ABSTRACT
This chapter presents an alternative narrative, in which Macaulay and his kind play no role, but which also takes some distance vis-à-vis the Kaleckian model, a narrative of the slow emergence, from within a merchant world, of a strata of entrepreneurs who have become an important component of the Indian middle classes. The theme of the rise of an Indian middle class or rather a petty bourgeoisie was first elaborated upon only in the 1930s, mostly by Marxist authors, such as Rajani Palme Dutt. The middle decades of the nineteenth century saw a series of concomitant developments which concurred to reshape to a significant extent the profile of the mercantile world of India, although they did not amount to a complete revolution. The mercantile world of India in the pre-independence period, in spite of its own great internal diversity, remained largely separate from the world of the English-educated middle classes which were more conspicuous and influential, politically and culturally.
