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

Photo-1: Illustrates a gift from third generation Sukanya to third generation Nabamita
[Source: Nabamita Das’ collection of gifts]
Enwrapped in some new imaginings,
A voice of a female companion was suddenly heard,
A promise is made hereafter,
To keep this secret friendship in memory’s silence.
The modern language of intimacy, as this narrative text suggests, reconstructed women
as individuated selves accompanied by a shift from erotic, external to that of emotional,
internal intimacy (Kaviraj, 2006: 170-171). This transformation of intimacy is directly
echoed in the structural and cultural practice and ‘imaginings’ of homosociality of the
bhadramahila. The ‘individual’, is however, better understood in Smart’s (2007) term as
‘person’. The term ‘person’ implies that the self is socio-culturally embedded within and
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