Since the late 1990s, India has asserted its modernity through a “new middle class” that promises inclusion to all worthy citizens. Yet India’s claims to modernity are consistently challenged by trenchant gender, caste, and class inequalities. The figure of the poor, uneducated rural woman marks the limits of Indian modernity. As such, rural young women and their families have become key targets of development programs. This dissertation looks at how families and young women in rural India are responding to new pressures to achieve social mobility and represent the nation. Using ethnographic data from ten months of fieldwork in the Guntur region of south India, I argue that gender, class, and caste are reproduced in distinctive ways, despite the vastness of change associated with modernization in India. I distinguish the current re-articulation of gender, class, and caste inequalities from the formations of the past on the basis of three characteristics: First, though women are becoming more educated, I find that education alone is insufficient to address social inequalities and may even increase disparities. Second, I demonstrate how the transnational migration of elites has transformed social life in Guntur. Lastly, I find that educational privatization has produced a highly stratified educational system that almost perfectly reproduces the class system. My analysis clarifies whether and how rural young women, who are often perceived as the most disadvantaged fraction of Indian society, are able to achieve social mobility.