NY Times Magazine, April 15, 2001 Keeping Up With the Shidhayes: India's New Middle Class By JAMES TRAUB There is an expression you hear nowadays in Aurangabad, a city of about a million souls located 150 miles northeast of Bombay, that would have made absolutely no sense when I lived there 25 years ago. People will say, "The traffic is too-too bad in old Aurangabad," or "The shopping is still cheaper in old Aurangabad." Back in 1976, when I served as a junior lecturer on the English faculty of the Maulana Azad College and its affiliated Ladies' Section, everything in Aurangabad was old. The city had decayed, but otherwise not much else had changed since the glorious moment in the late 17th century when Aurangzeb, the last of the great Mogul emperors, moved the capital from Delhi to this little outpost at the top of the Deccan Plateau. And in fact, the city that I knew, with its dusty lanes filled with the insane honking of scooters and motorbikes and three-wheeled auto-rickshaws and its sleepy sweet shops and its ancient wooden houses, hasn't changed a bit. . . What most Americans know about India is simply that it is very, very poor. And that's true. Perhaps 40 percent of the country's one billion people are still locked in mind-numbing poverty. But it is also true that even perfectly ordinary places like Aurangabad have a large and growing middle class, with the aspirations and the orientation toward change and growth that come with middle-class status. In his book "India Unbound," an unabashed celebration of the new culture of capitalism, Gurcharan Das, a former C.E.O. of Procter & Gamble India as well as a playwright and novelist, writes, "The most striking feature of contemporary India is the rise of a confident new middle class." India is slowly shedding its fabled otherness; perhaps we're too mesmerized by the otherness to recognize the reality. . . I would have described almost everyone I knew as poor, though they all lived innumerable grades above Aurangabad's truly poor, who lived piled on top of one another in the squalid warren of the city. The teachers earned about $100 a month on average, and most lived in tiny houses with a few sticks of furniture and nothing more than a calendar or a clock on the wall. Nobody I knew owned a telephone, and refrigeration was so unheard of that when I invited the girls from my Ladies Section class to lunch at my home, I heard them all excitedly murmuring, "Thanda pani"- cold water. It was a novel idea to them. The only cars I ever saw were the white Ambassadors driven by government officials. Virtually the only form of entertainment was conversation, and in this one regard, Aurangabad was rich. We would sit over endless cups of tea, talking about politics and literature and what little we could glean about the affairs of the world. Aurangabad was an Islamic version of R.K. Narayan's Malgudi, the mythical town where nothing ever happens and everyone is a commentator. . . Educated Indians are deeply divided about the merits, even the authenticity, of the new middle class. Modern India was born, in 1947, not simply as a nation among nations but also as a great experiment -- in democracy, in autonomy from the world powers, in forging unity from bewildering diversity, in fidelity to ancient spiritual ideals. The parents of free India, Mohandas K. Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, had very different, and ultimately incompatible, visions of the new nation, but both understood India in moral terms. Nehru's modern values, especially, provided a self-definition and a sense of high purpose to the old middle class. And so there is, to many of them, something repellent about a new class that defines itself by consumer habits. In "Mistaken Modernity," Dipankar Gupta, a scholar at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, accuses the new middle class of "Westoxication," by which he means consuming Western goods while ignoring the core Western values of respect for the individual, acceptance of impersonal norms, meritocracy and public accountability. The new middle class, he writes, is not the engine of modernity but its chief adversary. But these consumers are also producers. Gurcharan Das argues in "India Unbound" that the new middle class will liberate India from the morally irreproachable stranglehold of the Nehruvian servitors. "The older bourgeoisie," Das writes, "was tolerant, secular and ambiguous. The new class is street-smart. It has had to fight to rise from the bottom, and it has learnt to maneuver the system. It is easy to despair over its vulgarity, its new-rich mentality. But whether India can deliver the goods depends a great deal on it." Farooqui is a child of old Aurangabad: his mother's family is said to have served in Aurangzeb's army. I thought he might be an eccentric devotee of the ancien régime, but no: I found that declinism is the shared faith, or mood, of all true Aurangabadis. One evening virtually the entire college faculty traveled out to a guest house high up on a hill less than a mile or so from the famous Ellora caves for a dinner al fresco. I was sitting next to D.M. Khan, the tall and saturnine head of the College of Education, and he pointed to the stars and said to me in perfect seriousness, "Do you enjoy the sky where you live?" And then he launched into a threnody of his own, his theme being the loss of an old life of contemplation and calm, dignity and respect. His subtheme was that progress wasn't even succeeding as progress. Farooqui had confided to me that few of his commerce graduates were likely to land decent jobs, and Khan said the same was true of the education students. The students looked to computers as their salvation; they were frantic to get a diploma in computer anything. What's more, the government of Maharashtra was bankrupt, AIDS was on the rise, communal tensions were increasing, etc. In such moments, sitting beneath the stars on a cool and quiet night, melancholy takes on a beauty that is very close to romance. No one broke the spell with crude suggestions of optimism. Full article: http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/15/magazine/15INDIA.html Louis Proyect Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org/
