This work by anthropologist Mark Liechty, first published in 2003 in the US, sets out to provoke thought about the middle class in Kathmandu during the late 1980s and early 1990s. The book's Southasian edition was brought out this year by the Kathmandu-based research-and-discussion group Martin Chautari.
The 1990s were the years immediately following the first People's Movement and the transition to parliamentary democracy; but, for Liechty, this was a time in Kathmandu when "a discourse of class was unusually tangible." Unlike during the century of autocratic rule under the Rana regime, whose extractive and isolationist policies dramatically widened the gap between rulers and ruled, the developmental decades between 1951 and 1991 were a period marked by a massive influx of international aid and tourism. This period was also notable for the growing centralisation of the state, increasing monetisation of the economy, a spike in service-sector jobs and commodity imports, and a growing availability of English-language education.
Liechty argues that it was these trends that led to the formation, in Kathmandu, of a group of people who increasingly identified by class, rather than by caste or ethnicity. For the author, understanding the middle class in a place and at a time when the cultural space it occupied was "still being pioneered, its structures and fault lines not yet obscured by the sediments of time", offers rich rewards. The hope is to shed light on the ways in which, the world over, the reality of economic inequality is obscured by class-specific cultural practices that, over time, come to be taken for granted.
The attempt here is not to define who the middle class is in terms of the economic resources of its members. Rather, Liechty is interested in class "as a cultural practice". Instead of taking it to be a pre-defined, unchanging object or category, he believes that class must be seen as a set of practices that are acted out in everyday life. As such, his research consists overwhelmingly of what members of this group have to say about themselves and their lives. From material gathered during more than 200 informal interviews, Liechty concludes that the class of people he is studying imagines itself in a space of "middleness" between the high and low classes. Middle-class Kathmandu imagines these class extremes to be too influenced by foreign ways (and thus perhaps too modern) on the one hand, and too bound to tradition on the other. "To be middle class in Kathmandu," Liechty writes, "is to participate in a social and cultural dialogue about what it means to be a 'modern Nepali'."