'The World as India' is the title of a lecture that Susan Sontag gave in London last year, which was published in the Times Literary Supplement this June 13.
In it the distinguished writer celebrates the success of Indians in harvesting their legendary English-speaking skills in the global economy through call centres and other services. But Harish Trivedi, the no-less distinguished critic at Delhi University, promptly wrote an angry rejoinder in which he characterised call centres as ''brutally exploitative'' and its employees as ''cyber coolies of our global age, working not on sugar plantations but on flickering screens, and lashed into submission through vigilant and punitive monitoring, each slip in accent or lapse in pretence meaning a cut in wages.''
I have been associated with three call centres and I find Trivedi's depiction truly bizarre. What he sees as exploitation by multinationals, the young boys and girls see as an exciting chance to work with the world's top brands and acquire new skills to make a career in the global economy. It is true that many work the night shift but so do 21.2 per cent of all American workers. Yes, it isn't much fun to persuade someone in Detroit to pay his credit card bill, but it does build valuable negotiating skills. Many call centre employees answer telephones but some also do highly skilled back office jobs on-line — for example, medical students prepare medical dictionaries, architecture students make detailed drawings for American architecture firms, accountants prepare payrolls. And if these are coolie jobs, why are labour unions in America and England so upset about job losses to India? Finally, Trivedi might ask, is it better to have an idle son at home or a productive one at work, earning Rs 10,000 a month (and if he is diligent, Rs 20,000 after three years)?
At the root of the dispute is ownership of the English language. Today's confident young Indians view English as a functional skill, not unlike Windows or learning to write an invoice. When they speak English they feel they own it — ''its another Indian language'' — whereas Harish Trivedi's neo-colonial English flies the Anglo-American flag. The minds of these ''cyber coolies'' seem to be decolonised whereas Trivedi's is stuck in a post-colonial past.
We have always thought of English as the power language of India. Raghuvir Sahay, in a two sentence Hindi poem, caught it brilliantly: ''The English taught us English to turn us into subjects/ Now we teach ourselves English to turn into masters'' (which Trivedi quotes in a wonderful new book edited by Sheldon Pollock, Literary Cultures in History). But Star TV has now proven that when it comes to making money Hindi may in fact be the power language. When the old Star News in English changed to Hindi its audience share jumped from 2 per cent to 30 per cent, along with its share of advertising revenues.
Yet English remains the passport for every youngster who dreams of becoming ''master of the universe''. Sontag is on the right track. Business process outsourcing will create enormous number of jobs in India, and the first company to employ technology to teach quality English via language labs in franchised outlets across the bazaars of India will get rich. So, who is the coolie? Not the confident young person at the call centre with her liberated attitude to English, but Harish Trivedi, whose mind remains colonised in the old linguistic categories of post-colonial, pre-reform India.