MUMBAI, India — In India, waiting in line is not for the soft-elbowed.

When a line becomes necessary — say, while boarding a plane — some dutiful citizens will rise and form its initial trunk. Then, when the trunk appears too long to some, it sprouts branches. People create their own lines by standing next to, say, the fourth person in the trunk and hoping that others line up behind them. This process continues until you have a human evergreen tree, a single-file trunk of tender fools with impatient foliage on both sides.

There is a feline quality to standing in Indian lines. Certain parts of the man behind you — you don’t know which — brush against you in a kind of public square spooning, the better to repel cutters. (Women do less touching.) Still, this is no deterrent to cutters. They hover near the line’s middle, holding papers, looking lost in a practiced way, then slip in somewhere close to the front. When confronted, their refrain is predictable: “Oh, I didn’t see the line.”

But in a churning India, the line has new resilience. Businesses are becoming vigilant about enforcing queues, and a growing middle class, more well-off and less survivalist, is often less eager to cut. In this way, India’s experience seems to feed into a tradition of seeing line etiquette as a marker of modernity, of graduating from chaos to order, whims to rules, brutality to gentility, scarcity to abundance.

The reality may be more complicated, though, for in India and elsewhere, the reigning idea of modernity involves not just an evolution into queuing but also an evolution out. As scrums succumb to queues, queues are succumbing to the free market.