‘Middle’ in urban India: The conceptual limitations of the global middle class

The 21st century has been branded the age of the global middle class. Against this sweeping claim, ethnographies show that there are as many middle classes as there are ways of living. Beyond the plurality of middle classes, where do we arrive by conceptualising middle classes from the Global South? In this paper, I draw upon the narratives of young women in Delhi, who describe themselves as neither ‘hi-fi’, nor ‘gae-gujre’ [destitute], but in the ‘middle’. I argue that young women’s deployment of the English term ‘middle’ is an articulation of the ambivalence of world-making in the uncertain and uneven terrain of rapid socio-economic change. Rather than subsuming ‘middle-ness’ into a global middle class, the paper understands middle-ness as a position of gender, class, caste entanglements, where anxieties about the flux of social relations coalesce. Through a reading of ‘middle-ness’ as a middle range concept that emerges from the lived experiences of women in urban India, the paper suggests avenues for understanding class in and from diverse locations.