Values Education, Middle Class Anxieties, and the (Trans)National Child in Urban India

Abstract: This essay focuses on growing initiatives by suburban mothers, content creators, child rights activists, and non-profit workers to supplement children's schooling experiences with practical and moral education in contemporary urban India. Drawing on extensive interviews and observations with these different, often voluntary actors in the southern Indian city of Hyderabad, it explores the conflict between their nostalgia for the past and imaginations of (trans)national citizenship, gender, and moral selfhood. While these educators are constantly motivated by visions of modernity and the future, the paper highlights how their desires are shaped by dominant-caste, Hindu visions of nation, local histories, and zeal for middle class belonging, which align with but also often run contrary to logics of neoliberal capital and development. Building from these insights, the paper concludes by advocating for greater attention to the politics of children's education in urban centers of the global South as a methodological tool for reinterpreting transnational feminist solidarity and activism.