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The Pleasures and Anxieties of Being in the Middle: Emerging Middle-Class Identities in Urban South India*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 August 2011

SARA DICKEY
SARA DICKEY*
Affiliation:
Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Bowdoin College, 7000 College Station, Brunswick, Maine 04011, USA Email: sdickey@bowdoin.edu
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Abstract

Recent economic changes in India have coincided with a dramatic change in the concept of a ‘middle class’ in the south Indian city of Madurai. Whereas previous sets of class identities were overwhelmingly dichotomous (for example, the rich and the poor, or the ‘big people’ and ‘those who have nothing’), the middle class has now become a highly elaborated component of local class structures and identities. It is also a contested category; moreover, its indigenous boundaries differ from those most often used by scholars, marketers, or policy-makers. Drawing from research over the past decade, this paper examines local definitions of ‘middleness’ and the moralized meanings ascribed to it. Whilst being ‘in the middle’ is a source of pride and pleasure, connoting both achievement and enhanced self-control, it is simultaneously a source of great tension, bringing anxiety over the critical and damaging scrutiny of onlookers. For each positive aspect of a middle-class identity that emphasizes security and stability, there is a negative ramification or consequence that highlights the precariousness and potential instability of middle-class life. In exploring each of these aspects, I pay attention to the explicitly performative features of class identities. I conclude by considering the epistemological and experiential insights we gain into the construction of emergent class categories by focusing on self-ascribed identities and their performance.

Type
Research Article
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 46 , Issue 3 , May 2012 , pp. 559 - 599
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

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References

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14 Most middle-class people previously had to rely on extremely high-interest loans from local moneylenders for major expenditures such as motorcycles, new houses, business equipment, and dowries. In Madurai, local moneylenders typically charge 10 per cent interest per month; on very short-term loans, the rate can be as high as 10 per cent per day.

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16 See Fernandes, Leela, ‘Nationalizing “The Global”: Media Images, Cultural Politics and the Middle Class in India’, Media, Culture & Society 22, 5: 611–628 (2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Fernandes, ‘Restructuring’; Lakha, Salim, ‘The State, Globalisation and Indian Middle-Class Identity’, in Pinches, Michael, ed., Culture and Privilege in Capitalist Asia (New York: Routledge, 1999)Google Scholar.

17 Ghosh, Jayati, ‘Gender Concerns in Macro-Economic Policy’, Economic and Political Weekly 29, 18: WS-2–WS-4 (30 April 1994)Google Scholar; Kothari, Poverty; Fernandes, ‘Restructuring’; Desai, ‘Middle Class’; Ganguly-Scrase and Scrase, ‘Hegemony’.

18 Desai, ‘Middle Class’. Using data from the National Sample Surveys, Desai notes that ‘among 30- to 50-year-old men with higher secondary and college education, the likelihood of obtaining a white-collar job was about 0.73 in 1983, but it had dropped to 0.43 by 2000; the comparable likelihood for women dropped from 0.38 in 1983 to 0.24 in 2000’ (Desai, ‘Middle Class’, p. 346).

19 For example, Vanaik, Achin, ‘Consumerism and New Classes in India’, in Patel, Sujata, Bagchi, Jasodhara, and Raj, Krishna, eds, Thinking Social Science in India: Essays in Honour of Alice Thorner (New Delhi: Sage, 2002), pp. 227–235 at p. 228Google Scholar; Deshpande, Contemporary India, p. 134; Mazzarella, William, Shoveling Smoke: Advertising and Globalization in Contemporary India (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2003), pp. 264–265CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

20 For the difficulties of measuring the middle classes in India with existing data, see Desai, ‘Middle Class’, p. 345; Deshpande, Contemporary India, pp. 132–133; and Sridharan, E., ‘The Growth and Sectoral Composition of India's Middle Class: Its Impact on the Politics of Economic Liberalization’, India Review 3, 4: 405–428 (2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

21 Harriss, ‘Middle-Class Activism’, p. 447.

22 Dickey, Sara, ‘Permeable Homes: Domestic Service, Household Space and the Vulnerability of Class Boundaries in Urban India’, American Ethnologist 27, 2: 462–489 (2000), p. 466CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

23 Thus the key criteria by which young men in Bangalore's entry-level information technology positions distinguish themselves (for example, data entry versus software development, or employment by Indian versus multinational firms) are rarely relevant in Madurai (Nicholas Nisbett, ‘Friendship, Consumption, Morality: Practising Identity, Negotiating Hierarchy in Middle-Class Bangalore’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (n.s.), 13, 4: 935–950 [2007], p. 947). Coimbatore residents who had moved to the city from Madurai remarked on the comparatively sophisticated level of fashion and technological consumption used to establish class standing throughout their new city.

24 For example, Deshpande, Contemporary India; Desai, ‘Middle Class’.

25 Desai, Sonalde and Kulkarni, Veena, ‘Changing Educational Inequalities in India in the Context of Affirmative Action’, Demography 45, 2: 245–270 (2008)CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

26 Sonalde Desai, ‘Caste in 21st Century India: Competing Narratives’ (n.d.), unpublished ms. in author's possession.

27 Fuller, C. J. and Narasimhan, Haripriya, ‘Information Technology Professionals’ and ‘From Landlords to Software Engineers: Migration and Urbanization among Tamil Brahmins’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 50, 1: 170–196 (2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

28 See for example Harriss, ‘Middle–Class Activism’, pp. 248–249.

29 Fuller and Narasimhan, ‘Information Technology Professionals’ and ‘Landlords to Software Engineers’.

30 A Pallar (Dalit) acquaintance who is a highly educated professional told me in 1999 that he often used his class as a shield to prevent people asking about his caste or discriminating against him on the basis of it. In 2009, he described his family's recent move from a small rented home to a large, luxurious house they had built in a new neighbourhood. He commented that although all their new neighbours would have ascertained his jāti before he and his family moved in, they nonetheless ‘have a good opinion of us. . .everybody smiles and says “good morning”’ because his home is the largest in the neighbourhood. He hosts neighbourhood association meetings, and the primarily Thevar and Pillai members drink water and coffee there (though he has never offered them a meal). He concluded, ‘When you belong to a higher class, with a good education, a good appearance, owning a house and a car, dressing neatly, having an English education, that builds up your image. That very active overt [caste] discrimination cannot be enacted in that instance’.

31 See Dickey, ‘Permeable Homes’, for examples.

32 Fuller, C. J., ‘Introduction: Caste Today’, in Fuller, C. J., ed., Caste Today (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 1–31 at pp. 16–17Google Scholar. Mary Hancock makes a similar point in emphasizing the mutual interaction between caste and class identities. She asks, for example, whether Brahmans in Madras (Chennai) are perceived as educated and well-off because they are Brahmans or because most of them are middle-class. Hancock argues that since class is ‘a cultural as well as an economic formation that encompasses competing meaning systems, modes of self-attribution, discourses of distinction (such as taste), and forms of consumption’, and ‘insofar as [caste] derives from and is reproduced through these cultural practices’, caste and class have to be seen ‘in dynamic interaction’ with each other (Mary Hancock, Womanhood in the Making: Domestic Ritual & Public Culture in Urban South India [Boulder, Colorado: Westview, 1999], p. 46).

33 Not all high-caste ideals have become middle-class ones. For example, vegetarianism (which in Madurai is practised mostly by Brahmans and by sub-castes of other high jātis such as Pillais, though not by all the upper castes) is not an ideal of the middle class, nor are orthodox Brahmanic purity practises. Rather, emotional and material containment and rational deliberation are emphasized in middle-class discourse. Perhaps this is due to the contemporary emphasis on consumption in the establishment of middle-class standing, and the application of hegemonic values to a practice that, although necessary, could easily slip into the stereotypical ‘excess’ of the wealthy if not controlled.

34 The Tamil terms in this paragraph are transcribed in their literary Tamil forms. Later in the paper, speech is transcribed with the colloquial Tamil forms used by the speakers. Paṇakkārarkaḷ, for example, is usually spoken as paṇakkāraṅka.

35 By 2008 there was also an increasing tendency to differentiate between paṇakkārarkaḷ as those who have established wealth in property (usually land and/or gold), and vacatiyānavarkaḷ as those who own significant consumer goods—often acquired with loans—but do not have durable wealth. For a discussion of the nuances of various class terms, and of indigenous concepts of class itself, see Sara Dickey, ‘Conceptualizing Inequality: Class and Its Relevance in Urban South India’ (n.d.), unpublished ms. Säävälä describes a similar set of local class categories in Hyderabad, albeit one in which the middle group is designated less precisely (Säävälä, ‘Low Caste’, pp. 302–303).

36 Typically, domestic workers are seen by themselves and others as archetypes of the lower class. Occasionally, however, as individuals they may become members of the middle class. This is most likely in the case of cooks, especially those who work full-time for a wealthy household. If they are women, they usually also have another household member who has full-time employment with an occupation and income that provide sufficient economic means and status to merit a middle-class identity.

37 Individual Tamil speakers’ lexical incorporation of terms that originated in English is in part a form of cultural capital tied to modernity and class. The use of these terms rather than Tamil semi-equivalents may also, as Laura Ring argues for Karachi, suggest that the English terms also capture and represent concepts that were less prevalent or salient before their use became common. See Ring, Laura, Zenana: Everyday Peace in a Karachi Apartment Building (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), pp. 83–85Google Scholar.

38 Ordinariness does not mean the majority or even the mode, however. My own observations of the city's population strongly suggest that people who identify as middle class remain in the minority of Madurai's population.

39 For a discussion of the link between decency and modesty, see Dickey, Sara, ‘Still “One Man in a Thousand”’, in Blamey, David and D'Souza, Robert E., eds, Living Pictures: Perspectives on the Film Poster in India (London: Open Editions), pp. 69–78 at pp. 76–77Google Scholar.

40 See also Hancock, Womanhood; Waldrop, Ann, ‘Gating and Class Relations: The Case of a New Delhi “Colony”’, City & Society 16, 2: 93–116 (2004), p. 97CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Harriss, ‘Middle-Class Activism’, p. 458; Venkatachalapathy, A. R., In Those Days There Was No Coffee: Writings in Cultural History (New Delhi: Yoda, 2006)Google Scholar.

41 Fernandes, ‘Restructuring; Deshpande, Contemporary India, p. 130.

42 Mankekar, Purnima, Screening Culture, Viewing Politics: An Ethnography of Television, Womanhood, and Nation in Postcolonial India (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1999), p. 48Google Scholar.

43 Rajagopal, Arvind, ‘Thinking About the New Indian Middle Class: Gender, Advertising and Politics in an Age of Globalisation’, in Rajan, Raji Sunder, ed., Signposts: Gender Issues in Post-Independence India (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2001), pp. 57–99 at p. 73Google Scholar.

44 See also Srinivas, Tulasi, ‘Flush with Success: Bathing, Defecation, Worship, and Social Change in South India’, Space and Culture 5, 4: 368–386 (2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Liechty, Mark, Suitably Modern: Making Middle-Class Culture in a New Consumer Society (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), pp. 140–145Google Scholar.

45 In some other parts of Tamil Nadu, where the term for poor person is pāvakkāran, the connection is even more direct.

46 My friend Darshini, who made similar observations about the function of cellphones, commented even more ironically on the significance of another recent status indicator, the consumer loan. In 2004, she noted, ‘A person's status is now determined by loan eligibility. If you don't have it, it is a shame—it means you don't have proper employment. It used to be that taking out a loan was very shameful. Banks used to be for savings. Now they are for loans. Debt used to be a stigma, and now it is prestige’. Darshini, a Nadar, is a tutor and a struggling small business owner.

47 Säävälä, ‘Low Caste’, p. 303.

48 See Säävälä, ‘Low Caste; Francis Bloch, Vijayendra Rao, and Sonalde Desai, ‘Wedding Celebrations as Conspicuous Consumption: Signaling Social Status in Rural India’, The Journal of Human Resources XXXIX, 3: 675–695 (2004).

49 See Liechty, Suitably Modern; van Wessel, ‘Talking about Consumption’. Nicholas Nisbett (‘Friendship’) also describes the confluence of relational and moralizing aspects of middle-class identities among young men in Bangalore.

50 See, for example, McGilvray, Dennis, Symbolic Heat: Gender, Health & Worship among the Tamils of South India and Sri Lanka (Middletown, New Jersey: Grantha, 1998)Google Scholar.

51 See Tolen, Rachel, ‘Transfers of Knowledge and Privileged Spheres of Practice: Servants and Employers in a Madras Railway Colony’, in Adams, Kathleen M. and Dickey, Sara, eds, Home and Hegemony: Domestic Service and Identity Politics in South and Southeast Asia (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 2000), pp. 63–86 at pp. 70–71Google Scholar, for a revealing discussion of the nuances of vacati in Chennai.

52 Tolen, ‘Transfers of Knowledge’, p. 80.

53 See Liechty, Suitably Modern.

54 See, for example, Greenough, Paul, ‘Nation, Economy and Tradition Displayed: The Crafts Museum, New Delhi’ in Breckenridge, Carol A., ed., Consuming Modernity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1995), pp. 216–248 at p. 221Google Scholar; Banerjee, Mukulika and Miller, Daniel, The Sari (Oxford: Berg, 2003)Google Scholar; Liechty, Suitably Modern, p. 99; Srinivasan, Mytheli, ‘Emotion, Identity, and the Female Subject: Tamil Women's Magazines in Colonial India, 1890–1940’, Journal of Women's History 14, 4: 59–82 (2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Venkatachalapathy, In Those Days; Abigail McGowan, Crafting the Nation in Colonial India (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).

55 Their educations, parents’ occupations, and (where applicable) spouse's occupations were as follows. Amu had recently completed a B.Sc. in Chemistry and was planning to enter an M.Sc. programme in Agriculture. Her parents owned a jewellry store. Janaki, Amu's sister-in-law, had a bachelor's degree in Commerce. Her father had been a small businessman, her mother was a housewife, and her husband worked in his father's business. Priya, whose father is a travel agent and her mother an accountant, had a B.A. in English. Kumarasamy, the son of a retired teacher and a housewife, had a B.Sc. in Chemistry and an M.A. in English. Lalitha, the daughter of a building contractor and a housewife, had a bachelor's degree in education and was married to a contractor. Rajendran, whose family owned a stationery store and other enterprises, had a B.A. in English and a Post-Graduate Degree in computer applications. Except for Rajendran, who was a Nadar Christian, all were Hindu and members of middle to upper castes: Amu and Janaki were Chettiar; Priya, Acari; Kumarasamy, Yadava; and Lalitha, Naidu.

56 The 2001 Census of India Housing Profile for Tamil Nadu lists the availability of specified assets in urban households as follows: transistor radio, 50.5 per cent; television, 60.7 per cent; telephone, 19.9 per cent; bicycle, 46 per cent; scooter, motorcycle, or moped, 23.6 per cent; car, jeep, or van, 3.7 per cent; and ‘none of the specified assets’, 21.6 per cent (Government of India, Census of India 2001, ‘Housing Profile, Tamil Nadu’ (2003), www.censusindia.gov.in/Census_Data_2001/States_at_glance/State_Links/33_tn.pdf [accessed 15 June 2011].

57 A year later, Lalitha was the only one of these students to have attained a related position, teaching medical transcription in a women's college. By 2008, none of the former students had become employed as transcribers. Lalitha had by then entered the civil service in Delhi—but she attained the position because of her English skills and her brother-in-law's connections, not because of her post-baccalaureate credentials.

58 See van Wessel, ‘Talking about Consumption’, p. 114, on similar views in Baroda.

59 See also Bloch, Rao, and Desai, ‘Wedding Celebrations’, p. 677. In general, people prefer to marry their children into families of similar or slightly higher class standing. See Dickey, Sara, ‘Anjali's Alliance: Class Mobility in Urban India’, in Mines, Diane P. and Lamb, Sarah, eds, Everyday Life in South Asia, Second Edition (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), pp. 303–324Google Scholar, for a discussion of the role of class in selecting spouses. Class is not the only criterion used in marriage arrangements, but a variety of evidence—including oral histories I have gathered, changes in newspaper marriage advertisements in recent decades, and shifts away from kin-based preferences in marital arrangements (see for example Karin Kapadia, Siva and Her Sisters [Boulder: Westview, 1995], Chapter 3)—indicates that it is increasingly important.

60 Melanie A. Dean, ‘The Modern Eye: Reversals in Evil Eye Prophylactic Form and Function in Contemporary Tamil Nadu, India’ (n.d.), unpublished ms. in author's possession; Dwyer, All You Want; Fernandes, New Middle Class; Liechty, Suitably Modern; Mankekar, Screening Culture.

61 Fuller and Narasimhan, ‘Information Technology Professionals’.

62 Goffman, Presentation of Self, p. 56.

63 Warrell, Lindy, ‘Conflict and Hierarchy: Jealousy among the Sinhalese Buddhists’, South Asia XIII, 1: 19–41 (1990)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Pocock, David, ‘The Evil Eye’, in Madan, T. N., ed., Religion in India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 50–62Google Scholar; Bambi Chapin, ‘Mobilizing Envy: Sinhala Models of Emotion and Relationships in Conflict’ (n.d.), unpublished ms. in author's possession; Dean, ‘Modern Eye’.

64 Pocock, ‘Evil Eye’, pp. 52–53; Chapin, ‘Mobilizing Envy’. Although I agree that people do not experience their structural inferiors’ desire for higher-status goods as envy, I take some exception to this argument in terms of the evil eye. That is, there is evidence that a harmful gaze can come from any source, regardless of hierarchical closeness or distance. It is for this reason, for example, that caregivers mark babies’ faces with smears of black grease, and owners place stuffed figures on new buildings, in order to deflect the evil eye that can be brought on by admiring observers.

65 Ibid. p. 62.

66 See also Säävälä (2004), p. 313.

67 Melanie Dean documents the recent use of kaṇ tiruṣṭi prophylactics themselves as signs of distinction. The conspicuous display of these prophylactics to ward off harmful gazes indicates possession of sufficient vacati to require such deflective devices, and thus ‘the need to protect oneself from envy is itself taken as a sign of social status’ (Dean, ‘Modern Eye’).

68 India-wide, most people of Anjali's age cohort did not complete the 10th standard (the lower level of secondary school) even in urban areas. According to the Demography and Health Surveys (DHS) household survey data, in 1992–93 the median years of schooling for urban 15–19–year-olds in India was 9.2 (International Institute for Population Sciences, National Family Health Survey (MCH and Family Planning), India 1992–93 [Bombay: IIPS, 1995], p. 49).

69 For a more extensive discussion of Anjali's upward mobility, see Dickey, ‘Anjali's Alliance’.

70 Herring and Agarwala, ‘Introduction’, p. 325.

71 Hacking, Ian, ‘Between Michel Foucault and Erving Goffman: Between Discourse in the Abstract and Face-to-Face Interaction’, Economy and Society 33, 3: 277–302 (2004), at p. 299CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

72 See Säävälä, ‘Low Caste’, for a detailed discussion of the risks encountered by one family in using domestic rituals for upward mobility.

73 See for example, Deshpande, Contemporary India pp. 129, 139–142; Fernandes, Leela, ‘The Politics of Forgetting: Class Politics, State Power and the Restructuring of Urban Space in India’, Urban Studies 41, 12: 2415–2430 (2004), p. 2418CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Fernandes and Heller, ‘Hegemonic Aspirations’, p. 501.

74 Fernandes and Heller, ‘Hegemonic Aspirations’, p. 496.

75 Ganguly-Scrase and Scrase, ‘Hegemony’, p. 196.

76 Hacking, ‘Between Michel Foucault’, p. 280.