This careful ethnography of the meaning that education has in the lives of young men in rural North India today engages with debates about education on two levels. First, it addresses the role of education in discourses on development, with specific reference to Amartya Sen's assertion that education not only represents a prerequisite for the alleviation of poverty, but also has intrinsic value itself. Second, the ethnography shows how the experience of education is determined by communal identities, caste and religious origin, and local economic standing. Comparing the outcome of educational pursuits and aspirations for members of three different communities in rural Uttar Pradesh—namely, Muslims, members of the locally influential Jat agricultural landholding caste, and young, ex-untouchable Chamars—the authors show how the value of education, if measured in terms of access to resources, economic security, and status, is modified by other factors, in particular, collective networks and histories of migration. While their interlocutors in all three communities agreed with Sen's assertion that education has value in itself, as it is seen as “civilizing,” “modern,” and “progressive,” education is mainly seen as a means to gain salaried employment. In the context of neoliberal restructuring and state disinvestment, these expectations are often frustrated even among the better-off, whose sons join the groups of unemployed young, and not so young, men hanging around on street corners and in tea stalls in larger Indian villages.

Not surprisingly, the ethnography shows how the real value of educational achievements and merit is modified through power relations that reproduce caste privilege, religious communities, gendered identities, and class positions. For a young unemployed Jat man, education can become part of a leisurely, almost aristocratic lifestyle, whereas educated young Chamars may turn into “New Leaders”—political players and mediators in the village. But for the majority of ex-untouchables and for poor Muslims, the kind of education and networking that would make schooling into an asset are out of reach, and they are caught between the cultivated image of the educated man and the need to contribute to the household income.

Having shown that the value of education, which has become part and parcel of development rhetoric, but also of parental aspirations, household budgeting, marriage strategies, and family planning, does not lie in access to gainful employment and upward mobility, the authors move on to discuss the reproduction of inequality through a careful analysis of various sets of relationships of dominance and subordination found in rural India. With their focus on masculinities, they relate these relationships and their transformation in the new era to literature on youth culture, which traditionally is concerned with the way in which education and culture interact in the reproduction of social positions.

Authors such as Paul Willis and Pierre Bourdieu have focused on class, but in the given context, it seems that caste and religious identity create the cultural repertoires within which educational idioms have to be interpreted. Thus, young Muslims may have access to better education in local madrasahs, but they are not able to gain government jobs as the local administration discriminates against them, while young Chamars have access to reserved seats but talk about the humiliation they experience at the hand of teachers and pupils belonging to higher castes at school. Those with fallback strategies, either larger networks or a tradition of craftsmanship, may be able to find alternative meaningful employment, but the vast majority of young villagers belonging to these communities do not make much of their educational achievements.

Are these young villagers, then, in the same position as Willis's London working-class lads, whose background overdetermined their educational histories and whose lack of cultural and social capital leave very little room for alternative masculinities? It seems as if the Indian context is slightly more ambiguous, partly because we are talking about a local version of globalized youth cultures here, and thus a much more self-conscious representation of different appropriate styles and cultural repertoires.

With its attention to detail and local idioms, this book will be of interest South Asianists with an interest in rural transformations and processes of stratification, but it should reach a much wider audience of readers who are interested in education and global youth cultures, a growing field in need of ethnographically founded case studies like the present volume.