Managing Marriages through ‘Self-Improvement’: Women and ‘New Age’ Spiritualities in Delhi

Abstract

ABSTRACTThere has been a rise in the availability and consumption of ‘New Age’ spiritualities in urban India. I focus on one such self-care practice, Reiki, in a heterogeneous Delhi neighbourhood, and the engagement of urban upper-caste women from middle-class joint families with it. I argue that Reiki classes can be read as a site for the formation of gendered subjectivities. There are four kinds of interpersonal problems women discussed in Reiki classes: one's well-being in families, divorces, problems with mothers-in-law and material success. Through the habitualisation of positive thoughts, maintaining cosmic balance and managing one's ‘life-energy’, women were taught to take control of their lives within the constraints of familial situations. Through a focus on the self, these practices re-teach women to adapt happily by visualising the intimacies they desire, articulating their anxieties and imagining newer ways of ‘doing’ marriage. I argue that practices like Reiki disempower women through a language of self-responsibilisation. Self-healing strategies like Reiki therefore function both as a ‘technology of the self’ and as an extension of the adaptable Hindu joint family.