India’s early colonial professional class remained rooted in ground rent, blocking full class formation
Evidence
I use the term ‘Third Estate’ here to designate a broad social category in the urban life of early colonial transition, wherein a nucleus of the professional petty bourgeoisie has been assembled in urban society but is yet to assume a full-fledged class character because most members of this emergent social category continue to overlap quite decisively with commerce and ground rent. Since industrial development was obstructed by the same colonial transition which had laid the basis for the genesis of the capitalist ground rent in India, the professional classes were increasingly detached from pre-capitalist agricultural bases yet remained rooted in the ground rent, predominantly rural but also urban, which in turn overlapped frequently with petty commercial enterprise and/or was consumed in the process of securing a genteel life despite low professional incomes.
— Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 1537
Categorization
XREF: Ahmad’s core materialist argument: colonial modernity shapes identity-bearing classes through economic structure, directly serving the reader’s critique of discourse-first readings. — connects to: Anglicized Indian elites faced permanent subordination despite assimilation — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on…, 367