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| Growing up middle class in India |
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Sunday, June 28, 2009
Aakar Patel
In India, middle-class meant 'not poor'. People who had travelled abroad were rich. Middle-class meant that your father had a job, perhaps paying Rs5,000, and at some point in his career, when he was in his 40s, he bought a car. This was either a 'Fiat', a copy of the 1957 Grand Luce Berlina, manufactured in Bombay and branded the Premier Padmini; or it was an 'Ambassador', a copy of the Morris Oxford, also from 1957, manufactured in Calcutta.
In India's smaller towns, like Surat, families were likely to have scooters, made by Bajaj. These were developed by the Italian maker Vespa and made in Poona. All three vehicles were unchanged in design for decades, and the Ambassador remains the car of India's bureaucracy and politicians (though Manmohan Singh has a BMW 7-Series saloon). The Fiat is still famous as Bombay's taxi.
I learnt to drive on the same models in 1988 that my father had learnt on 30 years earlier.
Because manufacturing capacities were licensed and could not keep up with demand, cars and scooters had to be applied for, and then bought after a few months when they were available. A new car coming home was a big thing and we would have a pooja and anoint the car, and garland it and break a coconut before it for good luck. Green chillies and a couple of lemons were threaded together and hung from its mudguards to ward off nazar.
Getting a loan was a little more complicated and most people did not have the paperwork or the energy to secure one.
Telephones were bought the same way, after an application and a wait. When we got ours, in 1979, my mother excitedly showed me a wire coming in through the window. I didn't know what it was until she told me, and the instrument came days later. Since many families did not own a telephone, calls were received at the homes of neighbours, who would hang up, come over and alert us, and then we would wait by the telephone waiting for it to ring again. If calls were made from neighbours' homes, a one-rupee coin would be offered, and most times it was accepted. There was no facility to dial between cities, and a 'trunk call' would have to be booked through the operator. These calls were classified as Ordinary, Urgent or Lightning, and charged accordingly.
I do not remember many people booking a lightning call. People wrote mail, either on the blue 'Inland Letter' or the dust-coloured Post Card, both of which are still available, but not used much. Air mail was sent through blue 'aerogrammes' or letters inserted into envelopes that were white, with red and blue borders and stamped: 'Par Avion'. Urgent communication was through the telegram.
The only one I ever saw was sent in 1983 to the widow who was our neighbour, by her daughter, who worked in the Surat Electric Company. One afternoon she eloped with a Muslim colleague and sent the telegram to her mother, who wasn't home and the postman delivered it to my mother instead. "AM MARRIED AND HAPPY" the one-line telegram read. My mother spent the rest of the day consoling the widow, and explaining why she had opened it: "It said 'URGENT'."
Middle-class meant that the children went to English school. This was helpful in securing admission to college and getting a job, but not that good for your education if you weren't in a good school, and these were few. This is because most teachers didn't really speak English well, and certainly were unqualified to teach it.
One of our English teachers pronounced the word 'gigantic' as 'gig-natic'. Writing in correct grammar was optional and question papers were peppered with mistakes. We read great poetry: Whitman's O Captain! My Captain!; Milton's On His Blindness; Blake's The Tiger. But we only memorised these for reproduction at the exam; there was no understanding of them. We grew up, and remain, a generation particularly good at neither English nor Gujarati nor Hindi.
Missionaries ran most of the better schools. These schools would have Bible and Morals classes, but the message of these would go over our heads. At one school I attended, the Missionaries, who were converts from Kerala, taught from government textbooks that sometimes had mythology from the Mahabharat, and that would go over their heads. One of my teachers at the Seventh Day Adventist School was appalled that Hindus worshipped the sun and water, but we laughed at him. It did not occur to us as strange that a Missionary school was set up through funding from a Hindu family, the Dhamanwalas.
Religion was irrelevant in school (though some Sikh and Muslim girls wore a shalwar under their pinafore) and it was after I was much older that I registered that three of my friends, Najmi Saifee, Mubin Tapali and Mickey (Mir Maqbool Alam Khan, scion of the Nawab of Bela), were Muslim. The girl who always stood first (Mickey was always second, except at English, which he mastered), was Tasneem Mansuri, who married and dropped out when she was 15.
Another classmate at Seventh Day was Sheikh Mohammad, and one day during a cricket match in the afternoon, a man with a white beard cycled up to the boundary and Mohammad spotted him with a laugh and ran to him. "Who was that?" we asked. "Mara pappa," he said, without embarrassment.
Two things happened in November 1982 that influenced middle-class India.
The Asian Games in Delhi began on November 19, and television broadcast it in colour. Our old television sets, made by Indian firms like Televista, ECTV, Sonodyne and Weston went out and Japanese products like Sony were allowed to be imported. So precious were these new TV sets that we left the stickers on their screens for years.
People who did not have colour TV sets would gather in the evening at their neighbour's. This is one of the things that have stopped now that every urban home has its set, and TV has become our primary source of entertainment. Video players, or VCRs, also came in, and those families that didn't have these would rent them on weekends from the video libraries, for Rs100 a day. We would watch three movies back-to-back so that value was squeezed out. Those who owned VCRs would cover them in soft fabric when the machine was not in use. That is the sort of thing Indians mean when we refer to our middle-class values.
With video players, Pakistani serials became available. However much Pakistanis hate the Zia years, urban North Indians will forever be grateful for that period because it produced dramas like Dhoop Kinaray and Ankahi and Bakra Kishton Pe. Dr Zoya Ali Khan, because of the quality of her dialogue and her restraint, was urbane yet desi in a way that was most appealing. We were unwilling to grant Pakistan much, and the belief was that that backward nation even imported its needles, but we acknowledged that in television drama they were our superiors.
The Asian Games saw the rise of Indian athletes like Charles Borromeo, P T Usha, Shiny Abraham and Adille Sumariwalla, the first sportswomen and men to feature regularly in newspapers and magazines who were not cricketers or hockey players. The games mascot was Appu the elephant, who appeared on T-shirts and pullovers. The Asian Games also had a more profound effect: athletics at school began to be taken seriously. That Indian athletics is still incompetent 27 years on is a reflection of how bad things were before 1982.
The games ended on December 4, but before that, on November 30, Michael Jackson's Thriller was released. This was the first pop album heard in India the same time as it was in the rest of the world. It was also the first English record that became popular outside of the big cities of India. You could be in Surat and all your classmates would have heard of Michael Jackson and Thriller, though few knew of Simon and Garfunkel or Pink Floyd or had heard the Rolling Stones.
Because of television, Michael Jackson was the first pop star to be seen as well as heard in India, and that meant that his style was copied. Children did the Moon Walk on stage wearing red jackets and white gloves. We knew the words to the songs and saw the videos hundreds of times. Michael Jackson's songs were the initiation for most Indians into western popular music. This generation, that was able to understand Michael Jackson, was the one that grew up and modernised Indian popular culture. They were the ones behind the music television channels that came a decade later, and, through people like Karan Johar and Aditya Chopra, remade Bollywood.
Many things have changed in India in 25 years, and few of those who were 'middle-class' remain that as India's economy has made them really middle-class in the western sense, with their children born into economic security and not thinking of household appliances or motor cars as luxury products.
But there remains a nostalgia for that period because it is gone, though of course it wasn't as great as we would like to think it was.
The writer is director with Hill Road Media in Bombay. Email: aakar@hillroadmedia.com
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