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

universalized meta-narratives of the same. Through this ‘situated knowlwdge’ it is
posssible to appreciate not only Pushpa’s agency in subverting the patriarchal
surveillance of respectable femininity, but also to appreciate the indirect agency of her
intimate confidante, her sister, her best friend, Nandita and Pushpa’s homosocial
bonding with them in aiding this patriarchal subversion. It is relevant in this context to
appreciate post-structuralists’ understanding of people as agentic and as gendered
subjects who make choices within a range of socially available discursive positions,
moulding and creatively adapting discourses as they act (Leahy, 1994).
However, it is interesting to see that the way she narrativizes her pabitra prem or pure
love is heavily shaped by a strong gendered, monogamous, institutionalized
heterosexuality. Pushpa’s narrative imagination that one day her beloved would take
her as ‘his’ wife to ‘his’ house unquestionably conforms to the ‘heterosexual imaginary’
which “conceals the operation of heterosexuality as an organizing institution” (Ingraham,
1996: 169) and normalizes the discourse of institutionalized marriage and its
monogamous nature (Van Every, 1996: 40). This naturalized monogamous
heterosexuality belies her romanticized narrative of hetero-normative marriage, of
‘holding hands forever’ and ‘a union of two souls’. Pushpa’s perennial longing to reunite
with family and re-assert her natal and affinal kinship relations from which she and
Bimal have been excommunicated, is indicative of Pushpa’s wish and hope to heal the
societal pains of transgressions and its ‘guilt’. Despite her transgression, she wishes to
be absorbed into the community from ‘not-community’ (Mody, 2008). Pushpa’s narrative
that although Bimal periodically visited her family she was not taken to her, or Bimal’s
family, as ‘he didn’t like taking me’, is also indicative of institutionalized heterosexuality.
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