Living and Praying in the Code: The Flexibility and Discipline of Indian Information Technology Workers (ITers) in a Global Economy

This paper uses Jean Comoroff's argument in Body of Power, Spirit of Resistance to reflect on the changing nature of religious practice in the contemporary world. It draws on Comaroff's method, which situates "religion" in a complex social, economic, and political field that is itself in the process of unfolding. Using Hindu practices among Indian IT workers in the diaspora as a case in point, the paper suggests that the forms of techo-scientific labor that IT workers are involved in demands certain types of religious practice that discipline mind and body. At the same time, engaging in those practices opens up challenges to dominant tropes around religious belief and worker disposition, since it creates critical spaces for reflection in the gap between religious practices, technological work, and the ideologies of transnational and national technological economies.