How does André Béteille justify ‘middle class’ in India? (2020)
André Béteille is sceptical of loose talk about the middle class: economists, he objects, homogenise it without examining its structural composition, and there is no one middle class in India but many. Yet he defends it as a real sociological category, and those grounds are the answer.
The grounds of his justification
- Occupation and education, not property. His criteria are occupational function and employment status: the middle class is the body of non-manual, credentialled workers — administrators, professionals, teachers, clerks. Where Karl Marx made property the axis and the middle class transitional, Béteille takes the Max Weber-derived line in which saleable skill makes a class situation of its own.
- A real intermediate position, between capital and labour, owning no means of production and selling no manual labour — an ambiguity that is its structural location, not conceptual sloppiness.
- Dispersed rather than cumulative inequalities. In Caste, Class and Power (1965) he showed ritual status, economic position and political power in Sripuram coming apart after once being congruent. This dissociation of hierarchies is what makes an intermediate stratum possible: one may now stand high on one dimension, middling on another.
- Carrier of modern universalistic institutions. It staffs India’s universities, courts, bureaucracy and press — institutions resting on achievement and universalistic norms rather than birth, which he regards as India’s real institutional achievement.
- Open, unlike caste. Class has no boundary, no corporate existence, no ritual, no birth-membership; it is permeable to mobility, which caste is not.
His cautions
- It is internally differentiated and not a class-for-itself: shared market position has produced no shared consciousness.
- Its expansion has not dissolved caste. Recruitment stays narrow, and it is the middle class that spearheads its communities’ claims, with reservation the instrument. Equality of opportunity remains formal while backward-class politics turns it into competition between groups rather than individuals.
- The base is widening nonetheless: AISHE 2023-24 puts Scheduled Caste gross enrolment at 27.8 against 18.9 in 2014-15 — what D. L. Sheth reads as a real pluralisation of the middle class.
Critique
Leela Fernandes (India’s New Middle Class, 2006) holds the category politically constructed rather than merely occupational, and Satish Deshpande that its “casteless” self-image conceals an upper-caste composition renamed as merit — which Béteille’s confidence in universalistic institutions understates.
Conclusion
Béteille justifies the middle class not as an income bracket but as an occupational and institutional formation made possible by the dispersal of India’s inequalities. That only 23.6% of workers hold regular wage or salaried jobs (PLFS 2025) shows the category is real and bounded — and that he was right to keep it plural.