Contested Capital
Rural Middle Classes in India

It explores the formation of India's rural middle class, which rests on a complex, and often contradictory, set of processes that began unfolding with growing industrialisation in rural areas.

Maryam Aslany (Author)

9781108836333, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 3 December 2020

322 pages
23.6 x 16.5 x 2.5 cm, 0.61 kg

'This book significantly enriches our understanding of the changing dynamics of rural lives in India of the 21st century. By focussing on the subject of the 'rural middle class', the book opens up the study of the Indian village to an altogether new set of questions. Such a framing of the process of social change also enables the author to move out of the essentialist notions of the 'rural' and of 'India' that have often plagued the social science scholarship on the region. The use of 'critical pluralism' as a mode of approaching and analysing the subject has much to offer as an alternative way of looking at the middle classes and the complicated ways in which their formation intersects with other aspects of change, structural and discursive.' Surinder Jodhka, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi

The expansion and transformation of Asian economies is producing class structures, roles and identities that could not easily be predicted from other times and places. The industrialisation of the countryside, in particular, generates new, rural middle classes which straddle the worlds of agriculture and industry in complex ways. Their class position is improvised on the basis of numerous influences and opportunities, and is in constant evolution. Enormous though its total population is, meanwhile, the rural middle class remains invisible to most scholars and policymakers. Contested Capital is the first major work to shed light on an emerging transnational class comprised of many hundreds of millions of people. In India, the 'middle class' has become one of the key categories of economic analysis and developmental forecasting. The discussion suffers from one major oversight: it assumes that the middle class resides uniquely in the cities. As this book demonstrates, however, more than a third of India's middle class is rural, and 17 per cent of rural households belong to the middle class. The book brings this vast and dynamic population into view, so confronting some of the most crucial neglected questions of the contemporary global economy.

List of figures and maps
List of tables
List of abbreviations
Foreword Barbara Harriss-White
Acknowledgments
Introduction. The problem of the 'rural middle class(es)'
1. Trajectory of the Indian middle class: its size and geographical variations
2. In search of the rural middle classes: from village stratification to rural household variations
3. Marx: capital, labour and the rural middle classes
4. Weber: marketable capital, status and the rural middle classes
5. Bourdieu: cultural capital, self-perception and the middle-class identity in rural India
Conclusion. Understanding the rural middle classes
Appendices
References
Index.

Subject Areas: Economic systems & structures [KCS], Political economy [KCP], Economic growth [KCG], Macroeconomics [KCB], Economic theory & philosophy [KCA], Political science & theory [JPA], Social research & statistics [JHBC], Social theory [JHBA], Rural communities [JFSF], Social classes [JFSC]