TWENTY years ago, being middle class in India used to mean ‘not poor’, but it no longer means that. The middle class man still does the same sort of thing he used to: he has a job, not involving labour, in the bureaucracy of either government or of a corporation, or he is a small businessman, or a professional. But he is now a consumer of middle class goods and services as understood in the West. This fact, that of his increased consumption and the rise in his numbers, is seen as the remarkable achievement by India in this generation.

Incomes have risen as India’s economy has begun merging with that of the world, but what explains the rise in the middle class’s numbers? This has happened through the expansion of society, by more communities entering the middle class. This is actually where the big change is being registered, because it is happening through the inclusion of the peasant castes, the largest social grouping in India, into the urban middle class.

How is India’s middle class culture being changed and affected by this? Let us have a look at what is happening. First the numbers. Independent India did not count its population along the lines of caste, and it required special surveys, like that of the Mandal Commission, to identify the size of peasant groupings. The number was revealed to be over 50 per cent of the population. The British census before independence told us that the Brahmin population was about six per cent, though the community’s power and projection in urban India was disproportionate. Three small castes, all put together about 10 per cent of the population, dominated the urban middle classes: Brahmin, Baniya and Kayastha. What most urban Indians know as middle class culture is actually the culture of these three communities.

The peasant castes have not had similar access to modernity because they have been away from the city. There are exceptions. Consider the Patel. For over a century he has been travelling and setting up small businesses in Africa and in Europe. His early migration might have been helped by the fact that the Brahmin and Vaishya ban on foreign travel (Gandhi writes about having to do penance on his return from England in 1890) reduced his competition. He absorbed from them the philosophies of being vegetarian and mercantile, but even in America, the Patel retains his peasant self. His business of preference is that of the motel. He secludes himself and his family behind the walls of his property and transacts business through the cash window. The business does not require him to engage with American culture and he is happy with that. His true self unfolds on his visits back to the village in Gujarat, where he builds temples.

 

If we observe the peasant castes, we notice that there is an absence of high culture because they are not inclined towards it, even when they come into money. Try and make a list of artists, painters and singers you know named Gowda, Reddy, Yadav, Patel or Patil. This aridity will expand as these communities take up more urban and middle class space.

The second important thing we must consider is the quality and texture of literacy. India was only five per cent literate at the turn of the 20th century, and in the last 20 years the direction of urban middle class literacy is towards English. Increasingly, families speak English even at home and most middle class Indians do not read in their mother tongue. We are not referring here to the ability to read, which they have picked up at school. They can speak in the mother tongue, if it is peppered with the English words which have become indispensable. We mean regular reading of literature or entertainment in the mother tongue. A very powerful battle was fought and won by Anglophiles like K.M. Munshi and Nehru against cultural icons like Tagore and Gandhi, who wanted mother tongues to be the medium of education. The arguments on both sides were sound, but the pragmatists won on the evidence of modernity.

This has produced a unique community. There is no parallel to India of a nation whose middle class is trained to think and approach life in a foreign language, one they have not mastered. India’s elite occupy a liminal space; it is emotionally Hindi and intellectually English. One reason India produces so little literature is that India’s middle class does not own any language properly. The knowledge of English has come to them through stock phrases because the quality of teaching is poor. Even half-literate Americans speak better, cleaner and more precise English than educated Indians. And on the mother-tongue side, as Tagore and Gandhi feared, the loss of language has resulted in the erosion of India’s high culture, its classical inheritance. That is the third aspect we must consider, and this can be illustrated.

 

On April 27 last year, the National Centre for the Performing Arts met to discuss a problem: How to get Mumbai’s citizens to come and watch their programmes. The 41-year-old NCPA, set up by the Sir Dorabji Tata Trust, is Mumbai’s greatest cultural institution. It is home to India’s lone ensemble of western classical music, the Symphony Orchestra of India. There is nothing else quite like the SOI in India, and there cannot be. This is because the only audience for western classical music in India is here in Mumbai. Actually in one corner of the city: South Mumbai, the elegant part of the city that the British built and we renamed. And in this part, only in one small ethnic community: the Parsis. About seventy per cent of the Symphony Orchestra audience is Parsi and it finished its eighth season this year with every concert sold out. Tickets in the back rows for some performances cost seven hundred and fifty rupees, and sponsors who left their few donor seats unfilled were criticized from the stage! And so the meeting on the 27th of April was not about attendance for classical music. The Parsis, at least for as long as they are around, will nurture European music in India.

 

The problem is the attendance for Indian music and Indian dance. The NCPA, like every other institute in India, has a problem bringing Indians in to listen to Hindustani music and see a performance of Bharatanatyam. To address this, the NCPA invited writers on culture to the April meeting, and told them about plans to improve audience numbers. I was one of the half-dozen writers who sat around the table with ten NCPA officials, as its chairman, Khushroo Suntook, told us what his problem was. ‘We need to build audiences,’ he said. ‘As an institution committed to presenting classical and folk performing arts of the highest quality, we can see the red flags being waved with respect to dwindling audience numbers.’ He brought up a recent article in a newspaper referring to this, and said it had alarmed him. ‘As an organization committed to quality, we are doing something about it. We need to make classical and folk art more accessible.’

Why don’t Indians like to listen to Hindustani music and to watch Indian dance? It’s a strange question to ask because Hindustani’s great performers are revered. But reverence comes easily to us and the data show that Indians are not particularly interested in their music.

To see the extent to which Indians patronized their culture, I asked a friend to send me copies of the magazine Time Out from New York, London and Hong Kong. I compared the cultural events in these to those in Mumbai, Delhi and Bangalore. All six magazines were from more or less the same period, October 2009. Here’s what I found.

 

In one week (22-28 October), Time Out, New York, listed 65 classical music concerts, including 15 operas. Of these concerts, eight were free. New Yorkers watched 51 classical and modern dance shows (two free) and attended 86 museum events, of which seven were free. All of this is high culture, corresponding to Hindustani or Carnatic music. Then there were 412 live concerts of popular (including jazz) music, of which 25 were free. New York City has eight million people.

After New York, I looked at New Delhi. In two weeks between 16-29 October (Time Out is a fortnightly in India), Delhi had eight classical concerts, including one Western classical performance. Every show was free. That is an average of one classical music performance every two days for a city of 12 million. There was a Spic Macay festival and that was also free. There were 10 shows classified under rock/pop/international, but of these only two were free. In two weeks Delhi had six classical dance performances including three Bharatanatyam, one Kathak and one Odissi. All six were free. Incidentally, there were 11 listings for salsa and jazz dance classes, none free.

Next, a week in London (15-21 October). Londoners saw 101 classical music concerts (eight free) of which 12 were operas. They saw 45 dance performances of which six were free, and they heard 278 popular music concerts of which 32 were free. London has seven million people.

In two weeks between 16-29 October, Mumbaikars saw 12 concerts of which nine were free. But the three concerts Mumbaikars paid to watch included one playing Bollywood songs and a performance by a South African Western classical group. Meanwhile, there were 23 events in pubs and discos, of which seven were free. In 15 days, Mumbaikars watched two dance performances, including one Bharatanatyam. Mumbai has 19 million people. Now let’s see Hong Kong, which has seven million people. In two weeks between 14-27 October, Hong Kong had 14 classical concerts, none free, and the cheapest ticket was $100. There were another five classical concerts listed under ‘Events’ of which two were free. It had 33 popular music concerts of which nine were free.

In 15 days between 16-29 October, Bangalore had six concerts, three Carnatic, two Western classical and one fusion. All six were free. Bangalore also has seven million people.

 

Two things become clear, and they’re related. One, Indian cities have few cultural events. Two, these are free. Why is this so? Unlike Europeans and Americans and Chinese, we don’t pay for culture. So why don’t we pay for entertainment? The answer is that we do: We will pay Rs 100 to watch a film, and Rs 200 to enter a pub with a DJ. The reason we do not pay to listen to Hindustani music and watch Hindustani dance is that it isn’t entertainment.

The middle class might revere it, but does not enjoy it enough to pay for it. Our classical culture has withered, as NCPA is discovering, because it is irrelevant. This is a loss because it is one of the world’s great art forms. And hundreds of Indians, who know this, have spent their lives in its pursuit.

 

Let’s look at the story of one such individual. Subhashni Giridhar wants to dance for a living. She is a chartered accountant by training, and says she would have given up her profession – and would give it up today – if only she could get to perform without having to pay. Not making a living by dancing, mind you; she knows that isn’t going to happen. She just does not want to lose as much money as she does now to put her art on display. This is the strange thing about high culture performances in India. The artiste often needs to pay to entertain. The audience does some form of service just by presenting themselves at the performance; actually performances are mostly unattended.

Subhashni began learning Bharatanatyam at the age of eight, out of love, not the coercion of her parents. We know this because she had to stop dancing to put herself through college, because she had no money to do both, and then picked it up again when she could afford to.

Subhashni became a chartered accountant, and practices with a firm in Mumbai. ‘After I earned some money, I gave my first programme at age 25,’ says Subhashni. She became a good enough dancer to be asked to showcase the art form by the governments of Tamil Nadu and Maharashtra.

She practices every morning for two hours, as training for public performances that almost never happen. How many shows does she do in a year? One, and in some years not even that. Of these shows, none is ever ticketed. She has been paid for performing, however, and twice by the NCPA. Once for dancing at the Little Theatre, and the second time at the Godrej Dance Academy. For both these performances, one in 1994 and the other in 2006, Subhashni was paid Rs 5,000. About 60 people attended, she says, many of whom she had asked to come.

She paid the accompanying musicians – vocalist, nattuvanar, violinist, mridangam, flautist – Rs 20,000 for each performance. She says she also must pay for make-up and a fresh costume. If these costs were to even out against what she was paid, Subhashni says, she would quit as chartered accountant and perform full time. She practices in the hope that this will happen one day.

Dance at the NCPA was managed till recently by Arundhathi Subramaniam. A very elegant woman – tall, slender and beautiful –Subramaniam is also a poet. We were introduced at the NCPA lunch, and later, I approached her to discuss Subhashni’s experience. I asked about what sort of audience there was for classical dance in Mumbai. ‘There isn’t a real audience,’ she says, ‘people have to be wooed and cajoled and conned (sometimes by clever titles or programme notes liberally peppered with words like "innovative" and "experimental") into attending classical dance recitals,’ she said.

 

In her year at the NCPA, Arundhathi looked at the problem of paying audiences first hand. ‘There hasn’t been a culture of paying for our classical arts. Even in Chennai, during the December season, people aren’t really willing to pay large sums of money for Bharatanatyam.’ I asked Arundhathi why it was that when so many girls were sent off to learn dance, there were still so few people coming in to attend dance shows.

‘It’s true that good middle class girls are routinely sent off to learn what’s often called "Indian dance". The idea on the part of hopeful parents is to turn out accomplished young women – with one more qualification on their bio-datas (probably to improve their marriage prospects, among other things). But most of the time, neither the teacher, the parent nor the student quite know what’s happening. More than one school principal has told me in the past year that their dance teachers have started teaching Bollywood-inspired numbers to their students. So while these masquerade as classical dance, most of these classes are teaching a kind of folk-filmy-natyam. And often, a lacklustre kind. Nowhere near as lively – or as cool – as the neighbourhood salsa or jazz ballet class, I’m sure.’

 

Of the SOI’s 202 patron members, 122 are Parsi. The SOI’s musicians are mainly Kazakh, because Indian musicians are not good enough to play in a symphony orchestra. Of the around 100 musicians in the SOI, only 11 are Indian. Of these 11, nine are Catholic. Hindus and Muslims are not interested in listening to this music, and have no skill in playing it. In eight seasons, this hasn’t changed.

This fact separates India’s middle class from China’s, because Chinese have taken very strongly to classical music in their own country. As the middle class Indian community expands, and may properly be compared with their counterparts in the West, we will be able to examine them even better. But it is disappointing to look at urban Indians today and the behaviour of the educated Indian because it is still primitive. The opportunism of the Indian does not disappear with his entry into modernity, where trust is higher. Where we can bend the rules towards our end we will do so. We do not have to go far to see this: a society reveals itself in motion and our traffic says all that needs to be said about the low trust in our culture and our opportunism.

We can also observe this on international flights when Indian parents who can walk perfectly well queue up to be carted about on wheelchairs. The reason for this is that the airports in the West intimidate them and they do not wish to negotiate the terminals on their own. The wheelchair attendant is a sort of babysitter for them who takes them through the process without their having to apply themselves.

 

Do all communities improve in time? Not necessarily. The beautiful drains and gutters of Mohenjodaro are often cited to show how urban planning in ancient India was advanced before it was in Europe, and it was. However, what isn’t as repeated is the fact that many of the drains and gutters had collapsed during the period of the city’s occupation and had remained in a state of disuse through centuries before the city was finally abandoned. The people living in those homes with blocked gutters had gone back to their more primitive state. There appears to have been a regression in the Indus community away from modernity.

It is like the mighty highways built by Rome. As Christianity took Europe into the dark ages, medieval Europeans did not know how to maintain the hightech roads built a thousand years earlier and let them decline. In both cases, a superior culture was superseded by a lesser, more populous one.

In which direction is modern India moving? Our identification of India is with that of the urban middle class. We see a new India full of middle class people who will contribute to the universal civilization, uplifted through education and employment. Perhaps this will happen, but the evidence shows the emergence of something quite ugly.