The rapid expansion of higher education, both in the number of institutions and in terms of access by students, along with number of other factors, has brought about a remarkable change in the rise of proportion of women student in higher education. As per 2019-2020 All India Survey of Higher Education (AISHE) data the number of women students in the institutions of higher education is 49%. The young women students leave their town, family, and familial settings and migrate to other cities for higher education. They are not only visible in statistics but in the everyday spaces of the city.
Given this backdrop, this paper discusses the experiences of single young women students within the public and private spaces of their new lives in college. Some recent discussions concerning single young women in urban India have privileged public spaces as sites of freedom to which they should lay claim. This paper is based on research on women students in Prayagraj, a city in North India, and shows how college and hostel spaces enable new forms of sociability, in which they form non-kin relationships. These are formed among students of diverse social identities but are shaped by their class locations as well within the social context of homosociality. Young women students create a new social world inside their colleges and hostels, build friendships and create certain kinds of intimacies. Cooking together and caring for each other in times of illness emerge as important aspects of their friendships. Hostel spaces, in particular, provide some freedom and comfort for the young women who reside in them. This article brings out the ways in which women students inhabit such spaces, creating social support systems and care networks.
