies the ways that putatively caste-neutral criteria of evaluation, especially the privileging of ‘soft skills’, favour upper castes. Unlike the first chapter’s portrait of consensus around the meritocratic character of Indian IT, Chapter 2 offers a contrasting image of the ‘blood sport’ around the caste question. What comes through palpably is the stark polarisation between the ‘Merit Camp’, which vociferously denies the presence of caste, in part by pointing to the absence of affirmative action quotas, and the ‘Caste Camp’, which equally forcefully argues for the structuring force of caste prejudice. Chapter 3 takes us into the sphere of technical education to illuminate the prehistory of this ‘blood sport’ and to show how both elite public and private educational institutions in different ways lay the groundwork for the operations of caste in the IT sector. Fernandez notes that, while private education is a more favourable environment for upper castes whose hegemony is unchecked by redistributive measures, it is in elite public education that the ‘blood sport’ prevails because of the presence of lower caste beneficiaries of affirmative action. Chapter 4 offers an interesting analysis of gender in IT which, in contrast to caste, has been far more the focus of efforts to diversify the sector. Fernandez notes that this has to do with the intersectionality of gender, family, and caste, which contributes to upper caste women being seen as meritocratic. At the same time, she argues that, to the extent that women enter the IT work force, it is largely on the basis of ‘gender-neutral’ criteria. Curiously, Fernandez stops short of probing this notion of gender neutrality which, unlike her sustained critique of caste neutrality, is largely taken at face value. Perhaps because this chapter is more programmatic—that is, it is focused more on policies for enhancing gender diversity—the forms of power that underwrite the notion of gender neutrality are left uninterrogated. Fernandez could also have done more to flesh out the implications of the differential treatment of caste and gender in the IT sector.
The final chapter offers an overview of the book’s arguments. There is a puzzling tension here between Fernandez’s strong assertion throughout that IT is an unequal playing field that reproduces caste inequality and her claim that ‘the absence of hard evidence makes it next to impossible to test the respective assertions of the two [‘Merit’ and ‘Caste’] camps’ (p. 293). This call for ‘hard evidence’ may be Fernandez’s way to urge IT companies to generate data on caste presence and experience but it has the paradoxical effect of discrediting the substantial body of social scientific scholarship on the IT sector, hers included.
This is a commendable book, although one that could have been shorter. While the sustained analysis of merit discourses and caste critiques is appreciated, it is often weighted down by repetition and an unnecessary profusion of terms and subsections. This is unfortunate in a book whose overarching argument about merit as an ideology that underwrites the reproduction of caste inequality is of utmost importance.