[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.