Global Godot

Imagine that Gandhi was transported back to India in the 21st century. What would he think? He lands at Indira Gandhi International Airport in Delhi. One can imagine his surprise at the vast glass and concrete construction rising from misty tarmac. Consider his journey northwest onto the Gangetic plains. Striding along the road with stick in hand and his shawl flapping around his shoulders, the bespectacled Mahatma would doubtless shake his head in disbelief. Signs for mobile phones, flight attendant training colleges, and Java software instruction line the road. Yet confusion might recede as Gandhi entered the ancient city of Meerut, where India’s economic boom is less evident. If he walked into Meerut College, where he held a protest rally in the early 1920s, he would surely feel at home. The college is largely unchanged from the early 20th century. No computers to bewilder the Mahatma: as late as 2007 there were only six PCs for the college’s 16,000 students. And if Gandhi happened to walk to nearby villages he would encounter some of the same types of poverty, corruption, and casteism that characterized the social environment nearly a century ago.

Timepass examines these contradictions of Indian modernity. One the one hand, India has become a place of enormous and rapid economic growth. It is only ten years since sage commentators were referring to India as a sleeping tiger. It is now poised to become one of the largest and most successful economies in the world. The country has remained a successful democracy – the world’s largest. But the Indian state has failed to generate inclusive economic growth, and corruption, casteism and religious communalism remain pressing social issues.

Timepass examines these disparities and tensions with reference to a north Indian lower middle class belonging to the Jat caste. It builds on ethnographic fieldwork I conducted in rural western Uttar Pradesh (UP) in 1996–1997 and Meerut City in 2004–2005.

The main story of the book bears repetition. A prosperous, confident and influential lower middle class of Jat farmers emerged in northwestern UP in the first four decades after Indian Independence, partly as a result of improvements in agricultural production. During the 1990s they faced new threats to their power associated with the rise of lower castes. They addressed these threats by trying to influence the operations of local government and by investing in their children’s education – strategies which farmers imagined as forms of ‘waiting’. Only a few of the sons of these rich farmers were able to obtain the salaried jobs that they had been groomed to expect and many had come to imagine themselves as people who had no option but to ‘wait’. I investigate cultures of limbo among educated unemployed young men. Unemployed young men were advertising their aimlessness through a self-conscious strategy of hanging out or ‘doing timepass’– a masculine youth culture that challenged the dominant temporal logics of their parents and the state. Cultures of masculine waiting were also precipitating collective youth protest in Meerut, especially around issues of corruption, students’ progression through academic institutions, educational mismanagement, and government officials’ harassment of students. In Meerut young men from a wide variety of social backgrounds sometimes came together to orchestrate agitations against the state and university. Ultimately, however, class and caste inequalities fractured collective protest around unemployment and corruption. In particular, among unemployed students a set of Jat ‘leaders’, who also called themselves ‘fixers’ (kām karānewale), used their social contacts to monopolize local networks of ‘corruption’ – practices that undermined young people’s collective action.

The five generous and insightful commentaries on Timepass have helped me understand the contribution of the book to wider debates. Timepass informs anthropology, human geography and related disciplines in three key ways. First, it illustrates the value of a globally comparative approach that examines the practices of Jats in UP with respect to those of lower middle classes and youth in other parts of India and the world, as Horschelmann, for example, points out in her commentary. Many authors have proposed the emergence of a global middle class eagerly seeking to migrate and emulate western consumption patterns, and thus somewhat delinked from their nation and region. By contrast, I identify a defiantly ‘local’ lower middle class in India. The power of Jats in northwestern UP is firmly rooted in control over local networks and cultural capital, even while the local is itself being stretched imaginatively and practically through Jat spatial practices.

Second, my analysis of the strategies of rich farmers and students exposes shortcomings in postcolonial-inspired accounts of subaltern politics – such as those offered by Partha Chatterjee, Arjun Appadurai and Akhil Gupta – that pit the bourgeoisie against a subaltern mass. I argue instead for a more careful social geographic approach that examines different fractions of India’s heterogeneous middle class. I also discuss how some sections of the Indian population can engage in both ‘dominant’ and ‘subaltern’ practices at the same time.

A third contribution of the book to broader debates within geography, anthropology and related disciplines lies in its focus on waiting. We all wait. Waiting has always been a characteristic feature of human life. But what of long-term waiting? I show that young male limbo in Meerut in 2004 and 2005 led to novel types of cultural and political behaviour. While waiting around the college and city, young men were able to create new forms of sociality that cross-cut caste, class and religion. Waiting therefore serves as a window on the boredom, apathy and temporal suffering of subordinated populations while also showing how this suffering can offer a basis for new forms of culture and politics.

The reviewers on the book draw attention to other possible contributions that the book might have made to wider scholarship, and there are some issues they raise that I cannot address. The book is not about the sexuality and personal mores of young men. I cannot meaningfully comment on the cultures of heteronormativity that doubtless underpin much of the male ‘timepass’ on college campuses in India. Caroline and Filippo Osella have written on this broad topic. Nor am I able to provide the type of detailed ethnographic description of spaces of timepass that Jones and Conlon identify as a crucial topic. A different type of ethnography would have examined in greater depth the everyday experience of youth life, but my aim was to move fairly swiftly from the cultural to the political, drawing out the forms of mobilization that emerge from youth limbo.

But there are several questions raised by the reviewers that I would like to examine, in part because of their pressing relevance. Tania Li raises the important issue of why young men continue to hold out hope that their situation will change. Hope seems to continue even in the face of crushing and repeated disappointments. One of the main reasons for the tenacity of young men’s hopes was that there was a set of private educational entrepreneurs in Meerut who encouraged youth to believe that there is some perfect package of qualifications that would (eventually) deliver a good job. Young people’s parents also encouraged their offspring to hope. When they eventually reconciled themselves to being unable to acquire secure employment, many young men became complicit in the local cultural production of hope. They ran small private tutorial institutes in which they prepare younger youth for government interviews or exams.

These observations bear on the important question raised by Gareth Jones: why are young men in north India not involved in more violent, organized, insurrectionary activity of the type that Jones has observed in Mexico? This question becomes still more pressing in the context of the set of protests, many of them youth-led, that arose in 2011 across the middle East and North Africa and popularly known in the West as the ‘Arab Spring’. I would make three points here. First, young men in Meerut often interpreted their inability to obtain valued educational credentials and secure work as a personal failure rather than the result of structural inequalities. This was changing. A set of political animators were active on campus trying to persuade people their personal ‘problems’ could be linked to broader social ‘issues’. But in 2004 and 2005 it was often feelings of personal demoralization and self-critique that dominated over a shared sense of hostility towards the ‘the system’.

Second, young men said that they did not want to participate in open student demonstrations because of the reputational damage it would cause. They would become labelled as ‘troublemakers’ by the university and employers, and their marriage prospects might also be dented, as prospective in-laws became aware of their activity. When I asked about violence, many students asked rhetorically ‘Why would I take the risk?’

Third, young men’s relative political quietude in north India related to a belief in the value and authority of the state. Young people had a dual consciousness of the state: as a craven and corrupt set of institutions, on the one hand, and as a type of ideal realm of unquestionable authority, on the other. The latter sense of the state as a sphere of legitimate authority militated against violent protest. This point is also important because it provides an answer to Arild Ruud’s question about the relationship of the book to Lucia Michelutti’s (2008) work on the ‘vernacularisation’ of Indian democracy. Young men’s politics in Meerut was not straightforwardly ‘democratic’ in the western sense. Many young men combined protests with efforts to make money through corrupt means. But young men also believed in non-vernacular democratic ideals, which they had learnt from school textbooks when growing up in western UP. Indeed, many young men had become highly adept at using the law and local legal channels to push forward their goals, and more recently they have used India’s Right to Information Act, which came onto the books in 2007.

To make these points is not to discount the possibility that young men may in the future rise up en masse in places like Uttar Pradesh, for example on the issue of unemployment or educational privatization. The ever-widening gap between the glitz of Delhi and the realities of provincial life make such action increasingly likely. Anti-corruption protests in India in 2011, led by the north Indian social activist ‘Anna’ Hazare, enrolled many educated unemployed youth and have had some effect on the state at the national level. Moreover, Maoist (Naxalite) rebellions enrolling youth have become intense in recent years. It is therefore important to avoid the Bourdieuan argument that unemployed youth are somehow too whimsical and detached to be an effective force for change. (Marx and Engels were equally disparaging, viewing unemployed youth as ‘alchemists of the revolution, a term they used ironically.) But the point remains that young men in Meerut are not acting as a generational force in the manner, say, of youth in Tunisia in December 2010. The bewildering combination of rapid economic growth cheek by jowl with growing marginalization has not yet generated widespread political protest in India.

Since hope is a theme of this reply, let me end by identifying some of my own. There is a pressing need for senior academics and research bodies to support ethnographic work of the type performed in Timepass, as Deirdre Conlon points out in her commentary. I hope the book points to some of the intellectual and potentially policy-relevant fruits of such investment. I also hope that early- and mid-career academics conducting first-hand qualitative research in geography can speak more to each other. Geography is at heart a comparative discipline – the urge to ask ‘how might this be different elsewhere?’ is hard-wired into our disciplinary psyche, as, for example, Gareth Jones’s commentary shows. But this comparative commitment is poorly theorized (notwithstanding the excellent recent work of Gillian Hart and Colin McFarlane) and often impossible to act upon because of other pressures. Perhaps here is one contribution that Dialogues in Human Geography is making to the wider discipline. But we also need to devote more time to cross-learning across continents on crucial economic, social and political topics.