The merit of medicine: science aspirations in India

Abstract

This paper examines the social fever of MBBS (undergraduate medical) aspiration in India. It analyzes interviews conducted with 139 pharmacy graduates and 37 currently enrolled students in the western Indian state of Gujarat, of whom 147 pursued but failed to get admission to medical college. Respondents include graduates from the 1970s onwards. 51% are female. 28 respondents are from Socially and Educationally Backward Classes, 9 from the Scheduled Castes, and 13 from the Scheduled Tribes. The methodological foregrounding of failed aspirations gives a unique perspective on the cultural production of merit, which activates aspiration across social differences. The analysis suggests that institutional structures which narrowed the meaning of merit to programs located outside the university system; local interpretations of medical-engineering study as more valuable than that of the basic sciences, humanities, or social sciences; collective imaginations of meritorious students as necessarily pursuing MBBS study; and the enactment of pedagogic care within these cultural imaginaries produced widespread aspirations for high school science and subsequent medical-engineering study. Within this overdetermined world, respondents narrated their selves in diverse ways. The terrain of aspiration included substantive, ambivalent, and even hostile affects. Meanwhile, non-elites who did not pursue MBBS posit aspirational marginality as an effect of social marginalization. Unlike in the US or UK contexts, where researchers lament the paucity of science aspiration and consider family science capital to be a key determinant of student interest in science, in India, the strict limiting of academic value to medical-engineering has massified science aspirations.