MODERNITY AND

BIOGRAPHY: WOMENS LIVES IN CONTEMPORARY INDIA

Veena Das

study on the sources of the self, Charles Taylor makes a between the existential predicament of a person in traditional cultures for whom an unchallengeable framework is given within which life is to be lived and reflected upon, and the predicament of the self modernity where the world has lost its spiritual contours.2 The problem of the meaning of life is therefore on our agenda, however much 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 those whose spiritual agenda is mainly defined in this way are in a fundamentally different existential predicament from that which dominated most previous 3 cultures and still defines the lives of other people today.3 Taylors conception of the meaning of life as an object of a quest is closely tied with Alasdair Maclntyres notion of the unity of life, which he (Maclntyre) connects to the unity of virtue visible only in a life that is conceived and evaluated &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 obstacles to the realization of this unity under conditions of modernity, Taylor sees the quest for meaning itself as a modern predicament. For Maclntyre the sense that 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 destroyed or, 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.
In his seminal
contrast

52

53

In the theories described above, the processual nature of the self is emphasized. 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 can

be constructed as a whole. In this paper I want to examine this question with regard to personal biography and modernity in contemporary India. While Taylor assumes a sharp distinction between &dquo;us&dquo; and the &dquo;life of other people today&dquo;, one wonders in which 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 both tradition 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 by concepts of purity and honour, by a vision of life in which the telos of individual lives 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 on health 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 biography in contemporary India. Individual biography becomes the terrain on which the outside is folded to form the interior of the individual. How is the subject produced under these conditions? Does the individual construct him or herself as subject by assuming a stable framework of life given by tradition, or is the existential 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 ethnography of an urban family and individual life histories within it. My understanding of these fragments, however, is derived from my understanding of the macro 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 show that 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 alcoholic who has been unable to keep a job. The family, consisting of four daughters and one adopted son, is supported by the variety of jobs that Radhas mother does as a part-time maid in the affluent families of

54

the

live in the servant quarters of a highly placed official. K has completed her graduation and is looking for a government job. On this particular occasion, she is describing one of the most difficult moments that she has faced in her life. She says:

neighbourhood. They

First
I

Fragment
class. One

day my brother was 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 very bad 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 terrible devi (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.
,Second Fragment
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

was doing my exams for the eleventh refusing to wake up in the morning. My

speaking it. But even if the interview is in Hindi, I feel so numb and scared-I think I will make a mistake and everyone will laugh at 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. If we
in

talk

loudly, my father will scold us-I have never laughed loudly or freely in 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 you were 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 for the death of the brother. Her voice loses her normal low tenor.

guilty

55

t Third Fraginent
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?

How

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, my mother 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 my father. 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 certain

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 fleeting experience 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, available to 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 configuration of 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 destiny into 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
moments

56

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, she
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 and the wife as the faithful servant, Radha has seen an image of sexuality in the constant beatings her mother receives, in the paranoid suspicions that her father entertains about her mothers fidelity, and, with her ruthless realism, she recognizes her own future in these images. Her submission to this design of the 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, clear that 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 years to come, this memory of selfhood would be sustained only by electronically produced images on television. There is already a prefiguration of this in her recognition of female autonomy in the image of a woman dacoit. But I would not dismiss this as misrecognition or as an artificial production of plurality by the media which made Phulan Devi a dreaded but charismatic figure, as some 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 autonomy that Radha evokes from television, help her to recast the inner landscape of her life. Contra I~aylors formulation that tradition provides a stable framework within which ones actions and reflections are placed, one may argue here that this stable framework is simply the public face that Radha presents. Meaning is not 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 eyes of the world. Clearly the transaction between the self and the images received from the institutions of modernity, such as school text books and programs on television creates a deep division within the self. But rather than interpret this as a loss of meaning brought about by the destruction of tradition by the institutions of modernity, it seems to me that it is the failure of the promises of tradition and modernity for the underprivileged that gets folded as the inside to form a deeply divided sense of the self.
enacts

H. TOWARDS A MORE GENE REFLECTION ON GEN E AND SELF

Journeying from this fragment of a life history, let me reflect on the way gender relations, especially among those for whom the promises of modernity have failed, are reframed and how these get reflected in the conin which

57

struction of individual biography. The experience of modernity for many lower caste and poor communities in India has imbued their lives with deep ambiguity. On the one hand, they have the promise of an Indian state that strives to claim legitimacy through its anti-poverty programs, literacy drives and the promotion of better health through various public health measures such as programs 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 exercise some control over ones reproductive fate. On the other hand, many rural and tribal communities have faced the loss of their traditional means of livelihood. Whole communities have been displaced in the process of building dams, by the expansion of mining and through the commercialization of agriculture. In the urban setting, a vast underclass has been created in which men hover between

unemployment

and the fast tracks of

upward mobility through

urban

crime. This ambivalence about modernity leaves its mark on individual lives in several ways. In the case of gender relations, the definitions of masculinity and femininity as capabilities is constantly being reshaped. We saw in the case

of Radha, that her father was unable to hold a job and the family depended for its survival on the labour of the mother. Though the daughters had been educated, they too performed minor tasks in the affluent households to make ends meet. This kind of household economy among the urban and rural poor is by no means the exception. Norms of masculinity in Indian society emphasize not only mens authority over women but also their responsibility to ensure the economic well-being of the family. Womens labour is always considered secondary. Among the upper castes it is normative that this labour should be confined to the domestic sphere. Among the lower castes in which women have traditionally worked as agricultural labourers or in other menial jobs, their contributions are considered secondary as compared to those of the men. Yet in 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 experience this loss? I would like to present certain fragments from 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 working in 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

58

the union. But they threw out all the leaders who had actively challenged them for keeping them on such low wages. See, this is a Christian (sic) hospital and the Government is scared to do anything against them. But I 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 that he 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 is able to make some money by running errands for the relatives of patients who are often hard pressed for help. But that he spends whatever he gets on drink and 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 on her 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 the head of the family? Yet, they will laugh loudly sitting
me.

Am I not

brazenly with their heads uncovered. She is constantly out. I have seen her-always laughing, 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<a~n (community of kinsmen)-that she is not of a good character. And her daughters are following her. If they are educated, why can they not get proper jobs where they will be respected? Instead, one helps that lady who runs a boutique from her house-sewing buttons and hemming the dresses. For a seamstress do you need a B.A. degree? The other goes in two days a week in the beauty parlour-massaging the feet of rich women. Is this a way one can find grooms from respectable families for ones daughters?
In this antiphony of voices between a man who is unable to be the provider for the family any more, and a woman who scrounges for discarded clothes, left-over food, and does whatever odd jobs come her way to keep the family fed and clothed, we see how the failed promises of modernity translate themselves into the conflict of genders. Precisely because the labour of women can be used in so many diverse ways in the household economy of the rich, Radhas mother finds a greater flexibility in taking jobs that would ensure the survival of the family. In a real sense she has replaced the father as the provider. Yet she continues to enact the role of the subordinated, dutiful wife-performing all the fasts and the rituals for the well-being of her husband. She submits to beatings and according to all the women who employ her, one of her great assets is that

59

she is, nevertheless, always cheerful. She proudly tells me that one of her ladies had said that she (Ks mother) was not a servant but a companion in happiness and 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 wife that &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 have invested everything in seeing that my daughters do not have to bear the same burdens&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 when she was young, marriages of girls were not so difficult to arrange. Their caste did not have the custom of dowry but now in the quest for higher status and 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 they agree to a marriage. The traditional norms that ensured that the sequencing of the life cycle followed a pattern have disappeared as the corresponding institutions have dissolved. Yet the force of tradition requires that individual lives correspond to this standard biography leading to the enormous suffering that results from feelings of failure in ensuring this biography. This suffering is encoded not only in the subjectivities of women who have to bear the brunt of the inequalities of gender relations in the spheres of family and kinship but also in the subjectivity of men. Ihis third fragment is again from Radhas father. Third Fragment
I feel

oppressed by her very presence. When she comes in my presence, mocking me. The children are mocking me. See all the men around in this neighbourhood-even that lowly scavenger-they all proI feel she is

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.

fragments give us some indication of how the loss of masculinity experienced and the manner in which modern and traditional institutions almost conspire to redefine masculinity. In the work experience of Radhas father, one can see how urban unemployment makes the role of the man as the provider for the family redundant. As the family comes to depend more and more on the labour of its women, this loss of masculinity is felt even more
is

These three

60

the male titular head. This is compounded by loss of face among the kinsmen for being unable to fulfil the obligations of being a husband and a father, and paranoid suspicions about the fidelity of the wife. The wifes adherence to all the norms of feminine being-the performance of rituals for the long life of the husband, her adherence to norms of modesty-far from being experienced as acts of ritual submission and love-are experienced by the man as a mockery and a provocation. The male body seems penetrated by the forces of the market, while the demands of tradition on his masculinity seem 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 his wife cowering before him. I am not claiming that the fragments of life history presented here represent some kind of average or ideal type. Clearly the relation between the socially prescribed biography and a biography that is self produced has loosened in the lives of women, since life chances are determined neither by tradition nor by modernity alone. Yet I would claim that the larger picture of violence against women in Indian society that is emerging would sustain my argument that men and women face each other with a great deal of pain now. In a report published 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. It was 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 small scale surveys show that wife beating may be practised by as many as seventy five percent of men, among lower castes.l The figures seem lower among higher castes but we have to remember that members of these castes may be able 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 place within the family in contemporary Indian society and I have suggested that it is the particular intersection between institutions of tradition and modernity that have made the sphere of the family as the setting in which the private, biographical consequences of this intersection translate themselves into violence

strongly by

against women.
In the introduction to this paper, I

interrogated the notion that the spiritual

a

quest under conditions of modernity is the quest for the meaning of

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-but women recognize this stable narrative to be crafted by the voice of tradition and 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?

61

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 subject of a history that is my own and no one elses, that has its own peculiar meaning. When someone complains-as do some of those who attempt or 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 To be the subject of a narrative that runs towards a climax or a telos 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 complexity of the &dquo;variety of debts, inheritances, rightful expectations and obligations&dquo; which one 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 tradition and the promises of modernity which often fail-one produces oneself as a subject by the reflexive awareness of being subjugated to the tyranny of stories in which one owes little allegiance, but which become the public face

that 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 evidence from the various genres of womens speech, such as laments, curses, and songs of exile which would suggest that in the inner lives of women there was always 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 suddenly alter the stable frames even before the advent of modernity in traditional societies.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 of culture that are being produced provide opportunities for women to imagine other stories for their lives. Simultaneously the configuration of material conditions such as the working of the economy and the reproduction of inequalities in the family make it difficult for most women to realize any other stories except the ones transmitted to them through their traditions. Thus if the subject is produced through such experiences of subjugation, it is not surprising that the self becomes radically fugitive and forever fragmented-invested more in the stories 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

institutions and patterns of

biography

which

Chatterjji for discussions on helped in formulating some of the

Roma

62

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-Misunderstanding 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 a New Modernity (Sage, London, 1992). 9. See Report on 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 Chhaya Dalar (ed.) Violence Against 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).