On being middle class

In Kolkata, describing oneself as middle class is common among Bengali speakers, and in the public imagination middle-class status is closely associated with specific cultural traits of the Bengali Hindu ethnic and religious community. In a context where the language of class is often used, it is important to acknowledge the work this terminology does, as class is a product of historical processes but also constitutes these processes. Liechty (Reference Liechty2003: 21) elaborates this point when he suggests that “if we understand middle-classness as a cultural project or practice – rather than a social category or empirical condition – we can begin to see how the local and the global are brought together in cultural process, not cultural outcome.” In this respect, Sherry Ortner (Reference Ortner2006: 102) asserts that theories of the middle class have to acknowledge that cultural representation “hides social difference, even as it reveals (a certain picture of) social reality; that the amorphousness of the representational process…hides the ways in which different parts of the mix of images actually apply to different and even antagonistic social locations; that a theorized framework allows us to begin to sort out what goes where.”

Being middle class in India is associated with specific cultural markers, such as an emphasis on education, an emphasis on “traditional” gender relations and an emphasis on family values. While these cannot be realized in the same way by all those aspiring to middle-class status, it is the very engagement with these issues that defines middle-class discourses. In Bengal these traits are most fully realized by government employees, and here the association between middleclassness and ethnic identity is so strong that it brings being middle class and being Bengali into the same linguistic and symbolic domain. The resulting subjective identification with the category of being middle class points to the importance of the “language of class” (Ortner Reference Ortner2003), which in this context precedes the economic liberalization of 1991 but has become even more prevalent in its aftermath. In Kolkata, while “middle class” is often used as a self-descriptive term, it is also clear that this idiom is used more liberally by Bengali speakers than those belonging to other communities.

Within India, class first emerged as an important marker of identity in the colonial period, as a section of urbanites began to describe themselves as belonging to a

While nationalism undoubtedly enhanced the role of such idioms in discussing the changing social and cultural landscapes of multicultural Calcutta, the emergence of class as a marker of identity was not solely circumscribed by nationalism. It was equally shaped by emerging inter-class relations and realized through practices and values earlier attached to specific status-group and local life-worlds, in particular to caste, which preceded class but lived on in middle-class cultures. In this sense, middleclassness is often most fully realized by those belonging to upper-caste families.

Historically, these processes informed the self-conscious representations of the Bengali-speaking urban elite and the accompanying politics of reform, which dominated colonial society from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. In the course of the nationalist movement, the present social and cultural features became more homogeneous (Ahmad and Reifeld Reference Ahmad and Reifeld2001; Legg Reference Legg2003). Distinctions between the upper castes gave way to an overall middle-class sensibility and more inclusive political allegiances, among them what Jaffrelot and van der Veer (Reference Derne2008) refer to as a cult of “self-assured bourgeois nationalism,” which easily accommodated regional differences. Baviskar and Ray (Reference Baviskar, Ray, Baviskar and Ray2011: 5) assert that today there exists more empirical heterogeneity within the Indian middle class, but that the “iconic figure…of the urban, white-collar worker” still informs the imagination. I would like to suggest that, in addition to its emphasis on education, occupation and income, this dominant model crucially relates middle-class identities to family values.

In Calcutta the Bengali-speaking, mostly Hindu middle class took on a hegemonic role in the entire range of state institutions and has dominated politics ever since. However, with disinvestment in the state under conditions of neoliberal reform since 1991, the cultural, political and economic privileges this role had afforded can no longer be taken for granted. Thus, whilst the middle class on the whole might have gained from economic liberalization, neoliberal reform has weakened those sections depending on state institutions and has encouraged further stratification within this segment, often expressed through a critique of consumer identities (see Ganguly-Scrase and Scrase Reference Ganguly-Scrase and Scrase2008). Commodities and consumer lifestyles have been more accessible to low-caste communities, which have also increased their political weight (for detailed accounts, see Corbridge and Harriss Reference Corbridge and Harriss2000; Fernandes Reference Fernandes2006), but it is the terrain of middleclassness that is embattled by the new status games attached to such practices. Thus, in Bengal as elsewhere, what it means to be middle class has come under scrutiny and is seriously contested, a contestation that is part and parcel of middle-class family life in Kolkata today.

Adjustment and homemaking

Even a cursory glance at the comparative literature on middle-class lifestyles across the globe shows that a discourse on reform of the family, gender relations and appropriate class-based domesticities plays a dominant role in class formation. India had a key role to play in these debates (see, e.g., McClintock Reference McClintock1995). Within public discussions, Indian middle-class women were defined as homemakers, and over time the much contested homogenization of middle-class femininity united middle-class lifestyles (see Davidoff and Hall Reference Davidoff and Hall1992; Sangari Reference Sangari2000; Quayum and Ray Reference Quayum and Ray2003; Walsh Reference Walsh2004; McGowan Reference McGowan2006). Recent ethnographies of the new middle classes across the globe demonstrate that similar concerns appear in upwardly mobile communities, which focus on the family home and conservative gender relations in order to distinguish themselves from those above and below them. In the colonial context, appropriate maternities and conjugal relations, and thus the homogenization of multiple kinship and property relations, became subjects of reform and debates around the family. And in India as elsewhere, an idealized modern but simultaneously traditional femininity centering on motherhood, which excluded working-class women as mothers, emerged as the norm (Sen and Stivens Reference Sen and Stivens1998; Dickey Reference Dickey2000; Frøystad Reference Frøystad2006; Oza Reference Oza2006; Donner Reference Donner2008a; Rutz and Balkan Reference Rutz and Balkan2009).

Within this colonial context an ideology of a distinctive national identity rested on the opposition between the home on the one side, a safe haven of reformed indigenous culture and associated with women, and the outside world on the other. Thus, the reformed middle-class home was constructed as an arena for nationalist mobilization, and in particular through the work of women as mothers and good wives took center stage (Chatterjee Reference Chatterjee1989; Ray Reference Ray1996). Symbols of selfless love, middle-class women were now constructed as idealized rational mothers and devoted wives. Their job was to embody timeless family values and to transmit such values to their children, a duty that they were educated to perform (Walsh Reference Walsh2004). This formulation of these ideals was possible because a specific cultural repertoire was elaborated into nationalist ideas of womanhood across the upper castes and high-status Muslim communities (Sarkar Reference Sarkar2002). Clearly, being female and middle class intersected with ethnic and religious identities and excluded those belonging to lower castes and classes even where they spoke the same language and shared the same beliefs. Middle-class women became the main signifier of Bengali Hindu nationalism and of Indian modernity, traditional in outlook and demeanor but differentiated from their peasant sisters and the working class through access to modern education, which allowed them to sustain an appropriate family life. A “compensatory history” (Bagchi Reference Bagchi1990) that focused on motherhood and sons was to become their main source of identity.

Stemming from this history, domestic arrangements that are distinctively middle class continue to build on the rewriting of inequalities between the sexes, between different generations within the joint family and between members of different classes. However, my interlocutors, especially those born in the first half of the twentieth century, were not only brought up to become well-groomed and reasonably educated members of their husbands’ families who could instruct servants. In my own research, housewives had always worked alongside working-class women, from whom they differentiated themselves with reference to the latter’s need for paid employment and the kinds of task they performed. Younger married women were also required to withstand a gruelling regime of housework and submission to their mothers-in-law and other female affines. In this setting, women’s work in and for the family naturalizes inequality of gender and class through the daily experience of working together, notably between a young in-marrying wife and her sisters- and mother-in-law, and between these housewives and their servants. By the mid-1990s, when I undertook my first period of fieldwork, domestic patterns had changed as the number of children in the generation born after 1950 had fallen drastically (many grandmothers had been among six or more surviving siblings) so that the number of kin in any one household was now much smaller. The youngest children were now living with only their paternal grandparents and their parents, although other relatives would often reside nearby. In most cases the female labor force now consisted solely of a mother-in-law, a daughter-in-law and a servant, which remains the prevalent pattern today. The authority of the first over the other two is still in place. It is significant that this pattern represented the norm among middle-class households across a wide economic spectrum: families of professionals as well as lower-middle-class civil servants and small shopkeepers live in joint families and can afford maids in Kolkata. Thus, while the feasibility and durability may vary, most families would strive to realize this kind of set-up. Sons would only ever move into a separate home if they migrated to a different city or had a severely problematic love marriage. Even where migration took place, a daughter-in-law would often stay with her in-laws, who would help her to look after her children.

In this context it is impossible to overstate the importance of hierarchical and often exploitative relationships within the middle-class home, whereby young women contribute their labor power but are barred from any control over daily affairs. Across India, the term “to adjust” is frequently used to describe a set of dispositions valued in a bride. “Adjustment” goes into the very making of appropriate marriage partners for the middle class in Bengali families.

However, while all young brides have to adjust, the duties expected of them will vary widely. A family living off the salary of a clerk is unlikely to employ a full-time servant, and both mother and daughter-in-law might be busy all day performing household duties. The maid would appear once a day for an hour or so to clean the floors, do the laundry and probably wash the dishes, but would contribute less to the preparation of meals. In the home of an established university professor, on the other hand, the new daughter-in-law was allowed to continue her engagements as a singer provided she would assist her mother-in-law supervising servants and finishing off signature dishes in her spare time. In this, as in other rare households with working women, a small army of part-time and full-time servants might be involved in cleaning, shopping, cooking and organizing, and it is not uncommon to have live-in child labor to perform basic tasks such as cleaning floors and dishes. But it is important to point out that in no way is the number of servants related to whether or not a housewife has a job. Furthermore, where I found a working mother-in-law, it was likely that she had chosen a stay-at-home daughter-in-law for her son.

As we will see in the following sections, in the lives of middle-class women both food and education are domains in which class-based ideas about femininity come into their own. By guaranteeing the reproduction of status over time, mothers in particular link the middle-class home and the world, and both domains depend on maternal labor in distinctive ways.

The hidden labor of class

Economic liberalization and the neoliberal policies accompanying it have challenged much that was taken for granted by Bengali middle-class families. Especially in post-liberalization Kolkata, those traditionally depending on jobs in government services are worrying about their future. Government jobs, including schools and universities, provided the backbone of middle-class lifestyles, which were often modest but secure across generations. Disinvestment in the state sector has hit lower-middle-class households hard, as free education and healthcare are more limited in scope and quality. And while the salaries of some government employees, such as those in education, have risen over the last two decades, they do not match pay packets in the multinational companies that middle-class Kolkatans increasingly use as a point of reference. Furthermore, many of my interlocutors are coming to terms with the dwindling of permanent jobs and solid retirement schemes, and therefore experience the negative consequences of privatization. Despite all the hype around IT industries and the retail boom, Kolkata remains an economic backwater where employment opportunities are limited, and this leads to a tangible sense of insecurity.

As the middle-class lifestyle geared toward government service is now on the way out, family members adjust to the new culture of “self-made opportunities” and “project-related contracts” in different ways. The changes have also had an impact on family organization, as chakri (the coveted “positions” of an earlier era) entailed not just the attributes associated with office work, but a whole set of associated practices (see Sarkar Reference Sarkar1992), especially a fixed work schedule, fixed pay scales, access to credit and life insurance, subsidized healthcare and a pension – all markers of middle-class status. Middle-class domesticity in its material and immaterial forms developed in relation to these kinds of secure employment and their perks. Gender roles were very much interpreted as part of a wider domestic middle-class culture that related the provision of government service to the world of homemaking.

With economic liberalization, new opportunities have become available in the private sector that attract the younger generation because of the lifestyles associated with specific work environments such as media, IT companies and call centers. However, all these jobs challenge the kind of domestic arrangement associated with chakri. This is most obvious in relation to women’s employment, as chakri implied that Bengali middle-class families brought up young women to excel in formal education, but then expected them to take on a subordinate role as in-marrying wife. Even excellent students often would get married after graduation and very few degrees would lead to meaningful employment. Furthermore, while migration had become a feasible option by the mid-1990s, time spent abroad was a privilege of young men unless a scholarship was involved. Unlike the daughters of Tamil Brahmin families studied by Fuller and Narasimhan (Reference Fuller and Narasimhan2006), or young Keralites going into nursing elsewhere (Osella and Osella Reference Osella, Osella, Koshy and Radhakrishnan2008), young women from Bengali middle-class families very rarely considered going abroad or even moving to other Indian metropolitan areas. Through discourses on respectability and adjustment, they acquired “an orientation toward the home,” a set of dispositions directly and indirectly inculcated throughout their childhood and youth, which made them ideal wives and future mothers.²

But by the beginning of the new millennium the tables had turned and it became obvious that learning both how to be modern and how to “adjust” is one of the key challenges middle-class daughters face in India. As girls get ahead in formal education, expect to have a say in partner choice and may aspire to a nuclear family, they increasingly experience a disjuncture between the new femininity suggested by the media – a middle-class lifestyle driven by commodity consumption and individual fulfillment promoted by female role models such as actresses – and the demands of the family, their reputation and marriageability, which often thwart even modest aspirations (see Liechty Reference Liechty2003).

As their unpaid labor lies at the heart of Bengali middle-class lifestyles, families do their best to keep young women at home, which is often possible because a joint household is located in rent-protected accommodation. Statistics show that, since independence, the rate of female participation in formal-sector employment has always been much lower in West Bengal than in other urbanizing states and that Kolkata’s rates lag behind those found in other cities. In fact, recent research suggests the rate of female employment in Bengal’s formal sector, which is where most middle-class women would have worked, has declined even further in the post-liberalization period, a finding that is certainly supported by anecdotal evidence in my own work.³ Moreover, women rarely stay in jobs once they have children. While status and income determine whether a wife and mother will be encouraged by her husband and his family to stay in full-time employment, only professions such as medicine or teaching weigh in favor of continued paid work. My interlocutors argued unequivocally that domestic arrangements, in particular the demands of formal education and the preparation of Bengali food, were responsible for this state of affairs.

Educating 4 plus 1

Education has always played a major role in the lives of Bengali middle-class families. However, it is only in the last two generations that middle-class daughters have been expected to complete an undergraduate degree, with teaching a preferred career option due to its benefits for potential children.

Most of the women I worked with agreed that young middle-class women needed to be equipped with a degree, which was also seen as an asset in the marriage market. Education not only conveys a set of skills, but literally makes a middle-class person, shaping a youngster by instilling virtues such as discipline and self-control that the working class supposedly does not have. Thus, a lack of education is at the same time a lack of good and socially valued qualities, including language and reasoning skills. But part of middle-class educational strategies involves establishing social relationships with those “above”: teachers and professors in the case of lower-middle-class families; the international West Bengali establishment in the case of upper-middle-class families. Maximizing the value of such connections becomes even more indispensable given the rigorously competitive and notoriously corrupt educational system.

Very rarely have I been told about employment as being satisfying or as a way to reveal the true self familiar in Western middle-class narratives. With the exception of “fancy” jobs (for the lower middle class, call centers; for the upper middle class, positions with multinationals), employment is more often than not depicted as actually getting in the way of being cultured and true to oneself. Women in employment certainly are often suspected of being less respectable than “mere housewives,” and, except for work in higher education, middle-class employment for women is not associated with specific virtues. Apart from those positions in higher education, working outside the home is not considered to have a positive effect on their character, which is particularly true if women have to work with customers (for instance in a shop or a call center, or even as a doctor or nurse).

While neoliberal discourses available to women emphasize self-made careers and individuating choices in professional and personal relationships, even a cursory glance at women’s magazines aiming at middle-class readers shows that to be a good homemaker is a woman’s main duty (Basu Reference Basu2001). However, with commodity consumption a major contributor to constructions of class, women who were earlier taught domestic skills such as cooking are today trained much more broadly in order to take on the role of chief consumers in a changing world. Thus, while a young Bengali middle-class girl may dream of becoming a scientist, her fate will be determined by the ideal of becoming a mother to an only boy and future breadwinner in a joint family. As long as her studies and even working life contribute to that boy’s future, parents and in-laws will support her efforts, but science may only ever be practiced where it fits the family’s aspirations to upward mobility.

Increasingly, Indian middle-class families have either one or two children, and in my interlocutors’ families single boys were the norm. The need to produce male heirs and future supporters, as well as the sheer cost of raising children, encourage this ideal, often by the secretive use of amniocentesis for sex selection. In spite of the relative rise of nuclear-family living, most children spend at least some years living jointly with parents and grandparents, and this household composition found in middle-class Kolkata is strikingly similar to that created in urban China, where the “little emperors” grow up in “4 plus 1” households (Jing Reference Jing2000). In China, demographic change is evident across the classes and is commonly attributed to state intervention (including the single-child policy), migration flows and housing shortages. But in India the reasoning behind a preference for joint-family life highlights the need for care for children and the elderly, independently of whether or not the mother is in employment. It is generally assumed that the joint family has many advantages, as it offers children and the elderly protection, and shelters young couples from the vagaries of the housing market. But more importantly, joint living allows for middle-class lifestyles marked as truly Bengali, which depend on the perpetuation of the gender and intergenerational hierarchies by which they are defined. Grossly overgeneralizing, the ethos of the joint family favors collective interests over individual aspirations, and the well-being of men over the health and happiness of women, especially where the latter are young daughters-in-law or widows.

Within this framework, middle-class children, and especially boys, are brought up to see themselves as future breadwinners and carers of their parents and grandparents. Their future value is hinted at in the common saying that children are “capital” and grandchildren are “interest” (Donner Reference Donner, Assayag and Fuller2005). Few middle-class children in fact care for grandparents, as their education postpones the age at which they begin to earn. Even so, parents, even those with pensions, emphasize that sons, and more and more only daughters as well, would look after them in old age. In the past this often implied co-residence and a daughter-in-law looking after her affines, but the recent shifts in employment patterns and the lack of jobs with proper pensions are inevitably leading toward a more pronounced dependence of parents on children. Looking after your parents is, of course, one of the central tenets of traditional Indian middle-class family ideology, but financial dependence certainly is not. Moreover, at a time when few secure jobs are available to recent graduates and parental confidence in pension schemes has plummeted, children who may rely on their parents much longer are at the same time expected to provide for them in the not-so-distant future.

This complex and conflictive dynamic is enhanced by two typical middle-class factors. One is the scarcity of affordable housing on the market and the prevalence of low rents among older tenants, which makes it unfeasible for young couples to move out and allows a daughter-in-law to remain a housewife. The other is the customary laws that postpone inheritance until after a father’s death.⁴ With property and businesses being major resources among more affluent middle-class families, this delayed exchange of authority and capital for support in old age has a detrimental effect on family life. While parents are paralyzed by the fear of abandonment in old age, sons in particular may feel stuck. Parents and grandparents share responsibility for the same child, but the older generation may focus even more on control over grandchildren, in the hope that this will keep the joint family together. In turn, as the new generation of fathers are struggling to secure more than temporary employment, they will remain dependent on their families for much longer. While “keeping it in the family” therefore comes at a cost for all concerned, raising middle-class children turns into the main collective project.

The changes that economic liberalization has brought and the way they affect middle-class families in Kolkata, and elsewhere in India, are particularly pertinent where schooling is concerned. Earlier, only a tiny percentage of middle-class families sent their children to English-medium schools, mostly those in the professions. But by the end of the 1980s, with government jobs already in decline, educational strategies became more diverse and competitive. When I began my research in Calcutta in the mid-1990s, talk about English-medium education, admissions and performance was the overwhelming concern of middle-class parents (Donner Reference Donner2008a). Today, mothers should really have some knowledge of English, which has become a major aspect of middle-class children’s upbringing and family life.

Lastly, with the spread of early learning and English-medium education, both of which prepare children to become workers in global economies, have come “intensive parenting” ideologies and practices. Not only do children attend schools much earlier and longer, the involvement of middle-class mothers in schooling has intensified. The ways in which mothers are implicated in schooling vary with the economic standing of a household, with the lower-middle-class mother more involved in bringing and fetching children to and from school, preparing “appropriate” snacks and facilitating endless homework and tuition, while upper-middle-class mothers may spend most of their time supervising and organizing the services actually provided by drivers, cooks and tutors. In both sections of the middle-class, however, the mother–housewife devotes much of her time to education-related activities, and this has led to a re-organization of relationships in the joint-family home as it challenges the authority of mothers-in-law (see Donner Reference Donner2006). Furthermore, education is clearly a field in which middle-class practices and ideologies infiltrate working-class communities and the fluidity of class boundaries in the current climate becomes apparent. While economically secure middle-class families use reputed tutors in order to secure their children’s success, those less well off need to rely on their association with upper-middle-class families that are able and willing to provide such support. This dependence on patronage is something that they have in common with working-class families, for instance a maid whose children receive tuition in an employer’s home in return for extra hours of work.

Food and family

Economic liberalization and neoliberal reform link consumption to ideas of middle-class lifestyles. Mothers emerge as the chief consumers in a newly ordered frame of home and public realms, where their labor of love transforms commodities into suitable social relations. In the process, they experience a series of tensions. As markets targeting children and a consumerist youth culture extend into the home, maternal labor over the meaning of commodities and practices increasingly lies at the heart of family life.

A main arena that relates discourses on the family and gendered identities, food practices are a major signifier of Bengali identity, and the importance of food in Bengali middle-class families cannot be overstated. Across India, dietary habits indicate distinct religious, caste and communal origins. In the course of the nationalist movement, an “authentic Indian” cuisine developed and was popularized through cookbooks and restaurants (Appadurai Reference Appadurai1988), as were standardized versions of regional diets. “Bengali cuisine” (bangla ranna) is one of these, and the purchase, preparation and consumption of food plays a pivotal role in the reproduction of Bengali middle-class families. As we will see, the demands of the diet are an important way that the discourse on the family links domestic patterns, gender roles and class-based identities through deeply internalized dispositions, conspicuous consumption and exclusionary practices.

The preparation of food in the family home from scratch on a regular basis is the task of middle-class housewives, and, while the menu might vary, all dishes comprising a full meal are extremely labor intensive. In common with Janeja’s (Reference Janeja2010) study, my research shows that Bengali middle-class families take even the most ordinary meals very seriously as representations of “everydayness,” a discourse that establishes the order of things through experiences in the family home. While members of Bengali middle-class families denounce the dietary patterns of the upper class, the working class and those belonging to other ethnic communities, the so-called “typical” Bengali multi-course family meals and the household organization these impose come to blur the boundary between class and “being Bengali.” Thus, inequalities of gender and age, as well of class, become invisible as the actual dishes and the maternal love they embody take center stage.

This is not to say that food preparation and consumption are not contested: on the contrary. The preparation of these elaborate meals often requires the labor of servants, and new consumer identities challenge the implied value of the family meal. Although the actual preparation of meals routinely involves servants and the mother-in-law, it is the mother who is praised again and again for preparing a meal “with her own hands.” But with liberalization, new demands are made on the food-producing middle-class housewife. Firstly, consumer identities are becoming more tied to commodity consumption, and that consumption has become more complex as a result of the overlap of media representations, retail strategies and leisure habits. These include eating and shopping in up-market malls and supermarkets, and visits to restaurants and take-aways, which require new food knowledge and practices and which contradict the doctrine of the family meal. Secondly, food consumption in the home is transformed because mothers need to cater to their children’s new tastes. As many of my friends commented, today a mother ought to have knowledge of a much wider range of food to be served to her family, as children in particular tap into new consumer cultures and demand a range of new dishes at home (Donner Reference Donner2008b).

Local discourses about being properly middle-class focus on such challenges to customary understandings of appropriate food practices. Firstly, preprocessed ingredients, earlier attributed to non-Bengali communities, had been clear markers of lazy housewives. Today such items are no longer so easily rejected. High-status foods of the new era, for example pizza or pasta, are not made from scratch and are consumed inside and outside the home. But much more contentious is the issue of meat consumed in the home, which reflects rising demand for meat among middle-class consumers across India and the developing world.

Preprocessed foods are widely available in Calcutta today, and such items have found their way into middle-class diets. In diminishing the work of domestic food preparation, especially for housewives who employ servants, they undercut these women’s reputation for producing very elaborate, everyday meals, and so undermine the very Bengaliness that is produced through family meals. Until very recently, established categories of food such as “preprocessed” and “Western” indexed degrees of otherness, and so strengthened the distinctive practices that defined Bengali middle-class domesticity. But these distinctions are increasingly contested by the need to negotiate consumer identities through engagement with commodity consumption.

Furthermore, eating out has become more common, even where food from “outside” is largely seen as unhealthy, inauthentic and morally ambivalent (see Mukhopadhyay Reference Mukhopadhyay2004). Today, visits to restaurants form an important part of claims to status. And as young professionals tuck into their Domino’s pizza, children are driving the way that desired “modern” foods enter the realm of middleclassness. Here, it appears that the aspirational status of global convenience foods, associated with new middle-class public spaces such as shopping malls, force mothers to adapt to increasingly global dietary patterns. In the case of upper-middle-class families, global commodity consumption has become very much part of what being middle class means, and food knowledge indicates cosmopolitanism. However, for lower-middle-class mothers, whose most important contribution to their children’s upbringing may consist of highly symbolic local fare on a small budget, the devaluation of their skills is hard to take. Here, while the real thing may be out of reach, meals indicating modern tastes, such as Chinese dishes, are emulated in the home simply because children commonly demanded them.

In this context, meat consumption serves as a traditional marker of caste, and therefore provides the site for new gendered and distinctive practices based on food. Vegetarianism is associated with high castes and ritual purity, and is a major point of reference in South Asian Hindu debates on status, which means that meat consumption in the domestic sphere brings the intersections of class, ethnicity and gender sharply into focus. Drawing on upper-caste traditions, Bengali middle-class Hindu households, which constitute the majority of the Kolkata middle class today, used to be largely vegetarian (though the local definition of vegetarianism includes fish as a staple).⁵ Under the onslaught of consumerism and the cultural changes associated with globalization, more and more mothers are forced to provide their children, and especially sons, with non-vegetarian items, which traditionally were not cooked at home.

While men were always more prone than women to consume meat outside the home, the tendency of male family members to demand meat at home is recent. In this context meat is a highly politicized food with strong communal connotations, as it is associated with the everyday diet of Muslims. But increasingly, young male members of Bengali Hindu families expect meat on an everyday basis, while women may subscribe to what I have called “new vegetarianism” (Donner Reference Donner2008b). In many cases wives would have turned vegetarian if a couple experienced problems with conception, for excluding “heating” foods such as meat from their diet would balance the body. As women age, vegetarianism indexes a different kind of virtue, as it publicly demonstrates that a woman’s reproductive phase is completed, since meat, associated with increased sexual appetites, is no longer consumed. In these ways, a vegetarian diet fits middle-class ideals, as it indicates a cultured person, it contributes to well-being and, crucially, it helps to control sexual urges. Be it through serving sumptuous amounts of virile and high-status meat or by restraining themselves, mothers are responsible for realizing the perfect middle-class family at home.

Conclusion

In this chapter I have detailed domestic practices that lie at the heart of the identity described as middle class by my interlocutors. Taking a close look at the meaning of family and the forms of domesticity that define the middle-class home, it appears that middle-class identities rely heavily on specific gender relations and ethnic identifications. These reproduce globally recognizable class positions as well as local idioms and specificities. Thus, education and food practices, major fields of middle-class practice that signify global and cosmopolitan desires while allowing for the significant notion of tradition, were discussed as sites through which middle-class aspirations, desires and personhood are articulated.

However, here as elsewhere, the processes of class formation at play are fragmented and contradictory, and are experienced as diverse and contested. I contend with Liechty (Reference Liechty2003: 253) that “any anthropology of middle-class cultural practice must combine a Weberian concern for the role of culture in social life (lifestyle, education, status goods etc.) with a Marxian insistence that cultural practice be located in the context of unequal distribution of power and resources between classes.” In this sense the upper- and lower-middle-class households I worked with take part in the same discourses and share the same aspirations, but realize them differently. Both segments have cultural traits that exclude the working class while exploiting its labor on a daily basis, which is particularly pertinent with reference to the family home. As a key site for the reproduction of middle-class status through the making of appropriate middle-class persons, it also facilitates the perpetuation and intensification of gender and generational, as well as class, inequalities. The Bengali middle class reproduces its status partly by insisting on ethnic–cultural specificity, imbibed as family values through everyday practices, which rely on sharply differentiated gender roles in the home.

As pointed out, many of the contestations experienced by Kolkata middle-class families stem from the effects of economic liberalization and the neoliberal policies of the last two decades. Individualism and consumerism are promoted as part of middle-class imaginaries while social and job security are curtailed and dependence on kin and between the generations intensified. It is precisely the ongoing production and reproduction of middle-class identities in a changing historical and local context that remakes the family.