Negotiating Tradition and Modernity : Middle-Class Dilemmas in Colonial Malabar

Pawan Varma in his work on the Indian middle class, while citing Nehru’s famous ‘Tryst with Destiny’ speech in English, claims that the creation of a native elite in its own image was the most spectacular and enduring achievement of British colonialism in India. The triumph of colonialism and its unabashed confidence had given it a rare seductive power, and the members of the Indian middle class from the nineteenth century onwards did not shy away from imitating the lifestyle of those who were sent to govern them. However, it was not a simple process of blindly surrendering to the colonising ideas of the West. While selectively accepting aspects of the Western culture, the Indian middle class tried to maintain their distinct identity by possessively clinging on to what they considered the markers of indigenous tradition. This paper examines how the middle class in colonial Malabar negotiated these contradictory pulls.