The Politics of Self-expression: The Urdu Middle-class Milieu in Mid-twentieth Century India and Pakistan

Annotation Middleclass political culture in interwar North India was haunted by fascistic resonance. Activists from various political camps believed in forms of Social-Darwinism, worshipped violence and war and focused their political action on public spectacles and paramilitary organization. This book argues that these features were part of a larger political culture - the politics of self-expression - that had lost sight of society as the normal space in which politics was to be conducted. Instead, there was an emphasis on the inner worlds of individuals who increasingly came to understand politics as an avenue to personal salvation. It proposes that this re-orientation of politics was the result of social transformations brought about by the coming of a consumer society. The politics of self-expression was fixated with matters related to political choices, the branding of clothes and bodies and the use of a political language that closely resembled advertising discourse. This study traces the socio-genesis of this new form of politics through a detailed analysis of material culture in the Urdu middleclass milieu. It examines how middleclass people arrived at their political opinions in consequence of how they structured their immediate spatial surroundings, and how they strove to define the experiences of their own bodies in a particularly middleclass way. The scope and arguments of this book make an innovative contribution to the historiography of modern South Asia.