“A Useless Thing!” or “Nectar of the Gods?” The Cultural Production of Education and Young Men's Struggles for Respect in Liberalizing North India

Abstract

Drawing on fourteen months' ethnographic field research in western Uttar Pradesh among educated Dalit (ex-untouchable) and Muslim young men, this article uncovers a crisis in educated people's access to salaried employment in rural north India. Against the grain of other studies of youth underemployment in postcolonial settings, we argue that educated Muslim and Dalit young men have reacted to their exclusion from secure white-collar occupations by embracing education as a form of embodied cultural distinction rather than seeking out “traditional,”“indigenous,” or “village-based” identities. Young men elaborate on education's value with reference to a system of differences between moral, civilized, developed “educated” people and immoral, savage, underdeveloped “illiterates.” Education has become a type of discursive “scaffold” upon which people display their ideas about morality, development, and respect. These narratives are compromised and contested and highlight differences in the ability of Muslim and Dalit young men to maintain an image of themselves as educated people. The extraordinary durability of local ideas of development (vikās) in the face of poor occupational outcomes and local variations in young people's ability to maintain development identities point to the importance of the cultural production of education as a field for comparative geographical enquiry.

Key Words:

• development
• education
• India
• work
• youth
• Dalits
• Muslims

Acknowledgments

This article is based on wider research examining how secondary schooling is changing patterns and processes of social reproduction in rural North India. We are grateful to the Economic and Social Research Council [grant number R000238495], the Ford Foundation, and the Royal Geographical Society for funding aspects of this research, and to the Institute of Economic Growth, New Delhi, for our attachment there in 2000–2002. None bears any responsibility for what we have written here. We are also grateful to our research assistants, Swaleha Begum, Shaila Rais, Chhaya Sharma, and Manjula Sharma, and to the people of Nangal and Qaziwala. In addition, we would like to thank Stuart Corbridge, Peter Demerath, Jane Dyson, Alexander Jeffrey, David Jeffrey, Pru Jeffrey, Emma Mawdsley, and two anonymous reviewers for their comments on an earlier draft of this article. Errors and inconsistencies that remain are our own.

Notes

Source: Village censuses conducted by authors, September–October 1990, October–November 2000 and February 2001.

Note: Totals do not all add to 100 percent because of rounding.

Source: Village censuses conducted by authors, September–October 1990, October–November 2000 and Febuary 2001.

Note: Totals do not all add to 100 percent because of rounding. Figures should be treated with caution due to the small sample size.

1. Recent research in Latin America includes Levinson (1996,;1999), Punch (2002), for parallel accounts from Africa see, for example, Katz (1993,;1998), Stambach (1998), Silberschmidt (2001), Bryceson (2002), Watts (2003); for Asia see especially Heuzé (1996), Parry (1999b), Osella and Osella (2000), Manderson and Liamputtong (2002), Miles (2002), Harriss-White (2003), and Chopra, Osella, and Osella (2004).

2. See especially Katz (1993,;1998), Punch (2002), Ruddick (2003), Watts (2003), and Ansell (forthcoming).

3. Dalit means “broken and oppressed” in the Marathi language. For a discussion of the difficulties associated with defining Dalits in South Asia see Charsley (1996).

4. Prause and Dooley (1997, 245) define underemployment as “involuntary part-time employment, intermittent unemployment and inadequate income.”

5. During the 1980s and 1990s, scholars uncovered further evidence of violence (Sykes 1999) and psychological disorders (Stambach 1998) among young people in postcolonial settings frustrated by their failure to obtain secure employment. These signs of discontent have been accompanied by the introduction of state and nonstate regulatory frameworks that control young people's public, as well as their private, behavior (e.g., Katz 1998) and associated efforts in both the First World and Third World to pathologize young men (Stambach 1998; McDowell 2003).

6. For Bourdieu (1984, 144), the plight of these young men exposed the myriad treacheries of modernity: “a whole generation finding it has been taken for a ride are apt to extend to all institutions the mixture of revolt and resentment it feels towards the educational system.”

7. See Gooptu (1993), Dube (1998), Parry (1999a, b), Srivastava (1998), Osella and Osella (2000), Ciotti (2002), Klenk (2003), Moller (2003).

8. Willis (1982, 112) defined cultural production as “the active, collective use and explorations of received symbolic, ideological and cultural resources to explain, make sense of and positively respond to ‘inherited’ structural and material conditions.” While limited as a guiding concept (see Demerath 2003), the notion of cultural production neatly expresses the idea that young people's practices are not exclusively determined by socializing and structural influences, but also require analysis of choice, agency, subjectivity, and uncertainty.

9. For recent research on caste by geographers, see especially, Bentall and Corbridge (1996), Robbins (1998), Corbridge and Harriss (2000), and Jeffrey (2001).

10. For details of the views of parents and madrasah teachers on girls' education see Jeffery, Jeffery, and Jeffrey (forthcoming).

11. In U.P. classes one to five correspond to primary school, six to eight to junior high school, nine and ten to high school, and eleven and twelve to senior high school. Students take public examinations in Eighth Class, Tenth Class, and Twelfth Class.

12. We employ pseudonyms throughout the article.

13. For most of the postcolonial period, India's approach to macroeconomic planning combined a leading role for the private sector in economic decision making with substantial state intervention formally aimed at accelerating growth and redistributing social opportunities (Chandrasekhar and Ghosh 2002). In the face of a growing fiscal crisis, however, and under pressure from multilateral lenders, the Indian state embarked on a series of sweeping economic reforms, beginning formally in mid-1991 but commonly traced to the mid-1980s (see Corbridge and Harriss 2000).

14. In the 1930s the British created lists of formerly untouchable castes and “indigenous tribes” deemed eligible for special government assistance, the so-called Scheduled Castes (SCs) and Scheduled Tribes (STs).

15. Upper-caste leaders and scholars have typically attacked caste-based reservations on the grounds that they interfere with principles of “merit” in job appointments. Other upper-caste critics, and many on the political left, broadly support notions of positive discrimination but contest the use of caste as a criterion of difference.

16. Appropriating the language of educational reform (e.g., Giroux 1983), the Hindu right have advocated learner-centered rather than school-centered instruction focused on improving the “spiritual quotient” of students, introducing subjects such as Astrology and Vedic Mathematics into formal curricula and rewriting history textbooks to celebrate a glorified Hindu past. At the same time, Hindu nationalist social and cultural organisations, such as the Rastriya Swayam Sevak (RSS), have engaged in an energetic programme of school foundation.

17. Varnā literally means color. The varnā system of caste ranking originates in the Hindu sacred texts, the Vedas. In one of the earliest texts, the Rig Veda, society is linked to the divisions of the cosmic man Pūrûshā. The head corresponds to Brahmins, who perform a priestly function in society; the arms correspond to Kshatriyas, the warriors; the torso or stomach corresponds to the Vaishyas, the merchants; and the feet correspond to the Shudras, the menial workers. The untouchables, who traditionally performed work regarded by Hindus as defiling, were excluded from this hierarchy altogether. There is no direct translation of the word “caste” in Indian languages. Caste is derived from the Portuguese word casta meaning “pure breed.”

18. There is a risk of exaggerating the newness of these dynamics. Lewis (1965) and Mahar (1972) documented the rise of an educated Chamar elite in western U.P. in the 1950s and 1960s, respectively. See Nambissan (1996) for a useful history of Dalit education for India as a whole.

19. The Chamars were traditionally associated with shoemaking, see Briggs (1920), Mandelbaum (1970).

20. For more on Bijnor district, see Jeffery and Jeffery (1997).

21. This process is described in Jeffery, Jeffery, and Jeffrey (2003).

22. A detailed description of the Deoband seminary is available in Metcalf (1982).

23. For our reflections on the practice of ethnographic field research in western U.P. see Jeffery and Jeffery (1997) and Jeffrey (1999).

24. These were conducted by two of the authors during a previous round of research in Bijnor district. The authors are grateful to the Overseas Development Administration for funding this research.

25. For more on Chamars' educational and employment strategies, see Jeffrey, Jeffery, and Jeffery (forthcoming).

26. Muslim young men educated in madrasahs, but without mainstream secondary schooling, tended to agree broadly with those with mainstream qualifications about notions of educated/uneducated difference. Madrasah-educated young men from Qaziwala emphasized the good judgment, refined comportment, and knowledge of the educated compared to the uneducated.

27. On the symbolic significance of this dress, see Chakrabarty (2002, 51ff.).

28. We are grateful to Barbara Metcalf for drawing our attention to these scarves, which were not a feature of young male Muslim attire twenty years ago in western U.P. (Barbara Metcalf, personal communication, e-mail 1 June 04).

29. Parents perceived educated young men to be a greater social threat than illiterate young men due to their relative guile and propensity to spend long periods loafing around the bus stops in the villages.

30. For information on Amarpal's views on politics and caste, see Jeffrey, Jeffery, and Jeffery (forthcoming).

31. The failure of many educated young men to obtain secure employment has encouraged uneducated Chamars in an older generation to reflect critically on the idea that sons should be educated beyond high school. Our census data point to a move among Chamar parents to withdraw their sons from formal education after Tenth Class. Although school education among Chamars between 1990 and 2001 in the cohorts aged 8–12 and 13–17 increased markedly, the number of young men aged 18–22 in formal education declined: from 22 percent to 11 percent.

32. When asked about his education, a Chamar laborer turned over his hand to point out the calluses and blisters formed through manual labor. His friend leaned over to tell us, “We learn through blisters.”

33. Unlike many young people in Western societies, Chamars do not have the financial resources to eschew paid work altogether. In this context, it is not the image of “doing nothing” that terrifies educated young men, as appears to be the case in many parts of the West and some parts of the Third World (see, especially, Katz 1998), but rather the compulsion to enter occupations they consider beneath their dignity as educated people.

34. Also quoted in Jeffrey, Jeffery, and Jeffery (forthcoming).

35. In 2001, 40 rupees were roughly equivalent to one U.S. dollar.

36. The Sanskrit word amrt was more commonly used by Jats to express their enthusiasm for education.

37. Also quoted in Jeffrey, Jeffery, and Jeffery (2004), which provides additional material on Chamar young men's reactions to the dilemmas of educated underemployment.

38. Following the lead of the police force, the local media interpreted this and other incidents as examples of rising Islamic terrorism. Our research among the Hindu middle class in Bijnor suggested that anti-Muslim sentiments within this group were hardening in the autumn of 2001, or at least that middle-class Hindus felt that they could express anti-Muslim feelings more openly in our presence following the events of 11 September 2001.

39. A fatwā is a notification of a decision of Islamic law issued by a senior cleric with religious training in response to a question posed by a Muslim.