Leela Fernandes works on the question of how classes are made — not discovered as pre-existing groups defined by income, but produced through culture, politics and the everyday practices of workplaces, cities and states. Two bodies of research carry her reputation. The first is an ethnography of the Calcutta jute mills showing that the working class was constituted through gender, caste and community distinctions rather than in spite of them. The second is her analysis of the new middle class that liberalisation brought to political prominence in India, and of the politics of forgetting by which that class made the poor disappear from public space and public discourse.
Her value for Indian sociology is that she supplies a political and cultural account of class at both ends of the structure. Where much writing treats the middle class as a statistical category and the working class as an economic one, Fernandes treats both as identities under continuous construction, and asks who is excluded by each construction.
Life and intellectual formation
Fernandes was trained as a political scientist and has taught in the United States in departments of political science, women's studies and international studies. Her work sits deliberately across disciplines: it uses ethnographic fieldwork of the kind sociologists and anthropologists practise, engages the Marxist tradition on class formation, and draws on feminist theory, especially the argument that gender is not a variable added to class analysis but part of how class itself is made.
Two commitments run through her writing. The first is anti-economism: class exists as a lived and contested identity, so the analyst must study its cultural production rather than deduce it from position in the economy. The second is attention to the state, which appears not as a neutral arbiter but as an active participant in class formation through policy, planning, policing and the language of reform.
Producing Workers: gender, class and the shop floor
Producing Workers (1997) is based on fieldwork in the jute mills of the Calcutta industrial belt, an old industry with a militant union tradition, studied under the Left Front government of West Bengal. The book's argument is that class identity on the shop floor was not a straightforward reflection of shared position in production. Instead it was assembled out of differences.
Several mechanisms recur. The organisation of work was itself gendered and segmented: departments and tasks were coded as male or female, skilled or unskilled, and the boundaries were defended as natural rather than recognised as managerial decisions. Community, region and caste identities among migrant workers supplied further lines of division that management and unions both worked with. Union politics, dominated by a party organisation, articulated a class discourse built around the male breadwinner, so that women workers' concerns were treated as domestic or welfare matters outside the proper terrain of struggle; militancy coexisted with the reproduction of gender hierarchy inside it. Supervisory authority operated through paternalism and everyday practices of deference.
The theoretical claim is that gender and class are mutually constituted: the working class of the mills was a male working class because of how work, unions and public representation were organised, so the invisibility of women workers was a product of class politics rather than a gap in it. This places her among the feminist critics of a Marxist tradition that treated gender as secondary, and her fieldwork gives the critique empirical content.
India's New Middle Class
India's New Middle Class (2006) turns to the group that the economic reforms beginning in 1991 brought into cultural and political dominance. Fernandes's first move is deflationary: the new middle class is not simply a new set of people generated by growth. It is substantially a re-formation of existing middle-class segments — many of them upper caste, urban and English-educated, and some of them the beneficiaries of Nehruvian public-sector employment — who reinvented themselves as the natural agents of a liberalising India. The novelty is in the identity, not only in the numbers.
She identifies several features of this identity. It is organised around consumption: the ability to buy branded goods, cars, apartments and imported leisure becomes the marker of membership, displacing the older middle-class ethic of frugality, service and state employment. It rests on English-language education and professional credentials, presented as merit while functioning as inherited advantage — a point that connects her analysis to the politics of reservation, since merit was defended precisely as caste-based claims from below expanded. It carries a politics of respectability in which women's participation in consumption and work is managed through images of the modern yet traditional Indian woman. And, crucially, this class claims to represent the nation: its aspirations are narrated in advertising, television and political rhetoric as India's aspirations, so that the interests of a minority acquire the status of a national project.
In their essay on hegemonic aspirations, Fernandes and Patrick Heller press the point in Gramscian terms. The new middle class is best understood as a class-in-practice defined by the political and cultural practices through which it seeks hegemony, and its claim to speak for the nation while defending its own privileges makes its relation to Indian democracy ambivalent: it favours liberalisation and efficient governance, and is uneasy with the mobilisation of the poor and the lower castes that democratic politics produces.
The politics of forgetting and urban space
The 2004 essay on the politics of forgetting is her most cited intervention on the city. The politics of forgetting names a double process: the discursive erasure of the poor, who cease to appear as a public in the language of reform, media and governance; and their physical removal, through the restructuring of urban space around middle-class consumption and residence — malls, gated enclaves, beautification, road widening, the clearance of settlements and street trade.
Its significance is that this is not simple neglect. It is a reworking of the terms of citizenship, in which the middle-class resident acquires standing as a citizen with rights to a certain quality of urban life while the poor are recoded as encroachers and illegal occupants. State power is central: courts, municipal agencies and policy language do the work. The argument runs closely parallel to Amita Baviskar's bourgeois environmentalism and to Partha Chatterjee's distinction between civil society and political society, and together these accounts form the standard framework for reading Indian urban exclusion after liberalisation.
Transnational feminism and the state
Fernandes's later work turns to the politics of feminist knowledge. Transnational Feminism in the United States (2013) examines how the transnational became a frame for feminist scholarship and activism, and asks whether the category reproduces the inequalities it sets out to criticise — through the location of knowledge production in wealthy universities, the ethics of representing women elsewhere, and the ways global feminist agendas are set. She has also edited the Routledge Handbook of Gender in South Asia (2014) and written on gender and the state, including how state institutions and reform agendas structure women's claims. The consistent thread is scepticism about categories that appear progressive while carrying unexamined power relations.
Criticisms
Her account of the new middle class has been questioned on definitional grounds: the boundaries of the category remain elastic, survey-based researchers arrive at very different estimates of size and composition, and treating a group so internally varied — small-town salaried employees, metropolitan professionals, business families — as a single political actor risks overstating its coherence. Others argue that her emphasis on discourse and identity leaves the political economy of liberalisation, capital and labour markets thinner than it might be, and that the middle class is credited with more hegemonic capacity than its electoral weight supports, given the strength of caste and regional mobilisation.
Producing Workers has attracted the usual questions of scope — jute in West Bengal is an old, declining, heavily unionised industry, and its dynamics may not travel to the informal sector where most Indian workers are found, or to the newer service and export industries. Some labour historians of Bengal, while accepting the gender argument, contest her reading of union and party practice. And scholars of caste argue that although she registers upper-caste dominance in the new middle class, caste carries less analytical weight in her framework than class and gender.
Legacy
Fernandes has shaped two literatures. In the study of the Indian middle class she turned attention from consumption statistics to politics, and the phrases she gave currency — the new middle class, the politics of forgetting, hegemonic aspirations — are now standard references in work on liberalisation, urban restructuring and media. In labour studies she is part of the shift that made gender constitutive rather than incidental to class analysis. Her broader contribution is a way of posing the question of class in India that keeps culture, gender, the state and exclusion in the same frame.
For the UPSC answer
Fernandes is the authority to name in any question on the middle class after liberalisation. State her core argument compactly: the new middle class is less a new group than a re-formed one, defined by consumption, English education and professional credentials, and politically distinctive because it claims to speak for the nation while excluding the poor. Deploy the politics of forgetting for questions on urban space, slums or citizenship, and pair it with Baviskar on bourgeois environmentalism and Chatterjee on political society to build a framework rather than a list. For questions on gender and work, use Producing Workers to argue that class identity on the shop floor is produced through gender divisions, with unions speaking for a male breadwinner. Close with the criticisms — an elastic category and a possibly overstated hegemony — so the answer evaluates rather than reports.
References & further reading
- Fernandes, Leela (1997). Producing Workers: The Politics of Gender, Class and Culture in the Calcutta Jute Mills. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
- Fernandes, Leela (2004). The politics of forgetting: class politics, state power and the restructuring of urban space in India. Urban Studies, 41(12), 2415–2430.
- Fernandes, Leela (2006). India's New Middle Class: Democratic Politics in an Era of Economic Reform. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
- Fernandes, Leela and Heller, Patrick (2006). Hegemonic aspirations: new middle class politics and India's democracy in comparative perspective. Critical Asian Studies, 38(4), 495–522.
- Fernandes, Leela (2013). Transnational Feminism in the United States: Knowledge, Ethics, Power. New York: New York University Press.
- Fernandes, Leela (ed.) (2014). Routledge Handbook of Gender in South Asia. London: Routledge.