Hemangini Gupta‘s Experimental Times explores the gendered dynamics of startup capitalism in Bangalore, offering a rich ethnographic study of labour, urban space, and entrepreneurship. Tanushree Kaushal writes that the book is a nuanced and original contribution to the feminist understanding of cultural economy and tech-capital in India.

Experimental Times: Startup Capitalism and Feminist Futures in India. Hemangini Gupta. University of California Press. 2024.

In Experimental Times, an ethnography of startup capitalism in Bangalore, author Hemangini Gupta quotes the city’s startup festival organiser Vlad Dubovsky on the festival’s raison d’etre: “the idea is to convey that entrepreneurship is a lifestyle rather than a career”. With this book, Gupta, an anthropologist of labour and gender, interrogates the gendered production of the techno-entrepreneur in the Global South. This adds to growing scholarship on gender, labour, urban studies and tech including works such as Carla Freeman’s High Tech and High Heels in the Global Economy (2000), J.A. English-Lueck’s Cultures@Silicon Valley (2017) and Benjamin Shestakofsky’s Behind the Startup (2024). Gupta’s work is a unique addition which provides a contextually-embedded reading of labour in Bangalore’s startup industry.

[Gupta] locates this labour in a continuum of office work and home life, as multiple dimensions of workers’ lives are assembled in the process of creating startups.  

Gupta focuses on the work and lives of employees and employers at Captivate Travels, a travel startup in Bangalore, which provides travel packages and products for clients. The book promises and delivers three key contributions to scholarship on gender, labour and techno-capitalism in the Global South. Firstly, the book underscores the importance of place and urban spatial imaginary to startup capitalism; secondly, it examines the figure of the “entrepreneur” and thirdly, it traces the simultaneous production of care, friendship and leisure, which accompany entrepreneurial subjectivity in startup capitalism. Gupta uses labour as method, in which labour is not only an object of study but the lens through which startups are perceived and then analysed. Moreover, she locates this labour in a continuum of office work and home life, as multiple dimensions of workers’ lives are assembled in the process of creating startups.  

The book deploys the concept of “experimental time”, the embodied experience of experimentation which is intrinsic to startup capitalism. Startups are known for experimenting with new products, models and working cultures. Gupta lucidly illustrates that this experimentation is not an abstract occurrence but is experienced through embodied and material everyday work cultures and workers’ future dreams. Startup capitalism operates through “experimental time”, by creating conditions of precarity for workers, who are simultaneously called upon to be entrepreneurial and risk-taking and to even experiment with automation technologies that can one day replace their labour. By locating experimental time in workers’ experiences and desires, this book provides embedded readings of startup capitalism from the vantage point of different types of workers.

Care relations blend with professional roles to create new ties and forms of belonging in urban spaces

The experimental character of startup capitalism is also strongly gendered as becomes evident in the story of Malathi, a woman entrepreneur who was making a pitch to venture capitalists in Bangalore, but whose idea was dismissed for not being sufficiently innovative. Malathi was a middle-aged woman pitching a product for children’s education, illustrating the value of this product by drawing upon her own experience as a mother. Her idea was swiftly rejected as she was cut off mid speech and asked to be more risk-taking. As Gupta explains, Malathi was being seen as a middle-class woman whose product for children’s education emerged from her own domestic experiences. This ran “contrary to the configurations of caste, class and gender that were being valorised” since the ideal entrepreneur was someone who was not domestic, but highly mobile and one who could leverage urban masculinity. Hence, despite the future-oriented and innovative claims of startup capitalism, it remains embedded in axes of gender, class and caste.

A key actor in the book is the city of Bangalore, which Gupta historicises by weaving in stories from her own family and their histories in British India and then post-independent urban life. As economic liberalisation took off in India in the 1990s, images and discourses of the “New Indian Woman” became widespread, a woman who occupied new spaces while staying within the limits of “respectable femininity”. As women enter unconventional workplaces, bonds based in care, friendship and solidarity emerge in urban places of work. Gupta narrates the story of Lata, an employee at the Captivate Travels, whose ex-husband began stalking her over the phone and then it was her colleagues at work (who she calls her “brothers”) who stepped in by threatening to report him to the police. While her family remained distant as she navigated difficult relations with her former husband, her colleagues were proactive in ensuring her safety and wellbeing. Here, care relations blend with professional roles to create new ties and forms of belonging in urban spaces.

A much-needed contribution to the feminist study of startup capitalism and labour in the South, offering fresh insights at the intersection of cultural economy, gender studies and tech-capital

The concluding chapter nods to ongoing processes of deindustrialisation and precaritisation of labour, which could have been further theorised to frame the specific political-economic moment in which startup capitalism emerges and becomes key to the Indian economy. How does deindustrialisation play into these shifting solidarities and more importantly, in changing the contours and dimensions of contemporary labour? As a reading of capitalism from the South, Gupta might also have engaged more with the theory of racial capitalism and the organisation of capital through embodied difference. Jodi Melamed points out that “capital can only be capital when it is accumulating and it can only accumulate by producing and moving through relations of severe inequality among human groups”. While these differences might not fully map onto Harish Trivedi’s descriptions of Bangalore’s “cyber coolies”, Gupta’s ethnographic material sheds light on the specific types of differences, inequalities and capital created and sustained in Bangalore, and India’s urban spaces more broadly.

That said, the book is a rich deep-dive into the world of startups and is especially empathetic and attentive to workers’ lifeworlds. Gupta balances reading workers’ appearances (I was particularly interested in her descriptions of women’s clothing and how these signal status, class and urban belonging) and their inner worlds, as articulated in conversations with others, homelife and types of relationships. Gupta makes a much-needed contribution to the feminist study of startup capitalism and labour in the South, offering fresh insights at the intersection of cultural economy, gender studies and tech-capital in everyday life. 

Note: This review gives the views of the author and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Image: Bhatakta Manav on Shutterstock.

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