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Text of Review Follows

BY ARNAB BHATTACHARYA
 

FRACTURED MODERNITY: MAKING OF A MIDDLE CLASS IN COLONIAL NORTH INDIA

By Sanjay Joshi,

Oxford, Rs 495
 

The emergence of the middle class is one of the major social phenomena in colonial India. In India, like elsewhere in the world, the values and lifestyle of the middle class are determined as much by economic indicators as by its specific mode of intervention in the public sphere. Middle-class discourse in colonial India, derivative as it is, incorporates glaring paradoxes, evident in such public sphere activities as the nationalist politics or the women's empowerment programme of this period. Ambiguities in the middle class consciousness prompted its inconsistent attitudes towards social issues which kept oscillating between the authoritarian and the liberal, the egalitarian and the parochial, the democratic and the hierarchic and so on.
 

Sanjay Joshi's contention in his book, Fractured Modernity, is that the Indian middle class consciousness is a product of cultural entrepreneurship. It is shaped by the notion of modernity, received during the British rule as ruptured and fragmented. Positing his study against the backdrop of Lucknow, Joshi argues that this "fractured modernity" is not an exclusive colonial legacy for the Indian middle class (as suggested by most subalternists), but a characteristic of the post-Industrial Revolution and post-Enlightenment European middle class as well. But the model of European modernity fails to explain the efforts of the middle class, both Indian and European, to reconstitute itself.
 

Joshi's exploration of the competing ideologies that go into the making of the middle class in Lucknow is, to his mind, a case-study based on variables flexible enough to have wider application. He notes that the middle class in colonial Lucknow, in its bid to assume social leadership, created new norms of respectability while remaining equidistant from the elite and the lower classes. Its attempts at self-construction called for a reworking of traditional values of the nawabi era and tempering them with radically modern concepts. This resulted in contradictions still evident in the postcolonial north Indian middle class.
 

The most interesting chapter of the book is the last, where Joshi records his reflections on the fractured modernity. Here he suggests methods of "provincializing" European modernity, erroneously conceived as universal in the colonial period. He recognizes the divergence between the theoretical and practical aspects of modernity as part of lived reality in both Indian and European contexts.