The fate of the aspirational class

The lower classes dream, but are pinned down by an economy that lacks industrial jobs and can only offer the grindstone of unregulated, low-paid service jobs

In 1899, Thorstein Veblen, in his Theory of the Leisure Class, wrote of the feudal and priestly classes, who used their inherited wealth to buy ostentatious lifestyles. Capitalism rests, of course, on mass consumption goods, even as the super-rich practice the conspicuous consumption of exclusive products.

Over a century later, in 2018, Elizabeth Currid Halkett‘s little book A Sum of Small Things to Come: A Theory of the Aspirational Class, talked about contemporary elites of post-modern, post-industrial societies who make appropriate, environmentally-conscious lifestyle choices, avoiding obscene expressions of opulence.

They may pack a healthy lunch to office instead of visiting expensive cafés, carry a cloth bag to organic farmers’ markets, and choose home schooling over designer kindergartens. However, as lawyers, bankers, executives, and university professors, living off or directly contributing to capitalist wealth generation, the knowledge/aspirational elite propagate a lifestyle which tinkers at the margins of capitalism, offering a somewhat greener, gentler alternative, but not a challenge.

In India, elite imaginations of ostentation and display remain inspired by the cultural practices of late-19th century leisure classes. Pre-wedding or wedding bashes of the super-rich are akin to the conspicuous consumption of the leisure classes of Veblen’s vintage.

Of course, in India too, there is a small knowledge elite. They prefer biking to driving, practice organic agriculture in their retirement farmhouses, their children study in alternative schools but are finally dispatched to elite US colleges. Deeply tied to dominant socio-economic structures, their numbers are in any case very small compared to the rising middle classes, new entrants to the gates of wealth and consumption.

Those who remain outside the gates, aching for entry, could be seen as the new aspirational class. For them, the struggle is always to be “the other”. While some insignia of middle-class life may be accessible – English-medium schools, smartphones, online shopping -- the lower classes remain caught in the dismal reality of low waged, insecure informal work.  

Monica (32), housekeeper to a family of four in Bengaluru, works 10 hours a day for Rs 12,000 per month, well below the State-stipulated Rs 17,000 for eight hours a day.

Recently, she brought home her employer’s old washing machine, which she can operate only by pouring buckets of water into it since water supply to her home happens only thrice weekly. An online Kannada language baking course has convinced her to buy an oven. Well turned-out in her employer’s used Fabindia wear, Monica dreams of a gadget-filled home.  

Rakhi (26), hailing from a village in South 24 Parganas in West Bengal, cooks in five houses in North Bengaluru, earning Rs 20,000 per month. Her husband earns Rs 10,000 as a sales assistant in a textile shop. Their four-year-old son goes to school and private tuition. After a grueling day, Rakhi returns to their airless, one-room home and starts teaching her sleepy son from his picture book of English nursery rhymes. The rhymes capture Rakhi’s dreams, of the education that she missed out on, her son’s imagined proficiency in English, and his future.  

Urban informal workers often take advantage of an unregulated, open-ended workday.

As a contract security guard, Venkatesh (30) of Bengaluru earns Rs 15,000. He additionally works night shifts as a guard at an ATM, to meet the rising demands of his son’s school for fees and donations. As the night closes in, Venkatesh’s only activity is to dully calculate expenses.  

Anadi Ghosh (39) had inherited a little sweet shop overlooking a small rivulet in West Bengal’s South 24 Parganas. Having sold the shop during a family financial crisis, Anadi is now a construction worker in Bengaluru earning Rs 700 per day, when work is available.

At the sites, his noise-weary mind often goes back to the quiet bubble of rasgullas steaming on sugar syrup on a coal fire. But his wife Tuku, who earns Rs 20,000 cooking for five households, enjoys Bengaluru. She models herself on her employers, affluent couples who work, send their children to school and tuition.

During the pandemic, she took a loan to buy a smartphone so that her son could attend online classes. She herself has learnt to make pastas and noodles for his tiffin so that he can keep up with wealthier classmates in his private English-medium school. Much as her employer madams, Tuku has started buying salwar kameez sets online.

Aspirations play a key role in driving development. Shared imaginations of mobility, aligned with economic opportunities, provide the necessary developmental energy for nations to grow.

In the US, for example, the passage of an entire post-World War II generation of working-class and immigrant households into the middle class was driven by the widely shared ‘American Dream’, of a suburban home and two cars, predicated on a period of high industrial growth and some guarantees of equal opportunity. 

In India, the tipping point between lower-class aspirations and actual mobility may yet be missing. According to a new survey of Bengaluru’s famed apparels export industry, workers’ adult children, barely have 10th class education and typically work in low-level services.

Young men from Kolkata work 10 hours a day at food stalls at the Bengaluru International Airport and sleep at night in densely shared company-provided rooms, thus belying the migrant dream. 

Even in fast-growing Bengaluru, aspirations can mean running to stay at the same spot, pinned down by low wages and lack of options.

Lower-class aspirations, coloured by digital imagination and mall window shopping, remain framed by the lack of industrial jobs in an economy in which the market produces only low-paid service work for the unskilled and semi-skilled, and the State provides no regulation of work.

Expanding access to cheap consumer goods has generated an illusion of prosperity, diverting attention from substantive issues of income, housing, and security. But no system of control has worked so effectively as the aspirational model in keeping the outsiders’ gaze deliriously fixed on the inside, and their nose to the grindstone.

(The writer is Visiting Professor at the National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bengaluru)