Questioning success: Dispossession and the criminal entrepreneur in urban India

Abstract

Conceptual divisions between the formal and informal sector are a marked feature of studies of Indian neoliberal dispossession, which juxtapose the experiences of an insecure informal workforce with their counterparts in an increasingly privileged and hegemonic formal sector. I suggest that dispossession be conceptually extended to areas of formal, urban India that experience economic liberalisation as a loss of job security and engage with the ideology of the enterprising individual in critical ways. Amid the casualisation of industrial labour and assumptions of endemic corruption, workers in one of India’s largest private corporations argue that the success of the neoliberal entrepreneur relies upon the use of criminality and corruption. In this environment, entrepreneurs are regarded in a politically critical manner, inviting a re-examination of the extent to which the ideology of the enterprising individual has been internalised in India’s urban centres.