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.
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