ABSTRACT
In recent years, India’s middle classes have emerged as a central socio-economic and political force in contemporary India. This chapter presents an overview of some of the complexities and contradictions that shape India’s middle classes. Contemporary discussions of India’s middle classes are fraught with conceptual ambiguities regarding the precise boundaries that mark this social group. Contemporary political and public discourses are marked by highly inflated forms of rhetoric about the nature of India’s middle classes. Middle-class identity in many ways is defined by a kind of productive ambiguity. A number of well-publicized events have seemed to mark the emergence of a distinctive form of middle-class politics in contemporary India. An understanding of the impact of India’s middle classes requires analyses that hold in tension both the contradiction and interrelationship between dominant narratives and internal differentiation. The 2014 elections in India provide a central example of the political complexities of India’s middle classes.
