Escaping India’s culture of education: Migration desires among aspiring middle-class young men

Abstract

Escaping India's culture of education: Migration desires among aspiring middle-class young menThis paper discusses the relationship between student migration and processes of class formation in the southern Indian state of Kerala, with a particular focus on a group of young men from middle-class backgrounds who desire to migrate to Australia as students. It brings back to life data gathered between 2009 and 2010, the heyday of student migration from India to Australia. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork conducted at a recruitment agency that specializes in sending students to Australia, the article is primarily aimed at deepening our understanding of the motives of young men for seeking to migrate as overseas students within the context of their middle-class lives in India.Current research on Indian overseas student migration to Australia has rightly shown that there is an intricate relation between class formation and migration processes (see, e.g., Baas, 2010b). Yet most of this work has tended to focus on the experiences of students already abroad. Research on the link between the formulation of migration-decisions and class dynamics from the perspective of the sending side that sheds light on how young people's decisions to migrate are produced in complex ways, in relation to individual/familial strategies of mobility and ideas of self-realisation, exploration and development, has been slow to emerge. Osella and Gardner (2003: vi) describe as a 'northern bias' still shaping much research on migration. This refers to the preferential focus on the 'receiving places', the English-speaking north in particular, where diasporic communities and This gap arguably reflects what

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