One manifestation of India’s recent transformations and rapid economic growth has been the emergence of a new group referred to as the “new middle class.” The relatively recent and growing literature on this topic represents the new middle class as a relatively homogenous social group with specific lifestyles and politics. The main objective of this article is to critically engage with these homogenizing assumptions. Based on original research, I introduce presence of a group within the new middle class – critical activist milieu – who in their work and lifestyle are contentious and explicitly reject the bourgeoisie values and attitudes that are widely ascribed to the Indian new middle class.
AnjariaJ. S. (2009). Guardians of the bourgeois city: Citizenship, public space, and middle-class activism in Mumbai 1. City & Community, 8(4), 391–406.
2.
BaviskarA. (2011). Cows, cars and cycle-rickshaws: Bourgeois environmentalists and the battle for Delhi’s streets. In BaviskarA.RayR. (Eds), Elite and everyman: The cultural politics of the Indian middle classes (pp. 391–418). New Delhi: Routledge.
3.
BaviskarA.RayR. (2011). Introduction. In BaviskarA.RayR. (Eds), Elite and everyman: The cultural politics of the Indian middle classes (pp. 2–3). New Delhi: Routledge.
4.
BennettW. L. (1998). The uncivic culture: Communication, identity, and the rise of lifestyle politics. Political Science and Politics, 31(4), 741–761.
5.
BourdieuP. (1984). Distinction: A social critique of the judgment of taste. London and New York: Routledge.
6.
BrosiusC. (2010). India’s middle class: Forms of urban leisure, consumption and prosperity. New Delhi: Routledge.
7.
ChatterjeeP. (2004). The politics of the governed: Reflections on popular politics in most of the world. New Delhi: Permanent Black.
8.
ChatterjeeP. (2008). Democracy and economic transformation in India. Economic and Political Weekly, 43(16), 53–62.
9.
DonnerH. (2008). Domestic goddesses: Maternity, globalization and middle class identity in contemporary India. Aldershot: Ashgate.
10.
EbrahimiA. (2001). NGO behavior and development discourse: Cases from western India. International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations, 12(2), 79–101.
11.
FergusonJ. (1990). The anti-politics machine: Development, depoliticization, and bureaucratic power in Lesotho. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
12.
FernandesL. (2004). The politics of forgetting: Class politics, state power and the restructuring of urban space in India. Urban Studies, 41(12), 2415–2430.
13.
FernandesL. (2006). India’s new middle class: Democratic politics in an era of reform. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
14.
FernandesL.HellerP. (2006). Hegemonic aspirations: New middle class politics and India’s democracy in a comparative perspective. Critical Asian Studies, 38(4), 495–522.
15.
GhertnerD. A. (2012). Nuisance talk and the propriety of property: Middle class discourses of a slum free Delhi. Antipode, 44(4), 1161–1187.
16.
GiddensA. (1991). Modernity and self identity: Self and society in the late modern age. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
17.
HarindranathR.KhoranaS. (2014). Civil society movements and the twittering classes in the post colony: An Indian case. South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 37(1), 60–71.
18.
HarrissJ. (2007). Antimonies of empowerment: Observations on civil society, politics and urban governance in India. Economic and Political Weekly, 42(26), 2716–2724.
19.
JenkinsR. (2010). Non governmental organizations. In Gopal JayalN.Bhanu MehtaP. (Eds), The Oxford companion to politics India. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
20.
JoshiS. (2001). Fractured modernity: Making of a middle class in colonial north India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
21.
JoshiS. (Ed.). (2010). The middle class in colonial India. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
22.
MathurN. (2010). Shopping malls, credit cards and global brands: Consumer culture and life style of India’s new middle class. South Asia Research, 30(3), 211–231.
23.
MazzarellaW. (2003). Shoveling smoke: Advertising and globalization in contemporary India. Duhrum, NC: Duke University Press.
24.
MohantyM.SinghA. K. (1996). Foreign aid and NGOs. New Delhi: Voluntary Action Network India.
25.
RadhakrishnanS. (2009). Professional women, good families: Respectable femininity and the cultural politics of a new India. Qualitative Sociology, 32(2), 195–212.
26.
RagagapolA. (1999). Thinking about the new Indian middle class: Gender, advertising and politics in an age of globalization. In RajanR. S. (Ed.), Signposts: Gender issues in post-independence India (pp. 57–100). New Delhi: Kali for Women.
27.
RayR.QayumS. (2009). Cultures of servitude: Modernity, domesticity, and class in India. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
28.
RoyA. (2011, August22). I’d rather not be Anna. The Hindu. Retrieved January10, 2014, from http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-opinion/id-rather-not-be-anna/article2380789.ece
29.
RudolphS. H.RudolphL. (2011). From landed class to middle class: Rajput adaptation in Rajasthan. In BaviskarA.RayR. (Eds), Elite and everyman: The cultural politics of the Indian middle classes (pp. 108–139). New Delhi: Routledge.
30.
SahooS. (2013). Doing development or creating dependency? NGOs and civil society in India. South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 36(2), 258–272.
31.
SenS. (1999). Some aspects of state–NGO relationships in India in the post independence era. Development and Change, 30(2), 327–355.
32.
ShahN. (2012). Resisting revolutions: Questioning the radical potential of citizen action. Development, 55(2), 173–180.
33.
ShethD. L.HarshS. (1991). The NGO sector in India: Historical context and current discourse. Voluntars, 2(2), 49–68.
34.
SrivastavaS. (2011). Urban spaces, Disney-divinity and the moral middle classes in Delhi. In BaviskarA.RayR. (Eds), Elite and everyman: The cultural politics of the Indian middle classes (pp. 364–390). New Delhi: Routledge.
35.
TaylorV.WhittierN. E. (1992). Collective identity in social movement communities: Lesbian feminist mobilization. In MorrisA. D.McClurgC. (Eds), Frontiers in social movement theory (pp. 104–129). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
36.
TownsendJ. G.PorterG.MawdsleyE. (2004). Creating spaces of resistance: Development NGOs and their clients in Ghana, India and Mexico. Antipode, 36(5), 871–889.
37.
TugalC. (2001). Transforming everyday life: Islamism and social movement theory. Theory and Society, 38(5), 423–458.
38.
UpadhyaC. (2011). Software and the new middle class in the new India. In BaviskarA.RayR. (Eds), Elite and everyman: The cultural politics of the Indian middle classes (pp. 167–192). New Delhi: Routledge.
39.
VarmaP. K. (1998). The great Indian middle class. New Delhi: Penguin books.
40.
Voluntary Action Network India (VANI). (2000). Voluntary action pulse: The newsletter of Voluntary Action Network of India. New Delhi: VANI.
41.
WoodJ. M. F. (2012). Who operates and who agitates? A class-wise investigation of contentious action and citizenship in Varanasi, India. In DesaiR.SanyalR. (Eds), Urbanizing citizenship: Contested spaces in Indian cities (pp. 161–189). New Delhi: SAGE.
