Professional identities and servile realities: Aspirational labour in Delhi malls

Introduction

For Nizam, a 22-year-old man from an urban village in South Delhi, and others like him, the job of a Customer Advisor (CA) in a large retail store was an exciting employment prospect. It seemed to offer the possibility of acquiring a professional identity that would lead to social mobility and a better future. His story, and those of other workers I encountered during my fieldwork, points to a popular imaginary about how such mobility can be achieved—through employment in organised retail, or more broadly in the ‘new service economy’ (Basole et al. 2018: 20).

After Nizam finished school, he could have joined his father’s butcher shop, but the thought of working in a dingy shop alongside animal carcasses depressed him. Nizam’s disdain for the idea of working in his father’s butcher shop illustrates the kinds of aspirations that are held by many urban young people in India. Nizam told me that he liked to wander around the mall located across the road from his neighbourhood. He loved window shopping in the air-conditioned stores where workers and customers spoke English and looked stylish and professional. Nizam decided to apply for a job in a mall store and had been with ‘Distinction’ for two years when we met in the winter of 2015.

For Nizam and other CAs, interactions with hi-fi and foreign customers speaking in English, and the glittering cosmopolitan ambience of the mall, reinforce the sharp contrast between retail work and the kinds of jobs typically available to urban youth from low-income households. Working in a mall connotes style, and seems to offer a route to upward mobility. ¹

The idea of being a ‘professional’ implies a distancing from informal or manual work in the minds of sales assistants in the retail stores of Delhi’s malls. The excitement with which they initially envisage the mall suggests that they see it as offering opportunities to cultivate a new identity and sense of social worth.

In contrast, Sandeep, a 28-year-old CA from Uttarakhand, told me that after a few months of working in retail, the fun faded away. He realised that the job was a dhoka, ² as it would not fulfil his aspirations for social mobility. Sandeep asserted that the notion that one becomes a ‘professional’ by working in large retail stores is a dhoka because CAs are treated like naukars (servants) or mazdoors (casual or manual workers). Despite his disillusionment, Sandeep chose to continue working in the mall because he felt that retail jobs are better than the alternatives available to young men and women like him—from underprivileged backgrounds and who have limited educational qualifications. Like Sandeep, other CAs also preferred to stay on in this aspirational world of organised retail. In explaining this choice, they spoke about the majboori (compulsion or constraint) that compelled them to stick to their jobs. In this article, I unpack these contradictions and tensions in CAs’ experiences of working in organised retail stores.

The article is divided into seven sections. Section II provides the background to the study and outlines the research methods. Section III discusses the theoretical concepts that inform the argument drawing upon sociological literature on post-liberalisation India. Sections IV–VI present the findings from my ethnographic research in Delhi malls, organised around three key themes. Section VII brings together these findings and concludes with a discussion on aspirations for mobility in the new service economy.

Working in the service economy

Nizam and Sandeep are members of the growing youth workforce that has emerged to fill jobs in India’s proliferating consumer-driven service economy. The liberalisation of the economy in the 1990s altered the sociocultural environment, particularly in the major cities, with fast-paced urbanisation, new paths of migration and a growing middle-class consumer culture (Brosius 2012). Novel kinds of enterprises and services emerged within the consumption-oriented urban economy in domains such as real estate, retail, hospitality, beauty and wellness, big retail and entertainment (Baas and Cayla 2019). This ‘new service economy’ has given rise to a range of mostly low-skilled, low-paying jobs and employs a large youth workforce, primarily young men and women from lower-middle class or rural backgrounds (Upadhya and Roychowdhury 2020: 6). Such enterprises require a new kind of worker, one who is relatively well-educated (with at least 10^th or 12^th standard education) and groomed to work in corporate spaces and cater to certain kinds of customers.

Economic reforms also led to the expansion of the middle classes and the reshaping of lifestyles and aspirations (Fernandes 2006; Mazzarella 2003), influencing the kinds of jobs and futures to which Indian youth aspire (Naafs and Skelton 2018). Young people are pursuing forms of education and employment that they believe will lead to middle-class, metropolitan futures and consumer citizenship (Gilbertson 2017; Lukose 2009). In this context, agrarian and informal sector occupations have been devalued and stigmatised, and the youth are turning away from such livelihoods and seeking formal sector white-collar employment, ³ driven by the expectation that this will lead to upward mobility. ⁴ Against this backdrop, in this article, I explore the aspirations and mobility strategies of employees in organised retail stores.

The article is based on 14 months of fieldwork conducted in three malls in Delhi, during 2015 and 2016, where I worked as an intern CA in three retail stores (for two months each). ⁵ Two of the stores, which I call ‘Distinction’ (an international brand) and ‘Namaste Fashion’ (a domestic retail chain), are apparel and accessories retailers, while the third, ‘Rouge’, is an international beauty and cosmetics retail chain. ⁶ The stores selected for the study represent premium, mass and high-end segments of the retail industry. The primary research method I adopted for my fieldwork was extended periods of participant observation through working full-time in these stores. While I was not paid a salary or incentives, I had the same roles and responsibilities as other CAs—customer service, meeting sales targets and trial room duty—and underwent standard weekly reviews with managers and floor supervisors. ⁷

During my fieldwork in the malls, I was confronted with the question of how to present myself to my interlocutors. It took time to make them understand my research objectives. To gain the trust of the CAs in particular, and to make the most of my own relatively privileged background, I offered various kinds of help, such as practising English conversation, conducting mock job interviews, helping fill bank forms, proofreading resumes and accompanying them for interviews. My gender also helped to build rapport with women workers. However, the difference in social class between my interlocutors and me could not be erased, and I am aware that my presence in the stores influenced how they articulated their experiences and framed their responses to my questions. Following Haraway’s argument that knowledge is always ‘situated’ and ‘socially contingent’ (Haraway 1988), the analysis of CAs’ narratives presented below is a ‘partial construction’ (Geertz 1973) and ‘a view from somewhere’ (Haraway 1988), rather than an ‘objective’ view from the ‘inside’.

In the following section, I discuss the literature that informs my analysis of CA experiences. I draw particularly on anthropological and sociological studies of youth aspirations for mobility and the relation between consumption and class in post-liberalised India.

Aspirations for mobility in post-liberalised India

Many anthropological studies have explored the outcomes of liberalisation in India for consumption patterns, class identities and the social life of the middle classes in particular (Nakassis and Searle 2013). The structural and cultural changes brought about by economic reforms have engendered new aspirations and mobilities, as the national development agenda has been redefined in terms of the consumerist ‘good life’, and citizenship is increasingly negotiated through consumption practices (Deshpande 2003; Fernandes 2000a). Scholars have highlighted in particular the reconstitution of the middle class around consumption practices and desires (Baviskar and Ray 2011; Fernandes 2000b). In the post-globalisation era, we also find the circulation of novel cultural objects and ideologies, especially via the media (Chaudhuri 2017) fuelling aspirations for material progress and dignity among marginalised citizens (Cross 2009).

Several studies have documented this ‘new aspirational regime’ (Mathew and Lukose 2020) and the strategies that are pursued by different kinds of subjects to achieve social mobility, especially through the pursuit of education (Gilbertson 2017; Sancho 2017; Stambach 2017) and ‘employability’ (Deuchar and Dyson 2019; Jeffrey et al. 2004). McGuire (2013) and Jayadeva (2019) have shown that aspirational subjects enrol in personality development and English coaching courses to acquire skills associated with middle-classness and to fit into ‘professional’ workspaces. Building on this body of work, I highlight the strategies that young men and women working in retail stores deploy in pursuit of social mobility.

In his study of middle-class culture in Kathmandu, Liechty (2003) shows that middle-class consumption is not just about owning or possessing goods but also about belonging, access and participation. I draw from his work to argue that class mobility is only partly pursued through the acquisition of economic or educational capital; instead, for workers from marginalised backgrounds, part of what signifies middle-classness is participation in global consumer spaces. As a key site of consumption, the mall therefore, plays a substantial role in the way these classed identities are carved out (Srivastava 2014; Zabiliute 2018). The symbolic value of such locations is highlighted by Cross (2014) in his study of workers in a Special Economic Zone (SEZ), which he argues represents ‘dreamscapes’ or ‘arenas of imagination, hope, aspiration and desire in which people construct and assemble possible future worlds for themselves and others from existing ideas and images’ (ibid.: 10). In the following sections, I show how the mall plays a vital role in shaping the imaginations and aspirations of retail workers by allowing access to markers of class identity.

A key element of the quest for mobility articulated by retail workers is the category of ‘professionalism’. Writing on women IT workers in India, Radhakrishnan (2011) highlights the symbolic value of the ‘professional’ identity and the respectability that is derived from its embedding in middle-classness. She argues that ‘professionalism’ is an ideological construct associated with the emergence of the middle classes during the post-Independence period and has been reproduced within the ‘new middle classes’ following liberalisation. In her study of real estate developers in New Delhi, Searle (2013) similarly identifies ‘professionalism’ with upward mobility and globality. She states that the notion of the professional encapsulates ‘English-speaking, urban, white-collar segments of the middle class who are benefiting the most from new employment opportunities made available since liberalisation’ (ibid.: 280). The significance of the aspiration to become a ‘professional’ lies not just in the occupational or economic status it designates but also in how it indexes social dignity and recognition.

As I discuss in the following section, self-identification as ‘professional’, observed among CAs, can be viewed as a quest for legitimacy, respect and class mobility. Kaur and Sundar (2016) also underscore the importance of gaining respect and recognition through employment in the organised service sector, no matter how low-skilled the job is:

… there is a significant difference between being a pizza delivery man in a uniform, a sales-clerk in a department store, a sanitation employee at the airport, or a beauty parlour masseuse from a chotu [young helper] in a kirana dukan [neighbourhood grocery shop], a full-time domestic worker, or a maalish wali [masseuse], in terms of the kind of self-respect that comes from nomenclature. (Ibid.: 9)

Building on these insights, I argue that my interlocutors view their jobs as a means of achieving their aspirations for upward mobility because they can claim a ‘professional’ identity—an identity that has historically been associated with the middle class.

Moreover, acquiring a professional identity works as a practice of ‘social distinction’ (Bourdieu 1984), as it allows CAs to distinguish themselves from workers in the informal economy or manual labourers—what they refer to as mazdoori (informal or manual labouring). In his study of steel plant workers in Bhilai, Parry (2013, 2020) observes that rigid social class distinctions have emerged between regular salaried workers who have a naukri (secure employment) and contract labourers who perform kaam (insecure wage labour). This class differentiation is reflected in differing levels of material rewards and security of employment, lifestyles, consumption patterns and aspirations. This distinction is congruent with, but different from, the more broadly accepted social boundary between manual and non-manual labour in India. Although his study focuses on industrial workers, I draw from Parry’s conceptualisation to highlight the hierarchical distinction between what CAs refer to as ‘professional’ jobs and mazdoori, which have very different implications for respect and recognition.

The value of a professional identity has also been observed in the case of business process outsourcing (BPO) employees who position themselves as upwardly mobile ‘professionals’, even though the work is often deskilled and highly regulated (Sandhu 2006). Sandhu (ibid.) argues that the identity of call centre workers is hybridised with a complex new middle-class identity due to their association with a globalised industry where they work in shiny big buildings with modern equipment. The assertion of a professional identity as a form of social distinction indicates that work and workplace identities are critical sites where class identities and social mobility are articulated and sought.

In the following sections, I present the findings from my ethnography of retail stores that trace the aspirational trajectories of CAs. I highlight their strategies of social mobility which centre around notions of professionalism and upward mobility in the next section, while Sections V and VI describe what becomes of these aspirations as well as workers’ reflections and responses to the nature of their work in the stores.

‘Professionalism’ as aspiration

As I started to engage with my colleagues in the field, I discovered that many had sought jobs in organised retail as a means of pursuing aspirations for better futures. When I probed further, a key term that ran through most of their narratives was that of ‘professionalism’—a code for formal sector employment, viewed as a key avenue for improving their status. CAs spoke about the respectability, visibility and legitimacy that these jobs offer, especially compared to the alternatives available to them and their parents’ occupations (mostly informal sector work). In this section, I highlight the personal and work histories of several CAs to illustrate the aspirational value these jobs hold for them.

At Rouge, Ganesh, a 25-year-old CA articulated vividly his aspiration to become a ‘professional’. Ganesh had moved to Delhi six years earlier from his village in Orissa. His father was an agricultural worker, while his mother had passed away many years ago. With limited education, skills and networks, Ganesh could only find work in a rubber plant on the outskirts of Gurgaon (now Gurugram). Ganesh described the job as ‘hell’ and spoke about the nauseating smell of rubber that made him vomit regularly:

My hands were always black from grime and soot. You don’t feel [physically] good in these kinds of jobs. It’s just manual labour that you do day in and out. I didn’t leave home for this … I could have done similar jobs back home [in Orissa].

Every day on his way to work in the factory bus, Ganesh would pass by a mall, and he began to feel that he should be working there instead. On seeing his situation at the rubber plant, a friend found him a janitorial job in a beauty parlour. Ganesh felt that this job was better, as it was, at least, ‘indoor work’. After a year at the parlour, Ganesh got a job selling hair-care products in a small cosmetics store in a market complex in Gurgaon. The job helped Ganesh learn some English and other ‘professional skills’, such as how to groom himself, talk to customers and generate sales reports. After a year at the store, he heard about vacancies at Rouge and applied for the job. His dream of working inside the mall came true when he was hired after three rounds of interviews.

Ganesh’s narrative helps us understand why a ‘professional’ identity is seen as enabling upward mobility. His desire to work in the mall, formed while passing by it on his way to the factory, suggests that the mall represents a ‘dreamscape’ where aspirations for better futures could be met—unlike the rubber factory. For Ganesh, an indoor job in clean, hygienic and air-conditioned spaces where one performs (relatively) non-physical labour, are criteria that define a ‘professional’ job, which is sharply distinguished from physical labour and informal work.

Similarly, Sandeep (introduced in Section I) had moved to Delhi eight years earlier to work in a restaurant kitchen, along with his cousin. His parents were agricultural workers, and he was the first of his siblings to leave home for Delhi in search of work. He worked for about six months at the restaurant but said that he hated it; hence, he found a sales job in a small domestic apparel company located in a market complex in south Delhi. After a few years in this job, he worked in a global denim wear company for about three years before moving to Rouge. He told me that the job of a CA is starkly different from the laborious work in the restaurant kitchen where constant dishwashing made his hands ‘dry and rough’. Working in retail had made him fashion-conscious, and he loved the fact that his hands were now ‘so soft’ after using hand cream every day at the store.

Mamta, a CA at Namaste Fashion, lived in an urban village in south Delhi with her parents and siblings. After completing her schooling (12^th class), she was on the lookout for a job. Her father found her work in a cybercafe/photocopy shop in the neighbourhood, but she was not excited by the prospect. A friend recommended working in the mall, which Mamta felt was a better option, as she would ‘learn a lot’ while being in a ‘good and safe workplace’. She had been at Namaste Fashion for two years when I met her. She explained that working in retail had helped improve her spoken English, her grooming, how to apply make-up ‘properly’ and had taught her to conduct herself in a ‘smart’ and confident way. While describing her work history to me, Mamta said that she did not want to end up like her elder sister who worked as domestic help in luxury apartments in the colony adjacent to theirs. She wanted something better for herself.

These narratives point to a critical dimension of how and why retail jobs are seen as a route to upward mobility through the acquisition of aesthetic and grooming skills. In her study of self-presentation practices in India, Pathak (2014) argues that grooming is a crucial practice for pursuing desires associated with new consumer-based identities of post-liberalised India. She observes that presentability, and the grooming necessary to achieve it, are forms of cultural capital deeply connected to social mobility and confer advantages (such as in the job and marriage markets) apart from socio-economic power. For Mamta and other CAs, new modes of self-grooming and social etiquette, which they learn on the job, reflect the practices of the urban and elite customers they serve. This leads them to aspire for new class identities.

In another example, Kavita, a CA at Distinction, started her career as a security guard at a store in a west Delhi mall. She told me that she found the work boring and felt invisible standing at the entrance with nothing to do except check customer receipts as they exited the store. From her perspective, the job of a CA looked more exciting, since one could talk to people (customers and colleagues). She believed that such interactions would help her learn communication skills, improve her English and give her a chance to ‘dress up’ so that she would look better than what a security guard uniform allowed. Kavita looked out for opportunities to assist customers when the CAs were busy or not available on the floor. After a year as a security guard, she found a job in a small lingerie store in West Delhi. After gaining some experience there, she applied for a job at Distinction, and she had been there for six years when I met her. She was considering pursuing a degree in visual merchandising through distance education, as an avenue to a better job such as back office work at the store.

Unlike a CA position, Kavita did not regard her job of a security guard as ‘professional’. For her, a professional identity came from working inside a store rather than outside, engaging with other workers and customers, making sales and meeting targets. Other CAs in the mall made similar comparisons when they expressed how thankful they were not to be security guards, bathroom attendants or cleaners in the mall, or cooks and restaurant delivery staff—all service jobs that clearly held much less value for them.

Studies of lower-skilled service workers in India have highlighted the importance placed on visibility and respect (Gooptu 2009, 2013; Ray and Qayum 2009). In their research on Barista staff and gym trainers in India, Baas and Cayla (2019) argue that such workers often suffer from the invisibility of their labour, which stems from the significant differences in socio-economic status that separate them from their customers. For these workers, the ability to interact with affluent customers becomes a marker of mobility, since it presents them with opportunities to accumulate social and cultural capital. The authors observe that there is a ‘certain conflation between the idea of “becoming visible” and receiving recognition in the case of service workers in India’ (ibid.: 10).

While speaking about the advantages of working in retail, many CAs highlighted the opportunity that it affords to learn English. Sociological literature has extensively documented the aspirational value attached to knowledge of English in India (Cayla and Bhatnagar 2017); it is also a central vehicle for achieving economic security and social recognition. Vaish (2008) argues that young Indians associate English with the power to escape from their disadvantaged class backgrounds and enter the elite professional and social classes. Cayla and Bhatnagar (2017) contend that the ability to converse in English does not simply allow service workers to perform their jobs but is also a marker of belonging to the world that the English-speaking upper and middle classes inhabit.

For many CAs, a ‘professional’ identity is also defined by seemingly minor attributes of formal employment, such as receiving appointment letters and regular payslips, having professional designations and electronic ID cards, wearing a name badge and a uniform with a logo, and having one’s salary deposited automatically every month (and on time) in a bank account. Further, routine management practices such as appraisals and performance reviews leading to annual increments make their jobs seem legitimate and respectable. Workers also spoke of employee benefits such as cab drops and food reimbursements when working late at night and learning to use a computer to generate sales reports or how to file income tax returns—skills or advantages that reinforce the notion that they have become professionals. Jobs that connote a professional identity (even if low-skilled and poorly paid), therefore, constitute an entry point for the less privileged to penetrate and participate in middle-class worlds.

Overall, CAs’ narratives indicate aspirations for lives and occupational identities that they perceive as better than those of their parents (or siblings), or what jobs in cybercafes, factories or as security guards offer. The distinctions they make between non-professional and professional work reflect broader perceptions of social worth beyond practical matters of pay. Further, the substantive content of their jobs allows for the accumulation of symbolic capital in the form of respectability and a semblance of upward mobility. I contrast these positive aspects of the job, with more negative articulations of their work experiences, showing how they come to perceive the limits to the desired mobility, leading them to speak about the job as a ‘dhoka’ in the next section.

Retail work as ‘dhoka’

In this section, I introduce narratives that explain why Sandeep and others referred to the job as ‘dhoka’. The Hindi word ‘dhoka’ has multiple meanings including ‘deceit’, ‘betrayal’, and ‘defraud’, depending on the context. In my study, CAs often used the term to challenge the glamourous image of elite stores and malls that once excited them. They also use it to refer to their thwarted aspirations when they realise that the jobs do not actually lead to mobility. Further, they speak of the job as dhoka because it is not very different from the ordinary, manual jobs they had sought to avoid in the first place. To make further sense of their narratives of dhoka, I draw from Cross’s (2014) study of SEZ workers where he highlights the ‘nightmares’ or structural constraints to fulfilling aspirations engendered by the ‘dreamscapes’ of capitalism.

During my fieldwork, I often heard CAs complain about multiple problems they faced on the job, such as long working hours, low salaries, having to stand on their feet all day, not getting enough time off and so on. Beyond matters of physical exhaustion and pay, workers spoke of feeling humiliated by managers and customers who treated them in ways that undermined their claim to professional identities. At Distinction, over lunch break one afternoon, Maya—a CA from Darjeeling—narrated her experience of the brutal reality of retail work. She was bubbling with enthusiasm when she first joined the store, but after a few months, the excitement waned. For Maya, the reality of the work was ‘depressing’. She referred to her experience as a ‘dhoka’ because the company cared only about sales and not their welfare. ‘If you don’t sell … you are fired’, she said to me. She also expressed the view that customers treated CAs like ‘naukars’ by expecting (or making) them carry their shopping bags, speaking rudely to them and ‘giving gaalis’ (abusing verbally) and generally ‘behaving like they [customers] are gods or something’.

In a startling incident that reinforced what Maya told me, a customer humiliated Anuj—a senior CA—over her misplaced handbag at Distinction. The customer had shopped at the store the day before and claimed that she had lost her designer handbag there. She approached Anuj for help who offered to review the CCTV footage from the previous day. He found no evidence of a handbag being misplaced and accordingly informed the customer who got enraged. She accused Anuj of stealing her expensive handbag and warned him that she would pursue legal action. Anuj tried to stay calm in the midst of this altercation, but the customer abused him, calling him ‘uneducated’ and ‘just a class 12 pass’. When other CAs and customers began to gather around to watch what was happening, the customer suddenly slapped Anuj across the face. His face turned red, and he looked utterly shocked. The store manager (SM) arrived on the scene, admonished Anuj for not handling the issue better and escorted the customer to the back office to deal with the matter. Following this incident, the other CAs were visibly shocked by what had transpired and spoke about the lack of tameez (decency) in customers. The reality of their work and identities had quite literally hit them hard in the face.

In another incident at Rouge, Ganesh was humiliated by an irate customer who came to demand a refund. The customer sought out Ganesh and shouted at him for giving her the wrong cream when she had shopped there the previous day. She called him a ‘stupid salesman’ who could not even pronounce the brand name (a luxury French brand). Launching into a tirade against him, she asserted that the value of her bill was worth more than Ganesh’s salary and called him a ganwaar (villager lacking in urban sophistication) for not knowing the difference between a day cream and a night cream. After this incident, Ganesh expressed how upset he felt and said that he could not get over the fact that she got ‘personal’ to prove her superiority: ‘It’s one thing to abuse the company [or the brand]. But to abuse me and who I am…! I hate it when customers try to put us down’.

At Namaste Fashion, male CAs would feel insulted when customers would refer to them as bhaiyya ⁸ (brother) or draw their attention by calling out ‘oye’ instead of a more polite ‘excuse me’. Anil would get particularly annoyed by such behaviour and asked me rhetorically: ‘Do I look like some autowallah [autorickshaw driver] or dhabawallah [roadside restaurant worker] that they can call me bhaiyya?’ For Anil, employment in a store, wearing a uniform with a logo and name badge and being able to explain to customers the difference between a ‘Chinese’ and ‘band’ collar warranted some respect in the form of being addressed more appropriately.

For CAs, the desire to be treated with respect due to their professional identity was reflected in their distinguishing themselves from other kinds of workers in the mall such as security guards and washroom attendants, as well as from informal sector workers such as autowallahs. When Anil got frustrated with such behaviour, he would sarcastically ask customers who called him ‘bhaiyya’, to whom they were referring. For many CAs, getting customers to acknowledge their presence and status and to call them by name was one of the most important markers of being treated like a professional.

The sense of entitlement that many customers expressed in their interactions with CAs is a constant source of anger and personal degradation, especially as such experiences directly countered workers’ perceptions of themselves as professionals. They realised that learning classed behaviours and habits, wearing uniforms and name badges and having professional designations and grooming skills were not enough for them to transcend their social class locations. This becomes real when they understand that they must display docility before customers and managers at the cost of their dignity, which in turn reinforces the class divide that separates most service workers from their customers in India.

Ray and Qayum (2009) point to India’s ‘culture of servitude’ in which ‘social relations of domination/subordination, dependency, and inequality are normalised and permeate both the domestic and public spheres’ (ibid.: 3). Upadhya (2012) makes a similar point in the context of India’s IT (Information Technology) industry when she argues that despite being emblematic of modern work cultures and practices, IT organisations remain entangled in older structures of sociality and accumulation (ibid.: 158). Writing on security guards in Kolkata, Gooptu (2013) notes that forms of humiliation are being reproduced in interactive service work because of ‘the organised, systematic inculcation of cultures of deference and servility, as well as the quotidian routinisation and institutionalisation of humiliating encounters’ (ibid.: 32). The use of terms such as naukar and mazdoor by CAs to capture their work experiences suggests that larger structures of social inequality permeate the spaces of organised retail as well.

CAs also expressed frustration about the forms of control and discipline to which they are subjected by managers; for instance, they rarely ask for reimbursements or overtime pay because they feel that such requests would be perceived negatively by management, leading to bad reviews and lower increments or even to getting fired. At Distinction, Kavita was often instructed to help out in the back office with stock and inventory issues in addition to her responsibilities on the floor—duties that meant she would work beyond her regular shift. When I asked whether she was paid overtime for the extra hours, Kavita laughed and said that CAs are expected to be submissive and thankful to managers and stores for the opportunity to work (and, therefore, to not ask for overtime pay). Her words point to their precarious employment situation and to the fact that retail workers are easily replaceable, given the large pool of potential workers available. ⁹

Many CAs also found the work they had to perform disappointing, especially at Namaste Fashion where male workers perform hard physical labour such as lugging cartons of stock from the warehouse located across the road from the mall. Sanjay told me that although he is a CA, he barely got to work on the floor and instead spent half his time sorting through stock in a dark, stuffy warehouse. He complained that he was drenched in sweat by the time he returned to the store and looked like a ‘mazdoor’ instead of a CA. Sanjay’s use of the word mazdoor reinforces the expectation that retail work should be free of manual labour and related bodily pains, sweat and dirt. He implied that professional workers should not have sweat patches on their clothes (or uniforms), since they are supposed to perform non-manual work in air-conditioned, temperature-controlled environments.

Sandeep summed up why the job is a dhoka when he said that the bright lights of the store blind workers to the realities of hard labour; the fancy English music drowns out abuse by the ‘chutiya’ (‘asshole’) customers and managers, and the uniforms mask the fact that at the end of the day, retail jobs entail the same ‘mazdoori’ as other jobs. Sandeep’s words illustrate how the reality of their jobs bely CAs’ expectations of ‘professional’ identities and corresponding desires for mobility.

The narratives of dhoka suggest that CAs realise that they continue to be marked by their class locations and are identified as such by classed others, despite their superficially ‘professional’ jobs. Their attempts to cultivate a middle-class habitus prove to be curtailed, as they are still subject to the hierarchy that separates the poor and the middle class or elite, which in turn limits their chances of achieving their aspirations for upward mobility. In the next section, I examine how workers navigate this dhoka and reflect on their aspirational trajectories.

The ‘majboori’ of retail work

As highlighted in the introduction, Sandeep and many other CAs choose to stay on in their humiliating jobs despite the dhoka. They explain this through the notion of majboori. In this section, I explore their articulations of majboori.

The term ‘majboori’ has various, context-specific meanings. English translations of the word would include ‘compulsion’, ‘constraint’, ‘helplessness’ or the phrase ‘my hands are tied’. When I first heard CAs use the word, I assumed that it implied ‘no choice but to stay on in retail because of the lack of other opportunities’. It was only later that I realised that majboori, in their narratives, also represents agential action in pursuit of their desire to participate in the ‘dreamscapes’ (Cross 2014) of post-liberalised India.

During a break one afternoon at Rouge, over cups of free tea served to CAs, Sandeep, Ganesh and I sat in the pantry talking about why workers stay on in retail. Sandeep explained that for migrants such as himself, the job is about sustaining themselves in an expensive cosmopolitan city. They find life in their native villages and small towns dull, with no opportunities for naukris or ‘personal growth’. Several scholars have argued that for youth from rural backgrounds, living in a big city or metropolis often becomes a vehicle for pursuing aspirations for better futures, especially due to the devaluation of agriculture and the uneven reach of development in India (Datta 2018). Mankekar (2011) similarly suggests that for young men and women in small towns, migration to urban centres is seen as key to success, and the very act of leaving the ‘claustrophobia of the small town’ is part of ‘making it big’ (ibid.: 24).

In the small survey of retail workers in Delhi that I conducted to understand their social backgrounds, I found that most were migrants (from states outside of Delhi) and came from agricultural households and rural areas. The survey results suggest that most CAs are from low-income but not impoverished households. However, their families were clearly in financial need, as most of the respondents said that they had to quit studies after school due to financial constraints, or that they were working to pay for higher education. For migrant workers from such social backgrounds, retail jobs provide just enough income to sustain themselves in the city where they can enjoy the attractions of urban life. Further, working in malls and stores locate Sandeep, Ganesh and other migrant CAs in a key site of middle-class consumption that provides access to desired lifestyles.

However, the majboori that leads CAs to persist in onerous retail jobs goes beyond sustaining life in a metropolis. After all, their prior employment in factories and restaurant kitchens in Delhi had afforded Ganesh and Sandeep a source of income and respite from unemployment. Yet, as discussed earlier, they did not want to work in places where their hands were always rough and dirty and with smells that made them sick. The majboori to stick with a demeaning job stems from the semblance of upward mobility that it offers, symbolised by soft and clean hands and air-conditioned workplaces. Located at the confluence of the new consumption culture, opportunities to learn spoken English, interact with elite customers, the pride in professional designations and the opportunity to participate in the fashion and beauty industries these retail jobs encapsulate CAs’ aspirations for a better life—their sense of what and where they would like to be in the future.

Further, CAs’ narratives of majboori also refer to the social value that retail jobs carry outside the workplace, in their communities and families, given the stark contrast between service sector jobs and farming or manual labour. As we sipped our sugary tea, Sandeep told me that his mother was proud of his job in the city and would be disappointed if he were to give up his ‘professional’ life to return to the village and work in their fields, especially since he had completed his graduation. Sandeep’s narrative suggests that CAs stay on in these jobs partly to earn the respect of their families. Mathew’s (2018) study of aspirations highlights how deprivations of the past are profoundly meaningful in the way marginalised subjects pursue futures. CAs’ narratives of majboori include such evaluations of their current jobs in contrast to their parents’ occupations—agriculture, industrial, domestic work or self-employment in the informal urban economy (auto-rickshaw driving, carpentry and tailoring). The notion of majboori, thus, entails their families’ expectations of their future mobility, especially because they have sacrificed to provide their children with some education. ¹⁰ The fact that Sandeep has a college degree and works in a big store in Delhi makes his mother proud, which prevents him from returning home or searching for alternative work.

As we finished our tea, Sandeep expressed that all jobs involve mazdoori and hardships. After working for eight years in retail, continuing to do mazdoori in the store made the most sense for him because he is familiar with the retail sector and has developed the skills required to deal with the humiliation and drudgery of the job. Sandeep also pointed out that a retail job offers a level of comfort and pleasure not available in other kinds of work, such as being served free tea, working in a temperature-controlled environment, having access to hand creams and clean washrooms and so on. These features of retail work also motivate Sandeep to stay on because they allow him to differentiate himself from other types of workers. Thus, the majboori to continue in retail jobs reflects a desire to create and perform a new self within their project of social mobility.

The majboori to stay on in the job, therefore, transcends ideas of ‘false consciousness’ or ‘false opposition’ (Freeman 2000, 206); rather, workers’ narratives imply an intentional choice to consent to work they regard as demeaning in their search of securing a desired social identity. As one peels away the layers of their narratives of majboori, we see that work in organised retail is a quest for belonging in spaces that have historically been out of their reach for accessing better futures and meeting familial expectations and duties.

To make sense of the complex and even contradictory articulation of majboori, I draw from Mahmood (2005) who argues that ‘agential capacity is entailed not only in those acts that resist norms but also in the multiple ways in which one inhabits norms’ (ibid.: 15). This perspective allows us ‘to conceptualise agency as a capacity for action that specific relations of subordination create and enable’ (ibid.: 18). It helps us understand that subjects might welcome, inhabit, reorient or resign themselves to dominant norms depending on the particular setting, as in her case of Egyptian women’s practices of piety. Mahmood’s (2005) approach allows us to recognise how certain acts which may transform, reconfirm or even strengthen the existing identities of subjects may be understood as agency. Through this conceptualisation, CAs’ choice to stay on in the job must be seen as an act of self-preservation rather than driven by ‘constraints’ or ‘compulsions’. The narrative of majboori implies a determination to hold on to work that seems to provide access to a different social class, reflecting how these young men and women wish to see and remake themselves in the here and now.

Conclusion

This article highlights how employment and work constitute a central site where aspirations for social belonging and mobility are articulated by marginalised subjects, especially against the backdrop of liberalisation and its cultural and social afterlives in India. Building on studies that discuss the reconstitution of class and youth aspirations in post-liberalised India, the quest for a ‘professional’ identity as a strategy of class-making and a practice of social distinction is highlighted.

The article analyses the aspirations that are articulated and pursued by retail workers in Delhi malls and the contradictions and tensions they experience in the job. On the one hand, they try to meet desires for mobility by accessing opportunities in the ‘dreamscape’ of the mall and remake themselves as ‘professionals’ within the classed spaces of ‘hi-fi’ retail stores. These aspirations explain why they are keen to learn how to groom themselves, speak in English, use a computer, become fashion-conscious and develop soft, moisturised hands—elements of the job that produce a respectability and social status that working in the informal economy does not afford. The acquisition of such markers of middle-classness, in turn, allows them to cement boundaries between themselves and other workers from similar class backgrounds who work in factories or cybercafes. Through such practices, CAs imagine themselves as respectable, white-collar employees who have escaped the drudgery and low social status of mazdoori.

On the other hand, we see the fragility of such aspirations when CAs are confronted with the servile realities of retail work. While the nature of labour in organised retail may be distinct from manual jobs, the social class identities of workers are not erased by working in malls; instead, they become spaces where inequalities between the rich and poor are directly experienced, enacted and exacerbated, such that CAs feel they are still just mazdoors or naukars. They face disappointment and frustration as managers’ and customers’ expectations of docility and submissiveness undermine their identity as ‘professionals’. Rather than producing feelings of self-worth, work in the new service economy does little to destabilise existing structures of social inequality, leading CAs to speak about retail work as a dhoka—akin to the ‘nightmares’ of capitalism that Cross (2014) writes about.

Despite the frustrations, retail workers articulate a majboori to stick to the job. I argue that this ‘compulsion’ to stay on does not stem simply from a lack of alternatives but represents a resolution of the conflict between their negative experiences of work and their determination to inhabit these aspirational spaces and identities. I read their narratives of majboori as reflecting practical and strategic agency, as it expresses their resolve to survive and progress in a complex, unequal milieu by appropriating and manipulating the opportunities offered by the job to produce social value outside the workspace.

The findings of this study draw attention to the ways in which marginalised youth appropriate and cultivate new class identities for themselves in post-liberalised India. Moreover, the distinctions they consistently draw between formal employment and informal work highlight that the class identities they value are marked not by income or wealth alone but also by recognition, respect and visibility. By presenting the contradictions of retail work and its impact on CAs’ lives, within and outside the workplace, I try to offer a nuanced reading of how work and mobility are entangled, pursued and experienced in the contemporary moment.