Chair: Karline McLain, Bucknell University

Discussant: Radhika Chopra, University of Delhi, India

This panel brings together scholars interested in the politics and nature of youth in South Asia. Not only is South Asia demographically ‘young’, but neo-liberal economic change, educational restructuring, and moves to increase young people’s political participation are rapidly transforming experiences of youth in the region. The young scholars involved in the session write from diverse disciplinary and theoretical perspectives, but each author draws on intensive ethnographic field research to elucidate their arguments. Three themes traverse the papers. First, each paper is centrally concerned with the representation of youth. The presenters point to how young people become the subject of peer, parental or state discourses, and the processes through which young people seek to reject, appropriate or conform to these representations. Second, the papers share an interest in the politics of respect. While youth ambitions and insecurities are diverse, many young people build their practices around the need to protect or develop a sense of dignity. Finally, the papers play close attention to how young people themselves express their ambitions and insecurities, and they do so with attention to distinct spaces, such as the college (Jeffrey), firm (Nisbett), forest (Dyson) or village (Ciotti). The panel will appeal to scholars studying young people in South Asia within a range of disciplines, including anthropology, history, sociology, and geography. Although the papers focus on India, the contributors situate their findings within broader Asian and comparative work, and the discussant will draw out cross-learning perspectives on youth, cultural practice, and the politics of respect.

Jane P Dyson, University of Washington

Drawing on ethnographic field research in the Indian Himalayas, this paper explores forest-related work as a site for young people to build friendships, individual and collective reputations of competence, and a sense of self-respect. In the agro-pastoral regime of the high Himalayas, women and girls spend long periods collecting dry leaves from forest areas. The leaves are collected in woven baskets and are used as bedding for cattle. Villagers monitor girls' leaf collection as they return from the forest, and taunt those who fail to bring back tall and skillfully packed loads.

Through careful attention to what I call the ‘micro-geography of work’, this paper shows that girls energetically sought to accord with age- and gender-based expectations of what constitutes a ‘good basket’ of leaves. Children aimed to meet and exceed these expectations through labouring in small work teams, sharing knowledge of techniques of leaf collection, and collaborating to construct ‘good baskets’ of leaves. The paper considers the importance of leaf collection in local ideas of friendship and explores how far girls’ leaf collection practices reproduce caste and gender norms. In the last part of the paper I reflect on my own experiences collecting leaves in the village and how this participant observation improved my understanding of the work practices of rural girls.

Craig J Jeffrey, University of Washington

Building on Albert Hirschman’s notions of ‘exit, voice and loyalty’ as responses to the decline of powerful organisations, this paper explores how three sets of students have responded to a deterioration in higher educational provision in a government college in north India. A first group of students have reacted to a perceived ‘crisis’ in higher education and associated fears over the value of their degrees by reaffirming their faith in their college degrees as a basis for individual progress and concentrating on their studies. A second set of students have sought to express voice through organising protests on the college campus, barracking university staff, and cultivating social links with journalists, criminals and politicians. A third group, have chosen to exit from the campus as a space of educational instruction, sociability and protest. Many students reject all three of these apparent ‘options’. A substantial number imagine themselves simply to be ‘making do’ (jugaar), an orientation to college and the future that traverses and unsettles the distinction between exit, voice and loyalty.

The paper seeks to establish the ambivalent nature of student’s attachment to particular strategies, and how their decision to engage in exit, voice and loyalty may change. In particular, the paper shows how rising rural violence within the college in the summer of 2004 altered many students’ strategies and increased feelings of insecurity and ambivalence. The paper uses these reflections to call for broader comparative geographies of educational credentialism, unemployment and youth insecurity in Asia.

Manuela Ciotti, University of Edinburgh, UK

Based on field research carried out over several years, this paper explores the interplay of democratisation politics, (under)development and middle-class imagination in a northern Indian village. In particular, the paper focuses on how political change initiated by Dalit young men during the 1990s and associated forms of upward mobility have affected Dalit women’s lives. The paper argues that these processes have reinvigorated notions of women’s honour and strengthened gender regimes inspired by middle-class respectability while leaving women politically marginal. These local processes might well reflect supra-local gender trends cutting across castes and classes. Testifying to the absence of a direct nexus between women’s development and the improvement of gender relations, the better-off women in the village, who in many ways represent underprivileged women’s future, are often confined inside the home by greater male control. On the other hand, underprivileged women are stigmatised because of their outside casual labour, a consequence of expanding household population and shrinking employment opportunities available to men. However, underprivileged women still enjoy a higher degree of freedom of movement and expression. Against this ‘dichotomised’ scenario, the paper finally investigates the potential for village young women to carve out alternative spaces within existing gender relations.

Nicholas Nisbett,

University of Sussex, UK

The rhetoric of progress associated with ideas of the ‘knowledge society’ has taken on particular strength in India. The new hero of the middle class is no longer the builder of dams and steel plants of the Nehru era, but the highly paid, mobile, Information Technology (IT) worker. This paper examines the antecedents of this narrative in the post-independence visions of technology and modernity and its contemporary manifestation in discourses of the ‘knowledge’ or ‘information’ society. The paper also explores how the IT dream shapes the trajectories of young middle class men in Bangalore. I consider the movement of these men through IT education and employment in the software and business process outsourcing industries.

The defeat of the NDA/BJP government and their articulation of the IT dream in their ‘India Shining’ campaign might suggest that ideas of an emerging ‘information society’ have lost their political force. But this paper suggests that narratives of e-progress continue to hold a powerful sway over young men in Bangalore. Jobs in call centres and data-processing fail to accord with young men’s dreams of IT employment, but such jobs have opened up possibilities for consumption and earning that were previously unimaginable to middle class young men and their families. At the same time, the IT dream helps sections of the IT industry to obscure the structural insecurity of outsourced employment. As the industry moves on to other labour centres offering a still cheaper supply of workers, many young men find themselves in a precarious position.