Domestic Goddesses (Urban Anthropology)

DOMESTIC GODDESSES

For Jorrit

Urban Anthropology Series Series Editors: Italo Pardo and Giuliana Prato both at University of Kent, UK Urban Anthropology is the first series of its kind to be established by a major academic publisher. Ethnographically global, the series includes original, empirically based works of high analytical and theoretical calibre. All volumes published in the series are peer-reviewed. The editors encourage submission of sole authored and edited manuscripts that address key issues that have comparative value in the current international academic and political debates. These issues include, but are by no means limited to: the methodological challenges posed by urban field research; the role of kinship, family and social relations; the gap between citizenship and governance; the legitimacy of policy and the law; the relationships between the legal, the semi-legal and the illegal in the economic and political fields; the role of conflicting moralities across the social, cultural and political spectra; the problems raised by internal and international migration; the informal sector of the economy and its complex relationships with the formal sector and the law; the impact of the process of globalization on the local level and the significance of local dynamics in the global context; urban development, sustainability and global restructuring; conflict and competition within and between cities.

Domestic Goddesses Maternity, Globalization and Middle-class Identity in Contemporary India

HENRIKE DONNER London School of Economics and Political Science, UK

© Henrike Donner 2008 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Henrike Donner has asserted her moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. Published by Ashgate Publishing Limited Gower House Croft Road Aldershot Hampshire GU11 3HR England

Ashgate Publishing Company Suite 420 101 Cherry Street Burlington, VT 05401-4405 USA

Ashgate website: http://www.ashgate.com British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Donner, Henrike Domestic goddesses : maternity, globalization and middle-class identity in contemporary India. - (Urban anthropology) 1. Motherhood - India - Calcutta 2. Middle class women India - Calcutta - Attitudes 3. Family - India - Calcutta I. Title 306.8’743’0954147 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Donner, Henrike. Domestic goddesses : maternity, globalization and middle-class identity in contemporary India / by Henrike Donner. p. cm. -- (Urban anthropology) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7546-4942-7 1. Motherhood--India--Calcutta. 2. Mothers--India--Calcutta--Social conditions. 3. Mothers--India--Calcutta--Economic conditions. 4. Middle class families--India-Calcutta--Social conditions. 5. Middle class families--India--Calcutta--Economic conditions. 6. Calcutta (India)--Social conditions. 7. Calcutta (India)--Economic conditions. I. Title. HQ759.D64 2008 306.874’3086220954--dc22 2008015372 ISBN 978-0-7546-4942-7

Contents List of Map and Figures Acknowledgements Introduction

vii ix 1

1

Middle-class Domesticities and Maternities

31

2

Of Love, Marriage and Intimacy

63

3

The Place of Birth

91

4

Education and the Making of Middle-class Mothers

123

5

Motherhood, Food and the Body

155

Conclusion

179

Glossary Bibliography Index

183 187 203

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List of Map and Figures Map of Calcutta with Taltala

xii

Figure 1.1 Street Scene in Taltala Figure 1.2 Courtyard in a Multi-storey Building in Central Calcutta

7 11

Figure 2.1 Foodcourt at the Swabhumi Heritage Plaza

63

Figure 5.1 Vegetarian and Non-vegetarian Fast Food Menu

156

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Acknowledgements This book would have not been possible without the support of many people who helped me in different ways to complete my research and writing. Although the book is based on fieldwork conducted from the mid-1990s onwards in Calcutta,1 many of the initial contacts and issues had emerged within a longer time frame. Calcutta had already been indirectly present through my father’s involvement with non-government organizations (NGOs) in the city throughout my childhood, a fact which no doubt furthered my interest in India and the choice of Calcutta as a site for fieldwork. During my studies in Munich, I was part of a student group engaging with feminist theory. The discussions, activism and critical debates we shared have shaped my life and my work in many ways. In London I have profited greatly from the stimulating academic environment of the Department of Anthropology at the London School of Economics. I am grateful for the many helpful comments and critical suggestions I received from my fellow students in the course of post-fieldwork seminars, and the friendship and support of Geert De Neve, Maria Kausträter and Danna Levin-Rojo. Oliver Wooley worked hard on the manuscript of this book many years later. During the initial stages of preparation for fieldwork, the sometimes difficult research process in Calcutta, the writing-up, and for many years after these experiences, Chris Fuller and Johnny Parry have been critical, open-minded and supportive guides in their very different ways. With just the right mixture of scepticism and encouragement they ensured that I was not carried away by my bias towards women and too openly partial to all things Bengali while I was writing my thesis. As they rightly predicted, I eventually wrote on kinship in a changing world, although I found the idea difficult to accept at the time. Very special thanks are due to Chris Fuller, who initiated two Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) projects on globalization without which the bulk of this research would not have been undertaken and who was always prepared to provide constructive criticism when it was needed. Those who have endured drafts of chapters of the manuscript and provided critical suggestions for rewriting them included Mukulika Banerjee, Radhika Chopra, Geert De Neve, Chris Fuller, Nandini Goopta, Barbara Harriss-White, Deborah James, Patricia Jeffery, Martha Mundy, Filippo Osella, Jonathan Spencer, Charles Stafford, Sylvia Vatuk and Sue Wadley, and I am grateful for all their comments. I would also like to thank the editors of the Urban Anthropology Series at Ashgate, Italo Pardo 1 Calcutta was renamed Kolkata in 2001 after a short Bengali-language campaign which was much criticized for its distinctively chauvinist flavour. Much of my fieldwork was conducted before the city was renamed, and the historical sources use the English terminology as do a significant number of Bengali intellectuals writing in English in an attempt to highlight its multicultural character (see Chatterjee 2004) and I will follow their lead.

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and Guiliana Prato for their useful suggestions, and Neil Jordan for handling the manuscript. In Calcutta I have mounting debts to families in Taltala and in Ganguly Bagan, where I began my research, and many other friends and acquaintances with whom I have worked more recently. Without the many women and men who generously gave their time and invited me into their homes, this book would not have been possible. Amongst those I am particularly indebted to are Borsa Ganguly, Jorna Hari, Sankari Seal, Shibani Ghosh, Ujjala and Romila Ghosh, Anita Datta, the extended Sarbadhikari family, Renu Gomes, Saher and Simple Bhandia, the Chowdhury family, Ila Chakraborty and Sankari Mukherjee, all of whom allowed me to meet them on many occasions and all of whom patiently answered my many questions on return visits over the years. During the very early stages of fieldwork, Bebi Datta, Leela Sen Gupta and in particular Ambalika Chowdhury assisted me in numerous ways, patiently bearing with my first steps in learning Bengali, and their engagement with a part of the city that they were as unfamiliar with as me. Krishna Ghosh kept on improving my language skills and thankfully forced me to work on my reading and writing. I proved to be a lazy student and should have done better. Since I came to Calcutta for the first time in 1985, I have benefited from the support of family friends whom I have known from childhood. The late Jyotirmoy Basu Roy Chowdhury, a sociologist by training and an educator by calling, had himself a keen interest in diverse subcultures and in the impact of socio-economic change in different localities, and I wish he could have witnessed my gradual progress. Sujoy Srimal has always generously provided me with accommodation, occasional feasts and innumerable stories, as well as a warm welcome from the whole family in his house. Utpala Mishra and her family have been there in the background, and as my pishi she has never spared me advice on a wide range of subjects, advice most of which I do not follow. It was thanks to her initiative that I selected Taltala as a possible research site with the help of Bishoka Roy. When things got too much in the city, Swami Bhabananda and Manikpara provided a haven of peace ‘only’ a four-hour train journey away. More recently, the generosity of Indranil Chakraborty and the many neighbours in Dover Terrace have led us to think of the whole neighbourhood as our para. Joyontodi, Dipali and Mina supported us throughout our time in Calcutta and their commitment and kindness enabled me to do ‘my own work’ while they kept the household running. During various periods of fieldwork I have been affiliated with the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences (CSSS), an affiliation made possible by the late Dr Sudhendu Mukherjee. I am grateful to the director and staff at the CSSS for the opportunity to use its facilities and for the chance to present some of my earliest findings during the course of a seminar there. This was actually first suggested by my local guide, Professor Nirmala Banerjee, who often filled me in on the macro picture to counterbalance my anthropological perspective which provided me with a more localized view. Over the years there have been more and more people whose friendship made our life in Calcutta enjoyable. With Catrin Evans and Joseph Chandy I had many conversations about the strains of fieldwork but also loads of fun since their hospitality included delicious food and large doses of humour, both shared out in

Acknowledgements

xi

equal measure during our extended adda sessions. Moushumi Bhowmik and Nazees Afros provided much needed cultural sustenance and generously introduced me to their wide circle of friends. Thanks to Simple Bhandia I got to know lots of new places and enjoyed the occasional teetotal girls’ night out, and thanks to Bela Purohit and Habibur Rahman we were often invited for an Eastern-style evening in. The visits of numerous close friends from abroad sustained me during the (sometimes lonely) first fieldwork period and made me (re)discover the city again and again. The observations and company of Gernot Deter, Petra Gerschner, Michi Backmund, Stephan Dünnwald, Danna Levin-Rojo, Cuautémoc Medina, Debjani Das, Geeske Merkel and Tony Cox brought up old questions and provided many opportunities to look afresh at what I thought I already knew. Others who have been a source of support and affection over the years and without which this project and my life in Munich, London and Calcutta would not have been so rich, are Heilwig Donner and Oliver Hermann, Anne Zühlke and Stefan Wesseling, Uli Thamerus, Mohammed Ibrahim Mohammed, Inga Rogg, Petra Rethmann, Grace Carswell and Geert De Neve, Maria Kausträter and Harry Holmes, Penny Vera-Sanso and Gordon Talbot, Indranil Chakraborti, Michael Schultze, Helen Parker and Julia Griffin, Martin and Petra Thies, Steinar Liverud, Sybille Berger, Olivia Kilmartin and Mark Jordan, Tatjana Simjanovich and Rustam Chichger, and Lisa Ott. Josef Kramhöller, whose untimely death cast a shadow over our second stay, would have loved the city he travelled to in his mind. My parents Fentje and Helmut Donner encouraged us to think critically and question many givens, and always respected our own priorities. They taught me that love and support can take many forms, and for all of this I am grateful. My late grandmother Ulla Harders, with whom I shared a very special relationship, has been a source of inspiration and her unquestioning acceptance of her eldest granddaughter’s very different outlook and lifestyle has always puzzled me. She would have been delighted to see this book completed. Hendrik Wittkopf, without whom Munich, London and Calcutta would have been very different places, I cannot thank enough – his caring support, tolerance, creativity, and open-mindedness enrich my life and work. This book is dedicated to him and to our son Jorrit, who has brought boundless joy to our lives and a whole new direction to my work. Born in London while I was writing-up my PhD, he travelled with us to Calcutta for his first visit when he was 9-months-old and returned to a much changed Kolkata shortly before his fourth birthday. My love for the city has certainly grown through seeing it anew as his mother and through experiencing the generosity with which our many friends make him feel at home.

Map of Calcutta with Taltala

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‘Handelnd und sprechend offenbaren die Menschen jeweils, wer sie sind’ Hannah Arendt

Introduction

Mapping Locations, Developing Themes Unlikely heroines On a hot and humid evening in October 1995 I attended the meeting of the Congress Party’s women’s group in Ward 53, which was held on the ground floor of a private residence in the neighbourhood I had chosen for my fieldwork. About fifteen, mostly middle-aged, women had already arrived and were seated on an old sofa, some rickety chairs and on mats spread across the floor. I had come with a friend, who had mobilized her contacts in the Calcutta Municipal Corporation to help get me in touch with women in the area. Unbeknown to me then, I met many of the women I was going to work with for years for the first time during this initial meeting. I was simultaneously exhilarated and anxious. When Shibani, a 40-year-old teacher and leader of the samiti (committee), had joined us from her flat upstairs, and after their curiosity about me and my research, which was generally referred to in terms of a ‘survey’, had been satisfied, their jokes and gossip ceased and the first ‘case’ of the evening was discussed. This case was brought to these representatives of the local party by a woman in her late teens who, dressed in a cheap salvar kameez, was sitting on the floor. She told us that she had been married for some months and had now come to make an official complaint about her in-laws who, she said, abused her physically and verbally, forced her to do endless chores and even denied her visits to her parental home. For the committee members this was a routine case but they listened patiently to the young woman who was tearful and told us in much detail about her misery in the shasur bari (in-laws’ house). The senior women in the samiti interrupted her a couple of times to confirm who she was and who her in-laws were, but otherwise encouraged her to continue with her own story. After about thirty minutes she was assured that the senior leaders of the committee would talk to the councillor about her affines, and that he would then decide what had to be done about her ‘difficulties’. While some of the women present were wearing the obvious signifiers of Bengali Hindu married women, shindur (vermilion) on the forehead and the set of white conch-shell bangles framing a red one around the wrists together with the lohar (iron bangle), others were not as easily placed. It turned out that quite a number were unmarried, among them a sporty Muslim girl wearing trousers and a loose shirt, quite an uncommon sight in this environment. She was in her mid-twenties, and therefore perhaps still awaiting marriage, while two other women were Bengali Christians. Others, like Gayatri, an outspoken woman in her forties, I was told in a somewhat embarrassed tone, were widows and had to come here ‘because they get some work’.

2

Domestic Goddesses

After the young woman who had sought help had left, Shibani, the organizer of the committee turned to me and explained that although they all felt for the young ‘girl’, her domestic problems were caused by her age, her lack of education and – most importantly – the fact that being a Hindu she had chosen to marry into a Muslim family. The committee members agreed that the problems with this marriage would persist, and that the young woman would perhaps run away a couple of times only to return as there was nowhere else to go, because women of ‘her class’ were ‘fickle-minded’. But since the young woman had approached them they felt that they had to discuss the case with the councillor, who could then decide whether he and his associates would pay the in-laws a visit and intervene on her behalf. In the course of the discussion it emerged that all the committee members considered their cases on the basis of ethnic community and class. Some of the women stated that while domestic violence was by no means a problem of workingclass women alone, they distanced themselves as respectable middle-class women from the way working-class women dealt with such problems. One of ‘them’ – they were at pains to make me understand – would not be able to turn to the public committee because, unlike bustee lok (people from the slums), she would have to guard her reputation more carefully. However, it was also asserted that even among the poor, not everybody would approach the samiti. In their view those most likely to seek help from baire (outside) were ‘girls’ married into ‘other’ communities – those Hindu women who had married into Muslim and Christian families, and vice versa, who had been disowned by their families because of these ‘love’ marriages. After this brief introduction into the communal and class boundaries present in the neighbourhood where I intended to spend the next eighteen months, the conversation shifted to other topics, among them a theatre play that one of the members wanted to stage during a political rally, and a trip to Murshidabad in North Bengal some of the more ambitious members had undertaken as part of an election campaign. Both, public ‘functions’ and ‘election duty’ were further aspects of the samiti’s involvement in the affairs of the neighbourhood because, as Shibani, the leader, explained, its members could reach out to women through their social work, thereby facilitating direct communication with different communities. The meeting had lasted for around three hours when women left in groups of two or three, while my acquaintance and I stayed back to fix another appointment with Shibani, who offered to introduce me to other women in the para (neighbourhood). A short and round woman of East Bengali origin in her late thirties, Shibani was somehow different from the rest because she had married into a West Bengali family here and, more significantly, she was employed as a teacher. Not being a para meye, or girl from the neighbourhood, she admitted herself that she was a somewhat unusual choice to head the committee. But she was ambitious and had political aspirations to be nominated as candidate for the all important municipal elections, though she was aware that, as she told me herself that evening, this was a rather unrealistic goal. Although her in-laws and her much older husband were accepted in the community and supported her, being an ‘inmarried’ wife meant that she would not be perceived as ‘one of us’. Furthermore, many in the neighbourhood disapproved of the fact that she, as a middle-class mother, was working and was involved in politics. I later learned that her concerns were well-founded: numerous times other women, mostly

Introduction

3

middle-aged housewives, remarked that although the committee was widely accepted as an official outfit dedicated to ‘women’s problems’, Shibani’s involvement was criticized because she was a bangal (East Bengali), and a wife and mother. That she was ‘from a respectable family’ and a teacher, a respectable profession, did not really help here, as to its middle-class residents, this neighbourhood was not a place where women could or should get involved in the baire (outside) world of politics and employment. My brief encounter with the members of the samiti brought out many of the themes which were to preoccupy me throughout my research in the area and in other localities, and which determined middle-class women’s lives. I soon realized that although some women in the households I would visit worked outside the family home and a small minority was actively involved in local politics, the vast majority felt that the roles of daughter-in-law, wife and mother were opposed to such public engagements. Indeed, class and ethnicity were frequently cited when we discussed respectability and appropriate behaviour. A lack of respectability and of commitment to domestic roles were attributed to the working classes because of their ‘public’ lives. It was, for instance, alleged that they would seek help from the party in marital disputes and take up paid work, which together with a higher number of children and allegedly more sexual freedom marked out those who were not considered bhadralok, that is members of respectable society. Furthermore, the Bengali middleclass women I worked with over the years held – in their majority – very strong views on the domesticities of ‘other’ communities, including Marwaris, Christians and Muslims, who even when they were undoubtedly middle-class, were described as different with reference to housework, parenting and respectability. Learning about their lives I began to see how class, ethnic and religious identities were related to the organization of the domestic sphere, and how the overarching concern in these women’s lives was the reproduction of class-based, middle-class identities, which favour the role of the housewife and stay-at-home mother in order to produce the perfect family. Furthermore, in the years that followed this first encounter, I realized that notions of the local, of kinship, family and motherhood, far from being conservative remainders of an earlier, more traditional lifestyle, as they are often represented, form important sites for wider transformations occurring in urban India, which are at the centre of this book. The background The material on which this book is based was collected during fieldwork between 1995 and 2005, which comprised of three year-long visits and several shorter stays. Initially I worked in a central Calcutta neighbourhood and different south Calcutta localities, but gradually I expanded my networks to encompass a huge number of families across the city. I was introduced to women randomly and so their ages varied greatly, although the majority were middle-aged (between 30 and 60 years old) when I met them. Most households had members belonging to different generations, and in some the oldest members were in their late seventies then and have since passed away. In other cases, young girls have now grown into adolescents or even

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Domestic Goddesses

married women. Working with members of the same family belonging to different generations is greatly rewarding, given that it is sometimes possible to meet a number of family members at once and to get different points of view across different age groups. It can also provide a sense of continuity and thus broaden narratives and reveal the dynamics within a range of relationships. It does, however, also have its drawbacks, since intra-household hierarchies are powerful determinants of women’s lives. There are many stories that remained untold because of the presence of other family members. Often I found that only the more senior women were able to spend some time with me during the day, while junior female members of the family, in particular daughters-in-law, rarely found a minute to sit down and talk when there were meals to be cooked, servants to be supervised and children to be collected from school. I am often asked why I did not work more extensively with men, given that they are also part of the family, marry and have parenting roles. There are three main reasons for this: first, though I got acquainted with husbands, brothers, sons and fathers as well as with the women in the house in many instances, the majority of senior men felt awkward when asked to talk to an unrelated young female researcher in their own homes. Second, in many houses women are very busy once husbands and sons come home from school and work, so that I visited during the day, when their male relatives were out. Last, although I may have been introduced by a husband, brother, father or son initially, their presence often made my visits much more formal than I intended them to be, and so I highlighted my interest in ‘women’s issues’. Thus, because I wanted to work with women on topics like marriage, motherhood and reproductive processes, I had to limit myself to the female sphere, which is symbolically constructed as separate from that of men. In order to ‘hang out’ more informally with women I had to decide whether I wanted to work with women or men. Most of the data was collected during visits to family homes, visits which were usually initiated through an introduction by a relative or neighbour. In many cases the relationship worked out well and I was invited to spend time chatting, eating, cooking or watching TV with other family members more regularly. Because visiting friends and family is very much an everyday activity and leisure pursuit in middle-class Calcutta, the material not only includes the formal interviews I did on such occasions. The book draws mostly on informal conversations, participation in household rituals, and the sharing of everyday activities from cooking a special meal with a widowed friend, to supervising children’s tuition. In the course of my fieldwork I also attended various public events like the meeting of the samiti described above, political functions and religious festivals in different localities, and met with (mostly male) representatives of political parties, councillors, religious committees and academics. Though this book draws on material from a variety of places in Calcutta, two neighbourhoods where I worked for longer periods are the focus of much of what is said. One of them is located in central Calcutta’s Taltala area, while the other one is situated in the southern suburb of Ganguly Bagan. These two neighbourhoods are significant not only as sites of fieldwork, but because they represent distinct histories that together make up the framework within which local perceptions of class, social

Introduction

5

change and modernity are viewed. As such, their features need to be explored in some more detail within the context of recent processes of urban restructuring. A central Calcutta neighbourhood As an urban anthropologist I have an interest in the specificity of socio-spatial relations that occur in the given context, but also the ‘urbane’, that is, a specific way of life that can be found in cities. I therefore selected the neighbourhood where the first encounter with the committee occurred in 1995, because it was located in central Calcutta – at the borders of its commercial and administrative heart - and emerged as a mixed settlement during the early colonial period. Although the British administration implemented a segregated settlement policy according to race, Taltala has always been an in-between place: at the border of the areas designated for Europeans and not really part of the north Calcutta reserved for ‘natives’ either. Lying within the boundaries of the Maratha ditch and in close proximity to the centre of early colonial rule at Fort William, it grew alongside the bazaars in Dharmatolla, which attracted different communities (Mukherjee 1993: 1–47). Wealthy Bengali merchants initiated the building boom that changed the character of these central Calcutta neighbourhoods and transformed them from loosely organized and often deprived settlements around small ponds and tanks interspersed with agricultural land into the urbane and affluent neighbourhoods of today. Businessmen first began to buy larger plots and erect mansions that housed their large extended families in the 1830s when, as early maps testify, vast bustees (slums) dominated the area. Gradually the large open spaces, ponds and tal (palm) trees from which the name Taltala is said to have been derived, gave way to street upon street of multi-storey brick buildings adjacent to slums which connected the previously segregated older settlements of different castes. The new bourgeois houses were multifunctional – they provided residential, office and workshop space, with the upper parts and inner courtyards strictly separated from the reception rooms at the front. Given its growing importance for the aspiring middle-class bhadralok – the genteel elite that was to become the template for Bengali middle-class lifestyles – it is not surprising that modern amenities were installed. By the turn of the century Taltala had not only a well-developed infrastructure with public sewage systems and gas lights lining the streets, but its proximity to the developing colonial administration had also made it a preferred area for middle-class Bengali families, North Indian business communities and others dependent on the colonial economy. The proximity to the centre of power and its wealthy clientele enabled the growth of educational institutions (many of them Christian, others Muslim and some Hindu) of churches, mosques and temples, as well as of charitable foundations and cultural institutions including publishing houses and newspaper offices, along with a wide range of commercial organizations that found their home there later on. By the 1880s Taltala had become a unique space for urban politics first in the form of dals, the castebased political committees which formed the basis of municipal self-representation in the city, and later as a centre for nationalist politics with Surendranath Banerjee,

6

Domestic Goddesses

who twice led the Indian National Congress, born here as the son of a local Brahmin doctor. Like other parts of central Calcutta, the ‘Doctor’s Lane para’ developed fully when wealthy Bengali merchants settled next to wholesale markets. Sumanta Banerjee states that by the end of the eighteenth century the areas bordering Fort William had turned into little villages with wealthy banik (traders) acting as patrons for those who lived in the huts of the poor around them: As for the social shape into which they were molding the city, they were re-enacting a role expected of the ‘zamindar’ in the little rajyas [chiefdoms] of the earlier period. These little rajyas accommodated centres where a kind of urbanism, at a level other than that of commercial cities or the great politico-military centres, persisted through the centuries ... Modelled on small villages, these localities became replicas of the old landed estates owned by feudal chieftains, their contours changing in response to the urban needs. Calcutta thus became basically a city of hutments and palatial buildings of opulent Bengalis surrounded by bazaars and slums. (Banerjee 1989: 29)

By the end of the nineteenth century this structure increasingly intersected with the new spatial practices related to the development of a centralized government in the colony, and the employment opportunities, institutions and administrative reordering it provided. Caste still played a significant role in religious festivals and local political organization, but was slowly pushed into the background. With reference to local divisions, class and increasingly ethnic and religious divisions began to play a major role, as the occurrence of ‘communal riots’ proved (Das 1991, 2000). Today, the local community, if one wants to describe it thus, is almost completely segregated along communal/religious lines, with the majority of Muslims living in bustees. The neighbourhoods of the middle classes are clustered to the north of the area, and are on the whole much less densely populated than the southern parts, where fewer middle-class residents are to be found. Though Doctor’s Lane itself is widely regarded as a Bengali Hindu neighbourhood, other communities including Muslims, Marwaris, South Indians, Anglo-Indians and Chinese also reside in the para, although their numbers are declining through migration to the west. This para developed out of a settlement of haris (scavengers) on land owned by one of the local Bengali zamindars (landlords), but quickly drew settlers from a wide range of castes and origins. Over time these settlements developed, thanks to the neighbourhood’s proximity to centres of trade and commerce, into ‘modern’ places, with government institutions, sanitation, educational facilities and early political representation. But in spite of its appearance as a very heterogeneous para, the violence in the wake of the partition of India had a strong impact on the social composition and definition of the locality (Bose 1964). During partition the vast majority of affluent Muslim families left the area for Park Circus or relocated to East Pakistan. In the aftermath of partition Bengali Hindu refugees from East Bengal came to take their place, and many still rent flats in the spacious residences of West Bengali landlords.1 More recently, Bengali Christians, who first came here to find 1 The history of these movements of Hindus to Calcutta has recently gained some attention, but the other side of partition, the relocation of Muslim families to East Pakistan has

Introduction

7

work on ships during the colonial period and who are often employed in the Gulf today, are buying property in the neighbourhood because of its proximity to reputed Christian schools. The locality is in many other ways similar to other ‘old’ Calcutta neighbourhoods, with their typical mix of residential and commercial activities, workshops and shops lining the main roads, and the narrow, often crowded and polluted lanes leading into the quieter corners (Figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1 Street Scene in Taltala In the early morning and late in the evening, goods are moved through the area towards the bigger markets with a constant stream of people passing through. But even in the part of the neighbourhood off the main road, workshops and shops line the streets, and though not frequented by trucks and buses, goods are constantly transported through its lanes and bylanes, either by small van, three-wheelers or on carts. Due to this and the ubiquitous hand-pulled rickshaws plying the streets of central Calcutta, even smaller streets are often congested, the growing number of private cars contributing to this constant flow of traffic. But walking is also made difficult by the open drainage system installed in many places and the errant collection of refuse in areas where many of the poor residents use open spaces in front of their houses for everyday activities like bathing, cooking, the washing of clothes and more.

not generated the same nostalgic interest. Many Muslim families left their houses in exchange for properties that Hindus had fled in East Pakistan. Such so-called exchange houses can be found all over Calcutta.

8

Domestic Goddesses

Politically, the Doctor’s Lane neighbourhood2 belongs to the municipal Ward 53 of the Calcutta Municipal Corporation (CMC, now renamed Kolkata Municipal Corporation), and has had a rich and varied history. Many colonial institutions, including churches and schools, are still located in the area, and it was a hub of anticolonial activities during the pre-independence period. The street names in the area reflect these changing fortunes, and refer to the geography, property relations, markets or the caste of specific settlers found in the available records. The area has turned gradually into a cityscape full of references to colonial and nationalist institutions or personalities. So Hari para, which was no doubt populated by members of this sweeper community, some of whom have become affluent and today occupy middleclass homes, initially became Doctor’s Lane in the late 1800s, when it was renamed in honour of the father of Congress leader Surendranath Banerjee, a local doctor and dignitary. Along the same lines, Neogi Pukur Lane, which indicated that a Brahmin family by the name of Neogi owned a pukur (pond) nearby, turned into Taltala Library Row when well meaning bhadralok founded the local library in 1881. There are also countless street names that remind us of the British presence in the wider area, for instance Creek Row or Ripon Street (both of which have been renamed officially although not even the locals use the Indianized names), and further south many streets are named after important Muslim nationalist leaders for example Rafi Ahmed Kidwai and Abdul Halim. One of the characteristics of Calcutta in the nineteenth century was its heterogeneity, with only a few of its residents born in the city, the overwhelming majority of migrants being Muslims from ‘upcountry’ states and poor people. Taltala has always been at the centre of urban politics, and from the turn of the century onwards conflicts of a more encompassing nature often resulted in local riots, in earlier times mostly food riots, and from 1918 onwards ‘communal riots’ between members of different ethnic groups (Das 1991, 2000). The communal riots known as the ‘Great Calcutta Killing’ of 1946 are intimately related with Taltala’s reputation. Moreover, its heterogeneity and working-class population marks the area out as a trouble spot and as a deeply segregated centre of illegal activities, that include smuggling, trafficking and illegal political activities in the view of outsiders. As a site of anti-colonial and Indian nationalist politics, the area has a reputation for being a Congress bastion, and since independence has had various Congress councillors. But true to its reputation for heterogeneity, the dominance of the Congress party has not gone unchallenged and strong factions of other parties are active in the different neighbourhoods, including the ruling Communist Party of India (Marxist), whose headquarters are located in Alimuddin Street, just a stone’s throw away from the neighbourhood I worked in. The Calcutta Municipal Corporation, which has played an important role in this part of town right from its inception, is a major player in local politics and access to its generous funds and power base is an important issue in the area. 2 Surendranath Banerjee Road constitutes the northern boundary; its southern borders are made up of Abdul Halim Lane, Taltala Lane, Dedar Baksh Lane and Haji Mohammed Mohasin Square while Rafi Ahmed Kidwai Road and Taltala Lane constitute the eastern borders and Achharyya Jagadish Bose Road marks the western boundaries.

Introduction

9

The second neighbourhood I came to work in more extensively is structured very differently and is situated in the south of the city. Like other such localities which used to be at the fringes of Calcutta until the 1960s, it emerged in the aftermath of partition as a refugee colony founded by East Bengal Hindus. Earlier, Ganguly Bagan had derived its rather mundane name from a garden owned by a Brahmin family in the area and was, according to today’s residents, an overgrown, jungli area with few pakka (brick) homes, inhabited by members of the local agricultural castes. Like hundreds of refugee colonies, it has come a long way from its humble origins of ramshackled huts and unpaved roads, tanks and small community schools and clubs as described by Ray (Ray 2002). For many years after partition these neighbourhoods formed closely knit and largely homogenous communities of East Bengali Hindu families, most of whom belonged to the upper-castes and many were already middle class when they arrived. Today ‘outsiders’ are moving into what are now affluent neighbourhoods in order to buy apartments and, the tranquillity of the past not withstanding, the spread of suburban developments here has lead to a frenzy of construction work which makes life in the neighbourhoods less pristine than it used to be. Though transport links have improved, the main road connecting the neighbourhood to central Calcutta is today continuously blocked by hundreds of private cars, trucks, buses, vans, bikes, three-wheelers, cycles and rickshaws. This arterial road does not only carry all the traffic from the districts south of Calcutta into the city, but is also lined with shops and workshops, providing cheap consumer goods and franchised branches of the more upmarket eateries that the middle class so desires. Politically, this area used to be closely affiliated with the ruling Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPI(M)) and other left wing parties which came to power, partly on the ‘refugee vote’ after a period of unrest in the early 1977. The Left Front is still very influential in the affairs of the neighbourhood through the municipal councillor. However, although open dissent is kept to a minimum due to the huge influence wielded by the local Communist representatives, there has been a marked increase in votes for the oppositional Trinamul Congress in this para and the surrounding areas throughout the 1990s. For Calcuttans, paras are very significant spaces in the lives of women, and the neighbourhood was routinely described in relation to other significant places, for instance, places of work, consumption or worship. Comparisons, either with other neighbourhoods or with imaginary maps of the city, were introduced into our conversations about a specific para and its role in women’s lives, and often related to behavioural codes and ideas about femininity and proper conduct. South Asianists, who have shown that women’s bodies and therefore their movements are a symbolic manifestation of group boundaries in a metaphorical as well as a practical sense (Sharma 1980; Jacobson 1982), have also shown that differences between groups are extremely significant in relation to the conceptualization of the neighbourhood in a given context. As I have shown elsewhere (Donner 2006b), concerns about gendered class and ethnic identities dominate the discourse on the locality in Calcutta and determine how social norms related to women’s mobility are enforced in relation to material conditions, which as Blaustein observes ‘respond to and produce conceptions

10

Domestic Goddesses

about, and lived experiences of, sexual difference’ (Blaustein 2001: 15). Women’s accounts of local life and architectural forms always draw on two prototypes of localities in the city – linking the character of both to gendered behaviour and ideals. Neighbourhoods such as Doctor’s Lane are generally described as ‘traditional’ in relation to other places like Ganguly Bagan, which are in turn seen as ‘modern’. Prototypes of the latter kind are the paras that came into being with partition and the massive influx of East Bengali refugees into the city, who settled at the fringes and who over the last thirty years have become increasingly affluent. As Manas Ray pointed out with reference to the refugee colonies, it was here that a Bengali ‘modernity’ emerged, because these colonies gradually became home to a largely successful, upwardly-mobile middle class, which modernized the ‘vernacular’ through the introduction of new social, educational and architectural patterns contained in the neighbourhood (Ray 2002). Among these patterns, new ways to be in the city for women developed, alternatives involving female employment, education and women’s involvement in politics, for example. In the course of this transformation the ‘new modernity’ made possible through the experiences of displacement among refugees has become a generalized expectation, while ‘old’ Calcutta (purono kolkata) has become more localized and permanently fixed in the central and northern neighbourhoods (which are by now almost engulfed by new developments). They in turn became marked as ‘traditional’, and are often described as localities with ‘true Bengali culture’. For those who live there this clearly implies very specific gendered norms, like less freedom to pursue education for young women, a strong emphasis on married women’s domestic roles and a preference for joint family life. In short, restrictions on women’s mobility and education, specific marriage patterns and neighbourhood organization make up characteristics of specific paras in the city. But the alleged impact of the neighbourhood on the personal lives of women extends much further, and the interviewees emphasized the effect a locality has on family values. In their view the ‘modern’ para is dominated by the ideology of the nuclear family, exemplified in the layout of the prototypical apartment. This view is held in spite of the de facto prevalence of a nuclear-extended residential pattern in ‘modern’ paras. A typical house in the old paras dates back to the 1880s and was designed for the extended family of a businessman, whose sons and their families partitioned and refurbished it numerous times so that the basic original layout may be barely discernable. Today, the smaller units are occupied by those who earlier belonged to a ‘joint’ family, and in some cases relatives still share all of the rooms. But even where a nuclear family broke away from the larger household, the layout, occupation and use of space is seldom as self-explanatory as in a modern twobedroom apartment. Thus, even though the houses with their balconies, rows of windows and heavily decorated entrances look more or less alike from the outside, and even though the interiors were once comparable in that galleries surrounded a courtyard which could be accessed through one central gate, the number of units and the distribution of rooms is, in reality, flexible (Figure 1.2). Furthermore, while living spaces are clearly separated in middle-class residences, workshops, shops and offices are often located on the ground floor or in the courtyard, as indicated by

Introduction

11

Figure 1.2 Courtyard in a Multi-storey Building in Central Calcutta signboards, benches and chairs, or a counter in the area of the bhaikhanna, the streetlevel reception room. Residents of the Doctor’s Lane neighbourhood highlighted the fact that the old houses provided an environment within which ‘privacy’ and conjugality – both associated with the nuclear family – are subordinated to the wider interests of the extended family. To remain in such an environment by marrying into such a family was largely seen as desirable and in more than one instance, represented the conscious decision of a young educated woman, a decision explicitly not interpreted as a function of financial circumstances. The cultivated conservatism displayed was realized through gendered behaviour, like the limited mobility granted to young girls and recently married women, and an expressed preference for ‘joint’ family life. Many young married women and middle-aged mothers were proud of the way their in-laws’ family reflected what they saw as ‘traditional Bengali culture’. While the nuclear family provides a solution to those who want to leave the tensions of joint living behind, it also gives rise to particular anxieties: first, the fear of abandonment in old age and, second, fear of violence from outsiders, in particular from people working in the house. In more than one sense, the locality provides women with a wider sense of belonging which, as will be discussed in the following section, is created through gender-specific practices which highlight group boundaries, reproduce middleclass status and define women’s engagement with neighbours as part of moral communities.

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Domestic Goddesses

In Taltala, households are largely composed of extended families and in many instances members of three generations share some or all of the facilities, such as kitchens, bathrooms and services. Most households depend on more than one income from male employment and a significant minority receive rent from real estate owned collectively by members of the bangsha (patriline), which often only includes fathers and brothers. In many instances, men are employed in middle-range positions in government service, which would make them lower rather than uppermiddle class. But as many households contain entrepreneurs who supplement these types of incomes (mostly through building, developing, trade) the vast majority of households are more secure and affluent than this label suggests. Married women in these families are housewives and mothers and only very few are, or have ever been, in employment. Older women attended Bengali-medium schooling, but few among the generation older than thirty moved on to college, and even among the younger women education at college level is rarer than in the south Calcutta neighbourhood. In both neighbourhoods young children and women in their twenties attended English-medium schools. In both areas the majority of households comprise of two to three generations living jointly at some point, but collaterally-extended joint households are very rare in the south Calcutta para. Here, spacious multi-storey houses are shared by parents and their sons/son’s families. These buildings were often planned to allow for a degree of separation between apartments and often a son’s family moves into an upstairs flat with its own bathroom at some point. In these Southern, more homogenous neighbourhoods, the range of occupations is much less diverse. In the fathers’ generation incomes were likely to be from middle-ranging jobs in government service or the professions, and in the sons’ from the professions or from working for private companies. Furthermore, many women in these households were in fulltime employment before they had children, and daughters-in-law are often working women. Household incomes vary according to the exact positions held by members of the household but are generally higher than what is earned by the majority of those living in Taltala. In some cases the number of employed persons in the household can account for four full salaries. These salaries are often supplemented through other types of income, most prominently rent from letting out part of a residence, so that the majority of families are rather affluent with a lifestyle to match. Urban anthropology and the gendered city This book deals with class in an urban environment and I would hope represents a further example for the revival of urban anthropology. When talking about my work in terms of urban anthropology, I have often received critical comments by fellow anthropologists. There seems to be widespread unease with the idea of the urban as a focus of attention, which stems from a traditionalist bias towards rural field sites, which is especially true with reference to South Asia, where a classic pattern prescribes a first initiation into fieldwork in a village followed by further research projects in the city. If work in urban areas is acceptable, it has at least to comply with the self-sacrificial, heroic and often

Introduction

13

masculinist positioning of the fieldworker in a public context, produced through engagement with a marginalized community or an otherwise challenging situation. In many ways implicit understandings of fieldwork emphasize public spaces, the relevance of work with the urban poor and institutions of the state. These norms of what is ‘real’ or ‘good’ fieldwork inform the way we do research as well as the way we write and teach anthropology. In public presentations inside and outside the classroom, anthropologists of either sex often assume a detached stance when speaking about their fieldwork, and reflections on how data were collected and the experience in the field are more often than not conveyed in an anecdotal or ironic manner. Not only are doctorate students doing ‘exciting’ or ‘dangerous’ fieldwork seen as a matter of prestige by professionals and institutions, even seasoned fieldworkers regularly present their own research through vignettes that emphasize the most unusual and dramatic aspects of ‘being’ there. In anthropology, as in other field sciences, nobody wants to be caught doing what colleagues refer to as ‘quaint fieldwork’ and Gupta and Ferguson’s notion of ‘hierarchies of purity’ among field sites, by which fieldwork at home is distinguished from work in non-European and US-American contexts, can also be applied to a distinction between urban areas and village sites. Within this framework the latter represent more suitable locations and projects (Donner 2005). Urban fieldwork is also, according to much anthropological lore, problematic as the visitor is not strange enough or they would not be adequately displaced and acculturated. Curiously, exposure to a variety of situations and relationships that are new, interesting and unfamiliar is a prerequisite of fieldwork and is welcome in a rural context, however, the same multiplicity of experiences, contacts and situations are often seen as a hurdle to successfully completing fieldwork in an urban environment. But anthropologists have since the 1980s developed new approaches to theorize the city, which led away from an earlier perspective on urban space as an agglomeration of villages. According to Setha Low this ‘urban turn’ rests on the exploration of four sets of metaphors, namely the ethnic city, the contested city, the divided city and, last but not least, the gendered city (Low 1999: 9–10). Gradually, it seems, we begin to appreciate what makes cities and urbane lifestyles distinctive. While all four propositions are relevant avenues for the exploration of urban South Asia through an anthropological lens (and none can really be discussed without reference to the other three) I will turn to the latter for the remainder of this section. The ‘gendered city’ is firstly a place seen from the perspective of women. In India, as elsewhere, early studies of women in cities followed the example of the Chicago School ethnographies and focused on migration, mostly of working-class women, and discussed issues of housing, employment and livelihoods (see for example, Sharma 1986; Roy 2003). With reference to South Asia, ethnography moved later beyond the subject of migration, and ethnographies of domestic and family life, popular religion and politics focused on different groups, amongst them middle-class urbanites (Roy 1972; Vatuk 1972; Caplan 1984; Hancock 1999; Seymour 1999). The domestic sphere tends to be the focus of attention here, but few authors explore women’s movements and the spatial relationships they form beyond the home or the role that

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Domestic Goddesses

strategies of place making play in their lives. Literature on the city rarely explores women’s public roles and does only emphasize the way the domestic and public division is created through everyday practices in passing (notable exceptions are Kaviraj 1997 and Dickey 2000). This lacuna is curious, since in South Asia the status of a family or of a community is directly related to ideas about women’s mobility, which is usually controlled and often severely restricted in a variety of ways. Furthermore, the ideologies employed here also determine the spaces within which fieldwork is undertaken and, last but not least, the life and experience of the anthropologist herself. In the South Asian context the related ideologies may imply that high-status families will enforce segregation directly, in the form of purdah, a system which governs women’s behaviour towards affines and unrelated men, and defines women’s and men’s spheres literally in terms of ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ the home. In many instances these boundaries are not only symbolic but demarcate women’s and men’s quarters in the house, spaces where women are to be veiled or can not enter, and set clearly defined behavioral codes (see for instance, Sharma 1978; Jeffery 1979; Raheja and Gold 1994). In such contexts male fieldworkers may find it difficult to interact with unrelated women even when they stay with a local family, while a female fieldworker’s interactions with men may be limited or even impossible. However, even where strict segregation is enforced and specific groups of women are not able to move beyond the confines of the house unaccompanied, not all women belonging to the same households or village are subjected to the same restrictions. Whether or not purdah is observed depends as much on the community, the status of the family concerned and on individual elders. Sarah Lamb’s ethnography provides wonderfully rich examples for the freedom of movement enjoyed by high-status widows in rural Bengal (Lamb 2000). And the anthropologist, who is a complete outsider, but often a high-status one, may only be required to fulfil minimal conditions – as Katy Gardner’s fieldwork memoirs testify, who experienced the demands to adjust her dress-code and demonstrate respectful behaviour towards men in the home, but could interact with a wide range of male villagers during her stay in rural Bangladesh (Gardner 1997). Female anthropologists, unlike their local sisters, may be free to move between houses and make contact with men and even explore some of the places into which women belonging to the community would never venture. However, in all cases the experiences of male and female fieldworkers differ significantly with the ‘public’ sphere of political gatherings, religious performance and economic exchange often rendered inaccessible to unaccompanied women. In many communities, women’s mobility is strictly controlled. Furthermore, because high-status is associated with practices of spatial segregation and women’s domestic roles, the boundaries of what constitutes the domestic sphere and women’s engagement with public space are continuously renegotiated. In urban areas, senior members of a family may feel that the honour of the female members of the family or more broadly speaking, the respectability of the family, can only be protected by limiting their contacts with the outside world. But how such boundaries are enforced varies, as there are also examples, where recently migrated families encouraged women to enter new relationships in search of education, employment and new patterns of consumption, where these could be defined as ‘protected’.

Introduction

15

Wilson and others have argued convincingly that across classes women’s lives in the city are led in the interstices of a male dominated public sphere (Wilson 1992; Weiss 1992) and that urbanization and migration bring about new behavioural codes. In the more anonymous environment of the city, such restrictions are on the one hand, less easily enforced – as women move beyond the home, but at the same time the concerns about their honour, chastity and safety become more pressing. Fieldworkers are of course very openly concerned with place making and spatial relations, and though fieldwork is often – and, some would contend, ideally – an exercise in voluntary displacement, it is also concerned with homemaking and the rebuilding of socio-spatial relationships reordered actively in and through the process of research (for a fuller discussion see Donner 2008b). Thus, unlike tourism, which serves the immediate consumption of other places in very short periods of time, fieldwork is a slow process of reorientation, in terms of language and routines, and of bodily practices, ideas and values. Among the most tangible practices that emerge are those to do with movement and space – which lead towards an understanding of the ordering principles underlying certain behaviours and guide the immediate physical experience of place. Often the gradual acquisition of the skills necessary to act according to one’s age, gender, class and racial aspiration takes considerable effort and inevitably results in a reorientation of what Raymond Williams refers to as ‘structures of feeling’ (Williams 1977) occurs in the process. The methodology of fieldwork thus raises questions that address the place of gendered persons in the city. The fact that so few anthropologists have commented on this process belies the impact gender differences have on our fieldwork experience. While the prototypical fieldworker resembles the urban flâneur in the modern city, women in societies with a history of segregation often find it hard to realize these ideals. Unlike their male colleagues, female fieldworkers may not have access to certain public spaces and the degree to which they can stroll or wander the streets and alleys as well as the practice of ‘deep hanging out’ is mostly severely limited. In reality, the fieldworker – unlike Benjamin’s flâneur – is not a detached, selfabsorbed observer – but has a long-term project, and his or her presence is ideally more directed and more permanent than that of the floating passer-by enjoying and consuming the city temporarily. While a certain amount of freedom to engage is indeed necessary, and the stories of fieldwork and field sites are riddled with the anecdotes of accidents, chances, coincidences and unexpected events, the serious fieldworker does in the end aim at a more stable relationship with the city and its inhabitants. Most of us familiarize ourselves thoroughly with the environment we find, so as to establish a more formal working relationship with a select group. However, though the urban fieldworker is mobile they can only ever capture a fraction of the social relationships and events, where the village ethnographer may be able to cover almost all relevant facets of local life. Furthermore, fieldwork in the city demands mobility, and often shifts between known people and the constant introduction to strangers, so that the spatial meanings created in the course of one’s work are continuously redefined and amended by new encounters. Thus, while it is possible to envisage fieldwork in the central Calcutta neighbourhood where I worked as solely concerned with the residents living there, the reality of social relations in the city I experienced in my daily life was

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Domestic Goddesses

multilayered and complex. No matter which subject is investigated, the fieldworker in the city tends to maintain a wide variety of social relationships, which range from links within neighbourhoods to meetings with officials, academics or friends elsewhere. Often these are not directly related to the study undertaken but turn out to provide further information and data or serve as a background against which acquired knowledge can be evaluated. These movements through ‘cityscapes’ are not neutral, they are determined by the built environment/location in terms of class, gender and race, as well as the cultural landscape we are exploring. For fieldworkers the city is a terrain through which the subject at hand can be studied but also through which the fieldworker constitutes him or herself as a professional. And cities, just as any other space, are not experienced in the same way by men and women as they move through them. Thus, women’s experiences of fieldwork more generally and work in the city more specifically differs significantly from male experiences through the gendered meanings attributed to specific places. Once we have acknowledged this fact the social and spatial relationships creating the field of anthropology appear in a different light. I would like to suggest that mobility and access to public space present foundational myths for fieldwork, and have stifled any discussion of what insights we might gain if we take women’s very different experience of cities and fieldwork seriously. My first fieldwork focused on two neighbourhoods, and allowed for in-depth comparisons and very detailed ethnography to be produced, but it was also guided by the local interest in the category of the neighbourhood as a main site of social interaction. In this sense my research asks questions about class, about gender and power. It links the micro-level to the macro-level picture through a bottom-up approach, which highlights the household and the family within the neighbourhood as sites where wider politics and histories are implied in everyday lives. Methodologically speaking, urban anthropology is challenging as it always implies a degree of multisited fieldwork (families, political parties, institutions, archives and planning bodies are among the sites explored) and also the maintenance and management of multiple contacts and resources. Pardo describes, how when he was doing fieldwork in Naples, setting up house in the neighbourhood was not a matter of simply renting a place, as one would probably expect, but a matter of understanding local agents and their moralities within a wider urban economy of relationships that stretch across and probably beyond the cityscape (Pardo 1996). In this as in many other instances, urban anthropologists aim at linking local relationships and their transformations with wider social, economic and – crucially – spatial determinants that have to be negotiated in an urban environment. In this sense then, urban anthropologists always research the city as a whole as more often than not their subjects traverse different terrains, communities and informal and formalized spaces even within the span of a day.

Introduction

17

Listeners and narrators Apart from working in the two neighbourhoods mentioned above, I conducted many interviews with those I came to know through living and working in Calcutta, in particular when I began to work on schooling and children. Thus, although a huge quantity of data was collected while I worked in Doctor’s Lane and Ganguly Bagan, other persons unrelated to these areas were interviewed because they were affiliated with a specific family or institution. With the network of contacts widening over the years, I have expanded my research to include a wide range of persons whose circumstances and outlooks are comparable to those encountered in the two neighbourhoods that are described here in more detail. In both neighbourhoods I met middle-class women, mostly belonging to the dominant ethnic/religious group in the city and the wider region and to the uppercastes who are privileged in multiple ways when compared with the vast majority of their compatriots. Within this setting I was seen as one of many representatives of a hegemonic ‘Western culture’, about which my interlocutors considered themselves well informed and with which they associated the shared colonial history and its legacy and, more importantly, the recent influx of commodities and media images linking middle-class households with global lifestyles and aspirations. Though the majority of the women I worked with had no first-hand knowledge of Western societies, and indeed most had never left India, many had relatives, friends and neighbours with experience of migration or travel abroad. In a climate of rapid economic change more and more began to harbour hopes for sons and daughters to travel to Europe and the Gulf, for further education, employment, or marriage. The ideas about life in ‘the West’ were largely abstract when I first began to work in Taltala in 1995, where only the Bengali Christian households I worked with had experience with institutionalized long-term migration, but became increasingly more common among members of other ethnic groups throughout the following decade, so that gradually conversations about ‘Western’ families, ‘Western values’ and ‘Western food’ were replaced by discussions of migrants’ experiences, mostly in the US but also in the Gulf, Europe and Singapore. It was in the context of such shared aspirations that our different origins faded into the background. With the possibility, if not the wish of having their children migrate in their minds, mothers in particular highlighted similarities rather than pointing out the differences between us in many conversations. Initially, however, the vast majority of those women I met on a regular basis had no plans to send their children abroad and their husbands were in secure employment in Calcutta, so that their main interest in our conversations about the West was ‘our family life’ and, related to this, ‘our’ ideas about morality, propriety and femininity – or more precisely the lack thereof. My visits comprised of a range of interactions within which what I chose to term ‘narratives’ emerged, often within informal settings and on more than one occasion. Represented here as a text these hardly convey the complexity of the situations in which these conversations and the encounters that went into their making took place, and the many ways I could be placed in a setting in which – for all its familiarity – I remained an outsider. Among the various factors that shaped my fieldwork, my being a ‘foreigner’ became an important part of the

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Domestic Goddesses

way women and men related to me, and more than once during my initial 18 months of research my relatively young age, the fact that I was living on my own and that I had an obviously rather unscientific way of going about my research was mediated by this essentialized ‘otherness’. The bideshi (foreigner) origin, clearly discernable from my looks, speech and behaviour, was in itself a cause for various classifications: I was compared to the young backpackers, who volunteer to work for Mother Theresa’s homes for the destitute, and who live in central Calcutta’s Sudder Street. If these strangely behaved foreigners exoticize Calcutta, as Hutnyk claims (Hutnyk 1996), the local middle class exoticizes them and regards their mannerisms and hippie lifestyle as fascinating but also largely decadent. By the end of the mid-1990s these images of the ‘Westerners’ were gradually being substituted by stereotypes presented in American and Australian TV serials, especially ‘Santa Barbara’ and ‘Neighbours’, which became popular among the younger generation and projected an ‘Americanized’ version of ‘abroad’ directly into living rooms across the nation. The sexy images of beachbabes and Australian housewives did very gradually substitute the representations of white women learning about ‘natives’ in their roles as missionaries, teachers, doctors or benevolent wives of government officials, which are part and parcel of women’s education in better schools and which are therefore familiar to middle-class housewives. As a third point of reference, my interlocutors would mention Europeanborn wives of Indian husbands, most of whom stay abroad, but whose visits form part of family lore among their Calcutta relatives. Frequently I was reminded of the fact that there were many early examples of such marriages, including the cases of reformer Michael Madhusan Dutt, whose wife Henrietta was British, the religious reformer Swami Vivekananda, who married the Irishwoman Margaret Noble (revered as Sister Nivedita in Bengal), and politician Subash Chandra Bose (Netaji), whose wife was German and who fraternized with Nazi Germany during World War II, an historical link between Bengal and Germany that was – much to my discomfort – often enthusiastically pointed out to me. If these were exceptions and historical cases, from the 1960s onwards numerous young Bengali men went to study abroad and brought back a bideshi bou, a foreign wife. Many of the women I talked to had such foreign sister-in-laws within their wider families and they told me their own stories about these ‘insider-outsiders’, as Deborah Bhattacharyya has called them (Bhattacharyya 1992). However, while the daughter-in-law is seen as the outsider par excellence she is also gradually made into one’s own through daily interaction, sharing of food and sexual relations, and her bearing offspring for the benefit of the family. None of this applied to me, as I did not marry a Bengali man, and so I was very often reminded that I was from baire (outside), not really ‘belonging’ to the neighbourhood or the city and thereby women’s everyday worlds in the same way as even the most recently in-married young daughter-in-law or the foreigner living with one’s cousin in Leicester, Cologne or Texas. Furthermore, working with more affluent households did make the research experience markedly different from that of anthropologists who focus on marginalized groups. In my case the asymmetry of power between the fieldworker and those she works with was not so much based on funding and economic means, but rather emerged solely due to the way anthropological knowledge is constructed and due

Introduction

19

to the practice of ethnography itself. Those who worked with me were, with a few exceptions, economically secure and many, though not all, were familiar with higher education and had a good idea of what social science research implied. Though my work was considered to be a sufficient reason for a respectable young woman to roam around in the city, neither of us assumed that what I did would directly benefit any of the women I worked with, and most saw their cooperation as a sort of favour that they were doing for me. In this sense I depended on the interest of my subjects, many of whom withdrew even after they had initially conceded to talk to me, a frustrating and time-consuming experience, which may be more prevalent in urban environments. In her critique of feminists ethnography, Kamala Visweswaran points out that in the case of Tamil middle-class women, with whom she talked about their involvement in the independence movement, unequal power relations were produced through her quest for ethnographic data, which created ‘situational knowledge’ (Visweswaran 1996). She then argues that dissent – as shown by silences, omissions and withdrawal – is equally informative as the more explicit information elicited in the course of an interview, and concludes that such instances of resistance highlight power relations existing between the fieldworker and her subjects. Not surprisingly, the examples she provides for such acts of resistance relate to women speaking, or rather not speaking, about sexuality, marriage and kinship within the context of the Nationalist movement. Apart from those who withdrew their support early on, the women with whom I established long-term relationships would at times react in a similar way, and I assume that their silences or evasions indicated that certain questions about their social relations, marriages and neighbours, which I deemed relevant for my research, were seen as inappropriate or not worth elaborating on by them. I would, however, suggest that it was not, as some feminist critics have asserted, the interviewer–interviewee situation per se, which they found problematic, but my attempts to discuss certain subjects. This can be read as a restaging of the problem that Visweswaran addresses, namely the way in which the ethnographic practice itself presents a violation of close or intimate relationships. Let me illuminate this through an example. I have at various times decided to pursue particular topics knowing that this would cause unease and raise potentially problematic questions. However, I feel that rather than being an effect of the practice of fieldwork more generally, most of the instances of disagreement or withdrawal occurred because of my interest in the domestic sphere and the need to interview women in their homes and neighbourhoods. This presents a predicament with which female fieldworkers may be more familiar than their male colleagues, who tend to work in public places. One of the women who was particularly keen on convincing me about certain aspects of her narrative was Sankari, a 36-year-old mother of one, who used my frequent visits to her house to present herself as a well connected local woman, constantly emphasizing her role as a mother and housewife. Sankari knew that I also visited her direct neighbours frequently and so she would ask me again and again what others had said on certain issues, in particular those with whom she maintained a rivalry fuelled by a short-lived political ambition. She first highlighted her life as that of a stay-at-home mother and, more importantly, a para meye – a girl from the neighbourhood, which in her view should have made her my chief informant. On

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Domestic Goddesses

other occasions she displayed her qualities as a hostess by inviting me for pujas held in her house and asking me as a Westerner to help her bake a Christmas cake. We had long conversations about her roles as daughter and mother, as well as about her relationships with other relatives and neighbours. However, contrary to her assertion that her son was devoted to her, I had only ever seen him once during the first seven months of fieldwork, and even on that occasion he rushed quickly in and out of the flat. Sankari, who never commented on her son’s rather unusual behaviour or the fact that her husband seemed to be away most of the time, quickly changed the subject whenever I asked about any of them. As it turned out, her husband had a second family permanently installed in the neighbourhood and two years later moved in with his mistress. His son followed suit, which left his mother devastated; but there was nothing she could do. While, as Visweswaran suggests, we can not ‘assume the willingness of women to talk’ (Visweswaran 1996: 51), it is probably equally important to look more closely at those who do talk and the circumstances under which certain kinds of conversations occur. In my case, working with women in their own homes and neighbourhoods turned out to be the determining factor for all conversations, and the relationship with the stranger/fieldworker was interpreted within this specific context. The limits of what could be said were very apparent on some occasions and in the case of specific women, but in other instances – depending on an individual woman’s position in the house and her character – I realized that they saw my fieldwork as an opportunity to create elaborate narratives around specific themes they felt were important. This was clearly the case with Sankari’s neighbour, Borsa Ganguly, who was a bit older and had a husband who, unlike Sankari’s, was very often at home, and a son, who was sent to study medicine in Bihar while I was working in the para for the second time. Borsa Ganguly had initially refused to interact with me and had instead made me sit down and talk to her husband about ‘the neighbourhood’, but she quickly warmed to the idea of frequent visits, partly because she spent all day in the flat looking after her mother-in-law, who was suffering from Alzheimer’s and rarely ever ventured out. Furthermore, she was educated to degree level and thus felt that she was the right person to help out with the research – someone to set the record straight and to highlight important themes others would find unpalatable, like love marriages or domestic violence, because they were exposed to them. Because she herself had established exemplary relationships within her own affinal family and saw these as the result of her own hard work as a daughter-in-law, wife and mother, she was quite confident about her reputation and liked to show off in front of me. For her and others I worked with, silences and what was left unsaid were clearly ways to redress the imbalance between my – often intrusive – presence in their homes and their commitment to the ‘work’ we were doing and many used our meetings more openly to display a particular image of themselves. Frequently, my fieldwork became a favourite way of creating these personas in a semi-public way, in which different audiences, including relatives, neighbours and friends played a leading role. If these were the same people through whom we got introduced, then people like Sankari or Borsa envisaged them going through the very same process and clearly saw their own elaborations as responding to this situation. Often their interactions with me made it clear that it was this familiar audience that was important, not the imaginary

Introduction

21

and much more abstract ‘West’ I belonged to. If we discussed what I was going to write about their lives and where I would publish this, they envisaged not so much an academic public, but an audience made up of people just like themselves, consuming articles and films published in the media environment that they were familiar with. Contrary to anthropological lore, I soon found that the fact that I lived in a different neighbourhood, had no relatives in the city and thus could not acquire an insider knowledge of family life by other means, made many women feel at ease with me. Unlike a new bride or a visiting relative, I was not part of their kinship networks. Though it is very uncommon to accept a complete stranger into your home, here, as elsewhere, many of those I was introduced to seemed to be more accepting of me precisely because I was a complete outsider. In fact, rather than being incorporated into their families and households in the way anthropologists like to describe their transformation from stranger to adopted kin, I was marked as an outsider in conversations through a constant emphasis on my attempts to ‘learn about Bengali culture’. For instance, in many homes I was never invited into the inner parts of the house where women reign, but had to wait in the reception room for someone to turn up and meet me, and rarely shared the all important family meal with any of the families I met in Taltala, though sharing was common in other localities where my route of access was different. But my age, gender, marital status and origin also proved to be major limitations in a context where suspicion, envy and an overwhelming concern with individual and collective reputations are powerful factors in women’s lives. For those who did so, to ‘help’ me with my research was an important objective for cooperation, and for most, though not all, of the women I met, independent travel, a PhD, or the choice to get married or become a mother were clearly not seen as desirable or as privileges when compared with the sense of security and clear-cut roles they themselves possessed. However, for a small minority these differences were not merely a matter of reflecting upon changes and hypothetical choice but highlighted restrictions they experienced as a result of their roles within the family and wider society. Among the women I work with are a number who, for various reasons, experience economic hardship and emotional or physical abuse, and who therefore took discussions about women’s agency and the freedom of movement and economic independence available to me much more seriously. Where the assumed security of an orientation towards the family gained through marriage and the birth of sons was revealed as a myth, as among separated, divorced and widowed women, they spoke of independence and the weight of social norms in much more ambiguous ways than their married sisters. On a number of occasions, I was asked for advice regarding employment or legal support by those whose marriages had not worked out and who relied on their affines or brothers for maintenance. And more than once a woman I met initially in her in-laws’ house made sure that I met her later on her own in order to ask for information on jobs or legal advice, and it was in these cases that being a ‘Westerner’ and being ‘educated’ most clearly outweighed my relatively junior age. The lack of alternatives for those who had fallen out with their relatives, be that their in-laws or their natal family, because they lost the support of a husband or son, or failed to live up to the expectations of kin, made me feel extremely helpless in view of

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Domestic Goddesses

the hardships such situations imposed. I came to know that women and sometimes children were victims of domestic violence, most often coming from husbands but also on the part of their female affines, and it was here that I saw my own role as outsider-confidante most critically. These situations did bring the contradictions of my role, and of ethnography as a feminist practice, into focus: the empathetic listener on the one hand, and a researcher with her own agenda and stakes in the academic discourse on the other. The fact that my research depended on trust and a degree of intimacy, which I could then not reciprocate with responsibilities normally established by a local researcher over time, responsibilities that are expected to come with such closeness, haunted me and still poses a dilemma I am not able to fully resolve. First, I was no doubt gaining more from the project than any of those interviewed, which was blatantly obvious to both parties. Second, as the example above demonstrates, I did not feel equipped to make any interventions which are often expected in a context where ‘education’ in women also very often means social commitment and the kind of patron–client relationships that allow others to approach you for jobs and advice in times of crises. I do not propose that our conversations, though in many instances obviously enjoyed, sought and used as a platform to think aloud, had the same positive impact on their lives as they could have had, had I been a local researcher. However, those women who had successfully carved out a role for themselves within their families and communities often cherished the way the discussions allowed them to air their views and exposed them to different perspectives and, in many instances, because of the long-term commitment this kind of fieldwork entailed, we did go back over earlier conversations, weigh up different decisions taken in the past and ponder over possible options for the future. Knowing and being known The dynamics that made the ‘field’ as it was in this specific case include issues of difference and the way I thought about my ‘informants’ as well as their own interactions with me. Since debates on women researchers and their locations have emphasized the problematic nature of this relationship, which is always uneven in the long run but which depends on the goodwill of the subjects of research at the time, in this section I will unravel how my informants negotiated my presence and work. In many ways the process, whereby I became the researcher and the neighbourhoods became my field, was arbitrary. Visweswaran observes that feminist ethnographers act as tricksters and must accept failure as part of the research process, since there can be no complete identification with or understanding of other women (Visweswaran 1996: 100). If identification is intended, anthropological research and ethnography can, indeed, only disappoint. However, I would suggest that in the urban environment fieldwork is more obviously a mode of dwelling in a place and therefore resembles, in this setting, the ambivalent relationship of a women married into the neighbourhood: just like the female ethnographer working with women in the city who has to travel and mediate between various dwellings and subject positions. They clearly saw the responsibilities associated with making and keeping one’s place in a

Introduction

23

home are constituted through partly consciously managed relationships with those who are to become ‘one’s own’, and some of the women compared this process with the process of acquiring knowledge in the course of research. Reflecting on their own experiences as members of affinal families, as people who had mostly married and shifted from their parents’ house to the husband’s residence, my temporary presence in the neighbourhood and their circle was widely accepted. They were aware that a continuation of this relationship depended on outside factors, and that in spite of closeness and trust I might not be able to return. For many women friendships, in the sense of chosen emotional ties with other women not belonging to one’s immediate family, end with marriage into a different ‘house’, and they may only ever visit their natal place for very brief periods after this. Friendships that were tied to their natal homes were therefore almost impossible to maintain, unless in-laws were interested in allowing the new bou (daughter-in-law) to keep such relationships going. Furthermore, many families had relatives living abroad so were familiar with the costs and effort involved in keeping up relationships across long distances and periods of living apart. What is more, in spite of this familiar pattern it became obvious that in order to be trusted I had to remain an outsider, someone who did not belong to the neighbourhood and who could therefore keep secrets, gossip and unconventional views. In this role I could be supported, sent away, requested, and sought out to be told facts, tales, visions and dreams. I also acted as a sounding board for the commonly held and accepted views, which seemed to have come under fire in an age of globalization, and, less obviously, transgressions. This was first revealed to me when Shibani, the leader of the samiti and a married mother and teacher, took me aside one day to chat about her political aspirations and the lack of enthusiasm the other women attending the meetings displayed. She portrayed herself as a very active woman who, most certainly against the wishes of her in-laws, had finished her studies and had taken up a job as a teacher after her marriage into this ‘oldfashioned’ neighbourhood. While we were talking about the most common problems discussed during the meetings, she went to a steel cupboard and produced a pack of photographs which she handed to me. The pictures had been taken on a trip to a small town about 150 km from Calcutta where the committee members had gone on an outing sponsored by the Congress party. The photographs showed various members in ‘Western dress’, as she explained, some wearing jeans and a T-shirt, some wearing baseball caps and others with cigarettes dangling from their lips. I was amazed that she was showing them to me when, suddenly, an elderly aunt of hers appeared in the doorway and she quickly shoved the pictures back into the envelope. It was then that I realized that my apparent failure to fulfil the role of a daughter/ sister/wife or neighbour made much of this research possible. In the eyes of the vast majority of women a researcher belonging to a Calcutta middle-class family would not have been trusted with many of the secrets and views that women did actually raise in my presence. This was made explicit when I decided to work by myself rather than to employ a research assistant towards the end of my very first year of fieldwork. A number of those I had visited more regularly told me at this point that they had felt uncomfortable because I had brought ‘these Bengali girls’ with me. The assumption was clearly that whereas I had virtually no connection with their families, there

24

Domestic Goddesses

could have always been potential links between a local student’s family and their own circles. After the departure of the assistants they could also engage more fully with my ‘Western’ identity and ask about practices like premarital affairs and love marriages, high divorce rates and generally loose relationships between family members as well as aspects of positive and negative consumerism, such as smoking, drinking, semi-processed foods, meat and fully-automated kitchens. Almost all of these social habits and consumption patterns were, in their view, divisive and rather appalling, while the objects making such lifestyles possible were admired and longed for. My assumed expertise in all things Western led to many conflated discussions, for instance about the availability of labour-saving devices in middleclass households, which in the view of many women were responsible for social evils associated with industrialized societies (this does, of course, mirror debates in early twentieth-century Europe). No matter how much information I provided and irrespective of the countless examples I gave from my own background and the comparatively traditional views on housework, gender and the family commonly held in Germany, there was little interest in this more nuanced picture. Moreover, I was, as a Westerner, expected to help with the acquisition of foreign goods, including information on the prices of VCRs and cameras and, more importantly for many women, various items to do with hygiene and beauty care. At the time of my first and second stints of fieldwork even these relatively well informed middleclass consumers were overwhelmed by the sheer diversity of products introduced on to the local market. On many occasions an item was kept in a drawer for some weeks or months until I came to visit when I had to admire it, explain its usage, and translate the instructions. In this sense, then, I clearly had access to a set of practices they were keen to emulate, and although I politely declined to demonstrate my indepth knowledge of objects like deodorants and tampons on a number of occasions, my explanations sometimes ended speculation about the origin and utility of such products. Being Western, then, could in a way outweigh the disadvantages of being a foreigner and a young unmarried woman. It did also mean that I had to be taught about correct behaviour and family values, since many of the women assumed that I was not aware of the most basic values in terms of relationships. The second positive attribute was that of being a student/researcher, albeit female, because a degree from a foreign university was desirable in its own right and commonly featured on the wish list of future accomplishments for children in these households. Thus, though none of the women had been abroad themselves, a foreign degree was a signifier of status and it was therefore assumed that my family must be respectable and relatively affluent. Above all, my status changed over the years. Initially I worked with women many years senior to me, and this allowed only a very hierarchical relationship to develop. Although I may at times refer to these relationships as friendships, for want of a better word, even the most intimate of these encounters would not be referred to in these terms in Bengali. To them I was either the friend of a neighbour, and thereby another neighbour, or a less specific junior who was expected to use the term for maternal aunt or maternal grandmother to address the woman concerned. During the first two periods of fieldwork, our exchanges were characterized as unequal since I was always the junior person learning from an older, more experienced, well

Introduction

25

meaning but patronizing teacher. I remain to those women I got to know during my first trip ‘a little girl’, who has only very gradually acquired some status through having her own child. After the initial period of work, I returned to Calcutta to do further fieldwork after two years. In the meantime I had written my doctoral thesis and had given birth to a son, who was accompanying me on a visit to the neighbourhood when I went to see Borsa Ganguly on soptomi din, the seventh day of the festival of Durga Puja, in October 1999. It was afternoon, the best time to walk in the para since the majority of its residents are at work or asleep and few vehicles ply the narrow streets. Durga Puja is a magnificent and important collective festival in Calcutta during which pandals (tent-like constructions) house images of the goddess Durga, who is venerated and addressed as mother by Bengali Hindus and whose effigy is surrounded by those of her children. The most glamorous of these images are designed and decorated by artists from Kumartuli in north Calcutta and are worth tens of thousands of rupees, they are two storeys high, and are paid for by influential neighbourhood associations. Among family members and in the house the festival is an occasion to exchange presents and visit relatives and, since Durga Puja is a celebration of the victory of good over evil, a festive mood prevails for days. For many women and their families Durga Puja has a different flavour as well since it is traditionally an opportunity to visit the parental home. And since every woman is a potential mother and also a daughter who has come with her children to visit her parental home, this puja is of special importance in these women’s lives. It was this very emotional image of the returning daughter that Borsa Ganguly evoked when I arrived at her house with my 9-month-old son that afternoon. She had been sleeping when the young servant girl led me into the living room, where she was sitting on the large bed. As I had expected, the TV was on and a Bengali soap was being screened. Borsa, whom I address as mashi (maternal aunt) but hesitate to call by her first name even in writing, had been living in this neighbourhood for the better part of thirty years, ever since she came to the house as a new bride. We had been introduced in the autumn of 1995 when I happened to meet her neighbour during my initial tour of the para, and I had visited her innumerable times thereafter. Though I was introduced to the house by a member of the Congress women’s group, Borsa was not active in politics and later, when I got to know her better, she explained that for a respectable woman without ambitions, like her, it was not a ‘good’ place to be. She did, however, observe what was happening in the neighbourhood and supported her husband’s involvement with the party. Like many others she had initially not volunteered to take part in what was to become known as my ‘study’ among her friends but, unlike so many of her neighbours, once she had committed herself, she was always very generous with her time, and enjoyed my visits and our conversations. Over the years we have established a relationship that allows me to raise all sorts of questions and discuss them with her on the understanding that I will not refer to her views in public, including in front of her husband or adult son. Departures as well as returns are special occasions in these families, and the value placed on the appropriate formalities can hardly be overstated. Middle-class family networks extend across the state, the country and often across continents, and so the event of a relative coming back after a long break is a common feature. To celebrate

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Domestic Goddesses

my return Mrs Ganguly instructed the maidservant to prepare tea and buy fresh patties from the neighbourhood stall, and we spent the following two hours chatting and exchanging news. While we were talking I noticed that – as I had expected – she had put my Christmas card up on a shelf, placed between a replica of the Taj Mahal and a deodorant her sister had brought from a trip abroad. I could hear the familiar noises wafting in through the open door of the veranda. Now, around four, the heat abated and the roads and side lanes of the neighbourhood came to life after the long siesta. Soon families decked out in the new clothes they had just received would go out to visit the pandals, customers would make quick purchases at the many roadside shops, and many houses would receive visits from friends and relatives. We had by then talked about children and about her son, who had returned from a not very successful stint at a college in Ranchi to complete his studies here, and then turned to our common acquaintances, the exam results of her nephew, the marriage of the downstairs neighbour’s eldest daughter, and the reappearance of the estranged husband next door. It was only when she finally mentioned the death of her aged mother-in-law, who had spent hours squatting next to us when I had been visiting her at the beginning of fieldwork, that she talked about herself. She asserted that her mother-in-law, once a beautiful bride, had led a fulfilled life, although she had been unable to prevent the break-up of the joint family after her husband’s death. This led Borsa to remark that though her mother-in-law had given birth to three sons she had suffered ‘as only a mother suffers’. Drawing out our newfound commonality based on this inclusive statement, Borsa proceeded to talk about herself and the fact that, though not beautiful even in her youth, she had been an equally good wife and mother, and had always been a dutiful daughter-inlaw. In the course of our conversations she had on previous occasions come up with examples to demonstrate the importance of the roles of devoted wife, mother and daughter-in-law, and how altogether these made for a virtuous life. Most of these stories from the lives of saints, Bengali reformers and nationalist leaders or drawn from the experiences of neighbours and relatives, illustrated this point. This, in many respects Mrs Ganguly was a typical Bengali middle-class housewife and whatever we discussed was judged according to a value system with women’s roles as wives and mothers at the centre. In her world, the changes urban India was experiencing in the wake of liberalization policies and political change represented threats insofar as her efforts to reproduce earlier family patterns were at stake. Increasingly people like Mrs Ganguly faced the challenges of a more globalized middle-class lifestyle, including the decrease in secure government employment, the multiple influences of media images and new consumption patterns as a mother. Globalization was interpreted as commodities and new ideas about kin relationships experienced at home, within the family context, mostly as a possibility for a different lifestyle within reach, as a local phenomenon. However, far from being simply rooted in the past, these women were as much commentators on the post-modern city as those equipped with cameras and pens. I have attempted here to show how the ‘field’ emerged in the course of my conversations as a function of location, for the women I talked to as well as for me. On the occasion of this meeting Borsa and I spoke about the work we had done during my previous visits, and she reminded me that I had then not ‘known

Introduction

27

anything’. In Bengali she described me as ‘blind’ then, and recalled how I had been a ‘little girl’, not able to speak Bengali and unmarried. And repeatedly she emphasized her own role in my ascent to knowledge by stating ‘I taught you all you know’. In a way that described very well what kind of relationship I had established with her and other women in the neighbourhood. Since I was not a relative, a neighbour or indeed attached to any particular local institution, the majority treated me as someone who came to learn about their lives and more importantly their ‘culture’. But unexpectedly for Mrs Ganguly, as for others, this was not a one-way process. Talking to me, many felt that the outside world appeared more familiar than they had assumed, and at the same time realized how strange the known places – the home, the family and the often cited ‘culture’ – appeared to be in such a reflexive mode. Sites they had been sure about before disappeared and the world we inhabit seemed to be vast and sometimes uncanny. The reflexivity my presence had encouraged was brought out by what Borsa Ganguly alluded to when at one point in our conversation that afternoon – almost two years after our previous meetings – she leaned back and stated ‘I thought a lot about our conversations, the questions you asked, all the things we discussed – they made me think about my own life’. Liberalization and urban change The 1990s were a period of rapid transition in India, and during this period Calcuttans experienced far-reaching social and spatial transformations. The changes this metropolis is currently undergoing are comparable to those in other urban centres, but do also differ in some important respects. Though the neoliberal reforms have of course affected Calcuttans through the influx of goods, new media and opportunities for employment in industries like IT and the service sector, the most obvious effect of liberalization, the boom in consumer goods, took much longer to take off here than in any other Indian urban centre. Furthermore, although the emergence of Hindu nationalism as a political force reasserted Hindu hegemony, the restructuring of urban space and the accompanying politics had a much more palpable impact on life in the city post-liberalization than the right-wing politics at the centre had earlier had. Thus, middle-class revolts over access to state resources and the meaning of modern family life, which fed into Hindu nationalist movements and culminated in the destruction of the mosque in Ayodhya on 6 December 1992 and the communal violence that occurred in its wake, were markedly less relevant in Calcutta. Nevertheless, the political campaigns that politicized the ‘inferiority complex’ of the Hindu majority (Jaffrelot 1993: 338), could not and have not left the diverse communities that constitute the middle class in a metropolis like Calcutta unaffected, and the exclusionary practices of representation and speech directed against ‘other’ communities including Muslims and Christians transformed the political climate across the nation, Calcutta and West Bengal included. For the purposes of this book, it is relevant to note that the politics of hindutva (a Hindu way of life as propagated by the Hindu right) have not had a far-reaching impact here, but allegations that the state ‘pampers minorities’ fell on fertile ground in particular among two groups of middle-class residents in Calcutta: first, among

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Domestic Goddesses

the business communities of Northwest Indian origin, among whom the politically organized side of Hindu nationalism has gained considerable support, and second, among the various communities of former East Bengali refugees, who may not support Hindu nationalist parties in the state elections but who maintain strongly communalist views and values. Since the 1990s a notable transformation of the public sphere has taken place, and though Calcutta has not seen rioting on the scale of other cities, when the Hindu right attacked the Babri Mosque in Ayodhya in December 1992, organized communal violence occurred in some eastern and southwestern parts of the city (Das 2000).3 The relative stability that Calcutta has experienced is usually attributed to the thirty years of rule by the Left Front led by the (CPI(M)), which has dominated state politics in West Bengal on the basis of support by rural electorates. However, large segments of the urban population have always been hostile towards the Left Front, or have recently switched their allegiances to new oppositional movements. It is widely acknowledged in Calcutta that the CPI(M), for all its faults, has benefited large segments of the rural populace, it has also benefited certain middle-class voters by offering employment to the educated middle classes, and as Ananya Roy has rightly pointed out, by ensuring a steady flow of impoverished migrants into Calcutta, labour that benefits middle-class consumers (Roy 2003). Very recently and in the face of decreasing support, the parties involved have begun a programme of urban restructuring that reflects the wider climate of socioeconomic change that has transformed the lives and experiences of city dwellers in India. Partha Chatterjee referred to the effects of these processes on the urban landscape when he asked: ‘Are Indian Cities Becoming Bourgeois at Last?’, and cites the recent clean-up drives, the suburbanization of the middle classes, a new concern with heritage and the emergence of modernist spaces for consumption as being among the main characteristics of this development (Chatterjee 2004). Middle-class Calcuttans do, beyond doubt, enjoy many of the advantages these changes bring: they buy flats in their thousands, engage in new consumption patterns inside and outside the home and largely applaud the new infrastructure, which has made travel within the city much easier – not only for the growing minority with access to cars. But, at the same time, they are concerned about the way the city is developing and while many have a stake in the profits made, the majority of my subjects bemoan a perceived loss of older political and social ties, as well as of affordable goods and services. This ambivalence is particularly explicit where the relationship with the slums is concerned, who inhabit in the words of Jai Sen the ‘unintended’ city, unplanned squatter settlements but equally the many legalized slums, which house about three million people. While the middle classes are in favour of relocating many of those residents, whose lives are so different from the imaginary new ‘shining India’, they are painfully aware that in the new ‘shining India’ low cost services would disappear along with the slums. It is therefore often 3 Das (2000) refers to the 1992 incidents of rioting in Calcutta as a ‘land-grabbing riot under a communal garb’ during which real estate developers tried to get control of land occupied by poor slum dwellers and points out that unlike on earlier occasions, i.e. in 1947 or 1964, the riots did not affect north and central Calcutta.

Introduction

29

an expectation that the urban poor will be shifted, moved or evicted but that the services will remain, an expectation based on the largely wrong assumption that poor city dwellers and their activities are more disturbing for the general public than the activities of the middle classes (Sen 2001). These transformations of urban space have largely been initiated by the powerful bureaucracy that sponsored significant developments in the West Bengal government. Whereas earlier a lack of initiative and the anti-investment and anti-urban politics stand of the Left Front was bemoaned, debates about the needs of ‘ordinary’ citizens now centre around middle-class electorates and their lifestyles. In this process of negotiation, the democratization of public space that Kaviraj (1997) asserts is taking place has largely been substituted by processes of intensified privatization and segregation, to which new suburban middle-class enclaves contribute a great deal. There are those who are still largely critical of what is happening, and see globalization simply defined as India’s integration into world markets and depict it as the mostly negative experience of economic transformation. However, many of my middle-class interlocutors are now – as opposed to in the mid-1990s – much more positive about globalization and Calcutta’s transformation. The idea that middle-class lifestyles are under threat coexists with the increasing competition and economic mobility, and the idea that certain job markets are shrinking (i.e. government service) is weighed against the new opportunities those with good education are offered in the IT-related industries at home and abroad. Fear that they would be excluded from the new, consumption-orientated lifestyles, which dominated the latter half of the 1990s has partly given way to more appreciative discourses about a new, urban life that emulates Western models but also, increasingly, South East Asia. However, with the realization that the new developments are highly uneven, earlier concerns are giving rise to new intergenerational conflicts, which are often depicted as the inevitable consequence of economic transformation, and which rejuvenate older themes concerning the ‘family’ and ‘Indian tradition’. In this sense the 1990s were, here as elsewhere, a period of redefinition – as in Amit Chaudhuri’s novel of the same name a ‘new world’ emerged, not only visible in flash displays of consumption, media images and urban construction sites. Neither were all of these transformations sudden or only related to economic liberalization: some, like the flight of middle-class families from central areas to the suburbs, or the rise in private healthcare and education, were continuations of earlier patterns. What interests us here are the often very subtle transformations in the organization of domesticity, gender roles and relations between the generations, which promoted new forms of sociality, socialization and stratification which, in short, lie at the heart of a new, confident class-based lifestyle generally recognized as desirable and achievable. The chapters address these transformations from different angles but are united by a focus on gender and the domestic environment, reproductive change and the kinship work that middle-class women undertake. Chapter 1 sets the scene through a discussion of the theoretical debates of motherhood, kinship and reproduction on which my ethnography draws. In Chapter 2, the reader is introduced to a set of ideas defining modern selves through middle-class discourses on love and marriage, which relate earlier anthropological studies of kinship with contemporary themes

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of conjugality, love and intimacy. Chapter 3 focuses on the discourses surrounding medicalized childbirth as a middle-class privilege within a wider discussion of kinship and changing family roles, and discusses the transformation of childbearing through the move towards hospital birth and the adoption of Caesarean sections in relation to agency and ideas about modernity. In Chapter 4, the way upward mobility, ideas about global workplaces and the demands of private schooling are reshaping what it means to be a middle-class mother and grandmother is contextualized through a detailed analysis of the impact English-medium pre-schooling has on motherhood. This discussion of intra-familial relationships, of women’s work and educational strategies leads towards the final chapter, which highlights the manner in which maternal bodies are reinscribed as sites of social transformation through ‘new vegetarianism’ popular among middle-class mothers. The chapter analyses how reproductive change is perceived in terms of traditional notions of female constraint and how technologies of the self, here dietary restrictions, allow women to appropriate modern motherhood as part of gendered power relations within the extended family. Parts of Chapter 1 have been published as ‘Reflections on Gender and Fieldwork in the City’ in the volume Critical Journeys: The Making of Anthropologists edited by Geert De Neve and Maya Unnithan-Kumar. Sections of Chapter 2 have been published as an article in South Asia Research, vol. 22, no. 1 in 2002, entitled ‘One’s Own Marriage: Love Marriages in a Calcutta Neighbourhood’. Chapter 3 is based on an article entitled ‘The Place of Birth: Pregnancy, Childbearing and Kinship in Calcutta Middle-class Families’, which appeared in Medical Anthropology, vol. 22, no. 4 in 2003. Chapter 4 draws on my chapter ‘Children are Capital, Grandchildren are Interest: Changing Educational Strategies and Kin-Relations in Calcutta Middleclass Families’ in the volume Globalizing India: Perspectives from Below, edited by Jackie Assayag and C.J. Fuller, and an article entitled ‘Committed Mothers and Well-adjusted Children: Privatization, Early Years Education and Motherhood in Calcutta Middle-class Families’, published in Modern Asian Studies, vol. 40, no. 2 in 2006. Chapter 5 is based on my article ‘New Vegetarianism: Food, Gender and Neo-liberal Regimes in Bengali Middle-class Families’ published in South Asia (April 2008), vol. 31, no. 1. The line from Hannah Arendt’s Vita Activa is reprinted with permission from her collected works published by Piper Verlag, München, the lines from ‘Grandfather’s Holiday’ by Rabindranath Tagore are reprinted with permission from Selected Poems published by Penguin, London, the excerpt from Tagore’s story A Parrot’s Tale is reprinted from the book bearing the same title published by the Tagore Centre London, and the lines from Hemanter Pakhi by Suchitra Bhattarcharya are used with kind permission from Shrishti Publishers, New Delhi.

Chapter 1

Middle-class Domesticities and Maternities

Most days my mother-in-law does the cooking and looks after the house, I am so busy bringing Shreya to school and organizing things for her – even in the afternoon, I take her to the computer class so that she gets a good idea how to do that, she also does classical dance and classical music classes and drawing, and I teach her some English. When we were young all that wasn’t necessary, I just went to a Bengali-medium school and I did some singing with my uncle who lived with us. My mother was busy from night-time onwards, she would get up at half past four to start cooking breakfast for my father and us. He would go to the market in the morning and she would finish the cooking for lunch after he came back and before he left the home around 11 a.m. he would have a warm meal so that he could have a full stomach. She would prepare our breakfast and our tiffin for school. She was always busy cooking and preparing snacks for visitors as well, and then there were the special occasions like pujas, when there was plenty of extra food to cook and rituals to perform. With my grandparents, my uncles, aunts, with everybody coming and going, there was no time. My parents were very concerned and interested in our education, they made sure I did a degree. Because we lived outside Calcutta we could go to college and do a degree. So I am a qualified teacher, that means I could work if I wanted, but I stopped when I had Shreya, I want to look after my child by myself – but the degree is still helpful I can help her with her homework and I do know how teachers think. My in-laws were clever like that, they made sure all the bous [daughters-in-laws] were teachers and well-educated so that they can help the grandchildren. In that way you save money on the tuition, when I help her with her homework until her father comes back… If I had the choice, I would not allow her to marry someone working in a private firm, they are never at home and there is no security. When he comes home we play with Shreya or she watches some TV. We eat very late, then she goes to bed and I clear up the kitchen and put out the utensils and washing for the maid who comes early in the morning. I do hope we can buy an apartment soon, I am so fed up with living with my in-laws and only two rooms to share, it is embarrassing – even if we wanted to we could not afford to have a second child with the school fees, tuition and rising house prices.

In 1997 Moon-Moon, a married Bengali housewife in her thirties, gave birth to a baby girl after she and her husband had been trying for a baby for some years. Before she married, Moon-Moon had been a teacher and worked for a private school, but as it became clear that it was taking her much longer than expected to get pregnant, her doctor suggested that she should leave paid employment. By then she had been married for a couple of years to Sanjay, the youngest of three sons from an affluent south Calcutta family, who worked in a private company’s sales department. Since he earned well and they lived in a two-bedroom flat in her in-laws’ house, they could

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afford to do without her meagre teacher’s salary, while still managing to go out once in a while, take holidays and eat well on a daily basis, as well as to save for a flat. We became neighbours in 2003 when I arrived with my 3-year-old son and my partner in Calcutta for a year of fieldwork during which the former attended the same nursery school as 4-year-old Shreya. Moon-Moon, like most other married middle-class women I met in the course of my fieldwork, had had her marriage arranged and her in-laws had indeed picked her as much for her features – she was, she said, exceptionally light-skinned ‘for a Bengali girl’ – as for her education, which would benefit their grandchildren. Her family were civil servants in the generation above, but her two brothers were both doctors and so in the local idiom of matching status and lifestyles, she did in fact fit well into her in-laws’ household. Her father, a bureaucrat, died when she was still at school and her mother, who was a housewife, moved in with her uncle and his family in one of the districts near Calcutta. Moon-Moon’s father-in-law, on the other hand, had been manager of a tea plantation in the hills of Northern Bengal and, by the time of her marriage, had taken early retirement to live off his investments. He had built an impressive house in a well-to-do neighbourhood for himself and his sons, parts of which were rented out. Moon-Moon’s mother-in-law was over seventy when we first met, and had trained as a school teacher. Out of her four children, her three sons lived with their families in the same residence, and all of them were married and had one (grand)child each. The subject of this book is motherhood and how it is constructed, experienced and debated by women in Calcutta middle-class families. The brief excerpt from interviews I did with Moon-Moon in her flat, while our children were playing, and the history of her own and her in-laws’ family indicate how motherhood dominates the lives of middle-class women in India. Their education, their marriages and their professional careers are arranged and represented in relation to the female role of a mother, and listening to marital and educational histories I was almost without exception presented with narratives of the commitment, sacrifice and determination it takes to bring up children, as well as descriptions of the relative success of families to make ‘good’ Indian mothers. Reading between the lines of the common and in no way exceptional comparison of two generations of women (Moon-Moon and her mother and mother-in-law) another theme comes to the fore, namely the perception of social change. Thus Moon-Moon’s account of her own marriage, education and professional life on this and other occasions highlighted the differences between women belonging to the older generation, for instance, her mother whose schooling was not as extensive as hers, and her mother-in-law who despite (or because) of the fact that she was well educated never worked outside the home, and her own. She emphasized the way her education, marriage and professional life were laid out in terms of her future role as a mother in a rapidly changing environment. In recognizing her impact on future generations in a modern world she is not alone. Throughout the decade I have been doing research with middle-class women in Calcutta, the common denominator in their lives has been the question of whether or not they were successful as mothers in an era of globalization. These women represented a wide range of subjects including politics, changing consumption patterns, media

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representations and globalization – in short the impact of change on their lives in an era of economic liberalization – through the lens of motherhood. Since having children, child rearing and family relationships are of such concern to women like Moon-Moon, it is remarkable that apart from a few notable exceptions (see Trawick 1990; Seymour 1999) this important arena, which implies anthropological topics like notions of the body, of relatedness and kinship, of gender, of politics and economic change, has not received any attention in the writings of South Asian anthropologists. While those interested in the effects of neoliberal politics and globalization have recently begun to produce ethnographic accounts of new families, motherhood and the state from the perspective of women, rather than media representations, these are the work of anthropologists studying Japan, China and Malaysia (Allison 2000; Anagnost 1997; Stivens 1998), not India. More generally speaking, the everyday lives of middle-class families have received very little attention in anthropology per se, and it is only very recently that mothers and their experiences, which more often than not centre around the family, childcare and parenting, have been the subject of studies on changing notions of kinship and new families as well as neoliberal politics and new regimes of care in situations of rapid economic change (i.e. Stacey 1991; Weston 1991; Edwards 2000; Haukanes and Pine 2005). Why, then, has there been so little interest in middle-class family life and parenting in South Asia? I suggest that, first, it is the dearth of literature and in particular detailed anthropological studies of the middle class and its lifestyles in the post-independence period more generally, which is responsible for the way motherhood is excluded from South Asian studies on gender. Since middle-class women, unlike their working class counterparts, rarely figured directly as mothers in post-independence politics, because the interventions in the reproductive lives of the poor did not appear on the surface to affect them, they have not been the subject of enquiry. Second, I suggest that motherhood and kinship are conspicuously absent from the accounts of change in contemporary India due to scholars’ preoccupation with issues directly related to the state and nationalism. Historical studies provide us with a very rich literature on upper-caste and middle-class women in their domestic environments (Chatterjee 2004) and the way their roles as daughters, mothers and wives changed during the colonial period (see, for instance, Borthwick 1984; Sangari and Vaid 1989; Ram 1998; Sangari 1999; Sarkar 2001; Walsh 2004). With reference to the nationalist movement we hear of newly emerging domesticities, gender relations and maternities, but we can get only a few glimpses into the private worlds of middle-class families in contemporary, post-independence India. In the serious long-term studies available religion, education, law and occupational choice, as well as media representations of women’s sexuality are foregrounded, while the nitty-gritty of family life, of intra-household and intergenerational relations and the practices surrounding marriage, motherhood and parenting are rarely addressed (see, for instance, Standing 1991; Basu 1999; Das 1988; Hancock 1999; Mankekar 1999). This bias against the family, parenting and the domestic sphere also prevails in the literature on globalization and economic liberalization in India, despite a strong

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interest in middle-class lifestyles. While a number of recent monographs focus on the transformation of urban areas, they highlight mostly one aspect of the ‘public’ and in particular the way the spread of visual media and advertising challenges notions of being Indian and middle-class (Rajagopal 1999; Mazzarella 2003). The growing interest in new intimate relations and sexualities, masculinities and gender relations has resulted in exciting new perspectives on post-liberalization lifestyles and changing subjectivities (see, for example, Osella and Osella 2004; Srivastava 2004). However, the middle-class family as a site for physical and ideological reproduction through the practices I refer to as parenting, and the way these are restructured and reformulated in an era characterized by economic liberalization and cultural globalization, is conspicuously absent from these accounts. In search of an explanation for this lacuna I can only add to, reiterate and expand on what Nita Kumar has written about the absence of real mothers from writings on South Asian educational histories that could encompass any contemporary social science research on gender, sexualities and social change in South Asia. ‘The unattractiveness of certain spaces inhabited by women’, she asserts, lies partly in ‘the categories themselves: “mother”, “home”, “childcare”, versus “intelligentsia”, “the nation”, “education”. The former cluster has to do uniquely with women and is private, passive, apolitical and ahistorical. The latter has to do only with men and is public, important, the stuff of politics and history’ (Kumar 2005: 157). Following from this bias, the majority of studies dealing with middle-class women privilege these other more attractive and public spaces, where motherhood seems to be primarily discussed where it feeds into, or is overtly constituted by, the realm of nationalist discourse. This is of course not to say that motherhood can be studied in isolation from other domains of the social. On the contrary I suggest that motherhood as a middle-class institution is a prime site from where to study change and social transformation. For anthropologists and sociologists working in South Asia motherhood has mainly figured in two related fields of scholarship – the domain of kinship, with a focus on femininities and ideas about conception, gestation and birth or psychological approaches to motherhood as a cultural motif and stage in the life cycle, studied in the context of the socialization of young girls (see Östör, Fruzzetti and Barnett 1982; Das 1988; Ray 1995). Here motherhood appears as a timeless folk construction of biological processes and kinship roles, whereas maternities are politicized only where they are targeted by family planning and health care interventions (see UnnithanKumar 1994), thus generating a body of literature that deals almost exclusively with poor women’s experiences. In the process, middle-class ideologies and practices of motherhood, maternities and child rearing, being less directly governed by official policies, are constituted as natural, unproblematic and apolitical sites of privilege. Families and motherhood Maternities as ideological constructions of motherhood have, however, formed part of social research on South Asia, primarily in studies of the colonial and post-colonial political constitution of the family. Debates on changing family forms, on parenting,

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and on marriage have recently received new attention in ethnographic writings on industrialized countries through the obvious transformations that marriage, child rearing and intimate relations are undergoing in the face of economic and social change. Many of these studies deal with the transformation of the nuclear family and the way new economies and new technologies challenge our understanding of kin relationships (i.e. Stacey 1991; Ehrenreich and Hochschild 2003; Taylor et al. 2004). Significantly, motherhood and new regimes of care are at the heart of these approaches because, as Linda Nicholson observes, the modern ideal of the nuclear family implicitly assumes a class-based lifestyle that features motherhood as an institution for child rearing. They assert that the family represents an institution: [t]hat begins to emerge for the upper classes during the eighteenth century. It is typified by a strong sense of the separation of the unit of parents and children from both a more extended kinship network and such non-kin related persons as servants. It is marked by a norm of partnership between husband and wife and by the special role of the mother in shaping the character of her children. In brief, it represents an institution less organized around relationships of authority and more geared to relations of affection as the household becomes less a unit focussed on production and more on sexuality, intimacy and consumption. (Nicholson 1997: 31–32)

Within this framework, motherhood is therefore rooted in much more than a biological or genealogical relationship or even a specific role and stage in the life cycle; rather it emerges as part of historically specific family structures and the power relations produced. Unlike the nuclear family, mothering – the practices defined as nurturing and caring for children by a female person (not necessarily the birth mother) – has long been the subject of particularly interesting anthropological discussions because through a focus on these processes key questions about the relationship between nature and culture, individual and society, and socialization and cultural difference can be addressed. Mothering in the anthropological sense consists of culturally specific practices to nurture and socialize children into full members of a given society, and this encompasses reproductive practices as well as the particular power relations within which these practices are situated. For the West, the most influential theoretical approaches to mothering have been psychological theories on infant development, which provide comparative perspectives on nurture and caring in India as well (see Kakar 1978; Kurtz 1992; Seymour 2004). The mother–child dyad conceived as the most important relationship in the lives of infants is of course also the subject of Freudian approaches anthropologists employ to analyse processes of individuation and the formation of gendered subjects (see Moore 2007). Considerable debates regarding the extent to which mothering has been naturalized in such discourses have developed over time. While, as Barlow (2004) concedes, mothering is in Western societies conceptualized as primary care giving, it has also been argued that mothering practices are far more culturally specific than Freud and those following in his footsteps accepted. Thus, while mothering is universal to women who bring up children, the specific understandings of conception, birth and female personhood which emerge from it vary greatly and, equally significantly, so does the agency of women as mothers.

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With reference to South Asia, though historically and culturally birth mothers play an important role, ‘multiple mothers’ and shared parenting, for example in the joint family, are common. This fits with findings in comparative anthropological work which state that in most societies children are not brought up by birth parents on their own and that institutionalized multiple caretaking of infants and young children is, in fact, a much more common scenario cross-culturally (Seymour 2004.). Thus, the work of mothering/nurturing is spread across generations and sometimes classes, and anthropologists like Kurtz (1992) argue, that in mother-centred religious and cultural contexts like Northern India, sole caretaking by a birth mother is a recent exception, at least among the middle classes. For such a mother-centred model of caretaking to emerge, motherhood as a particularly recognized institutional arrangement explicitly relates birthing with rights in children. These are supported, more often than not, by ideas about genealogical relatedness and birthing as the main source of special, individuating relationships. Examples from across the world, including pre-colonial South Asian elite households highlight that motherhood so marked is not necessarily a recent European middle-class institution (pace Nicholson 1997) but is rather something determined by the way relationships between a birth mother, or those standing in her stead, and offspring are regulated in public. But in spite of its institutionalized character, historically, motherhood has to be envisaged, and is experienced and exercised, as a malleable part of very specific social formations. Writing about the notion of the affective family, the idea of childhood, of the nuclear family and companionate marriage, Indrani Chatterjee reminds us that for South Asianists in particular, a ‘historical sensitivity to how intimacy was created in the past appears to stand in stark opposition to the questions of power’ haunting them. She provides a telling example of the way in which motherhood was conceptualized in an elite Muslim household that settled in Banares in the 1780s. Here, a complaint to the East India Company triggered the following discussion of a mother–son relationship: Quatlaq Sultan Begun, a widow of Emperor Jahandar Shah, claimed to be the mother of a son, Muzzafar Bakht, who enraged her by ‘deserting’ the household on his father’s death. The mother’s letter to the Company said: ‘Mirza Muzzafar Bakht is the son of a slavegirl, who was an attendant to her grandmother and whom the late Prince had taken into his harem. She still lives at Delhi for the late Prince did not bring her with him. Only Bibi Zeban, who was a slave girl of Mehdi Behgam [sic], daughter of His Majesty, came with the Prince. In this manner the late Prince had several slave girls in his harem.’ The son in question, Muzzafar Bakht, in his address to the Company accepted the ‘motherhood’ thus: ‘The humiliation and ill-treatment that he [Muzzafar Bakht] has been receiving at the hands of his mother Qutlaq Sultan Begam cannot be adequately described. He on his part was never remiss in the observance of filial duty and expected naturally to receive a kindly treatment from her. But his expectations were belied. (Chatterjee 2004: 15)

As the above excerpt indicates motherhood constitutes a political issue when it is bound up with the idea of the family and, more specifically, when the parent and child triad instils specific rights. Even if nascent and not institutionalized beyond the household as in the case cited, as an institution motherhood implies a special kind of relationship between an adult caring for a child and the infant, which more

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often than not is based on notions of descent through shared substances. But it is in the conjunction of this idea, namely that descent allows for certain rights in children with new discourses on the ‘family’, that the prioritization of biologically-related parents emerges. Furthermore, with this discourse on families, care work is relocated to the family home, the much contested heart of the ‘modern’ middle-class ideal and, as my ethnography will show, therefore institutionalizes modern motherhood as we know it. However, for the ‘family’ to become the ideological locus of middle-class child rearing practices and lifestyles in India, its role had to be created from diverse earlier patriarchies and a wide range of existing rules about residence, household forms, inheritance practices, legitimate marital arrangements and sexual relations.1 As historians of the nineteenth century have shown, the changes that allowed for a discourse on the family, loosely defined, to emerge were in India intimately bound up with imperial and Western domesticities, but were also equally forcefully based on earlier patterns, which gained new meanings in the wake of anti-colonial and nationalist mobilization. Not all of the transformations were focusing explicitily on nationalist constructions of motherhood. Part of this pattern was the emergence of a child-centred discourse in Europe, which travelled to the colonies. As a disciplinary discourse, it created a role for mothers that simultaneously transcended and subordinated women within racially differentiated hierarchies (see Ram and Jolly 1998). The idea that ‘educated’ mothers, to the exclusion of others, should be ‘shaping’ children allowed for their work to be circumscribed solely in terms of child rearing, and middle-class women’s lives became defined as service to the husband and their children, often in opposition to earlier and more collective ways of marriage and parenting. Not only is a specific class-based bias contained in this construction of motherhood but also implied are assumptions about the kind of family within which this ideal can be realized. In the case of Bengal the discourse around mothers and motherhood was not and is still only rarely synonymous with the norm of the ‘modern’ nuclear family, as historically multiple forms of marriage, fostering and collective child rearing existed in different strata of society. Addressing the need to control the elites through reform, the colonial rulers were particularly anxious about genealogies and marriage, and issues like child marriage and high-caste polygamy led to well publicized debates. In the higher strata of colonial society the marked emphasis on patrilineal collaterally extended ‘joint’ families caused concerns about Bengali women as wives and mothers that have shaped ideas of their domestic roles from the colonial period onwards. In this sense, the reform of motherhood reflects hegemonic processes of change as well as ideas about modernity and its specific Indian formulation. It demonstrates how during an earlier phase of global encounter specific norms of marriage, family and motherhood spread. As new socio-economic relations redefined communities across the globe, specific redefinitions of cultural forms and ideas took root as well. It is in this sense that the colonial concerns with companionate marriage and marital

1 With very few exceptions, most notably the matrilinear Nayar community of Kerala, South Asian kinship is based on patrilineal descent and patrilocal residence.

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ages, birth and birth rates, or polygamy and joint families are not only significant in terms of ideas, but also indicators of capitalist expansion. I would like to suggest that middle classes everywhere reacted to the reformist norms of the ‘nuclear family’ and ‘exclusive motherhood’. Motherhood as an institution has been a subject of state-supported reform in South Asia and elsewhere as, from the beginning of the nineteenth century onwards, it came to be seen as the ‘respectable’ woman’s main role. But such ‘exclusive’ motherhood can not exist by itself; it depends on transformations of maternal ideologies and specific practices around marriage, sexual relations and wider kin relations. Helped by the newly introduced ‘rational’, ‘scientific’ view of the physical processes of conception, pregnancy and birth, motherhood only very gradually came to be defined and institutionalized on the basis of exclusively biological bonds established through conception and the act of giving birth. Anthropology of kinship, reproduction and the family Hegemonic ideas about specific maternities as being more suitable to produce the desired families and children never go unchallenged, but it was only with the critique of kinship studies put forward by David Schneider (1972) that the mother–child relationship became ‘de-naturalized’ in anthropology. The attempts of anthropologists to demonstrate cultural diversity in terms of practices related to bringing up children notwithstanding, it is only very recently that ideas about mothering, maternity and the symbolic importance of motherhood as a system of beliefs and practices related to wider fields like the family, politics of community and nationhood came to the fore. In an early paper on Schneider’s culturalist approach Lee Drummond invites us to deconstruct mothers and motherhood from an anthropological perspective: Far from being ‘the most natural thing in the world,’ motherhood is in fact one of the most unnatural. For one thing, a cultural analysis of mother can neatly invert the ethological argument: rather than going on about the universal, biocultural innateness of something called a ‘mother–child bond’, the process of conceiving, bearing, and rearing a child should be viewed as rather a dilemma that strikes at the core of human understanding and evokes a heightened, not a diminished, cultural interpretation. The birth of a child is a dramatic intrusion of a non-cultural being at the heart of the domestic sphere. A woman, in nurturing and protecting that being, establishes a perilous conjunction between opposites: a fully human adult becomes intimate with a nonhuman, even antihuman form. My point, which cannot be developed further here, is that the process of investing a foetus with a human identity is cultural – it gives meaning to the world – and so, correlatively, is the process of identifying a woman as mother. (Drummond 1978: 31)

Although this notion of motherhood as an institution does in itself build on assumptions about mothers and babies, personhood and the domestic sphere, such a critical approach explores the relationship between the genetrix and her offspring, as well as those involved in nurturing after birth. Anthropological studies of mothering have not only provided ample evidence of the great variety of mothering styles and settings – even in contexts where biologically relatedness is rated very highly (for examples of alternative forms of mothering in Euro-American contexts see Glenn

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et al. 1994) – but have also emphasized the processual aspects of parenting and the way various communities see the making of a person as a complex interweaving of human relationships, environmental influences and transcendental intervention. Thus culturalist approaches, which investigate how symbolic representations of relatedness across generations are influential beyond the idea of parenting as a set of rights and obligations derived from biological bonds, emphasize shared moral codes and the transmission of substances as significant ideas about such relations (Carsten 2000). Here, Schneider’s critique was extremely useful as South Asianists had earlier primarily focused on caste, hierarchies and ritual status to speak about kinship. Through a rereading of kinship in terms of relatedness and personhood as well as gender, substantivist perspectives present ideas about such relationships in a new light. Based on the scriptural elaborations on South Asian high culture, especially Hindu cosmology, anthropologists revisited ‘folk’ concepts of relatedness from the perspective of the body, and now include gendered accounts of previously marginalized relationships, like the ideas explaining the bond between mothers, fathers, and their children (Inden and Nicholas 1977; Östör et al. 1982; Daniel 1984). But unlike Schneider, who recognized the shortcomings of an understanding of kinship, which focuses on symbols rather than context, South Asianists did not move on to look at kinship and its institutions as crucial sites for the reproduction of inequality based on difference, for example in terms of gender, ethnic identities and class (Schneider and Smith 1973). Thus, South Asian as well as other such personhoodbased accounts (Carsten 2000) are rightly criticized by non-anthropologists for their homogenization of ‘culture’, whereby the historically specific embeddedness of ideas about relatedness disappears and the politics of reproduction are not taken into account. Coming back to the question of motherhood, we have to acknowledge that these studies have shown that among South Asian communities the models of how parents are related to their children – how groups of ‘one’s own’ kin come about and how inclusion into such units is facilitated – are based on ideas about the lineage, that is on ideas best described in terms of reproductive processes and increasingly biological relatedness, as well as nurture and shared substance. The focus on substances and thus on the physicality of parenting, as sharing, growing and nurturing bodies, allows us to direct our attention to the way gender is implied in South Asian kinship. As the substances that constitute and relate persons are gendered and transmitted, at least in some communities, through gendered lines this emphasis on the gendered body highlights reproduction as ‘producing children of substance’ (Fruzzetti 1982; Ram 1992; Busby 2000). These accounts contribute to our understanding of local categories, but they suffer from a fixation on structuring elements, often labelled ‘culture’. Furthermore, and this is a very serious shortcoming of such approaches, these studies do not always problematize the relationship between symbolic representations and a historically situated analysis of the politics of reproduction, which is needed in order to avoid overgeneralization. Ideas about conception, birth or nurture, which make a child fully social in a specific place, do not tell us anything about the context within which these ideas are realized; moreover, they are, as the South Asian example demonstrates very well, malleable and subject to political

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discourses and economic change. Thus the limits of culturalist accounts of relatedness and kinship lie precisely in the creation of stable categories of culture they intend to overcome. With their emphasis on symbols and systems, they tend to overstate the representation of social relations and take idealized norms as the equivalent of experience. However, relationships on the ground are often much more nuanced and varied, moreover they are the result of power relations, within which symbolic aspects of everyday life are contested and get appropriated by individuals and groups. While a focus on models is anthropologically speaking fascinating, and contributes to discussions among South Asianists, it hampers a comparative analysis of change and emerging subjectivities, as (for example) Trawick’s analysis of the idioms of love in a Tamil family shows (Trawick 1990). Moreover, this approach supports a portrayal of South Asian communities as static, traditional and overtly religious, which is especially pertinent where the study of motherhood is concerned. As my research shows, the malleability of concepts serving the institution of motherhood does not only depend on cultural schemes – that is symbolic systems which are transmitted between individuals and groups over time – but is particularly challenging in its historical variations and in relation to power. Here, a second set of anthropological questions and enquiries helps us to illuminate why motherhood as an institution is a relevant field for the study of historical change. As it is related to birth, motherhood is part of the wider relations enabling the reproduction of humans and, thus, social life. One of the shortcomings of ethno-sociological approaches is certainly that caste, community, class-based distinctions and post-colonial histories – which so strongly determine the life of ideas and concepts in South Asian communities – are rarely contextualized. Thus, while ethno-sociology has introduced the gendered person into debates about how South Asian actors understand themselves, we have to carefully analyse how the body relates to the body politic and how, as Ginsburg and Rapp so eloquently argue: [R]egardless of its popular association with notions of continuity, reproduction also provides a terrain for imagining new cultural futures and transformations, through personal struggle, generational mobility, social movements, and the contested claims of powerful religious and political ideologies. These imaginings and actions are often the subject of conflict, for they engage the deepest aspirations and the sense of survival of groups divided by differences of generation, ethnicity, race, nationality, class and, of course gender. (Ginsburg and Rapp 1995a: 2)

Thus, on the one hand I am interested in how motherhood is constituted through the relation of power and specific historical trajectories, while at the same time I explore how its practices reproduce new hierarchies of class, gender and ethnic group. To see these different intersections more clearly, it is necessary to situate the cultural narratives that make up much of our data within the specific politics of reproduction that shape their content, and study the discourses resulting from the interplay between local ideological landscapes and wider socio-economic processes.

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Reform and reproduction in the colonial period The colonial period saw intense debates on reformulations of gender relations in South Asian communities, especially where ideologies of the family, indigenous ideas about relatedness and practices of childbirth were concerned. In order to avoid falling into the trap of oversimplification and classist assumptions about different temporalities, I focus here mostly on the debates relating to Bengal and the impact of colonialism on urban middle-class women. In the course of the intensive debates around the tradition of a ‘Hindu community’, which affected life in urban Bengal from the colonial period onwards, women’s kin roles as wives and mothers were thoroughly politicized. The local intelligentsia and British administrators alike felt the need to reform and restructure existing patriarchal arrangements under the conditions of colonial rule. Himani Bannerji asserts that the wider reorganization of ‘indigenous civil society’ united the representatives of the colonial state and male elites, who shared hegemonic aspirations and a preoccupation with social reform and social control, a preoccupation that was based on a reordering of gender relations and a revised understanding of indigenous patriarchal norms (Bannerji 1998: 23). In particular the agitation around the Age of Consent Bill of 1891 shows that interference in ‘traditional’ arrangements brought hundreds of middle-class men out in protest onto the streets of Calcutta, as domestic relations were interpreted by the local elites as ‘traditional’ and, therefore, sacrosanct. The reactions to the ongoing transformations remind us of much earlier, precolonial histories, with which they share certain traits. First, the idea of what the family in the modern sense would be, had to be distilled from earlier models of social life in the household and had to be reinterpreted using a mixture of uppercaste patterns and newly available Victorian-inspired ideologies. The reformers’ interest in marriage and child rearing was preceded by older gender codes, which focused on caste and the control of women’s sexuality, but within which parenthood was clearly defined in terms of duties and rights only among the well off upper strata. With reference to Hindu Bengal, the main feature of the debates in the early and middle colonial period was kulinism, a custom whereby high-status Brahmins practiced extreme hypergamous polygamy and would ‘receive’ a child bride. The grooms were often ageing and consented to a number of such matches with families of lower-status because they desired the substantial dowries and in most instances the young girls were never transferred from their natal to their marital home, and they became widows at an early age. Though most well-known among scholars of South Asia for the debates regarding the ill-treatment of these widowed girls, reformist discourses that emerged were also concerned with the fact that these young women were involved in sexual relations and became mothers at an ‘unhealthy’ age but were left in their paternal homes without any hope of ever acquiring the full-status of a married wife and mother. In some cases the debates expressed a nascent criticism of the cult of male children and the devaluation of girls as the example of Kailashbasini Devi, an early Bengali author born in 1837, shows, who writes in her pamphlet regarding motherhood as an example of ‘The Woeful Plight of Hindu Women’:

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Domestic Goddesses Thus the expectant mother thinks incessantly till the time she gives birth: ‘Pray! If only the Good Lord grants me a boy child, how happy I’ll be, how my kin will love me’ But if, as fate may have it, a girl is born, the mother takes a look and sinks into unspeakable gloom – what is more – is often moved to tears, a sign of utter misery, and the kin show great distress … Lord have mercy! Are we so low that the times of our birth and death are equivalent? (Bhattacharya and Sen 2003: 26)

After this dramatic appeal, she continues to discuss the failure of high-status Brahmins to create a functioning family through cohabitation, by saying: Many a noble-hearted kulin meets his wife for a second time only during his son’s marriage; this is the moment too when the son first sees his sire. Heavens above! How hateful it is that these people, far from condemning such depravity, take pride in saying ‘Why should a man of kulin birth, feel ashamed of it?’ (Bhattacharya and Sen 2003: 33)

Thus, ideas about how the family and motherhood should be united through reforms formed part of the wider debates about child marriages and widowhood, and the status of Indian elites. But, although the colonial encounter and in particular the nationalist movement brought about very specific notions of what it meant to be Bengali, an Indian and a middle-class woman in the urban context, all those new identities were not necessarily homogeneously amalgamated into coherent notions about women’s roles as wives and as mothers. It is significant to look at the diversity of arrangements that survived within the fold of these upper-caste middle-class households. As Indrani Chatterjee observes with reference to the limits of reformist discourse in the nineteenth century, the ideals promoted were rarely all encompassing: [T]hrough the nineteenth century the picture of a complex household with varieties of conjugal relationships and of dependence remains the predominant one. The simple conjugal family of nationalist male aspiration can then be understood as a historically contingent ‘site of desire’ and not everywhere an accomplished fact. (Chatterjee 2004: 17)

Indeed, a number of more recent works on the history of the family, household and kin relationships in the colonial era demonstrate that upper-caste Hindu and influential Muslim households became sites of conflict, intensified social control and reform throughout the late colonial period. With chakri (salaried employment), new spatial arrangements, household economics and educational regimes were introduced. Within the nationalist imagination, the domestic sphere, parenting and the family, took on a millennial shine in public debates. Constructed in opposition to the male experience of subordination at the place of work, the home came to be seen as a site of Bengali male counter-culture and a source of authority. As Tanika Sarkar so aptly argues: [T]he household generally, and conjugality specifically, came to mean the last independent space left to the colonised Hindu (Sarkar 2001: 198)

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This is signified by the fact that different laws were introduced for different communities, which were referred to as ‘personal’ and opposed to the laws on land revenue etc. But where the family in the Victorian scenario occupied a household that was the opposite of the meaningful male world of work, nationalists saw the household more and more as their real place of work. (Sarkar 2001: 197) Among the Hindu upper-castes in urban Bengal, colonial legislation gradually became applicable to almost all spheres of family life, and women, represented at different junctures by the child bride, the minor mother and the self-immolating widow, became the subject of debates on self-regulation. Various interest groups searched for ways to reunite the need to modernize with the maintenance of hierarchical relations within the kin group, while at the same time establishing a sense of community. Just when in the Victorian context women’s bodies, minds and intimate relationships disappeared from public view, Bengali women’s bodies and their intimate relationships were dragged into these sorts of debates about emerging publics as part of colonial modernity. It was in the context of bhadralok culture, the cultured urban genteel lifestyles that the ideal of the gentlewoman, the bhadramahila, emerged. The debate on the ‘Hindu woman’ was resurrected through a combination of two essentialisms: the Victorian discourses on the nature of women and the domestic sphere, and the upper-caste ideal of the chaste Hindu wife and mother of sons. Whereas the British reformist and largely legalistic discourse had clearly created the Hindu bride/Hindu child widow as a victim, the emerging Bengali middle classes responded much more ambiguously, with the education of women playing a huge part in these debates. Writing specifically on the Bengali middle-class attitudes to education, Kum Kum Sangari observes that: [T]he reconceptualization of womanhood was embedded in the aspirations of the emergent but far from homogeneous middle class which needed to restructure the family, to produce ideologies for the reproduction of households, to measure patriarchal practices against emerging forms of stratification, to align personal with general class interests, to produce a common language about ‘culture’ as well as contest the colonial state’s practiced juridical rights over a newly constituted ‘public sphere’. (Sangari 1999: 122)

Female education, and its effect on the family, was a matter of great concern among the urban Bengali elites. In an early example of women’s involvement in these debates Kailashbasini Devi elaborates on women’s education in relation to her ability to fulfil her duty as wife and mother. Articulating some of the concerns of members of respectable society by the middle of the nineteenth century, she perceptively compares English and Bengali women: [W]hat basis is there for the notion that on being educated a woman would turn wanton and shun family duties? Is learning such a vile thing that associating with it makes a woman fall into evil ways? And why should she neglect housework? Would she, on being educated, turn less affectionate towards her husband, children and other kin? … What magnetic force resides in learning that would draw a woman out into the world? Also, what evidence is there that women would crave for freedom? Till now, women of no country have achieved freedom, when then would the Bengali woman seek it? … If one could be liberated by being educated and travelling about as one wished, the women of

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What emerged was a project of class formation, within which women became emblems of continuity subordinated to men. In the course of these developments the ideal of patrivrata (a wife worshipping her husband) played an important role, as it allowed the reformers to redefine women’s subordination as their dharma (duty). As anthropologists and historians of imperialism have observed, the reformulation of this ideal depended on a reordering of family and household relationships and an ideology of separate spheres, which in this context reflected older notions of purdah (seclusion) popular among upper-caste Hindus and affluent Muslims. This legacy of upper-caste traditions of female seclusion shaped modern gender relations among the urban middle classes, and provided a rigid reinterpretation of separate spheres. Towards the end of that period, the ideology of ‘two domains’, expressed in terms of ghore (inside) and baire (outside) the home, was already widely accepted in urban areas (Chatterjee 1993). Charting this development in the context of colonial Bengal, Partha Chatterjee observed that: Applying the inner/outer distinction into the matter of concrete day-to-day living separates the social space into ghar and bahīr, the home and the world. The world is external, the domain of the material; the home represents one’s inner spiritual self, one’s true identity. The world is a treacherous terrain of the pursuit of material interests, where practical considerations reign supreme. It is also typically the domain of the male. The home in its essence must remain unaffected by the profane activities in the material world – and woman is its representation. And so one gets an identification of social roles by gender to correspond with the separation of the social space into ghar and bahir. (Chatterjee 1993: 120)

Together with a significant rise in age at marriage and the decrease in the number of children this ideology redefined the actual work of housewives, although the spread of women’s education and female employment varied greatly between regions and ethnic communities. Thus, while the division between the outside and the inside of the house and the description of women’s roles as homemakers are derived from the colonial legacy of separate spheres, contemporary gender relations and representations of respectability vary and what such spatial metaphors as inside– outside actually imply in different historical and regional settings today has to be established in each case. These earlier behavioural and gender codes were modified to incorporate the needs of a new class. Central to a realization of such identities was the reform not only of marriage and education through legal and educational institutions but also of the minute details of everyday life, as apparent in the proliferation of texts and manuals teaching women the correct way of cooking, childcare, conducting marital relations, behaviour towards servants and with extended kin. As Judith Walsh observes, earlier women had been absorbed into the husband’s lineage, their individualism denied in favour of the wider interest of the kin group. Now, the new discourse on what middleclass women should be was represented in terms of patrivrata, as wives devoted to their husbands and mothers of sons (Walsh 2004: 61). It is in this early version of

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a middle-class morality that women first appear as active housewives and mothers within reformist discourse, because although the debates focus on the role of women as wives, the couple’s new role is foremost directed towards having children and raising sons to perpetuate the lineage and strengthen the nation. What figures as the family becomes at once more restricted and more fluid. Such new constellations are reflected in the ‘hybrid’ genre of the manual which, as Walsh shows, challenges the authority of older patriarchal systems in favour of a new way to run a household, the acknowledgement of the separate interests of the couple and the wider family, and the duties of the couple towards their children (Walsh 2004: 71). Although initially the number of Bengali women who could read such publications was small, the ideas put forward in manuals published from the 1880s onwards reached an impressive audience as women’s schooling became more common (in the Bengal presidency alone 44,096 girls were in education by 1881) (Walsh 1995: 41). The idea of the newly ordered home, highlighted in terms of cleanliness and ‘modern’ family relations, marriage focusing on conjugality and devoted maternities, also relied on practical changes relating to the body and the mind. In the sources we can access, intimate relationships are addressed mostly in terms of the effects of education on parents and daughters, conjugal relationships and the role of mothers. The manuals criticize these in relation to older norms and structures, notably the dominance of elder women in the extended household, and highlight new demands in terms of the necessary domestic restructuring and the shift from the authority of these older women to the authority of husbands. This shift brings women’s work and the division of labour in such households into focus. These were reorganized explicitly around an axis of class (i.e. where middle-class women were taught how to supervise servants), access to property and rights in property (i.e. where the rights of widows and dependents were concerned) and affines (here in particular the relationship between mothers-in-law and daughters-in-law and of the latter with other members of the family). Characteristically, ‘global domesticity’ as a hegemonic production of knowledge about families, relationships and reproduction: enabled the transformation and adaptation of many nineteenth-century worlds to the century’s new economies, new modes of production, and new institutional structures. The civilizing mission … addressed itself to people’s habitus in all these local contexts – to daily life and practice, to clothing, toothbrushes, and bowel movements, to cooking and cleaning, to the way mothers reared their children and wives cared for their husbands, to the organization of storerooms, kitchens, cupboards, and drawers. (Walsh 1994: 138)

How then did women react to these new demands and the tensions that ‘modern’ life created in their homes? Those who were able to publish did often embrace education and the new ideology of conjugality wholeheartedly. But their accounts do also show that they recognized the discrepancy between the new ideals and the reality of life in a joint family, where older women ruled over new brides and young daughters-in-law. The latter were now, in addition to their duties as affines, expected to please their husbands. The question of authority and the sheer amount of housework expected from a junior woman did not often give them the time and independence to fulfil the ideals of modern marital relations that they had embraced. Moreover, there is a significant tension here between the accounts of the very small

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elite of literate and increasingly articulate Bengali women in more progressive families (the shikata or learned woman of colloquial Bengali) – who, once they ‘became literate and found a “voice,” were able to express their own version of women’s positions, grievances, and solutions’ (Karlekar 1993; Forbes 2005: 13) – and the vast majority of women who were clearly not that educated but embraced the role of ‘house-wives’ (sic) nevertheless. The former, known as lekhika (educated women), initially depended on the generosity of parents, husbands and sons but were often later on enabled (by support through a father, husband or even mother-in-law) to criticize the old regime and embrace new patriarchal values. In their writings they condemned practices seen as irresponsible including segregation, the lack of education for girls and, increasingly, women’s exclusion from the sphere of the political (see, for instance, Karlekar 1993; Bhattacharya and Sen 2003). But, while these early feminists ‘prefigured twentieth and twenty-first century sensibilities’ (Walsh 2004: 143) it is important to note that the vast majority among them belonged to elite households, mainly of the reformist Brahmo sect, which overall represented a very small minority even among high-status Hindu families in Calcutta. Furthermore, while some of these women gained reputations as patrons and independent thinkers, the reform project was on the whole not aiming at fostering greater autonomy for women. The increased freedom of movement and restricted political involvement enjoyed by later generations does not account for the experiences of the vast majority of middle-class women, whose voices cannot be retrieved from the archives because they were never recorded. Thus, in how far pamphlets, magazines and, later on, women’s journals reflect the diversity of Bengali Hindu middle-class experiences up to around the turn of the century is extremely difficult to establish. It is likely that the hierarchies attributed by historians to the older patriarchal structures maintained a strong hold over the lives of this majority. For them, the break with ideas of caste, of affinal relations, lineages and new ideals of conjugality present in the learned discourse of the educated woman was not as relevant as the continuous power of older patriarchal norms and intra-household relations: In middle-class, joint family households, where the male and female spheres were clearly distinct, there was a separate women’s structure of authority. There were usually up to five or six women, including the mother and a widow, living in the zenana or working together in the household. The principle of seniority governed authority relations among women and either mitigated or aggravated the impact which patriarchal power had on women’s lives. Due to property relations, patrilocality and the religious significance of the male lineage, women were strangers in their husbands’ houses until they had contributed to the continuity of the lineage with the birth of a son. It was here that the female rise to a limited power began; it culminated in the position of ginni, the mature mistress of the house, mother of sons and superior to her daughters-in-law. (Engels 1996: 17)

In most instances power and coercion exercised by those in control, namely senior affines, did also mitigate the impact of women’s education. The vast majority of women were excluded from progressive literary practices available to a few and, what is more, seem to have been ‘content with and eager to receive the kind of education that men arranged for them to turn them into better wives and better

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mothers’ (Murshid 1983: 62). Thus the family emerges as part of not so much a nationalist but more a class-based project, as Bannerji poignantly points out: [T]he concern for educational social reform which alters family mores indicates the need to develop new forms of ‘class consciousness’, subjectivities, ways of being and seeing, this can only be done in its most fundamental form by reworking the family. (Bannerji 2002: 141)

And it is in the context of changing family relations between generations, affines, couples and parents with their children belonging to the household more generally, not exclusively as a woman to be educated or as a wife, that the Bengali bhadramahila as homemaker or mistress of the house (grihini, ginni more colloquially), who is crucially a mother, enters centre stage: The two central themes in this context are the familial social space designated as andarmahal/antahpur (inner quarters) and (home/household); the main creator-organizer of this space is named in the latter half of the century as grihini (the mistress of the home/ homemaker), especially in her incarnation of bhadramahila as the mother. This typology of ‘sentimental, morally-educative motherhoood’ subsumes social relations peculiar to the ideal social space of griha and the bhadramahila mother-homemaker, an educator and a nurturer, involve much more than a domestic labourer or a biological reproducer and physical dwelling space. (Bannerji 2002: 146–7)

The new class-based identity came only in the late colonial period to be crucially linked to the genealogy of nationalist thought and the role of Bengali middleclass women and men in the nationalist movement. With reference to women, the emergence of the doctrine of separate domains and notions of public and private spheres and, second, the ideological representation of Bengali women as belonging to the latter, which limited their political involvement in the public domain to these essentialized, domestic roles, are implied in nationalism and in notions of class. Motherhood, as we will see, came to play a significant part in these discourses, both as a new domain of reform as well as a main symbolic field. Partha Chatterjee, commenting on the nationalist project in the colony and the way the newly emerging public implied a ‘private’ sphere, observes [F]or the colonized to allow the intimate domain of the family to become amenable to the discursive regulations of the political domain inevitably meant a surrender of autonomy. The nationalist response was to constitute a new sphere of the private in a domain marked by cultural difference: the domain of the ‘national’ was defined as one that was different from the ‘Western’. (Chatterjee: 1993: 75)

This new relationship between a public and private sphere and the need to constitute the new identity through statements that emphasized cultural difference have been aptly discussed by scholars analysing Bengali upper-caste women’s symbolic roles as signifiers of the nation, and the participation of middle-class women in the non-partition and Swadeshi movements of the later nationalist phase (Engels 1996; Sarkar 2001; Forbes 2005). Women engaged with these questions

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because the ideologies produced addressed their roles as homemakers and mothers, whose domestic responsibilities were elevated to a quasi-transcendental status. At the same time, these new discourses accommodated those who wanted to become active outside the home while, very importantly, they emphasized the contribution of those who remained invisible in the public arena. Maternities and modernities For generations of Bengali women, the antahpur, or women’s quarters, had been the only place within which respectable women moved. While it provided the stage for a rich cultural life, an important source of support for younger women, and a site for creativity and meaningful relationships, as historians of nineteenth-century Calcutta have pointed out, it also limited women’s autonomy, kept them dependent through seclusion and taught young women to prioritize the authority of older females and their male relatives’ needs over their own desires (Banerjee 1989; 1990; Karlekar 1993; Bhattacharya 2003). Gradually, women’s roles in the home and as homemakers became politicized and the imagery of motherhood in the interest of the nation spread through an extension of the familiar idioms of devotion and suffering. Motherhood and the mother as the positive symbol of ‘Indian womanhood’ emerged as positive signifiers of nationalist modernity. Jashodara Bagchi remarks on the glorification of motherhood in colonial Bengal that with: the emphasis on one’s selfhood and identity to be opposed to the Western rulers, motherhood emerged as the domain which the colonised could claim as their own. The empowering of the symbol of motherhood should not be seen as a mere victory of traditionalism over the modernising tendency of the social reform era. (Bagchi 1990: 62)

Indeed, the politicization of the symbolism of motherhood had far-reaching consequences for women’s lives. Middle-class mothers, and their working-class sisters alike, became targets of criticism based on the assumption that to be the mother of sons no longer meant merely satisfying the needs of the lineage and providing security in old age, but was now the main purpose in the lives of all women. For middle-class women, this implied a reductionist view of their education and autonomy, while working-class women, who depended on employment and enjoyed considerable economic autonomy, were cast in the role of deficient mothers: By extolling an ideology that apparently rested on a show of the empowering of women, it was ultimately a way of reinforcing a social philosophy of deprivation for women. It was a signal for women to sacrifice everything for their menfolk. The internalisation of this so-called ideal that nationalism put up for women simply reinforced the traditional notion that the fruition of women’s lives lay in producing heroic sons. The nationalist ideology, therefore, simply appropriated this orthodox bind on women’s lives by glorifying it. … Bengali mothers had to contend with the unspoken call to renounce any other form of selffulfilment. Child-bearing and nurturing became the only social justification for women’s lives. Without any control over her own reproductive powers, this amounted to a form of slavery, however magisterial it may have been made to look. Numerous women died,

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trying to produce yet another son. Numerous women were deserted for their failure to produce a male child. (Bagchi 1990: 70)

Combining the emotional support attributed to the Bengali mother and notions of shakti (female power), which form part and parcel of popular religious practice in Bengal, the nationalist reinscription of motherhood did also distinguish between women from different backgrounds. First, the link between Bengal, and later on India, as the motherland was based on a Hindu-centred imagery of the nation, which excluded Muslim as well as Christian men and women; and, second, the positive appropriation of motherhood for the political domain did restrict women’s roles to that of devoted and selfless homemakers and nurturers. The ideal Indian woman, it appeared, not only sacrificed her own interests for the greater good of the family and community, but could afford to live an entirely domestic life. Based on folk notions of shakti, enshrined in popular religion, the novels of writers like Bankimchandra Chatterjee, but also the writings of more explicitly religious reformers like Swami Vivekananda drew on the rich imagery of mother goddesses and manifestations of shakti as sites of intense desire, thereby creating a spiritual as well as political sphere for action. Thus, Indian nationalism, and in particular its militant Bengali incarnation, created a domain of motherhood within which existing representations of female power and fecundity could be accommodated and controlled, through the real life subordination of real women. While the scale of women’s activism and political involvement outside the domestic domain remained limited, the politicization of the separation between a domestic sphere and a public discourse on motherhood had a strong impact on the lives of Bengali women of the respectable classes, who had to embody these ideals and integrate practices to reproduce the aspired to families and parenting practices even in the most remote mofussil towns. Global motherhood: new discourses on maternal health Motherhood gradually became politicized in the course of the nineteenth century as women’s activities in the home and the relationships that provided the framework for the emotional and physical well-being of children and the family were redefined in terms of a ‘new patriarchy’ characteristic of reformist and nationalist discourses. However, it is often conveniently forgotten that imperialist configurations, together with urbanization and industrialization, drew on earlier, local understandings of the social world as well as Victorian notions of gender roles and moralities (Walsh 2004: 142). Whiteread observes that motherhood as a symbol is much more versatile than the common focus on nineteenth century nationalist discourses leads us to believe as it: simplifies and condenses reality, while retaining a multivocal potential which can flexibly signal various class positions, forms of habitus, and world-views. What gendered practices would be grounded in the motherhood ideal, how the social context of domestic labour would be envisioned and organised, and how the ideal mother would be educated for her new role in independent India were questions that were continually negotiated throughout this period. (Whiteread 1996: 192)

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During the later part of the nationalist and anti-colonial mobilization in India one of the prime sites for colonial intervention, namely that of maternity, defined as the practices around birthing and bringing up children, parallel with motherhood, defined as the ideal of the good mother, became the subject of political intervention. As Partha Chatterjee has argued, the nationalists solved the ‘women’s question’, the problem of integrating women into nationalist discourse while at the same time controlling them, by redefining the home as a spiritual seat of power, with women as its caretakers and sources. Mothers, their reproductive power and their role in socializing children in the right spirit, do play a major role within this new discourse, from which real women, especially in their roles as mothers, are excluded (Chatterjee 1993). It is therefore only relatively late in the colonial period that real mothers were subjected to new discourses and institutions, which interfered directly with their bodies and reproductive processes. Since the colonial power defined its superiority very much in moral and cultural terms in order to introduce diverse practices of modern governance, the state condemned practices which were deemed ‘backwards’, traditional, indigenous and therefore repulsive. While pre-colonial maternities are not very well documented, and we only occasionally get a glimpse of the realities of women’s lives as mothers in India and elsewhere across Asia and the Pacific, the intersections of race, gender and class produced discourses on maternal health which formed part of wider attempts to reform sexualities and reproduction in a variety of contexts. Engels remarks that the state expressed an interest in Bengali women as bearers of children only from the 1890s onwards when mothers became the focus of attention through the medicalized discourse of childbirth (Engels 1996). These interventions introduced across colonies in the later imperial period did also, as Margaret Jolly reminds us, substitute the centrality of the mother in real terms by adopting a ‘discursive focus on the child’ (Jolly 1998: 2). Interestingly, in the case of the Bengali upper castes/middle class this shift only took place towards the end of the colonial period, mainly because the colonial administration had no interest in these women’s, or their children’s, labour power. Ram and Jolly remind us that within the project of modernizing maternities – which encompassed European as well as colonial sites in a truly imperial embrace – ‘improvement’ ‘not only meant the medicalization of pregnancy, birth and the post-partum period but the discipline of mother love itself’ – with maternal love by colonial subjects and the working classes judged as deficient by the increasingly influential experts (Ram and Jolly 1998: 4). However, more so than the problem of how to love your children in the right way, the medicalization of birthing played a significant role in bringing maternities into the public sphere. Birthing and medical intervention still represent major sites for reform in the modern Indian nation state today. Given the growth of a whole industry related to maternal health and the control of women’s bodies through new kinds of knowledge, it may not be surprising that India, and Bengal in particular, saw the introduction of medicalized imagery and medical institutions to deal with issues of pregnancy and birth only very late. But perhaps more remarkable than the new vocabulary is the fact that the actual influence of the various attempts to reform

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reproductive processes (including conception through birth control, antenatal care and the event of birth itself) actually remained very limited until very recently. With reference to the specificity of such colonial histories David Arnold points out that while: women’s health occupies a special place in the history of Western medicine and colonial hegemony … it is striking how little consideration was given to women’s health in colonial India before the 1860s and 1870s. (Arnold 1993: 254)

The 1840s saw the establishment of the Calcutta Midwifery Hospital and a Maternity Hospital in Egmore in the Madras Presidency, and a significant number of medically trained female missionaries also worked in India from the 1860s onwards. The practical disinterest of the administrators did not hamper the spread of a new, negative discourse on the women’s quarters that suited colonial elites. Instead of birthing per se, the place of birth and, with it, traditional female cultures of child rearing became the site for critique: [T]he reform of the antahpur became essential. This was done by the English and Indians through discourses of science in the name of improving practices of childbirth (the influence of the local midwife was seen as pernicious), of domestic hygiene (domestic science became a cornerstone of women’s education by the end of the century), moralistic literature, and dress that in certain parts of India by incorporating some features of Western dress attempted to be respectable. The relative autonomy of the woman’s world was threatened by such discourses, and the multiple discourses of colonial power infiltrated these domestic spaces. (Grewal 1996: 51)

Mirroring the attempts to civilize the English working-class woman through a public discussion of the home, of bodily hygiene and child rearing, Indian women living in segregated women’s quarters (antahpur, andor mahal or zenana) figured as victims of backward practices symbolized by spatial segregation. Equally important as the women’s quarters, which were depicted as dark, dirty and immoral, was the discussion of the figure of the indigenous dhai (midwife) as she embodied all these qualities as well (Hodges 2006: 3). The role of female missionaries, who acted as mediators and moral judges in these contexts, is of crucial importance, as they were often able to access the women’s quarters. They taught select women how to read and write and introduced ideas about housekeeping, antenatal care and birthing. Missionaries and their institutions also facilitated the training of female doctors and fed a discourse on the need for high-caste women to be rescued from ignorance and the ‘cruelty’ of tradition through new, ‘modern’ Indian maternities in the mould of middle-class English models (Burton 1996; Haggis 1998; Van Hollen 2003: 38–56). The debates on birthing formed part of a global discourse right from the start, but the ‘barbaric’ practices Indian women living in zenanas were allegedly subjected to were given special attention. However, although missionaries as well as medical doctors saw birthing as a crucial field for intervention, the Indian male elites had no intention of allowing Western medical practitioners and educators any control over the bodies of high-caste women. While they supported the attack on traditional

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women’s culture, which included, as Sumanta Banerjee has shown, particular rituals and understandings of reproductive processes demonstrated through myths and folksongs (Banerjee 1989), they did not allow doctors and midwives into their houses. In fact, Europeans’ understanding of upper-caste women’s worlds was very limited. Maternal mortality and child health gave as much reason for concern as did the fact that upper-caste women used low-caste birthing attendants. In the view of Europeans, the fact that low-caste dhais helped with the delivery of high-caste women soon figured as a major obstacle to the ‘advancement’ of Indian women. In the eyes of Western and Indian reformers alike, Indian mothers were seen as more loving and naturally feminine than their European counterparts; however, they were at the same time criticized for superstitious behaviour and their non-scientific child rearing practices. In the latest phase of the nationalist movement more and more Indian upper-middle-class women took part in various mobilizations. Some of these sites, like charities and the women’s wing of the Indian National Congress, related the iconography of the Indian mother to campaigns for mother and baby childcare. These were the first organized attempts to link public health interventions and women’s political mobilization, which united European women working in medical institutions and women’s organizations in India. Many of the Indian activists and an increasing number of female medical practitioners were from Bengali families. But in spite of the interest in maternal bodies and birthing practices displayed by these ‘experts’ in theory, the uptake of new institutionalized knowledge, demonstrated, for instance, in the number of hospital births, remained low among the middle classes, even in metropolitan areas like Madras or Calcutta, well into the twentieth century (Arnold 1993: 258; Donner 2003). Intervention into the reproductive processes of upper-caste women remained an arena dominated by charitable foundations and philanthropists. The medicalization of Indian women’s bodies, for instance, in relation to childbirth, is therefore not only significantly structured by discourses on race but also importantly involves articulations of class, which overlapped with earlier ideas of caste and kinship. In the Bengal presidency the late colonial period saw an interest in the bodies and labour power of working-class women, as well as in the reform of childbirth and child rearing among upper-caste and middle-class families. Working-class women, in particular jute mill workers and prostitutes, were defined as promiscuous and generally inferior mothers who allegedly caused trouble in the workplace and beyond in the lines (see Sen 1999). The discourse on middle-class and high-caste women used the same rhetoric of ‘civilizing the natives’, but did not have the same implications. Middle-class and high-caste Bengali women remained sheltered from the direct intervention of experts and their bodies were only gradually subjected to examinations by mostly indigenous practitioners. While westernized families belonging to progressive and thus reform-friendly environments developed an interest in new medical knowledge early on, it took until 1885 for an official fund aimed at training European women to become doctors, nurses and midwives in India, to be formed. Only very few of the Bengali upper-caste women of the older generation I met in the 1990s would have shared Geraldine Forbes’ view on the transformation in birthing evident among her subjects in the 1920s:

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The dhai became the symbol of superstition and dogged resistance to change. Enamored by science and Western medicine, ‘new women’ wanted lady doctors or nurses. They were not interested in traditional birth attendants because they no longer believed in rules and rituals surrounding childbirth, respectability and refinement had replaced purity and pollution in their everyday lives, so the old-fashioned dhai, with her experience gained from other women and knowledge of bhuts [ghosts] and the evil eye, was something of an embarrassment. (Forbes 2005: 98)

The vast majority of middle-class women did not belong to such ‘westernized’ families and for them practices such as purifying rituals were crucial and they often depended on dhais to assist with home births as late as the 1950s in Calcutta, elsewhere in some cases until the 1970s. The excerpt above does, however, make another important point, namely that wider kin relations played a crucial role for the processes of reform in the home. Rather less progressive, many of my own elderly informants reported how they had given birth in their natal or affinal family home, observed periods of complete seclusion due to post-natal ritual pollution in the atur ghor (birthing room) for days and weeks after the birth, and how a whole set of rituals performed for the well-being of mother and, more often, child, were conducted in the different houses they had claims to. This is not to say that indigenous ideas were not profoundly challenged through the new kinds of medical knowledge and the practices available to women in Calcutta. With the proliferation of written pamphlets that told women how to run a modern household, the minute details of care, including bodily hygiene and maternal health, became subjects of discussion inside the home and also in newspapers and books. The new ideal of an ‘Indian’ middle-class woman depicted as a self-sacrificing, educated and caring model mother relied increasingly on various media, like journals and newspapers, and experts who supported self-reform through education. Mary Hancock describes how home science helped in this process from the 1930s onwards and shows how it served the creation of global domesticities and maternities through women who: [A]ttempted to define domestictity and female agency using the rhetoric of Home Science in conjunction with Gandhian nationalist projects and international feminisms. These efforts took place in several Indian cities, most prominently in the provinces of Bengal and Madras. (Hancock 2001: 873)

These endeavours were stepped up after independence when curricula for the institutional education of middle-class girls were drawn up. In spite of the many differences between working-class and middle-class married women, their lives as mothers were profoundly affected by reforms that initiated reproductive change. Even when we limit ourselves to colonial Calcutta it transpires that, just as the direct interventions affected the lives of working-class mothers in the form of labour laws, housing policies and discourses on population and health, middle-class mothers were subject to comparable ‘interventions – in homes, schools and other institutions in both metropolitan and colonial sites – [which] were, as Foucault has persuasively argued, about governing life’ (Jolly 1998: 10). Medical knowledge did not only provide an important comment on what a good wife and mother could and should

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be, but made modernity accessible through debates on domestic practices which marked the female body as a site of reform. Middle class identity, gender and globalization This is a book about motherhood and families in the context of class. Given the problems in defining the middle class in any convenient way with reference to economic indicators, I use the term ‘middle class’, first, as a self-referential category, and second, as a denominator for a cultural project that encompasses a section of the population, which has certain economic, educational and occupational traits in common – historically, but also culturally. In Calcutta, different groups ascribe to shared denominators of middle-class status, and Calcuttans from all walks of life include related terms and notions in their everyday conversations. Thus, the ‘obsessive public concern’ with being middle class which Mazzarella asserts is not a recent phenomenon (Mazzarella n.d.). What is new, however, is that ‘middleclassness’ integrates a wider range of groups in addition to the salaried employees of yore into a discourse about what it means to be modern and Indian. This debate is prevalent in media representations and some of the official post-liberalization political discourses, especially those concerned with urban restructuring, and indicates the hegemonic claims of a broad range of more affluent Indians (Baviskar 2002; Chatterjee 2004). Far from being a media invention or the result of post-colonial nationalist anxieties, the Indian middle class, fuzzy borders not withstanding, is a diverse but recognizable and, moreover, significantly growing section of the Indian population. As Leela Fernandes points out in the most concise attempt to define the new in the middle-class segment in India today: [T]he rise of the new Indian middle class represents the political construction of a social group that operates as a proponent of economic liberalization. This middle class is not ‘new’ in terms of its structural or social basis. In other words its ‘newness’ does not refer to upwardly mobile segments of the population entering the middle class. Rather, its newness refers to a process of production of a distinctive social and political identity that represents and lays claim to the benefits of liberalization. At a structural level, this group largely encompasses English-speaking urban white-collar segments of the middle class who are benefiting from new employment opportunities (particularly in privatesector employment). However, the heart of the construction of this social group rests on the assumption that other segments of the middle class and the upwardly mobile working class can potentially join in. (Fernandes 2006: xviii)

Given the fact that this new national Indian middle class is still in the making, different segments of the middle class, or the middle classes as I prefer to refer to these strata of society, have different histories. In the former presidencies in particular, their predecessors emerged during the colonial period through the interaction of local elites with the colonial administration in these British ruled domains. In these areas, a significant community of affluent residents whose livelihoods depended directly on colonial administrative and business interests and whose culture was shaped by their role as intermediators, emerged. This middle class shared specific

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cultural traits: for example the participation of men in Western education, debates on the position of Indian women, the reform of conjugal relations, ideologies of the family, and debates about dress codes, occupational and language patterns largely related to involvement in nationalist mobilization. According to Béteille, a ‘relatively new social formation’, the middle class as we know it, is based on these colonial histories. But he also reminds us that the ‘pre-existing differentiation of Indian society on the basis of language, religion and caste’ played an influential role in this process of class formation (Béteille 2003: 74), a fact that is conveniently forgotten by those who see the idea of the nation as the only significant source for middle-class identities and lifestyles. Thus, differentiating factors like language, religion and ethnicity do make it difficult to speak of one middle class where the pre-independence period is concerned, and my analysis is limited to its arguably most well researched, and possibly most coherent regional variant, namely the Bengali Hindu middle class of Calcutta. It is also important to note that, although there have been entire communities which experienced substantial upward mobility from the colonial period onwards, ‘middleclassness’ does imply specific forms of cultural and symbolic capital and thus favours mostly upper-caste Hindus as well as high-status Muslims, and certainly relies on urbane norms and practices, which upwardly mobile groups embrace in an attempt to enhance their own status. With reference to gendered identities, the origin of, for example, specific dress codes, ideas about purity, marriage and the value of patrilocality, which are clearly remnants of caste-based identities are not always discussed as such. Furthermore, the transformation of caste-based into urban class-based identities has altered ideas and practices which were related to earlier configurations and social hierarchies. Moreover, in Bengal in particular, unlike, for example, in southern states like Tamil Nadu, caste ceased to be a differentiating factor in hegemonic middle-class lifestyles from the late 1890s onwards. Thus, while marriage practices, consumption patterns and medical discourses draw on caste-related histories and symbolism (Kaviraj 1997), other discourses, mainly related to ideas about class and ethnicity, have substituted references to caste in many spheres of everyday life. Though a Bengali Hindu middleclass person in Calcutta today is less likely to belong to a lower-caste or a Muslim community than to be an upper-caste Hindu, and although this correlation of castestatus and class position guides everyday interactions, many former lower-status groups are today accepted as respectable and members of various status groups and ethnic communities maintain middle-class lifestyles. It is, however, significant to note that an upper-caste bias in the self-definition of middle-class behaviour and lifestyles does very significantly shape gender ideologies, which incorporate high-caste ideals of chastity and marriage. In other words, while caste-based identities are very often downplayed in public, middleclass values reflect practices that are exclusive and that are often not accessible to those of lower-caste origin, since they centre around symbolic capital for their longterm reproduction (see Frøystad 2006). Since the 1980s, when economic liberalization kicked in, social and political scientists who had shown no interest in the middle classes during the postindependence period, began to pay more attention to the Indian middle class

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especially where the role of the middle class vis-à-vis the state was concerned. Following Pranab Bardhan, my definition of the middle class is based on the ideal of the middle-class professional, defined here as white-collar workers and their families, who belong to the dominant classes because they possesses education, skills and expertise. This includes professional white-collar workers in private companies and professionals, but a high percentage of these workers and their families were, up until the 1990s, dependent on employment in the public sector (Bardhan 1989). In the period between 1995 and 2005 the middle class so broadly defined grew in numbers and, more importantly for an anthropological study of middle-class culture, there are some relevant trends apparent across the country which can be observed from 2000 onwards. If we prefer to speak about class in terms of economic standing it is significant to note that, although the indicators may vary, it is clear that if measured in terms of access to consumer goods, incomes and infrastructure the Indian middle class has grown impressively over the last three decades. Sridharan states that, depending on the indicators used, the middle classes in India are comprised of 50 to 250 million people, which is a significant percentage of India’s population, namely between 5 and 25 per cent (Sridharan 2004). In terms of their economic standing, these households have experienced unprecedented growth, as middle-class or whitecollar incomes grew, so that households in the very broadly defined middle-class category have today comparatively more money to spend. However, at the same time, public-sector employment declined, and the percentage of middle-class people taking part in retirement schemes or opting for employment in the private sector also rose quite significantly (Sridharan 2004: 418–9). With reference to the social composition, it is sufficient to say that across India the vast majority of middleclass households in the pre-independence as well as the post-independence period belonged to the Hindu upper-castes whereas new political and economic conditions have led to a rise in affluent agricultural castes, which are increasingly economically and politically significant, though not in Bengal.2 In Bengal, the most well documented and perhaps most deeply implied groups belonging to the emerging middle-class category in the colonial period were the three upper-castes, namely Brahmin, Vaishya and Kayastha, whose involvement with British rule and later on the nationalist movement has been discussed extensively by historians and political scientists with reference to bhadralok (gentlefolk) culture. Although whole sections of lower-caste origin were incorporated, and caste was, in the case of single families, not an obstacle to bhadralok status as the history of the low-caste banik (trading castes) I worked with in Taltala shows, the three upper-castes formed a majority within the category of households that could aspire to bhadralok status (Broomfield 1968; Borthwick 1984; Chatterjee 1992). Contrary to some scholars, I do not see the bhadralok society of urban Bengal as a group, but as a cultural category, emerged from the interaction between the landed gentry, which with the permanent settlement act gradually lost much of its influence in the countryside, and the newly emerging ‘educated middle class’ or shikita madhyabitto

2 It is important to note that these urban middle classes supported the Hindu nationalist governments of the 1990s (Sridharan 2004: 421).

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3

sreni. This initial constellation displays already some of the defining features determining middle-class life in Calcutta more generally: the involvement with administration and the state, the diminishing link with the rural hinterland and, consequently, the development of a distinctly urban lifestyle, with a strong emphasis on the ideal of the rentier. A significant and self-conscious consolidation of the middle class in Calcutta only occurred after 1870 and was accompanied by considerable conflict: castes and communities competed for power and struggled to gain access to resources through their participation in municipal politics (Mukherjee 1993). Among them Bengali Hindus were particularly eager to embrace new avenues for employment, political engagement and education and, with time, colonial rule, its ideology, its practices of governance and its social consequences penetrated all spheres of life. Class-based identities began to transform social relations on all levels, notably the relations within castes, relations between members of different classes and intra-household relations. The affluent bhadralok families, which were landowners or zamindars in the old sense, lived, and still very often live today, off rents, since they invested in real estate when Calcutta was built and accumulated substantial assets in the city. Some groups, for example the baniks (traders) I worked with in Taltala, only reluctantly entered paid employment when a chakri (position) became the much maligned defining feature of Bengali lower middle-class lifestyles. By the end of the 19th century, the acquisition of an English education had become part and parcel of an upper middleclass son’s upbringing, and the lifestyle of the more affluent households has shaped the idea of middle-class families in urban Bengal ever since, although only a minority commanded the financial and cultural means to fulfil genteel aspirations.4 Indeed, specific families, first amongst them the Tagore family, have had such an impact on middle-class culture in Calcutta that it is not hard to differentiate between those who lived comfortably and were locally referred to as aristocrats and those who were in subaltern positions throughout the colonial period and beyond by reading accounts other than those produced by this self-styled urban elite.5 3 The emergence of bhadralok culture is aptly described in the work of Broomfield, Borthwick and Mukherjee (Broomfield 1968; Borthwick 1990; Mukherjee 1993). Broomfield sees the bhadralok as a single group, but in reality it was a term of reference for a number of distinct groups, incorporating elements of Bengali aristocratic lifestyles into new urban formations among the emerging middle classes. 4 ‘The Permanent Settlement Act of land revenue by Cornwallis in 1793 had led to a vast proliferation of rentier interests, many of them quite tiny, and this was the material base for the overwhelmingly upper-caste respectable educated bhadralok. Rentier incomes had to be increasingly supplemented by professional or clerical jobs, for which a smattering of Western education had become essential.’ (Sarkar 1998: 190) 5 The family of Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore came to Calcutta from Jessore and played a prominent role in the social and political life of the city. They joined the Brahmo Samaj, a progressive theist Hindu sect, like other influential aristocrats and became patrons to the growing community of writers, artists and later nationalist leaders. Remarkable is the culture of the sprawling Jorasanko mansion in North Calcutta, today a museum, in which members of the very large extended family, including women, were educated, performed

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A theme running through the literature on the Bengali middle class, today as in the 1870s, is that of stratification. With reference to the colonial period, Sumit Sarkar has pointed out that middle-class life is described predominantly through the writings and political involvement of the influential bhadralok, although the plight of the lower middle class, epitomized by dependency on male employment in service or chakri and a frugal lifestyle has been well documented: [T]he anguish and frustrations of genteel poverty in this world of the unsuccessful bhadralok – pandits losing patronage in the new era, obscure hack-writers, humble school-teachers, clerks, unemployed educated youth, high school or college boys with highly uncertain job prospects produced a late flowering of what may be called ‘Kaliyuga’ literature’ in mid and late 19th century Bengal. (Sarkar 1992: 1549)

Popular culture and largely vernacular cultural forms do speak extensively of the lower middle classes and the imagery of the clerk, whose idea of the age of kaliyuga, the dark age ruled over by the goddess Kali, is the necessary but at the same time despised job in government service. This image represents a cultural icon used by poets as well as those speaking about social change and economic restructuring to depict uneven processes of modernization. Thus, the moral ambiguity about ‘modernity’, the ‘new world’ or ‘globalization’ that many of my interlocutors expressed has a long tradition in Calcutta. This negative imagery is consciously cultivated in relation to being forced to seek employment, which is still commonly depicted as humiliating and demeaning. There are other themes that have been carried over from this early articulation of middle-class identities which were shaped by new employment patterns, some of which directly influence the lives of the women I worked with. Among them is the conviction that an emphasis on the family is a marker of Indian identity. When, as Chatterjee points out, the family became defined as the ‘inner domain of nationalist culture’ (Chatterjee 1993: 9) domestic relationships among the middle classes became inseparable from the history of the state and nationalist iconography. However, this insight should not encourage the conclusion that the analysis of class can be substituted by the analysis of nationalism. Even in post-colonial states, class is a very relevant paradigm for researching identities and different modernities. Unfortunately, with reference to South Asia, work on gender and the family has by now been fully absorbed by the study of nationalism, which is largely seen as the sole discourse that brings about emotional attachment, meaningful relationships and gendered identities. It is, therefore, singularly important to reiterate that class is a relevant category for the study of South Asian modernities. This is not only, as Jeff Pratt so eloquently put it, because the study of class poses many of the same questions, but also because class produces identities in much the same way: theatre and made music together. The life of the family in Jorasanko has been well documented not only by the male members but also by some of the women, including Jnanadanandini Devi (who created the combination of sari, blouse and petticoat worn by women today and known as brahmika sari) as well as writers Swarnakumari Devi and Sarala Devi. Family life in Jorasanko is well documented in Malavika Karlekar’s collection of private photographs from late colonial Bengal (Karlekar 2005).

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In this terrain we are also faced with all the dimensions of modernity, with the dislocation and concentration of economic and cultural capitals, with the mass movement of people and rapid cultural evolution. Here too we find complex historical narratives which shape class identity and future aspirations, we find ‘imagined communities’ and the transmission of memories. Here too we find the specific issues about how identity is ‘constructed’, and how specific experiences become class experiences. Above all, we also find passion. But such is the mesmeric hold of the canonical texts that it is worth repeating: passion is not an ingredient unique to the politics of nationalism. (Pratt 2001: 298)

If, as Liechty (2003) so perceptively suggests, anthropologists utilize a Weberian approach and study middle-class culture as process, we are able to integrate variations on nationalist themes in terms of class formation, and we can focus on concerns over change and transformations in values as sites that produce particular patterns and roles within the wider social landscape. Such an approach allows us to speak about ‘the Bengali middle class’ in terms of histories and a shared ‘life-world’, within which education, full-time white-collar employment for men, new consumption patterns and sensibilities have developed as denominators of identity from the colonial period onwards, but which is marked by anxieties around social mobility, as its assets have to be reproduced anew within every generation (see Walsh 2004). Though markers of middle-class status are not always available to all sections they are nevertheless aspired to, and it is aspiration which very often nourishes specific lifestyles. Thus, it makes good analytical sense to focus on practices and disciplinary regimes that are shared more widely than the actual economic markers so often taken as indicators of class. In this book I primarily highlight those aspects which characterize middleclass attitudes to gender relations, kinship and parenting, all of which play a very prominent role in securing status and in expressing regional, as well as ethnic, differences in the lives of middle-class Indians (Béteille 1996; Donner 2003). I am, however, well aware of the importance more formalized structural constraints like the legal discourse on marriage, and the debates around women’s rights play in the manipulation and experience of these relationships (see, for examples, the volume edited by Basu 1999 and Agnes 2004). Women do play a specific role in middle-class constructions of identity, because they are not only markers of boundaries between different groups, a function which has been studied in great detail in relation to the colonial elites of urban Bengal and the aftermath of partition (Butalia 1998; Sarkar 2001), but are also active agents in the reproduction of these boundaries in their everyday lives. Sara Dickey has shown that in spite of the considerable variations between different ‘middle-class’ households in the South Indian city of Madurai these are united through women’s ‘status production work’ (Papanek 1989; Dickey 2000), a concept that describes any work undertaken in order to reproduce the social standing of a household beyond its mere survival, work which dominates middle-class women’s lives in India as elsewhere. In the case of Dickey’s field site in a middle-sized Indian city, the way middle-class women talked about their work in the house, their servants and the need to police the boundaries of the household whilst multi-tasking, epitomizes domesticities and their values which are shared by a large majority of Indian middle-class families (Dickey 2000: 466). But Dickey’s approach does more than just highlight women’s work as a crucial marker of middle-class status: it is a reminder of the fact that women are

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not only signifiers of discourse but also producers of these discourses. In this case housework and the role of mothers in raising children reproduce gender roles and class, and Dickey’s focus provides a fruitful corrective to the extensive interest in public patterns of consumption. The overbearing role that the study of consumption plays in literature on middle classes obfuscates the fact that actual work goes into the transformation of a commodity or a service into a resource for upward mobility. A focus on motherhood and gender roles in relation to class does, therefore, bring us back to debates about work, consumption and the household, and the fact that class is not only constituted in the public sphere, through occupational choice and youth culture, but is crucially reproduced in households through women’s quotidian work – or ‘kin work’ as Michaela di Leonardo puts it – including childcare, chores, work in/for the marketplace and the maintenance of kinship networks (di Leonardo 1987). A domestic perspective furthermore emphasises that consumption practices are embedded into wider social relations, and can only be understood as part of debates on labour, economic policies and the state. While the middle classes, and more often the ‘new middle class’ of late, are generally believed to be the main beneficiaries of liberalization and economic reform in India we have very few accounts of how their lives have changed through processes of globalization. The prominence given to the middle classes in discourses and media representations of contemporary India and ideas about a different but simultaneously modern nationhood has not been matched by a detailed analysis of the continuities displayed by consumption patterns, media representations and the ubiquitous success story of Indian industries. Authors like Béteille emphasized from the 1970s onwards not only that there is a scarcity of studies focussing on the middle classes, but also that this stratum of society could only be defined in terms of a lifestyle or culture, rather than strictly employed economic indicators. First and foremost, the English term has emerged since independence as a common denominator through which specific sections of modern Indian society speak about their own perception of society and their role in nation building. As such it is part of the folk representations of India, within which the middle classes are defined in terms of their cultural and social position in an imaginary ‘middle’ – squeezed in between a small but influential and economically superior cosmopolitan upper-class and the vast majority of the Indian population, the ‘poor’. It is this definition of one’s class position in terms of relationships with both, a working class or the peasantry as well as the local elites, which according to Dickey and Liechty is often described in terms of ‘below’ and ‘above’, which implies wider notions of respectability, gender relations, occupational and residential patterns as well as domesticities (Dickey 2000). This self-description is still shared by many of those who would consider themselves as middle class in India today, and has been the backbone of middle-class politics in Bengal since independence. Reference to being middle class are followed by a negative comment on how the boro (big, influential, rich) people can afford a cosmopolitan, money-oriented, uncultured, laissez-faire lifestyle and how in turn the poor can afford to be more relaxed about education, sex, women’s work and the future because they have nothing to lose. By contrast, those in the middle, the maddhabitto sreni (middle class) or even more precisely the lower middle class nimno maddhabitto, are not in such a privileged

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position as they depend on salaries to make ends meet and at the same time have to preserve their reputation, not only as a family but also individually. These ideas about middle-class identity depict this wide stratum of society as an historically important, but increasingly problematic, social position which is united by similar middle-class lifestyles and implies specific temporalities. Mark Liechty, who writes about a comparable perception of ‘middleness’ emerging among newcomers to the world of goods in Nepal, uses this notion to open up discussions about the middle class more generally when he states that: [T]he middle class in Kathmandu is less a ‘thing’ to be located in some ‘objective’ social configuration than a new sociocultural project – material and discursive – in which members negotiate the apparent contradictions between what it means to be both modern and Nepali. (Liechty 2003: 61)

Such a processual view of middle-class identities is also embraced by Leela Fernandes who argues that a significant amount of stratification within the middle classes from a sociological point of view has diverted our attention from the new Indian middle class as a social fact, produced through consumption, media representations and national debates: [T]he newness of the middle class rests on its embrace of social practices of taste and commodity consumption that mark a new cultural standard that is specifically associated with liberalization and the opening of the Indian market to the global economy … In this process, the new (urban) middle class becomes a central agent for the revisioning of the Indian nation in the context of globalization. (Fernandes 2000b: 90)

In Calcutta, those commenting on the middle class will often refer to the differentiating capacity of these processes and insist on the persistence of lower, middle and upper middle class identities (see, for example, Ganguly-Scrase and Scrase 1999). But although many of the practices which mark out specific groups at any point in time may differ, I use the term middle class in the sociological sense when describing shared and precisely identifiable consumption patterns, marital, occupational and residential ideals, which make for specific processes and futureorientated projects. Thus, I argue, it is precisely the differentiating power of the discourse on respectability, the strategies employed to achieve upward mobility, and the shared cultural imagination, which makes middle-class lives in India, and indeed beyond, comparable and the space of a globalized Indian middle-class culture coherent. This is not to say that meanings and cultural symbols are irrelevant for an analysis of middle-class motherhood. The problem of analysing meaning over material, which is particularly relevant where we encounter often very powerful gender symbolism and hegemonic scriptural claims, is only resolved when anthropologists pay attention to the actual practices and the way materials evoke and modify meanings. In this sense this book owes much to Sherry Ortner’s reading of anthropology from the 1980s onwards as dominated by practice theory (see Ortner 1994). Drawing on Bourdieu and his close attention to spatial concepts and the material aspects of everyday life, anthropologists became able to discuss how gendered norms are internalized and

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how cognitive schemes are enacted in the minutiae through mundane activities (Bourdieu 1977; 1984). In insisting on the workings of culture and how it is enacted rather than the way it is represented, this invites us to focus on differences between groups, and highlights the way gendered ideologies based on the separation between different spheres are powerful because they institutionalize bodily practices and strategies as individual choice. Not surprisingly, practice-oriented approaches have been embraced by many feminist ethnographers specifically because they speak about the domestic sphere and kinship, as well as class, in a processual manner, of mundane activities (Bourdieu 1977; 1984). In this sense, this book is about ‘making mothers’ as much as it is about ‘doing class’, and explores how these related discourses are reproduced within households and alongside notions of the family through the ideology of motherhood. If culturalist analysis has shown us how persons are created through substances and how kinship reflects wider ideas of the world around us, a critical analysis of motherhood highlights how ideas of the self, of women’s roles and their bodies are related to a history of the present.

Chapter 2

Of Love, Marriage and Intimacy

‘I will not marry someone I don’t know, I will make my own choice – how can you live with someone you hardly know, someone you don’t love – just because your parents liked the family?’ Leela, student 26 ‘You know, you have to understand, we don’t marry for the looks like you do, we marry for the family.’ Mrs Das, housewife, 49

I was suitably shocked when I saw the first couple holding hands in public. ‘God, we have been away too long’, was what I whispered to my partner as we were walking into the ‘food court’ of the Swabhumi Heritage Plaza at the outskirts of what is considered old Calcutta (Figure 2.1).

Figure 2.1 Foodcourt at the Swabhumi Heritage Plaza

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We were visiting after a two year break and were stunned by the pace of the changes the city was undergoing. New roads and entire new townships and malls had sprung up, urban restructuring was in full swing, and a youth culture embracing global consumption patterns had gone public. Suddenly coffee shops had sprouted up and were being frequented by an ever-growing crowd of urban youths, who often spoke in the mixture of Hindi film phrases and English, referred to as ‘Hinglish’, and who were busy flirting and showing off status symbols like mobile phones while meeting their friends in public places. Where some ten years earlier the municipality had been forced to install floodlights in the smaller parks frequented by lovers in search of some privacy to protect popular notions of middle-class propriety, today openly displayed signs of affection across sex and peer-group socializing are encouraged in new spaces that represent a true transformation of a whole host of ideas and behaviours, amongst them most prominently ideas about courtship, marriage, love and conjugality. Before we can explore what motherhood means in globalized middle-class India, we have to discuss the wider context of motherhood, namely the family and kinship relations that make successful mothers. This chapter is, therefore, devoted to an exploration of what Patricia Uberoi has called ‘the critical institution of marriage’ in Indian kinship and the family (Uberoi 1993: 36), with a special focus on how it is transformed through new ideas about love, conjugality and global images of intimacy. Even a cursory glance at the sociological and anthropological literature, popular media representations of the new middle classes and soap operas will reveal the importance of discussions of love and marriage and the associated ideals and practices which are a continuous middle-class obsession. Soaps, for example, but also the Congress women’s committee cited above, deal with marital breakdown whereas my fieldwork focused much more on the general and often cheerful discussion of love and marriage through specific, often less spectacular, examples over a cup of tea while watching TV serials with a group of neighbours. My conversations with women brought out the various meanings of love, the quotidian aspects of marriage revealed by talk about weddings and matches, as well as the more sinister side of liaisons deemed illegitimate, marital discord and domestic violence, including dowry deaths. More than anything else, they highlighted the considerable anxiety about the relationship between love, individualism and desire and the reality of marital life as the only option within which legitimate sexual relations and motherhood could be fulfilled. Such conversations with middle-aged women focus on the marriage prospects of other people’s children, on the problems encountered by acquaintances and relatives in arranging a match, or on weddings one has to attend. In public, marriage is rarely discussed from an individual perspective; rather, talk about marriage focuses on the family and different roles within the household involved, on a general notion of ‘modern times’ indicated by new ideas about courtship, companionate marriage and selective maternity. Whereas specialist literature on South Asian marriage with its complex discussion of rules, rituals and gift exchanges appears to outsiders often as confusing – to say the least – the massive success of more populist accounts of arranged marriages, for instance Vikram Seth’s novel A Suitable Boy, demonstrate

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that talk about love and arranged marriage can actually reflect concerns felt beyond South Asian communities. After all, whether love or parental choice triggers the process of matchmaking, the search for a suitable spouse and the negotiation of such unions can actually provide an understanding of the underlying global desires which increasingly determine the meaning of ‘love’ and ‘marriage’ in most parts of the world (see Hirsch and Wardlow 2006). Emulating Seth, my aim here is to contextualize metropolitan ideas of what makes a good match through a wider discussion of marriage and the changing relations between men and women, daughters and parents, in-laws and their sons’ wives, which reflect the lived experience of contemporary Calcuttans. In private discussions young people in particular would speak very emotionally about their expectations regarding love and marriage and would often use a lot of vocabulary that is associated with companionate marriage, for instance the English word ‘soulmate’ (or its local equivalent sathi lit. a companion) representing an ideal partner. The themes of conjugality, love, and changes in expectations towards marriage form part of the fabric of family life in Calcutta middle-class families, just as they dominate the narrative of Vikram Seth’s monumental novel. When I first started to do fieldwork in Taltala I quickly learned that marriage, its rules, customs and realities, is used to speak about a variety of subjects all loosely related to women’s own identities as ‘modern’ Bengali middle-class subjects. It soon became clear that for women to get married is one step toward maturity, which is only fully achieved upon the birth of a child. Nurtured from early childhood, the desire to marry is certainly part of the everyday lives of children and adolescents but they are today taught to see marriage very clearly as a precondition for becoming a mother or father. To remain unmarried was represented not so much as a social problem but as a personal tragedy and a collective worry. In getting married an individual is therefore following the rules set and accepted by the wider society, and there are very few alternatives to married life although there are many women and men in the families I work with who, for various reasons, remained unmarried. Traditionally, marriages are, as the fictional Mrs Mehta in A Suitable Boy rightly states, arranged by the parents of a boy or girl, and in respectable middle-class families, where the average age of marriage lies now in the mid-twenties, arranged marriages are seen as the norm. The search for a suitable match is considered a parental obligation, although it can also become a burden, but in times when many children seek out their own partner, it is increasingly constructed as a crucial parental privilege. Across Bengali Hindu and as well as Muslim communities, biye (marriage) constitutes a life cycle ritual, and is thus necessary to make a person into a full human being, a process of mental as well as physical transformation through sexual activity, reproduction and nurture. Elizabeth Povinelli has recently argued that we need to investigate the way various epistemological grids were superimposed on existing socialities through colonialism (Povinelli 2002), and emphasizes that we are witnessing a further shift, wherein the spaces where experiments with new subjectivities are carried out are changing with the emergence of modern selves. She states that identities contained earlier within the family, and more precisely the married couple and the institution of marriage involving intimacy as recognition of the self through its relationship

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with the other, are now produced elsewhere, in particular the space provided by nationalism, but also through new, subaltern sexualities. A number of contemporary ethnographies focus on the issue of such new sexualities, for example Reddy’s study of hijras (ambiguous category glossed as Third Sex, transsexuals) and their ideas about love and intimacy, and they seem to support these claims (Reddy 2005). However, few ethnographers have cared to review how hegemonic discourses on marriage and modernity have reframed an institution which, as we shall see, is equally important as a site for displaying belonging within ‘South Asian modernity’ as it is a de facto framework for reproduction and legitimacy which encompasses rather than opposes notions of ‘intimate recognition’. It appears that far from being displaced, marriage is strengthened by discourses on modern Indian middle-class selves, and that far from being marginalized marriage emerges as a necessary precondition for the development of a recognizable ‘Indian’ woman. If this is so, the processes whereby marriage becomes a site for post-colonial selves to emerge, is not really a recent development in urban Bengal, where the transformations of marriage and the family have from the nineteenth century onwards been embedded in discussions about Indian and regional identities. In this chapter I am, therefore, not so much concerned with love and marriage as revealed in debates around nationalism, but as sites where gender and class-based hierarchies are challenged and reproduced. New ethnographies on South Asian middle-class lives show ‘modern’ selves in the making through affective attachment and intimate recognition (see, for example, Puri 1999), but they lack any detailed analysis of marriage, and certainly of ‘Indian’ marriage, as part of wider kin relations, which make such modern selves possible. In this chapter, I will show how discussions about love and marriage are not only prime sites for subjectivities to emerge, but also how their experience is framed by wider discursive formations and collective histories which are not contained within the context of sexuality. Marriage, Indian marriage and ‘Indian’ marriage The omnipresent tension within discourses on marriage on the Indian subcontinent is that between love and marriage, which has in the past allowed an emerging middle class to discursively construct the uneducated, backwards ‘other’ steeped in tradition as opposed to modern Indian traditionalism. Anthropologists have still to embrace the deconstruction of such discourses, as those working from the margins inwards have advocated (see Reddy 2005). In Bengali middle-class families love and marriage are certainly implied in ideologies of ‘modernity’, but while the ideal of companionate marriage has been wholeheartedly embraced, love marriages are seen as much more ambiguous. Talk about marriage among women often brings to the fore differences between generations, but while the older generation tend to focus on their conversations on the importance of affinal relations, the younger interlocutors, especially those not yet married emphasize an individual choice of partner as an idiom through which modern selves can be crafted. At the same time, as my material will show, talk about love and marriage is relevant and exclusionary

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tales and practices are crucial to group-based identities, and form part of the cultural repertoire through which such selves can be represented. Discourses on marriage and love are furthermore subject to structural constraints, key among them being the expected patrilocality, which fits uneasily with the paradigm formulated by Povinelli, who emphasizes sexuality and nationalism as substitutes for contractual relationships within the family. New forms of being modern, which include the possibility of falling in love, conducting a self-chosen marriage and, last but not least, of married middle-class lifestyles, are forced to take these constraints into account. As such, the narratives of love and marriage I have compiled here indicate that, as a work in progress, the project of Indian middle-class modernity is deeply implied where love and marriage are concerned, but also that older (or maybe more collective) identities, which are of specific interest to anthropologists, inform the debates and realities of the women with whom I discussed love and marriage. Wardlow and Hirsch’s assertion that it is ‘primarily these [European companionate] models of love and marriage that have been, and are being, globalized through missionization, through mass media’ (Wardlow and Hirsch 2006: 6) may hold some truth, but it is equally important to maintain that these models are not so much European as modern, and that the idea of companionship in marriage or even egalitarian forms of love and obviously very differently coded sexual practices existed at the margins of earlier cultural formations. Thus, reminding ourselves that the ‘traditional’ arranged marriage as it is presented today is as much a construct now as it was earlier, one that was strengthened through the colonial encounter, also implies that ‘traditional’ companionate marriage as indigenous European practice is critically seen in conjunction with it. As Ann Stoler has shown, the streamlining of a multitude of different marriage and family forms pre-dating or coexisting with this model took place across the British Empire as marriage and intimate relationships lay at the heart of colonial society and the production of racialized subjects and subjugated gendered bodies (Stoler 2002). As I recounted above, I was surprisingly shocked when I saw the first couple holding hands in public in Calcutta: ‘God, we have been away too long’ seemed to sum up how I felt. We were walking into the aptly named food court of the brand new Swabhumi Heritage Plaza on the Eastern fringes when I made my observation. This leisure complex is not only the site of new-found middle-class family entertainment, it is also among the growing number of privatized public spaces where middle-class youths meet and indulge in modest, and sometimes not so modest, flirtation and displays of affection. I use the term youths quite loosely because it became apparent while we were having snacks and some tea that a good number of the couples sitting very close to each other on the concrete walls of the food court were probably not really that young. They were generally ‘office-goers’, dressed in smart wear, but there was also a good sprinkling of students, easily identifiable by the bohemian mix of Western and ethnic clothes popular among that crowd. What was surprising was not so much the fact that couples would meet – here more clandestinely than in the mushrooming coffee shops found in the city centre and in the malls – but that they were actually holding hands thereby defying my expectations of what ‘respectable’ young people could do in Calcutta’s public places.

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After being away for only two years, the pace of change the city was undergoing was truly mind-boggling. The youth culture which had emerged was especially visible and fitted into stereotypes of ‘Westernization’ and the large-scale embrace of consumerism which was being highlighted in the media as a marker of the new, shining India. On this occasion, we were mixing with other middle-class families on an outing. Looking at the scene that was unfolding in this artificial pleasure park dedicated to the consumption of ‘Bengali culture’ in the form of handicrafts, clothes, music and food, but obviously also attracting the custom of couples in search of a bit of peace and quiet, one could be forgiven for doubting that this was the same city in which only ten years before the only half-way acceptable option would have been a local park in a proper middle-class neighbourhood. At the time, the party-led municipality, always on the lookout for inappropriate imports affecting ‘Bengali cultural heritage’, had been forced to install floodlights in the said localities to protect young women, as they argued, and prevent ‘indecency from occurring’. These were the same parks that a friend had taken me to see after we had had a heated discussion about the advantages of arranged marriages over love marriages in 1986. He had wanted to prove love and romance were indeed very popular among young Calcuttans even then. And this is still a city where couples who fall in love and get married against their parents’ wishes more often than not find it impossible to secure a place to live and where, frequently, the police or party officials are employed by parents to forcibly return a young woman involved in such a relationship to her parental home, as happened only recently in the much publicized case of the inter-community love-marriage between Priyanka Todi and Riznavur Rahman.1 My own marital, or rather unmarried, status was often discussed during the first period of long-term fieldwork. With my younger friends, these discussions would always take the same form: they would launch into a rant about how they hated the idea of arranged marriage to ‘someone you don’t love’ and would then swear that in their case a love-marriage was the only option. As Chandra, a 19-year-old volunteer for an NGO who I had invited to my house for lunch, put it: I am not marrying a man I don’t know and have not chosen myself, my parents wouldn’t dare to even ask me to agree to an arranged marriage. The problems you have if you are not married to someone you love – I have seen it with my cousin, her marriage is basically an arranged marriage, and she is not happy, not happy at all. Her in-laws are ok I guess, but she just can not adjust to living in their house, they don’t match.

In other cases, like with my then 20-year-old assistant, these rants ended with a concrete example and, sure enough, the revelation that a young woman had fallen in love or had at least been approached by a boy. A bit further on and they would tell 1 Priyanka, a student from an affluent Marwari family of North Indian origin, married Riznavur, a Muslim, in August 2007 and moved in with her in-laws. A couple of weeks later Riznavur’s body was found near a railway track and it was alleged that he committed suicide after she was forced to return to her parents. His family filed a case asking for his death to be investigated as it has been established that her family and the police exercised pressure on the couple.

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me that they actually intended to marry someone they had chosen themselves. In the case of my assistant, who had worked with me for a year and had helped me with many interviews on love and marriage, our conversation was a way to confirm that she was actually falling for a classmate at college. She confided in me out of the blue while we were having tea: You know, in my class, there is that boy, and he is very nice, we are going out and want to marry, I really like him, he is a very fine man, but he is from a very different background, a really rich family, so I don’t know what to do, my parents will kill me if they find out.

While such instances of talk about love were quite common, they were often framed by talk about the favourite theme of middle-aged women and mothers, namely the opposition of arranged marriages and self-chosen or love-marriage. In the view of most of my older interlocutors Indian marriages were ideally arranged by parents, since these marriages were not only meant to make the couple happy and allow them to have sex and therefore offspring, but also expressed and reproduced ‘traditional family values’. Western marriages, on the other hand, were in the view of middle-aged women oriented towards individual fulfilment and ‘mere’ sexual satisfaction, and thus represented the opposite of the type of marriage depicted as a sacrosanct ‘Indian’ institution. Among married women such discussions were sometimes conducted for my benefit, as Mrs Das’ exasperated remark, cited above, shows. As mother of a friend she was wondering whether I really understood the significant difference between European’s individualistic, short-term and superficial marriages based on a personal and single-handed decision, often taken on the spur of the moment, and ‘Indian’ ideas about marriage. In her view the former’s pervasive power was self-evident and materialized in the problems her daughter’s self-selected marriage demonstrated, as well as in the rising divorce rates in India more generally. Thus, her own ideal scenario for her second daughter did include the young woman’s consent to a suggested match, but also put the decision of who to introduce to her firmly into her parents’ hands. Mrs Das acted upon her conviction and actively searched for suitable boys to meet her second daughter just as she had done, rather unsuccessfully, in the case of my friend, who had had a great time meeting potential candidates her mother sent to see her in airport lounges, French restaurants and on American university campuses (with and without their parents), but who had in the end chosen her own partner. What Mrs Das expressed here was not so much a desire to dominate her daughters’ lives, although this is as much a motivation for seeking a suitable match here as it is elsewhere, but a preference for what she presented as the cool and rational decision making only parents seem capable of. And her views were supported by the naturalized distinction between ‘Indian’ and ‘Western’ marriages, which is in reality no longer clear-cut, but which provides a recognizable idiom to argue in favour of parental authority over young people’s passions. Although she would not have been as naïve as Serena Nanda’s informants, who apparently claimed that middle-class kids lack opportunities to meet with members of the other sex at school, at university and through relatives and friends (Nanda 1991), Mrs Das agreed with Nanda’s interlocutors that choosing a partner has far-reaching consequences. Furthermore

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she, like others, argued that as many young people live in joint families, marriage cannot possibly be seen as a private matter, as it affects the lives of parents and the equilibrium of the whole household. While falling in love (prem pora), is generally seen as inevitable here as elsewhere, and while it is fully accepted that young people are prone to such emotional upheaval, it is seen by most parents as a clearly temporary attraction. Thus, more than once, mothers emphasized that bringing up children meant sensitizing them towards the dangers of falling in love, especially girls who might be lured into starting an affair by the more carefree and often cunning attitudes of their male classmates. While falling in love is seen as a natural event accompanying youth, such feelings are not meant to be acted on, and most mothers hoped that their daughters would be social enough not to fulfil their own selfish desires by encouraging a young man’s infatuation or acting on their own longings. Mrs Das was, therefore, not the only one who stated that love-marriages – not love – were alien to Indian culture, and could certainly ruin even the most successful family. It soon transpired in my conversations with women in Taltala, who on the whole were much more conservative than her, that if arranging a marriage was left entirely to parents then they as mature and well meaning elders, who were experienced in marital affairs, would be able to act in the best interests of their children. Moreover, mothers saw their own ideals realized in such matches, as they insisted that Indian children had to be educated to be able to distinguish between love and marriage. This, they argued, would enable them to ‘wait for love’ to develop within marriage, and would enable them to overcome the temptations of modern life, especially those posed by co-educational environments and a heterogeneous neighbourhood. Ideally, mothers like Sangita (aged 38) argued, her 18-year-old daughter would find that the partner chosen by her parents met the requirements of the couple and the family involved, and this would in the end reaffirm the respect of the young people for their parents. It would also enhance their chances of realizing a modern, but essentially ‘Indian’, family ideal. Here, as in other cases, marriage represented the heart of Indian, or more specifically Bengali Hindu culture, which is seen as under threat from ‘modern’ ‘Western’ global influences and media representations. While young people’s tendency to rebel against tradition and their disposition to fall in love are acknowledged, such phenomena as ‘boyfriends’ or premarital sex are not really seen as a necessary part of discourses on marriage, which is a modern institution perfectly capable of encompassing and containing such desires. Faced with the relatively ‘new’ option of love marriages, many women quoted examples of long-suffering mothers featured in TV serials, or relatives whose children had married on their own, in an attempt to emphasize that such matches often brought as much misery to the newly-weds as to their parents. Love marriages, which are not by accident referred to as nijer biye (one’s own marriage) in Bengali, are seen as essentially individualistic and, thus, antisocial in character. But as those mothers more prone to procrastination admitted, with ideals of companionate, or ‘modern’, marriage now firmly part of Indian ‘traditional’ marriage, the task of parents to make proper marriages happen has become infinitely harder. On screen, in novels and in real life the arranged marriage of old, one between virtual strangers who meet at the wedding for the first time, is no longer an openly supported option, though many mothers would admit in private that they would not

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hesitate to arrange such a match for a daughter should the need arise. And in fact, the idea that virtual strangers can be matched is currently experiencing a revival of sorts, as many parents of young, well educated but not affluent women cannot resist the temptation, if the opportunity of marrying a daughter to a migrant working either in the Gulf or in the US, presents itself. In these cases, the so-called ‘dollar brides’ are often not able to meet the precious groom before he flies in before the wedding, and whether or not parents arrange for virtual contact via video links or at least email, depends entirely on the individual case. I have come across two instances where a young woman, rather unusually for Bengali middle-class families, was married into the family of a green card holder without having had a chance to meet her future husband before the actual wedding day. However, in most other cases, such oldfashioned marriages between virtual strangers are looked down upon and parents try to negotiate at least one meeting before the negotiations are finalized. It has taken anthropologists considerably longer than their ‘informants’ to realize that the dominance of stranger marriage and the rigid rules governing the organization of groups through marriage (hypergamy and other forms of organized social mobility through marriage), which make up the anthropological literature on South Asia, do not provide much insight into what marriage means to the increasing number of Indians living in urban centres. Recently the rather static accounts of the way marriage constitutes kinship and politics have given way to more flexible approaches to the analysis of marriage which interpret the institution as part of wider social formations and gender relations and which allow for an analysis of changing contents even where the structure of arranged endogamous marriage is maintained (see Uberoi 1993). In metropolitan communities, the ideal of arranged marriages has shifted from virtual stranger marriages arranged by male elders towards the involvement of both parents and children in the selection of suitable partners. As the discussion indicates, with values like individuality, intimacy and companionate conjugality very much part of middle-class self-representations, the ‘Indian’ marriage which involves parents as well as their offspring offers varying degrees of choice and agency, with the selfchosen ‘love’ marriage only one of a number of variations on the main themes. Careful ethnography has shown that the concept of companionate marriage has become popular among the younger generation in upwardly mobile communities, but while it is often represented in globally acceptable liberal terms as a contractual union between equals, it is in reality often a substitute for more egalitarian, or at least flexible, arrangements between husbands and wives. These preceded the legal discourses on marriage that have emerged. More often than not do the new formal arrangements favour patriarchal and class-biased readings of marital unions (see Parry 2001; Kapila 2004). However, despite all the transformations middle-class marriages have undergone over the last century, there remain some very definite ideas of what an appropriate marriage is, which are no longer phrased only in terms of arranged versus lovemarriages, but rest on the notions of community/caste endogamy and the final assertion of parental authority over the decisions taken. Even younger generation urbanites are usually convinced that marrying within one’s own community, that is religious and caste-based environment, is better than marrying outside of one’s

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linguistic or religious group, and while caste may be less important under certain circumstances, the feeling that ‘we are not against marriage with others, but we like to marry our own’, as a close friend so politely put it, is a sentiment shared by all generations. It also matches the assertion of my younger friends who stated quite often that ‘parents know best’. Thus, whereas new social spaces for love, premarital relationships, courtship within negotiated marriages and the expression of individual preferences have opened up, marriage is still, on the other hand, very much defined in terms of collective interests which subordinate individual women’s and often men’s desires to the socially constructed interests of the family. Arranging a marriage Older members of the Bengali families I work with have often come to terms with the fact that more and more younger family members insist on finding their own spouses, and women in particular embrace the idea of companionate marriage, often very emphatically. But self-chosen unions, unlike arranged marriages, also bear the mark of subversion and are more likely than arranged matches to cross caste and communal boundaries, with often serious and sometimes fatal consequences for the couple involved (see Donner 2002; Mody 2002).2 Having a love affair and choosing your own partner are not necessarily treated with urgency by parents, who are aware that their children are in the end not strong enough to fight for their selfchosen marriages. In addition to the question of parental consent, what defines love marriages in public discourse is the fact that they do not fit with the spirit of Hindu marriage due to the possibility of, and often real life association with, exogamy; they allow for the violation of filial duties; and they include the suggestion of premarital sex. With reference to the Bengali middle-class women I worked with, marriage by choice and unions across communal boundaries were generally associated with nonHindu populations, notably Christians, Anglo-Indians and, of course, lower-castes as well as tribal communities (Sangari 1995; Caplan 1998). Until the 1970s among my interlocutors, though, high-caste models of arranged, endogamous marriage prevailed and dire consequences awaited those who challenged the norm that informed the way ordinary people married. Furthermore, it is worth noting that in the comments made to me in private, marriage clearly remains a prime marker of religious and caste identity even in this multicultural and very urban environment. Today there are clearly more love-marriages and such unions were more openly discussed in 2005 than even back in 1994, when I first started to talk about these changes with women in various contexts. Then, the multiple new ways of involving a daughter or son in arranging a marriage were still seen by many more conservative mothers as a ‘fancy’ idea affluent and more cosmopolitan upper middle-class families would entertain, though such marriages were already popular among the South Asian diaspora where ‘marriage by introduction’ had become very common (Raj 2003).

2 The public outrage following Riznavur Rahman’s death, however, can not be seen as an indicator of the privately expressed views of parents.

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Today, even parents with otherwise rigid views on matchmaking see a need to satisfy their children’s desire to get to know a future partner before the marriage and often enable them to engage in very modest forms of courtship after the negotiations have been taken up. Young women especially have become much more involved over the last five years or so, and are often proactive in searching for a suitable groom on the web. This is partly possible because they negotiate this space for themselves through good behaviour (i.e. as a reward for not having an affair) and so gain the right to be involved in the search for the life-partner. In quite a few cases families I know have successfully used the internet as an alternative to closer contacts or old-fashioned print media to find a suitable groom. In two cases this was a daughter-led effort, and the parents quite willingly accepted that virtual matrimonials allowed for a much wider circulation of their ads – and better and less expensive presentations of their assets. Increasingly such searches are presenting profiles which suggest they were written by the candidates themselves, unlike the more traditional search posted by a ‘guardian’ (often a member of the extended family), but this depends on whether one wants to appeal to the more ‘modern’ or the more ‘traditional’ segment of the market. But whereas the method of searching for a suitable groom has changed, and the initiative is no longer necessarily solely in the hands of the potential groom’s family, marriage among the Bengali middle classes is still seen as a union for life and is governed by the ideal of patrilocality. In Calcutta, the bride is usually expected to move into her in-laws house, and patrilocality remains the prevalent residential pattern across all age-groups. This has an impact not only on the way the married couple set up their household and organize their lives, but also means that the wellbeing and interests of the groom’s parents, younger siblings and other relatives like uncles, aunts and grandparents living in the same house have a bearing on the choice of a ‘suitable’ girl. It is the in-laws, together with her parents, who are to weigh individual happiness against the wider concerns and needs of the family. When arranging such marriages, parents look for members of their own (sub-)caste first, although I have come across a number of cases where a marriage was arranged across the upper-caste spectrum – for instance the marriage of Shibani, the Congress leader mentioned in the introduction, who belonged to a Kayastha family but who was married into a Brahmin family because her father and her father-in-law were best friends. But generally focusing on caste allows parents to automatically acknowledge the importance of religious, ethnic and language boundaries as well as histories of social mobility and class. That which goes without saying, namely the class and communal identities involved, cannot be crossed in arranged marriages. Choosing a partner for a daughter or son does not, however, really limit the parents’ concerns to caste, as most Bengali jatis (castes) are so widely defined that sub-castes and a host of other factors including economic standing, educational background and ‘the culture of a family’ are equally, if not more, important variables. But if arranging a marriage looks from the outside to be just a matter of finetuning a list of priorities, the reality of the relationships that are created by marriage, as well as its symbolic value, is more complex. It is, first of all, necessary to note that far from being private, arranging a marriage is a significant public performance which can enhance a family’s social-status but which may, on the other hand, also

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damage their reputation. Second, while new work on gendered perspectives on marriage, whether arranged or not, pays tribute to the association of companionate marriage with intimacy and choice, the perspectives of different actors in this social scenario differ depending on their own role in a given match. Third, when speaking about marriage in India, it is worthwhile to distinguish between individual histories of families and the histories of communities in relation to debates around marriage and custom. Every family will strive to create a situation in which marriage proposals are received without much need for too public a search and where a daughter or son agrees to a match because the chosen candidate fits with their own romantic ideals. Considerable skills and parental investment are required to produce a marriageable boy or girl, and marriage is certainly one of the most important objectives in the way children are socialized at home as well as in schools and the wider society. As many of the mothers, especially those with children who were already married, pointed out, to arrange a marriage was neither enjoyable nor rewarding, but rather very stress inducing. Not one single mother seemed to be over confident about her family’s standing or her children’s achievements. At the same time, the business of marrying-off a child is more urgent in the case of daughters than in the case of sons, partly because of the culturally perceived shortage of eligible grooms and partly because of marriage is construed in terms of the selfless kanyadan (gift of a virgin) that represents a religious duty and reproduces hierarchical relationships between wife-givers and wife-takers. The ideological construction of all marriages in terms of kanyadan, earlier the privilege of the upper-castes whose weddings were lavish and whose matchmaking was informed by the high-status hypergamy of Brahmins, creates not only unequal ritual relationships between the affines; it also reflects the de facto situation of the parents of a potential bride, who are much more vulnerable throughout the process as rejection can have dire consequences for alternative future marriage proposals. And last, but not least, parents of daughters worry about the prestations and demands expected to flow from their house to that of their daughter’s in-laws, which may have to continue and thus constitute a dowry. Although, for obvious reasons, such concerns are not very often discussed, stories of torture for dowry and about the greed of in-laws circulate quite freely, and in one case a middleaged mother of three directly told me about her own history of domestic abuse and violence perpetrated against her by her mother-in-law, allegedly because her parents did not continue to satisfy these demands. Even where such a tragic situation did not prevail, affines ‘asking for more’ were not an exception, and it was generally agreed that one could never know in advance what the other family was really like even in an arranged marriage. As Borsa, who did have one son, commented on the problems the parents of daughters face: [W]ith a daughter you never know, even if you try your best you might just pick the wrong family, because you are mislead by them or because you are too greedy, yes, the parents of a daughter do definitely find it much more stressful to arrange a marriage than those of boys.

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Though true hypergamy (marrying a daughter into a higher-status group) is not practised among non-Brahmins and even excessive unilateral gift-giving is less explicit in Bengali families in other North Indian communities, the idea of unequal relationships between wife-givers and wife-takers determines the way affinal relationships are perceived and lived out. There are different levels on which this distinction, which may appear old-fashioned, is relevant to women’s lives, and throughout the negotiations before the wedding these unequal relationships are ritually confirmed. One example is the practice of meye dekha (looking at the girl) when relatives of the young man visit the house of a potential daughter-in-law and meet her and her family. This was often referred to as the ‘tea’ routine, because it used to consist of a meeting during which the young woman had to offer tea and snacks she had prepared ‘with her own hands’ to the potential in-laws, who eyed her more or less openly. As one of my more straightforward informants pointed out, ‘they would sometimes even ask to see her feet in order to establish whether the skin colour they saw on her cheeks was her “real” colour or whether she was wearing make-up’. Very importantly, any meeting would allow the in-laws to see whether the photo they had received was an actual representation of their future daughter-inlaw, who ideally would be shorter than their son, fair, and with the clearly defined features often described as typical for a Bengali bride and of sound mind. While the ‘tea routine’ may be dropped, preliminary visits are still the norm, and young girls in particular are, from very early on, expected to practice the role of the ‘bhalo meye’ (good girl) who is ultra-modest and subdued whenever visitors are around. Where such premarital meetings include the introduction of the two candidates concerned, these often take place in restaurants, where the potential couple may even get some time to talk among themselves. On all such occasions, the superiority of the boy’s family is strongly enforced by means of little taunts, demands and general uptightness on their part. And even in the most liberal-minded families, who denounce the demeaning display of a daughter’s domestic skills and the giving of dowries, it is the prerogative of the groom’s parents to open the pre-wedding chain of requests. The negotiations about the wedding itself are another occasion during which the unequal affinal relationships are displayed: the family of the groom can, and do, make requests regarded by their counterparts as unnecessary or costly or both, for example a specific wedding hall or invites for an excessive number of guests to the main reception the girl’s side are paying for, which display their power over the bride’s family. And, grudgingly, the bride’s parents give in to their requests for material and financial prestations that may include major investments (for instance a car, a home extension or cash) which are – if perceived as excessive – labelled by the English word ‘demands’ or the Bengali dabi. The latter makes arranging a marriage a very anxiety-inducing process throughout, as these demands cannot always be satisfied and increasingly exaggerated prestations dominate the acceptable list of household items which formed part of the original trousseau (tattya) (Donner 1999). In these arranged marriages, prestations on the occasion of weddings are not unilateral, but neither are they balanced, as the girl’s family is expected to invest much more seriously in the presents as well as the main reception, and presents to the groom’s family are increasingly dictated by the woman’s future in-laws. While one finds the parents of the bride stressed-out during the months before the wedding, as they are

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the ones who have to recruit the manpower to run the event, take out loans and often have to struggle to meet the expectations of their future affines, the groom’s parents can sit back and enjoy a major event in the life of the family. The anxiety surrounding arranging a marriage does, however, not only stem from the inflated costs and heightened expectations, but also from the fear that the chosen affines may turn out to be not as one expected or, worse still, that a groom’s family will cancel the engagement when the arrangement has already become common knowledge. When this happens the reputation of the young woman involved is tarnished forever, and her family will find it very difficult to overcome the prejudice associated with this outcome. Earlier, young women frequently remained unmarried after negotiations failed; today, a new engagement with a less desirable candidate (i.e. a divorcee) may materialize. In two cases I know about, parents did actively encourage their daughters to seek a love-match after an already agreed-on deal fell through. But, more to the point, marriage negotiations are usually acrimonious. In fact, due to their very importance, they seem to inevitably lead to a flood of complaints not only from the girl’s side, who are burdened with the main expenses, but also from the parents of the groom who voice grievances as well. This happened to Toju, the single son of two civil servants, whose parents invited me to his wedding reception. Before and after the wedding his mother talked about little else than the fact that his future in-laws had not booked a decent hall, and she described in minute detail how half of the guests had to wait outside while the other half was tucking into the food provided so that as a result most relatives missed the main rituals. The bad vibes were palpable throughout the wedding reception and related rituals, and were more or less openly expressed afterwards, which made the new daughter-in-law very uncomfortable whenever her wedding was discussed or photos of the reception were shown to the many visitors who came to her new home to meet her. In another case, the parents of the bride were furious about the fact that they had to provide an extension to be built on the roof as an apartment for the young couple, and had also had to accommodate a steadily growing number of colleagues and neighbours for the guest list. But by far the most contested point about arranging a marriage, and in this stratum of society the most problematic to discuss with outsiders like anthropologists, was the rise of demands, excluding those prestations locally defined as traditional. As my friend Borsa, whose son was at the time only sixteen, pointed out, demands are usually identified as ‘non-traditional payments’ from the bride’s to the groom’s family, and are made either in kind – comprising of ‘modern’ and exceedingly expensive consumer goods like motorcycles, cars, an extension or the like – or, more and more popular, in cash. In reality, it is often difficult to distinguish demands from the traditional tattya prestations consisting of clothes, jewellery, utensils, food and household items because the growth of consumerism has made even those necessities a matter of distinction and competition. But, crucially, demands are represented as immoral, and such payments are unilateral, exceed the wedding costs and are paid to the in-laws rather than the couple which turns them into illegal dowry payments. Though it is possible to put rough numbers to the amount demanded for salaried grooms in desirable professions, like doctors, or high-ranking civil servants, the direct transfer of money to a daughter’s in-laws seems to be much less acceptable in the context of Bengali middle-class families than is the case in other South Asian

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communities. However, this is not to say that demands are not made, it just indicates that because of the illegal and contested nature of payments, such transactions are not easy to research unless one concentrates on the documented cases of dowry murder. Like Borsa, mothers of eligible boys would, of course, always swear that they would not ask for anything beyond the reasonable expectations of a decent reception and the exchange of tattya prestations. Moreover, since the debates on dowries branded such payments as backwards and a corruption of traditional practices, Bengali middle-class families depicted dowries as a problem found in other communities that do, in my experience, often identify much more positively with the giving of a dowry as a tradition. It is rare to find a Bengali mother hinting at the fact that increasingly the family of a suitable boy expects consumer goods instead of the customary trousseau, and in most cases talk of a dowry only emerged in hindsight when a marriage failed or, even worse, a young woman was abused by her in-laws in order to make her parents pay more. While some women did not see demands as dowries, as they are often not paid in cash, dowries do emerge publicly only in the event of a crisis – either once negotiations turn sour and the demands raised by a groom’s family are given as a reason for this, or when marital breakdown occurs early on in the marriage. A dowry is, therefore, not initially a material reality, quantifiable and measurable, but the sum of a complex chain of exchanges and prestations, which the public see as excessive and therefore violating the ideals and values guiding the community’s view on arranged marriages. But, in spite of the fact that much criticism is directed towards agreed unilateral payments, women in particular are keen on seeing their parents invest in their marriages, since they are in most cases expected to turn down their rights to other parts of their inheritance. If an extension is built on the existing house of the new in-laws, as is often the case, this investment may be seen as a daughter’s share of her inheritance, whether or not the space is in the end used by her and her husband. However, if her marriage happens to be an unhappy one, and she considers leaving her in-laws’ house, always a last resort in these families, she and her parents may begin to speak about the same investment as a ‘dowry’, since she will not be able use ‘her inheritance’ to secure her livelihood with it. In this case, she may even file a case against her in-laws, and such legal disputes around dowries have become quite common across communities (see Basu 1999). Although, as in the case of demands, it is acknowledged that marriage practices are subject to historical change, arranged marriages and lavish weddings still represent ‘traditional’ family values and typically ‘Indian’ styles of consumption in the eyes of the general public. Arranged matches are seen as important occasions to reaffirm the status of the family in the wider community, enhance its reputation and sometimes affluence, and demonstrate its past successes in terms of education and sophistication. An arranged marriage gone wrong, on the other hand, can have devastating effects on a family, and parents will strive to keep failed negotiations under wraps. Given the asymmetrical relationships between the two houses involved, gender inequality in the future couple often reflects the inequality between the affines and remains a bone of contention throughout their married lives. This is also mirrored in the relationship between the daughter-in-law and her mother-in-

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law, and was often palpable in the way everyday relationships between affines were conduced. It is, therefore, important to find a good family to marry-off a daughter to, and parents do agonize and argue over the best choices, the possibilities open to them and realistic aims. Mostly, such talk about how to go about arranging a marriage is limited to the older members of the family, and usually young men and women display signs of utter embarrassment when asked about their own future or their own parents’ involvement in finding a suitable match. In the case of both sons and daughters the process is fraught with difficulties and it is a realistic possibility that parents with more than one child may not find a good match for all their children. The problems mothers mentioned when we discussed arranging a marriage were mostly related to the scarcity of ‘good’ boys from respectable families, that is from families of a comparable background. In the process of selection it is necessary to establish the social standing of a family, which accounts for much of their respectability and potential affines would be checked out as thoroughly as possible before official meetings took place, as once negotiations had been initiated there was no going back for a girl’s parents. Arranging a match is particularly problematic for the middle-class families belonging to lower castes with a limited number of well educated grooms. However, every story about arranging a marriage was in hindsight more complicated than assumed at first. To bag the elusive ideal groom, a doctor or (software) engineer without siblings, who lives in a nearby area but has no links with the neighbourhood, and whose parents occupy their own house built in order to accommodate separate flats at a later date, is indeed a shared dream. In practice, these candidates are rare and if a boy ticked all the right boxes his parents would be so conscious of the market value that only the ideal daughter-in-law, namely the fair, beautiful, shy, conventeducated, teacher or doctor with a well placed elder brother, stood a chance. But apart from looks, the general educational and financial background of their affines, many parents search for a daughter-in-law who will not upset the personal relationships in the home. Thus, one of the main distinctions made in the preferences of different families was the one between those rare families who looked for a daughter-in-law in employment, and the majority who expected her to make running a joint household with her mother-in-law her priority. Parents of daughters were also often concerned about whether or not their daughter would marry into a joint family, though for different reasons. When we were discussing their daughters’ futures some mothers pointed out that they had brought them up to manage a joint family’s household, and to work under the watchful eye of a mother-in-law. As for the young women themselves, those who had love-marriages often found it hard to adjust in their inlaws’ house; others settled for a young man who himself did not have much to offer in terms of looks or bright prospects but whose family was affluent, lived jointly, and could therefore support him and his wife and future children. They were often equally dissapointed. Joint family life (ekannabarti paribar, family sharing rice), sharing food with parents and grandparents living in the same house, is seen as a prerequisite for bringing children up in a socially responsible manner, and thus the capacity of the daughter-in-law to adjust is a crucial characteristic in marriage. But all matches involved compromises and some negotiation, usually on both sides, and

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thus in hindsight all parents express concerns that they were forced by circumstances to settle for less than they deserved. Parents who marry-off a daughter are often worried about the reception she will receive when she gets to her new home, as mothers especially remember the first few years in their in-laws’ home with mixed feelings. The new daughter-in-law, while she is a symbol for the continuation of the line and is addressed as ma (mother) by older members of the household, is expected to adjust to her new role as an inferior and disenfranchized female member of the home. With the exception of a few friends who lived in nuclear households, all the women I met were expected to work very hard in the kitchen, regardless of educational background and whether or not they were in employment, during the first few years of marriage. The duties of the bou (daughter-in-law who was traditionally called jhi or maidservant), centre around nurturing the family, so she is involved in cooking and serving food to the male family members and works closely with servants and her mother-in-law. There are pleasures of course, for many in particular those stolen moments of intimacy with a husband these young women are often falling in love with after their marriage, but for many, as for Rekha, a 34-year-old mother of a daughter, this was the hardest time of their lives: I was on my feet day and night, I was asked to get up before anybody else to serve morning tea, then cooked with my mother-in-law, sent the men to work with the tiffin, always waited for my mother-in-law to eat first before I got the leftovers, and I never had any spare time. The first few weeks, had my husband not taken me out once in a while, I think I would have killed myself, it only gradually got better as I learned about their household and their ways, and adjusted to it.

The ability to adjust is a key cultural construct of feminine virtue, and is represented in popular fiction and films as well as everyday conversations as an intrinsic part of married life (Singh and Uberoi 1994). As such, adjustment is often highlighted as a characteristic of a young woman in matrimonials and in conversations about the ideal daughter-in-law sought by a Bengali middle-class family. For middle-class women, who were often the spoilt single daughters in their natal homes, the expected performance of modesty often contrasts with their educational achievements and hobbies. But young women feel forced to describe themselves in matrimonials, in an appropriate way. ‘I can adjust with [sic] any environment’, as was posted by a young woman of 22 who holds a BSc from Calcutta University in an advertisement on the web. Again, a groom’s family states that they seek ‘a girl who can adjust to a Bengali family’, which implies that she will live with her parents-in-law and fulfil her duties towards them without much ado. The ability to adjust is widely seen as a product of, and prerequisite for, joint family life, and therefore associated with a ‘traditional’ young woman who puts others first, who is able to help out in the household, and who will be able to live with extended kin. Crucially, it also implies that she will not expect control over her own time or freedom of movement, as evidenced in the continuous struggles over visits to the baper bari (father’s house, natal home) many women were reporting. In a nutshell, a good daughter-in-law will accept that her relationship with her husband and the wider world will be subordinated to the demands of the household.

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Love-marriage and beyond Though accepted, arranged marriages in the families of civil servants, professionals and businessmen I work with are also contested, since they are no longer the only model for finding a partner. Arranged marriages are the norm, but ‘love-marriages’ have become a very common alternative in Calcutta as elsewhere, and the boundaries between the two are increasingly blurred. Anthropologists have rarely discussed alternatives to arranged marriages with reference to middle-class families in South Asia, although so-called ‘love’ marriages have been common in urban areas from the 1970s onwards, and a moral panic around love and marriage has kept them in the media and public discourse ever since.3 Earlier, that is before liberalization took hold, love-marriages were very much seen as exceptional in these families, although they occurred frequently. But they were seen as signifiers of a negative and ‘foreign’ modernity and thus signalled the breakdown of ‘Indian values’ and a joint family system, which it was assumed cannot easily accommodate a self-chosen union. Sylvia Vatuk’s observation on the negative impact ideals of romantic love may have had on marriage practices among the youth of Meerut and the differing views young people and their parents hold, prevailed when I first started my research. She writes on the 1970s situation in Meerut that ‘[o]lder conventions prevail even though many young people, particularly boys in their late teens and early twenties, profess a desire for more control over the choice of their mate’ (Vatuk 1972: 87). Though this short passage indicates the increasing importance the ideal of non-arranged marriages has had since the 1960s, it also reflects the reluctance of social scientists to investigate the discourse on marriages beyond the obvious statement that arranged marriages are the norm. However, my own research in Taltala quickly revealed that among the generation who married in the 1970s, a significant number of love-marriages had occurred. Furthermore, although arranged marriages were far more common, love-marriages seemed to be easily accommodated within the patrilocal and joint family system. Many women did not see these unions as exceptional, but as the ‘modern’ form of marriage. Apart from intergenerational differences, love-marriages are problematic on various counts. First, they disturb the symbolic and real domination of younger family members by their elders, and thus are often depicted as more troublesome. In an environment where moving in with the in-laws is a major objective in a young woman’s life, being chosen by the mother-in-law often makes for a better start. Second, love-marriages do disturb the image the middle classes have of themselves as a group that is significantly more family-oriented and therefore more ‘Indian’ than others, for example the matches of lower classes, for whom marriage can be less of a permanent investment with more freedom to choose with whom to live. Thus the allegedly rising number of so-called love-marriages, and the underlying related reformulation of conjugal ideals, ideas of the self and of youth culture, are successfully presented by the media as a trend that threatens established ideas and middle-class ways of life. My ethnographic data indicate that 3 See the classic accounts of Bengali kinship by Inden and Nicholas and Fruzzetti’s work on kinship and marriage rituals, as well as marital histories presented by Manisha Roy (Roy 1972: Inden and Nicholas 1977; Fruzzetti 1982).

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even in urbanized arenas ambivalent attitudes towards love-marriages prevail and that, while they have become more common, self-chosen unions are not the norm. But we should not be lured into emphasizing the exceptional status of such unions, thereby ignoring the true variety of practices found in contemporary urban India. This type of analysis ‘fails to consider the possibility that the ideas and practices surrounding marriage in India might also have been influenced by historical events and circumstances in the wider political and social order’ (Caplan 1998:3). It is in the context of wider challenges to the ideas of marriage and love that a discussion of love-marriages makes sense. What’s love got to do with marriage? Love and marriage are prominent themes in Bengali middle-class families and they are also associated with specific localities. Taltala, for instance, has a reputation for having a particularly high number of love-marriages, as it is a very heterogeneous area, and many of the children growing up there attend co-educational schools in nearby central Calcutta. As in all other instances, the views of the area and the views of marriage and love differed between the older generation, whose children had got married already, and younger household members who still expected to find love and meet their partner and in-laws. Let us start with the common view that marriage, rather than love-marriage, has changed the way Indian middle-class families function today through a more nuanced account of a marriage that took place in the 1950s. My husband is a modern man, he has always taken my side, and we learned to love each other after we got married. It was not always easy but we managed, and because we lived in Rajasthan, away from my in-laws when the boys were growing up, I had a very good relationship with my husband. These were the best years, after that we had a hard time when we fell out with his elder brother, with whom we were living here in this flat together with my mother-in-law. I don’t know why my son had to have a love-marriage, it makes things so difficult, I can’t tell you how many problems I am facing because of this, the only thing that keeps me going is my granddaughter. My daughter-in-law, even her own family don’t want anything to do with her anymore, and she did not even stop working when she had the child.

Sushmita Banerjee, a very agile 70-year-old mother of two sons, had been married as a very young girl of 16 to a much older man of 28. When we met in her tiny apartment in Taltala, her granddaughter was at nursery school and her husband was lying on his bed next door, while we sat on the veranda, chatting. Sushmita was, unlike most other women that age, extremely open, and talked about her arranged marriage and her son’s nijer biye (own marriage), as love-marriages are commonly called, comparing it with her own experiences. Central in her account was the notion that love and companionship should form part of a modern marriage, and she was eager to point out that in this sense her own marriage was very ‘modern’. However, she was also adamant that the family comes first for a woman, who is expected to make the best of the situation she finds herself in as a daughter, a daughter-in-law

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and as a wife. She felt lucky as her husband’s postings meant that her desire for intimacy, a sense of privacy and the needs of the family worked in favour of the ‘self-interest’ of this married mother. Her account also reflects the deep impact the idea of modernity has had on the institution of marriage in Bengal, and the fact that this South Asian modernity has certain traits in common with other such contexts – the idea of modern conjugality, and emotionally and sexually fulfilling relationships between husband and wife – but also shows significant differences in the way these are embedded into the wider context and social structure. Indian friends and acquaintances often emphasized that marriages are today modern in outlook, but that the demands of the couple have to be weighed against, and ultimately subordinated to, the needs of the joint family. Pointing out, as Mrs Das did in the quotation above, that marriage in India was not based on superficial attraction, many married women insisted that marriage here was a matter of more important and more long-term objectives. While the way a marriage comes about may differ, ideally both types of marriage facilitate companionship and trust between the partners, who may or may not be chosen by parents, and some understanding that marriage has to fit in with the wider family background. This last point was highlighted by Tanu, a 20-year old when we first met, who grew up in a joint family with her parents, grandparents and her uncle’s family. By all accounts hers was a well educated and relatively affluent middle-class family who had lived in the area for more than a hundred years in their now decaying ancestral home. Their lifestyle was modest and geared towards keeping the family together, all the tensions of joint family life notwithstanding. She studied biochemistry at the time, and had done exceptionally well in a subject that was not only oversubscribed but is also generally seen as a safe bet for further employment and, indeed, a career. Marriage was, at the time, still not on the cards, although I knew that her parents had started to look for a suitable groom so that she could marry by the time she finished her studies. Tanu herself professed to have no interest in marriage or any discussion of the matter, and told me that her problem would be that while she was looking for a partner to find love and affection, she was not a ‘modern type’. She meant that she had been raised in a joint family and could not envisage living in any other context. This made her a bhalo meye (good girl) in the eyes of her parents and the neighbours, but also restricted her career choices to the traditionally female profession of teaching. Love was certainly not one of the main talking points in the conversations we had, which is not to say that Tanu did not fall in love. As it turned out, she found a young man to marry by herself and since he was from a very comparable background to hers, and lived in a joint family as well, they got the consent of their parents and married. But since then things have been rather difficult for this self-professed ‘good’ girl who desperately wanted to marry into a joint family, as she has been struggling to come to terms with the fact that her affines, and in particular her husband’s mother, are extremely intrusive and commandeering. When we met two years ago she showed me the photos taken on her honeymoon in North Bengal, a memorable occasion for many other young couples because it is often the only time in the early years of marriage when they enjoy the privacy and intimacy they associate with ‘love’. Tanu was no exception and depicted her married life so far as miserable, quite the opposite of her earlier romantic courtship.

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Her days now consisted of housework directed by her mother-in-law. Her husband, who was sitting with us, agreed and almost apologetically conceded that both his mother and his wife were very strong-minded women. Tanu has now taken up a job teaching at a reputable college, which will allow her some freedom of movement, including extended visits to her paternal home, but more importantly will give her and her husband some time together, as he will be able to drop her off and pick her up from work. The ideal of companionship between spouses prevalent in middle-class settings today emerged over the course of the past one hundred years and profoundly affected women’s view of marriage. Marriage and conjugal relations underwent many redefinitions, but arranged marriages remained the norm. During the colonial period the discourse on marriage was strongly flavoured by the rulers’ bills to prevent ‘social evils’ such as child marriages or polygamy, while indigenous elites were concerned about the changing intra-familial relations and the influence of the new socio-economic order on marriage and the joint family. Love-marriages, while common among lower-castes, remained a taboo among the emerging middle class, while emotional fulfilment was clearly seen as part of a modern endeavour and a reflexive self, as the letters exchanged between well educated couples show (Borthwick 1990: 121). Yet, though affectionate ties between spouses became a positive attribute of successful marriage, neither ‘love’ nor mutual consent figured as a necessary predisposition for the vast majority of matches.4 In fact, self-chosen or love-marriages remained so exceptional that Fruzzetti, who conducted research in a Bengali town in the 1960s, still referred to ‘marriage by choice’ as elopement (polayan kora), although many cases I encountered in my own fieldwork date back to that period, and the progressive Communist parties had, since the 1930s, created an internal culture of love-marriages among comrades (Fruzzetti 1982). However, the narratives of elderly women in the neighbourhoods who recall that in many instances selfchosen marriages implied the failure of parents to arrange a suitable match due to ‘bad’ looks, a ‘rotten’ character, or indeed a history of political activism and thus an independent spirit, do show how problematic such unions were at the time. But even these elderly informants considered love a natural thing of youth, something which in their view had become increasingly important with the expansion of education beyond the premenarche years for girls, and affairs between young men and women in the neighbourhood flourished earlier, although they were mostly clandestine and therefore difficult to work on. Until very recently such premarital relationships were conducted purely through letters and involved more than the couple concerned, as they used siblings and mutual friends as couriers and informants. Increasingly, the internet is a place for young people to try out different romantic, and often quite explicit, modes of communication,5 but from what I can 4 Incidents of marriage by choice, documented in the literature on nineteenth-century Bengal, are confined to the circle of reformist organizations like the Brahmo Samaj, whose members embraced monotheism, women’s education and companionate marriage. 5 The remarks on affairs of the older generation fit with Ahearn’s observations on the genre of love letters as a manifestation of a specific South Asian form of modernity (Ahearn

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discern most teenage relationships are rather more chaste and secretive than the bold displays of affection currently fashionable in public places suggest. Premarital affairs are problematic, but love within marriage is, in the view of even the oldest of informants, a good thing and most women explained that modern relationships had changed towards a more compassionate and positive relationship between husband and wife. Thus, they were not concerned with the classic opposition of prem (physical attraction) and bhakti (devotional love) so beloved to social scientists (see Trawick 1990; Marglin 1995: 298–315). Women belonging to all age groups maintained that ideally both husband and wife should coexist in a fulfilled conjugal relationship, regardless of how it came about, and of whether one or the other appeared initially. Though elderly women agree that devotion and bhakti are necessary to make a marriage last, prem and bhakti are not the most contested categories here, nor are they mutually exclusive. Probably owing to the strong influence of devotional cults, which emphasize individualized attachment and the transformative power of love, discourses on marriage sometimes draw on the ambivalent coexistence of prem and bhakti through the traditional model of the ideal divine lovers, Radha and Krishna (Miller 1982: 13–26; Dwyer 2000: 34–40). But, unlike their illegitimate love affair, attachment is idealized as married women’s devotion to their husbands, eulogized in the story of Behula and Lakhinder, originally depicted in the stories honouring the goddess Manasa. In it, Behula is sailing down the river with her husband’s dead body after he has been bitten by a snake during their wedding night because his father had angered the goddess. Thus, different models of love coexist in contemporary novels, soap operas, movies and popular music, and some contrast bhakti with the classical patrivrata relationship between a husband and his devoted wife. As a tendency prem is certainly valued much higher as part of truly ‘modern’ relationships, as the many pages of advice on sexual fulfilment in marriage and recent debates on cohabitation one can find in women’s magazines show (Basu 2001),6 but the main focus of discussions is not on prem but on the lack of devotion or selfless love bhakti implies, which allegedly has gone amiss in marriages. Especially older women did not so much argue the moral quality of these two types of love, as the unpredictability of emotions and the insecurity of a match based on falling in love. The real moral opposition between different marriages has, therefore, to be understood outside of the sanscritized straightjacket of earlier discussions, and has to acknowledge that in common parlance love is often referred to as bhalobhasa. Where bhakti, or devotional love, can exist between a disciple and a guru or a deity and a worshipper as well as between parents and children, husband and wife, bhalobhasa (love) is not hierarchical and expresses the egalitarian values of other relationships rather than those between kin or teachers and their wards. Crucially, it takes love and romance out of the family and into the domain of modern, self-chosen relationships, for example friendships. Bhalobhasa signifies mutuality, akin only to the special relationships between close siblings and friends, whose relationships are much more

2002). In this case the same discourse would apply to women born in the 1930s. 6 For examples of highbrow literature see Roy (Roy 1972: 39–70).

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egalitarian than any others encountered in these families (Inden and Nicholas 1977: 22; Osella and Osella 1996). But choice is not the only trait associated with the new conjugal ideal and especially married women who drew on their own experiences cited common decision making as well as financial and family planning, emotional fulfilment and trust between the spouses as typical features more often found in love-marriages than arranged marriages.7 Along these lines Reshmi, a student belonging to a middleclass but low-caste family stated, ‘Today all marriages, whether they were arranged or love-marriages are modern, we don’t have the same ideas as our parents’, when we were discussing a neighbour’s wedding. Reshmi had been telling me how she was of the opinion that her parents would find a suitable groom for her and that she was not really interested in finding a partner for herself. Although many of her friends had their eyes firmly set on a love-marriage she thought that it would upset her parents and her potential in-laws, and argued that since she had not been brought up ‘that way’ her chances of falling in love were slim. When I met her during her last year at high school, Reshmi was a very beautiful, intelligent and well groomed young woman, who had lived all her life with her parents and elder brother in a small second-floor flat in central Calcutta. Now, as her final exams were approaching, her family was facing a specific problem finding a suitable groom for her, because they were technically not caste Hindus, although nobody ever mentioned this in public. Since they had been in the neighbourhood for ages and were educated and middleclass, Reshmi’s parents were expected to find good matches for their two children, but because few members of their caste are really upwardly mobile and Reshmi’s father worked for a small salary in a printing press, the search for a suitable groom was going to be difficult. This partly explained why Reshmi’s mother and father were not by any stretch of the imagination liberal even in central Calcutta terms, and why she was expected to finish school and marry. After failing to arrange her marriage within a year of her last exam, her parents agreed to send her to college for a BA degree course, which was an option she was equally at ease with as with an arranged marriage. Although she was adamant that she would agree to an arranged marriage, she had very definite ideas on how and with whom such a match should be arranged, ideas which reflect the changes in actually arranged marriages if we compare Reshmi’s with her mother’s generation. Mrs Hari, her mother, was well aware of the fact that the pool of eligible bachelors in their own caste educated enough to pass as middle-class or even upwardly-mobile was limited, and so she had, as she pointed out herself, brought up both of her children to make something of themselves in order to fit into a good family in a stricter sense than was the case for her daughter’s classmates. In the course of such discussions arranged marriages are continuously compared to love-marriages, and though the arranged marriages outnumber love-marriages among middle-class Calcuttans, many women have experienced the effects of different kinds of arrangements in their own homes, either as mothers-in-law or as daughters-in-law. In discussions of marriage, the starting point may be a specific union, but they soon turn towards more general themes, expectations and values like 7 Debi’s survey material includes questions about ideal conjugal relations (Debi 1988).

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filial duty and parental responsibility, modernity and change, group-based identities and the purpose of marriage, which is parenthood. Some love-marriages are more easily identified than others, and sometimes ambiguity as to how a match came about may be expressed in different ways by different commentators in hindsight. However, while a clear-cut definition of lovemarriages exists – one which defines them as based on the sole decision of the spouses concerned – in practice all sorts of arranged marriages are today presented in the same terms. In its local avatar, the definition of a proper love-marriage does not depend on the period or mode of courtship, the consent of the candidates or the notion of emotional involvement, because women are well aware of the fact that these factors may be present in modern arranged marriages. Love-marriage is defined in terms of the agency of the partners, who enter into a premarital (if often modest) relationship, and it is their own initiative that is marked by the phrase ‘one’s own marriage’, which in colloquial Bengali denotes such matches. Marriage, agency and storytelling As we have seen, parents’ and children’s views of marriage can differ considerably, and in many instances love-marriages are a last resort for parents who find that their children have already had a long affair or where earlier negotiations failed (Debi 1988: 20). While young adults are generally in favour of more freedom and opportunities to mix and mingle, and do increasingly take part in the emerging youth culture (including leisure activities like visiting cafes, going to the movies, engaging in sports, extra-curricular clubs and shopping), parents try to control and limit their children’s involvement with the outside world in order to prevent love-marriages. Furthermore, if parents are worried about premarital relationships, which increasingly also involve premarital sex, a major concern among mothers and fathers are relationships between boys and girls in the neighbourhood, which are seen as particularly problematic as they damage the reputation of the family, and much worse, often involve members of different castes or communities (see Donner 2002). Though daughters’ movements are a primary source of such worries, in trying to safeguard the name of a family, sons in the better-off families are also discouraged from making friends in the locality, and their contacts are strictly monitored. For parents, the worst case scenario is that their son or daughter falls in love and starts an affair with a person from an unsuitable background, for example someone of a lower caste, from a working-class household or someone belonging to a different community. The younger generation share some of these concerns, although they are very often enjoying the new freedom youth culture promises. However, their desire to be part of an in-crowd and to join their friends is very strongly contrasted with their need to please parents and grandparents, and this more often than not results in the rigid differentiation between a public face and their private troubles. Since filial duty is the core value at the heart of family life in these middle-class households, interviewing adolescent sons and daughters always garnered the same replies to questions about love and marriage. When I met members of that age-group outside, on the other hand, the need for self-assertion and the desire to choose one’s

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own partner were commonly highlighted and vehemently supported by examples of one’s friends’ ‘own marriages’. However, having said this, it was striking how rarely a young woman revealed an ongoing affair she, herself, was having. Here, a space for the telling of sexual stories only emerged very recently, and it took much longer for the interpretative community such stories create to emerge than for lovemarriages to become more common. As Plummer observes: [Whilst stories] can be heard amongst isolated individuals, they can gain no momentum if they stay in this ‘privatised’ mode, and personal narratives remain in the private sphere of dim inarticulateness, having no group to sustain them. For stories to flourish, there must be social worlds waiting to hear. Social worlds are not like communities of old: no locale is required, only a sense of belonging, sharing traditions, having common memories. (Plummer 1996: 36)

While there exists a community to listen to stories about love and marriage, as the success of the Internet, soap operas (Das 1995), short stories and of vernacular adhunik gan (modern songs) shows, there is still not much of a neighbourhood community waiting to listen to narratives of sexual encounters. My own experience of fieldwork has made me extremely conscious of the split in the representation of the changes marriage has undergone, and the lack of indepth research into hegemonic discourses on sexuality, marriage and love. It has also sensitized me to the pitfalls of research that does in such intimate matters not take the domestic environment and the constraints produced by patrilocality seriously (see, for instance, Puri 1999). There is, however, a more hedonistic subculture emerging within certain families who, by virtue of the relative homogeneity of their environment, are happy to allow their children to mix with a wider circle of friends and colleagues based on their socialization into the role of a responsible adult and member of the family. The new world already encourages those of exactly the same caste and class background and financial standing to go for love-marriages, as the example of Fuller and Narasimhan’s research among Chennai software engineers from Tamil Brahmin backgrounds shows (Fuller and Narasimhan 2007). However, the embrace of an ideology of choice and consent should not make us believe that this necessarily leads to marriages preceded by premarital affairs or romantic courtship. Increasingly, the opposite, arranged marriages within which the young men and women have their say, but equally popular are arranged marriages where the future spouses do not necessarily meet on their own. This chapter has exposed the different discourses on marriage in contemporary India and has revealed the tensions between a modern, liberal view of love and marriage and the demands of joint family life. While, certainly, young men and women have different ideas about love and romance than their parents and grandparents, filial duty and the normative character of arranged marriage are still important to the vast majority of middle-class citizens. Young Calcuttans may want to distance themselves from their guardians and the practices associated with arranged marriage in the past, where the agency of the bride and groom involved was very limited, but as the chapter has shown this does not lead to a full embrace of an ideology of love and intimacy as the basis for the selection of a spouse. The parents and children agree that finding a suitable partner should not always be left to the young people concerned and that as long as

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the new ideal of companionate marriage is a realistic option, conjugal life, filial duty and family needs have to determine the choice of a partner. And they are not alone, as this conservatism is not merely regional. In a recent nationwide survey conducted by the Centre for Developing Societies, 59 per cent of young, urban men and women agreed that parents should have the final say in marriage (Centre for Developing Societies 2007).8 The issue of consent is, therefore, not only one relevant to the study of the younger population, but demonstrates how marriage is part of long-term reasoning and mutual dependency within a given social setting. As long as we do not lose sight of the lived experience of marriage and love, it is worth emphasizing as well that, as classical anthropological approaches have pointed out, marriage forms part of the system of social relationships established by exchange, and that such exchanges have their own morality. Marriage is, after all, subject to the sometimes contradictory ways of reasoning implied in relationships more generally. As Maurice Bloch and Jonathan Parry point out, ‘short-term exchanges associated with individual appropriation, competition, sensuous enjoyment, luxury and youthful vitality’ are ‘morally acceptable as long as they remain subordinated to, and do not compete with, the long-term restorative cycles’ (Bloch and Parry 1989: 24–5). My material also shows that a new space for love-marriages has opened up within this framework which makes them not only a viable alternative to arranged marriages, representing as they do, spaces of desire, but which also allows them, generally, to be accommodated within the pattern of arranged marriages because they are taking place in a patrilocal setting. In other words, love-marriages are treated in the same way as arranged marriages wherever this is possible. If they do not jeopardize the long-term priorities of the family and, in the wider sense, the coherence of the collective world view, they are often accommodated surprisingly well. In these cases, which outnumber the ones in which marital breakdown occurs, parents provide a proper wedding reception, gifts and accommodation for the couple. My material shows that where couples fall in love with someone from the same caste, community and religious background and insist on marriage, they are more often than not neither marginalized nor forced to elope and do not even have to resort to a civil wedding or feel that they have to pretend that theirs was an arranged marriage (pace Mody 2002). Conversely, there are some marriages, markedly those across community boundaries, which cannot be contained within the same framework for practical and ideological reasons and are therefore severely disruptive to the social fabric of the family and the neighbourhood. While affairs do not always lead to marriage because a young woman or a young man consciously decides against a love-marriage in favour of an arranged marriage, the really problematic matches are those which violate the rules of caste and community endogamy and class boundaries. Finally, I would like to raise a point often missed in the literature on marriage, namely the processual character of any such union as part of real lives. In a setting where a daughter-in-law begins a new life with her in-laws upon marriage, in-laws who deliberately try to make her ‘adjust’ to their household by making her work 8 The same study found the majority of urban youths to be significantly more tolerant towards dating before marriage than their rural, less educated counterparts.

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harder than anyone else, views on marriage vary considerably over the life cycle and across genders. In the case of love-marriages, however, the ambiguity between the new expectation of companionship and the older order of the joint family is probably more openly played out and articulated, partly because the couple can claim a distinctive separate identity from the start compared to arranged marriages where such attempts at differentiation occur over longer periods of time. It is the role of the anthropologist to challenge simplistic assumptions about the way new ‘modern’ selves are constructed in relation to social institutions like marriage and to analyse generalizing concepts like intimacy and companionate marriage through an anthropological reading of specific ideas and social relations. The globalizing idiom of ‘love’ has to be related to the wider kin relationships which provide the metaphors and material for an imagination of intimate relationships.

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Chapter 3

The Place of Birth Marriage is not an aim in itself, as many of my friends pointed out. It is part of the life course and a precondition for parenthood which cannot be imagined without marriage. Becoming a mother or a father is not only a necessary part of the life cycle, it is also proof of sexual prowess and fecundity, and infertility carries considerable stigma (Kohler-Riesmann 2000). Marriage frames sexualities as legitimate, and acceptable sexual relations are purposeful in that they are directed towards reproduction within marriage. Thus, fertility and reproduction are crucial in making a person and expand marriage in its social significance far beyond the sociolegal construct of the same name. Through marriage, that is, through completion of the necessary rites, a young woman truly becomes an adult person; but it is as the mother of a son that she becomes a member of the affinal lineage, and thus her status in her new family changes with her first pregnancy. Once married, the new wife and daughter-in-law goes through an extended liminal phase of resocialization in her in-laws’ house, a phase which only ends when she gives birth. In middle-class families today, pregnancies are planned in great detail and are timed very carefully, taking promotions, pension schemes and other outside factors that will enhance the new family’s financial well-being into account. But such considerations do not alter the fact that among newly-weds conception is expected within two years of marriage. Getting pregnant is a marker of respectability and prowess, with the ideal pregnancy occurring not too shortly after the wedding (to avoid rumours about the sexual appetite of the new daughter-in-law) but not too long afterwards either, as this would raise doubts about her fertility and her husband’s performance. Getting pregnant is a matter of deep anxiety, not only for the women concerned, but also for their husbands, in-laws and the wife’s natal family. Such worries are not new but have gained a different quality when read in conjunction with the decline in the birth rate among middle-class families, a phenomenon which is evident in Calcutta and elsewhere. The first class-sensitive study of more than 6,000 women conducted in three neighbourhoods of the city in the early fifties showed middle-class families to have between 5.5 and 6.0 children (Chandrasekaran 1956: 39). Today, the single child has become the desired ideal and in 1994, when I started my fieldwork in Taltala, siblings were rare unless the firstborn was a girl, and of the children born after that, not a single one has a younger brother or sister. Common wisdom has it that the drop in fertility has three major causes, namely the drop in infant mortality related to better medical services, and therefore a lower mortality rate in infancy and childhood, better antenatal and post-natal care contributing to the survival of children born to the same mother and, the major factor, the rising costs of raising children. The latter has by now become the main point of reference, as among the middle classes high infant mortality has become a

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thing of the past, and it seems to best reflect middle-class families’ interest in specific fertility patterns. What is conveniently forgotten in this modernist narrative is the fact that fertility rates are not solely the result of outside factors but are also affected by new ideas about wider social relationships and thus by ideas circulated within the family. In this context, parents and children alike buy into the demand for a ‘new middle-class childhood’, a privileged upbringing which will realize the new family. As Cleland and Jejeebhoy wryly remark, fertility transition is not a one-way neutral process but is related to reformulations of social roles: Better educated parents want better educated and ‘higher quality, more expensive’ children. This involves greater financial costs, usually borne by both parents, as well as greater time and opportunity costs, invariably borne by the mother. The major economic cost is certainly schooling. The growing recognition of the importance of schooling for children and their costs are held to be the most important factor swinging the flow of wealth away from parents and an important precondition for the fertility transition. (Cleland and Jejeebhoy 1996: 99)

But contrary to their economic model, maternities are not defined solely in terms of real costs. Maternal ideals and women’s desires shape these as well, as we will see when analysing low birth rates in relation to the mode of birth and the family context. Family size both forces and enables women to act out specific maternal roles, and links education, idealized middle-class lifestyles and consumerism in multiple ways to the imagery of global markets in opportunities and transnational kinship links. Today the need to produce a single child family encourages couples to use contraception more effectively, a strategy helped by a decline in the primary fertility of middle-class mothers due to a higher age at marriage and a sedentary lifestyle but early conception is still a must. You see, you women in the West you marry late and have children, but for an Indian woman, the ideal age to have children is 17, because after that their bodies become fat and their wombs don’t hold the child anymore.

This is how Sumita, a 22-year-old, recently married woman described the perceived difference between Indian and Western ideal life courses. Within this environment, as Bharadwaj points out, marriage leads to pregnancy, childbirth and parenthood and, as Uberoi has shown, failure to conceive is very commonly constructed as a quasi-natural reason to legally annul a marriage (see Uberoi 1996; Bharadwaj 2002). Bharadwaj rightly states that adoption can only ever be a minority solution, as failure to conceive gives rise to serious problems of recognition (Bharadwaj 2002). It is these latter problems of recognition, of acceptance and of the validation of the central values shared in middle-class Bengali families, which make infertility so problematic. The infertile couple does not only publicly symbolize sexuality without a purpose, ‘coupledom’ without a future, and personal loss, but also challenges generally held ideas about marriage and the Indian middle-class family. These serious issues weigh heavily on both partners in a couple, and more often than not find their outlet in the marginalization of the childless woman in her affinal home.

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This may be played out as estrangement from her partner, but also as rejection by his family and sometimes as problems with her natal family, who could be called to her support as well. In some extreme, but by no means singular cases, childlessness in a married woman has been used as an excuse by her in-laws to abuse her. While all aspects of women’s sexuality are regarded as shameful and cannot be discussed in public, her fertility is another matter, and the enquiring looks, veiled and not so veiled questions relating to offspring are often a source of acute embarrassment to a daughter-in-law. Once she is pregnant, she will become the expectant mother-tobe, with all the excitement this entails, and her position in the in-laws’ house and her general outlook may change considerably (see Roy 1972). Pregnancy Pregnancy and birth are, next to marriage and education, two areas that have been affected by reforms which originate in the colonial period and are crucial for the contemporary construction of Indian middle-class motherhood. The prevalent medicalized view of reproduction has led to the emergence of new ‘Western’ practices including routine antenatal checks, amniocentesis and interventionist deliveries, which are complemented by, but overshadow, older models of successful procreation which involved notions of religious virtue. Today, a range of techniques, technologies and services are widely available to pregnant middle-class women, with allopathy believed to be by far the most potent guarantor of healthy pregnancies and safe births. But the practices applied to achieve motherhood vary and most women that I spoke to, while asserting that ‘Western medicine’ was the best form of intervention, utilized a variety of other strategies to ensure a mother’s and the baby’s well-being, including fasts which often involved other members of the family and the support of religious experts belonging to different communities. Mothers and their families also rely on health services provided by the state and the private sector to enhance their fertility and support a positive outcome for pregnancies. All these efforts are directed at the achievement of the desired boy who will be happily embraced by the wider joint family. However, in spite of the relative openness of private providers advertising services, such as abortion, amniocentesis and ultrasound, pregnancy itself is not really visible or celebrated in public. Pregnant middle-class women are the subject of special attention and shadh (special rituals), during which they are fed desired foods. Many women belonging to the older generation, those who were at the time of interview in their forties to sixties, recalled how during their first pregnancy they would hide the fact that they were pregnant from their in-laws as long as possible. They said that they felt ashamed to speak about ‘it’, namely the pregnancy, but that once their female affines had discovered that they were expecting they were frustrated by the lack of personal care they received. More important than the health and well-being of the mother-tobe was a celebration of the fertility of the daughter-in-law and the well-being of the unborn child, which had to be wished into being male through various auspicious rituals. More often than not their in-laws did not bother to have them checked by doctors, and in those cases where antenatal care was taken seriously this was due

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to an earlier history of miscarriages or of problems in conceiving. Examples of illtreatment – ranging from overworking of the daughter-in-law to general neglect during a time when she expected to receive special care – abound, and in most instances pregnancy was depicted as a difficult time with relations between daughterin-law and her mother-in-law tense. Until the former was allowed to depart to her paternal home where she would customarily deliver her first child. This new engagement with her own family often represented a break after a hard year or two in the shasur bari, and women were generally keen to spend as much time before and after the delivery in their ‘own homes’. But things were changing in the 1960s and a few of the women now in their sixties were not allowed to return to their paternal homes because, or so their in-laws alleged, of the lack of medical care provided by their parents. However, by and large this generation of women would be sent back to their natal families, who would be responsible for them before and after the birth. This was the case with Rekha whose first daughter, quite unusually, was born at home in the early eighties: That was a great time I had there, they send me back when I was eight months pregnant, and I stayed even two more months after the time in the atur ghor [lying-in room] was over. I did get good food and my parents paid for a doctor to come and check up on me once, but I managed the birth itself with the help of a midwife and some relatives. Afterwards I relaxed, and the baby and I got very good food instead of leftovers my inlaws were feeding me.

Following this delivery she gave birth to two more sons and had two miscarriages, but did not return to her natal home for these. Instead she endured the much less positive experience of being pregnant and giving birth in her in-laws’ house, where she was subjugated to a gruelling regime of fasts and religious vows and worked right: up until the pain started, only then they would let you go, you’d be too embarrassed to ask. They are expected to give you special food, and I got that for the rituals, but I was working so hard even when I was vomiting and felt really dizzy, I wouldn’t wish that on anyone. Today, these girls who marry into this kind of families, they are all memsahibs, they run to the doctor all the time and can’t do any work in the house just because they are pregnant, imagine if we would have done that with the number of pregnancies we had!

Her account indicates that amid the many implied changes of being modern in Calcutta, reproductive change is a clear marker of status in the middle-class context. Since birth is a much talked-about event, it feeds the discussions on modernity and change in relation to the family which are so prominent in middle-class family life. A detailed discussion of hospital births and elective Caesareans, which have become the norm, in the context of joint family life and the single child unit allows us to locate women’s more recent experiences within a global discourse.

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The medicalization of childbirth Within mainstream discourses medicalized childbirth has been hailed as a sign of economic and social progress and an indicator of development and modernity, and middle-class India has adopted such models in a surprisingly uniform manner. The advanced technologies, monitored pregnancies and specialist interventions which have been so severely criticized by feminists in the West are, today, extensively used to facilitate a ‘child-only’ rather than a ‘mother-and-child-centred’ approach to care, and the women I work with have wholeheartedly embraced medicalized childbirth. For feminists where and how women give birth is a highly ideological issue. Even if we assume that the objective of research is the health of mother and child, which is arguably not always the case, how the relative well-being of both is construed within the process remains subject to intensive popular and scientific debate. Anthropologists have contributed to these discussions in two ways, first by demonstrating that a wide range of understandings, techniques, and practices coexist in non-Western contexts. For more than two decades, pregnancy and birth have been explored from a comparative perspective (Oakely 1979; Jordan 1993 [1978]; MacCormack 1994a; Davis-Floyd and Sargent 1997). The anthropology of birth emerged as a critique of hospital births in the West and is one of the rare examples of anthropological studies which have exerted a huge influence on commonsensical views, at least among the middle classes in Europe and the US. By providing a heterodox perspective on birthing, which challenged the medicalized understanding of deliveries prevalent until the 1970s, anthropologists have certainly helped to deconstruct existing hegemonic discourses. Second, anthropologists and historians have begun to analyse the discourses surrounding changing ideological and practical patterns of reproduction, especially those relating to colonial rule and processes of globalization (Crouch and Manderson 1993; Ginsburg and Rapp 1995; Ram and Jolly 1998; Guha 1998; Hunt 1999). The early critique of the ‘medicalization of childbirth’ that brought about the anthropology of birth as the study of ‘indigenous’ and ‘traditional’ practices has given way to an understanding of reproduction, which is less inclined towards studying static, culture-bound traditions. In this context, and overlapping with development concerns, hospital births emerge as an increasingly important subject of anthropological study. In this chapter I focus on changing birthing practices in the ‘developing world’, but with the focus on the minority with privileged access to an unusual degree of health care services. Unlike much of the existing literature on hospital births, the chapter explores pregnancy and birth within domestic and kin relationships and as part of class-based identities. Furthermore, what is investigated in this specific context is why, given that ‘women collaborate … because of their own needs and motives, which in turn grow out of the class-specific nature of the their subordination’ (Riessman cited in Jacobson 2001: 222–3), women choose high-tech interventionist Caesarean sections. The maternal histories presented in this chapter refer to middle-class women, although during some of the interviews working-class women, for instance maidservants, were present and contributed to the discussion as well. Except for

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medical surveys, such as the study of hospital births in Chennai undertaken by Pai et al. (see Pai et al. 1999), such material is rare and these studies lack the detailed analysis of the context that long-term fieldwork can provide.1 Contextualizing births I worked with many women who had become mothers during the post-partition period and the 1970s during my first extended stay in 1994–95, but returned to have a closer look at reproductive change between April 1999 and August 2000, at a time when liberalization had truly kicked in and the growth of the private health sector had accelerated. During fieldwork only four births occurred in the households I worked with, partly because many women included in this self-selected sample were already mothers of adolescents, and partly because the birth rate in middleclass households of Bengali origin is generally very low. In most instances, women of below fifty years of age saw their family as complete once the desired son had been born, and would use a combination of traditional vows, amniocentesis and abortion to achieve the birth of a single male child. Only two of the women I worked with who gave birth over the past ten years had had more than one child, even where the single child born to a couple was a daughter. In two cases I was able to visit the pregnant woman/young mother before and/or after the delivery, and visits to hospitals and further informal conversations with friends and medical practitioners provided ample evidence to support the generalizations drawn from the interviews with mothers and mothers-to-be at home. The focus of the interviews and the visits at home was on women’s experiences and the context within which they and their relatives placed childbirth, rather than the views of specialists on the pros and cons of specific procedures, so that what emerged was a domestic emphasis on wider changes in technologies and customs. This focus limits my discussion of the physical effects of reproductive change but does contribute a ‘domestic and comparative perspective on birthing’, which is relevant if we are to analyse the impact of technology and changing reproductive patterns on motherhood. Most of the households I included were joint households and although many younger, recently-married women were hoping to move out at one point, none had given birth and returned from hospital to stay with only their husbands. The patrilocal norm ensures that the vast majority of pregnancies occur while middleclass couples live with a woman’s in-laws, which was of course the experience of women of the older generation. In these families, ‘traditional’ family values and women’s orientation towards their roles as mothers and housewives are very pronounced, regardless of whether they are in employment (Standing 1991: 63; Chatterjee 1993: 35; Varma 1998: 166). At the time of research some of the younger women were working ‘outside’, but they were expected to leave their jobs upon the

1 The same holds true for the growing body of comparative literature dedicated to the cross-cultural study of the ways Western models of medicalized childbirth and new technologies are producing new forms of ‘authoritative knowledge’ (Sargent 1989; Jordan 1993 [1978]: 152; Davis-Floyd and Sargent 1997; Ram and Jolly 1998).

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2

birth of their children. Most insisted that employment cannot be combined with the duties of a mother, who has to devote all her time and attention to the education of her offspring. Changing hospital births: two case studies The following section provides case studies of the birthing experiences of two women belonging to different generations, both of whom gave birth in hospital. They highlight the degree to which hospital deliveries have changed since they first became popular in the 1960s and indicate the role played by affinal relations in shaping the process. The first case study reflects the experiences of women now in their fifties, and was compiled from interviews during which they talked about their experience of pregnancy and birth in hindsight. The second case study is a detailed account of the circumstances surrounding the birth of Akash, the son of Madhushree and Amrit Chowdhury, who was born on 25 February 2000. Case Study One: Ila Chakraborty At the time of the interview, Ila Chakraborty was in her mid-fifties and lived with her husband and two sons in an affluent south Calcutta suburb. Like most of their neighbours, her family were refugees from East Bengal. She married at the age of nineteen and spent many years with her in-laws before her husband, who is a contractor, could afford to build the very spacious house they inhabit today. During that period her three children were born. Ila enjoyed life in her in-laws’ house most of the time, her relationship with her mother-in-law and elder sister-in-law being good for many years. She, nevertheless, appreciated the autonomy she gained once they separated from the extended family, a move that she asserts resulted from tensions in the in-laws’ house caused by her younger sister-in-law. Looking back at her experience of pregnancy and birth, she presented her maternal history in the light of her 28-year-old daughter’s marriage and the recent birth of her granddaughter, which were very important themes in her life at the time of the interviews. When Ila gave birth she was the younger of two daughters-in-law in a household consisting of three married couples, their children and unmarried relatives. Though her mother-in-law rarely allowed her to visit her parents, who lived a short bus ride away, she asserted that her in-laws and her parents got along very well, and was keen to point out that her own daughter’s in-laws make her feel equally welcome. Either she or her husband visits her daughter, who married into the family of a business partner and lives nearby, every day. They arranged this match with a less affluent family because the daughter lacks looks and education, as she left school before the final exams. But her mother emphasized that she is a real pearl, an

2 Rates of female employment in Bengal are notoriously low. According to the 1991 Census, Calcutta had the lowest female work participation rate (5.42) among the four main metropolitan areas including Delhi (7.46), Madras (8.46) and Greater Bombay (10.32). (Census of India 1991: 13).

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old-fashioned daughter-in-law, and that as she now lives with her husband’s wider family, she is an asset to the household: My daughter does all the cooking, although they have two servants. In my own in-laws’ house the in-marrying women were exempted from any hard work but looked after the food and the children – that was enough for us.

The division of work among women in the household was also used as an explanation of the fact that her in-laws did not send her to her parents’ house when she was pregnant with her firstborn. Instead, the boy was delivered in a nearby nursing home chosen and paid for by her affines. When I was pregnant I did not go to my natal home, but remained in my in-laws’ house, although this is our custom and women should not work for a month after the birth. I gave birth to my daughter in a nursing home nearby and the sons were born in another one. I did my two check-ups during each of the pregnancies but everything was fine, I did not have any problems – not like my daughter who needed months of bedrest. Of course I suffered from nausea, but that did not stop me from working, because my mother-in-law did not allow me to work less – so I worked until the end. If I was sick I threw up and got on with it, although when I was pregnant with my daughter I got sick by merely looking at a glass of water and could hardly eat anything: no rice, no fish, only curd.

Reflecting on her deliveries she said: When the pain came, I told my sister-in-law and when it got worse and worse I was brought to the nursing home by my brother-in-law. At that time husbands, or their parents, would not accompany a woman about to give birth. My mother-in-law was too old anyway, she came the next day to look at the grandchild. There was a nurse with me, who did all the check-ups, but the doctor delivered the child. I had spent a lot of time worrying about what would happen, whether I would be able to cope with the pain, whether the child would be all right … At that time we didn’t know whether the child would be a boy or a girl – we didn’t have ultrasonography then. Today doctors can tell, but they won’t say – in my daughter’s case the doctor could tell – he saw it and said ‘look here is the head, here is a leg’, and her husband said to her that he believed it would be a girl. They used to tell you the sex, but then there were these arguments about it and since then they will not tell anymore. Because some people abort girls they stopped telling you. I did not care about the sex of my first child, but with the second one I hoped for a boy and everybody said this will be a boy. After the birth of my second child I realised why people could tell: the birth of a boy is much more easy than the birth of a girl and one can tell in advance because their heads are shaped differently. When I gave birth to my daughter I was already in labour when I arrived at the nursing home, that was around nine o’clock in the evening. They said then after some hours that they would use forceps to get her out, because it took so long. It was terrible and very hard. In the case of my first son the waters broke, and I went to the nursing home, but nothing happened so they gave me an injection because I had no contractions for two days after that. They thought they would have to do a ‘caesar’, but that did not happen and after three hours he was born.

Like others, Ila then described the birth of her second son in detail and concluded that she had gone through enough by then: ‘I thought I won’t do that again – never again’. She remained in hospital for two days after each delivery and had a check-

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up some time later, but since there were no complications this seemed of little significance. When she returned to her in-laws’ house she was allowed to ‘rest’ for about two weeks. When the customary period of confinement, which in the case of her sons lasted for 21 days, was officially ended by a Shosthi puja on behalf of the newborn, she had already returned to the stove and resumed her duties.3 Case Study Two: Madhushree Chowdhury Madhushree, who gave birth while I was doing fieldwork in 2000, lived next door to the Chakraborty family in her in-laws’ house. At the time, she was twenty-eight and had been married for two years. She was four-months pregnant in October 1999 when my last period of fieldwork commenced, and I paid regular visits to her home during which I talked to her and her mother-in-law before and after the birth of her son. During her pregnancy, the Chowdhury household consisted of Madhushree and her husband and his parents, as well as a live-in servant. Unlike most of the women interviewed, Madhushree was in employment – working in the billing department of Nokia telecommunications – when she became pregnant, while her husband worked as a representative for another multinational company. Madushree’s motherin-law had been the manager of a prestigious nursing home before her children started secondary school and she became a housewife, while her father-in-law was a government engineer. They had completed the three-storey house, which was occupied jointly by both couples, about fifteen years earlier. When I visited the Chowdhury family on 25 February around noon, I anticipated that Mrs Chowdhury – Madhushree’s mother in-law – would be at home alone, since Madhushree had been on sick-leave for some weeks and had gone to stay with her mother for a couple of days. She was due to give birth by the middle of March but expected an elective Caesarean to take place some time before that date. When I arrived at the house I found Mr Chowdhury fast asleep; Mrs Chowdhury had just taken her morning bath and attended to the deities. Upon seeing me, she exclaimed that I had chosen a good and auspicious day to come since Madhushree had given birth to a boy in the morning. We settled down for a cup of tea in the living room, and she began to recount the events of the last twenty-four hours leading up to the birth of her first grandchild. According to her mother-in-law, Madhushree had called the previous evening complaining about discharge so Mrs. Chowdhury had contacted the doctor, who was an acquaintance of hers. The doctor advised rest but then reviewed her recommendation and offered to do a Caesarean section early the following morning since her medical ‘team’, consisting of this female obstetrician, an anaesthetist and two nurses, would be assembled in one of Calcutta’s most prestigious nursing homes 3 A puja for the Goddess Shosthi is celebrated at the end of the post-partum period as she protects children from illness. Today, this is organized upon the return of the newborn from hospital to the paternal grandparents’ house. While the rituals to remove pollution from both mother and child have disappeared, this puja, which is solely directed towards the wellbeing of the child, is still celebrated.

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to perform a series of Caesareans. Working from midnight onwards, they could easily ‘slot’ Madhushree in, and to help them with the decision. The doctor had emphasized that it was unlikely that the team would meet again closer to the original estimated date of delivery. After many phone calls had gone back and forth, as she was staying with her mother at the time, Madhushree, her mother-in-law and her father-in-law had agreed though regrettably Amrit, the father-to-be, was on a training course in Mumbai.4 Around 5.30 a.m., the Chowdhurys had gone to Woodlands Nursing Home, where they met Madhushree, her brother and her mother. After assisting her with the formalities, the visitors settled in her room, and shortly afterwards she was wheeled into the operation theatre. About twenty minutes later, the remaining relatives were joined by Amrit’s sister, her husband and a female cousin, and shortly after their arrival the doctor returned and announced the birth of a baby boy. They were given his weight and the exact time of birth, which is used to compile astrological charts, and then a nurse brought the newborn in. Before he was transferred to the adjacent baby-room, she ensured that one of the elder relatives checked the sex of the baby. Mrs Chowdhury’s account ended here and she got up to make phone calls to relatives. Thus, I never got the opportunity to ask her about the health of her daughterin-law, which she had not mentioned at all. When Mr Chowdhury appeared a little later he reluctantly revealed more details, but since he was clearly not comfortable with my questions regarding Madhushree or the baby I changed the subject. I was then invited to accompany them on their afternoon trip to the nursing home, which was situated in an affluent suburb, about half an hour away from their home. Upon our arrival, we were received by a laboratory assistant, a former colleague of Mrs Chowdhury, who ‘had kept an eye on mother and child’. This nursing home is located in one of the most exclusive areas of Calcutta, and is housed in a purpose-built building, which reflects the tastes of its affluent private clients. From a huge marbled hallway, elevators and a staircase lead to the individual wards, which are modern in appearance, well maintained and consist of spacious rooms with up to four beds. When we entered her room, Madhushree was awake and on seeing her mother-in-law complained about thirst and pain in her lower abdomen. Mrs Chowdhury got some painkillers from the nurses outside, and upon her return did produce an insurance claim form for Madushree to sign. Later they discussed with her whether Amrit, the absent father, should return earlier from Mumbai but agreed that it would be a waste of money. In the meantime, Madhushree’s mother and her brother had arrived and were led in by Mr Chowdhury, who had effectively assumed the role of host, which he performs on festive occasions in his own house. Given the fact that the presence of men in general, and, indeed, a father-in-law in this case, at the hospital bed of a woman who has just given birth is a recent phenomenon and may well make the latter feel quite uncomfortable, he resigned himself to meeting visitors in the corridor. There were so many of them that one hour later, ten hours after the ‘operation’ had taken place, the 4 There has been no recorded incident here in which the date of delivery was manipulated so as to match an auspicious day; however, there are reports that this happens elsewhere.

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room was crowded by relatives, friends and neighbours, who had come to ‘see the new-born’ before they proceeded to greet Madhushree. Most visitors commented on the size and weight of the baby, the skin colour and other characteristics, and made some remark relating its more obvious features to his father’s looks. In all these conversations about the little boy, his mother’s contribution was downplayed, mainly because the baby was male and was therefore expected to look like the father. Three days later I returned to the hospital with my partner and one-year-old son where we met the Chowdhurys, Madhushree’s mother and brother and some friends who were chatting with the new mother. She was still propped up against some pillows in bed but had been walking around earlier and said that she felt much better. Her main complaint was that the nurses did not bring the baby in often enough. But she, nevertheless, seemed to enjoy the attention of her guests.5 Though everybody was in good spirits, among the affines the sense of relief, which had united her in-laws and her mother and brother during my first visit, had given way to palpable tension. This, I found, related to the question of where Madhushree and, in the eyes of her in-laws more importantly, the newborn would stay once she was released from hospital. Though the matter was not openly discussed, we witnessed a silent battle and got to know that both camps had stocked up on equipment and extra help to support their claims to mother and child. In the end, the Chowdhurys were overruled by their strong-willed daughter-inlaw who took advantage of the custom that allows a young mother to spend some time in her natal home before and after the birth of her first child. Her wish to move to her natal home was supported from a moral point of view by the ill-health of her widowed mother. While her in-laws helplessly looked on as Madhushree manipulated notions of customary rights and filial duty to her advantage, they had to accept that Amrit would also spend the month-long ‘confinement’ in his wife’s mother’s house. The resulting tension between the various parties surfaced openly during Shosthi puja, which took place in the Chowdhury’s house a month later. On this occasion, Amrit made clear that he was determined not to accept his parents’ attempts to marginalize Madushree and her family’s relationship to his son, and at one point an argument between him and his father broke out. Unperturbed, the assembled guests greeted the young couple and baby Akash, who in their view had finally found his way into his bangsha and had arrived at his future home. Medicalization: continuity and change Since the publication of Brigitte Jordan’s seminal comparative work Birth in Four Cultures, the anthropology of childbirth has represented a critique of the medicalized, obstetric perspective on childbirth, with its reliance on experts and its tendency to minimize women’s agency (Jordan 1993 [1978]: 4–6). The numerous cross-cultural studies that followed show the heightened interest in alternative childbearing practices and the concern with changes in traditional ways of birthing. 5

Like many middle-class mothers she did not try to breastfeed.

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It is in this context that authors like Davis-Floyd and Sargent emphasized the need for anthropological studies of childbirth which ‘actively seek ways to enhance [this] potential for complementarity’ (Davis-Floyd and Sargent 1997: 5). Following earlier explorations of ‘other’ models of childbirth, scholars have recently focused on the imposition of a ‘Western’ model on existing practices and meanings in a wide range of regional settings. Authors such as Jordan came to the conclusion that the medicalization of childbirth has more negative than positive effects, and this critique of medicalized childbirth is perhaps most forcefully articulated by those who study hospital births in various contexts (see Stephens 1986). The interest in the exploration of non-traditional, medicalized childbirth (see Sesia 1997; Szurek 1997; Hunt 1999) is fuelled by a focus on the ‘cultures of globalization’ and the diversity of effects the adaptation of ‘Western’ practices and knowledge may have. It is apparent that a more differentiated view on technologies and the so-called ‘new reproductive world order’ has emerged and although a wide range of studies emphasize the negative effects of socio-economic change, authors like Ginsburg and Rapp argue that reproduction does provide a fruitful arena in which to explore the micro-perspective of such transformations (Ginsburg and Rapp 1995b: 2). Where new reproductive technologies are concerned path-breaking work on the everyday lives of women affected by globalization has been done (see Edwards et al. 1993; Bhardawaj 2002), but with reference to conception and birth we still have to grasp the full extent to which less recent, but equally invasive, technologies transform the everyday lives of women and the wider understanding of reproduction and the family in different contexts. As in most studies of hospital births in the West, investigations into non-Western contexts are critical towards numerous aspects of medicalized birth, including antenatal services, medical practitioners, the technologies applied and the authoritative knowledge produced. Jordan’s summary set the tone for the critical work on ‘cosmopolitan obstetrics’, and can be easily applied to India: In many countries of the Third World strategies for development include the importation of obstetric technology and of technology-dependent obstetric procedures such as hospital deliveries, pharmacologically managed labours, the use of ultrasound and electronic foetal monitoring, induction of labour, instrumental and surgical delivery, and the care of premature and sick infants in intensive care units. While it is clear that such facilities and their technologies will lower some kinds of mortality and morbidity, their importation often has unforeseen and not really assessed negative effects. Beyond that, the replacement of traditional ‘low technology’ raises fundamental questions about concomitant transformation in the nature of knowledge about the birth process, which in turn affects the distribution of decision-making power and the ability of women to control the reproductive process. (Jordan 1993 [1978]: 199–200)

This stance has certainly been employed in the study of childbirth in poor and marginalized communities in South Asia from a development perspective (see Jacobson 1995; Patel 1998; Rozario 1998). Within this context, ‘medicalized hospital birth’ figures as a system imposed on poor women, with mostly negative and often fatal consequences. Decisions on the type of care and delivery on offer are analysed

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within a rationalist framework, within which economic determinants may be modified by including cultural values, such as ideas regarding purity and pollution. But what is obvious in the case of South Asia is that in this region, the high rates of mother and child mortality6 and detailed studies of reproductive processes based on fieldwork in rural areas do not support a nostalgic view of non-allopathic approaches to childbirth (Jeffery et al. 1989; Rozario 1998). However, what is also clear is that even as more poor women in urban areas have access to antenatal services and hospitals, their well-being may suffer as substandard procedures and interventionist reproductive technologies employed to produce children of the desired sex put them at risk (see, for instance, Van Hollen 2003). The institutionalization of medicalized childbirth on the Indian subcontinent commenced more than one hundred years ago when the first maternity wards were established in Madras and Calcutta during the latter half of the nineteenth century. Since then, hospitalized birth has become the norm among the middle classes and, in line with comparable developments elsewhere, ‘elective’ Caesarean sections have become the delivery of choice. In the following section I will attempt to broaden our understanding of the transformations reproduction is undergoing through an investigation of the question as to why Caesarean sections are so popular and will move away from the common interpretation of interventionist childbirth as a matter of status towards a more nuanced interpretation of deliveries and technologies within the framework of kinship. Narratives of pregnancy and birth are, here as elsewhere on the subcontinent, situated in the domestic sphere and became the subject of intense debate when ‘indigenous’ practices relating to kinship, marriage and the raising of children were scrutinized by foreign administrators, missionaries, and social reformers (Chatterjee 1993). The rituals, technologies and practices involved in childbearing in colonial contexts were typically judged in the light of new discourses on modernity and ‘scientific’ forms of knowledge, which included new practices of ‘hygiene’ and of ‘antenatal’ and ‘post-partum’ care. While their maternal qualities were questioned, Bengali upper-caste and middle-class women were at the same time exposed to European concepts of pollution, maternal well-being and household organization on the basis of racist stereotypes (Jolly 1998: 6). However, although such hegemonic discourses were influential in the Indian context, and inform policies of the postcolonial state to date, the diversity of reactions ranging from direct resistance and

6 According to the human development report published by the UN, the infant mortality rate in India was 71 per 1,000 life births in 1997 and maternal mortality was stated as 570 per 100,000 life births in 1990 (United Nations Human Development Report 1999). These rates compare negatively with countries like Thailand, where the infant mortality rate was 31 per 1,000 life births in 1997 and maternal mortality was 200 per 100,000 births in 1990. Though the maternal mortality rates decreased marginally in the meantime, maternal deaths in India account for 30% of the worldwide rate of mortality (Times of India 30/9/2000) and a local study states that women in West Bengal report very high rates of complications before and after birth (Ghatak 2005: 44).

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indirect protest to partial appropriation and transformation is well documented throughout the region (see Ram and Jolly 1998).7 Various forms of disciplining knowledge found their way into women’s everyday repertoire via home management manuals and the education of girls. However, the ‘reconceptualization of Bengali women’ (Walsh 1994) did not initially include the reform of pregnancy and childbirth-related rituals and customary practices. In spite of the efforts made by those initiating the foundation of hospitals and funds dedicated to the spread of medical knowledge about childbirth, discourses about hygiene and medical intervention did – according to the older women interviewed – not really affect birthing until the 1960s. Arnold suggests that Indian women’s health was not seen as a priority under colonial rule, unless these women were prostitutes (Arnold 1993);8 and in the post-colonial era women’s health was not really a concern unless these women were poor and had to be subjected to family planning programmes. Moreover, until hospital deliveries became more widespread, pregnancy and birth did not figure as prominently in discourses on reforms as female education and conjugality (Guha 1998). Though middle-class women gradually entered the public sphere as pupils, students, political activists and professionals, they remained literally hidden from public view as birthing women throughout the colonial period and beyond (Engels 1996).9 My data suggests that it was only during the 1960s that private nursing homes, which were used by middle-class families – as opposed to hospitals run by the state or charities – sprang up, and these institutions offered deliveries in a more intimate and less anonymous environment than hospitals. Gradually discourses on hygiene substituted notions about the polluting effects of birthing while medical intervention began to be seen as safe, especially for the child. Pregnancy and childbirth are complex processes, but individual representations like the maternal histories on which this chapter is based are dominated by a number of related themes. One of them is the opposition between tradition and modernity, which women refer to when describing the changes birthing has undergone. My data suggests that, in the same way as the much studied spread of female education and companionate marriage, new discourses on pregnancy and birth represented significant conjunctures in the lives of women belonging to different generations (see Borthwick 1984; Chatterjee 1993; Engels 1996). Thus, individual time, chronological time and notions of progress are often reflected upon with reference to reproductive change, and hospital births signified intergenerational differences in many accounts. But while the dichotomy between past and present may appear clear-cut in hindsight, there are strong continuities as well, as actual practices were modified within a set of structural constraints – most prominently the norms associated with patrilocality. 7 The strategies employed to avoid the control of maternal bodies included the management of fertility through contraception or abortion (Jolly 1998). 8 Discussing the foundation of the Dufferin Fund, Guha asserts that the hospitals run by the trust could not cope with the high number of women wanting admission but fails to analyse the underlying reasons for oversubscription (Guha 1998). 9 Like in the Madras Presidency, Anglo-Indians and Bengali Christians in Calcutta were the first to accept the services on offer (Van Hollen 1998).

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The narratives of mothers demonstrate that these transformations are gradual, with younger women comparing their experience of highly interventionist Caesarean sections with their mother’s deliveries in nursing homes, and the latter talking about the shift from the home births their mothers experienced to birth in such a medical context. Maternal histories of the most senior women and their daughters begin, more often than not, with accounts of the acute sense of shame felt by a young married woman when she realized that she was pregnant. Early pregnancy was characterized by instruction in the appropriate behavioural patterns, food taboos and restrictions regarding her mobility, which matches younger women’s experiences of this early phase as a contest for control over the pregnant woman’s body. Living in her in-laws’ house, a pregnant woman relies on her affines for support and the customary treats, which are often denied or granted in a patronizing manner. The majority of elderly women reported that a rigid regime of food taboos and religious observations was imposed during their first pregnancies. Among secluded upper-caste women contact with men became minimal during pregnancy, while all women spoke about the dangers they feared, which included attacks by ghosts and the evil eye, as well as damage to the foetus through contaminated food and ‘bad’ thoughts. Though the last three decades saw beliefs in supernatural powers like ghosts dwindle. The way intra-household hierarchies determine the well-being of the birthing mother through the provision of specific foods dominated all accounts of pregnancy. I used to get these cravings for all sorts of special foods, and my mother in-law would send the maidservant out to get special treats like sour mango, which was exactly what I needed. Another day I wanted some sweetmeat from a specific shop, and my husband would go and buy ten of those, all of which I ate in one evening.

This is how Rekha describes the very caring treatment she received in her inlaws house. But not all women were so lucky, and in the majority of cases, cravings, treats and aversions would turn the daily meals into a battle between daughter-inlaw and her husband’s mother, with both sides depicting the other as inconsiderate, irrational and ignorant. Sunita, a 50-year-old, described in detail how (according to her) her mother-in-law would deliberately make her prepare dishes she found abhorrent when she was pregnant, and how she was deprived of the treats and desired foods benefiting a mother. Here, as in other narratives, the mother-to-be appears to be treated just as a vessel for the growing foetus, and is therefore force-fed items considered beneficial for the baby. When I was pregnant I could keep nothing down, but she would just try to force me to eat all these things like almonds and milk, and I would sit on my bed and could not get any of it down, so I started to throw all of it out of the window and lost a lot of weight, since they would not allow me to eat anything I really wanted.

Among the powerful ideas related to food, taboos imposed on pregnant woman are many, although within this group there was very little consistency as to what

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should be avoided. Thus, Borsa Ganguly asserted that she ate almost everything during the early stages of pregnancy but that she did abstain from eggs and the commonly avoided pineapple. However, she emphasized that her in-laws encouraged her to have more nutritious foods like butter, bananas, vitamin-rich vegetables, milk, lentils and fish. In her case conception had taken much longer than her in-laws expected, and so she had been treated ‘like a queen’ in her in-laws’ house. Furthermore, in many cases the complaints about the treatment in the in-laws’ house included the way they catered for the psychological well-being of the pregnant daughter-in-law. Like Rekha, others were not happy to spend the first few months of pregnancy in their shasur bari, during which time they felt weak and vulnerable. To facilitate the positive development and growth of the child, a pregnant woman should avoid all tensions and ‘consume good words as well as good books’. But Borsa, who herself had a very positive experience of pregnancy in her in-law’s house, pointed out that the tension between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law does often increase during this time. While, in theory, a pregnant woman should be made to feel comfortable and happy, Borsa echoed other voices when she added: ‘but [all that] is rarely possible in the in-laws’ house, there you will not get good food or at least you will not eat what you like’. Loss of appetite, nausea and vomiting are the most common complaints during early pregnancy and are taken seriously, since it is believed that the body of the child ‘hardens’ fully within the first five months, and that deficiencies in the mother’s diet can seriously hamper the growth of the child. Fear of supernatural threats and food taboos routinely imposed on pregnant women in the past have become less important today, but affinal relations structure the experience of pregnancy and are crucial in all accounts. Whereas rarely taken seriously, restrictions on the variety of food, movements and exposure to unrelated persons are still imposed by many a mother-in-law. A pregnant woman’s well-being is often the responsibility of affines, and it is up to her mother-in-law to lower her workload, provide her with healthy meals, and perform shadh ceremonies during which she is fed her desired foods. Though it seems that these rituals are meant to celebrate the pregnant woman, the more sinister side is a celebration of a pregnancy which in the past many mothers did not survive. Today, the ritual is performed to enhance the growth of the foetus and to foster an easy delivery.10 During shadh, the mother-to-be is worshipped as auspicious and fertile by the women belonging to her husband’s and/or her own patriline. The shift from giving birth at home – in the double sense of natal home and home birth – towards giving birth in the in-laws’ house or a hospital nearby, constitutes one of the most significant changes in the lives of Bengali middle-class women after independence. Like other north Indian communities, Bengali women were traditionally sent back to their parents’ house a couple of weeks before the birth of at least their first child and remained there until the period of post-partum confinement was over. As many senior women observed, the introduction of professional antenatal care has laid the responsibility for the well-being of mother and child firmly on the affines who, on the one hand, are now paying for many of the related services but 10 Such female rituals have been interpreted as occasions for the positive symbolic integration and affirmation of the fears and insecurity surrounding birth (Jacobson 1995).

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who can also legitimize demands on her time and labour power. Supriya Mukherjee, a widow in her fifties, gave birth to all her three sons in the late sixties and early seventies and asserted that she spent all her pregnancies in her in-laws’ house. She explained: I was not allowed to go to my parents’ house, my father came, but she [the mother-in-law] did not give me permission to go to my parents’ house, she also did not give permission to my sisters-in-law. We had to do what the mother-in-law said. She told my parents that there was no good hospital in their place, ‘so how can I send my daughter-in-law? How can I be at peace?’ She always prohibited these visits [to the parental home], and after the birth she said ‘No, the boy is going to feel cold’. So I did not go for one and a half years, only long after the first-rice ceremony. At that time we did not think about whether we liked that or not. Today when someone feels that she wants to be taken to father’s house she will just go – but when my mother-in-law said ‘no’ you had to stay. She did not trust my house, she said that they will not tell me off … But it was often hard, when I was sick during the pregnancy the doctor prescribed some medicine, but she said ‘no you cannot take that because it may harm the child’.

In the case of elderly women, who often migrated to the city upon marriage, antenatal care and the introduction of hospital deliveries implied the decrease of customary visits to the natal home, a change facilitated by the gradual emergence of a medicalized birthing model. Today, doctors are involved from the earliest stages of pregnancy onwards and they are mostly chosen by in-laws, so that in order to guarantee the much valued continuity of care, a young married woman will remain in their house and often returns after giving birth in a hospital selected by her affines. The cultural meaning of a daughter’s visit to her natal home, and the important role of these ties in the north Indian kinship system has recently been highlighted by anthropological studies like Raheja and Gold’s account of women’s perspectives in marriage and kinship in western India (Raheja and Gold 1994). With reference to childbearing in Bengali middle-class families, this custom has been modified to the effect that women belonging to the most junior generation I worked with actually remained in their in-laws’ house before and after birth. Thus, a very important positive aspect of women’s experience of childbearing – namely the role played by a daughter’s parents, her return to her parental home to give birth, and the subsequent period of rest surrounded by ‘one’s own people’ – has virtually disappeared. There are obvious reasons for this development, amongst which the control of the daughter-in-law’s labour power was paramount in all accounts. I use the term labour power here in the sense of women’s contribution to domestic work which is, as Kum Kum Sangari asserts, ‘culturally specific and changing’ and ‘is structured by social institutions, the labour market, and by other institutions that regulate labour and inheritance’. In the given setting arranged marriages, patrilocality and middle-class domesticity provide the basis for the exploitation of daughters-in-law, even during the last weeks of pregnancy or just after birth (Sangari 1999: 279). The contribution of an in-married woman to the work done in the household figures prominently in the accounts of women belonging to all generations and is indeed, here as in Jeffery, Jeffery and Lyon’s work that deals with rural Uttar Pradesh, the factor that most obviously determines the type of medical care a woman receives (Jeffery et

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al. 1989). Though the labour undertaken differs significantly from their account, with middle-class women mainly engaged in what Papanek referred to as status production work (Papanek 1989), the notion of ‘work’ (kaj) provides the framework that unites women across class. Regarding the epistemological relationship between different forms of domestic labour, Sangari observes that: Though similar in terms of responsibility, the contemporary middle-class woman’s assisted labour, often geared to family status production including activities related to high consumption and elaborate maintenance of property, is not comparable to poor rural or urban women’s survival-orientated domestic labour, essential to the bare existence of the family. There is, however, a relation between different types and definitions of domestic labour along the joint axes of class differentiation and mobility. (Sangari 1999: 295)

Although every household in this sample employed servants to perform certain tasks, virtually all women who had given birth complained about the immense workload they were given by their in-laws, and the availability of servants before and after birth was clearly an important marker of status. Supriya Mukherjee, who lived jointly with her in-laws and her husband’s brothers’ families at the time of the birth of her three sons, explained the discrepancy between the idealized custom and reality thus: I was in hospital for seven days when the eldest was born, and with the middle one I said I will not stay long, I left after four days – again, with the youngest one I stayed for seven days. In the hospital we paid a Bengali woman to help me, she massaged the baby and me and emptied the bedpan and so on. Here in the house we had our own people who did all that. I stayed alone in that room [during the period of confinement], my mother-in-law told me to do that. I talked only to those who came close to the door … If the daughterin-law stays in the house [of her in-laws], we should not let her do any work, that is our custom – for two to three months, she should not carry anything after the birth, etc. But I had to do everything, I washed the clothes of the children, I made food, I cleaned the thakur ghor [room for the gods] while I was pregnant. I cooked and did all that work, it was only after the birth that I didn’t work that much. It was like that: while I was doing roti for the children, I felt the ‘pain’ and then had a baby.

Other changes addressed in the course of interviews are related to the management of birth and, more specifically, the role of the various relatives involved. In the ‘old days’, the period before nursing homes became popular, birthing was an all female affair. At the onset of contractions, referred to as baetha (pain), a pregnant woman was ushered into a separate room which had been equipped with a pile of rugs or an old bedstead. It was up to the birthing woman’s senior relatives to decide when to send for the dhai, and often this happened very late. Once the dhai had arrived the birthing mother was left in her care. Unlike the rural women in studies of home birth elsewhere on the subcontinent, none of those who gave birth at home were physically supported by a female relative during any of their births. Confined to the smallest and darkest corner in the house and often seated on a bedstead, birthing mothers were forced to rely on the dhai to guide them through the various stages of birth. Because of the polluting nature of birth, these ‘traditional birth assistants’ were always recruited from low-caste communities, and although

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some dhais must have gained some obstetric knowledge and were expected to handle complications like a breech birth or excessive blood loss, their expertise was perceived as minimal. This feeling was aggravated by the fact that in all these families the dhai was seen as a low-caste working-class person called to deal with a polluting and potentially dangerous event. Consequently, her effective support and autonomy in dealing with the birthing woman was very limited. It is not surprising that my interlocutors referred to dhais as ‘dirty’ old women, who spent a lot of time shouting and haggling, and Rozario reminds us that dhais were not necessarily devoted to the job in the past either (Rozario 1998).11 In the accounts I collected it appears that it was not uncommon for more experienced mothers to postpone the dhai’s arrival for as long as possible and try to ‘get on with it’ by themselves. Such negative feelings and the acute sense of shame experienced by mothers are carried over into the early phase of hospital births. At first, nursing homes in the locality did the job unless there were complications.12 Whereas, traditionally, only women had been involved in birthing, fully medicalized birth necessitated that the pregnant woman enter the ‘outside’ sphere and thus men got involved in the process, for instance accompanying a pregnant woman to and from the hospital and discussing matters with ‘officials’. Many women recall the acute embarrassment they felt as they travelled with the (normally avoided) husband’s elder brother, father or uncle, who would sit in the corridor during the delivery. Once admitted, the birthing woman was routinely confined to a ‘stretcher’ and attended to by an ‘ayah’. These ayahs, often former dhais, had a very limited role to play and the existing social distance between her and the birthing woman was reinforced by the institutional hierarchy.13 As a hospital employee, the dhai was called ayah, and her duties consisted mainly of cleaning up, inserting catheters, and of the cutting and disposal of the umbilical cord.14 Borsa Ganguly recalled the breech birth of her son in the late 1970s, during which she was only assisted by such a low-caste and lower-class attendant: We went to the hospital at night, it was Sunday and it was raining very hard when he was born. The doctors were not present, only one ayah was there when the waters broke around ten. He was born at 1.45 a.m., feet first and then the rest, but it still was a normal birth, totally normal. The doctor did not come, there was only the ayah, who was not sure what to do, so she went and fetched the nurse. He [the son] then started screaming, and the nurse held him into some warm water and gave him oxygen. 11 As in-married wives, birthing women had few opportunities to get to know the ‘traditional birth attendant’. Special attendants for different castes as reported by Patel were not mentioned (Patel 1998). 12 Until the 1960s doctors called to pregnant patients diagnosed while the woman in question was represented by a male member of the family or hidden behind a screen. This kind of ‘medicalized’ antenatal care was seen as an extension of seeking advice from local male medical practitioners (like a kaviraj or fakir) who were regularly consulted on behalf of pregnant women in the past and who are still popular today for advice on problems with fertility and pregnancy. 13 It should be noted that nursing is not a prestigious occupation in this part of India. 14 An important aspect of women’s recollections is the arbitrariness of the decisions taken by the dhais, who have also been studied by Rozario in rural Bangladesh (Rozario 1998).

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As the account shows, often a nurse supervised the early period of labour and was responsible for standard procedures like manual external examinations in the nursing home. The appointed doctor arrived once the actual delivery was imminent, and in many instances reached the nursing home only after the birth. Nevertheless, all women belonging to this middle-aged generation presented doctors and nurses as powerful, knowledgeable and proactive. A rather positive aspect of hospital birth mentioned in all accounts was the successful management of pollution outside the home, but this advantage of the new regime was weighed against the involvement of lower-class personnel in the care of mother and child, which was described as less desirable. In fact, the care received was among the reasons women cited for leaving the nursing home as soon as possible. Returning to their in-laws’ house, women were then often put up in a separate room with their baby and most families employed an additional servant dedicated to the care of mother and child. In the home, a brief period of confinement was still observed after women began to give birth in their in-laws’ house or a nursing home. Soon this institution took on a more ambivalent character. Since the weeks after a delivery are the only time when an in-married woman can delegate work and withdraw from her duties, as an increasing number spent this period in the affine’s house, the most enjoyable aspect of confinement – the rest and food a mother would provide for her daughter under the same circumstances – turned into a matter of control. Under the new regime affines decide what is best, and in more than one case they did not provide the expected services at all. Some new mothers demonstrated their dissent and rage over this new pattern by throwing away food cooked especially for them; others refused to eat ‘healthy’ food altogether. What still is a period of positive adjustment and recovery in other settings (see Patel 1998) took on a much more ambivalent meaning under these new circumstances. A majority of mothers who spent the post-partum period in their in-laws’ house described it as a rather unpleasant experience and complained about their complete isolation, and a significant minority alleged that affines routinely neglected them. This new regime, in which the traditional rights of the birthing woman are being eroded and the affines’ control expands, provides the context for the following discussion of yet another shift in childbearing practices, namely the emergence of a preference for elective Caesarean sections. Caesarean sections With the introduction of new technologies available in the private sector, deliveries in nursing homes underwent further dramatic changes. Most prominent among the new trends is the increasing popularity of self-elected Caesarean sections, which today represent the ideal form of delivery in this stratum of Indian society.15 15 Data from a sample of 210 deliveries in private hospitals in Chennai suggests a rate of 45% for elective Caesareans (Pai et al. 1999). These interventions are popular in many countries, notably the US and across Latin America, where a correlation between higher national production levels, a well developed private health sector and rising rates of Caesarean sections has been established (Belizán et al. 1999; Potter et al. 2001). In comparison, Caesarean sections are much rarer in countries without a well developed private health care provision,

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While the chapter resituates the analysis of discourses on motherhood in South Asia within the framework of an anthropology of kinship and reproduction view – which allows us to deal with the specific power relations this entails – we would be in denial if we did not recognize that the transformation of reproductive processes and understandings of women’s well-being among the Indian middle classes does not have to be interpreted in the light of a massive, global, consumer-oriented market (Lazarus 1997; Stivens 1998; Taylor 2000; Jacobson 2001). Of course, high-tech Caesarean deliveries have a widely acknowledged value as markers of class and affluence, which feeds directly into aspirations and middle-class culture in India as elsewhere. Although privatization has played a role in the popularity of such deliveries in the past, the availability of new ‘ultra-modern’ hospitals and not privatization per se, shaped the preference for such interventionist deliveries among the women interviewed. This mode of delivery represents the ideal among all the younger women and although there are many middle-class women who still give birth the ‘normal’ way, those given the choice opt for an elective Caesarean section. Before we resort to a common sense explanation suggesting that the rise in elective Caesareans stems from a combination of women’s ‘false consciousness’ and the dynamics of the private sector, I would suggest that we analyse the context within which women themselves represent the pattern. For new ideas about reproduction to gain hold, they have to match with existing notions about what makes the body, the person and the related reproductive processes work. The notion that ideology, not medical necessity, is essentially responsible for the rise in medical intervention in the birthing process has been put forward by scholars who criticized the production view of reproduction identified with Western obstetrics. Emily Martin, who analyses the metaphors related to birthing from the seventeenth century onwards, asserts that ‘mechanical metaphors’ emerged with the modern view of the body as a machine (Martin 1987: 54). With the imagery of the ‘body-machine’, the production view of reproduction spread and triggered a whole range of specialist procedures applied at the time of birth. Though such a ‘production’ seems to be situated firmly within the context of European histories of industrialization, the traditional view of birthing in the given setting lends itself to interventions because the processes involved are seen in a very mechanistic way as well. The prevalent understanding of reproductive processes is based on Ayurvedic teachings and an understanding of the body – holistic as it may be – which explains physical processes through notions of balance between substances, passages and organs. This mechanistic view of the processes of birthing prevails among those interviewed, and is supplemented with vocabulary and ideas borrowed freely from Western obstetrics. In fact, doctors do frame their explanations of medical problems in terms of these ‘traditional notions’, with a strong emphasis on the idea that most complications during birthing are caused by failure of the baby to ascend through the birthing channel. This image is widely used to justify medical intervention, and in particular Caesarean sections.

for example in Britain where they account for only one fifth of all deliveries, out of which 6% are classified as ‘emergency’ Caesareans due to complications.

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Madushree, whom I mentioned above, for instance, was convinced that a mother over the age of twenty-five will face problems during a vaginal delivery based solely on the grounds that she will have gained weight after marriage. In her own case, she argued that a Caesarean was the only safe option because the additional kilos blocked the birthing channel. Others expressed concerns that overeating during pregnancy would cause the stomach to expand and push on the baby’s body so that it could not develop appropriately and would not enter the birthing channel at the right angle. Further related notions involve explanations for complications in terms of excessive retention of menstrual blood, which is not discharged during pregnancy and which is, therefore, blocking the baby’s way. Interventions like Caesarean sections are, within this context, seen as a functional alternative to emni (normal) birth, which may not present a viable option for the mothers of today because they lack the strength and physical fitness of the older generation. When I pointed out that I, myself, had had a ‘normal’ delivery at the age of thirty-three, Minakshi, Madushree’s mother-in-law, explained: But you were physically fit. If a woman here is pregnant at the age of thirty-three she will be afraid, because she is not fit. Look at my daughter-in-law, she knows what she has to do to keep well, but she has no tendency to do so, she does whatever she wants to do, she eats everything, she goes out whenever she wants, and goes to see the doctor all the time … But if there are problems, the doctors are there to fix it. That was different for me at the time, I was living with my in-laws, and I understood a lot, I tried hard, and I can stand pain. If the doctors see that someone has this mentality they will give their best. … Earlier we did not have a choice, they would have just said, you are fit and therefore you will not have a Caesarean, but today the patients have become so focused on their convenience … They hear that with a Caesarean there is no pain, and this and that. I have seen it myself, when I was working at the hospital, if a woman had contractions for some days, many would say ‘open it, I can’t bear this any longer’ – what are the doctors supposed to do?

As indicated in Minakshi’s response, the provision of these deliveries is also interpreted in the context of new consumption practices among a growing middle class obsessed with status. Furthermore, changes in the way health care is provided play an important role. While a complete review of the changes the health care system in urban India has undergone during the period of economic liberalization is beyond the scope of this chapter, some points need to be discussed. Changing health care The first pertinent changes are related to the increased medicalization of women’s fertility and reproductive behaviour, including the routine employment of amniocentesis and abortion for sex selection, and the widespread use of interventionist contraceptive measures like permanently inserted contraceptives or hysterectomies. In this environment, Caesarean sections can be interpreted as one step in a line of routine interventions, including antenatal care and various other practices related to hospital deliveries. The ‘privatization’ of health care shapes the way antenatal care and deliveries are approached and is widely held responsible for the rise in Caesarean sections. With liberalization a market for health care opened up, and the

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subsequent restructuring of the Indian economy introduced more competition, with a host of national and multinational corporations operating chains of hospitals and laboratories in urban centres. Previously, many families would have been happy to send a pregnant woman to have her delivery supervised by the doctor of choice in a government hospital. Today, new facilities are available in more nursing homes and hospitals, all doctors are attached to private sector institutions and, as I show below, they recommend these to their patients. Reproduction has become big business, not only where very complex technologies like in-vitro fertilization are practised, but especially where antenatal care and routine birth are concerned. For example, instead of the three ante-natal checks regularly performed in the past, pregnant women today visit their doctors as often as once a week and undergo many, mostly unnecessary, tests. This phenomenon is the result of the powerful doctor–laboratory nexus, which is not limited to the private sector but which affects the public sector as well. The data collected suggest that tests are as likely to be carried out on behalf of doctors employed in the public sector, and in practice the lines between the two sectors are often blurred. Because public opinion of the medical system is very low, urban families maintain close personal ties with specific doctors who are seen as trustworthy and whose skills and decisions are rarely criticized.16 The prestige attached to a modern, high-tech delivery has rightly been highlighted by researchers investigating the ‘modern medical hegemony’ of hospitalized deliveries as a factor in their acceptance (see Georges 1997: 94–6). In recent studies the status attached to high-tech medical procedures is held responsible for the rising rates of elective Caesareans among middle-class women in Latin America (Belizán et al. 1999), Turkey (Tatar et al. 2000) and India (Pai et al. 1999). A further explanation, ready at hand, is the financial interest doctors have in such interventionist and expensive, but also time saving procedures, and recent research has highlighted that women in many of these settings are subjected to Caesarean sections even though they may actually prefer a vaginal delivery simply out of convenience (Potter et al. 2001). There can be no doubt that doctors and those investing in nursing homes and hospitals have a pronounced interest in the proliferation of reproductive technologies and interventionist procedures, of which amniocentesis, ultrasound, Caesarean sections and abortions are particularly widespread. In 2003 an elective Caesarean section cost between 5,000 and 15,000 Rupees, depending on the hospital chosen, and it was clear that where medical insurance did not cover the procedure, the resources of the family were stretched to pay for such deliveries. One reason for the ease with which middle-class families may choose a Caesarean is the increase in the number of husbands, whose jobs include a packet for health insurance that includes cover for the birth of their children. However, this is not the case for most government employees, who may still choose a private nursing home but whose expenses for Caesarean sections are not covered. Among this group of middle-class consumers, women often decide in favour of vaginal delivery. One of them, Lakshmi Datta, a lower middle-class 16 With a heavily unionized public sector, doctors in the private sector are more likely to be liable if procedures are unsuccessful. Assaults on doctors have become increasingly common in both environments.

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woman in her mid-twenties, went for a ‘normal’ birth because she and her husband had married against the wishes of his family, and thus they lacked any support from her in-laws. She told me before the birth of her son that their savings from her job as an office assistant and her husband’s salary as a middle-ranking civil servant did not cover the costs of a Caesarean section. The procedure had been suggested by her doctor who offered her ‘a special price’ should she decide to book into the private branch of the charity-run nursing home he was attached to. Lakshmi herself, whom I had a chance to talk to before and directly after the birth and whom I have met many times since, still regrets her decision to have a ‘normal’ delivery. She maintains that the pain she suffered was unbearable and emphasizes whenever we happened to discuss the subject that should she ever have a second child she would go for an elective Caesarean. In her case, the choice was hers and she did not go for the costly interventionist procedure for reasons related to the general situation within her household. She did, however, explicitly state that the fact that the doctor was clearly guiding her – a perfectly healthy young woman – towards a procedure the couple could ill afford, had played no role in this decision. I think it is fair to say that there is no evidence for a critical stance towards Caesarean sections as publicly expressed by any member of the medical establishment in India, although doctors do, in private, admit that there are growing concerns about the number of such operations carried out in badly maintained hospitals. Among the mothers themselves any criticism is directed at the cost of private health care and not towards the procedure or the preference of such deliveries.17 Their narratives do, however, also reveal how the shift from vaginal deliveries towards Caesarean sections does result from the negative notions associated with reproductive processes per se. Among their concerns are the strong association with shame and the experience of embarrassment, the allegedly extraordinary levels of pain endured and the possibility of bodily harm or even maternal death, evidence of which is seen in the high morality rates in rural areas and among urbanites in the past. Furthermore, although women are well aware of the interest medical practitioners have in a scheduled and speedy delivery, the image of caesars being less painful and ‘safe’ in comparison with the so-called emni (normal) birth is of great importance. There are no differences between members of various ethnic communities in this respect, and elective Caesareans are now as popular among Bengali Christians as among Marwari women, who held on to the tradition of home births for much longer. In spite of learned debates regarding the safety and pain experienced during and after different types of delivery, in urban Bengal it is widely believed that women suffer more during ‘normal’ births. In the course of the interviews ‘pain’ was a muchdiscussed topic and mothers who had had ‘normal’ births did not hesitate to describe the excruciating pain, the length and problematic nature of birth in general and the

17 Data on the Caesarean rates in Calcutta’s government or private hospitals are not available. It is, however, common for government hospitals to promote vaginal deliveries; they often charge a basic fee for antenatal care, delivery and post-natal check-ups, around 3,000 Rupees in 2001. I have discussed the impact new discourses on privatization and health care have on hospital births in detail elsewhere (Donner 2004).

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deliveries of their own children, in considerable detail. Unlike Van Hollen’s Tamil informants, who could draw on a discourse of female power (shakti) to discuss the empowering aspects of birthing, such positive connotations were never mentioned in the narratives I heard (Van Hollen 2003). Of knowledge, kin relations and the meaning of intervention Within this discourse Caesareans are represented as less dangerous than normal births, mainly by virtue of their shorter duration. Even doctors described them as safe and less prone to cause complications, while women belonging to different generations argued that an ‘operation’ would not be as life-threatening as having a vaginal delivery. No doubt, the largely negative experiences of earlier hospital deliveries fuel a generally critical attitude to ‘normal’ birth, although some of the older women asserted that they suffered only during the birth of their first child, there being a belief that birthing becomes easier with practice. Given this negative image, a newly-married woman will not readily agree to attempt a vaginal delivery. Thus, whether or not Caesareans are de facto easier and less painful or more painful and high risk – as many of my commentators assert – is not really the issue. However, it became clear in the course of the interviews that rather than looking at the scientific or medical evidence supporting such assumptions, class and intra-household relations provided the framework within which women argued in favour of one or the other type of delivery. A number of women were well aware that the pain experienced in the aftermath of a Caesarean section is intense, but this led them only to conclude that due to the prolonged period of recovery Caesareans represent the mode of birth for bhadramahila (gentlewomen). The view that Caesarean sections are for those who can afford prolonged periods of rest – and not financial considerations – were also put forward by working-class women. Since Caesareans are also believed to lead to excessive blood loss – which weakens the young mother even more and makes breastfeeding difficult as breast milk is thought to originate from blood – this kind of delivery is deemed unsuitable for lower-class women. A woman who has a Caesarean section is considered weak and has to bottle-feed, which makes Caesareans emblematic of middle-class status in the view of all the women interviewed. The meaning of this discourse on strength and recovery is reflected in the arrangements after the birth, when ‘helpers’ are employed in even the least affluent households. Whether or not women get more time to recover after a Caesarean section is difficult to establish. Those who had a vaginal delivery were expected to take up their chores as soon as two days afterwards and were very likely to resume their full duties within a fortnight. Women who had had a Caesarean section, on the other hand, emphasized that the wound kept them from doing housework for at least fourteen days. This was reflected not so much in the comments of younger women, but in those of their mothers and mothers-in-law, for instance Ila Chakraborty, who

18 Just how powerful the imagery of painful vaginal deliveries is was brought home to me when I realized that baetha, the generic term for pain, is also the word for contractions.

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commented on the fact that she had to take up her duties almost immediately after giving birth in a nursing home, whereas her daughter had been given some weeks rest in her in-laws’ house. The medicalized model of birth thus helped women living with their affines to gain rest after deliveries, whereby they are partly compensated for the loss of ‘traditional’ support in their parents’ house. This matches the observations that many, though not all, young women are ordered by their doctors to maintain bed rest towards the end of the pregnancy, and are thus de facto exempted from some chores. Though mothers-in-law complained about this new habit, and some pointed out that today every daughter-in-law will get a doctor to prescribe bed rest whenever she feels the slightest discomfort, these complaints present us with evidence that women do get the desired periods of rest in the context of medicalized birth.19 All the women interviewed, including Madhushree, presented their experiences of pregnancy and birth in the context of their roles as daughters-in-law living with affines. While working-class women see interventionist deliveries in the light of the negative effects on their labour power, the same assumed physical consequences are anticipated as a chance to gain extra help, rest and support by middle-class daughtersin-law. In short, both groups negotiate hospital births and different modes of delivery in the context of prevailing patterns of residence, intra-household hierarchies and household budgets. The last argument used in favour of Caesarean sections relates to an older concern with pollution which through hospital births has been successfully moved from the home to a neutral environment. Older women, who experienced home births attended by a low-class dhai, and those who gave birth during the early phase of hospital birth, agreed that pollution and the related embarrassment are successfully managed in the context of Caesarean sections. For those who still adhere to concepts of birth pollution, this is minimized because the pollution is related to notions of ‘bad’ and ‘nasty’ unmentionable body parts and fluids, which should certainly not be exposed, touched or examined. Since the blood lost during birthing is seen as equally polluting as the blood lost during menstruation, the discharge of vaginal blood during ‘normal’ births should be avoided. As medical intervention that involves internal examination is not associated with Caesarean sections, these deliveries appear to be ‘clean’ and allow women to manage shame, pollution and pain during birthing. The discussion and the case studies highlight the importance of the wider network of kin and intra-household relations for the analysis of changing childbearing practices. Residential patterns and the organization of housework, even if this consists ‘merely’ of tasks like the supervision of maidservants, are as important in determining a woman’s choice of delivery as are medical knowledge, the emergence of private hospitals and the interests of doctors. The decisions taken and the experiences of women are crucially embedded in the way the households they live in are organized in terms of class-based arrangements regarding women’s labour power and status production work.

19 It is widely assumed in the literature that women who returned to their natal home were not expected to participate in the running of the household. This was not necessarily the case and depended entirely on the composition of the household.

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Pregnancy and birth underwent multiple transformations and, here as elsewhere, the medicalization of childbirth led to the marginalization of forms of knowledge located in the domestic domain (Ginsburg and Rapp 1991: 321–3). But in the given context this process took a different form than one might have expected. It is apparent from the interviews and the two case studies that young birthing women negotiate their relative well-being (including rest, support and their ideal delivery) by playing out two types of authoritative knowledge against each other. They refer to knowledge generated within the domestic sphere that involves careful strategies to manage their relationships with their in-laws, and use the authority of knowledge situated outside the domestic sphere – medical knowledge in the strict sense – to negotiate the particular circumstances.20 This process set in with the general shift from birth in the natal home to birth in the affinal home. Since then birthing has shifted out of the domestic sphere as it takes place in hospitals. In the wake of this first major adjustment, the supremacy of the medicalized model of birth in private nursing homes was established, and deliveries and medical care for the pregnant woman became a matter of prestige for her affines. In a second shift, deliveries became subject to intervention and Caesarean sections emerged as a suitable middle class form of childbirth. Early maternal histories are dominated by the shift from birthing as something experienced by daughters in their parents’ house towards the gradual subordination of the birthing woman to the strict regime of her in-laws. In constrast, the material presented suggests that a growing number of young women today have access to better doctors and hospitals not because their parents or in-laws grant them better treatment but because their own or their husband’s status as employees entitles them to specific services. But regardless of who pays, under the new regime, the temporary removal of a birthing woman from the domestic sphere and existing intra-household hierarchies provides her with a sense of privilege at least during and immediately after the actual birth. How strongly domestic roles and power relations shape women’s experiences and decisions is further exemplified through an analysis of the rise in elective Caesarean sections. One of the most criticized interventionist techniques, elective Caesareans are the opposite of the idealized home birth of anthropological literature and parenting manuals, far removed from the ideal birth which has been described by MacCormack as characterized by ‘slow pace, jokes, gossip, and cat naps of village women upholding their neighbour and kinswoman on her heroic journey towards motherhood’ (MacCormack 1994b: 11). Critical perspectives on hospital deliveries and ‘medicalized’ childbirth emphasize more often than not that women experience an extreme loss of control and alienation in the course of this procedure. Moreover, Caesareans are represented as more painful and damaging to the overall health of the birthing woman than any other form of delivery. Consequently the popularity of Caesareans in non-Western countries (Belizán et al. 1999; Pai et al. 1999; Tatar et al. 2000) is explained with 20 General Practitioners working with Bengali women in London state that their female patients often prefer a non-Bengali doctor, as they are allegedly less likely to treat a patient as a ‘daughter’ or ‘daughter-in-law’ (Roseanna Pollen, personal communication).

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reference to the prestige value of high-tech medical procedures, the privatization of medical care and the decline in woman-centred forms of knowledge associated with pregnancy and birth. All these broad tendencies are relevant and influence women’s acceptance of medicalized birth in a context in which, we have to remind ourselves, the preferred methods of contraception are sterilization and abortion, and where one of the best kept secrets is the free use of amniocentesis for the purpose of sex selection. However, as Marcia Inhorn has pointed out with reference to Egyptian women’s use of reproductive technologies to conceive, while it is in our interest as anthropologists to show women’s agency as constrained by structural forces and power hierarchies, we also have to take into account that our subjects are ‘savvy reproductive actors who make pragmatic, agentive choices about their reproductive lives’. Structural constraints are not the only relevant factors, as reproductive agency is situated within limits which are ‘ideological, moral, social relational, practical, and even bodily in nature’ (Inhorn 2003: 269). All my interviews showed that women’s experiences and preferences have to be analysed in relation to the domestic setting in which they are embedded, in other words the ideology and the reality of the joint family. The accounts that older women provided remind us that home as in ‘home birth’ does not always imply romanticized notions of a safe haven in an alienated world, a shared sense of belonging and an imaginary female-centred space; it is quite clear, in fact, that most women experienced the meaning of ‘home’ in a much more ambiguous manner. The role of experts within this setting is equally complex as in many instances doctors dealing with a young woman during her pregnancy were perceived to be on the ‘woman’s side’. The doctor-patient link can, under certain circumstances, represent one of the main relationships a newly married woman has with people outside her husband’s house, which made some daughters-in-law evaluate their experience of experts and the technologies they used in very positive terms. Thus, the discussion of reproductive choice highlights once more the powerful role of affines in the lives of Indian middle-class women. Embodying class: value, work and pain Scholars and laypersons with whom I discussed the relative complacency with which women in Calcutta undergo elective Caesarean sections, were quick to label them as less knowledgeable and more subordinated than their (middle-class) Western ‘sisters’. In this chapter I contest easy assumptions regarding the reasons why women from very different backgrounds may have to agree to or choose an interventionist procedure. Furthermore, the chapter seeks to establish that these decisions are not exclusively based on a lack of knowledge about, or access to, a presumed ‘truth’ regarding the relative merits of different types of birth. I have argued elsewhere that privatization has brought reproductive choice very clearly into the orbit of neoliberal ideologies of the body, personhood and the family (Donner 2004). However, while it is quite clear that different modes of childbearing are related to class-based identities, they are not merely a reflection of economic standing or access to specialist services in urban areas. In the given setting the workings of gender and class determine in a

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much more subtle, and ethnographically more complex, way whether a woman will have a Caesarean section or forego the operation in favour of the allegedly more painful ‘normal’ birth. In addition to the prestige attached to technologies and expert advice, the dynamics at work here are equally related to questions about the value of marriage, in terms of health insurance, for instance, as they are related to ideas about women’s work in the household and the reordering of relationships between women belonging to different generations in the house. When asked why she wanted a ‘C-section’, Madhushree, whose case study is featured above, did know exactly where I was coming from – after all, she had read all the available imported manuals on pregnancy, childcare and birth during the months she had been confined to her bed because of pre-eclampsia. She was, therefore, aware of the arguments against Caesareans put forward by childcare ‘experts’. Nevertheless, she asserted that: [I]t is not as if I am taking that lightly, but it is less dangerous and less painful. See, not all women can afford to go for it, moneywise anyway, because it is expensive, but also because they will be needed in the house. My mother for example, she could not have a Caesarean although they could afford it, because she was on her own, my father was posted in Bombay at the time, and so she had to get back to the house after the birth. I can do that because we have health insurance and because I am living with my in-laws, and they can do without me, we’ll just hire another girl [maidservant] to look after me and the baby and then my mother-in-law and the other one can do the rest.

Here, as in many other households, having a Caesarean section was possible because the family that the young mother-to-be married into was affluent and could afford to make up for the longer convalescence and the fact that the young mother would not be able to look after her newborn by herself (since she could not move well) by hiring additional help. Madushree was therefore well aware that, at the time, living in a joint family, allowed her to make a specific choice, which was supported by her husband because she married well and her in-laws did not depend on her income or her labour power. This was, however, not the case in all the middle-class families I visited, as the example of Lakshmi, who married a civil servant against the will of her in-laws and moved into a onebedroom flat with her husband, shows. Lakshmi and her husband lived off his earnings but, unlike those living with in-laws, they had to pay a high rent out of their combined income, to which Lakshmi, who worked as an office-helper, contributed only marginally. They were not only struggling financially, Lakshmi was also working very hard to make their small room a home and to provide her conservative husband, who had left his parents for her, with the best food and amenities she could manage. When she was five-months pregnant, she was sent by her local doctor to sign up for a regular check-up in one of the better government-subsidized hospitals which many lower middle class women used. She had her first check-up there some weeks later, when the registrar gave her the choice between the current hospital, which only provided ‘normal’ deliveries,

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and a private clinic, which he ran as well.21 He tempted her by saying that if she was prepared to pay the reduced rate of 12,000 rupees for a Caesarean section in the private clinic, he would personally conduct the operation, whereas a ‘normal’ and ‘unplanned’ delivery provided by the hospital would be supervised by whoever happened to be on duty at the time. Lakshmi commented by saying when she was pregnant: I thought it sounded good, and I would like to have a C-section, I am just so scared of the normal birth. I talked to my husband about it, but it costs 12,000 rupees, we don’t have the money, and my in-laws are not giving us a paisa. I wonder whether they don’t care about their grandchild being born, and being healthy, maybe not, but we surely cannot afford the private clinic. Plus, when I come back I heard that after a C-section you can’t work, you can’t look after the baby properly, so who is going to be here and do all the work and look after the baby – him [her husband]? He has to go to the office, hasn’t he? And we can’t afford a helper, C-sections are for those who have plenty of money and can hire a helper for the time after birth.

She went on to have her baby at the hospital and returned home three days later, at which point she managed to return to her duties of cooking, cleaning and the like as well as looking after the baby on her own. Although the fact that I, myself, had had a ‘normal’ birth as well was probably of some encouragement to her, she was convinced that she had not had the optimal birth for someone of her standing, and felt as if she had had a rustic, inferior delivery, one which did not really display the status and achievement of the sort of person who should not be forced to go through such a demeaning and extended, painful process. Debates concerned with various types of deliveries centred quite often on the pain and lasting harm caused by different modes of delivery. And not surprisingly, an important aspect emphasized by the women I interviewed was that normal births are more painful than Caesarean sections. It is commonly assumed and promoted in the West that the pain related to birth is less severe for the case of vaginal deliveries and that Caesarean sections are more ‘painful’ as they involve a major abdominal operation. No popular critical discourse about control and choice in these matters exists in Calcutta but in general vaginal deliveries are represented as excruciatingly painful and although Caesarean sections are not seen as pain-free and also ‘make women suffer’, they are shorter and are therefore seen as less painful. Far from denying the actual pain contractions during birth involve, these discourses exploit the general notion that motherhood brings suffering to women, and drastic descriptions of abdominal pain experienced during and after the birth are usually the only aspect young women are told about. However, among the various themes related to a discussion of ‘pain’, the ideology of shame and notions of pollution associated with ‘normal’ birth easily outweighed the consequences of a caesar. A fast, scheduled and

21 It was not entirely clear whether this was maintained by the same charity that very successfully runs the hospital. Presumably he was talking about a private clinic owned by himself but it appeared to Lakshmi as if it was the institution that was offering Caesarian sections to patients from this hospital in a private clinic.

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specialized procedure seems desirable and provides a sense of control in a setting in which women do not expect birthing to be an enjoyable or elevating experience.22 Physical pain is one issue but there are other aspects of birth which have to be dealt with, one of them being the lajja (shame) felt when giving birth and the abhorrence of birth pollution. I mentioned earlier that hospitals allow birthing to be separated from the domestic domain, which in the eyes of the women who had given birth was clearly a good thing. Older women talked about how birthing was so shameful as every woman in the house was able to see the dirty blood and polluted sheets, other members of the household could hear the birthing woman moan, and the whole house knew what was going on. If we define pain in a more encompassing way to include psychological suffering, it is clear why women assert that hospital births allow for the successful management of pain. Within the context of hospital births, it is possible to relocate the pollution of birth outside the house, and Caesarean sections are an even more practical way to avoid the shame of pollution as there is no vaginal blood involved. This physical separation of birthing works in combination with an ‘operation’ conducted by high-status experts, provides the social space for an official acknowledgement of the contribution the birthing woman makes, as she can be imagined as a patient, though not a celebration of her reproductive power. By carefully manipulating the authority attributed to medical procedures and personnel, young middle-class women with sufficient means utilize this new context and negotiate individual privileges in the in-laws’ house. This was quite clear in the case of Madushree, who did move to her natal home with her son, clearly an affront to her in-laws, and who only agreed to return to her shasur bari (in-laws’ house) after she had negotiated a full deployment of support staff, an extension to the bathroom on the roof, and time off to visit her mother. Back after her stay in hospital, she made it very clear that her new life as a mother would be conducted on new terms, and that it would involve a much more pronounced spatial segregation between her and her husband and son’s room and her in-laws’appartment on the lower floor. In this as in other less dramatic cases young women can make up for the loss of certain customary rights, for example to spend extended periods of time in the natal home, because of the medicalization reproductive processes have undergone. Young women have lost some of the traditional perks, like the time off pregnant women used to spend with their parents and siblings before and after the birth, but since today they are patients who undergo an ‘operation’, they gain extended periods of rest prescribed by their doctors, and can use the legitimizing discourse of medicalized childbirth to support such claims. This explains why young women experience the new mode of delivery as empowering, though it is limited in its scope and depth by the constraints of a patriarchal family ideology and its dependency on specialists. If 22 Van Hollen cites staff in overcrowded hospital wards in Madras, who are in favour of induction in order to move women through the labour wards and into their beds as quickly as possible. Induction does of course increase the severity of contractions, but there were no anesthetics or other kinds of pain relief at hand (Van Hollen 2003). Some middle-class women in Calcutta did give birth in such hospitals, others went to private nursing homes, but none spoke about any kind of pain relief being administered.

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empowerment and agency are understood as processual, we can see how a young woman may create some space for herself in the context of medicalized childbirth. A domestic perspective on childbirth and change does reveal why younger women are often envied by their mothers and grandmothers, who in the words of one elderly mother of three ‘may have been stronger, but suffered more’.

Chapter 4

Education and the Making of Middle-class Mothers

Once upon a time there was a simple bird. It would sing songs, but could not recite any of the sacred books. It would freely hop and fly about, but it knew nothing of rules or manners. ‘Such a bird is useless’, declared the king. ‘In fact by eating the fruits of the forest, it damages the royal fruit-market.’ Calling his minister, the king commanded: ‘Give this bird an education’. Rabindranath Tagore: The Parrot’s Training

In this chapter I will discuss a subject that this writer and educationist was particularly passionate about, namely education and schooling during the early years of childhood. Tagore’s criticism still rings true today, but whereas he commented on institutional settings and formal learning I will focus on a less prominent aspect of schooling, namely the way parenting is implied in institutional practices and the way intimate relationships between mothers and their children are informed by wider socio-economic transformations. While children and childhood have been analysed as part of schooling in relation to regional modernities and the emerging cultures of globalization among the Asian middle classes (Chopra and Jeffery 2005), contemporary parenting and in particular the role of mothers, who are heavily implicated in educational practices, have rarely been discussed. With reference to Bengal, the role of formal education in the establishment of specific ideals of motherhood among colonial elites has been highlighted as part of reformist and nationalist discourses (Bagchi 1990; Chatterjee 1993; Walsh 1994; Sangari 1999; Kumar 2005). However, in post-independence India this link between schooling and parenting has been mainly explored in relation to a very specific set of state practices, namely family planning. Through population-control policies aimed at poor mothers the pedagogy of ideal, desirable and educated mothers as opposed to deviant, undesirable types of motherhood, became part of everyday discourses. The imagery and rhetoric employed contrast the responsible middle-class mother, who is educated enough to practice birth control efficiently and will bring up young potentially successful students/citizens with the poor, uneducated mother of many. Today, the relatively comfortable position of the middle-class mother, who learnt to value education and who would be able to support children throughout their educational careers has gained iconic status in urban Bengal. According to this modernist narrative, once middle-class women entered formal education as a result of nationalist agitation, any ambivalence in their relationship with formal education

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was resolved as was, apparently, the role of middle-class women in building the nation. In this chapter I situate the practices related to schooling within ongoing processes of socio-economic change and their effects on the domestic sphere. Among the factors that challenge middle-class lifestyles the privatization of services utilized by the urban middle classes, in particular the accelerated commoditization of health care and education is among the most prominent ones. Where education is concerned, this is directly related to the imagery of a global workforce characterized by white-collar employment in particularly desirable industries, for example as software engineers in the IT sector. I will therefore focus on how mothers’ involvement with pre-school education can be interpreted within this framework and how early learning produces distinct discourses on domestic relationships, motherhood and modernity, discourses within which a view of mothers as educators – associated with a new workforce – is appropriated. Parenting and education In many respects the way children are brought up in Bengali middle-class families is similar to what middle-class mothers elsewhere perceive as the adequate way to raise children. But while many practices common in Indian middle-class households – including child rearing ideals, educational strategies, life cycle expectations and the management of marital and kin relationships – are part of the global ‘intensive parenting’ phenomenon, others, like the common practice of shared parenting, are distinctly different. Furthermore, older ideologies and practices are now transformed in accordance with newly emerging global socio-economic patterns. As mentioned above, the definition of middle class I use is not entirely without ambiguity; however, within the spirit of this project it refers to those whose lifestyle is based on employment in white-collar jobs with a strong emphasis on the ideology of the joint family and educational achievement. The way children are raised in Indian middle-class families has been explored by scholars with an interest in emotional and psychological development through childhood (Kakar 1978; Trawick 1990; Seymour 1999), and sociologists and anthropologists interested in the intersections between the family and formal education (Scrase 1993, Srivastava 1998; Chopra and Jeffery 2005). These studies offer insights into two crucial middle-class institutions which can hardly be imagined separately, namely the family and the school. But with the notable exception of Drury’s exploration of parental attitudes towards education among lower-class families in Kanpur, very few have focused on the part the school plays in shaping the family (Drury 1992). Moreover, work on education and middle-class identities usually focuses on schooling, narrowly defined as what happens in the classroom, and not so much on pupils as children who grow up as members of families. I will therefore continue along this specific trajectory and will look at how raising children in Bengali middle-class households combined with the current educational regimes shape other relationships, by means of a detailed analysis of maternal involvement in pre-schooling.

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Formal education in Bengali middle-class households is an important, if not the most important, issue throughout a child’s journey to adulthood, and the demands of formal education dominate family life. From the moment family and friends welcome a new member of the lineage into the community during the annaprashan (first rice ceremony), which takes place a couple of months after birth, the thought of schools and schooling is never far away. On this occasion, the child will be fed their first solids, and in middle-class families they will be given an official bhalo (good) or ‘school’ name. The significance of naming, aptly describe by Jhumpa Lahiri in her novel The Namesake, is central to the lived experience of the conceptual division between the home and the world, as children are very rarely called by their official names at home. Instead, members of the wider family, especially grandmothers and paternal aunts, choose dak nam (nicknames), which are different for the mother’s and father’s set of relatives, so that children can easily have three names: one for the school, one used at home in their paternal family and one used by those from the mother’s side. The politics of naming consciously play on the contrast between the informal and loving character of kin relationships and the ‘outside’, including the school environment. They also highlight the fact that children are not brought up by their parents alone since paternal grandmothers and aunts enjoy the privilege of choosing the official name as well as a personal nickname. But a name is not the only thing given to the child during the ceremony as they will also, albeit jokingly, be presented with a pen, a book and a coin laid out on a plate, symbolizing either an inclination towards academic performance or towards business acumen. When the Chowdhury family were conducting this ritual for their new member in their living room, everybody breathed a sigh of relief when the little boy grabbed the biro and waved it triumphantly at his grandfather. ‘He will do well at school, maybe he will be a scholar’, the bystanders congratulated his grandparents. To them the incident indicated a concern about his future as a pupil and student, something which ultimately would shape their lives as well. What they meant was of course not that the poor boy would work as staff in some badly paid university post, but they were referring to the fact that the boy’s immediate future would depend on his performance in educational institutions. When parents referred to ‘education’ in English, they used it clearly in a multivalent way, and often opposed it to what their own chelebelay; meyebelay (idealized boyhood or girlhood) was all about. Education is not so much implied in a general sense, when mothers talk about raising a child, but enters the picture when mothers talk about making a child into a fully middle-class person. In this context, formal schooling is intimately related to nationalist narratives and figures together with science and medicine as part of discourses on modernity. Indeed science and education inhabit the same space in the post-colonial landscape as the following notes by Prakash on the symbolic role of science, which could be equally applied to Western-style education, show: Introduced as a code of alien power and domesticated as a an element of elite nationalism, science has always been asked to accomplish a great deal – to authorize an enormous leap into modernity, and anchor the entire edifice of modern culture, identity, politics and economy. (Prakash 1999: 12)

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A majority of mothers would agree that science and education are necessary to advance the nation, but on a personal level education stands for much more than that: it encompasses their hopes for upward mobility and the desire for personal refinement within a modernized version of ‘tradition’. And within a framework of reference, which distinguishes between tradition and modernity, between Western and Indian forms of knowledge, it valorizes the social relationships and understandings of the world which they mark out as ‘Indian’. Education, as an ideology of middleclassness, makes modern Indian citizens possible and allows middle-class people to insert status and refinement into everyday life through institutions and practices. Thus, education, quite literally produces middle-class people. But as the monopoly of the metropolitan middle class to attend superior institutions and to get access to the best paid positions is being threatened by the considerable diversification of private schooling and new career paths, education has also become a major concern. Earlier, in spite of considerable differences in household expenditure and salary levels, educational strategies were much more limited and ultimately very similar. Usually graduates from professional backgrounds made their way through selective elitist English language institutions, while the majority of middle-class pupils got admission to Bengali-medium schools and universities, and girls in particular did attend quite traditional schools and colleges. Thus, within the ‘educated’ middleclass group, while opportunities varied, the Bengali middle class was united in the appreciation of educational achievement through a well-known set of practices, educational strategies and institutions. Today, mothers and fathers worry more since educational strategies and the landscape within which schools and colleges are located have broadened and a new, more directly economically determined process of stratification through educational achievement seems to have set in. As Patricia Jeffery remarks, ‘many parents are optimistic about the benefits that will accrue to their children from education – enhanced employment and marriage opportunities, improved social competences and cultural capital – and they may be prepared to make considerable sacrifices to see these ambitions fulfilled’ (Jeffery 2005: 35) but my material shows that for certain sections the new post-liberalization requirements are also undermining old certainties. In Calcutta, as elsewhere in India, the middle class had benefited from the post-independence prioritization of secondary education in government spending, although it should be noted that not everyone did benefit in the same way from state subsidies (Fernandes 2006: 21). Rather like health care, as I have argued elsewhere (Donner 2004; 2006a), but even more profoundly, ‘education became a central arena in which state–middle-class relationships of patronage and dependence were consolidated’ in the decades after independence (Fernandes 2006: 21). With liberalization this link has become weaker and those segments of the middle classes traditionally dominant in educational discourse, whether as parents and pupils or as teachers and policymakers, are under immense pressure to either adjust to new strategies and regimes or risk being left behind. Thus, the very same parents Jeffery cites may also express extreme anxiety about their children’s futures and refer to the lack of quality education in Calcutta as the main reason for the general pressure under which their families find themselves.

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The tension they feel about education is, on the one hand, an effect of the weakening of the link between education, employment and the state (decreasing chances to find employment in the state sector); but on the other hand it is also an expression of their belief in the promise of new opportunities which they see as the future of post-liberalization India. New skills for global workplaces The jobs middle-class parents see as desirable are mostly in IT-related industries, which at the beginning of the decade in which I did my fieldwork sounded pristine: companies located in business ‘parks’ would provide office work in entirely middle-class environments; high-tech jobs in a globalized workplace with scientific knowledge, flashy lifestyles and excellent ‘exposure’ to the West without migration. Gradually, the reality of economic restructuring and the new world of knowledge industries, outsourcing and foreign (often volatile) investment has reshaped these imagined possibilities. Today, I am more likely to meet disenchanted parents of young children, pupils and students, who doubt that their sons and daughters will join a multinational company and enjoy good career prospects, unless they are prepared to migrate within India.1 But by the 1990s parents seemed to be convinced that what was elsewhere a booming market with thousands of new ‘respectable’ positions, namely the development of software and IT-enabled service industries, would provide new opportunities for Calcuttans as well. Judging from official pronouncements and successfully managed investment in other South Asian cities, they were bowled over by the powerful imagery of new global workplaces and competitive investment, which led them to believe that new employment prospects would demand new kinds of education or, rather, new skills. In the absence of any clear guidance as to what such new jobs would require, most parents felt compelled to employ a mixture of earlier strategies and new investment and emulated the upwardly-mobile professionals around them. Thus, mothers repeatedly told me that language skills and ‘exposure’ to environments marked as ‘English-medium’ and IT-related were the order of the day, and that ‘adjustment’ and ‘flexibility’ would be required of the successful employees of the future. The early embrace of new industries and neoliberal vocabulary was accompanied by more ambiguous feelings about the transformation of middle-class lives in the city. While consumer goods and new technologies were often highlighted as positive 1 This cautious approach is confirmed by recent comparative studies: Although an estimated 20,000 employees have been recruited by IT-related industries in the city so far, Swasti Mitter observes that in order to replicate the success of knowledge industries in other cities, Calutta needs to improve the training facilities it provides and will have to focus on those portions of the sector which will absorb lower skilled workers, e.g. call centres and remote-processing work (Mitter and Sen 2000). Furthermore, it remains to be seen how many workplaces are lost through the current bleeding of public sector undertakings, many with more than 1,500 employees, which is supported by the UK Department for International Development as part of structural adjustment measures employed in the city.

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effects of globalization and desired indicators of the new affluence that some sections of the middle class enjoy, most of those interviewed agreed that among the negative outcomes of India’s integration into the world market is a marked loss of social security, sociality and ‘culture’ for the ordinary middle-class person. In 2005 the same parents who had earlier been positively encouraging their children to aim for some IT-related job were rather disenchanted, and in particular the parents of girls were highly critical of what the industry could offer in terms of career prospects and social environment. As one father of an 18-year-old daughter expressed these typical reservations: She wanted to become a software engineer, but we did not allow this – firstly, it was not clear what that institution would be like, what kind of children would go there, and secondly we were worried about her career prospects. All the government has done is to throw money at these big companies who make vast profits, but in Calcutta at least they have created inferior jobs, it’s all call-centres and so on, and girls should not do that kind of work. So we made her do bio-chemistry instead, she can run her own laboratory or work as a teacher, which is much better.

Sure enough his daughter married a classmate whose family run their own laboratory from home. Increasingly economic development is linked to the experience of Calcutta’s decline after partition and beyond, and globalization is depicted as a threat to family values and in particular the relationship between parents and their children. Thus, the new times are interpreted in terms of changing social relationships, especially those between sons and their parents, daughters and their in-laws, and neighbours. Mothers I have known for over a decade seem to be much more critical than the working women Ganguly-Scrase and Scrase interviewed about their views on liberalization in Calcutta, while generalized concerns about changing forms of sociality, comparable to those described by Van Wessel for her Baroda interlocutors, were presented as well (Ganguly-Scrase and Scrase 1999, 2001; Van Wessel 2004). While the impression of a continuously stagnant local economy may stem from different sources, and even assuming that the effects of economic change on ‘traditional’ values may in fact be much more diverse, it is certainly the case that the financially less saturated segments of the Bengali middle classes are, de facto, losing privileges. These include hegemony in the cultural sphere, educational institutions and secure employment in government service, and with their loss fears about uncertain futures have grown steadily. Even among those who, in reality, are among the winners from liberalization, for instance the Bengali business communities, anxiety about their changing status is rife, and liberalization is clearly seen in terms of shrinking rather than expanding access to resources. Thus, while as Béteille suggests, middleclassness is still largely inferred from and reproduced through a combination of education, occupation and financial circumstances into which children are socialized within the family, the precise strategies to be employed in relation to the outside worlds are, as Fernandes points out, under negotiation (Béteille 2003; Fernandes 2006). One may not be certain where all these transformations are leading, but there is a feeling that in order to grab the new opportunities, or even only to avoid downward

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mobility, new skills are necessary. The changing employment patterns that have emerged over the last two decades raise questions about transformations of parenting and the family which are by no means unique to India. Nor does an analytical framework focused on linear progress and inclusion do these transformations any justice, because, as Merry White points out with reference to Japanese middle-class families facing economic change during a period of transformation: [T]he complicated economics of employment and family life … involve contradictions: encourage workers to retire early, encourage workers to stay on the job; encourage leisure activities and consumption, demand that families save for the care of their elderly; encourage women to work, encourage them to have babies for a future labour force that will need more workers. (White 2002: 29–30).

It is therefore important to reiterate that ‘restructuring’ is not only taking place in the economic sphere. Given the local and long-term factors within which these processes are situated, solutions to the pressures experienced by families are often surprisingly different from what one would expect. The most obvious solution to the new demands of child raising and education is one that is based on and strengthened by the prevailing joint family ideology. While the spectre of the ‘breakdown of the joint family’ has haunted discourses on modernity from the colonial period onwards, as a malleable institution the joint family has proven itself to be extremely resilient once again. Shifts in occupational preferences and the effect these have on households have been analysed in some detail in the case of industrial labour in India (Holmström 1999; Parry 2001). However, though the views of parents on different types of education have been analysed, the impact of formal education on the intra-household relations beyond the conjugal relationship has rarely been explored. In the course of any interview it became clear that if anything has profoundly altered the way gender roles and ideologies of motherhood are reproduced among the Bengali middle class – and to an extent other communities in the same setting – it is the orientation of all efforts in the common households towards the formal education of children. With the complex expectations parents have for financial success, upward mobility and care in old age, today’s mothers coach their children to achieve from an early age and emphasize that parental involvement in schooling is a major factor for children’s success. Thus, liberalization has altered the role mothers play in relation to schools. Where earlier the critique of modernity was wrapped in criticism of modern brides unable to adjust to joint family life, today the tension within families is depicted by mothers who selfishly push for the success of their children in order to escape from their duties towards other members of the joint family. And increasingly, mothers comment that these concerns are real as they often feel caught between the demands of schooling and the expectations of their affines, as Sangita, a mother of a 4-year-old son who lives with her in-laws, pointed out: Today you cannot get by without being fully involved in your children’s education, that is a must. If I wanted to work, that would be impossible, because I have to bring him to school, I have to get him back, I have to prepare his food, I have to get him to after-school tuition. And I have to be there for him in the evenings, when we do homework. There is

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nobody who can do these things as well as I can, because I know how to make him work hard, and he will do things less reliably if I am not there.

The medium of English Sangita’s son attends an English-medium school, a choice his parents have consciously made with job prospects in the IT industry in mind. The idea of a global industry like IT, clean and prestigious, but also reliant on English, brought about a transformation of educational choices and strategies in Calcutta – namely the insertion of English into the lives of all middle-class households to a degree hitherto unknown. With it the work of parenting has changed, as a whole culture of English-medium education emerged, which I will analyse in the next sections through the rise of pre-school education, on the one hand, and the impact of English-medium education on patterns of shared parenting, on the other. Although only two of the mothers I met on a regular basis were educated in English, none of the children born after 1980 has been admitted to a Bengali-medium school. While Bengali-medium education was earlier acceptable in the vast majority of Bengali middle-class families, it has lost out to English-medium schooling. With education in English, a son’s or daughter’s age of entry into formal education has also dropped, so that all middle-class children today attend pre-schools, or Montessori nurseries as they are called. In the vast majority of cases children born in the nineties were the first generation to be admitted to pre-school or nurseries and to receive formal education in English. In addition, after-school activities including tuition and computer education were introduced and play an important role in preparing children for exams. Finally, the schools chosen are no longer neighbourhood schools, and the distance between home and school as well as the time spent travelling and the need to accompany even fairly mature children has increased. Though there is a general discontent at the quality of care provided in nurseries, parents rarely gave reasons other than that ‘it has a good reputation’, ‘it is an Englishmedium school’ and ‘it is easy to reach’, when asked why they had admitted their sons and daughters to a particular school. All parents I asked asserted that they had selected a ‘good’ school on the basis of what they had heard, and even those overtly conversant with different schools came up with very superficial assessments of the curriculum taught. Key aspects mentioned by even less educated mothers from the mid-1990s onwards were access to computers and structured playtime. In accordance with mothers’ own educational levels, these factors increased to include specific methodologies, e.g. Montessori, and various kinds of equipment and facilities, e.g. outdoor space and Fisher-Price toys. Amid all this global imagery one finds that Bengali-speaking middle-class parents complain and bemoan the loss of Bengali language skills that follows in the wake of English-medium education, and mothers in particular fear that the younger generation will not be conversant with their mother tongue, as they will not learn how to read and write Bengali. But since Bengali is secondary as far as employment is concerned, only one of the families I spoke to hired a tutor for Bengali lessons. Mothers in particular were much more concerned about their own inability to teach

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their children English at home than about the loss of reading and writing skills in Bengali, as they saw it as a clear disadvantage even for pre-schoolers to spend too much time on the vernacular. However, given that these parents envisage themselves as part of a global, rather than national or regional, labour market, their choice of English as the language of instruction, and the consequent casualization of Bengali, are responses to the pressures parents feel. The need to compete, if not in an international arena then at least on a national level, is acutely present in the accounts of parents and children, and the pressure on households to direct all available resources towards education is interpreted as a direct result of India’s integration into the world market. Success would often be attributed to students and their parents in equal measures, and in particular mothers were seen as key facilitators of their children’s education. Though it may be acceptable for a daughter to be an average student, she will be expected to make her children a success, and this increasingly involves a multitude of learning and training on the job. Thus, English-medium education has become a desirable trait in a bride-to-be, and campaigns for ‘computer literacy’ aimed at lower middle-class women whose ability to coach their children based on their own ‘knowing computers’ have substituted the familiar ‘trained in classical dance/music’ in matrimonial ads. Potentially, IT-training for women (which in some instances has been subsidized and hailed as a measure designed to bring educated women into the labour force) could bring more independence and provide the basis for running a business from home. This possibility was mentioned in many conversations with mothers whose daughters did attend computer courses. However, not one married woman in any of the families I work with is thus employed which demonstrates that for young women ‘knowing computers’ is more relevant in terms of their educating children in the future than for the purposes of finding a job in the present. Mothering and shared parenting Becoming a parent and bringing up children are among the most important markers of gendered personhood in Bengal, and although men and women in middle-class families can, of course, lead very fulfilled lives without ever being married or having children, cultural ideas of gender and personhood are framed in terms of reproductive processes. Notions of status, individual fulfilment and happiness are inevitably linked to men’s roles as fathers and grandfathers and women’s roles as mothers and grandmothers.2 To become a parent is considered to be an essential stage in the life cycle of men and women across class boundaries, and parenthood and family life provide the grounds for everyday communication and interaction between people from very different backgrounds. Anthropologists have highlighted the fact that in Bengal the desire and the ability to produce and bring up children are naturalized and emphasized as a central determining feature of human life (Inden and Nicholas 1977; Kotalova 1993: 191). Marriage and parenthood link social roles with

2 No contemporary form of a celibate lifestyle – e.g. joining an order – is available to women.

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important physical changes and character traits acquired through sexual intercourse, gestation and birth as well as with the manush kora (making of a human), as bringing up a child is referred to. However, there are important factors, among them maternal involvement in education, which determine the success of children brought up in Bengali families, and working-class as well as middle-class mothers are acutely aware that successful parenting in this sense is linked to class. Parental roles are also intensely debated in public, in TV soaps and in women’s magazines and newspapers, and middle-class mothers’ practices are constantly scrutinized, critiqued and examined. These discourses were initiated when the art of being a good daughter, daughter-in-law, good citizen and mother, was defined through a set of ‘modern’ domestic skills in the colonial period (Borthwick 1984: 151; Bose 1995: 118; Sangari 1999: 305). In India, as elsewhere, nation building has reformed middle-class motherhood, and the related discourses are well documented for the colonial period, but comparable debates are less obvious in the nation state from 1948 onwards.3 Mothers themselves contrast the naturalized wish to have children with the changing skills necessary to bring them up in the right manner, and are adamant that parenting as a ‘modern’ practice is challenging and a fulltime job. First, they remark that consumerism tempts children, who get to know about commodities, including goods and services (e.g. eateries, toys, electronic equipment) through TV ads and in their friends’ houses. Second, they are of course aware of the public discourse on correct parenting which features a growing number of experts, including teachers, doctors and psychologists, who have become part of the celebrity circuit and of institutional lives. Third, they argue that parenting in middle-class families today depends on a very different vision of the relationship between mothers and children, one which is more labour intensive and build on trust, and thus was described by mothers in terms of friendship. This new focus on closeness or intimacy between mothers and their children has been the subject of analysis of wider transformations of the family, which some scholars see as characteristic of modern society and, more importantly, a precondition for democracy (Giddens 1999). In the West, maternal roles have changed in accordance with the need to produce such selves within a family environment, and parenting has been interpreted by sociologists as a main site for the democratization of wider society, with intimacy the basis of processes whereby a reflexive self can be established. Some argue that middle-class Euro-American mothering aims at the kind of intimacy associated with the more democratic family norm and produces such modern selves (Jamieson 1998). And, with reference to the given context, the spread of a more egalitarian mothering-style could be read as a signifier of similar processes among the Indian middle classes. However, rather than expanding the range of practices whereby a child is encouraged to become an individual, Bengali mothers pointed out that their newfound pedagogical confidence was born out of the need to instil a much more compelling sense of duty and moral obligation towards elders in the new generation of children who grow up in a fully-developed consumer society. 3 Stivens’ work on Malaysia provides a comparative perspective on such discourses (Stivens 1998).

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All these concerns shape the relationship that mothers have with schools, and mothers are critical of the way the nursery has replaced the home as an ideal site for socialization. With its very strong emphasis on relatedness among relatives, reciprocity between generations, and adequate ‘Bengali’ consumption patterns (as described in the next chapter), it is the mother’s job to draw the line between the home and the world quite clearly at this early stage, so as to shield children against the undesirable temptations and dangers present in the ‘outside’ world. Not unlike middle-class mothers in the West, but without the explicit emphasis on autonomy and individualism, mothers spoke of the need to become more of a friend rather than a figure of authority in order to communicate values and control a son or a daughter. But, unlike in the West, these mothers were extremely anxious to avoid any encouragement of a child’s independence.4 On the contrary, boys and girls are not only often discouraged from forming lasting friendships with peers, mothers also ensure that their children, especially girls, are confined to the house as much as possible and socialize primarily with a small circle of neighbours and relatives. Younger children and girls are encouraged to spend their leisure time watching TV and making phone calls rather then visiting friends. In conversations it turned out that mothers saw these restrictions as part of a situation within which the decline in the birth rate, the rise in living standards and the modification of residential patterns led to concerns about security in old age. By encouraging their children to stay within the confines of the home, parents try to ensure that their offspring develop a very close attachment and internalize the responsibility they carry as their parents’ source of support in old age. Family histories presented by women very often centre around issues of childcare, parenting and motherhood, with much emphasis put on the hardship, sacrifice and the heavy responsibility carried by parents (Drury 1992: 64). Apart from the moral concerns schooling raises, fathers and mothers alike reflect upon the changing role played by mothers in their children’s education. Generally parents focused on these changes in terms of their own mother’s involvement with schooling, which was more relaxed and sporadic. Rather than supervising their children’s homework, the older generation was instead expected to be excessively caring and selflessly serving the wider family. Fathers of the same generation, on the other hand, were often presented as distant mediators between the outside world of school and the home. Today the everyday tasks related to schooling are mainly carried out by mothers who shuttle between the house and the institution and are busy with a multitude of activities derived from new educational strategies. Fathers, on the other hand, have been relegated to the sidelines and are, more often than not, less involved in the education of their children than their own fathers had been. Earlier generations had been brought up to be ‘proficient’ in terms of domestic labour, but today mothers are in addition trained to manage and organize the school careers of their children (Sangari 1999: 308). Among the changes responsible for the new role mothers play in schooling was the introduction of pre-school education from the middle of the 1980s, when middleclass children as young as 18 months began to join. Admission for most of the 4

The main fear is that this will encourage love marriages.

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English-medium schools is highly formalized, and parents spend endless mornings queuing for forms as well as organizing the necessary coaching for interviews and admission tests before their children reach four years of age. Once a child has been admitted the mother will have to learn how the school functions, which tests, exams and events take place and what kind of tuition is needed to gain good marks. In more than one way every new generation of mothers goes through a phase of on-the-job training and young women are seen as full and responsible adults only once their children enter formal schooling. However, mothering also comprises the creation of a favourable environment for ‘study’ at home, which many describe as ‘giving the children peace of mind’. This idiom is particularly important for women in lower middle-class families who are generally less well educated and who cannot support their children as well as others, since they themselves often lack English-medium education. Girls and boys are constantly involved in studying, very often until late at night, so they are almost without exception exempted from domestic responsibilities. It is their mothers’ role to facilitate study at home, provide them with special meals, coax and remind them of their duties and organize their leisure time. As one mother put it, ‘there is always something to do, they can always study’. This view is enforced with much more rigour in the case of girls who are, under the pretext of studies, often discouraged from socializing at all. Not surprisingly young mothers and middle-aged women with children state that to ‘make’ children successfully complete formal education is the most challenging aspect of their lives and causes them serious anxiety. But most children are raised by their parents and grandparents so mothers are not usually alone in raising successful middle-class citizens. Shared parenting is, in fact, highlighted as a characteristic of South Asian middle class and middle-income households and has been studied in considerable detail in accounts such as Kurtz’s study of attachment in early childhood, Seymour’s research in two neighbourhoods in Bhubaneswar, or Trawick’s analysis of relatedness in a Tamil Brahmin family (Trawick 1990: 218; Kurtz 1992: 104; Seymour 1999: 77). It is by and large seen as a ‘traditional’ practice, one which is expected to become obsolete with urbanization. For example, Seymour remarks that shared parenting was about to disappear among the more affluent and mobile middle-class residents of an urban neighbourhood of Orissa’s capital Bhubaneswar, which she studied in the 1980s, where her subjects, all civil servants, mostly lived in nuclear families (Seymour 1999: 14). But, quite remarkably, the same trend has so far not been predominant in the two neighbourhoods of Calcutta where I have done most of my fieldwork. Apart from the financial advantages joint family life offers to young families, mothers explained that the intensified involvement in schooling has, on the contrary, strengthened the joint family as the demand for shared responsibilities, if not parenting, increased. I have seen in many families that the new educational strategies combined with the demands of producing an adequate standard of food and domesticity for the wider family make shared parenting mandatory and do, in fact, prevent the early separation of households, largely because husbands are not involved in any aspect of housework or schooling. The observation that parenting can involve grandparents as well is significant in a range of contexts, not least those where mothers migrate. Moreover, shared

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parenting and the involvement of grandparents is contrary to the developmentalist discourse employed in urbanization theory not a remainder of earlier patterns. The involvement of grandparents is, for example, found in the context of rapid economic change that affects industrialized societies, even those without a history of patrilocality, i.e. Eastern Germany, where shared parenting involving grandfathers emerged in the context of the retreat of the welfare state (Thelen 2005). Here, the need for mothers to organize childcare while they go out to work has brought about shared parenting as a new pattern, whereas in Bengal it is not paid work, but excessive involvement in schooling that keeps the daughter-in-law preoccupied. Generally, prolonged cooperation and intensifying interdependence between the generations occurs in different contexts. In the course of my research it became clear that with the more elaborate demands of formal schooling, young mothers spent a considerable amount of time outside the house and therefore depended more heavily on the support of female relatives, notably their mothers-in-law. Paternal grandmothers As the previous sections have shown, being a mother is, in this context, not primarily experienced as an extension or realization of ‘coupledom’, but is significantly shaped by the relationship between the mother and her mother-in-law. With the new focus on extended education, the way in which mothers and paternal grandmothers are involved in raising children has undergone considerable changes. Though the actual nature of the mother-in-law and daughter-in-law relationship can vary considerably according to class and context (Vera-Sanso 1999; Lamb 2000: 71), the two roles are structurally opposed to each other and thus women compete for the attention and resources offered by the same male breadwinners, first the father-in-law and husband, and later the son. From the point of view of the older woman, a son’s marriage is one of the highlights in life, not least because she is fortunate enough to spend many years with her retired husband and their son’s family, she expects to be relieved from some of her chores. Many elderly women choose to ‘retire’ from running the whole household once their daughters-in-law have been trained and have gained a certain stature. And traditionally, though they would look after them, their direct responsibilities for bringing up their grandchildren were minimal, so that becoming a grandparent was associated with ‘a carefree life’, introducing the phase of old age during which detachment from social ties and worldly obligations is sought (Lamb 2000). Grandchildren, as Tagore’s poem Grandfather’s Holiday suggests, were there to teach their grandparents to let go: Hurricane of freedom in my heart as you jump. Who has taught you, how he does it, I shall never know – You’re the one who teaches me to let myself go 5

5 See the volume of selected poems translated and edited by W. Radice (Tagore 1985).

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In the contemporary urban middle-class family, a retired grandfather may in fact spend hours playing with his grandchildren before he retires to his study or joins his friends for extended adda sessions. Yet his wife is unlikely to gain much leisure time when their son marries, and while she may welcome the extra ‘pair of hands’ when her daughter-in-law moves in, soon after she will no longer be able to devote herself exclusively to religious activities and extended socializing. Since in today’s smaller joint families only the daughter-in-law is increasingly involved in the activities related to her child’s formal education and future employment, her mother-in-law remains the most important woman in charge of the household. It is, therefore, clear that the involvement of the paternal grandmother in the daily chores is prolonged and many elderly women are well aware of the changes their role has undergone. Even if we consider this a bit of an exaggeration, 65-year-old Sushmita Mukherjee’s description of her own mother-in-law’s ‘retirement’ matches the accounts of her contemporaries: When I arrived in this house that was an occasion of great happiness, especially for my mother-in-law, who had till then only had servants to help, as she had no daughter of her own. I was fully trained when I came, and she taught me all I had to know to fit in, but gradually I took a lot of responsibility for running the household, and even when I had my sons I did not go out or deal with other things much. My daughter-in-law, on the other hand, is most of the time bringing her son somewhere, picking him up, and so on, so I am here dealing with the rest of it.

If anything this situation is more serious for those whose daughter-in-law continues with outside employment after giving birth, in which case the mother-inlaw may find herself at home alone with a young grandchild. This shows that the changes the family is undergoing cannot only be interpreted as a result of a new emphasis on ‘coupledom’, as scholars like Giddens would have it (Giddens 1999), and that conjugal relations are only part of the story. This is even more pronounced where married couples live apart for long periods of time due to the migration of the male spouse which inevitably makes women more dependent on their in-laws, as is the case in many Bengali Christian households in central Calcutta who receive remittances from the Gulf but also want to take advantage of the Christian schools in the area. Here, the whole family, including mother and grandmother, cooperate to raise children. Another example of the intensification of relationships other than the conjugal arises for couples who migrated together (often not primarily for the sake of conjugal relations, but again because of the educational opportunities provided), for example green card holders in the US. Far from letting go of the ideal of a joint family, their social landscape stretches and in these families grandparents often travel long haul to look after grandchildren temporarily but for prolonged periods of time, as the following case taken from my fieldnotes demonstrates: 65-year-old Mrs Samita Chatterjee, who agreed to talk to me in November 2003, lives in a two-bedroom flat in Ganguly Bagan, and has been widowed for two years. Since then, she has been in this area and has sold her house elsewhere, because, as she says, it wasn’t safe to stay there, and she is not often at home. Indeed, when we met, she was about to fly

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to Singapore, where her daughter lives. I suggested we could meet after her return, and she laughed – that would be quite nice, but she would be away for the summer, spending three months with her daughter’s family in the East, and then move on to her son’s family in the US for the summer holidays. Her trip was so cleverly planned around the grandchildren’s school holidays that, she added jokingly, she would never be out of ‘work’.

Rather than disappearing, shared parenting has been revived even in the face of migration, and in many instances constitutes a transnational practice shaped as much by the demands of the two families between which the grandmothers shuttle, as by immigration laws. In this it does, of course, fit well into the recent discourse on new regimes of care which are organized transnationally. Not only has mothering become a transnational practice among female migrant workers (see Ehrenreich and Hochschild 2003), but so has grandparenting. All across India the phenomenon of the ‘mobile grandmother’ is becoming quite common, not always to the delight of the older generation involved, as Fuller and Narasimhan found when they interviewed software professionals and their families in Chennai. Their research confirms the considerable ambiguity expressed by my own informants belonging to the older generation about this new trend: Older people with some or all of their children and grandchildren now resident overseas generally recognise that they face a new and serious problem, and many, though not all, are realistic enough to accept that they have to deal with it by reorganising their relationships with all their adult children. Because children working abroad normally return for only occasional short visits, older people believe that they should go and stay with them for extended periods, despite boredom and ‘house arrest’. During these visits, they can look after their grandchildren, which is generally seen as a valuable contribution, and perhaps teach them some religious traditions, which helps to counteract the corroding materialism of Western society. However, if there are also grandchildren in Chennai, foreign visits disrupt their childcare arrangements. Because working couples in the city commonly rely heavily on their parents for help with childcare, the travel plans of both sets of parents become critical to their own domestic arrangements and may in turn cause tensions between siblings and affines. (Fuller and Narasimhan 2007: 147)

Even where no travelling is involved, the individual reactions of grandmothers to the new regime vary. Whereas some enjoy the feeling that they are needed and, indeed, manage to extend their influence over their sons beyond national boundaries in spite of migration, most feel obliged or even blackmailed to extend their care to their grandchildren, and many older women clearly see that this type of obligation goes beyond what is considered to be a ‘traditional’ duty. Furthermore, they are aware that their new responsibilities are usually comprised of tasks of little status, i.e. child-minding, cooking, and supervising servants, while the daughter-in-law is increasingly able to engage with schooling, especially Englishmedium education. This new division of labour contests intra-household hierarchies between women and frustrates the expectations of the paternal grandmother who would like to see her power and independence expanded rather than diminished. Not surprisingly, childcare and housework have to be constantly negotiated, and even grandmothers who take full responsibility for grandchildren while their mothers are working, display signs of subtle resistance, like the cultivation of chronic illnesses

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and the manipulation of social relations with extended kin. While some grandmothers are filled with pride and are energetic enough to continue with their responsibilities at the same rate as before, others feel weighed down by the emotional, physical and financial constraints of this continuous commitment. Most are critical of this ‘modern’ version of grandparenthood and feel exploited. In their view, the pattern violates the expected reciprocity between the generations. Describing the new regime, one elderly resident in central Calcutta stated that grandmothers increasingly feel that they are deprived of their rights as grandmothers but are forced into parenting a second time round. Pre-schools and the educational environment While walking down the road in central Calcutta, my 3-year-old son remarked, ‘This place is full of school children’ and pointed at groups of pupils at the gates of a central Calcutta nursery school. He was right: public places in the city are dominated by school children at certain times of the day. But equally conspicuous are their mothers, who are sitting next to the gates or who stand in the shade under a tree waiting for their sons and daughters to emerge. Mothers can be seen in the morning on the way to school, and later when those who have travelled from further away sit chatting on the steps of a shop nearby. Groups of mothers reappear in front of secondary schools in the afternoon to collect children, hurrying them home for a meal before they accompany them to tuition classes, music and computer lessons later in the evening. On weekends mothers attend sports and drawing contests, and during the various yearly exams held centrally in public institutions crowds of mothers can be found guarding the entrances of the various venues for hours on end. If Calcutta is a city of school children, it is equally a city of their mothers who form part of this ‘educational environment’ (Jeffery et al. 2006) in multiple ways. Pre-school education is not so much special because of its content but because of the fact that it used to be unknown only a generation ago, and while sending your children to attend institutions at an early age appears normal to middle-class people in many modern societies today, we tend to forget that early years education was an entirely new practice only three generations ago. In Europe and America preschooling emerged as a solution for the childcare problems of working mothers, but quickly became a prominent site for state policies aimed at working-class families. The same pattern of reasoning can be found in many contexts where pre-schools cater to the needs of working mothers and aim at educating those who otherwise cannot be relied on to become good citizens (Stivens 1998; Anagnost n. d.). Perpetuating this pattern, the West Bengal government has recently encouraged NGOs to found preschools in some of the most deprived areas of the state (Rana et al. 2002). However, in urban centres pre-schools targeting a middle-class clientele are booming as well, a fact that the government has only acknowledged very recently, though a concerned public has raised the question of regulation with regards to this new industry. Thus, although the state sees the need for the pre-schooling of poor children, middle-class children below four years of age are not targeted by government policies.

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But I would argue that it is the similarities, rather than the differences, that tell us something about the underlying changes and the way in which the foreign concept of pre-school education has far-reaching consequences. Whether in the case of the middle-class child or the working-class child, the idea of pre-schooling is based on a new interpretation of childhood and, more specifically, a model of early childhood as a ‘developmental stage’ that is related to learning. Based on educational theories developed in the West, such ideas travelled to India where they have since gained prominence as a folk model in support of pre-schools. Early childhood is presented as a phase during which children are particularly susceptible to the acquisition of discipline and ‘manners’ through schooling. Furthermore, middle-class parents never fail to mention that children are to be developed, and their capabilities nurtured, so that they are enabled to succeed academically. In this convincing discourse, mothers, poor and middle-class alike, are held responsible for the lack of discipline displayed by school children, whether this be demonstrated by a little boy dropping out of a village school or a city girl failing an exam. The introduction of formal schooling from an early age implies, therefore, educating mothers at the same time as their children. However, this is where the commonalities regarding the reasons for preschool education across social divisions end, since there also exist stark differences: whereas the state government’s initiatives to draw more young children into village schools – whether motivated by political considerations or not – are hampered by financial and organizational constraints, the expansion and elaboration of early years education among the middle classes in a city like Calcutta and in the district towns is breathtaking. Rural women, as mothers, are blamed for their children’s failure to attend schools at all, while middle-class mothers are keen on sending their children to the most competitive institutions, compliant with the demands and sacrifices they have to make in order to enhance their children’s chances of a good career. From the mid-1980s onwards ‘Montessori schools’, as they are known, started to appear in all the better neighbourhoods, usually run by a female founder/proprietor. Apart from promising personal development and basic academic skills, these schools offer preparation for tests and interviews in ‘big’ schools, which children ‘sit’ between the ages of three and five. Secondary schools with a selective policy expect their new entrants to have attended a known ‘Montessori’ nursery, but even less competitive schools demand that their prospective pupils can produce English phrases, alphabets, numbers and songs as part of entry tests. It is this functional aspect of nursery education – access to a good school – that is highlighted by parents in conversations about pre-schoolers, although most other characteristics of schooling like discipline and ‘development’ also feature in longer conversations I had with a range of parents. Where a son or daughter was admitted for pre-school education depended on three factors: the financial circumstances of the household, the place of residence and the ethnic identity of the parents. Generally speaking, children from lower-middleclass families do not usually attend the same nurseries as those from professional and business backgrounds, who are admitted to more selective, centrally located pre-schools with lower intakes. In 2002, fees in these institutions varied between 700 and 1,200 rupees per month, whereas many local ‘Montessori schools’, which are typically located in a garage or in a spare room within an apartment building,

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charged between 250 and 500 rupees a month. Both categories may have different ‘classes’ for each grade, and it is not unusual to find admission ages as low as eighteen months. In both settings, prospective students are screened with a view to economic and ethnic homogeneity; however, there is often no limit to class sizes and teacherpupil ratios could be as high as 1:30. Depending on the location, neighbourhood ‘Montessori schools’ appear, in reality, to cater to a rather homogenous clientele. But the south Calcutta nursery my son attended in 2000 attracted custom from local shopkeepers as well as doctors. Pre-schools are usually founded and owned by women, many of whom are teachers themselves. These owner/heads always emphasize the English-medium character of the institution, which is perhaps better described in terms of global Americanism. Though in theory English is stated to be the medium of instruction in all these Montessori nurseries, the degree to which children are discouraged from using the vernacular languages and to which they are taught in English varies greatly. Unlike those teaching in primary schools, nursery teachers are often not qualified, and many have not received any training in English. In a very selective nursery school I worked with, the teachers spoke English all the time, but they used stereotypical sentences and few of the children acquired any fluency in English. In the local nursery, the teachers were themselves barely fluent in English and used only a few phrases inbetween conversations in Bengali. The English-medium character of a school is not so much a matter of language but of culture, with even the smallest neighbourhood nurseries carrying aspirational names like Little Angels, Morning Glory, Blooming Rose or Playhouse Montessori, to indicate a child-friendly atmosphere and Englishmedium surroundings. Furthermore, unlike traditional primary schools with their emphasis on discipline, here concepts like ‘fun’ and ‘playful learning’ are promoted through visual displays and the selection of toys that often references to popular American cartoon characters. In many cases the ‘Englishness’ of these pre-schools was described by educated parents and teachers in terms of such ‘foreign’ themes and toys. In short, Calcutta’s nurseries emphasize their resemblance to such institutions elsewhere – not only to pre-schools in other Indian cities but also to pre-schools in other Asian countries and the US. In contrast to state-run primary schools and many private schools, these nurseries highlight the global character and the ‘foreign’ origin of nursery education more generally, which is confirmed by the absence of any nationalist symbolism (flags, portraits of nationalist leaders and of ‘indigenous’ educationists like Tagore and Vivekananda) which is ubiquitous in other schools and middle-class homes. Preschooling among the middle classes is clearly about tapping into what is represented as a ‘global’ culture and no identifiable communal or Indian images are promoted. The ideal of the committed mother This global connotation feeds into the established discourses of motherhood, within which Bengali middle-class women’s own understanding of their roles is defined in relation to parenting elsewhere. The opposition of the ‘traditional’ way of bringing up children and Western, more ‘scientific’ parenting practices dates back to the

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colonial period when nationalist discourses and regional variations on the theme of motherhood produced a distinctly modernist version of ‘traditional motherhood’ in Bengal. Jashodhara Bagchi thus describes the meaning of motherhood in nationalist iconography: Bengali mothers proverbially stood for unstinting affection, manifested in an undying spirit of self sacrifice for the family ... Motherhood emerged as the domain which the colonised could claim as their own. (Bagchi 1990: 65)

Even today, the ideal of motherhood as sacrifice is never far away, and Western parenting is largely associated with negative stereotypes of institutional childcare and working mothers. How can we explain this negative image of institutional childcare and at the same time the acceptance of pre-schooling among the middle classes, in particular in a setting where few mothers are in employment? With the admission to pre-school, middle-class parents, and in particular mothers, feel that they are involved in the wider project of producing graduates and, more to the point, Indian white-collar workers in a global economy. Much has been written about the way these new subjects are envisaged, represented and conditioned. Both the transformation of childhood and the idea of children as potential migrants have been crucial in the way liberalization has affected families in India and other places, for instance China (Rofel 1994; Zhao and Murdock 1996; Fernandes 2000a; Donner 2005, 2006a; Anagnost n. d.). In this section, I will analyse how the reproduction of the implied neoliberal values relies on pre-school education, and how it subjects mothers and children alike to the related disciplining regimes. While sitting in her office talking about admission procedures to her school, the headmistress of a well-known Montessori school explained the interviewing process, involving children as young as two years: In the interview I am looking for a well-rounded child, I show them this pencil holder here for example, and say ‘this is a key’ and wait how they react, and if they react – if they shake their head or if they say no, then that is a good sign. I ask them ‘what have you had for breakfast?’ and if they say ‘chicken’ then that is a good sign. Or I show them my keys and make a sound with them and ask them ‘do you want this?’ and if they take it I will say ‘give it back’ and if the child then gives it back, that’s a good sign – I don’t want a child who is grabbing everything and who is demanding and shouts ‘I want this’ and ‘I want that’. Of course you cannot expect a two-year old to say much, what can you see in a two-year old – but I rarely make a mistake, I can tell. In general I am looking for a welladjusted child, not for one clinging to his mummy.

Many Montessori nurseries have similar procedures, whether they are truly ‘selective’ because places are in demand or simply reproduce a competitive atmosphere to appear exclusive. More educated mothers consult self-help books before the interview, which claim that they can prepare the child for admission tests by providing guidance for modern parenting. Under the heading ‘Foundation Stones’, one of the many preparation manuals for admission tests, published in Calcutta and available for just under 100 rupees, starts rather emphatically:

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The author then provides a list of fifty traits ranging from pride to sincerity, and from courtesy to love for nature, which the skilful mother should nourish in her preschooler. The accompanying text emphasizes that to make a child a success is a longterm project, during which the parents ‘can not expect overnight results’ but will have to ‘spend endless hours, months, years together with [sic] hard work, sleepless nights and total dedication’ (Jain 2000: 19). With regard to tests and interviews, the author emphasizes that these are in the interests of the school and the child, not because the capabilities of the child have to be established, but because the authorities ‘have to assess in what type of environment the child is growing and how much [sic] committed you are towards your child’. After placing the responsibility for the success of an average child firmly in the mother’s lap, she is informed that: [N]o matter how much [sic] committed, and sincere the teachers are, it is the parent’s commitment and sincerity towards the child’s education that plays the most effective role as the child spends most of the time with his/her parents. (Jain 2000: 20)

Finally, parents are asked to grade the intelligence of the child concerned and are to be: humble while answering that question. Be very frank and let them know exactly how much [sic] intelligent your child is. And please don’t tell us that you don’t know, as that will clearly indicate that you haven’t given proper time to your child. (Jain 2000: 20)

Far from being regarded as naïve, the book reflects popular wisdom about the role of parents in early childhood held by the mothers I met. Teachers and parents alike emphasized the importance of commitment in relation to children’s schooling which, if scrutinized more carefully, appeared to be a clearly gendered term. Although the home environment of a child is checked in interviews with both parents, fathers attending the ‘interview’ for admission are assumed to engage with their children’s ‘education’ as part of their leisure pursuits. Every self-respecting middle-class father can immediately answer stereotypical interview questions like, ‘What do you do first when you come home from work?’; ‘How do you spend time with your child?’, and practices those in advance, the right answers being ‘When I come home I spend time with my child reading a book or playing a game’ and ‘I like to take my child to the museum or to a park’. Mothers, on the other hand, are not let off as lightly. First, all applications are scrutinized carefully for signs of employment. The few working mothers I spoke to reported, without exception, negative experiences with teachers, who directly or through questions like, ‘When do you come home at night?’ and ‘Who cooks for your child and feeds her?’ expressed their concern about the degree of commitment displayed. In the view of mothers and teachers alike part-time work from home may be just about acceptable, but mothers in full-time employment receive little

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encouragement. Ironically, mothers are, of course, often criticized by teachers who may have children themselves. Apart from maternal employment, the interviews at pre-school level explore other social relationships which are expected to have an impact on the child’s schooling and indicate commitment and devotion. Since in Bengali middle-class families many tasks are divided between women belonging to different generations who live and work in the same household, or at least in the same house, and middle-class families hire servants, children are surrounded by a number of adults who look after their needs; they are rarely alone with their mothers as sole carers. Most are single children, and thus teachers focus on the presence of grandparents and servants in the house as part of the interview or further conversations in order to find out about the domestic environment. Both sets of relationships with other women may, in the view of the mothers, involve different moralities – grandparents are loving guardians with rights and are often seen as co-carers, whereas servants may be loving but cannot be trusted and tend to represent a potentially bad influence. However, during the interviews and later on in their dealings with teachers these two sets of relationships are fused into ‘other people at home’ and the presence of grandparents at the gates or the servant picking up a child is often interpreted by the school as an indicator of a lack of discipline in the mother concerned. More than once a teacher told me that certain children, often those coming from specific business communities, who send a servant to collect a child, were criticized. The same negative image was commonly expressed when grandparents played a prominent role in school-related activities. It is significant to mention that the role of grandparents and other carers in the formal education of children has not always been denied either by the educational establishment or by the parents I spoke to. On many occasions parents with grownup children recalled the crucial role played by a grandparent who decided which school a child would attend and took care of the admission process; and in some families it was an uncle’s job to take a child to school or an aunt was looking after a niece or nephew on a regular basis. Today, however, pre-schools emphasize formal education as the sole responsibility of parents, and in particular mothers, as prime carers, and expect them to take responsibility for all formal aspects of education as well as the child’s daily routine. This ideological construction of a nuclear family is most obviously promoted where the ‘work’ children are doing is concerned. Asked whether pre-schoolers should do homework, one Montessori teacher argued: Parents have to work with the children at home – we expect them to do the homework themselves, but you can always help with reading, writing and little number games – after all parents know what the child needs and wants.

Here, the discursive construction of a child’s ‘needs’ is linked to the intimate knowledge gained within a relationship only the mother possesses. Even if homework is set by the school in the first place, it is only the mother who can make the child perform. Being the mother of a young child appears, in the context of pre-schooling, as a modern middle-class occupation for which one does not only have to be fairly well educated, but for which extended families are also obliged to adopt the ideology of a nuclear unit. While mothers are expected to utilize the readily available labour

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power of servants and grandmothers, their involvement has to be channelled towards the more ‘mundane’ tasks in the house. In theory, only the mother and her child are involved in schooling and the mother is free to devote herself fully to school-related activities. The previous sections have shown that the role mothers play in early years education is based on the values of exclusive maternal care and intimacy between mother and child, which are borrowed from the economy of the nuclear family, but which are employed in a setting where most children grow up in the house of their grandparents. Without acknowledging the role of other carers, the pre-school enforces the global image it tries to project, and frames the work of mothers in relation to schooling in terms of the nuclear family. Mothers are, on the one hand, happy to be valued so highly, especially where their role in the in-laws’ house is a subordinate one, but also complain about the unilateral shift in responsibilities they experience. In a typically ambiguous manner, some of my friends lamented that their sons or daughters refuse to ‘work’ by themselves or with anyone apart from their mother: He will not learn anything with his father, he doesn’t listen to what his grandmother says, and anyway, the old lady has no idea about Montessori education, the number games etc. – I am the only one with whom he would study – and I am worried what will happen once he joins ‘big’ school and has to attend tuition classes.

Nandini, the mother of a 4-year-old boy, complained in a typical fashion. Whereas this ideology of intimate and exclusive bonds between a mother and her school-going child is familiar in other contexts, the ‘culture of care’ (Hochschild 2003) emerging in urban Bengal differs from China, America or even cities in western India in that these mothers are housewives. Here, as in the case of some European countries, modern motherhood implies the withdrawal of women as mothers from paid work.6 The idea that mothers are the sole carers of children is further challenged, even in nuclear families, through the presence of servants. The management of servants, who may explicitly have been hired to look after young children, is a crucial task for mothers in these families and teachers regularly dispense advice on this. As a 6 It is important not to take the views of urban respondents at face value and to distinguish between their representation of such signifiers of modern society as love marriage or women’s employment and the reality of family life and women’s agency. Pace Ganguly-Scrase’s middleclass informants, who reproduce the common view that the number of middle-class women in employment is still rising, studies show a recent decline in urban women’s participation in the labour force and in particular the number of women working in the formal sector. In fact, Banerjee had earlier shown that women’s overall employment rates were dwindling. That the number of urban working women, especially in the service sector, has declined even further in the era of liberalization is proven by the analysis of Census data from 1983–2000 provided by Mitra (see Mitra 2006). Among middle-class women voluntary retirement schemes, which were introduced in the wake of liberalization mainly for civil servants, attracted working mothers in particular, ‘A tidy sum in the form of a golden handshake, time that one could finally call one’s own, a more leisurely lifestyle and the option of working a few hours a day form the home were attractive propositions. At least the children would get better attention’ (Bose 2003).

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responsible mother, Sneha, whose daughter was doing exceptionally well, recognized that the right environment for her daughter’s progress in pre-school included this aspect and explained with reference to her servant: As I go along I decide what she can do and what she can’t do, and obviously with my daughter going to school now there is less for her to do – she cannot read, and play with a 4-year-old is more demanding than the earlier stages. It is fine as long as the children cannot really speak, but after that you have to be careful, because they will pick up foul language from them, and I don’t want that. This one I have kept for longer, but she has to go – I will have to let her go, I will soon have to kick her out.

How far maidservants are aware of this dynamic is unclear, but this passage reflects concerns raised by other mothers as well, and highlights implicit assumptions about childhood and developmental stages. Although the association of ‘foul language’ and maids is not new, the importance given to the right games for pre-schoolers in the house is of recent origin. In more than one way, the relationship between a middle-class mother and the school resembles a working contract with clear obligations as it forms part of the ‘status production work’ undertaken by women (Papanek 1989: 103). Their children’s admission to pre-school was, therefore, not surprisingly seen by many mothers as an entry into a professional relationship, and as a result teacher training has become a sought after qualification in brides, as the example of many teachers, who were sought out by their in-laws because of their useful qualification, shows. Pedagogising the domestic environment: languages and lunch boxes As part of the new pedagogy mothers are reminded that pre-schoolers need encouragement to spend time on useful activities and are cautioned against the influence of family members who may not be as committed as they are to the child’s education. ‘It is you who has to ensure that a 2-year-old is learning the English numbers while the child herself may want to go upstairs and play hide-and-seek with the grandmother’, Tanuka’s mother was told by a teacher when she picked up her child from nursery. Regarding their involvement with the child at home, mothers mentioned that they themselves were aware of the need to employ new methodologies and many emphasized that they had to learn how to make use of educational resources, in particular English books and TV serials. Though the amount of time dedicated to reading educational books may have been exaggerated, visiting children and their mothers at home I was regularly invited to witness even very young children performing simple English rhymes and the alphabets, numbers and commercial jingles. By far the majority of all middle-class children in Bengali families speak Bengali at home even in households where fathers, and increasingly mothers, are educated in English With their admission to nursery, English should ideally be part of conversations between mother and child because once a son or a daughter is about to enter ‘big’ school they are expected to be able to answer simple questions in English.

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From the point of view of the pre-school, studying in English is not generally seen as a problem for those children whose mothers speak English and can teach them at home. But when a mother had attended a Bengali-medium school, teachers as well as mothers often felt some extra attention was needed. Moreover, English-medium tuition excludes most grandmothers from school-related activities. I asked the mother of a university student whether or not her daughter had already known English when she entered the nursery at age two, she replied, ‘Yes of course she knew English, I taught her and she just picked it up from her father. She could count, she could say short things like, “Thank you” and she could tell her name. She never had any problems and liked learning a different language.’ Significantly, this mother does not speak English herself, but had taught her daughter some phrases and the name of specific items using popular charts before sending her to a local nursery – which amounted to her daughter ‘knowing English’. As Viruru points out in her excellent monograph of a nursery school in urban Karnataka, Indian pre-schools are usually multilingual environments with more than one or two languages spoken by staff and students on an everyday basis (Viruru 2001: 134–6). This was also the case with the nurseries I studied, which were largely attended by children from families within which few members spoke English fluently, and who used either Bengali or Hindi at home.7 In most cases staff reported that vernacular languages were used for ‘extra-curricular activities’ and that English was reserved for ‘study’ purposes. At home, the way English pre-schooling was understood varied with the background and individual capability of mothers to speak English, most of whom expected their children to become confident using certain phrases and expressions by repeating them. But more importantly, very young children were encouraged to learn English by watching children’s programmes on TV, which among all mothers was seen as a valuable educational resource for preschoolers. Given the multilingual environment within which urban Indian children grow up, mothers are rightly convinced that their offspring will be able to pick up languages without problems. But it was only non-Bengali mothers who felt that growing up in a multilingual environment not restricted to English provided a strategic advantage in the job market more generally. Tania’s mother, a Gujarati-speaker in her forties, explained: We have an advantage, because we ourselves have to speak in different languages all the time, because we are Gujarati, but we speak Hindi and English for business purposes and living in Calcutta you also come to know Bengali. I encourage her to speak Bengali as well, since she is young she can learn the language. I guess she can speak all these languages. I teach her Gujarati and she speaks with her grandmother, Hindi she learns from watching TV, and she picked up Bengali from the neighbours, and we are both teaching her English so that she succeeds at school.

7 The main reason for this is that the members of staff who work in nurseries are usually educated in the vernacular language and have normally received only rudimentary training in English.

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The emphasis on the advantages of the multilingual environment was less pronounced among the Bengali-speaking mothers, as they were often themselves not as confident in their use of other languages. The mother of a Bengali-speaking classmate of Tania’s expressed a common concern about her daughter’s exposure to Hindi, which she felt was a drawback of education in schools attended by pupils from different language groups: If you want to send them to the better schools they will be exposed to a lot of Hindi there, she picks that up watching TV and at school now. There are not too many Bengalispeaking children there, and the city as a whole is becoming more and more dominated by Hindi-speakers. Nowadays children are more likely to pick up Hindi and English than to learn Bengali properly, which is a shame, but there are so many children from Hindispeaking backgrounds.

In her view, the nursery environment was clearly marked as a place where vernacular languages did not belong and should be subject to discipline, and where mothers had to be re-educated to overcome their natural urge to speak with their young children in the mother tongue. Although all mothers emphasized the importance of the vernacular language in the domestic context, in relation with schooling it had no practical value and was therefore not actively taught or encouraged. Although mothers did not problematize learning English as such, proficiency was seen as a skill alongside computer skills, numeracy and literacy, and thus it had to be actively pursued. The ‘work’ mothers should ideally do at home involves activities centred around a set of training materials, and while only a few of the households had a computer at home (this is still very much seen as a luxury) children were given an endless supply of small books and games to enhance literacy and numeracy skills, practice colour charts and instil simple moral messages in English. Most of these teaching aids resembled textbooks in the way they were compiled and laid out. Thus, exercises followed a simple question and answer scheme with adults taking the position of the teacher supervising the ‘work’ done by the child. While the fact that pre-school children are generally not interested in these exercises is acknowledged, the author of one such book appeals to their mothers by emphasizing its clever didactic mix: The child is more interested in playing rather than in studying. Hence it is very difficult for the parents to prepare him or her for school admission. Keeping this fact in mind this book includes study materials for your child which help in playing and learning at the same time. (Karn 2003: v).

In more affluent or professional households, mothers were often English-medium educated, and thus could introduce tales and storybooks related to TV serials and movies to make learning English fun. If books in the vernacular were read in these households at all, these were at this stage substituted for compilations of English nursery rhymes and European fairy tales, introducing characters like Little Red Riding Hood and adorned with moral messages printed in bold letters at the bottom of the page. Increasingly these are spin offs of Disney productions, and typically the mother of a 3-year-old, who had only just begun to speak and read in English, would

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proudly cite ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ as her daughter’s favourite story, followed by ‘Peter Pan’ and ‘Sleeping Beauty’. Teaching the pre-school child English at home does, therefore, include familiarity with a set of narratives and artefacts largely identified with global and ‘Western’ consumer culture, which mothers introduce as part of the pre-school system. The preparation of food to be taken to school was, next to the question of languages, the second important arena for the imposition of discipline and the reform of mothering practices. Lunch boxes for pre-schoolers are the subject of endless discussions among mothers waiting for their children in front of the school gates, for exchanges with teachers, and in terms of tales of love and betrayal between mothers and their children. Often when children were picked up from nursery school I overheard a mother asking her child, ‘Did you have your tiffin (lunch box)?‘ On opening the container she would then turn around to the wider audience exclaiming, ‘I don’t know what to do, he never finishes his lunch’. Here, as elsewhere, conversations about children’s eating habits and their preferences, aversions and daily routines, are of the utmost importance to middle-class mothers. In Bengalispeaking households in particular, the preparation and consumption of full meals represents the hallmark of a distinctive Bengali domesticity, and ‘Bengali cuisine’ features as the main marker of ethnicity among the middle classes. Regarding the importance of food, Maila Stivens suggests that with reference to the domestication of middle-class mothers within a nationalist discourse, the development of a ‘cuisine’ is of utmost importance. In her own work on the Malaysian middle classes she shows how cooking and the promotion of class-specific child rearing practices are united as part of the same nationalist project: The ever-growing cultural production of ‘domesticity’ suggests that women (as wivesmothers) are being groomed to take a crucial role in producing the everyday practices of modern Malays. The detailed instructions on household decor, advice bringing women up-to-date [sic] with ‘modern’ views about child rearing and interpersonal relationships, and the reinvention of a cuisine all apparently accord women a key part in the ‘domestic’ construction of Malay middle-classness. (Stivens 1998: 62)

While this holds true in relation to Bengali cuisine as well, as will be explored in the next chapter, it suffices here to say that in Bengali middle-class families children’s tastes in foods are taken very seriously, and that the development of a gourmet’s palate is actively promoted by mothers and grandmothers as part of classbased consumption patterns. Once a son or daughter enters school the preparation of a tiffin (lunch box) becomes a major signifier of individual tastes, but also of ‘good mothering’. As there is no need for crèches, pre-schoolers attend nurseries in the morning, and in middle-class families they are served a hearty breakfast, often lovingly prepared by their mothers themselves, so that they only need a little snack before it is time to go home. However, all children bring a substantial packed lunch, which is left with an ayah (minder) at arrival and is consumed during break time. For mothers, as well as the nurseries, these lunch boxes are a matter of concern and represent a prime arena for the imposition of discipline on mothers and children.

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Since pre-school children in Bengal do not often feed themselves, an adult is always at hand, so that teachers have a practical interest in the types of food permitted, and many smaller places struggle to keep parental involvement in the actual consumption of the packed lunch under control. Although I have not come across an instance where a mother insisted on sending hot food for a child at lunchtime, as reported by Viruru, it is common for mothers to bribe staff in the hope of securing extra care for their children during lunchtime (Viruru 2001: 103–5). But food brought into schools is never only about these practical aspects or just about nutrition. It is, as Anne Allison points out in her beautiful analysis of the meanings attached to obentō lunch boxes prepared by the mothers of preschoolers in Japan, a small pleasure in an environment where the ‘work’ of learning is emphasized. Just as the intricate parcels prepared for school children in Japan signify not only maternal love and skills but also cultural identity, in Bengal, lunch boxes are filled with ‘typical’ food. Last but not least, lunch boxes represent a field in which the teachers try to assert their authority over mothers who, although they cook full meals on a regular basis for the family, are here reprimanded and educated in the ways of the world found beyond the home. Whether we look at the beautifully decorated obentō lunch boxes Japanese mothers are expected to master or the home cooked snack Bengali mothers are expected to prepare from scratch, the significance of these seemingly harmless pleasures does not escape mothers or teachers. As Allison explains: Obentōs … are designed to be pleasing and personal. The obentō is also, however, designed as a test for the child. And the double meaning is not unintentional. A structure already filled with signification of mother and home is then emptied to be provided a new form, one now also written with the ideological demands of being a member of Japanese culture and a viable and successful Japanese in the realms of school and later of work. (Allison 2000: 90)

Given the multiple meanings of such food offerings, it is perhaps less surprising that even the small neighbourhood nurseries made it a point to send notes regarding suitable foods and packaging home with their young students. And on more than one occasion teachers emphasized that with respect to lunch boxes all mothers, regardless of economic standing or education, were irresponsible and unreasonable. Bengali mothers, on the other hand, often expressed contempt for a school’s strict policies regarding food, and subverted the attempts to impose order in the school environment by sending ‘inappropriate amounts’ and ‘unsuitable food’ on a daily basis. I would like to suggest that far from representing a mere boycott of the nursery teachers this attitude can be read as a refusal to accept the school’s messages about good mothering, about discipline and the emphasis on education outside the home per se. Bengali Hindu middle-class mothers, more so than those from other backgrounds, take great pride in the development of discerning tastes in their young children, who are offered a wide range of everyday foods and treats at home. When a son or daughter entered school, these mothers felt that their loving and controlled ‘education of the senses’ was disrupted, because mother and child had to rearrange meals taken in the home around the lunch taken in the nursery. Anxieties about social status,

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multicultural environments, and the contaminating effects of modernity, which are translated into negative discourses about eating ‘outside’ more generally, were also implied in talk about lunch taken at school. Thus, while lunch boxes were prepared and packed at home, what happened to the food at school was a much discussed issue in these families, an issue that expressed a wider concern with commensality between groups. The anxieties expressed included where, when and with whom lunch was taken at school. In a typical example, the Bengali mother of a little boy complained that the helpers at his nursery, who assisted the children to have their lunch, were not fit to perform this task hygienically, since they all came from working-class backgrounds. She blamed the nursery’s owner for neglecting the health of the children and claimed that her son had caught stomach bugs more than once because of the lunchtime routine. Another often criticized aspect of the school lunch was the sharing of food between children, although the children themselves identified this as the most enjoyable part of going to pre-school. Their mothers, on the other hand, were disgusted by the mere idea of sharing in the classroom, and most referred to hygiene as well as communal identities when I asked about it. A Marwari mother of a 3-year-old daughter did not hesitate to pinpoint the problem: You never know what they eat at school, I told her not to touch anything other children may offer, you don’t know who prepared it and how – and if you have ever seen the kitchens of these Bengali families, you wouldn’t want your child to eat any of the food that’s been prepared there.

In the view of teachers, on the other hand, mothers seemed to be obsessed with lunch, and had to be told what to send, how to prepare it and what amount of food to provide. Although teachers acknowledged that children needed a snack, depicting lunchtime as an important opportunity to teach children manners and the values of sharing by encouraging them to lay a table, to take turns and to emphasize tidiness, they felt that a nursery could not channel the various meanings of food and the related maternal transgressions. Moreover, increasing consumerism tended to aggravate the problem of lunch boxes through the introduction of new and, in the view of teachers, highly competitive foods, which made the children greedy and seemed to contain messages appropriate in the domestic environment but not at school. Mothers themselves acknowledged that new snacks marketed for children introduced an element of open competition, since most of these foods were relatively costly, but at the same time speculated that pre-schoolers would not easily share such precious items with their friends. Consequently, even very young middle-class children successfully demanded snacks like Maggi noodles for their lunch from early on, and commercially produced food has become inseparable from schooling in the nursery. Modern times Although all mothers sent their children to nursery, this was often done reluctantly. When we talked about entry into nurseries and schools, the majority seized the

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opportunity to relate their domestic concerns to wider political issues. In many instances a mother felt that her son or daughter was not ‘ready’ to leave the home and spend time with teachers in a group of children, but few younger mothers dared to express their criticism of the new regime as directly as the mother of a 25-year-old student, whose daughter had been the first in her family to be sent to a nursery: When my daughter was three, she was not ready to go to kindergarten, she cried and cried, but we had to bring her there and gradually she settled in. The place was not very good, the aunties were not so educated and she did not like it at all. But that was the first generation to get admitted to the better schools like this.

Her comments did also demonstrate the shift in the ideas of what pre-school is really all about, as she mentioned that earlier children of well educated mothers did not need to attend pre-schools, as early years education was seen as a means to make up for deficits in the home environment: Of course, if the mothers are not educated or not really disciplined, then children will have to go to nursery or Montessori school, like my sister-in-law’s son and daughter, but with my daughter I could have educated her at home, and so we sent her as late as possible.

This clearly critical, if class-biased, approach has gradually been replaced by the general acceptance of pre-school education among younger mothers from a wide range of backgrounds, who look at pre-school in terms of chances, opportunities and future careers. To them, pre-schooling provides social skills and a ‘well rounded personality’ that the home environment can no longer produce, simply because, in their own view, mothers and their children are not ‘disciplined’ and ‘smart’ enough for today’s world of work. If this new approach rests on the promotion of early learning institutions as ‘just like home’ to make the separation of mother and child more palatable, this implies not so much that nurseries have become more homely, but that homes have become more structured environments. In the new world, mothers are teachers who take full responsibility for the learning experiences of a single child. The need for children from middle-class families to attend nursery schools is a recent trend which emerged in the wake of globalization and the integration of employment markets into worldwide discourses of skills and mobility. During the 1990s it was supported by the increasing privatization of education in Calcutta, and the massive investment in related institutions by private parties and professional providers. Bigger schools and ‘reputed’ selective institutions have had kindergarten (KG) classes for 3-year-olds for some time, but a huge number of smaller schools are now busy adding pre-school classes in an attempt to jump on the ‘early years’ bandwagon. Earlier only a few pioneers interested in Montessori education or alternative schooling, such as the reformist approach promoted by Tagore in his project in Santiniketan included some early schooling; otherwise schooling resumed at the age of five or six. But from the middle of the 1990s onwards most neighbourhoods had their own small ‘Montessori schools’ added. Indeed, the growth of this lucrative market in pre-school education has recently been a matter of concern for the state government, which initiated steps to ‘regulate’ pre-school learning. But unlike the

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discussions of state schooling and the poor, which centre on the curriculum and the problem of attendance, the debate on pre-schooling for middle-class children emphasizes the service character of schooling, and discusses the provision from a consumer’s point of view. There are multiple discourses that brought about pre-school education, but the rhetoric of consumer interests and market mechanisms is dominant in all of them. In the view of the state government the regulation of pre-schools is a necessity, accompanying attempts to control other areas of urban growth which should be supervised and subjected to trading standards, including the property market, health care and the leisure industry, restaurants, clubs and entertainment venues (see Roy 2003). Alongside these, pre-school education may just represent another prestigious service, and parents can expect to be saved from unscrupulous investors, whilst still being able to invest in education. There is to date little concern about the quality of individual learning programmes other than with the infrastructure provided in specific schools – contrary to the debates that dominate higher secondary education in the state. Among parents pre-school education is widely regarded as a prerequisite for admission into a good school, and across all economic divisions, middle-class mothers think of the means required to pass an entrance exam at age three or four in terms of alphabets, counting and general knowledge. But variations in their views on pre-schools relate to the behavioural aspects of early years education, with the more educated mothers emphasizing the pre-school’s importance in establishing behavioural patterns like independence and smartness and lower middle-class mothers with a view on less ‘reputed’ schools highlighting discipline and the ability to sit a test, all skills taught in the nursery. Accordingly, mothers chose a mix of strategies to help their children, strategies involving classic ‘rote-learning’ at home and ‘learning-is-fun’ educational toys designed to instil the same kind of knowledge. Indeed, since pre-school education has become synonymous with Montessori, which some of the better educated mothers identified as ‘child-centred’ learning, a more labour-intensive type of home schooling has emerged. Mothers educated to degree level and from upper middleclass families were mostly conversant with the educational tools and the ‘method’ employed at the pre-school their child attended, a ‘method’ which was constructed as the opposite of ‘rote-learning’ and discursively represented in terms of individual development. Here, to be a modern mother clearly implied a critique of the old regime, but was not translated into actual activities through which a son or daughter acquired knowledge beyond a set of already popular skills. Mothers were convinced that in order to be a competent consumer they themselves had to ‘learn’ about childcentred education. Parenting, schooling and global citizenship By ‘nationalizing a foreign product’, namely early years education (Fernandes 2000a: 615), middle-class mothers and the teachers are actually transcending the division between the home and the school and negotiate liberalization through children’s

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education. With reference to middle-class motherhood, Chatterjee and Riley observe that: ‘[V]oluntary (responsible) parenthood’ prescribed as essential for global, national, and individual progress, is the key issue. In this version of modernity, the triumph of reason is to be found in each citizen’s claim to a greater share of national wealth and a higher standard of living. In promotional materials the rewards of fertility control are always material and the didactic stories about exemplary planned families emphasize consumer power. While individual’s happiness is linked to material and physical, rather than spiritual, well-being, the materialism promoted has a recognizable Indian, local and middle-class character. (Chatterjee and Riley 2001: 831)

Within this context pre-school education exemplifies the ways in which motherhood, childbearing and child rearing became associated with wider consumption patterns and particular domestic arrangements. Stivens cautions, with reference to Malaysia, that: [T]his may seem predictable to observers of consumerist capitalist culture in the West, where women are seen to occupy a similarly focal role as co-ordinators of consumption and elaborate domesticity. But, as noted, the embeddedness of a range of Islamic practices in the material manifestations of becoming modern lends a highly specific set of meanings to women’s place in producing domesticity. (Stivens 1998: 63)

But apart from these differences the emerging consumer culture of the 1990s has reshaped ideologies of motherhood, in India as elsewhere, which are related to earlier formations but which are now transformed in globally recognizable ways: To be a modern mother is to be an active consumer under great pressure to acquire all the commodities necessary for the satisfactory performance of motherhood. The smaller number of children has coincided with an enormous expansion of expenditure on children. (Stivens 1998: 63)

Distinctively, the post-independence state with its earlier emphasis on secularism and development and Hindu nationalism provided the background against which these new practices are formulated. But what form they take depends on regional histories and global movements. In a recent paper on middle-class motherhood and the nation in post-liberalization China, Ann Anagnost observes that ‘in the ideologies of motherhood, we see how aspirations for national transcendence over “an anxiety of belatedness” are being reworked in the private sphere in the production of the middle-class child as a new subject who can stride across national borders with confidence’ (Anagnost n. d.). With reference to Calcutta middle-class families, these same anxieties nurture the desire to recreate a ‘global lifestyle’ at home. The process whereby the new economic policies ‘reorganise the family from within’ (Anagnost n.d.) has been described in much detail for the United States, but we are only just beginning to understand how these transformations work in India. Liberalization, the prospect of migration and global competition are determining the way in which educational landscapes are perceived by middle-class children and their parents. Moreover, these are embedded in national and regional histories

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and ideologies including nationalist and/or religious discourses. In India, these configurations have been described with reference to Hindu nationalist ideologies which prescribe the production of new domesticities, gender relations and child rearing practices (see Banerjee 1995; Sarkar 1995). With reference to middleclass children in Bengali families in Calcutta, educational histories reflect other trajectories, most prominently the politicization of education under the influence of the Left Front government. Although the state is expected to facilitate reforms in education, which in turn could serve to integrate the poor into the ‘mainstream’, middle-class parents yearn for privatized education – a space where reservations are not an issue, students are expected to realize their ‘full potential’ and gain their parents a place in ‘new’ consumer society. Thus, middle-class families with children living in Calcutta envisage their sons and daughters as citizens, but with a view to a global economy, and therefore emphasize marketable skills acquired in educational institutions which are ‘private’. This view of a global market is reflected in the way in which pre-school education is helping to reorganize the mothering practices in an environment where ‘the idea of early childhood represents a “latent potentiality” that must be seized’ (Anagnost n.d.). Mothers and teachers are not alone in making this child/citizen a reality. Increasingly, their efforts are supported by professional experts. Their suggestions, predictions and solutions address anxieties which accompany this kind of move and which are consumed in the homes of more and more middle-class children. Unlike elsewhere in India, religion is not among the main issues raised by Bengali middleclass parents, whose ideological outlook implies new ideas about culture, regional tradition and education. Here, middle-class society is markedly communalist in much more subtle ways. Whereas in the Malay context Islam and state-sponsored religiosity feature at school, and whereas in Maharashtra regional and languagebased identities have fed into Hindu nationalist schooling (Bénéï 2005), the Bengali middle class opts largely for a secular (albeit regionalist) public culture. Just like Anagnost suggests for the case of China, Bengali middle-class children as pupils have become the subjects of multiple practices resulting from liberalization policies. In order to realize these, their mothers require training in the new methodologies as well as ‘rules and manners’ which produce specific understandings of modernity through schooling. The new motherhood that has emerged is therefore a crucial site for the production of suitable subjects and citizens, not only children, but children and their mothers.

Chapter 5

Motherhood, Food and the Body

After that it was the holiday season for the entire family. Christmas, year-end, New Year’s Day. Father and sons were determined to feast on delicacies – whether they remained at home or not – and demanded chocolate cakes, fruit cakes, biryani, navratan pulao and what have you. Of course it was possible to get all these things from shops but no one cared to have them unless Aditi made them herself. Suchitra Bhattacharya, Hemanter Pakhi

Throughout the 1990s the lifestyle of the Indian middle classes changed dramatically, and a new consumerist orientation challenged many of the certainties embedded in everyday practices. Amongst the arenas where these changes were played out food consumption and the availability of new foods across India’s metropolitan areas were particularly prominent although these changes have been notably absent from the analysis of these lifestyles. Changing food habits signify wider social transformations in the aftermath of reform, as has been documented in some detail in the case of other regions, for example China (Jing 2000; Farquhar 2002), but in spite of a rich literature on traditional understandings of food in South Asia the emerging new patterns have not been analysed beyond a banal recognition of the attraction fast food chains have for Indian youths (Figure 5.1). For this exploration of motherhood, however, food and related practices, its changing meanings and the role mothers play in its preparation and mediation, are extremely relevant reflections of recent transformations, of global images and of class-based consumption patterns. Thus, while most of the literature on food focuses on food transactions and commensality in public (see, for example, Dumont 1953; Mayer 1960; Pocock 1973; Appadurai 1981; Khare 1992), with the exception of Caplan’s study of middle-class households in Madras, the less easily observed changes food consumption in the family home has undergone have largely been overlooked (Caplan 2002, 2008). One objective of this chapter is, therefore, to direct attention away from the representation of middle-class consumption produced by professionals, towards the practices that produce it in the domestic setting. Another objective is to analyse middle-class women’s agency as consumers and to explore contemporary notions of motherhood in relation to food consumption and gendered bodies. Taking what I have elsewhere referred to as ‘new vegetarianism’ as my point of departure (Donner 2008a), the chapter highlights a modern understanding of a ‘traditional’ practice, namely vegetarianism, with reference to motherhood, but also with reference to new consumption patterns.

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Figure 5.1 Vegetarian and Non-vegetarian Fast Food Menu While married women as nurturers and ‘producers’ of food are often at the centre of debates about what signifies middleclassness and the nation, their role as ‘chief consumers’ (and, in fact, non-consumers) of food has not been acknowledged to the same degree. In this chapter I will, therefore, focus specifically on the multiple meanings of women’s food practices as a gendered form of ‘adjustment’ to new

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realities in post-liberalization India. I will link the overall transformations that have affected middle-class food practices in Calcutta, to a less visible but very significant trend, namely the fact that more and more mothers are becoming vegetarians. Within this framework, the main challenge to existing food practices is not only represented by new commodities, which transformed public eating, private cooking and consumption quite visibly over the years I did my fieldwork, but the practices that make them work as signifiers of new selves. Moreover, the chapter explores the ways these practices affect ideas about female personhood, and transformations of the social relationships that make up the family, the neighbourhood, and the cityscape. In order to do so, I will discuss one of the main sites of self-cultivation in Hindu discourses on the basis of my fieldwork with middle-class women in Calcutta, which is a vegetarian diet, associated in this context not only with caste and thus the hierarchical relationships between groups expressed in the idiom of purity – but vegetarianism associated with the control of sexual urges and celibacy. In this chapter I argue that the role of vegetarianism, as an extremely significant practice associated with the control of women’s sexuality and the cultivation of the self, takes on a new urgency in the context of consumerist society and medicalized maternal bodies among middle-aged Bengali women. New vegetarians – old ropes I was surprised when Moon-Moon, mother of Shreya, told me during our first meeting that she had become a vegetarian before her daughter was born. Moon-Moon had problems conceiving and after a number of treatments, numerous trips to the temple, to Muslim pirs and of course the doctors, she decided to become a vegetarian. Today, she is a very devoted mother, who since she gave birth to her daughter has stopped working as a teacher in order to ‘look after her properly’. Both, her daughter and her husband, are non-vegetarian, and since her affinal as well as her nuclear household command considerable incomes, the family eat out once in a while. When asked, Moon-Moon was quite explicit about why she became a vegetarian, and emphazised her role as a mother in conversations about eating and food in order to explain to me what it means. First, she argued, she had to try it out, since Bengali Hindus are of course not often ‘full’ vegetarians, but usually eat fish and meat, and so it does not come ‘natural’. In this context, full vegetarianism is strongly associated with non-Bengali communities, especially Jains, a wealthy and strongly disliked business community famous for its very strict vegetarian diet and conspicuous consumption. So in our conversation, Moon-Moon was eager to point out that this is not what her kind of vegetarianism is all about. In addition, she also distinguished it from that of her mother, who was widowed early and brought up her and her two brothers with the help of Moon-Moon’s uncles. In her case, Moon-Moon asserts, that her own decision to turn vegetarian was triggered by her ‘failure’ to conceive, which caused her and her husband as well as the wider family distress during the early years of marriage. Obviously, her family and her in-laws sent her from pillar to post, and she was subjected to numerous tests

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and drugs – she would have tried – by her own admission – anything in order to conceive. Today, Moon-Moon and her husband are both convinced that her religious vows and different fasts as well as the dietary adjustments she made enabled her to finally get pregnant. However, if it was only about conception, she could have started eating fish again, after she gave birth. Asked why she remains a vegetarian, Moon-Moon pointed out that she continues to eat a vegetarian diet, as she argues that while it would have been nice to have a boy, she and her husband have to be careful now, both have to make sure that they control their sexual urges. Vegetarianism, it turns out, is expected to help in this endeavour, as meat is heating, which in turn leads to enforced sexual appetites. Thus, she tries not to cook meat in the home – and while fish would of course be acceptable, and in fact her mother-in-law upstairs and her sister-in-law next door cook fish on an everyday basis and send some for her husband and little daughter, she doesn’t really do so herself. In fact, she argues, that her being a vegetarian was one of the reasons for her husband to press for separate households and so they had a small kitchen installed next to the bathroom – which ultimately made them separate the flat from the rest of the house. Food systems and gendered meanings Gendered bodies and food regimes are of course not only to be seen in the context of ‘new vegetarianism’ or new consumption patterns among the urban middle classes. Hindu ‘food systems’ are explicit about the different meanings of food in social life, and as Ravindra Khare, among others, points out – food is interpreted on three different levels: The first discourse on food – ontological and experimental – is concerned with the ‘cultural’ givens within the worldly sphere (including food classifications, taboos, intrinsic qualities, normal meal patterns, dietary restrictions, and notions of sufficiency and insufficiency). It includes one’s passage along the designated social-ritual phases (varnāśramadharma), on the one hand, and on a ‘path’ of spiritual welfare (atmakalyāna), on the other. The second discourse – transactional and therapeutic – concerns itself with the maintenance and promotion of comprehensive body-soul ‘wellness’ (including the prevention and cure of various diseases by diet and medicine) by recognising interdependence among different intrinsic properties of foods, the eater and his actions of giving and receiving. The third discourse – world critical – shows the limits of the first two as it concerns itself with such ultimate issues as the reality or illusion of the world and the roles (‘inner’ or spiritual and ‘outer’ or physical) of foods in enhancing one’s spiritual knowledge (jñāna) and ‘inner sight’ (antardrsti) for attaining liberation (moksa). The three food discourses, in other terms, are concerned with (a) worldly life and becoming, (b) healing and happiness, and (c), self control and salvation. (Khare 1992: 8)

This short passage already expands our horizon beyond the South Asianist concern with food transactions and group-based identities, demonstrating as it does that food is not only relevant in relation to collectivities, but also in relation to notions of the self – the individual body-soul wellness, as Khare calls it. The other two dimensions that appear here are a sense of becoming – of movement, process and striving,

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which transactional analysis and structuralism find difficult to accommodate – and a discourse of self-control and salvation through the life cycle, approaches which are not solely content with the rigid symbolic meanings of specific foods. Notably Khare is not relating any of this to gendered bodies, but if we take this reading of food discourses seriously, it is clear that while vegetarianism is also an upper-caste custom, reproducing group-based identities by indicating and maintaining social distance through notions of ritual purity, there is more to eating or not eating certain foodstuff. Even where we need to look at status and food in the context of caste, the example of Moon-Moon’s view on vegetarianism shows that regional interpretations of wider food systems play an important role here; first, Bengali Brahmins are lax in terms of their vegetarianism according to all India standards, since they consume fish, and thus full vegetarianism is associated with ‘other’ communities; second, the region is known for the severe deprivation that high-caste widows experience, who have to become strict vegetarians forgoing meat, onion, garlic, spices and specific lentils, cooking separately and eating leftovers. This emphasis on widows and their control through diets suggests that gender plays a more poignant role in the way vegetarianism links bodies, groups and sociality here than elsewhere on the subcontinent. Khare and others quite rightly emphasize that within South Asian knowledge systems, food and the practice of vegetarianism provide powerful symbolic and moral messages. Because it is, on the one hand, a distinctly Hindu trait and, on the other hand, relates high-status with physical and mental health, vegetarianism has political potential. In the case of Hindu men, vegetarianism is seen as liberating them from sexual and therefore worldly bonds, emphasized in the figure of the renouncer so powerfully projected by Gandhi. It is this suggestive association between sexual appetite and masculinity that led Joseph Alter to interpret vegetarianism and celibacy as constituting ‘somatic truths’ (Alter 1997), as opposed to mere technologies of the self in the Foucauldian sense. But it is the latter that have been discussed extensively in the literature on family planning, which draws on the notions of control, power and hierarchy in order to analyse how Indian women as mothers have been subjected to scientific discourses that expect them to become reformed, rational and responsible agents of the state’s population control programmes (see Chatterjee and Riley 2001). While middle-class women are also targets of such programmes, the technologies of the self Foucault is alluding to need to be differentiated from methods of selfcultivation (Foucault 1979). Though the notion of ‘somatic truth’ may be as intriguing as it is mystifying, Alter’s distinction opens a debate that allows us to look at vegetarianism as an instance of conscious self-cultivation and a means to realize a truth, which may change over time. We need to analyse, therefore, in how far women’s reality does draw on the ‘stereotype of women that predominates in family planning media … that of the wife-mother, an image that stresses her familial identity, respectability, industriousness, centrality to domestic order and prosperity’ (Chatterjee and Riley 2001: 839), not – as Chatterjee and Riley suggest – because it makes women

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vulnerable to interventions by the state, but because it constitutes the context within which somatic truths can emerge. In Bengal, vegetarianism is associated with the gendered body through the institution of widowhood, at least in its post-nineteenth century form, which has been explained in terms of patriarchy and the need to control the sexuality of often very young, high-caste widows living with their in-laws. These widows posed a potential threat to their family’s honour and so their sexual appetites had to be curtailed through ‘non-heating’ diets, which marked them as non-reproductive and inferior members of their affinal households. Though widows are usually much older today, such notions do still dominate their lives in middle-class Bengali families, where one may no longer adhere to other customary deprivations, but where widows are expected to become vegetarians. The fact that it is perfectly acceptable for these women to avoid the white saris of widowhood and attend social events and outings – as opposed to being confined to the home – but that it is still seen as inappropriate and even offensive for them to eat fish, indicates that the assumed control of sexuality is only half the story. Moreover, if the association between vegetarianism and widowhood, and the loss of privileges, rights and sociality in the in-laws’ house is so pervasive, why is it that more and more young mothers like Moon-Moon become ‘vegetarian’ in contemporary Calcutta? Becoming a vegetarian is always a political act, and although here it is not related to religious observation as such, it can be compared with the various practices adopted by other women with an interest in self-cultivation. Saba Mahmood, who studied women in the Egyptian mosque movement has convincingly argued that systems of power mark human bodies with different kinds of truths brought about by self-formation and invites us to take the body more seriously (Mahmood 2005). With reference to South Asia, anthropologists studying embodiment, the subject and gender have not really looked into the meanings of older practices of self-cultivation, like vegetarianism, and their transformation in the current climate of socio-economic change. I would like to suggest that we can only understand the meaning of vegetarianism for young mothers if we take the wider transformations of women’s lives into account. This leads us away from the analysis of widowhood and Hindu ideas about food and its meanings, towards the globalization of the local food scene, and the way meat and its consumption figure in wider discourses on the gendered body and reproductive change. Consumption Consumption has been identified as a hallmark of new middle-class lifestyles in India, but it has been largely viewed in terms of the ‘public modernity’ paradigm, and thus the focus of social scientists has been on the public sphere, i.e. the emerging youth cultures, fashion and advertising (see, for instance, Conlon 1995; Liechty 2003; Mazzarella 2003; Mukhopadhyay 2004). This narrowly confined take on consumption has directed our attention away from the middle-class household as

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an important site of such practices and has introduced a bias towards male and young actors, with women’s involvement mostly interpreted in terms of media representations (Mankekar 1999; Srilata 1999; Basu 2001). If we take vegetarianism like that of Moon-Moon seriously, it appears that a practice marked as ‘traditional’ is re-interpreted in relation to new consumption patterns. Moon-Moon very clearly argued that it was her decision to become a vegetarian in the first place, whereby she cut herself off from her mother-in-law and the communal kitchen upstairs. But her reasons to continue with her vegetarian diet after becoming a mother were not limited to her concern with such intra-household relationships – she and others like her, told me repeatedly how it was important for her to control her sexual urges in order to prevent further pregnancies. While she told me that earlier her difficulty in conceiving provided the reasoning behind her diet, she was now concerned with maintaining the status quo – namely the single child family. And her concern with the well-being of her daughter was quite closely related to preventing further pregnancies, as she told me on numerous occasions that the expenses incurred bringing up a child in the new consumer society – where a range of earlier irrelevant goods and of course private schooling have become the norm, prevent couples like her and her husband from having more children. It is in the context of reproductive change that the degree to which economic reforms, with their emphasis on new opportunities but also disinvestment and thus insecurity and the spectre of unfolding middle-class consumerism, have brought about new understandings of what makes gendered bodies. In the process, the female body – disciplined as it is – becomes a prime site of middleclassness, directed towards the reproduction of the desired ‘single-male-child’ family. Local understandings of vegetarianism Let me revisit my first encounter with Indian vegetarianisms experienced while living with Bengali friends of my family for three months in 1986. Theirs was a well educated, affluent family, occupying a beautiful three-storey house in south Calcutta, where three of six brothers had established their own households, the house consequently having been divided into flats with separate kitchens. The mid1980s were a period of relative calm and modest growth, the Communist Party of India (Marxist) had just come to power and the state was undergoing rapid political transformations but remained in economic decline. My host’s family was typical in that they had benefited from the increase in government employment since Independence, and all its members had been educated at university with the male members going abroad, which was somewhat unusual and marked them as more affluent than the average middle-class household. However, although this family was well off, their lifestyle was not extravagant, certainly not in the eyes of a West German student to whom it appeared almost austere and vaguely Eastern European. In and across the flats in my hosts’ house, the preparation of food not only dominated many conversations, relationships and schedules – shopping, cooking and the eating of everyday meals was a major preoccupation in which women and men, as well as servants, were involved on a daily basis. Consequently, food and eating

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became one of the main vehicles through which various family members started to teach me about ‘Bengali culture’ and food practices contributed a great deal to what I learned about cultural difference during that first trip to India. This family certainly consisted of what a close friend of mine referred to as ‘serious’ eaters – in the way Tamil Brahmins from the south, with their strict vegetarianism, are considered in Bengal to be serious about their food. Although there was a lot of pleasure involved in the consumption of food, the preparation and related practices were indeed never taken lightly. Khare has referred to the fact that because Hindu systems of knowledge put so much emphasis on the moral qualities of food and related practices, worries about its ‘intersubjectivity’ and the fear of pollution through its incorrect handling or unsuitable handlers are very pronounced (Khare 1992). Though caste was never mentioned apart from when it came to the performance of certain rituals marked out as religious, the family’s Brahmin-status was signified in terms of its members obsession with food, cleanliness, the order and type of dishes served and, last but not least, the persons who were allowed to enter the kitchen, cook and serve. Another indicator of high caste-status was a strict differentiation between what was seen as a ‘traditional’, adequate vegetarian diet that included fish and, in contrast, the consumption of chicken or indeed any other meat. Although most family members ate chicken or meat outside, and men in particularly boasted that they had even tried beef and pork in Chinese restaurants or abroad, this was a typical Bengali vegetarian household which ‘by and large’ followed a vegetarian diet ‘except for fish’. At the time I did not question the notion of fish being a vegetarian item because it was obvious that vegetarianism did not have much to do with any notion of animal welfare, but was related to the idea that meat, and in particular chicken, was ‘dirty’ and ‘polluting’. More importantly, it turned out that none of the younger members of the wider family was a ‘full’ vegetarian; however, they would not consume meat inside the house because the oldest member of the family, the ageing mother of all the brothers, was a widow and therefore strictly vegetarian, excluding fish, meat, onions and masur dal (red lentils) from her diet. Now in her seventies, she had given birth to eleven children before becoming a widow in her forties. She spent her days cooking special foods for her sons, dressed in a torn white sari that barely covered her breasts, but she commanded the respect of her relatives and it transpired that she had been an extremely strict mother-in-law. In these kind of families widows, though not forced, are expected to follow tradition and adhere to the dress code and diet appropriate for widows, which acts as a public reminder of a family’s high caste-status. But while these women cook their own food, often in a separate space, I found to my surprise that even where a widow accepts all the rules governing her own life, she nevertheless contributes to the consumption of others. In the case of my hosts, this strictly vegetarian mother did occasionally cook special fish dishes for her sons ‘with her own hands’, something which was interpreted as a maternal duty. Indeed, her lenience towards her sons’ ‘modern habits’ was in the view of her family members a sign of true devotion, a devotion that underlined her own virtuous and self-sacrificing stance. In Calcutta’s Bengali Hindu dominated middle-class culture vegetarianism was not so much represented as a marker of caste, but as a matter of community

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expressed through gendered practices and/or as an individual choice of a healthy lifestyle. Caste-status was, of course, implicitly present: as I have shown above, a high-caste middle-class family did not cook or consume specific kinds of meat in the house, but its members were only required to be strictly vegetarian during life cycle festivals and pujas. Second, as my Brahmin friends would argue, while vegetarianism is historically associated with higher castes, members of devotional Vaishnavite sects, who often originate from lower-castes, are strict vegetarians and do not even eat fish. Thus, vegetarianism within this specific social landscape does not automatically signify high-caste status. While distinctions between an amish (meat, non-vegetarian) diet and a niramish (excluding fish, onion, meat, eggs) diet are as clear-cut in Bengal as elsewhere, these descriptive terms do not translate into vegetarian and non-vegetarian castes, but as we will see, produce gendered persons. While the link between vegetarianism and caste is weak even in the case of Brahmins, vegetarianism today carries strongly marked ethnic and communal connotations in contemporary Calcutta. Apart from being an indicator of reproductive age/marital status within the Bengali-speaking Hindu community, a discussion of vegetarianism evokes a much broader historical discourse on group-based identities. Generally speaking, vegetarianism is a very important marker of religious and ethnic identity and part of the embodied experience of communal relations enacted every day on different levels. Due to the absence of strict vegetarianism among the Brahmins of the region, non-vegetarian diets are not associated so much with low caste origins as with the division between Hindus and Muslims, on the one hand, and Bengali Hindu ‘sons of the soil’ and vegetarian Gujarati and Jain migrants belonging to affluent business communities, on the other. Especially in central Calcutta, with its heterogeneous population, the meaning of diets in reproducing communal boundaries cannot be overemphasized. The importance of diets for communal boundaries was, for example, obvious in the discourses on love-marriages, which focused often on the problems a Hindu girl marrying into a Muslim home would face, as the discussions among members of the party committee cited earlier show. They were also continuously referred to by my Bengali Hindu interlocutors when we spoke about their Bengali Christian neighbours, who were not vegetarian and, according to my friends, did not prepare all their meals from scratch. Muslims figure at one end of the spectrum, while the Jains are their direct opposite; and, in true middleclass fashion, urban Bengali-speaking Hindus place themselves somewhere in the middle. It is, then, against the definition of these communities as ‘other’ that Bengali vegetarianism comes into its own as, in the words of my informants, it is neither rigid, as in the case of the Jains, nor irrelevant, as in the case of the Muslims. Within this discourse on the multicultural urban context bangla ranna or (Bengali cuisine) emerged as the basis for a largely vegetarian diet including fish which, although obviously historically specific and, more importantly, relatively recent, is perceived as the main ‘traditional’ marker of Bengali identity. Cultivated in a very self-conscious way, the everyday meals served in middle-class households are elaborate, labour-intensive and costly. Such food is constitutive of Calcutta’s Bengali Hindu urban middle-class domesticity, which relies on at least one woman fully devoted to cooking for the family and the availability of servants to help out

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with the more labour-intensive tasks. In this way, the kind of food consumed by all members of the family helps to maintain specific gender relations which define women in terms of motherhood and the home, as it is mothers who shoulder the responsibility for the communal identities produced here. Being Bengali Hindu in this stratum of urban society implies a strong emphasis on food knowledge and food consumption in everyday life, and the way the related practices are valued is an – often ironically cited but nevertheless serious – marker of a naturalized sense of belonging. As I have shown, a true niramish (vegetarian) diet is traditionally reserved for strict Bengali Hindu widows, regardless of their ritual status or economic standing, but is followed most rigidly by high-caste women. Widows have to avoid amish or non-vegetarian items in their diet since they are expected to accept that their sexually active life has ended with the death of a husband. Thus widows have to avoid ‘hot’ foods including meat, which are thought to enhance sexual appetites; since fish and meat are also high-status foods in middle-class households, these constraints express their new dependency through a public statement in which they substitute costly food with less symbolically prominent items. In public discourse vegetarianism is strongly associated with such serious deprivation, which stands in stark contrast to the refined dietary requirements the male householder indulges in. Though commentators have rightly argued that we owe many of the vegetarian delicacies served in Bengali homes today to the ingenuity of widows, who created these from leftovers (Nair 2005), we need to resist the temptation to glorify or romanticize their creativity, born as it is from their marginal position. Widows have been and are often today family members, who are denied the potency of pleasurable eating and commensality enjoyed by other members of the family. Vegetarianism does, therefore, not simply mark caste but, through a combination of gender, caste background and an emphasis on marital status, is elevated to the status of an encompassing symbol of complex, overlapping identities in Bengali homes. Given its relevance in gendered discourse on marital and reproductive status, it is, therefore, not surprising that strict vegetarianism is today rarely depicted as a desirable mainstream diet for the whole family. This makes it even more remarkable that I found many younger married women and mothers choosing a vegetarian diet. Having analysed the most significant meanings of vegetarianism, we shall now turn to the specific terms within which a non-vegetarian diet is understood. Associated with Muslims, who are often depicted as aggressive and sexually more active than their Hindu counterparts due to their diet, a non-vegetarian diet, especially where it includes red meat, is seen as naturally virile and ‘heating’. Second, meat is associated with male sociality, for example among students, fellow workers and businessmen. But while all men may consume meat, and even alcohol, in restaurants outside the home, those who fashion themselves as true householders, good husbands and fathers would not indulge in the consumption of such non-vegetarian items in the home. Thus, even today middle-aged men with older children do sometimes adopt an outwardly domestic lifestyle and stick to a vegetarian diet which only allows fish on a daily basis. Most of these respectable men are, however, not doing this solely for reasons associated with caste and tradition, but also believe that such a vegetarian diet is ‘healthier’ and helps to control their sexual urges. While it is fully

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acceptable for men to indulge in eating meat regularly outside the home, few Hindu families would have prepared non-vegetarian items including meat on an every day basis in the past. For women, on the other hand, non-vegetarian items have always been a less acceptable option, and eating chicken or red meat is still regarded as a slightly guilty pleasure in which young girls can indulge. Young women were not usually encouraged to consume meat at home and, like the women in my host family, would enjoy meat treats on festive occasions, including life cycle rituals, and pujas, during which non-vegetarian items like the traditional pulao mangsho (rice with meat) would be served in non-Brahmin households. The nationalist legacy A non-vegetarian diet and the use of meat as a high-status food is, of course, not entirely new in Hindu Bengal. During the colonial period meat played an important role in the everyday life of affluent Calcutta households, including those of wealthy Bengali Hindu landlords and businessmen, who indulged aristocratic preferences for non-vegetarian, ‘Mogul’ cuisine. Emulating courtly lifestyles, Hindu households employed Muslim cooks to prepare red meat dishes, which were cooked in separate kitchens and served to male members of the family and their guests in the outer parts of the house. With the emergence of a service-oriented middle class, some of these traits of the colonial aristocracy where discarded. Since this new class of service-holders could not afford such grandeur, a vegetarian diet became more popular. Furthermore, nationalist agitation facilitated other ideals of cultured bodily comportment and triggered the creation of a ‘Bengali cuisine’. This was by and large defined in opposition to non-vegetarian ‘Muslim’ food, and was deliberately based on the non-vegetarian diet that was produced and consumed by the whole family. Furthermore, building on earlier notions of male celibacy and women’s chastity, the alternative masculinity that Bengali elites carved out for themselves filtered down into everyday practices so that a new, less ‘heating’ diet became acceptable even among those who could afford non-vegetarian items. Self-control, and not the indulgence of the past, became a hallmark of middle-class Bengali lifestyles and the body became a prime site for explicitly political alternative truths based on specific disciplinary regimes. This had, as Chowdhury remarks with reference to the religious reformer Vivekananda, political implications ‘It was against the Western obsession with body [sic] that Vivekananda posited the notion of disciplining the body in order to train the spirit and make it truly manly’ (Chowdhury 1998: 130). With reference to women, Uma Chakravarti points out that the ideal of physical restraint was already based on patrivrata and the submission of women to their husbands, which represented an ideology by which women came to see chastity as part of selfhood; for example fasting on behalf of others became a preferred preoccupation of good nationalist wives and mothers (Chakravarti 1993). This ideology was transformed and expanded in order to integrate ideas of cultural and political nationalism as part of the reinvention of patriarchy within a colonial situation. Crucially, this reinvention was based on the control of women’s sexuality,

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the mechanisms of which had to be adjusted to a rapidly changing environment. However, what changed women’s lives was not so much a new understanding of women’s sexuality but a transformation of their roles and responsibilities in the home or, as Tanika Sarkar points out with reference to the idea of the Bengali Hindu wife, what changed was the way in which the new nationalist regime defined the female body as the opposite of the weak and effeminate male body and suggested new disciplinary practices. Within nationalist discourse the earlier despised female body was: held to be pure and unmarked, loyal, and subservient to the discipline of the shastras alone. It was not a free body by any means, but one ruled by ‘our’ scriptures, ‘our’ custom. The difference with the male body bestowed on it a redemptive strength for the community as a whole. (Sarkar 2001: 202–3)

As a ‘repository’ of power, the new Bengali Hindu woman drew on her ‘traditional’ ability to endure pain (such as during the hardships of widowhood) for which vegetarianism had became emblematic. This ideological shift was, of course, not limited to women alone. From the time when the representatives of the Bengal renaissance had ‘converted’ to Western ways by adopting knives and forks at home, the debates about diets had come a long way when writer Bankimchandra Chatterjee became a vegetarian in the late 1880s. Drawing on the pervasive link between ‘purity’, ‘spiritual strength’ and the control of female sexuality for male liberation, the nationalist movement venerated shakti (female reproductive power) and this new discourse implicated middle-class women as disciplined subjects per se. With the rise in marital age and increasing mobility, they had to be enabled to control their ‘natural’ urges through domestic rituals, while their commitment to serving their husbands and the extended family had to be reinterpreted as a service to the wider nation. Thus, Bengali middle-class women came to be seen as wives and future mothers of sons (Bose 1995). Under the old regime, writers like Karlekar point out, early marriage had implied that parents transferred the responsibility for a daughter successfully to a husband, except for the case of kulin Brahmins, where young wives remained in their parental home (see Karlekar 1996). The concern about women’s sexuality was not really about the actual sexual activities of women, but with the possibility of illegitimate offspring. As Chakravarti points out: [C]ontrol over female sexuality was almost obsessively applied among high caste women because the danger to the structure of brahmanical patriarchy was great in their case. The reproduction of the hierarchical caste order with its horror of miscegeny subverting the entire edifice necessitated such stringent control. Unlike the lower caste woman the high caste woman did not labour outside the home or participate in primary production. She was regarded solely as a receptacle through which reproduction could take place. (Chakravarti 1995: 2251)

From the 1900s onwards, with increasing maturity at marriage, bringing up daughters in the new setting implied that their mothers had to take more responsibility for them – and a discourse on women’s moral education, which relied on wives and

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mothers as female educators, emerged. This reworking of traditional brahmanical patriarchy fused modern education, medical knowledge and ‘rational’ approaches to housekeeping, and was first and foremost located in the home. Here, the new woman was not only required to guard her own conduct, but to guarantee the quality of the offspring she would produce – and increasingly this implied her physical discipline before and after giving birth. Based on the reconceptualization of customary practices in a modern world this reworking of femininity also encouraged a re-evaluation of what it meant to be a vegetarian. Post-independence The vignette of dietary regimes in a middle-class, high-caste Bengali Hindu family outlined above is fairly typical of what could be expected in the period between independence and the moment when economic reforms had an impact on the lives of ordinary Calcuttans in the 1990s. With independence, the importance of Bengali middle-class women’s practices as exemplary for the nationalist project as a whole faded and the new discourse on a pan-Indian identity, regulated through the many institutions of the state, more clearly brought out the meaning of ‘Bengali’ domesticity, as opposed to ‘other’ such constructs. In a multicultural Calcutta, communal histories and identities are played out not only on the big screen of public lives but resonate also, and perhaps more so, in domestic practices. Given the importance of commensality, purity and chastity in the past, new roles for the relatively privileged urbane female elites were largely located in the home and supported a strongly classbased model of original ‘Bengali’ womanhood based on the model of the chaste housewife and, increasingly, an elaboration of intensive mothering. While communal tension, the influx of refugees from East Bengal after partition, and the restructuring of the middle classes around the widening government sector did all contribute to what has since become the ‘Bengali’ diet, women’s roles and their relationship with food as nurturers in the Bengali home were strengthened and have, as I argue below, remained crucial in the post-liberalization period. The refugees who came to live in Calcutta contributed greatly to the ‘Bengali’ diet as we know it today, and their influence on culinary regimes shows in the rising consumption of fish and rice among the more affluent sections of society during the 1950s and 1960s. And with the ongoing processes of middle-class migration food has slowly substituted the vernacular as a signifier of Bengali identity.1 I arrived to do fieldwork in 1995, and living in the city involved learning Bengali and learning about the practical aspects of food, i.e. where to shop, how to cook and, of course, how to eat, as well as some knowledge about the propensities of specific items. I soon realized that if I wanted to pursue my interest in kinship and gender in a Bengali-speaking middle-class environment, and in particular if I wanted to talk to women, I not only had to learn the language but also adjust my research to a lifestyle which centred around food and eating. 1 This is evident in the number of food ‘memoirs’ produced and marketed for the Bengali diaspora in the US and the importance these communities attribute to keeping their diet ‘Bengali’ (see, for instance, Banerjee 1991, 2001; Ray 2005).

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At the time of my first extended fieldwork in the mid-1990s economic liberalization had established a firm hold over the economy and culture of the middle classes in Indian cities. Consequently, the lifestyle of the Bengali families I worked with was gradually becoming much more openly determined by the arrival of new commodities, among them pre-processed foods, new ‘foreign’ ingredients and practices like eating ‘Western’ fast food which were fast becoming important markers of distinction. Excitement and some apprehension marked the advent of such new patterns and commodities in the families I worked with, the members of which discussed a range of consumer goods frequently. New food items, which had been trickling into the urban market from the 1980s onwards, were now flooding in and food-related practices were often quickly adopted. Initially my earlier experience of living in a Bengali household served me well: just like everyone else, I purchased fresh ingredients daily from the market, complained about shortages of fresh milk, cheese and bread, and cooked most meals from scratch without the use of ‘ready-made’ spices and semi-processed items except for the occasional ‘Chinese’ noodles. Most of the women I came to work with were Bengali-speaking Hindus and prided themselves on the fact that – unlike other communities – they did not use pre-processed foods, apart from the ubiquitous Maggi noodles, Nescafe and Amul dairy products. Then and now, Calcutta boasted a wealth of eateries, but apart from street food, eating out was an occasional treat and for many families Chinese food was the most exotic and ‘foreign’ cuisine they would have tried. But things were changing: by the middle of 1996 my local neighbourhood stall had begun to launch special promotions, which became a feature of all such small shops, and started to focus on a wide range of semi-processed items which previously had not been available in the locality or had not been on the market at all. As my fieldwork progressed I saw a huge number of special offers come and go, but a variety of pre-processed foods like pasta, frozen pizzas, tomato purees and frozen chicken, as well as a wide range of dairy products, were introduced successfully. Although ‘Bengali’ food with rice as the central focus remained the staple food, Western and non-vegetarian items now figured on weekly shopping lists and transformed the way middle-class Calcuttans ate, as the lower- (and middle) middle-class households began to emulate the more cosmopolitan habitus of the elite. But this transformation of a diet seen as ‘traditional’ also generated debates about the implications of these changes, debates which reached far beyond the mere question of novelty and nutrition and which touched upon deeper meanings and knowledge implied by middle-class lifestyles. One of the most interesting aspects of this transformation was the rise of a nonvegetarian diet including plenty of chicken products, which together with salami and bacon are becoming more and more popular in Bengali-speaking families. The success of Arambhag Limited, a chain selling poultry, signifies this pattern, whereby foods, which used to be seen as bideshi (foreign), or which were strongly associated with other communities, for instance chicken, have found their way into the kitchen, and thus the heart of Bengali Hindu family life. In the course of such interventions, intergenerational differences and new consumer lifestyles merge, and challenge earlier understandings of gendered consumption. Thus, mothers, who figure as chief consumers in the middle-class

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home are keen to re-establish control and to retain the sense of ethnic identity that is so closely linked to ‘home-made’ meals. However, they do so within a rapidly transformed frame of reference, as the following exploration of new practices within the home shows. Modernizing gendered practices During my earlier visits to the city I had seen how meat was deemed a treat for middle-class families outside the home in the form of kebabs and Chinese meals, the consumption of which was largely seen as a ‘modern’ transgression from a supposedly ‘traditional Bengali diet’ constructed along the lines of Hindu high-caste preferences. And while men could, even in the 1980s, be outwardly modern and would therefore be expected to eat at least chicken and even school girls were treated to kebabs at times, married women of reproductive age did not usually express a specific liking for meat dishes and I rarely saw any having such treats. Along the same lines, young adolescent women were often encouraged to go for a vegetarian dish and were not usually expected to express a preference for non-vegetarian items. Married women, especially those with children, fulfilled the role of gatekeepers and symbols of ‘true’ Bengali culture, and did often emphasize that they were not keen on eating ‘outside’ and many claimed that they fell ill immediately if they had food from ‘outside’. Even in the 1990s mothers would explain that just as a married Bengali Hindu woman was expected to wear a sari while men, boys and some girls could wear non-Bengali clothes, married women were more constrained where meat eating was concerned. But during my fieldwork in the post-liberalization era, these culinary certainties were gradually challenged by new discourses surrounding food and class-based ideas about the family as well as about regional identities. The broad outline of the Bengali Hindu middle-class approach to vegetarianism remained central to the way people speak about food, but in the more conservative and often less affluent households I came to work with I found that increasingly children expected to be served nonvegetarian items on a regular basis, while many women described themselves as vegetarians. Dietary restrictions did not apply only to widows, but also unmarried women who had passed the age where they could reasonably expect to get married and who declared themselves to be vegetarians. When I enquired about the reasons for their special diet, it was explained that unmarried women tend to be physically imbalanced due to their lack of sexual intercourse. This reflects a commonly held contemporary view that women have a stronger, natural desire for sex and are more prone than men to suffer physically if it is denied (Uberoi 1996: 342). But in the view of my informants the balance of the female body did not depend so much on sex, although this was seen as psychologically stabilizing, as on giving birth. The discourse that was prevalent was remarkable in that it was not primarily concerned with women’s desire as a threat to the reputation of the family, but with the physical and psychological problems women experience if they do not have children. Giving birth is seen as an important rite of passage, a physical process within which blood –

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that is produced from food – is turned into the foetal body, and thus menstruation and giving birth help to keep a woman healthy. While nobody suggested that unmarried women had to become vegetarians, and unlike widows there was no rule that applied to all concerned, they were expected to give up eating fish and meat, both of which were seen not only as ‘heating’ but also as blood producing. Since they would not have intercourse or give birth, it was argued that the resulting blood would not be used to form a foetus and that these women would, as a consequence, suffer from extremely heavy periods and ensuing anaemia. Unmarried women, whose bodies might become unbalanced and who were expected to refrain from sexual intercourse, were not the only female vegetarians in these households. I found that recently in many families even middle-aged married women declared that they abstained from eating meat and fish and followed a vegetarian diet. This vegetarianism among married women of reproductive age was not a convention, and can only be described as a ‘new’ phenomenon. Among those who had become vegetarians the decision was presented as a matter of personal choice that was based on notions of health and fertility and the ideal family, which depended on a woman’s chastity. Those who had become vegetarians presented their conversion as a difficult one, especially in cases where the married woman lived with in-laws and prepared meals for the whole extended family when becoming a vegetarian was met with criticism from other family members. Younger married women who turned vegetarians were seen as ‘difficult’ and individualistic, and their mothers-in-law often presented their dietary habits as disruptive and interpreted them as a sign of rebellion. It is also significant to note that while a small minority of married women had always adopted vegetarianism for religious reasons, the spread of vegetarianism among middle-class mothers in their thirties and forties is a different phenomenon. On the one hand, it can be described within a medical context as a means to guarantee reproductive success, a perspective which was certainly held by younger women who often emphasized that their decision was triggered by problems with conception. However, they were not the only ones, and other mothers, who had children and were not yet of retiring age, became vegetarians too. They argued quite often that it was a mother’s responsibility to show restraint and keep herself clean and morally superior, and that becoming a vegetarian at a time when food practices were changing was their way of dealing with the constant threat the influx of new foods and new demands represented. Thus, for younger women vegetarianism often resembled a statement, an individualistic gesture in a context within which women share food-related activities and where commensality is a marker of family life, while older women looked at it in terms of a refusal to partake in new practices imposed on them in a consumer society. But most importantly, all women represented it as a choice made with the wellbeing of the whole family in mind. Like bratas (ritual fasts) which form part of these middle-class lifestyles and which have featured prominently in the education of girls from the nineteenth century onwards, new vegetarianism was understood as a personal practice undertaken on behalf of others. Fasting on behalf of others was, and is, a woman’s issue and is often a personal symbol that helps women to create some individual space in a strictly patrilocal setting; but fasting is also directly related to notions of fertility and reproductive agency. Insofar as fertility and

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reproduction are concerned, fasting and voluntary vegetarianism are both constitutive of the maternal body. Among the women I worked with fasting was common and, like vegetarianism, was said to signify a woman’s need for self-control as well as a healthy restraint. Fasting was believed to be of particular importance in the case of ‘overindulgent’ middle-class Bengali women, whose lack of restraint and discipline appeared to be more problematic at a time when consumption ‘has gone mad’. Apart from the obvious similarities between vegetarianism and fasting – as practices of corporal control and the domestication of desire, a discourse so brilliantly employed by Gandhi – informants pointed out that fasting is not the same as becoming a vegetarian: in their view fasting has ‘always’ formed part of women’s domestic practices and is, as such, not disruptive for the family, whereas vegetarianism was not part of the repertoire attributed to the role of a dutiful daughter-in-law or wife, and has more political potential. Thus, far from being a matter of self-realization in a straightforward, individualistic sense, the young mothers themselves saw the new regime in a wider context of traditional and modern ideas about fertility, and it turned out that many who had given up meat and fish formed part of a married couple who had experienced problems with conceiving a child in the past. Moon-Moon, the mother cited above, pointed out how they had tried for a child for a couple of years during which time she had been to see many doctors, being assured, however, that nothing was wrong with her. Not a very religious woman in her youth, she had married into a devout family and was lauded for taking up different fasts once the problem had been recognized by the wider family. But when she had later on decided to become a vegetarian – a process that became manifest over a period of time – her mother-in-law as well as her husband’s brothers’ wives, with whom she shared the daily chores, had not been supportive and challenged her decision numerous times. Since then they have moved into their own little flat within the bigger residence occupied by her affinal family, and she has stopped cooking non-vegetarian food altogether although she employs a servant who occasionally prepares fish for her husband and daughter. Like Moon-Moon, in many cases newly converted vegetarians had experienced problems conceiving, and had usually observed bratas (fasts), offered food to deities in the house and in the temple, visited the dorga (shrine) of Muslim saints, and underwent allopathic treatment before they changed their diet. In many instances, these women observed regular fasts before a vegetarian diet was suggested by a doctor. Since meat and fish are widely believed to be responsible for a ‘hot’ body, they had to be cut out of a woman’s diet to solve the fertility problem. Once these wives and future mothers had become ‘vegetarians’, their bodies were said to be balanced and so they assumed that they had a better chance of conceiving. But this straightforward medical explanation of new vegetarianism as a way to improve fertility does not tell us why after having a child many more middleclass mothers feel obliged to either remain vegetarian or to take up a vegetarian diet. The fact that many did so suggests that vegetarianism is not only a way of enhancing women’s fertility, but that vegetarianism also has wider persuasive power and other beneficial effects. I found that these were related to the fact that, as one of these newly vegetarian mothers put it, ‘The times are changing, in the old days you could just eat whatever was there, and young women did often go hungry. With so

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many pregnancies, they got as much as they could.’ Explaining why she remained a vegetarian after the birth of her daughter, she told me: I had problems conceiving and first changed my diet. After some time I became a vegetarian and for whatever reason we had a daughter after eight years of marriage, maybe because of the vegetarian food, maybe because of the fast, maybe because of the pilgrimages. I stuck to it because we can’t afford to have any more children, living in a tiny flat and so on, and so I try to control myself, and even my husband has become a vegetarian for that reason.

While some, including her and Moon-Moon, felt that they had to become vegetarians before conception, other married women, who had already given birth to the single desired son, were at pains to maintain the status quo and tried to abstain from sex. In these cases vegetarianism served the double purpose of signalling that the reproductive phase of their lives was over after the birth of a single child while at the same time helping them to manage their own sexual desire. The link between vegetarianism and chastity is of course a familiar theme in the lives of devotees and widows, as well as in Gandhi’s thought, but until recently has had no place in the lives of married women, who were to become mothers of more than one child and thus wanted to remain sexually active for much longer. Today, the same mothers frequently use highly interventionist contraceptive methods like sterilization or hysterectomies to limit family size, and appropriate the discourse that links self-control and the superiority of a celibate lifestyle to achieve and maintain an ideal. Moon-Moon, whose husband was well paid and who could afford more than one child, interpreted her vegetarianism in terms of her devotion to the family, and more importantly to her daughter: Nowadays, with all the stuff you need, you cannot afford to have more than one child – in fact, if you want to give them all they want and need, you cannot afford that with a middle-class salary. They need a lot of things to be a success, a lot of money goes into schooling and so on, that is why we have to be careful, you know, that is why we cannot have more children.

Indeed, a number of mothers told me that they had chosen sterilization at the time of (Caesarean) birth to avoid further pregnancies, and interpreted their own vegetarianism as part of these strategies to achieve the perfect nuclear family. Clearly such a discourse and the language of maternal sacrifice and restraint as embodied in vegetarian practice is here providing a rhetorical outlet to address this desire to achieve the perfect family. It represents a language which avoids the less accepted display of women’s use of contraceptives and which allows women to speak about their individual struggle to adjust to the new world. Mothers more than once mentioned that a consumer lifestyle and the perceived need for upward-mobility did not allow for unrestricted fertility, and they emphasized the moral/physical benefits of a balanced body. As one mother put it: When you had one [child], you do not want any more, so you have to stop having sex, and that may be a good thing because you become calmer, you can care better for your family and with only one to look after, you can actually give them every attention. Mind you, it is

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very exhausting to bring them up nowadays, and so you need to be healthy and alert, not like our mothers, who were so worn out because of all those pregnancies.

Increasingly such reinterpretations of feminine ideals are directly related to the influx of new consumer goods and the changing dietary patterns more generally, patterns which again are highly gender-specific. I would, therefore, like to suggest that the notion of vegetarianism as a way of controlling sexuality locates its new practices within changing patterns of gendered consumption in the middle-class ‘home’, which actively support neoliberal ideologies of personhood. Changing diets: mothers and their children Since the early 1990s when the economic reforms were introduced, urban middleclass lives have changed and some of the most pertinent changes have taken place in relation to food. One of the more subtle transformations is a tendency among young men to now prefer non-vegetarian meals to the ‘traditional’ vegetarian fare. I encountered this trend for the first time during my first episode of fieldwork in 1995 when I regularly visited the house of my Bengali teacher, who was a mother of two sons. After a couple of weeks I noticed that whenever I came for my lessons around 10.00 am her retired husband left their apartment in south Calcutta carrying a nylon shopping bag. After some weeks I became aware that it took him two hours to finish the ‘marketing’ and when I asked my teacher about this she explained to me that in addition to doing the usual round at the local bazaar, where he purchased vegetables, fish and groceries, he travelled by tram to a predominantly Muslim area to purchase mutton and chicken for their younger son. It turned out that this boy of fourteen refused to share the fish curries eaten by his parents and his older brother and insisted on having mutton or chicken dishes cooked specially for him every day. Over the years I have come across the same preference for meat, and more specifically red meat, in many young boys from the more affluent Bengali Hindu families I worked with, and although mothers and grandmothers would refuse to prepare mutton in their kitchens, chicken has become a regular item in many middleclass households. Most mothers explained that this was a result of ‘youth’ culture into which their sons and daughters had been groomed by TV advertisements, which played on the difference between home cooked food and more desirable restaurant dishes. What had changed were not so much the adverts, but the approach of middle-class families to eating out and the consumption of ‘other’ food items and preparations that were clearly marked as non-Bengali. While before liberalization eating out had been the exception for middle-class families, restaurants and eating takeaway food at home has clearly become more common. Thus, the stay-at-home mothers, who were cooking for about three hours a day anyway, argued that they had to take it upon themselves to recreate the ‘fancy’ restaurant foods in the home, and some would go so far as to cook red meat for their sons. This was, more often than not, prepared for young boys in nuclear households, where the mother of the boy in question was the only housewife. Where an elderly grandmother was still present, meat may have been cooked, but mutton was often banned out of respect

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for the ‘old ways’. Moreover, the gendered character of this preference for meat in more and more boys is even more pronounced: while some young boys could insist on red meat at home, a daughter’s love of kebabs would not make her mother or her grandmother serve them. Though it is important to note that girls in Bengali middle-class families are equally encouraged to develop very specific tastes, tastes which are indulged by mothers and grandmothers alike, girls were in all cases less likely than boys to insist on non-vegetarian items and were provided with items such as Chinese ginger chicken only very occasionally, furthermore in the case of girls a liking for street foods like the chow min noodles or phuchka, lentil balls filled with potato mash and tamarind sauce, is still interpreted as a liking for something transgressive which in the eyes of their guardians can cause problems. The diet of schoolchildren and students has always been a matter of concern for mothers, mostly because of their love for unhealthy street foods and snacks from ‘outside’, which are generally regarded as dangerous and polluting through their association with lower-class producers (Mukhopadhyay 2004). Mothers I spoke to were concerned about their children’s diets and tried to provide them with the preferred foods, either mutton-based dishes or the desired street foods, at home. Most mothers agreed that while daughters would not be allowed to consume too much meat, a son’s preference for meat was acceptable even in a largely vegetarian (fish-eating) household because of its virile connotations. In all households with younger children, mothers had also adopted some non-Bengali foods into the weekly diets which they prepared at home. Anjali, the mother of an adolescent girl, was not alone in complaining about her daughter’s tastes, but did everything she could to keep her happy: Nowadays they get all these foods in the restaurants and coffee shops, and because I don’t want her to eat anything there I told her ‘Let me know what it is you want and I will cook it for you’, so I am doing chow min and kebabs as well as pasta for her. Some of the ingredients are expensive but it is better than eating the same food outside, she would just fall ill.

The same sentiment was echoed in the comments which Shreya’s mother, who had become a vegetarian before the birth of her daughter, made about her food habits when she argued that: Whatever she wants she gets, whether she has seen it on TV or just heard about it from someone, but I make sure that everything she eats is cooked in the home and never allow her to eat outside – I don’t even take her to weddings or the club to avoid her eating anything cooked elsewhere. She is very weak and she would only fall ill if she had outside food, so I cook pasta and other special dishes for her here at home, at least she can have them here.

All-time non-Bengali favourites among children and adolescents I met included Chinese dishes, rich north Indian preparations usually served in restaurants as well as ‘Western’ snacks. When I did more research on the changing consumption patterns of the middle classes and the way mothers responded to these, most conversations quickly turned towards the preferences for such non-Bengali foods, which are

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generally seen as unhealthy, either because they are a non-veg option or are allegedly cooked with too many spices and oil. So generally, young Bengali-speaking people are expected to accept a Bengali diet but are at the same time also keen to experience non-Bengali food associated with restaurants, modern lifestyles and exotic cuisines. As long as their consumption is controlled by mothers and grandmothers, this kind of food is perfectly acceptable for home cooking. Furthermore, in many cases the competition between a daughter-in-law and a mother-in-law leads to regular feasts of these special new dishes. Just as the intra-household dynamics of food preparation and consumption may lead young mothers to assert their individuality by becoming vegetarians, the same women are often keen to produce special dishes for their children, who therefore may refuse the commensality of food cooked for all family members. Often, a pronounced dislike of fish is a symbol of this new power dynamic, since fish represents the ultimate symbol of Bengali home cooked meals. This idiom was employed by Anuradha, the 16-year-old second of three cousins living in a joint family, whose abstinence from fish stemmed, according to her mother (herself a ‘new’ vegetarian), from competition with her elder cousin, the intelligent and wellturned-out daughter of her paternal uncle. To the utter disgust of her aunt, who was the main cook in the house, Anuradha refused to eat any fish and although she often suffered from ‘gastric’ problems after eating outside, she avoided family meals altogether. Female eating habits in this family had been largely vegetarian, with all three adult women (Anuradha’s mother, her aunt and her widowed grandmother) not eating fish for various reasons: the elderly grandmother since she became a widow, the older aunt after she decided that it was too late for her to try for a son once her daughter had reached the age of twelve, and her mother after she had given birth to a much adored son when Anuradha was six. So to choose her own diet could have been interpreted as the practice of an adolescent woman imitating her older female relatives, had it not been for the fact that Anuradha’s diet was not marked by restraint but, as her aunt pointed out, fitted with her general admiration for a consumerist lifestyle. With her refusal to eat fish went a preference for meat-based ‘Mogul’ dishes and Western clothes, as she refused to wear anything considered ‘traditional’. This is another case where a female member of a joint family managed to turn her own dietary preferences into an individualist gesture; however, unlike her mother, who had become the vegetarian daughter-in-law and who had practised denial, the daughter indulged herself. Challenging new regimes through bodily ‘truth’ Is the ‘new vegetarianism’ an affirmative gesture of relatively privileged middleclass mothers who adjust to the demands of new consumption patterns by simply reappropriating a traditional practice, a realignment of sorts, or do women’s practices related to food represent a particular space for female agency within a rigidly structured family setting? So far I have charted the terrain of new food-related practices in relation to gender-based identities among the urban middle classes in Calcutta. It is clear that

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with reference to the vegetarian/non-vegetarian divide the group-based differences and therefore the direct transactional meanings of food – manifest in rules of commensality between castes and ethnic groups – have diminished. What emerges is a more homogeneous picture of a Bengali Hindu middle class within which vegetarianism is no longer a trait of the family or wider kin group, though this was the case vis-à-vis Muslims in the period after independence. But today it is very strongly associated with personal choices. Thus vegetarianism is currently not so much based on the need of society and the family to control women’s sexuality as members of a group, as was the case for the nineteenth century discourse on widowhood, but on ideas about the need to retain the ideal of the chaste wife and mother in a modern world. I agree with Alter who asserts that ‘female chastity does not seem to be constructed in terms of a biomoral truth along the same lines as male celibacy’ (Alter 1997: 278). However, I would like to suggest that female vegetarianism and the sexual restraint it indicates a truth of a different kind. Vegetarianism is one way of adjusting to the need for biomoral truths, which can only emerge in relation to reproductive processes, that is the processes that make gendered persons in changing times, and thus its practices have to be reinvented in the process: where previously vegetarianism was for widows, today young married women need to turn into vegetarians; where earlier fecundity proven through numerous births crucially established motherhood, the family and the self, today the female body has to be seen in public as a site of restraint, not for a higher political aim, as Gandhi envisaged it, but to produce and nurture the ideal middle-class, single child family. Exemplified in dietary restrictions, which represent part of a wider need for self-discipline, such self-cultivation is no longer directed at the discourse of the nation, but the much narrower middle-class ideal of the single, male-child family. No doubt the personal symbolism of mothers’ vegetarianism also represents a means to be individualistic in a more and more consumption-orientated environment, and emphasizes the importance of choice and individual agency in a highly visible way. By adapting the garb of a chaste wife and taking on ascetic practices, often in a very self-conscious manner, younger married women who feel that their husbands’ families control their lives, can carve out a niche for themselves. These young women use the ideology of the single child family and the cultural repertoire of maternal devotion, including fasts on behalf of others and ascetic vegetarianism to make a stand, and create a space where their individuality has to be recognized by their affines. This somatic truth is political insofar as it reconstitutes a gendered morality at a time when consumerist indulgence establishes a tight grip over middle-class imaginations. Acting actively on the body through corporal regimes that include ‘traditional’ practices like fasts and vegetarianism, young mothers re-establish the maternal body as a site for ‘true’ Bengali culture. Such a feminist reading of the material directs our attention away from the different frameworks within which female vegetarianism has been interpreted, frameworks which are particularly dear to anthropologists: first, the notion that the control of sexual urges and women’s sexuality in particular can be interpreted within a straightforward scheme of ‘traditional’ versus ‘modern’ practices; and second, an interpretation of the link between vegetarianism and sexuality in modern urban settings as one that is solely explained in terms of psychological models of embodiment.

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Even less adequate is an explanation that focuses on resistance to patriarchal norms as the only possible adequate site for agency. As Saba Mahmood has rightly pointed out with reference to women in the Egyptian mosque movement, we need to pay more attention to other modalities of agency and to raise ‘questions that remain submerged … if agency is analyzed in terms of resistance to the subordinating function of power’. She reminds us that this is as much an analytical question as it is a political one, and thus argues that any analysis of transformation has to pay attention to the conditions under which a practice can be both subordinating and providing the conditions for agency. As such, she invites us as social scientists to: [B]egin with an analysis of the specific practices of subjectivation that make the subjects of a particular social imaginary possible … this means closely analyzing the scaffolding of practices both – argumentative and embodied – that secured the mosque participants’ attachment to patriarchal forms of life that, in turn, provided the necessary conditions for both their subordination and their agency. (Mahmood 2005: 154)

But as for example Ann Anagnost points out, the rhetoric of self-development, of teaching, learning and disciplining, which can provide a fertile ground for agency, is not disembedded. In the current political climate, it is worth remembering that in itself it bears a resemblance to neoliberal ideologies. Thus, she observes with reference to the transformations reproductive processes and the idea of the maternal body are undergoing in urban China that the modalities of agency located in discourses around the maternal body are determined by the wider socio-economic context. Within this framework, she argues that the contemporary politics of reproduction are as much about potential transformations and self-realization as they are about exploitation: The latent capacities of the human body are expressible in a rhetoric of development. It is self-development that ‘qualifies’ neo-liberal subjects, so that the actualization of the body’s latent potentialities becomes an expression of value. Viewed positively, this selfdevelopment may be seen as the actualization of human possibility – the achievement of a telos of creativity that achieves its fullest expression. However, in a more critical light, we might also recognize this development as opening the body to a regime of exploitation perhaps unparalleled in human history. (Anagnost 2004: 201)

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Conclusion We have seen how middle-class motherhood is reconfigured in post-liberalization India, but also how the different discourses on class, marriage and the family are crucially shaping women’s lives. Moon-Moon, Madushree, Borsa Ganguly, Sankari and others share the same desire for the perfect family and try to create an environment within which not only their own but also their children’s futures are secure. They do so within the limits of a number of constraints, some of them ideological, among them the ideal of the joint family, the role of the daughter-in-law, filial duty and others more biographical or practical, i.e. educational histories and employment opportunities. These constraints do not only determine how they individually live their lives as women, but also how they realize the ideal of ‘middleclassness’ through motherhood. My ethnography shows how their reproductive choices and preoccupations are determined by the way the ideology of the family shapes gendered identities and emphasizes the importance of class as a way of life and as a collective project. Within this process Bengali middle-class women clearly recognize reflexivity, intimacy and individualism as markers of ‘modern selves’ which can be realized through motherhood. Elizabeth Povinelli has argued with reference to marriage that ‘intimate recognition’, which marks modern subjectivities, is today no longer located in the family or the conjugal relationship (Povinelli 2002). While the importance of intimate relationships is changing in India and contractual institutions like the family and marriage are clearly undergoing relevant transformations, the different chapters have emphasized that equally as prominent as such global transformations are locally constructed, class-based practices and identities which emerge in conjunction rather than against older patriarchal arrangements based on marriage and joint family life. Thus, public stories about ‘modern’ love and sexuality do not necessarily tell about private lives here as elsewhere, and my research suggests that in the given context, motherhood emerges as the main space for intimate recognition, often uneasily framed by affinal relationships that emphasize collective identities over and above an individual woman’s interests and desires. As the references to earlier forms of ‘global domesticity’ show, the focus on reform, good mothering and new subjectivities found in public discourse is not as recent as suggested, but rather builds upon earlier reformulations of patriarchal regimes, legal discourses and ideologies of the family. So what has changed? There are stories that remain untold, especially those of unachieved desires for motherhood, of denied independence, aborted girls and failed marriages. Nupur’s story is an example. She was widowed at the age of thirty-two and told me about her suffering at the hands of her in-laws, a suffering mainly caused by the fact that she did not have children. She clearly had her own abilities and possibilities, for example, she was a masterful cook, making do with very limited resources, and she was able to maintain herself through the money she earned giving tuition. However,

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her situation was dire, as her in-laws wanted her out after her husband died, and she could not make any claims to shelter or maintenance as she did not have children. Or the story of Urmila, whom I met at a friend’s house where she was trying to get legal advice on how to force her in-laws to return her 3-year-old son to her, whom she had left behind when she fled her shashur bari because of violent abuse. Although she missed her son dearly, she refused to be victimized and was proactive in pursuing an independent life by occupying an empty flat her parents owned and seeking out influential community leaders for help. Stories like these, of women who would earlier have just endured maltreatment and discrimination within the family, have become more and more common and I have met many who were in the process of giving their own demands a public voice by filing cases against husbands, brothers, in-laws and even sons. But the instances in which women acted in this decisive manner are far outnumbered by those who – given the fact that a mother is still unlikely to secure custody over her children, regardless of her religious and ethnic background, and that a separated or divorced woman will find it almost impossible to find a residence to live in – decide to stay and endure often extremely difficult circumstances. This is not to say that women are constantly subdued and passive, but I have deliberately focused on the examples of women whose lives come very close to the norm of committed motherhood and whose family circumstances are not particularly problematic precisely in order to highlight where the conditions of their subordination, but also the space for agency is located. The ethnography has shown that in the face of high expectations women do consider love-marriages, and do challenge the authority of in-laws and exercise their own judgement as part of good-mothering on an everyday basis. But what comes out clearly in my own research is not only that the constraints women are subjected to have not diminished, but also that their own investment in their roles as dependents, on the one hand, and the desired autonomy as mothers of future providers, on the other, has risen. Neoliberal restructuring of the economy has hit the Bengali middle classes, who depended on employment in the public sector (see Fernandes 2006), and similar processes of stratification and modes of adjustments as those among disenfranchised workers can be found. My study is a reminder that the conflicts over the meaning of economic reform are not played out on the public stage of electoral politics alone, but also within families, between generations and in the embodied experiences of citizens. If neoliberalism is not seen purely as an ideology but as a set of institutions, ideologies and technologies that bring about specific discourses, my research shows how it reshapes the Indian middle-class family, and with it motherhood. Where, for example, economic restructuring and the promotion of private industries challenge the conception of what kind of jobs middle-class parents aspire to for their children, marital and educational strategies, and thus the work of parenting, change. New arrangements within the state – in India the reduced employment opportunities in the state sector and lack of funding for education and health care – encourage similar shifts as can be found elsewhere. In this case, marriage with an eye on health insurance, or reproductive strategies aiming at single, male children, often strengthen existing institutions, in this case joint family life and arranged marriage.

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Last but not least, very strong normalizing ideologies are at stake where the family is redefined in conjunction with global ideals, from choosing the right sex for a child, to providing the right, healthy pregnancy and birth as well as the right education. The maternal subjects that emerge here are increasingly defined in terms of a discourse of choice, responsibility and commitment. These discourses appear in discussions of love and sexuality, but also in the redefinition of mothers as chief consumers and, if one decides to raise daughters at all, in the formation of young girls as proto-mothers ‘by choice’. Motherhood in a climate determined by neoliberal talk about chances, opportunities, agency and choice is positively valued where mothers sacrifice their own interests and desires in favour of their children’s future success and participate in discourses of empowerment through added responsibilities. It is devalued, however, for those, mostly underprivileged, segments of the population who cannot live up to this ideal. But although the material gains the Indian middle class has made collectively can not be denied, as the study shows, this does not imply that middle-class mothers never suffer as a result of the adjustments made to new conditions. This is particularly pertinent where women as mothers become increasingly responsible for having the right number of healthy male children but also, perhaps less obviously, where they ensure their well-being before and after birth through control over their own bodies. The maternities which emerge subject female bodies not only to constant intervention to maintain the ideal family norm, but also re-establish the maternal body as an ideal site of middleclassness. In relation to health as well as to other areas, middle-class mothers increasingly participate in global circuits of expertise, of practices and of commodities, which have to be modified to fit local standards and moralities. In the process mothers have become translators and mediators between their families and an imagined outside ‘world’. It is here, as subjects, that Bengali middle-class mothers are increasingly invested with choice. They are expected to display the ability to take rational decisions in accordance with their family roles and as such are reproducing class positions through their own actions and bodies as well as through their children. But while all the above applies not only to mothers, what is special in the case of Bengali middle-class women, and more generally of Indian middle-class mothers, is that they are forced to transform their individual interests into common, shared objectives within the setting of the joint family. Within this framework, less security and a more consumer-based lifestyle emerge hand in hand with new anxieties about familiar relationships and concerns that raise wider political issues. Intimate citizenship, the idea that the bonds of love in marriage or between parents and their children do need to be fostered and regulated through the state and its agencies, is crucially determined by the way in which modern selves internalize a vocabulary of choice, access, rights and technologies that allow for the control of desire. With reference to India, the increasing number of nuclear families, love-marriages and divorces in urban contexts is commonly seen as an indication of such changes. The different chapters show in great detail that patrilocal residence, arranged marriages and lifelong unions still constitute normative discourses, and are often reinvigorated. Furthermore, I would argue that simultaneously, the increased

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significance of privacy, conjugality and individualism among urbanites supports new socialities and gendered identities. It is by now well established that concepts and practices ‘modernize’ in accordance with existing notions, thereby modifying the hegemonic tendencies of global developments (Miller 1995: 8; Khilnani 1997: 34). With reference to gender relations, the ongoing ‘indigenization’ of ideologies of individualism, media representations and family ideologies is particularly prominent in representations of the ‘new Indian woman’, who is depicted as middle class, who is consumption- and family-oriented, as well as nationalist, and who prioritizes motherhood (Fernandes 2000a: 615; 2002). My ethnography shows that, while the construction of the new middle class as a cultural ideal is relatively homogenous, the outcomes of the processes leading to new middle-class lifestyles are often ambiguous and surprising. This book highlights the impact of globalization from the perspective of the household and women’s work, including kin work, and explores the continuing strength of ideologies of interdependence, of shared parenting, and reciprocity in intra-household relations. In this sense the ethnography supports critiques of generalized assumptions about globalization and gender that neglect class. The detailed ethnography of the work of mothering shows that only the study of ‘past and present middle-class domesticities’ can provide the basis for a radical ‘joint critique of labour, consumption and ideologies’ (Sangari 1999: 291). Here, Hannah Arendt’s (Arendt 1999) differentiation between work and labour appears to be crucial, as it is through women’s work as mothers, that class comes into being.

Glossary Terms with a common spelling (e.g., purdah) are not transliterated. Adda – informal discussion among friends, a favourite pastime among men adhunik gan – modern popular songs amish – non-vegetarian, meat dishes andor mahal – women’s quarters of the house (also antahpur, zenana) annaprashan – ceremony to feed baby first solids, ‘first rice’ antahpur – women’s quarters (see andor mahal, zenana) atur ghor – room in which women spend the period of seclusion during and after childbirth ayah – maid servant Baetha – pain baire – outside bangla ranna – Bengali cuisine bangsha – patriline, father or male descendant banik – trader baper bari – father’s house bari – house barir lok – people of the house bhadralok – nineteenth-century educated elite in urban Bengal, lit. affluent or gentleman bhadramahila – women belonging to the bhadralok elite, lit. affluent or gentlewoman, lady bhaikanna – street-level reception room bhaitakkhanna – see bhaikanna bhakti – devotional love, especially in Vaishnavism bhalo – good bhalobhasa – love, affection bhat – boiled rice, a complete meal bhut – ghost bideshi – foreign biye – marriage boro – big, influential, rich bou – wife, bride, daughter-in-law brahmika sari – the combination of sari, blouse and petticoat that allowed respectable women to leave the women’s quarters, developed by women in the Tagore household brahmo samaj – reform-oriented nineteenth-century Hindu community embracing companionate marriage among other ‘progressive customs’

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brata – women’s rituals observed in the house consisting of fasting, puja and sometimes offerings undertaken on behalf of the family, the husband’s health, fertility etc. bustee lok – slum dwellers Chakri – position, job chapati – flat bread chelebelay – childhood Dabi – demand dak nam – nickname dal – lentil dish dan – prestation dhai – midwife dharma – religious and moral duty dorga – seat or grave of a Muslim saint Ekannabarti paribar – joint family, lit. the family who share the same rice Ekannaborti poribar – see ekannabarti paribar emni – normal Ghar – home ghee – clarified butter ghore – inside ghore-baire – inside, outside, title of novel by Tagore translated as ‘The Home and the World’ ginni – mistress of the house (colloq. of grihini) grihini – female householder Hari – untouchable caste tradititionally employed to remove pollution hijras – Third Sex hindutva – Hindu way of life as promoted by Hindu nationalists Jati – genus, caste, ethnic or religious group jhi – daughter(-in-law), maidservant jungli – lit. from the jungle, wild, untamed Kaj – work kaliyuga – the dark age ruled by the goddess Kali kam – lust kanyadan – gift of a virgin kulin(ism) – system adhered to by high-status groups among Brahmins and Kyasthas who follow prescribed hypergamy Lajja – shame lekhika – educated woman

Glossary

lohar – iron bangle, sign of marriage Madhyabitta sreni – middle class mahila samiti – women’s association manush kora – to bring up a child, lit. to make into a human being mashi – maternal aunt mofussil – district moksa – attaining liberation Nijer biye – love-marriage, lit. own marriage nimno moddhobitto – lower middle class niramish – vegetarian Osthomir din – eighth day of the Durga puja festival Pakka – solid, brick pandal – seat of a deity during community puja, mostly a tent-like construction pandit – priest para – neighbourhood para meye – neighbourhood girl parar lok – neighbourhood people patrivrata – Hindu ideology: the duty of the devoted wife to worship her husband phutchka – lentil balls with filling pishi – paternal aunt polayan kora – elopement prem – physical attraction puja – worship pukur – pond pulao mangsho – rice with meat purdah – seclusion and the related rules of segregation, lit. curtain purono kolkata – old Calcutta Samaj – society samiti – committee sathi – soulmate, companion sati – widow’s (self-)immolation shadh – rituals of ‘desired foods’ performed for the health of a pregnant woman and safe delivery, to have a son shakti – female power shankha – conchshell, bangles made from conchshell shashuri – mother-in-law shasthi – sixth day of the month, dedicated to the goddess of small pox of the same name shastras – verses from the Hindu scriptures shasur bari – in-laws’ house

185

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shikita – learned woman shikita madhyabitto sreni – educated middle class shindur – vermilion soptomi din – seventh day of the festival of Durga Puja Tal – palm tree tattya – traditional gifts given by the families of bride and groom (biyer tattya) thakur ghor – room for the gods tiffin – packed lunch box Zamindar – landowner under British rule zamindari – landholding, in the style of the zamindars zenana – women’s quarter of the house, (see andor mahal, antahpur)

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Index

adjustment, 79, 127, 156 as a quality in women 79 new workplaces, 127 affinal relations, 45, 74, 104, 107 nineteenth century reform, 45 prestations, 74 labour power of daughter-in-law, 107 pregnancy, 107 agency, 121, 177, 180 expert knowledge, 121 modalities and conditions for, 177 Allison, A., 149 Alter, J. S., 159, 176 amish (non-vegetarian, containing meat), 163–164 Anagnost, A., 33, 138, 141, 154 andarmahal/antahpur (inner quarters), 47 andor mahal, 51 annaprashan, 125 antahpur, 48, 51 anthropology cultural analysis of kinship 39–40 culturalist analysis 62 of marriage in South Asia, 66pp of maternity, childbirth and reproductive change 100–107 of consumption 155 of motherhood 37–38 urban 12 Appadurai, A., 155 Arendt, H., 182 aristocracy, 165 Arnold, D., 51, 52 arranged marriage 69–71 atur ghor (birthing room), 53 ayah (helper), at birth 109 Bagchi, J., 48, 48–49, 123, 141 baire (outside), 3, 43 Banerjee, S., 6, 48, 51, 52, 154 bangla ranna (Bengali cuisine), see cuisine bangsha (lineage), 12, 101 banik (trader), 56, 57 Bannerji, H., 41, 47

baper bari (father’s house, natal home), 79 Bardhan, P., 55–56 Barnett, S., 34 Basu, S., 59, 84, 161 Baviskar, A., 54 baetha (pain, contractions), 108 Belizán, J. M., 113, 117 Bénéï, V., 154 Bengali Christians 6–7 migration, 17 as neighbours, 163 Bengali middle classes motherhood, 37 Benjamin, W., 15 Béteille, A., 54, 59, 128 bhadralok (gentlefolk), 5, 43, 56, 57 culture, 43 genteel elite, 5 history, 5 bhadramahila, (gentlewoman), 43, 47 bhakti (devotion), 84 bhalo meye (good girl), 75 bhalobbhasa (affection), 84 Bharadwaj, A., 92, 102 Bhattacharya, M., 42, 43, 46 Bhattacharya, S., 48, 155 Bhattacharyya, D., 18 bideshi (foreigner), 18 bideshi bou (foreign wife), 18 birth, 94, 101, 104, 106, 108, 110, 111, 114, 118, 121–122, 169 affinal relations, 116 affines, 110, 118 agency, 121–122 anthropological critique of medicalization, 101–102 childcare experts, 119 confinement, 110 cross-cultural study, 101 dhai, 108–109 doctors, 110, 118, 121 early hospital births, 109 female body, 169 home birth, 104–107, 116, 118–120

204

Domestic Goddesses

hospital birth, shame and pollution, 120–121 labour power, 107–108 legitimacy, 121 manuals, 119 medical discourse, 121 medicalization 103–104, 111, 117 modernity, 94 normal birth, 112, 114, 115 pain, 120 pollution, 110 poor communities in South Asia, 102 post-partum period, 110 shakti, 115 western models in other contexts, 102 biye (marriage), 65 Blaustein, J. B., 10 Bloch, M., 87 blood, reproduction and food, 169–170 bodies, 161, 166, 169–170, 176, 177,181 corporal regimes, 176 exploitation, 177 female body as site of restraint, 176 maternal bodies as sites for middleclassness, 161, 177, 181 neoliberal ideology, 177 redefined in nationalist discourse, 166 intercourse and birth, 169–170 Borthwick, M., 56, 83, 104, 132 Bose, N. K., 6 Bose, P. K., 132, 166 bou (daughter-in-law), 79 Bourdieu, P., 61, 62 enactment of gendered norms, 61 everyday life, 61 Brahmo sect, 46 women writers, 46 bratas (ritual fasts), 70 Broomfield, J. E., 56 Burton, A., 51 Busby, C., 39 bustees (slums), 5 Caesareans, 94, 97, 121 and other interventionist techniques, 118 as safe, 119 as status markers, 111 blood loss, 115 case study, 100–101 costs, 113–114, 120

criticism, 114 critique of and explanation for their popularity, 117–118 elective, in Latin America and Turkey, 113 health insurance, 119 household composition, 119 housework, 119 joint family, 119 labour power, 119 managing pain, shame and pollution, 114–115, 116, 119, 120–121 power relations, 117 private health care, 110–111 rest, recovery and strength, 113–114, 120 safe, 115 self-elected, elective, 110 vs vaginal delivery, 115 work, 116, 120 Calcutta Municipal Corporation, 1, 8 Ward 53, 8 Caplan, P., 13, 72, 81, 155 Carsten, J., 38, 39 caste, 5–9, 41, 43, 47, 72, , 84, 87, 161, 162, 166, 176 commensality, 176 endogamy, 72, 73, 87 food and status, 162–163 marriage educated low-caste girls, 85 nineteenth century, 6 upper caste ideals shaping colonial family, 41 upper caste women as symbols, 47 Central Calcutta, 5–9 Centre for Developing Societies, 87 Chakravarti, U., 165, 166 chakri (service), 42, 57, 58 Chandrasekaran, C., 91 chastity, 165, 167, 176 biomoral truth, 176 Chatterjee, N., 153, 159 Chatterjee, B., 49, 166 Chatterjee, P., 36, 41, 43, 47, 50, 54, 56, 58, 104, 103, 123 Chaudhuri, A., 29 chelebelay and meyebelay (childhood), 125 child development, 139 and schooling, 139 Childcare (see parenting), 134, 137

Index grandmothers in transnational families, 137 joint family life, 134 childhood, 123, 124, 125, 139, 154 Asian middle classes 123 cultures of globalization, 123 education, 124 India, 124 naming, 125 pre-schooling, 139 Chopra, R., 123, 124 Chowdhury, I., 165 city gendered, 13 theory since 80s, 13 class, 2, 9–10, 44, 52, 54–55, 58, 59, 118–119, 126, 139, 153, 165, 167, 173, 179, 181, 182 and education, 126 anxieties around food at school, 150 as a collective project, 179 as category for South Asian studies, 58 as identity, 58 as imagined community, 59 Donner, H., 9–10 education and class, 139 food 165–167 formation and nationalist themes, 44, 59 gender and reproductive change, 118–119 motherhood after liberalization, 179 mothers reproducing class in joint families, 181 motherhood transcending middle-class anxieties, 153 new diets and consumption patterns, 173–174 middle class, definition, 54 reform of childbirth nineteenth century, 52 reproduction as work, 58, 182 status production, 58 stratification through education, 126 Cleland, J., 92 communal identities, 150 commensality, 175, 176 sharing of lunch, 150 communalism, 27 Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPI(M)), 9, 28 community, 2, 162–163

205

group boundaries, 11–12 food, 162–163 religious, ethnic and food, 163 conception, 39, 157–158, 170 diet, 157–158 ideas in South Asia, 39 vegetarianism, 170 Congress Party, 8 conjugality, 81–86, 182 Conlon, F. F., 160 consumption, 23, 45, 60, 64, 150, 152, 155, 157, 160, 161, 168 and vegetatrianism, 161 anthropological literature on changing practices, 155 fieldwork, 23 food, 155–157 gendered body and food, 160 housework and upward mobility, 60 mothers as consumers, 152 new food practices, 168 of education, 152 of food at nursery, 148–150 contraception, 92, 118 courtship, 73 Crouch, M., 95 cuisine, 148, 163 Bengali, 163 marker of identity, 148 culturalist analysis, 62 culture of care, 144 dabi (demands), 75, 76 Daniel, E. V., 38 Das, V., 34, 87 Das, S., 8 data, 4, 17 Davis-Floyd, R. E., 95, 102 Debi, B., 86 departures and arrivals, 25 Devi, K., 41, 42, 43 dhai (midwife), 51, 52, 53, 108–109 dharma (duty), 44 Dickey, S., 14, 59 diet, 163, 164, 165, 167, 168, 169, 173, 174, 175 and service, 165 boys, 173–174 changing due to liberalization, 168 different communities, 163 eating out, 168

206

Domestic Goddesses

home vs restaurant food, 173 joint family and food preference, 175 mothers and children, 173–175 non-vegetarian, 164 post-independence, 167 reproduction and fertility, 169–173 restrictions and marital status, 169 street food, 174 virility and meat, 165, 173 widows, 164 Doctor’s Lane para, 6, 10–11 doctors, 113, 119, 121 domestic sphere, 13, 20, 42 as fieldsite, 20 nationalism, 42 domestic violence, 2 domesticity, 45, 53, 148, 154, 167, 179 global, 53 and national cuisine, 148 globalisation and education, 154 relationship between new and old regimes, 179 Donner, H., 9–10, 13, 15, 52, 59, 72, 86, 126, 141, 155 Donner, H., meaning of ethnicity, 9–10 dowry, 76–77 Drummond, L., 38 Drury, D. 124, 133 Dumont, L., 155 Durga Puja, 25, 26 Dwyer, R., 84 economic restructuring, 29, 129 education, 43, 45, 124, 126, 127, 130, 139, 142, 145, 148, 152, 180 Bengali-medium education, 131 changing strategies, 180 child development and early years, 139 developmentalist discourse, 126 role of home, 148 English-medium education, 130–131 family and schooling in India, 124 government policies, 152 in the discourse of reform, 43 IT industries, 131 languages, 131 liberalization, 152 middleclassness, 126 mother’s role, 146 nineteenth century, 45 parents’ view, 127

pedagogising the domestic, 145–150 pre-schools, 131 state and class, 126 upward mobility, 126 Edwards, J., 33, 102 Ehrenreich, B., 35, 137 ekannabarti paribar (family sharing rice), 78 embodiment, 176 employment, 83, 127, 131, 142, 151, 180 discipline at school, 151 effect on families, 180 in IT, 127–128 labour markets and language skills, 131 mothers and schooling, 142 parenting patterns, 128 endogamy, 71–72 Engels, D., 46, 47, 50, 104 ethnography feminist critique, 19 ethnosociology, 39–40 body, 40 personhood, 39 extended family see family, joint family, 33, 34–38, 46, 47, 58, 124, 125, 132, 136, 143, 153, 161, 170, 172, 175, 180 affinal relations, 129 and schooling, 124 as class project in nineteenth century, 46 democratization, 132 devotion to family and vegetarianism, 171–172 effects of economic restructuring, 129 fasting on behalf of others, 170–171 globalization, 132 ideal birth control, 161 in South Asia, 34–38 in studies of globalisation and liberalization, 33 individualism, 132 intimacy, 132 intra-household relationships between women, 135–138 joint family and food preference, 175 joint family and liberalization, 129 migration, 136 names, 125 nationalism and education, 153 nationalist discourse, 47

Index nationalist iconography, 58 nuclear family ideology, 143–144 other caretakers, 143 perfect ideal, 172 reshaped through neoliberalism, 180 transnational lives, 136–138 Farquhar, J., 155 fasts, 94, 170–171 feminist critique of ethnography 19 Fernandes, L., 54, 61, 126, 128, 141, 152, 180, 182 fertility, 91, 171 adoption, 92 decline in birth rate and middle-class family ideal, 92 infertility, 92–93 middle-class birthrate, 91 single child norm, 91 fieldwork, 13, 15, 16, 17–27 as displacement, 15 consumption, 23 continuity, 23 contradictions, 22 different position of women, 21 in the city, 16 neighbourhood as site, 16 positioning, 17–23 public persona, 20 relationship researcher-informant, 17–27 urban, 22 filial duty, 86, 133 flâneur, 15 food, 148–150, 157, 158, 159, 160, 161, 162, 163, 165, 167, 168, 169, 174, 176 anxieties around lunch boxes, 149–150 anxiety about pollution, 162 Brahmin, 159 caste, 157, 159 celibacy, 157 colonial period: food and class, 165 community and diet, 163 control, 159 cultural identity, 149 domesticity, 163 fish, 158 gender, 164 gendered practices, 169–173 heating, 158 Hindu thought, 158–160

207

knowledge and fieldwork, 167 lunch boxes, 148–150 maternal love, 148 meaning in Bengali families, 161–162 meaning of lunch boxes, 149 meanings of vegetarianism, 157–160 meat, 158, 160, 162, 164–165 men and sexuality, 164 pleasure, 149 post-independence, 167 restaurant food, 174–175 self-cultivation, 157 sex, 169 sharing at school and class and community, 150 status, 159 street food, 174 systems and gendered meaning, 158–160 transfer notions, 157 transactional meaning and commensality, 176 Western and foreign, 168 dietary restrictions of widows, 162, 164, 169–170 work, 163 Forbes, G., 46, 47, 52–53 Foucault, M., 159 friendship, among children and youths 84, 133 with informants, 23 mothers and children 132 Frøystad, K., 55 Fruzzetti, L., 34, 39, 80, 83 Fuller, C. J., 87, 137 Gandhi, 176 biomoral truth and bodies, 176 Ganguly Bagan, 5–9, 10 Ganguly-Scrase, R., 61, 128 Gardner, K., 14 gender relations, Colonial Bengal, 41–44 gender personhood in South Asia, 39 reproductive processes, 39 shared substances, 39 gendered city, 13 gendered persons, 13 Georges, E., 113 ghore (inside), 43

208

Domestic Goddesses

Giddens, A., 132, 136 ginni (mature mistress of the house), 46, 47 Ginsburg, F. D., 40, 95, 102, 117 Glenn, E. N., 38 globalization, 51, 128, 140, 168, 182 conjugality, 182 food, 168–169 individualism, 182 medicalization in the nineteenth century, 51 parental concerns, 128 pre-school culture, 140 privacy, 182 public discourse, 128 sociality, 128 Gold, A. G., 14, 107 Grewal, I., 51 Guha, S., 95, 104 habitus, 45, 49 Haggis, J., 51 Hancock, M., 13, 53 hari (untouchable caste, scavengers), 6 Haukanes, H., 33 health care, 112, 119 ante-natal checks, 112–115 changes due to liberalization, 112–115 doctors, 119–120 privatization, 119 hijras (transsexuals), 66 Hindu nationalism, 27 Hindutva, 27 Hirsch, J. S., 67 Hochschild, A. R., 35, 137, 144 Hodges, S., 51 Holmström, M., 129 home birth, 53, 94, 108 home, 23, 45, 50, 118 as ambiguous in birth, 118 as constituted through women’s social relationships, 23 redefined in the nineteenth century 45 hospital birth, 94, 95, 97, 109 case studies, 97–101 household, 3, 12, 42–43, 56, 60, 161 as site of consumption, 161 income 56 work and consumption, 60 comparisons, 12 internal relationship of upper caste family, 42–43

middle-class growth, 56 middle class, 60 houses, 5, 10 housework, 3, 108, 116 Caesarean sections, 116 labour, epistemological status, 108 other communities, 3 Hunt, N. R., 95, 102 Hutnyk, J., 18 hypergamy, 71, 74–75 Inden, R. B., 38, 85, 131 Indian National Congress, 52 individualism, 182 infertility, 179 affinal relations, 179–180 childlessness, 179 Inhorn, M. C., 118 intimacy, 19, 63pp, 71, 132, 179, 181 ideal and companionate marriage 63pp, 74, 79, 82, 97, 98 in past families 36 relationship with informants, 19 intimate citizenship, 181 intimate recognition, 66–68 parenting, 132 relation to modernity, 65 Jacobson, N., 95, 111 Jacobson, D., 9, 102 Jaffrelot, C., 27 Jain, M., 142 Jamieson, L., 132 jati (caste), 73 Jeffery, P., 14, 103, 107, 123, 124, 126, 138 Jeffery, R., 103, 107, 138 Jejeebhoy, S., 92 jhi (maidservant), 79 Jing, J., 155 joint family ideal, 10, 37, 82, 143 Jolly, M., 37, 50, 53, 95, 103, 104 Jordan, B., 95, 101, 102 Kakar, S., 35, 124 Kapila, K., 71 Karlekar, M., 46, 48, 166 Karn, N. 147 Kaviraj, S., 14, 29, 55 Khare, R. V., 155, 158 Khilnani, 182 kinship, 39, 40

Index culturalist accounts and relatedness studies, 39–40 personhood, 39 relatedness, 39 Kohler-Riesmann, 91 Kotalova, J., 131 Krishna, 84 kulinism, 41, 166 Kumar, N., 34, 123 Kurtz, S. N., 35, 36, 134 Lahiri, J., 125 lajja (shame), 120 Lamb, S., 14, 135 languages, 146 at home, 145–148 schools as multilingual environment, 146 Lazarus, E., 111 learning, 145–148 at home, 145–148 lekhika (educated women), 46 liberalization, 26, 126, 127–128, 129, 141, 152, 168, 179 class, 26 economic restructuring, 127–128, 129 education and middle class, 126, 152 family change and childhood in China, 141 food changes, 168 motherhood, 179 public discourse, 128 reproductive choice, 179 women’s roles, 179 Liechty, M., 61, 160 love, 64, 70, 80 falling in love (prem pora), 70 ideals in soap operas, 64 love marriages, 2, 68, 72, 80–81, 163 Low, S., 13 lunch boxes, 148–150 Lyon, A., 103, 107 MacCormack, C., 95, 117 madhyabitto sreni, 56 Mahmood, S., 160, 177 Manderson, E., 95 Mankekar, P., 161 manuals contemporary about education 117, 119, 141

209

nineteenth century 44–45, 104 marriage, 2, 23, 38, 41–44, 64, 65, 66, 68, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75–78, 81–85, 87–88, 131, 135–136, 179–180 affairs and premarital relationships, 83–84 affinal relations, 75–78, 135–136 age at, 44 Age of Consent Bill, 41 and joint families, 70 and love, 81 and personhood, 65 anxiety about love marriages, 133 arranged 65 arranged vs love, 68 arranging a marriage, 72–80 as discourse, 65 bridal ideals, 75 by introduction, 72, 75 changing norms, 87 childlessness, 179–180 colonial reform, 41–44 companionate marriage, 65, 67, 81 conjugal ideals, 83 conjugality and modernity, 85 consent, 87 coupledom, 136 education, 85 elopement, 83 employment, 23 endogamy, 87 global desire, 65 hierarchical relations, 74 homogenisation, 67 hypergamy in South Asia, 71 ideal daughter-in-law, 78–79 language skills, 131 love within marriage vs bhakti, 84 love-marriage and agency, 86 love-marriage in the neighbourhood, 86 marriage and endogamy, 87 migration and household, 136 modern conjugality, 65 modern selves, 66 morality of exchange, 87 negotiations, 76 parental concerns, 69 parental privilege, 74, 87 parenthood, 91, 92 patrilocality, 73 premarital affairs, 86

210

Domestic Goddesses

racialised discourse, 67 sexuality, 91 shortage of grooms, 74 stranger marriage, 71 weddings, 77 wife-givers and wife-takers, 75 Martin, E., 111 match-making, 64 as parental privilege, 65 maternal histories, 105–107, 108, 109, 114, 119–120 home births, 108 hospital births, 108–109, 114 maternities, 38, 48, 49, 50, 181 as modernity, 48–49 colonial intervention, 49–53 maternities, ideal families and neoliberal ideology, 181 medicalization, 50 modernizing, 50 sacrificial ethos, 48 Mayer, A. C., 155 Mazzarella, W., 34, 54, 160 meaning of ethnicity, 9–10 medicalization, 50, 95, 112, 122, 172 as context for new vegetarianism 172 pregnancy and birth in the nineteenth century, 50–53 agency and empowerment, 122 of child birth and anthropology, 95–96 methodology, 3–5, 15, 18, 19 dissent, 19 middle-class research, 18 resistance, 19 meye dekha (looking at the girl), 75 middle-class identity, 54 middle class, 18, 33–34, 38, 46, 54–62, 56, 57, 61, 64, 111, 126 propriety, 64 ‘middleness’, 60–61 practice, 61 as process, 61 Bengali upper caste origins, 56 caesarean section, 111 Calcutta, history, 57 definition, 54, 60 education and the state, 126 formation, 55 high caste cultural traits, 54 lack of literature, 33–34 lifestyles, 160

motherhood and nationalism, 124 motherhood, 38 Nepal, 61 new life-styles, 60 post-liberalization, 54 stratification through economic exchange, 128 values and culture, 55 voters, 28–30 women’s view on nineteenth century reform, 46 working with, 18 youth culture, 64 middleclassness, 54, 55, 156, 161, 179, 180 Miller, B. S., 84, 182 modernity, 48, 53, 126, 153, 179 and education, 153 idea of, 82 in debates on the female body, 53 intimacy, reflexivity, 179 modernization kaliyuga, 58 Mody, P., 72, 87 mofussil towns, 49 Moore, H. L., 35 mother–child bond in anthropology, 38 motherhood, 24–25, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36–38, 48, 50, 62, 123, 124, 141, 143, 144, 145, 149, 153, 154, 159, 166, 169, 170–171, 174, 177, 179–180, 180, 181, 182 agency and subordination, 180 anxieties and global middle-class lifestyle, 153 as middle-class institution historically, 36 as middle-class institution in theory, 36 Bengali middle classes, 37 biological, 38 birth control and state intervention, 123 changing norms, 133 child/citizen, 154 childlessness, 179–180 class differences, 123 colonial elites, 123 concerns about diets, 174 desirable motherhood, 123 economic transformation, 33 education and nation-building, 124 education as vocation, 143–144 education, 123

Index exclusion, 33–35 fasting, 170–171 formal education and development, 123–124 global motherhood, 49 historically, 33, 37, 38 ideas of, 32–33 ideology, 62 neoliberal climate, 181 intergenerational difference, 32 joint family, 37 liberalization reshaping ideologies, 153 links to consumption and child-rearing, 153 love and food, 149 maternal bodies, 177 middle class, 38, 179 middle-class ideal, 123–124 mothers and educators, 124 mothers as citizens, 154 mothers as sole carers, 144 mothers of sons in nineteenth century discourse, 48 mothers’ roles as mediators, 181 nationalist discourse on wives and mothers, 166 nationalist iconography, 141 new foods, 168–169 new Indian woman, 182 nineteenth century redefinition of good mothering, 132 pedagogising the home, 145–150 politicization, 48 practices reinforcing ideal motherhood, 48 pre-colonial period, 36 pregnancy, 93 reform of domestic relations, 37 religion, 48 responsibility for daughters, 166–167 reworking, 48 rights, 36–37 sacrifice, 141 shakti, 48 somatic truth, 159 through birth, 38 unfulfilled, 180 mothering, 35 in anthropology, 35–36 Mukherjee, S. N., 5, 57 Mukhopadhyay, B., 174, 160

211

multiple caretaking, (see also shared parenting) cross-culturally, 36 Murdock, G., 141 Murshid, G., 46–47 Nair, P. T., 164 Nanda, S., 69 Narashimhan, H., 87, 137 natal home, during pregnancy, 107 nationalism, 124, 125, 148, 153, 165, 166 and education, 153 chastity and food, 165–166 class and women’s education after independence, 123–124 cuisine and class, 148 education, science and medicine, 125 global discourses on education, 153 legacy concerning food and politics, 165–167 wifehood, 166 love marriages, 81 neighbourhood, see para, 3, 5–9, 17, 19 street names, 8 neoliberal ideologies, 181 neoliberalism, 127–128, 141, 77, 180–181 urban space 27 conflicts over the meaning of economic reform, 180 maternal bodies, 177 values and pre-school education, 141 new reproductive world order, 102 new vegetarianism, 175pp agency, 175 meaning of, 175 Nicholas, R. W., 38, 85, 131 Nicholson, L., 35 nineteenth century reform affinal relations, 45 couple, 45 habitus, 45 education, 45 habitus, 45 women’s culture, 51 niramish (excluding fish, onion, meat, eggs), 163 niyer biye (one’s own marriage), 70, 81 nuclear family, 35 modern ideal in literature on the family, 35 Oakely, 95

212

Domestic Goddesses

obentō (lunch boxes), see lunch boxes old age, 136 affinal relations, 135–136 old Calcutta (purono kolkata), 10 Ortner, S., 61 Osella, F., and Osella, C., 34, 85 Östör, A., 34, 38 Pai, M., 96, 113, 117 pain during birth 114–115, 121 Papanek, H., 108, 145 para (neighbourhood), 3, 5–9, 13, 17, 19 Central Calcutta, 5–9 Doctor’s Lane, 6 domestic space as predicament, 9 Ganguly Bagan, 5–9 South Calcutta, 5–9 Taltala, 5 traditional vs modern, 9 women and employment, 3 women’s life, 9 para meye (girl from neighbourhood), 19 Pardo, I. 16 parental responsibility, 78 parental views, 70 parenting, 39, 125, 129, 130, 131, 132, 133, 135–138, 140, 143, 147, 148, 149, 151, 167 ‘traditional’ vs Western, 140–141 and English-medium schooling, 130 and personhood in Bengal, 131 and values in Bengali kinship, 133 anxiety about love marriages, 133 as friendship, 132 becoming a parent, 131 class and schooling, 151 consumer society, 132 cross-culturally, 39 cuisine, 148–150 fathers’ involvement in education, 133 food and love, 149 food for school, 150 friendship, 133 grandmothers’ childcare duties, 137 grandparents’ feelings, 137–138 grandparents, 131, 143 ideas, 39 intensive mothering, 167 intimacy, 132 mothers and lunch boxes, 149

mothers’ changing roles, 133 mothers’ language skills, 130–131 multilingual environment, 147 naming, 125 parents’ expectations, 129 public discourse on, 132 relationships built on trust, 132 separate spheres, 133 servants, 143, 144, 145 shared parenting as new trend, 135–138 shared parenting, 131–135, 143 shared parenting: grandmothers, 135–138 substances, 39 successful parenting and class, 132 support in old age, 133 women as nurturers, 167 work books, 147–148 Parry, J., 71, 129, 87 partition, 6, 9 refugee colony, 9 Patel, T., 102, 110 patrivrata (a wife worshipping her husband), 44, 84, 165 Pine, F., 33 place making, 15 Plummer, K., 87 Pocock, D., 155 pollution, 110, 120, 121, 161, 174 birth, 110 hospital, 110 street food, 174 positionality, 19–27, 24 Potter, J. E., 113 Povinelli, E., 65, 179 practice theory, 61–62 processual character of gender, kinship and class, 62 Prakash, G., 125 Pratt, J., 58–59 pregnancy, 91, 93–94, 96, 105, 107, 108 affinal relations, 94 affines, 107 complaints, 106 conception, 91 contractions, 108 shasur bari, 94 fasts, 93–94 food, 105 multiple strategies, 93 patrilocality, 96

Index rest, 107 segregation, 108 shadh rituals, 93 shame, 105 technologies, 93 prem pora, see falling in love, 70 prem, 84 pre-school education, 133 prestations, 74, 75, 76–77 affinal relations, 74 demands, 76 dowry, 76–77 tattya, 76–77 unilateral gifts, 74 private health care, 96 private sector, 110 privatization, 110, 112, 113, 118, 119–120, 124 as explanation for Caesarean sections, 118 health care sector, 110, 113, 112–115, 119–120 doctor-laboratory nexus, 113 health insurance, 113 status and reproductive change in anthropological writings, 113 of education, 124 workforce and education, 124 public sector, 113 doctors 113 public space, 13, 14, 67, 68 parks and couples, 68 public sphere separate spheres, 43 puja (worship), 20 purdah (seclusion), 14, 43 Puri, J., 66, 87 Raheja, G. G., 14, 107 Raj, D. S., 72 Rajagopal, A., 34 Ram, K., 37, 39, 50, 95, 104 Rana, K., 138 Rapp, R., 40, 95, 102, 117 Ray, B., 34 Ray, M., 9 Reddy, G., 66 reflexivity, 27, 179 reflexive self, 179 reform, 37, 42, 43, 44, 50 nineteenth century, maternity, 50

213

nineteenth century, reproduction, 50 nineteenth century, sexuality, 50 nineteenth century domestic relations, 37 nineteenth century marriage, 42 motherhood, 42 Victorian ideas, 43 widowhood, 42 refugee colony, 9 reproduction, 102, 111, 113, 118, 121, 123, 169, 170–171, 176, 177 agency, 118 and agency through expert’s knowledge, 121 anthropological approach to the politics of, 40 change and ideology, 111 contemporary politics and neoliberal ideology, 177 diet, 169–173 family planning and schooling and birth control, 118 fasting, 170–171 and biomoral truth, 176 and joint family, 118 mechanistic view of the body, 111 private health care, anthropological analysis of, 113 reproductive technologies, 102 reproductive change, 53, 94 middle-class identities, 94 post-independence reform, 53 respectability, 3, 14, 38, 61, 67, 78 Riesman in Jacobson, 95 Riley, N., 153, 159 ritual fasts, see bratas Rofel, L., 141 Roy, M., 93 Roy, A., 13, 152 Rozario, S., 102, 103, 109 sacrifice, 48 samiti (committee), 1–3 Sangari, K., 43, 72, 107, 108, 123, 132, 182 Sargent, C.F., 95, 102 Sarkar, T., 43, 47, 57, 154, 166 sathi (companion), 65 Schneider, D., 38 schooling, 123, 133, 134, 138–139, 141, 142–143, 144, 145, 150, 151, 152 admission, 134 discipline, 139–140, 150–151

214

Domestic Goddesses

books at home, 147 class stratification, 152 discourse on work and learning, 152 English at home, 145 English-medium, 140 family planning, 123 global imagery, 140 grandparents’ roles, 134 home study, 134 interviews, 134 manuals, 141–142 Montessori nurseries, 139 mothers’ responsibilities, 139 multilingual, 140 pre-school and class, 151 pre-schooling, state and class, 138–139 selection, 141–142 servants, 143, 144–145 teaching aids, 147 work at home, 147 work, 144 working mothers, 142–143 schools, 142, 146 as multilingual environment, 146 selection tests and interviews, 142–143 Scrase, T. J., 61. 124, 128 seclusion after birth, 53 self-chosen marriage, see love-marriage self-control, 171 self-cultivation, 157, 160 in feminist anthropology, 160 self-development, 177 discipline, 177 Sen, A., 42, 43, 46, 52 Sen, J., 29 separate spheres, 14, 42, 43 as ideology, 14 colonial family, 42 ethnography, 14 methodological, 14 nineteenth century home, 47 public spheres, 43 Sesia, P. M., 102 Seth, V., 64 sexuality, 66, 165–166, 169, 172, 176 heating foods, 169 subaltern, 65 vegetarianism and birth rate, 172 Seymour, S. C., 13, 33, 35, 36, 134

shadh (ritual of desired foods during pregnancy), 106 shakti (female reproductive power), 48, 166 politicization of motherhood, 48 shame, during pregnancy and birthing 116, 120 Sharma, U., 9, 13, 14 shasur bari (in-law’s house), 1, 106, 121, 180 shikata (learned woman), 46 Shosthi puja, 101 Singh, A. T., 79 Smith, R. T., 38 somatic truth, 159 Sridharan, E., 56 Srilata, K., 161 Srivastava, S., 34, 124 Stacey, J., 33, 35 status, 59, 60 class, 59 consumption, 59 reproduction of class, 60 reproduction of class, 60 Stephens, M., 33, 102, 111, 138, 148, 153 Stoler, A. L., 67 Swabumi Heritage Plaza, 63 Szurek, J., 102 Tagore, R., 123, 135 Taltala, 8, 10–11 Congress Party, 8 role in urban politics, 8 Tatar, M., 113, 117 tattya (trousseau), 76–77 Taylor, J., 35, 111 technologies of the self, 159 Thelen, T., 135 tiffin, see lunch boxes Trawick, M., 33, 40, 124, 134 Trinamul Congress, 9 Uberoi, P., 64, 71, 79, 92, 169 Unnithan-Kumar, M., 34 urban politics, 5, 8 nineteenth century, 5 urban poor, 28 restructuring, 28 urban restructuring, 28–30, 64 vaginal delivery, see birth, normal, 115 Vaishnavite sects, 163 Van Hollen, C., 51, 103, 115

Index Van Wessel, M., 128 Vatuk, S., 13, 80 Vegetarianism, 157–160, 161, 162, 165, 169, 170, 171, 172, 176 affinal relations, 170, 171 and consumer society, 170 as control of sexuality, 176 as corporal regimes, 176 as diet of service-holders, 165 as personal symbolism, 176 as self-cultivation, 160 Bengali community, 162 birth control, 161 caste, 159 celibacy, 159 conception, 170, 171–172 fertility, 157–160 Hindu men, 159 in Bengal, 157–160 individuality, 176 local ideas, 161–165 meaning and fasting, 171–172 new among married women, 170 politics, 159 reproduction and fertility, 169–173 reproduction and truth, 176 sexuality, 172–173 somatic truth, 159 unmarried women, 169–70 various meanings, 157–160 widowhood and heating diets, 160 widows, 159, 162, 164, 169–170, 172, 176 Vera-Sanso, P., 135 Viruru, R., 146, 149 Visweswaran, K., 19–20 Vivekananda, 49

215

vows, 94 Walsh, J., 44, 45, 46, 49, 59, 123 Ward 53, 8 Wardlow, H., 67 weddings, 77 Weiss, A., 15 West, 17 westernization, 68 Weston, K., 33 White, M. I., 129 Whiteread, J., 49 widows, 1, 14, 45, 159–160, 162, 169–170, 172, 176 kulinism, 41 diet and sexuality, 162, 159–160 vegetarianism and sexuality, 172, 176 Wilson, E., 15 women’s committee, 64 women’s culture, nineteenth century, 51 women’s quarters, see zenana and antahpur working class, 3 marital disputes, 3 mothers as deficient, 48 the need to have sons in nineteenth century, 48 youth, 64, 68, 86 and ideals of marriage 90, 93, 96 culture in Calcutta and urban space 64, 67–68 consumption literature 60, 160 youth culture and dietary change 155, 173–176, 179 zamindars (landowners), 57 Zhao, B., 141