Beyond Consumption

India's New Middle Class in the Neo-Liberal Times

Manish K Jha, Pushpendra, Manish K Jha, Pushpendra

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367565718
• eBook ISBN: 9781000439458
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Regional Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This book analyses India's middle class by recognising the diversity within the class, the people, their practices, and the production of spaces.

It explores the economic and social lives of the new middle class, expanding the areas of inquiry beyond consumption in post-liberalisation India and its intersectionalities with gender, caste, religion, migration, and other socioeconomic markers in various cities across the country. The book interrogates the meanings and perceptions of social mobility, growth, consumerism, technology, social identity, and development and examines how they can be emancipatory or subjugating in different contexts. It engages with the new entrants in the middle class, particularly from the marginalised sections, their struggles, insecurities, anxieties, agency, and experiences. The personal, emotive, and psychic dimensions of social mobility have been dealt with in the larger context of socioeconomic settings. The book crosses disciplinary and spatial boundaries and uses a variety of methodologies to provide perspectives on several unexplored or underexplored areas of India's new middle class.

This book will be of interest to scholars and researchers of sociology, economics, development studies, public policy, social work, and South Asian studies.

1 Contextualising India's new middle class

Intersectionalities and social mobility

Manish K Jha and Pushpendra

DOI: 10.4324/9781003098416-1

Introduction

Understood generally through relational aspect, the middle class is construed as an intermediary social stratum between the “rich and powerful and the poor and powerless” (Lange and Meier 2009). In India, it did not attract much academic interest until towards the end of the 20th century when, thanks to New Economic Policy, not only their number enlarged and they made their presence visible but also some distinct attributes of the new entrants in this class led to the conceptualisation of the term ‘new middle class’. To keep the definition of the new middle class simple, we refer to those who have entered the middle-class post-liberalisation period, are beneficiaries of the liberalisation, have some disposable surplus income and are also inclined to consumerism and lifestyle enhancement, and ideologically who see the growth of their career and wealth in the success of liberalisation.

Being a decisive departure from the state-led economic model towards a market- based economy, the structural adjustment programme led to the rise of private capital. The policy of liberalisation and globalisation significantly facilitated the free movement of international capital and foreign direct investment. Technological advancements, particularly digital technology, the increasing role of knowledge in the production process, and unprecedented expansion of the service sector have marked a new era since the 1990s. Decades of high GDP growth resulted in an unprecedented expansion of the economy, liberal credit policies, and the emergence of private lending agencies – all these boosted spending and demand for consumer goods. Consequently, rapid corporatisation and financialisation are observed in all sectors of the economy – sports, entertainment, art and culture, publishing, media, advertisement, telecommunication, information technology, aviation, tourism, retail trade, and logistics. Transactional services such as banking, insurance, accounting, regulatory and financial services have also observed a similar expansion in the private sector.

In a growingly iniquitous economy, the ‘middle’ comprising professionals, managers, administrators, technocrats, offshore workers, and an ambiguous section of lower-rung white-collar employees has gradually burgeoned. The emergence of this class is associated with the decline and breakdown of state monopoly capitalism. This new middle class is marked by new and innovative sources of employment and earning; its attitude towards money – from saving to spending; its support for liberalisation, privatisation, and other market-friendly reforms; and its consumerist consciousness, to name a few. Ideologically, this class has contempt for the public sector and state welfarism and favours a political regime that supports and promotes business. Politically too, it is showing a “right-ward” orientation at this juncture.

Gradually, this new middle class has started influencing the policies, practices, and official discourse. However, it is a highly internally differentiated class and pursues diverse political and ideological agendas. This ranges from positions that explain its hegemonic control over state-led developmental agendas (Deshpande 1998) to its attachment to neoliberal market-dependent agendas (Fernandes and Heller 2006); and from a welfare centric notion to an exclusionary cultural enterprise (Fernandes 2004; Kaicker 2014). Its civic and political engagement extends from moulding of the urban spatiality to its focus on the niche environmentalist activist milieu (Anjaria 2009; Kamath and Vijayabaskar 2014; Zérah 2007) and from its progressive cosmopolitan imagining to its credence to imaginations and imageries of overt majoritarian nationalism (Krishna 2006; Rajagopal 2011). Placed within such a diverse and often paradoxical paradigms, understanding this class calls for more in-depth explorations of its positions and practices in all their complexities. The global recession since 2008, continued economic downturn during last one decade in India, slowing down of corporate India due to massive debt and low demand, and, on top of it, in 2020 the impact of COVID-19 have calmed down the initial euphoria and excitement over the emergence of the new middle class. How this class responds to the emerging structural conditions of the economy and external influences is another area of academic exploration.

Not only the economic side of the story of this class is non-linear, but its embeddedness in the sociocultural milieu of the country also presents challenges before social scientists. The intersectionality of this class with caste, class, gender, religion, and region demands attention to details, particularly narratives of its practices to unfold the process of entry into this class, its struggles, anxieties, and strategies from its vantage points. Studies of the new middle class have to deal with the following questions: What is the location of this class in terms of its intersectionalities with different characteristics of the present social structure? How does it address its internal differentiation and issues of social mobility? How does it relate and respond to larger contemporary socio-political and economic issues? What are the limits to its aspirations and consumer behaviour? How does it deal with the coexistence of and the conflict between tradition and modernity in its social relations, especially gendered relations at home and workplaces? What are the specific characteristics of its relations with the “other”, the urban poor, and migrants? Are there regional dimensions to the growth and characteristics of the new middle class?

A class with “Contradictory Locations within Class Relations”

The middle class has been under-theorised in classical Marxist literature as, for Marx, it was unimportant for his time. For him, classes are created during the production process characterised by separation of means of production from labour, thus creating owners of labour-power, owners of industrial capital, and owners of land who derive income through wages, profit, and rent respectively. Correspondingly, wage labourers, capitalists (including the finance aristocracy), and landowners constituted three broad classes (Marx and Engels 1848). However, for Marx, the class structure did not appear in a pure form. Intermediate and transitional strata obscured the class boundaries even in most highly and classically developed England during his time (Marx 1850). In his writings, Marx variously referred to the petty bourgeoisie and small peasants. For him, the lower strata of the middle class included the small tradespeople, shopkeepers, handicraftsmen, and peasants. The small-holding peasantry was the most numerous class in mid-19th-century France. He also mentions the army, the so-called men of talent (lawyers, professors, doctors, etc.), state creditors, the bankers, the money dealers, and the wolves of the bourse, the clergy, and ‘dangerous classes’ (declassed, degraded, and degenerated elements such as beggars, prostitutes, racketeers, swindlers, petty criminals, etc.) during his time (Marx 1850). Marx did not attempt to explain these categories conceptually but instead looked at these social classes in terms of their role in the class struggles of his time, particularly the class struggles in France.

More generally, the classical Marxian understanding of classes is based on simple commodity production wherein those directly involved in material production, who create surplus value (use value and exchange value), who do not own the means of production, and who are exploited by the owner of capital constitute the working class or proletariat. Poulantzas (1975) differentiates between productive and unproductive labour where the productive labour adds surplus-value, and the unproductive labour lives off the surplus-value produced by the productive labour. Even if unproductive (and the grey areas between the productive and unproductive notwithstanding), they are useful labour (Poulantzas 1975) who work in exchange and circulation and sell their labour-power to earn wages or payment from the owner of the capital who appropriates the surplus-value and treats such expenses as faux frais of production. Not all such wage-earners belong to the working class. The state apparatuses too employ a large number of people in exchange processes.

However, modern production systems have travelled far beyond simple commodity production. Increasingly, the production processes and commodities themselves are becoming highly technical and immaterial such as software, networks, designs, rays, signals, and waves which have also expanded the exchange and circulation processes immensely. With the commoditisation of more and more skill sets and cultural products, they have acquired the status of productive instruments like any other means of production. All these have produced a wide range of positional opportunities as professionals and managers (both wage earners), employers (mainly in the form of small firms but dealing with high-value production/trade), or individuals who can successfully convert their skill sets into varying degrees of wealth (e.g., sportsperson, film stars, and painters). However, despite adding value, similar to the way working classes do, their salary benefits or earnings far exceed the value of their labour-power (Baudelot et al., as quoted in Ross 1978). Besides, the ever-expanding circulation and exchange have opened up a large number of positions whose class locations are ambiguous. These various positions are often differentiated, internally contradictory, and locked into incoherent social relations. Wright (1985, 43) appropriately calls these positions “contradictory locations within class relations”. For practical purposes, we are putting them under a broad taxonomy of the middle class, and in the contemporary context, the ‘new middle class’.

Heterogeneity of the new middle class

The new middle class has sharp internal division along class lines. Though it is a highly differentiated class, we have confined our categorisation to lower middle, middle middle, and upper middle classes. These three sections display different concerns, anxieties, struggles, enterprise, and lifestyle choices in their everyday existence. The lower new middle class households comprise that segment which is in a precarious situation. Having experienced gradual upward mobility, they know that even a minor economic shock can push them back to poverty. They generally come from socially disadvantaged groups and single-earner families and sometimes they engage in multiple economic activities. They are aspirational which is best reflected in the private schooling of their children (even if the private schools are low-end schools) and possess essential but cheaper brand of consumer goods such as a refrigerator, motorcycle, colour television, and smartphone. They cannot afford consumerism beyond modest levels. However, the private capital’s continuous cost-cutting efforts to reduce, wherever possible, non-executive group of employees by using machines and automation are threatening their upward mobility. New entrants in the new middle class coming from the lower social groups are often very close to the working class’s socioeconomic condition, and despite working in a market environment, they expect strong state support. Reservations in education and government stipends carry a huge attraction to them. Not all those who enter the new middle class are immaterial labour. Empirically, it is challenging to differentiate between the lower section of the new middle class and the new/old working class.

The post-liberalisation period has seen the highest rise in the middle segment of the new middle class households. They come mainly from the professional and managerial white-collar job holders placed at the mid-level salary brackets, or belong to business class, have considerable income, mostly have more than one earner are conscious consumerists, and spend a part of their money on maintaining a lifestyle which is informed and influenced by advertisements and images of the glitterati. They possess a large number of consumer goods, including car, have a taste for a comfortable life, and extend their consumer experience by regular shopping, parties, dining out, and holidaying. Their children study in expensive schools, and they invest a fair amount of money on their allied interests and extracurricular activities. Their anxiety is to meet the rising costs of their living and absorb occasional financial shocks because of illnesses and other contingencies.

The upper section of the new middle class is concentrated in megacities, is placed in the highest-earning brackets, and is the anchor of the new consumerism and lifestyle. Their struggles and concerns are how to remain at the top amidst fierce competition as some of their occupations are age-sensitive, or time-bound, or require lots of networking and contacts, prudently investing their surplus and continuously generating money to meet their high-society lifestyle.

However, one pertinent question to ask here is what kind of social mobility the new middle class phenomenon has allowed in Indian society. The new middle class may not share the same roots with the older, established middle-class stratum but indeed refers to many of their same values and practices (Donner 2011, 3). Apart from the liberalisation of the economy and its impact on society, several government initiatives, particularly OBC reservation through affirmative action policy, have impacted the size of the middle class. The received wisdom/understanding around merit/achievement was intensely contested after the government acceptance of the Mandal Commission recommendations. State policies of reservation in the educational institutions and public employment for SCs, STs, and OBCs, in addition to economic development, expansion of educational facilities, and the success of Green Revolution provided newer opportunities to people from hitherto disadvantaged groups and communities. Affirmative actions in jobs and education and related social changes have facilitated the entry of a section of them in the middle class (Saavala 2001).

One marker of their aspirational cultural capital is good English medium education, and the strategy for attaining this cultural capital is linked to schooling in private branded schools (Fernandes and Heller 2006). During the COVID-19 pandemic, the closure of schools and a shift to online classes have serious implications for education. Online classes require smartphone(s), personal computer(s), continuous and good quality internet supply, and separate space at home for school-going children. These requirements have put an additional burden on the pockets of the new middle class. For the lower economic segments, limited access to and unaffordability of such devices/facilities have imposed new constraints on their struggle for gaining cultural capital for entry into the middle class.

Consumer culture

The consumerist representation through images of leisure, prosperity, and refined taste has taken centre stage in defining the new middle class in post-liberalisation India. The spectacle of overarching and expanding consumption capacities presents the class as the vanguard of India’s economic growth and prosperity. It has a distinct celebratory tone and tenor in governmental and media discourse. Their lifestyle, status consciousness, and aspirational, consumerist approach have been typical themes of numerous studies (Liechty 2003; Mathur 2010). In the introductory sentences of his voluminous and enriching work, Trentmann (2016) brings the expanse of possession and consumption in human society emphatically:

We live surrounded by things. A typical German owns 10,000 objects. In Los Angeles, a middle-class garage often no longer houses a car but several hundred boxes of stuff. The United Kingdom in 2013 was home to 6 billion items of clothing, roughly a hundred per...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Preface
• List of abbreviations
• 1 Contextualising India's new middle class
• Part I: Social mobility and the making of new middle class
• Part II: Middle class, urban poor, and migrants: A complex interface
• Part III: Middle class in the regional landscape
• Part IV: New middle class: Exploring technology, identity, and spaces
• Index