Imagining India: software and the ideology of liberalisation

India's successful software outsourcing industry has come to represent the achievements of the liberalisation programme, and accordingly its entrepreneurs have positioned themselves as economic and political leaders of the 'new India'. This paper explores the cultural politics of liberalisation and globalisation in India by focusing on representations of the software industry that form part of the dominant discourse on liberalisation, and on the 'imagination' of India's future articulated by its leaders. The hegemony of India's new capitalist class is far from complete, however, given the social divisions and tensions that have been engendered by India's neoliberal development regime, exemplified by conflicts surrounding the role of the software industry in the aspiring 'global city' of Bangalore. The paper explores how, in the context of conflicting social imaginaries, the exclusion of large sections of the urban population from neoliberal development, and a range of resistance movements that have arisen in consequence, the software industry attempts to control representations of itself in order to shore up its ideological power. This analysis points to the elevation of private corporate capital to a new ideological role and (sharply contested) hegemonic position in the Indian polity and cultural economy.