Abstract: 

In the southern Indian state of Kerala today, engineering colleges lie half empty. Indeed young people seem to be altogether disillusioned with higher education, and many undergraduate institutions are being remodeled as language-migration centers for a population that seems increasingly desperate to leave the state and country. In my own research I met software developers and civil engineers alike who were abandoning their jobs and willing to retrain as nurses in order to fuel the demands of an ageing western population. Two decades ago, this would have been inconceivable. The rigid hierarchies of status, gender, class and caste, and the one way street of upward mobility within Malayali and Indian society would simply have not allowed for such shifts to be imaginable. Based on my recent ethnographic research in Kerala, In this talk, I will address the rapid growth of nursing and what it tells us about shifts in the relationship between migration and social mobility among Malayali youth - particularly young men. Indeed while Kerala has long produced a disproportionate number of the country and even the world’s nurses, the industry has recently experienced remarkable growth that has seemingly been indifferent to the anxieties around status, caste, masculinity etc. that have always haunted it. What explains this rapid reconfiguration? Why do the young in Kerala seem so desperate to leave, and what does it mean that their mobilities today are imagined, and increasingly also expressed, as part of global care chains?