In Defence of Sustho Sanskriti (Healthy Culture): Understanding Bengali Middle Classness in Neoliberal India

Abstract

The ‘new middle class’, often identified as an upwardly mobile segment, primarily employed in the growing private service sectors, such as the information technology, and supposedly, representative of the changing lifestyles and consumption patterns of the Indian middle class, has stolen much of the limelight of the contemporary popular as well as scholarly discourses on the Indian middle class. 2 2 This article draws upon from the fieldwork conducted as part of my PhD work completed in 2016. An earlier version of the paper was presented at the international seminar on ‘The Middle Class in World Society’ held at ISEC (Institute of Social and Economic Change), Bangalore, India on 16th and 17th December, 2016. This article, on the other hand, takes up a different social group located in West Bengal, having a close relationship with the state, often described as the ‘old middle class’/‘Nehruvian middle class’ in the postcolonial context, the respondents being predominantly public sector employees and academicians. By taking up the register of sanskriti (culture), the article argues that it is fundamentally through forging continuity from the past that this historically dominant social group is engaged in the construction of Bengali middle classness. Through an analysis of class and its relation to cultural distinctiveness, the article shows that the specific way in which this relation plays out in case of the respondents in my study and argues that any theoretical attempt to understand the complex relationship between class distinction and the question of taste needs to be grounded within narrowly defined contextualised specificities.