B n ddl l n th

Javed Majeed

History Workshop Journal, Issue 65, Spring 2008, pp. 247-252 (Article)

Published by Oxford University Press

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Being Middle-class in South Asiaby Javed Majeed

Markus Daechsel, The Politics of Self-Expression: the Urdu Middle-class Milieu in

mid twentieth-century India and Pakistan, Routledge, 2006; 250 pp., £65; ISBN 0-415-

31214-0 (hbk) 0-203-48029-5 (pbk).

In this interesting, wide-ranging book Markus Daechsel argues that

historians of colonial India, especially those concerned with Muslim

separatism in the Punjab and United Provinces, have focused on what he

calls the politics of interest. By this he means politics conducted within the

representative structures established by the colonial state, where influential

individuals belonging to local elites tended to represent the interests of their

caste and religion, rather than their economic or social class. This accorded

with the official British view of India as a society dominated by primordial

collective loyalties rooted in caste, religion or tribe, which in turn were

reflected in the truncated electoral system established by the British state.

In addition, from the first decennial census of 1871 onwards, caste and

religion were the key categories in the collection of statistical data on the

Indian population, thereby reinforcing their importance as the determinants

of political allegiances in the public arena. The prevailing presumption was

that the numerical strength of communities, defined by these categories,

should determine their share of resources. Since politics found it difficult to

shake off the straitjacket of these communal categories, the colonial state in

India was successful in forestalling the emergence of class politics at various

levels of the Indian social hierarchy. One result of this was to inhibit the

emergence of a politically conscious middle class. Even those who could

be classified as middle-class – lawyers, urban professionals, government

servants, journalists, and so on – identified less with each other than with

networks of patronage formed around powerful local elites. In the case of

the Punjab in the period covered by Daechsel, this lack of an autonomous

middle class was partly due to communal differences between ‘Hindus’ and

‘Muslims’, but the dominant position of landowners in the province, who

had been heavily favoured and protected by the colonial state in its bid

to ensure social stability in the countryside of the Raj’s most important

recruiting ground for the army, was also an important factor.This politics of interest formed the background to what Daeschel

describes as ‘the politics of self-expression’ prominent in the South Asian

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middle-class milieu of the Punjab and United Provinces (later UttarPradesh) from the 1930s to the 1950s. The politics of self-expression waspremised on a notion of inward-looking and self-contained subjects. Theshared mission of individuals and nations, treated as analogous to eachother, was the ‘authentic’ expression of their ‘inner essences’. Daechselconcentrates on the style of this politics, focusing on figures such asInayatullah Khan ‘Mashriqi’, Subhas Chandra Bose, and V. D. Savarkar.He points to the blend in their work of individual introspection, a nebulousand emotive language of authenticity, social Darwinism, a strong sense ofmilitarism, and an aestheticized politics, in which reading and writing forthe purpose of creating ‘affective states’ became political acts in themselves.1

These elements resulted in a broadly fascistic outlook that conflatedindividual selfhood with the nation, and denied the reality of the ‘societal’ asan arena for political bargaining and negotiation. The purpose of politicswas to seek salvation through the expression of a ‘purified inner self’: anideal, Daeschel shows, that reflected a real lack of political power. Self-expressionism, in his words, was the ideological vehicle of a marginalizedmiddle class (p. 34).

Having outlined this argument, Daechsel goes on to examine the rolesplayed by body and space in the politics of self-expression. He explores somecharacteristic middle-class ambivalences toward the body, as represented ina variety of figures from the feudal landlord to the traditional wrestler.2

Drawing on a wide range of Urdu texts, from newspaper articles andadvertisements to pamphlets, he shows how they expressed middle-classsensibility in relation to diet, hygiene, and sexual pleasure in all its variety,from intercourse to masturbatory fantasies. He emphasizes the commu-nalization of the body, with Hindu and Muslim papers and pamphletsexpressing different kinds of corporeal anxieties. He is careful to distinguishbetween Indian and European discourses on masturbation and intercourse,given the tradition of semen-retention in one strand of Hinduism.3

He discusses the construction of conceptual spaces and imaginary maps,usefully contextualized in relation to the changing character of Lahore as anurban space and the impact of these changes on the lives of its inhabitants.4

There are some fine interpretations of Urdu texts here, in keeping withthe illuminating combination of literary interpretation and socio-historicalanalysis that characterizes the book as a whole. More discussion of howUrdu diction and styles might have differed between ‘Hindu’ and ‘Muslim’papers would have been welcome, given the spectacular success of the Hindimovement in north India by this date and the increasing identification ofUrdu as a marker of Muslim identity, and conversely of Hindi as a markerof Hindu identity.5 Since the term Urdu is central to the book as a whole(the middle class Daechsel investigates is called the ‘Urdu middle-classmilieu’, not the Punjabi or north Indian middle-class milieu), more reflectionon the rhetorical complexities and different inflections of Urdu in his sourceswould have been useful.

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Daechsel’s argument about the conflation of individual selfhood withgroup identities in the politics of self-expression is persuasive. But somefuller explanation for the urgent concern with issues of selfhood in thecolonial context is necessary, and here Daechsel might have drawn uponpostcolonial writings on the politics of identity such as Frantz Fanon’swork. Ayesha Jalal, in her Self and Sovereignty: Individual and Communityin South Asian Islam since 1850 (2000), has made a key point in this regard.The colonial framework of representation was rooted in communalcategories. As a result, individuals expressed their subjectivity throughcollective discourses, fashioned in a manner that made few concessions todiversities within communities.6 This crucial point, and the experience ofwhat Fanon called being ‘an object in midst of other objects, sealed intocrushing objecthood’,7 against which individual selfhood was asserted, isdownplayed by Daechsel. Moreover, a concern with individual selfhooddoes not necessarily lead to the kind of politics he describes. The questionis surely what kind of individual self is being imagined. Not all national-ists who grappled with questions of individual identity assumed that,in Daechsel’s words, ‘nations and individuals are ontologically analogous’(p. 51). As I have argued elsewhere, autobiographies of some Indiannationalists are distinctive in refusing to conflate individual identity withgroup identities; this refusal grounds their critique of nationalism as alevelling, homogenizing process, and in some cases, their articulation ofalternatives to the nation state as a polity. Such writers included the Urdupoet and Muslim nationalist, Muhammad Iqbal (1877–1938), who residedin Punjab, but whose work Daechsel does not consider in any detail.Iqbal’s writing, like that of other nationalists who did not conflateindividual identity with group identity, was at times tense and contra-dictory, signalling a level of complexity in his work which is often missed.A similar complexity could be found among other exponents of the politicsof self-expression, such as Lajpat Rai, whose works were far fromsimplistic or reductive.8 Even in the case of Savarkar’s Hindutva (1949)there is tension between its hybrid linguistic textuality, in which English,Hindi and Sanskrit are mixed, and its essentializing of one particular kindof Hindu identity. By ignoring or understating these complexities,Daechsel’s focus on ‘expression’ is not always as nuanced as it might be.Daechsel also stresses the ‘painful mismatch’ in the politics of self-expression ‘between the deadly seriousness and hubris of politicalconsciousness and the mundane circumstances of its socio-genesis’. Heargues that ‘lofty concepts such as interiority and self-hood have a firmbasis in hard material realities’ (p. 10, p. 93), suggesting that uncoveringthese material realities somehow deflates, or explains away, ideas ofselfhood. But socio-historical contextualization and the seriousness of ideasof selfhood are not mutually exclusive. As ideas, concepts of selfhood areby their very nature immaterial, but they are not, therefore, any less ‘real’than material realities.

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Baudrillard’s work on consumer society is a key reference point forDaeschel, who sees himself as dealing not with ‘class’ in any objective sensebut with what he calls a milieu, ‘an effect . . . at the intersection of historicalprocesses’, ‘the growth of a will to middle class-ness’ (p. 12, p. 196).Baudrillard’s ideas about consumer society apply particularly well to theUrdu middle class, Daeschel suggests, because there the true nature ofconsumer society – its ‘strangely mono-dimensional and unreal quality’ –revealed itself more clearly than in developed forms of consumerism (p. 186).Daechsel’s argument here is dense and sometimes difficult to follow, partlybecause he uses two separate strands of Baudrillard’s work, one thatemphasizes production over consumption as in The Consumer Society(1970), and another (in The System of Objects (1968) and For the Critique ofthe Political Economy of the Sign (1972)) that focuses on how objects becomedivorced from production and begin to function like signs. As Baudrillardputs it ‘the circulation, purchase, sale, appropriation of differentiated goodsand signs/objects today constitute our language, our code, the code by whichour entire society communicates and converses. Such is the structure ofconsumption, its language, by comparison with which individual needs andpleasures are merely speech effect’.9 Daechsel uses both strands in hisargument about the ‘unreal’ quality about consumer society in north Indiain the period under study, although he uses the second strand more thanthe first. He argues that whereas in Baudrillard’s post-modern world thereis no longer any yardstick by which the ‘unreality’ of consumption can bemeasured, in colonial India, by contrast, there was such just a yardstick,namely the social framework of the politics of interest, with its powerfullocal elites and the politics of patronage. But there may also have been moremundane reasons for the fragility of consumer society in late colonial India,which are underplayed by Daechsel in this part of his argument. The SecondWorld War seriously affected India’s economy, leading to an increase in theprice of consumer goods in domestic markets until 1943, and the impositionof rationing schemes and price controls for many commodities after that.Once the war ended the pressure for further liberalization grew, butalthough the Indian government tried consistently to run a liberal importpolicy, the failure of this policy by the early 1950s as a result of a combi-nation of circumstances, including the lingering impact of wartime inflation,was clear.10

As noted, Daechsel argues that the historiography of South Asia has beendominated by the story of the politics of interest, which has obscured thepolitics of self-expression. He sees himself as ‘unpicking’ this dominantstory, and as replicating ‘what the politicians of self-expression themselveswere after, when they . . . attacked a restrictive form of politics that didnot accord any legitimacy or importance to matters of selfhood’ (p. 30).However, it is in relation to the politics of interest that he deflates thepolitics of self-expression, which would seem to support the dominant storytold by historians. In a peculiar way, then, there is an ambivalence towards

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the politics of self-expression and the Urdu middle-class milieu in the book,

of the same order as Baudrillard’s ambivalence towards ‘primitive societies’,which for him were lacking in relation to modern Western consumer societywhile possessing their own intrinsic sophistication that threw into relief thedistinctive nature of Western consumer society.11 Nowhere, of course, does

Daechsel use the term ‘primitive’ (which anyway is not a pejorative term inBaudrillard), but the Urdu middle-class milieu seems both to be lacking insubstance (presumably in contrast to a fully formed European bourgeoisie)while yet providing a perspective in which, as noted above, the true nature of

consumer society revealed itself even more clearly than in its more developedforms. It seems to have the same doubleness as the ‘primitive’ has forBaudrillard.

Nonetheless, the points raised here are testimony to the book’s provoca-tive thesis. Daechsel’s grappling with the issues raised by Baudrillard in thecontext of South Asia will be increasingly important as commentators begin

to analyse India’s new middle class,12 and his use of Baudrillard to exploreconsumer society in South Asia opens up an additional area in the economichistory of modern India, which has so far tended to focus on conventional,albeit crucial, issues of underdevelopment and dependency. Daechsel’s

book points to some of the ways in which Baudrillard’s work might beilluminating in helping us to characterize the now globally powerful middleclass in India and South Asia. Overall, Daechsel’s study is a deeplythoughtful and rich one, with interesting readings of Urdu sources, and a

sophisticated, intriguing argument. His book is an important intervention inthe growing work on the politics of selfhood in South Asia, in an interdis-ciplinary style which admirably suits the complexity of its subject matter andthemes.

Javed Majeed is Professor of Postcolonial Studies in the School of Englishand Drama, Queen Mary, University of London.

NOTES AND REFERENCES

1 Chaps 1–2. His argument on the aesthetics of politics is developed in an interestingdiscussion of ‘name fetishism’ in Indian nationalism and the Pakistan movement (pp. 163–6).

2 The international wrestling champion Gama posed particular problems for this middle-class sensibility: see also the illuminating exploration of this by Joseph Alter in Gandhi’s Body:Sex, Diet, and the Politics of Nationalism, Philadelphia, 2000.

3 For some clear expositions of this strand of thinking in relation to Gandhi, see BhikuParekh, Colonialism, Tradition and Reform: an Analysis of Gandhi’s Political Discourse,New Delhi, 1989; also Lloyd I. Rudolph and Susanne H. Rudolph, The Modernity of Tradition:Political Development in India, Chicago, 1967.

4 Chap. 4.5 These issues have been discussed in Paul Brass, Language, Religion and Politics

in India, London and New York, 1974; Christopher R. King, One Language, Two Scripts:the Hindi Movement in Nineteenth Century North India, Bombay, 1994, Vasudha Dalmia,

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The Nationalization of Hindu Traditions: Bharatendu Harischandra and nineteenth-centuryBanaras, Delhi, 1997, Francesca Orsini, The Hindi Public Sphere 1920–1940: Language andLiterature in the Age of Nationalism, Delhi, 2002.

6 Ayesha Jalal, Self and Sovereignty: Individual and Community in South Asian Islam since1850, London and New York, 2000, pp. 41–2.

7 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, London, 1986, p. 109.8 See my Autobiography, Travel and Postnational Identity: Nehru, Gandhi and Iqbal,

Basingstoke, 2007 for a discussion of these issues from a different angle.9 Jean Baudrillard, The Ecstasy of Communication, transl. Bernard and Caroline Schutze,

1987, New York, 1988, pp. 79–80.10 Brian R. Tomlinson, The Economy of Modern India, Cambridge, 1993, chap. 4.11 Richard J. Lane, Jean Baudrillard, London and New York, 2000, chap. 3.12 The recent essay by Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad on India’s middle class in contemporary

India is interesting in this respect; although it does not use Baudrillard, it continues the themeof the failure of that class, especially in relation to its apparent lack of commitment to politicsand social reform: ‘India’s Middle class Failure’, in Prospect, September 2007.

doi:10.1093/hwj/dbn008

The Birth of Nowby Daniel C. S. Wilson

David Edgerton, The Shock of the Old: Technology in Global History Since 1900,

Profile, London, 2006; 270pp, £18.99; ISBN: 1861972962.

Bernhard Rieger, Technology and the Culture of Modernity in Britain and Germany,

1890–1945, Cambridge University Press, 2005; 319pp, £55; ISBN: 0521845289.

The period extending from the final quarter of the nineteenth centurythrough to the first quarter of the twentieth appears from today’s vantagepoint transformative. Under the glare of bright electric lights, these wereCharlie Chaplin’s ‘Modern Times’. Along with the famous fin-de-sieclegloom came radical innovations that changed the world. Key markers ofchange in this period were to be found in its cultural productions, politicalideas and social relations. But the real signifiers of change were things: thenew material artefacts that appeared in people’s lives, affecting them inunprecedented ways. The importance of these things is evident from the riseof the many cultural forms that sought to engage with them, from sciencefiction to the techno-fetishist imaginings of the Futurists and eventually theModernist movement, with its particular ambivalence toward technolog-ical change. These developments found parallels in politics, where nationalgovernments moved quickly to encourage, and to restrict, technological

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