Force behind globalisation
Santosh Kr. Singh

Patterns of Middle Class Consumption in India and China
Ed. Christopher Jaffrelot & Peter Van der Veer. Sage, New Delhi. Pages 300. Rs 695.

INDIA and China have emerged as the two most powerful economies of the world. It is being argued that the era of globalisation has benefited these societies the most. The robust economic growth of unprecedented scale bears testimony to this. However, the segment which has been hogging the limelight is the ever mysterious middle class in both the countries. Changes in these societies, as witnessed in the late 20th century onwards, have been characterised by the burgeoning middle class and its bewildering behavior patterns.

The concept of middle class has always been a notoriously elusive and ambiguous category. There have been attempts to pigeonhole the concept in some kind of definition with universal acceptability but to no avail. As a matter of fact, the phenomenon of middle class can best be described by its ethos, by conditions which are symptomatic of the formation, crystallisation and existence of a category somewhere between the top echelon and the base of a society.

However, there are a number of common elements across the cultures which are characteristically middle class. It is unambiguously linked to modern, industrial and post-industrial conditions. The rise of skilled professional categories and then lately the boom in service sector has rearranged the social order of traditional societies from pyramid to olive to onion-shaped structures. The middle class everywhere invariably shows the insatiable and unabashed urge to exhibit; to flaunt and indulge in what Thorstein Veblen called "conspicuous consumption". It makes its presence felt through consumption of food, clothes, newer consumer items and, most importantly, experiences which are adventurous and hedonistic in taste and orientation.

The conspicuous consumption of ‘global commodities’ by the middle class in contemporary societies everywhere, in a way, has worked as the engine of globalisation. Both China and India are no exceptions to these trends. The volume under review here is a serious attempt to unravel some of the mysteries around this class while highlighting the role of specific social and cultural contexts in its formation and then in designing its configuration.

In India, the emergence of the middle class as an objective reality is attributed to the arrival and spread of the British colonialism. Initially, mainly the petty bourgeoisie and the upper castes with primary westernisation became its almost exclusive constituents. But gradually as the freedom struggle picked up, the middle class came to occupy the central place in anti-colonial protest movements. The significant presence of lawyers, for example, among the top leadership of Indian National Congress underlines this fact.

Post-Independence, however, the kind of economy and polity that the Indian state followed had deep imprints of Gandhi’s anti-materialism. A city was seen essentially as a landscape of sin, amorality and avarice. The 1980s however saw a change in some of these premises. By 1990s, the dismantling of licence raj structures was in full swing. This heralded a new era, which became a breeding ground for the middle class mentalites. The boom in the service and the IT sectors severely undermined the earlier upper caste tag of the professional and the occupational profile of the young Indians forming the major chunk of the middle class.

China also followed almost a similar trajectory. Mao’s period and the Cultural Revolution in the 1950s were marked by anti-city, anti-materialist and anti-imperialist ideological overtones. It was only post-Deng Xiaoping in the late 70s that the opening up of the economy began. Shanghai, which once descried as a city of dreadful delight and everything un-Chinese, became a new reference model of modernity and growth. Both Mumbai and Shanghai emerged as powerhouses of globalised era levered by the unprecedented magnitude of energy supplied by the new middle class sans any frills or fiction.

The chapters, for instance, on changing sexual behavior of young Chinese women professionals and the impact of American television dramas like Sex and the City on it by Jacqueline Elfick and Patricia Uberoi’s analysis of the middle class’ fetish for ostentatious marriages as reflected through some of the bridal magazines and their ways of catering to this new clientele, capture the dynamics of market, modernity and the changing value system of the middle class in both these societies. Besides, an entire gamut of aspects of consumer culture has been explored—tourism, leisure activities and the entertainment industries (art, karaoke and soap operas)—as well as consumption of experience through these.

The Indian middle class, however, seems to retain some of its anti-colonial streaks from the past. Hence, when it comes to its response to the forces of Americanisation, unlike its counterparts in China, it is more balanced and rooted in the tradition. As Carol Upadhya convincingly argues in her chapter that the IT professionals she interviewed combined a deep sense of globalisation yet a strong attachment to their Indian roots.

In short, the middle class in both China and India seems to have finally arrived and kicking. At the moment, it’s time for sheer pragmatism and mammon worship without much care for the old baggage of collective morality. A vast majority of people, however, in both the societies continue to undergo pauperisation at the periphery, besides internal differentiation and discontents within the middle class itself. This is perhaps a major concern as to how long this majority will continue to silently consume this conspicuous consumption of the middle class. Hence the ideal of equitable distribution of the gains of economic growth holds the key to any future projections in these societies.





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