[ESSAYS, ARTICLES, BOOK EXCERPTS ] Indian Middle Class Subjectivity post 1947

Select Pages / Book Review by Frank F. Conlon of Henrike Donner (Ed.). Being Middle Class in India: A Way of Life. New York: Routledge, 2011 in Journal of International and Global Studies Volume 5, Number 2

অগ্রন্থিত রচনা : ঊনবিংশ শতাব্দীর শিক্ষিত মধ্যবিত্তের মন, আবদুর রাজ্জাক (The Mind of the Educated Middle Class in 19th Century, Abdur Razzaq) http://bit.ly/2Jz6XnU

https://scroll.in/article/740011/everyone-in-india-thinks-they-are-middle-class-and-almost-no-one-actually-is

Surinder S. Jodhka, Aseem Prakash, “The Indian Middle Class: Emerging Cultures of Politics and Economics”, KAS International Reports 12|2011

Sonalde Desai, Middle Class in India , in Kaushik Basu (Ed.) Oxford Companion to Indian Economy, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005)

Gyanendra Pandey, “Can There Be a Subaltern Middle Class? Notes on African American and Dalit History”, Public Culture, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009)

Arvind Rajagopal, “The Emergency as Prehistory of the New Indian Middle Class”, Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 45, No. 5 (September 2011), pp. 1003-1049

This set of readings were brought forth by a nebulous hypothesis about the emergent Indian middle-class post-1947. Since this chapter is about state-produced propaganda material about ‘secularism’ / ‘communal harmony’, I am increasingly coming to believe that the middle-class was the intended audience and moral purveyors of that ideology (Erving Goffman’s ‘Fresh Talk’ according to Rajagopal 1031/30, relaying state ideology without taking any personal responsibility) Trying to read it from my parents’ generation ‘s (the midnight’s children) approach towards ‘secularism’ / ‘communal harmony’, it seems like an elaborate repression with a convenient ideology (just like partition trauma), a tightening of breath, a blinkering of eyes for daily swallowings of bitter pills about survival in a newborn nation in political, economic and social shambles which finally rears its head with implicit or explicit support of the rising Hindu nationalism in the eighties. This ties in with Zachariah’s mention of endless sacrifices asked by the Nehruvian state from its citizen (symbolic from the upper and middle classes and real from the lower classes) to rebuild the nation. “Government policies since independence had been structurally biased towards the more affluent classes, proportionately favouring college over primary education, public sector over private sector employees, and drawing revenue disproportionately from indirect taxes borne by the poor. ” (p. 1018 / 17, Rajagopal) . Whether or not the Indian state’s austerity measures to be closely looked at remains to be decided. (see p. 1019/18, Rajagopal) But after the readings, I realised that more readings are required to turn the nebula into concrete.

 

Middle-class culture beyond parsimony (keeping the plastic car seat cover on)

The middle-class by definition is an economic category. So a lot of research generated around it in India is unsurprisingly market research and the media rhetoric around it reproduces its purported market potential. (For example, see ‘THE GREAT INDIAN MIDDLE CLASS : Results from the NCAER, Market Information Survey of Households, In association with Business Standard, 2001-2002’ with Indian middle-class categories like ‘The ‘near rich’’, ‘The strivers’, ‘The seekers’, ‘The aspirers’)

The reason why everybody who is not destitute or eminently rich enough to claim the label (Scroll, 3) claims it because of the cultural and moral belongings this label bears. The middle-class has always had state approval as it is often actively engendered by the state: “The middle class in India grew at the intersection of colonialism,

democratic state and (capitalist) economic development.” (p. 44/3, Jodhka, Prakash ) with three ‘moments’ (1911- , 1947-70, 1980s). The second being the most relevant to my study: (pp. 45/4, 46/5, Jodhka, Prakash) “The second moment of the middle class began with the coming of independence from the colonial rule in 1947. Given that the democratic political leadership consisted mostly of members of the middle-class, and that the state began to play an active economic role in ushering-in socioeconomic transformation, the middle-class once again became an important category that lay between the state and society. The democratic Indian state not only retained the older bureaucracy, but also expanded it by many-folds with a steady growth of the developmental state. During a period of fifteen years, from 1956 to 1970, the public sector (central, state, local and quasi government bodies) added 5.1 million workers. In the next decade, the growth was even more impressive. Within the framework of mixed economy, the private sector also played a small but crucial role in the economy. In the organised private sector, 1.7 million workers were added between 1960 and 1970. Compared to the public sector, the growth in employment during the next decade was sluggish, and only half a million workers were added. Thus, the nature of the middle class during the decades following independence was typically that of a salaried and professional class, without any direct creative involvement

in trade, commerce and industry, “short on money but long on institutional perks”. It derived its power primarily from the relative autonomy that the state enjoyed during this period. Through its control over the bureaucratic system, the middle-class often hijacked the state apparatus and policies for its own benefits. The higher bureaucracy also derived its power from the model of economic development India adopted after independence, where, following the soviet model of socialist economics, the Indian state was directly involved, albeit along with the private sector, in different sectors of the economy.”

But here we are more concerned about the cultural vicissitudes “the production of middleclassness is a cultural project—and not just a material one”’ (Conlon, p. 145 / 2) …“even where [the cultural] practices [of the middle classes] differ, they are producing shared cultural imaginaries that make middle-class lives in South Asia and, indeed, beyond comparable and the space of a globalized Indian middle-class culture coherent” (Conlon, p. 146 / 3)

A more generic socio-cultural overview of the ‘default’ / ‘unmarked’ category of middle-class is provided by Pandey (pp. 321/1, 323/3, 324/4, 325/5, 328/8): “once middling strata in these societies come to be recognized as a distinct entity, with the historically assigned task of carrying their people into modernity and a regime of human rights and equal opportunity... The middle class or classes have been something of a privileged category in modern society, precisely because the people so described remain unmarked, supposedly nonpolitical, and in significant ways even invisible — “a class paradoxically bound together by its ‘common embrace of an ideology of social atomism’ and prone to ‘express its awareness of its common attitudes and beliefs as a denial of the significance of class.’ ”Consciously or unconsciously, the middle classes are often regarded as the quintessence of “modern,” “respectable” living, with the absence of an explicit (or “vulgar”) collective politics being taken as one sign of respectability. These are individuals and families who supposedly pursue their private interests quietly in well-designated public and private spaces, while the task of organizing and ordering the society is taken over and managed by “experts,” themselves ordinary middle-class individuals in another capacity. This privileging of the middle-class idea flows at least in part from its claimed universality. At times, as in England in the nineteenth century or India in the first half of the twentieth, the term middle-class referred pejoratively to upstart bourgeois, the uncultured and frequently migrant nouveaux riches, who attempted to mimic upper-class practices and manners. In the longer run, however, middle-classness came to be seen as the wave of the future and the middle classes as the makers of their own (as well as of the wider, modern society’s) destiny — a destiny made through an individual’s, as well as a people’s, own unaided efforts. To be middle-class could even be described as the common aspiration of all “modern” groups and individuals. The ideal society would be a society in which no one had the benefit of aristocratic wealth or the afflictions of inherited poverty. The emergence and strength of the middle classes appeared to be the measure of human equality, of the possibility of self-fashioning, of individual achievement and capability — the very signs of the modern. It is merit, not inherited wealth or privilege, or sectional loyalty or networks, that counts in the making of the middle-class world, we are told. It is improvement, and self-improvement, through education and moral reform, individual effort, and sheer determination that brings advancement for society, family, and individual…. Anyone can be middle-class, and in a sense, everyone should be. Those who do not make it are simply not determined or talented enough. The urge to “make it” and the promise of its possibility are the transparent, evident signs of the modern and the good society. At the same time, middle-classness — like the modern — has always been defined by a series of exclusions: in other words, by what it is not. Central among these, although not always recognized as clearly as they should be, have been exclusions based on ideas of race, gender, and religion. In eighteenth- and nineteenth century England, the emerging middle classes marked themselves as distinct from the nobility by the fact that they earned their wealth and position through hard work. On the one hand, the middle classes were distinguished from manual workers by the professions they entered (occupations in which they did not soil their hands through labor), the houses they lived in, the language they spoke, and their temperate behavior. On the other, and this was as critical, they were distinguished by a notion of malehood in which the man was the breadwinner and presided over a household with a clearly separated private domain inhabited by “nonworking” women and children. Middle-class men claimed political rights and the status of citizens: the exclusion of workers and women was long seen as being entirely natural. It was only in later discourses of citizenship and middle-classness — such as those represented in the women’s movement — that this kind of exclusion came to be challenged… the divided or double consciousness of the colonized. “It is a peculiar sensation,” as W. E. B. DuBois so brilliantly put it in his meditation on the history of American blacks, “this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.” Part of the struggle of the colonial middle classes, like that of African Americans, must be to “merge [this] double self into a better and truer self.””

A more specific, chronologically-matching, middle-class subjectivity case study is in the Donner volume (23, 30, 31, 32) where ‘Douglas Haynes describes middle-class males’ anxiety about their financial responsibilities to their families, emphasizing the males’ anxiety regarding their abilities to provide such unrelated products as life insurance, health tonics, and malted milk powders (to avoid “night starvation”) (Conlon, p. 145/2)

Middle-class as the ventriloquist’s unreliable dummy

Although Rajagopal’s essay talks about the Indian middle-class post-emergency (Jodhka/Prakash’s ‘third moment’) but it brings up relevant contexts which I can use for post-independence Indian middle-class (Jodhka/Prakash’s ‘second moment’). This middle-class, according to him ‘increasingly defines itself through cultural and consumerist forms of identity , and is less identified with state.’ (p. 1003/2, Rajagopal) It seems to be very different from the state-abiding Nehruvian middle-class (‘second moment’): ‘The Nehruvian developmental era was idealistic in its effort to transcend the antagonism of anticolonial politics as well as of domestic class conflict. Such idealism resonated well with the fact of single party domination, and with the state’s need for occupying the commanding heights of planned development. One outcome however was that, when faced with vociferous internal dissent.‘ (p. 1004/3)

But the middle-class is not so seamlessly aligned with the state ideology either, as historically observed in India (pp. 1010/9, 1011/10) : “Relevant historical literature on the Indian middle concerns regarding economic transition and establishing national autonomy through the processization. In other words, the state itself creates new middle class formation, that in turn distances itself or from what the state used to stand for. It examines entailments of a colonial project of state formation, class was engendered by the British to emulate themselves than the native aristocracy. Although the middle to function as a governing intermediary vis-a-vis the on to become nationalist. This literature regarding class formation either as a continuous process with only superficial changes in cultural and political alignment, or as marked by ‘fractured modernity,’ involving a structural fault-line between colonial and native worlds requiring to be negotiated.”

The ‘third moment ‘middle-class’ as a ventriloquist’s dummy of the state unlike their ‘first moment’ counterparts as argued by Rajagopal, has to be checked on for size by me for the ‘second moment’ middle-class: “ invocation of the middle class as a sanctioned actor, and as favoured agent of growth, development and democracy is a feature of the post-Emergency period. ‘Middle class’ became a proxy for reason, ventriloquizing arguments and designs of those at the of government and a force for criticism when government views were ignored or overlooked in the political process. The complementary era of market liberalization, involving new arguments pertaining the economy and bringing together issues of need and utility and manner of their administration, highlighted the relatively autonomous domain of public opinion as an emergent second layer of the state that was, however, not distinguishable as state” (p. 1012/11)

Middle-class as the apolitical, areligious temperate

The suppression of all realities under an economic state ideology (For the ‘Economic Nationalism’ propaganda posters, see below) is what has given rise to Hindu Nationalism, argues Rajagopal (p. 1045/ 44): “The growth and influence of this class illuminates the intersection of a new kind of economic nationalism with a resurgent Hindu cultural nationalism, i.e., the support for market-led economic reforms joined to the view that the perceived failure of Nehruvian developmental policies could only be redressed by declaring Hindu majority rule. ”

In the previous section where we briefly talked about the state-instrumented reproduction of middle-class values (creating a class reliable to state ideology, entirely dependent of policies of job production by the state) going awry, often, in this section I wanted to briefly flag the issues in the religious arena. First we will look at how it went awry in ‘first moment’ colonial middle-class (see Raazaq) for whom it gave rise to Hindu reform (came via the state-provided English education, essential for employment) that eventually ripened into anti-British nationalism. And in the ‘third moment’ where all religious strifes were illegitimized as compared to the labour / factory strifes. Similar investigations need to be carried on for the ‘second moment’ middle-class.

“মিশনারিরা এবং রামমোহন গোষ্ঠী উভয়েই ইংরেজি শিক্ষার পক্ষ সমর্থন করে, তথাপি দুই দলের স্থিরকৃত উদ্দেশ্য ছিল সম্পূর্ণ আলাদা| মিশনারিরা তাদের অনিয়ন্ত্রিত ও অপরিণামদর্শী উৎসাহের বশে বস্তুত যা করতে সমর্থ হয় তা তাদের লক্ষ্যের সম্পূর্ণ বিপরীত| ধর্মসংস্কারের দেশি আন্দোলন ছিল মিশনারিদের ধর্মান্তরকরণ পরিকল্পনার সোজাসুজি পাল্টা জবাব| কিন্তু ভারতীয় সমাজের দূরপ্রসারী বিকাশের দিক থেকে এই পাল্টা জবাবের একটি দুঃখজনক পরিণাম ছিল|ইংরেজির প্রবর্তন, যা হতে পারত একটি পুরোপুরি ধর্মনিরপেক্ষ ব্যাপার, সেটি হলো শিক্ষিত শ্রেণির মধ্যে রিভাইভালিজম বা ধর্মীয় পুনরুজ্জীবনবাদের এক হাতিয়ার …মিশনারিদের প্রথম আক্রমণ জন্ম দেয় ধর্ম সংস্কারবাদীদের| এরাই প্রতিষ্ঠা করেছিল ব্রাহ্মসমাজ ও হিন্দু কলেজ, কিন্তু পরে এদেরই থেকে জন্ম নেয় রিভাইভালিস্টরা (পুনরুজ্জীবনপন্থী)—হিন্দুয়ানির আরও বেশি গোঁড়া সমর্থক|” (pp. 3, 4, Razzaq)

“Conflict between religious communities, in contrast, played no part in the developmentalist agenda of the state, except as events to be suppressed. The entities that clashed in such conflicts were invariably private, and lacked official status of any kind. Unlike industrial conflict, where negotiation was the norm and violence was the exception, the opposite was the case with communal violence. Communal conflict made the news chiefly through reports of violence and the disruption of civil order. Gangs, rowdies, and criminal elements tended to feature as key combatants in such violence, engaging in various non-official behaviours in which no government agency could intervene, save the police or the army. In other words, this was a form of conflict centred in what Partha Chatterjee has called political society, a realm of informal negotiation between the state and the majority of its citizens, whom the state lacks the resources to treat on an equal footing with members of civil society. However, the increase in this form of conflict occurred as part of the governing political process, through what Paul Brass has called ‘an institutionalized riot system’, thus calling Chatterjee’s distinction into question, and posing the need to rethink the formation of politics in this context… Although at first it appeared to be secular, and later Hindu, violence was treated as necessary and productive during and after the Emergency. It contributed, ultimately, to the formation of a middle class that regarded such violence as legitimate, as law-making and law-preserving, enacted on its behalf, and on behalf of the nation as it ought to be. Government policies since independence ” (pp. 1006/5, 1018/17, Rajagopal)

Title Image via http://www.velcromag.com/clear-plastic-auto-seat-covers/

Illustration Images via Seminar, December, 1975. Government of India, Publications Division, Economic Survey, New Delhi, 1975-1976