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

love which taught her to value ‘commitment’ and the ‘labour’ required to sustain a
relationship viz-a-viz her next generation’s ‘fast and easy’, ‘quickly changing’, nature of
love.
By relating her generation’s nature of coupling as ‘pure’ and pejoratively associating the
third generation as ‘Westernized’ (pejorative in her body language and tone), she
indirectly ties up the ‘pure’ or ‘emotional’ love with the non-Western superior self viz-aviz
its ‘Westernized’ inferior other. “Cultural beliefs that middle- and upper-class women
embody a changing, modernizing national cultural identity are frequently offset by
concerns that these women are being corrupted by the influences of modernization, and
especially, “Westernization”” (Puri, 1999: 3). Such beliefs reflect a strong impact of the
nationalist anti-colonial discourse of cultural tradition (Chatterjee, 1989) which is
constructed as superior in terms of its modern but spiritual embodiment (‘pure’ love in
Shanta’s narrative possibly implies this) in contrast to the less superior Westernized
individualism and materalism (‘individualistic’ and ‘rationally calculative’ in Shanta’s
narrative possibly implies this) – love for us was ‘blind, more ‘pure’, from the heart and
now, for the “Westernized” next generation, it is more ‘rationally calculative’ and
‘practical’. Shanta’s narration of intimacy is also shaped by national and trans-national
hegemonic codes of gender performance and class boundary. This is manifested in her
appreciation for middle-class respectability (read in her description of her
lover/husband’s respectable background) and a gender appropriate performance of
‘feminine modesty and shyness’ (although she partly conforms to it and partly plays to it
by deliberately performing it). It is sociologically significant to note that she
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