Micro geographies of youth movement in Darjeeling, India

Abstract

This thesis explores the everyday experiences of young women aged 19 to 21, as they navigate their lives as college students in a regional Indian town. It draws on two months of ethnographic fieldwork in the northeast Indian town of Darjeeling, to explore young women’s everyday movements in and around Darjeeling’s urban and natural settings. It examines the walking and wandering practices of both unmarried and married students, whose patterns of everyday movement shed light on the relationship between young people’s engagements with space and their own gendered journeys through the life course. I analyse these routine spatial practices to consider how young women’s everyday movements are folded into the wider spatial and social rhythms of life in the town. In this way, this thesis analyses the micro geographies of people’s movements, asking: how do young women move through local space, and what does this tell us about their gendered experience of youth? It examines the everyday walking and wandering practices of this group to highlight the gendered experiences of everyday life, within a period of youth marked by anticipation and uncertainty, waiting and expectation. It argues that these movements while ordinary and routine, bead together the tensions, joys and contradictions at the heart of small-town life.