Patna: While most scholars from abroad come to Bihar to study its backwardness, poverty or outmigration issues, American Fulbright scholar Isabel Salovaara chose to study the aspirations of its women population. And, she found it in abundance in the state’s densely-packed, fluorescent light-lit classrooms of state’s coaching centres where hundreds of young men and women were preparing for competitive examinations for govt jobs.After graduating from Harvard and Cambridge universities, she joined Stanford University and got a Fulbright fellowship for doing her research on “Becoming the state: aspirants, examinations and the govt Job in Bihar, India”. She was awarded a doctorate degree from Stanford University on Friday.The timing of Salovaara’s research was significant. A landmark 2016 state govt policy reserved 35% of new govt job vacancies for women, including the police force and other roles historically considered male territories.For more than 10 months in 2022-23, she moved through coaching institutes and exam preparation centres across the state, observing and interviewing young women from lower-castes and rural backgrounds who had been drawn into the competitive examination circuit for the first time.The coaching centres, she found, were not mere exam factories. They created a community as women developed a shared identity around their collective efforts to enter govt service, generating a sense of closeness both to each other and to a state that officially opened its doors for them. Yet, Salovaara was careful not to overstate this transformation. She described the outcomes as “partial incorporations”— real changes in women’s status and mobility, but ones that rearrange existing hierarchies rather than dismantling them.Her central argument challenges the familiar story of aspiration as a straight upward climb. For the women, she studied, the process was cyclical, often stretching across years during which families grew impatient and the social pressure around marriage mounted. During her state’s visit, Salovaara was hosted by IIT-Patna where humanities’ department teacher Aditya Raj guided her doctoral work.For IIT-Patna, the fellowship underlines the institution’s growing stature as a research hub capable of attracting and supporting serious international scholarship, said Aditya Raj.
