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

of sophisticated respectability that Udayan, Manjir and their families seem to embody as
representative of another section of the bhadrasamaj. It needs to be qualified that the
various sections of the Bengali bhadrasamaj and their ideologies and practices are only
anatytically separate and can often be ethnographically seen as overlapping. The
important point that needs to be noted is the fragmented and heterogenous nature of
Bengali middle-class and its associated practices of intimacy. For instance, where
Udayan and Majir understand the shift from tui to tumi as representative of cultural
respectability, Anandita, critiques such a shift as backdated husband (lord)-wife
theatrics. By creatively individualizing her companionate conjugality and refusing to
conform to its hetero-normative imperatives and hegemonic middle-class codes, she
interrogates and radicalizes the normative class boundaries that conserved the middleclass
values against its other. In fact, in defining herself, she others the conjugal
symbolism of Manjir and Udayan as ‘rural’ instead of its self proclaimed urbanity;
‘traditional’ and ‘backdated’, instead of its modern progressive claims. By this she
defines herself and her practice of intimacy as ‘truly modern’ that is also by her narrative
implication, progressive and urban. What should not be missed here is that although
she dissolves class boundaries at one level, she constructs other boundaries at another
level of ‘true’ modernity versus ‘pretentious’ modernity or the traditional ‘other’.
What is also interesting to critically appreciate in all these narratives is the ‘politics of
time’ in operation (Banerjee, 2006). Defining what is the other of modern lies at the
heart of the discourse of modernity. “In this time, only one can exist in the present – the
truly modern...if both the modern man and his other had to inhabit the same space, then
the latter must be seen as inhabiting another time” (Banerjee, 2006: 5-6).
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