However, these writings rarely represent child perspectives. Since the emergence of the global pandemic, several commentators and scholars working in India have drawn attention to existing social and health inequalities and how these have been exposed and exacerbated by the COVID-19 outbreak (Hasan, 2020 Lee et al., 2020). We conclude by defining the key significance of our contribution to future research and policy. Subsequent sections focus on our key findings and discussion. In particular, we discuss the multi-linguistic online and in-person data collection approaches utilised in our study to help contribute to the literature on diverse methodological and cross-cultural approaches to social research involving children. Third, the methodology section outlines the aims and methods including ethics and analysis. Second, the theoretical framework underpinning our study is introduced by highlighting the scholarly debate on class and childhood inequalities that the article builds on and contributes to. First, a background section provides the broader context to help understand COVID-19 and children in India. Further, the empirical insights presented here prompt us to rethink the conceptual apparatuses for studying children's everyday geographies developed in the global North and contribute to the growing call for diversifying the theorisation of childhood inequalities (Barn, 2021). Consequently, our study highlights the challenges faced by Indian middle-class children as they coped with everyday life during the COVID-19 lockdown amidst technological glitches and continuing and significant pressure to perform. Indeed, a window into their lived realities exposes their ambivalences and anxieties of not being able to reproduce class advantages down the generation and of falling down the class ladder in a country with infrastructural problems and no state welfare support (see Kumar, 2011). Moreover, the privileges enjoyed by urban middle-class families in India are relative in nature and not absolute. The relational approach to the class that we adopt in this study enables us to grapple with the way other forms of social division, such as geography and gender inflect class, and how class privileges and disadvantages are produced and reproduced through unequal relations between classes. The Indian middle class is not a homogeneous entity, and in this study, we focus on urban middle-class children in Punjab who attend private fee-paying schools and share relatively similar patterns of consumption and lifestyle as each other. Through a focus on urban middle-class children's experiences of the pandemic, our study contributes to this literature by casting fresh light into the reproduction of social and economic inequality and the cultural politics of middle-classness in contemporary India. Existing scholarship demonstrates how urban middle-class homes in India are caught up in the macro-level changes in economic and political structures, consumer cultures and inter-community relations currently afoot in India (Banaji, 2017 Donner, 2006 Sen, 2014). Drawing on interview narratives of 24 children (aged 16–17 years) living in a major city in the northern Indian state of Punjab, this article analyses the ways in which study participants made sense of the changes to their daily routines, combated the challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic and negotiated a new order of everyday life by drawing on a range of classed and community-based resources.
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