‘Take This Land’

This study challenges scholarly claims about the unity of vision and purpose shared by elites in the making of neoliberal projects. As a critical history of the Karnataka Golf Association (KGA) suggests, social, political, and economic elites do not always pursue the same interests when using public land and other vital resources in service of private gain. Founding members at the club—among them industrialists, agriculture landowners, and salaried professionals—simply wanted to recreate an exclusive members-only space like the ones they inhabited elsewhere in the city, except with an international standard golf course as the main feature. Government officials without prior membership in these social and economic circles used their control of land and other resources as leverage in winning access to the club as permanent members. This chapter draws on a combination of interviews and archival material, including minutes to meetings, annual reports, and other memoranda, in order to reveal the strained negotiations that followed, and which ultimately produced a club divided by competing interests and loyalties.

Kula Gauravam, Transnational Migration, and Class Mobility

Perceived from the outside and inside as a cohesive community, Kammas (a dominant caste in Coastal Andhra) self-project themselves as a group that has always extended the frontiers of economic advancement, including through transnationalization. Despite the sense of community cohesiveness, there exist layers of class stratification within this community. In this chapter, I argue that the notion of kula gauravam (caste pride) and kutumba gauravam (family pride) play a significant role in creating aspirations among the non-elite Kammas to become rich like others in the community and motivate them to bridge this class gap. To ‘middle-class’ Kammas then, transnational migration and urbanity become central precepts around which this, once rural and peasant, community has attempted to jump the scale of class to recreate their rightful economic status akin to their high-caste status (refurbished from a Sudra to a Kshatriya status in the last century).

Artefacts and Artifices of the Global

The real estate crash in the Global North in 2008, accompanied by the growth of a comparatively stable real estate market in India, saw a number of architects and allied companies from the Global North enter India’s National Capital Region (NCR). Indian state actors and developers, as well as corporations from the Global North, propagated a discourse of the global in order to generate economic and cultural capital for their work. The discourse operated through and embedded into the built environment and material landscapes of NCR. This paper argues that elite cultures in India need to be understood as an entanglement of local governing and corporate elite with foreign elite actors. It further argues that material environments act as sites through which both local and international groups contest, claim, and reframe the elite identities in India, intimately tying together the global and the elite. Material worlds are integral to understanding the dynamics of elite interactions in the Global North and Global South as they cross language barriers, disseminate knowledge sensorially, and constitute the foci of multinational capitalist intervention in developing countries. This paper is part of a cross-class ethnography of the building construction industry in NCR.

Issues of Entitlement

This chapter explores some of the ways in which affect and entitlement, friendship and privilege, and memory and hierarchy come together and fall apart. Focusing on my diverse elite subjects, including members of my cohort from high school—a co-educational institution with a privileged status in the heart of New Delhi—I seek to weave together narrative and analysis, ethnographic vignettes and anecdotal theory. Here, the many faces, colours, and smells of privilege are crucial to tracking the distinctions and differences, the contradictions and contentions among the elite. Indeed, at the core of my interpretive bid are critical questions turning on the incessant interplay between power and difference and authority and alterity.

For Things to Remain (Sort of) the Same, Everything Must Change

In this chapter, the author uses high status work environments as sites to investigate the (re)production of a new generation of Indian elites. Using the example of modern professional service organizations that have variations in gender and class outcomes, Ballakrishnen illuminates that while elite education is a standard requirement for entry, firms vary in the ways they valorize other markers of status. Particularly, Ballakrishnen finds that Desi—rather than global—firms align themselves around markers of language and cultural capital rather than gender in stratifying their inhabitants. In revealing these patterns, the author proposes to extend the following lines of sociological research about elites. First, Ballakrishnen argues that these ‘first-generation elites’ afford us a new understanding to a literature that has predominantly focussed on economic and political lineage as a source of its definitional authority. Second, the author suggests that one way in which the coordinates of elite mobility are moderated is through organizational exchange partners who act as powerful audiences that shape and repose to this definition. Finally, Ballakrishnen argues that while this new generation of elites are seemingly devoid of the hereditary lineage of their predecessors, their embodiment of meritocratic selection and advancement is still steeply rooted in background frameworks of class and patriarchal privilege that surreptitiously reinforce new avatars of deeply embedded stratification.

Heirs, Corporate Aristocrats, and ‘Meritocrats’

This chapter proposes an analysis of the social space inhabited by the CEOs and chairpersons of the top 100 Indian companies in 2012, using a Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA). The analysis aims to understand the internal divisions to be found in the field of economic power, by looking at the divisions along the lines of educational capital, inherited capital (family capital), caste and social capital (drawing on a network analysis of interlocking directorates). Our results point to a very peculiar structuration of the economic field: we find that credentialism has a very weak influence; there is a clear and massive cleavage between owners and managers of capital; social capital carries decisive weight; and the actors closest to the State apparatus occupy a marginal role. We argue that it is possible to identify three poles among business leaders: the multipositional family-business owners, the unipositional family-business owners, and the managerial galaxy.

The Meritocrats

The politics of meritocracy at the Indian Institutes of Technology illuminates the social life of caste in contemporary India. This chapter argues that an IIT graduate’s status depends on the transformation of privilege into merit, or of caste capital into modern capital. It also calls for a relational approach to merit as a response to subaltern assertion. Analysing claims to merit in relation to subaltern politics allows us to see how they shift between disavowing and affirming caste affiliation. In this marking and unmarking of caste, we see that claims to collective belonging and to merit are eminently commensurable, and become more so when subaltern assertion forces privilege into the foreground. Rather than the progressive erasure of ascribed identities in favour of putatively universal ones, we are witnessing the re-articulation of caste as an explicit basis for merit and the generation of newly consolidated forms of upper casteness.

The Secret Lives of Money

This chapter studies the lives of elite women in India, specifically the wives of business elites. Mainly housewives, these women are seen as being unrelated to generation and circulation of money. Their lives are instead often simplistically explained as being more befitting to a discourse of conspicuous consumption and idle leisure. This chapter queries such a popular understanding of elite housewives by revealing certain surreptitious practices of money investment that they indulge in, often without the knowledge of their husband or family members. Treading the lines between familial and non-familial, private and public, secrets and manifest expressions, I argue that elite women create specific and unique relationships with money, which can overcome as well as reiterate their vulnerabilities, anxieties, and desires. This complex circuit of money—generation, savings, investments—in which the elite housewives proactively participate further shapes their networks, friendships, conjugal relations, and self-image.

Reproducing Elite Lives

This chapter explores the social reproductive roles performed by elite ‘upper’-caste Aggarwal women in family businesses in Delhi. By focusing on women’s associational and familial roles in a South Delhi neighbourhood, three strategies of reproduction are discussed: first, forging inter-strata fictive kinship ties for caste cohesion through women’s ‘social work’; second, forging intra-strata fictive kinship ties for business opportunities through sustained interactions; and third, steering the individuating aspirations of children around marital choices for the unity of the joint family and business. These strategies of elite reproduction highlight the secularizing pulls on gender and caste in urban contexts, despite the dependence of family businesses on caste and family ties. Furthermore, by focusing on women in family businesses, this chapter shows that while they are not passive victims of caste patriarchy neither are they invisible in the male-centric family businesses.

Introduction

The introduction of this volume argues that while the social science scholarship on inequality in India has mostly focused on the lower-end of power, processes of privilege consolidation have been relatively less studied. Such an exclusive preoccupation with the dynamics of deprivation can sometimes lead us to ignore the relational dimensions of inequality and the role played by the upper-end of power in these dynamics. As the Indian social structure expands with economic growth, some of the middle-class spaces have begun to increasingly intersect and overlap with politics and business, contributing to a renewal of the elite demographics. The authors argue it is important to extend our understanding of these complex processes and to discuss the sociological dimensions of elite lives in the post-1990s India, their different dimensions, diversities, and directions.