Friendship, Consumption, Morality: Practicing Identity, Negotiating Hierarchy in Middle Class Bangalore

Abstract

This article examines the shared social and cultural practices of a group of young middle‐class men in Bangalore. In examining the changes between two generations of Bangalore's labour aristocracy, it highlights the role of friendship in providing a space for the negotiation of hierarchies, both old and new. Core concerns within the text include: the centrality of consumption within middle‐class identity; the transient nature of egalitarian youth culture; the impacts of new forms of labour and capital; and the resulting new forms of hierarchy. Where there has been a tendency in wider middle‐class discourse to moralize on materialism, practices of consumption and narratives of morality appear here not as mutually exclusive but, in their reference to the social and economic changes associated with Bangalore's role as a commercial and technological hub, as increasingly overlapping.