Youth, Class, and Economic Aspirations in Urban India
Summary
Urban India’s young population is navigating a rapidly changing socioeconomic landscape marked by expanding educational opportunities, rising consumer culture and persistent inequalities. Class origins continue to shape access to schooling, languages of prestige and networks that facilitate urban employment. At the same time, aspirations for secure white-collar jobs, entrepreneurial ventures and middle-class lifestyles are fuelled by media, family expectations and global imaginaries. Young men and women deploy educational credentials, linguistic proficiency and digital skills as forms of cultural capital, while negotiating caste and gender norms that constrain mobility. In this context, novel forms of work—ranging from private‐tuition entrepreneurship to service-industry positions—offer both possibility and precarity. Ethnographic studies reveal how youth strategically engage with neoliberal discourses of self-enterprise, mould their bodies and social behaviours to fit urban workplaces, and carve out new socialities that redefine productivity and respect. These dynamics carry broader implications for urban governance, labour markets and social cohesion in other rapidly urbanising settings.
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Technical terms
Cultural capital: Accumulated skills, education and prestige that confer social mobility within class hierarchies.
Neoliberal subjectivity: The shaping of individual identities around self-enterprise, competition and market-oriented goals.
Body plasticity: The adaptive modification of one’s physical appearance and comportment to meet workplace or social expectations.
References
- ‘Below English Line’: An ethnographic exploration of class and the English language in post-liberalization India. Modern Asian Studies (2018).
- Between unemployment and enterprise in neoliberal India: Educated youth creating work in the private education sector. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers (2020).
- Plastic Bodies: Women Workers and Emerging Body Rules in Service Work in Urban India. Gender & Society (2022).
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