Art in Bazaar: DTP Gig Work, Precarity and the Digital Everyday of Kolkata

Principle Investigator：Abhijit Roy

The Indian state’s aspiration for global leadership based on what it calls aatmanirbhar Bharat or self-reliant India is heavily premised on developing a robust digital infrastructure against what it perceives as Chinese and broadly east Asian dominance in the field. ‘Digital India’ schemes started in 2015, digital governance Apps like Cowin for vaccine-distribution management and the present drive for semiconductor fabs on Indian soil, all seem to be aligned to a neoliberal idea of ‘development’ where geopolitics and market interests primarily inform state policy. Such an idea of development is not only exalted by the mainstream media and the urban elite, but lends a ‘universal’ logic to the particular politics of Hindutva, a legitimacy that sustains authoritarian tendencies in parliamentary democracy. The proposed research delves underneath this fanfare to explore a world where digital work involves informal labour, struggling livelihood and precarity.

We focus particularly on small shops in urban local markets offering DTP (Desk Top Publishing) services for common people and small organisations. Beyond the typical DTP jobs of designing notices, posters, banners, leaflets, publicity material, legal documents, school projects, family memorabilia, etc., the DTP artist also does a lot of other “computer” jobs for its clients: filling up online application forms, download and upload documents, obtain government identity cards, etc. Such work is Gig in its job-based payment and variety of contracts (independent, full-time or part-time contract, on-call, temporary), lack of minimum wage, compensation for loss and social security, absence of unionism, high workplace risk, recycling, cheap hardware (non-branded, primarily Chinese), “jugaad”, piracy, nonexistence of formal training and IP. The research will explore these aspects, along with interrogating how the workers treat their job and perceive their lives in this bazaar of digital artwork. Life stories would be crucial in this research on digital affordance. While there have been some work on app-based delivery workers, the huge landscape of DTP artists in the context of India’s much hyped digital future has not drawn significant critical attention so far. This digital hinterland is strewn all across the urban local bazaars in India and south Asia. Our ethnographic focus will be Kolkata, the first major site of India’s colonial modernity, historically replete with 19th century legacies of urbanisation and English education and a present marked by a widespread sense of decadence and crisis.

Through interviews and audiovisual documentation in the areas of Sealdah, Dharamtala, Dalhousie, High Court, Jadavpur, Dum Dum, Shyambazar in Kolkata where such small shops are thickly concentrated, the project will investigate how a south Asian city encounters the digital and communicative modernity of the 21st century, how do notions of art, skill, authorship and livelihood reorient themselves in the digital everyday, how can such reorientations take different forms in relation to the sub-local geographies, and broadly to what extent such a study can open up new understanding of digital labour, technology, expertise, digital infrastructure and geopolitics.