Abstract
This considerable volume brings together a range of scholars, who have published on the Indian middle-class for some time. It therefore provides an in-depth view of its cultural politics and a kind of stock-taking. As Baviskar and Ray state in their insightful, if short, introduction that whilst internally highly differentiated, it is the hegemony of values and trajectories that contributes to the formation of a new middle-class under conditions of post-liberalisation and globalisation, its diversity notwithstanding. It is this common awareness of being middle-class as a project involving castes, communities, households and individuals, which comes into focus throughout the book.
The first set of chapters provides insights into the historical processes of middle-class formation with Sanjay Joshi’s chapter detailing the singularity of middle-class emergence within the colonial context, whilst Leela Fernandes analyses very recent new forms of middle-class hegemonies which are based on the ideological tenet that ‘everyone can join in’. Susanne H. Rudolph and Lloyd I. Rudolph provide a detailed case study of how a Rajput elite moved from farming to become heritage hoteliers, utilising new middle-class imaginations. Finally, this section also contains a re-print of the seminal paper analysing the Indian middle-class in economic terms by E. Sridharan. In this chapter and in the following chapter, intergenerational differences and the way they indicate and mediate ongoing social change are taken up. This is fleshed out in the chapter by Roger Jeffery, Patricia Jeffery and Craig Jeffrey who document how various sections of the farming Jat community employ complex household strategies to gain access to middle-class lifestyles. Here, as in some of the other chapters, the importance of collective (re-) positioning in relation to caste and locality is demonstrated, as education is only one of the means by which Jats reposition themselves. Whilst caste is mentioned in some of the chapters in this section, it would have been helpful to include a chapter on the politics around status and affirmative action and Dalit dilemmas. This would have brought the issue of caste, absent in the following chapters, into focus.
The second section is concerned with the reproduction of class, strictly speaking socialisation and a shared habitus, which explains how in the face of obvious and significant differentiation in shared values, aspirations and narratives, they still constitute a recognisable social field. There are globally three arenas most obviously associated with being middle class, namely work and the workplace, domesticity and consumption. These are explored in chapters ranging from the most conspicuous indicators of middle-class status in contemporary India, employment in the information technology (IT) industry to the reorganisation of middle-class homes across lines of gender and class, towards an analysis of education and middle-class investment in children, surveys of sexual habits and lower middle-class assessments of recent processes of public sector privatisation. In this section, the ideological underpinnings of ‘middleclassness’, that is, the everyday reproduction of intra-class subjectivities as well as inter-class relations are addressed with ethnographic detail. Carol Upadhya discusses the iconic status of software engineers and the way the ideological underpinnings of such workplaces have become the most powerful symbols of post-liberalisation India. Here, the quality of middle-class discourse to become hegemonic, to shape reality on the level of individual and family aspirations as well as politics is most poignantly reflected in media discourses and transnational cultures. This discussion of the IT industry and its far reaching consequences is expanded in the chapter by Smitha Radhakrishnan. She shows how employees buy into and enact strict gender ideals, justified in terms of a ‘gender-neutral’ ethos based on professionalism and meritocracy by reinventing a discourse on Indian femininity.
Nita Kumar’s article on the role of schooling and the Indian middle-class child offers a glimpse into the rarely discussed domestic practices of contemporary middle-class families. Looking at the all-consuming passion for academic success, she argues that the family, rather than the school or workplace, is the main site of remaking ‘middleclassness’. This position is strengthened by Seemin Qayum and Raka Ray’s exploration of servants as a real-life marker of middle-class status across a wide economic spectrum. The question of managing and imagining what it means to be middle-class is further explored by Patricia Uberoi, who via an illuminating comparison between surveys on the sexual lives of a middle-class separated by 70 years argues that a new, encompassing interest in managing domestic affairs in accordance with ‘modern’ values is evident in the recent spurt of ‘sex’ talk. In comparison, Ruchira Ganguly-Scrase and Timothy Scrase’s analysis of lower middle-class views on work in the public and private sectors draws out differentiations within the middle-class, rather than treat them with a common discourse. Where these subjects were concerned, the rhetoric of a new era feels threatening as opportunities are, realistically, viewed with much scepticism. Here as in the following section, it would have been extremely useful to have examples of how discussions pan out in various communities, including explicitly non-Hindu collective representations, institutions and practices.
The last section deals with the public sphere and the role middle-class morality plays in shaping the public discourse on India today. This is exemplified in William Mazzarella’s chapter on the politics of censorship which showcases the complex moral contradictions that tales of new freedoms and the need for its containment bring about. As Sanjay Srivastava’s chapter exemplifies, such contradictions are also powerfully implied in new consumption practices, even where these consist of religious experiences or state-facilitated leisure activities like festivals. Amita Baviskar’s chapter on environmental discourses as a struggle over rights to urban space shows that hegemonic claims to superiority are often only partially realised. This section implicitly references politics, but it would have been a great place to explore some politics on the ground and the complex way this realm is interdependent with middle-class cultures of non-metropolitan origin.
The chapters in this collection provide a stock-taking of sorts and point towards the variety of approaches that have been employed to discuss the Indian middle-class as a cultural category, specifically in relation to education, consumption and neoliberal politics. It appears that scholars have finally moved beyond the largely futile discussion of whether we can speak of an Indian middle-class, to instead analyse the multiple sites, representations and practices that bring it into being. It is hoped that more studies of how the privilege of a few is turned into political clout and common sense will be added to the study of this self-conscious elite posing as ‘everyman’.