Books

ELITE AND EVERYMAN: The Cultural Politics of the Indian Middle Classes edited by Amita Baviskar and Raka Ray. Routledge, New Delhi, 2011. THE middle class is an elusive and yet popular category. Be it lay discourses on social and political life, or serious academic writings on economy, history and cultures of contemporary India, the category of middle class is used in a large variety of contexts. But what exactly is (or are) middle class(es)? What is specific about the Indian middle class? What role does it play in contemporary Indian social life? While recent writings by Indian economists have mostly concentrated on its size as an income category, the term has a broader sociological and conceptual history, both in the western context and in India. The edited volume by Amita Baviskar and Raka Ray brings together essays that draw upon and indicate a wide range of scholarship that has recently emerged on the Indian middle class. The essays, first discussed in a workshop at the Institute of Economic Growth in New Delhi, discuss a wide array of concerns about the Indian middle class, ranging from the simple economics of middle class in terms of its numbers or income levels, to its history, changing social and occupational profile, and even the ways in which it is represented in sex surveys. As the editors suggest in their introduction, the arrival of the middle class, or the growing scholarly interest in the subject, is also a consequence of the economic progress that a section of Indians have made over the last 50 or 60 years. Though their numbers in relative terms are still small, estimated to be anywhere between 10 to 26 per cent of the population, in absolute terms they have been growing, particularly during the post-liberalization period. More importantly perhaps, the middle class in India has also gradually occupied centre-stage, displacing the poor and the peasant, the common man. The pre-liberalization common man was a rather quiet and humble creature. The popular media articulated his concerns in terms of roti, kapda aur makan. The growing presence of middle class has changed this popular concern to bijli, sadak aur pani. While this shows a degree of social and economic mobility of the aam admi, it does not mean that the entire poor population has moved up the ladder. One can

equally read this shift as reflecting a further marginalization of the poor, whose number, even in relative terms, remains very large. However, the aam admi of urban India is no longer a humble and helpless creature. He is now a middle class person, a citizen, who could be better described as everyman. Unlike the common man, everyman is assertive and demanding. It is this ascendency of the middle class during the 1990s, the post-liberalization period, that provides the context for different essays in the book. So far, with the exception of historical commentaries, writings on the Indian middle class have mostly been of a general nature, based on impressionistic notions about the urban professional and salaried classes, invariably focusing on the conceptual difficulties of using the term in the Indian context. They often critiqued the Indian middle class for not being like its western counterpart, as being self-serving or nonsecular. In contrast, the papers presented in the volume mostly draw on empirical evidence. Even the conceptual discussions have moved beyond the earlier moralistic commentaries. The introductory chapter by the editors and the paper by Leela Fernandes are good examples of this tendency. Similarly, Sanjay Joshis historical account of the middle class in Lucknow and the paper by the Rudolphs on the postland reform Rajputs of Rajasthan, raise interesting conceptual questions about the specific context of the emergence of a middle class in India. In the same vein, the paper by Roger Jeffrey, Patricia Jeffrey and Craig Jeffrey provides a fascinating ethnography of the mobile Jats of western Uttar Pradesh, their growing desire to be a part of the middle class and their efforts at changing their lifestyles. The post-1990s context and the rise of a new middle class is the subject of several papers. Working through numbers, E. Sridharan provides a comprehensive analysis of the data on employment, income and consumption categories through different data sets. In another paper, Carol Upadhya and Smitha Radhakrishnan present their work on the software professionals. The book also has several papers on the personal or private life of the middle class. While Nita Kumar focuses on the reproduction of middle class through education by looking at the child, Seemin Qayum and Raka Ray present their work on changing practices of servant-keeping in Kolkata and the challenge that middle class households face in negotiating their relationships with servants vis-a-vis their selfidentities of being modern. Another study of Kolkata by Ruchira Ganguly-Scrase and Timothy J. Scrase look at the lower middle class among the Bengali bhadralok, their experience of relative downward mobility and the growing pressure of conforming to the new normative of middle class life, where success in English medium education

has increasingly become critical. In another essay in the section, Patricia Uberoi analyzes the changing sexual character of the Indian middle class by comparing a survey done by the famous sociologist G.S. Ghurye conducted during the late 1930s with a 2007 sex survey published by India Today. Continuing with the changing 1990s, the last three chapters of the book look at the emerging nature of middle class politics and urban public sphere. Focusing on cinema, the first of these chapters by William Mazzarella, looks at the manner in which a new liberal discourse on censorship emerged around the freedom of consumer choice for the urban educated viewer, even while it accepted censorship for the masses. Similarly, Amita Baviskar and Sanjay Srivastava discuss the reconfiguring of urban spaces in their contributions. However, they focus on two very different contexts and with differing perspectives. While Srivastavas ethnography of the Akshardham temple in Delhi shows how the appeal of the temple lies in its ability to present itself as a tableau of consumption, Baviskar examines the ongoing emergence of the public sphere on Delhis street and the restructuring of urban space to make it fit the bourgeois notion of environmentalism and modernity. Though one can always quibble about or identify what has not been addressed by the book, it is hard to ignore its contribution to the scholarship on the Indian middle class. The range of subjects covered and the quality of scholarship makes reading of this book an imperative for anyone interested in understanding the changing character of the middle class and contemporary India. Surinder S. Jodhka