Stories of Postwar and Postcolonial Middle-class
Fear of the Future
After running several blocks, Ben finally got to the church, but the doors were locked. He ran up the stairs and from the church window he could see the bride kissing the groom. “Oh Jesus Christ, no!” he said, then closing his eyes in despair. Instead of giving up, he began knocking on the church window and calling out to the bride, “Elaine! … Elaine!” Elaine turns around and looks up to the window in bewilderment. She began walking towards the window almost trans-like but her eyes emotional. She looks left and right at the angry crowd—the guests, her parents, the man she just married. Finally, she calls out his name “Ben!”
Ben fights off Elaine’s dad in the stairway and then, with a huge cross, block the fuming crowd behind the run-away bride. They have finally escaped! They hopped on a bus, sat at the back, and you would think that this is the moment that they are going to kiss—but no, Mike Nichols’ critically acclaimed 1967 film, “The Graduate” does not end so typically. Instead, it ends with the couple in a back seat of a bus with a slight grin on their faces that quickly became an empty stare into space—into the uncertainty of the future.
Fear of the future was like a middle-class plague in an ever-burgeoning postwar America of the 1960s, excellently portrayed in The Graduate.
The Adventures of the Middleman
In 1960s America, for many young men like Ben, who had just completed their bachelor’s degree, their envisioned future became a psychological nightmare. Less than a decade later, the underlying question “what are you going to do with your life after your bachelor’s degree?” was equally relevant for young men who were fortunate to experience higher education in many modernizing Asian countries. As these new independent countries strive with economic growth and urbanization, higher education begins to dictate one’s status in society. This ordeal is entwined in the complexity of capitalism, traditional values, and patriarchal culture. In the context of India, this is brilliantly captured in Indian filmmaker, Satyajit Ray’s, classic, Jana Aranya or The Middleman (1976).
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| The last scene in The Graduate (1967) |
After graduating, Somnath found himself facing the grim reality of unemployment and the uncertainty of the future. In this vulnerable moment, his girlfriend dumps him for a man her parents had arranged for her to marry—a doctor, a man with a future. However, the film does not end with Somnath barging in, sabotaging the wedding, and running off with his girl. On the contrary, Somnath chooses to move on and, after a few unsuccessful job interviews, delves into a terrain foreign to his upbringing—the business world. His father was skeptical of his choice, however, Somnath found the encouragement he needed in his sister-in-law, Kamala. He would proudly show her a hard day’s earnings and she was where he came to when he needed someone to confide in as well as a cup of tea.
Somnath did fairly well as a middleman in the petty trading environment of Calcutta (now Kolkata). During his colorful adventure, suddenly he found himself submitting to the evils of the business world where women are used to seal a deal. For the first time, he was in direct contact with the “dark world” where wives work as sex workers (with their husband’s blessings) and mothers receive clients at home for their daughters.
The climax of the film saw Somnath facing the fact that Kauna, the sister of an old university buddy, is the woman he will take to his client in order to seal a contract. At this point, Somnath, who had throughout the night’s journey battled the conflict in his head of what was morally right and wrong, was ready to call off the deal. However, Kauna which he knew as a young girl has grown into a determined and independent woman, who will not take Somnath’s money and go, and in addition, does not need his pity. Somnath’s moral conflict of right and wrong is irrelevant to her reality.
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| An unexpected encounter between Somnath and Kauna |
Ray’s The Middleman, a part of his trilogy (Pratidwandi/The Adversary (1970), Seemabaddha/Company Limited (1971)), captures 1970s Calcutta as a city rapidly changing but vulnerable due its political and economic upheavals. Economic stagnation caused by the Naxalites leftist revolutionary movement and the massive influx of refugees from East Pakistan after the Bangladesh Liberation War in 1971 all took a toll on Calcutta’s economy. India was experiencing structural changes in the economy where the share of agriculture in output continued to fall as most parts of the country faced droughts and massive shortage of food grains, resulting in price spikes. Industrialization had created a rural-urban gap as infrastructure grew largely in urban areas. However, a very low demand for manufactured goods meant that industrial production went down and employment rapidly declined (Dutta, 2018; Kumar, 2021).
Ultimately in 1975, the situation, deemed as “internal disturbances”, prompted the Indian government to impose a state of emergency. Two years on, India was under authoritarian rule–political freedom was curtailed and trade unions were restrained. Moreover, lack of job opportunities meant an idle educated middle-class was on the rise. Typically, corruption and unemployment prevailed, the sex industry grew (Ganguly, 2020), and the educated middle-class sought to secure their position as salaried professionals (Jodhka and Prakash, 2011). Against this backdrop and through the daily events of its characters, The Middleman ingeniously unfolds the changes evolving in Calcutta, known as the literary capital of India, in all its irony.
Satyajit
Ray (India Today)
Middle-class, a Political Term
Some scholars have argued that in the 1950s, the term middle-class Americans was more of a Cold War political term rather than an economic term. Nevertheless, the term was a powerful tool to create an American identity associated with a set of values, a specific lifestyle, taste, and culture. The middle-class, which represented stability and the success of capitalism in US Cold War propaganda, by the 1960s became a group despised by its own kind—its younger generation, the generation that began the counterculture movement (Maragou, 2015).
Choosing to live a dull privileged-life or to break with convention became a source of anxiety and uncertainty for the children of postwar parents, as Ben experienced in The Graduate. The anxiety and uncertainty were far reaching beyond financial security, encompassing the realms of sexuality and gender norms, questioning society’s fundamental institutions, such as the family and marriage institutions. In this case, it did not only affect the younger generation.
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| Ben takes Mrs. Robinson home |
Mrs. Robinson (who coincidentally was Elaine’s mother) represented the bored white middle-aged, middle-class housewife turned seductress. Her relationship with Ben tells a story of the dissatisfaction of life lived in hypocrisy, confined by societal norms to maintain class divisions. For Mrs. Robinson, breaking free was not her goal as it would be hard to give up her privileged life, but she found remedy in breaching the rules of the respectable, faithful good wife. For Ben, his secret relationship with Mrs. Robinson heightened the psychological battle he is fighting to break free from the values of the past generation and lead his own life.
Where marriage is also used as a family safety net in India, industrialization and urbanization posed uncertainty to women’s role in the family and society. Of course, it would be difficult to define women’s role in a society as multicultural as India, however, postcolonial reformists and nationalists have created a traditional idealized image of the woman of modern India. This image exemplified the colonial Victorian values where respectable women were devoted to family life and domesticity. As more women were educated and became part of the workforce, their domestic virtue was even more emphasized to maintain men’s patriarchal control. Thus, a new upper caste, middle-class culture was created, which clearly separates the private and public sphere and defines women as belonging to the former and men the latter (Chaudhuri, 2012). The Madonna-whore (chaste-promiscuous women) dichotomy has also been culturally intact to stigmatize women and to strengthen patriarchal values amidst the confusion of changing norms.
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| The last scene in The Middleman (1976) |
Middle-class Fragility
The Graduate captures the essence of the counterculture movement in America that grew after World War II and reached its peak in the 1960s. The movement questioned the establishment, class, and conformity, and criticized consumerism, middle-class lifestyle, and inequality, including gender inequality. The Middleman tells the story of a postcolonial India in the 1970s, about the educated middle-class struggling in a changing economy and politically unstable environment, about how their colonial past affected gender norms, cultural identity, and nation-building. Although, one is situated in a First World country and the other in what was a Third World country, both films illustrate the fragility of being “middle-class” in a changing society. Despite the main characters being both men, in both films gender issues are interwoven into the narratives.
The Middleman ends with the scene where Somnath came home from the hotel that night and his father was sitting and waiting under the dim porch light. Not too proud of himself, before entering the house, Somnath, in a low-key voice tells his father that the contract came through. His father smiles with great relief, hopeful of his son’s future. Meanwhile, Kamala stands quietly behind the curtains, in the shadows; she seemingly suspected the great lengths Somnath had gone to secure the deal. Then, the father, having no idea of his son’s ordeal, called on his daughter-in-law. “Somnath is home,” he said. Of course, it’s time for her to make tea.
Note: scenes from the films are taken from Youtube.
Special thanks to Dhritiman Banerjee for his comments on the initial draft of this article. Follow his blog, Literary Political.
References:
Chaudhuri, M. (2012). Indian “Modernity” and “Tradition”: A Gender Analysis. Polish Sociological Review, 178, 281–293. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41969445 [21 November 2021].
Dutta, Prabhash K. (2018) ‘Did Indira Gandhi impose Emergency to escape economic crisis?’ India Today. https://www.indiatoday.in/india/story/did-indira-gandhi-impose-emergency-to-escape-economic-crisis-1269992-2018-06-26 [28 November 2021].
Ganguly, Suranjan (2020) Encounters with the Forbidden: Satyajit Ray’s Pratidwandi and Jana Aranya https://quod.lib.umich.edu/f/fc/13761232.0044.103/--encounters-with-the-forbidden-satyajit-rays-pratidwandi?rgn=main;view=fulltext [31 October 2021].
Jodhka, Surinder S. and Aseem Prakash (2011) The Indian Middle Class: Emerging Cultures of Politics and Economics. https://www.kas.de/c/document_library/get_file?uuid=2a88c45c-60eb-6767-a2c4-8b098550842b&groupId=252038 [14 November 2021].
Kumar, Arun (2021) ‘The 1970s Indian Economy: A Period of Growing Strains and the Nation's Fight Against Poverty.’ The Wire. https://thewire.in/history/indian-economy-1971-poverty-bank-nationalisation-indira-gandhi [14 November 2021].
Maragou, Helena (2015) Lawrence R. Samuel, The American Middle Class: A Cultural History. Review https://journals.openedition.org/ejas/10458 [14 November 2021].
Punch, David A. (2018) The Graduate: Symbolism in Film. https://medium.com/@DavidA.Punch/the-graduate-symbolism-in-film-a549ef9882c0 [21 November 2021].
