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

caste and class (Lakha, 1999: 265). This is an example of the higher caste Brahmins
manifesting symbolic capital in the form of Hindu notion of ‘purity’ and claiming a
legitimate access to higher education and thereby acquiring the educational and cultural
capital needed to be respected as the bhadralok. A simultaneous corollary process was
the denial of the ritual purity (a form of symbolic capital) to the lower caste and to the
Muslims (who coincidentally in many occasions belong to the lower caste and classes)
to have the required cultural capital to become the middle-class with its class distinction
of ‘taste’.
Taste is a social construction and functions to be a ‘matchmaker’; “it marries colours
and also people, who make ‘well-matched couples’ initially in regard to taste” (Bourdieu,
1984: 243). The couples experience their mutual election as a coincidence which
‘mimics transcendent design’ as Bourdieu puts it in Sartre’s words, ‘made for each
other’ (243). The social sense, Bourdieu argues, is guided by the system of mutually
reinforcing science of things such as ‘clothing, pronunciation, bearing, posture,
manners’ and which ‘unconsciously registered’, are the basis of ‘antipathies’ or
‘sympathies’, and of the ‘elective affinities’ in love or friendship (241). The most
indisputable evidence of ‘elective affinities’ and ‘social compatibilities and
incompatibilities’, is provided by class and even class-fraction endogamy. This is
ensured almost as strictly by the free play of sentiment as by deliberate family
intervention. Bourdieu holds that the structure of the circuit of matrimonial exchanges
tends to reproduce the structure of the social space (241). The following section is a
cultural contextualization of the intersectionality of the discourses of gender, sexuality,
race and class within the Bengali bhadrasamaj.
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