Living the Body: Embodiment, Womanhood and Identity in Contemporary India

Living the Body

Living the Body Embodiment, Womanhood and Identity in Contemporary India

MEENAKSHI THAPAN

Copyright © Meenakshi Thapan, 2009 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. First published in 2009 by SAGE Publications India Pvt Ltd B1/ I-1 Mohan Cooperative Industrial Area Mathura Road, New Delhi 110 044, India www.sagepub.in SAGE Publications Inc 2455 Teller Road Thousand Oaks, California 91320, USA SAGE Publications Ltd 1 Oliver’s Yard, 55 City Road London EC1Y 1SP, United Kingdom SAGE Publications Asia-Pacific Pte Ltd 33 Pekin Street #02-01 Far East Square Singapore 048763 Published by Vivek Mehra for SAGE Publications India Pvt Ltd, typeset in 10/12 pt Galliard BT by Excellent Laser Typesetters, Delhi and printed at Chaman Enterprises, New Delhi. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Thapan, Meenakshi. Living the body: embodiment, womanhood and identity in contemporary India/Meenakshi Thapan. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Gender identity—India. 2. Body, Human—Social aspects—India. 3. Sex role—India. 4. Women—India—History. I. Title. HQ1075.5.I4T43

306.4—dc22

2008

2008039698

ISBN: 978-81-7829-901-3 (HB) The SAGE Team: Rekha Natarajan, Sushmita Banerjee, Anju Saxena and Trinankur Banerjee

To the memory of Professor Ravinder Kumar

Contents

Acknowledgements Introduction: An Engagement with the Sociology of Embodiment 1. Embodiment, Identity and Womanhood

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2. Cultures of Adolescence

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3. Embodiment and Womanhood in Femina

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4. The Body in the Mirror: Embodiment, Violence and Identity

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5. The Body as a Weapon: Embodiment, Work and Identity

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6. Aporiai of Resistance

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References and Select Bibliography Index About the Author

173 185 191

Acknowledgements

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ll books invariably have personal histories and this is no exception. This book’s journey has taken an incredibly long time in its making and in its final completion. It began several years ago, in 1993, when I was a Fellow at the Centre for Contemporary Studies at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library (NMML), New Delhi. Professor Ravinder Kumar, then Director at the NMML, gave me the opportunity to begin work on this project and I remain indebted to him for this. He asked me, one afternoon in late 1991, as I entered the library and was putting away my bag at the reception, ‘And when will you write your next book?’ I confidently replied. ‘I will write my next book here’ and, thinking I had overstepped politeness, apologised. He smiled and asked me to apply for a fellowship. A year and a half later, I was beginning work on this project. I was at the NMML as Fellow at the Centre for Contemporary Studies from 1993–1995. It was a lively group of Fellows and we participated in several exciting dialogues and seminars chaired by Professor Ravinder Kumar at the Centre. Professor Ravinder Kumar was dedicated not just to the library and its environs, but also to the band of Fellows at the Centre whom he encouraged and nurtured with infinite support, friendship and affection. This book is dedicated to his memory in gratitude for his support for all things of the mind and the scholarly zeal he inspired in young minds. I was teaching at the Department of Education, University of Delhi, from September 1989 until July 2002. Although my area of research was the sociology of education and schooling practices, in particular, I sought to begin new work in a completely different area. I was inevitably drawn to women’s studies, partly as a consequence of my personal trajectory. With complete independence as a young woman, supportive parents and a generous spouse, I found motherhood fulfilling but also extremely constraining. My personal

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experience led to a search for understanding womanhood in its complexity and diversity. I was interested in questions about how women’s embodiment could be the site of not only domestic conviviality but also of violence, of community honour, and the practices of the State. State policy appeared to exacerbate women’s traumatic and embodied experiences of divisions of home, families and property at different historical junctures, and fundamentalisms sought to assert national and religious honour in the bodies of women. I was particularly interested in women’s lived experience of embodiment, and its representation in the media, in the visual arts, in dance and in the annals, in constructions and practices of the State. In an effort to understand some of these issues, I organised a conference in late 1994 at the NMML on ‘Femininity, the Female body and Sexuality in Contemporary India’. Some of the papers presented at this conference were later edited and published (see Thapan 1997b). Subsequently, I returned to teaching and worked on this project, along with the other commitments and responsibilities in the university and in the family. Although I began by working with, and trying to understand, the lives of middle-class women, who were educated, professionals and working, I also interviewed well-educated, but less successful women, who were struggling in the workplace as much as in their domesticity. I was struck by the eagerness with which women wanted to talk and often, I was approached by women who volunteered to be interviewed. My understanding of this aspect of women’s lives would however have been incomplete if I had neglected the world of underprivileged and poor working-class women. I selected Jahangirpuri in north-western Delhi as my ethnographic site primarily because the Department of Education, University of Delhi, was already engaged in several projects in the area. This undoubtedly helped me to gain access to the homes of women, who welcomed me and often sought me out, to tell me their stories. Earlier versions of some chapters in this book have been presented at a number of fora: the Centre for Contemporary Studies (NMML), at a seminar on Pierre Bourdieu: Sociologist and Sociologies, Department of Sociology, Delhi School of Economics; the seminar on Gender in South Asia at Queen Elizabeth House, University of Oxford; the South Asia Workshop, University of Chicago; the Department of Sociology Seminar at Hofstra University, New York; the annual conference of the Society for the Interdisciplinary Study of Social Imagery at the University of Southern Colorado; the Townsville International Women’s

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Conference at James Cook University, Townsville; the Sixth Women in Asia Conference at the Australian National University, Canberra; the weekly seminar at the Centre for Asia Pacific Social Transformations Studies (CAPSTRANS), University of Wollongong; the conference on Development Paradigm: Social Transformation and Gender Performance in Asia at the Department of Sociology, University of Madras; the weekly seminar at the Centre for Research in Gender Relations and Women’s Studies at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver; the seminar at York Centre for Asian Research, University of York, Canada; the Conference on Values in Education organized by the Konrad Adenauer Foundation at Neemrana Fort, Rajasthan and at the University of Bordeaux, France. This work has benefited from research at the NMML, the Ratan Tata Library at the Delhi School of Economics, Delhi University, the Koerner library at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, the Regenstein library at the University of Chicago, the Social Sciences Library at the University of Oxford, the University of Wollongong and the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, Paris. Earlier versions of some of the chapters in this book have been published in Economic and Political Weekly (Women’s Studies Special issue 28 October 1995, Vol. XXX, No. 43) Gender and Nation (ed. NMML, New Delhi 2001), Women’s Studies International Forum, (2001, Vol. 24, No. 3/4), Gender and Development (July 2003) Educational Regimes in Contemporary India (eds Radhika Chopra and Patricia Jeffery, Sage, 2005) Contributions to Indian Sociology (2004, Vol. 38, No. 3), Women’s Struggle for Existence (2006, UNDPTAHA), Reading Pierre Bourdieu in a Dual Context. Essays from India and France (eds Roland Lardinois and Meenakshi Thapan, 2006, Routledge, Taylor and Francis). I am grateful to several people for their help in very different ways and at varying times in the preparation and writing of this book and I thank them all: the anonymous reviewer at Sage, Margaret Abraham, Neera Chandhoke, Radhika Chopra, Barbara Harriss-White, Ruchira Ganguly-Scrase, Sneja Gunew, Shubhra Gururani, Loraine Kennedy, Roland Lardinois, Francine Muel-Dreyfuss, Namita Ranganathan, Valerie Raoul, T.N. Madan, Monique de Saint Martin, Timothy Scrase and Patricia Uberoi. I especially thank Niraja Gopal Jayal for her detailed and meticulous comments on Chapter 5. I am indebted to Professor Najma Siddiqi, then at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Education at the Department of Education, University of Delhi,

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who provided me with the funds and facilities to conduct fieldwork in Jahangirpuri over 2001–2002. I am very grateful to Rachna Singh and to Malini Mittal who helped me conduct the fieldwork. My parents have supported me in innumerable ways through the years I was struggling to complete this and other work—thank you for being there at all times. I am always grateful to George who is my greatest support, worst critic and best friend and forever beholden to Jyotsna and Ayushya for their unconditional love. I was privileged to spend two and a half months at the Rishi Valley School, in rural Andhra Pradesh, in mid 2007 where I was able to finish this work in an atmosphere of complete silence, pristine natural beauty and intellectual companionship. I thank Radhika and Hans Herzberger, A. Kumaraswamy, Geetha Varadan, M.S. Sailenderan, and other friends, for all this, and more. Above all, I remain indebted to all the women who agreed to be interviewed and spent several hours of their time talking to us in their homes and at work.

Introduction AN ENGAGEMENT WITH THE SOCIOLOGY OF EMBODIMENT

To work on a “paradigm of embodiment”… is not to study anything new or different, but to address familiar topics—healing, emotion, gender or power—from a different standpoint. (Thomas J. Csordas 1999a: 147) …it is in the everyday life of women, articulating the poisons that enter social relationships, that the act of hearing and recognition gets done, and through which I propose that culture acquires a soul—that it is born. (Veena Das 1995: 178)

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his work is concerned with the development of a sociology of embodiment, rather than a sociology of the body, in the context of women’s lives in contemporary, urban India. My understanding of this focus on embodiment is mediated by gender and class, two critical elements, that constitute identity in relation to embodiment. My earlier works on women (Thapan 1997a, 2000, 2001a, 2004, 2005a, 2005b and 2005c) as well as an edited volume (Thapan 1997b) emphasise my effort to understand the complex relationship between embodiment, gender and identity. At a symposium held at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library in 1997, on the release of the book Embodiment: Essays on Gender and Identity (Thapan 1997b), Rajeshwari Sunder Rajan, one of the key discussants, commented that the book explores ‘trendy’ concepts such as ‘embodiment’ and ‘identity’ and she wondered whether this would lead to meaningful research in women’s studies. To understand women, their position and their struggle in Indian society, the perspective of embodiment is imperative, as a woman is undoubtedly located in a physical and psychological space as much as she is in the cultural and social domain.

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It is not surprising that there has been a growing interest in this area in feminist scholarship in India: John and Nair (1998) and Niranjana (1999, 2001), among others. Unravelling the complexities inherent in a multi-layered and fluid construct such as ‘identity’ has been a continued preoccupation in my work, whether it is in the area of transnational migration (Thapan 2004, 2005c), education (Thapan 2006b), or religion (Thapan 2007) and engages my attention in the present work. Undoubtedly, a sociology of the body has been around for some time, as is evident in the work of Pierre Bourdieu (1977, 1984), Bryan Turner (1984, 1996, second edition), Featherstone, Hepworth and Turner (1991), Shilling (1993), and others. Feminist scholarship in the west has also addressed embodiment in specific areas, such as, Elizabeth Grosz (1994, 1995), Conboy, Medina and Stanbury (1997), Price and Shildrick (1999), Emily Martin (2001), and others. However, it is also the case, as pointed out by Helen Fielding that ‘the more the body comes into focus,’ as it has in recent times, ‘the more our understanding of embodiment recedes’ (Fielding 2000:124). An interest in locating women firmly within their embodied experience of everyday life runs the risk of ‘essentialising’ women, that is, seeing them only in terms of the biological bases of existence, resulting in a feminist fear of working with the conceptual category of embodiment. An alternative perspective is that of phenomenology that views embodiment, not merely in corporeal terms, but always in a social and ‘relational’ context. This work therefore addresses embodiment very much as ‘the existential richness of being-in-the-world’, through the ‘vividness and urgency of experience’ (Csordas 2002: 3). No doubt, the historical influences and social and cultural backgrounds and spaces which encapsulate women are significant to this experience. As pointed out by Shildrick and Price, the notion of ‘being-in-the-world—or more appropriately, becoming-in-the-world—is an expression of indivisible corporeal subjectivity in which the temporal and the spatial are fully operative’ (Shildrick and Price 1998: 8). Moreover, the embodied subject is not an isolated, experiential self in relation to the world, out there, perceived as a separate entity. Contrarily, ‘it is the nature of the embodied subject to move into and be taken up by the world around her. Essences emerge through this intertwining, in the space between. They are enacted but always and only in relation to the world and to others’ (Fielding 2000: 132). In this process of playing out, enacting

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performing selves in relational terms, it is significant that we are collapsing the dualities of subject-object (as did Merleau-Ponty 1962) as well as that of structure-practice (Bourdieu 1977, 1984) through the conceptual category of embodiment. I do not discuss the work of Merleau-Ponty at length but certainly elaborate on Bourdieu’s focus on ‘practice’ as the cardinal anthropological principle for understanding embodiment through the concept of habitus. If the paradigm of embodiment is essential to understand women in everyday life, it is no less important to emphasise identity, in its fluid, incomplete sense, as the sum of this experiential embodiment. An essential component of both the experience of embodiment and the playing out of an identity, always on the make, as it were, is that of resistance. In both experiential terms, as well as in terms of an awareness and knowledge of their condition and the possibilities for struggle open to them, women in telling their stories, pay acute attention to this aspect of their embodied lives. Resistance in fact is a double edged sword in women’s lives, one with which they constantly articulate and exhibit their struggle but one which does not always enable complete success. Resistance, nonetheless, remains central to their lives whether or not it achieves social transformation. In being crucial to their telling of their lives, their stories that reflect their dilemmas and their conscious choices, it certainly transforms women’s experiential living out of an embodied identity. This undeniable reality gives them a strength and dignity that is of their making, driven by their awareness and understanding, and therefore lies outside the domain of what is socially approved or normative behaviour.

WOMEN AND THEIR WORLDS My work focuses on two sets of adolescent and adult women, those who are educationally advantaged—in school or working, professional, career women and those who are educationally disadvantaged—located in slums and engaged primarily in unskilled labour or domestic work. The professional and educated women are articulate and conscious of their dilemmas and rights and view the world from their position in particular sections of society. I seek to understand their lived experience from their location, listening to

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their constructions of their everyday world, as an experienced and contested social reality. Undoubtedly, poverty is central to women’s experience in the slum. This includes not only the objective criteria that define the parameters of poverty such as life expectancy, female mortality, assets, economic deprivation, access to education, consumption, nutrition, health, and so on, but also the ‘subjective experience’ of poverty as an everyday reality. I consciously take their subjective experience of poverty as central to their recognition of themselves as gendered subjects and assert that subjective experience is crucial to our understanding of the complexities characteristic of everyday life. My analysis of women’s experience is based on their accounts during my interviews with two sets of women: a) Forty adolescent young women from educationally advantaged socio-economic backgrounds and 25 middle- and uppermiddle class adult women in New Delhi. These women were selected on the basis of a snowball sample and particularly represent the category of urban Indian women, who because of their educationally advantaged and privileged status and position in urban society, are exposed to an array of visual images and textual discourse on embodied representation in the media and elsewhere. b) Fifteen adolescent, married and unmarried, educationally disadvantaged young women and 25 adult migrant women from a Gujarati community and from the northern state of Uttar Pradesh who live in a slum in north-western Delhi. The methodology employed for engaging in fieldwork among adolescent young women varied: on the one hand, I was able, with the help of a research assistant, to conduct interviews and have fairly elaborate discussions with students who also answered a long questionnaire. This interaction took place in the location of their schools. On the other hand, we had long discussions, group meetings and interviews with groups of young women in their homes in the slum. Undoubtedly, this resulted in vastly different sets of data based on written and interview material in the one case and oral testimonies in the other. This did not cause any serious problems except that the interviews with the educationally disadvantaged young women

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required us to draw them out in greater depth to ensure that we had sufficient material on which to base our analyses. Data were collected therefore through a written questionnaire distributed randomly to 50 women students from different co-educational, public (that is, fee paying) and government schools in New Delhi and also a boarding school in southern India spread over 2002–2005. The students were all aged around 16–18 years. Our meetings took place in the location of the school where we met students without the presence of teachers; students experienced a certain sense of freedom in responding to questions away from their families and in the absence of teachers. Interviews were also conducted with young women in the age group of 16–20 years in their homes in the slum. A larger age span was used for this group in order to understand the experience of adolescence at different stages. Interviews were conducted in groups, largely in the absence of older women and other family members. These young women are members of the Gujarati community and are the daughters of migrants who work as labourers in the vegetable and fruit wholesale market and do other odd jobs to earn a livelihood. The young women have either never been to school or have been there for a very short period (three to five years) only. In the first part of my fieldwork among these women, I conducted intensive, in-depth interviews with 30 adolescent and adult women of varied castes, belonging to different regional and linguistic backgrounds and living in different blocks in the slum. These were followed up by focused group discussions and meetings with the same women over an extended period of a few months. By focusing largely on interviews in which we recorded oral testimonies and women’s voices, and were dependent on their construction of their experience, it would appear that my understanding of embodiment is limited, as it is based primarily on the intersubjectivity of the interview. This may also suggest that the temporal dimension is removed and there is therefore a lack of engagement with women’s social and personal histories. My focus in Chapter 1 on the processes of social inclusion and exclusion, the drawing of boundaries, and the development of the habitus based on class, capital and culture points to the social and historical bases of the personal trajectories I seek to establish through the interviews. Time and space are crucial elements to how lives are shaped, as well as told. The life course is one way of experiencing time in different spatial settings.

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Moreover, no individual lives in a particular social or cultural vacuum and clearly, marriage and the family are not the exclusive markers of women’s embodiment and identity. The educational and professional background of women, in one case, ensures an embodiment that is expressive of a particular habitus, developed over more than one generation, that bestows the women with certain capital. In the other case, marriage and the family may be significant markers in the experience of embodiment but women’s engagement with work of various kinds is of no less importance. The habitus is developed over generations of socialisation into bodily gestures, movements and practices that both reflect and reproduce the women’s relationship to both domestic work and unskilled labour. The two sets of women in this study are very diverse not only across categories of the slum or middle-class/professionals but also within each category. This is suggestive of a heterogeneity that is part of the everyday in terms of both location and experience. The book does not seek to explain the similarities or differences between or among the women. Nor does it set out to focus on those aspects that are common to both sets of women. The purpose is precisely to give voice to multiple voices and diverse locations to enable a nuanced understanding of the interplay between embodiment, culture, social relations and agency. In the writing of the book, the voices of women are present, as they are, without any embellishments, keeping always to the spoken or written word, as it was said or written. Apart from Chapter 1 that lays out the conceptual framework for the work, there is one chapter that examines textual and visual material from a women’s magazine, and the remaining chapters are based on material from women’s voices. Although my attempts at explanation within the overarching theoretical frameworks underlying embodiment, identity and resistance are no doubt present in different forms throughout the text, I have refrained from interfering with the stories of women, both in their telling and in their presentation. The varying manner in which the women spoke, with a quiet, morose sense of finality, or more excitedly and sharply, with tenderness, or with an acute consciousness of wanting to say only the ‘right’ thing, in a conspiratorial whisper, in minute detail, with gestures, smiles, silences and tears, sharply brought out the urgency and vividness of their heterogeneous experience. I have attempted to bring this out in the text. Simultaneously, I was always conscious of my presence as an ethnographer and

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was asked questions about my life, my family, my work, by all categories of women. I replied to their questions with honesty but I was always consciously present as an ethnographer in the field and did not try to achieve professional or personal erasure amidst women who gave of themselves to me with complete sincerity and openness. I explained my role as an ethnographer to the women and was accepted by them as such. This work does not seek to make generalisations about ‘women in contemporary India’, their travails or their successes, and consciously speaks from the standpoint of women’s voices alone. It is no longer possible, however, to imagine that the text, truthful to the voices of subjects, reflects reality ‘as it is’ to even the participants in the process. Undoubtedly, all representation of the lives of others is always an incomplete reality, a ‘partial truth’ (Clifford 1986) and this work is, in that sense, no different. In the telling of their stories, women play out the tensions between self and society through the ‘presentation of a unique self which can also be recognised by society’ (Chanfrault-Duchet 2000: 61). Women in this manner seek to define their identities in relation to the distinctive character of their experiential self as well as to their living out of the social in everyday life. The ‘good’ woman, whether she is selfless worker, wife, daughter, mother is a significant trope in the stories, so that women work for the survival of the family, those who are in ‘bad’ marriages stay on for the benefit of the family, or are obedient daughters, or seek to establish their place as ‘good’ women in their aspirations to be recognised as such by the family and community. Similarly, among one category of women, it is quite evident that they seek to be identified as ‘radical’ women, consciously defining and aware of their lived experience, in its telling and in the articulation of their departure from social norms, whether it is as rebellious daughters, or as those who seek to assert their identities as reflective, thinking beings who challenge the social order. The significance of ‘work’ in relation to identity in the lives of another category of women points to a negotiated self and brings out their effort to establish an identity that is socially coherent as well as unique to their perception of their everyday existence. The social self, so to speak, confronts, contains and liberates the distinctive, personal self and the evolving relationship between the two, perhaps unexpressed, unconscious, and yet deeply present, results in the construction of both, as a gendered subject.

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THE CHAPTERS IN THE BOOK Within the larger problematic of embodiment, identity and resistance, this book seeks to cover ground in different dimensions pertaining to visual and textual representation and womanhood, the experience by young women of adolescence in the context of schooling, marriage and peer group cultures, women’s lived experience among poor, educationally disadvantaged women and among middle and upper class educationally advantaged women. Chapter 1 lays out the conceptual framework within which this work is located. The paradigm of embodiment, through lived experience, is viewed as being central to an understanding of women’s lives as well as of Indian womanhood in a changing society like India. I consider the linkages between embodiment, gender and identity and how these point to the socially, emotionally and individually constructed human body. To understand these linkages, I examine Bourdieu’s widely influential conceptual category of habitus in the context of ‘recolonisation’, an ideology that induces global flows, among other colonising practices. I also discuss the politics of the ambivalence in constructions of Indian womanhood in contemporary India. In Chapter 2, there is a foregrounding of young women’s lived experience in order to understand cultures of adolescence as they prevail in two different groups of young women. Clearly, there is no well-defined age period within which adolescence is experienced as a marked lifecycle event and in fact there are a series of transitions in the lives of young women that mark the lived experience of adolescence in particular and varied ways. The influence of family, peer group and schooling, or its absence, and marriage and domesticity emerge as significant components of the adolescent young woman’s life shaping their recognition and articulation of the experience of embodiment, sexuality and embodied self and other ‘images’ in diverse ways. Chapter 3 seeks to address the question of how representations of woman’s embodiment and definitions of identity are embedded in textual and visual displays of a popular women’s magazine Femina. While one set of women do not read this magazine and are not subject, therefore, to its specific influence, this in no way undermines the importance of women’s magazines in urban India. This particular magazine, in this genre, provides a legitimate space for developing normative definitions of woman’s embodiment within a trope of

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what is considered ‘authentic’ embodiment and appearance perfected through body regimes and displays. Women’s lived experience and the multiplicity of voice, class and location form the focus of the next two chapters in the book. Chapter 4 examines women’s voices from middle class and upper class social spaces, who have had some access to education, are privileged in different ways, through education, employment, wealth or a combination of these. Marriage is crucial to these women’s self-definitions much as they seek to break away from normative definitions of their identities as respectable, married women. Women do however simultaneously indicate a movement away from these external definitions to the extent that they articulate and express their dissatisfaction with what they are expected to be. They attempt to alter these normative definitions with their own construction, through expression and performance in front of the male gaze or to their own gaze in the mirror, of what they would like to be or how they would like themselves to be seen, creating, in the process, an intimate and personal portrayal of their embodiment. In Chapter 5, the perspectives and experiences of women in the slum point to the significance of work and marriage in the context of their location in the slum and their experience of grinding poverty. Work is crucial to women’s self-definitions, as indeed is marriage; paid work as well as work in the home, gives women a basis for living, for survival, and for strategising their lives in the context of complex networks of marriage and extended kin. Their embodiment is experienced within a largely utilitarian perspective for the crucial role of childbearing, work and inevitable sexual relations rather than only for adornment or pleasure. Within this world of the everyday, woman recognises her ability to negotiate, strategise and intervene, as she wants to, and in the very recognition and articulation of both her position and her desires, aspirations and hopes, she achieves her sense of identity as a woman. In the last chapter, I discuss the emancipatory possibilities of resistance in the everyday lives of women. In recognising that resistance is not conclusively linked to transformation, especially at larger social and cultural levels, I discuss resistance as an ‘impasse’, indicating an inevitability as well as an openness to possibilities. This view allows us to consider women as charters of their destinies as much as they experience them through the struggles and dilemmas that characterise their everyday lives.

1 EMBODIMENT, IDENTITY AND WOMANHOOD

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his work is specifically concerned with the lives of women and seeks to provide an understanding of women’s experience of embodiment in everyday life.1 The focus on women arises from an explicit effort to speak about the social, from the perspective and experience of women. It is only then that we can speak about ‘a sociology’ for women: when the experience of women forms the basis of understanding the social. The social then is not only about women, but from their perspective, provides the basis for a sociology that serves to help us discover and understand the larger social and political reality. Such a sociology, that takes women’s experience as its starting point, does not objectify the subjects under study but seeks ‘to investigate how that society organises and shapes that everyday world of experience. Its project is to explicate the actual social relations in which people’s lives are embedded and to make these visible to them/ourselves’ (Smith 1999: 74). Ethnographies of communities and social processes in India that have taken the experience of women as central to their analyses include the works of sociologists and social anthropologists such as Das (1988), 1 Embodiment, ‘a lived matter of gender’ (Hughes and Witz 1997), is crucial to the experience and perception of gender identity. As Lois McNay puts it: ‘At the point of overlap between the physical, the symbolic and the sociological, the body is a dynamic, mutable frontier. The body is the threshold through which the subject’s lived experience of the world is incorporated and realized and as such, is neither pure object nor pure subject’ (McNay 1999: 98). As object, it is argued that the body and its image is part of ‘formally identical objects interacting in the infinity of space and time’ but as subject, the same body and body-image is ‘immeasurably enriched with the inner content of lived experience’ (Ferguson 1997: 6).

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Dube (1986, 1988), Ganesh (1993), Jeffery (1979), Raheja and Gold (1996), Kapadia (1995) and Uberoi (1996), among others. These studies have sought to foreground women’s voices as being critical to their everyday experience in a network of social relations that are embedded in socio-economic and political domains. Such work has focused on issues that emphasise, among others, kinship relations, the status of women in the family and household, women’s work and agrarian relations, embodiment and sexuality, women and caste, the law and women and the state and social reform. My own interest in a sociology of women is firmly grounded in an exploration of embodiment and women’s lived experience through voice and agency.2 I seek to understand women’s embodiment and identity in their everyday lives, and local knowledge(s) and practice(s) as sites of power and resistance. I suggest that woman speaks with a complexity located in the multiplicities of economic deprivation, caste, familial and gender relations.3 This multiplicity is importantly located in the physical and social conditions of everyday life that women experience.

EMBODIMENT AND IDENTITY My purpose here is to consider the linkages between embodiment, gender and identity and how these point to the socially, emotionally and individually constructed human body. We exist through our bodies and the materiality of our existence is a certainty. We are embodied socially through our location in a socio-cultural and political space. In this sense, we are located in time and space, race, ethnicity and 2

In this work, I do not focus on embodiment as experienced through disability, disease, violence, religion or age, among other such categories. These are important considerations in any work on embodiment, as they frame the paradigm of embodiment in vastly different ways, but lie outside the scope of this book. 3 I assert that woman ‘speaks’ and therefore has voice, will and agency. We need to engage with women’s voices, ‘to learn to speak to (rather than listen to or speak for) the historically muted subject of the subaltern woman’ (Spivak 1988: 295). Spivak later clarifies that she is arguing for agency as ‘institutionally validated action’ (Spivak 2000: xx). She argues that this is crucial: ‘The politics of demanding and building infrastructure so that when subalterns speak they can be heard’ (ibid.). This is not however the point of this work where women’s voices construct an understanding of everyday life practices through an articulation of the twin processes of compliance and resistance.

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gender, and history and culture which shape and limit us in different ways (Bordo 1997: 181). Our embodiment is therefore experienced in our everyday lives as lived and communicative bodies. To the extent that we can articulate our embodied experience through language, emotions, memory and speech, we use our bodily senses to both perceive and give voice to our experience. Embodiment in this sense is ‘an existential condition in which the body is the subjective source or intersubjective ground of experience’ (Csordas 1999a: 143) and therefore I am essentially concerned with culture and experience as they can be understood ‘from the standpoint of bodily being-in-the world’ (ibid.).4 Individuals clearly do not constitute singular, isolated and fixed identities but are multiply constituted with contradictory and often conflicting subjectivities. In an attempt to bring in these multiple voices, representing multiple subjectivities, my focus is on the lived and communicative body and on lived experience as constitutive of the embodied self. By lived experience, I mean that experience which is premised on the articulation by women of their subjectivity based in the everyday and simultaneously in particular historical and social locations.5 In foregrounding this subjectivity, it is important to refrain from providing anecdotal accounts or personal narratives that do not in some way reflect subjectivity in the social so that it is an engagement with the social that is the bedrock of lived experience.6 4 The work of Erving Goffman has been particularly significant in emphasizing the place of the body in identifying the links between people’s self-identity and social identity. Goffman was concerned with the techniques of the body in social relationships, such as ‘face-work’, gestures, and other nuanced forms of behaviour in the ‘presentation of the self ’ and maintenance of appearances as a form of public display in everyday life (Goffman 1956 ). The significance of Goffman’s work lies in his emphasis on the body ‘as integral to human agency’ (Shilling 1993: 82). His work shows us how people can, and do, intervene in the flow of everyday life through different aspects and modes of self-presentation, whether physical or sartorial. However, Goffman’s work also suggests that there is an extent to which individuals can express themselves through and with their bodies. This social constraint is exercised through ‘shared vocabularies of body idiom’ (as quoted by Shilling, ibid.) which implies that while bodies belong to individuals, their significance is socially derived. 5 ‘Lived experience’, it is suggested, ‘designates the whole of a person’s subjectivity. More particularly, the term describes the way an individual makes sense of her situation and actions’ (Moi 1999: 63). 6 Sara Suleri however warns us of the dangers of ‘lived experience’ or ‘radical subjectivity’ translating into a ‘low-grade romanticism’ that maybe unable to recognize its discursive status as a ‘pre- rather than post- colonialism’ (Suleri 1992: 761).

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As Henrietta Moore has pointed out, persons and selves are bounded and therefore ‘embodiment is the essence of identity’ (Moore 1994a: 31). However, embodiment does not impart a fixity to identity as identities are always in the process of becoming, being made and re-made, constructed and re-defined, shaped and transformed. My interest in human embodiment is also in relation to the expression of inner feelings, self hood and identity, viewing none of these as isolated single issues but rather as multiple constituents of human embodiment. Phenomenology has been foremost in imbuing matter (the body) with life (agency) through the lived experience of human beings. The mind, imagination, emotions and memory play as much a role in the construction and experience of the human body as do the social expectations and the male and female gaze. The phenomenological perspective views all human perception as embodied. And embodiment thereby becomes both experience and body, agency and physical corporeality, life and matter. The psychological element is not insignificant in the formation of gender identity and as Nancy Chodorow has emphasised, I too contend that ‘each person’s sense of gender…is an inextricable fusion or melding of personally created (emotionally and through unconscious fantasy) and cultural meaning’ (Chodorow 1995: 517). The important point however is that much of the personal creation is grounded in social, cultural and ethnic factors so that it is not clear to what extent an individual’s own sense of gender subjectivity is not informed by the society in which she lives. For example, Ahmed points out how bodily encounters with strangers ‘in which something that cannot be named is passed between subjects’ serves to embody the social agent and such encounters in fact are ‘played out on the body, and is played out with the emotions’ (Ahmed 2000: 85–6).7 The psychological element remains an important component 7 In a moving quote from Audre Lorde’s encounter, as a child on a subway train with her mother, with a white woman who shirks from bodily contact and stands up to avoid sitting next to her, Ahmed concludes that ‘through such strange encounters, bodies are both deformed and reformed; they take form through and against other bodily forms’ (Ahmed 2000: 86). Such strange encounters also serve to mark out boundary lines between bodies, through the assumption of a bodily image, and also involve ‘social practices and techniques of differentiation’. In other words, bodies may be differentiated ‘not only from each other or from the other, but also through differentiating between others, who have a different function in establishing the permeability of bodily space’ (ibid.: 90).

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in the formation of gendered selves to the extent that the body must be ‘psychically constituted in order for the subject to acquire a sense of its place in the world and in connection with others’ (Grosz 1994: xii) (emphasis added). It is in relation to others, especially significant others, that the embodied self is constituted and understood. Rather than split the person into the mutually exclusive categories of mind and body, and view gender identity in terms of a series of binary oppositions based on this essential opposition, it becomes important to emphasise the psychological and cultural nature of the embodied self. To this end, Elizabeth Grosz suggests we develop an understanding of what she calls ‘embodied subjectivity’ or ‘psychical corporeality’ which avoids dualism and the alternatives to it and thereby the criticisms of it (ibid.: 22). The psychological construction of gender identity, and thereby of womanhood, is therefore acknowledged. My attention in this work is focused on how woman, as embodied self, is defined both by her interiority as well as the public and social domain and what strategies and modes she uses to define, articulate, manipulate and transform both the inner and the outer in terms of her experiential reality. My concern with the experience of embodiment focuses my investigation into how young and adult women articulate this experience in their everyday lives. The act of hearing women’s voices is essential to understand woman’s recognition of herself as a feminine subject and the act of ‘recognition is a significant moment in the construction of subjectivity’ (Skeggs 1998: 98). Giving voice to agency therefore forms a significant component of the questions this work seeks to address. Woman’s personal and social worlds are defined very clearly in terms of the home, the family, their childhood, the workplace and their life experiences through various periods of their lives. In the process of articulating their life worlds, women traverse untrodden paths of revelation, strength and surprise as well as the more frequented ones of abuse, dishonour, shame and rejection. In traversing these paths, women revert to memory, narrative and voice as tools for reconstructing their emotions, thoughts and experiences in making sense of their own constitution as embodied, gendered beings. It is through her embodiment that woman both experiences and articulates herself: The woman knower for whom we will write the systematic feminist consciousness of psyche and social relations stands outside textually mediated discourse, in the actualities of her local and particular

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world…She is always where her body is; if she makes the Cartesian leap into doubting its existence, the ontological irony is that she makes it as a body, with the disciplining of the body that subdues it in the presence of the text, an active being of the body in a particular actual local historical setting. (Smith 1991: 159)

The attempt is not only to provide descriptions of their everyday embodied experiences but also to understand whether written and oral responses and testimonies to my questions about their lives bring out important ways of remembering and forgetting, living, dying and being re-born, and political consciousness in spirit and in will. I argue that the experience of an embodied and gendered self lies at the intersection not only of multiple subjectivities but also at multiple points of political consciousness and location. Embodiment is therefore not merely about being-in-the-body or behaviour but about experience, subjectivity, political consciousness, agency and will. In my emphasis on the everyday as both the focus of study and site for explanation, I have undoubtedly been influenced by the work of Pierre Bourdieu who focuses on social power in the everyday. The great advantage of this approach is that everyday life practices become crucial to understanding how both power and agency operate in the most mundane situations, contexts and practices. Simple and everyday tasks such as the embodied engagement with work of different kinds, with domestic tasks and social networks, acquire a renewed significance when viewed from this perspective. In addition, a woman’s physical stance, the gestures she uses, the facial expressions she communicates, her articulation of her life experience in a particular tone of voice as well as the silences, the absence of speech, the hushed voice, are critical markers of both the exercise of power and of woman’s agential response. I examine Bourdieu’s widely influential conceptual category of habitus in terms of its emphasis on the collective, the social, so well articulated in his statement that, ‘Habitus is a socialized subjectivity’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992: 126); and the implications of this when we seek to emphasise a sociology for women on the basis of subjectively constructed knowledge. I do not however preclude the possibilities of resistance or transformation as these are embedded in the nature of habitus itself to the extent that Bourdieu was concerned with the notion, following Chomsky, of ‘generative grammar’ and thereby of the ‘creative, active, and inventive capacities of habitus and of agent’. In fact, Bourdieu and Wacquant clearly emphasise that

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‘Habitus is not the fate that some people read into it. …It is an open system of dispositions that is constantly subjected to experiences, and therefore constantly affected by them in a way that either reinforces or modifies its structures. It is durable but not eternal’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992: 133). Moreover, the habitus is embodied in the human subject and is an experience, and in that sense, a capital, made explicit through bodily hexis—the bearing of the body, comportment, and deeply ingrained habits of behaviour, feeling and thought. Thus, embodiment is critical to Bourdieu’s sociology of lived practice and of what he calls ‘the practical sense’. The habitus, in this work, is an important concept as it focuses attention on the body. While we may know that the body ‘is a medium’ for expressions of moods and feelings, Bourdieu emphasises that the body, ‘as a repository for social experience, constitutes an essential part of the habitus’ (Krais 2006: 127). All human action is embodied, gendered and social. This does not however imply that the human is passive in ‘being-in-the-world’ but is ‘actively participating and grappling with the world’ (ibid.: 129). It is this element of struggle, and contestation, in habitus that, to my mind, is critical to understand the space between mere reiteration of social acts and of the open-ended and fluid nature of action.8 In this work, I seek to understand habitus, its constancy and simultaneously its malleability in the context of woman’s experience and my point of intervention in this debate takes place on two registers. First, I seek to define and understand the constancy of habitus in women’s experience wherein agency is contained in every attempt at breaking out so that the challenge to oppression or domination takes place on well recognised and trodden paths of resistance and rebellion that often do not reveal more than they appear to. They thus emerge from, and rest within, the social fields inhabited by 8 The major feminist critique against Bourdieu, however, expresses a dissatisfaction with the concept of habitus which, in spite of Bourdieu’s emphasis on the possibilities of change, is viewed as embodying an unchanging, obstinate set of dispositions that inhere in the body, emotions and psyche and endure over time. Contrarily, contemporary feminist discourse emphasises ‘agency, fluidity, the instability of subject positionings and identities’ which, as Terry Lovell tells us, ‘contrasts at times very starkly with the durability of Bourdieu’s dispositional subject’ (Lovell 2000:12). See also Lovell (2003), Adkins and Skeggs (2004) and Krais (2006) for new approaches in feminism towards Bourdieu’s work since his death in 2002.

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subjects. They do however articulate individual aspirations, desires and goals and reflect the struggle for being-in-the-world in everyday life. Following Derrida (1993), I use the term ‘aporia’ (or ‘aporiai, pace Aristotle) suggestive of impasse without closure, to signify the quality of ambiguity, in resistance as a tool and as a method. Second, I address the problem of woman’s enactment or performance of identity in terms of what they seek to present about themselves through a variety of expressions that are embodied in their vision and construction of themselves as gendered beings. In a sense, as Judith Butler argues, ‘gender is performatively produced’ thereby ‘constituting the identity it is purported to be’. Further, ‘there is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the very “expressions” that are said to be its results’ (Butler 1990: 24–25).9 I therefore pursue the notion of performativity as being central to woman’s self-construction and pose the question of whether this performativity and the creativity that is imbricated in performance in fact constitutes a break down in habitus. Or is it the case that the habitus is structured to some extent by ‘a kind of performativity’, as suggested by Butler (Butler 1997: 153)? If habitus operates according to a performativity, then the ‘social life of the body’, Butler argues, ‘is produced through an interpellation that is at once linguistic and productive.’ The manner in which this interpellative call takes ‘form in a bodily stylistics’, it is suggested, ‘in turn, performs its own social magic [and] constitutes the tacit and corporeal operation of performativity.’ Such a formulation understands habitus as the bodily enactment of certain dispositions that are already given and reaffirmed by society. I propose that performativity in a woman’s enactment and presentation of her embodied self, however, steps out of the constraining nature of habitus and reflects the more liberatory elements of play, movement, and unfettered expressions of the self. The constancy of the social is undeniable. In the playing out of an embodied identity through performance, in the assertion of an 9

‘Performatives’, we are told, ‘(utterances which enact or instatiate or bring about social statuses, as in the authorized declaration of marriage) are also always performances, but they have the force of social institutionalization behind them which mere performances lack. They are embedded in the social structures and norms that authorize them. For Butler, socially embedded performatives may be dislodged, their meanings transformed, by inspired performances that transgress with authority’ (Lovell 2000:15).

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independence of spirit through the body, I do not suggest that the body has an independent existence. As Helen Fielding points out, ‘It is the nature of the embodied subject to move into and be taken up by the world around her. Essences emerge through this intertwining, in the space between. They are enacted but always and only in relation to the world and to others’ (Fielding 2000: 132). There is both a fluidity and closure therefore in expression and enactment. This should put to rest any attempt to consider such a perspective as essentialising woman as a biologically driven entity. In emphasising the agential aspects of embodiment, I do not suggest an ‘emancipatory model of agency’ (Mahmood 2005) but argue that agency emerges from within the structures of power and (like Butler) emphasise that ‘the reiterative structure of norms serves not only to consolidate a particular regime of discourse/power but also serves as the means of its destabilisation’ (as quoted in Mahmood 2005: 20). Moreover, ‘norms are not only consolidates and/or subverted but performed, inhabited and experienced in a variety of ways’ (ibid.: 22). In this understanding of the simultaneous constancy and malleability of habitus, the view is that the habitus is not only embodied, unthought and instinctual but also reflective through understanding and articulation, as well as through embodied work and play, made and unmade in the experience of everyday life. We are empowered through our bodies and the practical, material conditions of our everyday lives serve as markers of our embodiment as much as they do for the ground on which resistance, change and transformation are articulated and become possible. Class, caste and nation are therefore not only inscribed on our bodies but also, through our everyday lives, become the very agencies through which we negotiate our lives and the strategies we engage in to ensure our place, position and status in society or our struggle to attain class position and status as the case may be. Location is therefore critical to our understanding of embodiment in both its experiential and empowering contexts. It is not out of place to emphasise woman’s use of the body, including her sexuality, as a weapon—for survival, whether to combat the harsh conditions imposed by poverty, to attack the oppressor physically, or to strategically manipulate, coerce or extract the maximum to her advantage. Women seek to maximise their gains through embodied strategies of negotiation and manipulation, contestation and submission, creating desire and suggesting fulfilment. Such sexual strategies are not unknown in the

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literature about women’s sexuality but I contend these embodied acts are as much political acts as they are sexual ploys, seeking to exploit and dominate as much as to sometimes submit to prevailing definitions about Indian womanhood. Location is also significant in the symbolism of the mirror in the narratives of women. What does the mirror symbolise in the lives of the women, in the family, in relationships and in self-imagery? The mirror, in one sense, constructs the ‘looking-glass self ’ (Cooley 1902)10 through engagement with the image reflected in the mirror whether this is one that emphasises ‘beauty’, desirable sexuality, or thebody-as-it-is, through display, adornment and self-appreciation. The mirror is also used as a metaphorical device to indicate the reflection of an embodied self in relationship, in play and in performance. Class is central to the use of the mirror as a strategic device, real or metaphorical, and it is upper-class women, with access to education, linguistic skills and the western media, who articulate this aspect of their lived experience of embodiment. My focus on women’s embodiment is clearly an effort to understand woman’s experience of her body, rather than emphasise the body as an object, image or construction. This formulation of embodiment as lived experience derives undoubtedly from the work of Merleau-Ponty who emphasises the body as ‘the vehicle of being in the world’ (Merleau-Ponty 1962: 82). Embodiment, a ‘lived matter of gender’ (Hughes and Witz 1997), articulated through our bodily senses, is crucial to the experience and perception of gender identity. In this sense, embodiment is ‘an existential condition in which the body is the subjective source or intersubjective ground of experience’ (Csordas 1999a: 143). I am therefore essentially concerned with culture and experience as they can be understood ‘from the standpoint of bodily being-in-the-world’ (ibid.). Bourdieu’s concept of habitus is critical for understanding the influence of structures in shaping our decisions as well as our response to them; similarly, the lived experience of embodiment is crucial for understanding the manner 10

Charles Cooley argues that the ‘looking glass self ’ or the ‘reflected’ self is a ‘social self ’. In this context, he says, ‘as we see our face, figure and dress in the glass, and are interested in them because they are ours and are pleased and otherwise with them according as they do or do not answer to what we should like them to be; so in imagination we perceive in another’s mind some thought of our appearance, manners, aims, deeds, character, friends, and so on, and are variously affected by it’ (see Cooley 1902: 179–185).

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in which the body is perceived, constructed, performed, displayed and adorned. In the feminist discourse in contemporary India, woman’s embodiment is closely associated with the signifiers of identity emerging from the tropes of nation, community and religious fundamentalism whether it is in the context of the fractured nation-state of the partition period, the interests and forces of the nationalist movement, Hindu or Muslim communities, caste and ethnic communities and contemporary caste and class contexts.11 Woman’s embodiment is the true repository of purity, sacredness and honour thereby suggesting that in one way or another ‘the female body needs to be appropriated for a sense of national, racial or community identity to persist’ (Gedalof 1999: 203). The intersection of class and embodiment in the construction of identity is somewhat more complex. This emerges not only from women’s experience of their embodied and gendered selves in the context of their class positions but also from the ability of subjects to capture and convert different forms of capital to ensure upward mobility, status, position and privilege in society. Class is crucial to my analysis of women’s embodiment and identity as it shapes women’s experience of their everyday lives in very different ways. This is reflected in their diverse ways of knowing, remembering and experiencing their material conditions, their relationships with others and their consciousness of their condition in relation to caste, gender and community. The need for economic, cultural and social capital of different kinds signifying varied indicators of status and position is expressed very differently by women belonging to different social and economic backgrounds.12 Femininity, as that ‘way of being’ which bestows status, respectability and recognition, through embodied modes of appearance and selfpresentation is dependent on the social class position of women in differing contexts. For a middle-class woman, it is important to be viewed, both socially and culturally, as one who has clearly articulated self-definitions about her femininity as an embodied state that 11 See, for example, Sangari and Vaid (1993), Tanika Sarkar (1995, 1997), Butalia (1997), Chowdhry (1994, 2007), Chakravarti (2003). 12 I am here referring to the uses of capital as elucidated by Pierre Bourdieu (1986). In his understanding and analysis of the forms of capital, namely, economic, cultural and social capital and their transformation into symbolic capital, Bourdieu has made an important contribution to our understanding of how the conversion of capital results in changes in social class, status, privilege and domination.

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gives off self-negotiated and constructed expressions about herself. A working class woman articulates her construction of femininity from within her economic and political space. It is therefore a very different construction of femininity, based on utilitarian and practical considerations, grounded in her everyday life experiences at work, in the family, community and poverty. Class is significant but I would like to emphasise that culture is equally important to our understanding of embodiment and identity as we are located in a space wherein culture in various forms impacts our physical senses and fleshly bodies in very specific and concrete ways and is simultaneously reflected in the practices we engage in. These include not only cultural practices that serve as markers of women’s status and roles in Indian society, but increasingly the domain of popular culture, the media and its manifestations and the practices emanating from them. The influence of culture is present in ways in which we use our bodies, look at our bodies, seek to change them in bits and pieces and above all, experience our embodiment in relation to others. In this sense, the space of everyday life, namely, ‘culture and social relations’, and I would assert our experience of these relations, are ‘essentially political spaces and practices’ (Bannerji 2001a: 8). Culture, and our experience of culture, is mediated by class relations and the discursive practices emanating from them. In contemporary social settings, therefore, changing modes of domination through the media, the ‘vendors of slimming aids’ and other agents of the increasingly dominant middle classes impose new uses of the body and create a new bodily ‘hexis’ which ‘substituting seduction for repression, public relations for policing, advertising for authority, the velvet glove for the iron fist, pursues the symbolic integration of the dominated classes by imposing needs rather than inculcating norms’ (Bourdieu 1984: 153–4). In this manner, both material conditions and social, cultural and symbolic transformations effect new modes of domination that in subtle ways are the tools par excellence of reproducing gender politics through embodied experience. It is in this sense that ‘class, as an ensemble of social relations and significational practices, is then not only an economic but a social form. It indicates how social spaces of lived relations, valorised practices and experiences are implicated in relations and moralities of property and labour relations’ (Bannerji 2001a: 10). This complex interplay of culture, social and class relations informs my analysis in different ways in the context of the experience of young

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and adult women in the urban context of a changing postcolonial society like India. In my view, therefore, the body has both a physical location as much as a social construction. We experience our bodies not only in their socio-cultural located-ness but also through our emotions and our senses. We engage not only with the world but we also engage with our inner dilemmas, fears and anxieties through our embodied selves. The continuous dialogue between the inner and the outer, the self and the body, enables us to realise our goals through the experience of struggle, contestation and contradiction that is critical to everyday life.

SITES AND PRACTICES: RECOLONISATION AND ITS CONSEQUENCES The social, cultural and political consequences of location are significant indicators for embodied experience. The larger sociopolitical sites within which embodiment is experienced is at one level, the particular postcolonial context, that constructs a particular framework for the embodiment of subjects in contemporary society. Secondly, the specific socio-economic context in which subjects are both located and embedded is intrinsic not only to their class position but also to their particular experience of embodiment and gendered identity. There are thus variations at both the national and global levels and in the social locations of subjects. ‘Difference’ in a sense is critical to this approach. However, it is also significant that such difference does not imply or indicate a specificity of experience outside a universal experience but in fact includes the specific, and the multiplicities of experience implied, within the national and global.13 The ‘post-colonial’, as in postcolonial societies such as India, implies not only a historical condition but has also become a metaphor for an extraordinary situation in which a nation finds itself. This is the legacy of a mixed heritage characterised by the quality of 13 I would like to emphasise, pace Mohanty, that differences however are not mere ‘differences’ but that how ‘specifying difference allows us to theorise universal concerns more fully’(Mohanty 2002: 505).

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the dominant postcolonial habitus that it embodies in its subjects. This habitus is produced and reproduced through the family, the educational code and its attendant discourse, such as language, and over a period of time becomes a significant marker of status and distinction.14 Simultaneously this habitus generates the recolonisation of society whether or not it has experienced political and economic colonialism. As opposed to the current preoccupation with postcolonial-ism, as both a social and political condition, as well as a conceptual category for the understanding of relations of power, I use the conceptual category of recolonisation which I see as a far more significant fallout of colonialism. The term ‘recolonization’ was brought to my attention through the astute comments made by Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Mohanty who refer to ‘processes of recolonization’ as those processes which are a result of ‘global alignments and fluidity of capital [which] have simply led to further consolidation and exacerbation of capitalist relations of domination and exploitation’ (1997: xvii). Recolonisation is not merely a process, as some would say, akin to globalisation or westernisation. Far more dangerously, it refers to relations of power that manifest themselves and function through different social processes at different historical moments in time and point to the continuities, discontinuities and transformations in colonial and imperial power. The term ‘colonisation’ implies several different relations at different historical and cultural moments. Apart from the obvious political and economic inequalities it addresses, it also significantly refers to ‘the production of a particular cultural discourse about what is called the “third world”’ (Mohanty 1991a: 52). In particular, this has included a feminist, white preoccupation by western scholars about women of colour, women in the ‘Third World’, ‘native’ women, and as Mohanty succinctly concludes, ‘almost invariably implies a relation of structural domination, and a suppression—often violent—of the heterogeneity of the subject(s) in question’ (ibid.). This hierarchical relation ends up therefore ‘producing/re-presenting a composite, singular “third-world woman”—an image…arbitrarily 14 I use the conceptual category of ‘postcolonial habitus’ to specify the context in which habitus is created and reproduced. I therefore take recourse to ‘postcolonial’ as a historical and social condition that shapes habitus in diverse and particular ways through familial relations, schooling practices and other modalities of the social and public domain.

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constructed, but nevertheless carries with it the authorizing signature of Western humanist discourse’ (ibid.: 53). This hegemonic relation of power where western, feminist, predominantly white women appropriate for themselves the privileged position of commentators and theorisers of the condition and position of universal woman is, I contend, another example of recolonisation. All societies are characterised however by not only a dominant culture but also by those who have been excluded from both the culture as well as from the social and cultural reproductive process (to the extent that they remain outside the formal education system) and its gains. By remaining outside a fixed system that provides gains to those who simultaneously understand and imbibe it, they are in a sense outsiders to the dominant postcolonial habitus of that society. In other words, they have not imbibed the habits and manners of the colonisers, nor are they educated in elite, English-medium schools, nor do they have the cultural and social class that would signify their position in the dominant sections of a postcolonial space, and nor are they privileged to fathom the depths of recolonisation that takes them and their position in society as given but a nonetheless insignificant presence. Their educationally disadvantaged position and location in social space therefore generates a habitus that reproduces difference and lived experience as gendered, subaltern subjects. The social divisions that inhere in society may easily be grouped according to class, caste, age, ethnicity and gender differences but the divisions that exist on the ground go deeper than these well-defined and analysed social categories. Caste divisions therefore are not the only defining characteristics of social exclusion; the dominant culture ensures the reproduction of a habitus that automatically ensures exclusion along varied dividing lines.15 This habitus however is such that it seeks to rise above the very postcoloniality that it embodies and therefore seeks to consolidate and establish new relations of power that are both rooted in the contemporary as well as take on shades of a distant past that is both culturally and socially located in a modern, 15 Power relations, I would therefore argue, following Bernstein, ‘create boundaries, legitimise boundaries, reproduce boundaries, between different categories of groups, gender, class, race, different categories of discourse, different categories of agents’ (Bernstein 1996:19). The most significant and pervasive boundaries in rural and urban India are those of caste, gender and religion. See, among others, Chowdhry (2007), for the practices that serve to maintain and reproduce these boundaries in different contexts and the efforts towards resistance.

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changing India as well as in its essential corollary, an emotionally, culturally and socially rooted tradition. In this process of exclusion, it is important to also establish the defining characteristics of those who have been included. These are primarily based on their class and caste affiliations, their social status and position in society in relation to their gender, education and occupation. These are perhaps the visible markers of being included in the pre-eminent habitus that is part of the dominant culture. There are however certain invisible markers of inclusion and these are visible only to others who seek to differentiate between those who are in and who are out, the included and the excluded, the privileged and the under-privileged, and the dominant and the subaltern. The invisible markers are defined by that which they purport to hide, the lack of an appropriate habitus, as it were, that forms the ground of the social and cultural exclusion. These may include aspects of their existence that do not fulfil the criteria of inclusion such as the appropriate caste or class status, educational or professional qualifications, linguistic abilities, age and gender. Although the postcolonial subject has herself been a subject of hegemonic forces, she still does not hesitate to knowingly exclude the subaltern other. The politics of recolonisation is therefore all about both reproducing the colonial moment as well as extending the hegemony of the past in the present. The dominant postcolonial habitus in India has been embodied primarily in those who had access to the colonisers and were privileged in the sense of being able to relate to them in terms of their language and socio-political relations. It was primarily in Bengal that the colonial literary and cultural encounter took root and shape and was to influence the nature and quality of the postcolonial character. This class imbibed western (English) education, culture, literature and the arts while simultaneously seeking freedom from the yoke of foreign rule. At the same time, as Aijaz Ahmad has argued, the ‘sense of the superiority of Western knowledges’ was established not in the literary or cultural but in the ‘cognitive and technical fields’ (Ahmad 1992: 269). He suggests that the ‘petty bourgeoisie, of both the traditional (propertied) and the new (professional) kinds’ were pushed towards English and Western knowledges because of the nature of their school education and their own ambitions. However, there was a contradiction to the extent that ‘their own lives kept them rooted on their own linguistic communities’ (ibid.: 272). It was this class

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that existed in a contradictory realm of both loyalty and rebellion, western in its mind and indigenous in its life, that constituted the heart, as it were, of postcolonial habitus and influenced the direction in which further social inclusion and exclusion could and eventually would take place. It is also the case that this postcolonial habitus is now germane to the middle classes who are at the forefront of Indian socio-political and cultural life today. It has been suggested that it is the middle classes in Indian society who have taken on the mantle of building India in the postcolonial period, of playing a leading role in the development and growth of the nation. Satish Deshpande identifies the main function of the middle classes in this period as hegemonising: ‘to build hegemony’ (Deshpande 1998: 153). This ‘moral privileging’ of the middle-class task of modernising the nation through a model of ‘development’ which imitated the west and yet maintained a pristine inner sphere ‘protected from western contamination’ (ibid.) is an illustration of recolonisation through social agents whose postcolonial habitus created in them the general dispositions to perform a hegemonising role. This pure, untouched, inner sphere did not remain unpolluted for very long. The advent and spread of global culture has ensured its recolonisation with the help of the very same middle classes that perhaps sought to protect it in earlier times. In contemporary urban India beset by globalisation, recolonisation is in fact a complex process giving rise to complex and changing identities in everyday life. Alexander and Mohanty add, ‘Understanding the various constructions of self and identity during late capitalism—when transnationalisation confounds the postcolonial and women’s relationship to it, and when fluid borders permit the mobility of ‘free’ market capital—is a complicated enterprise that cannot be simply invoked by claiming fluid or fractured identities’ (Alexander and Mohanty 1997: xvii-xviii). My work makes an effort to comprehend these cultural, socio-economic and political processes of transnational crossings and understand their impact on identity in relation to gender and embodiment. In doing this, I aim to present a more nuanced understanding of the relations of power allowing for multiplicity in subjectivities, in perspectives, in the public and social domain and in agency and resistance. The possibilities for transformation are present in lived experience and find expression in multiple ways through voice, action and often

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through a recognition and articulation of the acts of oppression and violence that are tied to the relations that bind women. Agency is therefore crucial, although the possibilities for transformation are always bounded by the restricting nature of the dominant constructions of caste, class, age, ethnicity, religious and regional locations. Does such agency, including struggle against oppression of different kinds, engender resistance to particular issues, experiences, actions and values and does it have any intent to transform? Sunder Rajan contends that ‘It [resistance] is not (yet) a revolutionary term since, as we notice, it is a praxis that is reactive to domination rather than one that initiates a transformation’ (Sunder Rajan 2000: 154). It is imperative to consider however that ‘transformation’, as the complete change of existing social and political conditions, can be attempted successfully only through a concerted effort at change at different levels of social existence. Transformation in itself is therefore not a condition that will necessarily result from individual acts of resistance although contrarily, individual actions do indeed often contribute to social transformation. The processes of resistance in the lives of women in urban India need to be understood in the context of their construction as ‘Indian’ women in the problematic scenario, that has accompanied the processes of globalisation, and that is still being played out in the arena of the socio-economic life of the country.

WOMANHOOD IN CONTEMPORARY INDIA Womanhood in contemporary India is a complex construct, and ambivalent experience, located as it is in the contradictions, cleavages and dilemmas that beset the social and public domains as well as in the complexities of everyday life. Uma Chakravarti’s seminal work on a colonial and nationalist construction of an Aryan Hindu identity for women in the second half of the nineteenth century documents the ‘invention’ of a tradition (Chakravarti 1993: 73). The construction of a particular past was coterminous with the construction of a particular kind of womanhood. Nationalism, like religion, became a legitimate area for women’s participation and the nationalists focused only on upper caste Aryan women. Chakravarti concludes

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that the twentieth century has ‘continued to reproduce, in all essentials, what the nineteenth century has so carefully and so successfully constructed as an enduring legacy for us’ (ibid.: 79). This points to the recolonisation of women as gendered, subaltern subjects in contemporary India where discourses of tradition and modernity in fact exist simultaneously, and often contradictorily, creating an ambivalent space both for the construction of womanhood in the social and public domain and for women’s lived experience in everyday life.16 Modernity is a troublesome construct in postcolonial societies, particularly because it has to contend with a legacy of both a tradition that must be changed even as it must also be valued (Ram 1998: 270).17 This contradictory experience indicates a constant movement between defining and redefining old and new social and political constructions of womanhood in the changing and markedly fluid social and public discourses of ‘modern’ India.18 I contend that the new woman in the rapidly altering cultural and social imaginary of this nation need not necessarily always be constructed in the context of a charged and transformed modernity, as it were. Rather, she should be viewed in the fluid and marked nature of her identity as a woman, 16 Nita Kumar provides a cogent discussion of ‘women as subjects’ and rejecting the Cartesian subject as well as the subject as constituted by the Subaltern Studies group. She constitutes the subject through what she calls, ‘a modified Foucauldian approach’ wherein ‘the subject is constituted, as formed by discourse, but also, the subject that resists, that can inevitably fashion other discourses’ (Kumar 1994: 8). This perspective is similar to my own conclusions as elaborated in this work. 17 Modernity is also viewed as having been ‘misrecognised’ in India because it is understood as ‘technology and contemporary artefacts’ (Gupta 2000: 2). Gupta defines modernity in terms of ‘attitudes, especially those that come into play in social relations’ such as an individual’s dignity, adherence to universalistic norms, individual achievement and accountability in public life (ibid.). Undoubtedly, modernity includes not only attitudes that prevail in social relations but also the resultant practices that may emanate from these attitudes as well as from what may be considered ‘tradition’. 18 I do not consider ‘Indian woman’ as representative of a larger, homogeneous monolith whole but one constituted by and through the multiplicity, diversity and complexity of caste, class, linguistic and other social and economic indicators. My discussion of this ‘new’ or ‘modern’ woman is therefore very much related to her class and social position (she is educated), her ability to consume (she has income of some sort), to make choices (ability to discriminate and exercise choice), and so on. She is therefore unlike the category of the ‘Asian modern woman’ who, argues Munshi, ‘may be no more than a discursive ideological space for identification created by the global/local media’ (Munshi 2001: 7).

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shaped and redefined in the everyday experiences of women as they both contest and submit to the images and constructs that impinge on their senses, their emotions and their material and social conditions. In this sense, as Sangari and Vaid argue, the constructs of tradition and modernity are the products of a colonial enterprise and should be rejected in favour of understanding ‘cultural processes in their actual complexity’ (Sangari and Vaid 1993: 17). This complexity is undoubtedly characterised by the heterogeneity and multiplicity of experiences, events and disjunctures of everyday life. Social class, status, and education, among other factors, are significant markers in the construction of the embodied identity of the ‘modern’ Indian woman. Squarely located in the facts of her material existence in terms of both her embodiment and her class position, ‘her image interacts with so many social forces that compete for space in female imagination, that historically and cross-culturally she continues to be a powerful dream or female fantasy’ (Munshi 2001: 7). It is this image and the fantasising about the image, linked as it is to feminine desire and consumption, that makes it imperative to understand the ‘modern’, new and somewhat fluid components of Indian womanhood. In contemporary times, the liberalisation of the Indian economy has added a new impetus to the discourse of modernity, particularly in relation to women. It is precisely in this period of transition that the possibilities for both recolonisation, and also for resistance, open up. Recolonisation is characterised by a mix of global elements translated into socially and culturally acceptable, and thereby legitimate, ideas, values and practices in everyday life. The phenomenon of globalisation, and its implications for urban India over the last decade, offers one example of the recolonisation of women (Bhattacharya 1994, Chaudhuri 1999, John 1998). The production of a global culture has consequences for everyday life in contemporary urban India. Education processes and media culture play a significant role in this production. A new global media provides the symbols, myths, resources, ideas, and images for the construction of a common culture as well as of individual identities. Thus the upper-class, English-speaking, educationally advantaged urban elite in India emphasises the non-traditional (contemporary), liberated (westernised) and trendy (modern) aspects of everyday life. The cosmopolitan, urbane, civilised Indian social agent, who is part of a globalised network of relations, constitutes the elite section of the new middle class, which has now become the crucial component of

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a modern India.19 This new middle-class Indian emphasises all that is modern in the world today, including a view of the Indian woman that transcends her earlier location in the domestic world. Sangari and Vaid point to the ‘formation of a predominantly middle class public sphere’ in nineteenth century Bengal that repositioned ‘cultural forms…in a desired version of Indian culture and in desired versions of ideal women.’ This reformulation also implied the repositioning of the home ‘as the insulated private sphere which is to be free from even temporary challenges to male authority’. This paved the way for women to access the middle class sphere as both reformers and indeed as reformed women (Sangari and Vaid 1993: 12). There is however a complexity in this entry of women into the public sphere wherein although they had access to the English literary tradition and acquired a linguistic sophistication appropriate to their class and social status, they remained embedded in a patriarchal discourse that seeks to shape their engagement in public life in both enabling and restricting ways. The new and emergent view of Indian womanhood defines women, amongst other things, as ‘of substance’ and includes a more visible and public view of women in the workplace, both within new spheres of work, such as design and fashion, journalism and social activism, and through an entry into the traditionally male preserves of the military, police, banking, and other allied occupations. This emphasis on women’s public roles is largely at variance with the middle and upper class nationalist construction of the cultural domain in terms of an inner and an outer sphere. In everyday life these refer both to the home and the world, with the home representing our spiritual self and our true identity. Women are constructed at the centre of the inner world, whereas the exterior domain of ‘material interests’, treachery and intrigue is the domain of men (Chatterjee 1993: 238ff.). The inner world is also the ‘moral’ world, as it were, and it is the symbolic control of the moral, through education and 19 Contemporary work has addressed the significance of the middle class in postcolonial India. Deshpande (2003) provides an analysis of the centrality and social significance of the middle class in building hegemony in the post-independence period; Gupta’s (2000) analysis of modernity in India includes a scathing critique of the role of the middle class; Joshi (2001) examines the public-sphere politics of the middle class in late nineteenth and early twentieth century north India and links it to a ‘fractured modernity’ that included elements of both ‘authoritarianism and liberalism, emancipation and hierarchy.’

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other civilising processes, that is emphasised in that period. Commenting on the same historical juncture, Bannerji emphasises, ‘…The hegemonic agenda, is invariably an agenda of morality, of values expressed through both ideas and practices…It is through the creation, recreation and a diffusion of a set of norms and forms that the necessary “consent” can be built which is essential for hegemony’s fullest expression’ (Bannerji 2001a: 139). The middle classes, who at the time hold ‘a subordinate and/or collaborative position within classes which are ruled…and ruling’ (ibid.), play a significant role in the control of the moral domain that contains the home with woman at its centre. This does not however deny the agency of women or restrain their voice during this period. It has been powerfully argued that women’s approach to nation-building at the time includes ‘demands for property or economic self-sufficiency (and) entitlement of political agency and citizenship’ (Bannerji 2001b: 70). It is therefore not only the home but most definitely, ‘the public sphere, resonating with a discourse of reason, which attracted women inexorably’ (ibid.). At the same time, however, women were limited by their own middle-class lifestyles that prevented them from breaking free of patriarchal structures and relations that had been created, legitimised and reproduced by a ‘fractured modernity’(Joshi 2001: 21). In contemporary, middle class, urban India, global culture rearticulates woman’s identity and interests through a set of discursive practices that privilege her position in the outer world. This world is largely defined by norms and forms emanating from the west, indigenized, adopted for consumption by the Indian middle classes and presented and represented through the countless tropes of modernity present in everyday life. This ‘entrapment’ of women in the conflict between ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’ in postcolonial contexts (Sunder Rajan and Park 2000: 61) can be viewed as a process of recolonisation that seeks to position women in particular ways that are not dissimilar to their positioning in colonial contexts. It is apparent in contemporary India that the so-called old modes of contact (including religious practices, cultural tradition and social custom) and apparently new ones (most significantly, educational processes and the visual and print media) shape, influence, structure, and construct womanhood in particular and varied ways. Both modes of contact, I suggest, are forms of recolonisation of social agents in postcolonial societies. The reiteration of the old characteristics of colonialism include, for example, an emphasis on the education of women, not necessarily for their individual empowerment but for the

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purposes of having educated and aware mothers and wives who are harbingers of social and cultural development that will contribute to national progress. The process of recolonisation is significant because it reproduces the characteristics of colonialism in a redefined mode, asserting the essential value of such characteristics, in postcolonial societies thereby ensuring continuous hegemony over cultural, social and economic domains. In urban India, the visual and print media has taken upon itself the mantle of spreading, supporting and thereby legitimising a particular image of a changing, ‘modernising’ India. The dominant postcolonial habitus asserts itself in different ways through the modalities of reproduction and change offered by the multiple channels of the visual and print mass media available in a rapidly growing and increasingly media-savvy urban society like India. For example, television today is dominated by a mix of indigenous television serials caricaturing contemporary urban and rural life. They are largely set in the familiar spaces of the family which is sacred to the constitution of personhood within the cultural dynamics of what it means to be an ‘Indian’. Reproduction of family norms, values, traditions and practices is therefore crucial to maintaining and conserving the image of the middle-class family in everyday life. There is a simultaneous celebration of the spending power of the middle-class elite through advertisements for all kinds of products in different channels of the media. Chakravarty and Gooptu aptly conclude that their analysis of the construction of the nation in the media in contemporary India, ‘has shown the emergence of a certain vision of the nation in the mainstream media, in which the middle class family forms the core of a community and a nation-space of plenty, and consumption provides the primary mode of enfranchisement’ (Chakravarty and Gooptu 2000: 104).20 The reproduction of the family as the core of a developing and changing society in turn reproduces values pertaining to its protection and well-being. This ensures an instrumental view of women who are 20 In the same way as the middle classes took on the mantle of modernising and developing the nation in the postcolonial period, the middle class plays a similar role in shaping the future vision of the media, including television policy in India. The middle classes embody the ‘target audience’ of official television networks and policy makers. In fact, it is suggested that through ‘its portrayal of “modern” middle-class lifestyles and its encouragement of consumerist desires, television seems to have played a crucial role in the cultural constitution of these middles classes as a powerful historic bloc’ (Mankekar 1999: 9).

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now required to play a new role as educated mothers and wives, as well as, enlightened consumers of goods and services that will secure the family as a consuming, healthy unit. This perspective on women, engendered by globalisation, is one that merely views her in terms of her contribution to the national economy and, by not shaking off the clutch of patriarchy in any way, results in the recolonisation of women through a regurgitation of the old dressed up as new. Identities are not radically redefined, only recast in the language and mores of the contemporary moment. It is not surprising then, as Guha Thakurta concludes, that the new Indian woman in advertising in the media, for example, is trapped in ‘a twofold commodification of femininity’: on the one hand, through the ‘controlled and passive sexuality of the (Indian) woman that is inscribed in the bodies of “good” women with some sort of relation to the family’ and who end up propagating the ‘valorised ideals of sacrifice and self-effacement for the ‘cause’ of the family’(Guha Thakurta 2004: 138). On the other hand, not only does advertising encourage women to consume but it also ‘induces women to perceive themselves as commodities’. Through lending their bodies for endorsement of various products in the visual and print media, women do contribute to the commodification of their fragmented bodies, as lips, hair, eyebrows, legs, and so on. In this manner, a fragmented experience of embodiment may result and contribute to further commodification in an endless cycle of reproducing the very structures that serve to construct us in various ways.21 I would not like to conclude however that women are mere spectators and passive participants in this process of commodification and in their reproduction of an ideology that supports and values such commodification. There is a complexity underpinning women’s participation in work of all kinds and this needs to be further understood before we arrive at any hasty conclusions that emphasise the collusion of women in their own commodification. Perhaps, we need to understand that the new urban middle classes are not only the consumers of commodities but also of the ‘new India 21 It is significant that the resistance to such marketing ploys to boost the global/ local economies, has come from a Rightist perspective (more specifically, the Hindu right) that now seeks to reinvent Indian womanhood through an emphasis on values of the ‘virtuous’ and ‘good’ Hindu wife and mother (see Guha Thakurta 2004: 143ff), who in fact concludes that the ‘global economy/consumer capitalism goes hand-inhand with Indian (Hindu) nationalism’ (ibid.: 144).

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produced through the meanings attached to these commodities’ (Fernandes 2000: 622). These include new and reworked meanings and identities of gender roles and gender relations within a re-imagined national identity. In this construction, the ‘new Indian woman’ is an ambivalent entity shaped by the social and public domain which simultaneously portrays her as glamorous, independent, conscious of her embodiment and of the many forms of adornment and selfpresentation available to her, and yet enshrined in the world of tradition through her adherence to family and national values. The overarching trope therefore remains that of middle-class respectability within which woman is ‘free’ to pursue her career and look after the interests of her family and her body repair and maintenance. This portrayal is perhaps one attempt to ‘manage the destabilizing contradictions’ produced by globalisation in the new India (Fernandes 2000: 623). Lest the trendy and socially elite lifestyles associated with contemporary consumerism suggest the emergence of amoral or decadent choices, it becomes essential to project the Indian woman as the symbol of all that is ‘good’ and yet ‘modern’ in the national imaginary. This active management of women as bearers of tradition and symbols of a ‘good’ (respectable) modernity may indicate at one level the victory of the agents of recolonisation, but it simultaneously gives rise to new and emergent forms of contestation and negotiation that engage women in pursuit of their goals in everyday life.

CONCLUDING COMMENTS This chapter has examined sociological and anthropological constructions of embodiment, gender and identity and asserted the significance of these for the study of the social construction of womanhood in contemporary India as well as women’s lived experience in everyday life. Such a perspective emphasises the embodied and thereby material existence of everyday life but, equally, underscores the fluidity in the socially lived experience of identity as a gendered subject. The methodological pitch of such an approach undoubtedly points to the politics of the construction, and living out of womanhood, based on historical and social events and perspectives, in contemporary India. The paradoxical elements in this process result in an ambiguity in an understanding of womanhood which remains a contested category, presented, represented, negotiated and experienced in vastly contradictory terms.

2 CULTURES OF ADOLESCENCE

T

o understand the construction and experience of womanhood among young women in contemporary India, I turn to the everyday world of adolescent young women, in, and out of, school. Adolescence in India is a contested category as there is no fixed age span when young women may experience adolescence; it remains a more ambiguous and fluid category than it is perceived in the west. The term adolescence is Latin in origin and derives from adolescere, which means ‘to grow into adulthood’ and clearly there is ‘no single event or boundary line that denotes the end of childhood or the beginning of adolescence’ (Steinberg 2003). It has been suggested that adolescence comprises a ‘set of transitions’ that unfold gradually in the context of an individual’s behaviour, development and relationships (ibid.). There are gender differences in this process that remained unnoticed in the early works on the subject. It was only in the early 1980s that psychologists such as Carol Gilligan highlighted the psychological development of young women as part of a theory of adolescence. Psychologists like Erikson (1968, 1979) had earlier focused on male adolescents in formulating their theories and did not seek to differentiate between women and men. The term ‘adolescence’ itself was a masculine construct based on masculine images. Crucial defining concepts such as ‘self, identity, relationship, sexuality, morality, creativity, achievement and even development itself were drawn for the most part from a man’s perspective or reflected the viewpoint of a male child’ (Gilligan 1995: 196). While the sociologist James Coleman (1961) did include young women as a distinct category in his work, his primary focus was on the ‘value climate’ of each of the ten US schools he studied rather than women per se. Carol Gilligan’s work (1982, 1988) was a major landmark

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in adolescent studies, highlighting the neglect of young women and focusing on the different dimensions of female adolescence. She has in fact suggested that by not studying women, what has been missed is an understanding about ‘relationships’ and their significance in young women’s lives.1 Cultures of adolescence are somewhat complex in a heterogeneous, pluralist and changing society like India where they are not only shaped by class, gender and educational status but are also mediated by the peer group, marriage and childbearing. There is clearly no well-defined age-period within which adolescence is experienced as a marked transition period between childhood and adulthood by young women in Indian urban and rural society.2 T.S. Saraswathi (1999) has argued that although there is a period of transition between childhood and adulthood marked by the onset of puberty, adolescence itself is ‘a matter of cultural construction’. She writes, ‘the greater the continuity between childhood and adulthood, and greater the similarity in life course and continuity in expectations from childhood to adulthood, the greater the possibility of the absence of a distinct phase or life stage called adolescence’ (Saraswathi 1999: 214). Referring to a large number of cross-sectional and longitudinal studies of Indian children, Saraswathi concludes that child-adult continuity is clearly marked among young women cutting across social class except in the highest socio-economic groups.3 Women in all social classes are groomed, in one way or another, for marriage and motherhood. It is only in the elite and the highest income groups that young women have the opportunity to pursue their interests and self-defined career goals. The influence of peer group culture and the mass media are significant in this group. Even here, however, young women experience a conflict in their articulation of their 1 Gilligan’s work has also addressed the importance of ‘moral questions’ in adolescence, which she suggests is a crucial time for a ‘moral education’ (Gilligan 1988). See also Gilligan et al. (1990) and Gilligan (1995). 2 There are differences between urban and rural experiences of adolescence further differentiated according to social class and educational backgrounds. Kumar (2002) divides the period of adolescence in a Rajasthani community into three phases: early adolescence characterising residence with parents with some physiological changes, mid-adolescence with the onset of menstruation and residence with the husband, and late adolescence when young women become mothers. 3 See also Verma and Saraswathi (2002) who examine the influence of ‘tradition and modernity in sociopolitical and cultural factors’ in shaping adolescence in India.

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career aspirations and their commitment to the family. In very poor and working-class families, there does indeed appear to be an absence of adolescence as a distinct stage in the life cycle of educationally disadvantaged women especially among those who are betrothed in childhood and married before the onset of puberty. It is therefore difficult to fix any age at which young women may, therefore, be perceived as experiencing adolescence: is it when they attain puberty, or when they have sexual intercourse for the first time, or when they bear children? It is therefore a more fluid period of transition between childhood and adulthood that stretches out longer in this category of young women. In this chapter, I seek to understand the complexities in the articulation and constitution of gender identity as part of the cultures of adolescence among elite, educationally advantaged as well as poor, educationally disadvantaged adolescent women in urban India. The term ‘educationally advantaged’ refers to that category of individuals who not only have access to education (in a range of private and government schools) but also have the privilege of pursuing their educational goals to fruition. This is not common across India but is a distinct part of the lives of girls who belong to the middle and uppermiddle class in urban Indian society. The educationally advantaged young woman is simultaneously a part of tradition, ritual and customary practices and also experiences the contemporary world through both the education she may receive, the diverse images and texts presented by the visual and print media and the peer group culture she is part of. This dilemma gives rise to conflicting sets of expectations about her identity as a young woman in relation to familial and socio-cultural factors and in relation to her peers at school. The educationally disadvantaged young woman, on the other hand, due to the absence of schooling, except in her very early years, appears to lack a similar kind of obvious exposure to the contemporary modern world, with its imagery and the public sphere within which it is located. Early marriage, child bearing, her marital home and its attendant tasks and her relationship with her husband and his family, are her major preoccupations and her experience of adolescence is grounded in the dominant defining features of her life in the family and community. Although adolescent and adult women in this category are unable to read, it would be somewhat problematic to therefore assume that they do not have access to the visual media, Bollywood films, and an entire range of popular cinema in a variety of linguistic

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and cultural genres. Satellite television is a part of the social life of families in urban slums and this opens up a visual world in the form of films, soaps, news and music channels.4 Although they do not have the experience of schooled education, this no doubt influences their perceptions of relationships between and among members of the family, the peer group and larger social and community networks. Moreover, the lure and driving force of the visually creative world of advertisements undoubtedly influences their sense of physical beauty in relation to their embodiment but, as we will see later, this too is largely influenced by cultural custom and tradition as complete choice, dependent on resources, lies outside their realm of experience. While their everyday life worlds may seem to be disparate and completely alien to each other, the presence or absence of schooling, is significant in the lives of both sets of young women. For the educationally advantaged group, schooling practices and the experience of schooling leads to certain career choices and decisions that are a result of schooling. Marriage is not perceived as inevitable although there is a consideration of family life in their career choices. In the second set of young women, schooling is more or less absent. This group therefore experiences the transition between childhood and adulthood through the institution of marriage which is the most significant post-pubertal event in their lives. The agential voice is present in both sets of young women although its articulation takes different forms. Educationally advantaged young women give voice to the disadvantages they experience in relation to young men and schooling practices in particular. Educationally disadvantaged young women are also critically engaged with the world: they give voice to their powerlessness through a recognition of the acts of powerlessness they experience. Their cognition of their powerlessness enables them to confront realities in ways that enable them to manoeuvre, strategise and survive often in very difficult and disempowering situations and contexts. The experience of ‘adolescence’ is based on young women’s perceptions and lived experience in relation to their families, peer group 4 Not only are all categories of women watching television, McMillin’s study on consumers of television and their choice of television programming in India suggests that women’s choices are certainly influenced by their class and income levels and, more importantly, their ‘selection of non-native language programmes was an important rite of signification of their citizenship within the multi-lingual, multi-ethnic and multicultural Indian nation’ (McMillin 2002: 128).

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cultures, and schooling or lack of it. To understand how identities are both constructed and lived, I am interested in ‘the generation and circulation of meanings…relating to gender, and how these meanings are implicated in the construction of femininity in girls and young women’ (Taylor 1995: 5). These meanings do not however exist merely at a personal, experiential level but are also imbricated in social structures and indeed constitute such structures as much as they influence them. Taylor suggests that certain institutional settings such as schools, families and the workplace are sites where ‘social practices are gender structured’ (ibid: 6). To these may also be added sites outside formal institutional settings such as community centres, playgrounds, streets, and friendship groups, clusters or gangs, which may or may not be located within school settings. It is also essential to emphasise that meanings may certainly be shaped in institutional and non-institutional settings but are also simultaneously produced and engendered through talk, conversation, and gossip between young women, in the presence or absence of young men or older women, in friendship pairs or larger peer group settings. I will first examine the role of the family in providing, constructing and reproducing normatively defined and experienced gender identities among educationally advantaged young women. I will then consider the space of the school and peer group cultures in further articulating and legitimising the experiences of young women into well-defined feminine roles and identities. The second part of the chapter will examine the experiences of the educationally disadvantaged young women highlighting the significant absence of schooling and the centrality of the family, marriage and childbearing in their lives.

EDUCATIONALLY ADVANTAGED YOUNG WOMEN Cultures of adolescence in this category are characterised largely by the dominant influence of the family in constituting identities in terms of a patriarchal norm of the perfect but somewhat distant father and the communicative though sometimes strict mother, both of whom inhabit the emotional spaces and physical worlds of the young women differently. Together however they serve to reproduce habitus in its generative state wherein familial norms are affirmed

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and strengthened within the larger context of schooling and peer group cultures.

The Reproduction of Patriarchy The family is a crucial site for the development of gender identities in relation to both familial perceptions as well as to those emerging from the social and public domain. The experience of young women may be articulated at one level in the register of the directly stated as experiential and at another level, through the register of the subtext of voices and texts, of the underlying nature of their relations with other members of their families. The emergence of multiple selves is clearly evident in their construction of self in relation to the family and peer group, in their diverse and varying images of self and others in the construction of identities. The characteristics of modern Indian family life appear to have changed, from the traditional extended family living together to the more commonly visible nuclear family.5 This may have resulted in greater bonding between members of the nuclear family, due to the absence of a large and overbearing network of kin relations, but in no way does this suggest a marked transformation in the articulation of the roles and functions of various members of the nuclear family. The work of Indian feminists and scholars such as Leela Dube (1988), Zarina Bhatty (1988), Sudhir Kakar (1988), Kamala Ganesh (1989), Shahida Lateef (1990), and Jasodhara Bagchi (1995), among others has shown the contribution of cultural and social values, in differing religious and social contexts, to the development of gender identities. These values include an emphasis on female submissiveness and passivity and particular role-specific identities and they tend to reproduce gender asymmetry and a classical femininity that is continuously looking to the external, social world for its own 5 A.M. Shah has used census data to show that the preponderance of joint households has increased and that a larger number of people live in joint households than nuclear households (1999: 1180). However, among the educationally advantaged, urban elite in India, there appears to be a greater preponderance of nuclear households, although more research is needed in this area. Not a single respondent in my sample indicated joint household residence. Among educationally disadvantaged young women, however, respondents were members of joint family households whether in their natal or in their marital homes.

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nurturance and sustenance. In a sense, these processes also ensure that the gendered self does not seek to consciously develop an interior world of social and political awareness that may challenge social constructions of identity. Thus, contemporary middle class, urban India finds itself in a safe, patriarchal haven as far as the politics of the family is concerned. The family remains the cradle of nurturance, comfort and security that it has always constituted.6 Simultaneously, however, the family is also the site for the multiple oppression of young women, depending on their social class and background. This oppression is perceived for what it is by young women from poor or low middle-class backgrounds who can clearly predict their life trajectories and seek to negotiate their everyday life practices from within that experience. The cohesive and all-encompassing nature of the Indian family and the reproduction of existing patriarchal norms and values appear to be central to the experience of young women. That is, young women seek to acknowledge and affirm this experiential component of their relations with the family. Simultaneously, we may ascertain certain complexities in their articulation of their familial relationships. Fathers are idealised and revered for their abilities to look after the family, earn a livelihood against all odds, and be ‘perfect’ in more ways than one. A young woman’s relationship with her father, it has been suggested, is ‘only one strand in the great complexity of interfamilial relations that contribute to the construction of social and sexual identity in contemporary times’ (Mann 1996: 80). It is from these relationships and from young women’s relationships with other men in the family that the basis for relationships with men in different contexts is formed. It is a somewhat problematic relationship with the father wherein he is respected and admired but is not always around for a close relationship. One young woman says: My father: somebody who I always look up to for care, love, helping me make my decisions. His perfection in whatever he may 6 This is somewhat at variance with the status of the family in contemporary Western society, where it is acquiring a new historical form, the post-familial family (Beck-Gernsheim 1998: 54). However, this may not be embraced by North American and British Indians. Patricia Uberoi’s paper (1998) on contemporary commercial Hindi cinema points to the felt need among such diasporic communities for the rearticulation and regeneration of patriarchal and patrilineal family values among its possibly wayward, westernised youth. Clearly, the significance of place as location is important in understanding the Indian family.

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do, compels me to make him my role model. … Since I have always seen my dad work very hard in his jobs; and he mostly came back home late, I certainly did spend more time with my mother. She is from where I belong, my shelter, my friend. She is a very patient and understanding listener; I can talk my heart out when with her. Of course we share an undestructible bond.

Young women, in the educationally advantaged category identify closely with their mother who is a close friend, partner and also their role model: ‘My father is one person I have always looked up to. My mother is my ideal. Her values, outlook of life, character is out of the world. She is most understanding and we have a perfect daughtermother relationship.’ The father has an image of ‘being there’, providing a sense of unshaken faith in the stability they provide for daughters even though they are not always available for the kind of close bonding the young women experience with their mothers: My father is my moral support…the faith he has in me…lets me talk to him about everything even boys and stuff. Where plans for the future are concerned, he is so excited about them as if he is going to choose a career for himself.

The father is also admired and valorised for his capacities to fulfil fatherly qualities such as ‘dedication’ to work and to the family. I think of my father as a man who does not influence me much as I have never had a very close or personal relationship with him. I however admire him a great deal because he’s dedicated to his work and in some ways his family, is absolutely fit even at this age (46) and is incredibly fun to be with. I would love to be like him.

Young women are nonetheless conscious of themselves as separate entities, as individuals, who experience themselves as not needing to communicate at any depth with anyone. My communication with my mom is fine. Affection: fine. I don’t share many of my ideas with anyone. Same goes for my thoughts. Plans for the future are shared however. My communication with dad: rare. Affection: fine. No sharing of ideas or thoughts or plans for future.

There are variations among young woman with similar backgrounds and there is also a strong awareness of how different parents

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might relate to their children at different stages in their life cycles. For example, this young woman, in a government school, says, ‘My father is my bestest friend in this whole world. He treats us as a friend, not a very strict man with a hard hold on children. He behaves like a teenager when sitting with me.’ Her mother however is not so friendly and the channels of communication are somewhat closed. She is a very strict, principled woman. She loves me a lot but her way of loving is very different. I mean she keeps a hold on me because she wants me to become successful in my life…I communicate with my mother but can’t express [myself] clearly because she takes things very seriously and thinks always in regard to future, not present. That’s why I am more close to my father.

Fathers are valued for performing feminine tasks, for example, a young woman shares her memory of a father when he looked after her sister and herself while her mother had gone to another city to take her undergraduate degree exams. This young woman writes, ‘Our father used to get up at five since our bus got there at six a.m. and made us breakfast (which wouldn’t be too good) and made our plaits which would open but still the effort he made was commendable.’ While the father is an ideal support, it is, nonetheless, with their mother that these young women find friendship and from whom they draw strength and courage. This aspect of the relationship is repeated in almost all the responses, that is, a close friendship based on the ability to talk to the mother and confide in her: I love her very much. She supports and guides me in the steps I take for my future. Clear however that she’s a separate person whose opinions and advice I’m free to take or leave. My mother talks to me about her day and various issues on her mind. I love listening. I talk about almost anything under the sun, I love her listening. My mum leans on me for emotional support. I love to be strong. I love the relationship I have with my mama. My relationship with my father is less intense. I love him very much but I don’t know him as a person. Discipline was mostly handled by my mother…

The responses of young women from a government school, with a low middle-class social background, are vastly different from those in public schools (private schools in India). Family relationships are quite complex for them due to the fact that their mothers have had very little education or that their fathers may be rather strict in their

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attitudes towards their daughters, and often do not relate to them at all, ‘My mother is an uneducated lady. She can’t understand my feelings. I can’t talk with her frankly…I share all my ideas, thoughts or plans for the future with [best friend]. But my mother loves me…’ The same young woman writes about her father’s overwhelming presence in the household that imposes an atmosphere of complete authority and control, ‘My father is a calm person…In fact, we can’t laugh in front of him. When he comes to the home there is a quiet atmosphere. It seems that there is no one in the house.’ There are certain influencing factors that shape their relationships with their mothers. These centre around the fears and concerns that mothers might have about their daughters’ future and especially her relationships with known or strange young men. Young women, on their part, whether in government, elite, or middle-class public schools, resent this kind of an attitude that often leads to poor communication between mothers and daughters, ‘I can share some things which are personal with my mom, but not all. I think she suspects a lot…’ Another young woman turns to her father for support and friendship as her mother disapproves of her relations with young men, ‘My father is a very friendly person…He doesn’t poke his nose in my matters. I am very much close to him…My relationship with my mother is very open. However, in matters like boyfriends, I can never talk to my mother.’ She then turns to her sibling for the support and understanding she craves from her mother, ‘I am closest to my sister. She is the only person I have seen from day one I was born. She takes me seriously. She is like a second mother to me.’ In the government school group as well, some young women experience an excellent communication with their mothers indicative of very strong bonding between mothers and daughters: My mother is a perfect mom, everything is good about her. I don’t know what good qualities to point out. She is just perfect and tries to make me so and in the process sometimes I feel hurt, as she always points out my mistakes. But I guess that’s for my best.

Among the middle class, English speaking girls, fathers remain central to young women’s experience of an ideal and perfect person and mothers for their strong ability to communicate with their daughters. Girls idolise their fathers: [‘He is] 5’11" with the most striking eyes ever. Straight-forward and frank. Humorous. Very caring about his parents and his in-laws.

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Very punctual, hardworking and a bit short-tempered. Handles the accounts, etc. …I am not as close to my father as I am to my mother, however, it’s a very friendly relationship. I would regard him as my advisor. We have discussions often and I enjoy them... There are several qualities I admire about him and it is enjoyable to be in his company… [Mother] We agree on several aspects so it’s a very loving relationship that exists. I love and respect her very much.

Sometimes, there is an indication of regret regarding the emotional bonding with fathers, ‘My dad has a big ambition for me. He is the only one who can see right through me. He wants me to always be independent and responsible. He never gives up on me. He is very encouraging […]. He is very affectionate but never often kisses me.’ Perhaps earlier in the relationship her father had been more demonstrative in his affections. Apart from the obvious emphasis on the patriarchal norm of a masculine role model, the young women’s desire for deeper emotive relationships with their fathers is also an indication of the significance of relationships in their lives. The fathers’ opinions, appreciation of their efforts and encouragement does count a great deal in their lives, shaping their life experiences and relations with others. Bonding with their mother does not rule out their desire for a similar relationship with their father, which they consider necessary but cannot have due to his preoccupation with work as well as a social and cultural socialisation that does not encourage a close or intimate relationship between fathers and daughters. The complexity characteristic of recolonisation as a hegemonic tool is apparent in the dual-edged manner in which it manifests itself within the urban Indian family. On the one hand, the young women’s responses indicate a yearning for a closer relationship with their father, and on the other hand, they view their father as an ideal role model worthy of emulation. Longing for proximity with their father is based on the images derived from global culture and contemporary perspectives on intra-familial relations; it is generally not valued or encouraged by indigenous cultural norms and values which, in fact, exhort young women not to speak before their fathers. Simultaneously, there is an idealisation of the masculine figure, ‘physically fit’, ‘striking’ (in appearance), who ‘does the accounts’, a workaholic, a personification of great strength and determination, a provider for the family, one who holds authority in the family, all of which indicate a clear reproduction of the patriarchal norm and ideal.

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There is also sympathy for fathers who are successful even though they did not have access to education or other privileges. Several young women consider their fathers their role model from among family members, ‘Because I think he is a perfect man’. They may consider their father ‘unsuccessful in life’, but he is valorised for other admirable characteristics. This girl, in a government school, writes about her father who works in a government job: ‘He is an honest person, truthful and he hates bribes. However, he’s unsuccessful in life…But he is an intellectual. He has knowledge about everything. I want to be like him.’ The multiplicity of voices of these young women reflect their construction of fathers in different registers that are simultaneously present. Fathers are responsible, efficient, strong and honourable, ‘Coz he’s a responsible person. Handles the family well. Takes us out for entertainment. Has fun with us.’ Or ‘…He knows the tricks to handle any situation.’ The fact that their fathers ‘made it good’ despite their underprivileged background holds a special place in their consideration of his virtues, ‘Because in his lifetime he had to struggle and he never gave up. In his family he was a good for nothing and he was mistreated by his parents…Luckily it made him strong to show them something and that’s what I admire.’ Also, ‘Because he never gets angry. He started earning from a very young age even though he was not very well educated. I am very proud of him because he has earned so much respect and goodwill.’ Very few young women actually view their mothers as their desired role models. Mothers are often valued because of her abilities to ‘play’ different roles successfully. It is in her competencies as a mother and a wife that mothers gain recognition from their daughters as models worth affection and emulation, ‘Because she plays her role very well. She is an ideal wife and an ideal mother. She is really a very lovable person.’ Sometimes, young women appreciate qualities in both their parents that they would like to emulate, ‘My mom and dad both because mom has the greatest patience and works day and night for us and my dad, who just for us is working in Calcutta all alone without his family’ and ‘Both my parents are my inspiration and role models. I want to be understanding and confident and strong like my parents. I want to be someone who loves others and is liked in return. I want to handle things like they do.’ Within the larger familial network, grandmothers are rarely seen as contributing to family harmony but more as perpetrators of

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violence against the young women’s mothers. One young woman revealed, in the course of a focused group discussion at a middle-class private school, that her parents were separated for a while because of her paternal grandmother. ‘My grandmother,’ she stated, ‘was perpetually unhappy with my mother. Earlier she would lock her in the bathroom and unlock her only when it was time to clean and cook. She also poisoned my father against my mother.’ In the same group, two other young women agreed that their mothers ‘were simply great. Despite having nagging mothers-in-law they managed to be very good daughters-in-law’. Another young woman asserted, ‘I am simply amazed to see my mother’s strength and the way she pulled herself through despite my grandmother’s torture. My mother still managed to be nice.’ This experience was repeated in the experience of another young woman, ‘My grandmother,’ she stated, ‘had been the most cruel one. She had always been upset with my father and later also with my mother. The fact that my father had two daughters and no son was also a major factor aggravating the discontent. I am in fact surprised that my mother took everything in her stride and is still surviving.’ While the young women are loyal to their mothers and appreciate their role as daughters-in-law, there is a clear understanding that the relationship between paternal grandmothers and their mothers is fraught with conflict and violence. This results in an internalisation of an image that may affect their own familial and gender roles in adulthood as well as their relations with young men during adolescence. The previous respondent added that the experiences with her family had made her a different person. She did not have ‘crushes on boys’ like other girls and was not really interested in young men from the point of view of an exclusive relationship. Familial bonds and ties also tend to keep young women focused on goals and aspirations that are compatible with nurturing such bonds in their own adult lives. In a sense, then, the defining characteristics of middle-class families are those that also firmly establish young women’s place in the world of occupations and careers.

Careers and the Family The language of the young women’s constructions of masculinity and femininity reflects the power relations embedded in the playing

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out of identities. The generative habitus develops sex role stereotypes and limits the subject’s own aspirations, although there is indeed a struggle among them between a desire to be independent and a desire to be like their mothers and like other women. Multiplicity, that creates a complex and perplexing situation for them, is present in the simultaneous presence and assertion of both maternal and familial interests as well as of career aspirations and interests. Gender identity is firmly entrenched as a social and cultural construction through the process of socialisation in the family and community. Although a young woman may not subscribe to the view that some professions are more appropriate for women than for men, she may be well aware of the division which is created by the internalisation of a heterosexual norm focusing on marriage and children. For example, ‘I guess the husband should be a little dominating as well as caring, for women often like being dependent on their husbands. The wife on the other hand should take care of the family for a mother’s love has no substitute.’ These young women in the elite schools have clearly internalised what they are expected to ‘know’ about themselves. ‘Girls sometimes just have a knack for doing some stuff like making jewellery or designing clothes although boys too do these things. Girls are mostly more gentle in nature too so maybe they excel in social work or baby sitting, etc.’ Or, being even more precisely focused on sex-specific career choices, ‘Careers involving less of hard labour or physical activities are more appropriate for girls keeping in mind their physical composition unlike men who are endowed with strong bodies and physical structure. Careers like teaching, designing, etc., are more appropriate for girls.’ It appears then that gender identity is firmly entrenched as a social and cultural construction through the process of socialisation in the family and in the community. In other words, the ‘constancy of habitus’ reproduces the structures and values of the patriarchal society in which it is embedded thereby reproducing the ‘relative constancy of the structure of the sexual division of labour’ (Bourdieu 2001: 95). Bourdieu explains this process: …Through the experience of a ‘sexually’ ordered social order and the explicit reminders addressed to them by their parents, teachers and peers themselves endowed with principles of vision acquired in similar experiences of the world, girls internalise, in the form of

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schemes of perception and appreciation not readily accessible to consciousness, the principles of the dominant vision which lead them to find the social order, such as it is, normal or even natural and in a sense to anticipate their destiny, refusing the courses or careers from which they are excluded and rushing towards those for which they are in any case destined. (Bourdieu 2001: 95)

Young women may therefore argue about the significance of careers for ‘personality development’ and ‘my growth as an individual’, as my material in fact does indicate. They are, however, constrained in the pursuit of their goals by social and familial norms that point to socially approved career trajectories. At one point, one young woman says, ‘My career is very important for me because in my relations [relatives] I have to show them that even if I was not good at studies, I chose the right stream and I am successful. The main thing is I want my parents to be proud of me.’ She is not yet clear about her choice of profession at this point as her commitment to a career and to be good at whatever she does is the driving force of her life, ‘I am very confused about which profession to take up. But whatever I choose, I want to be the best at it. Things will be much clearer for me later. The main aim is a creative line like a designer (there are so many kinds of designers), advertisement agency job, an artist, etc.’ Later, she adds, ‘I think no profession has or should have a set image for girls or boys. Any person has the right to work in the field he/she wishes to.’ In so far as the habitus is a lived category, we can argue, however, that there is an element of creativity, struggle and perhaps surprise even in the most routine reproduction of gender identity. Young women no doubt struggle with social and familial definitions and expectations and experience conflict and dilemmas as they struggle to redefine and shape their identities in different contexts and situations. In accordance with her aspirations and desires, one young woman ranks her three career preferences as: ‘1) Neuroscientist; 2) Neurosurgeon; 3) Neurologist.’ She explains, ‘I love Maths and Sciences. I wasn’t influenced by anyone instead it was the topic that got me going.’ The family however is as important as her career, in fact more so, ‘Well, I suppose it is important to handle a career as well as take care of the family. In my opinion the family should come before one’s career. Therefore, before dedicating one’s self to the career it would be wiser to think about the family first.’

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Similarly, another young woman lists her career choices as: 1) Engineer; 2) C.A. [Chartered Accountant]; 3) Hotel Management; and explains, ‘My sister is doing engineering. I love science and would like to pursue it. I would love to do Bio-Medical Engineering.’ However, she also expresses a struggle between her career aspirations and her commitment to her family: ‘A career is very important for me, I don’t want to depend on anyone else. […] I think it is very important to have a career that is compatible with family life. If your work makes you very busy, you tend to neglect your family which leads to separation and lack of closeness.’ These young women have selected a career in no uncertain terms, but at the same time they are at pains to emphasise their commitment to their families and the need for their career to be compatible with their family responsibilities. This refrain can be heard in the responses of others as well, who indicate a wide variety in their choice of professions from journalism, teaching, writing, the legal profession, to business, chartered accountancy, fashion designing, and architecture, but who do not want to be seen to be giving up their families. Thus, ‘It is very important to have a career that is very compatible with family life as families are very important in everyone’s lives,’ or ‘If I ever have kids they will come first—other than that I don’t really wish to be tied down with a family or such. I wish to travel, etc.’ This indicates the all-encompassing nature of the Indian family that somehow keeps young girls trapped within its complacent world of warmth and contentment. At the same time, young women in a less elite, and more middle-class school assert their intent to be more independent and argue that every age has its own freedom and independence and that they do not want to sit at home, cooking and washing dishes. The young women’s voices also include the voice of the creative subject who wants and seeks a close relationship with her father and is extremely happy when she has it. There is also the voice of the educationally advantaged and socially aware subject, who clearly understands and knows her choice of career but keeps a check on her aspirations so as to enable a ‘balanced’ life. The transitory space created by modernity opens up her career options and perhaps provides her with a host of opportunities to which she did not earlier have access, but her rootedness in a tradition that glorifies the family and relationships within the family inhibits her complete immersion in

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the external world.7 In this manner, adolescence is characterised by a troubled and contested conformity to familial and social expectations about self and others in the experience of gender identity.

Peer Group Cultures at School Schooling is a site where gender ideologies are transmitted through peer group cultures, and through teachers, via the hidden curriculum of school practice. The heterosexual norm promoted by the young women’s ideal family types, with father as provider and advisor, a pillar of strength, and mother as nurturer, carer and communicator, is reinforced by peer group approval/disapproval of particular ways of behaving, acting and being in school. Adolescence is also the period when young men and women become acutely aware of the changes taking place in their bodies. This can, and as borne out by the material on educationally advantaged young women, often does result in apprehensions and anxieties about physical appearance linked to their acceptability in the peer group. It has been suggested that for boys, ‘body awareness is expressed as concern for physical strength and prowess…and popularity is associated with strength and athletic skills’ (Currie 1990: 31). For girls, it is argued, the focus is on physical beauty which is considered crucial for popularity with boys. Physical beauty is, however, also considered critical for acceptability in the peer group which during the time spent at school is the most significant group within which gender identity is validated and legitimised. At the same time, academic success is often considered unfeminine and therefore academically successful girls may particularly experience body anxiety (ibid.). Young women and men have pre-constructed images of one another that are based to a large extent on family stereotypes, social It has been reiterated by Kalpagam that ‘the ties that bind women in their lives provide both securities that impact positively on their personhood, as well as liabilities that are often very oppressive’ (Kalpagam 2000: 177). The family is undoubtedly the single most important of such ties and others include those of the sphere of intimacy and sexuality, of practical kinship relations, of friendship, and other social ties (ibid.). Both within and outside the family, women engage in the twin process of compliance and resistance, submission and rebellion, silence and speech, to assert their identities as women in what they clearly and assertively recognise as oppressive contexts and situations. 7

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expectations and the visual and print media. By and large, young women acknowledge that having a ‘good figure’ is a passport to popularity at school among both boys and other girls. One young woman adds, ‘Most boys are like that’, suggesting that little else could be expected from young men than a focus on women’s bodily qualities. However, those girls, whose self-image extends beyond their physical embodiment, resent this, ‘There are boys countable on your fingers who appreciate loyalty, good nature and sensibility. Majority go for a good figure, short skirts and physical appearance.’ This way of looking at girls appears to be common across schools, as observed by the young women themselves: In all the schools I’ve been to, boys seem to give the most importance to the way a girl looks, not just a pretty face but also what she wears. They also give importance to the femininity of a girl. Studies or a sense of humour doesn’t seem too important. It’s more the physical outlook.

At the same time, young women showed an equal interest in young men’s physical characteristics, appreciating men who are ‘good-looking’, have ‘good height and stuff ’, a ‘good physique’, a ‘macho personality’, are ‘chivalrous’, have ‘charming ways of talking, movement’. However, they also mentioned appreciating men’s social skills, such as their ability to be friendly, have an ‘easy and open manner of speaking’, a ‘sense of humour’, and not being ‘anti-girls’. As one girl enumerated, ‘1. In school, guys have to be humorous. 2. Boys have to be “nice” and not rude.’ Nonetheless, the young women often found it difficult to reject conventional imagery completely. Indeed, there was a tension between the idealisation of men’s physical attributes (a form of conventional masculinity) and the idealisation of their social skills (that of contemporary masculinity), as the following voices reveal: ‘They gotta be good at football. Good-looking guys are appreciated. They have to talk nicely and not be shy. Friendly, outgoing, not mean guys are always welcome too’. Another girl says, ‘1. Should be a good friend. 2. Never to bitch behind back. No male chauvanism (sic). 3. Gives you another chance. 4. Good height and stuff.’ Young women’s self-images are essentially grounded in their embodiment, wherein the body as object and the body as subject are simultaneously present. There are some variations dependent on social class and cultural backgrounds. However, the experience of

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being fat and therefore ugly is almost universal. The young women’s assessment of their image contains many aspects of their identity. As one girl says: I’m a confident girl. Not worried about looks at all. I love being tom-boyish—I am (though my mum doesn’t like it too much). I have a medium ego. Except with boys I don’t allow male chauvinism to take over me. I’m fat—Yuck. Need to reduce...I’m fat. But that’s it. I like my height. I’d be very happy if I could reduce. I don’t exactly crave for a ‘figure’ but I’d like to look healthy and strong (more guyish I suppose).

Some girls define their experience of embodied identity in terms of body parts, a fragmented but nonetheless, very experiential view, ‘Chubby, breasts on the small size, sexy legs, smooth delicate collar bones, very woman. Over all if I was slimmer I’d be pretty nice figured. Hips good for childbearing and shoulders strong for working and fighting.’ Others are a little more reflective: I haven’t given much thought to my appearance although people find me good-looking. However my image in the mirror is of a young, mature, no-nonsense human being who knows her goals and are [sic] all set to achieve it. I look at me and know myselfwell. The image has a touch of arrogance and poor communication skills.

These young women are certainly aware of their womanly characteristics, grounded in their embodiment, yet at the same time they assert their independence from the more feminine aspects of their embodiment. They also know how to express these multiple characteristics, whether it is in terms of different body parts or in terms of confidence, strength or even looking more boyish. These characteristics are asserted unselfconsciously and often together, so that a heightened femininity does not necessarily imply a lack of confidence or strength. However, there is a troubling concern with weight, the adolescent preoccupation across cultures, and for some women this overrides everything else: [I am] fat, ugly and stupid. (I’m a neurotic–just kidding!!). No, sometimes I develop a Fat-O-Phobia (a word I have made up myself ) although I’m underweight at the minute. I like my hair (‘coz I bleached it)...That’s about it!!!...Sometimes I exercise a lot also I’m no way overweight but I would like to be thinner…

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Or, as another girl says, ‘I am obsessed about my weight...because the first thing a person is judged by is his/her physical appearance (Matter of First Impression).’ The obsession with weight here is overwhelming, both in terms of the emphasis on being thin as well as in terms of the desire for the perfect body image. There is a frightening contradiction in the first response, where a girl asserts simultaneously that she is already underweight and yet would like to be thinner. The second response makes clear the context within which bodily perfection is desired, namely, the assessment of one’s embodied self by the other. There is also the experience of a young woman who tries to convince herself that her expectations of her embodied self are not rational but eventually she is overwhelmed by her concern for her weight: I am not very particular about my looks. Yes! Before going out or before school, I dress up and do my hair neatly. Even if sometimes I feel that I am not very fair, tall, etc., I try to make myself understand to be happy and confident in whatever I look like because I think your personality matters more than looks. One thing I am always guilty about is I eat much sometimes and it seems to me I’m becoming fatter. I’ve become conscious about my weight after the time when I lost a lot of kilos (from 72 kg to 54 kg). But my weight still doesn’t match my height.

Physical body weight, is, in the young women’s minds, related to creating the right ‘impression’ and thereby ensuring a place in the social networks of friendship and inclusion. A sense of failure is experienced if the body does not match up to the perceived expectations of others. The wrong impression may perhaps result in exclusion and is not desirable at all—a clear link is manifest between embodiment, self-image and relationships. There is also an anxiety about being completely out-of-shape among girls in all kinds of schools, ‘I’m short, not too dark, high cheek bones, pinocchio nose, weird walk, knock kneed, bowlegged, busty...I’m not like I’m really happy. But I’m not bitter about it. I’m bitter about my walk, bust. The rest is fine and I can get along with it.’ Or, ‘I am fat, ugly, short height, immature, hair are not long, and eyes are not beautiful.’ More poignantly, a girl expresses an unhappiness regarding her sense of self, ‘I am incomplete!’ There is also a desire to portray an image of an older woman, perhaps more self-possessed, mature, ‘Not satisfied because I don’t know, all I see is a teenage girl whereas I want to see more.’

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Thus looks and appearance are central to peer group cultures, whether in terms of young women’s self-image, their perceptions of young men, or their understanding of how young men perceive them. Teachers’ definitions of peer group cultures confirm this overriding concern with modes of self-presentation and appearance, citing peer group pressures and family cultures as the two most important factors. As a teacher in an elite English-medium school puts it, ‘Peer group pressure is very strong. [It] Influences the way you dress, your ideas on issues, sexual preference.’ According to this teacher, the criteria dictating the popularity of young women were: having the right male idol; being allowed out late; going to parties; wearing the right length of skirt (short); waxing (legs); and plucking eyebrows. Another teacher in the same school confirmed that peer pressure centres on women’s ‘looking good’, which requires waxing their legs, plucking their eyebrows, wearing their shirts outside their skirts or jeans and anything else which is ‘anti-establishment’, such as chewing gum and adopting an attitude of ‘defiance towards the school’. The peer group, therefore, provides the strength for collective resistance and rebellion which is exhibited in very specific ways through gestures, bodily display or plain disobedience. However, this resistance is not directed at breaking stereotypes or reproduction of gender identities but only in joining the gang, as it were, in a collective voice against the authority associated with the school establishment. The approval of friendship groups and other peers counts a lot for this age-group of young women and men, primarily because they want to blend in with their peers rather than stand out. As one teacher explained, ‘In the same way as the like-minded stick together, the like-bodied stick together’. The image young women and men strive for is to ‘look cool, act cool’ but, as a teacher explained, what this means is differentiated by gender. For young men it implies ‘not listening to teachers, not giving in home-work, not wearing regulation uniform’, whereas for young women it includes wearing short skirts listening to western music, waxing the hair off their legs and making friends with the opposite sex. Both young men and women are clearly adhering to the dominant characteristics associated with a stereotypical masculine and feminine image: the young men being riotous, rebellious and defiant while the young women are more concerned with self-presentation. Contemporary media culture shapes identity in many conflicting, competing, and formative ways. Ella Shohat has argued that, ‘In a

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transnational world typified by the global circulation of images and sounds, goods and peoples, media spectatorship impacts complexly on national identity, communal belonging and political affiliations’ (Shohat 1997: 209). Clearly it also impacts on gender identity but not without class resonances. Contemporary popular Hindi film heroes like Shah Rukh Khan are also idolised, especially among government school girls, more for his having ‘made it’ in Hindi films, rather than for his popular appeal. The fact that he was able to rise above his low middle-class background and become a super star makes him an idol in their eyes. At the same time, the ideal male body espoused by elite young women in this study is not a classically Indian body, clothed in Indian clothes, but very much a body grounded in western culture. This body is appropriated from popular cinema, television serials and novels: Leonardo di Caprio from the film Titanic; Howard Roark from Ayn Rand’s novel The Fountainhead. These young women make a romantic association with western images of hegemonic masculinity through popular culture, and the perfectly formed, physically fit, healthy, preferably white, glamorous, and wealthy male becomes the ideal through which the gendered body is recolonised. The young women’s understanding of their embodied selves is also shaped by contemporary global media culture. The plump and even voluptuous female body associated with physical well-being and a deeply sensual sexuality and fertility in classical Indian thought, and reflected in popular art and cinema until the 1960s and 1970s, does not find any place in the idealisation of embodiment by young women in contemporary India. This earlier imagery has been replaced by a recolonised version that, although grounded in western cultures, is adapted to acceptable norms and representations in Indian culture. In school, this characterisation of young women and men changes when they indicate a high or positive self-image through their assessment of their image as they see themselves in the mirror. It is striking that amongst the middle classes and in the government schools, young women assert their positive image amid complaints of being fat and overweight, ‘I am fat, OK looking, a good friend, a person who wants to help, has a big fat ego and gets angry very fast.’ These girls appear to be brimming with confidence, have high self-esteem, and are very secure in their embodied self-assessment, ‘…I am very confident and I will earn name and fame in my life.’ Or,

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‘I am very pretty and if my sister says that someone likes me, then she is probably right. I can be liked by anybody.’ This girl’s assessment is exceptionally self-determined, ‘I am pretty and I find myself very cute and beautiful.’ Looks are not the only criterion for judgement, as this girl asserts, ‘I am an independent, friendly, responsible and sensitive girl’ and even when they are, the positive self-assessment is undeniable, ‘No doubt I feel I’m beautiful with good features, figure and beautiful thick hair. I can speak well in front of the mirror and I love to talk with myself when I’m in front of the mirror.’ These young women are overwhelmingly focussed on projecting themselves as strong and confident, even though they may be unable to provide reasons for such an assessment, ‘I find myself very confident and strong, why, I myself don’t know.’ Although their positive self-image stems from normative definitions of femininity—cute, pretty and beautiful—there is a confidence in some of these responses that indicates the impact of positive reinforcement from family and perhaps peers and friends as well. The significance of class at this juncture cannot be overemphasised. These are the responses of girls from the lower end of the social class spectrum who study in the less upmarket private and government schools. Their exposure to English fiction, cinema and media is perhaps less than that of girls from the private, more privileged, educational backgrounds. Their positive self-image is a result of a combination of factors including their socio-economic backgrounds where the emphasis is perhaps on developing a culture of obedience, submission and marriage rather than on looks and appearance as an individual goal in itself. It is remarkable that the culture of submission promoted at home is not however reflected in the young women’s understanding of their embodied identities as passive subjects, but in fact serves to highlight their experience based on very high self-esteem, confidence and assertive expressions of themselves as independent young women. Some young women in the elite schools view their body size and shape in terms of its benefits in their chosen tasks or fields of specialisation. For example, one such woman says, ‘Yes, I am happy with the kind of body I have. Though it is huge but it is perfect for my field as I am into sports.’ Or, ‘Yes, because I have never bothered about having a figure, etc. I am fat but I can live with it. Among my class girls, in spite of my physical appearance I am the most flexible.’ There are other factors influencing their confidence and self-esteem

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such as an acceptance of, and satisfaction with, what they have. For example, one young woman comments, ‘I am happy with my body shape because it is a gift of god.’ Another is content with her embodied self because she sees herself as being perfect, ‘Yeah, I’m happy. I have a good figure, beautifully charming face. Everything is shaped and sized.’ At other times, there is a deep guilt attached to having a particular skin colour or body shape that may not be considered socially desirable, ‘I feel O.K. Sometimes, I feel guilty because of my dark complexion.’ The guilt is an expression of the shame and inadequacy experienced among young women in a culture that glorifies fair coloured skin and either dismisses dark skin colour with contempt or exoticises it for purposes of marketing particular clothes or accessories.8 The significance of the peer group in adolescence cultures is critical to definitions of the self that are measured in relation to the other. Comparisons are drawn with their peers who are viewed as better looking than themselves and this gives them feelings of inadequacy and shame. For example, ‘I feel I am not as beautiful as my friends when I look at myself in the mirror. My face also has some scars which I don’t like. I am fat, ugly, short, and immature. My hair are not long and I am not beautiful.’ The emphasis on the experiential lack of an embodiment, that is common to others, is commonly expressed. For example, ‘There are things [in relation to her embodiment] which I don’t have and others have in plenty.’ It has been suggested that ‘comparison, and by extension, envy’, among adolescent young women is ‘a characteristic supported by the popular media’ (Nichter and Nichter 1997: 129). Young women are goaded into aspiring to be like the images they see in the magazines they read and the films they watch. This includes enhancing the idea that they too can be better than the girl in the picture, in the story or in the most popular film of the moment. In women’s magazines, body imagery is strikingly conveyed primarily through adverts and fashion photography. The female gaze is preoccupied with the visual imagery of one’s self and of others and there is a continuous assessment of whether these images match up to others’ expectations or to the 8 Writing about poor adolescent women in Bangladesh, Rozario (2002) draws linkages between poverty, skin colour and ‘purity’ wherein the stigma of being ‘dark’ also has implications for woman’s character resulting in the jeopardizing of marriage prospects.

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socially prescribed ideal. In this manner, the body is seen outside the self. This is the most dangerous outcome of the objectification of women’s bodies: women now begin to ‘live in a world where they confront their bodies as things outside themselves’ (Currie 1990: 34).9 However, young women, especially from the lower middleclasses who study in the less upmarket schools, also contest these images and are strongly embedded in positive and assertive selfimages that affirm and celebrate their embodiment.

EDUCATIONALLY DISADVANTAGED YOUNG WOMEN Cultures of adolescence are constructed largely outside school in the domain of the family in this group of young women. Moreover, the experience of adolescence in this category is not fixed but moves across a larger age span that includes a range of bodily changes and psychological adjustments: when they experience menstruation for the first time, they are married but are waiting for the gauna (when they are sent to their husbands’ homes for the first time), are living with their husbands, bearing children, and coping with work and survival in their husbands’ homes. All (except one) are married and are in the liminal stage between marriage and gauna or are visiting their parents’ homes. In general, their experience of adolescence focuses on their embodiment, the family and relationships, primarily with the marriage partner and his affines. Relationships with the family are vastly different from the earlier set of young women. There are no heroic fathers or perfect mothers. In fact, young women in this category have no visible communication with their fathers who tend to be somewhat authoritarian and their relationships with mothers are also restrained. The natal family, however, is an important source of comfort and well-being and also the site for the reproduction of patriarchy and values ensuring compliance and submission on their part. 9 In this context, Frost refers to adolescence as the period when there is the ‘enforced location of self or identity within the confines of a gendered body’ which further results in ‘the lived contradiction of the body as somehow self and not-self ’ (Frost 2000:71).

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Schooling practices and peer group cultures in the context of the school are absent. The same-sex peer group in the community is however crucial for this group’s shared articulation of their sexual experience and marital relations. In this sense, the peer group represents that collectivity of young women in whose presence they all find a common and legitimate space for the articulation and expression of their experience. The peer group is the critical space within which identities are expressed, constituted and affirmed. A significant component of this group’s experience of adolescent gender identity is, therefore, their experience of marriage and the relationships it entails as well as their definition of work and its impact on their self-esteem and identity especially in relation to their location in their husbands’ homes.

Staying Out of School Adolescent young women’s experience of any kind of formal education and of the institutional setting of the school is very limited. Instead, their childhood experience is based on a lack of engagement with schooling for a variety of reasons, including that of violence at home and with the tutor, lack of awareness about the benefits of education, preoccupation with work for livelihood purposes, and a total lack of interest. For example, one young woman, married, and visiting her natal home, nonchalantly tells me: I used to study in a small school. I used to study at a tutor’s house. His son and daughter-in-law always fought. He too used to hit us, pull our hair, etc. He was very physical in his hitting and I couldn’t study with him. Then I went to a government school, there they used to inoculate us and I hated injections. So, I used to avoid [going to school] and later my name was struck off. I used to be unwell a lot and I stopped going to school. Then I stopped studying altogether. My grandmother used to hit me a lot, I was scared of her. I was very naughty, I used to wander around. I used to often break things.

Another young woman tells me: I have studied till Grade 5. I can read slowly but cannot write. I can keep accounts till about Rs 2000. I studied only Hindi in a Government School. Education is important only for the purpose

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of taking care of the expenses at home or to be able to get fair wages for the work done.

Sometimes, parents and their poor socio-economic condition is responsible for staying out of school: My parents did not enroll me in school. My mother used to go to the vegetable market, do dishes, sweeping etc. My father died when I was very small. I have one older and one younger brother. Earlier my mother used to cook; I started cooking from the age of 10–12 years. For the past three years I have been peeling ‘Green Gram’ for which I get paid Rs 5/- per pack.

Or, simply put, one young woman states, ‘I can only write my name. I have not studied at all.’ Sometimes, there is an expression of regret for a lack of formal education but they are also quick to assert that there is no point in being educated as, ultimately, a woman has to wash dishes whether or not she works outside the home. There is the recognition that education does liberate women, for example, ‘It is good to study these days. If one is educated then at least one can be independent.’ Or, the recognition that a lack of education results in the inability to communicate with others, such as: I could not study further because the elders in my family did not let me after the death of my father. When we were children, we would spend a lot of time at the guava orchard. But I never attended school sincerely at that time. At 10–12 years of age, I really wanted to go to school, but there was no chance. Now I really regret it, as I cannot even write a letter to my parents. I can recognise the alphabets separately but cannot connect them and read.

The most significant understanding is that education provides employment, work, independence and dignity, ‘If I were educated I would have taken tuitions at home. Now I have to work at other people’s houses. If someone scolds me, it feels very bad. Nobody in my family has done this work; relatives would ridicule the work I’m doing.’10 10

The work mostly entails cleaning dishes at other people’s houses.

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One young woman had been asking her father to send her to school but he always refused. He asked her to find out whether other girls were studying in the school, as he could not have possibly send her to school where only boys were present. She can read and write due to her own efforts. She reads the Hindi newspaper very well and can write a little bit. She says: Nobody has taught me, I try myself. I am very fond of studying. There was no one to work at home so I could not study. I always desired to study whenever I saw girls going to school. I think it is important to go to school to have a better understanding about issues like health, hygiene, etc.

She tells us that in their community, they are not sent to school because it is understood that they have to only cook and clean all through their life. When probed further, she indicated that while some girls did study, it was by and large a norm to discontinue studies after marriage. A young woman tells us that she was taught at home, initially by a Gujarati maharaj and later by a woman tutor. She knows to write names and house numbers. She says, ‘With difficulty, I can count up to 100.’ She studied in the Gujarati medium, but has now learnt Hindi from her brother, so she can read the newspaper in Hindi and can generally read a little. She says that she can only do housework; she cannot even sign a form. Her brother has studied till Grade 7, so he signs various forms on her behalf. She does not even sign her name but nonetheless feels happy that she knows something. She says that she would like to study but is unable to do so as she has grown older and she wonders who would teach her now that she is past the school-going age. She adds that her parents did not send her to school and that whatever she has learnt, has been learnt at home. As a young girl, she says that girls were not allowed to go out. Boys can go out and she added that girls do not like to be caged up. ‘If we were boys we could have roamed about. Why weren’t we born boys?’ she laments and adds that their parents scolded them, but not their brothers, if they spent too much time in front of the mirror. The agential voice yearns for some kind of education, as education and gender in this case appear to be linked to notions of independence and freedom. By and large, there is a devaluation of formal education, primarily because of social expectations that focus on domestic tasks

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such as ‘cooking, cleaning, washing dishes’ as well as compelling circumstances that force them to drop out of school.11

Domesticity and Marriage Adolescence also includes the period when women are trained in domestic tasks to ensure their adaptation to married life. A young woman tells us she was married at the age of 13. Her gauna took place when she was 15 years old. She had her first child at the age of 16. She said that she had never worked at her mother’s place. Her grandmother never allowed her to work. It was only when she was 13 years old, was married and her gauna was due that she started learning some household chores. She learnt to knead the dough, make vegetables, and so on, and thus entered the preparatory stage for marriage. In the same way as educationally advantaged young women identified ideal images of young men, these young women also have images of the other which they valorise and yearn for. These are based largely on boys’ physical attributes and social skills. The emphasis on skin colour is unmistakable, ‘A boy who is fair and has blue eyes is good looking.’ Apart from looks, ‘goodness’ as an attribute is also valued, ‘A fair, slim, nice build and a good heart. He should be good both from inside and outside. He should speak nicely and not think evil for anyone.’ Expectations of the marriage partner are clearly entrenched and influence young women’s perceptions of young men: He should be good looking, should be of my age, should be doing good work and earning well. He should leave the house on time and return on time. He should have good behaviour with everyone. Whenever I see a drunken man I wish to have one who is not. It is better if he is educated, only if he understands, will he be able to explain things to me.

The value of education is undoubtedly recognised by girls who have themselves had no, or very little, access to schooling. In her study of uneducated herd girls in rural Rajasthan, Gold provides their ‘practical’ perspective on school education as one that values grazing the family’s sheep, that gives them an income through the sale of lambs and dung, above schooling which will give them nothing (Gold 2002: 91). 11

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Some young women view men only as a marriage partner: My husband is five years older to me, otherwise he is fine. I have a habit of laughing. But I cannot share everything with him. He can hit me if I make a mistake. He might explain to me once or twice but later may also hit.

The support for the partner is very strong, even allowing them to be beaten, or bear several children, as the case may be. Don’t ask about my husband, I like my husband very much. I like him when he works. He is older to me, but I like him. I like the way he speaks. He did not allow me to consume Mala-D. Nobody tells us anything in our community. He says that once we have six to seven children quickly then I can have an operation.

The experience of bodily changes overshadows other events so that the experience of menstruation constitutes a critical event in their lives. In their minds, it is associated with a coming of age, ‘growing up’, as they put it. However, bodily changes are not experienced through work, which is important to their lives but are inevitably linked to social practices, such as the ‘engagement’ and the glorified ‘first night’ after marriage. These events shape their experience of bodily changes and their understanding of their embodiment. They also assert that their mothers did not adequately prepare them for the experience: My older friend used to talk about periods; I never used to listen to her. I thought it happened only to her. Only when it happened to me did I realise that it happens to all. Even when my periods started, I did not feel that I had grown up. Before my grandmother died, I had to start working at home since my mother was busy nursing her. When I started working I didn’t realise when I grew up. But, at 17, when I got engaged, I realised that I had grown up. On the day of suhaag raat (first night after marriage) also, I did not allow him to touch me much.

Young women’s experience of adolescence includes early sexual encounters which may not be consensual or pleasurable. The first night and the strangeness associated with it are freely expressed by the young women. There is however an unquestioning acceptance of how things are meant to be, of a denial of their own sexual desires and pleasures. The larger kin network ensures submission and

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compliance. One young woman narrated the events of her first night and stated that she was told that if one’s first night went well, then one’s entire life was destined to be happy. Her elder sister-in-law had explained that she should agree to whatever her husband asked for during that night. She said that her husband asked her to take out her clothes so she started to pull out a suitcase from under the bed till she realised what he had asked for. She started shaking vigorously and was scared. She clarified that she was very innocent, only 15 years’ old and did not realise the intimacy of sex on the first night. Another young woman did not like her first night; she sleeps alone and is troubled if someone sleeps with her, even her sister. So, if a stranger sleeps with her, whom she has not seen before, she definitely does not like it. She has not slept with him after that. One young woman used to enjoy sexual intercourse with her husband soon after they were married. She did not however understand or feel anything in the beginning. When she got up in the morning, she felt as if something had happened to her. When she asked her sistersin-law, they told her that this was the way that it happened and she was supposed to not speak or think about it. This was the way men were. In this manner, she was advised by other women in the family not to acknowledge or in a sense, even erase her sexuality and view it merely as another aspect of marriage. Her husband used to have sex with her everyday and, if she refused, he used to force himself on her. She did not want it everyday, she stated, ‘I used to feel repulsed and used to ask everyone if their men did the same.’ The importance of the peer group at this stage is immeasurable. It is the peer group that provides information about the sexual intimacy they are to encounter with their husbands. One girl says, ‘My mother’s brother’s daughter told me regarding the happenings after marriage but my husband does not force me for sex.’ Another clearly articulates the significant place of the peer group for such enlightening conversations, ‘One comes to know by sitting with and listening to older girls. I was informed a little bit by my cousin sister, a lot of it was told to me by my elder sister-in-law and some by my husband.’ Although the husband sometimes becomes a friend and partner in this learning experience, the mother is clearly taboo for such discussion, ‘My cousin told me that these things don’t have to be discussed with one’s mother. One refrains from it for a couple of days as a custom. It usually happens at the in-laws place, but it did not happen with me because I refused, he started arguing and a fight ensued.’

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In the peer group it is considered more appropriate to indicate an aversion to sex rather than emphasise its pleasures. With great hesitation, a young woman stated that she did like sexual intercourse but only once in the day, while her husband wanted it at least four times in the day. She felt dirty doing it all the time. She tried talking to him during the night, so that time went by and she could avoid sex. Only one young woman courageously wants to express her pleasure through sexual experience with her husband but is unable to. She would like to be sent to her husband’s place sooner than later so that she can enjoy sex without tensions. She does not like the idea of these interim sexual encounters. She added that her husband’s happiness was more important to her than her own and that she enjoyed sex with her husband soon after marriage. The loss of childhood, a yearning for childhood friendships and games, is part of the experience of adolescence. A 19-year-old young woman says, ‘Sex happens only when a man wants it. Ever since the birth of my children, I don’t even enjoy it. I also feel very tired.’ She adds that sex is a man’s interest, not a woman’s and that she is totally involved with her children, ‘I did not even realise when my teenage years came and went. I’ve been staying with my husband since the age of fifteen. I therefore did not perhaps feel the urges that most of the girls of my age do. When it was the age to gossip among friends I was already married.’ Childbearing is the next significant experience in the adolescent stage of these young women. Some women have difficult childbirth and the trauma of miscarriage often takes place during adolescence. One such young woman, after her second miscarriage, always looks very pale and tired and is very quiet. On one occasion, she was eating khichdi (boiled rice and lentils) when her husband entered the room. She immediately covered her head and stopped eating. She tried to push away the food, but her mother reprimanded her and asked her to continue eating. She was completely indifferent to herself and relaxed only after her husband left the room. Clearly, she has not only accepted all that she has been socialised into but also appears to concur with behaviour that reproduces social norms of submission and acceptance. She also has a physical condition that causes her discomfort and pain and which she stoically bears with not only forbearance but also a sense of complete surrender, as it were, to the certainties and vicissitudes of adulthood that has so quickly arrived.

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Identities are constructed around the event of marriage and the abilities to bear children. There is simultaneously an understanding of the powerlessness and therefore this entails an awareness about doing better for their children: I consider myself smart but I was not even clever enough to control the birth of four girls. When my first daughter was four years old, my mother-in-law started cribbing. Three-four months after delivery I did not realise that I was pregnant again. I got my periods a year after my marriage. My parents did not speak to me about anything and got me married. My marriage was negotiated at a public function when I was seven. I grew tall and people thought that I was old enough to be married. My gauna happened when I was only 14 years old. When my husband used to approach me, I used to fear him and shout that he was beating me. My desires were not fulfilled after marriage. Work was the major determinant in my life. I would like to do better for my children. My eldest daughter studied till Grade 5, the younger one is studying in Grade 5. The eldest one works as a domestic help. I will support my children. My parents were very simple and married us too soon. They did not have a mind of their own and were easily influenced by other people’s viewpoints.

‘Doing better’ for their children, however, does not enable them to educate their children beyond a particular grade due to prevailing social norms and restrictions. This is characteristic of the constraint that is present in every experiential context where women consciously understand the situation and are yet somehow unable to break the pattern of conformity. Another young woman was married early and has two daughters. She does not really want a third child but respects the viewpoint of her elders when they say that she should try for a son. She plans to have a tubectomy as soon as she has a third child even if it is a girl. The old women in her village tell her, ‘You feel exhausted after having only two children; there is no need to have an operation yet.’ She has not only accepted the voice and views of her elders but the habitus also communicates normative definitions of acceptable and authentic manhood and marriage partners. She tells us that ‘when looking for a boy for us, our parents see his income, (that he should at least have five-six bighas of land) house, and looks.’ By ‘looks’ she means that the boy should be presentable among people in society.

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Adolescence, among these young women, is being engaged to be married, marriage itself, house work, keeping fasts on various days of the week for different reasons—for getting a good husband, for having one and keeping him, ‘for our parents’ peace and happiness’ and for other reasons. The body, as we have seen, remains enmeshed in the practices of conjugal life whether these entail unenjoyable sexual intercourse, childbearing and working for survival. Young women say their mother’s generation did not use make-up, no bindi or lipstick, but now they wear everything. Jewellery is worn during auspicious occasions. They enjoy using make-up and feel their face looks good. One young woman is glad that she is not short but just right in terms of her height, weight, and so on. There is therefore a greater acceptance of body size and shape among young women in the slum. The body is accepted as it is and only make-up can be used to add to what already is given. Jewellery and make-up is also used as an embellishment of marriage and not so much for purposes of changing or perfecting the body. They are allowed to wear both only after reaching 12–13 years of age and after a certain ceremony associated with marriage: goud bharai or gauna. Among married young adolescent women, the body acquires a symbolic status of auspiciousness and fulfilment that must also be visible and in a sense flaunted in the community. Using lipstick and filling vermilion in the central parting of the hair (lipstick lagana aur maang bharna) are the two most important activities of daily adornment symbolising the coalescing of tradition and modernity in the lives of these women. As one girl says: My mother says that I keep looking in the mirror the whole day. I like to do make-up while looking in the mirror. I like putting lipstick and ‘sindoor’ (vermilion). I get a lot of pimples on my face, they don’t let me live. My husband likes me with make-up. Rest of my body is O.K., nothing good, but I like the fact that I’m not short. I’m tall enough. I feel I’m very fat.

To the extent that ‘breasts look nice’ and that ‘flat chested women look like eunuchs’, there is a celebration of not only their femininity which is accentuated by their use of make-up, their acknowledgement of their husbands’ appreciation of such make-up, and also an awareness of their sexuality in their reference to eunuchs who are socially considered sexless. More importantly, it was the observation of these

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young women that it was ultimately not just looks that mattered but one’s ability to work, ‘My lips are very fat, I don’t like them. I like hanging earrings and using bindiya and sindoor. It is very difficult to work with one’s face covered (with a veil or sari) and then in-laws complain that I do not know the work.’ Early marriage however results in the experience of loss of freedom and curtailment of desires and there is simultaneously a desire for independence and to be self-sufficient and free. One young woman acknowledges her multiple experiences of bodily changes, ‘growingup’ with her engagement and the necessity of ‘practical knowledge’ (not education) for survival: We have five fields. I would like to work there with my husband. I feel like standing on my own feet. But I don’t get the chance. If tomorrow my in-laws are no more and my husband does not work, if I have practical knowledge, I will be able to feed my children. I did not think like this before marriage. I used to feel free, now I feel caged. I don’t know why I feel like that. Even when my periods started, I did not feel grown up. Only when my mother had me engaged that I felt that perhaps I have grown up. …When my chest was just developing, it used to ache. My mother explained: that’s the way it happens. My engagement was broken off once, my mother liked the boy, but many people had broken the engagement with that boy and so we did too. We decided then that I would not be married to a boy from Delhi and that I should only marry a villager.

Although young women emphasise their abilities to work and also to endure bad marriages with great strength, their agency is clearly restricted by the family, social norms and practices. One young woman wants to take over vegetable vendoring from her motherin-law, ‘I can join her only after I’ve had children. People would talk about it if I go before that. Even my elder sister-in-law does not work yet; I can do it only when she starts.’ On the other hand, marriage and the long hours of tiring, domestic work it entails, is resented especially if young women feel they are being unfairly treated by their husband’s families. I find marriage destructive; I cannot stay without buffalo milk. At least food should be good, family members should behave well, even if they do not give food. It is more troublesome to keep shifting between my in-laws’ place and my house. I am woken up

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at 3.00 A.M, and expected to sweep six houses and by then it is 5.00 A.M. I warm the water then, and cook chapattis for each cow. I then warm milk and make tea. I wash dishes thereafter and have to keep the food ready by 10.00 A.M. All women from the house work in the field, then again food has to be prepared in the evening. It was only after the wedding was completed that my brother’s wife told me that I was supposed to conduct myself according to the affinal family’s expectations. It is painful…how can they throw me out? I’ll throw them out instead.

Finally, however, it is through work that they acquire an identity and hold their own in their marital homes. A young woman who has been married for three years, emphasises the importance of work in a woman’s life: In my in-laws’ home, everyone respects me a great deal. I do all the work. I never give them a chance to say anything. I like living in the village very much: plenty of milk, clarified butter, buttermilk, and the greenery. But the most important thing that I like in my life is work and earning my livelihood.

More than any physical features of beauty or adornment, it is work alone that defines her embodied identity. Their refrain, ‘Woman must be not only beautiful to look at but also excellent in the work she is able to do’, emphasises the significance of work in the lives of these young women especially in their husbands’ homes. Identity is experienced in the context of the self in relation to the other through ‘doing something’ and doing it well: We do not have an identity, had we done something, we would have had one. I only wish that I don’t make any mistake at my inlaw’s place so that my elders at home may feel ashamed. Whatever I have got is fine. At home mummy used to stop me from roaming even with my friends. I used to feel bad then, but not anymore. Now, I can justify that. My mother used to prompt me for work, she used to scold me, I used to feel bad then but now I understand. My father used to help me understand that actually my mother loves me. Now if I am able to do anything new I am reminded of her strictness which has enabled me to do things in my life now.

Adolescence is also a process of growing up too fast to the extent that young women emphasise the traumatic aspects of marriage, of having sexual intercourse at a very young age, the fear of sexual

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intercourse and of a demanding husband, of domestic violence and their conclusion that marriage is inevitable and therefore has to be endured. Their voices reflect their conclusion that marriage is inevitable: Marriage can make or break someone but mostly it is bad’ or ‘If we don’t marry, we would have to depend on our sisters-in-law (brothers’ wives) after our parents’ death. The sister-in-law of today would never keep us, rather we would have to work for her and keep her children. At our husband’s place everything would be ours. We would have a right there. If we tolerate some pain, we might also get some happiness.

There is simultaneously an affirmation of faith in their strength and self-determination as they are quite sure they can make their marriages work, sometimes with a little bit of help from the partner. There is also a clear assertion of their understanding of their position in the marriage as being the one in control. The voices of women reflect the multiplicity and complexity of their responses, ‘I feel my life is good, if I can run it well’; ‘If my husband supports me, it’ll be good, otherwise not’;. ‘If my husband listens to me, then I would do the same, otherwise not. If I leave my throne, then it will be shaken’; ‘My heart says something and conscience something else’;. ‘My heart says something, mind something else and conscience says nothing’. The reflective, agential voice is present in these ruminations about self, in their clear distinctions between emotion (heart), rationality (mind), and the moral, ethical self, that Carol Gilligan (1982) tells us is so critical to young women’s development. Marriage is not only sometimes bad but also gives them status and standing in the social and public domain. It is through their embodiment that they assert themselves whether it is in terms of its utilitarian considerations, as a worker or as bearer of progeny. Abstinence from food in the innumerable fasts kept by young women again reflects the use of the body for personal gain (a good husband) and familial or social good (parents’ peace of mind and happiness). Although the generative habitus reproduces the forms of engagement with the marital space and sexual encounters, it simultaneously provides the consciousness of will and agency that lies in their strategic manoeuvring to not wanting to, for example, give up ‘the throne’ on which they have been installed through the act of marriage.

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CONCLUDING COMMENTS One part of this chapter has sought to understand the processes in families and schools which contribute to the reproduction and creation of a class and gender specific habitus, as well as the factors that lead to the formation of gender identities located in the transitory moment of both reproduction and change in contemporary Indian society. It has been argued that the family is the ground on which the heterosexual patriarchal ideal is nurtured and sustained, but it is essential to understand that peer group cultures informed by global media are also important to adolescent young women’s perceptions of their embodied selves and gender identity. Grounded in global media images, family preferences and social expectations, young women consciously create, devise and formulate their own rules for conduct, appearance and self-presentation and seek to comprehend and assert their gender identities. Among educationally disadvantaged young women in the slum, the defining moments of gender identity occur in the very early years when they are compelled to view marriage as the only viable option or trajectory available to them through which they may be able to seek fulfilment of their desires and aspirations. The generative habitus, with enduring dispositions of conformity and success, also allows space for struggle and contradiction, compliance and resistance occurring simultaneously. Adolescence, as a marked, well-defined stage, may appear to be missing but the critical presence of the peer group in the school and in the community, in very different ways for the two sets of young women, ensures the experience of adolescence, as a lived reality and not a mere construct, in the lives of young women. In the next chapter, keeping in mind the role of the media in processes of recolonisation, I move towards an understanding of womanhood through the pages of a popular woman’s magazine.

3 EMBODIMENT AND WOMANHOOD IN FEMINA

I

am concerned, in this chapter, with the question of how body images serve to construct womanhood through the medium of visual imagery and textual discourse in women’s magazines.1 Images of women however do not only construct womanhood or femininity but are also seen in a social, political and economic context. In other words, ‘they always have a specific use value in the particular time and place of their consumption… [and] they also have exchange value: they circulate as commodities in a social/economic system. This further conditions, or overdetermines, the meanings available from representations’ (Kuhn 1996: 53). Through visual and textual images, then, women not only receive messages about themselves as embodied, feminine beings but also as consumers of both products and of themselves as objects for consumption. ‘Meanings do not reside in images, then: they are circulated between representation, spectator and social formation’ (ibid.). The image therefore does not reside in a vacuum but in the cultural context of spectatorship as well as in the ‘institutional and social/historical contexts of production and consumption’ (ibid.). The structural and the symbolic therefore coalesce in the construction of gendered imagery within an 1 My analysis of the magazine under review is based on a random reading of Femina from 1994–2007. I am aware that one category of women in this study are excluded from the readership of this magazine. This does not however lower the significance of the magazine for the other category for whom this is their favourite magazine. Moreover, I am focusing on Femina to the exclusion of other magazines such as Cosmopolitan or Women’s Era that address women consumers from two ends of the social spectrum of the urban middle class. Femina falls somewhere in-between and is therefore most suitable for analysis.

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overarching trope of recolonised modernity represented in English women’s magazines popular in urban India. The field of exploring and understanding the construction of womanhood in Indian women’s magazines has been a relatively unexplored field with some notable exceptions (for example, Bannerji 1991, Wolf 1991, Singh and Uberoi 1994, Srilata 1997, 1999, Uberoi 2001, Oza 2006). It is necessary to state at the outset that my concern is not with the body images of women themselves as they are presented in the discourse of women’s magazines. The images serve to only highlight and reveal the ideas and practices underlying the use of particular images. The culture of body imagery in itself is therefore not my central concern. My focus is more centrally on the refashioned construction of Indian womanhood, ambivalent, contested and also contained, through a variety of images that address women’s embodiment, and the beauty culture associated with it, produced through the medium of visual imagery and textual discourse in women’s magazines. There are many aspects to the magazine that in a sense provide a grand narrative of an authoritative reality for women but I have focused on two major aspects, namely, the emphasis on beauty as an ideal and as a goal and on the ambivalent construction of Indian womanhood. 2 Other aspects of identity such as sexuality would perhaps need a more elaborate consideration as would the emerging interest in such magazines in masculinity and men as partners, friends, lovers, and fashion models. These are however not the focus of this chapter. One of the most commonly read magazines by middle- and upperclass women in urban India is Femina, edited by Sathya Saran and under the proprietorship of Bennett, Coleman and Company Ltd.3 It was first published in 1959 and had, by the 1990s, a readership of over 850,000 which made it the largest circulating women’s magazine (Srilata 1999). Among the professional, more educated, upper-class women I interviewed, all did not claim to be readers on a regular basis but some did confess to glancing at it (carefully enough to remember specific articles and fashion displays) at neutral, infrequently visited 2 The ideal of beauty, is based on a particular definition of femininity and, as V. Geetha says, ‘is both contemporary and historical’ (Geetha 2002: 109). In women’s magazines, this ideal, located in a multiplicity of images that reflect varying perspectives, is presented through visual imagery and textual representation of different kinds. 3 Sathya Saran is no longer the editor of Femina.

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spaces, as it were, such as the beauty parlour or the doctor’s waiting room, outside the home and work place. Women clearly did not see their rational and intellectual lives being directly influenced by such a magazine which they never seemed to buy. However, middle-class women, both homemakers and working women, were more direct in their appreciation and appropriation of the magazine and said that they always made it a point to buy the magazine whenever it came out. They considered it as the one treat for themselves every month, that is, buying the magazine and going through the articles. Many of the issues discussed seemed very real to them, and they also developed ideas about clothes and fashion. Femina itself claims to cater to those it considers ‘women of substance’ in modern India. More recently, it has removed the ‘women of substance’ label and added on ‘Generation W ’ instead, the W obviously referring to all Women as a Generation and not simply to perhaps a few women of substance. This is yet another marketing tool to widen its readership by appealing to all women including homemakers, beauticians, fashion models and other professional women. Femina has advertised itself as a magazine that reflects ‘what women want’ (Times of India 10 March 2002, Sunday Review, New Delhi: 3). Its advertising slant now addresses the liberated Indian woman and man through this blurb: What’s experienced by women but explored by men? So have you ever felt, there is more to a marriage than just romancing each other or being each other’s spouses? How about being each other’s best buddies? Possible? Can you tell your husband that you have a crush on his best friend? You can tell your best friend. So is there any room for friendship between husband and wife? Ah, a delicate subject. Needless to say, a man would love to know more about it. Besides a woman who’s living the dilemma. Thanks to Femina, enlightenment is just a copy away. For both… (ibid.)

The rhetoric of equality and friendship between spouses serves to make the magazine more accessible to a wider audience that is now claimed to include men as well. This has resulted in the introduction of columns that target men such as Locker Room, Malespeak, Style and Pin Up. This advert assumes that men and women talk to each other as equals to begin with and that the feature in the magazine will enable friendlier and better communication between two equals. However, the advert also ensures that the Indian woman

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remains contained within the respectable relationship of matrimony as the proposed ‘friendship’ is between spouses and therefore ‘being respectable’ includes the containment of sexuality and perhaps a wayward modernity. This in fact has been the hallmark of Femina’s marketing strategy over the years. Cosmopolitan has provided serious competition to Femina in recent years as it is a more glossy production and has provocative articles on beauty, sexuality and the lives of apparently more liberated women in its overt celebration of women’s sexuality. However, it has perhaps been unable to dislodge the middle-class reader in small towns all over India who turn to Femina precisely because it stays within prescribed moral codes, along with other women’s magazines such as Women’s Era.4 The marketing strategy adopted by Femina, under Sathya Saran’s editorship, could not be more direct, as she reveals the kind of women the magazine targets: The professional Indian woman, who is between the ages 20–40, also a homemaker, probably has young children in school. That’s the obvious target…but beyond that is the target that I think is more relevant…the woman who wherever she is and whatever she is doing is interested in improving her life…it’s a very aspirational kind of target. (Oza 2006: 36–7)

In stating that the magazine targets women who seek to improve their lives, Saran is clearly indicating the ideology of consumption that the magazine seeks to promote. It is through the consumption of a variety of goods, home products, recipes, cosmetics, fashion, appliances of various kinds, beauty regimes, physical exercises, and advice for good grooming, food preservation, kids, and pets among other things, that improvement is suggested, and is likely to take place. Through the range of issues that the magazine addresses and the products it seeks to sell, women aspiring improvement in their lives may turn to Femina for inspiration and the satisfaction of their desires whether it is through consumption through the gaze or 4 Women’s Era is a vastly successful magazine in terms of its circulation and acceptance amongst large numbers of middle-class women all over India. Srilata suggests that the popularity of Woman’s Era lies in ‘its successful rendering of a commonsensical understanding of what constitutes a middle-class woman’s problems, the ‘reality’ of their lives’ (Srilata 1997: 51). Marriage, for example, is naturalized as part of a ‘good “Indian” tradition’ and is constructed as central to a middle-class Indian woman’s existence (ibid.).

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through the purchase of products and services suggested by Femina precisely for an improved status. Over time, Femina has also projected itself as the women’s magazine that promotes fashion and beauty culture through its unstinting support for beauty contests that are hosted in its name, the grooming and training of the young women who prepare for the events, and the celebration of the event once it is over especially if an Indian wins an international beauty title. Femina explicitly promotes the fashion industry through the beauty contests or pageants it hosts for women and the magazine in recent years has acquired the characteristics of a grooming ground for prospective models. There is a focus on the beauty contest itself, on young and upcoming models, on preparation for the event and on celebration of the event. There is clearly a commercial angle to Femina’s support of such events in terms of the corporate sponsorship of the different events and the huge money now involved in international beauty contests and their associated activities. Although Femina has always celebrated the beauty culture, it is the more recent impact of globalisation and liberalisation of the Indian economy that has resulted in this upswing in the magazine’s celebration and extolment of international beauty contests. Oza in fact suggests that the beauty pageant has become an ‘icon of globalization’ in contemporary India (Oza 2001: 1071). The focus on beauty as both an ideal and a goal, undoubtedly sets a certain kind of agenda for the woman the magazine addresses. I examine some samples of adverts and fashion photography, and selected textual material, available in Femina. It is quite clear of course that adverts have a strong commercial aspect to their production and it is apparent that a similar commercial angle dominates the production of fashion photography. Both use woman’s embodiment to promote a product which is obvious in the manner in which the body is packaged, displayed and eventually consumed through both the male and the female gaze and this points to yet another recasting or refashioning of Indian womanhood in the social imaginary of contemporary India. Women’s magazines in addressing different kinds of woman take various aspects of her embodiment such as clothing, beauty culture and adornment, as salient features of the magazine’s production and articulate these in conjunction with market forces that also push for consumption of products associated with woman’s embodiment in very different ways. The focus therefore, in Femina, is on the desirability of woman’s body not only as a glamorous,

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well groomed product but also as a commercialised product for consumption in an international marketplace, that emphasises that India has arrived in the world of beauty and glamour, thereby legitimising the recolonisation of the Indian woman’s embodiment in the global economy.

BEAUTY AND GLAMOUR AS FEMININE IDEALS Femina which, apart from promoting beauty enhancing products, seeks to both fuel and fulfill woman’s desire to engage with beauty as an ideal and a goal. The magazine, over the years, has had regular features on Model Watch, Images, Faces, Haute Stuff (about the latest in designers, clothes and accessories), Events, Beauty News and Beauty Beat, and so on, all of which address beauty through the contemporary icons of beauty, that is, those who are winners of various beauty related international events such as Miss Universe and Miss World, and local events such as Miss India-Universe, Miss India-World, and so on, fashion models, and their creators, fashion designers, beauty experts, make-up artists, and others. Another section, Salon de Beaute, emphasises body care and has details on body maintenance and perfecting the body. This results in an undue emphasis on youth and an exoticisation of beauty. Youth and physical perfection are crucial to definitions of beauty and the ageing or disabled body is significantly absent in the magazine’s engagement with Beauty. Beauty, in Femina, takes on a sensual tone, emphasising the alluring and sexual aspects of embodiment. This sensuality is not perceived as a negative component but an aspect, that in its maturity, or indeed fulfillment, will ensure a sense of contentment and pleasure. An article in the Salon de Beaute column is curiously entitled, ‘The Zen of Beauty’ and tells readers, that it is ‘A sensual guide to achieving real beauty that brings with it a definite sense of well-being’ (Femina 1 June 2001). It further coaxes woman to strive for the ‘Buddhahood of Beauty’ through a mastery of the ‘Zen of Beauty’. It is assumed by the magazine that the rhetoric of a trendy attitude towards an age-old problem would help the more discerning or educated readers to relate to the propositions presented in the article and accept them more easily. The ‘Zen of Beauty’ is defined ‘as a way of handling all the bad things that happen to your mind, your body, your skin, your

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very looks, of turning the negative into the positive’ and as a prime solution, the reader is asked to ‘tap into your senses…(that) hold the key to attaining the Buddhahood of Beauty.’ A step-by-step assessment of bodily needs, according to the senses, is provided and solutions are recommended in terms of products such as moisturisers and creams of different kinds, massages, yoga, acupuncture, ‘reflexotherapy’, eating habits, ‘colour therapy’ and the use of fragrances (ibid.). This particular approach to the enhancement of Beauty emphasises that it is ‘from within’ but uses external resources to attain an ideal perfection, harmony and well-being. This dependence on products and techniques of different kinds suggests that although Beauty may lie within, its outward manifestation certainly needs to be cultivated, developed and perfected and that there are tried and tested ways of doing this. At the same time, the ‘creativity’ or individuality of readers is not denied. Clearly, women ‘can selectively choose “options” to express their unique sense of self by transforming commodities from their mass-produced forms into expressions of individuality and originality’ (Lury 1996: 134). Consumption practices may therefore be seen as playing a vital role in the ‘creation of the feminine self ’ (ibid.). The use of products results in an attainment of Beauty with different meanings. Beauty is not only sensual but is primarily ‘modern’ and woman can look ‘modern and chic’ by highlighting ‘natural beauty’, ‘lighter make-up’ and by simply using ‘five tricks’ advocated by Femina (Salon de Beaute, Femina 15 January 2004). The modern chic look, Femina advises, is all about ‘shapely brows, a touch of pink on the cheekbones, glossy lips, soft face and softer feet’ and the tricks include details on how to get these done ‘right’ by using the appropriate products that Femina promotes. Apart from promoting products and styles for the authentic contemporary woman, who is both modern and chic, Femina emphasises aspects of this modernity: ‘looking feminine’, emphasising eyebrows that are ‘super defined but slightly natural’, having ‘full’ lips that are ‘kissably glossy’, having or creating ‘super curly lashes’, keeping feet ‘looking smooth and sexy’ (ibid.: 62–64). Through the consumption of beauty aids and commercial products, the sensual and the feminine coalesce in Femina’s modern and chic look. The feminine self is created not only by the personal whims and fancies of women readers but also by an evaluation of products in terms of their usefulness and validity as appropriate products. There

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is a definite effort in Femina to portray beauty care as a growing international trend that takes care of the scientific bases of such care to attain greater acceptability among the educated readership that may place greater value on such information. A recent feature in the Makeover column asks readers to ‘Glow your way this season with a combo of smoky eyes and luminous skin. Here’s a quick tutorial with international make-up artist Paul Williams’ (Femina 15 April 2003). Paul Williams’ status as a make-up specialist is first confirmed by stating that he is consultant to the well-known international brand of Clarins and, to add to his qualifications, he is also a trendy jazz dancer. He declares with certainty that the ‘beauty forecast for the summer is: Dramatic and Natural.’ The ‘dramatic image’ is highlighted by women ‘doing up their eyes smoky and seductive; heavy mascara and flashy lipsticks…’ whereas the ‘natural look gets a post-modern, hippie-meets-spa-trekker take. The idea is based on well-being—radiant and healthy skin and hair that reflects light. And to do this fashionably so, match the looks with soft and light fabrics that are cut to enhance breasts and hips.’ In this statement, there is an attempt to target the ‘modern’ young woman who may be partly into an alternative lifestyle that is encased in a framework of the natural as opposed to the overtly consumerist as well as is concerned about being fashionable in a contemporary manner. So while her hair and skin may reflect a natural radiance, she none the less needs to wear mascara, lipstick and close fitting clothes to enhance her modernity. Beauty here acquires the tones of a complex modernity, located in multiple lifestyles, that moves away from conventional ideas about classical beauty that emphasised well established notions of physical perfection in different ways. The change in definitions of beauty is reflected in the terminology used in Femina. For example, adverts for body care of different kinds increasingly reflect more rational bases for the use of certain products that will not only enhance body image and style but more importantly take good physiological care of the particular body part or surface. This care is grounded in an ‘all-natural’ product base that relies on ingredients such as retinal, salicylic acid, kinetin, aloe vera, and so on, that are all derived from natural sources whether these are the bark of the willow tree (salicylic acid) or wild plants of the lily family (aloe vera). The emphasis on the natural and therefore healthy, however, in no way detracts from the normative definitions of beauty that are based on purely physical characteristics such as

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height, weight, skin colour and texture, age and other related characteristics. Clearly, the multiplicity of definitions is to ensure an attraction for different kinds or readers who may be influenced by one or the other definitions and also thereby pushed towards the consumption of a variety of products advertised in the magazine. The Faces is a model watch column that recommends very young and largely unknown models, for example, 16-year-old Kavya Peerbhoy is highly recommended because of her age, her height (5 feet, 8 inches), her weight (44 kg), her vital statistics which Femina says, ‘Imagine the curve it could take if 32–23–34 were to shape up.’ In the accompanying photos and comments, the emphasis is on her youth, her innocence, her charming awkwardness, and her incredible figure. She is admired by a photographer for her ‘awkwardness and gawky manner…her mouth and curly hair’ and by a former model for her ‘fantastic height…, fantastic face…, a very good figure and she’s extremely photogenic.’ A senior model, Mehr Jesia comments on Kavya that she has a good attitude (‘very important in a model’) as she is ‘willing to try anything and everything at least once’ (Femina 1994). Being awkward and gawky is celebrated precisely because these characteristics are an indicator of adolescence and reflect the immature body as an ideal. Femina adds, ‘This large doe-eyed waifwoman is Kavya Peerbhoy, headed to prefix “model” to her name and the suffix “success” to her surname.’ In promoting the model, the magazine targets other aspiring 16-year-old models and also emphasises the essential quality of youth and a flexible attitude for a potential career in modelling. Another young model, Judi, is recommended for her dark-skinned look. Entitled Dark Devastation, the feature suggests an exotic element that is presented as being very different, thereby distinctive, and completely disarming. She is introduced through an emphasis on aspects of her overt and subtle sexuality, ‘She’s got drop-dead skin, naughty eyes, a wicked smile and a seductive pout.’ ‘Drop-dead skin’ is not explained but there is Femina’s conclusive recommendation, ‘Femina knows the impact of the difference.’ The photographer recommends her for her ‘nice body which she uses really well’ and concludes that ‘with that face, body and attitude, ...she’ll go a long way modelling high fashion stuff .’ Her ‘attitude’ perhaps reflects professionalism in her approach to modelling, which is deeply valued in models. A caption beside a particularly expressive photo says, ‘The song about her goes: Judi’s got the lips I wanna kiss...’ Judi’s voice

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tells us that her experience of ‘being this exotic got me a lot of work (in London)’ where clearly being dark-skinned in London turned out to be an advantage (Femina 8 November 1995). Grewal has examined English ideas of beauty on the basis of Edmund Burke’s work at the time (1764) which was meant to reproduce an ‘aesthetic status quo’ that ‘could teach taste and judgement to the upper classes’ (Grewal 1996: 28). Burke’s idea of beauty was racialised and imbricated in class to the extent that the qualities that symbolised beauty such as ‘small bodies, weak bodies, a smooth bed, fragile flowers, a dove’ could only be found in a single ‘object: a white woman’ (ibid.: 30). Similarly, Mitter finds that nineteenth century Europeans resorted to the use of ‘scientific objectivity’ to highlight ‘European beauty’ as opposed to ‘African ugliness’. He adds, ‘By the 1850s, black had come to symbolize evil and degraded, the very opposite of chaste white’ (Mitter 2000: 45). He significantly concludes, referring to the contemporary supermodel Naomi Campbell in whose embodiment ‘the Western canon has not been dislodged in the least,’ that not only did Western ideas ‘construct a knowledge system to control the other but that the scientific discourse of the nineteenth century enabled the West to rationalize its cultural preconceptions, which, in our postcolonial age, we have not been able to shake off ’ (ibid.: 49). This preoccupation of eighteenth and nineteenth century European intellectuals with aesthetic preferences was squarely located not only in maintaining the order and hierarchy of European society but also has had an added effect of establishing a perspective that has become part of the postcolonial habitus and, in contemporary India, acts as a trope of idealised beauty in the recolonisation of women. One indication of the manifestation of the dominant postcolonial habitus is the internalisation of the coloniser’s inferiorisation of dark skin as native and Other. There has always been an attempt, among the middle and upper class sections of Indian society, to privilege white or lighter skin over dark skin and this is nowhere more clearly evident than in adverts in newspapers, seeking marriage partners, that reflect a woman’s skin characteristics as ‘fair’ or the more ubiquitous ‘wheatish complexion’. To achieve the goal of fair skin there are innumerable beauty products, such as ‘Fair and Lovely’ face cream, that serve to help achieve the goal of fairness or whiteness in skin colour. This preoccupation with skin colour in fact serves to highlight the intangible ways in which the postcolonial habitus endures in the

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cultural trope for self-presentation as white (as opposed to dark), pure and virginal (as opposed to wild and untamable), chaste (as opposed to carnal), and familiar (as opposed to other). Quoting Fanon, Patel (2001) writes that there is a desire among the colonised to overcome the “state of ‘blackness’ or inferiority” (p. xv). This is done therefore ‘not by imitating the mannerisms of “whiteness” but by adopting the language of dominance as well.’ Patel in fact argues that ‘the black man’s confrontation with whiteness is automatically pathological and takes the form of mimicry’ (ibid.). While this in a sense may explain the innate and obsessive desire for fair or white skin among women in middle-class urban India, it is also representative of the consumer’s desire to perfect her self-presentation in the image of the perfect and dominant other. Although the virtues of fair skin are lauded and celebrated, dark skin is also exoticised in the beauty culture prevalent in women’s magazines. On the basis of her analysis of nineteenth century travel narratives, Grewal argues that colonised woman is viewed as ‘exotic’ as she is ‘believed to be sensual with a sexuality that was seldom represented as being connected with motherhood’ as opposed to the ‘bourgeois Englishwoman’s leisure’ which was a combination of ‘a nonsexual morality of wifehood and motherhood’ (Grewal 1996: 45). The reproduction of colonial stereotypes is germane to contemporary Indian society but recolonisation has introduced a concurrent trope of the native as exotic, and the exotic as distinctive, and, in market terms, extremely saleable. In a feature on Haute Stuff, a model, Cajol Sarup, is presented under a sub-title ‘Exotic Species’. The selling of what might appear an exotic element in a model’s sex appeal is part of Femina’s marketing strategy. There is an exoticisation of ‘dark looks’, ‘luminous skin’, ‘wild mane’ and so on, which are in fact the norm in an Indian or South Asian body. Similarly, an obviously dark-skinned model with dark, thick hair, large and luminous black eyes, displays a ‘short matka cotton kurta’ in two photographs (Femina 1 March 2001). The first photograph enhances an untamed sexuality in the pose of the model who is kneeling on the ground with her legs spread apart. With her thick, uncombed, dark hair, and full lips, her bodily display enhances her sexuality and serves as an invitation to consume the product and the look for achieving the total effect which is both sartorial and intensely sexual. The second photo display has the same model in a subdued pose, her hands interlinked in the front, her eyes shut. Not only is there an obvious erasure of identity in the closed

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eyes but also, more importantly, a suppression of a blatant display of sexuality. The blurb adds that the use of ‘sequins and beads’ gives an ‘Indo-Western look’. This image will perhaps be more acceptable to those who desire good fashion without being overtly adventurous. In another fashion display image, a model is situated in an exotic desert locale, with a camel and local folk in the background, wearing a fur jacket with leather boots with fur trimmings (Femina 1 June 2001). The clothes are completely inappropriate for the terrain so clearly it is the exotic and unusual locale that serves as a foil to emphasise the exclusive fashion statement. In the photo at the bottom right hand corner, the ‘stoned’ (as suggested by the blurb) model is wearing denim capris but the focus is the belt of stones and her beaded shirt. More significantly, the photo is striking because of the boys/men framed in the car window who are looking into the camera. They form the audience, within the frame, from a different social class background than the model but by gazing at the camera, and not the model, they are almost not there. In other words, their socio-economic background can help provide the visual locale but results in their exclusion from the main frame of making eye contact with the model or simply gazing at her. Fashion photo imagery has a class and a gender dimension both of which provide stereotypes as well as unconventional portrayals and both serve to enhance the difference and exclusion. The poor remain excluded outside the frames of reference of culture as it is constructed by the urban elite in the pages of a women’s magazine that often uses the underprivileged, poor and marginalized to offset fashion and a beauty culture that is built on the edifice of a recolonised modernity.

THE AMBIVALENCE OF INDIAN WOMANHOOD Recolonisation serves to retain conventional images that will feed the postcolonial habitus as well as provide more challenging images that, through unconventional imagery, tease the viewer into surprise, submission or rejection. Market forces are the most critical determinants influencing the imagery of women in visuals and text. An advert for Bata footwear highlights the ‘wild’ aspects of woman’s nature in contrast to its own image as a tried and trusted producer of very middle-class, conventional shoes for men and women. This advert

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(Femina 1 June 2001) has the film star Rani Mukherjee modelling Bata sandals with labels such as ‘Monica’, ‘Linda’, ‘Sera’ emphasising the ‘Untamed’ aspects of femininity by exhorting women to ‘Unmask your wild side. Unleash your natural instinct. In stripes, spots and hissing patterns.’ The use of unconventional names that have clear western connotations is to emphasise Bata’s departure from its past image of a family store providing traditional family shoes. It now appears to address the ‘modern’ woman epitomised in the model whose attire of striped top and leather trousers indicates another departure from tradition. The emphasis on ‘hissing’ patterns suggests the image of a snake with sexual undertones. Nonetheless using the non-controversial Rani Mukherjee as the model underscores the company’s adherence to the glamorous and ‘good’ woman. The soft approach to definitions of womanhood emphasise woman’s femininity and aspects of her identity that view her largely in her domestic roles as a devoted mother, wife, sister, and so on. The ‘good’ woman then is one who is married, is secure in her status as wife and mother and reflects an aura of contentment and success. An advert for the Life Insurance Corporation tells woman readers, ‘Only you can give life. That’s why we protect yours.’ There is a photograph of a ‘homely’ young woman, wearing a bindi, mangalsutra and sari, her hair tied back neatly in a bun, smiling gently and almost passively into the camera. The Company pledges complete support to this image of a married woman by saying, ‘Our tribute to the Indian woman is an insurance scheme that understands her need and covers her accordingly. Jeevan Bharti. Today’s woman deserves something special’ (Femina 15 May 2003). The emphasis on marriage as a suitable project that would appeal to readers has encouraged the magazine to initiate a column in its pages that offers matrimonial alliances. Entitled Meeting Ground, this column provides photographs and brief biographical details of eligible young men who are usually below 30 years of age, are apparently successful in their professional careers and looking for young women partners with clear indications of friendship and matrimony. The magazine simultaneously has stories about women who are leaders in their professional careers and portrays them as successful role models. The ‘Women’s Day Special’ cover story is entitled, ‘Faster, Higher, Further… The New Frontiers Women have set for the World.’ (Femina 1 March 2003). There is an effort to provide a space to highly motivated career women, who may or may not be in

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a state of matrimony, but in the fine print, the magazine ultimately fails to break the pattern of feminine dependence on male partners. The same article therefore has four sections that read, ‘Storming the Male Bastion, Against all Odds, The Woman’s Touch and Male Support.’ The opening sentence of the last section reads, ‘Yet, women wouldn’t be where they are without the support of men. And they are gracious enough to admit it.’ Through this dual construction of Indian womanhood by both justifying, pursuing and celebrating the state of matrimony and a dependence on men as well as a portrayal of women as world class pioneers and professionals, Femina is only reflecting the ambivalence about women that reigns in society. The ambivalence in the construction of Indian womanhood in the public and social domain is nowhere more apparent than in multiple representations of woman’s embodiment in often a single photo frame. Fashion designers, make-up artists, and all those who contribute to the creation of the image play a significant role in this representation. Moreover, there is a simultaneous effort to contain woman, to impose boundaries and limits to her freedom, that is captured in an advert of the Seasons store that somewhat contradictorily asks woman to ‘Be Yourself ’. The model is draped in a long skirt and blouse but with the traditional veil and a jacket, contemporary yet demure, wearing a bindi on her forehead and bangles on her wrists, symbols of auspicious Indian womanhood. It is striking however that the model is pictured at Knightsbridge, London in front of Harrods department store. At the bottom, the advert adds that the store is located only at an address in Mumbai. The image therefore asserts a modernity that, in its location, is found in its best and most exclusive form in the western world. This location of the Indian model in a western context emphasises a recolonised modernity that finds expression and fulfillment only in a western public and social space. To be herself, however, Indian woman has to find the best of both worlds of tradition and a westernised modernity, being glamorous and beautiful in attire and presentation without breaking the boundaries of a normatively prescribed femininity. The ideal Indian woman contradictorily embodies the dichotomous, and yet congruent, identity of innocence and sophistication, purity and maturity, together in a single frame. The repeated focus on the contemporary woman is shifting and ambivalent in its representation: such a woman embodies the contemporary Indian woman. An advert for woollen shawls, available at Ahujasons in Karol Bagh, New Delhi,

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shows a woman wearing a string of pearls, gold earrings, hair tied back in a neat bun, all wrapped up in a shawl, and reads, ‘Never screams for attention, never fails to get noticed. Always contemporary, always distinct.’ The advert adds at the bottom, ‘Rare Shawls for Rare People’ suggesting that distinctive people, with discerning taste, are rare and thereby exclusive. Such rarity then becomes symbolic of a style that is related to social class and status moorings and becomes a sought-after quality to be achieved. The idea that contemporary need not necessarily signify outrageous but someone who is discreet and yet stylish is a clear reminder of the concept of Indian womanhood as being within limits, boundaries or margins and emphasises the boundedness or a containment of gender identity. Similarly, visuals for adverts of saris, the traditional Indian female costume, tend to retreat from an exotic or westernised look and the emphasis is on Tradition. Deepam silks available at Chennai are promoted through an advert featuring a woman wearing classical jewellery and a wedding sari and the text reads, ‘essentially woman’. Her nails are devoid of polish, and her face, hair style and jewellery all emphasise her identity as a young woman entering the auspicious state of a married woman (Femina 1 June 2001). Other adverts for saris (for example, Femina 15 May 2003) reflect the current preoccupation with designer wear and certain designer labels are not only popular but also considered appropriate in terms of respectability thereby, once again, reflecting a need to stay within limits. In an advert for Ravi Bajaj Womenswear where a sari-clad model is featured wearing an off one shoulder blouse and is devoid of the conventional bindi, mangalsutra, or indeed any form of excess. The focus is on simplicity and style. The unconventional blouse and lack of jewellery gives the model an extremely contemporary look although she is clearly modelling traditional wear. Fashion celebrities offer a more glamorous image than other models and are commonly used in fashion photography. Aishwarya Rai, for example, has been presented both as a sophisticated woman of the world as well as a modern, young woman, ‘very much the woman in vogue,’ and with Sushmita Sen, as one ‘chosen to lead... young, smart, upbeat and winners all the way.’ The blurb in the corner of the photo says, ‘We aaj ki naris (women of today) are here! Right on top of the world’ (Femina 23 May 1995). Femina often invites its readers to participate in various beauty contests and there is a clear emphasis on post-contest privileges: ‘Hollywood parties,

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press conferences, motorcades, meetings with Heads of State’ (Femina 8 November 1995). Another advert for a beauty contest emphasises ‘The Exultation, The Exhilaration. One small step for you’ (Femina, 1995). While the emphasis is on the glamour and excitement of success, a woman’s vital statistics, height, weight, and age are essential accompaniments in striving for this success. Interviews in the magazine with two of the current leading beauty icons in fact reflect the strict demands made on them to maintain their physical proportions and style. Sara Corner, the Femina Miss IndiaWorld 2001, tells the interviewer that ‘the diet was the hardest part to follow’ and ‘it took a lot of getting used to’ (Femina 1 March 2001). She is described as the ‘quintessential doll’ with the ‘grace, quietude and beauty of a giraffe’. Apart from this somewhat derogatory description of her physical characteristics that project all the qualities of colonial ideals of beauty on her embodiment, as also in ‘her delicate beauty’, she is identified simultaneously as a woman with ‘determination and maturity’ thus indicating that beauty so defined goes with strength, ‘self-confidence’ and an ambition to win further contests that will bring even greater rewards (ibid.). Similarly, an interview with Celina Jaitley, the Femina Miss India-Universe 2001 winner, describes her as a ‘cool cookie’ well-versed in the art of repartee and as one who has ‘elegance and mental agility’. It also reveals that while she is excited about future events, she is also ‘nervous’ because she is now preparing for another beauty pageant and ‘that means more diet food’ (Femina 1 March 2001). The interviewer adds, ‘And like Sara, Celina too found the diet and workout regime tough going. “It was very difficult to concentrate on both intellectual and physical growth at the same time,” she says, recalling the training sessions’ (ibid.). The emphasis on a strict diet regime that is adhered to by contestants in beauty pageants contributes to the reproduction of the ideology of ‘weightlessness’ associated with beauty practices. This is further enhanced by descriptions of the body statistics of various beauty models and through fashion photography a highlighting of various body parts excessively. In this definition of Indian womanhood, Femina is projecting beauty and glamour alongside hard work and success and in so doing reflecting a redefined image of woman who uses her embodiment as a tool towards greater and greater success, wealth and recognition. There is an emphasis on beauty regimens, diet rules, physical workouts and other such focused activities requiring hard work and present woman in a professional cast. This is not a

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new perspective of Indian womanhood but acquires a recast image in the contemporary globalised world that provides new occupational choices for women such as the beauty contest industry. This is another example of the recolonisation of woman’s embodiment in a different temporal, spatial and socio-cultural frame. The glamour angle is projected by Femina precisely for its appeal to ordinary middle-class women who, it is assumed, lack glamour in their everyday lives.5 The two most well-known glamorous Indian beauty icons, Sushmita Sen and Aishwarya Rai, were ordinary young women, with images of the girl-next-door, who made it to the big world of fashion and beauty. This element gives their life stories an element of replicability so that it is fairly simple for women to relate to them and to imagine that such a life could indeed be theirs as well. Femina’s editor applauds Sushmita Sen’s victory as Miss Universe, 1994 and argues that the one area in which India has been ‘lagging behind’ the West is that of ‘glamour’, a gap which Sen amply filled with her victory. (Femina 23 June 1994). Femina also glorifies the ‘Sushmita Sen look’ which is defined as one of ‘naturalness’, a ‘smile that reaches out from the heart, into the eyes, and across the face to light it like a Diwali day’ (Femina 8 June 1994). The link between the familiar, the ordinary, that is, being natural and traditional, as in the metaphor, ‘Diwali day’, cannot be denied. Sen is also suggested as a ‘role model’ for ‘hundreds of young, pretty hopefuls who have their sights set on the invisible pot of gold at the end of their rainbows’ (ibid.). In order to be successful however the processes of recolonisation cannot cross the line of middle-class modernity. Glamour is therefore not an unattainable ideal for the middle-class reader and the trope of the ordinariness of Indian fashion models is continuously revoked in the magazine.

THE FRAGMENTED BODY AND AN AMBIVALENT IDENTITY The magazine offers advice for beauty care and watching body weight which it addresses through its own columns and features as well as through adverts. An obvious fragmentation of woman’s 5 This implies that a lack of glamour in the daily life of the reader encourages her to dream about glamour and a glamourous lifestyle offering her visual pleasure and some form of fulfillment. A desire for consumption is none the less also created.

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body is apparent in the advice offered. Women are advised on skin care, hair styles and maintenance and caring for feet and hands, using appropriate nail varnishes, focusing specially on eyes, eyebrows, nose, mouth and, most significantly, lips and breasts, which are seen as a clear sexual symbol. This fragmentation by the beauty industry is linked to the marketing of their specific products which may focus on one or another feature of woman’s embodiment. More dangerously, this market-driven intervention in beauty care results in the fragmentation of woman’s embodiment as types of bodily parts that need constant care, repair and maintenance. There is, in this fragmentation, also an erasure of subjectivity and an objectification of woman’s body. The fragmented body may also signify a fragmented identity to the extent that particular bodily parts may be perceived as being especially important and as constituting the whole. Embodied gender identity may then be produced through particular aspects of woman’s embodiment highlighting what are considered ‘best features’, whether these are legs, hair, height, waist or lips. A fragmentation of facial features takes place in the marketing of goods that address the new Indian woman’s character and identity. An advert for Lakme Deep Pore Cleansing (Femina 1 June 2001) defines different parts of the model’s face in terms of certain positive qualities, highlights her strengths rather than weaknesses and, in this manner, emphasises that the use of the product will enable her to ensure that these strengths are not affected by dirt, pollution and stress. The advert asserts that the forehead symbolises ‘intelligence’, the eyebrows ‘pride’, the eyes ‘honesty’, the nose ‘character’, the lips ‘happiness’, the chin ‘determination’, and the punch line is ‘There’s a lot that shows on your face. Dirt, pollution and stress shouldn’t be part of it.’ In addition, ‘Now, one and half minutes is all it takes to uncover the real you. Presenting the complete Deep Pore Cleansing Regimen from Lakme. Simply because your face says it all.’ The true characteristics of Indian womanhood, constructed as essential by the magazine, are seen as lying in the fragmented features of this western model’s face which can have public and social visibility if adequate cleansing care is taken primarily of the skin. Similarly, woman’s breasts are particularly prone to a separate treatment as they embody a sexual character of their own and women are exhorted to have tighter, firmer and more uplifted breasts through the right kind of exercise and also through adverts for ‘ultimate push-up’ bras that promise the dream cleavage. So readers are told, ‘Give your figure

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a boost and get the cleavage of your dream. Get Maximiser now!’ in an advert for ‘Maximizer. The ultimate push-up bra’ (Femina 1 March 2003). Adverts also engage in the fragmentation of woman’s embodiment for selling products for the adornment of the body. Adornment is central to self-presentation and indeed, as Wilson points out, ‘there has never been a culture without adornment, without some modification of the raw material of the body’ (Wilson 1990: 68). This includes the body’s relationship with objects of all kinds, such as, jewellery, accessories, and above all, clothing. Jewellery has always been central to woman’s adornment from the period of the Indus Valley Civilization, as Harappa and Mohenjodaro relics show us, until contemporary times where more gold is bought for jewellery in India than in any other country. Jewellery, among diverse religious communities in modern India, is an indicator of auspiciousness, associated with marriage and fulfilment. Different occasions in a woman’s life cycle are associated with different kinds of sartorial and other modes of adornment. This is particularly evident in the context of certain life cycle rituals in a woman’s life such as puberty, marriage, child-birth, marriages of children and other kin, and so on. The auspicious nature of adornment which includes not just jewellery, but also the use of kohl in the eyes, vermilion in the central parting in the hair, flowers in the hair, glass bangles on the wrist, and so on, is nowhere more strikingly apparent than in its absence among widows. An advert for the Tribhovandas Bhimji Zaveri jewellery store in New Delhi shows one eye of obviously white woman on the left hand page of an open book while the opposite page reads, ‘Her eyes were like limpid pools of dark emerald you could drown in. Funny how no one even seemed to notice them’ (Femina 1 June 2001). The word ‘notice’ is the only word in an otherwise black background lit up by a golden light and pink glow. Thus beautiful eyes by themselves cannot attract sufficient attention, and that in order to be noticed, there is a need for jewellery, preferably gold jewellery. Earlier jewellery adverts show women traditionally attired in conventional saris, in the midst of an auspicious event, surrounded by family and friends, wearing different kinds of jewellery. The emphasis was on auspicious events such as weddings and birthdays as occasions for the exchange of gifts of jewellery. This advert emphasises the necessity of adornment for the recognition of beauty as, without adornment, the suggestion is that

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beauty remains incomplete. However, in doing this, it focuses only on the eyes of a woman, and that too only on one eye. By focusing on a single aspect of woman’s embodiment, and commenting on the lack of recognition without jewelled adornment, this advert is emphasising its inclusion as necessary to woman’s complete feminine presentation and identity. Similarly, another advert for Carbon jewellery promotes itself as a part of fashion accessories and emphasises the heightening of the sensuality of woman through the use of the product (Femina 1 September 2001). A woman in a western dress, with long slits along her legs, is leaning against a fence and gazing longingly into the distance. It is dark and she is alone, in an unusual dress. The advert reads, ‘If you don’t hear the whistles, they’re still catching their breath.’ There is longing and desire in the model’s gaze and the jewellery promises to be ‘very provocative’ which will not only heighten the wearer’s sensuality but also have a ‘heart-stopping effect’ on others. The combination of the global and the local in each frame, repeated in the magazine, will serve to heighten the experience of being part of an international trend setting scene if the spectator and the consumer are ready to be adventurous, untamed and wild without losing their traditional or normatively constructed femininity in any way. Similarly, woman’s sexuality is never directly addressed in adverts or fashion photography but a subtle or covert link is present in the text or in the model’s appearance in most adverts. In an advert for the ‘Beauty Secrets’ range of cosmetics, there is an image of a partially clad woman looking provocatively into the camera. The text reads, ‘A gorgeous well kept body takes a lot of care and a few Beauty Secrets.’ The advert highlights three points: that a ‘gorgeous well kept body’ is an ideal; that it takes a ‘lot of care’; and that the use of the advertised product would be helpful in this venture. The advert also emphasises the sexual dimension of beauty in the model’s caressing of her naked shoulder and the suggestion of her removing her bra. An overt display of an obvious sexuality is very carefully represented. In an advert for Vanity Fair underwear, a young woman is shown lounging in her underwear in front of a window where the curtains are not drawn. Although credits are displayed in small print at the bottom of the page, the model’s face is hidden from the viewer although she is perhaps clearly visible from the other side of the window. Her face is not revealed so that a woman who chooses to be daring in terms of body display and her body stance, which

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appears to be sexually uninhibited and defiant, has to be somehow controlled possibly by being partially hidden from view (Femina 1994). Similarly, in an advert for Jockey stretch sport top, the model is behind a screen but is now shown with a full frontal image and not obscured or partially withheld from view as earlier lingerie adverts indicated (Femina 1 September 2001). This image appears almost prepubertal and very young and child-like in its representation and therefore becomes acceptable to the viewer. An international brand, Lovable, (Femina 1 June 2001) has an international model featured in a full frontal display in a visual expressing exuberance and joy. The text reads ‘Cotton Essensuals’ and the viewer is exhorted to ‘show it off ’, presumably a reference to her embodied self. An Indian model was clearly unacceptable in this advert so as not to offend social and public sensibilities in such an obvious overt bodily display of sexual freedom and what the advert considers a liberated and perhaps outrageous and therefore unacceptable sensuality. Wearing the advertised bra might be a ‘safe’ choice however as it is not visible to the naked eye and lies underneath a sartorial choice that may exude the aura of desirable respectability. These are shifting, contradictory and often ambivalent representations of a feminine gender identity. Adverts and fashion displays hover between tradition and modernity and there are no clear-cut or sharply defined body images which construct femininity in an idealtypical way. There are many different versions of femininity, as it were, and therefore many masks and persona available to women to acquire and use to fulfill their desires and aspirations. An advert for an Elizabeth Arden ‘arden beauty eau de perfum’ (Femina 15 April 2003) perhaps sums up what all adverts and fashion photography have been constructing about women: ‘Partreality. Partillusion. Allwoman’. The message clearly is that woman is made up of both an embodied material reality but also contains certain illusory characteristics and that taken together, she may be constructed as a complete woman. The partly illusory and partly real characteristics of womanhood however ensure that an ephemeral characteristic gets attached to womanhood that remains out of the grasp of ordinary acts of cognition and recognition. There is both erasure and incompleteness in this construction of womanhood, leaving an open door for the constructive role that women may play in the performance of their identity. It is also true that notions of the authentic Indian woman are constantly changing and the role of the media in this process in

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undeniable. Television reaches out to millions of homes and the serials (daily soaps) that are watched by women range from those that extol traditional values of womanhood to those that celebrate contemporary womanhood by emphasising their commitment to work and the family. In one issue, Femina has a Cover Story (Femina 15 January 2004) on a television show (Jassi Jaissi Koi Nahin literally ‘There’s no one like Jassi’) that is about an ordinary young woman, who is not glamorous or stunning to look at (she wears spectacles, dresses in a dowdy style) but is hard working, caring and affectionate. This serial is appreciated by Femina for projecting ‘a kick-ass professional, confident, ambitious, caring and progressive’ woman who describes the ‘millions of women emerging from a new India-anchored by values but fired up with the hope to excel in life’ (ibid.: 34). The significance of work in women’s lives is emphasised as is her capacity to become ‘invaluable at the workplace and outside’ and Femina suggests that this reflects a ‘trend’ rather than just a passing fad. Femina also emphasises that such a change indicates that there is a break with tradition, ‘a sense of continuity slips away’ and that ‘we occupy a time of no enduring ideas, no over arching values or questions’ (ibid.: 37). The possibilities for dreaming about a different life, for nurturing hope and challenging stereotypes is therefore left open. The same issue of the magazine (Femina 15 January 2004) contains two adverts that emphasise woman’s assertion of her independence and fearlessness. One advert is for Asmi diamond jewellery and shows a very contemporary face of Indian womanhood, with very little make-up, straight hair, wearing a shirt, and modeling a small diamond pendant. The text reads: When did fear go away… And passion replace it? When did the boundaries disappear… And horizons look near? When did the world matter less… And your inner voice more? When exactly did you begin to believe There is no one You would rather be than you. Asmi Diamond Jewellery. Reflects your inner fire’. (Femina 15 January 2004)

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An advert for Sahil Emporium foregrounds a woman, arms outstretched, glowing face, draped in a heavily embroidered sari, wearing traditional jewellery, against a backdrop of overpowering mountains and a cloudy sky, and another woman standing in the shadows at the back. The text reads, ‘Woman, its time you came out of the shadows’ (Femina 15 January 2004). Contemporary adverts therefore focus on contemporary womanhood and emphasise woman’s independence, fearlessness and courage while advertising products that would nonetheless aid in highlighting woman’s femininity. The message clearly indicates that although women today are independent and free, and need to be encouraged in their efforts, there is no need to give up traditional or trendy wear, beauty aids, expensive jewellery, and remain modern and chic at the same time. The emphasis is also on an assertion of what woman desires for herself and pushes woman to be more self-centred and selfish: An advert for Natalia designerwear shows a model in trousers and a lightweight jacket, wearing closed shoes, looking directly at the camera, a true professional who is urged to think only about herself as the label reads, ‘Natalia. I. Me. Myself ’ (Femina 1 November 2003). It may appear that there is a break with what are considered tradtional definitions of the female body which lead scholars to conclude that the ‘individual corporate woman is the icon’ of the upmarket magazines that project ‘a post-liberalised post-feminism’ (Chaudhuri 2000: 264). I contend, however that, Femina or even other magazines such as Elle or Cosmopolitan, clearly do not point to this construction of contemporary Indian womanhood. It is woman as an icon of beauty and glamour that dominates the magazine’s construction of Indian womanhood within the trope of an authentic woman who is both modern and yet epitomizes the best of tradition. While adverts and fashion photography may apparently depict Indian woman as modern, successful career and even corporate woman, and her embodiment as constitutive of self-identity to the extent that there is an excessive concern with shaping, moulding and fashioning the body, or indeed as a career woman who may outwardly appear not excessively concerned with her embodiment or engaged in power dressing, the link with traditional definitions of femininity has not been broken. A woman may therefore be shown as a professional or as a career woman, or as a modern, liberated woman, but she is simultaneously depicted as seductive and sensually appealing. An advert for Samsonite baggage has a promising one-liner

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for the aspiring career woman ‘Take a Different Route’. While one frame (Femina 15 May 2003) depicts the western model in western clothes striding down an endless road with vast possibilities and open endings indicative of endless vistas embodying the opportunities and success that might await her, another frame (Femina 15 April 2003) seeks to restrict woman to the board room table on which she walks as a model might walk the ramp under the watchful eyes of her male colleagues, partners or simply, male predators.

FEMINA TODAY More recently, Femina has adopted a very different marketing strategy and I would argue, its management is perhaps no longer clear about its readership, and is searching for an elusive reader, having lost some ground to the plethora of magazines that have invaded the market. It is a much more upmarket magazine than it was only a few years ago, going primarily by the kinds of products being promoted by the magazine addressing the reader directly with its aggressive promotional call, ‘Femina says so’ (Femina 29 August 2007). To begin with, it has changed its opening statement about whom the magazine is intended for: moving from ‘Woman of substance’ to ‘Generation W’ to now simply ‘Femina Believe’. The connotations of this statement are ambiguous, open to many different kinds of interpretations, such as, inviting the reader to ‘believe’ in the magazine and all that it stands for, or perhaps suggesting that Femina believes in the potential of its clientele, or even that ‘belief ’ as a value, in oneself, in others, in life, is perhaps integral to being a woman today. This particular issue of the magazine is devoted to the movies, and in her editorial, Up Front, the editor sells the idea of using the movies as a theme for the magazine: ‘This issue is ‘All About Eve’. It’s telling you ‘What Lies Beneath’, it shows you ‘How (Not) To Lose a Guy in 10 Days’. It’s got 31 Things To Do Before You’re 30’, it talks about ‘A Mighty Heart’. Got it? We’re taking you to the movies’. (Femina 29 August 2007)

This racy style is reflected in the magazine as whole. The entire layout appears to have changed, with more colour, glossy full page or double

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page adverts, professional fashion advice from an in-house fashion director and food advice from a consulting editor. Professionalism and opulence together now appear as the hallmark of a magazine set on recasting its image and that of the Indian woman as well. We now find, for example, that ‘perfecting the body’ has acquired a new meaning in the magazine, moving beyond body regimes such as physical exercise, the proverbial ‘best’ diet, to advice about cosmetic surgery. A leading cosmetic surgeon advises readers on such matters as arm lifts, breast reduction, sunken nipples, nose repair, pinning back the ears and removing facial moles (Femina 29 August 2007: 95). Similarly, an international aestheticienne answers queries about skin and hair and there is advice on puffy eyes, an uneven complexion and hard palms (Femina 29 August 2007: 100). In an apparently professional tone, there is an enhancement of the fragmentation of women’s embodiment in textual representation and this can only produce a similar experience in the reader. ‘Femina inner circle’ inviting the reader: ‘Its all about you’, is a whole new section on ‘relationships’ (‘how not to lose a guy in 10 days’), ‘evesdropping’ (a short piece on an airport encounter) ‘intimacy’ (about the ‘long goodnight kiss’ through visuals of American movie scenes), ‘me-time’ (‘31 things to do before you’re 30’), ‘parenting’, ‘family matters’, ‘fly on the wall’ (about male strippers), ‘therapy’ (about self-help books) and ‘your right to know’ (legal advice regarding divorce and other laws) (Femina 29 August 2007). Apart from the last column which provides sensible legal advice to readers, the rest are mere trivia, addressing young women through pieces, both texts and visuals, that seek to emphasise youth, adventurism, and simultaneously projecting itself as a trendy magazine for both the young and older woman. Perhaps this is the change that the new editor has brought about: appealing to the younger, slightly more fashionable woman, with higher disposable income, who may be lost otherwise to Cosmopolitan, Elle Hair, Fashion, and many other magazines. Femina has not forsaken its interest in Beauty and Fashion. That still remains its main focus and has acquired a cutting edge, because now ‘Femina says so’. The opening pages of the magazine begin with ‘Whats Buzzing? From the hottest to the coolest…’ with sections such as ‘beautiful women’, ‘all men’, ‘classic’, ‘watches’, and so on. The highlight of the section, ‘beautiful women’ is a quiz with a visual display of a hundred chosen women presented as ‘India’s most

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beautiful women’, that have to be narrowed down to fifty. Names are provided and readers are invited to ‘grab your phone and help us to choose’. While this may suggest the involvement of the reader in expressing her selection of the ‘most beautiful’ women through a vote, the reader is in fact already provided with a visual display of what the magazine considers legitimate or authentic Indian beauty. This is done through names and photographs of mainly film actors and fashion models, which is then sought to be confirmed by readers through a voting and narrowing down process. In this manner, the magazine seeks to rest Indian womanhood on the shoulders of the fashion and film industry. The irony could not be more significant. ‘Femina Believe’ asks its women readers to believe in these icons which must be the most far removed from their individual lives as ordinary women in small towns and big cities. Beauty is still being promoted very much as something to strive for, to seek through various ways and means, and success may meet women who seek, follow the rules, and appropriately perfect their bodies, whether it is through professional advice, fashion displays, adverts and other features that exclusively address their embodiment, their emotions and their lives.

CONCLUDING COMMENTS As even casual readers of Femina, women undoubtedly experience their embodiment through a collage of visual and textual representation of which women’s magazines is only one arena. The presentation of woman’s embodiment through fashion photography, for example, is aimed at projecting both a glamourous body and a lifestyle which can apparently be achieved by any woman. The middle- or upper-class urban Indian woman to whom visual representation in women’s magazines is addressed is educated, upwardly mobile, class or status conscious, economically independent, capable of taking decisions for the family, modern, urban and consciously middle-class. Most importantly, she has the economic capacity to consume the products advertised in the magazine where beauty and body are equally emphasised, along with household/home care, through the use of appliances, gadgets, wall paint, and so forth. She also has the ability to develop her culinary skills displayed in the colourful and appetising

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centrespread of the magazine, take appropriate care of her children, animal pets and garden plants, and simultaneously work hard to ‘keep her man’ and the marriage. She may find answers to her sexual and psychological problems in the Home Truths columns, the Doctor’s page, or the various other reader advice columns. Otherwise, she has to essentially rely on her wits and her imagination to survive in the world. Such a woman is perhaps Femina’s ‘woman of substance’ or ‘Generation W ’. Beauty pageants are crucial to the magazine’s glamour image and, in economic terms, to its circulation. Beauty pageants we all know are market grounds for not only the bodies on display but also for the promotion of the cosmetics and the fashion industry. It has also been suggested that the beauty pageant is a significant site of ‘political intervention’ precisely because it opens up the possibilities of new ways of considering ‘women’s engagement with desire and pleasure’ (Oza 2001: 1089). There is no pure space within which women are constructed as non-objectified subjects and therefore their expression of agency in participating in such events indicates a complex network of agency, negotiation and self-definition. There is however a factual reality which indicates that women participants in such beauty contests end up being the primary icons of the fashion and cosmetics industry and therefore remain trapped in the domain of objectified display and recognition. The ageing, disabled, obese or out-of-shape body, which are seen as being deviant from the perfect embodied state, find no place in this space and there is therefore an inability to break the dangerously limited and structuring nature of such embodied construction. More importantly, magazines like Femina, and even Cosmopolitan, and Elle, ensure that postcolonial constructions of gendered modernity are based very squarely on economic factors relating to advertisements and a policy that is meant to enhance the magazine’s circulation. The resultant new ‘consuming’ woman is a result of the new economic order and is a beneficiary of globalisation as much as she is caught up in the larger processes of recolonisation. It is also the case that postcolonial habitus reproduces gender identity as well as engenders social practices for the performance of identity through agential negotiation, strategisation and self-definition. In this context, Bourdieu notes, ‘The social gaze is not a universal, abstract, objectifying power...but a social power, whose efficacy is always partly due to the fact that the receiver recognizes the categories of

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perception and appreciation it applies to him or her’ (Bourdieu 1984: 207). It is through this recognition that compliance as well as agency and resistance come into play and women are simultaneously engaged in the construction and reproduction of embodied womanhood. The complexities underlying this engagement belong both to the world of cognizance as well as to an unconscious playing out of desire and emotion in the construction of identity. The media has played a role that, through its ability to ‘inflect desire, memory and fantasy’, serves to reproduce prevailing ‘relations of ruling’ (Smith 1999) in various modes that may appear different but largely remain unchanged.6 The challenge in the contemporary moment lies in organising and developing a ‘media practice by which subjectivities may be lived and analysed as part of a transformative, emancipatory practice’ (Shohat and Stam 1996: 166). As long as women’s magazines continue to pander to the hard sell of the beauty and fashion industry, and cater to their own economic ambitions, it is unlikely that such a challenge will ever be raised.7 Magazines like Femina may have co-opted the language of feminist discourse in their emphasis on the ‘professional’ woman reflected in articles about women professionals, or in providing information about the different career choices available to women. Their overwhelming emphasis on beauty and glamour, both in the fashion displays and in the advertisements they carry, however, indicates that they attempt to address a diversity of women and by carrying progressive articles and a variety of useful information, they may attract some discerning readers. Moreover, the overall slant of Femina certainly remains very much towards emphasizing a life style dedicated to Beauty and Glamour. The woman who Femina addresses is no doubt a ‘modern’ woman to the extent that she may have access, through her education and privileged socio-economic status, to a variety of occupations that are increasingly available in a rapidly globalising and modernising urban India. She is no doubt interested in beauty and body care and maintenance to the extent it helps in the embodied presentation of herself 6 Smith has examined in depth ‘the ruling relations’ which she identifies as that ‘complex of objectified social relations that organize and regulate our lives in contemporary society’ (Smith 1999: 74). 7 I therefore find it difficult to accept Chanda’s view urging the women’s movement to negotiate the popular media, including women’s magazines, and to ‘use’ them as a ‘vehicle for the conveyance of our aims and concerns’ (Chanda 2004: 132–3).

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in everyday life. She is also traditional to the extent that she places a high premium on certain values relating to, for example, marriage, motherhood and family life. She is, as Sunder Rajan defines her, the ‘woman for all seasons’, ‘new’ in the sense of ‘having evolved and arrived’ (Sunder Rajan 1993: 130) in response to the times as well as being ‘modern’ and ‘liberated’. She is also representative of the ‘truly Indian’ woman, to the extent that she has not forsaken tradition and in fact her identity is tied to that. The recolonisation of womanhood in contemporary India projects the trope of modernity as the overarching privileged space that offers freedom and liberation. However, the relations of power embedded in this trope simultaneously reconstruct woman as keeper, preserver and nurturer of tradition well within its normative definitions of gender identity. Gender in this way becomes essential to preserving the honour and integrity of the nation state that is beset with the vicissitudes of globalisation and turns to Indian womanhood as the embodiment of respectability and national honour that must be preserved at all costs. To understand women as the bearers of respectable and honourable embodiment is to emphasise their primary responsibility towards the community and the nation. Is this however how women themselves perceive their experience of embodiment? I turn now to women’s voices to understand their lives in the everyday from the perspective of embodiment and identity, and their experience of violence in the troubled contexts of their existence as gendered subjects.

4 THE BODY IN THE MIRROR EMBODIMENT, VIOLENCE AND IDENTITY

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his chapter is based on material from interviews with two categories of women: those who are educated, professionals, upper class and engaged in work or are homemakers. The second category includes women who are from a more middle class socio-economic background, working outside the homes and who speak their mother tongue as their first language.1 The women in the first category have all received education at fee-paying private schools and have studied with English as the medium of instruction throughout. Many of them have studied abroad at institutions of higher education and have travelled outside India. They are cosmopolitan in demeanour, sartorial styles, and lifestyles. There are variations in their presentations of self in everyday life. Depending on the extent of their education, they consider it important to express and communicate their feminist outlook, articulating and emphasising by often using sophisticated linguistic turns of phrase, their various relationships through a feminist lens. Simultaneously, however, the mirrorimage of their embodiment appears as a trope in some of their stories signifying the construction of a self based on what is revealed to them through the looking glass.2 This is however not the only Interviews with both categories of women were conducted between 1997 and 2001. 2 Among some educationally disadvantaged young women as well, a mention was made of the use of the mirror but this appeared to be for purely utilitarian considerations such as the putting on of the bindi, sindoor or lipstick. The mirror is used by them for the construction of the self as well, even though, it remains unspoken to the extent that they rely on their reflection for the performance of a particular identity—as a married woman. 1

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image as women’s embodied experience in everyday life is also derived from their location in the class and the family with capital of varying kinds. The metaphor of the mirror, however, is marked with meaning as there is an experience of embodiment through an image that is passing, impermanent, changeable and therefore very much incomplete. The sense of incompleteness emphasises the grounding of self in an ephemeral embodiment and inadvertently reflects women’s understanding of themselves as fluid beings, always in motion, to be constructed, redefined and remodelled according to the image and the meanings conveyed through the image. The second category of women have a more utilitarian construction of the embodied self, based on their experience of their marginal status in the family and, although they express their views on the oppression of women, their relatively conservative backgrounds limit their modes of expression. This in no way however detracts from the significance of their attempts at contestation, negotiation and change. The ‘good’ woman whether she is daughter, wife, daughter-in-law, or mother is a recurring motif in the stories of both sets of women. Relations within the family, between different sets of actors, with the woman at the centre of it all, is another persistent theme. Undoubtedly, social class is important, and the variations in social class is reflected in women’s understandings of their position in the family, their goals and motivations, and above all, in their contestations of their position in the domestic and the public sphere. Educated, westernised and upper-class women in urban India tend to be more articulate about the forms of oppression they experience in their everyday lives and simultaneously recognise their conflicts and dilemmas and know how to deal with them. This is also the case for women slum dwellers although their manner of expression and style of performance is both articulated and performed quite differently. Their voices nonetheless reflect the call for challenging the structures of habitus through explicit negotiation and contestations as well as the more implicit forms of performance, play and enactment that women engage in to achieve their goals. I now turn to these voices to explore and understand the multiple subjectivities that inform women’s constitution of their gendered identities in the multiple worlds they simultaneously inhabit as well as point to the generative constituents of the habitus itself.

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RESISTANCE WITHIN THE FAMILY AND MARRIAGE In my narration of the stories that follow, I do not deviate too much from the voices of women. It is essential to let the stories be told without persistent sociological analysis. It is no less significant that the voices speak about lived experience as much as about the tenacity with which women confront the dilemmas of everyday life. Sneha was born in 1953 in West Bengal and at the time of the interview had been married for nine years. She had qualified for a Masters degree in Hindi and held a government job before her marriage. She now has a small business in garments. She did not want to get married at all. ‘I had a job.’ However, the social domain asserts itself through re-presenting and reproducing normative definitions of single womanhood, including the pain and loneliness of a miserable life, ‘But then my mother explained to me about the necessity of companionship in old age, so I got married.’ Sneha’s husband is an artist and they live in an extended family with her husband’s parents. She has rationalised the joint family existence with an enhanced sense of filial duties as her husband is the only son of his parents and, as is customary, is required to take care of them in their old age. Although she had internalised this normative requirement, she was not quite prepared for the experience of ill will and loss of self-esteem she encountered. This experience is however based on her sense of self being defined in terms of a ‘goodness’ that has definite social and cultural meanings. She was not considered a ‘good’ person by her mother-in-law who continuously taunted her that ‘You will have a daughter only’ because, as Sneha says, ‘the mother of a son is a very valued and respectable member of society…and I must not have anything good. That is what they wanted. I had a girl only.’ Giving birth to a female child became, for Sneha, a symbol of being a dishonourable member of society and, by implication, unable to experience a ‘good’ life. Commenting on the manner in which her marriage has contained her and set limits to her horizon, Sneha emphasises: I have nothing for myself. No entertainment, no shopping due to lack of time. I can’t visit my sister also. When we got married, we used to go out a lot to parties as my husband has a large circle of friends. That irritated them a lot. They thought husband has brought her into the house for them only, to do the housework

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and sit at home. They didn’t like the idea that I am going to have a child. My mother-in-law fell ill for a few days hearing about it. My father-in-law was very happy about the child but mother-in-law didn’t want a male grandchild.

Sneha understands that her mother-in-law’s resentment of Sneha’s condition is based on the cultural premise that her dominant position in the household would have been threatened if Sneha had a male child and in any case, as a mother, Sneha would have an enhanced visibility in the kin and social circles that value motherhood as much as they do marriage. The dominant presence of the family is overwhelming and takes over women’s lives. At the time of marriage, main problem was with my mother-in-law. My father-in-law was very affectionate and used to look after me a lot. My husband was the only son so they resented our going out alone. Even my daughter they resented when she was born because my husband gave her a lot of attention. My husband understood but used to keep quiet. Sometimes he used to shout at me, used to believe my mother-in-law and sisters-in-law. He was controlled to a large extent by them. Some two-three months after marriage, it all started. Now he has understood all these things. Three cousin sisters-in-law helped me a lot to cope with my marriage. My mother-in-law all the time was expecting sympathy for her being sickly. Both in-laws have pace-makers (in their hearts).

Sneha’s position as a ‘good’ daughter-in-law was also continuously under attack by her mother-in-law within this larger network of aunts and sisters-in-law. While it is within the family that she experiences severe conflicts, it is within the family itself, in the presence of larger kin, that Sneha steps out of the imposed definitions of a ‘good’ daughter-in-law and wife by breaking the boundaries of acceptable behaviour: Then I took a drastic step and decided to live separately last year. I stopped eating food for five days and said ‘I want to talk to everybody in front of everyone (aunts and other members of the larger family).’ Everything was cleared up. Because I didn’t eat for five days, then, my husband agreed to the meeting. At this meeting, I asked everyone present, ‘What I hear from others, they are saying about me?: like, I don’t serve food to my father-in-law, don’t like my sister-in-law, etc.?’ After the meeting, things were

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cleared up somewhat. Now my husband also stands up for me so they are behaving better. With my daughter also they take better care now but not the way I take care of her. I can’t keep a maid because mother-in-law cannot manage her. My husband now helps me a little. Earlier he had feeling that they may taunt that he helps me, so he did nothing. But now he does some things. I still feel tired. I don’t have maid or helper.

Sneha’s act of resistance indicates how women use diverse means like fasting, or holding meetings with elders in the family, to confront their oppressors and break out of a predefined normative, regularising and disciplining mode of kin relationships. Sneha chose to confront the accusations in the presence of a larger kin network that silenced her in-laws. Her experience however has diminished her loyalty and affection to her husband’s family: I have suffered so much. I don’t have ‘family feeling’ for them anymore. At first, I was willing to adjust but not any more. I was very adjusting and I thought everything will work out but it didn’t. I have myself lived in a joint family before my marriage.

It is also important to consider how relations with the larger family impact intimate relations between partners and create sexual anxiety: I enjoy his company more but I don’t want sex with him all the time. He is however a very satisfying lover. Some ‘mental strain’ of the marriage was also there and I feel tired all the time. Initially, two-three months were very good. So the strain of the marriage tells on the sex life.

Sneha has often blamed him for not standing up to his parents on her behalf, ‘My husband didn’t take stand during troublesome period. I used to blame him as he could not control the situation. I wanted to live separately with my daughter but he couldn’t take it. But now it is much better.’ She thinks that some of her husband’s behaviour can be attributed to his strong sense of filial duty and responsibility he has internalised even though, in her eyes, he has not been treated on equal terms with his other four siblings: My mother-in-law is very fond of her daughters but my husband was not treated equally. Now he feels his people are selfish, he wasn’t looked after. Only when they need him to go to hospital

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or for money, they talk to him. Not otherwise. He has no close relationship with any of the four sisters. He is closer to aunts and cousins than his own sisters. It is still a mental torture for me to live in that house but I have to live there. My husband wants to do many things but he is helpless. He feels it is his duty to give money, to do his own work, to take food, etc. I would leave with my daughter but she needs her father also and basically my husband is a nice man. In-laws had a ‘good lesson’ that their youngest daughter is now going through a divorce. These girls are always told to dominate but even that didn’t work out.

Sneha gets some satisfaction from a failed marriage of one of her sisters-in-law, especially because she has worked hard to ensure the success of her own marriage in terms of her relationship with her husband and her position in his family. The significance of the family as a major theatre where the drama of gender politics is played out not only between partners but also in the complexities of relations among and between the larger family, cannot be underestimated as Sneha’s account emphasises. It is in the marital relationship that is embedded in the family that Sneha finds sexual pleasure and fulfillment (she was a virgin until she married at the age of 32 years) but is also oppressed, primarily by other women in her husband’s family, and where she finally achieves control over her situation through a strong expression of her agency. The family in modern, urban India is simultaneously the source of fulfillment as well as oppression and disenchantment for the recast or redefined ‘modern’ Indian woman. In addition, the significance of social class in the formation of an individual’s habitus as well as in women’s lived experience in everyday life is undeniable. The following account shows us how class permeates women’s understanding of their position in the family, their goals and motivations, and above all, their contestations of their position in the domestic sphere. Monica, born in 1944, clearly belongs to an upper class, privileged, educated and elite family. Her father studied at Oxford and went on to become the head of an eminent institution of higher education in Punjab. Unlike Sneha, she had access to a good English-medium school in New Delhi and to an exclusive boarding school. She has a younger sister and both girls received ‘good’ education, as was common at that time among this social category, at ‘all girls’ institutions of education. However, she was married at a very young age. Her husband’s mother saw her skating at the rink and sent a proposal for marriage of her

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son. Evidently, in familial contexts, marriage and a ‘good’ marriage are celebrated and valorised. Monica’s younger sister in fact envies Monica’s marital status as that of a well married woman, rich and well-settled. Women’s perceptions of their everyday realities may be markedly different from how others, including their kin, perceive them. When asked what her occupation is, Monica replied, ‘I do everything but earn money. Now I’ve realised I’ve missed the bus.’ Her husband is a businessman and they are extremely wealthy. Monica however emphasised that she has no access to any money and has no decisionmaking authority in the household. She repeatedly said that her husband takes all decisions from buying the furniture to other household tasks, ‘He had the knack and the money to do it. I can’t take major decisions. Children have to speak on my behalf. Money speaks. I’d put up a fight but nothing comes of it.’ In the context of the family, women are divested of sexual desire for many reasons, the most significant being a complete lack of communication and affection between the marital partners. It has been argued that the social construction ‘of female “need” constrains women to invest desire in maternity rather than…sexuality. Hence it constructs the female self in accordance with the dominant cultural paradigm’ (Das 1995: 169). In fact, a woman is often compelled to invest desire in maternity primarily because of the lack of communication or pleasurable sexual relationship with the partner. Monica has three children and while the older two children are married, the youngest daughter fills her life, ‘Ever since I had my daughter, I wanted to be with her and look after her. I wanted her so badly. I was lonely. You know, that inner loneliness. I want people all the time.’ Monica’s sexual relationship with her partner is devoid of desire and is a source of intense agony for her: I was forced to have sex. The hurts during the day reflected in my sex life at night. Slowly, I didn’t want any of that. Now we don’t share a bedroom for the last eight years. I started getting a phobia. I wouldn’t move for hours together in case I disturbed him and he would pounce on me. After every fight, I would sleep with the children and then those periods grew longer. He used to womanise and that hurt me and I couldn’t bear his touch. Physically I am so put off, I don’t think I would like him to touch me.

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Her social class propels her to add: Indian men have no ‘grooming’ and I value that in a man. I yearn for a companionship. I was only 41 or 42 [years of age] when I moved out of the bedroom. Where is the good relationship? You don’t get it on a platter. Even if I get a chance today, I would walk out. Casual flirtation, people are in to. But I’m conservative, I can’t do anything on rebound. But today if I get a solid relationship, I would give it all up.

Monica’s experience of her unfulfilled sexuality is linked to her expectations of an interpersonal relationship that embodies the dispositions of an upper-class upbringing with all its expectations of what Monica refers to as good grooming. The continuous attack on her embodied self which she experiences as rape, loss of dignity, and so on, prevents her from engaging in a satisfying sexual relationship with her partner. The denial of sexual desire is further mitigated by her experience of her marriage as an oppressive condition that denies her freedom, choice, and financial independence and from which she has no clearly articulated exit points. Motherhood undoubtedly marks an important defining moment in a woman’s identity and is also invested with desire, as a socially invested ‘need’. However even motherhood, exalted and praised as it is in the Indian family, fails to provide women with self-worth and fulfillment if their self-respect and dignity is continually under assault by their partner. I have become a very bitter person and I am very rude to him. There is always rape in marriage. One hour before, he is abusing me and then wanting sex; and I refused and he pulled my hair and raped me. Then, one day I broke his precious things and I told him, ‘You dare touch me’. My needs were never perceived by him. Now I don’t take any shit from him. He never used to even give money for housekeeping, etc. My decisions I say doesn’t matter one bit. He will listen to my children but not to me. I don’t like it. It hurts my dignity that my children have to speak for me. I’m emotionally dependent on my children and I don’t like it. Am I a caretaker only? I would like to get out of the situation. The best thing is to be away for three-four months or I would have a nervous breakdown. We’ve outgrown each other. I don’t like being near him.

In seeking independence from her children, Monica is asserting a movement away from tradition that emphasises the opposite, that is,

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close and dependent relations between grown-up children and their ageing parents. While it is within the family that Monica experiences shame and dishonour in front of her children, it is in the same physical and emotional space that Monica steps out of the accepted definitions of a ‘good’ wife and mother, by breaking her husband’s precious things, by leaving him for several months in a year, and by even indicating a desire to be independent of her children. Monica partly blames her mother-in-law’s continuous presence for many years as one reason for the breakdown of her marriage: My husband and me always drifted apart. We have nothing in common. What I like, he doesn’t do. He married me only for my looks. Boys’ adulation was a problem for me. It was a handicap for me. I didn’t enjoy it. I had a very restricted, conservative upbringing and then I was married very early with all [in spite of] my father’s education. I had a horrible mother-in-law. She was controlling everything. She didn’t like my husband even sitting next to me. The doctor told me to be careful during my pregnancy. She didn’t like him touching me. She was a young widow and very possessive about her son. I was given no money, no freedom to do what I want. My husband was weak and didn’t rebel and in fact over the years he has become a carbon copy of his mother. All the time she was there.

In a sense, her mother-in-law therefore continues to exist through her son and this is evident in Monica’s life. The presence of the kin plays a significant role in shaping the marital encounter and relationship and influences need and desire within the relationship as both Sneha’s and Monica’s accounts so clearly show us. The reverse is also true so that Monica’s relationship with her mother-in-law has influenced the manner in which she treats her daughter-in-law who lives with her son in her house. I always give in to my daughter-in-law. I am very considerate after the experience of my mother-in-law. But him I always want to hurt. At this age, you need the husband mostest because children have their own lives. This I don’t have. I am a very independent person. This was my biggest asset. I always found ways to amuse myself. So I didn’t have a nervous breakdown.

Monica does however experience a sense of being completely alone in her predicament as it is not exactly something she can share with the children. Nor can they help fulfil her expectations from her partner,

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‘I am alone even now. What happens to you happens to you alone. But children cannot fulfill you emotionally. Nothing can compensate for a good husband.’ Social class and its privileges are, however, not sufficient in themselves to prevent the experience of gender domination or a breakdown of self-esteem. At the same time, the generative quality in the habitus continuously seeks a space within which there can be a ‘breaking out’ of the existing space whether we understand this in terms of women’s well-being or an actual social and physical space. The wealth and social status that privileges Monica over other women in no way contributes to an added experience of emotional contentment or well-being: The craving of ‘being wanted’ everyone has. If you have five cars, three servants and four dogs, it is not necessary to be happy. He is working more to show others that we have so much money. I would like to have a husband who is retired, likes to travel and we have less money. He is like a machine; he always talks in terms of money and his goal is to make more and more money. I would like to enjoy my life. To keep up his standard, he has to work more and more. I am not enjoying my life because my husband is not there. I would go mad here staying in this tense atmosphere. There is a lot of stress here.

Then, Monica finds her own solution to her problem. By questioning her present state, and seeking another life, her action reflects the creation of other dispositions outside the current frame: That’s why I go away to … for four to five months every year. I don’t care if he minds or not. I don’t care if he womanises. My children are grown up now. They support me. I’m not an escapist but time is running out and I want to get away. I’m dying to have some peace and being away gives me that relief. I don’t ask him even when I’m going.

In this way, Monica seeks to resolve the external conflict and by defining and seeking well-being for herself, she moves away from the constancy that is imposed on her by her habitus without however completely abandoning her present state as a married woman with a family to whom she always returns. Monica also feels that she cannot express her unhappiness to other women and therefore is unable to share her life and problems with others:

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I have very good friends but most women are so shallow, they don’t understand. ‘What is she talking about? She has everything.’ I talk to my neighbour who has a terrible marriage and because she understands we talk openly to each other…Only three people are important to you: husband, mother-in-law and mother. I was never close to any of them. My mother was only concerned about my sister as she thought I have plenty of money and everything is OK. But there is emotional fulfillment also which people don’t know. My sister had an alcoholic husband so she had a lot of sympathy. But no one understands my situation. Everyone thinks I’m in complete control.

The nuclear family, as much as the extended family, changes women’s goals, occupational choices and indeed their notions about their embodied existence. Monica’s experience in the family is very much shaped by the fact that she did not study beyond high school and is therefore unable to be financially independent. She has also become dependent on her situation, tormented as it is, to the extent that she acknowledges that she is conservative and also committed to her children in diverse ways. In some senses, Monica appears to have surrendered to a life of luxury and wealth that sustains her in the midst of her emotional and personal misery. The postcolonial habitus clearly endures in the class-based nature of its existence and the social status and the position this entails. Simultaneously, however, there is a movement between the constancy and malleability of habitus, both aspects that simultaneously seek to keep Monica firmly embedded in her current context, much as she desires to break free, as well as provide her with the impetus, drive, and strength which enable her to take on violence and despair on her own terms. Monica’s account of her experience may project her as a dissatisfied, discontented and spoilt woman who has everything and continues to complain. In the articulation of her experience in the perspective of how gendered identities are constructed and endure in the midst of wealth, glamour and social status, women’s needs and desires remain unaddressed. The experience of poverty, unemployment, low caste and class status, disease and suffering raises the issue of choices in terms of needs and desires in the everyday life of a woman. I contend however that at no time are woman’s choices located outside their everyday existence; in that sense, they speak from within the multiplicity of their experience and location. This does not however

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suggest that women do not in fact articulate and indeed exercise their agency in contesting, resolving or changing oppressive conditions as accounts by middle- and upper-class women indicate. It is only that they decide to use several and varying acts of resistance that need not necessarily fall into a universal pattern, but remain embedded in local acts or modalities of agency evolving from individual ways of perception and action. Their potential for change is therefore always there, so to speak, but remains limited and constrained. The nuclear family, as much as the extended family, changes women’s goals, occupational choices and indeed their self-definitions. Woman however may also express their agency in other ways from within the nuclear family. Rehana was born in 1956, is married with two young children and works as a journalist. Like Monica, she had a very western education and upbringing in schools outside India which she thinks has largely influenced her ideas about relationships, choices and equality. At the same time, being in the nuclear family has also redefined her ideas and experience of equality: I’m very demanding of equality. It’s an inbuilt thing. An intellectual discussion goes on in my head. I’m a hard taskmaster in terms of what men are used to. So for me it’s an emotional torture to have this on my head, for example, never to leave the children alone. But my husband’s job changed and became a nine to five one. So now my job becomes less important and I have to take over the gap caused by his new job. This bothers me. [That is,] the problem of equality, equally sharing home tasks. I feel very deeply about it, that there must be an equal relationship. So within me it is a problem. With each example, I accept that true equality is not possible between men and women especially after the birth of children. There is a special bond between mothers and children which cannot be taken over by men however close men may be to them. They [the children] are priorities for me now. Day-to-day definitions of equality have to change. To see men and women in different roles has to change and this change may not be ideal or more equal.

In this manner, Rehana clearly perceives her role, as she sees it, in relation to her children and family, as a mother and care-giver, and much as it disturbs her sense of justice, she accepts this as her main role. Although Rehana seeks to redefine equality in terms of her perceived priorities, she emphasises women’s ability to exercise

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choice in everyday life. So if a member of her extended family says that Rehana ‘didn’t do much as a daughter-in-law’, she asserts: It bothers me but it doesn’t torment me. Women trap themselves, [we] imprison ourselves so badly, [we] don’t define our relationships. [There are] certain rebellious acts which do make a statement. But you can do a whole lot of things without upsetting anyone. We need to look within and compound our sense of self-confidence and don’t need to do what you need to. We think we have no choice but we actually have a lot of choices. We have to stop lying to ourselves.

Rehana articulates and defines the changing contours of habitus and its trajectory thoughtfully but, as we have seen, nonetheless submits to its assertion of her primary role of mother, nurturer and care-giver. Rehana has worked hard to free herself from dominance in more than one domain of family life and in the process changed the traditional relationship between father and daughter. She asserts that her relationship with her highly educated father was a source of intellectual and emotional domination which she resisted and, over time, established the relationship on her terms: My father has been an important influence in my life. This changed under pressure in the sense that he had a lot of expectations about me but my struggle for independence began then. My father was a strong person and influenced me through logic, discussion, etc. The struggle to battle him through analysis became very strong. So we learnt from his dominance, to struggle through analysis. The question, for example, of the ability of freeing myself from my father’s questioning and influence has been an emotional torture and torment for me. You take on the family to free yourself. It has not been a silent battle. And my father gave in through a struggle in order to preserve his relationship with his daughter.

In Rehana’s articulation of her struggle, we find the good daughter being transformed primarily as an outcome of her education and persistence. Culture and tradition therefore are not permanent and may be contested depending on woman’s class, position, status and location.

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BODY IMAGE AND SELF-PRESENTATION An important aspect of gender consciousness and identity is body image. Vision itself implies that there is a body that is visible.3 The body image is not just about how one is seen by another but also how sees oneself and would like others to see us. The element of self-construction is therefore always present in both perception and practice. In this section, I will attempt an understanding of woman’s performance both in front of the mirror not only to present herself with a particular embodied image, or recognise it as a familiar shadow, but also to see herself performing for the gaze of the other. While it is true that through such performances, woman is not thereby transgressing authority and her construction of her gender identity remains embedded in particular images that exist in the social, cultural and public imaginaries, she nonetheless is giving off expressions of herself that she wants to, in this process of construction of her self and public image. In this sense, she is engaged, in a practical sense, in creating and performing images that will show her to be what she wants to be seen as.4 The narratives that follow indicate that women do indeed understand the impact of the social, cultural and male representations of their embodiment which to a large extent influence their own images and perceptions. However, their agential practices are reflected in their attempt to redefine beauty in a strategic mode to resist conventional notions of beauty. This resistance is not however always sustained and women therefore are often in a complex situation where they both seek and value the approval of the social and public other, which may incorporate both the male and the female gaze, and simultaneously resist the gaze in order to enable their own vision to prevail. More importantly, they use their performance, to also tease and manipulate the other, as well as consciously devise their self performativity, in such a way that enables their vision to prevail. The element of 3 This, argues Grosz, is ‘the very condition of seeing, the condition of embodiment’ (Grosz 1994: 101). The limits and shape of body image are largely determined by ‘space surrounding and within the subject’s body’. It is the ‘lived spatiality of endogenous sensations, the social space of interpersonal relations, and the “objective” or “scientific” space of cultural (including scientific and artistic) representations’ (ibid.: 80). 4 Andrew Stathern however points to ‘the contradiction between expression of “the self ” via a “unique” make-up/fashion style and the limited range of images of sociallyrecognized and accepted ‘roles’ which are available to women’ (Craik 1994: 106).

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strategy that is imbricated in this process is obvious and is indicative of ‘the situation of duress under which gender performance always and variously occurs’ (Butler 1990:139).5 There is an intimate relationship between woman’s perception of embodiment and the experience of sexuality. Kamini, born in 1956, a school teacher and separated from her husband says: The shape of my body is important. That is, to feel good about myself. Not a barbie doll figure, of course. As a particularly progressive woman I might say I am not vulnerable to media images of the body but of course one is. [One] also justifies it by saying it is ‘healthy’ [to stay thin]. A woman’s body is pleasing to yourself, to have a beautiful body. Feel more relaxed relating to somebody if I feel my body is the shape I like.

Kamini in fact urges men to acknowledge her body shape and comment on it. In this manner, she plays a dominant role in the assertion of her body image and its acceptance among the men she relates to: When men do express themselves in relation to my body’s shape, its almost as if I prompt them to say it. I nudge them to do it. Their saying ‘It’s wonderful’ is not enough because I know it’s not. [An] oriental figure: large breasts, small waist, is what I have and men might say they appreciate it because they like it. Their perceptions are different from mine in terms of what they like, e.g. western female body. But their perceptions don’t convince me enough to alter myself for them.

The effect of media representations of woman’s embodiment is acknowledged as well as there is an articulation of her self as someone who desires male approval of her body and simultaneously resists male constructions of what may be considered ‘authentic’ feminine embodiment. She perceives her need for the other’s appreciation of her physical beauty which is clearly linked to her sexuality but she is also aware that she is not convinced by male notions of idealised embodiment to transform herself. There is an obvious conflict, in this case, between her perceived need and her rejection of the male gaze. At the same time, however, Kamini consciously resisted her former 5 Judith Butler concludes therefore that ‘as a strategy of survival within compulsory systems, gender is a performance with clearly punitive consequences’ (Butler 1990: 139).

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husband’s assessment of her body image throughout the marriage, refusing to subscribe to his expectations: My husband didn’t like my weight. In a kind of protest, I remained fat throughout my marriage. He had no right to relate to the way I looked. That was my business. It was also related to the fact that I didn’t like my body fat. He didn’t articulate it obviously but jokingly and with vibes… My identity was tied up with this image of being slim. Although I was protesting all the time, I was also succumbing to it. I wasn’t relaxed about it. It affected my sexuality. My husband didn’t realize what he was doing. So many women are more inward-looking and articulate to themselves about the subtexts in their relationships than men.

Resistance is therefore a conscious, articulated act in response to a perceived act of oppression that has important consequences for the identities women shape for themselves. So while women may experience conflict in their own assessment of their body image and response to the gaze of the other, there is often a far more clearly articulated response when the gaze is experienced as oppressive in ways that threaten their identities. Kamini also expresses an acute awareness of woman’s abilities to articulate her emotions in relationships far more effectively than men who are not so much in tune with their inner selves. This observation helps Kamini to recognise her relationship with her husband as ‘violent’ in many dimensions and enables her to focus on acts that express her resistance to the violence. Ageing, with its temporality signifying, in this context, not decay, but an emotional and physical maturity is an important part of women’s stories of their embodied images. Kamini’s emphasis on women’s ability to articulate their inner worlds is reflected in Rehana’s experience of her embodiment and the manner in which age, changing perceptions and lifestyles contribute to bodily practices. Rehana identifies age and the changing life course of a woman as strong identifying characteristics of body image: Those definitions [of body image] change with age. As a teenager and as a married mother would be completely different. When I was in my early twenties, my body had to be athletic, sexy, and I had to flaunt it because I was in the West. I wore hot pants, mini skirts. But I don’t feel like that anymore. Now my body is mine. Something nobody owns. I have a kind of relationship with it in

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which it is mine to do what I please with it and it doesn’t have to be shown. Comfort and aesthetics is the primary factor in my existence. In the process, it might look sexy to my husband and other people but it’s not what I set out to do. Now I’m not embarrassed by it. As a teenager I was, but now I am not separated from my body… There is a greater self-confidence and self-assurance now that comes from motherhood. The fact that I breast-fed, used my body for my children, it has a value, it is more precious now. Then it is not so much on display. Now more a sense of the wholeness of my body: mental, physical, etc. Age, intellectual growth and physical change (motherhood), a combination of these three factors which have influenced my perceptions of my body. The fact that I’m doing yoga, homeopathy, all this has to do with my body.

As they approach middle age, women articulate this movement away from earlier definitions of embodiment. Radhika, born in 1953, is a well-educated theatre personality who directs, acts, and dances on stage, and is married with a child. Her experience of body image and bodily practice also highlights the changing concepts of embodiment with age and maturity. She, unlike Rehana, experienced her embodiment as a young woman in terms of display but more in terms of peer group approval which she did not necessarily seek herself. Moreover, Radhika’s assertion is that as one grows or ages, mediating notions of the self that are created or shaped by others, fall back and are overtaken by agentially negotiated constructions of self: There was the notion of ‘the fashionable girl’ in college days and we didn’t want to be fashionable. We had our own notions of fashionable from scruffy jeans to a beautiful Indian sari. My friends wore skirts but I didn’t. But now, I feel if it looks good on me, why not? So it is a changing notion of viewing the self. In college, peer group and whatnot came between self and the world. Now, one is more in touch with self as self and unmediated by notions of self, so one can arrive at different things/notions about clothing. Also a different notion of self now where it [clothes/the attire] can look nice but I’m not making a statement.

Radhika’s body image and self-presentation may be unmediated by the social and public gaze as she perceives it but she also wants to be simultaneously recognised as a trend setter or as someone whose sartorial style is publicly appreciated. In this sense, there is a desire for social and public recognition of body image that is tied up with

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her own identification of what constitutes her image in terms of the clothes she wears and the style she sees herself as setting. For example, she has recently started wearing skirts outside the home and says: …But it’s a big thing for me [wearing skirts] now I’ve started wearing them outside. When it gets cooler I’ll start wearing shorts and jeans at home. I discovered shorts in Goa and felt liberated. So cool. Nothing trapped around the legs. Felt very young. With jeans you are already typecast as a ‘madam’ you can be pally with. Also wear lungis, tastefully, in batik. I’ve fashioned it so it doesn’t get tucked in but have two strings. I have been stopped and asked if I’m setting a new fashion which thrilled me. I’d like someone to say to me, ‘I’d like to design for your body and personality.’

There are other utilitarian considerations that influence sartorial choice but all of these are nonetheless shaped by class dispositions and taste. Radhika therefore has a strong sense of what beauty means for her in terms of both her experience of it as well as her idealisation of it. If I started looking very scrappy and skin full of blackheads and looking tired, I wouldn’t want to go around like that. The idea of physical beauty has been very important for me—not long nails and removing hair. [It is] to do with acting. In front of a mirror, [I have] performed for hours. So it has to do with looking at an attractive and beautiful person. Mixture really of attractive and beautiful. [I have] an interest in theatre, performing another, enacting another in front of the mirror. Not just seeing yourself but also the character you are playing. So mixture of inner character, your own physical features, and the character you are playing. So when one is really into a character one’s physical features can change and become beautiful as your inner character also changes.

In this manner, she creates the perfect image of herself through the mirror, using the medium of theatre, through which she presents how she sees herself at different moments of time and space. The conflict may be between Radhika’s idealisation of beauty and her dissatisfactory experience of her own body image as she perhaps sees it reflected in the mirror and through touch so that she is unhappy when her eyes have a puffy look or her paunch is loose. However, Radhika herself does not experience this as a conflict and in fact sees a direct relationship between her work, that is, theatre, ‘feeling good’ and ‘looking good’. She also acknowledges the important role of

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the gaze and appreciation by the social and public other in enhancing her own experience of feeling good. In this sense, for Radhika, shape, form, pleasure and feeling good are all part of the everyday experience of beauty and this is heightened by others’ appreciation of her physical form as well as of her work. Health (through yoga and homeopathy), happiness and beauty, as in looking good, both within their own definitions as well as in the discursive constructions of others, are associated with good work for women like Rehana and Radhika. In this sense, for Radhika, shape, form, pleasure and feeling good are all part of the everyday experience of beauty. Shape is very important and form too. Not that I strive towards a slim body. I don’t strive towards it. I don’t like flab. It’s linked to being healthy and feeling good. I used to like big breasts and all that but it went off. With dance, one sheds weight around the breasts. So it changes notions of sexuality. Because of work, breasts go but you’re feeling beautiful and good. So big breasts are not important. I love it in others. I like women with big breasts. From high school days, my passion was to have big breasts. When people say, ‘You’re looking trim. You’re looking good’, I take it to mean that they say you’re looking ‘trim and slim’. It’s related to work also. Like, ‘You’re looking good, are you working on something new?’ I haven’t become indifferent to what other people say. I like [it when they say] nice things. I feel bad when they’re critical. I dye my hair. It’s very important for me to have black hair. I’m not ready to go grey at all. It’s a mixing up very much of youth and beauty, looking good, and so on. My face structure, I’m sensitive to that. I don’t have a full face and grey hair doesn’t go. I’m not ready for old age. I would like to postpone it as much as I can. I want my husband also to look young. So it works both ways. I like him to say, ‘You’re looking nice,’ but it could be because of my sari and whatnot. It’s not so much that my husband is telling me but that he’s noticing my weight and may do something about his own too. If something nice is happening to me, I’d like him also to experience that. Health has been a problem with me and I like it, it’s very important that my family appreciates my getting over it and doing something about my work. I can only do good stuff if you are feeling healthy and feeling happy and looking good.

Radhika’s identity is largely constructed around the dominant defining paradigms in her life, her work and her family, which are ordered within multiple layers of looking and feeling healthy and

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good Radhika also links her experience of her sensuality and sexuality to her work: I wondered ten years ago if I could have sex outside my marriage and then enjoy it. A couple of times I was attracted, became physical, and then switched off. But I was already a changed person. Person and work became paramount. All my work is to do with the sensuous. I am an emotional actor—it is to do with emotion and a sensual reservoir…In work, a sense of sensuality is very important. I love it when my husband cuddles me. I love to cuddle him. But I hope I don’t arouse him. It’s a physio-emotional arousement in me. Not a sexual arousal. This is possible in theatre also.

In this manner, the emotional, physical, sexual and social self come together in Radhika’s expression of her embodiment and identity as wife and as an actor who uses the mirror to project herself not only for her work but also as how she would like to be seen in everyday life. The mirror is an important instrument in women’s experience. It is used both for reflecting body image as well as for constructing the image through performance and play. In the construction of her image, Radhika uses the mirror for enhancing particular aspects of the reflected body, express emotions and it therefore is an agential instrument. In Leena’s narrative that follows, however, the mirror is used for an assessment or evaluation of the body image through the gaze of the other and this can sometimes result in a fetishisation of one’s embodiment through a fragmentation of the body into its various parts. Simultaneously, however, the body is also used to construct an identity by performing different versions of self-expression in front of the mirror. Leena, born in 1961, is a university teacher, married and pregnant when I interviewed her and has a very well-defined perspective on her embodiment in terms of its idealised form, sensuality and her own relation to her changing bodily shape. The desire for an idealised embodiment is concealed behind her emphasis on her personality. Mike Featherstone refers to this as ‘the performing self ’ and examines the attention paid to the shaping and perfecting of the personality as a mode of self-presentation (Featherstone 1991). Leena presents her ‘body-for-others’ as her personality but underneath her personality lies her ‘body-for-myself ’: I like to look good. I’ve always taken care of myself. I like my body to look nice. I should like my face when I look at it in the

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mirror. I don’t like to see a tired face. I like to see a glowing face in the mirror…When I see my body in the mirror, I should like it, it should be pleasant for me. I don’t like to see sagging breasts; don’t like to have extra flesh on thighs or hips. So I like to maintain my body and eat less. I should like my body. So I don’t want to have a thin body but it should look nice to me. But if I have seen it [fat], then I always do something about it. Most men don’t talk about my body, that they find my breasts desirable and ravishing, etc. They talk to me, about me, as a person. My husband used to talk about my body before marriage, in letters, etc. But not later. Maybe its not a ‘ravishing body’. Maybe they don’t find it attractive. Because I admire men’s bodies. I like certain kinds of men’s bodies.

The image in the mirror is of profound significance for Leena who judges the mirror reflection in terms of her own standards of physical perfection. She then undertakes a project to change the image and replace it with one that is more appealing to her own gaze. She is emphatic that her body image, as reflected in the mirror, should please her. This includes the physical feeling and experience of a sensuality associated with ‘sexiness’: I should find my body sexy too. For example, I don’t like a fat stomach in my body. I also relate to my body in a sexy way. I should feel sexy looking at my body. I find my body sexy in the pregnant state. There is an incongruity that I find attractive: the breasts are bigger. I really thought that I would hate my body when I am pregnant. But I don’t. I actually quite enjoy it. I take off my clothes to look at my body and then put them on again.

The mirror becomes the instrument through which she tends to define her identity in relation to her embodied state. The image is therefore of considerable importance in her overall perception of her body, its symbolic value in her everyday life, and the uses to which she seeks to put it. Although there is clearly a narcissistic concern here with body image and the pleasures of the body, the social and public other is nonetheless a major consideration in defining her embodiment. She says: I don’t know if my body is ‘sexy’ in the male definition of it; whether your [one’s] lips or boobs are sexy. I’m not oozing sex. I don’t have breasts that are heaving or bouncing about, so that men may not find it sexy. In my case, it’s hidden but it’s all there. And that in

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a way attracts men. I don’t dress up to highlight my contours, emphasise my shape, etc. I emphasise more on my personality.

There is an underlying concern here with what men desire from women’s bodies and Leena’s perception of her inability to fulfill that desire in an obvious manner. She however offers the promise of fulfilling that desire through her suggestion, ‘it’s all there’. Embodiment, for Leena is therefore very much for the other and significantly seeks fulfillment as much from the other as through the mirror. While some women may veil their desire for male approval with descriptions of a spiritual or inner beauty, or do so as a strategically resistant mode, others assert the influence of the male gaze in the experience of their own embodiment. In this manner, woman sees a reflection of the image and elides the image with the gaze resulting in a bodily perception and practices that exist only through the gaze. However, simultaneously through performance, emphasising her ‘personality’, as Leena puts it, she actually manages to put forward and thereby assert a particular image of her self. The mirror in these women’s accounts is the site for the enactment of an identity, as a stage or theatrical prop for Radhika who uses it not only for emoting or performing different suitable expressions but also for assessing her own embodied props for beauty. For Leena, the mirror serves as a reflection of what she wants to see, to give her pleasure, a feeling of sexiness as she puts it and also to examine and assess her image. It is also a site through which they perform a version of what and how they want to be seen. Although this performance takes place in a personal space where the only spectator is the woman herself, she uses this to perfect her image, through repetition and mimicry, to construct a self-defined version of her identity. Woman also plays around with definitions of her identity, allowing it to take on different contours, masks and personas, depending on the context, situation and temporal moment. Kamini does it through her embodiment and experience of sexuality, endlessly carving out an emotional and physical space within which she may be constructing her embodied identity, through lived practice, deciding to, for example, ‘stay fat’ throughout her unhappy marriage as a strategic form of contestation, thereby emphasising her refusal to comply with an ostensibly authentic image. There is an element of strategic manipulation as well. We find that to evade

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bullying by her husband, at one level, Monica engages in an overt form of resistance by leaving town and going away or through an explicit confrontation. At another level, there is an understanding of resistance as a simultaneous engagement with a self-mediated persona thereby creating, or giving off a new self or embodied identity, showing glimpses, sides or even, completely, what I might like to be or could be. ‘I love my body’, says Kamini or Leena, and therefore want to be myself in a particularly sexy way. These self-definitions may not be acceptable to others but women engage with them, not only as acts of defiance but more assertively, as acts of creation and self-definition. Undoubtedly, notions of self and gender are shaped by the male or the social gaze but they are also made whole, as it were, by their own understandings and practices which they seek to use not only as a form of self-fulfillment but also for manipulating or teasing the other whether this other is masculinity, maleness, or even a discursive order that creates and re-creates the culture of a society.6 In addition, their own perceptions and strategic use of feminist or alternative notions of beauty, derived from women’s lived experience, the media, women’s magazines, and other influences, contributes to the construction of an agentially negotiated and socially-constructed gender identity. Contrarily, women often seek to become the image that is presented to them not so much in terms of replication but in ways which affect their self-perceptions so that they see themselves always as ‘the other’ which has to be perfected and presented in as authentic a form as possible to the ever-watchful gaze that is both male and female. Hence, the image of the body in the mirror is always that of the embodied self seen through the other’s gaze. In other words, although woman’s embodiment has a material existence, she also exists through the gaze of the other as much through her own strategically defined, contested and experientially situated gaze.

6 The construction of identity includes within it the potential for agency. As Butler emphasises, the task for feminism is ‘to locate strategies of subversive repetition enabled by those constructions, to affirm the local possibilities of intervention through participating in precisely those practices of repetition that constitute identity and, therefore, present the immanent possibility of contesting them’ (Butler 1990: 147).

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EMBODIMENT AND ITS DISCONTENTS In the construction of her identity as a gendered subject, women experience their embodiment through a range of cultural and social domains and practices as well as her own experiences, emotions and thoughts that all work in multiple and varied ways. In this section, I am concerned with ‘violence’ and psychological oppression or ‘mental torture’ experienced by urban women in interpersonal relationships in everyday life. Following Henrietta Moore, I advocate the use of an anthropological perspective in understanding such violence thereby taking into account ‘meaning, representation and symbolism’ (Moore 1994b: 139). This approach is linked significantly to understanding the crucial relationship between violence and sexuality. It has been suggested that ‘sexuality is intimately connected with power in such a way that power and force are themselves sexualized, that is they are inscribed with gender difference and gender hierarchy’ (ibid.: 149). In the women’s accounts that follow there is therefore a close link between women’s experience of violence, their embodiment, sexuality and self-identity. While I provide accounts of women’s experience of embodiment, I contend that this experience is shaped and exacerbated by their notions of their embodiment and sexuality and an idealised female embodiment. This is the nature of postcolonial habitus as it constructs our embodied selves through modes of recolonisation that impact our everyday lives in many different ways. This is not to deny that the violence women experience is unreal, a figment of their imagination or brought upon themselves but only to emphasise the critical nature of its manifestation. I do not also wish to overemphasise in this context the extent to which woman’s embodiment becomes a tool for culture to manipulate, mould, shape and adorn. I therefore do not fully accept Foucault’s construction of ‘docile bodies’ (Foucault 1991: 135ff) regulated by the norms of the social and public order. I do however believe that woman’s embodiment is undoubtedly influenced by social and cultural discursive categories and practices and that in this sense femininity ‘disempowers us even as it seduces us’ (Bartky 1990: 2). In pursuing postcolonial habitus as it engages us in our acts of compliance and resistance, I seek to also understand how ‘the values of a system that oppress us are able to take up residence in our minds’ (ibid.). This helps us to understand the complexity underlying women’s apparent collusion with forces that often sustain their own oppression.

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The internalisation of representations of woman’s embodiment appears to be fundamental to the formation of gender identity but this does not happen in a straightforward manner. It is only by ‘mapping the way in which the body circumscribes subjectivity’ that we can begin to see how ‘gender is constitutive of identity’ (McNay 1991: 130). In women’s accounts, we find that their embodiment is continuously perceived as both defining and limiting woman’s identity by both the perpetrators of the violence and by women themselves. In this manner, in interpersonal relationships, definitions of embodiment are often experienced as painful and oppressive as they are incongruent with women’s own perceptions of their embodiment. In this section, I also seek to address forms of ‘psychological oppression’ that women experience in interpersonal relationships with their partners and in the family. Women referred to such oppression as ‘mental torture’ or ‘emotional violence’ and their articulation of such experience as violence indicated the extent to which interpersonal relationships enact multiple subjectivities of experience, from the most tender to the most violent, in the constitution of gender identity. Leena has had a very intense relationship with her husband who has always pampered her in terms of giving her a lot of attention and always appreciating her physical appearance. So, she says that even if she had ‘a really bad haircut’ or ‘wore terrible clothes’, he made it a point to appreciate her appearance. Leena thinks they had ‘very good communication’ and they spoke in a ‘private language’ so no one could really understand what they were saying to each other. Much of this private language was ‘baby talk’ with one partner becoming parent to the other. Although this aspect of their relationship did not seem strange to Leena, she was sometimes ‘frightened’ as they could not communicate in any other language. He expressed himself a lot as well, cuddling her often and hugging her even in front of friends. All this fell apart about ten months ago when he met another woman. Leena thinks he has now ‘grown-up, of course at my expense’. The social background of partners is important among the middle and upper classes in contemporary India in terms of class, community and regional associations and the impact this has on their interaction. Monica could not communicate with her partner whom she considered very wealthy but not from the same social, cultural and ‘civilized’ background as her own natal family. She said he had ‘no

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grooming’ and described him as someone whose sole purpose in life was to make more and more money without an appreciation of the finer things of life. One outcome of Leena’s deteriorating relationship with her partner is the negative nature of his comments about her natal family and herself: He has started criticizing me physically and comments, which are derogatory, about my family. That is, the stereotype of being loud, rotund, money-minded, excessive in every sense. They’re noncreative, speak loudly to their wives; they’re from a particular social class and background. I probably encouraged him in the beginning but he was always very fond of them. Now it has been twisted.

The comments about Leena’s family are directed at a Punjabi business community by her educated, westernised, intellectual Bengali husband. Comments on Leena’s body are rather specific: How I’m not that attractive; I’m short; I have a bigger head [not in proportion to the rest of her body]; I’m fat, and so on. In a relationship, it bothers me that someone who had pampered me so much should switch over so suddenly. But I don’t suffer from lack of self-esteem.

Leena finds it hard to accept these derogatory comments about her embodiment and family which she feels are signs of a ‘crumbling marriage’. In addition, it is her husband’s interest in another woman, that she thinks, is responsible for his attempts to continuously denigrate her in his and in her own eyes. Bartky has argued that both ‘fragmentation and mystification’ are present in forms of psychological oppression (Bartky 1990: 23). She defines fragmentation as the ‘splitting of the whole person into parts of a person which, in stereotyping, may take the form of a war between a “true” and a “false” self—or in sexual objectification, the form of an coerced and degrading identification of a woman with her body’ (ibid.). What Leena in fact experiences as ‘mental torture’ or ‘emotional violence’ is her partner’s attempt to sexually objectify as well as stereotype her embodiment. Degrading comments on her body are expressions of an intent to split her identity into body and mind by focusing only on the externally visible body. By emphasising her embodiment and its defining characteristics, her partner ensures that Leena tends to also view herself in almost an identical manner in relation to her embodiment. Leena therefore works hard at maintaining her definition of

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perfect embodiment by visiting the beauty parlour and by adhering to different disciplinary bodily regimes and practices. While verbal abuse is one form of marital violence, verbal silence acts as another form of abuse. Men resort to silence and avoid direct verbal confrontation especially with educated and articulate women. Leena says: We don’t speak about issues that bother us. We never have a fight. We don’t throw things at each other. Initially I did but the response was total silence. Total indifference. So I tried to control my anger, to be like him—silent, and not get into confrontations, etc. Then I got out of it. Even now, as he says, ‘he does not fight’. No issue is discussed in a raised voice; it has to be discussed in a ‘non-hysterical’ manner. It’s a male point of view. Spontaneity has been taken out of my personality. I’ve started intellectualizing, theorizing, etc. in the last three years of our marriage.

In this manner, Leena has learnt to change her way or style of resolving issues, not merely to suit her husband’s whims about ‘civilised’ conduct, but also to avoid confrontation and ensure peace. Radhika encounters great periods of silence too, especially after violent fights with her husband. I have hit my husband, provided the physical provocation and then he has retaliated in order to really survive. This has happened twice. I have not been one bit apologetic about hitting him. He has crumpled with shame, hugely apologized, in front of me. For his not being able to talk that there is a brute in him. But in me there is much more violence, more brute in me. Lashing out lasts for one or two minutes. We have verbal rows these days on how to handle the child.

Radhika however perceives her everyday life in terms of her work and for her. Violence is also drawing out emotion brinking on the way you do it in theatre. Violent fights are due to his criticism of my actions, even though he may be right or misinterpreting my actions. So I have a fight when I am upset and express it through anger. So it’s a mixture of tears and anger. Sometimes maybe I say things to test it for theatre. So maybe I am theatrical and maybe melodramatic. I torture myself. There is a silence about my husband when the fight is over. He regains peace of mind. He can forget about a fight

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and come out of it. I want to dissect it, etc., but he doesn’t want to talk about it. This is a torture for me—not talking about it is a problem.

To deal with her partner’s silence, Leena adopts a strategy that will most likely satisfy her husband and learns to be silent when he analyses and theorises about their relationship whenever he wants to. At the same time, she has also learnt to manipulate the situation to her advantage. I became silent also because I haven’t seen my mother raise issues with my father because she didn’t have the guts. She didn’t negotiate or bicker with him. She was a very submissive and silent person. I have to do this on my own. I have learnt this on my own—to manipulate things. I have learnt to do this when my marriage started crumbling. I wasn’t in a sense socialized to do this.

Leena has also been emotionally distressed by her husband’s lack of interest in her pregnancy or in their expected child. She sees it as an unwillingness to accept responsibility for the child and an assertion of his independence from the family. There is no commitment to my pregnancy. I’m not very sure that this guy is going to be around when I have the baby. He doesn’t accept the procreation even though we were both not using contraceptives. He should have accepted the baby but he didn’t want to take responsibility. So my right to procreate was being questioned. If he was so hassled he should have just used a condom. But he taunted me, ‘You’ve had it your way. You wanted a child and you have it’. But he had a choice to prevent it. Secondly, once the child is there, there is no commitment to the child and especially to the relationship. I don’t know if the child will have a father or not. This is also a mental torture. He keeps telling me he will leave after the baby is born. He can’t walk out on a pregnant woman. Middle-class values are supporting this relationship as a façade. It can break any time.

Apart from a lack of obvious commitment to the marriage or his family, his behaviour also indicates his desire to be free of responsibility and the perceived stress of a changed lifestyle. Although this creates some insecurity in Leena, she is not very sure she can handle it. However, she relates her experience of marriage to her mother’s experience of violence in her home especially in the context of her

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sexual relationship with her husband. She clearly experiences a dissatisfaction in her sexual relationship and she finds in this an experience of oppression within marriage. My father was an alcoholic and withdrew sexually from my mother… So a similar experience in my marriage becomes a mental torture. It’s ironic that I’ve felt sexually dissatisfied with my husband due to his preoccupation with work. But I couldn’t articulate this then because I thought I was perverse. But now because of the problems we’re having, I can articulate it…We women are socialized into thinking we should remain faithful and that guilt prevented me from articulating my need for more physical pleasure in the first few years of our marriage. We had no children but we had most sex before marriage. We never articulated this to each other. I also felt less attracted to him as a person. I’ve had sex [with husband] even when I was tired, etc., especially when I didn’t have a job, but he didn’t though he was a very giving person…; it was only at his convenience… That’s when I started getting attracted to other men very early in my marriage. [He is] Like my father, alcoholic, coming late and withdrawal of sex. Alcohol and sexual activity are related.

Leena’s experience of the repetition of an identical situation of an ‘unhappy marriage’ in her mother’s life exacerbates her own experience of ‘mental torture’. Mental torture is also not coming home on time, not eating meals on time, a lack of commitment to being home on time. I felt mentally tortured as a child as we never had meals together, my father never came home on time. He [husband] has never said sorry to me. He has never made up to me…His commitment is now to another relationship, it may be to work so he still doesn’t come home early even though he has a more regular job now. Now it may be another woman but it could again be the work.

This ‘mental torture’ that is experienced by women may go on for a long time before any help is sought. Leena perhaps was locked into a cycle of experience where violence, reaction, manipulation, silence and suffering all constituted her everyday life. Mystification in psychological oppression is defined by Bartky as the ‘systematic obscuring of both the reality and agencies of psychological oppression so that its intended effect, the depreciated self, is lived out as guilt or neurosis’ (Bartky 1990: 23). Women do not however always

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emerge as victims of oppression but as survivors in the social and public domain that views marriage as their ultimate refuge. There is a specific moment when woman snaps out of this cycle and actually takes control of what is happening to her. I didn’t speak to anyone about the problems. I recall eight months of crying everyday. He was silent about the problems. I could only surmise the problems…Then, I had a public breakdown at … when I could start speaking, then everything came pouring out and then I could go to a counsellor and sort things out. I wanted to commit suicide. It was a feeling, not seriously. I wanted to murder him, throw him off the cliff. This was a completely new emotion to me as we earlier had such a lovely relationship. We were the ‘perfect couple’.

In recent years, Leena has not only experienced motherhood, rescued and restored her marriage, reconstructed her life, but has also achieved success in her professional life. She took charge of her marriage when she strongly felt she did not want to be a single mother for the rest of her life and worked hard at ensuring its success. She therefore, evolved a strategy that she felt would ensure the success of her marriage which she perceived as being essential to her mental and physical well-being. There is a direct link between violence and sexuality as accounts by Monica, Sneha and Leena highlight in the context of their experience of their sexuality in marriage. It has been emphasised that, ‘sexuality is intimately connected with power in such a way that power and force are themselves sexualized, that is they are inscribed with gender difference and gender hierarchy’ (Moore 1994b: 149). This is nowhere more evident than in Monica’s life who experiences marital rape until, through an act of resistance, she succeeds in ensuring a sex-free life with her partner. Marital rape is only one form of sexual violence. It is often the case that women experience sexual attacks by their partner because of suspected infidelity. Gail Omvedt has pointed to this through her argument that, ‘the everyday reality is that doubts about women’s “faithfulness” and efforts to control women’s sexuality are major factors in all forms of violence’ (Omvedt 1990: 6).7 Yet another form of violence related to sexual activity is the denial of 7 Suspected infidelity by spouses informs the narratives of women in the slum (see Chapter 5 in this book).

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her sexuality to woman who may experience it as a form of violence. For example, Kamini’s articulation of the violence she experienced in her marriage, in the context of a denial of her sexuality assumes crucial significance in understanding the relationship between sex and women’s experience of oppression. Kamini married someone when she was fairly young and knew her husband quite well before she married him. They were married for many years, have one child and are now separated (subsequently divorced). Her sexual relationship with her husband was almost ‘non-existent’ and Kamini sees this as being ‘prompted’ by him: This is a form of violence because I wanted it [sex]. [This kind of behaviour] is characteristic of a particular generation of men who have changed or altered their moralities, their world-views. This is, on the one hand, the kind of woman they want to relate to—articulate, aggressive, independent. On the other hand, they’re scared out of their wits. So a woman’s expression of her sexual rights or her expression of her sexual desire becomes one area of contestation. It’s something they can’t cope with. It is in part a fear of failure; of an inability to satisfy that [desire]. The male view of his own sexuality is tied up with achieving an erection and the fear of failure is really seen through that. Being denied any sexual relationship is considered violence and I experienced this. [The fact that sex] was very occasional and other tensions made it less satisfying, all through our marriage. He did have other sexual relationships so I was certainly being denied a satisfying sexual life. It was a ‘gigantic’ problem in our relationship.

Kamini does not view this aspect of the violence she experienced in her relationship as being significant in itself. She endured it because, as she says, ‘we shared a great deal, apart from our child, he understood me and I understood him.’ The breaking point in her marriage came with ‘the other woman’: His involvement with the other woman in the last year of our marriage broke it up. He inflicted violence on me. I was very hurt by it. It wasn’t a moral position I took. He had already had other brief sexual involvements. The hurt was heightened because I perceived it as violence. We had a very friendly and interactive relationship which was premised on a certain understanding in spite of the problems. So the idea that he could continue to do something which was so distressing to me, that was the act of violence, the aggression. He was articulating his preference for the

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marriage when confronted with a choice but actually continuing the other relationship so I couldn’t carry on any longer.

Both Leena and Kamini have identified a denial of adequately satisfying sexual relationships with their partners as either mental torture or violence. The unresolved question is whether the men denied this aspect of the relationship consciously to negate the women’s selfesteem or because they felt threatened in other ways by the kind of women they had chosen to marry, or simply because they had ‘fallen out of love’ and sought sexual satisfaction elsewhere. The control of women’s assertiveness and independence through a regulation of their sexuality is an acknowledged method of the exercise of patriarchal power. That both these women found such control unacceptable, articulated its experience as a form of violence, and chose to resist the situation indicates acts of resistance even in the midst of an experientially oppressive relationship. Lack of sexual interest or desire on the part of the partner is experienced as oppressive and there is no doubt they strive, as their accounts suggest, in different ways, for sexual fulfillment with their partners. It is when this is denied that they seek fulfillment elsewhere. From Leena and Kamini’s accounts, as also from those of Radhika and Rehana it is seen that urban, educated, professional women living in nuclear families, experience a heightened sexuality as compared to women living with their partners in the joint family in which their sexual experience changes due to relationships with other members of the family. Saloni, born in 1955, is a university teacher with an educated social background. She is married into a family in which she considers her father-in-law more educated and from a more cultured family than her mother-in-law who she thinks is from a ‘a milieu which is more patriarchal’ (that is, upper class, perhaps of royal lineage from a former princely state). Saloni asserts that such cultures have ‘a distinct notion of how women are to behave and conduct themselves after marriage.’ She has been married for some years and has known her husband for several years before they were married. As they are from very different social and class backgrounds, they endured difficult years of courtship in the midst of family tensions that viewed their alliance with distrust and misgivings. When finally they were married, Saloni faced ‘oppression’ from her mother-in-law with whom they lived. Saloni does not however absolve her husband of any responsibility of what took place. The emotional agony she experienced in relating to her mother-in-law is evident in the anguish in her account, ‘The sense of despair I have felt

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at the way in which she [mother-in-law] conducted her relationship with me. This has also implicated my husband because I stayed with her, despite my oppression, because of him.’ Saloni articulates her experience of her oppression in psychological terms where there is an experience of loss of personhood and selfesteem through continuous psychological assault: [I experienced] the feeling of being completely unwanted and unacceptable; in the way in which I dressed, my manner, the fact that I was from the wrong kind of family: Punjabi, middle class, ordinary folk, and therefore the wrong kind of woman. This is not what she wanted for her son. She had no control over me in the sense that I was already there. She had no control over my time as for a large part of the day I wasn’t there, I worked. But actually she had a great deal of control over me because of the way she continually expressed her displeasure over the way I ate, dressed, used no make-up. She was constantly chipping away at me, if you know what I mean. There was also emotional blackmail as she used her widowhood as a stick over her own son and me.

Although Saloni was distressed by her experience with her motherin-law, she did not allow herself to continue in this state for a long period: In the first three years of my marriage, I was unsure of myself and they just went along fine. The happiness, the euphoria of marriage was there. Later, the clash is more evident when you become part of the family. I was made increasingly aware of my difference in a way in which I was not earlier. In the next two years, I came to realise that this is the way I am; I can’t erase myself into nothingness or be anybody else. So I decided to be much less apologetic about my differences…The situation was resolved in two stages. My husband and I decided to take a separate place and move between the two houses. This was very complex and fraught. It was physically very taxing for us. Lasted about a year and this certainly didn’t resolve the problem for us. It got better sorted out when I decided this couldn’t go on. And she [mother-in-law] moved to the family home in…

In her realisation that the situation could not continue any longer, and her explicit act of resistance which enabled her to actually take a decision that changed the course of her married life, Saloni has expressly indicated an agency that has transformed her situation.

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However, she does not have any romantic notions about her marital relationship after this. Its resolved in that its not there in the everyday but its not in the forgotten past. Its there in the relationship. Having experienced head-on confrontations, it does alter things. The initial euphoria is no longer there. The problem continues even now when my motherin-law comes to stay or we go there. I am uncomfortable with her and am apprehensive. The subterranean text is always there.

Although Saloni’s husband was not directly involved in her experience of oppression, he is equally involved, as indicated by Saloni. In such situations, his commitment to his natal family often overrides his commitment to his partner or, as in Saloni’s case, he is emotionally torn between his partner and his natal family. Saloni’s husband, she says, ‘was deeply affected by this tension. He felt hugely guilty on both counts. It affected him physically, he lost weight and suffered insomnia’. These tensions undoubtedly affect relations between partners. For example, Saloni tends to respond to her husband’s comments about her embodiment, which are often made in what she calls a ‘joking’ manner, by worrying whether he is comparing her to the women in his family whom she considers more ‘elegant’ than herself. So if her husband makes a joking reference to her toes, Saloni wonders whether he is comparing her feet to his grandmother’s feet which are ‘very beautiful’. Clearly, what is at stake is the threat to Saloni’s femininity by an idealised femininity signified by an elegance which she does not possess. She therefore experiences an inferiorised embodiment in comparison with her idealised image which is also constituted by the embodiment of the oppressive other. The nature of the relationship with other members of the extended family also impacts the marital relationship which is not as ecstatic as it was in the early years of their marriage. Saloni is very sure that her marriage has suffered a certain strain as a result of her relationship with her mother-in-law: We are less caring towards each other, less tenderness and so on. Even now, when I’m apprehensive and uncomfortable, it reflects on the marriage. We’re less caring about each other, less concerned. This whole scenario, so prolonged, has not made my marriage stronger. To grow together, you also need to grow apart, so that’s what we’re undergoing now. If my mother-in-law had been a little more graceful, it would have changed things between us.

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This tension is further reflected in their sexual relationship: It [sex] is not a predominant thing for me either for myself or in my marital state. It doesn’t bother me if we’re in a sexually inactive state. It’s not such a heightened experience as it was initially but a more tender and gentler experience. It was altered when I found my mother-in-law’s presence all-pervasive and restraining and restrictive. But it’s not there now.

The lack of interest in her sexuality is perhaps exacerbated by the conflictual nature of Saloni’s marital life, an experience that comes out even more sharply in Sharmila’s account. She was born in 1949, works for the government and has been married for fifteen years. She met her husband in a Bengali theatre group in which they were both very active and she says she married him ‘really just to keep the group active’ which was falling apart with other peoples’ departures. They lived together with her husband’s family and have only very recently moved to a separate, independent home. Sharmila did not hesitate to tell me that the fact that her husband’s family belongs to a lower caste was probably responsible for their unreasonable and often violent behaviour: In-laws always tried to play husband against me. Just to make me suffer, in-laws used to encourage him to drink, stay out late, etc. I was forced to cook for 13–14 people every evening with separate menus for everyone. Whether I had food or not, no one was bothered. I stopped eating egg and fish so that my husband could eat more. But no one was bothered that I was not eating. That was mental torture. In-laws used to complain about me to husband and he used to believe them and start shouting or hitting me. My mother-in-law used to be very happy when he was shouting at me. And later on, I started complaining but he didn’t believe me as I had earlier not complained. I asked in-laws to tell one incident in which I actually misbehaved but this could never be stated. My sister-in-law [husband’s elder brother’s wife] abused me, and said, ‘You have nowhere to go. We’ll kick you out’ and no one said anything. My mother-in-law was happy that she said it. This hurt me a lot. Then, I told my husband, ‘I’m leaving’.

For Sharmila, physical violence from her husband took the form of ‘slapping, pulling hair, shoving me out of the room, shutting the door in my face, etc.’ and was accompanied by verbal abuse supportive of the complaints of other members of the extended family. His abuse,

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both physical and verbal, is also based on his ‘suspicions’ about his wife’s imagined relationships with other men. Sharmila find his suspicions of her infidelity ‘very insulting’: He doubts everybody, colleagues, my sister’s husband, that I have relationships with them. This I find very insulting: all the time, he is checking on my movements. When we were living with in-laws, then his mother used to give him all the information. When he gets angry, he hits out…I had to make him believe that whatever you think is not true or correct.

Her partner’s definitions of her gender identity as immoral or sexually promiscuous undoubtedly affected Sharmila’s notions of beauty and self-adornment as well as her ability to interact with friends: I used to be fond of dressing and my friends used to love that. Now I don’t feel like doing anything or going in front of friends. I feel it does not suit me anymore. Husband is suspicious if I dress up too much or if I am underdressed. I want to keep a balance but I don’t want to dress up now. For example, bindi I’ve stopped wearing as he always suspects if my bindi has got smudged or fell off.

In addition to the lack of communication with her partner, she experiences a continuous feeling of exhaustion due to her endless domestic chores and has a very nonchalant attitude towards her sexuality: Initially, I used to feel very nice. I was told not to get pregnant by in-laws as their children [that is, her sister-in-law’s children] were small and they would have to look after mine as I work in an office. So whenever he came near me I used to feel tense and worried that I should not get pregnant…Now it is mechanical. I am making chapattis, it is like that. Most of the time, he is sleeping. Just do it fast and go to sleep. People say it is good for peace of mind, etc., so I do it. But he is out-of-station a lot and I don’t miss that part either.

Undoubtedly, the Indian family, eulogised in tradition, represented in film and theatre, reproduced through the media, remains almost unchangeable in a fast changing modern India. The postcolonial habitus is unable to generate definitive structures that can transform the traditional structures of the Indian family. Resistance in this con-

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text indicates the assertion of a challenge to tradition and imbricated in this challenge is an awareness and recognition of the dominating structures of habitus. In this sense, resistance is very much ‘produced from “within” rather than outside a dominant order’ (Bordo 1997: 188). Moreover, I tend to agree with Susan Bordo when she says that ‘the fact that resistance is produced from within a hegemonic order does not preclude it from transforming that order’ (ibid.: 190). The significance of such resistance therefore lies in its ability to question that order, speak from different locations in multiple voices and, through voice and practice, seek to transform that order.

CONCLUDING COMMENTS Women’s narratives of their lived experience emphasise their embodiment as both a source of pleasure as well as discontent, that enables them to take powerful decisions regarding, for example, their professional trajectory or their appearance. At the same time, they do not deny the constraints that are imposed on their embodied experience through culture, tradition and the ubiquitous male gaze. The experience of violence is not only restricted to attacks on the body but, as is well-known, on personhood as well. This happens through the experience of both physical violence and psychological oppression. In fact, as Bartky emphasises, ‘psychological oppression is “dehumanizing and depersonalizing”: it attacks the person in her personhood’ (Bartky 1990: 29). Women’s accounts tell us how their identity is defined largely in terms of their body shapes, their sexuality and their inability to conduct themselves within the normative dictates of a social and public discourse. Saloni’s physical appearance and conduct was expected to merge completely with what was expected by her of her husband’s family. However, Saloni resisted this and no doubt, the fact that she is educated, independent and has a career, helped in enabling agential negotiation and strategisation. Sharmila’s experience of violence was enhanced by her partner’s lack of empathy with her situation and with her physical battering. Women’s experience of violence in relation to their embodiment is, as Kamini’s and Leena’s stories tell us, helped by their critical acceptance of prevailing notions of ‘authentic’ womanhood. Although women may question

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these constructions, a complete denial or rejection of this constructed womanhood never actually takes place. Women’s multiple voices however indicate different experiences from diverse locations and in the next chapter, we see how work and family life are critical to woman’s lived experience in a slum in north-western Delhi.

5 THE BODY AS A WEAPON EMBODIMENT, WORK AND IDENTITY

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n this chapter, I present the stories of women slum dwellers in Jahangirpuri, a resettlement colony in north-western Delhi. It is a large slum, located on the borders of Delhi and Haryana, with a population of approximately seven lakh (1 lakh = 100,000) persons. There is a mix of permanent housing structures and small, precarious, unstable hutments (jhuggis) set up as part of a resettlement drive to shift slum dwellers in 1976. The economic condition of the slum dwellers worsened due to the occurrence of floods in 1978 and the burden of poverty was hoisted onto women who took up the task of looking after the family and children. The slum is divided into eleven blocks and most of the interviewed women resided in a cluster in one block of the slum. As first generation Gujarati migrants, they stayed close to one another, in one room tenements, in a labyrinth of small, narrow lanes, criss-crossing each other in a restricted area. There were larger homes as well, of better off Gujarati migrants, in the main lanes in the same area but apart from a cursory glance, my focus was not on women in these homes. Women from other northern states such as Uttar Pradesh or Bihar lived in a slightly different area of the same slum. They were also living in similar oneroom tenements; all homes were extremely neat and tidy, with clean washed floors, belongings tidily put away against the walls, with a small mirror, a framed photograph and calendars being the only wall hangings. All the women were migrants who had come to Delhi with their partners several years ago in search of work. Work is central to women’s lives and embodied existence. It is the reason for their departure from their homes in rural India, to which

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they return every year, if possible. It is also central to their definitions about themselves, their relations with others, and the means through which they seek to achieve their goals of better living conditions, food for their families and well-being for themselves. Everyday tasks show how women use their bodies in different kinds of work, ranging from performing domestic tasks, through sexual activity and childbearing, to paid work, and finally to maintaining and developing social networks. Examining everyday life practices shows us how both power and agency operate in the most mundane situations and contexts and women’s lived experience reflect an engagement with the exercise of social power in different ways. It is through voice, gestures and bodily hexis that women articulate aspects of their embodiment in relation to work of different kinds. Women take pride in their work, in their independence, in their strength to shift the balance of power in their own interest. The experience of harsh poverty, deprivation, and masculine domination has not resulted in loss of self-esteem, anger or defeat. On the contrary, women speak from great strength drawn from deep reservoirs of self-reliance and independence in thought and perception. Undoubtedly, there is struggle but also endeavour, perseverance, and commitment, and their assertion of their experience of their embodiment, as a weapon, as it were, driven by their gendered experience of poverty and fight for survival. Every day, women use their bodies to express resistance to unequal power relations. Women I spoke to were adept at finding ways and means through which they could show their agency, circumvent impositions and controls on them, and exercise choice, to enhance their sense of well-being. Many factors shape the individual married women’s experience of poverty, and determine the extent to which, despite their poverty, they have a sense of well-being. Well-being is a multidimensional concept, including material and psychological well-being, physical well-being, social well-being, security, and freedom of choice and action (Narayan 2000). Whether a woman experiences a sense of well-being depends on factors including a woman’s educational level, the sex and number of children to whom she has given birth, relations with members of the extended family, economic deprivation and its physical and social consequences, and other social and cultural factors. Well-being thus depends not only on a woman’s sense of herself as an individual, but also on her relationship with others in her extended family and community.

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The overwhelming experience shaping the everyday lives of women in this slum is the burden of poverty. This is reflected in their relationship with work, with significant others including the immediate family, the network of extended kin, neighbours and others, as well as imbricated in their thoughts, perspectives, and experiences of everyday living. A woman’s embodiment is rarely experienced for pleasure or joy; the body is an instrument for survival. In this sense, the body becomes the weapon with which there is a desperate attempt to contest the harsh realities of everyday life in the fight for survival in a world that is ordered by relations of gender inequality and economic necessity. How does a woman’s embodiment help her in the reorganisation of her everyday world from one of utter chaos to one in which she finds meaning and comfort? What kinds of conflicts, dilemmas and contradictions does she encounter in this process of defining and redefining herself? This chapter seeks to address some of these questions in the context of woman’s experience of embodiment in the slum as one of both destiny and of resistance. I present the complexities and dilemmas that characterise these processes by examining three aspects of women’s lives: childbearing and contraception, their relation to work of different kinds, and the subjective experience of embodiment and sexuality. These are not exclusive categories of the markers of identity and selfhood among women but are the complexly interwoven characteristics of everyday embodied experience. At the same time, because of my overriding emphasis on women’s subjective experience of poverty, I might add, as pointed out by Cecile Jackson, that ‘gender justice is not a poverty issue’ and therefore there is a need to force the distinction between gender and poverty as all kinds of significant disadvantages cannot always be collapsed into poverty (Jackson 1998: 59, emphasis added). The focus therefore is on gender inequality within poverty mediated by women’s voices indicating conflict, struggle, and resistance.

MOTHERHOOD, CHILDBEARING AND CONTRACEPTION The imprint of gender inequality is unmistakable in the way in which women construct their stories of their individual experiences of poverty. Having a female body means not only that you must perform ‘heavy work’ for money outside the household, but you must also

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take on responsibility for the work your body performs in childbearing. In telling their stories, women are keen to emphasise their autonomy in taking decisions in situations of great adversity and their ability for ‘hard work’ in difficult times. There is a tussle between their aspirations for independence, reflected in their conscious decision-making and simultaneously, there is a submission to a culture that values work. It is in this conundrum of lived experience that they construct their embodied identities as women.

Bearing a Son Childbearing is central to married women’s well-being and sense of personhood and identity. Women who cannot bear children at all, or who do not bear a family that includes boys, feel incomplete and unfulfilled. In this sense, a woman’s body has failed her, and becomes a source of shame, loss of face, and mental agony, as well as family dishonour. Phoolwati from a village in Uttar Pradesh, is in her early thirties and has three daughters. She has a cheery exterior but starts looking unhappy once the conversation centres on child bearing. She says in anger, ‘No one is allowing me to live. All my in-laws are after me because I have not had a boy. The name of the family cannot continue which is very important.’ She explains that daughters do not stay with their natal family forever, and therefore, it is important to have a son. Phoolwati, through her tears and internalised experience of an unbearable condition, clearly expresses her embodied incapacity to bear a male child and thus, being incapable of lending to the continuity of the family name, failing in her maintenance of family honour and social identity. It is perceived as a failure of women’s embodiment in achieving social and thereby personal goals which have been created by the family and the community. While talking about her life, Sumati, in her late forties, said that she gave birth to seven daughters and then a son was born. She said with a sense of achievement that has definite social approval, ‘Then, I received respect (Tab meri kadar hui).’ The discrimination or oppression experienced after the repeated births of girl children does not always make women weak and voiceless. On the contrary, Sumati appeared tough and resilient and recounts with pride how she had caught a burglar in her neighbour’s hutment, made him admit his guilt, beat him, and recovered the stolen goods. Her sense

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of achievement, unlike Phoolwati, is not shaped only by her ability to produce a male child in appropriate time but also by her sense of place and space in everyday life. The burglar episode has established her position in the community and she derives respect and stature from that although, in the past, she has indeed suffered the ignominy of only bearing girl children. It is not uncommon to experience childlessness as a condition that has to be tolerated, but not without resistance. When I met her, Sangeeta was 31 years old and expecting her first child after twelve years of marriage. It was assumed that she would be unable to bear children, and she suffered the taunts and venom of her husband’s family, as well as the poor material conditions of her everyday life. Yet, when I spoke to her, she found the strength to articulate her life experience in powerful words. Constantly smiling, she recounted all her husbands’ and in-laws’ atrocities in a quick, rushed manner, as if to say it all quickly before she changed her mind. Her oppression has been so intense that she is strangely confident about voicing it. A lot of the discussion took place in front of her mother-in-law and husband, of whose presence she was hardly aware. Sangeeta was very poor in her natal family and used to wash dishes to support the family income. She stayed with her mother for four years after her marriage to pay for the mortgage that her mother had taken for her and her sister’s marriage. She added, ‘All the utensils, clothes and jewellery that I have is from my own hard work. I tell my mother-in-law that it is all given by my mother but actually it is all a result of my own effort’. In the context of her relationship with her husband, Sangeeta said that ‘he did not do a single thing’ and expected her to lift a loaded bucket, or other heavy items, despite her pregnancy. She had already washed and ironed all her husband’s clothes just in case she went into labour unexpectedly. Her sisterin-law, who was present, commented that Sangeeta’s husband was insensitive despite the fact they were having a child after 12 years of their marriage. Sangeeta elaborated that she had been getting up at 5:00 AM and working till late in the night, ever since she had been married, doing all the chores. Her husband was completely dependent on her; if she ever went to Ahemdabad (her parents’ home), which was rare, he phoned her to come back immediately. ‘I do not want to trouble him; he will remember me proudly after my death as a wife who never used to even answer him back.’ Even at this stage of heavy pregnancy, she is continuing her paid work as a domestic help. She

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says with resignation, ‘Men are hungry for a woman’s body.’ Here, Sangeeta is not only attacking men’s sexual desires but also their desire to dominate women through using women’s bodies for work, primarily in the household which is the most acceptable form of labour. The male desire to torment women through work is well-known in the slum. Sangeeta said that her husband’s brother used to hit her and asked her to work constantly. If she refused, he slapped her. She seemed to be doing everything at home, in a mechanical way and appearing accustomed to a pattern of work, since what she has to do is both regular and familiar. Her methodical and organised manner of work is clearly a source of immense satisfaction to her. Her close identification and commitment to work results in support and approval from both her natal family and her husband’s family. This suggests that if women give in to the harsh and endless world of domestic work, the results can be simultaneously oppressive and liberating in different ways. Women are conscious of their agency and celebrate their achievements in their very articulation of it. Sangeeta is rather proud of the fact that she has paid for her infertility treatment from her own savings and dismissed her husband as having been of no help in this effort. She saved around Rs 80,000 to use for the treatment. She said, ‘The money used was mine; however my husband took the credit. Often, he did not even accompany me to the hospital. He does not care about me at all.’ Her mother-in-law never helped her either, by giving her money.1 Sangeeta smiles while speaking, ‘There is happiness even in sorrow (dukh mein bhi sukh hai).’ This expression is not a sign of mute acceptance of her condition and indicates her ability to be on top of the situation, however oppressive it might be. She gains strength through her abilities to work as a domestic help outside the home and as a homemaker and provider inside her home. In a sense, her life has never been hers to do with as she pleases but rather has been an existence to work for survival and for status within her family and the community. This provides her with self-esteem and a sense of well-being from where she can actually articulate her happiness even in sorrow. 1 Jeffery and Jeffery (1997) point to the fact that women’s experiences alter during their life cycle, and women’s different interests, status and position (for example, as mothers-in-law or daughters-in-law) affect their experience of subordination as well as the exercise of power.

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A few days after I spoke to her, Sangeeta had a healthy baby boy by Caesarean section. She appeared to be proud of the fact that she had been busy with hard physical work right up to the birth of the baby—she worked until the early hours of the morning. Later, water broke from her uterus while she was cleaning wheat; she cooked and also carried 7 kg of sugar on her head. Two days later, her pains increased and her in-laws took her to a nearby government hospital. The doctor however refused to admit her; she therefore was taken to a good private hospital. She stated that she had not eaten anything for the last six days and that she felt like giving her new born a punch because he had given her so much pain. She added while lying in the hospital bed, ‘A woman’s life is no good. Only a man’s life is fine. One gives water and tea to a man and he still responds with a slap. Truly, a man’s life is “mast” (joyous, fun).’ She later added that she prays to God to grant her manhood in her next life. The value of manhood in the sense of the pleasures that appear to be part of the everyday lives of men, and are missing in her own experience, is the very stuff of Sangeeta’s dreams. In daring to aspire for the life of a man, Sangeeta, however, simultaneously reveals her lack of faith in the abilities of women and submits to patriarchal construction, of the same. Sangeeta has attained motherhood after having lost all hope. Having given birth to a boy against all odds, Sangeeta was being well cared for by her in-laws. She enjoys a better status than she ever did in 12 years of marriage. Her mother-in-law calls her son, ‘my lotus flower’ and is clearly delighted with her daughter-in-law for having produced him. Despite feeling physically weak, however, she could not help speaking strongly about her in-laws and their past behaviour and attitude towards her. She was often mistreated for her inability to conceive a child. She reflects on her inauspicious condition as a barren woman and categorically remembers that her mother-in-law never used to accept food from her while her father-in-law did not allow her to wear her sister-in-law’s sari for fear of bringing her bad luck or making her barren as well. Now, she felt, God had finally settled all accounts on her behalf. Sangeeta’s positive outlook suggests that a woman learns and also looks for ways and means with which to deal with the conflicts and struggles in her life, ‘If God gives pain, he also gives the strength to bear it. One who does not have parents realises their importance. My mother told me to never come back no matter what I went through

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after marriage. She said there is no one of your own here. She asked me to not get burnt either but to go to my cousin sister’s home.’2 Her parents have taught her to fight back and not accept or adjust to difficult or oppressive conditions. Learning, in the eyes of women like Sangeeta, does not take place through formal education in school but at home and takes the form of directives from kin and family as well as relies on women’s own life experiences. Sangeeta added that she had never been to school but had taught all her siblings. Both she and her sister used to work and sent their brothers to school. Sangeeta however did not value education in her own life, ‘If I would have gone to school, who would have taken care of the house?’ is her question. The relationship between education and work is complex. Women are aware that education does not always lead to opportunity, work, or occupational choices. There is a disillusionment with the opportunities that education may be able to provide them: young adolescent women, married or unmarried, living in the slum express an understanding that they are fated to do the housework or wash dishes and will therefore be unable to make occupational or career choices. They often do not see an escape from this way of life. There is also a sense of immense pride among women who are uneducated or illiterate about their abilities to function more effectively than educated women. Vineeta was married at the age of 20 years by her parents. Her husband died some years ago and she is currently married to another person with whom she had a ‘gandharv vivah’ (marriage without witnesses). She appears as an intrinsically strong woman and is so recognised by other women in the locality as well. She is illiterate while her current husband has studied till Grade 4 or 5. Vineeta is of the opinion that an illiterate can speak better than a literate, and education does not make any difference; she rhetorically asked the interviewer, ‘I can abuse policemen, can you?’ And added, ‘there is a lot of difference between book knowledge and mental intelligence. I can set everybody straight. I know how to talk; If somebody is bad, I can be worse, I am not scared of anyone. I speak the way the person concerned talks to me.’ The lack of education is not perceived as a 2 There is a clear reference here to the mother indicating to her daughter that she must not allow herself to be ‘burnt’ for dowry and simultaneously educating her about her own safety in the face of domestic violence.

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disadvantage but is in fact used to emphasise woman’s awareness of her strength and advantage in any social or political situation if she so wants to express herself. When asked why then was she sending her daughter to school, she stated that education makes a difference and if had she been educated she would have not only improved her house but the entire community. Vineeta’s viewpoint reflects an understanding of the importance of education in terms of its longterm benefits, but she also seems to find herself at an advantage over a literate in practical and immediate terms. For example, she says that an educated person might be image conscious while hurling abuses, even if they see some injustice. Her lack of education does not make her feel inferior to any one and she does not blame her parents for not educating her. She stated that they were six girls in her natal family and her parents sent her brother to school but they also loved them. ‘He was the youngest so he was obviously loved more,’ is the wellreasoned reply. For women like Vineeta, education is for a higher purpose, to perhaps be a better human being, but is not necessarily useful for practical purposes in everyday life.

Controlling Fertility Sterilisation (tubectomy) is a critical event in the lives of married women. The decision whether or not to have the operation is seen as crucial, affecting the health and well-being of mothers and their children, and their own economic condition. They are either strongly opposed to being sterilised, or have taken a firm decision to have it, against the wishes of their husbands and other family members. Vineeta had her sterilisation done 12 years ago in a large, wellknown hospital, without telling her husband. She blandly stated that she went on her own and had it done, ‘I came back home and worked in the evening.’ The next day, she walked 7 kilometer ‘I have lot of strength in my body.’ Both her children are from her earlier marriage and her husband, who now knows about the operation, often tells her, ‘Get your operation undone, I want a son.’ Vineeta says that she does not listen to him and nor does she care about what members of the community may have to say. Instead, she tells her husband that if he starts earning, she will have her operation undone. She believes that a woman’s hard work and self-respect are the only things that pay and does not want to give birth to a child and abandon it. ‘Children

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need everything; one has to see everything before one decides to have a child,’ she added. In this manner, Vineeta has taken decisions regarding reproductive choice into her own hands and does not care about what either her husband or members of the larger community may have to say in the matter. Premwati’s husband kept on postponing her tubectomy operation. In winter months, he would say, it could be done in the summer and, in summer, he would say, get it done in the winter. This continued for some time. She finally got it done by herself during the monsoon season in her husband’s home-town. When her last child was six months old, she says she took a bath and went for the surgery. Earlier, a doctor in her village had asked her for a letter from her husband which he refused to give. She therefore had it done elsewhere. Premwati’s strong emphasis on her own initiative and action in taking a decision relating to her body suggests her autonomy and strength in doing something for which she knew her husband could later punish her. However, she just went ahead, and adds that she had not stopped working after the operation. In fact it was slightly painful when the stitches were removed but she did not discontinue housework. In Heena’s case the tubectomy failed because the doctors could not find the tubes (nas). Her husband though did not want her to have it done. All her children have been born through Caesarean sections. She uses a Copper T but has pain in the back, legs and feet and experiences a loss of appetite. When her son was born, she had a real problem. She tried having an operation but failed as it did not work out. She feels she is stuck in a bad situation. With utter resignation and defeat she says, ‘Life itself is a problem, a woman’s life is useless.’ The worthlessness is being experienced because of the inability to have a successful tubectomy, as a result of which she continues to bear children. Her embodiment has failed her in her attempts to help herself through contraception. She experiences pain and bodily discomfort and is therefore uncomfortable in her embodied state; and her entire life or existence appears worthless. Anila has two daughters and plans to be sterilised as soon as she has a third child even if it is also a girl. She tells us that, in the village, the desire for a male child and the happiness associated with it far exceeds the drudgery of having too many children, and the sorrow of bearing girls. Moreover, the opinion is also that a girl is born with her own fate and is taken care of by God and should be accepted as

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God’s gift. The birth of a male child is however considered essential. The old women in her village chide her, ‘You are already feeling exhausted after having only two children; there is no need to have an operation yet!’ Out of a sense of respect for older members of the family and community, Anila concludes that she has to take another chance for sure as she has only two girls and in this manner renounces the agency which she is conscious of and articulates so well in her views. It is significant that concern for the well-being of others in the family outweighs all other considerations in women’s decision making about having the tubectomy. Women are protective of their husbands who are in need of protection; they require ‘healthy’ bodies for ‘heavy’ work. There is an underlying assumption in women’s voices that men’s work is heavier than that of women. For example, Jeena decided to stop having children, had an abortion and then an operation. She is however clear that men don’t like to have sterilisations, ‘Men will not have the surgery. Their work is heavy.’ Jeena argues that as men lift heavy packages in the wholesale fruit and vegetable market (mandi), being packers, it is not advisable for them to have surgery. The male body is perceived as being weak, ‘aadmi kamzor hai,’ and in need of protection by women especially in the context of the manual work they are engaged in. Sita Devi has three daughters and a son, and does not want any more children. She is scared of having a tubectomy but she was clear that she was not going to ask her husband to have the surgery. She too considers his work ‘heavy’ and also did not want him to suffer in any way. Sita Devi firmly believes that this particular surgery suits some people and not others and therefore she did not want to take any risks. Martha Nussbaum (2000: 56ff) refers to an early paper by Veena Das and Ralph Nicholas (1981) in which they claim that, for Indian women personal well-being is necessarily tied up with the well-being of family members. Das and Nicholas are extending the concept of personal well-being to include those of significant others in women’s lives. My data indicates that women are most concerned about the welfare and well-being of their husbands who are considered the primary breadwinners in the family. There is also an element of sacrifice in women’s decision to have themselves sterilised.3 3 My own material also contradicts Agarwal (1994: 434) who concludes that women’s concern for ‘the family’ does not extend to include the husband but is more about other members of the family such as children, especially sons, and others.

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In justifying and rationalising men’s apparent weakness, based on their perceived capacity for hard and heavy work, as compared to themselves, women however simultaneously assert their ability to take a decision regarding their own bodies and reproductive health, and also give in to the patriarchal management of female sexuality and fertility.

EMBODIED WORK AND INTERPERSONAL RELATIONS This section highlights the embodied work experience of three very different kinds of women based on factors as diverse as caste, sexual encounters and marital discord. Women negotiate their paths as workers through the maze of caste affiliations that may contradict the nature of work, sexual encounters that ultimately do not deliver what they promise to and marital discord that spurs domestic violence. Against all odds, women develop strategies that not only circumvent imposed controls but also seek to establish their own behavioural norms. Work is the main strategy for survival, for women in the slums. Such work includes household tasks, but more significantly involves wage labour or work for additional income outside the home. Work takes on different meanings for women, depending on the level of economic deprivation, number of children, husband’s income, nature of the household (nuclear or extended), and so on.4 It is also not always within the woman’s purview of rights that she is able to work or get work of her choice. Her ability to work is therefore contingent on several associated factors. Women are in control of their working lives to the extent possible in their engagement with work, but often express a desire for different kinds of work. They may be discontented with the kind of work they do, but nevertheless extract a tremendous sense of self-worth from the fact that they aspire to work, they like to work, they find work of one kind or another and are able to achieve some comfort and success in their everyday lives. 4 In a village in rural Maharashtra, Kemp discovers that women view themselves as hard workers in their everyday lives. ‘We work like bullocks’, they tell Kemp who concludes that bullocks provide a model of women’s work activities because they are major work animals in dry farm areas (Kemp 1998: 217–8).

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Hence, they contribute to family income, to the education, health and nutrition of their children, and they are aware of this as a major achievement. Generally speaking, they do not wallow in self-pity or feel worthless. This sense of well-being to a large extent comes from their engagement with, and commitment to work.

The Dilemmas of Work Premwati from Haryana, has five daughters and two sons. She was married when she was 14 years old and had a daughter within two years. Her in-laws insisted that a son should be born. So she kept on trying to have a boy. Her husband did not allow her to work by saying, ‘A woman goes and works among ten men. It affects our honour (izzat).’ Premwati considers herself illiterate (anpadh) with formal education only upto Grade 3. Premwati would like to do some work (kaam-dhanda) worth Rs 1,000 or Rs 1,500 per month. She emphasises that she has five daughters and has to organise their dowries and would therefore like to work as a sweeper in a factory. Although she perceives the need for additional income to marry off her daughters, she is not willing to work as a domestic help. The main reason for this hesitation is the caste impurity associated with being a domestic help, cleaning other people’s floors or dishes. The space of the factory appears as a more neutral space where no major caste factors come into obvious conflict. Premwati’s husband’s income is Rs 4,700 per month as an employee of the Municipal Corporation of Delhi. But he is also an alcoholic and the family owes money to various money lenders. Premwati’s lack of opportunity to work outside the home has been exacerbated by the physical labour of giving birth to seven children. After her sterilisation, Premwati emphasised, she continued doing all the housework, ‘Work must go on’ (kaam chalta rahe). Work is therefore considered crucial to existence whether it is their housework or work outside the home. Savita is from Uttar Pradesh. She was married when she was between 10 and 12 years old and has five children—three sons and two daughters. She was working as a domestic help in different houses but then left the job because of children’s ill-health and the severe cold. Her husband works as a motor mechanic in the vegetable market (subzi mandi) and she does not even know how much he

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earns. She says that she understands well that husband and wife both have to do paid work, because only then will the expenses be met. She has to work at home and outside as well. It is difficult, says Savita, but one has to do it to have a better life. Her vision of a better life includes educating her children to a higher standard than she herself had reached. Three out of her five children are in school. She has aspirations for a better job, and through that, for a better life, ‘badiya naukri mil jaye’. For her, a better job means one in a factory or a semi-skilled job. She is quite certain that she is not interested in employment as a construction worker. She adds with regret, ‘If I was educated, I would stand on my feet.’ She was educated only until Grade 3 but is now taking adult classes. Although Savita has aspirations for better work of any kind, she realises her inability to spend time outside the home as her children are small and so she has to somehow manage her expenses within her husband’s income and the money she makes, off and on, through domestic work. She identifies the main problems in her life as being her husband’s addiction to alcohol and gambling and having many daughters. Savita’s first child was a girl and she was taunted by her mother-in-law, ‘Why not a son?’ She had no children in the first two years of her marriage. That was also considered a problem. She now regrets that she has five children. She was scared of a sterilisation and her mother-in-law encouraged her not to have it. But Savita was fed up after a while and had the operation. Her husband gives her fifty rupees every two or three days for household expenditure and then tells her not to ask for money. The money for household expenditure is given only when she agrees to sexual relations once in a week or ten days. He tells her not to ask for money and that is why she has to work as a domestic help. Then, she says: I have to pacify him and feed him and get some money out of him for expenditure. In the last few months, he has started earning less, so the problems and fights have re-started over money. I have to get my daughter married, in a few years, so we have to save for that. But he doesn’t seem to be too bothered.

By stating her willingness to give in to her husband’s sexual demands, Savita strategically negotiates the release of money that serves her practical interests, that is, money to buy food for the children and herself.

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There is a commitment to work and a disenchantment when work is not available or not taken up by the partner who is supposedly the bread-winner in the family. Savita says: My only problem with my husband is that he does not work properly and I am worried. My eldest daughter has to get married. This worry is eating me up. He doesn’t save money for the marriage. So I fight with him a lot over money matters. Earlier, my mother-inlaw used to work; we used to all stay together but now slowly as we had more children, the problems have increased…My parents have not taught me or sent me to school, that is a regret I have. If I was educated, I could learn something e.g stitching, but one has to know numbers in order to take measurements. I could have earned some money sitting at home. As it is, now I earn as a domestic help from two houses, and look after my own house and the children.

If she could ask for a boon, Savita says, she would ask ‘for the wellbeing and happiness of the home (ghar ki sukh shanti), children’s happiness’, which in part can be achieved through work. ‘Work must go on. That is all (kaam chale. Bus aur kuchh nahin)’, is Savita’s desire, entangled as she may be in a life of poverty, her husband’s alcoholism and gambling habits. The well-being of the family is deeply desired by the women to whom I spoke and, as earlier suggested, they are likely to see their own well-being emerging or resulting from this familial well-being. Work is always sought out for a better life, but sometimes women pay a heavy price. They may experience insults and verbal abuse for the work they do due to the aspersions cast on them by their partners. They refer to these comments as ‘reversed abuse (ulti gaalis)’ when husbands tell them that ‘if you are going to a house to work, you are going to meet someone.’ In a strategic move, exercising their autonomy, women often circumvent this control by working in the absence of the men and using the extra income for household related expenditure. The relationship between caste and work is well-known and internalised by the women.5 However, it is often affected by poverty so that women often engage in all kinds of work regardless of their 5 Such a relationship implies that an upper-caste woman would normally not take on paid work which would lower her caste position in the eyes of other members of her caste community. Such work might include the washing of dirty dishes, sweeping, cleaning, scavenging, and so on.

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caste affiliations. This is however not always the case and there can be an acute conflict between caste and work which results in psychological discomfort and even trauma. Sunila, from Bihar, is 32 years old and has three children. She works as a domestic help as her husband is a rickshaw puller and does not earn much but she is fed up with the work she has to do. With tears rolling down her cheeks, in a voice choked with anguish and sorrow, she says she has worries on her mind all the time, ‘I worry about the home (chinta rehti hai; ghar ki chinta)’, ghar symbolising the home, the hearth, the family. She adds: I go to work because of great helplessness (mazburi). In my caste, I have been brought up not to touch anyone’s dirty dishes but I am forced to wash other people’s dishes (Neech kaam karna pad raha hai. Main mari ja rahi hoon). It is killing me. I have been given so much love and affection in my childhood but now I have to do this work. So much poverty is not there in my family (either natal or in-laws’ house).

Sunila would rather die than work in the mandi. If someone back home were to learn she is a domestic helper, she says, they would penalise her family. Earlier, her husband ran a small restaurant and they had reasonable earnings. She could afford to spend money on various ceremonies, including essential rites of passage for her children, like the hair tonsure (mundan) and sacred thread (janeyu) ceremonies. ‘If my husband was OK (sahi), I would be able to have an easy life. Because of my husband, I have to suffer. Sometimes he has a job, sometimes not. This is my worry. He gives me all the money but it is very little.’ Moreover, she adds, he is not bothered whether it is enough or not. She says, ‘I have to send money home also. What will they think? We have been in Delhi for so long but have nothing to our name. We are so poor and my worry for the home is driving me crazy (ghar ki chinta dimag kharab kar rahi hai).’ Sunila remembers her relatively well-off childhood and youth, so different from her present status. In the village, there is a different kind of worry, whether the labourer will come to work on the land or not. ‘But in my present life, my head aches thinking of all the issues,’ she says. The multiplicity of Sunila’s everyday experience results in her experience of shame and dishonour due to the conflict between her caste position and the nature of the work she has to do. Her anguish and despair do not however absolve her of her relationship with her

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husband, the home and the family. ‘My husband gives me five rupees and then goes away. And then he comes back, flapping his slippers as he walks, wanting something or the other.’ Although Sunila experiences some helplessness because of her partner’s inability to work, she cannot think of abandoning him. Moreover, she has children and a daughter to get married and work is important. So there is not much she can do about her situation and she has to work for not so much her own survival but for that of her family and the home. Work does not always mean a necessity for mere physical survival and may also be used as a tool for survival in a large family, for example, in an extended family household, to escape oppression and domination by the in-laws. Work here is defined as simply work (kaam) and effort or labour (mehnat) by Kasturi (an elderly, upper caste woman) who lives in a joint family. She narrates her experience as a daughter-in-law in a large joint family where she worked for everyone else; did things for them, brought up her mother-in-law’s children, but they did not care for anyone except themselves. So she says, her strategy was to immerse herself in work: ‘I used to drown myself in work, working, working (kaam mein doob jaati thi, kaam karte, karte hi).’

Sexuality, Work and Resistance The malleability of postcolonial habitus, embedded as it is in social class and location, is revealed in the following account which reflects an experience of embodied work where women do not have an occupation as such but, after having experienced embodied shame and dishonour, use their bodies to dominate the oppressive other. The strength and effectiveness of performance lies in their ability to transgress authority although this effort may often invoke moral or ethical questions about the ‘good’ of women. Nevertheless, such women show great strength, resilience and the power to dominate through their tough posture (bodily hexis) and strategic and manipulative responses to every difficult situation they encounter. One such woman is 29-year-old Parvati, mother of two children, with a ramrod straight posture and a defiant stance.6 Parvati (the 6 In this narrative, I have retained the name given to me by Parvati and protected her original name.

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name of a goddess, Shiva’s consort) is an assumed name. She tells us that she was named Parvati by the man who first bought her. I encounter Parvati suddenly, I do not know her, nor have I heard anything about her, so I do not seek her out. She walks into the hutment where I am conducting interviews with some women. It appears that there is an electricity problem in the slum and the Delhi Electricity Board has suddenly cut off all power. Parvati stands at the door and harangues the women about their inaction in having the power restored. She berates them for their lack of action and tells them that unless they march to the electricity office and threaten the officials with dire consequences, there will be no electricity. Parvati’s bodily stance, voice and tone indicate a militant woman, aggressive, fearless and articulate. She motivates the women to action by arguing that the ‘sarkar’ (government) cannot suddenly remove electricity: ‘They should have given it to us long ago, if they do not give it to us by this evening, we’ll break all the wires.’ In her long narrative about her life, which is primarily dominated by her relationships with different men, Parvati emphasises aspects of her life when she was not subjugated—by men, her predicament or circumstances—but was able, each time to circumvent the imposed control. She is conscious of her agency that she has exercised, and emphasises her ability to contend with different men and difficult circumstances. Her narrative is dominated by her experience of repeated rape or attempts at rape and comprises the subjective experience of her everyday life. Parvati emphasises her attempts at being strong and fierce. She says she has fought with the police and the local representative (vidhayak) on various issues. She says that she does not have a husband, and is not dependent on anyone. She also does not have any work and that she has been told that she talks too much. She seems to think that this is the reason why she is out of work. Parvati narrates her life history over several days, appearing to realise the extraordinary nature of her life experiences and speaking with passion, depth and emotion. She begins by telling me that she was kidnapped from a small town in Uttar Pradesh when she was child, (studying in Grade 3) and was sold thereafter for the purpose of prostitution. She, however, ran away from there when she was seven years old. At the age of 14, she married a 35/40-year-old man who harassed her and did not give her food. Parvati found work as a domestic help to feed her children. She slowly got fed up of her life and ran away only to return

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shortly as she had nowhere else to go and she missed her children. Her husband hit her black and blue on her return such that she had to be admitted to a hospital. She was in bed for six months and was relatively less harassed in that period. Parvati stated that this was the only time when her husband was soft with her and an effort was made to help her back to normalcy. Later, her husband took her to the railway station to sell her but Parvati managed to escape on the pretext of visiting the toilet. She arrived at a friend’s house where her friend’s husband and brother tried to rape and harass her. Parvati asserts that she managed not to be raped because she raised an alarm and threatened them of informing her friend. Parvati later rented a hutment in the slum, where she now lives, and started work by polishing utensils in a steel factory. Regarding her state of impoverishment at that time, she stated that food was a luxury for her. All she managed to eat, or rather drink, was a solution of water mixed with wheat flour, ‘when one is hungry, then one realises what life is all about. I used to sleep in a gunny bag.’ This implies that she had given up the hutment she had rented and the children appear to no longer be with her. In the meantime, she continued working at the factory. Here the employer tried to cheat on her in terms of money. She then changed her job to work at a hospital as a cleaner. There again the doctor and his attendants raped her under the influence of drugs. Later, she allowed the doctor to have sex with her because she did not want to lose her job for which she received Rs 800 a month. At her place of residence (it is not clear which one or where), Parvati made up a story about a fictitious husband who returned at midnight and left around 4:00 AM to obtain social acceptance and also safety from lecherous men preying on single women. The landlord, however, came to know that she did not have a husband and tried exploiting her. Later, a man kidnapped her and took her into a jungle and raped her. While narrating all this, Parvati made it a point, at her own initiative, to emphasise all the acts of resistance she engaged in to assert her independence and maintain her self-esteem. She refused to remove her clothes and told this man, ‘If you want to remove them, take them off yourself.’ He not only removed her clothes then, but also made her undergo the torment with other men. She later made him pay her back the way she wanted. She first married him at a temple. (When asked the reason for marrying him she added that he had promised to take care of her.)

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Later, he took her to a property dealer where her thumb impression was taken. This property dealer and his brother encouraged her husband to consume alcohol. These men then raped her and one of them even bit her breast. She grew increasingly fed up of her life and left after informing her husband and her mother-in-law. Parvati then took up a job as a Security Officer with the local police as she had managed to make contacts with them while with her previous husband. Later, her husband visited her but refused her any monetary support and called her a woman of bad character (badchalan). She managed to save some money with her job to buy a small hutment (jhuggi) but found it difficult to stay alone. Often, she would run to a temple where she found other women staying. She stayed there for about a year until a mahatma threw her out. Ironically, this man too had tried raping her, but she had managed to escape by slapping him. Later, she had tried reporting the incident to a journalist, to unravel the misconduct happening at the temple, ‘a place of worship,’ as she said. However, she was asked to first lodge an FIR at the police station. Before she could file a complaint, the mahatma from the temple set the police on her, fabricating a case that she had forced herself upon him. She stated that she decided to face the police instead of running from them and told them the whole story. She returned to her jhuggi thereafter and resumed her work as a security person. At this point, Parvati said that she wanted to kill herself because she was fed up with her life and tried to get run over by a train. She was however saved by a police officer who brought her back to her jhuggi. The jhuggi was in a bad condition and needed repair. The police officer not only gave her money to have her jhuggi repaired but he also gave her clothes. He thereafter took her to his place. They grew fond of each other and even went out together. People objected to their relationship, saying that she (Parvati) was a bad character. But he continued their relationship and took her to his brother’s place to refer her for a job. His brother tried raping her and she complained to the police officer. He retorted that she should have slapped him. He took her from there to a nearby housing colony where they stayed for some time. Parvati confesses that she loves him and always will and adds that this man really cared about her and gave her a lot in material terms. She spent some of the best moments of her life with him: ‘Those eight years were the best years of my life’. This man now stays elsewhere and is married to a woman of his

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community (Muslims), ‘If I phone him, his wife abuses me and if I trouble him he says, that if I continue to trouble him, he would kill himself,’ Parvati said. She has rented out her jhuggi and lives off the rent, which is around Rs 1,200 and enough for her survival. Parvati’s language suggests agency and well-being. She appears to be independent and reflects a sense of purpose and self-reliance. Her life has made her completely focused on survival and she expects the same from other women asserting that women who cannot face life head-on and resist oppression are worthless. I do not trust anybody, not even a woman. I have fought with life and death. I will not make any friend now. A woman should keep her faith and not lose courage. I fought with evil; that is why my life is very precious. If a woman is in distress, I am the first one to help. A woman who is not ready to take challenges is good for nothing.

Parvati also appears to be disillusioned with men in general. The person whom we call brother plays with our honour, one who can keep one’s master happy can work. For a man, woman in the house is not valuable, but a woman from outside is special (like tasty meat). They never think that they may have to answer God. Men think, if they have slept with a woman they have accomplished something, but they would have to pay for it at some point in time.

After many sessions with her, spread over several days and indeed months, Parvati concludes the interview by commenting, ‘Parvati is not a human being, she is just a life’ (Parvati koi insaan nahi, kewal ek zindagi hai). Her embodied experience of repeated rape, sexual abuse and oppression by men, has resulted in her construction of herself as ‘just a life’ and not really as a thinking, feeling, experiencing person. She views her identity in terms of her past existence and experience and not in terms of her own aspirations and desires. She has also learnt to use her body for survival and for dominating the oppressive other. To some extent, she has been a victim by virtue of being a single woman, forced by men into unwanted relationships. Later, she seems to have taken to seeking support from the same people and one is led to think through granting sexual favours as well. She has full faith in God and adds that she has done everything including sleeping on the road and under a cart. She takes pride in

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the fact that she ‘kept’ a policeman as a companion. It was perhaps the ultimate act of resistance: publicly keeping a policeman as her lover and companion. It was a complete transgression of all norms and achieved a dual objective with a single stroke: her protection by a man with an official and honourable face as well as her own goal of being independent and free. The uses of the body have however resulted in her subsequently seeking an identity above or outside her embodied life as a sexual object, as it were, by pursuing a ‘good’ life in the service of the community. In this manner, although Parvati says that she is now considered a woman of bad character (badchalan) because she does whatever she wants to, she is quick to point out her role in service to the community and her restoration of her ‘good name’. Through performing a service and role that will bring recognition and acceptance, Parvati finds comfort and final acceptance. She has also succeeded in projecting herself as she would like to be seen and understood: as a community person, working for the upliftment of women, a do-gooder as well as a force to contend with. The other women told me that when Parvati walks into the local police station, the policemen look scared and start locking up the place because before they can react, she flings the choicest abuses at them, threatens them, then tells them the problem and leaves with an ultimatum that often includes death to the policemen. She certainly has a presence in the community and says, with some pride and satisfaction: I am now much better off than what my earlier situation was. I fell but I have been saved. I never thought I would be able to stand up again. I never told anyone that I am a mother. People used to hide their children from me but now I work in the service of the community. I have earned a name for myself. Everyone knows me, you can ask anyone.

Parvati emphasises her work for the community, which has restored the more socially desirable ‘good character’ and social recognition to her on which her identity now seems to rest. In her eventual search for social acceptability, she falls back on the strategy of working for the greater common good which will bring her more honour, status and acceptability and eventual recognition for being more than a mere life—a person. Thus, it is within the same social and public domain which is the source of her rejection that she ultimately finds acceptance and legitimacy.

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Sexuality however is central to Parvati’s experience of her life, her oppression, her acts of resistance and even agency, which helps her to use her body for her survival through the very pleasure it seems to provide others: the granting of sexual favours. She recognises the double-edged nature of women’s sexuality which can be both a source of strength but can also become a terrible weakness, ‘When a woman is in a man’s arms she loses her senses, this is her biggest mistake.’ This is how Parvati acknowledges the manner through which compliance may take place, through sexual encounters, which may also serve at different times to provide the ground for engaging in resistance. Bourdieu’s enigma of the coexistence of compliance and resistance in an experiential sense is marked in the sexual domain of Parvati’s life. But this does not necessarily result in the transgression of authority, rather it helps in the attainment of personal goals and, in Parvati’s case, is her strategy for survival. This also raises the significant question of work, through woman’s embodiment, that is considered at the margins of what is ‘moral’ and socially acceptable behaviour.7 In transgressing the boundaries of the socially acceptable, Parvati’s everyday life practices reveal her struggle for survival in a life dominated by exploitation and poverty. However, Parvati has also shaped an identity for herself through her engagement with all forms of authority, for example, by using foul language with policemen thereby presenting herself as fierce and unassailable, engaging in sexual encounters of different kinds for the express purpose of survival and, through her bodily hexis, presenting herself as a strong, independent woman. Speech and body stylistics come together in performance and Parvati emerges as an agential subject driven by her desires, aspirations and goals.

The Drudgery of Work and Marriage Marriage is not however only about work, resistance and survival in a life dominated by the vicissitudes of everyday struggle. Marriage may also end in divorce as it did for Shahnaz, a 19-year-old woman who divorced her husband after two and a half years. She was married at the age of 15 and has a three-year-old daughter and now lives with her parents. She was born in Delhi where they have lived since 7

I am grateful to Niraja Gopal Jayal for the formulation of this point.

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when she can remember. They are four sisters and two brothers; two of her older sisters are married, one brother is unemployed while her younger sister and brother are very young. She is working as a domestic help and earns around Rs 1,000 every month. Shahnaz was married on the recommendation of one of her neighbours who often used to watch her while she returned from work. They suggested a Bengali Muslim boy whose family, she said, lied to her parents regarding their whereabouts. They claimed to stay in Delhi before marriage while two months after marriage they took her to a village where they lived in rented accommodation. She added that she was very naïve before marriage and had absolutely no idea about what would follow. Her sister had explained to her at the time of marriage that she should totally comply with her husband’s wishes. She was scared to leave her natal home after marriage which she communicated to her father and he sent her younger brother along. On the first night, her husband persuaded her to relieve him from the customary payment made to the bride in Muslim marriages. She said, mehar bakshwali, indicating her awareness of the exploitation she experienced immediately on marriage. Shahnaz’s ex-husband made her work in the fields from eight in the morning until six in the evening. He was suspicious about her behaviour and used to beat her. Her mother-in-law also used to hit her with a stick. Her father-in-law had died long ago and Shahnaz says her mother-in-law has engaged in sex-work since then. She slept with men in the jungle and earned through the trade. Her sister-inlaw stayed with them and followed the same practice. This woman’s first marriage ended in a divorce while her second husband died. Shahnaz stated that her sister-in-law roamed around with men, even at night. One of the men she stated also approached her saying that, if she needed Rs 350, she should accompany him to the jungle. She complained to her husband but, instead of listening to her, he hit her and accused her of lying. He did not also heed to her complaint about his sister and instead beat her up. Shahnaz says that a woman marries for her husband’s support and not that of her parents-in-law or sister-in-law. Her husband however was not bothered about her and used to hit her. He was under the influence of his mother whom he blindly supported. She tried to bring her husband to Delhi where she explained that both of them could work but he never listened to her. Once she did manage to get him to Delhi but his mother came to get him back. He earned

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Rs 1,500 in the village, which he then handed over to his mother. She was not given a penny out of his income, ‘I also was married in that family. He was supposed to take care of me. He never understood anything’. Shahnaz cannot stop talking about her miserable marriage, ‘I used to faint, used to roam around hungry and thirsty. My husband never used to give me money.’ She used to work from dawn till dusk. Later she would return home and cook for everyone, ‘I had to bend down to detach the vegetable from the plant, my back used to hurt a lot. If I refused to work my husband used to beat me.’ According to Shahnaz, her husband continued the torture even when her daughter was in her womb. Once her daughter was born she began sleeping away from her husband and did not allow him to come near her. Her daughter, she added, was born at her mother’s place. No one from her marital home came to see her or bring her anything special to eat (as is customary after the birth of a child). When her daughter was a month and a half old her elder brother-in-law (jeth) came to see her. She however refused to see him because she was alone at home and he had not brought anything for her or her daughter. Her husband came to get her once her daughter was two months old and she returned to the same drudgery. For Shahnaz, work acquires the characteristic of drudgery because of her dissatisfactory relationship with her husband and his family. She experiences herself as being used for purposes of generating income for the rest of the family without receiving any affection or appreciation. Marriage itself, although viewed as a significant event in the life cycle of a woman, is not to be endured if it is unbearable. Narrating her first escape from her husband’s family, she stated that the entire family was in the jungle, when a man came to get her. She understood his intentions and informed the neighbours. She then decided to run away from the house since she was fed up and very scared. She could not collect the valuables received at her marriage. All she could manage was to gather a few pairs of clothes for her daughter. ‘Courageously I took the road across, I had not eaten anything, and I kept walking. After walking for quite some time, I got a bus till Sayana. On reaching Sayana, I sold all the valuables that I was wearing—silver earrings, chain and toe rings.’ She says she recovered enough money to cover her travelling expenses. Although Shahnaz takes the important step of running away to escape domestic violence, she still views marriage as the ultimate

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refuge as she expects her affinal family to reclaim her. The point of running away is then a ploy primarily to express her resistance to the oppression she experiences in the home. She says that her in-laws did not come to get her and she registered a case for divorce in the court. However, on receiving the notice from the court, people from her husband’s village came and with the intervention of the village leader (pradhan), it was decided that Shahnaz would give them another chance. Consequently, she returned to her affinal family. Shahnaz says, ‘Everything remained the same, in fact those people also started troubling me for dowry. They used to indulge in sex work themselves but called me a sex worker.’ She ran away from her husband’s house a second time and this time she decided to take a divorce. The whole legal procedure was very difficult and her husband’s family challenged Shahnaz against divorce. Her husband’s elder brother threatened to kill her but she was determined and claims that she even hit the elder brother in court. Narrating the incidents of the past she stated that her in-laws were very cruel; they once hung her naked from the ceiling fan and beat her. She was made to work in the fields from morning till evening in the sun. She was not given enough to eat and she fainted in the fields very often. On a visit to her daughter, Shahnaz’s mother was so angry on seeing her daughter’s situation that she slapped her son-in-law. Her mother was proud that Shahnaz has studied till Grade 5, and that she could have worked, but she spoilt her life by getting her married. Shahnaz herself is fiercely independent, evident from the fact that she did not go to her sister’s home despite the problems that she was facing and was now feeding her mother and daughter by working as a domestic help. She however regrets the fact that she does not have a son who would have been a strong support to her and adds that one has to work hard for a girl and in this manner perceives her daughter as a burden. In fact, her future is directly linked to her daughter’s future. She tells us she would re-marry only if the man earns well and if he agrees to take care of her daughter. She would want him to deposit some monetary amount for her daughter’s marriage before she consents to her own marriage with him. For Shahnaz, marriage, although experientially disappointing with excessive violence and oppression, remains critical to her sense of well-being as an institution that has full social and public approval because she sees in it that space that contributes to her support, well-being and fulfilment.

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EMBODIMENT, SEXUALITY AND IDENTITY Sexuality, as a contradictory and conflicting experience, is central to women’s experience of their embodiment as is their often contradictory experience of other aspects of their embodiment. In this sense, we may say that women’s perceptions of their embodiment in terms of its erotic and utilitarian considerations are influenced by both their commitment to work for survival and also to relations with men, especially their significant others. There is also a variation in the perceptions of older, married women as compared to young, married women. Older women tend to have a more utilitarian perspective whereas younger women view aspects of adornment and beauty as being central to their embodied experience. The body is clearly not experienced only for its joyous or pleasurable aspects but for what it can help women attain in terms of daily requirements as well as the symbolic aspects of marriage, auspiciousness and fulfilment. Kanta (married, in her mid-thirties) picks chickpeas (chhole) and sells them to earn her living and is affectionately referred to as a chhole wali (seller of peas) by other women in the locality. She appreciates her hands, feet and legs the most. But she emphasises her stomach as being the most pleasurable part of her embodiment as she says, ‘when we eat roti (bread), it feels nice because the stomach is full’ (jab roti kha lo, to achha lagta hai). At this point, Sanawati, (married, in her twenties) who works as a domestic help, is very thin, hair tied back, dark complexioned and very matter of fact asserts, ‘but if you eat a lot, your stomach will come out (you will become fat). Then how nice will you look? In any case’, she adds, ‘what is there in the body that is so nice?’. Kanta joins in to assert: The thing down below is nice (Neeche ki cheez achhi hai). If that is not there, then there is no need for anything else. Your husband won’t look at you if you don’t have anything down there. A woman is judged only by that. A man will not want you. He will call you a eunuch (hijra).

Tamanna (married, late twenties), a tailor working from home, comments, ‘everything is nice. (Sab kuch sahi hai). You work with your hands, cook and eat with your hands’. For Tamanna, hands are the most important because ‘hands have the best attributes (hath mein gun hain)’. Her hands are very useful to her. Kanta comments on a woman’s sexual attributes, ‘Chest too is important, (chhaati);

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Breasts and the thing down below (neeche ki cheez), If these are not there, a woman cannot exist (janani kuchh bhi nahin hai).’ The most significant comment on woman’s perception of her embodied identity is that, the uterus (bacchadaani) is the most important part of woman’s embodiment. ‘No one acknowledges us without that (uske bina koi puchta hi nahin). We spend money on that. If you do not have that, no one will marry you. A woman is recognized by that (yahi to aurat ki pehchan hai)’. Woman is recognised by her ability for childbearing and woman’s identity is therefore perceived in relation to that aspect of her everyday life. As also are hands, the most important for all kinds of work, which is crucial to their selfdefinitions. The feet are similarly important, to walk with, ‘as to work, one has to walk first’. Most significantly, more than aspects of their own embodiment, women value their husband’s body for its utilitarian purpose. For example, Sunila, the upper caste woman who resents her lower caste occupation of washing dirty dishes, has a low income generating husband but wants to see him remain healthy and fit, ‘What is there in my body? If the hands and legs stay good, it is good. I don’t care if something happens to me, my husband should stay fine.’ Moreover, she is not sure if she will ever get well, but she wants her husband to keep going so that he can continue to feed her children. There is in a sense a devaluation of aspects of woman’s embodiment due to her inability to overcome her sometimes difficult and oppressive material conditions. The burden of poverty compels woman to believe that their husband’s body has greater value than their own due to their apparent ability to undertake ‘heavy’ work, which they are themselves unable to do, as well as men’s perceived role as the main providers for the family. The body is also viewed as a passport to attaining something as valuable as a marriage partner. For example, Heena had thought, at the time of her marriage, that if her face is nice, she would be considered beautiful. She thinks this did not happen because she ended up with an ordinary partner thus indicating a lack of embodied perfection in herself. Phoolmani, with a squint in one eye, who works as a domestic help, is very astute in surmising in this context that desire alone cannot lead woman to fruition so that there is no point in having a desire for something (a suitable partner) if one does not have the means (a beautiful face) or the resources (wealth) to acquire it. Among young adolescent, single and married women, who are newly married, and have very young children, the body acquires a

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symbolic status of auspiciousness and fulfilment that must be visible and in a sense flaunted in the community. ‘Using lipstick and filling vermilion in the central parting of the hair (lipstick lagaana aur maang bharna)’ are the two single most important activities of daily adornment. One young married woman says, ‘I have many pimples and they are making it difficult for me to live’. She is therefore concerned about getting rid of her pimples. They enjoy wearing gold jewellery but they realise it is not in their fate to wear such ornaments. They also feel that breasts look nice, ‘ladki ko shobha dete hain’ and that flat-chested women look like eunuchs (hijras). There is of course a celebration of not only their femininity in their use of make-up, their acknowledgement of their husbands’ appreciation of such make-up, but also an awareness of their sexuality in their reference to hijras or eunuchs who are socially considered sexless. (Adult women also referred to hijras as being those who are less feminine women and therefore, useless in the eyes of men.) But more importantly, it was the observation of these young women that it was ultimately not just looks that mattered but one’s ability to work: ‘dekhne mein bhi sundar ho aur kaam mein bhi’, that is, a woman must not only be beautiful to look at but also excel in the work she is able to do, that emphasises the significance of work in the lives of even these young women especially in their husbands’ homes. Malti, 21-years-old and married for three years, emphasises the importance of work in a woman’s life: In my in-laws’ home, everyone respects me a great deal. I do all the work. I never give them a chance to say anything. I like living in the village very much: plenty of milk, clarified butter, buttermilk, and the greenery. But the most important thing that I like in my life is work and earning my livelihood.

She eagerly provided a detailed account of all the housework and other work she is engaged in. More than any physical features of beauty or adornment, it is work alone that defines Malti’s embodied identity. Women’s sexuality is also subjectively constructed in relation to their everyday life and experience of gendered relations within the context of poverty. Women’s voices reveal that most often than not, those who have had children and have been married for about ten years, do not enjoy sexual relations. It is yet another chore they have to engage in. They agree that women do not initiate sex which is

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a male prerogative. Men, women said, when they need sex, woo women by coming home early, feed them with their hands, are nice to them, ask them to do the dishes the next morning, give them gifts, and so on. Women realise that they are essential to man’s sense of physical well-being through sexual relations but are equally aware that men do not consider it essential for women’s well-being as the act is not only initiated by men but there is also no concern for women’s enjoyment. There is an apparent suppression of woman’s sexuality through a submission to the normative order that does not encourage women to enjoy and take pleasure from their sexuality. The sexual act is meant for procreation and once that has been achieved, it seems like a meaningless act for the women. There is also a clear perception that sex is only a male interest and that women somehow do not and perhaps should not desire sex. ‘A man only desires sex (admi ki tammana to yahi hoti hai). A man wants to work, eat and have sex. He spends so much money for this (sexual gratification) and he also goes out for this. But, if he is married, he also gets a family and is saved from any disease,’ says Anila. The family offers women protection but is simultaneously the institution in which they are treated as mere adjuncts, caretakers and workers. It is also the source of denial of woman’s agency by counselling women to adjust, give in and submit to men’s sexual advances because men are ‘like that’ and ‘this’ is marriage. However, women like Sangeeta also perceive the natal family as being critical to the lives of women and for shaping and developing their skills to manage or negotiate their married lives. There is even physical revulsion among some women, for example, Heena considers it a dirty task (ganda kaam) and at times even vomits afterwards. She fights against it but is forced to submit. She feels she is helpless and cannot do anything because her husband tells her he will have to go to someone else if she doesn’t provide sex. The experience of grinding poverty also erases sexual desire. Tamanna, for example, says: If you are not married or choose not to get married, people won’t understand. So I was brought up to believe in marriage, and wanted to get married, and now after marriage, there is poverty. Now, I don’t desire sex at all. Cash is short, so I have no desire.

Women also experience a sense of shame in front of the children who are often present, though asleep, during these sexual encounters.

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They indicate that men do not have any shame and if they want it, they do it whenever and however they can. For example, Vineeta is 35 years old with a 16-year-old daughter. She says that her husband craves sexual intimacy while she does not. Earlier, she indulged him but now she has a grown-up daughter. They often fight over his demand for sex, but she does not give in, though she has to sometimes, she admits. Moreover, those women who may want to initiate the act are prevented from doing so by social norms and their partner’s suspicions—she is suspected of initiating sex with other men as well. These cultural, social and gender prescriptions thereby prevent women from an experience of sexual pleasure, wellbeing and contentment. As one woman said, ‘It has been ten years of sexual intimacy but still I have not found happiness (dus saal ho gaye sambandh hote, khushi nahin hoti).

CONCLUDING COMMENTS Women’s self-worth in the slum emerges from a social identity acquired through marriage which they identify as being essential to their destinies as women. However, their experience of embodiment indicates that although they have control over their reproductive and related health by having taken the important decision of sterilisation, even against the advice of their husbands, they are unable to challenge patriarchal control over their sexuality. They are also governed by a largely utilitarian experience of their embodiment in terms of the functions their bodies perform and how it can be used to combat the poverty in their everyday lives. This is however not reflected among the younger women who celebrate their embodiment through adornment and an articulation of body images that appear not to be necessarily located in a utilitarian perspective. The imprint of gender is unmistakable in women’s construction of their subjective experience of poverty. For example, they are responsible not only for child rearing and other domestic labour but also for contraception. Their partners simply do not agree to sterilisation or women themselves suggest that male bodies are weak and have to perform ‘heavy’ labour and therefore cannot take the strain of surgery. At other times, women may be unable to contest male demands for sex in lieu of money for household expenditure. They

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may however also use the situation to manipulate their husbands for such money. Poverty and gender inequality are critical to married women’s experience of embodiment, selfhood and identity in everyday life in the slum. Women, nonetheless speak out, engage in acts of resistance, and, above all, recognise that they exercise agency in different contexts. However, agency remains a problematic concept. There may be an eagerness to valorise women’s agency as it is reflected in Parvati’s experience of resistance and agential action but, for other women, as communicated by Parvati herself, she remains a ‘bad character’ until she reforms herself through her service to the community. Roger Jeffery and Patricia Jeffery have pointed out that rural women are somewhat frightened of what might be considered agency and therefore do not necessarily experience it as such (Jeffery and Jeffery 1997: 162). Women may therefore not opt not to exercise agency, as they do not want to be seen doing things which may challenge family honour, or their identities as married women. Even if women do exercise agency, it is not always possible to anticipate the extent to which this will obtain the results they want. Also, although woman’s agency often facilitates change which challenges male power, women can also choose to take decisions which reinforce traditional gender power relations. Finally, it should be re-emphasised that marriage is a critical component of women’s identities as embodied, gendered selves. Whether resistance is covert or overt, acts of resistance by individual women in their everyday lives are critical in terms of giving women a feeling of self-worth. This is especially true if women are able to recognise these acts for what they are, and articulate their recognition. It has been argued that conscious ‘intention’ in an act of resistance is crucial to the recognition of that act as resistance (Lock and Kaufert 1998). However, while there may not be a conscious intention to resist, there may indeed be a consciousness of the act after it has taken place, which is also significant for the contestation of power relations in everyday life.8 Looking at individual women’s acts of agency and resistance is a challenge to those perspectives which highlight the importance 8 Bina Agarwal has also argued that ‘the absence of overt protest’ in her material does not however indicate ‘an absence of questioning inequality’ (Agarwal 1994: 431). The possibilities for agential consideration and action are in a sense always open.

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and effectiveness of collective action. Often, resistance by groups is emphasised as if it is of more importance, and has more validity, than resistance by individuals. But resistance is not only effective when it is a group-based or collective activity, or when it is organised into a social movement. Individuals engage in acts of resistance, recognisable through the voices and practices of everyday life, and these are important to ensure their well-being. It is however not always possible to indicate the extent to which agency attains desired results although its immediate gains for women are undeniable. We move, in the next chapter, to an understanding of the complexities underlying the concept of resistance and the implications this has for woman’s agency in everyday life.

6 APORIAI OF RESISTANCE1

I

n this concluding chapter, I examine the emancipatory possibilities of resistance, as a tool and a strategy, by women in urban, contemporary India. I also seek to establish the quality and power of resistance, as two sides of the same coin, that enables possibilities even as it forecloses them, allows engagement with the operation of power and simultaneously prevents the containment of power. I further argue that, in this sense, the dual characteristic of resistance, symbolising both agency and loss, is not a negative phenomenon that may suggest the eventual voicelessness and despair of the gendered subject. In fact, taking recourse to Derrida’s theory of aporias (Derrida 1993), I seek to present resistance as an enabling construct, a state of being in an ‘impasse’ which in a positive sense, allows the ‘impossible movement of traversing—without crossing—the ultimate border’ (Wang 2005: 45).2 The stories of women in everyday life express the experience of womanhood, embodiment and identity through voice, emotion and bodily hexis. In their telling of their lives, there is an underlying emphasis on both compliance and resistance and how these together shape women’s identities and lives in particular and varied ways. 1 Aporias, or more correctly, aporiai, always in the plural, was used by Aristotle in Metaphysics. Younis refers to ‘impossibility but also in relation to possibility’, ‘on bringing puzzlement, perplexity, or reflection…to the level of awareness, and keeping them there, so to speak, so that the way forward may become clearer for the understanding’ (Younis 2007: 4). In one passage alone, Aristotle refers to twelve significant aspects of aporiai (ibid.: 2). 2 Aporia, in Greek, suggests ‘the state of impasse, nonpassage or logical contradiction that can never be permanently resolved, a state of constant dilemma with no general or final solution’ (Wang 2005: 45).

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Without any attempt to valorise acts of resistance in everyday lie, it is imperative to acknowledge women’s attempts at resistance as symbolic of their awareness of their condition and of their struggle to deal with it if not to overcome it. Women negotiate, strategise, manipulate, revolt and rebel against situations, events and persons in their everyday lives in the family and in the workplace. I agree with Nita Kumar that protest appears as ‘evasive tactics, countercultures of language, genres of song and dance, myths full of double entendres, private correspondence and diary writing’ among other forms (Kumar 1994: 3). At the same time, women’s socio-economic position often restrains them from open rebellion as does their socially internalised respect for family and community honour.3 Resistance, as a concept, therefore necessarily implies that power is redefined and reconstituted as indeed is the subjectivity of the resisting subject (Kalpagam 2000: 170). Moreover, women’s multiple subjectivities are marked by difference and resistance and complicity then do not merely refer to types of agencies but, as Moore so insightfully remarks, to ‘forms or aspects of subjectivity’ (Moore 1994a: 50). Women’s resistance to the dominant habitus is therefore dependent on their variously marked and changing subjectivity which, at different times, will influence the mode, intensity and transformatory potential of resistance differently. Bourdieu attempts to locate the exercise of power within an apparent neutrality that is both enabling and restricting or constraining for women. Writing about the Kabyle society, he perceptively comments: Even when women do wield the real power…they can exercise it fully on condition that they leave the appearance of power, that is, its official manifestation, to the men; to have any power at all, women must make do with the unofficial power of the eminence grise, a dominated power which is opposed to official power in that it can operate only by proxy, under the cover of an official authority, as well as to the subversive refusal of the rule-breaker, in that it still serves the authority it uses. (Bourdieu 1977: 41)

3 This points to the problematic nature of resistance which includes submission. Bourdieu refers to this as the ‘unresolvable contradiction of resistance’ and indicates that while resistance may appear to liberate and compliance may suggest control and alienation, in fact the opposite may also be true (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992: 22ff).

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Such a perspective includes both the forms of oppression that women may experience as well as points to the possibilities for strategising and the skilful manoeuvring they may engage in to achieve their goals. Although it further indicates that, the power women exercise is eventually subsumed by patriarchy and indicates the presence of agency within power, as it were. In this sense, ‘resistance is found in the social ontology from the start’ (Hoy 1999: 19). Power cannot work without resistance and in fact needs it ‘to spread itself more extensively through the social network’ (ibid.). This is the paradox of resistance, as Bourdieu has pointed out, that not only disrupts power but also serves its ends. There are definite constraints in exercising agency and these constraints are not necessarily located outside our embodied selves; in fact, more dangerously, they may be accepted by women as being their essential defining characteristics. ‘Symbolic violence’ therefore ‘accomplishes itself through an act of cognition and of miscognition that lies beyond—or beneath—the controls of consciousness and will, in the obscurities of the schemata of habitus that are at once gendered and gendering (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992: 172). It is in this sense that gender domination consists ‘in an imprisonment effected via the body’ (ibid.). It is through the dominant postcolonial habitus that the structure which has produced it governs practice. In other words, power operates from within us and has taken root in the form of general dispositions in our ways of thinking, knowing and seeing so that we perceive as we are meant to and thus know of our embodied selves as we are expected to. This is a deterministic view of the function of power and it therefore becomes imperative to understand its functions in a very subtle and non-intrusive manner so that in fact it is possible that one is hardly aware that one is in its grip. Bourdieu notes, ‘the main mechanism of domination operates through the unconscious manipulation of the body’ (Bourdieu and Eagleton 1992: 115). It is through forms of symbolic violence that culture as systems of meaning and symbols are imposed and experienced as legitimate. This is possible through the process of misrecognition through which ‘power relations are perceived not for what they objectively are but in a form which renders them objective in the eyes of the beholder’ (Bourdieu and Passeron 1977: xiii). This form of domination which is symbolic in nature is not imposed but ‘is something you absorb like air, something you don’t feel pressured by; it is everywhere and nowhere, and to escape from that is very difficult’ (Bourdieu and Eagleton 1992: 115).

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Foucault, whose work on power has been found constructive by feminists as much as it has vexed them, considers power a positive rather than a repressive force. It is productive to the extent that it does not exist in the form of interdictions or prohibitions but is ‘hidden’ in the social body. In fact it exists nowhere except in the minds of individuals ‘under the form of representation, acceptance or interiorization’ (Foucault 1988: 119). In that sense it is not experienced as oppressive and because it is productive, it may even be pleasurable. It is therefore important for woman to view and construct her embodied self on what she considers her own terms and not as defined by some external agency. It is also of considerable significance that woman experiences her embodiment, and her manipulation of it, in terms which are seen as being profitable to her physical and emotional well-being contributing to her self-esteem and body image in positive ways. The body and its discontents, are therefore never experienced as oppressive in themselves. They acquire that quality of oppression only in relation to significant others and to the politics of location in women’s lives. Control is then exercised in everyday life not through repression but, following Foucault, through what Lois McNay terms ‘more invisible strategies of normalization’ in accordance with his argument that individuals regulate themselves through an inner search for ‘truth’ which lies in their innermost identity. This identity is clearly one’s sexual identity which is the ‘linchpin of normalizing strategies’ (McNay 1994: 98) to the extent to which individuals fail to recognise the constructed nature of their sexuality and are therefore unable to see the possibilities for change. Socialisation processes, are not the only means through which normalising strategies effectively function. Women are continuously exposed to an array of social and cultural ideologies and practices that impact their identities in multiplex ways and women are simultaneously engaged in subverting these social practices through negotiation, strategising and contestation.4 4 Veena Das has argued that ‘the sense of being a woman is internalised’ through the double perspective of ‘the body as object and the body as subject’ (Das 1988: 193). The socialisation process in Indian society reflects the manner in which the bodies of men and women are socially viewed, thereby assigning different values to the masculine and the feminine body (ibid: 193ff.). A young woman’s experience of her gendered identity therefore rests very much on her body, both in terms of body image and her experience of her embodiment in her relations with others in everyday life. Gender is therefore not only perceived and experienced but also ‘deeply inscribed on our bodies’ (McNay 1999: 98), and thereby on our lived experience. Also

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Power and resistance are in this way coextensive. Whenever power is exercised, resistance will follow: ‘As soon as there is a power relation, there is a possibility of resistance. We can never be ensnared by power: we can always modify its grip in determinate conditions and according to a precise strategy’ (Foucault 1988: 123). Such a sharp strategy is only possible however only when power is recognised for what it is. When power is not imposed and has a ‘capillary form of existence’ in so far as ‘power seeps into the very grain of individuals, reaches right into their bodies, permeates their gestures, their posture, what they say, how they learn to live and work with other people’ (Foucault 1980: 217), then, the extent to which resistance can either be very specific, organised or even articulated, needs to be considered.5 The problem with Foucault’s theory of power lies precisely in his discussion of resistance which remains embedded in a ‘reactive’ model of agency rather than as a form of transformative practice. If, however, we consider resistance as productive agency, then, individual responses and formulations serve as the beginning of transformative practice and are not without purpose. It follows that we seek to understand the sources from where resistance is drawn. Do these sources lie within individuals, in their minds and hearts embedded in their consciousness? Or are such acts of resistance drawn from external conditions and sources that serve to initiate our ability to resist? No doubt, there are many deep wells from where we may draw our ‘oppositional spirit and project’ (Bordo 1997: 190). These wells or depths of our existence are located in our lived experience of our everyday worlds and therefore the nature of resistance will vary depending on social position, privilege and status and other assets that serve as markers of inclusion and exclusion. More importantly, see Dube (1988), Lateef (1990), Bhatty (1988), Chanana (1988), Ram (1992), for considerations of normalising strategies used by the family in everyday life to socialise young girls into normative truths of gender identity. 5 Butler (2004) seeks to provide a nuanced understanding of Foucault’s efforts to delineate agency in the subject’s struggle against the imposition of power through the body. She argues that Foucault finds the ‘seeds of transformation’ in the ‘life of passion that lives and thrives at the borders of recognisability, which still has the limited freedom of not yet being false or true, which establishes a critical distance on the terms that decide our being’ (2004: 193). See Butler (2004) for her understanding of Foucault’s approach which appears to be contingent, in this formulation, upon the development of bodily passion that is itself created by the power acted upon the body.

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however, resistance will depend on the internal experience of individuals and their ability to understand and link this inner experience with the external social and political reality of everyday life. This ability does not necessarily derive from formal or non-formal systems of education although education may help in the articulation of experience. It is an awareness of the dominant order, of the complexities of the social and public domain, and most significantly, of their consequences, that enables resistance as well as its recognition. This awareness may result from education but often has an inexplicable source that arises more from an act of cognition and inner strength and does not seem to have any external referent or source of inspiration. At the same time, the dividing line between compliance and subversion is rather thin and woman’s embodied self is often the conflicting site of both giving in to, as well as resisting, dominant ideologies and ways of being. Conflict is central to women’s lives, whether or not woman is able to give expression to her desires and views. In response to the tendency to portray women as passive, submissive, helpless victims, feminist works examine the possibilities of women’s agency within the limitations or constraints of discursive power.6 Compliance and resistance are both central to women’s everyday life experiences. It has been reiterated by Kalpagam that ‘the ties that bind women in their lives provide both securities that impact positively on their personhood, as well as liabilities that are often very oppressive’ (Kalpagam 2000: 177). The family is undoubtedly the single most important of such ties and others include those of the sphere of intimacy and sexuality, of practical kinship relations, of friendship, and other social ties (ibid.). Kalpagam argues that it is only through an understanding of the trajectories of experience in each of these domains can one understand ‘how compliant or resistant selves are constituted’ (ibid.). None of these domains is, however, an independent sphere so that the impact of all spheres is 6 Raheja and Gold analyse women’s oral traditions in rural Rajasthan and argue that women’s songs and stories ‘consistently compose ironic and subversive commentaries on the representations of gender and kinship roles found in the epic texts, in male folklore genres, and in a good deal of everyday talk’ (Raheja and Gold 1996: 12–13); Bacchetta examines the role of the women’s wing of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) in constructing ideal models for ‘powerful symbolic femininity and powerful material womanhood’ that provide tremendous potential for resistance among its members (Bacchetta 1994). See also Oldenburg Talwar (1990), O’Hanlon (1988, 1991).

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experienced simultaneously by women in their everyday lives. Both within and outside the family, women engage in the twin process of compliance and resistance, submission and rebellion, silence and speech, to assert their identities as women in what they clearly and assertively recognise as oppressive contexts and situations. Women’s stories in this work clearly point to the overt and extremely vocal questioning by women of their oppression in the family, community and society even as they are simultaneously submitting to the exercise of power. In understanding women’s agency in everyday discourses and practices, I must therefore emphasise that we should retreat from a partial understanding of only the visible forms of domination to the voices and practices—‘gestures, habits, desires—that are grounded in the body…as the sources of resistance and protest’ (Kielmann 1998: 129). The complexities that characterise everyday life include both conscious and often unconscious considerations that influence decisions in particular ways. It has been argued that conscious ‘intention’ in an act of resistance is crucial to the recognition of that act as resistance (Lock and Kaufert 1998: 12). This negates all acts other than those which are not only conscious but self-calculated, self-willed and clearly intended to work for change. While there may not be a conscious intention to resist, there may indeed be a consciousness of the act after it has taken place. This consciousness or recognition of everyday acts of resistance is significant in the contestation of relations of power in everyday life. However, resistance is effective not only when it is a group-based or collective activity or indeed only when it is organised into a social movement. That is one view of the effectiveness of resistance or agency for social change. I contend that resistance, expressing agency, is effective for individual wellbeing even when it reflects covert and overt acts of resistance by individual women in their everyday lives especially in the recognition and articulation of such acts by women themselves. Such recognition is indicative of the fact that women are able to perceive, develop and use strategies for ensuring their well-being and survival through acts of resistance in everyday life. I therefore distinguish between agency for social transformation and agency for individual well-being and view the latter as being critical to women’s everyday life practices.7 7 cf. Sunder Rajan who argues that although ‘agency’ is treated synonymously with ‘resistant agency’, it is ‘not (yet) a revolutionary term since…it is a praxis that is reactive

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However, it is also a fact that, much as we would like social agents to be active, knowing and therefore resisting subjects, ‘no one can ever be fully aware of the conditions of their own construction’ (Moore 1994a: 53) and in this sense can therefore never seek to be free of their oppression. It is also a fact that complete awareness is not always found and it is perhaps essential to begin from what is apparent and true from women’s lives where both conflict and resistance coexist in all their multiplicity and complexity. That is the real world of the everyday: troubled, torn, chaotic, violent, unequal, and simultaneously joyous, pleasurable, worthy, and worth fighting for. It is in this mixed space of emotions, embodiment and selfhood that I have presented the stories of women in their socio-culturally and politically marked spheres of everyday life. To view resistance as aporiai is to endow resistance with emancipatory potential, to view it always as a conscious state of perplexity, an overcoming of which is the ultimate act of agency. It is in the nature of aporiai, not to remain in perplexity but to rise above the confusion, unfettered, to a new level of understanding. Aporiai, for Derrida, is linked to the experience of openness and interminability. Women recognise that it is both necessary to resist as well as very difficult to surmount or transcend the obstacle but that knowledge does not restrict their agency. In fact, acts of resistance are linked to the possibilities of change without always attaining it. Yet, it is in the moment of resistance that there is the possibility of openness and change. In that sense, it is ‘both impossible to pass the border and necessary to transcend it’ (Wang 2005: 46). It is therefore in this moment of crossing borderlines, ‘an impossible passage’, that there is the experience of aporiai. It is at this point when ‘the edge is overrun, contradictory imperatives and opposite gestures from both sides are fully awakened and thereby bring pressure for an answer’ (ibid.). It is not possible however to simply erase the known and in that sense the border between this state of lived experience and the other, the unknown, the potential for newness, change, always remains. Wang in fact argues that this condition does not therefore allow for the full to domination rather than one that initiates a transformation’ (Sunder Rajan 2000: 154). Contrarily, R. Jeffery and P. Jeffery make a distinction between ‘autonomy’ and ‘agency’ and argue, in the context of rural women in Bijnor district, that women are vulnerable and it is therefore perhaps necessary to assert the significance of approaches that recognise that they have to employ the ‘weapons of the weak’(Jeffery and Jeffery 1997). See also Jeffery (1998).

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experience of aporiai ‘because it refuses the arrival of the final destination’ and that in the end ‘there is no way out of aporiai, but in this impasse, active engagement with the impossible becomes imperative for creating new forms of life’ (ibid.: 48). Crossing borders from this condition of existence to another are not only fraught with contradiction and struggle but always contain, within the act of crossing, the possibilities for transformed existence, unknown newness and change. It is within these processes of crossings, that include often a return to that which has gone before, as much as to that which is not yet been revealed, in terms of both experience and possibility, as subjecthood is experienced simultaneously as constraining and full of potential, that voice as culture is reborn. To resist is therefore not merely to wave a flag or point a path but at the same time to pose the question for the future, as an openness rather than inevitability or closure, filled with meaning and promise for an unknown and emergent future.

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Index

adolescence, xvii, xx, 26ff. adornment of the body, 82–83, 159, 161 adulthood, 26–29, 38 advertisements, representation of woman’s body, 29, 68, 81–87 ageing, 69, 90, 108 agency of women xviii, 4, 6–7, 9, 17, 18, 22, 29, 60, 62, 90, 98, 104, 132, 136, 141, 148, 151, 153, 160, 162, 163, 164, 166, 168, 169, 170–71. See also embodiment aporias, 164 aporiai, 164, 171–72 auspiciousness and fulfilment, 59, 157, 159 beauty and glamour: beauty contest industry, 79–80, 90; colonial ideals, 79; conventional notions, 106, 128; as feminine ideals, 69–75; market-driven intervention in beauty care, 81; sexual dimension, 83 being-in-the-body, 6 being-in-the-world, notion of, xiv, 3, 7–8, 10 biological bases of existence, xiv body: changes, 50, 55, 60; image, and self-presentation, 106–15; lived and communicative, 3; in the mirror, 93ff.; as object

and body as subject, 43–46; relationship with objects, 82; as a weapon, 131ff. Bollywood, 28, 47 Bourdieu, Pierre, xiv–xv, 6–7, 10–12, 39–40, 90–91, 153, 165–66 Burke, Edmund, 73 Butler, Judith, 8–9, 107, 115, 168n5 Campbell, Naomi, 73 career aspirations and the family, 28, 38–42 caste, 2, 9, 11, 15–16, 18; and work, relation, 145–46 child-adult continuity, 27 childbearing, xxi, 27–28, 30, 44, 57, 59, 132, 133–34, 158; and contraception, 133–42 childhood, 26–29, 51, 57; and adulthood, transition, 27 childlessness, 135, 137 Chomsky, 6 Clarins, 71 class and embodiment, 9, 11, 13, 16, 21, 27–28, 62, 94, 110 collective action, 163 colonialism, 22, 23 colonial stereotypes, 74 communication, 33–35, 44, 50, 66, 117 companionship, 95, 100

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conflict, dilemmas and contradictions, 40, 94, 169 consciousness, xviii, 5–6, 11, 40, 62, 106, 162, 166, 168, 170 consumption practices, xvi, 67, 70 contemporary womanhood, xiii, xix–xx, 11, 18–25, 26, 28, 32, 36, 43, 70, 77, 85–86, 92 contestation and negotiation, 7, 9, 13, 25, 94, 98, 114, 123, 162, 167, 170 contraception, 133–42, 161 conventions. See norms and values, tradition Cooley, Charles H., 10 corporeal subjectivity, xiv Cosmopolitan, 64, 67, 86, 88, 90 culture, xx, 12, 14–15–17, 20–22, 26, 27–31, 129 daughter–mother relationship, 33–34 decision-making power of women, 99, 134, 139–42, 170 Derrida, Jacques, 8, 164, 171 desire and fulfilment, 9 discursive practices, 12, 22, 111, 115–16, 169 divorce, 154, 156 domestic violence, 62, 138, 142, 155 domestic work, 60,128, 135–36, 144 domesticity and marriage, xx, 54–62 dowry, 156 drudgery, 140, 153–57 economic deprivation, xvi, 2, 132, 142 education process, 20; absence of schooling, 28–30; access to, xvi, 28, 37; educationally advantaged young women, 29–30, 42, 54;

educationally disadvantaged young women, 29–30, 31, 50, 63, 93–51; and media culture, 20 Elle, 86, 90 embodiment: changing concepts with age and maturity, 108–09 and its discontents, 116–29; feminine aspects, 44; fragmentation of, 80ff.; in global economy, 69; inferiorised, 126; and identity, 2–13, 25, 44–47, 92, 93ff., 112, 157–61;—and resistance, xviii, xx;—and womanhood, 1ff.;—in Femina, 64ff.; postcolonial context, 13, 15–18, 19, 22–23, 73, 90, 116, 147, 166; and self-image and relationships, 10, 45, 49, 94; and sexuality, 2, 133 157–61; social, cultural and male representation, 106; repository of sacredness and honour, 11; respectability and national honour of, 92; violence and identity, 93ff.; work and identity, 131ff.;—and interpersonal relations, 142–57 emotional: agony, 124; bonding, 36; contentment, 102–03; torture and torment/violence, 104–05, 117–18 emotions, 3, 4, 5, 13, 20, 89, 108, 112, 116, 171 enfranchisement, 23 equality, 66, 104 ethnicity, 2, 15, 18 exclusion and inclusion process, 15–17, 45, 75, 168 experiential reality, 5, 9, 30–32, 44, 58, 153, 156 family, family relations, xix, 2, 12, 14, 23, 25, 29–34, 37–38,

INDEX

187

41, 50, 94, 98–101, 118, 120, 124–26, 128, 132, 170; and career aspirations of adolescents, 28, 38–42; and construction of self, 31; nuclear and extended, 95–97, 103–05, 126–27, 132 Fashion, 88 fashion, fashion industry, 68, 74–75, 90–91, 109–10 fashion photography, 49, 68, 75, 78, 79, 83–84, 86, 89 father–daughter relations, 33–37, 41, 105 female fantasy, 20 female gaze, 4, 49, 68, 106 Femina, embodiment and womanhood, 64ff. feminine dependence on male partners, 77 feminine self, 70, 99 femininity, 11–12, 30, 38, 43–44, 48, 59, 64, 76–77, 84, 86, 116; commodification, 24 fertility, 139–42 filial duties, 95, 97 Foucault, Michel, 116, 167–68 fragmentation and mystification, 118, 121 fragmented body and an ambivalent identity, 80–87, 88 freedom of choice and action, 132 fundamentalism, 11

42; politics, 12, 98; roles and relations, 2–3, 25, 38, 162 glamour, 69–75, 79–80, 86, 89–91, 103 globalisation and liberalisation of Indian economy, 14, 17–18, 20, 24–25, 68, 90 globalisation, icon of, 68

gender, gendered subjects, xvi, xix, 4, 8, 15, 15n15, 16, 25, 30, 53, 62, 92; and class, xiii; domination, 102, 166; gendered selves, 5–6, 11, 32, 162; hierarchy/inequality, 26, 116, 122, 133, 162; identity, 1n1, 4–5, 8, 10, 13, 17, 25, 28, 39–40, 42, 46–47, 51, 63, 78, 81, 84, 90, 92, 106, 115, 117, 128, 168n4; ideologies at school,

kinship relations, 2, 31, 42, 97, 169. See also family

habitus, xv, xvii–xviii, xx, 6–10, 14–15, 30, 39–40, 58, 62–63, 94, 98, 102–3, 105, 165–66; postcolonial, 13, 14–17, 23, 73, 75, 90, 103, 116, 128, 147, 166 heterogeneity, xviii, 14, 20, 39, 63 home as the insulated private sphere, 21 identity, xviii, xix, 17, 22, 32, 44, 83, 108, 129, 131ff.; social constructions, 32. See also gender identity illusory characteristics, 84 Indian womanhood, ambivalence, 75–80 intellectual and physical growth, 79 interpersonal relations, 100, 106n3 116–17; and embodied work, 142–57 jewellery and adornment, 59, 78, 82–83, 86, 159

labour relations, 12, 39 life cycle of women, 136n1, 155; educationally advantaged, 20, 28–33, 41–42, 54; educationally disadvantaged, 15, 28–31, 50, 63, 93; rituals, 82 life expectancy, xvi linguistic sophistication, 21

188

LIVING THE BODY

loneliness, 95, 99 looking-glass self, 10 male chauvinism, 43, 44 male child, preference for, 26, 134, 140–41 male dominance, 132, 136–37 male gaze, xxi, 4, 68, 106, 107, 114, 129 marital rape and violence, 119, 122 marriage, marital relations, 27–30, 39, 51, 92, 95–97, 98, 99–101, 108, 118–22, 125–26, 155–57, 161; and domesticity, xx, 54–62; and family, xviii; and work, 153–57 masculine construct, 26 masculine role model, 36 masculinity, 38, 43, 47, 65, 115 materiality, 2 maternity, 99 meaning, representation and symbolism, 116, 167 media, 12, 27, 46–47, 84–85, 91; global, 20, 47, 63; representation of women’s embodiment, 107; visual and print, 22–24, 28, 43 memory, 3, 4, 34, 91 mental torture, violence, 98, 116–18, 120–22, 124, 127 metaphysical device, 10 middle-class woman, xviii, xx–xxi, 11, 12, 17, 20–25, 32, 34–35, 38, 41, 47, 50, 65–67, 73–75, 80, 89, 93, 104, 120, 125 mind and body, 5 mirror-image of embodiment, 93ff. modernity, 19, 22, 41, 65, 67, 71, 77, 80, 90 moral domain, symbolic control, 21–22 mother and children, relation/bond, 104

motherhood, 27, 74, 92, 96, 100, 109, 122, 137; childbearing and contraception, 133–42 mother-in-law and marital relations, 58, 95–97, 101, 103, 125–28, 135–36, 144, 147, 150, 154 nationalism, nationalist movement, 11, 18 norms and values, xv, 9, 22, 23, 25, 32, 36, 43; and femininity, 76–83; and gender identity, 92 occupational choices, 80, 103–04, 138 oppression and domination, 7, 17–18, 32, 94, 98, 108, 122–23, 126, 134–35, 147, 151, 153, 156–57, 166–67, 170–71; psychological, 116–18, 121, 125, 129, 132 patriarchy, 24, 31, 50, 166; reproduction of, 31–38 peer group/peer group culture, 27–30, 42–46, 49–51, 56, 63, 109; at school, 42–50 perception and action, 104 performativity and creativity, 8, 106 performing self, 112 personality, 43, 45, 110, 112, 114, 119 personality development, 40 personhood, 23, 125, 129, 134, 169 phenomenology, xiv, 4 physical beauty, 42 physical corporeality, 4–5 political consciousness, 6 politics, xx, 2n3, 12, 16, 90 postcolonial, 13ff. poverty and deprivation, xvi, xxi, 2, 9, 12, 103, 131–33, 142,

INDEX

145–46, 153, 158, 159, 160–62; gendered experience, 132 power relations, 14, 92, 132, 162, 166, 168, 170 powerlessness, 29 print media, 22–24, 28, 42 professionalism, 72, 88 prostitution, 148 puberty, 27, 28, 82 public and social domain, 5, 17, 19, 77, 81 public sphere, 21–22, 28, 94 rape, sexual abuse and oppression, 148–51. See also marital rape and violence recolonisation of women as gendered, subaltern subjects, 15, 19, 63, 65, 69, 73, 75, 79–80, 92 religious and social contexts, 31 reproductive choice, 140 resistance and rebellion, 7, 18, 46; with the family and marriage, 95–105 respectability and recognition, xx–xxi, 11, 17–18, 83–84, 92, 124, 152, 169–70 role models, 33, 36, 37, 76, 80 same-sex peer group, 51 schooling, xx, 28–30, 42, 51, 54. See also education self, selfhood, 4, 10, 26, 133, 162, 171; and the body, 13; and identity, 4, 17; and society, xix self-confidence, 79, 105, 109 self-esteem, 47–48, 51, 102, 132, 136, 149 self-presentation and appearance, 43–46 self-reliance, 151 self-respect and dignity, 100

189

sensuality, 69, 83–84, 112–13 sex role stereotypes, 39 sex work, 154, 156 sexual: desire, denial, 99–100; freedom, 84; intercourse, 28, 56–57, 59, 61; relations, xxi, 56–57, 99–100, 121, 123–24, 127, 144, 159–60 sexuality, 9–10, 24, 59, 67, 74–75, 83–84, 99–100, 107, 108, 111, 114, 116, 129, 132–33, 153, 160; and fertility, 47; and identity, 157–61; in marriage, 122–24; unfulfilled, 100; work and resistance, 147–53 sites and practices: recolonisation and its consequences, 13–18 slum dwellers, body as a weapon, xxi, 131–63 social: activism, 21–22; capital, 11; class, 20, 32, 78, 98, 100, 102; construction of female need, 99; and cultural factors, 28, 36, 80, 132; existence, 18; networks, 29, 45, 132; order, norms and practices, xix, 30, 39–40, 57–60, 90, 129, 161, 167; and political conditions, 18; and public domain, 18, 19, 25, 31, 62, 122, 152, 169; relationships, xiii, 3n4; skills, 43; status, 16, 21, 102–03; transformation, xv, 18, 170 socialisation process, xviii, 167 socio-economic backgrounds, 13, 27, 48, 52, 75, 93, 165 status quo, 73 stereotypes, 42, 46, 85, 118 sterilisation, 139 structural domination, 14 subject-object dualities, xv symbolism of mirror, 10 symbols, myths, resources, 20 symbolic violence, 166

190

LIVING THE BODY

television, 29, 85 time and space, xvii, 2 tradition, 29, 76–77, 92, 100, 129; and modernity, entrapment of women, 19, 22, 84–85. See also norms and values transformation, xxi, 6, 9, 12, 14, 17–18, 31, 170 transnational migration, xiv, 17 unemployment, 103 urban India: 17, 20, 22–23, 32, 65, 91; family, 36, 98; middle classes, 24, 28, 74, 89; slums, 29; society, xvi, 13, 23, 27; women, 18, 28, 65, 94, 116, 124, 164 utilitarian and practical considerations, 12, 62, 110, 157 violence and sexuality, relationship, 116, 122–23; and personhood, 129; physical, 119, 127, 129 visual imagery and textual discourse in women’s magazines, 64ff. voice as culture, 172

weightlessness associated with beauty practices, 79 well-being, 122, 132, 134, 136, 141, 145, 151, 156, 160, 163, 170 wifehood, 74 woman, woman’s: assertiveness and independence, 124: in advertising in the media, 24; faithfulness, 122; needs and desires, 103; perceptions and lived experience, 29, 99; physical stance, 6; into the public sphere, 21–22; self images, 8, 43–46; and their worlds, xv–xix womanhood, 1ff., 63, 95, 129–30, 164–65; in contemporary India, xix–xx, 11–13, 15, 17, 18–25, 26, 28, 32, 36, 43, 47, 70, 73, 77–78, 85–86, 91–92, 117, 164; in Femina, 64ff.; social construction, 25 Women’s Era, 67 work: identity and body, 131ff.; and childbearing, 134ff.; and education, 138ff.; and marriage, drudgery, 153–57; and resistance, 147–53

About the Author

Meenakshi Thapan is Professor of Sociology at the Department of Sociology, Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi, India. Since 2003, she has been associated with the Developing Countries Research Centre at the University of Delhi as Fellow and is Convenor of their programme on Gender Perspectives on Asia. She has taught at the University of Delhi since 1986 and has also taught at the Department of Sociology, University of Chicago in 1995 and at the University of Richmond in 2008. Her research interests include the sociology of education—schooling in particular, women’s lives and gender relations in urban schools and slums, and more recently, migration and identity. At present, she is engaged in a study of pedagogy, citizenship and schooling in three settings in India, Canada and France. Her publications include: Life at School: An Ethnographic Study (Oxford University Press, 1991, 2006); Embodiment: Essays on Gender and Identity (Ed.), (Oxford University Press, 1997); Anthropological Journeys: Reflections on Fieldwork (Ed.), (Orient Longman, 1998); Transnational Migration and the Politics of Identity (Ed.), (Sage, 2005); Reading Pierre Bourdieu in a Dual Context: Essays from India and France (Ed.) with Roland Lardinois), (Routledge, Taylor and Francis, 2006). She is also Series Editor of a five volume series on Women and Migration in Asia (Sage, 2005–2008).