Living the Body

Living the Body

Embodiment, Womanhood and
Identity in Contemporary India

MEENAKSHI THAPAN
Copyright © Meenakshi Thapan, 2009

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any
form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,
recording or by any information storage or retrieval system, without
permission in writing from the publisher.

First published in 2009 by

SAGE Publications India Pvt Ltd

B1/ I-1 Mohan Cooperative Industrial Area
Mathura Road, New Delhi 110 044, India
www.sagepub.in
SAGE Publications Inc
2455 Teller Road
Thousand Oaks, California 91320, USA
SAGE Publications Ltd
1 Oliver’s Yard, 55 City Road
London EC1Y 1SP, United Kingdom
SAGE Publications Asia-Pacific Pte Ltd
33 Pekin Street
#02-01 Far East Square
Singapore 048763

Published by Vivek Mehra for SAGE Publications India Pvt Ltd, typeset in
10/12 pt Galliard BT by Excellent Laser Typesetters, Delhi and printed at
Chaman Enterprises, New Delhi.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Thapan, Meenakshi.
Living the body: embodiment, womanhood and identity in contemporary
India/Meenakshi Thapan.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Gender identity—India. 2. Body, Human—Social aspects—India.
3. Sex role—India. 4. Women—India—History. I. Title.
HQ1075.5.I4T43 306.4—dc22 2008 2008039698

ISBN: 978-81-7829-901-3 (HB)

The SAGE Team: Rekha Natarajan, Sushmita Banerjee, Anju Saxena and
Trinankur Banerjee
 To the memory of
Professor Ravinder Kumar
 Contents

Acknowledgements ix
Introduction: An Engagement with the
Sociology of Embodiment xiii

1. Embodiment, Identity and Womanhood 1

2. Cultures of Adolescence 26

3. Embodiment and Womanhood in Femina 64

4. The Body in the Mirror:

Embodiment, Violence and Identity 93

5. The Body as a Weapon:

Embodiment, Work and Identity 131

6. Aporiai of Resistance 164

References and Select Bibliography 173

Index 185
About the Author 191
 Acknowledgements

A ll books invariably have personal histories and this is no

exception. This book’s journey has taken an incredibly long time
in its making and in its final completion. It began several years ago, in
1993, when I was a Fellow at the Centre for Contemporary Studies
at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library (NMML), New Delhi.
Professor Ravinder Kumar, then Director at the NMML, gave me
the opportunity to begin work on this project and I remain indebted
to him for this. He asked me, one afternoon in late 1991, as I entered
the library and was putting away my bag at the reception, ‘And when
will you write your next book?’ I confidently replied. ‘I will write
my next book here’ and, thinking I had overstepped politeness,
apologised. He smiled and asked me to apply for a fellowship. A
year and a half later, I was beginning work on this project. I was at
the NMML as Fellow at the Centre for Contemporary Studies from
1993–1995. It was a lively group of Fellows and we participated in
several exciting dialogues and seminars chaired by Professor Ravinder
Kumar at the Centre. Professor Ravinder Kumar was dedicated not
just to the library and its environs, but also to the band of Fellows at
the Centre whom he encouraged and nurtured with infinite support,
friendship and affection. This book is dedicated to his memory in
gratitude for his support for all things of the mind and the scholarly
zeal he inspired in young minds.
I was teaching at the Department of Education, University of
Delhi, from September 1989 until July 2002. Although my area
of research was the sociology of education and schooling practices,
in particular, I sought to begin new work in a completely different
area. I was inevitably drawn to women’s studies, partly as a conse-
quence of my personal trajectory. With complete independence as a
young woman, supportive parents and a generous spouse, I found
motherhood fulfilling but also extremely constraining. My personal
x LIVING THE BODY

experience led to a search for understanding womanhood in its

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

Conference at James Cook University, Townsville; the Sixth Women in

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

who provided me with the funds and facilities to conduct fieldwork

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

To work on a “paradigm of embodiment”… is not to study any-

thing new or different, but to address familiar topics—healing,
emotion, gender or power—from a different standpoint. (Thomas
J. Csordas 1999a: 147)
…it is in the everyday life of women, articulating the poisons that
enter social relationships, that the act of hearing and recognition
gets done, and through which I propose that culture acquires a
soul—that it is born. (Veena Das 1995: 178)

T his work is concerned with the development of a sociology of

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

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

performing selves in relational terms, it is significant that we are col-

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

WOMEN AND THEIR WORLDS

My work focuses on two sets of adolescent and adult women,

those who are educationally advantaged—in school or working,
professional, career women and those who are educationally
disadvantaged—located in slums and engaged primarily in unskilled
labour or domestic work. The professional and educated women are
articulate and conscious of their dilemmas and rights and view the
world from their position in particular sections of society. I seek to
understand their lived experience from their location, listening to
xvi LIVING THE BODY

their constructions of their everyday world, as an experienced and

contested social reality. Undoubtedly, poverty is central to women’s
experience in the slum. This includes not only the objective criteria
that define the parameters of poverty such as life expectancy,
female mortality, assets, economic deprivation, access to education,
consumption, nutrition, health, and so on, but also the ‘subjective
experience’ of poverty as an everyday reality. I consciously take their
subjective experience of poverty as central to their recognition of
themselves as gendered subjects and assert that subjective experience
is crucial to our understanding of the complexities characteristic of
everyday life.
My analysis of women’s experience is based on their accounts
during my interviews with two sets of women:

a) Forty adolescent young women from educationally advantaged

socio-economic backgrounds and 25 middle- and upper-
middle class adult women in New Delhi. These women were
selected on the basis of a snowball sample and particularly
represent the category of urban Indian women, who because
of their educationally advantaged and privileged status and
position in urban society, are exposed to an array of visual
images and textual discourse on embodied representation in
the media and elsewhere.
b) Fifteen adolescent, married and unmarried, educationally
disadvantaged young women and 25 adult migrant women
from a Gujarati community and from the northern state of
Uttar Pradesh who live in a slum in north-western Delhi.

The methodology employed for engaging in fieldwork among

adolescent young women varied: on the one hand, I was able, with
the help of a research assistant, to conduct interviews and have
fairly elaborate discussions with students who also answered a long
questionnaire. This interaction took place in the location of their
schools. On the other hand, we had long discussions, group meetings
and interviews with groups of young women in their homes in the
slum. Undoubtedly, this resulted in vastly different sets of data based
on written and interview material in the one case and oral testimonies
in the other. This did not cause any serious problems except that
the interviews with the educationally disadvantaged young women
 INTRODUCTION xvii

required us to draw them out in greater depth to ensure that we had

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

Moreover, no individual lives in a particular social or cultural vacuum

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

was asked questions about my life, my family, my work, by all

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

THE CHAPTERS IN THE BOOK

Within the larger problematic of embodiment, identity and resistance,

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

what is considered ‘authentic’ embodiment and appearance perfected

through body regimes and displays.
Women’s lived experience and the multiplicity of voice, class
and location form the focus of the next two chapters in the book.
Chapter 4 examines women’s voices from middle class and upper
class social spaces, who have had some access to education, are
privileged in different ways, through education, employment, wealth
or a combination of these. Marriage is crucial to these women’s
self-definitions much as they seek to break away from normative
definitions of their identities as respectable, married women. Women
do however simultaneously indicate a movement away from these
external definitions to the extent that they articulate and express
their dissatisfaction with what they are expected to be. They attempt
to alter these normative definitions with their own construction,
through expression and performance in front of the male gaze or to
their own gaze in the mirror, of what they would like to be or how
they would like themselves to be seen, creating, in the process, an
intimate and personal portrayal of their embodiment.
In Chapter 5, the perspectives and experiences of women in the
slum point to the significance of work and marriage in the context of
their location in the slum and their experience of grinding poverty.
Work is crucial to women’s self-definitions, as indeed is marriage;
paid work as well as work in the home, gives women a basis for
living, for survival, and for strategising their lives in the context of
complex networks of marriage and extended kin. Their embodiment
is experienced within a largely utilitarian perspective for the crucial
role of childbearing, work and inevitable sexual relations rather than
only for adornment or pleasure. Within this world of the everyday,
woman recognises her ability to negotiate, strategise and intervene,
as she wants to, and in the very recognition and articulation of both
her position and her desires, aspirations and hopes, she achieves her
sense of identity as a woman.
In the last chapter, I discuss the emancipatory possibilities of
resistance in the everyday lives of women. In recognising that
resistance is not conclusively linked to transformation, especially at
larger social and cultural levels, I discuss resistance as an ‘impasse’,
indicating an inevitability as well as an openness to possibilities. This
view allows us to consider women as charters of their destinies as
much as they experience them through the struggles and dilemmas
that characterise their everyday lives.
 1
EMBODIMENT, IDENTITY
AND WOMANHOOD

T his work is specifically concerned with the lives of women and

seeks to provide an understanding of women’s experience of em-
bodiment in everyday life.1 The focus on women arises from an explicit
effort to speak about the social, from the perspective and experience
of women. It is only then that we can speak about ‘a sociology’ for
women: when the experience of women forms the basis of under-
standing the social. The social then is not only about women, but
from their perspective, provides the basis for a sociology that serves
to help us discover and understand the larger social and political
reality. Such a sociology, that takes women’s experience as its start-
ing point, does not objectify the subjects under study but seeks ‘to
investigate how that society organises and shapes that everyday world
of experience. Its project is to explicate the actual social relations
in which people’s lives are embedded and to make these visible to
them/ourselves’ (Smith 1999: 74).
Ethnographies of communities and social processes in India that
have taken the experience of women as central to their analyses include
the works of sociologists and social anthropologists such as Das (1988),

1
Embodiment, ‘a lived matter of gender’ (Hughes and Witz 1997), is crucial to
the experience and perception of gender identity. As Lois McNay puts it: ‘At the
point of overlap between the physical, the symbolic and the sociological, the body is
a dynamic, mutable frontier. The body is the threshold through which the subject’s
lived experience of the world is incorporated and realized and as such, is neither pure
object nor pure subject’ (McNay 1999: 98). As object, it is argued that the body and
its image is part of ‘formally identical objects interacting in the infinity of space and
time’ but as subject, the same body and body-image is ‘immeasurably enriched with
the inner content of lived experience’ (Ferguson 1997: 6).
2 LIVING THE BODY

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

EMBODIMENT AND IDENTITY

My purpose here is to consider the linkages between embodiment,

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

2
In this work, I do not focus on embodiment as experienced through disability,
disease, violence, religion or age, among other such categories. These are important
considerations in any work on embodiment, as they frame the paradigm of embodiment
in vastly different ways, but lie outside the scope of this book.
3
I assert that woman ‘speaks’ and therefore has voice, will and agency. We need to
engage with women’s voices, ‘to learn to speak to (rather than listen to or speak for)
the historically muted subject of the subaltern woman’ (Spivak 1988: 295). Spivak
later clarifies that she is arguing for agency as ‘institutionally validated action’ (Spivak
2000: xx). She argues that this is crucial: ‘The politics of demanding and building
infrastructure so that when subalterns speak they can be heard’ (ibid.). This is not
however the point of this work where women’s voices construct an understanding of
everyday life practices through an articulation of the twin processes of compliance and
resistance.
 EMBODIMENT, IDENTITY AND WOMANHOOD 3

gender, and history and culture which shape and limit us in different
ways (Bordo 1997: 181). Our embodiment is therefore experienced
in our everyday lives as lived and communicative bodies. To the extent
that we can articulate our embodied experience through language,
emotions, memory and speech, we use our bodily senses to both
perceive and give voice to our experience. Embodiment in this sense
is ‘an existential condition in which the body is the subjective source
or intersubjective ground of experience’ (Csordas 1999a: 143) and
therefore I am essentially concerned with culture and experience as
they can be understood ‘from the standpoint of bodily being-in-the
world’ (ibid.).4
Individuals clearly do not constitute singular, isolated and fixed
identities but are multiply constituted with contradictory and often
conflicting subjectivities. In an attempt to bring in these multiple
voices, representing multiple subjectivities, my focus is on the lived
and communicative body and on lived experience as constitutive of the
embodied self. By lived experience, I mean that experience which is
premised on the articulation by women of their subjectivity based
in the everyday and simultaneously in particular historical and social
locations.5 In foregrounding this subjectivity, it is important to
refrain from providing anecdotal accounts or personal narratives that
do not in some way reflect subjectivity in the social so that it is an
engagement with the social that is the bedrock of lived experience.6

4
The work of Erving Goffman has been particularly significant in emphasizing
the place of the body in identifying the links between people’s self-identity and social
identity. Goffman was concerned with the techniques of the body in social relation-
ships, such as ‘face-work’, gestures, and other nuanced forms of behaviour in the
‘presentation of the self ’ and maintenance of appearances as a form of public display in
everyday life (Goffman 1956 ). The significance of Goffman’s work lies in his emphasis
on the body ‘as integral to human agency’ (Shilling 1993: 82). His work shows us
how people can, and do, intervene in the flow of everyday life through different aspects
and modes of self-presentation, whether physical or sartorial. However, Goffman’s
work also suggests that there is an extent to which individuals can express themselves
through and with their bodies. This social constraint is exercised through ‘shared
vocabularies of body idiom’ (as quoted by Shilling, ibid.) which implies that while
bodies belong to individuals, their significance is socially derived.
5
‘Lived experience’, it is suggested, ‘designates the whole of a person’s subjectivity.
More particularly, the term describes the way an individual makes sense of her situation
and actions’ (Moi 1999: 63).
6
Sara Suleri however warns us of the dangers of ‘lived experience’ or ‘radical
subjectivity’ translating into a ‘low-grade romanticism’ that maybe unable to recognize
its discursive status as a ‘pre- rather than post- colonialism’ (Suleri 1992: 761).
4 LIVING THE BODY

As Henrietta Moore has pointed out, persons and selves are

bounded and therefore ‘embodiment is the essence of identity’
(Moore 1994a: 31). However, embodiment does not impart a fix-
ity to identity as identities are always in the process of becoming,
being made and re-made, constructed and re-defined, shaped and
transformed. My interest in human embodiment is also in relation to
the expression of inner feelings, self hood and identity, viewing none
of these as isolated single issues but rather as multiple constituents of
human embodiment. Phenomenology has been foremost in imbuing
matter (the body) with life (agency) through the lived experience
of human beings. The mind, imagination, emotions and memory
play as much a role in the construction and experience of the human
body as do the social expectations and the male and female gaze.
The phenomenological perspective views all human perception as
embodied. And embodiment thereby becomes both experience and
body, agency and physical corporeality, life and matter.
The psychological element is not insignificant in the formation
of gender identity and as Nancy Chodorow has emphasised, I too
contend that ‘each person’s sense of gender…is an inextricable
fusion or melding of personally created (emotionally and through
unconscious fantasy) and cultural meaning’ (Chodorow 1995: 517).
The important point however is that much of the personal creation
is grounded in social, cultural and ethnic factors so that it is not
clear to what extent an individual’s own sense of gender subjectivity
is not informed by the society in which she lives. For example,
Ahmed points out how bodily encounters with strangers ‘in which
something that cannot be named is passed between subjects’ serves
to embody the social agent and such encounters in fact are ‘played
out on the body, and is played out with the emotions’ (Ahmed 2000:
85–6).7 The psychological element remains an important component

7
In a moving quote from Audre Lorde’s encounter, as a child on a subway train
with her mother, with a white woman who shirks from bodily contact and stands up
to avoid sitting next to her, Ahmed concludes that ‘through such strange encounters,
bodies are both deformed and reformed; they take form through and against other
bodily forms’ (Ahmed 2000: 86). Such strange encounters also serve to mark out
boundary lines between bodies, through the assumption of a bodily image, and also
involve ‘social practices and techniques of differentiation’. In other words, bodies
may be differentiated ‘not only from each other or from the other, but also through
differentiating between others, who have a different function in establishing the
permeability of bodily space’ (ibid.: 90).
 EMBODIMENT, IDENTITY AND WOMANHOOD 5

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

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

The attempt is not only to provide descriptions of their everyday

embodied experiences but also to understand whether written and
oral responses and testimonies to my questions about their lives bring
out important ways of remembering and forgetting, living, dying and
being re-born, and political consciousness in spirit and in will. I argue
that the experience of an embodied and gendered self lies at the inter-
section not only of multiple subjectivities but also at multiple points
of political consciousness and location. Embodiment is therefore not
merely about being-in-the-body or behaviour but about experience,
subjectivity, political consciousness, agency and will.
In my emphasis on the everyday as both the focus of study and
site for explanation, I have undoubtedly been influenced by the work
of Pierre Bourdieu who focuses on social power in the everyday.
The great advantage of this approach is that everyday life practices
become crucial to understanding how both power and agency
operate in the most mundane situations, contexts and practices.
Simple and everyday tasks such as the embodied engagement with
work of different kinds, with domestic tasks and social networks,
acquire a renewed significance when viewed from this perspective. In
addition, a woman’s physical stance, the gestures she uses, the facial
expressions she communicates, her articulation of her life experience
in a particular tone of voice as well as the silences, the absence of
speech, the hushed voice, are critical markers of both the exercise of
power and of woman’s agential response.
I examine Bourdieu’s widely influential conceptual category of
habitus in terms of its emphasis on the collective, the social, so well
articulated in his statement that, ‘Habitus is a socialized subjectivity’
(Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992: 126); and the implications of this
when we seek to emphasise a sociology for women on the basis of
subjectively constructed knowledge. I do not however preclude the
possibilities of resistance or transformation as these are embedded in
the nature of habitus itself to the extent that Bourdieu was concerned
with the notion, following Chomsky, of ‘generative grammar’ and
thereby of the ‘creative, active, and inventive capacities of habitus
and of agent’. In fact, Bourdieu and Wacquant clearly emphasise that
 EMBODIMENT, IDENTITY AND WOMANHOOD 7

‘Habitus is not the fate that some people read into it. …It is an open
system of dispositions that is constantly subjected to experiences, and
therefore constantly affected by them in a way that either reinforces
or modifies its structures. It is durable but not eternal’ (Bourdieu
and Wacquant 1992: 133). Moreover, the habitus is embodied in the
human subject and is an experience, and in that sense, a capital, made
explicit through bodily hexis—the bearing of the body, comportment,
and deeply ingrained habits of behaviour, feeling and thought. Thus,
embodiment is critical to Bourdieu’s sociology of lived practice and
of what he calls ‘the practical sense’.
The habitus, in this work, is an important concept as it focuses
attention on the body. While we may know that the body ‘is a
medium’ for expressions of moods and feelings, Bourdieu emphasises
that the body, ‘as a repository for social experience, constitutes an
essential part of the habitus’ (Krais 2006: 127). All human action is
embodied, gendered and social. This does not however imply that the
human is passive in ‘being-in-the-world’ but is ‘actively participating
and grappling with the world’ (ibid.: 129). It is this element of
struggle, and contestation, in habitus that, to my mind, is critical to
understand the space between mere reiteration of social acts and of
the open-ended and fluid nature of action.8
In this work, I seek to understand habitus, its constancy and
simultaneously its malleability in the context of woman’s experience
and my point of intervention in this debate takes place on two
registers.
First, I seek to define and understand the constancy of habitus in
women’s experience wherein agency is contained in every attempt
at breaking out so that the challenge to oppression or domination
takes place on well recognised and trodden paths of resistance and
rebellion that often do not reveal more than they appear to. They
thus emerge from, and rest within, the social fields inhabited by

8
The major feminist critique against Bourdieu, however, expresses a dissatisfaction
with the concept of habitus which, in spite of Bourdieu’s emphasis on the possibilities
of change, is viewed as embodying an unchanging, obstinate set of dispositions
that inhere in the body, emotions and psyche and endure over time. Contrarily,
contemporary feminist discourse emphasises ‘agency, fluidity, the instability of subject
positionings and identities’ which, as Terry Lovell tells us, ‘contrasts at times very
starkly with the durability of Bourdieu’s dispositional subject’ (Lovell 2000:12). See
also Lovell (2003), Adkins and Skeggs (2004) and Krais (2006) for new approaches
in feminism towards Bourdieu’s work since his death in 2002.
8 LIVING THE BODY

subjects. They do however articulate individual aspirations, desires

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

9
‘Performatives’, we are told, ‘(utterances which enact or instatiate or bring
about social statuses, as in the authorized declaration of marriage) are also always
performances, but they have the force of social institutionalization behind them which
mere performances lack. They are embedded in the social structures and norms that
authorize them. For Butler, socially embedded performatives may be dislodged, their
meanings transformed, by inspired performances that transgress with authority’ (Lovell
2000:15).
 EMBODIMENT, IDENTITY AND WOMANHOOD 9

independence of spirit through the body, I do not suggest that the

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

literature about women’s sexuality but I contend these embodied

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

10
Charles Cooley argues that the ‘looking glass self ’ or the ‘reflected’ self is a
‘social self ’. In this context, he says, ‘as we see our face, figure and dress in the glass,
and are interested in them because they are ours and are pleased and otherwise with
them according as they do or do not answer to what we should like them to be; so in
imagination we perceive in another’s mind some thought of our appearance, manners,
aims, deeds, character, friends, and so on, and are variously affected by it’ (see Cooley
1902: 179–185).
 EMBODIMENT, IDENTITY AND WOMANHOOD 11

in which the body is perceived, constructed, performed, displayed

and adorned.
In the feminist discourse in contemporary India, woman’s em-
bodiment is closely associated with the signifiers of identity emerging
from the tropes of nation, community and religious fundamentalism
whether it is in the context of the fractured nation-state of the parti-
tion period, the interests and forces of the nationalist movement,
Hindu or Muslim communities, caste and ethnic communities and
contemporary caste and class contexts.11 Woman’s embodiment is the
true repository of purity, sacredness and honour thereby suggesting
that in one way or another ‘the female body needs to be appropri-
ated for a sense of national, racial or community identity to persist’
(Gedalof 1999: 203). The intersection of class and embodiment in
the construction of identity is somewhat more complex. This emerges
not only from women’s experience of their embodied and gendered
selves in the context of their class positions but also from the ability
of subjects to capture and convert different forms of capital to ensure
upward mobility, status, position and privilege in society.
Class is crucial to my analysis of women’s embodiment and
identity as it shapes women’s experience of their everyday lives
in very different ways. This is reflected in their diverse ways of
knowing, remembering and experiencing their material conditions,
their relationships with others and their consciousness of their
condition in relation to caste, gender and community. The need for
economic, cultural and social capital of different kinds signifying
varied indicators of status and position is expressed very differently
by women belonging to different social and economic backgrounds.12
Femininity, as that ‘way of being’ which bestows status, respectability
and recognition, through embodied modes of appearance and self-
presentation is dependent on the social class position of women in
differing contexts. For a middle-class woman, it is important to be
viewed, both socially and culturally, as one who has clearly articulated
self-definitions about her femininity as an embodied state that

11
See, for example, Sangari and Vaid (1993), Tanika Sarkar (1995, 1997), Butalia
(1997), Chowdhry (1994, 2007), Chakravarti (2003).
12
I am here referring to the uses of capital as elucidated by Pierre Bourdieu (1986).
In his understanding and analysis of the forms of capital, namely, economic, cultural
and social capital and their transformation into symbolic capital, Bourdieu has made
an important contribution to our understanding of how the conversion of capital
results in changes in social class, status, privilege and domination.
12 LIVING THE BODY

gives off self-negotiated and constructed expressions about herself.

A working class woman articulates her construction of femininity
from within her economic and political space. It is therefore a very
different construction of femininity, based on utilitarian and practical
considerations, grounded in her everyday life experiences at work, in
the family, community and poverty.
Class is significant but I would like to emphasise that culture is
equally important to our understanding of embodiment and identity
as we are located in a space wherein culture in various forms impacts
our physical senses and fleshly bodies in very specific and concrete
ways and is simultaneously reflected in the practices we engage in.
These include not only cultural practices that serve as markers of
women’s status and roles in Indian society, but increasingly the
domain of popular culture, the media and its manifestations and the
practices emanating from them. The influence of culture is present in
ways in which we use our bodies, look at our bodies, seek to change
them in bits and pieces and above all, experience our embodiment in
relation to others. In this sense, the space of everyday life, namely,
‘culture and social relations’, and I would assert our experience of these
relations, are ‘essentially political spaces and practices’ (Bannerji
2001a: 8). Culture, and our experience of culture, is mediated by
class relations and the discursive practices emanating from them.
In contemporary social settings, therefore, changing modes of
domination through the media, the ‘vendors of slimming aids’ and
other agents of the increasingly dominant middle classes impose new
uses of the body and create a new bodily ‘hexis’ which ‘substituting
seduction for repression, public relations for policing, advertising
for authority, the velvet glove for the iron fist, pursues the symbolic
integration of the dominated classes by imposing needs rather than
inculcating norms’ (Bourdieu 1984: 153–4). In this manner, both
material conditions and social, cultural and symbolic transformations
effect new modes of domination that in subtle ways are the tools
par excellence of reproducing gender politics through embodied
experience. It is in this sense that ‘class, as an ensemble of social
relations and significational practices, is then not only an economic
but a social form. It indicates how social spaces of lived relations,
valorised practices and experiences are implicated in relations and
moralities of property and labour relations’ (Bannerji 2001a: 10).
This complex interplay of culture, social and class relations informs
my analysis in different ways in the context of the experience of young
 EMBODIMENT, IDENTITY AND WOMANHOOD 13

and adult women in the urban context of a changing postcolonial

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

SITES AND PRACTICES: RECOLONISATION AND

ITS CONSEQUENCES

The social, cultural and political consequences of location are

significant indicators for embodied experience. The larger socio-
political sites within which embodiment is experienced is at one
level, the particular postcolonial context, that constructs a particular
framework for the embodiment of subjects in contemporary society.
Secondly, the specific socio-economic context in which subjects
are both located and embedded is intrinsic not only to their class
position but also to their particular experience of embodiment and
gendered identity. There are thus variations at both the national and
global levels and in the social locations of subjects. ‘Difference’ in a
sense is critical to this approach. However, it is also significant that
such difference does not imply or indicate a specificity of experience
outside a universal experience but in fact includes the specific, and
the multiplicities of experience implied, within the national and
global.13
The ‘post-colonial’, as in postcolonial societies such as India,
implies not only a historical condition but has also become a
metaphor for an extraordinary situation in which a nation finds itself.
This is the legacy of a mixed heritage characterised by the quality of

13
I would like to emphasise, pace Mohanty, that differences however are not
mere ‘differences’ but that how ‘specifying difference allows us to theorise universal
concerns more fully’(Mohanty 2002: 505).
14 LIVING THE BODY

the dominant postcolonial habitus that it embodies in its subjects.

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

14
I use the conceptual category of ‘postcolonial habitus’ to specify the context in
which habitus is created and reproduced. I therefore take recourse to ‘postcolonial’
as a historical and social condition that shapes habitus in diverse and particular ways
through familial relations, schooling practices and other modalities of the social and
public domain.
 EMBODIMENT, IDENTITY AND WOMANHOOD 15

constructed, but nevertheless carries with it the authorizing signature

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

15
Power relations, I would therefore argue, following Bernstein, ‘create boundaries,
legitimise boundaries, reproduce boundaries, between different categories of groups,
gender, class, race, different categories of discourse, different categories of agents’
(Bernstein 1996:19). The most significant and pervasive boundaries in rural and
urban India are those of caste, gender and religion. See, among others, Chowdhry
(2007), for the practices that serve to maintain and reproduce these boundaries in
different contexts and the efforts towards resistance.
16 LIVING THE BODY

changing India as well as in its essential corollary, an emotionally,

culturally and socially rooted tradition.
In this process of exclusion, it is important to also establish the
defining characteristics of those who have been included. These are
primarily based on their class and caste affiliations, their social status
and position in society in relation to their gender, education and
occupation. These are perhaps the visible markers of being included
in the pre-eminent habitus that is part of the dominant culture. There
are however certain invisible markers of inclusion and these are visible
only to others who seek to differentiate between those who are in and
who are out, the included and the excluded, the privileged and the
under-privileged, and the dominant and the subaltern. The invisible
markers are defined by that which they purport to hide, the lack of
an appropriate habitus, as it were, that forms the ground of the social
and cultural exclusion. These may include aspects of their existence
that do not fulfil the criteria of inclusion such as the appropriate caste
or class status, educational or professional qualifications, linguistic
abilities, age and gender. Although the postcolonial subject has herself
been a subject of hegemonic forces, she still does not hesitate to
knowingly exclude the subaltern other. The politics of recolonisation
is therefore all about both reproducing the colonial moment as well
as extending the hegemony of the past in the present.
The dominant postcolonial habitus in India has been embodied
primarily in those who had access to the colonisers and were privi-
leged in the sense of being able to relate to them in terms of their
language and socio-political relations. It was primarily in Bengal that
the colonial literary and cultural encounter took root and shape and
was to influence the nature and quality of the postcolonial character.
This class imbibed western (English) education, culture, literature
and the arts while simultaneously seeking freedom from the yoke of
foreign rule. At the same time, as Aijaz Ahmad has argued, the ‘sense
of the superiority of Western knowledges’ was established not in the
literary or cultural but in the ‘cognitive and technical fields’ (Ahmad
1992: 269). He suggests that the ‘petty bourgeoisie, of both the tra-
ditional (propertied) and the new (professional) kinds’ were pushed
towards English and Western knowledges because of the nature of
their school education and their own ambitions. However, there was
a contradiction to the extent that ‘their own lives kept them rooted
on their own linguistic communities’ (ibid.: 272). It was this class
 EMBODIMENT, IDENTITY AND WOMANHOOD 17

that existed in a contradictory realm of both loyalty and rebellion,

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

through a recognition and articulation of the acts of oppression

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

WOMANHOOD IN CONTEMPORARY INDIA

Womanhood in contemporary India is a complex construct, and

ambivalent experience, located as it is in the contradictions, cleavages
and dilemmas that beset the social and public domains as well as in
the complexities of everyday life. Uma Chakravarti’s seminal work on
a colonial and nationalist construction of an Aryan Hindu identity
for women in the second half of the nineteenth century documents
the ‘invention’ of a tradition (Chakravarti 1993: 73). The construc-
tion of a particular past was coterminous with the construction of a
particular kind of womanhood. Nationalism, like religion, became
a legitimate area for women’s participation and the nationalists
focused only on upper caste Aryan women. Chakravarti concludes
 EMBODIMENT, IDENTITY AND WOMANHOOD 19

that the twentieth century has ‘continued to reproduce, in all essen-

tials, what the nineteenth century has so carefully and so successfully
constructed as an enduring legacy for us’ (ibid.: 79). This points to
the recolonisation of women as gendered, subaltern subjects in con-
temporary India where discourses of tradition and modernity in fact
exist simultaneously, and often contradictorily, creating an ambiva-
lent space both for the construction of womanhood in the social and
public domain and for women’s lived experience in everyday life.16
Modernity is a troublesome construct in postcolonial societies,
particularly because it has to contend with a legacy of both a tradi-
tion that must be changed even as it must also be valued (Ram 1998:
270).17 This contradictory experience indicates a constant movement
between defining and redefining old and new social and political
constructions of womanhood in the changing and markedly fluid
social and public discourses of ‘modern’ India.18 I contend that the
new woman in the rapidly altering cultural and social imaginary of this
nation need not necessarily always be constructed in the context of a
charged and transformed modernity, as it were. Rather, she should
be viewed in the fluid and marked nature of her identity as a woman,

16
Nita Kumar provides a cogent discussion of ‘women as subjects’ and rejecting
the Cartesian subject as well as the subject as constituted by the Subaltern Studies
group. She constitutes the subject through what she calls, ‘a modified Foucauldian
approach’ wherein ‘the subject is constituted, as formed by discourse, but also, the
subject that resists, that can inevitably fashion other discourses’ (Kumar 1994: 8).
This perspective is similar to my own conclusions as elaborated in this work.
17
Modernity is also viewed as having been ‘misrecognised’ in India because it
is understood as ‘technology and contemporary artefacts’ (Gupta 2000: 2). Gupta
defines modernity in terms of ‘attitudes, especially those that come into play in social
relations’ such as an individual’s dignity, adherence to universalistic norms, individual
achievement and accountability in public life (ibid.). Undoubtedly, modernity includes
not only attitudes that prevail in social relations but also the resultant practices that
may emanate from these attitudes as well as from what may be considered ‘tradition’.
18
I do not consider ‘Indian woman’ as representative of a larger, homogeneous
monolith whole but one constituted by and through the multiplicity, diversity and
complexity of caste, class, linguistic and other social and economic indicators. My
discussion of this ‘new’ or ‘modern’ woman is therefore very much related to her class
and social position (she is educated), her ability to consume (she has income of some
sort), to make choices (ability to discriminate and exercise choice), and so on. She
is therefore unlike the category of the ‘Asian modern woman’ who, argues Munshi,
‘may be no more than a discursive ideological space for identification created by the
global/local media’ (Munshi 2001: 7).
20 LIVING THE BODY

shaped and redefined in the everyday experiences of women as they

both contest and submit to the images and constructs that impinge on
their senses, their emotions and their material and social conditions.
In this sense, as Sangari and Vaid argue, the constructs of tradition
and modernity are the products of a colonial enterprise and should
be rejected in favour of understanding ‘cultural processes in their
actual complexity’ (Sangari and Vaid 1993: 17). This complexity
is undoubtedly characterised by the heterogeneity and multiplicity
of experiences, events and disjunctures of everyday life. Social class,
status, and education, among other factors, are significant markers
in the construction of the embodied identity of the ‘modern’ Indian
woman. Squarely located in the facts of her material existence in terms
of both her embodiment and her class position, ‘her image interacts
with so many social forces that compete for space in female imagina-
tion, that historically and cross-culturally she continues to be a power-
ful dream or female fantasy’ (Munshi 2001: 7). It is this image and
the fantasising about the image, linked as it is to feminine desire and
consumption, that makes it imperative to understand the ‘modern’,
new and somewhat fluid components of Indian womanhood.
In contemporary times, the liberalisation of the Indian economy
has added a new impetus to the discourse of modernity, particularly
in relation to women. It is precisely in this period of transition
that the possibilities for both recolonisation, and also for resistance,
open up. Recolonisation is characterised by a mix of global ele-
ments translated into socially and culturally acceptable, and thereby
legitimate, ideas, values and practices in everyday life. The pheno-
menon of globalisation, and its implications for urban India
over the last decade, offers one example of the recolonisation of
women (Bhattacharya 1994, Chaudhuri 1999, John 1998). The
production of a global culture has consequences for everyday life in
contemporary urban India. Education processes and media culture
play a significant role in this production. A new global media provides
the symbols, myths, resources, ideas, and images for the construction
of a common culture as well as of individual identities. Thus the
upper-class, English-speaking, educationally advantaged urban elite
in India emphasises the non-traditional (contemporary), liberated
(westernised) and trendy (modern) aspects of everyday life. The
cosmopolitan, urbane, civilised Indian social agent, who is part of a
globalised network of relations, constitutes the elite section of the
new middle class, which has now become the crucial component of
 EMBODIMENT, IDENTITY AND WOMANHOOD 21

a modern India.19 This new middle-class Indian emphasises all that is

modern in the world today, including a view of the Indian woman
that transcends her earlier location in the domestic world.
Sangari and Vaid point to the ‘formation of a predominantly
middle class public sphere’ in nineteenth century Bengal that repo-
sitioned ‘cultural forms…in a desired version of Indian culture and
in desired versions of ideal women.’ This reformulation also implied
the repositioning of the home ‘as the insulated private sphere which
is to be free from even temporary challenges to male authority’. This
paved the way for women to access the middle class sphere as both
reformers and indeed as reformed women (Sangari and Vaid 1993:
12). There is however a complexity in this entry of women into the
public sphere wherein although they had access to the English liter-
ary tradition and acquired a linguistic sophistication appropriate to
their class and social status, they remained embedded in a patriarchal
discourse that seeks to shape their engagement in public life in both
enabling and restricting ways.
The new and emergent view of Indian womanhood defines
women, amongst other things, as ‘of substance’ and includes a more
visible and public view of women in the workplace, both within new
spheres of work, such as design and fashion, journalism and social
activism, and through an entry into the traditionally male preserves
of the military, police, banking, and other allied occupations. This
emphasis on women’s public roles is largely at variance with the
middle and upper class nationalist construction of the cultural do-
main in terms of an inner and an outer sphere. In everyday life these
refer both to the home and the world, with the home representing
our spiritual self and our true identity. Women are constructed at the
centre of the inner world, whereas the exterior domain of ‘material
interests’, treachery and intrigue is the domain of men (Chatterjee
1993: 238ff.). The inner world is also the ‘moral’ world, as it were,
and it is the symbolic control of the moral, through education and

19
Contemporary work has addressed the significance of the middle class in
postcolonial India. Deshpande (2003) provides an analysis of the centrality and
social significance of the middle class in building hegemony in the post-independence
period; Gupta’s (2000) analysis of modernity in India includes a scathing critique of
the role of the middle class; Joshi (2001) examines the public-sphere politics of the
middle class in late nineteenth and early twentieth century north India and links it to a
‘fractured modernity’ that included elements of both ‘authoritarianism and liberalism,
emancipation and hierarchy.’
22 LIVING THE BODY

other civilising processes, that is emphasised in that period. Com-

menting on the same historical juncture, Bannerji emphasises,
‘…The hegemonic agenda, is invariably an agenda of morality, of
values expressed through both ideas and practices…It is through the
creation, recreation and a diffusion of a set of norms and forms that
the necessary “consent” can be built which is essential for hegemony’s
fullest expression’ (Bannerji 2001a: 139). The middle classes, who
at the time hold ‘a subordinate and/or collaborative position within
classes which are ruled…and ruling’ (ibid.), play a significant role in
the control of the moral domain that contains the home with woman
at its centre. This does not however deny the agency of women or
restrain their voice during this period. It has been powerfully argued
that women’s approach to nation-building at the time includes ‘de-
mands for property or economic self-sufficiency (and) entitlement of
political agency and citizenship’ (Bannerji 2001b: 70). It is therefore
not only the home but most definitely, ‘the public sphere, resonat-
ing with a discourse of reason, which attracted women inexorably’
(ibid.). At the same time, however, women were limited by their
own middle-class lifestyles that prevented them from breaking free of
patriarchal structures and relations that had been created, legitimised
and reproduced by a ‘fractured modernity’(Joshi 2001: 21).
In contemporary, middle class, urban India, global culture reart-
iculates woman’s identity and interests through a set of discursive
practices that privilege her position in the outer world. This world is
largely defined by norms and forms emanating from the west, indi-
genized, adopted for consumption by the Indian middle classes and
presented and represented through the countless tropes of modernity
present in everyday life. This ‘entrapment’ of women in the conflict
between ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’ in postcolonial contexts (Sunder
Rajan and Park 2000: 61) can be viewed as a process of recolonisa-
tion that seeks to position women in particular ways that are not
dissimilar to their positioning in colonial contexts.
It is apparent in contemporary India that the so-called old modes
of contact (including religious practices, cultural tradition and social
custom) and apparently new ones (most significantly, educational
processes and the visual and print media) shape, influence, structure,
and construct womanhood in particular and varied ways. Both modes
of contact, I suggest, are forms of recolonisation of social agents
in postcolonial societies. The reiteration of the old characteristics of
colonialism include, for example, an emphasis on the education of
women, not necessarily for their individual empowerment but for the
 EMBODIMENT, IDENTITY AND WOMANHOOD 23

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

20
In the same way as the middle classes took on the mantle of modernising and
developing the nation in the postcolonial period, the middle class plays a similar role
in shaping the future vision of the media, including television policy in India. The
middle classes embody the ‘target audience’ of official television networks and policy
makers. In fact, it is suggested that through ‘its portrayal of “modern” middle-class
lifestyles and its encouragement of consumerist desires, television seems to have played
a crucial role in the cultural constitution of these middles classes as a powerful historic
bloc’ (Mankekar 1999: 9).
24 LIVING THE BODY

now required to play a new role as educated mothers and wives, as

well as, enlightened consumers of goods and services that will secure
the family as a consuming, healthy unit. This perspective on women,
engendered by globalisation, is one that merely views her in terms
of her contribution to the national economy and, by not shaking
off the clutch of patriarchy in any way, results in the recolonisation
of women through a regurgitation of the old dressed up as new.
Identities are not radically redefined, only recast in the language and
mores of the contemporary moment.
It is not surprising then, as Guha Thakurta concludes, that the new
Indian woman in advertising in the media, for example, is trapped in
‘a twofold commodification of femininity’: on the one hand, through
the ‘controlled and passive sexuality of the (Indian) woman that is
inscribed in the bodies of “good” women with some sort of rela-
tion to the family’ and who end up propagating the ‘valorised ideals
of sacrifice and self-effacement for the ‘cause’ of the family’(Guha
Thakurta 2004: 138). On the other hand, not only does advertis-
ing encourage women to consume but it also ‘induces women to
perceive themselves as commodities’. Through lending their bodies
for endorsement of various products in the visual and print media,
women do contribute to the commodification of their fragmented
bodies, as lips, hair, eyebrows, legs, and so on. In this manner, a
fragmented experience of embodiment may result and contribute to
further commodification in an endless cycle of reproducing the very
structures that serve to construct us in various ways.21 I would not
like to conclude however that women are mere spectators and passive
participants in this process of commodification and in their reproduc-
tion of an ideology that supports and values such commodification.
There is a complexity underpinning women’s participation in work
of all kinds and this needs to be further understood before we arrive
at any hasty conclusions that emphasise the collusion of women in
their own commodification.
Perhaps, we need to understand that the new urban middle classes
are not only the consumers of commodities but also of the ‘new India

21
It is significant that the resistance to such marketing ploys to boost the global/
local economies, has come from a Rightist perspective (more specifically, the Hindu
right) that now seeks to reinvent Indian womanhood through an emphasis on values
of the ‘virtuous’ and ‘good’ Hindu wife and mother (see Guha Thakurta 2004: 143ff),
who in fact concludes that the ‘global economy/consumer capitalism goes hand-in-
hand with Indian (Hindu) nationalism’ (ibid.: 144).
 EMBODIMENT, IDENTITY AND WOMANHOOD 25

produced through the meanings attached to these commodities’

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

CONCLUDING COMMENTS
This chapter has examined sociological and anthropological construc-
tions of embodiment, gender and identity and asserted the significance
of these for the study of the social construction of womanhood in
contemporary India as well as women’s lived experience in everyday
life. Such a perspective emphasises the embodied and thereby mate-
rial existence of everyday life but, equally, underscores the fluidity
in the socially lived experience of identity as a gendered subject. The
methodological pitch of such an approach undoubtedly points to the
politics of the construction, and living out of womanhood, based on
historical and social events and perspectives, in contemporary India.
The paradoxical elements in this process result in an ambiguity in an
understanding of womanhood which remains a contested category,
presented, represented, negotiated and experienced in vastly contra-
dictory terms.
 2
CULTURES OF ADOLESCENCE

T o understand the construction and experience of womanhood

among young women in contemporary India, I turn to the
everyday world of adolescent young women, in, and out of, school.
Adolescence in India is a contested category as there is no fixed age
span when young women may experience adolescence; it remains a
more ambiguous and fluid category than it is perceived in the west.
The term adolescence is Latin in origin and derives from adolescere,
which means ‘to grow into adulthood’ and clearly there is ‘no single
event or boundary line that denotes the end of childhood or the
beginning of adolescence’ (Steinberg 2003). It has been suggested
that adolescence comprises a ‘set of transitions’ that unfold gradu-
ally in the context of an individual’s behaviour, development and
relationships (ibid.). There are gender differences in this process
that remained unnoticed in the early works on the subject. It was
only in the early 1980s that psychologists such as Carol Gilligan
highlighted the psychological development of young women as part
of a theory of adolescence. Psychologists like Erikson (1968, 1979)
had earlier focused on male adolescents in formulating their theories
and did not seek to differentiate between women and men. The term
‘adolescence’ itself was a masculine construct based on masculine
images. Crucial defining concepts such as ‘self, identity, relationship,
sexuality, morality, creativity, achievement and even development
itself were drawn for the most part from a man’s perspective or
reflected the viewpoint of a male child’ (Gilligan 1995: 196). While
the sociologist James Coleman (1961) did include young women as
a distinct category in his work, his primary focus was on the ‘value
climate’ of each of the ten US schools he studied rather than women
per se. Carol Gilligan’s work (1982, 1988) was a major landmark
 CULTURES OF ADOLESCENCE 27

in adolescent studies, highlighting the neglect of young women and

focusing on the different dimensions of female adolescence. She has
in fact suggested that by not studying women, what has been missed
is an understanding about ‘relationships’ and their significance in
young women’s lives.1
Cultures of adolescence are somewhat complex in a heterogeneous,
pluralist and changing society like India where they are not only
shaped by class, gender and educational status but are also mediated
by the peer group, marriage and childbearing. There is clearly no
well-defined age-period within which adolescence is experienced as
a marked transition period between childhood and adulthood by
young women in Indian urban and rural society.2 T.S. Saraswathi
(1999) has argued that although there is a period of transition
between childhood and adulthood marked by the onset of puberty,
adolescence itself is ‘a matter of cultural construction’. She writes,
‘the greater the continuity between childhood and adulthood, and
greater the similarity in life course and continuity in expectations from
childhood to adulthood, the greater the possibility of the absence of
a distinct phase or life stage called adolescence’ (Saraswathi 1999:
214). Referring to a large number of cross-sectional and longitudinal
studies of Indian children, Saraswathi concludes that child-adult
continuity is clearly marked among young women cutting across
social class except in the highest socio-economic groups.3 Women
in all social classes are groomed, in one way or another, for marriage
and motherhood. It is only in the elite and the highest income groups
that young women have the opportunity to pursue their interests and
self-defined career goals. The influence of peer group culture and
the mass media are significant in this group. Even here, however,
young women experience a conflict in their articulation of their

1
Gilligan’s work has also addressed the importance of ‘moral questions’ in
adolescence, which she suggests is a crucial time for a ‘moral education’ (Gilligan
1988). See also Gilligan et al. (1990) and Gilligan (1995).
2
There are differences between urban and rural experiences of adolescence further
differentiated according to social class and educational backgrounds. Kumar (2002)
divides the period of adolescence in a Rajasthani community into three phases: early
adolescence characterising residence with parents with some physiological changes,
mid-adolescence with the onset of menstruation and residence with the husband, and
late adolescence when young women become mothers.
3
See also Verma and Saraswathi (2002) who examine the influence of ‘tradition
and modernity in sociopolitical and cultural factors’ in shaping adolescence in India.
28 LIVING THE BODY

career aspirations and their commitment to the family. In very poor

and working-class families, there does indeed appear to be an absence
of adolescence as a distinct stage in the life cycle of educationally
disadvantaged women especially among those who are betrothed in
childhood and married before the onset of puberty. It is therefore
difficult to fix any age at which young women may, therefore, be
perceived as experiencing adolescence: is it when they attain puberty,
or when they have sexual intercourse for the first time, or when they
bear children? It is therefore a more fluid period of transition between
childhood and adulthood that stretches out longer in this category of
young women.
In this chapter, I seek to understand the complexities in the articu-
lation and constitution of gender identity as part of the cultures of
adolescence among elite, educationally advantaged as well as poor,
educationally disadvantaged adolescent women in urban India. The
term ‘educationally advantaged’ refers to that category of individuals
who not only have access to education (in a range of private and
government schools) but also have the privilege of pursuing their
educational goals to fruition. This is not common across India but is a
distinct part of the lives of girls who belong to the middle and upper-
middle class in urban Indian society. The educationally advantaged
young woman is simultaneously a part of tradition, ritual and custom-
ary practices and also experiences the contemporary world through
both the education she may receive, the diverse images and texts
presented by the visual and print media and the peer group culture
she is part of. This dilemma gives rise to conflicting sets of expecta-
tions about her identity as a young woman in relation to familial and
socio-cultural factors and in relation to her peers at school.
The educationally disadvantaged young woman, on the other
hand, due to the absence of schooling, except in her very early years,
appears to lack a similar kind of obvious exposure to the contemporary
modern world, with its imagery and the public sphere within which
it is located. Early marriage, child bearing, her marital home and its
attendant tasks and her relationship with her husband and his family,
are her major preoccupations and her experience of adolescence is
grounded in the dominant defining features of her life in the family and
community. Although adolescent and adult women in this category
are unable to read, it would be somewhat problematic to therefore
assume that they do not have access to the visual media, Bollywood
films, and an entire range of popular cinema in a variety of linguistic
 CULTURES OF ADOLESCENCE 29

and cultural genres. Satellite television is a part of the social life of

families in urban slums and this opens up a visual world in the form
of films, soaps, news and music channels.4 Although they do not
have the experience of schooled education, this no doubt influences
their perceptions of relationships between and among members of
the family, the peer group and larger social and community networks.
Moreover, the lure and driving force of the visually creative world of
advertisements undoubtedly influences their sense of physical beauty
in relation to their embodiment but, as we will see later, this too is
largely influenced by cultural custom and tradition as complete choice,
dependent on resources, lies outside their realm of experience.
While their everyday life worlds may seem to be disparate and
completely alien to each other, the presence or absence of schooling,
is significant in the lives of both sets of young women. For the edu-
cationally advantaged group, schooling practices and the experience
of schooling leads to certain career choices and decisions that are a
result of schooling. Marriage is not perceived as inevitable although
there is a consideration of family life in their career choices. In the
second set of young women, schooling is more or less absent. This
group therefore experiences the transition between childhood and
adulthood through the institution of marriage which is the most
significant post-pubertal event in their lives. The agential voice is
present in both sets of young women although its articulation takes
different forms. Educationally advantaged young women give voice
to the disadvantages they experience in relation to young men and
schooling practices in particular. Educationally disadvantaged young
women are also critically engaged with the world: they give voice to
their powerlessness through a recognition of the acts of powerless-
ness they experience. Their cognition of their powerlessness enables
them to confront realities in ways that enable them to manoeuvre,
strategise and survive often in very difficult and disempowering situ-
ations and contexts.
The experience of ‘adolescence’ is based on young women’s per-
ceptions and lived experience in relation to their families, peer group

4
Not only are all categories of women watching television, McMillin’s study on
consumers of television and their choice of television programming in India suggests
that women’s choices are certainly influenced by their class and income levels and, more
importantly, their ‘selection of non-native language programmes was an important rite
of signification of their citizenship within the multi-lingual, multi-ethnic and multi-
cultural Indian nation’ (McMillin 2002: 128).
30 LIVING THE BODY

cultures, and schooling or lack of it. To understand how identities

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

EDUCATIONALLY ADVANTAGED YOUNG WOMEN

Cultures of adolescence in this category are characterised largely

by the dominant influence of the family in constituting identities
in terms of a patriarchal norm of the perfect but somewhat distant
father and the communicative though sometimes strict mother, both
of whom inhabit the emotional spaces and physical worlds of the
young women differently. Together however they serve to reproduce
habitus in its generative state wherein familial norms are affirmed
 CULTURES OF ADOLESCENCE 31

and strengthened within the larger context of schooling and peer

group cultures.

The Reproduction of Patriarchy

The family is a crucial site for the development of gender identities

in relation to both familial perceptions as well as to those emerging
from the social and public domain. The experience of young women
may be articulated at one level in the register of the directly stated as
experiential and at another level, through the register of the subtext
of voices and texts, of the underlying nature of their relations with
other members of their families. The emergence of multiple selves is
clearly evident in their construction of self in relation to the family
and peer group, in their diverse and varying images of self and others
in the construction of identities.
The characteristics of modern Indian family life appear to have
changed, from the traditional extended family living together to the
more commonly visible nuclear family.5 This may have resulted in
greater bonding between members of the nuclear family, due to the
absence of a large and overbearing network of kin relations, but in
no way does this suggest a marked transformation in the articula-
tion of the roles and functions of various members of the nuclear
family. The work of Indian feminists and scholars such as Leela
Dube (1988), Zarina Bhatty (1988), Sudhir Kakar (1988), Kamala
Ganesh (1989), Shahida Lateef (1990), and Jasodhara Bagchi (1995),
among others has shown the contribution of cultural and social
values, in differing religious and social contexts, to the development
of gender identities. These values include an emphasis on female sub-
missiveness and passivity and particular role-specific identities and
they tend to reproduce gender asymmetry and a classical femininity
that is continuously looking to the external, social world for its own

5
A.M. Shah has used census data to show that the preponderance of joint households
has increased and that a larger number of people live in joint households than nuclear
households (1999: 1180). However, among the educationally advantaged, urban elite
in India, there appears to be a greater preponderance of nuclear households, although
more research is needed in this area. Not a single respondent in my sample indicated
joint household residence. Among educationally disadvantaged young women,
however, respondents were members of joint family households whether in their natal
or in their marital homes.
32 LIVING THE BODY

nurturance and sustenance. In a sense, these processes also ensure

that the gendered self does not seek to consciously develop an inte-
rior world of social and political awareness that may challenge social
constructions of identity. Thus, contemporary middle class, urban
India finds itself in a safe, patriarchal haven as far as the politics of
the family is concerned. The family remains the cradle of nurturance,
comfort and security that it has always constituted.6 Simultaneously,
however, the family is also the site for the multiple oppression of
young women, depending on their social class and background. This
oppression is perceived for what it is by young women from poor
or low middle-class backgrounds who can clearly predict their life
trajectories and seek to negotiate their everyday life practices from
within that experience.
The cohesive and all-encompassing nature of the Indian family
and the reproduction of existing patriarchal norms and values appear
to be central to the experience of young women. That is, young
women seek to acknowledge and affirm this experiential component
of their relations with the family. Simultaneously, we may ascertain
certain complexities in their articulation of their familial relationships.
Fathers are idealised and revered for their abilities to look after the
family, earn a livelihood against all odds, and be ‘perfect’ in more
ways than one. A young woman’s relationship with her father, it has
been suggested, is ‘only one strand in the great complexity of inter-
familial relations that contribute to the construction of social and
sexual identity in contemporary times’ (Mann 1996: 80). It is from
these relationships and from young women’s relationships with other
men in the family that the basis for relationships with men in different
contexts is formed. It is a somewhat problematic relationship with
the father wherein he is respected and admired but is not always
around for a close relationship. One young woman says:
My father: somebody who I always look up to for care, love,
helping me make my decisions. His perfection in whatever he may

6
This is somewhat at variance with the status of the family in contemporary
Western society, where it is acquiring a new historical form, the post-familial family
(Beck-Gernsheim 1998: 54). However, this may not be embraced by North American
and British Indians. Patricia Uberoi’s paper (1998) on contemporary commercial
Hindi cinema points to the felt need among such diasporic communities for the
rearticulation and regeneration of patriarchal and patrilineal family values among its
possibly wayward, westernised youth. Clearly, the significance of place as location is
important in understanding the Indian family.
 CULTURES OF ADOLESCENCE 33

do, compels me to make him my role model. … Since I have always

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

Young women, in the educationally advantaged category identify

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

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

Young women are nonetheless conscious of themselves as separate

entities, as individuals, who experience themselves as not needing to
communicate at any depth with anyone.

My communication with my mom is fine. Affection: fine. I don’t

share many of my ideas with anyone. Same goes for my thoughts.
Plans for the future are shared however. My communication with
dad: rare. Affection: fine. No sharing of ideas or thoughts or plans
for future.

There are variations among young woman with similar back-

grounds and there is also a strong awareness of how different parents
34 LIVING THE BODY

might relate to their children at different stages in their life cycles.

For example, this young woman, in a government school, says, ‘My
father is my bestest friend in this whole world. He treats us as a
friend, not a very strict man with a hard hold on children. He behaves
like a teenager when sitting with me.’ Her mother however is not so
friendly and the channels of communication are somewhat closed.

She is a very strict, principled woman. She loves me a lot but her way
of loving is very different. I mean she keeps a hold on me because
she wants me to become successful in my life…I communicate
with my mother but can’t express [myself] clearly because she takes
things very seriously and thinks always in regard to future, not
present. That’s why I am more close to my father.

Fathers are valued for performing feminine tasks, for example, a

young woman shares her memory of a father when he looked after her
sister and herself while her mother had gone to another city to take
her undergraduate degree exams. This young woman writes, ‘Our
father used to get up at five since our bus got there at six a.m. and
made us breakfast (which wouldn’t be too good) and made our plaits
which would open but still the effort he made was commendable.’
While the father is an ideal support, it is, nonetheless, with their
mother that these young women find friendship and from whom
they draw strength and courage. This aspect of the relationship is
repeated in almost all the responses, that is, a close friendship based
on the ability to talk to the mother and confide in her:

I love her very much. She supports and guides me in the steps I take
for my future. Clear however that she’s a separate person whose
opinions and advice I’m free to take or leave. My mother talks to
me about her day and various issues on her mind. I love listening. I
talk about almost anything under the sun, I love her listening. My
mum leans on me for emotional support. I love to be strong. I love
the relationship I have with my mama. My relationship with my
father is less intense. I love him very much but I don’t know him as
a person. Discipline was mostly handled by my mother…

The responses of young women from a government school, with

a low middle-class social background, are vastly different from those
in public schools (private schools in India). Family relationships are
quite complex for them due to the fact that their mothers have had
very little education or that their fathers may be rather strict in their
 CULTURES OF ADOLESCENCE 35

attitudes towards their daughters, and often do not relate to them

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

Among the middle class, English speaking girls, fathers remain

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

Very punctual, hardworking and a bit short-tempered. Handles

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

Sometimes, there is an indication of regret regarding the emotional

bonding with fathers, ‘My dad has a big ambition for me. He is the
only one who can see right through me. He wants me to always
be independent and responsible. He never gives up on me. He is
very encouraging […]. He is very affectionate but never often kisses
me.’ Perhaps earlier in the relationship her father had been more
demonstrative in his affections. Apart from the obvious emphasis on
the patriarchal norm of a masculine role model, the young women’s
desire for deeper emotive relationships with their fathers is also an
indication of the significance of relationships in their lives. The fathers’
opinions, appreciation of their efforts and encouragement does count
a great deal in their lives, shaping their life experiences and relations
with others. Bonding with their mother does not rule out their desire
for a similar relationship with their father, which they consider neces-
sary but cannot have due to his preoccupation with work as well as
a social and cultural socialisation that does not encourage a close or
intimate relationship between fathers and daughters.
The complexity characteristic of recolonisation as a hegemonic
tool is apparent in the dual-edged manner in which it manifests
itself within the urban Indian family. On the one hand, the young
women’s responses indicate a yearning for a closer relationship with
their father, and on the other hand, they view their father as an
ideal role model worthy of emulation. Longing for proximity with
their father is based on the images derived from global culture and
contemporary perspectives on intra-familial relations; it is generally
not valued or encouraged by indigenous cultural norms and values
which, in fact, exhort young women not to speak before their fathers.
Simultaneously, there is an idealisation of the masculine figure,
‘physically fit’, ‘striking’ (in appearance), who ‘does the accounts’, a
workaholic, a personification of great strength and determination, a
provider for the family, one who holds authority in the family, all of
which indicate a clear reproduction of the patriarchal norm and ideal.
 CULTURES OF ADOLESCENCE 37

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

violence against the young women’s mothers. One young woman

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

Careers and the Family

The language of the young women’s constructions of masculinity

and femininity reflects the power relations embedded in the playing
 CULTURES OF ADOLESCENCE 39

out of identities. The generative habitus develops sex role stereotypes

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

…Through the experience of a ‘sexually’ ordered social order and

the explicit reminders addressed to them by their parents, teachers
and peers themselves endowed with principles of vision acquired
in similar experiences of the world, girls internalise, in the form of
40 LIVING THE BODY

schemes of perception and appreciation not readily accessible to

consciousness, the principles of the dominant vision which lead
them to find the social order, such as it is, normal or even natural
and in a sense to anticipate their destiny, refusing the courses or
careers from which they are excluded and rushing towards those
for which they are in any case destined. (Bourdieu 2001: 95)

Young women may therefore argue about the significance of careers

for ‘personality development’ and ‘my growth as an individual’, as
my material in fact does indicate. They are, however, constrained in
the pursuit of their goals by social and familial norms that point to
socially approved career trajectories.
At one point, one young woman says, ‘My career is very important
for me because in my relations [relatives] I have to show them that
even if I was not good at studies, I chose the right stream and I am
successful. The main thing is I want my parents to be proud of me.’
She is not yet clear about her choice of profession at this point as her
commitment to a career and to be good at whatever she does is the
driving force of her life, ‘I am very confused about which profession
to take up. But whatever I choose, I want to be the best at it. Things
will be much clearer for me later. The main aim is a creative line
like a designer (there are so many kinds of designers), advertisement
agency job, an artist, etc.’ Later, she adds, ‘I think no profession has
or should have a set image for girls or boys. Any person has the right
to work in the field he/she wishes to.’
In so far as the habitus is a lived category, we can argue, however,
that there is an element of creativity, struggle and perhaps surprise
even in the most routine reproduction of gender identity. Young
women no doubt struggle with social and familial definitions and
expectations and experience conflict and dilemmas as they struggle
to redefine and shape their identities in different contexts and
situations. In accordance with her aspirations and desires, one young
woman ranks her three career preferences as: ‘1) Neuroscientist;
2) Neurosurgeon; 3) Neurologist.’ She explains, ‘I love Maths and
Sciences. I wasn’t influenced by anyone instead it was the topic that
got me going.’ The family however is as important as her career,
in fact more so, ‘Well, I suppose it is important to handle a career
as well as take care of the family. In my opinion the family should
come before one’s career. Therefore, before dedicating one’s self to
the career it would be wiser to think about the family first.’
 CULTURES OF ADOLESCENCE 41

Similarly, another young woman lists her career choices as: 1)

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

the external world.7 In this manner, adolescence is characterised by a

troubled and contested conformity to familial and social expectations
about self and others in the experience of gender identity.

Peer Group Cultures at School

Schooling is a site where gender ideologies are transmitted through

peer group cultures, and through teachers, via the hidden curriculum
of school practice. The heterosexual norm promoted by the young
women’s ideal family types, with father as provider and advisor, a
pillar of strength, and mother as nurturer, carer and communicator,
is reinforced by peer group approval/disapproval of particular ways
of behaving, acting and being in school. Adolescence is also the
period when young men and women become acutely aware of the
changes taking place in their bodies. This can, and as borne out by
the material on educationally advantaged young women, often does
result in apprehensions and anxieties about physical appearance
linked to their acceptability in the peer group. It has been suggested
that for boys, ‘body awareness is expressed as concern for physical
strength and prowess…and popularity is associated with strength
and athletic skills’ (Currie 1990: 31). For girls, it is argued, the
focus is on physical beauty which is considered crucial for popularity
with boys. Physical beauty is, however, also considered critical
for acceptability in the peer group which during the time spent at
school is the most significant group within which gender identity
is validated and legitimised. At the same time, academic success is
often considered unfeminine and therefore academically successful
girls may particularly experience body anxiety (ibid.).
Young women and men have pre-constructed images of one
another that are based to a large extent on family stereotypes, social

7
It has been reiterated by Kalpagam that ‘the ties that bind women in their lives
provide both securities that impact positively on their personhood, as well as liabilities
that are often very oppressive’ (Kalpagam 2000: 177). The family is undoubtedly the
single most important of such ties and others include those of the sphere of intimacy
and sexuality, of practical kinship relations, of friendship, and other social ties (ibid.).
Both within and outside the family, women engage in the twin process of compliance
and resistance, submission and rebellion, silence and speech, to assert their identities
as women in what they clearly and assertively recognise as oppressive contexts and
situations.
 CULTURES OF ADOLESCENCE 43

expectations and the visual and print media. By and large, young
women acknowledge that having a ‘good figure’ is a passport to
popularity at school among both boys and other girls. One young
woman adds, ‘Most boys are like that’, suggesting that little else
could be expected from young men than a focus on women’s bodily
qualities. However, those girls, whose self-image extends beyond
their physical embodiment, resent this, ‘There are boys countable
on your fingers who appreciate loyalty, good nature and sensibility.
Majority go for a good figure, short skirts and physical appearance.’
This way of looking at girls appears to be common across schools, as
observed by the young women themselves:

In all the schools I’ve been to, boys seem to give the most
importance to the way a girl looks, not just a pretty face but also
what she wears. They also give importance to the femininity of a
girl. Studies or a sense of humour doesn’t seem too important. It’s
more the physical outlook.

At the same time, young women showed an equal interest in

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

being fat and therefore ugly is almost universal. The young women’s
assessment of their image contains many aspects of their identity. As
one girl says:

I’m a confident girl. Not worried about looks at all. I love being
tom-boyish—I am (though my mum doesn’t like it too much). I
have a medium ego. Except with boys I don’t allow male chauvinism
to take over me. I’m fat—Yuck. Need to reduce...I’m fat. But that’s
it. I like my height. I’d be very happy if I could reduce. I don’t
exactly crave for a ‘figure’ but I’d like to look healthy and strong
(more guyish I suppose).

Some girls define their experience of embodied identity in terms

of body parts, a fragmented but nonetheless, very experiential view,
‘Chubby, breasts on the small size, sexy legs, smooth delicate collar
bones, very woman. Over all if I was slimmer I’d be pretty nice fig-
ured. Hips good for childbearing and shoulders strong for working
and fighting.’ Others are a little more reflective:

I haven’t given much thought to my appearance although people

find me good-looking. However my image in the mirror is of a
young, mature, no-nonsense human being who knows her goals
and are [sic] all set to achieve it. I look at me and know myselfwell.
The image has a touch of arrogance and poor communication
skills.

These young women are certainly aware of their womanly charac-

teristics, grounded in their embodiment, yet at the same time they
assert their independence from the more feminine aspects of their
embodiment. They also know how to express these multiple char-
acteristics, whether it is in terms of different body parts or in terms
of confidence, strength or even looking more boyish. These charac-
teristics are asserted unselfconsciously and often together, so that a
heightened femininity does not necessarily imply a lack of confidence
or strength. However, there is a troubling concern with weight, the
adolescent preoccupation across cultures, and for some women this
overrides everything else:

[I am] fat, ugly and stupid. (I’m a neurotic–just kidding!!). No,

sometimes I develop a Fat-O-Phobia (a word I have made up
myself ) although I’m underweight at the minute. I like my hair
(‘coz I bleached it)...That’s about it!!!...Sometimes I exercise a lot
also I’m no way overweight but I would like to be thinner…
 CULTURES OF ADOLESCENCE 45

Or, as another girl says, ‘I am obsessed about my weight...because

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

Physical body weight, is, in the young women’s minds, related

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

Thus looks and appearance are central to peer group cultures,

whether in terms of young women’s self-image, their perceptions of
young men, or their understanding of how young men perceive them.
Teachers’ definitions of peer group cultures confirm this overriding
concern with modes of self-presentation and appearance, citing peer
group pressures and family cultures as the two most important factors.
As a teacher in an elite English-medium school puts it, ‘Peer group
pressure is very strong. [It] Influences the way you dress, your ideas
on issues, sexual preference.’ According to this teacher, the criteria
dictating the popularity of young women were: having the right male
idol; being allowed out late; going to parties; wearing the right length
of skirt (short); waxing (legs); and plucking eyebrows. Another
teacher in the same school confirmed that peer pressure centres on
women’s ‘looking good’, which requires waxing their legs, plucking
their eyebrows, wearing their shirts outside their skirts or jeans and
anything else which is ‘anti-establishment’, such as chewing gum
and adopting an attitude of ‘defiance towards the school’. The peer
group, therefore, provides the strength for collective resistance and
rebellion which is exhibited in very specific ways through gestures,
bodily display or plain disobedience. However, this resistance is not
directed at breaking stereotypes or reproduction of gender identities
but only in joining the gang, as it were, in a collective voice against
the authority associated with the school establishment.
The approval of friendship groups and other peers counts a lot
for this age-group of young women and men, primarily because
they want to blend in with their peers rather than stand out. As one
teacher explained, ‘In the same way as the like-minded stick together,
the like-bodied stick together’. The image young women and men
strive for is to ‘look cool, act cool’ but, as a teacher explained, what
this means is differentiated by gender. For young men it implies ‘not
listening to teachers, not giving in home-work, not wearing regula-
tion uniform’, whereas for young women it includes wearing short
skirts listening to western music, waxing the hair off their legs and
making friends with the opposite sex. Both young men and women
are clearly adhering to the dominant characteristics associated with
a stereotypical masculine and feminine image: the young men be-
ing riotous, rebellious and defiant while the young women are more
concerned with self-presentation.
Contemporary media culture shapes identity in many conflicting,
competing, and formative ways. Ella Shohat has argued that, ‘In a
 CULTURES OF ADOLESCENCE 47

transnational world typified by the global circulation of images and

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

‘I am very pretty and if my sister says that someone likes me, then she
is probably right. I can be liked by anybody.’ This girl’s assessment
is exceptionally self-determined, ‘I am pretty and I find myself very
cute and beautiful.’ Looks are not the only criterion for judgement,
as this girl asserts, ‘I am an independent, friendly, responsible and
sensitive girl’ and even when they are, the positive self-assessment is
undeniable, ‘No doubt I feel I’m beautiful with good features, figure
and beautiful thick hair. I can speak well in front of the mirror and
I love to talk with myself when I’m in front of the mirror.’ These
young women are overwhelmingly focussed on projecting themselves
as strong and confident, even though they may be unable to provide
reasons for such an assessment, ‘I find myself very confident and
strong, why, I myself don’t know.’
Although their positive self-image stems from normative defini-
tions of femininity—cute, pretty and beautiful—there is a confidence
in some of these responses that indicates the impact of positive
reinforcement from family and perhaps peers and friends as well.
The significance of class at this juncture cannot be overemphasised.
These are the responses of girls from the lower end of the social
class spectrum who study in the less upmarket private and govern-
ment schools. Their exposure to English fiction, cinema and media
is perhaps less than that of girls from the private, more privileged,
educational backgrounds. Their positive self-image is a result of a
combination of factors including their socio-economic backgrounds
where the emphasis is perhaps on developing a culture of obedi-
ence, submission and marriage rather than on looks and appearance
as an individual goal in itself. It is remarkable that the culture of
submission promoted at home is not however reflected in the young
women’s understanding of their embodied identities as passive sub-
jects, but in fact serves to highlight their experience based on very
high self-esteem, confidence and assertive expressions of themselves
as independent young women.
Some young women in the elite schools view their body size
and shape in terms of its benefits in their chosen tasks or fields of
specialisation. For example, one such woman says, ‘Yes, I am happy
with the kind of body I have. Though it is huge but it is perfect for
my field as I am into sports.’ Or, ‘Yes, because I have never bothered
about having a figure, etc. I am fat but I can live with it. Among my
class girls, in spite of my physical appearance I am the most flexible.’
There are other factors influencing their confidence and self-esteem
 CULTURES OF ADOLESCENCE 49

such as an acceptance of, and satisfaction with, what they have.

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

8
Writing about poor adolescent women in Bangladesh, Rozario (2002) draws
linkages between poverty, skin colour and ‘purity’ wherein the stigma of being ‘dark’
also has implications for woman’s character resulting in the jeopardizing of marriage
prospects.
50 LIVING THE BODY

socially prescribed ideal. In this manner, the body is seen outside

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

EDUCATIONALLY DISADVANTAGED
YOUNG WOMEN

Cultures of adolescence are constructed largely outside school in

the domain of the family in this group of young women. Moreover,
the experience of adolescence in this category is not fixed but moves
across a larger age span that includes a range of bodily changes and
psychological adjustments: when they experience menstruation for
the first time, they are married but are waiting for the gauna (when
they are sent to their husbands’ homes for the first time), are living
with their husbands, bearing children, and coping with work and
survival in their husbands’ homes. All (except one) are married and are
in the liminal stage between marriage and gauna or are visiting their
parents’ homes. In general, their experience of adolescence focuses
on their embodiment, the family and relationships, primarily with
the marriage partner and his affines. Relationships with the family
are vastly different from the earlier set of young women. There are
no heroic fathers or perfect mothers. In fact, young women in this
category have no visible communication with their fathers who tend
to be somewhat authoritarian and their relationships with mothers
are also restrained. The natal family, however, is an important
source of comfort and well-being and also the site for the reproduction
of patriarchy and values ensuring compliance and submission on
their part.

9
In this context, Frost refers to adolescence as the period when there is the
‘enforced location of self or identity within the confines of a gendered body’ which
further results in ‘the lived contradiction of the body as somehow self and not-self ’
(Frost 2000:71).
 CULTURES OF ADOLESCENCE 51

Schooling practices and peer group cultures in the context of the

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

Staying Out of School

Adolescent young women’s experience of any kind of formal

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

Another young woman tells me:

I have studied till Grade 5. I can read slowly but cannot write. I
can keep accounts till about Rs 2000. I studied only Hindi in a
Government School. Education is important only for the purpose
52 LIVING THE BODY

of taking care of the expenses at home or to be able to get fair

wages for the work done.

Sometimes, parents and their poor socio-economic condition is

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

Or, simply put, one young woman states, ‘I can only write my name.
I have not studied at all.’
Sometimes, there is an expression of regret for a lack of formal
education but they are also quick to assert that there is no point in
being educated as, ultimately, a woman has to wash dishes whether
or not she works outside the home. There is the recognition that
education does liberate women, for example, ‘It is good to study
these days. If one is educated then at least one can be independent.’
Or, the recognition that a lack of education results in the inability to
communicate with others, such as:

I could not study further because the elders in my family did not
let me after the death of my father. When we were children, we
would spend a lot of time at the guava orchard. But I never
attended school sincerely at that time. At 10–12 years of age,
I really wanted to go to school, but there was no chance. Now
I really regret it, as I cannot even write a letter to my parents. I
can recognise the alphabets separately but cannot connect them
and read.

The most significant understanding is that education provides em-

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

10
The work mostly entails cleaning dishes at other people’s houses.
 CULTURES OF ADOLESCENCE 53

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

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

such as ‘cooking, cleaning, washing dishes’ as well as compelling

circumstances that force them to drop out of school.11

Domesticity and Marriage

Adolescence also includes the period when women are trained in

domestic tasks to ensure their adaptation to married life. A young
woman tells us she was married at the age of 13. Her gauna took
place when she was 15 years old. She had her first child at the age of
16. She said that she had never worked at her mother’s place. Her
grandmother never allowed her to work. It was only when she was
13 years old, was married and her gauna was due that she started
learning some household chores. She learnt to knead the dough,
make vegetables, and so on, and thus entered the preparatory stage
for marriage.
In the same way as educationally advantaged young women iden-
tified ideal images of young men, these young women also have im-
ages of the other which they valorise and yearn for. These are based
largely on boys’ physical attributes and social skills. The emphasis on
skin colour is unmistakable, ‘A boy who is fair and has blue eyes is
good looking.’ Apart from looks, ‘goodness’ as an attribute is also
valued, ‘A fair, slim, nice build and a good heart. He should be good
both from inside and outside. He should speak nicely and not think
evil for anyone.’ Expectations of the marriage partner are clearly en-
trenched and influence young women’s perceptions of young men:

He should be good looking, should be of my age, should be doing

good work and earning well. He should leave the house on time
and return on time. He should have good behaviour with everyone.
Whenever I see a drunken man I wish to have one who is not. It
is better if he is educated, only if he understands, will he be able to
explain things to me.

The value of education is undoubtedly recognised by girls who have

themselves had no, or very little, access to schooling.

11
In her study of uneducated herd girls in rural Rajasthan, Gold provides their
‘practical’ perspective on school education as one that values grazing the family’s
sheep, that gives them an income through the sale of lambs and dung, above schooling
which will give them nothing (Gold 2002: 91).
 CULTURES OF ADOLESCENCE 55

Some young women view men only as a marriage partner:

My husband is five years older to me, otherwise he is fine. I have a

habit of laughing. But I cannot share everything with him. He can
hit me if I make a mistake. He might explain to me once or twice
but later may also hit.

The support for the partner is very strong, even allowing them to be
beaten, or bear several children, as the case may be.

Don’t ask about my husband, I like my husband very much. I like

him when he works. He is older to me, but I like him. I like the
way he speaks. He did not allow me to consume Mala-D. Nobody
tells us anything in our community. He says that once we have six
to seven children quickly then I can have an operation.

The experience of bodily changes overshadows other events so

that the experience of menstruation constitutes a critical event in their
lives. In their minds, it is associated with a coming of age, ‘growing
up’, as they put it. However, bodily changes are not experienced
through work, which is important to their lives but are inevitably
linked to social practices, such as the ‘engagement’ and the glorified
‘first night’ after marriage. These events shape their experience of
bodily changes and their understanding of their embodiment. They
also assert that their mothers did not adequately prepare them for the
experience:

My older friend used to talk about periods; I never used to listen

to her. I thought it happened only to her. Only when it happened
to me did I realise that it happens to all. Even when my periods
started, I did not feel that I had grown up. Before my grandmother
died, I had to start working at home since my mother was busy
nursing her. When I started working I didn’t realise when I grew
up. But, at 17, when I got engaged, I realised that I had grown up.
On the day of suhaag raat (first night after marriage) also, I did not
allow him to touch me much.

Young women’s experience of adolescence includes early sexual

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

compliance. One young woman narrated the events of her first night
and stated that she was told that if one’s first night went well, then
one’s entire life was destined to be happy. Her elder sister-in-law had
explained that she should agree to whatever her husband asked for
during that night. She said that her husband asked her to take out her
clothes so she started to pull out a suitcase from under the bed till she
realised what he had asked for. She started shaking vigorously and
was scared. She clarified that she was very innocent, only 15 years’
old and did not realise the intimacy of sex on the first night.
Another young woman did not like her first night; she sleeps
alone and is troubled if someone sleeps with her, even her sister.
So, if a stranger sleeps with her, whom she has not seen before, she
definitely does not like it. She has not slept with him after that. One
young woman used to enjoy sexual intercourse with her husband
soon after they were married. She did not however understand or
feel anything in the beginning. When she got up in the morning, she
felt as if something had happened to her. When she asked her sisters-
in-law, they told her that this was the way that it happened and she
was supposed to not speak or think about it. This was the way men
were. In this manner, she was advised by other women in the family
not to acknowledge or in a sense, even erase her sexuality and view it
merely as another aspect of marriage. Her husband used to have sex
with her everyday and, if she refused, he used to force himself on her.
She did not want it everyday, she stated, ‘I used to feel repulsed and
used to ask everyone if their men did the same.’
The importance of the peer group at this stage is immeasurable.
It is the peer group that provides information about the sexual inti-
macy they are to encounter with their husbands. One girl says, ‘My
mother’s brother’s daughter told me regarding the happenings after
marriage but my husband does not force me for sex.’ Another clearly
articulates the significant place of the peer group for such enlighten-
ing conversations, ‘One comes to know by sitting with and listening
to older girls. I was informed a little bit by my cousin sister, a lot of
it was told to me by my elder sister-in-law and some by my husband.’
Although the husband sometimes becomes a friend and partner in
this learning experience, the mother is clearly taboo for such discus-
sion, ‘My cousin told me that these things don’t have to be discussed
with one’s mother. One refrains from it for a couple of days as a
custom. It usually happens at the in-laws place, but it did not happen
with me because I refused, he started arguing and a fight ensued.’
 CULTURES OF ADOLESCENCE 57

In the peer group it is considered more appropriate to indicate

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

Identities are constructed around the event of marriage and the

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

‘Doing better’ for their children, however, does not enable them to
educate their children beyond a particular grade due to prevailing
social norms and restrictions. This is characteristic of the constraint
that is present in every experiential context where women consciously
understand the situation and are yet somehow unable to break the
pattern of conformity.
Another young woman was married early and has two daughters.
She does not really want a third child but respects the viewpoint
of her elders when they say that she should try for a son. She plans
to have a tubectomy as soon as she has a third child even if it is
a girl. The old women in her village tell her, ‘You feel exhausted
after having only two children; there is no need to have an operation
yet.’ She has not only accepted the voice and views of her elders but
the habitus also communicates normative definitions of acceptable
and authentic manhood and marriage partners. She tells us that
‘when looking for a boy for us, our parents see his income, (that
he should at least have five-six bighas of land) house, and looks.’ By
‘looks’ she means that the boy should be presentable among people
in society.
 CULTURES OF ADOLESCENCE 59

Adolescence, among these young women, is being engaged to be

married, marriage itself, house work, keeping fasts on various days
of the week for different reasons—for getting a good husband, for
having one and keeping him, ‘for our parents’ peace and happiness’
and for other reasons.
The body, as we have seen, remains enmeshed in the practices
of conjugal life whether these entail unenjoyable sexual intercourse,
childbearing and working for survival. Young women say their
mother’s generation did not use make-up, no bindi or lipstick, but now
they wear everything. Jewellery is worn during auspicious occasions.
They enjoy using make-up and feel their face looks good. One young
woman is glad that she is not short but just right in terms of her
height, weight, and so on. There is therefore a greater acceptance of
body size and shape among young women in the slum. The body is
accepted as it is and only make-up can be used to add to what already
is given. Jewellery and make-up is also used as an embellishment of
marriage and not so much for purposes of changing or perfecting the
body. They are allowed to wear both only after reaching 12–13 years
of age and after a certain ceremony associated with marriage: goud
bharai or gauna.
Among married young adolescent women, the body acquires a
symbolic status of auspiciousness and fulfilment that must also be
visible and in a sense flaunted in the community. Using lipstick and
filling vermilion in the central parting of the hair (lipstick lagana
aur maang bharna) are the two most important activities of daily
adornment symbolising the coalescing of tradition and modernity in
the lives of these women. As one girl says:

My mother says that I keep looking in the mirror the whole day.
I like to do make-up while looking in the mirror. I like putting
lipstick and ‘sindoor’ (vermilion). I get a lot of pimples on my face,
they don’t let me live. My husband likes me with make-up. Rest
of my body is O.K., nothing good, but I like the fact that I’m not
short. I’m tall enough. I feel I’m very fat.

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

young women that it was ultimately not just looks that mattered but
one’s ability to work, ‘My lips are very fat, I don’t like them. I like
hanging earrings and using bindiya and sindoor. It is very difficult to
work with one’s face covered (with a veil or sari) and then in-laws
complain that I do not know the work.’
Early marriage however results in the experience of loss of freedom
and curtailment of desires and there is simultaneously a desire for
independence and to be self-sufficient and free. One young woman
acknowledges her multiple experiences of bodily changes, ‘growing-
up’ with her engagement and the necessity of ‘practical knowledge’
(not education) for survival:

We have five fields. I would like to work there with my husband.

I feel like standing on my own feet. But I don’t get the chance. If
tomorrow my in-laws are no more and my husband does not work,
if I have practical knowledge, I will be able to feed my children. I
did not think like this before marriage. I used to feel free, now I
feel caged. I don’t know why I feel like that. Even when my periods
started, I did not feel grown up. Only when my mother had me
engaged that I felt that perhaps I have grown up. …When my
chest was just developing, it used to ache. My mother explained:
that’s the way it happens. My engagement was broken off once, my
mother liked the boy, but many people had broken the engagement
with that boy and so we did too. We decided then that I would
not be married to a boy from Delhi and that I should only marry
a villager.

Although young women emphasise their abilities to work and also

to endure bad marriages with great strength, their agency is clearly
restricted by the family, social norms and practices. One young
woman wants to take over vegetable vendoring from her mother-
in-law, ‘I can join her only after I’ve had children. People would talk
about it if I go before that. Even my elder sister-in-law does not work
yet; I can do it only when she starts.’ On the other hand, marriage
and the long hours of tiring, domestic work it entails, is resented
especially if young women feel they are being unfairly treated by
their husband’s families.

I find marriage destructive; I cannot stay without buffalo milk. At

least food should be good, family members should behave well,
even if they do not give food. It is more troublesome to keep
shifting between my in-laws’ place and my house. I am woken up
 CULTURES OF ADOLESCENCE 61

at 3.00 A.M, and expected to sweep six houses and by then it is

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

Finally, however, it is through work that they acquire an identity

and hold their own in their marital homes. A young woman who has
been married for three years, emphasises the importance of work in
a woman’s life:

In my in-laws’ home, everyone respects me a great deal. I do all the

work. I never give them a chance to say anything. I like living in the
village very much: plenty of milk, clarified butter, buttermilk, and
the greenery. But the most important thing that I like in my life is
work and earning my livelihood.

More than any physical features of beauty or adornment, it is work

alone that defines her embodied identity. Their refrain, ‘Woman
must be not only beautiful to look at but also excellent in the work
she is able to do’, emphasises the significance of work in the lives of
these young women especially in their husbands’ homes. Identity is
experienced in the context of the self in relation to the other through
‘doing something’ and doing it well:

We do not have an identity, had we done something, we would

have had one. I only wish that I don’t make any mistake at my in-
law’s place so that my elders at home may feel ashamed. Whatever
I have got is fine. At home mummy used to stop me from roaming
even with my friends. I used to feel bad then, but not anymore.
Now, I can justify that. My mother used to prompt me for work,
she used to scold me, I used to feel bad then but now I understand.
My father used to help me understand that actually my mother
loves me. Now if I am able to do anything new I am reminded of
her strictness which has enabled me to do things in my life now.

Adolescence is also a process of growing up too fast to the extent

that young women emphasise the traumatic aspects of marriage,
of having sexual intercourse at a very young age, the fear of sexual
62 LIVING THE BODY

intercourse and of a demanding husband, of domestic violence

and their conclusion that marriage is inevitable and therefore has
to be endured. Their voices reflect their conclusion that marriage is
inevitable:

Marriage can make or break someone but mostly it is bad’ or ‘If

we don’t marry, we would have to depend on our sisters-in-law
(brothers’ wives) after our parents’ death. The sister-in-law of
today would never keep us, rather we would have to work for her
and keep her children. At our husband’s place everything would be
ours. We would have a right there. If we tolerate some pain, we
might also get some happiness.

There is simultaneously an affirmation of faith in their strength

and self-determination as they are quite sure they can make their
marriages work, sometimes with a little bit of help from the partner.
There is also a clear assertion of their understanding of their position
in the marriage as being the one in control. The voices of women
reflect the multiplicity and complexity of their responses, ‘I feel my
life is good, if I can run it well’; ‘If my husband supports me, it’ll be
good, otherwise not’;. ‘If my husband listens to me, then I would do
the same, otherwise not. If I leave my throne, then it will be shaken’;
‘My heart says something and conscience something else’;. ‘My heart
says something, mind something else and conscience says nothing’.
The reflective, agential voice is present in these ruminations about
self, in their clear distinctions between emotion (heart), rationality
(mind), and the moral, ethical self, that Carol Gilligan (1982) tells
us is so critical to young women’s development. Marriage is not only
sometimes bad but also gives them status and standing in the social
and public domain. It is through their embodiment that they assert
themselves whether it is in terms of its utilitarian considerations,
as a worker or as bearer of progeny. Abstinence from food in the
innumerable fasts kept by young women again reflects the use of the
body for personal gain (a good husband) and familial or social good
(parents’ peace of mind and happiness). Although the generative
habitus reproduces the forms of engagement with the marital space
and sexual encounters, it simultaneously provides the consciousness
of will and agency that lies in their strategic manoeuvring to not
wanting to, for example, give up ‘the throne’ on which they have
been installed through the act of marriage.
 CULTURES OF ADOLESCENCE 63

CONCLUDING COMMENTS

One part of this chapter has sought to understand the processes

in families and schools which contribute to the reproduction and
creation of a class and gender specific habitus, as well as the factors
that lead to the formation of gender identities located in the transitory
moment of both reproduction and change in contemporary Indian
society. It has been argued that the family is the ground on which
the heterosexual patriarchal ideal is nurtured and sustained, but it is
essential to understand that peer group cultures informed by global
media are also important to adolescent young women’s perceptions
of their embodied selves and gender identity. Grounded in global
media images, family preferences and social expectations, young
women consciously create, devise and formulate their own rules for
conduct, appearance and self-presentation and seek to comprehend
and assert their gender identities.
Among educationally disadvantaged young women in the slum,
the defining moments of gender identity occur in the very early
years when they are compelled to view marriage as the only viable
option or trajectory available to them through which they may be
able to seek fulfilment of their desires and aspirations. The generative
habitus, with enduring dispositions of conformity and success, also
allows space for struggle and contradiction, compliance and resistance
occurring simultaneously. Adolescence, as a marked, well-defined
stage, may appear to be missing but the critical presence of the peer
group in the school and in the community, in very different ways for
the two sets of young women, ensures the experience of adolescence,
as a lived reality and not a mere construct, in the lives of young
women. In the next chapter, keeping in mind the role of the media
in processes of recolonisation, I move towards an understanding of
womanhood through the pages of a popular woman’s magazine.
 3
EMBODIMENT AND
WOMANHOOD IN FEMINA

I am concerned, in this chapter, with the question of how body

images serve to construct womanhood through the medium of
visual imagery and textual discourse in women’s magazines.1 Images
of women however do not only construct womanhood or feminin-
ity but are also seen in a social, political and economic context. In
other words, ‘they always have a specific use value in the particular
time and place of their consumption… [and] they also have exchange
value: they circulate as commodities in a social/economic system.
This further conditions, or overdetermines, the meanings available
from representations’ (Kuhn 1996: 53). Through visual and textual
images, then, women not only receive messages about themselves as
embodied, feminine beings but also as consumers of both products
and of themselves as objects for consumption. ‘Meanings do not
reside in images, then: they are circulated between representation,
spectator and social formation’ (ibid.). The image therefore does not
reside in a vacuum but in the cultural context of spectatorship as well
as in the ‘institutional and social/historical contexts of production
and consumption’ (ibid.). The structural and the symbolic there-
fore coalesce in the construction of gendered imagery within an

1
My analysis of the magazine under review is based on a random reading of
Femina from 1994–2007. I am aware that one category of women in this study are
excluded from the readership of this magazine. This does not however lower the
significance of the magazine for the other category for whom this is their favourite
magazine. Moreover, I am focusing on Femina to the exclusion of other magazines
such as Cosmopolitan or Women’s Era that address women consumers from two ends
of the social spectrum of the urban middle class. Femina falls somewhere in-between
and is therefore most suitable for analysis.
 EMBODIMENT AND WOMANHOOD IN FEMINA 65

overarching trope of recolonised modernity represented in English

women’s magazines popular in urban India.
The field of exploring and understanding the construction of
womanhood in Indian women’s magazines has been a relatively
unexplored field with some notable exceptions (for example, Bannerji
1991, Wolf 1991, Singh and Uberoi 1994, Srilata 1997, 1999,
Uberoi 2001, Oza 2006). It is necessary to state at the outset that
my concern is not with the body images of women themselves as they
are presented in the discourse of women’s magazines. The images
serve to only highlight and reveal the ideas and practices underlying
the use of particular images. The culture of body imagery in itself
is therefore not my central concern. My focus is more centrally on
the refashioned construction of Indian womanhood, ambivalent,
contested and also contained, through a variety of images that address
women’s embodiment, and the beauty culture associated with it,
produced through the medium of visual imagery and textual discourse
in women’s magazines. There are many aspects to the magazine that in
a sense provide a grand narrative of an authoritative reality for women
but I have focused on two major aspects, namely, the emphasis on
beauty as an ideal and as a goal and on the ambivalent construction of
Indian womanhood. 2 Other aspects of identity such as sexuality would
perhaps need a more elaborate consideration as would the emerging
interest in such magazines in masculinity and men as partners, friends,
lovers, and fashion models. These are however not the focus of
this chapter.
One of the most commonly read magazines by middle- and upper-
class women in urban India is Femina, edited by Sathya Saran and
under the proprietorship of Bennett, Coleman and Company Ltd.3
It was first published in 1959 and had, by the 1990s, a readership of
over 850,000 which made it the largest circulating women’s magazine
(Srilata 1999). Among the professional, more educated, upper-class
women I interviewed, all did not claim to be readers on a regular basis
but some did confess to glancing at it (carefully enough to remember
specific articles and fashion displays) at neutral, infrequently visited

2
The ideal of beauty, is based on a particular definition of femininity and, as V.
Geetha says, ‘is both contemporary and historical’ (Geetha 2002: 109). In women’s
magazines, this ideal, located in a multiplicity of images that reflect varying perspectives,
is presented through visual imagery and textual representation of different kinds.
3
Sathya Saran is no longer the editor of Femina.
66 LIVING THE BODY

spaces, as it were, such as the beauty parlour or the doctor’s waiting

room, outside the home and work place. Women clearly did not see
their rational and intellectual lives being directly influenced by such
a magazine which they never seemed to buy. However, middle-class
women, both homemakers and working women, were more direct
in their appreciation and appropriation of the magazine and said that
they always made it a point to buy the magazine whenever it came
out. They considered it as the one treat for themselves every month,
that is, buying the magazine and going through the articles. Many of
the issues discussed seemed very real to them, and they also developed
ideas about clothes and fashion. Femina itself claims to cater to those
it considers ‘women of substance’ in modern India. More recently, it
has removed the ‘women of substance’ label and added on ‘Generation
W ’ instead, the W obviously referring to all Women as a Generation
and not simply to perhaps a few women of substance. This is yet
another marketing tool to widen its readership by appealing to all
women including homemakers, beauticians, fashion models and
other professional women. Femina has advertised itself as a magazine
that reflects ‘what women want’ (Times of India 10 March 2002,
Sunday Review, New Delhi: 3). Its advertising slant now addresses
the liberated Indian woman and man through this blurb:

What’s experienced by women but explored by men?

So have you ever felt, there is more to a marriage than just
romancing each other or being each other’s spouses? How about
being each other’s best buddies? Possible? Can you tell your
husband that you have a crush on his best friend? You can tell your
best friend. So is there any room for friendship between husband
and wife? Ah, a delicate subject. Needless to say, a man would
love to know more about it. Besides a woman who’s living the
dilemma. Thanks to Femina, enlightenment is just a copy away.
For both… (ibid.)

The rhetoric of equality and friendship between spouses serves

to make the magazine more accessible to a wider audience that is
now claimed to include men as well. This has resulted in the intro-
duction of columns that target men such as Locker Room, Malespeak,
Style and Pin Up. This advert assumes that men and women talk
to each other as equals to begin with and that the feature in the
magazine will enable friendlier and better communication between
two equals. However, the advert also ensures that the Indian woman
 EMBODIMENT AND WOMANHOOD IN FEMINA 67

remains contained within the respectable relationship of matri-

mony as the proposed ‘friendship’ is between spouses and therefore
‘being respectable’ includes the containment of sexuality and perhaps
a wayward modernity. This in fact has been the hallmark of Femina’s
marketing strategy over the years. Cosmopolitan has provided serious
competition to Femina in recent years as it is a more glossy produc-
tion and has provocative articles on beauty, sexuality and the lives of
apparently more liberated women in its overt celebration of women’s
sexuality. However, it has perhaps been unable to dislodge the
middle-class reader in small towns all over India who turn to Femina
precisely because it stays within prescribed moral codes, along with
other women’s magazines such as Women’s Era.4
The marketing strategy adopted by Femina, under Sathya Saran’s
editorship, could not be more direct, as she reveals the kind of women
the magazine targets:

The professional Indian woman, who is between the ages 20–40,

also a homemaker, probably has young children in school. That’s
the obvious target…but beyond that is the target that I think is
more relevant…the woman who wherever she is and whatever she
is doing is interested in improving her life…it’s a very aspirational
kind of target. (Oza 2006: 36–7)

In stating that the magazine targets women who seek to improve

their lives, Saran is clearly indicating the ideology of consumption
that the magazine seeks to promote. It is through the consumption
of a variety of goods, home products, recipes, cosmetics, fashion,
appliances of various kinds, beauty regimes, physical exercises, and
advice for good grooming, food preservation, kids, and pets among
other things, that improvement is suggested, and is likely to take
place. Through the range of issues that the magazine addresses and
the products it seeks to sell, women aspiring improvement in their
lives may turn to Femina for inspiration and the satisfaction of their
desires whether it is through consumption through the gaze or

4
Women’s Era is a vastly successful magazine in terms of its circulation and
acceptance amongst large numbers of middle-class women all over India. Srilata
suggests that the popularity of Woman’s Era lies in ‘its successful rendering of a
commonsensical understanding of what constitutes a middle-class woman’s problems,
the ‘reality’ of their lives’ (Srilata 1997: 51). Marriage, for example, is naturalized
as part of a ‘good “Indian” tradition’ and is constructed as central to a middle-class
Indian woman’s existence (ibid.).
68 LIVING THE BODY

through the purchase of products and services suggested by Femina

precisely for an improved status.
Over time, Femina has also projected itself as the women’s
magazine that promotes fashion and beauty culture through its
unstinting support for beauty contests that are hosted in its name,
the grooming and training of the young women who prepare for the
events, and the celebration of the event once it is over especially if an
Indian wins an international beauty title. Femina explicitly promotes
the fashion industry through the beauty contests or pageants it
hosts for women and the magazine in recent years has acquired the
characteristics of a grooming ground for prospective models. There is
a focus on the beauty contest itself, on young and upcoming models,
on preparation for the event and on celebration of the event. There
is clearly a commercial angle to Femina’s support of such events
in terms of the corporate sponsorship of the different events and
the huge money now involved in international beauty contests and
their associated activities. Although Femina has always celebrated
the beauty culture, it is the more recent impact of globalisation and
liberalisation of the Indian economy that has resulted in this upswing
in the magazine’s celebration and extolment of international beauty
contests. Oza in fact suggests that the beauty pageant has become
an ‘icon of globalization’ in contemporary India (Oza 2001: 1071).
The focus on beauty as both an ideal and a goal, undoubtedly sets a
certain kind of agenda for the woman the magazine addresses.
I examine some samples of adverts and fashion photography, and
selected textual material, available in Femina. It is quite clear of course
that adverts have a strong commercial aspect to their production
and it is apparent that a similar commercial angle dominates the
production of fashion photography. Both use woman’s embodiment
to promote a product which is obvious in the manner in which the
body is packaged, displayed and eventually consumed through both
the male and the female gaze and this points to yet another recasting
or refashioning of Indian womanhood in the social imaginary of
contemporary India. Women’s magazines in addressing different kinds
of woman take various aspects of her embodiment such as clothing,
beauty culture and adornment, as salient features of the magazine’s
production and articulate these in conjunction with market forces
that also push for consumption of products associated with woman’s
embodiment in very different ways. The focus therefore, in Femina,
is on the desirability of woman’s body not only as a glamorous,
 EMBODIMENT AND WOMANHOOD IN FEMINA 69

well groomed product but also as a commercialised product for

consumption in an international marketplace, that emphasises that
India has arrived in the world of beauty and glamour, thereby
legitimising the recolonisation of the Indian woman’s embodiment
in the global economy.

BEAUTY AND GLAMOUR AS FEMININE IDEALS

Femina which, apart from promoting beauty enhancing products,

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

very looks, of turning the negative into the positive’ and as a prime
solution, the reader is asked to ‘tap into your senses…(that) hold the
key to attaining the Buddhahood of Beauty.’ A step-by-step assessment
of bodily needs, according to the senses, is provided and solutions are
recommended in terms of products such as moisturisers and creams
of different kinds, massages, yoga, acupuncture, ‘reflexotherapy’,
eating habits, ‘colour therapy’ and the use of fragrances (ibid.).
This particular approach to the enhancement of Beauty emphasises
that it is ‘from within’ but uses external resources to attain an ideal
perfection, harmony and well-being. This dependence on products
and techniques of different kinds suggests that although Beauty may
lie within, its outward manifestation certainly needs to be cultivated,
developed and perfected and that there are tried and tested ways of
doing this. At the same time, the ‘creativity’ or individuality of readers
is not denied. Clearly, women ‘can selectively choose “options” to
express their unique sense of self by transforming commodities from
their mass-produced forms into expressions of individuality and
originality’ (Lury 1996: 134). Consumption practices may therefore
be seen as playing a vital role in the ‘creation of the feminine
self ’ (ibid.).
The use of products results in an attainment of Beauty with
different meanings. Beauty is not only sensual but is primarily
‘modern’ and woman can look ‘modern and chic’ by highlighting
‘natural beauty’, ‘lighter make-up’ and by simply using ‘five tricks’
advocated by Femina (Salon de Beaute, Femina 15 January 2004).
The modern chic look, Femina advises, is all about ‘shapely brows,
a touch of pink on the cheekbones, glossy lips, soft face and softer
feet’ and the tricks include details on how to get these done ‘right’
by using the appropriate products that Femina promotes. Apart
from promoting products and styles for the authentic contemporary
woman, who is both modern and chic, Femina emphasises aspects of
this modernity: ‘looking feminine’, emphasising eyebrows that are
‘super defined but slightly natural’, having ‘full’ lips that are ‘kissably
glossy’, having or creating ‘super curly lashes’, keeping feet ‘looking
smooth and sexy’ (ibid.: 62–64). Through the consumption of beauty
aids and commercial products, the sensual and the feminine coalesce
in Femina’s modern and chic look.
The feminine self is created not only by the personal whims and
fancies of women readers but also by an evaluation of products in
terms of their usefulness and validity as appropriate products. There
 EMBODIMENT AND WOMANHOOD IN FEMINA 71

is a definite effort in Femina to portray beauty care as a growing

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

height, weight, skin colour and texture, age and other related char-
acteristics. Clearly, the multiplicity of definitions is to ensure an
attraction for different kinds or readers who may be influenced by
one or the other definitions and also thereby pushed towards the
consumption of a variety of products advertised in the magazine.
The Faces is a model watch column that recommends very young
and largely unknown models, for example, 16-year-old Kavya
Peerbhoy is highly recommended because of her age, her height (5
feet, 8 inches), her weight (44 kg), her vital statistics which Femina
says, ‘Imagine the curve it could take if 32–23–34 were to shape up.’
In the accompanying photos and comments, the emphasis is on her
youth, her innocence, her charming awkwardness, and her incredible
figure. She is admired by a photographer for her ‘awkwardness and
gawky manner…her mouth and curly hair’ and by a former model
for her ‘fantastic height…, fantastic face…, a very good figure and
she’s extremely photogenic.’ A senior model, Mehr Jesia comments
on Kavya that she has a good attitude (‘very important in a model’)
as she is ‘willing to try anything and everything at least once’ (Femina
1994). Being awkward and gawky is celebrated precisely because
these characteristics are an indicator of adolescence and reflect the
immature body as an ideal. Femina adds, ‘This large doe-eyed waif-
woman is Kavya Peerbhoy, headed to prefix “model” to her name
and the suffix “success” to her surname.’ In promoting the model,
the magazine targets other aspiring 16-year-old models and also
emphasises the essential quality of youth and a flexible attitude for a
potential career in modelling.
Another young model, Judi, is recommended for her dark-skinned
look. Entitled Dark Devastation, the feature suggests an exotic
element that is presented as being very different, thereby distinctive,
and completely disarming. She is introduced through an emphasis on
aspects of her overt and subtle sexuality, ‘She’s got drop-dead skin,
naughty eyes, a wicked smile and a seductive pout.’ ‘Drop-dead skin’
is not explained but there is Femina’s conclusive recommendation,
‘Femina knows the impact of the difference.’ The photographer
recommends her for her ‘nice body which she uses really well’ and
concludes that ‘with that face, body and attitude, ...she’ll go a long
way modelling high fashion stuff .’ Her ‘attitude’ perhaps reflects
professionalism in her approach to modelling, which is deeply valued
in models. A caption beside a particularly expressive photo says, ‘The
song about her goes: Judi’s got the lips I wanna kiss...’ Judi’s voice
 EMBODIMENT AND WOMANHOOD IN FEMINA 73

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

cultural trope for self-presentation as white (as opposed to dark), pure

and virginal (as opposed to wild and untamable), chaste (as opposed
to carnal), and familiar (as opposed to other). Quoting Fanon, Patel
(2001) writes that there is a desire among the colonised to overcome
the “state of ‘blackness’ or inferiority” (p. xv). This is done therefore
‘not by imitating the mannerisms of “whiteness” but by adopting the
language of dominance as well.’ Patel in fact argues that ‘the black
man’s confrontation with whiteness is automatically pathological and
takes the form of mimicry’ (ibid.). While this in a sense may explain
the innate and obsessive desire for fair or white skin among women
in middle-class urban India, it is also representative of the consumer’s
desire to perfect her self-presentation in the image of the perfect and
dominant other.
Although the virtues of fair skin are lauded and celebrated, dark
skin is also exoticised in the beauty culture prevalent in women’s
magazines. On the basis of her analysis of nineteenth century travel
narratives, Grewal argues that colonised woman is viewed as ‘exotic’
as she is ‘believed to be sensual with a sexuality that was seldom
represented as being connected with motherhood’ as opposed to the
‘bourgeois Englishwoman’s leisure’ which was a combination of ‘a
nonsexual morality of wifehood and motherhood’ (Grewal 1996: 45).
The reproduction of colonial stereotypes is germane to contemporary
Indian society but recolonisation has introduced a concurrent trope
of the native as exotic, and the exotic as distinctive, and, in market
terms, extremely saleable. In a feature on Haute Stuff, a model, Cajol
Sarup, is presented under a sub-title ‘Exotic Species’. The selling of
what might appear an exotic element in a model’s sex appeal is part of
Femina’s marketing strategy. There is an exoticisation of ‘dark looks’,
‘luminous skin’, ‘wild mane’ and so on, which are in fact the norm in
an Indian or South Asian body. Similarly, an obviously dark-skinned
model with dark, thick hair, large and luminous black eyes, displays
a ‘short matka cotton kurta’ in two photographs (Femina 1 March
2001). The first photograph enhances an untamed sexuality in the
pose of the model who is kneeling on the ground with her legs spread
apart. With her thick, uncombed, dark hair, and full lips, her bodily
display enhances her sexuality and serves as an invitation to consume
the product and the look for achieving the total effect which is both
sartorial and intensely sexual. The second photo display has the same
model in a subdued pose, her hands interlinked in the front, her eyes
shut. Not only is there an obvious erasure of identity in the closed
 EMBODIMENT AND WOMANHOOD IN FEMINA 75

eyes but also, more importantly, a suppression of a blatant display of

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

THE AMBIVALENCE OF INDIAN WOMANHOOD

Recolonisation serves to retain conventional images that will feed the

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

(Femina 1 June 2001) has the film star Rani Mukherjee modelling
Bata sandals with labels such as ‘Monica’, ‘Linda’, ‘Sera’ emphasising
the ‘Untamed’ aspects of femininity by exhorting women to ‘Unmask
your wild side. Unleash your natural instinct. In stripes, spots and
hissing patterns.’ The use of unconventional names that have clear
western connotations is to emphasise Bata’s departure from its past
image of a family store providing traditional family shoes. It now
appears to address the ‘modern’ woman epitomised in the model
whose attire of striped top and leather trousers indicates another
departure from tradition. The emphasis on ‘hissing’ patterns sug-
gests the image of a snake with sexual undertones. Nonetheless using
the non-controversial Rani Mukherjee as the model underscores the
company’s adherence to the glamorous and ‘good’ woman.
The soft approach to definitions of womanhood emphasise
woman’s femininity and aspects of her identity that view her largely
in her domestic roles as a devoted mother, wife, sister, and so on. The
‘good’ woman then is one who is married, is secure in her status as
wife and mother and reflects an aura of contentment and success. An
advert for the Life Insurance Corporation tells woman readers, ‘Only
you can give life. That’s why we protect yours.’ There is a photograph
of a ‘homely’ young woman, wearing a bindi, mangalsutra and sari,
her hair tied back neatly in a bun, smiling gently and almost passively
into the camera. The Company pledges complete support to this
image of a married woman by saying, ‘Our tribute to the Indian
woman is an insurance scheme that understands her need and covers
her accordingly. Jeevan Bharti. Today’s woman deserves something
special’ (Femina 15 May 2003). The emphasis on marriage as a
suitable project that would appeal to readers has encouraged the
magazine to initiate a column in its pages that offers matrimonial
alliances. Entitled Meeting Ground, this column provides photographs
and brief biographical details of eligible young men who are usually
below 30 years of age, are apparently successful in their professional
careers and looking for young women partners with clear indications
of friendship and matrimony.
The magazine simultaneously has stories about women who are
leaders in their professional careers and portrays them as successful
role models. The ‘Women’s Day Special’ cover story is entitled,
‘Faster, Higher, Further… The New Frontiers Women have set for
the World.’ (Femina 1 March 2003). There is an effort to provide a
space to highly motivated career women, who may or may not be in
 EMBODIMENT AND WOMANHOOD IN FEMINA 77

a state of matrimony, but in the fine print, the magazine ultimately

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

shows a woman wearing a string of pearls, gold earrings, hair tied

back in a neat bun, all wrapped up in a shawl, and reads, ‘Never
screams for attention, never fails to get noticed. Always contemporary,
always distinct.’ The advert adds at the bottom, ‘Rare Shawls for Rare
People’ suggesting that distinctive people, with discerning taste, are
rare and thereby exclusive. Such rarity then becomes symbolic of a
style that is related to social class and status moorings and becomes a
sought-after quality to be achieved. The idea that contemporary need
not necessarily signify outrageous but someone who is discreet and
yet stylish is a clear reminder of the concept of Indian womanhood
as being within limits, boundaries or margins and emphasises the
boundedness or a containment of gender identity. Similarly, visuals
for adverts of saris, the traditional Indian female costume, tend to
retreat from an exotic or westernised look and the emphasis is on
Tradition. Deepam silks available at Chennai are promoted through
an advert featuring a woman wearing classical jewellery and a
wedding sari and the text reads, ‘essentially woman’. Her nails are
devoid of polish, and her face, hair style and jewellery all emphasise
her identity as a young woman entering the auspicious state of a
married woman (Femina 1 June 2001). Other adverts for saris (for
example, Femina 15 May 2003) reflect the current preoccupation
with designer wear and certain designer labels are not only popular
but also considered appropriate in terms of respectability thereby,
once again, reflecting a need to stay within limits. In an advert for
Ravi Bajaj Womenswear where a sari-clad model is featured wearing
an off one shoulder blouse and is devoid of the conventional bindi,
mangalsutra, or indeed any form of excess. The focus is on simplicity
and style. The unconventional blouse and lack of jewellery gives
the model an extremely contemporary look although she is clearly
modelling traditional wear.
Fashion celebrities offer a more glamorous image than other
models and are commonly used in fashion photography. Aishwarya
Rai, for example, has been presented both as a sophisticated woman
of the world as well as a modern, young woman, ‘very much the
woman in vogue,’ and with Sushmita Sen, as one ‘chosen to lead...
young, smart, upbeat and winners all the way.’ The blurb in the
corner of the photo says, ‘We aaj ki naris (women of today) are here!
Right on top of the world’ (Femina 23 May 1995). Femina often
invites its readers to participate in various beauty contests and there
is a clear emphasis on post-contest privileges: ‘Hollywood parties,
 EMBODIMENT AND WOMANHOOD IN FEMINA 79

press conferences, motorcades, meetings with Heads of State’

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

new perspective of Indian womanhood but acquires a recast image in

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

THE FRAGMENTED BODY AND AN AMBIVALENT IDENTITY

The magazine offers advice for beauty care and watching body
weight which it addresses through its own columns and features
as well as through adverts. An obvious fragmentation of woman’s

5
This implies that a lack of glamour in the daily life of the reader encourages her to
dream about glamour and a glamourous lifestyle offering her visual pleasure and some
form of fulfillment. A desire for consumption is none the less also created.
 EMBODIMENT AND WOMANHOOD IN FEMINA 81

body is apparent in the advice offered. Women are advised on skin

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

a boost and get the cleavage of your dream. Get Maximiser now!’
in an advert for ‘Maximizer. The ultimate push-up bra’ (Femina
1 March 2003).
Adverts also engage in the fragmentation of woman’s embodiment
for selling products for the adornment of the body. Adornment
is central to self-presentation and indeed, as Wilson points out,
‘there has never been a culture without adornment, without some
modification of the raw material of the body’ (Wilson 1990: 68).
This includes the body’s relationship with objects of all kinds, such
as, jewellery, accessories, and above all, clothing. Jewellery has always
been central to woman’s adornment from the period of the Indus
Valley Civilization, as Harappa and Mohenjodaro relics show us,
until contemporary times where more gold is bought for jewellery in
India than in any other country. Jewellery, among diverse religious
communities in modern India, is an indicator of auspiciousness,
associated with marriage and fulfilment. Different occasions in a
woman’s life cycle are associated with different kinds of sartorial
and other modes of adornment. This is particularly evident in the
context of certain life cycle rituals in a woman’s life such as puberty,
marriage, child-birth, marriages of children and other kin, and so
on. The auspicious nature of adornment which includes not just
jewellery, but also the use of kohl in the eyes, vermilion in the central
parting in the hair, flowers in the hair, glass bangles on the wrist,
and so on, is nowhere more strikingly apparent than in its absence
among widows.
An advert for the Tribhovandas Bhimji Zaveri jewellery store in
New Delhi shows one eye of obviously white woman on the left hand
page of an open book while the opposite page reads, ‘Her eyes were
like limpid pools of dark emerald you could drown in. Funny how no
one even seemed to notice them’ (Femina 1 June 2001). The word
‘notice’ is the only word in an otherwise black background lit up by a
golden light and pink glow. Thus beautiful eyes by themselves cannot
attract sufficient attention, and that in order to be noticed, there is a
need for jewellery, preferably gold jewellery. Earlier jewellery adverts
show women traditionally attired in conventional saris, in the midst
of an auspicious event, surrounded by family and friends, wearing
different kinds of jewellery. The emphasis was on auspicious events
such as weddings and birthdays as occasions for the exchange of gifts
of jewellery. This advert emphasises the necessity of adornment for the
recognition of beauty as, without adornment, the suggestion is that
 EMBODIMENT AND WOMANHOOD IN FEMINA 83

beauty remains incomplete. However, in doing this, it focuses only

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

appears to be sexually uninhibited and defiant, has to be somehow

controlled possibly by being partially hidden from view (Femina
1994). Similarly, in an advert for Jockey stretch sport top, the model
is behind a screen but is now shown with a full frontal image and not
obscured or partially withheld from view as earlier lingerie adverts
indicated (Femina 1 September 2001). This image appears almost
prepubertal and very young and child-like in its representation and
therefore becomes acceptable to the viewer. An international brand,
Lovable, (Femina 1 June 2001) has an international model featured
in a full frontal display in a visual expressing exuberance and joy. The
text reads ‘Cotton Essensuals’ and the viewer is exhorted to ‘show it
off ’, presumably a reference to her embodied self. An Indian model
was clearly unacceptable in this advert so as not to offend social
and public sensibilities in such an obvious overt bodily display of
sexual freedom and what the advert considers a liberated and perhaps
outrageous and therefore unacceptable sensuality. Wearing the
advertised bra might be a ‘safe’ choice however as it is not visible to
the naked eye and lies underneath a sartorial choice that may exude
the aura of desirable respectability.
These are shifting, contradictory and often ambivalent represen-
tations of a feminine gender identity. Adverts and fashion displays
hover between tradition and modernity and there are no clear-cut or
sharply defined body images which construct femininity in an ideal-
typical way. There are many different versions of femininity, as it
were, and therefore many masks and persona available to women to
acquire and use to fulfill their desires and aspirations. An advert for an
Elizabeth Arden ‘arden beauty eau de perfum’ (Femina 15 April 2003)
perhaps sums up what all adverts and fashion photography have been
constructing about women: ‘Partreality. Partillusion. Allwoman’.
The message clearly is that woman is made up of both an embodied
material reality but also contains certain illusory characteristics and
that taken together, she may be constructed as a complete woman. The
partly illusory and partly real characteristics of womanhood however
ensure that an ephemeral characteristic gets attached to womanhood
that remains out of the grasp of ordinary acts of cognition and recog-
nition. There is both erasure and incompleteness in this construction
of womanhood, leaving an open door for the constructive role that
women may play in the performance of their identity.
It is also true that notions of the authentic Indian woman are
constantly changing and the role of the media in this process in
 EMBODIMENT AND WOMANHOOD IN FEMINA 85

undeniable. Television reaches out to millions of homes and the

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

When did fear go away…

And passion replace it?
When did the boundaries disappear…
And horizons look near?
When did the world matter less…
And your inner voice more?
When exactly did you begin to believe
There is no one
You would rather be than you.
Asmi Diamond Jewellery. Reflects your inner fire’.
(Femina 15 January 2004)
86 LIVING THE BODY

An advert for Sahil Emporium foregrounds a woman, arms out-

stretched, glowing face, draped in a heavily embroidered sari, wearing
traditional jewellery, against a backdrop of overpowering mountains
and a cloudy sky, and another woman standing in the shadows at the
back. The text reads, ‘Woman, its time you came out of the shadows’
(Femina 15 January 2004). Contemporary adverts therefore focus on
contemporary womanhood and emphasise woman’s independence,
fearlessness and courage while advertising products that would
nonetheless aid in highlighting woman’s femininity. The message
clearly indicates that although women today are independent and
free, and need to be encouraged in their efforts, there is no need to
give up traditional or trendy wear, beauty aids, expensive jewellery,
and remain modern and chic at the same time. The emphasis is also
on an assertion of what woman desires for herself and pushes woman
to be more self-centred and selfish: An advert for Natalia designer-
wear shows a model in trousers and a lightweight jacket, wearing
closed shoes, looking directly at the camera, a true professional who
is urged to think only about herself as the label reads, ‘Natalia. I. Me.
Myself ’ (Femina 1 November 2003).
It may appear that there is a break with what are considered
tradtional definitions of the female body which lead scholars to
conclude that the ‘individual corporate woman is the icon’ of the
upmarket magazines that project ‘a post-liberalised post-feminism’
(Chaudhuri 2000: 264). I contend, however that, Femina or even
other magazines such as Elle or Cosmopolitan, clearly do not point to
this construction of contemporary Indian womanhood. It is woman
as an icon of beauty and glamour that dominates the magazine’s
construction of Indian womanhood within the trope of an authentic
woman who is both modern and yet epitomizes the best of tradition.
While adverts and fashion photography may apparently depict
Indian woman as modern, successful career and even corporate
woman, and her embodiment as constitutive of self-identity to the
extent that there is an excessive concern with shaping, moulding
and fashioning the body, or indeed as a career woman who may
outwardly appear not excessively concerned with her embodiment
or engaged in power dressing, the link with traditional definitions of
femininity has not been broken. A woman may therefore be shown
as a professional or as a career woman, or as a modern, liberated
woman, but she is simultaneously depicted as seductive and sensually
appealing. An advert for Samsonite baggage has a promising one-liner
 EMBODIMENT AND WOMANHOOD IN FEMINA 87

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

FEMINA TODAY

More recently, Femina has adopted a very different marketing strategy

and I would argue, its management is perhaps no longer clear about
its readership, and is searching for an elusive reader, having lost
some ground to the plethora of magazines that have invaded the
market. It is a much more upmarket magazine than it was only a few
years ago, going primarily by the kinds of products being promoted
by the magazine addressing the reader directly with its aggressive
promotional call, ‘Femina says so’ (Femina 29 August 2007). To
begin with, it has changed its opening statement about whom the
magazine is intended for: moving from ‘Woman of substance’ to
‘Generation W’ to now simply ‘Femina Believe’. The connotations
of this statement are ambiguous, open to many different kinds of
interpretations, such as, inviting the reader to ‘believe’ in the magazine
and all that it stands for, or perhaps suggesting that Femina believes in
the potential of its clientele, or even that ‘belief ’ as a value, in oneself,
in others, in life, is perhaps integral to being a woman today.
This particular issue of the magazine is devoted to the movies, and
in her editorial, Up Front, the editor sells the idea of using the movies
as a theme for the magazine:

‘This issue is ‘All About Eve’. It’s telling you ‘What Lies Beneath’,
it shows you ‘How (Not) To Lose a Guy in 10 Days’. It’s got
31 Things To Do Before You’re 30’, it talks about ‘A Mighty
Heart’. Got it? We’re taking you to the movies’. (Femina 29 August
2007)

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

page adverts, professional fashion advice from an in-house fashion

director and food advice from a consulting editor. Professionalism
and opulence together now appear as the hallmark of a magazine
set on recasting its image and that of the Indian woman as well.
We now find, for example, that ‘perfecting the body’ has acquired a
new meaning in the magazine, moving beyond body regimes such as
physical exercise, the proverbial ‘best’ diet, to advice about cosmetic
surgery. A leading cosmetic surgeon advises readers on such matters
as arm lifts, breast reduction, sunken nipples, nose repair, pinning
back the ears and removing facial moles (Femina 29 August 2007:
95). Similarly, an international aestheticienne answers queries about
skin and hair and there is advice on puffy eyes, an uneven complexion
and hard palms (Femina 29 August 2007: 100). In an apparently
professional tone, there is an enhancement of the fragmentation of
women’s embodiment in textual representation and this can only
produce a similar experience in the reader.
‘Femina inner circle’ inviting the reader: ‘Its all about you’, is a
whole new section on ‘relationships’ (‘how not to lose a guy in 10
days’), ‘evesdropping’ (a short piece on an airport encounter) ‘intimacy’
(about the ‘long goodnight kiss’ through visuals of American movie
scenes), ‘me-time’ (‘31 things to do before you’re 30’), ‘parenting’,
‘family matters’, ‘fly on the wall’ (about male strippers), ‘therapy’
(about self-help books) and ‘your right to know’ (legal advice
regarding divorce and other laws) (Femina 29 August 2007). Apart
from the last column which provides sensible legal advice to readers,
the rest are mere trivia, addressing young women through pieces,
both texts and visuals, that seek to emphasise youth, adventurism,
and simultaneously projecting itself as a trendy magazine for both
the young and older woman. Perhaps this is the change that the
new editor has brought about: appealing to the younger, slightly
more fashionable woman, with higher disposable income, who
may be lost otherwise to Cosmopolitan, Elle Hair, Fashion, and many
other magazines.
Femina has not forsaken its interest in Beauty and Fashion. That
still remains its main focus and has acquired a cutting edge, because
now ‘Femina says so’. The opening pages of the magazine begin with
‘Whats Buzzing? From the hottest to the coolest…’ with sections
such as ‘beautiful women’, ‘all men’, ‘classic’, ‘watches’, and so on.
The highlight of the section, ‘beautiful women’ is a quiz with a
visual display of a hundred chosen women presented as ‘India’s most
 EMBODIMENT AND WOMANHOOD IN FEMINA 89

beautiful women’, that have to be narrowed down to fifty. Names

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

CONCLUDING COMMENTS

As even casual readers of Femina, women undoubtedly experience their

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

centrespread of the magazine, take appropriate care of her children,

animal pets and garden plants, and simultaneously work hard to
‘keep her man’ and the marriage. She may find answers to her sexual
and psychological problems in the Home Truths columns, the Doctor’s
page, or the various other reader advice columns. Otherwise, she has
to essentially rely on her wits and her imagination to survive in the
world. Such a woman is perhaps Femina’s ‘woman of substance’ or
‘Generation W ’.
Beauty pageants are crucial to the magazine’s glamour image
and, in economic terms, to its circulation. Beauty pageants we all
know are market grounds for not only the bodies on display but also
for the promotion of the cosmetics and the fashion industry. It has
also been suggested that the beauty pageant is a significant site of
‘political intervention’ precisely because it opens up the possibilities
of new ways of considering ‘women’s engagement with desire and
pleasure’ (Oza 2001: 1089). There is no pure space within which
women are constructed as non-objectified subjects and therefore
their expression of agency in participating in such events indicates a
complex network of agency, negotiation and self-definition. There is
however a factual reality which indicates that women participants in
such beauty contests end up being the primary icons of the fashion
and cosmetics industry and therefore remain trapped in the domain
of objectified display and recognition. The ageing, disabled, obese or
out-of-shape body, which are seen as being deviant from the perfect
embodied state, find no place in this space and there is therefore an
inability to break the dangerously limited and structuring nature of
such embodied construction.
More importantly, magazines like Femina, and even Cosmo-
politan, and Elle, ensure that postcolonial constructions of gendered
modernity are based very squarely on economic factors relating to
advertisements and a policy that is meant to enhance the magazine’s
circulation. The resultant new ‘consuming’ woman is a result of the
new economic order and is a beneficiary of globalisation as much as
she is caught up in the larger processes of recolonisation. It is also
the case that postcolonial habitus reproduces gender identity as well
as engenders social practices for the performance of identity through
agential negotiation, strategisation and self-definition. In this con-
text, Bourdieu notes, ‘The social gaze is not a universal, abstract,
objectifying power...but a social power, whose efficacy is always
partly due to the fact that the receiver recognizes the categories of
 EMBODIMENT AND WOMANHOOD IN FEMINA 91

perception and appreciation it applies to him or her’ (Bourdieu 1984:

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

6
Smith has examined in depth ‘the ruling relations’ which she identifies as
that ‘complex of objectified social relations that organize and regulate our lives in
contemporary society’ (Smith 1999: 74).
7
I therefore find it difficult to accept Chanda’s view urging the women’s movement
to negotiate the popular media, including women’s magazines, and to ‘use’ them as a
‘vehicle for the conveyance of our aims and concerns’ (Chanda 2004: 132–3).
92 LIVING THE BODY

in everyday life. She is also traditional to the extent that she places a
high premium on certain values relating to, for example, marriage,
motherhood and family life. She is, as Sunder Rajan defines her,
the ‘woman for all seasons’, ‘new’ in the sense of ‘having evolved
and arrived’ (Sunder Rajan 1993: 130) in response to the times as
well as being ‘modern’ and ‘liberated’. She is also representative of
the ‘truly Indian’ woman, to the extent that she has not forsaken
tradition and in fact her identity is tied to that. The recolonisation
of womanhood in contemporary India projects the trope of mo-
dernity as the overarching privileged space that offers freedom and
liberation. However, the relations of power embedded in this trope
simultaneously reconstruct woman as keeper, preserver and nurturer
of tradition well within its normative definitions of gender iden-
tity. Gender in this way becomes essential to preserving the honour
and integrity of the nation state that is beset with the vicissitudes of
globalisation and turns to Indian womanhood as the embodiment of
respectability and national honour that must be preserved at all costs.
To understand women as the bearers of respectable and honourable
embodiment is to emphasise their primary responsibility towards the
community and the nation. Is this however how women themselves
perceive their experience of embodiment? I turn now to women’s
voices to understand their lives in the everyday from the perspective
of embodiment and identity, and their experience of violence in the
troubled contexts of their existence as gendered subjects.
 4
THE BODY IN THE MIRROR
EMBODIMENT, VIOLENCE AND IDENTITY

T his chapter is based on material from interviews with two cat-

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

image as women’s embodied experience in everyday life is also derived

from their location in the class and the family with capital of vary-
ing kinds. The metaphor of the mirror, however, is marked with
meaning as there is an experience of embodiment through an image
that is passing, impermanent, changeable and therefore very much
incomplete. The sense of incompleteness emphasises the grounding of
self in an ephemeral embodiment and inadvertently reflects women’s
understanding of themselves as fluid beings, always in motion, to be
constructed, redefined and remodelled according to the image and
the meanings conveyed through the image.
The second category of women have a more utilitarian construction
of the embodied self, based on their experience of their marginal
status in the family and, although they express their views on the
oppression of women, their relatively conservative backgrounds
limit their modes of expression. This in no way however detracts
from the significance of their attempts at contestation, negotiation
and change. The ‘good’ woman whether she is daughter, wife,
daughter-in-law, or mother is a recurring motif in the stories of
both sets of women. Relations within the family, between different
sets of actors, with the woman at the centre of it all, is another
persistent theme.
Undoubtedly, social class is important, and the variations in
social class is reflected in women’s understandings of their position
in the family, their goals and motivations, and above all, in their
contestations of their position in the domestic and the public sphere.
Educated, westernised and upper-class women in urban India tend to
be more articulate about the forms of oppression they experience in
their everyday lives and simultaneously recognise their conflicts and
dilemmas and know how to deal with them. This is also the case for
women slum dwellers although their manner of expression and style
of performance is both articulated and performed quite differently.
Their voices nonetheless reflect the call for challenging the structures
of habitus through explicit negotiation and contestations as well as
the more implicit forms of performance, play and enactment that
women engage in to achieve their goals. I now turn to these voices
to explore and understand the multiple subjectivities that inform
women’s constitution of their gendered identities in the multiple
worlds they simultaneously inhabit as well as point to the generative
constituents of the habitus itself.
 THE BODY IN THE MIRROR 95

RESISTANCE WITHIN THE FAMILY AND MARRIAGE

In my narration of the stories that follow, I do not deviate too much

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

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

Sneha understands that her mother-in-law’s resentment of Sneha’s

condition is based on the cultural premise that her dominant position
in the household would have been threatened if Sneha had a male
child and in any case, as a mother, Sneha would have an enhanced
visibility in the kin and social circles that value motherhood as much
as they do marriage.
The dominant presence of the family is overwhelming and takes
over women’s lives.

At the time of marriage, main problem was with my mother-in-law.

My father-in-law was very affectionate and used to look after me a
lot. My husband was the only son so they resented our going out
alone. Even my daughter they resented when she was born because
my husband gave her a lot of attention. My husband understood
but used to keep quiet. Sometimes he used to shout at me, used to
believe my mother-in-law and sisters-in-law. He was controlled to
a large extent by them. Some two-three months after marriage, it
all started. Now he has understood all these things. Three cousin
sisters-in-law helped me a lot to cope with my marriage. My
mother-in-law all the time was expecting sympathy for her being
sickly. Both in-laws have pace-makers (in their hearts).

Sneha’s position as a ‘good’ daughter-in-law was also continuously

under attack by her mother-in-law within this larger network of
aunts and sisters-in-law.
While it is within the family that she experiences severe conflicts,
it is within the family itself, in the presence of larger kin, that Sneha
steps out of the imposed definitions of a ‘good’ daughter-in-law and
wife by breaking the boundaries of acceptable behaviour:

Then I took a drastic step and decided to live separately last

year. I stopped eating food for five days and said ‘I want to talk
to everybody in front of everyone (aunts and other members of
the larger family).’ Everything was cleared up. Because I didn’t
eat for five days, then, my husband agreed to the meeting. At this
meeting, I asked everyone present, ‘What I hear from others, they
are saying about me?: like, I don’t serve food to my father-in-law,
don’t like my sister-in-law, etc.?’ After the meeting, things were
 THE BODY IN THE MIRROR 97

cleared up somewhat. Now my husband also stands up for me so

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

Sneha’s act of resistance indicates how women use diverse means

like fasting, or holding meetings with elders in the family, to confront
their oppressors and break out of a predefined normative, regularising
and disciplining mode of kin relationships. Sneha chose to confront
the accusations in the presence of a larger kin network that silenced
her in-laws. Her experience however has diminished her loyalty and
affection to her husband’s family:

I have suffered so much. I don’t have ‘family feeling’ for them

anymore. At first, I was willing to adjust but not any more. I was
very adjusting and I thought everything will work out but it didn’t.
I have myself lived in a joint family before my marriage.

It is also important to consider how relations with the larger

family impact intimate relations between partners and create sexual
anxiety:

I enjoy his company more but I don’t want sex with him all the
time. He is however a very satisfying lover. Some ‘mental strain’
of the marriage was also there and I feel tired all the time. Initially,
two-three months were very good. So the strain of the marriage
tells on the sex life.

Sneha has often blamed him for not standing up to his parents on
her behalf, ‘My husband didn’t take stand during troublesome period.
I used to blame him as he could not control the situation. I wanted
to live separately with my daughter but he couldn’t take it. But now
it is much better.’ She thinks that some of her husband’s behaviour
can be attributed to his strong sense of filial duty and responsibility
he has internalised even though, in her eyes, he has not been treated
on equal terms with his other four siblings:

My mother-in-law is very fond of her daughters but my husband

was not treated equally. Now he feels his people are selfish, he
wasn’t looked after. Only when they need him to go to hospital
98 LIVING THE BODY

or for money, they talk to him. Not otherwise. He has no close

relationship with any of the four sisters. He is closer to aunts and
cousins than his own sisters. It is still a mental torture for me to
live in that house but I have to live there. My husband wants to
do many things but he is helpless. He feels it is his duty to give
money, to do his own work, to take food, etc. I would leave with
my daughter but she needs her father also and basically my husband
is a nice man. In-laws had a ‘good lesson’ that their youngest
daughter is now going through a divorce. These girls are always
told to dominate but even that didn’t work out.

Sneha gets some satisfaction from a failed marriage of one of her

sisters-in-law, especially because she has worked hard to ensure the
success of her own marriage in terms of her relationship with her
husband and her position in his family.
The significance of the family as a major theatre where the drama
of gender politics is played out not only between partners but also in
the complexities of relations among and between the larger family,
cannot be underestimated as Sneha’s account emphasises. It is in the
marital relationship that is embedded in the family that Sneha finds
sexual pleasure and fulfillment (she was a virgin until she married at
the age of 32 years) but is also oppressed, primarily by other women
in her husband’s family, and where she finally achieves control over
her situation through a strong expression of her agency.
The family in modern, urban India is simultaneously the source
of fulfillment as well as oppression and disenchantment for the recast
or redefined ‘modern’ Indian woman. In addition, the significance
of social class in the formation of an individual’s habitus as well as in
women’s lived experience in everyday life is undeniable. The following
account shows us how class permeates women’s understanding of
their position in the family, their goals and motivations, and above all,
their contestations of their position in the domestic sphere. Monica,
born in 1944, clearly belongs to an upper class, privileged, educated
and elite family. Her father studied at Oxford and went on to become
the head of an eminent institution of higher education in Punjab.
Unlike Sneha, she had access to a good English-medium school in
New Delhi and to an exclusive boarding school. She has a younger
sister and both girls received ‘good’ education, as was common at that
time among this social category, at ‘all girls’ institutions of education.
However, she was married at a very young age. Her husband’s mother
saw her skating at the rink and sent a proposal for marriage of her
 THE BODY IN THE MIRROR 99

son. Evidently, in familial contexts, marriage and a ‘good’ marriage

are celebrated and valorised. Monica’s younger sister in fact envies
Monica’s marital status as that of a well married woman, rich and
well-settled.
Women’s perceptions of their everyday realities may be markedly
different from how others, including their kin, perceive them. When
asked what her occupation is, Monica replied, ‘I do everything but
earn money. Now I’ve realised I’ve missed the bus.’ Her husband
is a businessman and they are extremely wealthy. Monica however
emphasised that she has no access to any money and has no decision-
making authority in the household. She repeatedly said that her
husband takes all decisions from buying the furniture to other
household tasks, ‘He had the knack and the money to do it. I can’t
take major decisions. Children have to speak on my behalf. Money
speaks. I’d put up a fight but nothing comes of it.’
In the context of the family, women are divested of sexual desire
for many reasons, the most significant being a complete lack of
communication and affection between the marital partners. It has
been argued that the social construction ‘of female “need” constrains
women to invest desire in maternity rather than…sexuality. Hence it
constructs the female self in accordance with the dominant cultural
paradigm’ (Das 1995: 169). In fact, a woman is often compelled
to invest desire in maternity primarily because of the lack of
communication or pleasurable sexual relationship with the partner.
Monica has three children and while the older two children are
married, the youngest daughter fills her life, ‘Ever since I had my
daughter, I wanted to be with her and look after her. I wanted her so
badly. I was lonely. You know, that inner loneliness. I want people
all the time.’
Monica’s sexual relationship with her partner is devoid of desire
and is a source of intense agony for her:

I was forced to have sex. The hurts during the day reflected in
my sex life at night. Slowly, I didn’t want any of that. Now we
don’t share a bedroom for the last eight years. I started getting a
phobia. I wouldn’t move for hours together in case I disturbed
him and he would pounce on me. After every fight, I would
sleep with the children and then those periods grew longer.
He used to womanise and that hurt me and I couldn’t bear his
touch. Physically I am so put off, I don’t think I would like him to
touch me.
100 LIVING THE BODY

Her social class propels her to add:

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

Monica’s experience of her unfulfilled sexuality is linked to her

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

In seeking independence from her children, Monica is asserting a

movement away from tradition that emphasises the opposite, that is,
 THE BODY IN THE MIRROR 101

close and dependent relations between grown-up children and their

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

In a sense, her mother-in-law therefore continues to exist through

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

Monica does however experience a sense of being completely alone in

her predicament as it is not exactly something she can share with the
children. Nor can they help fulfil her expectations from her partner,
102 LIVING THE BODY

‘I am alone even now. What happens to you happens to you alone.

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

Then, Monica finds her own solution to her problem. By ques-

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

In this way, Monica seeks to resolve the external conflict and by

defining and seeking well-being for herself, she moves away from the
constancy that is imposed on her by her habitus without however
completely abandoning her present state as a married woman with a
family to whom she always returns.
Monica also feels that she cannot express her unhappiness to other
women and therefore is unable to share her life and problems with
others:
 THE BODY IN THE MIRROR 103

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

The nuclear family, as much as the extended family, changes

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

suggest that women do not in fact articulate and indeed exercise their
agency in contesting, resolving or changing oppressive conditions as
accounts by middle- and upper-class women indicate. It is only that
they decide to use several and varying acts of resistance that need
not necessarily fall into a universal pattern, but remain embedded in
local acts or modalities of agency evolving from individual ways of
perception and action. Their potential for change is therefore always
there, so to speak, but remains limited and constrained.
The nuclear family, as much as the extended family, changes
women’s goals, occupational choices and indeed their self-definitions.
Woman however may also express their agency in other ways from
within the nuclear family. Rehana was born in 1956, is married with
two young children and works as a journalist. Like Monica, she had
a very western education and upbringing in schools outside India
which she thinks has largely influenced her ideas about relationships,
choices and equality. At the same time, being in the nuclear family
has also redefined her ideas and experience of equality:

I’m very demanding of equality. It’s an inbuilt thing. An intellectual

discussion goes on in my head. I’m a hard taskmaster in terms of
what men are used to. So for me it’s an emotional torture to have
this on my head, for example, never to leave the children alone.
But my husband’s job changed and became a nine to five one.
So now my job becomes less important and I have to take over
the gap caused by his new job. This bothers me. [That is,] the
problem of equality, equally sharing home tasks. I feel very deeply
about it, that there must be an equal relationship. So within me
it is a problem. With each example, I accept that true equality is
not possible between men and women especially after the birth of
children. There is a special bond between mothers and children
which cannot be taken over by men however close men may be to
them. They [the children] are priorities for me now. Day-to-day
definitions of equality have to change. To see men and women in
different roles has to change and this change may not be ideal or
more equal.

In this manner, Rehana clearly perceives her role, as she sees it,
in relation to her children and family, as a mother and care-giver,
and much as it disturbs her sense of justice, she accepts this as her
main role.
Although Rehana seeks to redefine equality in terms of her
perceived priorities, she emphasises women’s ability to exercise
 THE BODY IN THE MIRROR 105

choice in everyday life. So if a member of her extended family

says that Rehana ‘didn’t do much as a daughter-in-law’, she asserts:

It bothers me but it doesn’t torment me. Women trap themselves,

[we] imprison ourselves so badly, [we] don’t define our relation-
ships. [There are] certain rebellious acts which do make a statement.
But you can do a whole lot of things without upsetting anyone. We
need to look within and compound our sense of self-confidence
and don’t need to do what you need to. We think we have no
choice but we actually have a lot of choices. We have to stop lying
to ourselves.

Rehana articulates and defines the changing contours of habitus

and its trajectory thoughtfully but, as we have seen, nonetheless
submits to its assertion of her primary role of mother, nurturer and
care-giver.
Rehana has worked hard to free herself from dominance in
more than one domain of family life and in the process changed the
traditional relationship between father and daughter. She asserts
that her relationship with her highly educated father was a source of
intellectual and emotional domination which she resisted and, over
time, established the relationship on her terms:

My father has been an important influence in my life. This changed

under pressure in the sense that he had a lot of expectations
about me but my struggle for independence began then. My
father was a strong person and influenced me through logic,
discussion, etc. The struggle to battle him through analysis
became very strong. So we learnt from his dominance, to strug-
gle through analysis. The question, for example, of the ability of
freeing myself from my father’s questioning and influence has
been an emotional torture and torment for me. You take on the
family to free yourself. It has not been a silent battle. And my father
gave in through a struggle in order to preserve his relationship
with his daughter.

In Rehana’s articulation of her struggle, we find the good daughter

being transformed primarily as an outcome of her education and
persistence. Culture and tradition therefore are not permanent
and may be contested depending on woman’s class, position, status
and location.
106 LIVING THE BODY

BODY IMAGE AND SELF-PRESENTATION

An important aspect of gender consciousness and identity is body

image. Vision itself implies that there is a body that is visible.3 The
body image is not just about how one is seen by another but also
how sees oneself and would like others to see us. The element of
self-construction is therefore always present in both perception and
practice. In this section, I will attempt an understanding of woman’s
performance both in front of the mirror not only to present herself
with a particular embodied image, or recognise it as a familiar shadow,
but also to see herself performing for the gaze of the other. While
it is true that through such performances, woman is not thereby
transgressing authority and her construction of her gender identity
remains embedded in particular images that exist in the social, cultural
and public imaginaries, she nonetheless is giving off expressions of
herself that she wants to, in this process of construction of her self
and public image. In this sense, she is engaged, in a practical sense,
in creating and performing images that will show her to be what she
wants to be seen as.4
The narratives that follow indicate that women do indeed under-
stand the impact of the social, cultural and male representations of
their embodiment which to a large extent influence their own images
and perceptions. However, their agential practices are reflected in their
attempt to redefine beauty in a strategic mode to resist conventional
notions of beauty. This resistance is not however always sustained and
women therefore are often in a complex situation where they both
seek and value the approval of the social and public other, which may
incorporate both the male and the female gaze, and simultaneously
resist the gaze in order to enable their own vision to prevail. More
importantly, they use their performance, to also tease and manipulate
the other, as well as consciously devise their self performativity,
in such a way that enables their vision to prevail. The element of

3
This, argues Grosz, is ‘the very condition of seeing, the condition of embodiment’
(Grosz 1994: 101). The limits and shape of body image are largely determined by ‘space
surrounding and within the subject’s body’. It is the ‘lived spatiality of endogenous
sensations, the social space of interpersonal relations, and the “objective” or “scientific”
space of cultural (including scientific and artistic) representations’ (ibid.: 80).
4
Andrew Stathern however points to ‘the contradiction between expression of “the
self ” via a “unique” make-up/fashion style and the limited range of images of socially-
recognized and accepted ‘roles’ which are available to women’ (Craik 1994: 106).
 THE BODY IN THE MIRROR 107

strategy that is imbricated in this process is obvious and is indicative

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

Kamini in fact urges men to acknowledge her body shape and

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

The effect of media representations of woman’s embodiment is

acknowledged as well as there is an articulation of her self as someone
who desires male approval of her body and simultaneously resists
male constructions of what may be considered ‘authentic’ feminine
embodiment. She perceives her need for the other’s appreciation of
her physical beauty which is clearly linked to her sexuality but she
is also aware that she is not convinced by male notions of idealised
embodiment to transform herself. There is an obvious conflict, in this
case, between her perceived need and her rejection of the male gaze.
At the same time, however, Kamini consciously resisted her former

5
Judith Butler concludes therefore that ‘as a strategy of survival within compulsory
systems, gender is a performance with clearly punitive consequences’ (Butler 1990:
139).
108 LIVING THE BODY

husband’s assessment of her body image throughout the marriage,

refusing to subscribe to his expectations:

My husband didn’t like my weight. In a kind of protest, I remained

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

Resistance is therefore a conscious, articulated act in response to

a perceived act of oppression that has important consequences for
the identities women shape for themselves. So while women may
experience conflict in their own assessment of their body image and
response to the gaze of the other, there is often a far more clearly
articulated response when the gaze is experienced as oppressive
in ways that threaten their identities. Kamini also expresses an
acute awareness of woman’s abilities to articulate her emotions in
relationships far more effectively than men who are not so much
in tune with their inner selves. This observation helps Kamini to
recognise her relationship with her husband as ‘violent’ in many
dimensions and enables her to focus on acts that express her resistance
to the violence.
Ageing, with its temporality signifying, in this context, not decay,
but an emotional and physical maturity is an important part of
women’s stories of their embodied images. Kamini’s emphasis on
women’s ability to articulate their inner worlds is reflected in Rehana’s
experience of her embodiment and the manner in which age, changing
perceptions and lifestyles contribute to bodily practices. Rehana
identifies age and the changing life course of a woman as strong
identifying characteristics of body image:

Those definitions [of body image] change with age. As a teenager

and as a married mother would be completely different. When I
was in my early twenties, my body had to be athletic, sexy, and I
had to flaunt it because I was in the West. I wore hot pants, mini
skirts. But I don’t feel like that anymore. Now my body is mine.
Something nobody owns. I have a kind of relationship with it in
 THE BODY IN THE MIRROR 109

which it is mine to do what I please with it and it doesn’t have to be

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

As they approach middle age, women articulate this movement

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

Radhika’s body image and self-presentation may be unmediated

by the social and public gaze as she perceives it but she also wants to
be simultaneously recognised as a trend setter or as someone whose
sartorial style is publicly appreciated. In this sense, there is a desire
for social and public recognition of body image that is tied up with
110 LIVING THE BODY

her own identification of what constitutes her image in terms of the

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

There are other utilitarian considerations that influence sartorial

choice but all of these are nonetheless shaped by class dispositions
and taste. Radhika therefore has a strong sense of what beauty means
for her in terms of both her experience of it as well as her idealisation
of it.

If I started looking very scrappy and skin full of blackheads and

looking tired, I wouldn’t want to go around like that. The idea
of physical beauty has been very important for me—not long
nails and removing hair. [It is] to do with acting. In front of a
mirror, [I have] performed for hours. So it has to do with looking
at an attractive and beautiful person. Mixture really of attractive
and beautiful. [I have] an interest in theatre, performing another,
enacting another in front of the mirror. Not just seeing yourself but
also the character you are playing. So mixture of inner character,
your own physical features, and the character you are playing.
So when one is really into a character one’s physical features can
change and become beautiful as your inner character also changes.

In this manner, she creates the perfect image of herself through the
mirror, using the medium of theatre, through which she presents
how she sees herself at different moments of time and space.
The conflict may be between Radhika’s idealisation of beauty and
her dissatisfactory experience of her own body image as she perhaps
sees it reflected in the mirror and through touch so that she is unhappy
when her eyes have a puffy look or her paunch is loose. However,
Radhika herself does not experience this as a conflict and in fact sees
a direct relationship between her work, that is, theatre, ‘feeling good’
and ‘looking good’. She also acknowledges the important role of
 THE BODY IN THE MIRROR 111

the gaze and appreciation by the social and public other in enhanc-
ing her own experience of feeling good. In this sense, for Radhika,
shape, form, pleasure and feeling good are all part of the everyday
experience of beauty and this is heightened by others’ appreciation
of her physical form as well as of her work. Health (through yoga
and homeopathy), happiness and beauty, as in looking good, both
within their own definitions as well as in the discursive constructions
of others, are associated with good work for women like Rehana and
Radhika. In this sense, for Radhika, shape, form, pleasure and feeling
good are all part of the everyday experience of beauty.

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

Radhika’s identity is largely constructed around the dominant

defining paradigms in her life, her work and her family, which are
ordered within multiple layers of looking and feeling healthy and
112 LIVING THE BODY

good Radhika also links her experience of her sensuality and sexuality
to her work:

I wondered ten years ago if I could have sex outside my marriage

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

In this manner, the emotional, physical, sexual and social self come
together in Radhika’s expression of her embodiment and identity as
wife and as an actor who uses the mirror to project herself not only for
her work but also as how she would like to be seen in everyday life.
The mirror is an important instrument in women’s experience.
It is used both for reflecting body image as well as for constructing
the image through performance and play. In the construction of her
image, Radhika uses the mirror for enhancing particular aspects of
the reflected body, express emotions and it therefore is an agential
instrument. In Leena’s narrative that follows, however, the mirror
is used for an assessment or evaluation of the body image through
the gaze of the other and this can sometimes result in a fetishisation
of one’s embodiment through a fragmentation of the body into its
various parts. Simultaneously, however, the body is also used to con-
struct an identity by performing different versions of self-expression
in front of the mirror.
Leena, born in 1961, is a university teacher, married and pregnant
when I interviewed her and has a very well-defined perspective on her
embodiment in terms of its idealised form, sensuality and her own
relation to her changing bodily shape. The desire for an idealised
embodiment is concealed behind her emphasis on her personality.
Mike Featherstone refers to this as ‘the performing self ’ and examines
the attention paid to the shaping and perfecting of the personality as
a mode of self-presentation (Featherstone 1991). Leena presents her
‘body-for-others’ as her personality but underneath her personality
lies her ‘body-for-myself ’:
I like to look good. I’ve always taken care of myself. I like my
body to look nice. I should like my face when I look at it in the
 THE BODY IN THE MIRROR 113

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

The image in the mirror is of profound significance for Leena

who judges the mirror reflection in terms of her own standards of
physical perfection. She then undertakes a project to change the
image and replace it with one that is more appealing to her own
gaze. She is emphatic that her body image, as reflected in the mirror,
should please her. This includes the physical feeling and experience
of a sensuality associated with ‘sexiness’:

I should find my body sexy too. For example, I don’t like a fat
stomach in my body. I also relate to my body in a sexy way. I
should feel sexy looking at my body. I find my body sexy in the
pregnant state. There is an incongruity that I find attractive: the
breasts are bigger. I really thought that I would hate my body
when I am pregnant. But I don’t. I actually quite enjoy it. I take off
my clothes to look at my body and then put them on again.

The mirror becomes the instrument through which she tends to

define her identity in relation to her embodied state. The image is
therefore of considerable importance in her overall perception of her
body, its symbolic value in her everyday life, and the uses to which
she seeks to put it. Although there is clearly a narcissistic concern
here with body image and the pleasures of the body, the social and
public other is nonetheless a major consideration in defining her
embodiment. She says:

I don’t know if my body is ‘sexy’ in the male definition of it; whether

your [one’s] lips or boobs are sexy. I’m not oozing sex. I don’t have
breasts that are heaving or bouncing about, so that men may not
find it sexy. In my case, it’s hidden but it’s all there. And that in
114 LIVING THE BODY

a way attracts men. I don’t dress up to highlight my contours,

emphasise my shape, etc. I emphasise more on my personality.

There is an underlying concern here with what men desire from

women’s bodies and Leena’s perception of her inability to fulfill
that desire in an obvious manner. She however offers the promise
of fulfilling that desire through her suggestion, ‘it’s all there’.
Embodiment, for Leena is therefore very much for the other and
significantly seeks fulfillment as much from the other as through
the mirror. While some women may veil their desire for male
approval with descriptions of a spiritual or inner beauty, or do so
as a strategically resistant mode, others assert the influence of the
male gaze in the experience of their own embodiment. In this
manner, woman sees a reflection of the image and elides the image with
the gaze resulting in a bodily perception and practices that exist only
through the gaze. However, simultaneously through performance,
emphasising her ‘personality’, as Leena puts it, she actually
manages to put forward and thereby assert a particular image of
her self.
The mirror in these women’s accounts is the site for the enactment
of an identity, as a stage or theatrical prop for Radhika who uses it
not only for emoting or performing different suitable expressions but
also for assessing her own embodied props for beauty. For Leena,
the mirror serves as a reflection of what she wants to see, to give
her pleasure, a feeling of sexiness as she puts it and also to examine
and assess her image. It is also a site through which they perform
a version of what and how they want to be seen. Although this
performance takes place in a personal space where the only spectator
is the woman herself, she uses this to perfect her image, through
repetition and mimicry, to construct a self-defined version of her
identity. Woman also plays around with definitions of her identity,
allowing it to take on different contours, masks and personas,
depending on the context, situation and temporal moment. Kamini
does it through her embodiment and experience of sexuality,
endlessly carving out an emotional and physical space within which
she may be constructing her embodied identity, through lived
practice, deciding to, for example, ‘stay fat’ throughout her unhappy
marriage as a strategic form of contestation, thereby emphasising
her refusal to comply with an ostensibly authentic image. There is
an element of strategic manipulation as well. We find that to evade
 THE BODY IN THE MIRROR 115

bullying by her husband, at one level, Monica engages in an overt

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

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

EMBODIMENT AND ITS DISCONTENTS

In the construction of her identity as a gendered subject, women

experience their embodiment through a range of cultural and social
domains and practices as well as her own experiences, emotions and
thoughts that all work in multiple and varied ways. In this section, I
am concerned with ‘violence’ and psychological oppression or ‘mental
torture’ experienced by urban women in interpersonal relationships
in everyday life. Following Henrietta Moore, I advocate the use of an
anthropological perspective in understanding such violence thereby
taking into account ‘meaning, representation and symbolism’ (Moore
1994b: 139). This approach is linked significantly to understanding
the crucial relationship between violence and sexuality. It has been
suggested that ‘sexuality is intimately connected with power in such
a way that power and force are themselves sexualized, that is they are
inscribed with gender difference and gender hierarchy’ (ibid.: 149).
In the women’s accounts that follow there is therefore a close link
between women’s experience of violence, their embodiment, sexuality
and self-identity. While I provide accounts of women’s experience of
embodiment, I contend that this experience is shaped and exacerbated
by their notions of their embodiment and sexuality and an idealised
female embodiment. This is the nature of postcolonial habitus as it
constructs our embodied selves through modes of recolonisation
that impact our everyday lives in many different ways. This is not
to deny that the violence women experience is unreal, a figment of
their imagination or brought upon themselves but only to emphasise
the critical nature of its manifestation. I do not also wish to over-
emphasise in this context the extent to which woman’s embodiment
becomes a tool for culture to manipulate, mould, shape and adorn.
I therefore do not fully accept Foucault’s construction of ‘docile
bodies’ (Foucault 1991: 135ff) regulated by the norms of the social
and public order. I do however believe that woman’s embodiment
is undoubtedly influenced by social and cultural discursive categories
and practices and that in this sense femininity ‘disempowers us even
as it seduces us’ (Bartky 1990: 2). In pursuing postcolonial habitus
as it engages us in our acts of compliance and resistance, I seek to also
understand how ‘the values of a system that oppress us are able to
take up residence in our minds’ (ibid.). This helps us to understand
the complexity underlying women’s apparent collusion with forces
that often sustain their own oppression.
 THE BODY IN THE MIRROR 117

The internalisation of representations of woman’s embodiment

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

grooming’ and described him as someone whose sole purpose in life

was to make more and more money without an appreciation of the
finer things of life. One outcome of Leena’s deteriorating relation-
ship with her partner is the negative nature of his comments about
her natal family and herself:

He has started criticizing me physically and comments, which are

derogatory, about my family. That is, the stereotype of being loud,
rotund, money-minded, excessive in every sense. They’re non-
creative, speak loudly to their wives; they’re from a particular social
class and background. I probably encouraged him in the beginning
but he was always very fond of them. Now it has been twisted.

The comments about Leena’s family are directed at a Punjabi busi-

ness community by her educated, westernised, intellectual Bengali
husband. Comments on Leena’s body are rather specific:

How I’m not that attractive; I’m short; I have a bigger head [not
in proportion to the rest of her body]; I’m fat, and so on. In a
relationship, it bothers me that someone who had pampered me
so much should switch over so suddenly. But I don’t suffer from
lack of self-esteem.

Leena finds it hard to accept these derogatory comments about

her embodiment and family which she feels are signs of a ‘crum-
bling marriage’. In addition, it is her husband’s interest in another
woman, that she thinks, is responsible for his attempts to continu-
ously denigrate her in his and in her own eyes. Bartky has argued
that both ‘fragmentation and mystification’ are present in forms of
psychological oppression (Bartky 1990: 23). She defines fragmenta-
tion as the ‘splitting of the whole person into parts of a person which,
in stereotyping, may take the form of a war between a “true” and a
“false” self—or in sexual objectification, the form of an coerced and
degrading identification of a woman with her body’ (ibid.). What
Leena in fact experiences as ‘mental torture’ or ‘emotional violence’
is her partner’s attempt to sexually objectify as well as stereotype her
embodiment. Degrading comments on her body are expressions of
an intent to split her identity into body and mind by focusing only on
the externally visible body. By emphasising her embodiment and its
defining characteristics, her partner ensures that Leena tends to also
view herself in almost an identical manner in relation to her embodi-
ment. Leena therefore works hard at maintaining her definition of
 THE BODY IN THE MIRROR 119

perfect embodiment by visiting the beauty parlour and by adhering

to different disciplinary bodily regimes and practices.
While verbal abuse is one form of marital violence, verbal silence
acts as another form of abuse. Men resort to silence and avoid direct
verbal confrontation especially with educated and articulate women.
Leena says:

We don’t speak about issues that bother us. We never have a

fight. We don’t throw things at each other. Initially I did but the
response was total silence. Total indifference. So I tried to control
my anger, to be like him—silent, and not get into confrontations,
etc. Then I got out of it. Even now, as he says, ‘he does not fight’.
No issue is discussed in a raised voice; it has to be discussed in
a ‘non-hysterical’ manner. It’s a male point of view. Spontaneity
has been taken out of my personality. I’ve started intellectualizing,
theorizing, etc. in the last three years of our marriage.

In this manner, Leena has learnt to change her way or style of resolving
issues, not merely to suit her husband’s whims about ‘civilised’
conduct, but also to avoid confrontation and ensure peace.
Radhika encounters great periods of silence too, especially after
violent fights with her husband.

I have hit my husband, provided the physical provocation and

then he has retaliated in order to really survive. This has happened
twice. I have not been one bit apologetic about hitting him. He
has crumpled with shame, hugely apologized, in front of me. For
his not being able to talk that there is a brute in him. But in me
there is much more violence, more brute in me. Lashing out lasts
for one or two minutes. We have verbal rows these days on how
to handle the child.

Radhika however perceives her everyday life in terms of her work

and for her.

Violence is also drawing out emotion brinking on the way you do

it in theatre. Violent fights are due to his criticism of my actions,
even though he may be right or misinterpreting my actions. So I
have a fight when I am upset and express it through anger. So it’s
a mixture of tears and anger. Sometimes maybe I say things to test
it for theatre. So maybe I am theatrical and maybe melodramatic.
I torture myself. There is a silence about my husband when the
fight is over. He regains peace of mind. He can forget about a fight
120 LIVING THE BODY

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

To deal with her partner’s silence, Leena adopts a strategy that

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

Leena has also been emotionally distressed by her husband’s lack

of interest in her pregnancy or in their expected child. She sees it as an
unwillingness to accept responsibility for the child and an assertion
of his independence from the family.

There is no commitment to my pregnancy. I’m not very sure

that this guy is going to be around when I have the baby. He
doesn’t accept the procreation even though we were both not
using contraceptives. He should have accepted the baby but he
didn’t want to take responsibility. So my right to procreate was
being questioned. If he was so hassled he should have just used a
condom. But he taunted me, ‘You’ve had it your way. You wanted
a child and you have it’. But he had a choice to prevent it. Secondly,
once the child is there, there is no commitment to the child and
especially to the relationship. I don’t know if the child will have a
father or not. This is also a mental torture. He keeps telling me he
will leave after the baby is born. He can’t walk out on a pregnant
woman. Middle-class values are supporting this relationship as a
façade. It can break any time.

Apart from a lack of obvious commitment to the marriage or his

family, his behaviour also indicates his desire to be free of responsi-
bility and the perceived stress of a changed lifestyle. Although this
creates some insecurity in Leena, she is not very sure she can handle
it. However, she relates her experience of marriage to her mother’s
experience of violence in her home especially in the context of her
 THE BODY IN THE MIRROR 121

sexual relationship with her husband. She clearly experiences a dissat-

isfaction in her sexual relationship and she finds in this an experience
of oppression within marriage.

My father was an alcoholic and withdrew sexually from my mother…

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

Leena’s experience of the repetition of an identical situation of

an ‘unhappy marriage’ in her mother’s life exacerbates her own
experience of ‘mental torture’.

Mental torture is also not coming home on time, not eating

meals on time, a lack of commitment to being home on time. I
felt mentally tortured as a child as we never had meals together,
my father never came home on time. He [husband] has never said
sorry to me. He has never made up to me…His commitment is
now to another relationship, it may be to work so he still doesn’t
come home early even though he has a more regular job now. Now
it may be another woman but it could again be the work.

This ‘mental torture’ that is experienced by women may go on

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

emerge as victims of oppression but as survivors in the social and

public domain that views marriage as their ultimate refuge. There is
a specific moment when woman snaps out of this cycle and actually
takes control of what is happening to her.

I didn’t speak to anyone about the problems. I recall eight months

of crying everyday. He was silent about the problems. I could only
surmise the problems…Then, I had a public breakdown at … when
I could start speaking, then everything came pouring out and
then I could go to a counsellor and sort things out. I wanted to
commit suicide. It was a feeling, not seriously. I wanted to murder
him, throw him off the cliff. This was a completely new emotion
to me as we earlier had such a lovely relationship. We were the
‘perfect couple’.

In recent years, Leena has not only experienced motherhood,

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

7
Suspected infidelity by spouses informs the narratives of women in the slum (see
Chapter 5 in this book).
 THE BODY IN THE MIRROR 123

her sexuality to woman who may experience it as a form of violence.

For example, Kamini’s articulation of the violence she experienced
in her marriage, in the context of a denial of her sexuality assumes
crucial significance in understanding the relationship between sex
and women’s experience of oppression.
Kamini married someone when she was fairly young and knew
her husband quite well before she married him. They were married
for many years, have one child and are now separated (subsequently
divorced). Her sexual relationship with her husband was almost
‘non-existent’ and Kamini sees this as being ‘prompted’ by him:

This is a form of violence because I wanted it [sex]. [This kind

of behaviour] is characteristic of a particular generation of men
who have changed or altered their moralities, their world-views.
This is, on the one hand, the kind of woman they want to relate
to—articulate, aggressive, independent. On the other hand, they’re
scared out of their wits. So a woman’s expression of her sexual
rights or her expression of her sexual desire becomes one area of
contestation. It’s something they can’t cope with. It is in part a
fear of failure; of an inability to satisfy that [desire]. The male
view of his own sexuality is tied up with achieving an erection and
the fear of failure is really seen through that. Being denied any
sexual relationship is considered violence and I experienced this.
[The fact that sex] was very occasional and other tensions made it
less satisfying, all through our marriage. He did have other sexual
relationships so I was certainly being denied a satisfying sexual life.
It was a ‘gigantic’ problem in our relationship.

Kamini does not view this aspect of the violence she experienced
in her relationship as being significant in itself. She endured it
because, as she says, ‘we shared a great deal, apart from our child,
he understood me and I understood him.’ The breaking point in her
marriage came with ‘the other woman’:

His involvement with the other woman in the last year of our
marriage broke it up. He inflicted violence on me. I was very
hurt by it. It wasn’t a moral position I took. He had already had
other brief sexual involvements. The hurt was heightened because
I perceived it as violence. We had a very friendly and interactive
relationship which was premised on a certain understanding in
spite of the problems. So the idea that he could continue to do
something which was so distressing to me, that was the act of
violence, the aggression. He was articulating his preference for the
124 LIVING THE BODY

marriage when confronted with a choice but actually continuing

the other relationship so I couldn’t carry on any longer.

Both Leena and Kamini have identified a denial of adequately

satisfying sexual relationships with their partners as either mental
torture or violence. The unresolved question is whether the men denied
this aspect of the relationship consciously to negate the women’s self-
esteem or because they felt threatened in other ways by the kind of
women they had chosen to marry, or simply because they had ‘fallen
out of love’ and sought sexual satisfaction elsewhere. The control
of women’s assertiveness and independence through a regulation of
their sexuality is an acknowledged method of the exercise of patriarchal
power. That both these women found such control unacceptable,
articulated its experience as a form of violence, and chose to resist
the situation indicates acts of resistance even in the midst of an
experientially oppressive relationship. Lack of sexual interest or desire
on the part of the partner is experienced as oppressive and there is
no doubt they strive, as their accounts suggest, in different ways, for
sexual fulfillment with their partners. It is when this is denied that
they seek fulfillment elsewhere. From Leena and Kamini’s accounts,
as also from those of Radhika and Rehana it is seen that urban,
educated, professional women living in nuclear families, experience a
heightened sexuality as compared to women living with their partners
in the joint family in which their sexual experience changes due to
relationships with other members of the family.
Saloni, born in 1955, is a university teacher with an educated social
background. She is married into a family in which she considers her
father-in-law more educated and from a more cultured family than
her mother-in-law who she thinks is from a ‘a milieu which is more
patriarchal’ (that is, upper class, perhaps of royal lineage from a former
princely state). Saloni asserts that such cultures have ‘a distinct notion
of how women are to behave and conduct themselves after marriage.’
She has been married for some years and has known her husband for
several years before they were married. As they are from very different
social and class backgrounds, they endured difficult years of courtship
in the midst of family tensions that viewed their alliance with distrust
and misgivings. When finally they were married, Saloni faced ‘oppres-
sion’ from her mother-in-law with whom they lived. Saloni does not
however absolve her husband of any responsibility of what took place.
The emotional agony she experienced in relating to her mother-in-law
is evident in the anguish in her account, ‘The sense of despair I have felt
 THE BODY IN THE MIRROR 125

at the way in which she [mother-in-law] conducted her relationship

with me. This has also implicated my husband because I stayed with
her, despite my oppression, because of him.’
Saloni articulates her experience of her oppression in psychological
terms where there is an experience of loss of personhood and self-
esteem through continuous psychological assault:

[I experienced] the feeling of being completely unwanted and

unacceptable; in the way in which I dressed, my manner, the fact
that I was from the wrong kind of family: Punjabi, middle class,
ordinary folk, and therefore the wrong kind of woman. This is not
what she wanted for her son. She had no control over me in the sense
that I was already there. She had no control over my time as for a
large part of the day I wasn’t there, I worked. But actually she had
a great deal of control over me because of the way she continually
expressed her displeasure over the way I ate, dressed, used no
make-up. She was constantly chipping away at me, if you know
what I mean. There was also emotional blackmail as she used her
widowhood as a stick over her own son and me.

Although Saloni was distressed by her experience with her mother-

in-law, she did not allow herself to continue in this state for a long
period:

In the first three years of my marriage, I was unsure of myself and

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

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

However, she does not have any romantic notions about her marital
relationship after this.

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

Although Saloni’s husband was not directly involved in her

experience of oppression, he is equally involved, as indicated by Saloni.
In such situations, his commitment to his natal family often overrides
his commitment to his partner or, as in Saloni’s case, he is emotionally
torn between his partner and his natal family. Saloni’s husband, she
says, ‘was deeply affected by this tension. He felt hugely guilty on
both counts. It affected him physically, he lost weight and suffered
insomnia’. These tensions undoubtedly affect relations between
partners. For example, Saloni tends to respond to her husband’s
comments about her embodiment, which are often made in what
she calls a ‘joking’ manner, by worrying whether he is comparing her
to the women in his family whom she considers more ‘elegant’ than
herself. So if her husband makes a joking reference to her toes, Saloni
wonders whether he is comparing her feet to his grandmother’s feet
which are ‘very beautiful’. Clearly, what is at stake is the threat to
Saloni’s femininity by an idealised femininity signified by an elegance
which she does not possess. She therefore experiences an inferiorised
embodiment in comparison with her idealised image which is also
constituted by the embodiment of the oppressive other.
The nature of the relationship with other members of the extended
family also impacts the marital relationship which is not as ecstatic as
it was in the early years of their marriage. Saloni is very sure that her
marriage has suffered a certain strain as a result of her relationship
with her mother-in-law:
We are less caring towards each other, less tenderness and so on.
Even now, when I’m apprehensive and uncomfortable, it reflects
on the marriage. We’re less caring about each other, less concerned.
This whole scenario, so prolonged, has not made my marriage
stronger. To grow together, you also need to grow apart, so that’s
what we’re undergoing now. If my mother-in-law had been a little
more graceful, it would have changed things between us.
 THE BODY IN THE MIRROR 127

This tension is further reflected in their sexual relationship:

It [sex] is not a predominant thing for me either for myself or in

my marital state. It doesn’t bother me if we’re in a sexually inactive
state. It’s not such a heightened experience as it was initially but a
more tender and gentler experience. It was altered when I found
my mother-in-law’s presence all-pervasive and restraining and
restrictive. But it’s not there now.

The lack of interest in her sexuality is perhaps exacerbated by the

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

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

both physical and verbal, is also based on his ‘suspicions’ about his
wife’s imagined relationships with other men. Sharmila find his
suspicions of her infidelity ‘very insulting’:

He doubts everybody, colleagues, my sister’s husband, that I have

relationships with them. This I find very insulting: all the time, he
is checking on my movements. When we were living with in-laws,
then his mother used to give him all the information. When he gets
angry, he hits out…I had to make him believe that whatever you
think is not true or correct.

Her partner’s definitions of her gender identity as immoral or sex-

ually promiscuous undoubtedly affected Sharmila’s notions of beauty
and self-adornment as well as her ability to interact with friends:

I used to be fond of dressing and my friends used to love that. Now

I don’t feel like doing anything or going in front of friends. I feel it
does not suit me anymore. Husband is suspicious if I dress up too
much or if I am underdressed. I want to keep a balance but I don’t
want to dress up now. For example, bindi I’ve stopped wearing as
he always suspects if my bindi has got smudged or fell off.

In addition to the lack of communication with her partner, she

experiences a continuous feeling of exhaustion due to her endless
domestic chores and has a very nonchalant attitude towards her
sexuality:

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

Undoubtedly, the Indian family, eulogised in tradition, represented

in film and theatre, reproduced through the media, remains almost
unchangeable in a fast changing modern India. The postcolonial
habitus is unable to generate definitive structures that can transform
the traditional structures of the Indian family. Resistance in this con-
 THE BODY IN THE MIRROR 129

text indicates the assertion of a challenge to tradition and imbricated

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

CONCLUDING COMMENTS

Women’s narratives of their lived experience emphasise their em-

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

these constructions, a complete denial or rejection of this constructed

womanhood never actually takes place. Women’s multiple voices
however indicate different experiences from diverse locations and
in the next chapter, we see how work and family life are critical to
woman’s lived experience in a slum in north-western Delhi.
 5
THE BODY AS A WEAPON
EMBODIMENT, WORK AND IDENTITY

I n this chapter, I present the stories of women slum dwellers in

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

they return every year, if possible. It is also central to their definitions

about themselves, their relations with others, and the means through
which they seek to achieve their goals of better living conditions,
food for their families and well-being for themselves. Everyday tasks
show how women use their bodies in different kinds of work, ranging
from performing domestic tasks, through sexual activity and child-
bearing, to paid work, and finally to maintaining and developing
social networks. Examining everyday life practices shows us how
both power and agency operate in the most mundane situations and
contexts and women’s lived experience reflect an engagement with
the exercise of social power in different ways. It is through voice,
gestures and bodily hexis that women articulate aspects of their
embodiment in relation to work of different kinds. Women take
pride in their work, in their independence, in their strength to shift
the balance of power in their own interest. The experience of harsh
poverty, deprivation, and masculine domination has not resulted in
loss of self-esteem, anger or defeat. On the contrary, women speak
from great strength drawn from deep reservoirs of self-reliance and
independence in thought and perception. Undoubtedly, there is
struggle but also endeavour, perseverance, and commitment, and
their assertion of their experience of their embodiment, as a weapon,
as it were, driven by their gendered experience of poverty and fight
for survival.
Every day, women use their bodies to express resistance to un-
equal power relations. Women I spoke to were adept at finding ways
and means through which they could show their agency, circumvent
impositions and controls on them, and exercise choice, to enhance
their sense of well-being. Many factors shape the individual married
women’s experience of poverty, and determine the extent to which,
despite their poverty, they have a sense of well-being. Well-being
is a multidimensional concept, including material and psychologi-
cal well-being, physical well-being, social well-being, security, and
freedom of choice and action (Narayan 2000). Whether a woman
experiences a sense of well-being depends on factors including a
woman’s educational level, the sex and number of children to whom
she has given birth, relations with members of the extended family,
economic deprivation and its physical and social consequences, and
other social and cultural factors. Well-being thus depends not only
on a woman’s sense of herself as an individual, but also on her rela-
tionship with others in her extended family and community.
 THE BODY AS A WEAPON 133

The overwhelming experience shaping the everyday lives of

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

MOTHERHOOD, CHILDBEARING AND CONTRACEPTION

The imprint of gender inequality is unmistakable in the way in which

women construct their stories of their individual experiences of pov-
erty. Having a female body means not only that you must perform
‘heavy work’ for money outside the household, but you must also
134 LIVING THE BODY

take on responsibility for the work your body performs in child-

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

Bearing a Son

Childbearing is central to married women’s well-being and sense

of personhood and identity. Women who cannot bear children at
all, or who do not bear a family that includes boys, feel incomplete
and unfulfilled. In this sense, a woman’s body has failed her, and
becomes a source of shame, loss of face, and mental agony, as well
as family dishonour. Phoolwati from a village in Uttar Pradesh, is in
her early thirties and has three daughters. She has a cheery exterior
but starts looking unhappy once the conversation centres on child
bearing. She says in anger, ‘No one is allowing me to live. All my
in-laws are after me because I have not had a boy. The name of
the family cannot continue which is very important.’ She explains
that daughters do not stay with their natal family forever, and there-
fore, it is important to have a son. Phoolwati, through her tears and
internalised experience of an unbearable condition, clearly expresses
her embodied incapacity to bear a male child and thus, being inca-
pable of lending to the continuity of the family name, failing in her
maintenance of family honour and social identity. It is perceived as
a failure of women’s embodiment in achieving social and thereby
personal goals which have been created by the family and the com-
munity. While talking about her life, Sumati, in her late forties, said
that she gave birth to seven daughters and then a son was born. She
said with a sense of achievement that has definite social approval,
‘Then, I received respect (Tab meri kadar hui).’ The discrimination
or oppression experienced after the repeated births of girl children
does not always make women weak and voiceless. On the contrary,
Sumati appeared tough and resilient and recounts with pride how
she had caught a burglar in her neighbour’s hutment, made him
admit his guilt, beat him, and recovered the stolen goods. Her sense
 THE BODY AS A WEAPON 135

of achievement, unlike Phoolwati, is not shaped only by her ability

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

says with resignation, ‘Men are hungry for a woman’s body.’ Here,
Sangeeta is not only attacking men’s sexual desires but also their desire
to dominate women through using women’s bodies for work, primar-
ily in the household which is the most acceptable form of labour.
The male desire to torment women through work is well-known
in the slum. Sangeeta said that her husband’s brother used to hit
her and asked her to work constantly. If she refused, he slapped her.
She seemed to be doing everything at home, in a mechanical way
and appearing accustomed to a pattern of work, since what she has
to do is both regular and familiar. Her methodical and organised
manner of work is clearly a source of immense satisfaction to her.
Her close identification and commitment to work results in support
and approval from both her natal family and her husband’s family.
This suggests that if women give in to the harsh and endless world
of domestic work, the results can be simultaneously oppressive and
liberating in different ways.
Women are conscious of their agency and celebrate their achieve-
ments in their very articulation of it. Sangeeta is rather proud of
the fact that she has paid for her infertility treatment from her own
savings and dismissed her husband as having been of no help in this
effort. She saved around Rs 80,000 to use for the treatment. She said,
‘The money used was mine; however my husband took the credit.
Often, he did not even accompany me to the hospital. He does not
care about me at all.’ Her mother-in-law never helped her either, by
giving her money.1
Sangeeta smiles while speaking, ‘There is happiness even in sor-
row (dukh mein bhi sukh hai).’ This expression is not a sign of mute
acceptance of her condition and indicates her ability to be on top of
the situation, however oppressive it might be. She gains strength
through her abilities to work as a domestic help outside the home
and as a homemaker and provider inside her home. In a sense, her
life has never been hers to do with as she pleases but rather has been
an existence to work for survival and for status within her family and
the community. This provides her with self-esteem and a sense of
well-being from where she can actually articulate her happiness even
in sorrow.
1
Jeffery and Jeffery (1997) point to the fact that women’s experiences alter during
their life cycle, and women’s different interests, status and position (for example, as
mothers-in-law or daughters-in-law) affect their experience of subordination as well as
the exercise of power.
 THE BODY AS A WEAPON 137

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

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

2
There is a clear reference here to the mother indicating to her daughter that she
must not allow herself to be ‘burnt’ for dowry and simultaneously educating her about
her own safety in the face of domestic violence.
 THE BODY AS A WEAPON 139

disadvantage but is in fact used to emphasise woman’s awareness of

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

Controlling Fertility

Sterilisation (tubectomy) is a critical event in the lives of married

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

need everything; one has to see everything before one decides to

have a child,’ she added. In this manner, Vineeta has taken decisions
regarding reproductive choice into her own hands and does not care
about what either her husband or members of the larger community
may have to say in the matter.
Premwati’s husband kept on postponing her tubectomy operation.
In winter months, he would say, it could be done in the summer
and, in summer, he would say, get it done in the winter. This
continued for some time. She finally got it done by herself during
the monsoon season in her husband’s home-town. When her last
child was six months old, she says she took a bath and went for the
surgery. Earlier, a doctor in her village had asked her for a letter
from her husband which he refused to give. She therefore had it
done elsewhere. Premwati’s strong emphasis on her own initiative
and action in taking a decision relating to her body suggests her
autonomy and strength in doing something for which she knew her
husband could later punish her. However, she just went ahead, and
adds that she had not stopped working after the operation. In fact it
was slightly painful when the stitches were removed but she did not
discontinue housework.
In Heena’s case the tubectomy failed because the doctors could not
find the tubes (nas). Her husband though did not want her to have
it done. All her children have been born through Caesarean sections.
She uses a Copper T but has pain in the back, legs and feet and
experiences a loss of appetite. When her son was born, she had a real
problem. She tried having an operation but failed as it did not work
out. She feels she is stuck in a bad situation. With utter resignation
and defeat she says, ‘Life itself is a problem, a woman’s life is useless.’
The worthlessness is being experienced because of the inability to
have a successful tubectomy, as a result of which she continues to
bear children. Her embodiment has failed her in her attempts to
help herself through contraception. She experiences pain and bodily
discomfort and is therefore uncomfortable in her embodied state;
and her entire life or existence appears worthless.
Anila has two daughters and plans to be sterilised as soon as she
has a third child even if it is also a girl. She tells us that, in the village,
the desire for a male child and the happiness associated with it far
exceeds the drudgery of having too many children, and the sorrow
of bearing girls. Moreover, the opinion is also that a girl is born with
her own fate and is taken care of by God and should be accepted as
 THE BODY AS A WEAPON 141

God’s gift. The birth of a male child is however considered essential.

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

3
My own material also contradicts Agarwal (1994: 434) who concludes that
women’s concern for ‘the family’ does not extend to include the husband but is more
about other members of the family such as children, especially sons, and others.
142 LIVING THE BODY

In justifying and rationalising men’s apparent weakness, based on

their perceived capacity for hard and heavy work, as compared to
themselves, women however simultaneously assert their ability to
take a decision regarding their own bodies and reproductive health,
and also give in to the patriarchal management of female sexuality
and fertility.

EMBODIED WORK AND INTERPERSONAL RELATIONS

This section highlights the embodied work experience of three very

different kinds of women based on factors as diverse as caste, sexual
encounters and marital discord. Women negotiate their paths as
workers through the maze of caste affiliations that may contradict the
nature of work, sexual encounters that ultimately do not deliver what
they promise to and marital discord that spurs domestic violence.
Against all odds, women develop strategies that not only circumvent
imposed controls but also seek to establish their own behavioural
norms.
Work is the main strategy for survival, for women in the slums.
Such work includes household tasks, but more significantly involves
wage labour or work for additional income outside the home. Work
takes on different meanings for women, depending on the level
of economic deprivation, number of children, husband’s income,
nature of the household (nuclear or extended), and so on.4 It is also
not always within the woman’s purview of rights that she is able
to work or get work of her choice. Her ability to work is therefore
contingent on several associated factors. Women are in control of
their working lives to the extent possible in their engagement with
work, but often express a desire for different kinds of work. They
may be discontented with the kind of work they do, but nevertheless
extract a tremendous sense of self-worth from the fact that they aspire
to work, they like to work, they find work of one kind or another and
are able to achieve some comfort and success in their everyday lives.

4
In a village in rural Maharashtra, Kemp discovers that women view themselves as
hard workers in their everyday lives. ‘We work like bullocks’, they tell Kemp who
concludes that bullocks provide a model of women’s work activities because they are
major work animals in dry farm areas (Kemp 1998: 217–8).
 THE BODY AS A WEAPON 143

Hence, they contribute to family income, to the education, health

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

The Dilemmas of Work

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

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

I have to pacify him and feed him and get some money out of him
for expenditure. In the last few months, he has started earning less,
so the problems and fights have re-started over money. I have to
get my daughter married, in a few years, so we have to save for
that. But he doesn’t seem to be too bothered.

By stating her willingness to give in to her husband’s sexual demands,

Savita strategically negotiates the release of money that serves her
practical interests, that is, money to buy food for the children and
herself.
 THE BODY AS A WEAPON 145

There is a commitment to work and a disenchantment when work

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

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

caste affiliations. This is however not always the case and there
can be an acute conflict between caste and work which results in
psychological discomfort and even trauma. Sunila, from Bihar, is 32
years old and has three children. She works as a domestic help as her
husband is a rickshaw puller and does not earn much but she is fed
up with the work she has to do. With tears rolling down her cheeks,
in a voice choked with anguish and sorrow, she says she has worries
on her mind all the time, ‘I worry about the home (chinta rehti hai;
ghar ki chinta)’, ghar symbolising the home, the hearth, the family.
She adds:

I go to work because of great helplessness (mazburi). In my caste,

I have been brought up not to touch anyone’s dirty dishes but I am
forced to wash other people’s dishes (Neech kaam karna pad raha
hai. Main mari ja rahi hoon). It is killing me. I have been given so
much love and affection in my childhood but now I have to do this
work. So much poverty is not there in my family (either natal or
in-laws’ house).

Sunila would rather die than work in the mandi. If someone back
home were to learn she is a domestic helper, she says, they would
penalise her family. Earlier, her husband ran a small restaurant and
they had reasonable earnings. She could afford to spend money
on various ceremonies, including essential rites of passage for her
children, like the hair tonsure (mundan) and sacred thread (janeyu)
ceremonies. ‘If my husband was OK (sahi), I would be able to have an
easy life. Because of my husband, I have to suffer. Sometimes he has a
job, sometimes not. This is my worry. He gives me all the money but
it is very little.’ Moreover, she adds, he is not bothered whether it is
enough or not. She says, ‘I have to send money home also. What will
they think? We have been in Delhi for so long but have nothing to
our name. We are so poor and my worry for the home is driving me
crazy (ghar ki chinta dimag kharab kar rahi hai).’ Sunila remembers her
relatively well-off childhood and youth, so different from her present
status. In the village, there is a different kind of worry, whether the
labourer will come to work on the land or not. ‘But in my present
life, my head aches thinking of all the issues,’ she says.
The multiplicity of Sunila’s everyday experience results in her
experience of shame and dishonour due to the conflict between her
caste position and the nature of the work she has to do. Her anguish
and despair do not however absolve her of her relationship with her
 THE BODY AS A WEAPON 147

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

Sexuality, Work and Resistance

The malleability of postcolonial habitus, embedded as it is in social

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

6
In this narrative, I have retained the name given to me by Parvati and protected
her original name.
148 LIVING THE BODY

name of a goddess, Shiva’s consort) is an assumed name. She tells

us that she was named Parvati by the man who first bought her. I
encounter Parvati suddenly, I do not know her, nor have I heard
anything about her, so I do not seek her out. She walks into the
hutment where I am conducting interviews with some women. It
appears that there is an electricity problem in the slum and the Delhi
Electricity Board has suddenly cut off all power. Parvati stands at the
door and harangues the women about their inaction in having the
power restored. She berates them for their lack of action and tells
them that unless they march to the electricity office and threaten the
officials with dire consequences, there will be no electricity. Parvati’s
bodily stance, voice and tone indicate a militant woman, aggressive,
fearless and articulate. She motivates the women to action by arguing
that the ‘sarkar’ (government) cannot suddenly remove electricity:
‘They should have given it to us long ago, if they do not give it to us
by this evening, we’ll break all the wires.’
In her long narrative about her life, which is primarily dominated
by her relationships with different men, Parvati emphasises aspects of
her life when she was not subjugated—by men, her predicament or
circumstances—but was able, each time to circumvent the imposed
control. She is conscious of her agency that she has exercised, and
emphasises her ability to contend with different men and difficult
circumstances. Her narrative is dominated by her experience of
repeated rape or attempts at rape and comprises the subjective
experience of her everyday life. Parvati emphasises her attempts at
being strong and fierce. She says she has fought with the police and
the local representative (vidhayak) on various issues. She says that she
does not have a husband, and is not dependent on anyone. She also
does not have any work and that she has been told that she talks too
much. She seems to think that this is the reason why she is out of
work. Parvati narrates her life history over several days, appearing to
realise the extraordinary nature of her life experiences and speaking
with passion, depth and emotion.
She begins by telling me that she was kidnapped from a small
town in Uttar Pradesh when she was child, (studying in Grade 3) and
was sold thereafter for the purpose of prostitution. She, however, ran
away from there when she was seven years old. At the age of 14,
she married a 35/40-year-old man who harassed her and did not
give her food. Parvati found work as a domestic help to feed her
children. She slowly got fed up of her life and ran away only to return
 THE BODY AS A WEAPON 149

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

Later, he took her to a property dealer where her thumb impression

was taken. This property dealer and his brother encouraged her
husband to consume alcohol. These men then raped her and one of
them even bit her breast. She grew increasingly fed up of her life and
left after informing her husband and her mother-in-law.
Parvati then took up a job as a Security Officer with the local
police as she had managed to make contacts with them while with
her previous husband. Later, her husband visited her but refused
her any monetary support and called her a woman of bad character
(badchalan). She managed to save some money with her job to buy
a small hutment (jhuggi) but found it difficult to stay alone. Often,
she would run to a temple where she found other women staying.
She stayed there for about a year until a mahatma threw her out.
Ironically, this man too had tried raping her, but she had managed
to escape by slapping him. Later, she had tried reporting the incident
to a journalist, to unravel the misconduct happening at the temple, ‘a
place of worship,’ as she said. However, she was asked to first lodge
an FIR at the police station. Before she could file a complaint, the
mahatma from the temple set the police on her, fabricating a case
that she had forced herself upon him. She stated that she decided
to face the police instead of running from them and told them the
whole story. She returned to her jhuggi thereafter and resumed her
work as a security person.
At this point, Parvati said that she wanted to kill herself because
she was fed up with her life and tried to get run over by a train. She
was however saved by a police officer who brought her back to her
jhuggi. The jhuggi was in a bad condition and needed repair. The
police officer not only gave her money to have her jhuggi repaired
but he also gave her clothes. He thereafter took her to his place. They
grew fond of each other and even went out together. People objected
to their relationship, saying that she (Parvati) was a bad character.
But he continued their relationship and took her to his brother’s
place to refer her for a job. His brother tried raping her and she
complained to the police officer. He retorted that she should have
slapped him. He took her from there to a nearby housing colony
where they stayed for some time. Parvati confesses that she loves him
and always will and adds that this man really cared about her and
gave her a lot in material terms. She spent some of the best moments
of her life with him: ‘Those eight years were the best years of my
life’. This man now stays elsewhere and is married to a woman of his
 THE BODY AS A WEAPON 151

community (Muslims), ‘If I phone him, his wife abuses me and if I

trouble him he says, that if I continue to trouble him, he would kill
himself,’ Parvati said. She has rented out her jhuggi and lives off the
rent, which is around Rs 1,200 and enough for her survival.
Parvati’s language suggests agency and well-being. She appears to
be independent and reflects a sense of purpose and self-reliance. Her
life has made her completely focused on survival and she expects the
same from other women asserting that women who cannot face life
head-on and resist oppression are worthless.

I do not trust anybody, not even a woman. I have fought with life
and death. I will not make any friend now. A woman should keep
her faith and not lose courage. I fought with evil; that is why my
life is very precious. If a woman is in distress, I am the first one
to help. A woman who is not ready to take challenges is good
for nothing.

Parvati also appears to be disillusioned with men in general.

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

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

the fact that she ‘kept’ a policeman as a companion. It was perhaps

the ultimate act of resistance: publicly keeping a policeman as her
lover and companion. It was a complete transgression of all norms
and achieved a dual objective with a single stroke: her protection by
a man with an official and honourable face as well as her own goal
of being independent and free. The uses of the body have however
resulted in her subsequently seeking an identity above or outside her
embodied life as a sexual object, as it were, by pursuing a ‘good’ life
in the service of the community.
In this manner, although Parvati says that she is now considered a
woman of bad character (badchalan) because she does whatever she
wants to, she is quick to point out her role in service to the community
and her restoration of her ‘good name’. Through performing a service
and role that will bring recognition and acceptance, Parvati finds
comfort and final acceptance. She has also succeeded in projecting
herself as she would like to be seen and understood: as a community
person, working for the upliftment of women, a do-gooder as well
as a force to contend with. The other women told me that when
Parvati walks into the local police station, the policemen look scared
and start locking up the place because before they can react, she
flings the choicest abuses at them, threatens them, then tells them
the problem and leaves with an ultimatum that often includes death
to the policemen. She certainly has a presence in the community and
says, with some pride and satisfaction:

I am now much better off than what my earlier situation was. I fell
but I have been saved. I never thought I would be able to stand
up again. I never told anyone that I am a mother. People used to
hide their children from me but now I work in the service of the
community. I have earned a name for myself. Everyone knows me,
you can ask anyone.

Parvati emphasises her work for the community, which has restored
the more socially desirable ‘good character’ and social recognition to
her on which her identity now seems to rest. In her eventual search
for social acceptability, she falls back on the strategy of working for
the greater common good which will bring her more honour, status
and acceptability and eventual recognition for being more than a
mere life—a person. Thus, it is within the same social and public
domain which is the source of her rejection that she ultimately finds
acceptance and legitimacy.
 THE BODY AS A WEAPON 153

Sexuality however is central to Parvati’s experience of her life, her

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

The Drudgery of Work and Marriage

Marriage is not however only about work, resistance and survival in a

life dominated by the vicissitudes of everyday struggle. Marriage may
also end in divorce as it did for Shahnaz, a 19-year-old woman who
divorced her husband after two and a half years. She was married
at the age of 15 and has a three-year-old daughter and now lives
with her parents. She was born in Delhi where they have lived since

7
I am grateful to Niraja Gopal Jayal for the formulation of this point.
154 LIVING THE BODY

when she can remember. They are four sisters and two brothers; two
of her older sisters are married, one brother is unemployed while
her younger sister and brother are very young. She is working as a
domestic help and earns around Rs 1,000 every month.
Shahnaz was married on the recommendation of one of her
neighbours who often used to watch her while she returned from
work. They suggested a Bengali Muslim boy whose family, she said,
lied to her parents regarding their whereabouts. They claimed to
stay in Delhi before marriage while two months after marriage they
took her to a village where they lived in rented accommodation. She
added that she was very naïve before marriage and had absolutely no
idea about what would follow. Her sister had explained to her at the
time of marriage that she should totally comply with her husband’s
wishes. She was scared to leave her natal home after marriage which
she communicated to her father and he sent her younger brother
along. On the first night, her husband persuaded her to relieve him
from the customary payment made to the bride in Muslim marriages.
She said, mehar bakshwali, indicating her awareness of the exploitation
she experienced immediately on marriage.
Shahnaz’s ex-husband made her work in the fields from eight in
the morning until six in the evening. He was suspicious about her
behaviour and used to beat her. Her mother-in-law also used to hit
her with a stick. Her father-in-law had died long ago and Shahnaz
says her mother-in-law has engaged in sex-work since then. She slept
with men in the jungle and earned through the trade. Her sister-in-
law stayed with them and followed the same practice. This woman’s
first marriage ended in a divorce while her second husband died.
Shahnaz stated that her sister-in-law roamed around with men, even
at night. One of the men she stated also approached her saying that,
if she needed Rs 350, she should accompany him to the jungle. She
complained to her husband but, instead of listening to her, he hit
her and accused her of lying. He did not also heed to her complaint
about his sister and instead beat her up.
Shahnaz says that a woman marries for her husband’s support and
not that of her parents-in-law or sister-in-law. Her husband however
was not bothered about her and used to hit her. He was under the
influence of his mother whom he blindly supported. She tried to
bring her husband to Delhi where she explained that both of them
could work but he never listened to her. Once she did manage to
get him to Delhi but his mother came to get him back. He earned
 THE BODY AS A WEAPON 155

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

refuge as she expects her affinal family to reclaim her. The point of
running away is then a ploy primarily to express her resistance to the
oppression she experiences in the home. She says that her in-laws did
not come to get her and she registered a case for divorce in the court.
However, on receiving the notice from the court, people from her
husband’s village came and with the intervention of the village leader
(pradhan), it was decided that Shahnaz would give them another
chance. Consequently, she returned to her affinal family. Shahnaz
says, ‘Everything remained the same, in fact those people also started
troubling me for dowry. They used to indulge in sex work themselves
but called me a sex worker.’ She ran away from her husband’s house
a second time and this time she decided to take a divorce. The whole
legal procedure was very difficult and her husband’s family challenged
Shahnaz against divorce. Her husband’s elder brother threatened to
kill her but she was determined and claims that she even hit the elder
brother in court.
Narrating the incidents of the past she stated that her in-laws were
very cruel; they once hung her naked from the ceiling fan and beat
her. She was made to work in the fields from morning till evening
in the sun. She was not given enough to eat and she fainted in the
fields very often. On a visit to her daughter, Shahnaz’s mother was
so angry on seeing her daughter’s situation that she slapped her
son-in-law. Her mother was proud that Shahnaz has studied till
Grade 5, and that she could have worked, but she spoilt her life by
getting her married.
Shahnaz herself is fiercely independent, evident from the fact that
she did not go to her sister’s home despite the problems that she was
facing and was now feeding her mother and daughter by working as
a domestic help. She however regrets the fact that she does not have
a son who would have been a strong support to her and adds that one
has to work hard for a girl and in this manner perceives her daughter
as a burden. In fact, her future is directly linked to her daughter’s
future. She tells us she would re-marry only if the man earns well
and if he agrees to take care of her daughter. She would want him to
deposit some monetary amount for her daughter’s marriage before
she consents to her own marriage with him. For Shahnaz, marriage,
although experientially disappointing with excessive violence and
oppression, remains critical to her sense of well-being as an institution
that has full social and public approval because she sees in it that
space that contributes to her support, well-being and fulfilment.
 THE BODY AS A WEAPON 157

EMBODIMENT, SEXUALITY AND IDENTITY

Sexuality, as a contradictory and conflicting experience, is central to

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

Tamanna (married, late twenties), a tailor working from home,

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

Breasts and the thing down below (neeche ki cheez), If these are not
there, a woman cannot exist (janani kuchh bhi nahin hai).’
The most significant comment on woman’s perception of her
embodied identity is that, the uterus (bacchadaani) is the most
important part of woman’s embodiment. ‘No one acknowledges us
without that (uske bina koi puchta hi nahin). We spend money on that.
If you do not have that, no one will marry you. A woman is recognized
by that (yahi to aurat ki pehchan hai)’. Woman is recognised by her
ability for childbearing and woman’s identity is therefore perceived
in relation to that aspect of her everyday life. As also are hands, the
most important for all kinds of work, which is crucial to their self-
definitions. The feet are similarly important, to walk with, ‘as to
work, one has to walk first’. Most significantly, more than aspects
of their own embodiment, women value their husband’s body for its
utilitarian purpose. For example, Sunila, the upper caste woman who
resents her lower caste occupation of washing dirty dishes, has a low
income generating husband but wants to see him remain healthy and
fit, ‘What is there in my body? If the hands and legs stay good, it is
good. I don’t care if something happens to me, my husband should
stay fine.’ Moreover, she is not sure if she will ever get well, but she
wants her husband to keep going so that he can continue to feed
her children. There is in a sense a devaluation of aspects of woman’s
embodiment due to her inability to overcome her sometimes difficult
and oppressive material conditions. The burden of poverty compels
woman to believe that their husband’s body has greater value than
their own due to their apparent ability to undertake ‘heavy’ work,
which they are themselves unable to do, as well as men’s perceived
role as the main providers for the family.
The body is also viewed as a passport to attaining something as
valuable as a marriage partner. For example, Heena had thought, at
the time of her marriage, that if her face is nice, she would be consid-
ered beautiful. She thinks this did not happen because she ended up
with an ordinary partner thus indicating a lack of embodied perfec-
tion in herself. Phoolmani, with a squint in one eye, who works as a
domestic help, is very astute in surmising in this context that desire
alone cannot lead woman to fruition so that there is no point in hav-
ing a desire for something (a suitable partner) if one does not have
the means (a beautiful face) or the resources (wealth) to acquire it.
Among young adolescent, single and married women, who are
newly married, and have very young children, the body acquires a
 THE BODY AS A WEAPON 159

symbolic status of auspiciousness and fulfilment that must be visible

and in a sense flaunted in the community. ‘Using lipstick and filling
vermilion in the central parting of the hair (lipstick lagaana aur
maang bharna)’ are the two single most important activities of daily
adornment. One young married woman says, ‘I have many pimples
and they are making it difficult for me to live’. She is therefore
concerned about getting rid of her pimples. They enjoy wearing
gold jewellery but they realise it is not in their fate to wear such
ornaments. They also feel that breasts look nice, ‘ladki ko shobha dete
hain’ and that flat-chested women look like eunuchs (hijras). There
is of course a celebration of not only their femininity in their use
of make-up, their acknowledgement of their husbands’ appreciation
of such make-up, but also an awareness of their sexuality in their
reference to hijras or eunuchs who are socially considered sexless.
(Adult women also referred to hijras as being those who are less
feminine women and therefore, useless in the eyes of men.) But more
importantly, it was the observation of these young women that it
was ultimately not just looks that mattered but one’s ability to work:
‘dekhne mein bhi sundar ho aur kaam mein bhi’, that is, a woman must
not only be beautiful to look at but also excel in the work she is able
to do, that emphasises the significance of work in the lives of even
these young women especially in their husbands’ homes.
Malti, 21-years-old and married for three years, emphasises the
importance of work in a woman’s life:

In my in-laws’ home, everyone respects me a great deal. I do all the

work. I never give them a chance to say anything. I like living in the
village very much: plenty of milk, clarified butter, buttermilk, and
the greenery. But the most important thing that I like in my life is
work and earning my livelihood.

She eagerly provided a detailed account of all the housework and

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

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

Women also experience a sense of shame in front of the children

who are often present, though asleep, during these sexual encounters.
 THE BODY AS A WEAPON 161

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

CONCLUDING COMMENTS

Women’s self-worth in the slum emerges from a social identity

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

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

8
Bina Agarwal has also argued that ‘the absence of overt protest’ in her material
does not however indicate ‘an absence of questioning inequality’ (Agarwal 1994: 431).
The possibilities for agential consideration and action are in a sense always open.
 THE BODY AS A WEAPON 163

and effectiveness of collective action. Often, resistance by groups is

emphasised as if it is of more importance, and has more validity,
than resistance by individuals. But resistance is not only effective
when it is a group-based or collective activity, or when it is organised
into a social movement. Individuals engage in acts of resistance,
recognisable through the voices and practices of everyday life, and
these are important to ensure their well-being. It is however not
always possible to indicate the extent to which agency attains desired
results although its immediate gains for women are undeniable. We
move, in the next chapter, to an understanding of the complexities
underlying the concept of resistance and the implications this has for
woman’s agency in everyday life.
 6
APORIAI OF RESISTANCE1

I n this concluding chapter, I examine the emancipatory possibilities

of resistance, as a tool and a strategy, by women in urban,
contemporary India. I also seek to establish the quality and power of
resistance, as two sides of the same coin, that enables possibilities even
as it forecloses them, allows engagement with the operation of power
and simultaneously prevents the containment of power. I further argue
that, in this sense, the dual characteristic of resistance, symbolising
both agency and loss, is not a negative phenomenon that may suggest
the eventual voicelessness and despair of the gendered subject. In
fact, taking recourse to Derrida’s theory of aporias (Derrida 1993),
I seek to present resistance as an enabling construct, a state of being
in an ‘impasse’ which in a positive sense, allows the ‘impossible
movement of traversing—without crossing—the ultimate border’
(Wang 2005: 45).2
The stories of women in everyday life express the experience of
womanhood, embodiment and identity through voice, emotion and
bodily hexis. In their telling of their lives, there is an underlying
emphasis on both compliance and resistance and how these together
shape women’s identities and lives in particular and varied ways.

1
Aporias, or more correctly, aporiai, always in the plural, was used by Aristotle
in Metaphysics. Younis refers to ‘impossibility but also in relation to possibility’,
‘on bringing puzzlement, perplexity, or reflection…to the level of awareness, and
keeping them there, so to speak, so that the way forward may become clearer for
the understanding’ (Younis 2007: 4). In one passage alone, Aristotle refers to twelve
significant aspects of aporiai (ibid.: 2).
2
Aporia, in Greek, suggests ‘the state of impasse, nonpassage or logical contradiction
that can never be permanently resolved, a state of constant dilemma with no general or
final solution’ (Wang 2005: 45).
 APORIAI OF RESISTANCE 165

Without any attempt to valorise acts of resistance in everyday lie,

it is imperative to acknowledge women’s attempts at resistance as
symbolic of their awareness of their condition and of their struggle
to deal with it if not to overcome it. Women negotiate, strategise,
manipulate, revolt and rebel against situations, events and persons
in their everyday lives in the family and in the workplace. I agree
with Nita Kumar that protest appears as ‘evasive tactics, counter-
cultures of language, genres of song and dance, myths full of double
entendres, private correspondence and diary writing’ among other
forms (Kumar 1994: 3). At the same time, women’s socio-economic
position often restrains them from open rebellion as does their socially
internalised respect for family and community honour.3 Resistance,
as a concept, therefore necessarily implies that power is redefined
and reconstituted as indeed is the subjectivity of the resisting subject
(Kalpagam 2000: 170). Moreover, women’s multiple subjectivities
are marked by difference and resistance and complicity then do not
merely refer to types of agencies but, as Moore so insightfully remarks,
to ‘forms or aspects of subjectivity’ (Moore 1994a: 50). Women’s
resistance to the dominant habitus is therefore dependent on their
variously marked and changing subjectivity which, at different times,
will influence the mode, intensity and transformatory potential of
resistance differently.
Bourdieu attempts to locate the exercise of power within an
apparent neutrality that is both enabling and restricting or constrain-
ing for women. Writing about the Kabyle society, he perceptively
comments:

Even when women do wield the real power…they can exercise it

fully on condition that they leave the appearance of power, that
is, its official manifestation, to the men; to have any power at all,
women must make do with the unofficial power of the eminence
grise, a dominated power which is opposed to official power in
that it can operate only by proxy, under the cover of an official
authority, as well as to the subversive refusal of the rule-breaker, in
that it still serves the authority it uses. (Bourdieu 1977: 41)

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

Such a perspective includes both the forms of oppression that women

may experience as well as points to the possibilities for strategising
and the skilful manoeuvring they may engage in to achieve their
goals. Although it further indicates that, the power women exercise
is eventually subsumed by patriarchy and indicates the presence of
agency within power, as it were. In this sense, ‘resistance is found in
the social ontology from the start’ (Hoy 1999: 19). Power cannot
work without resistance and in fact needs it ‘to spread itself more
extensively through the social network’ (ibid.). This is the paradox of
resistance, as Bourdieu has pointed out, that not only disrupts power
but also serves its ends.
There are definite constraints in exercising agency and these
constraints are not necessarily located outside our embodied selves;
in fact, more dangerously, they may be accepted by women as being
their essential defining characteristics. ‘Symbolic violence’ therefore
‘accomplishes itself through an act of cognition and of miscognition
that lies beyond—or beneath—the controls of consciousness and
will, in the obscurities of the schemata of habitus that are at once
gendered and gendering (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992: 172). It
is in this sense that gender domination consists ‘in an imprisonment
effected via the body’ (ibid.). It is through the dominant postcolonial
habitus that the structure which has produced it governs practice. In
other words, power operates from within us and has taken root in
the form of general dispositions in our ways of thinking, knowing
and seeing so that we perceive as we are meant to and thus know of
our embodied selves as we are expected to. This is a deterministic
view of the function of power and it therefore becomes imperative
to understand its functions in a very subtle and non-intrusive manner
so that in fact it is possible that one is hardly aware that one is in its
grip. Bourdieu notes, ‘the main mechanism of domination operates
through the unconscious manipulation of the body’ (Bourdieu and
Eagleton 1992: 115). It is through forms of symbolic violence
that culture as systems of meaning and symbols are imposed and
experienced as legitimate. This is possible through the process of
misrecognition through which ‘power relations are perceived not for
what they objectively are but in a form which renders them objective
in the eyes of the beholder’ (Bourdieu and Passeron 1977: xiii). This
form of domination which is symbolic in nature is not imposed but
‘is something you absorb like air, something you don’t feel pressured
by; it is everywhere and nowhere, and to escape from that is very
difficult’ (Bourdieu and Eagleton 1992: 115).
 APORIAI OF RESISTANCE 167

Foucault, whose work on power has been found constructive by

feminists as much as it has vexed them, considers power a positive
rather than a repressive force. It is productive to the extent that it
does not exist in the form of interdictions or prohibitions but is
‘hidden’ in the social body. In fact it exists nowhere except in the
minds of individuals ‘under the form of representation, acceptance
or interiorization’ (Foucault 1988: 119). In that sense it is not
experienced as oppressive and because it is productive, it may even
be pleasurable. It is therefore important for woman to view and
construct her embodied self on what she considers her own terms and
not as defined by some external agency. It is also of considerable
significance that woman experiences her embodiment, and her
manipulation of it, in terms which are seen as being profitable to her
physical and emotional well-being contributing to her self-esteem
and body image in positive ways. The body and its discontents, are
therefore never experienced as oppressive in themselves. They acquire
that quality of oppression only in relation to significant others and to
the politics of location in women’s lives.
Control is then exercised in everyday life not through repression
but, following Foucault, through what Lois McNay terms ‘more
invisible strategies of normalization’ in accordance with his argument
that individuals regulate themselves through an inner search for
‘truth’ which lies in their innermost identity. This identity is clearly
one’s sexual identity which is the ‘linchpin of normalizing strategies’
(McNay 1994: 98) to the extent to which individuals fail to recognise
the constructed nature of their sexuality and are therefore unable to
see the possibilities for change. Socialisation processes, are not the
only means through which normalising strategies effectively function.
Women are continuously exposed to an array of social and cultural
ideologies and practices that impact their identities in multiplex ways
and women are simultaneously engaged in subverting these social
practices through negotiation, strategising and contestation.4

4
Veena Das has argued that ‘the sense of being a woman is internalised’ through
the double perspective of ‘the body as object and the body as subject’ (Das 1988:
193). The socialisation process in Indian society reflects the manner in which the
bodies of men and women are socially viewed, thereby assigning different values to
the masculine and the feminine body (ibid: 193ff.). A young woman’s experience
of her gendered identity therefore rests very much on her body, both in terms of
body image and her experience of her embodiment in her relations with others in
everyday life. Gender is therefore not only perceived and experienced but also ‘deeply
inscribed on our bodies’ (McNay 1999: 98), and thereby on our lived experience. Also
168 LIVING THE BODY

Power and resistance are in this way coextensive. Whenever power

is exercised, resistance will follow: ‘As soon as there is a power rela-
tion, there is a possibility of resistance. We can never be ensnared by
power: we can always modify its grip in determinate conditions and
according to a precise strategy’ (Foucault 1988: 123). Such a sharp
strategy is only possible however only when power is recognised for
what it is. When power is not imposed and has a ‘capillary form of
existence’ in so far as ‘power seeps into the very grain of individu-
als, reaches right into their bodies, permeates their gestures, their
posture, what they say, how they learn to live and work with other
people’ (Foucault 1980: 217), then, the extent to which resistance
can either be very specific, organised or even articulated, needs to be
considered.5
The problem with Foucault’s theory of power lies precisely in his
discussion of resistance which remains embedded in a ‘reactive’ model
of agency rather than as a form of transformative practice. If, how-
ever, we consider resistance as productive agency, then, individual
responses and formulations serve as the beginning of transforma-
tive practice and are not without purpose. It follows that we seek
to understand the sources from where resistance is drawn. Do these
sources lie within individuals, in their minds and hearts embedded
in their consciousness? Or are such acts of resistance drawn from
external conditions and sources that serve to initiate our ability to
resist? No doubt, there are many deep wells from where we may draw
our ‘oppositional spirit and project’ (Bordo 1997: 190). These wells
or depths of our existence are located in our lived experience of our
everyday worlds and therefore the nature of resistance will vary
depending on social position, privilege and status and other assets
that serve as markers of inclusion and exclusion. More importantly,

see Dube (1988), Lateef (1990), Bhatty (1988), Chanana (1988), Ram (1992), for
considerations of normalising strategies used by the family in everyday life to socialise
young girls into normative truths of gender identity.
5
Butler (2004) seeks to provide a nuanced understanding of Foucault’s efforts
to delineate agency in the subject’s struggle against the imposition of power through
the body. She argues that Foucault finds the ‘seeds of transformation’ in the ‘life of
passion that lives and thrives at the borders of recognisability, which still has the
limited freedom of not yet being false or true, which establishes a critical distance on
the terms that decide our being’ (2004: 193). See Butler (2004) for her understanding
of Foucault’s approach which appears to be contingent, in this formulation, upon
the development of bodily passion that is itself created by the power acted upon
the body.
 APORIAI OF RESISTANCE 169

however, resistance will depend on the internal experience of individu-

als and their ability to understand and link this inner experience with
the external social and political reality of everyday life. This ability does
not necessarily derive from formal or non-formal systems of educa-
tion although education may help in the articulation of experience. It
is an awareness of the dominant order, of the complexities of the social
and public domain, and most significantly, of their consequences,
that enables resistance as well as its recognition. This awareness may
result from education but often has an inexplicable source that arises
more from an act of cognition and inner strength and does not seem
to have any external referent or source of inspiration.
At the same time, the dividing line between compliance and
subversion is rather thin and woman’s embodied self is often the
conflicting site of both giving in to, as well as resisting, dominant
ideologies and ways of being. Conflict is central to women’s lives,
whether or not woman is able to give expression to her desires and
views. In response to the tendency to portray women as passive,
submissive, helpless victims, feminist works examine the possibilities
of women’s agency within the limitations or constraints of discursive
power.6 Compliance and resistance are both central to women’s
everyday life experiences. It has been reiterated by Kalpagam that ‘the
ties that bind women in their lives provide both securities that impact
positively on their personhood, as well as liabilities that are often
very oppressive’ (Kalpagam 2000: 177). The family is undoubtedly
the single most important of such ties and others include those of
the sphere of intimacy and sexuality, of practical kinship relations,
of friendship, and other social ties (ibid.). Kalpagam argues that it
is only through an understanding of the trajectories of experience
in each of these domains can one understand ‘how compliant or
resistant selves are constituted’ (ibid.). None of these domains is,
however, an independent sphere so that the impact of all spheres is

6
Raheja and Gold analyse women’s oral traditions in rural Rajasthan and argue that
women’s songs and stories ‘consistently compose ironic and subversive commentaries
on the representations of gender and kinship roles found in the epic texts, in male
folklore genres, and in a good deal of everyday talk’ (Raheja and Gold 1996: 12–13);
Bacchetta examines the role of the women’s wing of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh
(RSS) in constructing ideal models for ‘powerful symbolic femininity and powerful
material womanhood’ that provide tremendous potential for resistance among its
members (Bacchetta 1994). See also Oldenburg Talwar (1990), O’Hanlon (1988,
1991).
170 LIVING THE BODY

experienced simultaneously by women in their everyday lives. Both

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

7
cf. Sunder Rajan who argues that although ‘agency’ is treated synonymously with
‘resistant agency’, it is ‘not (yet) a revolutionary term since…it is a praxis that is reactive
 APORIAI OF RESISTANCE 171

However, it is also a fact that, much as we would like social agents

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

to domination rather than one that initiates a transformation’ (Sunder Rajan 2000:
154). Contrarily, R. Jeffery and P. Jeffery make a distinction between ‘autonomy’ and
‘agency’ and argue, in the context of rural women in Bijnor district, that women are
vulnerable and it is therefore perhaps necessary to assert the significance of approaches
that recognise that they have to employ the ‘weapons of the weak’(Jeffery and Jeffery
1997). See also Jeffery (1998).
172 LIVING THE BODY

experience of aporiai ‘because it refuses the arrival of the final desti-

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

Magazines and Newspapers

Femina 1994–2007 (Selected issues).
Times of India 10 March 2002.

Books and Journals

Adkins, Lisa and Beverly Skeggs (eds). 2004. Feminism after Bourdieu. Oxford: Black-
well Publishing Ltd.
Agarwal, Bina. 1994. A Field of One’s Own. Gender and Land Rights in South Asia.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ahmad, Aijaz. 1992. In Theory. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Ahmed, S. 2000. ‘Embodying Strangers’, in Avril Horner and Angela Keane (eds),
Body Matters. Feminism, Textuality, Corporeality, pp. 85–96. Manchester:
Manchester University Press.
Alexander, J.M. and C. Mohanty. 1997. ‘Introduction: Genealogies, Legacies, Move-
ments’, in J.M. Alexander and C. Mohanty (eds), Feminist Genealogies, Colonial
Legacies, Democratic Futures, pp. xiii–xlii. New York: Routledge.
Asad, Talal. 1973. Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter. London: Ithaca Press.
Bacchetta, Paola. 1994. ‘All Our Goddesses are Armed: Religion, Resistance and
Revenge in the Life of a Hindu Nationalist Woman’, in Kamla Bhasin and Ritu
Menon (eds), Against All Odds: Essays on Women, Religion and Development from
India and Pakistan, pp. 133–56. New Delhi: Kali for Women.
Bagchi, Jasodhara (ed.). 1995. Indian Women: Myth and Reality. Hyderabad: Sangam
Books Ltd.
Bannerji, Himani. 1991. ‘Fashioning a Self: Educational Proposals for and by Women
in Popular Magazines in Colonial Bengal’, Economic and Political Weekly, 26(43):
50–60.
Bannerji, Himani. 2001a. Inventing Subjects: Studies in Hegemony, Patriarchy and
Colonialism. New Delhi: Tulika.
————. 2001b. ‘Pygmalion Nation: Towards a Critique of Subaltern Studies and
the Resolution of the Nationalist Question’, in Himani Bannerji et al. (eds), Of
Property and Propriety: The Role of Gender and Class in Imperialism and Nationalism,
pp. 34–85. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
174 LIVING THE BODY

Bartky, Sandra L. 1990. Femininity and Domination: Studies in the Phenomenology of

Oppression. London: Routledge.
Beck-Gernsheim, E. 1998. ‘On the Way to a Post-Familial Family’, Theory, Culture
and Society, 15(3–4): 53–70.
Bell, Vikki. 1999. ‘Mimesis as Cultural Survival: Judith Butler and Anti-Semitism’, in
Vikki Bell (ed.), Performatavity and Belonging, pp. 133–61. London: Sage.
Bernstein, Basil. 1996. Pedagogy, Symbolic Control and Identity: Theory, Research and
Critique. London and New York: Taylor and Francis.
Bhattacharya, M. 1994. ‘Women in Dark Times: Gender, Culture and Politics’, Social
Scientist, 22(250–51): 3–15.
Bhatty, Z. 1988. ‘Socialisation of the Female Muslim child in Uttar Pradesh’, in
K. Chanana (ed.), Socialisation, Education and Women: Explorations in Gender
Identity, pp. 231–39. New Delhi: Orient Longman Ltd.
Bordo, Susan. 1993. Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture and the Body.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
————. 1997. Twilight Zones: The Hidden Life of Cultural Images from Plato to
O.J. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Translated by Richard Nice.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
————. 1984. Distinction. A Critique of the Social Judgement of Taste. London:
Routledge.
————. 1986. ‘The Forms of Capital’, in J.G. Richardson (ed.), Handbook of Theory
and Research in the Sociology of Education, pp. 241–58. New York: Greenwood
Press.
————. 2001. Masculine Domination. Translated by Richard Nice. Cambridge
Polity.
Bourdieu, Pierre and J-C Passeron. 1977. Reproduction in Education, Society and
Culture. Translated by Richard Nice. London: Sage Publications.
Bourdieu, Pierre and Terry Eagleton. 1992. ‘In Conversation: Pierre Bourdieu and
Terry Eagleton “Doxa and Common Life”’, New Left Review, 191: 111–21.
Bourdieu, Pierre and Loic Wacquant. 1992. An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology.
Cambridge: Polity Press.
Butalia, Urvashi. 1997. ‘Abducted and Widowed Women: Questions of Sexuality and
Citizenship During Partition’, in Meenakshi Thapan (ed.), Embodiment: Essays on
Gender and Identity, pp. 90–106. Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble. London: Routledge.
————. 1997. The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection. California: University
of Stanford Press.
————. 2004. ‘Bodies and Power Revisited’, in Diana Taylor and Karen Vintges
(eds), Feminism and the Final Foucault, pp. 183–94. Urbana and Chicago:
University of Illinois Press.
Burke, Edmund. 1764. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the
Sublime and the Beautiful. London: R and J. Dodsley.
Chakravarti, Uma. 1993. ‘Whatever Happened to the Vedic Dasi? Orientalism,
Nationalism and a Script for the Past’, in Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid
(eds), Recasting Women: Essays in Colonial History, pp. 27–87. New Delhi: Kali
for Women.
————. 2003. Gendering Caste: Through a Feminist Lens. New Delhi: Popular
Prakashan.
 REFERENCES AND SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY 175

Chakravarty, Rangan and Nandini Gooptu. 2000. ‘Imagination: The Media, Nation
and Politics in Contemporary India’, in Elizabeth Hallam and Brian V. Street
(eds), Cultural Encounters: Representing ‘Otherness’, pp. 89–107. London and
New York: Routledge.
Chanana, Karuna (ed.). 1988. Socialisation, Education and Women. New Delhi: Orient
Longman.
Chanda, Ipshita. 2004. ‘Ye Dil Maange More: The Global Popular and Feminist
Practice’, in Malini Bhattacharya (ed.), Globalization, pp. 123–33, New Delhi:
Tulika Books.
Chanfrault-Duchet, Marie Francoise. 2000. ‘Textualisation of the Self and Gender
Identity in the Life-story’, in Tess Cosslett, Celia Lury and Penny Summerfield
(eds), Feminism and Autobiography: Texts, Theories, Methods, pp. 61–75. London
and New York: Routledge.
Chatterjee, P. 1993. ‘The Nationalist Resolution of the Women’s Question’, in
K. Sangari and S. Vaid (eds), Recasting Women: Essays in Colonial History,
pp. 233–53. New Delhi: Kali for Women.
Chaudhuri, Maitrayee. 1998. ‘Print Media, Advertisements and the New Indian
Woman’, Social Action (July): 239–52.
————. 1999. ‘The World of Advertisements and Globalisation: A Look at the Print
Media’, in R.M. Sethi (ed.), Globalization, Culture and Women’s Development,
pp. 239–56. Jaipur: Rawat Publications.
————. 2000. ‘Feminism in Print Media’, Indian Journal of Gender Studies, 7(2):
263–88.
————. 2001. ‘Gender and Advertisments: The Rhetoric of Globalisation’, Women’s
Studies International Forum, 24(3/4): 373–85.
Chodorow, Nancy J. 1995. ‘Gender as a Personal and Cultural Construction’, Signs
20 (3): 516–44.
Chowdhry, Prem. 1994. The Veiled Women: Shifting Gender Equations in Rural
Haryana 1880–1990. Delhi: Oxford University Press.
————. 2007. Contentious Marriages, Eloping Couples: Gender, Caste and Patriarchy
in Northern India. Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Clifford, James. 1986. ‘Introduction: Partial Truths’, in James Clifford and George
Marcus (ed.), Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, pp. 1–26.
Berkeley and Los Angeles: The University of California Press.
Coleman, J.S. 1961. The Adolescent Society. New York: The Free Press.
Conboy, Katie, Nadia Medina and Sarah Stanbury (eds). 1997. Writing on the
Body: Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory. New York: Columbia University
Press.
Cooley, Charles H. 1902. Human Nature and the Social Order. New York: Scribner.
Coward, Rosalind. 1984. Female Desire: Women’s Sexuality Today. London: Paladin.
Craik, Jennifer. 1994. The Face of Fashion: Cultural Studies in Fashion. London and
New York: Routledge.
Csordas, Thomas J. 1999a. ‘Embodiment and Cultural Phenomenology’, in Gail
Weiss and Honi Fern Haber (eds), Perspectives on Embodiment: The Intersections of
Nature and Culture, pp. 143–62. New York and London: Routledge.
————. 1999b. ‘The Body’s Career in Anthropology’, in Henrietta Moore (ed.),
Anthropological Theory Today, pp. 172–205. Cambridge: Polity Press.
———2002. Body, Meaning, Healing. Basingstoke: Palgrave, Macmillan.
176 LIVING THE BODY

Currie, Dawn. 1990. ‘Women’s Liberation and Women’s Mental Health’, in V.

Dhruvarajan (ed.), Women and Well-Being, pp. 25–39. Montreal and Kingston:
McGill-Queen’s University Press.
Das, Veena. 1988. ‘Femininity and Orientation to the Body’, in K. Chanana (ed.),
Socialisation, Education and Women: Explorations in Gender Identity, pp. 193–207.
New Delhi: Orient Longman Ltd.
————. 1995. ‘Voice as Birth of Culture’, Ethnos, 60 (3–4): 159–79.
Das, Veena and Ralph Nicholas. 1981. ‘Welfare’ and ‘Well-Being’ in South Asian
Societies’, ACLS-SSRC Joint Committee on South Asia. New York: Social Science
Research Council. Mimeo.
Davis, Kathy. 1994. Reshaping the Female Body: The Dilemma of Cosmetic Surgery.
London and New York: Routledge.
Derrida, Jacques. 1993. Aporias.Translated by Thomas Dutoit. Stanford: Stanford
University Press.
Deshpande, Satish. 1998. ‘After Culture: Renewed Agendas for the Political Economy
of India’, Cultural Dynamics, 10(2): 147–69.
————. 2003. Contemporary India: A Sociological View. New Delhi: Viking.
Dirlik, Arif. 1997. The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global
Capitalism. Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press.
Doane, Anne. 1991. Femme Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis. London and
New York: Routledge.
Dube, Leela. 1986. ‘Seed and Earth: The Symbolism of Biological Reproduction and
Sexual Relations of Production’, in Leela Dube, Eleanor Leacock and Shirley
Ardener (eds), Visibility and Power: Essays on Women in Society and Development,
pp. 22–53. Delhi: Oxford University Press.
————. 1988. ‘Socialisation of Hindu Girls in Patrilineal India’, in K Chanana (ed.),
Socialisation, Education and Women: Explorations in Gender Identity, pp. 166–92.
New Delhi: Orient Longman Ltd.
Erikson, E.H. 1968. Identity: Youth and Crisis. New York: Norton.
————. 1979. Identity: A Reissue. New York: Norton.
Faith, Karlene. 1994. ‘Resistance: Lessons from Foucault and Feminism’, in H.
Radtke and H.J. Stam (eds), Power/Gender: Social Relations in Theory and Practice,
pp. 36–66. London: Sage.
Featherstone, Mike, Mike Hepworth and Bryan Turner. 1991. The Body, Social Process
and Cultural Theory. London, Newbury Park, New Delhi: Sage.
Ferguson, A. 1997. ‘Me and My Shadows: On the Accumulation of Body-Images
in Western Society Part Two––The Corporeal Forms of Modernity’, Body and
Society, 3(4): 1–31.
Fernandes, Leela. 2000. ‘Nationalizing “the Global”: Media Images, Cultural Politics
and the Middle Class in India’, Media, Culture and Society, 22: 611–28.
Fielding, Helen. A. 2000. ‘The Sum of What She is Saying: Bringing Essentials Back
into the Body’, in Dorothea Olkowski (ed.), Resistance, Flight, Creation: Feminist
Enactments of French Philosophy, pp. 124–37. Ithaca and London: Cornell
University Press.
Foucault, Michel. 1980. Power/Knowledge. Edited by Colin Gordon. Brighton: The
Harvester Press.
————. 1988. Politics, Philosophy and Culture: Interviews and Other Writings
1977–1984. Edited with an Introduction by Lawrence D. Kritzman. Translated
by Alan Sheridan. London: Routledge.
 REFERENCES AND SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY 177

Foucault, Michel. 1991. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by
Alan Sheridan. London: Penguin Books.
Frost, Liz. 2000. Young Women and the Body: A Feminist Sociology. London: Palgrave.
Gamman, L. and Makinen, M. 1994. Female Fetishism: A New Look. New York:
Lawrence and Wishart.
Ganesh, K. 1989. ‘Seclusion of Women and the Structure of Caste’, in M. Krishnaraj
and K. Chanana (eds), Gender and the Household Domain, pp. 75–95. New
Delhi: Sage.
————. 1993. Boundary Walls: Caste and Woman in a Tamil Community. Delhi:
Hindustan.
Gedalof, Irene. 1999. Against Purity: Rethinking Identity with Indian and Western
Feminisms. London and New York: Routledge.
Geetha, V. 2002. Theorizing Feminism: Gender. Series Editor: Maithreyi Krishnaraj.
Calcutta: Stree.
Gilligan, C. 1982. In a Different Voice. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
————. 1988. ‘Prologue. Adolescent Development Reconsidered’, in C. Gilligan,
J.W. Ward, J.M. Taylor with B. Bardige (eds), Mapping the Moral Domain:
A Contribution of Women’s Thinking to Psychological Theory and Education,
pp. vii–xxxix. Harvard: Center for the Study of Gender, Education and Human
Development.
Gilligan, C., N.P. Lyons and T.J. Hanmer (eds). 1990. Making Connections: The
Relational Worlds of Adolescent Girls at Emma Willard School. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press.
Gilligan, C. 1995. ‘The Centrality of Relationship in Psychological Development:
A Puzzle, Some Evidence and a Theory’, in M. Blair and J. Holland and S.
Sheldon (eds), Identity and Diversity: Gender and the Experience of Education,
pp. 194–210. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters Ltd. in association with the Open
University.
Goffman, Erving. 1956. Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Doubleday
Inc.
Gold, Ann G. 2002. ‘New Light in the House: Schooling Girls in Rural North India’,
in Diane P. Mines and Sarah Lamb (eds), Everyday Life in South Asia, pp. 86–99.
Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
Grewal, Inderpal. 1996. Home and Harem: Nation, Gender, Empire and Cultures of
Travel Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Grewal, Inderpal and Caren Kaplan. 1994. ‘Introduction’, in Inderpal Grewal and
Caren Kaplan (eds), Scattered Hegemonies, Postmodernity and Transnational
Feminist Practices, pp. 1–33. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Grosz, Elizabeth. 1994. Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington
and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
————. 1995. Space, Time and Perversion: Essays on the Politics of Bodies. New York:
Routledge.
Guha Thakurta, Arpita. 2004. ‘Advertising and Re-construction of the Indian
Woman’, in Malini Bhattacharya (ed.), Globalization, pp. 134–46. New Delhi:
Tulika Books.
Gupta, Dipankar. 2000. Mistaken Modernity. India between Worlds. New Delhi: Harper
Collins Publishers Limited.
Harding, Sandra. 1998. Is Science Multicultural? Postcolonialisms, Feminisms, and
Epistemologies. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
178 LIVING THE BODY

Harriss, Barbara. 1992. ‘Rural Poverty in India: Micro Level Evidence’, in S. Guhan
and R.H. Cassen (eds), Poverty in India. Research and Policy, pp. 333–89.
Bombay: Oxford University Press.
Hoy, David Couzens. 1999. ‘Critical Resistance: Foucault and Bourdieu’, in Gail
Weiss and Homi Fern Haber (eds), Perspectives on Embodiment: The Intersections
of Nature and Culture, pp. 3–21. New York and London: Routledge.
Hudson, B. 1984. ‘Femininity and Adolescence’, in A. McRobbie and M. Nava (eds),
Gender and Generation, London: Macmillan.
Hughes, A. and A. Witz. 1997. ‘Feminism and the Matter of Bodies: From de Beauvoir
to Butler’, Body and Society. 3(1): 47–60.
Jackson, Cecile. 1998. ‘Rescuing Gender from the Poverty Trap’, in Cecile Jackson
and Ruth Pearson (eds), Feminist Visions of Development: Gender, Analysis and
Policy, pp. 39–64. London and New York: Routledge.
Jeffery, Patricia. 1979. Frogs in a Well: Indian Women in Purdah. London: Zed
Books.
————. 1998. ‘Agency, Activism and Agendas’, in Patricia Jeffery and Amrita Basu
(eds), Appropriating Gender: Women’s Activism and Politicized Religion in South
Asia, pp. 221–43. London and New York: Routledge.
Jeffery, Roger and Patricia Jeffery. 1997. Population, Gender and Politics. Demographic
Change in Rural North India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
John, Mary E. 1998. ‘Globalisation, Sexuality and the Visual Field’, in Mary E. John
and Janaki Nair (eds), A Question of Silence? The Sexual Economies of Modern India,
pp. 368–96. New Delhi: Kali for Women.
John, Mary E. and Janaki Nair (eds). 1998. A Question of Silence? The Sexual Economies
of Modern India. New Delhi: Kali for Women.
Joshi, Sanjay. 2001. Fractured Modernity: Making of a Middle Class in Colonial North
India. Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Kakar, Sudhir. 1988. ‘Feminine Identity in India’, in R. Ghadially (ed.), Women in
Indian Society, pp. 44–68. New Delhi: Sage.
Kalpagam, U. 2000. ‘Life Experiences, Resistance and Feminist Consciousness’, Indian
Journal of Gender Studies, 7(2): 167–84.
Kapadia, Karin. 1995. Siva and Her Sisters: Gender, Caste and Class in Rural India.
Boulder, San Francisco: Westview Press.
Kemp, Sharon. F. 1998. ‘Women as Bullocks: A Self-Image of Maharashtrian Village
Women’, in Anne Feldhaus (ed.), Images of Women in Maharashtrian Society,
pp. 217–39. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Kielmann, Karina. 1998. Barren Ground; Contesting Identities of infertile women
in Pemba, Tanzania, in Margaret Lock and Patricia A. Kaufert (eds), Pragmatic
Women and Body Politics, pp. 127–63. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Krais, Beate. 2006. ‘Gender, Sociological Theory and Bourdieu’s Sociology of Practice’,
Theory, Culture and Society 23(6): 119–34.
Kuhn, Annette. 1996. ‘The Power of the Image’, in Paul Marris and Sue Thornham,
(ed.), Media Studies. A Reader, pp. 50–54. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press Ltd.
Kumar, Anuradha. 2002. ‘Adolescence and Sexuality in the Rajasthani Context’, in
Lenore Manderson and Pranee Liamputtong (eds), Coming of Age in South and
Southeast Asia, Youth, Courtship and Sexuality, pp. 58–74. Surrey: Curzon.
Kumar, Nita. 1994. ‘Introduction’, in Nita Kumar (ed.), Women as Subjects. South
Asian Histories, pp. 1–25. Calcutta: Stree.
 REFERENCES AND SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY 179

Lamb, S. 2000. White Saris and Sweet Mangoes: Aging, Gender, and Body in North
India. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Lateef, S. 1990. Muslim Women in India: Political and Private Realities. New Delhi:
Kali for Women.
Lewis, Reina. 1996. Gendering Orientalism: Race, Femininity, Representation. London
and New York: Routledge.
Lock, Margaret and Patricia A. Kaufert. 1998. ‘Introduction’, in Margaret Lock
and Patricia A. Kaufert (eds), Pragmatic Women and Body Politics, pp. 1–27.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lovell, Terry. 2000. ‘Thinking Feminism with and against Bourdieu’, Feminist Theory,
1(1): 11–32.
————. 2003. ‘Resisting with Authority: Historical Specificity, Agency and the
Performative Self ’, Theory, Culture and Society. 20(1): 1–17.
Lury, Celia. 1996. Consumer Culture. Oxford: Polity Press.
Mahmood, Saba. 2005. Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject.
Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Mankekar, Purnima. 1999. Screening Culture, Viewing Politics: An Ethnography of
Television, Womanhood and Nation in Postcolonial India. Durham and London:
Duke University Press.
Mann, Chris. 1996. ‘Girls’ Own Story: The Search for a Sexual Identity in Times of
Family Change’, in Janet Holland and Lisa Adkins (ed.), Sex, Sensibility and the
Gendered Body, pp. 78–95. New York: St. Martin’s Press.
Martin, Emily. 2001. The Woman in the Body: A Cultural Analysis of Reproduction.
Boston: Beacon Press.
McClintock, Anne. 1992. ‘The Angel of Progress: Pitfalls of the Term “Postcolonial-
ism”’, Social Text, 31/32: 84–98.
McClintock, A. 1995. Imperial Leather. Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial
Contest. New York and London: Routledge.
McNay, Lois. 1991. ‘The Foucauldian Body and the Exclusion of Experience’,
Hypatia, 6(3): 125–39.
————. 1994. Foucault: A Critical Introduction. New York: Continuum.
————. 1999. ‘Gender, Habitus and the Field’, Theory, Culture and Society, 16(1):
95–117.
McMillin, Divya C. 2002. ‘Choosing Commercial Television’s Identities in India: A
Reception Analysis, in Continuum’, Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 16(1):
123–36.
Merleau-Ponty, M. 1962. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by C. Smith). New
York: Humanities.
Mignola, Walter. 2000. ‘(Post) Occidentalism, (Post) Coloniality, and (Post) Subaltern
Rationality’, in Fawzia Afzal-Khan and Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks (eds), The
Pre-occupation of Postcolonial Studies, pp. 86–118. Durham and London: Duke
University Press.
Mitchell, Timothy. 1988. Colonising Egypt. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Mitter, Partha. 2000. ‘The Hottentot Venus and Western Man: Reflections on the
Construction of Beauty in the West’, in Elizabeth Hallam and Brian V. Street
(eds), Cultural Encounters: Representing ‘Otherness’, pp. 35–50. London and
New York: Routledge.
Mohanty, Chandra T. 1991a. ‘Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and
Colonial Discourses, in Chandra T. Mohanty, Ann Russo and Lourdes Torres
180 LIVING THE BODY

(eds), Third World Women and The Politics of Feminism, pp. 51–80. Bloomington
and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
Mohanty, Chandra T. 1991b. ‘Introduction. Cartographies of Struggle: Third World
Women and the Politics of Feminism, in Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Ann Russo
and Lourdes Torres (eds), Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, pp.
1–47. Bloomington and Indianapolis, Indiana University Press.
————. 2002. ‘“Under Western Eyes” Revisited: Feminist Solidarity through
Anticapitalist Struggles’, Signs, 28(2): 499–535.
Moi, Toril. 1999. What is a Woman? And Other Essays. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Moore, Henrietta. 1994a. A Passion for Difference: Essays in Anthropology and Gender.
Cambridge: Polity Press.
————. 1994b. ‘The Problem of Explaining Violence in the Social Sciences’, in
Penelope Harvey and Peter Gow (eds), Sex and Violence: Issues in Representation
and Experience, pp. 138–55. London and New York: Routledge.
————. 1999. ‘Whatever Happened to Women and Men? Gender and Other
Crises in Anthropology’, in Henrietta Moore (ed.), Anthropological Theory Today,
pp. 151–71. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Mulvey, Laura. 1988. ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, in Constance Penley
(ed.), Feminism and Film Theory, pp. 57–68. London: Routledge.
Munshi, Shoma. 2001. ‘Introduction’, In Shoma Munshi (ed.), Images of the ‘Modern
Woman’ in Asia. Global media, Local Meanings, pp. 1–16. Surrey: Curzon Press.
Narayan, Uma. 2000. ‘Essence of Culture and a Sense of History: A Feminist
Critique of Cultural Essentialism’, in Uma Narayan and Sandra Harding (eds),
De-centering the Center: Philosophy for a Multicultural, Postcolonial and Feminist
World, pp. 80–100. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
Natarajan, Nalini. 1994. ‘Woman, Nation and Narration in Midnight’s Children’, in
Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan (eds), Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity
and Transnational Feminist Practices, pp. 76–89. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.
Nichter, Mark and Mimi Nichter. 1997. ‘Hype and Weight’, in Yasushi Uchiyamada
(ed.), Reading Gender. Postmodernism, Body and Marginality, pp. 111–56. Japan:
International Development Research Institute.
Niranjana, Seemanthini. 1999. ‘Off the Body: Further Considerations on Women,
Sexuality and Agency’, Indian Journal of Gender Studies, 6: 1–19.
————. 2001. Gender and Space: Femininity, Sexualization and the Female Body. New
Delhi, London and New York: Sage.
Nussbaum, Martha. 2000. Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach.
New Delhi: Kali for Women.
O’Hanlon, Rosalind. 1988. ‘Recovering the Subject: Subaltern Studies and Histories
of Resistance in Colonial South Asia’, Modern Asian Studies, 22(1): 189–224.
————. 1991. ‘Issues of Widowhood: Gender and Resistance in Colonial Western
India’, in Douglas Haynes and Gyan Prakash (eds), Contesting Power: Resistance
and Everyday Social Relations in South Asia, pp. 62–108. Delhi: Oxford University
Press.
O’Neill, John. 1985. Five Bodies. The Human Shape of Modern Society. London and
Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Oldenburg Talwar, Veena. 1990. ‘Lifestyle as Resistance: The Case of the Courtesans
of Lucknow, India’, Feminist Studies, 16 (2): 259–87.
 REFERENCES AND SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY 181

Omvedt, Gail. 1990. Violence Against Women: New Movements and New Theories.
New Delhi: Kali for Women.
Oza, Rupal. 2001. ‘Showcasing India: Gender, Geography and Globalization’, Signs,
26(4): 1067–95.
————. 2006. The Making of Neoliberal India: Nationalism, Gender and the Paradoxes
of Globalization. New Delhi: Women Unlimited.
Patel, Niti Sampat. 2001. Postcolonial Masquerade: Culture and Politics in Literature,
Film, Video and Photography. New York and London: Garland Publishing
House.
Peake, Linda and D. Alissa Trotz. 2002. ‘Feminism and Feminist Issues in the South’,
in Vandana Desai and Robert B. Potter (eds), The Companion to Development
Studies, pp. 334–38. London: Arnold.
Price, Janet and Margaret Shildrick (eds). 1999. Feminist Theory and the Body: A
Reader, New York: Routledge.
Quayson, Ato. 2000. Postcolonialism: Theory, Practice or Process? Cambridge: Polity
Press.
Raheja, Gloria Goodwin and Ann Grodzins Gold. 1996. Listen to the Heron’s
Words, Reimagining Gender and Kinship in North India. Delhi: Oxford University
Press.
Rajan, Gita and Radhika Mohanram. 1995. ‘Introduction: Locating Postcoloniality’,
in Gita Rajan and Radhika Mohanram (eds), Postcolonial Discourse and Changing
Cultural Contexts. Theory and Criticism, pp. 1–16. Westport, Connecticut:
Greenwood Press.
Ram, Kalpana. 1992. Mukkuvar Women: Gender, Hegemony and Capitalist Transfor-
mation in a South Indian Fishing Community. New Delhi: Kali for Women.
————. 1998. ‘Uneven Modernities and Ambivalent Sexualities’, in Mary E. John
and Janaki Nair (eds), A Question of Silence? The Sexual Economies of Modern
India, pp. 269–303. New Delhi: Kali for Women.
Riviere, Joan. 1986. ‘Womanliness as a Masquerade’, in V. Burgin, J. Donald and
Cora Kaplan (eds), Formations of Fantasy, London and New York: Methuen.
Rozario, Santi. 2002. ‘Poor and ‘Dark’: What is my Future? Identity Construction
and Adolescent Women in Bangladesh’, in Lenore Manderson and Pranee
Liamputtong (eds), Coming of Age in South and Southeast Asia: Youth, Courtship
and Sexuality, pp. 42–57. Surrey: Curzon.
Saadawi, Nawal E.L. 2000. ‘Why Keep Asking me about my Identity?’, in Diana
Brydon (ed.), Postcolonialism: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies,
Volume III, pp. 1328–43. London and New York: Routledge.
Said, Edward. 1979. Orientalism. New York: Random House-Vintage.
Saigol, R. 1999. ‘Homemakers and Homebreakers: The Binary Construction of
Women in Muslim Nationalism’, in S. Thiruchandran (ed.), Women, Narration
and Nation: Collective Images and Multiple Identities, pp. 89–136. New Delhi:
Vikas Publishing House.
Sangari, Kumkum and Sudesh Vaid. 1993. ‘Introduction’, in Kumkum Sangari
and Sudesh Vaid (eds), Recasting Women: Essays in Colonial History, pp. 1–26.
New Delhi: Kali for Women.
Saraswathi, T.S. 1999. ‘Adult-Child Continuity in India: Is Adolescence a Myth or
an Emerging Reality?’, in T.S. Saraswathi (ed.), Culture, Socialization and
Human Development: Theory, Research and Applications in India, pp. 213–32.
New Delhi: Sage.
182 LIVING THE BODY

Sarkar, Tanika. 1995. ‘Hindu Conjugality and Nationalism in Late Nineteenth

Century Bengal’, in Jasodhara Bagchi (ed.), Indian Women: Myth and Reality,
pp. 98–115. Hyderabad: Sangam Books.
————. 1997. ‘Scandal in High Places: Discourses on the Chaste Hindu Woman
in Late Nineteenth Century Bengal’, in Meenakshi Thapan (ed.), Embodiment:
Essays on Gender and Identity, pp. 35–73. Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Sault, Nicole. 1994. ‘Introduction: The Human Mirror’, in Nicole Sault (ed.), Many
Mirrors: Body Image and Social Relations, pp. 1–28. New Brunswick: Rutgers
University Press.
Shah, A.M. 1999. ‘Changes in the Family and the Elderly’, Economic and Political
Weekly, 34(20): 1179–82.
Shildrick, Margaret and Janet Price. 1998. ‘Introduction: Vital Signs: Texts, Bodies
and Biomedicine’, in Margaret Shildrick and Janet Price (eds), Vital Signs:
Feminist Reconstructions of the Bio/Logical Body, pp. 1–17. Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press.
Shilling, Chris. 1993. The Body and Social Theory. London, New York, Delhi: Sage.
Shohat, Ella and Robert Stam. 1994. Unthinking Eurocentrism. Multiculturalism and
the Media. London and New York: Routledge.
Shohat, Ella. 1997. ‘Post-Third-Worldist Culture: Gender, Nation and the Cinema’,
in J.M. Alexander and C. Mohanty (eds), Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies,
Democratic Futures, pp. 183–209. New York Routledge.
————. 2000. ‘Notes on the Post-Colonial’, in Fawzia Afzal-Khan and Kalpana
Seshadri-Crooks (eds), The Pre-occupation of Postcolonial Studies, pp. 126–39.
Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Shohat, Ella and Robert Stam. 1996. ‘From the Imperial Family to the Transnational
Imaginary: Media Spectatorship in the Age of Globalization’, in Rob Wilson and
Wimal Dissanayake (eds), Global/Local: Cultural Production and the Transnational
Imaginary, pp. 145–70. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Singh, Amita Tyagi and Patricia Uberoi. 1994. ‘Learning to ‘Adjust’: Conjugal Rela-
tions in Indian Popular Fiction’, Indian Journal of Gender Studies, 1(1): 94–120.
Skeggs, Beverly. 1998. Formations of Class and Gender: Becoming Respectable. London:
Sage.
Slemon, Stephen. 1994. ‘The Scramble for Post-colonialism’, in Chris Tiffin and Alan
Lawson (eds), De-scribing Empire : Post-colonialism and Textuality, pp. 15–32.
London and New York: Routledge.
Smith, Dorothy E. 1991. ‘Writing Women’s Experience into Social Science’, Feminism
and Psychology, 1(1): 155–69.
————. 1999. Writing the Social: Critique, Theory and Investigations. Toronto Uni-
versity of Toronto Press Inc.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1988. ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, in Cary Nelson
and Lawrence Grossberg (eds), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture,
pp. 271–313. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
————. 2000. ‘Foreword’, in Henry Schwarz and Sangeeta Ray (eds), A Companion
to Postcolonial Studies, pp. xv–xxii. Oxford: Blackwell.
Srilata, K. 1997. ‘A New Subject for Feminism: Print-Media, Dravidian Movement
and the Reconstitution of Readers’. Ph.D diss., University of Hyderabad.
————. 1999. ‘The Story of the ‘Up-Market’ Reader: Femina’s “New Woman” and
the Normative Feminist Subject’, Journal of Arts and Ideas, 32–33: 61–72.
 REFERENCES AND SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY 183

Steinberg, Laurence. 2003. ‘Adolescence: The Gale Encyclopedia of Psychology’.

Available online at http.//www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G2-34472200022.html
(downloaded on June 2007)
Suleri, Sara. 1992. ‘Woman Skin Deep: Feminism and the Postcolonial Condition’,
Critical Inquiry, 18 (Summer): 756–69.
Sunder Rajan, Rajeshwari. 1993. Real and Imagined Women: Gender, Culture and
Postcolonialism. New Delhi: Kali for Women.
Sunder Rajan, Rajeshwari. 2000. ‘Introduction: Feminism and the Politics of
Resistance’, Indian Journal of Gender Studies, 7(2): 153–65.
Sunder Rajan, Rajeshwari and You-Me Park. 2000. ‘Postcolonial Feminism/ Postcolo-
nialism and Feminism’, in Henry Schwarz and Sangeeta Ray (eds), A Companion
to Postcolonial Studies, pp. 53–71. Oxford: Blackwell.
Taylor, Sandra. 1995. ‘Feminist Classroom Practice and Cultural Politics: “Girl
Number Twenty” and Ideology’, in Janet Holland, Maud Blair and Sue Sheldon
(eds), Debates and Issues in Feminist Research and Pedagogy, pp. 3–21. Clevedon:
Multilingual Matters Limited in association with the Open University.
Thapan, Meenakshi. 1995. ‘Images of the Body and Sexuality in Women’s Narratives
of Oppression in the Home’, Economic and Political Weekly, XXX (43): 72–80.
————. 1997a. ‘Femininity and its Discontents: The Woman’s Body in Intimate
Relationships’, in Meenakshi Thapan (ed.), Embodiment: Essays on Gender and
Identity, pp. 172–93. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
————. (ed.). 1997b. Embodiment: Essays on Gender and Identity. New Delhi:
Oxford University Press.
————. 2000. ‘The Body in the Mirror: Women and Representation in Contemporary
India’, in N. Chandhoke (ed.), Mapping Histories: Essays in Honour of Professor
Ravinder Kumar, pp. 337–64. New Delhi: Tulika.
————. 2001a. ‘Adolescence, Embodiment and Gender Identity in Contemporary
India: Elite Women in a Changing Society’, Women’s Studies International Forum,
24(3/4): 359–71.
————. 2001b. ‘Gender, Body and Everyday Life’, in Nehru Memorial Museum
and Library (ed.), Gender and Nation, pp. 127–65. New Delhi: Nehru Memorial
Museum and Library.
————. 2003. ‘Marriage, Well-being and Agency among Women’, Gender and
Development, 11(2): 77–84.
————. 2004. ‘Embodiment and Identity in Contemporary Society: Femina and
the “New” Indian Woman’, Contributions to Indian Sociology, 38(3): 411–44.
————. 2005a. ‘Cultures of Adolescence: Educationally Disadvantaged Young
Women in an Urban Slum’, in Radhika Chopra and Patricia Jeffery (eds),
Educational Regimes in Contemporary India, pp. 199–229. New Delhi: Sage
Publications.
————. 2005b. ‘Introduction: “Making Incomplete”: Identity, Women and the
State’, in Meenakshi Thapan (ed.), Transnational Migration and the Politics of
Identity, pp. 23–62. New Delhi: Sage.
————. (ed.). 2005c. Transnational Migration and the Politics of Identity. Volume 1
of Women and Migration in Asia. New Delhi: Sage.
————. 2006a. ‘Habitus, Performance and Women’s Experience: Understanding
Embodiment and Identity in Everyday Life’, in Roland Lardinois and Meenakshi
Thapan (eds), Reading Pierre Bourdieu in a Dual Context: Essays from India and
184 LIVING THE BODY

France, pp. 199–229. London, New York, New Delhi: Routledge, Taylor and
Francis.
Thapan, Meenakshi. 2006b. ‘“Docile” Bodies, “Good” Citizens or “Agential Subjects?”
Pedagogy and Citizenship in Contemporary India’, Economic and Political Weekly,
XLI(39): 4195–4203.
————. 2006c. ‘Marriage, Well-being and Agency among Women’ in Equity
Foundation (ed.), Women Struggle for Existence, pp. 78–83. UNDP-TAHA.
————. 2007. ‘Islamophobia and the Veil: Religion, Gender and Identity in
Transnational Contexts’, paper presented at an international workshop on
The Nation State, Embodied Practices and the Politics of Identity, Delhi School of
Economics, New Delhi, March 1–2.
Tiemersma, Douwe. 1989. Body Schema and Body Image: An Interdisciplinary and
Philosophical Study. Amsterdam: Swets and Zeitlinger.
Tiffin, Chris and Alan Lawson. 1994. ‘Introduction: The Textuality of Empire’, in
Chris Tiffin and Alan Lawson (eds), De-scribing Empire: Post-colonialism and
Textuality, pp. 1–11. London and New York: Routledge.
Trinh T. Minh-Ha. 1989. Woman, Native, Other: Writing, Postcoloniality and Feminism.
Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
————. 1991. When the Moon Waxes Red: Representation, Gender and Cultural
Politics. New York and London: Routledge.
Turner, Bryan. (1984) 1996, 2nd Edition. The Body and Society: Exploration in Social
Theory. New York, London, New Delhi: Sage.
Uberoi, Patricia. 1998. ‘The Diaspora comes Home: Disciplining Desire in DDLJ’,
Contributions to Indian Sociology, 32(2): 305–35.
————. 2001. ‘A Suitable Romance? Trajectories of Courtship in Indian Popular
Fiction’, in Soma Munshi (ed.), Images of the ‘Modern Woman’ in Asia. Global
media, Local Meanings, pp. 169–87. Surrey: Curzon Press.
————. (ed.). 1996. Social Reform, Sexuality and the State. New Delhi: Sage.
Verma, Suman and T.S. Saraswathi. 2002. ‘Adolescence in India: Street Urchins
or Silicon Valley Millionaires?’, in B. Bradford Brown, Reed W. Larson and
T.S. Saraswathi (eds), The World’s Youth. Adolescence in Eight Regions of the
World, pp. 105–40. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Viswanathan, Gauri. 1989. Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India.
London: Faber and Faber.
Walkerdine, Valerie. 1990. Schoolgirl Fictions. New York: Verso.
Wang, Hongyu. 2005. ‘Aporias, Responsibility and the Impossibility of Teaching
Multicultural Education’, Educational Theory, 55(1): 45–59.
Wazir, R. (ed.). 2000. The Gender Gap in Basic Education. New Delhi: Sage.
Wolf, Gita. 1991. ‘Construction of Gender and Identity: Women in Popular Tamil
Magazines’, Economic and Political Weekly, 26(43): 71–73.
Young, Iris Marion. 1990. Throwing Like a Girl and Other Essays in Feminist Philosophy
and Social Theory. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
Younis, Raymond Aaron. 2007. ‘Aristotle’s Lantern: On Questioning and Perplexity:
Some Reflections in the Context of Higher Education in the 21st Century’. Paper
presented at the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain annual
conference at Oxford 30 March 2007. Available online at www.philosophy-of-
education.org/conferences/pdfs(Downloaded on August 2007)
Wilson, Elizabeth. 1990. ‘Deviant Dress’, Feminist Review: 67–74.
 Index
adolescence, xvii, xx, 26ff.
adornment of the body, 82–83,
159, 161
adulthood, 26–29, 38
advertisements, representation of
woman’s body, 29, 68, 81–87
ageing, 69, 90, 108
agency of women xviii, 4, 6–7,
9, 17, 18, 22, 29, 60, 62, 90,
98, 104, 132, 136, 141, 148,
151, 153, 160, 162, 163, 164,
166, 168, 169, 170–71. See also
embodiment
aporias, 164
aporiai, 164, 171–72
auspiciousness and fulfilment, 59,
157, 159
beauty and glamour: beauty
contest industry, 79–80, 90;
colonial ideals, 79; conventional
notions, 106, 128; as feminine
ideals, 69–75; market-driven
intervention in beauty care, 81;
sexual dimension, 83
being-in-the-body, 6
being-in-the-world, notion of, xiv,
3, 7–8, 10
biological bases of existence, xiv
body: changes, 50, 55, 60; image,
and self-presentation, 106–15;
lived and communicative, 3;
in the mirror, 93ff.; as object
and body as subject, 43–46;
relationship with objects, 82;
as a weapon, 131ff.
Bollywood, 28, 47
Bourdieu, Pierre, xiv–xv, 6–7,
10–12, 39–40, 90–91, 153,
165–66
Burke, Edmund, 73
Butler, Judith, 8–9, 107, 115,
168n5
Campbell, Naomi, 73
career aspirations and the family,
28, 38–42
caste, 2, 9, 11, 15–16, 18; and
work, relation, 145–46
child-adult continuity, 27
childbearing, xxi, 27–28, 30, 44,
57, 59, 132, 133–34, 158;
and contraception, 133–42
childhood, 26–29, 51, 57; and
adulthood, transition, 27
childlessness, 135, 137
Chomsky, 6
Clarins, 71
class and embodiment, 9, 11, 13,
16, 21, 27–28, 62, 94, 110
collective action, 163
colonialism, 22, 23
colonial stereotypes, 74
communication, 33–35, 44, 50,
66, 117
companionship, 95, 100
186 LIVING THE BODY
conflict, dilemmas and
contradictions, 40, 94, 169
consciousness, xviii, 5–6, 11, 40,
62, 106, 162, 166, 168, 170
consumption practices, xvi, 67, 70
contemporary womanhood, xiii,
xix–xx, 11, 18–25, 26, 28, 32,
36, 43, 70, 77, 85–86, 92
contestation and negotiation, 7, 9,
13, 25, 94, 98, 114, 123, 162,
167, 170
contraception, 133–42, 161
conventions. See norms and values,
tradition
Cooley, Charles H., 10
corporeal subjectivity, xiv
Cosmopolitan, 64, 67, 86, 88, 90
culture, xx, 12, 14–15–17, 20–22,
26, 27–31, 129
daughter–mother relationship,
33–34
decision-making power of women,
99, 134, 139–42, 170
Derrida, Jacques, 8, 164, 171
desire and fulfilment, 9
discursive practices, 12, 22, 111,
115–16, 169
divorce, 154, 156
domestic violence, 62, 138, 142,
155
domestic work, 60,128, 135–36,
144
domesticity and marriage, xx,
54–62
dowry, 156
drudgery, 140, 153–57
economic deprivation, xvi, 2, 132,
142
education process, 20; absence of
schooling, 28–30; access to, xvi,
28, 37; educationally advantaged
young women, 29–30, 42, 54;
educationally disadvantaged
young women, 29–30, 31,
50, 63, 93–51; and media
culture, 20
Elle, 86, 90
embodiment: changing concepts
with age and maturity,
108–09 and its discontents,
116–29; feminine aspects, 44;
fragmentation of, 80ff.;
in global economy, 69;
inferiorised, 126; and identity,
2–13, 25, 44–47, 92, 93ff., 112,
157–61;—and resistance, xviii,
xx;—and womanhood, 1ff.;—in
Femina, 64ff.; postcolonial
context, 13, 15–18, 19, 22–23,
73, 90, 116, 147, 166; and
self-image and relationships,
10, 45, 49, 94; and sexuality,
2, 133 157–61; social, cultural
and male representation, 106;
repository of sacredness and
honour, 11; respectability
and national honour of, 92;
violence and identity, 93ff.;
work and identity, 131ff.;—and
interpersonal relations, 142–57
emotional: agony, 124; bonding,
36; contentment, 102–03;
torture and torment/violence,
104–05, 117–18
emotions, 3, 4, 5, 13, 20, 89, 108,
112, 116, 171
enfranchisement, 23
equality, 66, 104
ethnicity, 2, 15, 18
exclusion and inclusion process,
15–17, 45, 75, 168
experiential reality, 5, 9, 30–32, 44,
58, 153, 156
family, family relations, xix, 2,
12, 14, 23, 25, 29–34, 37–38,

41, 50, 94, 98–101, 118, 120,
124–26, 128, 132, 170; and
career aspirations of adolescents,
28, 38–42; and construction of
self, 31; nuclear and extended,
95–97, 103–05, 126–27, 132
Fashion, 88
fashion, fashion industry, 68,
74–75, 90–91, 109–10
fashion photography, 49, 68, 75,
78, 79, 83–84, 86, 89
father–daughter relations, 33–37,
41, 105
female fantasy, 20
female gaze, 4, 49, 68, 106
Femina, embodiment and
womanhood, 64ff.
feminine dependence on male
partners, 77
feminine self, 70, 99
femininity, 11–12, 30, 38, 43–44,
48, 59, 64, 76–77, 84, 86, 116;
commodification, 24
fertility, 139–42
filial duties, 95, 97
Foucault, Michel, 116, 167–68
fragmentation and mystification,
118, 121
fragmented body and an ambivalent
identity, 80–87, 88
freedom of choice and action, 132
fundamentalism, 11
gender, gendered subjects, xvi,
xix, 4, 8, 15, 15n15, 16, 25,
30, 53, 62, 92; and class,
xiii; domination, 102, 166;
gendered selves, 5–6, 11, 32,
162; hierarchy/inequality, 26,
116, 122, 133, 162; identity,
1n1, 4–5, 8, 10, 13, 17, 25, 28,
39–40, 42, 46–47, 51, 63, 78,
81, 84, 90, 92, 106, 115, 117,
128, 168n4; ideologies at school,
INDEX 187
42; politics, 12, 98; roles and
relations, 2–3, 25, 38, 162
glamour, 69–75, 79–80, 86,
89–91, 103
globalisation and liberalisation of
Indian economy, 14, 17–18, 20,
24–25, 68, 90
globalisation, icon of, 68
habitus, xv, xvii–xviii, xx, 6–10,
14–15, 30, 39–40, 58, 62–63,
94, 98, 102–3, 105, 165–66;
postcolonial, 13, 14–17, 23, 73,
75, 90, 103, 116, 128, 147, 166
heterogeneity, xviii, 14, 20, 39, 63
home as the insulated private
sphere, 21
identity, xviii, xix, 17, 22, 32, 44,
83, 108, 129, 131ff.; social
constructions, 32. See also
gender identity
illusory characteristics, 84
Indian womanhood, ambivalence,
75–80
intellectual and physical growth, 79
interpersonal relations, 100, 106n3
116–17; and embodied work,
142–57
jewellery and adornment, 59, 78,
82–83, 86, 159
kinship relations, 2, 31, 42, 97,
169. See also family
labour relations, 12, 39
life cycle of women, 136n1, 155;
educationally advantaged, 20,
28–33, 41–42, 54; educationally
disadvantaged, 15, 28–31, 50,
63, 93; rituals, 82
life expectancy, xvi
linguistic sophistication, 21
188 LIVING THE BODY
loneliness, 95, 99
looking-glass self, 10
male chauvinism, 43, 44
male child, preference for, 26, 134,
140–41
male dominance, 132, 136–37
male gaze, xxi, 4, 68, 106, 107,
114, 129
marital rape and violence, 119, 122
marriage, marital relations, 27–30,
39, 51, 92, 95–97, 98, 99–101,
108, 118–22, 125–26, 155–57,
161; and domesticity, xx,
54–62; and family, xviii; and
work, 153–57
masculine construct, 26
masculine role model, 36
masculinity, 38, 43, 47, 65, 115
materiality, 2
maternity, 99
meaning, representation and
symbolism, 116, 167
media, 12, 27, 46–47,
84–85, 91; global, 20, 47, 63;
representation of women’s
embodiment, 107; visual and
print, 22–24, 28, 43
memory, 3, 4, 34, 91
mental torture, violence, 98,
116–18, 120–22, 124, 127
metaphysical device, 10
middle-class woman, xviii, xx–xxi,
11, 12, 17, 20–25, 32, 34–35,
38, 41, 47, 50, 65–67, 73–75,
80, 89, 93, 104, 120, 125
mind and body, 5
mirror-image of embodiment, 93ff.
modernity, 19, 22, 41, 65, 67, 71,
77, 80, 90
moral domain, symbolic control,
21–22
mother and children, relation/bond,
104
motherhood, 27, 74, 92, 96, 100,
109, 122, 137; childbearing and
contraception, 133–42
mother-in-law and marital relations,
58, 95–97, 101, 103, 125–28,
135–36, 144, 147, 150, 154
nationalism, nationalist movement,
11, 18
norms and values, xv, 9, 22, 23,
25, 32, 36, 43; and femininity,
76–83; and gender identity, 92
occupational choices, 80, 103–04,
138
oppression and domination, 7,
17–18, 32, 94, 98, 108, 122–23,
126, 134–35, 147, 151, 153,
156–57, 166–67, 170–71;
psychological, 116–18, 121,
125, 129, 132
patriarchy, 24, 31, 50, 166;
reproduction of, 31–38
peer group/peer group culture,
27–30, 42–46, 49–51, 56, 63,
109; at school, 42–50
perception and action, 104
performativity and creativity, 8,
106
performing self, 112
personality, 43, 45, 110, 112,
114, 119
personality development, 40
personhood, 23, 125, 129, 134,
169
phenomenology, xiv, 4
physical beauty, 42
physical corporeality, 4–5
political consciousness, 6
politics, xx, 2n3, 12, 16, 90
postcolonial, 13ff.
poverty and deprivation, xvi, xxi,
2, 9, 12, 103, 131–33, 142,

145–46, 153, 158, 159, 160–62;
gendered experience, 132
power relations, 14, 92, 132, 162,
166, 168, 170
powerlessness, 29
print media, 22–24, 28, 42
professionalism, 72, 88
prostitution, 148
puberty, 27, 28, 82
public and social domain, 5, 17, 19,
77, 81
public sphere, 21–22, 28, 94
rape, sexual abuse and oppression,
148–51. See also marital rape
and violence
recolonisation of women as
gendered, subaltern subjects, 15,
19, 63, 65, 69, 73, 75, 79–80,
92
religious and social contexts, 31
reproductive choice, 140
resistance and rebellion, 7, 18, 46;
with the family and marriage,
95–105
respectability and recognition,
xx–xxi, 11, 17–18, 83–84, 92,
124, 152, 169–70
role models, 33, 36, 37, 76, 80
same-sex peer group, 51
schooling, xx, 28–30, 42, 51, 54.
See also education
self, selfhood, 4, 10, 26, 133,
162, 171; and the body, 13;
and identity, 4, 17; and society,
xix
self-confidence, 79, 105, 109
self-esteem, 47–48, 51, 102, 132,
136, 149
self-presentation and appearance,
43–46
self-reliance, 151
self-respect and dignity, 100
INDEX 189
sensuality, 69, 83–84, 112–13
sex role stereotypes, 39
sex work, 154, 156
sexual: desire, denial, 99–100;
freedom, 84; intercourse, 28,
56–57, 59, 61; relations, xxi,
56–57, 99–100, 121, 123–24,
127, 144, 159–60
sexuality, 9–10, 24, 59, 67, 74–75,
83–84, 99–100, 107, 108,
111, 114, 116, 129, 132–33,
153, 160; and fertility, 47; and
identity, 157–61; in marriage,
122–24; unfulfilled, 100; work
and resistance, 147–53
sites and practices: recolonisation
and its consequences, 13–18
slum dwellers, body as a weapon,
xxi, 131–63
social: activism, 21–22; capital, 11;
class, 20, 32, 78, 98, 100, 102;
construction of female need, 99;
and cultural factors, 28, 36, 80,
132; existence, 18; networks,
29, 45, 132; order, norms
and practices, xix, 30, 39–40,
57–60, 90, 129, 161, 167; and
political conditions, 18; and
public domain, 18, 19, 25, 31,
62, 122, 152, 169; relationships,
xiii, 3n4; skills, 43; status, 16,
21, 102–03; transformation, xv,
18, 170
socialisation process, xviii, 167
socio-economic backgrounds, 13,
27, 48, 52, 75, 93, 165
status quo, 73
stereotypes, 42, 46, 85, 118
sterilisation, 139
structural domination, 14
subject-object dualities, xv
symbolism of mirror, 10
symbols, myths, resources, 20
symbolic violence, 166
190 LIVING THE BODY
television, 29, 85
time and space, xvii, 2
tradition, 29, 76–77, 92, 100, 129;
and modernity, entrapment of
women, 19, 22, 84–85. See also
norms and values
transformation, xxi, 6, 9, 12, 14,
17–18, 31, 170
transnational migration, xiv, 17
unemployment, 103
urban India: 17, 20, 22–23, 32,
65, 91; family, 36, 98; middle
classes, 24, 28, 74, 89; slums,
29; society, xvi, 13, 23, 27;
women, 18, 28, 65, 94, 116,
124, 164
utilitarian and practical
considerations, 12, 62, 110,
157
violence and sexuality, relationship,
116, 122–23; and personhood,
129; physical, 119, 127, 129
visual imagery and textual discourse
in women’s magazines, 64ff.
voice as culture, 172
weightlessness associated with
beauty practices, 79
well-being, 122, 132, 134, 136,
141, 145, 151, 156, 160, 163,
170
wifehood, 74
woman, woman’s: assertiveness
and independence, 124: in
advertising in the media, 24;
faithfulness, 122; needs and
desires, 103; perceptions and
lived experience, 29, 99; physical
stance, 6; into the public sphere,
21–22; self images, 8, 43–46;
and their worlds, xv–xix
womanhood, 1ff., 63, 95, 129–30,
164–65; in contemporary India,
xix–xx, 11–13, 15, 17, 18–25,
26, 28, 32, 36, 43, 47, 70, 73,
77–78, 85–86, 91–92, 117,
164; in Femina, 64ff.; social
construction, 25
Women’s Era, 67
work: identity and body, 131ff.;
and childbearing, 134ff.; and
education, 138ff.; and marriage,
drudgery, 153–57; and
resistance, 147–53
 About the Author

Meenakshi Thapan is Professor of Sociology at the Department of

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