Cyberabad Moves: Mobilizing Futures in a South Indian City

Their eyes glimmering with a high-tech future, the leaders of the South Indian metropolis of Hyderabad have spent the last two decades launching it onto the globalizing stage. The centerpiece of this effort has been the western periphery of the city, aspirationally christened "Cyberabad." The area has since been rapidly transformed, and its villages, farms, and wildlands have been swiftly inundated by a tide of urbanization. And a new, relatively affluent class of infotech workers---known locally as "techies"---has arrived from across India to dwell amidst the built expressions of the visions of planners, developers, and information technology corporations. In this dissertation, based on eighteen months of ethnographic field research in and around Cyberabad, I consider the transformed and transforming lives of these techies. In so doing, I enter an anthropological conversation regarding the often fraught relationships between, on the one hand, planners and developers who shape spaces using a modernist model of top-down planning and, on the other, the people who come to reside in these spaces and who remake them materially and conceptually through their day-to-day activities.;The shifting urbanscape of Cyberabad is a field on which changing experiences of space and time play out. This is particularly true for techies, who travel abroad and across India in greater numbers and with less difficulty than previous generations; change jobs more frequently and easily than previous generations; earn and consume more than previous generations; and move about an ever-expanding city more effortlessly than previous generations. These interlinked experiences find a key point of articulation in the concept of mobility. While I consider all of these experiences and a number of ways in which they intersect, I most specifically focus on mobility practices in the urban landscape, where techies have filled expanding, densifying road networks with a burgeoning fleet of private cars and motorbikes. As they increasingly rely on private vehicles to shuttle between distant locations within the city---from high-rise flats to corporate campuses to shopping malls---techies experience new daily rhythms of life. These rhythms are subject to global corporate logics, the ideological interests of state authorities, and the simultaneously enabling and limiting materialities of the city's transportation system. The recent and dramatic flourishing of vehicles on Cyberabad's roads has also led to a driving culture where motorists tend to ignore symbolic controls such as signs and lights, leading planners to rely heavily on concrete measures such as barricades, medians, and speed bumps to control traffic. Even then, drivers often find ways to subvert planners' intentions.;Cyberabad's techies have willingly entered and occupied specific state visions of modernity, progress, and the future, and have made these spaces their own. By attending to the lives of these men and women as they work, play, and travel, I extend anthropological literatures and social science scholarship about cities, new middle classes, globalization, modernity, urban planning, and mobility.