Timepass: Youth, Class, and the Politics of Waiting in India

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India Waiting

In 2004 I spent time with a student named Jaipal in Meerut College, Uttar Pradesh (UP). Jaipal was in his late twenties at that time and came from a lower middle class, rural background. He had failed to obtain a salaried job; Jaipal described himself as unemployed, someone just waiting. Politics was Jaipal’s métier. He was often at the forefront of collective student demonstrations against the Meerut College bureaucracy. A typical morning might find him leading protests against the corruption of university officials or lambasting a government official for neglecting student issues. Curiously, however, Jaipal often spent his evenings at the homes of university administrators and government bureaucrats colluding over how to make money from illegal admissions. It was an open secret in Meerut that many student leaders (netās) protested alongside other students against corruption while also making money from their political influence.

How common is it for young men in Meerut to imagine themselves as just waiting? Why and how do young men like Jaipal engage in such contradictory forms of politics? And what might answers to these questions tell us about class, politics and waiting? This book addresses these questions with reference to field research conducted in the North-Western part of Uttar Pradesh (UP) State. I focus on educated unemployed young men and rich farmers from a threatened middle class in order to engage with three main areas of scholarly inquiry. First, I contribute to emerging debates on post-colonial middle classes. Second, I examine the micro-politics of class and caste dominance in UP. Third, I reflect on how different forms of waiting are implicated in processes of social change.

I consider issues of class, politics and waiting through telling the story of a lower middle class of Jats in Meerut district, especially students from this caste studying in Meerut. A prosperous, socially confident and politically influential set of rich Jat farmers emerged in North-Western 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 (see Chapter Two of this book). Yet only a few of the sons of these rich farmers were able to obtain the salaried jobs that they had been led to expect and many had come to imagine themselves as people who had no option but to wait. I examine cultures of limbo among educated unemployed young men. Unemployed young men were advertising their aimlessness through a self-conscious strategy of hanging out—a masculine youth culture that challenged the dominant temporal logics of their parents and the state (Chapter Three). This culture of masculine waiting was 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 (Chapter Four). Yet 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 (Chapter Five). Through documenting these different forms of youth cultural and political action, alongside an analysis of the strategies of rich farmers in rural areas, the book highlights the micro-politics of class power in north India and the importance of waiting as a basis for mobilization.

This chapter locates my study with reference to broader literatures on time, middle-class unemployed youth and everyday politics in India. In the next section, I introduce recent literature on waiting and the Indian middle classes. I then focus on the experiences of educated unemployed young men within the lower middle classes, especially their temporal anxieties and political responses to waiting. This is followed by a consideration of how the politics of lower middle-class young men in India might be theorized. Finally, I outline my research strategy and the structure and argument of the book.

Waiting and Middle India

We all wait. Waiting has always been a characteristic feature of human life. Waiting for rain, harvests, birth and death are important components of the social organization of non-industrialized societies. Waiting is also a key dimension of modernity; during the twentieth century the increasing regimentation and bureaucratization of time in the West created multiple settings—such as traffic jams, offices and clinics—in which people waited (see Corbridge 2004; Moran 2004; Bissell 2007). But what of long-term waiting? What of situations in which people have been compelled to wait for years, generations or whole lifetimes, not as the result of their voluntary movement through modern spaces but because they are durably unable to realize their goals?

There is a growing literature based in different parts of the world on forms of waiting wherein people have been incited by powerful institutions to believe in particular visions of the future yet lack the means to realize their aspirations. Of course, there is nothing new about such chronic, fruitless waiting, which characterized the experiences of colonized populations (Chakrabarty 2000) and the lives of Europe’s large population flottante in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Darnton 1999), for example. From a rather different perspective, Siegfried Kracauer (1995 [1963]) argued that many professionals in urban Germany in the 1920s had a profound sense of just waiting. Kracauer described upper middle classes horror vacui (fear of empty time and space) in the context of a decline in religious faith.

Yet in a recent book, Jean-Francois Bayart (2007) has argued that long-term experiences of waiting became a more prominent feature of the experiences of populations, especially subaltern people, across the world after the 1960s (see also Bourdieu 2000). Bayart cites as evidence: an increase in the numbers of international migrants occupying detention centers on the edge of industrial states; the rising prison population in the US and parts of Europe; and people forced to move between countries in the global south in the aftermath of war or economic collapse. Bayart also suggests that there are whole nations, such as Zimbabwe in 2008, effectively waiting for a future and great swathes of the world’s population, for example in Sub-Saharan Africa and north India, who have written into their minds certain hopes but for whom social goods are elusive and, who, as a result, define themselves as people in wait (see Ferguson 2006). Much recent scholarship supports the tenor of Bayart’s argument. Ethnographic research on asylum seekers (Conlon 2007), refugees (Wong 1991; Stepputat 1992), urban slum dwellers (Appadurai 2002), the unemployed (Mains 2007) and rural poor (Corbridge et al. 2005), for example, is full of references to people waiting and their associated feelings of boredom and lost time. Moreover, these waiting populations are often subjected to discourses that stigmatize people as surplus to requirements or loitering (Mbembe 2004).

During my fieldwork I met large numbers of unemployed young men in north India who were engaged in forms of waiting characterized by aimlessness and ennui. Unemployed young men in Meerut commonly spoke of being lost in time and they imagined many of their activities as simply ways to pass the time (timepass, as it is often described in India). This waiting was not wholly purposeless, however: it offered opportunities to acquire skills, fashion new cultural styles and mobilize politically.

I also discuss another form of waiting in this book. Several scholars have referred to how situations of rapid change in the contemporary world may persuade people to readjust their temporal horizons. In particular, they may come to prioritize long-term over short-term goals: they choose to wait. For example, the anthropologist Arjun Appadurai (2002) has described how activist organizations in Mumbai improved the living conditions of the urban poor by deliberately adopting a long-term political horizon. These organizations encouraged their members to disregard the near-term development targets of foreign NGOs in favor of pursuing longer range goals. Such deliberate forms of investment have also been discussed in studies of household decision-making. In many situations, and perhaps especially during periods of rapid socio-economic change, people forego a desire for immediate consumption in favor of investing in the future of their families (Berry 1985). In the north Indian case I examine in this book, rich farmers made an explicit decision in the mid-1990s to prioritize their children’s education and they imagined this strategy as a form of investment that entailed waiting.

In elaborating on these two different forms of waiting—relatively purposeless youth timepass and more strategic investment on the part of rich farmers—my aim is not to construct a meta-narrative about the significance of waiting in India or across the world. I adopt instead an ethnographic approach that discusses the nature and social implications of waiting from the perspective of a struggling lower middle class, especially educated unemployed young men.

Middle classes of different types are highly visible social and political actors in many parts of the postcolonial world. Middle classes in Latin America, Africa and Asia often include struggling indigenous elites created through colonialism (e.g. Scheper-Hughes 1992), class fractions seeking to protect their access to state largesse in the face of the downsizing of the state (e.g. Harriss-White 2003) and entrepreneurs who have taken advantage of nation-building projects, economic restructuring and projects of international development to separate themselves from the poor (e.g. Berry 1985; Mawdsley 2004; Robison and Goodman 1996; Fernandes 2006). What tends to unite these disparate classes is a shared anxiety about the possibility of downward mobility and a determination to use their economic and social resources to shore up their position vis-à-vis the poor (e.g. Barr-Melej 2001; Cohen 2004).

India offers an example of how middle classes in postcolonial contexts are reshaping social and political life. The much vaunted emergence of Information Technology (IT) allied to the rapid economic growth rate in India since the early 1990s are often said to have raised increasing numbers of Indians into the middle class. There is considerable debate over the size of the Indian middle class; estimates vary from 50 million to 350 million (see Deshpande 2003; Nijman 2006), in large part because of disagreement over what combination of factors—lifestyle, income levels, consumption patterns and employment status, for example—should be used to delineate classes. For example, Deshpande (2003: 138) reports that if ownership of consumer goods is a key criterion for defining the Indian middle class, this segment of society was small in the mid-1990s: less than 8 percent of Indian households possessed a color television in 1995–96. If we examine the middle class as a social category actually used by people on the ground it may be even smaller than Deshpande suggests; Sheth (1999) argues that people tend to define themselves as middle class in India only when they possess a suite of consumer goods, education, a brick-built house and white-collar occupation. There is nevertheless a consensus that a reasonably substantial, moderately prosperous stratum now exists in India that does not herald from traditional elites but which exerts a profound influence over the politics, culture and social organization of the country (Fernandes 2006; Fernandes and Heller 2006; Varma 2006; see Milanovic 2005 for a dissenting view).

Fernandes and Heller (2006) identify three tiers within the Indian middle classes: first, senior professionals, higher bureaucrats and others with advanced professional credentials; second, a petit bourgeoisie that seeks to emulate the upper tier and which is comprised of rich farmers, merchants and small-business owners; and third, those with some educational capital who nevertheless occupy positions low-down within bureaucratic hierarchies. Fernandes and Heller stress that class and caste tend to overlap: middle classes tend to be from higher castes.

There is an important strand of research that has focused on the contemporary social and political practices of the highest tier in Fernandes and Heller’s schema: the upper middle classes usually residing in urban India, and especially in the metropolises of Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata and Chennai (e.g. Favero 2005; Harriss 2006; Nijman 2006; Fuller and Narasimhan 2007; Van Wessel 2007). This research suggests that upper middle classes benefited from the liberalization of the Indian economy from the early 1990s onwards. Rich urbanites were able to use their social connections and accumulated cultural capital, especially their mastery of English, to capture the most lucrative and secure positions that emerged in IT and allied industries in India or to expand their own businesses. Fuller and Narasimhan (2007), in a study of IT workers in Chennai, write of a mood of prevailing optimism and a sense among IT professionals of the multiple benefits wrought by the opening up of the Indian economy since the early 1990s (see also Favero 2005).

There is rather less research examining the second and third tiers of the middle classes in Fernandes and Heller’s categorization: the assortment of lower middle classes, including rich farmers, merchants, small-business owners, low-ranking bureaucrats and also sections of organized labor (see Harriss-White 2003; Gooptu 2007). The expansion of the Indian state bureaucracy, democratization of access to education and capital intensification within agriculture between 1947 and the late 1980s expanded the size and power of these middle-class fractions. For example, in many parts of the Indian countryside, a stratum of rich farmers emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, largely as a result of government subsidies for farming and technological changes in agriculture (e.g. Harriss 1982; Upadhya 1988; Rutten 1995; Gidwani 2008). Capitalist intensification and increased state expenditure on agriculture and business also heightened the importance of a wide range of merchants and entrepreneurs in India, who Harriss-White (2003), following Kalecki (1972), terms the intermediate classes (see also Chari 2004). The expansion of Indian state bureaucracies also swelled the ranks of the middle class, especially in urban areas (Fernandes 2000).

Economic reform threatened the accumulation strategies of many sections of this heterogeneous lower middle class, who typically came from middle-ranking castes. Between 1947 and the mid-1980s, India’s approach to macroeconomic planning combined a leading role for the private sector in economic decision-making with state intervention aimed at accelerating growth and redistributing social opportunities (Chandrashekhar and Ghosh 2002). In the face of a growing fiscal crisis, however, and under pressure from multilateral lenders, the Indian state began a program of economic liberalization in the mid-1980s which intensified in the early 1990s (see Corbridge and Harriss 2000). Economic reforms, while benefiting some sections of the lower middle classes (Chari 2004), often threatened middle classes’ access to state subsidies, reduced the supply of government jobs and undermined state services, such as educational and health facilities. By the late 1990s a gulf was emerging between an upper middle class in metropolitan India, the apparent beneficiaries of liberalization, and the lower middle classes, who typically found their jobs, educational strategies and access to state goods under threat. The rise of lower castes within formal politics in many parts of India and the related emergence of a small Dalit (ex-untouchable) and lower caste elite in the 1980s and 1990s unsettled middle classes still further (Jaffrelot 2003).

Leela Fernandes (2004, 2006) has shown how these economic and political threats to lower middle classes in India coincided with the circulation of new images of rapid social mobility. In particular, the onset of liberalization was accompanied by intense efforts on the part of sections of the state, business interests and media organizations to promote images of new middle-class success. Depictions of prosperous urban Indians occupying expensive suburban homes equipped with all modern conveniences became prominent at almost the precise moment at which lower middle classes were struggling to maintain their standard of living. This disjuncture between image and reality generated a feeling among some lower middle classes of being somehow in limbo and of their waiting for development (Favero 2005; Fernandes 2006). For Fernandes it was such a sense of waiting that staved off more radical protest among the middle classes: anticipation of future benefits mediates the immediacy of political opposition to the economic disruptions or deterioration produced by reforms (Fernandes 2006: xx).

Such lower middle-class anxiety is obviously not limited to India. Solvay Gerke (2000) has argued that a threatened Indonesian middle class in the 1990s were forced to resort to a form of virtual consumption, a set of strategies designed to display standards of living that they could not afford. Shana Cohen (2004) has described the emergence of middle classes in Morocco in the 1970s and 1980s, who saw similar a gap opening up between their aspirations and social realities. As in Fernandes (2006) work, Gerke and Cohen argue that middle classes increasingly imagined their individual mobility to involve participating in the drama of Western social progress, either through migrating or via the consumption of consumer goods and education.

Neither Gerke nor Cohen discusses in detail the politics of the middle class. But in India lower middle classes have devoted considerable energy to preventing downward mobility and expressing anxieties within political spheres. Several studies describe middle-class involvement in Hindu nationalist political organizations as a response to social frustration (Corbridge and Harriss 2000; Hansen 2001; Fernandes and Heller 2006). Others refer to politicking outside the realms of formal political organizations (Rutten 1995; Harriss-White 2003; Fernandes and Heller 2006). For example, Harriss-White (2003) shows that intermediate classes in Tamil Nadu reacted to economic liberalization through intensifying efforts to collude with local government officials within dense webs of corrupt and violent local-level practice. Similarly, Fernandes and Heller (2006) emphasize the opportunity hoarding of India’s lower middle classes within local networks of political relations.

Educated Unemployed Young Men

Threats to middle-class power in India are often especially keenly felt by educated young men excluded from secure employment. Indeed, such unemployed men may be key political actors in contemporary India. The scale of the employment crisis in India meant that some of the country’s bourgeoisie and upper middle classes experienced unemployment in the 1990s and early 2000s (see Favero 2005). Increasing education among formerly marginalized communities in India, such as Dalits and Muslims, also exacerbated problems of educated unemployment among historically poor sections of society (see Parry 1999; Jeffrey et al. 2008). Yet educated unemployment in India is often a particular problem for lower middle-class young men, who commonly possess the financial backing to obtain education and engage in a prolonged job search, but lack the funds, social networking resources and cultural capital to succeed within fiercely competitive markets for government jobs and positions in the new economy (see Fernandes 2000).

Official figures collected at employment exchanges and by the National Sample Survey (NSS) are poor indicators of joblessness because few people in India register themselves as unemployed (Ul Haq 2003). Nevertheless, according to NSS data, 12 million people were openly unemployed in 2004–5. Desai (2007) suggests that in the same year, about 150 million were in low-quality employment, many of them young people with high school and college qualifications. Rates of employment in India’s organized sector of the economy were stagnant in the late 1990s and early 2000s despite rapid economic growth. Industrial and service-sector growth in India was skill- and capital-intensive during this period and therefore tended not to generate employment. Sharp projected increases in the young adult population in the next ten years are likely to aggravate this problem. Joshi (2009) states the situation succinctly in a discussion of one of India’s apparently vibrant new sectors: The IT sector currently employs 1 million people; in five years, it may employ 3 million. But in five years India’s labour force will grow by around 65 million and much of the rise will occur in backward states.

Educated unemployment is not new in India. The colonial state often encouraged large numbers of young people to enter formal education, and not all of these men acquired salaried work (see Coleman 1965). Complaints about semi-educated young men hanging about around government offices surface in the reports of colonial officials at least as far back as the mid-1850s in India (Dore 1976: 53). Moreover, Robert Dore (1976) argued over thirty years ago that a combination of population growth, a lack of expansion in manufacturing and service industries and increased enrollment in education had created a large cohort of unemployed young people in many parts of India. Yet educated unemployment has become especially pronounced since the 1970s.

Similar contradictions have been noted in other postcolonial settings, as well as in the West (see Kaplinsky 2005). A recent rise in the visibility of unemployment or underemployment among educated youth has been discussed in places as diverse as Papua New Guinea (Leavitt 1998; Demerath 1999), Ethiopia (Mains 2007), Morocco (Cohen 2004) and Peru (Stepputat 2002). Substantial numbers of people in Asia, Africa and Latin America, especially those from lower middle classes, have looked to formal schooling as a means of social mobility since 1970, and they have been exposed via this education, the media or development institutions to images of progress through education and entry into white-collar work (e.g. Silberschmidt 2001). At the same time, global economic changes since 1970 have failed to generate large numbers of permanent white-collar jobs within manufacturing or service. The result has been the emergence of a global surplus population, which, unlike the reserve army of labor discussed by Marx in the nineteenth century, possess educational qualifications and are sometimes highly skilled (see Kaplinsky 2005). Indeed, many in this group perceive themselves to be underemployed rather than wholly without work. They are dependent on involuntary part-time work, engaged in intermittent unemployment, and/or involved in poorly remunerated labor (Prause and Dooley 1997: 245). I therefore use the term educated unemployed to refer both to people who are unemployed and underemployed.

Emerging work on joblessness in the global south suggests that educated unemployment bears most pressingly on men in their twenties or early thirties. This is not to deny the importance of unemployment for older people (see Breman 2000; McDowell 2003) or for young women, who comprise a substantial section of the educated unemployed in some regions of the global south, such as the Middle East (Miles 2002) and parts of South America (Miles 1998). But the prevalence of male breadwinner norms in the global south often means that educated unemployment has especially direct negative consequences for young men.

Scholars employing ethnographic methods have started to uncover the anxieties of educated unemployed youth in the 1990s and 2000s within and outside India.¹ Educated unemployed young men are often unable to marry (see Masquelier 2005; Chowdhry 2009). They frequently find it difficult to leave home and purchase or rent independent living space (Hansen 2005). Educated unemployed young men are also commonly dogged by a sense of not having achieved locally salient norms of masculine success (Osella and Osella 2000; Cole 2004); they might conform by dint of their education to a particular vision of successful masculinity but lack the resources necessary to assume the role of male adult provider (Cole 2004, 2005). Public discourses of educated unemployed young men as louts (McDowell 2003) or hypermasculine and violent threats to the state and civil society exacerbate this gendered crisis (Stambach 1998; Roitman 2004).

An intriguing aspect of recent work on youth unemployment is scholars’ tendency to mention young men’s anxieties about time. Educated unemployed young men may feel that they need to pass time in new ways in the face of their joblessness (e.g. Corrigan 1979). Indeed, time may become a central social preoccupation, as Michael Ralph (2008) argues in a recent essay on young men killing time in urban Nigeria and as Mains (2007) also suggests in research among youth in Ethiopia. This dimension of educated unemployed young men’s experiences must be contextualized with reference to changes in how time has been imagined and experienced over the past two hundred years. The onset of modernity in Europe and North America was associated with the institutionalization of chronological time (see Thompson 1967; Zerubavel 1985; Thrift 1996). Rather than operating according to seasonal rhythms, people began to measure their lives and activities more closely with respect to abstract units of time, such as days, weeks, years and decades. From at