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''I'll Be Like Water'': Gender, Class, and Flexible Aspirations at the Edge of India's Knowledge Economy
Gowri Vijayakumar Gender & Society 2013 27: 777 originally published online 26 August 2013 DOI: 10.1177/0891243213499445 The online version of this article can be found at: http://gas.sagepub.com/content/27/6/777

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ILL BE LIKE WATER: Gender, Class, and Flexible Aspirations at the Edge of Indias Knowledge Economy
GOWRI VIJAYAKUMAR University of California, Berkeley, USA
This article examines the ways in which ideologies of aspiration, inclusion, and womens empowerment associated with Indias globalizing knowledge economy are re-framed by young women workers in a small-town business-process outsourcing (BPO) center two hours outside of Bangalore. Drawing on forty in-depth interviews, I show that, in contrast to their managers expectations of individualized work aspirations, women workers draw on both individualistic and domestically embedded articulations of the future in a formulation I call flexible aspirations. In articulating flexible aspirations, they draw both on the gendered language of neoliberal self-improvement for the global economy and on the nationalist ideal of rural middle-class feminine domesticity. While insisting that the future is uncertain, young women use flexible aspirations as a symbolic resource to distinguish themselves from both old-fashioned village housewives and promiscuous urban call center girls. I briefly compare these flexible aspirations to young men workers strategic articulations of aspiration, which, rather than relinquishing hopes to an unpredictable future, adjust plans to fit known social limitations. This article, drawing on feminist interpretations of Bourdieu, extends the literature on the Indian middle classes by analyzing young womens aspirations in non-elite social locations. It builds on this feminist scholarship by highlighting ways in which young women use articulations of flexible aspiration as a mode of gendered class distinction.

Keywords: aspiration, middle classes, information technology, India, globalization AUTHORS NOTE: My thanks to Raka Ray, Marion Fourcade, Peter Evans, Aihwa Ong, Laura Enriquez, Ann Swidler, Margaret Frye, Caitlin Fox-Hodess, Beth Pearson, and the members of the Berkeley Sociology of Gender Workshop for their support and comments, as well as to Joya Misra and the anonymous reviewers at Gender & Society. This research was supported by a Graduate Research Fellowship from the National Science Foundation. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Gowri Vijayakumar, University of California, Berkeley, 410 Barrows Hall, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA; e-mail: gowri@berkeley.edu.
GENDER & SOCIETY, Vol. 27 No. 6, December 2013 777-798 DOI: 10.1177/0891243213499445 2013 by The Author(s) 777
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Whatever happens, in society, if youve studied a little, you can achieve something . . . you can make the future however you want. Whatever type of husband I get, Ill adjust. Its enough if they [my in-laws] give me a little support in working. Id really like to work outside. . . . If that happens, Ill adjust in every other way. . . . The good thing about me is that I adjust to everyone. . . . Im like water. Ill be just like water. Lakshmi, 22, rural BPO worker

Much has been made of Indias postliberalization transformation into a globalized knowledge economy, linked to growing middle-class consumerism, neoliberal1 individualism, and what Thomas Friedman (2010) calls a politics of aspiration. The growing literature on the Indian middle classes (Deshpande 1998, 2003; Donner 2011; Fernandes 2006; Fernandes and Heller 2006; Ganguly-Scrase and Scrase 2009; Mazzarella 2004; Ray and Baviskar 2011) provides an important corrective to such exaggerated accounts of globalization and neoliberalization by pointing to the class, caste, and gender dynamics through which understandings of the global and the national are produced and experienced. Yet the politics of aspiration require deeper examination. This article undertakes this examination with an extended focus on aspirations, seen through a gendered lens, in small-town India. The scholarship on the Indian middle classes emphasizes aspiration as a mediating force that binds the lower strata of the middle classes to the elite, high-caste urban professionals benefiting most from economic liberalization and the transnational knowledge economy (Fernandes 2006; Fernandes and Heller 2006). For these authors, as in this article, aspiration refers to a longing not only for social mobility or a level of educational or occupational attainment, but also for a global Indian class identity that anchors these desires and is specific to Indias new urban transnational elites (Radhakrishnan 2009, 2011). Yet, with the empirical literature on the Indian middle classes still limited (Ray and Baviskar 2011, 9), there is a need for more sustained examination of aspirations and their role in everyday life, particularly among non-elite young women. Here, I show how young womens aspirations center on an ethic of flexibility and openness to whatever the future may bring, claiming both the autonomy and worldliness of modern women and the family embeddedness of rural middle-class domesticity. In India and elsewhere, young womens aspirations have taken on increasing significance as symbolic of the social benefits of liberalization

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and globalization, a phenomenon that feminist scholars have criticized (e.g., McRobbie 2007). I draw on these feminist perspectives, particularly those engaging with Pierre Bourdieu, to examine small-town, upwardly mobile Indian womens aspirations, using a set of 40 in-depth interviews with young workers at the edge of Indias offshore information technology (IT) industry. In a small-town IT office emblematic of the inclusiveness of the globalized IT elite, managers strive to cultivate aspiration for urban IT jobs in their workers, while simultaneously asserting workers outsider status. From workers perspective, however, it is clear that the possibilities for aspiration are circumscribed. Instead of fully adopting aspirations to a career in the urban IT industry, workers engage in what Bourdieu (1984, 471) calls the practical anticipation of objective limits, articulating aspirations as an element of a classed and gendered small-town habitus. This practical anticipation operates differently for men and women workers. Women workers, who anticipate changes in their lives after marriage, and have access to both an individualistic corporate ideology of self-actualization in the liberalized IT industry and a nationalist ideology of rural middle-class domesticity and dedication to family well-being, shuttle back and forth between these poles in a formulation I call flexible aspirations.2 Cultivating flexibility in relation to both possibilities allows young women to claim access both to a corporate, modern, Western persona, with knowledge of the outside world, and to the traditionally virtuous life of a middle-class housewife. They distinguish themselves both from their mothers generation of confined, sheltered, rural housewives and the urban trope of the promiscuous call center girl, emphasizing their own feminine adaptability to circumstances. Men workers, meanwhile, emphasize practical skills and street smarts, skills that align more closely with their production of masculinity (Jeffrey 2010), and express their aspirations strategically within known social limitations. Further, because marriage presents a less dramatic change in their future life trajectories, long-term plans and aspirations are more feasible for young men. This article extends the literature on the middle classes in India by highlighting the ways in which aspiration is not simply modeled on elite lifestyles, but is produced as Bourdieus practical anticipation of objective limits within particular gendered small-town lower-middle-class social locations and stages of life. At the same time, I extend feminist approaches to aspiration by showing how, even if the future holds uncertainty, the act of aspiring itself can help produce gendered class distinction in this smalltown setting. Flexibility allows for dynamism and future change while expressing a demure, pliable small-town femininity. A focus on young women is particularly relevant here, because elite representations of the
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knowledge economys inclusive potential often hinge on representations of young womens empowerment. ASPIRATION AND INDIAS DIVIDED MIDDLE CLASSES: TOWARD ASPIRATION AS GENDERED CLASS DISTINCTION Deshpande (1998) marks a distinction between Indias old middle class of elite functionaries of the developmental socialist state and the new middle class, which emerges from the old, but looks down on the socialist state in favor of the globalized market. Gendered notions of the family play a key role in producing class distinction for the elite of the new middle classes (Chatterjee 1989; Fernandes 2000, 2006), celebrating a global Indian, respectable femininity that is both globally savvy and embedded in nationalist norms of the heterosexual, patriarchal family (Radhakrishnan 2009, 2011). Most scholars of the new middle classes in India distinguish between an elite professional group, beneficiaries of the liberalized knowledge economy, and the rest of the new middle classes, who benefit far less (Fernandes 2006; Ganguly-Scrase and Scrase 2009). Scholars argue that aspiration mediates this disjuncture. Central to the ethos of the new middle classes, and of the IT industry in particular, is the promise of inclusion and merit-based advancement (Fernandes and Heller 2006; Radhakrishnan 2011; Upadhya 2011). This ideology masks the elite class and caste position of the workforce of the transnational knowledge economy, while sustaining its dominance by encouraging new kinds of aspirations for the non-elite. For example, Bhatt, Murty, and Ramamurthy (2010) demonstrate the ways in which elite Indian returned migrants produce class: They hold up the promise of inclusion to their domestic servants as a mark of their own modernity. Being the object of aspiration, and offering (limited) inclusion, especially to women, becomes a way of reasserting eliteness. Less has been written about the subjects of this aspiration, particularly lower-middle-class women. Sociologists in the United States and the United Kingdom have long insisted that educational and occupational aspirations are shaped by social dynamics (e.g., MacLeod 1987; Schneider 1999), including gender. While early studies on gender differences in aspiration (e.g., Garrison 1979; Laws 1976; Marini 1978; Marini and Greenberger 1978) found lower aspirations among women, by the 1990s and 2000s, womens educational aspirations were higher than mens (Reynolds and Burge 2008), and occupational aspirations had increased and diversified, though still tending toward stereotypically feminine jobs
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(Francis 2002; Shu and Marini 1998, 2008). In the 2000s, these shifts coincided with a growing global policy emphasis on girls education, unconstrained choice, and aspiration as symbols of progress in the neoliberal era (Gill 2008; McRobbie 2007; Ringrose 2007; Pomerantz, Raby, and Stefanik 2013). Feminist scholars have problematized this discourse of the global girl and economically empowered woman. For Skeggs (2004), social mobility and individuality are resources that are unequally distributed; some groupsthat is, working-class womenmust remain fixed so that others can move (Massey 1994). Yet, at the same time, women and girls play a key symbolic role in the global economy: Upward mobility becomes a central trope of class/ification, where women and the qualities ascribed to femininity have a central place (Walkerdine 2003, 242). Thus, as Shu and Marini (2008, 29) point out, futuristic orientation acts as an effective means of social control, especially among those most disadvantaged in the present. In conversation with Bourdieu, feminist scholars have articulated alternatives to these gendered tropes of upward mobility. Bourdieu (1984, 65) sees aspiration as grounded in a class habitus; it is a realistic relation to what is possible, founded on and therefore limited by power. Engaging with Bourdieu, McNay (2003, 146) argues that actions constantly anticipate the future within a social field; the less mobility one has in the social field, the more resignation, so that the most oppressed groups in society oscillate between fantasy and surrender. Aspirations are thus never unconstrained, passive reflections of elite lifestyles: They must be understood within specific social locations, and emerge from the interplay of desire and objective possibilities. I use these critiques to point to the production of aspirations as an element of the class habitus of small-town middle-class young people. These aspirations cannot simply be derived from the representations of inclusiveness celebrated by elites: Articulations of aspirations for the future often express conflicts and constraints in the present (Frye 2012; St Clair and Benjamin 2011). Nor are aspirations static; they change throughout the life cycle in relation to various life experiences (Shu and Marini 2008). This is particularly true for young women in small-town India, who, in a patriarchal social structure, even if they do discuss high occupational aspirations, do not know whether they will be permitted to work after marriage or not. Jeffrey and colleagues work (Jeffrey 2010; Jeffrey, Jeffery, and Jeffery 2004, 2008) focuses on young, rural Jat men, who, in the face of limited urban opportunities and their own aversion to traditional agricultural work, resort to timepass, a particularly masculine
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hanging out, as they wait for opportunities. For young women, however, such timepass is inaccessible because of its threat to feminine virtue. Potential life changes after marriage play a greater role in womens aspirations than mens (Shu and Marini 2008). Thus, aspiration takes shape as a kind of feminine flexibility and readiness to adjust to both patriarchal, small-town family life and work in the knowledge economy. This flexibility allows young women to distinguish themselves from both an older generation of rural middle-class housewives and a new wave of impure, individualistic urban women, and to present themselves both as aspiring individuals and respectable daughters. BACKGROUND: THE PROMISE OF INCLUSION AND THE RURAL BPO3 Indias economic liberalization and the rapid growth of IT hubs such as Bangalore have ignited new political imaginaries of a globalized Indian knowledge economy that promises inclusion and social mobilityeven though the IT industry employs less than 1 percent of Indias working population (Census of India 2001; National Association of Software and Service Companies [NASSCOM] 2010). The rural BPO, or businessprocess outsourcing project, within which my interviews took place, epitomizes this promise of inclusion. One of a small but growing group of Indian IT outsourcing centers outside of a major urban center, it explicitly aims to assimilate rural India into the knowledge economy by employing small-town young people unable or unwilling to migrate to urban areas. Central to the rural BPO program, however, is a contradiction: While it promises inclusion to small-town youth, it also affirms their essential difference from urban elites. In response to rising wages and attrition in urban areas (NASSCOM and McKinsey & Company 2005), industry leaders have turned to smaller towns in part as a fresh source of low-cost labor for activities that require less English proficiency and cosmopolitan cultural capital. The resulting back offices of back offices take on work subcontracted from urban IT centers. Rural BPOs take on work considered of lower value than call center work: data entry, digital conversion of documents, or website updates. Typical salaries at such offices are half or less than half those of comparable positions in urban centers. Rural BPOs thus promise inclusion in the knowledge economys benefits while simultaneously profiting from rural-urban inequalities. Ideologically, rural BPO projects represent a hybrid of an older brand of state-driven social development programming and newer models of
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knowledge for development through the liberalized market (Radhakrishnan 2007). Subsidized by state governments,4 rural BPOs epitomize the close relationship between the IT industrys elite architects and the developmental state (Evans 1995). As their employment can be framed as womens empowerment, women have become central to positioning rural BPOs on this middle ground, as both social development and profitable enterprise through access to untapped low-cost labor (especially since young women are less likely to migrate to cities than are men). Media reports about rural BPOs inevitably showcase smiling, empowered young women as the knowledge economys latest social achievement, and articles on the website of the National Association of Software and Service Companies (NASSCOM) celebrate ruralshoring as an initiative that ensures empowerment, in which women take the lead. Though NASSCOM estimated the existence of just 50 rural BPOs in India, mentions of rural BPOs were peppered throughout a 2010 impact report, appearing in sections on generation of employment, contributing to regional development across India, impact on rural areas, and bridging the gender divide. Focusing on young women workers in rural BPOs thus provides insights into key instabilities within the imaginaries of social mobility associated with the Indian IT sector and the transnational knowledge economy. DATA AND METHODS Two empirical exercises ground the claims presented here. First, I analyzed 62 media articles about rural BPOs published in English-language newspapers between 2007 and 2010, reviewed publicly available information about the rural BPO program, and conducted interviews with 10 managers and government officials.5 Second, I conducted 40 in-depth interviews in the summers of 2010 and 2011 with 40 interviewees26 women and 14 menwho work at a rural BPO in a small town I call Chikkahalli, a twohour drive from Bangalore. Chikkahalli is a predominantly Hindu town with several major temples. Its location on a major highway gives its residents some familiarity with urban lifestyles, and many interviewees had seen its increasing urbanization in their lifetimes. Interviews were conducted at the office itself, in break rooms or outside, and were thus limited to between 25 minutes and an hour in length. The interviews were evenly distributed among all three projects at the center, which involve different skill levels and educational backgrounds. Interviews were conducted in Kannada (39 respondents) and English (one respondent).6 All but two men
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and eight women interviewees were unmarried; all but two (Muslim) women interviewees were Hindu. While I did not collect systematic data on caste, most interviewees seemed to be from landowning or business castes. All interviews were digitally recorded and then translated and transcribed in English. Interviews were semistructured, prompting interviewees to discuss their aspirations for future education and employment, their experiences working at the BPO and their families reactions to their work there, the uses of their BPO salaries, and their general views about gender relations and social change in their hometowns as well as in Bangalore. As a secondgeneration Indian American woman only slightly older than my respondents but more visibly urban, upper-middle-class, and English speaking, I became an object of curiosity and even aspiration. In an office context where English skills were one of the strongest indicators of rural or urban origins, my speaking in Kannada slightly eased the tensions of this social distance, but did not erase my privilege. The rural BPO proved an ideal research setting precisely because it was premised on the assumption of aspiration. Rural BPO entrepreneurs assumed that educated youth in small towns aspired to the glamour of urban call centers, and aimed to tap this aspiration. Almost all interviewees, both men and women, came from the old rural middle classes, with fathers either working in clerical and government jobs or owning land, or some combination of the two; 35 of 40 had mothers who were primarily housewives. As managers pointed out, the majority of workers had higher education levels than their parents, and saw themselves as distinct from an older generation they often dismissed as village people, not educated like themselves. Yet, with little cultural and social capital to use as leverage in the urban knowledge economy and, for young women, imminent changes in life after marriage, aspiring to urban jobs remained a complex proposition, and a job at a rural BPO provided an appealing middle ground. In the next two sections I lay out two ideologies, embedded and individualistic, that shape young womens flexible aspirations, and then discuss the interview data. Mobility and Constraint: Women's Embeddedness in the Patriarchal Family In India in general, levels of womens employment outside the home at middle levels of education are low (Kingdon 1997). In Chikkahalli, in line with urban patterns of employment, the official work participation rate is 14 percent for women, compared to 55 percent for men (Census of India

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2001).7 For my women interviewees, then, work outside the home was not a given. Further, opportunities for spatial mobility were largely restricted to moving in with in-laws after marriage, in line with typically rural patterns.8 Marriage represented a major rupture in their life trajectories, and with arranged marriage the dominant practice, most had limited control over whom they married and where they would move after marriage. Even if their parents currently allowed them to work outside the home, as part of their new families, they would act in relation to their in-laws preferences. My women interviewees often insisted that life after marriage was out of their hands, impossible to predict. These social patterns work through and in relation to a nationalist ideology that enshrines womens ultimate responsibility for domestic purity. Chatterjee (1989) describes the nationalist resolution of the womens question as assigning to Indian women the task of protecting the purity of the home, the source of Indian moral superiority over the economically dominant West. For young women in Chikkahalli, this ideal took shape in the high value placed on feminine domesticity, middle-class purity, and pliability, embodied in their mothers, most of whom were housewives (see also Lukose 2009). Within this ideological framework, future goals would focus on children and family, not on ones individual well-being. Rustic Youth to Knowledge Professional: Managerial Expectations of Individualism The idea of the aspiring, rural outsider is central to the ideology of the rural BPO. On the one hand, workers are always rural. One CEO (of a different rural BPO) put it bluntly: If you dress a donkey as a horse, its still a donkey. The rural worker can be paid less than an urban worker, and suggests a particular set of (stereotypically feminine) moral orientations valuable to the knowledge economy. Entrepreneurs of rural BPOs speak of rural people, especially women, as innocent and dedicated; they have not been spoiled by Indias rapid economic growth story (Ribeiro 2010). At the same time, managers expect workers to aspire to inclusion, improve themselves, develop an entrepreneurial personality, and become transformed, as one CEO suggested, from rustic youth into knowledge professionals. The Chikkahalli BPO, where I conducted interviews, was particularly concerned with supporting the long-term professional development and education of its workers, and the office manager strove to convince parents of the benefits of young women furthering their educations.

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Frustrations emerged, however, when managers, mostly young, urban men, found that women workers failed to aspire to self-improvement in the way they expected. As Srihari put it, Sometimes we . . . try to motivate them, saying . . . you should not settle down with this job. You should try looking for better opportunities. Women who might not aspire to career advancement or continued work after marriage lacked this motivation. One manager noted that, in a moment of irritation with a woman employee who continued to repeat the same mistake, he exclaimed, Dont you want to learn? Or do you just want to get married and sit at home? The aspiring outsider was inherently unfit for the challenges of an urban BPO environment, but was expected to want to learn, as though her goal were an urban career. In defining their aspirations, my interviewees invoked both embedded and individualistic ideals. Yet class position and marital status structured these articulations. More embedded articulations of aspiration appeared most clearly at the social extremes of my sample: Poor, married women were most likely to avoid discussing their own aspirations and focus on their childrens well-being, while wealthier single women emphasized their parents wishes and privileges over their own. Individualistic aspirations appeared most often among women who saw themselves as more disconnected and socially distant from their parents. In the following sections, I remain attentive to these differences among my interviewees. Flexible Aspirations: Embeddedness, Individualism, and Adjusting to the Unknown For Parvathi, 32, one of the oldest women at the BPO and of one of the least wealthy backgrounds, work at the rural BPO is a way of serving her family better. Her BPO salary plays a crucial role in her childrens education, and she has no plans to continue her own education, like many of her colleagues. She sees education as a potentially corrupting force: If youre doing education . . . you start having a lot of desires. . . . I want to do this, I want to do that. You lose interest in your children, too. For Parvathi, BPO work bears no particular value on its own; her only aspirations for the future lie with her children. In Parvathis formulation, individualized aspiration threatens womens morality and the ultimate goal of achieving social mobility for her children. Her family-oriented aspirations suggest an embedded sense of self that for many other interviewees, represents an older generation of rural women. Unlike Parvathi, most respondents insist that they will not remain at the rural BPO, and instead expect to pursue further education. Managers
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encourage workers to take correspondence courses or plan for higher degrees. Among my respondents, 19 of 26 women, and 12 of 14 men, describe some form of further education they would like to pursue. Most, when discussing these educational opportunities, speak of skill improvement and better jobs some day. Work at the rural BPO itself is also a way of accumulating knowledgecommunication skills, familiarity with office moresto open up future opportunities. Workers are particularly preoccupied with English and its connotations of urban cosmopolitanism, both of which they can access through the rural BPO. I often heard stories of transformation associated with working at the office and encountering this urban cosmopolitanism for the first time, of initial missteps with English now proudly replaced with basic conversational skills. These educational and occupational aspirations, however, come with a contradiction: All but three of the 17 unmarried women respondents say they are unsure of whether they will continue working after they get married, and will work or study only if their husbands families send them. Pushpa offers one explanation of the seeming disjuncture between this uncertainty and the concreteness of expressed aspirations. A 23-year-old unmarried woman from an educated and wealthy family in Chikkahalli, Pushpa finds it easy to articulate her planned trajectory: She wants to obtain an MBA, and later work in human resources at a large company. But when the question of marriage comes up, she reframes the future in vaguer terms:
I asked [my family] if I could do my MBA. But after that, that is left for lets see about that later. . . . Theres nothing like I absolutely have to do a job. But for this generation, for this situation, education is the most important thing in my life.

Pushpa articulates a concrete individualized aspiration without difficulty, but talking about her future in more detail reveals a more open-ended account. While her first claim to aspire to an HR job suggests a plan to continue work in the IT sector, her second reflects an insistence on the unpredictability of the future. The only woman member of my sample to have lived in Bangalore, Pushpa returned after some time there because she perceived it to be immoral. For Pushpa, as for many others, there are religious undertones to her sense of adjustment as morality; Pushpa and her family are deeply religious Hindus and their main pilgrimage site is close to Chikkahalli. She prefers to stay with my parents and listen to everything they say, including with regards to marriage. Within this domestically embedded future, her aspiration for education holds intrinsic
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value: It distinguishes her as a wealthy, modern woman. Yet her uncertainty about future work distinguishes her from comparably well-off Bangalore families, for whom educated womens work after marriage would likely be a given. For unmarried women like Pushpa, marriage appears as an unpredictable future event.9 Women who are married, meanwhile, also talk about the contingency of their situations, which largely depend on their husbands work. For Pooja, 26, who is married to a man with a comfortable income, it is important that her work serve purely as a mode of selfimprovement: If Im at home empty, all of the studying Ive done will go to waste. . . . If I do this, at least I can improve somehow. Money, she claims, plays no role in her job: You have it today and you dont have it tomorrow. . . . Love is its own wealth. Here again, improvement is key to her sense of self, yet the improvement has no specific goal: In the future, she says, she will decide whether to continue work or not, depending on the location of her husbands job. Like Pooja and Pushpa, Nandini, 23, comes from a relatively privileged background. She wants to study for a masters degree in Bangalore. Yet she, like Pushpa, has educational aspirations but no specific work aspirations, and is unsure whether she will work after marriage. She comes from an educated family; though she has more schooling than either of her parents, both of them have attended secondary school. For Nandini, educated people describes the class group to which she belongs, distinct from village people: For them its just get up, eat, sleep, work in the fields, but in families like hers, Educated people pursue education. Her work and aspirations define a particular class of educated people who are equipped to function in the modern world. At the same time, though, just as she sees herself as distinct from village people, she also sees herself as distinct from people in the city. When I ask her what she thinks about changes happening in Bangalore, she responds:
If girls are moving ahead, in a good way, thats correct. But now were seeing [something else]drinking. Weve been seeing it on the news for the last few days. Girls in the road, with men, making noise . . . theyre getting spoiled. . . . Girls used to be a certain way, and now theyre changing.

Nandini, Pushpa, and Pooja all have a relatively privileged position within small-town social structure, and articulating flexibility and adaptability to their families future marriage decisions, or Poojas husbands job decisions, poses no major risk to this privilege. For other interviewees,

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slightly more social distance from their parents forms the basis for slightly more individualistic expressions of aspiration. Annapoorna, 20, was soon to be married when I met her. Having attained a high school education when neither of her parents attended school, Annapoorna sees her parents as relics of an outdated past and is much more reluctant than Pushpa to value honoring her parents wishes. In her view, education is important not as a way of serving the family but as a way of asserting autonomy as a woman, to stand on ones feet. Comparing her generation to her mothers, she notes:
Back then, if you just said husband, that was enough. Theyd be afraid. Now theres nothing like that! Im equal to you, arent I? Why should I be scared? . . . Women have gotten enough courage to speak now, in this generation. Women speak up. Theyve studied, so they understand how to speak to their husbands, and what to say about what issues. Theres been a big change.

Yet even Annapoorna takes on this ability to stand on her feet with ambivalence. While she celebrates womens ability to use education to claim a voice in the domestic sphere, she insists that, despite the fact that women have attained higher levels of education, they should still be like a wife and do the work that a woman does. She sees home as a place where she must preserve traditional culture, for example, by wearing flowers in her hair that she might not wear to the office, and she insists that she is a village girl. Her aspirations for the future are open-ended: She is unsure of whether or not her in-laws will allow her to work while she is in Bangalore, though she hopes that they will. Shanti, an unmarried 22-year-old in the process of completing her high school degree alongside her BPO work, also comes from a less privileged family. Shantis father is a farmer and her mother a housewife. Her parents need her earnings at the BPO, and her value for adjustment10 reflects, in part, long experience with financial uncertainty and a responsibility to contribute. Her own insistence on the importance of flexibility and adjustment thus reflects not only the possibility of a future marriage but also the precariousness of her familys financial situation. Highlighting the religious undertones to an ethic of adjustment, Shanti draws on Hindu concepts of fate and karma to describe her future:
Wherever I go Ill adjust. Even if I have a plan, it wont happen as I thought it would. If I say I absolutely have to end up in Bangalore, it wont happen. If I say I want to be somewhere else, it wont happen. Whatever my fate

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isthats it; I have to adjust. Whatever happens, you have to live with it. Thats my view.

This kind of awareness of social disadvantages sometimes manifests itself in an explicit expression of social distance from old-fashioned village parents. Lalitha, 22, with her high school education, has studied further than both of her parents, a post office worker and a housewife, and also works to support her familys income. When Lalitha began work at the BPO, however, she felt that her parents had failed her by not ensuring that she learned the English communication skills necessary for work in the transnational knowledge economy. She relates her parents lack of understanding of the importance of education to their own limited education. She draws a sharp distinction between her mothers staying at home and her own knowledge of the world, contrasting her mothers isolation and naivet to her own feeling of self-sufficiency outside the home. Many interviewees express the same dichotomy, commenting that staying at home precludes knowledge of how society works. This contrast between the present and the past, between knowledge of the world and the previous generations confinement to the home, helps Lalitha use her work in the knowledge economy to claim a uniquely modern position for herself. While she does not necessarily expect to continue working she says her future, too, depends on her future husbandher work, education, and aspirations allow her to construct a contrast between herself and her mother. Practical Skills, Street Smarts, and Strategic Aspirations For my women interviewees, practical anticipation of objective limits responds to the changes married life will bring. For men interviewees, the future is less open-ended: The social limitations they face now will likely remain in place regardless of whom they marry. Thus, ideals of feminine flexibility and self-improvement play less of a role in their articulations of aspiration. Instead, the young men I interviewed articulate strategic aspirations that fit within existing social limitations and privileges. Gopal, 26, a relatively wealthy unmarried man, was perhaps the most confident person I interviewed. He nonchalantly rejects ideologies of education and self-improvement as relevant to his life. Instead, he takes pride in his air of a man-about-town. Rather than seeing education as a stepping stone to a better job or further study, Gopal sees it as a way to wander around or hang out and enjoy before he decides to settle down and start a business. The cityand educationhold no particular mystique for him:
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Its not like studying is the only way to succeed. You only really need school for communication knowledge. Thats it. You can do a job with that, make money with that. But if you dont have that, you can still make money . . . you just need a kind of . . . knowledge. You have to know how to do things.

Rather than relying on education as a mode of personal betterment, Gopal needs it only for communication, and practical knowledge is what will get him the good life he desires. Attaining higher levels of education, previously impossible for my women interviewees, holds less sacred value for Gopal, whose father is a tenth-grade-educated businessman. For Gopal, street smartsemerging from his own relatively privileged social positionare what matter. His aspirations for the future are strategic, based on the resources his family has to offer him. He, like his older brother and his father, plans to start a business. This relative lack of uncertainty about the future also emerges from young mens relative spatial mobility compared to young women. Because many of the young men I interviewed have lived in Bangalore and attempted to support themselves there, they have come into direct contact with the limits of the ideology of individualistic skill building for social mobility in the knowledge economy, and must adjust their aspirations to these limits. Amit, 24, comes from a less privileged background than Gopal, and, despite his education, he discovered his lack of what he calls, in corporatized terminology, soft skillsways of speaking and dressing, and urban social networkswhen he traveled to Bangalore to work. He was unhappy enough there to return to Chikkahalli, and is now less likely to believe in educations sacred value. In his view, it is more useful for small-town men to direct their attention to more accessible forms of entrepreneurialism within the limits of social structure. He tells the story of a famous sweets seller who became rich through pure dedication. He didnt even study up to first grade, Amit says. Its simple. He worked hard. Coming from a less wealthy background than Gopal, Amit experiences some pressures analogous to the ones the women interviewees face; he, too, faces both embedded and individualistic pressures shaping his aspirations. His father, a government employee, died when Amit was young, and he feels a deep responsibility to support his mother. He is just as likely as his women colleagues to blend discussions of his familyEverything I do is for themwith an insistence on fulfilling individualized personal goalsIm set on [getting married and building a house] in my life. I will do it. Yet Amit, rather than insisting on his flexibility, responds to these
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pressures by articulating aspirations he expects he can achieve. He recognizes the limits of his small-town origins and constructs alternative visions of the future to managers insistence that he look for a better urban job. He hopes to either pursue a government job, like his father, or stay in Chikkahalli and start a business. He already has a side business as a food distributor, so the aspiration is not vague or disconnected from his current social circumstances. Without the uncertainty of being allowed to work or not in a future marriage, concrete long-term aspirations are more available to him than they are to his women colleagues, and so he strategically identifies aspirations that he knows he can attain. CONCLUSION This article has traced young womens articulations of flexible aspirations, which draw both on individualistic and domestically embedded ideological frameworks and anticipate future changes after marriage, and stand in contrast to young mens more strategic aspirations that respond to their immediate social circumstances. In these flexible aspirations, individualistic future goals hold intrinsic value as a classed marker of modernity, while an insistence on embeddedness in the family distance them from Westernized impurity. Above all, whatever happens, these young women insist that they will adjust. They thus remain open to unpredictable constraints in the future, while using accounts of flexible aspirationsometimes unrealisticto enact gendered class distinction and feminine adaptability in the present. I have sought to locate my analysis in relation to studies that emphasize aspiration, especially among women, as a force that binds lower and elite fractions of the Indian middle classes. I show that non-elite young womens aspirations do not simply mirror elite self-representations but must instead be understood as produced within a setting of rapid generational change, and of a social structure that leaves the future after marriage more unknown than for young men, limiting the possibilities for future plans. In this context, flexibility is a key virtue, and flexible accounts of both embedded and individualistic aspirations work to distance young women both from the archetypal village housewife of a previous generation and the archetypal urban call center girl. These articulations resemble the kinds of hybrid global Indian femininities elite IT workers express (Radhakrishnan 2009, 2011), but rather than technical expertise and global savvy, here, aspiration and social mobility serve as essential symbolic

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resources. My interviews thus help to extend theories of the new Indian woman to a broader section of the Indian middle classes, and illuminate both continuities and discontinuities between urban and small-town middle-class femininities in liberalizing India. More generally, they highlight ways in which class distinction processes are themselves gendered. My approach to aspiration draws on feminist analyses of the ways in which ideologies of individualism and self-improvement in a neoliberal era celebrate upwardly mobile, non-elite young women, even as they entrench those womens outsider status and are often impossible to achieve (Adkins and Lury 1999; McRobbie 2007; Skeggs 2004; Walkerdine 2003). McNay (2003, 145), emphasizing the temporal nature of Bourdieus habitus, theorizes agency as a constant anticipation of the tendencies of social structure; thus, power relations shape and deform the experience of hope. Engaging with these accounts, I highlight ways in which young women cultivate flexibility as a response to their small-town middle-class social location, as well as their stage in life and relationship to future marriage (Shu and Marini 2008). At the same time, my interviewees do adopt accounts of individualized aspiration selectively, as a way of producing gendered class distinction. If aspiration is not available to these young women as a guide to future action, it is at least available to them as a gendered symbolic resource.11 Rural BPOs are a new entrant to Indias offshore IT scene: There are still relatively few of them, and the IT industry itself employs only a tiny proportion of Indias working population. Yet, as sites where the ideology of aspiration is selectively used and reshaped, rural BPOs provide an important site for an examination of the limits of the urban elite sector of the Indian middle classes and its promise of inclusion. My respondents flexible aspirations are not necessarily expressions of resistance to these elite representations; rather, they place them in exactly the kind of outsider/insider position that makes them valuable to the knowledge economy as rural knowledge workers, both aspirers to the urban IT sector and permanent outsiders to it. Ultimately, then, flexible aspirations may help to sustain the symbolic and practical value of the docile woman worker in a flexible economy, and the homology of my interviewees small-town identities with the lower-value sectors of the IT industry appears, as Bourdieu (1984, 234) puts it, a miracle of predestination. These interviews provide a response to the ideology of the aspiring, entrepreneurial Third World young woman in the global knowledge economy by highlighting the classed and gendered social structures within which aspirations are articulated and lived. Yet, in a setting of

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social change and neoliberal restructuring, where ambition is celebrated, aspiration can become a resource. McRobbie (2007) insists that, around the world, institutional emphasis on girls educational and economic capacity represents a post-feminist sexual contract in which girls give up collective politics. While my interviewees certainly do not espouse any collective politics, however, they do represent a shift from a norm of little to no education for girls to a college degree and a job within the space of a generation. The relevance of this shift in their everyday lives is clear when they insist on their fundamental difference from their mothers generation. In this context, drawing on the symbolic resources of a dominant ideology of womens empowerment and aspiration, even if it is narrowly individualistic, may allow young women space to challenge some aspects of patriarchal social structure in the short term, as Annapoornas insistence on womens newfound ability to stand on their feet and speak up suggests. They use ideals of rural middle-class domesticity to critique neoliberal individualism, and neoliberal individualism to critique domesticity. While these young womens flexible articulations of the future are never separate from gendered social dynamics, they may still create some space for maneuver. NOTES
1. I use the term neoliberal to emphasize the specific location of my data in Indias liberalized economy after the early 1990s. I understand the term to encapsulate both liberal ideological assumptions about the self-actualizing, autonomous subject and a particular set of globally dominant economic doctrines that drove economic deregulation and structural adjustment in this period (Harvey 2007). 2. I mean this term to encompass both the aspiration to be flexible and aspirations that are themselves flexible. 3. These centers are commonly referred to as rural BPOs. However, many such BPOs subsidized by the state government in Karnataka are located in small towns not classified as rural in the Census of India (2001). I use rural BPO to refer to the centers involved in the rural BPO program, but I consider small town a more accurate description of Chikkahalli. My interviewees own accounts reflect the hybridity of this small-town status, as they sometimes refer to Chikkahalli as a town in contrast to villages, and sometimes as rural in contrast to Bangalore. 4. Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, and Rajasthan. 5. Three CEOs, three city-based senior staff members, and four on-site managers at a total of four rural BPOs, three in Karnataka and one in the neighboring

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state of Tamil Nadu, as well as one government official at Karnatakas Department of Information Technology, Biotechnology, and Science and Technology. 6. In four cases, I spoke in Kannada and respondents spoke in a mix of Kannada and Telugu. 7. This is despite the fact that womens secondary school enrollment compared to mens enrollment is a relatively higher 76 percent in Karnataka as a whole (Government of Karnataka 2006). 8. India-wide, of the 173 million rural women migrants in 2001 for whom specific motivations were recorded, 79 percent moved because of marriage (Census of India 2001). 9. Rural BPOs have not existed long enough to give a clear sense of whether working there actually changes the prospects for marriage significantly. 10. The English term adjust is commonly incorporated into Kannada, as well as other Indian languages, and is used in a variety of contexts, usually to mean manage to make things work. 11. In similarly considering the uses of aspiration in the present, Baird, Burge, and Reynolds (2008, 947) describe high aspirations as sources of self-esteem in the context of cultures of ambition; St Clair and Benjamin (2011, 502) as determined as much by the needs of the moment as by a genuine expectation for the future, and as performance of policy emphasis on youth ambition; and Frye (2012, 1567) as expressions of moral identity in line with cultural schemas of bright futures.

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Gowri Vijayakumar is a Ph.D. candidate in Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. She is an NSF Graduate Research Fellow and holds an International Dissertation Research Fellowship from the SSRC. Her research interests include gender, class, and globalization.

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