This chapter builds on Arjun Appadurai’s works to contextualize the lives of women from rural North India, who dwell in ‘disjointed ethnoscapes’ and have found the navigational capacity of aspiration. In Haryana and Punjab, which have seen a Green Revolution, land ownership was once a source of family pride and prosperity for male members but cannot ensure steady income and local dominance today. Building upon her previous work, the author argues that the young rural women’s aspirations for education and employment (...) stems from this agrarian crisis where women’s unrecognized labour in family-held land for the enrichment of their male relatives is no longer mandated. This is also reflected in the emerging possibilities of non-normative and even intercaste marriages. This chapter thus highlights how the navigational capacity of women and a corresponding crisis in masculinity is both the source and product of a family crisis in post-agrarian India. (shrink)