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Paper short abstract

This paper explores the self-disciplining and meritocratic pedagogies that dominate the lives of India's civil service aspirants. Based on author’s ethnographic study in Delhi, this paper highlights the subtle and creative ways in which aspirants challenge this and reassert questions of inequality.

Paper long abstract

The neighbourhood of Old Rajinder Nagar (ORN) in India’s capital is teeming with ‘aspirants’- young men and women aspiring to join India’s elite civil services like the Indian Administrative Service (IAS). They are part of the nation’s millions seeking to transition from higher education to stable and secure employment—a transition that is as highly desired as it is increasingly difficult to achieve. Civil service aspirants in ORN attempt this transition through the practice of taiyārī (preparing, in Hindi/Urdu). This paper charts how taiyārī is much more than preparing for jobs and careers as it becomes a practice of wider meaning-making and future-making. Part of the author’s doctoral research on India’s civil service aspirants, and based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork, this paper focuses on the role of meritocratic self-disciplining pedagogies in shaping aspirants’ preparatory labours. The paper begins by examining the figure of the ‘serious aspirant’ as embodying the doxa of meritocratic self-discipline. Its dominance in ORN seemingly precludes any meaningful engagement with inequality. However, the paper shows that aspirants find subtle and creative ways to rework and challenge these discourses. A key method in this is talking about, and engaging in, actions and activities that are commonly termed ‘distractions’—activities that are deemed unbecoming of a ‘serious aspirant’—though aspirants gradually recover and reclaim the meaning of these ‘distractions’. The paper demonstrates how the seriousness-distractions dialectic becomes a key strategy through which aspirants challenge the discourse of meritocratic self-discipline and re-assert questions of inequality.