Bankey Bihari Misra wrote the book that Indian sociology still uses whenever it asks where the country's middle class came from. His answer was that it was a colonial creation — brought into being not by industrial capitalism, as in western Europe, but by English education, the legal profession, the colonial administration and the trade that grew up around European commerce. The Indian middle class was therefore a class of salaried and professional intermediaries, dependent on the state that had produced it, rather than a bourgeoisie owning the means of production.
The consequences of that origin run through his whole argument. A class created by education and employment rather than by accumulation could lead a nationalism of petition, association and constitutional demand, but could not lead the assault on agrarian property that a genuine bourgeois revolution would have required. Its politics, like its formation, was structurally shaped by its dependence.
Life and intellectual formation
Misra worked as a historian of institutions, and his method reflects it: the argument is built from education reports, administrative records, occupational returns, professional registers and the proceedings of political associations rather than from fieldwork. The Indian Middle Classes appeared in 1961, written under the auspices of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, in a period when the class basis of Indian nationalism was a live question for both historians and sociologists.
He returned to the same terrain from the side of the state in three later works — on the administrative history of British India, on the bureaucracy, and on Indian political parties. Together the four books form one project: an account of how colonial rule manufactured a set of institutions, and of how the social groups those institutions created went on to inherit them at independence.
The colonial making of the middle classes
Misra identifies several distinct streams flowing into the class, and much of his value lies in keeping them separate.
The commercial stream came first. From the eighteenth century onwards, Indian agents, brokers, contractors, moneylenders and suppliers attached themselves to European trade in the port cities — the banians of Calcutta, the dubashes of Madras, the merchant and banking groups of Bombay. They accumulated substantial wealth, but characteristically in intermediation, agency and finance rather than in production, and a great deal of it was subsequently converted into land.
The landed stream followed from revenue policy. The Permanent Settlement of 1793 turned zamindari rights into saleable property; urban commercial money bought estates, and successive subinfeudation created layers of intermediary tenure-holders living on rent without cultivating. This produced a rentier component of the middle class whose interests lay in the security of landed property.
The educated professional stream, the one Misra treats as decisive, was created by policy. The decision of 1835 to promote English education, and the educational despatch of 1854 that followed, together with the founding of the universities of Calcutta, Bombay and Madras in 1857, generated a supply of Indians literate in English for whom the available outlets were the subordinate ranks of government service, the bar, teaching, journalism, medicine and clerical employment. Law was the pre-eminent avenue, and the pleader became the representative figure of the class, combining income, literacy, urban standing and a professional command of argument.
Why this is not a Western bourgeoisie
The comparative point is the analytical core of the book, and it turns on a reversed sequence. In western Europe, commercial and then industrial accumulation created a propertied class which subsequently acquired education, culture and political power, and which in acquiring power dismantled the legal privileges of the old order. In India the order was inverted: education came first, employment in the colonial state and the professions followed, and industrial capital arrived later and largely separately.
From this Misra derives the distinguishing features of the Indian case. The class was a creature of the state, since both its qualification and its livelihood were controlled by government. It was a consumer of income rather than an owner of productive capital, so its characteristic aspiration was a secure post rather than an enterprise. It was overwhelmingly urban and drawn disproportionately from literate high castes — the bhadralok of Bengal, Chitpavan Brahmins and allied groups in Maharashtra, Brahmins in the Madras presidency — so that the new class formed along the grain of the old status order rather than against it. It was regionally concentrated in the presidency towns, and it coexisted with, rather than destroyed, landlordism and caste.
Politics and nationalism
Misra's political chapters trace how this class built the machinery of modern Indian public life: the vernacular and English press, the debating and reform societies, the presidency associations, the Indian Association, and in 1885 the Indian National Congress. Its political method matched its formation — memorials, petitions, deputations and appeals to British constitutional principle — and its central demands were the Indianisation of the services, expanded legislative representation and access to higher office.
Two limits follow. Because the class held professional and rentier rather than industrial interests, its economic critique of colonialism concentrated on the drain of wealth, discriminatory tariffs and service exclusion rather than on the transformation of agrarian property relations. And because so many of its members depended on government employment and on land, it had structural reasons to prefer reform to confrontation. Its social radicalism was accordingly directed at custom — the reform of marriage, widowhood and women's education — rather than at property. The passage from constitutional agitation to mass politics required a leadership and an idiom the nineteenth-century middle class did not possess.
Place in Indian sociology
The book is the empirical complement to A. R. Desai's Social Background of Indian Nationalism. Desai supplies the Marxist framework in which nationalism expresses the interests of new classes generated by colonial capitalism; Misra supplies the detailed anatomy of the principal class in question, showing exactly which occupations, institutions, revenue settlements and educational measures produced it. Read against Marx's account of the European bourgeoisie, it also belongs to the wider debate about why colonial India produced no revolutionary capitalist class — the question that later animated the colonial mode of production controversy.
Criticisms
The most persistent objection is definitional. Misra identifies the middle class by education, occupation, income and style of life rather than by its relation to the means of production, and Marxist critics argue that the resulting category is too heterogeneous to do analytical work, bundling together rentiers, traders, professionals and clerks whose interests diverge. His own plural — middle classes — concedes the heterogeneity without resolving it.
The coverage has also been faulted. The account is weighted towards Bengal and the presidency capitals, stops at the close of the nineteenth century, and has little to say about the vernacular, small-town middle class whose self-fashioning Sanjay Joshi later reconstructed for north India. Feminist historians have shown that middle-classness was constituted as much in the reform of the home, domesticity and the ideal of the educated wife as in offices and courtrooms, a dimension almost absent from Misra. And because he treats class as a category to be enumerated rather than as a process of self-representation, the cultural politics that later writers such as Leela Fernandes place at the centre falls outside his frame.
Legacy
The central thesis has proved remarkably robust. The idea that India's middle class originated in education and state service rather than in capital is now the standard explanation for its enduring characteristics: its orientation to credentials and secure employment, its close relationship with the bureaucracy, its stake in public institutions, and the intensity of its conflicts over recruitment and reservation. Every subsequent account, including the large literature on the post-liberalisation new middle class, positions itself in relation to the colonial origins Misra established.
For the UPSC answer
Misra is the compulsory citation for the middle classes in Paper II, and the way to use him is structurally rather than descriptively. State the origin thesis in one line — English education, law, administration and commerce, not industrial capital — and then set out the streams: commercial intermediaries, the rentier beneficiaries of the Permanent Settlement, and the educated professionals created after 1835. The high-value move is the comparison: in Europe capital preceded education and destroyed feudal privilege; in India education preceded employment and coexisted with landlordism and caste, which explains a salaried intelligentsia rather than a bourgeoisie. Link this directly to nationalism's early constitutional method and its silence on agrarian property, pairing Misra with Desai. Close with the Marxist critique of the category itself and with the shift in later scholarship towards culture, gender and the vernacular middle class.
References & further reading
- Misra, B. B. (1961). The Indian Middle Classes: Their Social Structure and Politics in the Nineteenth Century. London: Oxford University Press.
- Misra, B. B. (1970). The Administrative History of India, 1834–1947. Delhi: Oxford University Press.
- Misra, B. B. (1976). The Indian Political Parties: An Historical Analysis of Political Behaviour up to 1947. Delhi: Oxford University Press.
- Misra, B. B. (1977). The Bureaucracy in India: An Historical Analysis of Development up to 1947. Delhi: Oxford University Press.
- Joshi, S. (2001). Fractured Modernity: Making of a Middle Class in Colonial North India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
- Fernandes, L. (2006). India's New Middle Class: Democratic Politics in an Era of Economic Reform. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.