Naga youth’s aspirations, identities, and education: Relational sense-making within evolving contexts

• In Event: South Asia, Young Learners and Social Justice

Proposal

Nagas are an ethnic community belonging to erstwhile Naga Hills which are now divided between northeast India and northwest Myanmar. Naga nationalist movement, which emerged in first half of the 20th century, demanded a separate sovereign state for Nagas from the British colonizers on the premise that Nagas have been self-sustaining village-based groups, never a part of Indian society. When India gained independence in 1947, the Indian nation-state took control of Naga Hills and promised to give Nagas everything but sovereignty. From 1947 until 1998, active violent conflict between Naga nationalists and the Indian National Army persisted. This period also witnessed transition of Naga identity, Nagas’ religion, and the formation of a separate Nagaland federal state. A ceasefire has existed between the nationalist groups and the Indian nation-state since 1998. How have Naga youth made sense of their future aspirations for themselves and their society as the relationship between the Indian nation-state and Naga nationalists has evolved since 1947 (the year of India’s independence)? How are these aspirations related to their understandings of formal education and social identity? My 9-months comparative case study in Kohima, capital of Nagaland, with youth (23-28 years, and bachelors graduated) explores these sense-makings and relationships. I argue that aspirations of youth in Kohima are strongly rooted in understanding of home, which is created and reproduced in social interactions in intimate everyday spaces like family, Church, formal education, and village-based kith and kin networks. Youth are aware that this ‘home’ cannot be found beyond Nagaland. They thus use a politics of time to negotiate between their career and social aspirations and understanding of home. They either ‘hustle’ between different ‘odd-jobs’ in Kohima; participate in service-industry jobs across Indian cities with an expectation to ‘come back to home’ in future; or ‘wait’ for ‘stable’ state government’s bureaucratic jobs to achieve a future expected of a bachelor-degree recipient, a future situated within home which is Nagaland. However, even with different personal aspirations, most youth’s paths lead to struggling for a government job in order to find employment within Nagaland. Government jobs, although highly competitive today, are the only large-scale, long-term jobs within Nagaland, given Nagas’ history. It is within this context of reliance on government jobs that most youth understand Naga independence to be a matter of future beyond their lifetime. The study thus engages with the CIES 2024 conference sub-theme histories of protest where the conference seeks to ponder upon how wider socio-economic and political circumstances limit our capacity to protest.

The study employed comparative case study research design (Bartlett & Vavrus, 2017) to explore how do Naga youth in Kohima make sense of their aspirations, identities, and formal education. I worked in-depth with 8 young Nagas (23-28 years, bachelors’ graduated). Data was generated through semi-structured interviews, shadowing, mapping, and participants’ personal reflective essays. I conducted one-time interviews with 20 other young Nagas as well to get some breadth of perspectives. Additionally, to explore the sense-making from various actors’ perspectives and to explore the intergenerational shifts in sense-making of education, future aspirations, and socio-political identities, I did semi-structured interviews with 8 parents, 10 Church leaders, and 7 government education and youth department workers in Kohima. The study is firmly rooted within the field of Comparative and International Education (CIE). Many studies in CIE have asked the question about youth aspirations and their fulfillment, especially after the historic implementation of policies of universalization of elementary education across the globe in 1980s-1990s. Other works have studied education and youth’s socio-political identities, especially in conflict situations. The study seeks to expand these corpuses of literature by studying youth’s future aspirations, value of formal education and socio-political identities relationally. I thus submit this proposal for the CIES conference 2024 to contribute to and learn from this year’s theme “The Power of Protest”.

Author

• Mili Bhatnagar, University of Wisconsin Madison