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

in Priya’s narrative of a practical ‘now’. It is also important to remember Priya’s
qualification that between the time of her courtship and marriage, her partner will
financially do something that will grant family’s approval of their relationship. Also, her
sole stress on individual compatibility is later coupled with a stress on familial
compatibility which she later narrativizes as equally important because the ‘family
ultimately comes in’. Familial compatibility, meaning both compatibility with the spouse’s
family and compatibility between two spouses’ families, significantly shapes the
construction of self-narratives and its intimate imagination. Love marriage or marriage of
‘choice’ is thereby re-inscribed into acceptable parameters of social arrangement that
often overlaps with a family’s ‘choice’. The dichotomy between the categories of love
and arrangement are thereby collapsed. How this dichotomy is blurred will be illustrated
in detail a little later.
An integral aspect of intimacy that belies all the narratives, even in the stories of
transgression and individual ‘choice’, is the sociological significance of family that binds
the three generations in terms of its continuity. Pushpa’s narrative, “Afterall true
marriage is not only between two individuals but also between their two families”,
demonstrate this in the most direct way. ‘Practices of intimacy’ that overlap with ‘family
practices’ and are materially, socio-culturally and symbolically embedded within family
history and kinship relations, problematize unbounded pleasures of the self and ‘pure
relationship’ as claimed by Giddens (Jamieson, 1999, 2011; Smart, 2007). Moreover,
the repertoire of ‘practices of intimacy’ interrogate the claim of pure’ relationship’ that
couples are together till it is mutually desirable. Practical caring, sharing and
responsibility also constitute important bases of the practices of intimacy (Jamieson,
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