Being Middle-class in South Asia

Javed Majeed
History Workshop Journal, Issue 65, Spring 2008, pp. 247-252 (Article)
Published by Oxford University Press
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Being Middle-class in South Asia
by Javed Majeed
Markus Daechsel, The Politics of Self-Expression: the Urdu Middle-class Milieu in
mid twentieth-century India and Pakistan, Routledge, 2006; 250 pp., 65; ISBN 0-415-
31214-0 (hbk) 0-203-48029-5 (pbk).
In this interesting, wide-ranging book Markus Daechsel argues that
historians of colonial India, especially those concerned with Muslim
separatism in the Punjab and United Provinces, have focused on what he
calls the politics of interest. By this he means politics conducted within the
representative structures established by the colonial state, where influential
individuals belonging to local elites tended to represent the interests of their
caste and religion, rather than their economic or social class. This accorded
with the official British view of India as a society dominated by primordial
collective loyalties rooted in caste, religion or tribe, which in turn were
reflected in the truncated electoral system established by the British state.
In addition, from the first decennial census of 1871 onwards, caste and
religion were the key categories in the collection of statistical data on the
Indian population, thereby reinforcing their importance as the determinants
of political allegiances in the public arena. The prevailing presumption was
that the numerical strength of communities, defined by these categories,
should determine their share of resources. Since politics found it difficult to
shake off the straitjacket of these communal categories, the colonial state in
India was successful in forestalling the emergence of class politics at various
levels of the Indian social hierarchy. One result of this was to inhibit the
emergence of a politically conscious middle class. Even those who could
be classified as middle-class lawyers, urban professionals, government
servants, journalists, and so on identified less with each other than with
networks of patronage formed around powerful local elites. In the case of
the Punjab in the period covered by Daechsel, this lack of an autonomous
middle class was partly due to communal differences between Hindus and
Muslims, but the dominant position of landowners in the province, who
had been heavily favoured and protected by the colonial state in its bid
to ensure social stability in the countryside of the Rajs most important
recruiting ground for the army, was also an important factor.
This politics of interest formed the background to what Daeschel
describes as the politics of self-expression prominent in the South Asian
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middle-class milieu of the Punjab and United Provinces (later Uttar
Pradesh) from the 1930s to the 1950s. The politics of self-expression was
premised on a notion of inward-looking and self-contained subjects. The
shared mission of individuals and nations, treated as analogous to each
other, was the authentic expression of their inner essences. Daechsel
concentrates on the style of this politics, focusing on figures such as
Inayatullah Khan Mashriqi, Subhas Chandra Bose, and V. D. Savarkar.
He points to the blend in their work of individual introspection, a nebulous
and emotive language of authenticity, social Darwinism, a strong sense of
militarism, and an aestheticized politics, in which reading and writing for
the purpose of creating affective states became political acts in themselves.
1
These elements resulted in a broadly fascistic outlook that conflated
individual selfhood with the nation, and denied the reality of the societal as
an arena for political bargaining and negotiation. The purpose of politics
was to seek salvation through the expression of a purified inner self: an
ideal, Daeschel shows, that reflected a real lack of political power. Self-
expressionism, in his words, was the ideological vehicle of a marginalized
middle class (p. 34).
Having outlined this argument, Daechsel goes on to examine the roles
played by body and space in the politics of self-expression. He explores some
characteristic middle-class ambivalences toward the body, as represented in
a variety of figures from the feudal landlord to the traditional wrestler.
2
Drawing on a wide range of Urdu texts, from newspaper articles and
advertisements to pamphlets, he shows how they expressed middle-class
sensibility in relation to diet, hygiene, and sexual pleasure in all its variety,
from intercourse to masturbatory fantasies. He emphasizes the commu-
nalization of the body, with Hindu and Muslim papers and pamphlets
expressing different kinds of corporeal anxieties. He is careful to distinguish
between Indian and European discourses on masturbation and intercourse,
given the tradition of semen-retention in one strand of Hinduism.
3
He discusses the construction of conceptual spaces and imaginary maps,
usefully contextualized in relation to the changing character of Lahore as an
urban space and the impact of these changes on the lives of its inhabitants.
4
There are some fine interpretations of Urdu texts here, in keeping with
the illuminating combination of literary interpretation and socio-historical
analysis that characterizes the book as a whole. More discussion of how
Urdu diction and styles might have differed between Hindu and Muslim
papers would have been welcome, given the spectacular success of the Hindi
movement in north India by this date and the increasing identification of
Urdu as a marker of Muslim identity, and conversely of Hindi as a marker
of Hindu identity.
5
Since the term Urdu is central to the book as a whole
(the middle class Daechsel investigates is called the Urdu middle-class
milieu, not the Punjabi or north Indian middle-class milieu), more reflection
on the rhetorical complexities and different inflections of Urdu in his sources
would have been useful.
248 History Workshop Journal
Daechsels argument about the conflation of individual selfhood with
group identities in the politics of self-expression is persuasive. But some
fuller explanation for the urgent concern with issues of selfhood in the
colonial context is necessary, and here Daechsel might have drawn upon
postcolonial writings on the politics of identity such as Frantz Fanons
work. Ayesha Jalal, in her Self and Sovereignty: Individual and Community
in South Asian Islam since 1850 (2000), has made a key point in this regard.
The colonial framework of representation was rooted in communal
categories. As a result, individuals expressed their subjectivity through
collective discourses, fashioned in a manner that made few concessions to
diversities within communities.
6
This crucial point, and the experience of
what Fanon called being an object in midst of other objects, sealed into
crushing objecthood,
7
against which individual selfhood was asserted, is
downplayed by Daechsel. Moreover, a concern with individual selfhood
does not necessarily lead to the kind of politics he describes. The question
is surely what kind of individual self is being imagined. Not all national-
ists who grappled with questions of individual identity assumed that,
in Daechsels words, nations and individuals are ontologically analogous
(p. 51). As I have argued elsewhere, autobiographies of some Indian
nationalists are distinctive in refusing to conflate individual identity with
group identities; this refusal grounds their critique of nationalism as a
levelling, homogenizing process, and in some cases, their articulation of
alternatives to the nation state as a polity. Such writers included the Urdu
poet and Muslim nationalist, Muhammad Iqbal (18771938), who resided
in Punjab, but whose work Daechsel does not consider in any detail.
Iqbals writing, like that of other nationalists who did not conflate
individual identity with group identity, was at times tense and contra-
dictory, signalling a level of complexity in his work which is often missed.
A similar complexity could be found among other exponents of the politics
of self-expression, such as Lajpat Rai, whose works were far from
simplistic or reductive.
8
Even in the case of Savarkars Hindutva (1949)
there is tension between its hybrid linguistic textuality, in which English,
Hindi and Sanskrit are mixed, and its essentializing of one particular kind
of Hindu identity. By ignoring or understating these complexities,
Daechsels focus on expression is not always as nuanced as it might be.
Daechsel also stresses the painful mismatch in the politics of self-
expression between the deadly seriousness and hubris of political
consciousness and the mundane circumstances of its socio-genesis. He
argues that lofty concepts such as interiority and self-hood have a firm
basis in hard material realities (p. 10, p. 93), suggesting that uncovering
these material realities somehow deflates, or explains away, ideas of
selfhood. But socio-historical contextualization and the seriousness of ideas
of selfhood are not mutually exclusive. As ideas, concepts of selfhood are
by their very nature immaterial, but they are not, therefore, any less real
than material realities.
Reviews 249
Baudrillards work on consumer society is a key reference point for
Daeschel, who sees himself as dealing not with class in any objective sense
but with what he calls a milieu, an effect . . . at the intersection of historical
processes, the growth of a will to middle class-ness (p. 12, p. 196).
Baudrillards ideas about consumer society apply particularly well to the
Urdu middle class, Daeschel suggests, because there the true nature of
consumer society its strangely mono-dimensional and unreal quality
revealed itself more clearly than in developed forms of consumerism (p. 186).
Daechsels argument here is dense and sometimes difficult to follow, partly
because he uses two separate strands of Baudrillards work, one that
emphasizes production over consumption as in The Consumer Society
(1970), and another (in The System of Objects (1968) and For the Critique of
the Political Economy of the Sign (1972)) that focuses on how objects become
divorced from production and begin to function like signs. As Baudrillard
puts it the circulation, purchase, sale, appropriation of differentiated goods
and signs/objects today constitute our language, our code, the code by which
our entire society communicates and converses. Such is the structure of
consumption, its language, by comparison with which individual needs and
pleasures are merely speech effect.
9
Daechsel uses both strands in his
argument about the unreal quality about consumer society in north India
in the period under study, although he uses the second strand more than
the first. He argues that whereas in Baudrillards post-modern world there
is no longer any yardstick by which the unreality of consumption can be
measured, in colonial India, by contrast, there was such just a yardstick,
namely the social framework of the politics of interest, with its powerful
local elites and the politics of patronage. But there may also have been more
mundane reasons for the fragility of consumer society in late colonial India,
which are underplayed by Daechsel in this part of his argument. The Second
World War seriously affected Indias economy, leading to an increase in the
price of consumer goods in domestic markets until 1943, and the imposition
of rationing schemes and price controls for many commodities after that.
Once the war ended the pressure for further liberalization grew, but
although the Indian government tried consistently to run a liberal import
policy, the failure of this policy by the early 1950s as a result of a combi-
nation of circumstances, including the lingering impact of wartime inflation,
was clear.
10
As noted, Daechsel argues that the historiography of South Asia has been
dominated by the story of the politics of interest, which has obscured the
politics of self-expression. He sees himself as unpicking this dominant
story, and as replicating what the politicians of self-expression themselves
were after, when they . . . attacked a restrictive form of politics that did
not accord any legitimacy or importance to matters of selfhood (p. 30).
However, it is in relation to the politics of interest that he deflates the
politics of self-expression, which would seem to support the dominant story
told by historians. In a peculiar way, then, there is an ambivalence towards
250 History Workshop Journal
the politics of self-expression and the Urdu middle-class milieu in the book,
of the same order as Baudrillards ambivalence towards primitive societies,
which for him were lacking in relation to modern Western consumer society
while possessing their own intrinsic sophistication that threw into relief the
distinctive nature of Western consumer society.
11
Nowhere, of course, does
Daechsel use the term primitive (which anyway is not a pejorative term in
Baudrillard), but the Urdu middle-class milieu seems both to be lacking in
substance (presumably in contrast to a fully formed European bourgeoisie)
while yet providing a perspective in which, as noted above, the true nature of
consumer society revealed itself even more clearly than in its more developed
forms. It seems to have the same doubleness as the primitive has for
Baudrillard.
Nonetheless, the points raised here are testimony to the books provoca-
tive thesis. Daechsels grappling with the issues raised by Baudrillard in the
context of South Asia will be increasingly important as commentators begin
to analyse Indias new middle class,
12
and his use of Baudrillard to explore
consumer society in South Asia opens up an additional area in the economic
history of modern India, which has so far tended to focus on conventional,
albeit crucial, issues of underdevelopment and dependency. Daechsels
book points to some of the ways in which Baudrillards work might be
illuminating in helping us to characterize the now globally powerful middle
class in India and South Asia. Overall, Daechsels study is a deeply
thoughtful and rich one, with interesting readings of Urdu sources, and a
sophisticated, intriguing argument. His book is an important intervention in
the growing work on the politics of selfhood in South Asia, in an interdis-
ciplinary style which admirably suits the complexity of its subject matter and
themes.
Javed Majeed is Professor of Postcolonial Studies in the School of English
and Drama, Queen Mary, University of London.
NOTES AND REFERENCES
1 Chaps 12. His argument on the aesthetics of politics is developed in an interesting
discussion of name fetishism in Indian nationalism and the Pakistan movement (pp. 1636).
2 The international wrestling champion Gama posed particular problems for this middle-
class sensibility: see also the illuminating exploration of this by Joseph Alter in Gandhis Body:
Sex, Diet, and the Politics of Nationalism, Philadelphia, 2000.
3 For some clear expositions of this strand of thinking in relation to Gandhi, see Bhiku
Parekh, Colonialism, Tradition and Reform: an Analysis of Gandhis Political Discourse,
New Delhi, 1989; also Lloyd I. Rudolph and Susanne H. Rudolph, The Modernity of Tradition:
Political Development in India, Chicago, 1967.
4 Chap. 4.
5 These issues have been discussed in Paul Brass, Language, Religion and Politics
in India, London and New York, 1974; Christopher R. King, One Language, Two Scripts:
the Hindi Movement in Nineteenth Century North India, Bombay, 1994, Vasudha Dalmia,
Reviews 251
The Nationalization of Hindu Traditions: Bharatendu Harischandra and nineteenth-century
Banaras, Delhi, 1997, Francesca Orsini, The Hindi Public Sphere 19201940: Language and
Literature in the Age of Nationalism, Delhi, 2002.
6 Ayesha Jalal, Self and Sovereignty: Individual and Community in South Asian Islam since
1850, London and New York, 2000, pp. 412.
7 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, London, 1986, p. 109.
8 See my Autobiography, Travel and Postnational Identity: Nehru, Gandhi and Iqbal,
Basingstoke, 2007 for a discussion of these issues from a different angle.
9 Jean Baudrillard, The Ecstasy of Communication, transl. Bernard and Caroline Schutze,
1987, New York, 1988, pp. 7980.
10 Brian R. Tomlinson, The Economy of Modern India, Cambridge, 1993, chap. 4.
11 Richard J. Lane, Jean Baudrillard, London and New York, 2000, chap. 3.
12 The recent essay by Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad on Indias middle class in contemporary
India is interesting in this respect; although it does not use Baudrillard, it continues the theme
of the failure of that class, especially in relation to its apparent lack of commitment to politics
and social reform: Indias Middle class Failure, in Prospect, September 2007.
doi:10.1093/hwj/dbn008
The Birth of Now
by Daniel C. S. Wilson
David Edgerton, The Shock of the Old: Technology in Global History Since 1900,
Profile, London, 2006; 270pp, 18.99; ISBN: 1861972962.
Bernhard Rieger, Technology and the Culture of Modernity in Britain and Germany,
18901945, Cambridge University Press, 2005; 319pp, 55; ISBN: 0521845289.
The period extending from the final quarter of the nineteenth century
through to the first quarter of the twentieth appears from todays vantage
point transformative. Under the glare of bright electric lights, these were
Charlie Chaplins Modern Times. Along with the famous fin-de-sie`cle
gloom came radical innovations that changed the world. Key markers of
change in this period were to be found in its cultural productions, political
ideas and social relations. But the real signifiers of change were things: the
new material artefacts that appeared in peoples lives, affecting them in
unprecedented ways. The importance of these things is evident from the rise
of the many cultural forms that sought to engage with them, from science
fiction to the techno-fetishist imaginings of the Futurists and eventually the
Modernist movement, with its particular ambivalence toward technolog-
ical change. These developments found parallels in politics, where national
governments moved quickly to encourage, and to restrict, technological
252 History Workshop Journal