Rural Upstarts Move In on Colonial Lackeys

Punit Paranjpe/Agence France-Presse - Getty Images A man speaking on a cellphone in Mumbai, Maharashtra, on Feb. 2, 2012.

To understand India's middle class as it is now, it helps to think of it as two waves that came 150 years apart.

First, the British education system combined with India's caste elite to produce the colonial middle class in the mid-19th century. This was a group of mostly low-rung administrators and professionals who served the British. They spawned much of India's metropolitan middle class, whose population was around 30 million until the early 1990s.

Then the opening up of India's economy in the 1990s created a hungry, rising group, especially in hundreds of India's smaller towns and villages. At the same time, political empowerment of the lower castes created regional parties with strong rural roots, which inspired new ambitions among once caste-bound populations.

The results have been dramatic. India's post-liberalization middle class, some 250 million strong, is fast breaking down the elitist preserves of the historical middle class, built on the exclusivity of education and other privileges.

India's long-term economic success and the health of its middle class depend on how fast these hierarchies break down. Giving social and geographic mobility to swathes of rural population who are now close to breaking into the middle class will further dilute the exclusivity of that class.

This exclusivity that once defined India's middle class was part of British design: “… it is impossible for us, with our limited means, to attempt to educate the body of the people,” Thomas Babington Macaulay, the pioneer of colonial education in India, is quoted in the Bureau of Education's minutes from Feb. 2, 1835. “We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern, - a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect.”

James A. Mills/Associated Press Mohandas K. Gandhi in this 1931 photo.

In fact, to unseat the British, Indian rulers had to shuck off their colonized ways. Mohandas K. Gandhi's biggest success was the ability to take the independence movement away from “Macaulay's Children,” turning it into a strong grassroots movement in the countryside.

The urban middle class, whose power was based on patronage from the colonizers and exclusion of the masses, could not translate resentment against the British into a nationwide movement. “These middle classes were too much the product of that structure to challenge it and seek to uproot it,” Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, himself part of this anglicized class, explained in his 1946 book “The Discovery of India.”

Post-independence, the colonial-rooted middle class crowded the bureaucracy as English remained a key requirement to pass the civil service examination. Higher education was heavily subsidized by the state owing to middle-class pressure, even as primary education suffered.

Much of India's education system is still caught in this colonial time warp. “Schools across the country have similar content taught in a similar manner, with the similar objective of creating a group of people who can help administer governments or companies,” noted the Asian Development Bank. “Very little attention is given to vocational training, manual skills or entrepreneurship development.”

In small-town India, this education system has opened up a gap between employment opportunities and available skills, even as the new generation looks to move away from agriculture. For the optimistic projections of India's middle class to come true, this massive transition from agriculture to skilled jobs will have to go smoothly. For a prosperous, employed consumer base in the new urban centers, skill-based education will have to be strengthened, and alarming dropout levels in primary schools, especially among girls, will need to be tackled in earnest.

Kevin Frayer/Associated Press Passengers waiting outside a stranded train en route to New Delhi on July 31, 2012.

Despite their educational disadvantages, the post-liberalization, small-town middle class has created a new paradigm that is here to stay. The move away from the cities is now visible everywhere - in politics, in Bollywood, in sports and in business.

When television came to India in the early 1980s, all advertising was targeted at the urban consumer who had the TV set and the spending power. The advertising industry was run by the south Mumbai or south Delhi elite selling a faux-Western lifestyle to their own brethren.

But now most global brands have a marketing strategy for the increasingly affluent small-town or rural consumer, an economic trend that McKinsey had noted in a report published in 2007. “Within urban areas we will also begin to see India's middle tier and smaller cities begin to emerge as increasingly attractive markets with substantial number of middle class customers.”

The advertising industry, too, has a much higher representation from these segments now, promoting products through creative, indigenous campaigns in Indian languages, like this one selling mobile phones to the large rural market.

The transformation is instructive in cricket, the old colonial sport that is now India's national obsession. Once patronized by the Indian aristocracy and their British overlords, cricket gradually became an urban middle-class sport in the decades after independence.

Now, cricket is played in every part of India, and the last decade has seen an influx of small-town players into the national team. The current captain, Mahendra Singh Dhoni, was born and raised in Ranchi, a small city by Indian standards in the eastern coal belt. At the age of 31, Mr. Dhoni is already India's most successful captain ever, having led the team to two World Cup victories.

Andres Leighton/Associated Press Mahendra Singh Dhoni, left, during a match in St. Lucia, West Indies, on July 3, 2009.

His style of cricket and leadership is typical of hinterland India: industrious, street-smart and innovative. His two immediate predecessors â€" Rahul Dravid and Anil Kumble â€" were both urbane products of the Bangalore middle class. While they were feted as gentlemen of the sport, they were not successful captains, nor were they seen as transformational figures like Mr. Dhoni.

“The new small-town middle-class wants to reach where the urban elite is, and they want to get there quick,” said Dipankar Gupta, a sociologist. “They are willing to take more risks; they are more determined to succeed.”

Wednesday: Meet Yogesh Chile, 30, a supplier of sand to construction sites in Mumbai, who typifies India's middle class.

Sambuddha Mitra Mustafi is an independent journalist. Follow him on Twitter @some_buddha