Fragmentation, diversity, and inequality: the city and everyday youth culture

ABSTRACT

This study examines a lesser explored area of research involving the interaction between young people and culture in an Indian city, Pune. By looking at young peoples’ conceptions about the city and their everyday cultural participation, we show that the city is culturally divided on the lines of language, spatiality, class, and status, and these further interact with each other in complicated ways. For young people in Pune city, English and Marathi are set in an unequal relationship, however there is a disagreement on the place of these languages in this relationship. Further, the recent young migrants showed ‘in-betweenness’ in their cultural imaginations about the rural and the urban. Young people’s everyday cultural interactions happened through family, friends, and the internet. Diversities, inequalities, and tensions marked those processes. Their families’ differential access to cultural capital shaped their cultural socialisation and opportunities in cultural fields. They saw engagement with the digital world as inevitable; but recognising the difference between the virtual and the real worlds, they involved themselves in online debates only with persons with whom they had some real-world connections. We further show that along with socio-economic inequalities, young people are fragmented at the cultural level too, and they navigate these different cultural worlds.

KEYWORDS:

• Young people
• language
• rurbanity
• social capital
• everyday negotiations

Acknowledgements

The fieldwork for this article was done with the support from European Union for CHIEF research project. The EU has supported it under the Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, grant agreement No. 770464. This article partially borrows from the report submitted earlier to the European Commission. Prof. Suhas Palshikar and Dr Cornelia Sylla had read an earlier draft and provided useful suggestions to improve the quality of the text. An earlier version of this article was presented at the International Conference on Urban Transformations, Youth Aspirations and Education in India that took place at IIT, Gandhinagar in February 2020. We thank Prof. John Harriss, Dr Divya Vaid and other participants of the conference for discussing the arguments. Critical comments from the anonymous referees and the editors of this special journal issue have immensely helped in sharpening the arguments put in here. Dr Priya Gohad helped us in coordinating the fieldwork. Shruti Hussain and Amogh Bhongale assisted us in conducting the same. Sayali Shankar helped us in copy editing the text. The authors, however, are alone responsible for any limitations in the article.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. This project involved collaboration of nine country-partners and support of the European Union, and aimed to investigate the cultural literacy of young people to facilitate policy on diversity and heritage. It studied the cultural knowledge of young people in terms of heritage and diversity as it is shaped on the sites of formal education, non- formal cultural organisations and informal familial socialisation.

2. Williams, Keywords: A vocabulary, 90.

3. Ibid.

4. Ibid.

5. Lenard, “Culture,” 1.3.

6. Ibid.

7. Swartz, Culture and Power.

8. Bucholtz, “Youth and Cultural Practice”.

9. Ibid.

10. Debattista, “Cultural Omnivorous, univorous or”.

11. Bennett, “Speaking of Youth Culture”.

12. Lukose, Liberalization′s Children.

13. Robinson, Cafe Culture in Pune.

14. Gooptu, Enterprise Culture in Neoliberal.

15. Fernandes, India’s New Middle Class.

16. Jeffrey and Young, “Jugad”.

17. Chakraborty, Young Muslim Women in.

18. Deshpande, “Dialectics of Defeat”.

19. Kumbhojkar, “Contesting Power, Contesting Memories”.

20. Robinson, Cafe Culture in Pune.

21. Butsch et el., ‘Growing “Smart”’, 4.

22. Jiang, “The Relationship Between Culture,” 328.

23. Williams, The Country and the, 297.

24. Ibid., 298.

25. Datta, “Pride and Shame,” 663.

26. Anh et el., “Becoming and Being Urban,”1128.

27. Scott, “Cities and Regions,” 199.

28. Harvey, “The Right,” 9.

29. Krishnamurthy, Mishra and Desouza, “City Profile: Pune, India,” 101.

30. Butsch et el., ‘Growing “Smart”’, 9.

31. Literal meanings of the Hindi words Didi and Bhaiyya are elder sister and elder brother respectively. But they are also used as honorifics.

32. Chan and Goldthorpe, “Class and Status,” 513 and 514.

33. Roy, “The Englishing of India,” 57.

34. Ibid.

35. Jayadeva, “Below English Line,” 592.

36. Yadav, “Talk of Hindi dominance,” 12–14.

37. Atula, “The Problem,” 1–2.

38. Jayadeva, “Below English Line,” 608.

39. Chan and Goldthorpe, “Class and Status,” 515.

40. Bourdieu, “The Forms of Capital,” 21. Bourdieu defined Social Capital as ‘possession of a durable network of more or less institutionalised relationships of mutual acquaintance and recognition – or in other words, to membership in a group – which provides each of its members with the backing of the collectively owned capital, a “credential,” which entitles them to credit, in various senses of the word’.

41. Bourdieu, “The Forms of Capital,” 17; O’Brien, & Fathaigh, “Bringing in Bourdieu’s Theory,” 69. For Bourdieu, cultural capital refers to the broader social environment including family and other socialising structures that forms the background for scholastic, educational and artistic success and achievements of the individuals. He has classified cultural capital in three inter-related forms: objectified, embodied and institutional. For O’Brien and Ó Fathaigh, “objectified form is manifest in such items as books, qualifications, computers; the embodied form is connected to the educated character of individuals, such as accent and learning dispositions; and the institutionalised form represents the places of learning one may attend (e.g. different types of schools, colleges, universities, or technology institutions)”.

42. Bhandari and Titzman, “Introduction: Family Realities in”.

43. Wyly, “The City of Cognitive,” 392.

44. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 7.

45. Appadurai, “Disjuncture and Difference,” 301–4.

46. Fernandes, ‘Nationalizing “the Global”’, 616.

47. Ibid., 625.

48. Pathak-Shelat, and DeShano, “Digital Youth Cultures,” 995–6.

49. Fernandes, ‘Nationalizing “the Global”’, 625.