Addressing the Youth: Emerging Youth Publics in Late Colonial Uttarakhand

This essay discusses the formation of political youth publics in the late colonial period in Kumaun and Garhwal in the northwestern Himalayan region of India. More specifically, it highlights forms of address to youth and students in the Hindi press in the period of nationalist mobilization. In published speeches and editorials, educated youth were a target audience for newly fashioned political roles; they were asked to spread regional awareness over rights, to travel to the countryside, to make sacrifices, to make use of time, and to demonstrate their duty towards national causes. Overall, the paper argues that the notion of youth as a form of solidarity and as a distinct public emerged in Uttarakhand at this time, drawing from a regional imaginary. This vocabulary of politics continued in later forms of youth mobilization in the region post-independence

Regional Charisma: The Making of a Student Leader in a Himalayan Hill Town

This article explores the production of “regional charisma” in youth politics in hill towns of Uttarakhand, India. Focusing largely on the narratives and experiences of a group of forward caste student leaders in the hills in the years after statehood (November 2000), the article offers an ethnography of political aspiration. Student leaders worked to cultivate regional charisma through drawing on their caste affiliations and political genealogies, demonstrating localized knowledge, and referring to regional idioms of place. They fashioned themselves as appealing and caring moral leaders, orienting their political practices toward sacrifice and service, while disassociating themselves from perceived corruption in adult party politics. In this way, the article argues that regional charisma is a quality that is sutured in, rather than contradictory to, transactional political repertoires

Youth futures and a masculine development ethos in the regional story of Uttarakhand

Research on the Uttarakhand region, which became a new state in 2000, has focused largely on agrarian livelihoods, religious rituals, development demands, ecological politics and the role of women in regional social movements. This essay discusses another dimension of the regional imaginary—that of a masculine development ethos. Based on ethnographic research and print media sources, this essay focuses on stories, politics, mobilities and imaginations of young men in the years immediately after the achievement of statehood. Despite increased outmigration of youth in search of employment, many young men expressed the dream of maintaining livelihoods in the familiar towns and rural spaces of Uttarakhand, describing their home region as a source of power and agency. In rallies and in print media, young (mostly upper caste) men expressed their disillusionment with the government and the promises of statehood, arguing that their aspirations for development and employment were left unfulfilled. Gendered stories of the region, told in Hindi in rallies and print media, contained references to local places, people and historical events and were produced through local connections and know-how, fostering a regional youth politics. The article argues that Uttarakhand as a region is shaped by the politics of local actors as well as embodied forms of aspiration, affiliation and mobility.IS

Introduction: reconsidering the region in India: mobilities, actors and development politics

In this introduction to a special issue on ‘Reconsidering the Region in India’, we aim to develop a synthetic and theoretically nuanced account of the multifarious ways in which the idea of region has been imbricated in diverse spatial, political, cultural and socio-economic configurations. We draw from various bodies of anthropological, geographic and historical literature to elaborate on three themes that we believe are central to understanding contemporary processes of region-making in India: trans-regional mobilities and connections; the actors who produce and perform regional imaginaries; and changing regional politics of development.IS