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

‘rupa’ or physical external sexual beauty to ‘saundarya’ or emotional internal beauty
(Kaviraj, 2006: 170). Rabindranath Tagore championed the transformation of ideals of
love through this specific discourse of love as ‘prem’ (Kaviraj, 2006: 162).
The rationale behind historisizing this modern language of love in Tagore is to
contextualize the obsession of the Bangali bhadrasamaj with Tagore as their symbolic
capital and his new discourse of emotion in their narrative texts of intimacy. This
modern discourse of love as narratives suggest, heavily mediated the ‘subtle’, ‘indirect’,
‘non-physical’, ‘spiritual’, ‘poetic’, ‘respectable’, ‘tasteful’, ‘modest’, ‘sophisticated’
expressions of the bhadralok narratives of intimacy. The few love letters that subjects
have kindly shared with me, for instance, narrativize intimacy through various quotations
from Tagore’s works in ways that made his language of love, their own. This modern
Tagorean aesthetic of love that has by now well established its sophisticated refined
subtlety, however, is re-coded by many like Anandita as ‘traditional’, ‘rural’ and ‘of the
past’. Such language of intimacy is also charged against its high handed patriarchal
language, dismissed by a third generation man Soumya as ‘antel bhnat’ or pseudo
rubbish and by his male friend who also is a radical communist, as ‘bourgeois chauvinist
chaat’ or bourgeois bullying/licking. It is important to state in the context that this
modern language of love and emotion, was a direct product of the colonial encounter of
the Indians with the British in the nineteenth century (Chakrabarti, 1995; Karlekar,
2005). This encounter gave birth to a sort of refracted localized Victorian ideology of
conjugal companionship and its associated sexual sobriety particularly through feminine
modesty that also influenced the rigidly conservative patriarchal mentality in Bengal
(Chakrabarti, 1995: 298). Basu (2002: 296) argues how this modern Victorian ideology
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