NEGOTIATING CLASS BOUNDARIES

While suburban striver students and parents imagined that brighter futures would be facilitated by the attainment of foreign degrees, SoBo elite participants and the industry professionals that cater to them disputed whether international education can convert into meaningful upward socio-economic mobility for suburban strivers. By asserting their superior cultural capital, SoBo elites maintain localised class boundaries by denigrating suburban strivers on the basis of their ‘misplaced’ aspirations or their inability to

appropriately embody cosmopolitan cultural capital, despite their ability to access international education.

There were three key ways in which SoBo elites cast doubt on the ability of suburban strivers to achieve upward socio-economic mobility. First, SoBo elite participants commonly sought to downplay the significance of international education by pointing out that attaining a foreign degree is becoming normalised. Naina, 24, believed that the value of international education as a tool to distinguish a graduate from the crowd is diminished because more people are accessing this form of education:

I remember my mother telling me about a friend of hers who went abroad when they were young, that was very unusual. And her parents went around telling everyone that their daughter is studying abroad. It was such a huge thing to say. But now it’s become like an everyday thing because so many people are doing it. So I think it kind of loses its value if you’re doing it to stand out.

Naina states that attaining a foreign degree is no longer a marker of distinction because it lacks ‘scarcity value’ (Bourdieu, 1986). The implication that logically follows is that graduates holding foreign degrees must employ tactics to create distinction in other ways, which is where the pursuit of things like ‘personal growth’ and ‘self-actualisation’ come to prominence. SoBo elites thereby maintain their elite status by normalising the acquisition of foreign qualifications, but augmenting the value or importance of spending time overseas as a rite of passage into adulthood.

Second, SoBo elite respondents questioned the pre-existing knowledge and therefore the motivations of those with ‘new money’ who seek international education. Akash, an education counsellor and a returned student from a SoBo elite family, contended that as wealth rises in India more people seek international education, but this has – in his professional opinion – resulted in more people sending their children ‘anywhere’ to study. Unless international education is approached with due consideration, he argues, it does not ‘add value’ to the individual:

There’s a lot more money that’s come into people’s hands. So I feel like, uh, the first thing they want to do is obviously get a bigger house, then they get a nice car, then they want to send their kids abroad to study. … As people kind of started getting wealthier, they started seeing more value in studying overseas. … But they don’t always know what they're doing, uh, they just send the kids anywhere – and that doesn’t add value.

Akash implies that people who have recently acquired wealth (i.e. suburban strivers) understand international education as an additional possession of sorts, which they anticipate will symbolise their achievement of upward class mobility. However, it must also be noted that Akash is legitimating himself as an education counsellor here – if suburban strivers hire a counsellor they would presumably not ‘just go anywhere’. Nonetheless, SoBo elite participants, like Akash, tended to view the educational attainments of suburban strivers as different (read: unequal) to their own because they were not accompanied by a requisite display of cosmopolitan cultural capital, such as foregrounding self-actualisation as we saw in the previous section. A foreign degree is therefore not ascribed with an even amount of worth because value is ascribed by the onlooker, not by the qualification itself.

Last, and in a similar vein to above, SoBo elites consistently implied that suburban strivers do not have the competences, comportment, tastes, skills or ideologies that would allow them to convert international education into ‘a good life’. Vidya, 25, a returned student from a SoBo elite family, suggested that people who ‘can't afford it’ but who seek international education often have ‘misconceptions’ about the likelihood of their success:

I think a lot of middle-class people go abroad with the notion that it will give them a step-up in life, but you cannot blame anybody else except yourself for thinking that. ... You can't just assume that you will do this and have a bright future! … They see other people’s experiences, that this person went and now they have everything! But I think it doesn’t just come from a degree. Even if you have gone there with a misconception – a wrong notion – if you are someone who can't afford it but went there to make a good life, you have to work really hard and you have to have the smarts to make it over there too.

Vidya, like other respondents in this section, seeks to undermine the imagined value that suburban striver students and their families ascribe to international education. SoBo elite participants were quick to detail the potential pitfalls of international education, whilst concurrently displaying their aptitude for not having succumbed to these hazards. This creates class distinction wherein suburban strivers do not acquire or perform the ‘correct’ skills and traits, at least according to SoBo elites.

SoBo elite participants were often critical of suburban strivers’ ability to embody cosmopolitan cultural capital, which had often been observed during their international education. Discussing their perception of others, SoBo elites held up evidence of their

own advanced, competent embodiment of cosmopolitan cultural capital that differentiated them from other Indian international students. In this sense, an individual’s class status is transported across borders and used to distinguish Indians from various backgrounds even when they are outside the context in which their class status was originally made. By constructing their version of cosmopolitan cultural capital as legitimate and identifying that some people ‘do it wrong’, SoBo elite participants imply that exposure is accumulated over time and international education will therefore have unevenoutcomes for international students depending on their localised micro-category of class.

Criticism of the way that suburban strivers behaved whilst they were studying in foreign institutions was one of the key ways that SoBo elites sought to define the legitimacy of their own cultural capital. For instance, several returned students from SoBo elite families mocked other Indian international students from less privileged backgrounds for taking pleasure in free giveaway items on campus. Divij, 23, a returned student from a SoBo elite family, ridiculed ‘scholarship students’ (the implication being that they could not otherwise afford a foreign degree) because they tended to take pleasure in ‘smaller things’:

There were also people who came on scholarships, and I think they enjoyed smaller things a lot more, like walking down the street or getting a free meal coupon, or a free [university] t-shirt. They really found a great thrill in that. I guess for them it’s special.

Divij constructs an ‘us’ and ‘them’ relationship, differentiating on the basis of economic capital (scholarship vs. non-scholarship students), but also on the cultural capital that each group embodies. Scholarship students found a ‘thrill’ in receiving free things, whereas those with greater stores of cultural capital knew not to demonstrate excitement at ‘inappropriate’ junctures, which would undermine their ability to reproduce their existing class status. Further, the prior exposure that SoBo elite students have to ‘walking down the street’ in foreign countries (in which pavements do not have open drains and are rarely used as public toilets), means that they have already accumulated cosmopolitan cultural capital that allows them to not (openly) find simple pleasures ‘special’.

A second key area of criticism that SoBo elite students made of their suburban striver peers concerned the way that they engaged – or rather, did not engage – with the

international education ‘experience’. Sahil, 22, a returned student from a SoBo elite family, described the ‘aspirational middle-class’ as those who are not willing or able to push themselves outside of their comfort zone whilst overseas:

S: In the aspirational middle-class, say if someone goes abroad, they might be a little conservative and they might not want to branch out to local people or, you know, go outside of what's known to them.

N: Why do you think that is?

S: I just think it’s the sense of comfort that they have with their own Indian community. If it’s someone from Bombay or Bangalore or wherever in India, it gives them security and the other person understands where they come from. I think it’s a cultural barrier more than a language barrier. I think some people from the aspirational middle-class feel like they might be perceived differently – I don’t know why that is. I would say that if they weren't as conservative and they gave it a chance, then it would be perfectly ok.

Sahil positions suburban strivers (the ‘aspiring middle-class’) as conservative, reserved and uncomfortable outside the Indian community/diaspora. Sahil identifies this as the result of cultural boundaries, rather than other (perhaps, more acceptable) language barriers. The implication is that suburban strivers do possess English language skills required to interact with foreign friends (in Chapter Four I discussed language and the reproduction of class status), but lack the cultural capital that facilitates comfort in the company of non-Indians. Being ‘more open’ to other cultures and finding comfortable spaces within foreign landscapes is thus a marker of possessing greater quantities of cosmopolitan cultural capital (Weenink, 2008). The implication is that suburban strivers cannot go overseas and acquire cosmopolitan cultural capital, rather, one must possess cosmopolitan cultural capital before they leave India in order to experience international education in the ‘right’ or ‘best’ way.

Echoing earlier anecdotes about the desire to ‘become independent’ via international education experiences, Sahil continued his thoughts about why suburban strivers behave with constraint whilst abroad. Sahil contends that SoBo elites and suburban strivers have divergent incentives to engage with international education, based on whether they are there for a degree or for an ‘experience’:

They have an end goal in mind. I was there for an experience. So while my end goal was a degree, I had absolutely no doubt that I was going to get that degree … I had my eyes set on the fact that I was there for education. But I

really held to the fact that I had this opportunity to make it an experience. At that level, I think they were there because it was like, ‘if I don’t have that degree, then what is it going to be like?’ For them, the degree is the end-all and be-all. … I think it’s a much more serious atmosphere for them. … I think it’s a difference in approach. I think it just doesn’t occur to them to give it a shot, to put themselves out there.

Sahil’s comment illuminates the unevenness of international education experiences among Indian students. Sahil describes his ability to make international education an ‘experience’, as opposed to suburban striver students whose economic situation is less stable and therefore they are more anxious about ensuring that they obtain a degree with marks that will allow them to find a good job after they graduate. Furthermore, Sahil’s comment speaks to the fact that for SoBo elites, international education is presupposed as part of their lifecourse, whereas for suburban strivers studying overseas is aspirational and is therefore more fraught. However, as the next section discusses, gender can have a significant impact on determining which suburban strivers become mobile in the first place, despite widely held aspirations to pursue international education.