India’s vision for Amrit Kaal (time of happiness) includes facilitating opportunities for citizens, particularly the youth, and provide “the aspirations for the good life that inform life projects” (Fischer 2014). But these aspirations don’t evolve in a vacuum (Appadurai 2004). The capacity to aspire depends on an individual’s cultural context and their ‘system of ideas.’ These aspirations are linked to the living space, such as school, state, and market. The school here acts as the catalyst and mediator between the present and the future and provides the“capacity to aspire.”(Appadurai 2004) Cultural and social circumstances also shape these future aspirations.
The Telangana Social Welfare Residential Educational Institutions Society (TSWREIS) is seen as the source of empowerment and social mobility for the Dalit and tribal students, as spaces producing “hope” for “the good life.” This paper extends this concept by drawing on participant observation of the School Techno-Cultural Festival called “Ignite Festival 2022”. It looks at students’ performances on the stage and how these performances show backstage realities of their marginal identities and their views about what is modernity. This idea of modernity is in turn, linked to their aspirations. An anthropological analysis of state-supported residential schools for students from marginalized communities and students’ subjective experiences in the school space provides a better understanding of how state, market, and individual identities interact in everyday life and what a “good life” is for the younger generation in these neo-liberal times. This paper is based on the ideas of Geertz’s (1973)“Thick Description” and Goffman’s(1959) “Performativity” and “Dramaturgy.” As Goffman (1959) says, performances “show backstage realities on stage as a symbolic representation of a reality in their life and their aspirations for the future.”
