Aspiration, Mobility, and Temporality in India

Session Submission Type: Organized Panel

Abstract

Scholars of South Asia have recently emphasized aspiration and mobility as forces transforming India’s society and economy. Economic liberalism has empowered some Indians with new wealth, precipitating a rise in youth and consumer culture. Yet as Arjun Appadurai notes, aspiration is not simply the provenance of the individual, but a culturally-inflected and often collective project. Families and caste groups plot their ascent. Mass movements give voice to broadly shared yearnings and anxieties. These dynamics also point to the disjuncture between the ambitions and material realities of people’s lives, particularly in rural areas. This panel takes the multiplicity of aspirations and movements reshaping South Asia as a starting point. How do new desires and possibilities recast the position of the subject vis-a-vis institutions like the state, family, and market? What sort of claims are made on the past and future? How might we as scholars address the methodological challenges posed by the study of aspiration?

In this panel, Zyskowski explores the opportunities and hazards facing mobile young women working in Hyderabad’s IT industry. McDowell traces the relationship between aspirations for caste uplift and the stigma of TB that restricts respiration in the bodies of SC/ST population in rural Rajasthan. Kantor considers how unemployed young men in rural Bihar struggle to negotiate the conflicting desires of working to contribute to the joint family household and indulging their own pleasure through wandering. Dutta elucidates how the ethnic conflict in Northeast India shapes young people’s sense of identity and community participation.

Area of Study

• South Asia

Session Organizer

• Hayden Kantor, Stanford University

Chair

• Naisargi Dave, University of Toronto

Individual Presentations

• Gendered Politics of Aspiration and IT Education in Urban India - Kathryn Zyskowski, University of Washington

• Aspiration and Respiration: Caste Politics and TB Care in Rural Rajasthan - Andrew McDowell, McGill University

• Questionable Comportment: Aspiration, Wandering, and the Figure of the Badmash in Rural Bihar - Hayden Kantor, Stanford University

Discussant

• Naisargi Dave, University of Toronto