Abstract
Timepass is a remarkable ethnographic account of an understudied population that falls in the amorphous middle of many classificatory schemes: young men from a middle class and middling caste, of middle peasant background, straddled between the countryside and a small provincial city in northern India. They are young adults with significant autonomy in their daily lives, but scarce resources. They are educated in the sense of bearing numerous higher level qualifications, but these are issued by colleges of dubious quality, leaving them straddling on that scheme too. Simply by drawing our attention to this social group, their daily lives, reflections and predicaments, the book already makes a significant contribution to the science and art of human geography. Here I want to draw out three themes that I found especially compelling. These are the elements that I would pick up when recommending the book to a student or colleague.
First, the book speaks powerfully to the hard work that goes into the social reproduction of class. This is a matter too often overlooked in accounts that describe, for example, how a ‘village elite’ dominates or exploits the poor, but fail to specify how the elite gets to be an elite, or how they are able to reproduce that status in the face of countervailing forces and rapid change. Timepass examines in some detail how Jat farmers, who prospered with the introduction of green revolution technologies, faced threats from new economic, political and legal configurations in their district. In order to hold onto their economic class position, as owners of land and capital, they had to counter these threats through non-economic strategies in various arenas: bullying and intimidation of poor Jats and Dalits; cultivating links with politicians and bureaucrats who could supply agrarian resources such as market quotas; and buying off the police who helped to protect their various schemes. For Jat landowners in the 1990s, educating sons was part of the strategy to reproduce their economic class position in the countryside, a move that necessitated good links in town. It was simultaneously a means to consolidate elite social status in a transformed countryside, which required a suburban-style house, educated offspring, and constant to and fro with the city.
Timepass specifies the distinct social groups and class fractions operating in this district, each with a set of assets and limitations that has shifted significantly over the past few decades. The result is to provide an account of social reproduction that is animated by human agency, but does not reduce this agency to the strategizing of individuals. Instead, we learn how the social situation of the different subjects of the book shaped their actions in patterned ways, to produce outcomes that are systemic, but can only be sustained with constant work.
The second element that is especially compelling is the treatment of the moral ambiguity of subaltern agency. Too many accounts of subaltern subjects are ethnographically thin, painting them in monochrome terms as victims, villains, or heroes. One reason for the monochrome treatment is that researchers often enter the field with an affiliation in place, or find themselves captured by one party and unable to gain much exposure to the perspectives and practices of their opponents. Sometimes the lines are ideological – subalterns are good, elites are bad, etc. Tackling moral ambiguity head on, Timepass provides an unflinching, resolutely unromantic account of the solidarities, betrayals, justifications, critiques, and reflections that emerge among young people acting to secure a foothold on treacherous terrain. We are introduced to student leaders who lie, cheat and extort to enrich themselves, and others who attempt to protect fellow students from unfairness and exploitation. Further, we can appreciate how each is responding to the possibilities and limitations of their milieu.
Finally, and most globally, Timepass offers a window on a section of the surplus population that is produced when labour leaves agriculture, but is not absorbed into productive work in another sector. Elsewhere, I have examined this question with a focus on dispossession: how people are ejected from the countryside when they lose access to land, or their labour is displaced by new technologies. They exit agriculture on highly disadvantageous terms. Timepass highlights the experience of young people whose exit from their rural homes is voluntary, as they aspire to non-manual work in urban locations, and are supported by families that can afford to finance education and living expenses, at least for a period. Yet their hopes are dashed by the very limited number of suitable jobs that are available in their small city, and their lack of access to jobs in major urban centers, where they cannot compete with other young people whose education, cultural capital, social networks, and financial backing greatly exceed their own. The numbers are staggering: a quarter of a million young people stuck in higher-education limbo in Meerut alone (p. 106), tens of millions in other small cities across India, and hundreds of millions across the global south, similarly frustrated.
Way out of touch with these numbers, and these realities, the Word Bank’s 2008 World Development Report argued that the problem of rural poverty in India could be alleviated if only young people had better education and more information about urban jobs. What we learn from Timepass is that these young people are alert to every possible educational credential and economic niche, develop networking and information management into a fine art, and work every angle with persistence and finesse. But the jobs really are not there for them, and there is no sign that they are coming, at least not in relevant numbers. Timepass explores how these young men experience the period of extended waiting, and their extremely limited options: retreat to watch over the labourers who work their families’ land in the countryside, or create a marginal niche in the urban informal sector, both of which save face but do not accomplish the task of social reproduction. Indeed, they mask de facto downward mobility, since they do not provide the basis for replicating the economic class position, or social status, of the previous generation.
Timepass avoids apocalyptic prognoses about the effect that the growing presence of educated, unemployed young men in India’s small and large cities will have on urban and national politics. What it offers, rather, is a carefully researched and skilfully analysed account of the world inhabited by these young people, who have been robbed of optimism about their future, yet are actively shaping the future in ways we need to understand. The author achieves an admirable balance between telling their story in intimate terms, and situating their practice of hanging out at street corners in a global conjuncture at which large numbers of people who aspire to be modern, productive citizens are permanently excluded from employment and a stable adult life.
There is one question that the ethnographic data presented in Timepass does not fully resolve, and about which I would like to learn more. Why do the young men continue to refer to their condition as waiting, and thereby insist on a linear timeline in which – sooner or later – a positive change will occur? Rather like the linear narrative of development, in which the direction of movement is always forward, the young men do not expect that the result of waiting will be stasis, or a move in reverse. But how do these men hold onto the narrative of patient, hopeful waiting, in the face of such overwhelming odds? At what point does ‘not yet’ become ‘not ever’? I ask this because I have come across a similar phenomenon in a very different context, one in which farmers who have lost most of their land pin their hopes on a tiny, residual patch of barren ground. This land cannot provide them with a livelihood, and their chance of accessing new land is extremely slim. Yet they are reluctant to name their new class position – that of landless workers or worse, landless people without work. I look at the sea of earnest faces in my undergraduate classes in Toronto with a parallel concern: that very few will have access to the stable career paths their parents enjoyed, and far too many will find that their labour is surplus to requirements. Yet each of them has absorbed the neoliberal ethos that holds them responsible, as individuals, for taking initiatives, making choices, working on their CVs, keeping up their grades, and attempting to gain a competitive edge. A lot rides on whether the end of hope will be marked by the despair of isolated individuals, or a broad recognition of the structural predicament of this generation, and an appropriately collective response.