Coaching centre as camp: Structures of feeling in popular representations of India’s coaching industry

Abstract

In the last two decades, critical representations of the Indian education system have gained prominence in Hindi-language popular media. Centring on concerns about both pedagogy and inequality, these media texts have recently begun to incorporate fictionalized depictions of schooling beyond school – the vast ‘shadow education’ system that prepares students for school tests and competitive examinations in engineering, medical, civil service and other primarily technical and professional fields. This article explores the political significance of ambivalences that inhere within and between representations of the coaching industry. These ambivalences produce a narrative of enclosure in which upper-caste middle classes endure persecution while simultaneously engaging in forms of disciplinary self-fashioning in service to the nation. These ‘structures of feeling’ resonate with social theories of the camp, reconsidered from the Indian context.