Talukdar (2014) Rituals and Embodiment. Class Differences in Religious Fasting in Hindu Women

Rituals and Embodiment: Class Differences in Religious Fasting Practices of Bengali Hindu
Women
Author(s): Jaita Talukdar
Source: Sociological Focus, Vol. 47, No. 3 (July–September 2014), pp. 141-162
Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd.
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Sociological Focus, 47: 141-162, 2014
Copyright © North Central Sociological Association 1^ ROUtl6dQ0
ISSN: 0038-0237 print / 2162-1128 online 8 m Tay,or & Frands CrouP
DOI: 10.1080/00380237.2014.916592
Rituals and Embodiment: Class Differences in Religiou

Fasting Practices of Bengali Hindu Women
Jaita Talukdar
Loyola University New Orleans
Research unraveling the potential for women's empowerment through participation in religi
rituals is an important corrective to theorizing that suggests that liberation requires that women avo
rather than embrace the litany of cultural rituals that in the past have served to oppress them. The fie
however, is premised on theoretical frameworks that are heavily focused in the pursuit of uncove
resistance against patriarchal orders in religious engagements of women, thereby failing to acco
for the dialectical nature of such engagements. Employing Bourdieu's theory of habitus to investig
religious fasting practices of 41 Bengali Hindu women, I argue that the impetus for active negot
tions, that entail a more dialectical engagement with meanings of cultural rituals, is located in a se
class-based predispositions that are fostered and reinforced in the experiences and opportunities t
women encounter in their daily lives.
Religious rituals typically involve disciplining or controlling some element of the body or
desires, but for women that may entail being subjected to ritual practices aimed at con
ling them and reinforcing male domination. However, recent scholarship examining wo
rituals in "gender-traditional" religions' (Burke 2012:1) has significantly challenged our
standing of embodied agency (Avishai 2008; Liebelt 2011; Mahmood 2001). Scholars
study contemporary head veiling practices of Muslim women, for instance, argue that
als typically associated with female submission are now taking on new meaning; fo
women, the veil is part of the effort to establish an independent self (Brenner 1996; H
2010; Read and Bartkowski 2000), and for others it serves as a trigger for political activ
(Lorasdagi 2009). Such evidence suggests that women are quite capable of co-opting relig
rituals to reclaim or subvert socio-religious notions of womanhood, challenging the arg
that women's participation in gender-traditional religions is a sign of passivity (for a revi
Burke 2012).
Research unraveling the potential for women's empowerment through participation
gious rituals is an important corrective to theorizing that suggests that liberation requires
avoid rather than embrace cultural rituals that in the past have served to oppress them. Th
'Burke uses gender-traditional religion as a term to refer to major religious systems that are based on male
ship and female submission, which perpetuate through doctrinal texts and practices the notion that men and wo
essentially different from each other.
Correspondence should be addressed to Jaita Talukdar, Department of Sociology, Loyola University New
6363 St. Charles Avenue, New Orleans. LA 70125, USA. E-mail: jtalukda@loyno.edu
142 SOCIOLOGICAL FOCUS
of literature has also pushed forward an alternate understanding of women's relationship

their bodies; that is, women's bodies are not merely loci of frustrations with circumscrib
but also tools with which women circumvent or subvert forces of subordination into me
ful engagements with the self (Bartkowski 1997; Byng 1998; Liebelt 2011; Mahmoo
The field, however, is premised on theoretical frameworks that are heavily focused on
ering resistance against patriarchal orders in religious engagements of women (Avishai
thereby failing to account for their dialectical nature (Burke 2012). For instance, my s
the brata, or religious, ritual-intensive fasting practices, of 41 Bengali Hindu women pro
complicated scenario of acts of resistance or submission regarding religious fasting. If the
some women who partook in fasting to either re-invent traditional meanings of fasting
its "extra-religious" benefits (Avishai 2008:410) while resisting a full immersion in its ri
details, others embraced those very details even when they were not fully convinced of
ual's ability to transform their material conditions. In other words, women's engagemen
conventional rituals were not wholly about either resistance or submission to religious fas
rather a little of both. Differences, though, in the narratives of the women of what they em
or rejected about ritual fasting, and why, cohered along their class positions.
Rather than falling back on individual-level accounts of differences, I propose that Bou
notion of habitus demonstrates how the impetus for active negotiation with the meaning
tural rituals is located in a set of class-based predispositions that are fostered and reinfo
the experiences and opportunities that women encounter in their daily lives. It became cle
that ritual fasting practices were strongly linked to resources—both cultural and material
disposal of women, especially those associated with class-gender-body expectations, pra
and inclinations which, here as elsewhere, can be viewed as forms of capital (Bourdieu
1984, Reay 2004, 2005; Skeggs 2004). In such analysis, class operates not only as an
ing principle that significantly determines access to resources and interactions but als
at an intimate level to produce a "structure of feeling" (Skeggs 1997:6) constitutive of
bodily emotions of fear, anxiety, and conviction that shape experiences and self-subjecti
The body then becomes the foundational piece through which "practices of the self ar
possible" (Winchester 2008:1758), while the framework of a habitus enables an investig
of bodywork (Gimlin 2007) that individuals engage in to anchor themselves in the midst
complex interplay of choices and constraints that mark their lives (Talukdar and Linder
Wacquant 2004).
With this study, I make the case that religious rituals need to be similarly subjected
gender-class-body analysis. There is very little research that has taken an in-depth look
role played by social class on women's religious involvement, except for tacitly acknow
that a woman's educational or occupational status affects her engagement with conventi
uals (Read and Bartkowski 2000). The case of Hindu women's religious fasting directly
itself to a class analysis because brata practices entail partaking in both ritual and emo
labor and the material roles women perform within the family. Brata practices centered
ily on familial institutions and ties that have a purported goal of benefitting significant
the family, and linked with patriarchal arrangements between men and women within th
household, continue to thrive in Indian society. They thrive in spite of the fact that Indian
have enthusiastically welcomed and adopted global elements, lifestyles, careers, and w
being introduced by a new liberal economy.
FASTING PRACTICES OF BENGALI HINDU WOMEN 143
What we do not know enough about, and the purported goal of this study, is to see how
a society going through rapid economic changes with its concomitant pressures on class and
gender structures has affected the traditional practice of ritual fasting; or, more specifically, how
do women engage with religious rituals, and toward what purposes? In this paper, I suggest that an
approach that takes into consideration class subjectivity can help us understand the varying ways
class shapes and informs a woman's engagement with conventional rituals. The implications of
this study are important not only for understanding and contributing to the body of research that
looks into the role conventional rituals play in the subjective wellbeing of contemporary women
but also how and to what extent women's active and creative engagement with meanings and
practices serve as catalysts for larger social change.
HABITUS AND EMBODIED STRATEGIES
Bourdieu's theory of habitus is being increasingly recognized as a powerful framework fo

standing women's agency in conjunction with the structural attributes that shape and lim
expression (Adkins 2004; McNay 2000). It is particularly relevant in understanding wom
embodied practices, or in this case women's engagement with conventional rituals, as h
captures the embodied nature of acquiring "durable, transposable dispositions" that guide
ior (Bourdieu 1990:53). At the center of Bourdieu's habitus is the individual strategist wh
learned and structured ways of being and thinking in her engagements with the social
Though dispositions learned during childhood continue to structure adult experiences,
cess whereby they do so is neither automatic nor exhaustive. That is, dispositions are not
rules of behavior but mental frames or a generalized set of understandings that come
when the individual navigates social institutions or spaces, or what Bourdieu refers to as
(Bourdieu 1990; Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992). The individual is at all times adapting to ch
in the field, and such adaptations, in turn, can work back on the habitus.
Studies have shown that women sometimes adjust their dispositions to meet new exp
tions by reformulating gendered styles of being (Bourdieu [1979] 1984; Fowler 200
2011). For example, Singaporean women who leave the field of professional work to bec
homemakers have been found to experience a change in their attitude towards domestic r
bilities and identify themselves as "household resource managers" (Brooks and Wee 200
In this example, it is important to note, that change in the mental frame towards an instrum
approach to housework is enacted on the body itself with the acquisition of a new bodi
position, captured symbolically with the notion of "resource manager." After all, as Bo
himself said, "the principle generating and unifying all practices [of the habitus] is nothin
than the socially informed body" (Bourdieu 1977:124, emphasis in original). Bodies, thu
"irreducible elements" (Csordas 1990) of experiences that ground individual lives in par
structural arrangements. And yet, bodies also provide the templates on which processes of
ments and redefinitions (or what others have identified as "bodywork") are enacted and
visible.
Theoretically, then, Bourdieu's notion of habitus captures both the structurally root
straints that work on action in the form of the dispositions, the resources, and the ab
individuals to creatively navigate and, at times, transform their lives as they encounter a
ously changing social world. However, from a more practical standpoint, it is clear that th
in which people manage the challenges of social life vary extensively. That is, the kind o
ily dispositions that individuals will retain, adjust, redefine, or completely reject will de
what they have access to and aspire for in terms of both material and cultural resources. F
researchers have expanded Bourdieu's thesis of an embodied habitus to include feminin
sitions and have shown that femininity in itself is a resource or a form of capital, as evin
the different ways it is acquired and utilized by women differently situated in the social hie
(Skeggs 1997, 2004).
Some feminine dispositions, such as maintaining a thin, youthful appearance in Weste
eties (McRobbie 2004) or a powdered face in Japanese society (Ashikari 2003), have
values and returns associated with them than dispositions such as caring for others (Skeg
Moreover, as Bourdieu and others have demonstrated, members of lower classes often fin
selves at a disadvantage in relation to social institutions designed to satisfy and improv
the cultural tastes and preferences of privileged classes. Experiences with poverty leave
markers of deficiency on the body that not only become objects of mockery and ridicule
may induce a sense of lacking among working class women (Adair 2001). Especially rele
to this paper are studies that have significantly contributed to our understanding of how
make sense of and act upon their own embodiment of gender roles, vis-a-vis their soc
tions, and have revealed the complex rules of engagement with cultural meanings of fem
that characterize both women's display of femininity and their gender claims in differen
(Lawler 2004, 2005; Skeggs 1997). When it comes to the experiences of working class w
on one hand, we have learned that in some cases women reject adopting appearance-work,
fitness concerns popular with women in upper or middle classes, on the grounds that it in
with their mothering responsibilities (Talukdar and Linders 2013). On the other hand,
(2004) has shown, poor women may find themselves struggling with providing advice or d
their children's educational growth—essentially being good mothers to their children—
of the shame and guilt associated with their personal failures in the mainstream educa
culture.
With such insights in mind, I argue in this paper that the way lay Bengali Hindu wome
sense of their ritual fasting practices will depend not only on their access to material r
(such as income) or ideological resources (such as education) but also on the resources r
to bodywork that are available to them. In other words, both the kind of bodily functi
as mothering, care-work, appearance-work, or being professional that are valued in wom
their ability to access them, will combine to affect practices of fasting. Ritual fasting h
been an important appendage to Hindu women's domestic responsibilities towards their
and hence has played a constitutive role in defining a good woman. But the traditiona
context that sustained and reinforced these practices has recently come under assault as
entered the global marketplace and undergone rapid modernization.
THE RESEARCH CONTEXT: FASTING AND BENGALI HINDU WOMEN
In traditional Hindu fasting, women are known to practice "familial fasting" (Khare 1976) that i
inextricably tied to women's obligatory roles as daughters, mothers, and wives. Married women
in particular, as part of their stridharma (duty as a wife) have long fasted to seek the protection of
heavenly deities for the men they rely on, such as their husbands and sons (McGee 1987, 1991)
Fasts are undertaken to secure the blessings of a deity and are integral to the institution of a Hindu
pujo (puja in Hindu), or the ceremony that involves chanting of mantras and offerings made to a
deity by the practitioner. Familial fasts flourished when women were entirely dependent on men
for their status and basic survival, a structural arrangement that some call "classical patriarchy"
(Wessinger 2007). Common to Hindu women's fasting practices, and a pan-Indian feature, is
the fact that fasts embody the vow a Hindu woman takes to be responsible for the material and
emotional wellbeing of her family. In Bengal, familial fasts that are undertaken by women are
referred to as brata (regional rendition of the Sanskrit term vrata), which literally means a vow
or a pledge.2
Much has been written about the habitus of the Bengali, Hindu household undergoing a
period of modernization in the late nineteenth century (Bannerji 1992; Chatterjee 1989; Sarkar
2001). But these developments did not dislodge either the stridharma ideology or the primacy
of religious rituals in daily affairs (Roy 1975) and life events, such as wedding ceremonies (see
Majumdar 2009). Learning about bratas initiates Bengali women into the Hindu worldview of
what it means to be a good woman, and the bodywork associated with a brata practice teaches
her how to labor—physically and emotionally—for significant others. For instance, older women
tell mythical accounts to young girls of the lives of Savitri3 and Behula, both laywomen, who
were granted a place in the canonical literature of Hindu mythologies because of the extreme
fasts they undertook to bring their dead husbands back to life (Roy 1975).
Further, the act of fasting and its accompanying ritual labor emphasizes a woman's unwavering
commitment to her role as a caretaker. Bratas, though rituals in themselves, also tend to have
other rituals associated with them (also referred to as stree achar), such as specific ways of
cleaning, cutting, and cooking the food and collecting the flowers being offered to the deity
(Menzies 2010; Ray 1961). Even when they are on the fast, it is the women of the household
who have to attend to these details and ensure that offerings are made in accordance with "rules
of purity" (Madan 1991) and the deity and the place of worship are protected from any kind
of profane contamination. For women, being in this pure state of mind entails refraining from
eating, drinking fluids, and, when menstruating, abstaining from fasting and staying away from
the place of worship (Nagarajan 2007). In this sense, a "pure" and "clean" body of the female
practitioner is an offering in itself to a higher deity, at the crux of which, however, lies the desire
for someone else's wellbeing.
Since women's fasts are grounded in the mundane realities of everyday life, some believe that
they lack the scope necessary for cultivating the higher virtues of selflessness, introspection, or
steadfastness that, according to Hindu doctrines, lead to the purification of the soul (Khare 1976).
2Uposh (or upavasatha in Sanskrit) is another Bengali term popularly used to describe religious fasting but it is more
of a gender-neutral term than the term brata.
'Born a mere mortal, Savitri found a place in the canonical literature of Hindu mythology, along with other gods and
goddesses, because of a fast she undertook to save her husband's life. It was predicted that Satyavan, Savitri's husband
would die within a year of their marriage. Three days before he was supposed to die, Savitri took on a fast and went
along with her husband to the woods where he met his death. When the god of death (Yama) arrived to take her husband
away, Savitri followed them to the gates of afterlife insisting on accompanying them, as any dutiful Hindu wife would
have done. Impressed by her perseverance and devotion, Yama overturned her destiny of becoming a young widow and
brought her husband back to life. This version of Savitri's story was taken from Meyeder Brotokutha. A slightly different
version of Savitri's story can be found in Susan Wadley (1976), "Brothers, Husbands, and Sometimes Son: Kinsmen in
North Indian Ritual."
Striving for ascetic or spiritual goals through the practice of fasting were often reserved for
and female ascetics, with some exceptions made for those women who had fulfilled fami
gations (Lamb 1999). Others argue that ritual practices of lay Hindu women produce subser
and acquiescence in women towards male kin members (Mukherjee 1978), the pernicious r
of which can be readily seen in the marginalized and dependent lives Bengali widows led
past (Ghosh 2000). However, we know that women also have managed to carve out transg
spaces in the midst of ritualistic practices. For example, both lay Christian women and nu
were routinely denied recognition and sidelined by a male-dominated clergy, turned to e
fasting or, perhaps more importantly, abstained from food associated with gendered rol
tasks in order to demand a holy state of being (Brumberg 1988; Bynum 1987).
Contemporary research on Hindu women's fasting practices has similarly shown that w
reconfigure doctrinal practices in ways that benefit and aid their personal self-growth (Pintc
2007; Wadley 1983) to develop virtues of sankalp (or strengthening one's resolve), seva
ing others), or punya (or cleansing the mind of carnal desires) even when working wit
parameters of familial fasting (for more details, see Pearson 1996). These studies have dis
the argument that a woman abiding by conventional behavior is, to paraphrase Mahmood
evidence of the operation of a high degree of social control and repression. In this paper
ther elaborate on the link between rituals and the performative aspects of the self (Edwa
Knottnerus 2010), though I focus on how changes in gendered subjectivities of women
affected the practice of ritual fasting and how that engagement is powerfully shaped by
conditions.
As Indian society globalizes, new fields emerge, new opportunities arise in old fields, and
new value systems develop. Such changes and movements in various social fields place pressures
on the habitus to adapt (McNay 2000), re-evaluate, or abandon old practices and competencies.
Present scholarship on urban Indian women attests to the negotiations women have undertaken
regarding their identities and roles in this new multilayered society (Chaudhuri 2001; Munshi
2001; Radhakrishnan 2011). When India liberalized its economy in the 1990s and experienced a
growth in the service and IT industry, women entered the labor force in large numbers, became
members of a professional class, and emerged as engaged and knowledgeable consumers of the
global economy. These developments have put a strain on the habitus of a Hindu household and
the belief that women's worth is determined primarily by the roles they fulfill as caretakers of
their families (Radhakrishnan 2011).
Scholarship on urban Indian women has explored in great detail women's engagements in the
fields of fashion, beauty pageants, and the IT industry, but we know much less about how changes
in these social fields have impacted the practices and dispositions—habitus—that used to charac
terize the Hindu household or the practice of religious fasting. Neither has there been a systematic
effort to determine how engagements with traditional dispositions surrounding gender roles differ
by social class locations. Because the good homemaker ideology lies at the heart of familial fast
ing, an examination of fasting practices promises to provide important insight into how women
negotiate dispositions of traditional ideal feminine behavior in light of the drastic changes in
many women's lives. Employing a straightforward Bourdieusian analysis allows us to see how
material and cultural resources at the disposal of the women bring about differences in the kind of
agency women use in their practice of fasting. Also, if dispositions of a habitus are expressed by
both minds and bodies, as Bourdieu claims they are, the capacity to change meanings associated
with familial fasting will depend on how deeply or shallowly a Hindu woman's body is embedded
in the household as well as in other social spaces.
METHODOLOGY
This paper is based on interviews with 41 Bengali Hindu Indian women living in the city
Kolkata, West Bengal, India in the year 2005. The women were selected on the basis of t
different class locations; the three classes, which are widely recognized by Indian sociol
as distinct and important social locations, are: the new middle class (Fernandes 2006), the
middle class (Ganguly-Scrase 2003), and the poor working class. The women's ages ranged f
18 to 58 years old, with an average age of 33 years, and they varied in terms of educationa
fications (no formal education to PhD or management degree-holders) and occupations (dom
helpers, school teachers, accountants, sales executives, and a company vice-president).
Thirty women were married; of these, 16 were housewives, 24 had children, and 29 li
in non-nuclear family arrangements. The family structure was composed of a husband,
and their children who lived with mostly paternal grandparents. Some women lived in ex
family settings, which meant they shared both living spaces and household activities with
spread over three generations of patrilineal relationships (typically husband's male sibling
first cousins). As I describe below, there are objective and identifiable income and educa
differences among the women in different class locations, but for the purposes of this stud
most important differences are those linked to habitus, and those related to class-specific w
"feeling and thinking" (Reay 2005).
Working Class (WC)
The seven women in this group were mostly recent rural migrants, with little or no forma
tion, who worked as domestic helpers, and were often single-handedly responsible for prov
for their families. Combined monthly household incomes in this group ranged from a hig
Rs. 5,000 ($125) to a low of Rs. 500 ($12.50).4 These women lived in squatter houses
were part of slums located on the fringes of neighborhoods of high-earning families. T
the women live and work in the city, sometimes as live-in domestic helpers, they are cul
the most invisible (Ray and Qayum 2009). Five of these women were married with childre
two were single without children.
Lower Middle Class (LMC)
Monthly household income of these women (fourteen in total) ranged from a high of Rs.
($250) to a low of Rs. 4,000 ($100). Nonetheless, their lives were in many ways qualitativ
different from those of the working class women. Of the eleven married women in this
one worked as a theater actress, and the rest were housewives and relied on the income of
family members who typically worked for small local businesses or in low-end governmen
4The conversion rate is based on the rate at the time of the study in 2005 [$1= Rs. 40 (value rounded)].
The majority of the families in this social class relied completely on the urban econom
finding employment and did not enjoy any additional income from being landowners lik
of their rural counterparts (Majumder 2012). The remaining three women were single c
students. Most of the women lived in extended family arrangements. In terms of educatio
had a high school degree, and a few had some college experience.
New Middle Class (NMC)
These twenty women, classified as new middle class, were quite diverse in terms of inc
their combined monthly household incomes ranged from a high of Rs. 175,000 ($3,500)
low of Rs. 15,000 ($375)—but they all had at least a baccalaureate degree. The majority
women in this class were fluent in English (a result of their educational training), had ac
computers and the Internet, were routinely exposed to Western media (through films, c
networks and magazines), and worked in professional and technical fields. The six single
in this group lived with their parents, while nine of the married women lived in nuclear s
and the remaining four lived with their parents-in-law. There was only one woman in th
who lived in an extended family setting. Six women were housewives, five were studen
nine women were professionally employed.
I used a combination of purposive and snowball sampling methods to recruit the wome
this study. Since this was an exploratory study of contemporary fasting practice of Bengali,
women, I asked semi-structured questions about what kind of fasts they performed, wh
fasted, and why fasting was important to them. All interviews were tape-recorded and trans
When the interview was conducted wholly or in part in a language other than English (B
I translated the interviews. Pseudonyms were given to all my respondents. The data, c
over a six-month period, were coupled with visits alongside the respondents to temples an
social gatherings that centred on religious fasts; these also provided important insights
women's practices of fasting. *
To account for familial fasts, I consulted M
a Bengali vernacular publication and part of
available in local markets. It serves as a guid
descriptions of 103 familial fasts popular in th
did not do all the 103 bratas listed in the book,
the bratas. Instead, the women relied on an or
what kinds of rituals to follow that they had le
women did fasts outside of those mentioned i
reverence for popular deities (such as Shiv, K
days marked in the Hindu calendar as very au
During the interviews, I used the Bengali ter
to its socio-religious nature; still, it soon beca
experiences were mostly centred on concern
economic and spiritual wellbeing, some pushe
to include "extra-religious" goals, such as heal
tool is used extensively by researchers intere
weave together meaningful and coherent def
used to study how habitus works through an
the act of narrating what you do and who you are requires linking "the past with the present,"
interrogating things and practices that have become habitual or taken for granted, and invok
ing that which may have been forgotten. Given the fact that ritual fasting is an integral part of
Hindu women's household, a narrative analysis allowed me to see the differences in the ways the
women made sense of and reconciled what they knew about fasting with what they actually did
or believed in at the time of this study.
I used a grounded theory (Glaser and Strauss 1967) approach to code (and recode) themes
that emerged from the interviews in two phases. In the first phase, I looked for general overall
themes emerging from the accounts, such as fasting and family welfare, fasting and religiosity,
fasting and tradition, and fasting and health. In the second phase of coding, in keeping with
my empirical question of how women across different social classes engaged with and made
sense of gendered ideologies of religious fasting practices, I recoded data along three dominant
categories that diverged and sometimes converged along social class lines—fasting and familial
motives, fasting and non-familial motives, and fasting and subjective wellbeing. Below I present
the narratives generated by the women to account for the fasts they did and show how the narrative
themes are linked to the women's class locations.
A Brief Note on Hindu Ritual Fasting
Before addressing the findings, I would like to briefly comment on some of the general rules of
Hindu fasting that provide the context necessary to understand the references women make about
the prohibitions regarding food that the women could eat or the time of the month when they
could fast. In most cases, fasts precede the pujo during which time the practitioner is expected to
be in a pure state of mind by abstaining from mundane desires such as hunger, thirst, or sex, and
being clear of bodily fluids such as semen or vaginal discharges that according to Hindu "rules
of purity" are considered pollutants. In daily practice, keeping a fast means to maintain a nirjala
(without water and food) state, but men and women are known to take "breaks" to drink water,
tea, or lime juice. Unlike other religious fasting, such as Lent or Ramadan, that are observed once
a year, the time and hours of Hindu fasting are determined using the Hindu calendar, which carries
detailed information about its frequency (once a year to weekly or monthly occurrence) and the
time period of the fast with exact start and end times. There are as many familial fasts as there
are Hindu gods and goddesses, and their actual execution in terms of what kinds of foods and
fluid items are tolerated or encouraged before and after fasting tend to depend on a combination
of the deity being worshipped and the way familial or lineal practices, caste, and regional/local
predilections (Das 1953; McGee 1991; Pearson 1996) have evolved over time. Though there is
some amount of choice about which gods to honor and hence which fasts to participate in, women
usually follow family traditions and communal practices.
CONTEMPORARY FASTING PRACTICES OF BENGALI HINDU WOMEN
Out of the 41 women in this study, all but two had at least some experience with religious fasting.
About two-thirds of the women (26) provided family-oriented motives for their fasting practices
whereas the remaining (13) cited non-familial goals for their fasting practices (for more details,
see Table 1). The women also differed in the kinds of fasts that they undertook and the rationales
TABLE 1
Fasting Ideologies and Practices by the Women's Social Class Background
Lower New
Working Middle Middle Total
Attributed familial motives and ideologies to their religious 1 13 6 26
fasting practices
Distanced themselves from familial motives and ideologies to 0 1 12 13
their religious fasting practices

Did not do any religious fasts 0 0 2 2
Total 7 14 20 41
they provided for their fasting. They had in common family backgrounds that were fairly reli
gious, and most had grown up surrounded by women who regularly engaged in familial fasts.
That did not, however, automatically translate into an adherence to familial fasting practices.
Differences in the accounts of women vis-a-vis their social class locations indicate that women
not only have different fasting experiences but also think about those experiences in very different
ways.
As expected, women in the working and lower middle classes engage in many more bratas
than do the women in the new middle class. The women also differ in terms of the motives
they provided for their fasts. Women in the lower classes were much more likely than the new
middle class women to invoke traditional familial motives, whereas the middle class women were
clearly more reluctant to rely on traditional motives—instead, they infused their motives with
contemporary concerns around health and personal wellbeing. In the next few sections, I use a
Bourdieusian framework to demonstrate that it was the kind of social roles women were expected
to fulfill in the private and public spheres of their lives, as informed by their gender-classed
subjectivities, that brought about differences in practices.
Fasting and Familial Motives
The first theme addresses how women in this study engage with familial goals and motives that
are part of brata practices of Bengali, Hindu women. The family, or more specifically the union
between a heterosexual man and a woman that abides by traditional conventions and customs,
continues to be the bedrock of Indian society (Puri 1999). Also, the advent of a globalized culture
into Indian society has resulted in women's facing added responsibilities to protect the tradi
tional family by being good homemakers (Munshi 1998) and prioritizing fulfilling family duties
(Majumdar 2009), even as they stake out individual careers. Most of the women in this study
engaged in familial fasting practices, perhaps indicating that the good homemaker ideology con
tinues to be an important institution in Indian society. Yet I found that the kinds of rationales
women provided for familial motives guiding their fasting practices varied by how their mate
rial realities informed their bodily dispositions or, more particularly, the kind of bodily roles and
functions they were expected to acquire and cultivate.
The working and lower middle class women did the maximum number of bratas and talked
about their fasts in terms of the wellbeing of their family members. Because they were poor,
the immediate motives the women invoked were typically about alleviating economic hards
While rooted in religious devotion, a more practical foundation of poor women's fasting
tices is also evident in the more particular fasting goals that urban living had inspired, suc
praying for better wages, being able to pay back borrowed money, or averting vehicular
dents. Particularly in the case of working class women, bodies act as "instruments of survi
(Thapan 2009) such as when migrating to cities in search of work they find employment
live-out domestic helpers or factory workers that requires engaging in hard labor. Lack of
ization, low wages, and poor living conditions cause a great deal of instability in the lives of
women (Das and Das 2007). As a result, fasting practices are an important part of the strat
they use to cope with the vicissitudes of a harsh urban existence. Of course, it is not so simple
the women rely on fasts to improve the material conditions of the family—this, after all, i
they work long and hard hours for very little pay—but rather that the fasts connect them wi
collective past, ground their precarious existence in a familiar tradition and, importantly, pr
the women with a sense of agency. Charrad has recently argued that agency in its most
form is the individual's "capacity to act" (2010:517), even when operating within the limi
a socially proscriptive behavior. In actively doing something to facilitate her family's wellb
poor women exercise at least some control over a life that otherwise provides them with
realistic choices.
Beas (18, domestic helper, WC), for instance, was a recent migrant and the eldest of four
siblings. She also worked as a live-out domestic worker in at least five households to help her
mother pay for basic amenities. Beas's father was unemployed, and the family was dependent
entirely on what Beas and her mother earned (about $200/month). Beas started working when
her mother fell ill, and it was around this time that her mother asked her to do Shiv brata (fast kept
for the Hindu god Shiva) on her behalf. Beas, however, told me her prayer was a little different
from what the brata is generally associated with—young women who want to be blessed with
a husband who exhibits personality traits typically associated with the deity. Following in her
mother's footsteps, Beas instead prayed for the financial stability for her family. When I asked her
what else motivated her fasts, she simply stated that fasting is a "good practice." Beas quietly had
slipped into her new role of being an important provider. Taking on household responsibilities
was something that, in her view, just had to be done—it was nothing to think about—but her
decision to expand her fasting practices clearly indicated a new sense of responsibility for the
family's wellbeing.
The belief of the poor women in this study that their fasting practices were indelibly linked
to their identity as primary caretakers of the family was grounded in the practical realities of
daily living, which they had in common with other women in a similar social class. Growing up,
Kaveri (25, housewife, LMC) used to see her mother perform fasts two or three times a week
for different deities, but she identified herself as a bhakto (a great devotee) of the deity Shiv with
whom she had felt an inexplicable sense of affinity from a very young age. Kaveri started doing
the Shiv brata for her favorite deity only recently though. Young children are typically dissuaded
from fasting out of a concern that children will be unable to handle the rigors of a religious fast.
On becoming a mother, Kaveri had found additional meaning in bratas:
The woman has to fast. After all, she is the one who stays at home. Men will get up in the morning,
eat, and leave the house. Women stay at home the whole day; when they see their child is sick, they
have to take care of them. It is the rule of the jogot sansar [world family] that a mother takes care of
her child. That is how it is.
Kaveri's husband worked at a garment store while she stayed at home taking care of h
and her parents-in-law. Though women like Kaveri in the lower middle class did not eng
paid work, they still had to physically care and labor for their family members. In the begin
the women fasted out of curiosity, excitement, or personal connections they felt with a part
deity, an additional dimension was added to their fasting experience when they got marr
entered extended family arrangements or settings where "everybody fasted." The wome
rarely use the stridharma ideology or a higher religious calling to describe their pract
instead would say, "everyone says [fasting] is a good practice, so it must be good" (emp
added).
By "everybody" they meant their mothers, mothers-in-law, family members, and Active kin
members who lived in their neighborhoods, or women who lived lives just like theirs, physically
and emotionally taking care of their family members. Fasting also meant coming together and
collectively praying at a neighborhood temple or at each other's house to break the fast with like
minded women dedicated to a higher vocation of serving others. This acted as a "sanctuary" or a
"cosseted space" (Wacquant 2004:14) in the lives of these women, which they were committed
to maintain. For the women, this often resulted in keeping the fast while doing hard labor in the
form of cleaning and cooking for their employers as part of their day jobs or chores around the
house. The fact that the women repeatedly said that "everybody does the practice [fasting]" or
"everybody says it is good" reveals that the motor, or what Bourdieu would call the "genera
tive principle," energizing their practice and propelling it forward was the value they saw in the
embodied struggles these women had in common with others in their community.
Engagements with bratas as part of shared embodied experiences with significant others were
also part of the new middle class women's narratives. Though these women were fewer in number
and the economic compulsions driving their practice were missing from their narratives, they,
just like the working and lower middle class women, emphasized the shared, communal aspects
of fasting they enjoyed in their current or past extended family arrangements. Familial fasting
practices, in their cases as well, were enactments of the past that brought learned dispositions
"back to life" (Bourdieu 1990:73). It was a time to relive memories they shared with their mother,
aunts, or mothers-in-law—moments that were sacred and spiritual.
For Aleya (46, accountant, married, NMC), familial fasts reminded her of her deceased mother
doing pujo in the early hours of the morning before the noise and commotion of a busy household
and a much busier city commenced. Now, she fasted alongside her mother-in-law and sisters
in-law with whom she lived in an extended family setting, which Aleya described as, "when
things end up being together." Brata practices, as mentioned earlier, are communal activities.
Women keep fasts together and gather at the site of worship—temple or makeshift shrines in
people's houses—to break the fast (McDaniel 2003). By situating her own practice of fasting as
"things" that are done collectively in an extended family arrangement, such as cooking, dining,
or doing leisure activities together, it as though Aleya is taking a tour of the life she has led so
far and identifying all those moments that have led to the inevitability of her own fasting practice
becoming part of a family activity.
Women who had come out of an extended family arrangement also believed that ritual fasting
was a way of remembering and honoring old ties. For instance, Sita (43, housewife, NMC) did
the Neel Shoshti brata for her son that she had learned from her mother-in-law, yet she told me
that, "it is not that I have to do the fast, just that it is a habit." Similarly, Ira (55, housewife,
NMC), who lived only with her son after her husband's and mother-in-law's passings, said not
continuing with the fasts . .feels strange; whatever I have seen my mother-in-law do, I do it
now in her remembrance." But it was also evident that these embodied dispositions were under
attack from others (colleagues, husbands, and children), and there were signs that there had been
a shift in the attitudes of the privileged classes towards brata practices.
Hints of familial motives underlying fasting practices of the women in the new middle class
generated negative responses from family members and colleagues who were eager to miscon
strue their practice as blind devotion or as being old-fashioned. Ira, for instance, had to hide her
Ekadashi brata, which she did in remembrance of her deceased husband, from her college-going
son who thought such practices archaic and oppressive. On a lighter note, Aleya shared that her
colleagues at work often made fun of her Neel Shoshti brata by saying that she must be fasting
to expiate her sins from a previous lifetime. Smiling, Aleya told me, "I do not mind the teasing;
it is not meant to be derogatory—just fun." Yet, she introduced her brata to me as "completely a
case of superstition," possibly hinting at a slight awkwardness or embarrassment with having to
describe a practice typically not associated with her public profile of being an accountant. It was
in the narratives of the professional women of the new middle class, to which I turn to next,
that it became clear that brata practices did not match a new, emerging habitus among the urban
elites that women's bodily practices should be directed mostly toward professional growth and
development.
Fasting and Non-Familial Motives
This category of findings deals with how and why some women claimed non-familial goals even
when they fasted for religious occasions. Some of the women in this study distanced themselves
both from brata practices and from any kind of familial motives dictating their practices (for more
details, see Table 1). Most of them belonged to the new middle class. Their common response was
an emphatic denial of engaging in any kind of brata practices. It is important to note that these
women did not abandon religious fasting practices altogether but found within these practices new
means and ways to develop new connections and relationships with their bodies. They invoked
health motives, spiritual motives, and motives of self-empowerment, but not familial motives and
not religious motives, which were the two dominant motives expressed by the working class and
lower middle class women.
The reasons the women distanced themselves from familial motives are complex. Since all had
grown up with women who fasted, the practice itself was part of a world they took for granted.
But many of the women's other experiences, especially including their education or professional
engagements, provided them with additional narratives to make sense of their own lives and the
resources to follow through. Moreover, the rapid economic and cultural changes that characterize
contemporary urban India much more clearly implicate women in the middle and upper classes
than poor women in the country. This is so, especially regarding expectations surrounding what
it means to be modern and independent— the "new Indian woman" is expected to be different
from her demure and family-oriented predecessors, even as she is not asked to altogether abandon
traditional forms of gender expression. It is in this light that a woman's continued engagement
with fasting rituals is best understood.
Many of the women in the new middle class were critical of brata practices and believed that
women who engage in them are "weak," "fearful," "dependent on others," or "very religious."
While most of the women in this social class linked familial fasting practices with superstition,
some of them, nonetheless, fasted on important religious days. Yet, the women went t
lengths to prevent misattribution of their fasting practice as an exercise in blind faith an
critical of the notion that "starving is what it takes to appease the gods" (Sarika, 24, MBA stu
NMC). While most of the women said they fasted for mental satisfaction and not to please
for personal gains, Radha (28, sales executive, NMC) stated:
I like fasting; it makes me feel good—nothing else. There is no reason behind why I fast—not f
religion, nor for health. One year I had to travel for work and could not fast. I did not feel bad [a
not fasting]. It is something that I do out of choice.
Radha did not grow up doing too many fasts, but during the last few years she had sing
Janmashtami (day marking the birth of the deity Krishna) as a day to fast, even though s
up in an extended family arrangement. She refrained from giving any explanation for her p
to illustrate and draw attention to the fact that she could exercise limitless choice about r
fasting. She also provided a contrasting example to further reiterate that she was not a
conventions—on the day of her wedding she refused to keep a fast, much to the disappoin
of her family members. Radha was proud of her ability to defy tradition, transcend expec
personalize her experience, and in the process, devise a practice that satisfied only her.
Women like Radha seemed to be free to discover or independently arrive at what was
about fasting. Growing up, Anita (21, biology student, NMC) was exposed to many reli
rituals in her house. Her mother was a Krishna devotee and, according to Anita, was "dee
gious." During the interview, Anita showed me the room in her house that was devoted entir
deities that her mother worshipped on a daily basis. When I asked if she assisted her mother
responded by saying "sometimes." In terms of keeping a fast Anita was a very recent co
and the transformation had happened at an unlikely place— a friend's house. During a sl
at a friend's house, Anita stayed up to witness the pujo being offered to the female de
in the middle of the night. During the pujo, she experienced an overpowering and inexp
sense of "strength" that was new and refreshing. Since then, once a year and only on the
Kali pujo, she has kept a fast. But, although she kept the fast, she also questioned some as
it—"Where is the need to starve? I eat before I make my offerings." This was a common n
among women in Anita's social class. Since fasting is integral to the practice of pujo, life
like weddings, births, funerals, and other rites of passage that involve worshipping deitie
that the participants fast. The women, however, saw fasting as an appendage to the prac
pujo and a rule that could be dispensed with from time to time. Simply put, to "eat and f
not about whether the women actually ate or what they ate while keeping a fast but an expr
the women used to show they questioned some of the prescriptive aspects of ritual fastin
The inability to see their contradictory stance on eating and fasting and to frame it a
ter of personal choice or discretion is related to an overall sense of entitlement and pr
that women in these classes have started enjoying in recent times (Dhawan 2010; Radhak
2011). Most of the women, like Anita, had mothers or mothers-in-law in their immed
roundings who engaged in familial fasting practices, even if they did not live in extende
arrangements. Yet all of them, albeit to varying degrees, had discontinued with the tra
picking up or doing fasts that were popular with significant female kin members in t
ily. Many had done it for entirely individualistic reasons, judging by their narratives. On
explaining this break with family tradition is that women in privileged classes are being
differently from women in previous generations to lead more public lives. They are enc
to pursue higher education, hold professional jobs, and become avid consumers of a global soci
ety (Thapan 2009; Waldrop 2012). While the women did not mention being actively discouraged
from continuing the fasting practices of their mothers and aunts, they also did not mention being
actively encouraged to partake in them or being reprimanded for failing to continue with fasting
traditions of the household.
Ritual-intensive, family-bound, bodily practices, such as a brata, in this group of women no
longer seemed to enjoy the kind of symbolic capital felt necessary to advance their public persona
as independent and ambitious women. If anything, it was this group of women who associated
familial fasting practices with women who were either less educated than they, or who belonged
to the working classes, or who knew no better (Dhawan 2010). This became clear when some
of the women mocked the ignorance underlying the fasting practices of other women, even their
close friends and relatives. "It is nothing but superstition," said Chandni (46, software engineer,
NMC) while discussing her mother-in-law's practice. Dora (30, school teacher, NMC) wove
together a sophisticated description of what constitutes this ignorance:
I think there is a scientific reason underlying the practice of fasting. In the past, women did not have
a strong position in the family and thus did not have access to nutritious food. On days of the fast,
however, they could drink milk, have fruits, and all other kinds of foods. Maybe, these foods helped
them in their digestion. But the women, someone like my mother-in-law, did not know that. For the
women, the reasons for keeping a fast were purely religious.
Professional women's criticism of familial fasting practices can be attributed to its rural,
provincial aspects. Familial fasts continue to thrive in agrarian economies (see McDaniel 2003)
and among working class women who regularly engage in the practice with the goal of becoming
good mothers and wives. What women like Dora did not see, however, are the structural inequal
ities in the lives of women in the privileged classes, vis-a-vis those of working class women,
which contribute to the differences in fasting practices. Nor did they see that fasting practices
complemented the provider role that the working class women had to fulfil. They also did not see
their own privilege in terms of being able to delegate some of the domestic responsibilities to their
mothers, mothers-in-law, other female kin members, and live-in domestic workers. For the pro
fessional women, religious practices, such as ritual fasting, belonged to the domestic realm of life
and were a part of daily household activities, which were incongruous with their newly-founded
sense of self as serious, engaged professionals. This does not mean that the women were not
religious, or that they completely rejected all kinds of ritual practices (see Radhakrishnan 2011),
but that they were able to selectively engage in them and, more importantly, distance themselves
from practices that signal a "ritual-dependency" (Purkayastha 2009) of the religious kind.
In their new embodied identities as individuals dedicated to self-improvement, the professional
women were not only rejecting some of the traditional sentiments associated with familial fasts
but were also modifying and pushing religious fasting into a secular realm. Some women spoke
of body-centric health benefits of religious fasting. During the days Dora kept a religious fast, she
thought of it as a form of "scientific dieting," while others believed that periodic fasting helped
in their digestion (Laali, 45, NMC) or aided in "detoxifying the body" (Chandni, 46, NMC).
Asserting that fasting is a scientific practice is a way for educated, Hindu women to reconcile
their modern beliefs about their bodies with what is otherwise a highly ritualistic behavior. Such
reasoning allows them to comfortably enter the modern context without having to completely lose
their religious heritage. That is because, as Tamney (1980) has shown, the underlying princip
of self-control in fasting is as much a secular value as it is a spiritual value.
The fact, though, that none of the women in the working or lower middle classes explicit
linked their fasting to health motives is a testament to the fact that not all women, only th
laying claims to a modern world view, felt the need to make adjustments to their understand
of fasting. The working class women, for instance, did not see any hidden or obvious heal
benefits associated with religious fasting practices. They believed that the kind of fasting th
entailed not drinking any water could potentially cause temporary physical weakness, but that
all. Some found associations between good health and fasting laughable. Barnali (24, domest
helper, single, WC) stated: "No, I do not fast to have good health. I do not think about all th
things (laughs). I do not think like that [personal health in particular]. I just want to do it [t
fast]." Bratas were firmly entrenched in the religious and familial domains of their lives and
cultural worlds they inhabited, beyond which the women were not willing to venture or expl
Fasting and Subjective Wellbeing
In the third and final category, I discuss how women made sense of the benefits of brata prac
in particular and fasting practices in general for their own subjective wellbeing. Here, I fou
similarity in responses in the self-accounts of fasting. Across social class locations, the wom
believed that fasting overall was "good" practice as it involved cultivating virtues of persevera
steadfastness, and piety, even if they differed in how they perceived the ritualistic aspects
fasting. Some of the women intermittently used terms like strength (shakti), devotion (bhakti),
duty (dharma) from the Hindu textual tradition to describe the goals of their practice. Though t
also simultaneously refrained from engaging in any vigorous intellectual or theological de
about the nature of their practice. Others spoke of spiritual benefits associated with the prac
of fasting. Religious fasting gave them an opportunity to cultivate virtues of perseverance
strength of character, while enduring the physical discomfort of starving, as the following quo
demonstrate:
The way I see it is that when you are asking for something from god, then you need to suffer. Unless
there is suffering, there will be no gain. (Sita, 43. housewife, NMC)
Fasting is for my mental satisfaction; I am dedicating one day to god. I am enduring physical pain to
get god's blessings. (Sarika, 24, marketing executive, NMC)
Fasting is important to achieve your goals. But, only by offering prayers, will it happen? You need
the strength of mind. (Barnali, 24, domestic helper, WC)
In its most distilled form and devoid of religious affiliations, fasting is a medium through
which individuals develop a virtuous self because it requires mining mental resources of strength
and determination to persevere in the face of physical hardships that come with starving the
body. According to the Hindu belief system and mythological tales, and as seen in the accounts
of women, hardships endured during the time of the fast are tests of one's moral and personal
character, and the successful completion of which attracts rewards from the deity (Pearson 1996).
Rewards, for the women in my study, constituted primarily of the closeness they felt towards
a higher being. Others have similarly found that Hindu women tend to reconfigure doctrinal
practices in ways that benefit and aid their personal self-growth (Pintchman 2007). This is not
only true for religious practices of Hindu women but a finding that is consistently seen in research
on women's religious engagements and subjective wellbeing (Liebelt 2011; Mahmood 2001).
I would like to point out here, though, that the way the women in my study spoke of personal gains
and benefits differed—women in the new middle class, for the most part, spoke of individual-level
outcomes such as values of "perseverance" and "determination," while for the working and lower
middle class women goodness was not squarely attributed to personal gains but as a practice that
benefitted all.
What I also found was that though the women in the working and lower middle classes resisted
framing their fasting practices in individual goals and benefits, they were nevertheless acutely
aware of the limited returns they could expect from their fasting practices. I found Purnima's
account most telling in this regard. Purnima worked in three houses and provided for her two
children and her husband with a small monthly income of Rs. 3,000 ($66). She had this to say
on being asked how her brat a practice benefitted her: "We do not have much to benefit from
this [fast]." Others expressed their skepticism by saying, "I cannot tell you what is good about
fasting" (Meena, 34, housewife, LMC). Though familial fasting practices provided women with
avenues to persevere against social hardships and somewhat take charge of their lives, the women
nonetheless remained skeptical or unsure of the transformative ability of fasts. I found this to be
different from existing research on religious engagements and subjective wellbeing. Rarely is
materiality of experiences acknowledged or heeded to when religious beliefs and practices are
templates for carving out a higher virtuous self (Liebelt 2011).
The realization, among the women in my study, that bratas alone would not change their
material realities was acute because they were part of a larger neoliberal culture in which they,
along with all other women, were constantly bombarded with cultural messages that women's
lives were endowed with limitless opportunities. Fasting practices dedicated to protect and serve
their families were a potent source of perseverance for the women in the working and lower
middle classes; yet, it paradoxically served to remind the women, to paraphrase Skeggs (1997),
of their "place" in the social hierarchy. For instance, Sara (29 years, housewife, LMC) had this to
say about her practice:
I did not do too many fasts before my marriage, except for the Shiv brata. That changed after I came
to this house. My sister-in-law told me, "it needs to be done," and so 1 do it. Everyone does the fast.
Here, there is nothing to call your own.
Sara had graduated from high school and had college aspirations that were cut short when she
got married. She lived in her husband's ancestral home together with his extended family. There
were clear signs of Sara's struggling to make ends meet. Her husband worked at an electric
supplies store earning a small wage of Rs. 5,000 ($125/month), while Sara was the primary
caretaker of their child and responsible for chores pertaining to the family, including her parents
in-law. The phrase "here, there is nothing to call your own" is indicative of a self that encountered
daily struggles and probably could feel expended or worn-out amidst the difficult realities of a life
rife with material constraints. By using the term "here" Sara demonstrated her ability to recognize
a "there," an alternate lived position of privilege where women do not have to continuously and
ceaselessly provide for others. Previously, in Purnima's narrative, the use of the word "we" to
answer a question that was specifically asking about what she stood to gain personally from
fasting was also very poignant. Purnima's response in the first person plural tells us that she
located her own disappointment in failing to see any tangible benefits of fasting not with her
practice per se but with what she had in common with other women in her communit
unchanging and motionless habitus that has failed to see the fruits of neoliberal developme
country has experienced in the last few decades.
CONCLUSION
Contemporary research has unearthed the continued salience of religion in the lives of women
Thus, now more than ever, there is a need to develop frameworks that examine religious liv
of women without losing the capacity to critique or evaluate the nature of these practices
(see Thomas and Avtar 2011), especially those pertaining to overhauling or drastically chang
ing women's quality of life. Towards that purpose, I found that lay Bengali Hindu women's
engagements with religious fasting, across social class locations, were indeed means to improv
or elevate their life-experiences, even when faced with crippling structural inequalities. Yet, wh
I bring to light, and hence contribute to this field of research, are the mechanisms through which
women experience religious rituals dialectically and lay out a more nuanced understanding o
"what actions or choices are made possible" (Burke 2012:130) in the context of a globalizing
India. I argue that engagements with religious fasting varied by women's social class ba
grounds and were impacted by the kind of roles they fulfilled, as well as how they were informe
by their material realities. Bodies of women in the working classes were firmly placed in t
habitus of the Hindu household and tied to its maintenance, while the women in the privilege
classes were able to extend their bodies onto a public realm and exercise latitude in revising o
doing away with conventions associated with fasting practices.
The new middle class women felt the need to match their fasting practices with a moder
consciousness of the body that came from their engagements in the public world through th
roles as educators, market researchers, or computer professionals. There is now a strong push
encourage women to pursue advanced education, hold professional jobs (Radhakrishnan 2011
and develop new tastes and expectations regarding lifestyles, dress, food, leisure activities, an
living arrangements (Ahmed-Ghosh 2003; Ganguly-Scrase 2003). Talukdar (2012), for instanc
has shown that carving out personal regimes, such as aspiring for fitness, has become very imp
tant to the life-projects of urban Indian women eager to move away from conventional ideolog
of womanhood. As a result, the body of this new woman has been projected onto a pub
realm, and how it is adorned and clothed (Thapan 2009), equipped with gadgets (Munshi 199
or directed towards professional success (Radhakrishnan 2011) have all become yardsticks of
progress. Religious fasting of the ritualistic kind, therefore, did not fully complement this pu
identity and was generally avoided, though not wholly abandoned.
In contrast, the working and lower middle class women were highly committed to the r
ualistic details of their fasting practices, even though partaking in them caused much physic
discomfort. The women were already engaged in rigorous, monotonous labor as part of the
day jobs or household responsibilities, which sometimes caused their "bodies to give out" (R
and Qayum 2009:90). Their commitment to the fasts, in spite of the fact that the women we
aware of the limited material returns from their fasting practices, speaks volumes to the fa
that embracing their fasting practices was a way for the women to communicate that they d
not want to succumb to material conditions. Their fasting practices were more than "instr
ments of survival" (Thapan 2009). They were embodiments of resilience and persevera
that women showed in their efforts at carving out good lives based on nurturing commu
nal and familial ties and responsibilities rather than pursuing selfish concerns and individual
successes.
A large body of research has powerfully shown that women's engag

rituals not only caters to their emotional wellbeing but also motivates
belong to marginalized groups, to take political actions such as mobi
demand change or protect their rights (Byng 1998; Weber 2004; Willi
this study, I have found that while conventional rituals are attractive
individual self for both privileged and less privileged women in the s
lend themselves in ways that the women could use to fulfill vested int
or as groups. For instance, partaking in ritual fasting was a potent me
women in the study to persevere against social hardships pervading
tices were too closely tied to their direct engagements as providers an
others to be used as tools of resistance. Those tied to caring and provid
it difficult to form positions of resistance to significantly alter their pl
out of concerns for jeopardizing those responsibilities (Skeggs 1997).
the underlying mechanism of "hunger-strikes," which have been used
change or political reform (Waismel-Manor 2005). But in the lives of
in this study, ritual fasting was so entangled in their domestic responsib
something that could not be transformed into a weapon of resistance a
such as poor living conditions or low wages. This does not imply tha
ritual fasting into political activism is a personal failure on the part o
or part of a false consciousness about their material realities. It does i
research examining or assessing the role of religious rituals in the liv
into account the socioeconomic inequities and inconsistencies in whic
with conventional rituals unfold.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jaita Talukdar is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Loyola University New Orleans. Her
research explores the effects in urban India of social forces of gender, social class, culture, and
globalization on the body, bodily processes, and health. Presently she is investigating how gyms
in metropolitan cities of India are shaping people's perceptions and ideas of a fit and healthy
body.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The author is grateful to Catherine Wessinger, Sue Mennino, Annulla Linders, and Rhys W
for their very helpful comments on previous drafts of this article. The author would also
thank the women who took part in this research. This article was previously presented
"Bodily Interventions" session of the 2012 American Sociological Association's annual me
held at Denver, Colorado.
FUNDING
This research was funded by the Taft Research Center located at University of Cincinnati.
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Rituals and Embodiment: Class Differences in Religious Fasting Practices of Bengali Hindu

Rituals and Embodiment: Class Differences in Religiou

Loyola University New Orleans

of literature has also pushed forward an alternate understanding of women's relationship

HABITUS AND EMBODIED STRATEGIES

Bourdieu's theory of habitus is being increasingly recognized as a powerful framework fo

THE RESEARCH CONTEXT: FASTING AND BENGALI HINDU WOMEN

Working Class (WC)

Lower Middle Class (LMC)

New Middle Class (NMC)

A Brief Note on Hindu Ritual Fasting

CONTEMPORARY FASTING PRACTICES OF BENGALI HINDU WOMEN

Working Middle Middle Total

Attributed familial motives and ideologies to their religious 1 13 6 26

their religious fasting practices

Fasting and Familial Motives

Fasting and Non-Familial Motives

Fasting and Subjective Wellbeing

A large body of research has powerfully shown that women's engag

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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