The old middle class is the salaried and professional stratum produced under colonial rule — clerks and officials, lawyers, teachers, doctors, journalists — whose position rested on English education and employment by the state or the professions. The new middle class names the stratum that expanded after the liberalisation of the nineteen-nineties, working largely in private services and defined as much by its patterns of consumption and aspiration as by its occupations. The contrast is used to argue that the same broad class has changed its economic base, its cultural style and its political self-image.
Where it comes from
B. B. Misra’s study established the peculiarity of the Indian case: unlike the European bourgeoisie, which grew out of trade and industry, the Indian middle class was created from above by colonial administration and modern education. It was a service class, drawn disproportionately from literate upper castes, possessing credentials rather than capital. Its ethic combined thrift, respect for education and public service, and it supplied the leadership of both social reform and the nationalist movement. Leela Fernandes provides the counterpart account of the post-reform stratum.
How it works
The two are distinguished less by income than by the sources of status. The old middle class secured position through the examination, the degree and the secure government post, and treated frugality as respectable. The new middle class secures it through private employment in services, fluency in a globalised English and visible consumption — the car, the apartment, the private school, the mall. Its horizon is global rather than national, and it reads its own advantage as merit.
Why it matters
Fernandes argues that the new middle class functions as a political claim rather than a mere statistical category: it presents itself as the representative of a liberalising India, and in doing so authorises what she calls a politics of forgetting, in which the urban poor are removed from public space and public concern. Deshpande similarly notes that the middle class comes to stand as a proxy for the nation.
For the UPSC answer
Contrast the two on origin, base and style: Misra’s colonial service class of credentials, and Fernandes’s post-liberalisation class of consumption. Then add the critical point — continuity of upper-caste composition means the new middle class is substantially a refashioning of the old, not a new social group.
References & further reading
- Misra, B. B. (1961). The Indian Middle Classes: Their Social and Economic Background. Oxford University Press.
- Fernandes, L. (2006). India’s New Middle Class: Democratic Politics in an Era of Economic Reform. University of Minnesota Press.
- Deshpande, S. (2003). Contemporary India: A Sociological View. Viking.