Questions of Aspiration have always troubled me. It is central to research with young people and education. Yet, it has left me wondering, “Do only youth from poor and marginalised communities aspire?” Why is the term ‘aspiration’ most often associated with students with an assumed ‘lack’ – of economic, social, geographical, and such privileges? With this tension in mind, I once asked a group of youth in Bastar, the site for my doctoral research, what they see as the value of education. It was a mixed group of youth including those who were in their higher secondary school and also the ones who had decided to leave school after completing grade tenth. One of the youths, a first-year college student, explained, “It will help us be better. ” Upon further asking what she meant by better, Urmila says, “Being educated can be helpful beyond being a means to achieving salaried employment. It can also help us be better farmers. It helps older women to be better traders. Having basic literacy has helped older women like my grandmother to negotiate better for their forest produce. Knowing the measurement system has helped them not get swindled by the non-Adivasi traders from towns.”

In the context of rural Adivasi young people of central India, Dost and Froerer (2021) argue for a “relational approach” to understanding youth aspirations. They analyse the concept of aage badhna (forward movement) in the Adivasi young people’s aspirations in relation to education and social mobility. However, the concept of aage badhna – a forward movement – is a process to achieve aspirations and an “aspiration in itself is tied to a possibility of falling behind” (111). While arguing for the relationality of aspirations and the complexities of structural disadvantages, they show that aspirations of a “better future” are envisaged in close connection to formal schooling. They foreground the importance of education in the future orientations of Adivasi young people. The authors find that the “transformative potential of education” remains a strong force in forming young people’s desire to attain prestigious salaried employment (as opposed to manual work like agriculture) and a better future than their parents’ current social locations. Their work introduces critical juxtapositions of aage badhna and peechhe rehna (forward movement and falling behind) to demonstrate that aspirations are formed in relation and interactions with peers, parents, and educational systems that enable particular forms of respectability and social mobility.

Education, although it does not facilitate the “most desirable possibility of forward movement”– salaried employment, education remains central to young people’s aspirations because it enables them to “reframe accessible viable futures” (Dost and Froerer 2021, 125). They find that schooling for the rural youth in Chhattisgarh, “instead of giving rise to important opportunities for social mobility, leads to a narrowing of young people’s aspirations by progressively channelling ‘forward movement’ toward a limited set of occupations that are not achievable for most villagers” (ibid., 112). The education related aspirations are associated with social status, spatial mobility, and acquiring material things like cement houses, smartphones, and motorcycles. The most aspired occupation of salaried, permanent employment for these young people was a “movement away from reliance on land-based livelihoods and implying the opposite of manual labour” (Dost and Froerer 2021, 114).

In my conversations with Adivasi youths of South Bastar, however, education emerged as more than a pipeline toward salaried employment. Instead, values of education are also envisaged in the form of basic literacy of the entire community that would act as a defence against exploitation by the non-Adivasi settler communities. In these youths’ response towards the value of education, I find that they are acutely aware of the disadvantages created by the state’s paradoxical treatment of Adivasi communities as they articulate that the very processes of integration of Adivasi families into the ‘mainstream’ through developmental schemes in education has worked to sustain the Adivasi communities’ marginalisation. In such a context, education-related ‘wants’ and ‘desires’ among the Adivasi youth always appear in family, community, and collective contexts. For the youths, education is towards a larger goal of overall “betterment” of their everyday work of which agriculture is central.

In this context, my work utilises the concept of relational aspirations to understand Adivasi youths’ efforts in shaping their future. I extend Dost and Froerer’s argument to show that Adivasi youth, although desiring a stable middle-class life, offer a unique critique of the promise of education and its failure to materialise into a desirable future of salaried employment. Instead, the youth find education’s importance in creating avenues for literacy and awareness among Adivasi traders and producers. The youth respondents in my research who have witnessed their elders being exploited, especially their mothers, aunts, and grandmothers, often attribute this to their lack of literacy, along with the caste-based discrimination practised by non-Adivasi traders. The youth explained that not knowing the measurement system and not knowing how to count the currency notes made their mothers (predominant sellers of forest produce and locally grown vegetables) vulnerable at the hands of caste-Hindu business owners in the area. The relationality aspect emerges in the complex trajectories of aspiration among Adivasi young people as they navigate their paths to a desirable future amidst the scarce opportunities in employment, ranging from local social barriers to national political expectations. Adivasi youths’ aspirations become gendered and intergenerational as they are closely conceived in relation to the past experiences of Adivasi communities.