Question

Dicuss the nature of middle class in post independence india

Answer 1

idea and category of middle class is not new to India. It was in the early decades of the 19th century, during the British colonial period, that the term began to be used for a newly emergent group of people in urban centres, mostly in Calcutta, Bombay and Madras, three cities founded by the colonial masters. Over time, this middle class spread its presence to other urban centres of the subcontinent as well. After Independence, with development and expansion of Indian economy, the size of the Indian middle class grew manifold. Beginning with the 1990s, the story of the Indian middle class witnessed a major shift. The pace and patterns of its growth changed with the introduction of economic reforms. By incentivizing private capital and encouraging foreign investments in India, the ‘neo-liberal’ turn helped India accelerate the pace of its growth substantially.



enterprising, mobile and young women and men; consumers of luxury goods and services; a housewife of an urban family struggling to keep her domestic economy going with a limited income in times of rising prices; an agitated and angry office goer who always envies his/her neighbor for managing to keep ahead.

Even though being middle class in contemporary India is, in many ways, a matter of privilege, those located in the middle class tend to also view themselves as among those with a fragile sense of security. Along with the poor, they often complain about the manipulative and “corrupt” economic and political system controlled by the rich and the powerful, the wily elite. Middle class engagements with politics have been of crucial and critical significance in modern India; from the colonial period to present times. It is the middle class that generally produces leaders who challenge the existing power structures and provide creative directions to social movements of all kinds.

The Indian middle class has also been accused of being a self-serving and self-obsessed category, indifferent to the poor and the marginalized. Middle class creates barriers and boundaries to keep the poor out of its sphere of privileges. On the other end, the poor aspire to join the middle class and work hard to achieve it. Even when they can’t afford to provide wholesome food to their children, they send them to private English medium schools with the hope that education would help them move out of poverty, to middle-class locations.

Besides its invocation in descriptions of social structures and spheres of inequality and power, the idea of the middle class is also invoked, positively, to describe the emerging Indian, who, through education and hard work, is trying to move upwards, with his/her own resources, and in turn, is transforming the country into a modern and developed nation. It is creative individuals from middle-class India who have been spreading themselves across the most valued and critical avenues of opportunities and expanding the Indian and global economy in neo-liberal times. Globally, mobile computer software engineers and management gurus of Indian origin, who have come to matter almost everywhere in the world today, all come from middle-class families.

The third popular invocation of the middle class is in relation to the market. As an economic agent, the middle-class person is a consumer par excellence. It is the middle class that sustains the modern bourgeois economy through its purchasing power. Given its location, middle class is presumed to be obsessed with consumption. Consumption for the middle class is not simply an act of economic rationality but also a source of identity. The shopping malls, mobile phones and growing reach of media are symbolic evidences of the growing significance of the middle class in India. Much of the advertising industry is directed at the middle-class consumer.

Identifying who belongs to the middle class appears to be quite simple: those in the middle, in-between the poor on one end and the rich on the other are all middle-class. Interestingly, this is how most of the contemporary discourse, shaped and shared by economists and policy makers, has been framed. Perhaps the only source of contention for mainstream economists has been the choice of objective criteria, income, consumption or something else, for drawing the boundaries on the two ends of the middle.

Answer 2

"The nature of middle class in post-independence India

• Though different sections of the Indian society had participated in the struggle for freedom from colonial rule, it was the middle classes that took over the institutions of governance from the colonial rulers.
• It has been argued that the end of the colonial rule did not mean a total break from the past.
• Much of the institutional structure that had developed during the colonial rule continued to work for the independence within the ideology of the new regime.
• Thus members of the middle class who were working for the colonial rulers did not lose much in terms of their position in the institutions of governance."