I may have been in Class Three when a teacher showed us a picture of the constellations for the first time. The white dots looked dispersed across the two-page spread of a navy-blue sky until the teacher had linked a few with precise lines and announced they constituted a bear, a hunter, a plough. The class was happy. And then someone enquired, in great astonishment, where the queue truly was and why they had never seen it before.
The teacher grinned. “The lines,” she remarked, “were our imagination.
A few years ago I spent an evening in a village hidden in the Himalayan foothills chatting to a group of teenage girls. They were out before the sun. They drew water, collected fodder, cooked meals and lived a rhythm of existence that had altered little over centuries. I asked them at one point if they were aware of some of the online terminology that is now used in every interview section on “today’s youth”. They seemed confused. One girl, who had some access to phone, considered for a time, then said quite sheepishly, ‘That is a different kind of world. It is the world of the city folk.
You might browse at the online tabloids and discover endless stories everyday about what Gen Z wants, how Gen Z dates, why Gen Z quits employment, dissecting the tiniest crevices of the lives of ‘today’s youth’. But the person being described is virtually invariably the same person. She is often urban, chronically online and technologically sophisticated, cushioned by disposable affluence and most likely speaks in a freshly designed social media syntax that incites both fascination and revulsion. What about the shepherd under a Himalayan glacier, the girl in a distant Odisha hamlet supporting her family, the unemployed young guy in a Delhi slum? They were all also born after 1997. Also Gen Z? Or did the label quietly cease making them?
The building of a generation.
“Gen Z” was not an inevitable sociological category but a construct of American market research. Advertising corporations sought a handy name for the generation after the Millennials, a name that would divide up the audiences and predict buying behaviours. The label was thus seized onto long after the domain of advertising, slowly gaining the force of common sense. This is similar to the concept of “making up people” that philosopher Ian Hacking has proposed: categories don’t only describe individuals; they may impact how people come to view themselves. The idea is not that Gen Z is a fiction, but that the borders of the category are established by people—and hence are never impartial.
Like many imported notions, ‘Gen Z’ moved successfully and landed in a severely divided and stratified nation like India. Followed the fascination and brouhaha around their allegedly peculiar conduct. But the premise behind most talks about Gen Z – a generation has basically comparable experiences – starts to break down in India.
The most common thing people say about Gen Z in India is that they are always on the internet. But how accurate is it in a nation where rural internet penetration is a mere 41.72%, compared to an urban penetration of over 110%? A label established around digital nativeness eliminates millions of young rural Indians before it has posed its first inquiry.
Language further sharpens the difference. The young Indian who is the focus of every trend item is nearly always an English speaker, a population that makes up just 10 to 12 percent of the country. The more and more this thin slice is a proxy for the entire.
Caste worsens this situation further. Together the SC, ST and OBC, groups that have historically been marginalised, comprise nearly 75% of the population of India, the vast majority of whom are not present in the media ecosystems where Gen Z stereotypes are created and propagated.
That’s a narrow, urban, wealthy slice of what “lazy, entitled” Gen Z CEOs are complaining about on LinkedIn. For them, the luxury of seeming disinterested is itself a class privilege. The rest of us are too busy working to even get into the conversation.
Can India have a generation?
In his 1928 article The Problem of Generations, Karl Mannheim argued that generations are not only groupings of people born in the same period but rather groups formed on the basis of shared historical experiences, over a century ago. That concept sits uncomfortably in India. History, from anything like the same starting line, does not meet the country’s under-25 population, more than 600 million people. NFHS-6 reveals that in West Bengal, more than one-third of women in the age group of 20-24 years got married before the age of 18 years. In Kerala, the proportion reduces to roughly 2%. These are the timelines that shape the lives of millions of young Indians, timeframes where gap years, Instagram reels and mindful shopping exist in a completely new world of potential.
What differentiates these young people is opportunity itself, not taste or culture alone. As Amartya Sen has emphasised, it is not only what individuals choose but what they are really free to do. The divide between two young Indians usually starts long before any of them download Instagram.
That results in a feedback cycle of biases. When opinion-influencers, policy-makers, businesses and media seek for ‘the youth’, they discover precisely the young person their tools were built to locate. She is the face of a generation not because she is the majority, but because she is the most readable. The same perspective is used to sketch a form, again and again. And anybody beyond its bounds gets more and more difficult to see.
The stars had always been there. The lines belonged to us.
Perhaps that is the question that we need to ask ourselves every time we talk about Gen Z in India, are we finding a constellation or are we creating one? And what stars have we ceased to gaze at at all, in our admiration of the singularities of form?
