ABSTRACT
The subaltern middle class of my title refers to middle class groups that emerge from, and remain in various ways tied to, long stigmatised lower-class and underclass populations. Two striking examples are found among the African American and the dalit (or ex-Untouchable) populations in the US and India, the ‘black bourgeoisie’ and ‘dalit brahmins’ as they have been called, white but not quite, groups that are under pressure to be citizens of the modern world (rational, meritrocratic and universalist in their outlook), on the one hand, and to speak for their still underprivileged communities, ‘not to forget where they come from’, on the other. It is the particular struggles of these middle class elements that I wish to analyse in this essay.
