ABSTRACT
A burgeoning literature on young people and media consumption in the West has not been matched by similar studies about young people in India or its South Asian neighbors. Published studies on this topic, which will be explored in the opening sections of this chapter, tend to concentrate on urban middle-class Generation Y youth or on the educational importance of technology for rural populations. Issues such as pleasure and participation through media consumption are only mentioned in passing. Yet the rapid neoliberalization of broadcast media and film in India as well as the erstwhile expansion of its middle classes since the 1990s has given rise to a variety of myths about “Indian” youth. Their consumption habits, educational prowess, and aptitude for information technology have been discussed in articles on the new “call center” crews and dance studios. But questions about the other India or Indias remain unanswered—how are working class young people changing their habits in relation to media, work, and consumption? Are young rural migrants to cities and youth in rural areas of India doing the same things and aspiring to the same sorts of lives as their urban counterparts? And how are these aspirations bound up with the media representations that are so ubiquitous in cities? Via snapshots from a decade of interview-based qualitative research, and contemporary literature on the diverse contexts inhabited by children, young people, and their parents in India today, the discussion in this chapter will contextualize the complex lives and experiences of different groups and classes of young people in South Asia's most populous nation. To begin with, it is worth asking how this chapter sits with the volume as a whole and why its title contains no reference to Generation X.
