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Bangalore and Its IT Industry
Askew—A Short Biography of Bangalore by T J S George, New Delhi: Aleph Book Company, 2016 (hardback).
Reengineering India—Work, Capital, and Class in an Offshore Economy by Carol Upadhya, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2016, pp xiii + 384, ₹995 (hardback).
Encoding Race, Encoding Class—Indian IT Workers in Berlin by Sareeta Amrute; Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2016, pp x + 268, price not mentioned (paperback).
A persistent myth has it that when Kempe Gowda founded Bangalore1 in 1537, he had four towers built to mark the outermost boundaries of the city, and had proclaimed that the city would never grow beyond these limits. The views from atop these towers, however, show that present-day Bangalore’s outer limits have long since disappeared into the horizon. In fact, the towers can now be considered part of the city’s urban centre. Disheartened by the rundown state of some of the towers, especially the one located in Kempegowda Nagar in south Bangalore, a facelift was announced for all four recently, at a total cost of ₹3 crore.2
While the city has never been particularly heavy on historical sites that predate the arrival of the British, this latest effort to protect and upkeep what remains of Bangalore’s heritage needs to be at least partially understood within the context of urban change. It could be argued that nowhere else in India has urban change been as rapid, impactful, and perhaps as “disheartening” as it has been in Bangalore. There is no denying the influence the IT industry has had on the city. Over time, India’s IT industry and Bangalore have not just developed a symbiotic relationship, but they almost seem to have become synonymous with one another.
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