BPO: Bangalore Pariah Orientalism

Edward Said, the great Columbia University scholar of global political culture, who died in 2003 and whose masterwork "Orientalism" defined and delineated the field of postcolonial studies for the current and subsequent generations of scholars, probably had little knowledge of or interest in BPO: Business Process Outsourcing.

Among Said's ideas, summarized below by reviewers, the most notable is the entrenched millennia-old Western view of the exotic East, the inferior and yet dangerous "Other":

"The Orient exists for the West, and is constructed by and in relation to the West. It is a mirror image of what is inferior and alien ("Other") to the West....The Orient is seen as separate, eccentric, backward, silently different, sensual, and passive. It has a tendency towards despotism and away from progress. It displays feminine penetrability and supine malleability. Its progress and value are judged in terms of, and in comparison to, the West, so it is always the Other, the conquerable, and the inferior...The [oriental]man is depicted as feminine, weak, yet strangely dangerous because [he] poses a threat to white, Western women. The [oriental] woman is both eager to be dominated and strikingly exotic. The Oriental is a single image, a sweeping generalization, a stereotype that crosses countless cultural and national boundaries."

Orientalism is alive, well, and thriving in the BPO field. There are no outcries of political incorrectness when political, business, and media leaders in the United States routinely and regularly bash the "orientals" -- men and women -- of Bangalore and other exotic locales in India for stealing American jobs by accepting pennies to the dollar of American wages.

Business Process Outsourcing or "offshoring" is of course not new. When it was people from Ireland or Israel that were doing these outsourced jobs, there was no political outcry. Ireland is not the Orient. While technically in the Middle East and thus squarely within the geography of the Orient, Israel is for all practical purposes a Euro-American enclave.

But India... that is Orient par excellence... Ganga Din.. Naked Fakirs...Riding the Elephant on a Howda.... Going for a Shikar of the Royal Bengal Tiger... Ten-armed Godesses...

In 2004, legislative efforts are rife in the United States to ban offshoring of government work to India or to require India-based Call Centers to explicitly state "This call is being answered from India", when responding to queries by denizens of the Occidental master races.

Unfortunately, there is usually not much to be gained in global business settings from explicit discussion of such political-cultural issues. In the days when South Africa was ruled by the white supremacist Apartheid regime, that country wanted to do business with the resurgent economic superpower that was Japan. So the Apartheid regime decided to characterize the Japanese not as "colored" people but as "honorary whites".

Indians, Filipinos, Vietnamese and others gloating at the BPO pie.... put on your pin-striped tie...

It is time to revive another grand old Kiplingesque orientalist idea... that of the WOG: the Westernized Oriental Gentleman!



Nik Dholakia