http://www.india-seminar.com/2002/510/510 books.htm
FRACTURED MODERNITY: Making of a Middle
Class in Colonial North India by Sanjay Joshi. Oxford
University Press, Delhi, 2001.
Sanjay Joshi’s Fractured Modernity: Making of a Middle
Class in Colonial North India is a refreshing new book on
the dynamics of middle class politics in colonial Lucknow.
Offering a fresh perspective, the book revolves around the
many-layered, often paradoxical nature of modernity, a
concept familiar to us, yet difficult to unravel. The author,
unafraid to indulge in theoretical speculation, excels in taking
us through the various dimensions of this multifaceted idea
and reality. Forcing us to think of our present polity and
society, the author takes the case study of Lucknow as an
axiom through which we can think of similar histories and
trajectories of many parts of India.
One may begin reading Sanjay Joshi’s book backwards. For
it is in the conclusion that the author places the book firmly
in a historiographical debate on modernity, though he
articulates the main arguments insightfully and consistently
throughout. Joshi bases his work on a few important
propositions that he sets out to establish through examples
from primary sources, buffeting his arguments with
intellectual discussion. He proposes the following for his
study of colonial Lucknow of the late 19th and the early
20th centuries: that one way of studying colonial Lucknow is
to examine the emergence and growth of a middle class;
that this middle class can be best understood if we look at it
as created by and a creator of a public sphere; that this
‘cultural entrepreneurship’ of the middle class was a
process through which it wished to acquire political, social
and moral hegemony; and most significantly that the
modernity of the middle class in its politics and ideological
postulations was necessarily fractured, impermanent,
protean.
It is the last point that Joshi has explicated at length. He has
rejected the idea of an ‘ideal-typical’ modernity – secular,
liberal and progressive – of any middle class anywhere in
Europe, though the myth of its existence has worked as a
trope making modernities elsewhere seem unfinished, indeed
unachievable. And just as modernities everywhere were
built on the old and the new, ‘traditional’ and emerging
hierarchies, with secular and religious composites woven
into them, so did the modernity of Lucknow’s middle class –
ergo that of India. This has led Joshi to reject the point of
view of those historians who have argued for a derivative
modernity (P. Chatterjee), or those who have celebrated the
‘difference’ of third world modernities (D. Chakrabarty).
This inconsistent modernity, Joshi has argued, was an aspect
of the quest of the middle class for empowerment, and it
used traditional (including hierarchies derived from
perpetuation of caste) and new (ideas borrowed from its
Victorian counterpart) ideologies to achieve its goal.
In the first chapter Joshi traces the emergence of the middle
class and its notion of itself as a ‘public’. He covers the
ground from the ‘service gentry’ background of this class,
its upper caste and financially ‘better-off’ status, to its
exploitation of the educational and professional opportunities
that came its way. Joshi examines the contradictions
inherent in the use by this class of ideas of western
Enlightenment to marginalize the traditional elites and its use
of older caste hierarchies to put down the lower classes.
The self-conscious use of ‘public-ness’ by this class has
been delved into, however limited the public sphere may
have been (in Habermas’ sense of the term). However,
while the distance between the ‘public’-appropriating middle
class and the lower castes/classes has been reiterated, Joshi
has not commented upon the resulting incomplete hegemony
(in a Gramscian sense) as limiting the political ambitions of
this class.
In a study that has consciously chosen to discuss the role of
the public sphere in the making of a middle class, the second
chapter is devoted to analyzing the ideological moorings of
its ‘private sphere’, perhaps a concession to the enormous
work that has appeared in this field in the last decade. The
author has explored the uneasy sangam between Victorian
bourgeois ethics concerning a good housewife and the many
borrowings from the more indigenous notions of a pativrata
that animated the writings of domestic improvers of the
period. This uneasy blend, according to Joshi, informed the
ideas of even women emerging in the public by the early
20th century. This made an autonomous feminist politics
impossible, even as it did not allow traditional patriarchy to
survive either. While one may agree with the overall
arguments placed here, a shift of focus on conflict
encountered in ordering new patriarchal agendas would
flesh out the complex ways in which patriarchal structures
change.
In the third and the fourth chapters the author goes back to
the public sphere, discussing a ‘publicized Hindu religiosity’,
first in the late 19th century and then in the 1920s. Joshi is at
his best here as he scratches out the manifold contradictory
positions that gave birth to the politics of nationalism and
communalism simultaneously. He has rejected the attempts
of those historians who have located a syncretic culture in
pre-colonial Lucknow, emphasizing the Shia Islamic bent of
Lucknow’s nawabs. He has also examined why Islamicized
elites like the Kashmiri Pandits and the Kayasthas now set
about affirming their Hindu identities. The author examines
this shift in stance as a need for empowerment, along with
the effects of the Orientalist vision of the state, its
administrative and legal structures, and the representative
politics of the city. The celebration of Hindu masculinity and
the reified notions of Hindu religiosity that emphasized
community and numbers, however, could do little to alleviate
divisions arising from caste hierarchies. This tension was
inherent in the politics of shuddhi and sangathan.
Joshi also examines why the anti-Muslim rhetoric became
more strident into the 1920s, especially as nationalist
campaigns waned. He locates the change in Lucknow in
three moments: the Hindi-Urdu controversy, the
representative politics of the new century, and the
Hindu-Muslim riot of 1924 over Muslim prayers in the
Aminabad Park. Yet the growing sharpness of the
anti-Muslim rhetoric, again, had its limitations in an ideology
of Hindu ‘reasonableness’ that only sought the strengthening
of the Hindus rather than the decimation of the Muslims.
The same middle class, Joshi maintains, could espouse
secularism and Hindu empowerment in the same breath.
By focusing on the contrary nature of modernity itself,
Joshi’s book works anew on the conundrum of finding
secularism with sectarianism, nationalism with communalism
in India. It offers a way of understanding Hindu/Hindutva
politics in a country that is constitutionally structured around
principles of secularism, and must necessarily defend
pluralism in order to survive.
This book on the middle class, however, has not taken
account of petite bourgeoisie so to speak. Joshi has
concentrated on the well off upper caste, though those who
still need to work, but has left out the middling caste
aspirants both to an upper caste status and a middle class
lifestyle. Indeed the problem of hegemony may be best
understood in the milieu of those who aspired to join its
ranks. Also we get to know very little of a Muslim middle
class. Though this may have been outside the scope of
Joshi’s work, the material in the first two chapters that did
include some discussion of the way changes were affecting
parts of the Muslim society could have been carried further
in this well-argued book on the nature of modernity.
A book that covers very wide ground on the making of a
middle class, from its social and cultural background to its
quest for political power; it is a must read for those
interested in the social history of North India.
Anshu Malhotra