Even though being middle class in contemporary India is, in many ways, a matter of privilege, those located in the middle class tend to also view themselves as among those with a fragile sense of security. Along with the poor, they often complain about the manipulative and “corrupt” economic and political system controlled by the rich and the powerful, the wily elite. Middle class engagements with politics have been of crucial and critical significance in modern India; from the colonial period to present times. It is the middle class that generally produces leaders who challenge the existing power structures and provide creative directions to social movements of all kinds.

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Middle-class should thus be seen as a historical and sociological category. It emerges with the development of modern capitalist society, with markets and cities. Its rise implies the emergence of a new kind of social order: a system of ranking and social classification. It transforms the nature of social relations within communities and households; between men and women; and between young and old.

Given that it emerges historically within a given social context it does not necessarily transform everything in the pre-existing social structures of social inequality. Even when the rise of middle class transforms the way people think, behave and relate to each other, the process does not do away with inequalities of caste and community. Those trying to move up in the new social and economic order use their available resources and networks, including those of caste and kinship to stabilize and improve their positions in the emerging social order, with a new framework of inequality.

This is also the reason why the middle class is not as homogenous as it may appear at the first instance. Diversities within the middle class are many, of income and wealth as also of status and privilege. Middle classes are often sub-classified into the “upper”, the “lower” and “those in-between” segments, depending upon income, education, occupation, residence and life-style. As mentioned above, those who call themselves ‘middle-class’ or are classified as such, also do not abandon their other identities; particularly those that have been sources of privilege; of caste, community/religion and region/ethnicity. Thus, we have notions such as the “Bengali middle-class” or the “Muslim middle-class” or the “Dalit middle-class”. The rise and consolidation of a middle class within an “ethnic” or cultural group could work to sharpen those identities, rather than weakening or ending them.