Drawing on twelve months of fieldwork in suburban Hyderabad, this paper explores the double binds experienced by middle-class young women as they attempt to meet the competing demands of ‘respectable’ and ‘fashionable’ femininity. For middle-class women, respectability requires purposeful movement, demure posture and modest clothing when in public, as well as avoidance of lower-class spaces where men congregate. Status can, however, also be achieved through more revealing fashionable clothing and consumption in elite public spaces. Whilst respectability for some sections of the middle class necessitates avoidance of even platonic relationships with the opposite sex, upper middle-class informants encourage heterosociality and for some upper middle-class and elite youth pre-marital romance is a form of ‘fashion’ due to its location in high-status spaces of leisure and consumption. The tensions described in this paper reveal the fragmentation of Hyderabad's middle class and the barriers to social mobility experienced by women for whom the relationship between legitimate cultural capital and feminine modesty is becoming increasingly complex.
Amid growing calls for education to be more globally oriented, scholars have asked how best to educate for global citizenship and what truly cosmopolitan learning looks like. This article draws on ethnographic fieldwork in middle‐class Hyderabad, India to highlight the overlap between the cosmopolitan competencies promoted in schools and uppezr middle‐class cultural capital, and to question whether it is possible to legitimate and institutionalize cosmopolitanism as merit within education systems without furthering class reproduction.
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