TIMEPASS

Youth, Class, and the Politics of Waiting in IndiaBy CRAIG JEFFREY

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2010 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-7074-3

Contents

Acknowledgments...........................................................................vii1 India Waiting...........................................................................12 Cultivating Fields: The Rise and Resilience of a Rural Middle Class.....................373 Life at the Crossroads: Timepass........................................................724 Collective Student Protest..............................................................1035 Fixing Futures: Improvised Politics.....................................................1356 Conclusions.............................................................................171Bibliography..............................................................................193Index.....................................................................................213

Chapter One

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 (netas) 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 postcolonial 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" (kam karanewale), 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...