Youth and Selfhood in Neoliberal India: Shifting Geographies of Higher Education, Coaching Centres and Religiosity in Patna

This article presents a grounded analysis of subaltern youth anxieties for selfhood in neoliberal India, characterised by a decline in public education and shrinking work opportunities. In a multi-sited ethnography in Patna, I find that ordinary youth see public universities as sites of inefficiency and politicisation. This motivates a shift from the historically reputed university to low-quality private coaching that offers youth mere promise of success in competition for jobs. The everyday culture of coaching is replete with propaganda of apolitical market discourses. Yet, the lens of critical bifocality renders visible its covert linkages with social and political power. Besides, ritual celebrations of Saraswati Puja disrupt private educational endeavours—it is an extraordinary moment when the reliance of coaching on political patronage and majoritarian religiosity becomes overt. Thus, fear, and not market freedoms, upholds ‘actually existing’ local projects of neoliberalism and the fragile attempts of ordinary youth for secure futures.