Patterns of Middle Class Consumption in India and China
ed by christophe jaffrelot and peter
Van der veer
sage, Rs 695

In a pre-book release interview with The Financial Express (February 17), Christophe Jaffrelot made the interesting observation that different political systems in India and China might not yield much practical difference. The Chinese middle class seems to be coming to terms with a one-party autocracy and the Indian middle class doesn’t vote, Jaffrelot said. “What may be at stake (in India) is the resilience of parliamentary democracy.”

Jaffrelot explains his thesis in the first chapter of this compilation. He concludes that India’s middle and upper middle classes don’t so much want to secede from India — a favourite theme of the leftwing radical chic — but that they are fed up with the “plebeianisation” of politics and are looking for ways to “continue to rule the country”.

This is, of course, a straight counter to mainstream Indian chatterati’s favourite political story, made all the more interesting because it comes from an astute and learned India observer. It is also, sadly for this book, its only first-rate intellectual argument. Most of the rest are sociological examinations of the kind that make up the numbers on the social sciences seminar/conference circuit: perfectly respectable but not terribly sharp. No surprise there perhaps; the book is a compilation of papers presented at a New Delhi seminar.

One near-exception is Shoma Munshi’s thesis on why the celebration of consumerism by private television channels in India is a tool for empowerment. Munshi argues that Indian lower middle class women find small but significant means to challenge the status quo when they make television-driven lifestyle choices. Bombarded as we are with indignant arguments about consumerism’s soul-destroying regressiveness, it is refreshing to find an academic thesis that eschews (middle-class intelligentsia) snobbery and looks at how “ordinary” people find hope. Hope sometimes, as Munshi demonstrates, can be found in New Delhi’s Lajpat Nagar shoe shops.

... contd.