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

imaginings into neat dichotomous classification. Having mentally rebelled against the
idea of ritual marriage for all its patriarchal symbolism and practices, I also seek
belongingness of my identity through these rituals that socially bind family traditions and
kinship relations. All I can appreciate through reflective self introspection is my identity
as a fractured feminist who at once is able to critique the conventional traditional beliefs
associated with these signs, and also at the same time, relate to its semiotic strength
and its familiarity as part of growing up as a woman within the Bengali bhadrasamaj.
It is also interesting to see how many women ‘modernize’ these ‘traditional’ marital
symbols by wearing more decorative shnakha and pola to exhibit it as an accessory or
read in another way, as a spectacle of consumption. Second generation Gayatri
narrates,
“I have bound my pola with gold patterns to make it ornamental and also
‘modernized a sleek size’ of the otherwise clumsy ugly thick gayiya traditional
looking ones which really look bad”.
Narratives of speak of ‘modernization’ of traditional signs of marriage, come to signify
tradition as constraining, metaphorically represented through adjectives like ‘clumsy’,
‘thick’ and ‘ugly’. To keep alive these traditional signs, they need to be modernized and
to modernize means to make these more pleasurably commoditized. Not withstanding
subjective modifications of traditional signs of intimacy, I contend that such intimate
subjectivities are embedded within the imperatives of capitalistic cultural economy.
Narratives in this context often illustrate the capitalistic ‘romanticization of commodities’
and ‘commoditization of romance’ that is based on a trans-national globalized
“hedonistic” model of intimacy (Lasch 1997: 53). They also reflect the politics of
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