Embodied History: Intergenerational Conflict in Indian Fiction
Abstract
This article builds on the existing critique of the modernization paradigm, and its particularly Indian manifestations, to propose that the relationship between disadvantages in later life and modernization be situated within the context of class-based imbalances of access and exclusion at the intra-familial, intergenerational level. Following Pierre Bourdieu, I adopt a model of class which is based on ‘capital’ movements through social space. Capital here functions as an economistic metaphor referring to the resources distributed throughout the social body. The value of Bourdieu’s ideas is reflected in two Indian short stories I will examine (one each from Hindi and Bengali), here chosen as representative instances of a widespread preoccupation of contemporary Indian fiction.
Full text
- 1 Premilla D’Cruz and Shalini Bharat, ‘Beyond Joint and Nuclear: The Indian Family Revisited’, Journa (...)
- 2 W.J. Goode, World Revolution and Family Patterns, Free Press (New York, 1963), p. 268.
- 3 L. Cohen, No Aging in India: Alzheimer’s, the Bad Family and Other Modern Things, University of Cal (...)
- 4 Cohen, pp. 103-104.
1Even though within a decade of its formulation the theory of modernization – an analytical paradigm founded by American sociologists in the 1960s to explain the process whereby traditional societies attained modernity – stood largely discredited, its conceptual and methodological assumptions continue, albeit with some modifications, to underwrite the practice of social gerontology in India today. The influence of modernization theory was evident in family research in India undertaken in the 1960s, which focused primarily on the study of family patterns and structures.1 W. J. Goode, as one of these early and better known theorists, propounded that industrialization and urbanization of traditional societies would lead to the dismantling of the extended family and the development, in its place, of a nuclear or conjugal family system, along the lines of the west.2 The tradition vs. modernity binarism of the modernization paradigm meant that the perceived fall in the status of old people in modernizing societies such as India was conceptualized primarily in terms of a conflict between the cultural values of a western modernity and the indigenous tradition, a formulation which also alerts us to the fact that such constructions were not solely attributable to a mimicry of internationalist gerontology’s Ageing and Modernization paradigm.3 As Lawrence Cohen observes, gerontology in India is predicated upon a sense of Kulturkampf: Western modernity is specifically the central villain in the gerontological narrative of the Fall and what is under threat is the loss of an ‘essential Indian self’, no less. The proverbial Indian joint family, along with the aging person ensconced firmly at its centre, get reified within this discourse as signifying an unchanging notion of an authentic indigeny. To quote Cohen: ‘Against both an imagined West and an experienced Here and Now, the family’s internal relations are constituted not as shifting in time and potentially fractious but as anchored in a stable tradition and characterized by equipoise, love and respect’.4
- 5 A. McClintock, ‘Family Feuds: Gender, Nationalism and the Family’, Feminist Review 44, p. 66.
- 6 I. Raja, ‘Signifying the Nation: Identity, Authenticity and the Ageing Body in the Post-Independenc (...)
2The familial self, offered in gerontological narratives in India as an embodiment of an essential Indianness perpetually threatened by Western modernity, is often interchangeable within this discourse with the aging body. The disembedding of this aging body from the folds of the joint family, then, becomes a powerful and abiding symbol of the loss of self. Indeed, the post-Independence Indian short story is characterized by a recurring mobilization of the aging figure to represent the authentic ‘body’ of national tradition embodying, to borrow a phrase from Ann McClintock, ‘nationalism’s conservative principle of continuity’.5 Nonetheless, as I have argued elsewhere, fiction often rejects models of easy opposition (between youth and age, modernity and tradition, Indian self and Western Other) that naturalize the loss of status of old people as an inevitable concomitant of modernity, to reveal that not only do these categories need to be constantly reconstructed,6 but that presenting them as essentially given in effect serves to elide the constructed nature of disadvantages in later life.
- 7 M. Hockx, ‘Theory as Practice: Modern Chinese Literature and Bourdieu’, in M. Hockx and Ivo Smits, (...)
3In this article, I build on the existing critique of the modernization paradigm, and its particularly Indian manifestations, to propose situating the relationship between disadvantages in later life and modernization within the context of class-based imbalances of access and exclusion at the intra-familial, intergenerational level. Following the French theorist, Pierre Bourdieu, I adopt a model of class which is based on ‘capital’ movements through social space, where capital functions as an economic metaphor referring to the resources distributed throughout the social body. As one scholar has put it, Bourdieu’s microtheories of social power rely on a ‘thick description’ that takes account of all the practices that are part of the struggle for cultural power and prestige (quoted in Hockx 2003, p. 220).7 Insofar as the concepts of cultural capital and cultural legitimacy draw upon a wide range of criteria – from economic, political, and social attitudes to moral values, education, gender relations, family life, types of child rearing practices and so on – they enable us to define divisions not just between classes but also within them. The value of Bourdieu’s ideas finds narrative instantiation in two short stories I will examine in this paper, one each from Hindi and Bengali. Bhisham Sahni’s ‘Dinner for the Boss’, and Mahasveta Devi’s ‘The Son’, both show how textual instances of intergenerational conflict, while seeming to lend themselves to a fairly standard modernity vs. tradition reading, upon closer analysis reveal that the source of this conflict is the more specific phenomenon of upward class mobility: the old parent symbolizes not ‘Indian tradition’ so much as the social class which the younger generation seeks to escape.
- 8 D.C. Tipps, ‘Modernization Theory and the Comparative Study of Societies: A Critical Perspective’, (...)
- 9 S.M. Neysmith and J. Edward, ‘Economic Dependency in the 1980s: Its Impact on Third World Elderly’, (...)
- 10 W.C. Cockerham, This Aging Society, Prentice Hall (New Jersey, 1991), p. 48.
- 11 J. Hendricks and C.A. Leedham, ‘Making Sense of Literary: Relevance of Recent Gerontological Theory (...)
- 12 See Cohen (1998), Tipps (1973), Hendricks and Leedham (1987). See also D.O. Cowgill, ‘A Theory of A (...)
4Intellectuals in nineteenth-century Europe approached industrialism with a constructed sense of nostalgia based on romantic visions of a pre-modern society in which it was possible for even poor and uneducated people to lead simple, contented lives in a community bound together by strong affective ties. While this understanding of the past remains influential even today in various modes of indigenist thought, modernization theory, as formulated in the mid-twentieth century, generally looks upon tradition not with nostalgia but regret: it regards modernity as representing ‘the very embodiment of virtue and progress, and tradition merely a barrier to its realization’.8 Since the 1960s, international programs have been based on modernization theory,9 which has been especially influential in explaining the relationship between society and the aging process, though this assessment has varied over time.10 The initial perception that social changes brought about by modernization were relatively benign for the elderly11 altered considerably in the early 1970s, when the American gerontologist Donald Cowgill proposed that the status of old people was inversely proportional to the degree of modernization within a society. Cowgill’s argument drew on the general assumption that in pre-industrial societies, where the number of people who live to be old is relatively small and where stability and experience are considered more valuable than innovation and individual achievement, the elderly enjoy high status. As the number and proportion of the elderly in the population start to increase, their economic and social usefulness begins to decline; as primitive subsistence economies give way to technology-intensive, industrialized economies, as industrialization and urbanization lure young migrants away from villages to cities in search of employment; as joint families are disrupted and children displaced, as growth in technology makes traditional knowledge obsolete, as closed, ascriptive status systems become open and achievement-oriented, as life spans lengthen and mortality rates decline, the status of the elderly starts to depreciate.12
- 13 Hendricks and Leedham, p. 197.
- 14 R. Grew, ‘Modernization and Its Discontents’, American Behavioral Scientist 21-2 (1977), p. 301.
5Critics of modernization theory, however, argue that a single model, especially one such as modernization, which on the one hand takes nation states as units of analysis and on the other does not specify and examine the political context in which old people live, cannot adequately serve as a template for an accurate understanding of how old people are placed in society.13 Nations, after all, are not socially or culturally homogeneous:14 they encompass a diversity of traditions that may emerge over time or coexist in a dynamic, even mutually conflicting, relationship with each other. Modernization theory’s focus on differences between nations rather than within them does not allow for the conceptualization of a hybrid society that is neither traditional nor modern in the sense in which these terms are used by these theorists.
- 15 R. Kothari, ‘State and Nation Building in the Third World’, in G.N.S. Raghavan, ed., Readings from (...)
- 16 Social Indicators of Development, World Bank Report, Johns Hopkins UP (Baltimore, 1994).
- 17 L. Budhwar, D. Reeves and P. Farrell, ‘Life Goals as a Function of Social Class and Child Rearing P (...)
- 18 R. Dwyer, All You Want Is Money, All You Need Is Love: Sexuality and Romance in Modern India, Casse (...)
6When the modernization paradigm shifts from the geographical space of the nation to social, economic or political systems within that space, the rigidity of its analytical categories once again belies the political reality of existing patterns of dominance and control. Social transformation within this paradigm takes place as a result of an immanent process of change that is seen as being distinct from external sources of influence. Its emphasis on economic development through the model of industrial growth and urbanization produces an economic, bureaucratic, and technocratic elite,15 which comes to be seen as the primary agent of social change. In the Indian context, the consolidation of the middle classes started in the 1960s, when a number of developments took place that were central to their economic growth. According to a recent World Bank Report (1994),16 India now has the largest middle class in the world, and it counts as the most significant social group in the country.17 Undoubtedly a powerful force in terms of its size, the middle class has also gained in terms of visibility as the result of a series of government policies in the 1990s, a decade associated with widespread changes in consumer lifestyle choices and spending patterns.18
- 19 Cohen, pp. 88-89.
- 20 Ibid.
7In a scenario of middle-class hegemony, the entire project of modernization can become identifiable with the values and ambitions of the middle classes, which then stand to gain the most from its suppression of social class as a category of analysis. Drawing attention to the insidious impact of middle-class dominance on the practice of social gerontology in India, Lawrence Cohen points out that the majority of the aged in India is subsumed under the relatively privileged category of the middle-class, urban pensioner. While social security schemes for the majority of the population remain minimal, justification for middle-class claims for patronage are frequently sought in the name of the disadvantaged elderly. Private gerontological institutions, ostensibly serving the needs of a working-class majority, in fact, cater for the requirements of an urban middle-class clientele.19 Given its bias towards the western model of development, it is perhaps not surprising that modernization theory looks towards modernized, post-industrial societies for solutions to fixing the ‘problem’ posed by the increase in the number of elderly. Thus, social policy measures for the population proposed by gerontologists include the construction of more old age homes, geriatric institutions, and services such as meals-on-wheels, measures that address needs which are class-specific but which deny their basis in class. In thus erasing the question of social class and making the category of the urban pensioner stand in for the working class majority, the already disadvantaged old person is made even more peripheral.20
- 21 B. Skeggs, Formations of Class & Gender, Sage (London, 1997), p. 7.
8In an account of the disappearance of class analysis from a range of academic sites, Beverley Skeggs points out that ‘[m]aking class invisible represents a historical stage in which the identity of the middle class is assured’.21 While the concept of class has been historically useful to the middle classes for the purposes of maintaining and consolidating differences in power, Skeggs argues, its recent invisibility suggests that these differences are now crystallized into a set of institutionalized, legitimated and uncontested assumptions. Skeggs’ observation is useful for understanding how the absence of class as a category from studies in social gerontology in India is necessitated by the need to camouflage and maintain its middle-class orientations.
- 22 T. Eagleton, Ideology: An Introduction, Verso (London, 1991), p. 59.
9In looking at the change in the status of old people as an essential corollary of modernization, the modernization narrative, to draw upon Terry Eagleton’s definition of ideology, reifies social life into what seems not only natural but also universal.22 Changes in elderly status that come about over time, however, as I will argue in this article, are not inevitable outcomes of a western modernity encroaching upon an essential Indian tradition which safe-guarded elderly interest but rather signify shifts in relations between individuals and groups as socioeconomic beings.
10If indicating what kinds of erasures are effected when the category of class is permitted to go unnamed suggests why a class-based analysis is important, then the discussion that follows seeks to show how such an analysis might proceed. Accordingly, I introduce certain ideas and concepts of Pierre Bourdieu, to be followed in the second half of this article by a demonstration of how they might be used for framing fictional representations of intergenerational relations.
- 23 N. Crossley, The Social Body: Habit, Identity and Desire, Sage (London, 2001), p. 96.
- 24 Ibid., p. 97.
- 25 Skeggs, p. 9.
11Bourdieu’s model of class is based on ‘capital’ movements through social space, where capital refers to the resources (unequally) distributed throughout the social body which have an exchange value in one or more of the various ‘markets’ or ‘fields’ seen to comprise the social world.23 Bourdieu identifies four different types of capital: economic, cultural, social and symbolic. Economic capital includes income, wealth and assets of monetary value; cultural capital can exist in an embodied, objectified or institutionalized state, wherein the first refers to long-lasting dispositions of the mind and the body, the second takes the shape of cultural goods, and the third of educational qualifications; social capital refers to resources based on connections and group membership, that is, capital specifically generated through relationships; and lastly, symbolic capital which roughly amounts to status or recognition.24 For the first three types of capital to be converted into symbolic power it is important that they are perceived and recognized as legitimate; that is, capital has to be regarded as legitimate before it can be capitalized upon. All forms of capital, needless to say, are context-specific, their exchange value varying according to the ‘field’ in which they are situated.25
- 26 Crossley, p. 97.
- 27 C. Wilkes, ‘Bourdieu’s Class’, in R. Harker, C. Mahar and C. Wilkes, eds., An Introduction to the W (...)
- 28 Ibid., p. 127.
- 29 Crossley, pp. 90-91.
12Capital figures prominently in another concept central to Bourdieu’s theory: social class. Class, as he understands it, refers to the respective amounts of the various forms of capital that individuals possess.26 Bourdieu conceptualizes social class neither as an essence nor an indeterminate set of signifiers; it is rather an arbitrarily imposed definition, though its social effects are tangible. Since such a notion of class is subject to constant change, every class formation for Bourdieu is ultimately partial. The trajectory of the social class, or of class fractions, which refers to their motion within the class structure (i.e. whether as a group they are on an upward or downward trajectory) is useful for understanding changes in occupational or class structures across historical time. There is a second sense in which Bourdieu uses the concept of a class trajectory, which is to refer to the progress of an individual as a class agent throughout their life history. This is useful for explaining why certain fractions of social classes may incline towards the tastes of another class − perhaps because their origins, or their pretensions for the future, lie in the direction of this other class.27 An important site of dynamic engagement between class trajectory and individual trajectory is the family.28 It is in the family, for example, that processes are generated by which those who have smaller resources of educational, economic and cultural capital aspire to increase these through a combination of self-help, education, the acquisition of English, or saving and consumer choices, so as to distinguish themselves from those beneath them.29
- 30 Ibid., p. 94.
- 31 S. Lawler, Mothering the Self: Mothers, Daughters, Subjects, Routledge (London, 2000), p. 113.
- 32 Ibid., pp. 113-114
- 33 Andre Beteille, ‘The Family and the Reproduction of Inequality’, in Patricia Uberoi, ed., Family, K (...)
13The family is also crucial to Bourdieu’s concept of the habitus. Determined by one’s position within a particular family form (with its attendant economic, cultural and symbolic capital) as well as within systems of education, a habitus is a factor of social difference that inclines agents to act in certain ways without either consciously aiming towards ends or possessing mastery of the modes necessary to attain them.30 The habitus of different social groupings (such as different classes) are for Bourdieu marked unequally and hierarchically. The notion of habitus is especially useful for my analysis of intergenerational relations, since it ‘conceptualizes the present in terms of the past’.31 By providing a way of seeing ‘class’ at once spatially and temporally the concept of habitus enables an analytical focus on the history that constitutes (part of) the subject. As Bourdieu puts it, ‘the habitus – embodied history, internalized as a second nature and so forgotten as history – is the active presence of the whole past of which it is the product’.32 This allows us to explore a range of situations within the family: What happens when families which gamble for capital to improve their position within a field attain a measure of success so that they are then able to distinguish themselves from others who have shared their habitus until then but are now beneath them? What happens when in the interest of the onward individual trajectory the very past (of which one’s habitus is an active presence) seems necessary to disown? If the habitus is determined by one’s position within a particular family form, then how does one’s relationship with the family change in the event of a perceived need to disown the past? In other words, in this article it is not the habitus internalized as second nature (embodied history) that concerns me but the discrepancy between the habitus that is sought to be internalized as second nature on the one hand, and the previous habitus that is desired to be forgotten on the other. To put this differently, I am interested in exploring the issue of disrupted habitus that arises when individuals attempt to move between different social classes in a single lifetime with the aim of attaining a different habitus. Additionally, I want to consider how a disrupted habitus may impact upon intergenerational relationships within the family, an institution which continues to be strong across India.33
- 34 Ibid., pp. 440-441.
14The family forms a very important part of the social environment of the infant, the child and the adolescent. While many individuals overcome the disadvantages of family and social background, others suffer because of failures of one kind or another, sometimes within the family itself. While the internal dynamics of the family are not dependent entirely on its capital (even in the broad sense in which the concept is deployed by Bourdieu), the family, particularly the service class, plays an active and successful part in transmitting its cultural and social capital to its younger members. This transfer is guided by complex social and psychological processes whose outcome can never be predicted with certainty in the individual case.34 The important point to recognize about Bourdieu’s concept of habitus is that it is not rigid. It is both durable and oriented towards the practical: Agents use their feel for the rules of the game as a means of furthering and improving their own standing and capital within the cultural field. Dispositions, knowledges and values are thus always potentially subject to modification, rather than passively consumed or reinscribed.
- 35 B. Sahni, ‘Dinner for the Boss’, in Middle India: Selected Short Stories transl. from Hindi by G. W (...)
15Bhisham Sahni’s (1915-2003) ‘Dinner for the Boss’35 is a story of a young and ambitious couple which literally does not know where to ‘put’ the mother in its quest for upward social mobility. The story begins with the husband and wife duo making frantic preparations for a party they are hosting for the husband’s boss. The preparation is nearly finished to their satisfaction when ‘[s]uddenly an obstacle appeared before Shyamnath…. Mr Shyamnath turned to Mrs Shyamnath and said in English, ‘What can we do with mother?’(p. 1). The problem with the mother, as quickly becomes clear is that she is an illiterate rustic who does not [even] know how to sit on a chair without pulling her feet up. Shyamnath is afraid that if the boss should come across his mother he might face embarrassment (p. 4). After much deliberation the couple decide that mother should stay put in the verandah while the guests are in the drawing room; later, when the guests move into the verandah, she should quietly slip into the drawing room through the bathroom. She is also instructed to refrain from sleeping lest the guests overhear her snoring. As the evening is about to begin, the nervous mother, her heart ‘pounding’, finds herself seated on the chair in the verandah ‘her legs hanging down’(p. 5). Despite all the warnings, though, the mother nods off, and when the guests come out of the drawing room and into the verandah they find her ‘sitting on her chair just as she had been [b]ut both her feet were on the seat of the chair and her head was lolling from side to side, and from her mouth issued loud snores’ (p. 6). Shyamnath is stunned: ‘What he saw made him stumble, and in a moment his intoxication took flight’ (p. 6). Trying to make the best of a bad situation, he ‘said in English, ‘My mother comes from a village. She’s lived there her whole life.’’ (p. 8). At this point the story takes an interesting turn. The American boss is suddenly quite fascinated by the mother: ‘I like village folk a lot’, he says. ‘Then your mother must know village songs and dances’ (p. 7). The conversation turns to village handicrafts from Punjab and the boss is eager to learn more (p. 8). Shyamnath’s annoyance turns into joy and pride; he is thrilled that ‘Mother had brought new colour to the party’ (p. 8). Before the evening finally comes to an end, Shyamnath has persuaded his mother to offer to embroider a phulkari piece for the boss. The mother, who initially protests that her sight is not the same as before, gives in to her son’s demands willingly enough when he tells her that her effort might be helpful in securing him a promotion at work.
16Deploying Bourdieu’s concept of the habitus to explore the manner in which people in fact do not fit into a habitus reveals the real source of Shyamnath’s discomfort with his mother who otherwise comes across as a singularly unassuming character in the story. Shyamnath’s pretensions for the future lie in the direction of the social class to which his boss belongs and not that of his mother. The dinner that he hosts for his boss is aimed at cultivating a familiarity with him in the hope that this will help his career. Shyamnath’s attempts to consolidate his social capital appear to meet with some success when he notes with quiet pleasure that ‘the sahib had begun to make jokes and tell stories. He was being as friendly here as he was awe-inspiring in the office and his wife… was chatting with Shyamnath’s wife as if she were an old friend’ (p. 5).
- 36 See Sahni, ‘Chacha Mangal Sain’, in We Have Arrived in Amritsar and Other Stories, transl. from Hin (...)
17As in similar other stories,36 the house generally, and the living room in particular, becomes the site for displaying one’s cultural capital. In ‘Dinner for the Boss’, Shyamnath, we are told, is a stickler for orderliness in the house:
The running of the entire household was in his hands: where hooks should be put, where the beds should be, which colour the curtains should be, which sari his wife should wear, what size the table should be… (p. 4)
18Shyamnath seeks the approval of those he aspires to emulate in social terms, above all, the American boss: ‘The sahib had liked the whisky. His memsahib had liked the curtains, the design of the sofa covers, the decoration of the sitting room. What more could they [the hosts] want?’ (p. 5). Shyamnath looks to establish, to himself as well as his colleagues who are co-aspirants for professional success, that he is well on his way to the same social footing as his boss, if not there already. The fact that the boss and his wife are willing to shed their reserve and mingle with the hosts on seemingly equal terms and that they share the same tastes only authenticates Shyamnath’s pretensions. There is one thing, however, that threatens to spoil this self-image that Shyamnath is trying to project, and that is the presence of the old mother. With her ‘small, shrivelled body, her cloudy eyes’ (p. 4) and her generally rustic manner, the mother presents a problem that Shyamnath has gone to great lengths to address. Since the mother does not appear to fit the cultural or literary stereotype of the interfering, aggressive mother-in-law, one starts to wonder just what it is about the old woman that her son finds so threatening.
- 37 See P. Ray, ‘The Blanket’ (1984), in S. Tharu and K. Lalita, eds., Women Writing in India: 600 B.C. (...)
19The mother, like parents in numerous other similar stories,37 has educated her son through great hardship. When the son, by way of improving her appearance in anticipation of the approaching dinner party, asks her to wear some bangles she points out that she no longer has any jewellery: ‘You know I sold all my ornaments to pay for your education’ (p. 4). The son is irritated by his mother’s response: ‘Why touch on that?’(p. 4). But that is where the rub lies: the mother has evidently brought up her son on a standard of living far beyond her means. She has sought to alleviate her own capital deficit by enabling her son to acquire it through education. The class difference between the mother and the son − where class is determined by the differential possession of economic, social, cultural and symbolic capital between them even though they share the same social space − is signified in the mother’s physical appearance, in the way she dresses, in her unfamiliarity with the graces of middle-class sociality. She must thus occupy a place of abjection in her son’s household.
20Although the young generation in such stories acquires a measure of symbolic and cultural capital, it has not inherited this capital, but ‘bought’ it within systems of education and training, or, as is the case with Shubhro in the story I discuss next, through the relationships of their adult lives. The young generation therefore cannot fully occupy what Bourdieu calls the habitus – the ‘second sense’ or ‘feel for the game’ of the ‘real’ middle classes. Indeed, its movement across class categories is accompanied by expressions of anxiety at not knowing enough or not quite getting it right, evident in Shyamnath’s obsessive concern with ‘order in everything’ (p. 3). There is always the danger for Shyamnath that he might not pass, that his colleagues might ‘see through’ him. The fear of the younger generation stems from insecurities about its class positioning, and the older generation comes to signify a socioeconomic class to which the younger generation fears returning. The mother’s presence is a continual reminder to Shyamnath that the legitimated cultural capital he owns is a relatively recent acquisition. She is a link to the world her son and daughter-in-law would rather disown because her very presence can give them away.
- 38 Skeggs, p. 9.
- 39 Crossley, p. 98.
- 40 D. Mahasveta, ‘The Son’ (1986), transl. from Bengali by D. Mahasveta, Indian Literature 29-2, p. 47
21As it turns out, the boss’s interest in the mother’s ability to sing folk songs and her ‘traditional’ skills of embroidery makes the son realize that the mother in fact possesses a cultural capital that can be traded for symbolic capital; he begins to look upon her not with embarrassment but with proprietorship and pride. Such a shift clearly reveals that the denigration of the aging parent is not denigration of age per se. The mother’s superfluity and irrelevance is not a discrete attribute of old age itself. But even more significantly, it shows the usefulness of Bourdieu’s economistic metaphors for understanding how access, resources and legitimation contribute to class formation. They help to explain, for example, why those with a small quantity of cultural capital may have difficulty in increasing their ‘capital stock’ composition and subsequently have a circumscribed trajectory:38 The mother on her own cannot designate her skills as cultural capital. As the boss’s gesture shows, the advantage of being in a position of power is that it enables groups or agents to designate what is ‘authentic’ capital (23). Nick Crossley, in a discussion of Bourdieu’s work observes that ‘forms of capital depend upon recognition or ‘misrecognition’ for their value. They are valuable to the extent that we agree that they are valuable’.39 The various reasons, for example, why Shubhro, the adult son in the story I discuss next, tries to dissuade his father from printing yet another book of poetry at his own expense include whether any publisher is bearing the cost, whether there is any hope of selling any copies of the book once it is published, and finally if his father has ever written for ‘any big, well-known journal’.40 Expense is thus not Shubhro’s only concern. The father’s poetry, which we are told is ‘brimming with nineteenth-century ideas’, is not the kind of cultural capital that can be converted into symbolic. Just as the cultural capital possessed by the mother in ‘Dinner for the Boss’ could be converted into symbolic capital only after it had been legitimated by those deemed superior, the father’s poetry in the story discussed below, unless published by a recognized journal, cannot be deemed to have any symbolic capital.
- 41 Skeggs, pp. 5-13.
22With the American boss’s recognition of her talents, the mother’s value goes up in her son’s eyes but it does not bring about any fundamental change in her position of disempowerment. If anything, her situation is worse than before. She now has to labour to produce an embroidered piece for the son – a task made enormously difficult on account of her failing eyesight. The new found value attached to her skills does nothing to alleviate the mother’s disempowerment because she does not possess the ‘feel for the game’ which would enable her to manipulate the situation to her advantage. If even her son Shyamnath does not quite have a feel for the game then how much less a feel for the same game must the mother possess! As Beverley Skeggs points out, it is by analyzing access to, and legitimation of, cultural formations that we are able to see how cultural capital might be converted into symbolic capital and thus how inequalities are generated and systemic disempowerment reproduced.41
- 42 See Skeggs, p. 107.
23Nick Crossley (pp. 98-99) argues that habitus are important in this respect in that they simultaneously effect and disguise these agreements about what is valuable. According to Bourdieu, much of the strategic manoeuvring required to reproduce capital and the forms of inequality it entails are sedimented at the level of habitus, so as to often pass unnoticed by those who benefit and those who suffer from the process. In doing what comes to seem ‘natural’ to them, the classes reproduce themselves. And because this happens at the pre-reflective level of the habitus, it can be naturalized as a fact of life. The above story, like the one discussed below, is significant precisely because through its focus on disrupted habitus it exposes the socially constructed nature of elements of social class which are otherwise offered as ‘natural’. Shyamnath’s fear of the mother is born out of two related sets of anxieties: firstly, the ones that arise out of being associated with the social class she belongs to and out of a dread of returning to it; and secondly, those that arise out of a sense of being ‘impostors’ in a bourgeois world.42
24If in ‘Dinner for the Boss’ the son’s sense of unease about the mother is explained in terms of his own aspirations and expectations of life, in Mahasveta Devi’s ‘The Son’ we are provided as well with a glimpse of parental expectations. ‘The Son’ is a story about an old couple, Niraja and her now blind husband Ramapati, who share their house with their only son, Shubhro, his wife and their small child. Even though the two generations live in the precincts of the same house, they maintain completely separate lifestyles. The space occupied by the young couple is distinguished as much as possible from that of the parents. Niraja’s old prayer room has been converted into the secular space of a modernized kitchen equipped with all the latest gadgets. The new kitchen, however, is out of bounds for Niraja who cooks meals for the whole family in the old kitchen which still runs on wood, coals and cow-dung cakes for fuel. The new kitchen is for the exclusive use of her daughter-in-law Ratna, who prepares ‘snacks there for her own folks and friends of her husband, herself and also . . . meals for her son’ (p. 42). The old mother ‘works like a devil’ all day doing chores and cooking the evening meal for the whole family except her young grandson whose daily ‘calorie’ requirements, it seems, an illiterate woman like her cannot be presumed to know.
25Intergenerational conflict in ‘The Son’ is plotted along the familiar lines of melodrama: the silent suffering parents are pitted against their shallow, insensitive and materialistic children. The story thus lends itself rather willingly to an essentialist paradigm of conflict between the old and new, tradition and modernity, youth and age, a perception shared by the characters themselves: Ramapati, for instance, naturalizes the difference between his son and himself as a generational difference: ‘You’re just one of a generation whom we of another generation just do not know. Since we do not know you people, we do not trust you’ (p. 54). His wife Niraja too seems to understand the difference between herself and her son as one founded in ‘nature’: ‘even from childhood Shubhro had been the calculating type’ (p. 48). By attributing Shubhro’s selfish disregard of his parents’ feelings to his innate nature, by seeing those differences as always already there, Niraja distances herself from her own share of responsibility in making Shubhro who he is. In suggesting that the only relationship between the generations is one founded on opposition, the old couple fails to acknowledge the points of continuity between the two ends of the generational conflict. As the narrative bears out, however, intergenerational conflict in this story is not a clash of (cultural) values so much as a conflict of (class) interest born out of a shared sense of values.
26Typically, the old parents have spared no expense on the education of their only child. Ramapati had dreams, we are told, of a future for his son that clearly marks him out for worldly success: ‘English medium education for Shubhro… Times are changing you know that? No vernacular school like I had for him. He has to go up in life’ (p. 46). Ramapati seeks to keep pace with the times. His aspirations for his son are best described in terms of improvement and bettering rather than modernity. He realizes that a ‘good education’ is the ticket to a better lifestyle and accordingly works hard to pay for an expensive education which will help their son differentiate himself from his peers who do not or cannot ‘improve’. The parents take great pride in the ways in which their son stands out amongst the crowd:
How proud Niraja was of her son who alone in the locality went to a high class school and looked upon the local boys with contempt. How fluently he spoke English, how resplendent his uniform was, what a big bus came to take him to school. (p. 46)
27The emergent value system is thus shared between the generations more than is immediately apparent. In seeking upward class mobility through their son, the old couple buys into the very logic of which they see themselves as victims. Paradoxically, it is this concurrence of values between the generations that encourages the younger generation to distinguish itself from the older. Shubhro is encouraged by his parents to distinguish himself not only from his peers but also from the parents themselves: The father concedes quite willingly that being a poet like him is not really desirable: ‘It won’t do for him to become a poet like his father’ (p. 46). The son internalizes that distinction while also in the process starting to look upon his parents as those from whom he needs to distinguish himself. In the process of ‘moving class’, he begins to find the parents a liability. As the domestic help Malini observes, Ramapati and Niraja have only themselves to blame: ‘you had to bring up your son on a different standard. Why, I’ve seen you cowering before him because he spoke English, was ashamed to bring his friends home…’ (p. 48).
28If, for the parents, their son is the site of investment and display of distinction, for the son and his wife that site of investment is the home. Shubhro feels ‘suffocated’ in his parents’ house which is located at a ‘horrible, uncouth address’ (pp. 43, 47). His wife Ratna is similarly quite conscious that ‘17/16/3 B, Dharma Thakur Lane was not a decent address’ (p. 43). As we are specifically told, ‘the Thakur of ‘Dharma Thakur’ was no one related to the great Rabindranath Tagore but a local deity’ (p. 43). Shubhro dreams ‘of the day when he would leave all this behind’ (p. 47). It is with this motivation that he ‘marries a working girl of his own choice through an advertisement in the paper’: ‘He was ambitious and he needed his wife’s earnings’ (p. 45). In an interesting inversion of gender roles Shubhro (rather than his wife) takes the classic route to a middle-class life: education, and marriage into the middle class. For all their resentment at having to call their parents’ home, the young couple continues to live with them because they realize that they can save on house rent in the process, which in turn enables them to pay off the instalments towards ‘a modern apartment, a colour television and a refrigerator’ (p. 43). For the upwardly mobile couple, the home that they hope to buy becomes the central site for defining themselves through the use and organization of consumer goods.
29Perhaps surprisingly, flexibility in relation to the modern also marks the old couple. While they are certainly seen to espouse a different set of values (broadly ‘traditional’ rather than ‘modern’), the oppositions set up at the beginning of the story are steadily undercut in various ways. Easy equations made between old people and a ‘traditional’, non-commercial, even sentimental attitude are belied, for example, when Ramapati, whose poetry is described as ‘[o]ld-fashioned, rhetorical, brimming with nineteenth-century ideas’, is shown as being quite capable of stepping out of this frame of mind when called upon to do so: ‘No more waste of our meagre savings. Let’s go to the bank and take a joint account. We’ll need it. And let my pension money, 211 rupees, accumulate in the bank… A son who fails to recognize his father’s sentiments… listen, we have to be practical and accept the fact that we have none but each other’ (pp. 46, 48-49).
- 43 Dwyer, pp. 78-79.
- 44 I. Wallerstein, After Liberalism, New Press (New York, c. 1995), pp. 126-127.
- 45 Mahasveta, p. 45.
- 46 Eagleton, p. 14.
- 47 Wallerstein, pp. 126-127.
30Thus far, my critique of existing attempts to situate the loss of elderly status in urban middle class families in the context of modernization rather than class runs the risk of underplaying the historical link between the rise of the middle class and the process of modernization. If the middle class is understood as a post-feudal group which emerges along with the ideology of modernism involving a shared belief in modernity, secularism and rationality, and access to a wide range of economic opportunities,43 then what is it in such a definition of modernity that is antithetical to elderly interest? To my mind the story suggests an oblique critique of the middle-class understanding of modernity. The story recognizes that the meaning and content of modernity cannot be exhausted by the lifestyle aspirations of the middle classes represented in this story by the younger couple Shubhro and Ratna. Ratna signals her modernity not just through the lifestyle which she longs for, but equally through her worldview which marks her out as progressive, that is, anti-feudal/anti-medieval in an oppositional framework where feudal/ medieval signify narrow mindedness, dogmatism and constraints of authority.44 She is identified in the story with such sentiments as ‘It is not just to exploit the poor’, and her implicit critique of the feudal patriarchal values of her father-in-law as responsible for her sheltered mother-in-law’s assumed lack of confidence in dealing with the outside world.45 The story, however, makes it quite clear that Ratna’s mouthing of these pieties comes with a certain irony: her eagerness to protect the domestic help she has employed from being ‘exploited’ by her mother-in-law sits oddly with her own willingness to exploit the old couple’s labour as well as their values and customs which exclude the possibility of their ever demanding rent from their son and his family for their use of their house. Ratna’s relation to tradition thus remains conveniently selective. But the point is that we understand and appreciate the irony of these words only if we also comprehend their ‘other’ meaning. In the words of Terry Eagleton, ‘in order to be able to decipher an ideological system of discourse, we must already be in possession of the normative, undistorted uses of terms’.46 It is against the ways in which Ratna fails to follow the meaning of her own words, that her reductive definition of modernity is unravelled. Ratna’s speech may signal modernity but in so far as her modernity is a posture rather than a belief the story is not a rejection of modernity as an unmitigated evil encroaching upon a traditional society in which the old lived happily in the folds of the joint family. Ratna’s ‘modernity’ is a problem because she does not really believe in its central tenets which she purports to espouse. Her progressive, anti-feudal, anti-patriarchal professions, while signalling what Immanuel Wallerstein refers to as the eternal modernity of liberation, of substantive democracy, are merely instrumental in securing that other modernity − fleeting rather than eternal − of technology and middle class lifestyle.47
- 48 Mahasveta, p. 56.
31Towards the end of the story Shubhro recognizes the continuity (as opposed to the differences) between the generations when he expresses his anxiety over bringing up his own little son ‘on a standard much above’ his own and then wonders if his son will force him to say the same words that he had forced his father to say that day.48 He is, however, quick to suppress that knowledge: ‘Come, let’s go in,’ he says to his wife, abruptly casting that thought aside. The momentary contradiction of revulsion and desire, ambivalence and doubt, is brushed aside by Shubhro whose modernized sensibility can only ever engage in a relationship of opposition with that of his parents. Through my readings of these two stories, however, I hope to have established that both the stories in question are far from simply predicated on familiar tropes of intergenerational opposition to account for the disadvantages of old age. Against the notion of inexorable social change, which would have the effect of simply confirming already existing ideas, they constitute the terms of a newer, and more dynamic, understanding of the finer processes caught up in social change, in a reciprocal relationship to other methods of understanding social process such as those of a sociologist like Bourdieu. In one way they embody the older (Marxian) truth that ‘men [indeed] do make their own history’; on the other hand they may come closer to certain insights in Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage, where the protagonist’s suffering at the gradual, but again ‘inexorable’ loss of all her children to the war is only matched by her failure to recognize that it is her own labours that have contributed to sustaining the war itself.
Notes
1 Premilla D’Cruz and Shalini Bharat, ‘Beyond Joint and Nuclear: The Indian Family Revisited’, Journal of Comparative Family Studies 32-2 (2001), pp. 167.
2 W.J. Goode, World Revolution and Family Patterns, Free Press (New York, 1963), p. 268.
3 L. Cohen, No Aging in India: Alzheimer’s, the Bad Family and Other Modern Things, University of California Press (Berkeley, 1998), pp. 103-104.
4 Cohen, pp. 103-104.
5 A. McClintock, ‘Family Feuds: Gender, Nationalism and the Family’, Feminist Review 44, p. 66.
6 I. Raja, ‘Signifying the Nation: Identity, Authenticity and the Ageing Body in the Post-Independence Hindi Short Story’, Journal of Commonwealth Literature 39-3 (2004), pp. 25-43.
7 M. Hockx, ‘Theory as Practice: Modern Chinese Literature and Bourdieu’, in M. Hockx and Ivo Smits, eds., Reading East Asian Writing: The Limits of Literary Theory, London: Routledge Curzon (London, 2003), p. 220.
8 D.C. Tipps, ‘Modernization Theory and the Comparative Study of Societies: A Critical Perspective’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 15 (June 1973), p. 207.
9 S.M. Neysmith and J. Edward, ‘Economic Dependency in the 1980s: Its Impact on Third World Elderly’, Aging and Society 4-1 (1984), p. 23.
10 W.C. Cockerham, This Aging Society, Prentice Hall (New Jersey, 1991), p. 48.
11 J. Hendricks and C.A. Leedham, ‘Making Sense of Literary: Relevance of Recent Gerontological Theory’, Journal of Aging Studies 1-2 (1987), p. 196.
12 See Cohen (1998), Tipps (1973), Hendricks and Leedham (1987). See also D.O. Cowgill, ‘A Theory of Aging in Cross-Cultural Perspective’ in D.O. Cowgill and L.D. Holmes, eds., Aging and Modernization, Appleton-Century-Crofts (New York, 1972), pp. 1-13 and A. Kolker and P.I. Ahmad, ‘Aging and Society’ in A. Kolker, and P.I. Ahmad, Coping with Medical Issues: Aging, New York: Elsevier Biomedical (New York, 1982).
13 Hendricks and Leedham, p. 197.
14 R. Grew, ‘Modernization and Its Discontents’, American Behavioral Scientist 21-2 (1977), p. 301.
15 R. Kothari, ‘State and Nation Building in the Third World’, in G.N.S. Raghavan, ed., Readings from India, Indian Council for Cultural Relations (New Delhi, 1996), p. 141.
16 Social Indicators of Development, World Bank Report, Johns Hopkins UP (Baltimore, 1994).
17 L. Budhwar, D. Reeves and P. Farrell, ‘Life Goals as a Function of Social Class and Child Rearing Practices in India’, International Journal of Intercultural Relations 24 (2000), p. 228.
18 R. Dwyer, All You Want Is Money, All You Need Is Love: Sexuality and Romance in Modern India, Cassell (London, 2000), pp. 78-79.
19 Cohen, pp. 88-89.
20 Ibid.
21 B. Skeggs, Formations of Class & Gender, Sage (London, 1997), p. 7.
22 T. Eagleton, Ideology: An Introduction, Verso (London, 1991), p. 59.
23 N. Crossley, The Social Body: Habit, Identity and Desire, Sage (London, 2001), p. 96.
24 Ibid., p. 97.
25 Skeggs, p. 9.
26 Crossley, p. 97.
27 C. Wilkes, ‘Bourdieu’s Class’, in R. Harker, C. Mahar and C. Wilkes, eds., An Introduction to the Work of Pierre Bourdieu: The Practice of Theory, London: Macmillan (London, 1990), pp. 125-126.
28 Ibid., p. 127.
29 Crossley, pp. 90-91.
30 Ibid., p. 94.
31 S. Lawler, Mothering the Self: Mothers, Daughters, Subjects, Routledge (London, 2000), p. 113.
32 Ibid., pp. 113-114
33 Andre Beteille, ‘The Family and the Reproduction of Inequality’, in Patricia Uberoi, ed., Family, Kinship and Marriage in India, OUP (Oxford, 2002), p. 440.
34 Ibid., pp. 440-441.
35 B. Sahni, ‘Dinner for the Boss’, in Middle India: Selected Short Stories transl. from Hindi by G. Wright, Penguin (New Delhi, 2001), pp. 1-11.
36 See Sahni, ‘Chacha Mangal Sain’, in We Have Arrived in Amritsar and Other Stories, transl. from Hindi by J. Ratan, Orient Longman (New Delhi, 1990), pp. 189-208 and K. Singh, ‘Go Your Way, Baba!’, in B. Sahni, ed., Anthology of Hindi Short Stories, transl. by J. Ratan, Sahitya Akademi (New Delhi, 1996), pp. 420-435.
37 See P. Ray, ‘The Blanket’ (1984), in S. Tharu and K. Lalita, eds., Women Writing in India: 600 B.C. to the Present, Vol. II, transl. from Oriya by J. Mahapatra. OUP (Delhi, 1991), pp. 512-523, F. M. Senapati, ‘The Postman’ (1983), transl. from Oriya by A. K. Das, Indian Literature 26-6, pp. 20-25 and A. Desai, ‘A Devoted Son’, in Stephen Alter and Wimal Dissanayake, eds., The Penguin Book of Modern Indian Short Stories, Penguin (New Delhi, 1991), pp. 92-101.
38 Skeggs, p. 9.
39 Crossley, p. 98.
40 D. Mahasveta, ‘The Son’ (1986), transl. from Bengali by D. Mahasveta, Indian Literature 29-2, p. 47.
41 Skeggs, pp. 5-13.
42 See Skeggs, p. 107.
43 Dwyer, pp. 78-79.
44 I. Wallerstein, After Liberalism, New Press (New York, c. 1995), pp. 126-127.
45 Mahasveta, p. 45.
46 Eagleton, p. 14.
47 Wallerstein, pp. 126-127.
48 Mahasveta, p. 56.
Top of pageReferences
Bibliographical reference
Ira Raja, “Embodied History: Intergenerational Conflict in Indian Fiction”, Commonwealth Essays and Studies, 27.2 | 2005, 9-25.
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Ira Raja, “Embodied History: Intergenerational Conflict in Indian Fiction”, Commonwealth Essays and Studies [Online], 27.2 | 2005, Online since 02 April 2022, connection on 22 January 2026. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/ces/11414; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/120tr
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