Global and Comparative Ethnography. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019. 322 pp. US$115.00, cloth. ISBN 9780190664763.
Narrow Fairways: Getting By & Falling Behind in the New India is an invaluable treatise on the dynamics of social mobility among the lower middle classes in a globalizing India. Patrick Inglis conducts his study among the poor caddies, mostly hailing from the lower castes, working in three elite golf clubs: Bangalore Golf Club (BGC), Eagleton Golf Resort (EGR), and Karnataka Golf Association (KGA), located in the city of Bangalore (now Bengaluru), christened “India’s Silicon Valley” since the 1980s. Spanning over a decade from 2007 to 2017, the study explores the interactions taking place between the rich members and poor caddies to understand and analyze the changes resulting therefrom in the lives of caddies and their families, particularly for the life opportunities of their children. With a focus on investigating this relationship, the author addresses the question of “why some get ahead and others fall behind,” even as “the distribution of power, privilege, and advantage in society remains largely unchanged” (11).
Inglis combines academic rigour with participant observation and archival research to develop his thesis about social mobility in the New India. Dividing his time between members and caddies, the author took part in the activities of the caddies’ everyday lives and closely observed the factors that sustained their relationship to the members, which resulted in social mobility while reproducing a status quo. Altogether, Inglis conducted 178 interviews with 123 individuals (64 members and 59 caddies); carried out two surveys, one of member applications at the KGA and BGC, and another of caddies at all three clubs; and recorded countless hours of audio and snapped innumerable images (11). It deserves mentioning that Inglis’s Narrow Fairways is discussed within the framework of globalization and in terms of neoliberal reforms in the Indian economy. Strikingly, the author has opted to narrate his stories in the first person, thus giving the reader a first-hand account of what the author experienced and saw.
Besides the introduction and conclusion, there are 11 chapters divided into four parts. Part I has two chapters, and parts II, III, and IV, each three. Part I deals with the prevailing labour conditions at the clubs, and considers the favourable land rates and other subsidies the government offers them. In chapter 2, the author argues that while members enjoy comforts at the clubs and play a game subsidized by taxpayers’ money, they have no interest in implementing a system of institutional support for the caddies which would provide stability with guaranteed benefits and protections. Parts II, III, and IV are organized thematically; each of the three chapters in each part focuses on a select group of caddies. Part II develops a comparative perspective on “the limits and uses of servility and deference” for social mobility. Part III discusses the human and emotional costs involved in seeking support from club members. And, finally, part IV confirms the author’s basic thesis that interactions between the rich members and poor caddies resulted in social mobility for the latter, while “effectively leaving the status quo in place” (13).
The book is also a damning indictment of the development model that comes with a free market economy and the retreat of the state from the welfare sector. Yet interestingly, while raising serious doubts about the efficacy of a development model concomitant with globalization, the findings of the study take readers beyond scholarly and critical studies that either peddle globalization as a panacea for the ills afflicting societies in the developing world or analyze the effects of globalization solely in terms of growing inequality and a yawning gap between rich and poor. Inglis’s main contention is that interactions between the rich and the poor that are a result of globalization and their implications for the everyday life of the poor are overlooked.
The core thesis that emerges from the findings of the study is that rather than being pulled apart, rich and poor are “necessarily being drawn together as a result of globalization, and in ways that both upended yet reproduced a status quo long in the making” (7). In contrast to existing studies that focus on statistical representations of social mobility in India, Inglis’s study “emphasizes the social quality of social mobility” (11) through individual narratives of the subject of his research.
In a situation where market forces get a free hand and the state becomes apathetic to the welfare of citizens, the poor are left with no option but to turn to the rich for support. In such a context, the rich assume the role of “small welfare states”; Inglis calls them “governments-in-miniature” (10). He argues that while there is dependency in these relationships between rich and poor, there is also social mobility. This “dependence on dependency,” for the author, “is no way to develop a nation” (236). Inglis highlights the need for large-scale collective resistance and protest to demand “a more open and inclusive development strategy” and a different kind of state, and reflects on the strategies for organizing labour under changed circumstances of globalizing capital (237).
This study is confined to one large city in India and three golf clubs therein. Here, too, the author observed more than one pattern of social mobility. While servility to members was one way to move up the social ladder, an alternative path of autonomy was also open within the larger framework of changes that Bangalore was experiencing; Inglis terms the path of servility, “upward servility.” It is legitimate, therefore, to say that in other parts of the country, one may find different patterns of social mobility. This, however, is not to say that the findings of Inglis’s research hold no significance for the whole of Indian society.
The main contributions of the book lie in going beyond existing academic studies on globalization, focusing on the emerging relationships between rich and poor, and analyzing the factors that sustain these relationships and also result in social mobility for the poor. Despite its limitations, Narrow Fairways: Getting By & Falling Behind in the New India gives readers important insight into the nature of social mobility in India today. Elaborate notes are scholarly and helpful in understanding the context and the author’s arguments. The language is lucid and the book is gripping. It will be of interest to students and scholars of social sciences, and general readers who are interested in understanding social mobility in contemporary India.
Ganeshdatta Poddar
Foundation for Liberal and Management Education (FLAME) University, Pune