This book analyses India’s middle class by recognising the diversity within the class, the people, their practices, and the production of spaces. It explores the economic and social lives of the new middle class, expanding the areas of inquiry beyond consumption in post-liberalisation India and its intersectionalities with gender, caste, religion, migration, and other socioeconomic markers in various cities across the country. The book interrogates the meanings and perceptions of social mobility, growth, consumerism, technology, social identity, and development and examines how they can be emancipatory or subjugating in different contexts. It engages with the new entrants in the middle class, particularly from the marginalised sections, their struggles, insecurities, anxieties, agency, and experiences. The personal, emotive, and psychic dimensions of social mobility have been dealt with in the larger context of socioeconomic settings. The book crosses disciplinary and spatial boundaries and uses a variety of methodologies to provide perspectives on several unexplored or underexplored areas of India’s new middle class. This book will be of interest to scholars and researchers of sociology, economics, development studies, public policy, social work, and South Asian studies.

This book brings together a diverse set of expert scholars to enliven and sharpen the debate about the ways in which consumption affects society today. Research on consumption can shed light on many fundamental questions, such as the character of society, including social and cultural dimensions; the relations between the generations; dependency of technology and the risks involved; the rise of Asia and its potential consumption preferences; the question of whether we must continuously increase our consumption to avoid a recession and whether this is ecologically sustainable.

Beyond Beijing is an independent video documentary and handbook produced by women about the largest meeting of women in world history, the Non-Governmental Organizations Forum on Women in Huairou, China, in September 1995.