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

omantic coupling cue. This phrase thereby gradually came to signify across
generations a semiotic register of exaggerated heterosexual love and affection
particularly, of an ‘emphasized femininity’ (Connell, 1995; Leahy, 1994) with its
accompanied accentuated tone, pitch and other non-verbal gestures like the secret
exchanges of the eyes. This way the postcolonial modernity of Bengal creatively
negotiationed intimate spaces by strategically localizing the colonial modern imperatives
of individualized romantic coupling to suit its extended family cultures (Majumdar, 2000:
127). The ‘practices of intimacy’ thereby overlapped with the ‘practices of family’ in
which heterosexual intimacy was realized in and through family and kinship relations
(Jamieson, 2011). This is best captured in second generation Shanta’s ideal of
romance,
“Our next generation does not understand that staying away from others just as a
couple with having no one else in the family can often become burdensome with
no one to distribute familial responsibilities to. More importantly it can become
quite boring where too much of each other can saturate love and cause more
conjugal conflicts. Contrary to idea that the joint family is not conducive to
romantic coupling, I think that romance is best experienced in the presence of
others (smiles shyly)...by hiding from them, secretively exchanging glances,
coming close, and stealing from others some shared togetherness.”
Udayan says his great grandmother, referred to her husband as ‘shunchhen’ rather than
‘shunchho’ in the initial stages of her marriage. The former is accompanied by the
pronoun ‘apni’ and the latter ‘tumi’. The Bengali pronoun ‘tumi’ is the English pronoun
you but ‘apni’ does not have a direct English translation. It therefore represents a classic
methodological challenge for striving to keep its cultural connotation intact, the meaning
of which runs the risk of getting lost in translation. I have only tried to transcreate its
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