It is common knowledge that India has been home to a large and influential middle class since the colonial era. It continued to expand in size and scope in the post-Independence period, and more so since the 1990s following the liberalization of Indian economy. This crucial stratum of the Indian social structure, christened as the new (post-liberalization) middle class, is now a much sought-after subject of social science research in South Asia and beyond. Asiya Islam’s book is a valuable addition to this growing body of scholarship. Given the fragmented and tangled character of the Indian middle class in general and the new one in particular, Islam’s book chooses to focus on—but also move beyond—one segment of the latter: the lower middle class or the class which is neither a quite (upper or middle) secure middle class nor a precarious working class so to speak. Drawing attention to the study and politics of class making, she investigates, primarily through intensive ethnography, what the new (lower) middle class understands as middle-ness and how its location of being in-the-middle or in-between is strategically deployed and dealt with in the face of rapid socio-economic transformation of urban landscapes in India.
So, who are the significant actors in the evolving theatre of middle-ness in post-liberalization urban India? How do they navigate their work, lives and subjectivities by virtue of their positioning in a liminal zone? Islam, in order to address these and related issues, offers rich ethnographic narratives of young women who are employed, notwithstanding ‘their complicated attitudes towards employment’ (p. 7), in various non-white collar jobs—in, for example, malls, cafes, call centres and so forth—in urban Delhi. These women, writes Islam, work-live, to borrow Victor Turner’s classic expression, ‘betwixt and between’ or in-transit; however, contrary to Turner’s formulation, they hardly ever aspire for structural change, choosing as a consequence a lasting experience of middle-ness. In this complex and uneasy middle field, these women get on by bearing a ‘double consciousness’ (p. 9) characterized by ‘simultaneous identification and disidentification’ (p. 9) with ‘competing discourses of modernity, freedom, urbanity, domesticity, respectability, consumerism, mobility, and so on’ (p. 8). What is interesting is that these contrarian pulls, as indicated, are not resented and hence reconciled by the women in question.
Rather, as Islam shows, ‘it is precisely by playing the role of mediating agents, by adopting middle-ness [or mid-identification] as the framework of their lives, that women [navigate] reproduction of inequalities as well as [affect] social change. In that, this middle-ness is the defining structure of young, lower-middle-class women’s lives’ (pp. 8-9; emphasis original).
Indeed, the middle lives of these women—shaped by the ‘dialectic of constraint of freedom’ (p. 9)—are the theme of Islam’s work. In other words, she, in seven short chapters, introduces the reader to young working women—caught as they invariably are in the intersectional web of caste, class, labour, gender and sexuality—whose sense of selves and emergent subjectivities are sculpted through the culture of middle-ness/mid-identification. This novel approach makes the chapters, especially the purely field-narrative ones, a highly engrossing read. The book, with many photos of the city, opens with a section on cast of characters—women in the age group of 19-23 years—followed by an introductory chapter, already discussed above, on the theoretical-methodological framework, brief literature review and aims and objectives of the work. In the five chapters which follow, Islam describes how these women negotiate the rising demands of the labour market on the one hand, and prevalent gender norms in India on the other in their everyday lives. Linking global things, women characters and their subjectivities, the chapters in a temporal sequence, show how ‘these things connect the minutiae of women’s everyday lives to the larger picture of socio-economic transformation in urban India, and development and globalization in the Global South more generally’ (p. 19).
Women’s entry into the world of paid work is a theme tackled in chapters two and three. Islam highlights two crucial resources, using the respective tropes of ‘Madam’ and ‘Fast-Forward’, required by the women to gain access to, not without struggle of course, the new, globalized economic system; one the English language, and two, mobility. The former is contextually deployed to maintain the separate ethos and distinction between work and non-work place, while the latter is skilfully managed, lest its pace disturbs the work-leisure-home balance. The experiential aspects of being engaged in paid work are brought up in chapters four and five. Comprising multiple voices, the narratives in these two chapters share one register, and that is the global culture of commodification and consumption. The two commodities, and their attendant motifs which feature here are smartphones, the ubiquitous object of middle class desire and need, and smart clothing (jeans), again the global symbol of modern, cool dressing. What Islam shows in a nuanced manner, and in line with the broad argument of the book, is the tension—or simultaneous association-dissociation—involved in the consumption of these commodities. The women actors using them consciously distance themselves from acts of profligacy; the keyword for them is ‘moderation’ which must be exercised to avoid social labels of being wasteful (in phone use) and promiscuous (in wearing jeans). The relentless tight rope, middle ground walking with a gendered identity often has its consequences for the women and their work-domestic lives.
In chapter six, Islam notes how their lives, in both spaces, are punctuated by acts, even if momentary, of protest, refusal and resignation. However, such defiant acts are only moments of exit rather than actual exit or structural transition in a substantive sense; in this process, the middle space is never abandoned, but continues to be reclaimed and reinforced. The book then, as the final chapter tells us, is about the persistence of the idea and practice of mid-identification in the lives and times of women who, with their otherwise (and ironically) declining numbers, inhabit the peripheries of the economies of the Global South. Islam, to reiterate, has done a fine job and the book is not only suitable for specialized readers but for non-specialized, general ones too.
Nabanipa Bhattacharjee teaches at Sri Venkateswara College, University of Delhi, Delhi.