An analyst of class

Eric Hob-sbawm, the Bri-tish Co-mmunist historian who died recently, might have called the current debate over class a storm in a British teacup. But rumblings in China and Hobsbawm’s own penetrating comments about India suggest Karl Marx knew what he was talking about when he wrote that “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles”.

I loved Hobsbawm’s description of what he saw as the ultimate “bizarrerie” of Indian radicalism — Christmas dinner hosted by “the doe-eyed Renu Chakravarty” at her Calcutta home. “After ham and turkey, provided by Renu’s cousin, secretary of the Calcutta Club, which clearly had not abandoned the menu of the days when no Indian would have been allowed into the building except as a servant, came biryani and finally Christmas pudding, also provided by the club and chewing pan (betel nut).”
Unpardonable in an analyst of Homo hierarchicus, Hobsbawm was wrong about the Calcutta Club. Far from being racially exclusive, it was started as an ethnic bridge and to counter the whites-only Bengal Club. But he rightly wondered at the miracle of “an extraordinary anglicised, modern-minded ‘Establishment’ of perhaps 100,000 people drawn from highly educated (that is, mainly wealthy) families” comprising former loyalists of the British Raj as well as people who fought for freedom governing India for a generation after Independence.
Class presents even more bizarreries in Britain, as one would expect from the source of bizarreries like first- and second-class university degrees, postal service and railway travel. Even more bizarre, George Osborne, the chancellor of the exchequer (equivalent of our finance minister), was caught the other day in a first class carriage without a first class ticket.
A wit suggested that since MPs demand first class travel on the grounds that they need the space and cushioned comfort to work on official files, first class should be renamed “working class”.
That might suit the ruling Conservatives who are setting up a separate organisation to attract blue-collar workers — the majority whose vote matters most in a democracy. Traditionally, working class folk were expected automatically to follow the lead set by their masters and betters. Perhaps that was why the Old Etonian Harold Macmillan, married to a duke’s daughter, attracted more working class votes in the 1959 general election than middle class Hugh Gaitskell and his Labour Party.
But that logic held true only so long as the ideas of the ruling class were also the ruling ideas.
Patrician politicians didn’t need then to remind police officers they were plebs because plebeians knew their place. As the hymn runs, “The rich man in his castle/The poor man at his gate, God made them high and lowly, and ordered their estate.”
Problems arose when high and lowly no longer abided by their estate. A frustrated Margaret Thatcher, the grocer’s daughter, denounced the concept of class as a Communist conspiracy to “group people as bundles and set them against one another.”
Her successor, John Major, promised a “classless society”. That revealing phrase reflected Major’s humble birth and the social aspiration that inspired the BBC accent he mastered.
Now come the Blue Collar Conservatives. As the group’s coordinator explains, “Securing the support of blue-collar voters is vital to the long-term future of the Conservative Party. Through BCC we hope to demonstrate that the Conservatives share the values of ordinary working voters and understand their aspirations.”
Things are simpler in China where, even more than in India, politics means money. If Wen Jiabao’s family really has made $2.7 billion, as an American report claims, his heirs will be doubly blest. They will be rich and they will be princelings (tai-zi-dang, literally Crown Princes Party, in Hanyu-Pinyin) as the privileged children of party stalwarts are called. But the fate that befell the high-flying Bo Xilai’s wife, Gu Kailai, and that probably also awaits Bo now that he has been stripped of immunity, shows that when China’s glitterati fall, they fall much harder than in Britain or India.
Hobsbawm was friendly in London with several fellow-travelling Indians. Among them he mentioned P.N. Haksar “who provided cover in Primrose Hill for the courtship of Indira Nehru with Feroze Gandhi and, as a civil servant, was the most powerful man in independent India” at one time. Also, the Old Etonian Mohan Kumaramangalam, his brothers and sister Parvati. He emphasised they were not just untypical of their societies. They were actually strangers to it, “exiled at home” to borrow Ashish Bose’s telling phrase.
His “admirable friend and comrade from King’s, the late Indrajit (‘Sonny’) Gupta”, is Hobsbawm’s illustrative example. “When the party put him in charge of leading the tramwaymen’s union in Calcutta, and later the jute workers of (West) Bengal,” Gupta “subsequently general secretary of the Communist party and briefly minister of the interior, had as much to learn about the Calcutta working class as any foreigner”.
That was because “class is at least as great a segregator of experiences as distance, culture or language”. Hobsbawm is careful never to deride or diminish its importance. He probably knew that many would extend to the subject of class Lady Bracknell’s famous
comment in The Importance of Being Earnest, “Never speak disrespectfully of Society. Only people who can’t get into it do that.”
As a fellow of both King’s College, Cambridge, and the British Academy, and president of Birkbeck College, Hobsbawm was showered with accolades, including the Balzan Prize (a million Swiss francs) and Britain’s Companionship of Honour. Laden with dignities, the Jewish-German refugee who believed in the Red utopia to the very end was himself part of the establishment, confident enough of class and society to reject a nighthood. Those paradoxes sound very Indian.

The writer is a senior journalist, columnist and author