June 22, 1998
|
|
|
|
Bubble
Gum Analysis An essay on the middle class which has lots of moral outrage -- but little else. By Shiv Visvanathan THE GREAT INDIAN MIDDLE CLASS Oxford University Press recently published a few antholo-gies on Indian politics. A reading of these is enough to convince anyone about how dismal political science is. As data, as analyses, as a literary style, these essays are soporific. Such academic efforts have given way to two livelier but still superficial styles of analysis. The first is the political travelogue as a narrative, encased in the books of Sunil Khilnani and Sashi Tharoor. Their English is elegant even if their analysis isn't. The second genre seeks to model itself on political pamphlets and claims to be a social analysis. It usually consists of one essay blown up into a breathless book. Examples of these are Rajni Kothari's Beyond Amnesia and Pavan Varma's The Great Indian Middle Class. Varma is well-known for his books on Krishna and on Yudhisthir and Draupadi. But when he moves from myth to demythicising the middle class, he finds the going harder. Krishna and Yudhisthir at least fall in love. You wonder if the great Indian middle class loves anything, even itself. Varma creates an angry scenario about a moral weakening of the Indian middle class. He does it through a triptych of chronologies -- colonial, Nehruvian and post-Nehruvian -- showing the middle class' hypocrisy is a structural one created by history and politics. In fact, it is a book about structural adjustment of the moral kind. How does one make the middle class rise above itself and graduate into something more than an aggregate of material wants? How does one exorcise Macaulay's curse? Varma's answer involves expanding the question, giving it an ancestry, a history and a dismal future. The questions asked are important but the analyses are disappointing. As a Sunday sermon, angry and sonorous, it is tolerable. It is best read as an excerpt, the trailer usually more exciting than the movie. The narrative is an assembly line of newspaper and magazine cuttings editorialised into a landscape. It is a familiar terrain, from Rammohun Roy to Nehru to the ncaer report. You enjoy guessing what the neat lines of the "dialogue" are or who the next quote belongs to. There is enormous energy but the moral breathlessness hides a lack of sociological content. Varma never stops to analyse anything in detail. All the topics -- sexuality, popular culture, communalism -- are standard length. The book needs what Geertz calls "thick description" or a detailed reading of texts or data. The book only becomes a tutorial essay masquerading as a literary-sociological tract. One wishes Varma had modelled his book on C. Wright Mills' White Collar to learn how the social imagination can combine moral power and sociological theory to enhance its vision. There are interesting vignettes on hypocrisy, on hygiene, on communalism, on how the elite uses education to enhance its scarcity value. But if the anger had been more ironic, the understanding of hypocrisy more anthropologically nuanced, one would have obtained a little Veblenesque classic. Instead, one gets a literary double-bubble gum which gets flatter on reading. But like Wrigley's, it will sell and be bought by the very Indian middle class Varma condemns.
|
|
Issue Contents | Write to us | Subscriptions © Living Media India Ltd |
 |
 |
