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Abstract
In this essay, I examine ‘Education Abroad’– the large-scale migration of engineering students from India to the USA for seeking graduate education. I argue that Education Abroad in contemporary India is articulated at the intersection of multiple factors at different scales. These include imaginations of successful careers and lifestyles as well as frustrations with state-sponsored higher education in India – factors which, in turn, are themselves located within particular histories of (post)colonialism, developmentalism, and more recently, neoliberalism. Drawing on historical analysis and ethnographic research conducted among engineering students in Mumbai, India, and various parts of the USA, I trace ways in which Indian engineers make sense of and navigate through the intersections of these various historical and contemporary currents and the particular shape of Education Abroad that emerges as a result. Moreover, I suggest, in pursuing Education Abroad, these engineers inadvertently undermine the very systems of higher education of which they are legacy beneficiaries.
Acknowledgements
Research toward this paper was made possible by a Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (HASS) Fellowship awarded by Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, USA, and a Dissertation Improvement Grant awarded by the US National Science Foundation (Award #0848540, Understanding (Indian) Technomigration: Experiences and Structural Conditions). Different versions of this paper have been presented at three different conferences: ‘Governing Futures: Imagining, Negotiating and Taming Emerging Technosciences’ International Conference hosted at University of Vienna, Austria (Sept 2011), ‘Engineer or Engineers? Between Expansion and Fragmentation’ International Conference hosted by L’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), Paris, France (Oct 2011), and the annual meetings of the Society for the Social Studies of Science (4S) in Cleveland, OH (November 2011). The author has also benefited immensely from the engagement of colleagues at the Research Program in Science, Technology, and Society at Maastricht University, The Netherlands (MUSTS), where a version of this paper was presented at a colloquium in December 2011. The author is grateful for critical commentary from Ernst Homburg, Kim Fortun, Grant Jun Otsuki, and Deepa S. Reddy during various phases of the preparation of this manuscript. Finally, the author acknowledges the critical inputs of the three anonymous reviewers for Engineering Studies, as well as the efforts of Gary Downey, Kacey Beddoes, and other members of the editorial team of the journal.
Notes
1Bhandari and Chow, Open Doors 2008.
2Khandekar, “Engineering the Global Indian.”
3Marcus, “Ethnography in/of the World System.”
4I do so elsewhere, see: Khandekar, Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam, forthcoming.
5Fernandes, India's New Middle Class.
6Jawaharlal Nehru, a central leader in the anti-colonial nationalist struggle, went on to become independent India's first Prime Minister.
7Rudolph and Rudolph, In Pursuit of Lakshmi; Kohli, State-Directed Development.
8Khadria, “Tracing the Genesis of Brain Drain in India.”
9The commission identified 3428 communities, which constituted about 54.4% of India's population, as constituting the category of OBCs. The Mandal Commission recommended that public sector organizations, institutions receiving financial assistance from the government of India, and institutions of higher education, traditionally dominated by members of the upper classes, reserve a percentage of their capacity for OBCs so as to more accurately reflect the actual constitution of Indian society. In conformity with the constitutional mandate of reservations not exceeding 50%, therefore, the implementation of the Mandal Commission report brought net reservation in the system to 49.5%, from the existing 22.5% which was already reserved for those belonging to the Scheduled Castes (SCs) and Scheduled Tribes (STs). Bayly, Caste, Society, and Politics in India. Reservation in many Indian states, however, routinely exceeds this number. This is allowable given the political structure of India, and the distribution of authority between the federal government and various state governments. Caste-based reservations in the southern state of Tamil Nadu, for example, are now over 70%.
10In recent years, with the election of the Congress-led government of Dr Manmohan Singh in 2004, there have also been proposals to extend the job quotas to private sector jobs and to certain institutions of higher education (such as the IITs) which had heretofore been exempted from reservations for OBC candidates. Private industry has been extremely resistant to the idea of introducing caste-based reservations in their workforce, and some have suggested voluntary programs toward increasing the representation of people belonging to BC and OBC categories among their employees.
11Chatterjee, Politics of the Governed; Lukose, Liberalization's Children.
12Hansen, The Saffron Wave, 56.
13Mankekar, Screening Culture, Viewing Politics; Rajagopal, Politics after Television; Chaudhuri, “Indian Media and Its Transformed Public.”
14The summer of 1991 marked the transition from a state-managed to a market-driven, liberalized model of political-economy in India. Years of political instability, with the concomitant absence of coherent budgets and spiraling fiscal deficits, had resulted in economic stagnation and an inability to service India's international debt. Foreign debt had risen three-fold over the last decade, making India the third largest debtor in the global economy, after Brazil and Mexico. By the end of June 1991, hard-currency reserves were estimated at merely $1.2 billion, which would last only two weeks. The prospect of bankruptcy looming large, the government turned to the IMF for an emergency loan, which was conditional upon India agreeing to neoliberal economic restructuring. Budget passed, reforms promised, the Indian government succeeded in averting immediate crisis.
15Mazzarella, Shoveling Smoke; Mazzarella, “Middle Class.” For a more comprehensive overview of the new middle class, see: Khandekar and Reddy, “An Indian Summer.”
16Deshapnde, “Imagined Economies.”
17Fernandes, India's New Middle Class.
18Ibid., p. 195.
19Ibid., emphasis added.
20Ibid., p. 132.
21Ibid.
22Beteille, “The Social Character of the Indian Middle Class”; Sridharan, “The Growth and Composition of India's Middle Class”; Vanaik, “Consumerism and New Classes in India.”
23Sitapati, “What Anna Hazare's Movement and India's Middle Classes say about Each Other.”
24Khandekar and Reddy, “An Indian Summer.” The anthropology of class generally approaches the study of class as simultaneously a cultural and a structural entity. Drawing on Marx and Weber, Liechty provides a particularly insightful discussion into the production of the cultural space of the emerging middle class in Kathmandu as being articulated primarily through consumerist idioms, given their ‘ambiguous relationship to the productive economy’: neither ‘sellers of labor (workers) [n]or owners of capital (the capitalist elite)’, but ‘consumers of goods in the market place’. Liechty, Suitably Modern, 16, 18.
25Scholarship that focuses on the emergence of engineering in different cultural contexts, for example, emphasizes the central social status afforded to engineers in many national contexts. cf. Downey and Lucena, “Knowledge and Professional Identity in Engineering.”
26Prakash, Another Reason; Abraham, The Making of the Indian Atomic Bomb.
27To name just a few examples: Aneesh, Virtual Migration; Xiang, Global Body-Shopping; Nadeem, Dead Ringers; Radhakrishnan, Appropriately Indian. Engineers also get implicitly equated with being middle-class in various other works. cf. Fernandes, “Restructuring the New Middle Class,” 95, 97; Fuller and Narasimhan, “Information Technology Professionals.”
28NRI, a term often encountered in Indian popular discourse, stands for Non Resident Indian, an administrative-bureaucratic category used to refer to diasporic Indians.
29Nair, Technobrat, 149.
30Five-year plans have been instruments of planning government policies in relation to various sectors of the Indian economy since the earliest years of the post-independent Indian state. The first five-year plan was enacted between 1951–1956.
31Fernandes, India's New Middle Class, 21.
32Rudolph and Rudolph, In Pursuit of Lakshmi, 296.
33Quoted in Khadria, “Tracing the Genesis of Brain Drain in India,” 274.
34Quoted in Khadria, “Tracing the Genesis of Brain Drain in India,” 274.
35Rudolph and Rudolph, In Pursuit of Lakshmi, 296.
36Khadria, “Tracing the Genesis of Brain Drain in India,” 277.
37Thus, the “brain drain,” as this massive outmigration has come to be called, Khadria argues, became a “safety valve” for the Indian economy.
38Immigration from India and many other Asian countries into the USA was virtually banned after the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the Barred Zone Act of 1917. It was only after the enactment of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 (proposed by John F. Kennedy, and enacted by the Lyndon Johnson administration) that immigration from India to the USA picked up in any significant way.
39Park and Park, Probationary Americans.
40Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments; Zachariah, Developing India.
41Zachariah, Developing India, 159. A foundational argument in Indian historiography is that articulating an Indian modernity based on an essential difference from the modernity of the West was foundational to Indian anti-colonial nationalism, and hence, the very imagination of the new nation that was to be. This literature is vast; for a starting point, see: Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments.
42Abraham, The Making of the Indian Atomic Bomb; Prakash, Another Reason.
43Gupta, Postcolonial Developments; Fortun, Advocacy after Bhopal; Visvanathan, A Carnival for Science.
44The latter four IITs were established one each in collaboration with various international partners: IIT at Bombay with the help of the former Soviet Union, Madras with the help of Germany, Delhi with the help of the UK, and Kanpur with the help of the USA.
45Leslie and Kargon, “Exporting MIT,” 117.
46Ibid., 118.
47Psuedonym.
48With India's economic boom, a significant theme of inquiry has been on the possibility of “return migration” among diasporic Indians. While there is definite evidence that more Indians have been returning back to India after living elsewhere for extended periods of time, whether this is an established pattern – and the magnitude of the phenomenon – remains disputed; cf. Fuller and Narasimhan, “Information Technology Professionals.” During my extended fieldwork, many interlocutors have confirmed that they indeed consider returning to India after spending a few years in the USA. The reasons are dominantly three-fold: fulfilling their filial responsibilities of caring for their (aging) parents is difficult when the physical separation is so large; for bringing up their own children in a more culturally authentic manner; and more recently, many report that various multinationals are relocating high-end research positions – and not just service-sector work – to India. This creates both more and diverse employment possibilities in India, but equally, preemptively relocating to India themselves implies that diasporic Indians are able to return on more lucrative expat-salary packages rather than the domestic wages that they would otherwise be offered.
49The notion of finding a “balance” between “tradition” and “modernity,” “India” and the “West” is a long-standing discussion in Indianist scholarship. Recent works that trace middle-class inflected notions of (global) Indianness that seek to reconcile these contradictory pulls into a reformulated cosmopolitan selfhood hone in on the notion of “balance” prominently. See, in particular, Radhakrishnan, Appropriately Indian.
50Oak, GRE Coaching and Preparation.
51This practice has changed somewhat since the data for this paper was gathered. A state-level entrance examination specifically for students seeking to pursue a degree in engineering, in addition to H.S.C. examination scores now regulates admissions into engineering colleges across the state of Maharashtra. Admissions to the IITs has always been regulated by a national-level examination, the IIT-JEE (IIT Joint Entrance Examination).
52So, for example, quite a few of my student interlocutors complained that the end-of-semester examination system in place at MU encourages rote learning and an excessive focus on passing one single examination rather than semester-long learning that encouraged practical experience (as opposed to theoretical knowledge) as part of their curricula.
53Fernandes, India's New Middle Class.
54For a particularly poignant description, see: Yardley, “In India, Dynamism Wrestles with Dysfunction.” Yardley paints a picture of Gurgaon, a city 15 miles South of New Delhi, which often stands in as an icon of India's economic success story in recent years. As home to India's nouveau rich, Gurgoan has transformed from a city that barely existed two decades ago, to one that is home to 26 shopping malls, seven golf courses, luxury automobile showrooms for Mercedes-Benzes and BMWs, and designer brands such as Chanel and Louis Vuitton. And yet, Yardley portrays an equal sense of dysfunction: until recently, the district of Gurgaon had no government at the local level at all. Public utilities that have been traditionally provided for by the Indian state are often provided in Gurgaon through a wide range of arrangements, and in some cases, not provided at all. Electricity is often provided through diesel-powered generators. Water is provided through private borewells. Policing functions have been assumed by private security firms, of which there are many. The local post-office collects mail from private courier services only, given the unreliability of the national postal services in these parts. And sewage and garbage disposal facilities are largely unavailable. Indeed, until recently, even the heart of the city's commercial enterprises were almost entirely off the grid.
55Chatterjee, Politics of the Governed; Lukose, Liberalization's Children.