Globalised dreams, local constraints: migration and youth aspirations in an Indian regional town (original) (raw)
Related papers
Youth Mobilities and Rural-Urban Tensions in Darjeeling, India
South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 2015
Globalisation has introduced new sources of mobility for India’s youth, yet not all youth experience mobility in the same way. The unevenness of mobility trajectories is especially visible in regional towns, where poor rural migrants and more globally connected middleclass youth occupy the same social space. To illustrate these mobility trends, this paper presents the stories of youths from various backgrounds in the town of Darjeeling, exploring different sources of mobility for rural and urban youth. While rural youth experience some forms of upward mobility as they migrate into the town, urban youth are confronted with downward mobility and are frustrated in their aspirations for professional careers and ‘modern’ lifestyles. For aspiring urban youth, upwardly-mobile rural people are seen as a threat to their privilege, blocking their mobility aspirations. This is contributing towards emerging tensions between rural and urban populations within the town.
The diaspora within: Himalayan youth, education-driven migration, and future aspirations in India
Economic change has driven parents across the Indian Himalayan Region to send their children to major Indian cities for higher education. Himalayan students’ urban experience and understanding of the nation is profoundly shaped by the movement between the Himalayan context and the foreign experience of Indian city life. We draw on interviews with students to discuss their experiences in the sometimes liberating and sometimes hostile cities of India. In their perceived cultural and racialized difference, we argue, Himalayan students form a diaspora within their own nation, and we suggest that attention to their micropractices of belonging and movement between home and city is critical to understanding India as a nation-state. Here, we suggest that education-driven migration to urban centers results in challenging spaces of encounter, and that minority students cope with these encounters both by forging diasporic ties with those from their homeland and other marginalized Himalayan students, and by building a cosmopolitan sensibility that reaches beyond India’s borders. Our research is based primarily on a set of twenty interviews conducted in 2011 in Delhi, Sikkim, and Leh, Ladakh, but is informed by our ongoing work on the topic, and on our previous and continuing research.
Politics, pleasure, and difference in the intimate city: Himalayan students remake the future
Across India, first-generation college students are flooding from rural backgrounds into Indian universities in urban settings – many facing additional challenges of ethnic, religious, regional, or linguistic minority status. Following the lives of Ladakhi youth, who travel to the city from the edge of the Tibetan plateau in India’s Jammu and Kashmir State, this article traces the experience of ‘the intimate city’ through discussion of urban pleasures and marginalization. Bridging critical emergent literatures on education and on the intimate and political city, here, I argue that the rural to urban mobility necessary for education enables self-consciously global and cosmopolitan subjectivities for subaltern youth that transcend and complicate both neoliberal development projects and parents’ hopes. Despite problems of unemployment, decline of government jobs, and increasing competition between educated youth, higher education remains a path to a better standard of living, particularly for first-generation students. Parallel to this instrumental role of higher education, for underrepresented students joining the higher education path, experiences of discrimination and marginalization can be intensified in the foreign urban setting and university campus. This research finds that young people both struggle and thrive in the city and that their embodied practices of clothing, food, and friendship enable them to forge subaltern forms of cosmopolitan belonging that transcend regional and national borders, create new subjectivities, and different understandings of the political. This work then suggests attention to the role that rural–urban mobility and education play in enabling new and self-consciously global or transnational subjectivities for subaltern youth that exceed neoliberal state development projects, create new horizons beyond the medical/engineering-focused dreams of rural parents, and reshape geographies of belonging.
FROM THE VILLAGE TO THE CITY: THE CHANGING DYNAMICS OF MIGRATION IN CONTEMPORARY INDIA
This paper, while tracing the origins of a group of migrants to their roots in the villages of Bihar, analyses the rationale and the patterns of migration in contemporary India. The growth of rural to urban migration in India is a very significant phenomenon. An increase in migration is directly associated with the shift in the development paradigm in India and the move towards globalising trends. Changes in the capital flows, investments, commodities, and information have created new avenues for people to find economic engagement. The impact of information, communication and transportation is becomingly critical in facilitating regional development, which is highly relevant in the context of migration, as it facilitates and strengthens people’s movement, on one hand, while also enhancing their link with the origin areas, which are largely rural, on the other hand. The present paper analyses how the migrants, through their double location, have become part of a new information and knowledge world, which make them aware of a new and potential world of opportunities, welfare and entitlement. It, therefore, tries to delve deeper into the meanings and forms associated with the movement of people from their rural hinterland to life in the cities in contemporary India, and is based on a study conducted in six villages in the Samastipur district in Bihar, the origin of the migrants, and Delhi, their destination.
A significant proportion of Indians (29%) live in cities with populations less than 50,000. Despite the prevailing ‘urban bias’ towards large cities, small urban agglomerations are growing faster than large and even mid-sized cities. Ostensibly, small cities are playing a vital role in creating accessible educational and employment opportunities for rural youth. The case of eGramServe, a ‘rural’ BPO set up in Narendra Nagar, which is a city of approximately 10,000 people located in the Tehri Garhwal district of the mountainous state of Uttarakhand, serves to illustrate the migration decisions of the educated young in the light of a fresh employment opportunity close to home. The research shows the perceived migration costs are high for rural youth who commute to Narendra Nagar for work on a daily basis. Under-confident of their ability to secure well paying jobs in larger cities, they are satisfied to work close to home where they can continue to support and be supported by their families. In contrast, youth who already live in Narendra Nagar whose parents are already in secure government or private jobs are more ambitious and see eGramServe as an opportunity to gain experience that will secure them better jobs in a larger city. For women, employment near home allows them to continue to work despite the bindings of a patriarchal society that denies them independence in movement and decision-making. Migration decisions of young people appear rational, albeit complex and a number of interesting patterns including multiple cycles of migration as well as return migration are observed. The study questions the notion that educated youth in rural and small town India aspires to migrate to the big city fulfil their dreams. Instead, it indicates that it is worthwhile to find ways to support small urban agglomerations like Narendra Nagar in terms of investment and governance to enable rural youth to be meaningfully employed closer to home.
Leaving the Northeast Borderland : Place-making and the Inward Pull of Citizenship in India
2013
This article analyses the connections between borderlands and heartlands through migrants leaving Northeast India and migrating to Delhi. While real and potential cross border flows capture the imagination of borderlands scholars, the inward pull of citizenship from borderlands to heartlands is equally important in shaping the present and future environment of borderlands and frontiers. This article is concerned with three interlinked dynamics evident in the migration from the borderland to the heartland. First, as distinctive ethnic minorities from the borderlands, Northeast migrants experience racism, violence and discrimination in Indian cities suggesting that encounters between frontiers and heartlands are rarely seamless. Second, while these negative experiences are crucial in shaping the lives of Northeast migrants in Indian cities, they are not just “victims of the city” and create a sense of place through neighbourhoods, food, and faith. Third, migration demonstrates the shi...