Organizer: Henrike Donner, London School of Economcics, UK

Chair: Mattison Mines, University of California, Santa Barbara

Discussant: Akhil Gupta, Stanford University

In the wake of liberalisation policies, the restructuring of the Indian economy has been widely linked to the emergence of new middle-class lifestyles and the transformation of urban cultures (Fernandes 2001). It is increasingly acknowledged that in many parts of India new, often upwardly mobile groups have joined the ranks of those previously seen as constituting the ‘Indian middle classes’. Following new employment and consumption opportunities, changing notions of what it means to be middle-class have transformed the lives of both the ‘old’, largely salaried, middle-class as well as that of those who joined the middle classes more recently.

In the light of such transformations, the panel will address three main questions:

  The panel will address various practices, institutions, beliefs and representations related to the Indian middle classes and ask what role representations of middle-classness play in the lives of contemporary Indian citizens. The panel will provide a critical anthropological perspective on the Indian middle classes by charting earlier forms and recent constellations and address issues such as changing consumer behaviour, educational and employment patterns, notions of group identities and belonging, and the transformation of gender relations as part of global as well as local transformations. 

Through detailed ethnographic accounts of the meaning of middle-classness in different settings, provincial modernities and more metropolitan representations will be discussed as part of a new politics of class in the Indian context.

Geert R. De Neve, University of Sussex, UK

Contemporary representations of the Indian middle classes have by and large emerged from studies that took the urban elites in metropolitan (North) India as their subject of study (Gupta 2000; Varma 1998; Fernandes 2000; 2004). Fernandes, for example, has recently written several thought rovoking papers on the restructuring of the new Mumbai middle classes following economic liberalisation policies, while others have begun to discuss middle class identity in relation to new consumption practices (Mazzarella 2003; van Wessel 2004).

This particular scholarly bias has left us with a meagre record of alternative middle class identities, and of the ways in which different social groups outside the main metropolises see and represent themselves as ‘being middle class’. By focusing on the life histories of South Indian small-town industrialists, the paper aims to explore alternative versions of being middle-class, cosmopolitan and globally connected. The argument builds on the concept of ‘rural cosmopolitanism’ developed by Gidwani and Sivaramakrishnan (2003), which is explored in the life histories of small-town industrialists in Tamilnadu. The cosmopolitanism displayed here differs significantly ways from the ‘new middle class cosmopolitanism’ emphasised in sociological and popular literature, and is based on characteristics such as historical involvement in long-distance trade, pioneering entrepreneurship and active distancing from ‘localist’ neighbours. The paper explores similarities and differences between such provincial cosmopolitanism and that of the metropolis.

Anne Waldrop, University of Oslo, Norway

Kitty-parties have become very popular among Indian middle-class housewives. They may be described as saving clubs where a group of female friends meet at a regular basis, and where they eat, talk and draw the "kitty". Based on research in New Delhi among middle-aged women belonging to the pre-liberalization middle-class, this paper will ask about the connections between kitty-parties and female middle-classness. In New Delhi where most upper caste women of the middle-class that I interacted with experience various forms of restriction to their movement outside the protected sphere of the home and the family, and where the idea of "being homely" is a widespread virtue among the same women, kitty-parties are an interesting phenomenon. The pre-liberalization standards of female middle-classness, which on the one hand, can be regarded to have been about homeliness including socialization of children and keeping up family relations, and on the other hand, about a public duty to live a restrained lifestyle and to help the underprivileged through forms of charity, are virtually opposites of what kitty parties stand for. To the women, participation in a kitty-party is partly about friendship with other women who are regarded in the idiom of fictive kin as "sisters", and partly about "winning money" for their own individual consumption. In view of this, the paper will discuss the meanings of middle-class and gender in contemporary New Delhi.

Henrike Donner, London School of Economics and Political Science, UK

This paper explores the way in which an ‘orientation towards the family’ represents middle-classness among urban Bengalis. It draws on the narratives of women, who present their relationships with others and their understandings of their own lives in terms of this overarching theme.

Building on the notion of class as a ‘constantly reinacted cultural project’ (Liechty 2004) the paper argues that among the Bengali middle class of Calcutta social boundaries are crucially enacted in and through idealised narratives of family life and its values, which are enacted in and through the middle-class ‘home’. In an urban setting where being middle-class has become an increasingly diffuse arena, established notion of what it means to belong to the respectable middle-class has come under threat in the wake of economic liberalisation and thus there appear subtle changes in the gendered representations of what makes a middle-class family. The paper traces the meaning of middle-classness as crucially embodied in middle-class mothers’ work, and argues that it is in the family rather than the emerging youth consumer culture that existing class positions are reinforced through new collective practices, reinvented traditions and ideological shifts. The paper explores how intra-household relationships and gendered behavioural codes constitute the cultural process of class-making in this context and identifies the notion of an ‘orientation towards the family’ as common guideline shaping narratives of successful and failed attempts of upward mobility in a ‘new world’.

Rashmi Sadana, Columbia University

Indian English-ness has long and rightly been associated with the urban elite. Yet, in post-Independent India, the relationship between class and language has shifted as Indians have become the producers and consumers of English-language art and culture to a much greater extent. In the process, English has not merely become a post-colonial language, but has been the vehicle, somewhat paradoxically, for the formation of a pan-Indian nationalist and cosmopolitan identity.

This paper seeks to explore how the popular, though now defunct, features magazine, The Illustrated Weekly of India, helped forge a pan-Indian middle-class identity, particularly in the 1970s, under the editorship of Khushwant Singh. While conducting field research with Hindi and English literary and scholarly publishers in Delhi in 2001, nearly everyone I spoke with mentioned the Weekly as a conversational aside. Some denigrated it as being "not serious" or "not literary enough," but most also admitted that, unlike other English publications, "everybody bought it." It was a staple of the English-educated Indian household. How might the analysis of the Weekly shape our understanding of English-educated Indian middle-classness, or the attempt at creating a pan-Indian middle-classness? What are the post-Independence ideals that go along with this particular brand of class membership?