The Making of India’s Managerial Class: Understanding Year Books from the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, 1972-1980

During the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, a new form of capitalist organization  dependent on the expertise of professional managers consolidated itself  in India, challenging older forms of family business and colonial firms that had relied on the “managing” agency system. Critical to the development of “managerial capitalism” were elite educational institutions that trained “managers” to play key decision-making roles within private and public sector firms. The Indian Institutes of Managements (IIMs) were crucial to converting individuals from  India’s service communities, with strong legacies of participation in government and the literate professions, into a managerial elite that staffed the highest executive ranks of the country’s biggest companies.  Their impact went far beyond the schooling that was provided; the institutes played an instrumental part in shaping the contours of a managerial class is a social sense, contributing to the construction of new notions of identity and new solidarities. 

This lecture examines the value of using yearbooks from the IIM Ahmedabad to understanding these processes of class formation.  Yearbooks are important to the social historian in at least two different ways and their analysis thus involves inter-disciplinary approaches. First, they document the social practices—from sport to dorm life-- that gave rise to a sense of “we-ness” among IIM students and that came to delineate the social boundaries that marked the students off from others present in the institute environment and the larger society.  Appreciating this function involves using evidence from yearbooks to carry out a sociological/anthropological treatment of Institute life.  At the same time, the yearbooks themselves played a constitutive role in constructing a sense of group consciousness, one that survived the moment of their creation.  Yearbooks were involved in reproducing  a sense of commonality, articulating a specialized language meant to be appreciated only by insiders, creating a community of humor and good-natured ribbing that unified IIM students, and forging a set of charged social geographies on the campus (as a space designed by the architect Louis Kahn) that would be emotive to alumni.  Yearbooks---publications that were meant to be referred to for decades--fostered communities of memory that would outlast the educational experience as students went on to jobs all over India (and even abroad).  Exploring these ways in which yearbooks served to construct a social class thus also requires a close textual analysis of their content. 

Overall, the lecture will seek to provide a vantage point from which the history of modern business in India can be understood as something more than the actions of individual business firms and entrepreneurs or the role of enduring “business communities” but as an outcome  of dynamic socio-cultural processes that took shape during the early post-independence period.