It explores the formation of India's rural middle class, which rests on a complex, and often contradictory, set of processes that began unfolding with growing industrialisation in rural areas. It examines its composition, characteristics and social identification from the perspectives of three major class theorists: Marx, Weber and Bourdieu.
The expansion and transformation of Asian economies is producing class structures, roles and identities that could not easily be predicted from other times and places. The industrialisation of the countryside, in particular, generates new, rural middle classes which straddle the worlds of agriculture and industry in complex ways. Their class position is improvised on the basis of numerous influences and opportunities, and is in constant evolution. Enormous though its total population is, meanwhile, the rural middle class remains invisible to most scholars and policymakers. Contested Capital is the first major work to shed light on an emerging transnational class comprised of many hundreds of millions of people. In India, the 'middle class' has become one of the key categories of economic analysis and developmental forecasting. The discussion suffers from one major oversight: it assumes that the middle class resides uniquely in the cities. As this book demonstrates, however, more than a third of India's middle class is rural, and 17 per cent of rural households belong to the middle class. The book brings this vast and dynamic population into view, so confronting some of the most crucial neglected questions of the contemporary global economy.
Indian Tourism brings together leading experts from all over the world to assess the challenges and opportunities of the tourism sector in India and its correlation to the country’s economic performance and prospects.
This book offers an overview of India’s emerging digital economy and the resulting challenges and opportunities for urban workplaces. It examines contemporary economic and social transformations in India by focusing on how new technologies and policies are shaping urban work practices and patterns. The book emphasizes inclusive and equitable practices that consider the needs of the formal and informal sector workforce as essential to India’s urban development. Drawing on cross-disciplinary frameworks, it examines key issues related to work trends in the Indian urban economy and its digital landscapes, including Industry 4.0 and technology–labour nexus, smart cities and innovation, urbanism and consumerism, workplace transitions such as service industry and remote work, digital divide, skill development initiatives, and the impact of socio-economic inequalities and disruptions. The authors provide perspectives on the digital future of urban work in India and other emerging economies in the post-COVID-19 phase, and underscore the importance of enacting balanced policies, remodelling institutions, and equipping the labour force for adapting to new demands related to future employability and investments. This book will interest students, teachers, and researchers of urban studies, urban sociology, sociology of work, labour studies, human and urban geography, economic geography, urban economics, development studies, urban development and planning, public policy, regional planning, politics of urban development, social and cultural change, urban sustainability, environmental studies, management studies, South Asian Studies, and Global South studies. It will also be useful to policymakers, non-governmental organizations, activists, and those interested in India and the future of the global economy.
"As state funding to public universities becomes increasingly scarce, many universities have turned to a new student population to draw in revenue: international students. Typically fluent in English, and overwhelmingly enrolled in high-skill professional fields, students from India have consistently served as one of the most valuable student-migrant populations, and the United States has been their most popular destination. Assumed to be rationally calculating, ambitious, and globally minded consumers of higher education, these migrant youth are depicted as success stories of the global neoliberalization of education. But not all are wealthy or savvy, nor do they necessarily end up in a program that will leave them better off. Sociologist Susan Thomas followed a group of Indian middle-class men studying at a public university in New York for 16 months as they attended classes, worked in under-paid or unpaid research jobs, and socialized with each other. Thomas's ethnographic research shows that these men see themselves as pursuing successful careers, paths that they uniquely deserve due to their work ethic and intelligence. At the same time, that pathway is entangled within webs of obligation tethered to the imagined future returns of an American education. For these students, such obligations translate into an experience of indebtedness-materially, affectively, and morally. The students consider themselves the beneficiaries of an American education, accruing considerable financial debt to pay tuition and perceived moral debt to their families for the opportunity to study in the US, at the same time that they are marginalized on campus and off. They thus develop a logic of owing and being owed as a way to reconcile the ambivalences they experience while located on an American campus where they must form racial and class sensibilities as South Asian student-migrants. As students approach graduation, however, they are forced to reconcile the debts they have accrued with an uncertain return. Their final days on campus forced a reckoning with their anxieties about successful masculinities, which manifested through competitive frictions with one another, the uncertainties of supporting existing or future households, and the precarity of being drawn into the global knowledge economy as indebted migrants. Thomas illuminates not only how students' movements across national borders are an invaluable part of the neoliberalization of education, but also how this system forms indebted subjectivities"--
Suitably Modern traces the growth of a new middle class in Kathmandu as urban Nepalis harness the modern cultural resources of mass media and consumer goods to build modern identities and pioneer a new sociocultural space in one of the world's "least developed countries." Since Nepal's "opening" in the 1950s, a new urban population of bureaucrats, service personnel, small business owners, and others have worked to make a space between Kathmandu's old (and still privileged) elites and its large (and growing) urban poor. Mark Liechty looks at the cultural practices of this new middle class, examining such phenomena as cinema and video viewing, popular music, film magazines, local fashion systems, and advertising. He explores three interactive and mutually constitutive ethnographic terrains: a burgeoning local consumer culture, a growing mass-mediated popular imagination, and a recently emerging youth culture. He shows how an array of local cultural narratives--stories of honor, value, prestige, and piety--flow in and around global narratives of "progress," modernity, and consumer fulfillment. Urban Nepalis simultaneously adopt and critique these narrative strands, braiding them into local middle-class cultural life. Building on both Marxian and Weberian understandings of class, this study moves beyond them to describe the lived experience of "middle classness"--how class is actually produced and reproduced in everyday practice. It considers how people speak and act themselves into cultural existence, carving out real and conceptual spaces in which to produce class culture.
This book adds to the growing literature on dynamics of regional development in the global South by mapping the politics and processes contributing to the distinct developmental trajectory of Tamil Nadu, southern India. Using a novel interpretive framework and drawing upon fresh data and literature, it seeks to explain the social and economic development of the state in terms of populist mobilization against caste-based inequalities. Dominant policy narratives on inclusive growth assume a sequential logic whereby returns to growth are used to invest in socially inclusive policies. By focusing more on redistribution of access to opportunities in the modern economy, Tamil Nadu has sustained a relatively more inclusive and dynamic growth process. Democratization of economic opportunities has made such broad-based growth possible even as interventions in social sectors reinforce the former. The book thus also speaks to the nascent literature on the relationship between the logic of modernisation and status based inequalities in the global South.
