Chandreyee Goswami – ECR Spotlight
In our ECR Spotlight Series for 2023, Chandreyee Goswami tracks friendships and kinships through place and time in her fieldwork amongst young migrant women who have recently moved away from home for college. This piece follows the Academic Writing for the Public workshop that GENDER.ED conducts annually.
An Untailored Tale of Coming of Age – Gendered travels through space and time
By Chandreyee Goswami
“When I am at university, I don’t feel like going home, and when I am at home, I don’t feel like coming back.” I have frequently heard my research participants—women university students in Northeast India—express the dilemma of travelling back and forth between their familial home and university. This journey is more than a strictly spatial one and captures equally their negotiation with the process of coming of age in which they constantly navigate between spaces – home, university and the city.
For young women, the ‘journey’ between home and university is significant in two ways. One is the literal sense of travelling between home and university by public transport, which makes women feel confident and self-sufficient; the second is the social significance attached to this journey as first-generation women to attend university not only within their family but sometimes even in their respective villages and towns. Going to university in Guwahati is not just about educational achievement but also the desire to stay and study in a city. Guwahati, as the largest city in the entire region of the Northeast, attracts young people for jobs and education. In an Asian borderland increasingly marked by the inroads of globalisation, Guwahati also becomes a space for them to explore the lifestyle and consumption practices which a globalised world has to offer. Thus, irrespective of ethnic identities and class locations, women students look at Guwahati as a place to explore and fulfil their classed and gendered aspirations.
Once they are in Guwahati, they either stay at university hostels, private hostels, or on rent. They decorate their rooms with photographs of extended families and friends from school and college, as well as new friends from the university. They put up artwork, prizes or trophies they might have won at a university event. The two constant pieces of decorative items were fairy lights and plants. Besides being easily available and cheap, these two things were most common due to the exchange of ideas relating to decorating rooms with friends. I could see these two things in the rooms of every women student that I visited. Even the way they were placed in the room was sometimes the same.
“I saw Fatima putting the lights in this style, and I liked the idea, so I also put it in this way. I think Ruby and Daisy have also put the lights in the same way.” Swarna told me when I went to her room for evening tea. While Fatima and Swarna shared an intimate friendship, they were not equally close to Ruby and Daisy. Yet, they considered each other friends as they shared the same block in the hostel. Material objects allow women students to make new spaces comfortable away from familiar settings of familial homes and localities. They learn about new things and exchange notes about room decoration with their friends at university. This ‘stuff’ becomes a part of this new, comfortable, and safe space, symbolic of their new relationships, changing lifestyle and adapting to life in a relatively unfamiliar university and the city than their homes and neighbourhoods. These stuff gives them a semblance of ‘home’, a sense of familiarity and yet offers relative freedom than their familial homes in terms of carving out a room—a mere physical structure—into a more meaningful space. Decorating their rooms with old and new stuff based on exchanging ideas with friends is one of the significant ways in which women students experience a biographical change. Even if it is not monumental, it is an impressionable experience in this formative phase of their life course.
Women students are also constantly in contact with their familial homes through audio and video calls. For most of them, a daily call is common. Some women students do not call regularly or do not have a specified time to call. But almost all women students keep a regular connection with their families. For instance, they spontaneously call their sisters to show a new purchase or to ask their brother to fetch them something through the post office. They display their rooms and introduce their friends during those calls if it is on video. These video calls then become a point of intersection between their familial home, university, and city lives.
Primarily these calls were to update the day-to-day life at university and to know the well-being of their parents and siblings as well as to hear neighbourhood gossip Women students sometimes called at an unusual time to get permission for outings or to let their parents know if they were going out and might be late while coming back at night. None of the women students referred to these phone calls as forms of policing or monitoring. Parents would advise them to stay safe, be cautious, and message on return to the hostel. Even women students from more conservative families mentioned this parental approach. Yesmin remarked:
My parents do not object; they just tell me to be cautious and careful. I think they have confidence in me that I can take care of myself. I mean, I travel from home to Guwahati alone by bus or train without any problem. I have been living in the city for almost two years now. All these have perhaps assured them that I will be alright.
Yesmin is from Dhubri district and belongs to a lower middle-class Muslim family. She is also the first one in her village to do a Master’s degree in Guwahati. Women students from other ethnic affiliations based on language, tribe, localities, caste, and religions have shared similar responses of their parents if they belong to conservative families. This also suggests a changing perception among parents who increasingly want to see their daughters educated and self-reliant. For women students like Yesmin, it is still challenging to negotiate their marital and academic aspirations. However, support from a few university friends, including male friends and parents who constantly negotiate with the larger societal pressure and questions about their daughters’ future lives, helps in this coming-of-age process.
Coming of age for these young women occurs through parallel and overlapping interactions with people at home–parents and siblings—and at the university–friends, juniors, and seniors. These processes of coming of age entail how biographies of women students are anything but linear. These young women use material objects to mediate between these spaces and the existing and emerging relationships in these spaces. For them, material objects such as photographs, plants, fairy lights and mobile phones become ways in which they continuously create and recreate their familial and friendship relationships while being simultaneously affected by these parallel and overlapping relationships.
Author Bio
Chandreyee Goswami is a PhD student in Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh. Her research broadly looks at friendships with a particular focus on university friendships of women students in Northeast India. She is currently writing up her thesis.