[Excerpts from the book: The Great Indian Middle Class]
Secession of the Successful
===========================
A forthcoming book by Pavan K. Varma charts the Indian middle class's
insular landscape
The absence of a moral code, binding on all, reinforced the doctrinal bias
in Hinduism for the individual over the community. There were, of course,
the loyalties of kin, clan and caste. At first glance it would appear that
these could provide a transcending framework for the individual to acquire
a wider and collective vision. But, paradoxically, these were too narrow
categories, while blurring a sense of obligation to the community as a
whole. The fact of the matter is that whether as a result of his religious
inheritance, or the rigidities of the social structure to which he
belonged, or the absence of a moral imperative which stressed collective
values, the average Hindu middle-class person had a very undeveloped sense
of social sensitivity to the overall good of his community. He attached
little priority to an altruistic interface with society. His motivation to
contribute to its betterment, without the notion of personal gain, was
weak. He saw no great reason why he should identify his personal welfare
with the well-being of even his immediate environment. His concerns were
restricted to himself, his family, and, at a lower scale, his clan or
caste. His cosmic view held an individual to be a microcosm unto himself.
There was no need for his path to meander into the needs of others, who,
even if they were obviously in need of succour, were only suffering the
consequences of their own karmas.
.....The issue here is not of
poverty alone. Obviously, India is a
poor country, and poverty cannot be pushed under the carpet. The issue
here is the approach of the more well-to-do citizens of Indian society to
this all-pervasive poverty. For the burgeoning and upwardly mobile middle
class of India, such poverty has ceased to exist. It has ceased to exist
because it does not create in most of its members the slightest motivation
to do something about it. Its existence is taken for granted. Its
symptoms, which would revolt even the most sympathetic foreign observer,
do not even register any more. The general approach is to get on with
one's life, to carve out a tiny island of well-being in a sea of
deprivation. The utter obsession with individual survival and betterment
and the complete absence of a sense of social obligation is not unlike a
system of apartheid, rendered more insidious because the perpetuators no
longer even notice the conditions of those they have banished. The concern
with personal salvation at the spiritual plane had assumed, at the
temporal level, a Frankenstein form: the almost complete inability to see
or identify with anything beyond the narrowest definition of
self-interest. The absence of a strong moral imperative for social
altruism had resulted, under the tutelage of unethical leaders and
opportunistic politics, in a horribly bloated unconcern for society
itself. The end product was the acceptance of a certain kind of lifestyle:
insular, aggressive, selfish, obsessed with material gain and socially
callous.
.....The attempt to escape the external milieu, to build fences as a
substitute for civic responsibility, nurtured its own sense of a siege
mentality; if the unwashed masses seem to be climbing up the garden wall,
raise the height of the wall; if there is not enough supply of water, dig
a tube well, or add a water tank, or, best of all, siphon off the supply
with a pump on the municipal line itself, irrespective of the consequences
to the others; if the electricity is deficient, instal a general, or
illegally increase the sanctioned load by bribing the electrical
sub-station. The emphasis was on finding a short-cut, a quick-fix
solution, which had to be efficacious even if unethical. In fact the siege
mentality had little of the innocence or valour of those wrongfully
besieged. Its origins lay in a cynical and deliberate withdrawal from a
constructive interface with society; its motivations were based on an
unyielding conviction that there could be no interest higher than one's
own. Such a conviction was not restricted to a theoretical narcissism; it
was easily identifiable in action. Contrary to the popular notion, most
popular with the middle class itself, that it is the urban poor who are
the least concerned about municipal rectitudes, the biggest offenders in
the massive theft of electricity all over urban India belong to the
'affluent yuppie middle-class'. Vehicles owned by the middle class are the
largest cause of pollution in metropolitan India. If Delhi has 1,500 tons
of uncollected garbage every day, much of it is not generated in the
squatters' colonies: a low-income-group colony produces only 0.3 kg waste
per head, whereas a middle-class or rich colony produces upward of 1.5 kg
per head. Moreover, the lower income dumps have ninety-six per cent
bio-degradable matter, whereas the garbage from the more affluent
neighbourhoods have only forty per cent bio-degradable refuse. A typical
middle-class colony of one thousand homes can generate an average of 5,200
plastic bags a day, and these do not include the hundreds left scattered
in public parks after a weekend of picnicking.
One reason for the 'predatory prowess' was the perceived inefficiency of
the system: it could not deliver in accordance with expectations, not even
such basics as electricity and water, or such essential services as
garbage removal. But this resentment at the State's limitations led to no
desire to address the root causes of the problem. There was no
introspection; it did not occur to the average middle-class Indian that in
a country where scores of millions did not have even enough to eat, the
State could, perhaps, have priorities other than only catering efficiently
to the increasing demands of a vocal minority. Middle-class criticism of
the State for its inefficiencies and rampant corruption was certainly
valid. But this criticism was flawed, emphatically limited only to "why
can't the State do more for us?"; and it provoked no desire for organised
action to rectify this state of affairs. The demands and the indignation
displayed an acute sense of dependency: the State should deliver; it
should deliver more of what we want; and if it cannot do so, we have the
freedom to criticise, but no obligation to think or act beyond the
articulation of our requirements.
Mindless imitations: The seeking of approbation from the West may have
become a noticeable trait in Nehru, but it did not diminish him as an
Indian. His formidable intellect and his genuine pride in being an Indian
combined to make him more than an equal to those whose approbation he
sought. But as a role model for lesser mortals, such as the average
middle-class Indian, this 'looking up to' the West only strengthened the
deep sense of racial inferiority bequeathed by the colonial experience.
This inferiority manifested itself in more ways than one. First, it
reinforced the tendency to seek solace in an idealised past whose
achievements, imagined or otherwise, could reduce the erosion of
self-worth. Secondly, it fostered an excessive sensitivity to any
criticism or praise emanating from the West: the one was countered with
disproportionate aggression, the other projected with unbecoming
effusiveness. And thirdly, and this was by far its more debilitating
consequence, it spawned a vast imitativeness which dulled the pursuit of
excellence and creativity, and made most educated Indians-in their
lifestyles and aspirations and cultural idiom-persistent and unthinking
apes of anything Western.
There is hardly any area of achievement, aesthetics or lifestyle where
this imitativeness, and the accommodation with mediocrity which it
legitimises, is not evident. The world of academia is littered with
doctoral theses which have nothing more to contribute than extensive
quotations from 'foreign' experts. The best works on India are still the
monopoly of Western experts, or of Indians who have suddenly discovered
their brilliance in institutions abroad. Scientists are judged by their
'foreign' degrees. The general impression of the middle class is that
'science and technology in India is second rate'. Institutions of
excellence have been patterned on those of the West, with little thought
to curriculum and content as relevant to India. Some of the best and
brightest students study here but their dominant interest is to go West,
to somehow enhance their marketability by acquiring a Western degree. Most
faculty members in such premier institutions have the 'mandatory'
doctorate from the US, but that is probably the last time they did any
worthwhile research.
.....Lutyen's Delhi, even as a statement of imperial power, imaginatively
incorporated Indian motifs and construction materials. But since then
architecture in India has become a showcase of some of the most
rootless-and ugly-imitations of Western design and concepts, a pathetic,
tasteless hybrid that has prompted such clever appellations as "Chandni
Chowk Chippendale, Tamil Tiffany, Bania Gothic, Punjabi Baroque", etc.
Incredibly enough, even today new housing colonies in the capital of the
country proudly give themselves names such as Beverly Park, Regency Park,
May Fair Gardens and Malibu Towne! The melody and lilt of Indian film
music, with its roots in the classical and folk traditions, has gradually
given place to the simplistic obsession with the fast-paced beat of
Western popular music. The beat can be catchy, but there is often a
soullessness that bespeaks a mechanical grafting and an unthinking neglect
of the possibilities and appeal of the indigenous tradition. If an earlier
generation of upper-middle-class children came of age on the entertaining
stories of Enid Blyton set in small-town England, ignorant of the
extensive repertoire of folk tales and mythological stories in their own
country, a new generation is being weaned on Barbie and Cindy dolls,
completely clueless about the rich Indian doll-making tradition.
Artistic talent has scandalously languished in India until recognition and
acclaim has come from abroad. Once recognised in the West, all
discrimination is thrown to the winds in lauding the new find. There is no
balance, no equilibrium, that comes from a confidence in one's own worth
irrespective of the certificates from others. The fashion conscious adopt
the fads or the labels of the West with lightning speed. Women who still
pronounce lingerie as 'linger here' flaunt designer wear from the West as
their most treasured possessions. "The Indian woman whose individualism
was such that it used to be said that no two women wore a saree or a
salwar-kameez the same way" can now be seen "squeezing, squirming, pulling
and punishing (her body) to fit into undergarments made with the Western
woman, with one and a half children and an active sex life, in mind". If
Victoria's Secrets is still spelt correctly in the marquees of the bigger
cities, the middle class in small-town India is not half that fussy:
Western designer labels that look like the original and roughly spell the
same way will also do quite well.
Consumer neuroses: Driven by the twin engines of material desire and the
ceaseless competition to fulfil these wants, the Indian middle class
appears to be close to a collective neurosis. The symptoms of this
neurosis are increasingly discernible. Between 1984 and 1994 the number of
people who committed suicide in the country almost doubled. This statistic
does not take into account those who failed in their attempt, estimated to
be ten times the number of those who succeeded. Divorces have increased
dramatically. Stress-related diseases have become commonplace. And worst
of all, children are showing signs of stress-related symptoms that were
till recently the exclusive preserve of adults.
What has gone wrong? There are visible signs of greater
material success. The average middle-class family today has,
for instance, many more consumer durables than that of a generation ago.
But the possession of more seems to have fuelled the desire for more, in
an endless rat race of want multiplying want. The problem is compounded
because this race must be pursued amidst an avalanche of municipal
concerns-about housing, transport, education, and even such basic
amenities as adequate water and electricity supply. Moreover, the new
ethos of acquisition and competition does not seem to have obliterated a
hankering for the easy-paced securities and assurances of the past. In
order to enhance the family income, more and more men now seek out working
brides; "and yet, after marriage, (they) miss their non-working mothers'
single-minded dedication to the family. The contradiction afflicts women
too: much as they desire economic independence, they long for the
securities their mothers enjoyed within the confines of the home." The
institution which is under ceaseless pressure is the home. The demise of
the joint family has given place to the nuclear family, where traditional
family values of support and a sense of belonging and togetherness have
often given way to individual pursuits and ambitions. Economic
independence and education have made women more assertive, mostly for the
right reasons. But this has also meant the destabilisation of the
traditional equilibrium of middle-class homes. If the mores of a
male-dominated society are-ever so slowly-being eclipsed, so are the
virtues of compromise and adjustment long considered an intrinsic part of
marriage. Divorce has become a real middle-class alternative. Twenty
divorce petitions are filed in the courts of Delhi every day, and the
trend is the same in all the bigger cities; even in Bangalore, where the
pace is less frenetic than in the big four metropolises, the number of
divorce cases has doubled in the last three years. One of the reasons for
the spectacular success of two recent films, Ham Aapke Hain Kaun and
Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge, was that they recreated an idealised world
of the happy joint family and the slightly aimless but settled pleasures
of a bourgeois existence, but without the strife and tension that have
become their adjuncts in real life.
Liberated from guilt: In mid-1991, the then Prime Minister, Narasimha Rao,
ably guided by his erudite Finance Minister, Dr Manmohan Singh, announced
a series of economic reforms which would help dismantle some of the
inefficient State controls on the Indian economy and facilitate its
greater integration with the world economy. This 'liberalisation' package,
tailored to make India a player in the 'globalised' economy, suddenly put
the spotlight on the middle class for an entirely new reason: its ability
to consume. If India was to open up to the world markets, it was essential
to know how much it could buy. The segment with the largest concentration
of purchasing power in India was the middle class. Its consumerist prowess
had therefore to be accurately gauged.
This exercise was important not only for the Indian government, which
wished to advertise the strength of the untapped Indian market to woo the
economies of the developed world, but also for the latter, always
sensitive to newer pastures for the sale of their goods and technologies.
The logic of economic reform, therefore, dictated that the middle class
now be analysed, not for its lack of ideological moorings, or its lack of
commitment to anything but its own material well-being, or for its utter
insensitivity to social and moral causes, but for its craving for and
ability to buy what the developed countries could sell to it.
In this process the size of the Indian middle class became, for the first
time, a matter of crucial importance. Several figures were bandied about,
ranging from 200 million to 500 million. Overnight the consumerist thirst
of the middle class became an asset, a sign of the dynamism of the Indian
market. Learned proponents of the New Economic Policy (nep) exulted in the
revelation that "urban India itself is the world's third largest country".
Several systematic surveys were carried out to reinforce perception with
facts.
.....The great Indian 'liberalised' economic machine was all set to roll
with the middle class as its engine, but, unfortunately, many of these
very surveys revealed that the power of the engine was hardly in
conformity with the wishful thinking of the enthusiasts. According to (an)
ncaer survey, households with incomes restricted to between Rs 12,500 and
Rs 40,000 per year account for as many as 331 million people. Only 4.1 per
cent of the population, or 37 million people, have an income of over Rs
40,000 a year. And the rich, with an income of over five lakh rupees a
year, do not number more than 1.4 million. Other indices are equally
sobering.
....."People who wake up in the morning thinking that they have no
history, no ancestors, are simply uncultured." This was a comment made by
a leading Russian politician to Newsweek in March 1996, and should have
been profoundly sobering for those in his country who thought that
post-communist Russia could at one stroke forget the legacies of the past
and, much in the nature of a quick-change artist, emerge totally at ease
in the new attire presented to it by its Western benefactors. Some such
perspective is perhaps of relevance in the Indian context as well. The nep
may have put a new focus on the middle class, primarily as a consumer, but
the middle class was not suddenly conjured out of thin air the day the
policies were announced. The middle class had 'ancestors', and a 'history'
before policy makers began to carefully assess its buying capacity and
size. Its origins and evolution, its behavioral traits, and the nature of
its interaction with other elements in society, should have been as
relevant to the architects of the liberalisation policy as putting an
accurate fix on its consumer choices or purchasing power. Such an approach
would have made immediately clear that in a country where the destitute
are numbered at over 200 million by the same surveys that mapped the
predilections of the consuming classes, the middle class could not be
expected to achieve an economic miracle in isolation; the Indian middle
class could not be an entity unto itself, defined solely by its material
desires, and autonomous to the economic realities of the country as a
whole. The error, born out of historical myopia, was two-fold: first, it
gave to the middle class an economic clout that it could not possibly
possess in a country as poor as India; and second, and with far more
serious consequences, it failed to take into account what the policies of
liberalisation would do to a class which was already morally rudderless,
obsessively materialistic, socially insensitive to the point of being
unconcerned with anything but its own narrow self-interest.
.....Its economic prowess may have been limited, but there was no ceiling
now on the middle class' aspiration to the good life. "The lifestyle of
the Indian elite is amazing," commented Noam Chomsky during a visit to
India in 1996. "I've never seen such opulence even in America." It was
this lifestyle, replete with expensive cars, the latest consumer gadgets,
designer clothes and accessories, and five-star living, which became the
role model for the middle class in the heady hedonism unleashed by the
liberalisation process. The urge to move up the consumption ladder, to
somehow put an unbridgeable gap between the squalor of the poor and the
plush material insularities of the rich, was always there. But now this
urge had the stamp of 'official' acceptance, the justification of an
ideology. "We should all get this clear," wrote an ideologue of the new
school of thought on the editorial page of a national newspaper, "that a
country of the size and importance of India has no choice but to clamber
to its new tryst with destiny inside shiny buildings of chrome and glass
at the free market. There is no mileage in looking wistfully at quaint mud
huts rushing by the car windows because they, and their ilk, cannot meet
our burgeoning needs, and if truth be told never have."
.....Is the middle class capable of pausing to think, of seeing what is
good for its own enduring interests? Can it for a moment see beyond
immediate self-interest, and think seriously about what the problem is and
how best it can achieve on a more secure basis its goals for a better
life, not just for tomorrow but for the next generation and the
foreseeable future? Can middle-class Indians transcend the sound and fury
of their myriad little worlds of desires and pursuits to forge a vision
that is sustainable in the long run? Can they somehow escape the clutches
of the illusion that their upwardly mobile aspirations can remain
insulated from the basic deprivations that are the lot of most of their
countrymen? The odds certainly appear to be stacked against their
undertaking such a fundamental reappraisal. There is a total absence of
any credible appeal to social commitment or a moral imperative that can
counter the obsession with personal gain and promotion. The shrinking of
the moral domain in national life cannot but destroy the resolve of even
the most well intentioned. "Moral losses are like radiation, colourless
and odourless and the more terrifying for that." Greed-the desire to
possess more and more irrespective of the means or the consequences-is a
fertilizer that accelerates the growth of particularities; it can hardly
be expected to produce a harvest of restraint or re-evaluation. The
buoyant media messages of consumer nirvana crowd out the need for sobering
introspection. The removal of any stigma associated with making money has
ended hypocrisy but also the need to be concerned about anything else.
"When a long-suppressed desire becomes realisable, it drives the fortunate
few unscrupulous." Unscrupulous in the single-minded pursuit of their own
betterment to the exclusion of any other cause or concern. In such a
milieu, the loss of one kind of restraint quickly leads to the unravelling
of the whole system. A young fashion designer holds a 'loo' theme party at
a disco in the countryside on the outskirts of Delhi. All the guests have
to come dressed in apparel worn normally in the loo, and the decor is done
up to resemble a loo. Is this great party idea just a frivolous, juvenile
ripple of the affluent class? Or is there just the hint of the vulgar and
the perverse? Not in moral terms at the choice of the theme, but in what
the evening demonstrates: the unthinking acceptance of the enormous gulf
that separates the tiny group of people living out in the middle of a
semi-rural setting from the thousands of people only a few yards away who
still use the fields to defecate and walk a kilometre or more to obtain
something as basic as drinking water. The comment is not on the event per
se: that is of no consequence. It is on the sensibilities of a westernised
affluent fringe, increasingly a role model for many in the middle class,
that can find such ingenious, flamboyant ways to party, oblivious to the
revulsion such a lifestyle creates when juxtaposed to the backdrop for its
shenanigans.
Judgement hour: For the Indian middle class, the moment has come for some
very critical decisions. Either it must pause, in its own interest, and
take a hard look at what needs to be done to ensure its well-being in the
long run, or persist with its current short-sighted obsession only with
what can be had, by any and all means, in the here and now. Either it must
curb its frenetic preoccupation with immediate material gain, or
contribute to enduring material progress by preoccupying itself a little
more with the good of the nation as a whole. Either it must inculcate in
itself a greater social sensitivity, or accept the fact that all that it
is seeking to acquire can be set aside by forces beyond its control. India
may not see, for a variety of reasons, a violent revolution by the
dispossessed. But if their needs are not addressed in a more concerned and
interventionist manner by those who are in a better position to do so,
there is likely to be great political instability, which could be as
inimical to economic growth and prosperity as violent upheaval. A
functioning democracy-and there is no reason to assume that India will not
remain one-renders illusory the prospect of the secession of the
successful. The time has come to definitively bury that illusion.
The Great Indian Middle Class by Pavan K. Varma; Viking India, Rs 295,
pages: 232 |
