Neoliberalism, Islam, and marginalised young people's cultural production of work in North India

Drawing on 14 month long ethnographic fieldwork in the North Indian city of Saharanpur, this thesis looks at marginalised Muslim young people’s everyday sociocultural, religious, and affective engagements with ideas of ‘work’. Building on scholarship from the Global South emphasising the cultural production of work beyond singular questions of ‘the wage’, I show how young people in Saharanpur were thinking of their work and labour in relation to their religious identities, education, and local environment. I build these ideas in the context of converging crises of youth unemployment, far-right Hindu Nationalist marginalisation of Muslim communities, and social change across scales, to emphasise marginalised young people’s everyday agency and practice in the Global South.

I have three empirical chapters that look at how young people in Saharanpur engaged in practices of cultural production through work in three interrelated ways. The first empirical chapter looks at the cultural production of work through young people’s use of the Hindustani term kaam. It focuses on young men nearing the end of their study in a Deobandi seminary to investigate their navigation of neoliberal and Hindu Nationalist discourses surrounding work and employment in the context of socioeconomic precarity. I show how young men locally constructed and mobilised the idea of work as kaam in relation to a variety of social and cultural resources to demarcate their work as provisioning and more-than-provisioning. This chapter has been published in Environment and Planning D: Society and Space (Kulshreshth, 2024)

The second empirical chapter focuses on college-educated young men’s practices of self-making in the platform economy in the context of joblessness and socio-economic exclusion. Complimenting political economic analyses of platform work and neoliberalism, I focus on a set of young men working as online resellers who styled themselves as ‘serious young men’ to look at young people’s bodily and affective production of precarious work. This chapter is under review as a journal article in a Geography journal.

The final empirical chapter inverses the approach to precarious work and uncertain life, by looking at how vocabularies of work—kaam in this instance, become a way to demarcate ethical action during rapid social change and uncertainty. Taking young people’s articulation kaam as deed in relation to social practice, this chapter shows how young people faced with infrastructural transformations around urbanisation, neoliberalism, and digitisation, were making sense of their emerging practices of sexuality, dating, and consumption vis-à-vis notions of piety and Deobandi Islam. I show how young people were engaging with and reflecting on a wide variety of moral and religious discourses in assessing these emerging practices in ways that both reproduced and expanded normative ideas of being young and Muslim. This chapter is under review as a journal article in an Anthropology journal.