Small-town India’s new middle class is negotiating globalisation and modernity in much more meaningful ways than the metropolitan middle class, says Sanjay Srivastava’s new book, titled Passionate Modernity: Sexuality, Class and Consumption in India.
The book examines the middle class in globalising India through the lens of the ‘friendship magazines’ of the Hindi heartland and popular women’s magazines in non-English languages (Grhalakshmi, Grhashobha, Meri Saheli, each with circulations of 3 to 5 million), the footpath pornography and the sex clinics that index the mobile and displaced populations of the metropolitan city, and of course Indian cinema and advertising. Significantly, the middle class that Srivastava examines is the real middle class of Middle India, of places such as Bhatinda, Sonbhadra and Khandwa, not the visible middle class of the metros and mini-metros that the mainstream media peddles and that might in fact have a longer monopoly on the title ‘middle class’.
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