IMC - The Indian Middle Class

The European genesis and evolution of "Middle Class" is generally well understood. But the transfer, acceptance and currency of this nomenclature to the intellectual discourse in cultures peripherally affected by Europe’s industrial hysteria have created cognitive confusion. In China, an exception-instance, the phrase is discouraged. There, they speak of the "Middle Stratum". But like the water hyacinth, this semiotic import is ‘core-valued’ as a ‘given’ in most Indian societal analyses [ii].

As one, by comparison, fortuitously born and school-educated in an economically-advantaged environment, I have, to get my bearings here in India, had to do a fair bit of thinking on the IMC-phrase. Most of my real thinking has found expression in Hindi. It is not the size of a learned tome but a monograph. What follows is a best-effort English rendering of my thoughts.

I find that when applied to a group of people here in India, the IMC-phrase appears little more than a convenient, but inappropriate, cosmetic that attempts to make a very old exploitative situation appear politically correct and palatably contemporary.

Since it’s often used in India as a synonym for westernization/industrialization/modernization, an intellectually brilliant clarification that uses a more accurate phrase, 'the westoxicated', instead of ‘the IMC’, is noteworthy [iii]. Sadly, no remedies are therein speculated upon, or offered.

I see the IMC as both the problem and - under possible appropriate reorientation - an exemplary means to the solution. It is a problem because most of its social participation is phony and its 'productivity', not only a fake, but shamefully exploitative and immensely resource-draining.

A highlighting-digression on post-1947 Indian governance that enables IMC-members unprecedented security, near-absolute unaccountability and blatant dominance, regardless of the superficial democratic processes, will aid understand the two examples [iv] cited herewith. The present Indian constitution, for instance, can be characterized as entirely by, of, and for the IMC Bäbûcracy.

Before 1947 – when, on the sub-continent, there were 500+ kingdoms that had been brought under the British heel - the survive-&-thrive strategy of most IMC-networks was comparable to that of the outlaw power-structure that operated globally under different names [v]: (a) Disguise under convenient labels; and (b) Subvert the local power systems by all possible means. This ‘voluntary vassalage’ and compliant complicity in exploitation, enabled them to retain their hierarchical positions that had first been created by distorting and corrupting the caste-system [vi].

This remarkably-consistent-over-eons, chameleon-like felicity of the IMC to get in phase with the dominant elements in the social matrix has no parallel. Day before yesterday, IMC spoke Sanskrit; yesterday, to please its Mogul masters, it learnt Persian and Arabic. Until WW-II, it was the Queen’s English’s ‘received pronunciation’. Today, IMC call-center-jobbers train for the California accent.

A unique feature of this is that while, in comparison, the attempt to interpret Christianity to validate racism, slavery etc. finally lost much of its steam, in India Hinduism was most successfully and thoroughly corrupted to get religious sanction for behavior that is different only in name.

For example, socio-religious divisions based on work and position in life - and not birth - were made to take a U turn to make the reverse sanctified and acceptable.

Hindu thought anthropomorphizes everything into an organic whole system, be it the Universe, the solar system, the earth and its species of life, including human groups. The "head", "arms" “torso" and "feet" are called 'varña' - a Sanskrit word with nine other meanings and fifty-eight derivatives [vii]. Varñäshrama Dharma is a dynamically holistic Hindû way of social organization.

Few today know that the 'caste-system', or Jäti-prathä, originates in skills-grouping. Without contradiction, I have speculated that the birth-related 'Jä’ in 'Jäti' is a misheard-corruption of a similar sounding knowledge-related syllable, spelt variously as ‘jnä/gnä/gya/’ in the Roman script. In Gûjerät, for instance, people still ask for your ‘Gnäti’ [a collective noun for ‘Gnäta(s)’, meaning ‘(which) skills-community (do you belong to)?’ The answer can be ‘cobbler/goldsmith/carpenter etc).

While many, including Mahätmä Gändhi, tried to exorcise the aberrant, by-birth-determined caste-system from the collective Hindû mind, enduring, broad-based success still eludes. This pernicious anachronism is now rolling back under increased global connectivity. Perhaps, what is still missing is the theoretical knockout that I have alluded to in the previous paragraph. I am reconciled that the transformation is Kabuki and not cataclysmic.

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[ii] This is because Indian intellectuals, while they superficially but perpetually maintain a mutually-bickering mode, are more pliant, less discriminating, ingratiating even, to the external influence of received wisdom. In a perverted way, they are proud of being aliens to their own land and culture.

[iii] Extract from a January 2000 Times of India Edit Page Dipänkar Gûpta essay titled < 'Westoxication' Syndrome> in which he credits Iranian intellectual Jaläl-älé-Ahmed for coining and bringing this word into popular intellectual use. Mr. Gûpta says, and I Quote:
["Unlike westernization which implies the establishment of universalistic norms and the privileging of achievement over birth, westoxication is the superficial consumerist display of commodities and fads produced in the West.....Westoxicated people are not westernized in the true sense of the word at all. They use their privileges of birth, their superior access to wealth and power to flaunt their social distance from the rest. The places the Westoxicated inhabit and the lifestyles they exhibit are alien from what the majority are familiar with.....When people complain against westernization what they often fail to realize is that they are actually railing against westoxication….As the distinction between westoxication and westernization are not kept alive, the hearts of the liberals go out to the westoxicated whenever they are under attack. This only legitimizes on a larger scale the ideological pronouncements of fundamentalists and communalists. As a result the optical illusion that merges westoxication with westernization gets disseminated on an even wider-scale. This allows the westoxicated, too, to take refuge under the skein of secularism and modernization which only does true westernization more harm than good. Secularism appears as a shibboleth and a cover for the westoxicated. There is always the possibility that those against the westoxicated, need not always be communal or fundamentalist in their orientation. Yet the way….liberals line up behind the westoxicated tempts others to forsake the high ideological achievements of true modernization and westernization….India has been lucky because democracy has taken the edge off the mass anger that the westoxicaed usually succeed in generating (elsewhere).]

[iv] Per the Sept 24/04 Times of India item on p. 04 the Orissa government's PR department disburses Rs. 90,000,000/= as staff-salaries out of its total annual budgetary allocation of Rs. 110,000,000/=. Per an item in the Sept 29/04 The Hindu on p. 10, fourteen departments and 260 signatures are involved before flowers can be exported out of India.

[v] as ‘the East India Company’, the ‘British Empire’, ‘the United States of America’ and recently, under the leadership of George W, Bush, as ‘the Coalition of the Willing’.

[vi] This had become endemic at least 2000 + years ago. The most notable effort to remove these interpretative distortions was made by Krishna, who, today is deified more as an avatär than as an always-relevant preceptor. The followers of the Bûddha, who held sway over the subcontinent by their alliance with power - a condition similar to the alliance of the Church and the fiefdoms in Europe - threw the baby with the bathwater and, under the guise of nihilism, became so hedonistic and corrupt that it took an uprising to extirpate Buddhism out of India; but only after the best of its precepts were planted outside in Asia. This was quickly followed by the Moguls and British periods.
[vii] Thus in a human society, knowledge-workers(Brähmins), are identified as the 'head', security-personnel* (Kshatriya) are the 'arms', entrepreneurs(Vaishya) are the 'torso' while the utility-providers(Shûdra) are the 'feet'. Similarly, the various social positions in life were called 'äshrama'. Children and youth, busy with various explorations, are said to be in Brahmachayäshrama. The family-householders are in the Grihasthäshrama. When their children have grown and married to enter this äshrama in the joint family, their middle-aged parents are freed from their house-keeping responsibilities, to enter the Vanaprasthäshrama, where the activities’-focus of these 'elders' is the community and its relationships to other communities. Finally, those that can amongst the old (above 75), enter the Sanyäsäshrama, while the infirm and the sick are looked after within the joint family with ample help from the community. This self-disciplining, dynamic combination 'Varñäshrama' way of social life is one of the bedrocks of Hindû Dharma, which also has another name that would roughly translate as “The Eternal Code of Conduct”. It hardly needed any external 'governance' because it created self-regulating, lateral-vertical omni-syntegral connections in the social community whereby each person knew what his/her social role and obligations were.