Girls about town: educated subjectivities, gender and the urban public space in India

As an anthropologist, I am interested in how individual experiences of higher education accrete to bring about a change in the role of women in a society. I study how college education changes young women's characters and life expectations, and how their families and the society perceive their new personalities. I worked in a non-elite government college in Ghaziabad, 30 miles east of Delhi, and many of the young women I followed are the first in their families to receive a college education. During my doctoral fieldwork, I interviewed college-going young women about their educational experiences and observed them over a longer period of time. This in-depth engagement makes visible that most of the learning at the colleges in small towns of India takes place outside of the classrooms-and is not derived from textbooks. Young people redefine education and devise emotional ways of knowing and being in the world. The focus of education is on the emotional transformation of a student's character and on the practical know-how of living a freer life. My interest in these research questions began as journalist for the Financial Times in Delhi when I reported on India's response to large-scale youth protests over gendered access to public spaces in 2011-12.

My research illustrates that higher education changes gender power relations and educated young women are more confident and assertive in independently speaking with men in the bazaars, the malls and the McDonald's in provincial India. The caveat to this is that young women are expected to give up these sexual and social freedoms on marriage. Upon marriage, a number of them are haunted by what they once thought that they could become. My research emphasises the emotional development through education that enables young women to claim social and sexual freedoms in a patriarchal society. Recent media panic over rape in India has paradoxically restricted women's access to public spaces to certain hours of the day and certain places at night, notably in the small towns outside of the metropolitan cities of Delhi and Mumbai. A policy implication of my research is to illustrate how young women access public spaces without threat of intimidation.

During the fellowship, I plan to publish 2-3 strong academic articles to influence a range of educational researchers and policymakers. In addition, I plan to undertake a 2-month long internship at the Education Department of Uttar Pradesh State Government, to conduct knowledge exchange and learning with the state-level educational policymakers on the challenges for women's access to higher education and public spaces in India. Further by facilitating a workshop at the Indian Institute of Advanced Studies (IIAS), Shimla with Dr Satendra Kumar, I would translate these findings into published articles that can inform policy-making. My research on women's movement in public spaces provides an evidence base for policy safeguarding access to public spaces without threat of intimidation in contemporary India. It will contribute to debates on the expansion of higher education in India by arguing that cuts to state-funded universities directly constrict women's access to higher education. It will also emphasise the role of a university learning experience in shaping emotional dispositions and gender practices. These student experiences have a more powerful role in transforming broader male-dominated public culture of north India than government-funded Skills Development Programmes and unregulated skills-development institutes. My work showcases the role low-ranking public universities play in enhancing female employability. They enable women's entry into service sector work, such as call centres and retail, in urban India. Overall, it will underscore the importance of education-led changes in gender relations and the redefining of public space.