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Book Review
Asia
Sanjay Joshi.
Fractured Modernity: Making of a Middle Class in Colonial North India.
New Delhi: Oxford University Press. 2001. Pp. ix, 209. $29.95.
| Sanjay Joshi's careful
study of the emerging middle class in an important city of north India
between 1880 and 1930 is a convincing and sophisticated intervention in
current debates about the nature of modernity in India and, most centrally,
the foundations of the Indian state. At first blush, Joshi may be assumed
to be reviewing familiar ground about the central role of education, not
industrialization, in shaping a colonized, bilingual middle class that
could only be flawed when compared to its European counterparts. Joshi
in fact challenges this interpretation, above all by building on recent
work in European history that rethinks the ideal-typical middle class.
Using a wide range of government documents, English and Hindi newspapers
and publications, the records of key voluntary associations, and private
papers, Joshi argues, in short, that what may seem Indian anomalies are
in fact continuities with European patterns. Attention to the India case,
moreover, enlarges understanding of both. |
1 |
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Joshi maintains that while changes in economic and educational life may
form a necessary background to creating a middle class, the key activity
of this population everywhere is not economic but cultural and political.
The middle class constitutes itself through the deployment of new forms
of social conduct and new modes of political activity to assert its respectability
and centrality, as against the nobility (and colonialists) on the one hand
and the lower classes on the other. Second, these assertions inevitably
require contradictory stances. The same people, the same organizations,
the same newspapers at any given time may well express commitment to universal
values, like meritocracy and gender equality, and simultaneously espouse
"tradition" that both enhances their status and, inevitably, draws exclusionary
lines defined by such parameters as birth, gender, and religion. As a result,
Joshi argues, such labels as "progressive" and "reactionary" can be misleading,
as they obscure the "modernity" of what in fact are novel positions. |
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Joshi identifies four themes, discussed in successive chapters, that shaped
the self-representation of the middle class. The first was the very claim
to represent the public, through new genres like public newspapers and
new kinds of civic associations, on the basis of the respect owed to exponents
of respectable, improvement-focused behaviors. Second, issues related to
gender proved central to making these claims. Being middle class was characterized
by disapproval of the courtesan, emblem of the nawabi court culture of
the past, coupled with celebration of the housewife, who was to be tutored
in skills and behaviors that distinguished her at once from the elites
and from the uneducated. |
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Third, religion, far from an uncolonized space assigned to private life,
was transformed precisely by being made into a symbol of public life. In
a place like Lucknow, where the old Persianized service classes became
the backbone of the middle class, those who had flourished under nawabi
rule "discovered"—in this region as elsewhere—a past history of persecution
at the hands of Muslims and were strident in their newfound claims of Hindu
authenticity. As the notion of a "Hindu community" became a resource for
empowerment, it inevitably meant empowerment of one group over others.
The new Hinduism at once spoke a language of universalism, with a service
ethic and an assertion of unity, as well as a language of difference, against
those of other religions and those outside these newfound norms. |
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Finally, the tensions evident in this project of middle-class representation
inevitably meant that the middle class would oscillate between support
of the ideals of liberal, secular nationalism and anti-Muslim Hindu nationalism.
The electoral politics, and mass movements, of the 1920s marked a decisive
turn to the latter pole, but, Joshi insists, both strands were evident
throughout. |
5 |
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Joshi tries to include Muslim participants in his study, but here his data
is thinner, in part constrained by the limitations of using only Hindi
(and not Urdu) vernacular sources. Nonetheless, his work contributes richly
to the history of the high colonial period, as well as to a history that
emphasizes simultaneity and similarity in historical developments in India
and Western Europe. He also succeeds in a further goal: namely, an identification
of the heritage of today's Hindu majoritarian nationalism. That nationalism
is virulently anti-Muslim yet claims to be the true secularist; it opposes
strategies to benefit the excluded and marginalized lower classes yet proclaims
itself the defender of true democracy. Joshi provides a way of seeing how
those apparent contradictions are, in fact, inherent in the nationalist
project, and he calls for clear-sightedness in recognizing the cost to
liberal values of the very project that made the middle class. |
6 |
| Barbara D. Metcalf |
University of California,
Davis |
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