Book Review | Experimental Times: Startup Capitalism and Feminist Futures in India by Hemangini Gupta (California University Press, 2025)

Startup Capitalism and Feminist Futures in India traces the complex and sometimes conflicting constitutions of techno-future making in India.What is unique about "experimental time" as an analytic is that it allows for the tracing of two processes that may at first seem at odds: global startup capitalism in tandem with feminist future making.Through a deep ethnography of startup culture and startup capitalism in Bangalore, Hemangini Gupta unpacks how these processes are aligned.Gupta illustrates the textures of these startup capitalism and feminist future making projects through a journey across various sites, including office spaces, post-work drinks, startup festivals, and other kinds of networking and leisure meetings in the city of Bangalore, sometimes referred to as India's Silicon Valley.Bangalore features as not only a backdrop in the book but also as an actor playing a role in the constitution of startup capitalism.This scenario goes back to the formation of the IT sector, which, by the early 2000s, was booming.Bangalore became reputable on the world technology stage for software, and the word Bangalored came to signify software professional outsourcing, or, more literally, the replacement of a US job with one in Bangalore (Radhakrishnan 2011).And now, the city has shifted from a register of outsourcing to that of technological innovation.This shift plays out not only in the private sector but in an enmeshing of public and private, with techno-futures experimented across these sites as "the city's technological czars run universities and nonprofits, [and] sit on publicprivate urban planning committees" (Gupta 2024, 20).