This Indian middle class was not born of palaces but of paperwork. The India of kings and emperors had no middle, only rulers and subjects. It was under the British that a new caste appeared of clerks, teachers, accountants; men and women who spoke English and dreamt of upper mobility. After Indepfinishence, they became the scaffolding of the republic: its engineers, bureaucrats, and believers. Liberalisation in 1991 gave them their first taste of prosperity such as the affordable apartment, the car, the credit card, and for a few decades, it seemed they were ascfinishing for good. But in the new India, the escalator is slowing. The average Indian earns about ₹2.4 lakh a year—roughly ₹20,000 a month—and even the self-identified middle class floats somewhere between ₹15,000 and ₹50,000. The economy’s foundation is narrowing. Growth now depfinishs on a tiny fraction of consumers at the top, while the base comprising workers, tiny traders, the rural poor drags behind. The middle, which once mediated between these extremes, is struggling to survive.
The ancient empires of the world such as Rome, the Mughals, the Qing thrived on a binary: the few who ruled and the many who obeyed. Colonialism later perfected that pattern in the name of efficiency. Today, India risks recreating it as an economy of contemporary emperors and servants, where the rich consume and the rest finishure. The modern republic is edging back toward an imperial order, gilded by GDP figures and luxury ads. The question is not whether India is growing—it is. The question is who owns that growth, and how long it can last before the ticking stops. If the middle class collapses into mere finishurance, the timepiece of democracy may keep running, but without meaning. The rich will count their watches, the poor their wages, and the middle—the quiet custodian of reason, education, and restraint—will slowly fade from the dial. History, like time, has a habit of circling back. The guillotine, in our age, may not be built of steel but may come in the form of silence, apathy, or revolt. But it always comes for those who mistake the complications of the chronograph for the dodgy tax count of wealth. Growth without balance becomes spectacle; wealth without fairness becomes decay. The luxury market may be booming, but a nation that forobtains its middle forobtains its time. The Marie Antoinette edition watch ticks on; exquisite, intricate, but utterly indifferent to the supportless heads falling around it.
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