It explores the formation of India's rural middle class, which rests on a complex, and often contradictory, set of processes that began unfolding with growing industrialisation in rural areas. It examines its composition, characteristics and social identification from the perspectives of three major class theorists: Marx, Weber and Bourdieu.

It explores the formation of India's rural middle class, which rests on a complex, and often contradictory, set of processes that began unfolding with growing industrialisation in rural areas.

'This book significantly enriches our understanding of the changing dynamics of rural lives in India of the 21st century. By focussing on the subject of the 'rural middle class', the book opens up the study of the Indian village to an altogether new set of questions. Such a framing of the process of social change also enables the author to move out of the essentialist notions of the 'rural' and of 'India' that have often plagued the social science scholarship on the region. The use of 'critical pluralism' as a mode of approaching and analysing the subject has much to offer as an alternative way of looking at the middle classes and the complicated ways in which their formation intersects with other aspects of change, structural and discursive.' Surinder Jodhka, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi