Culture and Privilege in Capitalist Asia - Jurusan Antropologi ...

10
The state, globalisation and Indian
middle-class identity
Salim Lakha
The celebration of the Indian middle class in recent years symbolises its dominant
presence in the economy. To foreign investors and government officials, the
middle class is a potential market and a testimony to the country’s economic
progress. Whereas in the 1960s and 1970s India’s image was synonymous with
poverty, in the 1980s and 1990s international attention has increasingly focused on
the process of economic liberalisation and globalisation. The burgeoning middle
class, which gained a new lease of life under a liberalised economic environment
(post-1985), has emerged as a selling point for the country in international forums.
Subsequent to India’s further economic liberalisation in July 1991, a report in
Fortune magazine announced that the country’s attempt to enter the global
economy offered ample ‘opportunities’, especially ‘the chance to sell to India’s huge
middle class’ whose expansion, it claimed, was more rapid than that of other
sections of the population (Jacob 1992:20). Similarly, at a business forum in
Melbourne, India’s Minister of State for External Affairs strongly promoted India
as an alternative to China by highlighting his country’s strengths, including an
estimated middle class of over 250 million people (Caruana 1995:61).
Viewing the middle class in terms of consumption or a consumer goods market
is a common feature of many reports on economic liberalisation in India. The
affluence of the middle class in India in recent years is closely associated with the
process of economic deregulation at the domestic level and the opening up of the
economy to global forces, both of which are intrinsic features of the liberalisation
process. One report stated that the middle classes ‘claim the economic reforms as
their own’, and that they have gained ‘in terms of a greater variety of produce and
greater purchasing power’ (Uren 1995:78). Another report confirmed such an
assessment by quoting a middle-class employee of Indian Airlines who stated: ‘I
support liberalization. Globalization has led to an improvement in the quality of
goods and a wider buyers’ choice’ (Chakravarti 1995:91). By most accounts the
middle class is expressing an insatiable propensity to consume as a consequence of
rising incomes and a greater variety of goods offered through an increased
exposure to global forces.
Whilst many reports highlight the rapidly growing size of the middle class and
its predilection for consumerism, there is insufficient recognition of
its transnational character and identity. The underlying assumption in this chapter