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

conditioned by sedimented structures and the cultural imaginings (Smart, 2007: 29) of
gender, class, family (Jamieson, 1989) and the colonial-modernist bhadrasamaj
(Majundar, 2000: 124), rather than being a product of unbridled individualism and
embodying unbounded agency, as claimed by proponents of reflexive modernization,
particularly by Giddens (1992). Such structural ‘field’ and its internalized ‘habitus’ do set
limit to women’s ‘reflexive narrative of self’ and their intimate relations (Bourdieu and
Wacquant; 1992: 16-19; Heaphy, 2007: 179); Lash, 1994: 120). In this sense, the
emotional, intimate, private space of adda for individual women, as will be elaborated in
further sections, can at best be seen as negotiated spaces of ‘bargaining with
patriarchy’ (Kandiyoti, 1988). It sought ‘home’ within ‘home’; ‘our own’ ‘private’ within the
‘private’. It was a negotiation that was not outside the heterosexual domestic and its
associated gender inequalities, but it definitely problematized the idea of the domestic
‘home’ or ‘private’ and therefore logically its ‘other’, the ‘public’. “The very division
between an ‘inner’ and an ‘outer’ world is particular to Western conceptions of the self”
(Hockey et al., 2007: 89) and maps onto the nationalistic discourse of ‘tradition’ and
‘modernity’ (Chatterjee, 1989). Even in its habitation within the traditional private space,
female homosocial intimacy destabilized a patriarchal trans-national and nationalistic
dichotomy between the private and public or the female and the male which lies at the
heart of a hegemonic heterosexual nuclear family (Sarkar, 2001; Beauvoir, 1972).
Feminists’ critique of the non-visibility of women in the public world and their
‘confinement’ within it is partly confirmed but also troubled by subjects’ narrativization of
this space. The individualistic, personalized, non-conforming idea of the ‘our own’
private, troubles the conventional conceptualization of the private as the domestic and
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