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

In this context, by appreciating the mutual co-constitution of the putative dichotomy
between ‘past’ and ‘present’, ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’, ‘East’ and ‘West’; the research
critiques a ‘politics of time’ (Banerjee, 2006), which is a colonial-modern linear notion of
time and progress that universalizes a hegemonic global modernity of heterosexual
identities and intimacies and/or thereby tries to establish the ‘progressive’ nature of
such modernity. This research problematizes any linear notion of ‘progress’ and
critiques any homogenized notion of modernity by empirically illustrating instances of
multiple and ‘alternative modernity’ (Chakrabarty, 2002) that is built around a tension
between globalization and local affiliations (Lakha, 1999). For instance, it provides
illustrations of indigenization of global bourgeois ideologies of intimacy like the postcolonial
adaption of colonial Victorian discourses of heterosexual romance and
companionate marriage within the structural and cultural requirements of Bengali
kinship system and joint family (Majumdar, 2000: 124).
Post-colonial ‘hybrid’ practices and forms of intimacies that are common in urban
Bengali bhadrasamaj, manifest national and trans-national narratives of intimacy and
thereby problematize both the erasure of otherness and also of any essentialized notion
of ‘self’ and ‘other’. These post-colonial conditions manifest both affinity and difference
within and between the colonizer and the colonized. The encounters between self and
other in such contexts are shown to often engender situations of ‘cultural hybridity’ and
a ‘third space’ (Bhabha, 1991). This ‘third space’ conforms neither to an ‘authentic’
cultural tradition nor to a universalized, homogeneous, modernity (Chatterjee, 1989). It
suggests what I term a ‘cultural politics of ambivalence’ which appreciates
contradictions and multiplicity both within and between self and other, and appreciates
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