Between emancipatory potential and hierarchical reproduction: social movement aspirations and class in a South Indian NGO

As development initiatives by NGOs remain subject to criticism, some NGO staff react by aligning their organizations with social movements, implicitly positioning staff as activists. In urban India, activism is associated with middle-class identities. NGOs aligning themselves with social movements are often staffed and run by middle-class people, yet there are cases where social conditions enabled mixed-class NGOs to emerge. This ethnographic study examines the case of a single mixed-class NGO in India to ask: how does social class differently orient NGO staff members to social movements and activism? Through an analysis of 18 months of fieldwork (including over 75 interviews) with a large sexual rights NGO in Bangalore that I call Dosti, I show that this emphasis on social movements and activism reveals the class relationships at Dosti that ultimately reproduce class hierarchies. I find that the degree to which staff identify as activists prior to coming to Dosti is a product of class background. For middle-class staff, formal education introduced them to social movements and enabled them to identify as activists, motivating them to work at Dosti. By contrast, working-class staff, whose access to formal education was limited, came to Dosti knowing little about social movements and not previously identifying as activists. This class dynamic pushes middle-class staff to attempt to inculcate in working-class staff a social movement and activist orientation through on-the-job “trainings.” Though such trainings are intended to be equalizers, they reflect and thereby reinforce class differences and hierarchies. In practice, the trainings reveal class relationships as they reproduce amongst Dosti’s own staff the same inequalities and power hierarchies the organization advocates against. These findings suggest the value of incorporating a class analysis in research on the internal dynamics of NGOs.