Flying High or Lying Low? The Moral Economy of Young Women in Higher Education in Punjab, India

This chapter explores young women’s participation in higher education as a reflection of changes and challenges to the moral economy currently taking place in the Indian state of Punjab. With its renowned capitalist agricultural development as well as skewed sex ratios against females, we highlight how the metaphorical liking of girls and young women as ‘paraya dhan’ (others’ property) outward bound from the natal ‘nest’ highlights the deepening and extending role of gendered patriarchal norms making women’s education a potential risk to the moral economy of society. Thus, the moral panic surrounding the sex ratio and ‘scarce women’ in Punjab exists within a paradoxically broader moral economy in which potentially threatening impacts of women’s higher education participation to the patriarchal social order are measured up against a deeply patriarchal social and economic base of Punjabi society.