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

Giddens’ individualization thesis that constructs tradition as self-limiting and reflexivemodernization
as self-enabling. The commoditized implication of ‘modernization’ as
narratives of intimacy suggest, demonstrate that in reflexive modernization, reflexivity,
agency and narrative of the self are highly bound by the structural imperatives of market
‘rules’ and capitalist economy of commodity consumption that consumes not only
commodities but also selves. I will critique Giddens’ association of tradition with
constraints by later showing how traditional spaces are also culturally narrativized as
conducive to self-reflexivity and realization of the self. The subjective ‘modernization’ of
‘traditional’ signs definitely re-signifies meanings at one level of discourse but
nevertheless operates within another level of discourse and is thereby never outside the
discursive regime.
The traditional religious significance of marital signs is also often radically secularized
by re-defining and re-interpreting its religious value. For instance, some women who
occasionally bear these signs often wear them as accessories that enhance a traditional
Bengali attire of a white sari with a red border worn particularly although not exclusively
during traditional Bengali festivities. A non conformity with these Hindu ritualistic
notions of marriage at one level, however, reinforces a communal discourse of
hegemonic middle-class Bengaliness and a gendered discourse of hegemonic codes of
feminine respectability of particularly the bhadramahila, on the other. Specific colours
are intertwiningly communalized, communitarianized, and gendered. White and red
colours represent a hetero-normative mix of virginity/purity and sexuality respectively
and come to symbolically mark off through the woman’s body, the non-Bengali, the non-
Hindu ‘others’. Women thereby once again come to represent the cultural ‘authenticity’
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