Beyond Consumption: India’s New Middle Class in the Neo-Liberal Times

✍ Scribed by Manish K Jha (editor), Pushpendra (editor)

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2021
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 290
• Edition: 1
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

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, and South Asian studies.

✦ Table of Contents

Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Table of Contents
List of figures
List of tables
List of contributors
Preface
List of abbreviations
Chapter 1: Contextualising India's new middle class: Intersectionalities and social mobility
Introduction
A class with “Contradictory Locations within Class Relations”
Heterogeneity of the new middle class
Consumer culture
Modernity and tradition
Middle-class apathy
The contributions
Social mobility and the making of new middle class
Middle class, urban poor, and migrants: a complex interface
Middle class in the regional landscape
New middle class: exploring technology, identity, and spaces
References
Part I: Social mobility and the making of new middle class
Chapter 2: Risk, trust, and social networks: A study among middle-class Nair families near Technopark, Kerala
Transitions in the lifeworld of Nairs
The emergence of the risk society
Social networks, fluid ideologies, and political manoeuvring
Conclusion
Acknowledgements
Notes
References
Chapter 3: Muslim middle class in India: Size, diversity, and correlates
Conception and estimation of middle class
Size, growth, and distribution of middle class
Size of Muslim middle class with consumption expenditure-based approach
Size and growth of middle class with an asset-based approach
Socioreligious categories and size of middle class
Statewise distribution
Middle class by states and socioreligious categories
Causes and correlates of growth of middle class
Urbanisation and middle class
Education and middle class
Salaried, business class, and migration
Entrepreneurship and ownership of enterprises
Conclusion
References
Chapter 4: Dalit desires, middle-classness and the city of Surat
The new middle class as a problematique
The Mahyavanshis of Surat
Spatial realignments of aspirations
The story of Rita
Conclusion
Acknowledgements
Notes
References
Part II: Middle class, urban poor, and migrants: A complex interface
Chapter 5: The middle class and migrant: Contention in the city
Colonial remnants and neoliberal products: the making of the new middle class in India
The political positioning of ‘middle class’: questions of civility and citizenship
NMC and migrants in Mumbai: complementarity and contestation
Covid-19, migrants and the middle class
Stigma and fear: pandemic, migrants, and the middle class
Why would anyone sleep on the tracks? Social media and the voice of the NMC
Conclusion
Notes
References
Social Media
Chapter 6: In the pursuit of middle-classness: Exploring the aspirations and strategies of the urban poor in neoliberal Delhi
Neoliberal transformation of Delhi and contestations over space
Aspirations, strategies, and the pursuit of cultural capital
“Credentializing strategies”
English and computer as pathways to success
English-medium schooling over basic needs
Symbolic boundaries and the construction of class difference
The inside and the outside
Making and unmaking of social identities
Conclusion
Acknowledgment
Notes
References
Chapter 7: Politics of dark rooms and neurotic urbanity through Padmanabhan's Lights Out
Building homes and incarcerating women
Looking and non-participation
Neighbouring and guarding spaces
References
Part III: Middle class in the regional landscape
Chapter 8: The Kashmiri middle class and its everyday politics
The emergence of the middle class in Kashmir
The alienated middle class in Kashmir
Being aspirational during the conflict
Mapping the consumerist everyday and the politics of visibility
New ideas of housing and household space
Mutton every day and changing foods
The private schools for the middle class(es)
Range of middle-class politics: dissent, protest, and governance
Opposing the state
Exerting influence on the state
Conclusion
References
Chapter 9: Of imported SUVs and buying ‘the Last Supper’ in Milan: ‘New middle class’ and its crisis of hegemony in India's Northeast
When being middle class is not enough
Middle class and its changing status: inaugurating the debate
Section one
Situating the middle class in India's northeast: exceptions and continuities
Assam and its middle class: a hegemonic expansion and its contentions
Assam movement and the middle class: from hegemony to contention
Section two
Imported SUVs and villas made of Italian marble
Liberalisation, anxieties, and aspirations in a ‘resource frontier’
New middle class or classes that aspire?
Conclusion: a region mired in anxieties and aspirations
Notes
References
Chapter 10: The ‘Threshold People’ 1 : Narrating middle-class lives in neoliberal Kolkata
Exploring threshold-ness
Theoretical contexts
Being at ‘home’: memory and middle-class living
Banking on trust: financial trajectories of the middle
Conclusion
Notes
References
Chapter 11: Doing good, being political: Middle class bhadralok narratives from neoliberal India
The idea of samaj sachetanata (social consciousness)
Imagining ‘agency’ within the political
Outlining the political–personal relation
Conclusion
Acknowledgements
Notes
References
Part IV: New middle class: Exploring technology, identity, and spaces
Chapter 12: ‘Cyborgs’ or ‘House elves’? WhatsApp mothering in a Greater Mumbai suburb
‘ And may the odds be ever in your favour ’: affordances, agency, and middle-class mothering 3
The WhatsApp world of school group mothers
Dependent-mums
Critical-mums
Reputation-mums
Conclusion
Acknowledgements
Notes
References
Chapter 13: Work-from-home for Bangalore's new middle class women: No future ‘workplace’ for women?
Defining telework
The background of shifting to ‘home’ in India
The multiple negotiations in making room for and doing telework
Instituting the teleworking labour process – multiple shifts, technological artefacts, and surveillance
A note on methods
To keep teleworking – Manvi and Seema
Everyday bargains by Sreyoshi and Mythili
Mythili
Conclusion
Notes
References
Chapter 14: ‘The One-Dimensional Man’: Unravelling identity of a new Indian subject
Birth of the consumer citizen
Understanding construction of mobility through consumption
Revisiting mobility – the consumer subject into newer forms of control
Nation and the consumer citizen – congruence and conflict
Diversity, heterogeneity, class divisions
Conclusion
References
Index