Being Middle-class in South Asia

In this interesting, wide-ranging book Markus Daechsel argues that historians of colonial India, especially those concerned with Muslim separatism in the Punjab and United Provinces, have focused on what he calls the politics of interest. By this he means politics conducted within the representative structures established by the colonial state, where influential individuals belonging to local elites tended to represent the interests of their caste and religion, rather than their economic or social class. This accorded with the official British view of India as a society dominated by primordial collective loyalties rooted in caste, religion or tribe, which in turn were reflected in the truncated electoral system established by the British state. In addition, from the first decennial census of 1871 onwards, caste and religion were the key categories in the collection of statistical data on the Indian population, thereby reinforcing their importance as the determinants of political allegiances in the public arena. The prevailing presumption was that the numerical strength of communities, defined by these categories, should determine their share of resources. Since politics found it difficult to shake off the straitjacket of these communal categories, the colonial state in India was successful in forestalling the emergence of class politics at various levels of the Indian social hierarchy. One result of this was to inhibit the emergence of a politically conscious middle class. Even those who could be classified as middle-class – lawyers, urban professionals, government servants, journalists, and so on – identified less with each other than with networks of patronage formed around powerful local elites. In the case of the Punjab in the period covered by Daechsel, this lack of an autonomous middle class was partly due to communal differences between ‘Hindus’ and ‘Muslims’, but the dominant position of landowners in the province, who had been heavily favoured and protected by the colonial state in its bid to ensure social stability in the countryside of the Raj’s most important recruiting ground for the army, was also an important factor.

This politics of interest formed the background to what Daeschel describes as ‘the politics of self-expression’ prominent in the South Asian middle-class milieu of the Punjab and United Provinces (later Uttar Pradesh) from the 1930s to the 1950s. The politics of self-expression was premised on a notion of inward-looking and self-contained subjects. The shared mission of individuals and nations, treated as analogous to each other, was the ‘authentic’ expression of their ‘inner essences’. Daechsel concentrates on the style of this politics, focusing on figures such as Inayatullah Khan ‘Mashriqi’, Subhas Chandra Bose, and V. D. Savarkar. He points to the blend in their work of individual introspection, a nebulous and emotive language of authenticity, social Darwinism, a strong sense of militarism, and an aestheticized politics, in which reading and writing for the purpose of creating ‘affective states’ became political acts in themselves.¹ These elements resulted in a broadly fascistic outlook that conflated individual selfhood with the nation, and denied the reality of the ‘societal’ as an arena for political bargaining and negotiation. The purpose of politics was to seek salvation through the expression of a ‘purified inner self’: an ideal, Daeschel shows, that reflected a real lack of political power. Selfexpressionism, in his words, was the ideological vehicle of a marginalized middle class (p. 34).

Having outlined this argument, Daechsel goes on to examine the roles played by body and space in the politics of self-expression. He explores some characteristic middle-class ambivalences toward the body, as represented in a variety of figures from the feudal landlord to the traditional wrestler.² Drawing on a wide range of Urdu texts, from newspaper articles and advertisements to pamphlets, he shows how they expressed middle-class sensibility in relation to diet, hygiene, and sexual pleasure in all its variety, from intercourse to masturbatory fantasies. He emphasizes the communalization of the body, with Hindu and Muslim...