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    Continuous Assessment, GEC

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    Akanksha Konwar

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    Continuous Assessment, GEC

    Uploaded by

    Akanksha Konwar
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    3 views2 pages

    Continuous Assessment, GEC

    Uploaded by

    Akanksha Konwar

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
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    Continuous Assessment

    Understanding Indian Society


    GEC, Semester 1
    Submitted by
    Akanksha Konwar
    BA(hons) History
    Roll no. 22/HIS/03

    India’s Middle Classes In Contemporary India


    Leela Fernandes
    Review

    In recent years, India’s middle classes have emerged as a central socio-


    economic and political force in contemporary India. The text puts light
    into some of the complexities and contradictions that shape India’s
    Middle classes. Leela Fernandes digs into the implications of the growth of
    the middle class in India and uncovers—in the media, in electoral politics, and
    on the streets of urban neighborhoods—the complex politics of caste, religion,
    and gender that shape this rising population. Using rich ethnographic data,
    she reveals how the middle class operates as a proponent of economic
    democratization. The end result is a paradoxical relationship between political
    claims about a single middle class and a diverse social group that includes
    lower middle classes that struggle to keep their socioeconomic standing all the
    way down to very elite English urban upper middle classes.
    The text is divided into four sections. The historical background and
    theoretical issues that inform current discussions of India's middle class are
    presented in the first part. The post-liberalization middle class is examined in
    more detail in the second part. The third part investigates the political
    ramifications of the middle class rifts in post-liberalized India. The chapter
    comes to a close with a talk of potential future lines of inquiry into India's
    middle classes.
    Marxian and neo-Marxian theoretical work on the category of class has
    tended to dismiss or neglect this social group in part because of the
    relative lack of attention that Marx paid to the middle class.
    In Marxian conceptions, the middle class is either conflated with the
    bourgeoisie or conceived of as a petty bourgeoisie that was without a
    social basis or a class that would ultimately become proletarianized
    (Marx and Engels 1848).
    The colonial Indian middle class was thus marked by high degrees of
    uncertainty produced by its dependence on the colonial state for
    employment and the limits on its economic power in the context of the •
    colonial political economy of India.

    With the advent of policies of economic reforms in the 1990s, public


    discourses - from politicians, media outlets, businesses and marketing
    and advertising firms - centred on the change in the nature of India's
    middle classes.

    This form of politics is intertwined with a growing sense of middle-class


    resentment against state governance and institutions that the middle
    classes perceive as failing to represent their interests. A second example
    of this form of anti-institutional politics is a longstanding middle-class
    resentment of a democratic state that this social group perceives as
    having been captured by subaltern social groups.

    The growing political significance of the middle class and the complex
    differentiation that characterizes this group is such that there is a need
    for much closer and systematic study of India's middle classes.

    Given the diversity of the middle classes, it is an easy task to illustrate


    the uniqueness of particular social segments of this group as well as to
    contrast these segments with idealized images of the middle class that
    are shaped by the media and by political rhetoric.

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