ABSTRACT

This chapter considers how analysis of the lives of working class rural and urban children in a country such as India can be helpful in theorising childhood, media representations, digital technologies and agency differently. Work on new media in India is also useful in unpicking the ways in which class functions at the intersection of caste and geography to structure and enable social relationships, work and leisure. In journalistic and development reports, there is usually reference to classes in India as if they map neatly onto classes in Western Europe – with a rather homogenous middle, lower middle and working class making up a majority of society. In their study of domesticity and class in modern India, Cultures of Servitude, Raka Ray and Seemin Qayum insist that the Indian middle classes are not in any way shape or form actually in the middle of the economic class spectrum in India.