Ego, balance and sophistication: experiences of schooling as self-making strategies in middle-class Kochi

This article examines the relationship between private schooling and the middle classes in urban India. It complicates the argument that private schools have become spaces in which young people come to see themselves less as representatives of one ethnic or caste community and more as indices of their own family’s economic standing and as members of a class group. I argue that a closer look at the way in which students experience and narrativise private schooling reveals a much less straightforward process. Schools, I argue, are mobilised by youth as flexible tools in complex and competing strategies to construct a middle social space for themselves. The article seeks to address a dearth of research on the complex and severely contested processes of transformation of the self implicated in strategies towards urban educational opportunities.