Paper short abstract

Urban schooling in India is often imagined as a space of merit and choice. Drawing on interviews with parents in Varanasi (Kashi), this paper examines how caste shapes the lived and emotional world of schooling, producing uneven educational futures even among families with similar incomes.

Paper long abstract

Urban schooling in India is frequently framed as a pathway to mobility. Yet these promises are unevenly realised. Drawing on Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus and capital, this paper examines education as a lived site through which unequal futures are actively produced.

The study is based on fifty in-depth interviews with parents from different caste groups who are salaried government employees in Varanasi (Kashi). Focusing on families with comparable and relatively stable incomes, the paper isolates how in absence of material deprivation, social and cultural resource still shape schooling experiences. Advantaged-caste families approach schooling with a sense of ease. Interactions with institutions are marked by confidence, and home is assumed to provide cultural foundations required for educational success.

Dalit families, by contrast, encounter schooling as an aspirational and emotionally demanding project. Their educational choices are marked by vigilance, sustained labour, and careful negotiation, aimed at securing dignity, and social mobility for children. What appears as the same educational decision, enrolling children in English-medium private schools, rests on unequal stocks of social and cultural capital and produces markedly different futures.

Situated in Kashi, a city long associated with learning and intellectual authority, the paper treats the city not only as a geographical setting but also a symbolic field in which claims to knowledge and belonging were historically monopolised and are now unevenly contested. Rather than viewing inequality as fixed, the paper shows how educational aspirations and emotional labour reproduce polarised futures, while also revealing the fragile possibilities that emerge within these conditions.