Aspiration as Capacity and Compulsion: The Futures of Urban Middle-Class Youth in India

Abstract

India is often portrayed as a country on the rise—an economic giant and potential global superpower that is soon to have the world’s largest and youngest population. India Rising has been the title of a BBC radio series exploring “the stereotype of the burgeoning India”(Arney, India rising, BBC World Service, 2007), a book describing the country’s socio-economic transformation by journalist Oliver Balch (India rising: Tales from a changing nation, 2012), and a Time article on the meeting of US President Barack Obama and Indian Prime Minister NarendraModi (Kumar, India rising, Time, 2015). At the heart of these narratives of India’s bright future are the “new” middle classes, depicted as both the beneficiaries and the drivers of the country’s growth. In the words of the public intellectual, Guruchandan Das (India unbound: From independence to global information age, 2002), “The most striking feature of contemporary India is the rise of a confident new middle class… Whether India can deliver the goods depends a great deal on it” (p. 280).Just as India is frequently portrayed in terms of its hoped-for future state, so too are the middle classes understood in many contexts to be in a state of “becoming.” This is particularly clear in the widely used class (income) categories of India’s National Council for Applied Economic Research, with the two middle-class income brackets labeled “seekers” and “strivers,” with “aspirers” wedged between the middle class and the “deprived” (Beinhocker, Farrell, & Zainulbhai, McKinsey Quarterly3: 51–61, 2007). How then, is the future imagined and cultivated by these aspiring–seeking–striving middle classes in this rising nation?.