El silencio, lo visual y lo escrito

Sujit Mahapatra

Suddenly, the middle class is everywhere, whether it is the newspapers, or social commentaries or the television. The Indian midle class is a category often used by both experts and common persons.

The focus on the middle class in popular discourse is partly explained by the fact that its rise is

considered the most striking feature of contemporary India. Gurcharan Das, an icon of corporate India and a prominent newspaper columnist, celebrates the unleashing of this middle class in his book India Unbound. This new, young and dynamic middle class has, according to Das, led to ‘the biggest transformation in its (India’s) history’ and he says that he feels the same excitement his parents had felt at the time of Independence.¹ His arguments, however, suggest that the members of this new middle class are not midnight’s children but children of a new dawn.

It is being said that the Indian economy is doing so well despite the political impediments to growth (read the Left parties) because of the young and huge middle class, which shot into

prominence with the economic reforms ushered in the early 1990s. That is the first time that the size of the middle class was debated, as the MNCs saw their major market in this middle class. Although there is no clearly accepted definition of the middle class, some estimates peg the Indian middle class at 300–350 million,² while conservative estimates put it at about 200 million.³ Even the latter figure makes it the biggest middle class anywhere in the world (China, as our favourite middle-class

benchmark, has about 130 to 170 million that can be considered middle class). This also makes the Indian middle class bigger than the entire population of most European countries and almost as huge as the US population.⁴ The size of the middle class has also changed our attitude towards the question of population, which is no longer seen as a liability but as an asset.

It has almost become a cliché to talk about how the middle class enjoys power disproportionate to its size. It had always been politically powerful and, from the time of Independence (as we shall discuss), has set the agenda for the nation. It has always dominated the institutions of the judiciary, the bureaucracy and the political class itself. The middle class has become even more powerful today with the spectacular growth of two institutions they dominate—mass media and large corporations that now have a major say in an India that is liberalizing. Hence, politicians who ignore the middle class are vulnerable to punishment from these middle-class institutions. For instance, Lalu Yadav earlier fought elections with slogans such as ‘Vikas nahin, samman chahiye’ making it clear that his politics was about empowerment of the lower castes and not development for the middle class. After losing the elections in Bihar, the same Lalu has reincarnated himself, as he tries to appeal to middle-class values and concerns of development and efficiency in his stint with the railways.

The middle class itself has become so huge and so powerful that it is often possible to forget that there is a world that exists outside. In fact, it is possible that if someone wakes up like Rip Van

Winkle after 17 years and goes through the mass media, she may not realize that the middle class does not constitute the entire India. The case of the India Shining campaign before the general elections of 2004 illustrates how it has become increasingly difficult not to confuse the concerns and feelings of the middle class with that of the entire country. Most electoral predictions went horribly wrong about an NDA victory because, as always, the respondents of the surveys predominantly belonged to the middle classes.

The other distinctive feature of the power of the middle class in contemporary India is that like never before, the middle class now sets the tone for the other classes culturally as well. According to Ashish Nandy, middle-class cultural products:

… are threatening to turn both the folk and the classical into second-order presences (the way the immensely successful television serials on the Ramayana and the Mahabharata now influence the frame for interpreting the epics for a large number of Indians) and today even the global mass culture enters the subcontinent filtered through the same middle-class sensitivities epitomized by commercial cinema.5

But before we ask how the middle class became so powerful, what turned it into the engine for India’s growth and what its implications are, let us try and understand the ‘middle class’. This is because the question of what is middle class and who constitutes the middle class elicits varied and often contradictory answers.

THE ‘MIDDLE’ IN THE MIDDLE CLASS

There are two popular ways in which we understand the concept of the ‘middle’. It is taken to designate that member (the median) of a group or series or that part of a whole, which has the same number of members or parts on each side. Or, it can be understood as the intermediate stage or part between two other parts in relation to which it defines itself.

Neither the middle class in India nor in the West is really in the middle if one takes one of the conventional definitions of the middle class as including families whose incomes lie between 75 per cent and 125 per cent of the median.⁶ In America, for instance, the middle class practically includes the entire population. In a country like India, where statistically a third of the population lives below the poverty line, where 46 per cent of the income is accounted for by the top 20 per cent of the

population and the lowest one-fifth accounts for only 8 per cent of incomes, if we define the middle class in terms of the median income, we are talking of those who are actually better off than the majority.

This definition, however, does not explain why we talk of so many middle classes—the upper middle class and the lower middle class—and why we never talk of the lower upper class or the upper lower class.⁷ This is probably because in our popular imagination, there are two definite

classes, the rich and the poor, and all those that come in between constitute the middle class. We have a definition for the poor, however contested, and we have some understanding of the rich, but the middle class has always been a fuzzy category. It is because there is such diversity within this class that we have these further classificatory categories.

In fact, our understanding of the rich and poor necessitates a conceptual space for the middle class.

The word ‘rich’ comes etymologically from the Latin reich, which like the German reich stands for the power of the king. The power of the king comes from the fact that the others are subjects and not the king. Later, when the word ‘rich’ came to be applied to the power that comes with money, for the rich to be rich, the poor required to be poor. At the same time, this means that in a social

stratification, the rich and the poor cannot meet. Hence, we need the intervening middle classes between the rich and the poor.

This middle class, because it avoids the extremities, is seen as the most desirable social location.

Even when one moves beyond the middle class, one is admired for retaining a middle-class lifestyle as was epitomized by Narayan Murthy continuing to drive his old Fiat even after becoming the czar of the Indian IT industry. Moreover, in all our debates and arguments about ending poverty, what we do not state is our desire to uplift the poor into the middle class. The rich, poor and the middle class are of course relative terms—if all the poor are lifted into the middle class, what would the middle class be the middle of?

THE ‘CLASS’ OF THE ‘MIDDLE CLASS’8

In modern Europe, the middle class emerged as an intermediate social class between the nobility and the peasantry. While the nobility owned the countryside, and the peasantry worked the countryside, the middle class, also called the bourgeoisie (literally town-dwellers), then arose around mercantile functions in the city. This bourgeoisie allied with the kings in uprooting the feudalist system and supported the American and French revolutions, and were instrumental in the rapid expansion of commerce.

With the expansion of commerce, trade and the market economy, the bourgeoisie grew in size, influence and power, and gradually became the ruling class in industrialized nation-states in the late 19th century, which means that it owned the bulk of the means of production (land, factories, offices, capital and resources). The middle class, disassociated from the bourgeoisie now, came to describe the professional and business class in the United Kingdom. This middle class is sometimes called the petit or petty bourgeoisie. They are the white-collar workers—those who work for wages (like all workers), but do so in conditions that are comfortable and safe compared to the conditions for blue-collar workers of the ‘working class’.

It must be mentioned, however, that there is little unanimity in the understanding of the ‘class’

denoted by the middle class from the 20th century onwards. In the United States, by the end of the 20th century, most people identified themselves as middle class. In contrast, recent surveys in the United Kingdom indicate that up to two-thirds of Britons identify themselves as working class.⁹ This is probably because in the USA, the term always has a positive connotation whereas in the UK, it often has a pejorative value due to its association with matters of culture and taste. In fact, in the USA, money is the marker of social status, whereas in the UK, markers such as accent, manners, place of education, occupation and a person’s family, circle of friends and acquaintances determine one’s class.

In this contested terrain, to understand what the middle class in India stands for, we have to examine the history of growth of the middle class in India right from its origins. It is from this exploration shall we try to arrive at a definition at the end.

The Emergence of the Indian Middle Class

One way of thinking about the Indian middle class is in terms of the adjectives commonly used to describe it such as ‘urban’ and ‘English speaking’. It follows that an urban, English-speaking person is definitely middle class in India. The strong association of these adjectives with the middle class appears to be a historical legacy.

The middle class in India came into being with the felt need by the colonial masters to create a native elite in its own image for the colonial administration of the country. Thus, the middle class did not emerge with industrialization as in England but with the need for colonial administrators. This middle class did not emerge as the manufacturing class but was, in a way, itself manufactured in the Presidency towns of Calcutta, Bombay and Madras. Lord Macaulay said in his notorious ‘Minute on Indian Education’ in 1835, ‘We must at present do our best to form a class, who may be interpreters between us and the millions we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect’.¹⁰ It is worth noting here that by ‘English’, Macaulay referred to the upper-class English taste because only the upper class had taste in the first place.

The native elite they created were modern Indians like Raja Rammohan Roy, who maintained two houses in Calcutta, one in which he entertained his Western guests and another in which he

entertained his Indian guests. It has been famously said about him that in his Western house, everything was Western except Rammohan and in his Indian house, everything was Indian except Rammohan. In other words, the native elites like Rammohan were neither with the British nor with the Indians.

Macaulay’s Minute also indicated that it was a job in the colonial administration, which also implied English education, that secured the entry into the middle class. Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, the author of Vande Mataram, had written of the middle class in 1873 that ‘like Vishnu, they will have ten incarnations, namely clerk, teacher, Brahmo, accountant, doctor, lawyer, magistrate,

landlord, editor and unemployed’¹¹ It is significant that the question of unemployment only emerges with the failure of education to secure a job contrary to its promise, or in other words, the failure of education to deliver one into the middle class. We, therefore, do not talk of the illiterate unemployed but almost always of the educated unemployed.

The social groups not dependent on education were excluded from the middle class. They included the vast majority of the agricultural poor, and the unskilled, semi-skilled and skilled manual workers, petty clerks and employees such as postmen, constables, soldiers, peons, etc. At the other end, it excluded the rich industrialists and capitalists like the Goenkas, Birlas and Tatas, the very big zamindars and taluqdars, and members of the princely families.

Education not only promised a job, but an entry into the middle class, the bhadralok in colonial Bengal. The bhadralok are the genteel, civilized people; the native equivalent of the gentlemen. This

connection has strong roots and permeates our contemporary consciousness as well. For instance, in the film Raju Ban Gaya Gentleman, Shah Rukh Khan graduates from a slum to a middle-class life through his education. People who have not had the privilege of middle class education, often imagine education as having a transformative effect. Hence, the traffic policeman who stopped me on my bike for not wearing a helmet said, ‘What is the use of all your education if you do not follow the law?’

That is why we often overhear maids bemoan, ‘Look, how that husband and wife fight with each other! What is the point of all that education then?’ The idea of education, they still retain, promises not only a job but also the social graces and etiquette that mark civilized behaviour.

Partha Chatterjee argues that the Indian middle class in the colonial context had a paradoxical position.¹² The middle class was culturally invented through colonial English education, yet

structurally limited as it lacked a basis for economic expansion in the context of colonial economic control. So, it was never a bourgeoisie as in the West. Hence, it was not a fundamental class in Chatterjee’s opinion as it made no attempts at social transformation. In fact, the existing social structure mutated itself to constitute the new middle class. The requirement of English education for entry into the hallowed circle of the middle class meant that the upper-caste Indian with traditional access to education could exploit the opportunities and become the middle class. In the process, it acquired a class identity without losing its caste moorings.

Implications of an Upper Caste Becoming Middle Class

In the existing studies of the Indian middle class, hardly any attention has been given to the historical fact of an upper caste constituting the original middle class. This has been a major gap in

understanding the specificities of the Indian middle class and its distinctive development in the contemporary period. For instance, the middle class that emerged in the Presidency towns in the colonial period was classical in its cultural preferences, both classical Sanskritic because of its Brahminical origins, and upper-class Western because of education. It had distaste for the popular and the folk in both the Indian and the English traditions. That is how indigenous, popular, cultural forms such as the nautanki and jatra acquired pejorative values, which continues today.

More significantly, the upper-caste location of the original Indian middle class led to the retention of their traditional roles in the social hierarchies, where the upper caste engaged itself with education and disengaged itself with any form of physical labour. This has major implications for the

understanding of middle-class existence even now. One defining characteristic of a middle- class lifestyle in India today is the reliance on domestic help, whether in the form of the maid, the cook, or to a lesser extent, the driver (‘chauffeur’ sounds too upper class). Sometimes, it may even include middle-class help such as the home tutor for children. This presence or dependence on domestic help for the menial jobs is a distinctive feature of middle-class India (it is not the case in the West, where middle-class people do most of these jobs themselves). It has, however, been largely ignored in the studies on the middle class, perhaps, because the significance of the upper-caste origins of the middle class in India has been little explored.

The failure to acknowledge this distinctiveness of the Indian middle class has been a major

problem in city planning as well. The cities of India are very different from the cities of the West on which they are modelled. The cities are of course for the civilized people or, in other words, for the middle class. In fact, the word ‘civilization’ comes from the Latin root, civitas, which signifies city.

In modelling our cities on the West, we, however, forget that the urban middle class in the West does not depend on the kind of domestic help the middle class in India does. The urban poor are

indispensable to the urban middle class in India. Yet, the city is never planned with the slum in mind and a slum always has an illegitimate birth. In each city, therefore, there is also what the architect Jai Sen calls ‘the unintended city’, which the city cannot do without, and which, in cities like Bombay and Calcutta, houses the majority of the population.¹³

Political Dominance of the Middle Class

Until the first two decades after Independence, there was the political hegemony of a small, upper-caste, English-educated elite. At the same time, the rule of the middle-class elite at the national level could not be typified with the rule of the upper castes. Even if the ruling elite had their origins in the upper castes, they had become detached from their traditional ritual functions. They had acquired new interests and lifestyles, which came through modern education, non-traditional occupations and a degree of Westernization in their thinking and lifestyle.

The upper castes, reconstituted as middle class, could comfortably own both the upper-caste and

The upper castes, reconstituted as middle class, could comfortably own both the upper-caste and