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Paper short abstract

Bringing together individual and collective aspirations, out-migration for education in rural India is analysed as an individualising release from obligations to provide and care. Yet as new hierarchies are encountered, migrants often shoulder fresh obligations to achieve caste/tribe mobility.

Paper long abstract

For Koya adivasi young people, aspirations for education and schooling are closely enmeshed within inter-generational negotiations around family status, provision of care within households, marriage, and social mobility. Out-migrations from small villages to government school hostels are vehicles for individual and collective desires and projections for the future. Grounded in ethnographic research on livelihood transitions and affirmative action, the paper explores young people’s accounts of their motivations to study. Parents sometimes support, facilitate, are ambivalent to, and occasionally undermine their children’s aspirations, within longer inter-generational assessments of labour and livelihoods. I analyse these contestations between young people and their siblings, parents, and potential in-laws, as negotiations with cultural and economic scripts for adult personhood that are heavily loaded with moral and political associations and obligations. These narratives are supplemented by first-hand household survey data on the educational outcomes of young people in three relatively isolated adivasi villages in Andhra Pradesh. Beyond an inter-generational analysis of the potentials, costs, and rationales for government schooling, education holds a distinct prestige and value within marginalised castes/tribes across India. The ethnography counterpoises individual narratives of transition and self-realisation, with collective aspirations across Koya lineages for greater mobility, affluence, and collective dominance in the regional social landscape. I argue that out-migration for education powerfully integrates Koya young people into regional hierarchies of value, and consumption patterns. Education also fosters complex narratives of collective mobility that are projected forward onto future generations.