The Married ‘New Indian Woman’: Hegemonic Aspirations in New Middle-Class Politics?

Abstract

ABSTRACT The ‘new Indian woman’, among the few to have gained from the ‘benevolent’ capitalist economic forces, has been projected as the new face of global India in the development discourse of the Indian state, as well as the media discourse. The article refers to professional women managers working in multinational corporations (MNCs) in Kolkata as subjects of enquiry in real spaces of the category of the ‘new Indian woman’. The proper functioning of a dual-earner household, as in the case of the professional woman, is largely dependent on the presence of a domestic worker(s). The article uses empirical evidence to demonstrate ways in which the legal definition of marriage becomes a crucial point around which a redefinition of the middle class, and its differences from the working class, becomes possible. Despite the contradictions and conflicts visible in their own married lives, most professional women rhetorically assert their cultural and moral ascendancy over domestic workers, who are allegedly marked by their undisciplined sexuality and disrespect for the legal sanctity of marriage. The ‘new Indian woman’ chooses to push into the background similarities in marital experiences, while foregrounding experiential dissimilarities across classes. This article represents an attempt to understand the ways in which the married ‘new Indian woman’ uses the trope of marriage to reinforce the hegemonic discourse of the new middle class.