Tags:
Journalism of Courage
Patterns of Middle Class Consumption in India and China
ed by christophe jaffrelot and peter
Van der veer
sage, Rs 695
In a pre-book release interview with The Financial Express February 17, Christophe Jaffrelot made the interesting observation that different political systems in India and China might not yield much practical difference. The Chinese middle class seems to be coming to terms with a one-party autocracy and the Indian middle class doesn8217;t vote, Jaffrelot said. 8220;What may be at stake in India is the resilience of parliamentary democracy.8221;
This is, of course, a straight counter to mainstream Indian chatterati8217;s favourite political story, made all the more interesting because it comes from an astute and learned India observer. It is also, sadly for this book, its only first-rate intellectual argument. Most of the rest are sociological examinations of the kind that make up the numbers on the social sciences seminar/conference circuit: perfectly respectable but not terribly sharp. No surprise there perhaps; the book is a compilation of papers presented at a New Delhi seminar.
One near-exception is Shoma Munshi8217;s thesis on why the celebration of consumerism by private television channels in India is a tool for empowerment. Munshi argues that Indian lower middle class women find small but significant means to challenge the status quo when they make television-driven lifestyle choices. Bombarded as we are with indignant arguments about consumerism8217;s soul-destroying regressiveness, it is refreshing to find an academic thesis that eschews middle-class intelligentsia snobbery and looks at how 8220;ordinary8221; people find hope. Hope sometimes, as Munshi demonstrates, can be found in New Delhi8217;s Lajpat Nagar shoe shops.
Lajpat Nagar, where incomes and aspirations are outpacing civic amenities and where real-estate values are signalling its possible upgrade to a higher class of lebensraum, may already have many Indians who don8217;t vote. But do they and the millions in other Indian cities represent a fundamental, systemic challenge to India8217;s parliamentary democracy, as Jaffrelot argues? One can argue that if politics is shaped by the votes of the 8220;plebeians8221; and policy still has inputs drawn from the middle-class weltanschauung, then imperfect as it is, the system serves a country where a lot of people are getting wealthier but which also has a lot of poor citizens. Indeed, India8217;s democracy may be the reason why the economic paradigm shift since the early 1990s hasn8217;t engendered acute class tension. And the real scandal in Indian democracy is not so much that the rich don8217;t vote but that the governments poor voters elect let them down so badly, by consistently designing bad welfare policies. If there8217;s any concern about India8217;s political system that has been remarkably resilient so far, it arises from government delivery failure. But at least one bunch of non-performers can be thrown out every five years.
They can8217;t do that in China, where by all accounts social tension is on the rise. Can China8217;s GDP shape its politics to such an extent that even a rudimentary form of democracy becomes an academic point, especially since the share of mass consumption in China8217;s GDP is remarkably low, compared with both India8217;s and the West8217;s?
This is probably a more critical question for the near future than the one Jaffrelot poses for India. In fact, a surprising omission from a seminar on patterns of Indian and Chinese consumption, at least in the humble view of this reader, is a paper comparing Indian and Chinese consumption trends. Is there a likely political crisis in China8217;s communists tamping down on mass consumption? That8217;s something Jaffrelot8217;s first-rate research can perhaps address.
March Past
The story of the Archaeological Survey of India8217;s early years is only beginning to be told in all its human and intellectual drama. This lavish coffee-table book A Vision of Splendour by Gerda Theuns-de Boer, Mapin picks up the task through the career of Jean Philippe Vogel, a Dutch scholar who joined the ASI in 1901 as the superintendent for the Punjab, Baluchistan and Ajmer Circle. The book tracks his travels around the country for a decade, and especially riveting are the accounts of his excavations, most notably of the Buddhist Gandhara sites.
But what makes the book come alive are over a hundred old photographs of the ASI above, Jama Masjid, Agra from the Kern Institute in Leiden in the Netherlands. As the author ties up Vogel8217;s work with that of men like John Marshall, it emphasises the often little acknowledged contribution of Indians of the early ASI. A lovely book that explains a little more of how India found itself.
