The most striking feature of contemporary India, as I noted in my book India Unbound, is the rise of a confident new middle class. What I wrote there might serve as useful background to this play:
The new middle class is full of energy and drive and is making things happen. That it goes about it in an uninhibited and amoral fashion is also true. It is different from the older bourgeoisie, which was leisurely, tolerant, and ambiguous. The new class is street-smart; it has had to fight to rise from the bottom, and it has learnt to manoeuvre the system. It is easy to despair over its vulgarity, its new rich mentality and its lack of education. But whether India can deliver the goods depends a great deal on it.
This new middle class is displacing the older bourgeoisie—people like my grandfather and father—which first emerged in the 19th century with the spread of English education. It had produced the professionals who had stepped into the shoes of the departing English in 1947, and have since monopolised the rewards of the society. The chief virtue of the old middle class was that it was based on education and merit with relatively free entry, but it was also a class alienated from the mass of people and unsure of its identity. The new middle class, on the other hand, is based on money, drive, and an ability to get things done. Whereas the old class was liberal, idealistic and inhibited, the new order is refreshingly free from colonial hang-ups.
We may feel regret at the eclipse of the old bourgeoisie, especially because it possessed the unique characteristic of being a class based on free entry, education and capability. We may feel equally uneasy that a new class based on money is replacing it. However, this is not a new phenomenon. This has happened repeatedly in all societies, particularly after the advent of the industrial revolution …. When India became independent, the middle class was tiny—around five per cent of the population—but we had a clear idea of what our parents wanted us to grow up to be. They wanted us to be nice Indian boys, well-bred, handsome, intelligent, and good at games. We were groomed to be brown sahibs, the rightful rulers of free India. They educated us at private schools. Those who could afford it sent theirs to Doon and Mayo (even when it pinched their pockets.) We became good at cricket and tennis and adequate at studies. ‘He is a good all-rounder,’ was the model held up before us. After school, we went on to Delhi’s St. Stephen’s College or Presidency College in Calcutta and Madras. A few lucky ones even managed to go to Oxford and Cambridge. We were expected to acquire the basic intellectual equipment at the university, but not to become scholars.
After college, we were ready to join the IAS or industry or the professions—all the pleasant riches for which the older Indian bourgeoisie groomed its young. With secure jobs in our pockets, we were married off to good middle or upper middle class girls whom we courted in the Gymkhana clubs and in hill-stations during our summer holidays. We were ready to become pillars of the establishment and repeat the process with our young. As we prospered in our jobs, we built houses in South Delhi and went to lots of stylish parties where we met out friends, rubbed shoulders with diplomats and enjoyed the wit of the intellectual elite of our land. Could one have a better recipe for the enviably happy life? We had fulfilled the dreams of our fathers. But why then, with all our advantages, do we feel a gnawing pain in the gut?
We were Macaulay’s children, not Manu’s. Our ambivalence goes back to that day when Thomas Macaulay persuaded the British government to teach English to Indians. Our position is similar to Rammohun Roy’s, who had two houses in Calcutta. One was his ‘Bengali house’, the other his ‘European house.’ In the Bengali house he lived with his wife and children in the traditional Indian way. The ‘European house’, on the other hand, was tastefully done up with English furniture and was used to entertain his European friends. Someone teased him, saying that everything in the Bengali house is Bengali except Rammohun Roy; and everything in the European house is European except Rammohun Roy. The dilemma of the postcolonial ‘brown sahib’ was similar. We could live our hypocritical lives only for so long; ultimately we had to question our recipe for the enviably happy life.9
Rai Sahib is a caricature of this class, but even the sensitive Karan Chand, who is aware of this problem, is a victim. This parody of our inner lives—one foot in India and the other in the West—is rapidly and happily vanishing after the 1990s as we are more relaxed today and the minds of the young, as I mentioned, have became decolonized.
9 Jakhoo Hill is about many things. It is about the hold of Indian mothers on their sons, about a fading class clinging foolishly to spent dreams, about the incestuous obsessions of ageing uncles. But the main theme is the betrayal of sexual love. Traditional Indian social life is fundamentally incomprehensible to the West largely because we Indians have always regarded sexual passion as a relatively trivial matter. As a result we set higher value upon filial rather than marital love. The Indian male appears to Western eyes as effeminate and a ‘mummy’s boy’ because he often gives precedence to his mother over his wife. The modern Indian male, however, is caught in a dilemma. Modernity demands of him that he think of sexual love as a chief source of virtue. He is thus in a dilemma of conflicting values between his ‘traditional’ duty to his mother and his modern duty to his wife. Generally speaking,
