Bounded aspirations and youth capacity: interrogating public higher education in North India

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper engages with youth and the everyday culture of public higher education in selected urban sites of the Banaras Hindu University (BHU). As a public university, the BHU inspires massive youth mobility from rural areas and small towns in North India, specially of youth from socially disadvantaged castes and women. I find that these youth are not lacking in a capacity to aspire. Rather, their desires are formed in complex social conditions, and involve overlapping temporal flows. Their migration for education is about escaping the routine and habits of a rural past. It is simultaneously a dream for a future with secure government jobs and urban living. Further, their aspirations are not merely utilitarian – they include a normative idea of the university, with good-quality education and an egalitarian culture, replete with freedoms. However, the everyday culture of the public university is replete with boundaries. Persisting patriarchal constraints, bureaucratic academic cultures, and rampant casteism place boundaries on youth aspirations. Finally, I argue that the relational resources among youth on campus form a collective resource that provides them with a navigational capacity to overcome bounded aspirations.