Valuing Deaf Worlds in Urban India 9780813570624

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Valuing Deaf Worlds in Urban India

44444444444444444444444

Valuing Deaf Worlds in Urban India

MICHELE FRIEDNER 44444444444444444444444

RUTGERS UNIVERSITY PRESS NEW BRUNSWICK, NEW JERSEY, AND LONDON

Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­P ublication Data Friedner, Michele, 1978–­ Valuing deaf worlds in urban India / Michele Friedner. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978–­0–­8135–­7061–­7 (hardback) —­ISBN 978–­0–­8135–­7060–­0 (pbk.) —­ ISBN 978–­0–­8135–­7062–­4 (e-­book (web pdf)) 1. Deaf—­India. 2. Deaf culture—­India. 3. People with disabilities—­India. 4. Sociology of disability—­India. I. Title. HV2863.F75 2015 305.9'0820954—­dc23

2014040074

A British Cataloging-­in-­P ublication record for this book is available from the British Library. Copyright © 2015 by Michele Friedner All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is “fair use” as defined by U.S. copyright law. Visit our website: http://​rutgerspress​.rutgers​.edu Manufactured in the United States of America

In memory of Shmuel Yochanan Friedner For Jamie and Saffron

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

ix

List of Abbreviations

xiii

Naming and Translation Practices

xv

Introduction: Deaf Turns, Deaf Orientations, and Deaf Development

1

1

Orienting from (Bad) Family to (Good) Friends

27

2

Converting to the Church of Deaf Sociality

53

3

Circulation as Vocation

77

4

Deaf Bodies, Corporate Bodies

101

5

Enrolling Deafness in Multilevel Marketing Businesses

125

Conclusion: India’s Deaf Futures/Reorienting the World

151

Appendix: Key Concepts from Indian Sign Language

163

Notes

167

References

181

Index

191

vii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am immensely grateful to my deaf friends and interlocutors in Bangalore and elsewhere in India. Spending time with them—­in their schools and homes, on buses, in coffee shops and cafés, and in other social spaces—­has been a joy. I thank them for their patience, sense of humor, and love. I thank them for putting up with my many questions and my sometimes incomprehensible Indian Sign Language. I especially want to thank the people who in this book I call Chetan, Sushma, Narayanan, and Radhika. The four were generous guides who have become dear friends. I have wonderful memories of long conversations, cooking delicious meals, and traveling through Bangalore with them; their contributions to my research have made this a richer book (and they have made my life richer as well). My first introduction to India’s deaf worlds was through the wonderful women at the organization that I call the Delhi Deaf Women’s League. These women have provided me with endless hospitality, encouragement, and support every time I return to Delhi. I can feel them cheering me on, urging me to finish this book, and teasing me for being so timid at times. I only wish I were able to spend more time at this organization, with these women. I was extremely fortunate to be generously welcomed by almost all of the nongovernmental organizations, businesses, and churches with which I interacted. Administrators, human resource executives, and pastors permitted me to attend classes, training sessions, and worship services; hang out in computer rooms and workplaces; and they granted me interviews. I owe much to these organizations. The person whom I call Jaisel Ahuja was one of the first deaf Indians whom I met, and he was very generous with his contacts both before and during my years in India; indeed, it was he who introduced me to many of the organizations and people with whom I subsequently worked, and he has become a dear friend over the years. The person whom I call Atul Deshmukh has also been a wonderful guide to India’s deaf worlds, and I thank him for his gregarious personality and constant honesty. Ruma Roka and Arun Rao have been very helpful over the years and have warmly welcomed me into their organizations and their lives.

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In Bangalore, I thank Vanita, Joella, and Johnny Thomas for providing me with the most beautiful home ever, complete with an orange wall and a coconut tree. I thank Ida, Rebecca, and Kezia Thomas for being lovely neighbors and for bringing me appam from time to time. I thank Sravanthi Dasari and Nanda Kishore for being occasional translators and partners-­in-­crime; I especially thank Sravanthi for her searing insight and indignation (the two go well together!). I am very grateful to Meenu Bhambani for opening her house to me, feeding me, and imparting many words of wisdom. Thanks as well to Rajneesh Khosla for putting up with me. Also in Bangalore, I thank Asha and Babi Dey and Aban Adenwalla for providing me with historical and background information about the beginning of deaf education in Bangalore, and Rama Chari for sharing her vast knowledge about the state of disability in India. In Chennai, where we lived in 2013–­2014, I thank Mr. and Mrs. Balachander for their hospitality as well as the residents of the Dhanalakshmi Avenue Colony for welcoming us into the community and creating a lovely environment in which to write. This book project started as a dissertation in the joint Medical Anthropology Program at the University of California, Berkeley—­University of California, San Francisco. Although it has been significantly revised, I hope that Sharon Kaufman, Lawrence Cohen, Vincanne Adams, and Gillian Hart see their influence on these pages. I want to especially thank Sharon and Lawrence for being wonderful mentors. Sharon taught me the importance of careful ethnography, while Lawrence was always willing to ruminate and expound upon the most seemingly mundane details, finding beauty and fascination in every (potential) story. At Berkeley, I also wish to thank Rahul Bjorn Parsons for being the best Hindi teacher ever. While at Berkeley I received generous funding from the American Institute of Indian Studies, UC Berkeley, the UC Berkeley Human Rights Center, and the National Science Foundation. At the American Institute for Indian Studies, I thank Elise Auerbach for all her help. At Berkeley, I was fortunate to have had Sue Schweik, Devva Kasnitz, Katherine Sherwood, Lakshmi Fjord, and Alison Kafer around as examples of what engaged and (com)passionate disability studies scholars could be like. Outside the university, I learned a great deal from Catherine Kudlick, Corbett O’Toole, and Paul Preston, as well. I wrote this book while I was a National Science Foundation–­sponsored postdoctoral fellow in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Anthropology program, a program filled with the best colleagues a postdoc could hope for. Stefan Helmreich was a mentor in every sense of the word and has continued to awe me with his generosity and intellect. This book has benefited tremendously from his guidance and enthusiasm and my spirits have benefited from his encouragement and occasional sense of whimsy. I also wish to thank Graham Jones for his willingness to talk through ideas and for guiding me through

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xi

the writing process. I was especially lucky to be at MIT when Yehuda Goodman was there, and I am grateful for his interest and attention to my work. A book workshop held at MIT and attended by Stefan Helmreich, Heather Paxson, Yehuda Goodman, Smitha Radhakrishnan, and Chris Walley was greatly beneficial to making this book what it currently is, and I want to acknowledge Smitha for her careful, enthusiastic reading and copious notes. Amberly Steward, Irene Hartford, and Rosemarie Hegg were amazing department administrators and helped facilitate my postdoc and organize my book workshop. David Wunsch and John Kelly were my academic and pastoral cheerleaders and helped to make Boston more of a home. I also benefited from a book workshop held at the American Institute of Indian Studies 2012 annual conference and I thank the members of my session as well as Susan Wadley and Geraldine Forbes for their input. Frank Bechter, Vandana Chaudhry, Terra Edwards, Mara Green, Alastair Iles, Eunjung Kim, Satendra Kumar, Annelies Kusters, Mike Morgan, and Joan Ostrove read through drafts of chapters. I especially want to acknowledge Frank for his generous engagement with my work (talk about close reading!) and Mara for carefully and painstakingly reading and rereading drafts of chapters. Indeed, Mara read this manuscript multiple times, and I am very much in her debt; she will see herself on these pages. The Society for Disability Studies provided me with a community of loving and generous scholars and comrades for which I am very grateful. I especially wish to thank Alison Kafer, Eunjung Kim, Vandana Chaudhry, Joan Ostrove, Susan Burch, Mara Mills, Catherine Kudlick, Sunaura Taylor, Pamela Block, Devva Kasnitz, Akemi Nishida, Elaine Gerber, and Mike Gill. In India, studies of disability and deafness are in nascent stages, and I am excited to see the field grow. I want to thank Shilpaa Anand, Deepa Palaniappan, Amba Salelkar, Meenu Bhambani, Tanmoy Bhattacharya, James Staples, and Vandana Chaudhry for their engagement, ideas, and support. I am especially appreciative of Renu Addlakha and Jagdish Chander for being my first introductions to the field of disability studies in India. Both have been mentors and sounding boards over the years, generous with their time and advice. I am happy to have Annelies Kusters and Mara Green as sounding boards for all things related to deaf South Asia. Mr. V. Gopalakrishnan, an Indian Sign Language expert and consultant from Hyderabad, India, is responsible for the beautiful line drawings in the book; I thank him for his work on these and am very happy to be able to include them here and on the cover. Margaret Case provided excellent copy editing support and Cassandra Evans read and re-­read chapters as well. At Rutgers University Press, I want to acknowledge Marilyn Campbell, Jennifer Blanc-­Tal, and Allyson Fields for their work on this book. I especially want to thank Marlie Wasserman

x i i A cknowledgments

at the Press for her enthusiasm and support for the project as well as her unfailing honesty and amazingly prompt attention. This book could not have been written without support and encouragement from my wonderful friends Naomi Baer, Emilie Cassou, Mara Green, Elizabeth Mazur, Gabrielle Marcus, Karen Thompson, and Rachel Aronowitz as well as my family. My mother, Ann Friedner, came to India twice, even though she swore she never would. I thank her for her unstinting love, support, and encouragement. My sister Karen Friedner visited me in Bangalore, and I thank her for jumping into my research and field sites enthusiastically and making friends with everyone. While my father was not alive to see this project develop or come to fruition, I believe that I learned many of my anthropological skills from him. I have a wonderful family, and this also includes Richard Woolman and Susie, Jim, and Jeff Osborne. Most of all, I am indebted to Jamie Osborne for his patient and steadfast encouragement, his excitement about this project, and his help with thinking, writing, formatting, and living over the years. This book is for him and for our daughter Saffron who, at the age of two, has spent half her life in India. I hope she becomes more fluent in Indian Sign Language than I have.

ABBREVIATIONS

AIFD

All India Federation of the Deaf

AIISH

All India Institute of Speech and Hearing

ASL

American Sign Language

BDA

Bangalore Deaf Association

BISL

Bangalore variety Indian Sign Language

BPO

business process outsourcing

CBS

Chronological Bible Storytelling

CII

Confederation of Indian Industries

CSI

Church of South India

CSR

corporate social responsibility

DPA

Disabled Peoples Association

HR

human resources

IDCS

International Deaf Children’s Society

IR

independent representative

ISL

Indian Sign Language

ISLRTC

Indian Sign Language Research and Training Center

IT

information technology

ITES

information technology enabled services

JSSPPH

JSS Polytechnic for the Physically Handicapped

LDS

Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints

NAD

National Association of the Deaf

NCPEDP

National Centre for Promotion of Employment of Disabled People

NGO

nongovernmental organization

NIHH

National Institute for Hearing Handicapped

PM

prosperity meeting

xiii

x i v A bbreviations

RCI

Rehabilitation Council of India

SKID

Sheila Kothavala Institute for the Deaf

SMS

Short Message Service

SSLC

secondary school leaving certificate

UNCRPD

United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities

NAMING AND TRANSLATION PRACTICES

My practice of using pseudonyms may appear to be confusing or erratic. I am motivated by a desire to respect people’s privacy and do no harm, although it is likely that my deaf friends in Bangalore and elsewhere in India will be very aware of what organizations, people, and schools I am writing about. I use pseudonyms for all individuals and for all organizations and entities that have requested that I use pseudonyms. I also use pseudonyms for most schools and educational institutions, nongovernmental organizations and training centers, businesses and corporations, churches and religious organizations, and political/activist organizations. In some cases I have chosen to use the actual names, as I thought that this would be appropriate—­in the case of international or national organizations, government institutions, historical deaf schools, or entities and organizations well known to the general public. As such, the text is therefore a mix of pseudonyms and unchanged names. I ask the reader to bear with me. My practice of using quotations and rendering my sign language–­using interlocutors’ words into text is as follows: sign language has no conventionalized or widespread written form. In representing my interlocutors’ words, I use two methods. I use italics in quotes when I paraphrase my interlocutors’ words. I do this to make it clear to the reader that sign language is a different language from spoken and written language (in this case, mostly English). Many of the signed words and phrases that are repeated throughout the book can be found in the glossary. When I translate my interlocutors’ words from sign language (American Sign Language, varieties of Indian Sign Language, or International Sign) to English and render their words into English grammatical structure, I use quotation marks and I do not italicize. An example of these italicizing and translation practices would be the often-­repeated phrase “deaf deaf same,” which I translate as “I am deaf, you are deaf, we are the same,” although I conceptualize this as “deaf similitude.” For translations between Hindi or Kannada and English, I write the Hindi or Kannada words in italics using their commonly accepted American English spelling, and I provide a translation immediately following the italicized word.

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Valuing Deaf Worlds in Urban India

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Introduction Deaf Turns, Deaf Orientations, and Deaf Development

Sunday Circulations

It was late morning on a Sunday in June 2009. True Life Bible Fellowship, one of Bangalore’s eight deaf churches, had just finished its weekly fellowship. Energized by a particularly spirited discussion of “question answer,” or question and answer, in which fellowship attendees discussed their relationships with their normal families and the importance of helping other deaf people, attendees chatted on the lawn of the theological college where the meeting had been held. In addition to sharing news and information, many attendees were deciding what to do that afternoon. The options included a statewide Jehovah’s Witness conference where there would be sign language interpreters, a meeting to discuss disability pensions and government certifications sponsored by a Bangalore-­based deaf nongovernmental organization (NGO), and an information and recruitment session for a multilevel marketing business with a deaf leader. Many of those present decided to attend the multilevel marketing business meeting, and so a diverse group of young deaf people—­including manual laborers, business process outsourcing employees, and hospitality sector workers from different economic, caste, religious, and geographic backgrounds—­ boarded a bus to go to the meeting location. The deaf business leader had strategically rented the courtyard of the sole college in Bangalore that provided sign language interpreters, and as a result many of Bangalore’s deaf people knew where the meeting was to be held. On the bus, I sat with Zahra, a young woman who worked as a barista (or “silent brewmaster”) at Café Coffee Day, one of Bangalore’s new coffee chains. As we traveled through the city, we chatted about Zahra’s job, the many deaf churches and deaf-­focused NGOs in Bangalore, and the fact that we had attended other churches and multilevel marketing business

1

2 INTRODUCTION

recruitment sessions together. Along the way, the bus stopped at a major transit connection point and two deaf women climbed on. I knew one of the women from a basic computer course at the Disabled Peoples Association (DPA), a Bangalore-­based NGO with a vocational training program, although I had never met the other woman, who was older, perhaps in her forties. Zahra did not know either of them but we quickly started chatting after ascertaining that we were all deaf or “deaf deaf same,” and that we all had some degree of fluency in Bangalore variety Indian Sign Language (BISL). The two women told us that they were coming from another deaf church and that they were on their way home. When they told her which church they were coming from, Zahra remarked that she had previously attended their church but that she did not think that it helped her to “develop.” She then suggested that they switch to the True Life Bible Fellowship because it was “better for development.” Then the younger woman asked Zahra questions about her job and which NGOs she had gone to for vocational training and job placement help. In the span of just a few minutes, the four of us had an intense discussion (common in deaf networks) about churches, Zahra’s job and the older woman’s lack of one, and the various deaf-­focused NGOs in Bangalore. The conversation was really about deaf development and which Bangalore-­based deaf resources could best facilitate this development. A few stops later, the two women got off the bus, and a new stream of deaf people climbed on, also heading to the multilevel marketing business meeting. The three events that day—­the Jehovah’s Witness assembly, NGO meeting, and multilevel marketing recruitment session—­represented three different paths toward what my deaf friends called “deaf develop,” or “deaf development.” Deaf people in Bangalore and elsewhere in India frequently discussed deaf development and deliberated about where it could be found. My deaf friends defined deaf development as the emergence of deaf-­centered, and therefore sign language–­centered, structures and institutions that help deaf people develop language, educational, economic, social, and moral skills for living in the world as both a member of deaf sociality and part of a larger normal world. These structures and institutions would include deaf-­ run and deaf-­ administered schools, NGOs, businesses, churches, and old-­age homes. Deaf development will result in deaf people’s becoming equal to normal people—­although it will not result in their becoming the same. Desiring deaf development requires that people take what I call “deaf turns” and become oriented toward each other. Going forward, I treat deaf development as an analytic category and the desire for it as an ethnographic fact. My deaf friends strongly believed that they had to actively seek deaf development on their own. This is because the needs and desires of sign language–­using deaf people have largely been invisible to both the state and the public at large



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FIGURE I.1.  Development as signed in Bangalore variety Indian Sign Language. Credit: V. Gopalakrishnan.

(comprising people who are not deaf and who do not use sign language). There is no reliable data on how many deaf people, sign language–­using or not, live in India.1 The Indian government has not recognized Indian Sign Language (ISL), and India’s landmark legislation on behalf of people with disabilities, the 1995 Persons with Disability (Equal Opportunities, Protection of Rights, and Full Participation) Act does not say anything about sign language. The Rehabilitation Council of India, the government body that oversees special schools and teacher training programs, only offers a fifteen-­day sign language training for teachers, and most deaf schools do not provide deaf children with literacy or general education skills. Although India signed and ratified the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD), which specifically mentions deaf people as a linguistic minority and the importance of sign language in deaf people’s lives, there has been little or no implementation of the convention. In addition, although India’s eleventh five-­year plan (2007–­2012) called for the formation of an independent sign language research and training institute, there are no signs of such an institute being established. Deaf people therefore generally believe that the state has failed to provide them with deaf development and that their social, moral, and economic practices are invisible to outsiders. Thus conversations like the one that I had on the bus with Zahra and the other two deaf women take place frequently, and often with some urgency, as well. The experience of living in India’s urban centers is changing for deaf people. On the one hand, the emergence of neoliberal political economic policies means that fewer social and economic protections, social services, and public

4 INTRODUCTION

sector employment opportunities are available. On the other hand, multinational corporations can be found in information technology enabled services (ITES), hospitality, and other sectors that offer new structures of employment opportunity as well as funding for disability-­focused vocational training programs and nongovernmental organizations.2 Vocational training centers, churches, and multilevel marketing businesses that cater specifically to deaf people offer new forms of social, educational, and economic support and new spaces for creating aspirations for deaf development. Indeed, while Bangalore exists as an exceptional case study of how India has been transforming over the last two decades, my deaf friends may also be exceptional case studies of Indians’ changing relationship with the state; they depend less on the state for education, employment, and personal development and instead turn to NGOs, multinational corporations, multilevel marketing businesses, other internationally funded organizations such as churches and missionary organizations, and to each other. This book therefore explores how deaf people circulate through structures and institutions—­schools, workplaces, churches and other fellowship spaces, and multilevel marketing businesses—­ in search of deaf development. However, despite repeated and overlapping circulation, deaf development rarely actually takes place in these spaces. What does take place is the production of deaf selves and deaf socialities (or deaf social practices and processes). Deaf selves and socialities are produced through feelings of “deaf deaf same.” This is a common sentiment and statement in Bangalore’s deaf worlds, and it is a way of expressing deaf similtude or a shared experience of being in the world based on common sensorial experience, use of sign language, and an awareness that structural barriers exist for deaf people. Feelings of “deaf deaf same,” combined with circulating together through the same spaces, produce deaf turns. I argue that as deaf people move together through spaces, they also turn toward each other. Sara Ahmed stresses the importance of “turning” for the creation of new subject positions. She writes: “Depending on which way one turns, different worlds might even come into view. If such turns are repeated over time, then bodies acquire the very shape of such direction” (2006, 15). The concept of taking a deaf turn foregrounds acts of movement in space and in sentiment. Deaf turns result in deaf selves and deaf orientations. Thomas Csordas very productively connects the creation of selves and orientations. According to Csordas, the self is “neither substance nor entity, but an indeterminate capacity to engage or become oriented in the world, characterized by effort and reflexivity. Self processes are orientational processes in which aspects of the world are thematized with the result that the self is objectified, most often as a ‘person’ with a cultural identity or set of identities” (1997, 5). Building on Csordas’s work on how selves are created, I examine how my deaf



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friends take deaf turns and produce deaf selves and deaf orientations. I argue that there is a specific practice that is required to enact these deaf orientations. This is a practice that I call “sameness work.” Through sameness work, deaf people learn to adjust their expectations and negotiate class, caste, geographic, educational, religious, and gender differences in order to productively study, work, socialize, and spend time together. As part of sameness work, deaf orientations are cultivated and foregrounded. Sameness work also manifests itself as “copying” or imitation as deafs attempt to model themselves after other successful deaf people and follow in their footsteps. While part of sameness work, “copying” also establishes deaf hierarchies in which deafs with good sign language skills, access to information, and strong deaf social networks are seen as more developed people who should be imitated. These hierarchies may not, and often do not, map neatly onto class or caste hierarchies.3 For example, a deaf person with deaf parents from a lower-­ class background may have excellent sign language skills that would enable him to cultivate a vast deaf social network. Another lower-­class deaf person might receive good (or good enough) free primary and secondary education and vocational training, which would position her to work as a deaf teacher or community-­based rehabilitation worker, therefore placing her at the top of deaf hierarchies. Or, as a final example, a visiting American Christian missionary may financially and logistically help a low-­caste deaf young man attend Bible college and subsequently establish his own church. Thus, although hierarchies do exist, “deaf deaf same” and shared desires for deaf development often privilege sameness over difference in deaf worlds. To be sure, negotiating deaf hierarchies and engaging in sameness work can be ambivalent and fraught. Sameness work is by no means a seamless process, and it requires active disorientations and reorientations. As I discuss in Chapter 1, deaf people learn how to disorient from their families in order to take deaf turns and reorient themselves toward other deaf people. In addition, deaf sociality is not always harmonious, and deaf people must negotiate shared histories of schooling, working together, and socializing that often involve disagreement and tension. Indeed, “adjusting” and negotiating sameness and difference are very much a part of the active work (or the “effort” that Csordas mentions) of becoming a deaf person oriented toward other deaf people. Unlike Csordas, however, I do not utilize the analytic of identity in discussing deaf development because it has played a problematic role in the discipline of Deaf Studies and in anthropological work on deafness. Indeed, most work posits identity as a starting and end point.4 Influential Deaf Studies scholar and activist Paddy Ladd has proposed the important concept of Deafhood, which he defines as “the existential state of Deaf ‘being-­in-­the-­world.’” According to Ladd, “Deafhood is not seen as a finite state but as a process by which Deaf

6 INTRODUCTION

individuals come to actualise their Deaf identity, positing that those individuals construct that identity around several differently ordered sets of priorities and principles, which are affected by various factors such as nation, era and class” (2003, xviii). Although I appreciate that the concept of Deafhood is based upon a process, the teleological endpoint is that deaf people will actualize their deaf identity.5 In contrast, I believe that the analytic of identity perpetuates a form of both analytical and ontological violence by “fixing” people in space, time, and place (Haraway 1991). Instead of the fixed category of identity, this book is concerned with both the fluidity and the constraints of circulations. I analyze what kinds of selves, orientations, and socialities are produced through circulation.6

Multiple Registers and Temporalities of Development Deaf development as a concept and as an analytic encompasses development across multiple registers; it includes social, moral, and political economic development. Here I draw inspiration from Anand Pandian’s work on the multiple registers of development; analyzing the ethical and physical toil that Tamil agrarian workers engage in, Pandian writes: “Development is one of the most important objects of desire, imagination, and struggle in contemporary India. What I mean by development is the promise of a gradual improvement of life, and the fulfillment of its potential for progressive growth through deliberate endeavors in transformation” (2009, 6). As Pandian reminds us, development as a concept bundles together social, moral, and political economic practices and provides opportunities for individual and collective transformation (also see Sharma 2008). Similarly, my deaf friends’ conception of deaf development includes the cultivation of specific and intertwined social, moral, and economic practices. By social practices I mean practices such as spending time with other deaf people in both informal and formal deaf gatherings, including deaf coffee meet-­ ups or deaf sporting events, seeking out other deaf people with whom to ride the bus to and from school, searching for vocational training programs or workplaces where other deaf people can be found, coming early to work in order to share news and information with other deaf employees working for the same company, and privileging deaf social spaces over normal ones. Social practices also include teaching other deaf people sign language so that they can contribute to and participate in deaf sociality. They also include the social work in which deaf people engage to minimize conflict among themselves and to maintain a harmonious deaf sociality. Social work is based on sameness work in that deaf experiences are privileged over other kinds of experiences. The deaf practices that I have outlined do lead to deaf people’s social development or



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the emergence of strong deaf social worlds. As a result, deaf social worlds can become equal to normal social worlds. Moral practices include practices such as helping other deaf people by sharing information, skills, and resources and acting as a teacher to those who are less developed. Those who are more developed are responsible to “help support,” or help and support, those who are less developed. “Help support” includes practices such as bringing another deaf person to a vocational training center, a church, or a multilevel marketing business, and it can also include a gentle lecture about the importance of not quitting a job. Perhaps most important, moral practices are centered around ensuring that other deaf people are “saved” and not “spoiled.” Being “saved” means being a member of deaf sociality and acting according to deaf social norms; it means being able to develop as a deaf person who communicates in sign language. It also includes knowing the proper way to behave, such as not gossiping or behaving promiscuously with members of the opposite sex, and paying careful attention to other deafs and normals who are trying to help. In the words of a student at a Delhi-­based deaf vocational training center with deaf teachers: “When I was growing up, there was no sign language, it was a problem in school, I didn’t learn anything. Nothing. The same with students here. They go to school, there is no sign language, nothing. They are spoiled. Then they come here and they learn English and sign language and it is good and they are saved. Saved.” In contrast, being “spoiled” means going “the wrong way” and not being open to having other deaf people guide you toward deaf development. While one can “spoil” oneself, one needs other deaf people to be “saved.” As Vinit, one of my deaf friends in Delhi, told me: “It is like a deaf person walking on the train tracks and not realizing that a train is coming. This person can be killed but someone pulls them away.” As this quote reveals, the stakes of being “saved” or “spoiled” were very high, and being “spoiled” meant not living a proper (deaf) life and even experiencing social or moral death. Economic practices revolved around the importance of finding meaningful livelihood. Many of my deaf friends wanted to be teachers in deaf schools, vocational training centers, NGOs, and churches and fellowships. They also wanted to find employment teaching sign language to normals. They felt that teaching would allow them to “help support” other deaf people and that they would be able to financially benefit from their deaf orientations. For many deaf people, economic development meant having jobs that helped other deaf people to develop. Economic development also meant, for many, engaging in meaningful and stable work in employment settings in which deafs and normals were equal. Many of my deaf friends told me bitter tales of feeling subservient to normal workers or being passed over for promotions and pay raises. Not unimportantly, economic development also meant having the ability to consume material possessions and experiences.

8 INTRODUCTION

And what of political economic development for deaf people more generally? Desires for deaf development often exist alongside desires for India’s political economic development: as India develops, so will deaf people. According to my deaf friends, just as India is a young nation, struggles for deaf rights are nascent too. A common mantra among deaf and disability activists was that the Indian disability movement was young. India’s disability law had just been signed in 1995. India had ratified the UNCRPD recently, in 2007. As a result of this ratification, activists were advocating for a new and stronger disability law. New political organizations such as the National Association of the Deaf (NAD) and educational opportunities such as a New Delhi–­based Bachelor of Arts program in Applied Sign Language Studies have recently emerged. South Indian states such as Tamil Nadu and Kerala now offer higher education in computer science, commerce, and arts in Indian Sign Language, although reports are mixed about both the quality of sign language used and the instructional content. And according to many of my deaf friends, there were more employment options available to deaf people. As I discuss in Chapters 3 and 4, deaf young adults are finding jobs as back office data entry operators, data analysts, and graphic designers for both multinational and domestic companies. They are working as “silent brewmasters” in India’s new coffee café chains, and they are deep frying chicken and taking orders at “special” Kentucky Fried Chicken outlets. Some are finding jobs as missionaries or evangelists with funding from international missionary organizations. And others are working as teachers at new NGOs, sign language teaching programs, and educational courses for deaf children and youth. Many of my deaf friends attributed these increased opportunities to the work of NGOs, which provide vocational training and job placement support. As I will discuss, these NGOs and employment opportunities have emerged because of public-­private partnerships, corporate social responsibility initiatives, and a new interest in disability because of international disability legislation. To be sure, as I discuss throughout this book, most of my interlocutors were extremely ambivalent about these “opportunities” and doubted that they were “for life,” an important concept for my deaf friends (and for many Indians in general) that indexed financial security and stability (see Nair 2005; Parry 2013). Despite this ambivalence, however, there was a strong sense that deaf development would take place in the future. There was a sense that things were changing, gradually, for the better. Unlike other anthropological works that explore the failure of development in India and elsewhere and the perceived emptying out of opportunity for youth in today’s world, I contend that the temporality of deaf development is different from that of normal development, while existing alongside and in relation to it.7 My deaf friends had a strong sense that deaf development was yet to come, unlike many normals



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who lamented the impossibility of development. In my conversations with vocational training students at DPA, which often took place after classes or functions in which no sign language was used and without an interpreter, students always told me that they thought the future would be better. In the future, there would be more deaf teachers, more sign language, and better deaf schools. And in the future, deaf people would have better jobs. As such, this book aims to answer these three questions in relation to development as a concept: How might deaf people have unique horizons of possibility and aspiration, as reflected in the concept of deaf development? How might the temporality of deaf development be different from other kinds of social, political, and economic development? How do the multiple registers of deaf development allow us to critically interrogate our understanding of what development means, both empirically and analytically?

Multiple Regimes of Value In thinking about how temporalities around disability and development might be different from other kinds of development based on other categories such as caste, gender, or sexuality, for example, it becomes clear that disability might productively be viewed as a source of value. With the emergence of new domestic and international disability laws and treaties, increased funding opportunities in the arena of disability and development, and the very close relationship between Indian corporate social responsibility initiatives and disability services and employment, it is possible that the category of disability offers disabled people additional rather than fewer opportunities in both India and elsewhere in the developing world. (To be sure, I use the words “value” and “opportunities” hesitantly, as the question of who ultimately benefits looms large.) I draw inspiration from anthropologist James Staples’s attempts to reshape researchers’ analytical orientations to disability. In a discussion of the political economy of leprosy in India, Staples writes: “The same clawed hand and distorted face that provokes social ostracism might also serve as a vital resource for collecting alms and for accessing other benefits” (2007, 13). As Staples shows, lepers are able to use their stigmatized bodily deformities to provide for themselves and their families. Elsewhere Staples challenges researchers to use qualitative and life history data to rethink the seemingly black-­and-­white category of “stigma” (2011). In this book, I want to think about how what might be considered stigmatized could actually function as a source of value, or at the very least how it creates conditions for producing alternative regimes of value, some beneficial to deaf people and some not. Indeed, in examining deaf people’s attunement to the concept of deaf development, this work differs from the trend in writing about disability in

10 INTRODUCTION

the developing world, which tends to follow two trajectories. The first trajectory utilizes a formula employed by development organizations reporting on the “plight” of people with disabilities. Such works focus on how people with disabilities are among the poorest of the poor, the most discriminated against, the least likely to be employed, the most affected by harsh neoliberal economic policies, and the most socially marginalized within families, communities, and other forms of social, political, and economic organizations.8 The second trajectory engages in macro-­theorizing about disabled people in the global South, utilizing a political economic framework that examines disablement through the lens of North-­South relations. This literature also explores the emergence of transnational social movements around disability and critically evaluates the adoption of “Northern discourses” (e.g., Grech 2012; Meekosha and Soldatic 2011). Such an approach, while important in its tackling of uneven power relations and discursive flows, ignores disabled people’s everyday practices in specific locations. In contrast to these two trajectories, this book contributes to the growing body of anthropological literature on the experiences of people with disabilities and the emergence of disability subjectivities in relation to the changing nature of the state and civil society.9 Yet this is a tricky tightrope to walk because I do not want to, and will not, paint a rosy picture of deaf people in India simply for the sake of rebutting the dominant narratives of poverty and marginalization. This book is therefore attentive to the ways that my deaf friends do feel marginalized, and I attempt to be mindful of the specificities of such feelings. There are a few key ways that this book differs from the two trajectories outlined above and adds to this growing body of academic literature on disability. First, this book is not about disability in general but rather about the specific experiences of Indian deaf young adults, most of whom do not identify with the category of “disability.”10 I focus on what is unique about deafness—­the role of sign language in enabling particular structures of feeling, as well as the cultivation of strong orientations toward other deaf people. In addition, this book focuses mostly on the experiences of urban lower-­to upper-­middle-­class ­deaf young adults, experiences that differ from those of rural or urban poor deaf people. And so those expecting to read about the poorest of the poor will be disappointed—­although I will discuss the less than ideal conditions of Indian deaf schools, the dearth of substantial employment opportunities available to deaf young adults, and the failure of the state to recognize sign language; it would be irresponsible of me to ignore these issues. In addition, I stress the fact that my deaf friends are circulating through spaces in search of deaf development under conditions not of their own making. I try to strike a balance between stigma and value, constraint and possibility. In a special edited volume of Contributions to Indian Sociology on questions of value in contemporary India, Constantine Nakassis and Llerena Guiu Searle



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write: “We are particularly interested in elucidating the ways in which heterogeneous kinds of value—­be they economic, ritual, aesthetic, ethical or otherwise—­ come to be articulated to each other, enmeshed and entangled, and thereby caught up in precisely the kinds of transformations ushered in by liberalization” (2013, 170). As Nakassis and Searle point out, liberalization in India has brought about significant transformations in how value is conceptualized, experienced, and extracted. The authors are particularly interested in what they call “social value projects” or “social actors’ reflexive attempts to intersubjectively construct value with the aim of achieving particular goals” (2013, 171). Deaf development is such a social value project, although I would adapt Nakassis and Searles’s concept to include moral and economic value, as well; my deaf friends were also moral and economic actors, as I emphasized above in my discussion of deaf development.11 In addition, I am also interested in what kinds of value are constructed for others by deafness. In addition to establishing conditions of possibility for the creation of new kinds of social, moral, and economic value for deaf people themselves, I argue that post-­liberalization has resulted in new valued and valorized categories for economic extraction. As deaf people are employed in India’s new ITES, hospitality, and other sectors, their positioning as deaf workers enables the creation of new forms of social, moral, and economic value for the corporations that hire them, their normal coworkers, and the state. In addition, their enrollment in multilevel marketing businesses, businesses that are ostensibly inclusive of all kinds of people from bored housewives to middle-­class youth, flags important questions about what it means to be “included” in neoliberal times. As deafness and deaf sociality become springboards for extractive economic value-­making, it is essential that we ask who benefits and how this benefit is derived. I argue that this process of (multiple forms of) value making is a highly ambivalent one for my deaf friends, and that they are required to adjust by engaging in uneasy compromises and sameness work. Indeed, the meaning of what value is and how it is created constantly needs to be negotiated. Deaf Studies has long been concerned with carving out an analytical and activist space for valuing deaf people, their experiences, and their languages.12 Along these lines, scholars have recently proposed the concept of “Deaf Gain.” According to Dirksen Bauman and Joseph Murray, “Deaf Gain is . . . the notion that the unique sensory orientation of Deaf people leads to a sophisticated form of visual-­spatial language that provides opportunities for the exploration of the human character” (2010, 216). According to the authors, deaf people have unique perspectives and knowledges to share with the world, from their use of sign language to their social practices to their art and architecture forms. In examining how deafness is an asset, “Deaf Gain” exists as an alternative to and play on the medical term “hearing loss.” In an article in the

12 INTRODUCTION

innovative Deaf Studies Digital Journal (an example of Deaf Gain in its promotion of signed scholarship), Bauman and Murray (2009) conclude by stating: “A deaf baby is value added to a family, but the contribution benefits not only the family but general society as well. Every deaf baby born on this planet is a gift to humankind.”13 While I am appreciative of these attempts to carve out a space for valuing deaf people, their experiences, and their use of sign language, I am wary of discussions about “added value” and the argument that deaf people contribute to human diversity. As I will discuss in Chapter 4, these are the arguments made by NGO administrators and human resource managers at multinational corporations to explain why they train and hire deaf workers. Although I am cognizant that these arguments are made by scholars and activists in a (much needed) attempt to preserve deaf bodies as deaf, especially in light of so-­called advances in medical research promising to eradicate deafness, the increasing prevalence of cochlear implant technology, and the closing of deaf schools, I am concerned about how these new discourses about deafness are being harnessed for others’ advantages. I argue that Deaf Studies scholars must be critical about how arguments about deaf exceptionalism render deaf bodies as potentially exploitable under neoliberal rhetoric about diversity and inclusion. I therefore hope this book can serve as a model for a more critical scholarly and activist exploration of deaf value.

Deafs and Normals While writing this book, I struggled with the appropriate terminology for writing about deaf people in India and about deaf people in general. The field of Deaf Studies has grappled with these issues extensively, most concretely in the debates around whether deaf should be written with a capital or lower case d/D. Following James Woodward (1972), most Deaf Studies scholars choose to write about Deaf people, and not deaf people, as Deaf represents a person or group of people as a member of a linguistic and cultural minority. In contrast, deaf is seen to be a medicalized condition, a disability, and/or an impairment. Most Deaf Studies works focus on a binary between Deaf people and hearing people, and there are few works that explore the tensions between deaf and Deaf as categories.14 This is a very specific construction of d/Deafness that has been used in the United States to demand political rights and representation (Shapiro 1994).15 The deaf young adults whom I met in Bangalore, however, never wrote deaf with a capital D nor did they talk about being a linguistic or cultural minority (unless they had substantial contact with international Deaf visitors)—­although they did express a strong sense of being different from those that could hear. My interlocutors also did not talk about deaf and hearing people but about deaf and normal people. Indeed, “Deaf normal which?” or, “Are you deaf or normal?”



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FIGURE I.2.  Indian Sign Language signs for deaf and normal. Credit:

V. Gopalakrishnan.

was the ubiquitous question that deaf people in India asked other people that they met. One was either deaf or normal. Deaf was signed in the internationally understood way of signing deaf, and normal was signed by opening and closing one’s hand next to one’s ear (see figure I.2). Most of my interlocutors mouthed or said “deaf” or “normal” in English as they signed the respective signs. In writing text messages or notes, they would often write “deaf(s)” and “normal(s).”16 Hearing people who spent time with deaf people often spoke or mouthed (while signing) in English of themselves as normal(s), and deaf people did not see this as a problem. I, like many Westerners, was initially uncomfortable with this terminology and at first avoided using it. For example, people often asked me if my husband or family members were deaf or normal, and I replied that they were hearing (I used the correct sign but I mouthed “hearing” instead of “normal,” to blank faces). I quickly came to realize that “normal” meant normal hearing and that the use of “deaf” and “normal” served to create both categories as distinct norms. That is, the category of normals created the category of deafs and vice versa. By placing these categories in relationship, both are created as distinct (and normal) ways of being in the world. Although many readers may view the use of the word “normal” as signifying some internalized oppression or stigma on the part of my deaf friends, I argue that most of my interlocutors were unaware of the negative connotations that often accompany the word. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, normal means “conforming to a standard; usual, typical, or expected.” It seemed to me that my deaf friends were using a definition of normal that was similar to the

14 INTRODUCTION

Oxford English Dictionary definition, as it is more usual and expected that people are hearing than deaf. When I asked deafs to clarify what normal meant, they told me that it meant someone who could hear. While I do not dispute that normal is a category heavy with normative connotations and judgment (e.g., Goffman 1963), understanding how the category of normal operates in general is not my purpose. Rather, what is at stake is what is produced when deaf and normal are used as binary, co-­constitutive normative categories in specific contexts. How are deaf and normal a productive binary and what does this binary produce? In addition, as part of my broader project of exploring tensions between stigma and value and the different ways that deafness enables the formation of social, moral, and economic value, I want to challenge readers to think about where their discomfort around the category of normal comes from. Through immersing readers in the world of deafs and normals, I hope that the ways that both function as normative categories will come to the fore. My goal is for readers to see how creating a binary between deafs and normals is productive of and for deaf sociality as well as for the extraction of different kinds of value from deaf people. In addition, although this may seem ironic in light of Deaf Studies scholars’ practices of writing about Deaf (and not deaf) people, I also see this decision to utilize my deaf friends’ categories as contributing to Deaf Studies in its disciplinary commitments to challenging ideas of normalcy (Bauman 2008). I want to note that the category of deafs included deaf people with varying sign language abilities as well as deaf people who were not (yet) signers at all. The category of normals encompassed disabled (but not deaf) people and normal people who were fluent signers. As I will discuss in Chapter 4, there were normals who said that they “loved” deafs (although deafs did not “love” normals in return), and while some of these normals identified as being deaf or said that they had “deaf hearts,” deaf people did not consider them to be deaf. As I stress throughout this book, my deaf friends had both ambivalent and rewarding relationships with normals, and aspirations for deaf development also included aspirations for “deaf normal equal” (but not “deaf normal same”).

Exceptional Bangalore Located in the southern state of Karnataka, Bangalore is India’s third most populous city. It was once known as a sleepy tree-­and bungalow-­lined “garden city,” a colonial outpost where British military officers and expatriates settled, and a pleasant place for Indian retirees to spend their last years. However, it has been remade as India’s Silicon Valley, a cosmopolitan “technopolis” to which highly educated Indian migrants and foreign engineers gravitate for work. According to Michael Goldman, “Until the IT explosion of the 1990s, Bangalore was



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a comfortable middle-­class town with secure union jobs in large public-­sector research and manufacturing firms that fed into the high-­end functions of the Indian state and economy (e.g. radar and satellite systems, telecommunications and space research, manufacturing equipment)” (2011, 4). There are many large government industries located in Bangalore. These industries, many of which started in the early 1900s, include Bharat Electronics Limited, Hindustan Aeronautics Limited, and Bharat Heavy Electricals Limited. Combined with the existence of top science institutes, they produced the initial wave of India’s information technology revolution in the 1950s (Goldman 2011). The second, and current, wave of Bangalore’s information technology (IT) boom occurred “when firms such as Texas Instruments asked for substantial upgrading of Bangalore’s pleasant but small-­town public facilities in order to survive in the fiercely competitive global IT sector” (Goldman 2011). Goldman points out that India’s IT boom was born out of the conjuncture created by the 1991 world economic crisis, which resulted in India’s financial liberalization, and Western corporations’ anxieties about the upcoming Y2K computer crisis. Once Indian engineers realized that the technology work required was simple and repetitive, they also realized that they could set up corporate structures in India to do this work for a fraction of the cost (Goldman 2011; Upadhya and Vasavi 2008). As a result of this realization, firms quickly sprang up in Bangalore, and a global shift occurred. The emergence of these corporations has led to the remaking of the city as corporations play a large role in political and civic life. Indeed, as a result of India’s 1991 financial crisis, Bangalore, and the state of Karnataka more broadly, has been the site of much neoliberal state contraction and reforms that have led to the emergence of ever ubiquitous public-­private partnerships (Goldman 2011; Nair 2005). I decided to conduct research in Bangalore after a preliminary visit in 2005. During this visit I was struck by how deaf people in Bangalore were struggling with the changing face of employment, their relationship to other deaf people both in India and elsewhere, and their (and other deaf Indians’) sense that Bangalore was an exceptional place in both the opportunities and constraints that it offered for deaf development. Reflecting broader changes in the city, the field of vocational training and the structure of employment opportunities available to deaf young adults has shifted. Previously, many deaf people were able to find comfortable and secure jobs working as welders, electricians, watch assemblers, and clerks in Bangalore’s many public sector factories, but this is increasingly no longer the case. As government industries shrink or close altogether, there are fewer jobs to be found in the public sector. Deaf people are increasingly turning to NGOs for help with finding employment. In meeting and also producing this demand, Bangalore is home to more deaf-­focused NGOs that provide vocational training

16 INTRODUCTION

and computer training than any other city in India. NGOs with close ties to corporations provide deaf young adults vocational training that is designed to make them productive workers in India’s growing service sectors (including ITES and hospitality). In turn, corporations have funded these same vocational training programs, encouraged employees to volunteer at them as part of mandatory volunteering programs, and provided deaf people with jobs. Also reflecting broader structural change in the city (which privileges the private over the public sector), the political atmosphere around deafness and disability in Bangalore is quite convivial—that is, it is characterized by accommodation, acquiescence, and a general lack of contentious politics.17 In contrast to New Delhi, Mumbai, and Chennai, where protests, marches, and contentious public gatherings around disability rights take place, in Bangalore there is very little public agitation around disability issues. All of the Bangalore-­based NGOs that I spent time at were interested purely in providing vocational training, although they also paid lip service to the importance of “empowerment” and “independence,” concepts that I was told were important to funders. There were no deaf or disability-­focused NGOs with the aim of challenging the state, and the National Association of the Deaf (NAD) was not active in Bangalore; Bangalore deafs as well as leaders in the NAD told me that there was little interest in contentious politics. Deaf youth considered the Bangalore Deaf Association, the sole deaf-­focused civic organization that was active in Bangalore, to be stagnant and out of touch with their needs. Started in 1961 with support from the Delhi-­based All India Federation of the Deaf (AIFD), its meetings were attended mostly by older deaf men and women, many of them government employees. Rather than engaging in political activism or attending deaf civic organizations, deaf young adults in Bangalore circulated among churches, multilevel marketing business recruitment meetings, and informal social gatherings. Indeed, when I asked my deaf friends why they did not participate in contentious politics, I was often told that they spent time in these other spaces instead of going to protests or “fighting the government”; deaf people themselves created this binary opposition. A few deaf friends made explicit connections between employment and the lack of contentions politics by saying that they worked instead of going to protests; in this sense, they were perhaps embodying ideal workers under regimes of public-­private partnerships. Bangalore occupied a very specific place in deaf Indians’ imaginations. Deaf young adults from all over India flocked to Bangalore to seek training at one of its NGOs and to find jobs; it was considered to be a key site for seeking education and livelihood, and ultimately deaf development. Despite this influx of deaf people from elsewhere in India, there was still a sense of an intimate deaf world. As Jamie, one of my deaf friends, said, “Bangalore’s deaf world is very small.”



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What Jamie meant was that deaf people came to know each other, often quite well, because of circulating together through various spaces. Deaf people spend Monday to Saturday together at vocational training programs and then meet again on Sunday at church or multilevel marketing recruitment meetings (or both). Trainees enrolled in vocational training programs were often hired by the same employer, and after completing their training they worked together. Many deaf people—­from Bangalore and elsewhere—­attended the same deaf schools as children, and they continued to study, work, and go to church together after they finished secondary school. Deafs also encountered each other on buses and trains and when walking through the city, and then ran into each other again at different deaf functions. Deaf people therefore created dense social networks while repeatedly circulating together through multiple spaces. Highlighting Bangalore’s particular past and present, Bangalore deaf use a unique variety of Indian Sign Language called Bangalore variety Indian Sign Language (BISL), which is closely connected to American Sign Language (ASL) because of the efforts of a Canadian Roman Catholic missionary named Father Thomas, who came to Bangalore in the 1970s and helped to found one of Bangalore’s better deaf schools, the Sheila Kothavala Institute for the Deaf. Today Father Thomas’s legacy remains, and most deaf people in Bangalore use the ASL alphabet or “one-­handed alphabet” for fingerspelling as well as some ASL lexicon, although the sign language used is not ASL. This ASL-­based “one-­handed alphabet” and lexicon is different from the “two-­handed alphabet” (related to the British Sign Language alphabet) and ISL lexicon that most Indian Sign Language users in other cities use. There has been little formal linguistic research on Indian Sign Language (ISL), although linguists have argued for the existence of an “Indo-­Pakistani Sign Language” that is common to deaf people in urban areas of southern Pakistan and northern India.18 This is perhaps a political claim, made to establish Indian Sign Language as a legitimate language that exists in a large part of the Indian subcontinent. More recently, the Central Institute of Indian Languages in Mysore has started an ISL corpus project that aims to both create an ISL corpus and document regional variation, although this project has only just started. Indeed, deaf Indians living in urban areas are very aware of regional variations (and of variations within variations), although none of these regional variations is as distinct as BISL. Although there has been little linguistic research on Bangalore variety Indian Sign Language, I have had extensive conversations with Madan Vasishta, Samar Sinha, Sibaji Panda, and Michael Morgan, linguists working in the field of Indian Sign Language, about the differences between BISL and other varieties. These researchers agree on the close lexical relationship between BISL and American Sign Language (also see Johnson and Johnson 2008; Vasishta et al. 1985). This

FIGURE I.3.  Indian Sign Language alphabet. Credit: Noida Deaf Society.



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FIGURE I.4.  American Sign Language alphabet. Credit: Author.

different variety of sign language was often a source of tension with deaf people in other parts of India who criticized Bangalore’s deaf for not learning the variety of Indian Sign Language that was disseminated by the National Institute of Hearing Handicapped and used more broadly across India.19 Indeed, deaf people living in other Indian cities often told me that “Bangalore deaf try to be different from other Indian deaf.” When I asked my deaf friends in Bangalore why they did not want to change their sign language to be more like the rest of India, I was repeatedly told: “This is our language. Why should we change to be like Mumbai?” The reference to Mumbai specifically derives from the fact that the first Indian Sign Language training and research program was established in Mumbai, at the Ali Yavar Jung National Institute for Hearing Handicapped. For many years, sign language

20 INTRODUCTION

teachers from Bangalore have traveled to Mumbai to enroll in ISL teacher training courses. There they learned ISL as well as pedagogy. However, once they returned to Bangalore they taught BISL and not ISL (although they utilized the pedagogical tools that they learned).20 When watching sign language classes in Bangalore, it was often unclear to me which sign language was being taught—­ BISL? ASL? ISL? Something that the teachers themselves developed?—­ despite ongoing efforts by a few NGOs to create BISL dictionaries, none existed. If they used dictionaries at all, sign language teachers in Bangalore utilized both ASL and ISL dictionaries and they switched between the two. (I will discuss sign language classes in depth in Chapter 1.) It also seemed to me that BISL was always changing. As deafs from other parts of India traveled to Bangalore for education and employment, Bangalore deafs learned more standardized ISL; in their desire to communicate with their new friends and coworkers, they changed how they signed. Very often I noticed ISL and ASL signs used together, and there was little or no distinction made between the two. In Bangalore, it seemed that deaf people were less concerned with which sign language they were teaching and learning than with actually communicating. That is, there was little boundary work around what was or was not BISL, although deaf Bangaloreans were very adamant about holding onto their ASL “one-­handed” alphabet.21

Deaf People, Everyone Else, and the State Often when I discussed my research with colleagues, they made comments like: “What is so unique about the experiences of deaf young adults? They seem like everyone else in India who had poor education opportunities and are currently looking for employment” and “They seem so normal, just like everyone else!” I argue that there is something unique about the experiences of deaf young adults—­again, connected to sign language use, orientation toward other deaf people, and the existence of structural barriers—­and I hope to show this uniqueness. My deaf friends often told me that they felt unique: they felt that normal people did not understand what was important to deaf people and that deaf people were misunderstood, both literally and figuratively. On the other hand, I do not wish to render my research subjects too much the exception rather than the norm, too peripheral. Instead, I draw inspiration from the Disability Studies scholar Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, who writes: “In accordance with postmodernism’s premise that the margins constitute the center, I probe the peripheral so as to view the whole in a fresh way” (1997, 5–­6). What can the experiences of deaf young adults in India teach us about what is happening in India in the current moment? What can their experiences tell us about what it means to be Indian? I



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argue that the experiences of deaf people are both peripheral and central experiences. Deaf people, while desiring deaf development, also struggle with the same precarious political economic system that normals struggle with. Indeed, my deaf friends had seemingly normal desires for things such as a good education, meaningful work, economic development, and consumption of material goods and experiences (although these desires coincided with desires for deaf development). Indeed, deaf people’s unique positioning within political economic structures and the tactics that they use to improve this positioning offers us both a mundane and exceptional tale of selfhood, sociality, and labor under late capitalism. As I discuss throughout this book, these tactics include (re)creating novel ideas of value, development, and equality. As an administrator at a vocational training center for deaf people told me while we were discussing the current lack of stable employment opportunities available to deaf people: “We all feel pain at this current economic moment. This is a moment of great pain and uncertainty. No one knows what the future will hold. Yes, deaf people will have to go through a period where they feel more pain because their situation is even more unstable but it will get better for everyone.” While I am not sure about this administrator’s sense of optimism, I do think his comment about instability and the additional pain that deaf people feel because they are deaf is an important one. As I will discuss throughout this book, there is a way that deaf people have come to embody the uncertainties of India’s economic future. Indeed, deafs faced additional barriers that were significant due to structural constraints that prevented communication from being taken for granted. Deaf people often had complicated relationships with the state, since they were not provided with the tools and information that they needed to participate in official public spheres (although, as Gupta 2012 reminds us, everyone has only a situated and partial knowledge of what constitutes the state). My deaf friends often mentioned the government’s failure to provide support, although they never specified which part of the government, which office, or which official. This abstract discussion of the state often served as a form of critique; in invoking the state, my deaf friends were inevitably bemoaning its absence. Because of poor educational access that did not provide my deaf friends with literacy skills in any language or a substantive education in general, only a few of my deaf friends were able to mention revered national figures such as Mahatma Gandhi or Jawaharlal Nehru by name. They were also unaware of major historical or current events besides those that other deaf people or sign language–­using normals told them about. Because of communication barriers that prevented them from reading newspapers (the text was too difficult) or watching television (there were seldom subtitles, and when there were they scrolled across the screen too quickly), most of my deaf friends were unaware

22 INTRODUCTION

of local, state-­level, or national politics. Very few of my deaf friends voted, and those who did usually voted for politicians favored by their families—­many deafs told me that their parents accompanied them to vote and pointed to specific names on the ballot—­although a few told me proudly that they secretly went against their parents’ wishes (usually based upon guidance from a deaf friend). Vocational training programs often had courses on civic history and general knowledge, which included information about India such as geography, government structure and processes, government industries, and Indian history, but these courses were not taught in sign language, and as a result most deaf young adults did not learn much. This lack of literacy about, and connection with, the state was not always the case. The All India Federation of the Deaf, which was established in 1955 in New Delhi, has prided itself on its close ties to the national government throughout the years, and its older members deeply revered political figures such as V. V. Giri and Indira Gandhi who they say “loved deaf people.”22 The AIFD offices are lined with photos of deaf leaders with Indian politicians, mostly taken before the 1990s. In contrast, the younger generation does not have this relationship with political figures or familiarity with the state apparatus. Recently, in order to increase deaf people’s knowledge about the responsibilities of the government, the newly formed NAD’s board members attempted to increase their familiarity with the structure of the Indian government. As such, they examined official government documents and analyzed the responsibilities of the different ministries and offices. They did this with the hope of holding the government accountable for improving access for deaf people and their efforts mirror recent trends in which social justice activists engage in practices of social auditing to demand accountability (Appadurai 2001; Roy 2009). To this end, the NAD also holds rallies and demonstrations, often in coordination with the Disability Rights Group, a consortium of disability groups in Delhi. The NAD is attempting to create a more familiar idea of the state that deaf people can confront in order to demand rights. However, as I noted above, deaf people in Bangalore are not members of the NAD and do not participate in NAD-­sponsored workshops or demonstrations. Nevertheless, deafs in Bangalore had some very concrete exposure to and interactions with the state. They visited government hospitals to get disability certifications, and such visits were often spoken of as rites of passage: deafs discussed the government doctors whom they encountered and the complicated negotiations for a certain percentage of disability to be allocated to them (in order to get a reduced fare or free transit pass or a disability pension, individuals must be certified with having certain minimum percentages of disability). They also frequented the Karnataka State Disability Commission, where they went for help finding jobs and (very rarely) to file complaints about discriminatory



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public-­sector employers. Deafs also attended National Flag Day events, where they were supposed to celebrate being Indians. At these non-­interpreted events, bureaucrats often made speeches that deafs could not understand and so they used these functions as opportunities to socialize with friends. Similarly, while the Bangalore Deaf Association hosted events for national holidays such as India’s Independence Day, the space provided for these holidays was often used to discuss and debate news and issues perceived to be more relevant to deaf people.

Interlocutors, Places, and Their Emplacement My primary interlocutors were sign language–­using deaf people between the ages of approximately eighteen and forty. They were an extremely diverse group. For one thing, my interlocutors had varying exposure to sign language beginning at different ages, so they possessed different sign language skill levels. Some of my deaf friends read lips and spoke, while others did not. Some wore hearing aids, but this often depended on their level of hearing loss and their families’ financial status. Many of my friends had stories of being forced to wear hearing aids as a child in school because of school rules, and they only had negative memories about this. In the present, quite a few of my deaf friends adamantly refused to wear hearing aids and expressed disgust and repugnance at the prospect of cochlear implant surgery or other interventions. Indeed, most expressed great mistrust of doctors or medical knowledge. For this reason, I did not ask many questions about the etiology of their deafness; I was not very concerned with why my interlocutors were deaf, and neither were they. Most of my deaf friends were from the lower to upper middle classes, although I also interacted with some poor and wealthy deafs and their families. In addition, my deaf friends were from a wide variety of caste and religious backgrounds. Most had finished class ten and were enrolled in, or had completed, some form of higher education (although this did not mean that they were literate or that they had mastered the subject content required to graduate from secondary school). I interacted with both young men and women in most spaces, with the exception of certain computer training courses and ITES work sites in which mostly young men were to be found. What united my interlocutors were the facts that they were from the same age group, they desired communication in sign language, and they had aspirations for deaf development. This research mostly took place during thirteen consecutive months in 2008–­2009 in Bangalore, although I also conducted short periods of research in 2007, 2010, 2011, 2013, and 2014. Although the bulk of my time was spent in Bangalore, because deaf young adults travel for educational, social, and employment opportunities, I traveled as well. In my efforts to understand my deaf

24 INTRODUCTION

friends’ educational histories and backgrounds, I spent time at JSS Polytechnic for the Physically Handicapped, an institution in Mysore, Karnataka, that offered three-­year diploma courses in computer science, architecture, jewelry design, and electronics, with many deaf students; and at various primary and secondary schools and colleges for deaf students in Chennai, Tamil Nadu. I also traveled to Coimbatore in Tamil Nadu and Mumbai and Pune in Maharashtra in order to visit schools, educational programs, NGOs, and employment sites for deaf young adults. I spent about four nonconsecutive months in New Delhi in order to understand the history of deaf organizations and political organizing. This book is therefore an “ethnography of circulation,” to use Arjun Appadurai’s concept. Appadurai stresses the importance of shifting our analytical gaze from “an ethnography of locations to one of circulations” (2001, 25). As an ethnographer, I circulated, and I see circulation as a central part of my methodology. The five chapters of this book are each focused on a specific space in and through which deaf people circulate, and there is a temporal order to the organization of chapters. However, there is another order to the organization as well: the first two chapters examine how deaf young adults take deaf turns and cultivate deaf orientations, whereas the following three chapters analyze how deaf orientations become a source of value for deaf people themselves, NGOs, corporations, and multilevel marketing businesses. As the book progresses and as we move through diverse spaces, I analyze the multiple social, moral, and economic value projects at play, and I highlight how value is often extracted from deaf people in ways not always to their benefit. The first half of the book is more concerned with the multiple kinds of value that deafs create for themselves; the second half analyzes how this value is utilized and harnessed by others. Chapter 1 begins with the family, the first space that deaf children inhabit. This chapter includes background on the specific stakes of deaf childhood and educational experiences, and I argue that there is a discursive process connected to learning sign language that results in deaf people’s disorienting from their families and reorienting toward other deaf people. Chapter 2 continues this discussion of disorientations and reorientations by focusing on key sites where reorientations take place: Bangalore’s many deaf churches and fellowships. This chapter analyzes what deaf church attendees learn in these spaces; I argue that deaf young adults learn new authoritative discourses with which to think about sign language and deaf sociality. Chapter 3 explores the vocational training centers toward which deafs gravitate after finishing secondary school and analyzes how vocational training becomes an important space for learning livelihood skills in the aftermath of not learning anything in primary and secondary school. I demonstrate both how deaf young adults recreate these training centers as deaf spaces in which deaf selves are produced and how NGO administrators attempt to create productive “workers with disabilities.”



DEAF TURNS, ORIENTATIONS, DEVELOPMENT

25

Chapter 4 examines the employment sites where deaf young adults are produced as deaf groups by employers, paying particular attention to the possibilities and constraints offered by the new ITES sector for both individual and group formation. This chapter analyzes how deaf people add value in these new economic spaces and how multiple forms of value are extracted from them. Chapter 5 focuses on multilevel marketing businesses that deaf people join and analyzes how participating in these businesses creates new understandings of deaf sociality and new visions of future lives. This chapter analyzes how deaf people’s desire to transform their social capital into economic capital produces fractures in deaf sociality that deaf people must work to mend. Although I have organized the chapters by spaces and places, I see these spaces and places as articulating with, and existing in relation to, each other. That is, deaf young adults often go back and forth between vocational training programs and sites of employment, and many will simultaneously attend training programs and work. Similarly, family members will occasionally visit vocational training centers and churches in order to see what happens in these spaces; the space of the family intersects with these other two spaces (and, of course, many of my deaf friends live with their families). And recruiting for churches and multilevel marketing businesses takes place in all spaces, including ITES offices, vocational training centers, and on crowded public buses and in bus terminals. This is therefore an attention to circulation that is also mindful of how spaces of circulation often exist in relation to each other. I see the spaces that I am writing about, the spaces that deaf people circulate through, as created through social, political, and economic relationships. Indeed, deaf people circulate through these spaces with other deaf people (and again, this is why Bangalore’s deaf world is very small).

Returning to “Deaf Deaf Same” One of my most vivid memories from conducting fieldwork in Bangalore is standing on a very crowded public bus heading to a deaf church on the outskirts of the city in the summer of 2007. I was traveling with two deaf young men, and we were standing toward the back of the bus. We were trying to hold onto something to secure ourselves and to sign at the same time. There was a young woman, one of many without seats, standing toward the front of the bus. She waved to the people I was with and looked at me and signed: “Are you deaf?” When I signed back that I was, she replied “deaf deaf same” with a broad smile. This woman turned out to be Zahra, who I introduced in the opening vignette, and this was our first encounter (we were heading to the Korean church this time). As a deaf person, I was often told “deaf deaf same” by my interlocutors, and because of this sense of similitude, I felt that they were more willing to engage

26 INTRODUCTION

with me, answer my many questions, bring me home to meet their families, and be patient with my very awkward BISL. I experienced instances in which my deaf friends lectured other deafs about the importance of helping me with my research because we were all deaf and therefore they had the responsibility to help me. My deaf friends also felt a sense of responsibility for making sure that I understood what was happening in different spaces—­ including churches, multilevel marketing recruitment sessions, and deaf gatherings. They often asked me if I understood and offered to interpret or repeat things if I needed help. Ultimately, I wondered too if my interlocutors felt a sense of responsibility for helping me to take a deaf turn. Like many of my deaf friends, I had been raised orally and had not learned sign language until I was in my early twenties. Unlike many of them, I was presumably a successful product of oral education and I benefited from my use of hearing aids and later on a cochlear implant (a source of much curiosity and occasional scorn). In any case, my deaf friends were unstintingly patient and compassionate with my presence and many questions, and they often told me that my research and my doctoral degree was part of overall deaf development. I must confess that this sense of responsibility was reciprocated. I found myself acting as an advocate in certain situations. For instance, I pestered vocational training center administrators about the importance of hiring deaf teachers and utilizing sign language. With these same administrators, I advocated for deaf trainees to be able to find a wide range of jobs, beyond those at multinational corporations as back office data entry operators. I felt compelled to become such an advocate because many of my friends asked me to “help” them. “Help” is an important concept in deaf sociality and it serves to create substantial bonds between people. As I was “helped” by my deaf friends who so generously shared with me, I found myself enmeshed in deaf sociality as well. And this is why I often call my interlocutors for this research my deaf friends. I feel that I was bound to them by very real feelings of mutual bonds of affection, sentiment, and responsibility. I was and am well aware of the power differentials that exist and the privilege that comes with being a highly educated white foreigner conducting research in India.23 I am grateful, though, for a shared sense of deafness that overcame barriers and helped to make this research especially rewarding and rich. This shared sense of deafness certainly overcame the communication barrier created by the crowded physical mass of people on the bus.

1 44444444444444444444444

Orienting from (Bad) Family to (Good) Friends

Interviewing the Family

One afternoon in November 2008, I went to visit Kamala and her family. Kamala was a young deaf woman whom I had initially met in the summer of 2007 at the Disabled Peoples Association (DPA), a popular NGO offering vocational training program for deaf and disabled young adults, where she was studying electronics. I was eager to meet Kamala’s family, as I had spent a lot of time with her at DPA and I enjoyed her lively personality and inquisitive nature; we joked and practiced BISL together, and she often asked me for help with English writing. This afternoon, with the assistance of Ravindra, a Kannada-­ language translator, and a patient and intrepid rickshaw driver, I traveled across Bangalore, traveling from east to west; we finally found ourselves in a narrow unpaved lane of new three-­story apartment buildings in a rapidly developing middle-­class area of Bangalore. Kamala was not yet home from the vocational training program where she was studying computer hardware (she had since finished her course in electronics at DPA and was now studying hardware at a government training program where there were a few deaf students), and so we phoned her father, who came down to escort us up to the family’s apartment. Ravindra and I settled down on a sofa in the family’s living room, and a cousin hospitably offered us coffee. As we waited for Kamala to return from her course, Kamala’s father and cousin showed us various framed photos of Kamala as a child: Kamala dressed up for a dance recital at the deaf school that she attended, Kamala receiving a certificate for her dance skills, and Kamala and her younger sister in new saris. Kamala’s younger sister also hovered around, occasionally sneaking glances at the television that her father had turned on. While we waited, we also discussed how we would communicate once Kamala returned home. We decided that I would ask questions in English, Ravindra would translate these questions to Kannada, and then I would also

27

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CHAPTER 1

translate these same questions into BISL for Kamala. Ravindra would then translate the family’s responses from Kannada to English for me and Kamala’s sister would translate the same responses from Kannada to BISL for Kamala. However, when Kamala arrived, she was not happy with this arrangement. She said that her sister did not really know sign language and that she only knew gestures and signs that they had made up together. Nevertheless, she reluctantly agreed to this process (perhaps because there was no better option), and we went ahead with the interview, an unstructured discussion about raising a deaf child. As we started talking, it quickly became apparent that there were two interviews taking place in the living room: one in English and Kannada and another in BISL. For example, I asked why Kamala was studying computer hardware (and therefore potentially not using the skills she had learned from studying electronics at DPA) and not working. Kamala’s father replied: “As money is not a problem for us and she does not need to work, I want her to continue her education. I want her to study as much as possible. I didn’t look for a job for her.” In contrast, Kamala replied: “My father looked for a job for me but he could not find one that would hire deaf people. I was bored and sat at home.” During the interview, Kamala’s father also told me that Kamala’s brother, who was not present at the interview, was very helpful to Kamala and that he “loved her the best.” When I translated this for Kamala, she very quickly retorted that this was not true at all and that her brother helped her “only sometimes” and that he often ignored her. Indeed, Kamala often seemed upset by the responses uttered by her father, cousin, and sister. Signing urgently, she answered questions too, and then told me not to translate these answers into English or Kannada. And so I struggled with the two interviews, the gaps in the stories I was told, and ultimately, the gap in understanding between parents, familial networks, and deaf children. Deaf young adults frequently told me about the disconnect that they felt while spending time with their families. Many of my deaf friends strongly felt that they had little or no communication with their families. They lamented the fact that their parents did not know sign language, and they told me that the only interactions that they had with their families were related to biological needs such as eating, drinking, and sleeping. A common refrain was: “My mother only beckons me to come and eat and then tells me that it is time to sleep.” Home, for many of my deaf friends, was a place to eat a dosa and sleep, but not much else. To be sure, other analysts have very productively argued that food preparation and consumption, or what Arjun Appadurai calls “gastro-­ politics” (1981, 496), construct intimate relationships. However, my deaf friends did not value this sense of affiliation and attachment ostensibly engendered through eating together and sharing living space. Instead, they talked about the importance of communication, understanding, and sharing.



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29

In this chapter, I explore the ambivalent and largely absent role that the family plays in deaf young adults’ present and future orientations. This may be surprising, because, as Diane Mines and Sarah Lamb write, “The family is a central site of everyday life in South Asia” (2010, 7). They point out that in several Indian languages the word for family is samsara, or that which flows together. However, in the case of my deaf friends, the family was something to be negotiated with ambivalence. In foregrounding this ambivalence and asking why and how it occurs, I also depart from much of the anthropological work on disability and deafness that examines family relationships and the role of the family in negotiating disability.1 Let me be clear about an essential point around which this chapter revolves: articulating desires for communication, understanding, and sharing was something that my interlocutors learned as young adults. Similarly, they learned to critique their families for lacking the abilities for these things to take place. As I will argue in this chapter, and throughout this book, communicating, understanding, and sharing are values that deaf young adults learn as they formally and informally learn the values of deaf sociality and the importance of sign language. Indeed, such values are embedded and foregrounded in the transmission of deaf language ideologies and practices (Woolard and Schieffelin 1994). Learning these values is part of taking a deaf turn and becoming disoriented from the family and oriented toward other deaf people. How do these turns, disorientations, and new orientations occur? And what is it about their families that is so dissatisfying for my deaf friends? The visit to Kamala’s house, with its negotiations and tensions around communication, was typical of other visits. I conducted home visits with approximately twenty-­nine families. Initially I planned to conduct structured interviews with both parents and their deaf young adult children in the hopes of creating an environment that was communicatively open to all parties. I felt strongly that ensuring language access was important after my deaf friends’ constant discussions about their feelings of exclusion in family experiences; I did not want to reproduce these feelings while conducting research. However, I quickly learned that providing communication access to all parties was either difficult or impossible in most cases. Let me explain why. For families whose primary languages were Kannada, Telugu, Hindi, or Urdu, I initially brought a translator to the meeting, as I did with Kamala’s family. This person was responsible for facilitating communication between the parents, other relatives who happened to be present, and myself. However, the question remained of who would interpret for the deaf person? It was not possible to find a qualified sign language interpreter in Bangalore who was available for these meetings, as there were only three or four such interpreters in the city, and their services were in high demand. In some cases, there was a sibling who knew some sign language and

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CHAPTER 1

he or she would interpret—­although I observed that in most cases the information provided was not complete or accurate.2 In other cases, I interpreted and therefore engaged in a complicated juggling act through which I asked questions via the translator, attempted to understand what the translator was relaying to me, and then I tried to provide all of this information in sign language to the deaf person. Occasionally two different interviews happened simultaneously, as with Kamala and her family, as my deaf friends also answered questions and their answers were sometimes in direct contradiction to what their families told me. In at least a few cases, families told me that they felt that they had good communication with their deaf child and that he or she was included in conversations and family events. Also, many parents told me that they loved their deaf child more than their other children. When I interpreted this for the child, he or she would adamantly reply otherwise and say, “I am always bored at home”; “No one ever talks to me”; “I ask for information and I am not told anything”; or “They all talk to each other and do not tell me anything.” The fact that many families told me that they loved their deaf children more than other children while deaf children continued to feel excluded and outside of family communication foregrounds a discordance in perspectives on the meaning of love or care. For families, love and communication were two different things while deafs, through their participation in deaf sociality, came to see love and communication as synonymous. There could be no love without communication. There were times when these interviews were tense and heavy with sentiments not shared. Occasionally, deaf children told me not to repeat what they had said in front of their parents, especially when it was about interacting with someone from the opposite sex or going to church, and there were times when families used my presence as a means of gathering information about their deaf children. An example of this occurred during an interview with Faiza’s family, lower-­class Muslims living in Bangalore whom I met through my research at DPA. I asked Faiza’s mother, through an Urdu translator, if Faiza spent a lot of time outside the family’s home and if she was sent to nearby shops for milk and other items. Faiza’s mother thought about it for a second and said that she did not think that Faiza went out into the neighborhood often. She then turned to me and asked if I would ask Faiza this very same question. She then asked if I could ask Faiza about what she did the previous weekend while she was out with deaf friends. Faiza’s mother said that I could communicate better with Faiza and she was hoping to gain more information about how her daughter had spent her time socializing. And before I traveled to Faiza’s house for this interview, Faiza had pleaded with me to advocate for deaf-­deaf marriage because she had a crush on a deaf young man whom she had met at DPA.3 I declined, although I promised her that I would ask her mother how she felt about such marriages.



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31

These kinds of requests were not uncommon and reveal the complicated role that I played during these visits. (While I was talking to her mother, Faiza had some friends over and they sat in a tight circle having a conversation in sign language, which Faiza’s mother could not understand.) While conducting these interviews, I had concerns about my deaf friends not having access to them. I also realized that I was not actually learning very much because I was perhaps overly privileging speech acts and missing the gap between what people say and what they do. I therefore changed my strategy after the first few home visits. I began to enlist the deaf child as the interpreter (or communication mediator), and I did not bring another interpreter. This was important to me, as I wanted to see how deaf children and their hearing families communicated. In some cases children were able to communicate orally with their parents. In other cases, parents and deaf children had developed a home sign system (gestures and signs that are understood by members of the family, although not always by outsiders) or the parents knew a few basic signs that their children taught them. There were also cases in which siblings knew some sign language, and they interpreted. Deaf friends with signing siblings often told me that these siblings were sources of support and conversation at home (although, like Kamala, they also complained that they did not sign well enough). And when spoken and signed communication failed, I ended up simply spending time with the families, hanging out and drinking tea.4

“Communication Gaps” and Their Effects These visits furthered my understanding of what NGO administrators and deaf education professionals often call “communication gaps” between deaf children and their parents. According to Brinda Chaudury, a former technical advisor to the United Kingdom–­based International Deaf Children’s Society’s (IDCS) India project, deaf young adults often came to her to express frustration about their lack of communication with their parents. She told me that she had heard many stories of young adults feeling isolated, sad, and depressed about their inability to communicate with their families. Chaudury told me that she thought that families were to blame, and that they did not make enough of an effort to reach out to their deaf children. An article in an October 2007 newsletter published by IDCS India states: “Approximately 50% of deaf children have emotional, behavioral, and social difficulties as compared to 25% of children in the general population. A major reason for these difficulties is the frustration that most deaf children feel at not being able to communicate, even with their own family members. It is estimated that over 80% of families of deaf children never learn to communicate with the children.” While I am not sure where IDCS’s numbers come from and what is meant by “emotional, behavioral, and social

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difficulties,” the article makes a provocative point.5 In addition, this quote very clearly highlights the discourse used to describe communication between deaf children and hearing parents in which there is a focus on gaps and deaf children’s frustrations about these gaps. This discourse is, of course, laden with normative assumptions about what communication should be like, including the expectation that communication should be easy and that families and children should understand each other and share information. Parents were often aware of communication gaps (although none of the parents I spoke to used this term) and, with varying degrees of urgency, they approached teachers and NGO administrators who knew sign language for support and interpreting services when they needed help explaining something to their deaf child.6 While spending time at DPA, I often witnessed families soliciting help from Radhika, the principal of the industrial training center, to communicate with their child. On one occasion, Radhika was asked to “talk some sense” into a student who was less interested in his studies than in pursuing young women. And on a home visit that Radhika and I conducted together, we were intermediaries between an angry normal older brother and Narayanan, his younger deaf brother. Narayanan had come from the family’s native village to live with his brother in Bangalore. Narayanan’s older brother did not understand why Narayanan was spending so much time with other deaf people instead of being at home with his family. Narayanan tried to explain that he felt that he was isolated at home and that spending time with other deaf people offered opportunities for sharing knowledge and communicating. Radhika helped by interpreting from sign language to Kannada, although there was little resolution at the end. In addition to these kinds of interventions, Radhika often made phone calls home for students to relay information to families about diverse matters, including why a student would be home late, what kind of sporting or cultural program they would be attending on a field trip, and when final exams would be held. Students were often unable to communicate this information themselves to their parents. Indeed, Radhika and other DPA teachers often interpreted in mundane and everyday conversations. On one occasion, another DPA teacher who knew some sign language interpreted for a mother and her deaf daughter as they debated how much spending money the daughter should have each day for snacks and tea. In August of 2007, Radhika and I organized a workshop at DPA for parents of deaf students in its various training programs. During the workshop, Radhika asked parents to stand up and recount a good conversation that they had had with their deaf child and to share how they had this conversation. Our goal was to solicit strategies for improving communication between deaf children and hearing parents. None of the approximately fifteen parents were able to do this, and instead they talked about how happy they were that their son or daughter



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33

was learning at DPA. Afterward, a father told me that he wrote back and forth with his daughter and that he felt that this worked well, something that I had also heard from other parents. DPA occasionally offered sign language classes, and families said that they wanted these classes. However, enrollment often dropped off after the first few weeks as parents had to balance other competing commitments, including work schedules and home responsibilities. In parent workshops that DPA offered, Radhika constantly encouraged parents to learn sign language from their deaf children, and parents said that they would do so, although most did not. According to Radhika, most families that she queried about why they do not know or use sign language told her that they feel shame around using sign language, as it marks them as different from others; they feel that they have sufficient communication without using sign language; no one ever told them while their child was young that they should learn sign language; and they never realized the importance of communication and instead focused on providing basic needs such as food, clothing, and education. Many families also told Radhika that they were specifically instructed by school administrators and audiologists not to sign with their children. I heard similar stories and families also told me that it was “too late” to learn. I was often told: “My child is now grown up and we have managed this long. Why should I have to change now?” But as I discuss throughout this chapter, it was precisely because their children were grown up, interacting with other deaf people, and learning new language ideologies and practices that families needed to change. Parents’ responses to Radhika’s questions are revealing for what they say about both the current landscape of intervention and language ideologies in regards to deafness and sign language. Early intervention professionals and educators often do not inform parents that there is such a thing as ISL. If they mention sign language at all, professionals and educators stress that learning sign language will impede so-­called normal development. Parents are told that their children should learn to speak and lip-­read and that they should wear hearing aids. They are told that they should enroll their children in educational institutions that use the oral method of education. The oral method focuses on using auditory verbal techniques to teach deaf children how to speak and lip-­read. This method is most successful when it is started from an early age, usually before the age of one year, and when it is accompanied by appropriate amplification and by families playing a significant role in helping their children learn to pronounce and decipher sounds. For oral education to have a chance at succeeding, classroom sizes must be appropriately small and teachers must have experience using auditory verbal methods. In addition, studies have shown that high-­quality hearing aids and cochlear implants (a surgically implanted electronic device) increase the likelihood of success in oral education (Power and

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FIGURE 1.1.  Image of (sad) girl and boy with body hearing aid. Credit:

V. Gopalakrishnan.

Leigh 2004, xiii). Most of the schools that I visited in India had class sizes of more than ten students, teachers were not extensively trained in auditory verbal methods, and children wore old models of body hearing aids, which offered minimal amplification that was not tailored to the individual child’s hearing loss (also see Broota 2005).7 In an interview at the All India Institute of Speech and Hearing (AIISH) in Mysore, Karnataka, a senior audiologist told me that most deaf children in India grow up without appropriate amplification or training to make use of the sounds that they may be able to hear (and many children are unable to learn to speak and lip-­read even with amplification and training).8 This is not to say that parents do not want their deaf children to do well. Almost all of the families with whom I interacted spoke about the grief that they felt when they found out that their child was deaf. Many families had stories of taking their children to temple after temple in search of healing. Other families told me about the expensive Ayurvedic and Western medicines that they purchased for their child on the advice of doctors in the hopes of curing their child. They spoke of arduous journeys to AIISH to consult with doctors and audiologists and about long waits in clinic and hospital waiting rooms.9 In many cases, looking for treatment and services was a gendered responsibility that fell on the shoulders of mothers. And mothers also told me about traveling daily with their deaf children to special preschool programs for deaf children in order to learn how to best work with their children. During a visit with an upper-­caste, upper-­class young man in his early twenties named Sarnath and his parents, Sarnath’s mother reminisced about how she accompanied him daily to school when he was small. She spoke of how



ORIENTING FROM (BAD) FAMILY TO (GOOD) FRIENDS

35

they would travel by auto-­rickshaw together to and from school and she would stay with him, sitting in the back of the class to learn skills for helping him learn to lip-­read and speak. Now that he is older, she told me that he does not have time for her. “We used to be so close when we went to school every day together when he was a child but now all he wants to do is go off with his friends and use this sign language. Why does he need this sign language?” As Sarnath sat with a sheepish expression on his face and checked his mobile phone for text messages from deaf friends, his mother discussed his early childhood as a counterpoint to what she sees as his current estrangement from her: we were so close then and he is so distant now. I will come back to this theme of estrangement later.

Educational Choices Parents are required to make decisions about their deaf children, although in many cases they are not provided with information about early intervention, whether to learn sign language, and about the existence of multiple deaf schools with different language ideologies and options. Before the mid-­1960s, Bangalore’s deaf children and their families had to travel to Chennai, Tamil Nadu (a six-­hour bus ride from Bangalore) if they wanted to attend a deaf school. In Chennai, deaf children went to residential schools operated by the Little Flower Convent and the Church of South India, two well-­known deaf schools that attracted deaf students from all over India. In some cases, mothers accompanied their children and rented rooms or houses in order to reside with them there, but in most cases children were dropped off and picked up for holidays and vacations. Chennai’s residential deaf schools, as I discuss in the next chapter, have become spaces for the emergence of a certain kind of pan-­Indian deaf experience. However, in 1966 the Sheila Kothavala Institute for the Deaf (SKID) was established in Bangalore as the city’s first deaf school. SKID is located off of Bangalore’s bustling Old Airport Road on a very valuable piece of land behind one of the city’s best hospitals and in close proximity to IT offices and a luxury mall. Students travel from all over the city to attend, and the campus feels like an oasis from the bustle of Bangalore’s busy roads. The school was started through the initiative and influence of a prominent Parsi family with a deaf daughter who had attended Little Flower Convent School in Chennai. The family had recruited Sisters from Little Flower Convent to help start SKID, and some of these Sisters stayed on as teachers and administrators. After SKID opened, families in search of educational opportunities no longer had to travel to Chennai. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, other deaf schools also opened in Bangalore, although none was established with the same level of financial support and technical expertise as SKID. SKID offers only English-­medium education, and although it started as strictly an oral school, under the auspices of the Sisters

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who helped start and administer the school, most classes are taught in a mixture of sign language and English—­although none of the teachers has been formally trained in sign language. There is also currently a lone deaf teacher who uses sign language when he teaches—but he does not receive the same salary as normal teachers. SKID was founded as an oral school, but sign language has been used in the school since the 1970s, when a normal Roman Catholic missionary from Canada named Father Thomas came to Bangalore to work with deaf children and young adults. Father Thomas was an excellent signer, and much to the dismay of Sister Helen, SKID’s first principal, he taught sign language to the students. An avid lover of music and drama, he organized sign language drama troupes and taught sign language songs to students. After Father Thomas settled in Bangalore, other signing American and Canadian missionaries came to SKID to work with students on diverse topics such as leadership, drama, and sign language development. In talking with members of the Deaf Aid Society who oversaw the development of SKID during the 1970s, I learned that there was often a lot of tension and debate over what direction SKID should take in terms of providing oral or sign language-­based education. The constant presence of foreigners—­ the Little Flower Sisters, Father Thomas, American Catholic missionaries, international deaf university students—­served to create a diverse communicative atmosphere in which multiple ideologies around deaf education and communication were discussed and experimented with. SKID now offers its teachers weekly sign language classes and its principal is committed to trying to create a bilingual (sign language and English) environment. This is not true for the other deaf schools in Bangalore, most of which are adamantly oral (again, in theory). In these schools, students sit in classrooms of twenty or more students in rows in which they cannot see each other when they ask or answer questions. Teachers speak and write on the board, occasionally using a few signs or gestures that they have learned from their students. In many cases, teachers only write on the board and leave the students to copy what they have written without checking for comprehension. There is little or no use of technology, and students use body hearing aids or behind-­the-­ear analog hearing aids that are not calibrated to students’ specific hearing losses. The majority of deaf children leave these schools lagging behind their hearing peers in reading and writing skills—a source of increasing concern to government officials, as I will discuss below. There are currently seven deaf schools in Bangalore and SKID has the best reputation in Bangalore’s deaf worlds for providing quality education, although many of its students and graduates also have significant difficulty with reading and writing. One of the schools offers education only in Kannada medium, while the others offer either only English medium or a choice between English and Kannada. Deaf children are exempt from India’s second



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FIGURE 1.2.  Deaf Indians’ real and desired educational settings. Credit: V.

Gopalakrishnan.

language requirements, so their primary and secondary school education takes place in one language. Bangalore’s schools, with the exception of SKID, which is more innovative in its communication and pedagogical practices, are similar to and representative of deaf schools in other Indian cities. How do parents decide where to send their children to school? For the majority of the families whom I interviewed, the two factors that went into choosing a school were language of instruction and proximity to home; most learned about the various schools through word of mouth, audiologists, or referrals from the AIISH or the Institute of Speech and Hearing, an organization that offers speech therapy, auditory verbal therapy, hearing tests, and special education and rehabilitation courses in Bangalore. Most families chose English-­ medium instruction for their child even if they did not know English themselves (and this, of course, added another layer of communication difficulties). Parents told me that they were counseled to do this by audiologists and counselors, as “English was the most important language for future job opportunities.” There were families, however, who chose Kannada-­medium schools because they felt that it was more important to be able to communicate with their child in their family’s mother tongue. This choice of mother-­ tongue education ultimately becomes a source of frustration and anger for deaf children who, after finishing class ten, overwhelmingly flock to vocational training programs and employment situations where English is required. While I was spending time with Aisha, a deaf young woman in her early twenties, she complained about being educated in Kannada medium, although she only had very positive things to say about the Kannada-­medium deaf school that she attended and she often enthusiastically showed me photos in which she posed with classmates and teachers. She attended an English-­medium college where she received a special accommodation of taking her exams in Kannada; she said that she had a very difficult time understanding her English-­language course materials and lectures. In addition

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to studying English on her own, Aisha also learned English and sign language from a deaf government worker named Chetan and his wife Sushma who lived close by. Aisha told me that she was now extremely angry with her parents for placing her in Kannada medium because she found it very difficult to learn English as a young adult. When I asked Aisha’s mother about why they chose the school that Aisha went to, she earnestly told me that their family did not know English well and it seemed silly to have Aisha learn a language that they could not use to communicate with her. I met many young adults with similar frustrations who were less than enthusiastic about the hard work that they needed to do in order to learn English after they finished their secondary school education. In their frustration, they did not value the fact that they could communicate in their mother tongue, nor did they value their mother tongue in the same way that their families did. I observed in many cases that even when they were educated in their mother tongue, deaf young adults could not carry on a conversation with their parents or others because of their inability to lip-­read and speak. It should be noted that dissatisfaction with mother-­tongue education emerges as deaf young adults finish class ten and join vocational training programs and/or realize that English is essential for many vocational paths. English is also needed for using the Internet and sending text messages—two very important practices for many of my deaf friends. Sign language activists in India often argue that sign language is a deaf child’s mother tongue (Bhattacharya 2010). This reinvention of conceptions of a mother tongue is a political claim, often made in the hopes of receiving government funding and recognition under the Right to Education Act of 2010, which calls for instruction in children’s mother tongue in government schools and is designed to protect endangered indigenous languages. So far, sign language activists have not been successful at utilizing this discourse with others who are not deaf (although it resonates strongly with deaf people) because the national government has not recognized ISL, and there is still much work to do around documenting its regional varieties and developing pedagogy for teaching it. The implications of this claim about deaf children’s mother tongue are especially significant because deaf children’s families do not know or use sign language; utilizing this discourse indexes yet another marker of disorientation from families and orientation toward deaf sociality. Deaf children learn sign language from each other and from deaf and hearing adults who do know the language. A new kinship structure with its own lineage is emerging. At the head of this lineage perhaps are deaf teachers at the Mumbai-­based Ali Yavar Jung National Institute for Hearing Handicapped (NIHH) and other sign language research and training centers in India.10 Many wealthier parents send their deaf children to normal private schools. However, of the five families that I interviewed who did this, four wound up



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transferring their child to SKID when he or she fell behind and was not able to keep up with hearing peers. I was told that none of the normal schools offered deaf children additional services or support and that deaf children were treated just like everyone else. These children, now young adults, fondly told me about transferring to SKID and being able to interact with deaf peers (and understand them) for the first time. This transfer of schools often resulted in a social transformation and parents reported that their children seemed happier and had more friends once they were with other deaf children—­although they all said that they perceived SKID to be of inferior educational quality in comparison to the normal school that their children had attended earlier.11 Indeed, everyone with whom I interacted—­families, deaf young adults, NGO administrators—­commented on the poor educational quality of all of Bangalore’s deaf schools. Students sat in rows not understanding their teachers and they copied notes off the blackboard. Only SKID had (one) deaf teacher and the other schools employed only normal teachers. Students often emerged from these schools unable to read or write properly and without basic skills needed for livelihood. Deaf young adults often told me that they passed their secondary school leaving exams by copying from their classmates or receiving answer papers from teachers. They told me that otherwise there would have been no way that they could have passed (and they told me this without a trace of shame—­what else could they have done?). However, my deaf friends viewed these schools as productive and nourishing spaces in terms of deaf sociality formation: lifelong friendships often began at them, as I will discuss in subsequent chapters.

A Crisis in Indian Deaf Education I want to stress that Indian oral schools are not really oral schools in that they do not provide the appropriate support needed for oralism to work, even potentially. Students do use sign language at these schools to communicate with each other, although not with their teachers or administrators. During the summer of 2009, I traveled to Chennai in order to visit Little Flower Convent School for the Deaf. As a result of its reputation, deaf children and their mothers from all over India (and other developing countries) travel to enroll at the school, which was started in 1926 by the Missionary Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. Girls and boys (boys attend until fourth standard and then transfer to a neighboring boys’ school called Saint Louis School for the Deaf) are strictly required to speak to each other at all times. Students sit in classes of around twelve to fifteen students, often in rows, and strain to follow their teachers’ mouth movements. Some of these students use hearing aids and others do not. Alumni told me stories about having their hands and wrists hit with rulers for using sign

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language in between classes and they reminisced about the strictness of their former teachers and principals. One alumna in her early forties poignantly told me about having her knuckles painfully rapped when she used sign language. She felt that this was particularly unjust, as her parents were also deaf and she needed to use sign language to communicate with them. Families who spent time at the school in the past told me that I would never find sign language being used at the school. However, when I visited the school in order to attend an alumni reunion function (which was, ironically, conducted entirely in sign language), I observed that before and after classes most of the students signed to each other.12 This did not surprise me as I saw this practice at all of the deaf schools that I visited, and it led me to think that a pure oral school is an ideal that does not occur in reality, at least not in India. When I spoke with Sister Mary Peter, the school’s retired principal, who is still extremely influential in the field of deaf education, she told me that she no longer thought it was possible for Little Flower to be an oral school, as the children who stay in the hostel use sign language at night, after classes, and on the weekends. In addition, Sister Mary Peter told me that because the school offered both Tamil-­and English-­medium education, students in the different mediums communicated with each other using shared sign language. In an attempt to avoid this, the school had tried diligently to keep the two mediums separate: Tamil-­and English-­medium hostel students are not permitted to share a room and they also eat their meals in separate cafeterias. However, this attempt at segregation was not successful and the students mingled during recreation activities and free time. When I asked Sister Mary Peter how she felt about this, she seemed resigned. On one hand, she told me that she firmly believed that “you cannot teach everything through sign language” and that the decline in oral education is the reason why deaf people are no longer being employed at government banks and other government bureaucracies.13 However, she told me that she had come to realize that “deaf children are a heterogeneous group” and that there were deaf children for whom sign language was appropriate: children with multiple disabilities and children from poor families whose parents were too busy to work diligently with them on oral training. Sister Mary Peter’s categories of children who would be best served by sign language education show her lack of respect for sign language and her opinion that it was the option of last resort. However, despite Sister Mary Peter’s negative opinion of sign language, students still learned it from each other and continued to use it to communicate. When I met with Sister Mary Peter in the summer of 2009, she had just returned from a nationwide meeting held at the Rehabilitation Council of India (RCI) headquarters in New Delhi, where Indian deaf education researchers and educators assembled to discuss the current problems in deaf education. This



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meeting was notable because it included both deaf and hearing stakeholders from a wide variety of backgrounds and perspectives; as such it represented a critical event in which ideologies around deaf education were explicitly discussed and negotiated. Attendees included a normal deaf education researcher who formerly ran a deaf school in north India, an ISL interpreter whose deaf parents started an innovative deaf school in north India, Sister Mary Peter, and a deaf Indian man who helped to develop the NIHH ISL curriculum and who is currently studying and teaching sign language linguistics in the United Kingdom, among other people. According to Ezra John, the general secretary of RCI: “It was important to have such a meeting. I am sick of all this fighting between the oralists and the manualists and I wanted to force them to sit in the same room and talk to each other.” John told me that the impetus for the meeting was the signing of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD), which called for sign language–­based education for deaf children. In addition, John told me that he felt that there was increasing awareness that deaf children in India were not getting a good education. In interviewing people who participated in the meeting and reviewing notes that were compiled afterward by RCI, I learned that participants did indeed talk to each other, although advocates of increased opportunities for sign language were in the minority of those present, and they resented the “Chennai dominance and power” exercised by Sister Mary Peter and Mrs. Monika Ravendra, the director of a well-­respected oral early intervention program and preschool named Bala Vidalaya. Both have long worked closely with the RCI to ensure that oral methods are foregrounded in deaf education teacher training programs and deaf schools. According to their critics, the “Chennai model” of oral education is not universally replicable, as it requires that parents be extremely invested and available for intensive auditory training and speech therapy. It also requires immense state funding and resources, which states other than Tamil Nadu lack or are reluctant to provide. This meeting was the first time at RCI that the importance of having schools that used sign language as the medium of instruction was explicitly discussed. There was discussion about including sign language in special education teacher training courses and ensuring that teachers of deaf children had sign language competence. Participants discussed the importance of ensuring that there were opportunities for deaf children and their families to learn about and have access to ISL instruction, although there was no specific discussion of how to do this. In follow-­up visits to RCI, however, it became clear to me that RCI administrators did not have an understanding of ISL as a “real” language. Administrators told me that they thought that ISL could be taught to teachers and other stakeholders in fifteen days. Indeed, as a result of India’s ratification of the UNCRPD, the RCI had instituted a series of fifteen-­day sign language training programs for

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teachers and administrators working with deaf children throughout the country in the spring and summer of 2009.14 At the RCI meeting, participants also emphasized that all deaf children should have access to appropriate amplification devices, although policies and processes for ensuring that this happens were not discussed. As I mentioned earlier, most children still use the one-­size-­fits-­all body aid because this is what the government disability allowance provides them with. Appropriately fitting ear molds are not provided, nor is there a process for ensuring that these devices are maintained. As cochlear implants now loom large in technology development circles and within a medical apparatus that is interested in eradicating and curing deafness, it will be interesting to see how the RCI’s policies and approaches change. During a 2007 meeting, a former government bureaucrat told me that the government was currently developing technology for cochlear implants, thereby skipping over possibilities of less invasive (and less spectacular) higher-­end digital hearing aids. Currently a few Indian state governments provide poor children with such implants, although there are no statistics available on how many children have undergone the surgery or whether those who have undergone the surgery have benefited; for cochlear implantation to be successful, there must be significant follow-­up, auditory training, and speech therapy.15 The multiple perspectives and diversity of interests present at this RCI meeting illustrates that the complex field of deaf education in India is contested and that there is a growing awareness of the fact that deaf education in India is not meeting the needs of most deaf children.

Returning to the Family The complicated terrain around parenting, deaf education, and communication ideologies may be seen to hinge on an understanding of a “good” family. In the summer of 2007, Manju Auntie and I sat on the large bed in her room and talked about her experiences raising three deaf daughters.16 I had spent a lot of time at Manju Auntie’s home, located in an upper-­class Brahmin area in Bangalore, and I had eaten many meals that she had prepared. However, this was the first time that she and I had sat alone together and talked about her experiences raising deaf children. Manju Auntie’s daughters are now in their twenties and all three are married to normal men. The oldest and youngest are married to members of the family’s Sindhi community and the middle daughter, previously married to a Sindhi man, is now married to a Kannadiga. While Manju Auntie’s daughters no longer live at home, her home is still a space where her daughters and their deaf friends come to socialize. Manju Auntie is friendly and welcoming, serving soft drinks and fried snacks. While she does not know sign language, she prides herself on having lips that are very easy to read and she made a point to tell me



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that all of her daughters’ deaf friends can understand her and that she can communicate with all of them. Manju Auntie never expected her daughters to have deaf friends or to use sign language. When her oldest daughter Sreela was born, she was around nineteen and living in Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu, with her husband and his large extended family. She realized that something was wrong with Sreela when she did not respond to sounds and so Manju Auntie took her to AIISH in Mysore for testing. Her in-­laws did not encourage her to go and they told her that Sreela would ultimately be able to talk “when she is five or ten.” Manju Auntie said that her in-­laws did not understand what deafness was. Two years later, Dimple was born, and Manju Auntie realized very quickly that Dimple was also deaf. As Manju Auntie was quite clear that she wanted an English-­medium education for her daughters, she was referred to Little Flower Convent School for the Deaf in Chennai so she set off there alone with her two young daughters when they were four and two. She left Anjali, her third and youngest daughter, who just an infant at that time, with her husband’s brother and his family; later Anjali, also deaf, came to Chennai when she was old enough to start school. Manju Auntie rented a small room and spent every day at the school with her daughters, sitting in on their classes and learning techniques for teaching them how to lip-­ read and speak. She told me that there were so many other mothers there like her, “we were like a big family,” and that they all socialized and discussed their children’s progress. Manju Auntie’s choice of words reveal another reinvention of kinship that happens around deafness: in contrast to the sign language lineage mentioned earlier, this reinvention privileged oral communication and augmenting already existing familial bonds—­as well as encouraging new bonds among mothers of deaf children. Although she told me that this was a time of great hardship in terms of the amount of housework she was required to do and the responsibilities of caring for three deaf daughters, Manju Auntie also viewed this experience as rewarding because she felt that she became extremely close to her daughters. It was just the four of them, and her husband came once a month to visit. When Sreela was in fifth standard, Dimple was in third, and Anjali was in first, Little Flower’s principal told Manju Auntie that the girls were ready to go to school with normal children. At that point, Manju Auntie and her extended family moved to Bangalore and her daughters were all enrolled in a private school in a prestigious area. According to Manju Auntie, the girls responded to this change in different ways and with varying degrees of success. Sreela was chatty and warm with everyone, Dimple was stoical and removed, and Anjali was shy and awkward. Academically, the girls did not do well. Sreela was married off before she finished tenth class, as she was uninterested in academics. After marriage she became a housewife and occasionally sold Avon products and

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clothing. Dimple continued on to college and dropped out after a cousin came to Manju Auntie and told her that Dimple was crying every day because her classmates teased her and refused to help her. Dimple then studied beauty culture and subsequently enrolled in a professional course teaching skills for working in the airline industry. Anjali studied longer than her sisters and earned a Bachelor of Arts degree; she received help from the extended family in studying and preparing for exams, which she passed, earning a BA with a low final score. When Dimple was twenty, the family arranged a marriage for her to a Sindhi man, but they divorced about a year afterward. Manju Auntie said that she changed her parenting style and attitude after Dimple’s divorce. At this point, she said she clearly saw how unhappy Dimple was. She also came to realize that Dimple had been very “isolated”; she said that Dimple and her husband had never consummated their marriage and Dimple had not realized that there was anything wrong with this: “No one had taught her about sex. How would she know that this was wrong? Finally Sreela asked Dimple why she wasn’t having any children yet and Dimple told her that her husband never touched her and so then we came to know.” Around the time of Dimple’s divorce, the daughters met a deaf man at a wedding and became friends with him. He introduced them to other deaf people and to sign language. Sreela and Dimple quickly started learning sign language and became immersed in an upper middle-­class deaf network in Bangalore. This network was reinforced when Dimple began meeting many deaf people at DPA, where she went for computer training soon after her divorce (her attempts to find a job as a beautician and as a clerk in the airline industry were not successful). At DPA, she learned basic computer skills and sign language. According to Manju Auntie, this was fine with her, as she just wanted her daughters to be happy. Although Manju Auntie herself did not learn to sign, she accepted the fact that her daughters wanted to do so. Dimple’s divorce made her realize the importance of sign language for her children.17 Manju Auntie’s close relationships with her daughters and their friends differentiated her from other parents whom I met. While most parents were strategically indifferent: they did not learn sign language themselves but they did not mind so much that their children signed—­with other deaf people—­there were some parents who were adamantly against their children learning sign language. I met a mother named Nirmala, for example, who was with her daughter Sarah at Little Flower Convent School for the Deaf at the same time that Manju Auntie and her daughters were there. Sarah is the same age as Dimple and was in her class at Little Flower, and they also studied computers together at DPA. Nirmala occasionally volunteered at DPA, and I first met her at a DPA-­sponsored retreat. At the retreat, I introduced myself to Nirmala and told her about my research, and without provocation, she adamantly told me that she disliked sign language and strongly felt that “Deaf children should learn to speak like



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normals do. Why should I have to learn a new language to speak to my daughter? She should learn to speak my language. She needs to learn to participate in the society.” Nirmala’s perspective, while worded very strongly, was not unique and many parents voiced similar sentiments. Yet despite Nirmala’s strong views, her daughter Sarah followed a common trajectory: she learned sign language from other deaf students at DPA and now she also has a small group of deaf friends with whom she communicates almost exclusively in sign language, much to her mother’s dismay. When I went home with Nirmala after the DPA retreat to meet Sarah, Nirmala constantly lectured us to “speak and not sign.” However, when we tried to humor Nirmala and switched to spoken language, our conversation dramatically slowed down. We had trouble understanding each other because neither of us could understand the other person’s speech. I often had this problem when interacting with deaf people (children and adults alike) who were raised orally. While they were “oral,” they were often functionally unable to communicate with people beyond their immediate families—­if that. This limited scope of communication prevented deaf children from forming meaningful connections outside of their family networks, reminding us of the comments made by Brinda Chaudury, advisor to IDCS’s India program, about deaf children’s feelings of isolation and frustration. This sense of isolation is true for Manju Auntie’s youngest daughter, Anjali, who chose not to learn sign language because she said that she found it “dirty.” She told me that she did not want or need to learn sign language and she harshly judged her two sisters for choosing to learn to sign as after all, she proclaimed, they could speak. However, I noticed that, unlike her sisters, Anjali had no social connections of her own. When I asked her who her friends were, she named her sisters’ friends. However, during social functions and events it was clear that she had difficulty communicating with everyone, including hearing family members. Anjali tended to spend a lot of time with Manju Auntie’s brother-­in-­law and his wife, who had looked after her while Manju Auntie was living in Chennai with Sreela and Dimple, and they were adamantly opposed to sign language. This is perhaps where Anjali picked up her anti–­sign language orientation.18

Learning Sign Language and Learning to Critique the Family Most of my deaf friends formally started learning sign language after finishing class ten and attending vocational training programs that were taught in sign language. This does not mean that deaf children did not sign earlier. Deaf children learned sign language from each other, from older deaf role models who graduated from their schools and returned for social events, from visiting missionaries and college students from the United States and elsewhere, and occasionally from deaf parents. Indeed, at school functions and “open school days,”

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I often observed deaf children watching signing deaf adults with rapt attention. They often interrupted to ask what things meant and adults were happy to stop their conversations and indulge the questions. Indeed, these interruptions happened with all age groups, not just children, and informal teaching and learning occurred in all spaces where deaf people gathered. However, I argue that a shift happens when deaf young adults finish class ten and enter vocational training programs or higher education programs where sign language is explicitly taught as well as utilized as a medium of instruction. Learning sign language is never only about learning a language; it is also a process of coming to see it as a legitimate and valuable language in itself. More specifically, learning sign language requires a reorientation through which learners come to see sign language as a language that is uniquely suited to the needs of deaf people and expressive of deaf ways of being in the world—­it is deaf people’s mother tongue. Learning sign language involves taking a deaf turn through which deaf young adults become increasingly oriented toward other deaf people and toward deaf sociality in general. Learning sign language is therefore a process of realizing that one is different from one’s family and other normals and becoming disoriented from them.19 Frank Bechter (2008, 2009) argues that deaf culture is a convert culture. As an estimated 90 percent of deaf people are not born into signing families, how do they come to value both sign language and deaf sociality? According to Bechter, deaf culture “is ‘conversionary’ and as such, all signers in the cultural community engage in inherently conversionary forums that reproduce this worldview” (2008, 67). Bechter looks at the role that stories, jokes, and narratives play in creating a deaf convert culture and he suggests that such narratives often serve to “explicitly invoke the potential of people to be signers and to be valued as such”; he argues that there “is a cognitive transformation necessary for this” (2009, 168–­169). For Bechter, participation in deaf sociality (or culture) requires a shift in orientation toward other deaf people. As deaf people are surrounded by people who are not deaf and who do not value deaf ways of being in the world, creating deaf sociality requires narrative work. Telling stories about oneself, about other deaf people, and about the value of sign language—­and these stories always exist in relation to the broader deaf community—­“converts” both the teller and the listener to deaf sociality. Although Bechter does not explicitly discuss practices of learning sign language (his research is based in the United States), I argue that the process of learning sign language—­and learning the ability to tell these stories—­is part of taking a deaf turn. The NIHH sign language curriculum, which is used in sign language classes all over India (although it can be modified to be more in line with regional varieties of Indian Sign Language), begins its course sequence with information about the history of deaf people living in India, the concept of “deaf culture,”



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and the importance of sign language for deaf people’s everyday and future lives. This information is provided in a course handbook as well as on a DVD featuring Atul Deshmukh, a deaf Indian who helped to design the NIHH’s ISL course and who is currently a lecturer and researcher in linguistics at a British university. Students learn from the very start of the course that deaf people are a linguistic minority and that sign language is deaf people’s native language and mother tongue. They are also taught that sign language is a real language and that sign languages vary from country to country. India, just like other countries, has its own sign language. More important than these new facts, however, is who teaches these courses and how they are taught. In observing sign language classes at different schools, NGOs, and vocational training centers in Bangalore, Delhi, and Noida (a growing urban center close to Delhi), I noticed identical pedagogical processes, which enabled certain structures of feeling to emerge. In contrast to normal classrooms, in which students sat in rows and could not see each other, in sign language classes seats were usually arranged in circles or semicircles so that students could easily see each other and their teacher. There were often group exercises in which students worked together to practice signs and create new sentences; these exercises helped to build rapport among students. Teachers were often young, familiar, and collaborative with their students, in contrast to the hierarchical relationship that usually existed between students and teachers. Teachers were usually close in age to their students and had attended the same deaf schools before becoming sign language teachers; “deaf deaf same” was very much present. Many told me that they thought that it was important for them to become teachers because they were “the same” as their students and that they had knowledge that they wanted to “share” with other deafs. For many deafs, becoming a teacher was a desired livelihood path because it offered opportunities to work with other deafs toward deaf development. Teachers constantly checked for comprehension and encouraged students to ask questions if they did not understand. Indeed, they stressed that communication, learning, sharing, and understanding were essential. They often admonished students not to sit quietly if they did not understand: “If you do not understand, don’t just sit there and nod your head, ask!” And teachers, as articulate and confident sign language users, offered their students a sense that deaf development was possible. There were also cases in which teachers themselves were learning how to become teachers (as with a Mumbai-­based program that sent apprentice teachers to Bangalore and other cities to teach at deaf-­focused NGOs and schools); teachers and students worked together and supported each other. In these situations, there was a sense of collective learning as students helped teachers to become better teachers and teachers helped students to become better signers.

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In sign language classes, I watched teachers teach hand shapes, the alphabet, lexical items, and grammar. I also observed teachers teach the importance of introducing oneself to other deaf people by stating upfront whether one is deaf or normal in their introductions; and I saw teachers introducing other norms in deaf worlds, such as the importance of sharing one’s autobiography in relation to the deaf world. Such an autobiography includes stating which deaf school one has attended, deaf clubs or organizations of which one is a part, whether parents or siblings are deaf, and if one is married, whether it is to a deaf or normal spouse. These details help to further define individuals sharing their autobiographies as deaf individuals who are members of a broader deaf world (see Lane et al. 1996, 7). Sharing these autobiographies creates opportunities for deafs both to orient themselves toward becoming a part of this community and to learn what is important within it (Bechter 2008). One of the first things that students learn in sign language class is how to ask the question: “Are you deaf or are you normal?” thereby foregrounding what is important in deaf worlds. In observing students learn how to ask this question and answer it with the correct answer, “I am deaf,” and in observing students learning sign language in general, I became increasingly aware of how learning sign language served to reorient deaf young adults in their understandings of what it meant to be deaf. Not only did sign language increase the social capital of deaf signers (“we have our own language”) and make communication less difficult between deaf people; it also legitimated deaf experiences. This legitimacy was in relation to the other answer to the question “Are you deaf or normal?” This answer, “I am normal,” was the de facto wrong answer. Learning the importance of asking people if they are deaf or normal when one first meets them constantly produces and reproduces “deaf” and “normal” as two different but normal experiences of being in the world. Consider this as well: in August 2011, I observed a beginning Indian Sign Language course taught at the Noida Deaf Society, a deaf-­focused NGO in Noida with over six hundred deaf students. Students in this class were young adults between the ages of seventeen and twenty-­two and had mostly finished their secondary school leaving certificates. They sat in a semicircle and eagerly watched their teacher, a young man their age who had attended a sign language training course at the New Delhi branch of the NIHH. In this particular course, they were learning the sign for “disabled” and to learn this sign, they watched a video of a deaf young woman telling a story about a normal and deaf person trying to communicate. The normal person does not know sign language and so therefore he cannot communicate with the deaf person. Therefore, according to the storyteller, this normal person is disabled: “He’s disabled,” she signs. Afterward, the students were put into groups where they were tasked with creating sentences using the word “disabled.” All of the sentences were variations on this



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same theme: normal people cannot sign and therefore they are disabled. As such, in addition to learning the sign for “disabled,” deaf students in the class were also learning a language ideology in which normal people who could not sign were disabled, whereas deaf people who could sign were not disabled. As deaf young adults learned sign language and developed ideas about its value, many became increasingly dissatisfied with their families who did not sign. Their inability to communicate with their families was contrasted with the ease of communicating with other deaf people. They openly discussed this communication lack, or “gap.” Deaf young adults often complained that their parents did not or would not learn sign language and that they were forced to communicate using speech or gestures at home. As I mentioned at the start of this chapter, my deaf friends often said that their parents did not share any information with them and that they were excluded from family discussions. These feelings increased as deaf young adults participated in deaf spaces that were full of communication in sign language because they provided a comparison. Deaf spaces were seen as spaces of deaf development while homes and family functions were not. In sign language classes, deaf young adults learned the language and the discourse for critiquing their normal families for not including them—­“They don’t teach me anything” and “They don’t share anything with me.” While most of my deaf friends told me that they always had a strong bond with other deaf people and that they always had a sense of being excluded in family life, formally learning sign language together with other deaf people served to cement this bond and produce even further a sense of one’s exclusion at home. Learning sign language provided both the actual language and the discourse to articulate this. The value of communication, sharing, and understanding were built into the language ideology of learning sign language. Indeed, as my deaf friends learned sign language, they came to expect communication, sharing, and understanding in their relationships with others. In an article examining the use of ISL in educational settings, Ulrike Zeshan, Madan Vasishta, and Meher Sethna discuss the success of the ISL program at NIHH in Mumbai where deaf and normals study ISL, sign language interpreting, and how to become sign language teachers. This program is India’s first ISL program and it has been instrumental in setting up ISL courses, creating ISL materials, and training ISL teachers and interpreters. There are five other NIHH branches around India but the Mumbai NIHH offers the largest ISL program.20 In analyzing the impact that the program has had on both deaf teachers and teacher trainees, the authors conclude: The effect of the training on deaf people who participate in the course can only be described as dramatic. Usually deaf Indians do not believe that their sign language is a “proper language” that has a grammar of its

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own. They think of signing as being some way of communicating that is inferior to spoken language. . . . Through the training programme, they learn that this is not true, and this awareness, together with the new confidence that they gain through the programme, has a deep effect on their sense of identity and self-­esteem. . . . All deaf teacher trainees, even those who do not pass the exams, also get a new sense of what deaf people in general, and they themselves as individuals, can achieve and this motivates them to pursue goals that they would have thought to be out of reach earlier. (Zeshan et al. 2005, 28)

Zeshan et al. stress that both learning sign language and learning about it have had profound and positive effects on deaf people’s self-­esteem and identity. Learning sign language creates conditions of possibility for learning other things as well. Deaf people come to realize that they possess skills and knowledge that they did not previously realize had value. In addition, participating in sign language classes gives deaf students and teachers access to an institutionalized deaf sociality and opportunities to participate within deaf networks. And, although Zeshan et al. do not specifically mention family relationships in the aftermath of learning sign language, I argue that learning sign language creates new perspectives on and disorientations from one’s family.

Conclusion I return to Sarnath, the upper-­class, upper-­caste young man who was more interested in chatting with deaf friends via SMS than talking to me and his mother. In returning to Sarnath’s mother’s lament: “We used to be so close then [when Sarnath was a child],” and her question: “Why does [my son] need this sign language?” it seems clear what the answer to the question is—­Sarnath needs sign language in order to communicate with other deaf people and to become oriented toward deaf sociality. In actuality, Sarnath started learning sign language quite early as he attended primary and secondary school at SKID, where he used sign language to communicate with his peers. However, there was something about how Sarnath comported himself now that he was in his twenties that was alarming to his mother. She saw him socializing with mostly deaf peers, spending time with deaf women, and desiring a deaf wife. Sarnath attended two international deaf leadership camps and brought home deaf Americans from this camp as well as deaf foreign travelers whom he met on Facebook and other social networking sites. To her, these actions and desires were a rejection of the familial past, which was characterized by her sense of closeness to her son developed through daily routines of going to and from school together, and the imagined familial future in which Sarnath would be a loyal son who married



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a normal Brahmin girl. However, Sarnath’s trajectory of becoming disoriented from his family and oriented toward other deaf people was quite typical of many of my interlocutors (although attending leadership camps sponsored by deaf Americans and the amount of time spent on social networking sites was not so typical). As such, sign language comes to stand in for and signify deaf orientations for deafs’ families as well as for deafs themselves. In this chapter, I have analyzed how my deaf friends learned the language and discourse for critiquing their families’ practices. They learned this language and discourse both formally and informally from other deaf friends and teachers. They learned concepts and values such as the importance of being able to communicate, being able to understand and be understood, and the value of sharing information and knowledge. And when they compared the interactions that they had with deaf friends and teachers with those that they had with their families, the latter were found to be lacking. Home and family were considered to be “boring” and family functions and gatherings were looked forward to with dread. Many of my deaf friends were similar to Sarnath in that they spent significant amounts of time at home SMSing with deaf friends or plotting escapes from their families. Learning sign language and the discourse that accompanies its transmission enabled deaf young adults to take deaf turns, and these turns resulted in new disorientations and orientations. These turns were both metaphoric and concrete in nature—­as deaf young adults became oriented toward other deaf people, they began to seek out and turn to deaf spaces such as deaf churches, clubs, sporting events, cultural performances, and informal meetings. But what of the family? In examining relationships through deaf young adults’ eyes, I am confident that I have missed nuances and fraught dynamics. I have not written about the complicated dance that many deaf young adults and their families often engage in to try to make things work at home, about the concerned glances that mothers often bestow on their deaf sons as they worry about how their children will make a living or provide for themselves after they are gone, or about the ways that some deaf children and young adults are often cared for by parents who insist that they do not have to help with the housework, contribute to household expenses, or hold down a job. I also have barely touched on the sacrifices that many parents make for their deaf children: they move to other cities for better educational opportunities, they permit their children to attend religious services that they would never set a foot in themselves (Chapter 2), and they encourage their children to join multilevel marketing businesses, which they find morally problematic for themselves (Chapter 5). I have neglected these subjects because this is not an ethnography of families with deaf children or of deaf families, but rather it is an attempt to render visible the often invisible experiences and perspectives of deaf young adults themselves. Lawrence Cohen, writing about the emergence of Alzheimer’s Disease as

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a diagnosis in India, argues that senility is a relational concept that requires the presence of others in order for it to be made meaningful. He writes: “Senility is acutely attributional; it almost always requires two bodies, a senile body and a second body that recognizes the change in the first” (1998, 33). For Cohen, this “second body” is usually a family member or the family unit. However, for my deaf friends, the second body or set of bodies in question is not the familial body but rather other deaf people and deaf sociality. In the following chapter, I turn to deaf churches, which, like the sign language classes discussed in this chapter, are key spaces for disorienting from families and orienting toward other deaf people. Deaf churches and fellowship spaces offer opportunities for learning sign language and discourse about the importance of sign language and communication, understanding, and sharing with other deafs. Like sign language classes, deaf churches are spaces where deaf people learn together in a structured way and they are able to practice the new language and discourse that they learn. In addition, churches and other fellowship spaces also seemingly offer opportunities for earning a livelihood as a preacher, missionary, or evangelist oriented toward helping other deaf people.

2 44444444444444444444444

Converting to the Church of Deaf Sociality “For the deaf, there is only one god.” —­Mrs. Jacobs, trustee and administrator of the Technical Association for the Deaf Program

“There is a problem because there are these banners put up by people from your country who say that they can make [disabled] people hear, see, and speak, and deaf children see this and they go to church and are forced to convert. I have seen this here, Bombay, Chennai. . . . So many missionaries are here.” —­Principal Rao, National Deaf School, Bangalore

Always Believe

In early August of 2007, I sat with a group of deaf young men in the dusty recreation area attached to DPA. As we sat on benches and chatted under the hot summer sun, the conversation took an unexpected turn. I asked what they would be doing on Sunday since DPA would be closed. One of the young men, Ambarasan, enthusiastically told me that they were all going to church. Surprised, I asked for more information, and I was told that the church in question was run by a deaf Korean man who had immigrated to Bangalore, and that these young men enjoyed his detailed and colorful PowerPoint presentations and the small deaf choir that he had created. As a group, the young men stood up and started to sign and sing, in BISL and English, “God Is Great!” with a bit of a dance thrown in as well. I was quickly told, after this impromptu concert, that the church is not all fun and games and that it is a place where deaf people can learn and develop. What these young men did not explicitly say, but which 53

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I will argue, is that churches and other fellowship spaces are spaces where deaf people learn the importance of deaf orientations and can take deaf turns. During the time of my fieldwork, Bangalore had at least eight deaf churches, a fact that I was told repeatedly by deaf young adults who listed the names and locations of the various churches that they knew about and attended. Attending churches and fellowships was a part of most of my interlocutors’ life histories. Churchgoing was a deaf social fact, and what was learned in church was discussed as part of everyday conversations and shared with deaf friends, coworkers, and classmates.1 It became apparent to me that many deaf young adults circulated among more than one church or fellowship and that these spaces played a significant role in creating deaf sociality; they provided deafs with a space to spend time with other deaf people, learn sign language, and learn deaf values and norms such as sharing knowledge and information, teaching each other, and engaging in “help support.” Churches were spaces of potential deaf development in which deaf people learned from each other and experimented with new ways of being deaf. In the following chapters, I look at other such spaces, such as vocational training centers and workplaces, where deaf orientations are formed. What is particular about churches and fellowships is how deaf and Christian cultural practices articulated with each other and created a scene of conversion to deaf sociality. The authority attached to Christianity meant that deaf people saw church and fellowship spaces as especially legitimate. As a result, the deaf orientations that emerged in church spaces were seen to be valid and important as well. As I discussed in Chapter 1, Frank Bechter (2008, 2009) argues that deaf culture is inherently “conversionary.” If this is the case, what can we learn from a space in which several forms of conversion are potentially in play? Therefore, in this chapter I ask what deaf people “convert” to in deaf churches and fellowships, although I want to stress that I am most interested in how these spaces create conditions of possibility for the emergence of deaf orientations. I will argue that being “saved” in this context means becoming a deaf person who is an excellent signer who is confident and strong and invested in deaf development. In placing “conversion” in quotation marks, I am following in the footsteps of anthropologists such as Nathaniel Roberts, who argue for a more nuanced understanding of conversion that avoids the sometimes-­posited binary between resistance to an external colonial force and submission to a colonization of consciousness. Roberts argues that “converts rarely understand their conversion as a choice between alternative ‘belief systems’; more often it is a matter of discovery” (2012, 278; emphasis in original).2 Following his lead, I explore the possibilities and constraints offered by churches and fellowships as spaces where deaf people encounter and experiment with new knowledge. To this end, I do not judge whether such spaces are coercive or problematic.



C onverting to the C hurch of D eaf S ociality 5 5

Returning to the assertion of Mrs. Jacobs with which I opened this chapter—­ “For the deaf, there is only one god”—­what role does this “deaf god” play in creating deaf orientations? And, how do deaf people come to have what they call “open hearts,” which orient them toward this deaf god and toward other deaf people? As I analyze what deaf young adults learn in church and fellowship spaces, I demonstrate how these are key spaces for learning deaf orientations and imagining and creating new deaf presents and futures. I also explore how churches and fellowships come to take on multiple (social, moral, and economic) roles in the absence of other spaces that facilitate the use of sign language and nurture deaf development: they are spaces where deaf attendees cultivate deaf orientations as well as collectively attempt to negotiate and mitigate uncertain education and livelihood opportunities.

“Open Hearts” Deaf people’s first encounter with Christianity often takes place at missionary-­ run schools for deaf children, which plays a prominent role in many of my deaf friends’ narratives of how they came to be participants in deaf sociality. For many of my deaf friends, attending these schools created what they called “open hearts.” Having an “open heart” meant being open to attending church and other fellowship spaces and being willing to seek deaf development in a variety of (unexpected) places. Most deafs with “open hearts” traced their beginnings to Tamil Nadu. There, the Church of South India (CSI) established residential schools in Palayamkottah in 1896 and Chennai in 1912 under the auspices of the Zenana Mission Society. Also in Chennai, the Missionary Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary established the Little Flower Convent School in 1926, and in 1962 the Montforte Brothers founded the Saint Louis Institute for the Deaf and Blind as a brother school to the Little Flower Convent School. These four residential schools historically and currently provide education and services to deaf children as young as three years of age and their families. Funded by churches and private donors, these institutions are free or very inexpensive, making them financially accessible to most children. These schools have historically been considered India’s best deaf schools, and children from all over India have traveled to Chennai to attend them; although none of them offers education in sign language, children learn sign language from each other and older deaf mentors who visit. As students at these schools, deaf children develop friendships with other students from different geographic locations in India; my deaf friends who attended them often referenced a pan-­Indian deaf sociality when reminiscing about their schooldays. These schools were established as a result of sentiments of transnational deaf similitude. According to Elizabeth Morgan, one of the first principals of the

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CSI school in Palayamkottah, the schools were founded after a letter was sent “from the deaf of England and America to Queen Victoria, begging her majesty to do something for the deaf of India,” as they had heard that the sole school for the deaf in Bombay was only for the sons of rich families (Morgan 1947, 66). Morgan writes about her work in Palayamkottah in the early 1900s: Travelling by rail in India recently, I met a stranger to whom India was a new land, full of interest, and she talked incessantly about things she had seen and heard since her arrival. Presently she remarked: “We send missionaries to India to make these people Christians. Is that fair? Do you not think they ought to be allowed to keep to their own religions?” I replied that nobody could make another person a Christian. Jesus Christ came into this world as the Light of the World, and all that we Christians could do was to let the Light shine, wherever we were. People accepted or rejected it of their own free will. Was it fair to withhold the Light of the World from any in that world? “What do you mean by ‘Light’?” she asked, and by “letting it shine?” So I told her about the Indian deaf and dumb children, who because of their handicap, were cut off from fellowship, despised by society, living in the darkness of ignorance. Some of these children, through the love shown to them in a Mission School started for their aid, were now happy and useful citizens. (Morgan 1947, 9)

I quote this passage at length because it lends historical perspective to the founding of Indian missionary deaf schools and also points to tensions and ambiguities inherent in missionary education in general. To be sure, there is a history of missionary involvement in education for all children, not just deaf children. Such involvement was considered part of a “strong civilizing and educational effort” and the “white man’s burden,” aimed at bringing civilization to the natives (van der Veer 2001). The stakes of missionary deaf education, because of very concrete issues around access to language and education, are different from education of normal children, however. Gauri Viswanathan, for example, writes about the ways that missionary schools utilized and taught English literature to create “secular” modern Indian subjects (Viswanathan 1998). But the transmission of language cannot be taken for granted for deafs as it can for normal Indians. I visited these missionary-­run deaf schools and spoke with deaf friends who had attended them in previous years, in order to explore the role that Christian ideology played in teaching and learning. During visits to the CSI school in Chennai, Little Flower Convent, and Saint Louis, which occupied leafy and expansive compounds in sleepy areas of Chennai established during colonial



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times, I met deaf students from all over India who were living in the schools’ residential facilities. In talking with them, I learned that they often had complicated relationships with Christianity and that the relationship between learning about Christianity and learning in general was ambiguous. This ambiguity was compounded by the fact that mandatory church services were often conducted in sign language and everyday classes were not (these schools mostly focused on oral education and both foreign and domestic educators in religious garb sternly tried to teach deaf children to speak). When I asked students of all backgrounds how they felt about attending church, they were invariably enthusiastic and said that they enjoyed “learning for future life.” I was repeatedly told that church taught “good behavior” and “good paths toward the future.” Students often did not separate or make a distinction between what they learned in the classroom and what they learned in church: everything they learned was knowledge for “future life.” Indeed, students learned in these school-­based church spaces to have “open hearts” toward each other, and it was these “open hearts” that made them open to valuing different kinds of knowledge—­about academic subjects, sign language and deaf sociality, and Christianity—­and treating all of these as valuable. This approach to learning often resulted in tensions with families when students returned home for holidays and vacations. The residential setting of these schools provided deaf students with different parameters for acceptable behavior from those at home, in addition to new ways of communicating in sign language. Tensions also surfaced around whether deaf children could attend church when they returned home from school during holidays. Sushma, a Kannadiga Brahmin now in her early forties, told me that her family reluctantly sent her to the CSI school because there was no appropriate school in Bangalore at the time. She said that her family knew that she was attending church and although they did not like it, they were resigned to it. What choice did they have? They had sent her away to school and she was “out of their control.” In May 2013, Sushma and I toured the CSI school together and we visited her old dormitory room, where she reminisced about staying up late with deaf peers and signing under blankets. We stopped in the laundry area, where she told me about washing her uniforms daily, and the cafeteria, where we talked about the nonvegetarian meals that she ate. She poignantly told me about the first few times that her mother dropped her off at the school and how she quickly adjusted, learning to feel at home there among other deaf peers. She said that returning home for holidays required her to adjust again as she became a different person at school surrounded by other deaf people. Tensions also developed around familial food norms. Sushma told me that she started eating meat because it was served at the school; she “developed a taste for it.” When she returned home for the holidays, she climbed over the

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fence to the house next door where her neighbor gave her chicken. She quickly ate the chicken and then chewed a clove to disguise the smell—­although she said that her mother always looked at her suspiciously when she returned. I heard similar stories from other CSI graduates who said that although their families were strict vegetarians and Hindus at home, they permitted their children to eat meat at school. Subsequently, these deaf children “developed a taste for it,” as Sushma did. The cultivation of these new tastes can be seen as a further marker of the difference between families and their deaf children. Here a taste for meat functions as a marker of difference (Bourdieu 1984). A twelfth standard student at CSI in Chennai told me that he grew to love the church, although his Muslim parents told him that he was not permitted to become a Christian. He said: “At home I am Muslim, in school I am Christian.” While he did not see the problem with not having a stable or fixed religious identity, he noted that this was not acceptable to his family. For this young man and others like him, attending residential schools resulted in negotiations around churchgoing and their relationships with their families’ practices at home; home and school were two different worlds. “Open hearts” resulted in tension with families who did not understand their children’s new desires and practices. Indeed, deaf people’s “open hearts” seemed to exist in opposition to the “closed hearts” of families that could not communicate in sign language or “share” with their deaf children. An “open heart” allowed deaf people to seek out deaf development in multiple spaces, including churches, and resulted in new habits and sensibilities. Indeed, returning to Roberts’s (2012) argument about the importance of carving out a space for understanding the role of discovery in people’s churchgoing and conversion experiences, I contend that having an “open heart” marks one as being open to discovering deaf orientations and cultivating desires for deaf development.

The Bangalore Fickle Heart In Bangalore, the “open heart” characteristic of missionary-­run residential schools was also found among deaf young adults, most of whom had not attended these schools (as I noted in Chapter 1, by the 1970s, there were a few deaf schools in Bangalore and deaf children no longer had to travel to Chennai for schooling, although some continued to make the trip). Compared to other Indian cities, Bangalore was unique in being home to eight deaf churches. Unlike Chennai, none of these churches had any connection to deaf schools.3 Although none of the six deaf schools in Bangalore was directly founded by missionaries, there was faith-­based involvement: Belgian sisters from Little Flower Convent came to Bangalore in the 1960s to help establish SKID, and in the 1970s, a much-­ loved normal Canadian Roman Catholic priest named Father Thomas traveled



C onverting to the C hurch of D eaf S ociality 5 9

to Bangalore to work at SKID. He subsequently started an exclusively deaf vocational training center, which waned in popularity in the late 1990s onward due to lack of funds.4 According to many of my interlocutors, before the 1980s there was not much deaf missionary activity in the city, and deaf social and learning spaces revolved around deaf schools, the deaf club, sporting events, and cultural festivities. The Bangalore Deaf Association (BDA) started as a social and advocacy organization in the 1960s and is affiliated with the All India Federation of the Deaf and the All India Sports Council for the Deaf. By most accounts, the BDA was once quite popular and its Sunday meetings attracted a large deaf crowd that came to share news and information, participate in cultural and sports programs, and plan occasional political activism. Although the BDA still exists, it is not popular with young adults, who feel that most of its members are older and that the leadership is out of touch with deaf youths’ everyday experiences. Indeed, when I attended a few meetings in 2008–­2009, I interacted with mostly middle-­aged and older deaf men who had secure public sector employment or who worked as manual laborers. In addition, the BDA has come out strongly against deaf youth going to churches. Its president, a government employee in his fifties, has harsh words for missionaries and churchgoing deaf youth, whom he mocked by saying: “They talk again and again about open hearts for Jesus. But is the church going to find them a job? Does an open heart lead to a job? Will Jesus give them a job?” For BDA’s president, there was no benefit to be derived from churchgoing, although it was clear that most deaf young adults did not agree with him (and there were also cases where church connections did result in employment). The 1980s onward saw a rapid growth in deaf churches in Bangalore. In the 1980s a deaf American Baptist missionary named Bryan came to Bangalore, established his own deaf church, and began recruiting deaf youth. He was pleasantly surprised that he was able to communicate with the youth in ASL (as a result of Father Thomas’s legacy) and he set about teaching them the good news in small groups and taking them on trips around Bangalore. In the early 1990s, Bryan established a seminary for deaf people (which has since closed) and a church in the city, although he left after a few years for a nearby hill station where he bought land for a larger school. After Bryan’s departure from Bangalore, Anoop, one of his first recruits, who trained at a Bangalore-­based Bible college, took over. Shortly afterward, the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints (LDS) sent an American deaf family on a mission to Bangalore for a few years. Although the family has since left, there is a dedicated deaf LDS contingent. More recently, normal Jehovah’s Witnesses started learning sign language from videos and DVDs sent from the United States in an attempt to recruit deaf attendees, and a deaf Korean pastor arrived in Bangalore and drove his scooter

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around looking for deaf recruits for his church. Another player is a Bangalore-­ based evangelical church that works with an American-­funded Chronological Bible Storytelling project (based on translating the Bible into distinct sign-­ language stories) to provide nondenominational worship services. In addition, a deaf Tamil nondenominational preacher comes to Bangalore twice a month and holds fellowship meetings on the top floor of a Pentecostal church. There is also a small sign language fellowship attached to an international nondenominational Christian community called the International Fellowship, which meets weekly in Bangalore’s botanical garden. It should be noted that the landscape of encounter between deaf missionaries and missionary subjects was different from that typically found in colonial and current-­day missionization in that the lines between “us” and “them” were blurred. The encounter did not follow along the lines of the (literally) black-­and-­ white example of colonial invasion in which white foreigners traveled to distant countries to convert native people. Rather in most cases deaf Indians reached out to other deaf Indians. Many of the pastors, missionaries, and evangelists were the same age as those who they were teaching and “deaf deaf same” was invoked to explain why it was important to teach the Word to other deafs. Gauri Viswanathan points out that scholarly work on “conversion” tends to focus on missionaries themselves and “uni-­directional flow[s] of activity.” With such a lens, analysts miss the transactions and exchanges that take place between missionaries and subjects (1998, 42). In addition, a binary is often created between missionaries and missionary subjects. In deaf churches and fellowship spaces, transactions and exchanges were of utmost importance as they produced deaf orientations. In addition, in these spaces the boundaries between missionaries and missionary subjects were always changing as deaf people learned new knowledge and then went out and shared it with others; all of my deaf friends in these spaces were actual and potential missionaries. The proliferation of deaf churches and fellowships in Bangalore over the past twenty years has had effects different from those of missionary deaf education because Bangalore’s deaf churches, unlike both missionary schools elsewhere and Bangalore’s own deaf schools (none of which had a sign language–­ based curriculum), encourage the use of sign language and focus explicitly on teaching the Word and on facilitating the formation of deaf sociality. As such, the church’s role and function in this context goes further than in the context described by Lane (1984), who writes that deaf churches are key spaces for deaf people to socialize with each other. They are not only spaces of socialization but are also spaces where deaf people come to develop as deaf people oriented toward other deaf people and where they learn both language and discourses. Bangalore’s deaf churches focused on creating specific kinds of deaf individuals who were oriented toward other deaf people and deaf development.



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Teachings stressed the importance of “individual choice” and “empowerment.” Exercising “individual choice” meant overcoming obstacles—­such as families’ anti-­church sentiments or long bus rides—­to attend church and be with other deaf people. Sermons encouraged deafs “to be strong and attend church” and to “do the right thing and bring others to church.” As such, the discourses of individual choice and empowerment were directed at creating stronger deaf socialities in church and fellowship spaces. Above all, teachings talked about the importance of “open hearts” to both Jesus and other deaf people. Churches offered deaf young adults physical and communicative space for conversations in sign language about both abstract and everyday conundrums (which I will discuss in further detail below), therefore legitimizing sign language as a medium for such communication. According to deaf church leaders with whom I interacted, the Bangalore “open heart” was fickle because churchgoers often attended multiple churches and frustrated attempts to create stable congregations. Circulation among churches resulted in battles between the various churches for deaf recruits and rumors and gossip proliferated about the different pastors and church services. Anoop, Bryan’s protégée, lambasted Naveen, the young deaf pastor who taught Chronological Bible Storytelling, because Anoop said that Naveen had not gone to a proper Bible college. Deafs said that the Korean “bribed” people to come to church with money and shoes imported from Korea. The Jehovah’s Witnesses with whom I interacted spoke derisively about Anoop and the Korean pastor because they provided deafs with meals. Deafs also resisted pastors who they said were “strict,” or disciplinary, because they told deafs that they should only come to their church, that they should not hug people of the opposite sex, and that they should come to church on time. On the other hand, some deafs also were concerned about pastors and missionaries who they said encouraged practices such as hugging members of the opposite sex. Deafs expressed anxieties about pastors’ alternating strict and immoral behavior. These anxieties articulated with deafs’ anxieties about their desires to comport themselves as “good” deaf people who were not “spoiled.” As I will discuss later in this chapter, these anxieties were further compounded by deafs’ sense that churches and fellowship spaces were important spaces for developing “for life.”

“Sign Butter” Jean Comaroff (1991), writing about the work of missionaries in South Africa, argues that: “It was through conversation rather than ‘conversion’ (at least, in its narrow, institutional sense) that the church had its impact” (Comaroff 1991, 15). According to Frank Bechter (2008, 2009), narrative, or conversation, plays a crucial role in deaf sociality because it is through narrative—­telling stories and

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jokes and sharing information—­that deaf sociality is (re)produced. In the case of Indian deaf churchgoers, however, it is not only through conversation that the church has its impact but also through the ability to understand conversation. Being able to understand conversations results in deaf social (re)production as well as successful sharing of information, values, and norms. A few of my non-­churchgoing friends cynically used the phrase “sign butter” to describe what they felt pastors and leaders at churches do to deaf attendees: they sign beautifully and in doing so, they “butter up” deaf attendees. As one young woman told me very clearly: “Deaf people do not understand anything at school or at home. Then they go to church and see the leaders there signing sweetly and beautifully. They are fascinated! They become hooked!” Beautiful sign language creates conditions of possibility for new orientations and new senses of self and community. Although quite a few of my interlocutors used “sign butter” as a way of discrediting or dismissing what deaf people learn in churches, I take this phrase seriously, as “sign butter” creates opportunities for discovering and participating in new deaf worlds. Indeed, what is key here is the transformative power of understanding: as deaf churchgoers come to understand new concepts, ideas, and ways of being in the world through learning sign language, new orientations emerge.5 As deaf churchgoers learn both sign language form and discourses for discussing the importance of sign language and deaf sociality, I argue that “sign bread and butter” is a better description and analytic as well because it reflects the substantial nature of what deaf churchgoers are learning: they are learning language for having complex conversations about important social and moral topics and they are learning practices that are important in deaf worlds. Through “sign bread and butter,” they are learning how to take deaf turns. and they are converting to deaf sociality. I now analyze “sign bread and butter” practices in three deaf churches in particular—­the Korean Church, True Bible Fellowship, and the Jehovah’s Witness deaf congregation—­although many of these practices occur in the other churches as well.6 These three churches feature a mixture of normal and deaf leadership and differ greatly in form and structure. More important than their differences however, they all provide space for teaching attendees both sign language and new forms of knowledge, they encourage witnessing and recruitment, and they focus on deaf development. These churches, and perhaps all of Bangalore’s eight deaf churches, enable the (re)production of deaf orientations and deaf sociality. I argue that this is what makes them successful at recruiting deaf attendees.

PowerPoint Presentations and Big Hearts The Korean Church, as deaf people in Bangalore called it, was started by a youthful Protestant deaf Korean pastor named Peter Sung or “the Korean.” Pastor Sung



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immigrated to Bangalore with a normal wife who is a fluent signer and two young children in 2006. When Pastor Sung first arrived in Bangalore, he drove around the city on a scooter looking for deaf youth to recruit for his church. Deaf young adults, attracted by his enthusiasm and his drive to learn BISL, flocked to the church. Indeed, Pastor Sung was very good at developing rapport with new attendees at his church through playful bantering and joking. While attending church services, I observed that a common tactic he used to establish comfort and rapport was to compare and contrast various signs in Korean Sign Language with those in BISL, invariably eliciting giggles as he signed words such as “toilet” in both languages. When I attended the church from 2007–­2009, there was a dedicated group of approximately seven core attendees or church leaders, all deaf young adults in their mid twenties, who either attended vocational training programs (see Chapter 3) or worked (see Chapter 4). On Sundays, these attendees arrived earlier than everyone else in order to organize the church space, an airy vacant apartment on the outskirts of the rapidly expanding city. This core group also helped Pastor Sung recruit new members by encouraging their friends to attend and by visiting deaf schools around Bangalore, where they urged students to attend. They occasionally led prayers, and female members, under the direction of Pastor Sung’s wife, started a women’s group. In addition, Pastor Sung started a theological school for his leadership group members in which they read and worked through the Bible. The goal was to train them as church leaders who could eventually teach the Bible to other deafs. One Sunday in 2009, I arrived at the church early and spent time with the leadership group as they set out folding chairs for the service. Other attendees trickled in, including about five teenagers from a nearby deaf school who were attending for the first time. The room where the service was conducted gradually filled up with around twenty-­five attendees and we chatted as we waited for Pastor Sung and his family to arrive. I talked to one fourteen-­year-­old attendee who was attending a church for the first time, and he told me that he did not understand anything in school and so he had come to this church in the hope of “learning and understanding.” One of the core group members had found him after school one day while he was waiting for the bus and encouraged him to come by telling him that he would learn “knowledge for future life.” When the pastor and his family arrived promptly at 11:00, we all stood up. Pastor Sung introduced himself to the newcomers, cracking jokes to put them at ease, teaching them the Korean signs for “bathroom” and “clean heart.” His confidence in switching back and forth between BISL and Korean Sign Language appeared to impress these newcomers as well as everyone else present. He also teased these new attendees by telling them that he was really normal and his wife was deaf; by lightheartedly foregrounding questions of deaf and hearing

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identity, he was positioning himself as a deaf person. The worship service began with an opening prayer by one of the leadership members and then the small choir donned choir robes and signed a song. Pastor Sung began his sermon, which was about tongues and not using your tongue to offend. As he started, a leadership member emphatically told everyone to write things down and if we did not understand, we should ask later, that it was very important to learn everything, to practice what we learned, and to have what was taught in your heart. As is the norm in Pastor Sung’s sermons, he utilized an elaborate PowerPoint presentation. It was very easy to follow, with English words in different colors and many special effects such as dancing letters that drop down (which made the young student sitting next to me smile with delight). The sermon was also an English lesson; with each new word included on the PowerPoint slides, Pastor Sung checked for comprehension and signed the meaning of the word. Afterward, when the electricity went out (because of a daily power cut) and it was no longer possible to use PowerPoint slides, Pastor Sung talked about the importance of having a strong heart and robustly hugging people—­three times—­ and he modeled this with multiple attendees. He stressed the importance of showing other deaf people love and not being ashamed. He said that attendees must have a big heart for other deaf people and that they must be strong. Deaf attendees often spoke about the PowerPoint presentations and how helpful they were for understanding the content of what the pastor was teaching them as well as for learning English and sign language in general. Deafs constantly told me that Pastor Sung helped them to “understand,” “learn,” and “develop.” Just as at this particular worship service in the summer of 2009 at which attendees learned the importance of having a strong heart and appearing confident, at other services attendees learned the importance of not being sloth-­ like, being motivated, working hard, and being compassionate and forgiving. The Korean church therefore instilled important elements of deaf sociality such as being supportive of other deaf people, being strong and confident in how one relates to other people, learning the importance of understanding, and asking questions—­in addition to teaching and learning English and sign language. And as Pastor Sung stated: “It is important to have a big heart for other deaf people.” This “big heart for other deaf people” is perhaps the most important thing that deaf churchgoers learned at Pastor Sung’s church. However, Pastor Sung was more hierarchical than other Bangalore church leaders; he had established a practice in which attendees stood up for him when he entered a room, and his preaching style was such that he positioned himself as an expert with knowledge and skills to impart to those attending the church. While espousing the discourse of “deaf deaf same,” Pastor Sung had created a structure in which he was to be looked upon as an expert, and this rubbed



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some deafs the wrong way. Therefore, while a core group continued to attend this church, many left to attend the True Life Bible Fellowship because fellowship meetings were run through “question answer,” a more free-­flowing structure based upon leaders and attendees asking and answering questions.

“Question Answer” and Learning Together True Life Bible Fellowship started out as the “underdog” deaf church in 2006. A large family from Coorg (a district in the Western ghats of southwestern Karnataka) had converted to Christianity from Hinduism and subsequently migrated to Bangalore. Upon arriving in the city, the family looked for a church that was open to working with deaf people because Manju, the family’s patriarch, was deaf. The family found its spiritual home at True Life, an evangelical church with a charismatic bent spreading rapidly in India. After meeting with Manju and his family, the head pastor at True Life agreed to provide funding and space for a separate deaf worship service. Fellowship meetings were initially based in a rented office space until they shifted to one of Bangalore’s Bible college campuses. Diya, the family’s eldest daughter, was employed as a sign language interpreter at the only college in Bangalore that provided interpreters, and she invited deaf college students to attend the fellowship. While setting up deaf worship services, the family learned about an innovative American-­funded program that teaches deaf young adults to tell Bible stories chronologically in sign language and then teach other deaf these stories; this is called Chronological Bible Storytelling (CBS). According to one of the American coordinators of the program: “Deaf love to tell stories and the Bible is full of stories.” Indeed, storytelling is a significant part of deaf sociality, and its articulation with churchgoing gives both storytelling and churchgoing more power. In 2007 the family recruited a deaf trainee from this program to work with them. The trainee, a young man named Naveen, was in his early twenties and from Erode, a city in Tamil Nadu. When I first started attending True Life Bible Fellowship in summer of 2007 there were only ten steady attendees: Manju and his daughter Diya, some young unemployed deaf men from a town just over the Tamil Nadu border, a few lower-­middle-­class manual workers from Bangalore, and some college students from the college where Diya worked and their friends. As time went by and as Naveen circulated throughout the city, meeting deafs at bus stations and deaf social events, the numbers of attendees grew. People also flocked to this church from other churches because they said that Naveen was more open to “question answer,” services were more “equal,” and the church felt more like “deaf people supporting each other” than at other churches. Naveen’s young age and the fact that he was a new pastor also added to the collective and cooperative atmosphere at this church. Naveen’s focus

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on “question answer” in particular was of importance because it meant more than just asking and answering questions. “Question answer” involved valuing other deaf people’s contributions to conversations and believing that they had important things to share. In October of 2008, I had a conversation with a young deaf man named Narayanan who was excited to tell me that in January 2009 he was planning to switch from the Korean church to Naveen’s church as he saw Naveen’s church as less hierarchical and therefore more encouraging of deaf development and progress. Narayanan saw this move from the Korean church to Naveen’s church as a transformational one that would help him develop. Narayanan did switch churches, and he started circulating with Naveen throughout the city in search of other recruits. He also attended weekly meetings held during the week at Naveen’s house, where he sat around with other young men watching DVDs of Bible stories and imitating them; discussing the meaning of “good behavior” in relation to oneself, one’s friends, and one’s family; and planning for future life. During these meetings we talked about workplace frustrations and boredom, the importance of not daydreaming or fantasizing too much, the need for more deaf teachers in Bangalore’s schools and NGOs, and why being humble is good, among other things. Participation in these evening meetings provided deafs with an opportunity to have important moral conversations and to have these conversations legitimated; after all, although they took place at Naveen’s house, and not at church, they were church conversations and they often began and ended with prayers. Naveen’s life trajectory involved a radical disorientation from his family and previous life. While growing up in Erode, a mid-­size Tamil city, he attended a government school for the deaf where he did not receive much formal education. After finishing class ten, he found work as a weaver. He told me that he used to sit at a power loom for twelve hours a day, which he found to be boring and repetitive. In search of additional development, he learned about a deaf church in Coimbatore, a city approximately two hours away from Erode, and he traveled there weekly. In Coimbatore, he learned about the American-­funded CBS program and its headquarters in Kerala. He therefore decided to travel to Kerala to visit the program. A graduate from this program then came to Erode and taught him the stories and how to preach them. After finishing his course, he was recruited by Manju and Diya to come to Bangalore. The pastor from True Life Church provided Naveen with room and board and he received a salary from the American organization that sponsored CBS work and evangelism among deaf people. He spent his days visiting with deafs and teaching them the Bible, looking for new deaf recruits, and immersing himself in Bangalore deaf social networks. He was slightly awkward and quiet, although he came alive when telling Bible stories. His sermons were often created through a mixture of Tamil variety Indian Sign Language and BISL, and



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attendees worked with him to establish a vocabulary that was mutually understood. Some attendees knew more Tamil variety Indian Sign Language than others, and these attendees interpreted for Naveen and other deafs. Naveen often repeated a story multiple times during a meeting to make sure that everyone followed. He also constantly checked for comprehension to make sure that attendees followed what he said. At gatherings at his house such as the ones I attended with Narayanan, he carefully taught other deafs the Bible stories so that they, too, could perform them. The sharing and circulation of stories was important for deaf sociality. When I asked Jamie, a young man who attended Naveen’s church, why he attended church, he said: “In order to know the stories. It is good to know the stories. This way if someone asks me I can say I know.” I argue that what is important is not only knowing how to communicate the stories but also being able to understand them (and then relay them to others). Being able to share stories has given Jamie a position of authority because sharing information is a key deaf social norm. Frequently after church, I watched attendees compete to tell those who did not understand the stories what they had missed. Attendees constantly turned to each other and asked each other if they understood: “Do you understand?” was a way of expressing orientation toward others. I was constantly asked if I understood, as attendees knew that I was not fluent in BISL and they wanted to make sure that I could follow. Helping others to understand was a responsibility and attendees with good sign language skills or those who had been attending church for a while often enacted mentoring roles with newcomers. A typical Sunday fellowship service at True Bible Fellowship included a prayer by Manju, a few sign language songs led by volunteers, a CBS story told by Naveen, and a short sermon. Immediately following the sermon, “question answer” sessions involved concrete, specific, and immediate problems and issues: “My parents treat my sister better than they treat me”; “A normal person would not help me kick-­start my scooter”; “What should I do about lying to my parents about coming to church?”; and “I want to marry another deaf person but my parents will not allow me. What to do?” Attendees asked questions and contributed answers. A space was created for grappling with pressing life questions and charting paths for living life as deaf people with deaf peers and communally held deaf values. At True Life Bible Fellowship, attendees also cultivated disorientations from normals and discussed the injustices that resulted from unequal relationships. Indeed, on one rainy Sunday afternoon, Naveen taught that deafs were similar to the Israelites who were oppressed by Egyptians. At another fellowship service, attendees used a story about Jesus healing a boy who could not speak as a platform to discuss society’s lack of respect for sign language. Deaf attendees at True Life learned the importance of learning from each other in a collective learning space, checking in with others in order to ensure

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that understanding occurs in diverse communities of signers in which not everyone is equally skilled, and the importance of “question answer” sessions in which knowledge is shared. Through talking about experiences of interacting with other deafs and with normals, deafs also learned the importance of viewing deafs and normals as equals and behaving strongly and confidently in their interactions with normals.

Learning and Copying through Multiple Modalities In contrast to the free-­flowing nature of True Life Bible Fellowship, Jehovah’s Witness meetings were regimented pedagogical spaces based upon repetition of stories, Bible facts, and prayers that were learned through multiple modalities including DVDs, individual and group tutorials, and worship services. Deaf services were held in a small enclosed room separated by a glass wall from the normal English service in a large Kingdom Hall with multiple floors; each floor hosts a service in a different language and the English and deaf services were on the top floor, located above floors where the Tamil and Kannada services took place. The first time that I attended a meeting in August of 2008, I was surprised by how neatly everyone was dressed—­young men in button-­down dress shirts, ties, and nice slacks and young women in fancy salwar kameez suits—­as I had mostly seen these attendees in their khaki uniforms or casual clothing at Bangalore’s various vocational training centers where they studied welding, electronics, and basic computer skills. I was also surprised by how many normal people were present who were excellent signers and who served as interpreters and teachers. Many of these normal signers told me that they had learned sign language from deaf attendees and from the steady stream of DVDs that were sent to them from the Jehovah’s Witness headquarters in New York. As these DVDs were signed in ASL, attendees signed in a distinctive mixture of ASL, BISL, and if they were not from Bangalore, the sign language of their home region. Being part of the Jehovah’s Witness deaf congregation was a multiday commitment for many deaf attendees. In addition to meetings on Friday night and Sunday morning, on Saturdays many deaf young adults met at the Kingdom Hall’s covered parking area to read scripture together, watch DVDs, or have one-­on-­one tutorials with one of the excellent normal signers or deaf leaders. There were also collective learning sessions during which deaf young adults sat with a book of Bible stories, The Watchtower or other Jehovah’s Witness literature, and a teacher. During these sessions, new and continuing deaf attendees struggled to make sense of both the English words and the meaning behind them. An hour was sometimes spent on just a few sentences as deaf attendees worked slowly through unfamiliar English words and signs: “suffer,” “drought,” “plague,” and “thrilling,” for example. New and continuing attendees appeared



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equally invested in each other’s development, as everyone was on a path of learning although some were further along than others. I attended services on many Friday evenings, and I occasionally visited on Saturdays for the collective learning sessions. Present at these Saturday classes were three or four young women who only came on Saturdays. They told their families that they were attending classes at vocational training centers because their parents had not given them permission to spend time somewhere other than home or at vocational courses. Some of these young women did in fact have computer classes to attend, but they felt that they learned more at the Kingdom Hall and so they went there instead. Most of the regular attendees at Friday and Sunday meetings were young men who were literate in English and were able to keep pace with, and occasionally lead, the rigorous services. These services consisted of animated question-­and-­answer sessions during which participants read sections of the Bible, watched a DVD of the same section featuring a middle-­aged cardigan-­ and tie-­wearing American man signing in ASL, and then answered questions about what they had just seen and read. More experienced deaf participants coached newer attendees in language and behavior; they also modeled appropriate dress. When deafs gave short commentaries on Biblical verses, which they painstakingly prepared for in advance, or answered questions with extended answers, other participants cheered for them. Attendees constantly gave each other feedback and offered corrections. The deaf service was a combination of interpretation of what was happening in the adjacent English service and a distinct service with its own question-­and-­answer structure, role plays, and sign language songs. As at True Life Bible Fellowship, there was much asking and answering questions. However, unlike at True Life, the answers were all to be found in the DVDs, copies of The Watchtower, and the study guides that were used in the meetings. Indeed, as I noted earlier, multiple modalities were employed to encourage practicing and copying: these included DVDs, collaborative lessons, individual tutorials, and structured participation in services through either leading a service or answering questions. A moral space was created for grappling with important questions and learning new behaviors. Similar to True Life Fellowship, attendees discussed the importance of behaving in certain ways in relation to both other deaf people and normals. During one meeting, attendees had a conversation about the evils of lying to others. Immediately after another meeting, attendees talked about the importance of not quitting jobs soon after being hired because doing so would make deaf people look bad in front of normals and bring shame on other deafs. Attendees also constantly commented on each other’s sign language use and the appropriateness of their dress. After the service was finished, deaf

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attendees made it a point to greet each other and the normal attendees in the next room in order to exhibit polite behavior and to show that they were “equal to normals.” The Jehovah’s Witness Kingdom Hall had more interpreters than any other space in Bangalore, and services were often interpreted by multiple interpreters who took turns. These interpreters, unlike many whom I had met elsewhere in India, were deeply committed to translating and interpreting effectively and they were quite skilled. In conversations I had with a few of these interpreters, they stressed that their work was a project given to them by Jehovah and as such it was full of much gravity and meaning; providing correct and appropriate translation was a way of doing Jehovah’s work. These interpreters had learned sign language from a normal Nepali Jehovah’s Witness missionary who had eagerly learned sign language because of “her love for deafs,” watching sign language DVDs, and socializing with deaf people. Interpreters, as well as deaf teachers, therefore played key roles in introducing new possibilities for deaf development and they were invested in such development. In their commitment to providing careful interpretation that was as accurate and clear as possible, these interpreters were among the best interpreters that I observed in Bangalore. Because there were so few interpreters in Bangalore and because these few were in such great demand, I asked some of the Jehovah’s Witness interpreters if they would be willing to interpret for me during meetings and interviews with families. They politely refused, saying that they were only interested in interpreting in the Kingdom Hall. What was also at stake in the Jehovah’s Witness deaf congregation was a sense of being part of an expansive transnational deaf sociality. As Bima, one of the normal interpreters, told me: “Across the world in 230 countries, the same sermon and program is followed. Why? Because Jehovah is the same everywhere.” I also heard this from deaf attendees who spoke proudly of the DVDs that were sent to them from the United States; they also told me that around the world, everyone reads The Watchtower at the same time. There was a feeling of belonging to an international deaf world—­into which the smiling blond man wearing a cardigan and the other diverse signers featured on the DVDs offered accessible entry. Deaf attendees in Bangalore chatted with international deaf Jehovah’s Witnesses online; they wanted to study abroad at various Jehovah’s Witness programs and they spoke about possibly living at Bethel, the Jehovah’s Witness compound in Karnataka where international volunteers lived. There was therefore a sense that attending the Jehovah’s Witness congregation could lead to social and educational development that could not be found in other spaces. Deaf Jehovah’s Witnesses in Bangalore were therefore among the most zealous missionaries that I encountered: they eagerly taught their friends about what they learned in Jehovah’s Witness meetings and encouraged them to come to meetings.



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Language and Development I became more aware of how many of my deaf friends felt that churchgoing led to development during my conversations with Zakir, a young man in his early twenties who had attended church since 2005. Zakir’s story also points to the transformative power of discovering understanding in deaf worlds. Zakir had studied at a deaf residential school in Bangalore that is known among deaf people in Bangalore for its poor management, unqualified teachers, and lack of language access. Although the school’s head, Principal Rao, was extremely strict and did not let students leave campus to go to church on weekends, Zakir knew about the deaf churches in Bangalore from former classmates. Anoop had also come to talk to students a few times, managing to come inside the school campus before being asked to leave.7 As Zakir’s family lived about two hours outside of Bangalore, he was given permission to visit his family on weekends and on his way back to school he would go to Anoop’s church. Zakir told me that initially he did not understand Anoop’s signing because he had not had much exposure to anything beyond what he called the “shallow” conversations in sign language that happened before and after classes and in the dorms at school. Zakir said that he understood neither the sign language nor the content of what was communicated in sign language, but he continued to return to church, and slowly he started to understand. He said that both Anoop and other church leaders’ signing skills and levels of confidence impressed him. After passing his Secondary School Leaving Certificate (SSLC), Zakir moved into a rented room in Bangalore and therefore had more freedom to go to church-­ related events. He attended Anoop’s Tuesday and Friday night Bible study sessions, and through repetition—­what was taught on Sunday was also discussed on Tuesday and Friday nights—­he came to understand. And he said that what he learned in church—­communication in sign language and English, the importance of helping others, and being a good person—­helped him in school, in everyday life, and in his computer training course at DPA. As he continued to attend church and Bible study sessions, he became increasingly confident and I often saw him sharing what he learned at church with other deafs at DPA. For others, going to church replaced the education that they had not gotten. In the absence of learning in school, they learned at church. Nisha, one of Zakir’s former classmates at the National Deaf School who was also studying computers at DPA, told me that although the students do not learn anything at school, at church she learned how to read and write in English and she has also learned how to develop for the future. She told me that she desires to teach others about the Word, about good behavior, and about how to live a good life. Nisha now plays a leadership role at the church and this leadership role also spills over to DPA where she constantly advises other students on the right way

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to behave. One of Nisha’s DPA classmates told me that she wanted to be like Nisha because Nisha was “strong” and a good role model. She said that she wanted to start attending the same church as Nisha because this is where Nisha learned these values and skills.

Livelihood across Multiple Registers The discursive authority introduced in churches also instilled new ideas of how to obtain a livelihood, or visions of a different kind of “bread and butter.” Many of my deaf friends talked about wanting to become a preacher, pastor, or deaf missionary themselves; they saw this as a vocational path that would be more rewarding than working as a manual laborer in a government or private factory, a coffee shop barista or other food-­preparation worker in Bangalore’s growing hospitality sector, or as a data entry operator at an ITES corporation. Becoming a church pastor or leader meant that one would have an opportunity to “help” or teach other deaf people; this was a desirable career and an important contribution to deaf sociality. Church vocations also represented freedom: deaf youth said that they could follow the paths of Anoop, Pastor Sung, or Naveen as they traveled long distances for their work and appeared free from financial worries and overbearing normal supervisors. Similarly, there was the possibility of going to live at Bethel, the Jehovah’s Witness compound, or traveling to another country to learn how to become a missionary, and therefore escaping biological families. Indeed, Naveen seemed free compared to those to whom he ministered. Unlike other deafs who made electronic products at public and private factories, loaded Coca-­Cola bottles into trucks, baked pizza, and stocked mail for DHL, Naveen was able to set his own schedule. His position as a preacher gave him flexibility and an unstructured day. He told me that he loved preaching as he felt responsible for other deafs; he was motivated by a sense of “deaf deaf same.” In the future, he told me that he would like to travel to other cities besides Bangalore and teach deafs in these cities. Preaching provided him with mobility. There were many other deafs who wanted to be like Naveen. Narayanan has followed in Naveen’s footsteps, and he has become a missionary-­in-­training with the same American organization that employs Naveen. Instead of working as a data entry operator or welder, Narayanan first moved to a small town in the north of Karnataka where he taught CBS to deafs and he subsequently learned how to do video editing in order to help create CBS DVDs for this organization. He told me that the income that he is earning is comparable to what he would have earned at these other two jobs and that the work is more rewarding. As a missionary, Nara­ yanan is responsible for deaf development and he feels that there is more at stake than at these other jobs. In addition, Narayanan is also continuing to develop as a



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deaf person. According to Jamie, one of my interlocutors who has interacted with Narayanan at Naveen’s church, Narayanan has become much more “confident and strong.” Jamie said that when Narayanan first started attending Naveen’s church, he never participated in discussions. Now, Jamie said admiringly, “he signs strongly and is a leader. Now you should see him!” Ramakrishna, a man in his late twenties, told me that he had attended the American Baptist Bryan’s mission school up until class eight. After dropping out of school, he worked a variety of low wage and unskilled jobs, mostly in food service. He told me that he wanted to be a pastor and that even though he was not affiliated with a church or fellowship structure, he traveled to neighboring cities and states in order to preach the Word to other deafs. He stressed that unlike Naveen, Anoop, and Pastor Sung, he was not paid to do this work. He was searching for an international missionary organization to sponsor him. As he was unemployed, he spent his days as an independent unpaid preacher, circulating through the city in search of deafs to teach about Jesus and the Bible. In the absence of an SSLC certificate, higher education, or employment, teaching the Word became a way of elevating his status. Late one night I unexpectedly ran into Ramakrishna at one of Bangalore’s main bus stations; he proudly told me that he was on his way to preach to deaf Muslim men who he said wanted to learn Bible. Ramakrishna was not the only aspiring preacher and teacher; there were others who sought social and sometimes economic capital from teaching the Word and the Bible. Churches and fellowship spaces therefore offered possibilities for economic development as well.

Witnessing and Confusion Ordinary deafs also witnessed to each other by sharing what they learned at church and encouraging deaf friends to come to church. Deafs who attended vocational training programs often witnessed about the Word to those who did not attend church and they earnestly told their friends about the churches that they were attending. Current and former students at vocational training centers would take new students under their wing, and the more advanced students would “help support” the new students by encouraging them to attend church. Senior students at DPA told me that they felt that it was their responsibility to inform those junior to them, especially those from rural areas with poor sign language skills, about church. I observed one very eager second-­year student at DPA telling a new student about Jesus so that he would “know good behavior and good ways.” Deafs not enrolled in training centers would come to witness at them during lunchtime or after classes finished for the day. As vocational training students often had to travel long distances on public transit to reach home, witnessing also took place while waiting for the bus, on

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the bus, and during short interludes when deaf students met in parks or eating halls for a few minutes on their way to bus stops.8 Any free moment was potentially a moment of education and transformation. On one occasion, I went with three young women who were studying computers at DPA to meet with a young man studying electronics at another training center. He had come to DPA to meet them and the five of us together took a bus to Shivaji Nagar Bus Stand, a central transit point that many people pass through in order to catch connecting buses to different areas of the city. Once there, we sat down in the attached eating hall and shared a plate of gobi manchurian, spicy fried cauliflower. While we ate, we looked at pictures in a Jehovah’s Witness book and learned that God’s name is Jehovah. After about twenty minutes, the three young women said that they needed to head home and they boarded their respective buses. They made tentative plans to meet again another day. This young man and others like him are fulfilling a dual responsibility: they are doing what they must do both as members of a Jehovah’s Witness community and as members of deaf sociality in which they are responsible for sharing with other deaf people what they know. I talked with these three young women a few days afterward and they told me that they were interested in attending services at the Kingdom Hall. More specifically, they told me that perhaps when they were done with their courses at DPA they would go to the Kingdom Hall (therefore rendering DPA and Jehovah’s Witness congregations as commensurable spaces of learning). However, one young woman told me that she was confused because another friend at DPA had told her that the Korean church was the best church and she had gone there once and liked it. She was confused because the young man who she sat with at Shivaji Nagar Bus Stand, and other deafs too, had told her that the Jehovah’s Witness congregation was the best church and that it provided “deep knowledge” that offered more possibilities for understanding, learning, and ultimately, development. These same friends told her that the Korean church was “simple.” Indeed, deafs often compared the church that they attended with other churches that they knew about. Deafs often said that their preferred church was “deep” or “full” while others were “simple” or “half half half.” “Deep” churches offered “deep knowledge” and therefore more possibilities for deaf development. These comparisons were often quite anxious as deafs were concerned that they were missing opportunities to develop “deeply.” Deafs often alternated between saying that they would stick with one church “for life” and switching to another church. These discussions about “for life” churches revealed anxiety about where one could develop “deeply” and fears about missing out on deaf development.



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Conclusion And what of the Bangalore deaf “open heart”? In this chapter, I have analyzed how sign language-­using deaf young adults cultivated “open hearts” toward sign language, toward each other, and toward a broader sense of deaf sociality. Having an “open heart” meant being willing to seek learning, understanding, and development in many kinds of spaces, including churches and fellowships. Following Roberts (2012), having an “open heart” meant being open to discovery, or more specifically, discovering oneself as a deaf person. Church and fellowship spaces are key sites for deaf young adults in Bangalore, and elsewhere in India, for learning both sign language form and content and the values of deaf sociality. Pastor Sung, Naveen, and Jehovah’s Witness leaders’ “beautiful” signing, or “sign butter,” created possibilities for understanding both sign language form and content. Pastor Sung’s hierarchical PowerPoint presentations and structured sermons, Naveen’s collective “question answer” sessions, and the regimented repetition of topics and facts at the Jehovah’s Witness services encourage attendees to learn both the form and content of sign language as well as the importance of valuing sign language as a language uniquely suited to deaf people. In each of these three churches, and in Bangalore’s other deaf churches, deaf development is both implicitly and explicitly reflected upon as a goal toward which to work. My deaf friends saw church leaders, teachers, and missionaries as deaf people who were more developed and who should therefore be copied. In these church and fellowship spaces, conditions of possibility are created for the emergence of new understandings of oneself as a member of a larger sign language–­using deaf sociality. My deaf friends often stressed that church leaders taught them how to negotiate everyday lives amid normals who do not know sign language and that they, and other attendees, provide “help support.” “Help support” includes everyday practical advice and emotional encouragement as well as pastoral counseling and prayer during times of need. It also includes teaching, sharing, and cultivating “deep knowledge.” In addition to focusing on life in the present, church leaders also helped attendees imagine and plan for better deaf futures in which sign language would be more ubiquitous and deaf people would be stronger, more confident, and proud. In addition to “sign butter,” churches and fellowships also provide opportunities for earning a livelihood. Many of my deaf friends desired to become church leaders, missionaries, and Bible teachers because they felt that these career paths would give them more freedom and time to “help support” other deafs and work toward deaf development. Indeed, pastoral power, deaf power, and economic power seemed to be intermingled, as many deafs told me that by becoming missionaries, they would be working explicitly toward deaf

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development while also earning a needed livelihood. Churches and fellowships were therefore spaces in which new kinds of social, moral, and economic life could be imagined and cultivated. The “for life” employment potentially offered by churches and fellowships was especially attractive in light of diminishing possibilities for other kinds of “for life” livelihoods as a result of changing political economic structures, to be discussed in the following chapters. Indeed, church and fellowship spaces’ discursive authority enabled the imagining of multiple kinds of development. Attending and possibly being employed by one of Bangalore’s deaf churches offered deaf people possibilities for learning language and discourse and for earning a livelihood; a new deaf world emerges in these church and fellowship spaces. As such, I have argued that “sign bread and butter” is perhaps a more accurate phrase than “sign butter” as it reflects the substantial nature of what deaf churches and fellowships offer attendees. I want to return to the second quote at the beginning of this chapter, in which Principal Rao, the principal of one of Bangalore’s deaf schools, denigrates foreign missionaries for “say[ing] that they can make [disabled] people hear, see, and speak, and deaf children see this and they go to church and are forced to convert.” I argue that on the contrary, the churches’ power lies not in trying to “cure” deaf people but rather in recognizing and cultivating deaf people’s unique orientations and desires for deaf development. I argue, too, following in the footsteps of other anthropologists of Christianity in postcolonial contexts, that comments such as Principal Rao’s, which are based upon the premise that people are “forced” to convert by oppressive external powers, ignore the very real power of Christianity as a situated and contingent knowledge system and structure (e.g., Keller 2005; Robbins 2004). In the context of Bangalore’s deaf churches, being “saved” means being a deaf person with an “open heart” who is attuned to other deaf people and to deaf development.

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Circulation as Vocation

Trying to Learn

Chetan is a deaf government worker with excellent sign language and English skills who volunteers at the Disabled Peoples Association (DPA) on Saturdays as an English and sign language teacher; he volunteers because of his desire to be a role model for younger deafs.1 Soon after I met him, Chetan told me about the first day of his class with DPA’s new batch of deaf trainees.2 As part of this first lesson he introduced himself by following a deaf social norm. He identified himself as a deaf person and shared where he went to school, whether he passed his Secondary School Leaving Certificate (SSLC) exam, his higher education qualifications, his current employment position, and his marital status. He positioned this autobiography as a deaf one by stressing that he attended a deaf school, that his wife and daughter are deaf, and that he communicates with them using sign language. He then asked the trainees to do the same, and one by one they went around and introduced themselves using the sign language lexicon and communication structure to which Chetan had just introduced them. According to Chetan, almost all of the twenty-­plus students in the room told him that they had copied (but not that they had cheated) on their SSLC exam and that this is how they had received their certificates. Copying on this exam is a normal part of deaf educational experience throughout India; because of its ubiquity and the way people understand it as natural and inevitable, it is what I refer to as a deaf social fact. Many of my interlocutors matter-­of-­factly told me stories about copying (and then passing). In some cases teachers came into the exam room and gave students the answers while in others, families pooled funds and paid bribes to examiners and bureaucrats to ensure that their children passed.3 In Bangalore, there is an NGO whose director is well known for arranging for deaf people who have failed the exam multiple times to take it again and (finally) pass; he arranges press

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coverage and newspapers feature inspirational stories of deaf housewives going off to take the SSLC exam for the fourth or fifth time, but this time they finally pass (and although this is not mentioned in the press, the director provides answer sheets to test takers). I want to stress that deafs talk about copying and not cheating. There is no shame around copying, as what else is there to do? It is part of the shared experience of not-­learning for deaf students in India’s deaf education system. Sakshi Broota writes in her 2005 report on the current issues facing deaf people in India: “it seems that oralism has left the majority of deaf people in the country without adequate modes of communication and education. If, for years, the auditory-­verbal approach to communication has been followed and is claimed to be successful, then why do we not see graduates, doctors, engineers, civil servants, architects, lawyers who have hearing impairment? . . . why don’t we see deaf children in colleges?” (Broota 2005, 6). Broota brings us to this chapter’s starting point: deaf children are not learning from their teachers in deaf primary and secondary schools, nor are they acquiring essential language skills. In interviews with advocates working to improve education for deaf children, I was told repeatedly that deaf children often finish school without access to language development, and that even teachers themselves do not realize the relationship between deafness, language development, and education. And so what happens when deaf children pass their SSLC without learning? What happens when they transition from childhood to young adulthood?4 In this chapter, I analyze deaf young adults’ attempts to mitigate the fact that they have not learned very much in primary and secondary school by circulating through vocational training centers where they can learn from people such as Chetan as well as from each other. Such centers have emerged in many Indian cities as key spaces where deaf young adults are supposed to learn marketable skills for earning a living. Indeed, they have become spaces where the category of “worker with disability” has come to replace the previous welfare category of “person with disability.” In these spaces, trainees are supposed to learn how to be productive workers for a variety of public and private sectors and industries. One NGO director, for instance, told me that the goal of his vocational training center was to create responsible deaf workers who “would be integrated into the mainstream and be productive and contributing members of society,” and I heard nearly identical comments from other administrators. In actual practice, however, what deaf young adults learn in these centers departs from what is intended by administrators, teachers, and the funders who support these programs. The focus of my analysis is therefore on what deaf young adults actually learn in such centers; I argue that they learn how to become oriented toward a particular deaf moral economy (and not necessarily toward the wider neoliberal economy of the present). Building on the work of Craig



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Jeffrey et al. (2008), who analyze how education in modern India functions as a “contradictory resource,” I argue that inequalities based on deafness and lack of access to appropriate education are further produced and reproduced in these settings. At the same time, however, deaf people learn from and educate each other. There is learning that takes place, but it is not the learning that training center administrators intended to impart, and it is not learning that will result in employment, although deaf attendees very much wanted employment. Although there is an increasing array of postsecondary educational options available to Indian deaf young adults, in the majority of cases teachers do not use sign language, and students complain that they do not, and cannot, understand; they copy and learn from each other or more advanced classmates. According to the Rehabilitation Council of India, the number of deaf youth pursuing higher education is minuscule. Vocational training has therefore become a key site for educating (and “rehabilitating”) deaf young adults and the national government requires that government Industrial Training Institutes offer a 1 percent quota to deaf students.5 Few deaf young adults choose to attend mainstream or normal vocational training programs and instead they flock to where other deaf young adults are—­ programs offered by disability-­ focused organizations and NGOs. The current discourse around vocational training for deaf people is that as vocational training focuses on manual and applied training, it is possible to ignore or at least mitigate deaf young adults’ educational deficits by imparting “technical” skills such as welding and electronics, photography, tailoring, and increasingly over the past ten years or so, basic computer skills. However, according to Deepa Patel, a community-­based rehabilitation and deaf education expert living in Bangalore, focusing on vocational training for deaf young adults was like “fighting fires or damage control.” She also said that it was easier to find vocational training teachers than deaf education specialists who could teach deaf children to read and write well. According to her, it was less challenging to develop successful vocational programs than successful deaf education programs. While I do not necessarily agree that it is easier to build a successful vocational training program, especially in light of all the educational baggage (or lack of it) that deaf young adults bring with them, I want to stress that vocational training is a critical space for deaf young adults—­another opportunity to learn something. However, vocational training centers and NGOs were not designed specifically for deaf young adults and most administrators were unaware of the particular needs and desires of deaf people. Many of the vocational training centers where I conducted research were designed to provide services and training to people with physical disabilities: there were ramps, bathrooms designed for wheelchair users, and other kinds of physical access features. The needs

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of deaf people for communication access were not included in the design of educational spaces. For example, classrooms were set up in rows with teachers standing in front of uncurtained windows. Because of this arrangement, deaf students could not see each other because their view was blocked by other students, nor could they see their teachers because they were blinded by light from the windows. Administrators were also often unaware of deaf people’s desires to be recognized as participants in a distinct deaf sociality and to communicate in sign language. For example, one NGO director refused to permit a celebration for International Week of the Deaf because he said that deaf people should not be singled out or treated differently from other disabled people. He was thus propagating a discourse of disability universalism whereby deaf people are lumped under the broader category of disability and all disabled people are “the same.” Similarly, another NGO’s director encouraged deaf trainees to write on individual whiteboards that she provided them with to communicate instead of using sign language as “in the future they will be in the normal world where no one will know sign language and they will have to communicate.” Both of these actions were a rejection of deaf values and desires. Despite the inhospitality of these spaces to deaf students, however, deafs have become the majority population at many vocational training centers. This has happened because the numbers of people with physical disabilities have declined over the years as a result of lower polio incidence rates; deaf people are also (physically) mobile in a way that many people with physical disabilities are not. As a result, training programs have increasingly sought out deaf students as a source of needed bodies with which to fill training programs. This interchangeability of disabilities points to the emergence of the “one-­size-­fits-­ all disability NGO” in which all disabilities are essentially treated the same and can seamlessly replace each other.6 And because deaf students complete their SSLCs without learning, they ostensibly need vocational training, or an opportunity to learn skills that they can use to earn livelihood. As such, a situation exists in which multiple training centers appear to be competing for deaf trainees, and deaf trainees circulate between these centers, enrolling in similar courses again and again.

Orienting to Other Deafs in the Meantime While deaf young adults did occasionally learn how to be productive workers in vocational training centers, they also learned other things, unbeknownst to administrators, teachers, and funders. I argue that my interlocutors learned to be oriented toward others like them, and they learned how to participate in a sign language–­centered deaf sociality. They learned deaf norms such as sharing information and helping each other, and they created moral spaces for



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discussing both present-­day problems and ideas for the future with each other and with cherished deaf teachers and role models who came to visit or teach. For “moral spaces,” I draw on Arthur Kleinman’s work on local moral worlds, in which he argues that moral experience is created through “local processes (collective, interpersonal, subjective) that realize (enact) values in ordinary living” (1991, 71–­72). And morality is key, returning to the chapter’s opening vignette, which was about copying and not cheating; a moral economy is created as deaf persons copy, share, teach, and collectively learn from each other. Not only is it copying and not cheating, it is part of a broader moral economy of sharing. Although these training spaces, at least for deaf attendees, came to take on deaf forms and structures of their own, I do not mean to imply that these were spaces of resistance. To the contrary, deaf young adults made no claims on these spaces nor did they actively attempt to reorder or change them to make them more representative of their needs and desires. Program administrators and teachers were unaware of how deaf young adults used these spaces, and often complained to me that they saw their deaf students as “lazy,” “pampered,” “immature,” “emotional and prone to gossiping,” and “not capable of making good decisions”—­characteristics that impeded the program’s goal of creating productive deaf workers. There was thus often tension between the goals of administrators, teachers, and funders on one hand and deaf trainees on the other. In my analysis, I pay close attention to the ways that deaf young adults utilize three particular Bangalore-­based vocational training centers and placement organizations. These were not the only three vocational training centers in Bangalore, but they were the ones with the highest deaf enrollment and they overlapped in terms of the kinds of training provided. They also often served the same students; as soon as a training course finished at one center, the same students could be found enrolling in a similar course at another center. However, the three centers had different ideas of deaf livelihood trajectories and futures. DPA hoped to find students stable government jobs, while the other two organizations, one named Vision and the other called Employment Center (I will not discuss the latter in as much detail), placed deaf workers at multinational corporations, which offered more unstable private sector employment. Although each of these centers attempted to create productive deaf workers (with varying degrees of success), they all became spaces where deaf orientations were created out of shared past and present experiences of understanding and not-­understanding, learning and not-­learning, and envisioning and preparing for a future in which deaf development would take place. Deaf development was a dominant discourse invoked by deaf young adults in vocational training centers. They invoked it when they talked both about the present (which was characterized by the absence of deaf development) and

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the future (which they hoped would have opportunities for deaf development). Deaf interlocutors often told me: “There is no development happening now” or “We are not developing.” Desires were channeled through this discourse of deaf development: “I want to develop” or “I want Chetan to teach us because he offers us opportunities to develop.” Because training centers and NGOs are supposed to be harbingers of deaf development, although they are not necessarily so, talking about deaf development provided a way to criticize such spaces and to imagine other, deaf-­focused, presents and futures. Discussions about deaf development functioned as “morality talk” through which participants criticized the current state of things and offered alternatives for the future (Sharma 2008). Such discussions also function similarly to the discourse of “timepass” utilized by the lower-­middle-­class Jat young men with whom anthropologist Craig Jeffrey (2010a,b) worked in Meerut (a small city in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh). Jeffrey argues that the discourse of “timepass” (and engaging in practices of passing time together) enables the formation of positive social identities in unemployed young men, and to a limited degree, cross-­caste solidarity (2010a, 470). Similarly, the discourse of deaf development creates deaf orientations across class, caste, religious, and geographic difference—­and, unlike Jeffrey’s interlocutors who were only young men, deaf development also allows for sameness work across gender as well. It is important to point out that the story of my deaf friends significantly differs from that of Jeffrey’s (over)educated Jat interlocutors, who often possessed multiple higher education degrees. It also differs from the story told by Jamie Cross (2009) about educated young men in Andhra Pradesh who work as diamond cutters due to the lack of other skilled employment opportunities, and from Daniel Mains’s work with young unemployed Ethiopian men trained as computer operators who waited hopefully for employment (Mains 2007) and who saw education as a means of progressing toward a better future (Mains 2012). Indeed, one of my key points is that the experiences of deaf young adults differs from the experiences of other youth discussed in anthropological studies on youth in contemporary society.7 The following story illustrates the difference: In January 2009 I met a deaf woman in her late thirties in Delhi who told me that she had spent eight years circulating between different vocational training programs after she finished secondary school. When I expressed surprise at the wide variety of different skills she had learned, including beauty culture, typing, batik-­ making, and food preparation, she responded: “In all places I learn.” I contend that what she meant is “I am always trying to learn.” As a result of their familial and educational histories, learning, communicating, and understanding were never taken for granted by my deaf friends. That is, my friends experienced structural inequalities not only in relation to their class and caste backgrounds, but more significantly in relation to their distinct



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communication modalities. And unlike the overeducated and underemployed young people who have been the focus of much anthropological literature on youth in late modern times, the deaf young adults with whom I worked did not receive an education that actually permitted them to learn. These structural inequalities also existed in vocational training centers and deaf trainees continued to not-­learn as they circulated through multiple centers in search of learning and ultimately employment. As such, athough these organizations were meant to be spaces that deaf young adults moved through quickly—­a brief interlude between finishing school (with an SSLC, a diploma, a certificate course, or a bachelor’s degree) and finding employment—­in practice these organizations were produced as spaces of waiting and socializing. They were dwelling spaces for the meantime of “half half half” knowledge (fragmentary and unsatisfying knowledge, usually imparted by a normal person who cannot sign well), or waiting for and desiring “deep knowledge” (knowledge that will result in development, often imparted by another deaf person), as I discuss below. As we saw from the experience of the young woman who attended multiple training centers and courses, learning was often partial and unsatisfying—­ and not enough to launch her on a career path.

Welding versus Typing/Now versus Later DPA was the oldest of the three training centers and the only center to still offer courses in welding and electronics; the other two centers focused almost exclusively on computer training and “soft skills” that are nontechnical in nature. Shortly after I arrived in Bangalore in August 2008, DPA started its new batches of vocational training courses for the year. Deaf students enrolled in welding, electronics, or computer classes.8 Throughout the first few weeks of September, a steady stream of new students, mostly from Bangalore but also from across Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh and elsewhere in India, came to DPA with their parents and other relatives to register for courses. They arrived clutching folders containing SSLCs, disability certificates, Below Poverty Line cards, photographs, proof-­of-­address documents, and report cards. Upon registration, they were asked which of the three courses they wanted to enroll in and many of them said that they did not know and deferred to either their family members or the DPA staff person doing the intake process. Depending on who this intake person was, they received different recommendations. The head of DPA’s computer course was an aggressive marketer for her program and was keen to recruit as many students with good English skills as possible. As a result of her efforts, many of the deaf students who grew up in Bangalore and studied in English-­medium schools joined the one-­year basic computer course. Rural families were not encouraged to place their child in the

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computer course because of poor English skills. Besides, these families were often more impressed by the government certificate that came with successful passing of the government electronics and welding exams, as well as the perceived practical nature of these skills. Parents of female students also saw these certificates as potential forms of capital to leverage in finding a marriage partner for their daughter—­although there was also lingering anxiety about these industrial training fields being “unclean” or “unfeminine.” As classes started and students entered into routines—­computer students familiarized themselves with computers, electronics students started learning about circuits and wires, and welding students began experimenting with drafting, drilling, and different welding techniques—­I observed that many of the welding students repeatedly went to Radhika, the earnest and soft-­spoken principal of DPA’s industrial training center, and asked to be switched to the computer course. They told her that the computer course was easier and less tiring and that they would find a job more quickly afterward. And I observed students talking about how they had learned from other deafs that they would only be able to get manual labor jobs once they finished their welding training.9 They constantly speculated about what the future would hold and the relationship between current training and future livelihood. Through these conversations ran anxieties, not specifically articulated, about the status of vocations such as welding in light of the shrinking of the public sector and the emergence of the new information technology enabled services (ITES) and hospitality sectors in India. On one occasion, I sat with Radhika while she talked with two students who wanted to switch to the computer course because other deafs had told them to. She advised them that they should stick with welding because they would receive a government certificate after completing the course and passing an exam. She told them: “While you might be tired now, your future will be good. You will get a government certificate, then a government job, and then a good future.” She continued by discussing potential jobs such as working for the Indian Railway; she said that there would always be a demand for train tracks. The students did not ask her any questions, and it seemed that they were not interested in the details about the government certificates or future jobs. These students had made up their minds through talking among themselves and to other deaf friends elsewhere that computers were better. Much to Radhika’s frustration, these two students left the welding program and DPA shortly after their discussion with her. A few months later, I saw them at Vision, another NGO providing training and placement services. They were looking for both computer training and part-­time jobs as brewmasters at a Café Coffee Day, a bright and gleaming new coffee chain with a funky young atmosphere. Khaki uniforms and aching backs were no match for the allure of computers and fancy café chains.



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This story illustrates the pervasive power of deaf-­deaf communication and the privileging of deaf perspectives over normal ones. Radhika often complained to me that she felt that deafs never listened to her, that they only listened to, and trusted, each other. She often seemed to be fighting a losing battle against deaf communicative networks.10 This story also illustrates the anxieties and tensions surrounding different ideas of the future and the different temporalities attached to public and private sector work: is it better to hope for work in the public sector in the future or to work for a private company now? Radhika had worked at DPA for almost twelve years at that point and she had come from an industrial training background herself. She strongly believed that the welding course provided the best option for deafs’ futures because she said that trainees would get a government certificate, then they would do an apprenticeship at one of Bangalore’s government industries such as Bharat Earth Movers Limited or Hindustan Aeronautics Limited, and then they would get a “for life” job with a good salary. However, this rarely happened, as students struggled to pass their exams and earn their government certificates. Even when they succeeded in gaining admission to apprenticeships, they were usually unable to get permanent jobs, and so they moved on to lower paying and less stable private companies. In many cases they did not get these coveted government jobs because the 1 percent public sector quota available to deaf workers (to be discussed in Chapter 4) was already saturated with older deaf workers who had not yet retired. As one of the leaders of the All India Federation of the Deaf in Delhi told me when we discussed public sector employment possibilities for deaf youth, “The glass is full.”11 It was rare to see a deaf man below the age of forty with a laminated government industry identification card.12 However, for someone like Radhika, who had spent the previous twelve years working in the industrial training center, it was difficult to imagine other kinds of futures and professions. DPA, with its large and under-­utilized industrial training center, is indeed in many ways a relic of the past, and it is not surprising that Radhika was expressing such views about government employment or the problems of interacting with anxious deaf trainees in such a setting. Located in a fast-­growing area of Bangalore that was formerly considered the city’s outskirts but is now closer to its ever-­expanding center, DPA is a cheerful enclave of gardens and low buildings with a cavernous training center that feels like an airplane hangar, complete with a tin roof. DPA began in 1959 as a sheltered workshop where people with physical disabilities made machine parts. An affluent family with a polio-­ affected daughter started the organization in the garage attached to their bungalow in one of Bangalore’s oldest neighborhoods. Because of this young woman’s diligence and influential connections, DPA grew rapidly, and over the years it started a full-­scale industrial training center, a self-­contained manufacturing

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unit supplying parts to government industries, a primary school for disabled children, community-­based rehabilitation programs, horticulture training, and community health workshops.13 The computer-­training program only started in the last ten years. As polio incidence rates waned over the years, and as access to physical therapy and mobility aids improved, DPA found itself with a declining student population for its industrial training center—­until the organization’s vocational training center was approached by deaf students finishing class ten at a local deaf school in 2002. Radhika was an electronics teacher at that time, and when a family with a deaf child named Aruna approached her, she agreed to learn sign language. Aruna taught her sign language and the importance of ensuring that deaf students could follow and understand.14 Through word of mouth deaf students began flocking to DPA, and Radhika became increasingly committed to learning sign language and teaching deafs. She taught the other welding and electronics teachers sign language and as the numbers of deaf trainees grew, DPA instituted an informal policy under which all new trainees were required to learn sign language in a foundation course shortly after joining. This policy applied to normal and deaf trainees alike in order to introduce an “inclusive” atmosphere, although in practice most normal trainees were not so motivated to learn sign language and the little sign language that they did learn did not result in the imagined inclusive communication access. This policy has resulted in some tension because DPA’s matriarchal founder believes strongly that DPA should prioritize people with physical disabilities and she told me that she feels that deaf people are taking over the center. There is also tension for other reasons: deaf trainees, who are now the majority, feel that their hearing teachers do not sign well enough and in some cases they do not sign at all (an ironic fact, given that all students are required to learn to sign). Trainees were often frustrated because teachers were required to perform multiple administrative and teaching roles and so, as trainees pointed out, they often only taught “half half half.” Trainees often sat in classrooms, copied notes from each other, and tried to make sense of what they were supposed to be learning—­a throwback to their primary and secondary school days. Sometimes trainees thought they did understand, but their understandings were not accurate. An example of this occurred during a social studies lesson. A normal trainee asked the social studies teacher (who did not know any sign language) if the world was going to end in 2012. She said that she had seen this discussed on television recently. The teacher wrote the normal trainee’s question on the board for the deaf trainees’ benefit and then replied verbally that this apocalyptic prediction would surely not take place. However, the deaf trainees only saw what the teacher had written on the board and so they thought that the teacher had said that the world was going to end. After the lesson, two



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trainees approached me to ask if the world would end in 2012. Approaching a deaf peer (or me, when I was around) for help in understanding was a common occurrence and deaf peers frequently mediated communication for each other as they collectively struggled to understand.15 A common lament uttered by trainees at DPA was that they were bored, they did not understand their teachers, they understood only “half half half,” and that they were not learning. These shared feelings—­about boredom, understanding, and learning—­and talking about them produced a social space of not-­ understanding and not-­learning among trainees. Trainees became increasingly oriented toward each other through sharing information and thoughts from everyday life (what one has brought for lunch, a fight that someone had with her mother last night, the festival coming up next week, for example) as well as expressing desires for an accessible present and future (desires for more deaf teachers like Chetan, desires for normal teachers to sign, desires for families to learn sign language, and desires for better deaf schools, for example). As they sat in these training center classrooms in the present, trainees embarked together on knowledge accumulating projects in which they struggled collectively to figure out both how to do their homework assignments and the “right way to act.” They aspired to replace their “half half half” knowledge with “deep knowledge.” In addition to discussing math and social studies homework, female trainees collectively struggled to figure out the appropriate way to have relationships with male trainees within the confines of modesty, how to negotiate family relationships with parents and siblings who do not sign, and what it meant to have menstrual cramps, as no one had ever explained what these were. In having these conversations about both academic and everyday topics, deaf trainees created a moral economy of information sharing and exchange. Trainees often told me how grateful they were to have other trainees to share information with and learn from, as they did not learn these things elsewhere.16 Deafs told me that it was through “sharing” that they learned crucial things about how to navigate through the world as a deaf person. Indeed, through these conversations, deaf trainees learned how to see themselves as deaf people and members of a wider deaf sociality—­and they called this “deep knowledge.”17 These discussions about learning “half half half” and the importance of “deep knowledge” also helped to produce these two categories and what kinds of knowledge (and communication modalities) fell within each. In additions, these conversations helped to cement the importance of learning in sign language from deaf teachers. Through these conversations, deaf people shared and taught each other the value of “deep knowledge.”

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Exit Interviews and Future Jobs As the following episode illustrates, deafs gave the “deep knowledge” learned from other deafs a higher priority than the “half half half” knowledge learned from normal teachers. In June of 2009, Rashmi, the head of the computer department, and I conducted individual exit interviews with thirteen computer students. These students ranged in age from seventeen to twenty-­seven, and they were all uncertain about their next steps after they finished their computer course. Some of the interviews went more smoothly than others, depending on the students’ sign language skills.18 When we asked the students what they had learned, they immediately and enthusiastically responded with “English and sign language” and those who were in Chetan’s Saturday morning class spoke glowingly about it. Everyone told us that they wanted more English and sign language in order “to develop more. English and sign language are good for future development.” In contrast, when we asked what they had learned in their computer classes, they shook their heads or shrugged their shoulders. Rashmi grew increasingly frustrated as she asked students what specific skills they had learned in their computer classes and many replied “half, half, half” and commented that there were a few teachers whom they could not understand well. They told us that they did not think that they had learned much about computers. When she asked them what kind of job they wanted for the future, they said “computer” and when she pressed them on this: “Do you want a data entry job, an animation job, or a web design job?” they could not answer. Many simply replied: “You will give me an address and I will go for a job.” This was a common refrain. Throughout the year, when I asked computer students where they wanted to work after they finished their courses they told me: “Rashmi ma’am will give me an address and I will go.” These students did not have clear ideas about their individual vocational futures and most could not state what kind of jobs they wanted. They were, however, able to speak more concretely about the importance of collective deaf development and deaf education—­the need for better deaf schools, teachers, and for sign language as a modality of communication. The notable exception to this lack of clarity about desired employment futures were those students who had learned English and sign language from Chetan and from visiting deaf teachers. These trainees told us that they wanted to become deaf teachers. Unfortunately there were not many opportunities for deaf teachers because the Rehabilitation Council of India did not permit deaf teachers in government schools, there were no sign language-­based teacher training programs, and although many NGOs were willing to hire one or two deaf teachers, they often did not pay them as much as they paid normal teachers. Deaf people told me that they resented this inequality in payment and that very often the salary was not even enough to live on.



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In any case, Rashmi did not have very many addresses, and neither did DPA’s Career Guidance and Placement (CGP) office. As I mentioned, DPA is in some ways a relic of the past. Although it has a solid reputation in Karnataka’s disability service arena, its employees and current director have not kept up with the changing trends of employment in Bangalore—­more specifically, the emergence of the ITES and hospitality sectors. Cultivating connections in these sectors requires good English skills, advanced educational backgrounds, and knowledge of corporate structures, which DPA staff largely lack. The CGP did have some addresses for low-­paying data entry jobs (specifically at a corporation named Excel to be discussed in Chapter 4), but these were not very popular with prospective job seekers. Rather than accept a job at one of these places, students chose to head to yet another vocational training center and try to learn basic computer skills, often the same exact skills, again. This was not true only for computer students. Welding and electronics students also went on to study computers or moved to entirely different tracks, such as working in the hospitality sector, much to Radhika’s dismay. And many of these students ultimately found their way to Vision, a new NGO with a very different outlook on training and employment.

Neoliberal Deaf Employment Futures Vision’s origin story and current training and employment placement practices are examples of India’s post-­liberalization employment trajectory. Two software engineers started Vision in 1999. These engineers, a married couple, previously worked in the United Kingdom in the corporate and IT sectors. Chandra, Vision’s more public face, has a blind sister whom she helped “to successfully rehabilitate” by making her employable by an IT company. Vision started out working exclusively with blind job seekers and provided training and placement services to them. As a result of Chandra’s eloquence (she excels at giving impassioned speeches about disabled people’s special abilities), connections, and previous experience in the corporate and IT world, she was able to successfully place blind people in various IT companies and as medical transcriptionists. Thus, like DPA, Vision did not start out to serve deaf people, but when Chandra successfully placed one deaf person in an IT company, she received an influx of deaf applicants for trainings and jobs, and she now recruits potential deaf candidates from colleges and technical diploma programs across India. Because of deaf demand, Vision now runs three-­to-­six month business process outsourcing (BPO) training courses in Indian Sign Language (although the normal trainers have varying levels of proficiency) where young deafs learn how to perform back office tasks such as data entry, data collation, and online customer service techniques. This training is almost exclusively for deaf candidates with diplomas,

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bachelor’s degrees, and some written English skills. (Note that although these deafs may have had degrees, in many cases they were barely functionally literate. They talked about not-­learning and copying in their higher education experiences.) Vision also works closely with Employment Center, the third NGO that I mentioned, which runs more basic data entry and computer courses. Students who perform well in this basic course will then be considered for Vision’s BPO training. In addition, Vision offers manual job training for deafs without higher education qualifications or written communication skills. As I will discuss, Vision’s specific focus on training potential deaf and disabled workers in “soft skills” or personality and attitude development and finding them employment in multinational corporations marks it as different from DPA. Unlike DPA, Vision only works with private companies and corporations. Its placement records read like a globalization laundry list: Shell Oil, Pepsico, Café Coffee Day, Infosys, Mphasis, Thompson-­ Reuters, IBM, Big Bazaar, and Indian Tobacco Company—­that is, some of India’s current leading corporations. These connections are a source of great pride to some deaf young adults who have been successful at finding employment in the IT sector, who talk about how Vision has transformed Bangalore into a city of opportunity for deaf young adults and how Chandra helps them to improve their lives. Rajesh, a young deaf man working for a large multinational company, told me that deafs in Bangalore have a lot to be proud of, thanks to Vision’s work. He said that Vision’s opening has “resulted in milestones for the deaf.” Indeed, Vision has been producing specific kinds of workers through its training programs for deaf people. It has also been producing new employment possibilities in Bangalore (and India more broadly) for these potential workers through its outreach to India’s new private sector companies. As I discuss in Chapter 4, Chandra and other Vision staff have formed close relationships with human resource managers at many corporations, and they work closely with them to place disabled workers at these corporations. Close description and analysis of Vision’s registration and intake process, its manual labor trainings, and its BPO training, reveal how both its manual and BPO training attempt to produce a malleable, responsible, and self-­aware “worker with disability” who will perform productively. These trainings, like those at DPA, also provide spaces of deaf sociality where deaf development is discussed and aspired toward. In these spaces deaf young adults ambivalently embrace their new status of “worker with disability” and negotiate limited and unstable livelihood prospects. Indeed, participating in Vision’s training programs requires deaf young adults to reorient themselves to employment trajectories that are not “for life.” Almost all deafs who attend Vision’s trainings first attend a registration event to which they bring all relevant medical certificates, school reports, and



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exam score sheets. They are required to take an aptitude test and then have an intake and evaluation meeting with a Vision trainer or volunteer who knows some sign language. This intake person assesses them on their willingness to work hard, work flexible hours, perform a variety of tasks, and commute long distances. They are asked about their salary expectations, and if these are deemed to be too high, the person conducting the intake bluntly talks them down. Job seekers are asked what they do each day, and if they are not independently looking for a job, the intake conductor scolds them for sitting at home and wasting time. They are asked pointed questions such as “Do you want an easy job or a hard job?” and “Is it OK to go to work late?” Deafs are then placed into categories: manual labor, semiskilled labor, or BPO training, and they are informed about “appropriate” training or career options. Deafs come from all over India to register at Vision, and Vision’s waiting room is a social space in which deafs from all walks of life, from hotel housekeepers to IT professionals to those who have never had a job before, come into contact with each other. They collectively wait, sometimes full days, for their intake. These registration days facilitated socializing, as deafs who knew each other from school, college, or church ran into each other and caught up on each other’s news. In addition, new friendships or aquaintanceships were formed as deafs from different backgrounds met each other and chatted to pass time. Deafs did not seem to mind waiting, and most already had experience with waiting: they had waited for jobs that did not materialize, and they had waited for this single Saturday each month when the monthly intake would take place. For many, this was not their first visit to Vision. They had returned for yet another intake day after losing or leaving jobs that they previously held.

Manual Labor and BPO Training Like DPA’s courses, Vision’s manual labor and BPO training courses were intensely social spaces where, in addition to learning how to be good employees, trainees learned how to be good deaf people from each other. However, unlike DPA, Vision focused on creating workers who would work for private sector companies under unstable conditions. The three-­day manual labor training was designed to impart so-­called soft skills in which deafs were taught to be flexible and responsible workers able to engage in teamwork, with low salary expectations. Soft skills are here defined as personal characteristics and interpersonal skills including flexibility, time management, cheerfulness, motivation, and responsibility, and they are compared and contrasted to hard skills, which are technical skills. Vision did not teach any hard skills in its manual labor training. Manual labor training participants ranged in age from eighteen to midforties, and most had previously worked as garment workers, baggage handlers

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at the airport, brewmasters at new café chains, welders, and petrol pumpers. The training was very disciplinary, although a focus on games and teamwork tended to obfuscate this. The tone was set on the training’s first day when those who arrived on time were given badges to pin to their shirts that said “Great” and those who were late were publicly chastised by Chandra and the other trainers. Trainees were encouraged to scold their late classmates, and they were simultaneously harsh and lenient. In one instance, a shy young man was very late, and the other trainees publicly ridiculed him. He was so embarrassed that, after standing in front of the group with his head hanging, he turned around and left. One of the trainers ran out after him and upon his return, another trainee, in a dramatic switch from her previously harsh demeanor, said: “Do not be shy, we are all deaf here, we are the same.” In signing “deaf deaf same,” this woman was marking the space as a deaf space where trainees were oriented toward each other. Interactive group activities were designed to teach deafs the value of teamwork. In one activity, deafs were given a competitive card game to play in teams of five or six people. Each member had a certain number of cards that they had to dispose of in a specific order, requiring all team members to pay attention and work together. If one person failed to pay attention and missed the order of the cards, the team would lose. Throughout the training, work was constantly likened to a challenging game that employees had to win or succeed in. Chandra told them that when they worked for a company, they would be part of a team and so they needed to work hard: “You must work the same way in the company as you worked in the game.” What Chandra neglected to mention was that the workplace “team” would be made up entirely of normals with one deaf person in its midst; how much fun would that be? On another occasion, Chandra said: “When games are hard, you enjoy them but when work is hard you do not enjoy it. Just like when you play cricket, when the manager asks you to work hard, [you should] work more, accept, enjoy.”19 Chandra was likening repetitious and difficult labor to playing cricket in her attempts to create obedient and flexible workers. Throughout the training, Chandra and the other trainers (all of whom were hearing) focused on instilling a sense of responsibility in trainees toward employers, and they had devised two role plays to highlight the importance of responsibility. Four trainees were invited to act out a family at dinnertime. This family included a father, mother, and two small children. In the first performance, the mother cooks food and everyone eats and is happy. After this, Chandra said: “See, a good family. The mother is doing her responsibility and so everyone is happy.” In the second role play, the mother refuses to cook, and so the children and the father are left hungry and the children cry. After this performance, Chandra said: “See what happens when the mother does not do her



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responsibility. Same with you in the company. You must do your responsibility. At home, your mother cooks even when she is sick and has fever. When people come from out of town she cooks more and does not complain. She knows her responsibility. Same with you in company. . . . If the manager asks you to work late, do not complain. If the manager asks you to come in on Sunday, go in on Sunday.” This performance of the good and bad family had an impact on most of the students, and they were worked up about the bad mother’s abdication of her responsibility and the disorder that resulted (although one trainee suggested buying the mother a sari, and another suggested going out to dinner). Chandra then asked everyone to stand up and recite: “I will accept my responsibility” which everyone did with great enthusiasm. In addition to learning soft skills, these spaces were also used by deafs to share information about previous education and jobs and their feelings of being discriminated against by normal managers and workers. During group exercises, deafs with stronger sign language and written English language skills often took on the responsibility of writing and reporting back to the group, and acted as mentors to those who had never worked before. The first training batch that I saw included a particularly gregarious group of young people who had just finished class ten; older trainees who had work experience coached them and offered them advice on how to behave, communicate, and what kinds of expectations they should have. Chandra’s emphasis on teamwork therefore articulated with and reenforced a broader sense of deaf orientation. Indeed, she did not need to utilize games and role playing to discuss concepts such as teamwork and responsibility, as deafs learned them from each other. Training sessions were very social, and deafs who did not know each other interacted during the training, over tea and lunch breaks, and afterward when they met each other at deaf functions. Unlike the manual labor training, which targeted deafs with little educational qualification, Vision’s three-­month BPO training program attracted deaf young adults with either diplomas, bachelor’s degrees, or other forms of higher education, although, as I noted above, they were barely functionally literate. A training batch comprised around fifteen (mostly male) students taught by two young and energetic trainers. Chandra occasionally taught, as well.20 In many cases, trainees knew each other from three-­year diploma courses at JSS Polytechnic for the Physically Handicapped (JSSPPH), primary and secondary schools, or other deaf spaces. In many batches, the majority of the trainees had attended JSSPPH at one time or another, and so they had shared experiences and similar sign language.21 Trainees from out of town stayed in paying guest homes or in rented flats together, which further cemented deaf bonds. Many of the trainees told me that they did not actually want BPO jobs—­they had studied electrical engineering, architecture and auto-­cad, computer science

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and software, and art—­and wanted jobs in those fields. However, Vision staff told them during their intake and registration that BPO work was the best job for deaf people because it did not require much interaction with normal people. Vision staff then encouraged them to do BPO training. Many trainees had stories of trying to find jobs in other sectors such as architecture and education on their own and failing. There were also deafs who were formerly enrolled in higher education degree programs who dropped out because they were not provided with sign language interpreters in these programs. Instead, they came to Vision for BPO training, because at least at Vision the trainers knew some sign language. In one batch there was a sign language instructor turned future BPO worker (he said that he loved teaching but did not earn enough to support his family as a sign language instructor), and he playfully corrected other candidates’ sign language usage. There was also one deaf who had participated in Vision’s first BPO training batch, who had been placed at a prestigious corporation. This placement fell through when the company downsized, and Chandra told him to repeat the training instead of wasting time sitting around at home (he was happy to oblige because he was bored at home, although he was not thrilled to be repeating the same training). These deafs had multiple stories of “adjusting”: of adjusting expectations in relation to employment and of adjusting sign language and communication styles in relation to other deafs who were from different locations in south India and elsewhere. This adjusting helped enable a cohesive sense of deaf sociality in these training courses. Like its manual labor training, Vision’s BPO training focused on constant evaluation of self and others.22 Upon walking into the training center, the bare first floor of a house in an elite area of Bangalore appointed only with a row of computers and plastic chairs, the first thing that caught my eye was four large charts on the wall. Each chart had trainees’ names listed on it. One chart was for daily typing speed and accuracy, another was for weekly typing goals, a third was for attendance, and then a fourth was for overall performance and points won for good behavior, scoring well on aptitude tests, and coming to training on time. Trainees filled out these charts daily and compared their scores with one another. Chandra excitedly told me that trainees came up with their own rules, and they were encouraged to monitor each other. Group work was encouraged, although Vision trainers struggled to strike a balance between individual responsibility and group orientation. A daily activity was to read the newspaper in small groups every morning and make a presentation to the whole training batch about an article. However, because trainees could not understand the newspapers, they spent most of their time sharing personal stories and news. In addition, while deafs were supposed to work individually on aptitude tests, they often copied and asked each other for help, much to their trainers’ dismay. Deaf trainees preferred to work in groups,



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and individualization in the form of aptitude tests and individual projects was resisted or altogether ignored. Such attempts to resist individualization may appear reminiscent of Nikolas Rose’s work on governing through community in which he analyzes how “the community” becomes a space for individuals to fashion themselves as entrepreneurial and self-­sufficient subjects who take care of themselves (1999, 172). However, my deaf friends radically depart from Rose’s conception of both individual and community because deaf individuals are deeply subsumed by their deaf orientations and being a member of deaf sociality; the goal is not to become self-­sufficient subjects who take care of themselves but to become deaf subjects who take care of each other. In Chapter 4, I discuss this further by demonstrating how deaf young adults produce themselves and are produced by NGOs and employers to be a cohesive deaf group. In addition to typing practice and teamwork, BPO trainees also learned what were called “analytical skills” from Chandra and their regular trainers. They learned how to list the qualities needed to work well in a BPO office: “good typing speed, accuracy, good English skills, and high performance,” and they were placed in groups to write “reports” to Chandra about which qualities they did and did not have. To practice these “analytical skills,” trainees engaged in an exercise in which they had to assess each other’s positive and negative qualities. In almost all cases, positive qualities included caring about and helping other trainees and other deafs in general, having good English and sign language skills, and joking around and telling stories. Negative qualities included poor English skills, always asking for help from other deafs, being lazy, and typing slowly or improperly. These responses suggest that the deaf trainees were learning to embody both the normative values required by their future employers (fast typing, accuracy, independence, and good English skills) and the normative values inherent in this particular form of deaf sociality (helping and supporting other deafs, communicating through telling stories and jokes, and having good communication skills).23 They were learning to be a part of both deaf moral economies and India’s new neoliberal economy. At the end of one training batch, trainees created and performed dramatic skits about what they had learned. At the very end of the skits, they shared the skills that they had learned: not to be lazy, how to type fast, to come to training on time, and to work hard. The audience, made up of trainees, trainers, and about five Vision employees, applauded. The mood was festive, and the trainees told me that they were happy to finally be finished with the training. The following day, they received a combination lecture and pep talk from one of their trainers who told them that while they waited for their employment placement, they had to practice their typing, analytical skills, and English. She told them that they had to engage in self-­observation, and that Vision would continue to observe and analyze them as well. She said that they were starting

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new lives—­and then the training was over, and this batch began waiting for job placements.24

Waiting, Circulation, and Suspicion Waiting was a fraught process for many of my interlocutors, although waiting together helped mitigate the uncertainty of the future. Many trainees expressed frustration about waiting, especially four trainees who had previously completed the basic computer course that Vision offered in conjunction with the Employment Center. One of these four trainees, Jagadish, told me that he felt that a year was “lost.” He had graduated from JSSPPH in May and then immediately moved to Bangalore with some friends, confident that he would soon be working. He enrolled in the basic computer course that Vision and the Employment Center offered in July and finished it in December. Then, he started the BPO training in February and finished this at the end of April. When I met him in June, he said that he felt like he was wasting his life and his family’s money. He felt that he had not learned anything from any of the training programs that he had participated in, although he did enjoy the social opportunities that they had offered him as well as the freedom to live apart from his family in Bangalore. Jagadish lived with three other trainees in a small flat on the outskirts of Bangalore, and they spent their time watching Telugu and Malayam movies both at home and in the theater, wandering around Bangalore’s central shopping districts, and playing carrom, or finger billiards. Waiting for a job consisted largely of socializing, worrying about “wasting time,” and speculating about whether or not Vision and the other centers were “good” or “bad” and whether they were perhaps lying to them about finding them a placement. These trainees were justified in being suspicious, because when they enrolled in Vision and the Employment Center’s joint basic computer training, the Employment Center had told them that it would give them a job within a month after finishing training. This did not happen. And at one point during Vision’s BPO training, they had received text messages from someone at the Employment Center asking them to come to interview for jobs. These four deafs, and a few others from the earlier training, dressed up nicely and went to the Employment Center with high hopes. However, the center was having donors visit, and administrators wanted to stage a mock interview in order to impress them. When the deafs realized this, they were furious and decided that the Employment Center was “fooling” them, and that the Employment Center was “bad,” while Vision was “good.” Ironically, these trainees were scolded when they returned to Vision that afternoon because they had missed most of their BPO training that day, and Vision trainers had not given them permission to be absent.



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Some deafs were entirely devoted to Vision. One young man who previously completed welding training and then went to Vision for BPO training told me, “I will follow Vision only. I want to see Vision and deaf develop for the future.” This young man saw Vision as more than just a training center. He volunteered at Vision during registration and intake days, and he talked about how he liked helping other deafs to develop. He saw Vision as doing more to contribute to deaf development than the other NGOs and so he put his sense of responsibility toward other deaf people in Vision’s service through providing it with free labor. Indeed, this young man’s devotion to Vision resembles other deafs’ commitment to Bangalore’s deaf churches, as discussed in Chapter 2. In contrast, other deafs were very strategic about attending different centers and asked for training and help finding a job placement from each of them. Deafs constantly made judgments about the three main training centers—­DPA, Vision, and the Employment Center—­in relation to each other, and they constantly compared and contrasted them as they circulated through them, often cycling back as well, in search of employment or more training. Comparison was mainly about two key concerns: gaining “deep knowledge” (instead of “half half half”) and job placement. For the majority of deafs, neither DPA, Vision, nor the Employment Center provided “deep” training, and so in an attempt to learn as much as possible and derive the most benefit, they circulated. This circulation between various centers was especially obvious to me one Monday when I went to conduct participant observation at the Employment Center. DPA’s one-­year basic computer course had finished on Saturday, two days earlier, and on this Monday five DPA graduates arrived at the Employment Center to register for the next batch of its free three-­month computer and English training course. While learning “half half half” in multiple spaces does not result in “deep knowledge,” it does result in some learning; some is better than nothing (and “some” is what deafs said they learned earlier in their primary and secondary schools). In additional attempts to mitigate “half half half” knowledge, deafs took strong pedagogic stances in relation to each other in these training centers. Deafs with more computer, English, employment, and life experience taught those with less experience. Each training batch at each center was very much produced out of the pooling of knowledge and understanding gained from other centers. Notebooks and workbooks were used for multiple trainings and in thumbing through trainees’ notebooks I came across an archeology of knowledge creation from multiple training centers and courses. As a result of such circulations and layering of knowledge, it was difficult to view each of the training centers as self-­contained or bounded units. The training centers were physically and architecturally open spaces as well. Gates and doors were never locked, and there was an ongoing stream of former trainees returning for job advice, typing practice, and just to

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hang out; Jehovah’s Witnesses and other missionaries came, hoping to witness to deafs; and curious deafs visited, interested in seeing the training centers.

Conclusion Vocational training centers and organizations such as DPA, Vision, and the Employment Center are so much a part of the social and moral fabric of deaf young adults’ lives in Bangalore that wealthier and/or successful deaf young adults often told me that they hoped to help other deafs by starting their own training programs. In contrast to the ones that already existed, these imagined training programs would have deaf teachers and sign language as the medium of instruction. These programs would provide trainees with “deep knowledge,” and they would help deaf people find jobs that were stable and meaningful. In addition, as these programs would have deaf administrators and teachers, they would be based upon deaf values, and administrators would not see deaf trainees as only a source of potential revenue. In the meantime, the present situation for deafs who attended vocational training programs seemed to consist of circulating through spaces of waiting, cultivating patience, and becoming oriented toward other deafs in pursuit of deaf development. While some deaf young adults did learn (usually “half half half”) technical and marketable skills in these vocational training centers, the orientations cultivated in these spaces were more important for everyday life. These orientations enabled feelings of responsibility for sharing knowledge and information, valuing sign language, and desiring better deaf futures. In the present situation of waiting for education and livelihood, time was spent circulating between training centers. One NGO administrator called this circulation between different training programs “a training merry-­go-­round,” with no small degree of irony. This description seems especially apt in that merry-­go-­rounds feature wooden horses and other animals and objects that are fixed in place while moving slowly in circles. My deaf friends and interlocutors could be seen as these wooden horses, moving in circles between different training centers. In this chapter I have analyzed how NGO-­administered vocational training programs were key spaces for creating deaf orientations, sharing news and knowledge, and learning the value of deaf development. While administrators, teachers, and funders attempted to train deaf people to become diligent and productive “workers with disabilities,” this rarely happened. At best, deaf workers ambivalently embraced the training and livelihood paths allocated to them, and they also used the classrooms and other physical spaces in these centers to create social and moral spaces that were distinctively deaf. To be sure, deaf trainees were worried about their futures and the fact that they had not learned much in primary and secondary school. They worried about what kinds of



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futures would be available to them, and they anxiously tried to learn marketable skills. However, faced again with teachers and administrators who did not sign well and who did not understand the importance of deaf values, deaf trainees only learned “half half half.” As I noted, a deaf friend named Rajesh told me that he felt that deaf people in Bangalore had much to thank Vision for because it was providing deaf people there with new opportunities. Although I take his comment (and his gratitude) seriously, I also hope that this chapter and the next will show how these opportunities can also be seen as constraining. This chapter has shown the ways that NGOs such as Vision are attempting to produce deaf people as specific kinds of workers. At the same time, they are also attempting to produce Bangalore and other Indian cities as spaces for specific kinds of disability employment. In doing so, they are shaping what kinds of employment futures are possible for deaf workers, and they are foreclosing other kinds of opportunities. Many of my deaf friends told me that they had previously looked for jobs through neighbors, family members, and friends. They now go to NGOs for job training and placement. And NGOs, as I have discussed, often have very specific ideas of what kinds of jobs are good for deaf people. At Vision, for example, I once observed an intake worker telling a deaf job seeker: “You are deaf. Computers are good for deaf people because you do not have to talk to anyone. You should do BPO training and get a BPO job.” It therefore seems to me that these NGOs and job placement centers are potentially limiting employment possibilities available to deaf and other disabled potential workers. I want to stress that such training centers do not exist in all Indian cities, and the existence of three large centers is unique to Bangalore. When I visited smaller cities such as Coimbatore in Tamil Nadu, I observed that there were fewer NGOs and other organizations focused on job training and placement, and that deaf people there depended on their families, neighbors, or extended social networks for finding employment. There was therefore a different structure of employment opportunity: deaf people actively looked for employment instead of waiting for an NGO to find them a job. In the following chapter I build upon this discussion of vocational training, learning, and not-­learning, and the production of “workers with disabilities” by turning to the relationship between NGOs and corporations. I analyze how both produce deaf workers as a deaf group and what this means for deaf workers negotiating this group category. I turn to deaf young adults’ experiences in the workplace to return to the concept of “sameness work,” and I analyze how deaf workers adjust to becoming a member of such a deaf group. I continue to focus on the tensions between deaf people’s actual and desired employment paths and futures, and I also pay closer attention to deafs’ feelings of ambivalence around negotiating and maintaining deaf orientations. While in this chapter I

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discussed how NGOs benefited from training deaf people and providing them with job placements, in the next chapter I demonstrate how India’s new multinational corporations and other workplaces benefit from employing deaf workers. Deaf workers contribute added value to these workplaces in multiple and unexpected ways.

4 44444444444444444444444

Deaf Bodies, Corporate Bodies

“One Size Fits All” Deafs

In May of 2009, I visited with four deaf young men at their small rented flat in a lower-­middle-­class area of Bangalore. They had recently completed Vision’s three-­ month BPO training and were waiting for Vision to give them an employment placement. With a Telugu movie playing on the small television set in the background and a well-­used carrom, or finger billiards, board on the floor next to us, one of the young men asked me if I would proofread his CV. As we were just idly chatting and this seemed like a purposeful activity, we decided that it would be a good idea to look at everyone’s CV. Amid frantic paper passing, we sat on the floor and collectively perused the documents. As I scanned them, it quickly became obvious that they were identical and that each of the four had listed the same hobbies and interests: collecting pictures, reading the newspaper, religious activities, gardening, painting, and playing chess. Surprised, I asked how it was possible that they all had the same (rather bourgeois) interests. They said that they had copied from each other’s CVs and that the original CV had come from a former classmate at JSS Polytechnic for the Physically Handicapped (JSSPPH), which they had all attended. This copying of CVs was not an isolated incident. While conducting research at vocational training centers, I frequently observed deafs circulating and copying CVs. As a result, deafs wound up creating homogenous representations of themselves and one deaf blurred into another, at least on paper.1 In previous chapters, I discussed the ways that deaf young adults orient themselves toward other deaf people and participate in deaf sociality. In this chapter, I focus on deaf employment and I demonstrate how NGOs and potential employers build upon and take advantage of deaf orientations and further produce deaf people as a deaf group; deafness functions as a qualification and a form of added value for employers. I analyze the ways that NGOs and employers position deaf young adults as deaf workers, a positioning that obscures forms

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of difference through privileging sameness. Through focusing only on deafness, other forms of being, belonging, and relating are erased and deaf young adults are rendered identical to one another. This privileging of sameness is productive for NGOs that provide vocational training and job placement services, as discussed in Chapter 3, and for corporations that hire deaf young adults. The former are able to create homogenous training programs for “one-­size-­fits-­all” deafs that are specifically tailored to meet the needs of corporations. In turn, corporations are able to utilize the (often free-­of-­charge) training, job placement, and interpreting services that NGOs provide. They hire deafs as a group via these NGOs, and treat all deaf employees identically. In addition, employers are able to extract multiple forms of social, moral, and economic value from these supposedly identical deaf workers as they are less mobile than normal workers (so their attrition rate is lower) and they make normal workers feel emotions such as inspiration, responsibility, and loyalty toward both their deaf coworkers and the corporation—­ emotions that are both expected and unexpected. In Chapter 3, I specifically focused on deaf young adults’ circulation among organizations providing vocational training. I analyzed how deaf young adults cultivated deaf orientations in these spaces as they struggled to learn, engaged in continued practices of learning and not-­learning, and shared ideas of deaf development. One of the recurring motifs in this chapter was mobility: vocational training programs recruited my deaf friends because they could more easily traverse the city than physically disabled people and therefore they were a reliable source of trainees for these programs, which needed to show funders that they were training a certain number of students per year. And in their circulations among programs in pursuit of “deep knowledge,” deaf trainees were mobile (although this mobility was ambivalent, fraught, and constrained by the existence of structural barriers). In contrast, here I focus on immobility. I demonstrate how deaf people become immobile employees for India’s new multinational corporations and provide employers with a stable workforce. In addition, I explore how the introduction of deaf employees, in the form of the immobile deaf group, creates new workplace experiences for both deaf and normal employees. Building on other work on the information technology enabled services (ITES) sector that examines how workers reluctantly and ambivalently comport themselves as workers in these sectors, I analyze the sameness work that deaf young adults engage in and how corporations build upon and take advantage of it.2 By the term “sameness work,” I mean the work that deaf young adults do to negotiate differences between themselves and other deafs and adjust their own expectations. Sameness work is built upon a foundation of similar and often shared experiences of language, education, vocational training, and attending



D eaf B odies , C orporate B odies 1 0 3

the same social organizations and functions. The circulation and copying of CVs is an example of sameness work, as these deaf young adults produced themselves as identical potential deaf employees. In contrast to other contemporary works on the ITES sectors, however, I examine how this sameness work produces socialities and not just individuals both inside and outside of the office. Much contemporary work focuses on how experiences of space, time, and relationships with other people are radically altered (e.g., Aneesh 2006). Writing specifically about the BPO sector, Shehzad Nadeem writes: “Through the diffusion of communication technologies, local work relations are dissolved and reconfigured across vast distances. Along the way, they alter our experiences of place and truncate the turnover time of capital” (2011, 28). Nadeem’s statement foregrounds the view of most analysts writing about the ITES sector in its allusion to global flows, space-time compression, and the removal of barriers and boundaries. In contrast, I argue that the deaf workers’ workplace experiences cement, rather than reconfigure, relationships. That is, relationships formed in schools, vocational training programs, deaf social and cultural events, churches and other religious spaces, and previous workplaces are deepened. And these relationships are maintained through embodied practices of sameness work (and engaging in the same labor in the same space and at the same time).

Mandating and Marketing the “Worker with Disability” In 1977, India’s first disability-­related legislation instituted a 3 percent reservation for people with disabilities in public sector employment. As part of the reservation system, specific jobs were identified for disabled employees and these jobs were the only ones eligible for the quotas. Deaf and hearing-impaired workers received one-­third of this 3 percent; the other two-­thirds went to physically disabled and blind and visually impaired workers respectively. Initially, reservations applied only to jobs in the “C” and “D” categories, which included mostly manual and unskilled labor positions. In 1995 the Persons with Disabilities (Equal Opportunities, Protection of Rights, and Full Participation) (PWD) Act was passed after prolonged activism by organizations representing physically disabled and blind people. This act continued to mandate a 3 percent reservation for disabled people, but the job categories were expanded to encompass “A” and “B” level positions—­therefore including prestigious positions such as officer positions in the Indian Administrative Service. It is estimated, however, that the number of posts that the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment has identified as suitable for people with disabilities is only 10 percent of the actual number of possible posts (World Bank 2007), and that in the majority of cases posts identified for disabled people have not

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been filled by disabled people. The percentage of disabled people in all posts remains negligible at 0.44 percent (ibid.). Even when deaf people are “eligible” for positions and pass the necessary exams, they are often denied postings. This was evident in the media-­publicized case of Maniram Sharma, a young deaf man who passed the Indian Administrative Service exam three times in 2005, 2006, and 2009 and was refused a position because officials said that he was required to have at least 70 percent hearing ability despite the existence of the quota (Nagarajan 2009). The process of finding a public sector position is bureaucratic and confusing and remains so despite the opening of Special Employment Exchange Bureaus, dedicated offices in several cities where disabled job seekers can solicit information about public sector job vacancies. Today, job seekers or government employers seldom utilize these “special” offices. As a clerk in the Bangalore exchange matter-­of-­factly told me, “Madam, we have such little work here.” Indeed, my painstaking efforts to find the Bangalore office in September 2012 were anticlimactic: after spending hours in an auto-­rickshaw and on foot traversing up and down a road filled with government institutions and hospitals, I finally found it, the last office down a dusty hallway in a government Industrial Training Institute. The office held the paperwork of almost five thousand disabled job seekers and, as the clerk ruefully told me, only two placements were made last year because government offices were not doing their part to inform the office of vacancies. None of my deaf friends had visited this office to apply for jobs nor were they able to tell me where it was. Instead of visiting this office or consulting government-­issued newspapers containing public sector job vacancies, they went to new privately funded NGOs (such as Vision and the other organizations discussed in Chapter 3), where they were only given information about the private sector and placed in private sector jobs. The 1995 PWD Act does not mandate that the private sector provide employment quotas nor does it require that it engage in antidiscrimination practices. Section 41 of the act vaguely calls for the provision of “incentives” to both public and private sector companies to hire people with disabilities in order to ensure that at least 5 percent of the workforce is disabled. However, incentives were not instituted until 2008 when the government unveiled a scheme to pay for the employer’s contribution to the Employee Provident Fund and Employee State Insurance for private sector employees earning up to 25,000 rupees per month for up to three years.3 Because there is no regulation, this scheme has had little or no impact. In 1999–­2000, there was much debate about extending the quota system and requiring the private sector to reserve 3 percent of its positions for disabled employees. However, this initiative, proposed by Minister of Social Justice and Empowerment Maneka Gandhi, was overwhelmingly rejected.



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On October 1, 2007, India ratified the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD) amid much celebration among disability activists. This treaty requires that ratifiers ensure that people with disabilities have equal opportunities to employment in all sectors, including the private sector. Although India has signed and ratified the convention, it has not been mainstreamed into Indian laws, and disability activists say that efforts have not been made to implement it. The Disability Rights Group (a coalition of disability advocacy groups), including the Delhi-­ based National Association of the Deaf, has organized multiple protests around the government’s failure to implement the UNCRPD.4 There are currently negotiations and consultations with government officials around creating a new disability law in order to reflect the current reality of employment in India in which the private sector has emerged as the dominant source of employment. Deaf and disabled workers consistently state that they face discrimination in hiring and that they do not have the same opportunities as normal people. One organization that has worked hard to expand opportunities for disabled people in the private sector is the National Centre for Promotion of Employment of Disabled People (NCPEDP), started in 1996 by a politically well-­connected and charismatic wheelchair user named Feroz Abbas, who also helped found the Disability Rights Group. The NCPEDP successfully reached out to India’s two large chambers of commerce and business organizations—­the Confederation of Indian Industries (CII) and the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry—­and got them to take up the issue of disability employment. The NCPEDP also organized a series of roundtables in the early 2000s to which it invited heads of India’s growing ITES sector in order to encourage employment of disabled people in this sector. It also conducted research on the poor track records of India’s top one hundred businesses in employing disabled people and these studies subsequently received media publicity. As a result of the NCPEDP’s work, disability employment, at least in the corporate sector and later in the IT sector, became a more visible and politically charged issue.5 An editorial in The Hindu on December 4, 1999, entitled “Empowerment through Employment,” states: The record of successive Governments in securing employment [for people with disabilities] is an abysmal 0.4 percent as shown by a recent study conducted by the [NCPEDP]. But if there is at least an official policy on disabilities with all its shortcomings, the corporate sector does not even have that to boast about. The neglect of the disabled is particularly glaring in the context of pronouncements in recent times by the Confederation of Indian Industries regarding its commitment to the social sector, including the campaign against child-­labour, measures for people affected by AIDS and so on. (The Hindu 1999)

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This editorial comment highlights two important details: that disabled people have had difficulty finding employment and that disability was previously considered a “social sector” issue. However, I argue that the discourse around disability employment has since changed and now stresses that disabled workers are good employees who contribute both stability and diversity to the workplace. That is, there has been a shift from the previous welfare-­based model of the “person with disability” who should be given certain entitlements (such as employment quotas and pension schemes) to a neoliberal notion of a productive “worker with disability,” who does not need quotas or accommodations and who can contribute multiple forms of social, economic, and moral value to the workplace. In 2006 the CII created a corporate code on disability. The language in this code has important implications for how it represents disabled workers as possessing multiple forms of value. The first paragraph states: “Studies have shown that disabled people are capable, reliable employees, who often stay on the job longer than other employees. They contribute to productivity, to staff morale, and to team spirit in the workplace as a whole.” In this code, people with disabilities are represented as immobile workers who add value through their immobility, the diversity their presence creates in the workplace, and the ways that they make employers look caring or noble. These themes are emphasized in a handbook that CII produced in 2009 in coordination with a new disability-­ focused consulting firm Diversity and Equal Opportunity Centre entitled A Values Route to Success: The Why and How of Employing People with Disabilities. This handbook cites studies demonstrating that disabled workers stay in the workforce for longer periods than nondisabled workers and that they have lower absenteeism rates (Diversity and Equal Opportunity Centre 2009, 3). In interviews with NGO administrators, job placement officers, and HR executives in Bangalore, I heard repeated arguments about the added value of disabled workers. When I asked NGO job placement staff how they “marketed” disabled workers to corporations, I was told that they utilized the following five points: disabled workers stay on the job longer and are more stable than nondisabled workers; disabled workers add to the diversity of the workforce; disabled workers boost the morale of nondisabled workers as they are a source of inspiration; nondisabled workers see how well the company “takes care” of disabled workers and are therefore happy to work there; and hiring disabled workers “makes good business sense” because these disabled workers enter into the consumer pool and become loyal consumers of the company’s products. Thus, like the CII corporate code, NGO administrators represent disabled workers as immobile, stable, diverse, and reliable workers who also add value in affective ways through instilling new ways of feeling in the workplace. In addition, disability becomes a marker of increased productivity because disabled workers stay on the job longer and are eager to please their employers.



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In August of 2009, I interviewed a cheerful and loquacious HR executive at Phillips Morgan, a prestigious multinational ITES corporation. Phillips Morgan’s BPO operations have hired approximately forty deaf workers over the past five years, and this HR executive participates in the CII’s disability forum and works closely with Bangalore-­based disability NGOs to promote employment of disabled people. As we sat and chatted in his office, located in one of Bangalore’s new gleaming office buildings, I asked this executive why there was such interest recently in hiring disabled people. He replied that initially it was a result of corporate social responsibility (CSR) but more recently it was because “talent has become scarce and attrition rates have gone up.”6 He also said that BPO corporations had established systems in which processes had been sliced up into different repetitive pieces in the interest of cost-­effectiveness and so it was possible to hire less skilled disabled workers to do the work.7 This HR executive exclusively sourced people with disabilities from Bangalore-­based NGOs such as Vision. He told me that Vision provided a “finishing school” and a “stamp of approval” for candidates who might otherwise be viewed with hesitation by HR executives because of their disabilities. In our discussion, I asked him what would happen if I, as a deaf person, wanted to work at Phillips Morgan and applied directly to the company as normal people do. He told me that I would be referred to Vision and that Vision would do the initial screening and placement. His response highlighted the close relationship that his corporation had with Vision and the important role that NGOs have in providing job placements for disabled people. If prospective deaf workers are sent to Vision and other NGOs for “a stamp of approval,” this means that deaf workers are actually required to jump through more hoops than normal workers, who can apply directly to the company for employment. In addition, this means that corporations are able to do less work in terms of sourcing and training disabled workers, so they extract value not only from deafs but also from NGOs. This HR executive also told me that as a result of employing people with disabilities, his corporation had received positive publicity and a national award from NCPEDP. In discussing his corporation’s motivations for hiring disabled workers and the rewards it received for doing so, he was highlighting the tension between understanding disability employment as a form of corporate social responsibility and understanding it as a strategy to combat attrition; ultimately he was highlighting the complex nature of CSR as a concept.8 He was also revealing the very close relationship between disability NGOs, disability advocacy organizations, and corporations such as his own. A review of popular media sources shows that ITES corporations’ hiring of disabled workers is increasingly visible in the public domain and uncritically embraced. In a 2005 article in The Hindu titled “Calls for Special Skills,” T.E. Raja Simhan and Anjali Chandramouli write:

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Information technology (IT), IT-­ enabled services (ITES), and business process outsourcing (BPO) firms are seriously considering employing a greater number of disabled people. The reasons include increasing attrition levels in IT (10–­25 per cent), and ITES/BPO (35–­50 per cent) firms. Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is also driving firms to recruit disabled people. . . . [T]he non-­availability of talent and high attrition rates are driving companies to discover new sources of talent. One such option is the recruitment of disabled people, say industry experts. (Raja Simhan and Chandramouli 2005)

This article points out that most hiring of disabled candidates occurs in the BPO sector or in other lower-­end positions even though many disabled people possess qualifications to enter into the software sector. Disabled workers are seen first and foremost as disabled and prospective employers may not consider their educational qualifications. In a 2008 article in Infochange entitled “Persons with Disability May Apply,” Monideepa Sahu cites a study undertaken by the National Association of Software and Service Companies and Deloitte LLP which revealed that 64 percent of ITES corporations have disabled workers, a higher percentage than other sectors. Sahu also writes that Infosys, one of India’s largest IT companies, has more than 165 disabled employees and that its job advertisements encourage disabled people to apply for jobs (Sahu 2008).9 The majority of popular media articles devoted to disability and employment discuss the power of technology to eliminate barriers to employment and the ways that the ITES sector acts as a trailblazer of inclusion and diversity in the workplace, which is ironic in light of the fact that most disabled people are overqualified for positions for which they are hired. According to these articles, technology (usually in the form of computers) is a great enabler and creates equal opportunities for disabled people in the workplace.10 And if barriers remained, they could easily be remedied through technological solutions. As Chandra, Vision’s energetic director, repeatedly pointed out in presentations and talks with HR managers, there were “workplace solutions” for access issues that could easily be put into place, such as screen readers and screen reading software for blind employees and web-­based chat applications, e-mail, and writing back and forth for deaf workers. Chandra’s confident and assured discussion of “workplace solutions” resonated well with the entrepreneurial and creative spirit that ITES corporations represented themselves as possessing as well as with the representations of these corporations in popular media. Indeed, “including” disabled workers (and publicizing such efforts) has become a way for such corporations to highlight representations of themselves as being open, forward-­thinking, and diverse.11



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In contrast to this popular media representation, much social science literature of late has criticized working conditions in ITES workplaces. Such work argues that the ITES industry demands young, mobile, entrepreneurial, and flexible workers who can be trained quickly and then let go once their specific job assignment finishes.12 Carol Upadhya and A. R. Vasavi write: BPO companies have developed a revolving-­door system of continuously hiring new recruits, training them quickly and pushing them onto “the floor” while churning out a large proportion of the workforce each year through “voluntary” and “involuntary attrition.” In order to be successful in this industry, workers must be constantly mobile and move rapidly from corporation to corporation in search of better pay packages. These actions frustrate employers who desire better control over their workers. (Upadhya and Vasavi 2006, 19)

While ITES corporations desire flexibility and adaptability, mobile workers are threats to workplace stability. And this is where immobile deaf workers come into the picture.

Introducing the Deaf Group In August of 2009, I spent time on the floor of Phillips Morgan’s BPO center in Bangalore, visiting with fourteen deaf employees who had recently started working on a six-­month data merging project. As I had previously spent time with these deafs at Vision where they underwent BPO training (see Chapter 3) and at their homes as they waited for employment, I was curious about their (eagerly awaited) transition to this new workplace. They had finished their training at the end of May and had not received their job placement until the beginning of July. They had spent the month of June sitting at home, in paying guesthouses, or in rented rooms shared with other deaf friends, some of whom were working, some of whom were also waiting for work. At the end of June, the fourteen deafs were hired as a deaf group as a result of Vision’s outreach to Phillips Morgan. Despite individual geographical, educational, and experiential differences, the workers were all treated by Phillips Morgan as being identical in that they had all been assigned to the same work on the same contract and at the same pay rate. The first time I visited Phillips Morgan, the Internet was down and employees were not working. As the deaf employees were on a temporary six-­month contract and there was a dearth of office space, they were working in two conference rooms that had been converted into offices. With the Internet down, these conference rooms, set apart from the open floor with low cubicles outside, had turned into intense social spaces that struck me as being very similar to the atmosphere of the

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BPO training program that the workers had recently completed. Unlike the training center, however, these rooms were air-­conditioned spaces with ergonomic office chairs and new computers. They were spaces where deaf people worked together to figure out how to comport themselves as employees, what the proper way to input data and do other work was, and whether they would be hired as permanent employees or given raises or promotions. Normal workers occasionally entered these conference rooms and when they came in, conversations stopped in mid-­sentence and the atmosphere became more formal and slightly awkward. At all other times, the rooms felt like the deaf spaces created at vocational training centers where deaf sociality looms large and permeates the space with its own logic of sharing and exchanging information. In the absence of communication access to and with normal colleagues, deafs attempted to exchange and share knowledge and information with each other. They created a deaf bubble of sorts as information circulated within the bubble but did not go outside it. In this bubble there was much discussion and speculation around both everyday routines and what the future would hold (and the space still felt like a deaf bubble even when the Internet was working). On the day I first visited Phillips Morgan, the deaf employees entreated me to ask their supervisor if they would be made permanent and if he was satisfied with their performance. As I could communicate through both sign and speech, I asked their supervisor these questions and the deaf employees anxiously waited for the responses (Yes, he was very happy with their performance and, unfortunately, he did not know if they would be made permanent because the decision was to be made by higher management and not by him). This is not to imply that deafs did not have relationships with their normal coworkers, who sometimes came into the deaf conference rooms; deafs sometimes spent time in normal spaces such as the cafeteria and break room although they usually hung out with each other in these spaces. However, they told me that they preferred to be with deaf colleagues because they felt more comfortable with them due to ease of communication and a feeling of “deaf deaf same.” They also told me that it was easier to share news and information with deafs, although they enjoyed “joking” with normals. By “joking,” deafs meant that they did not have serious conversations with normals and that there was less at stake; these were not conversations about the future or about “deep” social, moral, or economic issues. Through collectively participating in BPO training, group job placements, and everyday workplace interactions, deafs came to see themselves as part of a deaf group from which they could not be separated. In January of 2010, I asked Aruna, the only woman among the fourteen deaf employees at Phillips Morgan, if she would continue working there after the six-­month contract expired (their contract had been slightly extended at that point so they were still working). She told me that she was uncertain because she did not possess



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the necessary qualifications to become a permanent worker. For this, she said that an advanced degree such as a bachelor of arts or bachelor of commerce degree was required, but she only had an Industrial Training Institute government certificate. I asked about the other deaf workers as some of them had advanced degrees. In response, she told me: “Phillips Morgan will not hire just one or two people from the deafs because we are a group and if one or two of us are hired and the others are not, we will all feel sad.” I was not sure if Aruna’s perception was correct and if Phillips Morgan would decline to permanently hire individuals. However, Aruna’s comment is important for what it reveals about how deaf employees view themselves, their relationships with each other, and their interactions with their employer: they see themselves as a deaf group. Although I was also unsure if Aruna would really feel sad if other deafs were hired and she was not, I did know that it would certainly represent a rupture in the current deaf order as these deaf workers had been together through their training at Vision and as employees at Phillips Morgan where they worked side by side and took breaks together. Most of these young adults had known each other for many years. In addition to attending the same BPO training program in Bangalore, some had also attended the same three-­year diploma program at JSSPPH in Mysore, and prior to that they had attended the same residential primary and secondary schools in Kerala, where they had lived and learned together. As I noted, some of these young men currently lived together in a small rented flat and spent both work and free time together; they were intensely a part of each other’s lives.13 Despite coming from different states and different educational, class, religious, and caste backgrounds, they mostly got along well. The fourteen deafs at Phillips Morgan were lucky in that they all operated at similar performance levels and were adept at meeting their work quotas early in their shifts; they were able to spend their remaining time socializing and taking breaks together. There were occasional personality conflicts when certain deafs were seen as dominating or unprofessional (because of joking around or gossiping too much) but for the most part, they productively negotiated differences and engaged in sameness work. In contrast to this cohesive batch of deaf workers, I spent time with another group of six deafs that had been placed by Vision at a multinational ITES corporation named Pinnacle. These deafs were from an earlier Vision BPO training batch and, like the batch placed at Phillips Morgan, they were also a geographically, educationally, and experientially diverse group. Unlike the batch placed at Phillips Morgan, who were all excellent signers, however, deafs in this batch possessed varying sign language abilities. In particular, Bharath, one of the trainees-­turned-­employees, had attended normal schools and therefore had a limited understanding of sign language. He had a difficult time following the initial training after induction into the company because he could not understand either the trainer’s speech or the interpreter’s

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signs. A BPO trainer from Vision, who interpreted during the six-­week training period, helped ensure that Bharath was able to understand by spending extra time with him. Bharath’s batch-­mates also helped by explaining things to him during breaks. However, after a few months, the project that they were working on changed and Bharath had difficulties adjusting to the new project. When Vision staff learned about Bharath’s difficulties, they called (via SMS) all of the deaf employees to Vision one Saturday, although not all came. I happened to be there that Saturday and I watched one of Bharath’s coworkers named Vikas (seemingly) patiently sit with him and help to interpret a conversation between Bharath and a few normal Vision trainers. The trainers wanted to figure out why Bharath was having problems with the new project. Although Bharath was not able to understand the sign language used by Vision’s trainers very well, he was able to understand Vikas because Vikas had a great deal of experience signing with a wide range of deaf people as a result of attending deaf educational institutions and vocational training programs. Vikas served as a relay interpreter, using very simple signs in a slow manner, and he spent a few hours with Bharath and the Vision staff trying to help Bharath understand the new project. At the end of the day, the Vision trainers instructed Vikas to continue to help Bharath. I observed one trainer telling the others that the other deaf workers also helped Bharath during tea and lunch breaks and that they explained things to him when he needed help. This trainer stressed the fact that the deaf workers were interdependent and functioned as a cohesive group. The following week I met with Vikas alone. I asked him how he felt about helping Bharath, and he was ambivalent. He said that he had to repeat things for him constantly, which frustrated him, but that he had “no choice.” He said that he was obligated to help Bharath because they were both deaf and they had been hired together: “Even if the best deaf is excellent, if the worst deaf is terrible, the company might decide to get rid of all of us.” Vikas accepted the responsibility of helping Bharath as a result of what he describes as “deaf deaf same.” He must help Bharath because they are both deaf, were hired at the same time, and will be collectively evaluated—­his statements echoed the sentiments that Aruna shared with me. That is, deaf employees see themselves as members of a deaf group and they believe that others see them this way. However, it also seemed to me that Vikas was also motivated by a sense of responsibility to “help support” Bharath; he wanted Bharath to do well. Vikas’s desire to help Bharath was therefore motivated by both a sense that he had to help Bharath in order to help himself and a desire to help other deafs. It is important, however, to consider Vikas’s ambivalence in relation to “deaf deaf same.” During our meeting, I asked Vikas how he felt about constantly being with these same deafs—­at BPO training, work, and home—­and he said that he initially found it difficult to communicate with the others because he was from



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Tamil Nadu and his sign language was slightly different. Vikas lived with a group of other deaf young men who he met at Vision’s BPO training. He was the only one in the group who had not attended JSSPPH in Mysore and he was also the only deaf from Tamil Nadu. While the others were from Kerala and Andhra Pradesh, they had all met and spent three years together in Mysore. Slowly he became friends with the others, although he stressed that they were not close friends. Vikas said that when he found out that he would be working with them after spending so much time with them in the BPO training program, he felt unhappy as he did not really feel a sense of attachment to them. Despite not feeling connection, he knew that he had to adjust because he understood the stakes of being part of a deaf group (he said that they had been hired as a group and they would therefore potentially be fired as a group)—­and so he went to Vision on a Saturday to help Bharath. Indeed, the stakes of being part of a deaf group were perceived to be quite high. Chandra, the CEO of Vision, and other Vision trainers often told deaf employees that they had to work hard so as not to bring “shame” on other deafs. Chandra told deaf employees that if they did not work hard, companies would not hire other deaf workers and that current deaf employees had to be good role models for potential deaf employees. Statements such as these further served to cement a feeling of being a member of a deaf group and, through instilling a sense of fear and pressure, they helped to produce model deaf workers.

Normals Who Love Deafs An exploration of deaf and normal interactions also reveals important insights into how deafs produce themselves and are produced as a deaf group. As I noted earlier, normal colleagues at Phillips Morgan occasionally entered the conference rooms where deaf people worked. And deafs often told me about normals who were very keen to learn sign language. This desire to interact with workers who are different resonates with Reena Patel’s finding that workers in BPOs enjoy the “melting pot”–­like atmosphere and “social camaraderie” that occurs in BPO offices where people from very different educational, class, caste, and religious backgrounds interact and form friendships (2010, 126). However, I argue that the implications of interacting with deaf workers and learning sign language goes beyond working in a “melting pot,” and such interactions actually create ruptures in the everyday routine of BPO work. This became clear to me while attending an unusual orientation session at Pinnacle. At this orientation, the process team slated to receive six new deaf workers (the group that Vikas and Bharath were members of) learned facts about deafness and some basic sign language from Radhika, an administrator at DPA.14 Radhika showed a PowerPoint presentation about the causes of deafness and the effects that it has

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on childhood development and educational opportunities. This presentation was enthusiastically received with much curiosity and many questions. With the exception of one worker who had a deaf neighbor, team members had not had any experience with deaf people. Radhika then taught some basic sign language, mostly focusing on the finger-­spelling alphabet so that people could spell out words and sentences even if they did not know the proper sign for a word or concept.15 During this orientation to deafness and sign language, the deaf workers were in the conference room next door filling out enrollment paperwork. After their training and induction period, they would be assigned partners from the group of normal workers sitting in the other conference room that we were in, through a buddy system. Toward the end of Radhika’s training, the six new deaf employees were invited into the room and their normal future coworkers were given simple questions to ask them using sign language and gestures: “Where do you live?” “Where did you work before?” “What is your mother’s name?” and so on. The room was filled with laughter as the normal workers fervently tried to communicate while the deaf trainees nervously tried to understand. Afterward Radhika and I asked a few of the normal workers how they felt about their new deaf buddies and they were very excited although also anxious about communication challenges. I contend that these spaces of deaf-­normal encounters create novel experiences and make the workplace a more affective space—­for the normal workers. Normal workers frequently told me how competitive and cut-­throat these workplaces are, how people are always evaluating themselves in relation to their colleagues, how hard everyone must work in order to get ahead, and how there is a general sense of pressure.16 The deaf workers represented a break from this stressful everyday routine as Rebecca, an earnest young trainer at Phillips Morgan, told me when I asked her how she felt about training the deaf staff and subsequently working alongside them. Rebecca said that she felt like the deaf workers were nice and innocent: “They are like big babies.” I do not think that Rebecca meant her statement to be condescending or offensive. She was saying that, unlike normal coworkers with whom she was constantly competing and felt guarded around, the deaf workers appeared simultaneously vulnerable and noncompetitive. They were different from her normal coworkers who did not treat her with respect, perhaps because of her young age or quiet demeanor. I would argue that Rebecca’s interactions with deaf coworkers were also influenced by the fact that they treated Rebecca with respect because she was senior to them, she was a permanent worker, and she was normal. In addition, Rebecca was not privy to the full range of deaf communication, due to both language barriers and the fact that deaf workers often stopped what they were doing when she entered into the room; she therefore had only a limited view of them.



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Rebecca told me that she felt personally responsible for the deaf workers and that she wanted them to succeed and do well. According to the deafs, she often visited them in the conference rooms, where she inquired about their lives and asked about their weekend plans using simple signs that she had learned or by writing things down. During the time that I visited Phillips Morgan, Rebecca hung out in the conference room for a while gently teasing the deafs about their romantic lives. According to Aruna and other deafs: “Rebecca loves deafs.” They proudly told me that Rebecca attended a large function in December 2009 to celebrate Vision’s anniversary. Rebecca was not the only deaf-­lover; deafs told me on many occasions about normals who loved deafs and they used the word “love” to stress that these were normals who cared about and were interested in learning how to communicate with deafs. There was an affective dimension to love that transcended other relational terms such as “respect.” Love in this context is bound up with a sense of responsibility as well as an orientation toward learning sign language. Yet, saying that “X loves deafs” (as opposed to a specific deaf person with whom X had formed a bond) further produced deafs as a homogenous group.17 During one visit to Phillips Morgan, I spoke with the deaf workers’ supervisor, a quiet and thoughtful man in his mid to late thirties, who told me that he thought that it was “inspirational” to work with deaf people; he felt that it was good that Phillips Morgan was giving them an opportunity to work as “these people deserve to have opportunities too.” He told me that he felt that deafs work harder than normals and that they do not gossip as much because it is not possible for them to gossip and work at the same time (since they cannot sign and type simultaneously). For the deafs’ supervisor and for Rebecca, interactions with their deaf coworkers and subordinates were a break in the everyday work routine and offered opportunities for feeling emotions such as responsibility toward their deaf coworkers and wanting to help them to succeed, inspiration as a result of working in such close proximity to those who have managed to “overcome” the challenges of deafness, and curiosity about the novelty offered through learning sign language. This rupture creates value for the normal workers as it offers them new ways of feeling and relating in the workplace that engender unexpected attachments and responsibilities. Through deaf-­normal encounters, normal workers are able to re-­envision and reinvent their everyday workplace experiences. In this sense, normal workers are reorienting their expectations and understandings about both deaf people and the workplace. This affect created by working with deaf people differs from the “emotional labor” that Upadhya and Vasavi (2008) suggest that BPO workers engage in because it is not managed nor does it only serve the corporations’ interests. According to Arlie Hochschild, “emotional labor” “requires one to induce or suppress feeling in order to sustain the outward countenance that produces

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the proper state of mind in others” (1983, 7). Emotional labor is oppressive and requires the worker to package and market her emotions. Although normal BPO workers may engage in “emotional labor” in their interactions with clients via phone or e-mail, their feelings for their deaf counterparts appeared not to be managed. These feelings of responsibility, inspiration, and love represented a break in the everyday monotony of “feeling rules” in which workers are required to express so-­called authentic feelings such as gratitude or happiness toward customers or managers (1983, 56). The production of this form of value goes beyond the feelings of loyalty to the corporation that corporate HR executives hoped to cultivate in normal workers, as per the “official” rationale for hiring disabled workers, which I discussed above, since normal workers felt loyalty toward their deaf counterparts and not just toward the corporation. These feelings restored social and moral aspects to workplaces which, according to A. Aneesh (2008), are “postsocial.” Kalindi Vora, writing about the affective labor that takes place in Indian call centers, states: “I suggest that affective labor produces value through the capacity of human vital energy as a creative force to be invested directly into other human beings, thereby supporting their lives” (2010, 35). Vora argues that call center employees’ vital energies are extracted for the benefit of the customers with whom they are interacting. However, in the case of normal workers working alongside deaf coworkers, these vital energies are in fact replenished. In light of the discussion of how deaf workers both see themselves and are seen by others as a group, questions about the circulation of feelings of responsibility, attachment, and love arise. Specifically, between whom do these feelings circulate and in which directions? What are the boundaries of such circulations? As I mentioned earlier, Aruna told me that Rebecca, her trainer and coworker, loved deafs although she did not say that she reciprocated and loved Rebecca. Deafs proudly told me about various normal people working at NGOs, government offices, or different corporations who loved deafs and this was viewed positively because these normals cared for and helped deafs. However, deafs never told me that they loved specific normal people or normals in general. In addition, I never saw deaf workers develop close individual relationships with normal workers. The deaf group always mediated interactions with normals, and it was seemingly only the normal workers who experienced affective ruptures in their everyday relationships with their deaf colleagues. In contrast, the deafs’ work lives continued to be ordered in the same ways as their social and educational lives: despite living and working among normals, they remained oriented toward each other and looked to each other for help and support, information, and development. Consider this display of disability: December 3 is International Disability Day, and it is celebrated by the state and civil society alike. In 2009, as it does



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every year, Infosys hosted a large celebration and awareness program for all of its BPO workers as part of its “Infyability” initiative designed to promote diversity and inclusion.18 Attendees sat on oversized steps in the large outdoor amphitheater on Infosys’s pristine Electronic City campus. The amphitheater’s stage was covered with banners featuring inspirational slogans about overcoming obstacles. The masters of ceremonies (MCs) were two perky young normal workers who repeatedly extolled the virtues of disabled Infoscians and introduced performances by nondisabled dancers, an Infosys-­sponsored inclusive (mixed disabled/nondisabled) dance troupe, and skits by nondisabled BPO workers about the importance of inclusion and not leaving people out. There was also a fast-­paced filmi (film) dance by a deaf man who shimmied and shimmered to loud pulsating music. After he finished, the MCs declared: “Wow, we never would have known that he was deaf and could not hear the music. How amazing!” Affective value, deriving from awe and inspiration, was being produced right there as the MCs were required to reorient themselves to the idea of an “amazing” deaf dancer. At the end of the program, awards were presented to disabled workers who were “best buddies” to the sound of thunderous applause. These “best buddies” excelled at teamwork and were considered to be inspirational. While there were around twenty deaf workers present, sitting close together in a group so that they could see the interpreter, it was obvious that this was more a program by and for normal Infosys workers. It was an opportunity for them to witness, feel good about, celebrate, and derive value from Infosys’s commitment to diversity and inclusion. And afterward, the deaf workers and I stood around discussing their concerns about not being promoted. Most of them told me that they desired to be doing something else—­such as software or hardware—­anything but BPO work.19 When I asked why, many of them said that they did not think there was a future as what kinds of promotions or growth would be accessible to them? Indeed, I did not meet a single deaf person who had been promoted to a management position at Infosys or in another IT company—­and participating in such a conversation at Infosys on World Disability Day felt especially ironic to me. When I posed this question about future career opportunities to the HR executive at Phillips Morgan, he told me that he believed that there were two different kinds of advancement or “ladders to success”: improvement in management of self and improvement in management of others. He said that the deaf workers could easily focus on the first, that while they unable to become managers or supervisors, they could cultivate excellent individual work habits. Each deaf person would therefore be responsible for managing himself. However, this logic of focusing only on oneself is contradictory to the ways that deaf workers relate to other deaf workers, orient themselves toward each other, and

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engage in collective pursuit of knowledge and development. It is also contrary to how they produce themselves and are produced by NGOs and corporations as a deaf group. It remains to be seen what kinds of livelihood futures can be found in the ITES sector for deaf workers (or for anyone, as Aneesh 2006; Nadeem 2011; and Patel 2010 point out).

The Deaf Group Is a Deaf Family In September 2008, I went with Jyothi, a normal young woman working at DPA, to visit Excel, a mid-­sized Bangalore-­based ITES corporation where 95 percent of its approximately 150 employees were disabled and a large percentage of this 95 percent were deaf. We had heard much about Excel both from deaf young adults working there and newspaper articles extolling its innovative model of providing BPO and data entry services. DPA and other NGOs often referred deaf young adults looking for jobs to Excel (although as I noted in Chapter 3, many trainees refused to accept jobs there). We also knew that Excel frequently won awards, including a national award from the National Centre for Promotion of Employment for Disabled People as a result of being “a BPO with a heart” (Ribeiro 2009). After a long auto rickshaw ride to a quiet industrial area in south Bangalore, we reached Excel’s offices. The first thing that we noticed was a banner hanging outside its offices announcing job openings for data entry operators. Written on the banner in large bold letters was: “Physically Challenged Only May Apply.” After entering the office, we talked to one deaf man who had been working for Excel since it opened three years ago. He told us with a broad smile that Excel previously hired normal workers but that they quickly quit because salaries were low. As a result of this rapid attrition, he told me, the founders decided to hire only disabled people because they do not quit so quickly. After casually telling us this, the young man hurried back to work because there was much to do. Jyothi and I then met Laxshmi, Excel’s young founder and chief operating officer. Laxshmi told us that she had decided to hire people with disabilities after facing a high rate of attrition and realizing that “for such work, you do not need people with Ph.D.s. It is not rocket science. The work is often mundane and it requires sitting for long periods of time. People with disabilities can do this work.” She also told us that she had learned that there were many NGOs in Bangalore and elsewhere providing computer training to people with disabilities and that when they finished this training, they needed jobs. She thought that Excel could “fill that gap.” Laxshmi told us that Excel never rejected a person with a disability. If someone applied and lacked the minimum typing skill and speed requirement, she sent them to either Vision or DPA for additional training. After they met the



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requirements, she hired them.20 As such, Excel was the obvious place for NGOs and training centers to refer their trainees, as it more often than not hired these trainees and therefore helped these training centers bolster their placement statistics. Highly (and sometimes over-­) qualified but unemployed older deaf people sought employment at Excel after being laid off elsewhere due to economic downturns and deaf college students worked part time on the night shift after attending school during the day. Through working with disability-­focused HR specialists and NGOs, Excel attracted deafs and other disabled workers from all over India as it promised work, a hostel (which employees had to pay for), and meals on the job (which again employees had to pay for). Excel is constantly expanding. It has won several new contracts and is opening satellite offices in Kerala and other states. Its need for employees is increasing, and Excel is searching all over India for appropriate disabled workers. Laxshmi told us that she wanted to empower her employees to overcome their disabilities and to realize that disability was not in itself a qualification for employment. She said that she wanted her workers to see themselves as workers first and to take pride in their work. When I challenged her on this, mentioning the banner hanging outside the office, which stated that only people with disabilities could apply, she countered that disability was not a qualification and that she felt that a qualification was something that one is proud of. I argue, however, that for Excel, Phillips Morgan, and other such corporations, disability does function as a qualification and a source of added value. Indeed, disability is prominently mentioned three times on Excel’s main website: “95% of our work force are Differently Abled. we are not an NGO but a private company striving to achieve our own sales & a small piece of profit by providing excellent service . . . by overcoming all our disabilities” (typos and bold in original). Why else would Laxshmi say that Excel never turned anyone with a disability away? When Jyothi and I asked Laxshmi how she retained workers, she said that she instituted a familial atmosphere. She told us that all of the workers were “like a family” and that workers talked freely with her and discussed their personal problems. Indeed, when Jyothi and I were finally taken onto the floor, there did seem to be a family-­like atmosphere and Laxshmi joked and bantered with the workers in sign language (which she had learned from deaf workers). I spent time talking with two deaf women in their late thirties who had worked at Excel since the company started. Prior to working for Excel, these two women had studied electronics at a deaf vocational training center, worked at Titan Watch Factory for five years, and then enrolled in a dental hygiene course. They are now team leaders at Excel, where they supervise teams of deaf workers and encourage them to meet the management’s work goals. They enthusiastically gushed about the company and told me that they planned to stay at Excel “for life.” They also told me that Laxshmi “loves deaf people” and they pointed to her

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excellent sign language skills as evidence of this. The cultivation of an intimate atmosphere could be seen as an attempt by Laxshmi to offset long working hours and pay that was lower than industry norms. Indeed, these women’s choice of words was telling because “for life” is a phrase normally used to describe government jobs. Excel, or rather Laxshmi, has replaced the public sector as a source of protection and stability. Ironically, Excel is not a stable workplace and is precariously dependent on the economic climate both in India and abroad. Most of Excel’s employees were not, in fact, as enthusiastic as these two women, and their experiences were marked by ambivalence. On one hand, they enjoyed being in a workplace where they could communicate easily and where they felt comfortable. On the other hand, they resented the long hours, the extremely low pay, and the lack of opportunities for advancement. As Laxshmi generously permitted me to return to Excel and spend time with workers, both while they were working and during lunch and tea breaks, I spent a few days sitting with workers as they scanned old offer letters for an insurance company, entered micro-­finance loan applications into a database, and struggled to read British census reports from the eighteenth century that they were digitizing. During breaks, I chatted with workers. I asked a deaf woman if everyone who worked at Excel was disabled and she said yes. I pointed out that the supervisors were not disabled and while she conceded my point, her everyday experiences were characterized by identifying and bonding with other disabled workers. The supervisors, all of whom were normal, lurked on the periphery of her everyday experiences. At one point, I sat with two women who had been working together for two years. One woman was deaf and the other physically disabled. The latter woman knew some sign language, which she said that she loved using to communicate, and I observed these two women bantering and sharing details about their lives. I asked them how they felt about working at Excel. The physically disabled worker told me that she liked working at Excel because: “Everyone is the same and has problems. They are blind, deaf, and physically disabled. If I worked in an office with normal people, people would be mean, they would laugh at me, but here people are the same and have pappa [pity], for each other.”21 Both young women had stories of being stared at and ridiculed by normals and they valued the safe space that Excel provided. Other workers told me that even when they had no work to do or were done with their shift, they preferred to come to the office instead of staying home. A deaf man who worked the night shift told me that he often came to the office early to socialize. Another young man told me that he often lingered at the office after his shift ended. During lunch, people sat together and chatted about their lives and shared news. Excel provided workers with a friendly and social space—­while also extracting labor and demanding significant investments of time and energy



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from workers. Hours were often longer than industry standards and salaries were significantly lower. There also appeared to be fewer holidays and perks in the form of tea, coffee, and snacks than at other companies. Similar to the situation at Pinnacle that I discussed earlier, in which Vikas felt compelled to help Bharath because they were both deaf, workers at Excel were pressured into doing extra work to compensate for slower workers. One evening I observed the floor manager ask a deaf woman who had been working there for over a year to help an inexperienced deaf worker who was quite slow. The experienced worker had been at the office since early morning and she wanted to go home. Still, she reluctantly agreed to help the slower woman. After all, they were both deaf. Friendship, intimacy, and communication (a sense of “family” in Laxshmi’s words) were used to keep workers invested in working for Excel. This strategy is both similar to and different from those utilized by the BPO administrators and managers with whom Nadeem (2011) conducted research. Nadeem analyzed how BPO administrators cultivate a party-­like atmosphere in which workers are encouraged to go out drinking together and spend large sums of money on alcohol. A drunken camaraderie develops among workers and their managers, therefore fostering a sense of being a member of a team. Laxshmi is also trying to create a teamlike atmosphere, although she does not need to encourage her workers to go out together nor does she have to resort to group drinking as a strategy for creating a sense of teamwork: her workers already spend significant amounts of time together outside of work and they are already oriented toward each other. Deaf people’s sameness work was therefore productive for Laxshmi as it meant that she had to do less work to retain employees.

Conclusion Both anthropological studies of disability and Disability Studies scholarship have long focused on the exclusion of disabled people from workplaces, as a result of physical barriers and the existence of active discrimination and stigma. Indeed, one of the facts taken for granted within the Disability Studies canon is that because of the Industrial Revolution, under which the assembly line was developed and migration to cities occurred, disability emerged as both an analytical concept and lived way of experiencing the world. Factories demanded a specific kind of “able” body and the state began to exert control according to, and along the lines of, bodily difference.22 According to this analysis, the emergence of capitalist modes of production and the modern nation-­state have fostered both disabling conditions and categories that have rendered disabled people unemployable. Writing about contemporary times, Disability Studies scholars David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder have argued that under neoliberal

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political economic regimes, “disabled people have become objects of care in which enormous sectors of post-­capitalist service economies are invested. In the terms of recent theories of political economy, disability has been transformed into a target of neo-­liberal intervention strategies.” According to them, disabled people (or rather disabled bodies) are valuable not as workers but as objects for a medical-­industrial complex that is able to generate profit through providing rehabilitation services and interventions. It is through this that disabled people’s “non-­productive labor power” becomes productive in other ways (2010, 180). In contrast to this narrative of disabled people as unemployable subjects, however, the experiences of my deaf friends reveal that deaf and other disabled people are being produced as idealized “workers with disabilities” and included in neoliberal workplaces. Indeed, in the corporate workplaces that I analyzed, deaf workers are considered to be a very productive source of labor power and they are productive in multiple ways beyond performing their job functions. Deaf workers provide corporations with value in that they are immobile workers who do not turn over at the same rate as normal workers. In addition, they provide added value through helping corporations rack up CSR “brownie points.” They are also remaking the workplace as a more affective space for normal coworkers who experience novel feelings of responsibility, inspiration, attachment, and love in relation to their deaf coworkers. It seems especially important that we think about what qualities are valued by what kinds of workplaces and what this means more broadly in a globalized context that is characterized both by unequal power and economic relations and by an increasingly international division of labor. In her book on bipolar disorder, Emily Martin argues that mania, once stigmatized, is now an increasingly valued characteristic or quality in American life. Mania represents energy, creativity, and productivity—­qualities that are demanded by the market. According to Martin, there are now “specialty firms [that] are teaching people how to be manic for the sake of greater productivity; the mania they intend to tap flows from the mind and will go forth, so they hope, to unleash creative potential” (2009, 53). Qualities enabled by mania include being adaptive, being willing to change in innovative ways, and being a “creative chameleon” (2009, 216). It seems, then, that in American and other Global North workplaces based on entrepreneurship and individualism, adaptive and creative mobility are valued and conditions such as mania are therefore reinscribed with value. In contrast, and in an entirely different but structurally related labor market, immobility, the ability to engage in repetitive work, and obedience are valued. In ITES workplaces, deaf workers are inscribed with these characteristics.23 It is therefore important to critically engage with how and why deaf and disabled workers might be ideal neoliberal workers and under what kinds of structural inequalities.



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FIGURE 4.1.  Poster on the door of special KFC in Chennai, India. Credit: Author.

To be sure, there were deaf young adults who found other kinds of jobs elsewhere, most notably in India’s growing hospitality sector where they often cycled through food service employment and worked for fast-­ food outlets such as Café Coffee Day, Barista, KFC, and Pizza Hut. Like the ITES corporations discussed in this chapter, many of these fast food chains see deaf people as valued employees. Café Coffee Day has created the category of “the silent brewmaster” and regularly recruits deaf people via NGOs for this position (Friedner 2013).24 Similarly, KFC started hiring deaf workers to fry chicken and make coleslaw. More recently, the chain has opened a few “special KFCs” in Indian cities where the majority of the workers are deaf and posters and signs instruct customers to point to the menu items that they wish to order from deaf cashiers.

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These jobs too offer little stability, poor pay, and an uncertain sense of the future. Indeed, some of these food chains, in their attempts to cultivate a youthful atmosphere, do not hire people over the age of thirty-­five. This was a source of anxiety to deaf workers at these chains as they wondered what the future would hold and if they would be fired from their jobs when they became older. Many of my deaf friends still had hopes for a government job although this hope was diminishing as most disability employment NGOs did not work with the public sector and tracked deaf and other disabled workers into private sector work. My deaf friends often spoke of this trajectory—­from NGO to employment in the ITES or hospitality sector—­with resignation, but they could not see any other alternatives in the present, and they said that NGOs would not help them look for other kinds of jobs. And so they continued to flock to NGOs that provided them with training and then placed them in jobs where they were offered little opportunity for advancement or even stable livelihoods. In this space of limited employment options, other forms of employment become attractive. In the following chapter, I move to a discussion of deaf participation in multilevel marketing, another employment option toward which deaf people gravitated in search of better futures that would enable deaf development. As I discuss, multilevel marketing also draws upon and utilizes the logic of sameness work in order to transform social capital into economic capital. And just as deaf workers have become a source of value for new neoliberal workplaces, I argue that multilevel marketing businesses are another site where deaf people are productively “included,” often not entirely to their own benefit.

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Enrolling Deafness in Multilevel Marketing Businesses “Silver Venture is about business. About 1000 deaf in india join it to earn better n transform our lives.” —­SMS sent to author by Aparna, Team Silver Dream’s Bangalore leader, when asked about Silver Venture

“[These other businesses] do not have teamwork and they are not good businesses for the deaf. Silver Venture adds value for the future and helps people to realize their dreams. . . . It is a good business for people with dreams. The other businesses are finite as you get someone to join under you, then you eat and sleep, that’s all.” —­Rajesh, Team Commitment’s Bangalore leader, in an interview with the author

Deaf Uplines and Downlines

On August 1, 2009, I flew to Pune to attend a mela, or celebratory function, marking the second anniversary of deaf people’s involvement in Silver Venture, an international multilevel marketing business.1 Deaf Indians from as far away as Kerala, Karnataka, and Uttar Pradesh (over thirty hours, twenty hours, and fifteen hours by train, respectively) converged on Pune for this five-­hour function, which was supposed to be a celebration of deaf people’s success in the business. The mela was also designed to celebrate the creation of the category “special friends,” which is what deaf members of Silver Venture are fondly called by both deaf and normals alike. (I will discuss the origin of this category later in this chapter.) I accompanied members of the Bangalore branch of Team Commitment, a team with branches all over India. Team members traveled to Pune

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by bus, train, and air. Expectations were very high, as the previous year’s mela, the first anniversary, had brought almost one thousand special friends to Pune.2 The mela, held in a dimly lit auditorium, was supposed to start at 1:00  p.m. sharp, although by the time attendees made their way inside it was already almost an hour later. Those sitting around me joked that we were on “deaf Indian time.” Attendees sat on plastic multicolored chairs and signed with their neighbors as they waited for the program to start. Most people sat with their teammates and the room appeared to be organized by region. When I looked closely, I could make out regional variations in Indian Sign Language. There were orange, blue, and white balloons hung throughout the auditorium in an attempt to impart a festive air and loud music blared. Finally the curtains on the stage slowly parted, spotlights came on, and Bhupen and Vicky, the first two deaf people to join Silver Venture, ran out of the wings and onto the stage. Clad smartly in white polo shirts and blue jeans, each exuberantly asked the crowd in Indian Sign Language: “Do you know me?” Most people in the cheering crowd did know them and if they did not know them personally, they had heard their stories or seen promotional DVDs in which the two played starring roles. The duo energetically recounted how they had joined Silver Venture and how successful they have become. They stressed that thanks to Silver Venture, they were able to acquire consumer goods such as cars and computers, they had become financially independent, and they are able to “help support” other deaf people. Both leaders repeatedly roused the audience by proclaiming: “You can do it! Copy me! Follow me!” As the first deaf people to join Silver Venture, Bhupen and Vicky were leaders to everyone in the room and they represented a particular and much-­ coveted trajectory of deaf development. They stressed during their opening speeches that they were financially successful and they wanted to share their success with other deaf people; they were confident and strong, they said, and they wanted other deafs to be confident and strong as well. They were, in fact, models of development both because of their financial success and because they wanted to help other deafs. In accordance with the structure of Silver Venture, those present would have to copy them in order to replicate their success. Up on the stage, Vicky and Bhupen promised to help everyone else in the room become successful too. Although many deaf people tried to imitate Vicky and Bhupen’s success, they were unable to do so. Exact imitation was impossible because Silver Venture was structured like a pyramid. In the language used by the company, when someone joins the business she becomes a downline to the person under whom she joined. Similarly, after she recruits someone to join under her, she becomes that person’s upline. When uplines recruit two downlines, they receive a percentage of each downline’s initiation payment and then smaller percentages for



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FIGURE 5.1.  Representation of multilevel marketing structure. Credit:

V. Gopalakrishnan.

each subsequent pair of downlines (usually recruited by their own downlines). A pyramid-­like structure develops, becoming increasingly complex and unwieldy as additional members are recruited. There are distinct lineages within this pyramid structure and lineages are grouped into “teams.” As I said, I attended the mela with members of one of Bangalore’s two deaf teams, Team Commitment; both Vicky and Bhupen were uplines to all of the teams’ members. I also spent time with leaders and members of another Bangalore team called Team Wonderful Dream, which also had Vicky and Bhupen as uplines. In addition to Silver Venture, there were at least five other multilevel marketing businesses operating in Bangalore in 2008–­2009. During visits to other major Indian cities, I learned of additional businesses. Even if they did not join these businesses, my deaf friends often attended recruitment sessions and spent time at vocational training centers, workplaces, and churches discussing these businesses and analyzing whether they were appropriate livelihood opportunities. Why do businesses like Silver Venture play such an important role in deaf people’s social, moral, and economic lives? I argue that the practices required by multilevel marketing businesses articulated with deaf social, moral, and economic practices to create new deaf present-­and future-­oriented formations. More broadly, I argue that participation in Silver Venture and other multilevel marketing businesses is directly related to possibilities and constraints emerging as a result of neoliberal changes in the Indian economy, and that just as deaf workers in the previous chapter were “included” in India’s growing ITES sector, so too are deaf people “included” in multilevel marketing businesses. The overarching questions are, of course, who benefits from this “inclusion” and what kinds of ambivalences do deaf people struggle with while participating in such businesses?

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Economic liberalization in India has resulted in fewer welfare-­oriented policies and less public sector employment, rendering livelihood for people with disabilities more precarious. Liberalization has also resulted in the introduction of new forms of capital circulation and value production, particularly with the emergence of the ITES sector and other sectors featuring multinational corporations (as discussed in Chapter 4). In these uncertain times, Silver Venture offered the possibility of a safety net and my deaf friends explicitly compared and contrasted it to the state. In fact, in contrast to the state, it was seen as a source of livelihood and protection, it offered deafs “help support” through teamwork and the arrangement of deafs into teams and lineages, and it promoted new imaginaries of deaf development, which included deaf old-­age homes, recreational travel in deaf groups, and better deaf schools. Many of my deaf friends told me that unlike the state, Silver Venture would help them to develop. During the second anniversary mela, one of the speakers said that Silver Venture was a “beautiful business” and that it was a “business where deaf and normal are equal to each other” and where “there is lots of sharing and helping.” I therefore analyze how multilevel marketing businesses produced a space for (“beautiful”) deaf practices, such as “help support,” “share,” and the cultivation of new dreams, which included things like deaf old-­age homes. On the other hand, I also discuss aspects of Silver Venture and other multilevel marketing businesses that deafs were more ambivalent about. The existence of lineages has led to clear hierarchies as well as reproduction of class inequalities. There were tensions between individual gain and collective deaf development. In addition, the finite number of deaf people available to join such businesses meant that deafs who did not like each other were required to spend time together. As such, multilevel marketing participation offers a productive space for thinking about the limits of “deaf deaf same,” sameness work, deaf similtude, and tensions around the production of the deaf group. While I also discussed these questions in Chapter 4, where I analyzed deaf workers in India’s ITES sector, this chapter differs in that I focus on how deafs actively attempt to turn their social capital into financial capital. This chapter also more directly engages with the ambivalences that deafs feel toward each other and toward being a member of the deaf group—­although the focus on hierarchy within these businesses renders the category of the group more complicated. It is for these reasons—­ the fact that multilevel marketing businesses enabled both the creation of new dreams and practices and the creation of new hierarchies and tensions—­that deaf participation in multilevel marketing is important to examine. Readers might think that this is simply a story of exploitation of deaf people by normals or other deaf people; this is certainly a story that could be told, but it is not the story that I will tell here. Focusing only on exploitation would mean a missed opportunity to examine multiple aspects of



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deaf sociality. More broadly, an analysis of deaf participation in multilevel marketing businesses provides an opportunity to explore the intermingling of different kinds of social, moral, and economic value, the coerciveness of sociality, and the cultivation and creation of novel dreams and practices in modern India. To be sure, there has been much anthropological and other social science literature on the proliferation of multilevel marketing under neoliberal political economic structures and on the role that such businesses play in creating new forms of economic livelihood and social connections.3 For instance, Jean and John Comaroff (2000, 303) suggest that the burgeoning of such businesses and schemes, “a few legal, many illegal, and some alegal” are not new but that there is something about this (current) moment of dramatic shifts in production, the role of the state, and people’s expectations that have led to the flourishing of such schemes. In thinking about the social work that such schemes do, Peter Cahn (2006, 127) argues that such businesses “represent an opportunity to replace systematized and anonymous labor with work that is transformative and fulfilling, characteristics that compensate for the uncertainty of material rewards.” Similarly, deaf participation in Silver Venture is related to feelings of economic insecurity, hopes that it is an opportunity to earn money (in the absence of other opportunities), and the sense that it is a deaf-­friendly business that articulates with already existing deaf moral economies. What is different about my contribution is that I attend to the ambivalences that participants in these businesses feel and the work that they do in order to maintain a cohesive sense of sociality both inside and outside of these businesses.

Silver Venture and Its Special Friends Silver Venture is an international multilevel marketing business that represents itself as providing “interactive business opportunities” through direct sales of gold coins, health products, watches and jewelry, vacation packages, and telecommunications. The company started in 1998 in Taiwan, where its headquarters still exist. Currently it has offices in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. There are different enrollment packages that one can buy to become a member, or in the company’s words, an independent representative (IR). For the most part, Silver Venture’s special friends make a one-­time payment of around 30,000 rupees and receive either a numismatic gold coin or a fused glass energy disc that is supposed to increase vitality when it is placed close to the body.4 They are told that neither of these objects is as valuable as recruiting people for the business. The real value comes from becoming an IR and recruiting others to join under them. They are told that “IR equals RI” or that becoming an independent representative equals recurring income. Although the numismatic coin is supposed to increase in value and independent representatives often told me

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that they could be sold on eBay or elsewhere for large sums, I never learned of anyone selling a coin. Silver Venture’s website features images of smiling IRs of many nationalities and exudes an air of cosmopolitan multiculturalism. Special friends stressed the fact that Silver Venture is international and this gave it more purchase than other popular multilevel marketing businesses that only existed in India. Although Silver Venture’s global structure might seem to require a messy accounting process, transactions take place and are monitored through an online “e-commerce system” on the company’s website, which appeared to effortlessly track complicated lineages; this website also linked Silver Venture’s special friends to the larger international Silver Venture community. All of the deaf team leaders with whom I talked said that they hoped to ultimately have deaf downlines based in the United Kingdom, United States, and Dubai, thereby creating international deaf financial networks. This would invert currently existing spatial practices (and power dynamics) in which deaf foreigners come to visit India but deaf Indians do not generally travel outside of India. Although this dovetails with Ida Fadzillah’s (2005) findings that rural Thai young women were drawn to becoming Amway distributors because Amway made them feel cosmopolitan (also see Wilson 1999), I argue that the kind of cosmopolitanism desired by special friends is based on an already existing sense of deaf similitude and a desire to create concrete bonds with deaf people living outside of India. For instance, a deaf Silver Venture member named Devananda proudly told me more than once about a downline who is a famous deaf badminton player in the United Kingdom. Rajesh, a deaf Bangalore leader, forwarded to all of his downlines a newspaper article about deaf Silver Venture members in Hong Kong. When a deaf man who emigrated to the United States returned to Bangalore for the summer, Rajesh tried diligently to recruit him by doing multiple “prosperity meetings”—­PMs, Silver Venture’s term for recruitment meetings—inviting him to these meetings, and introducing him to his Bangalore team. Where did the term “special friend” come from and how did deaf people initially become involved in Silver Venture? At the very head of deaf Silver Venture lineages is a normal man named Pradeep Sathi who is credited by deaf people with creating the term “special friend.” Sathi is often called G.O.D., an acronym for his business name, which is “Guide of Destiny.” In a captioned video made in 2008 for the first anniversary function of Silver Venture’s special friends entitled “Silent Pathbearers to Success,” Sathi sits in a massive black leather armchair (just large enough to comfortably seat his large frame) and enthusiastically proclaims: “Hello, my special friends, I love you!” He then says that he prefers to call “those who the world call as deaf my special friends because they are close to my heart.” Sathi joined Silver Venture in 2001 and he says in the video that he was always interested in helping “the less privileged.” However it



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was not until 2007, after he became a millionaire, that he “found” a way to help his special friends. It so happened that one of his downlines worked with a deaf man named Bhupen and this downline conducted a PM with Bhupen in which he explained the principles of the business to him. Bhupen was interested and decided to join. After signing up, Bhupen rapidly recruited other deaf people from his social networks. In September 2007, there were around thirty-­five deaf members of Silver Venture living in Pune and Sathi decided to donate an air-­ conditioned conference room on a weekly basis, provide sign language interpretation for training sessions, and to caption Silver Venture training videos. Deaf members of Silver Venture consider Sathi to be the father and great upline of all deaf teams in India and they speak affectionately about him and his commitment to them. Deafs cheered and applauded when someone used the term “special friend” at a Silver Venture meeting and Sathi’s financial success was discussed with much admiration and reverence.5 Although most deafs had never met Sathi, he was more than just an abstract business leader; he was considered to be a nurturing and enabling supporter of “deaf development” in all of its registers. He was similar to the church leaders discussed in Chapter 2 in that he also preached the gospel of deaf development, albeit his version of development was explicitly based on deaf people’s financial success. In churches and other fellowship spaces, deaf people learned authoritative language and discourse for discussing the importance of sign language and deaf sociality. They also learned how to be strong and confident deaf people. In Silver Venture and other multilevel marketing businesses, deaf people also learned how to be strong and confident deaf people, but these characteristics were discussed in the context of economic success. G.O.D. helped to legitimize and authorize financial success, as he himself was ostensibly an example of how monetary profits could be used to help others. Indeed, G.O.D exuded both charismatic and pastoral power. As a charismatic leader, Sathi provided encouragement and inspiration.6 His pastoral power, or the ways that he tended to and took care of deafs, extended to providing them with communication access such as closed-­ captioned videos and sign language interpretation. Silver Venture events for the deaf were always interpreted, and when top deaf Indian leaders traveled to Malaysia for a conference, for example, ISL interpreters accompanied them. Many training videos were also interpreted, notably by some of India’s most well-­known sign language interpreters. Special friends proudly told me about this level of access and juxtaposed it with access elsewhere: as I have discussed, there are few qualified interpreters in India and even fewer schools, colleges, and workplaces that hired interpreters on a daily basis or for special functions. Indian disability laws do not mandate the provision of communication access. As such, there were very few spaces where Indian deafs felt that their communication modalities were respected—­and Silver Venture was one such space.

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As Sathi stated in the second anniversary special friends video: “This business gives an equal opportunity to everyone.” Indeed, Silver Venture was one of very few normal organizations or businesses that provided the communication access that might make this possible. In addition, not only did Silver Venture give deaf people an “equal opportunity” but it appeared to be particularly well designed for deaf participation, because it permitted deaf people to transform their dense social networks into financial capital, and deaf people were able to work almost exclusively with other deaf people. G.O.D. and many of his immediate downlines live in Pune, the second largest city in the state of Maharashtra and the eighth largest in India. Pune is an intimate yet bustling college city that feels more like a town and this is where Sathi first “found” his special friends. According to Pinky, the wife of a Pune special friends leader named Dinesh who later became a special friends leader herself: “Pune is very small and there are one thousand deaf people living within an eleven-­kilometer radius. This makes it easy to meet people; if there is a problem, it can be resolved easily.” Although I am skeptical about Pinky’s numbers, her comment reveals the importance of being able to meet in person for structured meetings. Her comment also reveals that a large pool of potential deaf recruits is essential for success. Dinesh and Pinky head up the Pune branch of Team Wonderful Dream, which meets formally on a weekly basis, usually at Dinesh and Pinky’s house. It is not uncommon for people on their team to meet daily to “share” ideas, plan, and discuss recruitment strategies. Dinesh said that he pairs successful team members with those who are not so successful and everyone works together and helps one another. “The power of team” is stressed and teammates are encouraged to practice their prosperity meetings (PMs) with each other, come to each others’ aid to convince reluctant potential members, and share their business goals and dreams. Deaf people all over India know Pune as the place where Silver Venture started for the deaf, and the special friends living there have been most successful at turning their social capital into financial capital, as they had all of India’s deaf as potential recruits; deaf Silver Venture leaders such as Bhupen, Vicky, Dinesh, and Pinky are at the top of Silver Venture’s deaf lineages and as the business spread in different geographic regions, they benefited. Dinesh joined Silver Venture under Vicky, who had joined under Bhupen. His joining coincided with the closing of his family’s manufacturing factory and subsequent times of economic uncertainty in 2008–­2009. As such, Dinesh devoted himself full time to conducting PMs and outreach to other deaf people living in Pune and elsewhere. He and Pinky, who joined under him, began traveling all over India in search of new additions to his team. This traveling has been a source of great pride to them both and they speak frequently of their independence and ability to fly all over India to meet current and prospective



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downlines. Many of my deaf friends enviously mentioned these practices when talking about Dinesh and Pinky because such travel is not the norm in Indian deaf worlds. Dinesh and Pinky are an energetic couple in their early thirties. Both attended oral schools in Pune where they did not learn sign language or use it to communicate and they often stress this fact during their PMs and other presentations. They have since learned sign language from socializing with deaf signers and now they sign fluently, as they say that they want to communicate the wonderful opportunities offered by Silver Venture to other deaf people; their choice to learn sign language serves to align them with the larger deaf world. Dinesh and Pinky’s rags-­to-­riches (in truth, their families were relatively affluent) and voice-­to-­sign story is a source of great inspiration to many deaf people. The telling of such inspirational stories is both part of Silver Venture’s power and part of what many scholars consider to be a key component in the creation of deaf sociality. As I discussed in Chapters 1 and 3, deaf people in different contexts introduce themselves by telling their personal, institutional, and communal biographies and share their past experiences and histories in relation to deaf worlds; such stories serve as a means of sharing information and they bring people together (Lane et al. 1996, 7). The telling of stories also functions as a communal norm; through telling them, opportunities are created both for deafs to orient themselves toward becoming a part of this community and to learn what is important within it (Bechter 2008). As I will demonstrate, Dinesh and Pinky, as well as other Silver Venture leaders and members, have transformed this technique of telling self-­narratives to include future-­oriented narratives in which hopes and dreams are shared. These future-­oriented biographies-­in-­the-­making therefore mark a departure from the normative telling of stores within deaf worlds, which are usually past-­oriented (Mindess 2006). The emergence and cultivation of these future-­oriented biographies and narratives point to the emergence of social, moral, and economic practices oriented toward deaf development.7

First Prosperity Meeting I first learned about, and then later met, Dinesh while I was living in Bangalore. On September 1, 2008, I had invited myself over to Aparna’s house, as deafs in Bangalore had told me that Aparna was one of Bangalore’s deaf Silver Venture leaders. At that point, I had never seen a PM nor did I know what one was. I was initially quite surprised that Aparna had joined the business because she had two well-­paying and stable jobs: she was an animator for a large company with multinational connections and she also worked as a fashion designer in her family’s business. Aparna is a tall and fashionable woman in her early thirties with excellent sign language and English communication skills (she had attended an innovative deaf private school that used sign language in her home city)

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and a vast deaf and normal social network. Her love marriage to a normal husband created waves in the deaf world in Bangalore; although love marriages between deafs were increasingly common, love marriages between normals and deafs were much rarer. Upon arriving at Aparna’s house, I discovered that the other attendees were two young women and a young man in their twenties, all of whom worked at different coffee café chains; a young man studying for a bachelor’s degree in computer applications; and a young deaf pastor named Naveen. As I had seen one of the women and the pastor at church the previous week, we chatted for a few minutes and caught up on each other’s news. We also admired Aparna’s lovely apartment. The attendees were in awe of Aparna because she was of a different social and economic standing from them and had higher educational qualifications. After talking informally for a while, we clustered around the coffee table in the sitting room. Aparna began the prosperity meeting by asking us, “Who does not want to help people?” Of course everyone responded that they wanted to help others. Aparna then told us that the presentation was going to be like a parachute trip and that we should not interrupt or ask questions until we landed. She said that we were required to turn off our mobile phones, which we all obediently did. At that point she turned on her laptop and began an elaborate PowerPoint presentation that Dinesh had given her. Aparna started by saying that we all had dreams when we were children and she asked us what our dreams were. The male coffee shop worker said that he wanted a house and a stable job. Aparna responded by stating that these dreams were impossible to attain with his current job and salary. She then showed us pictures of various objects of desire: a big bungalow, a Ferrari, a world tour, good education for children, and money for retirement. She told us that, like most of the world, we would never be able to afford these things. Then she showed us complicated charts with data about poverty rates and percentages as established by the United Nations. After showing us these charts, Aparna had to stop her presentation because no one in the room knew what the United Nations was. (To explain, Aparna said that it was the United Nations that stopped India and Pakistan from fighting.) She then showed us a diagram of a river of money far away from a cluster of houses. Over a period of a year, one house laid pipes and was able to access this water and money, and then the other houses around it piped in water from that initial house. Aparna’s point was that through sharing resources, everyone would benefit. Implied was that upon joining Silver Venture and being connected to other uplines and downlines, there would always be a steady stream of revenue. This resonated with attendees, as they were already connected and oriented toward each other through being part of deaf sociality. Returning to the theme of helping people, Aparna told us about the Silver Venture Foundation, which had donated money to NGOs around the world. She



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showed us a scrapbook in which she had arranged various certificates attesting to Silver Venture’s humanitarian work and pictures of famous members of Silver Venture performing charitable works. “Here is a business that helps people” was implied. Aparna connected the things in the scrapbook back to our desires to help others and she said that through participating in the business we would be able to do this. Aparna ended her PowerPoint presentation with video clips of dizzying crowds at Silver Venture international conferences and she told us stories about various people in the clips: the twenty-­six-­year-­old man who retired after making lakhs of rupees and the bored housewife who joined Silver Venture despite her husband’s resistance and subsequently wound up making more money than her husband. After Aparna finished, we sat around drawing diagrams of uplines and downlines as we struggled to understand how the business worked. These diagrams resembled pyramids as well as family trees. Aparna patiently explained the rules around duplication or the need to recruit two downlines, one each for your left and right sides, as this was the only way that you would earn money. She called this “the importance of balance.” She also explained the importance of duplicating the work of uplines and she stressed that “the power of duplication” was one of Silver Venture’s main principles. We then had a conversation about logistics in which Aparna told us that potential members had to possess permanent account numbers and credit cards in order to join.8 Once they had these, names and numbers could quickly be entered into the “e-commerce” system. As everyone left, Aparna distributed silver-­and-­white business cards on which she was identified as a “prosperity consultant” and as a member of Team Wonderful Dream. The attendees, with the exception of the pastor (who said that he had come just to “see learn”), were excited about joining, but they were concerned about their lack of money and credit cards. Later when we were alone, Aparna told me that she did not want these deafs as her downlines. She said that they lacked good English skills, were not computer literate, and their current earnings of 5,000 rupees a month prevented them from being able to raise the required 30,000 rupees to join. According to Aparna, it is important to focus on quality and not quantity when recruiting people for the business. She explained that quality means someone who is easy to communicate with via text messaging and e-mail, knows good English, can quickly be trained to do a prosperity meeting and to recruit others to the business, and has disposable income. Aparna said that there were few deaf people like this in Bangalore and elsewhere and so it was difficult to find good team members. She also said—and this is something that I heard others say frequently when critiquing other Silver Venture teams—that there were people who just wanted to make fast money and were not selective in choosing downlines, and this would later create problems. Aparna’s comments about quality versus

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quantity reveal cracks in ideas and ideals of deaf similitude. She was quite clear that she wanted a specific kind of deaf person as a downline and that such deaf people were hard to find. This meant, as I discuss below, that she and others had to engage in uneasy compromises and sameness work (as well as excluding some deafs).

On Hopes and Dreams Although Aparna’s prosperity meeting was the first one that I saw, it would not be the last. A few days later I went to Kishore’s cyber café because Aparna told me that Kishore was one of her downlines and she was teaching him how to do prosperity meetings. Kishore showed me his presentation: it was identical to Aparna’s as she had given him a copy of hers (which, in turn, she had gotten from Dinesh). Kishore, a quiet, thoughtful, and earnest deaf man from an affluent Tamil family, also told me that Bangalore-­based members of Team Wonderful Dream congregated in his cyber café on Sunday afternoons in order to discuss their dreams for the future, plan prosperity meetings, and share strategies for recruiting people. Kishore told me that he was initially reluctant to join but he decided to do so after thinking about it for two months. He told me: “My cyber café is not enough for the future. My earnings are not good enough. How will I live in the future?” Kishore’s words “Future life how?” reflected anxiety and uncertainty about how to plan for the future and what life would be like. Kishore told me that his dream was to travel with other deaf people, a dream that was repeated by others on his team and other teams. Chetan, another member of Team Wonderful Dream, told me that he decided to join after meeting Pinky and Dinesh and hearing about their journeys all over India. He thought that it would be wonderful to travel recreationally with other deaf friends in large deaf groups but his government salary did not provide him with the financial means to do this. Aparna also wanted to travel (and she was interested in wine tasting and horseback riding). Since the formation of the All India Federation of the Deaf in 1955, deaf Indians have traveled all over India for sporting events and competitions, deaf culture seminars, and beauty and dance pageants, often in large groups. Such traveling, even to a neighboring city or state, is an important part of being a member of a deaf organization. However, the kind of tourism and traveling that special friends desired departs from this form of institutional deaf travel, as it is purely recreational and unfettered by deaf bureaucracies. In addition to such aspirations for personal mobility and independence, participants told me about their desire to help other deaf people. Dinesh told me multiple times that Silver Venture provides him with the freedom and time to help other deafs; he said that if he had a regular job, he would not be able to



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meet and help deaf people as frequently as he currently does (although he did not actually give me examples of how he helped people outside of encouraging them to participate in the business). He and Pinky regaled me with stories about how they had helped economically less well off deaf people as well as deaf people without good sign language or English skills. For instance, there were two very poor team members in Pune whom they had personally encouraged to join Silver Venture. Prior to joining Silver Venture, neither had a pukka (proper) house. According to Dinesh and Pinky, each had earned over two lakh (200,000) rupees and was able to build a house with a real roof. Another example they shared with me was a deaf Gujarati housewife who was timid and shy before she joined Silver Venture; after joining Silver Venture she could read and write in English and confidently give PMs on her own. Dinesh and Pinky seemed to me to be similar to the deaf missionaries, pastors, and evangelists that were the focus of Chapter 2. Like these individuals, Dinesh and Pinky were able to travel and minister to their current and potential flock. They traveled throughout India, meeting current team members, conducting training and recruitment sessions, and generally offering “help support.” And they had the authority of G.O.D. and other successful normal and deaf business leaders behind them. Dinesh and Pinky also talked to me about Margaret, an “average” and “low” deaf woman with poor communication skills who joined their team in Bangalore. Margaret exists on the fringes of Bangalore’s deaf world due to her halting sign language and awkward social skills. Although she had successfully secured a clerical position at a government bank many years ago, Margaret had joined Silver Venture because she desired additional income (and it also seemed to me that she was lonely and therefore excited about having this new network of teammates to interact with). However, she had problems recruiting people to join under her due to her inability to deliver a persuasive PM and her lack of an extensive deaf social network. Dinesh and Pinky said that her team members wanted to “help support” her to succeed. Helping Margaret by encouraging her to join the business was an example of how Silver Venture encouraged deaf people to support other deaf people whom they might not otherwise support: presumably Margaret would learn better sign language skills in order to share her hopes and dreams and successfully recruit more people. Through participating in Silver Venture, she would be transformed into a fluent signer and become more strong and confident, just like Dinesh and Pinky. Dinesh and Kishore told me that they wanted to build old-­age homes for deaf senior citizens—­this was one of their dreams. Devananda, a deaf Krishna devotee who teaches Hindu morality courses to deaf people throughout India, told me that he had joined Silver Venture in order to buy land to build an ashram, a home for aged deaf, and a meditation hall.9 Minoo, a former tailor and former Amway salesperson in her late fifties, and perhaps the oldest member

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of Team Wonderful Dream in Bangalore, told me that she joined under Devananda because “he is using the business to support and help deaf.” She said: “I want to help poor deaf people coming from villages, I want to help deaf people learn about HIV and AIDS, I want to help deaf go to America to study, and I want to help deaf in India get into colleges.” Minoo’s expansive list of ways that she wanted to support other deaf people shows both her sense of responsibility toward other deaf people and her conviction that Silver Venture would enable her to help others. Silver Venture members desired to use their earnings for deaf development—­for creating better education options for deaf youth as well as deaf-­run institutions such as schools, ashrams, and old-­age homes. Deaf development was therefore a theme running through prosperity meetings, and members often saw Silver Venture as a way of achieving deaf development both for themselves and for all deafs. In addition, deaf Silver Venture members wanted to become financially independent. They wanted the ability to travel recreationally and purchase material possessions. In this sense, they wanted to be “equal to normals” as normals presumably are able to do these things with fewer barriers. During a prosperity meeting that we attended together in Bangalore, Pinky told me: “It is difficult for deaf in India to get jobs and deaf and hearing are not equal. Deaf people do not own cars and do not fly on planes. But deaf people have dreams as well.” Pinky’s statement about deaf and hearing people not being equal and deaf people having dreams points to her and other leaders’ conviction that Silver Venture is one avenue for pursuing equality, at least economically (and Dinesh and Pinky were adamantly not interested in pursuing equality through deaf political organizations such as the National Association of the Deaf). However, I want to stress that Pinky’s definition of equality, at least in this particular example, is based on having the ability to engage in individual consumption. Indeed, participating in Silver Venture was permeated by tensions between desiring individual commodities and experiences and desiring to help others and engage in collective deaf development. It seemed to me that deaf members resolved this tension by using their aspirations for collective deaf development as a way to render acceptable their aspirations for individual financial development; although the latter was not seen as necessarily nonvirtuous. After all, consumption power might render deafs and normals equal (although it would result in inequality among deafs along class lines). This uneasy relationship between individual consumption and collective deaf development resonates with Margit van Wessel’s (2004) work with middle-­and upper-­class Gujaratis who have an ambivalent relationship to consumption, claiming that it is “immoral.” Van Wessel’s middle-­class interlocutors in Baroda moralize specifically against the materialism that has come to represent the consuming classes, while they fully participate in it themselves. In this case, it seems that my deaf interlocutors



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were not so concerned with the (im)morality of consumption itself as with how it would differentiate deaf people from each other. However, deaf development as an overarching goal helped to render all deaf desires as moral.

Negotiating Tensions Special friends negotiated recurring tensions as they attempted to maintain harmonious and cohesive socialities as well as productive Silver Venture teams. As I mentioned earlier, Aparna had very selective ideas of who should be included on her team. She stressed that members should choose their downlines carefully. Teams are ideally exclusive and controlled: the business is not for all deafs. For example, Chetan expressed his frustration after he learned that Margaret had been recruited to be a member of his team: “I cannot imagine the future of the business with people like Margaret in it . . . she is so low, she cannot think properly.” Aparna expressed dismay about the fact that a downline in another city had convinced a woman with poor sign language and English communication skills to join as his downline. She said that this woman would never be able to recruit other people under her and therefore it was pointless to have her as a downline. Aparna was bitter because it meant that she would have to do more work on behalf of her downlines because they would not be able to recruit people on their own. Chetan’s and Aparna’s sentiments reveal that there was a very specific desired deaf team member: the ideal team member was someone who could read and write well, with access to a computer, and with excellent sign language skills—­someone who is trainable and who will train others.10 In their search for such team members, Silver Venture leaders were constantly evaluating potential members and discriminating against those who they thought would be poor downlines. However, once a deaf joined a team, even if he or she was not an ideal downline, other teammates had to adjust and work together with them; they were “stuck” together. In the examples outlined above, Aparna and Chetan ultimately had to adjust. Furthermore, the importance of teamwork combined with the small pool of potential deaf members meant that people who would not normally want or choose to work together were required to interact on a weekly basis. For example, Aparna told me that she did not like Devananda because he behaved inappropriately with women. Chetan said that Minoo was a thief who borrowed money from people that she did not repay. He had avoided spending time with her in the past after a bad experience selling Amway products together and now he was upset that they were on the same team. Arman, a quiet and shy Muslim deaf man, became very angry when Devananda greeted people by saying “Hare Krishna” because he found this greeting offensive; he told me many times that he did not like Devananda. At one point, Aparna—­as she was an upline to both

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Devananda and Arman—­had to step in and mediate between the two of them. She encouraged both Devananda and Arman to focus only on the business and deaf development and to ignore religious differences. As a result, Team Wonderful Dream (and other Silver Venture teams) was a space created out of, and in relation to, past relationship histories that had to be negotiated in order to maintain team harmony. Team members engaged in sameness work through which they focused on shared experiences (such as deafness) and desires (for deaf development) and adjusted behavior and expectations. Tensions over conflicting understandings of “help support” due to downlines were also visible. At one point Aparna bragged to me that she had fifty-­ seven downlines. She was proud of being responsible for teaching and guiding so many people. She told me that Dinesh had taught her everything she knew. She in turn planned to teach her downlines the same things that Dinesh had taught her, just as she did with Kishore by sharing her PM presentation. In doing so, she was imitating her upline and passing on the knowledge that she learned from him. As mentioned earlier, Dinesh and Pinky travel all over India to “support,” “motivate,” and conduct further trainings with their downlines. On one occasion, I accompanied Dinesh, Pinky, and Aparna on a three-­day trip from Bangalore to Erode, a medium-­sized city in Tamil Nadu, where they went to do PMs and help their downlines recruit additional members. In Erode, these leaders gave PMs to large groups of potential recruits and they also met with current downlines to offer strategic tips and “help support.” However, many downlines complained to me that they had not received enough “help support” from their uplines and that they felt abandoned. They felt that their uplines were only looking out for their own interests and not really trying to help them. Downlines told me that they needed more help with practicing and giving PMs and there were people such as Margaret who were unable to find new downlines on their own at all. Silver Venture’s hierarchical structure was also a significant source of tension. Hierarchies were enforced and reinforced by uplines telling their downlines to imitate and follow them. A Pune-­based member of Team Wonderful Dream named Krishna told me that “members have to teach and explain exactly like those above teach and explain.” And remember, Vicky and Bhupen opened the 2009 second anniversary program by running onto the stage and commanding the audience to follow them. The lingering question remains, however, can a downline do exactly what an upline does? There are a finite number of deaf people and downlines, especially those currently at the bottom of the pyramid, have an increasingly limited pool of people from which to recruit.11 A tenuous harmony is created through hierarchy, although this harmony is occasionally threatened by downlines feeling disappointment at their inability to follow their uplines and their occasional sense that their uplines are not altogether



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invested in them. Indeed, these hierarchies pose a challenge to deaf similitude, as uplines and downlines are not the same. Downlines can perfectly imitate their uplines but, because of the finite (and decreasing) number of deaf people available to recruit, they can never be the same as their uplines, at least in terms of their earning potential. In addition, there was no harmony between competing teams and Silver Venture deaf teams and lineages posed a challenge to a cohesive Bangalore deaf sociality. In some cases sameness work was not sufficient to prevent fractures from forming. Aparna and Rajesh were bitter enemies, even though Aparna and Rajesh’s wife Varuna had been close school friends. Rajesh was originally supposed to join the business under Aparna. However, after watching a PM by another deaf man he changed his mind and joined Team Commitment, another Silver Venture team that was hoping to find new members in Bangalore. In choosing to join another team, Rajesh also turned his back on Devananda, his old teacher and mentor who had formerly counseled him on the importance of proper morality. (As I discussed, Devananda was one of Aparna’s downlines and if Rajesh had joined Aparna’s team he would have become Devananda’s downline and teammate). As a result of Rajesh’s decision to join another team, there were two competing teams in Bangalore in search of additional members to “grab.”12 Indeed, Rajesh told me that before he and Aparna joined Silver Venture, they were good friends. Now, he said, “it is like the two fruit carts right across from each other, competing for customers with lower prices.” (However, in this case the two fruit carts have the same fruit and the same prices; they just offer different uplines and downlines.) Team meetings were shrouded in secrecy and team members treated me with suspicion when they learned that I was interacting with more than one Silver Venture team. Members of different teams were afraid that I was spying for another team or that somehow word of what was happening in team meetings would circulate (which it often does in a dense deaf world that functions through circulations of news, information, and rumors). Deafs who were not members of Silver Venture were aware of and frequently discussed the rivalry between the two Bangalore-­based teams and the status of Aparna and Rajesh’s relationship. This rivalry was a source of great interest and concern to people because Bangalore’s deaf world felt very small to those within it. On the one hand, these competing teams created a fracture in this intimate deaf world and turned, in extreme cases, students against teachers (as in the case of Rajesh’s not joining Devananda’s team). On the other hand, through sameness work members of different teams were able to create friendly and harmonious deaf spaces by not discussing business issues when they met at other deaf functions or spaces; instead, they focused on other shared experiences or general desires for deaf development.

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Failed Promises The animosity between competing teams extended to other worlds as well: Arman was a shy, overweight, and socially awkward twenty-­nine-­year-­old Muslim man who avoided hanging out with other deaf people because he said that they always gossip and tell lies. Arman had learned sign language as a late adolescent; he initially attended a normal school where he performed poorly. His family then transferred him to Sheila Kothavala Institute for the Deaf (SKID) where he learned sign language as a secondary school student. According to his very protective mother, Arman was going through a “low” period in the spring of 2008 because he had left his job as an assistant supervisor at an Adidas shop and had no friends. Kishore and Rajesh had been classmates at SKID, and although Arman was initially close to Rajesh, they grew apart and did not have much contact after they finished their SSLC. One day, however, Kishore invited him to his cyber café for a meeting that Arman thought was to be about real estate but that turned out to be about Silver Venture. Arman said that after watching Kishore’s PM, he was not interested, and he thought that Silver Venture was a “bad business.” Kishore then brought Aparna to Arman’s house to do another PM and although Arman said that he was still not interested, he said that Aparna “kept on SMSing and calling my mom and calling and SMSing and finally I agreed. She forced me.” He also said that Kishore, Chetan, and Aparna kept on telling him via SMS that the business was “good.” So he joined Silver Venture under Aparna. According to Arman’s mother, Aparna promised her that she “would take care of Arman and train him.” Arman’s mother also said that Aparna promised that she would help Arman get a job at her animation company and the two became very close friends, so close that Arman called Aparna his sister. According to Arman’s mother, Aparna promised Arman more than just inclusion in Silver Venture; she promised to include him in wider deaf social networks. Silver Venture became Arman’s ticket to becoming a member of deaf sociality. However, as the competition between Aparna and Rajesh intensified and there was increasingly personal tension between them, Aparna started to step back from the business; as a result, she played a smaller and less visible role in the training process for her downlines. Because of this, Arman and his family felt as though Apartna had abandoned them. Things escalated when Arman and his family asked for their money back.13 Now Arman is not friends with Aparna anymore, and Silver Venture members from both teams have shunned him.

“Force” and “Pressure”: Turning the Deaf Group into Deaf Lineages There are two elements of Arman’s story that call for further discussion: the theme of “force” and the role that his mother played in his decision to join Silver



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Venture. In fact, “force” and the ambivalent presence of family are recurring themes in many Silver Venture stories. Arman said that Aparna “forced” him to join the business. He asked me if Aparna, Dinesh, or Pinky had “forced” me to join. When I asked him what this meant, he said: “to call, contact, SMS, contact repeatedly.” Similarly, another woman living in Erode who joined the business told me that she was “forced” to join by a deaf man who was a community leader: she said that he repeatedly asked her to join, sent her multiple text messages, and then he used his credit card to sign her up and demanded that she pay him back. She paid him because she said that she was “forced” to do so even though she was not particularly interested in Silver Venture. My understanding is that she agreed to give him the money because he was a powerful person in the local deaf community and she did not want to have a conflict with him. I also heard stories from other deaf members who said that they had been “forced” to join by close deaf friends and acquaintances. These people were ambivalent about joining but they did so to please their friends. After joining, many of them professed remorse and said that they did not want to be associated with the business but they did not know how to extricate themselves. Margaret, the “low” woman, said that she had asked Dinesh if she could quit. She told me that his response was no, that she must keep on trying to find other people to join under her. She said he was “forcing” her to remain a member. In conversations with Dinesh, Pinky, Aparna, and Rajesh, they were all very clear that they did not want to force people to join and that it was up to people to make up their own minds: “If they like the business they can join, if they don’t like it, no problem.” But in many cases, members exerted heavy pressure on their friends after PMs and at social functions. Devananda told me that he thought there was a problem “because deaf people cannot tell the difference between pressure and force. One must persuade only, not force.” However, in dense deaf networks, persuasion and social pressure can often be felt as force (Becker 1980, 89–­90). How to say no to one’s schoolmates, churchmates, coworkers, and close friends? Indeed, the use of the word “force” foregrounds the fact that many deaf participants feel that they do not have a choice about whether to participate or not. Deafs depend on and imitate other deafs. More than that, they feel a sense of responsibility to “help support” other deafs as they are “deaf deaf same.” Deaf similitude provides the conditions of possibility for easy translation from social to financial capital, at least for those at the top of deaf lineages. This discussion of “force” also highlights the sense of ambivalence that many deaf people feel and the coerciveness of sociality that occurs when moral and financial economies become intermingled amid and in the face of structural barriers.

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Padding Downlines with the (Normal) Family Returning to the second feature of Arman’s story, despite the fact that Silver Venture promoted deaf independence and that a popular future goal was deaf old-­age homes (where deafs could live apart from their biological families and grow old together), deaf people’s normal families were very much present in Silver Venture lineages. Arman’s mother encouraged him to join Silver Venture, even though a few years earlier some family friends had tried to recruit her and she turned them down because she did not like the idea of participating in a multilevel marketing business herself. But, she said, “For Arman, it is a good opportunity.” She had hoped that it would “give him access to the mainstream deaf community and new friends as he is so depressed right now.” Arman’s mother hoped that joining Silver Venture would increase Arman’s social capital and improve his social experiences in addition to his financial capital. In fact, because their family was financially comfortable she was not concerned about Arman’s making money; she was more concerned with injecting him into deaf networks. In her desire to help Arman, she told Aparna that Aparna could bring potential normal recruits to her and she would help her do PMs. Arman’s mother was not alone in adjusting her feelings about multilevel marketing businesses: a recurring theme which came up during my research were families who thought that multilevel marketing businesses were not good for them but that such businesses were good for their deaf children. In many other cases, deaf children initially joined against their families’ wishes. Eventually, however, family members joined under them as downlines in order to support their deaf children. This meant that lineages were more stable because there was a greater pool of normals from which to recruit: family members could recruit other normals as downlines. Both Dinesh and Pinky’s entire families have joined the business under them, in an inversion of family trees and the hierarchy that generally exists in families. Older normal family members became downlines to their younger deaf children. Dinesh’s father has enthusiastically embraced the business and frequently travels to Qatar to make new connections. Dinesh’s deaf downlines often sent normal potential recruits to Dinesh’s father for PMs and he was instrumental in convincing families of other deaf people to join under their children. Dinesh’s father often told deafs to recruit their families, as this way “there is more benefit for the entire family.” According to him, normal family members could recruit other normals for the business, and success would not only be dependent on recruiting deaf people. Dinesh’s father and other normal speakers at the 2009 anniversary function stressed this point repeatedly. This recruitment of normals represented a tension between deaf participants’ desire to be independent and create new networks of deaf teams, lineages,



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travel groups, and old-­age homes, and their need for their family’s involvement and approval. Silver Venture and other similar businesses provided a space for deaf children and their families to be oriented toward the same goal of financial success; these businesses served as spaces of connection as hearing parents and deaf children became reunited through the creation of new lineages in the form of uplines and downlines. Deaf and normal relationships in the structure of multilevel marketing also point to the importance of normals in deaf lives and in this particular form of deaf development. Ultimately, due to the finite number of deaf people, there was no way for Silver Venture’s special friends to continue to benefit from participation in the business without normals.14 Deafs needed normals.

No Banquet at the Second Anniversary Pune has become a model of deaf development in the present and what a successful deaf future could be, although as Dinesh and Pinky are quick to point out, they have not fulfilled most of their dreams yet and they have not helped as many people as they would like to help. Dinesh, Pinky, Vicky, Bhupen, and the other Pune leaders constantly entreated downlines and potential recruits to “Come to Pune and see for yourself.” What they meant was come and see our fancy houses and cars, come and see how well we dress, come and see the air-­conditioned conference rooms in which we meet, and come and see how confidently we circulate among our neighbors and friends. Perhaps underlying all of this is a sense of come and see both how normal we are (look at our cars, air conditioners, and expensive clothing) and how deaf we are (look how well we sign and how much we care about other deaf people). And many of us did travel to Pune. As I noted earlier, perhaps one thousand special friends from all over India attended the 2008 anniversary function. However, the 2009 gathering had far fewer attendees and was not the envisioned international gathering of two thousand or more deafs attending. The lavish banquet that G.O.D. had promised there would be if there were over one thousand attendees therefore did not materialize and the mood was subdued. Why was there such a decline in numbers that year? One obvious reason was that India was in the midst of a difficult economic period and many deaf were either afraid to join the business or lacked money. Another reason was the fact that despite exhortations by Dinesh, Pinky, and other leaders to have their downlines duplicate their success, downlines were unable to convince other deafs to join for a variety of reasons: they could not explain the business clearly enough because of their sign language skills or because of not understanding the principles of the business themselves; they expected their uplines to “help” them by doing PMs for them (and therefore did not do any work on their own);

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they lamented the lack of training that they received from uplines; there was much fighting within teams over who would “grab” potential deaf recruits; and of course, there was fighting between teams. Deafs also mentioned that there was a lot of “force” placed on them to join the business. In addition, Silver Venture started developing a “bad” reputation over time both among deafs and normals: deafs constantly referred to the fact that the Silver Venture office in Ahmedabad had been shut down by the police and gold coins found there had been seized by the government and that Silver Venture had received negative media attention. Despite the rousing presentations and testimonies, at the end of the anniversary function the mood was melancholic because the poor attendance seemed to represent the end of a potential deaf future, the loss of hopes and dreams about financial independence, new schools for the deaf, and deaf old-­age homes. It goes without saying that most of my deaf friends never recouped their initial investment. And despite claims to the contrary, there was clear class (re)production that took place as those at the head of deaf lineages sought out increasingly poorer deaf people to join under them, therefore producing and reproducing the “bottom of the pyramid” as both an empirical and analytic category. This is not to say that there were not people who were still excited and optimistic. I talked to one young deaf man from Mumbai whose deaf father joined the business under Dinesh over a year ago but he had still not received training. When I asked this young man if he thought that this lack of training meant that his father’s opportunity was now ruined, he said that he did not think so. He said: “Silver Venture is like a beautiful new car. Even if you do not know how to drive it and take an auto [rickshaw] every day, you will wash it every day, and you will one day learn how to drive it.” Similarly, Rajesh was still invested and he ordered his Bangalore team to meet on a weekly basis (although his downlines had not recruited anyone themselves over the past five months and Rajesh did all the work). At the last Team Commitment meeting that I attended, Rajesh announced that he had recruited the treasurer of the Kerala Deaf Association and that this person had many contacts. And so perhaps there were still untapped markets, more social capital to transform into financial capital. And as Dinesh’s father said at the anniversary function: “Business goes up and down. You need to wait and be patient.” This was yet another space in which deaf people had to adjust their future hopes and dreams.

Other Businesses Silver Venture was not the only multilevel marketing business in which deaf people participated; in the absence of other deaf-­ centered employment opportunities, such businesses were perceived as being a means toward deaf



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development. After all, as Pinky and Kishore told me, the government does not help deaf people. In addition to Silver Venture, there were at least five other multilevel marketing businesses with deaf members operating in Bangalore and it was not uncommon for people to belong to both Silver Venture and other businesses. Recruitment sessions were mostly held in large halls in colleges and corporations, spaces that were inaccessible to deaf people on other days. Paper invitations in envelopes were distributed at one recruitment session for yet another and SMSes were circulated to invite deafs to come to meetings and learn about different businesses. These invitations often mentioned transnational links and guaranteed prosperity and they began with questions such as “Deaf’s future how?” Unlike Silver Venture, these other businesses did not require as much of a financial investment and cost around 3,000 rupees compared to Silver Venture’s 30,000 rupees. In addition, members rarely met in regimented and organized fashions to strategize and discuss dreams as they did with Silver Venture. As such, there was less at stake, socially, morally, and economically. In September 2008, I attended a function hosted by the deaf spiritual teacher Devananda for Krishna’s birthday celebration. As part of this festive program, there was storytelling about Krishna, an art contest, and a discussion of Hindu morality and the importance of good behavior. At the end of the program, Devananda invited a normal woman up onto the stage to talk about a business called Golden Days, for which she was recruiting. Devananda was a member of this business (in addition to being a member of Silver Venture: his dream was to build an ashram for deaf people) and he invited this woman to present at the function after soliciting donations from her for Krishna’s birthday. With the help of a deaf man who was a Golden Days member, this woman talked about the benefits of the business and the guaranteed income that participants would earn. At the end, many people filled out the paperwork to join before heading off for a rice dinner to celebrate Krishna’s birthday. When I talked about this recruitment session with Chetan, a deaf government worker and Silver Venture member, he said that deafs often had money problems, and that Golden Days was one way for deafs to help each other and become financially independent. Chetan’s words, and the existence of this recruitment session at a function for Krishna’s birthday, point to the intermingling of moral and financial economies and tensions between individual and collective success; they also point to the ubiquity of such businesses in deaf worlds. Indeed, multilevel marketing could be found in the most unexpected places: dusty courtyards of vocational training centers where deaf trainees ate lunch, high-­tech ITES offices where deaf people worked as back office data entry operators, deaf clubs where older deaf men employed as manual laborers drank tea, and deaf churches and deaf Hindu gatherings. To be sure, there were also participants who attended recruitment sessions for the complimentary tea and

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samosas, the opportunity to socialize with deaf friends, and the entertainment invariably provided by PowerPoint presentations and product demonstrations. Yet, in observing PowerPoint presentations proclaiming that everyone has dreams, that it is important to save for the future, and that deaf people must help each other, they were also producing and participating in both material and affective space for considering what this future might be and for speculating about deaf development.

Conclusion Readers may be wondering what the negative effects of participating in these businesses were for deaf sociality, especially since very few deaf people profited financially. Were there fractures in deaf sociality? What eventually happened between Rajesh and Aparna? Although these two leaders did not become friends again, there was very little change in Bangalore’s deaf worlds. As I have demonstrated throughout this book, deaf people very productively engage in sameness work in order to negotiate tensions and differences. They negotiated uneasy alliances and unsavory lineages as they attempted to create more inhabitable presents and futures. The exception to this is Arman, whose family demanded that his money be returned to him, and who has largely been shunned—although, as I mentioned, Arman was never really a member of Bangalore’s deaf worlds to begin with. When I spoke with other deaf people about Arman’s situation, they blamed him for not being able to adjust and for not being “cool” about what happened. What they meant was that by making contentious demands against Aparna, he threatened to rupture the harmony that characterized the current deaf order. Many of my friends were also upset about the loss of hard-­earned money but they did not make waves or confront leaders; they adjusted. To be sure, one only has to look a bit more closely at deaf participation in these businesses to realize that deaf sociality has the potential to be quite disharmonious and that harmony is maintained through deaf people’s active work. This maintenance of harmony by deaf multilevel marketing business participants is very similar to the work that deaf vocational training students, deaf employees at multinational ITES corporations, and deaf members of deaf churches engage in as they spend time and work alongside other deafs. As I have stressed throughout this book, deaf people produce themselves and are produced by others as a deaf group and deaf sociality becomes a source of multiple forms of social, moral, and economic value, in addition to being a value in and of itself. And because of structural barriers, in many cases deaf sociality was often the only value legible to normals that my deaf friends had to work with. Despite the existence of lineages, teams, and hierarchies, which seemingly served as a way of differentiating deaf people, these businesses were



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ultimately another site where deaf people are ambivalently produced as a deaf group (or, in this case, as members of the category of special friends). Multilevel marketing businesses were therefore another neoliberal site in which value is extracted from deaf sociality in ways not necessarily to all deaf people’s advantage. Already existing moral economies were transformed into financial economies that monetarily enriched a select few. Although there were deaf people at the top of lineages, a deaf bottom of the pyramid was produced and there was clear class (re)production. As I discussed in Chapter 4, there are ways that deaf people are “included” under neoliberal capitalism and this “inclusion” is potentially exploitative. In this case, deaf and normal people at the top of Silver Venture’s lineages benefited the most financially. Ultimately, it was the normal G.O.D. himself who financially prospered the most, although Dinesh and Pinky and other deaf leaders did quite well for themselves, too. As I noted at the beginning of this chapter, however, I do not want to analyze deaf people’s participation in Silver Venture and other multilevel marketing businesses as only an example of deaf exploitation by other deafs or normals. I argue that participants in these businesses, even if they did not profit financially, benefited in other ways—­they learned new sign language lexicon as well as new discourses, they experimented with new kinds of social organization, and they became more confident through conducting prosperity meetings and recruitment sessions. In that sense, they derived value from participating in these businesses, although this value came at a financial and occasionally a social price. Multilevel marketing businesses therefore offered deaf participants a space for experimenting with and re-­entrenching new and familiar social, moral, and economic practices and for developing deaf orientations concerned with both the present and future. In addition, such businesses provided an authoritative space for thinking about and working toward deaf development. After all, in Silver Venture, deaf people were special friends protected by a benevolent G.O.D. However and unfortunately, this G.O.D. did not do very much for deafs materially besides provide air-­conditioned conference rooms and sign language interpreters.

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Conclusion India’s Deaf Futures/Reorienting the World

India’s Deaf Futures

I began this book by discussing a bus ride that I took with Zahra and other deaf people from the True Life Bible Church to a multilevel marketing business meeting. It seems fitting to end by returning to Zahra, even though her experiences have not been explicitly discussed in the rest of the book. Zahra was a warm and thoughtful woman in her early thirties who was determined to seek out educational, training, and livelihood opportunities; she was also keen to spend as much time as possible with other deaf people. For most of the time that I knew her, she worked as a “silent brewmaster” at Café Coffee Day, a popular café chain that has been growing rapidly in India. (“Silent brewmaster” is the chain’s official term for deaf baristas.) Zahra first worked at a large but quiet outlet located in a leafy and exclusive neighborhood and later she was transferred to a smaller but busier outlet across the street from a prestigious women’s college. I often visited her at both outlets and she always made me a cappuccino, which she decorated with a foam flower. During these visits, we chatted about the various deaf events that we had gone to since we had last met, the different churches and fellowships that Zahra had attended, and her future plans since she was not very happy working at Café Coffee Day. When she was busy making coffee drinks, I would sometimes chat with her normal coworkers or customers, who were all very positive about interacting with Zahra. Normal coworkers told me that because Zahra had been working at Café Coffee Day so long, she was a helpful person and they would ask her questions about various procedures. I often saw her helping newer employees with the cash register or other tasks. Even though her official role was to make coffee, she also performed other jobs as well, depending on how busy the café was. Communication took place through gestures or rudimentary sign language. Many of these normal coworkers showed me signs that they had learned from

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Zahra and they took great pride in utilizing these. In addition, Café Coffee Day customers, especially repeat customers at the branch located across from the women’s college, told me that they thought that Zahra made the best coffee and that she seemed “happier” and “more hardworking” than the other employees. Although Zahra added value to Café Coffee Day for her coworkers, customers, and corporate headquarters, she was quite ambivalent about working there and worried about what her future would be like. She was the oldest employee at both locations where she worked and she had not received significant raises or promotions despite working for the chain for over three years. Zahra was also concerned because Café Coffee Day had an official age limit for its workers and she was approaching that limit. In 2009, in addition to working at Coffee Day, Zahra teamed up with a deaf man from the city of Tiruppur, Tamil Nadu, whom she met at church. Textiles are manufactured for export in Tiruppur, and the two of them sold cotton clothing that had been rejected for export. He brought big bags of this clothing from Tiruppur to Bangalore weekly and together they would bring the bags to church on Sunday. After the worship service was over, attendees would mill about and look over what was on offer. Especially popular were shirts with the ISL alphabet on them, which Zahra herself had arranged to have printed. She gave deafs deep discounts on the shirts (and everything else), and she told me that she hoped to save up money to open a small shop together with the man from Tiruppur and other deafs from church. The small garment shop never materialized and Zahra moved on to other things. In 2009, Zahra attended a competition that Café Coffee Day hosts annually on World Disability Day for its “silent brewmasters.” A public relations spectacle, the contest gives deaf baristas an opportunity to be creative and experiment with making different kinds of coffee drinks. Zahra did not win the competition, although she did meet her future husband, another “silent brewmaster” whom she befriended. He had originally told her that he wanted to marry a normal girl but she took him to the True Life Bible Fellowship and after spending time with fellowship leaders, he changed his mind. Against her family’s wishes (they wanted her to marry a Muslim man) and with the “help support” of True Life Bible Fellowship’s leaders, they married. The marriage was part of a deaf group marriage ceremony performed by senior pastors from the True Life Bible Fellowship’s headquarters in Kerala. The last time I met Zahra, in 2011, she showed me her wedding photo album and talked about how difficult it was for the two of them to make ends meet. Her husband would subsequently quit his job at Café Coffee Day and go work for Au Bon Pain, an international coffee and pastry chain that had just opened a store in Bangalore, which paid slightly better wages. The couple continued to attend True Life Bible Fellowship meetings and they became increasingly involved in the fellowship’s collective structure. When



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I returned to Bangalore again in 2013, I planned to visit Zahra at Café Coffee Day. I was looking forward to catching up on her news and enjoying coffee drinks made by her. However, mutual deaf friends told me that Zahra and her husband had moved to Hyderabad, where they were working as missionaries-­in-­training for True Life Bible Fellowship. I was not surprised to learn this, as a few of my other deaf friends also took similar positions with True Life Bible Fellowship as missionaries or translators in training. The organization was expanding and in September 2012 it had established an international Sign Language Bible translation center about two hours from Bangalore. With plans to translate the Bible into all of India’s Indian Sign Language (ISL) varieties and to send deaf missionary teams to all of India’s states to set up deaf-­run fellowships, this represented a potential new deaf future. Indeed, when I went to visit the new international center in 2013, I was surprised to see deafs whom I knew from Bangalore. Like Zahra, these deafs were former workers in the hospitality sector or data entry operators who had discovered what they said was a more fulfilling livelihood path. It will be interesting to see whether this vocational path will be “for life” and what kinds of new orientations and socialities emerge out of this very particular nexus of Christianity, deaf sociality, and vocational opportunities and constraints. And what of other deaf futures? Although India signed and ratified the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD), which explicitly discusses the importance of signed languages, there has been little progress toward research into and development of ISL materials and deaf education has not improved. On a more positive note, there is finally movement toward creating a new national disability law. This new law is supposed to reflect the language and spirit of the UNCRPD and, most important for deaf people, it is supposed to include sections on access to sign language interpretation in education and employment. However, there are significant concerns about implementation and whether the new law will recognize ISL as a language and protect the continued existence of separate deaf schools (which my deaf friends very much want). The National Association of the Deaf (NAD) is working closely with other disability organizations in India on drafting the law, and a representative from the NAD is on the drafting committee. As a result, deaf issues are increasingly becoming mainstreamed in the broader disability movement, although many deaf people continue to have doubts about how much the general disability movement understands and respects deaf concerns. Interestingly, deafs are often the foot soldiers of this movement and whenever there is a need to protest or exert presence, deafs are mobilized. For example, in 2011, there was a protest at a national book fair in Delhi for not including books for people with print disabilities. Deaf people were the main protestors, as they were able to move through the city with greater ease than physically disabled

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or blind people (and hence, exemplified another way that value is extracted from deaf people). Similarly, there was a massive mobilization of deaf and disabled people to come to Delhi in early 2014 to demand a new disability bill and deaf people outnumbered any other group by a large margin. In 2012, the national government finally allocated funds toward an Indian Sign Language Research and Training Center (ISLRTC), a center that would be responsible for researching and disseminating Indian Sign Language. Courses in Indian Sign Language, Indian Deaf Studies, and Sign Language Linguistics would be held at the center, as well as courses in sign language interpreting for normals who wanted to become interpreters. Plans were under way to build this center on the New Delhi campus of the Indira Gandhi National Open University. A board of directors was created and a managing trustee, Jaisel Ahuja, was chosen. According to Ahuja, a deaf Indian who emigrated to the United States as a young adult to study at Gallaudet University and who is now a professor there, the center was to be designed according to “deaf space” principles that would accommodate deaf people’s unique visual capacities. He spoke excitedly about consulting with architects located at Gallaudet University who are developing the field of deaf architecture. And many of my deaf friends spoke about finding jobs at the center as researchers, teachers, or administrators. Since this was to be a government institute, there was the sense that working at the ISLRTC would represent a new kind of “for life” on multiple levels: deafs would be able to work alongside other deafs on projects that would be beneficial for deafs, and they would be paid government salaries for doing so. However, in the summer of 2013, the national government abruptly pulled the funding from the institute and its future is uncertain. Ahuja has told me that he was increasingly concerned about the funding being reallocated to educational groups and organizations focusing on oral-­based education and cochlear implant manufacturing. While Ahuja’s fears might be unwarranted, they reflect broader concerns about the lack of attention paid to ISL, deaf education, and interpreting. Indeed, there is not yet a center or institute in India devoted exclusively to sign language. Sign language programs located in the National Institute for Hearing Handicapped often exist in uneasy proximity to and are overshadowed by oral and auditory-­focused programs. Deaf young adults continue to flock to NGO-­organized vocational training centers for training and job placements, multinational and domestic corporations (including café chains like Café Coffee Day) continue to hire deaf workers. There is increasingly a discourse about people with disabilities possessing special abilities and disability employment continues to be a key space for broadcasting corporate social responsibility. Deaf workers continue to be ideal (and idealized) “workers with disabilities” who add value to NGOs, corporations, and their coworkers. Nothing really seems to have changed in terms of deaf



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people’s circulations; although Silver Venture has largely disappeared in deaf circles, it has been replaced by other less expensive multilevel marketing businesses. Rajesh, however, continues to work as part of the Silver Venture business and he is now buying and selling the more expensive vacation packages, with the help of normal family members. As such, Rajesh and other deaf uplines such as Dinesh and Pinky continue to benefit financially. What has changed is that many of my deaf friends have married and started families. In many cases, marriages result in deaf children’s turning their backs on biological families in order to marry other deaf people of different castes, classes, and religious backgrounds. Some of these marriages, like Zahra’s, are officiated over by deaf pastors from True Life Bible Fellowship and other deaf Christian institutions. Biological families sometimes do not attend these ceremonies and only learn about them after the marriage happens; this often leads to bitter discord within families. In some cases, biological families do look for deaf partners for their children, therefore avoiding conflict with deaf children over mixed deaf and normal marriages. As I discussed in this book, deaf people have traveled to Bangalore from all over India in search of education, training, and livelihood. As such, diverse deaf people encounter each other and in some cases fall in love, creating new deaf alliances and intimacies that cross caste, class, religion, and geographic differences. It therefore seemed to me that my deaf friends were re-­and de-­territorializing spaces as they created and sustained these new relationships. The spaces in and through which deaf people circulated became deaf spaces where deaf people took deaf turns and became oriented toward each other. And in some cases, deaf orientations resulted in romantic love. Many of my deaf friends are having children of their own and they are required to make difficult decisions about which languages their children should learn, what communication modality to use at home, and how to plan for deaf family futures. Indeed, this latter question—­of how to plan for deaf family futures—­resonated on multiple levels for many of my deaf friends. How to create deaf lives that are emotionally and financially viable and that involve foregrounding deaf orientations? How to have children value deaf parents and sign language in a context in which sign language is not recognized? And how to provide materially for these children in light of a precarious labor market in which deaf people function as immobile workers? As most of these children are not deaf, this has important stakes for deaf futures. As children of deaf adults, will they become sign language interpreters and/or sign language activists?1 Will these children reorient deaf people toward their biological families as grandparents and extended families insist on spending time with these children? For many of my deaf friends, having children meant a return to familial structures. Having children also meant complicated and sometimes tense

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negotiations with the normal world as they attempted to communicate with their children’s doctors and teachers, for example. And many people, family members included, frowned upon deaf people’s desires and attempts to teach their children sign language, uttering statements such as “If he learns to sign, he will not learn to speak.” In some cases, families strongly offered to take normal children away from their deaf parents, arguing that these children would have better futures if they were to be raised by normal family members. Indeed, normal children pose both a host of challenges and a set of possibilities for deaf futures, and their existence also (perhaps literally) speaks to the importance of the role of normals in individual and collective deaf futures. In this book, I have argued that as a result of circulating together through multiple and diverse spaces, deaf people take deaf turns that are predicated upon a sense of “deaf deaf same” and that as a result of these turns, new deaf orientations emerge. As deafs become oriented toward each other, they become disoriented from their biological families. Through learning sign language informally and formally with and from each other, deafs learn the language and discourse needed to critique their families. They learn the value of concepts such as understanding, learning, and development; they also learn practices such as “share” and “help support.” At home, deafs say that none of these concepts or practices exist and they are “bored” because there is no communication. As such, home is a space where deaf development cannot take place and deafs go elsewhere to seek it. As I have argued, deaf development includes and encompasses social, moral, and economic development. Through desiring and working toward deaf development, my deaf friends were attempting to create social, moral, and financial value for themselves individually and for deaf people collectively. In the process of working to generate this value, value was also extracted from them by NGOs, employers, and the state, because although on the surface it appears that deaf people have been successfully “included” in new neoliberal institutions, this “inclusion” can be exclusionary and does not always generate substantial value for deaf people themselves. In addition, as deafs circulate through these spaces with each other, they produce themselves and they are produced by others as a deaf group. This sometimes results in the need for negotiations and compromises; deafs engage in sameness work as they adjust to potentially divisive differences and create a harmonious deaf sociality. There are also occasions when deaf sociality becomes disharmonious, as in the case of deaf employees with varying levels of language and computer skills working together for a multinational corporation, or in the case of competition for new downlines in multilevel marketing businesses. However, deafs were mostly able to adjust and maintain harmony. There was too much at stake not to adjust: the deaf



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world was too small and deafs had a strong sense of being seen by others as members of a deaf group. I have used the experiences of my deaf friends to interrogate the relationship between stigma and value in modern India. I argue that we must take seriously deaf people’s claims about sign language, deaf sociality, and ideas for deaf development as being worthy of value. Deaf experiences in modern India demonstrate that there are novel couplings of stigma and value at work and that conditions, identities, and ways of being in the world (such as deafness or disability) that could be considered stigmatized are being redefined as possessing value. More broadly, I argue that my deaf friends’ experiences offer a productive lens into questions of development and value making in late modernity. Deaf people’s desires for deaf development teach us that as a concept development needs to be cultivated through social, moral, and economic practices. In addition, the concept of deaf development pushes us to interrogate development as a value-­making project that operates across different intermingled social, moral, and economic registers. Returning to deaf futures, I argue that deafs have been made to embody an economic future for all Indians. What I mean by this is that deafs, through their emplacement as productive and immobile sources of labor in India’s new neoliberal employment sectors, perhaps stand in for all Indians who worry about unstable political e ­ conomic futures and the absence of development. Deaf experiences are both the norm and the exception in perhaps the same way that Bangalore, with its rapid growth and its embrace of neoliberal political economic principles and structures, is both a normal and exceptional modern Indian city. Deaf struggles with creating and negotiating social, moral, and economic value reveal the ways that selves, socialities, and labor practices are reconfigured in novel ways in late modernity.

Reorienting the World A broader perspective on deaf struggles with creating and negotiating value was highlighted for me on a cold winter afternoon in Delhi, in January 2010. I was watching students at the Delhi Deaf Women’s League practice a performance that they would soon be presenting at a deaf cultural competition in Calcutta at which there would be deaf people from all over India. Their only props were white gloves, which emphasized that their performance was to be narrated through mime, not sign language. The plot of the mime is as follows: the tragic young heroine is waiting for a bus to take her home. As she waits, she is accosted by a man driving by in a car who rolls his window down and flirtatiously offers her a ride. She rebuffs him by telling him she is deaf. He drives off but then quickly returns and tells her that he loves deaf people and wants to

158 CONCLUSION

marry a deaf girl. It is obvious to the audience that he is up to no good, but our heroine, reassured by his comments, gets into the car and goes off with him to a hotel. Once there, he takes her to a room and pours her a drink. She becomes drunk and he closes the door to the room. He leads her to bed and she gently protests. They have sex and she falls asleep. He sneaks out and drives off looking very happy. The heroine wakes up in the morning, alone and abandoned, and slowly gets dressed. She does not know where to go. First she goes to the police station and says that her lover has run off. A normal police officer dismisses her and sends her away when he realizes that she is deaf and cannot write. Then she goes to a pharmacist and tries to request a morning-­after pill. When the normal pharmacist sees that she is deaf, she tells her to wait and leaves, seemingly for a moment, but she does not come back. Alone, the girl quickly sneaks a pill into her pocket and exits the pharmacy. In despair, she stands by the side of a road and takes the pill. She immediately starts vomiting. A passerby rushes her to the hospital. All of the actors and choreographers then come on stage and sign: “We want more normal people to learn sign language. Please learn sign language to communicate with us so that we are not alone.” Entranced by this story, I watched it being rehearsed again and again. I argue that in addition to serving as a cautionary tale about the untrustworthiness of normals, this mime also puts forth a more hopeful demand: normals should take deaf turns too. At its core, this mime is a compelling story about the ways, both literally and figuratively, that the normal world penetrates the deaf world—that is, it is an example of a penetration story. According to Frank Bechter (2009), a penetration story is a genre of storytelling popular in deaf worlds that exists to dramatize deaf ambivalence about the necessity of communicating with and living alongside hearing people. Penetration stories emphasize the mixed feelings that deaf people have about living among normals. I should note that the mime, while compellingly acted, was not unique. I had seen mimes and plays with similar themes before. When I asked the participants how they had created the story, they said that they had not made it up themselves and that they learned it from other deafs: the story was a variation upon a penetration story that circulated in Indian deaf worlds. It serves both as a cautionary tale and a hopeful demand.

A Cautionary Tale The heroine in this mime was alone throughout all of these harrowing experiences, without deaf friends to help her. She waited for the bus alone and then, after her encounter with the normal man, she went to the police station and the pharmacy on her own. Why did she not contact a deaf friend to ask for advice about whether she should accept a ride from this man? Where were her deaf



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friends after her lover ran off and she needed help? Other deaf people are deliberately and conspicuously absent in this mime. As I have argued throughout this book, deaf people constantly turned to each other in search of “help support” and they “share” information and knowledge. Indeed, they collectively made decisions about which vocational training programs and churches to attend and which multilevel marketing business to join. They circulated together through spaces and in doing so, they produced themselves as a deaf group. Deaf young adults often frustrated normal family members, NGO administrators, and employers by privileging information given to them by deaf friends. So why was the heroine acting alone in this mime? Being alone made her more vulnerable to being “spoiled.” Embedded in this mime is a tale about morality. Deaf sociality is produced through deaf people’s social, moral, and economic practices. Morality, or acting as an appropriate deaf person, is a key component of deaf sociality. Deaf people created moral economies in which information is exchanged and deaf people with information are required to share this information with other deaf people. In discussing what it meant to be “good” members of deaf sociality, my deaf friends often invoked the polar opposites of being “saved” and “spoiled.” Being “saved” meant comporting oneself as a good deaf person and becoming a member of deaf sociality. Deaf people “saved” each other through teaching, helping, and supporting each other. A deaf person could “spoil” himself but salvation came from other deafs. Salvation was collective while becoming spoiled was an individual affair. In the mime, the heroine had “spoiled” herself and there were no deafs around to “save” her. This mime therefore can be seen as a cautionary tale about the importance of seeking salvation in deaf social networks and being cautious and wary around normals. Deaf worlds were compared and contrasted with normal worlds and the former were spaces of safety while the latter were potentially treacherous. As I have demonstrated throughout this book, normals often took advantage of deafs and deaf sociality. NGOs run by normal people did not understand what was important to deaf people and they attempted to produce homogenous deaf “workers with disabilities” that would be productive in India’s new neoliberal private sectors. Employers extracted labor from deaf workers and took advantage of the added value that they brought to the workplace. Normals at the very top of multilevel marketing business lineages benefited from deaf people’s ability to turn their social capital into financial capital. As this mime so compellingly reveals, normals were not to be trusted even if they claimed to love deafs.

A Hopeful Demand This mime is also a call for normals to take deaf turns. In the mime, the heroine first rejects her normal suitor’s invitation by establishing and emphasizing that she is different from him: she is deaf and he is normal. He counters by telling her

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that he loves deaf people and she accepts his proposition, perhaps despite her better instincts. She is hopeful but he winds up betraying her. She seeks help, alone in a normal world, with no success. Yet the performance ends with a plea, or perhaps a demand: “We want normal people to learn sign language so that we are not alone.” This demand reveals that those making it have not given up hope: normals can learn sign language and in doing so they will learn what is important to deafs. Implied is that it is not enough for normals to say that they love deafs. Indeed, this mime raises the question of what it really means when normals say that they love deafs. As I have demonstrated throughout this book, normal people often said that they loved deafs. Normal family members told me that they loved their deaf children more than they loved other children in the family. Normal coworkers who worked alongside deaf people at BPO offices frequently told me that they loved their deaf colleagues. However, this mime and its conclusion demonstrate that love and (sign) language go hand in hand. If normals really loved deafs, they would learn sign language and they would take deaf turns. Learning sign language is only one step in the process of taking a deaf turn, however. When normals learn sign language, they will learn to respect deafs and they will not take advantage of them. They will not just think that deaf people are “inspirational” and they will see beyond the deaf group. They will learn the specific practices that are part of deaf sociality, practices such as “share,” “help support,” “question answer,” and checking for understanding. They will become oriented toward deaf development and they will support deafs in their desire for stronger deaf institutions. Ultimately, this mime reveals that deafs have not given up on normals: they are born into normal families, they work alongside them, they join multilevel marketing businesses under them, and they have normal teachers, managers, and friends. Deafs want these people to take deaf turns too. Readers may be wondering: What would happen if normals did sign? What would it be like if deaf schools actually provided deaf children with education? And what if the spaces through which deaf people circulated were actually created with appropriate access for deaf people? More broadly, what would it mean for deaf turns, deaf sociality, deaf orientations, and desires for deaf development if there were fewer structural barriers? Henri Lefebvre (1991, 190) writes: “To change life . . . we must first change space.” While I agree with this statement, I also argue that there is something unique about deaf orientations. Changing spaces, or structures, to make them more accessible to deafs will not completely change deaf lives. The uniqueness of deaf orientations means that removing structural barriers will not result in the obliteration of deaf sociality. “Deaf normal same” may never be possible, although “deaf normal equal” may be.



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And the removal of structural barriers in the arenas of education, employment, and language access are essential in order for deafs to be equal to normals. As I have argued throughout this book, there is something unique about deaf sociality, something that is more than just two or more deaf bodies together in space. It is about being intensely oriented toward other deaf people, wanting to help and support them, and desiring deaf-­run institutions. Indeed, a desire for deaf development is more than just a desire for more sign language in the world, it is a desire for deaf people to be capable and confident as they both build deaf worlds and circulate through normal ones. Building deaf worlds is key here—­deafs want to continue to cultivate their own social, moral, and economic practices while also being able to circulate in normal worlds. When deaf development occurs, deaf people will be confident, strong, and capable of moving successfully through both deaf and normal worlds, therefore rendering situations such as that depicted in the mime performance unlikely to occur. And so, even if structural barriers were to disappear, I argue that there would still be an orientation—­“deaf deaf same”—­that is unique to deaf people. It is this orientation, and not just two bodies in space, that makes it so easy to sign “deaf deaf same” across a crowded bus to someone whom you have never met before.

APPENDIX: KEY CONCEPTS FROM INDIAN SIGN LANGUAGE

“Deaf deaf same” can be translated as “I am deaf, you are deaf, we are the same.” Deafs signed “deaf deaf same” in order to express feelings of deaf similitude. By invoking deaf sameness, forms of difference such as caste, class, gender, age, educational qualifications, geographic background, or religion were minimized, if not erased. “Deaf deaf same” foregrounds deaf orientations and shared experiences of deafness. Deafs sign “Deaf deaf same” when first meeting another deaf person, when trying to reconcile differences, and/or when trying to cement relationships. Invoking “deaf deaf same” is a form of what I call “sameness work,” work that deaf people do in order to negotiate differences, cultivate deaf orientations, and produce a harmonious deaf sociality. “Deaf develop” can be translated as “deaf development.” Deaf development will happen in the future and encompasses social, moral, and economic development. Once deaf development occurs, sign language will be recognized, many more deafs and normals will sign, schools will offer good-­quality education in sign language, and there will be a variety of vocational opportunities available to deafs. There will also be sign language interpreters and deafs will have communication access in different settings. Deaf development, for some deafs, also means being able to consume experiences and material goods and engage in travel. When deaf development takes place, deafs will become more confident and strong in their interactions with others (both deafs and normals) and they will no longer be considered inferior to normals. When deaf development occurs, “deaf normal equal” will take place. “Deep knowledge” can be translated as “deep knowledge.” It is knowledge that is communicated in sign language in a way that is easy to understand; another deaf person usually imparts it. Deep knowledge will result in deaf development and is often compared and contrasted with “half half half” knowledge, which is shallow and/or difficult to understand. Deep knowledge is authoritative knowledge,

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and the person sharing or teaching it is usually considered to be an expert in a particular field. Certain church and fellowship leaders, deaf teachers, and deaf multilevel marketing leaders are said to possess such deep knowledge. Deafs also use “deep” to mean “deep knowledge.” “For life” is a phrase used by deafs and normals to refer to employment that is stable and provides a living wage. For deafs, it also has additional meaning, as they desire “for life” employment that would exist on multiple social, moral, and economic registers. For many deafs, a “for life” job is one that would help other deaf people develop. An ideal “for life” job would enable deafs to work with other deafs and to work toward deaf development. “For life” employment is very difficult to find and as a result, deafs look for it in a wide range of spaces including deaf churches and multilevel marketing businesses. “Force” functions as group pressure, and it is used to recruit reluctant or ambivalent deafs to participate in something that they are not initially excited about or interested in. Deafs often said that deaf friends used “force” to get them to do things such as join multilevel marketing schemes, attend deaf churches, and visit different vocational training programs. “Grab” is another concept that is quite similar to “force,” especially in the context of multilevel marketing; deafs often spoke of how deafs involved in these businesses tried to “grab” other deafs to join their teams. “Future life how?” is both an individual and a collective question. On an individual level, it can be translated to “How will I live in the future?” and more collectively it is asking “What will deaf futures be like?” My interlocutors often rhetorically asked questions about what the future would be like. These questions were heavy with anxiety. How will I manage to earn enough money in the face of widespread discrimination against deafs and lack of government support? How will I survive on my own without a good education? How will I manage in the world as a deaf person? What will the future be like for deafs? Asking the question “Future life how?” also functions as a critique of the lack of deaf development in the present and the failure of the state, families, and other institutions to encourage deaf development. “Half half half” can be translated as “shallow, basic, or unsatisfying knowledge.” Deafs spoke of fragmentary and unsatisfying education or information as being “half half half.” “Half half half” knowledge was usually imparted by a normal person who could not sign well and it was contrasted with “deep knowledge,” which typically was imparted by another deaf person in sign language. Telling someone that they only learned or knew “half half half” also functioned as a form of critique. Deafs also used “simple” or “shallow” to mean “half half half.”



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“Help support” can be translated as “help and support.” Deafs often spoke about the importance of offering other deaf people help and support. “Help support” meant sharing information, advice, news, and education. It meant steering others in the direction of deaf development. Deafs who had skills or knowledge that other deafs did not have were required to “help support” these other deafs by sharing with them. Deafs who had better sign language or English skills, who knew about Jesus, or who were involved in innovative business programs were required to “help support” other deafs. “Open heart”: Deafs often spoke about having an “open heart.” This “open heart” made it possible for them to learn about paths and trajectories that were different from those of their families and their everyday networks. “Open hearts” were contrasted with families’ “closed hearts”: Deafs saw their families as being closed to new ways of developing and being in the world. The “open heart” desires to learn “deeply” or “fully” and is open to learning in different and diverse settings and situations. Deafs’ “open heart” enabled their disorientations from their families and taking deaf turns, which resulted in reorientations towards other deaf people. “Question answer” can be translated as “question and answer.” This is a practice in which deafs share information and give each other advice, usually during structured church or fellowship meetings. “Question answer” means more than just asking and answering questions: it means actually valuing other deafs’ contributions to conversation and believing that all deaf participants have important things to contribute and share. Through “question answer” collective and supportive problem solving spaces are created. In addition, through “question answer” deafs are able to “help support” each other. “Saved” and “Spoiled”: Many deafs were concerned about becoming “spoiled.” Being “spoiled” meant going down a bad path where one is not developing. Being “spoiled” meant not having good sign language skills, good morals, or good education and it also meant not having deaf peers and mentors. Ultimately, it meant straying from deaf sociality. In contrast, being “saved” meant that one was learning and developing and that one was part of deaf sociality. Deafs “saved” others who were at risk of being “spoiled”; deafs could only be “saved” by others although they could “spoil” themselves. “See learn” can be translated as “see and learn.” Deafs went to diverse sites such as deaf churches, multilevel marketing recruitment sessions, deaf marriage programs, disability employment fairs, new vocational training programs, and multiple deaf associations’ meetings in order to “see learn.” Deaf people were

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interested in seeing and learning in all kinds of spaces, as long as sign language was used. In the absence of communication access in most spaces, the few spaces that were deaf-­friendly were spaces where deafs could “see learn.” Being willing to “see learn” expresses an openness to learning about all kinds of things (which in and of themselves may not seem relevant or interesting) and it also expresses hope that there will be something interesting that one can learn, something that might be useful on the path toward deaf development. “Share” means pooling knowledge, skills, and information in order to help others develop. “Share” is often contrasted with independence as one could not share and be independent: they are seen as incompatible modalities of being in the world. Deafs often told me that they preferred sharing to working independently and that everything that they had learned in elementary school and secondary school had been learned through sharing with other deafs. Learning and developing were seen as shared processes, always done with others. “Sign butter”: “Sign butter” means beautiful, clear, and understandable signing. “Sign butter” allows for understanding to take place and creates conditions of possibility for new deaf orientations to emerge. Deafs said that it was because of pastors’ “sign butter” that they became interested in going to church and fellowships, for example. Generally considered to be a negative concept, akin to “brainwashing,” “sign butter” is a powerful driver of social, moral, and economic change in deaf worlds.

NOTES

INTRODUCTION: DEAF TURNS, DEAF ORIENTATIONS, AND DEAF DEVELOPMENT

1 The most recent data on deafness is from the eleventh five-­year plan, which states: “As per WHO [World Health Organization] estimates, in India, there are 63 million hearing impaired, with an estimated prevalence as 6.3%. A larger percentage of our population suffers from milder degrees of hearing impairment, adversely affecting productivity, both physical and economic” (Planning Commission 2007 3.1.180). These statistics are based on WHO estimates, however, and not on actual data collection. As India lacks universal newborn hearing screening, there are no records of the incidence of newborn infants with hearing loss (Nagapoornima et al. 2007). There has been no definitive study on questions of etiology, incidence, or prevalence of deafness in India, and disability rights activists have disputed recent (2001, 2011) census findings as dramatically underdocumenting the number of disabled people. As we know from Matthew Kohrman’s (2005) work on the use of disability statistics in China, disability statistics can be unreliable and suspect, manufactured for a variety of different reasons. 2 Information technology enabled services (ITES) is an umbrella category that includes information technology (IT), business process outsourcing (BPO), and data entry operating (DEO). My deaf friends who worked in ITES were mostly employed in the BPO and DEO sectors. As I discuss in Chapter 4, very few deaf people were employed in IT. 3 As scholars have argued, these hierarchies are not stable, clearly defined, or uncontested. See William Mazzarella (2005) on class and Nathaniel Roberts (2008) on caste as examples. 4 See, for example, Breivik 2005; Lane et al. 1996; Leigh 2009; Nakamura 2006. 5 Also see Kisch (2012, 23) for a critique of the applicability of the concept of Deafhood in diverse contexts. 6 My deaf friends’ concept of deaf development and my use of it as an analytic may seem similar to the concept of Deafhood in that they are both teleological concepts designed to carve out a space for thinking about distinct deaf ways of being in the world. However, it seems to me that deaf development’s teleology is based upon specific practices and concrete social, moral, and economic goals. Most important, deaf development also explicitly includes desires for changes in political economic structures, while the concept of Deafhood does not. 7 On the failure of development in India and elsewhere, see, for example, Gupta 1998, 2012; Kamat 2002; Mosse 2005; and Sharma 2008; on the perceived emptying out of

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opportunity for youth in today’s world, see Cole 2005; Cross 2009; Hansen 1996; Jeffrey 2010a,b; Lukose 2005, 2009; and Mains 2007, 2012. 8 See, for example, Harriss-­White and Erb 2002; Hiranandani and Sonpal 2010; Klasing 2007; Rioux and Zubrow 2001; World Bank 2007. 9 See, for example, Das and Addlakha 2001; Ingstad and Whyte 1995, 2007; Kohrman 2005; Livingston 2005; Staples 2005, 2007, 2011. 10 Deaf people in India often do not consider themselves to be part of a disability group and they often do not participate in wider disability movements or protests (although in 2013–­2014 the NAD successfully mobilized large numbers of deaf people from around India to come to Delhi to demand a new disability law, and deaf people do attend International Disability Day festivities, which are cross-­disability in nature). In some cases, the reason for the lack of affiliation is simple: deaf people do not have communication access at cross-­disability events and most disabled people do not know sign language. I observed disability leaders dismissing deaf people as uninterested in participating in a broader disability movement—­although these leaders miss the fact that communication access is not provided within the movement. At the same time, and contrary to this lack of awareness, I also encountered disabled people who have learned sign language in order to communicate with deaf people and act as interpreters at both schools and workplaces. When I asked deaf people about relationships with disabled people who signed, they acknowledged feelings of affinity but were always quick to distinguish between “deaf” and “handicapped”; these were seen as two distinct categories and ways of being in the world. It is for these reasons that I am reluctant to claim that this is a book about disability in India, although I draw inspiration from Disability Studies and the work that it does to ask critical questions about normality, deviance, bodily function, and the relationship between medical and social knowledge (e.g., Davis 1997). 11 Heather Paxson, in her analysis of how cheese makers in the United States attempt to create good lives for themselves while earning a livelihood, argues that “economic, moral, and social actions are fundamentally, inseparably implicated in one another” (2013, 13). 12 See, for example, Bauman 2008; Lane et al. 1996; Moore and Levitan 2003; Padden and Humphries 1988. 13 The Deaf Studies Digital Journal is an online journal that features academic articles signed in American Sign Language (ASL) and other sign languages in order to promote academic work in sign language. It can be accessed at http://​dsdj​.gallaudet​.edu/. This quote was translated from ASL into English by ASL interpreters working with the journal. 14 On the binary division between Deaf and hearing people, see, for example, Lane 1992; Lane et al. 1996; Padden and Humphries 1988, 2006. For works that do examine the tensions between deaf and Deaf catagories, see Burch and Kafer 2010; Friedner 2010b; Kisch 2012. 15 I draw inspiration both as a deaf person and a deaf scholar from this construction of d/Deafness and from Deaf Studies works in general. I am reluctant, however, to apply Deaf Studies works written about deaf people in the United States and elsewhere in the global North to the experiences of deaf people in India. 16 While the sign used for “deafs” could be translated to “deaf people,” I purposely write “deafs.” This is what my deaf friends wrote in their SMSes, handwritten notes, and e-mails. It was also what they mouthed or said in English. In addition to wanting to stay close to my deaf friends’ words, I think that there is an affective dimension to writing “deafs”: in this book I analyze how deaf people produce themselves and are



NOTES TO PAGES 16–31 169

produced as a deaf group. It seems to me that “deafs” foregrounds this sense of being a member of a group. 17 See Achille Mbembe 1992. 18 See Vasishta et al. 1978; Woodward 1993; Zeshan 2000, 2003. 19 Most deaf people in Bangalore do not call their sign language BISL. They call it ASL (although they do recognize it as a variety of Indian Sign Language as well). However, according to linguists, while Bangalore variety Indian Sign Language uses the ASL fingerspelling alphabet and there are some lexical similarities, the grammar and most of the lexicon is different from ASL. 20 All of the sign language alphabets used in India are based on English-­language letters. Movements to establish vernacular sign language alphabets have been unsuccessful. Hearing education professionals attempted to do this in Delhi with the Hindi/ Devanagiri alphabet in the 1960s and in Bangalore more recently with the Kannada alphabet, but deaf people have largely been uninterested. 21 Bangalorean deaf people’s indifference to the boundaries of what was or was not Indian Sign Language was very different from what I encountered in other Indian cities. In Mumbai and New Delhi, for instance, I often saw deafs criticizing other deafs for using signs that they said were ASL signs. They admonished these transgressors to use “their own” sign language, Indian Sign Language. 22 V. V. Giri was India’s president from 1969 to 1974. Indira Gandhi was India’s prime minister from 1966 to 1977 and then from 1980 until 1984. 23 See Friedner and Kusters 2014. Also Kusters 2012 for more on power differentials, ethics, and privilege in conducting research with deaf communities in “developing” countries. CHAPTER 1  ORIENTING FROM (BAD) FAMILY TO (GOOD) FRIENDS

1 See, for example, Becker 1980; Cohen 1998; Das and Addlakha 2001; Devlieger 1995; Kisch 2008; Preston 1998; Rapp and Ginsburg 2001; and Talle 1995. But see Nakamura (2005) on the formation of different deaf political organizations in Japan and Breivik (2005) on how transnational deaf experiences often provide Scandinavian deaf people with more of a sense of belonging than being with their biological families or living in the nation-­state of which they are citizens (also see Haualand 2007). 2 It is also possible that spoken language translations were also imperfect and incomplete. I do not mean to imply that there is perfect translation in spoken language. 3 Faiza’s desire to marry another deaf person was very common in deaf worlds (in Bangalore and elsewhere in India and around the world). As I discuss in greater detail in the book’s conclusion, deaf young adults often married each other without their families’ permission and this caused significant friction in families. In many cases, these marriages were cross-­caste, class, and religion. And often families did not want their children to marry another deaf person despite the fact that marrying another deaf person would presumably result in better communication. Indeed, many of my deaf friends said that being married to a normal person would be just like spending time with their families: there would be no communication, understanding, and sharing, and it would be boring. 4 Of course, hanging out and drinking tea together is also a form of (nonlinguistic) communication. When I discuss communication and communication gaps, I am using these concepts as my interlocutors—­deaf people, their families, educators, and NGO administrators—­use them.

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5 IDCS’s statement also makes me a bit uneasy in light of the fact that throughout my research I was told by multiple hearing administrators and teachers that their deaf students were emotionally immature, prone to gossiping, and unaware of social norms. In many cases, these hearing administrators and teachers did not know sign language very well and consequently did not understand their students’ words and actions. In other cases, students were not provided with access to important information about social norms and appropriate behavior. I appreciate, however, that IDCS is not placing the onus on deaf children but rather on their families and the social and educational structures from which they are supposed to be receiving such information. 6 Domestic issues were therefore made public as outsiders were brought in to interpret. This dovetails with Rapp and Ginsburg’s (2001) work on families with disabled children and the new forms of public intimacy that come to exist. 7 Paul argues that the key issue in oral education is whether or not deaf and hard-­of-­ hearing children are actually exposed to or can perceive a “full blown spoken language such as English.” He states that a large number of children who are exposed to oral systems “do not start school with a working knowledge of English or any other language to be used as a base for communication and learning” (2009, 16, 18). As such, there is no foundation for oral education to build on. 8 Deaf education is a polarized and contentious field and advocates generally fall into two opposing ideological camps: oralism (simply put, using auditory verbal techniques to teach deaf children to lip-­read and speak and banning the use of sign language) and manualism (simply put, using sign language to teach written language; this method is sometimes called bilingualism or total communication, although both of these methods have their own techniques and practices attached to them). Many researchers believe that this polarization has meant that deaf children are not adequately served. As Easterbrooks and Baker write: “Perhaps deaf and hard of hearing children have not fully reached their potential because of the long history of factionalism in philosophies and methods [of deaf education]” (2002, viii). While all deaf children are different and variables such as age of hearing loss onset, severity of hearing loss, etiology, economic status of parents and caregivers, and location of the child all go into creating a very individualized picture of hearing loss, deaf and hard-­of-­hearing children are routinely depicted as homogenous, and advocates of different kinds of deaf education routinely offer one-­size-­fits-­all solutions (Paul 2009). 9 Because there is no universal newborn hearing screening and few early intervention programs in India, most parents were at a loss about what to do once they found out that their child was deaf. Parents usually were not informed about interventions such as auditory verbal therapy and speech therapy until it was too late, if at all. 10 Also see LeMaster 2010 on how the concept of “heritage language” can be problematized by deaf sign language users born into immigrant families in the United States. 11 Unfortunately, this often seems to be the case in both public and private schools. Public schools are under the national government’s Sarva Shiksa Abhiyan (Education for All) Act, which has specific provisions mandating inclusive education for children with disabilities, although I never learned of accommodations being made for deaf children in mainstream settings. In addition, at integrated schools for children with different disabilities, such as DPA’s integrated school, I observed that deaf children were often left out as teachers did not have competency in sign language. 12 This reunion was an attempt to create an alumni association for the school, and more than one hundred former students of all ages from all over India traveled to Chennai



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for the function. Programs were entirely in sign language and speakers talked about the importance of sign language and sign language development in India, which was ironic because of Little Flower Convent School’s strongly oral mission. Most alumni were angry about their oral education and felt that it did not help them in the long run because they could not communicate well with either hearing or deaf people. During a presentation, one of the alumni association leaders mimicked an illegible oral deaf child and mocked the school’s strict anti-­sign policies by talking about how deaf children sign under the covers at night. 13 According to the general secretary of the All India Deaf Bank Employees Association, Mr. T. Raghava, reasons for the decline include the fact that work has become more computerized and therefore requires more specific technical skills that many deaf young adults do not have; there are fewer positions because of this computerization; and the quotas are now saturated in many places, as deafs who were hired in the 1970s and 1980s are still in their positions. Sister Mary Peter’s association of the decline of oralism with the decline in numbers of government jobs available to deaf people is yet another sign of her negative perception of sign language. 14 Article 24 of the UNCRPD, which deals with education, specifically states that states should take appropriate measures including “facilitating the learning of sign language and the promotion of the linguistic identity of the deaf community,” and is extremely clear in its advocacy of sign language as important. 15 Most of my deaf friends were emphatically against cochlear implantation and expressed feelings of disgust and repugnance toward them. The National Association of the Deaf has a position statement (taken from the United States-­based National Association of the Deaf) on its website in which it outlines the complicated terrain around cochlear implantation and advocates for a holistic approach to implantation that can also include learning sign language. 16 I call Manju Auntie by the affectionate term “Auntie” as a result of the very real feelings of affection that I, like many of my deaf friends, felt toward her. 17 One might think that the shame of Dimple’s divorce opened Manju Auntie up to other forms of shame—­the shame of her daughters visibly signing in public and therefore being marked as deaf—but I did not have the sense that Manju Auntie felt shame. 18 Anjali’s perspective on sign language was not unique, and many young adults who were raised orally told me similar things, though they did not use words like “dirty.” Rather, they talked about how deaf people should learn to speak so that they could “participate in and contribute to society.” It was not surprising that they felt this way: young adults who had participated in oral early intervention programs and attended oral schools told me about being forced to keep their hands behind their back and not being allowed to socialize with other deaf children after school. It should be noted too that those successfully raised orally tended to be upper-­class, upper-­caste young adults and adults. I do want to stress, however, that a very high percentage of deaf children who attended oral schools apparently did later learn (some) sign language, especially those who attended vocational training programs or higher education programs with other deaf people. 19 In a study with Flemish Sign Language users in Belgium, De Clerck (2007) notes that many of her interlocutors use the concepts of “sleeping” and “waking up” to refer to their sense of the world before and after learning rhetoric about deaf culture, and she discusses the role of “empowered” deaf role models and peers in helping others transition to “waking up.” While De Clerck focuses more on learning discourse about deaf culture than on learning sign language, taking a deaf turn is similar to “waking

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up,” and deaf sign language teachers play a similar role for my interlocutors as the “empowered” mentors De Clerck writes about. 20 The ISL program at the NIHH in Mumbai was started as a result of activism and advocacy by the article’s authors, Ulrike Zeshan, Meher Sethna, and Madan Vasishta. While this is the largest ISL program in all of the NIHH branches, there is still a sense that the NIHH administration does not support or respect ISL, and the bulk of the institute’s resources are devoted to audiology, speech therapy, and training normal deaf education teachers. CHAPTER 2  CONVERTING TO THE CHURCH OF DEAF SOCIALITY

1 While I was initially uneasy about these seemingly public conversations about churchgoing because of the rise in anti-­church violence in Karnataka and elsewhere in India in the fall of 2008, I realized that these conversations were largely illegible to hearing people who did not know sign language and that they existed outside of the (very politicized) public debates about religion and secularism in India. I also started to think critically about what these public conversations meant in relation to discourse around the importance of relegating discussions about religion, faith, and belief to the private realm (Chatterjee 1986, 1993; Nandy 1998). My deaf friends were not concerned with keeping their churchgoing private in the presence of other deafs and they knew that the normals surrounding us would not understand their use of sign language. Indeed, deaf people’s ease in talking about potentially sensitive topics like churches in the midst of normals illustrates that deaf communicative worlds are distinct from normal worlds. 2 Also see Asad 1993, 2003; Mahmood 2005; Hirschkind and Scott 2006. 3 Although every Indian city that I visited had at least two deaf churches, eight was by far the largest number. This may mirror trends in Bangalore’s Christian population in general. According to the 2001 national census data, Bangalore had more than double the percentage of identified Christians in the city than the national average. In addition, Bangalore is known as the “city of churches” and Christianity preceded the arrival of the British in India. By the 1930s, Bangalore had an urban Christian population of over 20 percent, the largest concentration in India. As Janaki Nair (2005, 37) writes: “The skyline of the cantonment included churches of every denomination to meet the needs of European sects and Indian converts alike.” As a result of the growing popularity of Evangelical, Pentecostal, and other “new” churches, the skyline has remained the same but one only has to scan the storefront signs to see evidence of these new religious spaces. 4 As I discussed in the introduction, Father Thomas is responsible for introducing ASL to Bangalore. As a result of Father Thomas’s work, Bangalore is the only city in India where the one-­handed ASL alphabet and some ASL lexicon is utilized; BISL is often called “ASL” by deaf people in Bangalore and elsewhere. 5 Joel Robbins (2001, 909) argues that the agency of listening or of the listener does not receive enough focus within analysts’ linguistic ideology or what he calls the “intention/meaning/truth model.” Similarly, I argue that the agency of understanding does not receive enough attention and that it is important for analysts to carve out a space for exploring the transformative power of understanding. 6 Note that Jehovah’s Witness Kingdom Halls are never called churches by normal attendees. However, deaf people often called them churches, and so I follow this convention. 7 Principal Rao did not permit any missionaries to come to the school. However, principals and administrators at other deaf schools had a more relaxed attitude and would



NOTES TO PAGES 74–79 173

permit missionaries to conduct leadership or cultural programs—­at least until they received complaints from families. Invariably, when parents found out that their children were interested in attending church, they complained and then schools would curtail access. 8 Traveling on public transportation and through crowded city bus stations offered deafs opportunities for witnessing and being witnessed to. During an interview with deaf siblings in their late twenties, I asked them why they had not known about deaf churches when they were growing up and they said that it was because their home was so close to their school; they did not need to travel by bus and so went straight from home to school and vice versa. They therefore did not meet other deaf people en route to and from school. See Kusters (2009) for an account of how traveling by train together in handicapped compartments permitted deaf people in Mumbai to cultivate a sense of deaf identity and community. CHAPTER 3  CIRCULATION AS VOCATION

1 Chetan’s command of English language skills was rare among deafs in India. Thanks to his older sister who tutored him and the education that he received at SKID, he mastered English grammar. He was proud of this and repeatedly told me that other deafs looked up to him and that many of Bangalore’s NGOs and training centers wanted him to teach their deaf students (although they did not necessarily want to pay him to do this). 2 Throughout this chapter I use the terms “trainee,” “candidate,” and “student” interchangeably. The organizations at which I conducted research used all three terms. Similarly, teachers were called teachers, instructors, and trainers. I also use the terms “vocational training center,” “NGO,” and “job placement center” interchangeably unless I am specifically writing about an industrial training institute (ITI) that follows national government curriculums and offers government certification. 3 Although passing the SSLC exam as a result of paying bribes is different from copying, my deaf friends also called this practice copying. 4 There are deaf children who emerge from school as fluent signers if they have access to sign language–­using deaf peers, mentors, and/or family members. However, as with their peers, it is not clear what they are formally learning in school. 5 Vocational training, or training that students enroll in after finishing class ten/SSLC, is not just important for deaf students but it is a crucial program for creating skilled laborers in India in general. During the 1990s, “the liberalisation and marketisation of education” resulted in the doubling of the total number of private industrial training centers in India, from 2,447 in 1992 to 4,647 in 2002 (Cross 2009, 358). As Jamie Cross points out: “Industrial Training Institutes (known across India as ITIs) represent the legacy of Nehruvian central planning and nationalist projects of industrial modernisation. They were originally designed to equip young people for specific posts in India’s public sector industries as welders, electricians and mechanics. The criteria for entrance were based on academic merit, though in line with national policies of positive discrimination, there were reserved places for ex-­untouchable communities.” However, over the past ten years or so, there have been critiques of the current structure of providing such education (International Labor Organization 2003; World Bank 2008). According to a 2008 World Bank report, there were 10,000 students enrolled in vocational training in the 1950s and this number has increased to more than 700,000 students now enrolled in 5,253 public and private institutions. This report noted that

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60 percent of students were still unemployed within three years after finishing their vocational training course, there was not enough government oversight of private programs, and there were also ambiguous and competing government certification schemes. In addition, education provided was deemed to be too narrow in focus, and there was not enough connection between actual industries and the vocational training centers. These factors combined with a general decrease in industrial sectors have resulted in increasing unemployment. As such, the experiences of deaf people in attending industrial training centers is both part of a broader pattern of shifts in the training and employment landscape and specific to deaf people in terms of the existence of disability-­and deaf-­focused training centers and questions of language access. 6 This is true in other kinds of educational institutions, as well. For example, JSS Polytechnic for the Physically Handicapped (JSSPPH) formerly had a student population that was around 90 percent students with physical disabilities. Currently, although the overwhelming majority of its students are deaf, teachers do not sign and have made few modifications to their teaching styles and classroom set-­up. 7 See, for example, Cole 2005; Cross 2009; Jeffrey 2010a,b; Lukose 2005, 2009; Mains 2007, 2012; and Nisbett 2007, 2008. 8 There were also tailoring and prosthetics-­making courses but these were not popular because families did not believe that they would offer much income potential. 9 See Parry (2013) for a study on the undesirability of manual labor positions in mines in Bihar. 10 Other administrators, teachers, and family members also complained to me about how deaf people privileged other deafs’ perspectives over their own. This privileging of deaf perspectives over normal ones has been written about in Deaf Studies literature (e.g., Mindess 2006). 11 Many deaf young adults also did not know how to find information about public sector employment. While vacancies are currently online, it used to be that one had to buy a copy of a government-­issued newspaper that listed all of the vacancies available. In either case there is then a complicated process of applying for these vacancies that involves taking an exam, having interviews, and then waiting for posts. Although there are Special Employment Exchanges in many Indian cities that are supposed to facilitate access to public sector employment for people with disabilities, very few deaf people visited these exchanges or knew where they were (and as I discuss in Chapter 4, these exchanges were not very helpful). None of the NGOs or training centers where I conducted research educated trainees about the concrete process of seeking out and applying for public sector jobs. 12 See Ganguly-­Scrase and Scrase (2009) on shifts in the public sector more broadly in India. 13 These connections were initially domestic, but as DPA grew, it formed international connections with disability service organizations, schools, and banking institutions, mostly in Europe. Today DPA depends on a combination of donations from Indian nationals, international funding sources including “sister” schools in the United Kingdom and Swiss banks, and multinational corporations operating in India. 14 There were deaf students who studied at DPA prior to this time, although teachers did not sign. These earlier students learned by watching the practical demonstrations and struggling to read notes written on the board. 15 I often felt that I was participating in or observing a game of deaf “telephone” when deaf people interpreted for each other or helped to decipher signed or oral



NOTES TO PAGES 87–93 175

communication. The end communicative product was often very different from what was originally signed or said. This happened both when the original message was signed by a deaf person and signed or voiced by a normal person. 16 I saw this sharing at all of the NGOs and training centers that I visited. I also saw it, albeit more intensely, at JSSPPH where students lived together. As I did not have access to male students’ intimate conversations or living spaces, I cannot make claims about male intimate sharing and knowledge exchanges. 17 At Delhi-­based vocational training centers that employed deaf teachers, students told me that they learned from these teachers and they had much less ambivalent relationships with the centers. For example, Shivani, a student at the Delhi Empowerment Training Center, told me: “My mother and father realized that I was deaf and so they put me in school. The teacher talked and wrote on the board and I didn’t understand anything—­I failed to learn—­and I chatted and chatted with my deaf friends. I didn’t know how to think about and plan for the future. Then I passed tenth class and I joined here [Deaf Empowerment Training Center], and I learned well. I learned English and computers. Words’ meanings were explained to me and also I learned how to eat nicely, I learned not to fight with my mother, to show respect and communicate with her nicely, I learned to help at my home with cleaning and not to ignore that. I enjoyed it very much and was very interested. I learned that if there was a problem and I was tense instead of thinking myself I should share it with others. I learned love, respect, communication.” Trainees felt that deaf teachers were more conducive to learning “deep knowledge” because they communicated in sign language and about topics that resonated with deaf students. 18 Rashmi and I utilized sign language and either spoken English, Kannada, or Tamil to conduct the interviews. In most cases we used a combination of sign language and spoken English. Some of the interviews on one day were difficult due to Rashmi’s and my inability to adjust how we communicated to meet the communicative needs of students from rural Karnataka or Bangalore who had not had access to sign language. The following day was easier and Rashmi told me: “These students are from Bangalore and so they have had exposure and they know more. Yesterday they were either young or from villages and had no exposure. . . . They are so difficult to teach. Here we have to try to teach everyone. We teach people from Tamil, Telugu, Kannada medium, we must try . . . it is so difficult sometimes.” Rashmi’s statement points to the struggles that teachers face in their attempts to work with a heterogeneous group of deaf young adults with diverse language skills. However, if Chetan or Radikha had conducted the interviews they would have been more successful because both had experience working with deaf people from a wide variety of language backgrounds, whereas Rashmi (and most of DPA’s teachers) did not. 19 When communicating with deafs, Chandra spoke and signed. She rarely spoke in grammatical English and she used very simple (yet clear and effective) signs that were rarely complete sentences in either English or ISL. She differs from Radhika in her ways of relating to deaf people (she dramatically simplifies her language, whereas Radhika used more substantial ISL vocabulary and grammar), and her vision of what deaf futures look like (deafs should be plugged into multinational companies as support staff or back office workers, whereas Radhika wanted to find deafs jobs that were stable and “for life”). In quoting Chandra, I try to balance between legibility and her actual words and grammatical order. 20 Young men are much more mobile than young women and are able to migrate more easily to Bangalore for such training and employment opportunities. Many families

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were resistant to having their daughters do BPO training or work at BPOs, as they associated this employment with the night shift, which they considered to be dangerous (see Patel 2010). In each batch there were always a few young women, but the gender distribution was not equal by any means. 21 Sign language at JSSPPH is considered to be unique, as students come from all over India and they must adjust to different sign language lexicons. Over the years a JSSPPH-­ based sign language has formed. Although this has not been studied, it seemed to be a mixture of various ISL varieties. 22 While I interviewed deafs who participated in all four batches of Vision’s BPO training, I conducted participant observation mainly in the third batch, which is where most of the ethnographic material included here is derived from. 23 As I was intrigued by this exercise, I later did a similar exercise with DPA students. Their responses mirrored those offered by Vision students. Students overwhelmingly mentioned the importance of “helping and supporting” other deafs as positive characteristics. 24 Xiang Biao (2007) writes about waiting, or being “benched,” as an inherent part of being a certain kind of (not too highly) trained information technology worker. The deaf graduates from Vision’s BPO training program were being socialized into the practice of waiting. Indeed, many of these future workers and other deafs who I met had experiences of waiting for work even after being hired. CHAPTER 4  DEAF BODIES, CORPORATE BODIES

1 It is interesting to compare deafs’ copying of CVs from each other with their copying on the SSLC exam, as I discussed in Chapter 3. Both examples of copying occur because of structural barriers to education and both are a form of sameness work in that they render deafs the same. 2 See, for example, Aneesh 2006; Biao 2007; Nadeem 2011; Patel 2010; Radhakrishnan 2011; Upadhya and Vasavi 2006, 2008. 3 25,000 rupees, or around $565, seems quite low as a cap for such a program. 4 Until the NAD was founded in 2005, the interests of deaf sign language users were not heavily represented by the Disability Rights Group. The NAD is now an active and visible participant in the group and has been working closely with the Disability Rights Group to pass a new disability law. 5 Since the initial advocacy work of the National Centre for Promotion of Employment for Disabled People (NCPEDP) directed at the ITES sector, a few former employees have gone to work in corporate social responsibility departments or as consultants at ITES corporations. There is a close relationship between NCPEDP and ITES corporations, which is reinforced by NCPEDP’s annual award competition that honors corporations for hiring disabled people. Unlike other Indian social movements such as the feminist or labor movement, the disability movement has not aligned itself much with other movements nor has it developed an analysis of how value is extracted from disabled workers in ways not always to their benefit. Its close relationships with corporations and its lauding of corporate social responsibility initiatives make this clear. 6 While corporations have historically played a role in the development of Indian society through philanthropy and trusteeship, there are no legal or policy guidelines for determining what CSR is, although it tends to involve providing social services, funds, and programs (Arora and Puranik 2004, Mishra and Suar 2010). There is a perception among Indian corporations that CSR is important for developing a positive image and



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for branding purposes (and I also was told this in my interviews with HR executives). The number of Indian companies that state that they are engaging in CSR is on the rise, although it is not clear what exactly they are doing (Arora and Puranik 2004; Mitra 2007). There is also a voluntary (but vague) code of corporate governance, “Desirable Corporate Governance: A Code,” established in April 1998 by CII, which can be accessed at http://​www​.nfcgindia​.org/​desirable​_corporate​_governance​_cii​.pdf. In 2013, the Companies Bill, new legislation that mandates that corporations engage in CSR, was passed, and this may have significant effects on how CSR is both performed and regulated. Newspaper archive reviews reveal that it is only in the last few years that disability employment has become part of CSR. The effects and affects of disability employment can be analyzed through the lens of recent social science critiques of CSR, which demonstrates that CSR is often used to create loyal employees and greater profits for corporations (e.g., Cross 2011; Shamir 2008). 7 See Nadeem (2011) on the boring, banal, and repetitive nature of such work. 8 During my research, some HR executives insisted that hiring people with disabilities was a “diversity issue” and not a corporate social responsibility tactic. However, the logic of diversity was not dissimilar to the logic of CSR, although the rhetoric of diversity serves to ostensibly “recode” CSR as business opportunities in that a diverse workforce results in better products (Shamir 2008, 12). 9 Approximately 1 percent of Infosys’s workforce is disabled, a tiny fraction. However, Infosys hired a dedicated consultant, a former NCPEDP employee, to work on mainstreaming disability in the corporation, and disability is considered one of Infosys’s diversity initiatives, along with gender. 10 Popular media representation of technology’s role in creating new inclusive workplaces in which all employees are equal is reminiscent of Thomas Friedman’s (2005) work on the so-­called “flat world” enabled through information technology. 11 Despite the ostensible possibilities offered by technology, deaf and disabled people often feel that the existence of the ITES sector ends up limiting their employment possibilities because they are tracked into such work by NGOs and training centers that provide computer training, They are told that this work is the only work that they can and should do. 12 See Aneesh 2006; Biao 2007; Nadeem 2011; Patel 2010; Upadhya and Vasavi 2006, 2008. 13 As of spring 2010, the Phillips Morgan deaf group has been dispersed to different areas of the company’s BPO processes, although deafs still work in small groups of two or three in normal units and they continue to socialize mostly with other deafs during breaks. 14 Radhika was often called for such corporate assignments, which seemed odd in light of her background as an industrial training institute educator and administrator and her lack of corporate experience. As there were so few professionals in the field of deaf education and employment, the same people were repeatedly contacted to provide introductory training. There was also a dearth of interpreters, and Radhika and Vision staff were often called to interpret for training sessions although only a few of them were qualified interpreters. That is, only Radhika and a handful of other people in Bangalore were sufficiently proficient in sign language and aware of the ethics and etiquette of interpreting from voice to sign language and vice versa. 15 I do not know of how much use fingerspelling was to these deaf employees because of their limited English skills. 16 Also see Aneesh 2006; Nadeem 2011; Upadhya and Vasavi 2006, 2008; Vora 2010.

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17 It is interesting to compare Rebecca’s love for deafs (and the deaf workers’ discussion of this and other normals’ love for deafs) with research by Joan Ostrove and Gina Oliva (2010) on d/Deaf and hearing relationships in the United States. Ostrove and Oliva conducted focus groups with d/Deaf women and found that these women wanted their hearing friends to look beyond their deafness and appreciate their individuality. In contrast, Aruna and other deafs did not have any expectation of Rebecca or others looking beyond deafness—­after all, they love deafs. However, deafs did want normals to learn sign language and be able to communicate with them. Willingness to learn sign language was perhaps the primary indicator of love. 18 The state of Karnataka had postponed and ultimately canceled its yearly celebration in 2009 because the Indian prime minister was coming to inaugurate the opening of a new college in Bangalore and there were to be traffic jams on the roads. Infosys’s celebration was one of the few that I heard about that year. 19 Infosys did not have a policy of placing deaf workers in the same process and deaf workers were spread throughout different processes. However, deafs sat together during trainings and programs such as this one. They would often plan to meet between shifts or before their shifts started in order to socialize and share news. 20 When I visited Excel again in June 2009, Excel had started its own fee-­based three-­month computer training center. Sensing an opportunity, Excel had entered the (already saturated) field of providing computer training. After successful completion of this program, students were guaranteed a position at Excel, and tuition was partially reimbursed. 21 Pappa was seen to be a positive feeling by everyone I spoke with. It did not mean to feel sorry for but rather to empathize with or feel for. 22 See, for example, Barnes and Mercer 2010; Gleeson 1998; and Oliver 1990. 23 Kaushik Sunder Rajan (2006) has argued that Indian bodies are valued as sites for situating clinical trials. Instead of being the creative force behind the making of pharmaceuticals, they are confined to being the bodies upon which such drugs are tested. Similarly, in the ITES industry, which largely exists as a result of North-­South economic inequality and international divisions of labor, deaf and other disabled workers are seen as having certain kinds of productive value based upon their ability to do routine and repetitive tasks and their immobility. 24 Also see Erika Hoffman-­Dilloway’s (2011) work on a bakery café chain in Kathmandu, Nepal, that hires deaf workers, and how interacting with these workers instills feelings of development and modernity in the café’s customers. CHAPTER 5  ENROLLING DEAFNESS IN MULTILEVEL MARKETING BUSINESSES

1 My interlocutors, specifically those in management or leadership positions, insisted that I not use the company’s name. In line with their request, I have used a pseudonym for the company and I have also tried my best to change identifying details (including where it started and the location of its Indian offices). The particular pseudonyms I have chosen are meant to capture the spirit of company’s and its teams’ names. 2 I have not been able to determine the exact number of deaf people who joined Silver Venture. The numbers that I cite about attendance and membership are based on what my interlocutors have told me and not written documentation or official statistics. According to deaf leaders, there were at least seven hundred deaf members in India. 3 See, for example, Cahn 2006, 2011; Comaroff and Comaroff 1999, 2000; Fadzillah 2005; Gu 2004; Srivastava 2010; Verdery 1995; Wilson 1999.



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4 At the current exchange rate of 60 rupees to the dollar, 30,000 rupees is $487.50. This is a sizable sum for deaf Indians targeted by the business who earn monthly wages of about 5,000–­18,000 rupees. 5 Deafs did not see the word “special” as paternalistic or stigmatizing, as those in the deaf and disability movements in the West might. Rather, they saw it as showcasing Sathi’s love and care for them. Most of my interlocutors told me that Pradeep Sathi “loves” deaf people; see Chapter 4 for a discussion of normals who love deafs. 6 Also see Cahn (2006) on the connections between spirituality, enchantment, and direct sales. 7 Future-­oriented narratives that revolve around the acquisition of material goods and consumption also point to the way that being a member of the middle class, or desiring to be such a member, is a social project within which many of my interlocutors participated (Fernandes 2000; Liechty 2003). Most Silver Venture members and all of the leaders whom I met were either middle class or aspirants to the middle class. While I agree with Mazzarella (2005) about the pitfalls of applying the category of the “middle class” to India and its existence as a discursive category, I also see the category as creating concrete practices and aspirations (also see Lukose 2005, 2009 on these practices and aspirations). 8 A Permanent Account Number is granted by the Indian Income Tax Office and is needed in order to engage in most financial transactions such as opening a bank account, applying for a credit card, or receiving a salary or professional fees. In order to get one, individuals either apply directly to the Income Tax Office or through a broker. 9 Devananda is a particularly problematic figure for many deaf in Bangalore. A former Hare Krishna devotee who is now an independent spiritual teacher, he teaches “moral science” at deaf schools in Bangalore while also recruiting people for multilevel marketing businesses. He embodies the tensions around the intermingling of moral and financial economies. 10 The ideal special friend is perhaps identical to the ideal ITES employee as discussed in Chapters 3 and 4 in his or her loyalty, command of sign language and English, and flexibility. 11 This vertical hierarchical structure of uplines and downlines exists in direct opposition to Deaf Studies literature that analyzes the collegial and collective nature of deaf culture and the deaf world, which is said to value horizontality and informality (Ladd 2003; Lane et al. 1996; Padden and Humphries 2006). In contrast, I argue that this literature ignores very real power and status differentials within deaf communities surrounding gender, race, educational background, signing ability, class, and caste. Mara Green (2008b) analyzes the vertical structure of deaf organizations in Nepal and argues that such verticality should not be seen as being at odds with (deaf) development, despite a widespread academic and activist focus on horizontality and equality. 12 Most deafs used the sign “grab” when talking about recruiting people for the business. This is the same sign that people used when talking about recruiting or being recruited for church. Once I used this sign when talking with Dinesh and he became upset and said that it was “not a nice sign.” He said that he preferred the sign and the concept “partner.” I see this tension between “grabbing” and “partnering” to be similar to the tension between deaf hierarchies and deaf similitude. 13 This was the first and only instance in which I heard of a team member asking for a refund. It was likely that Aparna provided Arman with a refund from her own money in order to avoid the shame of a potential public dispute.

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14 In June 2009, I attended a meeting in Bangalore for a business called Resource Happiness Power with many deaf members. The meeting had been organized by a deaf leader from a neighboring city. The mood in the meeting was tense, as the leader had promised that he would recruit normal people to be deaf people’s downlines and that the normal downlines would be able to recruit many downlines. However, he was unsuccessful in recruiting normal downlines, and those deafs who had joined under him lost their money. CONCLUSION: INDIA’S DEAF FUTURES/REORIENTING THE WORLD

1 See Paul Preston’s (1998) ethnography of the experiences of children of deaf adults in the United States. Preston powerfully shows the negotiations between multiple senses of identity, allegiance, and belonging that they engage in.

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INDEX

Bala Vidalaya, 41 Bangalore variety of Indian Sign Language (BISL), 17–­20, 169n21. See also Indian Sign Language barista, 123 Bauman, H-­Dirksen L., 11–­12, 14 Bechter, Frank, 46, 48, 54, 61, 133, 158 Becker, Gaylene, 143 Bharat Earth Movers Limited, 85 Biao, Xiang, 176n24 Big Bazaar, 90 bilingualism. See deaf education BISL. See Bangalore variety Indian Sign Language bottom of the pyramid, in multilevel marketing, 140, 146, 149 Bourdieu, Pierre, 58 BPO. See business process outsourcing Breivik, Jan-­Kare, 169n1 Broota, Sakshi, 34, 78 business process outsourcing (BPO), 108, 167n2; as ideal employment for deaf people, 99; training courses for, 89, 90, 93–­96, 175–­176n20. See also Excel; information technology enabled services; Phillips Morgan; Pinnacle

adjusting: to different sign language varieties, 176n21; to expectations, 94, 140, 146; to family practices, 57; feelings about, 113, 139, 144, 148; to negotiating sameness and difference, 5, 11, 99, 102, 156 affect, 168n16; and labor, 106, 114–­117, 122; and love, 115; and space, 148; and value, 117 Ahmed, Sara, 4 AIFD. See All India Federation of the Deaf AIISH. See All India Institute of Speech and Hearing Ali Yavar Jung National Institute for the Hearing Handicapped, 19, 38, 49, 172n20 All India Deaf Bank Employees Association, 171n13 All India Federation of the Deaf (AIFD), 16, 22, 59, 85, 136 All India Institute of Speech and Hearing (AIISH), 34, 37, 43 All India Sports Council for the Deaf, 59 ambivalence: about biological families, 29; about the category of disability, 168n10; about hearing people, 158; about multilevel marketing, 127–­129, 143; about new livelihood “opportunities,” 8, 120; about other deaf people, 112 American Sign Language (ASL): and Jehovah’s Witnesses, 68–­69, 172n4; relationship to Bangalore variety Indian Sign Language, 17–­20, 169n19, 172n4 Amway, 130, 137, 139 Aneesh, A., 103, 116, 118 anxiety, about the future, 74, 124, 136, 164 Appadurai, Arjun, 22, 24, 28 apprenticeship, in public sector employment, 85 Arora, Bimal, 176n6 ASL. See American Sign Language auditory verbal training: teaching methods for, 33, 37, 41–­42, 78, 170n8. See also deaf education autobiography, positioning as deaf, 48, 77. See also storytelling Avon, 43

Café Coffee Day, 1, 84, 90, 123, 151–­154 Cahn, Peter, 129, 179n6 caste: and hierarchy, 5, 167n3, 179n11; and marriage, 155, 169n3; and sameness work, 5, 163 CBS. See Chronological Bible Storytelling census: of Christians in Bangalore, 172n3; of disability in India, 167n1 Central Institute of Indian Languages, Indian Sign Language corpus project, 17 certificate: of disability, 1, 22, 90; from government industrial training institutes, 84–­85, 111, 173n5; of higher education, 83; of secondary school leaving, 48, 71, 73, 77 Christianity: authority of, 54; in Bangalore, 172n3; as a knowledge system, 57, 76; role in deaf education, 55 Chronological Bible Storytelling (CBS), 60–­ 61, 65–­67, 72 Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (LDS), 59

Bahan, Ben, 179n11 Baker, Sharon, 170n8

191

192 INDEX

Church of South India (CSI), 35, 55; school for the deaf, 55–­58 CII. See Confederation of Indian Industries circulation, 1, 4, 61, 97–­98, 102, 155; of capital, 128; of feelings, 116; as a methodology, 24–­25; as a way of producing selves and spaces, 6 class: and BPO employment, 113; and consumption, 138; and deaf-­deaf marriage, 155, 169n3; and deaf deaf same, 163; and hierarchies in deaf worlds, 5; middle-­class aspirations, 179n7; reproduction under multilevel marketing, 128, 146, 149; and sameness work, 5, 111; and “success” in oral education, 171n18 cochlear implant, 12, 23, 26, 33, 42, 154, 171n15 coercion: in deaf churches, 54; as part of deaf sociality, 143; as part of multilevel marketing, 129, 143. See also conversion; force Cohen, Lawrence, 51 Comaroff, Jean, 61, 129 Comaroff, John, 129 communication access: at cross-­disability events, 168n10; in higher education, 8, 94; in interviewing and research, 29; in multilevel marketing, 131–­132; as part of deaf development, 163, 175n17; in vocational training center classrooms, 80 communication gaps, discourses of, 31–­32 community: becoming a member of, 46, 48, 133, 173n8; governing through, 95; “sign butter” as creating, 62 Companies Bill (2013), 177n6 computer training courses, 83, 88–­90, 97. See also business process outsourcing; information technology enabled services; vocational training Confederation of Indian Industries (CII), and corporate social responsibility, 105–­107 consumption: deaf desires for, 138–­139; and deaf development, 21; and middle-­class aspirations, 179n7. See also class contentious politics, deaf involvement in, 16, 153 Contributions to Indian Sociology, 10 conversion: and coercion, 76; to deaf culture, 46, 54; scholarly debates about, 58–­61, 76 copying: in deaf education, 78, 90; in deaf moral economies, 81; and Jehovah’s Witnesses, 68–­69; in sameness work, 5, 101, 103; for secondary school leaving certificates, 39, 77–­78 corporate social responsibility (CSR), 8, 107–­ 108, 122, 154, 177n6; and diversity initiatives, 177n8. See also diversity; inclusion Cross, Jamie, 82, 173n5, 177n6 cross-­disability organizing, 153, 168n2. See also Disability Rights Group CSI. See Church of South India Csordas, Thomas, 4–­5 CSR. See corporate social responsibility

Davis, Lennard J., 168n10 Deaf Aid Society, 36 deaf culture, 171–­172n19, 179n11; conversion to, 46, 54; role of narratives in, 46, 54 deaf deaf same, 2, 4–­5, 47, 60, 72, 92, 110, 156, 161; definition of, 163; discourses of, 64; limits of, 128; sense of responsibility because of, 112, 143 deaf development: in Bangalore, 15; deaf churches, 54–­55, 62, 75, 78; definition of, 2, 6, 163; discourses of, 81–­82; and multilevel marketing, 128, 138; and open hearts, 58; and political economic development, 8–­9; role of normal in, 160; and the state, 3; and vocational training, 81–­82, 90, 98 deaf education: bilingual education, 36, 170n8; contested ideologies around, 36, 39–­42, 170n8; manualism, 170n8; missionary education, 56; not-­learning, 78; oralism, 33, 40–­41, 170n8; and vocational training, 79. See also vocational training deaf exceptionalism, 12. See also Deaf Gain deaf futures: anxiety in relation to, 98, 157, 164; and deaf churches, 55; and desires for deaf development, 82, 153, 163; and employment, 85, 88–­90, 98–­99, 124; and political economic futures for all Indians, 157; role of normals in, 155–­156 Deaf Gain, 11–­12 deaf group, 168n16; in employment, 99, 101–­102, 110–­113, 116, 118, 159; in multilevel marketing, 142, 148–­149; and sameness work, 156–­157. See also ambivalence; sameness work Deafhood, 5–­6 deaf-­normal relationships, 157–­161. See also family; love deaf old age-­homes, 2, 128, 137–­138, 144–­145 deaf orientations, 4–­5, 155–­156, 160; in deaf churches, 54–­55, 58, 60, 62; and deaf deaf same, 163; in multilevel marketing, 149; and sameness work, 5; and “sign butter,” 166; value produced for others, 101; in vocational training centers, 98, 102. See also deaf turns; disorientation deaf similitude. See deaf deaf same deaf social fact, 54, 77 deaf sociality, 5, 161; converting to, 61–­62; deaf people’s social, moral, and economic practices and, 159; extracting value from, 11, 149; fractures in, 141, 148, 156; and learning sign language, 46, 50, 160; pan-­Indian nature of, 55; role of deaf churches, 54; role of deaf education, 39; and social work, 6; transnational, 70; values of, 29–­30, 74, 95. See also deaf deaf same; sameness work deaf space, 92, 154–­155 Deaf Studies, 5, 11–­12, 14, 154, 168n15, 174n10, 179n11 deaf turns, 2, 4–­5, 51, 54, 62, 155–­156; and normals, 158–­160 De Clerk, Goedele, 171–­172n19



INDEX 193

deep knowledge, 74, 98; and deaf teachers, 87; definition of, 163–­164; importance of, 83, 87–­88, 97 development, multiple registers and temporalities of, 6–­9. See also deaf development Digital Journal of Deaf Studies, 12 disability certificate. See certificate disability nongovernmental organizations, and “one-­size-­fits-­all,” 80. See also vocational training Disability Rights Group, 22, 105 disability rights movement. See cross-­ disability organizing; Disability Rights Group; National Centre for the Promotion of Employment of Disabled People Disability Studies, 20, 121, 168n10 disability universalism, 80 Disabled Peoples Association (DPA) (pseud.): history of, 85–­86, 89; training courses offered by, 83. See also vocational training disorientation: from the family, 38, 66; and learning sign language, 50–­51; and sameness work, 5. See also deaf orientations; reorientations diversity, 12, 106, 108. See also corporate social responsibility; inclusion Diversity and Equal Opportunity Centre, 106 downlines, definition of, 125–­127, 135 DPA. See Disabled Peoples Association early intervention, 33–­35, 41, 170n9 Easterbrooks, Susan P., 170n8 education. See deaf education electronics, study of, 24, 79, 83–­84, 89 emotional labor, 115–­116. See also affect employment: disability quotas for in the public sector, 103–­104; incentives for disability hiring in the private sector, 104–­105. See also information technology enabled services; private sector; public sector; vocational training Employment Center (pseud.), 81, 90, 96, 98. See also computer training courses; vocational training Excel (pseud.), 118–­121. See also corporate social responsibility; information technology enabled services extraction. See value Fadzillah, Ida, 130 family: and attending residential schools, 57–­58; deaf perspectives on, 28–­29, 49; in information technology enabled services offices, 118–­121; not learning sign language, 33; role of in multilevel marketing, 144–­145; role of in negotiating disability, 42–­45, 160; scholarly literature on, 29, 52. See also marriage; mother tongue fears: in relation to deaf futures, 74, 154; in relation to deaf group, 113. See also ambivalence; anxiety; deaf futures Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry, 105

Fernandes, Leela, 179n7 fingerspelling, 17–­19. See also Indian Sign Language force, 142–­143; definition of, 164. See also coercion for life: and changes in India’s political economy, 76, 85, 90, 119–­120; and committing to a deaf church, 74; definition of, 8, 164; and new deaf futures, 153–­154 Friedman, Thomas, 177n10 Gandhi, Mahatma, 21 Gandhi, Maneka, 104 Ganguly-­Scrase, Ruchira, 174n12 Garland-­Thomson, Rosemarie, 20 gastropolitics, 28 Ginsburg, Faye, 170n6 Giri, V.V., 22 Goffman, Erving, 14 Goldman, Michael, 14–­15 gossip: morality of in deaf worlds, 7; and representations of deaf people, 81, 115, 170n5 government certificates. See certificates grab, 146, 164, 179n12. See also coercion; force Green, Mara, 179n11 group work, 94. See also deaf group Gupta, Akhil, 21 half half half: definition of, 164; and normal teachers, 83; and not-­learning, 74, 86–­88, 97–­99 Haraway, Donna, 6 harmony, 140–­141, 148, 156 hearing aids: behind-­the-­ear, 36; body, 34, 36; deaf people’s unhappy memories of, 23; digital, 42; role of in “successful” deaf education, 33 help, and deaf moral practices, 7, 26, 95. See also help support help support: conflicting understandings of, 140; in deaf churches, 75; definition of, 7, 165; responsibility to, 73, 112, 143 hierarchy: caste and class in deaf worlds, 5; complicating the category of the deaf group, 128, 141; harmony in, 140; imitation, 140; inversion of in families, 144; and reproduction of class inequalities, 128 Hochschild, Arlie Russell, 115 Hoffman-­Dilloway, Erika, 178n24 Hoffmeister, Robert, 179n11 home sign, 31 hospitality sector, 4, 123–­124 Humphries, Tom, 179n11 IBM, 90 IDCS. See International Deaf Children’s Society identity: in Deafhood, 6; in Deaf Studies, 5; effects of learning sign language on, 50; foregrounding deaf and hearing, 64; and religion, 58; in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, 171n14

194 INDEX

immobility: and deaf workers, 102, 106; as valued characteristic in a post-­ liberalization economy, 106, 122 inclusion: as a discourse in the information technology enabled services sector, 108; and exploitation, 127, 149; as neoliberal rhetoric, 11–­12, 117; and the production of exclusion, 156. See also corporate social responsibility; diversity independent representative (IR), 129 Indian disability movement, 8. See also Disability Rights Group; National Centre for Employment of Disabled People Indian Railways, and potential employment, 84 Indian Sign Language (ISL): attempts to vernacularize, 169n20; Bible translation, 153; Corpus Project, 17; curriculum, 46–­47; as deaf children’s mother tongue, 38; dictionaries, 20; fingerspelling, 17–20, 18; in higher education, 8; lack of state recognition of, 3; learning later in life, 45–­ 50; linguistic research on, 17–­20; regional variations in, 17–­20 Indian Sign Language Research and Training Center (ISLRTC), 154 Indian Tobacco Company, 90 Indira Gandhi National Open University, 154 Industrial Training Institute, 79, 173n2, 173n5. See also vocational training Industrial Revolution, and the creation of disability as experience and category, 121 information technology enabled services (ITES), 4, 167n2, 178n23; deaf workers’ ambivalence about, 102, 118, 122, 124, 177n11; scholarly literature on, 103, 109, 176n24; as trailblazer for deaf and disabled workers, 105, 108. See also Excel; Phillips Morgan; Pinnacle; vocational training Infosys, 90, 108, 117, 177n9, 178n19 inspiration: deaf workers as sources of, 102, 106, 115–­117, 122; popular media representations of deaf people as, 78; and stories, 133 Institute of Speech and Hearing, 37 International Deaf Children’s Society (IDCS), 31, 170n5 International Disability Day, 116, 168n10 International Labor Organization, 173n5 interpreter/interpreting: in deaf development, 163; disabled friends acting as, 168n10; family acting as, 46, 155; and Jehovah’s Witnesses, 68, 70; in multilevel marketing, 131; National Institute of Hearing Handicapped courses in, 49; in research methodology, 26, 29–­31; relay interpreting, 112, 174–­175n15; scarcity of in India, 29, 94, 131, 154, 177n14; in vocational training, 9, 32, 49, 170n6 IR. See independent representative ISL. See Indian Sign Language ISLRTC. See Indian Sign Language Research and Training Center

ITES. See information technology enabled services Jeffery, Patricia, 79 Jeffery, Roger, 79 Jeffrey, Craig, 79, 82 Jehovah’s Witnesses, 68–­70 Johnson, Jane E., 17 Johnson, Russell J., 17 JSS Polytechnic for the Physically Handicapped (JSSPPH), 93, 101, 111, 175n16; demographics at, 174n6; sign language used at, 176n21 Karnataka State Disability Commission, 22 Keller, Eva, 76 Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC), 8, 123 Kisch, Shifra, 167n5 Kleinman, Arthur, 81 Kohrman, Matthew, 167n1 Korean Church (pseud.), 53, 62–­65 Kusters, Annelies, 169n23, 173n8 Ladd, Paddy, 5, 179n11 Lamb, Sarah, 29 Lane, Harlan, 48, 60, 133, 179n11 language ideologies, 29, 33; in deaf education, 35 LDS. See Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints Lefebvre, Henri, 160 Leigh, Greg, 34 LeMaster, Barbara, 170n10 leprosy, 9 liberalization, 11, 128; and development of India’s information technology sector, 15 Liechty, Mark, 179n7 linguistic minority, deaf people as, 3, 47 Little Flower Convent School for the Deaf, 35, 39–­40, 43–­44, 55, 171n12 livelihood. See employment local moral worlds, 81 love: between deafs, 64, 155; between deafs and normals, 14, 22, 70, 113–­119, 122, 134, 160, 178n17, 179n5; from families, 28, 30 Lukose, Ritty, 179n7 Mains, Daniel, 82 manualism. See deaf education manual labor, 84, 174n9; and vocational training, 90–­93 marriage: between deafs, 30, 152, 155; between deafs and normals, 134 Martin, Emily, 122 Mazzarella, William, 167n3, 179n7 mime, 157–­161 Mindess, Anna, 133, 174n10 Mines, Diane, 29 Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment, 103 Mitra, Meera, 177n6 Missionary Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, 39, 55



INDEX 195

Mitchell, David, 121 mobility, 102; aspirations for, 136; becoming a pastor as means to, 72; value of, 122 Montforte Brothers, 55 moral economy, 78, 81, 87, 95 morality talk, 82 Morgan, Elizabeth, 56 Morgan, Michael, 17 mother tongue: and choosing a deaf school, 37; sign language as, 38, 46–­47 Mphasis, 90 multilevel marketing, representation of, 127 multinational corporations, role of in deaf employment, 4, 8, 90, 128, 154, 175n19 Murray, Joseph, 11–­12 NAD. See National Association of the Deaf Nadeem, Shezhad, 103, 118, 121, 177n7 Nair, Janaki, 8, 15, 172n3 Nakamura, Karen, 169n1 Nakassis, Constantine V., 10 National Association of the Deaf (NAD), 8, 16, 105, 138, 171n15, 153 National Centre for Promotion of Employment of Disabled People (NCPEDP), 105, 107, 118, 176n5, 177n9 National Institute for Hearing Handicapped (NIHH), 19, 38, 38, 46, 49, 172n20. See also Ali Yavar Jung National Institute for Hearing Handicapped NCPEDP. See National Centre for Promotion of Employment of Disabled People Nehru, Jawaharlal, 21 neoliberalism, 3, 15; and deaf employment, 11–­12, 89–­91, 106, 122, 156–­157; and Disability Studies, 10, 121–­122; and multilevel marketing, 127, 129, 149. See also liberalization newborn hearing screening, 167n1 NIHH. See National Institute for Hearing Handicapped Noida Deaf Society, 18, 48 Oliva, Gina, 178n17 open heart, 55–­61, 75; definition of, 165 oralism. See deaf education Ostrove, Joan, 178n17 Padden, Carol, 179n11 Panda, Sibaji, 17 Pandian, Anand, 6 Patel, Reena, 113, 118, 176n20 patience, 98, 146 Paul, Peter V., 170n7 Paxson, Heather, 168n11 penetration story, 158 Pepsico, 90 Persons with Disability (Equal Opportunities, Protection of Rights, and Full Participation) (PWD) Act (1995), 3, 103–­104 Phillips Morgan (pseud.), 107, 109–­111, 115, 117, 119, 177n13. See also corporate social responsibility; information technology

enabled services; multinational corporations; vocational training Pinnacle (pseud.), 111–­114. See also corporate social responsibility; information technology enabled services; multinational corporations; vocational training Pizza Hut, 123 PM. See prosperity meeting polio, 80, 85–­86 Power, Des, 33 pressure: in deaf sociality, 142–­143; in employment, 113–­114, 121. See also coercion; force Preston, Paul, 180n1 private sector: anxiety about employment in, 85; and disability legislation, 104–­105; disability nongovernmental organizations’ connection with, 81, 124. See also for life; public sector; quotas prosperity meeting (PM), 132–­136, 138 public intimacy, 170n6 public sector: anxieties about employment in, 84–­85; decline in, 15–­16, 120, 128, 173n5; and disability legislation, 103–­104; disability nongovernmental organizations, 124. See also for life; private sector; quotas Puranik, Ravi, 176–­177n6 question answer, 65–­66, 68, 75; definition of, 165 quotas: in government industrial training institutes, 79; in public sector employment, 85, 103–­104, 106, 171n13 Rapp, Rayna, 170n6 RCI. See Rehabilitation Council of India Rehabilitation Council of India (RCI), 3, 40–­42, 79 reorientations, 5, 46. See also deaf orientation; disorientation Robbins, Joel, 76, 172n5 Roberts, Nathaniel, 54, 58, 75, 167n3 Rose, Nikolas, 95 Roy, Ananya, 22 Saint Louis Institute for the Deaf, 39, 55–­56 sameness work, 5–­6, 102–­103, 148, 156, 176n1 Sarva Shiksa Abhiyan (Education for All) Act, 170n11 saved: and deaf churches, 54, 76; and deaf people’s moral practices, 7, 159; definition of, 165. See also spoiled Schieffelin, Bambi, 29 Scrase, Timothy, 174n12 Searle, Llerena Guiu, 10 secondary school leaving exam, 39, 77–­78, 173n3, 176n1. See also certificate self-­narrative, 133. See also autobiography Sethna, Meher, 49, 172n20 shame, 69, 113, 171n17, 179n13; and copying, 39, 78; and families’ reluctance to use sign language, 33 Shamir, Ronen, 177n6, 177n8 Shapiro, Joseph, 12

196 INDEX

share, 47, 128, 156, 159–­160; definition of, 166 Sharma, Aradhana, 6, 82 Sharma, Maniram, 104 Sheila Kothavala Institute for the Deaf (SKID), 17, 35–­37, 39 Shell Oil, 90 “sign bread and butter,” 62, 76 sign butter, 61–­62, 75–­76; definition of, 166 silent brewmaster, 1, 8, 123, 151–­152 Sinha, Samar, 17 SKID. See Sheila Kothavala Institute for the Deaf Snyder, Sharon, 121 social audits, 22 social capital: in multilevel marketing, 128, 132, 146, 159; from sign language, 48 soft skills, 83, 90–­91 Special Employment Exchange Bureau, 104 “special friend,” 130–­131, 179n5 spoiled: and deaf people’s moral practices, 7, 61, 159; definition of, 165. See also saved Staples, James, 9 stigma, 9–­10, 13–­14, 121–­122, 157. See also value storytelling, 65, 158. See also autobiography structural barriers, 4, 20, 102, 143, 148, 160–­161 Sunder Rajan, Kaushik, 178n23 Tamil variety of Indian Sign Language. See Indian Sign Language technical skills, 79, 171n13. See also soft skills technology: creating inclusion, 108, 177n10, 177n11; spectacular developments in, 42. See also cochlear implant; hearing aids Thompson-­Reuters, 90 timepass, 82 True Life Bible Fellowship (pseud.), 65–­68 United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD), 3, 8, 41, 105, 153, 171n14

Upadhya, Carol, 15, 109, 115 uplines, definition of, 125–­128 value: the disability movement’s lack of analysis of, 176n5; extracted from call center employees, 116; extracted from deaf people, 11, 14, 24, 102, 107, 149, 154, 156, 159; multiple regimes of, 9–­12 van der Veer, Peter, 56 van Wessel, Margit, 138 Vasavi, A. R., 15, 109, 115 Vasishta, Madan, 17, 49, 172n20 Vision (pseud.), 89–­97, 99, 107–­108. See also vocational training Viswanathan, Gauri, 56, 60 vocational training, 173n5; connections with multinational corporations, 15–­16, 154; deaf circulations between centers, 97–­98; as disciplinary spaces, 92–­94; as key site for deaf education, 78–­80; and job placement, 89–­90, 97; and learning sign language, 45; as limiting employment possibilities, 99; and not-­learning, 82–­83; as social space, 87, 91, 93, 98 Vora, Kalindi, 116 waiting, 83, 91, 96–­98, 109, 176n24 Watchtower, The, 68–­70 welding, 83–­85, 79, 89 Wilson, Ara, 130 Woodward, James, 12 Woolard, Kathryn A., 29 “workers with disabilities” as a new category, 78, 90, 103–­109, 154, 159 World Health Organization, 167n1 World Bank, 103, 173n5 Zeshan, Ulrike, 49–­50, 172n20

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

MICHELE FRIEDNER is an assistant professor of health and rehabilitation

sciences at Stony Brook University. A medical anthropologist, she conducts research with deaf and disabled Indians as they attempt to create more inhabitable presents and futures.