Abstract
I want to begin my appraisal of Craig Jeffrey’s insightful account of timepass cultures and politics among students in rural India by fully endorsing his final conclusion, which calls for more long-term, in-depth ethnographic research without which observations of social change often remain superficial, unconvincing and unable to unearth the crucial role of diverse social actors and their intersecting practices and discourses. Jeffrey’s immersion in the politics of rural change and education in northwestern Uttar Pradesh has resulted in perceptive analysis that strikes the difficult balance of commitment to the issues that matter most to research participants, reflection on diverse positions, practices and interests, and critical evaluation of the fragmented nature of subaltern politics. While engaging with, and further developing, broader sociological and postcolonial theory, Jeffrey’s analysis is led by his ethnographic observations, and it is because of this that he is able to make significant contributions to a number of conceptual debates that need more rather than less squaring with empirical findings. I wish to highlight just three broader areas of discussion to which Craig Jeffrey’s research contributes.
The first of these is the issue of cultural globalization. Counter to the dominant focus on ‘globalizing’ middle classes, Jeffrey highlights the significance of investing in local social and cultural capital by rich Jat farmers and Jat students in northwestern Uttar Pradesh, and the politics arising from these investments. His findings not only challenge how social mobility in postcolonial societies is understood, but also how ‘global youth’ are conceptualized. Economic expansion has led to uneven and partial immersions of young people in global economies and cultures. Although ‘metropolitan’ attributes and urban social connections carry some weight in the diverse practices of distinction and investment by students who wait for delayed, and increasingly unlikely, futures, it is their ‘playing’ of local fields of power that emerges as the most significant strategy in Jeffrey’s account. Analysing these locally focused investments and practices allows fewer conclusions to be drawn about ‘global’ youth, but is indispensible for developing policies that respond to empirical realities.
A second, related, issue concerns the nature of youth politics observed here. Jeffrey carefully distinguishes different types of political engagement and ‘entrepreneurship’, and as a result adds critical insight not just to debates on subaltern politics, highlighting persistent fragmentations along lines of class, caste and gender, but also to our understanding of ‘youth politics’. At a time when young people are either regaled for being politically disengaged or summoned to ‘participate’ actively in politics to further the interests of children and youth as if such participation in itself was a guaranteed social good and as if young people’s interests were universal, Jeffrey’s analysis adds much-needed critical reflection on the class fragmentation and gendered construction of student politics. Highlighting both possibilities for cross-caste relations, e.g. in the politics of social reformers, and the self-interested, corrupt practices of political ‘fixers’ who straddle the divides between representing student interests and gaining from illegal processes and grey-areas in university governance, Jeffrey offers a sensitive observation of micro-political relations without which any analysis of ‘youth’ politics risks reinforcing rather than challenging problematic power-relations. It is much to his credit that the gendering of these relations is reflected upon in depth at numerous points throughout the book, even though the author could not interview young women to the same extent as the male students.
The third issue I wish to highlight relates to the ways in which ‘youth transitions’ are frequently theorized. As an alternative to the many ethnocentric and universalist texts on this issue that make it onto undergraduate reading lists, I would thoroughly recommend Timepass for the ways in which it squares uncritical celebrations of hypermobility, flexibility and individualization on the one hand, and assumptions about structured transitions from youth to adulthood on the other hand, with his account of waiting, delayed futures and unfulfilled promises as central experiences of (youth) transition in postcolonial India. While, consistent with his ethnographic approach, Jeffrey does not generalize beyond his specific field location and draws primarily on research from other postcolonial contexts to develop further the conceptual implications of his observations on the cultures and politics of waiting, there are questions arising from his work that have important resonances with research on youth transitions in other contexts. In my own research in eastern Germany, waiting and the frustrations arising from delayed transitions and unachievable aspirations were similarly dominant experiences for those young people who could not take advantage of possibilities for spatial mobility. What I found inspiring and saddening in equal measure in Jeffrey’s account were the creative cultural practices and often ironic discourses developed by students to make waiting purposeful, perform paradoxical identities around the experience of being in limbo, and/or critique politically the causes and consequences of waiting. Jeffrey shows both progressive, democratic possibilities for protest action arising from this, and less savoury corrupt and caste-based politics arising from this. These political responses are one reason why ‘waiting’ as an experience of youth transitions needs further attention in research.
Further questions raised by the book for me concern the methodological restrictions on, and possibilities for, allowing young women’s voices to be heard more directly, and the degree to which students envisage alternative state and development policies that could lead to positive long-term change. These questions are already touched upon in the book, but could form the basis for fruitful further discussion in my view.