2. A sari is a garment of six or nine yards of cloth, commonly worn in the Indian subcontinent. While a sari is one continuous piece of cloth, it is aesthetically divided into separate parts—border, main body, and sari end—often demarcated by separate designs or colors.

3. Kulpi refers to a Community Development Block in South 24 Parganas, comprised of fourteen villages or Gram Panchayats (Village Councils), as well as to an individual village within this block named Kulpi. In this article, “Kulpi” refers to the village or Gram Panchayat of Kulpi.

4. Ostaagars told me that the beads, thread, and sequins came from Delhi and Uttar Pradesh in North India. The saris were sourced from the state of Gujarat, a major manufacturing hub. One ostaagar described the city of Surat in Gujarat as “the Manchester of India.”

5. This article is based on eighteen months of fieldwork conducted along a major highway, NH-117, in South 24 Parganas. People who work in zari embroidery were interviewed in Kolkata's wholesale market Burrabazar, Amtala, and in the villages of Kulpi, Kochuberia, Sagar Island Pathar Pratima, and in buses along the highway (see map).

6. “District Profile, South 24 Parganas, West Bengal,” Government of West Bengal, http://www.s24pgs.gov.in/s24p/index.php (accessed December 23, 2013). In 2014, the Indian government stated that those spending below Rs. 32 (Approximately USD 0.60) per day would be considered poor, in a controversial report that was widely criticized for setting the limit far too low.

7. Government of West Bengal, District Human Development Report South 24 Parganas (West Bengal, 2009). http://wbplan.gov.in/HumanDev/DHDR/24%20pgsSouth/Chapter%2003.pdf (accessed January, 26, 2015).

8. Neoliberalism in India generally refers to the Indian state's adoption of New Economic Policies from 1991 onward, “which intensified India's encounter with global capital.” See Oza, Rupal, The Making of Neoliberal India (New York, 2006)Google Scholar, 2. These policies included the privatization of previously state-run industries, greater entry of foreign investment and consumer goods into India, and the opening up of key sectors of the economy to private capital. See Ahmed, Waquar, India's New Economic Policy: A Critical Analysis (New York, 2011)Google Scholar; Chatterjee, Partha, “Democracy and Economic Transformation in India,” Economic and Political Weekly 43 (2008)Google Scholar; Upadhya, Carol, “India's ‘New Middle Class’ and the Globalising City: Software Professionals in Bangalore,” in The New Middle Classes: Globalizing Lifestyles, Consumerism and Environmental Concern, ed. Meier, Lars and Lange, Hellmuth (Dordrecht, 2009), 219–36Google Scholar.

9. As part of economic liberalization, India's Motor Vehicles Act and Rules was amended in 1989. See Calcutta State Transport Corporation, Annual Resource Mobilization, Internal Report (Calcutta, 2008). State-reserved bus routes were opened to private operators, and the frequency of buses in South 24 Parganas exponentially increased. During fieldwork in buses, I met embroiderers and workers in similarly outsourced industries, including beedi rolling and paper box-making, who discussed the importance of improved connectivity for their work. While improved connectivity has not caused the growth of this industry, it facilitates its spread along bus networks.

10. Similar processes of the rural outsourcing of embroidery are taking place in other parts of India, such as Uttar Pradesh. See Raksha Kumar, “A Tainted Tradition,” The Hindu Sunday Magazine, March 24, 2013. Fifteen years ago, Wilkinson-Weber's ethnography of chikan embroidery located it as an urban industry concentrated in the oldest areas of Lucknow. Contrast her study with the claim made in Belkin and Benhamou-Huet's 2009 book on Indian embroidery: “In the villages around Agra and Calcutta, life revolves around the manufacture and trade of embroidery—a frame for making saris stands in nearly every house.” See Belkin, Aurore and Benhamou-Huet, Judith, 21st-Century Embroidery in India: In their Hands (Munich, 2009)Google Scholar, 2.

11. I stress “commercial embroidery” here, as opposed to more traditional and regionally specific embroidery on clothes made for both rural and urban consumption, such as kantha, phulkari, or chikan. See Chattopadhyaya, Kamaladevi, Indian Embroidery (New Delhi, 1977)Google Scholar.

12. These saris display a low-skilled and generic form of hand embroidery, which people can learn after a short period of training. Many forms of hand embroidery have undergone similar “deskilling” processes to meet growing demand. See Wilkinson-Weber, Embroidering Lives.

13. In his study of rug production for IKEA in Tamil Nadu, De Neve identifies similar reasons for the outsourcing of work to villages from towns. See De Neve, Geert, “Weaving for IKEA in South India: Subcontracting, Labour Markets and Gender Relations in a Global Value Chain,” in Globalizing India: Perspectives from Below, ed. Assayag, Jackie and Fuller, C.J. (London: 2005)Google Scholar, 93.

14. Basu, Deepankar and Basole, Amit, Relations of Production and Modes of Surplus Extraction in India: Working Paper (Amherst, MA, 2010)Google Scholar, 45.

15. Important regional centers of textile production included Bengal, the Coromandel Coast, Gujarat and Maharashtra, and parts of North India. See Washbrook, David, “The Textile Industry and the Economy of South India” in How India Clothed the World, ed. Riello, Giorgio and Roy, Tirthankar (Leiden, 2009)Google Scholar, 178; and Om Prakash “From Market-Determined to Coercion Based: Textile Manufacturing in Eighteenth-Century Bengal” in How India Clothed the World, 219.

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17. Washbrook, “The Textile Industry,” 178.

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19. The Indian textile industry, the decline of Indian manufacturing, and the causes of the divergence are part of a large and extremely complex field of study. The debates within this field certainly cannot be summarized here. Rather, the aim is to draw some parallels between older forms of rural outwork and contemporary processes. Some key writings on the history of the Indian textile industry can be found in Roy, Tirthankar, Traditional Industry in the Economy of Colonial India (Cambridge, 1999)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Riello and Roy, How India Clothed the World; Parthasarathi, Prasannan, The Transition to a Colonial Economy (Cambridge, 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Chandavarkar, Rajnarayan, “Industrialization in India before 1947: Conventional Approaches and Alternative Perspectives,” Modern Asian Studies 19 (1984): 623–68CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Haynes, Douglas, Small Town Capitalism in Western India (Cambridge, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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35. Ibid., 52.

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39. The GoWB attempted to acquire over 900 acres of agricultural land in 2006 for Tata Motors Limited (a private multinational corporation) to produce what was billed as India's cheapest car, the Nano. The factory was never built in West Bengal due to widespread resistance and was moved to Gujarat. See Mitra, Rahul, “What About the People in the ‘People's Car’?” in Case Studies in Organizational Communication: Ethical Perspectives and Practices, ed. May, Steve (Los Angeles, 2012), 119–128 Google Scholar. Nandigram was to be the site of a “chemical hub” by Salim Group, an Indonesian MNC. Due to mass protests across the state in 2007 and 2008, and the communist government's electoral defeat, this project was also abandoned. For more information on Nandigram and SEZ policies in West Bengal, see Ray, Gautam, ed., Nandigram and Beyond (Kolkata, 2008)Google Scholar.

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41. Tamal Sengupta, “Panchayat Poll Result Trends Indicate Mamata Banerjee's Sweeping Victory,” Economic Times, July 29, 2013. http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2013-07-29/news/40872345_1_trinamool-congress-zilla-parishads-gram-panchayat (accessed January 26, 2015).

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50. Kohli argues that an important difference between economic growth in India and China is that in India production is less export-oriented and is geared toward a large domestic market, which has boomed since the liberalization of India's economy. See Kohli, Poverty Amid Plenty, 220.

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54. Fernandes, India's New Middle Class, 35.

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59. The importance of saris for Bengali identity can be seen in a landmark 2010 Calcutta High Court ruling allowing female teachers in West Bengal to choose their own clothing. Before that, teachers were expected to wear only saris to school, with multiple cases of teachers being coerced into wearing them. See “Teachers Win Right to Dress,” The Telegraph, May 8, 2010.

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63. The piece rate in 2008 ranged from US$1.60 per sari for light embroidery to US$20 for heavily embroidered pieces.

64. Chari, Fraternal Capital, 127.

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66. Many teachers I spoke with privately expressed anger over the pressure to attend CPI(M) rallies when they opposed the party and supported the then-opposition Trinamool Congress. They felt unable to freely express their political views.

67. Even among people who are beneficiaries of globalization-dependent industries, positions of ambivalence emerge. Mazzarella, in his study of Indian advertising, highlights the ambivalence of executive informants regarding the “localization of MNC brands” that leads to a “double discourse.” He writes, “It reflected a profound ambivalence on the part of my executive informants, an ambivalence that was experienced as personal and aesthetic as much as it was felt to be professional and strategic.” See Mazzarella, Shoveling Smoke, 251.

68. This is somewhere between US$15,000 and US$17,000.

69. The term Marwari is often used indiscriminately for North Indian merchants in West Bengal. Originally migrants from the Western Indian state of Rajasthan, Marwaris form an important business community in Kolkata. They are often seen as an “Other” and resented as rich outsiders by many Bengalis, in a problematic and exclusionary discourse.

70. Isik, Damla, “Personal and Global Economies: Male Carpet Manufacturers as Entrepreneurs in the Weaving Neighborhoods of Konya, Turkey,” American Ethnologist 37 (2010): 55 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

71. Ibid., 53.

72. Embroiderers repeatedly used the English word “cheating” to refer to unfair practices within the industry. The word “cheating” is widely used in Bengal to refer to unethical actions, such as cheating on exams, and also for the practice of adulterating foodstuffs and medications. Many English-language words take on popular meanings within the Bengali vernacular, a process Sudipta Kaviraj examines in his discussion of the term “public” in “Filth and the Public Sphere: Concepts and Practices about Space in Calcutta,” Public Culture 10 (1997): 97Google Scholar.

73. De Neve, Geert, “Weaving for IKEA in South India: Subcontracting, Labour Markets and Gender Relations in a Global Value Chain,” in Globalizing India: Perspectives from Below, ed. Assayag, Jackie and Fuller, C. J. (London, 2005)Google Scholar, 103.

74. Ibid., 104.

75. Breman, Jan, Footloose Labour: Working in India's Informal Economy (Cambridge, 1996)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; De Neve, “Weaving for IKEA.”

76. Some of the “cultural changes” that Choudhury identified were the growth of consumer culture and the increasing penetration of Hindi and Oriya cinema and music at the expense of Bengali media. He also identified a concomitant shift in youth behaviors, describing the growth of a “premerpsychology” (love psychology) where “young people here see all these [Bollywood] love stories, think why can't I also do love, go around with someone. But this causes problems particularly for girls. Sometimes the cultures cannot mix.”

77. The zari industry in Kulpi and in most of South 24 Parganas is unorganized, and there has been little or no union activity within this industry in rural West Bengal. But the state of West Bengal, after thirty-four years of Left-Front rule, has a long history of militant labor movements within formal factories in urban areas. Familiar with labor organizing within the state, ostaagars are unequivocally against unionization within the industry.

78. Guha, Ranajit, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (Durham, NC, 1999)Google Scholar, 167.

79. Haynes, Small Town Capitalism, 254.

80. There is a rich literature which critiques the view that class solidarity and ethnic ties are inherently inimical. Parthasarathi notes that in the 1700s weavers' powerful networks of caste-based solidarity allowed them strong bargaining positions against merchants and kings. See The Transition to a Colonial Economy, 31. Subho Basu argues that caste ties do not always impede the formation of class consciousness; that workers' politics can be informed by ideas of customary rights; and that solidarity can be bolstered by natal ties. See “The Paradox of the Peasant-Worker: Re-Conceptualizing Workers' Politics in Bengal 1890–1939,” Modern Asian Studies 42 (2008): 47–74 Google Scholar.

81. For example, a poor relation of Rabiul's had recently dropped out of school and moved to Bombay against his parents' wishes. He had “run off” to Bombay in order to learn high-end Zardosi embroidery work and eventually become an ostaagar dealing in Zardosi embroidery.

82. Sharad Chari also notes similar ideas of worker mobility and worker identification with small-capitalist bosses in his study of Tiruppur.

83. Basu and Basole, Relations of Production; Chari, Fraternal Capital; De Neve, “Weaving for IKEA.”

84. Marx, Karl, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume I (London, 1993)Google Scholar, 603.

85. Ibid., 601, 864.

86. Ibid., 597–98.

87. Ibid., 601.

88. Breman, Jan and Shah, Parthiv, Working in the Mill No More (Amsterdam, 2004)Google Scholar.

89. Anand Giridharadas, “Indian to the Core, and an Oligarch,” New York Times, June 15, 2008.

90. Ibid.

91. Chatterjee, Partha, “Democracy and Economic Transformation in India,” Economic and Political Weekly 43 (2008): 53–62 Google Scholar.

92. I certainly do not seek to celebrate caste-based identity here, but rather to point out that, historically, strong bargaining positions for workers in textile manufacturing were often based on caste and kinship solidarities, rather than non-ascriptive ones.

93. Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence, 4.

94. Ibid., 261.

95. Ibid., 262.