The Social Character of the Indian Middle Class

Abstract

This chapter defines the middle class in terms of its principal demographic, economic and social characteristics. In the west, the middle class began to be perceived as a distinct social formation only in the nineteenth century. Much of the nineteenth century was widely seen as that class or stratum which stood between the owners of land and capital on one side and those merely of labour power on the other. The new middle class of salaried employees grew continuously throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and for a time its growth appeared in marked contrast with the decline of the old middle class of self-employed persons in manufacture and trade. In India, the origins of the middle class derive not so much from an industrial revolution or a democratic revolution as from colonial rule. Trade unionism brings some sections of the middle class dose to the working but divides them from other sections of their own class.