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OXFORD
INDIA SHORT
INTRODUCTIONS

THE INDIAN
MIDDLE CLASS

SURINDER S. JODHKA
ASEEM PRAKASH
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 Contents

Preface
Acknowledgements
Introduction

1 What Does It Mean to Be Middle Class?

2 The Formative Years
3 The Age of Development and Nation Building
4 Transforming India, from Above
5 The Contemporary Dynamics and Number Games
6 Consuming Identities and Exclusionary Powers
7 Diversities and Margins

Conclusion
References
Index
 Preface

A day after India celebrated the 63rd anniversary of its independence, on the 16th of August 2011, a seventy-four-
year-old man named Anna Hazare, a former soldier with the Indian army and a rural farmer from Maharashtra,
began an indefinite fast demanding from the Indian government the setting-up of a new institution, the Lokpal, the
framework for which was proposed by groups of ‘activists’ working with him. The proposed institution was
expected to oversee the political and bureaucratic class and check corruption in India’s public life. Sitting on
dharna (sit-in protest) and fasting have been popular modes of political protest in India; however, such protests
attract the attention of the urban public rarely. This time though it turned out to be different. Not only was his
protest reported widely by the press and electronic media, it also generated an unprecedented response and received
the active support of the urban public. Though Anna Hazare himself is a kisan (a cultivator) and a former jawan (a
soldier), popular emblems of the India of the 1950s and 1960s, media reports suggested that it is the urban middle
class—which acquired strength and visibility during the post-liberalization period, the 1990s and after—that
responded to his protest most enthusiastically.
A little more than a year later, on the evening of the 16th of December 2012, a young physiotherapy student
was raped and brutally assaulted by six men in a moving bus in Delhi. The woman succumbed to her injuries a few
days later. Quite like corruption, rapes and murders are not rare events in cities like Delhi. But this time again, it
turned out to be different. The incident was widely reported in popular media and the capital witnessed
unprecedented protests in the following days and weeks. Several other cities of India also reported mobilizations of
people, protesting against the rape and murder of the young woman in the national capital. Those who participated
in these protests came from various cross sections of the urban population but were predominantly from middle-
class families.
This growing assertion and ascendance of the Indian middle class became even more pronounced in the
following years, especially during the national elections of 2014 and elections for the state assembly in Delhi in
2015. In both these elections, successful campaigns were framed in a language that gave centrality to middle-class
aspirations and avoided references to the cleavages of caste and community.
Popular views and analyses of Indian society and its political processes have generally tended to place the
differences of caste and community at the centre. Does the emergence of a middle-class identity imply the
weakening and probable decline of such ascriptive identities? Many analysts of the contemporary Indian scene
would indeed affirm this. They see the ascendance of the middle class as evidence of a fundamental change in
social relations and the mental disposition of the common Indian, the aam aadmi. This coming of age of the middle
class is viewed as the answer to all problems and challenges that India confronts in the 21st century. Once
mobilized, they argue, the middle class has the capacity to dislodge the ‘corrupt’ political elite and incompetent
bureaucracy and turn the country into an efficient and modern nation-state. They have already proven their worth
abroad and can do so in India, provided that they are allowed to do so by the ‘system’.
However, there are many within the middle class as well as outside it who view its role with a great deal of
suspicion. The dominant tendency in the Indian middle class, they argue, has always been to serve its own interest.
The growing influence of the middle class has tended to produce an exclusionary effect for those who have
historically been on the margins of Indian society—the Dalits, the Adivasis, and the various religious minorities. It
is this exclusionary tendency of the upwardly mobile middle-class Indians that keeps identities of caste and
community alive, they would argue (see Chapter 6). Unlike its counterparts in the West, the Indian middle class has
also been conservative and tradition-bound, temperamentally.
The emerging scholarly literature on the contemporary dynamics of the Indian middle class also points to a
reconfiguration of the urban family alongside societal gender relations. Even when the emerging middle-class
cultures make women more visible and active consumers, it nevertheless reinforces the patriarchal values and
traditional practices by not questioning the pre-existing gender divisions in society.
This short book is an attempt to unravel the idea of the Indian middle class, by looking at its origins during the
colonial period and the subsequent moments of its expansion during the Nehruvian phase of nation building and
after the introduction of economic liberalization during the 1990s. This is not simply a historical account of the
middle class as the book also provides a critical overview of the sociology and politics of the Indian middle class,
its hegemonic agenda, and its internal diversities. We have tried to write the book in an accessible language while
also trying to engage with the subject without sacrificing its complexities and complications.
 Acknowledgements

Work on this book began sometime in 2010–11 when the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung (KAS), a German Foundation
with an office in New Delhi, approached us to write a position paper on the subject for them as a part of their larger
project on middle classes in the emerging economies. Working on the Indian middle class was not very difficult.
Not only could we find a good volume of written material on the subject, the middle class had also become a
buzzword in post-liberalization India.
Besides the in-house discussions with Beatrice Gorawantschy and Susanna Vogt of the KAS Foundation, we
were fortunate to receive comments on our rather tentative ideas from a number of academics in India amongst
whom our position paper was circulated. This included Dipankar Gupta, N. Rajaram, Radhika Chopra, Ajay Mehra,
and Ashutosh Kumar.
However, this short book took a much longer time to evolve and is very different from what we first wrote for
the KAS Foundation. Some of this work was completed when one of us was a visiting faculty at the Lund
University in Sweden on a position funded by the Indian Council of Cultural Relations. We would like to
acknowledge the positive support from Anna Lindberg, Catarina Kinnval, Staffan Lindberg, Ted Svensson, and
Lars Eklund. We are also grateful to Leila Choukroune and Jules Naudet of the Centre for Social Sciences and
Humanities (CSSH) in New Delhi for their support. Jules Naudet read the manuscript and offered some very useful
and critical comments. Conversations with colleagues at the Centre for the Study of Social Systems (Jawaharlal
Nehru University, New Delhi) and the Tata Institute of Social Sciences in Hyderabad helped us in different ways
while working on the book. We are particularly grateful to Maitrayee Chaudhuri and Divya Vaid of the Centre for
the Study of Social Systems. Comments received from the Oxford University Press reviewers were also very
helpful. They helped us revisit some of our formulations and arguments.
Chapters of the book were also read by several of our friends and students. They include Sneha Sudha Komath,
Shilpa Deshpande, Priyanka Bawa, Anasua Chatterjee, Suraj Beri, Sreya Sen, and Mallika Chaudhuri. Their
comments and suggestions helped us in improving the text and making our language accessible.
While we have tried to write this book as an introductory text, we have tried to bring into our text all the
possible complexities of the subject.

Surinder S. Jodhka
Aseem Prakash
 Introduction

What does it mean to be middle class in India today? Is it simply an economic category, an income grouping, or
something more than that, a group adhering to a certain value system and aspiring to a distinctive style of life? Who
would thus qualify to be a middleclass person, and on what criteria? What proportion of the Indian population can
be classified as middle class? What role does the middle class play, beyond economics, in culture, in democratic
politics, and in shaping India’s position in the emerging world order?
Even though the category of middle class has been in use since the days of colonial rule and freedom struggle,
it became a buzzword in the everyday life of India only in the early 1990s, after the introduction of economic
reforms and neo-liberal policies. Over the years, ‘middle class’ has come to acquire a kind of generic character.
This is perhaps best reflected in its popular translation as the aam aadmi, the common person or everyman.
Interestingly enough, it is during this period that the notion and popular image of the aam aadmi also saw an
interesting change, from a tepid, defenceless, and worried person to an aspirational, proud, and acquisitive citizen.
The idea or identity of middle class is invoked in everyday life in contemporary India in a variety of different
ways and contexts: urban and educated with a salaried job; qualified and independent professionals; enterprising,
mobile, and young women and men; consumers of luxury goods and services; a housewife of an urban family
struggling to keep her domestic economy going with a limited income in times of rising prices; an agitated and
angry office-goer who always envies his/her neighbour for managing to keep ahead.
Even though being middle class in contemporary India is, in many ways, a matter of privilege, those located in
the middle class tend to also view themselves as among those with a fragile sense of security. Along with the poor,
they often complain about the manipulative and ‘corrupt’ economic and political system controlled by the rich and
the powerful, the wily elite. Middle-class engagements with politics have been of crucial and critical significance in
modern India—from the colonial period to present times. It is the middle class that generally produces leaders who
challenge the existing power structures and provide creative directions to social movements of all kinds.
The Indian middle class has also been accused of being a self-serving and self-obsessed category, indifferent to
the poor and the marginalized. The middle class creates barriers and boundaries to keep the poor out of its sphere of
privileges. On the other end, the poor aspire to join the middle class and work hard to achieve it. Even when they
cannot afford to provide wholesome food to their children, they send them to private English medium schools in the
hope that education would help them move out of poverty, to middle-class locations.
Besides its invocation in descriptions of social structures and spheres of inequality and power, the idea of the
middle class is also invoked, positively, to describe the emerging Indian, who, through education and hard work, is
trying to move upwards, with his or her own resources, and, in turn, is transforming the country into a modern and
developed nation. It is creative individuals from middle-class India who have been spreading themselves across the
most valued and critical avenues of opportunities and expanding the Indian and global economy in neo-liberal
times. Globally, mobile computer software engineers and management gurus of Indian origin, who have come to
matter almost everywhere in the world today, all come from middle-class families.
The third popular invocation of the middle class is in relation to the market. As an economic agent, the middle-
class person is a consumer par excellence. It is the middle class that sustains the modern bourgeois economy
through its purchasing power. Given its location, the middle class is presumed to be obsessed with consumption.
Consumption for the middle class is not simply an act of economic rationality but also a source of identity. The
shopping malls, mobile phones, and growing reach of media are symbolic evidences of the growing significance of
the middle class in India. Much of the advertising industry is directed at the middle-class consumer.
Yet, the middle class is not as homogenous as it may appear at the first instance. Diversities within the middle
class are many, of income and wealth as also of status and privilege. Middle classes are often subclassified into the
‘upper’, the ‘lower’, and ‘those in between’ segments, depending upon income, education, occupation, and so on.
Similarly, those who call themselves ‘middle class’ or are classified as such, do not abandon their other identities,
particularly those that have been sources of privilege—of caste, community/religion, and region/ethnicity. Thus, we
have notions such as the ‘Bengali middle class’ or the ‘Muslim middle class’ or the ‘Dalit middle class’. Invariably,
the rise and consolidation of such a class within an ‘ethnic’ or cultural group works to sharpen those identities.
Identifying who belongs to the middle class appears to be quite simple: those in the middle, in between the poor
on one end and the rich on the other, are all middle class. Interestingly, this is how most of the contemporary
discourse, shaped and shared by economists and policy makers, has been framed. Perhaps the only source of
contention for mainstream economists has been the choice of objective criteria, income, consumption, or something
else, for drawing the boundaries on the two ends of the middle.
This short book is an attempt to show how such a statistical view is limited and flawed because it tells us very
little about the substantive social processes that unfold themselves through the emergence of middle-class social
formations and how in turn middle classes in countries like India shape social, cultural, and political life. Middle
class for us is a historical and sociological category. It emerges with the development of modern capitalist society,
with markets and cities. Its rise implies the emergence of a new kind of social order: a system of ranking and social
classification. It transforms the nature of social relations within communities and households, between men and
women, and between young and old. While there is something similar about middle classes everywhere in the
world, as a historical category, middle classes also have their specificities. Thus, the Indian middle class has its own
specific history, sociology, and politics.
We need to understand the dynamics of the Indian middle class because besides being an empirically
identifiable sociological category, the middle class has also come to be the norm, that is, the ‘normal’ way to be, in
contemporary India. It has played a kind of hegemonic role since the days of the colonial period, in shaping national
identity during the freedom struggle, in shaping the development agenda and nation building after India’s
independence, and in contemporary times, in creating social consensus on neo-liberal reforms. It is also from within
the sections of the middle classes that contests and oppositions to these trends in Indian society are articulated.
Thus, besides being a short introduction to the Indian middle class, this book, we hope, will also open a window to
an understanding of contemporary Indian society, its pasts, and its possible futures.
 1
What Does It Mean to Be Middle Class?

The emergence of a middle class marks a decisive moment in a nation’s history. It indicates an open rather than a closed opportunity
structure, a society with the chance of upward mobility and achievement beyond subsistence. It further marks the transition from an industrial
society, polarized into the antagonistic classes of propertied and property-less, to one with buffering groups in the middle…. (Landry and
Marsh 2011: 374)

India has often been described as a land of contradictions. The discourse of the Indian middle class is a good
example of this. A few simple facts make it evident. In terms of real income or purchasing power parity, India today
is the third largest economy of the world. Only the United States of America and China are larger than India in
terms of the absolute size of its economic activity. India is also home to a large number of the rich and wealthy. The
absolute size of those who could be described as rich and middle class in India today is larger than the total
population of the relatively big countries of Europe: Germany, France, and Britain.
However, the other side of the reality in India is equally, if not more, compelling and important. Even in the
second decade of the 21st century, India is home to the largest number of the chronically poor in the world, larger
than Sub-Saharan Africa, and nearly one-third of all the desperately poor in the world. Together, they also account
for nearly one-third of India’s total population. The poor in India lack the basic facilities for a secure and dignified
human life. As per most indicators of economic and human development, India continues to be a developing
country. Despite its comparatively high rates of growth, India still does not figure among the top 100 countries in
the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) ranking based on comparative human development.
Social life in India, too, is marked by some very interesting contrasts and contradictions. As per the Census of
2011, a little more than two-thirds of the Indian population lives in over half a million of its rural settlements. In
states like Bihar and Himachal Pradesh, their numbers go up to nearly 90 per cent. A good proportion of those
living in rural India depend directly on agriculture for their livelihood. Agriculture was reported to be the primary
source of employment for more than half of all working Indians. However, the share of agriculture in India’s
national gross domestic product (GDP) has been consistently declining, and had come down to less than one-
seventh of the total income by early 2015.
As would be the case with agrarian settlements in other parts of the world, ownership and non-ownership of
land carries a lot of value in social, economic, and cultural life in rural India. However, traditionally rural
settlements in most of India (though not everywhere) have also been divided along caste lines, in a hierarchical
structure, governed by values of purity and impurity where the normative order divided village residents into
communities and ranked them vertically. Even when the hierarchical order of caste overlapped with patterns of
landownership, its logic was different. It was based on notions of status, honour, and humiliation. It also marked
rigid boundaries across communities and restricted social interaction and marriage alliances across caste groups.
There is no space for a ‘middle class’ in such an imagination. Those located in the middle of the caste
hierarchy, or in the land ownership pattern, do not qualify to be middle class. The systemic logic of caste does not
allow for individual mobility. Similarly, the ‘middle peasants’ of agrarian societies are not middle classes, because
of their attachment to land and their dependence on subsistence agriculture.
Middle class, as it has come to be viewed in contemporary times, is a category of modern society, a society that
emerged with industrial development and urbanization in the modern West. Middle class is not a community with
an ascriptive identity. It emerged in the Indian subcontinent only with the introduction of a Western-style secular
education system, the industrial economy, and a new administrative system by the British colonial rulers during the
19th century. Over the years, the Indian middle class has continued to grow.
After India’s independence from colonial rule, the new developmental state expanded its bureaucratic structure
manifold and invested large sums of money in public sector enterprises. It also built more schools, universities, and
hospitals. Private capital also grew, albeit slowly. As a consequence of these processes of economic development,
the size of the Indian middle class steadily grew. Beginning with the 1990s, the Indian middle class began to
acquire much greater visibility. Economic reforms introduced by the Indian political regime significantly enhanced
its engagements with the global economy. The onset of a new process of globalization also enabled India to
participate actively in emergent areas of what was being described as the ‘new economy’. By incentivizing private
capital and encouraging investments by foreign capital, the ‘neo-liberal’ economic reforms also raised growth rates
of the Indian economy quite significantly. From a sluggish pace of around 3 per cent during the first four decades
after independence, the Indian economy began to grow at 7 to 8 per cent per annum, and occasionally at even
higher rates.
A distinctive feature of this rapid economic growth has been its urban-centric nature. The size of India’s urban
economy, particularly its service sector, has been growing quite steadily. Even though the process of economic
liberalization has benefited private capital, the expanding service economy has increased the size of the middle
classes rapidly and substantially. The middle class also grew within the expanding private manufacturing economy.
With growing numbers, the influence of the middle classes in Indian society and its political system also grew.
Besides a manifold increase in its size, India’s new middle class has also been getting richer and internally more
diverse.
At another level, these processes of economic growth and expanding middle classes are fundamentally
transforming the structure of the Indian society and its economy, from being characterized by ‘a sharp contrast
between a small elite and a large impoverished mass, to being one with substantial intermediate classes’ (Sridharan
2008: 1). Some scholars have also argued that this change provides the necessary economic and political base to the
emerging market-based capitalist economy in the rapidly changing world today (Kohli 1989).
While no one would disagree with the fact that the size of the middle classes in India has indeed increased quite
substantially since the beginning of the economic reforms in the early 1990s, there are several disagreements on the
exact numbers of those who could be described as the middle classes, and their proportions in the total population
of India. These estimates vary significantly and range from a lower end of 5 or 6 per cent of the total population of
the country to an upper end of 25 or 30 per cent, and, sometimes, even more. However, almost everyone agrees that
the size of the Indian middle class will continue to grow, at least for several decades to come. This is in contrast to
many countries of the Western hemisphere and some other parts of the developed world, such as Japan, where the
middle classes have reportedly been shrinking. Thanks largely to the growing numbers of middle-class consumers,
India is being viewed as one of those countries where the markets will keep expanding for quite some time to come.
Despite its enormous social and economic problems, India is listed amongst the most happening places in the world
today, an emerging global economic power (see Chapter 5).
The rise of the Indian middle class is also transforming the popular image of India as well as that of Indians.
The old orientalist representation of India as a land of snake charmers, village communities, and spiritual gurus is
slowly giving way to a new picture. India’s weight in the global economy continues to increase because of its
technically and culturally skilled human power, which is willing to travel across continents and adapt to a variety of
working conditions. The middle class is also beginning to lobby in the internal politics of the country for reshaping
its political institutions and its systems of governance.

The Classical Conceptions

The ‘middle class’ has been an elusive and yet popular category. While recent writings by Indian economists have
mostly debated its size in terms of incomes and consumption levels, the term has a broader sociological and
conceptual history, both in the Western context as well as in India. As a modern sociological category, it emerged
in Western Europe with the rise of industrial capitalism during the 18th and 19th centuries, and continued to expand
conceptually and empirically during the 20th century. Karl Marx was perhaps the first social scientist who provided
a comprehensive analysis of an emerging industrial society through his concepts of capitalism and class.
Even though he used the category of class while discussing pre-capitalist societies as well, the term ‘middle
class’ is invoked primarily in the analysis of capitalist societies. For Marx, capitalism, or the bourgeois society, was
a class society structured around the relationship between two fundamental classes, the bourgeoisie and the
proletarian. The bourgeoisie, the owners of the means of production or the capital, exploited the proletariat or the
working classes, who in order to survive had to sell their labour power to the owners of capital.
While the two fundamental classes were tied to each other through an exploitative system, there were some
who had not yet been subsumed by the capitalist system. They were neither wageworkers employed by anyone nor
did they hire others. They were shopkeepers, small peasants, independent professionals, artisans, and other such
people. In social science literature, these groups have come to be known as the ‘old middle classes’, a residual
category.
Marx did not think that they would survive as independent economic actors for very long and the logic of
capitalist development would eventually swallow them up, subsuming them in one of the two major classes. While
some sections of these old middle classes indeed declined with the development of capitalist economies, some
continued to survive and flourish within the capitalist production system. More importantly, newer categories of
professionals—such as doctors, teachers, bankers, public administrators, architects, engineers, and managers—who
either worked independently or were employed in supervisory services and earned decent salaries, swelled over
time. Even though, technically speaking, the owners of capital employed them on a salary, they did not see
themselves as members of the ‘working classes’, nor did they support the proletarian class concerns.
Marx had called them ‘ideological classes’, who produced ‘false-consciousness’ and the hegemonic cultural
edifice for the ruling bourgeois regime. Later, Marxists also studied these ‘new middle-classes’ and tried to
conceptualize them in a variety of different ways. While some looked at them as bearers of cultural capital
(Gouldner 1979) and new petty-bourgeoisie (Poulantzas 1975), others viewed them as occupying ‘contradictory
class locations’, being beneficiaries of the capitalist mode of production and simultaneously being a part of the
proletariat as they too had to sell their intellectual labour for a wage (Wright 1978: 61–3). The contemporary
Marxist scholarship recognizes the fact that the middle classes have not only survived the growth of capitalism but
have also expanded in size over the years (Wright 1979: 64–82).
Perhaps the most important contribution of the Marxist notion of class is its emphasis on it being a social or
relational category and not simply an incomebased or economic classification. It is only through their relationship
to others that a category could be identified as being distinct.
Another German sociologist, Max Weber (1946), too wrote extensively on class. Though he initially claimed to
be only ‘reformulating’ Marx’s ideas, he eventually ended up offering a different conception of class and the
middle classes. For Weber, class, as a category of distinction, acquires significance in capitalism and the market-
driven economy, in which individuals compete for economic gains. He defines classes as groups of people who
share a similar ‘market situation’.
Weber also works with a pluralistic and differentiated conception of classes. He begins by making a distinction
between the propertied, the ‘ownership classes’ (Besitzklassen) and the property-less, the ‘acquisition classes’
(Erwerbsklassen). However, unlike Marx, Weber does not see them as two ‘basic class’ positions. They are
internally differentiated. For example, while the ‘rentiers’ and the ‘entrepreneurs’ are both ‘owners of capital’,
sociologically they are two very different categories. Similarly the ‘property-less’ are also differentiated in relation
to ‘types and degree of monopolization’ of the marketable skills which they possess:
Consequently, there are various types of middle classes, which stand between the positively privileged classes (the propertied) and the
negatively privileged classes (those who possess neither property nor marketable skills). While these groupings are all nominally property-
less, those who possess skills, which have definite ‘market value’, are certainly in different class situation from those who have nothing to
offer but their (unskilled) labour. In acquisition classes—i.e., those associated particularly with the rise of modern capitalism—educational
qualifications take on a particular significance in this respect…. (Giddens 1981: 43)

Another important feature of Weber’s analysis is his distinction between ‘class’ and ‘status-groups’. Unlike
class, where ‘economic interest in market relationship’ is the defining feature, status groups are ‘communities’ as
they are ‘built upon criteria of grouping other than those stemming from market situations’. Status groups are
defined by their specific ‘styles of life’. Interestingly, for Weber, consumption is an aspect of one’s ‘style of life’
and not ‘class situation’. Class situation stems primarily from one’s relationship with the process of production
(presumably goods and services). In other words, consumption patterns produce ‘status groups’ and not ‘classes’.
Further, unlike Marx, Weber does not see any tendency towards polarization of society into two classes. On the
contrary, Weber argues that with the development of capitalism, the white collar ‘middle class’ would tend to
expand rather than disappear.
While Marx and Weber differ in their understanding of middle classes, they also tend to agree on several basic
points. Both treat ‘middle class’ as a modern category, which emerges with the development of industrial capitalism
and the market economy. They also agree that class is an economic category, a material relationship, and not a
‘mental disposition’. Though, at an analytical level, Marx proposes a two-class model, he too recognizes the plural
character of the middle class. For example, his notion of ‘ideological classes’ is not very different from Weber’s
notion of ‘educated middle-classes’.
Another sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu, has made an important addition to our understanding of the social
dynamics of class. Instead of focussing purely on economic relations or market situation of individuals, he
underlines the need to look at the variety of resources individuals have: social networks, education, and other
cultural habits, besides the economic resources. They too work ‘as actually usable resources and powers’ for those
who possess them (Bourdieu 1984: 114). For example, social networks and the quality of education play crucial
roles in the economic possibilities or opportunities a person would have in the present day society. This indeed
helps in empirical study of the middle class and its reproduction in everyday life.
Further, Bourdieu also disagrees with Marx and Weber on the question of theoretically specifying boundaries
between different classes; instead, he underlines the need to focus on the practice. However, the social context, or
habitus, the socially constituted systems of dispositions that orient ‘thoughts, perceptions, expressions, and actions’
(Bourdieu 1990: 55), is also central to his analysis of human action. Thus, social classes do not have a pre-assigned
political position and the boundaries, for example, between working class and the middle class are not as neatly
marked as often presumed in the theoretical discussion of scholars like Marx and Weber.
It is in this broad framework of understanding of middle classes that we will later try to discuss the Indian case.

Middle Class in the West

Sociologists and historians of modern Western societies have also studied different dimensions of the middle
classes in these societies. Many of them have worked with the Marxist distinction between the ‘old’ and the ‘new’
middle classes.
The well-known economic historian Karl Polanyi has extensively explored the emergence of class-based
divisions in Europe and the distinctiveness of social relations that emerged with the development of modern day
market-based economies. He, too, locates their origin in the great social transformations that occurred with
commercial and industrial revolutions in the West and the subsequent rise of the capitalist economic system.
Following the European sociological tradition, Polanyi described the change in social relationships that the
industrial revolution produced as a movement from ‘customs’ to ‘contract’ (Polanyi 1957). Perhaps the most
significant change in this context was the emergence of the market as an institution for ordering economic
transactions. This also meant that things like land and labour could be bought and sold in the markets through
money at a price, determined at the intersection of demand and supply. How did this shift produce a class society?
As we have mentioned in the context of the caste system in India, Polanyi too argues that the economic and
social relations in pre-modern Europe followed a different logic. Quite like the caste system in India, social status,
derived from a traditional normative system, determined economic rewards. In custom-driven societies, movement
of goods and services was subjected to the rigid rights and obligations of the statusbased normative order (age, sex,
kinship, marriage). The rise of the market society transformed the nature of exchange relationships. They had to be
based on the logic of supply and demand, which operated through contracting. A contract is intrinsically
individualistic. It mandates economic transaction to the free will of the individual, which manifests in a legal
agreement. Individuals are no longer identified by their status in the hierarchical system of social order, but instead
are identified through the kind of services they could offer in the market place.
This shift towards a market society operating through contract gave birth to a distinct social pyramid. On the
top of the social pyramid were the gentry and aristocracy. These were usually men of independent means, but not
necessarily landowners, who had their own private income and did not have to work for a living. Mostly they lived
idly and without manual labour. At the lowest end of the social pyramid were the labouring poor, the working class,
who were hired through the markets and who dirtied their hands. Between these extremes were the middling people,
who worked but did not get their hands dirty. The majority of them were commercial or industrialist capitalists who
had control over money drawn through parental gift, inheritance, or loan, which they invested to earn more money.
Along with the upper class, they also employed the working class who had no stock of money and were dependent
on others for their living (Earle 1989: 3).
The emergent classes in the upper segment of the social pyramid, thus, employed the working class and
invested capital to enable it to accumulate on a regular basis. Earle does not think that men of letters—clergy,
lawyers, physicians—belonged to the upper or middle classes. Unlike the upper class they were not idle, nor did
they use capital to earn profit like the middle class. This educated class relied mainly on salaries and fees. These
professionals, argues Earle, occupied an intermediate position between the upper and middle classes. Further, some
of them, such as the bishops as well as most barristers and physicians, were clearly members of the upper class.
However, towards the 17th century, the younger generation of upper-class families started pursuing trade or went
into the service of the church, while the daughters married merchants (Earle 1989: 3–10).
Academic accounts analysing socio-economic relationships differ on the extent to which the economy was ‘dis-
embedded’ from customs (Gemici 2007), and also on the extent to which the emergent modern economy could
generate a middle class across different regions of Europe (Wahrman 1995). Yet the shift towards contract was
sufficiently large to enable a substantial proportion of people (merchants, bankers, traders, and so on) to reach the
middle rung of the social pyramid. Gradually, the middle class grew in numbers and social power. The new social
reality was eventually reflected in England through the Reform Bill of 1832 that allowed the admission of the
middle class into the parliament, which hitherto had been the preserve of the landed elite. As in England and other
parts of Europe, the idea of the middle class as a social group was further cemented with the political representation
of this class in both political and public spheres (Wahrman 1995). Gradually, the middle class was recognized as a
class not only of economic power but also of specific social manners, morals, and values, which were considered
integral to its formation and growth (French 1996; Owensby 1999). From a section of this middle class eventually
emerged the rich ruling class of capitalist society, the bourgeoisie, and as discussed by Marx and others, the term
‘middle classes’ began to be used for those who remained outside the new order of wage labour and capital.
Most sociologists attribute the emergence of the ‘new middle class’ to the further expansion of industrial
capitalism and the rise of big corporations with large and complex organizational structures. G.D.H. Cole (1950), a
well-known sociologist, attributes the birth of the new middle class to two important developments in the Western
economy: first, an increase in the number of public schools and the spread of education; and second, the spread of
joint-stock companies. These developments fostered large-scale enterprise and brought into existence a new class of
salaried managers and administrators. Lockwood, another sociologist, also attributes the rise of the white-collared
salaried class to the developments of corporate capitalism and the emergence of big organizations (Lockwood
1958).
The crucial difference between the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ middle classes is their position within the economy. The
old middle classes occupied that position by the virtue of their being placed outside the polar class structure. They
were neither part of the capitalist class nor of the working class. The new middle classes, on the other hand, did not
enjoy any such autonomy. They were part of the big organizations. Their intermediate position came from their
place inside the industrial economy. Their growth occurred because of the new demands of modern industry that
required the services of a large number of specialists and professionals with technical and administrative skills.
The ‘new’ middle classes further expanded with growth of the ‘tertiary’ or the service sector of the economy
(Dahrendorf 1959). Along with urbanization and industrialization, a large number of tertiary industries, such as
banking, insurance, hospitals, hotels, tourism, and the mass media developed. The proportion of this segment has
been consistently growing in the working population in most of the industrialized countries of the West.
The discourse of the middle class experienced another interesting shift in the West during the first half of the
20th century when the middle class became a more generalized category and a social identity. The rise of the
welfare state and strong trade unions produced a new category of the affluent worker (Goldthrope 1963), whose
wages allowed him or her to access middle-class lifestyles. The democratic welfare state expanded the domain of
citizenship rights and began to universally provide quality education, medical care, and basic housing for free
(Marshall 1950). The welfare state system also had to take care of all the basic requirements of those who were on
the margins, such as the aged, the disabled, and the unemployed.
Developed countries of western Europe, North America, and the Pacific thus virtually became ‘middle-class
societies’. Not that these countries had no economic disparities, but a large majority of their populations, going up
to 75 to 90 per cent, identified themselves as being members of different segments of the middle class.1 Middle
class thus came to be identified as ‘everyman’, which could be translated in the present day Indian context as aam
aadmi.2
The erstwhile developed countries have been through a rather severe economic crisis since the early years of
the 21st century. The gradual weakening of the welfare state and a prolonged economic crisis have had a direct
impact, particularly on the income levels of the lower segments of their middle classes, and consequently for their
self-image as middle classes. The shrinkage of the middle class in most of the developed world is not merely a
matter of perception.
The idea and the rise of the aam aadmi as the middle class in India has a different trajectory, which we explore
in the following chapters of this book.

1 http://www.gallup.com/poll/159029/americans-likely-say-belong-middle-class.aspx.
2 Interestingly, the category aam aadmi, as it has come to be understood in the Indian urban context, is not only gendered, referring to aadmi (man)
to the exclusion of aurat (woman), but is also a category that refers primarily to urban middle and lower middle classes, excluding the poor—urban as well
as rural.
 2
The Formative Years

The colonial middle class … was simultaneously placed in a position of subordination in one relation and in a position of dominance in
another…. For the … middle class of the late nineteenth century, political and economic domination by a British colonial elite was a fact. The
class was created in a relation of subordination. But its contestation of this relation was to be premised upon its cultural leadership of the
indigenous colonized people. The nationalist project was in principle a hegemonic project. (Chatterjee 1993: 36)

Societies and ideas do not ‘evolve’ through a simple process of diffusion, as a linear progression. Even though, over
the past century and more, the marketbased capitalist economic system has spread across different regions of the
world, local histories of its spread and development have been very different from what happened in the West
during the 19th and 20th centuries. Past realities and local histories of different regions and their cultures actively
shape outcomes of economic processes. Even when technological or political revolutions reorder social relations,
new social categories carry the stamps of their pasts. For example, the history of industrialization and capitalist
development and the new social orders in countries like China, Brazil, South Africa, Russia, or even Japan have
been different from what is considered as the ‘classical’ Western model spelt out in textbooks of economic history
and classical sociology. This is true about the middle classes as well, including the Indian middle class.
Despite their obvious suggestion, the recent processes of globalization and increasing economic integration
have not been able to erase diversities and differences across regions and nations of the world. Globalization does
not mean social homogenization. Diversities and differences persist, not only in the innocuous spheres of culture
and habit, such as food, dialect, or rituals, but also in larger structures, such as the modes of political organization,
social institutions, and even in market-based processes. Even newly emergent economic spheres such as corporate
businesses tend to exhibit distinctive sociological characters, derived from their past histories and their
local/regional contexts. India’s contemporary history is a case in point.
Perhaps the single most important fact about contemporary Indian society is its history of colonization by the
British. India, as we know it today, obtained its form and administrative systems largely during the colonial period.
Its present day geographic boundaries and identity of a nation-state were also shaped and acquired at the time of
Independence and Partition in 1947.
The Indian middle class also evolved during this period, out of the new educational system introduced by the
British during the early decades of the 19th century to produce a class of local babus (literally, clerks), who would
help the colonial rulers rule over the expanding territories of the empire. The oft-quoted extract from Thomas. B.
Macaulay’s Minutes, dated the 2 February 1835, sums up this formative intent of the colonial rulers quite clearly.
As a member of the colonial bureaucracy in India, Macaulay had argued with his colleagues about the need for
initiating a new education system in India:
… to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern, a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but
English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect. To that class we may leave it to refine the vernacular dialects of the country, to enrich
those dialects with terms of science borrowed from the Western nomenclature, and to render them by degrees fit vehicles for conveying
knowledge to the great mass of the population.1

As is evident from this and other historical accounts, the intention of the British rulers was not to produce a
middle class that would creatively innovate and participate in the economic process of the emerging bourgeois
economic order of the region, but to train a dependent category that would facilitate the British not only in their
needs for administration but also in generating a cultural hegemony. This class was to be an agency to enable the
natives to learn about the perceived superior knowledge systems prevalent in Great Britain and the other virtues of
Western civilization.
As the popular view goes, the new class of babus evolved into an agency that effectively mediated between the
colonial rulers and local masses and became the most important vehicle to spread the ‘superior’ Western culture, its
message of modernity, including the ideas of democracy, which also produced conflict between the local babu and
the colonial boss, eventually taking the shape of the freedom movement. According to this common sense, the
Western-educated middle class of India continues to be a modernizing social category, an important agent of
positive social change in Indian society, where the hold of tradition continues to be a critical source of its
backwardness.
While the colonial context of its origin is indeed a fact, this celebratory representation of the Indian middle
class is a myth that, to a large extent, is produced by members of the Indian middle classes themselves. It helps
them perpetuate their position of privilege and power. The actual history of the Indian middle class is far more
complex, diverse, and simply different.
The Indian middle class did not just emerge as a modernizing agent out of its traditional moorings. It did not
evolve as a distinct social group/category detached from its past history and existing social contexts. On the
contrary, in certain cases, the middle class championed ‘tradition’, and actively represented and constructed local
level ‘sectarian’ identities. A good example of this is the manner in which they were able to reproduce patriarchal
authority and a notion of Indian family that reproduced the position of women as homemakers through actively
eulogizing their roles as mothers and the guardians of native traditions. Similarly, the colonial policies of
classifying communities on clearly marked caste and religious identities sharpened ascriptive boundaries among
groups and communities. The British did not always wish to change the pre-existing social realities. On the
contrary, they actively participated in the production of a new common sense about India. They often absorbed the
‘traditional’ view into their policy frames and reinforced, and at times even strengthened, the pre-existing structures
of social relations. In other words, they simultaneously transformed and reinforced the pre-existing structures of
power relations. The Indian middle classes were at the centre of all these processes.

Colonial Rule and Social Change

Despite continuities and compromises, the British colonial rule over the subcontinent turned out to be
fundamentally different from all the earlier political systems and empires that had existed in the region. The British
not only established their rule over a much larger territory of the region compared to any prior ruler in the history of
the region, they also transformed the diverse economies and political cultures of the subcontinent. Their agrarian
policies had far-reaching implications for the existing structure of land relations and the manners in which
cultivators and landowners engaged with the state and with each other.
The new Land Settlements transformed patterns of revenue collections from the cultivators. They also initiated
the process of commercialization of agricultural production, without modernizing it; integrating the local cultivators
into market economy without enabling them to bargain and compete. As a consequence, India’s agrarian economy
declined. Pre-colonial India also had an urban economy and vibrant artisanal industries, which suffered and
declined when the British imported cheap goods from the factories in Britain where the industrial revolution had
transformed their technological base and productive capacity. This ‘de-industrialization’ of the erstwhile urban
economy of India added to the burden on agricultural lands.
On the positive side, they introduced railways and modern industries in the subcontinent. They reorganized the
political and administrative structures of the colonial empire and introduced modern modes of communication. The
task of administering an expanding empire needed an increasing number of skilled human resources.
The British initiated a process of educating the ‘natives’ by opening schools and colleges in different parts of
the subcontinent. These educational institutions first appeared in the new colonial cities like Calcutta, Bombay, and
Madras (now known as Kolkata, Mumbai, and Chennai respectively). Local communities, particularly those with
resources and high social standing, responded enthusiastically and sent their children for ‘modern’ education.
Historians of modern India claim that by the 1880s, the number of Englisheducated Indians was already around
50,000 (Sarkar 1983: 65) and increased quite rapidly soon after. The number of those studying in these English
medium schools rose from 298,000 to 505,000 in just around 20 years, from 1887 to 1907 (Sarkar 1983: 65).
English was not to be merely a language of the school. It soon began to acquire the stature of a superior
medium of communication among the embryonic middle-class elite. This is clearly indicated by the fact that the
circulation of English language newspapers rose quite rapidly during this period, from around 90,000 in 1885 to
nearly 276,000 in 1905 (Sarkar 1983: 65).
B.B. Mishra, who was among the first Indian scholars to write a detailed book on The Indian Middle Class,
published by the Oxford University Press in 1961, tells us that by 1911, British India had established as many as
186 colleges in different parts of the empire, teaching 36,284 students. These numbers went up to 231 colleges and
59,595 students by 1921 and to 385 colleges and 144,904 students by 1939 (Mishra 1961: 304). Manifestly, there
was an enthusiasm for Western education, particularly for higher education in English.
Seeing this enthusiasm, the British government began to reduce its grants for the purpose. This encouraged
private players and trusts to open schools and colleges, which helped in continued expansion of educational
infrastructure. According to one estimate, the number of private colleges increased from 11 to 53 between 1881–2
and 1901–2 (Sarkar 1983: 67). Some rich Indian families even sent their children abroad, mostly to England, for
further education in leading British universities, such as Oxford, Cambridge, and London. After securing degrees
from these prestigious institutions, many returned home. This new native elite also brought with them modern ideas
of ‘liberalism’ and ‘democracy’ that had become popular in the West after the French Revolution. Thus, they
became carriers of not only British cultural values but also of modern ideas of freedom, equality, and democracy.
Those educated in local colleges were mostly absorbed in the colonial administrative structure. These jobs in
the colonial government carried a ‘high’ social status and became a route to acquiring middle-class positions. Over
the years, a new class emerged in India. Apart from those employed in the administrative jobs of the British
government, they included independent professionals such as lawyers, doctors, teachers, medics, and journalists.
The size of this ‘educated middle class’ thus continued to grow during the second half of the 19th century.

Economic Changes and the Expansion of ‘Other’ Middle Classes

Apart from the newly introduced sphere of Englishmedium education, economic changes introduced by the colonial
government also expanded several other spheres of the Indian economy, which produced newer social groups and
enlarged the size of older groups, who could be described as middle classes. The most prominent among them were
the petty traders/shopkeepers and independent artisans, the social groups that were called ‘old middle classes’ in the
Western context. Merchants and artisans had always been separate social strata at the local level in economic
structures of most regions of the subcontinent. They could easily be identified through their separate caste
identities.
They were an organic part of local communities. As the economy began to change in response to the new
administrative policies of the colonial rulers, many of the merchants moved to newly emerging towns and cities and
became independent traders. This process was further accelerated during the post-Independence period.
Though limited in its significance, modern machinebased industry also began to grow during the colonial
period. The establishment of the railways during the middle of the 19th century created conditions for the growth of
modern industry in India. The colonial rulers had laid railways in the subcontinent primarily for transporting raw
materials from the region required for the British industry overseas. However, once the railways were established,
the British also invested in local industry in not only big cities but also in far-flung areas, such as plantations in the
Northeast.
The growing economic activity gave boost to trade and mercantile activity and some of the local traders
accumulated enough savings to be able to invest in modern industry. The swadeshi movement started by the
nationalist leadership during the early decades of 20th century gave a further boost to native industry. Apart from
giving employment to the labour force, this industry also employed white-collared skilled workers. Thus, along
with those employed in administrative positions by the colonial rulers, the growing numbers of these white-collared
employees of the new industrial sector also added to the size of the middle classes during the colonial period.

Social Origins and Status Hierarchies

In his historical survey of the colonial period, historian Sumit Sarkar demonstrates how the English-educated
Bengali middle class (lawyers, teachers, medics, journalists) ‘diligently cultivated the self-image’, which
represented them as a superior class, above the lay toilers of land, though below the traditionally dominant Bengali
upper-caste zamindars (Sarkar 1983: 67). However, unlike their Western counterparts, the social origins of this
class did not lie in industry and trade, which remained under control of the British companies or local trading
communities, such as the Marwaris, and other such castes/communities. While most of the educated modern
professionals came from relatively privileged social backgrounds and had some connections with land, they
generally occupied intermediary positions in the prevailing tenurial structure. In terms of their position in the
traditional ritual hierarchies, almost all of them came from relatively upper segments of the caste system.
A similar pattern could be observed in Madras and Pune where Western-educated groups had strong
connections with petty landholdings and petty rent collecting communities (Sarkar 1983: 68–9). Bombay saw the
emergence of a proto kind of alliance between the mill-owners and a group called the Bombay Intelligentsia on
issues like abolition of import duties on Lancashire cotton and the imposition of countervailing excise (Sarkar 1983:
68). These origins of the middle classes from the landed and propertied, as we discuss later in another chapter of
this book, shaped their politics in relation to the developmental process during the post-Independence period. Their
own linkages with landed interests structured their attitudes towards policies for agrarian change, such as the Land
Reforms, initiated by the government of independent India after 1947.

Middle Class as Social Reformers

Western education was not simply a process of learning skills or mastering a foreign language. It exposed
individuals to a different culture, a different religion, and a different set of values. While they would have been
proud servants of the Raj, their growing proximity to the British White-Christian culture also made them reflect on
their own culture. Given that a large majority of them came from the upper segment of traditional hierarchies and
relatively secure social backgrounds, they did not wish to simply abandon their moorings. While many aspects of
Western culture influenced them, they did not want to be swept away by it. They were enchanted by Western
modernity, but they also felt threatened by it. They were particularly worried about the possible expansion of
Christianity, along with the spread of Western values. They chose to critically examine their culture and initiate
reforms, often in collaboration with the colonial masters, so that they could strengthen their own ‘traditions’.
In some regions of the subcontinent, these newly educated individuals initiated a variety of social reform
movements during the 19th and early 20th centuries. These reform movements were most pronounced among the
upper caste Hindus, but they were not confined to them. Muslims, Sikhs, and those from lower orders of the caste
hierarchy also initiated reforms within their own contexts. Even though the reforms touched different segments of
their communities, members of the middle class almost everywhere provided the leadership to these initiatives.
The middle-class leaders of these movements worked for a negotiated adaptation of Western modernity. They
underlined the need for retaining what they saw as the core of the traditional religious belief and culture, and
simultaneously learning fromWestern and Christian cultures. Even though they had their regional character, these
movements emerged almost in all regions of India: in Bengal in the east, in Madras in the south, in Bombay and
Pune in the West, and in Punjab in the north. The two most important reform movements of these among the
Hindus were the Brahmo Samaj, initiated in 1828, and the Arya Samaj, initiated in 1875. Both these movements
were led by Western-educated upper caste and middle-class Hindus, Ram Mohan Roy and Swami Dayanand
respectively, and they both explicitly stated their agenda as saving Hinduism from the threat of Christianity through
internal reforms, to re-tune it, and to adapt it to modernity.
In case of such reforms among the Hindus, the narrative was to selectively reinvent the past tradition and
glorify it in order to claim its superiority over Western Christianity. This re-invention and glorification of the
ancient past also implied acceptance and advocacy of ‘tradition’, albeit in a reformed format, which included the
hierarchical social order of varna and caste, presided over by the Brahmins. Unlike in the West, where middle
classes were part of the processes of secularization and individualization, members of the Indian middle classes
invested their own identities in communities and their perceived traditions that they reinvented through these reform
movements. Their quest for the so-called social reforms eventually produced ‘new’, and sometimes more rigid,
cultural boundaries across and within the pre-existing communities.
Even when some of these reformers publicly rejected practices such as superstitions, devotional belief, or the
practice of Sati, they used religious symbolism for political mobilizations and public/intellectual debates. A
historian of colonial India, Lata Mani, shows how middle-class reformers underlined the greatness of the Sanskritic
Hindu tradition even when they collaborated with the British rulers on the legislation banning Sati:
The debate on sati was shaped by a specifically colonial discourse, which simultaneously privileged brahmanic scriptures as the locus of
authentic tradition and constituted woman as a site for the contestation of tradition. (Mani 1999: 2)

Thus, the debates on Sati during the colonial period produced a notion of Indian tradition which has had far-
reaching implications for the shaping of the socalled Indian and native views of gender and caste, as also of nation
and citizenship. The discourse on Sati privileged the Brahmin interpretation of select Hindu texts as the only source
of an authentic understanding of tradition, ignoring the actual custom and practice. Similarly, as Mani argues,
‘women and brahmanic scriptures became interlocking grounds for this re-articulation. Women became emblematic
of tradition, and the reworking of traditions was conducted largely through debating their rights and status in
society’ (Mani 1987: 121–2).
Middle-class activists also tried to rhetorically present a singular imagined Hindu community, even though the
notion of a single Hindu community did not go well with the hierarchical social order. The politics of the Indian
middle class during the colonial period remained caught in contradictions and tensions between the ‘old and new’,
the ‘hierarchical and emancipatory’, and ‘religious and secular’, eventually producing a ‘fractured modernity’, to
use Sanjay Joshi’s term (Joshi 2001).
 Quest for Power and Imaginings of India
The growing enthusiasm of this newly emergent English-educated middle class for social reforms clearly reflected
their growing aspiration to project themselves to the colonial masters as leaders of the local/native communities.
Their proximity to the colonial masters and their willingness to speak to their own communities on behalf of the
British rulers gave them a new role, that of mediators. Not only did they demonstrate the virtues of Western
civilization to the natives but also emerged as natural representatives of the natives.
This was also aided by the British view of Indian society. They did not see the Indians as being constituted
through associations of individuals. For them, the Indians were made of communities, of caste, religion, and
kinship. These were not simple notional issues of perception. They deployed these notions in their systems of
governance. They, for example, ‘encouraged the members of each community to present their case in
communitarian terms’ (Grewal 1989: 195). This had serious implications. Communities were to become
fundamental to perceived nature of Indian society. In collaboration with the emergent middle-class elite, colonial
policies often worked towards sharpening of communitarian boundaries, across and within religious and linguistic
communities.
In his historical work on Lucknow and northern India, Sanjay Joshi (2001) rightly shows how, through their
cultural activism, the newly educated members of the middle classes established their cultural authority. After being
educated in colonial institutions, members of the middle class initiated a new kind of civic activism in the public
sphere. They started publishing newspapers, magazines, and literary journals. They formed civic associations.
Members of the newly emergent middle class did not do it to serve universal interests but to establish their own
position as the new leaders of a changing India. This politics of the middle class was so constructed in the public
sphere that their socio-cultural and political agenda was distinct from the existing traditional feudal elite. However,
they did not wish to dislodge the feudal elite through a democratic discourse of citizenship. On the contrary, they
simultaneously invoked traditional prejudices to exclude lower castes and classes from participation in the public
sphere. This ‘led them to establish the difference from [other social groups] and assert power over the British rulers.
Through such projects a distinctive middle-class identity emerged’ (Joshi 2001: 8).
Thus the middle class in colonial northern India came to acquire a prestige and a position of leadership less
through their economic standing in the traditional social order, and more through, what Joshi describes as, their
effective ‘cultural entrepreneurship’ in the public sphere. In Lucknow,
the people who came to be termed middle-class in colonial India… belonged to the upper strata of society, without being at the very top.
Most of them were upper-caste Hindus or Ashraf (high born) Muslims, and many came from so called service communities, that is families
and social groups who had traditionally served in the courts of indigenous rulers and large landlords. Not only did this mean that such men
had enough economic resources but also they possessed sufficient educational training to shape and participate in public debates during the
colonial era…. Merely the knowledge of English, similarity of family background and even the exposure to western education did not
transform Ashrafs, Kyasthas, Brahmins, Khatris or Baniyas of north India into a middle class. This was achieved through cultural
entrepreneurship. (Joshi 2001: 7)

As the middle class expanded in size, its political aspirations also grew. They aspired for more share in the state
power. It is in this context that the middle class began to articulate the idea of India as an independent nation-state.
However, they recognized the need of a cultural project, of producing a larger ‘ethnic’ and cultural community,
beyond the simple agenda of social and religious reform of local level religious communities. Partha Chatterjee
describes this as ‘classicization of tradition’, which would become the foundational category of Indian nationalism.
Borrowing from already available resources in orientalist and colonial representations of India, the middle class
constructed India as a Hindu nation. As Chatterjee elaborates:
A nation, or so at least the nationalist believes, must have a past. …All that was necessary was a classicization of tradition. Orientalist
scholarship had already done the groundwork for this…. The national past had been constructed by the early generation of Bengali
intelligentsia as a ‘Hindu’ past…. This history of the nation could accommodate Islam only as a foreign element, domesticated by shearing its
own lineage of a classical past. Popular Islam could then be incorporated in the national culture in the doubly sanitized form of syncretism.
(Chatterjee 1993: 73–4)

While they aspired to be the natural leaders of modern India, the politics of mobilization and representation
also helped the middle-class elite to pursue their ‘class interests’. As Gooptu rightly points out, this politics of
representation was guided by the ‘need of elite politicians and leaders to negotiate with the British government for
political representation or the allocation of jobs and resources; the other related to the imperatives of mass
mobilization, but the two overlapped’ (Gooptu 2001: 11). They often couched the demand for representation in the
vocabulary of historical deprivation and economic backwardness as well as lack of political and social power and
rights. Their participation in popular mobilization enabled them to reach constituencies beyond their own social
rank, which in turn expanded the available public/political sphere. Newer social groups whom the middle class
claimed to be representing had to become a part of the political process, giving the elite and the middle class some
sort of social and political legitimacy. This legitimacy was also deployed to further their own interests to compete
and lobby for government jobs and procure other benefits from the colonial state. While the middle class sought
their own inclusion, their politics invariably demarcated and outlined their social status as distinct and superior to
the lower caste and toiling classes.
For example, the middle-class elite shared the perception of the colonial state of the poor as a ‘potential threat
to political order and stability, as well as to public health and to the social or moral fabric of “respectable” urban
society’ (Gooptu 2001: 12), or more precisely as a ‘separate social class laden with negative characteristics’
(Gooptu 2001: 420). This exclusion was even more intense in the case of Dalits and the Muslim poor, who were
stigmatized due to their caste and religious locations. Thus, the politics of mobilization and representation,
spearheaded by the middle class, was so configured that the interests of the poor and their concerns ‘deserved to be
represented and furthered by the elites and political leaders. Yet, in their supposedly unreformed and unruly state,
the urban poor remained effectively excluded and disenfranchised in practice from the social and political order…’
(Gooptu 2001: 421).

Modernity and the Traditional Self

This new idea of India as a viable ‘nation’ was constructed not only in the public/political sphere but also in the
private and social sphere, through a reinvention and re-articulation of ‘tradition’. One of the most important
concerns of the reformers was the status of women, particularly Hindu women, and family life.
Social reformers were obviously influenced and enchanted by the modern values of enlightenment, to which
they were exposed during their education in English medium schools and colleges. As mediators between the
colonial rulers and their own communities, they were also required to respond to what their masters saw as
uncivilized practices in their communities which often involved ill-treatment of women, such as child marriage,
prohibition on widow remarriage, and practices like Sati. These were identified as social evils and they needed to be
curtailed, if India had to become a modern society. However, as Chaudhuri, writing about Bengal, points out, those
were not the only reasons for the reformers’ concern for women. They also stemmed from ‘the strains that
developed in the families of the newly educated men’ (Chaudhuri 1993: 16). As she writes:
The common practice for men who came to study and stayed to work in the city was to leave their families behind in the village. The
tremendous gap of experience became a formidable barrier for close companionship…. The only class of women who could supply such
companionship were the courtesans…. The (increasing) demand could not be met by the daughters of the traditional courtesan caste alone.
The large number of young high caste widows, helpless victims of family neglect and even torture, was an obvious recruiting ground.
Middle class social reformers concerned with the threat this posed for both the family and society, raised question about the ill treatment
of widows, the denial of remarriage, child marriage and polygamy…. (Chaudhuri 1993: 16)

It was in this context that the ‘family’, including women’s status and their sexuality, emerged as the core
concerns of middle-class social reformers. They actively collaborated with the colonial rulers in introducing various
measures to ameliorate the situation. However, their efforts did not go all the way to ‘liberate’ women from
patriarchal frames of social life. On the contrary, they passionately argued for a reassertion of tradition, which
alone, they argued, could restore women’s honour and the nation’s identity.
Let us go back to Partha Chatterjee once again. Speaking in the same context of Bengal, Chatterjee shows how
the middle-class reformers invoked a separation between the material and the spiritual in narratives through which
they were working towards framing India and its distinctive identity. They accepted that the West was indeed ahead
of India in science, technology, rational/modern methods of statecraft, and economic organization, and the Indians
(men) had a lot to learn from them. However, they insisted that the inner sphere of home could be insulated from
the Western culture by reviving the ‘classical Indian tradition’. Underlying this move was the sense of anxiety of
these men to protect their position of authority within the spheres of family, kinship, and caste. They argued that
even though the West had progressed materially, in the inner-spiritual domain, the East was superior. This framing
of separation between ghare (at home) and baire (in the outside) enabled the middle-class reformer to safely
rejuvenate tradition, which had to be preserved and reproduced by women at home (ghare), while he himself could
work hard to become modern in the outside (baire) world.
… the principal site for expressing the spiritual quality of the national culture, and women must take the main responsibility for protecting
and nurturing this quality. No matter what the changes in the external conditions of life for women, they must not lose their essentially
spiritual (that is, feminine) virtues; the crucial need is for the protection of the inner sanctum (Chatterjee: 1993: 126).

This had a bearing on the manner in which the idea of citizenship evolved in India. Identification of women
with home and traditions also implied that they were supposed to be outside the domain of citizenship. Roy
provides a useful summary of the fairly vast literature on the subject produced by historians. As she argues, while
the anti-colonial nationalist ideology
presented itself as a project of modernity dissolving ascriptive identities to constitute a unified political identity of citizen as member of a
political community of equals, it remained embedded in the idea the nation as an authentic cultural tradition draws from a common past. This
contradiction between the ‘citizen’ and the ‘nation’ was resolved by the nationalists through the ‘natural’ division of gender.

Thereby women naturally became the ‘authentic “body” of the national tradition’ and thus remained ‘inert,
backward-looking and natural’. While ‘men by contrast were citizens—the agents of modernity embodying
nationalism’s progressive principle of rupture and change’ (Roy 2014: 59).
This binary of inner and outer could not effectively work with subjects like caste, which too had come to be
universally viewed as an essential element of Hindu tradition. It was hard for the middle-class reformers to deny the
existence of caste because it too had been verified as an essential element of Hindu tradition by the same orientalist
scholarship, from whom they had extensively borrowed, while constructing their own narrative of the glorified past
of Hindu tradition.
One way out was to defend the practices of caste through a modernist and scientific logic. In his work on the
Brahmins of Tamil Nadu, M.S.S. Pandian tells us:
A number of publications in the first half of the twentieth century tried to present untouchability as a social practice based on modern
rationality. These publications most often explained away untouchability by resorting to argument on hygiene and sanitation…. Hygiene and
sanitation were key themes in the British medical discourse on India…. (Pandian 2007: 38)

This was done not only to establish the superiority of the upper castes as ‘religious people with pure habits’
over the lower castes for having ‘filthy and unclean habits’, but they also deployed a ‘secularized language’ that
would validate the practice of untouchability as being a scientific and rational behaviour (Pandian 2007: 38).
Further, the caste system was also presented as another form of division of labour, as a natural phenomenon in the
economic evolution of societies, rather than recognizing its socio-historical specificity (Pandian 2007: 39–40).

Leadership and Hegemonic Aspirations

It is evident from the above discussion that the emergence of the middle class in India was facilitated by the
colonial state through the introduction of modern education and the employment of educated Indians in offices set
up for commercial, administrative, and other purposes by the colonial government (Beteille 2001). However, the
colonial political policy of considering India initially as a supplier of wealth and later as a market for goods
produced in Imperial Britain restricted industrial expansion in India, which in turn did not permit the significant
development of an industrial middle class (managers, supervisors, and so on) (Fernandes 2006: 4).
The middle class had a contradictory political character. On one hand, as a section of colonial subjects, who
acquired modern education and learnt/mastered the English language and became part of the colonial regime in
various capacities, they had an inherent interest in the reproduction of ‘language and colonial rule because their
socio-economic and political position rested on social, cultural and economic capital associated with colonial
education, training and state employment’ (Fernandes 2006: 5). On the other hand, these Western/modern educated
Indians were also inspired by the political ideas of self-rule, liberty, and freedom, which eventually formed the
bedrock of the struggle for self-determination against colonial rule (Alavi 1975: 1237).
Further, the middle class had two interrelated roles that shaped their political character vis-à-vis the colonial
state and market. Notwithstanding their other social identities (of caste, community, and in some cases, even
aristocratic status), members of the middle class developed a self-image of being progressive Indians, who had the
legitimate right to represent interests of the subject population, as leaders of the common masses. Quite early in its
history, the Indian middle class began to develop, what Fernandes and Heller call ‘hegemonic aspirations’ (2006).
Unlike its Western counterpart who claimed the position of leadership in society by actively pursuing a politics
of citizenship for all, the Indian middle class did so by actively pursuing a sectarian agenda, even when it invoked a
universalistic and modern language. Through its discursive practices, it tried to reinforce women’s subordination
through reviving, inventing, and consolidating the idea of Indian tradition. In the process, it also pushed the
Muslims and the Dalits to margins of the emerging Indian society because the glorious tradition that it invested and
celebrated was by definition an upper-caste Hindu tradition. Being middle class enabled it to position itself away
from all other ‘identities’.
However, the idea of the universality of the middle class was also fluid and acquired differing articulations
depending on the context. The universal identity was actively deployed while seeking political freedom. However,
while competing for specific economic and political benefits from the colonial masters, particularistic identities of
community and religion were emphasized, including things like numerical strength vis-à-vis other communities.
To realize its hegemonic aspirations, the middle class also tried to frame a politics of respectability. The
politics of respectability defined the norms of socially acceptable behaviour in the public sphere. The poor were
seen as continuously transcending the limits of acceptable social behaviour and hence there was a call for morally
and socially disciplining them (Gooptu 2001; Kidambi 2012) or to set a physical limit on their movement in urban
spaces.

1 ‘Macaulay’s Minute on Education, February 2, 1835’, available at http://home.iitk.ac.in/~hcverma/Article/Macaulay-Minutes.pdf (accessed on 8

August 2014).
 3
The Age of Development and Nation Building

Freedom and power bring responsibility…. The service of India means the service of the millions who suffer. It means the ending of poverty
and ignorance and disease and inequality of opportunity. The ambition of the greatest man of our generation has been to wipe every tear from
every eye…. And so we have to labour and to work and work hard to give reality to our dreams.1

These words of Nehru, spoken in sophisticated English, at the time of India’s independence from colonial rule in
1947, were clearly addressed to the fellow political elite and the English-speaking middle classes of India, who,
along with him, had the capacity and responsibility of developing the newly liberated country and building it into a
viable nation-state. The enormous task of ushering in social and economic ‘growth with equity’ rested on the
shoulders of the ‘enlightened’ and the ‘educated’ professionals, bureaucrats, and intellectuals. They alone were
imbued with scientific temper and rational minds to carry forward the historical mandate and ensure ‘that this
ancient land attain her rightful place in the world and make her full and willing contribution to the promotion of
world peace and the welfare of mankind’.2
At the time of its independence, India faced many challenges. Colonial rule had been a source of many
problems and contradictions. While it facilitated some kind of modern industrialization, it also left India’s
economy, particularly its agrarian economy that supported more than three-fourths of its population, in shatters.
Rural settlements in most of the subcontinent, where 9 out of 10 Indians lived at that time, remained deeply unequal
and hierarchical, segmented along the axes of caste, class, and community. Even though an indigenous class of
private industrialists and businessmen had grown during the later decades of colonial rule, their social base, vision,
and impact remained very limited. Even when it introduced secular education, which gave birth to a new mobile
and modern middle class, and set up new institutions of governance that brought about some kind of administrative
unification, the Hindu–Muslim communal divide grew, eventually resulting in the bloody Partition that left millions
homeless and many dead. Such contradictions emerged in other spheres of Indian life as well.
The nationalist political elite that took over the reigns of power from the colonial rulers knew of these
challenges. Perhaps the most immediate task before the new political establishment was to expand its capacity by
establishing institutions that would work in different spheres of national life: social, political, and economic. The
Indian state invested heavily in all these spheres. A direct implication of this state-led expansion of economic and
governance spheres was a gradual, but significant, expansion of the middle class, both in numbers as well as in
influence.
As the state expanded its spheres of activity and invested in building infrastructure for economic growth, it
added to the numbers of middle-class Indians simply by adding personnel on its roles. Besides the state bureaucracy
and economic planning, the middle class also increased in numbers with expanding media, modern education, and
other activities—private and public—in the growing metropolis. The state invested a great deal of money in setting
up colleges and universities, institutions of specialized learning to produce specialized human resources, scientific
capabilities, and modern infrastructure. The expansion of the state and its institutions as the primary vehicle for
socio-economic transformation of an underdeveloped nation directly benefited the middle classes. These educated
middle classes became the agents and bearers of modernity. Middle-class expansion among different sections of the
Indian population also became a source of legitimacy for the Indian state. They became its mouthpiece and active
advocates of its policies.

Middle-Class Imaginations of a Modern India

India was not the only country that acquired independence from colonial rule. The Second World War had
considerably weakened the colonial powers. Given their own compulsions, many of them chose to withdraw from
direct control over their colonies. Powerful nationalist movements also made it difficult for the empires to sustain
their control over the colonies.
While the political leaders of many poor countries of the newly emergent Third World were attracted to the
revolutionary doctrine of socialism developed by Karl Marx and others for restructuring social and economic life in
their societies, the middle classes generally preferred simple ‘evolutionary models’, presented in the then popular
dualistic and modernization theories of economic and social change made popular by social scientists from the
United States. These theories proposed a simple model of social transformation, which required the Third World
countries to imitate the West, inculcate ‘modern’ values, develop modern institutions as they had come up in the
West and lay modern infrastructure for rapid industrialization that would enable the rural population to move to
urban centres.
The dominant political spectrum under the leadership of Jawaharlal Nehru, actively supported by the native
industrial class, the bourgeoisie, wanted India to become a modern country, like those in the West. The newly
emergent middle-class Indians also aspired for a modern life, similar to the life in a Western city. They were the
ones who had worked with the Congress party in its struggle for independence. The middle class also spoke on
behalf of the large masses of the subcontinent. As Khilnani rightly argues:
Nationalism was the politics of an urban educated elite that presumed itself entitled to negotiate with the British and speak on behalf of the
country’s villages. For the early nationalist generations, independence meant being free to emulate colonial city life, it promised the
opportunity to take up addresses in the residential sanctuary of the civil lines, to create a world where public trees would flourish unabused.
(Khilnani 1997: 125)

After Independence, they also argued for their way of taking the country forward, through writings and political
campaigns. The idea of planning for development evolved out of such an imagination, an outcome of the
collaboration between the political elite of independent India, its nascent bourgeoisie, and its middle-class elite.
One of the first detailed articulations of this could be found in the writings of an accomplished engineer from
south India, M. Visvesvaraya, who was the Diwan of the Mysore state. He had designed drinking water and sanitary
systems of many cities including both Hyderabad and Karachi. He also established systems of flood control in
Orissa and was instrumental in planning the generation of electricity in Mysore. He was associated with the Tata
Iron and Steel Company in Jamshedpur as well. In his book called Planned Economy for India (1936), he proposed
a model of nation building, which was to be carried out by India’s educated middle class. He explicitly advocated a
capitalist economy along the lines of the European and US economies. He advocated rapid industrialization based
on mechanization, especially heavy industries, those relating to the manufacture of machinery and heavy chemicals.
Traditional agriculture and its accompanying cottage industries could not take India very far, he argued
(Visvesvaraya 1936; Vyasulu 1989). Nation building was closely linked to a desire to catch up with the ‘rapid
changes taking place in methods of production, means of locomotion and business practices in the civilized world’
(Visvesvaraya 1936: 165, emphasis ours).
However, unlike the Western countries, he underlined the need for planned economic development in India
through a ‘central economic council’ entrusted with the task of preparing a proposal for a ten-year plan and its
subsequent operation. The central economic council, in his view, was to be constituted by drawing in 50 experts
comprising ‘mainly of economists and leading business men representing the various organizations and activities in
all parts of the country in agriculture, industries, commerce, transport, banking and finance’ (Visvesvaraya 1936:
180). Only a planned economy could ensure the rapid advance of industry, agriculture, commerce, and finance
particularly for increasing production, reducing unemployment, and greater interdependence between the various
parts of India. It would help in training the required human resource in the practical arts of business and
administration (Visvesvaraya: 1936: 146). The role of the government, for him, was to create conditions for
capitalist development in India. The state ought to provide banking and credit facilities and adequate tariff controls.
Interestingly, his model of development asked for a strong bureaucracy that would enforce economic discipline and
maintain law and order. He was also among the first to advocate a scientifically defined poverty line and minimum
wages.
Even though he did not directly visualize any role for the middle class, his model essentially proposed state
supported capitalist development with a strong middle class facilitating and administering it. He wrote on the
critical need for developing middle-class sensibilities through ‘Training for Business Life and Citizenship’
(Visvesvaraya: 1936: 165–77). Modern citizenship required a certain kind of civility and participation in the
economic life of the nation. Visvesvaraya firmly believed that India lacked these conditions. Therefore, he
advocated building up a ‘new outlook in life’ where ‘people are literate, active and efficient and are imbued with
progressive ideals’. The outdated customs and traditions were restraining growth of individualism that would enable
Indians to develop the capacity to ‘prosper on their own’. Only an educated workforce could contribute towards
national efficiency and individual efficiency.
Interestingly, India’s business leaders of that time also proposed a similar model for India’s development
through a document published in 1944, called ‘Memorandum Outlining a Plan of Economic Development for
India’, popularly known as the ‘Bombay Plan’. Its authors were the top business elite of the time and included
J.R.D. Tata, G.D. Birla, Sir Ardeshir Dalal, Sir Shri Ram, Kasturbhai Lalbhai, A.D. Shroff, and John Matthai. The
chief proposals of the memorandum were as follows: centralized planning for the entire economy; economic
controls in order to pull India out of the clutches of economic backwardness and low level of growth; a
concentrated programme of heavy industry in the public sector; and deficit financing so as to finance the various
aspects of the plan such as education, health, and housing, raising agricultural and industrial output (Thakurdas et
al. 1944).
The Bombay Plan also flagged a few critical problems and suggested corresponding remedial interventions,
which by implication was to enable expansion in middle-class numbers. It proposed an increase in the total national
income, and reduction of economic disparities, which would increase the per capita incomes of common citizens.
Towards this goal, the plan favoured a combination of state initiative and market-based solutions. It argued for the
creation of basic heavy industry in the public sector including infrastructure services like power, railways, roads,
and shipping. It advocated encouraging private enterprise, but it also recognized the need of pulling people out of
low incomes and poverty, and propelling an appreciable number of them towards middle-class status, a task that
only an economically active state could perform. It proposed a target of reducing dependence on agriculture and
increasing employment in industry and the service sector at a rapid pace.
As has been pointed out by students of contemporary Indian history, the political establishment under the
leadership of Jawaharlal Nehru eventually chose a model of modernizing and developing India that favoured
industrial growth over the Gandhian model of village-centric reforms. As is well known, Gandhi, the most
prominent leader of India’s freedom struggle, was opposed to such a model of social change. For him true freedom,
swaraj, lay in recovering and reconstructing the traditional village, harmonious and self-contained, uncorrupted by
the modern life of the city and Western technology. It was only through the reconstruction of the village that India
could recover its lost self. Even though Gandhi was the tallest leader of India’s freedom movement, his viewpoint
of creating a federal polity based upon the self-organizing capacity of the Indian village was consciously rejected
(Mantena 2012: 536). In contrast, Visvesvaraya’s ideas had a significant influence. This resulted in the adoption of
what has come to be known as the Nehru–Mahalanobis Model of economic change (Vyasulu 1989). Similarly, the
idea of a developmental state proposed by the Bombay Plan was incorporated in the Industrial Policy Statement
(Chibber 2003: 94–104).
The relevant broad contours of the Nehru– Mahalanobis model were as follows:

1. The government and/or the ‘public sector’ should be responsible for developing heavy industries like
mining, metals, and machinebuilding industries. This required a disproportionate investment in machine-
building complexes.
2. Economic independence and self-reliance was identified with the creation of heavy industrialization, which
the colonial regime had not developed.
3. Emphasis on heavy industry would produce shortfall in consumer goods, which was to be taken care of by
the expansion of cottage and small-scale industries.
4. Besides fulfilling the need of providing locally produced cheap consumer goods, this sector was to also
generate employment and help develop a large class of new entrepreneurs.
5. Heavy industrialization was also to enable growth of agriculture by providing locally made modern
equipment, thus helping mechanize and modernize cultivation (Mahalanobis 1955; Joshi 1979; Chibber
2003; Balakrishnan 2007).

Unlike the state-controlled socialist economies of the erstwhile communist countries like the Soviet Union, the
planned economic development of India was to be carried out within the political framework of a liberal
democracy. Industrialization was not only an instrument to spearhead economic growth but was also seen as an
institution that could positively influence the socio-economic fabric. The process of industrialization, according to
this view, was capable of fundamentally denting the regressive social and economic structures and could help
equalize wealth and income in rural areas, loosen the traditional caste ties, which may in turn also promote inter-
religious and inter-caste marriages (Bayly 2012). In short the economic framework of development coupled with
representative democracy was expected to usher in social, cultural, and economic modernization of India.

Planning and the Middle-Class Expansion

Modern institutions in the realm of the economy and polity were to pull the nation out of social obscurantism,
challenge social hierarchies, and enable fast-paced economic development. This was a model of nation building that
required the creation of a new institutional framework to be staffed by educated and technically skilled Indians,
those from the existing educated middle classes, but also many first generation migrants from rural areas, who were
able to get into the expanding network of educational institutions.
The first three or four decades of economic growth, popularly called the Nehruvian phase of development
planning, saw a massive expansion of Indian capabilities in the field of science and technology, in state supported
industry, and in bureaucratic structures. Interestingly, as discussed in the previous chapter, under British colonial
rule, the subcontinent had already witnessed the emergence of a few significant urban centres of governance
systems and institutions of Western style secular education. A small section of urban population was exposed to
Western/modern ideas and modes of organizing economic and political systems as they had evolved in the West.
The independent Indian state continued with most of the civil and criminal administrative systems instituted by the
colonial rulers, but with an added strength of nationalist legitimacy, presented as being critical for nation building
and the development of the Indian people.
In the context of our discussion, this implied retaining the older bureaucracy, recruited by the colonial state, but
also its manifold expansion. As the state created newer institutions and expanded its reach to different corners of the
country, the number of people serving in these institutions also increased. Planning for development and its delivery
also required a new kind of bureaucracy, which was development oriented and could usher in not only economic
changes but also guide it as per the social and political priorities of the independent Indian state.
This development bureaucracy was broadly divided between the elite Indian Administrative Services (IAS),
central government services at the federal level, and provincial civil services at the state level. They were to carry
forward the mandate of their respective ministries and departments headed by the political executive. Besides, the
strength of a large number of specialized offices, old and new, expanded over the years. These included judiciary,
commissions, and technical training institutions. The authorized cadre strength of the Indian Administrative Service
was merely 1,232 in the year 1951 to which 532 officers were added during the first decade after Independence.
Their numbers steadily increased in the subsequent years and by the end of the 1980s there were 5,334 sanctioned
IAS posts (GOI 2012: 46).
In due course the ministries and departments established a large number of public sector organizations to
further the developmental mandate. They covered almost every sector of the emerging Indian economy: finance,
heavy engineering, heavy metals, chemicals and fertilizers, manufacturing, services, transport, agrobased industries,
medium and light engineering, transport, power and energy, petroleum, mining, textiles, and even hotels. Big public
sector organizations were viewed as being critical for unfolding of the Nehruvian model of development and their
numbers grew quite rapidly during the first two decades after Independence. During this period India also initiated
construction of several large scale river valley hydropower projects. Nehru had famously (or infamously!) described
them as ‘temples of modern India’. They were to be the foundation for building a self-reliant India, a source of
energy and water for land. Besides, India also initiated several ports and port services augmenting facilities within
the framework of the public sector. Several of the existing ports at Bombay, Chennai, Visakhapatnam, and
Mormugão were further expanded.
In addition to investments in building capacity for hydropower, the Nehruvian state also set up the National
Coal Development Corporation (NCDC) in 1956. With the exception of the coal mines owned by the Tatas and a
few others, all the coal mines were declared as national resources, effectively owned by the Government of India.
Likewise, the Industrial Policy Resolution of 1956 placed the mineral oil industry in the Schedule-A list of
industries, which made further developments in this sector as the sole and exclusive responsibility of the state.
Accordingly, the Oil and Natural Gas Commission (ONGC) (1959) was given the sole right to ‘plan, promote,
organize and implement programmes for development of petroleum resources and the production and sale of
petroleum and petroleum products produced by it, and to perform such other functions as the Central Government
may, from time to time, assign to it’.3 It promoted public sector units, such as, the Indian Oil Corporation, Bharat
Petroleum, and Hindustan Petroleum Corporations. State level electricity boards and road transport corporations
were formed during the 1960s.
TABLE 3.1 Public and Private Sector Organized Employment (in millions)
Public Sector* Private Sector
1956 5.23 NA
1961 7.05 5.05
1965 8.95 6.04
1970 10.33 6.73
1975 13.63 6.79
1980 15.48 7.24
Source: Economic Survey, Ministry of Finance–GOI, 1971 and RBI Handbook of Statistics, 2000.
Note: * Public Sector includes, central, state, local, and quasi government.

All these organizations were to hire a large number of educated and skilled workers, who were to be the
expanding middle class of India. The Nehruvian state also set up organizations that were to facilitate the creation of
such human resources for the expanding needs of the country. These included the Indian Institute of Management
(IIMs), Indian Institute of Technology (IITs) and a large network of laboratories under the Council of Scientific and
Industrial Research (CSIR). The Indian Council for Agriculture Research was further expanded. The Tata Institute
of Fundamental Research, originally started with support from Sir Dorabji Tata Trust in 1945, was also expanded
with support from the Government of India in 1954. Similarly, the University Grant Commission (UGC) was set up
in 1956 as a ‘statutory body’ for ‘the coordination, determination and maintenance of standards of university
education in India’. The number of universities and colleges expanded rapidly. In the year 1950–1 India had 370
colleges in general education, 208 for professional education, and 27 universities. By the end of 1980 their numbers
had gone up to 3,421 colleges for general education, 3,542 colleges for professional education, and 110
universities/deemed universities. The number of students they all trained also rose manifold.
During the period of 15 years, from 1956 to 1970, the state sector added 5.10 million workers. In the next one
decade, the growth was even more impressive and nearly the same numbers were added to organized public sector
employment (see Table 3.1).
Even the private sector that grew during this period partially depended on the state system for its growth. Many
ancillary industries that came up in the private sector were to feed the large public sector units. Similarly,
expanding employment in the public sector provided a boost to markets of various kinds, promoting a new
generation of entrepreneurs. These ancillary economic activities also contributed to the growth of the middle classes
and middle-income populations. During 1960s and 1970s, a total of 1.7 million new workers were added.
The spurt in economic activity created a need for the expansion of the railways, banking, and postal services.
The Indian Railways started its organizational journey in 1853 with a train connecting Bombay with Thane, a
stretch of 21 miles, and the first passenger train was between Howrah and Hooghly, covering a distance of 24 miles.
Over the years, Indian Railways witnessed massive expansion. Though it was first started to serve the economic
interests of the colonial master as mentioned earlier, it evolved into a significant institution for transportation as
well as for the socioeconomic development of India after its independence (Alivelu 2010: 5). In 1951, the Indian
railways lifted 37,565 million net tons kilometre (NTKM)4 of freight traffic while undertaking 66,517 million
passenger kilometres (PKM).5 By the year 1980–1 the NTKM and PKM stood at 147,652 and 208,558 millions
respectively. The contribution of the Indian Railways in developing, adding, and sustaining the educated (lower)
middle class is also quite significant. In the year 1950–1, Indian Railways employed 2,300 Group A and B
(management personnel) officers, 223,500 Group C, and 687,800 Group D workers. By the end of 1980, it
employed 112,000 Group A and B Officers, while Group C and D employees stood at 721,100 and 839,900
respectively.
The history of the Indian banking system during the post-Independence period has been a little complicated;
nevertheless, the number of people working in the system saw a manifold increase during the period, particularly
after major commercial banks were nationalized by the central government led by Indira Gandhi. In the year 1969,
there were 89 commercial banks (72 scheduled commercial banks and 17 non-scheduled commercial banks). By the
end of 1989, the number had gone up to 278, out of which 196 were Regional Rural Banks and 4 were non-
scheduled commercial banks. With an expanding network of branches in different parts of the country, the strength
of the Banking staff grew several folds. In the year 1969, the banking system in the country had 8,162 officers,
26,122 clerks, and 11,707 other subordinate staff. By 1989, there were 43,621 officers, 83,916 clerks, and 36,375
directly working in the banks as subordinate officers.
The primary emphasis of Nehruvian development planning remained on industrialization. However, Indian
agriculture, albeit in some regions, also developed quite rapidly, particularly after the relatively successful adoption
of the Green Revolution technology during the late 1960s and later. The droughts of 1965–6 and 1966–7 and the
resultant food insecurity led to surging import bills on food items and reliance on food imports from the United
States (US) under its Public Law (PL) 480 initiative, which meant to tackle world’s hunger. However, the US
government demanded that in return India conform to US policies in the Third World. It was in this context that the
Government of India initiated new programmes of agricultural development by expanding irrigation capacity
through the lifting of ground water and introduction of high-yielding variety (HYV) seeds.
This was supplemented by public investment in rural roads and a system of procurement prices that greatly
reduced uncertainty for farmers, thereby motivating them to grow more food. Rural Electrification Corporation
(REC) was established in the public sector in the year 1969. The REC along with the Agriculture Refinance
Corporation (established in 1963) and commercial banks provided loans to state electricity boards. Almost 1.25
million pump sets and tube wells were energized between 1966 and 1969. The National Thermal Power
Corporation (NTPC) was also set up in 1975 to help meet the power demand required for intensive irrigation.
These initiatives proved to be quite successful and by the 1970s the Indian countryside in the Green Revolution
pockets began to change socially, economically, and politically. A new class of surplus producing farmers emerged
on the scene. This class of ‘gentleman farmers’ (Thorner 1969) was to increasingly become integrated with the
urban market and social life. Not only did they sell their surplus farm produce to urban traders and government
procurement agencies and buy farm inputs, but also sent their children for urban education, who in turn eventually
aspired for an urban middle-class life (see Jodhka 2014).
Despite a relatively slow growth rate and many challenges and frequent ‘crises’ of various kinds, the Indian
economy witnessed a significant expansion during the first three or four decades after Independence, thanks largely
to the active role of the Indian state. Most of this happened with the expansion of its bureaucratic systems and
investments in public sector establishments and through its initiatives that enabled agriculture and other economic
activities to grow. The growth of the middle class during this period was not only substantive in terms of numbers;
it also created grounds for the next phase of its expansion in the subsequent decades, particularly during the post-
1990s period.

1 The speech, famously called ‘Tryst with Destiny’, by Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Prime Minister of independent India, to the Indian Constituent
Assembly in the Parliament, on the eve of India’s Independence, towards midnight on 14 August 1947. (Available at
http://www.svc.ac.in/files/TRYST%20WITH%20DESTINY.pdf [accessed on 5 November 2014].)
2 ‘Tryst with Destiny’.
3 See the short official history of ONGC (1947–60), available at http://ongcindia.ongc.co.in/wps/wcm/connect/ongcindia/Home/Company/History/
(accessed on 13 February 2015)
4 Net ton kilometres is the number of tons of freight carried multiplied by the average distance over which it is transported.
5 Passenger kilometres are defined as total number of passengers multiplied by the average distance over which they travel.
 4
Transforming India, from Above

The development state was seen primarily as an engine of production… But the ideological justification of this constantly expanding state
machinery was in terms of arguments of distributive justice…. The state sector came to control vast economic resources—through its
gigantic, interconnected networks of financing, employment, and contracts emanating from both the productive and welfare activities of the
state enterprises…. The huge economic bureaucracy of the developmental state increasingly had little to do with realistic distributive policies,
but became utterly dependent on a disingenuous use of that rhetoric. (Kaviraj 2010: 224–5)

As we have discussed in the previous chapter, after its independence from colonial rule, India embarked upon a
journey of change with hopes and aspirations. The new ‘native’ leaders, who inherited power from the colonial
rulers, chose a model of politics that was to take the country forward on a path of development and progress and
make India a modern society. While it underlined the need for individual freedom, including the freedom to own
private capital, it also aspired for a social change that would usher in a new culture of citizenship and reduce
persistent inequalities. Even though a section of its political elite was attracted to socialism, India chose a capitalist
model of economic growth with an active role for the state. The state was to actively participate in laying the
economic foundations for India’s industrial growth by investing in the development of infrastructure and heavy
industries that required large volumes of investment.
Through its proactive policies, the Indian state was also to work for building a new India that would care for its
poor and enable them to enhance their capacities of participation in the national social, economic, and political life.
Even though some scholars have argued that through state planning the Indian state intended to lay the foundation
of a socialist type of economy (Rao 1982; Kohli 2011: 12–13), a closer examination would show that the main
objective of state intervention in India’s economy was to lay the foundation of a liberal capitalist economy (Byres
1997).
The political elite of the time realized that if a capitalist economy and liberal democracy had to grow in India,
they needed to initiate measures to weaken the stranglehold of ‘feudal’ patriarchs over its rural/agrarian economy
and society that had become even stronger under colonial rule. Soon after Independence, the state governments
were directed by the central government to initiate legislative measures through a variety of Land Reform
legislations to incentivize the effective tillers of land and give them ownership rights by abolishing ‘semi-feudal’
intermediaries. In the political sphere it meant establishing institutions for democratic governance, providing a
constitutional guarantee of equality to all citizens irrespective of their social location, and programmes for
capability enhancement of poor and historically marginalized social groups, conceived and implemented by a huge
developmental administration. The new Constitution of the Indian republic abolished untouchability and
institutionalized quotas for historically deprived groups in state-run educational institutions and in employment in
state-owned institutions/enterprises. Given its size and diversity, these were mammoth tasks to be carried out within
the framework of a liberal democratic institutional order.
As we have discussed in the previous chapter, in order to fulfill these promises, the new developmental state
required the services of a large number of people who were not only educated and skilled but also had the mind-set
and orientation required for such a project of nation building. Thus, quite like the colonial state, the developmental
state was also confronted with the need to create a new middle class. However, this time the middle class had to
have a different orientation and social composition. The new political elite of India decided to produce such a class
through an expansion of education and training within the country. This process of formal education was to help
citizens enhance their economic entrepreneurship and develop their faculties of reason and imaginative thinking,
making them capable of participating and helping the state in the processes of growth and development
administration. It also implied creating policy frameworks for erecting economic institutions that could redress
poverty and economic backwardness and facilitate the social and economic mobility of diverse categories of people.
The nationalist middle-class elite that emerged during the colonial period were not averse to tradition or
religious beliefs. In fact, as we have seen in Chapter 2, many of them had actively participated in religious reforms
that also produced a new imagination of their own communitarian selves. However, there was a virtual consensus
among the new leaders of independent India that the process of economic growth and spread of modern political
institutions would inevitably dissolve regressive social features emanating from past tradition—the caste system
and the other similar social institutions.
The new rulers of India firmly believed that the country would enthusiastically move towards embracing the
idea of equal citizenship where every individual is valued for his/her inherent worth. As the change in economic
order progressed, the privileges and disabilities inherited from the past and/or social origin would begin to matter
less and less. In a move away from the caste system, social interactions and economic exchanges would no longer
be governed by custom and traditional norms. Nor would emergent political and economic systems be embedded in
the social framework of caste. On the contrary, as was believed to be the case with other modern societies, the
social interactions in India would begin to be dictated by the norms of modern economy, secular values, and
democratic political system. This was not simply wishful thinking on the part of the modern leadership of the
country but also a part of its agenda and promise to the nation, on the basis of which it claimed legitimacy for itself
(Austin 1966; Kothari 1970; Rudolph and Rudolph 1987; Khilnani 1997).
Even though the business elite and agrarian rich had considerable influence over the emerging political order,
the Indian middle class also occupied a critical position in shaping and articulating the politics and policies of the
times. The Indian middle class was literally placed in the middle of the new regime, between the rulers and the
traditional rich on one side and the so-called common people on the other. Most interestingly, it was through these
policies and initiatives of the new regime that the ‘middle’ in India was to undergo a considerable expansion in size
and influence. The colonial middle class was largely made up of a small number of professionals, who mostly came
from socially privileged backgrounds. As we have seen in the previous chapter, the new regime expanded the size
of its bureaucracy manifold and made large investments in setting up a variety of institutions and economic
enterprises, which increased the size of the Indian middle class. This expanding middle class was in turn to become
the social and economic base of the emerging capitalist economy. The process of economic development was to
expand the Indian economy and provide impetus to the growth of a variety of diverse occupations and newer lower
middle classes, which were to add diversity to the existing middle class.

The Age of Nehruvian Developmentalism

The first three or four decades after India’s independence were marked by a kind of continuity in economic policy
and political orientation. They were geared towards translating the vision of India’s first prime minister, Pandit
Jawaharlal Nehru, into practice. Even though the Indian economy did not grow very rapidly, it underwent
significant changes through a gradual process of industrialization, agrarian change, and considerable expansion of a
variety of infrastructure. The idea of ‘planning for development’ remained a dominant approach to economic
policy. Democracy too survived. With the exception of a brief period of Emergency during the 1970s, India
continued to elect its governments, central and federal, at regular intervals.
Even though the middle class grew in size and influence, the source of its power was largely through its
mediating role in executing state initiatives. From formulating planning documents and managing educational
institutions to running state-supported hospitals or helping farmers in growing new crops and use of fertilizers, this
middle class worked on several fronts. It had a mission to work as an agency of India’s modernization and
development.
Notwithstanding their diverse social and cultural backgrounds, they viewed their role towards the nation and
society with a sense of idealism and high-minded purpose transcending purely individual concerns. They were a
typically salaried and professional class, without any direct creative involvement in trade, commerce, and industry.
Given that they mostly worked within the state system or its allied institutions, their salaries were not very high,
particularly in comparison to international standards. However, their influence was significant or, as Mazzarella
puts it, they were ‘short on money but long on institutional perks’ (2004: 1).
While its members occupied critical positions in the political system and development regime, other interests
and actors active on different economic and political fronts of Indian society limited their influence. Until around
the 1980s, agrarian economies of many states and regions in India were still controlled by traditional landlords from
dominant and upper castes. Not only did they remain powerful in the rural settings of their territorial regions, they
often also dictated the directions of economic and social change. Interestingly, even though democratic and
electoral politics was formally institutionalized, it only helped these interests to consolidate their hold over regional
politics, at least during the first three or four decades after the introduction of electoral politics (Frankel and Rao
1989).
What role did this Nehruvian middle class play during these decades of economic planning? Did it actually
work as an active and positive agency in nation building, enabling the process of development and state-service
delivery? Or did it only help the new ruling elite, agrarian rich and business interests, to consolidate their position in
independent India through providing legitimacy to their growing influence in the name of development? Or was it
simply focused on itself, self-serving, power hungry, and narrow minded?
There is an iota of truth in all these characterizations of the middle class of those decades. However, the critical
point is that India could not have moved ahead during this period without expanding its middle classes. To help its
economy grow, its backward agriculture and nascent industry to grow; to develop its diverse regions/communities
and provide them with education, health care, and security; to manage its vast territories through institutionalizing
democratic process and bureaucratic delivery system, India had to expand its middle classes. India’s growth story
over the years clearly shows that this new middle class played a positive role in nation building. They were also
required for Indian democracy to flourish. It is mostly from their ranks and files that new generations of leaders
emerged who articulated the interests and aspirations of different regions and communities and helped in the
process of negotiated development.
However, as the Marxist scholars would argue, these middle-class individuals worked within the state system,
as per the directives of their masters. They had to often accommodate the locally powerful and the larger economic
interests of India’s new ruling classes. Though there were many instances where an individual member of the
bureaucracy or an independent professional would challenge vested class interests of the rulers and align with those
at the receiving-end in the system, their numbers were often small.
As individuals and members of communities and associations, they also had their private and personal interests
to serve. As Chatterjee rightly points out, the Nehruvian middle class saw itself ‘as the universal class, satisfying in
the service of the state its private interest by working for the universal goal of the nation’ (Chatterjee 1997: 88).
Unlike some other countries, the state system in India enjoyed a considerable degree of autonomy from the
dominant class interests (see Kohli 1987; Rudolph and Rudolph 1987). Even though most of the discretionary
powers of the Indian state system lay ultimately with the elected representative, members of the bureaucracy also
enjoyed significant amount of power over these resources. Some scholars have also pointed to the fact that during
this period, India did not have a single powerful class. Thanks to the implementation of Land Reform legislations
and powerful agrarian movements of the poor in some regions, old feudal interests were dwindling while industrial
capitalism was still in its early stages of growth (Bardhan 1984; Vanaik 1990). The growing needs of skilled and
educated personnel in a developing economy like India also worked as a source of influence and power for the
middle classes (Rudra 1989).

Dispositions and Self-Interest

As the state’s development role expanded, so did the size, influence, power, and geographical spread of this middle
class. Quite like its ancestor, the colonial middle class, this category of Indians also had their share of contradictory
dispositions. Given that a large majority of them came from relatively privileged backgrounds—the upper castes
and dominant communities of the diverse Indian society—they invariably had their own biases and opinions. While
they were happy to embrace modernity, they were not always comfortable with growing demands for inclusion
from below through the dynamics of ‘democracy’. Even though this class was a product of modernity and often
deployed the language of universal state, development, and democracy, its own social base was quite narrow. In
other words, its attitude towards universal citizenship was, at best, ambivalent. Dipankar Gupta is perhaps right
when he critiques the Indian middle class as being weak in ‘its commitment to principles of democracy’ and strong
in its dependence ‘on connections, family and patronage’ (Gupta 2000: 9).
Another famous commentator on the Indian middle class, Pavan Varma, is even more critical of its self-serving
attitude and indifference toward the poor. As he writes:
In an interventionist state in a poor economy, those who control state power tend to exercise enormous influence, and in newly independent
India, the upper and middle classes were the most strategically placed to control state power. Their representatives ran the all-powerful
bureaucracy, they were fully represented in the legislature; they were at the helm of business and industry; they had an outlet for their views
in the media; and in the countryside they owned most of the land. The result was that the interests of the middle class hijacked the agenda of
the nation, even as its members continued to believe that the State was rightly biased in favour of the less privileged. (Varma 1998: 50)

Given that Nehruvian India also worked proactively to protect its nascent industry from global competition, it
also put in place a rigorous regime of licenses and quotas to discourage the growth of economic monopolies. These
policies gave additional power to those in the bureaucracy, state controlled commercial banks, and other such
intermediaries. These could become sources of unlimited power, often leading to corrupt practices that favoured a
select few. Prem Shankar Jha goes to the extent of arguing that ‘since this class benefitted from economic controls,
it could perpetuate and even strengthen the regime of shortages’ (Jha 1980: viii), which gave it greater discretionary
powers. The Indian state, with its massive infrastructure and the legitimacy to penetrate every aspect of society and
economy, provided the means to members of the middle class to use such a position to their advantage. The source
of its influence and power during this period was primarily because of its proximity to the state system.
While there is an element of truth in this, such arguments also have their limitations. They tend to work with a
singular notion of the Indian middle class and ignore its plural and particularistic locations. The Indian middle class
has never been a homogenous category. With the manifold expansion during this period, its heterogeneity grew
further. This heterogeneity is not merely based on the variety of economic locations that its members occupy but
also on the diverse social and historical identities of region, religion, gender, ethnicity, caste, and community of its
members. Given that the independent Indian state also initiated policies like reservations for Scheduled Castes
(SCs) and Scheduled Tribes (STs) and universalized democratic systems of governance, the diversity of the middle
class became even more critical.
This is also true for gender. Even though we do not have any numbers and their overall representation remains
far below their proportions in the population, the number of women in middle-class occupations has been steadily
growing during the post-Independence period. This is true not only about government jobs, but also about middle-
class professions such as medicine, teaching, and law.
Even though the popular feminist view would tend to look at the state initiative for development as being
gender blind, at least during the early years of development planning, the Indian state surprisingly had a rather clear
view on the subject. Leaders of the nationalist movement appointed a Sub-committee as a part of the National
Planning Committee as early as 1939. The committee had 27 members, all women. Unlike social reformers of the
19th century, members of the Sub-committee viewed the women’s question from a citizenship perspective. As
Chaudhuri writes:
The terms of reference … laid emphasis on providing equal opportunity as a matter right of enable her to take ‘full share in India’s planned
economy’. Entry into the production sphere was seen as the key to resolving the unequal status of women. This is a radical departure from the
concern of 19th century reformers and early nationalists with middle class women’s issues stemming wholly from their lives within the
family. (Chaudhuri 1995: 213–14)

Commenting on another important report commissioned by the Indian state system and produced by a group of
women activists, Towards Equality, in the 1970s, Mary John also highlights the women activists’ perspective on
women’s equality being engaged through the provisions of the Indian Constitution and the agenda of nation
building, and not through the categories of Western feminism (John 1996). The rise of women’s movements during
the 1970s and 1980s was already a reflection of the growing size of middleclass women in the urban public sphere,
particularly in educational institutions at different levels.
Any formulation on the middle class has to examine this fluidity and recognize the significance of
particularistic identities while still retaining the elements of some form of commonality of identity. However, this is
not to suggest that during this period the Indian middle class had indeed acquired a representative national
character. On the contrary, despite growing diversities, social bases of the dominant or the ‘mainstream’ middle
class has remained rather narrow.
For example, it is a well-known fact that the Indian bureaucracy has mostly been populated by select upper
castes in each region. For instance, in Uttar Pradesh, Kayasthas, Brahmins, and Thakurs have been numerically
preponderant at almost all levels of the bureaucratic hierarchy. Similarly, Kayasthas and Brahmins have tended to
dominate the officialdom of West Bengal while members of the locally dominant communities of Vokkaliga and
Lingayats have had a major share of bureaucratic positions in the state of Karnataka. Similar trends have been
present in most other states/regions of the country as well.
More importantly, sections within such middle-class locations tend also to deploy their particularistic identities,
of caste and community, in competitive situations. They form ‘lobbies’ on caste lines, which promote and favour
their own members for plum postings and transfers, eventually reinforcing the power of the dominant castes at the
regional level. Similarly, Francine Frankel (1978) shows how the complex interaction between democratic politics,
national and state political leaders, and members of the dominant castes in rural areas produces a specific kind of
alliance. Such networks also shape the politics of patronage and ‘clientelism’ at the regional level.
Interestingly, this active involvement of middle-class individuals with their community-based associations
further reinforced the power of the state official. Such politics of patronage extended to the discretionary powers of
the individual bureaucrats through their control over subsidy dispensing machinery (also noted by Bardhan 1984).
The expansion of the subsidy regime and consequent economic benefits strengthened the big farmers economically
and further bolstered their social identities through their perceived power and domination over electoral processes
in the rural hinterlands. Such subsidies were not limited to agricultural inputs but also extended to cooperatives,
non-farm sector initiatives, and small-scale industries.
 These complex dynamics of social and economic mobility at the local level and its interaction with the
developmental state and its selective patronage has over the years produced a class of rural rich, big and medium
landowners belonging to specific caste communities, such as the Jats in western Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, and
Haryana, the Maratha sugarcane farmers in Maharashtra, the Pattidar Patels in Gujarat, and the Reddys and
Kammas in Andhra Pradesh. The source of their power and dominance does not emanate merely from their
dominance in agrarian economy but increasingly also from their growing presence in the urban economy and the
regional political systems (see Upadhya 1988; Rutten 1995). They not only invest in the education of their children
and aspire to be members of the urban middle classes; they also mobilize their caste, communities, and regional
identities to consolidate their positions in the emerging economy.
Thus, the expansion of the middle class during the Nehruvian period also increased its fragmentation. This is
also reflected in the nature of agitational politics during this period. Mobilizations for the redrawing of state
boundaries on linguistic lines during the 1950s and 1960s, in the southern, northern, and western parts of India,
were all led by the regional middle classes, belonging to specific upper/dominant caste communities. At some level
these movements were aimed at renegotiating structures of power and dominance inherited from colonial rule. The
newly emergent middle-class regional elite was no longer willing to work and survive under the political and
economic domination of other linguistic/regional groups. They played a crucial role in articulating regional
identities during this period. For example, the newly emergent middle-class Brahmins and Karans of the Orissa
region (the present-day state of Odisha) mobilized the regional sentiment against domination by the Bengalis over
the region. Similarly, Gujarat was carved out from Maharashtra in the 1960s when the dominant middle class of
Maharashtra as well as that of Gujarat articulated a demand for two separate states. The middle-class leaders in the
two different linguistic regions also came from specific castes communities. The story of Andhra Pradesh was also
similar. In more recent times, new regional middle classes successfully articulated similar demands in Uttarakhand,
Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, and Telangana, leading to formation of new administrative units from the existing states
of the Indian union. Interestingly, in almost all of these regions, those who led such regionalist movements emerged
as the local political elite.
 5
The Contemporary Dynamics and Number Games

They mostly live in rapidly growing cities and can afford cars, appliances and other conveniences that remain beyond the reach of most
Indians. Theirs is the fastest growing demographic group in the country, and their buying power is expected to triple in the next 15 years,
making India one of the most important consumer markets in the world…. (New York Times, 29 October 2011)

[If the middle income group] is to be reasonably secured in material terms, then India’s … [middle income group] constitutes less than 100
million people, and is crowded in the top decile along with the much smaller number of rich households. In that sense, India does not yet look
much like the middle class societies of Latin America, let alone of the mature western democracies. (Meyer and Birdsall 2012: 9)

The decade of the 1980s is often viewed as an important turning point in the history of contemporary India. It was
during the 1980s that the Nehruvian paradigm of development, which had hitherto been the dominant mode of
thinking about changing the social and economic structure of Indian society, began to lose its sheen. The processes
that produced this decline came from below, from above, and also from the side. The rise of a variety of ‘new’
social movements and the growing popularity of rights-based politics of marginalized groups questioned the value
of such a model from ‘below’. They pointed to the sufferings that the developmental process brought to a variety of
communities and categories located on the margins of Indian society.
Even though the Nehruvian model of planning for development professed growth with equity and it indeed
instituted programmes and policies for the inclusion of the marginalized in the process of development, it also
further alienated and excluded many whose voices were not easily heard in the corridors of power. For example, it
was often marginalized tribal communities who were displaced for the setting-up of large projects. Such groups and
communities had to lose their sources of livelihood in the name of development. The rise of identity-based social
movements among women, Dalits, and smaller ethnic communities also highlighted the blindness of such models of
development to their distinctive cultures, aspirations, needs, and patterns of exclusions.
Some of this pressure from below was also a direct consequence of the positive change produced by the
Nehruvian model of development. The first four decades of development planning and gradual institutionalization
of democratic political institutions had succeeded in spreading a new culture of citizenship. This translated on the
ground into ever increasing aspirations for inclusion of the historically deprived social categories. They began to
assert their autonomy in the electoral and social domains and contested the developmental process that they
perceived to be working against them. In other words, during the decade of the 1980s, the castes and communities
located on the margins of Indian society, Dalits and lower sections of the officially defined Other Backward Classes
(OBCs), began to move away from the politics of patronage and cosmetic inclusion within the dominant national
parties and by the early 1990s, the political processes in India were shifting out of the vertical alliances to newer
forms of horizontal mobilization around identities of caste and community, also described by some political
scientists as a new democratic upsurge (Yadav 2000; Varshney 2000: 12). The women’s movements raised hitherto
unfamiliar and often uncomfortable questions about sexuality, culture, and power. The new social movements of
the historically deprived social groups during the 1980s and 1990s were often outside the domain of electoral
politics, articulated and led by the emerging middle classes in the language of ‘rights’ and also by invoking
communitarian identities (see Jodhka 2001).
The Nehruvian paradigm of development planning was also questioned from above, by the emerging new
thinking on economic growth, which aggressively advocated for a shift in the policy paradigm and successfully
argued for the opening-up of Indian economy through neo-liberal reforms. The process of globalization that ensued
soon after, during the early 1990s, was a manifestation of this process. It offered newer opportunities of economic
growth, provided that India was willing to change its policy regime and participate in the promising economic
opportunities. The business and corporate houses, India’s private capital, that advocated some kind of state
protection and support for its own development during the initial years after Independence, had acquired a sense of
confidence by this time and wanted to be ‘liberated’ from the bureaucratic hurdles of the ‘license and quota raj’.
The pressure to change also came from the ‘side’. The collapse of the Soviet Union-led ‘Eastern Bloc’ in the
global economy, the oil crisis due to wars in the Gulf region, and the challenges of managing foreign exchange in a
fast changing global economy left very little space for the Indian state to carry on with old policies and perspectives
on subjects like international trade, foreign capital, and currency regimes. The rapid spread of new
telecommunication technology was revolutionizing the world, unleashing a new process of globalization, which
appeared like a challenge but also offered many new opportunities for social and economic integration with the
larger world.
Among those who enthusiastically welcomed the ‘new’ economic policy that began to unfold during the early
years of the 1990s—liberalization, privatization, and globalization—were the Indian middle classes. Thus began a
new chapter in the contemporary history of India. Not only did the middle class benefit economically from these
reforms, the much higher growth that the Indian economy experienced during the post1990 period also expanded
the middle class both horizontally as well as vertically. Horizontally speaking, its numbers grew very rapidly. It
also experienced a vertical expansion as it further grew in diversity and newer sections from the rural hinterlands
and margins increasingly identified themselves as middle class. Its influence over Indian society also grew. It soon
became the norm, the way to be, for a variety of Indians. By the turn of the century almost everyone wanted to be a
part of the middle-class story.
Even though the economic philosophy of the socalled neo-liberal policy regime was quite different from earlier
development thinking, the Nehruvian phase of development had contributed quite positively in preparing and
enabling India’s economy for this new phase. As discussed in the previous chapters, the first three or four decades
of state-mobilized investments in the core or ‘basic’ industries, and the import substitution policies that provided
protection to private capital from outside competition, helped it acquire strength and confidence to collaborate with
foreign capital and participate in the emerging global regime.
By default, the emerging global economic regime also created new space for educated and technically skilled
Indians. The technically skilled with degrees from IITs, IIMs, and a large number of engineering colleges became
readily available human resource for the rapidly expanding computer software sector and management of the new
corporate industries, in India and in the expanding ‘new economy’ the world over.
This presents a complex and complicated scenario for a discussion on the Indian middle class. The middle class
has been a major beneficiary of market-led growth processes. However, it is also the primary agency that articulates
aspirations of identities—castes, communities, or regions—and speaks for them. To argue differently, the Indian
middle class is placed quite centrally in this emerging scenario and it carries the burden of the balancing role in the
‘new India’.

The Macro Context

Despite a rather lazy start, the Indian economy began to grow on a variety of fronts after the country gained
independence from colonial rule. Even though the primary site of middle-class expansion during the first three or
four decades was within the state system, the growth in the public sector and the administrative systems had
implications for larger economic processes and created grounds for growth of private capital, which begins to be
evident from the 1980s. As can be seen in Table 5.1, the growth rates of the Indian economy increased significantly
during the 1980s, from an average of around 3 to 4 per cent until the early 1970s to nearly 8 per cent during the first
decade of the 21st century.
TABLE 5.1 Plan-wise Growth Rates of the Indian Economy
Plan Period Growth Rate (%)
First Plan, 1951–5 3.6
Second Plan, 1956–60 4.2
Third Plan, 1960–5 2.8
Fourth Plan, 1969–73 3.9
Fifth Plan, 1974–8 4.7
Sixth Plan, 1980–4 5.5
Seventh Plan, 1985–9 5.6
Eighth Plan, 1992–6 6.5
Ninth Plan, 1997–2001 5.5
Tenth Plan, 2002–6 7.7
Eleventh Plan, 2007–12 8.0
Source: Five Year Plan Documents (Eleventh and Twelfth Plans), Planning Commission, Government of India.

This growth of the Indian economy was not simply quantitative but also qualitative. Even though
demographically India continues to remain a predominantly rural society, with nearly two-thirds of its total
population still living in rural areas, its economic structure has changed quite rapidly. At the time of India’s
independence, more than half of the national income came from its primary sector, agriculture and allied activities.
By the 1990s, agriculture’s contribution had come down to nearly a quarter. The pace of this decline has been much
more rapid during the recent past. As is evident from Table 5.2, the share of the primary sector declined rapidly
from 23.2 per cent in 1999–2000 to less than 14 per cent in a little more than a decade (2012–13). Even though
manufacturing has not generated too many new jobs, India’s tertiary or service sector has been growing quite
steadily (See Table 5.2).
TABLE 5.2 Changing Structure of the Indian Economy in Recent Years

Source: Economic Survey, 2013–14, Ministry of Finance, Government of India.

The rapid change evident from these numbers also shows the stark contradictions and challenges the Indian
economy is confronted with. The increasing share of the service sector in the national economy clearly indicates the
expanding economic value of its service economy, which in turn indicates the growing prosperity of the middle
classes. However, the rapid decline of agriculture as a sector in terms of its contribution to the national income
when nearly half of working Indians remain primarily employed in this sector implies the declining worth of its
rural populace. Unlike many other parts of the world, where the rise of the middle class implied a decline of
inequality, in India the pattern seems to be virtually opposite, a point we discuss in the following chapter.

The Emerging ‘New’ Middle Class(es)

The growing influence of the Indian middle class, particularly during the post-1990 period, has been talked about
through two different yet overlapping perspectives. The first and the more popular one has been a simple income-
centric or statistical view of the middle class. The second is a more substantive, qualitative or sociological view of
the middle class. The first, income-centric view has been popularized by economists, financial
institutions/consultants, and investment bankers who understand this social group in terms of an income threshold.
Anybody earning an income equivalent to or more than the specified threshold qualifies to be in the middle class.
They focus on income because of their interest in assessing the number or proportion of Indians who can actively
participate in the market economy as consumers and sustain the market-led capitalist growth. This discourse has
been particularly influential during the current period of the Indian middle class.
Their active participation in the market economy as consumers has indeed been an important attribute of the
middle classes and discussion about them is abound everywhere in the contemporary world. However, the middle
classes have also been an important historical category and a bearer of new values and lifestyles. Their engagement
with the state as active members of the modern civil society has been critical in sustaining and promoting
democratic regimes. They have been the source of creative energy in modern India and the world over. Thus, by
implication, income levels, though critical, is only a qualifying criterion. Anyone who belongs to the middle-
income category may not necessarily be a middle-class person, subjectively or on the basis of an objective
sociological criterion. However, income levels could provide us with an easy starting point for a discussion on the
contemporary situation of the Indian middle classes.

The Number Games

As is mentioned above, the economic turn during the 1990s quite fundamentally changed the orientation of the
Indian economy. Neo-liberal reforms significantly raised the rates of economic growth, taking India out of what
was pejoratively described by some economists as the ‘Hindu rate of growth’. Not only did India open its economy
to global capital and enthusiastically invite direct foreign investment, its economic contribution to the global
economy also grew consistently.
Given that the Indian middle classes are popularly viewed as critical actors and agents in the emerging ‘India
story’ in the global economy, estimating their numbers and future trends of growth has virtually became an
obsession with a variety of institutions and actors in the academia and financial world. Mostly using available data
sets on consumption patterns and asset ownership of Indian households, they have evolved definitions, methods of
identifying middleclass individuals or households, and statistical cut off points that offer tentative estimates of the
size of the Indian middle class.
The following table gives a brief overview of some of these efforts:
TABLE 5.3 Definitions and Estimations of the Size of the Indian Middle Class
Author(s)/Agency and Stated Objective Definition of Middle Class Estimation
Authors: Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo Households whose daily per capita expenditure Does not estimate
(2008) valued at purchasing power parity (PPP) is between
Objective: To describe consumption choices, USD 2 and 4 and those where it is between USD 6
health and education investments, employment and 10 (page 3).
patterns, and other features of economic lives. Basis: Living Standard Measurement Surveys
Authors/Agency: NCAER, authored by Rajesh Households with an income of INR 250,000– Roughly 28 million households in 2009–10,
Shukla and Roopa Purusothaman (2008) 1,250,000 at 2004–5 prices. approximately 15 per cent of the total Indian
Objective: To capture the rise in consumer Basis: Market Information Survey of Households, population
spending to understand and project the expanse conducted by NCAER
of markets in the coming years.
Authors/Agency: The Mckinsey Quarterly, Households with a disposable income of INR 50 million (roughly 5 per cent of the
authored by Eric D. Beinhocker, Dianna Farrell, 200,000 to 1,000,000 a year in real 2000 terms. population)
and Adil S. Zainulbhai (2007) Basis: Market Information Survey of Households,
Objective: To understand consumer spending. conducted by NCAER
Author: Nancy Birdsall Meyer Christian (2012) Minimum threshold of USD 10 per capita per day 69.17 million (roughly 6 per cent of the
Objective: To estimate the size of the Indian and a maximum threshold of USD 50 a day (2005 population)
middle class. PPP).
Minimum threshold of USD 8 per capita per day 91.4 million (roughly 7.75 per cent of the
and a maximum threshold of USD 50 a day (2005 population)
PPP).
Basis: 66th Round NSS survey (2010)
Author: Sudeshna Maitra (2007) Households possessing a total of 12 durable items, Lower-, middle-, and upper-class households
Objective: To ascertain the size and 5 recreational goods (for example, tape players), 4 constitute 20 per cent, 62 per cent and 18 per
consumption habits of the Indian middle class. household goods (for example, refrigerators) and 3 cent of urban households, respectively; this
transport goods (that is, cars) at the time of means 17 per cent of the entire Indian
interview. 55th Round of the Indian NSS survey population
(1999–2000)
Authors/Agency: Deutsche Bank Research, Households that own 70 per cent to 150 per cent of Does not estimate
authored by Steff en Dyck et. al (2009) the household median net income of their
Objective: To understand Asia’s emerging respective countries
middle class and its role in the expansion of the
economy and political stability.
Authors: Ernst and Young (undated) People earning between USD 10 and 100 per day. 50 million people, or 5 per cent of India’s
Objective: To examine the growth of the middle People in this income bracket can be considered a population; the report projects that this group
class in the emerging markets and explore how ‘global middle class’—middle class by the will grow steadily over the next decade,
this will change both the developing and the standards of any country. reaching 200 million by 2020
developed worlds.
Agency: Asian Development Bank (2010) Middle class as those with consumption Lower-middle class: 20.45 per cent Middle-
Objective: To estimate the size of the middle expenditures of USD 2–20 per person per day in middle class: 4.15 per cent Upper-middle class:
class across the developing Asian countries. 2005 PPP. Lower-middle class—consuming USD 0.5 per cent Total: 25.05 per cent
2–4 per person per day. Middle-middle class—
between USD 4–10, is living above subsistence,
and able to save and consume non-essential goods.
Upper-middle class consumes USD 10–20 per day.
Basis: World Bank’s Povcal Net database
Author: Sonalde Desai (2001) Lower-middle class—households with per capita Lower-middle class: Of the total population,
Objective: To examine changes in the size and expenditure exceeding twice the poverty line but 11.21 per cent in 1983; 13.17 per cent in 1987–
composition of the households falling in the below four times the poverty line for the year. 8; and 16.48 in 1993–4 Upper-Middle Class: Of
upper tail of the consumption distribution. Upper-middle class—households with per capita the total population, 2.4 per cent in 1983; 3.08
expenditure exceeding four times the poverty line. per cent in 1987–8; and 3.33 per cent in 1993–4
Basis: Various rounds of NSS survey
Author: Martin Ravallion (2009) Household with consumption per capita between 146.8 million in the year 1990 (17.3 per cent of
Objective: To estimate the size of the middle- USD 2 and 13 a day at 2005 PPP. The lower bound the total population) and 263.7 million (24.1 per
class population in the developing world. is the median poverty line of developing countries cent of the total population) in the year 2005
while the upper bound is based on the US poverty
line.
 These are a small but representative proportion of a large number of such estimations of the category. They all
attempt to estimate the size of the Indian middle class and tend to converge around some common points. They all
assume that the middle-income category has a critical role in India’s development and economic growth, translating
in or through expansion of the market and consumers. This is also a paradigm shift in the imagining of the Indian
middle class, from Nehruvian development agents to the drivers of private consumption. Development effects of the
rising numbers of middle-class Indians begin to be viewed differently, as an indication of a population moving out
of poverty and into a class of consumers. Being middle class is to have sufficient amount of money to spend not
only on eating and drinking but also on entertainment, education, health care, domestic infrastructure (Banerjee and
Duflo 2008), leisure and travel, transport and communication, personal products, apparels, and so on (Kerschner
and Huq 2011). By boosting demand for consumer goods, expansion of private consumption is by itself seen as a
‘significant driver’ of growth. The proportion of consumption expenditure in India was 57 per cent of the total GDP
in 2008 and is close to that of developed nations such as Japan (55 per cent) and the US (71 per cent) (Kerschner
and Huq 2011)

Economic Locations of the Indian Middle Class

Who are India’s middle classes? Where are they located in the larger economic structure of the country? How is
their location undergoing change with changes in the Indian economy?
Until the 1980s much of the middle class grew within the state-supported sectors. During the post-reform
period, it grew with the expanding private sector of the Indian economy. However, this does not mean a switchover
from ‘public’ to ‘private’. Employment in public sector remains significant, much larger than the total employment
in the organized private sector even 20 years after the initiation of economic liberalization. Table 5.4 provides
estimations of employment strength in the organized sector of the economy from 1970–1 to 2010–11. This is
precisely the sector where the middle class has always had maximum presence in the decades after Independence.
Employment in the public sector grew from 11.2 million in 1970–1 to 19.14 million in 2000–1.
However, the state’s policy on public employment can be disaggregated into two phases. The first is the period
of expansion. Between 1970–1 to 1980–1 and 1980–1 to 1990–1, around 4.38 million and 3.58 million workers
respectively were added to public sector employment. The ‘thinning down of the state’ discourse officially initiated
in 1991 translated into a brake on the state’s recruitment effort. During the next decade, between 1990–1 and 2000–
1, merely 80,000 workers were added to the state’s personnel strength. However, the attempt to thin down the state
was most visible in the first decade of the 21st century when there appears to have been a moratorium on new
recruitments while retirements continued. The total employment in the public sector saw a decline of as many as
1.59 million workers.
This is interesting because even though employment declined in the state sector, the Indian state did not
experience any kind of ‘shrinking’. Nor did development activities see any decline during this period. On the
contrary, developmental and non-developmental expenditure of the central and the state governments rose by many
folds, from INR 231.94 and INR 226.64 billion in 1980–1 to as much as INR 15,152.25 and INR 16,322.92 billion
in 2012–13 respectively (RBI 2013).
Against the backdrop of such a mammoth increase in state expenditure, the reduction of jobs in the public
sector could be attributed to a variety of rationalizations and structural adjustment policies advocating thinning
down of the state. Even though the neoliberal policies advocated a ‘leaner state’, in effect it only meant increasing
instances of out-sourcing of official activities to private service providers and a kind of ‘informalization’ within the
state system (GOI 2009). The state agencies began to contract out a number of developmental functions—
electricity, sanitation, security, water supply, and so on—to private agencies with an inbuilt design of monitoring
through user groups. This indeed has had far-reaching implications for the reproduction of the middle class through
the Indian state and the politics of their relationship with the state.
TABLE 5.4 Employment in the Public and Organized Private Sectors (in millions)
Year Public Sector (End-March) Private Sector (End-March)
1970–1 11.10 6.73
1980–1 15.48 7.40
1990–1 19.06 7.68
2000–1 19.14 8.65
2010–11 17.55 11.45
Source: Table Collated from the Handbook of Statistics on the Indian Economy: 2012–13, p. 53, published by the Reserve Bank of India.
 Private Sector Employment
More importantly perhaps, the trend towards privatization and outsourcing of state services or the wider process of
promoting economic activity through the private sector did not lead to a significant increase in organized private
employment. Even though employment in organized private sector jobs grew from 6.73 million jobs in 1970–1 to
11.45 million jobs in 2010–11, the rate of its expansion was quite modest, only around 1 per cent per annum.
Despite a significant expansion of the private sector in the Indian economy, its employment practices remain largely
informal. According to The Indian Labour and Employment Report (ILER 2013), the Indian economy is
overwhelmingly constituted by the unorganized sector. Nearly 84 per cent of the workforce in the Indian economy
was employed in an unorganized and informal mode during 2011–12. Just about one-sixth of the total workers
worked in the organized sector. Further, not everyone who is employed in the organized sector has social security
benefits or permanency of job. Such workers make for more than half (60 per cent) of the 18 per cent employed in
regular wage employment. Only a meagre 6.8 per cent of the total working Indians have regular jobs with all the
statutory benefits. This is much smaller when we compare India with developed countries where regular
employment could be above 50 per cent. In some countries, it even goes up to 80 per cent.
However, the so-called unorganized or informal sector is not a homogenous category. It has enormous diversity
and internal differentiation. Not everyone working informally is poor or insecure. Even though a large proportion of
those working in this sector are small-time self-employed, small and marginal farmers, petty-shop keepers, and
low-wage earning workers in a variety of activities, the sector also includes those earning very high incomes, such
as doctors, lawyers, chartered accountants, big farmers, and big shopkeepers. Besides the diversity of income and
status, the unorganized sector is also differentiated by caste, religion, gender, and other similar social locations
(Harriss-White 2003; GOI 2009).
This would also imply that a good proportion of the Indian middle class is also located in this sector. In purely
economic terms, the middle-income groups would be located in all sectors of the economy—primary, secondary,
tertiary, quaternary or the intellectual activities, and the quinary, the highest levels of decision making in a society
or economy. As one would expect, a significant proportion of the middle classes are formally employed in the
public and private sectors. However, statistically speaking, a larger proportion of them would be located in the
private unorganized sector.
The Economic Survey of the central government (2014) notes that the compound annual growth rate (CAGR)
of the service sector GDP at 8.5 per cent for the period 2000–1 to 2013–14 has been higher than the 7.1 per cent
CAGR of overall GDP during the same period (GOI-MOF 2013–14). During the post-liberalization period,
particularly during the first decade of the 21st century, the share of the service sector in the GDP has been
increasing rapidly while that of agriculture has been steadily declining. The share of industry has remained more or
less stagnant (also see Table 5.2).
Even though this rather rapid change in the structure of income in the Indian economy also reflects in the
patterns of employment, the pace of change in the latter is much slower. As is evident from Table 5.5, even though
the contribution of the primary sector to the national income is less than 14 per cent, it still provides employment to
nearly half (48.9 per cent) of working Indians. However, a majority of working Indians are now employed outside
the primary sector, in the service or tertiary sector and industry or the secondary sector. More importantly perhaps,
the share of agriculture or the primary sector as a source of employment is steadily declining. This decline was
quite significant during 1999–2000 and 2012–13: nearly 11 percentage points in a decade. Even though nearly 49
per cent of the working Indians are still reported as being employed in agricultural sector, a large majority of them
also have subsidiary jobs, though mostly of informal nature.
TABLE 5.5 Share of Major Sectors in Total Employment (per cent)
Source: Economic Survey, Government of India 2013–14.

What are the broad conclusions? First, the primary sector of the Indian economy continues to be a source of
main employment for nearly 49 per cent of working Indians even when its contribution to the total GDP is less than
14 per cent; second, the service sector contributes more than 50 per cent to the GDP and its share has grown by
almost 9 percentage points during the first decade of the current century. The service sector also employs more than
a quarter of working Indians and this is likely to go up further. Given its pace of growth in terms of its share in
national income and employment, a majority of those in the middle-income groups are likely to find their earning
opportunities in the service sector. The manufacturing sector of the Indian economy also employs a quarter of
working Indians and contributes the same proportion to the national GDP. This sector certainly has a lot of potential
to grow and is also likely to offer employment opportunities at various levels, including for the middle classes.
Though agriculture continues to employ the largest proportion of working Indians, a large majority of workers
in this sector do not fall in the middleincome category. Their consumption and expenditure pattern, a proxy for
income, is abysmally low (ILER 2013). The middle-income households in rural areas are typically constituted by a
relatively small number of large farmers, small entrepreneurs/shopkeepers, and salaried government servants. The
secondary sector (industry) draws its middle-income households largely from manufacturing, mining, electricity,
basic goods, intermediate goods, and consumer goods. Given the sluggish growth rates of the agricultural and
industrial sectors, the tertiary sector has become the repository of a significant proportion of the middle-income
earners in India (ILER 2013: 252).

Social Composition of the Middle-Income Group

What kinds of social backgrounds do these middleincome households come from? Are there any differences in
terms of their caste, community, or other social origin variables? What do the available large data sets say on this
subject? Using the monthly per capita consumption expenditure (MPCE) data available from the National Sample
Survey Office (NSSO) as a possible proxy for income we can identify some patterns as presented in Table 5.6. This
is based on the available data for 1999–2000 and 2011–12.
We could possibly divide the entire population into five consumption quintiles. The bottom MPCE quintile and
the next 20 per cent can be taken as a proxy for poor and vulnerable households respectively. The next two MPCE
quintiles can be taken as proxies for lower-middle-income and middle-income households respectively and the
households in the last MPCE quintile can be considered as upper-middle income and rich households. A cross
tabulation of the MPCE quintiles with social groups could provide us with a broad view of the presence of different
social groups in each MPCE quintile. The social group classification is self-explanatory save ‘Others’, which is
largely constituted by upper castes, mostly Hindus and Sikhs. A few others, such as the Jains, Parsees, and non-
OBC Christians and Muslims, are also part of this group but their presence in the sample is likely to be nearly
insignificant in statistical terms.
One will perhaps not be surprised to find a majority of the rural STs and SCs in the ‘poor’ and ‘vulnerable’
categories. This is true both for the data for 1999–2000 and for 2011–12. As many as 59 per cent of STs were in
these two categories during 1999–2000 and despite India’s high growth rates in the following decade, this
proportion remains the same during 2011–12. Those clubbed with the official category of SCs, however, do
experience some mobility during this period and move upwards. The proportion of SCs in the ‘poor’ and
‘vulnerable’ categories comes down from 52 per cent to 48 per cent during the same decade. In comparison to this,
the share of ‘poor’ and ‘vulnerable’ in the so-called general category, who would largely be from the upper castes,
remains at around a quarter of their population at both points of time. The OBCs occupy positions in the middle,
with around 40 and 38 per cent of their total population being ‘poor’ and ‘vulnerable’ at both points of time under
consideration. As one would expect, when we look at the proportions of each group in the middle and upper-middle
income or rich categories, the statistical picture is completely reversed.
However, despite this persistence of correlation between caste and deprivation, the so-called middleincome
groups are not socially homogenous. Even when the share of SC and ST communities is predictably lower among
them, they are not entirely absent. Among the SCs, 17 and 18 per cent qualify to be in the middle-income category
over the two periods of data collection. This figure is 14 and 15 per cent for the STs. Those listed as OBCs have a
higher share in this category, above 20 per cent. But those from the upper castes or general category were above 30
per cent.
Patterns across social groups are not very different for urban India. Quite like rural settings, an overwhelming
majority of the poor and vulnerable are from the SC, ST, and OBC communities. However, the proportion of SCs
and OBCs among the poor and vulnerable is higher in urban India than is the case in rural areas. However, the
urban STs are a little less likely to be poor or vulnerable than their counterparts living in rural areas. The share of
poor general category is much lower, around 26 and 25 per cent at the two points of time, almost similar to their
counterparts in rural areas. Likewise, when we look at the numbers for the middle and upper-middle income/rich
categories, the statistical picture is again reversed.

Numbers Are Significant

Notwithstanding significant differences among those who have ventured to estimate the relative size of the Indian
middle class in the total Indian population, they all seem to suggest that the Indian middle-class story is an
important fact and its implications go beyond the local context. Even if they make for only 10 to 25 per cent of the
total population of India, their absolute numbers are very large and would be larger than the most populous country
of Europe. Even a small increase in its size in proportional terms would not only add a significant number to the
potential buyers of consumer goods, it would also imply an improvement for those living below the line of poverty.
The economists who look at the middle class from a growth perspective tend to agree that the expansion of the
middle class is an important outcome and a useful evidence of economic growth (Meyer and Birdsall 2012; Ernst
and Young [undated]; Ablett et al. 2007; Ravallion 2009).
However, the relationship of economic growth and middle-class expansion is not simply a one-way story. An
expanding middle class has important politicoeconomic consequences. A large middle class tends be a source of
political stability as it could help in building consensus around the critical questions of economic policy (Easterly
2001). Similarly, an expanding middle class could be an enabling source for economic growth. Economists Abhijit
Banerjee and Esther Duflo identify three distinct ways in which it could happen. First, the middle classes produce
entrepreneurs who ‘create employment and productivity growth for the rest of society’. Second, they could help in
capitalist accumulation because they invariably emphasize on ‘the accumulation of human capital and savings’, thus
enabling the economy to grow. Third, the middle class is a status and quality conscious social group and hence,
they create demand for high quality goods. They normally have the capacity and are willing to pay extra, thereby
encouraging firms to invest in production and marketing (Banerjee and Duflo 2008: 3; also see Lahiri 2014). The
relationship of the middle class with economic growth is in a virtuous circle. Rising incomes translate into
consumption, which further expands the market leading to economic growth, which in turn again results in even
higher consumption, and economic growth. It is possible to find some evidence of this happening in contemporary
India (Saxena 2010).
While numbers are indeed critical, the idea of the middle class is not exhausted by income classifications. As
we have seen in earlier chapters, the middle class is an important sociological and historical category and an
expansion in its size has implications beyond the economics of consumption. Social composition and political
contexts also shape the middle class and are in turn shaped by such emergent social categories. This is discussed in
the following chapters.
TABLE 5.6 Share of Population to Total Population of Each Social Group in Different Income Quintiles (in percentages)
Source: Various rounds of National Sample Survey.
Note: Figures are rounded off to the nearest zero.
 6
Consuming Identities and Exclusionary Powers

Advertisements and media images have contributed to the creation of an image of a ‘new’ middle class, one that has left behind its
dependence on austerity and state protection and has embraced an open India…. The newness of the middle class rests on its embrace of
social practices of taste and commodity consumption…. Images of mobility associated with newly available commodities … serve to create a
standard, which the urban middle classes can and should aspire to. In this process, the new (urban) Indian middle class becomes a central
agent for the re-visioning of the Indian nation in the context of globalization. (Fernandes 2000: 89)

As is evident from the previous chapter, notwithstanding disagreements on its extent or pace, almost everyone
estimating the number of middle-class Indians agrees that their size has been growing over the years and in most
likelihood, it will continue to grow at a reasonably good pace in the coming decades. They also tend to agree that
even when their proportions remain low in the total population of India, their absolute size is substantial. Even if
middle-class India were to be a mere one-fifth or one-fourth of India’s total population, it would perhaps be greater
than the total population of the largest country of developed Western Europe.
Interestingly, this expansion is not confined to their numbers. The idea of the middle class, as a subjective
category of self-identification, has also been expanding. A much larger proportion of people living in urban India,
and increasing numbers living in rural settlements, are today likely to identify them as belonging to the middle
class. In the urban context, such individuals could range from a ‘low’ level employee earning a few thousand rupees
per month in the organized sector to a rich professional earning more than a million rupees every month from his or
her private business. Even those working part-time as cultivators and owning agricultural land prefer to be viewed
as middle class, if they happen to be educated and simultaneously have an active relationship with urban or non-
agricultural economic activity. This growing diversity and differentiation within the middle class also makes the
category rather ‘amorphous’ and too general for a meaningful sociological analysis (Srivastava 2009; Fernandes
2006; Mankekar 1999; Dickey 2012).
At another level, this growing popularity of middle class as a category of self-identification among a wide
variety of Indians is also an indicator of changing structural and cultural realities of contemporary Indian society
where being middle class becomes more meaningful than the ascribed identities of caste, kinship, and ethnicity.
Even when the identity of middle class is invoked as a hyphenated category, such as the Dalit middle class or the
Muslim middle class, it inevitably points towards a process of increasing internal differentiation within these
social/ethnic groups and categories.
How does one make sense of this shift in the imaginations and identities of selves in a variety of contexts?
What exactly is gained or being conveyed through such a claim of being members of the middle class over a
‘traditional’ or a particularistic social identity among members of otherwise heterogeneous and internally diverse
and differentiated social groups? What is distinctive about the contemporary context of middle class in India, the
so-called neo-liberal times?
In order to understand this complex social phenomenon, we need to move away from the statistical view of
middle class that identifies it purely on the basis of the amount of income a person or a household earns. An
income-centric discourse merely captures anyone and everyone who can situate himself/herself in the market
through his/her purchasing power at a certain arbitrarily set threshold as middle class. The approach therefore
becomes blind to social composition and other cultural and political dynamics that occur within the broad social
category of the middle class. In such a discourse, even spatial, occupational, and educational differences become
insignificant except for underlining the fact that the proportion of the middle class is significantly more in urban
than in rural areas. As we have discussed in the first chapter of this book, middle class is also a historical category
and its social profile and political imagination changes with time.

The ‘Neo-Liberal’ Times and the Consuming Middle Class

As we have seen in the previous chapter, neo-liberal economic reforms initiated during the early 1990s changed the
thrust and priorities of India’s economic policy. While on one hand the shift in economic policy helped the Indian
economy grow at an accelerated pace, at another level, the ‘opening’ up of Indian markets unleashed a new regime
of consumption. Even though agricultural production and industrial manufacturing remained important, the new
economic policy was oriented towards the potential consumer, who could sustain demand in the marketplace for a
wide variety of consumer goods. The removal of restrictions on the import of consumer goods also implied that
those Indians who had money in their pockets could now buy virtually everything in the local market, from fancy
cars and computers to cosmetics and cameras.
An important aspect of the new consumer culture is also the growing ascendance of popular media and the new
modes of seducing potential buyers through images projected on television screens and pages of newspapers and
magazines. These images not only seduce a wide range of consumers with differing sizes of their pockets but also
become critical for social life, electoral politics, and cultural identities. Media images begin to be viewed as
normatives of a good and socially appropriate life-style. More than anything else, the ‘media revolution’ of the
1990s begins to influence and shape middle-class identities and their notions of self-realization and freedom.
In the emerging context of the increasingly mediated social and cultural life, consumption becomes the new
idiom of mobility, achievement, and identity. Leela Fernandes rightly argues that the discourse or debate on this
new middle class is centred on its ‘culture of consumption’ that has expanded with new commodities becoming
available in the Indian market after the shift in economic policy during the early 1990s, ‘liberalization’. Fernandes
is not the only one to point this out. Other writings on the contemporary Indian middle class also similarly argue
that consumption has come to be a critical arena for the reproduction of middle-class identity in South Asia today
(Appadurai and Breckenridge 2005; Oza 2006, Liechty 2003). The implication of this focus on consumption is
obviously that it gives primacy to the amount of disposable income a person has in his/her pocket. However,
consumption is not simply an economic activity. It also implies a ‘style of life’, a culture that reproduces itself
through a continuous, almost obsessive, involvement with commodities and their consumption. Thus, this ‘new’ or
post-liberalization Indian of middle class is very different in terms of its values and attitudes from the ‘old’ middle
class, which, as Nita Mathur rightly argues:
… distinguished itself from the elite and commoners or the general public… in terms of its emphasis on the virtues of diligence,
conscientiousness, individual achievement and commitment to the national interest. It articulated its distinction and respectability in society
by critiquing the indisputably affluent lifestyle that characterised the nawabs, taluqdars and aristocratic elites…. The Indian middle class
established certain benchmarks for social and moral order…. (Mathur 2010: 215)

In contrast, for the ‘new’ Indian middle class, the primary concern is largely ‘self-making’ through acquisition
of a lifestyle, primarily associated with possession of status goods. Comparative instincts and competitive processes
in which individuals try and keep up with the norms of the social group with which they seek to identify also
govern consumption as a social activity. This indeed has a larger normative and sociological dimension, which
shapes political imagination. Consumption becomes a modality of social life (Appadurai and Breckenridge 1995).
Economic liberalization in India has been synonymous with globalization and this is clearly reflected in new
identities of middle-class Indians,‘in both cultural and economic terms; in cultural terms by defining a new cultural
standard that rests on the socio-symbolic practices of commodity consumption and in economic terms as the
beneficiaries of the material benefits of jobs’ in the ‘new economy’ (Fernandes 2000: 88). This expansion or
globalization of the Indian economy also translates on the ground into new aspirations and identities. For example,
professionals belonging to information and technology sector in Chennai proudly told Fuller and Narasimhan
(2007) about the distinctive value of their newly acquired economic status while being interviewed for a study. ‘The
money meant that they could now enjoy very comfortable standards of living comparable with that available in the
west’ (Fuller and Narasimhan 2006: 134, emphasis added). A young man working in a multi-national company in
Delhi gave an almost ditto answer to another sociologist, Nita Mathur, while counting his achievements over a short
period of time in service of the company:
MNCs provide attractive salaries to starters and people like me with only two years of work experience; those who work in an MNC get
better exposure and opportunities to travel from one country to another and to adopt a cosmopolitan lifestyle. (Mathur 2010: 218)

At another level, the neo-liberal rise of a middleclass normative in urban India also means ascendance of
money as the most critical signifier of status, sometimes transcending (or working together with) other identities
such as caste, community, or gender. ‘Money is the most important thing in Madurai, even more than jāti’;1 ‘if a
person is well off, people will look at him respectfully, no matter what his jāti is’ (Dickey 2012: 225), were some of
the predictable responses when anthropologist Sara Dickey interviewed her relatively less privileged respondents in
the south Indian town.
Consumption in Madurai was not simply about eating well and living comfortably. It made the individual get
‘counted in society’, be ‘visible’, and acquire ‘dignity’ (Dickey 2012: 226). ‘Consumption was deployed to
negotiate middle-class recognisability’ by those who wished to identify themselves as such. Their recognition in
society as members of the middle class depended on some ‘critical consumption practices’, their ability to buy and
demonstrate the possession of those commodities (Dickey 2012: 221).
Being middle class and elite is more than just being rich. ‘Critical consumption practices’ also have to be
acquired and cultivated, such as bird watching tourism, or the ability to appreciate art and other forms of
recreation/entertainment that resemble cosmopolitan cultural forms. All these become consuming lifestyle features
of contemporary middle classes (Urfi 2012; Kochhar 2004: 20). The shift also has a larger meaning for the country.
Consumption, as Upadhya argues, is now seen as a substitute for development and the middle class as its flag bearer
(Upadhya 2008).
Those who produce consumer goods make sustained attempts to seduce increasing numbers of people into the
public culture of consumption through fierce advertisement campaigns, electronic and print media/channels, films,
sports, shopping malls, promotion of tourism, hotels, restaurants, clubs, and so on. Even visiting a hospital for
routine medical examination and clinical tests is often less of a medical requirement than an act of seeking social
status by going to fancy corporate/private hospitals which look like five star hotels. As Lefebvre argues, corporate
hospitals actively advertise and position themselves as part of a consumerist vision of healthcare (Lefebvre 2008).
Identity seeking through consumption weakens social differences and telescopes the middle classes towards a
single destination (Jaffrelot and van der Veer 2008: 12). It also reflects a certain kind of empowerment of the
individual who can consume the ever-increasing supply of goods and services. Unlike the traditional status
hierarchies of caste and kinship, middle-class statuses are, in principle, open and individually achievable. As a part
of the growing basket of consumable services, an increasing number of customized paid courses/services offered by
specialized agencies to develop personality traits have become available in a range of urban centres in India (see
Srivastava 2014).
Such subjects used to be earlier discussed with close friends and relatives behind closed doors or in the
confession box of a church. Bold advertisements persuading individuals to consult for personality development like
courage, self-confidence, peace of mind, freedom from resentment and regret, ability to fully express your love,
ability to make decisions without doubting oneself, different ways of achieving happiness in private lives now
routinely appear on television screens and on social media. They are all matters of consumption. Among other
services on offer to the contemporary middle class are education at different levels, health clubs, spiritual
discourses, personalized sexual therapies and consultations, customized Ayurveda treatments, yoga sessions,
dancing classes, Formula One racing, membership of golf courses and clubs, museum visits, art, paintings,
photography expeditions, wine tasting, adventurous and water sports, foreign language lessons, visits to theme
parks, and many more (see Brosius 2010). Being beautiful and healthy also becomes a part of the consumption
culture that could be acquired through visiting parlours and health clinics, provided one has enough money in one’s
pocket.

Gender Effects
This consumption-centric culture around which the contemporary middle class constructs its identities has
important implications for gender identities. Mediacentric culture has begun to influence and shape notions of
individual freedom and empowerment.
As mentioned above, the question of gender equality and women’s rights has been a part of the mainstream
political discourse, a promise made by the independent Indian state to its women. However, patriarchal social
structure and mental dispositions are hard to change. Constitutional promises and rigid structures on the ground
often come into conflict. The expanding size of Indian middle classes, growing aspirations, and mobility has meant
an increasing number of women going out to study and work. It was in this wider context that the decades of 1970s
and 1980s witnessed influential mobilizations by urban middle-class women2 against everyday street violence,
traditional practices such as dowry, and for greater representation in the nation’s political life. Over the years the
gender question acquired a kind of mainstream status. Giving representation to women in different spheres of life
has become a part and parcel of the ‘politically correct’ things to do.
The onset of economic reforms in the 1990s and the growing reach of neo-liberal economic philosophy through
media images and shifts in political discourse also appropriated this feminist discourse by underlining the critical
significance of individual self-realization, which could be achieved in the new dispensation through individual
entrepreneurship and pleasure seeking consumption. As Chaudhuri argues, in the neo-liberal economy with market
supremacy, ‘women were free to both achieve and enjoy’ (Chaudhuri 2014: 152). She sums up this connection
between the new notion of women’s empowerment and ascendance of the neo-liberal market economy quite well:
 [The] projection of ‘unfettered’ self … was equally a projection of economic liberalization, the concerned social context that made this
‘freedom’ possible, … unimaginable in the Nehruvian epoch of license raj and state control…. Celebration of this new-found ‘self’ of the
Indian women was therefore a simultaneous celebration of India’s economic reforms. (Chaudhuri 2014: 152)

However, the new media images also actively project Indian women as being Indian in a distinctive way.
Unlike the modern market-driven Western culture, where the individual autonomy of its middle-class women has
presumably been a reality for long, the Indian woman is almost always presented as being able to carry an element
of tradition with her, even when she travels in the market-driven globalized world. This is true not only about the
young woman who gets selected as the beauty queen, amongst the most beautiful women of the world in a given
pageant, but also about the successful professional IT worker, medical doctor, or corporate head, whose media
representations show her successfully and happily managing both her professional duties and the children and
husband at home, and doing well on both the fronts.
This can neither be easy, nor real. However, this ideational notion of ‘finding a balance’, Smitha
Radhakrishnan argues, makes the Indian experience of globalization gendered in a specific way. While it is viewed
as ‘progress’, it also asks for a kind of ‘sacrifice’ from women who wish to be individually successful in their
professional life. In her interviews with IT professional women in the city of Bangalore and in Silicon Valley in the
US, Radhakrishnan found this narrative of finding a ‘balance’ between ‘individual, family and community
responsibilities’ as a ‘recurring theme’ (Radhakrishnan 2008: 12).
However, at another level, this mainstreaming of the gender question and its advocacy through popular media
also opens up new spaces for the middle-class woman that were not earlier available to her. Sex ratios in India have
tended to worsen with social and economic mobility, with families choosing sexselective abortions in favour of
having male children. However, as the upwardly mobile stabilize in a middleclass location, parents tend to accept
daughters more easily (see Kaur and Bhalla 2015) and aspire for their education and their careers as they do for
their sons. A study by Ruchika Ganguly-Scrase among the lowermiddle classes in Bengal shows this quite clearly:
Parents frequently provide positive encouragement to girls to study so that a good education would better equip them to enter the work force.
Such expectations were previously absent among lower-middle-class families. Nowadays, not only is women’s education a source of pride
for parents, it also stands as a safety net: an insurance against a daughter’s failed marriage or widowhood. (Ganguly-Scrase 2003: 554)

Interestingly, even when Ganguly-Scrase tries to suggest that economic liberalization might shrink employment
opportunities for women, her respondents often argued back with passion that opportunities for women had
certainly become better in the recent past.

Beyond Consumption
Urbanization and expansion of middle class has indeed brought about a greater fluidity in social life, giving a larger
number of choices to individuals. However, being in the middle class in India rarely means emancipation from
prejudice or social and economic dependencies. The wide range and variety of consumable goods and services
come for a range of prices depending upon their quality and ‘class’. Thus, while at one level, consumption dissolves
differences of status; at another level it produces a new set of status hierarchies. It is here that we need to recognize
the obvious limits to the ‘fluidity’ brought about by consumption in the social sphere. While the new culture of
consumption indeed offers possibilities of individual social and symbolic mobility, the older boundaries of caste
and community do not disappear. Nor do the realities of economic inheritance and acquired social capital/social
network become irrelevant. On the contrary, they tend to condition the emergent hierarchies, within the middle
class and in its relation to those located below it. In other words, notwithstanding its ‘modernity’, membership of
the middle class is constrained by pre-existing privileges and hierarchies. Despite its apparent claim to
individualization, members of the contemporary middle classes often act collectively, preserve privileges, and
construct boundaries that exclude (see Beteille 2013). As Kapur puts it, ‘for a putative middle class to act as a class
and articulate [and preserve] its interest, one must think beyond income and consumption as the defining trait of the
middle class’ (Kapur 2010: 158).

The Politics of the Contemporary Middle Class

The contemporary Indian middle class is as much constituted by its social history and by the politics of the day as
by the economics of contemporary times. Over the past decades, it has emerged as a hegemonic class, a distinct
privileged group, which has assets (land and other properties), capabilities (modern/English education), and
invariably social/cultural capital (networks and status). This class has acquired the legitimacy to speak on behalf of
the larger society (while articulating ‘universal concerns’) or for its specific community (while articulating
‘particularistic concerns’). It is in the backdrop of this instrumental, yet socially rooted, definition of middle class
that this section of the chapter tries to interrogate the mutual relationship between middle-class politics and culture
and the state, economy, and the society in contemporary India.
The so-called old Indian middle class, though enjoying a hegemonic position, had a different kind of
relationship within institutions of power. Through its critical location and social/cultural capital, it acquired a
naturalized position of leadership with a considerable amount of authority over decisions about what is right or
wrong for the country and its people. The characteristic features of middle-class ideology during this phase were a
belief in the parliamentary form of democracy, secularism, respect for diversity, and support for welfare provisions
and affirmative action to ameliorate the living conditions of the poor and the historically disadvantaged. It
supported state initiatives in the economic sphere through direct investments in the public sector. As we have
discussed earlier, this middle class saw itself as an important agency of the nation-building project. However,
although the middle class claimed to represent national interest, the policy architecture, whether unconsciously or
by design, largely created conditions which made this class the biggest beneficiary of the state’s policies.
The contemporary or the ‘new’ middle class no longer appears to be championing the task of nation building or
the state-led initiatives for economic growth. Nor does it actively support efforts for poverty alleviation or pro-
active policies and programmes of the state for the disadvantaged. As Deshpande rightly argues,
having consolidated its social, economic and political standing on the basis of the development state, this group is now ready to kick it away
as the ladder it no longer needs. (Deshpande 2003: 150)

However, it does not mean that the Indian middle class has become completely globalized and it does not need
or identify with the nation. On the contrary, as Deshpande puts it, its identification and claim over the nation has
only become more hegemonic, albeit differently, from a position of ‘proxy’ to that of ‘portrait’.
… the middle-class no longer claims merely to represent the people (who alone were thought to constitute the nation in the era of
development), but rather that it is itself the nation. (Deshpande 2003: 150)

Having exhausted the historical potential of the state to serve its interests and enable its expansion, the Indian
middle class turned to the market for its further growth and consolidation; to meet its ever increasing desire for
higher earnings, material possessions, leisure, and consumption. This also changed its ideology and identity. Along
with those in the corporate sector, middle-class leaders now actively advocate marketbased instruments for
managing and organizing the economy and society. They see ‘too much bureaucracy and too little enterprise’ in the
Nehruvian developmental state and aggressively advocate the ‘need to reduce the role of the state and turn to the
market as a catalyst of development’ (Kothari 1991: 555). The state begins to be increasingly viewed as a site of
corruption and patronage while the market is seen as rewarding merit and performance (Chatterjee 2011).
At another level, quite like its role in the earlier phase, the ‘new’ Indian middle class provides the necessary
legitimacy to policies of economic liberalization and privatization initiated by the state during the 1990s (Kohli
2008). As a class, its members had already accumulated the required skill and asset capability to enter the market
and reap its benefits. The middle class thus made this transition from ‘development’ to ‘globalization’ rather
‘smoothly’ (Deshpande 2003: 150).

Inequalities and Exclusions

Interestingly, the trajectory of the Indian middle class’s growth and its politics appears to be quite different from its
counterparts in the Western world. Middle classes grew in Western countries during the 20th century to an extent
that many of them effectively became middle-class societies with more than 90 per cent of the population
identifying themselves as middle classes. This did not happen because of the growing reach of markets and
consumer culture. On the contrary, this was largely a result of an active welfare state and gradual expansion of
entitlements and extension of citizenship rights in the form of universal provision of health care, quality education
and housing, and so on. Gosta Esping-Andersen describes this as a process of ‘de-commodification’, which ‘occurs
when a state’s services are rendered as matter of right, and when a person can maintain livelihood without reliance
on the market’ (Esping-Andersen 1990: 22).
Individuals can transform their labour into commodity—goods, services, or ideas—only when they have assets
of capabilities. Lack of skill and capabilities translates into a precarious and vulnerable existence. De-
commodification requires a pro-active welfare regime and a corresponding institutional structure that can facilitate
building of assets and capabilities of the citizens. This helps them integrate themselves with the market society.
Gupta reminds us that the development of the middle class in the Western context was in fact a ‘de-
commodification’ project. It was a project to bridge the gap between the privileged and the rest of the society. Such
a project was actualized through the expansion of socio-economic welfare measures spearheaded by the state
(Gupta 2009: 83) whereas the contemporary middle class in India is created through the market which produces
exclusionary, rather than inclusionary effects.
The contemporary Indian middle class, which roughly makes for less than a quarter of its population (as per the
most generous estimates), celebrates the market as the ultimate panacea for all the problems encountered by Indian
society, its economy, and politics. Global economic experiences show that greater reliance on markets tends to
shrink, rather than expand middle classes. It also increases disparity and inequalities, often producing
marginalization for millions.
Instead of supporting or demanding welfare measures by the state, dominant sections of the Indian middle class
are often critical of welfare schemes for the poor because they presumably take away the resources required for
investment in capital goods and infrastructure. Lack of the latter is assumed to impact negatively on the prospects of
economic growth. Thus, instead of levelling differences and inequalities, such a socio-political process reinforces
older inequalities and produces newer ones. As Fernandes writes,
… the new middle-class does not just incorporate preexisting forms of inequality, it also generates inequality. The classificatory practices
through which individuals attempt to gain access to membership within the new middle class are about both access and restriction. The
acquisition education, for instance, is the most evident strategy of upward mobility for a wide range of social groups…. New middle-class
strategies simultaneously transform education into a thicker set of class practices that are contingent on a wide range of socio-cultural
distinctions based on language, lifestyle, credentials, residence—distinctions that encode historically produced inequalities such as those of
caste and language. (Fernandes 2011: 76)

She goes on to argue that it is for this reason that the dominant or the ‘hegemonic new middle class still largely
comprises segments of the upper-caste Hindu middle-classes’ (Fernandes 2011: 76). More often than not, it is they
who have a functional grip over the English language and are able to capitalize on new employment opportunities,
particularly in the private sector. The success of the upper echelons of the middle class is admired and sought to be
emulated so much so that it has become, what she calls, a symbol of ‘normative standard for the larger social group’
(Fernandes 2011: 74).
Given that access to quality education is the most critical vehicle for upward mobility and for enhancing
capability, the contemporary middle class forcefully opposes any policy design creating institutional frameworks
and unfolding a level playing field through affirmative action policies. Merit becomes the desired criterion for
acquiring the education valued by the markets. In practice, advocacy for merit is merely a self-preservation strategy
achieved through monopoly over private education, entry into university, and class endogamy (Peace 1984).
The economic reforms of the 1980s and 1990s, globalization, and the rise of the new middle class in India have
also been accompanied by the emergence of a new kind of politics which celebrates civil society organizations over
political parties and trade unions. This shift disempowers the poor and lower castes since decision-making
structures are taken out of political processes where the poor tend to have significant presence (Baviskar 2011)
simply because of their larger numbers. This nature of middle-class activism eliminates institutional spaces
available to the poor for articulating their demands or registering their protests.
Local level resident associations are a good example of such exclusionary politics. In her study of such
organizations in Mumbai, Hélène Zérah (2007) found that through such activism, those living in middle-class
localities came together and mobilized political support for the removal of hawkers. The emerging patterns in new
urban settlements also reflect attempts of the Indian upper-middle class to insulate itself from the realities of urban
life. This includes restructuring spatial patterns in cities, where an increasing number of the middle-class rich move
to gated residential communities. In the context of the thinning of the state discourse and the consequent depletion
of state funding for public amenities, municipalities are increasingly passing the burden of services which are
supposed to be provided by them to resident associations. These associations are able to privately bear the cost of
municipal services due to the collective economic capacity of their members.
As a consequence, some of the basic municipal services are withdrawn not only from gated communities but
also from low income housing areas. Further, the cultural standards of ‘clean’, ‘hygienic’, and ‘peaceful’ living
coaxes the residential association to attempt (mostly successfully) to remove encroachments and petty commercial
establishments from in and around their gated colonies. The drive to clean and beautify cities and build
infrastructure such as wide roads for the use of private vehicles sees urban poverty as a problem and hence the
clamour to forcibly evacuate the ‘illegal’ occupant residing in slums and on the side of the roads. Thus, the gated
colonies of the new middle class, which itself is a symbol of consumption, also become the means for
institutionalizing disparity and for a variety of exclusionary social and political practices in the emerging urban
India (Kundu 2011: 23–5; Kamath and Vijayabaskar 2009; Harriss 2007).
 ‘Consumption’ too has its exclusionary effects, as pointed out by many students of the contemporary Indian
middle class. ‘Existential reality of being a middle-class Indian is an inescapable desire to escape the rest of India,’
argues Krishna Sankaran (2006: 2327). Similarly, Malcom Voyce sees the emerging shopping malls as
exclusionary spaces, virtual monopolies of a certain class of people who consider themselves culturally superior
and are able to afford the cost of consumption, for leisure, of food and expensive goods. They are ‘social
fortresses’, which separate the middleclass consumers from those unwanted elements who are seen as being
ineligible for a high quality life and incapable of participating in the new economics of governance. Forging a new
middle-class identity, the malls help them to render invisible the needs of the working class and the poor (Voyce
2007).

1 Indian social structure is divided into four varnas (it eventually grew into five). The closest English translation of ‘varna’ will be caste. Caste is a
social grouping of the population into mutually exclusive, hereditary, endogamous, and occupation-specific varnas. There are four varnas: Brahmins
(priests), Kshatriyas (warriors), Vaisyas (traders), and the Sudras (menial workers) and the Ati Sudras (the untouchables, doing the lowest category of the
menial jobs). As the population rose and economy became more complex, the varna system evolved into jatis (closest English translation will again be
caste). Although jatis share the same characteristics of varna, there are considerable regional variations in the evolution of jatis. The same jati can be
classified backward in one region but excluded from the list of backwards in another.
2 These mobilizations were not always confined to urban centres or to the middle classes and often involved women from rural areas bringing in their
own concerns to the women’s movements.
 7
Diversities and Margins

The [middle] class is not just one grey amorphous mass. It is instead a spectrum of many colours, an aggregate of many subcultures, each
with its own shape and brilliance; its own traditions and aspirations; its own constraints and ambitions.1

As we have repeatedly argued in this book, middle class is not only an economic category, or simply a matter of
being placed in an income-consumption bracket, but also a social identity. Its emergence and expansion has
profound political implications for the larger political system. The idea and identity of the middle class has a
historical context. Middle classes, as we understand them today, emerged and expanded in modern liberal
democracies. A larger middle class is assumed to be good for democratic politics. It presumably helps in blunting
the possible skirmishes that inequalities inevitably generate in market-based capitalist societies.
The consolidation of democratic regimes in countries of Western Europe during the 20th century accompanied
an expansion of the middle class in those societies. Even though income inequalities persisted, the growing
identification with middle-class identity brought about a sense of common-ness and homogeneity. It was not simply
about increased income levels of the erstwhile poor and those from the working classes. Being and becoming
middle class also changed life-styles and modes of social and political behaviour. As we have discussed earlier, this
expansion of middleclass identity followed a degree of dissolution of the traditional hierarchies of status/rank and
an advent of new notions of citizenship based on ideas of equality, fraternity, and fairness. Differences of ethnicity,
race, or gender persisted. But the expansion of the middle class helped in evolving a democratic public sphere in
which nearly everyone could participate as equal members of the national political community.
The Indian middle-class experience has been different. Socially, culturally, and geographically India is among
the most diverse regions of the world today. Its social diversities are both horizontal as well vertical. Horizontally,
India has diversities of religion, ethnicity, and language. Vertically it has diversities and hierarchies of caste, tribe,
and race. Diverse cultures and communities are not only viewed as being different from each other but they are also
judged or valued as being unequal. Even though the national identity has over the years and decades become
stronger, some of the diversities have also become sharper. Hierarchies of caste and tribe have also persisted.
The middle class has been an important actor in the process of making and representing diversities. As we have
seen in the previous chapters, the emergence of a middle class during the colonial period played an important role
in producing a common national identity. It was through its activities that modern institutions and democratic
culture were taken to different regions of the Subcontinent. It provided leadership to the nationalist movement and
played an active role in the nation building process after Independence. However, members of the middle class have
also played a key role in shaping and sustaining India’s diversities. They have provided leadership to all kinds of
identity movements, of regions, castes, and communities. Some of these identity based political movements had
already emerged during the colonial period but they multiplied over the years and acquired prominence during the
post-1980s in Indian politics. Besides providing leadership to a diversity of social groups and communities,
members of the middle classes within these groups have also actively participated in the framing and articulation of
social and cultural differences among the groups.

Middle Class and the Politics of Diversity

The idea of diversity is invoked in contemporary India in four interrelated ways. First and foremost, middleclass
leaders representing diverse groups invoke the idea of diversity simply to describe the complexities of social,
cultural, and economic realities that constitute contemporary India. They demand from the state system recognition
of the pre-existing social and political pluralities, at the regional as well as national levels. This claim can take
diverse forms, ranging from seeking representation in political and constitutional bodies; advocacy for recognition
of their language: budgetary allocation for promotion of their communitarian art and culture: constructing
memorials for their community icons; lobbying for declaring public holidays on the birth/death anniversary of their
leaders: and so on. Second, they try to deploy the idea of diversity as a normative principle on which these realities
should be valued, endorsed, and accommodated.
The logical conclusion of upholding these two principles is the acceptance and recognition of diversity not
merely as a lip service but as a matter of right. At a broader level, it would also imply challenging the universalism
embedded in the idea of the individual citizen embedded in notions of democracy, equality, and equal opportunity.
Instead, they ask for a state system or a nation embedded in the principle of difference. This ‘right to diversity’ also
challenges the presumed power of the majority, both sociologically as a rule of the ‘dominant group’ or identities,
and normatively, as a notion of ‘good’ or ‘fair’ society. Thus, individual members of the middle class come to
represent politics of diversity framed through a range of social identities—caste, religion, region/language, gender,
or ethnicity.
At the operational and policy level, these identities are articulated in the discourse of representation, social
justice, affirmative actions, and access to equal opportunity—broadly in the language of citizenship. However, the
nature of these claims is often complex and not free of tensions and conflict. For example, even when they demand
equal citizenship in the framework of modern democracy, assertion of difference also has the risk of slipping into
nostalgia for the ‘past tradition’ and ‘going back’, often invoking the ideas of patriarchal and non-democratic modes
of social life.
Some of these regional or identity-based claims and mobilizations have had far-reaching implications for the
Indian political system. One good example of this is the emergence of various regional political parties during the
1970s and later. The logic of these regional parties was that the existing political formations did not reflect the
plurality of social cleavages present in Indian society. In other words, national level political parties were not able
to reflect regional needs and aspirations.
Even though these political processes reflect changing realities on the ground, often in rural and agrarian
settings, middle-class individuals play an active role in articulating the agenda of these political parties. At the same
time, in many cases, the rise of regional political parties was accompanied and galvanized by consolidation of a
caste or caste-like identity. The rise of the Samajwadi Party in Uttar Pradesh, the Lok Jan Shakti Party in Bihar, and
the National Lok Dal in Haryana are good examples of this process. In other cases, such politics could also present
itself as a combination of language, caste, and regional aspirations. The Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) and
the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK) in Tamil Nadu, the Akali Dals in Punjab, and more
recently the Trinamool Congress (TMC) in West Bengal represent this trend. At the political level, these regional
identity based formations ask for devolution of political power and tend to invariably promote a
caste/community/language group-specific politics in their region.
However, the role of middle-class members in these political parties is quite complex. This complexity is
reflected in their support for politics of diversity while selectively also abiding with the politics of the dominant
middle class. In other words, there is vociferous support for politics of diversity based on the articulation of a
regional discourse, autonomy and devolution of political power, respect and national status to their language,
political representation through regional or caste identity, respect and promotion of regional culture/aspirations; all
of which should not get subsumed under the attempt of homogenization, almost inevitably promoted by all nation-
states.
Even when they articulate a regional agenda, in most cases members of the middle class do not reject the idea
of a democratic nation-state. They complain about the organizational structure of the nation-state and its dominant
political culture that invariably impacts regional and local identity, marginalizing them, denying them what they
perceive as their legitimate claim over national resources and not granting them their rightful place in the socio-
political and economic fabric of the nation. However, they do not wish to operate outside the national political
system. Thus, regionalist and communitarian discourses are often shaped by aspirations and ambitions of the
regional middle class who aim to carve out a distinct niche of their own in national life.
Such a politics of difference is often fraught with internal tensions. As leaders and representatives of diverse
social groups and cultural regions, they contest the power of the dominant national elite. However, in their own
social context, they tend to uphold their superior class positions. As middle-class individuals, they also partake in
the consumption culture with as much excitement and enthusiasm as anyone else. While they ask for
accommodation in the emergent national power structure, they do not seem to be opposed to their positions of
privilege in their own local context.

Margins and the Middle Class

Besides the diversities and differences of regional identities, linguistic cultures, and other horizontal communitarian
identities, the pre-existing marginalities of caste and tribe are also sources of diversity within the middle classes of
India. The social order of caste in India has been based on notions of hierarchy, exclusion, and
discrimination/denial (Jodhka 2012). Individual mobility was simply not possible or allowed in the traditional
system. This was particularly difficult for those located lower down in the caste hierarchy, the untouchables or the
Dalits.
After independence from colonial rule, the democratic Indian state institutionalized a system of affirmative
action. Following the initiatives taken up by the colonial state during the first half of the 20th century, the Indian
state identified the most deprived communities and listed them as Scheduled Castes (SCs). Similarly, the social
groups living in relative isolation were classified as Scheduled Tribes (STs). The state introduced a special quota
for the two categories under which seats, approximating to their proportions in the total population, were reserved
for them in educational institutions, government jobs, and legislative bodies up to the highest level—the Indian
Parliament. The Indian government also introduced several other legislative and developmental measures targeted
specifically for the benefit of such groups and communities.
In addition to these provisions, constitutionally applicable at the national level, some states of the Indian union
have had their own quota regimes, which reserve jobs and seats in educational institutions at the state level for the
other ‘backward’ castes and communities, identified locally. Following recommendations of various commissions
set up by the Government of India to identify ‘classes’ that remain ‘backward’, other than those listed as SCs, the
union government also decided to reserve jobs and seats in state-funded educational institutions for the Other
Backward Classes (OBCs).
Though confined to a small proportion of the total population of the scheduled communities, the quotas did
begin a process of individual social mobility among historically deprived social groups and categories, the SCs and
STs. Over the years a new middle-class elite has emerged from amongst these communities. Even when the social
groups they come from largely remain poor and marginalized, individuals from these communities have been able
to move up to senior positions in political institutions, bureaucracy, and academia.
In normal course, an upwardly mobile individual gradually moves out of his/her group of origin to another
group compatible with his/her class location. This, however, has generally not been the experience of mobility
among those from the untouchable castes of the Indian social order. Even when they move to secular employment
and middle-class occupation, their identification with the communities of their origin tends to remain strong. Why
does this happen?
First and foremost, economic mobility does not always lead to a disappearance of the prejudice of the dominant
groups. Consequently, social mobility that should accompany the individual’s economic mobility is limited. Even
when they occupy high positions of authority, their colleagues identify them through their communities of origin
and they find it hard to socially integrate themselves in the work place (see Jodhka 2015; Prakash 2015). The
experience of individual mobility in society, where caste identities embedded with notions of hierarchy and
prejudice remain strong, produces a sense of anger and agitation among them. They turn back to their communities
with the realization that without a larger social change which gives dignity to their communities, their individual
achievements are of limited value.
Upwardly mobile SCs also find it difficult to realize their middle-class status because of their immediate family
contexts. Given that such an individual is likely to be the first or second generation person with a middle-class
salary, s/he is unlikely to have other resources, such as an urban house or social networks, that enable the stabilizing
of such a process of mobility. Such mobile Dalits are often among the first members of their kinship to move to an
economically secure position; they are invariably expected to ‘help’ other members of the family. The most obvious
mode of doing this is through sending a portion of their income home to poor parents and other family members
(Naudet 2014: 244). They also help members of their extended kin in their efforts of economic and social mobility
and they often do so with a sense of commitment (Srinivas 2008; Prakash 2015), as a source of overcoming their
distance from the communities of their origin (Jodhka 2015: 169–210). Such a role also implies sharing their
incomes with the larger community and compromising on one’s own aspirations.
Perhaps the most important reason for the primacy of community identity over class identity among the
upwardly mobile Dalits is the moral imperative of ‘paying back’ (Naudet 2008, 2014; Ciotti 2010). Even though
mobility through education, followed by a job, is an individual achievement, the community tends to see educated
members of their caste groups as a ‘collectively shared’ resource (Ciotti 2010). This moral imperative also works
on individuals. Given that an SC individual invariably acquires education and a secure job using quotas, which are
viewed as an outcome of the larger community’s struggle for their rights, s/he finds it hard to be indifferent to the
communitarian context of his/her mobility.
Speaking to upwardly mobile Dalits, Jules Naudet repeatedly found his respondents insisting on ‘the need to
maintain strong bonds with the group of origin’. He writes:
 These people’s successes are cases of an individual’s success. It is a person, at most, a family, who benefits from this mobility. And yet, these
individuals choose to speak of their mobility as if it were the community as a whole that was elevated by their success. Even though some of
them acknowledge the individual character of their success, they still place their individual story within the wider frame of their groups.
(Naudet 2014: 245)

However, notwithstanding this sense of identification with the social group of their origin and the politics of
caste discrimination, their mobility out of the community also inhibits their return. While they realize the need for
change through political mobilization and activism, they are no longer similar to those they have left behind and
feel a sense of alienation from their communities (Guru 2001). They tend to form their own enclaves where they
feel comfortable by expanding the boundaries of their caste communities through categories such as the Dalits. This
also gives them the sense of a new identity, a sense of being modern and dignified. Thus, they form a new
community with individuals from similar social backgrounds and political orientations. Their social interactions are
also likely to be limited to fellow Dalits (Ram 1988). Guru puts this very sharply in the following words:
The dalit middle class members are psychologically excluded from the larger middle class imagination…. Upper caste middle class show
unprecedented intolerance towards dalit officers…. [They] take extraordinary care to see that dalits are not able to buy houses in their
locality…. The dalits find themselves shunted out to the outskirts of the cities…. (Guru 2001: 145–6)

This middle class on the margins also tends to think differently. Their perception of the state and economy is
often shaped by the prism of caste and the associated hierarchies and discrimination experienced by members of
their community, if not by themselves. Hence, their image and understanding of India’s modernity is generally at
variance with that of the dominant section of the middle class. A good example of this is their attitude towards
economic liberalization. Even though they carry a sense of pride for being middle class because they perceive their
status as being an acquired virtue of merit rather than an ascribed attribute of caste origin (Guru 2001: 144), they do
not undermine the critical role of the state policy of quotas in their own personal mobility. They still look up to the
state which alone, for many of them, could be above caste-ridden institutions of the civil society and market
economy. Recognition of the deficits of social and cultural capital in their communities also makes them suspect
advocates of free market and meritorious regimes. Even when they mobilize for their increased participation in the
neo-liberal market economy, they seek quotas and state support.
Similarly, the Adivasi middle class invokes the politics of diversity to preserve their rights over natural
resources. They tend to join their communities in opposing large-scale developmental projects in tribal concentrated
pockets. Given that they are mostly concentrated in mineral rich parts of the country; such projects often end up
alienating tribal communities from the resources they always had access to. However, the Adivasi middle class is
often not able to put up a common front in support of their demand due to their vast internal diversity in terms of
language, religion, and spatial presence. Substantial sections of the middle class amongst Adivasis, particularly in
the North Eastern part of India, are also part of various ethnic movements seeking recognition and political
autonomy from the Indian state.
Beyond the diversities of region, religion, language, caste, and tribe, the Indian middle class also has diversities
of orientation and ideology. A large number of individuals from the mainstream middle class actively dissociate
themselves from its normative life style and actively participate in a variety of social movements and work with
civil society organizations in far-flung areas of the country. They articulate a variety of alternative ways of
organizing social, economic, and political relationships. Radical left-wing formations and movements of
marginalized groups against big dams and corporate take-over of common resources have invariably been led by
urban educated members of the middle classes.

1 Quoted in B.M. Bhatia 1994: 87.

 Conclusion

India is known to be a land of tradition, often represented through its village life, caste hierarchy, and religious
communities. While this image persists, the ground has shifted. Even though demographically nearly two-thirds of
the Indian population continues to live in its rural settlements and caste and religious sentiments have not gone
away, yet over the past century and more, a modern middle class has also grown in the country. More importantly
perhaps, the category of ‘middle class’ is increasingly becoming a preferred source of self-identification,
particularly among the rapidly growing numbers of mobile Indians.
As is widely known, the modern middle class in India was an offshoot of the British colonial rule, born during
the Macaulay moment, when they needed a class of clerks who had a working knowledge of the English language
and could be employed in their service for carrying out the administrative tasks of the expanding empire. The
introduction of English education also enabled a section of the erstwhile local elite to educate their children in the
Western system of learning and join the ranks of professionals, lawyers, doctors, and teachers, in the empire. Over
the years, its size and spread increased; so did its aspirations. Members of the middle class actively participated in
the freedom movement and were at the forefront of articulating the idea of India as a modern nation-state.
Among those who initiated the articulation of a middle-class identity for Indians was the first prime minister of
the country, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru. ‘I am, of course, a middle-class person’, he is reported to have claimed
(Baviskar and Ray 2011: 5). Being a middle-class person in the India of the 1950s and 1960s meant many things. It
meant inhabiting ‘a particular orientation towards modernity’, a mindset that was different from that of an industrial
worker, a peasant, or a landlord. It also meant being open-minded and egalitarian; following the rule of law and not
being swayed by private motives or particularistic agenda; being fiscally prudent and living within one’s means;
embracing science and rationality in the public sphere; setting aside the primordial loyalties of caste and kinship;
opening oneself to new affinities and associations based on merit, and to identities forged in the workplace
(Baviskar and Ray 2011: 5–6).
These universalistic claims had political effects. They enabled the middle class to acquire a position of power
and authority, as agents of building a modern nation. The middle class took upon itself the task of defining goals
and priorities for the newly liberated country. While communities, cultivators, workers, industrialists, or armed
forces all constituted the new nation, it was the middle class that was to become the fountainhead of modern India.
It carried on its shoulders the responsibility of being representative of all categories of Indians (Varma 1998;
Deshpande 2003; Fernandes 2011; Baviskar and Ray 2011).
No one gained as much from India’s independence from colonial rule as the Indian middle class. Not only were
a substantial proportion of the leadership that inherited power from the colonial rulers middle-class professionals,
the process of nation building and economic development also put them at the centre stage of the emerging nation-
state. They were at the helm of public and political affairs. Their self-acquired responsibility of setting the agenda
for the country gave the middle class immense power and enabled its manifold expansion.
Development was equated with modernization, liberal democracy, economic growth, and secularism. The
middle class was both the cause and the consequence of these processes. They articulated the need for a selfreliant
India, a political requirement and an imperative of Independence. These initiatives also helped the new state acquire
legitimacy to intervene in social, cultural, and economic spheres with its policies and programmes of developing
India. The state promoted industrialization, a variety of modern institutions, and a mammoth developmental
bureaucracy. These initiatives were supposed to help the new nation in achieving self-reliance, ameliorate poverty,
and enhance the capabilities of its citizens by providing health and education.
However, by the late 1980s, the processes of economic development and democratization began to produce
their own contradictions. While on one hand, demands of the rapidly changing global economic environment and
growing pressure from the private capital within the country made it necessary for India to pursue a policy of
liberalization and loosening of state controls, on the other hand ‘new’ voices for the expansion of democratic rights
began to emerge from the margins of Indian society. These had far-reaching implications for the Indian middle
class.
 The process of economic liberalization initiated by India during the early 1990s completely changed the script
of the Indian middle-class story. Given that it had already consolidated its social and economic position in the
national economy, it found it rather easy to switch over to the promising private sector. The shift in economic
policy and the changed global environment enabled Indian economy to grow at a much faster pace. The middle
class grew along with it. The engine of growth this time was private capital. This growth required educated and
technically skilled personnel, which expanded the ranks of the middle class.
The process of economic growth, some argue, is fundamentally changing the social structure of India, from a
society characterized by ‘a sharp contrast between a small elite and a large impoverished mass, to being one with
substantial intermediate classes’ (Sridharan 2008: 27). Unlike the ‘old’ middle class, this new Indian middle class
was not only located outside the state-system, but it also no longer carried the burden of nation building. The nation
had already been built and the middle class saw itself as its evidence. Its mandate this time was to live for itself,
through endless consumption. Consumption, for the neo-liberal middle class, was not simply an act of self-
indulgence but also a source of identity.
The neo-liberal middle class advocates a different set of values that go well with the new economic regime of
efficiency, merit, and competition. Policies of affirmative action begin to be seen as breeding inefficiency,
nepotism, and mediocrity. The state, they argue, should focus its energy on building infrastructure, which would
further galvanize the markets and help in economic growth. The Indian state had already done the job of laying its
foundations and it need no longer be directly active beyond its basic function of providing good governance,
financial management, and security.
As popularly understood, the market-centric economic system requires creation of an environment where
consumption exceeds production, which in turn ensures realization of profits. Further, for its growth, such an
economic system needs an efficient and skilled workforce. The expansion of the middle class is the answer to both.
An expanding middle class also becomes a natural source of producing legitimacy for a market-centric economy. It
becomes a norm for the larger society, a space where everyone (except the rich!) wants to be, it also becomes a
medium of defining what is good for society. Its access to media makes it easier for it to accomplish this task.
However, expansion also brings diversity. While the values that the middle class advocates acquire a kind of
hegemony, they do not go uncontested from those who stand at its margins. The Indian middle class remains a story
full of complexities without a simple or linear trajectory: socially, culturally, and politically. The sociology of the
Indian middle class is even more complex than its history. As we have discussed in different chapters, though
pioneers of the Indian middle-class story spoke in a universalistic language, they also promoted particularistic
identities, primarily to preserve their privileges of caste, class, and gender. By implication, such moves kept them
divided on regional, religious, and linguistic lines.
The middle-class story is also not merely a linear trajectory of upper caste or patriarchal domination. As an
ideological process, the evolving state system in India could be different from the everyday practices of its agents.
This is reflected in the constitutional commitments of the new regime, which require it to initiate policies and
programmes towards ensuring the creation of enablers for equal opportunity. Over the years, the programmes of
social engineering from above and growing democratic assertion from below have successfully carved out spaces
for marginalized social groups within the larger domain of the nation and the middle class. Thanks to the policies of
affirmative action, a small but important section of the middle class evolved from within the marginalized social
groups over a period of time.
These processes also make the political arena a contested space. The newly emergent elite from the margins
tend to pursue a politics of social justice. They demand for expansion of affirmative action programmes, a more
active and interventionist state that would create an enabling environment for them to enter the skewed fields of the
market economy and help in upward economic mobility of the members of their communities. They also find
support for their position from sections of mainstream civil society organizations, social movements, and a variety
of individuals.
However, the dominant sections of traditionally privileged groups, the upper castes, actively contest such
formulations.
The normative hegemony of the middle class acquires significance because it begins to shape mobility patterns
and value parameters. A good example of this is what has come to be described as the aspirational middle class.
The idea of the aspirational middle class has also come to shape the political discourse in Indian democracy. The
Election Manifesto of a major national party describes them as those ‘who have risen from the category of poor and
are yet to stabilize in the middle class’, the ‘neo middle class’.1
These ‘upwardly mobile poor’ are invariably young men and women who have acquired modern education
through one of the hundreds of thousands of colleges spread across the country giving degree/diploma courses in
information and technology, marketing, law, finance, business, or tourism. Many of them have moved from rural
areas to urban locations by selling their parental assets and have entered into the field of transport, manage small
businesses, work as sales executives in big consumer retails or as supervisors in showrooms of big corporates, offer
utility maintenance services, and perform the role of delivery agents or clerks with an e-commerce company.
Countless numbers of them are employed in the new business economy of supplying goods and services to middle-
and upper-middle-class homes.
Quite like the consumption-driven middle class, this category of workers has also largely grown during the
post-liberalization period. They have grown along with the expanding urban economy. They aspire for a place in
the Indian growth story and hope to eventually climb up within the private economy. However, their realities
remain precarious. Many of them are first generation young migrants from villages or small towns and relatively
less developed pockets of the country. Significant proportions of them remain employed in the informal sector or in
an informal/insecure mode. They stay in pooled accommodations, often shared between five and six people. They
eat their food at small roadside eateries and buy clothes and products that are imitations of established brands.
Some, who are middle aged, live in cramped apartments having left their families in their native hinterland and lead
lives of forced bachelorhood. Those who live with their families do so by living in irregular/unauthorized urban
settlements or in lower income group quarters in the urban peripheries. The rents they pay for their accommodation
far exceeds what they can afford. They travel long distances for work. Their living conditions further deteriorate
with the gradual and steady withdrawal of the state and entry of private players for providing water, electricity,
transport, and other basic amenities. The most prized possession of the better-off in this class is invariably a two-
wheeler, a ‘smart’ cell phone, and, occasionally, a laptop. For the young in this category, the internet, films, and
occasional strolls in the malls are the only sources of leisure.
Pinned down between the self-image and aspiration of being middle class on one hand and the social and
economic realities that accompany low-income groups in urban centres on the other, they almost always live in a
state of anxiety, struggling between the needs of supporting their families, paying educational fees of second- or
third-grade private English medium schools of their children, and maintaining the appearance of not being poor.
This creates a self-constructed space where they sway between conformity and bitterness with regards to the larger
social and economic systems, the political arrangements, and choices they make for themselves and their families.
Quite like their personal lives, their politics is also unpredictable. While this neomiddle class is indeed an unstable
social, economic, and political formation, its presence is functional for the hegemonic project of the Indian middle
class, particularly in the context of widespread inequalities and its size being relatively small in proportional terms.
However, its presence could also be a challenge, potentially destabilizing. Thus the hegemonic project of
middle class remains fragile, and is often contested, both from within and without. As we have repeatedly argued,
even when it insists on the need for universalistic norms that value individual merit, it has never shed its own
ascriptive identities. These identities often turn into cleavages and conflicts in times of scarcities and inter-
individual competition.
Sections within the middle class also become a source of conflict. For example, the upper segments of the
middle class, who also tend to be from traditionally privileged or upper caste backgrounds, oppose state-initiated
redistributive measures, subsidies, and expenditure on basic well-being. They perceive them as wastage of
resources. This is also because of their personal trajectories. They no longer depend on state services as many of
them have simply withdrawn into private residential enclaves, away from the hustle, bustle, and dirt of city life.
They seem to prefer the provision of the hitherto public goods like water, sanitation, transport or schooling of their
children from private providers. In contrast, withdrawal of the state from such service provisions severely hurts the
lower sections of the middle class and the aspirational neo-middle class who expect security and subsidy from the
state and view privatization of public services negatively.
Different sections of the middle class also have divergent perspectives on the question of representation. While
the upper segment of the middle class prefers technocratic and professional solutions to the questions of
governance, those on the margins seek proportional representation. Along with those below them, the lower
segments of the middle classes often articulate their concerns through the language of rights and view market-based
solutions with suspicion. Thus, notwithstanding its hegemonic claims, the Indian middle class remains a contested
space.
The politics of India in the coming decades is going to be increasingly shaped by these contestations. The
future of India will lie in the ability of the political regimes to channelize these contestations into institutionalized
democratic processes such that political articulations/contestations and representations translate into growth and
equitable (re)distribution.
 1 Election manifesto of the Bharatiya Janata Party for the 2014 General Elections, available at
http://www.bjp.org/images/pdf_2014/full_manifesto_english_07.04.2014.pdf (accessed on 7 March 2015).
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 Index

aam aadmi, 22–3, ix, xiv

acquisition classes, 12. See also classes; middle classes
Adivasi middle class, 184–5. See also classes; middle classes
affluent worker, 21
agrarian settlements, 3–4
Agriculture Refinance Corporation, 81
Arya Samaj, 39
aspirational middle class, 195. See also classes; middle classes

babus, during colonial period, 26, 28

baire (outside), 51
Banerjee, Abhijit, 135
Bharat Petroleum, 75
Birla, G. D., 67
Bombay Intelligentsia, 37
Bombay Plan, 67–9
Bourdieu, Pierre, 14
Brahmo Samaj, 39
British White-Christian culture, 38

CAGR. See Compound annual growth rate (CAGR)

Chatterjee, Partha, 45–6, 50, 93
Chaudhuri, Maitrayee, 49, 98, 154
classes
acquisition, 12
babus, 26, 28
ideological, 10, 14
industrial capitalism and, 8–14
Marx’s idea of, 8–11
middle class (see middle classes)
negatively privileged, 12
Other Backward Classes, 106–7
ownership, 12
positively privileged, 12
social dynamics of, 14–15
social origins during colonial period, 36–7
status hierarchies during colonial period, 36–7
versus status-group, 13
Weber’s idea of, 11–14
working (proletariat), 10
Cole, G. D. H., 20
colonial middle class, 24–30, 88–9
administrative structure and, 33–4
babus, 26, 28
classicization of tradition, 45
contradictory political character, 54–5
cultural authority, 43–4
economic changes and expansion of, 34–6
education system and, 27
English-educated Bengali middle class, 36–7
idea of Hindu nation, 45–6
intention of British rulers, 27–8
leadership and hegemonic aspirations, 54–7
in northern India, 44–5
political aspirations of, 42–8
politics of mobilization and representation, 46–8
pre-existing structures and, 29–30
sectarian identities, 29
and social change, 30–4
as social reformers, 37–42
socio-cultural and political agenda of, 44
See also classes; contemporary middle class; Indian middle class; middle classes; new middle class
communitarian boundaries, 43
compound annual growth rate (CAGR), 128
consumption, 144–52, 145
advertisement, 150–2
commodity, 147
critical consumption practices, 149–50
exclusionary effects, 168
identity seeking, 151–2
in Madurai, 149
new middle classes, 146–7
reproduction of middle-class identity, 145–6
role of media, 144–5
thinking beyond, 157–8
Weber’s concept, 13
consumption-centric culture. See consumption
contemporary middle class, 4, 163–4, x–xi
consuming lifestyle of, 150
gender equality and, 152–6
politics of, 158–62
See also colonial middle class; contemporary middle class; classes; middle classes; new middle classes
Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), 76
critical consumption practices, 149–50
CSIR. See Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR)
cultural entrepreneurship, 44

Dalal, Ardeshir, Sir, 67

Dalit middle class, 142. See also classes; middle classes
Dayanand, S., 39
Dayanand, Swami, 39
De-commodification, 162–3
De-industrialization, 31
Deshpande, Satish, 160
Development planning
in agriculture sector and rural India, 80–2
development bureaucracy, 72–3
establishment of public sector organizations, 73–5
establishment of research and educational institutes, 75–7
and expansion of middle class, 71–82
expansion of railways, 78–9
growth of private sector, 77–8
idea of equal citizenship, 87–8
Indian banking system, 79–80
Land Reform legislations, 85, 94
Nehruvian model for, 105–10
Nehruvian phase, 72, 109–10
role of Nehruvian middle class, 91–3
dharna (sit-in protest), vii–viii
Dickey, Sara, 149
diversity, 170–86
middle class and, 171–7
politics of, 172–7
principles of, 172–3
rise of regional political parties, 174–5
Duflo, Esther, 135

economic change/growth
Bombay Plan, 67–9
and Indian middle class, 5–7
Nehru–Mahalanobis Model of, 69–70
urban-centric nature of, 5–6
economic liberalization, 147
and gender equality, 156
legitimacy to policies of, 161–2
economic reforms neo-liberal, 5
Economic Survey, 128
educated middle class, 34. See also classes; middle classes
employment
by banks, 80
by Indian Railways, 79
organized, 76
private sector, 125–31
public and organized private, 125
share of major sectors in, 129
Esping-Andersen, Gosta, 162
Europe
 class-based divisions in, 15–19
discourse of middle class, 21–2
emergence of new middle class, 20–1
exclusion, 162–8
effects on consumption, 168
elimination of institutional space for poor, 166
forceful evacuation of illegal occupant, 167–8
gated residential communities, 167–8
local level resident associations, 166–8

Fernandes, Leela, 55, 145

Fractured modernity, 42
Frankel, Francine, 100
Fuller, C. J., 147

Gandhi, Indira, 79
Ganguly-Scrase, Ruchika, 156
gender equality, 152–6
ghare (at home), 51
globalization, 25
Gooptu, Nandini, 46
Green Revolution technology, 80–1
gross domestic product (GDP), 23
Gupta, Dipankar, 95

Hazare, Anna, vii, viii. See also Lokpal

hegemonic aspirations, 54–7
Heller, Patrick, 55
Hindustan Petroleum Corporations, 75

ideological classes, 10, 14. See also classes; middle classes

Imperial Britain, 54
Indian Administrative Services (IAS), 73
Indian banking system, 79–80
Indian Council for Agriculture Research, 76
Indian economy
changing structure of, 113
compound annual growth rate, 128
economic changes, 34–6
economic development, 89
emerging, 74
expansion of, 82
globalization of, 147–8
growth rate, 5
macro context of, 111–13
‘neo-liberal’ economic reforms, 5
plan-wise growth rates, 112
urban, 5–6
Indian Institute of Management (IIM), 76
Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), 76
Indian Labour and Employment Report, The, 126
Indian middle class
aam aadmi, 22–3
age of Nehruvian developmentalism, 89–94
category of self-identification, 141–2
celebratory representation of, 28
colonial (see colonial middle class)
complex social phenomenon of, 143
consumer culture, 144–52
contemporary dynamics of, x–xi
critical consumption practices, 149–50
critical to welfare schemes, 164–6
Dalit, 142
definitions and estimations of size, 116–21
development planning, 71–82
dispositions and self-interest of, 94–103
dominant tendency in, x
dynamics of, xviii–xix
economic growth, 5–7
economic locations of, 112–25
English-speaking, 59
evolution during colonial period, 26–30
expansion of, 5–7, 71–82
fragmentation of, 102–3
hegemonic, 158–9, 165
imaginations of modern India, 62–71
income-centric discourse, 143
involvement in community-based associations, 100–3
Muslim, 142
Nehruvian, 91–3
neo-liberal rise in urban India, 148–9
new, 146–7, 160–2 (see also new middle classes)
normative hegemony of, 195
old, 159
and politics of diversity, 172–7
rise of, 7–8
self-serving and self-obsessed, xv
size of, 115–31, 141
social identity, 142–3
Western-educated, 28
See also classes; middle classes
Indian Middle Class, The, 32
Indian Oil Corporation, 75
Indian Railways, 78–9
Indian upper-middle class, 166–7. See also Indian middle class
individual efficiency, 67
industrialization, 21, 25, 59
 based on mechanization, 64–5
heavy, 70
influence on socioeconomic fabric, 70–1
model of social transformation, 62–3
Nehruvian development planning, 80–1
versus Gandhian model of village-centric reforms, 68–9
Industrial Policy Resolution (1956), 75
Industrial Policy Statement, 69
inequality, 162–8
access to quality education, 165–6
de-commodification, 162–3
employment opportunities, 165
opposition of welfare schemes for poor, 164–5
reliance on markets, 163–4

Jha, Prem Shankar, 96

John, Mary, 99
Joshi, Sanjay, 42, 43–4

Kapur, Devesh, 158

Khilnani, Sunil, 63

Lalbhai, Kasturbhai, 67
land ownership pattern, 3–4
Land Reform legislations, 85
Lefebvre, Bertrand, 150
Lockwood, D., 20
Lokpal, vii. See also Hazare, Anna

Macaulay, T. B., 26–7. See also Minutes

Mani, L., 40
margins, and middle classes, 177–86
Adivasi middle class, 184–5
economic mobility, 180–3
hierarchies and discrimination, 183–4
provisions for deprived communities, 178
reserve jobs, 178–9
See also classes; middle classes
market-based capitalist economy
emerging, 6
local history of spread and development of, 24–5
market society, rise of, 16–17
Marx, Karl, 8–10, 12, 13, 15, 62
Mathur, Nita, 146, 148
Matthai, John, 67
Mazzarella, William, 91
middle-class elite
British collaborated with, 43
class interests of, 46–8
 English language mode communication, 32
nationalist, 87
from SCs and STs, 179
See also classes; Indian middle class; middle classes
middle classes
classical conceptions of, 8–14
in contemporary times, 4
discourse of, 8–14
educated, 14
emergence of, 1, 4
in Europe, 15–23
imagination and, 4
industrial capitalism and, 8–14
in Japan, 7
margins and, 177–86
new, 10, 20
old, 9, 10, 34
self-obsessed, xv
self-serving, xv
See also classes; Indian middle class; middle-class women
middle-class women
individual autonomy of, 154–5
mobilizations by, 153
new spaces for, 155–6
See also classes; middle classes
middle-income group, social composition of, 131–7
monthly per capita consumption expenditure, 131–2
OBC communities, 133–4
size of, 134–7
STs and SCs, 132–4
middle peasants, of agrarian societies, 4
Minutes, 26. See also Macaulay, T. B.
Mishra, B. B., 32
modernity
adaptation of Western, 39
fractured, 42
and traditional self, 48–54
monthly per capita consumption expenditure (MPCE), 131–2
MPCE. See monthly per capita consumption expenditure (MPCE)
Muslim middle class, 142. See also classes; middle classes

Narasimhan, Haripriya, 147

National Coal Development Corporation (NCDC), 74
national efficiency, 67
nationalist political elite, 60–1
National Planning Committee, 98
National Sample Survey Office (NSSO), 131
National Thermal Power Corporation (NTPC), 81
Naudet, Jules, 182
NCDC. See National Coal Development Corporation (NCDC)
Nehru, Jawaharlal, 58–9, 63, 89, 188
Nehru–Mahalanobis Model, of economic change, 69–70
Nehruvian developmentalism, 89–94
Nehruvian middle class, 91–3. See also classes; middle classes
neo-liberal reforms
and consuming middle class, 144–52
economic growth rates, 5, 115–16
economic philosophy, 109–10
Nehruvian paradigm of development planning, 107–8
new middle classes, 10
consumption, 146–7
emerging, 114–15
expansion of industrial capitalism and, 20
legitimacy to policies of economic liberalization, 161–2
upper-caste Hindu, 165
versus old middle classes, 20–1, 146
See also classes; Indian middle class; middle classes; contemporary middle class
NSSO. See National Sample Survey Office (NSSO)
NTPC. See National Thermal Power Corporation (NTPC)

Oil and Natural Gas Commission (ONGC), 75

old middle classes, 9, 10, 159
ONGC. See Oil and Natural Gas Commission (ONGC)
ownership classes, 12

Pandian, M. S. S., 53
Planned Economy for India, 64
Polanyi, Karl, 15–16
poor class
in India, 2
marginalized by middle class, xv
See also classes; middle classes
private sector employment, 125–31
organized, 76, 125
public sector employment, 125
organized, 76

Radhakrishnan, Smitha, 155

Ram, Sri, Sir, 67
REC. See Rural Electrification Corporation (REC)
Regional Rural Banks, 80
Roy, Anupama, 52
Roy, Ram Mohan, 39
Rural Electrification Corporation (REC), 81

Sankaran, Krishna, 168

Sarkar, Sumit, 36
self-obsessed middle class, xv. See also classes; Indian middle class; middle classes
self-serving middle class, xv. See also classes; Indian middle class; middle classes
Shroff, A. D., 67
Sir Dorabji Tata Trust, 76
social change
colonial rule and, 30–4
de-industrialization of urban economy, 31
in Indian society, 28
social composition, of middle-income group, 131–7
monthly per capita consumption expenditure, 131–2
OBC communities, 133–4
rural MPCE Class, 138
size of, 134–7
STs and SCs, 132–4
urban MPCE Class, 139
social life, in India, 3–4
social reformers
adaptation of Western modernity, 39
caste system in Hindu tradition, 52–4
colonial middle class as, 37–42
concern for family and society, 49–50
concern for women, 49–52
influence of Western culture, 38
as mediators, 42
modernity and traditional self, 48–54
modern values of enlightenment, 48–50
presented single Hindu community, 41–2
role in banning practice of Sati, 40–1
social reforms movements, during colonial period, 38–42
among Hindus, 39–42
Christianity and, 38
creation of cultural boundaries, 40
middle-class leaders in, 38–9
practice of Sati and, 40–1
during 19th and early 20th centuries, 38–9
status groups, 13
status hierarchies, during colonial period, 36–7
swadeshi movement, 35
swaraj, 68

Tata, J. R. D., 67
Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, 76
Tata Iron and Steel Company, 64

UNDP. See United Nations Development Programme (UNDP)

United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), 2
University Grant Commission (UGC), 77
Upadhya, Carol, 150
upwardly mobile poor, 195
urbanization, 4, 21, 157

Varma, Pavan, 95
varna, 39. See also classes
Visvesvaraya, M., 64, 66
Voyce, Malcom, 168

Weber, Max, 11–14, 15

Western feminism, 99
white-collared skilled workers, 35
working classes, 10

zamindars, 36
Zérah, Hélène, 166