Watch it. Lest you forget. The Marie Antoinette edition watch crafted by Breguet in over 40 years, commissioned by the French queen’s lover, layered with gold and sapphire was never worn by her. She was guillotined before it was finished. It is a tragic testament to excess and a warning about the fragility of privilege. In today’s India, where a Titan sells a ₹40 lakh tourbillon and Rolex boutiques glitter in every luxury mall, that story feels eerily relevant. The luxury watch market is set to rise by 12 per cent a year; a Rolex here begins around ₹6 lakh and stretches to ₹80 lakh; a Patek Philippe crosses ₹20 lakh and often touches a crore. The market itself, worth about ₹14,000 crore, is small by global standards, yet its symbolism is immense. It tells us who India’s time now belongs to.
The number of millionaires, however, has surged to more than 3.7 lakh now, a rise of over 33,000 in just a year. The new money flows not just from boardrooms and Bollywood but from entrepreneurs, startup founders, real estate dealers, and even social media influencers from Tier II cities. The wealthy have multiplied, and their tastes have refined; the boutiques at Palladium and DLF Emporio disgorge IWCs and LV trunks. Luxury, once imported from Europe, now has an Indian accent, not of refinement, but of triumph. Yet behind this glittering rise lies the quiet erosion of those in the middle: the class that once maintained the country’s moral and economic balance. But look beyond the glass. India’s middle class, that self-proclaimed backbone of democracy, is bending under the weight of its own aspirations. Inflation has been eating its savings alive, food prices have breached eight per cent, and incomes have stagnated. Their wealth share has fallen from 43 per cent in the 1960s to barely 29 per cent now. They are the state’s reliable moneybank which pays direct taxes, GST, excise, and every invisible levy that oils the bureaucracy. The poor are too many to be taxed directly and the rich are too mobile to be caught; the middle class remains the government’s most compliant financier, trapped between guilt and duty. Every new surcharge, every price hike, every interest rate tweak lands hardest on them. Yet they are told to be patriotic consumers, to drive the economy with their shrinking disposable incomes.
This Indian middle class was not born of palaces but of paperwork. The India of kings and emperors had no middle, only rulers and subjects. It was under the British that a new caste appeared of clerks, teachers, accountants; men and women who spoke English and dreamt of upper mobility. After Independence, they became the scaffolding of the republic: its engineers, bureaucrats, and believers. Liberalisation in 1991 gave them their first taste of prosperity such as the affordable apartment, the car, the credit card, and for a few decades, it seemed they were ascending for good. But in the new India, the escalator is slowing. The average Indian earns about ₹2.4 lakh a year—roughly ₹20,000 a month—and even the self-identified middle class floats somewhere between ₹15,000 and ₹50,000. The economy’s foundation is narrowing. Growth now depends on a tiny fraction of consumers at the top, while the base comprising workers, small traders, the rural poor drags behind. The middle, which once mediated between these extremes, is struggling to survive.
The ancient empires of the world such as Rome, the Mughals, the Qing thrived on a binary: the few who ruled and the many who obeyed. Colonialism later perfected that pattern in the name of efficiency. Today, India risks recreating it as an economy of contemporary emperors and servants, where the rich consume and the rest endure. The modern republic is edging back toward an imperial order, gilded by GDP figures and luxury ads. The question is not whether India is growing—it is. The question is who owns that growth, and how long it can last before the ticking stops. If the middle class collapses into mere endurance, the timepiece of democracy may keep running, but without meaning. The rich will count their watches, the poor their wages, and the middle—the quiet custodian of reason, education, and restraint—will slowly fade from the dial. History, like time, has a habit of circling back. The guillotine, in our age, may not be made of steel but may come in the form of silence, apathy, or revolt. But it always comes for those who mistake the complications of the chronograph for the dodgy tax count of wealth. Growth without balance becomes spectacle; wealth without fairness becomes decay. The luxury market may be booming, but a nation that forgets its middle forgets its time. The Marie Antoinette edition watch ticks on; exquisite, intricate, but utterly indifferent to the helpless heads falling around it.
