Building viabilities: youth social action in the Indian Himalayas

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the social action of young people in the north Indian village of Bemni, drawing on field research over a 20 year period. We argue that a cohort of young people in Bemni in the period 2004–2014 tended to focus on key issues of survival in their social action, what they often termed ‘lifelines’, related especially to infrastructure and schooling. A second cohort of young people involved in social action between 2015 and 2022 combined this focus with a concentration on issues of social inequality and ethical questions of how to sustain the social, environmental and spiritual/cultural fabric of their village. Building viability in this context involves simultaneously ‘thinking in’ to reflect on core issues of survival and ‘thinking out’ to consider how to integrate this quest for survival in relation to broader ethical concerns about society and cultural/spiritual practice.

KEYWORDS:

• Action
• India
• viability
• youth
• development

Introduction

Social, political, economic and environmental challenges are threatening young people's lives in many parts of the minority world and majority world. Young people are bearing a disproportionate burden of coping with climate change in numerous settings (Skelton and Aitken 2019). They are also experiencing widespread unemployment and underemployment, reflecting a sharp increase in school matriculates seeking salaried work, a lack of government employment, and the inability of many economies to create white-collar work (ILO 2020). In addition, young people often lack access to quality training, education, healthcare and other welfare services. Moreover, various forms of democratic erosion occurring globally result in poor governance (see Chatterji, Hansen and Jaffrelot 2019). Young people are increasingly demoralised with representative politics as a basis for political participation in many parts of the world (Sukarieh and Tannock 2014).

In some situations, young people lack the opportunity to respond to these converging crises (see Oosterom et al. 2017). In addition, social and environmental crises have sometimes led to reactionary youth social action which deepens dominant forms of power (see Chatterji, Hansen, and Jaffrelot 2019; Jeffrey and Young 2014). Nevertheless, since the mid-1990s there has been a wave of often youth-led social and political actions that are ‘progressive’ in the sense of having the net effect of building the capabilities of marginalised sections of society (see Sen 2014).

This paper examines two aspects of everyday youth mobilisation as it is emerging around the world. First, several recent studies suggest that young people's action is often oriented towards what the anthropologist Ghassan Hage (2019) terms ‘minimal viabaility’: core issues of survival, especially food, water, housing, education, health, work, infrastructure and security (Jeffrey and Dyson 2022; Oosterom, Pan Maran, and Wilson 2019). In situations of constraint and threat, young people are often compelled to focus on the issues ‘nearest in’ (see also Dawson 2022; Jeffrey and Dyson 2022).

Research that has explored this concentration of young people on minimal viability includes studies of youth social action in urban Myanmar (Oosterom, Pan Maran, and Wilson 2019), urban South Africa (Dawson 2022), rural Nepal (Korzenevica 2016) and rural India (Patel 2017). In some of these cases, scholars have argued that young people are explicitly discussing ‘survival’ or ‘viability’ as their overriding concern. For example, Fash, Vásquez Rivera, and Sojob (2022) have recently argued that in rural Ecuador young people often discuss their strategies in terms of the quest for a ‘survivable life’. Other studies refer to terms that are related to survival. For example, Thieme (2010) discusses how in urban Kenya young people commonly refer to a constant need to ‘hustle’ to survive. Likewise, Korzenevica (2016) draws on Vigh (2009) to argue that crises in rural Nepal have compelled young people to ‘navigate’ different aspects of everyday life, for example in relation to work, food and infrastructure.

A second theme in recent accounts of young people's social reflection and action in different parts of the world is of their concern with ethical life, as this is expressed through social, environmental and spiritual/cultural practice. In his account of viability, Hage (2019) argues that people in situations of constraint or crisis are typically not only concerned with survival but commonly also reflect on broader questions related to social, environmental and cultural/spiritual life. Hage refers to this process as a quest for ‘proper viability’ beyond the ‘minimal viability’ associated with the bare struggle for survival.

Recent studies with young people globally highlight how young people's social reflection and action often involves the pursuit of ‘proper viability’ in Hage’s (2019) sense. Dawson (2022) refers to young people in South Africa place a desire to lead lives that are ethically good alongside their material concerns. In this reading, young people are concerned not only with viability in its sense of the capacity to live a survivable life; they are also concerned with viability in Hage’s (2019) sense of the ability to lead a life that has moral value, for example one that defends certain principles of equality or sustainability. Moreover, Fash, Vásquez Rivera, and Sojob (2022) qualify their assertion that young people in Latin America are concentrating only on survival by arguing that notions of the ‘good’, in the sense of materially comfortable and morally right, remain key topics of debate and striving among young people. In addition, Korzenevica (2016) argues that young people in rural Nepal are not only constantly assaying ways of surviving across key domains of life but also connecting these ‘navigations’ to efforts to contribute to progressive community-level change.

In sum, recent research suggests that, in the context of socio-environomental crises, young people are commonly ‘thinking in’, a term we use to refer to their focus on key domains of life, especially the domains of food, housing work, education, health, infrastructure and physical security (see also Jeffrey and Dyson 2022). At the same time, young people are ‘thinking out’ in the sense of reflecting on aspects of life beyond the core domains associated with survival. In particular, they are often reflecting in novel ways on their social, environmental and cultural/spiritual milieu. In Hage’s (2019) terms, they are pursuing minimal viability and proper viability simultaneously.

Our paper takes up this theme of young people thinking in and thinking out in the face of crises through reference to the social action of young people in the village of Bemni, Uttarakhand, north India – a region profoundly affected by social and environmental crises. We draw on our ethnographic field research in this village carried out over 20 years. We identify two periods of youth action. First, between 2004 and 2014 young people (aged 18–30) typically channelled social action into ensuring the survival of their village, with particular reference to infrastructure, education and health. In a second period, between 2015 and 2022, a new set of youth (aged 18–25) in Bemni placed greater emphasis on questions of inequality and socio-cultural vitality. In this new period a rather different vision of ‘a viable life’ comes into view, one less closely oriented ‘inwards’ to human domains of life and more concerned with the relationship between local human life and the reproduction of a broader human and non-human system of living – ‘thinking in’ and ‘thinking out’ at the same time.

Bemni, Uttarakhand

Bemni is located in rural Chamoli district in the state of Uttarakhand at 2700 m in altitude. In 2012, the village had a population of approximately 1000: 75% are General Castes (GCs) and 25% Scheduled Caste (SC). GCs have significantly higher landholdings than SCs and have better access to social networks outside the village.

Households cultivate a range of crops for subsistence and manage the surrounding forest for pastoral use. A form of seasonal transhumance exists in the village, with people moving between three settlements at different altitudes in response to crop production and the needs of their cattle. Women assume primary responsibility for agricultural work, which includes the collection of forest products – firewood, fodder for livestock and leaves for cattle bedding – as well as the sowing, weeding, harvesting and processing of crops. The farming is entirely non-mechanised.

Substantial changes occurred in Bemni between 2003, when the first author conducted fieldwork there, and 2012: the government constructed a road to the local town and developed electricity, telecommunications and schooling infrastructure. In the early 2000s, children studied to Fifth Grade or Eighth Grade at the primary or junior schools in Bemni or a nearby village. By 2012, new school construction allowed youth to complete their high school (up to Twelfth Grade) while living in the village. Numerous other infrastructural changes have continued since that time, including upgrades to the road; successive upgrades to the telecommunicartions tower; new schools, shops and health centres; and the large scale construction of new homes and private toilets.

Very few women in the village over 50 had acquired a formal education (see also Morarji 2014), reflecting patriarchal norms that assigned agricultural and household work to women. However, from the early 2000s, parents became increasingly willing to send their daughters to school, reflecting a belief that girls’ education was important for their future role as wives and mothers (cf Jeffrey et al. 2008). In 2003, 13% of young women aged 16–30 living in Bemni had obtained a Grade Eight (junior high school) pass and just 6% had a Grade 10 pass. By 2012, these figures had risen to 38% and 26%, respectively. By comparison, 48% of young men aged 16–30 had a Grade Eight pass in 2003, and 34% had a Grade 10 pass, and by 2012 these figures had risen to 78% and 64%.

Educated young men in Bemni in the 2010s often hoped to obtain a government job but the scarcity of these positions meant that very few had been successful (see also Jeffrey 2010). They often reacted by migrating to urban areas for work. However, they typically found it very difficult to obtain remunerative jobs and often returned to the village to engage in construction, tourist-related work and small business. Very few educated young women had obtained government work or migrated out of Bemni for work, although a few had acquired positions in village government nurseries (anganwadis) or schools.

I conducted 15 months of fieldwork in Bemni in 2003–2004, focusing primarily on children's work and schooling, but also encompassing research with 18–30 year olds.¹ I returned eleven times between 2011 and 2022 for a combined 19 months, during which I carried out fieldwork focused on a cohort of 20–34 year old young people, working with the second author on four of these trips. We conducted participant observation and open-ended interviews with 30 of these young people. Our discussions were usually carried out while working alongside young people in the fields or forest, accompanying them during marriage or religious celebrations, or in their homes. We discussed young people's educational trajectories, their views on their progress, and their involvement in different forms of social and political action. However, these topics commonly expanded into discussions of health, the economy, gender relations and the state.

‘Lifelines’ (2004–2014)

In the late 2000s in Bemni there were sixteen men and eight women who had acquired at least a high school (Class ten) school qualification and engaged in ‘social service’ (samaj seva) in the village. To a greater extent than older generations, these young people had visited urban areas – typically for education – where they had experienced modern infrastructure: electricity, mobile phone coverage, schooling and roads. Young people said that for the village to survive (chal sakna), it would be necessary to emulate aspects of this ‘urban life’ (shahri jivan) (see also Dyson and Jeffrey 2022). They were particularly concerned that if that village fell too far behind (piche) better connected parts of Uttarakhand and India, young families would leave Bemni.

Educated young people had absorbed notions of liberal ‘service’ and the possibility for effective rural social mobilisation from reading school textbooks and interacting with urban-based school and college students. Uttarakhand government school textbooks put heavy emphasis on the responsibility of citizens ‘serving’ their locality, region and nation. Moreover, Uttarakhand was the centre of two substantial recent social mobilisations aimed in part at improving society through putting pressure on the state: the Chipko environmental movement of the 1970s and 1980s (Rangan 2000) and the movement for a separate State of Uttarakhand in the 1990s (Mawdsley 1997).

Vikram Singh was broadly typical of the young men engaged in social service in Bemni. Twenty-seven years old in 2011, he had been educated both locally and in the district town of Gopeshwar. Vikram was unmarried at that time and, like many other educated young men in Bemni, he channelled much of his energy into social action on behalf of the village (ganv):

If we are to survive as a village, we need to work together to change things here. Everyone had to help. Without such action, we are finished.

Vikram did not engage in social action as part of an NGO. He said that NGOs in the region were all based in urban areas and tended to lack an understanding of rural issues, especially questions of core survival. He also said that he did not see entering representative government as a basis for achieving change, paralleling other recent work in Uttarakhand (Koskimaki 2017) and Himalayan India (Chakraborty 2018; Sen, Jeffrey, and Dyson 2023). Instead, Vikram worked at the everyday level – often with other educated young people, youth and older villagers – to try to improve the viability of Bemni.

Vikram's everyday action was organised around trying to ‘think in’ and concentrate on issues of basic life. He expressed this idea in terms of an attempt to secure three ‘lifelines’ for Bemni (he used the English word ‘lifelines’): a road, electricity and schooling. In the early 2000s Vikram had campaigned especially for a road to be constructed to the village. This had involved writing letters to local government officials or seeking an audience with influential figures to plead their case. After several years of seeking to convince local officials of the importance of the road, Vikram and other villagers became frustrated at slow progress. Drawing on local traditions of direct action connected also to earlier social movements, in 2005 villagers took ‘building a new road’ into their own hands. Vikram was part of a week-long village ‘camp’, involving over 100 villagers – mainly young people – in which they started work on building a road themselves. They selected an area of jungle a couple of kilometres from Bemni – seemingly rather arbitrarily – and spent a week hacking undergrowth and cleaning ground over a roughly 100 m stretch. Several young people remembered borrowing tools from local shopkeepers, who encouraged the villagers to act. One young man recalled, ‘We did not always have good relations with urban people, but everyone could also see the benefit of the road’. Several other young people remember their contacting local journalists who agreed to cover the story; a journalist from Delhi splashed the headline, ‘Villagers build their own road’. While there is no firm evidence that the action influenced state agencies responsible for road approvals, the government soon began working hard on developing a passable road from Bemni to the local town. Certainly, young people remember the action as having had an effect. Vikram commented, ‘We shamed them into action’. Six years later, in 2012, the full 26 km of dirt track to Bemni that had been cut into the steep mountainsides became legally passable.

Vikram's ‘thinking in’ also entailed trying to convince government officials to establish an electricity network in the village. He received visiting officials; advised them on where to locate electricity poles, and wires; and made repeated efforts to chivvy officials when progress was slow. On one occasion when we were with Vikram sitting on the foundations of a home he was building, he grinned and said, ‘This is exactly where I hosted the electricity officials – I gave them biscuits, sweets, and tea’. It is difficult to identify a clear causal link between the efforts of young people like Vikram to cajole and host officials and infrastructural change. But several people in the village, including many older villagers, said that Vikram and a few other young people involved in social action were important in the introduction of electricity in the village, which was in use by 2011.

Vikram was also ‘thinking in’ through his efforts with the third ‘lifeline’ of schooling. He offered tutoring to younger children in his area of the village for which he did not charge, saying that he saw it as his ‘duty’ (farz) as one of the first people to obtain a degree in Bemni. ‘This is one way we can help, and it is only through education that we will survive’, he said. Vikram had also developed knowledge of the functioning of the school system. He kept timetables of board (national) examinations, monitored the number and activity of teachers in local schools, and checked on the availability of teaching materials and sports equipment. He worked with two other young people to submit an application to government to obtain bicycles for the local secondary school so that children could learn to ride. He also worked occasionally as a part-time teacher in school. Moreover, on several occasions Vikram campaigned for major extensions or improvements to local schools. For example, he went to the district town of Gopeshwar several times in the early 2010s to push for the local school to be extended to Tenth Class. In this case, there was a clear relationship between young people's social action and social change. In response to pressure, the government extended the school in 2012.

In his work on social ‘navigation’ Vigh (2009) refers to navigation as both metaphorical and literal; the young people in his study of urban West Arica were constantly required to move across different spaces to survive, a point also developed by Korzenevica (2016). In a similar vein, young people's investment in ‘lifelines’ in Bemni was literal as well as figurative. They could measure their progress in strengthening the viability of Bemni through reference to material ‘lines’ – the road, electricity wires and movement of teachers into the village. It followed, too, that young people tried hard to protect those lines, often working energetically to clear the road, mend wires that had broken, or ensure that the flow of key educational resources into Bemni – teachers, textbooks, information about examinations – was not disrupted.

When we discussed ‘lifelines’ with Vikram in the early 2010s he emphasised that this was not the entirety of his social service work for the village. Vikram's ‘thinking in’ required constant and careful attention to multiple domains of life beyond the lifelines he had identified. Vikram also referred to being involved regularly in repairing paths in the village, managing problems with water, assisting with exorcism ceremonies, and ensuring that the local temple and shrines are well kept. Vikram also regularly assisted people with health emergencies, for example contacting doctors or using his knowledge of urban areas to help seek medical treatment in local towns.

Vikram had built a good enough reputation in Bemni to be competitive in local government council elections. But he said that he was not interested in doing so, arguing that such roles offered little in the way of room for manoeuvre, enticed people to compromise on their principles, and were hugely time-consuming. There were two educated young men in Bemni in the early 2010s who had channelled their effort into seeking positions in local government. They said that they were also concerned with the viability of the village and wanted to seek to make the state work better for rural people. But, like Vikram, most young people argued that those who had entered representative government were not effective in promoting progressive change in the village.

Vikram's case is more broadly indicative. There were 15 other educated young men aged between 18 and 30 in Bemni who were involved in similar activity in the period between 2004 and 2014. Like Vikram, they tended to ‘think in’ to focus on core areas of life, and especially the ‘lifelines’ of the road, electricity and schooling. This list of activity is not exhaustive (see Dyson and Jeffrey 2018, 2022). Young men were also involved in asking the government for better communication technology, medical facilities, agricultural support and credit schemes. In addition, young men often assisted with managing social disputes in the village, for example after an extra-marital affair or where two families were quarrelling (see Dyson 2019; Dyson and Jeffrey 2018). In these situations, young men often acted as intermediaries between generations, problem solvers, and mediators between sections of the state, such as the police and villagers. Notwithstanding this other action, however, the focus on the ‘lifelines’ of the road, electricity and education was marked, and young people frequently referred to the importance of securing these three forms of ‘development’ (vikaas). Moreover, they said that such development is required for the village and its households to ‘survive’ (chal sakna).

At the same time, the eight young women in Bemni engaged in social action focused to a greater extent on health and education. The example of Manisha is instructive. Manisha was 22 in 2004 and belonged to a relatively wealthy household in Bemni. She obtained her early education in Bemni and then studied outside the village where she also acquired a degree.

Manisha said that her goal was to ensure that the village could ‘carry on’ (chal sakna) through assisting with health issues, in particular. Like Vikram, she said that she had a ‘duty’ (farz) as someone who had grown up in the village and would remain in Bemni to help to make the village viable. Paralleling the action of young men, Manisha did not want to campaign for change via holding a position in representative politics; she concentrated instead on everyday forms of action.

Over many years, I spent long periods with Manisha as she wandered through the village dispensing advice and assistance in relation to health. She would confidently and patiently discuss with other villagers issues around hygiene, nutrition, childcare, family planning and treatments for illnesses and injuries. Manisha also circulated discourses critical of the state for its lack of attention to ensuring good quality primary healthcare in Bemni.

Manisha combined this with helping other younger youth with education. She often visited local schools to check on the quality of education and worked with other young people to persuade the state to improve educational facilities in Bemni. She also spent time assisting younger girls to negotiate with their parents over remaining in formal education. Manisha said that she had struggled to convince her own senior kin that she should remain in school and that it was her responsibility (zimmedaari) to pass on her knowledge to young women coming after her of how to navigate and shift patriarchal norms.

The efforts of Manisha to ‘think in’ through engagement with health and education were significant. She spread awareness around a range of health and related issues and, in turn, generated a shift in villagers’ behaviour. For example, many younger women were pursuing family planning strategies in the mid-2010s, in marked contrast to a decade earlier.

Manisha's case highlights themes that recurred in our participant observation and interviews with other educated young women in Bemni. Like Manisha, they emphasised a need to focus pragmatically on health and education, a form of ‘thinking in’. Paralleling the case of young men, they argued that if this social action did not occur, the village would become unviable – ‘the village simply won't carry on’, as a friend of Manisha's put it. Like young men, young women put heavy emphasis on the importance of education (parhai) in facilitating their social service. They said that education had not only provided skills, confidence and an understanding of ‘the ways of the world’, as did young men, but also – and more specifically – that it had offered insights into the extent to which young women could challenge patriarchal norms.

‘New youth’ (2015–2022)

The action of young men and young women between 2004 and 2014 was important in ushering in the emergence of a cohort of educated youth who could take up social service work in the late 2010s and early 2020s. Vikram, Manisha and other young people were often especially concerned not only to build lifelines but to construct them in such a way that they would cater for the changing needs of their own cohort and of the teenagers and pre-teens who constituted the half-generation coming after them. Thus, for example, they engaged with schooling because they knew that their younger peers needed better facilities, and they campaigned around the road because they realised that younger youth would demand better access to urban Uttarakhand.

By 2022 there was a set of 18 young people with at least Tenth Class pass aged between 18 and 25 – younger than the cohort we had worked with in 2004 and 2014. Like the youth with whom we had worked in an earlier period, these young people were involved in social action. They sought to maintain and improve Bemni's ‘lifelines’. But they said that it was important to look beyond key domains if the village was to survive (chal sakna).

The example of Sarita exemplifies the approaches of ‘new youth’. Sarita was aged 22 in 2022 and unmarried. She had been educated up to 12th class in the village before attending college in the nearby market town of Lawad. Like many other young people attending the college, she split her time between Lawad and living with her parents and siblings in Bemni. Sarita was one of the most confident young women in X and had regularly spoken at public village meetings about development and social change. Sarita commented that the period between 2004 and 2014, when she had been a child in Bemni, was one in which there was a ‘rush’ to develop. She said that it had been important in that time to quickly campaign for the ‘lifelines’ required to ensure the village's viability, and she listed the lifelines of the road, electricity and schooling. But Sarita said that the period since then, it was important to take a more judicious approach to reflecting on viability.

Sarita commonly ‘thought out’ to reflect on social inequalities in the village. Sarita said that she is not someone who can ‘laugh when others are crying’. She said that she feels other people's sadness deeply and wants to acknowledge and act on her empathy. Sarita explained that in this context she finds it very difficult to observe inequalities within the village. Coming from a relatively poor family herself, she said that she had had extensive experience of poverty (garibi). She commented:

All the improvements to the village have had many benefits. But they have not changed the lives of many of the poorest members of the village. We continue to struggle.

In reflecting on this point, Sarita said that poor GC and SC households have little access to educational facilities. For example, she said that as someone from a poorer household she had had to attend college in the local town, Lawad. In contrast, richer young people in Bemni had been able to attend better, but more expensive, colleges in Gopeshwar. Sarita also referred to poorer and SC children being less confident in school or college.

Gender difference was also a key theme of Sarita's efforts to ‘think out’ beyond everyday domains of life to wider issues of social change. Sarita was angry that villagers tended to imagine young women in Bemni only in terms of their roles as future wives and mothers based in their future husbands’ home (as dictated through the prevailing patrilocal marriage system), rather than as people with valuable contributions to make in their own right. Chowdhry (1997) has argued that patriarchal power in a neighbouring area of India is performed in part through instilling in young women the idea that they are only ‘temporary members’ of households and therefore not entitled to a share of their parents’ land. Sarita fought back against the idea that women were defined by their future marriage. On one occasion she noted: ‘We are not just made to be future daughter-in-laws … but first we are girls and women (in our own right), and then we’ll become daughters-in-law’.

She said that young women are also unable to speak out effectively in many public forums. Sarita was a member of a Mahila Mangal Dar (MMD), a women's self-help programme introduced by the government to empower local women. Sarita regularly used MMD meetings and events, including village clean-up programmes and discussions of how to combat alcoholism, to express her ideas and demonstrate the capacity of young women to speak. In these and other contexts, Sarita also said that young women remained excluded from participation in some forms of schooling, especially Science stream education and that teachers commonly display patronising attitudes to young women.

Other young people aged 18–25 in 2015–2022 engaged in similar forms of ‘thinking out’, making similar arguments about the importance of caste, class and gender inequalities. They argued that poorer sections of the village, who lacked the money required to make frequent urban trips or establish a foothold in urban areas, were forced to rely on the relatively low-quality of X-based educational, medical and other services. Some young people were aware of a small set of families from Bemni that had settled in Delhi and lived upper middle-class lives. They drew sharp contrasts between the opportunities open to young people in these rich families and those available to village youth, and especially young people from the poorest households in Bemni. These critiques were especially common among poorer GC and SC young people. ‘New youth’ in the later 2010s and early 2020s often displayed sensitivity to the issues facing poorer sections of the village. Sarita and other new youth said that a focus on ‘survival’ was therefore not enough on its own to ensure the viability of the village; this focus had to be supplemented by considering multiple and intersecting forms of inequality.

Sarita and other new youth also engaged in a second form of ‘thinking out’. They said that the focus in the period between 2004 and 2014 had been on material and infrastructural development to the relative exclusion of reflection on the social, cultural and spiritual maintenance of the village. Sarita situated this interest in cultural and spiritual matters with reference to what she perceived to be the qualities (goon) of the village. She explained:

In this place, from every small child to everyone who lives in the village, they all really believe in the gods. Whatever you see – all the forms of worship (pujas) that happen – in every place, from the old people to the adults … . I mean, in this village, everyone believes (or thanks) the gods and goddesses.

She said that this divine presence powerfully shapes the viability of the village:

Look at other villages, and you’ll see that this happened, and that people died because of landslides, or that happened. But here, by God, those things never happen. Our village is very good. I mean, this whole village … ..is Shiv-ji's home, and the Pandav's home, and every god's home. They [the gods] are happy, I mean, because of the pure land they are happy, because of our natural nature, and our pure land. Look, it's so open, wherever you look … . Wherever the gods want to live, they are allowed.

Paralleling young people in parts of the neighbouring state of Himachal Pradesh, young people regarded the gods and spiritual life of the village as a crucial component of the village's distinctive existence (cf Sen, Jeffrey, and Dyson 2023). Moreover, young people in Bemni referred to the honouring of the spirits as part of maintaining the composition of the village and its region as ‘a whole’. For example, Sarita referred to how her village was ‘balanced’ (using the English word), but indicated that this balance would be upset without ‘thinking out’ to sustain the social, environment and spiritual/cultural milieu in which they lived.

Reflecting the importance of these ideas, in the later 2010s and early 2020s, Sarita and other ‘new youth’ redirected energies towards activities that rebuilt the cultural and spiritual life of the village (see also Mathur 2021). Sarita focused especially on assisting with the Pandav Lila, a nine-day festival held every two years in which villagers re-enact sections of the Mahabharata through dance. The Pandav Lila was not simply a form of ‘heritage theatre’ but rather a healing ritual in which key dancers in the re-enactment become possessed by the characters they played. Sarita was part of a group of many young people aged in their late teens and early twenties who worked with other villagers in 2017 and 2019 to ensure that the Pandav Lila was run successfully and enrolled as many villagers as possible. Commenting on her involvement, Sarita said:

The Pandav Lila and other old traditions, these days you can see that these customs could die out. To maintain these customs, we at least need to keep them in the village. We get power from the Pandav Lila.

Sarita also insisted that this cultural and spiritual activity was not simply an esoteric ‘extra’ element of village life but fundamental to the survival of Bemni. She commented

If we don't get this power from the Pandav Lila, then our cows will get ill. If we don't get this power from Pandav Lila, then our children won't grow properly. This is absolutely true (sukti).

In this regard, Sarita's views resonated with those of other villagers, who saw the Pandav Lila as a vital means of honouring the gods and therefore ensuring that the village would not experience catastrophic illness or other disasters.

The Pandav Lila was part of a much wider ‘ecosystem of practice’ (Jeffrey, Jeffery, and Jeffery 2022) oriented around spiritual worship in Bemni. This incorporated numerous efforts by individual households to exorcise ghosts who were interfering with the physical and mental health of individuals or families. It also included a wide range of more regular forms of worship targeted towards household gods or village deities, often in association with seasonal transitions. In addition, villagers spent a great deal of time honouring gods in association with lifecycle ceremonies, for example in relation to birth, death and marriage. This varied wider ecosystem involved all villagers, but young people aged 18–25 were often prominent in spiritual events, playing coordinating and even advisory roles.

Young people's investment in renewing the cultural and spiritual life of the village was motivated as much by an ethical concern over how to be ‘good’ villagers and community members as it was a reflection of their utilitarian desire for the village to be viable. Sarita was vocal on this point, noting that it is people's duty (farz) to honour the gods, and it is necessary to earn their blessings through ‘noble’ (‘nek’) work.

Reflection

A characteristic feature of the social action of young people in Bemni was the extent to which they reflected on the nature and outcomes of their practice. Young people commonly scrutinised why, how and with what effects they were seeking to pursue viability. This point came across especially clearly in our interviews with informants with whom the first author had worked closely in the period between 2004 and 2014. These ‘older youth’ were 18–30 in 2004–2014 but either in their later twenties or thirties in 2015–2022.

Three of the educated young women among these ‘older youth’ had migrated out of Bemni for marriage by 2017 and one had died. Three of the men among older youth had left the village permanently for work. Nevertheless, the remainder of those aged 18–30 in 2004–2014 who had assisted in building lifelines in that period continued to be active in 2015–2022 as older youth.

The ‘older youth’ who had been at the forefront of social action in the 2010s did not tend to share the same level of sensitivity to issues of caste and class inequality as did ‘new youth’ in the period between 2015 and 2022. This set of socially active ‘older youth’ were largely from relatively wealthy GC households whereas the cohort of educated and active ‘new youth’ was more diverse in terms of caste and class origin. The differences in the two cohorts’ attention to issues of social inequality also relates to increased social differentiation in Bemni over the first two decades of the twenty-first century. By the mid-2010s a divide had emerged between those households with the capacity to acquire opportunities for education and work outside the local area, with the upper middle class Delhi households at one extreme, and those who had not. The only partial success of the 2004–2014 phase of development in Bemni, represented visually in the village in the early 2020s by the derelict medical centre and continued problems young people faced in obtaining basic good-quality schooling, heightened the sense of a gap between those who were spatially and socially mobile and those based in the village.

Where younger adults did agree with new youth, however, was on the question of the importance of ‘thinking out’ to consider social, cultural and spiritual activity in Bemni. For example, in 2017, Manisha said that she had not paid enough attention to the social and spiritual life of the village. Moreover, she said that some of the changes that she had promoted between 2008 and 2015, such as the installation of electricity, had somewhat undermined social and cultural/spiritual life. Manisha said that infrastructural change had meant that people were increasingly focused on their own individual lives, and, in the evenings, they were often looking at their phones. She commented, ‘this is not real life’. In a conversation with the first author over tea late one evening Manisha elaborated:

It's all more complicated than I first thought. I wanted so much change. We got so much change. Life is better, but we’ve lost too much, too. I think in some ways I have failed.

These statements resonate with many similar arguments made by new youth that ‘vikaas’ (‘development’) had also come with ‘binaas’, a word meaning ‘damage’. It also ties in with themes in the Chipko movement in Uttarakhand in the 1970s and 1980s (Rangan 2000) as well as Sen, Jeffrey, and Dyson (2023) account of how Kinnauri youth in Himachal Pradesh critique multiple aspects of capitalist development (see also Chakraborty 2018; Govindrajan 2018).

Like Sarita, Manisha had responded to this realisation of the contradictions of ‘development’ in part through becoming more involved in the spiritual life of the village. She was an active participant in the Pandav Lila and many other smaller acts of worship (puja) in the village during the second half of the 2010s and early 2020s. Manisha also tried to revive social contact in Bemni to counteract individualism. This came across especially clearly when Manisha discussed the jhumela, a women's only dance that had formerly occurred most evenings in the village, when women would form a circle, arms over each other's shoulders, and sing and move together. Women had performed the jhumela in Bemni in the early 2000s when I had regularly participated, but it was becoming increasingly uncommon by the end of that decade. Discussing the context and importance of the jhumela, and remembering her conversations with her mother, Manisha said:

Everyone had their own problems. In your own house there may have been a particular problem, in another house there might be fighting, and in another house there’d be some other issue. And if you just stayed at home, you started worrying. So, instead, we went to do jhumela every night. The women linked our arms together, and slowly, slowly, we danced and sang. That's what jumela means: the joining of women. We thought of nothing except the single song that interested us, and all our problems immediately melted away. You know, this feeling bubbles up from inside, that I just have to go there! I get a ‘free mind’ [uses English words] from it. For women, it's really important.

Manisha was instrumental in encouraging women to restart the jhumela in 2019, if not on a regular basis, then at least during major village festivals and events. On one occasion, I spent the day with Manisha as she rushed around the village calling people to participate in the dance that evening. Manisha argued that jhumela was not simply a ‘custom’. For her, it was a necessary means for women to overcome loneliness and anxiety in Bemni. She said that it was a crucial part of survival (chal sakna): ‘It provides energy but it also shows what it means to live together in peace’.

Other older youth between 2015 and 2022 referred to the importance of attending to the spiritual and social needs of the village. They argued that this activity was intimately tied to the issues of food, water, housing, infrastructure, education, health and security, and thus integral to the capacity of the village to carry on (chal sakna). Viability therefore emerges as simultaneously concerned with core dimension of life and the social, spiritual and cultural frameworks that sustain basic life in Bemni.

Conclusions

Social and environmental crises are having devasting impacts on young people in large parts of the majority world (Cuervo and Miranda 2019; Honwana 2012; Jeffrey and Dyson 2022). Yet young people are often responding imaginatively to these pressures (Cuervo and Miranda 2019; Sukarieh and Tannock 2014); youth social action has become a notable theme of writing on Asia (Chakraborty 2018; Oosterom, Pan Maran, and Wilson 2019; Sen, Jeffrey, and Dyson 2023) and Africa (Dawson 2022; Makau 2011; Thieme 2010). We have contributed to this literature through documenting the efforts of young people in Bemni, north India to ‘think in’ and seek to improve key domains of life for their community, especially in relation to education, infrastructure and health. In addition, young people ‘think out’ to reflect and act upon social and cultural dimensions of their milieu, especially spiritual life (cf. Sen, Jeffrey, and Dyson 2023).

Young people's social action cannot be romanticised. We have suggested that, in the period between 2004 and 2014, in particular, young people in Bemni did not prioritise engaging with caste and class inequalities in the village. But young people's action was generally progressive in the sense of enhancing the capabilities of relatively marginalised sections of society. Moreover, insofar as it was not progressive, we have suggested that, as cohorts of youth social actors replace one another, they often learn from the ‘mistakes’ or omissions of those in the past. Active reflection on the nature and consequences of action is a marked feature of youth social practice in Bemni.

Our paper has focused especially on the content of progressive youth social action. Young people in Bemni tend to be channelling effort into addressing key domains of life, especially education, infrastructure and health: ‘thinking in’. In this regard, their action aligned with Hage’s (2019) observation that socio-environmental crises are often compelling people in different parts of the world to focus on issues of survival, or what he terms ‘minimal viability’. Our analysis also connects with recent accounts of young people in other parts of the Majority World that examine a preoccupation of youth with issues of core survival (Dawson 2022; Fash, Vásquez Rivera, and Sojob 2022; Sen, Jeffrey, and Dyson 2023). Also resonating with these other accounts, we have identified vernacular notions of survival, hustle and navigation voiced by young people themselves. Youth frequently use concepts – ‘chal sakna’ (the ability to carry on) as well as the idea of ‘lifelines’ – to summarise the importance of focusing on core dimensions of life (cf. Fash, Vásquez Rivera, and Sojob 2022; Korzenevica 2016; Vigh 2009).

Nevertheless, young people in Bemni have increasingly connected their concern with ‘lifelines’ to a concentration on maintaining the ethically valued social, environmental and spiritual/cultural characteristics of their village and region. In this view, viability entails simultaneously protecting core aspects of human life and sustaining a wider ethically-important milieu, with crucial social, environmental and cultural/spiritual dimensions. Young people ‘think out’ to connect their everyday struggles around core domains of life to wider ‘ecosystems of practice’, linked for example to religion and forms of cultural practice.

In making these points, our analysis supports Hage’s (2019) argument that crises are also commonly leading marginalised people to reflect in new ways on the wider ethico-social questions that enframe their lives. Hage argues that this concern with wider ethical questions, such as environmental sustainability or spiritual meaning, defines ‘proper viability’. Our conclusions also resonate with the work of other scholars of young people in the Majority World who are concerned with a life that is ‘more than just survival’ (Dawson 2022; Korzenevica 2016; Oosterom et al. 2018; see also Daigle 2019; Fash, Vásquez Rivera, and Sojob 2022; Sen, Jeffrey, and Dyson 2023).

One key advantage of the longitudinal research that we have conducted in north India is that it highlights how this concern with life beyond minimal viability can emerge sequentially. In Bemni young people's social action evolved over time as new cohorts of youth became active socially and as older youth reflected on the consequences of earlier practice.

The wider substantive significance of this study is to encourage further research into other situations in which young people tie together a concern for survival with an interest in ethical issues of society, environment and spiritual/cultural practice. Future studies might build on our discussion of vernacular ideas of viability – for example the notion of lifelines discussed in this paper – to develop a comparative analysis of how minimal viability and proper viability are discussed in different contexts. Such studies might include consideration of how the relative importance of minimal viabaility and proper viability may change over time (cf Hage 2019).

The broader conceptual value of the paper is to underline the importance of the term viability as a means of understanding the responses of youth and other marginalised or minoritized populations to situations of social and environmental crisis (see also Hage 2019; Jeffrey and Dyson 2022). This concept derives its power in part from being somewhat ‘encompassing’ across two dimensions. First, the term viability – like the terms ‘survival’ or life’ – encompasses multiple domains of life, such as work, education, health and infrastructure. Second, the term encompasses both survival and much broader ethical questions about social, environmental and cultural/spiritual practice.

Acknowledgements

We are indebted to the people of Bemni village for their time, friendship and willingness to participate in our research. We are grateful to the editorial office of JYS and to two anonymous reviewers for their very helpful feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Australian Research Council (DP170104376 and DP200102424)

Notes

1 ‘I’ in the paper refers to the first author.