narratives of three generations of urban middle-class - eTheses ...

today through the spaces of male homosociality, is the binary between the good and the
bad woman that controls ideal femininity as noted by Holland et al. (1998) in the
Western context. The bad woman is thus one who is either “too Westernized” and
sexually promiscuous (Chatterjee, 1989: 632) or a quarrelsome and jealous wife who
turns a brother against a brother and thus breaks up through her ‘entry’ into ‘his’ family,
the solidarity of the kula or clan or in the wider context, the nation, whose basic premise
is the imagined solidarity of ‘natural brotherhood’.
Shubhojeet is in his early thirties and his father, Sujit is quite concerned about his son’s
marriage. Sujit narrates,
“These days giving a son’s marriage is quite risky, for who knows if the girl will be
good or not (expresses worry)? After all, these days girls should have the right to
say if she wants to stay with her in-laws or not (sarcastically sighs)!”
Shantanu is in his early forties and faces social pressures for still not having married.
He narrates what he usually tells people regarding marriage,
“Do you not like the fact that I am happy with no family conflicts and disputes?
I’m very comfortable living with my parents and younger brother and I don’t need
a woman to come and split the family!”
These stories that construct and reproduce the cultural expectations of ideal femininity
have, in large part, shifted from its blatant injunctions of a joint family space to the male
intimate spaces of friendship. In its so called democratic nature, these spaces continue
to reproduce culturally hegemonic codes of gendered performances and expectations,
even more effectively in these ‘chosen’ spaces that are apparently constructed as
unconstrained by tradition. Through an appreciation of how spaces of male friendship
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