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

With a wide arc encompassing the ’institutional big men’, who run technical institutes and colleges, and the micro-politics of friendships and relationships among the youth, Gender, Caste, and Class in South India’s Technical Institutions is a deep dive into the world of Indian engineering colleges. It juxtaposes the stark realities and lived experiences of students against the global sensibilities and standards that such institutes lay claim to. Beginning in the 1980s, Tamil Nadu--the site of fieldwork--witnessed a record rise in the number of private engineering colleges, which continued until the early 2000s. However, despite the manifold increase in the number of institutions and, consequently, first-generation learners, hierarchies and inequalities largely continue to be reproduced in these almost temple-like institutions. Groups lacking the explicit markers of cultural and social capital struggle to find employment. By presenting perspectives on engineering students’ desires, anxieties, and processes of self-construction, the monograph examines how gender differences are reinforced through language, rules, regulations, surveillance, and control. In shifting the theoretical emphasis from ’subjects’ to ’subjectivities’, Hebbar draws on the youth’s narratives of upward social mobility, crafting respectability, and notions of adulthood, thereby holding a mirror to the fraught socialscape of the private education sector in India.

Nandini Hebbar N.

Dr Nandini Hebbar N. is an independent researcher based in Ahmedabad, India. She obtained her PhD from the Department of Sociology, Delhi School of Economics. Her articles have appeared in journals such as SAMAJ, SubVersions, and Studies in South Asian Film and Media. She won the Vina Mazumdar Memorial Fund - Indian Association for Women’s Studies (VMMF-IAWS) Young Research Scholars’ Award for the year 2019.