Engendering the State: Aspiration, Government Jobs, and the Coaching Industry in Bihar, India

Isabel Salovaara

India’s ‘coaching industry’ is a vast agglomeration of education businesses that promise to help young people secure their professional futures. In crowded classrooms or on India’s thriving EdTech platforms, tutors teach test strategies and modes of self-presentation tailored to passing exams and landing jobs. Once the tool of metropolitan middle classes, reinforcing alignments of social, cultural, and economic capital, coaching is now increasingly being utilized by provincial young people squeezed by structural inequalities. Through an online and in-person ethnographic study of the coaching industry, this research aims to understand the effects of aspirational orientations among Indian youth historically disadvantaged by caste, class, and gender. Examining the coaching industry for government jobs in Bihar—a state often cited for its gender- and caste-based inequalities—this project analyzes: (1) how marginalized youth and their families utilize the coaching system to envision and materialize successful futures, (2) how aspirational identities are constituted in the interactions, narratives, and labors of teachers and students in coaching classrooms, and (3) the ways coaching shapes the broader landscape of life possibilities for young women and disadvantaged castes. Through participant observation, semi-structured interviews, and biographical case studies of Bihari coaching teachers, students, and parents, this ethnographic study shows that supplementary education can be a tool for expanding aspiration, not only for promoting social reproduction. As one of the first ethnographic monographs of a “shadow education” system (Bray 1999), this work contributes a qualitative analysis of the motivations and effects of non-elite participation in supplementary education to this growing body of scholarship.

About Isabel Salovaara

Isabel Salovaara's research explores the social effects of aspirational projects in India. Her work on tutoring, coaching, and test preparation in Delhi and Patna has examined supplemental education institutions as sites for the production of personhood. Isabel conducted her Ph.D. fieldwork in Patna, Bihar, focusing on coaching institutes that specialize in entrance exams for lower-level, non-technical posts in the bureaucracy, public sector banks, and the police. Her dissertation addresses how aspirational processes of preparing for a government job refigure caste, gender, and youth politics ​in the shifting material and moral economies of post-liberalization urban India. Isabel received her A.B. in History summa cum laude from Harvard University and completed her M.Phil. in Social Anthropology as a Gates Scholar at the University of Cambridge. Her research has been supported by two Fulbright fellowships and a Wenner-Gren Dissertation Fieldwork Grant.​ Prior to beginning her Ph.D. program, she taught undergraduate fieldwork methods and introductory social science courses at O.P. Jindal Global University in Sonipat, India.