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

Pushpa’s imaginative space was interiorized and privatized as a ‘place of my own, my
dream home’. However, this ‘place of my own’ is continually shifting against and also in
relation to a place of the ‘others’ where at some points in time the others become a part
of this ‘place of my own’. In this context it is useful to argue that imagination and its
interior, ceases to only remain a subject matter of psychology and becomes immensely
significant as a sociological subject of study and analysis. In this place of imagination,
the self derives its social and relational definition, for instance, as an identity of a
daughter-in-law to someone else. The ‘others’, who lie outside a ‘place of my own’, also
live within it and define it. This is how Mead’s (1934) concept of ‘I’ and ‘Me’ become
inextricably enmeshed. A binary between the self and others collapse through a
relational dynamic in which the interior/private/self and the exterior/public/society
become mutually co-constitutive.
The nationalistic narrative of the spiritual feminine home is shaken by the interrogation
of what is ‘home’ in this context- Pushpa’s family? Or is it the ‘place of my own’? Her
narrative also interrogates what constitutes the ‘spiritual’ – a) is it her family’s notion of
constricted respectable middle-class sexuality; or b) her imaginative uninhibited creative
sexual capacities that circumvent conventional gendered codes of middle-class
respectability and femininity; or c) her notion of pabitra prem in which the so called ‘illicit’
is re-inscribed within the societal parameters of the ‘licit’ As the normative/licit and the
non-normative/illicit is mutually co-constituted and derive their meanings only in relation
to one another, the.discourse of national cultural ‘authenticity’ and the meaning and
boundary of what constitutes the spiritual is destabilized and its essentialized claims of
cultural superiority, troubled.
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