1-800-Worlds (The Making of The Indian Call Centre Economy)

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Indian call centre employees work through the night, sleep during the day, and listen to foreign voices in accented tongues over transnational telephone connections. Through a description of the nightly and daily lives of call centre workers in the university town of Pune, India, 1-800-Worlds engages with the complex negotiations that underlie the ostensible success of new service economies. As the author shows, the call centre industry is neither insular nor singular but offers a set of symptoms that can help read changing forms of urban Indian middle-classness.

Mathangi Krishnamurthy is assistant professor of anthropology at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Madras, India. She is currently pursuing a project on bodily imaginations in relation to new genetic diagnostic technologies. Her areas of interest include the anthropology of work and gender, medical anthropology, urban studies, globalization, and affective labour. She has published on questions of English language usage, the anthropology of work, and the anthropology of gender.

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