Feeding the Needy Student: Auto-Ethnographic Reflections from South India

Towns and cities have always been sites of attraction not only as centers of trade and commerce, seats of administration and power centers but also providing facilities for health and education. This is especially true of post-colonial nations such as India, marking differences between rural and urban areas in many significant ways. The late colonial and early post-colonial periods experienced widespread social change and witnessed a surge in rural students seeking formal education in locales far away from their places of origin be they villages or small towns. While their families may have been relatively immobile, the children (usually, male) were made to find sponsorship for temporary migration and hospitality among the urban dwellers. With urbanization, many such practices of sponsorship and serving as hosts to needy students have since disappeared. This paper is an attempt to present an "auto-ethnographic" account of some of the practices of hosting students in and around Bangalore, South India.