Panel Organizers:
Dr. Kathinka Sinha-Kerkhoff - Director Research Asian Development Research Institute (ADRI),Ranchi Jharkhand India
Dr. Ellen Bal - Asst. Prof. Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VU), Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Faculty of Social Sciences, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Abstract

   
Young people in South Asia are relatively more excluded from the benefits of the (welfare or developmental) state than similar groups in the North. Yet, higher levels of national economic growth since the last fifteen years have not bypassed all young people in South Asia, and some have indeed benefited and now possess more social, economic and cultural capital than previous generations. However, though differences between the ‘haves' and ‘have-nots' in various South Asian nation-states have always existed, the composition and character of the ‘have-nots' have changed and numbers have increased during the last decade- and-a-half. While globalizing market forces have thus empowered some young people, provided them with new goods, educational facilities, jobs (in South Asia and beyond) and also with new identities, status, rights and securities, others have been excluded or even become victims of the same processes. These ‘have-nots' are not necessarily economically deprived but also socio-culturally or politically, and at times all at the same time.

Thus whereas youth in South Asia is divided by gender, ethnicity, caste, religion, language, age, and so forth, we propose an alternative analytical categorisation, and divide the South Asian youth primarily in ‘haves' and ‘have-nots'. In everyday life, these two categories have their own coping strategies and means to strive for human security, yet they are not separated from each other but meet, form alliances, compete, fight and make friendships among and with each other. We not only wonder how such interactions take place, but we also want to know about their results. Do such interactions result in group- formations based on ethnicity, religion, caste, class, gender or age? When do such alliances engender violence (and bring about human insecurity for themselves or others) and when do they generate peace? There is very little empirical knowledge and analysis on these ‘haves' and ‘have-nots' in South Asia and how they relate to each other. We want to redress such a dearth by inviting papers that bring together these relatively young people and analyze their interactions and the outcomes of such interactions in the following every-day ‘settings':

• The educational field
• The employment field
• Social-cultural, political, and religious organizations and movements
• Other ‘public' fields such as ‘the street' and ‘private' fields such as ‘at home'

Jamie Cross, University of Sussex, Department of Anthropology, Brighton, United Kingdom
Education, Social Transformation and Export Manufacturing
 
Being educated is a defining feature of what it means to be modern in South Asia, and is central to the social transformations taking place across urban India. This paper explores how differential experiences of education play out in the course of everyday relations between managers and workers at a new, export manufacturing industry.
On the edge of a large coastal city in Andhra Pradesh, inside one of South India's Special Economic Zones, a European multinational employs a young workforce to cut and polish rough diamonds for export. For the factory's urbane, middle class and university educated managers, differences in education are part of what distinguishes them from the majority workforce. Senior Indian managers and their young trainees use education as an idiom through which to comment on the maturity, knowledge, and analytical capacity of production workers and to re-affirm their own identity as cosmopolitans.
For young male and female production workers who live on the social and economic periphery of this city, secondary education has been an important source of cultural capital and an entry point into the urban labour market. Yet in the context of high unemployment and ever rising benchmarks of what constitutes a ‘good education', their experiences are profoundly ambivalent. On the factory floor, many production workers reassess what it means to be educated and come to look upon their own education as an explanation for their low salaries.
 
 
Peggy Froerer, Brunel University, Department of Anthropology, School of Social Sciences and Law, Uxbridge, Middlesex, United Kingdom
Alliances and Alienation: Residential Proximity in the Formation of Friendship Amongst Youths in an Adivasi Community, Central India
 
In the mixed, Hindu/Christian adivasi village of Mohanpur, central India, residential proximity serves as one of the most important features that underlies the formation of friendship and the creation of alliances amongst youths, cutting across religious, kinship and ethnic divisions. Mohanpur has roughly 900 inhabitants and is comprised of seven bastis or localities. Some of these have been formed along caste or ethno-religious lines; others are more ethnically mixed. Young people who live in the same basti are more likely to form friendships and create lasting alliances with each other than with youths from other bastis, including those with whom they perhaps share more enduring, ‘primordial' ties, such as ethno-religious or kinship affiliation. Apart from gender which, with age, becomes of increasing importance in peer relations, proximity generally supersedes other distinctions such as shared school experience, age and class, along with caste, kinship and ethno-religious identity, to become the primary feature that renders possible the formation of friendship. Indeed, such friendships are often formed in opposition to those who live in other bastis, regardless of the features that young people from different bastis may have in common each other, and youths will regularly defend or justify their alliances based on proximal allegiance.
 
Why is proximity the pivotal factor around which friendships and alliances between young people are formed and sustained? What prevents young people - who otherwise share many social features - from forming friendships and creating alliances? What can this tell us about the nature of social relations, both in this ethnically mixed community and beyond? This paper will address these questions through an examination of young people's everyday interactions and the processes by which friendships are formed in this adivasi village. Of particular interest will be the way in which residential proximity can supersede caste and ethno-religious distinctions in engendering lasting social alliances.
 
Gabriele Alex, South Asia Institute, Heidelberg, Germany
In School we are the Same, but in the Street...
 
Public institutions like school or university stress principles of equality and unity  Youngsters in school mix with children from other class and caste backgrounds, but what happens after school? . In school any expression of "Untouchability" is punished by disciplinary measures. But within the family context, parents control the company of the youngsters and the lived equality of the school does nor easily enter the personal sphere.
Youngsters for example might sit and play together in school, they might hang out together at the tea stall or go together to the movies, but when it comes to visiting the house, caste rules often still play a role. These interclass and intercaste friendships however can be very strong, often they later find their expression in invitations to weddings or other life cycle rituals. Sometimes they even lead to very close personal relations, be they love affairs or long-lasting friendships. If these relations are not framed by kinship they however need a platform to be performed.
How are these relations from the public transformed in the private sphere? How are the values and rules that are learned at school practiced within the village context? And what sort of networks and relationships  are constituted over school and neighbourhood? But also, how do these relations lead to new self esteem or self evaluation of youngsters?
Looking at youths and children in rural Tamil Nadu this paper examines the interaction between children from different community backgrounds in the public and the private field and investigates the childrens' and youths' own feelings about these encounters. It further explores how ethnic and caste identity are valued aginst ur (village) identity in contexts such as work and educational contexts. And it finally asks to what extend school has the potential to transform traditional  village hierarchies and group-dynamics.
 
Michiel Baas, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam School for Social science Research, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
The Boom To Get Away From: Indian Overseas Students in Australia
 
India is currently the second-largest provider of international students to Australia, with more than twenty-five thousand Indians currently studying ‘Down Under'. This makes Australia the second-largest destination for Indian overseas students after the United States. Although Australia promotes itself as a green and safe country with a high standard of education, Indian students are far more attracted by something else Australia has to offer, namely permanent residency. If a student meets the right requirements after graduation he or she will be eligible for such a permanent residency. As Indian students often take out high student loans to finance their studies, the option of actually returning to India is often not a realistic one as paying such a loan back with on an Indian salary would be very hard.
 
This paper will deal with the reasons young Indians have for wanting to study, and in this case migrate, abroad. It will focus on how they themselves describe what they have left behind, how they see their futures, and why for instance they don't see that future in India for themselves (although the Indian economy is growing and most international companies seem keen to set up business their). It will also focus on those who do in the end return to India (either because they failed in staying abroad or because they wanted to) and those who manage to stay in Australia. The paper will, in the end, explore the more general question of success and failure and how these are perceived in light of the booming Indian economy and stories of successful transnational Indians.
 
Manuela Ciotti, University of Edinburgh, Centre for South Asian Studies, Edinburgh, UK
Remaking Traditional Sociality, Ephemeral Friendships and Enduring Political Alliances: Dalit Male Youth in Rural Northern Indian Society
 
This paper explores histories of social separation, impermanent encounters and lasting political alliances between Dalit male youth and members of other caste communities in a village in eastern Uttar Pradesh. Dalit young persons' entry into educational institutions followed by their political mobilisation and, for some, the transition into employment has led them to appropriate spaces and gain visibility often beyond the purview of the older generations. Against the backdrop of the Dalits' past roles as agricultural labourers, unheard political subjects and actors of religious marginality, not only have new meanings and expectations accrued around the ‘young persona' but new forms of masculinity, sociality, marginality, rebellion, class formation-especially through marriage-and different life-trajectories have come into being. The reconfiguration of the ‘modern young (Dalit) person' by education, the delimitation of a specific young person's life-stage and the creation of new careers need to be inscribed against the backdrop of interactional networks in rural and urban societies. It is argued that the new young persons ‘reorder' traditional relationships where (upper) caste membership has often been invested with an excess of salience over age, class and gender. Intercaste friendships between Dalits and others are forged but these appear to be ephemeral and often short-lived, as a result of entrenched social divisions especially after schooling and higher education degrees are completed. Moreover, Dalit youth life in schools and institutions is still marked by the accentuation of social membership and accompanying discrimination. By contrast, village and supra-local politics constitutes a space in which caste-driven interest and power produce more durable social links between Dalit youth and members of other communities.
 
Nicholas Nisbett, University of Sussex, Department of Anthropology, Falmer, United Kingdom
Hierarchy and Friendship in the Indian IT Sector : Alliances and Divisions Amongst Bangalore's Middle Class ‘Knowledge' Workers.
 
Amongst the haves and have-nots of post-liberalisation India, Bangalore's English-educated, middle class youths are considered a relatively privileged elite.  Family and individual accumulation of cultural capital have enabled access into Bangalore's new IT and Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) industries and the rewards of well paid, high status jobs. Individual trajectories within these sectors, however, are never as simple as the image would suggest and there are as many hierarchical distinctions within and between these industries as there are outside.  This paper focuses on the trajectories of a group of young male friends finding their own way through Bangalore's IT and outsourcing industries.  It examines the ways in which shifting friendship alliances amongst young men are central in building the cultural and social reserves one needs to find employment but which also reflect the hierarchies of skills, capital and labour identities which are beginning to shape social relations within this sector.  Friendships which were once helpful in exchanging information and knowledge regarding IT and IT employment opportunities are threatened once hierarchies of labour and consumption are established between friends.  Egalitarian friendship groups based on sharing and ‘treating' begin to fracture as individuals take up different positions within the IT hierarchy.
 
The new IT-based industries pride themselves in bringing together workers from a range of social and regional backgrounds and in challenging discrimination in the workplace.  Open discrimination based upon one's caste or religion, for example, has become unacceptable.  Increasingly, however, workers are reporting divisions and alliances between and amongst different regional identities .  As the IT sectors in Bangalore continuously widen their search for human capital and attract more middle class migrants, we can expect tensions within and between Bangalore's ‘haves' and ‘have-nots' to be expressed with increasing intensity.