Anthropology and the Urban Middle-Class: Ethnographic Studies of India’s Aam Aadmi

Ask someone to picture an anthropologist at work, and you’ll probably imagine someone documenting a tribal ritual, a fishing community, or a group living on the margins of the city. Rarely do people picture an anthropologist following a software engineer to her gym, sitting in a housing society WhatsApp group, or tracking how a bank clerk saves for his daughter’s wedding. Yet this is exactly where a growing number of urban anthropologists have turned their attention: to the aam aadmi, India’s vast and varied middle class.

Why anthropologists overlooked the middle class for so long 🔗

Anthropology as a discipline built its reputation on studying groups with little power. Fieldworkers documented tribal societies, informal-sector workers, street vendors, and other marginal occupational communities, treating them as distinct status communities worth understanding on their own terms. This wasn’t accidental. The discipline emerged from a tradition of studying “the other,” and in urban settings, that usually meant people struggling at the edges of city life rather than those comfortably settled within it.

A shift toward the powerful 🔗

In the last few decades, anthropologists broadened their lens to include elite and powerful groups, studying them as lifestyle groups defined by taste, consumption, and social distinction rather than survival. Corporate executives, political families, and luxury consumers became legitimate subjects of ethnographic curiosity. But between these two extremes, a massive population slipped through the cracks of scholarly attention: the middle class, which happens to be the largest single group in urban India.

Defining the middle class in the Indian context 🔗

In everyday conversation, the middle class is simply the aam aadmi, or common man, a phrase that gained real academic traction only in the 1990s, alongside India’s economic liberalisation. Scholars generally treat it in two overlapping ways. First, it’s an economic category, a band of income sitting between the poor and the wealthy. Second, and more interestingly for anthropologists, it’s a group defined by shared aspirations and the daily hardships of navigating city life.

Sociologists Surinder Jodhka and Aseem Prakash describe this group as salaried professionals, qualified employees, upwardly mobile youth, and urban housewives who manage tightening household budgets as prices rise. Their work makes a useful point: reducing the middle class to a mere income bracket misses the social and cultural weight the term carries. It’s as much an identity people claim as a category statisticians assign.

How large is this class, really 🔗

The numbers here are surprisingly contested. Depending on the income threshold used, estimates of India’s middle class swing wildly, from a few hundred million to a number closer to statistical scarcity. Pew Research Center analysis found that the pandemic-era downturn alone pushed millions of Indians out of the middle-income bracket, showing how economically fragile this “comfortable” group actually is. This fragility is itself an anthropological detail worth noting: middle-class identity in India often rests less on stable wealth and more on the constant, anxious work of maintaining appearances and status.

The middle class as a consumer and self-obsessed category 🔗

Popular commentary often paints the middle class in less flattering terms: self-obsessed, indifferent to poverty, and endlessly preoccupied with consumption. There’s some truth to this caricature. India’s advertising industry treats the middle class as its primary audience, shaping everything from soap commercials to real estate campaigns around its aspirations for a better car, a bigger television, or a flat in a gated society.

One label, many communities 🔗

Despite this shared consumer identity, the middle class is far from homogeneous. It cuts across nearly every religion, caste, and region in the country, which makes it an unusually difficult group to study ethnographically. A Tamil Brahmin schoolteacher, a Punjabi Khatri shopkeeper, and a Bengali government clerk might all identify as middle class, yet their daily practices, values, and even their anxieties can differ sharply. This internal diversity is precisely what makes the category anthropologically rich rather than a simple demographic box to tick.

The historical emergence of India’s middle class 🔗

To understand today’s middle class, it helps to look at where it came from. The Indian middle class did not emerge the way its Western counterparts did, through industrial and commercial growth. Instead, it grew out of British colonial administration, which needed a layer of English-educated Indians to staff offices, courts, and schools. This colonial demand for English-educated intermediaries created a new professional class of clerks, teachers, and lawyers who were culturally distinct from both landed elites and the rural poor.

Custom to contract 🔗

The broader global pattern behind this shift was described by economic historian Karl Polanyi, who traced how the industrial revolution transformed societies from ones organised around custom and community obligation to ones organised around market contracts. This transition pulled large numbers of people into wage employment and salaried work, effectively creating the economic conditions for a middle class to exist. In the West, this group eventually became politically decisive. India’s middle class followed a similar arc, though decades later and shaped by its own colonial and post-colonial history. Since the 1990s reforms opened up the economy further, this class has grown sharply in size and visibility.

Education and middle-class aspirations 🔗

Education sits at the heart of how the middle class reproduces itself and how others try to join it. Geographer Craig Jeffrey’s ethnographic work on young men in north India examined this closely. His research, published in American Ethnologist, showed how deeply families invest in education as the primary route to a better life, often at significant financial and emotional cost.

The catch, as Jeffrey documented, is that outside a handful of professional courses, there’s often a long and frustrating gap between finishing a degree and landing a job that matches it. This gap doesn’t just produce disappointment. It creates fertile ground for student politics and, in some cases, more radical youth movements on Indian university campuses. Educated but underemployed young people, caught between aspiration and opportunity, become a distinct social and political force in their own right, one that anthropologists find genuinely compelling to study.

Middle-class politics and consumerism 🔗

Political scientist Leela Fernandes took this analysis further by looking at how middle-class consumer aspirations get absorbed into electoral politics. Her research, detailed through the University of Minnesota Press, argued that politicians have learned to build campaigns around the middle class’s dreams: owning a house, a car, a business, or a plot of land. This creates a politics fuelled by market growth and the promise of limitless development, one that resonates strongly with urban voters even when its benefits remain unevenly distributed.

What makes this politically significant is scale. As the largest urban group in the country, the middle class doesn’t just consume goods and services; it shapes what political parties promise and how urban policy gets framed. Ethnographers are increasingly treating this group not as a passive economic statistic but as an active social and political actor whose everyday choices, from where to shop to which schools to fight for, ripple outward into city life and national politics alike.

Why this ethnographic gap matters now 🔗

The renewed anthropological interest in the middle class isn’t just an academic correction. It reflects a genuine shift in where power and cultural influence sit in urban India. Studying marginal groups remains essential, and so does studying elites. But leaving out the group in between means missing the class that actually sets the tone for popular culture, consumer trends, and much of urban political discourse. Ethnography of the aam aadmi fills that gap, treating ordinary, everyday middle-class life as worthy of the same careful attention once reserved for the exotic or the powerful.

What do you think? Do you see yourself, your family, or your neighbourhood reflected in the way scholars describe India’s middle class, or does the academic picture feel disconnected from lived reality? And given how fragile middle-class status can be, does it make more sense to think of it as a stable identity or as something people are constantly working to hold onto?

References

1. https://india.oup.com/product/the-indian-middle-class-9780199466795/
2. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2021/03/18/in-the-pandemic-indias-middle-class-shrinks-and-poverty-spreads-while-china-sees-smaller-changes/
3. https://ijels.com/upload_document/issue_files/19IJELS-107202523-TheRole.pdf
4. https://era.org.au/summary-of-the-great-transformation-by-karl-polanyi/
5. https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1548-1425.2010.01266.x
6. https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/indiaas-new-middle-class