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

What is education of any use if we cannot be modern enough to question
patriarchal religious prescriptions that oppress women?’ I told my ‘partner
straight away that forget about my wearing those shakha shnidur’, I will only get
married if we just have a ‘court marriage’ and a simple ‘engagement ring
exchange ceremony’ rather than go through all that meaningless ‘high caste
brahmanical Hindu ritual marriage’. ‘Although my in-laws are pretty traditional
and conservative and I knew they would not easily accept just a legal marriage, I
told my partner that if he ‘cared’ for me then he will have to ‘convince’ his
parents.”
Sunanda’s resistance to ‘meaningless’ high-caste hindu ritual marriage and to bearing
of marital signs attempts to make a ‘reflexive’ political language of resistance to
hegemonic codes of gender and its associated ‘patriarchal’ ideologies of casteism and
communalism. Her refusal to undergo ritual marriage and perform only a court marriage
and a simple ring ceremony however, cannot be read as an absolute resistance to
patriarchal power structure. In resisting a patriarchal religious discourse, she complies
with another patriarchal legal discourse of legitimate institutionalized marriage. The
Westernized ritual of ring ceremony popularly known as the ‘engagement’ ceremony
and adapted within the Bengali bhadrasamaj illustrates local adaptations of hegemonic
codes of trans-national intimacy and its hetero-normative romantic coupling (Puri,
1999).
Sunanda’s ‘modern’, ‘educated’, ‘cultured’, ‘progressive’, ‘reflexive’ and ‘feminist’ self is
contrasted with the ‘shadharon’ and ‘oppressed’ other. These invocations of self identity
in relation to her intimate space politicize certain hierarchical value judgment that
distinguishes the self from the other. Sunanda’s directly narrativized and implied binary
can be seen to be an influence of hegemonic Western modernity and feminism
255