The ‘middle class’ has become one of the key categories of economic analysis and developmental forecasting for all observers of India – whether from government, academia, policymaking, business or media. All this discussion suffers, however, from one major oversight: it assumes that the middle class is a uniquely urban category. Studies dedicated to understanding the middle class, in India and globally, almost entirely overlook its rural presence. As this book has demonstrated, however, more than a third of India's middle class is rural, and 17 per cent of rural households belong to the middle class. My purpose has been to bring this vast and dynamic population into view, and to fully confront the neglected questions surrounding India's rural middle class.

However, probing the development of the rural middle class required an exploration of the ways in which the middle class is defined theoretically, and the application of theoretical insights to generate empirical understandings. Given that there is no single overarching theory, critical pluralism came to be the order of the day. Three analytical lenses have helped me examine in considerable detail the making of the Indian rural middle classes – those of Marx, Weber and Bourdieu. This plural approach elucidates the dynamics of middle class formation in the wake of the introduction of economic liberalisation, and contributes to a holistic understanding of the economic characteristics, social composition, cultural practices, aspirations, everyday worlds and social identifications of the rural middle classes.

While urban India is being liberalised, rural liberalisation has been an uneven process in both economic and social terms. For some decades, agriculture has no longer been the primary focus of life in rural India. Diversification is now a central feature of rural economy and society, as households have undergone social and economic transformations, and in so doing have developed a new sense of class identity and aspirations. In the villages I have studied, and probably in many other parts of rural India, industrialisation has produced new social relations of production, accumulation strategies and labour relations. For the rural youths it has facilitated entry into the skilled labour market, a process they have accelerated with intensive pursuit of education and training, fast-tracked through the informal economy of technical credentials. The resulting rural middle class has created distinctive lifestyles, aspirations and consumption patterns. In what follows I will condense the findings of this book.