Learning Modernity in a Global World: Education and youth culture in Kerala, India

Ritty Lukose

A century ago, the Indian social reformer Swami Vivekananda called Kerala, a state on the southwestern tip of India, a "lunatic asylum": a place so steeped in repressive tradition that those of the upper-castes not only considered the touch but also the sight of low-caste individuals polluting. But today Kerala is world-renowned as a "development miracle": social indicators such as literacy, infant mortality, and healthcare approximate those of the industrialized West, and the "Kerala Model" has become a much emulated example for equality and development with education as its cornerstone. However, a detailed examination of the actual processes of education, contextualized within new global forces of migration, the flows of capital and media images, and local structures of inequality, reveals a contested and contradictory process in which modernization does not lead to unilinear Westernization, but rather an ambivalent and contradictory Indian modernity, fractured by new forms of caste, class, and gender hierarchy. This project examines the role of education in processes of sociocultural transformation in Kerala through an ethnographic and historical analysis of college student life. The research examines how the concept of modernization is apprehended, practiced, and negotiated in the everyday lives of college students, by analyzing the practices through which a low-caste college attempts to produce “modern” students; student practices such as politics, fashion, and the reception of movies, music, and magazines; and student's relationships to their families. Longitudinal analysis will examine student experiences of social mobility and migration in order to link educational experiences to global trajectories. Archival research will enable situating college student life within colonial and national contexts. Insofar as the everyday worlds of low-caste college students in India at different stages of the life cycle provide empirical insight into the workings of modernization through education – grounded in historical, social, and cultural specificity – the project seeks to contribute toward understanding the contradictory and transformative power of education for non-Western, postcolonial modernities.

About Ritty Lukose

Ritty Lukose is an anthropologist who focuses on the relationship between education, democracy, modernity and globalizing capitalism. She seeks to understand how education becomes a contradictory site for social change and transformation, with a strong focus on gender, class, and caste. Her work, so far, has looked at higher education, student politics, youth culture, and transnationalism in Kerala, India. As such, her research is simultaneously interested in international education, development, globalization, and the nature of non-western modernities. A second research effort is situated in the U.S. The goal here is to understand race, immigration, and multiculturalism in the context of Asian-American minority students’ educational experiences and in the formation of youth cultures. She is interested in linking these two projects by thinking comparatively about how different nation-states manage forms of difference and inequality in the educational context. Dr. Lukose received her PhD from the Department of Anthropology, University of Chicago and has been teaching at the Graduate School of Education, University of Pennsylvania for two years.