SOURCE: The Historian 65 no5 1213-14 Fall 2003

The magazine publisher is the copyright holder of this article and it is reproduced with permission.

Further reproduction of this article in violation of the copyright is prohibited. To contact the

publisher: http://www.troyst.edu/organization/phialphatheta

A. Martin Wainwright

    Fractured Modernity: Making of a Middle Class in Colonial North India. By Sanjay Joshi.

(Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001. Pp. xiii, 209. $29.95.)

    Historians have long recognized the importance of India's middle class in shaping modern

Indian society under British rule, delivering it from that rule, then providing leaders for India and

Pakistan since independence. What has received less focus is the nature and behavior of this

middle class as a social group, particularly during the period of British occupation. Sanjay Joshi

addresses this issue by focusing on Lucknow as a case study and by using a variety of primary

sources (both published and unpublished) to argue that "the middle classes in colonial north India

were constituted not by their social and economic standing, but through public-sphere politics"

(2). Having thus claimed the contingency of public participation for India's middle class, he goes

on to demonstrate it by devoting a chapter to each of four different aspects of middle-class

behavior in Lucknow's public sphere: its rise to dominance over other groups, its attempt to fuse

traditional Indian and Victorian-British concepts of appropriate behavior between the sexes, its

transformation and exaltation of religion, and its influence over forms of nationalist resistance to

British rule. For each of these aspects of resulting "modernity," Joshi points out the emergence of

contradictory values that "fracture" it in the resulting public discourse: 1) the middle class's claim to represent all residents of Lucknow while distancing itself from the city's lower classes; 2) its

simultaneous promotion of women's participation in the public sphere and "husband worship" at

home; 3) its denunciation of the religious justifications for caste while it exacerbated caste

distinctions in other ways; and 4) its simultaneous promotion of plural secular and exclusive Hindu nationalism (172).

    Joshi should be congratulated for fixing one of the central problems of much postcolonial

scholarship: the lack of agency among the colonized. Lucknow's middle-class citizens are the

central actors in this study, creating for their own purposes a distinctly Indian version of modern

society by drawing simultaneously on colonial and "traditional" examples. Perhaps equally

important, however, is Joshi's discussion of the basis of middle-class consciousness. By rejecting

the importance of the social and economic foundations of Lucknow's middle class and opting

instead for their self-identification in contrast to other groups, he applies some of the analytical

methods of postcolonial critique to solve the riddle of how a genuine middle class could emerge in a preindustrial economy. For Joshi, the middle class is a cultural instead of a social or economic group. The author uses his findings to explain not only the emergence of a modern middle class in colonial northern India, but also the behavior of this class in modern Indian society and politics.

    Fractured Modernity is easier to read than many theoretical monographs, but it is definitely

aimed at scholars and is probably most suitable at the graduate level and above. Nevertheless, this thought-provoking and original book deserves to reach a scholarly audience beyond specialists in India. Joshi's analysis may also apply to middle classes outside South Asia.

ADDED MATERIAL

    A. Martin Wainwright

    University of Akron