Gender, Caste, and Class in South India's Technical Institutions

Abstract With a wide arc that encompasses the ‘institutional big men’ who run the colleges to the micropolitics of friendship and the suitability of relationships among youth, this volume is a deep dive into the world of engineering colleges. The book attempts to make sense of the engineering college boom in South India that was largely fuelled by the growth of the IT industry as well as the aspirations, complexities, and crises emerging from the boom. Both office- and temple-like, these colleges are symbolic of a distinctive aspirational culture that reveres the engineering profession. This book tries to map the historical antecedents of that culture, the contemporary contexts created by it, and the diverse lived experiences in these spaces. What does it mean to live in such a setting for four years, especially as a young woman? What does it mean to study and make friends here? How are gender differences reinforced through language, rules, regulations, surveillance, and control? Drawing on young people’s narratives of upward social mobility, crafting respectability, and notions of being adult, this book attempts to hold a mirror to the fraught social landscape of the education sector. By centring young people’s desires, tensions, anxieties, and processes of self-construction, the book moves the theoretical emphasis from engineering college ‘subject’ to ‘subjectivities’, and brings to the fore the ways in which youth is experienced in higher education.