Politics, pleasure, and difference in the intimate city: Himalayan students remake the future

Abstract

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.