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Middle-Class Moralities: Everyday Struggle over Belonging and Prestige in India
New middle classes present themselves as the epitome of modernity and progress. Both in their role as social models and culture-brokers, they seem to promote a heightened consciousness of cultural difference and nationalism.
Middle-Class Moralities examines how the new middle classes of India create identities, practices and politics of the everyday in a dialogue that involves other social categories and an imaginary West.
Drawing upon ethnographic and interview material, this book studies family relations, leisure, food, housing and religious practices of these emerging and enterprising social classes. Defining the middle classes is a political and embodied process that people negotiate by making instrumental use of (or domesticating) the idea of the West.
A closer and analytical look at the consumption-driven, status-obsessed middle classes reveals their deeper struggles that seek to engage such cultural concepts as dharma, purity, and auspiciousness. The fieldwork for this study was conducted mainly in the city of Hyderabad among its upwardly mobile people who have identified themselves as “Hindus.”
The Indian situation, argues the author, is comparable to that of the urban middle classes elsewhere, especially those of the traditionally hierarchical Asian societies. The dilemmas of these classes in a fast-globalizing India have seldom been given the detailed attention offered in these pages.
Middle-Class Moralities examines how the new middle classes of India create identities, practices and politics of the everyday in a dialogue that involves other social categories and an imaginary West.
Drawing upon ethnographic and interview material, this book studies family relations, leisure, food, housing and religious practices of these emerging and enterprising social classes. Defining the middle classes is a political and embodied process that people negotiate by making instrumental use of (or domesticating) the idea of the West.
A closer and analytical look at the consumption-driven, status-obsessed middle classes reveals their deeper struggles that seek to engage such cultural concepts as dharma, purity, and auspiciousness. The fieldwork for this study was conducted mainly in the city of Hyderabad among its upwardly mobile people who have identified themselves as “Hindus.”
The Indian situation, argues the author, is comparable to that of the urban middle classes elsewhere, especially those of the traditionally hierarchical Asian societies. The dilemmas of these classes in a fast-globalizing India have seldom been given the detailed attention offered in these pages.
236 pages, Hardcover
Published January 1, 2010
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August 17, 2010
Most urban people would like to think of themselves as mercifully distanced from the sort of petty sagas that spur on the subplots of K-serials and their many regional variants — such as vengeful sisters-in-law who foist household chores on new dowry-less brides, or the barely concealed show of hierarchy within the gift-wrapped present from a newly affluent relative. Should you want a field guide to navigate the thorny thickets that lie before the upwardly mobile middle-class, you ought to read Middle-Class Moralities: Everyday Struggle over Belonging and Prestige in India, by Minna Saavala (Orient Blackswan, Rs 495).
Saavala, a Finnish social anthropologist, gathered most of the material for the book from the personal experiences, opinions and habits of a circle of acquaintances — “informants”— that she met during a stint in Hyderabad for a previous dissertation on fertility. The book begins with the fraught, fiercely contested realm of courtship and marriage, pointing out that despite the illusion of choice and flattening of hierarchy that urban life might promise, factors like dowry still determine a daughter-in-law’s place in the household pyramid, and “free choice” or “love” marriage continues to get “camouflaged” within the curious label of an “arranged-cum-love-marriage”. If you’ve marvelled at the real-estate advertisements that promise some gilded “lifestyle” and the geographical nowhere-ness we aspire to amid the landscaped gardening we like to surround ourselves with, you’ll especially enjoy the chapter on “Imagined Worlds”. This takes us on an excursion to the “heterotropia” of Ramoji Film City, “a mirage out of nowhere”, of mud villages, the Wild West, and Mughal palaces favoured for film shoots in the outskirts of Hyderabad.
In an arid, rocky land, rolling lawns and luxurious fountains are the most potent form of conspicuous consumption, points out Saavala. When one of her friends, who seemed indifferent to the spectacle, later professed great enthusiasm for it to her friends, Saavala observes that more than the excursion, she’d valued the consumption of indicators of the “West” — hygiene, efficiency, predictability, in a vendor-less, beggar-free environment. In other words, Ramoji Film City and your sparkly, new neighbourhood mall are “a huge stage… to be gazed at, and to prove [one’s:] middle-classness.”
Saavala, a Finnish social anthropologist, gathered most of the material for the book from the personal experiences, opinions and habits of a circle of acquaintances — “informants”— that she met during a stint in Hyderabad for a previous dissertation on fertility. The book begins with the fraught, fiercely contested realm of courtship and marriage, pointing out that despite the illusion of choice and flattening of hierarchy that urban life might promise, factors like dowry still determine a daughter-in-law’s place in the household pyramid, and “free choice” or “love” marriage continues to get “camouflaged” within the curious label of an “arranged-cum-love-marriage”. If you’ve marvelled at the real-estate advertisements that promise some gilded “lifestyle” and the geographical nowhere-ness we aspire to amid the landscaped gardening we like to surround ourselves with, you’ll especially enjoy the chapter on “Imagined Worlds”. This takes us on an excursion to the “heterotropia” of Ramoji Film City, “a mirage out of nowhere”, of mud villages, the Wild West, and Mughal palaces favoured for film shoots in the outskirts of Hyderabad.
In an arid, rocky land, rolling lawns and luxurious fountains are the most potent form of conspicuous consumption, points out Saavala. When one of her friends, who seemed indifferent to the spectacle, later professed great enthusiasm for it to her friends, Saavala observes that more than the excursion, she’d valued the consumption of indicators of the “West” — hygiene, efficiency, predictability, in a vendor-less, beggar-free environment. In other words, Ramoji Film City and your sparkly, new neighbourhood mall are “a huge stage… to be gazed at, and to prove [one’s:] middle-classness.”
August 2, 2018
One of the most fabulous documented ethnographic research, one can have the pleasure to read! This book is highly relatable since it captures all those little things in which the middl
e class moralities are hidden.....well documented!
e class moralities are hidden.....well documented!
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews