Das - Modernity and Biography - Women's Lives in Contemporary India

7/31/2019 Das - Modernity and Biography - Women's Lives in Contemporary India

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MODERNITYAND

BIOGRAPHY: WOMENS

LIVES IN CONTEMPORARY

INDIA

Veena Das

In his seminal study on the sources of the self, Charles Taylor makes acontrast between the existential predicament of a person in traditional culturesfor whom an unchallengeable framework is given within which life is to belived and reflected upon, and the predicament of the self modernity where theworld has lost its spiritual contours.2

The problem of the meaning of life is therefore on our agenda, howevermuch we may jibe at this phrase, either in the form of a threatened loss of

meaning or because making sense of our life is the object of a quest.And thosewhose spiritual agenda is mainly defined in this way are in a fundamentallydifferent existential predicament from that which dominated most previouscultures and still defines the lives of other people today.33

Taylors conception of the meaning of life as an object of a quest is closelytied withAlasdair Maclntyres notion of the unity of life, which he (Maclntyre)connects to the unity of virtue visible only in a life that is conceived andevaluated &dquo;as a whole&dquo;.~ There is a subtle difference in their formulations on the

relation between modernity and the unity of life. Whereas both see obstaclesto the realization of this unity under conditions of modernity, Taylor sees the

quest for meaning itself as a modern predicament. For Maclntyre the sensethat life is to be lived and evaluated &dquo;as a whole&dquo; seems to be given in the

cultures preceding modernity. This sense of wholeness and unity is destroyedor, at the very least, threatened, when modernity partitions each human life

into a variety of segments consecrating the separation between the individual

and the role that he or she plays.


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In the theories described above, the processual nature of the self is em-

phasized. The self, in order to be crafted, must be oriented to &dquo;a sense of the

good&dquo; or to the &dquo;unity of virtue&dquo;-visible only when the shape of ones life canbe constructed as a whole.

Inthis paper

I want to examine thisquestion

with

regardto

personalbiography and modernity in contemporary India. While Taylor assumes a sharpdistinction between &dquo;us&dquo; and the &dquo;life of other people today&dquo;, one wonders inwhich utopian space these &dquo;other people&dquo; are located. In countries such as

India, all institutions may be described as having a double articulation in bothtradition and modernity. These do not simply form stages in the successive

development of society, neither do they lie side by side in perfect harmony. For

example, a traditional institution such as the family is shaped today as much byconcepts of purity and honour, by a vision of life in which the telos of individuallives is given by their caste or gender, as by the codification of personal law,the attempts of the state to recruit the family as an ally in its programs onhealth and education and the electronic images received in the domestic space

by the pervasive popularity of television. The conflicting ways in which these

institutions become mapped on individual lives shapes individual biographyin contemporary India. Individual biography becomes the terrain on whichthe outside is folded to form the interior of the individual. How is the subjectproduced under these conditions? Does the individual construct him or herself

as subject by assuming a stable framework of life given by tradition, or is theexistential predicament of the individual to be understood in the threats that

modernity poses to the integrity of this framework?

I shall seek to answer these questions by taking fragments from the ethnog-

raphy of an urban family and individual life histories within it. My understand-

ing of these fragments, however, is derived from my understanding of themacro picture as well as my own studies on various aspects of the family and

of womens life histories for the last twenty five years. There is no ambition here

to provide a finely grounded, thick description of the urban family although

my previous work can be read along with this essay to provide that context.My method is to select certain fragments from my interviews and observations

and treat them in the way in which one would analyze a sequence of shots

in a film. From the montage like juxtapositions which result, I hope to showthat even in unconnected fragments, one can locate the configuration between

traditional and modern institutions as these are played out in individual lives.

Sequence 1

Radha comes from a low caste poor urban family. Her father is an al-

coholic who has been unable to keep a job. The family, consisting of

four daughters and one adopted son, is supported by the variety of jobsthat Radhas mother does as a part-time maid in the affluent families of


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the neighbourhood. They live in the servant quarters of a highly placed

government official. K has completed her graduation and is looking for a

job. On this particular occasion, she is describing one of the most difficult

moments that she has faced in her life. She says:

First Fragment

I was doing my exams for the eleventh class. One day my brother was

refusing to wake up in the morning. My mother tried to give him tea but

he said he was feeling very tired.After a while my mother said to my father

that she has never seen him so listless and maybe they should get a doctor.

We called a doctor. By that time he had developed high fever and a verybad headache. The doctor gave him an injection. But he did not improve.

By the evening my mother said that we had better take him to the hospital.But when they reached there he had died. I was so broken. He was our

only brother-one brother to four sisters. But my mother was hard like

iron. She said to me, you have to go and do your exam tomorrow-other

wise a year will be lost. I cried and cried and said I just cant do that-it

was the Maths paper next day. But my mother-she became like a terribledevi (mother goddess). Next day she took me to the examination centre

and sat outside to see that I completed the paper. When the results were

to be declared, I said I cant face it, I shall fail. So she went herself to see

the results-you know she is illiterate-so she had to ask someone to read

if my name was among the successful candidates-but I did pass. That

gave me a lot of courage.

,SecondFragment

Radha was describing to me why she cannot do well in interviews. Well it

is like this. I can read and understand English but I have a lot of hesitation

in speaking it. But even if the interview is in Hindi, I feel so numb and

scared-I think I will make a mistake andeveryone

will

laughat me.

They will know that despite my degree I come from a poor family-that

my father drinks-that I belong to a low family (she did not ever say that

she belonged to a low caste). Look, in families like yours, children are not

scared to speak. But in my family, we four sisters are always scared. Ifwe

talk loudly, my father will scold us-I have never laughed loudly or freelyin my life-not since I was a little girl. Since my brother died-it is now

six years-the atmosphere in the house is like on a grave yard. My father

blames us sisters for the death of our brother. He always says that if youwere of an auspicious fate-your brother would have lived. Why did he

die? I know my father would have preferred any one of us sisters to die.

I asked her if she agreed with her father that the sisters were somehow guiltyfor the death of the brother. Her voice loses her normal low tenor.


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Third Fraginentt

How can one say we are guilty? Was it my hand that killed him? It was a

disease.And my mother called the doctor. She took him to hospital. One

can only say that he who had to go, went--why torment those who were

left behind?

And sometimes I want to ask my father-why cant I be like a son

to you? I am educated. But I can hear him say that what use is my

education-I have not become a big officer because I have a B.A. degree.And sometimes when he gets angry and beats my mother and curses us

for the death of the only person he loved-I think I never want to have

anything to do with a man. I dare to ask her if she thinks she will ever

get married. If it was in my hands-never. But I know if I refuse, mymother will lose face among the kinsmen. But all the boys who have

come to see me want a dowry. Where can we find that kind of money?Sometimes my mother wails-why did I have four of these? Still I think

it is not my fault that I am a girl. Sometimes I see a film on television in

which a girl has become completely independent-perhaps a teacher, a

doctor--even Phulan Devi-~-a dacoit, thrown out by her family but before

whom everyone trembled. My mother made me do the exam even before

the mourning period was over and how she defied everyone-even myfather. But she will not defy them on the question of my marriage. Her

head will depend before these customs and traditions.

In these four fragments from the life of a young girl, we see a stable

narrative of the female life cycle provided by tradition but we also see certainmoments of rupture in which ordinary modern institutions such as the school

and the examination system provide fleeting opportunities of escape. In the

narrative organization of her story, there is a stitching together of cultural motifs

derived from the traditional representation of gender relations-in particular,the theme of submission to a design of life preordained for every girl. But

we also see that even in the failed promises of modernity, there is a fleetingexperience of defiance, even of a heroism in this defiance, which makes the

idea of a self independent of the roles that she is constrained to play, availableto her. To Kierkegaard, we owe the recognition of that inaugural moment

of modernity, when one accepts the contingency of life but converts it into

destiny by taking responsibility for it. In the case of K we see the configurationof the institutions of tradition and modernity in the radical reversal between

contingency and destiny that she enacts. She cannot change what tradition

hands to her as her destiny-but in her inner life she converts this destinyinto contingency. &dquo;You are the person to blame for the death of your brother

because a virtuous, auspicious sister would be able to snatch away her brother

from the hands of death&dquo;-says her father. His is the personalized voice of

countless stories from sacred lore that define the place of the virgin sister


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in protecting her brother. The unstated accusation of the father is that his

daughters have lost their virtue. But Radha refuses to be an accomplice in this

particular construction of reality and by rendering the death of her brother as

part of contingency, denying it causality in the terms that tradition dictates, sheenacts her freedom as subject.

&dquo;If it was in my hands, I would never have anything to do with a man&dquo;,Radha has told me this. Far from the images of the husband as god andthe wife as the faithful servant, Radha has seen an image of sexuality in theconstant beatings her mother receives, in the paranoid suspicions that herfather entertains about her mothers fidelity, and, with her ruthless realism, she

recognizes her own future in these images. Her submission to this design ofthe female life is not because she considers this framework to be given, but

because the love for her mother obliges her to submit. She is, however, clearthat this is a sacrificial submission made out of love for her mother and not

out of submission to the authority of her father. It is possible that in the yearsto come, this memory of selfhood would be sustained only by electronicallyproduced images on television. There is already a prefiguration of this in her

recognitionof female

autonomyin the

imageof a woman dacoit. But I would

not dismiss this as misrecognition or as an artificial production of pluralityby the media which made Phulan Devi a dreaded but charismatic figure, assome critics of the post-modern are inclined to do.5 Instead like a rumour or a

dream that does not itself have a stable frame but that is anchored to the stable

narrative organization of stories in a culture, the images of female autonomythat Radha evokes from television, help her to recast the inner landscape ofher life. Contra I~aylors formulation that tradition provides a stable frameworkwithin which ones actions and reflections are placed, one may argue here thatthis stable framework is simply the public face that Radha presents. Meaning isnot constructed in her biography, from adherence to this public face but from

the capacity to imagine a different face for herself, a face veiled from the eyesof the world. Clearly the transaction between the self and the images received

from the institutions of modernity, such as school text books and programson television creates a deep division within the self. But rather than interpretthis as a loss of meaning brought about by the destruction of tradition by theinstitutions of modernity, it seems to me that it is the failure of the promises oftradition and modernity for the underprivileged that gets folded as the insideto form a deeply divided sense of the self.

H. TOWARDSA MORE GENE REFLECTION ON GEN EAND

SELF

Journeying from this fragment of a life history, let me reflect on the wayin which gender relations, especially among those for whom the promises of

modernity have failed, are reframed and how these get reflected in the con-


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struction of individual biography. The experience of modernity for many lowercaste and poor communities in India has imbued their lives with deep ambi-

guity. On the one hand, they have the promise of an Indian state that strivesto claim legitimacy through its anti-poverty programs, literacy drives and the

promotion of better health through various public health measures such as pro-grams of mass immunization. Limited successes in these programs have meant

an increase in life expectancy, higher rates of literacy, and new avenues of

mobility through education and urban employment and the means to exercisesome control over ones reproductive fate. On the other hand, many rural andtribal communities have faced the loss of their traditional means of livelihood.

Whole communities have been displaced in the process of building dams, bythe expansion of mining and through the commercialization of agriculture. Inthe urban setting, a vast underclass has been created in which men hover be-

tween unemployment and the fast tracks of upward mobility through urbancrime. This ambivalence about modernity leaves its mark on individual livesin several ways. In the case of gender relations, the definitions of masculinityand femininity as capabilities is constantly being reshaped. We saw in the caseof Radha, that her father was unable to hold a job and the family depended forits survival on the labour of the mother. Though the daughters had been edu-

cated, they too performed minor tasks in the affluent households to make endsmeet. This kind of household economy among the urban and rural poor is byno means the exception. Norms of masculinity in Indian society emphasizenot only mens authority over women but also their responsibility to ensurethe economic well-being of the family. Womens labour is always considered

secondary.Among the upper castes it is normative that this labour should beconfined to the domestic sphere.Among the lower castes in which womenhave traditionally worked as agricultural labourers or in other menial jobs, theircontributions are considered secondary as compared to those of the men. Yetin many families men have been rendered incompetent because they do not

possess the capabilities to take advantage of the new economic opportunities.How do men

experiencethis loss? I would like to

presentcertain

fragmentsfrom the biography of Ks father as he explained his predicament to me.

Sequence 2

First Frctgment

I dont know who has told you that I do not have a job. I am workingin a hospital as an orderly. But they do not want to make me permanent.(This is a common expression to convey that he is employed as a casual

worker). This is not hecause I dont work well. You go to the hospital and

ask. The &dquo;sisters&dquo; (i.e. nurses) all depend on me. But the management of

the hospital is afraid of me. This is because twenty years ago when I first

joined this hospital, I was very aware of the rights of workers. I joined


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the union. But they threw out all the leaders who had actively challengedthem for keeping them on such low wages. See, this is a Christian (sic)

hospital and the Government is scared to do anything against them. ButI am educated, I know my rights-that is why they are scared of me. That

is why I am what I am-till now I am a daily wager.

Radhas mother concedes that at one time he had a good job but says thathe was always reckless in speech and was therefore dismissed for indiscipline.She says that he does go to the hospital now and then, and sometimes he isable to make some money by running errands for the relatives of patients whoare often hard pressed for help. But that he spends whatever he gets on drinkand does not give a penny for the house. In addition he beats her regularly.He behaves shamelessly in front of the children, she says, forcing himself onher without any regard to the fact that they have growing daughters who are

already of a marriageable age. Her husband, however, begrudges the lack of

respect which he feels has become his lot.

Second Fragment

She does not respect me and her daughters do not respect me.Am I notthe head of the family? Yet, they will laugh loudly sitting brazenly with

their heads uncovered. She is constantly out. I have seen her-alwayslaughing, with her eyes on how she can please this lady and that man.

How does she get so many gifts? There are all kinds of rumours in the~r


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she is, nevertheless, always cheerful. She proudly tells me that one of her ladieshad said that she (Ks mother) was not a servant but a companion in happinessand sorrow. She says that she never has time to reflect on what it means to be

abused by her husband and yet to pray the formulaic prayer of the Hindu wifethat &dquo;may he be my husband in the next seven births&dquo;. She dismisses what

appears as a great contradiction to me by saying, &dquo;that was my fate but I haveinvested everything in seeing that my daughters do not have to bear the sameburdens&dquo;. Yet by insisting that they must be married off within the biradiri,she seems to have pre-ordained such a fate for them. She bemoans that whenshe was young, marriages of girls were not so difficult to arrange. Their castedid not have the custom of dowry but now in the quest for higher statusand in the greed for things, young men have started asking for a refrigerator, a

bicycle, a watch, in addition to a cash payment to set up a business before theyagree to a marriage. The traditional norms that ensured that the sequencingof the life cycle followed a pattern have disappeared as the correspondinginstitutions have dissolved. Yet the force of tradition requires that individual

lives correspond to this standard biography leading to the enormous sufferingthat results from

feelingsof failure in

ensuringthis

biography.This

sufferingis encoded not only in the subjectivities ofwomen who have to bear the bruntof the inequalities of gender relations in the spheres of family and kinshipbut also in the subjectivity of men. Ihis third fragment is again from Radhasfather.

Third Fragment

I feel oppressed by her very presence. When she comes in my presence,I feel she is mocking me. The children are mocking me. See all the men

around in this neighbourhood-even that lowly scavenger-they all pro-vide for their women. Have you seen that man, Chiman? Just a scavenger.He does not touch the work-stands like a lord while his wife does all the

work but he has a government job even if it is only cleaning the streets.And I have to hide my face like a woman. No job. No money to give her.

I used to have so many friends. Now I feel even in the biradari, my wifes

infidelities are known. Yet she acts like some sati-savitri.7 Then I am like

a stretched elastic-stretched to the limit-ready to snap when I see her.

Only when I see her cower before me-I know I am a man again.

These three fragments give us some indication ofhow the loss of masculin-

ity is experienced and the manner in which modern and traditional institutionsalmost conspire to redefine masculinity. In the work experience of Radhas

father, one can see how urban unemployment makes the role of the man asthe provider for the family redundant. As the family comes to depend moreand more on the labour of its women, this loss of masculinity is felt even more


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strongly by the male titular head. This is compounded by loss of face amongthe kinsmen for being unable to fulfil the obligations of being a husband anda father, and paranoid suspicions about the fidelity of the wife. The wifesadherence to all the norms of feminine being-the performance of rituals forthe long life of the husband, her adherence to norms of modesty-far from

being experienced as acts of ritual submission and love-are experienced bythe man as a mockery and a provocation. The male body seems penetratedby the forces of the market, while the demands of tradition on his masculinityseem too difficult for a man in such a position to fulfil. Hence masculinity as

capability is experienced only in the fleeting moments when a man can see hiswife cowering before him.

I am not claiming that the fragments of life history presented here representsome kind of average or ideal type. Clearly the relation between the sociallyprescribed biography and a biography that is self produced has loosened in thelives of women, since life chances are determined neither by tradition nor bymodernity alone. Yet I would claim that the larger picture of violence againstwomen in Indian society that is emerging would sustain my argument that men

and women face each other with agreat

deal of

painnow. In a

report pub-lished in 1991, the National Crimes Record Bureau of the Government of India

compiled the crimes committed against women including rape, molestation,

kidnapping and abduction, and dowry deaths in the three previous years. Itwas found that dowry deaths had increased from 2209 in 1988 to 4836 in 1990.

Rape cases have shown a threefold increase from 1980 to 1990.9 Similarly smallscale surveys show that wife beating may be practised by as many as seventyfive percent of men, among lower castes.l The figures seem lower amonghigher castes but we have to remember that members of these castes may beable to protect the interiority of their family affairs due to their wealth and

influence; hence the extent of familial violence among the upper echelons of

society may be underestimated. Clearly a great deal of violence is taking placewithin the family in contemporary Indian society and I have suggested that it is

the particular intersection between institutions of tradition and modernity thathave made the sphere of the family as the setting in which the private, bio-

graphical consequences of this intersection translate themselves into violence

against women.

In the introduction to this paper, I interrogated the notion that the spiritualquest under conditions of modernity is the quest for the meaning of a life,crafted as a whole. I have suggested, instead, that the intersection and even

the conflict between the sub-rationalities of the different institutions in which

the individual is placed, give the life story a much more fragmented character.This does not mean that a stable narrative of the self is completely lacking-butwomen recognize this stable narrative to be crafted by the voice of traditionand not one in which the self is recognized as the author of its own story.What does this imply for the narrative concept of selfhood?


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In Maclntyres conception of the self, the narrative concept of selfhood

requires two conditions to be filled.As he says:

What the narrative concept of selfhood requires is thus twofold. On the

one hand, I am what I may justifiably be taken by others to be in the course

of living out a story that runs from my birth to my death. I am the subjectof a history that is my own and no one elses, that has its own peculiarmeaning. When someone complains-as do some of those who attemptor commit suicide-that his or her life is meaningless, he or she is often

and perhaps characteristically complaining that the narrative of their life

has become unintelligible to them, that it lacks any point, any movement

towards a climax or a telos ... To be the subject of a narrative that runs

from ones birth to ones death is, ... to be accountable for the actions

and experiences which compose a narratable life.&dquo;

In Maclntyres rendering then, the individual produces him or herself as

subject by taking responsibility for his or her life in the full awareness and com-

plexity of the &dquo;variety of debts, inheritances, rightful expectations and obliga-

tions&dquo; whichone

inherits from the past of ones &dquo;family, city, tribe, or nation&dquo;.In the life histories of women caught between the obligations imposed by tra-dition and the promises of modernity which often fail-one produces oneself

as a subject by the reflexive awareness of being subjugated to the tyranny ofstories in which one owes little allegiance, but which become the public facethat the person presents to the world. I cannot say whether this is the essence

of femininity in societies such as India, as some have argued. There is evidencefrom the various genres of womens speech, such as laments, curses, and songsof exile which would suggest that in the inner lives of women there was al-

ways a recognition of the burdens of a stable framework of life and a standard

biography. There is also evidence that wars, famines, and epidemics could sud-

denly alter the stable frames even before the advent of modernity in traditionalsocieties.l2 What seems to be new under the conditions of modernity is that the

new

settings of the school and the work place, as well as in the new forms ofculture that are being produced provide opportunities for women to imagineother stories for their lives. Simultaneously the configuration of material condi-

tions such as the working of the economy and the reproduction of inequalitiesin the family make it difficult for most women to realize any other stories exceptthe ones transmitted to them through their traditions. Thus if the subject is pro-duced through such experiences of subjugation, it is not surprising that the selfbecomes radically fugitive and forever fragmented-invested more in the sto-ries produced in films and on television than the story one is compelled to live.

Notes

1. I am grateful to Ravi Kapur, Biswajit Sen, and Roma Chatterjji for discussions on

institutions and patterns of biography which helped in formulating some of the


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ideas presented here although I take responsibility for the particular formulations

that follow.

2. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Harvard

University Press, Cambridge, 1989).

3. ibid.p.

18.

4.Alasdair MacIntyre,After Virtue:A Study in Moral Theory, (Duckworth, London,1981).

5. See for instance,Axel Honneth, "Pluralization and Recognition: On the Self-Misun-

derstanding of Postmodern Social Theorists", Thesis Eleven, 1992, no. 31, pp. 24-33.

6. Radhass father is referring to the Constitutional provisions that give freedom to

minorities to run their own institutions and a common perception among many

people that the special provisions for minorities make it difficult for labour laws to

be implemented in these institutions.

7. Referring to the mythic women whose fierce fidelity to their respective husbands is

valorized and held as a model in Hindu society.8. On the relation between institutions and biographical patterns, see Ulrich Beck,

Risk Society: Towards aNew Modernity (Sage, London, 1992).

9.See

Reporton Crime

Against Women, Government of India, (Delhi, 1991).10. See Background Data for Establishing the Health Burden from Domestic Violence

for the World Health Report of the World Bank, (unpublished). See also ChhayaDalar (ed.) ViolenceAgainst Women (Calcutta, 1994).

11.A. MacIntyre,After Virtue:A Study in Moral Theory, p. 202.

12. The most poignant description of this may be found in Krishna Sobti, Zindaginama(Delhi, 1986).

Documents

Das - Modernity and Biography - Women's Lives in Contemporary India