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

1989). Within colonial and anti-colonial deliberations and their associated hegemonic
discourses of gender and class; women, particularly the bhadramahaila came to be
expected to simultaneously embody a ‘modern India’ without jeopardizing their
‘traditional’ roles within the family and without failing to bear national cultural
‘authenticity’ (Puri, 1999; Sarkar, 2001; Chatterjee, 1989). How women narrativize their
heterosexual intimate spaces, identities and practices therefore becomes sociologically
relevant in terms of their material and discursive relations with national and transnational
discourses and intersections of gender, class and race. Through a focus on
cross-generational narratives of intimate coupling, I not only seek to theorize on
heterosexual intimacy but also contribute to broader questions of family, gender, class,
time, continuity and social change that shape so-called personal intimate spaces.
It is necessary to qualify that the analysis of this chapter heavily focuses on the
narratives of few subjects which will be methodologically presented as case studies
because ‘study of personal narrative is a form of case-centered research (Mishler, 1999
cited in Riessman, 2002: 697). The reason for presenting the narrative texts of Shanta
and Priya, from second and third generation respectively is because they are highly
representative of the inter-generational dynamic of heterosexuality. The motherdaughter
story is thus at once specific and general. The case study of first generation
Pushpa is an anomaly within the general cultural pattern. Her transgression of the norm,
through her story of elopement with her lover, however, indirectly informs the readers of
the norm of her time- the norm of ‘arranged’ marriage and the pathology of marriage of
‘choice’. Her story of negotiating heterosexual intimacy is nevertheless representative in
other ways, particularly through the sociological role of imagination in her life that is
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