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

interesting that although he narrates marriage primarily through the wishes of his family
and his parents’ arrangement of the girl, his individual decision based almost on an
intuitive vibe plays a significant role in subverting familial arrangements. Moreover, this
also shows that contrary to what he initially says, he has expectations from a marriage
and that his disengagement from it is partly an ideological construction of hegemonic
masculinity.
Twenty-six year-old woman Sanhita’s narrative is also important in the context,
“At some point in my life I definitely wish to get married, have a family and settle
down, but there is no hurry. Men and womwn are ‘equal now.’ So I want to be
‘financially independent’ myself and then ‘find the right guy’ to marry”.
This narrative at once interrogates and reproduces the cultural mandates of
womanhood and heterosexual intimacy. Many women across all three generations
conform to the inevitability of marriage by hinting at its practice as culturally mandated
status for being a ‘shompurno nari’ or a ‘complete woman’. Third generation Rimi
unromantically narrativizes how, “every woman has to get married at one point or
another whether they like it or not”. The first and second generation women often
romanticized such mandates unlike many of the third generation women who in
attempting to delay this cultural mandate by highly personalizing its practical
responsibilities, risks and burden, tended to de-mystify the romantic ideology of
marriage.
Their decisions to procrastinate, however, are often narrativized as “preparing
themselves for the right time”, both ‘financially’ and ‘emotionally’ and being able to
better realize marital companionship and its conjugal experiences. Hence, the initial
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