Vibrant waiting for hopeful futures: Post-college lives of educated unemployed youth of Borderland tribe in India

• In Event: Literacy in the digital world, multilingualism and unemployed youth: diverse case studies from South Asia

Proposal

Youth in Global South countries today are facing higher rates of unemployment and underemployment, especially among educated youth, than compared with their educated adult generations. Increasing numbers of educated unemployed youth have made scholars speculate if youth’s grievances can give rise to socio-political resistance (Honwana, 2014; Yeung & Yang, 2020). How are these educated unemployed youth experiencing their everyday lives though? How do they make sense of their everyday lives as educated unemployed individuals and its relationship with their socio-political circumstances? My 9-months ethnography with educated youth of borderland Naga tribe in India, experiencing one of the highest unemployment rates and a long running separationist movement in India, explores such questions.

Nagas are a group of tribes in hilly borderlands between India and Myanmar. They constitute a demographic majority in Nagaland, a Northeast Indian state. Kohima, where this study is situated, is Nagaland’s capital city. When Britishers were leaving the Indian subcontinent, some Naga leaders demanded a separate country for Nagas arguing that politically Nagas have never been a part of Indian society. Their demands were ignored, and Nagas’ territories became part of independent India. From 1950s till 1997, there have been active violent conflict between Naga separationists and Indian National Army. This period also witnessed transition of Naga identity, widespread conversion of Nagas to Christianity, and formation of a separate Nagaland federal state. Nagaland’s statehood brought many new state government jobs and development funds for Nagas who till then were predominantly engaged in small-scale agriculture. Over time, government jobs and funds became central to Nagaland’s economy and the coercive Indian state also started becoming a resource for people (Wouters, 2018). A ceasefire exists between the dominant Naga separationist group and Indian nation-state since 1997.

The present Naga youth generation is one of the first ones to come of age in the times of ceasefire. Unfortunately, they are also a generation who is facing one of the highest unemployment rates in India. In 2022-23, the unemployment rate among 15-29 years old in Nagaland was 18.5%, the average unemployment rate in India being 10%. Within Nagaland, the unemployment rates were the highest among university educated- 16.2% for graduates and 24.9% for postgraduates. The unemployment rates among non-literate and primary school pass outs in Nagaland were 0.0% and 0.2% respectively (Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation, 2023). These numbers hint towards dire realities of many college-educated youth in Nagaland. Are these numbers morphing into some political solidarities or resistance too? My study focused on college-educated (23-28 years) Naga youth in Kohima as they navigated their lives for a future that they aspired for. I drew on waiting ethnographies with educated youth in Global South countries. These studies show us how youths in Middle East, Africa and South Asia are experiencing their post-education lives not by being securely employed, but by being forced to wait for long to make transition from youth to social adulthood, which in many societies is dependent on economic independence of an individual. In the process of waiting, many youths have found novel culture to pass their time, such as extended tea-making rituals in Niger (Masquelier, 2013), where they found some solidarity with other unemployed youth (Deuchar, 2022; Dungey & Meinert, 2017; Eisentein, 2021; Jeffery, 2010; Johnson, 2018; Mains, 2011). My study asks how college-educated Naga youth (23-28 years) are living their post-college lives? How do they understand their socio-political context and its relationship with youth’s present and future?

I started my fieldwork in October 2022 by interviewing 28 Naga youth (14 males and 14 females). Then, I worked closely with 8 of these youth (4 males and 4 females), which I call core youth of the study, to explore their lives in-depth through life-interviews, observations, and personal reflective essays. Additionally, to understand youth’s socio-political realities through various social actors’ perspectives who played roles within youth’s lives, I took semi-structured interviews with core youth’s parents (one for each, so 8 parents), 10 Church leaders, 5 community leaders and 7 government education and youth department workers in Kohima. Based on these data, the paper will show how youth navigated their post-college lives by actively waiting for a “middle-class” income which a college-degree “deserves”, that translated to government jobs which were scarcely available. They were neither passive youth with lots of free time, as their adults perceived; nor were they engaged in some novel culture with other youth to pass their time as many youth’s waiting ethnographies have found. In a highly communal society like Nagas, community-based institutions and arrangements such as Church’s youth fellowships and Student Unions were occupying much of youth’s time. Interestingly, youth’s understanding of the precariousness of educated Naga youth’s circumstances today led them to be critical of Naga separationist movement. They talked about both the limitations that the movement has produced in their lives, as well as the social function that it continues to play. Above all, understanding the over-reliance of youth on government jobs and improbability of large-scale private investment in Nagaland by outsiders due to the separationist movement; they imagined a future possibility for youth and Naga society in entrepreneurship by Nagas, for Nagas. However, some of them who tried doing business faced many challenges to keep continuing with it. Church too played an important role in promoting the role of entrepreneurship among youth. Hence, college-educated Naga youth were navigating their post-college lives within a constellation of educated selves’ aspirations, pre-existing cultural arrangements, and socio-political relationships. It led them to wait for an economically secure future, actively and not passively; and hope for future possibilities in government jobs for ‘oneself’ and entrepreneurship for ‘others’, over engaging with political resistance.

The study contributes to the literature on youth and unemployment in South Asia by showing a socio-cultural view of post-college lives of the marginalized borderlands’ tribe youth. It also contributes to the waiting studies that have been done with educated unemployed and underemployed youth in many Global South countries, and hence is of interest to the field of Comparative and International Education.

Author

• Mili Bhatnagar, University of Wisconsin Madison