Elite and Everyman

The Cultural Politics of the Indian Middle Classes

Amita Baviskar, Raka Ray

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000083781
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia moderna

This book examines the middle classes — who they are and what they do — and their influence in shaping contemporary cultural politics in India. Describing the historical emergence of these classes, from the colonial period to contemporary times, it shows how the middle classes have changed, with older groups shifting out and new entrants taking place, thereby transforming the character and meanings of the category. The essays in this volume observe multiple sites of social action (workplaces and homes, schools and streets, cinema and sex surveys, temples and tourist hotels) to delineate the lives of the middle classes and show how middle-class definitions and desires articulate hegemonic notions of the normal and the normative.

I Introduction

Amita Baviskar and Raka Ray

‘The Common Man’, that silent presence anchoring R. K. Laxman’s daily ‘You Said It’ cartoon strip in the Times of India, has been an iconic figure of Indian political commentary for more than 50 years.¹ Despite charting India’s changing times since 1951, the Common Man has remained remarkably unchanged. He still wears a dhotikurta (traditional clothes) and a bemused expression. Yet traces of transformation are visible in the world that he inhabits: he has graduated from riding a bicycle to a car; where he once read the paper, now he watches the news on television with his formidable-looking wife. While the staples of satire — corrupt politicians, incompetent municipal authorities, bungling cricket teams — continue to animate the cartoon, we notice improvements in the material circumstances of the Common Man.

¹ Laxman once said of his Common Man, ‘A gloomy forecast about the increase in the cost of living, an additional tax burden, terrorism, endless scams, walkouts, water shortage, power failure are items that greet the Common Man as he wakes up and glimpses the headlines in the morning paper . . . He also witnesses riots, strikes, public meetings and so on. He voyages through life with quiet amusement, at no time uttering a word, looking at the ironies, paradoxes and contradictions in the human situation’. See R. K. Laxman. 1997. ‘Companion of Fifty Years: The Life and Times of the Common Man’, Frontline, 14 (16): 9–22, http://www.hinduonnet. com/fline/fl1416/14160900.htm (accessed 2 May 2009).

While Laxman’s Common Man is a silent spectator in the world of politics, his alter ego, the aam aadmi, the ordinary person or Everyman, is vocal and active. According to the Indian media, the chief concerns of the aam aadmi today are bijli, sadak aur pani (electricity, roads and water). These priorities suggest that mobilization around roti, kapda aur makaan (food, clothing and shelter), which marked politics in the 1970s, is now passé; the demand for these bare essentials has been met and a second-order set of concerns now constitutes the basic needs of ordinary Indians. Such a redefinition of needs does reflect the material improvement in the condition of many Indians over the last three decades. But it also conceals the fact that, for many more Indians, poverty and insecurity and hunger and sickness remain constant and insuperable features of everyday life. With the broadest definition of the middle class in India, it is estimated that the top 26 per cent of Indian households belong to this income group (see Sridharan, this volume). This means that about 70 per cent of the Indian households live on incomes that are substantially lower, with at least 40 per cent living below the poverty line. The politics of the aam aadmi does not include the poor or their concerns. It is a politics of and by the middle classes, and it signifies a sea change in the cultural and political life of independent India.

Plate 1.1.R. K. Laxman’s Common Man (© R. K. Laxman. Used with permission.)

The ascendancy of the aam aadmi as a middle-class identity has long antecedents, but its apogee was reached in the era of economic liberalization in the 1990s. Liberalization introduced market forces into areas of the economy controlled by the state. It facilitated foreign direct investment and trade, freed business firms from the licence-permit raj, and eased banking regulations to increase consumer credit and encourage spending. At the centre of these policies was the idea of a middle class unleashed from the chastity belt of Nehruvian socialism and Indira-era austerities, finally able to savour the fruits of its disciplined and diligent work. This middle class would be the producer as well as the consumer driving the engine of economic growth and prosperity, a Fordist model of development re-engineered for India.

The phenomenal rate of growth of the Indian economy since the 1990s has been alternately described as ‘India Rising’ and ‘India Shining’. This celebration, and the concomitant conviction that the nation should now claim its rightful place as an international superpower, is premised not only on the economic performance of the middle class but also its politics. As ‘the world’s largest democracy’, India is believed to epitomize the ideals of political expression and negotiation that distinguish it from its economic rivals, most notably China. Liberal democracy, it is argued, would not have been possible without the presence of a middle class mediating and moderating the sharp social conflicts of an unequal society, pre-empting authoritarianisms of the Right and the Left. This middle class had been stifled by state domination and alienated by the electoral appeasement of ‘vote-banks’; it can now reinvigorate politics by bringing in efficiency and rooting out corruption. A media campaign such as the Times of India’s ‘Lead India’ initiative, which sponsored English-educated, ‘idealistic’ young professionals to enter electoral politics, built upon such narratives of political decay and recovery.

In Marx’s historical explanation for the development of capitalism in Europe, the bourgeoisie was a revolutionary class that broke through feudal social relations ‘not only [to] transform the economic processes and structure of the society, but [also] reshape its politics and fundamentally rework the structure of values that dominates in the society’ (Gill 2008: 3). The French writer Alexis de Tocqueville, visiting America in the 19th century, claimed that the strength of America’s democracy derived from its prosperity and the possibility of upward mobility. For him, all the great revolutions of the world had occurred to eliminate inequality. It was the ‘countless multitude of almost identical men, neither exactly rich nor poor, [who] own sufficient property to desire order but not enough to arouse the envy of others’ (Tocqueville 2003 [1904]: 738), in other words, the middle classes, that were the mainstay of American democracy. These men (for Tocqueville, they were specifically men of European ancestry) in fact had a ‘natural horror’ of revolutions. The link between the middle class and democracy was re-asserted by Seymour Martin Lipset (1959), who believed that a middle class created both a more engaged citizenry and greater moderation. Writing in comparative historical mode, Barrington Moore (1993[1966]) also emphasized the importance of the bourgeoisie (the middle class and the owners of property) for democracy, but interpreted possible outcomes in terms of the alliances made by this class on the one hand, and the relative timing of events, on the other. Thus, his view about the link between the bourgeoisie and democracy was context-dependent. Scholars suggested that in post-Independence India the bourgeoisie was not strong enough to bring about a thorough-going shift to capitalism, and could only participate as a junior partner in what Gramsci called a ‘passive revolution’, a state-led command polity where ‘the common sense of society’ could not be changed to incorporate modern, democratic values (Kaviraj 1984: 225–26). With economic liberalization bringing the middle class to centre stage, it is argued that this group can educate the rest of the society about civic and democratic virtues, collectively creating a civil society that will reform the state and politics at large.

While there are studies which question the assertion that the middle classes form the primary link between capitalism and democracy,² claims about the progressive role of the middle class in the past, present and future of political and social change in India are widespread and influential. They demand careful scrutiny, especially given the lack of clarity about the term ‘middle class’.

² Huber et al. argue that the link between capitalism and democracy is rooted in the fact that ‘[t]he working and middle classes — unlike other subordinated classes in history — gain an unprecedented capacity for self organization due to such developments as urbanization, factory production, and new forms of communication and transportation’ (1993: 75).

Historical accounts have revealed to us the processes by which a colonial middle class came into being in the late 19th and early 20th centuries through participation in particular projects — the creation of professions, social reform with a special emphasis on the status of women, regional literature and, of course, the anticolonial struggle (see, for example, Dalmia 1996; Raychaudhuri 2002; S. Sarkar and T. Sarkar 2008). These accounts have tended to focus on what one might call the hegemonic fraction of the middle class, whose leadership in the nationalist movement secured the necessary legitimacy to continue to ‘represent’ the nation after Independence. Less is known about the vast swathe of the middle classes of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

When we talk about the middle classes today, to which precise social groups are we referring? Does it still make sense to think about projects of ‘middle-classness’? While there is clearly a diverse set of actors in the postcolonial Indian middle classes, the iconic figure is that of the urban, white-collar worker, suggesting that education, occupation and income are critical elements of the definition. But this definitional clarity becomes blurred when we consider that despite working with their hands, skilled manual workers in public–sector firms earn at the same level and enjoy an equivalent lifestyle. And, with the proliferation of sub-contracted service–sector jobs, many white-collar workers earn amounts that place their households below the poverty line. In the Indian case, then, is there a single middle class that extends across the differences of caste, region and religion? If these differences are significant, then how do they inflect the politics of class? For instance, has the rising political power of the Other Backward Classes, or the creation of a ‘creamy layer’ among the dalits, changed the meanings of being middle-class? Is a ‘convent-educated’ son of a well-to-do Vokkaliga farmer in Karnataka middle-class in the same way as a Bengali Kayastha woman who works as a journalist with a Kolkata daily? What social characteristics, orientations and attitudes do they share? What projects and aspirations could they have in common? As these questions indicate, there is an empirical imprecision in discussions of the middle class that calls for closer observation and an analysis of the varied forms of material and cultural capital that define being middle-class.

Among the qualities attributed to the middle class are its distinctive values. When Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Prime Minister of India, and a Harrow-educated scion of a wealthy Brahmin lawyer, who grew up in one of the most elegant mansions in Allahabad, said, ‘I am, of course, a middle-class person’ (quoted in Chhibbar 1968: 53), he was being neither modest nor disingenuous. Besides indicating that he was not an industrial worker or a peasant, Nehru was also invoking a certain mindset. To be middle-class was to inhabit a particular orientation towards modernity. It meant being open-minded and egalitarian; following the rule of law and not being swayed by private motive or particularistic agenda; being fiscally prudent and living within one’s means;³ and embracing science and rationality in the public sphere. It demanded setting aside the primordial loyalties of caste and kinship and opening oneself to new affinities and associations based on merit, and to identities forged in the workplace. Echoes of these values still reverberate through the exhortations to the middle class to become more active in politics and to ‘Lead India’ out of the quagmire of corruption and parochialism in which the nation has been stuck.

³ Middle-class prudence is also associated with more puritanical tendencies, such as an obsession with ‘respectability’ and sexual propriety — the ‘middle-class morality’ so wittily lamented by Alfred Doolittle, Eliza’s father in George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion.

Does the middle class actually represent these values in the public sphere? Survey data on middle-class voting preferences, as well as the public demonstrations of support for the anti-Mandal agitation and the demolition of the Babri Masjid, indicate that the middle class can be zealous in protecting upper-caste privilege and promoting Hindutva (Hasan 2001: 159). Dipankar Gupta excoriates the Indian middle class thus: ‘Its commitment to principles of democracy is weak . . . [I]t thrives on connections, family and patronage. Instead of animating public institutions, members of this class are constantly undermining them . . . [T]he Indian middle class is an ardent advocate of privilege’ (D. Gupta 2000: 10). Another commentator, observing the immunity of this class to the abject poverty and deprivation around it, remarks that the middle class is ‘morally neutral to inequity’ (Varma 2001: 88).

These comments express a bitterness brought on by a promise betrayed. However, if we adopt a more detached perspective on middle-class values and practices, it becomes apparent that the middle classes have historically deployed their cultural capital in contradictory ways. As Sanjay Joshi points out (this volume; also see Joshi 2001), the politics catalysed by the middle class in India spoke in the language of reason and sentiment, voicing the need to initiate radical change while simultaneously calling for the preservation of tradition, advocating liberty and authoritarianism, equality and hierarchy, all at the same time. These contradictions are inherent in the middle class’s claim of being an enlightened representative of public opinion while also needing to distinguish itself clearly from the lower orders. This duality creates a deep ambivalence about popular politics, with the middle class seeking to discipline and mobilize subordinate social groups. According to Joshi (this volume), this is not a disappointing deviation from the historical role played by the European middle classes; across the world, the notion of an authentic middle class, progressive and liberal in its views, is a myth.

If the notion of a progressive middle class that sustains a free and open sphere of reasoned debate where ‘public interest’ can be decided and acted upon is a myth, if the middle class actually represents and defends elite privilege that excludes the majority of Indian citizens, then perhaps one should look more closely at the category itself. The empirical issues around identifying the middle class need to be supplemented by an analysis of the ideological work performed by this social construct. Political scientist Yogendra Yadav suggests that the Indian middle class is not to be thought of as a sociological category at all, but, rather, as a proper noun. It is the term which the Indian ruling class prefers to call itself.4 Satish Deshpande argues that the power of the middle class resides in its claim of representing all Indians — the aam aadmi. The category ‘middle class’ conjures up a universal, unifying identity that summons legitimacy for projects that favour elites in the nation. By claiming to speak for the nation, this category performs the cultural task of concealing inequality. It is this ideological role of articulating hegemonic values and beliefs that distinguishes middleclass politics. Satish Deshpande writes that the

⁴ Yogendra Yadav, talk given at a workshop on ‘Civil Society and Activism in Neoliberal India’ at the Institute of Economic Growth, 15 January 2009.

middle class is the class that articulates the hegemony of the ruling bloc. It both a) expresses this hegemony by translating the relations of domination into the language of legitimation; and b) mediates the relationship between classes within the ruling bloc, as well as between this bloc and other classes. (Deshpande 2003: 139)

In a democracy, the cultural reproduction of inequality requires a public discourse of equality. The task of maintaining this paradox is accomplished by the idea of the middle class, a class which speaks on behalf of all others. Yet what are the specific sites and practices that accomplish this social alchemy, that is, the transmutation of particular elite interests to universal national ideologies?

Leela Fernandes (2006) points out that the idea of the middle class has taken on another set of meanings that are particular to this moment of Indian history. It has come to embody India’s transition to a liberalizing nation. Liberalization promises the pleasures of the market — a cornucopia of commodities magical and sensuous — as a hedonistic supplement to an older middle-class concern with maintaining social distance. To be a part of the middle class is to express oneself through consumption, and to establish one’s identity as being distinct from the lower classes through a set of cultural markers that proclaim one’s ‘good taste’ and style (Sheth 1999b). To be middle class in India today means to be no longer confined to the ‘waiting room’ of modernity (Chakrabarty 2000: 9–10). It calls for practices of consumption that mark one’s social identity as distinct from the middle class of the past and from the lower classes of the present (see Bourdieu 1984), while also signifying solidarity with ‘people like us’ or the social group one aspires to belong to. As Jeffery et al. (this volume) show, keeping a pet dog and naming it ‘Jackie’ becomes an expression of urbanity and sophistication for a well-to-do Jat household in rural Uttar Pradesh. These ways of being middle-class and striving to master its cultural codes require not just material resources, but the imaginative work and self-discipline essential to cultivating new forms of subjectivity (Mahmood 2005). The desire to be middle-class, to belong properly to this superior social group, is also a powerful aspiration among excluded social groups (see Guru 2001). When such groups seek entry into the middle class, how does their presence change the dynamics within this class? Do they, in turn, transform the cultural meanings and social experience of being middle-class? And what might their failure to achieve entry signify?

Questions about the role and composition of the middle class have been examined and debated in the academy and in the political sphere for more than a 100 years. They have acquired a certain urgency in the Indian context since the 1990s, when economic liberalization brought the middle class into prominence. At first, the debate primarily focused on the size of the middle class, its magnitude a proxy for the size of the market for consumer goods and, therefore, the growth potential of the Indian economy. The India Market Demographics Report 2002 by the National Council for Applied Economic Research (Rao 2004) sparked off a fever of speculation, financial as well as intellectual, about the ‘strength’ of this class, as measured by its capacity to consume (see Sridharan, this volume). This discussion was dominated by economists and demographers, business analysts, and corporate media keen to repackage their newspa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Abbreviations
• Glossary
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction
• Who are the middle classes? Economy, politics and history
• Being and becoming middle-class: Work, domesticity and consumption
• Middle-class politics, citizenship and the public sphere
• Bibliography
• About the Editors
• Notes on Contributors
• Index