Rituals and Embodiment: Class Differences in Religious Fasting Practices of Bengali Hindu Women

Research unraveling the potential for women’s empowerment through participation in religious rituals is an important corrective to theorizing that suggests that liberation requires that women avoid rather than embrace the litany of cultural rituals that in the past have served to oppress them. The field, however, is premised on theoretical frameworks that are heavily focused in the pursuit of uncovering resistance against patriarchal orders in religious engagements of women, thereby failing to account for the dialectical nature of such engagements. Employing Bourdieu’s theory of habitus to investigate religious fasting practices of 41 Bengali Hindu women, I argue that the impetus for active negotiations, that entail a more dialectical engagement with meanings of cultural rituals, is located in a set of class-based predispositions that are fostered and reinforced in the experiences and opportunities that women encounter in their daily lives.     

Gender, Class Aspirations, and Emerging Fields of Body Work in Urban India

If some research indicates that bodies are becoming central to the life projects of “new liberal Indian” women, public debates simultaneously reveal that their bodies are entangled in satisfying traditional and modern ideals of womanhood. There are few studies, though, that have looked into how women reconcile and make use of contradictory cultural signals surrounding their bodies that arise out of a rapidly changing gender and class structure. We draw upon both followers and critics of Bourdieu to show that bodily concerns and undertakings of 48 urban Indian women, and the ways in which they resist and embrace cultural demands on their bodies, vary by social class locations. The women in the study who were most keenly aware of “options” embedded in thin or fit bodies were the ones who could take advantage of new careers and styles of living that the global economy was bringing to their doorsteps. In contrast, women who saw limited prospects for social mobility were unconvinced of the symbolic value of a thin body and rejected appearance concerns on the ground that it interfered with their mothering responsibilities. We conclude that while the fit body has indeed emerged as an important site of self-making for the modern Indian woman, the degree to which she sees costs and benefits involved in the bodywork of losing weight depends on her class location.