For Things to Remain (Sort of) the Same, Everything Must Change India’s First Generation Professional Elites & the Surreptitious Reproduction of Hierarchy

Chapter IN: Mapping the elite : power, privilege, and inequality, Surinder S. Jodhka and Jules Naudet, editors, New Delhi, India : Oxford University Press, 2019

UC Irvine School of Law Research Paper No. 2020-36

25 Pages Posted: 14 Apr 2020

See all articles by Swethaa Ballakrishnen

Swethaa Ballakrishnen

University of California, Irvine School of Law; Harvard University - Center on the Legal Profession

Date Written: April 13, 2020

Abstract

This Chapter aims to locate one newly minted strain of neoliberal elite in India – elite professionals. The literature on elites in India has, for good reason, predominantly focused on political and/or economic elites with a standing assumption of ascription. But with an increasing ideological commitment to the idea of meritocracy (Mehta 2011; Subramanian 2015) and new kinds of global work that valorize it afresh, individual social mobility in India has become an important site of understanding the rejuvenating composition of elites. As other accounts of contemporary elites attest, no such analysis is possible without an introspection of both the individuals that inhabit these elite spaces as well as the circulation networks and structures that reproduce them (Khan 2012; Pareto 1968). Tasked to this end, this research asks: Who are the inhabitants of these new spaces? And, to the extent they are new kinds of inhabitants, what kinds of resources and institutional structures buffer their entry and success? In this unfolding process through the experience of first generation elite professionals, this Chapter attempts to unpack a more latent structural tension between status mobility and stability in the Indian context.

Suggested Citation

Ballakrishnen, Swethaa, For Things to Remain (Sort of) the Same, Everything Must Change India’s First Generation Professional Elites & the Surreptitious Reproduction of Hierarchy (April 13, 2020). Chapter IN: Mapping the elite : power, privilege, and inequality, Surinder S. Jodhka and Jules Naudet, editors, New Delhi, India : Oxford University Press, 2019, UC Irvine School of Law Research Paper No. 2020-36, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3575055

Swethaa Ballakrishnen (Contact Author)

University of California, Irvine School of Law ( email )

401 E. Peltason Dr.
Ste. 1000
Irvine, CA 92697-1000
United States

Harvard University - Center on the Legal Profession ( email )

1585 Massachusetts Avenue
Wasserstein Hall, Suite 5018
Cambridge, MA 02138
United States

Do you have negative results from your research you’d like to share?

Paper statistics

Downloads
37
Abstract Views
417
PlumX Metrics