Being middle-class in India : a way of life 9780203148532, 0203148533, 9780415671675, 0415671671, 9781136513398, 1136513396

Table of contents :
Cover
Being Middle-class in India: A way of life
Copyright
Contents
Figures and table
Contributors
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1 Masculinity, advertising and the reproduction of the middle-class family in Western India, 1918–1940
2 Gendered bodies, domestic work and perfect families: New regimes of gender and food in Bengali middle-class lifestyles
3 'Keeping in the family': Work, education and gender hierarchies among Tiruppur's industrial capitalists
4 Cultural contrations and intergenerational relations: The consturction of selfhood among middle-class youth in Baroda
5 Globalization, neoliberalism and middle-class cultural politics in Kolkata
6 The social transformation of the medical profession in urban Kerala: Doctors, social mobility and the middle classes
7 Kitty-parties and middle-class femininity in New Delhi
8 Zara hatke ('somewhat different'): The new middle classes and the changing forms of Hindi cinema
Index

Citation preview

Being Middle-­class in India

Hailed as the driving force behind the making of a global player with valu­able eco­nomic potential, India’s middle class derives from a multitude of traditions, social formations and polit­ical constellations. This book looks at Indian middle-­ class lifestyles after lib­eralization through a number of ethnographic case studies, ranging from women who belong to Delhi upper middle-­class households to Tamilnadu’s emerging entrepreneurial castes. The book pays tribute to the diversity of India’s middle class, while at the same time highlighting common preoccupations that make and unmake middle-­ class lifestyles, such as the striving for upward mobility, common consumption practices and crit­ical engagement with the state and its institutions. It unpacks the notion that the Indian middle class can be understood in terms of pub­lic performances, surveys and eco­nomic practices, and emphas­izes how the study of middle-­class culture needs to be based on long-­term fieldwork, as every­day practices and private lives create the distinctive sub-­culture and cultural pol­itics that characterize the Indian middle class today. The contributions to this volume discuss specific aspects of middle-­class culture in their regional con­text in order to highlight overarching themes, such as gender relations, family values and household organ­iza­tion, and present a fascinating con­tri­bu­tion to studies of South Asian culture and the comparative study of class. Henrike Donner is currently Professor for Indian Society and Culture at the Centre for Modern Indian Studies, Georg-August Universität, Göttingen, Ger­ many. Her research inter­ests include urban anthropology, gender and kinship.

Routledge contemporary South Asia series

  1 Pakistan Social and cultural transformations in a Muslim nation Mohammad A. Qadeer

  8 Regionalism in South Asia Negotiating cooperation, institutional structures Kishore C. Dash

  2 Labor, Democratization and Development in India and Pakistan Christopher Candland

  9 Federalism, Nationalism and Development India and the Punjab economy Pritam Singh

  3 China–India Relations Contemporary dynamics Amardeep Athwal

10 Human Development and Social Power Perspectives from South Asia Ananya Mukherjee Reed

  4 Madrasas in South Asia Teaching terror? Jamal Malik   5 Labor, Globalization and the State Workers, women and migrants confront neoliberalism Edited by Debdas Banerjee and Michael Goldfield

11 The South Asian Diaspora Transnational networks and changing identities Edited by Rajesh Rai and Peter Reeves 12 Pakistan–Japan Relations Continuity and change in economic relations and security interests Ahmad Rashid Malik

  6 Indian Literature and Popular Cinema Recasting classics Edited by Heidi R. M. Pauwels

13 Himalayan Frontiers of India Historical, geo-­political and strategic perspectives K. Warikoo

  7 Islamist Militancy in Bangladesh A complex web Ali Riaz

14 India’s Open-­Economy Policy Globalism, rivalry, continuity Jalal Alamgir

15 The Separatist Conflict in Sri Lanka Terrorism, ethnicity, political economy Asoka Bandarage

23 Economic and Human Development in Contemporary India Cronyism and fragility Debdas Banerjee

16 India’s Energy Security Edited by Ligia Noronha and Anant Sudarshan

24 Culture and the Environment in the Himalaya Arjun Guneratne

17 Globalization and the Middle Classes in India The social and cultural impact of neoliberal reforms Ruchira Ganguly-­Scrase and Timothy J. Scrase 18 Water Policy Processes in India Discourses of power and resistance Vandana Asthana 19 Minority Governments in India The puzzle of elusive majorities Csaba Nikolenyi 20 The Maoist Insurgency in Nepal Revolution in the twenty-­first century Edited by Mahendra Lawoti and Anup K. Pahari 21 Global Capital and Peripheral Labour The history and political economy of plantation workers in India K. Ravi Raman 22 Maoism in India Reincarnation of ultra-­left wing extremism in the 21st century Bidyut Chakrabarty and Rajat Kujur

25 The Rise of Ethnic Politics in Nepal Democracy in the margins Susan I. Hangen 26 The Multiplex in India A cultural economy of urban leisure Adrian Athique and Douglas Hill 27 Tsunami Recovery in Sri Lanka Ethnic and regional dimensions Dennis B. McGilvray and Michele R. Gamburd 28 Development, Democracy and the State Critiquing the Kerala model of development K. Ravi Raman 29 Mohajir Militancy in Pakistan Violence and transformation in the Karachi conflict Nichola Khan 30 Nationbuilding, Gender and War Crimes in South Asia Bina D’Costa 31 The State in India after Liberalization Interdisciplinary perspectives Edited by Akhil Gupta and K. Sivaramakrishnan

32 National Identities in Pakistan The 1971 war in contemporary Pakistani Ffiction Cara Cilano

41 Explaining Pakistan’s Foreign Policy Escaping India Aparna Pande

33 Political Islam and Governance in Bangladesh Edited by Ali Riaz and C. Christine Fair

42 Development–induced Displacement, Rehabilitation and Resettlement in India Current issues and challenges Edited by Sakarama Somayaji and Smrithi Talwar

34 Bengali Cinema ‘An other nation’ Sharmistha Gooptu 35 NGOs in India The challenges of women’s empowerment and accountability Patrick Kilby 36 The Labour Movement in the Global South Trade unions in Sri Lanka S. Janaka Biyanwila 37 Building Bangalore Architecture and urban transformation in India’s Silicon Valley John C. Stallmeyer 38 Conflict and Peacebuilding in Sri Lanka Caught in the peace trap? Edited by Jonathan Goodhand, Jonathan Spencer and Benedict Korf 39 Microcredit and Women’s Empowerment A case study of Bangladesh Amunui Faraizi, Jim McAllister and Taskinur Rahman 40 South Asia in the New World Order The role of regional cooperation Shahid Javed Burki

43 The Politics of Belonging in India Becoming adivasi Edited by Daniel J. Rycroft and Sangeeta Dasgupta 44 Re-­Orientalism and South Asian Identity Politics The oriental other within Edited by Lisa Lau and Ana Cristina Mendes 45 Islamic Revival in Nepal Religion and a new nation Megan Adamson Sijapati 46 Education and Inequality in India A classroom view Manabi Majumdar and Jos Mooij 47 The Culturalization of Caste in India Identity and inequality in a multicultural age Balmurli Natrajan 48 Corporate Social Responsibility in India Bidyut Chakrabarty 49 Pakistan’s Stability Paradox Domestic, regional and international dimensions Edited by Ashutosh Misra and Michael E. Clarke

50 Transforming Urban Water Supplies in India The role of reform and partnerships in globalization Govind Gopakumar

52 Non-­discrimination and Equality in India Contesting boundaries of social justice Vidhu Verma

51 South Asian Security 21st century discourse Sagarika Dutt and Alok Bansal

53 Being Middle-­class in India A way of life Edited by Henrike Donner

Being Middle-­class in India A way of life

Edited by Henrike Donner

First published 2011 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2011 Henrike Donner The right of Henrike Donner to be identified as author of the editorial material, and of the author of her individual chapters, has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Donner, Henrike. Being middle-class in India : a way of life / Henrike Donner. p. cm. – (Routledge contemporary South Asia series ; 53) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Middle class–India–History–21st century. 2. Middle class families– India–Social conditions. 3. Social mobility–India. 4. India–Social life and customs–21st century. I. Title. HT690.I4D66 2011 305.59509540905–dc23 2011024480 ISBN: 978-0-415-67167-5 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-203-14853-2 (ebk) Typeset in Times by Wearset Ltd, Boldon, Tyne and Wear

Contents



List of figures and table Notes on contributors Acknowledgements



Introduction

xi xii xiv 1

H e nrik e D onn e r and G e e rt D e N e v e

1

Masculinity, advertising and the reproduction of the middle-­class family in Western India, 1918–1940

23

D o u g l as E . H ayn e s

2

Gendered bodies, domestic work and perfect families: new regimes of gender and food in Bengali middle-­class lifestyles

47

H e nrik e D onn e r

3

‘Keeping it in the family’: work, education and gender hierarchies among Tiruppur’s industrial capitalists

73

G eert D e N eve

4

Cultural contractions and intergenerational relations: the construction of selfhood among middle-­class youth in Baroda

100

M argit van W essel

5

Globalization, neoliberalism and middle-­class cultural politics in Kolkata

117

T imothy J . S cras e and R u chira G ang u l y - ­S cras e

6

The social transformation of the medical profession in urban Kerala: doctors, social mobility and the middle classes C aro l in e W i l son

139

x   Contents 7

Kitty-­parties and middle-­class femininity in New Delhi

162

A nn e W a l drop

8

Zara hatke (‘somewhat different’): the new middle classes and the changing forms of Hindi cinema

184

R ach e l D wy e r



Index

209

Figures and table

Figures 1.1 ‘Would others give her refuge?’: advertisement for Free India General Insurance 1.2 ‘Sons need protection, we give it!’: advertisement for the Bombay Mutual Life Assurance Society 1.3 ‘Government official loses pro­mo­tion through night star­va­tion’: advertisement for Horlicks 1.4 ‘He nearly failed his only son through night star­va­tion’: advertisement for Horlicks

33 34 37 38

Table 5.1  Importance of English

124

Contributors

Geert De Neve is Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Sussex. His research inter­ests include industrialization, eco­nomic trans­forma­tion and social change in south India. He is the author of ‘Everyday Politics of Labour: working lives in India’s informal eco­nomy’ (2005) and co-­editor of various edited volumes including ‘Industrial Work and Life: an anthropological reader’ (2009). Henrike Donner is Professor of Indian Culture and Society at the Centre for Modern Indian Studies, Georg-­August Universität, Göttingen. Her research inter­ests include gender, kinship and reproductive change, as well as urban space and pol­itics. She is the author of Domestic Goddesses: Maternity, globalization and middle-­class identity in con­tempor­ary India (2008) and co-­edited The Meaning of the Local: pol­itics of place in urban India (2006). Rachel Dwyer is Professor of Indian Cultures and Cinema at SOAS, University of London. She has published ten books, the most recent being Beyond the Boundaries of Bollywood: the many forms of Hindi cinema, co-­edited with Jerry Pinto (2011) and is currently writing Bollywood’s India: Indian cinema as a guide to modern India for Reaktion Books, London. Ruchira Ganguly-­Scrase is Professor of Anthropology and the Coordinator of International Development Studies, Australian Catholic University in Melbourne, Australia. Her pub­lications focus on neolib­eral reforms, ethnographic method, childhood and schooling, gender relations in Asia and forced migrations. Her books include: Globalisation and the Middle Classes in India (with Timothy J. Scrase, 2009) and Global Issues/Local Contexts: the Rabi Das of West Bengal (2001). Douglas E. Haynes is Associate Professor of History at Dartmouth College. He is the author of Rhetoric and Ritual in Colonial India: the shaping of a pub­lic culture in Surat city, 1852–1928 (1991) and co-­editor of Contesting Power: resistance and every­day social relations in India (1991) and Toward a History of Consumption in South Asia (2010). His latest book, Small Town Capitalism in India: artisans, merchants and the making of the informal Economy, 1870–1960 is forthcoming from Cam­bridge University Press.

Contributors   xiii Timothy J. Scrase is Professor of Sociology and Associate Dean for Research at the Australian Cath­olic University in Melbourne, Australia. He has published widely on de­velopment and social change in Asia, and his most recent book is Globalisation and the Middle Classes in India (2009), co-­authored with R. Ganguly-­Scrase. Margit van Wessel is Assistant Professor of Communication Science at Wageningen University, Neth­er­lands. Her PhD thesis ex­plored how the emerging urban middle class in India confronts globalization, and her current research focuses on the societal complexities and shifts shaping inter­action between cit­izens and formal polit­ical and gov­ern­mental institutions. Anne Waldrop is Associate Professor of Development Studies at Oslo University College, Norway. She has done extensive fieldwork in New Delhi and has been a research affiliate at the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, and at the Department of Sociology at Delhi University. Her pub­lications focus on class, gender and social change in urban India. Caroline Wilson is a research associate at the School of Social and Community Medicine, University of Bristol. She completed her PhD from the University of Sussex, on the commodification of health care in Kerala, south India. Her research examines the impact of eco­nomic reforms and the growth of the middle classes on health and health ser­vice pro­vi­sion. She is currently conducting fieldwork on Type 2 diabetes in rural and urban Kerala.

Acknowledgements

This volume resulted from the interdisciplinary conference ‘Explorations of the Middle Classes in South Asia’ held in July 2007 at the University of Sussex, which was generously funded by the de­part­ments of anthropology at Sussex and at the LSE. The conference brought together a huge number of scholars from different dis­cip­lines working on aspects of middle-­class cultures. The parti­cip­ants provided in­valu­able comments on the papers that form chapters in this volume and neither the conference nor the volume would have happened without the input of my co-­organizers Filippo Osella and Geert De Neve, as well as colleagues at LSE and Sussex University. Futhermore, Dorothea Schaefter and Leanne Hinves at Routledge have been very supportive, and thanks are also due to the anonym­ous reviewers at Routledge, whose detailed comments went well beyond the call of duty. Cover image: Courtyard of a joint family home in Central Calcutta © Henrike Donner.

Introduction Henrike Donner and Geert De Neve

A volume about the Indian middle class might be greeted with a certain scep­ti­ cism given that it is a cat­egory difficult to de­scribe or delineate, espe­cially at this time of rapid trans­forma­tions that mark the post-­liberalization era. These ten­ sions are not new. Misra, embarking on a book about the Indian middle class in 1961, remarked: The term middle class is much used and since most of us, without the aid of a specialist, understand what we mean when we use it in our every­day con­ versation, I am not attempting a meticulous definition. While it may be of inter­est to note the features of the Indian middle classes, and while it may be neces­sary broadly to know their composition in order to be able to assess their his­tor­ical role, to attempt to draw the precise limits of the middle class, a hetero­geneous social layer, is, in the words of Lewis and Maude, to get ‘lured into an almost interminable discussion of the social sciences; and the result, while prob­ably failing to satisfy the expert, would certainly weary the layman’. (1961: 1) Not perturbed by the dif­ficult­ies of defining the middle class in India, Misra pub­ lished a book which charts the emergence of this class from its co­lo­nial roots as a van­guard of pro­gressive change. In fact, numerous studies of the middle class appeared in post-­Independence India up until the mid-­1980s.1 These studies ex­plored the caste backgrounds, migration and urbanization patterns, family forms, and the educational and occupational choices of the middle class since Independence. However, while the his­tor­ical roots of the Indian middle class, as well as the sociological markers of the ‘old’ middle-­class cat­egory, are well researched (Misra 1961; Sangari and Vaid 1989; Chatterjee 1989; Sarkar, S. 2002; Sarkar, T. 2002; Joshi 2001; Walsh 2004; Daechsel 2006), much less has been written about the culture of the middle class, its lifestyles, consumption habits, polit­ical views and do­mestic ar­range­ments in the post-­Independence period (for exceptions see Breckenridge 1995; Tarlo 1996). From the 1980s onwards, the ‘Indian middle class’ became almost entirely in­vis­ible in aca­demic research, not least because, as Chibber argues, class

2   H. Donner and G. De Neve ana­lysis more gen­erally disappeared from the agenda (Chibber 2006). The reasons for the demise of class as a topic of research are complex, but by and large the focus shifted to pol­itics and to the modern nation state (van der Veer 1994; Fuller and Benei; Corbridge and Harriss 2001). By the end of the 1980s nationalism had become the main para­digm for the study of the Indian middle class (Jaffrelot 1996; Mankekar 1999; Hansen 1999; Benei 2008). Thus, while the study of Hindu nationalism revealed the trans­forma­tions that politics among the Indian middle class underwent in the last few decades, as it did pay attention to self-­representation and identity pol­itics, it did not account for the full array of sites in which middleclassness is reproduced under con­ditions of globalization. Furthermore, where research agendas focused on politicized religion and com­munal identity pol­itics, class – after all a signi­fic­ant marker of social iden­ tity as well as a social formation – was relegated to the work of scholars who were inter­ested in gender, the family and do­mesticity (Roy 1972; Vatuk 1972; Béteille 1993; Seymour 1999; Basu 2001b; Dickey 2000; Quayum and Ray 2003). From the nineteenth century onwards it appears that middle-­class lifestyles, in spite of their many regional and situ­ational specificities, were becoming more homogenous in the course of reform movements and through engagement with institutions like the school, the legal sys­tem, the office and urban infrastructure. Class formation also became an issue in debates about religion and do­mestic life, and the home emerged as the most im­port­ant site of middle-­class socialization and differ­enti­ation (Chatterjee 1989; Sangari and Vaid 1989; Ray 1996; Dickey 2000). A specific cultural repertoire de­veloped that produced recognizably middle-­class lifestyles marked as modern, nationalist and Indian at the same time (Legg 2003). The family and religious practices became contested sites for reformers, as traditionalists and modernizers battled it out across com­munit­ies (Osella and Osella 2000). Only a few scholars inter­ested in nationalism noted, how­ever, that even the co­lo­nial middle class was fractured, and that middle-­class identities retained a distinctly com­munal flavour because cultural markers of caste and com­munal dif­fer­ence remained im­port­ant in the shaping of emerging class-­based notions of identity (Joshi 2001). Such earl­ier hierarchies and social forms fed into specific sub-­cultures and social relationships, which were often regionally bounded, but which at the same time created newly emerging middle-­class circuits through involvement in civil ser­vice, educational institutions, shared discourses on law, etc. In Bengal, where the argu­ably most self-­conscious middle class emerged, co­lo­nial elites soon repres­ented themselves in relational terms through the idiom of ‘being in the middle’ and defined their group-­based identity in cultural terms. They de­scribed themselves as belonging to a middle-­class (madhyasreni, madhyabitta), bhadralok world which situated itself below the aristocracy and dewans and banians but above the lesser folk who had to soil their hands with manual labour in coun­tryside and

Introduction   3 town, and who tended to be lower caste or Muslim. It largely snapped its links with the older culture . . ., de­veloping more refined and somewhat puri­ tanical norms and distinguishing itself from both, the luxury and corruption of old-­style Babus, and the ‘superstitious’ ways of the ‘uneducated masses’. (Sarkar 1997: 169) As is apparent, the emergence of this class was not solely circumscribed by nationalism; it was as much shaped by those practices and values that attach meaning to mem­ber­ship of a specific status group and life-­world. Indeed, in the pro­cess of class formation, many values and practices that previously marked col­ lect­ive identities, espe­cially upper-­caste norms, con­tinued to shape con­tempor­ary articulations of middleclassness, as the con­tri­bu­tions to this volume illus­trate. Among them are morality and respectabil­ity, gendered identities, mater­ial cultures, and the symbolic role of family values as a marker of Indian modernity. In con­tempor­ary India an ever-­increasing number of cit­izens de­scribe them­ selves as being ‘middle-­class’, and the term is ubiquitous in pop­ular media as well as every­day conversations, espe­cially in the nation’s growing urban centres. While this ‘obsessive pub­lic concern’ with the middle class (Mazzarella forthcoming) is a recent phenomenon, there is no doubt that ever more Indians are pub­licly identi­ fying and presenting themselves as ‘in the middle’, that is, between the ‘poor’ and the ‘rich’. Repeated ref­er­ences to shared eco­nomic resources and status are associ­ ated with specific cultural practices, and the attributes of ‘middleclassness’. Fur­ thermore, for the purposes of marketing as well as demographic practice and eco­nomic planning, a more or less homogenous, urban Indian middle class is con­ structed on purely eco­nomic grounds (Stridharan 2004). But in reality, even the most cursory glance at con­tempor­ary India reveals that the com­munit­ies and indi­ viduals de­scribed as being middle-­class in fact differ widely not only in terms of eco­nomic position and consumption practices but also in terms of status and values. While the middle-­class label remained confined to urbanized gov­ern­ment ser­ vants and professionals until well after independence, closely associated with upper-­caste Hindus and Muslim elite cultures, today a much broader section of the popu­la­tion con­siders themselves to be middle-­class. Many new com­munit­ies, fam­ il­ies and indi­viduals have gained access to the amenities of middle-­class life in the post-­liberalization period, and are now striving for mater­ial and social assets avail­ able only to a tiny minor­ity in the past. These newcomers, the newly rich, or new middle classes, as they are often called, may not share the same roots with the older, estab­lished middle-­class stratum, but certainly ref­er­ence many of the same values and practices. This explains why middleclassness in con­tempor­ary India is a mat­ter of debate not only among scholars, but also among its citizens.

Middle class in scholarship on India Until the middle of the 1980s the lifestyle of sal­ar­ied bur­eau­crats and professionals dominated pub­lic repres­enta­tions of the middle classes, but

4   H. Donner and G. De Neve middleclassness was not a major concern in representations of the Indian nation. Importantly, business com­munit­ies did not figure prominently in studies of the Indian middle class before the onset of lib­eralization, as being middle–class indexed almost exclusively the lifestyles of pub­lic ser­vants and professionals (see Misra 1961; Timberg 1978; Mines 1984; Markowits 2008). Even before Independence, ref­er­ence to a ‘middle class’ implied the fam­il­ies of gov­ern­ment servants, lawyers, doctors and em­ployees in private firms, who consciously understood themselves as a modern, nationalist elite (Ahmad and Reifeld 2002). As Jaffrelot and van der Veer argue, a culture of ‘self-­assured bourgeois nation­ alism’ in conjunction with the growth of state institutions marked the close asso­ ci­ation of upper-­caste Hindu cultural traits with ‘middleclassness’ (Jaffrelot and van der Veer 2008). Today, the ‘old’ middle classes, with their specific educa­ tional and occupational tra­ject­ories, have themselves become more hetero­ geneous, and their cultural, polit­ical and eco­nomic hege­mony can no longer be taken for granted. Social integration, affirmative action and the eco­nomic achievement of upwardly mobile com­munit­ies as well as the rhet­oric of a ‘new’ consumerist Indian middle class have broadened the discourse on middleclass­ ness and created novel practices and social relations. The ten­sions this extensive and more inclusive pro­cess of class formation caused were first evid­ent in the uproar fol­low­ing the Mandal Commission Report on the effects of affirmative action (reservations) in relation to lower castes. By suggesting more stringent pol­icies to sup­port students from backwards com­munit­ies, the Commission chal­ lenged the middle-­class mantra that privileges result from indi­vidual merit and hard work. Violent student protests followed pub­lication of the report. However, while reser­va­tions may have failed the majority of dis­advant­aged groups, state-­ led eco­nomic de­velopment, foremost the Green Revolu­tion, created newly afflu­ ent sections among rural low-­status com­munit­ies, a pro­cess later enhanced in the wake of eco­nomic lib­eralization. Today, un­pre­ced­en­ted oppor­tun­ities are avail­ able to a widening group of indi­viduals, fam­il­ies and com­munit­ies, while the gap between those who bene­fit and those who are excluded has widened sharply. Furthermore, middle-­class status is no longer the privilege of those living in the metropolis or urban centres, but can increasingly be realized elsewhere. Stream­ lined educational and occupational tra­ject­ories, which created a certain degree of homo­gen­eity in middle-­class lifestyles and consumption patterns, are avail­able across a range of sites, and make it pos­sible for as­pira­tional indi­viduals and com­ munities to access social arenas and practices earl­ier only avail­able to high-­status groups. Crucial are the new pub­lic consumer cultures, which are at once class-­ specific and access­ible across caste and com­munal bound­ar­ies (Appadurai and Breckenridge 1995). In this context, the success of Hindu nationalist par­ties and the rise of caste-­ based and regionalist pol­itics has been read as a claim for status and polit­ical influence among sections earl­ier under-­represented in this arena. The chapters in this book con­trib­ute further evid­ence of this diversification of claims and social practices (see Jaffrelot 2003; Michelutti 2008; Jeffrey 2008; Corbridge and Harriss 2000). It is due to this inclusive movement that a much broader spectrum

Introduction   5 of traditions and positions than ever before feeds into con­tempor­ary middle-­class lifestyles. Thus, what makes middleclassness, and who can claim such a status, has become a strongly contested social field, as values such as mater­ial austerity, earl­ier im­port­ant to urban middle-­class identity, do not carry the same weight today. The same holds true for middle-­class involvement in politics. Yet, despite the emphasis on diversity, the chapters in this volume also suggest that certain themes determine middleclassness across space and time. For instance, several chapters deal with the value attached to the family, inter­ generational conflicts, and anxi­eties about moralities, which often play out in relation to consumption patterns, gender relations and women’s auto­nomy, and in turn tie in with the quest for upward mobility that characterizes middle-­class culture globally (Dwyer 2000; Basu 2001a, 2001b; Mazzarella 2003; Mawdsley 2004; Fernandes 2006; Frøystad 2006; Oza 2006; Donner 2008; Herring and Agrawal 2008; Derne 2008; Ganguly-­Scrase and Scrase 2008; Lukose 2009; Upadhyay 2009).2 In the chapters that follow, the con­trib­utors chart some of the signi­fic­ant tra­ ject­ories of par­ticu­lar castes and com­munit­ies, including those who joined the ranks of the growing middle class more recently, and they highlight the diverse histories, positions and relationships that shape the multiplicity of middle-­class practices they have adopted. The commonalities and dif­fer­ences are discussed through ethnographies of the practices adopted, values expressed and transmit­ ted, and the strat­egies employed, thereby highlighting wider pro­cesses that support the hege­mony of the middle class in con­tempor­ary India.

The embarrassment of the middle class It is neces­sary to embed such an empirical engagement with India’s middle classes into wider theories of class. As E.O. Wright has pointed out, the middle class constitutes an ‘embarrassment’ among scholars of class (see Wright 1985: 5). This is partly due to the fact that Marx’s comments on the middling classes lacked conceptual sharpness, but due also to the unexpected growth of the modern state and with it social groups who are not owners of capital but sell their labour power, while their status clearly distinguished them from both the working classes and the upper classes. Strictly speaking, the middle class poses a prob­lem for those analysing class purely in terms of labour, capital and histories of class struggles, as this rigid framework forces the often instable middle to be cast in the same garb as those directly in control of and ex­ploiting labour. Furthermore, even if we ignore the thorny issue of class consciousness, the study of the middle class in India and elsewhere highlights just how prob­lematic an empiricist approach to the middle class is more gen­erally. Thus, empirical diversity and indetermi­ nacy add to the conceptual prob­lems scholars have expressed when studying the middle class. However, there are ana­lyt­ical frameworks that allow us to focus precisely on those groups in the middle due to their attention to status and its reproduction

6   H. Donner and G. De Neve beyond capital/labour relations. With an inter­est in social mobility and life chances, Weberian approaches perceive class formation through a focus on edu­ cation, occupation and social networks, and a community’s relationship with the market. Weber, who himself ex­peri­enced the massive growth in white-­collar employment as the German state expanded, saw the formalization of status-­ orientated, professional networks as shaping entirely new col­lect­ive cultures. Fol­ lowing him, many scholars have con­sidered the middle class almost exclusively in terms of identities and social mobility, while inter-­class relations are solely addressed in terms of affirmative action. In empirical studies simil­ar­ities between those belonging to the so-­called ‘old middle class’ elites, whose educational, occupational and cultural horizons overlapped across incomes, and the newly opened oppor­tun­ities to realize social mobility amongst many others, are seen as proof of a shared middle-­class culture. Moreover, such approaches emphas­ize the reproduction of class status through education and look at shared values as a crucial marker of middle-­class identities, which are produced through intercon­ nected but diverse sub-­cultures. While much of this would apply across the globe, as the empirical study of the ‘New Middle Class’ in very different settings shows, there are neo-­Marxists who set out to unite some aspects of these two approaches (see Wright 2005b). A third approach which takes account of contra­dict­ory class positions and allows for the ana­lysis of the middle class as a social formation is closely related to the work of Pierre Bourdieu, whose careful ana­lysis of class reproduction is in­valu­able to any study of middleclassness (Bourdieu 1984). Bourdieu shows how every­day practices and sub-­cultures that make class identi­ ties pos­sible and reproduce in­equal­ity depend not so much on eco­nomic assets per se but rather, on the accumulation of different kinds of capital, including social and cultural capital. With regard to the middle class, Bourdieu’s work pushes three im­port­ant points, namely the role of culture as a set of differentiated ‘tastes’ and socialization as a set of consciously differentiating practices; the im­port­ance of every­day practices; and the different kinds of capital avail­able to the middle classes. It was the emphasis on the everday and on internalised behav­ iours and values that enabled Bourdieu to reunite the study of class as status with the view of class as a set of contra­dict­ory positions vis-­à-vis other classes. Such a per­spect­ive recog­nizes that eco­nomic, social and cultural capital are making middle-­class subjectivities and lifestyles pos­sible, and that the lack of one or the other makes specific class positions appear to be always antagonistic, even if they are ob­ject­ively characterized by shared inter­ests. While not distracting us from questions of capital, class relations and the ob­ject­ive shared inter­ests among members of a class as opposed to others, this approach ac­know­ledges that class positions may be defined by a plurality of cri­teria. Not only are they determined by the relations of production, but the latter depend on cultural traits, values, skills, expertise, tastes, manners and other embodied attributes that reproduce dif­ fer­ence and with it hierarchical relationships in every sphere of life. These enable hege­monic kinds of know­ledge, networks and socialities to materialize. The theor­et­ical problem that the study of empirical mater­ial related to the ques­ tion of the middle class poses is by now a common theme. Taking the study of the

Introduction   7 middle class as a pos­it­ive challenge, a sensitivity towards all three types of capital and the actual practices reproducing group-­based and indi­vidual class-­based iden­ tities allows us to emphas­ize the simil­ar­ities of pro­cesses apparent across time and space. For example, the im­port­ance of education and credentials shapes the middle-­class family (see Béteille 1993; Scrase 2002), in post-­liberalization India as much as in Turkey and elsewhere (Lange and Meier 2009; Rutz and Balkan 2010). Yet local idioms, in India most obviously mater­ializing and ex­peri­enced through caste and ethnic or religious origin, determine how these processes play out. Rather than fulfilling the epistemic ambition of defining, once and for all, the correct classification, of discovering the ‘real’ bound­ar­ies of the middle class, a Weberian sensibility encourages us to study in great detail the middle sections of modern soci­eties and how they relate to the market and the state through specific eco­nomic, occupational, educational and ideo­logical tra­ject­ories, which in turn result in hege­monic positions albeit contested ones. While structure is no doubt crucial to any ana­lysis of what being middle-class means in any given con­text, this volume seeks to con­trib­ute to debates about India’s middle classes on a specific level. First, in this volume we focus on ‘being middle-­ class’, that is, the practices and values that constitute a social field and the agency that is derived from it. We agree with Wacquant, who stipulates that ‘class identi­ ties, practices and “lived ex­peri­ence” are not “afterthoughts” tacked on to pre-­ existing classes; they enter into the very making of these classes’ (1992: 51). Thus, highlighting intra-­class pro­cesses rather than inter-­class relationships, the various con­trib­utors pay attention to im­port­ant themes that structure the lived ex­peri­ence and make middleclassness real. For example an emphasis on respectabil­ity, specific gender relations, and ideas about the family, and the value attached to education may be seen as markers of middle-classness. Second, the con­tri­bu­tions broaden the range of sites investigated beyond the current focus on consumption in the narrow sense of consumer identities. We agree that class formation includes the appropria­ tion of commodities as a suit­able mode of being middle-­class, but suggest that every step of the way these identities are contested and their meanings en­tangled with complex symbolic sys­tems beyond the cliché of India’s consumerist turn and the dy­namics of commodity consumption, or in fact the aesthetics attached to the com­ modity form. The chapters emphas­ize that structures and agency determining how middleclassness is realized stem from diverse cultural practices, values and identi­ ties, which extend well beyond consumerism. Thus, im­port­antly, our authors do not attempt to deny material and economic differences among those considered middle-class, for instance access to infra­ structure or globalized consumer goods, which shape discourses on middle-­class ways of life. Often these are effective even through their actual absence and in­access­ibil­ity, but the contributors emphas­ize contestations through other sources of identification, symbolic and social, which produce mater­ial dif­fer­ences, for instance caste or regional identity. These struggles, though repres­ented here mostly from an intra-­class per­spect­ive, relate the groups ‘above’ and ‘below’ to the middle class, and their severity and in­tens­ity comes to the fore in times of crisis – as evid­enced in the riots after the publication of the Mandal Commission

8   H. Donner and G. De Neve report in 1990s. Moreover, they do also produce the every­day viol­ence of class dif­fer­ence, as evid­enced, for instance, in the relationship between ser­vants and mistresses in middle-­class homes. Third, while the con­trib­utors to this volume do not deny the im­port­ance of structural constraints, as expressed for example in struggles around ser­vices and infrastructure, they first and foremost engage with the micro-­politics of ‘middle­ classness’: the unspectacular, the every­day, the routine and the mundane, which demarcate class as a social field in Bourdieu’s work. Thus, we sub­sti­tute the question of what constitutes the middle class in India in favour of an ex­plora­tion of when, where, how and why being middle-­class becomes an option, a pos­sib­il­ ity, desir­able or a prob­lem. Such an ethnographically inspired approach to the study of the middle class allows one to inject social theory with a sense of how relationships between classes play out on the ground, how subjectivities relate to group-­based identities, how apparent contra­dic­tions feed into the reproduction of values and practices sustaining hierarchies and protecting privileges. However, most of our authors do not seek to prioritize class over other struc­ tures of domination. On the contrary, what the mater­ial presented here emphas­izes is that the hege­monic character of middle-­class culture hinges on its intersection with other forms of in­equal­ity, often stemming from earl­ier status sys­tems. For example, a discourse on caste or religious af­fili­ation may present the ‘folk’ idiom used to de­scribe and thereby hide unequal power relations based on class, while structural in­equal­it­ies (espe­cially those of com­mun­ity, caste and gender) may be presented in the form of a critique of class relationships. A potent concern about sexual relations, family values and women’s beha­vi­our, for instance ideas about pol­itics, corruption, the state and anxi­eties about global cultures, are regu­larly expressed with regard to practices that are shared across the middle-­class spec­ trum. The contributions to this volume discuss the efficacy of those idioms and discourses to reproduce middle-class status depends on other factors, including religious, caste and community affiliation and economic standing.

Locating class today Over the last ten years or so, renewed media, official and aca­demic inter­est in the growing Indian middle class has changed the way in which middle-­class identities and relations are being discussed. An over­whelm­ing concern is the role consumerism plays in the lives of middle-­class Indians. Often this work relates India’s middle-­class lifestyles to ‘New Middle Classes’ elsewhere, as research highlights the link between expanding consumerism and India’s integration into global markets (Meier and Lange 2009: 2; Pinches 1999). In much of this liter­at­ ure being middle-­class is equated with being a consumer, and the study of the middle class has to some extent been reduced to the study of consumption prac­ tices. As values, identities, cit­izen­ship and youth cultures involve consumption, consumerism and the consumption of commodities have become the lens through which all con­tempor­ary trans­forma­tions of middle-­class lives are in­ter­ preted (Rajagopal 1999; Mazzarella 2003; Oza 2006; Derne 2008). Moreover,

Introduction   9 media, academia and the corporate sector seem to have joined hands in their ele­ vation of consumerism as the sole epistemological basis for the in­ter­pretation of con­tempor­ary social pro­cesses in India. While some com­ment­ators document the ways in which consumption allows indi­viduals and groups to create new identi­ ties (Liechty 2003; Lukose 2009), others see the culture of consumerism as an in­dica­tion of a wider crisis, evid­ent in middle-­class aban­don­ment of lib­eral values and an ethic of redis­tribu­tion that informed earl­ier nationalist discourses (Varma 1998; Gupta 2000). Irrespective of where one stands in these debates over the merits and perils of an emerging consumer culture, it is difficult to ignore the im­port­ance of con­tempor­ary repres­enta­tions of the middle classes as defined through such ‘new’ practices. The apparent contra­dic­tion, namely that a middle class existed in India from the co­lo­nial period onwards, and that a number of scholars claim that the middle class is new, is addressed in a fruitful manner by Leela Fernandes, who points out that: [T]he rise of the new Indian middle class represents the polit­ical construc­ tion of a social group that operates as a proponent of eco­nomic lib­eralization. This middle class is not ‘new’ in terms of its structural or social basis. . . . Rather, its newness refers to a pro­cess of production of a distinctive social and polit­ical identity that represents and lays claim to the bene­fits of liberalization. (2006: xviii) It is the promise of these bene­fits of lib­eralization that has attracted new and upwardly mobile groups to join in and that has turned discussions of middle-­ class consumerism – as the expression and idiom of lib­eralization’s promises – into ‘an entire social ontology’ (Mazzarella 2003: 12). Consumerism has thereby become the trope through which all other relationships, including those of the middle class with the state, with the poor, with globalization and with its own past, are discussed and understood (Srilata 1999; Rajagopal 1999; Dwyer 2000; Mazzarella 2003; Liechty 2003; Lukose 2009). While this fascination with con­ sumerism has only recently gained centre stage, to speak of an Indian middle class in terms of consumption is not a new phenomenon (McGowan 2006). In fact, as Joshi (2001) has pointed out, the roots of the idiom that relates consum­ erism to middleclassness have been present from the co­lo­nial period onwards. In this context, we do not seek to refute that consumption plays a major role in self-­definitions, pub­lic repres­enta­tions and every­day practices of middleclassness. Nor do we deny that many con­tempor­ary pro­cesses are ex­peri­enced by middle-­ class subjects through a consumerist epi­stemo­logy of sorts. What we do seek to point out, how­ever, is that the consumption of commodities is not the sole in­ter­ pretive and experiential framework of India’s middle-­class subjects. Their ex­peri­ ence remains tied with, and embedded into, other – and indeed earl­ier – concerns and preoccupations, such as those of caste, which are aligned with gender rela­ tions and the symbolic role of the family, and draw on a wider range of ontolo­ gies. The latter provide equally im­port­ant tropes through which middleclassness

10   H. Donner and G. De Neve is constructed and repres­ented, even if the recent onslaught of consumerist ideo­ lo­gies and practices is signi­fic­antly reshaping the efficacy and con­tent of those tropes as consumerism gradually penetrates more and more arenas of life. Anthropology, with its emphasis on eth­no­graphy appears use­ful here. Indeed, empirically orientated studies show that the ‘new’ middle class cannot be under­ stood merely in terms of consumerism, and that questions of social mobility, educational strat­egies, professional worlds, honour and respectabil­ity, and per­ sistent identities of caste, religion, language and region, are equally central to the formu­la­tion of con­tempor­ary middleclassness (Fernandes 2006; Kaviraj 1997; Derne 2008). Thus, narrow explanations of middle-­class identity in terms of con­ sumerism have been rightly criticized as too thin a basis for a ser­ious aca­demic engagement with class. In addition, they tend to neg­lect his­tor­ical pro­cesses. Varma asserts in this con­text that: When, in 1991, India embarked on a pro­cess of eco­nomic reform, opening its eco­nomy and inviting foreign investment, the Indian middle class came into new prominence. There was much debate about its actual size, its con­ sumption pattern, and the pace of its growth in the years to come. But in the gen­eral euphoria of change and anticipation, what seemed to have been overlooked was that the class in question was not conjured up overnight; it had a past and a his­tory, which preceded its great discovery as a consumer­ ist predator. (1998: x) Sociologists of India have insisted that class positions emerge in conjunction with relationships, self-­representations and practices based on caste, ethnic and religious af­fili­ations. Such af­fili­ations have been much more readily recog­nized in debates about the working class, and his­tor­ical and ethnographic studies have dem­on­strated the ways in which older af­fili­ations and identities feed into the for­ mation of emerging working-­class identities (Béteille 1965; Chakrabarty 1989; Chandavarkar 1998; Parry 2001; De Neve 2005). In a sim­ilar way, the con­trib­utors to this volume seek to relocate the study of the Indian middle class within an ana­lyt­ical framework that ac­know­ledges the mul­tiple articulations of group-­based identities and sys­tems of meaning avail­able in a place as diverse as con­tempor­ary India. An approach that focuses on conti­ nuities and trans­forma­tions does not deny the im­port­ance of consumerism, but argues for a re-­embedding of its ana­lysis within a study of the multiple every­day practices and ex­peri­ences that shape people’s lives, indexing extensive local intersections and his­tor­ical depth. Middleclassness, it is argued, is as much marked by both continuities and ongoing trans­forma­tions around family values, com­munal moralities and gender ideals as it is challenged by the influx of com­ modities and their appropriation (Fernandes 2006; Herring and Agarwal 2008; Fuller and Narasimhan 2007; Donner 2008; Ganguly-­Scrase and Scrase 2008). Some recent ethnographic studies have already picked up where earl­ier research had left off. Instead of emphasizing the nov­elty of middle-­class

Introduction   11 practices and sites currently being researched by numerous scholars (such as malls, mul­tiplexes, eating out, IT employment and gated com­munit­ies), a small number of researchers is shifting the ana­lyt­ical focus onto how middleclassness is produced through the articulation of new practices and sites with older values and preoccupations around status, gender and in­equal­ity. The chapters by Scrase and Ganguly-­Scrase, De Neve, Wilson and van Wessel illus­trate how these earlier preoccupations still include the institutions that have shaped and marked Indian middle-­class identity since Independence: specific occupational patterns, polit­ical formations, debates around education and patterns of stratification shaped by caste and class histories. De Neve’s chapter, for example, discusses how educational strat­egies are key to a rewriting of gendered urban identity pro­ duced among previously rural and less educated Gounders in Tamil Nadu, who are today affluent and globally in­teg­rated entre­pren­eurs. Moreover, while the con­trib­utors to this volume emphas­ize some of the common themes that produce a recog­niz­able middle-­class position in present-­ day India, they also draw attention to the remark­able diversity of middle class formation, as well as to the regionally specific histories and expressions of mid­ dleclassness, which are so often emphas­ized by informants themselves. This is, for example, par­ticu­larly striking in the case of Calcutta where, as Donner and Scrase and Ganguly-­Scrase point out, the Bengali middle class con­ tinues to reproduce its status at least in part by insisting on ethnic specificity. These ten­sions are also revealed in the less obvious case of Hindi films, dis­ cussed by Dwyer in this volume, who shows how the main themes and the per­ sonnel involved in the films signify a trans­national version of North Indian middleclassness. Finally, the case studies presented here emphas­ize the every­day practices and idioms through which middleclassness is constructed and expressed. For example, van Wessel’s Baroda interlocutors worry endlessly about the meaning of practices and goods that have infiltrated their lives, which they find difficult to make sense of within older moral frames of ref­er­ence. In stark contrast, Wilson’s Keralites recog­nize that the reflected glory that surrounds those who are edu­ cated and affluent needs to be actively harnessed in order to become appropri­ ately middle-class, and they do so by competing for the exclusive services provided by high-status medical professionals. In Donner’s example, Bengali mothers recreate middle-­class values on a day-­to-day basis through regional food practices, thereby reproducing upper-­caste histories, modern gender and intra-­ household relations, and produce class through cultural distinction. In Waldrop’s Delhi-­based study of women’s ‘kitty’ par­ties, the relaxed leisure ac­tiv­ities of affluent gov­ern­ment ser­vants’ wives provide the neces­sary backdrop for (strictly segregated) indulgence, but they also provide valu­able connections and a respite from the family in the form of conspicuous consumption. The way commodity consumption makes class-­based identities is addressed in a number of papers, most explicitly in Haynes’ detailed study of advertisers’ attempts to create a pan-­North Indian male consumer stereo­type. Here, as well as in Dwyer’s account of Hindi cinema’s con­tempor­ary struggle with its audiences’

12   H. Donner and G. De Neve hetero­geneous regional, religious and language attachments, it appears that class formation does not always relate in a linear manner to commodity consumption, as its agents have to work hard to create an audience of willing customers for their goods. The kind of ana­lysis put forward in this volume owes much to estab­lished sociological frameworks with a focus on status and life chances, values and moralities, occupational and educational histories, and every­day practices that enable wider, often col­lect­ive, strat­egies. The vantage points of the chapters are diverse, but in one way or another they are all informed by an interest in the symbolic aspects of class, the embodiment of class identities and the cultural reproduction of class dif­fer­ences. Within this framework class becomes signi­fic­ ant as lived and ex­peri­enced through embodied practices, and it is precisely in every­day discourse that the relational nature of class is revealed. Indeed, class identities and locations are con­tinu­ally formed in relation to – and as distinct from – those of others (Bourdieu 1984). At all times the signi­fic­ant others are members of the working class, but also col­lect­ive ‘others’ within the same class range, from whom one needs to distinguish oneself. The term ‘middleclassness’ as used in this volume presents a concept that refers simul­tan­eously to class location at an indi­vidual level and to the ex­peri­ ence of class as a broader cat­egory. We concur with Wright that due to its mul­ tiple asso­ci­ations, the use of class as a noun should be avoided, as it produces confusion at a conceptual level (Wright 2005a). The term middleclassness, on the other hand, marks the ten­sions arising from struggles over symbolic bound­ ar­ies and emphas­izes the fact that class status is reproduced through every­day practices and in a relational manner, but remains always contested (Bourdieu 1984). As Sherry Ortner points out, even if class discourses can be elusive in pub­lic debates, class as a reality that stems from the unequal distribution of cul­ tural and mater­ial resources constitutes much more than a discursively con­ structed repres­enta­tion (Ortner 2003: 11). For most cit­izens in India, class constitutes not only a socio-­economic reality that shapes their every­day ex­peri­ ence of education, marriage, family and consumerism, but it is also part of col­ lect­ive identities (it intersects with specific caste, religious, and ethnic af­fili­ations) and col­lect­ive pol­itics (for instance in Resident Welfare Associa­ tions and anti-­corruption activism). This is revealed in the con­tri­bu­tion of De Neve, who de­scribes how for Tiruppur’s entre­pren­eurs an emerging middle-­class identity articulates with histories of caste, status and rural origins, which together shape the success of their businesses. Even more blatantly, van Wessel’s, Scrase and Ganguly-­Scrase’s and Donner’s interlocutors frequently employ the cat­ egory ‘middle class’ when discussing his­tor­ical change and the post-­ liberalization socioscapes they find themselves in. Although these conversations highlight intersections with ethnic and regional identities, class-­based identities appear to be more malleable than those other points of ref­er­ence, and class is therefore often the trope evoked to speak about the more far-reaching changes in the social and eco­nomic fabric of society. In this sense, we agree with Liechty (2003), who suggests that we should avoid treating the middle class as a stable

Introduction   13 or fixed cat­egory, that is, as a final product of his­tory. He asserts, ‘if we under­ stand middleclassness as a cultural pro­ject or practice – rather than a social cat­ egory or empirical con­dition – we can begin to see how the local and the global are brought together in cultural pro­cess, not cultural outcome’ (2003: 21). In every­day talk about class, Indians routinely emphas­ize the ‘pro­ject’ character of being middle class, which both Ortner and Liechty identify as a main feature of this identity and location (Ortner 2003, 2006; Liechty 2003). Middleclassness relies heavily on im­agery and on the production and con­ sumption of images of spaces, sites and practices that are not neces­sar­ily ever fully realized. Thus, Haynes’ con­tri­bu­tion presents various ad­vert­ising agencies involved in creating the idea of the middle-­class consumer, which shaped local ideas about sal­ar­ied lifestyles from the co­lo­nial period onwards. Dwyer’s chapter sim­ilarly shows how Hindi cinema acts as a cata­lyst in imagining class and as a source of images that produce a middle-­class envir­on­ment. Class ‘as constantly in the making’ appears espe­cially clearly where rel­at­ive newcomers to this par­ ticu­lar status game are concerned. For example, De Neve’s newly affluent entre­ pren­eurs experiment with the norm­ative aspects of status and respectabil­ity as they negotiate gendered employment patterns and invest in novel, costly and extensive educational strat­egies. Haynes’ study of advertisements in the earl­ier period of middle-class formation shows that anxi­eties around masculinity had to be addressed by those selling commodities in order to reach their ‘middle-­class’ customers. It is precisely the ongoing production of middleclassness – constantly pursued, enacted and expressed through both symbolic and mater­ial discourses – that makes these identities elusive, unstable and marked by ten­sion. Minor mis­ demeanours – mis­takes in performance, articulation or pre­senta­tion – can have lasting effects on the indi­vidual concerned and damage a family’s reputation. Crucially, beha­vi­our and morals are subject to constant surveillance and critique by col­lect­ives which may be local, but may equally well be spread across global networks, including those of the extended family, neigh­bour­hood, caste or reli­ gious community. Obviously, working-­class culture is in many ways sim­ilarly produced through embodied practices and discursive bound­ar­ies. But unlike working-­class cultures, middleclassness remains intan­gible, ima­gined, as it is lived and ex­peri­ enced through desire and as­pira­tion rather than actual labour relations. Furthermore, as middleclassness is marked by an ‘as­pira­tional way of being’, to paraphrase Madan, its im­agery is eagerly consumed by middle-­class and working-­class subjects alike, even where most lack both the symbolic and eco­ nomic capital needed to realize it in a lasting manner (Munshi 2008). In con­tempor­ary India, images of middleclassness have acquired a hege­monic role, not least because the lifestyles that accom­pany them are closely entwined with the as­pira­tions and discourses of modernity. As many of the con­trib­utors show, gender relations and gendered bodies are specifically signi­fic­ant in the reproduction of middleclassness. More often than not, it is women who are still expected to embody a reified ‘tradition’ and to transmit its values to the next generation (van Wessel 2004, Donner 2008; Lukose 2009). This is illus­trated by Donner’s work on

14   H. Donner and G. De Neve the specific do­mesticities em­braced by Bengali middle-­class fam­il­ies, which require women to carefully manoeuvre traditional cuisine and the demands for global food practices, as well as by De Neve’s discussion of gender-­specific education, employ­ ment and marriage strat­egies pursued by wealthy Gounder fam­il­ies in urban Tamil Nadu. Both cases illus­trate that the making of class distinctions is not solely a mat­ter of pub­lic performance, as suggested in much of the liter­at­ure on India’s ‘new’ middle classes, but that it hinges on the reproduction of status within, and through, the do­mestic sphere, where class-­based identities are con­tinu­ously social­ ized and performed among and for kin (Frøystad 2006). A focus on the every­day performance of class-­based identities across both the pub­lic and the private divide allows us to unveil some of the discrepancies and ten­sions that emerge in middleclassness as a ‘way of life’. For example, novel images of what an appropriately gendered middle-­class person ought to be might lead men and women to present themselves as part of a crowd of daring consum­ ers and global achievers seeking exposure, while they are simul­tan­eously under pressure to embody ‘traditional’ attitudes informed by adherence to caste, gender, and generational and religious norms (Fuller and Narasimhan 2007; Benei 2008; Lukose 2009). Such frictions lead to ten­sions that men and women have to negotiate in their every­day lives, and for which solutions are not always easily found. Thus, pub­lic and private spheres are reformulated through the search for an adequate middle-­class persona, as indi­viduals struggle to create ‘suitably modern tradi­tion­ally Indian’ ways of being in the world.

Continuities and commonalities If we emphas­ize dif­fer­ences we also have to reflect on the commonalities and the continuities that shape the expression and consolidation of middleclassness over time. Let us briefly remind ourselves of some im­port­ant commonalities and continuities. First of all, few would dispute that there is indeed a general under­ standing of what makes the middle class evid­ent here. This is the case even where emergent lifestyles seem to have little in common with the image of the ‘old style’ sal­ar­ied middle class. For instance, the Tamil entre­pren­eurs de­scribed by De Neve share the tra­ject­ories of provincial cosmo­pol­itans like Frøystad’s suburban business fam­il­ies in Lucknow, the Malayalam Muslim migrants studied by Caroline and Filippo Osella, and Jeffrey’s North Indian low-­caste profes­ sional politicians, rather than those of metropolitan elites (Frøystad 2006; Osella and Osella 2006; Jeffrey 2008). But, second, re­gard­less of regional dif­fer­ences, being middle class implies a stake in specific institutional sites that reproduce status and standing, notably the education sys­tem. While few middle-­class parents would as­sume that education automatically provides job pro­spects, Wil­ son’s con­tri­bu­tion on educational strat­egies in Kerala shows that upwardly mobile fam­il­ies belonging to lower-­caste backgrounds invest as heavily in degrees and qualifications as the estab­lished middle class does. Third, re­gard­less of whether we talk about the Bengali-­speaking lower middle class of Calcutta who, as Scrase and Ganguly-­Scrase’s con­tri­bu­tion suggests, mourn the loss of

Introduction   15 old privileges associated with gov­ern­ment ser­vice, or the newly affluent members of Tamil Nadu’s former agricultural castes, all ima­gine themselves not only as Indians but also as parti­cip­ants in broader, often global, cultures. Lastly, even though we may be witnessing a certain disengagement of the middle classes from the pro­ject of the de­velop­mentalist state, as Varma and Gupta suggest (Varma 1998; Gupta 2000), con­tri­bu­tions to this volume (for example, Scrase and Ganguly-­Scrase’s) dem­on­strate that a majority of middle-­class house­ holds still depend – directly or indirectly – on ser­vices and oppor­tun­ities provided by the pub­lic sector (Jeffrey 2008). Thus, while we do not seek to promote a state-­ centred approach to the study of the middle class, its relationship with the state, even where it is an ambivalent one, remains signi­fic­ant. This is apparent in the strat­egies employed by members of the middle classes to gain access to education, but also in debates on reser­va­tion, due to the state mono­poly on certification. Fur­ thermore, all middle-­class cit­izens depend on infrastructure provided or regulated by the state. This ongoing involvement with the state is reflected par­ticu­larly well in struggles over urban space (Baviskar 2003; Fernandes 2006; Mawdsley 2004; Chatterjee 2006; Upadhyay 2009). It is therefore often in relation to urban pol­itics and education that the hege­mony of the middle classes in Indian pol­itics plays out, and that the mater­iality of class and class struggle become manifest. However, despite the per­vas­iveness of the state in middle-­class urban life, it is in­dis­put­able that pub­lic notions of being middle class have increasingly begun to include global discourses about trans­nationalism, privatized ser­vices, and (post) modernist urbanism. This im­agery has par­ticu­larly spread through the rise of spe­ cific industries, notably the IT sector, and the growth of inter­na­tional migration, which have both had un­pre­ced­en­ted effects on the ex­peri­ences and imaginations of India’s middle class (see Nisbett 2006; Fuller and Narasimhan 2007; Upadhyay 2009). While recognizing the impact of these recent imageries, we also seek to reiterate in this volume that the middle classes con­tinue to play a key role in the very reproduction of nar­rat­ives about India as a nation, even though some of those nar­rat­ives may tell a new story al­to­gether (Bardhan 1989). Symbolized in the energy and ingenuity of its iconic entre­pren­eurs, it is the power of ‘indi­vidual effort’, the im­port­ance of ‘family values’, and India’s ‘polit­ical weight’ – its ‘great power status’ as Amitav Ghosh’s informants explained when commenting on the nuclear programmes financed by the gov­ern­ment – that crystallize in con­tempor­ ary middle-­class nar­rat­ives about the nation circulated by and for its middle class (Ghosh 2005: 81). Thus, even where the state is not neces­sar­ily any longer con­ sidered a viable source of de­velopment and pro­gress, it remains key to the sym­ bolic reproduction and pub­lic imagination of the middle classes and thus – so the story goes – of India’s place in the world. Here, how­ever, we also need to ac­know­ledge the anxi­eties and un­cer­tainties that mark the middle-­class location, as well as the con­sider­able differ­enti­ation in terms of mater­ial wealth within this class. They provide a stark contrast to visions of omnipotence and power. Equally, per­vas­ive imageries of a middle class ‘in crisis’ (signified by the plight of the ‘lower’ middle classes who strug­ gle to match their eco­nomic­ally more successful peers) and a crisis of morality

16   H. Donner and G. De Neve prevail. As Sarkar has observed, such anxi­eties and the way mater­ial hardship produces them as middle-­class tropes are not just a hallmark of the present, but have a much longer history: [T]he anguish and frustrations of genteel pov­erty in this world of the unsuc­ cessful bhadralok – pandits losing patronage in the new era, ob­scure hack-­ writers, humble school-­teachers, clerks, unemployed educated youth, high school or college boys with highly un­cer­tain job pro­spects produced a late flowering of what may be called ‘Kaliyuga liter­at­ure’ in mid and late 19th century Bengal. (Sarkar 2002: 1549) The recent work by Jeffrey et al. (2008) on educated but unemployed Dalit youths in North India indexes sim­ilar disappointments and frustrations among social groups seeking to achieve upward mobility, while Lukose’s study (2009) of youths in Kerala points to the highly gendered nature of middle-­class as­pira­ tions shaping consumerism and cit­izen­ship. In this volume, per­vas­ive middle-­class fears of downward social mobility, which are always present, are shown to determine the ex­peri­ences of Scrase and Ganguly-­Scrase’s lower middle-­class informants in West Bengal. The latter bemoan the passing of a par­ticu­lar regional and upper-­caste middle-class culture, which in their view gave way to blatant consumerism and ended up disadvantag­ ing less affluent middle-class families. Similar concerns about the future, and evo­ cations of an al­to­gether better past sociality based on caste, are raised by Gujarati-­speaking elders in joint fam­il­ies inter­viewed by Van Wessel, who claim that youths are hooked on unfettered indi­vidualism and exclusively concerned with commodity culture. Here, as in the accounts of Wilson, De Neve and Donner, it appears that vernacular class cultures con­tinue to dominate and structure middle-­ class lives, and resist the homogenous consumerist ‘Indian’ middle-­class identity promoted in every living room by advertisers and Bollywood directors.

Conclusion The lifestyle associated with being middle class in India today stems from the interplay of co­lo­nial and post-­colonial nationalism, state-­sponsored de­velopment and specific histories of urbanization and industrialization. Today, middle-­class cit­izens belonging to different com­munit­ies share not only specific cultural traits through their involvement with formal education and commodity consumption, but more often than not as­pira­tions for a distinctly urban lifestyle. While the middle class based on these co­lo­nial histories represents, in the words of Béteille, a ‘rel­at­ ively new social formation’, its heterogeneity stems not from failed attempts to homogenize, but the ‘pre-­existing differ­enti­ation of Indian soci­ety on the basis of language, religion and caste’ (Béteille 2002: 74), which prevails and is detailed across the chapters of this volume. This latter fact, namely that regional and hierar­ chical elements shaped the way different groups parti­cip­ated in the pro­ject of

Introduction   17 polit­ical emancipation and cultural reform, has been driving the estab­lishment of the Indian middle class, but is currently often subsumed by the overarching inter­ est scholars have had in the his­tory of the Indian nation. However, the con­tri­bu­ tions to this volume show that class produces subjectivities, pol­itics and social relations in much the same way as nationalism does, as they are also socialized and embodied through every­day practices (Pratt 2001). Furthermore, many of the debates that surfaced at different times in different places (such as concerns about women’s education, debates on affirmative action and questions re­gard­ing reli­ gious identities in a modern world), while presented as distinctive and divisive in discourses about being middle class, have in fact united, rather than separated, the im­agery, pol­itics and practices currently employed by newcomers to the middle-­ class world. Middle-­class subjects engage in these practices, access these institu­ tions and produce these repres­enta­tions precisely because they share common as­pira­tions and have common inter­ests due to their class location. We would also like to draw attention to the differentiating factors such as lan­ guage, religion and eth­ni­city which, speaking from the point of view of interlocu­ tors and from empirical evid­ence, do define the Indian middle class as diverse and multifaceted. However, the chapters in this volume do not ad­voc­ate an approach that would promote the value of empirical data and par­ticu­laristic accounts over the need to reach for gen­eralizations and a con­tri­bu­tion to wider theor­et­ical debates. Rather, the con­tri­bu­tions illus­trate what can be achieved by digging deep, based on a long-­term com­mit­ment to field sites and questions, by taking ser­iously what we are told, and by presenting a careful and jargon-­free ana­lysis of lived ex­peri­ences through col­lect­ive as well as indi­vidual repres­enta­tions. As middle-­ class lifestyles are today within reach of a growing number of com­munit­ies and groups, struggles over meaning underpin rather than under­mine the pub­lic re­cog­ ni­tion of middle-­class status as desir­able. While middleclassness is increasingly shaped by trans­national movements and interdependencies, the homogenizing tendencies are counterbalanced by the simultaneous pro­mo­tion of regional and com­munal distinctiveness, often most strongly mobilized by the very com­munit­ ies that have become global players. Given the impact of globalization, new forms of capital are reshaping existing circulations, and in post-­liberalization India, social worlds appear to be more in flux today than before. Hence, if we do not look at class merely as a marker of status, but as a local source of power and control, middle-­class identities resist any simplistic way to de­scribe them in terms of in­equal­it­ies alone. Here as elsewhere the ana­lysis of class needs to ac­know­ledge that in post-­colonial soci­eties in­equal­it­ ies are fragmented and interrelated, and that gender, regional and com­munal histo­ ries play a pivotal role in the way they are ex­peri­enced (Wright 2005c: 190–1). Thus, we argue for an understanding of middleclassness as a shared life-­world and a way of being that is produced through gendered ethnic, com­mun­ity and religious dif­fer­ences and histories on the one hand, and a distinct way of engag­ ing with the state and its institutions, the market and a range of hege­monic ideo­ lo­gies, values and moralities on the other hand. It is through every­day practices in both the pub­lic and the private sphere that the middle class is ultimately

18   H. Donner and G. De Neve productive of the middle class. Such a per­spect­ive, this volume suggests, can only be realized through a focus on its urban manifestations and on work on rural elites (see Jeffrey, Jeffery and Jeffery 2008). The con­tri­bu­tions to this volume reveal that the im­agery of the ‘new’ middle class needs to con­sider both the repres­enta­tions of class and the social relations that go into its making. As Sherry Ortner remarks, we need to acknowledge that cultural repres­enta­tion ‘hides social dif­fer­ence, even as it reveals (a certain pic­ ture of ) social reality; that the amorph­ous­ness of the repres­enta­tional pro­cess (. . .) hides the ways in which different parts of the mix of images actu­ally apply to different and even antagonistic social locations; that a theorized framework allows us to begin to sort out what goes where’ (Ortner 2006: 102). Major shifts in class ana­lysis are reflected in this volume: First, we find that the gap between the repres­enta­tion of class as relational and the lived ex­peri­ence of class in terms of exclusionary practices has become more signi­fic­ant. In this sense class-­based identities re­semble the identity pol­itics Giddens depicts as typical for ‘modern’ pro­jects of self-­fashioning (Giddens 1991). Everyday ex­peri­ences of class positions in terms of differ­enti­ation from others ‘below’ and ‘above’ sit uncomfortably with repres­enta­tions of class-­based identities in the pub­lic sphere that emphas­ize commonality of as­pira­tions and practices, such as those embodied in consumerism (see Dickey 2000; Liechty 2003). Second, and stemming from this epistemological prob­lem, present-­day notions of what constitutes middleclassness are increasingly framed with ref­er­ence to trans­national as well as regional and local identities, which are laboriously constructed through every­day practices. Thus, the micro-­study of local discourse and the quotidian allows for the ana­lysis of the way every­day practice ‘recast[s] the middle class cit­izen as a central agent for the revisioning of the Indian nation in the con­text of globalization’ (Fernandes 2000: 90). Even where the practices differ they are producing shared cultural imaginaries that make middle-­class lives in South Asia, and indeed beyond, com­ par­able and the space of a globalized Indian middle-­class culture coherent. This coher­ence is prob­ably more recent than the continuities of some themes suggest, but eco­nomic integration and the accom­panying cultures of affluence flourishing in the cities, specific com­munit­ies and entire regions helped to bring middle-­class lifestyles into new terrains. Both the attendant im­agery and the rel­ev­ant practices are now open to appropriation in ways they have never been before.

Notes 1 This main body of sociological liter­at­ure on India’s con­tempor­ary middle class consists of empirical research conducted before 1990, which broadly covers the cat­egor­ies migration and urbanization; class and caste; consumer and eco­nomic beha­vi­our; educa­ tional and occupational choice; res­id­en­tial and family patterns; women’s empowerment and working lives. Extensive bibliographies can be found in Vatuk (1972); Weiner and Katzenstein (1981); Bardhan (1989), as well as Ahmad and Reifeld (2002). 2 This volume resulted from an interdisciplinary conference held in July 2007 at the Univer­ sity of Sussex, funded by the de­part­ments of anthropology at Sussex and at the LSE, which brought together a large number of scholars working on different aspects of

Introduction   19 middle-­class cultures. The editor and the authors are grateful for the input of all those who parti­cip­ated and presented papers, in par­ticu­lar co-­organizer Filippo Osella and the anonym­ous reviewers for very detailed comments an each chapter, and to Dorothea Schaefter and Leanne Hinves at Routledge for supporting the project.

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Introduction   21 Mankekar, P. (1999) Screening Culture, Viewing Politics: an eth­no­graphy of tele­ vision, womanhood, and nation in post-­colonial India, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Markowits, C. (2008) Merchants, Traders, Entrepreneurs: Indian business in the co­lo­nial era, London: Palgrave. Mawdsley, E. (2004) ‘India’s middle classes and the envir­on­ment’, Development and Change 35: 79–103. Mazzarella, W. (2003) Shovelling Smoke: ad­vert­ising and globalization in con­tempor­ary India, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Mazzarella, W. (forthcoming) ‘Indian middle class’ in R. Dwyer and S. Sinha (eds) Keywords in South Asian Studies, London: Routledge. McGowan, A. (2006) ‘An all-­consuming subject?: women and consumption in late-­ nineteenth and early-­twentieth-century western India’, Journal of Women’s History, 18: 31–54. Meier, L. and Lange, H. (eds) (2009) The New Middle Classes: globalizing lifestyles, consumerism and envir­on­mental concern, Dordrecht: Springer. Michelutti, L. (2008) The Vernacularisation of Democracy: pol­itics, caste and religion in India, Delhi: Routledge. Misra, B.B. (1961) The Indian Middle Classes: their growth in modern times, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mines, M. (1984) The Warrior Merchants: textiles, trade and territory in south India, Cam­ bridge: Cam­bridge University Press. Munshi, S. (2008) ‘Yeh Dil Maange More: television and consumer choices in a global city’ in C. Jaffrelot and P. van der Veer (eds) Patterns of Middle Class Consumption in India and China, Delhi: Sage. Nisbett, N. (2006) ‘The internet, cybercafes and the new social spaces of Bangalorean youths’ in S.M. Coleman and P. Collins (eds) Locating the Field: space, place and con­ text in anthropology, Oxford: Berg. Ortner, S. (2003) New Jersey Dreaming: capital, culture, and the class of ’58, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Ortner, S. (2006) Anthropology and Social Theory: culture, power and the acting subject, Chapel Hill, NC: Duke University. Osella, F. and Osella, C. (2000) Social Mobility in Kerala: modernity and identity in conflict, London: Pluto Press. Osella, F. and Osella, C. (2006) ‘Once upon a time in the west: stories of migration and modernity from Kerala, South India’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 12: 569–88. Oza, R. (2006) The Making of Neolib­eral India: nationalism, gender, and the paradoxes of globalisation, Delhi: Routledge. Parry, J. (2001) ‘Ankalu’s errant wife: sex, marriage and industry in con­tempor­ary Chhattis­ garh’, Modern Asian Studies 35: 783–820. Pinches, M. (1999) Culture and Privilege in Capitalist South Asia, New York: Routledge. Pratt, J. (2001) ‘Anthropology and polit­ical movements’, Journal of Mediterranean Studies, 11: 297–318. Quayum, S. and Ray, S. (2003) ‘Grappling with modernity: India’s respectable classes and the culture of do­mesticity’, Ethnography, 4: 520–35. Rajagopal, A. (1999) ‘Thinking about the new middle class: gender, ad­vert­ising and pol­itics in an age of globalisation’ in R.S. Rajan (ed.) Signposts: gender issues in post-­ independence India, Delhi: Kali for Women.

22   H. Donner and G. De Neve Ray, R.K. (1996) Mind, Body and Society: life and mentality in co­lo­nial Bengal, Delhi: Oxford University Press. Roy, M. (1972) Bengali Women, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rutz, H.J. and Balkan, E.M. (2010) Reproducing Class: education, neo­liberalism, and the rise of the new middle class in Istanbul, Oxford: Berghahn. Sangari, K. and Vaid, S. (eds) (1989) Recasting Women: essays in co­lo­nial his­tory, Delhi: Kali for Women. Sarker, S. (1997) Writing Social History, Delhi: Oxford University Press. Sarkar, S. (2002) Modern India: 1885–1947, Delhi: Oxford University Press. Sarkar, T. (2002) Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation: com­mun­ity, religion and cultural nationalism, Cam­bridge: Cam­bridge University Press. Scrase, T. (2002) ‘Television, the middle classes and the trans­forma­tion of cultural identities in West Bengal, India’, Gazette: The International Journal for Communication Studies, 64: 323–42. Seymour, S. (1999) Women, Family and Childcare in India: a world in trans­ition, Cam­ bridge: Cam­bridge University Press. Srilata, K. (1999) ‘The story of the up-­market reader: Femina’s “new woman” and the norm­ative fem­in­ist subject’, Journal of Arts and Ideas, 32–3: 61–72. Stridharan, E. (2004) ‘The growth and sectoral composition of India’s middle class: its impact on the pol­itics of eco­nomic lib­eralization’, India Review, 3–4: 405–28. Tarlo, E. (1996) Clothing Matters: dress and identity in India, London: Hurst. Timberg, T.A. (1978) Marwaris: from traders to industrialists. Delhi: Vikash. Upadhyay, C. (2009) ‘India’s “new middle class” and the globalising city: software profes­ sionals in Bangalore’ in L. Meier and H. Lange (eds) The New Middle Classes: globalizing lifestyles, consumerism and envir­on­mental concern, Dordrecht: Springer. van der Veer, P. (1994) Religious Nationalism: Hindus and Muslims in India, Berkeley: University of California Press. van Wessel, M. (2004) ‘Talking about consumption: how an Indian middle class dissociates from middle-­class life’, Cultural Dynamics, 16: 93–116. Varma, P. (1998) The Great Indian Middle Class, Delhi: Penguin. Vatuk, S. (1972) Kinship and Urbanization: white collar migrants in north India, Berkeley: University of California Press. Walsh, J.E. (2004) Domesticity in Colonial Bengal: what women learned when men gave them advice, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wacquant, L. (1992) ‘Making class: the middle class(es) in social theory and social struc­ ture’ in Scott G. McNall, Rhonda Levine and Rick Fantasia (eds) Bringing Class Back In: con­tempor­ary and his­tor­ical per­spect­ives, Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Weiner, M. and Katzenstein, M.F. (eds) (1981) India’s Preferential Policies: migrants, the middle classes, and ethnic equality, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Wright, E.O. (1985) Classes, London: Verso. Wright, E.O. (2005a) ‘Introduction’ in E.O. Wright (ed.) Approaches to Class Analysis, Cam­bridge: Cam­bridge University Press. Wright, E.O. (2005b) ‘Foundations of neo-­Marxist class ana­lysis’ in E.O.Wright (ed.) Approaches to Class Analysis, Cam­bridge: Cam­bridge University Press. Wright, E.O. (2005c) ‘Conclusion: if “class” is the answer, what is the question?’ in E.O.Wright (ed.) Approaches to Class Analysis, Cam­bridge: Cam­bridge University Press.

1 Masculinity, advertising and the reproduction of the middle-­class family in Western India, 1918–19401 Douglas E. Haynes Scholars working on con­tempor­ary India have widely recog­nized consumption as a crit­ical arena in the shaping of the middle classes since 1980.2 Until recently, how­ever, such a per­spect­ive has been missing in writing on the co­lo­nial period. Historians have typ­ic­ally associated the middle class with the de­velopment of new professional occupations, with movements of social reform and ideas about gender relations, and with nationalist pol­itics, but rarely with consumer practices and values.3 But by the end of the co­lo­nial period, the use of mater­ial goods and new forms of leisure certainly had become major arenas for constituting what it meant to be ‘modern’, the central discursive terrain around which those who self-­consciously saw themselves as ‘middle class’ came to define their identities. This essay examines the place of ad­vert­ising in this pro­cess of self-­definition, focusing on the way advertisements parti­cip­ated in the forging of a new modern and middle-­class masculinity between 1918 and 1945. During this period, large businesses in India began to formulate more soph­istic­ated advertisements geared toward generating a consumer base among the educated em­ployees of the co­lo­ nial administration and private com­panies. They came to direct much of this effort towards men, whom they gen­erally believed to be the key de­cision makers determining how family resources were alloc­ated. Central to a wide range of sales pitches was a common set of themes. Increasingly, advertisers drew upon notions of male respons­ib­ility as fathers and husbands within conjugal fam­il­ies, and evoked un­cer­tainties among men about their abil­ity to fulfil these respons­ ibil­ities. The essay focuses on ad­vert­ising in Western India for three different kinds of consumer goods – insurance, Horlicks (a malted milk drink) and tonics – to illus­trate this argument. Through this examination, the essay ex­plores the intersection of capit­al­ism, the emergence of middle-­class family ideals, and consumption in urban India. Theoretically, per­spect­ives on advertisements have tended to fall into two contra­dict­ory positions. One approach has seen advertisers as figures able to engineer novel forms of consciousness that encourage radic­ally new kinds of expenditures (for instance, Ewen 1976; Strasser 1989). In purest form, this per­ spect­ive renders consumers into passive recipients of ad­vert­ising messages, as persons whose minds are easily moulded. An al­tern­ative view has been to suggest that advertisers typ­ic­ally tap into power­ful ideas and values already

24   D.E. Haynes circulating in soci­ety. A soph­istic­ated version of this approach is associated with scholars such as Timothy Burke, who has insisted that, to be successful, an advertisement needs to locate itself in ‘prior meanings’ understood by consumers. In his book on Zim­babwe, for instance, Burke (1996) suggests that advertisers of new products there drew upon a founda­tion of per­spect­ives about hygiene, modernity, commerce and consumption that had emerged in the decades before the advertisements appeared.4 This paper steers something of a middle course between these two positions. It argues that ad­vert­ising during the 1930s steeped itself in the values of a ‘new masculinity’ that had long been de­veloping among educated Indians as they constructed identities as members of a middle class differentiated from other cat­ egor­ies of actors, for instance, aristocrats, merchants and workers. These conceptions drew upon ideals of modern conjugality, promoting the primacy of the heterosexual bonds between husband and wife over other potential affective ties, and holding husbands to be solely respons­ible for the biological, eco­nomic and social reproduction of the nuclear family. By the early twentieth century, they had gained a strong foothold among the middle strata in urban soci­ety, but they competed with al­tern­ative models of maleness, including those based on obli­ga­tions to the joint family and the freedoms of single males.5 Developing cam­paigns for a variety of products around the new masculinity during the 1930s, advertisers in effect worked to elevate its position to one of dominance and to create a psychic link between the achievement of proper manhood and the consumption of certain commodities. To draw upon Arvind Rajagopal’s (1998) phrasing, advertisements advanced the ‘ped­ago­gical pro­ject’ of constructing middle-­class male consumers with exclusive com­mit­ments to the conjugal family. Advertisers thus neither created wholly new values conducive to unbridled consumption nor did they simply take ad­vant­age of a stable and fully tri­ umph­ant set of values; rather they became parti­cip­ants in existing pro­cesses through which masculinity was being reconfigured.

Advertising and the Indian middle class Advertisement for Indian and global com­panies expanded and changed its character between the two world wars.6 Before 1918, a large proportion of the commercial notices in news­papers might be called ‘bazaar’ advertisements. They were submitted by local businesses, which formulated advertisements consisting mostly of long verbal messages and very simple drawings in order to market their goods. Euro­pean firms did advertise as well during this period, though their notices usually reflected limited investment and often involved straight­forward replication of appeals drawn up in the metropole, ones relying on Euro­pean images and captions. After the First World War, how­ever, global and Indian consumer-­oriented com­panies began to devote signi­fic­antly more resources to ad­vert­ising. Sometimes they managed their own marketing efforts on the subcontinent by hiring ad­vert­ising specialists directly. In other cases, they employed professional ad­vert­ising agencies to do the job.

Masculinity, advertising and the middle class   25 Whether they were in-­house specialists or external agencies, whether they worked for foreign firms or for South Asian businesses, advertisers increasingly made a concerted effort to Indianize, that is, to cease merely reproducing Euro­pean advertisements and to de­velop appeals that they believed would capture the imagination of local consumers. L.A. Stronach, who founded an ad­vert­ising firm in Bombay during the 1920s, would later write: ‘the main press advertisements which came from Britain or Amer­ica, and were placed direct with news­papers, to my mind were quite useless at product-­selling, because they were prepared by and for the Euro­pean mentality, and there were only a half million Euro­peans, including ser­vice personnel, in the whole of India (Stronach n.d.).’ Stronach de­veloped cam­ paigns for his clients around themes he felt would appeal to the pref­er­ences of the urban middle class. The Amer­ican firm J. Walter Thompson Company let its clients all over the world know that ad­vert­ising would not be simply translated, promising instead ‘copy written on the spot’ by people familiar with local pref­er­ ences.7 According to one in­ternal letter, ‘the sales record of our clients is evid­ence of the abil­ity of our staff to apply the advanced ad­vert­ising skill of Amer­ica, adapting and modifying it as con­ditions and customs demand [italics mine].’ (‘Memo to Mr. Hutchins’, 1936: 2). In India, Thompson targeted the lit­er­ate strata in cities, which its reports estim­ated at about 13 per cent of the urban popu­la­tion (‘Notes on Indian Advertising’, 1938: 4–9). Agencies in Bombay hired artists to depict images of Indian persons and settings, employed translators to render Euro­pean copy into regional languages, and sometimes conducted simple investigations into Indian market con­ditions (‘Report on India, Burma and Ceylon’, 1931; ‘Notes on Indian Advertising’, 1938: 4–9). The heads of the local branches of these agencies, such Edward Fielden (who led Thompson’s office in Bombay during the 1930s) and Stronach, took pride in the expertise they had accu­mu­lated about local soci­ety through conversation and travel. They also relied on Indian subordinates – themselves drawn from the middle class – in de­veloping understandings of local soci­ety and consumer behaviours. As they accu­mu­lated know­ledge about pro­spective markets and sought to Indianize their appeal, professional advertisers col­lect­ively came to centre their ad­vert­ ising pitches around the nuclear family which, as we shall see, was becoming central to the self-­definition of the middle class. Seemingly, they calculated that the evocation of anxi­eties about the achievement of respons­ible conjugality constituted the best stra­tegic approach to prompt fam­il­ies to break with pre-­existing patterns of expenditure and to buy branded products. Advertisements oriented toward women, for instance, stressed the ways that the products helped wives to cope with childbirth, fulfil do­mestic expectations and make themselves more attractive for their husbands. Concern about the health of chil­dren was featured in advertisements for soap, veget­able oil and prepared foods. Most im­port­antly for this essay, cam­paigns for a great variety of products directed their pitch to men, drawing upon power­ful discourses in middle-­class soci­ety about male familial obli­ga­tions. There is little direct evid­ence about how the intended audience perceived these forms of ad­vert­ising, but we can clearly locate such appeals in wider discussions of masculinity that were going on in a range of other media at the time.

26   D.E. Haynes

The context of ‘prior meanings’: the new masculinity Reformu­la­tion of the self-­conceptions of men employed in the ser­vice professions, who were coming to constitute the Indian middle class, was a pro­cess that had been going on since the late nine­teenth century. There is already an extensive liter­at­ure on some aspects of this trans­forma­tion. Much of it focuses on co­lo­nial perceptions of Indian males as weak and ‘effeminate’ and their cor­res­ ponding effort to assert virile identities to counter these characterizations, whether through the celeb­ra­tion of phys­ical culture, martial values and milit­ant Hinduism or the em­brace of various kinds of asceticism (see, for instance, Sinha 1995; Nandy 1983; Rudolph and Rudolph 1967; Chowdhury 2001; Banerjee 2005). This research has con­trib­uted in rich ways to our understanding of the modes of becoming male in the pub­lic realm, but it says rel­at­ively little about conceptions of masculinity within the family. To some extent, Partha Chatterjee’s influ­en­tial argument (1989) that middle-­class ideo­logy created a bifurcation of the spiritual, the home and the female on the one hand, and the mater­ial, the pub­lic and the male on the other, may have had the effect of pre-­empting ser­ious examination of masculinity within the do­mestic con­text.8 If we are to understand the universe of prior meanings that informed corporate advertisements directed toward men in the interwar period, we thus need to turn first to scholarship that is about the family and about women. There is a wide range of research that addresses the ways in which notions of conjugality and do­mesticity were involved in shaping middle-­class identities. Dipesh Chakrabarty (1994) has suggested that the reformu­la­tion of family ideals was strongly associated with nationalism, as educated Bengalis sought to create a sense of dis­cip­lined do­mesticity, one based upon notions of orderliness in the home and affection between husband and wife. Pradeep Kumar Bose (1995, 1997) sim­ilarly has stressed the im­port­ance of a new discourse sur­round­ing the nuclear family that was focused on raising and disciplining chil­dren and on shielding its members from the disruptive influences of the joint family. As a number of scholars have dem­on­strated, these notions of conjugality were not simply foreign imports, but reflected compromises with pre-­existing high-­caste pat­ri­archies (Gupta 2002: 125). In her work on late nine­teenth century women in Bengal, Judith Walsh has posited the notion of ‘global do­mesticity’, arguing that do­mestic ideas and relationships were hybrid products reflecting the inter­ action of trans­national discourses and ‘language, beliefs, ideas, and values of pre-­existing indi­gen­ous family relationships and do­mestic ar­range­ments’ (2004: 27). The role of the housewife was no doubt central in these new conceptions (Sarkar, 1992; Hancock 2001; Banerjee 2004; McGowan 2006, 2009). Late nine­teenth century texts written for women examined the range of tasks they were expected to perform within the home, including food pre­para­tion, child care and the management of household finances. The offering of companionship to the husband and other ac­tiv­ities that would make life easier for him were crit­ical features of these conceptions of do­mesticity (Walsh 2004).

Masculinity, advertising and the middle class   27 But while the rise of the conjugal para­digm involved a refashioning of expectations of women within the home, it inev­it­ably prompted reconceptualization of male roles as well. The ideal of the nuclear family elevated the husband to a position of new power, but it also foisted upon him an almost exclusive expectation to ensure the secur­ity of its members. In the ideal, he should no longer rely on the col­lect­ive resources of the joint family, and he had obli­ga­tions to insulate his wife from meddlesome tendencies of extended kin. He was expected to propagate chil­dren, espe­cially sons, who would carry on the family’s status into the next generation. He also had a role in the upbringing of his offspring, ensuring they got a proper education and participating in the cultivation of their intellects and phys­ical de­velopment. In short, men were to play a special part in the biological, eco­nomic and social reproduction of the nuclear family. The codes of the new masculinity were set forth in various discourses that often invoked the common trope of incapa­city and weakness – so crucial in the conceptualization of male roles in pub­lic arenas – as they estab­lished expectations for men in the do­mestic setting. Here we can only identi­fy some of the gen­ eral contours of this de­velopment, brushing over to a great extent the regional dif­fer­ences involved. Indian fiction of the late nine­teenth and early twentieth centuries repeatedly focused on the in­abil­ity of husbands to protect their wives from power­ful forces issuing from the extended family or from the extra-­familial world. For instance, many of Tagore’s writings have as a main character an ineffectual husband who tragically fails to shield his wife from societal pressures.9 Even more common were writings that focused on the fate of men unable to resist parental interference or to overcome difficult family circumstances so that they could unite with their true loves in marriage, including such famous novels as Saratchandra Chattopadhyay’s Devdas (1917) and Govardhanram Tripathi’s Saraswatichandra (1993 [1887–1901]).10 Much of the tragedy in the main character’s situ­ation in each case rests in his failure to fulfil the roles of male householder, husband and father, often due to his own shortcomings.11 Each work linked wider discourses about male weakness and inaction with the failure to realize ideals of the conjugal relationship.12 Publications stressing worries about the in­abil­ity to ensure the eco­nomic well-­ being of the nuclear family also were pre­val­ent. Insecurities about sal­ar­ied employment based upon the time clock and tight supervision by (often Euro­pean) bosses had long been pre­val­ent among office workers. As Prashant Kidambi (2010) has argued for Bombay, concern about the mater­ial sustain­abil­ity of the family became par­ticu­larly central to middle-­class self-­fashioning in the interwar period. While the ranks of lit­er­ate young men entering the ser­vice sector had expanded con­sider­ ably before the First World War, inflation, retrenchment and unemployment characterized its aftermath. Those with sal­ar­ied jobs worried that their fam­il­ies might fall from the ranks of respectable people. In Western India, men employed in the ser­vice professions typ­ic­ally did not possess the resources controlled by landed fam­il­ies (that is, land) or merchants (that is, family businesses) that could be passed on to their offspring to guarantee eco­nomic secur­ity and respectabil­ity. Instead fathers needed to invest in that distinctively middle-­class form of social

28   D.E. Haynes capital – education – to make sure that their sons could de­velop successful careers and that their daughters could marry into well-­established households. As Caroline Wilson’s essay in this volume illus­trates for a later period, providing education for one’s offspring is central to the reproduction of the South Asian family and its middle-­class status. Kidambi’s discussion of periodicals among the Kanara Saraswat Brahmans shows that members of the com­mun­ity regu­larly expressed concern about finding work, living beyond the family’s means, and being able to afford their chil­dren’s schooling. These pub­lications placed a heavy emphasis on the role of husbands in sustaining the position of the family, and did not mention any potential role for extended kin. In effect the journals called for a dis­cip­lined, respectable kind of husbandhood that rejected frills in order to maintain the stability of the conjugal unit. Public debates also placed a special onus on men for the phys­ical viabil­ity of their offspring. As Bose (1997) has indicated, the new conjugal ideal possessed a highly medicalized character; maintaining the subsistence and health of chil­ dren was its central purpose. During the 1920s, discussions of the potential for the phys­ical deterioration of offspring (and the consequent deterioration of the Indian nation) became widespread, and these squarely placed respons­ib­ility for this de­velopment on the improper beha­vi­ours of men under the old pat­ri­archal order. A major debate over these issues was precipitated by Katherine Mayo’s Mother India, which argued that the ‘inertia, helplessness, lack of initiative and origin­al­ity, lack of staying power and of sustained loyalties, sterility of enthusiasm, weakness of life vigour itself ’ were due to oppressive practices of men, excessive male sexuality, and in­ad­equate health care (1955 [1927]: 16).13 Similar arguments were made in the con­text of the debate over the Sarda Act, which raised the age of marriage. Eugenic theories suggested that child marriage, dowry and other forms of traditional gender relations might be respons­ible for unhap­pi­ness, the phys­ical weakness of progeny and the production of chil­dren in­cap­able of con­trib­ut­ing to the wel­fare of the coun­try. ‘Child marriage,’ N.S. Phadke insisted, ‘leads to phys­ical deterioration. It not only under­mines the muscular strength of the people, but imperceptibly deprives them of all pluck and daring, all mental and moral stamina.’ Thus, Phadke reasoned, it rendered the coun­try susceptible to foreign domination. While Phadke’s main rem­edy to this prob­lem – love marriage – was not uni­ver­sally en­dorsed, the modern conjugal family, headed by fathers who provided companionship and affection to their wives and mater­ial sup­port to their chil­dren, was widely regarded as an effect­ive means of preventing the pos­sible reproduction of phys­ical and mental enervation into the next generation (1929: 68).14 Anxieties about procre­ation also stemmed from concerns about the potential effects of rapid change on men, the sedentary character of urban life and a propensity toward indi­vidualism, supposedly reflected in beha­vi­ours such as masturbation (Pande 2005). In other words, con­ tempor­ary writings suggested that the family was threatened by a wide range of prevailing practices, and they challenged men to reform indi­vidually and col­lect­ ively to ensure the production of hardy, energetic chil­dren and thus promote the revitalization of society.

Masculinity, advertising and the middle class   29 Women parti­cip­ated in constructing the new masculinity as well as men. The insistence in some women’s liter­at­ure that a pri­mary ob­ject­ive of wives should be to ensure the husband’s con­tentment so that he would not waste family resources or let his attention wander outside the home effect­ively estab­lished codes for respectable male beha­vi­ours even as they put forward prescriptions for women. Women’s autobiographies frequently criticized men for failure to live up to family respons­ibil­ities. While this aspect of their con­tent has been in­ter­ preted as evid­ence of a new fem­in­ism, it might also be characterized as an effort to enforce strictures of global middle-­class conjugality on husbands.15 Men’s encouragement of female do­mesticity has been well discussed, but the involvement of women in shaping masculinity requires signi­fic­ant further investigation.16 Thus a wide array of writings and other forms of pub­lic expression set out stand­ards for appropriate male beha­vi­our, often in discourses that focused on un­cer­tainties about men’s abil­it­ies to meet these stand­ards. But while these discussions had been going on for many decades, the new masculinity did not enjoy a position of uncontested hege­mony among educated urban males. For many of those employed in gov­ern­ment or in private com­panies, the conjugal family was often an ideal rather than a social reality; it also competed with the attractions of al­tern­ative masculine models. Economic circumstances and social factors frequently made it more viable to remain in extended households. The joint family, where obli­ga­tions to brothers, fathers and other male kinfolk constituted the pri­ mary social bond for men, in many cases exerted a power­ful appeal.17 Many educated males were new migrants to cities, sometimes living together with other young single men in chawls, tenements or small flats until they could afford to marry or to bring their fam­il­ies from rural areas (Rao 2007). As Kaushik Bhaumik has argued, a culture of the young, associated with the value of indi­ vidual freedom and with leisure activity such as cinema going, thrived in Bombay; this culture seemingly championed the homosociality of single men against the pull of conjugal relationships (2010). In short, no one para­digm had won out by the interwar period, and many men may have felt some ambivalence about the new masculinity.

Advertisements and male responsibilities While consumer-­oriented capit­al­ism did not origin­ate the discussions of modern maleness, it did play a signi­fic­ant role in advancing the position of the new masculinity in this contested field. Advertisements during the interwar period rarely sought to encourage an ethos of conspicuous consumption by stressing the pleasure men could obtain from using certain products. Far more commonly it drew upon a discourse of anxiety about expectations that were in danger of being unfulfilled. Advertising pitches came to place a tre­mend­ous primacy on male obli­ga­tions to the nuclear family; they implicitly defined other pos­sible forms of beha­vi­our as traditional, frivolous, irrespons­ible or not respectable. The centrality of this approach is striking. Thus far I have found no corporate

30   D.E. Haynes advertisements between 1918 and 1940 that addressed the joint family.18 Nor did advertisements for consumer goods normally evoke conceptions rooted in the cultures of youth associated with single men. Finally, advertisements gave voice to conceptions that were expected to have India-­wide reson­ance; they often masked regional vari­ations in the conjugal para­digm. In short, advertisements became vehicles for schooling male consumers in an emerging hege­monic model of manhood, discouraged al­tern­ative masculinities, and created a mental asso­ci­ ation between the ful­fil­ment of the new ideal and the consumption of specific goods.19 The evolution of ad­vert­ising cam­paigns for three different types of commodities illus­trate this new emphasis. In each of these three cases, businesses aban­doned other kinds of ad­vert­ising pitches for ones grounded in conceptions of conjugal responsibility. Insurance Publicity for life insurance com­panies was widespread well before 1918. Indian fam­il­ies clearly devoted extensive resources to buying life insurance, though there has been little research on the ethos that informed their purchases. Early insurance advertisements typ­ic­ally delineated a set of stat­ist­ics about the sponsoring com­pany, such as the capital it controlled, the income it earned and the value of payments made to indi­viduals. These stat­ist­ics were im­port­ant to buyers, since they delineated the viabil­ity of the com­pany and hence the likelihood that current purchases would be honoured in the form of payments to beneficiaries upon the insured man’s death. Established com­panies sought to distinguish themselves from fly-­by-night opera­tions that promised handsome bene­fits but might no longer exist at the moment of need. Such advertisements seemingly reflected less an effort to lure reluct­ant consumers into buying insurance than an attempt to attract those already inclined to select a par­ticu­lar com­ pany. During the 1920s, insurance advertisements diversified somewhat. Some com­panies began to introduce the theme of familial respons­ibil­ities, mentioning in rather subdued ways that wives would be cared for, the education of boys would be guaranteed, and dowries would be provided in the event of the male householder’s death. These advertisements might include a crude line drawing of a family, seemingly done by persons without formal training in the conventions of commercial art. By the 1930s, how­ever, the age of professional ad­vert­ising had arrived in insurance. A number of big Indian firms had entered the field of insurance sales, and com­peti­tion in the market had become intense. Insurance com­panies, some foreign but mostly Indian, clearly invested signi­fic­ant sums in ad­vert­ising, seeking now to induce more fam­il­ies to devote their funds to insurance pol­icies and on a larger scale. They hired ad­vert­ising agencies to run advertisements in a wide range of news­papers, both in English and in the vernacular. In most cases, advertisements now included line drawings by professionals, such as the gradu­ ates of the Jamshedji Jeejeebhoy School of Art in Bombay. More effort was devoted to de­veloping evocative copy as well. The new insurance advertisements

Masculinity, advertising and the middle class   31 gen­er­ated a hybrid appeal reflecting a conception of middle-­class masculinity that was a product of both global conceptions of the family and specifically Indian concerns. Messages for a wide range of com­panies coalesced around a single theme: the husband’s respons­ib­ility to secure the future of the nuclear family. As an advertisement for Crescent Insurance indicated, the purchase of insurance involved ‘Men in the Making’ (Times of India 30 Novem­ber 1938: 7). In most cases, advertisements took on a didactic tone, instructing the male reader on the necessity of obtaining insurance and the dire con­sequences of failure to provide for wives and chil­dren. Advertisements advanced proper notions of householder obli­ga­tions to men just entering the state of marriage, indicating that new husbands needed to leave behind ideas of leisure and freedom associated with youth for new ones of respons­ib­ility. One advertisement for Bombay Mutual commonly found in both Gujarati and English news­papers around 1940 focused on the im­port­ance of insuring the new family from the moment of marriage. ‘Look at your bride, Mr. Bridegroom, so lovely and loving,’ the advertisement implores. ‘She has put her hap­pi­ness, her secur­ity – in fact her whole future – in your hands, and you have promised to love, honour and protect her’ (Mumbai Samachar 22 March 1941: 12). A Gujarati advertisement for the Prudential of England offered a sim­ilar reminder alongside a drawing of a nuclear family, stressing it is ‘the duty [faraj] of a married man to provide insurance for his family’ and emphasizing the im­port­ance of guaranteeing ‘protection for the family’, ‘education for sons’, ‘dowry for daughters’ and income in old age (Prajabandhu 24 May 1930: 14). The nuclear family – headed by a comfortable bourgeois householder – was visualized centrally in many advertisements. A number of such images pic­tured the family as a con­tented group consisting of husband and wife, either with a new (male) infant, or with one boy and one girl. In some of these images the father sat in the single armchair in the frame, indic­at­ive of a man of some mater­ ial con­sequence whose mind could now be at rest. An English advertisement in the Bombay Chronicle for United India Life Assurance depicted a family on a picnic, and asked whether, if the male reader of the advertisement were to die, the family would still ‘have all those little comforts they have learned to expect under your care or would they have to fight for their livelihood’ (12 April 1938: 3). A Jayabharat Insurance Company advertisement pic­tures a middle-­class conjugal pair with an insurance agent, and stresses the inde­pend­ence (azadi) the couple would enjoy if they had insurance. The word azadi seemed to suggest a release from re­li­ance on the larger joint family while perhaps implying ana­lo­gies to the nationalist struggle (Mumbai Samachar 26 July 1945: 5). All these advertisements were marked by the absence of any extended kin. Often advertisements turned away from pleasant images to more ominous ones meant to raise fears about the survival of the family and its status as middle class. A notice for Bombay Mutual Life Assurance run in both English and Gujarati news­papers pic­tures a homeless widow with two chil­dren, all seemingly on the verge of star­va­tion, with the woman suffering and the chil­dren crying. Its

32   D.E. Haynes text runs: ‘This is a pic­ture of affliction – affliction wrought by one who professed to love her most – her own husband . . . . He manifested his great love for her in a way that will make you shudder – he left her and his chil­dren destitute, to the mercies of fate, without fin­an­cial secur­ity.’ The advertisement suggests the fear that the fatherless family will have to fend for itself, leaving the reader to con­sider how it would cope (Bombay Chronicle 23 Septem­ber 1940: 6).20 Similarly, an advertisement for India General Insurance (Figure 1.1) asks men to ima­gine their wives and chil­dren living in isolation and pov­erty, raising the question of whether the widow could rely on rel­at­ives or friends for sup­port (Mumbai Samachar 2 Decem­ber 1944: 9). The advertisement stresses it is the duty (dharma) of the husband to make sure the family does not to have to face such a situ­ation. Images of women or mothers with chil­dren exposed to torrential rains and thunderstorms or in the grip of a fist (symbolizing power­ful forces they cannot control) raised sim­ilarly dire possibilities. Many advertisements focused on the need to provide for the education of sons. Often, they sought to evoke concern about the potential thwarting of a boy’s pro­spects. In an advertisement for National Indian Life Insurance, a new baby pathetically asks his father: ‘Please Daddy. What about me?’ (Bombay Chronicle 8 Janu­ary 1938: 11). An appeal for Bombay Mutual Life Assurance also asks the reader to con­sider the future of the uninsured boy: ‘Will you leave your promising son in the lurch? Will you leave his ambitions frustrated because no pro­vi­sion was made by you for him to obtain higher education? You cannot afford to do this. You should do what other wise parents have done’ (Mumbai Samachar 10 June 1940: 3). Figure 1.2 provides an advertisement that sim­ilarly stresses the need to cover schooling and other expenses neces­sary to secure a son’s future (Bombay Chronicle 9 Octo­ber 1939: 5). But a father’s obli­ga­tions for the well-­being of female chil­dren were also present. For example, one frequent advertisement for Bombay Mutual pic­tures a just-­married daughter taking leave of her widowed mother while the new groom looks on; the visual depiction is one that would imme­diately resonate with middle-­ class readers. The notice praises the ab­sent man for having thoughtfully made ar­range­ments for her dowry when he bought a Bombay Mutual pol­icy so that such a good match could be arranged (Bombay Chronicle 9 Septem­ber 1940: 6). A sim­ ilar advertisement asks the reader to ima­gine the moment of a blissful marriage of one’s daughter. The neigh­bours were astonished, the advertisement indicates, when Rekha was able to marry a boy like Mohan since her family’s circumstances did not seem to be so strong. The explanation for her good fortune was that her father had purchased a dowry payment plan from National Indian Life Insurance. The advertisement encourages other fathers to con­sider taking out such a pol­icy themselves (Bombay Chronicle 4 Septem­ber 1937: 14). Insurance advertisements were gen­erally geared to young men: men who were about to marry, who had just married, or who had just fathered chil­dren. They schooled these men on how to be proper householders. Most had a double-­edged quality. On the one hand, they ac­know­ledged the reader as a person who knows the value of making sure his family will be cared for. But at the same time, they hinted

Masculinity, advertising and the middle class   33

Figure 1.1 ‘Would others give her refuge?’: advertisement for Free India General Insurance, Mumbai Samachar 2 December 1944: 9

at an incompleteness in his ful­fil­ment of his obli­ga­tions. They sought to extend the scope of the husband’s role as the guarantor of his family’s eco­nomic secur­ity. They also implicitly pre-­empted the pos­sib­il­ity that wives might share earning respons­ibil­ities with their husbands, an option that in practice was least starting to open up to women in small numbers by the late 1930s. I found no insurance advertisements directed toward females. In other words, the advertisements were themselves en­tangled in the pro­cess of socializing men in the new masculinity.

Figure 1.2 ‘Sons need protection, we give it!’: advertisement for The Bombay Mutual Life Assurance Society Ltd, Bombay Chronicle 9 October 1939: 13

Masculinity, advertising and the middle class   35 Horlicks Appeals for Horlicks constituted a second kind of advertisement that stressed male obli­ga­tions. Horlicks is a malted milk powder, still avail­able today, that is consumed after it is dissolved in milk. During the 1930s, it was one of the four most commonly advertised consumer goods, the others being Lifebuoy and Lux soaps and Ovaltine, a competitor of Horlicks. No doubt, Horlicks must have been widely consumed in order to sustain such signi­fic­ant investment in advertising. To some extent, Horlicks advertisers had engaged in super­fi­cial Indianization since the First World War. During the 1920s, a number of advertisements ran in English and vernacular papers stressing the im­port­ance of proper nourishment needed to withstand hot weather. They depicted, for instance, a Euro­pean woman with a Taj-­like monument in the background or a Euro­pean man wearing a pith helmet. Another relied on the image of an Indian raja, a figure the advertisers perhaps sought to associate with power and wisdom (Bombay Chronicle 26 July 1920: 12). By 1929, J. Walter Thompson took over the account, and the effort put into formulating advertisements clearly increased. Under Thompson, Horlicks at first centred its cam­paign around two issues. First, there was a stress on the health of chil­dren. Both boys and girls were pic­tured at play, with the commentary focusing on the value of Horlicks in sustaining nutrition. As the cam­paign evolved, it de­veloped a more exclusive focus on boys, and the trademark form of a cartoon sequence had taken shape, typ­ic­ally displaying a weak male child before and after taking Horlicks. One frequent advertisement depicts a boy who always comes in last in school games, and who is a major source of worry to his parents. By the last frame of the cartoon, the boy, after taking Horlicks, is pic­tured finishing first in a race (Bombay Chronicle 21 Octo­ber 1937: 3). The cam­paign clearly drew upon the prevailing medical theory of ‘enervation’, which the advertisements cast as a major cause of phys­ical and aca­demic non-­achievement among chil­dren. The second theme stressed was convalescence. Advertisements repeatedly portrayed Horlicks as a tonic food that would provide the nourishment needed to recover from lengthy ill­nesses. According to one Thompson report, the two targets of chil­ dren and the bed-­ridden ‘were undoubtedly good specific markets since Indians really will spend money for their chil­dren and there are always a convalescent group who are imme­diate buyers (‘Notes on Indian Advertising’ 1938: 4–5)’. By 1936, how­ever, Horlicks advertisers apparently decided these appeals were too narrow. They may have been spurred on to widen their markets by com­peti­tion with Ovaltine, which had long sustained a cam­paign in India urging women to provide the cocoa drink to their husbands and chil­dren as a way of upholding family health. The product’s advertisements now turned to the middle class male, and to anxi­eties associated with the new eco­nomy of urban India. In so doing, no doubt, the Thompson agency hoped to turn Horlicks into an every­ day product that men would see as crucial to coping with a com­petit­ive work world, and thus ultimately to perpetuating the nuclear family.

36   D.E. Haynes The new Horlicks ad­vert­ising drew from a set of several overlapping ideas. First, the advertisements grounded themselves in the familiar co­lo­nial stereo­ types of the educated male as weak and effeminate, stereo­types that were now brought into the con­text of employment. Second, they drew upon related medical theories of enervation, which characterized Indian males as prone to ‘weakness’ for reasons of the climate, lack of exercise, moral shortcomings and exposure to various ill­nesses. Third, they evoked un­cer­tainties about employment and professional advancement during the Depression. Finally, they drew upon the ideo­ logy of the middle-­class householder and his respons­ibil­ities in a medicalized conceptualization of the conjugal family. Horlicks ad­vert­ising adapted the form of the cartoon sequence to the theme of male in­ad­equacy. One of the earliest advertisements of this kind was entitled ‘I nearly missed my pro­mo­tion’ (Bombay Chronicle 5 Au­gust 1937: 4). In the advertisement, a man is told by his boss (also Indian) that if his work does not improve, he will not receive a pro­mo­tion. Recognizing that his prob­lems at work stem from his tiredness, he asks a friend for advice, and is told to consult a doctor. He starts taking Horlicks on the doctor’s re­com­mendation. By the last frame, he is being congratulated by his boss who has made him a district manager. By the late 1930s, this approach had evolved into the ‘night star­va­tion’ cam­ paign. The idea of ‘night star­va­tion’ was actu­ally an inter­na­tional theme, begun by the com­pany around 1931 but apparently not applied on the subcontinent before 1937. The concept of ‘night star­va­tion’, how­ever, apparently needed to be translated into more culturally meaningful terms in an Indian con­text, where star­va­tion was not a metaphor but a reality. In English language advertisements, the term ‘night star­va­tion’ was included, but a translation into a local vernacular (in Roman letters) was also provided. The various translations into vernacular languages lit­er­ally meant ‘morning weakness’, thus in effect drawing upon the ubiquitous language of male incapa­city. In vernacular advertisements, the term ‘night star­va­tion’ was not mentioned, only ‘morning weakness’. Most of the advertisements, which were repeatedly run in Western Indian papers from 1937 to 1939, followed a sim­ilar nar­rat­ive in their cartoon sequences. In each, the main figure is a male who is failing at work, and whose boss, sometimes Euro­pean, scolds him for poor performance. After advice from some third party, he seeks out a doctor, who dia­gnoses him as suffering from ‘night star­va­tion’ and urges him to take Horlicks daily. In the last frame, reinvigorated, he has achieved success and has won his pro­mo­tion or has avoided being sacked. In Figure 1.3, the male character, Chaudri, is demoted to the position of clerk and relegated to the mofussil (hinterland) before he discovers Horlicks, after which he is returned to head­quar­ters in a position of special authority (Bombay Chronicle 12 July 1939: 13). Other advertisements featured shipping clerks, railway officials, police inspectors, lawyers, sales­men and even film directors. In some cases, the potential failure to keep a job or to achieve a pro­mo­tion was tied to the pos­sib­il­ity that a father might be unable to ensure his son’s

Masculinity, advertising and the middle class   37

Figure 1.3 ‘Government official loses promotion through night starvation’: advertisement for Horlicks, Bombay Chronicle 12 July 1939: 13.

education. For instance, in Figure 1.4, a man laments that due to his own constant weakness, he is likely to be denied a pro­mo­tion he needs in order to be able to afford college for his son. After he begins taking Horlicks, the son’s schooling is secured (Bombay Chronicle 14 May 1938: 11). In another Horlicks cartoon sequence, a father fails to perform his role in the home; because he is always tired and grumpy, the chil­dren want to avoid him rather than join him in play. The sequence ends with a rejuvenated father whose kids love to spend time with him (Bombay Chronicle 23 Septem­ber 1939: 13). In stressing a man’s role in the re­cre­ational life of the family, the advertisement suggests an aspect of conjugal fatherhood that has not been ex­plored by historians. The theme of anxiety around masculine performance in work was one that Horlicks advertisers hoped would be applic­able widely to middle-­class men across com­munit­ies and regions. I found only one advertisement in the night star­va­tion cam­paign in Bombay news­papers during this period featuring a woman. In effect, the advertisements built upon deeply entrenched perceptions of the male, middle-­class body as weak, enervated and lacking vitality, but

38   D.E. Haynes

Figure 1.4 ‘He nearly failed his only son through night starvation’: advertisement for Horlicks, Bombay Chronicle 14 May 1938: 11.

stretched these perceptions from the realms of milit­ary activity and pol­itics into those of work and the household. In the con­text of the Depression, the advertisements carried a special emotive power as they connected failure in the workplace to failure to live up to expectations as husbands and fathers. In effect, Horlicks advertisements helped to construct males who could be productive workers and consumers in the eco­nomy of late co­lo­nial India. Tonics Tonics were perhaps the most common product line present in news­paper ad­vert­ ising between the wars.21 Tonic ad­vert­ising had long addressed concepts of male weakness, concepts that, as we have already seen, had roots in co­lo­nial stereo­ types about high-­caste educated men (discussed also in Haynes 2010). But by the 1930s, this kind of appeal often became in­teg­rated with a message that propagated notions of sexuality specifically associated with the conjugal family. Much of the earliest ad­vert­ising of sex tonics and aphrodisiacs came in the form of notices for bazaar products in vernacular news­papers. As Charu Gupta

Masculinity, advertising and the middle class   39 has discussed, such advertisements were widespread and constituted a major source of rev­enue for the papers (Gupta 2002: 66–84). Typically, they evoked anxi­eties about the loss of semen owing to masturbation, wet dreams and other forms of emission outside heterosexual intercourse, thus drawing upon well-­ established notions in both Hindu and Muslim medical traditions. Advertisements for tonics held semen loss to be respons­ible for a gen­eral weakness that led not only to a failure to perform sexually but to incapa­city in other realms of life, and they touted the product’s ability to combat these ill effects. Bazaar advertisements rarely suggested any notion of males confining their sexuality to the conjugal relationship. Indeed, by suggesting that power­ful figures from maharajas to British officials were the users of bazaar tonics, the advertisements encouraged men to indulge their imaginations in harems, relationships with courtesans, and the like. The advertisements suggested that males who had wasted semen in their youth and had become weak as a result could hope – with the use of the proper medical substances – to engage in forms of sexuality avail­ able only to the strongest, most virile men (Haynes 2007). In contrast to bazaar advertisements, early corporate notices for tonics often avoided mention of sex, confining themselves to the theme of gen­eral male weakness. By the 1930s, how­ever, corporate tonic makers and distributors strongly edged their marketing cam­paigns into the sexual potency business. One might speculate that, as their understandings of pop­ular mo­tiva­tions for using tonics improved, the sellers of some brand name products came to feel that they were abdic­at­ing a huge market to bazaar producers by failing to orient their sales pitches toward conceptions of failed male sexuality. They de­veloped a new kind of rhet­orical strat­egy for selling their goods, one that avoided the logic of semen conservation and that lodged itself in a language of science and modernity. These appeals, how­ever, shared with bazaar advertisements the notion that restoration of sexual functioning was connected to the functioning of the whole body, thus effect­ively linking themselves with ideas grounded in indi­gen­ous medical sys­ tems. One notice for Okasa, a German product that was the most widely promoted of all corporate tonics during the 1930s, indicated that the tonic improved ‘sex-­ vitality’ and addressed the health of ‘glands’ from the brain to the thyroid, the pancreas and the genitals (which are de­scribed as an im­port­ant gland controlling ‘Growth and Development of Sex-­Vitality and Manly Vigour’) (Bombay Sentinel 5 Febru­ary 1938: 5). A Gujarati advertisement for Sanatogen, a tonic food that was also advertised widely, suggested it would deliver ‘vitality (shakti) and brilliant good health’; it expli­citly raised the issue of sexual in­ad­equacy by claiming that Sanatogen cures ‘weakness of the reproductive organs’. The advertisement repeatedly moved back and forth between sexual health and the health of the body as whole, suggesting that the product combated both gen­eral phys­ical incapa­city and impotence (namardai) (Mumbai Samachar 15 April 1936: 13). Other advertisements used a vocabulary that was less expli­cit, but was recog­nized by readers as carrying both sexual and non-­sexual meanings (Haynes 2007). Corporate advertisements also increasingly resorted to a vocabulary of shame centring on the failure of men to meet the sexual expectations of proper

40   D.E. Haynes husbandhood. One Sanatogen advertisement features a man in a reclining pose, seemingly without the abil­ity or inclination to rise. ‘How you can increase your manliness?’ the heading pro­claims. The text becomes more expli­cit about what ‘manliness’ entails: ‘the man who is unable to enjoy worldly pleasures and carry out the duties of a married man is not only always anxious and sad, but also feels a lot of shame. He becomes frustrated, broken and bored of the world . . . and jealous of the abil­it­ies (shakti) and cleverness of others. . . . How can such a man regain strength and manliness?’ (Mumbai Samachar 24 Janu­ary 1931: 12). A common trope in these advertisements was that of a man slumped in a state of incapa­city with his wife standing above him in a position of empathy and pity. An advertisement for Stearns Tonic Pills provided an image of a seated male wearing pyjamas. His wife (marked by her sari and hair as both Parsi and modern) looks over him with an expression of concern, emphasizing the humiliating con­text. An empty bed is vis­ible in the background, the marker of the unfulfilled conjugal relationship. The caption reads: ‘DO YOU FEEL LIKE THIS? No strength, no energy, no manhood. No Joy? Sports, food, work, pleasure, amusements beckon you in vain. You can’t be bothered. . . . What is needed is a blood purifying tonic, digestive laxative and nerve builder. TAKE STEARN’S DIGESTIVE AND TONIC TABLETS. They will bring you back to life and make you fresh, fit, forcible and fertile both in brain and body (italics mine)’. Adult readers would have had no un­cer­tainty about the im­plica­tions of the words ‘manhood’, ‘vitality’ and ‘fertile’ (Bombay Chronicle 20 Au­gust 1934: 11). Finally, these corporate advertisements also addressed the issue of reproduction. In one Okasa advertisement, a happy Euro­pean couple hold a new child, the result of having taken the ‘hormone compound’ (Mumbai Samachar 28 March 1934: 10). A caption suggests the outcome (of childbirth) is a ‘miracle of science’. The advertisement promises that Okasa would address incapa­city (ashakti) and restore ‘youthfulness’, both phrases with strong sexual connotations. Other advertisements of this sort depict a childless couple in a state of despair in a ‘before’ image, while in the ‘after’ image – once the tonic has been taken – we see a happy family with a son, a wife pic­tured in a blissful state of mother­hood, and a con­tented husband, perhaps posed comfortably on an armchair (again, the symbol of the bourgeois householder) (Mumbai Samachar 17 Janu­ary 1934: 5). Not until the late 1930s did a new kind of ad­vert­ising emerge that focused on the satis­fac­tion of female sexuality. At that point, there was a sudden proliferation of tonic advertisements run by local com­panies that offered to promote a ‘happy married life’ and featured husband–wife poses stressing romance, affection and mutual sexual satis­fac­tion. While these advertisements sometimes con­ tinued the stress on biological reproduction, they more commonly invoked the pleasures of non-­procreative sex for both marital partners. There was even one cartoon sequence where a new wife discusses with a friend ser­ious dissatis­fac­ tions with ‘married life’ (a ref­er­ence to her husband’s sexual shortcomings) before the friend suggests that her husband take a tonic product that ultimately

Masculinity, advertising and the middle class   41 restores their sex life (Mumbai Samachar 10 Febru­ary 1941: 4). Such advertisements, I have argued elsewhere, reflected the influence of global sexology and the birth control movement on conceptions of companionate marriage (Haynes 2007). Interestingly, they mark an ac­know­ledgement of female sexuality in news­paper advertisements that would disappear after the war.22 Increasingly, corporate advertisements portrayed sex as an act that was to be confined to marriage, for men as well as for women. Its purpose was usually procre­ation and perhaps some kind of satis­fac­tion – phys­ical and psychological – for the conjugal pair.23 In corporate advertisements for tonics, as in the cartoon sequences for Horlicks, the pos­sib­il­ity of achieving ful­fil­ment of the nuclear family was portrayed as being threatened by the perceived tend­ency of the Indian male body towards degeneration and weakness. As in the case of the advertisements for insurance and Horlicks, these advertisements reinforced the centrality of the conjugal relationship, promising to provide medicalized solutions to a male’s shortcomings in realizing the nuclear ideal. They steeped their appeal in an instructional tone, teaching the concerned male – usually the newly married man – how he might overcome this key hurdle to achieving the ideals of companionate marriage.

Conclusion The making of men thus became a crucial terrain in the making of ‘middle-­class’ consumers. Between the wars, as private com­panies de­veloped cam­paigns around values they identified as those of the middle class, ad­vert­ising became involved in the pro­ject of advancing the new masculinity in Western Indian soci­ ety. In each case examined here, businesses decided to aban­don other kinds of ad­vert­ising pitch for ones that evoked notions of modern conjugality; col­lect­ ively these advertisements represent a crystallization of ad­vert­ising discourse around this theme. In so doing, advertisers bolstered a logic that had already been set forth in decades of pub­lic discussion in non-­advertising discourses such as liter­at­ure, social reform writings and film. But they also linked, to some extent for the first time, ideas of modern masculinity with the purchase and use of certain commodities. Advertisers made use of ideas of respons­ible husbandhood and fatherhood in the fashioning of dis­cip­lined consumer subjects, that is, men who would regu­larly purchase brand name products marketed by national and multi­national corporations rather than unmarked goods in local bazaars. In effect, the identity of the modern middle-­class male was now redefined around his consumption practices as well as by his occupation, his parti­cipa­tion in national pol­itics, and his em­brace of social reform. Through these cam­paigns, professional advertisers worked against other potential forms of masculine expression: the shared obli­ga­tions of adult males in the joint family, the comradeship of single men outside the home, ascetic manhood, the patronage of courtesans, and homoeroticism. None of these, the advertisers seem to have reasoned, offered the same scope for expanded consumption of brand name products. The models of maleness they invoked served

42   D.E. Haynes to distinguish the modern, middle-­class nuclear family from family forms believed to be associated with other classes, whether aristocrats, merchants, workers or peasants. Advertisements were involved in narrowing the range for middle-­class male expression, working to estab­lish, but never achieving, the hege­mony of the modern householder in the conjugal family. Thus the de­velopment of a consumer-­oriented capit­al­ism and the fashioning of masculinity became closely intertwined well before the end of the co­lo­nial period. Though con­tempor­ary advertisers have shown a willingness in their marketing strat­egies to resort to a wider range of male para­digms than their pre-­ independence counterparts – including conceptions based upon the extended family and youth cultures – these interconnections between masculinity and consumer culture have only grown stronger with the rapid expansion of the middle classes since the 1980s.

Notes   1 I wish to thank here the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Amer­ican Institute of Indian Studies for funding my research in India. I owe a par­ticu­lar debt to Jeremy Schneider, who worked on my pro­ject as a James O. Freedman Pres­id­en­tial Fellow during 2005–2006. Anita Sarkar generously shared mater­ials that she had gathered on the his­tory of ad­vert­ising in Bombay. Ananth Shankar, Shrikant Botre, Monalisa Dand and K. Hemlata have provided key help in my pro­ject. I wish to thank parti­cip­ants in the Sussex conference on ‘Exploring the “Middle Classes” in South Asia’ for comments on an earl­ier version of this art­icle, and par­ticu­larly Veronique Benei, Jonathan Parry, Abigail McGowan, Prashant Kidambi, Markus Daechsel, Henrike Donner and Geert de Neve. I also would like to thank Henrike Donner, Steve Ericson, Arvind Rajagopal and two anonym­ous referees for more recent comments on the essay.   2 For two examples of this larger liter­at­ure, see Liechty (2002) and Fernandes (2007).   3 See Joshi’s work, which has other­wise been crucial to the understanding of the middle class during the co­lo­nial period not as an eco­nomic formation but as a ‘pro­ject in the making’ associated with the shaping of the ideals and practices of ‘modernity’ in urban India (2001: 2). For some recent exceptions that do take consumption ser­iously into account, see Kidambi (2010), Venkatachalapathy (2006) and Daechsel (2006).   4 Burke is par­ticu­larly influenced by the work of Judith Williamson, whom he quotes: ‘the subject drawn into the work of ad­vert­ising is one who knows. . . . Advertisements clearly produce know­ledge . . . but this know­ledge is always produced from something known, that acts a guarantee, in its anteriority, for the “truth” in the ad itself ’ (Burke 1996: 3; Williamson 1978).   5 This argument has been influenced by Osella and Osella (2006) and Chopra, Osella and Osella (2004). Particularly use­ful is the emphasis in this work on the multiplicity of masculinities and the ten­sion between hege­monic ideals and lived masculinities. See also Vanita and Kidwai (2000) and Alter (1992).   6 For valu­able histories of the ad­vert­ising industry in India, see Doctor and Alikhan (1999) and Rajagopal (forthcoming).   7 ‘Memo to Mr. Hutchins’, cited in Schneider (2007: 64). In India, the promise that all copy would be written by ‘natives’ was hardly kept, since the copywriters on the staff during this period were British or Amer­ican, but copy was written on the spot.   8 See, for instance, Chatterjee (1989). Such rel­at­ive neg­lect of these subjects contrasts with work on masculinity in con­tempor­ary India such as Osella and Osella (2006) and Chopra, Osella and Osella (2004).

Masculinity, advertising and the middle class   43   9 See the stories published in Bardhan (1990). Somewhat more ambiguously, Tagore’s novel, Home and the World (2005 [1915]), features a main character unwilling or unable to stop the de­velopment of a relationship between his wife and a corrupt friend in the con­text of the Bengal Swadeshi movement. 10 Devdas was written in Bengali but translated into many languages and also made into a pop­ular movie in 1935; Saraswatichandra is the classic novel of Gujarati literature. 11 The ideals of the male householder run in ten­sion with an al­tern­ative notion of masculinity based upon ascetic ideals in Tripathi’s novel. 12 Rege (2004) argues that the prob­lem of action is the central issue of the Indian novel in English. 13 For a fascinating discussion of the con­tro­versy over this book and the pol­itics it engendered, see Sinha (2006). 14 Such concerns may have been par­ticu­larly pre­val­ent among Parsis, who by the 1940s were beginning to express ser­ious concern about their dwindling popu­la­tion and the supposed phys­ical weakness of their comunity, de­velopments blamed largely on Parsi males. See Luhrman (1996: 130–7). 15 See the rich treatment in Kosambi (2007). To take one example, Lakshmibai Tilak (1998), whose life story recounts in great detail her husband’s disap­pear­ances from the home, his failure to provide eco­nomic­ally for the family, his bad-­tempered beha­ vi­our and his frequent unwillingness to consult with his wife. 16 Thanks to Abigail McGowan for comments that prompted me to think about these possibilities. 17 See Chandra’s discussion (1992: 74–82) of the writings of Govardhanram Madhavram Tripathi. We must also be careful about accepting the his­tor­ical uni­ver­sality of the joint family form in pre-­colonial India. See the complex pic­ture that emerges from the essays in Chatterjee (2004). 18 After 1940, a number of firms did de­velop such cam­paigns. Advertising firms were certainly aware of the widespread pres­ence of joint fam­il­ies, as in­ternal docu­ments of J. Walter Thompson indicate. 19 Here I am adapting the concept of the ped­ago­gical pro­ject of ad­vert­ising from Rajagopal (1998: 14–31). 20 There may be a hint here that the widow might have to resort to prostitution. 21 I have treated these advertisements in more detail in Haynes (2007). 22 I have argued that these advertisements should be understood in the con­text of the spread of ideas from the birth control movement and sci­ent­ific sexology in Haynes (2007). 23 See the discussion of the ideas of N.S. Phadke in Srivastava (2004).

References Alter, J. (1992) The Wrestler’s Body: identity and ideo­logy in north India, Berkeley: University of California Press. Banerjee, S. (2004) Men, Women, Domestics: articulating middle-­class identity in co­lo­ nial Bengal, Delhi: Oxford University Press. Banerjee, S. (2005) Make Me a Man! Masculinity, Hinduism and nationalism in India, Albany: State University of New York Press. Bardhan, K. (1990) Of Women, Outcastes, Peasants and Rebels: a selection of Bengali short stories, Berkeley: University of California Press. Bhaumik, K. (2010) ‘At home in the world: cinema and cultures of the young in Bombay in the 1920s’ in D. Haynes, A. McGowan, T. Roy and H. Yanagisawa (eds) Towards a History of Consumption in South Asia, Delhi: Oxford University Press.

44   D.E. Haynes Bose, P.K. (1995) ‘Sons of the nation: childrearing in the new family’ in P. Chatterjee (ed.) Texts of Power: emerging dis­cip­lines in co­lo­nial Bengal, Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Bose, P.K. (1997) ‘Reconstituting private life: the making of the modern family in Bengal’ in G.Shah (ed.) Social Transformation in India: essays in honour of professor I.P. Desai, vol. 2, Jaipur and New Delhi: Rawat. Burke, T. (1996) Lifebuoy Men, Lux Women: commodification, consumption and cleanliness in modern Zim­babwe, Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Chakrabarty, D. (1994) ‘The dif­fer­ence – de­fer­ral of a co­lo­nial modernity: pub­lic debates on do­mesticity in co­lo­nial Bengal’, Subaltern Studies VIII, Delhi: Oxford University Press. Chandra, S. (1992) The Oppressive Present: liter­at­ure and social consciousness in co­lo­ nial India, Delhi: Oxford University Press. Chatterjee, I. (ed.) (2004) Unfamiliar Relations: family and his­tory in South Asia, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Chatterjee, P. (1989) ‘The nationalist res­olu­tion of the women’s question’ in K. Sangari and S. Vaid (eds) Recasting Women: essays in co­lo­nial his­tory, New Delhi: Kali for Women. Chattopadhyay, S. (2002 [1917]), Devdas, trans. Sreejata Guha (2002), New Delhi: Penguin Books. Chopra, R., Osella, C. and Osella, F. (eds) (2004) South Asian Masculinities: con­text of change, sites of con­tinu­ity, New Delhi: Kali for Women. Chowdhury, I. (2001) The Frail Hero and Virile History: gender and the pol­itics of culture in co­lo­nial Bengal, New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Daechsel, M. (2006) The Politics of Self-­Expression: the Urdu middle-­class milieu in mid-­twentieth century India and Paki­stan, London and New York: Routledge. Doctor, V. and Alikhan, A. (1999) ‘Kyo na aazmaye: the Indian ad­vert­ising century’, The India Magazine of Her People and Culture, Janu­ary: 44–57. Ewen, S. (1976) Captains of Consciousness: ad­vert­ising and the social roots of the consumer culture, New York: McGraw-­Hill. Fernandes, L. (2007) India’s New Middle Class: demo­cratic pol­itics in an era of eco­ nomic reform, Delhi: Oxford University Press. Gupta, C. (2002) Sexuality, Obscenity, Community: women, Muslims and the Hindu pub­lic in co­lo­nial India, New York: Palgrave. Hancock, M. (2001) ‘Home sciences and the nationalization of do­mesticity in co­lo­nial India’, Modern Asian Studies, 35: 871–903. Haynes, D. (2007) ‘Selling masculinity: advertisements for sex potions and tonics in late co­lo­nial India,’ paper presented at the Annual Conference on South Asia, Madison, Wisconsin. Haynes, D. (2010) ‘Creating the consumer? Advertising, capit­al­ism and the middle class in urban Western India, 1914–40’ in D. Haynes, A. McGowan, T. Roy and H. Yanagisawa (eds) Towards a History of Consumption in South Asia, Delhi: Oxford University Press. Joshi, S. (2001) Fractured Modernity: making of a middle class in co­lo­nial north India, New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Kidambi, P. (2010) ‘Consumption, do­mestic eco­nomy and the idea of the “middle class” in late co­lo­nial Bombay’ in D. Haynes, A. McGowan, T. Roy and H. Yanagisawa (eds) Towards a History of Consumption in South Asia, Delhi: Oxford University Press. Kosambi, M. (2007) Crossing Thresholds: fem­in­ist essays in social his­tory, Ranikhet: Permanent Black.

Masculinity, advertising and the middle class   45 Liechty, M. (2002) Suitably Modern: making middle-­class culture in a new consumer soci­ety, Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press. Luhrman, T.M. (1996) The Good Parsi: the fate of a co­lo­nial elite in a postco­lo­nial soci­ ety, Cam­bridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Mayo, K. (1955 [1927]), Mother India, New York: Greenwood Press. McGowan, A. (2006) ‘An all-­consuming subject?: women and consumption in late-­ nineteenth and early-­twentieth-century western India’, Journal of Women’s History, 18: 31–54. McGowan, A. (2009) ‘Modernity at home: leisure, auto­nomy and the new woman in India’, Tasveer Ghar: A Digital Archive of South Asian Popular Visual Culture, http:// tasveergharindia.net/cmsdesk/essay/95/index_4.html [accessed 3 Au­gust 2011]. ‘Memo to Mr. Hutchins’ (1936) J. Walter Thompson Company, Bombay, 27 April 1936, J. Walter Thompson Archives, Duke University. Nandy, A. (1983) The Intimate Enemy: loss and recovery of self under co­lo­nialism, Delhi: Oxford Univerity Press. ‘Notes on Indian Advertising’ (1938) J. Walter Thompson Company, Bombay, J. Walter Thompson Archives, Duke University, Reel 232. Osella, C. and Osella, F. (2006) Men and Masculinities in South India, London: Anthem Press. Pande, I. (2005) ‘Curing Calcutta: peace, lib­eralism and co­lo­nial medicine in British Bengal, 1830–1900’, unpublished PhD thesis, Prince­ton University. Phadke, N.S. (1929) Sex Problems in India: a sci­ent­ific ex­posi­tion of sex life and some curious marriage customs prevailing in India from time immemorial to the present day, Bombay: D.B. Taroporevala Sons and Co. Rajagopal, A. (1998) ‘Advertising, pol­itics, and the sentimental education of the Indian Consumer’, Visual Anthropology Review, 14(2): 14–31. Rajagopal, A. (forthcoming) ‘Advertising in India: genealogies of the consumer-­subject’ in S. Dube and I. Banerjee-­Dube (eds) Modern Makeovers: a handbook of modernity in South Asia, New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Rao, N. (2007) ‘House but no garden: apartment living in Bombay, 1898–1951’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of Chicago. Rege, J. (2004) Colonial Karma: self, action, and nation in the Indian English novel, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. ‘Report on India, Burma and Ceylon compiled on the basis of Messrs. Lehn and Fink’s questionnaire of May 1931’ (1931) J. Walter Thompson archives, Duke University, Reel 225. Rudolph, L. and Rudolph, S. (1967) The Modernity of Tradition: polit­ical de­velopment in India, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sarkar, T. (1992) ‘The Hindu wife and the Hindu nation: do­mesticity and nationalism in nine­teenth century Bengal’, Studies in History, 8(2): 213–35. Schneider, J. (2007) ‘Discourses in capit­al­ism: Ovaltine advertisements and visions of do­mesticity in the British Empire during the interwar period’, unpublished senior thesis, Dartmouth College. Sinha, M. (1995) Colonial Masculinity: the ‘manly Englishman’ and the ‘effeminate’ Bengali in the late nine­teenth century, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Sinha, M. (2006) Specters of Mother India: the global restructuring of an empire, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Srivastava, S. (2004) ‘Masculinity of dis-­location: commodities, the metropolis and the sex-­clinics of Delhi and Mumbai’ in R. Chopra, C. Osella and F. Osella (eds), South Asian Masculinities, New Delhi: Women Unlimited.

46   D.E. Haynes Strasser, S. (1989) Satisfaction Guaranteed: the making of the Amer­ican mass market, New York: Pantheon Books. Stronach, L.A. (n.d.) ‘Recollections’, text provided by Anita Sarkar. Tagore, R. (2005 [1915]) Home and the World, trans. S. Tagore, London: Penguin Books. Tilak, L. (1998) I Follow After: an autobiography, trans. E. Josephine Inkster, Delhi: Oxford University Press [origin­ally published in Marathi, 1934–7]. Tripathi, G.M. (1993 [1887–1901]) Saraswatichandra, Ahmedabad: Lakshmi. Vanita, R. and Kidwai, S. (eds) (2000) Same-­sex Love in India: readings from liter­at­ure and his­tory, New York: St Martin’s Press. Venkatachalapathy, A.R. (2006) ‘ “In those days there was no coffee”: coffee-­drinking and middle-­class culture in co­lo­nial Tamilnadu’ in A.R. Venkatachalapathy (ed.) In Those Days There Was No Coffee: writings in cultural his­tory, New Delhi: Yoda Press. Walsh, J. (2004) Domesticity in Colonial India: what women learned when men gave them advice, Delhi: Oxford University Press. Williamson, J. (1978) Decoding Advertisements: ideo­logy and meaning in ad­vert­ising, London: Marion Boyars.

2 Gendered bodies, domestic work and perfect families New regimes of gender and food in Bengali middle-­class lifestyles Henrike Donner What I have mentioned as a drawback of Bengali food is what is really also its virtue; if you cannot commercialize it, you cannot vulgarize it either. Any attempt to put it on the Universal Common Market would mean a violation of its dharma, an outrage on the very it-­ness of it. It is a product of the home and family ties, of personal relationships – as much of science as of human affection, as much of age-­old wisdom as of an intu­it­ive response to nature. The food of every region is related to the local climate, but where the techniques of refrigeration and transportation have been perfected, one can eat almost anything one likes any day of the year – out of cans and packs of course, a situ­ation unthinkable in India.’ (Bose 2005 [1971])

Introduction The above cita­tion stems from an essay by Buddhadeva Bose, entitled bhojon-­ shilpi bangali (the craft of ceremonial feeding of all living beings by a householder). This art­icle was first published in the con­ser­vat­ive Bengali daily Ananda Bazaar Patrika but, translated into English and entitled Bengali Gastronomy, found its way into Parabaas, an English language website aimed at the Bengali diaspora. The text represents a reflection on the mul­tiple meanings of food in the lives of Bengalis, associated with the ‘old’ Calcutta middle class, for whom – it states – food estab­lishes the most im­port­ant social relationships and underlines the im­port­ance of every­day life by transcending the quotidian exchanges taking place in the home. Given the im­port­ance of a ‘cuisine’ in the lives of Bengali fam­il­ies, food’s essential nature, its ‘it-­ness’, are dwelled upon. Bose points out that, more than merely a distinctive cuisine, ‘traditional’ Bengali food acts as an agent that estab­lishes local middle-­class culture, and food consumption lies at the heart of ideas about the intersections between ethnic and gendered identities that reproduce class bound­ar­ies and identities.1 In this chapter, I will ex­plore how the emergence of new consumption practices challenges the understanding of middleclassness in the con­text of Calcutta’s Bengali popu­la­tion with ref­er­ence to food practices. In order to ana­lyse food and consumption patterns in relation to gender, class and eth­ni­city, I draw on Mark Liechty’s understanding of class as a ‘constantly re-­enacted cultural

48   H. Donner pro­ject’ (Liechty 2003) and look at food practices that crucially reproduce class-­ based identities in the realm of the every­day. Class culture, and the im­port­ance that do­mesticities, do­mestic practices in relation to gender, age and ethnic com­ mun­ity play, are the subject of this chapter, which ex­plores middleclassness through an ana­lysis of changing foodways that Bengali middle-­class households have in common. In the course of the chapter it will become apparent that here as elsewhere class has to be thought in relation to gender, a relationship epitomized in the distinctive idiom of women’s orientation towards the home. Much of the ‘housework’ women do provides the basis for such distinctive food practices, which reproduce class-­based ethnic identities across time and space. This work is therefore the backbone of middleclassness in this context. As Appadurai and Breckenridge have suggested, consumption represents a prime site for the complex production of modern middle-­class identities in South Asia, and many recent schol­arly writings on the Indian middle class have confirmed its im­port­ance (Appadurai and Breckenridge 1995; Oza 2006; Liechty 2003). But curiously enough, pub­lic sites of consumption have so far been privileged, par­ticu­larly where the consumption of food and fashion is concerned (see Conlon 1995; Liechty 2003), which leaves the do­mestic sphere as a site of such practices under-­theorized. Though the pub­lic modernity para­digm proposed by Appadurai and Breckenridge did not intentionally exclude further ex­plora­tions of earl­ier themes in relation to class-­based food consumption patterns and gendered identities, it does prioritize the intersection of global and national middle-­class cultures in the making of gendered identities repres­ented in pub­lic spaces (see for example Mazzarella 2003; Mukhopadhyay 2004), and emphas­izes the consumption of visual media (Srilata 1999; Mankekar 1999; Rajagopal 2001; Parameswaran 2004; Thapan 2004) over other types. However, the im­port­ance of pop­ular visual cultures and pub­lic leisure pursuits notwithstanding, it denies the im­port­ance of middle-­class consumption patterns located in the home, which provide an im­port­ant ideo­logical and social site for the estab­lishment of personhood, gendered identities and intimate relationships. In this chapter, I draw on local food ‘cultures’ through the ex­peri­ences of Bengali middle-­class ‘homemakers’, whose role is to perform middleclassness in relation to various food practices, which link traditional notions of bodies, health and food with his­tor­ically specific ideas about appropriate gendered beha­vi­ours. Do­mesticity emerges as an im­port­ant site for the reproduction of religious, ethnic and class-­based col­lect­ive identities through women’s work and consumption patterns that reproduce middle-­classness do­mesticity in a changing environment.

Consumption and middleclassness In metropolitan South Asia, markers of middle-­class status have become increasingly loose and estab­lished notions of what it means to belong to the middle class, earl­ier expressed in terms of respectabil­ity, educational merit and white-­ collar employment have become less important. Various authors observe that

Gendered bodies, domestic work, perfect families   49 ‘middleclassness’ has become syn­onym­ous with a specific kind of consumer culture, and the as­sumed em­brace of self-­interested mater­ialism and com­petit­ive as­pira­tions for upward mobility. Characterizing the post-­liberalization socioscape, Varma comments that middle-­class consumption serves to reproduce class dif­fer­ences and adds that ‘it is the degree of this preoccupation, increasingly determined – specifically for its parvenu elements – by the quantum of mater­ial possessions that places the Indian middle class in a qualit­at­ively different cat­ egory’ (Varma 1998: 136–7). Whether or not we share his view on the dif­fer­ ence between ‘old’ and ‘new’ patterns, the way middle-­class indi­viduals and fam­il­ies react to the influx of commodities in the aftermath of eco­nomic lib­ eralization, and the trans­forma­tions that their lives are undergoing, shape ideal notions of class-­based identities. With the exception of a few crit­ical voices, we have very few studies that relate to middle-­class consumption in the period between Independence and lib­ eralization (exceptions are Betéille 1991; Tarlo 1996); and mar­ginally more crit­ ical interjections into the liter­at­ure on the middle classes, which perhaps not surprisingly, draw on long-­term fieldwork (Scrase 2002; van Wessel 2004; Fernandes 2000a, 2000b, 2006). All these studies distinguish between private attitudes, pub­lic performance and intergeneration as well as regionally specific ideas about consumerism, and emphas­ize the homo­gen­eity of the associated pro­cesses as well as the heterogeneity of regional histories and newly embedded cultural meanings. Following this approach I will trace the way lib­eralization pol­icies have transformed the lives of metropolitan middle-­class cit­izens, namely Bengali fam­il­ies in Calcutta, focusing on one im­port­ant arena of everyday life, namely the consumption of food. Food cultures and their trans­forma­tion feature high on the list of pub­licly ac­know­ledged sites of middle-­class consumerism, as new, pub­lic, food-­related practices fit with the im­agery of the globalization of the Indian middle-­class consumer. Next to youth culture, fashion, pop music, visual media and IT industries, new food- and drink-­related consumption in urban India is both highly vis­ible and closely associated with high-­status global consumer culture (see for example Nisbett 2005; Fuller and Narasimhan 2007). Restaurants and bars, recipe pages and cookery shows, which all mark idealized Western middle-­class consumer identities, all figure highly in India’s gentrifying cityscapes. Certain of these spaces for pub­lic middle-­class food consumption predate lib­eralization, as Conlon (1995) points out, but the emerging pub­lics of middle-­class modernity did by and large configure food and class as a mat­ter of nationalist themes, as Appadurai observes in his work on the cosmo­pol­itan cookbook (Appadurai 1988). Today, the sites for the consumption of food in urban India provide a suit­able background for the expansion of self-­styled cosmo­pol­itan eating ex­peri­ ences, which relate to earl­ier class-­related practices of ‘eating out’, but also reconfigure those earl­ier old-­fashioned forms (Conlon 1995).2 However, while ideas about middle-­class identity and food are certainly circulated in the pub­lic domain, consumption also, and perhaps more signi­fic­antly so, serves to reproduce class in the do­mestic sphere. Here food practices cross-­cut, define, elevate

50   H. Donner and mar­ginalize claims to cosmo­pol­itan tolerance, secular transgressions of taboos, and the playfulness of youth culture’s food practices, while group-­based identities are highlighted not as a culinary ex­peri­ence of the other, but as a mat­ter of essentialized embodied identities, reproduced meticulously on an every­day basis. For the Bengali middle class in Calcutta the 1990s were a period of rapid trans­forma­tion and one of the prime sites of these changes was the every­day practice of food consumption. The influx of new consumer goods and the large-­ scale intensification of food production challenged ‘traditional’ ways food was understood, pro­cessed and consumed. Although the new consumerist culture has perhaps not eroded food-­related practices in Bengali middle-­class fam­il­ies as drastically as has happened elsewhere in India, as ready-­made meals and meals on wheels for the elderly are still not accept­able (see Caplan 2008), the influx of new food items and oppor­tun­ities for dining out altered the way the Bengali middle classes think about and consume food today. During fieldwork periods undertaken from 1994 onwards I could observe the challenges that new commodities and consumption patterns pose to existing notions of appropriate middle-­class diets, which in turn challenge ideas about interpersonal relations and the phys­ical im­plica­tions of food practices. Food, personhood and women’s bodies figured prominently in gendered discourses on Bengali middle-­class modernity and Indian nationalism, within which women and their bodies were posed quite differently from men. From the nine­ teenth century onwards, middle-­class women’s homemaker’s skills became a major concern (see Borthwick 1984; Banerjee 2004), and today housewives, as mothers and wives, are the chief consumers respons­ible for kin work related to food practices and educational strat­egies (Donner 2008a). But it is not only the pre­para­tion of food, which has been discussed in the liter­at­ure on the nine­teenth and earl­ier twentieth century, which is strictly gendered: elaborate discourses exist on the gendered nature of food consumption, which draw on traditional Hindu notions of gendered bodies and their social roles through the life course. Specific debates around middle-­class Bengali diets and gendered bodies emerged in the co­lo­nial period, and con­tinue to inform ideas and debates about women’s roles as consumers under pro­ cesses of globalization. Locally, the im­port­ance of women as nurturers is highlighted in ritual practices, as signified by the affectionate use of Lokkhi (Laxmi) for young women serving food to guests, and the pre­para­tion and consumption of food in Bengali middle-­class households is highly ritualized (see for example Engels 1996; Roy 1972; Fruzzetti 1982; Banerjee 1991, 2001; Janeja 2009). But women’s ritual roles overlap with their roles as cooks and servers of food for the family and need to be situated in a class-­based ana­lysis of the specific do­mesticities reproduced. In the urban middle-­class household Laxmi’s footprints painted in rice flour on the floor do not lead to the grain storage area, they lead directly to the fridge. For a long time this gadget has been an emblem of as­pira­tions for upward mobility and the ultimate symbol of achievement; it used to signify the class character of food consumption, and as a marker of middleclassness was given pride of place in the middle-­class reception room.3

Gendered bodies, domestic work, perfect families   51 In bringing together research on women’s do­mestic roles as wives and mothers, which is virtually ab­sent from any debates on gender and the middle classes in post-­liberalization India, with debates on globalization and consumer identities, we can frame middle-­class consumption differently. Women figure here as producers and consumers, which explains their relationship to food, and the im­port­ance given to food practices in discourses about Bengali middle-­class identities draw on older, mostly caste-­related ideas about bodies and well-­being, com­mun­ity and reproduction. Second, by looking at women’s diverse roles in relation to consumption, we avoid a reproduction of the essentialism contained in the repres­enta­tion of Bengali foodways as ‘tradition’ (see for example Banerjee 1991, 2001; Janeja 2009), as I will focus specifically on the marked trans­ forma­tion that discourses on food have undergone in a very short period of time. While writing this paper I revisited my first encounter with Bengali middle-­ class understandings of food, which took place in 1986 when I lived for three months with Bengali friends. This was a well-­educated, upper middle-­class family, occupying a beautiful three-­storey house in affluent South Calcutta, in which three of six brothers had estab­lished their own households, complete with separate kit­chens. The mid-­1980s was a period of rel­at­ive calm after polit­ical unrest, and more and more middle-­class fam­il­ies came to depend on gov­ern­ment ser­vice employment, and lived off permanent secure, sal­ar­ied positions. In spite of being more affluent through access to education, migration and prop­erty, my hosts saw themselves as solidly middle class, and this identification was validated in many conversations I had about the family with lower middle-­ class friends, who would recog­nize dif­fer­ences in terms of eco­nomic standing but pointed out the simil­ar­ities in ‘culture’, that is, in middle-­class status. The family’s idea about what constituted middleclassness linked women’s do­mestic roles with specific consumption patterns and status to meritocratic educational achievements, all of which remained to be im­port­ant signifiers of middleclassness in a milieu where a shared his­tory of urbanization and specific do­mesticities allowed a white-­collar elite of gov­ern­ment ser­vants to create a hege­monic, Hindu, class-­based sub-­culture. The middle-­class ‘culture’ they referred to is seen as specific to Bengal, and flourishes in Calcutta, and the values attached to the family expressed through ‘Bengali cuisine’ (bangla ranna) lie at its heart. Scholars inter­ested in Hindu ontology have pointed out that food, body and self are closely related in Hindu thought, and that due to its link with otherwordly aspects of life, food is ‘in­teg­ral to all Hindu models and meanings of the Hindu world’ (Marriot 1976; Khare 1992). Owing to the transactional qual­it­ies of foodstuff (in the sense of mater­ial), feeding and eating unite morality and action as food practices simul­tan­eously constitute personal health, self/identity and group status. As Janeja’s ana­lysis of middle-­class Hindu and Muslim Bengali notions of food regimes shows, many actors present food in terms of such inherent, often tran­scend­ent, qual­it­ies (Marriott 1976; Janeja 2009). However, Bose’s paper cited above also indicates that the exchanges/transactions/flows that actors engage in are always situated within his­tor­ically specific, malleable and gendered discourses, that is, a pol­itics of consumption (Bose

52   H. Donner 2005). Bose’s notion that Bengali food cannot be commercialized reflects commonsensical views on Bengali cuisine, but much more im­port­antly it renders specific kinds of work that go into food production, and the social relations that allow for this work to be undertaken, in short the division of labour in the house, in­vis­ible. However, if we read his emphasis on the many items served in a Bengali meal against the grain, an emphasis reflected in countless conversations on Bengali food I have had in Calcutta, this hidden aspect of talk about ‘cuisine’ becomes even more apparent. Countless times I was told by Hindu informants in the 1990s that apart from a small res­taur­ant run by a char­ity for destitute women, Bengali res­taur­ants were non-­existent in Calcutta, irrespective of the multitude of Bengali Muslim res­taur­ants frequented by the Hindu middle class as well. By the beginning of the millennium this had changed, with at least three up-­market eateries catering exclusively to connoisseurs of Bengali cuisine, which were initially aimed at the growing non-­resident Indian com­mun­ity visiting the city (see Janeja 2009). But the earl­ier regime had estab­lished some lasting truths in the pub­lic sphere, namely, as my informants would confirm, and as Bose observes as well, the food prepared in the Bengali middle-­class household is superior to other kinds of cuisine as it is always prepared freshly and from scratch, it is therefore allegedly not diluted and cannot reasonably be emu­lated outside of the home in a commercial setting. This definition of a home as being a place where proper middle-­class meals are cooked from scratch every day defines the do­mestic sphere implicitly as a site where the social relations that make such food pos­sible are realized, that is, as a space where women’s work becomes part of the elaborate construction that makes Bengali middle-­class persons and marks middle-­class identities. Talk about cuisine, as in other households, hid the gendered division of labour as well as class distinctions, as both hierarchies were nat­uralized through the notion of what makes bangla ranna. When I lived with them, members of my host family spoke regu­larly and quite openly about their own middle-­class identity in terms of ‘being in the middle’, which implied their belief in the merits of education, hard work and sacrifice, as well as a ‘traditional’ lifestyle, indicated on an every­day level through food practices and the role of the women in the house. Women’s do­mestic involvement, their com­mit­ment to the family, distinguished them from those ‘below’ – the working class, who cannot afford elaborate meals and whose women have to go out and work, and those ‘above’, whose consumerism watered down the im­port­ance of home-­cooked meals and con­ser­vat­ive gendered ideals (see for sim­ilar notions Dickey 2000; Liechty 2003). Based on the belief in their own middleclassness, the family members, like most other middle-­class Bengali fam­il­ies I have come to know, took pride in a deliberately austere lifestyle, allegedly a legacy of the nationalist movement. This was seen as functionally use­ful and ethical for a middle class closely involved with the pro­ject of nation building and the de­velop­mentalist state, in spite of privately expressed criticism towards pol­itics more gen­erally (see Varma 1998). In the family home, by the middle of the 1980s, commodities were often marked as ‘Indian’ and brands that were indi­gen­ous but deemed to be of good

Gendered bodies, domestic work, perfect families   53 quality and successful were preferred over ‘foreign’ products. With enhanced exposure to migration, mostly for education, nar­rat­ives also inev­it­ably centred on ‘luxury’ items seen as essential for Western versions of respectable middleclassness, including televisions and the like. While some owned VCRs, such high-­tech equipment was at the time not essential, and com­puters for example are still rather rare in such Calcutta households to date. However, household goods, from plastic buckets to fridges, warranted intense discussion and con­ sider­able inspection even in this rel­at­ively affluent household, where the durabil­ ity and price of such purchases were often discussed. Many items found in middle-­class homes could not be found in working-­class households, but although clothes, media consumption and eating out did play a role in the budget of middle-­class fam­il­ies, the main expenditure was on food and education (see also Ganguly-­Scrase and Scrase 2008). In my host family, the pre­para­tion and consumption of food dominated the lives of all family members in the household, and the routine of shopping for food, cooking and eating became a preferred way to teach me about ‘Bengali culture’. This was not only a respectable and ‘cultured’ household but, as a visi­ ting friend pointed out, a family of ‘ser­ious’ eaters. Although there was a lot of pleasure gained from food, the pre­para­tion and consumption of food was never treated in a casual fashion or taken lightly, a quality which family members themselves attributed to their Brahmin origins. To plan meals, supervise the pre­para­tion of food and serve it to chil­dren and men coming back from school or the workplace was the domain of the married women in the house, but ser­vants were employed to do the ‘dirty’ and more laborious tasks, as is the case in virtually all middle-­class homes I have visited in Calcutta. Though a lot of emphasis is given to items cooked by the ginni (mistress) of the house ‘with her own hands’, housewives may very rarely prepare a complete meal without ‘helpers’. Women in such fam­il­ies are educated to at least degree level, but very few are in employment, for example in my host household only the youngest daughter-­in-law worked part time as a teacher.4 In each of the three related households sharing the residence, one daughter-­in-law took on the role of the housewife – an ideal epitomized by the mother of the three male householders, who had devoted her whole life to looking after her family. A mother of 11 surviving chil­dren, she was now a widow in her seventies, and true to her high-­caste status she had adopted the dress code and dietary rules associated with high-caste widowhood upon the death of her husband 20 years earl­ier. But although she was a ‘proper’ vegetarian herself, forgoing onions, garlic, meat, spices, fish and specific lentils, she occasionally cooked special seafood items for her favourite son ‘with her own hands’. This habit as well as her acceptance of her family’s ‘modern habits’ were hailed as an enactment of the self-­sacrificial maternal virtues sought in a Bengali mother as well as high-­caste widowhood (see Bagchi 1990; Chakravarti 1995). The daily meals I shared with members of the family did always follow a set order and contained one fish item, rice, dal and veget­ables, made from ingredients purchased freshly in the local market by male family members, and

54   H. Donner cooked and served twice daily by their wives. While the family was ‘modern’ enough to serve ‘Western’ breakfast, the full meals were markedly ‘Bengali’, so it was ‘select­ively’ vegetarian, as it included fish daily as typical for the cuisine of this region. The question of ‘selective’ vegetarianism, not vegetarianism itself, made the diet special, as men were often consuming meat outside, and increasingly young women ate non-­vegetarian snacks, but meat eating was associated with Muslim forms of sociality and low-­caste origins and therefore not condemned in the home. The symbolic importance of meat consumption had on the one hand to do with the Brahmin origins of the family. As a matter of status and courtesy, since the vegetarian mother-­in-law was still alive, daughters-­in-law cooking in their own flats could not easily prepare meat, but whilst beef remains taboo, mutton and chicken, though equally strongly associated with Muslims and lower castes, are gradually cooked more regularly in upper-caste Hindu households. This is indicated by the fact that non-vegetarian recipes including meat have been a regu­lar feature of pop­ular Bengali women’s magazines. Bengali cookery books have been produced from the 1880s onwards, and these pub­lications helped to define Bengali cuisine as a skilled art and a moral pro­ject. Bengali cuisine emerged in the con­text of specific do­mesticities: cooking became a mat­ter of maternal and wifely love and devotion, and a site to negotiate modernity in debates about gender and caste through discourses on health, hygiene and science. Traditional cookery books included next to local items Moghul dishes, and specific Western recipes such as cutlets and porridge, but they were not just compilations of recipes, instead they discussed the challenges of new food items in relation to South Asian ideas of dietary regimes, for example the bene­fits of a vegetarian diet and the challenges of creating healthy meals containing rice and fish (Sengupta 2010). In the fam­il­ies I work with, educational and moralistic discourses on food had led to a pattern whereby a strictly Bengali diet was con­sidered to be healthy, as it came to be based on rice and fish, but also not as virile as other diets, as it does not contain much ‘heating’ meat, which would produce male prowess and sexual urges. Around the time when the first cookery books were published, young Hindu men, espe­cially students and businessmen, were already estab­lishing a culture of eating out in non-­ vegetarian res­taur­ants on a regu­lar basis. But householders and fathers in high-­ caste fam­il­ies were gen­erally expected to accept a more do­mestic, restrained lifestyle and stick to more-­or-less vegetarian food, and more gen­erally, eat mostly at home. Even in strictly vegetarian households young women began to eat outside more often from the 1950s onwards, and by the 1980s a non-­ vegetarian item was seen as an accept­able treat for young girls, although well-­ brought-up young women still express a pref­er­ence for vegetarian snacks today. Certainly, women belonging to this and other households were not encouraged to consume meat at home and gen­erally did not eat out as often as their male relatives. As is apparent, ‘Bengali cuisine’ gained its im­port­ance as a marker of class and of Hindu identity, and both attributes rest on a ‘traditional’ diet, which is largely depicted as select­ively vegetarian. Cultivated in a rather self-­conscious

Gendered bodies, domestic work, perfect families   55 way, the related ideas and practices are constitutive of Calcutta’s Bengali Hindu urban middle-­class do­mesticity, with its specific gender relations, consumption patterns and com­munal identities related to such food practices. Food consumed inside the home was contrasted with the transgressive consumption of food eaten outside, in par­ticu­lar street foods (see Mukhopdhayay 2004), and family meals were a site to reproduce the bound­ar­ies between the pub­lic and the private sphere, ethnic, and religious com­mun­ity’s classes. Up to the 1990s, eating out was accept­able for a respectable middle-­class family, but the choices would be old-­fashioned res­taur­ants serving Western, Chinese and Punjabi dishes, with rare visits centring around non-­vegetarian food and alcohol, and only a few times I accompanied male members of the family to non-­vegetarian Muslim family res­ taur­ants. However, I was introduced to the extensive fast food culture by my 15-year-­old friend, who bought me ‘Chinese’ noodles and North Indian pau rolls and phuchka balls, kebabs from Muslim restaurants, as well as South Indian dosas from local stalls. While one could have prepared most of these items at home, there was a marked distinction between food that could be eaten outside, espe­cially by women, and the every­day diet provided in the house. Clearly, some of the food was con­sidered too ‘strange’ to be prepared at home, whilst other items were too strongly associated with non-­vegetarian diets to be in­teg­rated into home cooking. However, contrary to Bose’s view about the essential charac­ter­ istics that would prevent the commodification of Bengali cuisine and the inclusion of all sorts of items in the Bengali home, these certainties had evaporated by the end of the 1990s, when more globalized food practices became part of at least the affluent middle class segment’s routine. With consumerist lifestyles and the availabil­ity of not only new food, but new spaces of consumption signified by the ever-­present image of the mall and its food court, complex nego­ti­ations around food challenged the nat­uralized sense of identity and belonging that bangla ranna had provided earl­ier. This is exemplified in the fol­low­ing sections, which show how vegetarianism, which lies at the heart of South Asian food sys­ tems and represents caste-­based col­lect­ive practices (see Khare 1992), was modified to fit with new class-­based consumption patterns and creates gendered identities.

The nationalist legacy During the co­lo­nial period, many affluent households of wealthy Bengali landlords and businessmen indulged an aristocratic pref­er­ence for ‘Moghul’ food, which was markedly heavy and non-­vegetarian (Sengupta 2010) and high-­status, affluent households would employ Muslim cooks to prepare such dishes (see Khare 1976). Not much is known about the diet of the lower classes, including the lower orders of the emerging middle class. But it was only with the emergence of a service-­ oriented middle class that the indulgent customs of the aristocracy were criticized and a vegetarian diet, including the all-­important milk and fish, become a high-­ status option for Bengali Hindus. Though concerns about the virility of Bengalis rose in the co­lo­nial period. The nationalist movement made the distinctly Hindu

56   H. Donner vegetarianism we now recog­nize as ‘Bengali’, a respectable option for the less well-­off urbanites who came to dominate Calcutta and the moffusil towns. The sources we have about the reality of cooking and cuisine during the co­lo­nial period are few and far between,5 so I will draw on the inter­views with very elderly informants I conducted from the mid-­1990s onwards to reconstruct ideas and ar­range­ments pre­val­ent in extended family homes before Independence. In many cases, it seems, previously better-­off fam­il­ies had modified and stand­ardized their lifestyle at the beginning of the century, often because employment in gov­ern­ment ser­vice and the professions did not provide the same kind of incomes that ab­sentee landlords and affluent traders were used to. Furthermore, as extended fam­il­ies grew, their homes became crowded and were often divided, so that a number of women, chil­dren and elderly rel­at­ives came to depend on a single income. Gradually, if a large extended family had employed cooks before, the women of the house took over as the unit subdivided and housewives provided all the meals, assisted by female ser­vants (see Banerjee 2004). Food became a mat­ter of affection between affines, and its pre­para­tion very closely intertwined with the control exercised by mothers-­in-law over the free labour of incoming wives.6 Second, during the late co­lo­nial period and well into the post-­Independence era, more and more fam­il­ies, espe­cially refu­gees from East Bengal, joined the ranks of the Calcutta middle classes, and brought with them distinct culinary pref­er­ences, for example a focus on fish and veget­ables, as well as a need to devise a less costly diet. Not surprisingly, the result turned out to be elaborate and labour intensive. Lastly, as women’s roles as chaste wives became reformulated, mother­hood provided the grounds for a culturally conscious do­mesticity, focused on mothers as providers and nurturers within the con­text of a smaller extended family. The work they could and should perform ‘with their own hands’ was redefined as a ‘labour of love’, and as the com­mit­ment of women to their fam­il­ies’ well-­being fit well with earl­ier pat­ri­archal regimes, since it was based on patrivrata and the submission of women to the dharma of the Hindu wife, women’s roles as homemakers became nat­uralized as an ideo­logy (Chakravarti 1993). As a ‘repository’ of power, the new Bengali Hindu woman, a middle-­class housewife, turned into not only an icon of ‘tradition’ but also a producer of these traditions in the home (Sarkar 2001; Walsh 2004). Taking over the role of mediators between the compromising influences of modern, Westernized lifestyles that came with male employment in the pub­lic sphere (see McGowan 2006; Walsh 2004) and ‘tradition’, middle-­class women emerged as ‘chief consumers’, in par­ticu­lar where food know­ledge and practices were concerned. As such, the new ways of being female in Bengali middle-­class homes, where marital relations and maternal roles were reframed under the influence of reforms, emphas­ized the distinction between the pub­lic and the private, the inside and the outside, eating in and eating out, and linked the consumption of food intimately to new sites of know­ledge: about health, education, hygiene and home eco­nom­ics (Walsh 2004). The reworking of traditional high-­caste ideo­lo­gies through modern education, medical know­ledge and ‘rational’ applica­tions of home science were first and foremost located in the home and have been well docu­mented (Chatterjee 1993;

Gendered bodies, domestic work, perfect families   57 Karlekar 1993; Engels 1996; Walsh 2004; Sengupta 2010). It is never­the­less striking how little the sources tell us about women’s roles as cooks, super­visors of those cooking, and their own diets, which must have been on the radar of the reformers as well. As the ideo­logy of the ‘chaste wife, modern mother’ took hold from the 1890s onwards, the new bhadramahila (gentlewoman) ideal demanded that women guard their own conduct, but also altered their relationships with the food eaten by the family. Judging from pre­val­ent discourses now, the quality of the offspring produced came to be a concern related to dietary patterns before and after birth, and it still is.

Post-­Independence While it is perhaps not surprising that one encounters a dearth of sources detailing not so much ideal habits but actual food practices during the co­lo­nial period, what is surprising is the scarcity of mater­ial relating to middle-­class lifestyles, including food practices, in the post-­Independence era. A few ethnographies of middle-­class family life and women’s roles (for example, Roy 1972; Fruzzetti 1982; Hancock 1999; Seymour 1999) do highlight women’s ritual roles and their ex­peri­ences as wives and mothers during the life­cycle, but are largely silent about women as cooks. Food memoirs, a genre flourishing as the migration of middle-­class Bengalis has created a market for nostalgic accounts of life in affluent extended fam­il­ies (see Banerjee 1991, 2001), sell well and provide impressionistic accounts of intra-­household relations, the close link between ritual and food pre­para­tion and the pleasures involved in the leisurely lifestyle of the upper middle class in an imaginary pre-­industrial era. They do reflect the sense of distinction and women’s involvement that also shines through in the vignette of dietary regimes governing every­day life in a middle-­class, high-­caste Bengali Hindu household outlined above. The latter is fairly typical for what could be expected in the period between Independence and the moment when eco­nomic reforms began to have an impact on the lives of ordinary Calcuttans in the 1990s. However, lower middle-­class fam­il­ies, par­ticu­larly those with a refu­gee background, had only very gradually joined this estab­lished hege­monic elite, among whom today every­day meals make up a signi­fic­ant chunk of household expenses. In the 1980s middle-­class residents would still complain about the soaring price of onions, which had been a cause of food riots in the 1950s and 1960s in which these consumers played a key role (Desai 1999). With Independence the special role that the Bengali middle class had played as the avant-­garde of a nationalist pro­ject faded into the background, and middle­class consumption practices came to be marked by the ten­sion between involvement in the de­velop­mentalist state pro­ject and essentialized ethnic identity in a multicultural envir­on­ment. In the case of Bengal, the im­port­ance of the latter was enhanced by the new Bengali nationalism emerging in Muslim East Paki­stan/Bangladesh. In the multicultural setting of Calcutta com­munal identities play out in every­day practices, not only on the big screen of pub­lic life and through the infamous riots. As Laura Ring has so per­suas­ively shown in her

58   H. Donner eth­no­graphy of a Karachi apartment building, ‘every­day peace’ depends on women’s work, and ethnic identity and dif­fer­ence are estab­lished in the do­mestic sphere through transactions within the family, with kin and with neigh­bours. Given the im­port­ance of commensality, discourses on purity and pollution, more often than not through the practice of food exchange and the lim­ita­tions of women’s involvement in pub­lic socialities, food practices emerge as a central focus to reconfirm a sense of belonging and maintain bound­ar­ies in various secularizing South Asian middle-­class envir­on­ments (Ring 2006). In Calcutta, com­ munal ten­sion, the influx of refu­gees from East Bengal and the restructuring of the middle classes around the widening gov­ern­ment sector all shaped discourses on appropriate modern middle-­class consumption, and women’s roles and their relations with food as pro­cessors and nurturers in the Bengali home were strengthened in the pro­cess. As I argue below, the link between food–women– home remains a crucial marker of middleclassness in the post-­liberalization period. In fact, consumer surveys indicate that it is in the post-­Independence period that the ‘Bengali diet’ based on rice and fish becomes the ritualized meal of the Calcutta middle-­class household, since it is a hallmark of the regional identity of East Bengali refu­gees. Indeed the unhealthy diet of Bengalis had been an issue during the late colonnial period, and sci­ent­ific discourse promoted the healthy option of rice, fish and dairy products with veget­ables as suitably vegetarian diet for a regional middle-­class audience (Sengupta 2010). This tend­ency became even more pronounced in the aftermath of partition, partly because of the segregation of com­munit­ies, which lent extra weight to the significance of meat-eating as a Muslim practice (see Janeja 2009), but also due to the influx of East Bengalis, whose traditional fare contained more varieties of veget­ables and fish than the diet of arid West Bengal. Much to the dismay of my many ghoti (Bengalis from West Bengal) friends, what is today widely regarded as Bengali cuisine is in fact based on a bangal (East Bengali) selection of ingredients and pre­para­tions (see for instance Banerjee 1991, 2001; Ray 2005). After Independence, all middle-­class women in Calcutta had access to formal education but, contrary to common perceptions, women’s parti­cipa­tion in the labour force stalled soon. In fact, my data on family histories provide evid­ence for a decrease in female employment even in households where older women had been full-­time em­ployees. There are complex reasons for this decline, but women’s heightened involvement in educational strat­egies and therefore even more emphasis on the ‘orientation towards the home’ plays an im­port­ant role (Donner 2008a). Generally, on becoming a mother young women quit paid employment and devote themselves exclusively to their do­mestic roles (Donner 2006).7 Children’s formal education and the need to prepare full Bengali meals are the most often cited reasons for a withdrawal of middle-­class women from the labour market.

The post-­liberalization period Debates on food practices in middle-­class fam­il­ies ranged from simple exchanges of recipes to elaborate food philo­sophies, and the pre­para­tion,

Gendered bodies, domestic work, perfect families   59 consumption and discussion of food dominated much of my research. From the outset this also involved learning about the prac­tical aspects of food, that is, where to shop, how to cook and, of course, how to eat Bengali food. However, this food obsession comes at a price, as women who are in employment cannot pos­sibly fulfil their roles as cooks and housewives. Among the husbands of working women inter­viewed by Devi and Standing (Devi 1988; Standing 1991), one raised a typical complaint about the alleged neg­lect and the shortcuts working wives were taking:‘We cannot have delicious food. We cannot keep our social com­mit­ments due to lack of time and my daughter is less well cared for’ (Standing 1991: 77). This negative view was iterated in my own research where men and women agreed that a married woman could not pos­sibly work full-time and provide ‘proper’ food for her family. A young mother, a former sales­person herself, attributed this to mother­hood and her role as a wife: ‘You know, Bengalis are mad about food and you can’t just serve the ready-­made stuff you Westerners serve the family. A Bengali husband or a son will expect two warm meals a day, and we can cook some of it in advance and put it in the freezer, but you have to have at least three to four courses. That kind of food takes time.’8 Mothers-­in-law and husbands also argued that a wife who had to combine housework with employment would be overworked, thereby implying that it would never­the­less be her duty to feed the family. Indeed, I met numerous working mothers who prepared ‘full’ meals consisting of more than six items before going to work early in the morning and after they returned in the afternoon. All these accounts echo Bose’s sentiment cited above and in addition demonstrate why an ana­lysis of food based on its inherent transactional qual­it­ies perpetuates the prevalent invisibility of women’s labour, although such an approach tallies well with commonsensical notions of food’s essentialized qual­it­ies that is reproduced locally (see Janeja 2009). In the majority of households I worked with a mother-­in-law and a daughter-­ in-law shared the respons­ib­ility for food pre­para­tion, and food-­related ac­tiv­ities would often carry on from before six in the morning when a husband and schoolchil­dren got up, to midday, involving ser­vants as well as female affines. Housewives then took a well-­deserved break, to resume their duties in the afternoon when they usually had a snack ready for the returning family members, and cooked an evening meal to be served later at night. This extensive attention to food preparation can on the one hand be attributed to the labour-­intensive nature of the items cooked and the sheer quantities involved, but is related to the need to reproduce ethnicity through the procedure itself, expressed in the conscious refusal to utilize labour-­saving devices, or pre-­prepared ingredients, local idiom as a refusal to take ‘shortcuts’. But while such ‘proper’ meals are still prepared in thou­sands of middle-­class homes, other aspects of such familiar food discourses are changing. At the time of my first extended fieldwork between 1995 and 1997, eco­nomic lib­eralization had estab­lished a firm grip over the eco­nomy and the every­day practices of the middle classes in Indian cities were changing. The lives of the Bengali fam­il­ies I worked with were gradually becoming more openly determined by new

60   H. Donner commodities, signifying a high-­status consumer culture, which in the eyes of many was desir­able and as­pira­tional but also threatened middle-­class family coher­ence and values. Food was an obvious arena for these trans­forma­tions, as the arrival of Western-­style pre-­processed foods, new ‘foreign’ ingredients and the expansion of ‘eating out’ engulfed more and more sections of the urban middle class in India. Expertise about a wide range of food products as well as res­taur­ants delivering global cuisines, for example pizzas and sushi, became an im­port­ant marker of middleclassness in the metropolitan areas, and Kolkata with its extensive food culture soon boasted a couple of Indianized franch­ises such as Domino’s Pizza and Kentucky Fried Chicken, but also homegrown chains including the extraordinarily successful Arambagh frozen chicken enterprise. Knowledge about such places and items was therefore neces­sary, and was painstakingly acquired, espe­cially by mothers, who are on the one hand respons­ible for the socialization of chil­dren and in control of food practices at home, but who grew par­ticu­larly anxious about the new mores and the pressure to adjust to the large food–industrial sector’s offerings. Opportunities to sample global fast food, for example epitomized by the much-­celebrated advent of Pizza Hut, were publicly celebrated in the press, and women’s maga­zines offered detailed descriptions of new items that could be in­teg­rated into the every­day diet to satisfy the younger generation’s demands for such dishes. It was the presence of global fast-­food chains, not the recipe or skill to prepare your own burger at home, which served as proof that the newly renamed ‘Kolkata’ had arrived in the shiny new world of real estate, IT industries and malls pro­jected as the city of the future by its English-­speaking elites here as elsewhere (see Fuller and Narasimhan 2007, 2008). However, the very same fast-­food chains, new chil­dren’s snacks and the inflation of ‘eating out’ symbolized the negat­ive connotations of globalization with consumerism and ‘Westernization’. As van Wessel points out in her study of Baroda middle-­class residents, consumer goods and the image of a middle class defined solely in terms of consumption were not em­braced as pos­it­ive markers of Indian modernity by all sections of the middle class, and Kolkata’s Bengali residents are often exceptionally crit­ical of the trans­forma­tions their city and their lifestyles are undergoing. Amidst the excitement that the tri­umph­ant media cover­age of the new ‘markets’ for the growing middle class suggested, the actual trans­forma­tion of middle-­class lifestyles was always evalu­ated in markedly ambiguous terms. But unlike van Wessel’s Baroda informants, who raised the spectre of com­petit­ ive consumerism destroying earl­ier forms of com­munality and sociality, my Bengali friends did not complain about being forced to compete with their neighbours (van Wessel 2004). They worried most about the negat­ive effect of new commodities on intimate relationships within the family, in par­ticu­lar the parent–child bond. The recently acquired desirable commodities such as mobile phones, VCRs and televisions are shared within the family, and this mode of sharing amongst relatives became gen­erally accept­able as a precon­dition for a new, middle-­class lifestyle that pos­it­ively valued conspicuous consumption in pub­lic spaces. But other practices and arenas remained prob­lematic, including

Gendered bodies, domestic work, perfect families   61 fashion, changing food habits and the effect consumerism is expected to have on family and gender relations (see also Ganguly-­Scrase and Scrase 2008 and in this volume). Whenever investments in gadgets such as new cookers, washing machines and other domestic goods was discussed, these concerns came to the fore. Whilst they were marked as labour saving devices, my informants saw them as symbols of social decay. Viewed ambiguously, kit­chen devices were depicted as a “shortcut” that would allow those doing the work of feeding and looking after the family to become ‘spoilt’. This applies to the use of mixers as well as admittedly initially expensive items like washing ma­chines. As a housewife I have known for years explained, such a purchase would not bene­fit ‘the family’, but would on the contrary bene­fit only a daughter-­in-law or a ser­vant doing this kind of work. Along the same lines, concerns over pre-­processed foods and their influence on those who are preparing full meals were raised. Renu, a 36-year-­old housewife and single mother of three school-­age chil­dren, whose husband worked away in the Gulf, explained that a food pro­cessor would make it too ‘easy’ for the ser­vant or women of the house to avoid the most arduous tasks that occur on a regu­lar basis and therefore make them selfish. I got the same reaction from Shibani, mother of an as-­yet unmarried son of 22, who had recently received a car for himself, that she would not equip her recently refurbished kit­chen, which occupied a tiny part of their open veranda, before his marriage, ‘because if I purchase these things now, they [his potential in-­laws] will think that she [the potential daughter-­in-law] doesn’t have to produce proper food, that she can be lazy’. But labour-­saving devices are not the only food-­related nov­el­ties advertised to middle-­class Calcuttans. Given the gen­eral inter­est in gastronomic topics, food items and new food-­related practices lay at the heart of many advertisement cam­ paigns. Certain items, for instance specific soft drinks and frozen pizzas, were welcomed enthusiastically among the younger generation, and have been adopted by fam­il­ies as well. However, others, for example frozen bacon or pre-­ground spices, familiar today, took much longer to be en­dorsed by the middle-­class women who decide whether to buy or not to buy. And indeed, most products that popped up in the local stalls disappeared soon after they were first launched. When I came to stay in Calcutta for two years in 1995, my earl­ier ex­peri­ences with middle-­class family life and food habits were still sufficient to set up a household and feed myself without stretching my limited budget too far. Like other residents of the suburban neigh­bour­hood I moved into, I purchased all ingredients I needed daily from the market ‘sitting’ in the evenings, and used the corner shop to stock up on groceries. But unlike other residents, however, in common with most foreigners I met, I sometimes ventured out to posh markets elsewhere in search of ‘Western’ items, including cheese, Nescafé and pasta. At the time, and true to stereo­types about West Bengal’s eco­nomy, the local market ex­peri­enced shortages of every­day items including milk, sugar and bread quite regu­larly. Semi-­processed foods (pasta, powdered milk and tinned items) were markedly ab­sent, and while my informants from Central Calcutta were surrounded by some of the best markets in the city and thus could purchase those

62   H. Donner with ease – though they rarely did so – in neighbourhoods elsewhere this was just as well. On the whole, these Bengali fam­il­ies rarely consumed ‘Western’ or pre-­processed items, as such foods indicated a lack of com­mit­ment to the ideal of devoted wife and mother among the women in the house. Pre-­processed foods were coded ‘other’ and their use was attributed to different ethnic com­munit­ies, in par­ticu­lar the allegedly affluent Bengali Chris­tian households, which are often headed owing to male migration to the Gulf. Bengali Hindu housewives, on the other hand, would send their husbands or fathers-­in-law to the market in the morning and prepared fresh meals daily, often during two separate sessions. Labour-­saving shortcuts like ‘mixies’ and ‘packaged’ dals and spices were frowned upon, and apart from sweets, ready-­made foods were not regu­larly bought from shops. Cooking from scratch was to these housewives as much a mat­ter of com­munal identity as of indi­vidual pride, and the time that went into the pre­para­tion of meals was often ac­know­ledged by male household members. This discourse on Bengali identity, cuisine and women’s do­mestic roles did not centre on par­ticu­lar skills or ingredients, many of which are indeed very specific, but was based on the ‘orientation towards the family’ that Bengali middle-­class women were expected to display and enact. Unbeknown to some of the ad­vert­ising agencies, which were implementing nationwide cam­paigns targeting female customers through images of affluent but time-­poor ‘modern’ working wives and mothers, my informants saw many of the new items promoted as a threat to their authority, which was directly related to the ideal of a self-­ sacrificing wife and – in many ways much more im­port­antly – committed mother. To define the pre­para­tion of food as the ultimate labour of love trans­ ferred its status from a marker of ritual status and class to a modern practice that tied in with new intimacies, around which a cau­tious consumerism is centred. Since this is prob­ably more focused on the mother–child bond than the marital relationship, housewives are mediating and controlling what is consumed in their capa­city as mothers. Food consumption has therefore become a prime site to negotiate new consumer identities, which are, as we will see, forged through practices that reproduce the intersection between class, gender and ethnic identity.

Taking it all in In Calcutta middle-class families, it took until the end of the 1990s for markedly global food practices to threaten these estab­lished patterns. Clearly, such changes occurred in the aftermath of the opening of the eco­nomy, which enabled the influx of new consumer goods, and triggered a wider re-­evaluation of what it meant to be middle-class and ‘Indian’, as the liter­at­ure on the middle class asserts (see for example Rajagopal 2001; Oza 2006), but regional identities do also play a main role in certain com­munit­ies. Professional marketing reached even the smallest neigh­bour­hood store, and pro­mo­tions of specific food items rocketed. Many of these items were of the semi-­processed, ‘instant’ snack variety, numerous were health supplements, and a huge number were aimed at the emerging chil­dren and

Gendered bodies, domestic work, perfect families   63 youth markets. In an effort of brand consolidation new items were often sold with pro­mo­tions, which produced bizarre combinations: chocolate would come with free washing powder, or a toilet cleaner would be accompanied by a free pack of instant noodles. Selected ingredients, such as pasta, frozen pizzas, tomato puree and frozen chicken, today avail­able from many corner shops, had previously been the reserve of the very small group of wealthy cosmo­pol­itan fam­il­ies. Today, whilst the full ‘Bengali’ meal with rice at the centre remains the staple, more and more fam­il­ies include such ‘Western’ items, which figure on the daily shopping lists and transformed the way middle-­class Calcuttans think about food. But though all family members, including grandparents, get excited about some of the new foodstuffs, the accompanying challenges to the Bengali dietary regime they represent also cause debates. These point beyond the mere questions of nutrition and affordabil­ity towards other trans­forma­tions in middle-­class lifestyles. A second arena in which middle-­class food habits have been transformed is ‘eating out’, which became a major obsession from the late 1990s onwards. As mentioned earl­ ier, eating out was already part of middle-­class lifestyles, but the advent of the big multi­national chains was cel­eb­rated as much for the variety they added to the foodscape of Calcutta as for its symbolic value as eating out became a matter of prestige. Pizza Hut and Kentucky Fried Chicken are today very much seen as family res­taur­ants, which allow access to a global food culture and figure as proof of Calcutta’s cosmo­pol­itanism. The shift from an approach where every multi­national com­pany, espe­cially Coca-­Cola, were identified negat­ively with Amer­ican imperialism towards the em­brace of such ventures indicates the global as­pira­tions of the Bengali middle classes. But while their symbolic value cannot be denied, in terms of their actual outreach these high-­profile chains are much less prominent than the enthusiastic press cover­age of each single opening would have us believe, and few of the fam­il­ies in the households I work with have been to visit one of these outlets more than once. Indeed, it is the success of local food entre­pren­eurs, who use franch­ises to enhance their pres­ence and offer ‘Western’ items like pizza and ice-­cream to those with more modest budgets, that is most remark­able. An example of such a chain is Arambhag Hatcheries, which sells pre-­packed frozen chicken pieces and more recently condiments in a supermarket-­style envir­on­ment. Not only does this arrangement violate the traditional separation of meat products and groceries found in the open markets, but the chicken is frozen and not fresh, whilst packs with ident­ical parts (i.e., only legs, only breast) are not used in ‘tradi­tion­al’ Bengali cooking. Another success story is the Haldiram’s sweet and snack chain, which has brought ‘chat’ of non-­Bengali origin into many homes. The products of both local chains are avail­able in many shops, an im­port­ant ad­vant­age in an envir­on­ment where relations of trust can take pre­ced­ence over the glamour of multi­na­tional reputations. And signi­fic­antly, both enterprises sell items previously avail­able, but offer a more professional version of products, which were earl­ier imme­diately associated with the staple diet of ‘other’ com­munit­ies: with Muslims in the case of chicken, and with North Indian business com­munit­ies in the case of chat. The success of both these com­panies dem­on­strates that the

64   H. Donner products they offer have become part of the every­day diet in Bengali middle-­ class households, where middleclassness today implies an active appropriation of cosmo­pol­itan, and largely global, food practices. There can be no doubt that ‘foreign’ dishes, which were previously only consumed in res­taur­ants on special occasions, including pasta, pizza and specific meat pre­para­tions, are increasingly cooked and consumed at home. Furthermore, it is signi­fic­ant that more affluent middle-­class households are now frequently visiting res­taur­ants or ordering takeaway meals from chains outside. While a family of four, such as our long-­time neigh­bours, would previously have eaten out in a ‘middle of the range’ Moghul or Chinese res­taur­ant on a special occasion, the same family very often eats out at least twice a month today and is spoilt for choice between Italian, Moghul, Chinese, vegetarian and fusion places. A third arena that has seen im­port­ant challenges to the former or­tho­doxy of the food order as de­scribed by Bose is the decrease in the diversity of food avail­able on special occasions. Up to the mid-­1990s, catering was markedly ethnic and caterers would very often be asked to serve only vegetarian options (including fish courses), so as to not exclude or insult any of the more caste-­conscious guests. Weddings in par­ticu­lar were occasions during which Bengali middle-­class fam­il­ies competed in their search for conspicuous yet markedly ‘Bengali’ items, and in mul­tiple seatings guests would be served speciality dishes. During the last decade, the wedding feasts have not only transmuted into buffets, but while many a mother was bemoaning the gradual disap­pear­ance of the special delicacies ladled out of a bucket on to a banana leaf to be devoured by seated guests, meat-­heavy Punjabi and Moghul-­style meals, including pulao, kebabs and the obligatory fried fish item consumed standing from plates, have become the norm. However, before we conclude that this shift marks cosmo­pol­itanism, let me reiterate that first, Moghul-­ inspired food used to be consumed by aristocrats and thus has always been one of the avail­able high-­status options, and second, that while weddings in gen­eral have become less markedly Bengali, they are still designed to reflect ‘Indianess’, and are therefore seen by many youngsters as ‘traditional’. The last two sections have shown that new consumption patterns are only partly made pos­sible through the mere availabil­ity of new items, which have enabled the middle-­class consumer to incorp­or­ate ‘foreign’ food into the do­mestic diet. Clearly a major signifier of changing times, new food practices work because they represent a key marker of middleclassness and are driving consumerist lifestyles that challenge understandings of do­mestic and pub­lic distinctions, regional and national identities. Crucially, many of the new practices migrated from pub­lic sites to do­mestic envir­on­ments, where food-­related know­ ledge and consumption patterns are related to gendered roles in the family.

Contemporary gendered practices In this final section I will de­scribe a fourth field of trans­forma­tion, which is prob­ ably the least easily ob­serv­able, as it requires long-­term fieldwork in order to be accessed. As mentioned in previous sections, my earl­ier research showed that most

Gendered bodies, domestic work, perfect families   65 middle-­class Bengalis consumed ‘other’ foods outside their own homes in the form of kebabs and Chinese meals, but that this was largely seen as a ‘modern’ transgression from a supposedly ‘traditional Bengali diet’ constructed along the lines of Hindu high-­caste pref­er­ences. ‘Foreign’ and non-­vegetarian food was more easily and often accept­able for men, and even expected to be a favourite choice among those young, male and single. But married women and young daughters were often encouraged to go for a Bengali and a vegetarian dish even on special occasions and girls were certainly discouraged from eating out too often. I have written about gendered practices in terms of ‘new vegetarianism’ elsewhere (Donner 2008b), so here it should suffice to say that married women are today often becoming vegetarian, sometimes because they are experiencing fertility prob­lems, but often at the time they feel that their reproductive lives have come to a close and they therefore stop consuming ‘heating’ foods associated with sexual appetites. This is signi­fic­ant beyond the personal de­cision of a concerned mother and wife, as the “new” vegetarianism (excluding even fish) coincides with the need for mothers to introduce new, non-vegetarian items into the everyday diet of the households. Mothers increasingly feel forced to indulge their chil­dren, and espe­cially sons, through the pro­vi­sion of non-­vegetarian dishes. Whilst they themselves are prone to become full vegetarians, as motherhood is seen a highly moral role, many mothers emphas­ized a sense of unease about the new patterns, and complained about multiple problems caused by the new fashion of eating out all the time. Thus, complaints about stomach prob­lems after food from ‘outside’ are commonly con­sidered an appropriate female middle-­class response to the new patterns, which reasert the official norms. On many occasions it was clear that mothers as guardians of tradition whose role includes checking what enters the home (see Dickey 2000), were expected to embody these values. Just as a married Bengali Hindu woman is still likely to wear a sari while men, boys and some girls could wear non-­Bengali clothes identified as Western (and in fact girls and unmarried women are now increasingly enjoying fashions and food associated with global youth culture), married women’s ‘orientation towards the family’ is acted out and displayed in public through such practices. The changes in do­mestic food practices are therefore gendered and select­ive, and are based on ideas about maternal, marital and filial roles, marital status and appropriate beha­vi­our, but there are certain patterns that signify new middle-­ class as­pira­tions. It appears that with globalization, ‘foreign’ and non-­vegetarian items are increasingly demanded by husbands and chil­dren as part of their regu­ lar diet, and mothers pointed out that a non-­vegetarian diet has been introduced via commercialized ‘youth’ culture, into which their sons and daughters are groomed by advertisements and peer pressure. The signi­fic­ant relationship between ‘youth culture’ and diets has not gained any attention from social sci­ ent­ists working on India so far, but has been analysed in the context of urban China, namely the ongoing commodification of middle-­class chil­dren’s diets (Jing 2000). In Calcutta, these changes occurred from the early 1990s onwards, when multi­national com­panies launched massive marketing cam­paigns to groom

66   H. Donner these new consumers (Mazzarella 2003). Following the staged ‘war’ over sponsorship of a cricket cup by rivals Pepsi and Coke in 1996, which made multi­ nationals accept­able, agencies employed a range of strat­egies to appeal to young consumers. At the same time, when advertisements for food products targeted women, who were depicted as working mothers pressed for time failed to attract any of my informants who, as shown above, do not identi­fy pos­it­ively, if at all, with the im­agery of the ‘working woman’, let alone the ‘working mother’, youths were successfully engaged. Unlike their mothers, they do not necessarily see these commodities as signifiers of ‘other’ com­munit­ies lifestyles, partly because they do not represent tradition in the same way as mothers do. Among the products that made it in Calcutta were not many targeted at women as em­ployees or modern housewives, but those marketed to young chil­dren and ado­les­cents through whom mothers could be reached. This approach had earl­ier been pioneered in India by Nestlé with ‘Maggi’ instant noodles, which became an in­cred­ible success story only when a direct marketing cam­paign addressed chil­ dren at the school gates. In the words of a colleague who lived in Delhi when Maggi noodles were launched, ‘they came to the school and were cooking the noodles in front of us, so that we could tell our mothers exactly how to do it’. It is this child-­centred approach that has reaped rich dividends for various com­panies, and has brought Bengali middle-­class mothers under pressure to recon­sider their ideas about new and ‘foreign’ foods. Furthermore, while eating out has also become more common, preparing items avail­able from stalls and res­taur­ants at home is clearly a major occupation of mothers today. Mothers on the other hand give in to the demands of modern times, whilst they do attempt to ease the anxieties about many of the street foods that Mukhopadhyay and others have eulogized (Mukhopadhyay 2004). Because such foods are widely seen as impure, dirty and transgressive, mothers feel forced to take it upon themselves to recreate the desired foods at home. Though it is im­port­ant to note that girls in Bengali middle-­class fam­il­ies are equally encouraged to de­velop very indi­vidualized pref­er­ences, which are indulged by mothers and grand­mothers alike, usually only boys are encouraged to choose non-­ vegetarian items which are often non-­Bengali and cooked as part of their every­day meals. Madushree, the mother of an ado­les­cent girl, expressed this dilemma when she said, ‘Nowadays they get all these foods in the res­taur­ants and coffee shops, and because I don’t want her to eat anything there I told her “Let me know what it is you want and I will cook it for you”, so I am doing chow min and pasta for her. Some of the ingredients are expensive but it is better than eating the same food outside, she would just fall ill.’ Another mother, who had become a vegetarian before the birth of her daughter, told me that ‘whatever she wants she gets, whether she has seen it on television or just heard about it from someone, but I make sure that every­thing she eats is cooked in the home and never allow her to eat outside’. Obviously this statement does only reflect part of the reality, as in fact I took her daughter out for a meal at Domino’s Pizza after we finished the inter­view. But her comment implicitly points out the signi­fic­ant of chil­dren’s dietary pref­er­ences. While all young chil­dren are

Gendered bodies, domestic work, perfect families   67 expected to accept a Bengali diet at home, boys are increasingly allowed to become completely non-­vegetarian, and all chil­dren are exposed to commodified foods, which are associated with res­taur­ants and ‘modern’ lifestyles. Women as mothers attempt to control the consumption of such ‘other’ and potentially disruptive items, and as in China, often mother and grand­mother compete for attention through a child’s diet. Thus it is apparent that the power of children as consumers rewrites relationships between the generations (Jing 2000; Donner 2005).

Conclusion The last section indicates how the diet of Calcutta middle-­class fam­il­ies has changed, and how chil­dren are today at the centre of debates around appropriate food consumption. The link between globalization and trans­forma­tions in diets has been ana­lysed in some detail in the case of other regions, such as China (Jing 2000; Farquhar 2002), but in spite of a wealth of liter­at­ure on traditional food practices in South Asia, im­port­ant pro­cesses like the proliferation of discussions about changing habits including eating out and ordering in, the morality of specific foods and the re-­ordering of dietary patterns in relation to changing intrahousehold relationships have not been included in the ana­lysis of new middle-­class consumerist lifestyles (for notable exceptions see Conlon 1995; Caplan 2002; Liechty 2003). Throughout the 1990s the lives of the Indian middle classes changed dramatically, as eco­nomic restructuring and new oppor­tun­ities led to the loss of older securities, and challenged many of the certainties contained in every­day practices. Among the arenas where these trans­forma­tions were ex­peri­enced, the im­port­ant every­day ac­tiv­ities of eating at home, snacking in pub­lic and feasting represent a per­suas­ive site for the renego­ti­ation of class-­based identities and the assertion of new values, but a discussion of such actual practices has notice­ably been ab­sent from attempts to ana­lyse middleclassness. The chapter shows how dietary patterns are changing and that food practices are intimately linked to the way city-­dwelling middle-­class Indians ex­peri­ence and reproduce class as in the context of gendered identities. First, as I have shown, food discourses reproduce older, caste and religious com­mun­ity bound­ar­ies in the form of class-­based practices, not so much in terms of discourses on commensality but in terms of the gendered status of different foods and an emphasis on ‘tradition’. As much of the liter­at­ure on new consumption practices shows, food enables individuation, but also furthers distinctions that assert col­ lect­ive identities in terms of food pref­er­ences, in this specific case through the demand for elaborate every­day meals and women’s work, as well as the embodied differ­enti­ation between a female, more vegetarian diet and the non-­vegetarian pref­er­ence of young boys’ tastes. Both transformations co-­exist within the same family/do­mestic space. Furthermore, as suggested by Appaduri and Breckenridge, middleclassness needs to be ana­lysed in conjunction with consumption (Appadurai and Breckenridge 1995) both also suggest that the study of emerging consumerist identities needs to move beyond media repres­enta­tions and youth culture, and include next to the transgressive and self-­conscious consumption

68   H. Donner practices presented as typical for a new middle class, for instrance film, fashion and ad­vert­ising, the less obvious practices con­trib­ut­ing to middleclassness that are found in the do­mestic sphere. Thus I suggest that the subjectivities of middle-­class persons, often ima­gined as indi­vidualized consumers (see Liechty 2003; Mazzarella 2003; Parameswaran 2004), are funda­mentally shaped by their family roles, in the case of Bengali women their roles as wives and mothers. It is clear that with ref­er­ence to the consumption of every­day meals as well as practices such as eating out and catering on special occasions, regional histories and gendered practices intersect with national and global discourses on middleclassness. It is also apparent that in order to focus on consumption as a middle-­class practice, we have to overcome our preoccupation with pub­lic spaces, that is malls, res­taur­ants and media repres­enta­tions, which may figure prominently in self-­representations but only ever provide a partial pic­ture. Instead, the ana­lysis of middleclassness, that is, the strat­egies and values associated with reproducing middle-­class persons, culture and privilege, ought to take other sites ser­iously, espe­cially those related to do­mestic roles and consumption in the middle-­class home. Food practices play a very prominent role in these inter­actions, and their ana­lysis highlights the interdependence of gender roles, family values and middle-­class identities, made real through a reworking of older patterns, which determine various South Asian middle-­class identities. What emerges is a surprisingly homogenous pic­ture of a Bengali Hindu middle class, which defines itself to a large extent through every­day food practices located in the do­mestic sphere, where gender relations, intergenerational links and class relations are reproduced. With ref­er­ence to this segment of the middle-­class, women’s com­mit­ment to the family reflects, if not estab­lishes, low rates of parti­ cipa­tion in the labour force, as irrespective of educational or professional achievements the ideal housewife and stay-­at-home mother embodies class status, ethnic identity and Indian modernity at the same time. While mothers in these fam­il­ies are mediating the world of commodities and the demands of a ‘traditional’ extended family setting, sons and daughters on the other hand are becoming expert consumers, whose desires and pref­er­ences are indulged and em­braced by the whole family. The symbolic significance changing dietary patterns are epitomized by the shift from a largely vegetarian diet, including fish, towards the meat-­centred, virile every­day meal, which mothers prepare but may not consume themselves. Thus, the chapter traces the meaning of middleclassness not through the ‘ontology’ of consumerism, but through the every­day practices that local fam­il­ies em­brace and that reproduce class. It appears that middleclassness is closely related to gendered roles in relation to the do­mestic sphere, and that, for instance with ref­er­ence to food practices, reformu­la­tions of older notions of adequate consumption patterns still depend on women’s work in the home. Thus, middleclassness is on the one hand emphasizing conspicuous consumption, here ref­er­enced through the ana­lysis of going out, and the increase of global foods in the family home. At the same time, eating at home represents a more complex nego­ti­ation of class identities in the con­text of urban India, and mothers’ adoption of new vegetarianism as well as chil­dren’s indulgence and ‘pester power’ testify to this.

Gendered bodies, domestic work, perfect families   69

Notes 1 Fieldwork in Calcutta was conducted from 1995 onwards, and sup­ported by the ERSC. This paper has been presented at the workshop on the middle classes held at the University of Sussex and seminars at the University of Konstanz and University of Tübingen. I received constructive comments on all these occasions, but par­ticu­larly close readings by two anonym­ous reviewers at Routledge. 2 I do not, of course, suggest that less affluent com­munit­ies in South Asia do not share a food discourse that relates gender, the body and food. As Khare points out, the extreme im­port­ance attributed to food practices is a pan-­South Asian phenomenon (Khare 1992). However, the emergence of a national/regional cuisine, and debates linking the morality of food-­related rituals of consumption to specific do­mesticities, are distinctive markers of middle-­class cultures worldwide. 3 For a detailed description of the ritual role of food and its cooks see Khare 1976. 4 It is remark­able how the liter­at­ure on the new middle class has failed to highlight the fact that female employment in urban India has not only always been extremely low in comparison with other de­veloping coun­tries, but that with the exception of deliberately export-­oriented industries, including IT (see Fuller and Narasimhan 2007, 2008), a marked decline in female work parti­cipa­tion rate has occurred in urban areas since the 1970s. The share of urban women employed in manufacturing in 2000 was an average of 24 per cent and the share of women working in urban ser­vices – the sector where the majority of middle-­class women would tradi­tion­ally be found – comprised only 34.4 per cent (this includes private ser­vices and pub­lic administration): ‘In the ser­vice sector, there has been a drastic decline in the rate of female employment. The declines (sic) have taken place between 1993–2000’ (Mitra 2006: 5005). While Mitra uses National Statistical Survey data showing that there has been an increase in oppor­tun­ ities for skilled, English-­educated workers in specific regions with high investment in IT industries, mainly in the South, this rise is limited to ‘young, unmarried, gradu­ate, convent-­educated girls in the call centres. In fact in the software industry the share of women workers is estim­ated to be 27 per cent’ overall, she states (Mitra 2006: 5006). With regards to the kind of jobs avail­able in this sector, Mitra concludes that ‘Apart from the minuscule portion of the software ser­vices, (i.e., the ITeS and BPO opera­ tions) de­veloping tendencies of feminization, such tendencies have mainly de­veloped for work at the lower end of the value chain’ (Mitra 2006: 5008). 5 I draw attention here to the dif­fer­ence between the written sources that are aiming at female audiences, but whose reception and reach we can only guess at, and the real life ex­peri­ence of cooking and eating in the extended family, only partially reflected in autobiographies of elite women. 6 Very few fam­il­ies keep full-­time cooks today, but to employ men is still a statement of status. Women paid to cook in middle-­class homes are treated like other maidser­vants, though a part-­timer will take care of the more laborious tasks like grinding spices and cleaning the dishes. 7 This expectation explains the apparent attraction of voluntary retirement schemes, which have multiplied with eco­nomic lib­eralization, and seem to be par­ticu­larly attractive for working mothers: ‘A tidy sum in the form of a golden handshake, time that one could finally call one’s own, a more leisurely lifestyle and the option of working a few hours a day from the home were attractive pro­posi­tions. At least the chil­dren would get better attention’ (Bose 2003). 8 Writing about food practices in Bengali-­American households, Ray asserts that migration did not change the expectation to be served two hot meals a day, and that women take on all the food-­related tasks in the households he observed. This kin work recreates the normality of every­day meals; in fact migration has made food and the gendered division of labour in the home even more of an ethnic marker: ‘The assertion is that the Bengali dinner can be re-­enacted in any place and at any time, as long as she is willing to work’ (Ray 2005: 126).

70   H. Donner

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72   H. Donner Nisbett, N. (2005) ‘Knowledge, identity, place and (cyber)space: growing up male and middle-­class in Bangalore’, PhD thesis, University of Sussex. Oza, R. (2006) The Making of Neolib­eral India: nationalism, gender, and the paradoxes of globalization, New York: Routledge. Parameswaran, R. (2004) ‘Global Queens, National Celebrities: tales of fem­in­ine triumph in post-­liberalization India’, Critical Studies in Media Communication, 21(4): 346–70. Rajagopal, A. (2001) ‘Thinking about the new Indian middle class: gender, ad­vert­ising and pol­itics in an age of globalisation’ in R. Sunder Rajan (ed.) Signposts: gender issues in post-­independence India, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Ray, K. (2005) The Migrants Table: meals and memories in Bengali Amer­ican households, Phil­adel­phia: Temple University Press. Ring, L. (2006) Zenana: every­day peace in a Karachi apartment building. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Roy, M. (1972) Bengali Women, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sarkar, T. (2001) Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation: com­mun­ity, religion, and cultural nationalism, London: Hurst. Scrase, T.J. (2002) ‘Television, the middle classes and the trans­forma­tion of cultural identities in West Bengal, India’, International Journal for Communication Studies, 64(4): 323–42. Sengupta, J. (2010) ‘Nation on a platter: the culture and pol­itics of food and cuisine in co­lo­nial Bengal’, Modern Asian Studies, 44(1): 81–98. Seymour, S.C. (1999) Women, Family, and Child Care in India a world in trans­ition, Cam­bridge: Cam­bridge University Press. Srilata, K. (1999) ‘The story of the “up-­market” reader: Femina’s “New Woman” and the norm­ative fem­in­ist subject’, Journal of Arts and Ideas, 32–3: 61–72. Standing, H. (1991) Dependence and Autonomy: women’s employment and family in Calcutta, London: Routledge. Tarlo, E. (1996) Clothing Matters: dress and identity in India, London: Hurst. Thapan, M. (2004) ‘Embodiment and identity: Femina and the “new” Indian woman’, Contributions to Indian Sociology, 38(3): 411–44. van Wessel, M. (2004) ‘Talking about consumption: how an Indian middle class dissociates from middle-­class life’, Cultural Dynamics, 16(1): 93–116. Varma, P.K (1998) The Great Indian Middle Class, New Delhi: Penguin. Walsh, J. (2004) Domesticity in Colonial India: what women learned when men gave them advice, New Delhi: Oxford University Press.

3 ‘Keeping it in the family’ Work, education and gender hierarchies among Tiruppur’s industrial capitalists Geert De Neve Introduction1 For quite some time now there has been con­sider­able debate about the growth and diversification of the Indian middle classes. Questions have been raised about who is joining this expanding group of middle classes, what leads to its diversification (Béteille 2007) and the sense in which India’s expanding middle class can be called ‘new’ (Fernandes 2006). Clearly, over the last 20 years or so the routes to becoming middle class have diversified con­sider­ably. At the time of Independence the middle class consisted largely of English-­educated people whose fam­il­ies had tradi­tion­ally been employed in gov­ern­ment de­part­ments (such as rev­enue, police and administration), the legal sys­tem and education (Varma 1998: 1–24). New groups have joined the ranks of the estab­lished middle class along a variety of paths. While in many parts of India polit­ical and/ or caste-­based mobil­iza­tion has been pivotal to the eco­nomic and social mobility of the lower classes (Jaffrelot 2003), indi­vidual strat­egies have become more common too. This is perhaps best illus­trated by the rising young IT professionals who have joined the ranks of what Fuller and Narasimhan call a ‘new-­rich middle class’ (2007: 121). Confident of their newly gained position in soci­ety, these young professionals cel­eb­rate the oppor­tun­ities offered by eco­nomic lib­ eralization and denounce pub­lic sector employment of old in favour of highly com­petit­ive, flex­ible and potentially very rewarding private sector oppor­tun­ities (Fuller and Narasimhan 2006, 2007; Nisbett 2005; see also Scrase and Ganguly-­ Scrase in this volume). Even though they receive a great deal of media and schol­arly attention, the IT professionals are not the only new recruits to middle-­class India. Economic lib­ eralization has restructured ser­vice and industrial sectors across the coun­try, many of which hold un­pre­ced­en­ted oppor­tun­ities, bene­fiting not only those living in the metropolis but also several provincial parts of the subcontinent (Chari 2004, De Neve 2006, Fernandes 2000). Successful traders, entre­pren­eurs and industrialists have become members of new rural and urban elites (Chopra 2005, Jeffrey et al. 2005) who have much in common with the new middle classes in terms of income levels, educational as­pira­tions and moral values. In his inspiring monograph on the making of middle-­class culture in Kathmandu,

74   G. De Neve Liechty (2003) suggests that we should avoid treating the middle class as a stable or fixed cat­egory and writes: ‘if we understand middleclassness as a cultural pro­ ject or practice – rather than a social cat­egory or empirical con­dition – we can begin to see how the local and the global are brought together in cultural pro­ cess, not cultural outcome’ (2003: 21). It is Liechty’s suggestion to look at class formation as both a mater­ial and a cultural pro­ject that I follow here, and I will seek to dem­on­strate how a newly formed group of wealthy industrialists share much of what is widely referred to as ‘middle-­class culture’, even though according to socio-­economic definitions they may strictly speaking not even be clas­si­fied as ‘middle class’. What their parti­cipa­tion in middle-­class practices and discourses reveals, how­ever, is the extent to which this culture has today spread across com­munit­ies in India and the ways in which its values and as­pira­tions have captured the minds of a widening range of social groups. By looking at a com­mun­ity of affluent industrialists in Tiruppur, Tamil Nadu, I dem­on­strate how a newly formed urban industrial elite emu­lates a series of cultural practices and values that are commonly seen as typ­ic­ally middle-­class, while at the same time reproducing values and moralities that are caste-­based and more rural in origin. Tiruppur industrialists are in the pro­cess of constructing a new identity for themselves through a set of practices and discourses that evolve around conforming to (and reproducing) culturally valued notions of honour and respectabil­ity (maanam, in Tamil). I show how among Tiruppur’s industrial entre­pren­eurs respectabil­ity orders almost all facets of a family’s social life. A preoccupation with respectabil­ity manifests itself in widespread discourses not only about the values of entre­pren­eurship and hard work, but also about what are appropriate and suit­able family tra­ject­ories in terms of chil­dren’s education, women’s employment and marriage alliances. Vera-­Sanso has dem­on­strated the central place of honour and respectabil­ity, locally referred to as maanam, in Tamil Nadu (1995, 2001, 2006). Female chastity is emphas­ized as a key cri­terion of respectabil­ity and presented as a core value of Tamil identity that informs people’s every­day lives (Vera-­Sanso 1995). Yet, concerns about respectabil­ity also shape male beha­vi­our: ideas about honour inform do­mestic hierarchies as well as relationships between men belonging to different generations (Vera-­Sanso 2001, Osella and Osella 2006). As part of this, the family remains a core site of honour for both men and women, and its reputation needs protection by all means and at all times (Vera-­ Sanso 2001, 2006). Anything that risks undermining family reputation – such as women’s (paid) employment and labour market parti­cipa­tion – ought to be carefully controlled (by men) and negotiated (between men and women). While the language of respectabil­ity appears to en­cap­sul­ate values that are present across con­tempor­ary Tamil soci­ety, the practices associated with these values vary according to location, caste and religion, and – as shown below – are not immune to change over time. While Vera-­Sanso has de­scribed how concerns with respectabil­ity shape both male and female beha­vi­our in low-­income com­munit­ies in Chennai as well as in

‘Keeping it in the family’   75 gentrifying neigh­bour­hoods in Coimbatore District (1995, 2006), I seek to dem­ on­strate that a concern with one’s family’s respectabil­ity is equally im­port­ant in the discursive practices through which men and women in wealthy industrial fam­il­ies pro­ject themselves as members of an emerging urban middle class. In the provincial con­text of Tiruppur it is through adherence to what is defined as ‘respectable beha­vi­our’ – often locally presented as ‘traditional behaviour’ – that new urban industrialists and their fam­il­ies seek to locate themselves at the heart of what is locally constructed as an in­teg­rated and moral Tamil society. In Tiruppur, a major knitwear garment manufacturing centre near Coimbatore in Tamil Nadu, a new class of affluent industrialists came into being fol­ low­ing the boom in garment production and export since the 1970s. Emerging from a com­mun­ity of peasants and conscious of the way their fortunes have changed over just one generation, these industrialists constantly reflect on where they come from and where they are heading. Many of Tiruppur’s leading businessmen and com­pany owners are Gounders, who until one or two generations ago lived in villages, with agri­cul­ture as their hereditary family occupation (Chari 2004).2 Most Tiruppur Gounders are rel­at­ive newcomers to urban lifestyles, education and indeed business itself. Yet, as successful industrialists and entre­pren­eurs they are very much in the pro­cess of constructing a new class-­based identity for themselves, and this identity, I argue, reflects many of the more estab­lished middle-­class preoccupations with morality, respectabil­ity and honour. Unlike their estab­lished metropolitan counterparts in Tamil Nadu or the older business com­munit­ies of Northern India, Tiruppur’s industrial fam­il­ies still have a lot to learn in their search for a place among India’s older elites. Urban industrial Gounders often compare themselves in terms of education with the Naidus of Coimbatore, who have been sending their sons abroad since the 1930s (Berna 1960), or the Chettiyar business com­munit­ies, who have long involved their wives and daughters in family businesses (Nishimura 1998).

Fathers, ‘simple beginnings’ and hard work Tiruppur, one of the most successful textile towns in India, has boomed since the early 1970s when the first garment manu­fac­turers began to export and the town transformed itself into a leading garment production centre for the world market (Chari 2004). In what follows I refer to ‘fathers’ and ‘sons’, as a second generation of entre­pren­eurs has recently joined the ranks of the industrial pioneers who entered the industry in the 1950s–1970s. These entre­pren­eurs are today in their fifties, sixties and seventies and have sons who joined the business from the 1990s. In most fam­il­ies, father and sons are working together, but their relationship is often marked by ten­sions that stem from the need to run the business as a family, on the one hand, and the strong ideal of ‘standing on one’s own feet’ that informs sons’ beha­vi­our, on the other hand. Male hierarchies are thus constantly being negotiated between fathers and sons in a con­text where the reputations of both the family and the business are at stake.

76   G. De Neve Let me turn to the fathers first. Almost all of today’s most successful entre­ pren­eurs in Tiruppur come from an agricultural background. Idealized visions of the village as well as nar­rat­ives of hard work shape the self-­representation of this generation. Their rural background is a source of pride to the fathers, and when inter­viewed few fail to mention that they themselves used to work in fields and later in factories. Village roots are seen as proof of their abil­ity to do manual labour and live a ‘simple’ life, but also of their adherence to ‘traditional’ values, manifested through investment in kin networks and the reproduction of their caste as a moral community. The im­agery of ‘pov­erty’ and ‘simple beginnings’ also shape these entre­pren­ eurs’ nar­rat­ives about the early stages of their working lives in the city. Showkat Ali, today a successful Muslim garment exporter in his early fiftiess, showed me around his luxurious residence oppos­ite his factory. While he was clearly pleased with his large three-­storey house, and had made an effort to equip it with consumption goods, including an enorm­ous widescreen TV imported from the Middle East, he was even more proud of the tiny, old rooms at the back of the house, which he and his wife occupied when they were first married and which testified to his modest beginnings. It was the decline in yields from agri­cul­ture during the 1950s and 1960s that drove young men to town in search of industrial work (Chari 2004: 196–205). Yet, while most industrial pioneers in Tiruppur had rural backgrounds, not all were poor: some owned land that was later used as start-­up capital, giving them a con­sider­able head-­start in setting up their own companies. However, for all men nar­rat­ives about simple beginnings go hand in hand with a discourse of uzhaippu (toil, hard work), routinely used as an explanation for their success (Chari 2004; De Neve 2003). In Tiruppur, ‘hard work’ has become a gen­eralized nar­rat­ive through which people both explain and jus­tify their upward mobility. Or, as the TEA (Tiruppur Exporters Association) officer exclaimed in almost Weberian fashion: ‘in Tiruppur work is worship; you can’t find any shopping centres here, or res­taur­ants or cinemas, all people do is work, work, work!’ The first-­generation entre­pren­eurs also emphas­ize their lack of formal education. None of them hide the fact that they hardly had any formal schooling and they do not hesitate to refer to themselves as ‘uneducated people’. While this lack of education may not have bothered them much in the Tiruppur of the 1960s and 1970s, when employment was readily avail­able and skills could be learned on the job, the im­port­ance of formal education rapidly changed when these former peasant workers set up their own com­panies. Education came to be seen as a means to de­velop the business, to access global markets, and to gain status more gen­erally. In the course of this de­velopment hard work no longer sufficed, and a sound know­ledge of English became a new form of capital essential for communication with foreign buyers. Before long, the second generation was groomed to fill these gaps in know­ledge and to fulfil parental as­pira­tions for upward social mobility. While slightly dismissing the necessity of education to attain mobility, Gurusamy (45), an estab­lished exporter, was clearly feeling very uneasy and insecure when we first met for an inter­view in 2000. It quickly

‘Keeping it in the family’   77 transpired that he was embarrassed about not being able to converse in English and he apologized about this as I might have expected a man of his eco­nomic standing to ‘speak English’ and ‘be educated’. The lack of formal schooling among this generation of industrialists in Tiruppur shapes the educational tra­ ject­ories of their sons and, more im­port­antly, their daughters, today. The embarrassment expressed by Gurusamy becomes par­ticu­larly acute when non-­Gounders refer to Gounders as ‘uneducated’ and ‘illit­er­ate’ people. Mr Ravindran (48), a Nattukottai Chettiyar and a garment exporter, made the fol­ low­ing statement: Gounders have morals nor faith. They are rough and cheat a lot. They only managed to come up because they employed well-­paid managers to run their businesses and to deal with agents and foreign buyers. They are not educated and they pay little attention to the education of their children. People from other com­munit­ies regu­larly refer to first-­generation Gounder industrialists as ‘illit­er­ate’ and ‘backward’ simpletons, who had to employ managers from other com­munit­ies to run their businesses. Others again attribute Gounder success in Tiruppur to ‘their brashness and roughness and abil­ity to deal with any situ­ation’, as one Chettiyar exporter put it. At one level, such nar­rat­ives reveal the envy that members of other castes hold towards the recent success of Gounders in Tiruppur, but at another level they tell a more funda­mental story of changing class and caste relations in Tiruppur, in which Gounders have come to dominate an industry that until the 1960s was almost exclusively in the hands of North Indians, Muslims, Chettiyars and Mudaliyars (Chari 2004: 188–91). In just a few decades, Gounders overtook the older estab­lished knitwear manu­fac­ turers in terms of wealth, influence and status, and became the new core of Tiruppur’s industrial elite. As the largest and most successful com­mun­ity of entre­pren­eurs, Gounders currently control the various asso­ci­ations that or­gan­ize the industry and their lifestyles are readily emu­lated by well-­off Mudaliyar and Chettiyar fam­il­ies. Gounders are very aware that they are rel­at­ive newcomers to both urban life and formal education, and many expressed a strong sense of having to ‘catch up’ with more soph­istic­ated urbanites in Coimbatore or Chennai. The popular perception that they lack sophistication and the culture of educated, high-­caste com­munit­ies has produced a need to present their family and caste as respectable and has intensified discourses of respectabil­ity (maanam) within the com­mun­ity. It is their search for status that has led firstgeneration Gounder industrialists to invest heavily in the education of both their sons and their daughters.

Sons and educational choice While their fathers might not have completed elementary schooling, the high levels of formal education of the second-­generation sons are striking. Given the odd exception, most sons of affluent fam­il­ies, now in their twenties and early

78   G. De Neve thirties, have at least an undergradu­ate degree, acquired in English-­medium schools in India, and speak good English thanks to years of study abroad. This is exemplified by the fact that inter­views with the generation of fathers were conducted in Tamil, while all inter­views with their sons were conducted in English. Three major phases of educational strat­egies can be distinguished. First, the sons of business fam­il­ies began to attend college locally (or in nearby Coimbatore) and completed undergradu­ate degrees from the 1980s onwards. Often, fam­ il­ies would send one son to college while his siblings joined the business on completing secondary schooling. It was typ­ic­ally the oldest son who stopped formal education early on to assist his father in the business, while younger sons would be encouraged to study longer, with their education being con­sidered a long-­term investment for the family and the business. There are many examples of fam­il­ies where the first son completed class 8, while a second son went through with secondary schooling, and a third son earned himself a college degree.3 This pattern changed in the 1990s when almost all sons growing up in affluent Gounder fam­il­ies were expected to finish at least a BA degree and increasingly began to pursue postgradu­ate studies. In this second phase, young men attended educational institutions further away, as education rapidly became an aim in itself and took pri­or­ity over the imme­diate needs of the family business. Nevertheless, the degrees chosen were mostly in Commerce, Engineering or Computer Applications and thus fitted the wider needs of the business while reflecting the gen­eral pop­ularity of science and IT degrees among the Tamil middle classes (Fuller and Narasimhan 2006; Wilson in this volume). And although engineering and IT degrees are highly valued for their prac­tical use, less tan­gible kinds of know­ledge, such as communication skills and language, are much coveted sources of human capital needed to make the family business thrive in a globalized economy. Take the case of Kumarasamy (64), who comes from a village close to Tiruppur and whose sons now run a successful garment manufacturing and export com­pany. Kumarasamy himself only studied up to class 2, and started working as an unskilled helper to a tailor when he first came to Tiruppur. He set up his own printing unit in 1975 and gradually built up one of Tiruppur’s leading printing enterprises. However, when quizzed about his life his­tory and education, he admitted that his lack of English language skills had hampered his success in adopting new technologies; and that it was not until his twin sons Anand and Vijay joined the firm that they managed to further de­velop the business. On completing their BCom degree in Coimbatore in 1996, the boys entered the family firm, introduced CAD/CAM tech­no­logy and set up new production units. Anand recounted how he started direct exports in 2001 via contacts estab­lished over the internet and how he began to travel abroad to textile fairs in the UK, Europe and the US, enabled by his fluent English language skills and com­puter lit­er­acy. Clearly, attending educational institutions enhanced the cultural capital of this new generation of young Gounder industrialists. It made them confident and familiar with the skills that would prove crucial for business at a global level.

‘Keeping it in the family’   79 The third shift in the educational tra­ject­ories of Tiruppur’s Gounders took place in the late 1990s, when young men began to move abroad for further studies.4 The sons of affluent fam­il­ies entering college during this period were among the first to take up a postgradu­ate degree abroad, usually in the UK, Europe or the US, after completion of a first degree closer to home. Today, studying abroad is strongly encouraged by parents and older siblings in order to bring specific kinds of know­ledge and new per­spect­ives into the business, and it is strongly desired by the young men themselves, who are keen to get ‘exposure’ (Fuller and Narasimhan 2006). As money is rarely an issue in these fam­il­ies, overseas schooling is usually self-­financed. The family of Ravishankar (62), though a Kaikolar Mudaliyar and not a Gounder by caste, reflects the different educational stages in Tiruppur’s industrial com­mun­ity very well. Ravishankar started a knitting unit with his two brothers in 1971, before having five sons. By the late 1980s, they needed an extra pair of hands in the business, and so his first son was brought in as soon as he finished secondary school in 1989. Ravishankar’s second son, Naveen, completed a degree in marketing and commerce at a nearby Institute of Technology and joined the business in 1992. Naveen had a keen inter­est in marketing, and once in the business he concentrated on inter­na­tional marketing and before long estab­lished sound relationships with buyers in the UK. In the mid-­1990s, Ravishankar’s third son completed a BSc in Apparel Production Management in Coimbatore, followed by two years of further training in Chennai, after which he set up his own garment manufacturing unit. The fourth son, Bharat, finished a one-­year diploma course in Bangalore in 2000, the year in which he left for Scotland, where he took a four-­year BSc degree in Textile Technology at Heriot­Watt University in Edinburgh. He returned to Tiruppur to be trained in the family com­pany, and now manages the com­pany’s pro­cessing unit. The fifth and youngest brother, who was not keen on going abroad, completed a BSc degree in Coimbatore and joined the family business in 2005. This mater­ial also raises questions about class and family relations or, more specifically, about how Tiruppur’s industrial fam­il­ies re­con­cile ideas about upward mobility through close kin coopera­tion with modern idioms of choice and indi­vidual selves. When I first met Bharat in 2000, he was still undecided as to where in the UK he would study and what degree he would take, but it was clear that he himself was keen to go and study abroad. Assisted by his older brother Naveen, he searched for a suit­able degree and ended up at Heriot-­Watt in Edinburgh. While catching up in 2005, Bharat talked about the many friends he had made in the UK and how he had enjoyed his time in Edinburgh. When asked whether he had played with the idea of staying on in the UK, the pro­cesses of de­cision making within the family came to the fore: ‘No, not really. At some point we thought that I would stay in the UK after my studies to set up a com­ pany office there, but then it was decided that I would return to Tiruppur and join the com­pany here’. Clearly, family inter­ests and personal choice are closely intertwined and, as we will see below, the requirements of the business do not neces­sar­ily clash with the personal as­pira­tions of sons and daughters.

80   G. De Neve But what does education abroad have to offer? What do these young men learn abroad and how is the know­ledge gained use­ful to their Tiruppur-­based com­panies? At one level, their study abroad does have a direct impact on the family business. By taking degrees in marketing, management studies or IT, they acquire new skills and forms of prac­tical know­ledge that can be directly applied. However, this is not the only – and not even the most im­port­ant – ex­peri­ence that they recount when assessing their time spent outside India. It is their ‘exposure’ to different places, cultures and ways of communicating that they value, both in terms of their personal de­velopment and in relation to the family firm. Babu (29), who belongs to one of Tiruppur’s most successful Mudaliyar business fam­il­ies, first studied in Montfort Higher Secondary School in the Tamil Nadu hill station of Yercaud and then spent two years in Leicester, UK, where he completed a diploma degree. Reflecting on what he learned in the UK, shortly after his return to Tiruppur in 2000, he pointed out: I studied in the UK but I can’t say that these studies are of any direct help in the com­pany. I am now being trained in all divisions of the com­pany. But what my foreign study was good for, though, was that I learned good English and that I learned to survive on my own and be inde­pend­ent. I learned every­thing from cooking to going to the bank on my own. Here all these things are done for me. It was also use­ful to get in contact with buyers there. . . . Since I joined the com­pany I started to com­puterize a large part of the business so that I can look every­thing up myself now. I no longer depend on account­ants to get me the figures I need. Babu’s time in the UK taught him above all to be inde­pend­ent and self-­reliant, and he has in­teg­rated this value into the organ­iza­tion of his com­pany by starting up new in­forma­tion sys­tems. Apart from learning ‘good English’, as he put it, Babu also gathered in­forma­tion about buyers and markets while studying in Leicester. These two types of cultural capital were soon to pay off. In 2001 he founded his own com­pany with the help of already estab­lished uncles, and by 2004 he had set up a joint venture with a UK apparel com­pany. Currently, he is investing in the de­velopment of new high-­quality products and pos­sibly in a brand name of his own. He attributes his success to his ‘exposure’ while pursuing a degree abroad. His communication skills (speaking ‘good’ English and familiarity with communication technologies) and his mobility (he travels to Europe every two to three months) are both key to the success of his business ventures.5 While all the young men who went abroad had a say in where they would go and what they would study, fathers and (older) siblings play a crucial role in educational and employment de­cisions. Mohan’s father, a Gounder from a village near Tiruppur, started a small garment business at the age of 16 and did not enter the export market until 1992. He had little education but wanted his sons to go to university, and so Mohan (26) first completed a BTech in Coimbatore and then spent 18 months in Liverpool where he took an MBA at John

‘Keeping it in the family’   81 Moores University. Like so many of his peers, Mohan went abroad ‘for exposure’, that is, ‘to better understand Euro­pean culture and business envir­on­ments’. He stated: I was never compelled to enter this, but I myself wanted to con­tinue this business and I also want to diversify into IT. . . . I am 26 now and have been in the business for several years. I am married and my wife will prob­ably join the business in a few months too. . . . We need close family members for key management positions, other­wise one gets cheated. . . . I work inde­pend­ ently from my father and he gives me chances to try new things, and to fail too. But in the end it is father who makes the ultimate de­cisions . . . his final approval is needed for whatever we want to do. Mohan’s self-­representation echoed the accounts of many young men, who felt that what they gained from education abroad was prim­arily ‘exposure’. Fuller and Narasimhan write that the term ‘exposure’ is frequently used among young IT professionals in Chennai to refer to ‘the pro­cess of enhancing social skills and cultural know­ledge through new oppor­tun­ities, ex­peri­ences, social contacts and sources of in­forma­tion’ (2006: 260). Young men in Tiruppur talk about ‘exposure’ in a sim­ilar way. Exposure can be gained by going to Chennai or Bangalore, but living abroad offers ex­peri­ences and skills that are con­sidered par­ticu­larly valu­able. Indeed, there is an inter­esting ‘fit’ between the new oppor­ tun­ities and forms of exposure that young men of upwardly mobile fam­il­ies pursue, and the ways in which this exposure can be used for the de­velopment of the business on their return home. The family firm seems to offer young men attractive oppor­tun­ities and a unique chance to apply their skills gained abroad. While this rhet­oric of oppor­tun­ities and proving oneself is per­suas­ive, this ‘fit’ is rarely as seamless as the above examples may suggest. There are strong expectations that sons will stay in a joint family and help de­velop the business. And in some cases this leads to con­sider­able ten­sions between fathers and sons, in which the latter are usually made to submit to parental authority. This authority is imposed through a discourse that emphas­izes the im­port­ance of ‘keeping things in the family’, that is, of employing close kin in key positions in the com­ pany, a point which is also crucial to understanding women’s recent entry into family businesses (see below). Many young men enter the family firm with mixed feelings. Upon joining, often after several years of con­sider­able freedom living abroad, they may find it a daunting task to take on major respons­ibil­ities. After years of freedom, entry into the business is ex­peri­enced by many as a turning point in their lives, when earl­ier freedoms get reined in by family expectations and when parental control intensifies. The dilemmas, as he calls them, of Senthil (26) clearly illus­trate the parental expectations and the gendered intra-­household hierarchies that shape the lives of these young men. I met Senthil while he was working away at his laptop, dressed in fashionable jeans and T-­shirt in his com­pany office in Janu­ary 2006. After telling me how his father had started the family business with a partner, Senthil

82   G. De Neve quickly turned to the choices and oppor­tun­ities that shaped his own life. He first completed a diploma in Computer Technology and a Software Engineering degree in Coimbatore, and then planned to take up an MBA abroad. In fact, he had started to apply to universities in the US when, in the aftermath of 9/11, his visa applica­tion was rejected. Instead of going abroad he settled for an MBA programme in Bangalore, where after one semester he was offered a placement with WIPRO, one of the largest IT com­panies in the city. His de­cision to take up this offer was of great significance to him: ‘I faced the dilemma of finishing my MBA or taking up this great job oppor­tun­ity; I left college and joined WIPRO in Bangalore where I worked as a software engineer, doing coding work for Nike in Japan’. Less than 18 months later, he had to take another tough de­cision when his father and uncles asked him to join the family business in Tiruppur. This was par­ticu­larly difficult for Senthil, as it came at a time when his contract with WIPRO was up for renewal. This time the com­pany offered a two-­year on-­site contract in Japan with a monthly sal­ary of Rs51,000, a massive increase from the Rs20,000 he was earning at the time. ‘This was a really difficult de­cision to make,’ Senthil remin­isced, ‘but nobody compelled me to come here or go there. I decided not to go to Japan and instead left WIPRO and entered the family business on 9 April 2004. I remember clearly the date that I joined the business as it was a difficult moment.’ Although Senthil presents his family’s request as a mat­ter of choice for him, he clearly knew what was at stake. Had he decided against joining the business, he would have lost the respect and approval of his rel­at­ives. Clearly, here was a young man with the skills to excel and build a career in the booming IT industry, where jobs are sought after, sal­ar­ies are high and the workplace is portrayed as modern and exciting. But the demands of his family made it im­pos­sible for Senthil to pursue this inde­pend­ent path. For young men, the family business can be a double-­edged sword, offering new oppor­tun­ ities but also entailing con­sider­able respons­ibil­ities and restrictions. This ambiguity transpires in Senthil’s final comments: My parents and their business partners fully trust me now and they give me the freedom to try out new things in the com­pany. But recently my father told me, ‘make sure that the part­ner­ship is there for as long as you are there’. He didn’t say ‘for as long as I am here’ but ‘for as long as you are here’! So, I can do whatever I want in the com­pany but I should never upset the part­ ner­ship that my father set up decades ago. While oppor­tun­ities for education in India and abroad are happily taken up by the sons of these newly affluent industrial fam­il­ies, and while their levels of education, their communication skills and their inter­na­tional travel open up a range of new oppor­tun­ities, these men are never­the­less largely ‘kept within the family’, closely controlled by fathers and older brothers. Their educational choices and sub­sequent career tra­ject­ories are closely entwined with the inter­ests of the business as much as they are the outcome of their own aspirations.

‘Keeping it in the family’   83 In this con­text, the position of male heads of the family depends heavily on their abil­ity to keep their family members ‘on the right path’ and assert authority over them (Vera-­Sanso 2001: 186–7). In the case of Gounder industrialists, a household head’s control over both the household members and the business reinforce each other, and find their prac­tical basis and symbolic expression in his grip over his sons’ education and employment. But, like the father, a son’s gendered identity is also rooted in a sense of self-­reliance, of which the need to be seen to be inde­pend­ent is a crucial aspect – espe­cially once he gets married and estab­lishes his own household (Vera-­Sanso 2001: 184). As such, young men’s life and employment tra­ject­ories are shaped by per­vas­ive male hierarchies in which sons’ wishes to ‘stand on their own feet’ and be able to take their own de­cisions are in constant ten­sion with the attempts of fathers and older siblings to retain control and impose authority over junior men. Sons often oblige, not in the least because they fully realize that family businesses offer substantial bene­ fits to their own career tra­ject­ories in the long run. After all, only a few of them have access to attractive al­tern­atives outside the family business of the sort avail­ able to Senthil above. It is the same preoccupation with the family business and with masculine identities that shapes the gendered relationships between fathers and daughters, and between husbands and wives. It is parents and husbands who have a say over the oppor­tun­ities for education and work of young women in Tiruppur’s industrial families.

Daughters, education and status One is often told in Tiruppur that a major area of change is the introduction of education for Gounder daughters. ‘Today, Gounders educate their daughters better than their sons’ and ‘these days you find many daughters with a Masters degree in Tiruppur’s Gounder fam­il­ies’ are typical statements from informants belonging to other castes as well as Gounders themselves. Indeed, over the last 10–15 years, the education of daughters has been given un­pre­ced­en­ted attention in Tiruppur’s affluent Gounder fam­il­ies. Today, more and more women under the age of 35 have a college and sometimes even a postgradu­ate degree, while very few women of their mother’s generation (now in their fifties and sixties) have more than five or six years of schooling. Schooling of daughters is a rel­at­ively recent phenomenon in the Gounder com­mun­ity (Heyer 2000), and reflects the changing status of socially mobile, urban fam­il­ies belonging to what was once an entirely agricultural caste. Today, women’s education con­trib­utes to the production of distinction among affluent fam­il­ies in town, influences marital choice and boosts the prestige of indi­ viduals and their households (Chopra 2005). There are some im­port­ant ways in which girls’ education differs from that of boys. First of all, the formal education of daughters is slightly more recent than that of sons.6 It was from the late 1980s and espe­cially during the 1990s that Tiruppur’s industrial fam­il­ies began to educate their daughters beyond secondary schooling. Today most daughters of well-­to-do fam­il­ies in Tiruppur hold a

84   G. De Neve college degree and many of those who left college after 2000 hold a postgradu­ ate qualification as well. Young Gounder women frequently compare themselves with women of Naidu fam­il­ies in Coimbatore and state that ‘among the Naidus, women already have been educated for a long time, for at least two or three generations, but in our com­mun­ity we are the first ones to be educated!’7 ‘To be educated’, how­ever, means different things according to con­text. Among emergent industrial fam­il­ies in Tiruppur it basically means three things: to have a college degree, to speak ‘good English’ and to have had ‘exposure’ to the world beyond family and kin. Women’s education is not only more recent among these fam­il­ies, it is also more local than that of boys. Most women study in colleges in and around Tiruppur, or in Coimbatore. I heard of very few women who went to Chennai and of none who studied abroad. This has to be understood in the con­text of parental concerns about daughters living away from home, transport prob­lems, and the rise in women’s colleges estab­lished in the region over the last 15 years.8 Qualitative dif­fer­ences can be observed as well: while boys attend more estab­lished and prestigious colleges, girls tend to go to new institutions whose quality of education remains to be seen. A third distinction between sons’ and daughters’ education lies in the stated purpose and as­pira­tions of daughters’ education. Rather than job market con­ sidera­tions, ideas about ‘suit­able’ types of education, about appropriate levels of ‘exposure’, and about marriage pro­spects and status shape recent investments in daughters’ schooling. Osella and Osella have discussed the centrality of education in the pursuit of status among upwardly mobile Izhavas in Kerala (2000: 140–4) and illus­trated how young women’s education enhances their value in the marriage market (Osella and Osella 2000: 113). Lukose has more recently commented on the gendered as­pira­tion of education among Kerala’s upwardly mobile classes, where the reproduction of both masculine identities and ideas about women as educated wives and mothers prevails over women’s indi­vidual career as­pira­tions (2009). In Tiruppur’s industrial fam­il­ies, a daughter’s education is sim­ilarly fashioned by male control, marriage pro­spects and broader family status aspirations. First of all, most parents do not intend to let their daughters enter paid employment, and only some daughters are encouraged to work in the family firm before marriage. As a young woman, who runs a family business with her husband, explained: ‘parents feel bad about making money from their daughters and they fear it would affect their marriage’. Putting daughters to work for money risks affecting the family’s maanam (respectabil­ity) as well as a daughter’s marriage pro­spects. Educating daughters, how­ever, has become a must and is now­adays presented as a value (or source of status) in itself: it reflects a family’s increased ‘worldliness’ or, as one young man put it, its ‘broadmindedness’. Women’s education has itself become a key constitutive part of what modern middleclassness stands for (Lukose 2009). Perumai or prestige also plays an im­port­ant role in educational de­cisions, as fam­il­ies increasingly worry that their chil­dren might be looked down upon if uneducated. While affluence does not

‘Keeping it in the family’   85 automatically transform into prestige, a lack of education certainly risks damaging a family’s social status. Marriage con­sidera­tions too are of prime im­port­ance to the fam­il­ies we are concerned with, as it is now­adays widely as­sumed that the fam­il­ies of urbanized young men are looking for a well-­educated match and prefer girls who speak English, have a college degree and are well-­versed in urban lifestyles. While the need to protect girls remains strong, it is increasingly accepted that girls too need to be ‘in touch with the outside world’ and ex­peri­ence social spaces beyond their own home and home town. Yet, there are clear limits to what is suit­able for girls and therefore accept­able in terms of educational tra­ject­ories. Kumar, who like his wife studied for a BCom, explained why, for example, few daughters of industrial Gounder fam­il­ies study IT: If we had a sister or daughter who studied IT and worked in Chennai or Bangalore, it would be difficult to get them married. In our com­mun­ity, it is only those men who study IT (. . .) who marry IT women and they tend to be of a slightly lower class. They work for com­panies and for a sal­ary. We rarely study IT. The whole sector of IT-­related jobs is associated with the image of freedom, self-­ arranged marriages, sexual liberation and women’s empowerment. While other com­munit­ies are gearing the education of even the smallest pre-­schoolers towards getting jobs in IT (Donner 2006), Tiruppur’s respectable fam­il­ies dis­sociate themselves from the IT industry and reproduce socially con­ser­vat­ive ideo­lo­gies about women’s education and the family (van Wessel 2004). Contrary to Wilson’s argument in this volume, here professional degrees are deemed less suit­able, while a gen­eral degree in commerce or management is con­sidered desir­able – even though paid employment is never the purpose of study for young Gounder women. It appears that fam­il­ies gain little eco­nomic bene­fit from educating their daughters, as a daughter’s wedding is usually arranged soon after she completes her degree. In fact, until the mid-­1990s young women often used to be married off during their first or second year of study. But ‘things have changed a lot since then,’ says Usha, a 29-year-­old, who started a BA in English Literature. ‘I was married off during my studies and didn’t even finish my second year at college. But that was ten years ago, in 1995. . . . Now parents wait to get us married till we have finished our degree, or they marry us off but allow us to finish our education, but even this is increasingly rare’. However, with or without a degree, most young women end up living with their in-­laws after marriage, where they are expected to do housework, kin work (like attending family functions, where the pres­ence of a new daughter-­in-law is par­ticu­larly required), and child care. Hence, while the education of daughters is not valued because of the prac­tical know­ledge or skills they acquire, it has gained con­sider­able significance in terms of the reproduction of class and status relations. Perhaps the most vis­ible change that has occurred over the last decade is that a growing number of women are joining their in-­laws’ or husband’s business after marriage. In the mid-­1990s

86   G. De Neve married women began to work in their in-­laws’ firms in a variety of administrative jobs, usually alongside their husband or other members of his family. Given that women of the Gounder caste have a long his­tory of working on the family farm, women’s current work in the business seems to per­petu­ate a rural pattern but now in an urban industrial con­text. Senthilnathan (34), the owner of a successful buying house, explained: Women have always been power­ful in our fam­il­ies; you see, my grand­ mother has always been dealing with finances and been making de­cisions. . . . You wouldn’t have been able to tell, for she always dressed tradi­tion­ally in order to be accepted in soci­ety. In my parents’ generation, women stayed at home because it was fin­an­cially not needed for them to join the business, yet they still had a lot to say in the family! Senthilnathan’s pic­ture indicates three stages of women’s employment: women of his grand­mother’s generation worked in the fields; women of his mother’s generation were withdrawn from labour outside the home as fam­il­ies moved to town and set up garment factories in the 1960s–1980s; and since the 1990s, the youngest generation of married women are again taking up roles in the business, but this time in their in-­laws’ companies.

Women, work and flexible families Women are of course not just the objects of these changes, but are themselves actively pursuing new roles and oppor­tun­ities. Prabha, a 30-year-­old mother of two, was clearly keen to talk about these changes when we met in her office, where she sat at a desk with a laptop com­puter in front of her and her husband by her side. She stems from a Gounder family who ran a textile export business in town and after completing a BA in Business Administration in 1996, she got married that Septem­ber to a young man from a village just outside Tiruppur. I talked to her, as with most women, in the pres­ence of her husband, which often made for entertaining exchanges and inter­esting discussions between husband and wife. She explained that from the outset she was eager to work in the business and sought her husband’s support: Prabha: 

My husband fully sup­ported me in this. He was the one who wanted me to come into the business, but also my mother-­in-law was sup­portive. He has no brothers and only one sister. But I myself was also keen to come into the business. I now manage the office and deal with the staff, while he deals with the suppliers. We are both in the office from 9.30 a.m. till 9 or 10 p.m. Every night we discuss every­thing, and whatever has to be decided, we talk and then decide together. Sivaraj:  The main prob­lem in Tiruppur is that we don’t get good staff. We feel that it is better to get a sondukaarar (own person, rel­at­ive) in the job; it is more secure for the business.

‘Keeping it in the family’   87 Ironically, many of the oppor­tun­ities for women to work emerge from a strong ideo­logy of family and caste morality that presents the employment of kin as pre­fer­able to the recruitment of outsiders. This discourse, together with falling birth rates, makes daughters-­in-law par­ticu­larly suited. Revitha, another well-­ educated Gounder woman in her early thirties, reiterated the im­port­ance of employing rel­at­ives. Born into a Tiruppur Gounder family, she completed a BCom degree in Coimbatore and married her cousin (her father’s sister’s son), who studied medicine and set up a practice in town. Soon after the wedding she began to assist him in the clinic, and explained to me: You see, blood relations are more reli­able in the business, because they won’t work for self-­interest. They work for the family. Outsiders will steal and cheat us. Because my husband is often out, he needs someone who can always be here and that person needs to be a sondukaarar (rel­at­ive). I never thought I would work after marriage. But slowly I began to come to the office in the evenings and when another member of staff fell ill, I suddenly had to come in every day. In the beginning my parents-­in-law didn’t like it; they were or­tho­dox and wanted their daughter-­in-law to stay at home. That’s because they feel bad about it, they feel they shouldn’t make money from a daughter-­in-law. Yet, for all the ad­vant­ages attributed to employing kin, women did not enter such family businesses overnight. This gradual and ongoing pro­cess involved a variety of con­sidera­tions. The story of the brothers Bala (34) and Kumar (30), and their wives Usha (30) and Geetha (25), illus­trates the gradual trans­forma­tions taking place within fam­il­ies and the reasoning behind them. After completing their studies, Bala and Kumar joined the garment business set up by their father in 1968. Bala admitted that initially he was not keen on having his wife, Usha, work in the office, while his younger brother Kumar was eager to introduce his wife, Geetha, into the business. As it happened, their firm entered the export market in 2003, and at that moment they needed an extra pair of hands, so Geetha began to help out. It was at that point that a rather hesitant Bala allowed his wife to join too. Usha, had quit her BLitt at the time of her marriage, while Geetha had completed a BCom by the time she married Kumar; both spoke fluent English. Bala, how­ever, remained doubtful and clearly felt he had to jus­tify his de­cision to allow his wife, who had always been keen to join, to work alongside him: Usha now works with me in the do­mestic division, which is safe as fewer people come in the office than in the export division. It is when many unknown people walk in and out of the office that we hesitate to have our wives around. We also fear the other staff around, but here we have staff whom I have known since I was a kid. So, we don’t need to worry about having our women in the office. Some men also want their wives to look after the kids, and bring them to school and prepare lunch and dinner. But we are a joint family and my mother looks after our kids and does the

88   G. De Neve cooking. She also has the help of ser­vants. Also, my wife works only half days anyway, from 9 a.m. till 2 p.m., so she comes to the office after our daughter has left for school and is back home by the time she returns home. The ar­range­ments that Bala set up for his wife are such that she can assist him in the office while still fulfilling what are con­sidered to be her more im­port­ant roles as wife and mother (see also Lukose 2009, for sim­ilar gendered discourses in Kerala). Moreover, such ar­range­ments typ­ic­ally allow husbands – and mothers-­ in-law – to retain a good meas­ure of control over the movements and time of young wives while also bene­fiting the family business. Clearly, even though Bala enjoys his wife being a business partner, his attitude to women’s employment is shaped by ideas about what is ‘respectable’ and ‘safe’, and the sorts of do­mestic roles women ought to prioritize. The im­port­ant point here is that women’s access to employment within the family business firmly depends on their husbands’ de­cisions and on ideas about respectable beha­vi­our. However keen a woman may be to work in the business, she can only do so if ‘her husband allows’. Other rel­at­ives appear to have less influence here, as revealed by a conversation with Annapoorni, who belongs to a Chettiyar family. Annapoorni (30) only completed class 10 and explained that ‘after that I was always in the house. I wouldn’t even go to the cinema on my own at that time!’ She married in 1997, and as her husband had only just started his own dyeing com­pany, he was grateful for her help in the business: Annapoorni: 

I got the full sup­port from my husband, he really wanted me to help him in the office. Until then, I wasn’t used to talking to people but my husband forced me to sit at the front desk and talk to the people who turned up. At first that was very scary but that’s how I got used to it and I’ve been in the business for eight years now. First my parents-­in-law were against it, but as I did well, they too began to accept it. Geert:  Did your own parents object? Annapoorni:  They said ‘you do whatever your husband tells you to’. One’s husband’s wish is the main thing. My mother or father cannot make any de­cisions in this respect. While a husband’s opinion is clearly crit­ical, the sup­port and views of the wider family remain im­port­ant as well. Prabha, for example, mentioned that she got the sup­port of her father and brother when her husband asked her to join his business, and also her mother-­in-law went along with it, even though things were quite tense in the beginning: Talking to customers and to men was seen as a strange thing, and my mother and mother-­in-law had to get used to me walking around and talking to unknown people. My mother-­in-law lives in the village and is very con­ser­vat­ ive, so even seeing me wear a churidar was a big thing for her! Until I came to the office I always wore a sari in the house. But now all that has changed!

‘Keeping it in the family’   89 The stated im­port­ance of a husband’s decision-­making power in relation to his wife’s employment becomes even more transparent in the cases where a man keeps his wife away from the business. The case of Thangarajah, Usha’s 30-year-­old brother, illus­trates this. As an only son, Thangarajah had recently taken over the knitwear business started by his father in the 1960s. His wife, whom he married in 2000, has a BA in Business Administration and professed a keen inter­est in joining him in the business. But Thangarajah refuses to let her work, and explains his rationale this way: I want to keep my inde­pend­ence, like my father who always worked on his own. I want to keep home and business separate. Here I am always busy and my home is the only place where I can relax. If my wife joins me here, we will keep talking about work at home too and get into arguments. Then I won’t have peace anywhere. My mother and my sisters are trying to convince me to let her join the business, not imme­diately but once our [two] kids are in school. But I am still against it. Thangarajah’s hesitations illus­trate Lukose’s more gen­eral point that lib­ eralization and women’s increased access to education are reproducing longstanding ‘anxious discourses and regulations of young women, their bodies, their sexuality, and their vul­ner­abil­ity’ (2009: 12). While Thangarajah is not alone with his anxi­eties about control and about keeping the pub­lic and the private separate, he is becoming the exception among Tiruppur’s second-­ generation industrialists. Young Gounder women are aware of the oppor­tun­ities around them and increasingly comment that they only want to marry a man who will allow them to work after marriage. Geetha exclaimed in this con­text: ‘Nowadays, we girls have more exposure and we are even better educated than the boys in our com­mun­ity!’ Indeed, sim­ilar to what Fuller and Narasimhan have shown among Chennai’s IT professionals, who are largely Tamil Brahmans, women in Tiruppur’s affluent Gounder fam­il­ies increasingly recog­ nize the bene­fits of education and of being ‘exposed’ to the world outside the home (Fuller and Narasimhan 2006: 261), and it is their high levels of education that enable young women in Tiruppur to take on what are often demanding managerial roles. Interestingly, idioms and discourses that are seen to shape poor women’s access to paid employment (Vera-­Sanso 1995) are also shared by members of Tiruppur’s new business fam­il­ies. Even though educated women can now work for the family business, their employment should not be seen as a mat­ter of personal choice or inter­est. Rather, it needs to be presented as essentially the husband’s wish and as emerging from the extended family’s need for ‘reli­able hands’ in the business. In other words, women should not appear as agents in the pursuit of ‘unwomanly’ roles, and necessity rather than personal as­pira­tion is presented as the explanation for their involvement in the family business. Moreover, women’s parti­cipa­tion in the business remains restricted by their do­mestic respons­ibil­ities, and any actions that might under­mine their do­mestic roles, and thus put the wider family’s

90   G. De Neve maanam at risk, are carefully avoided. Hence, the need for ‘safe’ and ‘restricted’ work envir­on­ments, watched over by male family members. Many women live in joint households, usually comprising parents and one or more married sons with their wives and chil­dren. On entering such fam­il­ies as young daughters-­in-law, women are expected to perform household duties like supervising ser­vants and to parti­cip­ate in kin work, including family functions and rituals. Revitha, who works in her husband’s hos­pital, clarified the dif­fer­ ence between herself and her sister, a non-­working housewife: My sister is married to an exporter and she is the only daughter-­in-law in that house and she is still very new in their family, so she has to be present at all weddings and family functions. Even though she finds it all really boring, she has to stay at home. If she doesn’t, people will talk. Maybe later, once she has been there for a bit longer, she may well start working. Mirroring other middle-­class con­texts, such as the Calcuttta middle-­class fam­il­ ies studied by Donner (2005, 2008) or middle-­class bur­eau­crats in Bhubaneswar studied by Seymour (1999), here also mothers of small chil­dren are expected to be full-­time mothers. Those who do work in the family firm remain respons­ible for school runs and are expected to be at home when the chil­dren return in the afternoon. Children’s ‘need’ for their mothers and the in­ad­equacy of child care facilities are routinely used to explain why most women do not enter the family com­pany until their chil­dren are of school age. Many men confided that they are planning to ‘bring in their wife’ once all chil­dren are at school. While mothers need ‘to be around’ when the chil­dren are small, expectations shift when the chil­dren reach the age of six or seven, the age at which many chil­dren are sent to boarding school anyway. This differs from what Donner has de­scribed for Calcutta’s middle-­class fam­il­ies, where women remain extensively involved in the education of their chil­dren throughout their schooling (Donner 2005: 127–34). As elsewhere, shared parenting is the pre­val­ent pattern for bringing up small chil­dren in these affluent Tiruppur fam­il­ies, and the sup­port of both affinal fam­ il­ies is seen as crucial to enable women to work: Geetha: 

Our mother-­in-law looks after my two-­year-old daughter and after the four-­year-old daughter of Usha. Geert:  What happens if women have no help from their mother-­in-law? Geetha:  Then it is definitely much more difficult to work in the com­pany. But many women get sup­port from their own mother. You see, for women it is an ad­vant­age to marry locally, because then their own mother lives nearby and can help. In fact, at the moment my daughter is in my mother’s house. She too looks after our kids. So, I get help from both sides; whether we can work or not all depends on whether we get the sup­port from both sides. This pattern of shared parenting also explains why many younger mothers think of joint households and local marriages as real assets. Young female IT

‘Keeping it in the family’   91 professionals in Chennai sim­ilarly recog­nize the im­port­ance of living in a joint household and of having the sup­port of the natal family in the organ­iza­tion of child care that enables female employment (Fuller and Narasimhan 2007: 129–31, 2008a). However, the Tiruppur and Chennai cases contrast with what Donner has de­scribed for Calcutta’s middle-­class mothers: they too preferred ‘shared parenting’ and joint family life to share child care work, but they did not seek paid employment outside the home (Donner 2005). Be that as it may, Tiruppur’s Gounder fam­il­ies certainly have a strong bi­lat­ eral tend­ency in the way kinship relations are prac­tically or­gan­ized, as is apparent in Prabha’s case. She joined the business by the time her second daughter arrived and took only four months off before going back to the office. As she lived in a joint household consisting of herself, her husband, her mother-­in-law and her own mother, both her mother and her mother-­in-law looked after the younger girl, while her elder daughter was already boarding at Nazareth Convent School in Ooty. A bi­lat­eral tend­ency in kinship – a longstanding feature of South Indian kinship – does facilitate women’s access to employment and, as Vatuk has shown, urbanization enhances the relev­ance of such wider family networks for young married women (Vatuk 1972). Sharing a joint household with her parents rather than with her in-­laws, Revitha explains, makes perfect sense: My husband is my own aunt’s son and as there is no son for my father, we came to live with my parents. Initially we lived with my husband’s parents but when my husband’s brother got married we shifted to my parents’ house. We have two sons, one of eight and one of six, and my parents look after them, and in fact also after me and my husband! (Laughs.) Without my parents I could not be here. While her oldest son is already boarding at the Monfort School in Yercaud, her second son too will soon be sent to boarding school because, as Revitha explains, ‘there are no good schools in Tiruppur itself and the boys need to learn good English and be prop­erly dis­cip­lined’. Boarding is not only deemed neces­sary because Tiruppur lacks what are con­sidered adequate schools, but also because its work routines produce bad parenting. As Revitha explained: ‘We work such long hours and are often very tense because of work so that we cannot concentrate on our kids and bring them up prop­erly ourselves. My parents are much better at disciplining our kids than we are!’ Today, expensive boarding schools are widely used in these fam­il­ies and chil­ dren as young as six or seven are routinely sent to pub­lic schools in the hill stations of Yercaud and Ooty in Tamil Nadu. These schools have excellent reputations for high stand­ards of English, for teaching good manners and maintaining dis­cip­line, and their boarding facilities relieve increasingly busy parents of the day-­to-day involvement in the education of their chil­dren. While all Tiruppur parents share with other middle-­class groups a preoccupation with good quality education (Donner 2005; Jeffery 2005; Lukose 2009; Wilson this

92   G. De Neve volume), industrial fam­il­ies in Tiruppur differ from other urban middle-­class com­munit­ies in their abil­ity to afford boarding schools and in their willingness to ‘hand over’ formal education to experts. Parents themselves explain this strat­ egy in terms of their own lack of time to supervise chil­dren and to assist with homework, but they also admit a sense of in­secur­ity about how to best produce urban, educated people who will be at home in India’s growing middle class. They believe that high-­quality formal schooling will provide them with the cultural capital (locally referred to as ‘exposure’) needed to get on in the new India (see also Chopra 2005). In these new discourses on education and upward mobility, investment in education is seen as providing above all the cultural capital needed to enhance one’s family status in urban soci­ety and to de­velop successful family enterprises in the global economy. Another crucial factor that allows mothers in wealthy Gounder fam­il­ies to run their households effect­ively – and that may even allow some to join the family business – is the widespread employment of ser­vants and other do­mestic staff. All women of the oldest generation employed do­mestic ser­vants, who also helped to relieve daughters-­in-law from a range of do­mestic respons­ibil­ ities, espe­cially the care of small chil­dren. It is the availabil­ity of do­mestic help and the widespread use of boarding schools that made it feasible for grandparents to look after grandchil­dren, and for daughters-­in-law to work in the com­pany without jeopardizing their own or the family’s convenience or respectabil­ity. Marrying locally also con­trib­utes to this family culture, as it further facilitates shared parenting practices. It is to the meaning of local marriages that I now turn.

Marriage, locality and the ‘culture of Tiruppur’ While marriage has received little attention in recent writings on the Indian middle classes (Donner 2002 is an exception), it remains a persistent concern among Tiruppur’s emerging industrial com­mun­ity, and a continual source of concern and discussion among men and women alike. Most upwardly mobile fam­il­ies belonging to the Gounder caste claim that ‘in our com­mun­ity we only marry locally’, and at first, I found this surprising as I as­sumed that fam­il­ies, once they became affluent and urbanized, would widen their marriage circles and search for suit­able partners elsewhere, as has recently been docu­mented for successful Tamil Brahmans (Fuller and Narasimhan 2008b). Yet in the case of the Gounders, this pro­cess does note seem to take place, with marriages among the wealthy Tiruppur Gounders being both arranged and local, and marriage circles remaining distinctly restricted to Tiruppur and its sur­round­ing villages. Although one could have expected that, with urbanization, the cosmo­pol­itan ex­peri­ences of young men and the enhanced ‘exposure’ of young women, a flurry of love marriages would have ensued, both parents and their adult chil­dren were adamant that parental choice of spouses goes largely unchallenged. It was mentioned many times to me that marriage remains the mainstay of both family and business, and young men and women rarely con­sider it pos­sible to bypass

‘Keeping it in the family’   93 their parents in marriage de­cisions. In fact, love marriages are not seen as a realistic option in a con­text where the sup­port of the extended family remains vital, and where young men’s and women’s careers are closely tied up with the family business. It is in discussions about marriage that even young, educated members of the com­mun­ity regu­larly refer to their caste as ‘a very traditional com­mun­ity’. Having said this, the nature itself of arranged marriages has undergone change in recent years, and ideas about choice and consent have entered Gounder marriage practices. Unlike earl­ier, when the Gounders first began to migrate to the city, it is not uncommon today to have an engagement period of four to six months during which pro­spective spouses are introduced, date and get to know each other. Usha, for example, noted that when she got married in the mid-­1990s, she was not allowed to meet her future husband unchaperoned. But by 2005 dating and direct communication between potential spouses had become the norm and a period of courtship initiated by the parents was estab­lished as part of the engagement pro­cess. This dating is facilitated by technologies such as the mobile phone – a preferred present to be given to a fiancée – and by access to cars, which allow young men to take their fiancée out to a res­taur­ant or shopping mall. While both sides emphas­ize that this engagement period is very signi­fic­ant, it was women who stressed that it allows them to ex­plore the para­meters that will be set for later married life. As Geetha emphas­ized, it was during her engagement in 2001 that she found out about Kumar’s pos­it­ive attitude towards working women: ‘We met a lot during this time and talked a lot over the phone and as a result I knew his opinions and knew that he was keen to have me in the business’. Along with the engagement period, consent has become an increasingly signi­fic­ant part of arranged marriages as well, and I was told that if the selected partners did not get along during the dating period, marriage was no longer an option. Much like in the Victorian era in Britain, a period of engagement provides young men and women in Tiruppur today with the ad­vant­ages of being able to get to know their future partner and check on ‘compatibility’ while at the same time leaving parental authority to select partners and fam­il­ies largely untouched. Yet, if most marriages are still arranged, why is this done almost exclusively locally and why is ‘marrying locally’ so central to marriage discourses and practices in Tiruppur? A first explanation relates to the estab­lishment of business links between fam­il­ies engaged in sim­ilar industrial ac­tiv­ities. Given that the knitwear industry in south India is very localized in and around Tiruppur, young men and women are married into fam­il­ies with whom future business coopera­ tion is a pos­sib­il­ity, or has already been estab­lished. As everywhere in India, business fam­il­ies make trade-­offs between the ad­vant­ages and dis­advant­aged of local marriages, but what appears specific to Tiruppur is that the ad­vant­ages of marrying locally seem to outweigh its dis­advant­ages more strongly. Like many others, Thangarajah explains Tiruppur’s local marriage circles in terms of a shared ‘culture’, identified through patterns of consumption, ways of doing business and attitudes to risk:

94   G. De Neve An im­port­ant reason why we marry locally has to do with the character of Tiruppur itself. The character of Tiruppur is different. Here people are more broadminded than in other places. People here also take many more risks than elsewhere. Even for a family from Erode it would be very hard to deal with the sorts of risks we take. People from Tiruppur are used to risks and more willing to adjust when things go wrong. Here people are more exposed to the outside world and they also bring in a lot from outside. We also spend more in Tiruppur, on houses, on cars, on jewels, on functions . . . The ‘culture’ of Tiruppur is understood in terms of the shared values that those in the same trade or business have – which in the case of the fast-­moving textile industry involve high levels of risk taking and investment, a pioneering attitude and par­ticu­lar ways of dealing with money. Uncertainty and vul­ner­abil­ity are main features of the industry and each success story is matched by a story of loss, bankruptcy or bad luck, so that the export industry is often presented as ‘one big gamble’. It is as­sumed that indi­viduals from neigh­bouring towns may find it hard to ‘marry into’ the ‘culture of Tiruppur’, and rural Gounders, who have not been exposed to the industry, are said to find it nearly im­pos­sible to get accustomed to Tiruppur’s envir­on­ment and therefore appear very reluct­ant to marry their daughters into Tiruppur fam­il­ies. As Geetha explained with ref­er­ ence to marrying into a business family: For girls from other places it would be very hard to adjust here. They would have no rest and would find it difficult to cope with the fact that their husband works all the time. There are no Sundays here. But we have grown up here and are used to this type of family life and we can deal with it. Such statements emphas­ize the ‘culture’ of ‘hard work’ or uzhaippu (toil) (Chari 2004) that Gounders attribute to the town and their own com­mun­ity. Competi­ tion in a global export market has indeed put new strains on Tiruppur’s business fam­il­ies as lead times are becoming shorter by the day, delivery deadlines have to be strictly adhered to, and production schedules need to be monitored day and night. In many fam­il­ies, men and women take hardly any time off, and even women work in the office till late at night. However, while men and women feel under great pressure at work, the maintenance of family status also requires them to be present at family celeb­ ra­tions that take up con­sider­able amounts of time. Rather than cutting ceremonies and celeb­ra­tions short and thereby risking the wrath of the deities – and even more of the rel­at­ives – proximity of rel­at­ives cuts travel time and allows regu­lar visits even where time is short. Consider the exchange between Prabha and Sivaraj: Sivaraj: 

Here we always have to be close to the business as prob­lems may occur very suddenly. So, we can’t afford to be away from Tiruppur for very long.

‘Keeping it in the family’   95 Prabha: 

In our com­mun­ity we are very traditional and we have to do lots of rituals and functions, so it’s easier if both fam­il­ies live nearby. At the time of birth, for example, we have to be in our mother’s house and if that is far away, it is difficult for our husband to visit us and spend time with us.

Similar issues were raised by men too. Thangarajah, who is an only son and thus solely respons­ible for attending family functions, complained bitterly about the time spent on such occasions: For weddings, for example, we do not only have to attend, but rel­at­ives also expect us to stay over for several days! The time I have to spend on functions is going up by the day, and during some weeks I end up spending three to four days attending functions. Today, for example, I had to attend a wedding and visit a friend whose mother died. . . . Tomorrow morning I have to attend a rel­at­ive’s birthday party . . . I am running around from function to function. I find this very difficult. My wedding was attended by 10,000 people as my father was very well known in town, but now all those people are asking me to attend their functions . . . It is really sickening! The feeling that kin relations are becoming more difficult to maintain in the con­ text of busy working lives is compounded by a demographic trans­ition that leaves fewer sons – as in Thangarajah’s case – respons­ible for ever more social engagements and fewer women to prepare for family gath­er­ings. Thus, Revitha tells us: ‘In Tiruppur, it is horrible how we have to go around and invite every­ one in person for a wedding. That takes weeks and weeks . . . and it has become worse over the last few years’. In short, there is a strong sense that marrying locally makes it easier to combine the demands of modern business with the reproduction of family status through rituals, visits and celebrations. Whereas van Wessel’s informants in Baroda deplored the disap­pear­ance of local com­mun­ity relationships and the decline of the joint family (2004: 101–7), young men and women in Tiruppur complain about an overabundance of family life and social obli­ga­tions combined with a lack of time to meet family expectations. The joining of modernity and tradition poses new (and untried) challenges to Tiruppur’s young Gounders, who cel­eb­rate hard work while remaining subject to the demands of what they themselves reify as ‘traditional family values and obligations’.

Conclusion: business, family and respectability In this chapter I have presented eth­no­graphy of the social life of a rapidly urbanizing and indus­trial­izing rural caste in Tiruppur District, South India, and indicated some of the ways in which a newly formed com­mun­ity of urban industrialists relate to discourses and practices that are widely perceived to be middle-­class (Varma 1998). As a new urban industrial com­mun­ity with strong rural roots, the Gounders of Tiruppur are involved in the production of a new

96   G. De Neve identity for themselves in relation to other urban and more cosmo­pol­itan peers. In this pro­cess they are preoccupied with values, as­pira­tions and anxi­eties that are shared by many urban middle-­class Indians elsewhere, while at the same time reproducing what they perceive as more ‘traditional’, caste-­based practices and values – even though many of the latter are already con­tempor­ary urban adaptations of older rural forms. Much of these values evolve around the reproduction of family, respectabil­ity and gendered moral codes of beha­vi­our, each of which are mutually reinforcing (Fernandes 1997). In much of South Asia, the concept of respectabil­ity is conceived of in expli­citly moral terms (van Wessel 2004) and reproduced through the family, and more specifically through gender relations and women’s work. Indeed, as Vera-­Sanso put it, respectabil­ity – with male authority and female chastity as its key markers – ‘is the founda­tional moral value on which family . . . reputation depends’ (Vera-­Sanso 2006: 201). It is this value of respectabil­ity that Tiruppur’s new industrial fam­il­ies are in the midst of trying to protect and reproduce in a rapidly changing world, in which worldly-­wise sons travel abroad for higher education and already well-­educated daughters negotiate their entry into family businesses. Much of their struggle can be understood through their own idiom of trying to ‘keep things within the family’. For men, ideals of self-­reliance and inde­pend­ ence – ideals simul­tan­eously ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ in nature – run up against the needs of the business and the demands of the family, which foreclose any easy adoption of ‘modern’ values such as indi­vidual choice and personal freedom. As for young women, their honour con­tinues to be seen as the seat of a family’s maanam (respectabil­ity) and as central to the reproduction of family status. As a result they too are ‘kept within the family’ and their beha­vi­our remains closely checked by male authority. Yet, the ongoing investment among urban Gounder fam­il­ies in women’s education has opened up new horizons and allowed women access to family businesses. This, in turn, has led to the gradual renego­ti­ation of roles and respons­ibil­ities in every­day family life, and ultimately to the shifting of the basis of respectabil­ity itself. In all this, one cannot but observe that Tiruppur’s upcoming industrial fam­il­ ies hardly differ from other urban middle-­class groups that sim­ilarly struggle to protect family honour and respectabil­ity in a world that regu­larly shakes the grounds of morality (see Donner 2008, Lukose 2009). But what are the im­plica­ tions of the above for our understanding of the formation of class and its con­ tempor­ary dy­namics? Following Liechty, I maintain that the production of middleclassness is a cultural pro­ject – and not just a mater­ial one – that is fashioned through expli­citly gendered discourses and practices. The new class identity of upwardly mobile Gounder fam­il­ies is not just produced through business success and educational achievement, but is also fashioned through a con­tinu­ous nego­ti­ation over gendered norms, practices and bound­ar­ies of status and respectabil­ity. Anxieties and un­cer­tainties about male hierarchies between fathers and sons, about gendered hierarchies between husbands and wives, about suit­able levels of education, about appropriate types of employment, and

‘Keeping it in the family’   97 about women’s do­mestic roles lie at the heart of how middle-­class status is produced and maintained in Gounder fam­il­ies. It is concerns, as­pira­tions and anxi­ eties around status and respectabil­ity that the newcomers to this expanding middle layer of Indian soci­ety share with its old-­time members.

Notes 1 The fieldwork on which this paper is based was carried out in May–Au­gust 2000 and between Novem­ber and Febru­ary 2005–2006. It was funded by the ESRC and the Leverhulme Trust. I thank Henrike Donner, Chris Fuller, Akhil Gupta, Judith Heyer and Penny Vera-­Sanso for comments on earl­ier drafts of this paper, presented at the AAS Annual Conference 2006 in San Francisco and at the Universities of Sussex and Oxford. 2 Chari (2004) has detailed the caste’s remark­able and fast trans­ition from an agricultural com­mun­ity to a com­mun­ity of traders and industrialists involved in garment manufacturing. Today, the Gounders are amongst the wealthiest entre­pren­eurs in Tamil Nadu and their com­mun­ity boasts a con­sider­able number of urban, highly educated, English-­ speaking families. 3 See Chopra (2005) for a detailed example of family strat­egies with regard to chil­dren’s schooling. 4 Young men from other com­munit­ies, such as the Naidus from the Coimbatore region, have a much longer tradition of going abroad for further education. In his study of early entrepreneurial de­velopments in Madras State, Berna noted that as early as the 1930s and 1940s young men from Madras and Coimbatore studied in the UK, and to a lesser extent in the US. They belonged almost exclusively to the Brahman and Naidu castes and took degrees in engineering, which helped them in setting up new industrial businesses on returning home after the War (Berna 1960: 60–70). 5 See also Jeffrey et al. (2005) on the ways in which low-­caste Chamars came to value the ‘cultural capital’ derived from schooling, even in con­texts where it only rarely led to sal­ar­ied employment. For the Gounders, by contrast, high levels of schooling enhance both their cultural capital and their oppor­tun­ities for business development. 6 Women belonging to landed Gounder fam­il­ies used to work in the fields, often supervising agricultural labourers. Those village women were rarely ‘kept at home’ or secluded from the outside world, and many young men and women remember the influence that their mothers and grand­mothers yielded at home and in the fields. 7 ‘Community’ is the common term used by Gounders to refer to their caste, but it may also be used to delineate the limited circle of urbanized fam­il­ies within their caste that constitute the every­day moral com­mun­ity of Gounders that they engage with. 8 Tiruppur Kumaran College for Women, founded in 1996, and St Josephs College for Women, founded in 2000, represent examples of recently estab­lished women’s colleges in Tiruppur that attract thou­sands of female students from in and around town. These and other co-­ed colleges offer a range of degrees in commerce, management and com­ puter sciences.

References Berna, J.J. (1960) Industrial Entrepreneurship in Madras State, London: Asia Publishing House. Béteille, A. (1991) ‘The reproduction of in­equal­ity: occupation, caste and family’, Contributions to Indian Sociology, 25(1): 3–28. Chari, S. (2004) Fraternal Capital: peasant-­workers, self-­made men, and globalization in provincial India, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

98   G. De Neve Chopra, R. (2005) ‘Sisters and Brothers: schooling, family and migration’ in R. Chopra and P. Jeffery (eds) Educational Regimes in Contemporary India, New Delhi: Sage Publications. De Neve, G. (2003) ‘Expectations and rewards of modernity: com­mit­ment and mobility among rural migrants in Tiruppur, Tamil Nadu’, Contributions to Indian Sociology, 37(1&2): 251–80. De Neve, G. (2006) ‘Economic lib­eralisation, class restructuring and social space in provincial south India’ in G. De Neve and H. Donner (eds) The Meaning of the Local: pol­ itics of place in urban India, London: Routledge. Donner, H. (2002) ‘One’s own marriage: love marriages in a Calcutta neigh­bour­hood’, South Asia Research, 22(1): 79–94. Donner, H. (2005) ‘ “Children are capital, grandchil­dren are inter­est”: changing educational strat­egies and parenting in Calcutta’s middle-­class fam­il­ies’ in J. Assayag and C.J. Fuller (eds) Globalizing India: per­spect­ives from below, London: Anthem Press. Donner, H. (2006) ‘Committed mothers and well-­adjusted chil­dren: privatisation, early-­ years education and mother­hood in Calcutta’, Modern Asian Studies, 40(2): 371–95. Donner, H. (2008) Domestic Goddesses: maternity, globalization and middle-­class identity in con­tempor­ary India, Farnham: Ashgate. Fernandes, L. (1997) Producing Workers: the pol­itics of gender, class and culture in the Calcutta jute mills, Phil­adel­phia: University of Penn­syl­vania Press. Fernandes, L. (2000) ‘Restructuring the new middle class in lib­eralizing India’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 20: 88–112. Fernandes, L. (2006) India’s New Middle Class: demo­cratic pol­itics in an era of eco­ nomic reform, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Fuller, C.J. and Narasimhan, H. (2006) ‘Engineering colleges, “exposure” and in­forma­ tion tech­no­logy professionals’, Economic and Political Weekly, 41(3): 258–62. Fuller, C.J. and Narasimhan, H. (2007) ‘Information tech­no­logy professionals and the new-­rich middle class in Chennai’, Modern Asian Studies, 41(1): 121–50. Fuller, C.J. and Narasimhan, H. (2008a) ‘Empowerment and constraint: women, work and the family in the software industry in Chennai’ in C. Upadhya and A.R. Vasavi (eds) In an Outpost of the Global Economy: work and workers in India’s in­forma­tion tech­no­logy industry, New Delhi: Routledge: 190–210. Fuller, C.J. and Narasimhan, H. (2008b) ‘From landlords to software engineers: migration and urbanization among Tamil Brahmans’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 50(1): 170–96. Heyer, J. (2000) The Changing Position of Thottam Farmers in Villages in Rural Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu, between 1981/2 and 1996, Working Paper Number 59, QEH Working Paper Series, Oxford: Oxford University Department of International Development. Jaffrelot, C. (2003) India’s Silent Revolution: the rise of the lower castes in north India, New York: Columbia University Press. Jeffery, P. (2005) ‘Introduction: hearts, minds and pockets’ in R. Chopra and P. Jeffery (eds) Educational Regimes in Contemporary India, New Delhi: Sage Publishing. Jeffrey, C., Jeffery, P. and Jeffery, R. (2005) ‘When schooling fails: young men, education and low-­caste pol­itics in rural north India’, Contributions to Indian Sociology, 39(1): 1–38. Liechty, M. (2003) Suitably Modern: making middle class culture in a new consumer soci­ety, Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press. Lukose, R. (2009) Liberalization’s Children: gender, youth, and consumer cit­izen­ship in globalizing India, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

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4 Cultural contractions and intergenerational relations The construction of selfhood among middle-­class youth in Baroda Margit van Wessel The Indian pro­ject of modernity has a long his­tory. It has been elaborately ana­ lysed by Prakash (1999), who has shown how through the execu­tion of this vision in a myriad of ways, reason was raised to the status of uni­ver­sal truth and pro­gress got to be defined in sci­ent­ific terms. Prakash has shown how the pro­ject of modernity has been central to the shaping of the Indian nation. At present, the complexities brought on by this pro­ject of modernity appear to be somewhat out of favour as a schol­arly pursuit. Deshpande (1994) called Indian soci­ology a ‘tired dis­cip­line’ because of the seemingly endless discussion of ten­sions between modernity and tradition. In the social sciences, lib­eralization and concomitant de­velopments around consumption and media have been rejuvenating the debate (see e.g. Fernandes 2006; Osella and Osella 1999; Lukose 2009), liberating social sci­ent­ists from the ‘clutches’ of thinking in terms of institutions and old ideas of soci­ety. Modernity con­tinues to be a theme central to Indian soci­ology, but more and more we see modernity approached from a multiplicity of angles and in the con­text of the ex­plora­tion of many themes, from his­tory (Chakrabarty 2000) to sexuality (Shrivastava 2007). Modernity is taken as mul­ tiple, con­textual and realized through human creativity. A central question is how to understand the meanings of modernities and the social, polit­ical and eco­ nomic forces involved in realizing these meanings. Recent liter­at­ure on the middle class, while clearly accounting for the advent of the market in the shaping of middle-­class culture, does emphas­ize the dy­namics between new de­velopments and his­tor­ical continuities. Fernandes (2006), for example, shows how the ‘new middle class’ is shaped by the reworking of social hierarchies. However, the new emphasis on lib­eralization, consumption and media begs the question of the role of societal institutions (apart from the market) in the production of norms. While existing ana­lyses teach us how different forces interact in cultural production, many questions remain about how middle-­class people themselves understand and evalu­ate the cultural shifts in their lives. In this chapter, we will zoom in on this issue while focusing on middle-­class youth. We see in the current culture-­oriented study of Indian middle-­class youth much attention being paid to the way young people creatively shape selfhood by incorporating the different symbolic forms that come their way (e.g. Cullity and Younger 2004; Saldhana 2002; Lukose 2009). This

Contractions and intergenerational relations   101 liter­at­ure shows that we should understand the cultural significance of consumption and media among young people as gravely implicated by cultural pol­itics, such as those of class, caste, gender and nation. Analysis is largely geared toward describing and understanding this interplay between different forces. However, one can differentiate between the study of cultural dy­namics through the prism of social–sci­ent­ific theor­et­ical constructs such as ‘consumption’, and the study of cultural dy­namics that starts from people’s own understandings, that may evolve around differently framed issues. For this research pro­ject, I chose to be led by young people’s own sensemaking of their cultural state and the nature of the dy­namics between different and divergent forces in this sensemaking. Young people’s own sensemaking led me to the family as a site where young people locate im­port­ant ten­sions through which they shape selfhood. Young people’s own sensemaking also led me to conceptualizations of ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’ as central to their understandings of cultural challenges involved here. That questions of ‘modernity’ and ‘tradition’ do again crop up may seem like a return to ‘tired’ questions, but I was inter­ested not so much in distinguishing between the two as in understanding how the accom­panying norms were framed by the young, how they sought to integrate them into their lives, and what kinds of new tra­ject­ories emerged. The argument de­veloped in this chapter zooms in on middle-­class youth’s discursive constructions of self, and shows that these are thoroughly implicated by longstanding cultural ideo­lo­gies around the family. This is not to suggest that we should re-­emphasize the socializing force of the family, and de-­emphasize those of the state and the market. The discourses through which young people construct selfhood are likely to be closely connected with both. But as will be argued, in the discourses circulating among the young, ideas about ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’ are put on the same footing: as norms produced by soci­ety and producing selves. And the dy­namics between norms we can de­scribe as a quest that we see young people undertake: that of a search for coherent sub­ject­ivity negotiating culturally and socially diverging forces, assuming legitimacy in a wider social con­text in which ideo­logy around family takes prime position.

Baroda I conducted fieldwork in Baroda, a city with a popu­la­tion of around two million in the state of Gujarat. In broad terms, upward mobility and a strong increase in consumption have been a common ex­peri­ence for a signi­fic­ant part of the popu­ la­tion of Baroda and those who have migrated to it in recent years. Within the middle class of Baroda, education is a prime concern, and fam­il­ies tend to seek for their sons (and often also daughters) higher education in modern institutions, espe­cially universities. Many have taken part in the eco­nomic de­velopment of this city, part of the so-­called ‘golden cor­ridor’ of Gujarat, and many now live far more prosperously than before. Moving around Baroda, one comes across many soci­eties, recently de­veloped housing estates, each consisting of dozens of sim­ilarly built terraced houses. A stand­ard middle-­class residence is made

102   M. van Wessel of brick and neatly plastered, and contains several rooms, a separate kit­chen with standing platform, indoor plumbing and a space outside for washing clothes and utensils. Much money is invested in home decorations and appliances. Families commonly own vehicles such as mopeds, scooters and motor­cycles, and increasingly also cars, and purchase cosmetics and packaged foods. Clothing fashions have become increasingly diverse, with more and more teen­agers adopting, and being allowed to wear, Western fashions. Visits to res­taur­ants, fast-­food estab­ lishments, gyms and beauty parlours are equally part of a middle-­class lifestyle. Sections of a few high-­caste groupings constitute a large part of the mem­ber­ ship of the middle class in Baroda. The Brahmin, Bania and Patel castes have a his­tor­ical ad­vant­age that helps them to locally dominate in the com­peti­tion for power and eco­nomic success in the urban eco­nomy. In recent decades, more rurally oriented Patel com­munit­ies have made a rel­at­ively strong rise in trade, industry and schooling in this city. Earning members of fam­il­ies are mostly men, though it is not uncommon to find women working as well.

Methodology This study is based on data gathered partly through informal inter­viewing and parti­cip­ant observation carried out during 13 months of fieldwork. During this period, I spent time with interlocutors stemming from different sections of Baroda soci­ety, who identi­fy themselves as middle class. Interlocutors were all from fam­il­ies where one or more members have obtained a college degree and white-­collar employment as gov­ern­ment ser­vants, professionals and small and medium-­sized entrepreneurs. To learn about the ex­peri­ence of being middle class and young, I hung out on the campus of Maharaja Sayajirao University, at the university’s girls’ hostel, in fast-­food res­taur­ants, in a health club and at a sewing class. I also rented rooms with fam­il­ies for periods of several months, and thus shared their lives as a ‘paying guest’. In addition, I regu­larly visited many neigh­bours, acquaintances and friends living in different middle-­class neigh­bour­hoods across the city. I supplemented this ethnographic fieldwork with structured inter­views, which a dozen assistants conducted with 153 women and 152 men between the ages of 17 and 25. Interviews were conducted separately from family members. The assistants themselves were all young adults living in Baroda and could all be categorized as middle class in a broad sense, but came from diverse regional and caste backgrounds, although most were Gujarati and Hindu. Thus, they drew on different social networks to inter­view their own friends and acquaintances, neigh­bours and classmates. The chosen age-­group was selected since youths this age are at a crucial stage in their lives, in which much thought and action with regard to life de­cisions and family relations (education, marriage, career) are taking place, and intergenerational dif­fer­ences surface in a major way. Through the fieldwork and inter­views, we could learn how young people construct identity in the face of contra­dict­ory socializing forces. However, inter­views, and meetings that include a foreign

Contractions and intergenerational relations   103 researcher present for young people a specific con­text in which certain arguments rather than others may be taken as suit­able. In other words, we should not take the ana­lysis here as ‘opinion’, valid in all con­texts for these young people. On the other hand, the con­tinu­ous ref­er­ences to ‘real life’ con­ditions and conflicts that young people made suggest that what they shared with us has clear significance beyond the con­text of this research pro­ject. Nonetheless, claims about the stability of young people’s way of engaging with contra­dict­ory forces would be out of place – the constructions we see may be closely connected to their stage in life.

Style and the generations Even cursory observation makes it obvious that young middle-­class people in Baroda partly inhabit a culture of their own that expresses itself in terms of clothing style, consumption patterns, language and sites (cf. Liechty 2003). Young people claim specific spaces in the city, such as par­ticu­lar street corners and fast-­food res­taur­ants. Styles and commodities form an im­port­ant aspect of identity in the urban middle class, for boys as well as girls. Young people constantly categorize themselves and other young people, and these cat­egor­izations are rooted in a range of qualifications. For example, the possession of a motor­ cycle, rather than a scooter or moped, indicates manliness and glamour. Clothing styles mat­ter (cf. Lukose 2009; Liechty 2003). Stylish clothing items are often sought out that are associated with success, glamour and fashion, the latest cuts in salwar kameez, or items from inter­na­tional brands or expressing an inter­na­ tional style. But there is more to wearing specific clothes. For example, ‘Western’ clothing worn by young women, espe­cially jeans, is seen as expressing inde­pend­ence. A girl wearing ‘Western’ clothes is seen as rel­at­ively more avail­able to young men than what many refer to as a simple girl, who would wear a salwar kameez. The wearer of such garments may mix with male friends or have conversations with fellow students in the college canteen and is con­ sidered to be modern or even bindaas (cool) by the crowd she hangs out with. However, in another con­text the same girl may be called chalu for her carelessness in putting her izzat (honour) at risk through inter­action with boys. A simple girl wears Indian clothes, does not seek inde­pend­ence from her parents, and is not ambitious in terms of career. Nonetheless, a girl seen wearing a salwar kameez is of course not always characterized as simple. She too may wear a fashionable outfit and make-­up, cut her hair short, and pursue higher education with the aim of having a career, and thus be called modern, or forward. She is therefore not neces­sar­ily a maniben1 – a term that may be used to abuse a ‘unsoph­istic­ated’ girl who, for example, wears unfashionably cut clothes or a heavily oiled braid of hair. Apart from fashion, there are other markers that single out specific youths as modern, for example ‘English medium’ education or hairstyles. This applies espe­cially to what middle-­class youths refer to as hifi youths, those young men and women from affluent fam­il­ies who can afford ‘anything’ and (supposedly) have no fear of social control being imposed to keep

104   M. van Wessel moral norms intact. According to those describing themselves as middle class, these youths are free to mix with the oppos­ite sex at ‘dance par­ties’, unaccept­ able beha­vi­our for many girls, who would never attend such events for fear of losing their honour. Young people, through classifications like those above, claim space for their ex­peri­ence of the world and their identification with parts of that world. However, though expressed through the consumption of various forms of youth culture, with its clear style and lifestyle connotations, many of these cat­egor­ izations are rooted in broader social dif­fer­ences and index class through ref­er­ ence to gendered patterns of beha­vi­our and style, educational pursuits and moral as­sump­tions. In short, many of the cat­egor­izations are adapted from gen­eral classifications, made to fit young people’s concerns and ex­peri­ences but shared by their parents and the wider adult world. On the one hand, young people did not step away from the moral and cultural ideals of their elders, but on the other hand, they seemed to ex­peri­ence a cultural distance. So what is this distance about, and how does it relate to the shared referents these same young people express?

Modernity as an ontological paradigm Members of the middle class in Baroda employ the notion of modernity as an ontological para­digm – an ideo­logical resource that offers ideo­logical resources for understanding the nature of being.2 Members of the Baroda middle class draw on these resources to de­scribe and evalu­ate the state of persons and acts. When middle-­class people in Baroda speak of social and cultural change in their own soci­ety, they readily differentiate between ‘people of old thinking’ (juna vicar-­na loko) and ‘people of new thinking’ (nava vicar-­na loko). People de­scribe others who they perceive to be maintaining certain traditions without thinking of, or questioning, their meaning, as ‘walking in the track of the cart’ – not choosing or making a new path (chilachalu). The local language, Gujarati, has also incorp­or­ated English terms to speak about these distinctions: modern, forward, freemind and broadmind are opposed to or­tho­dox, backwards, narrowminded or rigid. Sometimes these terms are used in a neutral sense, to de­scribe the state of affairs. But often, and espe­cially among the young, the terms referring to ‘the modern’ are used in a pos­it­ive sense, and the terms referring to things marked as ‘traditional’ are used in a derogatory manner. In the Gujarati language there is a word that stands for ‘clinging to conventions’ (rudhichust), which among this crowd is used as a criticism or insult. If used directly in conversations – as might happen when subjects such as girls’ education or girl–boy friendships are concerned, the one so accused is expected to defend his or her beha­vi­our or ideas. Modern ‘thinking’, then, stands for ideals that have a bearing on a set of social issues, prim­arily with regard to gender and caste. Basically, these ideals dis­avow existing and past hierarchies and conventions, and carry an aura of legitimacy and sometimes even status, and they are con­tinu­ously engaged with. This is not to suggest that the discursive employment of this para­digm

Contractions and intergenerational relations   105 implies acceptance in practice of the same ideas. As we can learn from Gupta’s (2000) discussions of failed modernity among the Indian middle class, or Khilnani’s (2003) ana­lysis of the complexities involving engagement with ‘the idea of India’, we should not mis­take employment of modernist discourse for a straight­forward modernist attitude, let alone beha­vi­our. However, this does not take away the fact that modernity as an ontological para­digm has con­sider­able legitimacy and even prestige among members of the middle class. The lack of coher­ence we see here does not imply that young people themselves would easily relate to notions pop­ular in social science that emphas­ize the creative combining, relating and reworking of cultural elements such as ‘creolization’ or ‘hybridization’, even if from a social science per­spect­ive they could be clas­si­fied as such. In many young people’s own per­spect­ive, there are confrontations here, and we see strong identifications among them with clearly demarcated ideas and moralities – and it is such engagement that is the focus of the present discussion. As we will see: while beha­vi­oural stand­ards are, on the one hand, shared and clear, we find that young people draw on cultural resources through which to provide different readings of these stand­ards. By these different readings, they corroborate intergenerational cultural dif­fer­ence (cf. Donner 2006).

Modernity and the generations Sejal is a 19-year-­old student at Baroda’s Maharaja Sayajirao University. She is the daughter of Hema, a 50-year-­old Brahmin widow who was a friend and an im­port­ant informant to me. One day I came to visit Hema and her family after having been away. When I saw Sejal, I moved towards her in order to give her a hug. But Sejal yelled, somewhat embarrassed: ‘No, no!’ Later, as I chatted with her mother, Sejal sat in a corner of the room, separate from the place where the family normally gathered. Hema had made tea for all of us, and served Sejal some too, but in a steel cup, instead of the china she normally used to serve tea in. Sejal was having her period and was therefore restricted in her inter­actions with others. Water, food and a range of other mater­ials would be polluted by Sejal’s touch. When Hema went out of the room we talked about this, and Sejal shrugged it all off, insisting it was her mother who believed in such taboos. According to Sejal, how­ever, her enforced isolation was ridiculous. Sejal did feel that she should be obedient to her mother, she explained to me one day. Sejal also felt that she had to agree to an arranged marriage. All this because of her obli­ga­tions towards her family. ‘Like a bird nourishes the young ones, so our parents nourish us. How can we neg­lect them?’ And also: ‘people like a girl if she is obedient’. Sentences such as these that I heard repeatedly during my fieldwork expressed these obli­ga­tions and young people’s sense of moral propriety well. However, Sejal’s ‘own thinking’, as she put it, did not always correlate with the ideas she shared with her family members for the sake of respect from people around her. ‘Why should I not talk to my male classmates?’ And ‘why should I not go out after nine?’ She asked these questions

106   M. van Wessel rhet­orically, although she understood what was expected of her, and conformed. Sejal explained that what was prob­lematic to her was that the rules and expectations did not, in themselves, make sense to her. She in­ter­preted the divergence between ideas as a con­sequence of a ‘generation gap’ between her and her mother and asserted that she questioned many values and ideas that her mother and many others lived by. In her view, she told me, older people tended to take their way of life for granted, whereas young people reflected on their way of life and sought changes if they deemed it neces­sary. Manisha, a woman in her early twenties, sim­ilarly explained how young people challenge values and ideas that are im­port­ant for their families: There used to be no discussion on issues. It was a limited life. Everything regu­lar, routine. And everybody was meant for something. You go to any family, it’s the same. Now everybody is moving out and is conscious about himself. So sharing prob­lems comes into the pic­ture. Like, parents did not include a girl in marriage nego­ti­ations. And youngsters could not advise elders, even if they are educated for that. The ‘limited life’ in which all was ‘regu­lar, routine’ is challenged by young people, and while communication with the older generation is sought, such conversations challenge power relations. Manisha quali­fied adherence to the age-­ related hierarchies within the family as an absence of reflection, a fixation that would be overcome if crit­ical thinking was encouraged. And she felt strongly that young people were ‘moving out’ of that debilitating con­dition today. But this does not mean that young people construct their own cultural universe as separate from that of elders. For these young people, their attitudes amount to more than just resistance to the expectations and restrictions imposed by figures of authority. They frame their attitudes in terms of ‘being in touch’ with ‘the times’. Ideas and practices are thus constructed as inherently tem­poral, as Liechty (2003) also noted for middle-­class youth’s understandings of modernity in Kathmandu. We see this tem­porality, for example, in the way young people used the term ‘modern’. We often heard young people applying this term to de­scribe and evalu­ate phenomena, and we asked them what they thought the term meant. Their answers tell us not only about their understanding of the term, but also of their identification with ideals of reason as valid for their being modern in a tem­poral sense. As one young man, aged 18, said: You are modern if you are in line with modern ideas. Today is the world of science. If your thinking is rational. If you are guided only by logic and reasoning rather than superstition and rituals, it is modern. Reason is thus ‘modern’. Traditions cannot guide how one is to live one’s life; a person’s own insights should fulfil that guiding role. This argument is not only a mat­ter of the mind; it implies a specific approach to the social as well. There are many fields in which young people find themselves confronted with elders who

Contractions and intergenerational relations   107 seek to adhere to traditions that young people discursively associate with the past. We asked youths to de­scribe dif­fer­ences between ‘old thinking’ and ‘new thinking’. This contrast is one that people can gen­erally relate to, even though not all would use it in every­day conversations. Speaking of ‘old thinking’ is a way of speaking about ideas deemed old-­fashioned or or­tho­dox, another term commonly used in talk about the ad­vant­ages of cultural change. Perhaps more commonly among the young, we find usage of the terms con­ser­vat­ive and the Gujarati term junvaani. ‘New’ thinking is ‘rational’, ‘prac­tical’ or ‘broadminded’, but is also a mat­ter of realism. One girl, aged 20, explained: According to me, being modern means having broadness about the things, to be more prac­tical, believing in logical aspects rather than theor­et­ical aspects, having the mentality of uni­ver­sal brother­hood, to understand others, to be more realistic, etcetera. ‘New thinking’ is therefore thinking that mat­ters in the present; ‘old thinking’ has become outdated and ob­sol­ete. This modernity discussed above is for these young people not a mat­ter of youth’s separation from, or resistance to, local culture, and not something inherently ‘foreign’. Respondents argued for reason as a means to equip a person for flex­ib­il­ity and life in the present more gen­erally, as quotes by two young men, aged 23 and 22, show: People of old thinking always follow old rules. They cannot change themselves with the changing times. They impose their rules on other people whereas people of new thinking are able to change with every change of era. The old people are very narrow-­minded, stick to their ideas tightly. They even go to pee and shit at a certain time. If it doesn’t happen, they leave it for the next time. They all go by things at their convenience.

The construction of coherence These young people’s statements draw on discourses of modernity, constructing legitimacy for attitudes and beha­vi­our through their argued rooting in reflexivity, reason and auto­nomy – the right to take de­cisions affecting one’s life. Young people thus employ notions of modernity as if they refer to uni­ver­sally valid ideals. At the same time, ten­sions with other values that have equal validity and legitimacy in their lives are often imme­diately brought up in discussions. But how are these ten­sions then handled? Young people often argued that they give shape to their lives by making choices based on reason, and as indi­viduals rather than as members of a collectivity. In that sense, their discourse fits closely with Anthony Giddens’ ideas on self-­identity, which he de­scribes as being shaped by ‘life pol­itics’. For Giddens, life pol­itics concerns polit­ical issues which flow from pro­cesses

108   M. van Wessel of self-­actualization in post-­traditional con­texts, where globalizing influences intrude deeply into the reflexive idea of selfhood (Giddens 1991: 214). Life pol­itics are a pol­itics of self-­actualization by emancipated indi­viduals, acting with a certain level of auto­nomy. While this notions of indi­vidualism has been widely critiqued, I want to focus here on another prob­lem with it that was pointed out by McDonald, writing on youth culture in Australia. His work shows that Giddens’ notion of life pol­itics is too calculative, rational and goal-­ oriented. McDonald argues that Giddens reduces action to cognition, and while acknowledging that young people search coher­ence, he emphas­izes that it is not just cognition that defines action in this con­text. In a world increasingly shaped by the imperative of producing sub­ject­ivity, the young are moral actors, struggling for wholeness and freedom, while they find themselves in a social world made up of diverging and increasingly incoherent logics from which each must construct a coherent and unified ex­peri­ence (McDonald 1999). Life pol­itics so understood can also be found among young people in Baroda. Young middle-­class people often employ notions of reflexivity, reason and auto­ nomy to challenge cultural conventions and the authority of elders. However, they do not do away with what they challenge. Within their arguments they incorp­or­ate and negotiate elements of ‘traditional’ morality, which they ac­know­ ledge as legitimate even as they attack them. We will ex­plore how young middle-­class people in Baroda engage with the ten­sions involved here through discussion of three dimensions of intergenerational relations that they themselves often single out as im­port­ant points of collision: submission to family authority, selection of marriage partners and ser­vice to elders. From how young people engage with the ten­sions that they identified, we learn that they often attempt to re­con­cile moral contra­dic­tions, reconstruct moral bound­ar­ies and discursively construct coher­ence. The cultural realms of youth and adults are not compartmentalized. And while ambiguity about ideas and practices is not resolved, we see a carefully negotiated conjunction of meanings, through which young people seek to discursively overcome contra­dic­tions (cf. Harriss 2003).

Submission to family authority One of the questions raised during our inter­views with young adults was whether they felt that young people are less obedient and have less respect (maan) for their parents than before – something commonly attested to by parents and teachers in Baroda (van Wessel 2001). Some respondents said they dis­agreed, others agreed. Significantly, whether or not they agreed with the statement about young people not having respect for their elders, the notion that well-­defined forms of showing respect are central to child–parent relations was ac­know­ ledged. A third group among the respondents regu­larly challenged the understanding of appropriate parent–child relations that the question expressed and many in this group stated their dis­agree­ment something like this:

Contractions and intergenerational relations   109 People respect their parents and also try to obey them. But sometimes their views don’t match with those of the parents. Then they won’t accept their view. The young generation’s beha­vi­our is different because they have grown up in modern soci­ety and have modern views whereas our parents want to keep their culture alive. (Girl, 24) Nowadays young people have become more outspoken, and instead of blindly obeying what parents say, they prefer thinking over mat­ters first. And therefore parents say that they don’t obey and respect them. (Girl, 21) As far as these young people are concerned, hier­archy partly loses its legitimacy as a founda­tion to parent–child relations in ‘modern’ times. Parents tended to de­scribe this de­velopment as a form of personal loss and a con­sequence of widespread cultural and moral degeneration. Young people we spoke with who justified the supposed lack of respect and obedience, how­ever, thought that hier­archy loses ground not to immorality, but to more egal­it­arian ideals within the family. Respect for the older generation is something that is more a feeling than a guideline that can structure social inter­action and power relations. In the words of some: Nowadays parents are more like friends to their chil­dren. The relationship is not a starched one. In fact, parents to some extent have lost control over their chil­dren and therefore they think that the young people do not obey them or respect them. (Girl, 22) Young people do respect but don’t obey blindly. They obey them in their own way. They reason it out first themselves and then obey. Even I do that. In a way, I know I am insulting my mother but somehow that has become my way. The obedience has changed but the respect has not changed. (Boy, 19) An additional question asked to those who agreed with the statement that young people now­adays respect and obey their parents less than before requested them to give examples of changes in young people’s beha­vi­our towards their parents. Partly, the respondents’ answers to this question make statements commonly found in pop­ular discourse about this mat­ter: young people seek fun in ways that are immoral or prob­lematic; they have become Westernized, are lured by modern goods and are weary of their fam­il­ies’ eco­nomic lim­ita­tions. More frequently, how­ever, respondents did not make a clear moral judgement but rather explained the receding power of the values of respect and obedience in terms of cultural change, and focused on young people’s unwillingness to have their lifestyle and de­cision making guided by parental authority. Who to marry, what to wear, who

110   M. van Wessel to make friends with, what time to come home at, how to spend money, which career to choose are some of the many other issues of contestation that youths and their parents argue about: Because of clash of egos and generation gap, their [parents’ and chil­dren’s] thinking does not match, their ego comes in clash and the result is that chil­ dren stop listening to their parents. They would say, ‘come on yaar’ (friend), we have our own likes and dislikes, we have our thoughts. Why should we obey them all the time’. (Girl, 23) One im­port­ant way in which young people disrespect their elders is by arguing, or ‘talking back’. But while this has largely negat­ive connotations, young people also had ways of arguing in terms of ‘modern thinking’, which in turn revolved around the pos­it­ive notions of reflexivity, reason and auto­nomy. They often associated modernity with ‘openness’, ‘frankness’, ‘freedom of speech’ and ‘straight­forwardness’. An example that illus­trates the point was given by a 19-year-­old boy who explained the nature of the present ‘generation gap’ between today’s young people and their parents: This gap arises from very small issues – on indi­vidual thinking, your approach, how you look, you think, etcetera . . . A very good example is a father telling his grown-­up son that sex is very bad. The son says ‘How can it be bad? It is a very beautiful thing, a way of love, endless love.’ The son may even say, ‘if it is bad, you had it and I, being the result of it, am standing before you’. Through arguments about ‘frankness’ like the one above, respondents stress and legitimize their attack on rules about communication. A modern mindset is thus shown as standing for new modes of social inter­action, legitimate also when breaking the bound­ar­ies of respect and propriety, which estab­lished what could be talked about, and with whom. To sum up, the ideal of auto­nom­ous choice and the high status of ‘reason’ are brought in to plea for the accommodation of the desire for auto­nomy and more lib­eral forms of intergenerational inter­action. ‘Reason’ is thus an argument for the legitimacy of ‘choice’. This is then not to subvert the ideal of ‘respect’ but to counter accusations of moral degeneracy by conceptually defining the notion of ‘respect’ differently.

Selection of marriage partners Scholars of India have in recent years started to pay increasing attention to love and intimacy, par­ticu­larly zooming in on questions of conjugality and marriage (e.g. Donner 2008; Grover 2009; Fuller and Narasimhan 2008). An im­port­ant theme in this liter­at­ure is the shift that seems to be taking place in middle-­class

Contractions and intergenerational relations   111 soci­ety towards an ideal of companionate marriage, and the way this ideal is negotiated in relation to stand­ards of endogamy and propriety (Donner 2008; Fuller and Narasimhan 2008). The ten­sions between ideas and practices that this liter­at­ure refers to are also high in the minds of young people in Baroda, with many stories and arguments they presented to us centring on the question of ‘who selects?’ In order to learn how they handled ten­sions between different ideas, we entered discussions about this through this same question. We asked unmarried young men and women which they would prefer: meeting potential partners through their fam­il­ies, or finding someone on their own and then seeking their parents’ consent. In our sample boys showed more self-­determination with regard to marriage than girls, but many girls made clear that they were eager to choose a partner for themselves, even though such selection on the girls’ part is culturally much more prob­lematic. Girls and boys who had said that they wanted to select their own spouses were asked why they preferred this form of matchmaking to the arranged marriage option. To this question the answers were highly sim­ilar, expressing a desire to get to know the partner before marriage, which would ultimately make for a better relationship. Respondents made it clear that, left to their own devices, they would be able to find a com­pat­ible person­al­ity: a person who would share their likes and dislikes, and their way of ‘thinking’. A marriage, to these young people, should be a marriage of indi­viduals who have matching indi­vidual traits and wishes. Arranged marriages do not allow for such compatibility, it was argued. We also asked what kind of cri­teria respondents thought were signi­fic­ant in their selection of their spouse. Both boys and girls, and both those who wanted to select their own partner and those who sought to leave the initiative to their parents, employed sim­ilar types of cri­teria. One cat­egory of cri­teria that could be made on the basis of the answers that were given was that of the potential to fulfil expected social roles. For example, girls spoke of their wish to marry a young man who could earn well, while boys highlighted the desire to marry a young woman who would respect their parents and be able to run a household effect­ively. Both emphas­ized looks, education, good nature, broadmindedness and a sociable or cheerful character. Both also expected a spouse to be ‘understanding’, cooperative, con­siderate, loving and com­pat­ible in terms of character. This goes to show that re­gard­less of whether they were seeking a self-­arranged marriage or an arranged marriage, personal compatibility in terms of indi­ viduality and character was a key requirement for ideal partners. Interestingly, compatibility with their fam­il­ies and conformity to the wishes of elders appeared to be much less of a priority. While parents try to find out about the character of a potential bride or groom, those respondents who were looking for a love match argued that the traditional routes of matchmaking via the com­mun­ity would hardly allow the couple to get to know each other. While parents were expected to find a good match and, as mothers made clear, ask for specific likes and dislikes, as one parent who had a

112   M. van Wessel love marriage explained, parents make all sorts of promises and try to meet their chil­dren halfway. However, as one boy (20) said, talking of his reluctance to agree to an arranged marriage, this does not solve the prob­lem of intimate know­ ledge of a potential spouse: If you don’t know the girl, her beha­vi­our, goals, attitude, her mental frequency, her nature, her outlook towards life, how can you marry her? Along the same lines, Rajesh, a boy of 20, explained why – in his eyes – arranged marriages are an in­ad­equate way of finding a partner. He discussed the way he thinks it will go when his brother Chirag, now in his mid-­twenties, is to get married: I feel arranged marriage is a great oppor­tun­ity. Proper choice. But that is not the practice. It’s like this: someone will come to ask. Chirag will talk with that girl, sitting on the swing outside. Very super­fi­cial questions. The fam­il­ ies will check the background. So in this situ­ation they have to adjust with each other. After engagement they can meet but still the marriage is going to be fixed in 80 per cent of the cases. So there is always pressure: maybe that person is not understanding. The majority of the young people we spoke to said they wished to select their own partners, and a majority of that group again said they would also marry the partner of their choice if their parents dis­agreed. Motivations for marrying a self­selected partner were clearly founded in an ideal of indi­vidual compatibility and ‘modern’ conjugal relations. This does not mean, how­ever, that we should think that these young people are bound to get into severe conflict with their elders on this mat­ter. First, many young people who have a love marriage choose partners from an equal class and caste background (cf. Donner 2008), and therefore may not have to face severe opposi­tion. The chances are also that most of the young people who claimed they would choose their own life partner will end up with an arranged marriage. This is because, in spite of their com­mit­ment to a modern mindset, these young people are part of socially im­port­ant networks that determine whether they will be able to negotiate marriage in this way. Fear of being scorned by family and others, fear of being left alone without emotional or mater­ial sup­port in the case of need and obli­ga­tions towards parents are im­port­ ant reasons against ‘one’s own marriage’. In addition, although respondents spoke of finding their own partner and of inter­action with the oppos­ite sex as a normal aspect of every­day life, age reality is not often that easygoing and ‘modern’. Many of the boys and young men we inter­viewed are not used to inter­action with unrelated girls, and many girls and young women avoid becoming known for having relationships with boys. As it is well known that men would not wish to marry a girl with ‘a past’ of sexual relations, girls and young women are aware that they need to protect their reputation and do often not get openly involved with the oppos­ite sex.

Contractions and intergenerational relations   113 Young people’s talk of auto­nomy may therefore be just that: talk. However, what still strikes us is that many young people defend their per­spect­ives on social relations and their wish for auto­nomy as legitimate by presenting their ideals as rational and de­fens­ible, and therefore morally unprob­lematic. A heightened sense of auto­nomy is thereby legitimated through an appeal to reason; that the hier­archy comes to be subverted is, in their in­ter­pretation, simply a con­ sequence of this logic.

Serving one’s elders In one domain that was ex­plored in our inter­views attempts at discursively constructing coher­ence about modernity and young people’s worlds were markedly less successful. The ten­sions between the moral ideal that states that younger members of fam­il­ies should take care of parents in old age (provide seva to them) and the expressed ideals of auto­nomy did present prob­lems to most of our respondents. Here we see the attempt to estab­lish a coherent nar­rat­ive fail as young people struggled to bring the self-­confessed ideals of auto­nomy in congruence with the prob­lem of aban­don­ment of parents in old age. Abandonment in old age is a phenomenon that is often discussed in the Baroda middle-­class con­text as it feeds into the parental discourse on decline and the evil influences of indi­vidualism and Western culture on ‘traditional’ family values. Our young respondents found it hard to bring their notion of a pos­it­ive and fulfilling ‘modern’ mindset based on the ideo­lo­gies of auto­nomy, reflexivity and reason into this debate. Some employed it here too, but much less frequently and with much less vigour. Their discussions of intergenerational dependence (as opposed to relationships) shows that limits of the idea that young people construct coherent subjectivities on the basis of culturally and socially diverging forces has its limits. It appears that the Indian middle class is united by a discourse that posits the loss of existing practices sup­porting ‘traditional family values’, espe­cially the care for parents in their old age, as a central concern for modern society – stressing loss in terms of practice while simultaneously positing these values’ continued relevance, identifying with them. In relative disregard of the complexity of reality, we can see a relatively consistent pattern of identity work here. Uberoi (1994) pointed out how the decline of the joint family is, among educated Indians, an ‘art­icle of faith’ (Uberoi 1994: 31–2), although the persistence of the model has been shown and the as­sump­tion that all com­munit­ies have always favoured patrilocal extended fam­il­ies is a myth. In common with other com­munit­ies, members of the middle class in Baroda think of the joint family as thing of the past, while in reality nuclear fam­il­ies are only one of many options, as many middle-­class parents in Baroda live with a son’s family. But dis­re­gard­ing this reality, the negat­ive discourse on the family shows a remark­able resilience as respondents as­sumed that social and cultural change has made the joint family a thing of the past. Almost all the young men we spoke to stated that they thought it was their duty to take care of their parents in old age. However, half of the young men inter­viewed also agreed with the statement that ‘sons are no longer prepared to

114   M. van Wessel look after their parents’. The issue was so sensitive that hardly any young man who was inter­viewed was prepared to discuss a desire to leave the parental home, whether speaking with me or an assistant alone. However, we do see the notion of auto­nomy being applied here too. When asking young men what they thought were the reasons for the (supposed) unwillingness of sons to take care of their parents, their answers most commonly pointed to explanations that related to dif­ficult­ies in living, as young people were meant to be more inde­pend­ent and thus less willing to accept the authority or interference of parents. Younger couples and their parents were thought to have different ways of ‘thinking’. The inter­views pointed towards the im­port­ance of the nuclear family ideal, and some explanations may be more accept­able and therefore more willingly given than others. However, it can be noted that the explanations respondents gave point towards the im­port­ance of auto­nomy as a value and the nuclear family ideal as an expression of this value, which signals wider changes in the way these young men thought about the family. Rather than prop­erty disputes or dis­agree­ment among sisters-­in-law, folk explanations for family break-­up in much of the liter­ at­ure on the Indian family, we find ideas about lifestyle, the indi­vidual and inde­ pend­ence in day-­to-day life employed in talk about these matters. In the same set of inter­views we tried to find out whether girls thought it was their duty to ‘serve their in-­laws’. A large majority of them affirmed that they felt this was indeed their duty. But while, again, these respondents did not pub­licly challenge the estab­lished morality that very clearly states that daughters-­in-law are to serve their in-­laws, a small minor­ity did contest these ideas. This minor­ity showed itself to be less committed to the idea of the subservient daughter-­in-law, and typ­ic­ally made their performance of such duties conditional: If my in-­laws are understanding and try to understand me I as­sure that they would get the same from me. But if that dream breaks I would like to separate. Yes, it is my duty. Because they are the parents of your husband and they have made him capable and you could marry him. But if they don’t respect or respond prop­erly, I won’t respect them. If they behave prop­erly with me, respect my thoughts and ideas, then I will definitely serve them. Notably, these young women draw on one source to help them legitimize a less than full com­mit­ment to this moral duty: autonomy: ‘I am not to be taken for granted’ seems to be what they are saying. It is very well pos­sible that boys and girls were giving socially desir­able answers – presenting themselves as adhering to norms of ‘modern’ or ‘traditional’ – rather than showing moral ambivalence. However, we can observe that the legitimacy of the moral ideal of serving elders stands rel­at­ively unassailed, while expressions of auto­nomy were used to contest these ideals. With regard to filial duties and the role

Contractions and intergenerational relations   115 of the daughter-­in-law, the ten­sions between divergent ideas are not resolved through rhet­oric of dif­fer­ence: it appears that most young men and most young women inter­viewed find it im­pos­sible to diffuse the moral ten­sion, while auto­nomy re­appears as a value, thus reconfirming the centrality of this notion for our understanding of what it means to live in an Indian middle-­class family today.

Conclusion Young middle-­class people differentiate between themselves and members of older generations in terms of intergenerational relations: it means something to be young. This meaning takes shape in a social con­text that includes older generations, as being young is still (also) about social roles. Young people’s discourse also includes meanings that have significance in soci­ety beyond the world of youth, and in their constructions of themselves and others, young people engage with wider soci­ety and the contra­dict­ory ideo­lo­gies present there. Any rigid opposi­tion between generations and between ‘cultures’ can therefore be con­sidered out of place (see also Lukose 2009). However, intergenerational relations form a domain in which conflicts over meaning surface. Obviously, these conflicts are not resolved through rhet­oric, but young people discursively attempt to come to terms with contra­dic­tions, and are actively constructing meanings that seek to bring coher­ence to selfhood. They are, as McDonald has shown in other con­texts, engaged in a pro­cess of constructing sub­ject­ivity in the face of culturally and socially diverging forces (McDonald 1999). As others have shown (see e.g. Liechty 2003), ‘modernity’ as a pro­ject provides a use­ful way to understand the ten­sions involved here and deliberate on them. Young people often present these ten­sions within a pic­ture in which their cause is the advent of reflexive, emancipated auto­nomy; not a Western reading of it, but one that seeks to discursively integrate itself with locally estab­lished moral ideals (cf. Fuller and Narasimhan 2008). The search for a coherent sense of selfhood we see here is a long way from the protection of tradition and a holistic world view that the concept of the inner self, protected from the onslaught of modernity that rages outside, suggests (Das 2000). The notions of reflexivity, reason and auto­nomy that my young interlocutors drew on legitimize to them divergence from ideals of hier­archy and duty; and they thereby reshape these same ideals. The selves so constructed are not consciously fashioned as hybrid. They come into being through a nego­ti­ation between apparently forceful ideals of a modern mindset and estab­lished local moralities, in pro­cesses within which certain contradicting values coexist.

Notes 1 The girl’s name Mani has rural, rustic connotations. ‘Ben’ means sister (addressing a woman by her name with the added ‘ben’ is sociable as well as polite in Gujarati soci­ ety). See also the Maniben.com show that has brought the Maniben metaphor to life. 2 I thank an anonym­ous reviewer for this insight.

116   M. van Wessel

References Chakrabartry, D. (2000) Provincializing Europe: postco­lo­nial thought and his­tor­ical dif­ fer­ence, Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press. Cullity, J. and Younger, P. (2004) ‘Sex appeal and cultural lib­erty: a fem­in­ist inquiry into MTV India’, Frontiers, 25(2): 96–122. Das, V. (2000) ‘The making of modernity: gender and time in Indian cinema’ in T. Mitchell (ed.) Questions of Modernity, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Donner, H. (2006) ‘Committed mothers and well-­adjusted chil­dren: privatisation, early-­ years education and mother­hood in Calcutta middle-­class fam­il­ies’, Modern Asian Studies, 40(2): 339–64. Donner, H. (2008) Domestic Goddesses: maternity, globalization and middle-­class identity in con­tempor­ary India, Aldershot: Ashgate. Deshpande, S. (1994) ‘The crisis in soci­ology: a tired dis­cip­line?’, Economic and Political Weekly, 29(10): 575–6. Fernandes, L. (2006) India’s New Middle Class: demo­cratic pol­itics in an era of eco­ nomic reform, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Fuller, C.J. and Narasimhan, H. (2008). ‘Companionate marriage in India: the changing marriage sys­tem in a middle-­class Brahman subcaste’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 14: 736–54. Giddens, A. (1991) Modernity and Self-­Identity: self and soci­ety in the late modern age, Cam­bridge: Polity Press. Grover, S. (2009) ‘Lived ex­peri­ences: marriage, notions of love, and kinship sup­port among poor women in Delhi’, Contributions to Indian Sociology, 43(1): 1–33. Gupta, D. (2000). Mistaken Modernity: India between worlds, New Delhi: HarperCollins. Harriss, J. (2003) ‘The great tradition globalizes: reflections on two studies of “the industrical leaders” of Madras’, Modern Asian Studies, 37(2): 327–62. Khilnani, S. (2003) The Idea of India, London: Penguin. Liechty, M. (2003) Suitably Modern: making middle-­class culture in a new consumer soci­ety, Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press. Lukose, R (2009) Liberalization’s Children: gender, youth, and consumer cit­izen­ship in globalizing India, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. McDonald, K. (1999) Struggles for Subjectivity: identity, action and youth ex­peri­ence, Cam­bridge: Cam­bridge University Press. Osella, F. and Osella, C. (1999) ‘From transience to imman­ence: consumption, life-­cycle and social mobility in Kerala, South India’, Modern Asian Studies, 33(4): 989–1020. Prakash, G (1999). Another Reason: science and the imagination of modern India, Prince­ ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press. Saldhana, Arun (2002) ‘Music, space, identity. geographies of youth culture in Bangalore’, Cultural Studies, 16(3): 337–50. Shrivastava, S. (2007) Passionate Modernity: sexuality, class, and consumption in India, New Delhi: Routledge. Uberoi, P. (1994) ‘Introduction’ in P. Uberoi (ed.) Family, Kinship and Marriage in India, Delhi: Oxford University Press. van Wessel, M. (2001) Modernity and Identity. an eth­no­graphy of moral ambiguity and nego­ti­ations in an Indian middle class, PhD thesis, University of Amsterdam.

5 Globalization, neoliberalism and middle-­class cultural politics in Kolkata Timothy J. Scrase and Ruchira Ganguly-­Scrase

At the workplace there are growing prob­lems. People have forgotten how to lead a sys­tematic peaceful life. Everywhere there is chaos. All sorts of troubles are everywhere. Prices have sky-­rocketed. Life seems to have become very complicated. People were not like this before. People were different, they were peace-­ loving. But now there is a different sense, a different feeling. I don’t know how to explain this clearly, but . . . it’s a feeling I have that we are going through a great change. (Male, aged 42, technician)

Introduction Since the opening-­up of the Indian eco­nomy in 1991, and the sub­sequent neolib­ eral trans­forma­tion across many sectors of soci­ety, the middle classes have expanded greatly. As a polit­ical bloc, their sup­port is now seen as crucial, as was evid­ent in the rise of the BJP, pro-­liberalization national gov­ern­ment in the 1990s and more recently with the eco­nomic­ally con­ser­vat­ive, Congress alli­ance gov­ern­ment at the Centre led by the architect of neolib­eralization for India when he was Finance Minister in the early 1990s, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. In West Bengal – as elsewhere – the polit­ical as well as ideo­logical sup­port of the urban middle classes had become signi­fic­ant for the Left Front. But all is not well with the middle classes, and par­ticu­larly the not so well-­off, lower middle classes, who are the focus of this chapter.1 As places like Kolkata change, they struggle to protect their erstwhile cultural domination, and try to redress their declining status in the face of increasing disparities within the middle classes, as well as face challenges from the rise of entrepreneurialism and what they refer to as ‘new’ money. This increasingly intensified pro­cess of lower middle-­class cultural and status preser­va­tion, expressed in various ways but never­the­less exemplary of cultural pol­itics, is epitomized in this chapter through a close examination of three fields. First, we will discuss the attempts at the aboli­tion of English as second language taught at the pri­mary school level in West Bengal gov­ern­ment schools, which was implemented by the CPM and resulted in a massive backlash. Second, we ana­lyse the neolib­eral as­sault on the working lives of the lower middle classes and their loss of secur­ity, for example job secur­ity, affordable housing, and university places for their chil­dren. Third, we look into

118   T.J. Scrase and R. Ganguly-Scrase what is con­sidered by our informants a ‘moral’ as­sault on middle-­class sensibilities, like the increasing sexualized repres­enta­tion of women in the media and ad­vert­ising, and the decline of Bengali language skills and local customs. By closely examining the worldviews of these mostly lower middle-­class informants, our chapter highlights the many, and at times nuanced, ways in which neolib­eral reforms and pol­icies are contested and challenged on the ground. We suggest that the hege­mony of the traditional or old middle classes in Bengal is shifting, and that a consumer-­savvy and wealthier new middle class is emerging, so that the estab­lished social structure of urban West Bengal is transformed in the pro­cess. One con­sequence of this trans­forma­tion has been an emergent struggle over highly valued cultural resources, espe­cially education, but also over the cultural pol­itics of the middle classes, expressed by both inter- and intra-­class ten­sions. These are brought about and ex­acer­bated by the decline in long-­ established oppor­tun­ities for upward mobility, and the attendant opening-­up of increasingly commodified, marketized and entrepreneurial pro­spects for aspiring middle-­class residents.

Background The research on the social and cultural impact of globalization on the middle classes de­scribed in this chapter is prin­cipally qualit­at­ive in nature. Intensive and intermittent fieldwork was conducted in Kolkata and Siliguri in North Bengal between 1999 and 2005, with 60 residents were inter­viewed in in each city. Additionally, we returned to the field annually to meet with our 20 key informants to follow-­up with them on their pro­gress and discussed with them signi­fic­ ant personal and familial issues and prob­lems that have emerged more recently. The over­whelm­ing majority (85 per cent) of those we met were employed in the formal or or­gan­ized sector, while only 15 per cent were working in the so-­called informal sector, including some who were self-­employed. Among them were clerks, professionals and gov­ern­ment ser­vants, as well as sales and ser­vice personnel. However, sociological cat­egor­ies to de­scribe class in this con­text only partially explain the predicament and ref­er­ences of our informants. Neo-­Marxist (Wright 1985; Wright et al. 1989) accounts look at the social location of such a mar­ginal middle class, consisting of non-­manual wage earners and low-­grade technicians, and thus caught in a contra­dict­ory class position, somewhere between the proletariat and the petty bourgeoisie. Others have referred to this group as ‘lower white collar classes’2 and we utilize these cat­egor­ies to specify the respondents’ capa­city to enter the market, given that parti­cipa­tion in new employment markets and consumption patterns is a distinctive marker of the emerging middle class formations in Indian cities. Throughout the research, we were par­ticu­larly concerned about docu­menting their consumption and household survival strat­egies as well as their livelihood strat­egies, as most of these households command a very limited budget. However, as complex interlinkages of eco­nomic position, status and caste relations and the dy­namics of polit­ical power con­tinue to reshape the formation of social classes in India, we do not

Globalization, neoliberalism, cultural politics   119 claim that our definitions are completely adequate in analysing class relations across the state. In identi­fying the middle class, we first relied on the self-­ascription of our informants, which was often re­li­ant on the common distinction between a lower middle class and the middle class more gen­erally (see also Liechty 2003). Indeed, many de­scribed themselves in that way in English, although some used the Bengali term nimno moddhobitto (lower middle class) to depict their neigh­ bour­hoods. These cat­egor­ies were invoked where their sur­round­ings and neigh­ bour­hoods were depicted, often in a self-­deprecating way or to signal downward mobility of earl­ier generations. Presenting themselves in direct contrast to the poor, other terms our informants applied to themselves were ‘ordinary folk’, ‘common folk’, or ‘people of limited means’. Inevitably, informants con­sidered their lifestyle as ‘normal’, yet, looking at it from an ana­lyt­ical point of view, within India their households are in fact rel­at­ively privileged. What is distinctive then, is their aware­ness of the in­ternal divisions within the middle class cat­egory, and their constant distancing of themselves from those who would be de­scribed as ‘middle’ middle class, which means largely professionals, and the small, extremely affluent urban elites. In relation to fin­an­cial standing, some inter­ viewees simply de­scribed themselves as ‘those de­pend­ent on a sal­ary’, a very power­ful image in Bengali culture, which suggests a distinction from menial workers and trading com­munit­ies. However, it also serves to disguise the real incomes of those who, like civil ser­vants, supplement their sal­ar­ies by taking bribes and gaining favours through their positions. While during our fieldwork no one claimed that they were poor, despite their lack of mater­ial wealth, many inter­viewees complained about their lack of fin­an­cial freedom. Thus, although these residents of Kolkata and Siliguri are not affluent, their significance as a social group relates to their cultural status. Traditionally, middle-­class lifestyles in Bengal are orientated towards the ideal cat­egory of ‘bhadralok’, a term that refers to the often aristocratic literati drawn from the upper castes of pre-­colonial Bengal, who made their home in the city during the co­lo­nial period and provided the means and input for a flourishing cultural scene. Though the term, as it is used today, is multivalent, it is often applied in the sense of ‘respectable people’, and signifies refined manners and the cultivation of specific tastes and skills, but not neces­sar­ily substantial assets or power. Chatterjee (1997: 11) observes that those who looked up to the bhadralok hoped to achieve upward mobility through refinement and education, and the latter helped this newly emerging middle class in the co­lo­nial period to act in various roles as intermediaries for the British. Many castes and indi­vidual fam­il­ies flourished, but by the end of British rule in 1947, the Bengali middle class had begun to eco­nomic­ally lose out to the traditional North Indian merchants, who had migrated to Kolkata from the Punjab and Rajasthan (Buruma 1986). A number of Bengali trading and business houses also began to flourish from the 1950s, for instance, the Koley family, of Koley Biscuits fame, and the Sur com­pany, specializing in refri­ger­ators and electrical appliances. In the intervening years the middle classes, still adhering to the cultured ideal of a lifestyle that expressed

120   T.J. Scrase and R. Ganguly-Scrase refinement and the value of a university education as the main route to success, have ex­peri­enced some displacement, as eco­nomic standing and with it conspicuous consumption are increasingly becoming the main determinants of status in urban Bengal, and in India more gen­erally. Though liter­at­ure, music and the arts are still pop­ular pastimes among large sections of the Bengali middle classes, education is prob­ably the main inter­est they still share with earl­ier generations.

Middle-­class cultural politics and the contestation over English Neolib­eral eco­nomic reforms in India, together with globalizing pro­cesses, mean that education is espe­cially im­port­ant for skilled, professional jobs in the new eco­nomy, both at home and abroad. Part and parcel of educational success is proficiency in English, and the middle classes are very conscious of its value, as the two informants below attest: English is not only im­port­ant in getting a better job, it is everywhere in social inter­action. If you can’t speak it then you are a nobody. (31-year-­old female clerk) English is an inter­na­tional language. You feel humiliated if you can’t speak English. People think you are dumb. (39-year-­old male accounts officer) Since the days of the British Raj, English has been the language of domination, status and privilege, as well as communication across regional bound­ar­ies in India. The co­lo­nial pro­ject in India needed a class of administrative officers to rule the subcontinent, and the cre­ation of an English-­speaking, formally educated elite was essential. The emergence of such a class with a ‘col­on­ized sub­ject­ivity’ (Viswanthan, 1989) made English the language of both the col­on­izers and the middle class in India. It served to maintain an externally imposed hege­mony while facilitating the perpetuation of caste and class-­based domination.3 Since Independence, English has been introduced as one of the two national languages, and con­tinues to be taught in schools across the coun­try. Here, as in other post-­colonial states, the co­lo­nial language pol­icies and approaches to education have con­tinued and serve the inter­est of those in power (Phillipson 1992; Pennycook 1994). So even after Independence English was taught to Indian middle-­class students who aspired to become civil ser­vants or join the professions, albeit often only as a second language. The divide between those proficient in English and those who were not reproduced broader caste, class and spatial divisions within India. Simply put, the chil­dren of affluent elite and urban upper middle class professional fam­il­ies and the sons and daughters of higher-­up civil ser­vants attended English-­medium schools, whereas the poor, rural popu­la­ tions and business com­munit­ies did not. Lower middle-­class students in some states were schooled in the vernacular but acquired a working know­ledge of

Globalization, neoliberalism, cultural politics   121 English if they went to college. This situ­ation remained rel­at­ively unchanged until the 1980s, when the educational landscape altered with the expansion and opening-­up of the Indian eco­nomy (see also Jeffery et al. 2006). In summing up the shortcomings of the post-­colonial education sys­tem, one 37-year-­old informant wryly noted: The idea that English should be taught from the beginning has become entrenched because the [education] sys­tem was estab­lished by the British. They ruled us. They have left now, but we con­tinue to follow their sys­tem. Not just that, we also con­tinue to maintain the infrastructure, the buildings, prop­erty rules and regulations. It is not just a mat­ter of preserv­ing some his­ tor­ical remnants; we are simply fol­low­ing their path, uncrit­ically. The division of English medium and Bengali medium was a sys­tem created and estab­lished by foreign rule, with a par­ticu­lar purpose. Nowadays education is a business enterprise. I don’t even want to go into the details of getting admission at school or college. At every level money and pol­itics reigns supreme. At least for this person, the prob­lems with education stem from the co­lo­nial sys­ tem, but also from a gen­erally changing attitude to education where a combination of high fees, bribes and polit­ical connections allow entry into elite English-­medium schools and colleges. Since they came to power in 1977, the CPM-­led Left Front gov­ern­ment in West Bengal had initiated a range of reforms in urban industries and the rural sectors (Kohli 1987), and introduced cultural pol­icies par­ticu­larly targeted at making education more access­ible for the poor. The gov­ern­ment tried to overcome the hangover from the co­lo­nial period and address the need to make education more access­ible by introducing broad social justice initiatives such as mass lit­er­acy, polit­ical empowerment, the raising of women’s status and the pro­ vi­sion of health care, sup­ported by a groundbreaking attempt to impose ‘appropriate’ pri­mary and non-­formal education.4 The socialist agenda of the CPM, together with its sup­port among the rural popu­la­tion, formed the basis of its 1981 de­cision to officially abol­ish any tuition in English at the pri­mary level of gov­ ern­ment schooling. English, the gov­ern­ment argued, was seen as inappropriate for the majority of pri­mary school chil­dren, who came from impoverished households with illit­er­ate parents, and were struggling with lit­er­acy and numeracy skills already. Teaching such pupils a second language was deemed a waste of gov­ern­ment resources. But this de­cision was a challenge for lower middle-­ class fam­il­ies, whose chil­dren attended such schools and who recog­nized the ad­vant­ages of English proficiency in a nation that was becoming more inter­na­ tionalized and, signi­fic­antly, for whom English signified rel­at­ively higher social status. Although the experts drew on inter­na­tional studies of second-­language interference to sup­port their argument for the aboli­tion of English teaching, the CPM failed to harness the sup­port of the pub­lic and alienated the middle-­class voters, who demanded the con­tinua­tion of English tuition in state schools. In

122   T.J. Scrase and R. Ganguly-Scrase Kolkata, a loose co­ali­tion of middle-­class parents, teachers and intellectuals stood firm in their opposi­tion to the gov­ern­ment’s newly enacted pol­icy, but in spite of numerous protests, including the withdrawal of chil­dren from such schools, the pol­icy was enacted, although its success was limited. There was also widespread non-­compliance among teachers, most of whom, iron­ically, were CPM party members. Many schools con­tinued to teach English as a second language and the gov­ern­ment simply turned a blind eye (see Scrase 1993: 41–4), as the pol­icy was more an ideo­logical com­mit­ment to social justice and a populist meas­ure than an enforced challenge to existing practices. As one informant observed rather cynically: ‘The gov­ern­ment says, “this is for the people. We are doing this for the people – the ordinary folk”. This is vote-­buying rhet­oric!’. In defending its pol­icy change, the CPM maintained that its new English language pol­icy was for the good of Bengali culture and soci­ety as a whole in that all Bengalis would have the oppor­tun­ity to learn their mother tongue without having to grapple with a second language as well. They also argued that the majority of the popu­la­tion did not have any use for English. But in spite of such debates, the demand for English language tuition has increased not only in West Bengal but in India more gen­erally since the early 1980s.5 This is due to several factors: (i) the privileges of those fluent in English (largely upper and middle class) and their social and polit­ical hege­mony, together with the growing number of middle classes gen­erally; (ii) the cultural role of English proficiency as a status marker – in the case of Bengal between the upper and middle classes and the rest; (iii) the proliferation of English tuition in state schools as well as the mushrooming of spoken English courses and private English-­medium schools; (iv) the spread of English pop­ular culture through the media; and (v) the high demand for English language speakers in even the lower range of white-­collar jobs (see also Donner 2006a). As one of our informants, a 34-year-­old male who works as a gov­ern­ment clerk, bluntly pointed out: ‘you are worth nothing in the job market without good command of English!’. Continued pressure on the gov­ern­ment, espe­cially from the polit­ically influ­en­ tial, urbanized middle and upper classes, forced the CPM to change its pol­icy in 1999 and English language tuition would be formally reintroduced in gov­ern­ment pri­mary schools from class 3 from 2000 onwards. Importantly, eco­nomic lib­ eralization and globalization were two of the main reasons cited for this reversal of the earl­ier pol­icy. In the words of the government’s policy review committee: ‘the opening-­up of the coun­try’s eco­nomy to foreign multi-­national and trans-­national corporations as a precon­dition for eco­nomic lib­eralization, has also con­trib­uted to the high profile of English which it enjoys’ (Sarkar Report 1998: 35). Furthermore, the Report (1998: 21) notes that ‘due to eco­nomic globalization and the expanding opera­tions of the trans­national corporations, as with the faster speed of tech­no­logy trans­fer, the role of “business English” has received a boost’. In this con­text one informant, a female bank teller in her forties with two chil­dren, emphas­ized the im­port­ance of both spoken and written English, and the view that English can open doors in terms of higher education placements and jobs abroad. Importantly, she recog­nizes that chil­dren should learn English from an early age:

Globalization, neoliberalism, cultural politics   123 It is im­port­ant to know English. We know how to read and write, but are not very adept at speaking. So it is crucial that chil­dren learn it at an early age. I will teach them Bengali at home, but they must learn English at school. It is quite apparent that there are so many good students in West Bengal. However, when they compete on an All-­India basis for jobs, they miss out because this [their English] is not good. They have good credentials, good grades. When they go to inter­views, their spoken English is really poor, so they do not get the jobs. Both my chil­dren are in English-­medium schools. I want my chil­dren to study abroad. We never had many oppor­tun­ities. My daughter is very inter­ested in com­puters. If she wants to go abroad, she should be prepared for it. We are educating her that way. We are doing our utmost. In acknowledging the influence of cultural globalization, the Sarkar Committee also admitted that they had to give in to the demands and as­pira­tions of a growing, largely urbanized lower middle-­class clientele, with power­ful middle-­ class sensibilities ‘fed, fostered and often swayed by the dream-­peddling fares and advertisements of the print and electronic media’ (1998: 33). Crucially, when we asked our informants: ‘Should English be taught at the pri­mary level?’, 93 per cent answered in the affirmative. In her assessment of the pol­icy, and its ultimate failure, Damayanti Datta (1998) pointed to the inconsistencies and misreading of the cultural his­tory of Bengal which led the gov­ern­ment to abol­ish the teaching of English in the first place. She argues that from the nine­teenth century, English strengthened the Bengali language rather than di­min­ished it. Moreover, the argument that teaching English at pri­mary school level interferes with lit­er­acy in the mother tongue does not hold when in 1991 11 states (including Kerala) with higher lit­er­acy levels than West Bengal taught English from very early on.6 She concludes: History tells us that English forms an inali­en­able element in the consti­tu­tion of the pub­lic sphere of modern Bengal. That the Bengalis could manage to reap profit out of English under co­lo­nialism and still gloriously de­velop their own mother tongue for two centuries shows that it is futile to pose English as the ‘great enemy of the people’. To break the idioms of provincialism and connect to the globalized world order the Bengalis are once again ready to enter another round of negotiated transaction. (Datta 1998: 12) The debate around English education for very young chil­dren highlights the way in which gov­ern­ment pol­icy was ultimately shaped by the highly motiv­ated, educated and polit­ically or­gan­ized Bengali middle class. In a globalized, post-­ colonial world, the ideo­lo­gies of preserv­ing tradition at all costs are challenged. Instead, even the more traditional sections of the Bengali middle class are pragmatic in their pref­er­ences where education is concerned and many turn their backs towards tuition in and of Bengali more gen­erally in view of the oppor­tun­ities

124   T.J. Scrase and R. Ganguly-Scrase Table 5.1  Importance of English (n = 110) Reason Global language National language Success – employment Success – education Access and communication Begin late primary – too late Combination of above Total

Per cent 5 12 16 12 5 7 43 100

offered in a globalizing eco­nomy. But the pol­itics of English in India also raise several theor­et­ical issues with regards to middle-­class cultural politics. When we questioned informants as to why they thought English was im­port­ ant, a range of responses emerged. As Table 5.1 indicates, while it was seen as im­port­ant for education and employment, the majority (45 per cent) pointed to a combination of reasons, including English being a national and global language, and the way it allowed access to global media and communication. In examining whether eco­nomic lib­eralization has offered oppor­tun­ities for a better lifestyle, one informant provided a telling response: ‘Only a handful have gained from this so-­called eco­nomic lib­eralization. It is not madhybittya chaposha (ordinary middle-­class people) like us who have gained, but those who are a level higher than us; it is they who have bene­fited’ (emphasis added). Here we see evid­ ence of both a relativization of class position and an inversion of their superior eco­nomic place. As Bourdieu (1987) de­scribed, the most profound cultural struggles take place between those who hold the most eco­nomic capital (the dominant fraction of the dominant class) and those who hold the most cultural capital (the dominated fraction within this class). The fear of loss for our informants, induced by neolib­eral pol­icies and dramatic change, is all-­pervasive. In comparison with the vast majority of rural Indians and urban poor, there is a sense of both eco­nomic and cultural decline felt across large sectors of the lower middle classes in Bengal and other urban con­texts. For the remaining Bengali middle classes, it is the maintenance of cultural resources (at least in theory) – formal education and English – estab­lished and handed down to them by the British that appears to be essential to reproduce their social position. For instance, one older informant feels that he has bene­fited greatly from the pol­icies of the CPM. Significantly, he points to the role of cultural capital (educated parents, home sup­port, etc.), rather than the mere fact that English is taught, in fostering educational success: We had English in our curriculum. Then it was removed. Did we learn good English when it was compulsory? Ninety percent of my colleagues cannot speak English, even though it was compulsory in their schooling. People learned good English because of their family envir­on­ment, because of the

Globalization, neoliberalism, cultural politics   125 additional sup­port they received, not because it was taught at school. You look at our Professors, their chil­dren speak English because they themselves know English. Espe­cially the mothers introducing [their chil­dren to] English [at home] at pri­mary level. For the average person, it will not bene­fit them in any way. In fact, it will just foster a sense of failure. Lots of chil­dren are scared of maths for the same reason. Their parents cannot help them. So they get stuck. Education should not create a sense of failure. In the old days there were the exceptional students who managed to succeed in English despite not having the sup­portive envir­on­ment. I think that will con­tinue to happen. Those who are exceptionally bright, they will con­tinue to excel. However, as for mass education, there is no place for English. While globalization is in many ways rendering them eco­nomic­ally mar­ginal in comparison with the new entre­pren­eurs and the more cosmo­pol­itan upper middle classes, the lower middle classes, conversely, can maintain their rel­at­ively higher-­status positions through a range of new oppor­tun­ities offered by globalization, espe­cially the increased demand for English language proficiency. On the whole, we found among the young people we inter­viewed a sense of lost oppor­tun­ities, or failure, as they were the generation that was greatly impacted by the CPM de­cision to abol­ish the teaching of English. This is espe­cially the case for less well-­off fam­il­ies who sent their chil­dren to state schools and could not afford private tutors. One par­ticu­lar young woman, an under-­employed school leaver working as an assistant in a telephone booth, sees herself as a vic­tim of the pol­icy that abol­ished the teaching of English at the pri­mary level. She feels that she has been dis­advant­aged as she cannot converse in English: We are so weak in English. People all around us don’t have a grasp of the English language. In my view, if English was introduced from the start it would have been very bene­fi­cial. To get a firm grounding in English you have to start right at the beginning. You don’t teach the alphabet at class 6! Our generation didn’t get this, but the next generation when they learn English from the beginning, they will be better off. English is very im­port­ ant in the world of work. For her, it is the MTV hosts and the cool and soph­istic­ated ‘Hinglish’-speaking generation stereo­typed in numerous advertisements, fashion maga­zines and Bollywood pub­licity that she comes to admire and respect; her ali­ena­tion from an education sys­tem that privileged the more wealthy middle classes, who could afford private English coaching and other extra tuition, is ensured.

The workplace as a political and cultural battleground In this section we focus on workplaces, par­ticu­larly since white-­collar em­ployees have faced the brunt of pol­icies and programmes designed to reform dysfunctional and underperforming pub­lic sector offices and enterprises. The

126   T.J. Scrase and R. Ganguly-Scrase majority of our informants are loyal state em­ployees, but many never­the­less saw, and rationalized, the need for workplace reform. But they were at the same time often quick to defend the state, espe­cially as it was in their long-­term inter­est to retain their rel­at­ively secure state job with its ranges of bene­fits and allow­ances and generous pension on retirement. Our informants’ pos­it­ive appraisals of the state/gov­ern­ment stand in marked contrast to the (neolib­eral) arguments that characterize the de­velop­mental state as oppressive. Conceptions such as the idea of working for profit, or of gov­ ern­ment enterprises being ‘prof­it­able’, are ana­thema to many of our informants, who see gov­ern­ment ser­vice as a pub­lic duty and a right. Their identities are tied up with working in the pub­lic sector, and parents con­tinu­ally reinforce the im­port­ance of the pub­lic sector in communication with their chil­dren. In these conversations the ‘objectivity’ and ‘open-­minded’ nature of workplaces in the pub­lic sector are contrasted with the alleged personal whims of employers in private enterprises. From the per­spect­ive of low-­ranking clerical em­ployees, personal vendettas of owners and managers in private enterprise are a key concern, while they put forward a meritocratic view of such relationships in the pub­lic sector, as these typical remarks from a range of respondents show: In a gov­ern­ment organ­iza­tion there are uni­ver­sal rules and regulations that apply to everybody. In a private organ­iza­tion you are under the constant surveillance of the owner. If you make a mis­take in a gov­ern­ment organ­iza­tion, the officers are impartial. They will examine the situ­ation and will judge accordingly. They will not have a personal vendetta against you because you made a mis­take. Nor will they do you special favours because you happen to be in their good books. (Male, 31, clerk, state university) Some one is always looking over your shoulder. I suppose we are relieved of that kind of author­it­arian outlook in a semi-­government and a cooperative set up. (Female, 48, purchasing assistant, textile cooperative) In private organ­iza­tions you can sack an employee according to the proprietor’s whim. It may have nothing to do with the performance of the employee. In gov­ern­ment jobs unless you have done anything illegal, you cannot be got rid of like that. (Female, 51, lower division clerk, Reserve Bank of India) They overwork you in a private firm according to their whim. In gov­ern­ ment ser­vice you get promoted according to merit. In private enterprise, if they like you, they’ll promote you. If they don’t, you are stuck. (Male, 34, library clerk)

Globalization, neoliberalism, cultural politics   127 Essentially, in gov­ern­ment ser­vice jobs one is protected by various rules and regulations which provide some kind of back-­up, espe­cially for those in weaker positions, and also unions are strongly repres­ented, providing a further degree of sup­port to workers when their jobs and con­ditions are being threatened. Optimistic about lib­eralization, a number of formal private sector workers feel that the ethos of hard work and efficiency associated with the private sector should become part of gov­ern­ment ser­vice ethics as well. Under neolib­eral hege­ mony, pos­it­ive appraisals of private enterprise for its dynamism, initiative and offers of incentives have captured the imagination of the wider com­mun­ity and have come to dominate pub­lic opinion. Within this con­text, em­ployees in the private sector are extolled for the virtues of punctuality, diligence, dedication and enthusiasm. The pub­lic sector is portrayed as its oppos­ite: bur­eau­cratic and unproductive, its workers lethargic. Among our respondents, ad­voc­ates of private sector efficiency included workers from large private corporations, private school teachers and a small number of highly quali­fied civil ser­vants, and young people in gen­eral. Typically, negat­ive views about the work morale among gov­ern­ment ser­vants were expressed most forcefully among our upper middle-­class informants, who had never worked in the pub­lic sector. The fol­low­ ing case of a single woman in her mid-­thirties most vividly illus­trates some of the stereotypical ideas. This young woman, Tulika, currently works as a freelance administrator and pro­ject worker in the private sector, and occasionally for NGOs. Her average estim­ated annual income is Rs60,000, of which she sets aside Rs5,000 per month. The family income is over Rs30,000 per month, which is well above the average income of our respondents. However, we have included a lengthy account of her views because it is illustrative of the views of households whose incomes have risen and who typify the middle-­class sup­porters of lib­eralization that the media promotes. This family’s fortunes have indeed improved, but their con­dition was far from comfortable in the past. Fifteen years ago, when Tulika was in her early twenties, the family faced a crisis when Tulika’s father and his elder brother died unexpectedly. Being the eldest child, Tulika had to find employment and her ex­peri­ence of looking for a job and working in the private sector colours her views of pub­lic sector workers: Question:  Response: 

So, what did you do? Was there any chance of a gov­ern­ment job? Never! I was going to sit for the West Bengal [gov­ern­ment ser­vice] entrance examination. But then . . . well, I looked at the gov­ern­ment offices. They are filthy; dirty files everywhere; filthy walls, betel nut spit-­stain[s] on the walls. Horrible! It is the oppos­ite in a private firm. Clean offices, nice neat reception area. People are polite. No, I’ve never been inter­ested in getting a gov­ern­ment job. Q:  Do you still feel the same way? R:  Most definitely! You go and stand there and no one even asks you to take a seat. It is like they are doing you a favour. It is their job to help the pub­lic – aren’t they pub­lic servants?

128   T.J. Scrase and R. Ganguly-Scrase Q: 

What about your friends and other family members? Do they have a different opinion about gov­ern­ment employment? R:  Most of my friends are in the private sector, in the corporate sector, in news­ papers. In their opinion privatization is a good thing. In this coun­try people don’t work in the pub­lic sector; there is a lack of a work culture. What a strange thing! I mean you draw a sal­ary and you don’t want to work? Every day there is this meeting, that rally. Hopeless. Q:  Do you know many people that go to protest rallies? Would you say this would be a majority of workers? R:  Er . . . yes, only a minor­ity . . . Q:  How do you think privatization has affected the rest? Most of the popu­la­tion doesn’t work in the pub­lic sector. R:  How do you mean, the rest? Q:  I mean those people who don’t have a regu­lar sal­ary, like, you know, the entire informal sector. R:  Yes, some people work in casual jobs, part-­time jobs. They work until 6 in the evening. And then from 6 onwards, they might have another job. Yeah, it’s like that. Q:  Do you feel we tend to get upset when we see gov­ern­ment workers taking it easy? Maybe they got jobs at a time when you could get a gov­ern­ment job. Do you ever see anything like that in the private sector? R:  No, no. Inefficient people just won’t be able to get in. A person might be inter­viewed several times. There will be an IQ test. I’ve seen this with my own eyes. Forget English or shorthand or keyboarding skills. That is just taken for granted. Then you will have your inter­view. The panel will be very fussy, very select­ive about whom they get. In gov­ern­ment ser­vice you sit for the PSC or WBCS. That’s it. I am not talking about high-­ranking posts, just ordinary jobs. After you are selected, there is no accountability. Even the more re­ti­cent and self-­reflective respondents among the private sector em­ployees were highly crit­ical of the work ethics found in the pub­lic sector. For example, a senior technical assistant, aged in his mid-­thirties, stated that as a devout Chris­tian, he would find it hard to re­con­cile his work ethic with the attitude found among gov­ern­ment employees: [T]he indis­cip­line that you find among gov­ern­ment em­ployees is completely ab­sent in our workplace. Whenever I have had to deal with workers in gov­ ern­ment de­part­ments, whenever I’ve had to go to a gov­ern­ment office, I have observed that they are always fanki marche (bunking off ). This tend­ ency is highly pre­val­ent among them. We cannot ima­gine that kind of beha­ vi­our here. To be here for nine hours and doing nothing is unthinkable. They are doing this day after day. We cannot even sit around for one minute. When asked whether he believes this to be true of all gov­ern­ment organ­iza­tions, he replied, ‘No, nat­urally not. But there are some offices [that do] not have any work

Globalization, neoliberalism, cultural politics   129 culture what­so­ever.’ And senior state em­ployees raised sim­ilar criticisms re­gard­ing their own colleagues. For example, a technical officer in the pub­lic sector, in his early forties, said that ‘the biggest prob­lem with gov­ern­ment employment is the oppor­tun­ity for slacking off. You can’t do that in private enterprise!’ The contra­dict­ory sentiments of those employed in the private sector, who on the one hand need to work harder and immerse themselves in their job, but on the other hand do not gain much secur­ity, were ever-­present in our inter­views. For example, a clerk in a small accounting firm stated: I don’t notice any such ad­vant­age. Rather, I feel that a gov­ern­ment organ­ iza­tion is better that way; it offers more secur­ity, more bene­fits than private organ­iza­tions. However, may be there are bene­fits for people who hold very high positions. For us, there are none (ori­ginal emphasis). In this, and in others’ comments, lib­eralization is seen as bene­fiting business proprietors, entre­pren­eurs, professions and those engaged in the IT-­related industries (com­puter sales, marketing and management, etc.). It is im­port­ant to emphas­ize the enorm­ous sea-­change that has rapidly transformed the world of work in neolib­ eral India over the past two decades, underpinned by an emergent ideo­logy of indi­ vidualistic, monetary success coupled with per­vas­ive marketing. Consider just a few of these funda­mental changes: the opening up of the eco­nomy to global com­ peti­tion coupled with massive trade reforms; com­petit­ive tendering pro­cesses for gov­ern­ment contracts; micro-­credit ‘success’ stories; pub­lic–private part­ner­ships; the growing respect for capitalist entrepreneurialism; ‘Brand India’; the communications revolu­tion; the 20/20 cricket phenomenon; and the hosting of the Commonwealth Games in New Delhi in 2010. All these trends are, to a greater or lesser degree, framed by dominant ideo­lo­gies of a ‘can do’ attitude, an improvement in the work ethic, improved productivity, and the ambition to succeed; whether or not these are actu­ally realized remains highly contested. Liberalization pre­sup­poses an indi­vidualistic, entrepreneurial spirit which, in comparison with other states, is still largely contested among em­ployees in West Bengal. Many of our lower middle-­class informants extolled the virtues of col­ lect­ive action and unionization, and in­ter­preted the gov­ern­ment’s attempts to implement changes in the workplace as a means by which to under­mine workers’ rights and remove their secur­ity, rights fought for and won over several decades. On one level, the par­ticu­lar worldviews and lived ex­peri­ences of the lower middle class show an anti­pathy toward lib­eralization and globalization and yet, on another, they express a desire for India, and Indians, to move forward and compete in an increasingly globalized, cosmo­pol­itan world.

Globalizing media and its impact on culture To address the way these ambiguities are expressed, we will briefly examine the impact of what is perceived as a global television culture on the middle-­class identities we examine here. Two charac­ter­istics of the reactions to television and

130   T.J. Scrase and R. Ganguly-Scrase the wider media culture are espe­cially revealing: the nature of the localized, Bengali responses; and the more uni­ver­sal, middle-­class ‘moral’ concerns being expressed. One of the negat­ive influences of cable is the excessive desire for consumer goods, compared to our time. Young people today are more career-­minded, but not neces­sar­ily as a result of cable. In the past our chaibar aasha (capa­ city to desire), our needs, were limited and we asked for very little and our eagerness for wanting things was restricted. Now even 10–12-year-­olds constantly want this and that. Their eagerness to want things is immense. (Female, 51) Cable TV has gen­er­ated not only consumer desire, but also an increasing concern for the sexualization of women, par­ticu­larly through their sexualized portrayal in advertisements, beauty contests and certain pop­ular films and TV serials (see also Oza 2006). Although many of our informants were crit­ical of television and advertisements, as they promoted frivolous spending through their emphasis on consumer choice, an over­whelm­ing majority welcomed the opening-­up of electronic media and the advent of cable and satellite TV. While crit­ical of ‘culturally inappropriate’ foreign influences, these informants em­braced what they de­scribed as the ‘free flow of in­forma­tion’ with the demise of pre-­1990s state-­ run television, which was seen as poorly produced and boring. However, despite its entertainment value, television is seen as a morally prob­lematic medium in terms of the portrayal of women, a sentiment expressed by both male and female informants belonging to different generations. Television, it seems to many informants, like this 42-year-­old Bengali man, had a direct influence on gender relations and the family: Some women have begun to wear very revealing clothes as a result of seeing these [sexualized] images on TV. Clothing which is unsuit­able and would be unima­gin­able in a Bengali middle-­class family. There are some women who wear these types of clothing, like wearing jeans and a T-­shirt in a very revealing way. You feel embarrassed even when you pass these women in the street. Others, like this 30-year-­old Bengali woman, were more pos­it­ive about soap operas and family dramas on cable television: Previously if they [men] wanted to tell a woman something they weren’t able to, either sexually or emotionally. Now they don’t hold back. Women are more open as well; now they know every­thing . . . Because of cable TV we have been able to open-­up a lot more. The gen­eral response of our informants indicates that a sense of moral anxiety pervades their consciousness, which can be linked to their socio-­cultural

Globalization, neoliberalism, cultural politics   131 background. Many informants were unhappy with the portrayal of gender relations and women on television, but the reasons for this criticism differed. A young woman observed that: Sometimes they show women in the kind of clothing I don’t really like. I mean, I think, how can women demean themselves like this? It is beyond my comprehension. These portrayals are quite shameful for women. Viewers also criticized the commodification of women’s bodies, and contended that the way women are portrayed on television was shameful and degrading to all Indian women. A 48-year-­old woman complained of the way advertisements simply used women’s bodies and sexuality to sell products: In many items advertised there is no connection between the product and the woman. Why do you need a woman if you are selling Dulal Biris [a type of cigarette]? The same goes for shampoo advertisements. Is there a need to show a woman walking around in jeans? This can be shown in a much more aesthetic way. But as in the quote above, views on the impact television has had on gender relations were also pos­it­ive, espe­cially where younger women were concerned. Thus, one of the women stated that the portrayal of women’s roles on television had helped to bring them out of the home: Women have come forward a lot in terms of cultural and eco­nomic advancement. They are a lot more inde­pend­ent and self-­reliant. They try their very best to be inde­pend­ent by taking up tutoring jobs, etc. You wouldn’t have gen­erally seen this sort of effort before. But this is nothing to do with the influence of television. Undoubtedly in terms of education and culture, things have become better for girls. Interestingly, two inter­viewees pointed to the potential for women to question their social situ­ation and social standing and felt that television could play a pos­it­ive role in terms of advancing women’s social position. For example, some serials and soap operas were praised for the pos­it­ive role models portrayed – professional, educated woman who can make inde­pend­ent choices. Moreover, some also made the observation that these types of programmes can lead to oppressed or dominated women questioning their marriage, their role as housewife and mother, or the gen­eral family and household dy­namics (see also Das 1995). Despite this op­tim­ism, Chakravarti (2000: WS-­15) makes the point that, in certain soap operas, the televised portrayal of family ten­sions and relationships between husband and wife are ‘carefully crafted and deployed in highly controlled statements; her little struggles serve to merely provide a catharsis for herself and her female viewers rather than upturn the sys­tem in any way’.

132   T.J. Scrase and R. Ganguly-Scrase On the whole, informants were not very crit­ical of the actual nature of gender relations portrayed in advertisements and serials. These are more often than not carefully repackaged in advertisements and traditional power relations between men and women are reformulated (Chakravarti 2000). But the respondents did criticize the aesthetics of repres­enta­tion. In the view of our informants, it seems that eco­nomic lib­eralization has reinforced rather than challenged stereotypical repres­enta­tions of gender on television, and while subtle shifts in the way women’s roles are repres­ented can be traced, the under­lying ‘message’ of obedience and adherence to one’s ‘nat­ural role’ as wife and mother remains crucial. As Rajagopal (1999: 91) explains, in the con­text of television advertisements: The wife is now an outgoing, aggressive bargainer who is nonetheless a devoted mother and full-­time housewife; or the daughter-­in-law now outsmarts her mother-­in-law in her know­ledge of detergents but is prim­arily concerned with getting her husband’s shirts clean. While older power relations – keeping the woman in the home, or subordinate to her mother-­inlaw, are superseded, they are replaced by new relations emphasising the salience of pat­ri­archal nuclear family obli­ga­tions over those of the extended family or community. Similarly, Munshi (1998) argues that fem­in­ist struggle is subverted by the market­place, consumerism and the media so that a woman’s struggle remains ‘posited within traditional structures of pat­ri­archal hege­mony and does not become a disruptive force from without’ (Munshi 1998: 573, ori­ginal emphasis). Henrike Donner’s (2006b) work too is revealing, in that she uncovers the subtle ways Bengali women are ‘controlled’ within the urban spaces of Kolkata. Thus, class and cultural distinctions are reproduced and couched in the largely moralistic tone of ‘respectabil­ity’ and the ‘proper role and beha­vi­our’ of women, espe­ cially where the Bengali middle class is concerned. Apart from gender relations, the question of ‘Bengaliness’ also played a major role in our discussions with informants, even though many of their concerns around media and repres­enta­tion are sim­ilar to those reported in case studies of non-­Bengali con­texts (see for instance Oza 2006). The anxiety sur­ round­ing the theme of cultural change is expressed in the fol­low­ing statement: There are lots of advertisements in the media which try to entice us to change our Bengaliness. Even if we don’t want to, we are being tempted. Some people try to remain conventional, trying to preserve their indi­vidual Bengaliness and others want to be advanced or modern. (23-year-­old Bengali male) For this younger person, Bengaliness is – prob­ably unintentionally – associated with ‘backwardness’ and in the light of a funda­mental dichotomy between tradition and modernity, Bengaliness is repres­ented as an essentialized identity. The question that many of our interlocutors raised in this con­text is ‘Can one be tradi­tion­ally

Globalization, neoliberalism, cultural politics   133 Bengali and middle class, and yet be a modern cit­izen?’ The nar­rat­ives of informants reveal that funda­mental ten­sions between the maintenance of their cultural identities – seen as stable and based on traditional notions of ‘Bengaliness’, gender roles and age-­based authority on the one hand and the challenges that the new era brought, depicted in terms of consumerist, Western and non-­Bengali images and practices, introduced into their lives through television, on the other. Despite a rich diversity in Bengali programming and the vitality of visual media in Bengal, informants’ comments on the ‘foreign’ nature of programmes on cable and satellite television are instructive. For instance, one woman commented: Hindi programmes have come to dominate us. The use of Bengali has gone down. If you look at the sign boards you see more of English and Hindi. In some places people have tried to wipe it of and have written over in Bengali . . . They force you to show Hindi films as if Hindi is our language. There have been some dubbing in Bengali on TV, on some of the pop­ular programmes. Even they have been cut back. So Hindi continues. Some respondents expressed their concern that the images of lifestyles portrayed would potentially threaten Bengali culture, espe­cially its language. One woman argued: Every culture has its own way of thinking, their own morals, dhan-­dharna (cultural values/ways of thinking), their own unique ways. These are being destroyed. Those values about which we prided ourselves are under threat . . . There are many good cultural values of the West from which we can learn. If we can adopt the pos­it­ive aspects, then it is good. However, we seem to only copy the negat­ive ones. We seem to be more attracted to them. Despite those who regarded non-­Bengali influences as detrimental in some way, the majority of older informants never­the­less pointed out the resilience of Bengali culture which is able to withstand the negat­ive influences. This is exemplified in the fol­low­ing comment: The Western influence is not that great on our culture that we cannot counteract it. We have a culture that is very deep-­rooted, espe­cially in Bengal . . . We are not really that influenced by the Western media, but I have noticed that outside Bengal, espe­cially Delhi and Bombay, its influence is quite big. Maybe their culture is not as de­veloped or strong as ours, so they do not care much . . . Their own culture is quite weak. Similar to us, in the South, they are very proud of their identity and they do not want to imitate the West. The discreet ref­er­ence to the more ‘pure’ cultures of Southern India compares favourably with the cultures of the North and West, ‘tainted’ as they are by ‘foreign’ or outside influences by a succession of Muslim and Western ‘invasions’. In contrast, the cultures of the South are perceived to still en­com­pass the

134   T.J. Scrase and R. Ganguly-Scrase values and culture of ‘traditional’ Hindu India. Additionally, accounts such as these reveal the fragility of notions of a ‘national culture’, put forward by many analysts of the middle class in India (i.e. Rajagopal 1999; Oza 2006). As Barker rightly remarks, ‘Any given national culture is understood and acted upon by different social groups in divergent ways, thus gov­ern­ments, ethnic groups, classes and genders may perceive it differently’ (Barker 1999: 68). One middle-­aged female informant clearly thought that chil­dren and young people were vulner­able to television repres­enta­tions of consumption, viol­ence and immoral sexualities (apasanskriti).7 This comes out clearly in the fol­low­ing exchange: Interviewer: 

What sort of impact do you think foreign/Western programmes are having on Bengali culture? Response:  If you watch the serials then you’ll find a lot of influences. The way we behave, the clothes, the fashion, even the way young people talk. They are influenced by the Bombay channels, the cable channels. Interviewer:  Do you think some of these foreign programmes should be restricted or censored? Response:  These are satellite channels so there are child lock devices. But there should be some mech­an­isms (sic. control) on apasanskriti also. In summary, the youths who were inter­viewed, apart from their concern with the frequently sexualized images of young women in advertisements, were other­ wise not so concerned about the influences of television on the morality and Bengaliness of the local popu­la­tion. In most instances, young inter­viewees, as opposed to their parents and grandparents, had a more or less ‘don’t care’ attitude and felt they could live what they perceived as ‘cultural’ changes.

Conclusion In the con­text of neolib­eral India, are the anxi­eties, conflicts and contra­dic­tions we have de­scribed neces­sar­ily unique? In van Wessel’s (2004) ana­lysis of the middle class of Baroda and their attitudes toward consumption, she found that: members of the middle class in Baroda define middle class identity in terms of moral and cultural superi­or­ity of in relation to higher and lower classes . . . Ideas about the moral qual­it­ies of consumption, ideals of the merits of ab­stin­ ence from mater­ial culture and of family solid­arity are thus drawn from col­ lect­ively held notions about those topics, but only to construct and sustain indi­vidual identities, not larger entities like the middle class or the nation. (2004: 112) Similar ‘culturalized’ middle class divisions and fractions are found in other regions of India, and in other nuanced con­texts in South Asia (see Liechty 2003). Thus, in responding to the oppor­tun­ities but also the lim­ita­tions of globalization

Globalization, neoliberalism, cultural politics   135 in India, distinctive regionalized, localized and culturalized resistances have emerged. In their wide-­ranging book Cultural Politics, Jordan and Weedon outline the range and scope of issues and themes sur­round­ing the concept of ‘cultural pol­itics’ (1995: 3–22). Framed in terms of an ac­know­ledgement of the persistence of class, race and gender in­equal­it­ies, cultural pol­itics views ‘culture’ as both a contested cat­egory and a space involving power at several levels – indi­ vidual, social, and institutional – which invites us to broaden our understanding of the ways that meanings, subjectivities and cultures remain contested and challenged. The discussion that Jordan and Weedon present essentially de­scribes how privileged indi­viduals and groups suppress mar­ginal cultures and how, in the cultural and social cracks and spaces that appear, various mar­ginalized groups and indi­viduals are able to under­mine the dominant structures. The question we can ask at this point is: ‘But who, exactly, is mar­ginalized?’ As we have shown, the lower middle classes in Bengal, despite having access to ob­ject­ively higher incomes, perceive themselves as vic­tims of globalization, and as a mar­ ginalized segment of the wider com­mun­ity in Kolkata. Their own view of the ongoing cultural struggles is shaped by their ex­peri­ence of new eco­nomic pressures, di­min­ished job secur­ity and different employment options, which feed into increasing moral concerns over the cultural fabric of Bengal (and India). Thus, in this chapter we have mapped out what it means to be middle class and Bengali in Kolkata today in terms of crucial, yet often subtle, markers of middle-­ class distinction as they are emerging in the globalized social trans­forma­tion of Indian soci­ety. While the data collected focus on the Bengali middle-­class con­text, the pro­cesses and the resulting trans­forma­tions highlighted match with sentiments expressed by informants in other con­texts (see Oza 2006; van Wessel and Wilson in this volume), and do in this sense represent a way of being that is shared among middle-­class Indians more gen­erally. All across the nation, the distinctions between the elderly and young are evid­ent in terms of attitudes to these changes, with the younger generation more or less resigned to the impact of lib­eralization, and many acknowledging the new oppor­tun­ities (work, media and entertainment) avail­able to them. More senior informants, on the other hand, are more scep­tical, and a sense of un­cer­tainty that per­meates their lives is much more per­vas­ive. It is the older generation in Kolkata, those who bene­fited most from the inherited privileges the co­lo­ nial period had created and the expansion of the gov­ern­ment sector, who are crit­ical of lib­eralization and the trans­forma­tions that the new eco­nomic regime has brought to the workplace and the pub­lic sphere. It seems that these informants feel forced to believe in the sys­tem because it may bene­fit their chil­dren, but have no hope of enhancing their own situ­ation as they have to bear the costs. Significantly, among lower middle-­class informants in Kolkata, the arguments against the reforms are couched in cultural/moral terms, be that in relation to English dominance, which privileges the cultural capital of the wealthier middle classes who converse readily in English at home and can afford private tuition); to changes in workplaces, whereby the new workplace ideo­lo­gies are seen as an attack on the culture of workplace camaraderie and coopera­tion; or to the increasing sexualized images of the televised media, which are distasteful in the con­text

136   T.J. Scrase and R. Ganguly-Scrase of a reserved and respectful attitude towards the ‘Bengali/Indian woman/mother’. Culture appears here as the signifier for wider losses, among a generation that enjoyed the privileges of secure employment, pensions and educational oppor­tun­ ities, all of which were perceived as ‘rights’ of the educated middle classes. Since lib­eralization has kicked in, their hege­monic control over education and gov­ern­ ment pol­icy is challenged by an emergent entrepreneurial class with very different cultural ideals and practices. Thus, struggles over the reintroduction of English teaching at the pri­mary level, or the rhet­oric of reforms in the pub­lic sector, serve also as a way to discuss and negotiate this loss of hege­mony which was earl­ier couched in terms of Bengali middle-­class tradition and identity.

Notes 1 The impact of globalization, coupled with neolib­eral eco­nomic reforms, has affected many areas of social life (education, work and employment, gender relations, culture and media, consumption). We discuss these at length in Ganguly-­Scrase and Scrase 2009. This research was undertaken during the period of Left Front rule in West Bengal which ended in May 2011. 2 In the neo-­Weberian stratification model de­veloped by Goldthorpe and Hope (1974) fol­low­ing the sevenfold schema (seven scales), this group forms part of Class II (lower professionals; technicians; lower administrators; small business managers; super­visors of non-­manual workers) and Class III (clerks; sales personnel). 3 The rise and place of English in India has been discussed in several key writings (see: Kachru 1983; Viswanathan 1989; Trivedi 1995; Mishra 2000). 4 In this con­text their educational approach, at least for the vast rural masses and urban poor, in many ways re­sembles the ana­lysis and prescription for ‘demo­cratic’ education (or concientization) outlined by the Brazilian edu­cator Paolo Freire in his influ­en­tial book Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1972). 5 Driven largely by eco­nomic and cultural globalization, the rising demand for English language tuition is evid­ent in a range of coun­tries and regions from Malaysia (Mandal, 2000) and Sri Lanka (Punchi, 2001) to the Nordic region (Brock-­Utne, 2001) and Africa (Bgoya, 2001). See also several other art­icles on the theme of ‘Globalization, language and education’ in the 2001 special issue of International Review of Education (UNESCO), 47(3–4). 6 This observation concurs with a range of inter­na­tional research findings. For instance, Smolicz and Nical (1999) dem­on­strate that Filipinos, for example, can be lit­er­ate in their first language and still be fluent in English. 7 Translated, apa-­sanskriti is a complex term which essentially refers to ‘crass’ forms of pop­ular culture, or undesir­able mass culture. Mass culture is held in great disdain, an outlook which stems from the perception of the debased nature of mass culture. Their view mirrors in certain ways the Frankfurt School’s thesis of the culture industry and its critique of the rise and negat­ive cultural impact of pop­ular and mass culture from the 1930s (see, for example, Adorno, 1991).

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Globalization, neoliberalism, cultural politics   137 Bgoya, W. (2001) ‘The effect of globalisation in Africa and the choice of language in publishing’, International Review of Education, 47(3–4): 283–92. Bourdieu, P. (1987) ‘What makes a social class? On the theor­et­ical and prac­tical exist­ ence of groups’, Berkeley Journal of Sociology, 32: 1–17. Brock-­Utne, B. (2001) ‘The growth of English for aca­demic communication in in the Nordic coun­tries’, International Review of Education, 47(3–4): 221–33. Buruma, I. (1986) ‘A tale of two Bengals’, Far Eastern Economic Review, 3 April: 70. Chakravarti, U. (2000) ‘State, market and freedom: women and electronic media’, Economic and Political Weekly, XXXV(18): WS-­12–WS-­17. Chatterjee, P. (1997) The Present History of West Bengal: essays in polit­ical criticism, Delhi: Oxford University Press. Das, V. (1995) ‘On soap opera: what kind of anthropological object is it?’ in D. Miller (ed.) Worlds Apart: modernity through the prism of the local, London: Routledge: 169–89. Datta, D. (1998) ‘Lesson in pri­mary folly’, The Telegraph (12 Septem­ber): 12. Donner, H. (2006a) ‘Committed mothers and well-­adjusted chil­dren: privatisation, early-­ years education and mother­hood in Calcutta middle-­class fam­il­ies’, Modern Asian Studies, 40(1): 1–25. Donner, H. (2006b) ‘The pol­itics of gender, class and com­mun­ity in a Calcutta neigh­ bour­hood’ in G. de Neve and H. Donner (eds) The Meaning of the Local: the pol­itics of place in urban India, London: Routledge: 141–58. Freire, P. (1972) Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Ganguly-­Scrase, R. and Scrase, T.J. (2009) Globalisation and the Middle Classes in India: the social and cultural impact of neolib­eral reforms, London and New York: Routledge. Goldthorpe, J. and Hope, K. (1974) The Social Grading of Occupations, Oxford: Clarendon. Jeffery, R., Jeffery, P. and Jeffrey, C. (2006) ‘Parhai Ka Mahaul? An educational envir­ on­ment in Bijnor, Uttar Pradesh’ in G. De Neve and H. Donner (eds) The Meaning of the Local: pol­itics of place in urban India, London: UCL Press. Jordan, G. and Weedon, C. (1995) Cultural Politics: class, gender, race and the postmodern world, Oxford: Blackwell. Kachru, B. (1983) The Indianization of English: the English language in India, New York: Oxford University Press. Kohli, A. (1987) The State and Poverty in India, London: Cam­bridge University Press. Liechty, M. (2003) Suitably Modern: making middle class culture in a new consumer soci­ety, Prince­ton, NJ and Oxford: Prince­ton University Press. Mandal, S.K. (2000) ‘Recon­sidering Cultural Globalization: The English language in Malaysia’, Third World Quarterly, 21(6): 1001–12. Mishra, P.K. (2000) ‘English language, postco­lo­nial sub­ject­ivity, and globalization in India’, ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature, 31(1–2): 383–410. Munshi, S. (1998) ‘Wife/mother/daughter-­in-law: mul­tiple avatars of homemaking in 1990s Indian ad­vert­ising’, Media, Culture and Society 20(5): 573–91. Oza, R. (2006) The Making of Neolib­eral India: nationalism, gender, and the paradoxes of globalization, New York and London: Routledge. Pennycook, A. (1994) The Cultural Politics of English as an International Language, Harlow: Longman. Phillipson, R. (1992) Linguistic Imperialism, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Punchi, L. (2001) ‘Resistance towards the language of globalisation – the case of Sri Lanka’, International Review of Education, 47(3–4): 361–78.

138   T.J. Scrase and R. Ganguly-Scrase Rajagopal, A. (1999) ‘Thinking about the new Indian middle class: gender, ad­vert­ising and pol­itics in an age of globalisation’ in R.S. Rajan (ed.) Signposts: gender issues in post-­Independence India, New Delhi: Kali for Women: 57–100. Sarkar Report(1998) Report of the One-­Man Committee on English in Primary Education in West Bengal, Calcutta: Government of West Bengal. Scrase, T.J. (1993) Image, Ideology and Inequality: Cultural Domination, Hegemony and Schooling in India, New Delhi, London and Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Smolicz, J. and Nical, I. (1999) ‘Exporting the Euro­pean idea of a national language: some educational im­plica­tions of the use of English and indi­gen­ous languages in the Philippines’, International Review of Education, 43(5–6): 507–26. Trivedi, H. (1995) Colonial Transactions: English liter­at­ure and India, Manchester: Manchester University Press. van Wessel, M. (2004) ‘Talking about consumption: how an Indian middle class dissociates from middle-­class life’, Cultural Dynamics, 16(1): 93–116. Viswanthan, G. (1989) Masks of Conquest: lit­er­ary study and British Rule in India, New York: Columbia University Press. Wright, E.O. (1985) Classes, London: Verso. Wright, E.O., Brenner, J., Buroway, M., Burris, V., Carchedi, G., Marshall, G., Meisksins, P., Rose, D., Stinchcombe, A. and Van Parijus, P. (1989) The Debate on Classes, London: Verso.

6 The social transformation of the medical profession in urban Kerala Doctors, social mobility and the middle classes Caroline Wilson Introduction Since India intensified its programme of eco­nomic lib­eralization in 1991, the health care industry has become a leading sector in the coun­try’s de­velopment as a ‘know­ledge eco­nomy’ (Dahlman and Utz 2005). One of the major achievements and beacons of eco­nomic reforms is the growth of some of the most techno­lo­gically advanced hos­pitals in the world. As large corporate hos­pitals compete for medical tourists from the West, the rapid expansion of the private health care industry is testament to a new culture of entre­pren­eurship, op­tim­ism and self-­confidence, which has infected business leaders and ambitious professionals. According to media reports, for the first time in the his­tory of the medical profession, leading consultants are returning from the US and the UK to take ad­vant­age of the professional oppor­tun­ities opening up across urban India (Mascarenhas 2007; Kanth 2007). The Indian health care industry is estim­ated to be worth US$18.7 billion and as the employer of over four million people, it is the largest ser­vice sector of the eco­ nomy (WHO 2008). According to the World Health Organization, in 2009 health expenditure accounted for 4.2 per cent of GDP, and strong growth is predicted at an annual rate of 12 per cent between 2010 and 2020 (McKinsey and Company 2010). As the globalization of trade in health ser­vices and the growth of the middle class expedite the expansion of private health care, it would be easy to as­sume that members of the medical profession have been some of the most im­port­ant beneficiaries of eco­nomic reforms. However, the ‘medical profession’ refers to a highly stratified group of men and women, of different ages, social backgrounds and expertise, working across the private and pub­lic sectors, in urban and rural areas of India and overseas. As a hierarchical and highly differentiated profession, assertions re­gard­ing the ‘medical profession’ should be tempered by con­sidera­tion of the varied social con­texts in which modern medicine is practised; the divergent social backgrounds, life stages and career tra­ject­ories of doctors; the relationship between the medical profession and the growth of the wider middle classes; and the different ways in which India’s ongoing integration into the global eco­nomy has shaped the career oppor­tun­ities, lifestyles and as­pira­tions of different doctors.

140   C. Wilson A signi­fic­ant body of liter­at­ure has examined the relationship between professional education, the ‘new’ middle classes and India’s know­ledge eco­nomy, by focusing on the ex­peri­ences of em­ployees in the in­forma­tion tech­no­logy (IT) and outsourcing industries (Nisbett 2004; Upadhya 2007; Upadhya and Vasavi 2007; Biao 2006; Fuller and Narasimhan 2006, 2007, 2008). The growth of these industries has played a con­sider­able role in raising wider ambitions for social mobility, intensifying investment in English, science education and com­puter skills. The industry has created a signi­fic­ant but limited number of new employment oppor­tun­ities compared with the number of educated young people attempting to enter the workforce (Nisbett 2004; Upadhya 2007; Biao 2006; Jeffrey et al. 2008). Studies have examined the reasons for the enduring ad­vant­ages of older elites (Fuller and Narasimhan 2006, 2007, 2008), and the mar­ginality of lower castes and classes in accessing employment in India’s new know­ledge industries (Nisbett 2004; Upadhya 2007; Upadhya and Vasavi 2007; Biao 2006). Thus although social mobility into the most prestigious private sector industries has been somewhat limited, sustained eco­nomic growth and investment have opened up diverse oppor­tun­ities for white-­collar, technically skilled employment, alongside oppor­tun­ities for accumulation from migration, business and agri­cul­ture (Mazzarella 2005, Osella and Osella 2009). These observations highlight the dif­fer­ences between the wide-­ranging tra­ ject­ories of social and eco­nomic de­velopment leading to the ongoing expansion of a sizeable middle class, and the rel­at­ively limited role of know­ledge industries in con­trib­ut­ing to the social mobility of dis­advant­aged groups. While it appears that the growth of private industries has bene­fited high-­caste/class elites the most, greater gen­eral access to English-­medium schools, tertiary education, technical skills and diverse strat­egies for employment and accumulation have signi­ fic­antly reduced the eco­nomic and cultural distinction of elites. This has led to the somewhat paradoxical situ­ation in which the growth of the wider middle classes has accompanied rising ambitions to join elite professions, while the distinction between high-­caste/class elites and other members of soci­ety has di­min­ ished considerably. The narrowed distinction between elite professionals and the parallel growth in demand for professional qualifications raises im­port­ant questions about the social institutions, ideo­lo­gies and values shaping middle-­class ideals of social mobility. Although oppor­tun­ities for higher education and employment have expanded across diverse fields of the eco­nomy, the pop­ularity of medicine and engineering degrees suggests the enduring im­port­ance of his­tory, hier­archy and  elite ideo­logy in shaping educational practices and career choices. Medicine and engineering degrees are widely perceived as facilitating social mobility into the ‘new middle class’ (Wilson 2008). However con­sider­able disparities have emerged between middle-­class imaginings of life as a doctor or an engineer, compared with the actual ex­peri­ences of many young professionals attempting to estab­lish careers within these hierarchical and highly com­petit­ive professions (Fuller and Narasimhan 2007).

Transformation of the medical profession   141 This chapter examines the reasons for the high social value of a medical degree, and the im­plica­tions of the widening gulf between societal perceptions of the lives of doctors, compared with the actual ex­peri­ences of young doctors attempting to estab­lish a successful career in medicine. While media and industry rhet­oric has focused on corporate investment as the prin­cipal driver of health sector de­velopment, this chapter examines how trans­forma­tions to the medical profession are being driven by middle-­class ideals of social mobility. It ana­lyses the ex­peri­ences of doctors rel­at­ive to other members of the middle classes, and the ways in which in­equal­it­ies are reproduced within this hierarchical profession. The chapter draws comparisons between the ex­peri­ences of young doctors, successful engineering gradu­ates working in IT, and migrant nurses, as one of the most successful professional groups from Kerala. The chapter argues that despite the high symbolic capital associated with becoming a doctor, the medical profession has ex­peri­enced a rel­at­ive decline in status and income compared with other members of the middle classes. It thereby illus­trates how the enduring prestige attributed by the ‘aspirant’ middle class to the medical profession belies the extent to which this elite status group is being more fully in­teg­rated into the wider middle classes. The case study of the medical profession is used to illus­ trate the role of middle-­class as­pira­tions in accelerating the trans­ition from state socialism to market-­led de­velopment in the social sectors of health and education. Sample and methods The chapter is part of my doctoral research on the commodification of health care.1 It is based on 18 months of fieldwork between July 2005 and Janu­ary 2007 in Malabar, Northern Kerala, in a city acting as a tertiary referral centre for several neigh­bouring districts. The city’s popu­la­tion is comprised of equal numbers of Muslim and Hindu households (prin­cipally ‘forward’ caste Nayars and OBC Thiyyas),2 and a small Chris­tian popu­la­tion (less than 5 per cent). The area was selected because of the high levels of migration to the Arab Gulf coun­tries. This has increased the number of middle-­income households and financed the rapid growth of private health care, education and other consumer industries. The first year of fieldwork was spent observing medical practice across a variety of medical specialisms, in large and small private hos­pitals. Participant observation was supplemented by inter­views with approximately 80 doctors working across the private and pub­lic sectors, at different stages in their careers.3 The first section ex­plores the expansion of the ‘new’ middle class and the role of doctors as cultural, eco­nomic and intellectual elites, mediating local engagements with modernity. The second section briefly examines the growth of the wider middle class in Kerala and its relationship to the medical profession. The final section examines the changing social charac­ter­ istics and ex­peri­ences of the medical profession as parti­cip­ants in the local and global economy.

142   C. Wilson

The ‘new middle classes’ and the medical profession Since the middle of the nine­teenth century, modernity has been driven by advances in science and tech­no­logy, and the emergence of a regu­latory state ap­par­atus. The rise of bur­eau­cratic and technocratic controls led to the growth of an inter­medi­ate stratum of white-­collar occupations and professions, characterized by increasing degrees of education (Sridharan 2004: 407). In India, this ‘new middle class’ was distinguished from other groups through asso­ci­ations with the English language, and as employees in modern educational and administrative institutions.4 As the product of co­lo­nial rule, the new middle class remained rel­at­ively small yet more influ­en­tial in the pub­lic sphere and pol­itics compared with its Western equi­val­ents (Deshpande 2003; Béteille 2003; Fuller and Narasimhan 2007). Following more than 200 years of co­lo­nial control of trade and the local eco­ nomy, the industrial bourgeoisie has been a rel­at­ively weak class in India (Misra 1961, Deshpande 2003). Therefore in contrast to the middle class in industrialized soci­eties, which formed a signi­fic­ant inter­medi­ate stratum, India’s new middle class were elites forming the upper echelons of the class pyramid. Employment in modern occupations increased the social distinction of elites, and their influence in shaping the wider cultural values of soci­ety (Srivastava 1998; Deshpande 2003; Fernandes 2006). As elites gained privileged access to English­medium education, sci­ent­ific know­ledge, technical skills and white-­collar employment, the estab­lishment of modern institutions imbued a superior moral quality to the cultural capital acquired by the limited number of elites (Misra 1961; Srivastava 1998; Deshpande 2003). Access to medical know­ledge and professional education thus differed signi­fic­antly from Western con­texts, where the high social status of the modern medical profession was gradually achieved through strat­egies of col­lect­ive social mobility, such as the estab­lishment of professional bodies, and asso­ci­ations between the medical profession and advances in science and tech­no­logy during the early twentieth century (Freidson 1970; Starr 1982; Bynum 2006). In India, access to medical know­ledge and professional education was mediated through and further reinforced hierarchical caste and class structures.5 This cemented the high social status of doctors and other modern professionals, as occupations dominated by high caste/class elites until the estab­lishment of reser­va­tion pol­icies in the post-­colonial period. The co­lo­nial administration opened up medical education to native elites from the 1820s onwards, as part of the wider pro­ject to create an enlightened, educated intermediary class. This group was envisaged by the British to act as cultural intermediaries to diffuse English tastes, education, science and ideas of ration­al­ity and civility to the rest of soci­ety (Prakash 1999; Misra 1961). Until 1921 the official emphasis of British pol­icy focused on the pro­mo­tion of secondary and higher education, concentrating on English education for the urban elite. This produced a small number of gradu­ates in English liter­at­ure, law and medicine, to serve the eco­nomic, polit­ical and administrative inter­ests of the co­lo­nial administration (Misra 1961; Tangri 1961). As a result of co­lo­nial pol­icy, English

Transformation of the medical profession   143 education and professional and other white-­collar employment became an im­port­ant basis of social stratification, further legitimizing and distinguishing the social privilege of elites. However the numbers bene­fiting from modern education and employment oppor­tun­ities remained extremely small. For example, in 1911 there were only were only 4,282 places in professional colleges across the entire colony, and 64 per cent of those were in law (Tangri 1961). The history of modern medicine in Kerala Arnold (1993: 3) notes that while the legal profession flourished without signi­ fic­ant state sup­port, after 150 years of British rule Western medicine struggled to estab­lish itself among the Indian people.6 However, in Kerala the his­tory of Western medicine differs con­sider­ably from other parts of India. With an ancient popu­la­tion of Chris­tians, Travancore and Cochin differed con­sider­ably from other areas, owing to the early de­velopment of the plantation eco­nomy and the pro­gressive attitudes of successive Maharajas towards Western medicine and education.7 In Southern and Central Kerala, the patronage of local nobility and the central role of health care and education in community-­based reform movements played a crit­ical role in pop­ularizing allopathic medicine from the early nine­teenth century onwards (Kabir and Krishnan 1996). In Travancore, the Treaty of Alliance between the British and the local nobility led to the de­velopment of a char­it­able state, offering free medical relief to all castes until the 1940s.8 Between 1870 and 1930, the number of patients treated in gov­ern­ment institutions rose from 66,757 to almost two million. Euro­pean physi­cians running the Medical Department worked with Indian medical officers as surgeons, apothecaries and hos­pital assistants, the majority of whom were from the Syrian Chris­tian com­mun­ity (Kawashima 1998).9 The Maharajas also sent Brahmins to train in medicine at Madras Medical College, to serve as physi­ cians to the royal court. Members of the ‘forward’ com­munit­ies of Syrian Chris­ tians and Nayars also studied Euro­pean medicine, receiving stipends from the Maharaja to cover expenses (Rajasekharan Nair 2001). The Maharajas controlled access to medical education and pro­hibited lower castes from entering into the profession. Health care, education and the medical profession thus became im­port­ant fields through which social exclusion and injustice found new articulations, as crit­ical sites for symbolic struggle and reform (Sankarankutty Nair 1980, Kabir and Krishnan 1996). Most notably, entry to the medical profession was denied to Padmanabhan Palpu, a founding member of the Sree Narayana Dharma Paripalana Yogam (SNDP). Despite having achieved the neces­sary grades in the merit exam, Palpu was refused entry for medicine in Travancore in 1884. However, he later quali­fied with a Licentiate in Medicine and Surgery (LMS) from Madras Medical College. He was from a rich, educated family of Ezhavas, but despite his professional qualifications, many of his fellow doctors refused to ac­know­ledge his status as a doctor because of his caste. Following graduation, he was refused employment by the gov­ern­ ment of Travancore, eventually working for the British as a pub­lic health doctor

144   C. Wilson in Mysore. From there he worked to improve sanitary con­ditions in the city, also setting up a com­pany to manufacture medicines. Later, he pursued his studies in England, from where he peti­tioned the British par­lia­ment on the plight of the Ezhavas (Sankarankutty Nair 1980). At that time, caste pro­hibition rules of untouchabil­ity and inapproachabil­ity restricted the movement of Ezhavas in the pub­lic sphere (Jeffrey 1976). Popular mobil­iza­tion was con­sider­able, and educated elites played a crit­ical role in marshalling the com­mun­ity and peti­tioning for reform. In 1896, Dr Palpu submitted a mass memorial signed by 13,176 Ezhavas demanding admission to gov­ern­ ment schools and their appointment to pub­lic positions. Both Dr Palpu and Sri Narayana Guru were aware of the im­port­ance of education, not only for eco­nomic advancement, but also to change social and beha­vi­oural attitudes towards health and hygiene, as central platforms in the wider reform movement. In Malabar, under the direct rule of the British, modern health care and educational estab­lishments were rel­at­ively underde­veloped until state inter­ven­tion in the post-­Independence period.10 Since the 1960s, doctors from the Muslim com­ mun­ity have played a vital role as leaders of com­mun­ity reform, increasing access to health care and education, estab­lishing schools, colleges and clinics across the region. Dr Abdul Gafoor founded the Muslim Education Society (MES) in 1964, which con­tinues to work for the educational, social and cultural uplift of Indian Muslims. The soci­ety has been at the forefront of the recent expansion of self-­financing engineering colleges, and opened one of the first private medical colleges in 2002.11 Doctors, alongside other elite businessmen from the com­mun­ity, have been instrumental in promoting reform through education, ‘sys­tematic lifestyles’ and rational practices. As embodiments of the success of com­mun­ity reforms, and through their char­it­able work, doctors and other business elites have legitimated their status as com­mun­ity leaders, through paternalistic concerns for the ‘upliftment’ of the com­mun­ity, and as moral guardians of the ‘common good’ (Osella and Osella 2009: S210). Medicine and social mobility Amongst the Muslim and Ezhava com­munit­ies, who constitute a signi­fic­ant proportion of the burgeoning middle class, doctors have acted as key figureheads in promoting the value of social mobility through education and by extending access to health care. As the previous preserve of high-­caste/class elites, the symbolic capital associated with becoming a doctor has par­ticu­lar significance for aspirant middle-­class fam­il­ies from these com­munit­ies. For the Ezhava com­mun­ity, social exclusion from the medical profession con­tinues to imbue becoming a doctor with par­ticu­lar significance, as the most im­port­ant way in which to achieve social status. For the Muslim com­mun­ity, doctors have played a paternalistic role in extending access to health care and education, in ser­vice to the local com­mun­ity. The role of doctors as elites and com­mun­ity leaders has further enhanced the social prestige associated with becoming a doctor. As a result, doctors and their fam­il­ies receive a con­sider­able amount of respect from other com­mun­ity members.

Transformation of the medical profession   145 Srivastava (1998: 9) urges an approach to the reproduction of class and the definition of cit­izen­ship in which the ‘cultural’ and ‘eco­nomic’ are two reinforcing spheres of power. Through this dialogue, he argues, class dif­fer­ences and eco­nomic ex­ploita­tion became reconstituted into dif­fer­ences based on ‘absences’ and ‘lacks’ and the need for institutions to alleviate these shortfalls of character (1998: 11). In Kerala, the small number of doctors from elite Ezhava and Muslim fam­il­ies have been extremely influ­en­tial as role models, who challenged the dominance of ‘forward’ com­munit­ies in modern institutions, and acted as key modernizers, reformers and intermediaries, shaping local engagements with modernity. As cultural and eco­nomic elites, doctors from ‘backward’ com­munit­ ies have promoted the modern values of education and health care, thereby enhancing the social esteem and distinction of doctors. This has in turn per­petu­ ated demand for the social, symbolic, eco­nomic and cultural capital associated with becoming a doctor. Elites have encouraged other com­mun­ity members to depend on doctors as author­itat­ive experts, as the beha­vi­our of modern, educated subjects. The moral authority of doctors, as guardians of what is good and proper in social life, has been further augmented by the humanistic and highly esteemed nature of their work as healers. Given that doctors have been some of the wealthiest members of local com­munit­ies, the medical profession has come to en­cap­ sul­ate modern values of social mobility – English education, science, technical abil­ity, hard work, investment, consumption and accumulation – as the embodiments of success to which other com­mun­ity members should aspire. As a result of caste and com­mun­ity reform movements, doctors have been central in raising wider ambitions for social mobility through the as­pira­tion to become a doctor, while also cultivating respect for doctors by virtue of their achievements as highly educated, wealthy, successful elites. Whereas in 1965 only 0.6 per cent of Ezhavas and Muslims studied beyond high school (Lieten 1977: 6), these two com­munit­ies have con­trib­uted signi­fic­antly to the recent growth of the middle class as successful parti­cip­ants in the wider pro­ject of social mobility and reform (Osella and Osella 2000, 2009). This his­tor­ical con­text is central to understanding the con­tempor­ary high levels of demand for medical degrees, par­ticu­larly among the Muslim and Ezhava com­munit­ies, as the most im­port­ant way for members of these com­munit­ies to improve their social standing among fellow com­mun­ity members and wider soci­ety. The fol­low­ing section briefly con­siders the relationship between class and status, as a useful distinction to understand changing patterns of social stratification.

Class, status and the expansion of the middle classes in Kerala In the Introduction, it was suggested there has been a con­sider­able narrowing of the social distinction of the medical profession, as part of the ‘new’ middle class, rel­at­ive to the growth of the wider middle classes. Given the shared values of education, social mobility and accumulation, it is difficult to satis­fact­orily

146   C. Wilson delineate the bound­ar­ies of the middle classes. Using a composite meas­ure of income, education, occupation, housing and consumer durables, recent survey data suggest that the middle class now account for 50 per cent of Kerala soci­ety (KSSP 2006). Empirically, it is im­port­ant to con­sider the diverse social groups con­trib­ut­ing to the growth of an inter­medi­ate stratum, defined prim­arily in terms of education, employment and income, alongside any shifts in the basis of social stratification associated with this trans­ition. Analytically, this requires some con­ sidera­tion of the dif­fer­ences between class and status, as eco­nomic lib­eralization and migration create new oppor­tun­ities for employment and accumulation on the one hand; and the growth of new money and educational oppor­tun­ity increases the as­pira­tions for social mobility into the ‘new’ middle class on the other. Béteille (2002: 38–41) opposes class and status as two different and mutually irreducible dimensions of in­equal­ity whereby status expresses honour, dignity, worth, and so on, against the disparities of wealth, income and other forms of mater­ ial ad­vant­age. Status is thus associated with value and meaning, the proximity or distance from the sacred centre, and distinctions of rank between superior and inferior, in a hierarchical ar­range­ment. While the possession of eco­nomic capital is largely an ob­ject­ive meas­ure of one’s place within the social hier­archy on the basis of mater­ial wealth, status has sub­ject­ive dimensions, which acquire meaning and vary in relation to the possession of different forms of cultural capital. The previous section dem­on­strated how the social worth of a medical degree has a par­ticu­lar significance for members of ‘backward’ com­munit­ies, reflecting the ways in which caste-­based discrimination has reinforced the symbolic value of medical education as the most im­port­ant way to redress perceptions of the shortfalls of ascribed status. Across all com­munit­ies, doctors are widely perceived as being socially and mater­ially distinguished from other members of soci­ety. However, prestige judgements also vary con­sider­ably between indi­viduals and groups, according to age, gender, caste, com­mun­ity, income, educational achievement, professional qualifications, and so on. Analysis should con­sider the different ways in which people view their own social position at different moments in time, and how they are viewed by wider soci­ety and in relation to other social groups. In arguing that the social distinction of the medical profession is declining rel­at­ive to other members of the middle class, ref­er­ence is made to both income, as a result of new oppor­tun­ities for accumulation from Gulf migration, nursing, and business; and esteem, reflecting gradual trans­forma­tions to the ways in which soci­ety views doctors, how doctors view themselves, and the changing social charac­ter­istics of medical work. The fol­low­ing section briefly examines trans­forma­tions to the middle class in Kerala, before returning to a discussion of the medical profession. The dynamics of migration As Zachariah et al. (2001: 63) argue, migration has been the single most dynamic factor in the other­wise dismal eco­nomic scen­ario in Kerala, con­trib­ut­ ing more to pov­erty alleviation than any other factor. Between 1970 and 1986, per capita income increased by only 4 per cent compared with a growth rate of

Transformation of the medical profession   147 26 per cent for the rest of India (Rajesh 2004). Tourism and traditional industries such as coir, tea, coffee, pepper, spices, rubber, prawns and coconuts are central to the export eco­nomy and the state’s nat­ural rather than high-­tech image.12 Although Kerala has a highly educated, young popu­la­tion, inward investment in other industries has been limited, in part because of the state’s reputation for industrial action (Heller 1999).13 People from Kerala have gen­erally moved to take ad­vant­age of new eco­nomic oppor­tun­ities within the state, the rest of India and overseas (Osella and Osella 2000: 76). As an ancient spice route, Kerala has a long his­tory of trade and migration to the Gulf, par­ticu­larly from the Malabar region. Following the discovery of oil, trade flows reversed in the 1970s, and the number of Malayalees migrating to the Arab Gulf coun­tries has steadily increased.14 Currently, 2.19 million people from Kerala are working in the Gulf, affecting 17 per cent of households and accounting for 22 per cent of state GDP (Rajan and Zachariah 2007). More than 50 per cent of migrants are from the Muslim com­mun­ity, 13 per cent Ezhavas (Thiyyas), 12 per cent Syrian Chris­tians and 8 per cent Nayars. Migration has bene­fited the full spectrum of social classes – elite and small businessmen; professionals, in par­ticu­lar nurses and doctors; technicians, petty traders, shop assistants, drivers and manual labourers. However two-­thirds of Gulf migrants are technically unskilled (Zachariah et al. 2003). Gulf migration has been par­ticu­larly im­port­ant in transforming the fortunes of previously impoverished households from the Muslim com­mun­ity, in unskilled and semi-­skilled positions. However, the lives of many unskilled Gulf migrants are precarious, and when employed manual labourers may earn in the region of Rs10,000 ($200) per month. Despite hardships, the pub­lic face of Gulf migration in Kerala is that of conspicuous consumption, with many migrants building large houses and acquiring other consumer items, such as cars, previously restricted to doctors and other elites. Consumerism thereby often masks the differing fortunes of the migrant popu­la­tion, while also raising gen­eral perceptions of affluence. Domestically, Gulf migration has stimulated the growth of the consumer eco­ nomy, increasing oppor­tun­ities for white-­collar employment and accumulation from health care, education, retail and the hos­pitality industries. One of the most successful cohorts of migrants is nurses from Kerala, working in the Gulf and other Anglophone coun­tries (George 2005). There are an estim­ated 40–50,000 nurses in the Gulf from India, 90 per cent of whom are from Kerala (Percot and Rajan 2007).15 Many nurses study for a three-­year BSc course and then work for a one-­year bond, before migrating overseas. Although nurses still receive poor sal­ar­ies and suffer from low esteem in Kerala, attitudes are changing. Initially dominated by women from the Chris­tian com­mun­ity, more fam­il­ies from the Nayar and Muslim com­munit­ies, and some men, are now entering the profession. Nurses are locally de­scribed as ‘export commodities’, and the profession has become the most im­port­ant route to social mobility in the global eco­nomy for people from Kerala. The fol­low­ing section further examines the educational practices of the wider middle classes which have per­petu­ated the high demand for medicine and engineering degrees.

148   C. Wilson Education, medicine and engineering Tangri (1961) argues that while the prime mover of revolu­tionary change in the UK and other Western coun­tries has been tech­no­logy, in India and other de­veloping coun­tries it has been education. Education has been one of the most dynamic sectors, as many fam­il­ies attempt to improve their social status and employment oppor­tun­ities through tertiary education (Jeffrey et al. 2008; Upadhya and Vasavi 2007; Osella and Osella 2000, 2009). The expansion of higher education has signi­fic­antly increased the number of persons who view themselves as stakeholders in the Indian middle classes, raising as­pira­tions for social mobility through white-­collar employment. While postgradu­ate and professional qualifications are neces­sary entry requirements to access skilled jobs, in many areas of the coun­try high levels of under-­employment limit the extent to which higher qualifications translate into skilled employment oppor­tun­ities (Osella and Osella 2000; Biao 2006; Jeffrey et al. 2008). Thus although imme­ diate returns from education may be limited in employment, further qualifications have their own inherent value in cultivating middle-­class identities and enhancing marriage pro­spects (George 2005; Biao 2006; Percot and Rajan 2007). Across India, high levels of demand have sustained the rapid expansion of self-­financing colleges, most controversially in medicine and engineering, as the two most sought-­after degrees. Although eco­nomic growth has rapidly expanded the variety of degree courses and the diversity of technically skilled employment oppor­tun­ities, the enduring pop­ularity of medicine and engineering reflects the im­port­ance of schooling and related practices in producing more con­ser­vat­ive ambitions. Elsewhere I have examined the ‘craze for medicine and engineering’ as an in­teg­ral part of the every­day life-­worlds of the middle classes in Kerala (Wilson 2008). Participation in English-­medium education, graduation from high school in the science stream, entrance coaching for medicine and/or engineering and identification with the media and social hype sur­round­ing entrance exams are im­port­ant ways in which fam­il­ies parti­cip­ate in middle-­class life, and construct aspirant middle-­class identities. Schooling and related practices are crit­ical fields through which sub­ject­ive power relations of superi­or­ity and inferiority are constituted and reinforced (Da Costa 2008). In Kerala, the exten­sion of English-­medium and science education has played a signi­fic­ant role in raising wider ambitions to join elite professions, thereby reaffirming the social significance and value of becoming a doctor or an engineer. Although there are con­sider­able disparities in the quality of education avail­able to different social classes, greater access to English-­medium education, science courses and tuition classes has intensified ambitions to become a doctor or an engineer.16 Although few students gain seats in medicine and engineering, the ‘craze’ for these courses illus­trates the utility of consuming education, aspiring towards and actively pursuing mobility, as a pro­ject, practice and nar­rat­ive in the construction of modern, middle-­class identities (Leichty 2003).

Transformation of the medical profession   149 At the same time, pop­ular demand for medicine and engineering degrees has prompted the rapid expansion of self-­financing colleges. However, out of the total number of degree courses offered in Kerala, only 0.7 per cent and 8 per cent are in medicine and engineering respectively. Thus the actual educational and employment strat­egies con­trib­ut­ing to the growth of a sizeable inter­medi­ate stratum have varied con­sider­ably, as many students enrol in employment-­ oriented courses such as nursing, commerce, other health- and science-­related fields, social work, hos­pitality management, tourism, air-­hostessing and design, alongside traditional aca­demic dis­cip­lines. While few gain entry to medicine or engineering, parti­cipa­tion in the social hype sur­round­ing these degrees has helped to sustain pop­ular myths re­gard­ing the lifestyles and ex­peri­ences of doctors and engineers (Fuller and Narasimhan 2007). In part because medicine and engineering gradu­ates have excelled in the com­petit­ive education sys­tem, it is widely as­sumed that doctors and engineers effortlessly proceed to estab­lish successful careers and marriages and gen­erally lead happy lives after graduation from college. Although the exchange value of professional degrees is rel­at­ively as­sured in marriage for male gradu­ates, the career pro­spects and working lives of doctors and engineers vary con­sider­ably by gender, caste, com­mun­ity, affluence and family background (Béteille 1991; Fuller and Narasimhan 2006). While affluent fam­il­ies can afford to invest wealth accu­mu­lated from business, migration, medicine or professional employment into the symbolic capital associated with becoming a doctor or an engineer, many other middle-­class fam­il­ies take out con­sider­able loans to finance degrees from private colleges without recognizing the potential dif­ficult­ies and additional expenditure required to gain fin­an­ cial returns from their investment. In addition to the par­ticu­lar esteem in which the medical profession is held, medicine is gen­erally preferred over engineering, as the more difficult degree course for which to gain entry. Although the chil­dren of professionals may use more dis­cre­tion in selecting the most suit­able career option, according to personal pref­er­ences, indi­vidual charac­ter­istics and lifestyle con­sidera­tions, for the majority of middle-­class households a place in medicine is often automatically chosen over and above engineering, if obtained. For example, I met one doctor from the Thiyya com­mun­ity who had gained a place for both medicine and engineering. Despite his pref­er­ence for engineering, in accordance with parental as­pira­tions he entered medical college, with the expectation at the very least that he could estab­lish a small practice in the local com­mun­ity. His parents’ pref­er­ ence reflect the par­ticu­larly high esteem given to the fam­il­ies of doctors in rural com­munit­ies. Several other students spoke crit­ically about the fact that that middle-­class parents often pay less attention to the actual lifestyle im­plica­tions for their chil­dren of a life spent working as a doctor – in treating the sick and the prob­lems associated with a career in medicine (further elaborated below). While medicine and engineering are referred to in­ter­change­ably as preferred degree courses, the most striking dif­fer­ence between doctors and engineers is the age of successful professionals. While the average worker in IT is 27 (Fuller and Narasimhan 2007), the age of practising doctors ranges from 23 to over 80.

150   C. Wilson Although engineering gradu­ates can begin work after a three-­year degree and a one-­year masters course, many doctors have to wait until they are in their forties before they have gained the neces­sary qualifications, ex­peri­ence, reputation and trust of the patient popu­la­tion to earn a reason­able or good income from medicine. Thus while IT professionals work as sal­ar­ied em­ployees, obtaining additional training in com­panies, doctors have to be entrepreneurial to create a successful career in medicine, as as­pira­tions and societal expectations extend beyond rural practice with the basic MBBS qualification.17 The fol­low­ing section traces the broader tra­ject­ories of trans­forma­tions to the medical profession during the post-­Independence period.

The social transformation of the medical profession In the 1950’s, the estab­lishment of gov­ern­ment medical colleges in Trivandrum and Calicut was one of the first meas­ures taken by the newly formed Kerala state gov­ern­ment. Until the 1980s the gov­ern­ment expanded medical education, providing places on the basis of merit and reser­va­tion at a minimal cost to students, thereby successively opening up the medical profession to a broader cross-­ section of soci­ety. In contrast to previous generations of landowning elites, who could afford to practise medicine as a form of social ser­vice, medicine steadily became the prin­cipal income for the majority of practising physi­cians. The idea of medicine as the previous preserve and pursuit of the gentlemanly physi­cian is misleading. Throughout the post-­Independence period, doctors have earned signi­fic­ant rewards from medical practice in gov­ern­ment ser­vice and/or private practice, or as the owners of small nursing homes. However, medicine was initially an im­port­ant route to status and income within local com­munit­ies. It is only in the last 15 years that oppor­tun­ities have opened up con­sider­ably for specialist practice in urban areas.18 State-­sponsored medical education meant that little investment was required to become a successful physi­cian because most worked as MBBS doctors, without the need for or societal expectation of postgradu­ate qualifications. As doctors were in rel­at­ively short supply compared with the number of sick patients, com­peti­tion between doctors was much less, and more doctors were con­tent to return to serve their local com­mun­ity fol­low­ing graduation from medical college.19 Before the growth of remittances from Gulf migration, the expansion of higher education colleges, and large-scale hospitals, doctors were materially and culturally diminished figures serving local communities. Doctors attended calls to treat the sick in their households, and some routinely visited local neigh­bour­hoods, driving slowly around in their car, stopping at houses where a family member would wait outside to call the ser­vices of the doctor. The personal respect given and received by par­ticu­lar doctors has declined considerably, as more patients travel to consult urban specialists, and interact with doctors in the often more transitory and impersonal context of a large hospital. Compared with the physi­cian of yesteryear, the rel­at­ive income of many doctors has declined signi­fic­antly, although wider soci­ety still expects doctors

Transformation of the medical profession   151 to be some of the wealthiest members of the com­mun­ity. For example, in the 1950s, a doctor charged Rs2–4 for out­patient ser­vices, and a successful doctor would make at least Rs100 from seeing private clients in one evening session. By comparison, the income of a senior civil ser­vant at that time was Rs150 per month, whereas a doctor could earn in the region of Rs3,500, equivalent to three and a half times the cost of an imported Model T Ford car (Rajasekharan Nair 2001: 17). While doctors are widely remembered as the first members of local com­munit­ies able to afford a vehicle, today cars and large SUVs are commonly owned by successful Gulf migrants and other members of the middle class. Like many members of the middle class, mid-­ranking consultants take out loans to finance the purchase of a new car, while only more senior consultants and the owners of hos­pitals can afford luxury, imported models. As noted, for members of ‘backward’ com­munit­ies in par­ticu­lar, access to medical education is the most im­port­ant way for fam­il­ies to achieve social status and many more are entering the profession through state and private sector institutions. While soci­ety still views the doctor as rich, privileged and successful, this is very different from the actual ex­peri­ences of many young doctors. In medicine, family background and affluence are im­port­ant cri­teria to estab­lish a successful career in medicine (Béteille 1991). In addition to the inherited ad­vant­ age of exposure to a medical habitus, family her­it­age is also a signi­fic­ant ad­vant­ age in acquiring patients. As some of the most affluent members of soci­ety, the chil­dren of doctors are most likely to qual­ify as super-­specialists (requiring a min­imum of 11.5 years of aca­demic study). They can afford to study full time for admission to postgradu­ate courses, or pay for admission to private colleges, and gen­erally have higher as­pira­tions for career pro­gression.20 However, most young doctors, after completion of the five-­and-a-­half-year MBBS degree, combine temporary employment with time off to study for the com­petit­ive postgradu­ate entrance exams. For the majority, life as a young doctor is filled with exams, stress and poorly paid work as a junior assistant or casualty doctor in private hos­pitals. While young doctors receive a signi­fic­ant amount of esteem from wider soci­ety, most doctors only become fin­an­cially self-­sufficient in their late twenties, having to depend on parents or dowry to acquire postgradu­ate qualifications. Working as a casualty doctor and/or assistant in a private hos­pital, sal­ar­ies start at around Rs7,000 ($175) per month. Young male doctors can earn approximately Rs20,000 ($500) by taking round-­the-clock duties in private hos­pitals in rural areas. Doctors are on call 24/7 and have to attend morning clinics, despite the disruptions of night duty, and often work without a scheduled day off. Although doctors can gain valu­able clinical ex­peri­ence, there is no career pro­gression pos­ sible from this work, and positions are a temporary stop-­gap in between study for entrance exams. Due to the exacting nature of their duties, young doctors are often highly mobile, working across different hos­pitals on a short-­term basis. Even if young doctors decide to apply for gov­ern­ment ser­vice or return to practise medicine near their family homes, this still leaves the expectation of wider

152   C. Wilson soci­ety that doctors should study for postgradu­ate qualifications. For example, one young doctor complained that when he returns home, even manual labourers commonly ask when he is going to study for his ‘PG’ exam.21 Postgraduate qualifications Like many other degree holders, who imme­diately proceed for postgradu­ate study, specialist qualifications have become essential to becoming a doctor in the eyes of wider soci­ety. They are also essential to obtain a consultant position in a private hos­pital, and are increasingly im­port­ant to attract patients. However, oppor­tun­ities are extremely limited rel­at­ive to ubiquitous demand. In the period preceding entrance exams, hospitals are left with severe staff shortages, as many junior doctors take time off for study. Doctors from more affluent backgrounds can afford to take years out to study full time in specialist coaching centres. Others from more modest backgrounds work for six months of the year and study for another six months, or combine work and study according to their means. The chances of obtaining a good postgradu­ate place are slim, as there are only 128 postgradu­ate degrees and 91 diploma courses in the state sector. I inter­ viewed one rank holder who had come 100th out of approximately 2–3,000 can­ did­ates. He was con­sidering retaking the exam, as he can only get a postgradu­ate place in a minor specialism such as anaesthesia or a diploma course. The other route to gain a postgradu­ate place is to pay Rs25–50 lakhs ($50,000 to $100,000) to a private college, ordinarily outside Kerala. Dowry is a further option to finance postgradu­ate qualifications, most common among the Muslim com­mun­ ity. Doctors are highly eli­gible grooms for the fam­il­ies of wealthy Gulf migrants or businessmen. As new diploma courses are estab­lished in corporate hos­pitals this will help somewhat to alleviate the situ­ation, re­du­cing the cost of postgradu­ ate education and increasing access to higher skills. Medicine and migration Another option open to young gradu­ates and less well-­established consultants is migration, prim­arily to the Gulf, or to enter gov­ern­ment ser­vice. While the proportion of predominantly elite Indian doctors migrating to Anglophone coun­tries has remained fairly constant at around 10 per cent (Madan 1980; Mullan 2006),22 less-­privileged doctors tend to con­sider closer destinations, most im­port­antly the Gulf or the Maldives. In total there are approximately 35,000 doctors re­gis­tered in Kerala and about a further 7,000 working overseas (an additional 16 per cent).23 I inter­viewed several young doctors who, having failed to gain postgradu­ate admission, obtained positions in the gov­ern­ment sector, and sub­ sequently took leave to go to the Gulf for several years. Migration is an im­port­ ant route to earning higher sal­ar­ies, approximately four times the basic sal­ary for gov­ern­ment ser­vice – Rs15,000 per month ($375). Government ser­vice is still a pop­ular option for some young doctors. Seats have been reserved in postgradu­ate

Transformation of the medical profession   153 entrance exams for doctors who have completed one year of rural ser­vice, and sal­ar­ies have increased. However, the move to increase the sal­ar­ies of gov­ern­ ment doctors has been controversial because it accompanied a ban on the private practice of gov­ern­ment doctors – a move unpop­ular with many senior consultants and members of the pub­lic who regu­larly consult gov­ern­ment doctors privately. While em­ployees in the IT industry have come to epitomize the flex­ible migrant ‘know­ledge workers’ searching out new oppor­tun­ities (Biao 2006), the majority of doctors are more firmly grounded in the local health sys­tem. In accordance with parental as­pira­tions, the majority of young doctors are most concerned with gaining entry to a postgradu­ate course, arranging a good marriage, and setting up a practice in the local health care sys­tem, also a source of greater prestige for their fam­il­ies. As clinicians whose success is de­pend­ent on building a good reputation locally, it is more difficult for doctors to become mobile migrants. However, locally doctors are highly mobile, and most consultants move between different hos­pitals and rural and urban areas, combining private practice with hos­pital employment in order to earn higher returns. With the exception of elite migration to Anglophone coun­tries, push factors, such as com­peti­tion for patients in Kerala, and higher sal­ar­ies, are im­port­ant mo­tiva­tions for doctors to migrate overseas during early on in or mid-­way through their career.24 Therefore, unlike nursing, a medical degree in Kerala is not a ticket to migration, although many doctors migrate (cf. Mullan 2006; Kaushik et al. 2008). Inequal­it­ies within the profession also reflect the tend­ency of patients to flock to par­ticu­lar practitioners. The age and ex­peri­ence of doctors in treating local patients is im­port­ant to increase pub­lic confidence. Some of the most famous and successful doctors are former heads of de­part­ments of gov­ern­ment medical colleges, who joined the private sector after retirement at the age of 55. While this generation of doctors often dress in white coats and command a con­sider­ able amount of respect from patients and junior doctors, in corporate and other private hos­pitals, middle-­aged doctors dress in shirts and ties, rejecting the identity of the author­it­arian physi­cian, and feeling somewhat uncomfortable with the respect soci­ety bestows upon the doctor. Secular trends have also been accelerated by the entry of different com­munit­ies and classes into the profession and the increasingly technical focus of medical work. While media reports highlight that doctors are returning to India for the first time for the sake of professional oppor­tun­ities, it is difficult to discern any notable shift in patterns of elite migration. Cyclical migration patterns have long characterized the working lives of doctors from India, although returning doctors are more influ­en­tial in shaping health ser­vice pro­vi­sion by estab­lishing specialist units in private hos­pitals. The availabil­ity of the latest techno­lo­gical setups, greater oppor­tun­ities for continuing medical education, better con­ditions in private hos­pitals, the increased size and income of the middle classes and the availabil­ity of more consumer goods and leisure ac­tiv­ities have made life in India more congenial than ever before for elites (Fuller and Narasimhan 2007).

154   C. Wilson Although inter­na­tional migration to Anglophone coun­tries is less im­port­ant to acquire specialist technical ex­peri­ence, the most ambitious doctors still migrate to gain ex­peri­ence overseas (Kaushik et al. 2008).25 As the expertise and training avail­able in the local health care sys­tem con­ tinue to improve, migration patterns are symptomatic of the growth of in­equal­it­ ies and ambitions within the medical profession, which make it more difficult for doctors from middle-­class backgrounds (e.g. the chil­dren of teachers and lecturers) to estab­lish successful careers in a competitive marketplace. Several young doctors compared their low sal­ar­ies, years of study and prob­lems in estab­lishing a career with the fortunes of unskilled Gulf migrants and nurses migrating overseas. Working in the Gulf, nurses can earn four to six times the sal­ary of a locally employed MBBS doctor in a private hos­pital. The sal­ar­ies of migrant labourers have become com­par­able to those of young doctors, despite the latter’s years of study and con­sider­able respons­ibil­ities.26 The privatization of medical education One of the most controversial aspects of eco­nomic reforms in Kerala has been the recent licensing of 17 new private medical colleges. When launching the pol­icy in 2002, the gov­ern­ment argued that 45 per cent of medical students in private colleges in Tamil Nadu and Karnataka were from Kerala (Krishnakumar 2004). Opening private colleges, it was suggested, would bring money and jobs into the state, given the numbers of students already migrating. A signi­fic­ant number of students from Kerala also travel to other parts of India, China and Russia for gradu­ate and postgradu­ate qualifications before returning to practise in India. Donations to private medical colleges are high because of the con­sider­able capital expense associated with estab­lishing a new college, and the fact that institutions struggle to attract patients. There are now 1,650 places in private medical colleges compared with 850 places for MBBS in the gov­ern­ment sector. While doctors in state institutions have excelled through the com­petit­ive entrance exams, private institutions offer places to middle-­class fam­il­ies who can afford to pay for degrees, par­ticu­larly in the Non-­Resident Indian quota, which accounts for 15 per cent of can­did­ates. Several teachers in private medical colleges reported that students were not motiv­ated to study medicine: they had enrolled to fulfil their parents’ desire for them to become doctors. Privatization may thus reduce the cadre of medical gradu­ates, while also increasing the cost to soci­ety of producing more doctors. In total, can­did­ates may invest in the region of 40 lakhs ($80,000) to obtain an MBBS degree and postgradu­ate qualification (MD) from private institutions. For fam­il­ies, who have accu­mu­lated income from business and/or migration, marrying a doctor into the family or educating chil­dren as doctors is the most im­port­ant way households can convert eco­nomic capital into the cultural capital of having a doctor in the family. The Thiyya (or Ezhava), Muslim and ‘forward’ Chris­tian com­munit­ies are the most successful groups in business in the state

Transformation of the medical profession   155 (Osella and Osella 2000, 2008, 2009). These com­munit­ies have also been the most signi­fic­ant investors in private health care The desire of wealthy fam­il­ies to convert eco­nomic capital into the cultural capital of being a doctor has also been instrumental in forging the marriage between medicine and business. Several of the largest hos­pitals in the city were estab­lished in the 1970s and 1980s by leading business fam­il­ies in the state, who married or educated their chil­dren as doctors outside the state, with the vision to expand the quality and sophistication of health ser­vice provision. The privatization of medical education and the sys­tem of postgradu­ate education discriminates con­sider­ably against women. While men can make dowry demands to pay for postgradu­ate qualifications, it is difficult for female doctors to get married without con­sider­able expense. Families of female doctors prefer daughters to marry other doctors, so their husband is not of a lower status. However, the cost of marrying a doctor or an engineer is becoming pro­hibitive. Doctors lead dowry inflation, often demanding in the region of Rs10–15 lakhs ($20,000–$30,000), cars or more expensive postgradu­ate qualifications. However, many fam­il­ies encourage daughters to study medicine, and some women are entering new private medical colleges, from fairly modest family backgrounds. For example, I inter­viewed several men of fairly modest means, keen to pay for their daughters to study medicine. The first was from the Chris­ tian com­mun­ity – an office worker who had taken a bank loan to finance the Rs20 lakhs dona­tion. Another man from the Gulf who owned a small air-­ conditioning com­pany was also determined to get admission for his daughter, despite low grades. Some middle-­income fam­il­ies are trying to improve their family’s status through admission to private colleges, despite the signi­fic­ant expense associated with marriage and education. Although reforms have been greeted with op­tim­ism in demo­cratizing access to this elite status group, many remain cynical that the privatization of medical education will only bene­fit the rich. Both sides of the argument reflect the ways in which middle class as­pira­ tions to become a doctor divorce the social meaning of becoming a doctor from the work of treating the sick.

Conclusion The values of the ‘new’ middle class remain crit­ical in shaping the mobility as­pira­tions of the wider middle class, as access to medical education remains the most im­port­ant way in which fam­il­ies can improve their social status. This has produced con­sider­able disparities between the high symbolic value of a medical degree for middle class families, the earning potential and career prospects of young doctors, and the social value of a medical degree in improving access to affordable health care. The values of the wider middle class play a signi­fic­ant role in influ­en­cing the career as­pira­tions and tra­ject­ories of doctors. Although middle-­class imaginings of life as a doctor bear little resemb­lance to the ex­peri­ ences of young doctors entering the profession, the careers of doctors are being over-­determined by societal expectations to acquire postgradu­ate qualifications

156   C. Wilson and to enjoy the mater­ial bene­fits as­sumed to flow from professional education. Middle-­class as­pira­tions thus contradict the central role of doctors in the pro­vi­ sion of affordable, access­ible medical care, as young doctors take con­sider­able periods of leave to study for entrance examinations; as study for postgradu­ate qualifications limits the acquisition of clinical ex­peri­ence; and as doctors migrate to bene­fit from higher sal­ar­ies and ex­peri­ence overseas. While young doctors possess high levels of symbolic capital, many are disillusioned by low sal­ar­ies, exacting duties, respons­ibil­ities in treating crowds of patients, the stress of exams and limited pro­spects for career pro­gression. Contradictory status evalu­ations have emerged, reflecting the dif­fer­ences between the ways in which aspirant middle-­class fam­il­ies view life as a doctor and how doctors view themselves. On the one hand, the growth of an aspirant middle class has increased the value of a medical degree. Doctors are held in high esteem as the successful products of the education sys­tem, epitomizing shared values of social mobility. The prestige associated with medicine has also translated into eco­nomic bene­fits, inflating the value of medical degrees for male doctors in marriage. On the other-­hand, the medical profession has suffered a rel­at­ive decline in status and income, compared with the respect given to the community physicians of yesteryear, and the successes of other groups: migrant nurses, engineering graduates in IT and skilled and unskilled migrants. As more doctors view their work as ser­vice providers, many young and middle-­aged doctors reject the role of the elusive, author­it­arian physi­cian, and critique the prestige with which soci­ety views the medical profession as something extra­ordinary and special. However, relative reductions in status and income have had a benign impact on the prestige judgements of aspirant middle class fam­il­ies. Marriage and education-­related practices con­tinue to reproduce the eliteness of the ‘new’ middle class, despite the fact that many professionals have become more fully in­teg­rated into the wider classes. Although ob­ject­ive patterns of social stratification have changed, divergences emerge between the sub­ject­ive evalu­ation of degrees by wider soci­ety in education and marriage, compared with employment oppor­tun­ities from a medical degree, and the increasingly pragmatic ways in which doctors evalu­ate their work. In medicine, affluence, family her­it­age, gender, age and aptitude (to succeed in the com­petit­ive exams) are the most im­port­ant factors shaping in­equal­it­ies of oppor­tun­ity, as factors somewhat transcending traditional bound­ar­ies of caste, class and com­mun­ity. Outside the limited number of postgradu­ate seats in the gov­ern­ment sector, the chil­dren of doctors and other wealthy elites are ad­vant­ aged in medicine. Economic capital is increasingly im­port­ant to succeed in medicine in order to fund postgradu­ate qualifications and to estab­lish private clinics. Outside the government sector, practices severely discriminate against female doctors, as dowries are increasingly important to finance career pro­gression. The privatization of medical education is accelerating the im­port­ance of affluence to career pro­gression in medicine, while also extending oppor­tun­ities for further studies. High aspirations and access to loans have encouraged private investment

Transformation of the medical profession   157 in medical degrees by average middle-­class fam­il­ies, despite the ques­tion­able fin­an­cial im­plica­tions of this strategy, particularly for female children. Although medicine remains the most im­port­ant route for fam­il­ies to improve their social standing in the com­mun­ity, and most doctors can eventually make a good living from a career in medicine, the time and expense associated with fulfilling personal, familial and societal as­pira­tions to become a specialist doctor are con­sider­able. The expectation of wealth and privilege is far removed from the daily duty of treating crit­ically ill patients, falling hardest upon the shoulders of young doctors. Thus while medicine is still prestigious, the con­sider­able investment in studies and the comparatively meagre rewards for con­sider­able respons­ib­ility make medicine one of the most challenging and potentially rewarding career options for young people in India.

Notes   1 The PhD research was generously funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (PTA-­030–2004 – 00431). The writing of this chapter has been conducted during a joint post-­doctoral fellow­ship from the Medical Research Council (MRC) and the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) (G0802703). I am extremely grateful for the insightful feedback on previous versions of this chapter from Henrike Donner, and three anonym­ous reviewers.   2 In the Malabar region, the largest Hindu Other Backward Caste (OBC) com­mun­ity are known as Thiyyas, whereas in Southern and Central Kerala, the com­mun­ity are known as Ezhavas. Both terms are used in the chapter, as appropriate. Caste-­based discrimination was most pronounced in the princely states of Travancore and Cochin, under the rule of local Maharajas. The term Ezhava is therefore used to refer to the reform movements in these regions, whereas Thiyya is used to refer to doctors from this com­mun­ity in the fieldwork site in Malabar.   3 The medical profession is gen­erally a male-­dominated profession, although women constitute a signi­fic­ant proportion of MBBS (Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery) gradu­ates. Female doctors comprised approximately 15 per cent of the sample, in part reflecting the fact many women work as busy gynaecologists, managing professional respons­ibil­ities and home life. Thus it was more difficult to inter­view and observe the work of female doctors. Due to lim­ita­tions of space and data, gender discrimination and the medical profession is minimally addressed.   4 There is con­sider­able conceptual confusion among authors who use the term ‘old’ or ‘traditional’ to de­scribe the co­lo­nial or Nehruvian middle class (Mazzarella 2005; Varma 1998). This chapter uses the term ‘new middle class’ to refer to technocratic elites, associated with the de­velopment of modern bur­eau­cratic institutions of education and employment in the co­lo­nial and post-­colonial periods. The conceptual confusion re­gard­ing the middle class is sub­sequently addressed in the main body of the text.   5 The high social esteem afforded to medical practitioners reflects not only local engagements with modernity, but also the sacred and secular powers attributed to healers more gen­erally. See for example Krishnankutty (2001) and Varier (2002) for details of the Sanskritic traditions of the Nampoothiri Brahmins and the Ambalavasi caste in Kerala. Elite doctors from the ‘backward’ Ezhava caste also used the title ‘vaidyan’, practising medicine and acquiring know­ledge of Sanskrit, most notably, the spiritual and moral reformer Sri Narayana Guru (Krishnakutty 2001).   6 The limited pop­ularity of Western medicine in part reflected the inter­ests of the co­lo­nial administration in utilizing Euro­pean physi­cians to serve the inter­ests of

158   C. Wilson the  milit­ary and other officers stationed in India (Jeffery 1988; Kabir and Krishnan 1996). However, the training of native physi­cians was im­port­ant in pop­ularizing modern medicine amongst urban elites, who could afford the fees of allopathic doctors (Jeffery 1988; Arnold 1993).   7 Kerala state was formed in 1956 by uniting the three Malayalam-­speaking areas of India – the erstwhile princely states of Travancore in the south, Cochin in Central Kerala and Malabar, formerly under the direct rule of the British as part of the Madras Presidency. The his­tory of modern medicine differs signi­fic­antly between these three areas. In the Malabar region, modern medicine was pop­ularized after inde­pend­ence from British rule, when the state estab­lished a gov­ern­ment medical college and expanded other facilities. Malabar is still seen as falling slightly behind the Kerala model in lit­er­acy and other indic­ators for social de­velopment. This reflects the par­ ticu­lar histories of co­lo­nialism, affecting the later de­velopment of health care and education in the region. Many landowning elites and other professionals, including doctors, migrated to the area from Southern and Central Kerala to take ad­vant­age of oppor­tun­ities in the plantation eco­nomy, medicine and pub­lic sector employment.   8 Separate pro­vi­sions were made for lower-­caste patients, who were initially treated outside after other patients. Eventually patients were housed in separate accommodation blocks (Kawashima 1998; Kabir and Krishnan 1996).   9 In 1908, out of 87 officers of all grades in the Medical Department, 53 were Chris­tians, 23 Sudras, 8 Brahmins, 2 Mahomedans and one was Ezhava (Kawashima 1998). 10 Malabar was part of the Madras Presidency until the formation of Kerala state in 1956. 11 The privatization of medical education is discussed towards the end of the chapter. 12 See for example the Government of Kerala website: www.kerala.gov.in. 13 Daily life is frequently interrupted by ‘hartals’ or ‘bandhs’, which regu­larly close down businesses and schools across the state for the day. 14 The term Malayalee is widely used as a self-­descriptor by people from Kerala, as speakers of the Malayalam language. 15 See George (2005) on the migration of nurses from Kerala to the US and Percot and Rajan (2007) on the ex­peri­ences of nurses in the Gulf. 16 In some schools in Kerala, up to 90 per cent of high school students gradu­ate in the science stream. Many people from different walks of life – agricultural labourers, rickshaw drivers, teachers, cardiologists etc. send their children to English mediumschools and entrance coaching for medicine and engineering, although in widely different social contexts. 17 Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery (MBBS) is the basic medical degree awarded to doctors in India, ordinarily taking five and a half years to complete. 18 With its largely peri-­urban popu­la­tion, the prob­lem of rural–urban disparities in the distribution of medical practitioners has prob­ably been less pronounced in Kerala compared with other states of India, although it has become an increasingly signi­fic­ ant prob­lem over the last 15 years. 19 Teachers at medical college noted shifting pref­er­ences of young doctors for postgradu­ate special­ization, urban practice or migration, accelerating over the last 10–15 years. 20 Super-­specialist doctors have completed a three-­year postgradu­ate MD (Doctor of Medicine) in General Medicine, before further specializing in a three-­year DM (Doctorate in Medicine), in cardiology, neurology, nephrology, endocrinology, etc. 21 The gov­ern­ment recently introduced a reser­va­tion quota in the postgradu­ate entrance exam for young doctors who have completed one year of rural ser­vice, to alleviate rural–urban disparities in gov­ern­ment health ser­vice provision. 22 ‘Elite’ migration is used to refer to second-­generation doctors and those with a strong affinity towards Anglophone culture or family her­it­age of migration overseas as professionals.

Transformation of the medical profession   159 23 Figures provided by local doctors and the Indian Medical Association. 24 Access to more high tech set ups has been an important pull factor encouraging doctors to migrate to the Gulf. However, as technical capacity continues to improve in Kerala, this is a less significant reason for migration. 25 By comparison, a recent survey of physi­cians at the All India Institute of Medical Science (AIIMS) found that 54 per cent of doctors graduating between 1989 and 2000 were now practising overseas (Kaushik et al. 2008). The survey also found that twice the number of doctors gaining admission in the gen­eral cat­egory migrated compared with those admitted under reser­va­tion. Elite migration from this premier institution is im­port­ant, par­ticu­larly if physi­cians are able to gain good ex­peri­ence in the US. Similarly, the chil­dren of elites who have also worked overseas are more likely to migrate overseas early in their careers rather than taking entrance exams in India, although this groups constitutes a small minority. 26 In order to discourage/outlaw the private practice of gov­ern­ment doctors, the state has recently made signi­fic­ant increases to doctors’ sal­ar­ies, although the sal­ar­ies of young doctors in private hos­pitals remain low.

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7 Kitty-­parties and middle-­class femininity in New Delhi Anne Waldrop

At a kitty-­party The setting is the living room in a first-­floor apartment in Defence Colony, an upper middle-­class neigh­bour­hood in New Delhi. The time is ten minutes past 1 p.m. and 15 women, mostly married housewives aged between 50 and 65, dressed up in exquisite saris or shalwar kamizes and jewellery, are present. First all the women hand in their saving share to the cashier, which at this kitty-­party is INR 3,000 per meeting. Next, paper strips with the names of the remaining parti­cip­ants are put into a container and the ‘winner’ is the name that is drawn. She gets her full savings-­share at once, which in this case is INR 45,000.1 Each member may only be drawn once during a round, so that when a member is drawn, her name is excluded from future raffles. At this meeting only a few women are yet to be drawn, and one of them has said that if she is drawn she will swap with one of the others. She is saving for a trip abroad to go hiking in Scotland and does not want to get the money too far in advance, in case she should be tempted to start using it on other things. This is a description of the first 15–30 minutes of a kitty-­party – a rotating saving asso­ci­ation – where a group of female friends meet on a regu­lar basis to eat, talk and draw the ‘kitty’ that has been accu­mu­lated over a period of time. While generic rotating saving asso­ci­ations are a phenomenon well known to scholars as a means to empower poor women (Ardener and Burman 1995), the kitty-­party differs from these asso­ci­ations as it flourishes among urban, upper-­caste, middle­class housewives. Although kitty-­parties have been around since the early years of Indian inde­pend­ence and have become very pop­ular among middle-­class women, and although they have become an (in)famous phenomenon through a TV serial and other forms of media cover­age, very little schol­arly liter­at­ure deals with them. This chapter aims to fill that gap and ask what it is about kitty-­parties, which in con­tempor­ary neolib­eral India appear slightly dated, that still make them so pop­ular among middle-­class housewives. Through the ana­lysis I want to throw light on changes in middle-­class femininity in urban North India.

Kitty-parties and middle-class femininity   163 The drawing of the kitty is quickly done with, and afterwards some of the women move to the kit­chen to help out with the final food pre­para­tions. A young female ser­vant is also there doing the spadework. The food is then put on the dining table as a buffet, and when it is served we all take a plate and serve ourselves. The hostess is standing by making sure every­one gets their plate filled, and urging us to come back for more later. Everybody is praising the food, discussing how it is prepared, regional varieties, the types of spices that are used, and so on and so forth. Apart from all the food-­talk, the women talk about travels abroad, about their sons and daughters and what they do, and whether anyone is getting married. They also talk about how they have spent the money from an earl­ ier draw. The hostess, who is a widow, takes out two silk saris she has recently bought for kitty-­money, and shows them to us. The mater­ial, quality, price, etc. are discussed. One woman says that she has started working out at a sports complex, and the others snicker a little. After the food, some of the women move into one of the bedrooms where the TV set is located and watch The Bold and the Beautiful. They talk and gossip in a smaller circle about friends’ chil­dren, their love affairs, divorces and marriages. After approximately two-­and-a-­half hours the party is over and people start going home. The door to the kit­chen is closed, but one can hear the ser­vant doing the dishes and cleaning up all the pots and pans. Although the saving is what defines the kitty-­party, other aspects are also im­port­ ant for understanding women’s parti­cipa­tion. My interlocutors in Delhi emphas­ ized that getting out of the house and meeting up with friends was the main reasons for their con­tinued parti­cipa­tion. Furthermore, the saying that kitty-­ parties are about ‘three S’s’: shadi (marriage), sona (gold) and saris, indicates not only that the phenomenon tends to be slightly derided among the gen­eral pub­lic in urban India, but also refers to its asso­ci­ation with gossip, showing off and luxury consumption. In order to understand the con­tinued pop­ularity of kitty-­parties, this chapter will follow up on these aspects and discuss them under the three headings of saving, friendship and ‘exposure’. It was during fieldwork in 1997–1998 among men and women belonging to the estab­lished, educated middle class in New Delhi that I heard about kitty-­ parties for the first time.2 At that time, I lived in an upmarket neigh­bour­hood in the south of the city, and as part of my fieldwork, I parti­cip­ated in a kitty-­party circle over a period of six months. Then, during the autumn of 2006, while in New Delhi doing research for another pro­ject, I contacted one of the kitty-­party parti­cip­ants I had met nine years earl­ier. Through her I got the chance to conduct in-­depth inter­views with two of the women belonging to the ‘old’ kitty-­party circle. It turned out that both still parti­cip­ated in the same kitty-­party that I had been part of. In these additional inter­views conducted in their homes, the two women reflected on their con­tinued parti­cipa­tion over such a long period. The kitty-­party women I interacted with tended to play down the im­port­ance of kitty-­parties in their lives. When I first approached them in 1997 to ask

164   A. Waldrop whether I could parti­cip­ate in their meetings, the initial reaction was that a kitty-­ party could not pos­sibly be a suit­able ‘ser­ious’ research subject: ‘We are only housewives,’ many women said, ‘why would you be inter­ested in us? A kitty-­ party is only about dressing up nicely, eating good food and gossiping.’ These reactions show how, while the ideal of the virtuous wife and mother is im­port­ ant, being a housewife also implies a certain lack of status within the middle-­ class world. In many cases, the younger generation of daughters have taken up paid work, and their mothers validate the pop­ular image of the working woman when they refer to themselves as ‘only housewives’. But for their generation, the notion that a middle-­class woman’s role is that of a devoted wife and homemaker who should prim­arily be orientated towards the home and the family has remained fairly stable (Donner 2008a; Poggendorf-­Kakar 2001; Roy 1992; Seymour 1999). Since homemaking is associated with the do­mestic sphere, kitty-­party parti­cipa­tion is associated with outside self-­indulgence and consumerism, and con­sequently, parti­cip­ants tend to understate its im­port­ance in their lives. For the social sci­ent­ist investigating middle-­class lifestyles and femininity in con­tempor­ary India, how­ever, kitty-­parties are inter­esting because they constitute an arena for high-­caste middle-­class urban women to save money and network outside the family con­text. Furthermore, the kitty-­party is also inter­ esting because it opens a window to look at middle-­class women’s friendship, which turns out to be an im­port­ant part of the kitty-­party parti­cip­ants’ lives that tends to be downplayed in the anthropological liter­at­ure on South Asia.

The kitty-­party institution and middle-­class femininity in recent Indian history Very little liter­at­ure deals with kitty-­parties and it is hard to find any concrete evid­ence re­gard­ing the his­tory and de­velopment of the institution. Sethi (1995: 164) argues that the kitty-­party has de­veloped from a type of rotating saving asso­ci­ation among women that can be found in villages mainly in the southern parts of South Asia, where it goes under the names of kuri, chitty or chit fund. According to Sethi (1995: 164), who uses sources dating back to 1887, ‘the terms kuri, chitty (chit), or narukku derive from the Indian words meaning “writing”, “a piece of paper” or “paper cutting” ’, and refer to the pro­ced­ure of these saving asso­ci­ations where the name of each con­trib­utor is written on a piece of paper, and the paper is folded and put into a vessel from which the ‘winner’ is drawn. The kitty-­party institution differs from other forms of rotating saving asso­ci­ations found in South Asia in two ways. First, rather than emphasizing the saving aspect, the kitty-­party emphas­izes socializing and entertainment, and second, rather than being pop­ular among low-­income groups, the kitty-­party is patronized by the middle and upper classes (Sethi 1995: 167). In the Northern states of India, saving asso­ci­ations – and kitty-­parties – were unknown until the 1940s, but became increasingly pop­ular in urban areas of Punjab, Haryana and New Delhi from the 1950s onwards (Sethi 1995: 166). It is

Kitty-parties and middle-class femininity   165 likely that the emergence of the kitty-­party as we know it today, as a fem­in­ine middle-­class phenomenon, was closely linked to the his­tor­ical changes in India caused by the Second World War, Independence and Partition. An abundance of liter­at­ure on gender and modernity in co­lo­nial India has shown that, before the War, in the first half of the twentieth century, the nationalist movement idealized middle-­class, high-­caste women as repres­enta­tions of Indian spirituality and tradition (Chatterjee 1989; Sarkar 2001; Malhotra 2002). Women were thereby linked to the home (ghar), while men were seen as in charge of the mater­ial world, the sphere of modernization and eco­nomic exchange, the outside (bahir) as opposed to the inside of the home.3 Although women were encouraged to get an education and to take part in char­ity work, and although purdah, real phys­ical segregation in women’s quarters, became rare, the ideo­logy produced a specific emphasis on middle-­class do­mesticity and middle-­class women’s roles as housewives (Hancock 2001; Banerjee 2004). What happened to this middle-­class fem­ in­ine ideal of family orientation and modernity in the early post-­war and post-­colonial period? The Second World War and Partition were events that threw the normal out of balance on many levels.4 During the War, men were going away to fight, leaving women not only in charge of family comfort, but often also in charge of family eco­nomy. It has been shown how the War forced many women in the US and UK to take up paid work and how this, at least temporarily, affected their femininity and had an empowering effect on the former homemakers.5 In India the situ­ation was sim­ilar, in the sense that here also the War was a kind of liminal period where the normal order of things was put aside.6 With the end of the Second World War coinciding with Partition, Independence and nation building, how­ever, several things happened that affected middle-­class femininity and that may help to explain why kitty-­parties evolved as a middle-­class, fem­in­ine phenomenon. First, because many middle-­class ser­vice jobs that had previously been held by the British opened up to Indians and because of the state-­managed model of eco­nomic planning that was chosen by the Congress Party, this was a point in time when not only did the size of the middle-­class grow, but also nuclear household ar­range­ments became more common (Fernandes 2006; Varma 1991). Second, because the end of the War more or less coincided with Independence, being a socially engaged housewife con­tinued to be regarded as women’s con­tri­bu­tion to nation building (Forbes 2004: 254; Liddle and Joshi 1986; Oshikawa 2005). Third, because of Partition many fam­il­ies lost their properties and had to migrate to a new place. Taken together, these factors suggest that with Independence/Partition, many middle-­class women found themselves as housewives in nuclear households, far away from their own kin. Joining a savings group like a kitty-­party, where one could meet up with other middle-­class housewives, must therefore have made sense to many. It is, how­ever, likely that from the beginning, joining a kitty-­party was also about reinforcing middle-­class cultural notions of club life and having ‘some standing’; what in today’s parlance may be translated as ‘exposure’. Ritu, one of the kitty-­party parti­cip­ants that I inter­viewed, told me about her mother’s participation:

166   A. Waldrop I knew very well about kitty-­parties because my mother was in one. My grand­mother never had been, so I think it started with my mother’s generation. My mother and grand­mother emig­rated from Paki­stan around 1947, and over the years they got some standing. My father was a member of a club here in Delhi and my mother would often have her kitty-­parties at that club. From the 1970s onwards, with the emergence of the second wave of the women’s movement – and later with eco­nomic lib­eralization – the model of the socially engaged housewife that had become em­blem­atic of respectable, Indian middle-­class femininity was challenged by fem­in­ist discourses and a new consumerism (Caplan 1985; Liddle and Joshi 1986; Oshikawa 2005). In con­tempor­ ary India the homely housewife ideal, which to some extent has been stripped of its social engagement aspect, con­tinues to be held up as the model for the con­ ser­vat­ive, traditional, middle-­class majority. On the other hand, the ideal of the working woman has become im­port­ant to a younger, more lib­eral middle-­class minor­ity, mostly to be found in the metropolitan areas (Oshikawa 2005: 278; Uberoi 2006: 261; Donner 2008a; Waldrop 2011). Today, in view of neo­ liberalism, globalization and the emergence of the working woman ideal, kitty-­ parties look rather dated and one could have expected a decrease in their pop­ularity. This, how­ever, does not appear to be the case. Kitty-­parties are a widely attended institution among middle- and upper-­class urban women all over India and Paki­stan, and among South Asian emig­rants overseas.7 The phenomenon is also becoming increasingly commercialized. Restaurants and catering com­panies frequently advertise with kitty-­parties in mind8 and in 2002, the Zee TV channel even aired a Hindi serial entitled Kittie Party, about the lives and friendships of eight women who met once a month for a kitty-­party.

Middle-­class position and middle-­class making of the kitty-­party women How to define the Indian middle class is highly debated and has varied from so-­ called ‘Macaulayan’ approaches that emphas­ize the co­lo­nial middle class’s role as cultural brokers and have therefore also looked at English education, via more Marxian approaches that focus on occupation and type of employment in the production pro­cess, to Weberian approaches that look at income and consumption patterns (Béteille 2001; Markovits 2001). What is clear, how­ever, is that while the Indian middle class, like any other, is not a homogenous cat­egory,9 the number of households with the means to count as middle class has grown substantially over the last decades.10 This growth of the middle class is in­vari­ably linked to eco­nomic lib­eralization, and the term ‘new middle class’ has entered the vocabulary. Mostly, the term ‘new middle class’ has been used to refer to the upwardly mobile class segment that has been able to take ad­vant­age of the eco­ nomic structural adjustment pol­icies, and is counted as middle class either in terms of consumption of what have been labelled ‘middle-­class products’, or in

Kitty-parties and middle-class femininity   167 terms of the occupation of one of the increasing number of white-­collar (i.e. middle-­class) jobs. Fernandes, how­ever, uses the term ‘new middle class’ differently, as she argues that the ‘middle class is not “new” in terms of its structural or social basis’, but that ‘rather its newness refers to a pro­cess of production of a distinctive social and polit­ical identity that represents and lays claim to the bene­ fits of lib­eralization’ (2006: xviii). In view the heterogeneity of the middle class in India and in view of the many definitions of who can be counted as middle class in the con­tempor­ary, neolib­ eral setting, I find it use­ful to draw upon Bourdieu’s (1984) capital concepts, thereby taking eco­nomic, cultural and social capitals into account. Then it is pos­ sible to argue, in very gen­eral terms, that (i) middle-­class people have increased their eco­nomic capital and consumption capa­city over the last two decades (Donner 2008a: 56); and (ii) there seems to be a change in terms of how the eco­ nomic capital is invested. Whereas previously the middle class would habitually convert eco­nomic capital into other forms of capital – i.e. education, consumption of culture and/or club mem­ber­ship – to maintain its class position, it appears to be more legitimate for the ‘new’ middle class to wholeheartedly earn and spend and indulge in more blatant conspicuous consumption (Béteille 2001; Fernandes 2006; Kulkarni 1993; Varma 1998). Although it is im­pos­sible and meaningless to exactly define the middle-­class in con­tempor­ary New Delhi, middle-­class households have certain traits and orientations in common: They engage in, or are married to someone engaged in, white-­collar jobs; they have had access to English language tuition and higher education; and their residence is located in a middle-­class neigh­bour­hood with sim­ilar residents (thereby indicating, in the cases when they are house owners, a rather substantial eco­nomic capital). When I here define the kitty-­party women as middle class, I do that on the basis of these factors. However, since the women do not parti­cip­ate in the labour market it is their husbands’ type of job that is of inter­est here. All the kitty-­party parti­cip­ants lived in different middle-­class ‘colonies’ in south and south-­west Delhi and all were married or widowed and had adult chil­ dren. At the time of the inter­views they were in their late fifties or early sixties, and all living husbands were recently retired from the civil ser­vice or running small businesses such as jeweller’s shops. In terms of education, all husbands and some of the women had a college education. Some of the women had not been to English-­medium school and were obviously not comfortable talking to me in English. When visiting the women at home, it appeared that the eco­nomic standing of their households was roughly equal, with the exception of one of the widows who was signi­fic­antly worse off but whose education was far superior to that of some others.11 In terms of ethnic background, they all came from various parts of North India. Most of the women were Hindus, a few were Sikhs and one was Parsi. An inter­esting point in this connection that I will return to in the ana­ lysis, is how their different ‘com­munal’ backgrounds came up as a pos­it­ively loaded topic during the kitty-­party meetings held at parti­cip­ants’ homes in terms of food-­talk.

168   A. Waldrop With the growth of the middle class in recent years and with the im­port­ance of cultural capital for the making of the middle class (Bourdieu 1984; Fernandes 2006; Liechty 2003), kitty-­parties can be regarded as an arena where non-­ employed middle-­class housewives may get in­forma­tion and network. Therefore, although they are not employed and in Marxian terms are not producing any value, middle-­class housewives may be regarded as con­trib­ut­ing to the middle-­ class making of their respective households (Caplan 1985; Donner 2008a). This type of non-­paid ‘work’ has also been referred to as status production work (Papanek 1979; Sharma 1986), and gossip, which in this con­text is regarded as in­forma­tion gath­er­ing, constitutes a typical example. When, for instance, women gossip about pro­spective marriage can­did­ates, about the pros and cons of private schools, or about where to buy new consumer goods, they can be viewed as engaging in ac­tiv­ities that may increase the cultural, symbolic and/or social capital of the household. In this chapter it is from such a per­spect­ive that I view the kitty-­party phenomenon, with its apparently old-­fashioned housewife image, as an arena where middle-­class women not only get the chance to meet their friends and save money, but where they also get to con­trib­ute to the middle-­class making of their households and take part in New Delhi’s neolib­eral, global scene.

Joining a kitty-­party The two women that I inter­viewed about their kitty-­party parti­cipa­tion were Madhu (69 years) and Ritu (60 years). Both were upper-­caste Hindus from North India and had been housewives all their adult lives. Their husbands had now retired, but one had previously worked in the civil ser­vice and the other as an engineer in a construction com­pany. In the remaining parts of the chapter I will ana­lyse what they said during the inter­views about what kitty-­party parti­cipa­tion meant to them and compare this with the eth­no­graphy based on parti­cip­ant observation. In the inter­views, I started out by asking when and why they joined a kitty-­ party for the first time. Madhu gave the fol­low­ing answer: I joined my kitty long time back; 20–30 years ago. My husband and I have been married for 45 years, and during the first years of marriage it was no time for me to think about these things. As a newlywed, I lived with my in-­ laws in a joint family in North Delhi. I have five younger sisters-­in-law and my husband is the eldest. I was 24 when I married and my youngest sister-­ in-law was ten years old. My in-­laws were very good to me – they were too good – we had a mutual understanding and they gave me all the respons­ib­ility for looking after my sisters-­in-law. I would pick them up from school and look after them. One by one my three own daughters were born, so during the first ten years of marriage I was very busy with my own chil­dren and in-­laws. I had friends, but I never thought about joining any kitty, because I was too preoccupied in my in-­laws’ house.

Kitty-parties and middle-class femininity   169 As my chil­dren grew older and my sisters-­in-law got married, I had more time. I started in a kitty-­party because we were a group of women that were neigh­bours and we became friends because of that. We started to meet after lunch at my house, because my in-­laws were too good and let me have other women over. That is how it started. I do not remember how many we were origin­ally, but we are still seven or eight women from that core group who meet each other at different types of kitty-­parties. We see that Madhu joined many years back, but not as a newlywed. It was only after approximately ten years of marriage, when her chil­dren had reached school-­going age and she was less preoccupied with housework, that she joined. In this account, two things are remark­able: first, that it was a group of neigh­bours who had become friends that started the kitty-­party, and second, that her in-­laws are de­scribed as ‘too good’, as they allowed her to have friends over at the joint family house. While this might sound unremark­able to readers not familiar with the South Asian sys­tem of patrilocality, her in-­laws were clearly lib­eral, as the high-­caste Hindu femininity ideal normally does not allow a daughter-­in-law the freedom to de­velop friendships with other women (Donner 2006; Frøystad 2005). Selflessness and austerity are still im­port­ant virtues for this generation of Indian middle-­class women, and since this implies that women are supposed to put their in-­laws and chil­dren first, friendship with non-­kin is regarded as detrimental to the image of a good wife and mother.12 Ritu, who is part of that same core group, had a slightly different his­tory re­gard­ing her involvement with the kitty party, as her mother-­in-law and one of her sisters-­in-law were attending kitty-­parties before her: We lived in Srinagar during the early years of my marriage and moved back to Delhi in 1985. I am just a housewife, and I knew very well about kitty-­ parties because my mother was in one . . . When I joined, I did it because my sister-­in-law was in a kitty, and she asked me to join. Although Madhu was invited to join by her neigh­bours and Ritu joined through her sister-­in-law, their reasons for joining were the same. As Ritu put it: ‘I did it to get out of the house, to meet people and meet friends.’ They also emphas­ized that, because kitty-­parties were regarded as a leisure activity, they had to adjust their parti­cipa­tion to fit with the life of the family: ‘When my chil­dren were small, I just parti­cip­ated in a few kitty-­parties, because I was busy with them and I couldn’t leave them alone. When they got married I joined several more kitty-­ parties.’ We see that both waited to join a kitty-­party until parti­cipa­tion was regarded as com­pat­ible with family duties, espe­cially looking after small chil­dren. We also see that as the chil­dren grew older and married – and their mothers-­in-law became older and less power­ful – the women increased the number of kitties. That they have con­tinued with kitty-­parties over a number of years and over time

170   A. Waldrop also increased the number indicates that parti­cipa­tion is im­port­ant to the women. Although neither of them mention loneliness expli­citly as a reason for joining kitty-­parties, the need they both express to get out of the house and meet people indicates that at times they felt somewhat isolated and alone within the walls of the house. In the remaining sections of this chapter, I take a closer look at three aspects of kitty-­parties that seem to be most im­port­ant for women’s con­tinued parti­cipa­tion, namely saving, ‘exposure’ and friendship.

Saving money, for what? Since we have seen that kitty-­parties have been labelled rotating saving asso­ci­ ations (Sethi 1995), I will begin by looking at the saving aspect, including the purpose of saving. Although the drawing of the kitty is by no means the highlight of the meeting, saving money is not an unim­port­ant aspect of kitty-­parties to the parti­cip­ants. It is im­port­ant to understand in this regard that to draw the kitty is not the same as a raffle, where every­one has the same stat­ist­ical pos­sib­il­ ity to win each time. During one round of kitty-­party meetings all the women will be drawn once and once only. When drawing the kitty, the unpredictabil­ity lies in when one will be drawn, not if one will be drawn. And as the introductory example shows, the question of when one will be drawn can be manipulated, so that the draw turns into a rather predictable affair. In order to understand the role of saving money for the kitty-­party parti­cip­ ants, one needs to ask what they save for. In the introductory description of a kitty-­party meeting, I mention that the hostess showed me some expensive-­ looking mater­ial that she had bought with previous savings. Another parti­cip­ant wanted to spend her kitty-­savings on a trip to Scotland by herself, and she therefore preferred to wait longer for a larger share. Generally it seemed that at the time the women spent their savings on luxury items for themselves that they would other­wise not feel comfortable with spending money on. In the inter­views re­corded in 2006 I took the oppor­tun­ity to ask in more detail about how they spent the savings, and found that this was an issue that both Madhu and Ritu were a little hesitant to talk about. Their reluctance in this regard might stem from several factors, for instance the secrecy sur­round­ ing money mat­ters more gen­erally, the embarrassment the open display of consumer items can still cause, or the notion that women should be selfless and therefore not spend money on personal luxuries. When prompted, Ritu said: I re-­circulate from kitty-­party to kitty-­party, so I do not save new money in all of them. Over the years I have spent on different things. This is a joint family house and when we came from Srinagar it was an open space. So I have spent some of my kitty money on this flat, for instance I had tiles put in the bathroom. And then I spent quite a lot of my savings on my daughter’s wedding, because it is a custom in India to give money and jewellery when the daughter of the house gets married. I also save.

Kitty-parties and middle-class femininity   171 When I asked if she had spent on travel abroad, she confirmed that: Yes, three years back my husband and I went to Amer­ica and eight or nine years back we went to Europe; to Switzerland, Holland and London. This last summer we went to Malaysia, to Kuala Lumpur. Parts of these trips were funded with kitty money. Since she did not mention spending on luxury items for herself, as the two women in the introductory example did, I asked her about investing in jewellery and clothes. To this she had to say: I prefer to spend on my family, but if that is taken care of, I spend on myself. Sometimes I spend on my husband, because I get the money from him. Clearly, this housewife used the kitty-­party as a way to increase her eco­nomic flex­ib­il­ity, and spent the money on luxuries that bene­fited her nuclear family within the extended family setting. She was proud to put her family first and argued that one can only begin to spend on other things when the family is taken care of.13 Madhu stressed that she did not spend on herself, but used the kitty to indulge her grandchil­dren and on wedding presents. She emphas­ized that she was saving to be prepared for any eventuality, and added that many women would keep the fact that they saved hidden from their husband. Because her husband was generous and provided her with funds whenever she wanted anything, how­ever, she said that there was no need to hide her savings from him. Comparing what was said about how the kitty-­savings are spent during the meetings and what was said in the inter­views, a common thread is that kitty-­ party savings, when they are not recirculated, are spent on luxury items. In the inter­views, how­ever, both women hesitated about admitting that they spent the money on luxuries and they emphas­ized that it was luxuries that bene­fited the whole family. Their hesitancy was prob­ably due to the ambiguous attitude to the  consumerist culture of the post-­liberalization period that many people of Delhi’s upper middle class hold (see Van Wessel in this volume). On the one hand, various kinds of conspicuous consumption associated with the nouveaux riches is viewed as ‘un-­Indian’ and associated with self-­indulgence, Westernization and emptiness (Uberoi 2006). On the other hand, the metropolitan middle classes have disproportionally bene­fited from the eco­nomic lib­eralization, and new consumption practices are indulged in order to show off social status as part of middleclassness in ever-­evolving ways (Liechty 2003; Fernandes 2006; Derné 2008). Furthermore, when both women emphas­ized that they spent prim­arily on luxuries that bene­fited the whole family, and not on luxury items for their own personal use, they expressed a concern with presenting themselves within the moral framework of proper, home-­oriented, selfless middle-­class femininity. As pointed out by Bloch and Parry (1989), money circulation is often tied up with morality, and the kitty-­party, where ‘money goes round’, is no exception

172   A. Waldrop (Ardener and Burman 1995). Morality is here made rel­ev­ant in at least three ways. First, morality is made rel­ev­ant in terms of the way the saved money is tied up, like in a savings fund in the bank that can only be accessed peri­od­ic­ally. Therefore, this is money that the women in prin­ciple can control, without the interference of husbands (from whom they get the money) and without the moral demands of family members in need. Because the kitty-­savings are regarded as special funds that the women have sole access to, morality is also made rel­ev­ant in terms of what is con­sidered legitimate use of the money for middle-­class women. Hence, the emphasis of both Madhu and Ritu during the inter­views on spending money prim­arily on family mat­ters and travels with their spouse, and not on personal luxuries, should be understood as a way for these middle-­class women to legitimize their luxury consumption. Third, morality is made rel­ev­ant in terms of the neces­sar­ily long-­term trust between parti­cip­ants due to the large amount of money that the women put into the kitty at every meeting. I heard many stories about how a kitty-­party group had recruited a new neigh­bour or someone they did not know very well into their circle, only to find that the newcomer withdrew as soon as she had won. In the event of such reckless beha­vi­our, the con­tri­bu­tions of all other parti­cip­ants are lost. Thus, everybody participating in a kitty-­party emphas­ized that they only recruited family and friends.

Being ‘like sisters’ From an anthropological per­spect­ive, the most inter­esting aspect of the kitty-­ party phenomenon is that it is an arena where Indian middle-­class women de­velop friendships. This is also the theme both women dwelled upon during the inter­views and the aspect that Shobhaa Dé, the author of the TV serial Kittie Party, said had triggered her inter­est in the pro­ject when she was inter­viewed in connection with a party celeb­rat­ing the serial.14 In this ethnographic section I will look at the meaning of sociality for these housewives and how close relationships fit in with norms of middle-­class femininity. Studies of women’s life­cycles in South Asia solely focus on women as family members – as daughters, wives, daughters-­in-law, mothers and grand­mothers.15 Studies of woman-­to-woman relations are extremely rare, both in the case of so-­ called blood relations, as between sisters,16 as well as social relations between female friends. This lack of studies of female friendship in the anthropological liter­at­ure on South Asia is prob­ably due to the fact that female friendship in many settings, and certainly in upper-­caste fam­il­ies with a his­tory of seclusion, is mar­ginalized. In her study of middle-­class Brahmins in Kanpur, Frøystad remarks that ‘friendship was predominately a male cat­egory of social relationships’ (2005: 147). The women she worked with did not talk about friendship and did not seem to have any friends outside the imme­diate family circle. To them, ‘the most im­port­ant social ties beyond their homes were their female family members and rel­at­ives.’ (2005: 147). Frøystad sees this lack of female friendship prim­arily as a result of upper-­caste women’s limited freedom of movement outside the home. Because women ideally are supposed to be selfless

Kitty-parties and middle-class femininity   173 and devote their lives to the home and the family, or to social causes, they are not expected to have friends outside the family. Likewise, in her study of middle­class women in Calcutta, Donner (2008a) points out that women were not expected to make friends, and indeed that mothers discouraged their chil­dren (both boys and girls) from making friends at school and in the neighbourhood. Urbanization and ser­vice life, how­ever, imply two things that are of inter­est for understanding kitty-­parties as an arena for female friendship. First, as mentioned above, many middle-­class women live in nuclear households and therefore have no other women in the household to socialize with, implying that they easily may feel lonely – ‘sitting idle and not going anywhere,’ as Ritu put it. Second, when these women venture out to various middle-­class arenas in the city such as weddings or clubs, they meet women in a sim­ilar situ­ation. Participating in kitty-­parties may therefore be regarded as a balancing act for middle-­class women, between on the one hand portraying oneself as selfless and home-­ oriented, and on the other hand satisfying a need to get out of the house and meet other people. The emphasis of the parti­cip­ants on the familiar and sisterly aspects of kitty-­parties should be understood in this context. Ritu used the term ‘core group’ when she talked about the women she had befriended through the kitty-­party: I am still in that same kitty I started in. Our chil­dren were small when we joined, now they are big, but I am still with that same group. They have become almost a family. We are five to seven women friends in that core group, and my sister-­in-law is still there. Madhu explained that now that her husband had completed the final im­port­ant life­cycle ritual, namely his retirement, the couple had added a joint kitty to the list: Now we are ageing and my husband does not like to go out. He has worked all his life and he does not have any friends that he has kept contact with, so that is why we have the couple kitty. The men have met through us women. They did not know each other previously. In fact, I was the one who made that couple kitty. We meet once a month, and now also our husbands have become acquainted. During weddings they do not get bored anymore, because they have someone to talk to. Since the core group of women had been meeting over many years, they felt very close and would frequently refer to one another as ‘being like a sister’. And during the inter­view, Ritu said: ‘In weddings we all go together. We have become like a big extended family.’ By using kinship metaphors, kitty-­party women create what anthropologists often refer to as ‘fictive’ kin relations. The shared meals, the trust neces­sary to rotate the winnings, and last but not least the secur­ity afforded by the savings the kitty-­party allows, create close bonds among women, who might de­velop friendships that serve some of the roles reserved for

174   A. Waldrop kinship in pub­lic imagination. The emphasis on home-­cooked meals par­ticu­larly seems to sup­port the pro­cess of kinning17 as it strengthens social and emotional bonds between previously unrelated people (Conlon 1995: 118; Miller 1995: 276). By cooking for their friends, these housewives extend the love and care reserved for the family to en­com­pass their relationships with their friends, who become part of their intimate and do­mestic lives. They also act like extended family when they meet as couples at the couple kitty or when they attend weddings together, and that their husbands have now got to know one another well is an im­port­ant element in this familiarity. In some instances the close relationships de­veloped over time at kitty-­parties even transcend fictive kinship beyond the use of metaphors. Ritu mentioned the fol­low­ing example about two women she knew who had become extended family members due to kitty-­party gossip: One of my friends’ sons got married like this, because we talked about suit­ able young women at kitty-­party meetings. We know exactly the nature of other kitty-­party women’s family. We know that they belong to a good family and can re­com­mend one another’s chil­dren for marriage. The intimacy Ritu expressed, both by saying that they knew ‘the nature of other kitty-­party members’ family’ and the fact that the gossip sometimes led to actual matches, indicate that in this situ­ation kitty-­party friends took on the roles tradi­ tion­ally played by extended kin. To sum up, the sociality the kitty-­party affords is the factor that the parti­cip­ ants would emphas­ize most strongly when I asked them about why they con­ tinued with kitty-­parties. The friendship was very im­port­ant to my informants and they viewed the core group as an exten­sion of their fam­il­ies and adopted the beha­vi­oural codes of kin on several occasions. At the same time, it is im­port­ant to note that when they used terms such as ‘like a sister’ and ‘like a big extended family’, they also expressed that it was not the same as real kin. Keeping in mind that the parti­cip­ants came from three different com­munal backgrounds – Hindu, Sikh and Parsi – the relations between the kitty-­party parti­cip­ants went beyond familial hierarchies of com­mun­ity and caste. Nevertheless, through this sisterly friendship the women found that they managed to con­trib­ute to their own family, which reconfirmed the desirabil­ity of the kitty-­party as an institution. The lives of the parti­cip­ants, therefore, were enlarged through their friendship in many pos­it­ive ways.

Exposure As mentioned in the introduction when I first asked if I could join the kitty-­party for a while, the women’s response was that a kitty party could not be of inter­est to a researcher as it was only women dressing up in order to get together, to eat well and gossip. In view of what went on at the meetings that I parti­cip­ated in, I would say that the women here point at three im­port­ant elements in a kitty-­party

Kitty-parties and middle-class femininity   175 meeting, which also partly coincide with the so-­called three s’s – sari (clothes), sona (gold) and shadi (weddings). In this last ethnographic section I will ana­lyse the im­port­ance of the kitty-­party to the parti­cip­ants in terms of what goes on at the meetings. More specifically I will look at such mundane ac­tiv­ities as dressing up, going out, eating and gossiping and ana­lyse whether the clue to understanding the con­tinued pop­ularity of the kitty-­party is to be found here. When I asked Ritu and Madhu why they had con­tinued with kitty-­parties for all these years, both emphas­ized that it had to do with the same things that made them join in the first place. For both, their role as housewives meant that they spent most of their time at home, so being part of a kitty-­party was a good way to get out and meet people. Ritu put it this way: I do it to meet other women so that we can talk about things and to get dressed up nicely. If you are home you are just sitting idle and you are not going anywhere. If we do not have the kitty-­party, we will just think about going out or about calling a friend to meet up, but you will hardly ever get around to actu­ally doing it. Kitty-­parties give mo­tiva­tion to go out, because you have an appointment, so you have to. At the kitty-­party all the women were nicely dressed up in silk saris or shalwar kamizes. As noted earl­ier, it is common in India to conceptually separate the sphere of the home (ghar) and the sphere of the world/outside (bahir), and going to a kitty-­ party means going outside, ‘into the world’. What constitutes the ‘outside’ is differentiated according to con­text (Hancock 1999). During my fieldwork and later stays in New Delhi I have found that how a middle-­class woman is dressed is a sign of how she views the occasion. At home, many women would linger in their nightgowns and bathrobes during the day even with ser­vants around, and not get dressed until they had an appointment to go out. Even to step outside to buy veget­ables from one of the veget­able vendors that walk around in middle-­class neigh­bour­hoods with their carts would not require a woman to put on her ‘proper clothes’, that is, a sari or a shalwar. These do­mestic duties are part of women’s roles as housewives. When a middle-­class woman ventures ‘out in the world’, how­ever, she will always be made-­up and perfectly dressed in crisp, ironed clothes.18 The kitty-­party circle that I parti­cip­ated in held their meetings every second time at the home of a member and at a res­taur­ant. A core group of this kitty-­ party had met over a period of many years, and parti­cip­ated in several kitties together. Madhu explained: I am in so many kitties: Hotel kitty, where we go to five-­star hotels; card kitty, where we play rummy and eat lunch; and couple kitty where we meet in the evenings with our husbands. Each kitty-­party meets once a month, so I have at least one kitty-­party a week. Whether the kitty-­party that I attended was held at a res­taur­ant or at someone’s residence, judging from the quality of clothes and jewellery worn by the women,

176   A. Waldrop they obviously viewed all meetings as an occasion for dressing up in their best clothes. To my interlocutors, the kitty-­party was an oppor­tun­ity to wear one of the many silk saris and the gold jewellery Indian middle-­class women keep stored in their wardrobes to be worn on the occasion of weddings and the like. Looked at from the per­spect­ive of the housewife, the kitty-­party presents an occasion to get ‘out in the world’. Dressing up is, how­ever, also about distinctive know­ledge and about cultural capital. Silk saris are costly to acquire and to maintain, and wearing them on such minor social occasions is not only an act of conspicuous consumption. The intense discussion of sari mater­ials, the weave and patterns that took place at the kitty-­party de­scribed above, also provide an oppor­tun­ity to show off skills and expertise about clothes and fashion. Because of this, even the woman who holds the kitty-­party in her own home is to some extent ‘out in the world’ when she is at the kitty-­party and dresses up for the occasion. Eating a large meal is a key element in any kitty-­party meeting, and talk about food also plays a huge role in kitty-­party conversation. It is inter­esting to note the sharp contrast between the food discourse that took place at the kitty-­party meeting de­scribed in the introduction and the food discourse that took place when we met at a res­taur­ant. In the cases when we met at someone’s home, all parti­cip­ants would praise the food and ask for recipes. The fact that the women came from different religious and regional com­munit­ies was played out expli­citly in a pos­it­ive manner at these home meetings as dishes would reflect the com­munal background of the hostess. When the kitty-­party was held at a res­taur­ant, how­ever, the women would routinely complain about slow ser­vice and the bad quality of the food. I remember in par­ticu­lar their beha­vi­our at a Chinese res­taur­ant we once went to. The way the women in this case ordered the waiters about and insisted on getting a new serving of a dish that for some reason was unsatis­fact­ory made me ask myself why they bothered to eat out in the first place. Even more than in the case of the talk about sari mater­ials, the women’s beha­vi­our and the food-­discourse that took place during kitty par­ties – both when we met at a res­taur­ant and at a member’s home – can be regarded as ways of creating sameness among the parti­cip­ants and marking distinction vis-­à-vis outsiders. Because the women value the skill of making good food – for these housewives their know­ledge about food is closely tied to taking care of their own home and family – food here serves par­ticu­larly well, depending on the con­text, to either create solid­arity and intimacy, or to sustain rank and distance (Appadurai 1981).19 In the case of visits to res­taur­ants, the women used the oppor­tun­ity to display their know­ledge about food and its pre­para­tion, by implying that they were the real experts, and display their class-­based superi­or­ity vis-­ à-vis low class waiters and res­taur­ant owners. In the case of the kitty-­party at a member’s home, the women displayed their sim­ilar class position and created solid­arity by praising the food and discussing regional recipes among equals. As mentioned earl­ier, both Ritu and Madhu emphas­ized that getting out of the house was one of the most im­port­ant reasons for their long-­term parti­cipa­tion, and so far we have seen that because this entails dressing up and eating food, it

Kitty-parties and middle-class femininity   177 implies that the women get a chance to show off their expertise and get re­cog­ni­ tion from equals. ‘Getting out of the house’ entails, how­ever, more than this. It also entails that the parti­cip­ants get so-­called ‘exposure’. ‘To get exposure’ is an expression used widely today among students and young professionals, who use it in the con­text of global eco­nomic and cultural integration as a term indicating cosmo­pol­itan lifestyles (Fuller and Narasimhan 2006; De Neve this volume). Ritu used this expression when she answered my query about how her husband felt about all her kitty-­parties: He will ask me sometimes how I spend the day, but he wants me to enjoy myself. When you are in a kitty-­party you get exposure, meet so many people and go places. My husband is busy and he can’t go with me all the time. It is hard to say here whether it is her husband who in fact uses this term, or Ritu who uses it on behalf of her husband, but Ritu clearly chose to attribute the desire for ‘exposure’ to him. By using this term, Ritu indicates that ‘exposure’ is about something that is regarded as beneficial. So what does ‘exposure’ entail? In my view, the term is two-­sided in the sense that it refers to both exposing oneself to others and being exposed to the influence of others. Exposure is thereby about going out to see other people and be seen, and about giving and receiving in­forma­tion. In con­tempor­ary India this also entails being exposed to global imageries. From such a per­spect­ive, the kitty-­party with its dressing-­up, eating out, gossiping and meeting of friends is a great place to be exposed to – and through gossip and discussion, digest – new global, commercial trends. That many kitty-­parties now meet at res­taur­ants, rather than at someone’s home or at a club, is inter­esting because it increases the possib­il­ities for ‘exposure’ in the sense that the ones at res­taur­ants are seen by a potentially much larger audience. As such, it signals a new turn in middle-­class femininity. Eating out in India was tradi­tion­ally regarded as unattractive because of Hindu ideo­logical concerns re­gard­ing purity (Conlon 1995: 92). With neo­liberalism and a more cosmo­pol­itan modernity, eating out has not only become a frequent pastime for the middle class, but it has also become one of the markers of middle-­class identities, and one of the prime areas for the accumulation of cultural and symbolic capital (Conlon 1995; Donner this volume). In the case of the kitty-­party, how­ever, where it is a group of women eating out alone, middle-­class women’s relationships with this new practice are ambiguous. On the one hand, there is more ‘exposure’ involved in the sense of showing off and being seen when eating at a res­taur­ant than at someone’s home, but on the other hand, eating out without a male companion is not regarded as proper female beha­vi­our (Donner 2008b; Waldrop forthcoming). There is also ‘exposure’ involved when having the kitty-­party at a member’s home – so-­called home-­kitties – although the ‘exposure’ one gets here is in some ways different from the type one gets at res­taur­ants. When the kitty-­parties that I attended were held at a member’s home, there would gen­erally be more gossip, more food-­talk and, as mentioned in the introductory example, the pos­sib­il­ity of

178   A. Waldrop watching Amer­ican soaps on television. At the kitty-­party, the conversation extended to various topics of inter­est and the in­forma­tion exchanged through gossip covered every­thing from finding a suit­able boy or girl for an arranged marriage, via know­ledge about new schools, to new consumer goods that had appeared in the market (see Van Wessel in this volume for sim­ilar discussions among Baroda residents). When the parti­cip­ants in addition watch and discuss Amer­ican soaps together, a global dimension is added to their conversation. Home-­kitties thereby gave the parti­cip­ants an oppor­tun­ity to discuss and digest global imageries in a closed, friendly setting. With res­taur­ants like Pizza Hut now catering to kitty-­parties with special advertisements in the news­papers,20 one sees clearly how the commercialization that comes with neo­liberalism and globalization has entered the ‘kitty-­party world’. In view of this one may wonder whether the con­tinued pop­ularity of home-­kitties can be regarded as a sign of kitty-­party women resisting global commerce. What I have shown above, how­ever, indicates that this is not the case. Home-­kitties might appear closer and more closed than restaurant-­kitties, but global commerce has the abil­ity to penetrate into the closest circles and enters in this case through other channels, such as television. To sum up, with neo­liberalism and the strains of com­peti­tion within the con­ tempor­ary Indian middle class, wherein networking with the right people at the right places and consuming the ‘right’ goods have become markers of middle-­ class position, parti­cipa­tion in a kitty-­party – both at a member’s home and at a res­taur­ant – is a means by which housewives can get ‘exposure’. Because the ‘exposure’ involved through gossip, networking and showing off might be converted by the parti­cip­ants into cultural and social capital (Bourdieu 1984), parti­ cipa­tion makes women well-­equipped to con­trib­ute to the ongoing pro­ject of creating a suit­able middle-­class identity (Liechty 2003). It is in this sense that parti­cipa­tion in a kitty-­party might be regarded as status production work (Papanek 1979; Sharma 1986).

Middle-­aged middle-­class women in a new liberalized world In this chapter I have asked what it is about the kitty-­party phenomenon that can account for its con­tinued pop­ularity among middle-­class women in urban India. Kitty-­parties, as we know them now, started up at a point in time when Indian middle-­class soci­ety and gender ideals differed in many ways from the con­ tempor­ary neolib­eral situ­ation, and from today’s per­spect­ive they appear slightly dated. In the ana­lysis I have focused on saving, friendship and ‘exposure’ as three different but partly interrelated aspects of kitty-­parties, and found that all three are im­port­ant for understanding their con­tinued popularity. Saving is im­port­ant because when it is done within the con­text of the kitty-­ party, it is pos­sible for the women, who are mostly housewives without an income of their own, to get access to money that can be put apart from the household eco­nomy and used for specific, luxury consumption. Saving is also im­port­ant because it ties the women together morally and therefore it is linked to

Kitty-parties and middle-class femininity   179 another aspect of the kitty-­party, namely friendship. As pointed out above, although female friendship appears almost non-­existent according to the anthropological liter­at­ure on South Asia, the kitty-­party parti­cip­ants emphas­ized it as the most im­port­ant reason for their con­tinued parti­cipa­tion over so many years, and compared the kitty-­party to ‘a big extended family’. Lastly, the parti­cip­ants emphas­ized ‘getting out of the house’ as an im­port­ant reason for their con­tinued parti­cipa­tion and linked this to ‘exposure’, which was regarded as bene­fi­cial for the women and their fam­il­ies. ‘Exposure’ was in fact used to legitimize their parti­cipa­tion in kitty-­parties because it was regarded as providing them with in­forma­tion and contacts, which I have argued can be used to increase their respective households’ cultural and social capital. Throughout this chapter I have not ranked these three aspects in terms of im­port­ance for understanding the con­tinued pop­ularity of the kitty-­party institution. Rather, it seems to me that whereas saving and friendship were crucial elements to participating middle-­class women at the time when kitty-­parties became an institution around 1950, exposure is prob­ably the aspect that best explains the con­tinued pop­ularity in con­tempor­ary neolib­eral India. At the time of Independence/Partition many fam­il­ies were uprooted and had to settle down in a new con­ text without the extended family nearby. For middle-­class housewives it might have made sense to join a kitty-­party because of the oppor­tun­ities both for saving and for making friends, without stepping far outside the bound­ar­ies of proper female middle-­class beha­vi­our. In con­tempor­ary, neolib­eral India, how­ever, the cultural markers that are used to define middleclassness are increasingly commercialized and constantly changing, creating a sense of unease and com­peti­ tion. In such a setting, where keeping up to date has become a never-­ending pro­cess, it makes sense that ‘exposure’ is so highly valued.

Notes   1 With 15 members, the duration of the kitty-­party equals 15 meetings, which implies that each member saves INR 45,000 during one round. (INR 3,000 multiplied by 15 equals INR 45,000.) During my fieldwork in 1997–1998 the exchange rate with the dollar was approximately $1 = INR 40, so at that time the women saved over $1,000, which by Indian stand­ards was a large amount of money.   2 These nine months of fieldwork in 1997–1998 formed the basis for a DrPolit thesis (Waldrop 2002) on the ‘old’, estab­lished, educated middle class in New Delhi. Prior to this, I had lived in Delhi from March 1992 to Septem­ber 1994 while working for the UNDP, and during this period I got to know many middle-­class residents who later became im­port­ant for my research.   3 The Indian distinction between the home (ghar) and the world (bahir) is sim­ilar, but not equal, to the Western distinction between the private and the pub­lic. Ghar in Hindi means both house and home, and in the anthropological liter­at­ure it is associated with family, one’s own, the interior, and with order, hygiene and purity. Bahir refers to the oppos­ite of ghar and is associated with strangers, the pub­lic, the exterior and with dis­order, dirt and pollution. See e.g. Chakrabarty (1994); Chatterjee (1989, 1993); Dickey (2000); Hancock (1999, 2001); and Kaviraj (1997).   4 See Butalia (1997) and Das (1995) for empirical ana­lyses of some of the effects of Partition on women.

180   A. Waldrop   5 For the case of the US, see e.g. Gluck (1987), Hartmann (1982), Milkman (1987).   6 See Waldrop (forthcoming) for an argument about the effects of the Second World War on middle-­class Indian femininity.   7 See Srinivasan (1995) for details of rotating saving asso­ci­ations among South Asians in Oxford, UK. The kitty-­party women I interacted with in New Delhi told me about rel­at­ives in Canada and the US who were into kitty-­parties.   8 See e.g. www.pizzahut.co.in/dinein/kittypar­ties.php [accessed 13 Au­gust 2011] and http://bangalore.locanto.in/ID_102202509/Home-­Cooked-Food-­for-Parties-­BdayEngagements-­Kitty-par­ties.html [accessed 13 Au­gust 2011].   9 Because of the heterogeneity of the middle class in India, it has been noted that ‘prior to the 1990s, social sci­ent­ists gen­erally preferred to talk of the middle classes’ (Markovits 2001: 43). See also Misra (1961). 10 Although estim­ates re­gard­ing its size vary profoundly between less than 100 million and 300 million (Prakash 1994; Béteille 2001: 75; Fernandes 2006: 226), there is more agreement re­gard­ing its growth. According to ‘the National Council for Applied Economic Research (NCAER) the middle-­class grew from 8 per cent of the popu­la­tion in 1986 to 18 per cent in 2000’ (Poggendorf-­Kakar 2001). See also Donner (2008a: 56). 11 This widow illus­trates the difficulty of judging class position on the basis of where people live, and par­ticu­larly so in the case of women. In 2006 she lived together with her married son, his wife and their little daughter in a flat in a middle-­class neigh­bour­ hood in south Delhi. In 2007, how­ever, the son sold the flat and moved to the US with his wife and child. He made ar­range­ments for his mother so that she moved in with his wife’s parents. The widow, therefore, con­tinued to live in a middle-­class neigh­ bour­hood in New Delhi, but was left in a vulner­able situation. 12 See also Donner (this volume) and Waldrop (forthcoming) for more detailed ethnographic accounts of how the middle class ideal of the homely housewife, who is selfless and oriented towards home and family, is expressed variously in different generations of urban middle-­class women in North India. 13 When the women here use the English term ‘family’, they refer to their own household, which could be nuclear or patrilocal semi-­extended. In some other cases, how­ ever, they referred to family to mean kin who were not living in their household. 14 According to Shobhaa Dé: ‘Kitty party is about friendship and sharing. It is a power­ ful statement of what women do when they come together. There is a lot of bonding and a little bit of bitching’, Screen (2004) ‘Happenings: Kittie Party’, www.screenindia.com/old/print.php?con­tent_id=304 [accessed 13 Au­gust 2011]. 15 See for instance Roy (1992) and Seymour (1999), who both or­gan­ize their books on women’s lives in India according to how a woman’s stand­ard life­cycle is linked to different family relations. 16 According to Kolenda (2003: 341): ‘The most neg­lected sibling relationship in the liter­at­ure on Indian kinship is that of sisters.’ 17 I borrow the term ‘kinning’ from Howell (2007), who uses it to capture the con­tinu­ous pro­cess by which Western fam­il­ies by various means make their foreign adopted child into what they perceive as ‘real kin’. The kitty-­party women are not trying in the same way to make one another into ‘real kin’, since they use the expression ‘like family’, which clearly differentiates between kin and non-­kin. See also Minault (1981). 18 See Tarlo (1996) for a full ana­lysis of how ‘clothing mat­ters’ in relation to identities. See also Cohn’s (1989) well-­known con­tri­bu­tion on how clothes in India are his­tor­ ically linked to ideas about authority. 19 See Donner (2008b, this volume) for ana­lyses of the links between middleclassness and eating out versus eating at home, on the im­port­ance of ‘home-­cooked food’ and on how food habits demarcate caste (and pos­sible class) position among middle-­class people in Calcutta. 20 See e.g. www.pizzahut.co.in/dinein/kittypar­ties.php [accessed 13 Au­gust 2011].

Kitty-parties and middle-class femininity   181

References Appadurai, Arjun (1981) ‘Gastro-­politics in Hindu South Asia’, Amer­ican Ethnologist, 8(3): 494–511. Ardener, S. and Burman, S. (eds) (1995) Money-­Go-Rounds: the im­port­ance of rotating savings and credit asso­ci­ations for women, Oxford: Berg. Banerjee, Swapna M. (2004) Men, Women and Domestics: articulating middle-­class identity in co­lo­nial Bengal, New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Béteille, A. (2001) ‘The social character of the Indian middle class’ in I. Ahmad and H. Reifeld (eds) Middle Class Values in India and Western Europe, New Delhi: Social Science Press. Bloch, M. and Parry, J. (eds) (1989) Money and the Morality of Exchange, Cam­bridge: Cam­bridge University Press. Bourdieu, P. (1984) Distinction: a social critique of the judgement of taste, Cam­bridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Butalia, Urvashi (1997) ‘Abducted and widowed women: questions of sexuality and cit­ izen­ship during partition’ in M. Thapan (ed.) Embodiment: essays on gender and identity, Delhi: Oxford University Press. Caplan, Patricia (1985) Class and Gender in India: women and their organ­iza­tions in a South Indian city, London: Tavistock Publications. Chakrabarty, Dipesh (1994) ‘The difference-­deferral of a co­lo­nial modernity: pub­lic debates on do­mesticity in British Bengal’ in D. Arnold and D. Hardiman (eds) Subaltern Studies, VIII, Delhi: Oxford University Press. Chatterjee, Partha (1989) ‘The nationalist res­olu­tion of the women’s question’ in Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid (eds) Recasting Women: essays in co­lo­nial his­tory, New Delhi: Zubaan. Chatterjee, Partha (1993) The Nation and its Fragments: co­lo­nial and postco­lo­nial histories, Delhi: Oxford University Press. Conlon, Frank (1995) ‘Dining out in Bombay’ in Carol A. Breckenridge (ed.) Consuming Modernity: pub­lic culture in a south Asian world, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Cohn, Bernhard (1989) ‘Cloth, clothes, and co­lo­nialism: India in the nine­teenth century’, Chapter 5 in Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge: the British in India, Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press. Das, Veena (1995) Critical Events: an anthropological per­spect­ive on con­tempor­ary India, Delhi: Oxford University Press. Derné, Steve (2008) Globalization on the Ground, New Delhi: Sage. Dickey, Sarah (2000) ‘Permeable homes: do­mestic ser­vice, household space, and the vul­ ner­abil­ity of class bound­ar­ies in urban India’, Amer­ican Ethnologist, 27: 462–89. Donner, H. (2006) ‘The parlour and the street’ in G. De Neve and H. Donner (eds) The Meaning of the Local, London: Routledge. Donner, H. (2008a) Domestic Goddesses: maternity, globalization and middle-­class identity in con­tempor­ary India, Aldershot: Ashgate. Donner, H. (2008b) ‘New vegetarianism: food, gender and neolib­eral regimes in Bengali middle-­class fam­il­ies’, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, XXXI: 144–69. Fernandes, Leela (2006) India’s New Middle Class, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Forbes, G. (1998) Women in Modern India, Cam­bridge: Cam­bridge University Press.

182   A. Waldrop Frøystad, Kathinka (2005) Blended Boundaries: caste, class, and shifting faces of ‘Hinduness’ in a north Indian city, Delhi: Oxford University Press. Fuller, C.J. and Narasimhan, H. (2006) ‘Engineering colleges, ‘exposure’ and in­forma­tion tech­no­logy’ Economic and Political Weekly, 41(3): 258–62. Gluck, S.B. (1987) Rosie the Riveter Revisited: women, the war, and social change, Boston, MA: Twayne Publishers. Hancock, Mary (1999) Womanhood in the Making: do­mestic ritual and pub­lic culture in urban south India, Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Hancock, Mary (2001) ‘Home science and the nationalization of do­mesticity in co­lo­nial India’, Modern Asian Studies, 35: 871–903. Hartmann, S. (1982) The Home Front and Beyond: Amer­ican women in the 1940s, Boston: Twayne Publishers. Howell, Signe (2007) The Kinning of Foreigners, New York: Berghahn Books. Kaviraj, S. (1997) ‘Filth and the pub­lic sphere: concepts and practices about space in Calcutta’, Public Culture, 10: 83–113. Kolenda, Pauline (2003) ‘Sibling relations and marriage practices: a comparison of north, central, and south India’, Chapter 11 in Caste, Marriage and Inequality: studies from north and south India, Jaipur and New Delhi: Rawat Publications. Kulkarni, V.G. (1993) ‘The middle-­class bulge’, Far Eastern Economic Review, 156(2): 44–7. Liddle, J. and Joshi, R. (1986) Daughters of Independence: gender, caste and class in India, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Liechty, Mark (2003) Suitable Modern: making middle-­class culture in a new consumer soci­ety, Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press. Malhotra, A. (2002) Gender, Caste, and Religious Identities: restructuring class in co­lo­ nial Punjab, New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Markovits, C. (2001) ‘Merchants, entre­pren­eurs and the middle-­classes in India in the twentieth century’ in I. Ahmad and H. Reifeld (eds) Middle Class Values in India and Western Europe, New Delhi: Social Science Press. Milkman, R. (1987) Gender at Work: the dy­namics of job segregation by sex during world war II, Urbana, IL and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Miller, Daniel (1995) ‘Consumption studies as the trans­forma­tion of anthropology’ in D. Miller (ed.) Acknowledging Consumption. A Review of New Studies, London: Routledge. Minault, Gail (1981) ‘Introduction: the extended family as metaphor and the expansion of women’s realm’ in G. Minault (ed.) The Extended Family: women and polit­ical parti­ cipa­tion in India and Paki­stan, Delhi: Chanakya Publications. Misra, B.B. (1961) The Indian Middle Classes: their growth in modern times, London, New York, Bombay: Oxford University Press. Oshikawa, Fumko (2005) ‘Being a middle-­class housewife: a comparative ana­lysis of India and Japan’ in Shakti Kak and Biswamoy Pati (eds) Exploring Gender Equations. Colonial and Post Colonial India, New Delhi: Nehru Memorial Museum and Library. Papanek, Hannah (1979) ‘Family status production: the “work” and “non-­work” of women’, Signs, 4: 775–81. Poggendorf-­Kakar, K. (2001) ‘Middle-­class formation and the cultural construction of gender in urban India’, in I. Ahmad and H. Reifeld (eds) Middle Class Values in India and Western Europe, New Delhi: Social Science Press. Prakash, A. (1994) ‘How big is the middle class?’, The Pioneer on Sunday, 16 January. Roy, Manisha (1992) Bengali Women, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Kitty-parties and middle-class femininity   183 Sarkar, Tanika (2001) Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation: com­mun­ity, religion, and cultural nationalism, Delhi: Permanent Black. Sethi, Raj M. (1995) ‘Women’s ROSCAs in con­tempor­ary indian soci­ety’ in S. Ardener and S. Burman (eds) Money-­Go-Rounds: the im­port­ance of rotating savings and credit asso­ci­ations for women, Oxford: Berg. Seymour, S.C. (1999) Women, Family, and Child Care in India: a world in trans­ition, Cam­bridge: Cam­bridge University Press. Sharma, Ursula (1986) Women’s Work, Class, and the Urban Household: a study of Shimla, north India, London: Tavistock Publications. Srinivasan, Shaila (1995) ‘ROSCAs among south Asians in Oxford’ in S. Ardener and S. Burman (eds) Money-­Go-Rounds: the im­port­ance of rotating savings and credit asso­ ci­ations for women, Oxford: Berg. Tarlo, Emma (1996) Clothing Matters: dress and identity in India, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Uberoi, Patricia (2006) Freedom and Destiny: gender, family, and pop­ular culture in India, New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Varma, Pawan (1991) The Great Indian Middle Class, New Delhi: Penguin Books. Waldrop, Anne (2002) A Room With One’s Own: educated elite people in New Delhi and relations of class, unpublished thesis, University of Oslo. Waldrop, Anne (forthcoming) ‘Grandmother, mother and daughter: changing agency of Indian, middle-­class women, 1908–2008’, Journal of Modern Asian Studies.

8 Zara hatke (‘somewhat different’) The new middle classes and the changing forms of Hindi cinema1 Rachel Dwyer

The changes in Indian soci­ety that began post-­liberalization in 1991 are likely to have been the fastest and the most signi­fic­ant in Indian his­tory.2 Although India remains a poor coun­try, with an average per capita income still around USD750, it is also home to one of the largest growing middle classes in the world and its role as a major player on the global stage is no longer open to question. The new middle classes, the group which bene­fited the most from lib­ eralization, are also the major producers and consumers of romance in the form of liter­at­ure, film and maga­zines, which link romance and consumerism across these genres. Dwyer (2000) examined the shifting culture of the NMCs in Bombay at the end of the twentieth century, but the sub­sequent changes have been so rapid that the book now seems to be a his­tor­ical docu­ment compared with Fernandes (2006) and Brosius (2010). Trends that seemed to be taking shape, such as a lack of inter­est in Western brands and labels, have been disproved, as Mercedes and Chanel, to name only two, have now entered the Indian market. Other trends noted have intensified, most notably the spread of the new media that entered India during this period, but whose extent and influence were then unknown. These include the internet, cable and satellite television, mobile phone tech­no­logy and the MP3. In the mid-­1990s the impact of these new media on soci­ety was as yet unknown, yet now it can be seen that they have transformed Western soci­ety more profoundly than was ima­gined, through the emergence of ‘mediated selves’ (de Zengotita 2005). Such trans­forma­tions are yet to be studied in India.3 India’s new middle class is part of a trans­national group, being closely linked to the Indian diaspora who have not only become increasingly signi­fic­ant in any discussion of the Hindi film but whose role and pres­ence in India have shifted, as recog­nized by gov­ern­ment pol­icy. The ‘Overseas Indian’ became the ‘NRI’ (Non-­resident Indian) when new monetary pol­icies were introduced, then the ‘PIO’ (Person of Indian Origin) when further fin­an­cial bene­fits were supplemented with changes in cit­izen­ship and visa requirements. In the 1990s, the NRIs were often dubbed ‘Non-­Required Indians’ but changes, largely associated with the post-­1998 ‘Hindutva’ gov­ern­ment, led to an increase in the im­port­ance of the diaspora as they became seen as im­port­ant polit­ical lobbying groups in the coun­try of settlement. The Indian gov­ern­ment began to court them with

Zara hatke (‘somewhat different’)   185 investment possib­il­ities and eco­nomic trading zones, and then with the promise of dual nationality to PIOs, and the celeb­ra­tion of Pravasi Bharatiya Divas (Overseas Indians Day). A Minister was alloc­ated to deal with PIOs, thus increasing the diaspora’s influence on India’s in­ternal pol­itics (Therwath 2007). Many PIOs are now choosing to live in India for at least part of the year and many more talk of returning. They, like the new middle classes in India, elide the image of poorer India and are themselves more vis­ible, given that the diasporic Indian is omnipresent in the media, although not in a realist manner. The films underline the fact that the diaspora are still Indian and that India is set to surpass the rest of the world in eco­nomic terms. These eco­nomic, social and polit­ical changes have had a massive impact on Indian cinema. They have enabled the rise of new corporate com­panies, such as Yash Chopra’s Yash Raj Films, whose Bombay studios, opened in 2005, have in­teg­rated film finance, production and distribution, even creating their own music com­pany and recording studios. The coming of new media has changed the way films are consumed as the internet and the DVD have offered new ways of forming audiences and shaping viewing practices. Films are increasingly viewed outside the cinema halls, which themselves are being transformed from single screens into mul­ tiplexes, while others are situated in newly built shopping complexes, and this too has changed not just the audiences but also the films themselves. This paper discusses the changes among the new middle classes over the last two decades before suggesting that using the major cultural product of this group, namely the Hindi cinema, as a pos­sible a source of their social imaginary (Taylor 2004), may tell us more about the way these new middle classes are de­veloping as it is these classes who produce and consume this cinema. Bollywood is discussed as a par­ticu­lar form of Hindi cinema which emerged in the 1990s and was indic­at­ive of this social group (Dwyer 2000), but the chapter also introduces two other major forms of Hindi cinema that are rapidly emerging. These are the regional Hindi cinema, notably that made in Bhojpuri,4 which is associated with India’s lower classes, and a new form called ‘mul­tiplex’ or hatke (‘different’), which is associated with a new metropolitan elite, of which it is an item of cultural production, among the middle classes.

Defining and enumerating India’s middle classes The Indian middle classes increased in number and in wealth after 1991, representing an enorm­ous market primed for an influx of goods. However, while India is getting richer and income is rising overall, the distribution of income is getting more dis­par­ate. India’s consumer spending power is only a thirtieth of that of the USA, that is, the size of one small Amer­ican state (straight­forward numerical conversion of currency can be misleading in that the rupee may be low in terms of exchange but its purchasing power in India is higher, espe­cially given the cost of labour). It is hard to define exactly what is meant by ‘middle class’ in any culture, let alone estim­ate its size.5 India’s middle class is widely agreed to number some

186   R. Dwyer 100 million people or 10 per cent of the total popu­la­tion, but another figure is four million households or 25 million people.6 A working definition of the middle class in India could be the number of taxpayers. Luce (2006: 48) estim­ ates that this is around 35 million, so if numbers are increased to include households this could take it up to 200 million middle-­class people. Fernandes (2006: xiv) estim­ates the class to be 250 million. While eco­nom­ists debate whether the middle classes form 3 per cent or 25 per cent of the popu­la­tion, it is clear that they are substantial and growing in number. Bourdieu (1984) de­veloped a theory of taste to define classes and social groups rather than eco­nomic and fin­an­cial indic­ators. This allows an examination of the Indian middle classes by means of their lifestyles and consumerist beha­vi­our (Dwyer 2000; Brosius 2010). Bourdieu’s ana­lysis of taste in French soci­ety has certain prob­lems in the Indian con­text, for unlike France, which has a clearly defined ‘French culture’ created by the bourgeoisie, India has a plurality of cultures, further complicated by post-­colonialism and the relationship to Western culture. However, the national bourgeoisie has created one hege­monic version of Indian culture, per­petu­ated through gov­ern­ment organ­iza­tions (academies, universities, museums, etc.), which has attacked the new middle classes largely on the grounds of taste, prompting what might be de­scribed as India’s ‘culture wars’. Bourdieu argues that taste is part of a struggle for social re­cog­ni­tion or status, in which lifestyle plays a key part, emphasizing cultural consumption rather than production. Taste is defined by the dominant class, the bourgeoisie, who have eco­nomic capital (in terms of income, employment status, etc.). They impose their taste in order to estab­lish their cultural legitimacy, to ‘define the legitimate prin­ciples of domination, between eco­nomic, educational or social capital’ (Bourdieu 1984: 254). Thus the bourgeois aesthetic becomes cultural capital, seen as being inherent in the bourgeoisie rather than learned or acquired. The bourgeoisie define what is legitimate culture, and other sections of the popu­la­ tion are seen to be lacking in taste, liking what is ‘middlebrow’ or ‘pop­ular’. In Bourdieu’s terms, the petite bourgeoisie has to strive to differentiate themselves from those who are below them in the social hier­archy, but they may lack the education to acquire the cultural capital of the bourgeoisie. This view of taste makes cultural legitimacy seem arbit­rary and beyond any aesthetic definition, but it is a use­ful working model in a social rather than purely textual ana­lysis. The wider im­plica­tions of this theory in the power relations that this legitimacy enables lie beyond the scope of this paper, as the NMCs are linked to the rise of Hindutva, that is, a pol­itics of com­munal Hindu identity. Hansen (1999) notes that Hindutva has mobilized its sup­port in the domain of pub­lic culture (see also Rajagopal 2001), but it has had a limited success in the world of Hindi cinema for complicated market and ideo­logical reasons (Dwyer 2006a). While India has long had what we can now call the ‘old middle classes’, mostly highly educated professionals, the late twentieth century saw the emergence of new middle classes. This group are highly vis­ible socially: located at

Zara hatke (‘somewhat different’)   187 the upper end of the eco­nomic spectrum, they have non-­landed wealth (although many now have wealth from prop­erty inflation), which they draw on to sustain rel­at­ively high consumption; they work in emerging sectors of the eco­nomy such as tech­no­logy and media as well as in business; and they speak English as one of their major languages. They are also avid producers and consumers of much of India’s pub­lic culture, in par­ticu­lar that of the Hindi cinema. They are now also setting their own definitions of what is culturally legitimate, contesting the values of the old middle classes. This cultural conflict has led to the almost hysterical rejection of the culture of the new middle classes (Dwyer 2000). The new middle classes would largely reject the term ‘middle class’ that in India refers more to the lower middle classes. They refer to themselves as ‘upper class’; the professional middle classes call them the ‘nouveau riche’. Yet they are located culturally within the middle classes, having largely risen from the lower middle classes to create a new space in the middle classes, separate from the grande bourgeoisie and the old middle classes. Many would argue that they actu­ally constitute an elite, in terms of eco­nomic capital and because they are mostly drawn from the upper castes, and that they are in no way ‘middling’. Yet they are contesting the middle ground, the centre of Indian life. Even during the last decade, the changes within this class are becoming apparent. The rich are becoming very rich indeed and industrialists such as Mukesh and Anil Ambani and Lakshmi Mittal are global players. The middle classes are also becoming more vis­ible inter­na­tionally as tourists (Finch 2007), while in India the evid­ence of consumerism is vis­ibly increasing from day to day with the proliferation of car ownership and ever-­mushrooming shopping malls. This class was formerly exnominated (Dwyer 2000), but now its members frequently refer to themselves by class. As Fernandes (2006) argues, they are a new cultural formation but they have become norm­ative. Even though they are diverse in terms of education, language, and so on, Fernandes argues that they are largely polit­ically unified. The new middle classes are often associated with the rise of Hindutva or Hindu nationalist par­ties. Gujarat’s Chief Minister, Narendra Modi, is highly regarded by these classes. While some members of this class are undoubtedly associated with Hindu nationalist ideo­lo­gies, the entertainment media, rather than the news media, have tended to steer clear of such pol­ itics for reasons outlined in Dwyer (2006a): the diversity of the film industry, censorship issues, and commercial reasons such as the target audiences of the Gulf and other Muslim South Asians. The consumerist Hindu family which is cel­eb­rated in the Bollywood film is not neces­sar­ily Hindutva in terms of polit­ical allegiance, although it would be hard to define the dif­fer­ences between Hindutva and ‘Indian values’ in the con­text of cinema (see Dwyer 2006a). The new middle classes vary from city to city (see, for example, Lukose 2009 on Kerala and Brosius 2010 on Delhi) and comparisons need to be made with new middle classes in other coun­tries such as Nepal (Leichty 2003), Malaysia (Stivens 1998) and Brazil (Owensbury 1999) and Asia (Beng-­Huat 2000). These middle classes have eco­nomic and cultural capital, and see themselves and are seen as representing modern India and they are the class that has

188   R. Dwyer bene­fited most from lib­eralization. Modernity in India has its own form, or rather forms, as Ashis Nandy (1998 and passim) has argued repeatedly that there is no single modernity in India, while Leichty (2003) observed that in Nepal, modernity is something foreign. New middle class modernity is not just about consumerism but is complicated and ambivalent, seeking to view religion and morality as part of tradition, whereas they are often part of this very modernity (Dwyer 2004, 2006c). Juluri (2003) points out how even MTV India has to appeal to sentimental views on many issues such as the ideal of the family. The middle classes are very focused on family issues (Uberoi 1994: 31–2) and often talk of the decline of the family. Uberoi (2006: 23) points out that although the nuclear family is more common now­adays, the ideal of the joint family remains, with most people living in such an ar­range­ment at some point. While love marriage is cel­eb­rated in liter­at­ure, film and other media, arranged marriage still accounts for 90 per cent of marriages (Uberoi 2006: 24). Old traditions, such as dowry, are ‘modernized’ as part of consumerism, as clothing, jewellery and household objects are collected at the time of marriage. One im­port­ant com­pon­ent of the middle classes that has been little researched is Indian youth culture. Films in most cultures find their largest audiences among the young and consumption of other media is also very high in this group. Leichty (2003: 210) points out that this is a gap in the study of non-­Western soci­eties in gen­eral, but that in Nepal the emergence of youth culture is the subject of active debate (2003: 231). The study of youth culture is likely to be rewarding for that of the middle classes, the section of soci­ety where youth culture usually emerges, and also for film studies, as the bulk of film audiences is always from this group. The young are also more skilled in their use of media in gen­eral and likely to be among the groups whose beha­vi­our has been transformed the most radic­ally in the last 15 years. Middle-­class Indian youths also have an earning power which is way beyond that of their parents, espe­cially those working in infotech and the media. Indeed, in the last few years there is evid­ence of a ‘brain gain’ (as opposed to the ‘brain drain’: Therwath 2007) as software engineers and other return to India, where their earnings, although lower in real terms than in Europe or North Amer­ica, are compensated for by their lifestyle as well as other family and social concerns. A special issue on youth by India’s major English language weekly news maga­zine, India Today (19 Febru­ary 2007), offers some inter­esting stat­ist­ics about the 540 million Indians who are aged 18–34. It claims that 70 per cent of them own mobiles, while 23 per cent of them have their own com­puters. They appear socially con­ser­vat­ive, the most striking figure being that 84 per cent of them intend to live with their parents/in-­laws after marriage and 95 per cent of them feel that you should not drink or smoke in front of your parents. However, they prefer love marriages to arranged marriages and are increasingly tolerant towards living together without marriage. Their favourite leisure activity is to spend time with their family and friends, but when they go out they prefer to head to the cinema. When they watch television, 51 per cent choose to watch the news, while soap operas are at the bottom of their list. The results of this survey

Zara hatke (‘somewhat different’)   189 are almost ident­ical to the view of youth that is promoted in the Hindi films themselves, where the younger dir­ectors have shown themselves to be more con­ ser­vat­ive than their parents, notably Aditya Chopra and Karan Johar, although their productions are now featuring controversial topics such as divorce.

Cinema as grounds for cultural legitimacy The ana­lysis of Bourdieu’s cultural capital shows how these changes are crit­ical to understanding Indian cinema. Before the ‘re­hab­il­ita­tion’ to cultural capital of Hindi cinema in the 1990s, one of the sharpest divides over culture was the way that this cinema was seen through the lens of class, and these divisions were often along the lines of realism (see Prasad 1998; Dwyer 2000). The old middle classes were associated with realist cinema, including the ‘art’ cinema associated with Satyajit Ray and the ‘parallel’ cinemas that emerged during the 1970s. This cinema, like middle-­class cinema in the West, favoured realism over melodrama and usually depicted with most sym­pathy the lower middle classes, who were often shown struggling in the cities, as well as the rural poor and zamindari classes. Realist films, such as those of Shyam Benegal, were concerned with caste, class and gender, while Govind Nihalani made films about corruption and the struggle to remain human in such settings. There was also a trans­itional cinema which de­veloped during these years, which Prasad (1998) calls ‘middle class cinema’, made by Hrishikesh Mukherjee, Gulzar, B.R. Chopra and Basu Chatterjee, which can be located as having the realism of art cinema while sharing features with commercial cinema, in par­ticu­lar the use of song. The old middle classes (though not its younger members) rejected mainstream Hindi cinema, which they labelled ‘commercial’, finding it vulgar and idiotic. The audience for this cinema was drawn from a wider social spectrum, while its films manifested a mixture of class tastes, some having the lower or working classes as its major social referent, while others shared middle-­class values in their depiction of the couple and the bourgeois family. It was in the commercial cinema that the new middle classes began to estab­lish their cultural hege­mony, their depictions of lifestyle becoming those to which the lower classes aspire, hence its appeal to a broad social spectrum, and also its rejection by the old middle classes. Ashis Nandy argues that commercial cinema puts an emphasis on: lower-­middle-class sensibilities and on the informal, not-­terribly-tacit theories of pol­itics and soci­ety . . . and the . . . abil­ity to shock the haute bourgeosie with the directness, vigour and crudity of these theories. (1998: 2) This is a depiction of the culture espoused by the new middle classes, which may be close to that of the lower middle classes, but differs from it in that its consumerist lifestyle oppor­tun­ities are those of the rich. The old middle classes may well see this reading as a mimicry of their culture, hence their scorn of the

190   R. Dwyer medium, which they see as a lowbrow way of looking at a whole range of values, anxi­eties, lifestyles and utopias. However, by the end of the 1990s, mainstream cinema seemed prim­arily concerned with the social values of the new middle classes, which had been tempted back to cinema as the mainstream cinema returned to romance and music, with new young stars, fresh marketing strat­egies and the renovation of theatre buildings. A new style of cinema cel­eb­rated a consumerist, trans­national soci­ety, where love, romance, fashion and fun were the goals of the young wealthy Indians who, even if resident outside India, dem­on­strated to their parents true Indian family values, a cinema typified by Yash Raj Films (Dwyer 2000, 2002a). The 1990s were dominated by the Yash Raj style of filmmaking, also pop­ ularized by Karan Johar, in which a style of ‘glamorous realism’ was promoted in extravagant romances. Consumerism was embedded in all aspects of the film, creating an as­pira­tional world: many of the audience were not able to parti­cip­ate in this world directly, but the films created ideas of social mobility, and fantasies of wealth and of the linkage of consumerism with romance that became estab­ lished during this decade. As mainstream Hindi cinema became respectable for the middle classes, its cultural legitimacy was further estab­lished by gov­ern­ment re­cog­ni­tion, including the granting of industry status in 1998 and the setting up of FRAMES, an industry meeting hosted by the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry. Meanwhile, there was a growth in university courses on mainstream cinema in India and overseas, accompanied by a surge in schol­arly books and art­icles as well as ded­ic­ated journals, and an increase in visibility in the ‘ser­ious’ press.

Mediated selves and the middle-­class imaginary While Bourdieu’s ana­lysis defines who the middle classes are by taste, it predates India’s media ex­plo­sion. This paper suggests two ways of examining more closely the cultural world of the middle classes. It begins by looking at the middle classes as mediated selves and then draws on the media, in this case films, as a source of a middle-­class imaginary. De Zingotita (2005) argues that the new media are transforming Western lives into mediated selves as they give rise to a certain self-­awareness and reflexivity of the self which is quite new and different from the reflexivity which marks modernity in gen­eral (Giddens 1990; Bauman 2007). If, as is often argued, the print media were part of the cre­ation of the modern self, the rise of the new media has profound im­plica­tions because all ex­peri­ences are now mediated. However, the lack of access to the media marks one of India’s social dividing lines, as only the middle and upper classes are the mediated classes. The im­plica­tions of this formation of mediated selves in India are yet to be examined, although Mehta (2008) argues for India-­specific changes caused by television, while Jeffery and Doron (forthcoming) discuss the role of the mobile phone.

Zara hatke (‘somewhat different’)   191 Although this paper is concerned with film, the other media are also in turmoil. The audiences for television have changed and this medium has now much less appeal to the older, educated middle classes. Serious drama, docu­mentary and educational pub­lic ser­vice broadcasting have lost out, as expected, to the programming on cable and satellite channels of soap operas, reality television and various com­ peti­tions. The target audiences of specific shows can be seen in the range of products featured in the advertisements, showing female-­dominated audiences or youth-­oriented products. Much television con­tent is derived from film, whether music extracts or inter­views, alongside screenings of the films themselves. One area where the close connections between the different media are clear is that of celebrity culture, dominated by film stars, followed closely by sports and media stars, including models and television actors. More recent celeb­rities are the business magnates who are heroes of the new middle classes, from Vijay Mallya, the flamboyant owner of the Kingfisher Group, to the Ambani brothers, one of whom married a film star and whose father, Dhirubhai Ambani, was cel­ eb­rated in Mani Ratnam’s film Guru, 2007. Foreign celeb­rities are also becoming part of this culture because of the increasing access to the overseas media, partly through films and television channels, but increasingly through access to India’s growing broadband ser­vices. This culture ranges across all media from the star sys­tem of the film industry to celebrity en­dorsements in ad­vert­ising to news­paper cover­age of celebrity events to internet fan sites and social networking groups. For example, social comment, op-­eds and more highbrow forms are increasingly found in news maga­zines as the news­papers have increased their celebrity con­tent, with even the venerable Times of India adding a section called Bombay Times in the 1990s with its famous ‘Page 3’. It is alleged that anyone who pays can become a celebrity by having their event featured on these pages. This culture was depicted in Page 3, dir. Madhur Bhandarkar, 2005 – the story of three female flatmates whose encounters with this milieu formed a predictable exposé of sex and sleaze in this social set. ‘A suburban view of south Mumbai’, as social com­ment­ator and best-­selling celebrity author Shobhaa Dé once told me, refusing this definition of celebrity culture. Film in India never­the­less remains a dominant media form, even though its audiences may be smaller and its finances less than the world of television. Cinema has not only been central to the cultural world of the new middle classes (Dwyer 2000), but it also plays a par­ticu­lar role in the formation of the imaginary, drawing on Charles Taylor’s concept of the ‘social imaginary’. Taylor argues that the social imaginary is not a set of ideas, but ‘it is what enables, through making sense of, the practices of a soci­ety’ (2004: 2). It is a new conception of the moral order of soci­ety, which may have started with a small group and spread across soci­ety to become the way in which people ima­gine the soci­ eties they inhabit and sustain. It resists being theorized (2004: 23) as it is an unlimited, unstructured and inarticulate understanding of our whole soci­ety that cannot be expressed in doctrines. Its norms and expectations are shared by many as a common understanding for the basis of social lives, shaping interpersonal relationships and creating a moral order in which we understand life and history.

192   R. Dwyer Changes in soci­ety are marked through changing genres (Neale 1990: 64), which are often associated with shifts in mentalité (Todorov 1984: 80–93) and in Hindi cinema, new genres are beginning to crystallize, such as the Islamicist terrorist film and the biopic.7 A greater variety of genres is being made and these films are being marketed, consumed and reviewed in different ways. However, there are deeper divides forming as three major segments, separated by production, distribution and exhibition as well as by audiences and film styles, namely Bollywood, local forms of Hindi cinema and hatke or mul­tiplex cinema. Prasad (1998) argues for a model for the segmentation of Hindi cinema in the 1970s around the breakdown of the polit­ical consensus.8 In the current segmentation, the role of class and consumerism seems to be signi­fic­ant, with the new middle classes dominant with the ‘Bollywood’ form that is most closely associated with them, while the old middle classes have been transformed by the emergence of a new generation and perhaps other emerging middle classes to make a new kind of realist film, and the poor have con­tinued to watch Bollywood while also making their own cinema, often in languages not used by mainstream or regional cinemas, such as Bhojpuri. Realism and melodrama still divide cat­egor­ies of cinema as they did in Prasad’s model, but not in such a polarized manner, rather by clustering into certain features along a spectrum between the two modes. Political dif­fer­ences may be apparent too, as realist cinema is more concerned with old and non-­urban India while the Bollywood films are more inter­ested in modern India. The dif­fer­ences also appear in often controversial de­cisions on the pre­senta­tion of religion and religious mat­ters, or of gender issues, but also in language (Hindi, dialects/other languages, Hinglish), or the forms of music. The rest of the paper looks at these three forms of Hindi cinema to examine their dif­fer­ences and to examine more closely the rise of a new form of realist cinema. It does not discuss the so-­called ‘regional’ cinemas; which have their own specific concerns and audiences (Tamil: Dickey 1993; Jacob 2009; Velayutham 2008; Telugu: Srinivas 2009; Bangalore audiences: Srinivas 2002) that are separate cinema cultures from the many forms of Hindi cinema. This is not to suggest these films are confined to the ‘regions’, indeed, many of these produce films which are screened beyond local audiences, notably those of ‘Superstar’ Rajnikanth in Tamil, whose latest film Enthiran/Robot (dir. S. Shankar, 2010) has been a massive inter­na­tional phenomenon. It is rather that these are inde­pend­ent, estab­lished cinemas whose relationship to one another and to wider cinema culture in India is not yet researched.

The growth of localized forms of Hindi cinema While the pres­ence of the cinema in India’s metropolises and other cities is marked, there still remain areas of the county where access to any forms of media is limited and even cinema barely reaches or has a very limited market. This is seen in the film Swades: we the people, dir. Ashutosh Gowariker, 2004, where a makeshift screen and a gen­er­ator are used for a pub­lic screening of an old film for the village.

Zara hatke (‘somewhat different’)   193 During the 1990s, social and eco­nomic disparities became more deeply entrenched and it would not be too much of an exaggeration to say there are now two Indias. One is metropolitan and modern India, peopled by mediated, middle-­ class selves, while the other is ‘excluded India’, which can hardly be named as it not defined by caste, class or where one lives. The people of excluded India falls beyond the scope of this paper, but they form an absence here, and indeed they are missing from the films themselves (Inden 1999). They are India’s poor, the people who have not had access to the bene­fits of lib­eralization and globalization. They form 37.2 per cent of the popu­la­tion, that is around 410 million people, and live in pov­erty, with a daily income of less than $1 a day, mostly in lower-­income states such as Uttar Pradesh and Bihar (World Bank 2011). In his prize-­winning novel, The White Tiger (2008), Aravind Adiga labelled this part of India as ‘The Darkness’, the oppos­ite of the Light, the bright new India. This naming has polit­ical reson­ances as the poor were excluded from the rhet­oric of the Hindu nationalist ‘India shining’ election cam­paign of 2004 (see Sonwalkar 2004; Pinney 2005). The BJP talked only to the middle classes who bene­fited from lib­eralization, while the votes of the poor went to other par­ties such as the Congress and the BSP. These middle classes are keen to see the removal of signs of pov­erty, whether on the streets and in other pub­lic spaces or in the films and media they watch. The poor are blamed for their own pov­erty, and the media, espe­cially the western media, are berated for showing images of pov­erty in India. The poor are excluded in part because they do not consume. Some com­panies are targeting them in advance of their being consumers – so Pepsi and Coke advertise in villages where no one could afford to buy their products, even if they were avail­able – but even if they do consume, they will not be consumerist in that they will buy items such as fridges as one-­off purchases, rather than something to be replaced every few years. They have access to some media (television, film, radio, etc.) but in quite limited ways. The mainstream media do not address them directly and their patterns of consumption have hardly been studied. Most of them are uneducated or even illit­er­ate (lit­er­acy is still around 60 per cent nationally and lower in these states). The poor used to feature in Indian films as villagers and slum dwellers and often in rags-­to-riches tales. The rich were often seen as corrupt while the poor were virtuous and had to struggle to keep their virtue in the face of temptation. The poor began to vanish from films in the 1990s and now the only mainstream films set in rural areas are his­tor­ical (Lagaan, dir. Ashutosh Gowariker, 2001) or about de­velopment (Swades, dir. Ashutosh Gowariker, 2004), both of which espouse a par­ticu­larly Gandhian viewpoint. The poor con­tinue to watch mainstream Bollywood, at least when the films reach the minor circuits and the price of the ticket drops. They are known to reject the realist films which depict pov­erty – films that are made on their behalf by middle- and upper-­class Indians. They also shun Bollywood films which challenge their more con­ser­vat­ive values, espe­cially on the family and about women, so a film such as Karan Johar’s Kabhi alvida na kehna (2006), where the characters leave their spouses, would not be accept­able to them.

194   R. Dwyer However, among this group, a whole body of cinema is being produced that has barely been discussed in the media or by aca­demics. It seems that not only have the poor become in­vis­ible in films but also their cinema is largely ignored, although it is large in terms of the number of films made and their circulation. Many of these are low quality, not even shot on film, mostly trans­ferred straight to VCD, consisting mostly of religious, sex, horror and other déclassé genres. Most middle-­class Indians do not even know that these films exist – although they may have heard of the horror films of the Ramsay brothers, which have now acquired something of a cult status for their blend of sex and horror (Vitali 2011). Suketu Mehta (2005: 393–406) writes about a character who worked in a low-­budget (Rs40 lakhs, or approximately £50,000) religious film, Jay Shakumbhari Maa, a film about the Vegetable Goddess, one of the incarnations of Durga. The film was shot on 16mm and blown up, with the producers expecting to release it only in villages. A casual survey of film shops suggests a whole corpus of such films which are made to have a local release or a VCD-­only release, aimed only at the low end of the market. The emergence of a local cinema has been noted in the Maharashtrian town of Malegaon since 2003 (Joshi 2009). This consists of spoofs on Hindi films for release in local video halls. A fascinating docu­mentary, Superman of Malegaon, dir. Faiza Khan, 2009, follows the making of Malegaon ka superman, dir. Shaikh Nasir, 2009, showing how a film can be made for Rs1 lakh (c. £1,400). It depicts technical dif­ficult­ies of power supply and wet cameras, the lack of professionalism as the hero gets married suddenly, disrupting the schedule, and a heroine who has to be brought in from outside as local women refuse to work in the film, and who demands mineral water, a sign of her attitude prob­lem. The docu­mentary reveals that these are not just a bunch of Bollywood aspirants. Nasir is a fan of Hollywood, in par­ticu­lar of Charlie Chaplin, and says this is where he learned his trade. The feature film also cam­paigns against chewing tobacco and to encourage people to take polio drops, as part of the hero’s struggle against spitting and gen­eral squalor. The docu­mentary was much acclaimed at the Indian International Film Festival, 2009 and has made these films famous, if not much viewed. A much larger industry has de­veloped in Bhojpuri, a language or dialect closely related to Hindi, spoken in Bihar, part of the North Indian area where there has been substantial opposi­tion to Hindutva pol­itics, and has seen the rise of the lower castes in what Jaffrelot (2003) calls a ‘silent revolu­tion’. Tripathy (2007) notes that 76 Bhojpuri films were made in 2006. Although the first films were made in the 1960s, the industry only became a signi­fic­ant fin­an­cial pres­ ence more recently, cel­eb­rated as the cinema of the ‘other India’. It is now getting much attention from educated elites, including a book-­length study by a JNU gradu­ate (Ghosh 2010), and is currently the subject of a doctoral dissertation at an Ivy League University (Kathryn Hardy, University of Penn­syl­vania). English language websites such as www.cinebhojpuri.com also speak of an elite audience, although the audience is usually seen as markedly lower class, spread

Zara hatke (‘somewhat different’)   195 across Bihar and among migrant Bhojpuri speakers. However, the appeal to some upper classes is also noted by Tripathy 2007: [i]n the Bhojpuri audience, whether at home or abroad we are dealing most likely with a semilit­er­ate person. He does not belong to the white-­collared class of migrants from the hinterland. He could be a farmer, an electrician, or a carpenter. The educated migrants from the cow belt are capable of occasionally buying a few Bhojpuri audio CDs, keeping at a safe hearing distance from their roots. But to sit in a grimy hall and ‘witness’ the rustic vulgarity of Bhojpuri, no way! (These are often the permanent migrants). The referents of the films themselves are often downmarket. The VCDs of devotional songs in Bhojpuri have also become pop­ular, such as those produced by ‘T-­series’, where the devotees appear to be quite a rabble in a pub­lic phone office, smoking dope and dancing ecstatically while the gods walk around in cheap, glitzy costumes, singing playback as the editing cuts between them and the playback singers. However, the stars of this cinema include excellent actors, some of whom now appear in big-­budget Hindi films, although usually as the second hero. The best known of these is Ravi Kishen, a top Bhojpuri star who has also had major roles in the films of highly regarded filmmakers such as Shyam Benegal and Mani Ratnam. In other words, although the films may be regarded as B-­movies, this assessment needs to be approached with caution.

Bollywood The his­tory of this contested term remains disputed (Prasad 2003; Chopra 2007: 9–10). Rajadhyaksha seeks to separate the term from the rest of the film industry while extending the meaning to cover ‘a more diffuse cultural conglomeration involving a range of distribution and consumption ac­tiv­ities from websites, to music cassettes, from cable to radio’ (2003: 27), which he identifies as having been around for around ten years, catering mostly to the diaspora (where he suggests the term origin­ates). Vasudevan (2011) suggests restricting the term to the extended commodity function of the ‘high profile, export-­oriented Bombay film’ which is about a branding of India rather than a pre­senta­tion of India as an aesthetic form. He restricts its use his­tor­ically, taking its beginning to be with Dilwale dulhania le jayenge, 1995, dir. Aditya Chopra), which began the diasporic romance, while pointing out con­tempor­ary films which lie outside its remit before calling for a return to studying screen eco­nom­ies and practices in which this term must be discussed. ‘Bollywood’, the way in which this cinema is now referred to, is taken here to mean a type of mainstream Hindi cinema which is made by private producers and financiers, aimed at audiences across India and overseas: leaning towards the melodramatic rather than realism, though it may be said to feature ‘glamorous realism’ showing attractions or ‘items’ such as estab­lished stars and song-­ and-dance sequences; it is loosely nationalistic, modernizing, as­pira­tional and

196   R. Dwyer money-­oriented, and creates a lifestyle and an image of modern India as it is and how it wants to be. This portrayal matches the values of the new middle classes as outlined above with the concern for their family, religion and a modernizing of tradition. While these films depict middle-­class values, it does not follow that the audience is neces­sar­ily middle class; it may be aspiring to join the ranks of the middle class. Many of these films are also watched by the upper middle classes, or at least the younger among this changing group, who would have avoided these films as recently as the early 1990s. They will watch only the top end of Bollywood, that is, productions by Yash Raj Films or UTV, or films directed by acclaimed makers such as Mani Ratnam, which they combine with their viewing of Hollywood and world cinema. Bollywood, long watched elsewhere in the world by non-­South Asians, has become increasingly pop­ular in the diaspora,9 a situ­ation which has been widely noted, with much specu­la­tion that Hindi films are now deliberately aiming to attract these audiences of the Indian transational middle class. The UK has proved one of the largest markets for Bollywood, followed only by the USA, but other areas are also im­port­ant and are changing with better distribution and exhibition practices. In the Fijian diaspora, the attachment to films was often to songs;10 the Tamil diaspora in Malaysia and Singapore preferred Tamil films but are now avid consumers of Bollywood; while the South African diaspora has recently reformed into a major audience for Hindi cinema (Hansen 2005), as has the Gulf. Bollywood’s overseas pop­ularity is usually for its world of emotions, notably romance, family and religion, and the language in which it is expressed, espe­ cially the songs (Dwyer 2006b, 2006d; Dwyer and Patel 2002). The culture produced by the films is central to much of diasporic culture, as its music and clothing are consumed outside the film viewing in con­texts such as family events, weddings and par­ties and nightclubs. British Asians do not watch many Indian films other than Bollywood romances, as they prefer Hollywood for other forms of cinema such as action cinema (Dwyer 2006b). Bollywood films show the middle classes as they ima­gine themselves, or as they aspire to be. Middle-­class values are the norm, as the films cel­eb­rate their mater­ial culture and lifestyle options. The films exhibit consumer desires such as shopping, dressing and styling oneself, allowing the audience the pleasure of looking at them and styling their own choices around them. The films are a unique chance to promote consumerism, with all forms of life – even religion – touched by film and fashion. The audience may enjoy the delights of foreign travel and freedom from the family while celeb­rat­ing family values. Young couples look for space to move, to live, to love and to find privacy while also seeking to find a role in the extended family. However, the Bollywood group has always included very pop­ular films which are regarded as coarse and crude by those who are not fans. This type of comedy has produced its own stars, including Govinda, Akshay Kumar and Salman Khan and its leading dir­ector is David Dhawan. These films were regarded as déclassé

Zara hatke (‘somewhat different’)   197 but they are pop­ular with the younger middle classes who often watch them in large group outings to the cinema halls. Others enjoy the films as parodies of Bollywood itself, notably Dabangg (dir. Abhinav Kashyap, 2010), while Govinda’s undoubted comic genius and dancing talent has led to his ‘re­hab­il­ita­tion’ with the elites, signified in his ap­pear­ance in a Mani Ratnam film (Raavan, 2010). There are also big-­budget Bollywood films that find a par­ticu­lar appeal, so Gadar (dir. Anil Sharma, 2001) had a par­ticu­larly large audience in rural Punjab where it was set, and from where its major star, Sunny Deol, comes, to make it one of the biggest hits of the decade. At the other end of the spectrum, the upmarket Bollywood style is typified by Yash Raj Films, who have been the brand leaders since Aditya Chopra’s Dilwale dulhaniya le jayenge/The braveheart will take the bride (1995) to the present. This house style has also been followed by Karan Johar’s Dharma Productions. These two production houses have remained loyal to the upmarket Bollywood style, while others have experimented with more niche films. However, this Bollywood style reached its zenith with Karan Johar’s Kabhi khushi kabhie gham (2001), and vari­ations on the style have emerged even within these production houses. Other production houses have also innovated. Mukta Arts, the house of Subhash Ghai, whose films of the 1980s and 1990s helped define Bollywood, is now producing realist, middle-­class cinema such as that of Nagesh Kukunoor (including Dor, 2006) while Vidhu Vinod Chopra has produced the rare success of all India Bollywood hits, notably the two Munnabhai films, Munnabhai MBBS (dir. Rajkumar Hirani, 2004) and Lage raho Munnabhai (dir. Rajkumar Hirani, 2006), which were soph­istic­ated comedies on con­tempor­ary India (see Dwyer 2010), while his 3 Idiots (dir. Rajkumar Hirani, 2009) has broken all box office records (see below). A major production house which has emerged in the 2000s is the UTV Group, led by Ronnie Screwvala, who began his career in cable television and ad­vert­ ising. Like Yash Raj Films, they provide television con­tent and have an in­teg­ rated model of film production. Their films include both the big-­budget Bollywood films such as Rang de Basanti (dir. Rakeysh Mehra, 2006) and Jodhaa Akbar (dir. Ashutosh Gowariker, 2008), which covered ser­ious polit­ical concerns within the Bollywood form, as well as many im­port­ant mul­tiplex/hatke films such as Khosla ka ghosla (dir. Dibakar Banerjee, 2006), A Wednesday (dir. Neeraj Pandey, 2008), and Dev D (dir. Anurag Kashyap, 2009). The role of UTV in creating a bridge between Bollywood-­multiplex and hatke films is of enorm­ ous im­port­ance, and it seems poised to take a crucial role in the coming shaping of a new kind of cinema which can blend successfully Bollywood entertainment with nar­rat­ive cinema that addresses the concerns of the middle classes.

Hatke or multiplex cinema By the mid-­2000s a new formation of Hindi film appeared which has a different place in terms of production, style, con­tent, location, music, personnel and

198   R. Dwyer distribution, and seems a rich source for looking at a new imaginary appearing among a metropolitan, elite group of Indians. There is little schol­arly research on these films as yet, although Part II of Dwyer and Pinto (2011) consists of inter­ views with key personnel involved in their making. These films formed part of the screening at the mul­tiplex cinemas springing up in the new shopping malls all over urban India (Athique and Hill 2010) and hence are called mul­tiplex films or hatke (‘different’), as people say a film is ‘hatke/different’ from other films, ‘zara hatke/a little different’, or ‘majorly hatke se/very different from’, or has a ‘hatke/different’ subject. There is no consensus over which the films are included in this group, while some critics argue that hatke and mul­tiplex films are one and the same.11 In this paper, the terms are used differently but with some overlap, as the cat­egor­ies can be seen to form clusters of key features along a continuum from the Yash Raj/Karan Johar Bollywood, through the mul­tiplex film to the more experimental cinema. Multiplex films, while more realist than Bollywood and manifesting a rejection of melodrama, have a more focused nar­rat­ive, share some features of Bollywood cinema, notably the pres­ence of stars, such as Being Cyrus (dir. Homi Adajania, 2005), even if they are not perfoming their full star textual ref­er­ences in the film. Hatke films, such as those of Dibakar Banerjee (see below) have ‘unknown’ actors, often from theatre, and may have character actors recog­nized from Bollywood films (Boman Irani, Paresh Rawal, Anupam Kher) or actors from earl­ier forms of realist cinema (Naseeruddin Shah) or even their own stars, notably Abhay Deol. Hatke films are shown almost exclusively in mul­tiplexes, though only on one of the smaller screens and usually not at peak times, while Bollywood films are shown in the largest screens in mul­tiplexes and several showings may occur simul­ tan­eously, while they also are shown at single-­screen theatres. Multiplex and hatke films mark a change in production as they are made not with an eye on a major market, just safe returns on what is usually a smaller budget, as they have a limited release, mostly in the Indian metros and rarely overseas. Such films are made by special production wings of major houses such as Zee’s Limelight unit and UTV’s Spotboy. They eschew the attractions of the Hindi film (Dwyer and Patel 2002), but instead subordinate them to the nar­rat­ive. A striking feature is the use of real locations in India, mostly cityscapes and in par­ticu­lar that of Delhi, while music is incorp­or­ated diegetically or songs are used nar­rat­ively without playback singing. Item numbers are still found, though shown iron­ically as the pastiche of the wedding band in the hugely pop­ular ‘Emosional atyachar’ (Dev D, dir. Anurag Kashyap, 2009), or by hardly featuring in the film, such as the famously censored ‘Tu nangi acchi lagti hai/You look good naked’ (LSD, dir Dibakar Banerjee, 2010). The music itself is non-­Bollywood in style, more connected to the inde­pend­ent music scene in India, although Bollywood is quoted for romance as in Kishore Kumar’s ‘Thoda pyaar chahiye’ in Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye!, dir. Dibakar Banerjee, 2008. The film’s language is a marker of style with the use of a ‘cool’ style of Delhi Hindi, often lib­erally mixed with Punjabi, which is much appreciated by the young audiences.

Zara hatke (‘somewhat different’)   199 The films engage with social issues, most successfully in the form of comedy. Dibakar Banerjee’s Khosla ka ghosla (2006) finds dark humour in situ­ations including dealing with land grabs and Amer­ican visas, while his LSD: Love, sex aur dhokha (2010) takes up the digital filming of the every­day with disastrous con­sequences as characters have to engage with love, sex and deceit. Many makers of these mul­tiplex films have lived and travelled overseas, such as Nagesh Kukunoor, whose Hyderabad Blues (1998) is thought to have begun the trend, as a small budget film, about an Indian student who returns to Hyderabad to find his family determined to marry him off. It is made in a mixture of Telugu, Urdu/Hindi and English, as would be normal among this social group in Hyderabad. In recent years some of the mul­tiplex films have been made with more dialogue in English (such as Being Cyrus, dir. Homi Adajania, 2005), not to market the films overseas (there has been no inter­est in these films at all from overseas distributors) but because it gives an element of realism to the film. These dir­ectors are open about their love for Bollywood and often use it as pastiche in moments in the film where realism fades away, notably for love scenes. For example, in Main, meri patni aur woh (dir. Chandan Arora, 2005), as they watch a love story (Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Hum dil de chuke sanam, 1999), the hero ima­gines himself and his wife on screen, acting out their own love story and problems. As mentioned above, films group into clusters along the style spectrum from Bollywood to hatke. At the end between Bollywood and the mul­tiplex are films such as Prakash Jha’s police films which deal with real social prob­lems in Bihar, notablywith ref­er­ence to the Bhagalpur blindings in Gangaajal (2003) and his look at North Indian pol­itics in one of the big hits of 2010, Raajneeti. This group would also include Vishal Bhardwaj’s successful adaptations of Shake­speare into realist Indian settings in films such as his ‘Macbeth’, Maqbool (2003) and ‘Othello’, Omkara (2006), which seem to be aimed squarely at educated audiences. These films feature major stars, big-­budget production values and Bollywood music, but they have social and polit­ical ref­er­ences and often subordinate melodrama to realism in the manner of the multiplex. In between mul­tiplex and hatke would include one of the most cel­eb­rated of these films, Anurag Kashyap’s Dev D (2009), an adaptation of the story of Devdas, one of India’s most pop­ular film stories (Dwyer 2004) into a modern version of drink and drug abuse set in rural Punjab and the lowlife areas of Delhi (Dwyer 2009). This film was a huge crit­ical success in India and was a hit in the metropolitan areas, where a limited number of prints was released. The film was not screened in the UK and only two prints were shown in the USA. The film confirmed Anurag Kashyap, who ac­know­ledged Danny Boyle who in turn thanks him for his assistance with Slumdog Millionaire (2009), as the leading dir­ector in this new cinema and Abhay Deol as its major star of this form of cinema (inter­views in Dwyer and Pinto 2011). Dibakar Banerjee is the most ‘majorly hatke’ of the filmmakers and one of the most successful with his three films, Khosla ka ghosla (2006), Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye! (2008) and Love sex aur dhokha (2010). These films are set in a very

200   R. Dwyer realistic Delhi, the first being a middle-­class view of life and its struggles as a father seeks to build a family home and to keep his family together in a world of land-­grabbing criminals and the temptations of the West. The second is based on the story of a major thief, who has no Robin Hood virtues but steals to little purpose in what seems more of a pathologized consumerism. The last is the least successful as a film but one of the most fascinating in the way it handles its subject. It is divided into three parts, the first in which a student filmmaker seeks to remake DDLJ, but his unending film of his Bollywood fantasy and his real-­ life discovery of love and sex ends with an ‘honour killing’ as he is from a backward caste. The middle story takes up the MMS scandals, as a shop’s CCTV is used to film sex scenes which are to be sold to make money. The third story is of a sting opera­tion using a hidden camera on a singer who uses the casting couch. The film’s handicam shows an overall obsession with the visual and ways in which people can play with re­corded images and stories. Multiplex cinemas, located in new centres of middle-­class consumerist culture, transform the audiences by their eco­nomic and their phys­ical dif­fer­ ences. The mul­tiplex venues are expensive or upmarket cinemas where ticket prices are high and small screens are avail­able without the risk of hiring a large single-­screen theatre. Thus the audience is higher class in terms of purchasing power but is also likely to be educated and curious to see a film which has a different con­tent. These films have found little success in the Indian overseas audiences who stick to Bollywood, which they watch alongside non-­Indian media such as Hollywood and local media, notably television, as well as Indian soaps and film programming. Although the audiences for these films are eco­nomic­ally and educationally ad­vant­aged, it is inter­esting to note that the audience is more homogenized than before as there is no hier­archy of seating. In the single screen, the balcony looked down on the masses but in the mul­tiplex they are in­vis­ible and the seats are now all one price. The films are also forming new audiences for cinema. Realist or nar­rat­ive cinema in India has its own audiences, who may watch Bollywood (even if iron­ically or pretending to do so iron­ically) but who also watch Hollywood and other forms of world cinema. However, the audiences associated prim­arily with these other cinemas do not watch Indian realist cinema, which they find dull and lacking in entertainment values. Multiplex or hatke cinema is different as its audiences are familiar with many forms of cinema from the inter­na­ tional cinema screened at ever-­proliferating film festivals, or from highly eclectic DVD rental stores in the metropolises and commercially avail­able imported DVDs, as well as internet downloads and the increasing affordabil­ity of foreign travel. These viewers may have grown up with the art cinema of Satyajit Ray (although Dibakar Banerjee talks about his Bengali family watching it as ‘regu­lar’ cinema, (Masand 2008)), and a range of Indian middle-­class cinema, often symbiotic with the mainstream cinema through the cinema of dir­ectors such as Guru Dutt and Bimal Roy in the 1950s, Hrishikesh Mukherjee and Sai Paranjpe in the 1970s, to the wide-­ranging compass of the cinema of Shyam Benegal.

Zara hatke (‘somewhat different’)   201 The dir­ectors are often in direct contact with their audiences through workshops, cinema clubs, special screenings, blogs (notably www.passionforcinema. com) and social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter. Interviews with the personnel of these films suggest that many of them come from the old middle classes, the educated bourgeoisie, as their parents are often civil ser­vants and doctors who have sent their chil­dren into higher education. This implies that there is a strong connection between a younger generation of the old middle classes and this new form of cinema, which would certainly be likely in their know­ledge of film, liter­at­ure and music and their lib­eral, secular values. However, they could also be a new section of the new middle classes who are becoming more educated; only a study of the filmmakers themselves would confirm the strong pos­sib­il­ity that this is mostly a trans­forma­tion of the old middle classes with a smaller proportion of new middle classes. Multiplex and hatke show a trans­format­ive cinematic de­velopment, with the emergence of talented dir­ectors such as Dibakar Banerjee and cam­paigning voices for a new kind of cinema in Anurag Kashyap, along with striking new ideas of masculinity in the persona of Abhay Deol. Unfortunately, many of the films fail to find a balance between nar­rat­ive and the filmic and visual elements, or are simply too rough-­and-ready technically, with weak nar­rat­ives, or are self-­ indulgent, overblown or just sometimes plain boring. Nevertheless, their im­port­ ance as a new type of cinema and the films’ formations of new filmmakers and audiences must be recognized.

Conclusion Although there are clear divisions between these cat­egor­ies of cinema, they are not abso­lute any more in terms of audiences. Although the oppos­ite ends of the spectrum may be ir­re­con­cil­able, with followers of lower-­class films eschewing realist cinema and vice versa, the viewers of the hatke cinema are widely eclectic and may take different positions from those expected by the texts, so the educated elites watch Bollywood and Bhojpuri films iron­ically, while the hatke dir­ectors may present Bollywood elements as pastiche.12 Meanwhile. the attractions of the mainstream cinema are leaking into realist cinema, which cannot manage without song, even if it has to present it iron­ically, just as realism is often pen­et­rating mainstream Bollywood, whose production houses are now making these films. It would be wrong to see all Hindi cinema as middle class, but the cultural referent of this cinema is increasingly that of these classes. Meanwhile, Bollywood has achieved a dominance which seemed unlikely even 20 years ago. This does not imply that the entire audience for this cinema is middle class, but rather that the values of this group are becoming increasingly dominant, certainly in urban and mofussil (non-­metropolitan) India. It seems to be a two-­way inter­ action between the films and soci­ety, and as mainstream films begin to be shown more cheaply through digital formats, their reach is likely to increase. In the last decade, the position of India within the world and global trends in consumerist habits and culture have shifted from fantasies to real possibilities.

202   R. Dwyer The educated, young, cosmo­pol­itan Indians watch hatke/mul­tiplex films which other social groups largely avoid. It seems that this group may be a younger generation or a younger reformation of the old middle classes, who have retained their aesthetic need for realism in cinema although they do not share the hostility to Bollywood which they have grown up watching, and, even though likely to have travelled to or studied in the West, are less enamoured of the West than their parents. The less educated but still vis­ible classes, or lower middle classes, watch Bollywood and lower-­class comedies and television, while almost every­one who watches film watches Bollywood, which is dominant at a level not seen before and is no longer striving for re­cog­ni­tion or cultural legitimacy.13 The Bollywood filmmakers and those involved in it are making good money and are proud that their cinema is known – even if not watched – internationally. Although there is some audience research it has severe lim­ita­tions, as it as­sumes that viewers at a given moment are articulating longer trends, with con­sider­able fluency to outsiders. There is a need to look at wider audiences across the coun­try and the totality of cinema cultures from filmmaking discussions to the audience’s consumption and criticism of the films. It is also im­port­ ant not to talk about these films in a vacuum, but little is known about film viewing practices in India beyond the watching of Indian films. Directors and audiences have more access than ever to Hollywood and other forms of global cinema beyond Hollywood through DVDs, cinema, festivals and increased travel. In fact, in the absence of a study of the culture of India’s young, that is, the under-­35s, it is hard to have a broader understanding of the meaning of these films. In the absence of ana­lysis of the youth culture of India today, a focus on a reading of the texts to ex­plore their imaginaries is one of the key places to start. It is also im­port­ant to study the astute market ob­ser­vers, who are among the most successful filmmakers (Yash Chopra, Ronnie Screwvala, Anurag Kashyap), alongside a reading of the body of the texts themselves. These two approaches can be brought together by looking at one of India’s most skilful readers of texts, the box office and performance, Aamir Khan. A major Bollywood hero for 20 years, he is still one of the most bankable box office stars. A youthful hero in the 1990s, Aamir Khan became a producer with Lagaan in 2001, which became one of the most crit­ically discussed films and was India’s Oscar nomination as well as award winner at home. Starring in this film, Aamir Khan cut the number of films in which he appeared to an average of less than one a year, but all of which bar one (Mangal Pandey, dir. Ketan Mehta, 2005), have been among the major hits of their year and most highly acclaimed. All the films are made within the Bollywood world, but all of them query its style and push its bound­ar­ies. Indeed, were the films to have an actor other than Aamir Khan in them, they would not have been made within Bollywood, and even with such a major star, some push towards the mul­tiplex cat­egory, notably the story whose focus is on dyslexia in which Aamir Khan plays the teacher who understands the child’s prob­lems (Taare zameen par, dir. Aamir Khan, 2008).

Zara hatke (‘somewhat different’)   203 Aamir Khan was the only major current Bollywood star14 to appear in Rang de Basanti (dir. Rakesh Mehra, 2006; produced by UTV), a film which experimented with a complex structure and polit­ical issues to engage with youth ennui and a polit­ical consciousness raised by staging the story of the life of Shaheed Bhagat Singh by a group of disaffected students. The candle-­lit protest the students make against gov­ern­ment corruption in this film has been much imit­ated in real life. This film’s success with the metropolitan audiences made it one of the earliest films to mark a bridge between the mainstream and the ‘mutliplex’ films. The biggest hit so far this year (2010) is 3 Idiots (dir. Rajkumar Hirani, 2009), which brings the producer–dir­ector team of Vidhu Vinod Chopra and Rajkumar Hirani of recent Munnabhai success (see above) together with Aamir Khan. Taking every feature of Bollywood style to its utmost, the film drew on the very middle-­class theme of the tussle between parental pressure and vocation and self-­fulfilment in education and career choice among the young. These very real concerns of the young, par­ticu­larly those from new and insecure middle-­class groups, have a feel of mul­tiplex cinema while every­thing else about the film is pure Bollywood. In 2010, Aamir Khan used his Bollywood clout as a star in terms of audience appeal and marketing/finance possib­il­ities to bring films that would other­wise count as hatke cinema into mainstream entertainment. His pro­mo­tion of Peepli live (dir. Anusha Rizvi and Mahmud Farooqui, 2010), where the ser­ious topic of farmer sui­cides is ex­plored in the con­text of a satire on live media, meant this film was shown nationally and promoted inter­na­tionally, ultimately becoming India’s Oscar nomination for the year. This film would not have received this attention without his sup­port, but it was noted that Aamir Khan’s star power almost eclipsed the achievement of the filmmakers (Gupta 2010). This paper traced the de­velopment of two new forms of cinema, the ‘regional Hindi’ cinema and the mul­tiplex or hatke cinema that emerged in the 2000s, challenging the Bollywood behemoth. Both of these new forms are signi­fic­ant in the his­tory of media in India, the former for showing the emergence of locally produced media in groups which are increasingly othered by the middle classes, while the mul­tiplex/hatke films and Bollywood reveal the new complexity of production, as the corporatization of Indian business is transforming what was, until recently, a family-­owned cottage industry, and of the formation of new audiences with wide-­ranging tastes. They also exemplify how producers and creatives are in motion between different forms of media from film to television to ad­vert­ising and more in a new way. These young people are also crossing class bound­ar­ies or redefining them in terms of education, taste in media consumption and self-­fashioning. Media careers now provide some of the most lucrative sal­ar­ies in India, giving new power to these young creatives to take an active role in shaping the media while also playing out a new form of social mobility and trans­forma­tions within India’s middle classes. (For further details of some of these films see Dwyer (2005)).

204   R. Dwyer

Notes   1 Thanks to Rajeev Masand, Jerry Pinto, Nandini Ramnath, Anil Sinanan; Faisal Devji and Michael Dwyer.   2 Economic lib­eralization took place in India when foreign exchange reserves fell sharply fol­low­ing the rise in oil prices after the First Gulf War. Luce (2006) focuses on post-­1991 India to explain eco­nomic, social and polit­ical changes succinctly and elegantly.   3 Babb and Wadley (1995); Brosius and Butcher (1999); Butcher (2003); Juluri (2003); Mankekar (1999); Mazzarella (2003); Rajagopal (2001).There is little published research so far on the impact of mobile phones, the internet and other new media, though see Jeffery and Doron (forthcoming).   4 There is no formal linguistic dif­fer­ence between a language and a dialect. Bhojpuri, closely related to Hindi, is not recog­nized as an official language but is usually discussed as a dialect of Hindi. Perhaps the growth of the Bhojpuri cinema will make its formal re­cog­ni­tion more likely.   5 Few histories have been written of the de­velopment of India’s middle class. See Dwyer (2000) on Bombay’s middle classes; for their de­velopment in the co­lo­nial period see Haynes (1991) on Surat; Joshi (2001) on Lucknow; Cohen (1998) for middle classes in Varanasi and Brosius (2010) on Delhi. Verma (1998) and Das (2000) discuss the new middle classes. Two key books are Fernandes (2006), an im­port­ant study of pol­itics and the middle classes of India which also surveys the liter­at­ure in the field, and Leichty (2003), which provides a use­ful comparison with Nepal’s middle classes.   6 Figure from the Economic Times of India, quoted by Rajagopal (1999: 91).   7 See Dwyer (2002b, 2006c) passim on Indian film genres; on genre see Altman (1999); Gledhill (2000); Frow (2005); Neale (1980, 1990, 2000).   8 Madhava Prasad argues that the Hindi film’s omnibus genre of the social, with its under­lying theme of the feudal family romance, which long resisted generic differ­ enti­ation, was segmented in the early 1970s. He sees this as part of a wider change in ideo­logy, as the frag­menta­tion of the national consensus brought about polit­ical mobil­iza­tion, challenging the aesthetic conventions and mode of production of the film industry. This resulted in the emergence of three major forms of the Hindi cinema: de­velop­mentalist state realism; identification-­oriented realism of the middle-­ class arena; and the aesthetic of mobil­iza­tion. This model situates these changes in terms of wider issues of pol­itics and ideo­logy and shows how all these types of cinema to some extent draw on existing practices of nar­rat­ive codes and signification.   9 There is now a con­sider­able liter­at­ure on Indian cinema and the diaspora, such as Kaur and Sinha (2005). 10 My thanks to Vijay Mishra for demonstrating this to me at a musical gath­er­ing at his home in Perth, 2006. 11 The major critics dis­agree. For instance, Shubhra Gupta (2003) notes ‘The rash of the past month’s small films – Rs2 crore to Rs5 crore . . . with ‘zara hatke’ story­lines, bereft of estab­lished stars’. A gen­eral consensus is that mul­tiplex cinema is a new genre, a type of realistic cinema, made with smaller budget and more story driven (Trivedi 2008). Jerry Pinto argues that the dif­fer­ence is the absence of stars (or the absence of star performance at least) in hatke films, while Anil Sinanan sees little dif­fer­ence and only uses the term ‘mul­tiplex’ to mean there are no major stars, but the film has an unusual theme, and attracts an urban middle-­class crowd. Nandini Ramnath argues per­ suas­ively that there is not much dif­fer­ence between the terms, and ‘mul­tiplex’ is now eliding the form of ‘hatke’ as producers like the cat­egory of mul­tiplex for marketing purposes. The term ‘mul­tiplex’ suggests it attracts the classes rather than masses, so even big-­budget films can be marketed as mul­tiplex and shown on several screens in the same mul­tiplex. Rajeeve Masand suggests that hatke means experimental in any form of

Zara hatke (‘somewhat different’)   205 the film while mul­tiplex is niche, and refers to budget and release. Interviews based on personal email corres­pond­ence with the fol­low­ing film critics: Rajeev Masand (CNN IBN), Anil Sinanan (The Times, London/Time Out, London), Nandini Ramnath (Time Out Mumbai) and Jerry Pinto (freelance writer, author of the National Award-­winning book Helen: the life and times of an H-­bomb (Pinto 2006)). 12 Nikhil Advani’s Salaam-­e-ishq (2007) may have divided audiences by its knowing pastiche which appealed to some but may have disrupted the film for others. See also Dyer’s (2006) ana­lysis of pastiche. 13 Once again, the absence of any reli­able stat­ist­ics of box office returns must be noted. While figures which rank the major hits can be used with some confidence, the in­forma­tion about the success of the smaller films remains elusive. 14 Madhavan is a major Tamil star and Waheeda Rehman is one of the great actresses of Hindi cinema whose career began in the 1950s.

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Index

Page numbers in italics denote tables, those in bold denote figures. academic research on class, scope of 1–2 Adiga, A. 193 advertising 13; Bombay Life Assurance Society 34; Free India General Insurance 33; Horlicks 35–8; images of masculinity 41–2; increased use of 24; Indianization 25; insurance 30–4, 33, 34; Lifebuoy 35; Lux 35; and male responsibilities 29–41; and middle class 24–5, 26, 31–2, 35–6, 41; Ovaltine 35; targeting 25; theoretical perspectives 23–4; tonics 38–41 affirmative action 4; see also reservations agency 7 anthropology and class 10 anxieties 15–16, 96–7; and advertising 29–30, 37–8; and control 89; moral 130–1; sexual 38–40 aphrodisiacs 38–40 Appadurai, A. 4, 48, 49, 176 Ardener, S. 162, 172 Arnold, D. 143 aspiration 4, 10, 13, 16–17, 18, 49, 50, 63, 65, 73–4, 76, 79, 82, 84, 89, 96, 123, 139, 141, 145–6, 148–50, 153, 155, 190, 195 austerity 52 authority: parental 81, 93; patriarchal 83, 96, 108–10 autonomy: women’s 5, 113; for youths 107–8, 110, 113–15 Barker, C. 134 Baroda 100–15 Bauman, Z. 190 Benegal, S. 189 Bengal 2–3 Bengali: cuisine 52, 54; diet 58; middle

class (changes in food consumption 50; understandings of food 51, female employment 58, 69); nationalism 57 Béteille, A. 16, 73, 142, 146, 149, 151 bhadralok 119 bharat 79 Bhaumik, K. 29 Bhojpuri 194–5 Biao, X. 148, 153 boarding schools 91–2 Bollywood 192, 193, 195–7, 201–3 Bose, B. 47, 51–2, 55, 59 Bose, P.K. 26, 28 Bourdieu, P. 6, 8, 12, 124, 167, 168, 178, 186, 189, 190 brands, preferences 53 Breckenridge, C.A. 48 Brosius, C. 184, 186 Burke, T. 24 Burman, S. 162, 172 Calcutta 11, 14, 47, 49–68, 90–1, 173; Kolkata 117–36 Caplan, P. 168 capital: cultural 6, 167, 168, 189; economic 167; social 167; see also exposure cartoons, in advertising 36 caste 16, 142, 144; Eshava 143–7, 154, 157n2, 157n5; Gounders 11, 75, 77–80, 83–6, 91–5; caste-based politics 4–5; upper caste 3–4, 11, 16, 119, 162, 168, 172, 187 celebrity culture 191 Chakrabarty, D. 26 Chakravarti, U. 131, 132 Chari, S. 76, 94

210   Index chastity 74, 96 Chatterjee, P. 26, 119 Chibber, V. 2 child marriage 28 children, health of 25, 28, 35; food practices 26, 53, 59–60, 62, 65–7; see also education Chopra, A. 195 Chopra, B.R. 189 Chopra, R. 83 Chopra Y.R.: films 185, 190, 197 cinema 11, 13; audiences 200–1; Bhojpuri 194–5; Bollywood 192, 193, 195–7, 201–3; commercial 189–90; and cultural legitimacy 189–90; as dominant media 191; film genres 192; glamorous realism 190; hatke 197–202, 203; localized forms 192–5; mediated selves 190; middle-class cinema 189; realist 189, 199–200; regional 192, 203; segmentation 192; and social imaginary 191–2; 201–3; video releases 194 class: analysis 18; associated factors 10; construction of 11; diversity of middle class 4–5, 73; ethnography and study of class 10, 11; formation 2–3; locating 8–14; lower middle class 14–16, 51, 117–25,129, 135, 187, 189, 202; reproduction 145; as research topic 2; as source of power and control 17; and status 146; stratification within class 11, 136, 143, 146; theories of 5–8, 47–8; use of term 12 colonialism: characterization of Indian men 26, 36; food consumption 55–7; medical profession 142–3 conjugality 24, 25, 26–7, 41; see also marriage Conlon, F. 49, 177 consumerism 8–10, 147, 164, 187–8, 190, 196, 200; young people as consumers 65–6 consumption 11–12, 167; and middleclassness 48–55; patterns of, and class 51; public and domestic 48; research 49; food 47–66; see also consumerism cook books 54 cosmopolitanism 49 CPM, reforms 121–2 culture and marriage 92–5; preservation of 117–18; and television 133–4 Das, V. 115, 131 Dé, S. 172 de Zengotita, T. 184, 190

Delhi 66, 129, 133, 162–80, 198–200 Derné, S. 171 Deshpande, S. 100, 142 development 100 Devi, B. 59 diaspora 184–5, 195; global and overseas 196; young people 65–6 digital media 184, 185 domesticity 26, 54; global domesticity 26; women 29, 48, 56, 165 Donner, H. 58, 65, 90, 91, 92, 96, 105, 111, 112, 122, 132, 166, 167, 168, 169, 173, 177 Doron, A. 190 dowry 32, 151, 152; dowry inflation 155 Dwyer, R. 184, 185, 186, 187, 188, 189, 191, 196, 198, 199, 203 eating out 49, 53–6, 63, 65, 177; fast food 60 economic standing 51, 77, 120, 167 education 28; accessibility 121; boarding schools 91–2; for daughters 83–6; English language 120–5; expansion of 148–50; and gendered identity 11; Kerala 148; and marriage 85 new opportunities of 146; and status 85; study abroad 79–82; women 53 elders, duties towards 113–15 elite: industrial 74; rural 18; see also entrepreneurs; new middle class English language 148; and cultural politics 120–5; importance of 124; see also language entrepreneurs 11, 15, 63, 74; new class of 12, 73, 125, 139; upwardly mobile 73, 75–6; see also Tirrupur ethnography and study of class 10, 11 eugenics 28 exposure 179; kitty-parties 174–8; through education 81, 84, 91–2 see also cultural capital extended families 27, 29, 90–1, 93; see also joint families Ezhava 143–5, 147, 154 Family: authority 108–10; centrality of nuclear family 41; decision-making 79, 89; duties 95; in advertising 25, 31; moral foundation 96; nuclear 26; obligations 105; power relations 106; threats to 28; values 68, 95, 113, 190; businesses 95–7; reconceptualization of roles in the family 26–7

Index   211 fashion 103; kitty-parties 162–79; see also youth culture fast food 60; street food 55, 66; eating out 49, 53–67, 177 feminism 132 femininity 162–79 Fernandes, L. 9, 18, 73, 96, 100, 142, 167, 168, 171, 184, 187 Finch, J. 187 food: children 60, 62, 65; colonialism 55–7; division of labour 59; domestic 49; dominance of 53; entrepreneurs 63; fieldwork 50; foreign foods 64; gender roles 53–4; gendered practices 64–6; global food practices 62; importance of 57–8; inside and outside the home 54–5, 64–5; kitty-parties 174, 176; memoirs 57; and middle class consumerism 49; nationalist legacy 55–7; post-independence 57–8; postliberalization period 58–62; preprocessed foods 61–2; weddings 64; women in employment 59; eating out 53–60, 63–7, 177 friendships, between women 169, 172–4, 179; premarital sex 112 Frøystad, K. 169, 172 Fuller, C.J. 73, 79, 81, 89, 91, 92, 111, 115, 140, 142, 149, 153, 177 gender: and education 84; gendered food consumption 64–6; gendered hierarchies 81–2; gender roles 50; gender relations 13–14; effects of World War II and Independence/Partition 165; and television 130–2 generation: gap 105–6, 109; intragenerational relations 66, 74, 169; respect for parents and elders 108–9 Ghosh, A. 15 Giddens, A. 18, 107–8, 190 globalization 2, 9, 17, 48; and English language 122; global domesticity 26; global food practices 49, 60, 62, 65; of health care 139; kitty-parties 178; of media 129–34; and the middle class 118, 125; opportunities of 125, 129; and women 50–1, 166 government service 14, 51, 56, 125–9; doctors 152–3 Gujarat 101, 187 Gupta, C. 26, 38–9, 105

Hansen, T.B. 186 hatke cinema 197–202, 203 Haynes, D.E. 39, 41 health care: context and overview 139–41; globalization 139; history of medicine in Kerala 143–4 health: of children 28, 35; food and reproduction 65; health care 121, 139, 141, 143–4, 153 hegemony 8, 13 Heller, P. 147 Heyer, J. 83 hierarchy 108 Hindu nationalism 4–5 Hindutva 186, 187 homosociality 29 honour 35–8, 37, 38, 74–5; see also respectability household: goods 53; composition 62; intra-household relationships 29, 53, 57, 90–1; inter-household relationships 26, 50, 59 housewife, role of 26 see also domesticity; gender relations husband, role of 27–8; see also gender relations identities: group-based 10; identity politics 18; levels of construction 18; performance of 14; regional 62; reproducing 48; class-based 48–9, 67, 75 ideologies: ideology, used in advertising 36; gendered practices and ideologies 64–6; reworking 56 Inden, R. 193 Independence 31, 96, 103, 114; food consumption 57–8; see also partition Indian sociology 100; ethnography of India 10, 95–6, 168; see also caste inequality 8; and gender 11; ideas of duty 32 IT: professionals 73, 85, 140; industries 49, 60; knowledge economy 139, 140 J. Walter Thompson 25 Jaffrelot, C. 4, 73 Janeja, M. 51, 52, 59 Jeffery, R. 120, 148, 190 Jeffrey, C. 16, 144 joint households 90–1, 113; see also family Jordan, G. 135 Juluri, V. 188

212   Index Kabir, M. 143 Kaushik, M. 153, 154 Kerala: education 148; expansion of middle class 145–50; Ezhava 143–5; migration 146–7; Muslim community 144, 152 Khilnani, S. 105 Kidambi, P. 27–8 kitty-parties: attitudes to 163–4; conversation topics 178; dress and fashion 175–6; exposure 174–8, 179; food consumption 174, 176; friendships 169, 172–4, 179; globalization 178; history 164; joining 168–70; locations 175, 177–8; morality 171–2; popularity 166; reasons for saving 170–2; saving 178–9; sisterhood 173 knowledge economy 140; see also IT Kohli, A. 120 Kolkata see Calcutta Krishnan, T.N. 143 language: English medium education 78, 103, 120–3, 140, 148, 167; skills 78; television 133; see also English language Laxmi 50 liberalization: benefits 124, 171, 193; cultural 128–9, 135–6; critique of 117–36; economic 73–4, 131, 139, 146, 166; and English language 122; food consumption 58–62; and healthcare 139; and middle class 166, 171, 184, 193; opportunities of 146, 184; effects of 49, 51, 58–62 Liechty, M. 12–13, 47–8, 73–4, 96, 103, 106, 115, 134, 168, 171, 178, 188 lower middle class see class Luce, E. 186 Lukose, R. 16, 84, 88, 89, 96, 103, 115 maan 108–9 maanam 74–5, 84, 90, 96 Madan, T.N. 152 Mandal Commission 4 marginalization 135 marketing, targeted 3, 25, 42, 65–6 marriage 112: arranged 85, 92–3, 105, 111–12, 178, 188; colonialism 111; companionate 111; conjugality 24, 25, 26–7, 41; and culture 92–5; dating 93; and education 85; engagement, before marriage 93; love 27–8, 31–2, 92–3, 110, 111–12, 188, 190, 196; parental

consent and authority 81, 93, 108; premarital sex 112; selection of partners 110–13; self-arranged 85, 111; transformations 10, 49 Marx, K. 5 masculinity 24, 26–9; role of women 29; socializing 33; role of advertising 33 Mayo, K. 28 Mazzarella, W. 3, 5, 8, 9, 48, 65, 67, 140, 142 McDonald, K. 108, 115 McKinsey 139 media 129–34, 184, 185, 191; representations 67–8, 132, 134; see also cinema; youth culture medical: education 148–50; access to 143–4; government service 152–3; privatization 154–5, 156–7; (profession incomes 151, 156; migration 152–4; moral authority 145; postgraduate study 151–2; social mobility 144–5; social transformation 150–5; status 151, 156–7; working conditions 151); see also health Mehta, N. 190 Mehta, S. 194 men: economic responsibilities 27–8; selfconceptions 26; see also new masculinity; see also husbands menstruation 105 meritocracy 51 middle class: anxiety 104–5; as a cultural project 74; as being in the middle 15, 52; cultural and status preservation 117–18; defining 166–7, 185–6; expansion 73, 117, 145–50; as political bloc 117; as research topic 3–5; scope of term 3–4; self identification 3, 119; size of 185–6; middleclassness 12–13, 16–18; new middle class 3, 6, 8, 10, 14, 65, 73, 100, 118, 140, 142–3, 155, 166, 184–203; stratification within class 11, 136, 143, 146 migration 146–7; doctors 152–4 Misra, B.B. 1, 142 modernity 14, 24, 39, 49, 54, 60, 68, 100, 106, 113, 165, 188; drivers of 100, 115, 142; and generations 95, 105–7; as ontological paradigm 104–5 morality 3, 15, 51, 75, 87, 96, 108, 188; authority, of doctors 145; kitty-parties 171–2; moral anxiety 130–1 mothers: expectations of 90; as guardians of tradition 65; mothers-in-law 56

Index   213 Mullan, F. 152, 153 multiplex 197–202, 203; see also cinema Munshi, S. 132 Muslim community 144, 147, 152 Nandy, A. 188, 189 Narasimhan, H. 73, 79, 81, 89, 91, 92, 111, 115, 140, 142, 149, 153, 177 nationalism 17; Bengali 57; and family ideal 26; legacy of 55–7; as research topic 2 Neale, S. 192 neoliberalization 117–18 see also liberalization night starvation 36 non-resident Indian (NRI) 184 nurses, migration 147 Ortner, S. 12–13, 18 Osella, C. 84, 144, 145, 147, 148, 155 Osella, F. 84, 144, 145, 147, 148, 155 Oshikawa, F. 166 Ovaltine 35 Oza, R. 134, 135 Papanek, H. 168, 178 Parents: parental authority 81; shared parenting 90–1, 92; duties towards 113–15; see also marriage; mother partition 58 Patel, D. 196 Pennycook, A. 120 Person of Indian Origin (PIO) 184–5 perumai 84 Phadke, N.S. 28 Phillipson, R. 120 Pinto, J. 198, 199 politics: middle class 5, 8, 12, 15, 17; power of middle class 117; regionalist politics 4–5 post-liberalization period see liberalization poverty 193 practice 12–13, 17–18, 23, 28, 41, 74–5, 92, 93, 95, 96, 105–6, 108, 111–13, 122, 133, 136, 140, 148, 156, 171, 177, 185, 191, 195, 202; food practices 47–69; theory of practice 12 Prakash, G. 100, 142 Prasad, M. 189, 192, 195 prestige 84; see also status privatization, medical education 154–5, 156–7; health care 139, 141, 155; education 122, 125, 141, 154–5; see also liberalization

public: modernity paradigm 48; sector 125–9; employment 15; space (politics of 48, 60, 68; struggles over 48; restructuring of urban public space 49, 193; middle-class activism 193; food consumption 49) see also government service Rajadhyaksha, A. 195 Rajagopal, R. 24, 132, 134, 186 Rajasekharan Nair, K. 143 Ray, S. 189 regional cinema 192, 203 reservations 4; affirmative action 6, 17, respectability 74–5, 84, 90, 96; respect 108–9; see also honour Ring, L. 57–8 ritual 50, 58, 62, 90, 95, 106, 173 rotating savings associations 162, 164 Sarda Act 28 Sarkar Report 122–3 Sarkar, T. 3, 15–16, 122 Sarkar S. 3, 15 saving 170–2, 178–9 Scrase, T.J. 122 Sengupta, J. 58 servants 8, 53, 56, 59, 90, 92, 175; see also domesticity Sethi, R.M. 164, 170 sex 8; and advertising 38–41, 131; control of sexuality 28; sexual anxieties 89; sexualization of women 130, 131; tonics, advertising 38–40 Seymour, S. 90 shared parenting 90–1; see also parents Sharma, U. 168, 178 social: capital 167; exclusion 193; fears of social mobility 16; imaginary 191–2; mobility 140–1, 146, 148; networking 201 Sridharan, E. 142 Srivastava, S. 145 Standing, H. 59 state: dependence on 15; see also liberalization; government employment; middle-class politics status: and class 146; markers 48; medical profession 151, 156–7; preservation of 117–18; production work 168 stratification: within class 11, 136, 143, 146; see also middle class Stronach, L.A. 25

214   Index Tagore, R. 27 Tamil-Nadu: new entrepreneurs 73; Gounder caste 86, 92; see also Tiruppur Tangri, S.S. 142, 143, 148 taste, theory of 186 Taylor, C. 185, 191 television 129–34, 178, 184, 202, 203; changing audiences 191; and middle class 53, 60, 129 temporality 106 theories of class 5–8 Therwath, I. 185 Tiruppur: entrepreneurship and development 75–7 industrial elite 75 Todorov, T. 192 tonics 38–41 tradition: and modernity 106–7, 188; mothers as guardians 65; transmission 13–14 Tripathy, R. 195 Uberoi, P. 113, 166, 171, 188 uncertainties 15–16; see also anxiety UTV Group 197 uzhaippu 76, 94 van der Veer, P. 4 van Wessel, M. 60, 95, 96, 108, 134 Varma, P.K. 10, 49, 73, 95 Vasudevan, R. 195 Vatuk, S. 91 vegetarianism 53–5, 58, 65, 66; and gender 53–5, 65, 66; new vegetarianism 65, 68; and reproduction 65 Vera-Sanso, P. 74–5, 83, 89, 96 Viswathan, G. 120

Wacquant, L. 7 Waldrop, A. 11, 166, 177, 179, 180 Walsh, J. 26, 56 Weber, M. 6 weddings, food consumption 64 Weedon, C. 135 West Bengal, government reforms 121–2 Wilson, C. 140 women: changing roles 56; chastity 74, 96; domestic roles 50–1, 52, 53; dress 103; education 53, 83–6; employment 13, 53, 58–9, 74, 84–96; expectations of 172–3; in family businesses 83–92; friendships 169, 172–4, 179; as fulltime mothers 90; gendered roles 50; ideal femininity 165; domestic work 59; as producers and consumers 51; and tradition 13–14; sexualization of 130; food consumption 59 work ethic 4, 52, 74, 75–6, 94, 127, 129, 145; meritocracy 51 working-class culture 13 workplace, as political and cultural battleground 125–9 World Bank 193 World Health Organization (WHO) 139 Wright, E.O. 5, 6, 12, 17, 118 young people 16; autonomy 107–8, 110, 113–15; diet 65–6; family authority 108–10; modernity and generations 104–7; morality 108; respect for parents and elders 108–9; youth culture 42, 50, 67, 108, 188–9, 202; liberalization 188; consumption 8, 104; fashion 49, 65; film 188–9 Zachariah, K.C. 146