While the term ‘middle class’ has been in currency for almost 300 years, its definition – and thus its size – has always been bathed in vagueness, ambiguity and controversy. Just as the concept of class itself has been the subject of a series of mutually incompatible theories, the question of what might constitute the middle of an economic distribution or a social hierarchy has until now never been resolved by the sizeable industry devoted to it, other than in arbitrary ways. The peculiarities of the statistical evidence that might clarify the concept have made identifying middle classes, let alone comparing them, very difficult. And people have their own views about their class positions: their self-identifications can challenge those of the researcher.

In spite of these difficulties, the importance of what the concept denotes is indisputable, and has several equally indisputable dimensions. One dimension of ‘middle-class-ness’ involves culture – expressed in particular kinds of housing, social networks, leisure pursuits, style, and aspirations. The hope of upward mobility within the middle class focusses the longing to enjoy a swathe of services, notably health and education, to achieve competences and forms of security, and – in the view of many commentators – to develop and protect an illiberal politics of techno-authoritarian management.

Middle class culture also calls for a certain level of discretionary income – though the range of incomes considered to denote ‘middle-class-ness’ by scholars varies greatly. For India alone in the last decade this range has varied between an annual household income of US$ 4,300 in rupee equivalents, to one of US$ 27,000. Middle-class-ness may also be measured as the median expenditure group in a distribution of household expenditure; or identified by occupations – though here too there is a huge and debated range of occupations considered by analysts to be middle class.

Aspirational goods and services give rise to a politics of provision and consumption, of acquisition and defence of the status goods expressing discretionary income. The provision of such goods entails vast investments in the massification of formerly luxury commodities and services, and in the privatisation of facilities, places and spaces.

Household Survey Questionnaire 1

Household Socio-economic Survey Questionnaire 2

This chapter shifts the analysis of the rural middle class from Marx's notions of classes defined on the basis relations of production to a Weberian perspective, examining the formation of the rural middle class through market relations, occupational mobility, education, skill differentials and caste. We have so far seen that the process of industrialisation in Rahatwade and Nandur has resulted in the formation of new forms of livelihood and have established conditions for the development of the middle class. In what follows, I aim to explore the ways in which the boundaries of the rural middle class are shaped by shifts in the direction of employment aspirations. I reveal how the acquisition and distribution of various forms of capital – defined by Weber as including education, skill credentials and social networks – have enabled segments of the rural population to take advantage of industrialisation, gaining access to the middle-class labour market.

The first section provides an account of the ways in which Max Weber defined the term ‘class’ in his project of theorising social stratification, and outlines Weber's categorisation of classes – the property classes, commercial classes and social classes – which are less well-known than other aspects of Weber's theoretical work. The second section outlines the ways in which Weber defined the middle class, followed by a brief overview of how the Indian middle class is situated within the Weberian framework. The third part provides a brief account of Weber's conception of the caste system and its economic impact. In the fourth section, the literature on caste-class relations in India is reviewed. Following a brief overview of the socio-economic context in Rahatwade and Nandur, the fifth section introduces the occupational class structures within the Weberian framework and identifies the rural middle classes using empirical data.

The statement above by Mr Ramchandra, the former sarpanch of Nandur, who described himself as a ‘farmer’, a ‘businessman’ and a ‘politician’, provides anecdotal evidence of the diversified modes of generating livelihoods in rural India. In Rahatwade and Nandur, as in many parts of India, the processes of industrialisation have created new forms of economic diversification and significant class differentiations. This chapter is an attempt to examine the relations of production in the current phase of rural industrialisation, and to locate the middle class. Is rural India a capitalist economy, and if so, how many classes does it contain? These are important questions to have in mind when we talk about class formation in a Marxian tradition, but not very straightforward to answer. As we shall see, an overwhelming proportion of the rural population is still involved in some type of self-employment. However, despite the persistence of petty commodity production, there is a relatively high degree of capital accumulation, when the purpose of production is not solely the satisfaction of needs but the generation of profit, extracted from the labour power of others. In what follows, I first examine the dynamics of rural economic transformation over the past three decades, and then provide a classification of means of accumulation that exist in rural India.

Non-farm Occupations in Rahatwade and Nandur

In the following section, I use data from the IHDS-II to provide information on the average annual household income among different caste groups in 2011–12 (Tables A4.1 and A4.2). Comparing the mean annual income of the different caste groups, the tables show a significant difference between the average annual household incomes across different caste groups. In both rural and urban India, Brahmins and Forward Castes have the highest average annual income and SCs and STs the lowest. However, the high value of standard deviation, represented in the last column of both the tables indicates that annual household incomes are significantly higher than the mean values, suggesting a large variation of household income within the caste groups. Such a high level of standard deviation suggests a low level of confidence in any statistical conclusion (in this case, the relationship between caste membership and household income).

The following two histograms (Figures A4.1 and A4.2) show the distribution of annual household income in rural and urban India, respectively. It is evident that the distributions are highly skewed and heavy-tailed, suggesting that there are few data points (annual household income) with extremely large values on the right side of the distribution. In simple terms, this means that the annual household incomes are very likely to be highly heterogeneous. This type of distribution is referred to as the Pareto distribution. Such a highly skewed distribution of income will create issues when we compare the statistics of the income distributions between different castes. The average and other statistical features of fat-tailed distributions are not well defined and this is easily observed in Tables A4.1 and A4.2 – the standard deviations calculated for the income within each caste is far greater than the mean value, leading to a large error in the calculated mean.

To resolve this issue, we must transform the income variable logarithmically and work with the logarithm of annual household income from this point on. The logarithmic transformation will turn the skewed distributions with extremely large values to a localised value close to the normal distribution. There are many natural variables that grow exponentially, such as expenditure and income, and to be able to apply standard statistical tests on them we need to consider them in the logarithmic space.

Table A7.1 offers the class composition of each caste group in rural Maharashtra. Evident in the table, the majority of households among the SCs and STs belong to the labouring households (60.62 per cent of SC and 52.79 per cent of ST households). This is much higher than the average percentage of the average population in the labouring classes in rural Maharashtra. Furthermore, almost 55 per cent of Brahmins and 44 per cent of Forward Castes in rural Maharashtra belong to the three categories of the rural middle classes, while only almost 8 per cent of SCs and 11.72 per cent of STs in all rural Maharashtra belong to the three categories of the middle classes. This is illustrative of caste disparities in class membership in rural Maharashtra, with the middle and the upper classes consisting primarily of the upper castes, which is consistent with findings on caste disparities in class formation in rural All-India, illustrated in Chapter 4. It is notable that due to a low population (Frequency) of Brahmin households in rural Maharashtra in the survey, the absence of Brahmin households in the top two classes is not statistically conclusive.

This chapter explores the origins of the mental asylum in the nineteenth century and its governance.

This chapter examines the origins of contemporary policing and explores its governance.