Introduction

Take Bollywood: for an outsider, Mumbai's film industry might look like pure glamour; for the people who work in it, it is simply their workplace, complete with unions, wage demands, and the usual grievances of any industry. Its products still travel through familiar channels — distributors, cinema owners, cassette and video sellers — and its workforce, like the rest of the city, is sharply divided by what people earn: a film star in Juhu and a background artist in Girangaon inhabit the same city very differently, down to what they eat and where they live, even while sharing the same films, the same cricket matches, the same polluted air, and similar hopes for their children.

Work — its kind, its location, who does it — is a central part of anyone's identity, and this chapter asks two connected questions about it: how have changes in technology and available work reshaped social relations in India, and how do existing social institutions — caste, kinship, gender, region — in turn shape how work gets organised and products get sold? These are not purely economic questions. Why are nursing and teaching more heavily female professions than engineering, even though nursing is often the physically harder job — is that simple preference, or does it reflect assumptions about which work suits which gender? Why does an Indian coffee advertisement often show two cups where an American one shows one — because in India, coffee is as much a social ritual as a stimulant? Small puzzles like these point to a larger sociological interest: the geography of who works where and who sells to whom — patterns that are collective and social, not simply the sum of individual choices, even as individual choices in turn help shape those very patterns.