South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal
16 | 2017 Changing Family Realities in South Asia?
Parul Bhandari and Fritzi-Marie Titzmann (dir.)
Electronic version URL: http://journals.openedition.org/samaj/4364 DOI: 10.4000/samaj.4364 ISSN: 1960-6060
Publisher Association pour la recherche sur l'Asie du Sud (ARAS)
Electronic reference Parul Bhandari and Fritzi-Marie Titzmann (dir.), South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal, 16 | 2017, « Changing Family Realities in South Asia? » [Online], Online since 14 September 2017, connection on 10 April 2020. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/samaj/4364 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/samaj. 4364
This text was automatically generated on 10 April 2020.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. 1
SAMAJ-EASAS Series Series editors: Alessandra Consolaro, Margret Frenz and José Mapril. image This thematic issue is the fifth in a series of issues jointly co-edited by SAMAJ and the European Association for South Asian Studies (EASAS). More on our partnership with EASAS here.
South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal, 16 | 2017 2
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction. Family Realities in South Asia: Adaptations and Resilience Parul Bhandari and Fritzi-Marie Titzmann
Contesting the Norm? Live-in Relationships in Indian Media Discourses Fritzi-Marie Titzmann
Pre-marital Relationships and the Family in Modern India Parul Bhandari
Negotiations of Home and Belonging in the Indian Graphic Novels Corridor by Sarnath Banerjee and Kari by Amruta Patil Ira Sarma
Negotiating Middle-class Respectable Femininity: Bangladeshi Women and their Families Nazia Hussein
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Introduction. Family Realities in South Asia: Adaptations and Resilience
Parul Bhandari and Fritzi-Marie Titzmann
1 This special issue seeks to understand the South Asian family in contemporary times, both in its presence and absence, its control and contestation, and its potential to adapt as well as its resilience. The articles in this issue are a collection of compelling exploratory projects that explain the resistance, resilience, and adaptability of the family and its norms and values at the intersection of broader changes, particularly in relation to gender, technological intervention, media, and processes of individualization.1
2 The family occupies a pivotal space in the reality and imagination of societies and individuals. It is a crucial building block of identities, often mapped through the conjugal and filial relationships it produces. The family is shaped by—and also shapes— social, cultural, and technological changes. It is therefore pertinent to explain the status, structure, and symbolism of the family in the contemporary lives of South Asians who are undergoing an array of shifts. Being largely dominated by a patriarchal lineage and a family system, South Asian societies are witnessing changes as evident in the increasing participation of women in the work force, the rise of youth culture that shapes the experience of new intimacies, and a public discourse of love and companionship, as well as amendments to existing laws and the enactment of new laws. The family therefore, finds itself propagating continuity of certain normative behavior as it is also compelled to adjust its norms and values. These complex processes of modernization, the increasing use of technology in everyday lives, migration, and the
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imaginations and desires of South Asians, raise the question of the place and role of the family in contemporary times and how it adapts to—and also shapes—these changes.
3 It is this question that has led to the compilation of this issue, since we aim to study the changing realities of contemporary South Asia and the special significance of the family. In doing so, we refrain from proclaiming whether the institution of the family, defined in strict terms, either persists or is on the wane. Instead, through rigorous empirical evidence, we argue that the family and the idea of the family, exists in multiple forms in contemporary South Asia. We explain, for instance, that the idea of the family is constituted or reinforced by media representation, and we also delineate the ways in which the family intervenes in the more individuated spaces of love and romance. With this issue we bring attention to the ways in which the family reflects, and at times resists, the shifts and ruptures that shape South Asian reality.
4 The reality of the family exists in a wide spectrum of social, economic, and cultural practices and representations, and the contributions in this issue bring attention to these from multiple perspectives. They focus on the relation between the individual and the collective (the family, state, and community expectations; facilitating structures (law and technology); different geographic and urban spaces (big and small cities); and both male and female voices of Hindu and Muslim families. This compilation of papers is certainly not exhaustive and does not include, for example, the perspective of other religions such as Jainism, Christianity and Sikhism; nor does it explain the dynamics within the grand-parental generation. Despite these gaps, this collection of papers aims for diversity in geographical setting, religion, gender, and perspectives on the interaction between individuals and institutions. We hope that this rich empirical detail and the diverse theoretical positions articulated in each paper will help to understand the realities of the family, both in its representations and practices of adaptability and change.
5 In the remaining part of the introduction give an overview of the scholarship that has most influenced the compilation of these papers as well as the methodological, theoretical, and empirical approach of this special issue. We then introduce the three main axes through which this special issue can be read: 1) The Individual-Family- Community Nexus, 2) Gender Roles and Agency, and 3) Technology and Media.
Situating Studies on Family
Assessing Social Change
6 Early scholarship has embedded the study of the family in the framework of kinship structures, The most prominent examples being Irawati Karve’s (1953) exhaustive work on kinship types in India, Kathleen Gough’s (1959) study of matrilineal kinship amongst the Nayars, T.N. Madan’s (1965) study of Kashmiri family and kinship, and Veena Das (1976) and Paul Hershman’s work on Punjabi kinship (1981). The Alliance Theory, as popularized by Louis Dumont, also became an important approach to understanding families on the Indian subcontinent (1957). Works by Dumont and Karve particularly brought attention to the differences between North and South systems of kinship. Karve, however—as Uberoi explains in her comprehensive book Family, Kinship and Marriage in India ([1994] 2008)—contends that despite the diversity observed, India’s
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unity may be located in the existence of the joint family and the Hindu caste system throughout the subcontinent.
7 Subsequent scholarship studied the family without necessarily placing it within the framework of kinship. This shift in discourse was mainly motivated by a need to study social change, particularly in the wake of processes of modernization and urbanization (Ahmad 1976; Epstein 1962; Gupta 1971; Kapadia 1966; Karve 1953; Mandelbaum 1970; Singh 1973; Vatuk 1972). A key focus of these earlier studies was whether the households were shifting from joint to nuclear (Vatuk 1972; Uberoi 1994, 2006). The backdrop of this concern was two historical and global factors of established knowledge and imagination, and forces of migration. British administrator Thomas Henry Maine had understood the joint family system as an essential feature of Indian society, and subsequently, Indian sociologists as Karve (1953), Shah (1964, 1968) and others also emphasized the idea of the family as a unifying system of Indian society. In the period of industrialization and urbanization, the urban centers were beginning to be populated by increased migration. The question that loomed large, then, was whether this iconic joint family system would indeed persist? Secondly, there emerged in the 1950s and 1960s, a growing popularity of modernization theory as propounded by Parsons and Bales (1955), according to which one of the measures of a society’s progress, from “traditional” to “modern,” was an increase in the nuclearization of households and individualization. Scholars were keen to assess whether Indian society fit this paradigm and what the implications using such a paradigm would be.
8 This generated immense debate, with some scholars explaining that there has indeed been a nuclearization of households, and some others arguing that joint family households continue to be the norm, explaining that the bonds between migrants are re-invoked in the migration city since migration is enabled by kin networks (Rao 1970; Shah 1973/4; Vatuk 1972). These debates still seem pertinent to South Asian contemporary times that are witnessing processes of urbanization including migration for work. The changing times yet again raise questions about the form of family structure that persists and the impact of the intervention of technology, migration, and legal advancements on the importance of family. It is in this context that the viability of the family as an institution and a feature of unity, continues to be an important subject of enquiry, and Uberoi’s article “The Family in India” (2006) provides important insight into this enquiry. Uberoi makes an argument for distinguishing between a family and a household. She explains that while there very well may be a process of nuclearization of households due to urbanization in India, this does not necessarily indicate a decline in the joint family but simply a change in household composition. Moreover, households too, much like individuals, have a “life cycle” of development that may lead the individual from a nuclear household to a joint family household (Uberoi 2006:282). She explains, for example, that migrants might move to new cities as individual workers but “the passage of time combined with the governing principles of household formation and the pressures of urban living may well encourage the development of joint households in due course” (2006:282–83).
9 According to Uberoi, the crucial question then is not about the form of residence but the persistence of the family value system and norms of behavior (2006:283). She argues that “there is a strong and generalized commitment to joint-family values and norms of kinship behavior”, even in the nuclear household (2006:283). In other words, the household structure or type does not necessarily overpower the importance of
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family values and norms, as the family retains its image as a key figure of morality and unity. In fact, works on media and representation have demonstrated the role of Bollywood movies and TV in consolidating the image of a happy joint family as the main cultural symbol of Indian society. Uberoi (2001) and Juluri (2008) demonstrate with their analyses of audience reception and visual symbolism of the romantic blockbuster movie, “Hum Aapke Hain Kaun” (HAHK 1994) that this movie ushered in a new era of “clean and morally uplifting ‘family’ film[s]” (Uberoi 2001:313) in commercial Hindi cinema, and in doing so, re-constructed the ideal of the family. By simultaneously choosing the Indian family as its main theme and setting and addressing Indian families as its target audience, the film propagates a return to associated normative values of the family. Juluri explains the popularity of HAHK and subsequent similar films as a process of re-traditionalization (2008). In fact, Uberoi also argues that in times of globalization, it is the family, rather than the nation, that is a suitable symbol of “the unity, uniqueness, and moral superiority of Indian culture in a time of change, uncertainty and crisis” (2001:170).
10 Following this work, we also argue that the realities of the family elude debates, however pertinent, on the change in household composition. The family now exists in various forms and ensures that its values are observed despite distance and separation. In this issue, we attempt to bring out this perspective by explaining, for example, the presence of the family in its represented absence (Sarma) in graphic novels. We also situate the family in spaces that are not immediately associated with them but outside their realm of surveillance, as in pre-marital romances (Bhandari, Titzmann). Our intention is not to claim that the family has not undergone changes. Instead, we are motivated to tease out the ways in which family appears and works in modern spaces and times.
Site of Socialization and Oppression
11 Whilst family is seen to provide a sense of unity to individuals and the nation, it is also, as scholarship would argue, an important site of oppression, and of socialization of conformist gender roles. Anthropologists such as Dube (1988 and 1996) and Fruzzetti (1982) have underlined the ways in which the family socializes young girls to appropriate roles for women right from an early age. John emphasizes how, from the colonial period onwards, “the sphere of the home, family and marriage relations were critical institutional sites for social reformers and for the first generation of feminists” (John 2005:712). Some of the most radical critiques of the family already occurred during the 19th and early 20th centuries, such as social reformers’ fundamental critique of such “traditional” practices as child marriage, sati, or the prohibition of widow remarriage (John 2005:712). Feminist scholarship has particularly critiqued the institution of the family as hetero-normative, patriarchal, exclusionary and hierarchical. As Chayanika Shah writes, “[q]ueer, feminist, Dalit and left politics have all engaged theoretically and practically in an attempt to critique and transgress the familiar boundaries of marriage and family” (2005:709). Furthermore, feminist scholarship, such as John (2005) and Rao (2005), emphasize the entanglement of family and caste as factors of oppression on the subcontinent. John, furthering the Dalit critique of caste-based marriage alliances, states that the anti-caste movements, beginning during the early 19th century, were alternate ways of politicizing the
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institutions of marriage and family “by addressing sexuality, gender, caste and religion altogether” (2005:712f).
12 Whilst scholarship has delineated the specific ways in which the family promotes inequality and asymmetrical gender roles, another set of scholarship has highlighted women’s agency in dealing with the structures and norms of various forms of oppression. Ethnographic works have demonstrated that, far from being passive recipients, women have their own strategies to negotiate with familial suppression (Jeffery and Jeffery 1996; Gold and Raheja 1994; Thapan 2009).
13 The strength of the family’s role in socializing submissive and oppressive positions according to one’s gender roles comes into question particularly in times when women are increasingly employed in paid work and are undergoing the cultural experience of “exposure.” In the context of their research on women in India’s IT work culture, Fuller and Narasimhan use “exposure” as the key term for explaining the effects of IT employment on women’s lives (2006). They describe the dynamics of social and cultural experience as increasing new opportunities, advancing skills, and maximizing general knowledge and life experience. Interestingly, “exposure” in the context of a career in the software industry was often contextualized as “empowerment” by the interviewed employees: “Through their productive complicity with the demands of their work, women IT professionals have partially but significantly reconfigured gender relations and, as they themselves sometimes put it, have gained freedom and opportunities that their mothers never had.” (Fuller and Narasimhan 2008a:191). Fuller and Narasimhan thus explain that due to the emancipation through professional careers and individual income, young women’s hierarchical position changes in relation to their families (in- law) (2008a:196f, 203). A similar inference is drawn by Ravinder Kaur’s research on migration processes. In her work she has looked into different forms of mobility, varying from national and transnational bride migration (2012) to Indians’ work migration to Cambodia (Kaur and Shruti 2016). Through these works Kaur argues that hierarchical positions are changing due to an altered distribution of spending power, agency, and thus independence from greater family structures. Herein, it is also important to note the role of the State that becomes an important stakeholder in this changing landscape of women’s relations to household, work, and the family, as it promotes social welfare schemes and passes important legislative laws. The most recent bill passed in the Indian parliament that is seen as crucial to women’s working status is the Maternity Bill of 2017, which has increased paid leave from 12 to 26 weeks for women and has laid down the provision of providing child day care in the vicinity of offices.
14 Our aim is to explicate this dynamic nature of the family wherein, on the one hand, it is an oppressive and dominant structure, especially with regard to gender roles and duties, and on the other hand, it has transformative abilities—becoming a space to externalize resistances, especially for women—and in this process it itself undergoes transformation. In this special issue we highlight this dynamic aspect of the family as we bring attention to the strategies of resistance adopted by women to follow their chosen paths in love and work.
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Marriage, Love, and Modernity
15 An aspect of change that has characterized modern India is the shift—real, imagined, purported—to “love” or choice marriages. At least in public discourse, if not in real practice, there is an insistence on choosing a spouse based on feelings of compatibility, affection, connection and love. In her extensive work on the middle class in Bengal, Donner (2016) explains that love is a crucial identity marker for being modern. Another recent ethnographic work that focuses on issues of companionship, love, and marriage is by Fuller and Narasimhan, on the Vettimas of Tamil Nadu (2008b). Fuller and Narasimhan explain that the IT sector employees working in Chennai desire a “companionate marriage,” wherein they choose a spouse based on interpersonal compatibility. However, they also highlight that these companionate marriages follow caste endogamous rules. In other words, the spousal choices fall somewhere along the spectrum of “arranged” and “love” marriage, and it is this middle-ness, and not just the claim to “love” that constitutes the modernity of the young middle-class youth (Bhandari, 2018 forthcoming). Scholarship has highlighted that the dichotomy between “love” and “arranged” cannot withstand the reality of matchmaking in the South Asian subcontinent. These works reveal the reluctance and inability of the young to self- describe their experience in an oppositional construction of “love” versus “arranged” (Titzmann 2014:120ff), and therefore they popularly use terms such as “arranged-cum- love” marriages (Uberoi and Singh 2006) “companionate marriage” (Fuller and Narasimhan 2008b) and ensure a “family oriented individualism” in their process of spouse-selection (Titzmann 2013).
16 The desire to insert the sentiment of love into marriage and into the spouse-selection process is surely a process of individuation, by which the individual wants to assert his/ her identity. The pertinent question then is: where does the family and its values fit into in this process? This special issue explores this complexity; it reveals that individual love and other processes of individuation are not just to de-tachment but in some ways, reattach the individual to the family. The papers showcase that certain experiences, such as engagement in romantic relationships or separate living arrangements from parents, allow individuals to distance themselves from the family and engage in modern activities. Yet, these contexts always intersect with familial duties, responsibilities, norms and behavior such that they both contest and support the supremacy of the family. In other words, the family is not necessarily absent in spaces of dating, pre-marital relationships, and live-in arrangements. In fact, they continue to have presence in these everyday intimacies.
17 Keeping in mind these strands of scholarship and perspectives on the role and position of the family in understanding social change, the papers that constitute this special issue can be read through the following three main themes:
1. The Individual-Family-Community nexus
18 The realities of the family are constituted and expressed at multiple levels, including that of the individual, the community, and the state and two of the papers in this issue focus on these levels of interactions. The papers by Bhandari and Titzmann explain the transforming position of the family in relation to the individual’s pre-marital associations and decisions on marriage. Through different methodological lenses, these papers draw our attention to the couple—dating, in romantic relationships, engaged, or
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living-in, and relate their position to the family. They argue that even in a coupledom outside the purview of marriage, the family continues to intervene, advocating its values particularly in relation to the gender roles in the couple. Bhandari’s ethnographic research amongst the middle class youth of Delhi, for example, queries the rhetoric of individual choice and freedom in pre-marital romances: she demonstrates the ways in which the family structures these relationships in expected and unexpected ways. The notion of individualism is also tied to ideas of desirable modernity—which amongst other aspects include the performance of consumerism— and Titzmann’s paper addresses this nexus of modernity, individualism, and consumerism. Titzmann analyses a commercial advertisement and the online responses it generated to argue that advertisers disseminate the relevant consumer good in a framework of negotiation between a live-in relationship and the parental generation, and she thereby explores the facets of change and continuity in Indian family situations. She also juxtaposes the legalization (on the state level) of live-in relationships with its lack of social acceptance, and unpacks this unique interaction between the family and legal innovation in the context of the relatively new youth culture of romance and partnership, namely live-in relationships. Following on from these problematics, one of the main aims of this special issue is to explain that the debate about individualism and the role of the family ought not to be situated in binaries but should be understood as a dynamic process, which is shaped by considerations including middle-class identity, consumerism, and global culture.
2. Gender Roles and Agency
19 An important theme that brings together these papers is the ascription and construction of gender roles. A growing female workforce in highly qualified occupations, an increasing dispersion of families, as well as continuing global migration, have all changed the living situations of households, particularly for women, who may live away from their parents for purposes of work or may work away from home for long hours. These circumstances certainly cause anxiety and moral panic amongst families who want their daughters and daughters-in-law to be employed and contribute financially to the household, yet at the same time fear the loss of control over their sexuality and social life. One way of exercising control, then, is by inculcating ideals of respectable femininity (Belliappa 2013; Radhakrishnan 2011) that monitor their work cultures, leisure engagements, and romantic encounters. Whilst the women do obey these injunctions to some extent, they also resist their control mechanisms through various strategies.
20 Explaining this dynamic relationship between the family, women, and gender roles, the papers in this issue highlight the construction of femininity as enabled by the family through its practices of control and domination, while also bringing attention to the resistances of women in accepting gender roles and the use of their agency in negotiating these roles. In her paper on pre-marital relationships amongst the middle class of Delhi, for example, Bhandari explains that girlfriends are judged on their ability to adjust and adapt to the family, and they resist these expectations in different ways. Hussein describes how Bangladeshi women’s negotiation with normative conceptions of respectability measured against their domestic and caring roles are set in an area of tension between global trends and local customs. Based on qualitative in- depth interviews, she explores highly-educated professional women’s reconstruction of
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respectable femininity within the family. In doing so she shifts the focus of respectability research in South Asia from using a binary construction such as “good” and “bad,” to how women make and remake their respectable status and class privilege in neoliberal Bangladesh.
21 The papers in this issue also argue that agency should be understood as a non-static concept describing the capability to act within a certain, often limited, framework of social expectations and opportunities. As the debate around agency oscillates between intentionality and resistance, we understand the concept, in Sherry Ortner’s words, “as a form of intention and desire, as the pursuit of goals and the enactment of projects” (Ortner 2006:153). This interpretation is seperate from an ideological understanding of agency as resistance and can therefore also capture those acts that appear to strengthen conventional and even patriarchal structures. All four papers in this issue deal with varying forms of agency, in one way or another, be it freedom (and solitude) through individual urban migration (Sarma), the agency to negotiate a different form of relationship with the family (Titzmann, Bhandari), or working women’s ability to carve out new spaces and ways of establishing respectable femininity (Hussein).
3. Technology and Media
22 The use of technology and media in everyday life in contemporary South Asia makes the interaction of family with these media—in usage and representation—a compelling field of research. Dasgupta and Lal (2007) examine those aspects of interpersonal relationships that are difficult to assess sociologically and belong more to the realms of literature, mass media, art, and “folklore.” They show that literary and cultural representations articulate emotional conflicts and tensions within interpersonal relationships in varied and nuanced ways. In many novels, films, and other cultural works, the family serves as a locale for challenges and changes that reflect global and locally specific developments. Or, as works on the new era of “Bollywood” family cinema have shown, films may contribute to the reinforcement of conservative ideologies (Uberoi 2001; Juluri 2008). In the past few years, scholarship has also diverted attention to the phenomenon of matrimonial websites and the ways in which this medium of spouse-selection is appropriated, whether as more individual centric or catering to a familial imagination of marriage. Titzmann, for example, has argued that the websites enable a “family oriented individualism” where individual choices are made keeping in mind the suitability of the family (2014). Kaur and Dhanda also take a similar position as they explain that the matrimonial websites allow the individuals to make an “informed” choice (2014:289), allowing a modernity of expansion of choices that allows transgressions of physical boundaries but not of caste, class, religion, and region (2014). Kaur and Dhanda caution us to not view the intervention of technology to cause any structural change to the widely accepted principles of marriage, for the matrimonial websites ensure that the individuals do not make any wrong choices—such as falling in love with the “wrong” type of person, of the wrong caste, class or religion (Kaur and Dhanda 2014).
23 Keeping in mind the growing import of technology and media in the everyday lives of South Asians, this issue includes two papers explore the dynamic relationships between the family and the media, in particular the representation of family (or its absence) in media. Sarma’s literary analysis of two recent graphic novels highlights the perspective of young urban migrants. In relation to “Kari” (2008) by Amruta Patil she discusses a
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young woman’s journey in the “big city” (i.e. Mumbai) and renegotiates questions of belonging in relation to home, family, and friends, thereby highlighting a new understanding of these concepts. In Sarnath Banerjee’s “Corridor” (2004) the reader is confronted with a comparable migration story and the protagonist’s effort to establish a “home away from home.” Titzmann analyses a commercial television advertisement depicting a family situation of conflict while synchronously publicizing a desirable consumer product.
Conclusion
24 The papers in this issue aim at tackling questions of change, rupture, renegotiation, and continuity of the norms, practices, and representations of the family from different disciplinary and thematic angles. The four articles adopt different methodological tools including ethnography, interviews, media and literary analysis, and address the issue of the family through several themes: sexuality and relationship; class, community, and gender; and media representations of the changing family. This special issue examines the presence of family in spaces and experiences that might be considered outside the family’s influence. Also, it explores family influence in the very absence of a depiction of family in graphic novels about the contemporary lives of the young adults who migrate to other cities for work. In that sense, a seeming absence of the family in the lives of these young adults is not taken as a strong indication of their dwindling control or influence.
25 We explain that the family is adapting but is also resistant to change, as it re-aligns itself with the changing realities of contemporary South Asia brought forth by technology, processes of individualization, media presence, and state involvement. Above all, this issue will help pose pertinent questions that will inform and shape further research. The articles ask, for example: What is the significance of the family in contemporary times? Do individuals allow their family access to and dominance over their life that is also increasingly shaped by processes of individualization, and if so how? What do the media representations of the family indicate—drastic change or continued presence? And are these representations close to reality?
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Titzmann, Fritzi-Marie. 2014. Der indische Online-Heiratsmarkt: Medienpraktiken und Frauenbilder im Wandel. Berlin: Frank & Timme.
Uberoi, Patricia. 2006. “The Family in India.” Pp. 275–307 in Handbook of Indian Sociology, edited by V. Das. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
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Uberoi Patricia and A. Tyagi Singh. 2006. “Learning to ‘Adjust’: The Dynamics of Post-Marital Romance.” Pp. 217–47 in Freedom and Destiny: Gender, Family and Popular Culture in India, edited by P. Uberoi. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Uberoi, Patricia. 1994. Family, Kinship and Marriage in India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Uberoi, Patricia. 2001. “Imagining the Family: An Ethnography of Viewing Hum Aapke Hain Koun … !” Pp. 309–51 in Pleasure and the Nation, edited by R. Dwyer and C. Pinney. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Vatuk, Sylvia. 1972. Kinship and Urbanization: White Collar Migrants in North India. Berkeley: University of California Press.
NOTES
1. Two prior events contributed considerably to the discussion and research presented here. The international workshop on “Media, Technology and Family”—held at Humboldt University in Berlin in early 2016 (organized by Prof. Nadja-Christina Schneider)—provided an inspiring opportunity for exchange among the participants and further development of the presented arguments. Based on this network, we organized a panel on “Changing Family Realities in South Asia” at the ECSAS conference in Warsaw, July 2016, where more researchers on family-related themes joined in. It is from these two forums that we have brought together the articles for this special issue. Since not all participants from both these forums were able to include their research in this special issue, I would like to particularly thank Nadja-Christina Schneider, Ravinder Kaur, Mary E. John and Shilpa Phadke for their contributions to the ongoing discussion on family research in South Asia.
ABSTRACTS
The family as an institution garners much attention in the contemporary South Asian world, raising questions about its continued resilience and forms of change and adaptation. With forces of modernization, advancement of youth cultures, greater participation of women in the work force, and migration, the centrality of the family in the everyday lives and experiences of individuals is queried and piques interest. The four papers in this special issue deal with distinct aspects of realities and representations of the family in India and Bangladesh. These papers can be read against the background of three main themes, which, though not exhaustive, we believe form an essential analytical and thematic framework within which to understand the family in contemporary South Asia: the individual-family-community nexus; gender roles and agency; and technology and media. Situated in the context of these three themes, the papers herein explain that the family and the idea of the family exist in multiple forms in contemporary South Asia. The aim of this special issue then is to trace the ways in which the family realigns itself with social developments by adapting to certain changes and also undertaking strategies to maintain its central position in sites and situations of change.
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INDEX
Keywords: family, South Asia, representation, social change, media, gender
AUTHORS
PARUL BHANDARI St. Edmund’s College and The Centre of South Asian Studies (CSAS), University of Cambridge, UK; Centre for Social Sciences and Humanities (CSH), New Delhi
FRITZI-MARIE TITZMANN Institute for Indology and Central Asian Studies, Leipzig University, Germany
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Contesting the Norm? Live-in Relationships in Indian Media Discourses
Fritzi-Marie Titzmann
Introduction
1 As compared to premarital dating, which is increasingly acceptable among the urban middle and upper classes in India, live-in relationships pose a far bigger threat because they undermine the sanctity of the bond of matrimony. Cohabitation of unmarried couples has always existed but in the public imagination, it is mostly confined to the extravagant world of film celebrities1 or the Hindu pantheon, which includes several extramarital, polygamous and other unconventional couple constellations (Gudermuth 2006).
2 Since 2010, the Supreme Court has ruled that women in live-in relationships should have the same rights as married women. (Yadav and Yadav 2011). Despite a 2015 legal affirmation that such relationships are equal to marriage (Firstpost 2015), controversies in the Indian parliament as well as within society continue. The adversaries’ main argument is well known: the unmarried cohabitation is incompatible with Indian culture and values. We thus observe an obvious contradiction between the legal framework and its social acceptance. Media discourses reflect this tension.
3 A recent trend in television advertisements to stage unconventional social constellations—for example, a woman’s remarriage (as in an advertisement by jewelry brand Tanishq in 2013)—includes an advertisement released by the tea brand Red Label in 2015, featuring a live-in couple facing an awkward family situation that eventually dissolves into intergenerational harmony. The one-minute commercial visualizes not only an alternative to the married-couple situation but invites us to re-imagine the relationship between parents and children as well. Based on the assumption that society and media co-construct each other, this article asks whether the act of rendering the unconventional visible is already a challenge to the idea of the Indian
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family. The co-construction of media and society can be understood through the concept of medialization—or “mediatization”—which is currently being discussed in divergent ways as a meta process of socio cultural change. The term describes an increasing media influence on different social and cultural spheres (Hepp 2009; Kim 2008; Bergmann 2006). The key argument is that increasing medialization and socio-economic change reciprocally impact each other and thus co-construct social, cultural, and economic dynamics. Therewith, the medialization approach is a clear deviation from one-dimensional modernization-theory approaches. Media shape our lifeworld as content, and we as media recipients or media producers interpret, appropriate, and in many cases design this content.
4 Similarly to the above stated research question (whether visibility of the unconventional is already a challenge to the idea of the Indian family) referring to the encoded messages of advertising, a discussion about the reciprocal relation between visibility and social acceptance takes place around queer sexualities in South Asia. Gugler traces the development of formerly negative or ridiculing representations of marginalized sexual minorities on mainstream media towards more positive and balanced depictions and news reporting (2014:150f). He argues that an increasingly medialized discourse renders alternative sexual identities more visible and thus impacts the legal process negotiating legality versus criminalization of homosexuality.
5 Using a media culture perspective, this article further analyzes the conflictual online discourse evolving around the Red Label short film. In particular, looking at viewers’ comments reveals conflicting attitudes that reflect discursive trends in Indian society, although the validity of the findings is necessarily limited to a certain section of society and based on exemplarity analysis, rather than big data.2 On the one hand, the concept of live-in relationships is regarded as a welcome and progressive development, even though it is considered a “western” concept that has influenced Indian society. On the other hand, concerns about the decline of the family system and the rise of a commitment-phobic generation are expressed by self-proclaimed conservatives as well as YouTube users.
6 This article is structured in three parts. Part I serves as an introduction into the social and legal reality of cohabitation in India and the connected discourses. Parts II and III contain the Red Label case study. In analyzing the advertisement and its audience’s responses, I loosely follow Hall’s approach of encoding/decoding, whereby production is considered as encoding meaning whilst the audience decodes it: “In a ‘determinate’ moment the structure employs a code and yields a ‘message’: at another determinate moment the ‘message,’ via its decodings, issues into the structure of social practices.” (Hall 2006:165). Hall delineates how the meaning structures of production and reception do not necessarily correspond symmetrically (2006:166). While all media production encodes meaning which consequently circulates into the discursive sphere, decodings do not inevitably follow from encodings (Hall 2006:171). Decoding is shaped by social and economic relations which in turn influence how the media message is translated into the discursive sphere and into social practice. Some codes have been “naturalized” and have become part of the dominant-hegemonic discourse (Hall 2006:167). In the case of the Red Label advertisement, gendered markers of Indianness and “good” behavior fall into this category. Other “signs” of advertising language are read in highly ambiguous and polysemic ways and reinforce Hall’s argument that there is “no necessary correspondence” (2006:171) between encoding and decoding. This
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paper is structured into three parts. Following an introduction to relevant discussions (Part I), the Red Label case study is divided into two parts in order to understand the potentially conflictual dynamics of meaning production. Hence, Part II analyzes the advertisement in an attempt to locate the encoded meaning and connect it with a critical assessment of seemingly “progressive” advertising in competition with the industry’s inherent capitalist intention. Naturally, my own academic, ideological, and personal positioning comes into play here and determines my “reading” and analysis. Part III analyzes viewers’ comments on YouTube and contextualizes their decoding positions within larger social and academic debates.
I. Live-in relationships: legal situation, social reality and media/culture discourses
7 In India, unmarried couples have been considered equal to married couples in terms of rights since 2010. For example, an unmarried woman is entitled to inherit her deceased partner’s property.3 In a further landmark judgment on April 13, 2015 the Supreme Court ruled that couples in live-in relationships will be presumed legally married (Firstpost 2015). Despite these progressive judgments, controversies around the moral validity of cohabitation continue to polarize Indian society. Marriage continues to be the most important rite of passage and secures the viability of the lineage through procreation. Generally speaking, hardly any event is more important in South Asia than the wedding and the celebration usually takes on a very public character to announce the new family alliance. It functions de facto as an initiation into adulthood and actualizes the transition into entirely new social roles. In his work on Hinduism, Michaels states that premarital sexuality, illicit children and the dissolution of a relationship appear even more problematic given the public aspect of marriage and the associated rituals (2006:128). However, acts that occur in an accepted realm of silence are somewhat excluded from this proposition.4 Therefore, heterosexual marriage as a normative and exclusively acceptable relationship model is hardly ever challenged. One exception would be the initiative “Vina Mulya Amulya Seva” (Invaluable Service Without Any Price), that provoked nationwide attention.5 Natubhai Patel founded a non-profit organization in Ahmedabad in order to bring elderly singles together, with the aim of creating marital or live-in relationships. “There is no maximum age for marriage. No-one can stop two adults from living in either,” a BBC photo reportage quotes the founder (BBC News India 2012). Patel started the organization after the devastating 2001 earthquake in Gujarat which left—in addition to a total death toll of around 20,000—many people widowed and without family; thus the initiative is welcome and increasingly popular. Moreover, it does include widowed and divorced senior citizens in its matchmaking attempts. The propagation of remarriage, especially for widowed Hindu women, is particularly noteworthy since it breaks traditional taboos and may be read as a signifier of slow social change. On the other hand, the fact that “Vina Mulya Amulya Seva” exclusively targets senior citizens makes clear that this particular space is created for those who are, due to their age and connected social status, no longer subject to social rules in the same way as young people. Young people are just beginning to fulfill their expected social roles. For them, the “right” marriage significantly influences social status during adulthood.
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8 Given the ritual and social importance of marriage for the entire family, unmarried couples often lack the blessing and support of their families. Furthermore, they face practical problems such as renting a house or staying in a hotel room together (Chatterji 2015). Recently, the Delhi-based start-up StayUncle was set up in order to help couples renting a room in Indian metro cities (Balachandran 2016).6 Such initiatives originate in response to increased moral policing and persistent opposition to unmarried couples living together within parts of Indian society (Brosius 2013:266ff). One of the most prominent cases of moral policing is the infamous Aksa Beach hotel raid (August 6, 2015) on Madh Island and at Aksa Beach in Mumbai, where around 40 couples staying in hotel rooms were arrested and charged with “public indecency” according to section 110 of the Bombay Police Act (“Behaving indecently in public” from 1951). The couples were held in police custody for nearly five hours and charged with a fine of Rupees 1,200. Three cases were also registered under the Prevention of Immoral Trafficking Act that pertains to prostitution (Devnath 2015). Being a very drastic example, the incident immediately led to outcry in the media and furious debates among citizens and politicians, online and offline.7 Above all, it generated a discussion over ideas of public and private space. The critics’ fundamental argument is that public intimacy and certain behavior by women (e.g. drinking) is morally wrong, even socially destabilizing. Several authors have noted that displays of affection might be acceptable in certain “privatized/modern public space” (malls or coffee shops) that are clearly marked as middle class. But intimacy in public parks renders less-privileged couples more vulnerable, as their exclusion from the above mentioned “privatized/ modern public spaces” additionally reveals a classist division in moral judgment (Brosius 2013:271f; Phadke 2007:1514): Individual emotions are said to colonize public space and hurt the sentiments of a moral community …. Within this interpretation, pleasure becomes lust and obscenity, and lovers in public become public nuisances and an insult to conservative moral values (Brosius 2013:270). Against this background and the ever-lurking danger of physical attacks, unmarried couples often lack privacy, acceptance and safety. We thus observe an obvious contradiction between the liberal legal framework and social reality. Nevertheless, following the legal recognition, a growing visibility of live-in relationships in the media is observable. News media have reported extensively and overall approvingly on legal proceedings regarding the status of live-in relationships since Indian courts ruled them legal in 2005.8 Television serials and movies9 increasingly broach the issue and a widely aired television advertisement picked it out as a central theme, as I will show later on. The growing medial visibility creates an impression of growing social acceptance, but discussions and debates taking place in response to media content mirror social anxieties and suggest that something uncomfortable persists. Commentary functions in online media constitute a very interesting source for a new form of audience or readership studies. As Chauhan has shown with his India-based study on advertising language, media is an integral element of modern culture and society and advertising holds a peculiar position between marketing-driven intentions and hidden messages (2010), or in Hall’s words “encoded meanings” (2006). Although a more comprehensive analysis of a variety of media sources would be preferable, the following case study of Red Label’s tea advertisement and the online responses it generated reflect most of the dominant discursive themes I have identified so far in academic and public discussion.
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II. Progressive Advertising? Red Label’s “Surprise Visit” (2015)
9 Originally scripted for nationwide television broadcasting on Hindi-language channels, the company Brooke Bond Red Label also posted the advertisement via its official account on YouTube and added the description: “Can hospitality melt away the differences? Watch the heartwarming film of Red Label tea and find out. It’s a story about old and new. About relationships and conflicts. About tea and togetherness.”10
10 The one-minute commercial’s storyline is rather simple. The short film opens with an elderly couple ringing at their son Chirag’s door to pay him a surprise visit on his birthday. The first sentence uttered by the mother includes a comment on his pale looks with the promise to get him a wife soon.11 Suddenly, we see a girl brushing her teeth appearing in the background, accompanied by melancholic guitar music, which creates an uncomfortable moment rife with anxieties about what will happen next. She is eventually introduced by Chirag to his parents as Pallavi with whom he is living. The mother’s smiling face immediately drops to an unbelieving expression and she watches every move Pallavi makes with consternation. The awkward situation is finally dissolved by Pallavi who quickly puts on a dupatta,12 rushes into the kitchen and prepares tea for the utterly surprised parents. She not only serves them but even considers the father’s diabetes and the mother’s preference for two spoons of sugar. After confirming that she added cardamom to the tea as well, Chirag’s mother is finally pacified and concludes that Pallavi’s tea is not bad. Indicated by the music getting louder and more cheerful, the audience thus witnesses a nearly scandalous situation dissolving into intergenerational harmony and the hope of mutual acceptance through a cup of good tea.
11 Red Label uses a controversial topic to equip its consumer-good with associations of social progressiveness and therein employs a marketing strategy that seemingly encodes a social message into the advertisement. Research on advertisements has shown, that “[b]eyond the objective to sell products and services, advertising is noted to affect social attitudes, define social roles and influence cultural values” (Gabler 2010:2). Red Label had already gained attention in the past for its socially progressive commercial titled “Neighbors,” in which Hindu and Muslim neighbors share a cup of tea and thus create intercommunal harmony.13 Advertisements with messages that are interpreted as driving social change can be found in other commercial branches apart from tea advertising as well. Tanishq, an expensive jewelry brand, aired a television commercial displaying the remarriage of a Hindu woman and the groom’s acceptance of her daughter from a previous marriage.14 Following Gabler’s argument, images of gender roles and the formation of the couple are constituted through public imagination, which is strongly influenced by mass media, including advertising (2010). But as we see in “Surprise Visit,” discourses on couples transcend gender constructions and touch on multiple other social constructions, e.g. the parent-child relationship (Chirag and his mother), the couple-family relationship (Chirag and Pallavi towards his parents), and even more generally the idea of the collective. Red Label is not the only Indian brand to cash in on the representation of live-in relationships. The fashion brand Anouk15 as well as the real estate website 99acres16 have increased the visibility of cohabitation by presenting it as part of daily life. The Anouk advertisement is particularly notable because it features a lesbian couple getting ready to be introduced
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to the visiting parents. It thereby additionally breaks the taboo on homosexuality. Referring to the 99acres advertisement, a blogpost on swener.com reads: Capturing the growing trend of live-in in the urban areas, 99acres.com has cashed in on the concept pretty well. As the room-mate announces his girlfriend would be moving in with him, the guy is left clueless for finding an apartment. Friends form a major part of our social circle, and the way the guy accepts the girl moving-in with his friend, shows the changing perception of the society as well. (swener.com) It is of course debatable whether advertising does in fact mirror the “perception of the society,” as the blogger above claims. Nevertheless, Hall has remarked that “though the production structures of television originate the television discourse, they do not constitute a closed system. They [on] draw topics, treatments, agendas, events, personnel, images of the audience” (2006:164). Following his argument, the audience is both source and receiver of the encoded message. But just as significantly, the companies promote themselves as agents of social change, a stance which resembles the traditional post-independence Indian governmental attitude towards media production.17 The didactic entertainment of the nation-building era transforms into consumerism with a social message in post-liberalization India. The emphasis on this interpretation lies in the psychological aspect of capitalism, which advertising may trigger. Television commercials such as the ones discussed above actualize affective reactions, a phenomenon which in turn generates clicks, likes, or higher ratings, translating into capital profit. Thereby, advertising companies simply employ the postindustrial logic of information capitalism, where the creation, distribution, use, and manipulation of information is a significant economic, political, and cultural activity.18
12 Phadke argues, focusing on the growing visibility of explicit sexuality in Indian advertising, that mere visibility does not enhance a growing acceptance of individual sexual desires but more a consumerist commodification. She uses the term “sexual transformation” as distinct from sexual revolution because changes are driven by a market-oriented media and consumer-goods industry (Phadke 2005:75). Although what we see in “Surprise Visit” is not explicit sexuality, I suggest that Phadke’s argument may be applied to the Red Label advertisement as well. To encode an aspect of social transformation that still does not create a major friction with existing social practices, yields good commercial success for the product that is being marketed. Hence, the advertisement itself does not challenge the idea of the Indian family, although it is perceived this way by many viewers.
13 Another interesting example is a recent Indian television commercial for Tinder, a popular global dating app, where a mother approves of her daughter going out on a date. While being celebrated as groundbreaking by some, others criticized the stark resemblance to matrimonial advertisements19 and mocked Tinder for “going desi” 20 (Nettikkara 2016). The idea remains that the daughter eventually has to have a heterosexual monogamous marriage. The commercial’s tribute to modernity is her going out and finding that man. This perspective intersects with the image of the “New Indian Woman,” a concept that has been constructed and mediated by the media since the 1980s (Mankekar 1999 and 2009), although it was first located within colonial nationalist discourses (Chatterjee 1989).21 The contemporary “New Indian Woman” pursues a global lifestyle but sticks to “Indian values”; she combines tradition with modernity and stays “Indian at heart” (Chaudhuri 2001; Fernandes 2000; Mankekar 1999; Munshi 1998). I have argued elsewhere that this image is found in the
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aspiring middle and upper classes which constitute the prime target group for online matrimonial advertising (Titzmann 2011a:54). The Tinder advertisement follows a similar principle by showing the daughter going out on a date in line with her mother’s expectation of her finding an eligible groom.
14 Based on a decoding of what I perceive as visual sub-codes that mark a gendered Indianness in the dominant-hegomonic discourse, Pallavi in “Surprise Visit” adheres to certain “Indian values” by putting on a dupatta and attempting to please her possible future in-laws with her skills of servitude and hospitality.22 The fact that she is challenging the norm by living in with Chirag recedes to the background. Both protagonists manage to balance their modernity with a simultaneous Indianness. In summary, the advertisement is open to multiple interpretations. The progressiveness of taking up a counter-normative constellation with the depiction of a live-in relationship cannot be denied, while the didactic of social advertising is reminiscent of pre-liberalization developmental television. On the other hand, advertising is essentially embedded in consumer capitalism. One could conclude by calling Red Label’s strategy consumerist progressivism.23 While I decode the advertisement’s progressivism as a clever marketing strategy and attempt to point out the subversion’s limitation, viewers respond strongly to the “hidden messages” they detect in the short commercial.
III. Viewer Interpretation
15 The following section takes a closer look at how viewers interpret the Red Label commercial. The analyzed sample included all posts made until October 30, 2015, which amounts to 65 analyzed comments (including replies to comments). On April 7, 2017 the video had 101,419 views, 250 likes, and 29 dislikes. 30 different registered YouTube users posted below the video and from an interpretation of their user names the numbers of male and female users are almost equal. 12 names appeared male, 13 female and 5 could not be related to any gender. However, user names are chosen freely and might not reflect the actual gender of the person. Among the defining characteristics of social media platforms like YouTube are interactivity and non-verifiable authors. Both pose challenges to existing textual-analysis approaches. Interactive functions can be taken into account via the traceability of discussion threats rendering possible an exploration of dialogical discussions emerging between two or several users. But as Jayachandran in her methodological discussion on the analysis of reader comments to online news observes, “[t]he anonymity afforded through concealing identities while commenting could result in ‘utterly aggressive content’ that impedes constructive discussions” (2015:48). She further refers to studies concluding that writing under pseudonyms lowers the intellectual quality of the comments as well as the author’s responsibility for them (Jayachandran 2015).24
16 The analytical methodology applied in this paper consists of textual analysis in an attempt to understand the decoding positions of viewers who commented on YouTube. I have generated the main themes following the grounded-theory approach which corresponds to Hall’s understanding of decoded messages (Mey and Mruck 2007; Hall 2006). The findings generated through this method can be grouped into two thematic clusters: “Gender roles and the family” and “Indian culture versus ‘Westernization,’” both of which will be explored in the following sections.
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Gender roles and the family
17 The most discussed topic among the viewers’ comments was the girl’s behavior. Comments were more or less unanimous in the observation that Pallavi perfectly fulfills her prescribed gendered role. As mentioned above, by serving tea she adheres to principles like servitude, demureness and hospitality that are conventionally expected from a daughter-in-law. A viewer comments: “yeah, the girl getting tea part is not good… too clichéd” (Kakul Singh).25 Another one writes: “I’m sure several people especially pseudo feminists kinds will still have the problem with the girl getting the tea” (raina1161) and receives a reply from Agratha Dinakaran: “Well, I’m yet to see an ad where guests come over, and it’s the boyfriend/husband who rushes to the kitchen to get tea and snacks.”
18 Several viewers also asked what would have happened if these were the girl’s parents and came to the conclusion that a live-in relationship would have been even less acceptable from this perspective, therewith confirming different gendered standards within society that are mirrored in the narrative of the commercial. Widely discussed is the symbolic meaning of Pallavi putting on a dupatta before serving tea to her boyfriend’s parents. While some commenters are confused about the implied message, others identify the dupatta as the crucial turning point of the narrative: “what part shows her SANSKAR—a dupatta of her OR live with her boyfriend i m confused western style with indian touch……….incredible indian” (bhordia). 19 Sanskār (संकार) is a Sanskrit term used in Hindi that translates literally as a “sacrament,” which is celebrated in a particular rite but denotes culture and tradition. The confusion about how to categorize the advertisement—as “western” because it features a live-in relationship or as “Indian” because the girl wears a dupatta—is indicative of how strongly certain ideological constructions are connected to markers of appearance and an imagined “westernization.” Another viewer replies to this comment: “One dupatta holds all the sanskaars” (Rahul Shankhwar). The above- discussed, highly-gendered, visual symbol and behavioral pattern are apparently decoded by most viewers in line with a dominant cultural discourse of Indianness, similar to my interpretation in Part II. Nevertheless, the confusion regarding the intended meaning reinforces Hall’s argument of media products’ polysemic value and multiple possible positions of decoding.
20 Women’s double role as earners and housewives connected to a discussion of equality in relationships is another topic that would come under the overarching theme of gender roles in this analysis. The perceived simultaneous modernity of the relationship together with the strongly gendered performance is a starting point to criticize differing expectations towards men and women: “It just shows that despite everything, women are still expected to, and will be judged on their roles as domestic wives.” (Agratha Dinakaran).
21 It is striking that the discussion of gendered roles immediately becomes a battleground between defenders and attackers of feminism as well as ideas of gender equality. From a feminist point of view, the stereotypical depiction of the entire social scenario is to be criticized for its representation of women as obedient and homely. The above quoted comment by raina1161 on “pseudo feminist’s kind” already indicates a strong prevailing discomfort associated with the label feminism. A considerable part of the
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thread of posts consists of a paradigmatic discussion between three users (raina1161, Agratha Dinakaran, Sectum Sempra) who fight over ideas of gender equality and their interpretation of the commercial. Again, viewers’ comments reveal oppositional decodings of the same “product,” presumably depending on their own gendered and ideological positionality. Their conversation unfolds mostly dialogically via the reply function. It starts with Agratha Dinakaran, whom I have identified as female according to her user name, and who is insulted after criticizing the advertisement as stereotypical because of the strongly gendered roles: “instead of ranting about the video, make your own video with your bf bringing your parents the tea cup” (Sectum Sempra to Agratha Dinakaran). From that point onwards, the discussion increasingly escalates: Something as simple as raising a point of not showing enough men helping out in household chores is a rant now. Kind of explains why Indian men actually do the least amount of household work in the world. :) (Agratha Dinakaran to Sectum Sempra). Even with all this feminazi bullshit going on these days, I have rarely seen any couple in which the woman is earning more than the man. … Now, if the guy is earning more, the girl is supposed to be more involved in the domestic work. Makes sense? The commercials which shows a woman bringing a cup of tea, also shows she is a housewife, which is equality (Sectum Sempra to Agratha Dinakaran). In this comment, the emphasis does not lie on a division of male and female skills or chores but on the viewer’s understanding of equality in terms of an equal distribution of work. The viewer does not want to stand out as a misogynist but simultaneously exposes a deep-rooted aversion to feminism. An entire movement of women’s rights is dismissed by comparing it to Nazis and the term feminism is being used as an insult. The debate eventually leads to a point where not only is Agratha’s criticism laughed at, but she is accused of “harming everyone”: You are looking only at the bad apples, and I this is really harming everyone. This video had nothing to do with feminism, but you made it that way. Stop poisoning everything (Sectum Sempra to Agratha Dinakaran). It is not made clear who or what exactly she is meant to harm or poison but one possible interpretation is that the strong rejection of anything perceived as “feminist” also includes a fear of feminism as a destructive force that challenges and unsettles social standards. Shilpa Phadke argues that it is important to note the difference between feminism and gender equality: The discourse of equality is the easiest one for the state, for instance, to support, propagate, and attempt to institutionalize. Feminism(s), however, while they would include the idea of equality, are also a political critique of patriarchal power relations, and focus on the transformation of structures and institutions (Phadke 2015:64).
22 She contextualizes her article within a globally resonant discourse that young women nowadays actively distance themselves from feminism and elaborates on her own classroom experience teaching gender studies: “For young women, their feminism is precarious because it places possible heterosexual romance at risk by marking them as ‘anti-men,’ or so they perceive. Further, it often places them in an antagonistic position with their families” (Phadke 2015:64f). While leaving open the question of which gender is hidden behind the user name Sectum Sempra, the strong antagonism could well be understood within Phadke’s explanation.26 Viewers vividly discuss whether the depicted scenario seems realistic or not. The majority agree that the commercial does not reflect a realistic intergenerational relationship and that the easy acceptance of the
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live-in scenario is rather wishful thinking.27 Nevertheless, the effort to encourage social change is welcome and positively commented upon: “The ad is good and highlights a new age of parents” (raina1161). Remarkably, the normative framework of the highly hierarchically structured Indian family system pervades viewers’ interpretation. Given the social power structure, parents need to change in order to render social change possible. Viewers decode this effort as the inherent social message of the advertisement: “That’s what they are trying to change… parents ki mentality that it’s okay!” (TheFreeSpiritedSoul).
Indian culture versus “Westernization”
23 The idea of a normative and culturally rooted Indian family further serves to demarcate “western” culture from “Indian values.” Viewers relate to the structure of the traditional joint family, whereby several generations live under one roof, as Indian and perceive a live-in relationship as the “western” opposite: a nuclear and individualistic relationship of two people, often without the blessing of their respective families. “Are some young Indians way to cool to live with there families now? Gora28 wannabes” (SuperKing604), criticizes a viewer. Others go even further by accusing Red Label of threatening the traditional value system: “dumb is this company to buy such creative ideas destroying the value system of the culture” (Deepak Lanka).
24 At the core of the above quoted complaints lie anxieties around westernization, moral breakdown and the loss of tradition. The family as the most important social institution stands as a fortress of tradition and morality to be protected against alien influences and decay (Dasgupta and Lal 2007; Poggendorf-Kakar 2003; Uberoi 2003): [P]ublic opinion in India has been obsessed with the spectre of the imminent break- up of the Indian joint family system through processes of urbanization, industrialization, westernization, individualization, and the liberation of women (Uberoi 2001a:327). In anthropological literature, India is considered the prime example of a functioning “Joint Family System.” Based on Sanskrit scriptures, indological research has interpreted the joint family as the traditional family form of India. Despite the general acceptance of the symbolic importance of the Indian joint family, the definition, composition, functions, history, and future of the concept remain unclear. Although its decline has been predicted since the colonial era with much pessimism (Uberoi 2003:1062ff), most authors agree that the Indian family, particularly embodied in the joint family system, represents an ideological construction and code of conduct rather than a specific household formation (Dasgupta and Lal 2007; Uberoi 2003).
25 More recent studies have emphasized the roles of individuals and families as factors for change and social mobility as opposed to earlier studies focusing mainly on the caste system (Kaur and Shruti 2016; Sharma 2011b). Nevertheless, the joint family as a “traditional” ideological construction remains and is also closely tied to political ideas that stress the primordial Hindu identity of India and its social values and norms (Poggendorf-Kakar 2003:179f). It finds consistent confirmation within popular Hindi cinema (Uberoi 2001a). Another political aspect is the equation of the Indian family with the nation. Family rhetoric is central to nationalist discourse, exemplified by the conceptualization of “Mother India” (or the goddess Bharat Mata) and expressions like “the global Indian family.”29 Poggendorf-Kakar stresses the Hindu nationalist connotation of the contemporary discourse around “Mother India” but she also notes
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that the metaphor of the nation as goddess can be traced back to a synthesis of nationalism and Shakti worship in 19th century Bengal (2003:184f). Following this logic, the nation is conceived as a family and the family is conceived as the core cultural principal of Indian society. Former Indian President Abdul Kalam co-authored a book titled “The Family and the Nation” (Mahapragya, Jainulabdeen, and Kalam 2014). The book cover reads: “Only a strong and happy family can lead to the birth of a noble nation,” thus further perpetuating the nation-family nexus.
26 The discussion about the east/west divide essentially circles around the superiority of relationship models, wherein so called “arranged marriages” are thought of as culturally Indian and “love marriages” or live-in relationships are attributed to a “western” interpretation of modernity. Meena Khandelwal has dealt extensively with the assumption that in the “West” people marry out of love, while in the “East” marriages are arranged (2009). Arranged marriage exemplifies the problem of exaggerated cultural difference. It is constituted by both material needs and popular discourses of love, marriage, and family. It occupies the intersection of gender and nation, and is described as an exotic cultural practice in the United States, and signifies “family values” in Indian communities (Khandelwal 2009:584). She further argues that this logic clearly shows orientalist streaks. However, she points out that in the case of marriage the “East” is constructed as rational and the “West” as irrational. In orientalist discourses the distribution of attributes is usually the reverse (Khandelwal 2009:586). The juxtaposition of free romantic love with arranged marriages proves untenable. Dating, argues Khandelwal, does equally maintain socio- economic stratification. Most marriages in the USA and European societies are contracted within socio-economic classes and not across. Despite a rhetorical shift from material concerns to love, social reproduction remains the pivotal function of marriage within nearly all social and cultural contexts (Khandelwal 2009:592). In regards to the Indian context, Mody rejects the distinction between love and arranged marriage in favor of a classification that distinguishes between personal and social choice (2006). The Red Label commercial not only appears to bring out the east/west and arranged/ love divide, but the debate is also highly judgmental and emotionally charged. Self- proclaimed experts like the viewer Ayla Balaga clearly demarcate what is morally and socially of higher value from their point of view: im a social psychologist who has worked in the states…n I have specifically studied such relationships & hv compared more conservative relationships … If you see the western lifestyle… n then view the statistics… its shocking how many relationships are constructed… even they started with the whole idea of “live in” relationships decades ago…. The thing it won’t stop there…. Just keeps getting worse n out of control… now hookups n even online prostitution (Ayla Balaga). While looking closer at the discourses taking place around live-in relationships in the wider online sphere, the accusation of delaying commitment by not wanting to marry is a recurrent theme. A blogger by the name Samiksha Wadhwani writes: If an analysis is made of need of such relationships, avoiding responsibility would emerge as the prime reason. The lack of commitment, the disrespect of social bonds and the lack of tolerance in relationships have given rise to alternative to marriages (Wadhwani 2013). Similar accusations are not unfamiliar in a global popular discourse: the thirty- somethings of today are often called the undecided generation suffering from fear of commitment.30 The sociologist Eva Illouz has argued that a fundamentally capitalist logic of consumer choice can be seen as an explanation (1997). Too much choice results
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in having difficulties committing oneself because of the ever lurking thought that something better could come up. Hence, it comes as no surprise that most of the pro- cohabitation groups and posts contain references to liberalism, choice, freedom, and individualism.31
27 In her comment, Balaga argues that high divorce statistics and moral decay—e.g. “hookups”32 and “online prostitution”—are the eventual outcomes of live-in relationships compared to “conservative relationships,” i.e. marriage. As indicated in her comment, sexuality is closely related to the issue of culture and western influence. In this line of argument, live-in relationships refer to illicit sexuality and threaten the priority of controlled (female) sexuality. The holy bond of heterosexual matrimony forms the basic module within the above-discussed family conceptualization. Unconfined sexuality, consequently, undermines the moral superiority of the entire construction. Cohabitation, which is imagined inclusive of sexuality outside wedlock, as well as unmarried couples being sexually intimate in hotel rooms or public spaces, appears to threaten the values connected to the family’s symbolism, thereby threatening Indian culture. Recent incidents of moral policing indicate an overall hostile attitude towards relationships outside marriage. Balaga’s comment thus points to her perception of an encoded threatening “message” in the Red Label advertisement. Her own reading is situated within the normative discourse on the Indian family system and its entanglement with nationalism and morality. Within this context, many scholars have noted that women’s sexuality is the main site of anxiety. Mankekar links female sexuality also to middleclassness: [A]spirations to upward mobility into the middle class were frequently expressed in terms of a greater preoccupation with female modesty and respectability and, in many cases, an increased surveillance of women’s sexuality (Mankekar 2004:411). Bearing in mind women’s responsibility to protect and reproduce the symbolic Indian family, her respectability signifies not only her personal virtue but also that of the nation.33 Challenges to the normative family are therefore highly uneven along gendered lines, as the roles of Pallavi and Chirag in the advertisement clearly indicate. Feminist scholarship has particularly critiqued the institution of the family for being hetero-normative, patriarchal, exclusionary and hierarchical (Shah 2015).34 A perceived breakdown of patriarchy is therefore often decoded in terms of moral decay. Similarly to Balaga, another viewer paints a scenario of ever-increasing moral deterioration if commercial advertisements continue to feature norm-breaking social settings: “What’s next in this series? Parents visiting during a gang bang and enjoying a cup of tea made by a stripper in a dupatta?” (Rahul K).
28 Within the highly controversial debate about what constitutes Indian culture and which morality is valid, viewers express strongly diverging decodings. I think they are promoting acceptance of love, in whatever form it may be. Live-in isn’t immoral, it is two people who love each other staying together and living a happy life. I sometimes worry how twisted our definition of virtues and principles are. Love. Live. Share. Care. that is what morals should be judged on, on pseudo ideas of what we consider culture, defining Indian culture via such constructs only brings bad name to the culture (Irene). Interestingly, in this comment Irene challenges monolithic and conservative morality apostles but simultaneously expresses the intention of not bringing a “bad name to the culture.” What stands contested is again the idea of Indianness in relation to sexuality and morality.
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Conclusion
29 In summary, I grouped viewers’ discussions on gendered roles, feminism, ideas of equality and the role and behavior of the parents under the cluster “Gender roles and the family.” The second group of themes mostly included debates on Indian culture as opposed to the “West” with a particular focus on sexuality and relationship models. As the discussion illustrates, viewers are apparently confused about the exact message conveyed by the advertisement. Some read it as an emancipatory, liberating move towards a more egalitarian representation in commercial television; others decoded an inherently dangerous message aiming to destroy the dominant social fabric; and a third group of commenters is still not satisfied with the level of progressiveness and criticizes the authenticity of the representation. The research for this paper did not include an interrogation of the advertisement’s producers who could have provided further clarification about the (intended) encoded meaning. However, this was not the initial intention. This paper rather asked whether the act of rendering the unconventional visible is already a challenge to the idea of the Indian family. The answer can only be an ambiguous one as the subversion of the norm remains limited, both because the advertisement articulates counter-normative (live-in relationship) and normative markers (stereotypical gender roles), and because advertising is generally embedded in consumerism. The encoding/decoding approach thus reveals asymmetrical meaning structures of production and reception as well as polysemic decodings by the audience. The protagonist Pallavi fulfills the image of a caring, quiet, adaptive and family-oriented bride-to-be, and by indicating chastity with the dupatta that she puts on, she confirms conventional notions about gender norms. It is, as the YouTube discussion clearly points out, not the son but she who has to convince his parents of her value. Therewith, the commercial resembles similar ones that feature typical situations where the boy’s parents come to see a possible bride. As Rajeswari Sunder Rajan (1993) argues, commercial advertising redefines the themes that are the traditional terrain of women’s movements. Issues like sexuality, marriage and family are dealt with in a conflict-free and harmonious way. “Advertising targets the most frequent sites of women’s oppression—sexual harassment, domestic work, dowry demands, marriage rituals, the joint family—and redefines them in glamorized or, alternatively, trivialized terms as the sites of remaking female identity” (Rajan 1993:132). “Surprise Visit” conforms to the same ideal as commercials that feature women as protagonists to advertise kitchen equipment or healthy products for the entire family. Modernity remains superficial and merely technical. Red Label’s modernity is implied in the message of “soft” cultural change through the representation of an unmarried couple. But it does not negate the factuality of a television advertisement trying to sell a tea brand. The logic of advertising, Phadke argues, transforms the appeal of products from the rationality of utility to the aspirationality of social status (2005:69). That means the message shifts from “buy this product, it’s useful” to “buy this product and it will make you modern, progressive and yet retain your Indianness.” This again is connected to the very logic of information capitalism and advertising’s affective potential. “Click capitalism” seems to work well in the case of “Surprise Visit.” The emotional uproar created by the commercial has made Red Label’s marketing strategy successful.
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30 Taking viewers’ perceptions into account, one can further argue that discourses on family are deeply embedded in representations of the nation. Cohabitation poses a threat to ideological constructions of an essentialized “Indian family” and several entangled discursive themes such as (female) sexuality, relationship models, and intergenerational relationships yield an overall impression of immorality and non- conformity with an alleged “Indian culture.”
31 Some further observations are worth summing up. Despite the nature of commodification that is attached to commercial advertising, it is undeniable that in reality an individualized decision to live together causes changes in family relationships. As I have noted above, many viewers definitely see this aspect in “Surprise Visit.” We are confronted with two rudimentary altered relations: a different concept of partnership that is framed as egalitarian and self-chosen, and a different form of parent-child relationship, that is less paternalistic and authoritative. Within the second context, the role of the father as a decision-making patriarch is remarkably reduced. It is the mother (in-law) who needs to be pacified and convinced. But overall, the central themes—in the analyzed YouTube comment section as well as the popular discourse on live-in relationships—appear to be not solely holy matrimony or the relationship between Chirag and Pallavi as depicted in the advertisement. Additionally, the issue of controlling sexuality seems to override all other aspects and determines whether a constellation is acceptable or not to the respective viewers.
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NOTES
1. A Facebook group called “Live-In Relationship/Cohabitation in India” posted a photo album displaying “Famous Live-In Relationships in India & Abroad,” which included many celebrities from the film industry, e.g. film stars Freida Pinto and Dev Patel. The group has 463 likes (retrieved November 29, 2016). 2. I draw from various media resources and analyze them, following the grounded theory method (Mey and Mruck 2007). It is important to emphasize that I deal with representations which can only reflect attitudes. I do not base my observations on extensive field work. 3. In the Velusamy vs Patchaiammal case (2010), the Supreme Court held that “a relationship in the nature of marriage” must fulfill the following criteria: (a) the couple must hold themselves out to society as being akin to spouses: (b) they must be of legal age to marry; (c) they must be otherwise qualified to enter into a legal marriage, including being unmarried; (d) they must have voluntarily cohabited and held themselves out to the world as being akin to spouses for a significant period of time, and in addition the parties must have lived together in a “shared household” as defined in Section 2(s) of the Act. Merely spending weekends together or a one- night stand would not constitute a “domestic relationship.” The case also held that if a man has a “keep” whom he maintains financially and uses mainly for sexual purpose and/or as a servant it would not be a relationship in the nature of marriage. (CRIMINAL APPEAL NOS. 2028–2029 of 2010). The complete judgment of “D.Velusamy vs D.Patchaiammal on 21 October, 2010” (Indiankanoon 2010) is available online. 4. The dominant Hindu, upper caste, and middle class perspective falls short of acknowledging the diversity of social realities. John states that “significant debates on the intersections of caste and gender focus on paradoxes such as greater freedoms among the so-called lower castes and in Dalit family structures, compared to the strictures placed on upper caste women and their sexuality” (2005:714). Chakraborty (2012) and Grover (2011) refer to deviating realities in India’s poor urban areas where upward social mobility is more important than sexual purity. Similarly, Gudermuth states that upper classes and celebrities are somewhat excluded from the pressure of social conformity that particularly burdens the middle classes as representatives of a normative social order (2006). 5. See Sharma (2011a); Nagpal (2011); Ramgopal (2012). 6. StayUncle: http://stayuncle.com/home.
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7. Other highly medialized examples of moral policing include attacks in Meerut parks on couples (2005), the Mangalore Pub attack (2009), debates centering around practices associated with Valentine’s Day celebrations as “anti-Indian” and obscene (Brosius 2013:257, 266). 8. See Choudhary (2015); Prakash (2013); Shukla (2015). 9. An early example is Mahesh Bhatt’s film “Arth” (1982), a semi-autobiographical representation of the director’s extramarital relationship with Parveen Babi. Recent Indian films featuring live- in relationships include: “Salaam Namaste” (dir. Siddharth Anand, 2005), “Fashion” (dir. Madhur Bhandarkar, 2008), “Cocktail” (dir. Homi Adajania, 2012), “Shuddh Desi Romance (dir. Maneesh Sharma, 2013), “I, Me aur Main” (dir. Kapil Sharma, 2013), “Katti Batti” (dir. Nikkhil Advani, 2015). In Indian commercial cinema, however, extramarital affairs and adultery regularly end with negative consequences. Premarital dating is typically resolved either through a socially sanctioned marriage, which is then called “love-cum-arranged,” the couple’s separation, or an appropriate marriage with another partner (Gudermuth 2006). 10. Red Label India: Red Label – Surprise Visit, published on May 21, 2015. Links to YouTube videos are listed below the literature references. 11. The advertisement’s dialogues are spoken in Hindi. 12. A dupatta is a long shawl or stole worn over the chest and thrown back around the shoulders. It is part of a salwar kameez, a traditional dress for women in South Asia consisting of loose pants and a long shirt. The covering of the upper female torso is considered a sign of modesty and decency. 13. Red Label India 2014. 14. Tanishq Jewellery 2013. 15. Myntra, 2015. 16. 99acres.com, 2015. 17. On the state ideology of developmentalism with regards to television see: Singhal and Rogers (1989), Rajagopal (2001), Ohm (2001). 18. For research on information society or information capitalism, see e.g. Beniger (1986); Webster (2002); and the works of Manuel Castells. 19. For studies on the online matrimonial market and virtual friendships in India see: Agrawal (2015), Chakraborty (2012), Titzmann (2011a, 2011b, 2013). 20. “Desi” is a colloquial term derived from the Hindi word deś (देश) for land/homeland. It denotes people, objects or activities that either originate in South Asia or are perceived as typical. 21. In the nationalist discourse of the 19th and early 20 th century, the “New Indian Woman” denotes a non-westernized, politically emancipated and inherently Indian woman who is a fortress of essential “Indianness” and a supporter of Indian nationalism. Similar to her contemporary counterpart, the colonial concept was located in the educated middle class. 22. As one anonymous reviewer suggested, Collingham’s exploration of Indian food history may point to an additional possible interpretation of how a tea brand and the promotion of family (and communal) harmony are interconnected (Collingham 2006:188). She describes how tea- drinking was introduced by the British and—according to Collingham’s assessment—has contributed to the process of weakening intercaste differences. This leads us to Red Label’s slogan of “tea and togetherness” (Collingham 2006:201). Maybe this historical trajectory of drinking tea contributes—among many other factors—to the depiction of Chirag’s mother accepting a cup of tea from a stranger like Pallavi. 23. I would like to thank the anonymous reviewer for pointing out these three main strands of interpretation and suggesting the term “consumerist progressivism.” 24. For a more detailed methodological discussion on social media analysis see Jayachandran (2014) and Titzmann (2014).
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25. Many viewers use a colloquial mix of Hindi and English language, so-called “Hinglish,” which I explain only in relation to crucial terms or where an understanding for non-Hindi speakers appears difficult. Quotes from the comments include several spelling and grammatical mistakes. For the sake of authenticity I replicate them without correction. The name of the viewer who posted the comment is given in parentheses to indicate authorship. 26. I have made a similar observation about a strong dissociation from feminism as an ideological movement in an analysis of blog posts on the “Delhi gang rape case” (Titzmann 2014:94). 27. “Kaise parents ne kuch react nahi kiya [How (i.e. why) did the parents not react] ?????? my mother would have killed me” (Fauziya Maskati); “I’m a feminist and if there’s one thing that seemed wrong about this ad it’s that any guy’s traditional parents would just be okay with this over one fucking cup of chai.” (Sakina Sehgal) 28. Gorā (गोरा): white (Hindi). It is used as a colloquial term for foreigners from the “West.” 29. See: Mani and Varadarajan (2005) who write on the Pravasi Bharatiya Divas as “The Largest Gathering of the Global Indian Family” or Kantowsky (2002) who wrote an article on the new PIO card “Mother India ruft ihre Kinder” (“Mother India calls her children”). 30. In Germany, the impressive success of Michael Nast’s book on a generation that he calls “relationship-incapable” (2010) is but one example. Steven Carter’s “Men Who Can’t Love” (1987) is an earlier counterpart from the shelves of American relationship advice literature. 31. E.g. the Facebook group “Live-In Relationship/Cohabitation in India.” The cover photo shows a tropical sunset with the words FREEDOM written across the picture (retrieved November 30, 2016). 32. In this context “hookup” denotes a non-committed physical encounter. 33. For further studies on middleclassness, gendered family relations, and its representations in India, see Fernandes (2006); Donner (2001); Ganguly-Scrase; Scrase (2009). 34. For detailed studies on the entanglement of patriarchal power relations and the joint family system, see Ahmad (2003); Patel (2005); Rao (2005); Uberoi (2003).
ABSTRACTS
A recent trend in television advertisement of staging unconventional social constellations includes an advertisement released by the tea brand Red Label in 2015 featuring a live-in couple facing an awkward family situation that eventually dissolves into intergenerational harmony. The one-minute commercial visualizes not only an alternative to the married couple but invites us to re-imagine the relationship between parents and children as well. Based on the assumption that society and media co-construct each other, this paper asks whether the act of rendering the unconventional visible is already a challenge to the idea of the Indian family. Further, it analyzes the conflictual online discourse evolving around the short film. In particular, looking at viewers’ comments reveals conflicting attitudes that reflect different discourses in Indian society. Apart from the obvious topic of cohabitation, viewers “see” a multitude of interconnected themes reflected in the commercial and go on to discuss gender roles, sexuality and the visual symbols of “Indianness.”
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INDEX
Keywords: live-in relationships, advertising, family, social media, gender roles, sexuality, consumerism
AUTHOR
FRITZI-MARIE TITZMANN Institute for Indology and Central Asian Studies, Leipzig University, Germany
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Pre-marital Relationships and the Family in Modern India
Parul Bhandari
Towards local interpretations of love marriage
1 The binaries of “arranged” and “love” marriage have been popularly used to make sense of changing marriage practices in contemporary India, where the former is seen as a signifier of a traditional India and the latter an indicator of change, progress, and modernization. However, scholarship has problematized this simplistic binary conceptualization, arguing that elements of “choice” are also present in arranged marriages (Sharangpani 2010; Titzmann 2011), and that the reality of marriages is best captured in the use of in-betweens as in the case of arranged-love marriages (Uberoi and Singh 2006).
2 There is, however, also substantial focus on analyzing “love” marriages, as recent ethnographic works note that “love" is seen as an important trope for asserting modern identity in a globalizing world (Donner 2016; Hirsch and Wardlaw 2006; Twamley 2014) and provides insight into the contemporary values of individualism, entrepreneurship, and “enterprise culture” that drive much of India’s post- liberalization economy (Gooptu 2013). Whilst reiterating the feelings of love and choice, these works also critique the “modernist narratives of gradual and linear changes in marital practices from arranged marriages to self-chosen unions,” explaining that there are local experiences and interpretations of love marriages (de Neve 2016:1249). They allude to a new set of intimacies and desires of the young, in particular, companionate marriages, emotional compatibility, and generally the notion of choice that dominate the discourse on marriages (Donner 2016; Fuller and Narasimhan 2008; Lietchy 2003). A central feature of these diverse local experiences of the variations of “love” marriage is the continued importance of parental support and approval of the family. For example, Donner (2011, 2016) in her study of the middle class in Kolkata explains that whilst love and choice in marriages are important to claiming a modern self, the involvement and approval of the family remains intact. In
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fact, delineating the significance of the family, Donner goes on to argue that, more than consumption, it is the family that continues to shape the middle class identifications of modern India. Similarly, Fuller and Narasimhan (2008, 2014) in their study of IT sector employees in Tamil Nadu, argue that the young middle class desire to marry a spouse with whom there is interpersonal compatibility; however, this choice is exercised within the rules of caste endogamy. In a comparative study of Indians in Gujarat and second generation Gujarati Indians settled in the UK, Twamley (2014) explains that whilst these two sets of youth have differing conceptions of love and intimacy, they both place a strong emphasis on gaining parental approval in their choice of spouse. In a study of middle class in Kathmandu, Lietchy (2003) also notes that for the middle class subjects modern attitudes do value love but also seek parental consent. These experiences can often be described as “love-cum-arranged” marriages as a self-chosen alliance turns into marriage only after parental approval: “even though the couple may have chosen each other, they will have obtained parental consent, even if only after protracted arguments and disagreements” (de Neve 2016:1224). Furthermore, works on technologies of matchmaking (Agrawal 2015; Bhandari 2014; Titzmann 2013) have also outlined the specific ways in which matrimonial websites, for example, promote what Titzmann calls “family oriented individualism,” ensuring that the desires of both the individual and the family are met in the spouse-selection process.
3 The importance of parental approval or lack thereof in “love” marriages is best captured by the ethnographic works undertaken by Grover (2011) and De Neve (2016), who evaluate the post-marital arrangements of those who opted for “love” marriages. Grover explains that in comparison to arranged marriages, love marriages are less likely to suffer a breakdown, not because these marriages are more egalitarian and empowering for a woman, but because the woman does not have any parental support to leave the marriage (2011:9–10). De Neve (2016), in his work on the migrant work force of Tirrupur in Tamil Nadu, traces those love stories where the parents renounced support for their children upon their choice marriage. This withdrawal of support by the parents, as the young men narrate, adversely effects their financial position and professional mobility, leading the men to claim that if given another chance they will opt for an arranged over a love marriage.
4 Whilst de Neve and Grover explore the post-wedding arrangements of love marriages, in this article, I place emphasis on the pre-marital experiences, which may or may not convert to marriage. Following the works enlisted above, I explain the ways in which the family and the moral framework of parental approval is applied to pre-marital relationships, which are viewed by the youth as symbols and spaces of their individualism, freedom, and initiation into the modern world of opportunities.
Mapping Pre-marital Experiences
5 In this article, I place emphasis on what has been called the phase of “elongated singlehood,” where young adults (aged 24–31) are pushing the age of marriage (to 28– 29) primarily to acquire professional mobility.1 There are differing expectations for men and women with regard to age at marriage, as women come under more pressure to marry “early.” Yet in my research sample there were women who were 30 and unmarried, just as there were men who were 28 and married or engaged to be married. Nonetheless, women’s age at marriage was a matter of concern for them and their
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families, as the men and their family preferred the bride to be a younger woman. Despite this pressure the women were ready to increase their marriage age for professional pursuits and the desire to find a suitable spouse. Men and women appropriate this phase of “non-marriage” to experience diverse romantic encounters, and subsequently this phase is associated with ideologies of individualism, freedom, and liberty. The perspective that premarital relationships are expressions of individualism is further propelled by the fact that these experiences take place in the “away from home” space (Scalco 2016), that is, at work or in leisure spaces that are not immediately under the surveillance of the family. These encounters are therefore further romanticized, for their inception, as the young middle class argue, is based solely on the “individual” dynamics and emotional compatibility of the couple.
6 Real as these narratives are, I reveal in this article that these experiences in fact abide by the moral frameworks set by the family. In so doing I argue that the family controls these relationships, shaping their dynamics, and approving or disapproving them. Such is the importance of family even in defining pre-marital relationships that as the relationship takes a more serious turn the partners gauge each other on their ability to “fit in” with their family, at times by actively disciplining their partner’s behavior.
7 I thus explain the myriad, often contesting, affections, emotions, and perceptions associated with pre-marital relationships, which on one hand are viewed as the epitome of individualism and the stepping stone of the desire to write one’s own biography (Beck 1992, 2000), and on the other hand are enmeshed in the performances of familial duty and fulfilling parental expectations. These contestations and contradictions, however, are not necessarily seen as binary opposing categories, but as complementary aspects of the project of modern self-making, and are seamlessly interwoven into the romantic experience.2
8 I put forth my analyses in three parts. In the first part I explain that the young adults view pre-marital relationships as a largely individualistic experience as they revel in the opportunity to now write their own biography. In the second part I reveal that this image does not necessarily hold for long, as soon a moral framework set by the family is introduced to the relationship. This evokes certain practices of disciplining to ensure that the chosen partner matches the expectations of the family. In the third part of the article I bring attention to the direct involvement of the family in shaping the future of the relationship. I explain, however, that the family presents itself as merely guiding the relationship, which, I argue, is a crucial step for the modern self-fashioning of the family.
Fieldwork
9 This paper is based on ethnographic fieldwork on the middle class youth of New Delhi, which involved, other than participant and non-participant observation, in-depth interviews with a 100 men and women aged between 24–31, employed at multinational companies, as well as interviews with about 25 parents. Though the fieldwork site was Delhi, the interviewees were not all born and brought up in Delhi; several had migrated from cities including Jaipur, Ranchi, Patna, for higher education and stayed on to be employed in multinational companies. Whilst there was no restriction on the caste and religious composition, the representation was mainly of upper-caste Hindus, in line with the argument that the category of the middle class is a skewed composition of the
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upper castes (Deshpande 2003; Fernandes 2006; Jodhka and Prakash 2016). The middle class, as much scholarship has established, remains fuzzy and difficult to define, and for this paper I focused on a specific segment of the middle class population that is popularly described as the “neoliberal middle class,” as they choose to be employed in the private sector, particularly the multinational companies that set up their offices in India after the 1990s liberalization reforms.3 It is also to be noted that this sample self- identified themselves as being middle class (and not upper middle class), despite the fact that there were substantial variances in their economic and social status; some belonged to families of small or middle-income tradesmen living in smaller cities, whilst there were also those whose parents were high-status government employees or businessmen living in Delhi. What brought them together was their high salaried employment after achieving competitive educational and professional degrees (beginning from Rs. 50,000 per month going up to Rs. 5 lakhs), and a unique globally- oriented lifestyle involving foreign travel and engagement with global work cultures. The specific class position of this sample limits its generalizability and representativeness; nonetheless, it remains important for analyses as this class is seen as an appropriate symbol of a “global India.”
10 Whilst I did trace the lives of both men and women for this research, this particular article focuses more on the voice of women than men, because women were more vocal about their experiences of disciplining by their boyfriend or fiancé’s family. Men, on the other hand, did not narrate such experiences of control and surveillance, not necessarily because they did not undergo these strategies of disciplining, but perhaps because they were not comfortable discussing these issues with a woman interviewer.4 Furthermore, the men, much more than women, narrated their attempts to change the attitudes of their girlfriends in order to suit their family values. This desire to “change” and to some extent the confidence that women would indeed change their attitudes is indicative of the patriarchal outlook of these relationships.
Curating an Individualistic Experience
11 In the early 1990s India undertook certain economic liberalization reforms ushering the Indian state into a “new” era (Fernandes 2011; Varma 2007). As the economy “opened,” more opportunities for professional ambitions emerged, especially for the middle class, who extended their domination to the private sector as well (Jodhka and Prakash 2016). Acquiring a well-paid private sector job, particularly in multinational companies, as my young interviewees and their parents explained, became a dream the middle class aspired to, as along with offering high salaries, it allowed an opportunity for “exposure” to urban and global ways of life. This new set of professional opportunities lead people to move to the urban areas of Delhi, particularly Gurugram (formerly Gurgaon), where the offices of all multinational companies are located. To facilitate their commute, some employees also rented apartments in Gurugram, visiting their family in Delhi over the weekends.
12 In some senses, the work-place occupies a liminal state between Scalco’s distinction of “Home” and “Away from Home.” The former, according to her, constitutes those spaces where people find themselves under acute scrutiny, or where life is governed by family-like sociality. On the other hand, “Away from home” refers to those spaces where individuals have the potential to “evade familial control” (2016:327). Scalco
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clarifies that there are no strict boundaries between these two social spaces, and it is the fictive separation that is more crucial to the self-fashioning and understanding of her interviewees (2016:327). This analysis can appropriately be extended to my ethnographic research, where I found that the work place, an educational institute or leisure cultures formed the “away from home” space for my interviewees. Whilst even in these situations the individual did find themselves under scrutiny from colleagues, there was, however, no direct surveillance by the family and the nature of the surveillance differed as well. For example, they were rarely called out on their behavior instantly with strong reprimand, as would happen in a family-controlled space.
13 The “away from home” spaces are ever increasing, including not only work spaces but also leisure cultures facilitated by the transforming urban landscape, with the building of malls, bars, cafes and other such public spaces (Brosius 2010, 2013; Mazzarella 2002; Srivastava 2014). As Brosius notes: “new social and physical spaces have emerged in metropolitan centers with economic liberalization, enabling urban youth to meet, in principle in less socially regulated ways. These places could be colleges (even schools), malls, cinema halls, clubs, bars, or cafes” (2013:272). Another factor promoting these attitudes and aspects of pleasure, consumption, hedonism, and feelings of “individual space and control,” is the increasing use of technology in everyday lives that also allows for a virtual and instant “away from home” spatiality. In fact, much recent scholarship in media studies has shifted attention to the impact of media on intimacies and selfhood (Gershon 2011; Miller 2011). Together these spaces and places of “away from home” infuse the youth with feelings of “writing their own biographies” (Beck 1994; Giddens 1991). These feelings of individuality and freedom also extend to their romantic lives as they begin to date or choose romantic interests, not necessarily in view of marriage.
14 My interaction with middle-class youth revealed that they categorized these experiences on the basis of sexual involvement and “seriousness” or degree of commitment in the relationship. Some experiences are mainly sexual in nature and usually limited to a short period of time, at times consisting of only one encounter, and are referred to as “one-night stands.” The term “dating” is used for a longer period of being with together, without necessarily any commitment to marriage, and at times involving sexual relationships. It is the terms “serious” and “long-term” that are used to denote a relationship that is intended to be transformed into marriage. At times, these relationships also involve live-in arrangements, though this form of intimacy or romantic arrangement in which the couple lives-in before marriage is still not widely accepted. At other times they were also “distance” relationships, when partners lived in different cities for career-related reasons. It was also the “serious” relationship that was more publicly accepted and displayed, much more especially than “one-night stands.” These categorizations seem to be influenced by public representations and discourses of romantic relationships and sex, which in various forms, since the early 1990s, have increasingly appeared in the medium of cinema, television commercials, and celebrations of love and romance.5 For example, in another work I have noted that the Bollywood films of the past decade, including Break ke Baad (After the break, 2010) Shudh Desi Romance (Pure Desi Romance, 2013), Ye Jawani hai Deewani (This Youth is Crazy, 2013), and Tamasha (Spectacle, 2015), tell stories of “pre-marital relationships, including break-ups, and struggles to find ‘self’ in the contemporary nexus of profession, money, and love, and also live-in relationships”(Bhandari 2017:3).6 In fact, it can be argued that Bollywood cinema has enabled a greater public discourse on pre-
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marital relationships, so much so that the terms “boyfriends” and “girlfriends” appear more candidly in intergenerational interactions. Mazzarella writes of the contributing effect of advertising—especially of condoms—in the 1990s, which challenged the “public morality and austerity aesthetic of Gandhi and Nehruvian quality,” indicating that sex can also be for pleasure and fun (2003:60). Analyzing the rise in the depiction of romantic and erotic love in public, Brosius explains the significance and popularity of Valentine’s Day, which though “unspectacular, if not irrelevant” for her interviewees, nonetheless, “contributed to the circulation and spread of romantic, eroticized love as a legitimate element of lifestyle” (2013:269). The reason for this privileging of Valentine’s Day, she notes, is that for the first time in postcolonial India, romantic love became part of a rhetoric of a seemingly unrestricted way of life in which decision making is allegedly based on two people in love with each other… Valentine’s Day promoted an individual’s choice for a partner, legitimated the desire to be “in love” without necessarily wanting to be married to the same person… (2013:256). Brosius’ findings resonate with the experiences of my interviewees, for it was amply clear that their romantic encounters are not only motivated by feelings of love and care, but are also imbued with expressions and realizations of freedom and individuality. This is specifically because the decision to enter into a romantic experience and the process undertaken to do so is not under the explicit guidance of parents or family.
15 Raj, is a 27 year old project manager at a leading multinational company in Gurugram.7 His parents live in west Delhi, making the commute to his work place rather tiring. So in the second year of his employment he, along with two of his other colleagues, rented an apartment in one of the residential areas in Gurugram. When Raj joined the workforce at 23, he started dating a colleague but that did not last for long, for they “grew apart” he said. About two years ago, he started dating another colleague with whom he is now in a “serious” relationship. Raj clarified that his parents did not know about either of these relationships. He said, See, with the first one it was a short-term relationship so I never ended up telling my parents about her. The thing is I don’t want my parents to think that I go to the office to do all this! Especially when it is not serious. Also, I was quite young back then… I am very close to my parents, don’t get me wrong, but I also like the idea that I have my own life away from them and that I am not always answerable to them. When things get serious and when I know someone will be an important part of my life, I will surely tell my parents…
16 Sunaina is a 26 year old who is working as an analyst at a leading international bank. In narrating her romantic experiences Sunaina explained she feels less under surveillance with her more recent relationships than the ones she had whilst in university. She said, Back in college the parents had much more control. They were always worried, constantly checking on me. I of course had boyfriends then also, but it was a bit difficult to be absolutely free to meet them and go out. There were so many tensions and distractions: parents, friends, exams, the worry of a future. But things change when you get your first job. You are a lot more settled, you are making money, and also the control from parents reduces. Also, they begin to treat you as adults. Sunaina very clearly specifies a break in her experiences of romance with her new journey in life, that of employment, associated with which are feelings and expressions of more individual control, freedom of movement, and a sense of liberation from the everyday surveillances of home. She goes on to explain,
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My job involves a lot of traveling so I am away from home. In fact, I met my first boyfriend on these official trips. He and I were both in the same team, and we spent so much time together traveling and communicating with each other and got used to each other. The relationship however soon ended as we realized we don’t match that much after all… I met my current boyfriend also through office. He is a part of the Mumbai team and we met at a workshop. We just clicked and since then have been in a long-distance relationship. Like Raj, Sunaina also did not reveal her relationship to her parents. She said, You know how parents are. They get all excited and want to make enquiries and immediately see your boyfriend as a suitable boy [for marriage]. This makes me uncomfortable. I mean I don’t want that sort of pressure yet. I am living a good life, working, hanging out with friends, traveling, and I don’t want my parents to start with all the enquiries and pressure so early. Also, I need to assess the guy myself first. What if I don’t like him after a few months… I need some time to be sure too, and then I will introduce him to parents…. The rationale behind not disclosing a romantic encounter to parents was routinely explained in other interviews too. These encounters become a boundary marker of a personal life separate from that of the family. These opportunities of romance are also used as opportunities to experience other aspects of socializing that fall outside the realm of familial sociality, including traveling with the partner, going out for dinners, and partying/clubbing. In other words, through the opportunity of romance the young middle class also seize further opportunities of leisure and socializing that are not controlled or dictated by the family. In doing so, they show that these relationships are not simply about intimacy and love, but also about individual experience, freedom, and control over life decisions. The young professionals also realize that this private experience will not last for long, given the social and cultural significance of marriage, so they desire to protect these experiences from the scrutiny of parents. Whilst recent works (Donner 2011, 2016; Lietchy 2003; Saavla 2012; Twamley 2014) have explained the importance of love and choice in the self-fashioning of the modern for the middle class, I argue that experiences of short-lived and long-lived relationships are equally significant constituents of being modern.
17 However, this experience of individual freedom and choice soon gives way to a consensual and discussed decision on the suitability of the chosen partner as the youth begin to involve their parents in the relationship. The potential of marriageability as a result of their romantic encounter is adjudged and approved within a familial framework. In fact, in order to ensure that their family approves of their choice, the very relationship that was concealed from the parents and championed as being individual-centric begins to be disciplined and shaped to meet the family’s requirements and desires.
The Moral Framework of the Family
18 Being in a pre-marital relationship, in many senses, is a liminal state that might transform into marriage, for it is here that the partner (in particular the woman), is most obviously disciplined and who, as a response, might either resist the controlling behavior leading to the breaking up of the relationship or agree to be molded. In this section I bring attention to certain techniques of disciplining and surveillance that operate within a moral framework established by family values and expectations. These narratives lopsidedly address the attempts to discipline women, for my research
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revealed that women were under far greater pressure to be a suitable partner, thereby reiterating the societal norm of hypergamy and patriarchal living, wherein the woman is tamed to adjust to the man’s family.
19 One such sphere in which the woman was much more harshly scrutinized than the man was that of sexual activity. The obsession with a woman’s virginity is well-established by the central ritual of a Hindu marriage, that of kanyadaan (gift of a virgin), as well as through a social conditioning whereby the suitability of the girl is determined by her control over her sexual self, which is established through a rigorous process of socialization both within the home and outside it (Dube 1988; Fruzetti 1982). Whilst both men and women reveled in experiencing different intimacies, it was striking that even in pre-marital relationships, women were far more harshly judged for their sexual activity than men, a scenario which is not very different from the formal search for a spouse. Whilst I rarely encountered men who insisted on dating or marrying a woman who was a virgin, they were certainly concerned about her sexual past. The men claimed that as long as the woman was in love with a man, a sexual relationship was only natural. However, they frowned upon the possibility that the woman may have been sexually active with multiple partners, including indulging in “one-night stands.” Though the term “morally loose” was not used, the references to women with an active sexual past implied a strong undertone of immorality and “loose” character. These opinions were upheld even by those men who themselves had an active sexual past with multiple partners. The women, on the other hand, rarely desired a virgin man and were less scandalized by a man’s sexual past, often citing not the patriarchal mindset with regard to sexual mores, but claiming that times are changing, and both men and women are more sexually active. In other words, women seemed more accepting of sexual experiences for both themselves and the men, whereas men were reluctant to accept woman’s sexual histories.
Disciplining
20 I met Reema, a 26 year-old Chartered Accountant working in a reputed multinational consultancy firm, for coffee at a South Delhi café. A meeting scheduled for two hours turned out to be a four-hour conversation where she narrated, with much candor, her desires and struggles in her relationships, in particular the current one that had a history of ups and downs as it entered its fifth year. Reema’s parents migrated to Africa when she was a small child and when she turned 16, she returned to India with her younger sister, to live with her grandparents and pursue higher education. Reema decided to stay on in India, and after completing her graduation degree, she took a job in a leading multinational firm. Reema met her boyfriend, Manu, in college and started dating in the final year. She said, We were really good friends and then a friend suggested that our chemistry is so good that we should be together. Bas [That’s it] we soon got together … It has been quite a journey. Manu is a very caring person and watched out for me especially because my parents don’t live in India. But the thing is I am from a professional family and a Kayastha (caste group) background and he is from a business Marwari family, so, many differences crept up, mostly because he wanted me to be like the other Marwari girls who stay at home! I further enquired as to what sort of expectations he had of her. She explained, I am a very strong independent girl who has been taught to speak her mind. In fact, this is what he liked about me when we started dating. All other girls were so
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submissive and girly, but he was attracted to the fact that I had a mind of my own and that I was career driven. I mean I cracked the CA [Chartered Accountancy] exams all in the first attempt, within three year.8 However, about two years ago, when he started getting serious and talking about marriage he started finding faults in me, and disliking things that he previously liked! He would tell me that I should learn to adjust and fit into their family. Like I should wear saris [a female garment, typically wrapped around the waist with one end draped over the shoulder], not talk too much in front of others, or give my “expert” opinions [she said rolling her eyes]. Reema detested these attempts to “tame” her, she said. In fact, they had broken up a few times over these issues and when I interviewed Reema she was indeed on one of her “time-outs” with him. Reema desired a better compatibility with a partner, but she was not yet convinced she wanted to totally give up on the relationship for they had so much “history.” She narrated with much empathy that her boyfriend had been a strong support system for her especially since her parents were not living in India. However, she was also not ready to become a typical Marwari daughter-in-law, and hoped to negotiate her way into their relationship.
21 Other women too narrated their experiences of being “tamed” by their boyfriends to become more appealing to their family. As I dined with four young women at a restaurant in Gurugram, the conversation immediately shifted to the struggles of being a good girlfriend and their long list of controlling boyfriends. Shweta, who holds an engineering degree from one of the most reputed institutes in India, narrated her romantic experience with Amit. Amit presented himself as a highly independent and self-made man, who respects his family but was not the usual “mama’s boy.” However, once they started dating and the relationship took a serious turn, Shweta soon found herself bombarded with expectations to mingle with the family and earn their approval, by minding “small” things like her eating habits and dressing style. She said, As we got deeper in the relationship, I realized that his family’s approval is of paramount importance to him. Not that I have a problem with that, but then I was expected to appease them. Like when I was expected to go see them he said I should also wear Indian clothes. Also, we both enjoy eating meat, however, in his house everyone is a vegetarian, so I was told not even to mention that I eat meat and drink alcohol. I don’t have a problem with adjusting and respecting their lifestyle, but to lie about who I am makes me feel like an outcast, like there is something wrong in who I am. Despite Shweta’s reluctance to adhere to these specific demands by Amit, she decided to play along on the condition that she would not follow these expectations upon marriage. They suspected that his parents would perhaps take longer to accept her non-vegetarian eating habits, so they agreed that she would not eat meat in front of them, but she insisted that after a few years of marriage and especially upon the birth of their children she would no longer hide her dietary preferences. Shweta accepted these disciplining conditions only as strategies for approval of their union and made it clear to Amit that she intended to abide by them only temporarily.
22 Scholarship on Indian marriages has certainly noted extensively and theorized the importance of family in the process of spouse-selection. However, the very act of meeting the parents for the first time has not received the attention it deserves. In my interviews with the young middle class, I found that much anxiety and preparation governs the first time a boyfriend or girlfriend meets the parents. In fact, the practices of disciplining are to prepare for the first and subsequent meeting with the parents.
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23 Akash, aged 29, who is an MBA graduate, described the feelings of nervousness, anxiety, and jitter that he experienced the first time he “formally” introduced his girlfriend— who was his batch mate at the MBA institute—to his parents. He said, My girlfriend is from the Northeast part of India. She was brought up in Mumbai but she belongs to Assam, and their culture is different than our culture [referring to the fact that he belongs to Uttar Pradesh, a northern state of India]. There are little things like wearing a sari or salwar kameez (Indian attire: a long top and loose pants), and covering up, using the duppatta (scarf), and not being too sharp with the tongue. My girlfriend is a smart independent urban woman and to her maybe this environment will be alien. So, I have been training her [raises his eyebrows and smiles] to be a certain way when she meets my parents. When I asked Akash if he, like his girlfriend, was anxious on his first meeting with her parents, he responded that he “of course” was nervous and wanted to make a good impression on them. However, he was also quick to add that he was surely under “less” pressure to impress than his girlfriend would have been, given the “nature of our society,” he said.
Surveillance as Cornerstone of Relationships
24 These romantic relationships also modeled themselves on the framework of the family in another way, namely, the exercise of control and authority externalized through surveillance. This is indeed notable, for often men and women resist surveillance from their parents, fighting for individual space and freedom. However, this same space is soon occupied by a boyfriend or girlfriend, who puts the partner under strict surveillance. This was amply clear in my attempts to schedule interviews, where at times, instead of getting permission from parents, my interviewees discussed my request to meet them with their boyfriend or girlfriend. The boyfriends were keen to know the kind of questions I would ask, most fearing feminist conversations on their relationships or in depth discussion of past relationships. The girlfriends, on the other hand, seemed insecure and suspicious as to why a young woman would request a private conversation with their boyfriend. In either case, it was rather evident that the authority and control had shifted, now lying not with the parents but a romantic partner, who thereby still held up the principle of accountability that governs family dynamics.
25 One such experience was when I scheduled an interview with Sneha, a 27-year-old working in a multinational company. I met Sneha earlier at a house party hosted by another interviewee where she showed interest in my topic of research and joked that her life story would form an interesting case. I asked to schedule an interview with her and she immediately agreed. When she arrived at the café, however, she seemed a bit reluctant, and as soon as we sat down she said, “I have a request. My boyfriend wants to listen to our conversation. Can I put him on speaker phone?”
26 This was the first time that I had encountered this request and I explained to her that the purpose of the interview was for her to open up, relax, and talk about private experiences, especially of her past, and if her boyfriend were with her [even virtually] she would not be able to do so. Whilst she agreed with me she was petrified of her boyfriend, who insisted that he be made privy to our conversation. She looked at me and said, “He is insisting. I can’t help it.”
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27 I then came up with a solution and agreed for the mobile phone to be on speaker but kept on the adjacent table so that we are not clearly audible to him. Through the course of the interview, Sneha explained that her boyfriend is indeed demanding, for example, expecting her to drive across the city for his work and to pick up and drop off his family from the airport when they visit. Sneha however, always gives in to his demands because she believes that behind his dominant nature is immense love and affection for her. In fact, his acute control over her life is indeed a symbol of their intimate relationship and a testimony to the fact that he considers her family, for such interest and control is only exercised on family members, she explained.
28 Whilst Sneha’s case was one of the extremes, other women also narrated incidents of their boyfriends checking their text messages, emails, and keeping a track of their whereabouts.9 It was also not uncommon for women to exercise acute surveillance over their boyfriend as well, by keeping a tab on their phone, email, and social networking profiles. These narrations made it clear that the notion of control is paramount to Indian relationships—even in pre-marital romantic ones. Whilst the burden of accountability usually lies on the family, the young middle class—perhaps in absence of any well-defined template of experiencing these intimacies—reverts to this model of authority and control to define the dynamics of pre-marital encounters. The relationships, therefore, are modeled on familial dynamics with the change that the burden of accountability is shifted from the family to the boyfriend or girlfriend. Moreover, often this is viewed not as a constraining aspect of the relationship but a sign of deep intimacy. In fact, agreeing to be subjected to such surveillance serves as a reasonably important test to qualify for marriage, as it indicates the desire to be a part of a new family.
Resistances and Negotiations
29 These acts of disciplining are not always left unquestioned or are not critiqued, and women have various responses to them. It is important here to understand that resistances do not simply warrant an overthrow of structure, though at times that too happens when the woman breaks up the relationship, but also exist in small pockets (Scott 1985, 1990), as women adopt strategies, pick fields of battle, and negotiate within the power structure of their household (Gold and Raheja 1994; Jassal 2012; Jeffery and Jeffery 1996).10 Some women explained to me that they agree to follow the rules and norms regarding dress codes and food at the beginning of the marriage, only to overturn them once they have established themselves in the new household. Some others explained that while they agree to the demands of their boyfriend with regard to his family, they too make demands on his behavior regarding his interaction with their family. Whilst there are also those who claim to conscientiously follow the model of the dutiful wife and daughter-in-law, insofar as their aspiration and desire to be in paid employment is not thwarted.
30 However, some women did undertake the difficult step of breaking up the relationship, especially when they had reached marriageable age, and were risking their reputation, and agreed to venture on the perhaps long and arduous path of finding a suitable spouse. Rekha, aged 31, narrated that she was in love with Ramesh, who belonged to a different regional and linguistic community and they wanted to marry each other. He
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arranged to introduce her to his parents, who were not disrespectful towards her, but soon she noticed some changes in her boyfriend’s behavior. She said, Once the marriage was on the cards, I saw him becoming more possessive and he would keep track of every movement. If I was in a bad mood and snap at him he would answer back and say he does not want to be with someone who is so sharp- tongued. I mean suddenly things began to change. He was close to his mother, so maybe he used to discuss things about me to her. And maybe she didn’t think of me to be that suitable or encouraged him to control me? … Also, earlier he wouldn’t ask his parents’ permission to go out of town with me for a short holiday, but later they were always involved in all our activities. After many months of this constant interference and emotional trauma I decided to call the relationship quits. Rekha explained that every time she brought up Ramesh’s mother’s interference in their lives and her apprehensions regarding her mother-in-law’s control over their potential marriage, Ramesh would not engage her worries and simply asked her to stop “overthinking” or “overreacting.” Rekha claimed that she tried to have a discussion with Ramesh for several months but her pleas always fell on deaf ears, and so she decided to end the relationship. She added that Ramesh accepted her decision because they had been fighting a lot and he too thought that they were rather incompatible. He said that he did indeed love her but he could not see how they would make it work in the future. Rekha strongly suspected that his mother perhaps rationalized this decision for him, and it was her thoughts speaking rather than Ramesh’s own, as he indeed agreed to breaking up with little resistance.11
The Involvement of Parents
31 In an essay entitled “The Family and the Reproduction of Inequality” (1993), Béteille, argues that especially amongst the “service” class (referring to professionals, civil servants, managers and others), certain fundamental changes are occurring in the reproduction of inequality where the family (more than caste) plays an important role. It is therefore important to understand the specific relations of the family, particularly to aspects of modernity that aid in curating experiences of intimacies and processes of spouse-selection. One such dimension of modernity is the use of technology in everyday lives, and particularly the use of the internet for matchmaking. Recent works, such as Titzmann (2013) argue that matrimonial websites propagate a “family-oriented individualism” and Agarwal (2015) explains that these websites in fact enable a new form of “doing kin work.” The family, therefore, has not been displaced by modern lifestyles but has been crucially reconfigured in everyday realities (Bhandari 2018). The family, as I argue, also engages in the space of pre-marital relationships in ways that allow it to position itself as being “modern” by not actively deciding the fate of the pre- marital relationship but subtly achieving a desired outcome. It is to be flagged here that this is not the case for all pre-marital relationships, as there are in fact couples that insist on marrying their chosen mate even against the wishes of the parents. However, it is equally important to recognize that the family does influence even pre-marital choices. This is most evident in the fact that during my fieldwork I rarely came across inter-religious pre-marital relationships. The few that I was made aware of were usually broken off, precisely for the reason that the parents would not have accepted an inter-religious union, even if the chosen partner was well-educated and financially stable. There was more flexibility with regard to inter-caste relations. However, broadly speaking these relationships were between the upper castes, and I did not
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encounter a single “serious” relationship between a member of an upper caste and one of a so-called lower caste. This resonates with Béteille’s argument that the family is indeed an important site of reproduction of inequality, for it ensures that the chosen spouse is also from a similar class and social position. Furthermore, the principle of hypergamy largely governed the “serious” pre-marital relationships, as the man’s family was resistant to his marrying a woman from a higher caste and certainly opposed any plans to marry a woman who was more educated or professionally successful than their son.
32 In this section, I bring attention to the strategies of self-presentation as modern used by the family as it claims to have a “hands-off” approach in the romantic encounters of its children. Nonetheless, as we see, the family ultimately does ensure that its choice and criteria regarding a suitable spouse are adhered to. A key method by which the family does this is to not explicitly express its disapproval in the language of morality, caste, or community but uses the jargon of rationality, pointing to the logistics or impracticalities of the union.
33 Mrs. Shete, a highly successful medical doctor, claimed to have always supported her son’s choices in relationships. She was in fact fond of his last girlfriend, she exclaimed, who did not belong to the same community as them: she was Bengali, whilst they are Maharastrians. Her son and his girlfriend were negotiating the possibility of a future together, which called for his moving to another city. Mrs. Shete never openly said anything against this to her son. However, she secretly hoped that he would decide not to move away. She said, I am not the kind of mother who wants to restrict her son, or interfere in his life decisions … but I wouldn’t really want him to move away from me, from this city, forever. I was slightly anxious about this but never said anything to him [her son]… In the end, they couldn’t make the relationship work. I was sorry for my son but also relieved that now he would not leave me. Mrs. Shete never said anything against the girlfriend but she had another strategy in store. She had given them a “deadline to make a decision, and all the while suggested to her son that he join a matrimonial website catering to their community to look for another suitable girl, either from their city or who could move to their city. One of the reasons for this was that she was concerned that her son, aged 30, would be “too old” if they delayed the search process, limiting the opportunity for “good” proposals. Mrs. Shete always spoke highly of her son’s girlfriend but also kept bringing his attention to the practical difficulties of this match and the urgency to decide soon lest they both become too old to find suitable spouses if their relationship did not work out. Ultimately, their relationship broke up. It was interesting to note that the son put the entire burden of the collapse of the relationship on himself and his girlfriend, without ever recognizing the role that his mother might have played.
34 In another similar narrative, I met Abhinav, a consultant at a multinational company, who ended his seven-year relationship. Abhinav belongs to an upper middle-class family in Delhi and his ex-girlfriend Latika is from a well-to-do family in Jaipur. Abhinav explained that over the course of dating, they also had a long-distance relationship and differences began creeping up with regard to personality and likes and dislikes, and so he decided it was time to call it off. At the end of the interview, however, he added in a nonchalant way, “Also, my mother never liked her. She always knew it wouldn’t work out.” I enquired why his mother did not approve of the relationship, and he said,
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She never said anything against her. She didn’t think that Latika was a bad girl or anything, but she knew there was a class difference, a difference in background especially socially, and that we would face problems in the future. She of course said to me that the decision is entirely mine, and in fact, she doesn’t want any arranged marriage for me. She encourages me to find someone suitable from amongst my friends. Abhinav is now dating an upper middle class girl from Delhi, whom he met at work. Like Abhinav’s family, she too resides in a posh South Delhi bungalow. Abhinav’s mother, as he explained, is rather excited about this match, already preparing for the wedding.
35 The family is acutely aware of the phase of romantic experimentation that young people are engaging in, and their primary concern is to ensure that this space is supervised so that a “self chosen” spouse can also affirm and possibly increase their family status. Whilst they can be active in a space that warrants explicit spouse- selection conversations (such as with matrimonial agents or on websites), they take a more careful approach in pre-marital relationships in order not to antagonize their children by questioning their choice, whilst also ensuring that a suitable spouse, adhering to their standards and criteria, is selected. Herein, lies the modernity of the families.
Conclusion
36 Pre-marital relationships are often viewed as spaces of acute individualism or as a social phenomenon that can be a threat to the values and norms of the family. However, through this paper, I have argued that pre-marital experiences in fact mirror marital expectations, duties, and templates as the family comes to scrutinize and shape these relationships. Furthermore, this paper also highlights that the intimacies of the middle class youth and their ideals of marriage are evolving in contexts that are gendered and also influenced by processes of modernization such as the use of technology, global styles of life.
37 These processes and influences might seem to be pulling in different directions as the individualistic experiences co-exist with familial control, and as the local hierarchies of caste and community coincide with the globalizing contexts of middle class status. However, I argue that this seeming contradiction is in fact constitutive of the modern` and not opposed to it (Dube 2012, 2009). This is because the “modern” does not exist as a sharp disjuncture of time and space, but in fact is composed of oppositions, and begets contestations. This understanding of the modern also defies a unilinear model of progress, for example, one where “love” would champion the sentiments of “arrangement” (Bhandari 2018). It is in this analytical framework of the modern that I situate the current paper, and am motivated to analyze the elongated phase of singlehood that the young adults in India are witnessing, much like other South East Asian societies.12
38 Following from these ethnographic analyses and theoretical underpinnings of the “modern,” I offer four broad perspectives through which to understand pre-marital relationships in contemporary India. Firstly, like the work of de Neve (2016), my research is also an ideological rejection of the “individualism” that might be seen to define pre-marital relationships. I certainly make the argument that the post- liberalization era in India has enabled many opportunities, making use of which, the
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individuals also experiment with romances and intimacies. Premarital relationships are publicly embraced and dating is indeed widespread.13 More importantly, these experiences are viewed as highly individualistic, for they are based on an interpersonal bond between the two individuals, away from the surveillance of the family. However, as I unravel the dynamics of the premarital romances, I highlight that these relationships too are gauged and assessed with regard to their acceptability by the family. Whilst the family might be conspicuously absent from this space, it does influence the dynamics of the relationship.
39 This brings me to my second point that the moral and operating framework of these relationships is provided by the family. The couple attempts to discipline each other so that the family accepts the partner of choice. In particular, the men groom their girlfriends to dress and behave in a manner that is conducive to their family’s values and lifestyles. Furthermore, these relationships also follow the rules of authority and control as exercised in the family. The men, for example, maintain strict surveillance on the whereabouts of their girlfriend, at times also directly intervening in their social engagements and expecting them to report back. We thus see that the dynamics of authority and control generally espoused and exercised by the parents over their children are now emulated by the romantic couple.
40 Thirdly, the family also appropriates these romantic encounters to self-fashion itself as being modern. It presents itself as non-confrontational and non-authoritarian and instead of rejecting a union of choice, it implements strategies to make their opinion count, and in due process decide the future of the pre-marital relationship.
41 Finally, it is also amply clear that marriage remains central to the selfhood of young individuals. The young middle class certainly explore and experience various forms of romantic relationship, yet they continue to construct and present their selves along the norms and rules of marriageability, reiterating the importance of marriage in their social and cultural worlds.
42 The pre-marital phase of romance is surely outside the direct purview of the family and resonates with an affective desire for individualism. However, as Donner and Santos point out, “the language of romantic love and ‘affective individualism,’ draws on a conceptual framework that does not separate individuals from collectives or affect from material and self-interest” (2016:1130). My research, as presented in this article, also reveals that the notion of family is central to the construction of marriageability of the upwardly mobile middle-class youth. Whilst the individuals might experience pre- marital relationships as borne out of a “new” era of opportunities, the stability and framework upon which these relationships are actualized continue to be provided by the family.
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Scott, James C. 1985. Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.
Scott, James C. 1990. Domination and the Arts of Resistance. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.
Sharangpani, Mukta. 2010. “Browsing for Bridegrooms: Matchmaking and Modernity in Mumbai.” Indian Journal of Gender Studies 17(2):249–76.
Situmorang, Augustina. 2011. “Delayed Marriage among Lower Socio-Economic Groups in an Indonesian Industrial City.” Pp 83–98 in Changing Marriage Patterns in Southeast Asia: Economic and Socio-cultural Dimensions, edited by G. Jones, T. Hull, and M. Mohamad. London: Routledge.
Srivastava, Sanjay. 2014. Entangled Urbanism: Slum, Gated Community and Shopping Mall in Delhi and Gurgaon. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Therborn, Göran. 2013. “Family Systems of the World: Are They Converging?” Pp. 3–19 in The Blackwell Companion to the Sociology of Families, edited by J. Treas, J. Scott, and M. Richards. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.
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To, Sandy. 2013. “Understanding Sheng Nu (‘Leftover Women’): The Phenomenon of Late Marriage Among Chinese Professional Women.” PhD dissertation, University of Cambridge.
Twamley, Katherine. 2014. Love, Marriage, Intimacy among Gujarati Indians: A Suitable Match. Basingstoke: Palgrave.
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Uberoi, Patricia. 2009. Freedom and Destiny: Gender, Family and Popular Culture in India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Uberoi, Patricia and Amita Tyagi Singh. 2006. “Learning to ‘Adjust’: The Dynamics of Post-Marital Romance.” Pp. 217–47 in Freedom and Destiny: Gender, Family and Popular Culture in India, edited by P. Uberoi. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Varma, Pavan. 2007. The Great Indian Middle Class. New Delhi: Penguin. van Wessel, Margit. 2004. “Talking About Consumption: How an Indian Middle Class Dissociates from Middle Class Life.” Cultural Dynamics 16(93–116).
NOTES
1. Recent works (Jones 2007; Jones, Hull, and Mohamad 2011; Koh 2011) have brought attention to this phase that has been termed “elongated singlehood” as it has come to be a new and widespread phenomenon, especially in southeast Asian societies. These studies explain the impact of this phase on the state of marriage. 2. For further discussion on the conception of the modern as seen inherently based on contradictions and contestations, which this article follows, refer to the works of Dube (Dube 2009, 2012). Dube argues that it is important to view the modern not simply as a disjuncture in time and space, which is not to say that the opposition between “modern” and “traditional” is to be rejected as analytically flawed. Instead, he explains that modernity is a process of the past and present, and a checkered narrative that is constitutive of contestations and contradictions (2012:5, 6). 3. Recent scholarship has queried the significance of the term “middle,” for it has been established that the middle class in fact constitutes a small segment of the Indian population (Deshpande 2003) and, in fact, is far from a homogeneous category, as the income levels, for one, are rather varied (Jodhka 2013; Kapur and Vaishnav 2014). Owing to this, some scholars prefer to use the term “middle-classes” to denote the heterogeneous composition of this class. Scholarship also questions the economic basis of defining the middle class, arguing that it is more a social and historical category than an economic one (Baviskar and Ray 2011; Dickey 2011; Jodhka 2013). 4. Whilst the problem of trust and access to male informants by a female researcher exists, there are other ways to ensure that the male voice can be adequately represented, as through analysis of the virtual media. For the latest discussion on this see Rangaswamy and Curtell (2012). 5. These leisure cultures and “away from home” spaces in some ways become markers of a neo- liberal identity since, for the middle class youth, “transformation from planned economy to open market was also a shift from the imperative of serving the nation, to pleasure and consumption, as progress” (Brosius 2013, 266–67). For further discussion on understanding the “new” middle class and its penchant for consumption see Brosius (2010); Fernandes (2006); Jaffrelot and Van der Veer (2008); Mazzarella (2003); van Wessel (2004). 6. For further information on the intricate relationship between popular culture on the one hand and marriage and family norms on the other, see Uberoi (2009) and Dwyer (2000). 7. This article has used pseudonyms for all interviewees. 8. The Chartered Accountancy Examination in India is considered one of the toughest of CA exams. It is a three level examination, with each level consisting of six to seven subjects that are often divided into two groups. It takes anywhere between four to eight years for students to pass all sets of examinations. 9. For further discussion on these aspects of control and surveillance facilitated by social media, see Gershon (2012).
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10. Jeffery and Jeffery point out that whilst women remained silent on matters of household economics, they may have “turned to spitfires when speaking of their husbands’ moral transgressions” (1994:19). Gold and Raheja (1994) and Jassal (2012) find women’s resistance in proverbs and songs. 11. To decide to leave a relationship at the age of 30 was certainly not easy for Rekha. However, she explained that her family is supportive and insist that she finds a suitable match, rather than marry due to pressure of age and then decide to divorce. Rekha did enter the formal space of spouse-selection as she was registered on a matrimonial website, though her parents also encouraged her to look for someone on her own. Whilst women’s parents are accepting a later age at marriage, the man’s parents continue to have a preference for finding a bride that is younger than the man. The general view remains that an older unmarried woman is stubborn and will not easily adjust to a new family situation. In some ways, this resembles the phenomenon of “left-over” women in China, that is, the highly educated women who are less desirable for marriage (To 2013). 12. The aim of this paper is not to position the pre-marital relationships of young Indians vis-à- vis the romantic intimacies of other societies, to tease out the similarities or differences. Nor does this paper follow the binary conceptualization that explains romantic intimacies as definite indicators of a progress from “traditional societies” to “modern societies.” Nonetheless, there seem to be certain similarities, especially with other South East Asian societies (G. Jones 2007; G. Jones, Hull, and Mohamad 2011; Kabamalan 2011; Situmorang 2011). For further debate on convergence of family types, see Therborn (2013). 13. It is important to note here that I am not making the case that premarital relationships have increased in contemporary India. Instead, the change is in the public acceptance and visibility of these relationships, as couples openly display their affection in public and the parental generation too is aware of these encounters, though they might or might not approve of them.
ABSTRACTS
This paper is an inquiry into a form of intimate relationship that is garnering much public attention in contemporary India, namely, the pre-marital relationship. In order to query the rhetoric of individual agency and “freedom” that often gets associated with pre-marital relationships, this paper explores the family’s involvement in pre-marital relationships of young adults aged 24–31. The paper argues that though pre-marital relationships often fashion themselves as a disjuncture from the narrative of marriage, in reality, they model themselves on structures and expectations of a marital union. This paper also pays attention to the ways in which families position themselves vis-à-vis pre-marital relationships. Specifically, it discusses the strategies by which the family can obstruct or encourage certain pre-marital relationships over others, thereby highlighting the bearing of the family’s involvement in changing the course of a relationship: either from a non-serious form of relationship to a committed one, or leading to the breaking up of the relationship.
INDEX
Keywords: pre-marital relationships, family, marriage, modern, middle class
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AUTHOR
PARUL BHANDARI St. Edmund’s College and The Center of South Asian Studies (CSAS), University of Cambridge, UK; Center for Social Sciences and Humanities (CSH), New Delhi
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Negotiations of Home and Belonging in the Indian Graphic Novels Corridor by Sarnath Banerjee and Kari by Amruta Patil
Ira Sarma
Introduction
1 The individual’s sense of belonging—or not-belonging—is a recurring theme of city narratives: the big city is the prototypical site of anonymity and estrangement; it is a place of frequent comings and goings, of inclusions and exclusions. Feeling at home can be difficult in the city, even more so for the newcomer—the migrant—who needs to negotiate his or her position on various planes. As Georg Simmel argued in 1908 in his classic article “The Stranger,” the degree of a person’s strangeness depends on the congruence of spatial and social belonging; sharing a space does not necessarily entail being a member of the social group that occupies this space (Wolff 1950). Hence the dilemma of “being without belonging” ensues: in the city it is easy to feel lonely and isolated in the midst of a crowd, and we can become strangers even in our homes if we withdraw from the “entity” that constitutes the family. “In this city, no one talks. Everyone guards their sanity against the grief of strangers” states Kari, the protagonist of Patil’s graphic novel of the same title, and Brighu, the main character of Corridor, confirms: “The city is about anonymity. Some people … meet, talk, part. Some don’t” (Patil 2008:42; Banerjee 2004:107).
2 Exploring the two Indian graphic novels Corridor by Sarnath Banerjee and Kari by Amruta Patil, this article will provide a literary analysis of two twenty-first century representations of the individual’s negotiations of home and belonging in the city: What are the different ways in which the literary protagonists Brighu and Kari act and feel like strangers in the modern metropolis, or are made strangers by it? What does it take to make the city one’s home and overcome strangeness? What role does the
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(absent) family play in this process? The protagonists of both works are intellectual urban migrants; they are young, educated, and locally flexible—and both have decided to live away from their parental homes and their families.1
3 The family has long been considered a touchstone for evaluating social transformations in India2 and “traditional” family models (or their demise) have, accordingly, been at the center of many literary and filmic articulations of the theme.3 The graphic novel— very much an avant-garde voice in the Indian literary landscape—has taken up this discussion in an unconventional way. As a genre it has come to attest to the “gradual erasure of age old beliefs in kinship ties, ancestral locations and the genealogies of caste and creed” (Lal and Kumar 2007:x). In the context of migration to the city, as the graphic novels Corridor and Kari suggest, the position of the family home has become marginal.
Migration to the city
4 The subject of migration to the city has been on the agenda of Indian literature and film for many decades, presented either with a dichotomous approach—the city as juxtaposed to a “home” that is elsewhere—or with a view that focusses on the city itself as a new home and shows the migrants in their attempts to establish a sense of belonging amidst the unknown. Both views have, over the years, produced ample bodies of narratives: the city has, for example, been shown in opposition to the village —a dichotomy which, according to Sisir Kumar Das, “is as old as the days of the epic”4 (Das 1995:407). In its diasporic garb and against the background of increasing international migration, it has been contrasted with a “home” epitomized by India as the native country5 Finally, it has been explored as both a dangerous abyss and a place of opportunity for those who try to make it their new home.
5 As a destructive juggernaut the city does not allow strangers to ever settle in; protagonists in such narratives are lost, disoriented and unable to make that which is alien to them (H. parāyā) into something of their own (H. apnā).6 The city as a space of hope, on the other hand, allows newcomers to make a living and possibly find spatial as well social freedom. Thus, in a recent example of experimental city literature—the collection Iśq meṁ śahar honā (Being a City in Love, 2015), a compilation of Hindi laghu prem kathās (mini love stories) originally published on Facebook—the author Ravīś Kumār presents us with protagonists who wander the city in search of love. In the brief stories, ranging in length from around six lines to half a page, belonging is closely connected to belonging to one another; the alienness of the city finds expression mainly in its waxing and waning consent to grant the lovers moments of privacy. Interestingly, Kumār states in the preface to his book that he, too, has always considered the city in comparison to the village (H. śahar banām gāṁv). For him the city used to connote a temporary place of residence (H. asthāyī patā) while his village in Bihar was home (H. ghar) and the place of his permanent address (H. sthāyī patā) (Kumār 2015:ix). In his stories, however, this temporariness and shifting quality of the city is not depicted as threatening: it no longer forces the protagonists to be strangers but rather allows them to exploit urban spaces of anonymity that allow them a certain degree of togetherness. Kumār’s use of the word pair sthāyī—asthāyī sets him markedly apart from the dichotomy apnā—parāyā: his stories suggest that an initial lack of spatial
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belonging can be overcome by establishing a sense of social belonging, even if only in the context of coupledom.
6 In the graphic novels Corridor and Kari, which stand at the center of the following analyses because they both explore the theme of urban migration, the respective protagonists Brighu and Kari experience the city in a similar vein: it is a space that needs to be appropriated as home on both the spatial and the social level, and we see them employing different strategies to establish a sense of belonging and overcome their feeling of alienness. Importantly, as we will see, in Corridor and Kari an abundance of both verbal and visual intertextualities makes Brighu and Kari part of a twenty-first century global community.7 In contrast to the protagonists of the above-mentioned narratives, their points of reference for establishing a sense of belonging are not restricted to the village, the city itself, or a general (and homogenized) concept of Indianness but include examples from a cosmopolitan arena of music, literature, philosophy or film. Brighu and Kari negotiate their notions of home and belonging both on the local plane with its everyday life and against the background of a global cultural repository.
The graphic novel: to tell new stories one needs new languages
7 In another graphic novel of Sarnath Banerjee’s, The Harappa Files (2011), an imaginary “Harappa committee” comes together to commission an inventory of “the current ethnography and urban mythologies” of the country in order to document “contemporary societal concerns.” To have the findings recorded and then, duly, published, the committee decides upon the employment of a new medium—“the medium of comics”—because, in their opinion, it is through a combination of image and text that the ruptures of post-liberalization India can be best presented. And indeed, in South Asian modernities the visual realm “is central” as Sandria Freitag has argued: acts of seeing have become acts of knowing and it is through seeing and knowing that “persons constitute their identities and construct meaning from their world” so as to be better enabled to “grapple with change” (Freitag 2002:366). The graphic novel is amongst the sites where such processes of meaning-making are played out—“a site where old and new modes of visuality confer and where India is represented anew but often in an uncomfortable or an inauspicious manner.” (Dawson Varughese and Dudrah 2016:2) The Indian graphic novel thus satisfies a growing desire for the visual while, at the same time, asking the reader/spectator to move beyond the “darśanic” gaze8—as noted by Dawson Varughese and Dudrah who contrast the new medium with the classic Amar Chitra Katha comics which “celebrate India and Indianness” through straight- forwardly told stories and “neat line drawings” (Dawson Varughese and Dudrah 2016:3). The graphic novel, on the other hand, offers us diverse experimental and often complex visuals (e.g. collages) that do not always allow for easy deciphering. Far from being mere illustrations, they provide the story that runs through the text with additional—at times even alternative—narratives, facilitating interpretations of the depicted world that are much more multi-layered than those to be found in classic textual genres like the short story or the novel. In their introduction to a special issue of Modern Fiction Studies on the theme of graphic narrative, Chute and DeKoven (2006) emphasize that “images have never been more important, or more under siege” (Chute
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and DeKoven 2006:771). In an increasingly visual world the image is a vital means of communication, for words alone no longer convince people.9 Accordingly, in the Harappa Files we are told that the comic medium is “the sharpest butcher’s knife to cut a ‘society of anxieties’ into chewable filets.” When the committee concludes that “to tell new stories one needs new languages” (Banerjee 2011:11–15), they are getting right to the heart of modern graphic narrative.10
8 The Indian graphic novel is, indeed, a genre that has taken to telling the new stories of a rapidly-changing twenty-first-century India, providing us with an uninhibited and often unconventional look at conventional themes. It is an “alternative space” which has, according to Suhaan Mehta, the capacity to accommodate “voices that habitually fall outside the realm of Indian socio-politico-cultural discourses” (2010:173). As the genre is popular with “left-leaners, ecological warriors, travelling birds and political beasts”—not only in India but “the world over” (Patil 2010)—we encounter non- or counter-mainstream thought-provoking stories, presented to us in a range of original narrative modes and visual grammars. Indian graphic narratives allow eccentric (“ex- centric”) voices to be heard.
9 It is therefore not surprising that we find the protagonists in these new stories negotiating home and belonging largely outside a “classical” family context. Family, in general, is not of vital importance in the Indian graphic novel and family matters are not usually at the center of the stories. Instead, the graphic novel often challenges idealized notions of home and of family relations and we are presented with the subversive and dark side of the family.11 Unsurprisingly, as the family recedes into the narrative background, the idea of what socially and spatially constitutes home is expanded, as we will see in the following.
The texts
10 Sarnath Banerjee’s graphic novel Corridor came out in 2004 and sparked off an upsurge in the genre in India. Its narrative follows over quite some time the lives and development of the relationships of three young men: Digital Dutta, who “lives in his head” (2004:40), Shintu, who is newly married and searching for the ultimate potency remedy, and Brighu—protagonist and first-person narrator—a young urban intellectual who originally hails from Calcutta and has moved to the capital, presumably for work. In addition to this, Corridor is a portrait of twenty-first century Delhi from an intellectual and rather laid-back perspective, showing us the city as a site “of rich associations—between desire and its discontents” (Sardesai 2012:31). Importantly, Brighu’s Delhi is part of a global cultural network and we find his personal cultural reference points oscillating between Woody Guthrie, Perry Mason, Ibn Battuta and Tintin. The stories are brought to us through a combination of pointedly ironic texts and mostly black and white visuals, with single episodes and images presented in color. The multiple techniques—from line drawings to frenzied collages—make Corridor a dense and multi-layered novel, replete with the above-mentioned verbal and visual intertextualities that weave both the city and the story into a world-spanning cultural fabric.
11 Amruta Patil’s Kari (2008) is a coming-of-age novel: a 20-year-old woman, Kari, comes to the big city—Mumbai, or “smog city” as she calls it (2008:13)—to work as a copy writer for an advertising agency. Like Brighu in Corridor, Kari also portrays the city in very
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personal terms, and we become witnesses of how she learns to settle into her new environment and cope with the breakup of her (presumably) first relationship. A second narrative thread is Kari’s lesbianism which is, however, not the central theme of the book. Patil herself has called Kari “a queer book that wasn’t a ‘coming out’ book”—a story that is not setting out to accomplish a mission but rather wants to tell us about how to give people “room to be what they are, even if it looks odd to the majority” (Menezes 2012:42).12 We hear a story of a protagonist who happens to be lesbian rather than a story of what it means to be lesbian. Nevertheless, the theme is very much present: we learn about her special relationship with Ruth, her lover, and see the different (positive) reactions of her social environment to her homosexuality. Kari tells us about her coming-out as a young girl, watching the openly lesbian Canadian singer kd lang on TV, and we encounter Kari reading Jeanette Winterstone’s Sexing the Cherry, a novel in which the author presents her readers with “a counter-historical framework that naturalizes lesbian desire” (Roessner 2002:105).
12 As in Corridor, in Kari the protagonist tells us her story from a first-person-perspective, with the text heavily relying on longish narrative passages and thus meandering between voice-overs and direct speech. The “smudgy, charcoaly visuals” (Sardesai 2012:33) alternate between color and black and white, and like Corridor, Kari too connects some of its imagery with a global cultural arena, for example by quoting famous Western paintings and thus providing visual subtexts, as will be seen later. In the following we will first look at the living environments of Brighu and Kari—their current situations and their original homes—before analyzing in more detail the ways in which they negotiate their belonging to the social and physical arenas of the different places they call “home.”
New homes and old homes
13 In Corridor the protagonist Brighu has moved from Calcutta to Delhi, or to be more precise, a flat in South Delhi, a rather affluent part of the city. He is single and lives alone but later in the story his girlfriend Kali temporarily moves in with him. The flat as a space of living, however, does not play a major role in Corridor; we hardly ever see Brighu at home but rather find him out and about “travelling” through the city. He spends a lot of his time meeting friends and having coffee, partying, and smoking dope or playing chess with Jehangir Rangoonwalla, the owner of a book stall at Connaught Place in central New Delhi. Unlike Kari who, in her attempts to settle in, repeatedly ponders notions of belonging, Brighu does not make his “home away from home”- situation a topic of discussion. It is, therefore, primarily with relation to the “old” home that Corridor negotiates notions of home and belonging: Brighu goes to his parents’ place in Calcutta when he wants to take a break from his relationship with his girlfriend Kali, which suggests that for him his old “home” holds the promise of security in an insecure situation.
14 In Calcutta, however, feeling at home is not connected to the presence of the family but to other factors, as we will see later. During Brighu’s stay his parents only enter the scene when they pick him up at the station. We see them sitting in the car with him, his father delivering a comment on his son’s relationship situation like a line in a drama (see Figure 1). Like other elderly members of Brighu’s extended family his parents, too, are represented in a way that is reminiscent of the chorus in Greek (especially
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Euripidean) drama: They enter the “stage” of the narrative and inevitably comment on the dramatic action but ultimately remain bystanders (see Figure 2).
Figure 1
Corridor: 88
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Figure 2
Corridor: 74
15 Like the Greek chorus on stage the older generation represents the general population and speaks with an apparently collective voice. Parents in Corridor—not only Brighu’s but also those of other characters—are primarily employed to utter statements which function, in their brevity and absurdity, as ironic comments on daily life. As a point of reference, however, the family is of minor importance.13
16 Similarly, in Kari, the family has ceased to be Kari’s point of orientation. Her parental home in an unnamed town at the seaside is nostalgically remembered—Kari keeps it as “an altar in … [her] heart” (Patil 2008:84)—but it does not feature in the novel. In the beginning we find Kari homesick: lonely, anxious and feeling like “curling up and dying, or going back home” (Patil 2008:28). Like Brighu, she also perceives her parental place as a safe haven; she regularly calls her parents and appreciates the attention she thus gets through her mother’s voice even though, as we will see below in more detail, the communication is one-sided and it is more a question of Kari’s listening than of her entering into a meaningful exchange about what matters in her life (Patil 2008:21). As in Corridor, Kari’s parents are given the role of the chorus in Greek drama.
17 When they eventually visit her in Mumbai she awaits them at the station, but significantly the chapter in which she recalls the visit is titled “the visitations” (Patil 2008:27)—her parents enter her life like apparitions from a faraway world. When they leave again after ten days during which Kari desperately tries to distract them from aspects of her new life of which they disapprove (the flatmates, Kari’s “best friend” Ruth), Kari watches their train disappear—and with it an entire old world. Only temporarily does she slip into the old role of “guilt-ridden and miserable child” (Patil
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2008:31) until the follow-up phone call after the visit transforms her mother back into “a dismembered voice” from which Kari manages to distance herself (Patil 2008:31).
18 However, her new domicile in Mumbai does not naturally become a home—the feeling of belonging is hard-earned, and the fact that her flatmates have known each other for some time when Kari moves in makes it even more difficult for her to find her place. Kari shares a flat with two girls, Billo and Delna, whose personal stories remind us of the fact that family, in the graphic novel, is not a dependable concept. Both girls come from dysfunctional families—Billo, we are told, grew up with an alcoholic mother and Delna “ran away” from a wife-beating father (Patil 2008:22), an experience that has left her literally shattered: Kari tells us that she came to Mumbai to become an actress “but ended up being a Hand and Foot stand-in” (Patil 2008:22).
19 As has been argued earlier, according to Georg Simmel a sense of home and belonging entails both a spatial and a social dimension, and the aspects that constitute “home” for Brighu and Kari do indeed relate to both the physical and social planes: alongside the very materiality of home, we find the protagonists referring to a shared history, to aspects of familiarity and repetition, to communication and, lastly, to commensality. Brighu and Kari both negotiate and ponder these aspects, and we will see what role they play in their establishing a sense of belonging or overcoming strangeness. In addition, we shall see how far the presence or absence of family contributes to the protagonists’ ability to create a home for themselves.
The materiality of home
20 As indicated above, the physical home in the new city is of more importance for Kari than for Brighu and she introduces us to her residential situation quite early in the book. First of all, we learn that the postal address of the apartment block where her flat is located is Crystal Palace—a name that stands in stark contrast to the real life situation (see Figure 3). In Kari’s imagination Crystal Palace sounds like a pit stop in a fairytale. Where gold trees with silver boughs bear pomegranates with real ruby seeds. Floors of marble, ceilings of brocade. Place where twelve dancing princesses dance through the night until the soles of their shoes wear out. (Patil 2008:6) The real life Crystal Palace, however, turns out to be a mundane “2 BHK”—a 2-bedroom- hall-kitchen-flat—which is shown as a grey-in-grey floor plan (see Figure 4).
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Figure 3
Kari: 16
Figure 4
Kari: 17
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The visuals neatly illustrate the gap between signifier and signified: instead of a fairy tale palace we are presented with a matter-of-fact layout of the flat and we see the placement of names in a grid rather than a space inhabited by individuals. The technical and impersonal character of the home thus depicted neatly mirrors Kari’s initial situation of feeling “homeless.”
21 An important aspect of the physical home is furthermore that it provides a space for objects as carriers of memories, signifiers of history and emblems of intimacy. As Povrzanović Frykman and Humbracht have observed in a study on Objects in Migrants’ Transnational Lives “[o]bjects can be important for reasons of personal attachment, practical usefulness, or their ‘everydayness’ in a person’s life—regardless of where that life is being enacted” (2013:47). Both Kari and Brighu are aware of the significance of objects. We find Kari repeatedly formulating the idea that a space that is filled with the personal items of those that inhabit it signifies home and belonging. Thus, when describing her new flat in Crystal Palace Kari states: “You would imagine that with so much clutter, the one thing you wouldn’t miss was company” only to conclude, somewhat disillusioned: “But that isn’t true” (Patil 2008:18). Kari realizes that she has penetrated only the spatial but not the social boundaries of the group of flatmates. Within these boundaries, at least in the beginning, she remains a misfit—quite in contrast to Ruth, her lover, who has no interest in socially belonging to the group and therefore feels more comfortable in the space of the flat: “The grotty kitchen,” Kari tells us, referring once more to a dancing princess from a fairy tale, “turned into a secret garden around her. The house fit her perfectly, like a crystal slipper” (Patil 2008:26). Later in the narrative we see Kari sitting on the roof of her house watching a family in the opposite building through their window. Once again she ruminates on what she thinks home must feel like: a life that is “beautifully peopled,” with children “sitting at cluttered study tables” (Patil 2008:89). For Kari, an assemblage of everyday objects suggests that a place is inhabited by people; clutter signifies both spatial and social belonging.
22 Unlike Kari, Brighu does not tell us much about his living situation, but the materiality of home is important for him too: he presents himself, from the very beginning, as an obsessive collector of things (and stories), always “looking to find the impossible” (Banerjee 2004:9). The visuals suggest that his flat contains a hoard of collected objects, and Brighu states that “on good days” he feels “like Ibn Battuta” (Banerjee 2004:25 and 106)—the famous fourteenth-century Moroccan traveler and chronicler who is said to have collected stories from around the world during nearly thirty years of explorations, later to be published in his so-called Riḥla (journey), whose full title promises the reader insights into “the wonders of cities” (gharāʾib al-amṣār). True to the tradition of this apparently kindred spirit, Brighu collects all sorts of wondrous items, ranging from hard-to-find books and pens to tales about the city and its inhabitants. At the very end of the novel we see him drawing sketches of all the people whose stories we have encountered in the book, including himself (see Figures 5 and 6).
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Figure 5
Corridor: 108
Figure 6
Corridor: 107
The image that shows Brighu drawing himself as he is drawing himself is a neat narrative twist in the tradition of romantic irony whereby the process of composition is exposed “as a matter of authorial whim” (Baldick 2001:222)—or, in our case, a matter of “narratorial” whim.14 Brighu presents himself as a spectator—in Simmel’s understanding a classical position for the stranger who can observe from the outside and exhibit a certain “objectivity” without, however, necessarily becoming passive or detached (Wolff 1950:404).
23 For Brighu, the collector, the objects he assembles are of two types: firstly, items infused with memories which allow him to establish a connection to his family or his personal history, like the 8 mm camera that had been passed on to him by his grandfather or “the gallstone that killed him” (Banerjee 2004:6) (see Figure 7).
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Figure 7
Corridor: 6
Such objects invoke a feeling of belonging in him by reminding him of his “roots”—an aspect that is played out in detail when Brighu visits his parents in Calcutta as we will see later. On the other hand, Brighu accumulates objects for the sheer sake of collecting so as to make his collection “whole.” This striving for wholeness can, for one thing, be seen on a simplistic material level as a will to possess things. On the other hand, however, Brighu himself offers us a second reading by referring to Jean Baudrillard’s The System of Objects ([1968] 2005) where it is argued that collecting is not about the objects but about the act of “completing the set,” as Banerjee has phrased it, in order to achieve an illusionary state of “wholeness” (2004:7). In Corridor we thus learn at the very beginning of the story that wholeness is not only connected to a physical or social home but must also be seen as the eternal search for metaphysical completeness. Importantly, both in Kari and Corridor the objects in the home do not need to be used or employed in any way. Their main significance lies in being there and providing a meaning merely by what they stand for.
Shared history, familiarity and repetition
24 A second aspect that contributes to making a place “home” is the history one shares with the social group occupying this space. As briefly mentioned above, in Kari both Billo and Delna have already lived in the flat before Kari moves in; they have known each other for some time, and we learn that they have swapped boyfriends at some point in the past. Besides, they have established a clear hierarchical relationship: Billo, according to Kari, is the “diva” or “empress” of the flat and Delna acts as her “humble minister” (Patil 2008:22). Given this shared history of Billo, Delna and their partners, Kari feels like an outsider. She perceives the two couples as a “single-cell organism with not much room for strangers” (Patil 2008:22) and her position in the flat is the classical condition of “being without belonging.” As a result, Kari feels like the fifth wheel and has trouble settling in. Her initial position in the group is, to use Simmel’s words, “determined, essentially, by the fact that [s]he has not belonged to it from the beginning” (Wolff 1950:402).
25 At the same time, however, the flat also provides Kari with a routine which she feels is essential for her sense of belonging. Kari calls Crystal Palace “her chorus”—“the only part of the song familiar enough for me to sing along with, the only part that inevitably repeats itself whether I care for the words or not” (Patil 2008:16). Familiarity and
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repetition—good or bad—give Kari a sense of security and provide her with a reliable constant to fall back upon.
26 Likewise, for Brighu the feeling of being at home is connected to a particular set of routines and to a personal history—shared with objects, friends and, importantly, with the city itself. In Corridor the first thing Brighu does after arriving in Calcutta where he wants to spend his holidays is to get “reacquainted” with his old home (Banerjee 2004:88), and he accomplishes this, interestingly, through music and literature rather than interaction with his parents (see Figure 8).
Figure 8
Corridor: 88
It is in his old records and comic books—an eclectic mixture of James Elmore, The Rolling Stones, and Tintin—and in the history he shares with these objects from his past that he sees his “roots” (Banerjee 2004:88). In order to fully appreciate this situation in the context of the story we have to move backwards in narrative time to the beginning of Brighu’s journey: while boarding the train in Delhi, Brighu meets a fellow traveler, Mr. Murthy, who engages him in a conversation. He asks Brighu for his surname, his marital status, and, lastly, for his father’s name, and then declares that “roots are very important” (Banerjee 2004:87). This statement gets ironically twisted by the choices Brighu makes in order to settle back in, i.e. his opting for the “metaphysical home that clings to the person who sets out” (Lal and Kumar 2007: ix).
27 Home and belonging, for him as well as for Kari, is about ritual and the intimately known, which can be music (Kari, too, speaks of her “chorus”—if in a semi- metaphorical way) but, significantly, also the city itself and one’s routines within this city. We later see Brighu taking a tour of Calcutta, following old routines like eating sweets at Calcutta’s New Market, shopping for old records at Free School Street, or going to the Oly Pub in Park Street to have a drink. Significantly, just as Brighu reclaims his city by going back over his own well-trodden paths, for Kari, who struggles with the sensation of not feeling at home, the (new) city is not a stable entity. After the break-up of her relationship with Ruth, Kari observes: A city alters when a person leaves. It drops drawbridges, grows new roads, looks hairy at dusk. Since Ruth left, I don’t think I have walked the same road twice. (Patil 2008:14)
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For Kari the absence of familiarity and routine goes hand in hand with a sense of not- belonging. The loss of social togetherness, for her, entails a transformation of the spatial dimension of the city as well.
Communication and commensality
28 The last two aspects in Corridor and Kari which are associated with the feeling of belonging are communication and, closely related to it, personal interaction, and here especially commensality. Both graphic novels touch upon these themes, but as it is only Kari who addresses them explicitly we will, in the following, concentrate on her narrative. We have already seen that Kari feels the necessity to have, at home, a “song familiar enough to sing along with” (Patil 2008:16)—a situation, however, that ensues only after she has been staying in her new flat long enough for certain routines to develop. Hence, at a chronologically earlier point of her story we find her deeply afflicted by the lack of communication in her life: we see her in a phone booth talking to her mother, and from Kari’s monosyllabic answers it becomes clear that the conversation is one-sided and that there seems to be no exchange about, for example, her loneliness or the break-up of her first relationship (see Figure 9).
Figure 9
Kari: 20–21
From the voice-over commentary underneath the image, however, we learn that even these one-sided conversations with her mother are comforting for her because they provide her with the personal interaction that is missing in her flat: The only person who always wants to talk to me is Mama. Every Friday, at 10 pm, is the long call home. Mama talks, I listen. When I get back home, the silence has teeth again. My bed feels as large as a football field. (Patil 2008:21)
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Once again Kari is shown as the embodiment of the stranger who has entered the space but not penetrated the social boundaries of the new group. In spite of her spatial proximity to Billo and especially Delna, with whom she shares a room, she remains remote and feels lost—even in her own bed, the classical safe haven. At a later point, however, it is interesting to witness that the very silence she is bemoaning in the above quote, becomes a precious asset. As we see her sitting on the water tank on the roof of her apartment building, Kari’s voice-over narrative tells us that this is the place she retreats to when she doesn’t want anyone “to psychoanalyze … [her] silence” (Patil 2008:89). For Kari, meaningful personal relationships not only involve the right to communication but also the right to be silent if she so wishes.
29 Importantly, however, for both Kari and Brighu, the home is not the only space where personal interaction can take place and we see them both establishing meaningful social relationships in the outside world. For Kari it is her colleague Lazarus, her friend Angel and even her casual acquaintances Alexa and Manuel who provide her with the relationships she needs in order to develop a feeling of belonging. Among others, Brighu relies on his cousin, his girlfriend Kali, and on the bookseller Jehangir Rangoonwalla. Home, in Corridor and Kari, extends into the city; it is not limited to the space beneath one’s own roof. At the same time, the social group that ensures the development of a feeling of belonging diffuses into the open—as the family has ceased to be the basic reference point, the lives of both Kari and Brighu become more socially fragmented. Traditional responsibilities and tasks of the family, such as, for example, decisions about the selection of partners or the responsibility of caring for—and physically tending to—the dying are transferred to a variety of different people, as is the case in the relationship between Kari and Angel who is suffering from cancer.
30 A special situation in which personal relations are played out occurs in the context of meals. Commensality—the sharing of food and space—plays a vital role in establishing social relations. Thus, home, for Kari, is where people cook and eat together “properly”—signified by unhurried dining and homemade food, especially when prepared with high-quality ingredients. Much in contrast to Kari’s flatmates who have the cupboards in the kitchen filled with “hardened leftovers and junk and processed food,” Ruth introduces Kari to “the secret lives of ginger, cardamom, basil and anise” (Patil 2008:25) or the difference between FTGOP and NKOTB—“Fine Tippy Golden Orange Pekoe” as opposed to “New Kids on the Block,” as Kari feels compelled to explain in a footnote (Patil 2008:56). In Corridor, it is Biryani, a rice dish that is typical of North India and also of Delhi’s Mughlai cuisine, that is accorded a special position in the food universe: the high quality of the Biryani makes up for a failed business reception (Banerjee 2004:23–24) and it is Biryani that Brighu’s girlfriend Kali cooked for him as a welcome dish after he returns from Calcutta (Banerjee 2004:87). Here, too, commensality and homemade food signify home and belonging.
31 Food habits in Crystal Palace, Kari quickly learns, go hand in hand with eating habits: in the beginning she is rejected point-blank by Billo and Delna with a terse “no” when she invites them to have soup with her (Patil 2008:18). Only about half way into the narrative Kari does give an account of the “rare hearty suppers” which occur at the flat from time to time: I love it when the boys aren’t around. The girls are a lot cheerier, and a lot more interested in one another. I can smell the peaches of Billo’s perfume, Delna makes chicken in Coke and stir-fried spinach. On such days, the conversation wanders along a familiar track. Food, gossip, the occult, and then the moot-issue talk that
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ends either in a head massage or in (Delna’s) tears. The other thing that happens during these suppers is that the girls’ mother me and shamelessly flirt with me in turns (Patil 2008:58). These suppers, it appears, offer everything that is needed to establish a sense of home and belonging: familiarity, repetition, homemade food, togetherness, communication and intimacy. Much in line with Ruth’s above-described act of replacing “prosaic” with “poetic” food, the flatmates, at least once in a while, exchange fast-paced gobbling up of junk food for leisurely indulging in carefully-prepared dishes and each other’s company. Nevertheless, there is an interesting ambiguity contained in the image accompanying the above quote (see Figure 10).
Figure 10
Kari: 58
When comparing the image with Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper, the painting that provides the model for the panel, we find Kari in the first position on the left hand side, sitting in the place of Judas—the eternal outsider. After all, a home away from home, the image seems to imply, is not easily established; it is a difficult and winding way from the spatial into the social arena of a new home.
Conclusion
32 Kari and Corridor negotiate notions of home and belonging in the context of migration to the city. As twenty-first century graphic novels they introduce us to two young modern intellectuals—“city creatures” in the best sense of the word—who move through a global cultural arena with more ease than many of the protagonists of the other literatures mentioned above. Accordingly, we see the dichotomous perspectives on the city disappear once more: the city is seen neither in contrast to the village, nor is it, for example, an embodiment of an imagined deplorable “West” as opposed to a morally intact “East.” Likewise, the binary opposition contained in the word pair sthāyī —asthāyī as used by Kumār in the introduction to his collection Iśq mẽ śahar honā is not valid for Corridor and Kari: in both graphic novels the old as well as the new domicile are called “home” and the protagonists strongly focus on their respective current situations, intent on creating a home away from home for themselves.
33 As we have seen, this situation demands different strategies of adaptation on various levels: a house (or any space for that matter, even the city itself) becomes a home firstly when it contains objects that carry meaning and memories (Kari’s “clutter” and
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Brighu’s “collections”), secondly when it allows for familiar routines to develop which provide the occupants with a constant in their lives (the “chorus” at Crystal Palace, or Brighu’s ritualized walk through Calcutta), or thirdly when meaningful communication takes place between the newcomer and the receiving group (in our cases friends in the city, or the city itself, rather than the parents in the old home or, for Kari, the flatmates in the new home). Furthermore, an important factor in the process of overcoming “strangeness” is, as we have seen, the act of eating together—gathering around a table, sharing specially-cooked food, exchanging ideas and, ideally, memories: since a shared history contributes significantly to the sense of belonging, the process of establishing a home requires time. Belonging, in Kari and Corridor, is negotiated against the background of these criteria.
34 At the same time the protagonists Kari and Brighu are firmly rooted in a global cultural arena—in contrast to the initially-mentioned examples of narratives about migration to the city. The global frame is neither rejected as “Western” as is the case, for example, in many of the Hindi-language NRI-films, nor is it interpreted as an “alien” point of reference that is distinct from an “Indian” one. “The gap between the ‘East’ and the ‘West’ has narrowed” Lal and Kumar have noted, and therefore, unsurprisingly, “the new generation writers tend to disregard locational separateness” (2007:ix). Accordingly, the global cultural milieu of the two graphic novels is shown as a natural playground for the protagonists. In Corridor Baudrillard’s The System of Objects sits comfortably next to Ibn Battuta or the “Ideal Boy”; in Kari we encounter the Hindi movie Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge as well as John Kennedy Toole’s American cult novel A Confederacy of Dunces or Jeanette Winterson’s Sexing the Cherry.15
35 In Kari the connection with a global cultural landscape is further engendered by Amruta Patil’s visually quoting a number of famous paintings. We have already seen the girls’ flat dinner staged as the Last Supper. Other paintings used in this way include Frida Kahlo’s The Two Fridas, Andrew Wyeth’ Christina’s World, and Gustav Klimt’s The Virgin (see Patil 2004:3, 8, and 76, respectively).16 Since Kari, in these panels, is shown in situations that have already been painted by artists around the world, her experiences are connoted as both timeless (they have happened before) and placeless (they have happened elsewhere). Moreover, they are not individual experiences: others—the individuals depicted in the paintings—have had them too, even though they (or rather we, as the beholders) may have interpreted them differently.
36 As far as family relationships are concerned, it seems telling that in the graphic novel, at first sight, the family is either seen extremely critically or plays a minor role as appears to be the case in Kari and Corridor. The parents live far away from their children; they are not involved in their everyday lives and are not shown to be consulted in times of distress—their “modes and categories” seem to stem from the past and are no longer appropriate for the “reality experienced by the present world” (Lal and Kumar 2007:x). Both protagonists willingly arrange their lives independently from their families and we do not see the parents being assigned any role of importance in the context of their children’s attempts to establish a home for themselves in the “big cities” of Mumbai and Delhi. Nevertheless we must assume that notions of what constitutes “home” will have been formed, at least in part, in the parental homes of Kari and Brighu, who both seem to derive some comfort from their very existence: we have seen how Kari regularly phones her mother and Brighu spends his holidays at his parents’ home when he is thinking about breaking up with his
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girlfriend Kali. This suggests that the general criteria that are mentioned as important for producing a sense of belonging have been pre-established in these homes. Nevertheless, in the spaces of the graphic novel, Kari and Brighu are allowed to act and live much more independently and unconventionally than protagonists in other narrative genres. This includes a metaphysical sense of belonging, an opportunity for the protagonists to grow into themselves, in addition to the new spatial or social arena— quite in contrast, for example, to the eternally alienated characters of the Hindi nayī kahānī. The graphic novel, it has been said, is an alternative space—Corridor and Kari show that it negotiates alternative modes of urban living outside classical family models.
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NOTES
1. So far the Indian graphic novel has been largely an English-language genre, with only rare works published in any of the vernacular languages (mostly as translations from texts originally composed and brought out in English). English has been a literary language in India for more than a century, adding to the proverbial multiplicity of Indian (literary) languages. Nevertheless, in the following a brief glance at the themes of the (migrant’s) city as represented in a vernacular literary context seems to be in order, so as to place the works considered here in a wider context of the literary urban narratives of India (for a discussion of the desideratum of considering “urbanity in the vernacular” cf. Harder 2016). Given the multifaceted linguistic environment in India it is not possible to comparatively address urban narratives produced in all the vernacular languages that are potentially relevant for the cities that provide the settings for our graphic novels, i.e. Delhi (with the vernaculars Hindi, Urdu and Panjabi) and Mumbai (with Marathi, Hindi and Gujarati). Therefore, reference will only be made to selected works in Hindi, as this has been a literary language for both Delhi- and Mumbai-related city narratives. For an overview of early urban narratives in Marathi see Apte (1970); Hindi narratives on Indian cities, including Delhi and Bombay/Mumbai, have been listed by Śaśikānt (2005). 2. See Uberoi’s article “The Family in India: Beyond the Nuclear versus Joint Debate” (2001) for an evaluation of the topic. 3. For a multifaceted exploration of the topic see Lal and Kumar’s edited volume Interpreting Homes in South Asian Literature (2007). 4. According to Das, in the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth century the city-village contrast was increasingly conceptualized as a “nature-artefact dichotomy” and as “part of a new set of opposition that is East and West” (1995:408), with the latter perspective remaining virulent far into the twentieth century. Examples of technology- and industry-critical works from the Hindi literary sphere of 1920s and 1930s include Premcand’s novels Raṅgbhūmī ([1925] 1961, translated as Rangbhumi, The Arena of Life, Premchand 2010) and Godān ([1936] 1995, translated as The Gift of a Cow, Premchand 1968). For a brief overview of key themes and some major Indian literary works
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that explore “the city and the village” see Das (1995:406–09). The East-West opposition in the context of migration has also been thoroughly explored in popular Hindi film. 5. This theme has been explored in the literature of the South Asian diaspora, especially in the USA and the UK, but also in popular Hindi film, especially the so-called “NRI-films.” The latter present the viewers with the homeland’s perspective on migrants: their situation in the foreign land is often conceptualized as exile rather than opportunity; the alien culture (“the West”), it is suggested, needs to be contested and the situation must be overcome by mimicking the imaginary homogeneous culture of the homeland (“the East”). Diasporic migrants of film and literature inevitably carry the “baggage of a given-up past clinging somewhere in memory” (Lal and Kumar 2007:ix). For the representation of the binary of “East” and “West” in popular Hindi films see for example Kaur (2002), Punatambekar (2005) and Sarma (2009). 6. Among the best-known Hindi genres that have explored this topic is the nayī kahānī (new story) which, in the 1950s and 60s, introduced the readers to protagonists who found themselves alone in the city and far away from anything that might constitute a home for them. For a detailed analysis of the theme of alienation in the nayī kahānī see Roadarmel’s renowned study (1969). Typical examples are Kamleśvār’s short stories Khoyī huī diśāeṁ (Lost Directions, 1963), and Parāyā śahar (Alien City, 1965). Roadarmel provides us with an investigation of these and other stories revolving around the theme of alienation in the city (1969:188–205). 7. Banerjee and Patil literally present us with Kristeva’s “mosaic of quotations” (Kristeva 1980:66). Proceeding from Mikhail Bakhtin’s ideas of dialogism and the carnivalesque, Julia Kristeva coined the term “intertextuality” in 1966, contending that “any text is the absorption and transformation of another” (Kristeva 1980:66). Far more than a mere “study of sources” Kristeva understands intertextuality as a transposition of sign systems and discourses “into another” so that they produce multiple layers of meaning (Kristeva 1984:60). Intertextuality has also been a central term in postmodernism, the “classical” the arena of “pastiche, imitation and the mixing of already established styles and practices” (Allen 2000:5; for a more detailed discussion see Allen 2000:181–99). 8. For a brief introduction to the concept of darśan, the mode of deferentially beholding an image, for example, of a deity, and at the same time being seen by the deity, see Vidal (2015). 9. In this context Chute and DeKoven remind us of Donald Rumsfeld who pointed out with regard to the photographs of abused prisoners in the Abu Ghraib prison that “[w]ords don’t do it” (2006:771). 10. Ravīś Kumār’s collection of experimental laghu prem kathās, too, must be seen as an example of such a new “language” being used to negotiate the modern metropolis: here it is not through images but a combination of brevity and channeling (Facebook—an inherently mobile medium) that the life (in the city) is “dissected.” 11. See, for example, Hush which deals with the sexual abuse of children within their own families (Thomas and Eipe 2010); Lie touches, among other themes, on female infanticide (Bhatia et.al. 2010); in Kari alcoholism and domestic violence are mentioned (Patil 2008). 12. For Patil’s take on the question of Kari’s lesbianism see also Paul Gravett’s interview with the author (Gravett 2012). For a graphic novel that explores lesbianism as a primary theme, see for example Julie Maroh’s Blue is the Warmest Color ([2010, French: Le bleu est une couleur chaude] 2013). In India the topic has been addressed through comedy in A Queer Graphic Anthology (Gangwani and Biswas 2015), a special issue of the queer magazine the gaysi zine. 13. Brighu’s parents appear at the station once more when he is leaving again for Delhi, but we only see them waving in the background, so far away from us, the spectators, that not even their facial expressions can be seen. The parents, thus, literally “frame” Brighu’s visit but they are not shown as part of the “picture” itself. 14. Self-reflexivity is also a major tool of postmodern literary production where a potentially endless succession of duplications (Brian McHale’s “Chinese box” effect) calls our attention to the
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constructedness of works of fiction and also of our perception of the world (cf. McHale 2003:112– 30). 15. Baudrillard and Ibn Battuta were mentioned above; for the use of the “Ideal Boy”—visuals of the well-known educational charts—see Banerjee (2004:65(; a poster of the film appears in (and ironically comments upon) the scene where Kari meets Ruth for the first time (Patil 2008:68). For Kari reading Toole’s novel see Patil (2008:63). For Winterson’s postmodern narrative see Patil (2008:79). The latter work, incidentally, includes an adaptation of the fairy tale The Twelve Dancing Princesses which Kari uses to describe Crystal Palace. For an analysis of Winterson’s book see Roessner (2002). Mukherjee (2015) discusses the “marvelous intertextualities” (Mukherjee 2015:161) of the fairy tale references in Kari as important tropes of postmodern fiction. 16. The upper panel on page 5 probably quotes Kahlo’s The Suicide of Dorothy Hale, but the similarities are not as obvious as in the other examples.
ABSTRACTS
In times of increasing spatial mobility the negotiations of home and belonging for those who need (or want) to settle down in new places have become a daily issue, and the young in particular often leave their families behind as they set out to conquer new frontiers. Looking at two Indian graphic novels—Corridor by Sarnath Banerjee (2004) and Kari by Amruta Patil (2008)— this article will examine the notions of what constitutes “home” for the protagonists: two young urban intellectuals who have moved to Mumbai and Delhi respectively. We will see that “strangeness” needs to be overcome both on a spatial and social plane, but that establishing a feeling of “belonging” no longer depends on the their being closely connected to their families— the family being a concept that, in India, is still widely hailed as an ideal social paradigm. The Indian graphic novel constitutes a cosmopolitan “alternative space” (Suhaan Mehta 2010:173), and it presents us with alternative paradigms of home and belonging.
INDEX
Keywords: home, belonging, family, graphic novel, Corridor, Kari, intertextuality, materiality of home, shared history, repetition, communication, commensality
AUTHOR
IRA SARMA Institute of South and Central Asian Studies, University of Leipzig, Germany
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Negotiating Middle-class Respectable Femininity: Bangladeshi Women and their Families
Nazia Hussein
Introduction
1 The growth of neo-liberalization, an urban wage economy, and internal and international migration have fundamentally changed household structure and family ideology in Bangladesh. Since the 1990s, urban middle-class Bangladeshi women’s participation in the public domain as active economic agents has shifted the power relations in couples and families, particularly because professional women now seek familial support systems to find a substitute for their domestic work. Yet studies of Bangladeshi families predominantly address women’s oppression within families in relation to patriarchy (Chowdhury 2009), domestic violence (Schuler, Hashemi and Akhter 1996; Koenig et al. 2003; Bates et al. 2004; Heath 2014) and women’s reproductive role (Schuler, Hashemi and Riley 1997). But the nitty-gritty of family life such as changing household settings, intra-household and intergenerational relations, practices surrounding gender roles such as motherhood, daughters-in-law, and women’s contribution to family construction and the maintenance of middle-class status are overlooked.
2 This bias against studies of family structures and everyday practices of gender and class within families also prevails in literature on globalization, economic liberalization, Islam’s revival and sexuality studies in South Asia and Bangladesh. While much research in India and emerging literature in other South Asian countries like Sri Lanka, Nepal and Bangladesh address the transformation of women’s roles in urban areas, it is largely focused on women’s involvement in the “public” sphere through employment and education (Radhakrishnan 2009, 2011; Liechty 2003; Kabeer 1997, 2000).
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Additionally, the growing visibility of Islamic practices such as the headscarf and burqa1 among women has been addressed in recent research on women’s agency and respectability (Hussain 2010), empowerment (White 2010; Rozario 2006) and honor (Naher 2010). Finally, a nascent body of literature addresses sexualities, non- heterosexual relationships and post-liberalization lifestyles since the 2000s (Osella and Osella 2004; Karim 2010). Yet the growth of Bangladesh’s new and affluent urban middle class, their contribution to social transformation, and their numbers, characteristics, diversity and gender dynamics are under-researched (Lewis 2011). Shahidullah (1985) recognized that the economic reforms of the late 1970s and 1980s influenced the growth of the new middle class. Van Schendel (2009) saw the complexities of this middle stratum through their role in the reproduction of a Bengali cultural pride, their involvement in politics and economics, and their investment in education. Janeja (2010) identified the role of food and café culture and Mapril (2013) studied international labor migration as constitutive of the new middle-class in Bangladesh. In this paper, I explore the changing structure of urban middle-class Bangladeshi women’s household patterns, which have an impact on their negotiations with respectable femininity within the family and on the construction of a new affluent middle-class.
3 Normative conceptions of respectable femininity in Bangladesh, and South Asia at large, involve women prioritizing family above work through domesticity, caring and socializing roles and moral propriety. Using sociology of class (Bourdieu 1992, 2008) and boundary work (Lamont 1992), I present normative boundaries of middle-class respectability as a binding force or a “burden” that women navigate through their contribution to class privilege. As middle-class women gain access to higher education, highly-paid employment, capital investments of goods, high-fee English-medium education, concerted cultivation of children, and foreign tourism, they can change their gendered roles within the family and society. I argue that the achievements of these women give them a significant say in their own life trajectories, even though they do not eliminate conventional expectations of middle-class respectable femininity. Focusing on women’s familial negotiations, I demonstrate how the research participants add value and legitimacy to their self-aspirations. A gendered power lies in women’s ability to legitimize which status claims are respectable in what context. I argue that a professional career and capital investment add respectability, making it acceptable for a woman to be allowed autonomy and live life on her own terms in Bangladesh. Such new constructions of women’s respectability enable us to deconstruct the binaries of tradition and modernity or respectable and unrespectable, and carve out a third or “other” site (Menon 2005) for women to bring some improvement to their inferior gender position in a patriarchal society.
Boundaries of respectable femininity
4 Following Skeggs (1997), I use Bourdieu’s (1992, 2008) model of class based on “capital” movements in social space, and conceptualize respectable femininity as a symbolic capital that illuminates the embeddedness of gender and class. Capital is a set of common properties, objectified or sometimes legally guaranteed, such as possession of one or more goods, or a set of embodied practices such as clothing (Bourdieu 1992:101, 2008:280). Bourdieu’s multidimensional approach to class is based on economic
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(income, wealth), cultural (education, embodied aesthetics), social (friends, colleagues) and symbolic (prestige, honor) capital movements, which can confer strength, power and profit to their holder (Bourdieu 1992). Respectable femininity is a symbolic capital that women seek in order to gain symbolic profit and class status. Symbolic capital is the form that any other kind of capital (economic, cultural and social) can take once it is perceived as legitimate. Legitimization occurs when one’s privileged taste and capitals are considered part of one’s “natural” capacity, misrecognizing all others as inferior and reproducing the dominance of the privileged (Laberge 1995). Bourdieu maintains that all distinctive/classed lifestyles are defined by the mutual relationship of habitus, capital and the field. The distinctive “taste” of the class is derived from its agents’ “homogeneous conditions of existence (field), production of homogeneous systems of dispositions capable of generating similar properties … and practices (capital) … within a set of common properties embodied as class habitus” (Bourdieu 1992:101).
5 Respectable femininity is based around particular types of femininity, aesthetics, caring and morals, always seeking to get something “right”; it is articulated as a process through which women add value to themselves (Skeggs 1997). It manifests as behavioral expectations in workplaces, streets and homes. Respectability has long been a discourse used to differentiate middle and working classes (Skeggs 2004). For Watt (2008), respectability offers new insights into the experiences of living in both inner and suburban London. The use of respectable femininity to define middle-class status highlights feminist concerns around invisibility of gender in the Bourdieusian construction of class (Lovell 2000; Skeggs 2004). Additionally, McDowell (2008) argues that, given women’s ever-increasing participation in the labor force, the division of labor along gender lines within the household must be reconsidered to investigate how it contributes to new class politics in the UK and USA. In this paper, I agree with these feminist accounts of class and evaluate how the constant struggle to gain value and legitimacy—thus status and power2—through respectability enables participants in this research to distance themselves from other women.
6 In Victorian Britain women’s respectability was related to domesticity, appropriate language, behavior (Skeggs 1997) and sexual restraint (Frances 1994). Practices of respectable femininity are traceable in colonial India, especially Bengal, through the educational attainments of the middle-class bhodromohila,3 the respectable woman, who was expected to acquire education and cultural refinement to make her a worthy companion to her husband, without jeopardizing her feminine spiritual (domestic) virtues or her place in the home (Chatterjee 1989:628). Three themes dominated the literature on urban Hindu and Muslim Bengali bhodromohila’s status as superior to other women: the ideal of pativrata (a wife worshipping her husband), a woman’s subordinate position to a man as part of her Dharma (duty), and the separation of public and private spheres. Even educated women would not participate in the public sphere, reflecting older notions of purdah (seclusion) (Donner 2008:44). In postcolonial East Pakistan, middle-class women’s cultural practices were central to Bangladesh’s independence movement, which sought to establish a secular fusion identity, including aspects of their religion, Islam, and Bengali cultural practices, such as the sari and wearing a bindi4 on their forehead. This identity constituted Bengali middle-class women’s respectability. In contemporary Bangladesh, religious clothing such as headscarves and burqas have been associated with lower middle-class women’s respectability
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(White 2010; Hussain 2010). Elsewhere in South Asia, respectable femininity and its association with the family plays out in the individual choices of professional women and their prioritizing family above work (Radhakrishnan 2009:201).
7 Normative conceptions of middle-class respectability in India portray stay-at-home mothers as respectable women (Radhakrishnan 2009, 2011). In the IT sector, Indian women often “choose” family over career and either leave their jobs after childbirth, reduce their workload or decline opportunities for promotion (2011:156). In many cases this is a wholehearted decision; the few who show ambivalence are considered less respectable (2011:154). Additionally, Indian women going out alone or interacting with men after working hours—a necessity when building a professional career (Phadke 2007)—lose respectability and moral propriety (Patel 2006). Despite women’s cultural and economic capitals of high educational and professional achievements in Sri Lanka, visible changes in women’s roles as nurturers and caregivers cause loss of respectability (Fernando and Cohen 2013). Hence, professional aspiration is considered outside the boundaries of respectable femininity in South Asia.
8 Yet in contemporary Bangladesh and elsewhere in South Asia, middle-class women are expected to contribute to household income, and/or bring bridal wealth/dowry or inherited assets to reinforce the family’s affluent class status, thus investing in the family through economic capitals (Sabur 2014). Although such shifts enable many women to have careers and enter the public realm, their families remain a dominant factor in their lives, and some families still expect women to stay at home. Some women conform to such expectations, while others defy them and even file for divorce (Sabur 2014; Parvez 2011; Karim 2012). The present research adds to this nascent body literature, which identifies instances of negotiating respectability in relation to women’s domestic roles.
9 Binaries and boundaries of classed construction of respectability are central to this discussion. To theorize new or alternative forms of middle-class respectable femininity in Bangladesh, I use the concepts of negotiation and boundary work. Pereira (2010:27) draws from the Latin etymology of “negotiation”: neg meaning “not,” and otium, “leisure” or “rest,” thus “no rest.” Negotiation is continuous, endless, and demands boundary work. I find Pereira’s understanding of boundary work as an everyday and ongoing labor useful for understanding how respectability is used by middle-class women to perform continuous boundary work in order to negotiate with binaries of respectable (domestic duties) and unrespectable practices (professional/personal aspiration). Lamont (1992:11) defines boundary work as personal investment in identity: “[boundaries] emerge when we try to define who we are: we constantly draw inferences concerning our similarities to, and differences from, others, indirectly producing typification systems.” “Typification systems” indicate that boundary work guides and organizes both the self and other social identities into categories. For this research, Lamont’s typifications can be read as Bourdieu’s various capitals (economic, cultural, social and symbolic). However, Bourdieu’s understanding of distinction assumes that people with similar tastes and capitals tend to stay together, contributing to the reproduction of class structure. But to Lamont some boundaries are weak, and individuals do not always draw boundaries corresponding to their collective identity and taste, but rather to societal factors, such as profession, age or income, which can also influence individual ways of drawing boundaries that are different from other
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members of their class (1992:115, 147). Thus, through boundary work, women can create and recreate class distinctions and their new middle-class status.
10 I seek to explore to what extent professional women can negotiate with the normative conceptions of Bengali middle-class respectable femininity, introduce alternative forms of respectable femininity, and contribute to the creation of a new affluent middle class in Dhaka, Bangladesh. I will do so by investigating whether the participants conform and negotiate with permeable and shifting boundaries of Bengali middle-class respectability within the family, legitimizing their professional careers and capital investments in the family as respectable practices as opposed to prioritizing family above all.
The Bangladeshi context
11 Bangladesh is one of the “Next Eleven Tier” of developing countries, with a high potential of becoming one of the world’s largest economies in the twenty-first century (BBC 2014). Although women’s formal waged employment remains fairly low, it has more than tripled from 5.4 million in 1996 to 17.2 million in 2010, while men’s labor force increased from 30.6 million to 39.5 million (BBS 2012:63). Neo-liberalization gave poor Bangladeshi women access to the market: micro-finance5 for rural women and the ready-made garment industry for urban women. Studies of working women in Bangladesh primarily focus on poor women’s participation in garment factories (the industry sector employs 13.32% of all working women) or micro-finance (the agricultural sector employs 68.84% of all working women), overlooking the service sector, which employs the second largest proportion (21.89%) (BBS 2010:46).
12 Some research and news items identify a booming middle-class community in Bangladesh, who are affluent, engaged in the global consumer market and transnationally mobile (Sabur 2010; Karim 2012; Rashid 2012; Sadique 2013). Although 31.5% of Bangladesh’s population still live below the poverty line (Government of People’s Republic of Bangladesh 2014), in the past decade the middle class has nearly doubled to approximately 30 million, more than the populations of Sweden, Norway and Denmark combined and the incomes of the middle class have doubled as well, increasing Bangladesh’s private consumption to nearly £66 billion every year (Sadique 2013). The income bracket of middle-class households is £6,600–£9,900, which is a combined income from salary, small or medium-sized businesses, earnings from land sales or real estate rents, or investment in the capital market (Rashid 2012). However, there is little research on the impact of neoliberal movements on this rising middle-class community’s women. Thus, it is important to ask to what extent all women, rather than just rural and urban poor women, have benefited from globalization and neoliberalization in Bangladeshi society.
13 Finally, Bangladesh is identified as a patriarchal country. With no welfare state, professional women have no state-funded childcare. In fact, in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, there are only a handful of private childcare facilities, which are extremely expensive. Some NGOs have their own day care centers, for their employees only. In addition, part-time family-friendly jobs are unheard of for women in mid- to upper- level professions.
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Research design
14 This study is based on qualitative research through multiple in-depth interviews, over a year (January-December 2013) with 21 participants, aged 32–45, in Dhaka. However, owing to the focus on conjugal families this paper will only use the data of 17 married participants. Two semi-structured interviews were conducted with all participants within this year: the first face to face, and the second via phone or Skype. Email questionnaires were used to collect some clarification data. Most participants spoke in a mixture of English and Bengali, a common form of speech among urban middle-class Bangladeshis and a defining characteristic of the new middle-class. This helped me overcome the difficulty of the accurate translation of Bengali words. In addition, I often asked for friends and family members’ suggestions on translation. For example, participants constantly used the term man shonman, which literally means “measure of reputation.” Following much discussion with friends and family, I decided to translate it as “respectability,” which later became a key conceptual framework for my data analysis. The participants shared some common characteristics: they all lived in Dhaka city, were qualified to graduate level or above and were mid- to upper-level professionals. But there were also some differences: 11 were married with children, 6 married with no children. There were differences in household settings and they lived in different areas in Dhaka. All participants were selected using the snowball method: I identified a small group of people relevant to the research questions, who proposed other participants with the relevant experience and characteristics (Bryman 2012:424). To avoid any inherent bias in the method, I used several snowballs in this research. I sampled women from my peers, ex-colleagues, managers, friends, and family members and then expanded this to distant informants who self-identified as middle-class, who lived in Dhaka, had tertiary education, and were in mid- to upper-level positions in their careers. I started with four participants from my network, who then expanded my snowball to include the rest of the participants.
15 The lifecycle of participants’ household settings had a significant impact on their familial negotiations. Following are the three household settings of the participants: 1. Nuclear household: Participants live with husband and children in a separate location from their extended family. Seven participants live in this household setting. They are in the middle to older age range and their extended families live outside Dhaka. 2. Semi-extended household: Extended families live like neighbors, yet function as a family. Participants live next door to their in-laws, in housing owned by their in-laws, mostly sharing resources such as food, household help and cars. Eight married participants live in such a household system. They are in the younger and middle age groups, are engaged in relatively low-paid jobs or have faced some financial difficulty. 3. Extended household: Different generations of married couples and their children share a single household and a common pool of resources. Only two participants live in this household setting and they are in the younger age group.
16 The following table shows participants’ household settings:
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Table 1
Participants’ household lifecycle
Reinstating class distinction
17 Participants in this research accrue and invest capitals in themselves and their families. In so doing they contribute to the construction of their class distinction, which gives them respectability within the family, enabling them to negotiate their domestic, caring, and socializing roles. Tamanna, who is the country manager of a multinational accounting firm and lives in a semi-extended household, explains: I eat with my in-laws and live in one of my father-in-law’s apartments right below them in the building. So our household expenses are only my household help’s costs and my daughter’s expenses. My husband is a saving man; I have learned to save from him. As we do not have to pay rent we both save considerably to be able to invest in something big, such as a car or land. In semi-extended households most participants pay bills, the wage of household help and some food expenses (expenses are shared with their husbands) but there is no formal financial contribution to the extended family. However, there exist various informal ways of making financial contributions, such as gifts.
18 In the above quote Tamanna recognizes that because of the money she and her husband save on rent and food, they are able to make long-term economic investments. It is important to note that Tamanna’s mother-n-law (MIL) and father-in-law disapproved of Tamanna going back to work after childbirth, a normative expectation of middle-class respectable femininity. Tamanna’s MIL initially refused to provide any childcare support to her, but eventually relented. Tamanna explains: I guess my MIL noticed how my husband is supportive of my career, and due to my income, we are now doing so much better economically as opposed to my brother- in-law and sister-in-law. My sister-in-law had to give up her wish to pursue a career as her husband and my parents-in-law did not want her to work after having children…
19 It appears that through economic capital gained from dual partner income and the improvement of Tamanna’s social status as opposed to her brother and sister-in-law,
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Tamanna’s MIL’s opposition to her career transformed into support. Professional women living in semi-extended households reinforce their class status by accruing capitals for their families, which ultimately construct their professions as respectable.
20 All eight participants in semi-extended households are able to make long-term investments, most often property and cars, thus accumulating economic capitals. I read participants’ ability to buy and invest assets in the family as a means of capital accrual and reinvestment in the family, which earns them symbolic respectability, helping their families maintain their class privilege.
21 Setting up semi-extended households is not just a prerogative of the participants. The complete breakdown of the extended family setting is a loss of status, power and respectability for the older generation as well as a loss of access to a privileged lifestyle and support with childcare and chores for the younger generation. Owing to neoliberalization and women’s increased participation in paid work, both generations look for the best of both worlds. The older generation may prefer to help the younger generation by providing a support system, both economically and in household chores and childcare, in the form of semi-extended households. And younger families like Tamanna’s can negotiate a better work/home-life balance by utilizing the extended family’s support system and enjoying the economic stability of an affluent middle-class lifestyle. The younger family’s further investment in the family through the acquisition of long-term consumer goods or assets to increase class distinction is a symbol of their respectable position in the family, and may be a reason for the older generation’s acceptance of such changing household settings.
22 Semi-extended households also appear to provide young married participants increased opportunity to spend on children’s concerted development (Lareau 2011), an investment in children’s cultural capital as well as a sign of class status. Faria, who runs her own clothing business, explains: now that we have children, we need to spend on our sons to give them a good education in an English-medium school, take them to different classes for extracurricular activities etc. For all this we bought a car, although before we could just use my in-laws’ car. A semi-extended household setting gives Faria the economic flexibility and autonomy to reproduce class privilege through concerted cultivation (Lareau 2011), whereby middle-class parents cultivate talents in their children by organizing children’s leisure activities, and stimulating children’s cognitive and social development. Faria’s ability to afford the cultural capital of concerted cultivation and English-medium schooling (considerably more expensive than Bengali-medium schooling) signifies and reproduces her middle-class privilege, thus her family’s social status, and that of the next generation. Fifteen participants’ children attend high-fee English-medium schools; only two participants’ children attend low-fee schools, and they both live in nuclear families with no shared resources.
23 In semi-extended and extended households, the older generation does not lose face in the community or social network for the complete breakdown of the extended household and control over daughters-in-law (DIL), while the participants in this study can accrue more capital, which they reinvest in the family. Working women use this investment as a legitimate source of respectability and maintain work/home balance. This choice to use shared resources to maintain a middle-class lifestyle and further accrue long-term economic and cultural capitals for their family and the next
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generation is a key form of boundary work, whereby women are negotiating the boundaries of respectable household settings and intergenerational relationships.
Substituting domestic work
24 Some married participants in semi-extended and extended households are able to convert kin relations within their in-laws’ family, making allies who take over participants’ childcare responsibilities. Participants with younger children are particularly keen on securing the allegiance of their MILs, so they can pursue their careers after marriage and motherhood. I construct MILs as boundary keepers, individuals who police women’s performance of respectable femininity and help or hinder women’s boundary work in relation to negotiating boundaries of respectability and work-life balance. As discussed in the first section, through playing a symbolic role in relation to reproducing class privilege, women build a protective shield, enabling them to find substitutes for their gendered domestic work, such as food preparation, childcare etc., and avoid the disciplining of their families. Faria explains: When I was in my first job with an international NGO, where I had regular field work in the villages, I could not give enough time to do household work like my homemaker sister-in-law, and that worried me. So to please my in-laws, especially my MIL, I used to try to cook even after returning from field work, completely exhausted! I am a very bad cook! I used to call my mother to ask what I should put next in a recipe… I kept thinking God knows what my MIL is thinking of me, that this girl does not know anything about a household! … Now (after moving to semi- extended household) I only help out in cooking during social gatherings. Faria’s comment illuminates two things: first, that the normative conception of middle- class respectability requires daughters-in-law to participate in household chores; second, that professional women are often unable to meet such requirements to the same extent as homemakers, and thus look to negotiate by finding substitutes for this work. But this negotiation is only acceptable if they maintain a public display of doing domestic chores, like cooking during social gatherings. Most participants in semi- extended and extended household settings (15 participants) eat with their in-laws or have food sent to them and do not participate in everyday food preparation, which is acceptable, as these negotiations of domestic work remain hidden from society. I read such shared arrangements and public displays of household chores as a negotiation of normative conceptions of respectability. Boundary keepers such as MILs are more accepting of this, as they can still maintain a public display of control over DILs’ time and unpaid labor within the home as DILs participate in household chores during parties in front of others.
25 Notably, none of the participants living in semi-extended and extended households participate in everyday domestic duties such as food preparation, and they all share their childcare responsibilities with their MILs and household help. MILs also depend on household help for everyday chores. All participants who have children and live in semi-extended households, like Fatema, Faria, Tamanna, Nafisa and Shazia, (Rafia was pregnant at the time of interviews so it is unknown what arrangement she would have once she had the baby), have their own household helpers who primarily assist with childcare, but may also contribute to cleaning and food preparation. However, all household helpers are supervised by the MILs.
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26 Of the two participants in extended households, Maliha, does not have any children and Samia depends heavily on her MIL for childcare (discussed in the next section) not only while she is at work but also when she goes on holidays with her husband, leaving her children with her MIL.
27 Fatema provides a good example of securing the allegiance of boundary keepers of respectability within the family, such as the MIL: I had both my children while I was studying. I started working right after graduation and depended on my MIL to take care of the children. After my husband went bankrupt in his business I switched to this job, which is much more demanding in terms of hours and foreign travel than my previous job. I still depend on my MIL, who lives next door to us, for everyday childcare. When I go on foreign travel, I sometimes leave my children with my parents, to give my MIL a break. Fatema acknowledges her dependence on her MIL for childcare, and gives her MIL breaks when she goes away to foreign countries. This shows a reversal of control over women’s time and unpaid labor, whereby contrary to the normative command of the MIL over the DIL’s time and labor, in Fatema’s case the DIL is also able to obtain control over the MIL’s unpaid labor. I identify this role reversal as an example of Fatema’s boundary work, simultaneously negotiating norms of respectability by co-opting her MIL to take care of children for her and changing generational power relations. The role reversal can be further observed in participants’ comments about how, although they cannot pay their MIL for childcare, they try to compensate in other ways, investing in their MILs’ social status.
28 Faria says: In the morning I bathe my sons, feed them and prepare their whole day’s schedule and leave my in-laws in charge. I recognize what a big favor my in-laws are doing for me. I often give them expensive gifts, or take them on holidays to show our gratitude. Faria takes on a considerable amount of labor to access the support of the boundary keepers. Thus the participants in this study are efficient managers of household labor, though they also depend on boundary keepers for support. In addition, Faria compensates for the shared childcare of her MIL through expensive gifts and holidays. I identify participants’ purchase of expensive gifts and holidays for their MIL as a classed strategy, which simultaneously obliges the MIL to return the favor through childcare, and also maintains the boundary keeper’s class status (through the cultural capital of a holiday). In turn participants save money on professional childcare (as mentioned above, day care is limited in Dhaka and extremely expensive), and more importantly gain the loyalty of the MIL. The MIL’s loyalty reduces women’s childcare responsibilities as well as the chances of being disciplined for the avoidance of domestic work, enabling them to give their career as much importance as family. Such familial support is not available to participants in nuclear household settings like Nesa, Shumi, Nadia, Keya, Farrah, Afrin and Shanta, who are indeed stretching the boundaries of normative respectability, but at the price of the double burden of supervising household help for childcare and domestic chores as well as maintaining their careers.
29 The dominant literature on the MIL-DIL relationship argues that in South Asian MILs have power over DILs (Vera-Sanso 1999; Jejeebhoy and Sathar 2001; Naved and Persson 2005; Chowdhury 2010; Rozario and Samuel 2012; Schuler et al. 2013). The duty of the DIL, who was traditionally called a jhi (maidservant) in Bengali, is to nurture the
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family through cooking, childrearing, and serving the male members of the family, working closely with her MIL (Donner 2008:79). But De Neve (2011:91) notes that kinship bonds such as MIL-DIL can also facilitate middle-class women’s access to employment thanks to the availability of childcare in countries like India. He further argues that urbanization enhances such use of wider family networks for young working women. My findings support this and expand upon it by arguing that women’s active participation in paid employment is shifting the power relation between women and their kin, in this case the MIL. But participants also compensate for their MILs’ support for their career through childcare and by trading domestic work for gifts and holidays. Sabur (2010) has argued that tourism and gift giving and receiving are an important form of social exchange and are meticulously maintained by the Bangladeshi affluent middle class. Privileged class consumption patterns through foreign travel and gifts represent their discerning taste and are explicitly displayed, distinguishing them from other classes. Thus, participants’ appreciation of boundary keepers’ services through gifts adds value to their MILs’ class status, and enables women to maintain the symbolic respectability of adding value to their families and to negotiate older boundaries of respectable femininity in relation to domestic and caring roles.
Concealing unrespectable practices
30 Some participants living in semi-extended and nuclear households are also able to conceal practices that are considered unrespectable or outside the boundaries of moral propriety and escape the scrutiny of their in-laws, such as staying out at night/after office hours for work events. Nadia explains: Before when I used to live with my in-laws the nature of my job required me to attend work dinners without my spouse. During busy times I often had to stay at work till midnight and sometimes after a successful project I just wanted to celebrate with my team and go out. This used to bother my mother-in-law… I would always have to call her personally to tell her that I was going to have dinner out and often had to tolerate angry glares and frowns when I returned home late. In extended families participants have to maintain certain normative conceptions of moral respectability, including not being outside alone after working hours. Previously Nadia was expected to account for herself to her MIL if she was going to be out late, and endure the “discipline” of disapproval for transgressing moral boundaries of respectability. Sanjida adds that women working in the corporate sector are always perceived as losing respectability through night-time work events, and thus semi- extended households are the most suitable setting for corporate professionals, to avoid families’ disapproval of such professional practices while also utilizing family support for domestic chores and childcare. When I was single I had no restrictions on attending work parties or hanging out with friends till late at night. But after my marriage, even though my husband and I were going to the same work events, these were not very well-accepted by my mother-in-law … since we moved next door to her I am now able to go back to my old lifestyle. All fifteen participants in semi-extended and nuclear households are able to negotiate with moral norms of respectable femininity (not applicable to men, as Sanjida’s husband did not receive any disapproval) by partaking in night-time socializing for work once they have moved out of sight of their in-laws. The participants see socializing, both professional and social, as part of their class culture, a lifestyle, and
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through semi-extended (and nuclear) family settings, they are able to avoid the disapproving “discipline” of their kin/boundary keepers.
31 Again, it is women’s capital investment in the family that enables their negotiation of the moral restraints of night time-socializing for work. Samia says: My mother-in-law left her 25-year career as a professor of sociology to take care of me and my sister-in-law’s (husband’s brother’s wife) children. You see, I work for my husband’s company. It was established by my father-in-law; after he passed away my husband and brother in-law have taken over and as the eldest daughter- in-law I joined the company right after our marriage. At the end of the day my professional success contributed to my in-laws’ business, so they appreciate my involvement in this business. I also never get any pressure from my MIL to quit my job although as the director of public relations my working hours require me to stay out till late a couple of days a week … it’s a give-and-take relationship for me. The fact that Samia considers her relationship with her in-laws as a “give-and-take” relationship is an example of the acceptability of mutual benefit from women’s professional work, for both the woman and the boundary keeper, the MIL. While Samia’s paid labor in her husband’s firm adds economic value to the company, her MIL’s unpaid labor at home facilitates capital investment by Samia in her family. Through contribution to the family business, some women are able to negotiate boundaries of respectability in relation to motherhood duties and night-time work.
32 Being seen alone at night without their husband is considered especially unacceptable for married women in South Asia (Fernando and Cohen 2013). But eating out, hanging out with friends in cafes (Sabur 2010; Janeja 2010) and attending Western-style parties (which include alcohol consumption and dancing) are considered part of the lifestyle of younger middle-class people in Bangladesh (Sabur 2010). For the previous generation “eating out” was an occasional affair, and only involved family members. Thus to participants’ in-laws, night-time socializing without the rest of the family is an alien concept, and corporate parties an immoral space for women. Hence, there seems to be generational change in the conceptualization of the new and affluent middle-class lifestyle and women’s respectability, which is being reconciled through semi-extended and nuclear households.
Negotiating investment in familial social capital
33 Participants also conform and negotiate with familial socializing duties such as attending and hosting social events. Social networks including kin and friendships are crucial for maintaining the class privilege and distinction of the middle-class lifestyle. Participants’ comments illustrate that women are expected to sustain social networks and relationships for their families as part of their domestic duties and respectable femininity. All participants mentioned the requirement of being present at familial social events, such as festivals, weddings and family parties. Some of them conform to this, while others negotiate and manage such responsibilities more strategically, if they clash with work-related responsibilities.
34 Shumi holds a directorial position in a local NGO, has a young daughter and lives in a nuclear family where she has to take care of her daughter herself rather than relying on extended family. Shumi’s multiple duties, along with her prestigious professional position, provide her with the respectability and negotiation power to ignore
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comments of extended family about her inability to maintain her socializing role. She says: I often arrive late for family parties due to work or miss out others. My MIL does not complain and when I am late she always comes to me and asks if I have eaten or should she take my daughter from me so I can relax and socialize. But many times other family members say things like—why do you need to work, it must be harming your daughter and you do not have time for the rest of your family either —I just smile and let things like this pass without getting distressed. I know they do this to make me feel guilty about working; by ignoring such comments I refuse to give in to their tactic. Thirty-nine-year-old Shumi’s extended family members construct women’s work as a practice that harms their children and restricts them from giving time to their extended family and is thus outside the boundary of respectable femininity. But Shumi’s ambivalence towards such accusations is a form of negotiation of these normative conceptions of respectability in relation to performing socializing duties with the family. Although Shumi arrives late to parties, she does not avoid them altogether. Thus she is well aware of her responsibilities to socialize with her in-laws’ family, and tries to participate in social events, even if she is late and has to endure rebukes.
35 Keya is forty, a manager of a manufacturing company, and shares a similar experience of extended family disapproval: Every time I miss a family function my husband’s family tries to give me a guilt trip! Some of them even call me the next day to say it was rude of me to give an excuse of work and not attend the function as the only DIL of the family. I have just learned to live with such accusations now. Like Shumi’s observations, Keya’s statement illuminates that participants are not passive receptors of family expectations in relation to their socializing responsibilities; rather they actively interpret which aspects of these expectations to conform with and which to negotiate; thus do they do boundary work. They are also aware that, depending on their conformation and transgression, they will be rewarded or penalized through public criticism. Older participants hold higher positions in their careers and possibly also earn substantially, which adds value to their status in the family. Their professional position and accrued capital provide them with the scope to brush off rebukes when they choose to prioritize their careers over socializing with and for the family.
36 It is unclear in Keya’s comment whether her husband attends those family functions that she is unable to attend due to work commitments. However, thirty-two-year old Rafia’s comment demonstrates that rather than the son, it is the DIL’s responsibility to attend: My MIL always made it a point that I have to attend all weddings, birthdays, anniversaries or any other get-together in my in-laws’ family. I also have to dress appropriately for these occasions… At the beginning of my marriage my MIL used to tell me which gold jewelry or which sari to wear. My husband rarely goes to these occasions, he has always been an introvert and never really enjoys going to big gatherings unless he knows the people very well. His family never forces him to attend these. But I was never given that option. Sons are not necessarily required to attend social events or act as bearers of capitals. Rafia’s person is a display of capitals for her in-laws’ family, a consolidator of class and a primary site of forming distinction. This may be why the DIL’s presence in social events is seen as more important than the son’s, as femininity represented through
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embodiment practices of jewelry and clothing in social events represents the family’s class status. This may be why the majority of the younger participants, Sanjida, Maliha and Afrin, who are either newly married, still at the lower end of their professional career, or in low-paid professions, often fulfill their socializing duties rather than negotiate. Particularly interesting is Afrin, who lives in a nuclear household in Dhaka but happily travels to Chittagong, a port city, to her in-laws’ house for festivals and family get-togethers. The younger participants’ fulfillment of their socializing duties for the family establishes that the normative conception of respectability in Bangladesh expects DILs to play an active role in social events, part of their familial function. Therefore, not performing these duties may result in penalties for transgressing the normative standards.
37 Men and women play different roles in maintaining social relations in Bangladesh. While men are in charge of entertaining friends and networks outside the home, women are in charge of maintaining both kin relationships and friendships at the familial level (Sabur 2010:208). Such practices construct middle-class married women’s respectable roles within the marriage as crucial in terms of maintaining social capital. But such socializing norms make demands on women’s time, making it difficult for them to achieve professional success. Younger participants seem to fulfill this requirement and retain the public performance of respectable femininity by socializing with the family. They also conform to the display of cultural and economic capital through the use of clothing and jewelry at social events. Older participants show ambivalence or just reject familial socializing duties. In the context of this research, I contend that these practices constitute the negotiation of middle-class women’s respectability, measured in relation to women prioritizing familial duties above professional commitment. It is also worth noting that women often participate in entertaining friends and colleagues outside familial surroundings. I discussed this in the third section of this paper, Concealing unrespectable practices, where Nadia, Samia and Sanjida mentioned that they like to celebrate successful projects with colleagues and hang out with friends, which is identified as a man’s role in socializing among the middle class. Thus I argue that participants are able to negotiate boundaries of respectability in relation to familial socializing duties and practice alternative forms of respectability through socializing roles that have been normatively associated with men.
Conclusion
38 This study aimed to contribute to literature on the changing realities of families in urban Bangladesh through alternative practices of the classed gender identity of respectable femininity. The normative conception of middle-class respectable femininity in South Asia is traditionally measured through women prioritizing family above work (Radhakrishnan 2009, 2011; Fernando and Cohen 2013; Sabur 2010). Even a woman who engages in the global economy of work and consumption must claim her high cultural and symbolic status through the “assertiveness and autonomy afforded by her education and earnings,” which must still be focused on the service of the family and the nation (Gilbertson 2011:119; Radhakrishnan 2009; Mankekar 1999; Rajan 1993).
39 Based on the findings of the study I make three contributions. First, using Bourdieu’s (2008) concepts of capitals and a feminist understanding of women’s capital-
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accumulating strategies (Skeggs 1997), and Pereira (2010) and Lamont’s (1992) formulation of boundary work as an everyday ongoing labor, I have demonstrated that the negotiation of normative conceptions of respectability is mediated by women’s capital accumulation and legitimization strategies. The participants in this study maintain class privilege through investing capitals and legitimizing class taste for their conjugal family in relation to the economic capital of cars and land, the cultural capital of children’s English-medium schools and concerted cultivation, and the social capital of attending family get-togethers, weddings and festivals. They also contribute to their in-laws’ families by paying for household help and holidays, as well as giving gifts. Consumption and investment in long-term consumer goods and assets play a major role in self-definition and public representation and everyday practices of neoliberal middle-classness in South Asia (Donner and De Neve 2011). In Bangladesh, the family is the primary site for capital accumulation and maintenance, as individuals accumulate and preserve capitals for further investments to attain upward class mobility (Sabur 2010). I identify women’s capital investment in the family as a significant resource which enables them to play a symbolic role in their family’s class dominance, to obtain respectability and in turn substitute for their domestic, caring and socializing duties, and to participate in practices previously deemed unrespectable (even if in hiding).
40 Secondly, utilizing the investment of capitals in their families, some women negotiate domestic roles by co-opting MILs or household help, while others partake in night-time socializing (which is considered unrespectable) without the knowledge of the older family members. In relation to socializing duties, younger married women in the early stages of their career conform to such social capital maintenance responsibilities. However, older women in higher-level professional positions are able to show ambivalence towards pressure to perform these duties. Thus, women’s age and career position also have an impact on their negotiations with boundaries of middle-class respectability in the family. This establishes that, rather than focusing on women’s respectable or unrespectable practices, contemporary research needs to address women’s ability to negotiate with the boundaries of respectable practices and legitimize alternative practices of respectable femininity.
41 Finally, women’s negotiations are neither unitary nor homogeneous. Semi-extended households are more common among younger married participants with young children, and may be a step towards a nuclear home. There are variations on women co-opting their MILs for childcare, as some hire household help to support MILs in childcare, while others primarily depend on the MIL. Additionally, women of different ages and professional status approach socializing norms differently. I have also demonstrated that families respond differently to women’s negotiations of respectability, according to in-laws’ assets, MILs’ willingness to provide childcare, etc. Often, women’s wider extended families and society are more critical of their negotiations than their immediate families, who are thus not the ultimate arbitrators of women’s respectable practices. However, I also argue that in this alternative form of negotiated respectability, older accountability structures remain unchanged, as women are still expected to carry out household chores, though they have found ways to navigate through these expectations and give their careers as much importance as their families; I identify this as an alternative form of respectable femininity.
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42 To conclude, I have expanded the construction of the new affluent middle class in urban Bangladesh from propertied, highly-educated, English-speaking, internationally- mobile people engaged in the neoliberal market through business, civil society and multinational-company jobs (Mapril 2013) to include dual-income families where professional “new women,” through their practices of alternative forms of respectable femininity, are contributing to their family’s class status. “New women” have always been conceptualized as change agents. In Victorian Britain they represented political consciousness, professional identity and sexual freedom (Beetham and Heilmann 2004; Ledger 1997) and in colonial and post-colonial Bengal they represented nationalism against colonial rule in the public sphere and femininity and middle-class morality within the private sphere of the home (Chatterjee 1989). Such an understanding of “new women” is different from the studies of poor women’s empowerment and autonomy in Bangladesh, which demonstrate that despite neoliberalism’s integration of poor women in paid employment, their employment invokes hostility and anxiety about men and women’s power relations within the family. Poor married women never spend money on themselves or their natal families and seek their marital family’s affection and respect by carrying out all domestic chores, despite having jobs. They are highly dependent on their husbands and unwilling to disrupt marital relationships, despite child marriage, domestic violence, polygamy etc. (Kabeer 1997). I argue that alternative forms of respectable femininity, through giving both family and profession equal importance, are central to the construction and performance of “new womanhood” among affluent middle-class women in Bangladesh. Additionally, I propose that alternative forms of respectability are not exclusive to South Asia and can be further explored in studies of women’s negotiation with familial duties all over the world, particularly in relation to how women negotiate their household duties through investment in their class status.
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NOTES
1. An enveloping outer garment worn by women in some Islamic traditions. Often black in colour, it covers a woman’s whole body and has a separate headscarf. 2. To Weber (1978:509), status, defined by lifestyle, may coincide with class, but they are otherwise in “sharp opposition.” Wealth creates difference; it allows those who have it to claim the products of wealth (education, travel, cars, houses, etc.) as status products or marks of exclusive respectability. This conversion is a diagnostic characteristic of middle-class culture. 3. Here I define the bhondromohila and bhodrolok (respectable man) culture following Donner, as “a cultural category … [which] lost much of its influence in the countryside, and the newly emerging educated middle class” (2008:56–57). They embodied development of a distinctly urban lifestyle. 4. A spot on the forehead, between the eyebrows, “traditionally worn by Hindu women as a symbol of their marital status, but later adopted by Muslim and Hindu women as a cosmetic feature” (Kabeer 1991:56). 5. Microfinance is a group-based loan for entrepreneurs and small businesses lacking access to banking and related services. It was pioneered in Bangladesh by Nobel-Peace-prize-winner Mohammad Yunus in 1983, primarily targeting poor rural women.
ABSTRACTS
Using qualitative data, this article explains how affluent urban and new middle-class women in Bangladesh reconstruct the notion of respectable femininity within the family. The normative conception of middle-class women’s respectability is measured against women prioritizing family above work by performing their domestic, care, and socializing roles and by maintaining moral propriety. Using Bourdieu’s theory of capitals and Lamont’s formulation of boundary work, I demonstrate that by reinstating class dominance, concealing unrespectable practices, evading their domestic work by co-opting others to do it, and maintaining a public display of socializing duties for the family, women can negotiate the boundaries of respectable femininity in Bangladesh. In so doing, women legitimize alternative forms of respectability in the family, which vary according to their age, profession and household setting. The paper shifts the focus of respectability research in South Asia from a binary construction of respectable and unrespectable practices to how women make and remake their respectable status and class privilege in neoliberal Bangladesh, and reflects on the implications for gender and class relations.
South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal, 16 | 2017 101
INDEX
Keywords: women, respectability, family, middle-class, Bangladesh, Bourdieu
AUTHOR
NAZIA HUSSEIN Department of Sociology, London School of Economics and Political Science
South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal, 16 | 2017