Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-l7hp2 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-26T06:16:18.629Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

“I serve therefore I am”: Youth and Generative Politics in India

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 October 2014

Craig Jeffrey  and
Jane Dyson
Craig Jeffrey*
Affiliation:
School of Geography and the Environment, St. John's College, Oxford
Jane Dyson*
Affiliation:
School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford
*
[email protected]
[email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This paper uses qualitative research in Uttarakhand, India to highlight the vitality of civil society and the involvement of young people in everyday “civic” politics. Much recent academic literature emphasizes the ubiquity of narrowly self-interested patronage politics in South Asia, Africa, and Latin America, as captured in the saying sometimes attributed to politicians in Cameroon: “I graze therefore I am.” But in specific moments or conjunctures, more “civic” forms of politics come to light, perhaps especially among youth. Building on intensive, qualitative field research, we show that a new generation of educated, underemployed youth in the village of Bemni serve their community in key ways. They also make strong arguments about the nature of “politics” and how it might be re-imagined as “generative”—concerned with building resources—rather than “allocative”—a zero-sum game of competition for power. We draw attention to the potentials of this practice and discourse of politics as well as its limits, particularly that it is dominated by young men and tends to reproduce caste and gender inequalities. We also call for more concerted study of youth community activism in contexts of predatory clientelism.

Type
Research Article
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 56 , Issue 4 , October 2014 , pp. 967 - 994
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 2014 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Appadurai, A. 2002. Deep Democracy: Urban Governmentality and the Horizon of Politics. Public Culture 61, 1: 21–47.Google Scholar
Baviskar, A. and Sundar, N.. 2008. Democracy versus Economic Transformation? A Response to Partha Chatterjee's Democracy and Economic Transformation in India. Economic and Political Weekly 43, 46: 87–89.Google Scholar
Bayart, J-F. 2009. The State in Africa: The Politics of the Belly. London: Longman.Google Scholar
Bayat, A. 2013a. The Arab Spring and Its Surprises. Development and Change 44, 3: 587–601.Google Scholar
Bayat, A. 2013b. Life as Politics: How Ordinary People Change the Middle East. Stanford: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Biekart, K. and Fowler, A.. 2013. Transforming Activisms 2010 + : Exploring Ways and Waves. Development and Change 44, 3: 527–46.Google Scholar
Bourdieu, P. 1984. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Castañeda, E. 2012. The Indignados of Spain: A Precedent to Occupy Wall Street. Social Movement Studies 11, 3–4: 309–19.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chant, S. and Jones, G. A.. 2005. Youth, Gender and Livelihoods in West Africa: Perspectives from Ghana and The Gambia. Children's Geographies 3, 2: 185–99.Google Scholar
Chatterjee, P. 2004. The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World. New Delhi: Permanent Black.Google Scholar
Cincotta, R. P., Engelman, R., and Anastasion, D.. 2003. The Security Demographic: Population and Civil Conflict after the Cold War. Washington, D.C.: Population Action International.Google Scholar
Cole, J. and Durham, D., eds. 2006. Generations and Globalization: Youth, Age and Family in the New World Economy. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Comptroller Auditor General. 2012. Auditor Report Uttarakhand 2011–2012. At: http://www.cag.gov.in/html/cag_reports/up/rep_2012/contends.htm (last accessed 11 Dec.).Google Scholar
Corbridge, S., Williams, G., Srivastava, M., and Véron, R.. 2005. Seeing the State: Governance and Governmentality in India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Daly, S. 2010. Young Women as Activists in Contemporary Egypt: Anxiety, Leadership, and the Next Generation. Journal of Middle East Women's Studies 6, 2: 59–85.Google Scholar
De Vries, P. 2002. Vanishing Mediators: Enjoyment as a Political Factor in Western Mexico. American Ethnologist 29, 4: 901–27.Google Scholar
Diouf, M. 1996. Urban Youth and Senegalese Politics: Dakar 1988–1994. Public Culture 8, 2: 225–49.Google Scholar
Durham, D. 2008. Apathy and Agency: The Romance of Agency and Youth in Botswana. In Cole, J. and Durham, D., eds., Figuring the Future: Children, Youth, and Globalization. Santa Fe, N.M.: School of American Research Press.Google Scholar
Dyson, J. 2006. Faces of the Forest: Children's Work in the Indian Himalayas. Doctoral diss., Department of Geography, University of Cambridge.Google Scholar
Dyson, J. 2008. Harvesting Identities: Youth, Work and Gender in the Indian Himalayas. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 98, 1: 160–79.Google Scholar
Dyson, J. 2010. Friendship in Practice: Girls’ Work in the Indian Himalayas. American Ethnologist 37, 3: 472–98.Google Scholar
Dyson, J. 2014. Working Childhoods: Youth, Agency and the Environment in India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Flyvbjerg, B. 2006. Five Misunderstandings about Case-Study Research. Qualitative Inquiry 12, 2: 219–45.Google Scholar
Fox, J. A. 2007. Accountability Politics: Power and Voice in Rural Mexico. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Fredericks, R. 2014. “The old man is dead”: Hip Hop and the Arts of Citizenship of Senegalese Youth. Antipode 46, 1: 130–48.Google Scholar
Gellner, D. N. 2007. Democracy in Nepal: Four Models. Seminar 576 (Aug.): 50.Google Scholar
Giddens, A. 1994. Beyond Left and Right. Cambridge: Polity.Google Scholar
Glasius, M. and Pleyers, G.. 2013. The Global Moment of 2011: Democracy, Social Justice and Dignity. Development and Change 44, 3: 547–67.Google Scholar
Goonewardena, K. 2008. Marxism and Everyday Life: On Henri Lefebvre, Guy Debord and Others. In Goonewardena, K., Kipfer, S., Milgram, R., and Schmid, C., eds., Space, Difference and Everyday Life: Reading Henri Lefebvre. London: Routledge, 142–60.Google Scholar
Hall, G. S. 1904. Adolescence: Its Psychology and Its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion, and Education. Vols. I and II. New York: D. Appleton and Co.Google Scholar
Hansen, T. B. 1996. Recuperating Masculinity: Hindu Nationalism, Violence, and the Exorcism of the Muslim ‘Other.’ Critique of Anthropology 16, 22: 137–72.Google Scholar
Holston, J. 2008. Insurgent Citizenship: Disjunctions of Democracy and Modernity in Brazil. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Ismail, S. 2013. Urban Subalterns in the Arab Revolutions: Cairo and Damascus in Comparative Perspective. Comparative Studies in Society and History 61, 4: 865–94.Google Scholar
Jayal, N. G. 2001. Democracy and Social Capital in Central Himalaya: Tale of Two Villages. Economic and Political Weekly 26, 8: 655–64.Google Scholar
Jeffrey, C. 2009. Fixing Futures: Educated Unemployment through a North Indian Lens. Comparative Studies in Society and History 51, 1: 182–211.Google Scholar
Jeffrey, C. 2012. Geographies of Children and Youth II: Global Youth Agency. Progress in Human Geography 36, 2: 245–53.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Johnson-Hanks, D., 2002. On the Limits of Life Stages in Ethnography: Towards a Theory of Vital Conjunctures. American Anthropologist 104, 3: 865–80.Google Scholar
Jones, J. L. 2010. ‘Nothing is straight in Zimbabwe’: The Rise of the Kukiya-Kiya Economy 2000–2008. Journal of Southern African Studies 36, 2: 285–99.Google Scholar
Juris, J. and Pleyers, G. H. 2009. Alter-Activism: Emerging Cultures of Participation among Young Global Justice Activists. Journal of Youth Studies 22, 1: 57–70.Google Scholar
Kaur, R. 2010. Khap Panchayats, Sex Ratios, and Female Agency. Economic and Political Weekly 45, 23: 14–16.Google Scholar
Kaviraj, S. 1991. On State, Society and Discourse in India. In Manor, James, ed., Rethinking Third World Politics. Harlow: Longman, 72–99.Google Scholar
Kaviraj, S. 2001. In Search of Civil Society. In Kaviraj, Sudipta and Sunil, Khilnani, eds., Civil Society: History and Possibilities. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 287–323.Google Scholar
Keniston, K. 1971. Youth and Dissent: The Rise of a New Opposition. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.Google Scholar
Kett, J. 1971. Adolescence and Youth in Nineteenth-Century America. Journal of Interdisciplinary History 2, 2: 283–98.Google Scholar
Klenk, R. 2010. Educating Activists: Development and Gender in the Making of Modern Gandhians. Bloomington, Ind.: Lexington Books.Google Scholar
Krishna, A. 2012. Active Social Capital: Tracing the Roots of Development and Democracy. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Lefebvre, H. 2008. Critique of Everyday Life. Vol. I. London: Verso.Google Scholar
Lukose, R. A. 2009. Liberalization's Children: Gender, Youth, and Consumer Citizenship in Globalizing India. Durham: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Mamdani, Mahmood. 1996. Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Manilov, M. 2013. Occupy at One Year: Growing the Roots of a Movement. Sociological Quarterly 54, 2: 206–13.Google Scholar
Mannheim, K. 1972 [1936]. The Problem of Generations. In Altbach, P. and Laufer, R., eds., The New Pilgrims: Youth Protest in Transition. New York: David McKay, 101–38.Google Scholar
Martin, N. 2013. The Dark Side of Political Society: Patronage and the Reproduction of Social Inequality. Journal of Agrarian Change. At: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/joac.12039/abstract.Google Scholar
Marx, K. and Engels, F.. 1978. Collected Works, Volume 10: 1849–51. London: Lawrence and Wishart.Google Scholar
Mawdsley, E. 1997. Non-Successionalist Regionalism in India: The Uttarakhand Separate State Movement. Environment and Planning, A 29, 12: 2217–35.Google Scholar
Moller, J. 2003. Responses to Modernity: Female Education, Gender Relations and Regional Identity in the Hills of Uttar Pradesh. In Jeffery, Roger and Lerche, Jens, eds., Social and Political Change in Uttar Pradesh: European Perspectives. Delhi: Manohar, 103–28.Google Scholar
Newell, S. 2012. The Modernity Bluff: Crime, Consumption, and Citizenship in Côte d'Ivoire. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Office of the Registrar General. 2001. Census of India. Delhi: Government of India.Google Scholar
Office of the Registrar General. 2011. Census of India. Delhi: Government of India.Google Scholar
Orock, R.T.E. 2013. Manyu Youths, Belonging and the Antinomies of Patrimonial Elite Politics in Contemporary Cameroon. Cultural Dynamics 25, 3: 269–90.Google Scholar
Pearce, J. 2013. Power and the Twenty-First Century Activist: From the Neighbourhood to the Square. Development and Change 44, 3: 639–63.Google Scholar
Pratten, D. 2006. The Politics of Vigilance in Southeastern Nigeria. Development and Change 37, 4: 707–34.Google Scholar
Rangan, H. 2001. Of Myths and Movements: Rewriting Chipko into Himalayan History. Oxford and New Delhi: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Razsa, M. and Kurnik, A.. 2012. The Occupy Movement in Žižek's Hometown: Direct Democracy and a Politics of Becoming. American Ethnologist 39, 2: 238–58.Google Scholar
Sen, A. 1999. Development as Freedom. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Snellinger, A. 2005. A Crisis in Nepali Student Politics? Analyzing the Gap between Politically Active and Non-Active Students. Peace and Democracy in South Asia Journal 1, 2: 18–44.Google Scholar
World Bank. 2011. Conflict, Security and Development: World Development Report. Washington, D.C.: World Bank.Google Scholar