CENTRE FOR THE STUDY OF SOCIAL SYSTEMS
SCHOOL OF SOCIAL SCIENCES
JAWAHARLAL NEHRU UNIVERSITY
cordially invites you to the
THURSDAY COLLOQUIUM
on
Rank Factories. The coaching industry at Kota (Rajasthan)
by
Roland Lardinois
on 26th OCTOBER 2023 at SSS II,
ROOM 013, 3:00pm-5:00pm
Abstract: The aim of my communication is to present the coaching market that has developed in the city of Kota (Rajasthan) where thousands of aspiring engineers come every year to prepare the entrance exams notably for the Indian Institutes of Technology. This work is the result of a five-month field work carried out in 2014. In order to understand sociologically the structure and functioning of this market, whose effects are sometimes dramatic for students, we need to break with the rhetoric of ethico-political condemnation and consider together the state policies, entrepreneurial logics and family strategies that contribute to the organization of this system. To this aim, quantitative and qualitative data are used, as well as a few novels written by students, which can be read as personal testimonies to objectify an extreme experience.
Roland Lardinois is sociologist, Directeur of Research Emeritus at the French National Center for Scientific Research and member of the South Asian and Himalaya Research Center at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris).
Roland Lardinois has a multidisciplinary academic background. He started studying history and geography and completed his MA (1976) in geography with a study of the demography of the Guntur District (Andhra Pradesh). Specialized in demography with a professional diploma of Expert Demographer (1974), he wrote his PhD (1980) on the demographic history of the 1876-78 famine in South India. Meanwhile, from the mid-1970s, he attended Pierre Bourdieu’s teaching at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales and at the Collège de France (Paris) and later on he joined the editorial committee of Bourdieu’s journal Actes de la recherches en sciences sociales. He completed his French Habilitation (2007) in sociology with a thesis on the genesis of the sociology of India in France. His research on India covers several areas, notably historical demography of South India, history of the family, before focusing for the past 15 years on the history and sociology of the Indian engineers. Meanwhile he carries on his research on the French Indologist Sylvain Lévi who taught Sanskrit language and literature at the College de France before WWII, and he has published several books (in French) on this scholar.