Introduction
A great deal of fine scholarship has coalesced on the theme of reforming and modernising women in British India, with particular reference to the history of Bengal, as a pivotal effort to counter and respond to the colonial ‘civilising mission’ from the nineteenth century onwards.Footnote 1 The establishment of a template of a Hindu (middle-class) gendered modernity for women, which saw its birth in this ‘civilising’ process, centred on education, respectable domesticity and ‘modern motherhood’. Accounts of middle-class women in postcolonial India have investigated their activities in status production work also through dispensing charity to the lower classesFootnote 2 as well as to women's presence in national politics.Footnote 3 Usually tied to a representation of acquiescent reproduction, the idea of middle-class woman and the gender roles attached to her have been reformulated to reflect the advent of new national and supranational phenomena. Sunder Rajan has analysed the construction of the ‘new Indian woman’ as a result of global consumer capitalism and national state broadcasting. This ‘new woman’ mainly draws from the ‘urban educated middle-class career woman’Footnote 4 and constitutes ‘in media and official discourse in India today, a construction which serves not only to reconcile in her subjectivity the conflicts between tradition and modernity in Indian society, but works also to deny the actual conflict that women existentially register as an aspect of their lives’.Footnote 5 Along these lines, to contrast the neo-colonising transnational danger of globalisation, the criticality of women and gender as ‘sites’ where threats to national identity and integrity are exorcised, has been reinstated. Fernandez has argued that ‘Gender . . . serves as the socio-symbolic site which attempts to manage the destabilizing contradictions which globalization produces in the Indian nation . . . . The potential disruption is managed through a remapping of the nation's boundaries through a politics of gender which centers around conflicts over the presentation of the purity of women’.Footnote 6 While this reconfiguration of women and gender serves to symbolically counter globalisation, there is evidence that the effects of the above trends have penetrated intimate dimensions of Indian social life.Footnote 7 As colonialism, economic liberalization and globalization showcase women and gender as social, economic, political and cultural ‘battlefields’ for epochal transformations, women's agentive responses to these have often been inscribed within the trope of women ‘producing the nation’ through their stereotyped nurturing role while the effects of economic liberalization and globalization suggest how they increasingly appear to be ‘produced’ by the nation and supranational forces alike.
This paper analyses the juxtaposition of the trends outlined above in the lives of a group of Chamar (former Untouchable or Dalit) women in rural eastern Uttar Pradesh (UP). Unlike upper caste and middle-class women, Dalit women have not figured as protagonists in historical accounts of gender reform, or in the nationalist struggle for independence from British rule. It is only very recently that scholars have begun to retrieve their roles in anti-untouchability movements in colonial India.Footnote 8 These efforts will contribute towards the production of knowledge on the relation between Dalit women and nation-building, and surely will contribute to the exploration of the ‘Dalit man’ and nation-building, the latter identified by Osella, Osella and Chopra as ‘another of the modern South Asian nation's problematic ‘Others’.Footnote 9 Dalit women have usually been part of the labouring poor, defined by their menial work, as well as being depicted as outspoken and with a greater sexual freedom and mobility than upper caste Hindu women.Footnote 10
The Chamar caste constitutes a population of many millions fragmented into a vast number of subdivisions spanning across states of central and north India. This caste has been at the crux of development processes including the state policy of positive discrimination for communities such as theirs, and of political mobilisation movements for self-respect. Compared to other Dalit castes in north India, the Chamars have been at the vanguard of reaping the benefits of the above processes. This paper will examine how experiences of development, political mobilisation and middle-class aspirations have linked a supra-local historical model of women's reform and embourgeoisement to a renowned pocket of underdevelopment in north India, UP, and its regional identities. A significant historical site in the anti-colonial struggle against British rule, and a state of pivotal importance in national politics due to its sheer size (166 million inhabitants according to the 2001 census), this state is considered the barometer of pan-Indian political life. At the same time, UP constitutes one of the most problematic regions in terms of governance and development, with appalling indicators and unfavourable living conditions for women, especially amongst the low-castes. Ethnographic research carried out in a village (which the author has named ‘Manupur’) located on the outskirts of the pilgrimage city of Banaras, showed that in 1998 the inhabitants numbered about 1,500. Manupur Chamar community—representing a fifth of the village population—has been the theatre of important trends happening elsewhere in India: the spread of education, youth's efforts to enter the labour market together with their aspirations to government employment,Footnote 11 the wave of Dalit political mobilisation which has swept north India since the 1990s,Footnote 12 the effects of the policy of positive discrimination and the consequences of government policies of economic liberalisation since the 1990s. The effects of the latter on trade policies and the concomitant influx of Chinese imports have profoundly and adversely affected the Banaras sari industry—which previously provided many Chamar households with a source of livelihood.Footnote 13 The Chamar community has also seen changes in the marriage economy: a number of educated brides from nearby urban areas were suitably married to the nascent class of rural politicised educated young men in Manupur.Footnote 14 These men's families expected their children to secure government employment, and a number of them managed to obtain the much coveted jobs over the years. Amongst the Chamars, as well as other communities in their socio-economic position, marriage to a man with a government job is the most sought-after alliance. Following post-marriage virilocal rules, educated young women shifted from urban areas to the village rural environment and some of them entered the small group of aspiring middle-class Chamar families. It should be stressed that the changing socio-economic status of these families was tied to their location in the lower echelons of government salaried employment rather than to economic liberalisation and to the opportunities offered by global labour markets which connote the ranks of the Indian ‘new middle-classes’. As a result, the ‘buying power’ of the Chamars does not compare in the least with the swelling incomes of the above classes.
Shifting gender roles and regimes, being the direct result of Chamar women middle-class formation, is the focus of this paper. It will argue that the presence of young, urban-educated Chamar women revitalised notions of women's honour, and strengthened gender regimes inspired by respectability and other distinctions forged during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as outlined above. As a result, Chamar women were often confined to the home and to attending to their children's education, following a known, and accepted, path of social reproduction in Indian history. Rather than a simple reproduction narrative however, this paper will show how these women enacted a series of agentive choices towards their self-realisation in the interstices of the process of middle-class formation.
This paper's focus on elite Chamar women is linked to the worrying trends noticed at a pan-Indian level by scholars concerned with the problematic nexus between women, and development and change in gender relations. Karin Kapadia has argued that ‘in the recent decades there has been a strengthening of male-biased (‘patriarchal’) norms and values across all castes and classes in India, simultaneously with increasing economic development’.Footnote 15 One of the most striking manifestations of this phenomenon is the unfavourable sex ratio to womenFootnote 16 found amongst affluent communities and districts. This paper calls into question Bourdieu's capital circulation,Footnote 17 and precisely the ways in which Indian families convert their economic capital into cultural capital through their investment in young women's educational credentials, which are subsequently spent on the marriage market. Kapadia's findings suggest that the presence of economic capital—very often linked with an increase in women's level of education—causes a strengthening of patriarchal rules. This link has led to an interrogation of ethnographic data on urban educated Chamar women for the reasons behind the powerlessness intrinsic to women's economic and cultural capital, and their inability to translate these into symbolic ‘recognition’. Where this inability is revealed at the general level by national trends, such as female foeticide or dowry violence, fortunately these phenomena have not signalled their presence amongst the Manupur Chamars.
Where Bourdieu's different types of capital ‘are invariably theorized in ungendered ways’,Footnote 18 an analysis of capital circulation and the symbolic profits which might follow education—if applied to Chamar women for example—needs to include an investigation of the particular gender asymmetries in which this process takes place. Analysis of the possibility for young women to transform their cultural capital into symbolic recognition—in ways which would contrast women's devaluation—needs to focus on the gender regimes inflecting the capital circulation's process. Moreover, as a result of urban young women's marriage migration into the village, the space(s) in which capital circulation occurs adds a further and crucial element to the analysis. First, as a result of women's transition from an urban to a rural milieu, the conditions for women's agency register a further obstacle to the often disempowered status of newly-wed daughters-in-law. In the village, these women might find themselves in a socio-economic and political cul-de-sac as a result of the more restrictive gender regimes in place in a rural area as compared with an urban environment. Furthermore, the village does not provide women with the same range of opportunities as does the city. Secondly, the home, as the place for seclusion and reinvention of respectable domesticity in opposition to the outer world, is accorded different meanings according to different classes of Chamar women, and serves different purposes in their respective socio-economic trajectories. Finally, an analysis of women's capital circulation needs to be inscribed in a much wider landscape, that of the economic liberalisation of globalizing India in which pressures of heightened consumption and class status have gradually altered the marriage economy and caused an exponential increase in costs and spiralling dowries, a trend which, in very relative terms, has affected the Chamars.
Historical and Anthropological Women
Analysis of ethnographic data on Chamar urban educated women, addresses the limitations highlighted in the relationship between anthropological and historical discourses on South Asian women. In this regard, Nita Kumar has pointed out how the two disciplines, although influencing one another, speak of ‘two kinds of women’: the ‘progressive’, the reformed and active colonial version of the historian versus a more ‘vernacular’ type present in anthropological accounts. Kumar contends that,
It is unlikely that the subjects and sites of the anthropologist (local, usually village-based, little-educated, seen-from-the-inside) and that of the historian (colonial-national, usually metropolitan or at least urban, contextualised-in-a-larger-whole) would come together. This again produces a thinness of interpretation as we speak, seemingly, about two Indias.Footnote 19
In addition, Kumar argues that it might well be women such as those described by the anthropologists—with their popular practices such as the abusive songs they sang at weddings both in the nineteenth century and todayFootnote 20 —who were the targets of women reformers. In this paper, Chamar educated women are portrayed as a trait d'union between the modernising endeavours embodied by the ‘historian's woman’, and the ‘anthropologist's woman’ with her vernacular (and at times seemingly ‘irreverent’) semblances and performances. The Chamar embourgeoisement trajectory reverberates with the traits of reform. The most important of these traits is identifiable with shifting ideas of pardah—or the seclusion regime in place for women characterised by practices such as veiling and abstaining from outside employment—women's education, and the crafting of modern conjugal relations in which husbands have taken up the role of ‘educators’ of their wives, supporting them in the attainment of modern personas and avenues of self-realisation.
The adoption of upper caste gender roles and the abandonment of demeaning activities has been a strategy of social mobility used amongst the low castes. For example Osella and Osella have argued that the Izhavas of Kerala, South India
As a group have, over the course of the twentieth century, strategically attempted to move away from two forms of labour associated with stigmatised identities: manual—especially agricultural—labour and toddy-tapping: Izhava women have meanwhile followed their Nayar counterparts in adopting the bourgeois ‘housewife’ ethic and Hindu ‘seclusion’ identity.Footnote 21
This movement towards embourgeoisement of upper caste matrix is linked to the betterment of economic conditions. With reference to ‘Untouchable’ Pallar women in contemporary Tamil Nadu, Kapadia has noted how,
From the perspective of ordinary, impoverished Pallars, considerations of ‘appropriate’ female behaviour are quite irrelevant. These considerations only arise when a certain level of economic security is reached and women are being withdrawn from work outside the home. In short, they exist only in the context of the upwardly mobile groups in whom the desire to emulate upper-caste and upper-class norms is strong. It is among them that ‘appropriate’ female behaviour suddenly becomes the coin of new social status for men. The point at which women start to be withdrawn from outside work marks the division between the upwardly mobile and those below them.Footnote 22
This paper claims, however, that Chamar women's embourgeoisement trajectory is not just an emulation of upper caste norms and postures. This trajectory aims to gain a higher status but also to appropriate the ‘modern’, it is linked with the city space and with distancing from village life. In order to pursue their trajectory and establish their class status, aspiring middle-class women need to exorcise the ‘vernacular woman other’, who lives within the confines of the same residential community. This trend of separation bears resemblance with a similar dynamic noted in colonial India. Partha Chatterjee observed that in the project of Indian nationalists of nineteenth century Bengal, not only was the reformed ‘new woman’ modelled in such a way to contrast with Western society by virtue of her superiority derived from a purified tradition, but she also stood in opposition to ‘the “common woman”, who was coarse, vulgar, loud, quarrelsome, devoid of superior moral sense, sexually promiscuous, subjected to brutal physical oppression by males’.Footnote 23 Significantly, Chatterjee points out how in the literature of that period,
A host of lower-class female characters . . . make their appearance in the social milieu of the new middle-class—maidservants, washer women, barbers, peddlers, procuresses, prostitutes. It was precisely this degenerate condition of women that nationalism claimed it would reform, and it was through these contrasts that the new woman of nationalist ideology was accorded a status of cultural superiority to the Westernized women of the wealthy parvenu families spawned by the colonial connection as well as to common women of the lower classes.Footnote 24
The dialectics between the aspiring middle-class Chamar woman and her ‘other’, which finds its archetype in the women ‘pairs’ Chatterjee and others have analysed, may be fully grasped in light of regional ideas of status, work and education. The Chamar caste was included in the ‘razil’ classes as opposed to the ‘sharif’, a status classification identified by Gyanendra Pandey and operating in north India in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.Footnote 25 Amongst other defining elements, this classification was predicated on the presence of womenfolk in paid employment amongst the razil group. The observance of pardah and women's absence in paid employment outside the home was not an unknown practice within the Chamar community however, and elderly village women's narratives testify to its practice.Footnote 26 Forms of pardah were observed in the past in this community, as an expression of its internal socio-economic differentiation for example between landed families and those without holdings. An elderly Chamar woman—a native of Manupur who did not move out of the village after marriage—described how her wealthy dadi (paternal grandmother) only employed labourers in her fields and used to distribute sugar-cane juice to all the village Chamar community after the harvest was complete. Subsequently it would be inaccurate to assume that in the past all Chamar women were impoverished and had to work on the land—as the sharif-razil distinction accounts on the ‘Untouchable’ castes and their histories of menial work, would suggest. However, Chamar observance of pardah was not as rigid as amongst upper castes because it could disappear under financial pressure and vice versa. For example, the oldest woman in the Chamar community—now deceased—told me how she was forced into agricultural labour after she was widowed to support her children. Similarly, Manupur Chamar male weavers’ ethnohistories tell of how weavers had not considered their wives’ work at the loom as a result of the absence of the need for women's wages and the high-status conferred to their households by this decision.Footnote 27 Ultimately, the point here is that pardah, or more precisely the form it has taken in the Chamar community, is not modern but has been resuscitated by aspiring middle-class individuals and households in conjunction with improved economic circumstances.
The search for Chamar educated brides in Manupur signalled the increased importance of education in the marriage economy of the low-castes. With reference to the ethnographic context, the history of women's education in the city of the Banaras region testifies to girls’ education as a relatively recent phenomenon. Despite the city being a renowned learning centre, Nita Kumar argues that ‘There is little evidence to suggest that women received any kind of formal schooling in late nineteenth-century Banaras at all’.Footnote 28 It was only in the twentieth century that girls’ education became an issue in the ‘modernization’ agenda of individual caste communities.Footnote 29 Since the beginning of that century, a number of girls’ schools were opened in Banaras by women educators.Footnote 30 However Chamar women were almost certainly amongst the last to be able to benefit from private and state schools.
Education amongst Chamar urban brides instilled them with the desire for respectable employment, a rather different prospect if compared with the menial occupations and agricultural labour their caste womenfolk had historically been associated with. As a result, the practice of pardah amongst Chamar educated brides gradually took up new meanings: their process of embourgeoisement shifted the definition of respectability from the idea that womenfolk should not perform any outside (menial) work to a more middle-class oriented image of the ‘working woman’, similar to the ‘new middle-class career woman’ examined by Sunder Rajan. The working woman model represented a novelty in the established pattern of village gender relations where the nexus of women and work—the latter being only of low and menial nature—was one allowed to exist only under difficult circumstances within the household. Educated women's work now signalled a higher—but above all, modern—status. Moreover, educated women's appropriation of middle-class gender roles did not draw on a local community history but rather on a national history and repertoire which offered strategies, idioms and roles for class reproduction.
As women's work was included in the attainment of a higher class and gendered respectability in Manupur, the shift towards the new model of the village middle-class woman was deeply embedded in a ‘traditional’ gender setting: this shift could only take place through the consent of ‘enlightened’ young men.Footnote 31 This role powerfully reflects that which male reformers took up in their encounter with colonial modernity, and their efforts to re-cast women into suitable personas to attend family life in British India. In this process, Walsh points out how ‘a younger generation of men sought to undercut family authority through the creation of more nuclear, exclusive, and dyadic relationships between husbands and wives’.Footnote 32 In Manupur, it is only when Chamar men have secured education and employment for themselves that they pay attention to the ‘condition’ of their female relatives and spouses. Educated women are often supported in their upward-mobility process by male relatives and husbands who are both knowledgeable and relatively financially sound. These women, however, still depend on their husbands and in-laws for decisions regarding their careers. While they enjoy a better socio-economic condition than their uneducated and underprivileged counterpart, educated women hold a different bargaining power than the uneducated women (but not necessarily a greater one) because, if necessary, they are able to use their educational credentials to seek employment outside the household.
As argued above, middle-class formation amongst urban educated Chamar women was predicated on creating a social distance between them and the Chamar woman ‘other’: being the rowdy and uncultured labourer. The next section explores an encounter between the ‘two groups’ which vividly illustrates the issues at stake.
Class(ic) Encounters
On a visit in 2002 to the Manupur village Chamar community, Sushila—an agricultural labourer, wife of a former weaver, and grandmother in her early forties—attracted my attention by waving her hands. We often joked about dancing in marriage parties and, on these joking occasions, she would immediately show me a few moves. This particular day, she furtively looked around to see if anybody was in sight, lifted the blouse under her sari and started to dance with her breasts exposed, in an effort to embarrass me. I said to her I would go to see her later. After a while, I visited her house. One of her fellow women agricultural labourers, also a neighbour, joined us. Sushila literally jumped on her and started mimicking an unequivocal sex scene. We all burst into laughter.
Since this episode, I noticed that she was a ‘habitué’ in the ways she threatened to expose her body, and in the ways she joked. A few years prior to the episode described above, at a time when I was still not familiar with her performances, I had seen Sushila physically fighting with another of her women neighbours over the revelation of an illicit relation that Sushila's son was allegedly having with a married girl of the village who had not yet left for her in-laws' house—social anathema in communities such as these, given the web of fictive and actual kin relations which holds them together. Sushila and her neighbour had beaten each other up with wooden sticks. I had been watching the fight from an adjacent house belonging to the well-off section of the Chamar community. Predictably, this manifestation of violence, the disclosure of ‘immoral’ matters and the public and loud display of its consequences as stereotypical traits of the popular classes, elicited people's disapproval. I was first advised not to get too close to the scene and then Radha, the Chamar wife of a government employee, a little older than Sushila, and a grandmother herself, commented ‘They are Chamar and they do kharab karma [bad deeds]’.Footnote 33 I have labelled Radha as ‘bourgeois’: however she did not receive any formal educational training, nor is she ashamed to attend her plot of land beside her house or feed her cattle. She just happened to come from a well-off family and was married into a similar milieu in Manupur. This implies that the way she perceives gender roles for women, and the room for manoeuvre they have according to these roles, differs (at times substantially) from those of her neighbour, Sushila. Also, Radha enforces these perceptions on her co-habiting aspiring middle-class daughters-in-law.
Over the summer of 2005, I saw these ‘two worlds’ (the bourgeois Radha and the half-naked Sushila) coming together. It was on the occasion of a Hindu festival celebrated in a Chamar upwardly-mobile household in Banaras’ southern urban sprawl. In order to serve and feed a large number of guests, Sushila had been called upon to work as a servant in exchange for money and food. The recruitment of labour amongst members of the same caste was yet another unequivocal element pointing to the ongoing process of class formation. This is also reminiscent of the dichotomised relationship between middle-class women and those from lower castes employed in menial work, as previously discussed.
These vignettes epitomise the dilemmas and contradictions around class metamorphosis in the Chamar community as reflected in different images and performances by women. A dichotomised image of Chamar women is not offered here, however: many agricultural labourers would not talk and act freely like Sushila, and not all government employees’ wives would call the two fighters ‘Chamar’. As a result of processes of internal differentiation in which women have often only followed men along as a result of their marriage careers, Chamar womenfolk form a heterogeneous group. Notwithstanding the presence of ‘many’ (Chamar) women, Radha and Sushila are emblematic of how women are being affected by changing political economies (differently from men), of how the gap between the elite and the rest of the Chamars is widening, and of how women from both groups embody these trends through ‘uncontrolled’ bodies and speech (as one jokingly threats to expose herself, while the other abuses caste fellows). Radha and Sushila also speak of processes, of a growing significance within caste society, whereby caste communities are increasingly becoming heterogeneous socio-economic bodies. As part of these processes, caste community members in Manupur and elsewhere are enmeshed in worlds not only governed by caste rules—even if endogamous marriage is still the preferred mode for alliance in India for example—but are increasingly sharing wider (global) communities through consumerism, the media, and the use of technology.
While the socio-economic gap amongst the Chamar is widening, poor and underprivileged Chamar women—while often more visibly vocal and unconstrained by bourgeois gender models—have been increasingly stigmatised because of their work as casual labour. To fully grasp the salience of the changes in urban educated women's status and roles, the following section analyses women and agricultural work in the Chamar community and the ways in which labourers like Sushila have become ‘caught’ between the consolidation of notions of caste pride and honour linked to politicisation, middle-class aspirations and their often irretrievably poor condition.
Women's Work and Political Fields: ‘Cultivating Disrespectability’
Four white pinnacles in the middle of Manupur cultivated fields separating the upper caste Brahman and the Chamar residential settlements are reminiscent of a different past for women. The pinnacles are a satisthan, or site, where women performed sati, or self-immolationFootnote 34 on the dead husband's funeral pyre. Two pinnacles represented Brahman women, and two the Dhobi (washermen, low-caste) community. This revered place reminds people, in particular women, of other pasts and of expectations linked to womenfolk. From the social background of the satis, it seems that both low and high caste women were expected to uphold this Hindu practice. It is in these fields that Chamar women's labour history unfolds.
According to the accounts of elderly Chamar women, earlier generations of women used to work as grass-cutters. Many of them also worked in the fields as labourers. A number of Chamar women claim that a degree of sudhar (improvement, reform) has taken place for them in Manupur as they have left their employment in the fields and returned to their homes. However, many decades after Chamar men abandoned agriculture as their main occupation and found alternative employment in Banaras and its surrounding areas, in 1998 one-fifth of Chamar women were still employed for three months in a year as agricultural labourers in the fields of the landed castes. As a result, agricultural labour could only provide limited financial help to the household. Where Chamar men could claim independence and freedom from exploitative agricultural labour, women continued in an occupation considered no longer suitable for men. Most of the women employed in agriculture were generally amongst the poorest in the Chamar community. Women's labour often existed in relation to the extent to which men failed to provide the household with enough income due to illness, old age or alcoholism. Women claimed that they usually started agricultural labour after the birth of two or three children. Agricultural labour aside, as women did not control any autonomous or remunerative work domain within the village or outside, and some of them were not used to agricultural work, those in need of work were forced to seek petty employment in the informal sector, as vegetables sellers or casual labourers in the surrounding areas, while young daughters-in-law attended to the children and the domestic chores.
Women's working activities became the object of a controversial intra-caste debate in Manupur about the image of the community and its women. A group of Chamar men, in the wake of mobilisation in Dalit politics, attempted to stop ‘women's work’ in the name of the preservation of women's izzat (honour). Before 1998, a Chamar panchayat (caste council) meeting was held with the intention of stopping women's domestic work for all castes, consisting of making cow-dung cakes for domestic fuel, cutting fodder in others’ fields and helping in the food preparation at weddings. The objective of these meetings resonated with similar efforts to regulate midwifery—an activity Chamar women usually performed in villages and a source of stigmatisation for its inherently ‘polluting’ nature according to the purity and pollution ideology.Footnote 35 The activities discussed in the above panchayat were criticised by its main representatives for reproducing relations and images of dependence to which many Chamars were strongly opposed. Women's agricultural work came under the scrutiny of the panchayat too. Not only did the latter impose a ban on domestic work at any outsider's house, it also ruled that agricultural work must be carried out in teams which could be composed of both young and old women. As usual, penalties were fixed for those contravening these rules and the panchayat threatened to ostracise the households who did not abide by its decisions. Subsequently, a few women stopped domestic work and agricultural labour was thereafter performed in teams.
During 1998–1999, more panchayat meetings were held to reinforce the prohibition on some kinds of women's work. Again, the reason for the meetings was that not only did women's work project an image of caste-dependence but was also an izzat issue. The problem highlighted by Chamar men was that unmarried and newly married girls would carry out domestic work for the Brahmans for an entire day. Some Chamars claimed that young women who engaged in domestic work might be faced with the chance of earning ‘easy money’ with Brahman men. This was not regarded as ‘honourable’ for the women, the Chamar community, or the women's relatives who visited the village. In Manupur, it is hard to say whether cases of harassment took place, as there is no data available to confirm this hypothesis. In addition, panchayats were never held to discuss relationships between Chamar women and men from other castes. Nor were meetings convened to discuss molestation, although this does not mean that such cases never occurred.
Women labourers offered a different explanation to that given by the panchayat concerning the performance of agricultural work. They believed that if a newly-wed woman worked in the fields, Brahmans could assault and rape her. However, they claimed that, ‘If a woman had already had two or three children [as is usually the case with women labourers] she was no longer beautiful and therefore she could work safely’.Footnote 36 Women labourers could not publicly complain at the panchayat meetings about men's alcoholism and other problems afflicting women, or intervene when labour issues were being discussed, because they were run by male representatives only. Years after the panchayat's resolutions on women's labour, things still did not change:
• men did not stop drinking;
• employment opportunities for men did not increase, rather the contrary;
• women were still involved in occupations for which they were stigmatised;
• households were not ostracised;
• with the progressive decline of the weaving business during the 1990s, and its almost total disappearance by 2005, more women and their families faced hardship.
‘Women's Movement(s)’, or The Geographical Production of Gender Inequality
After her marriage, Suman is transported from her well-to-do home in a rural district to the stench of the narrow lanes in the inner city and the claustrophobia of the small dark room in which she houses with her elderly husband.Footnote 37
In the novel Sevasadan by the famous writer Premchand, Suman is an upper caste, refined rural girl in fictionalised ‘Banaras’ and surrounding districts at the beginning of the twentieth century. Her family is unable to find a suitable groom from village areas so she marries a Banaras-based groom. Suman is then obliged to make the painful transition into the city which will result in her being abandoned by her husband and becoming a city courtesan. Premchand is celebrated for the realism with which he portrayed Indian society of his time. This leads us to think that marriages similar to that of Suman might well have taken place.
By contrast, the Manupur Chamar community has frequently showcased the reversal of Suman's ‘arrangement’. Marriage exchanges amongst Chamars had mainly taken place between villages, and most married Chamar women of all ages were born in villages within a twenty-five km radius. However, the emergence of a Chamar educated generation of young men increasingly led to the need for suitable educated brides who could not be recruited in rural areas, given the very low education levels found in villages—especially amongst low-caste communities and more so amongst women from such communities.Footnote 38 As a result, Banaras and other nearby urban areas became a source of marriageable young women.Footnote 39 The city was the source of brides to other caste communities in Manupur, including upper castes. Subsequently, a number of Chamar women were married into Manupur and they represent the highest educated women in the Chamar community. It is very likely that this transition from the city to the village would be regarded as unfeasible in other regions of India, and it might also be considered as a strong sign of a more general ‘environment of subjection’ women in this part of UP had to endure.
The influx of urban wives stretches back approximately two decades.Footnote 40 Prior to this, only the uneducated wife of the Chamar community's elderly headman—the daughter of a city-based government employee—had moved into the village as a result of her marriage. In her generation, and prior to that, the desire for an educated bride within this community and in this region was uncommon, even amongst high-status Chamars, considering the overall low literacy rates amongst men and women in both urban and rural areas. A first wave of urban women (comprising eight marriages) is constituted by those educated up to twelfth-class with high school as well as by uneducated women, all aged up to 40 years, with a maximum of five children. In this generation, educated women completed many more years of schooling if compared with those in the same age group who married into the village from rural areas. Within this generation of better educated women, a number of government employees’ daughters living in the city had been married to the educated sons of sari weavers or labourers from Manupur with the prospect of a government job. Amongst the above mentioned group of young men, were the first Chamar graduates of Manupur. A number of them were successful in obtaining a government job years after their marriage.
The second wave of urban women (again, eight marriages) is a heterogeneous group ranging from uneducated to postgraduate women. In 2005, they were aged up to 25 years and had a maximum of four children. The postgraduate wives married into the village a few years before the first Manupur Chamar girl had started her postgraduate degree. The Manupur Chamar community has only recently been ‘producing’ educated girls. The gap between the first male and the first female graduate (born in the village) is about fifteen years. Half of the married women in the second wave are daughters of government employees, but of these only 50 per cent were married to government employees, whereas the rest of the women's husbands cannot aspire to enter salaried employment.
The meanings attached to the urban space of Banaras have only slightly shifted from Suman's times. Manupur Chamars still view the narrow lanes of the old city as dirty and constraining, much in the same way as Suman did. However, the facilities offered by the city which the village still lacks, and the new imperatives around children's education have made aspiring middle-class women consider the city a better place to live than the village.Footnote 41 Spaces do not carry the same salience for the different sets of people taking part in the organisation of a marriage. The lack of amenities in the village and its distance from the city do not seem to play a role when parents arrange a daughter's marriage. Informants from different castes mentioned that they wished to marry their daughters into a ‘good family’ (which amongst Chamars means marrying an educated man with a government job or with the prospects of getting one), irrespective of the groom's family's urban or rural location. Moreover, marriage costs remain unvaried across these locations. The consequences of a marriage between an urban young woman and a rural man are borne entirely by the woman, who has to move into a household often lacking the basic amenities she used to enjoy in her paternal home, and often with a lack of security about her husband's employment prospects.
An exemplification of this trend is the case of a young woman called Kavita, the daughter of a government employee living in the city. She was married into Manupur about twenty years ago. Her husband is one of the first community graduates. For several years following her wedding she lived in a mud house with her children and her husband who, only years later, obtained a post in the Electricity Department. Many years after his appointment, they started the construction of a concrete house with several amenities. In addition to the distance between the village and educational institutions, offices, markets, hospitals, and cinema halls found in the city, young daughters-in-law also encountered stricter mobility restrictions in place in the village.
On the other hand, Manupur Chamar girls’ marriages arranged over past years in the upwardly-mobile section of the Chamar community showed the early signs of elite formation.Footnote 42 Current marriage patterns show how Chamar parents have often married their daughters outside the geographical area in which alliances have been historically forged in the community. Young women have been married to men in government or private sector jobs, and these women are the only ones who have had a chance to make the transition from Manupur village into urban areas. However, even in the case of these marriages, the groom's urban or rural location did not make a difference in the way parents thought of his suitability. As government employees living in the city would marry their daughters with rural grooms, similarly girls born in high status Manupur Chamar families were sent off to rural areas where they faced the same uncertainties outlined above.
Future Women of Worth: The Gender Imprint of Class Metamorphosis
Many are opposed to the idea of education for girls, but now young girls are being educated. There are schools and pathshalas in most localities. Parents think, ‘All right, she will soon go away to her in-laws, if she is literate then she will be able to write to us and not have to depend on others.’ Not only that, these days when people come to select brides they are not content with merely asking the girl her name and then letting her be. The reason for asking her name is obviously to ensure that she is not deaf or mute. But now they need to test her intelligence and learning and hence they ask, ‘What do you study?’ Unless the girl is educated, it is difficult to get her married. Most college and university-educated young men now insist that mere good looks will not do, the bride will have to be educated too. If at the wedding the educated groom realizes that his bride is not literate it makes him very sad indeed.Footnote 43
Eastern Uttar Pradesh, over a century later: On the occasion of the worship of the Goddess of knowledge Saraswati in 2004, the author attended a cultural program in a private school near Manupur. The school caters for students from all castes. Amongst other performances, a natak (drama) was staged by the students. The plot was as follows:
Two Brahman friends—a school master called Tripathiji and his friend, Pandeyji—talk about the latter's wife. She wears saris and speaks Bhojpuri [local language spoken in both urban and rural areas]. Pandeyji tells his friend that he and his wife had once gone to a party. There, all guests wore western style clothes and danced to a Walzer with the exception of his wife. At the party, she had showed up wearing a sari and had danced in the traditional village style. Pandeyji is evidently ashamed of her. As a consequence, he decides to employ his school master friend to teach his wife English [the school where the play was taking place is both a Hindi and English medium]. The school master starts to teach his friend's wife the alphabet letters but there is always a misunderstanding over the pronunciation of English words which she mistakes for inappropriate words in Hindi and Bhojpuri. At each class, the woman ends beating up the teacher with a stick, and chases him away from the house. Her husband comes back home and regularly asks his wife about her progress in her studies. Finally, she confesses to him her inability to learn the English alphabet. As the play draws to a close, Pandeyji conveys the ultimate message to the audience: ‘Don't get married to an uneducated woman!’
Evoking the making of the ‘modern woman’ of nineteenth century Bengal in the excerpt opening this section, the drama staged by the students near Manupur advocated the education of girls in this region of UP, an indispensable currency within the contemporary marriage economy, as indeed it appeared in the Bengali author's writings. The drama however did not provide any advice on how many underprivileged families in the nearby villages could afford to send their daughters to a private or even to a government school. The play also suggested a particular kind of gendered modernity linked to the idea of the education of girls: it showed how the husband's interest in ‘civilising’ his wife through education was aimed at saving him from losing face in public. Further, Pandeyji's ‘civilising mission’ around his wife centred on the repudiation of the Bhojpuri language and village ways by making the English language the repository of modernity and refinement. Lastly, it might have been a pure coincidence in the drama, but it may well have contained a ‘caste message’. Tripathi and Pandey are Brahman surnames in UP and therefore the awareness about girls’ education might have been conveyed through the traditional authority which this caste embodies. This might equally have meant that the supposedly beneficial message to educate girls is necessary amongst all castes.
Not surprisingly, a high percentage of Manupur Chamar women are uneducated. With the exception of the daughters of government employees, girls are withdrawn early from school and normally study only up to the fifth grade. Anita, the mother of two Chamar girls who made it into college argues that:
We provide our girls with education so that at least they can stand on their [own] feet. After marriage, if they are unable to work in the fields, feed the cattle or do other works in their husbands’ house, they are educated, they can do other services. If the girls are educated they are safe from the hands of their mothers-in-law: because of dowry, girls are killed in their husband's house. The other reason for girls to get educated is that when a girl is married and lives away from her mother's house, at least she can write a letter back home’.Footnote 44
There is a striking resemblance between Anita's words and the passage by Saratkumari Chaudhurani quoted at the beginning of this section. Being independent and literate and able to write home is a precautionary measure against the dangers of marriage and a way to be in touch with their families of origin. But both Chaudhurani's and Anita's words speak of education as an imperative for marriage. Chamar government employee households can afford girls’ schooling and possibly a reasonable dowry to place them into high-status families. However, dowry is said to overcome obstacles such as a girl's looks, skin colour, or even lack of a high level of education. Not surprisingly, education has led to an increase in the marriage age of girls and boys. The ceremonial bringing of a wife from her father's to her husband's home, or gauna, usually performed years after a girl's marriage, is now considered suitable for chote log (small people, lower-status, unimportant) as in Chamar aspiring middle-class families both grooms and brides are grown up and educated. Also, a two-child policy is considered the norm for newly-wed couples. However the desire for a small family is not alone found amongst educated married young women and men.
Education can be considered a relatively new element within the Chamar community. According to a young woman from a household supported by government employment, ‘marriage is parents’ main concern when they provide their daughters with education as well as for the latter, when they pursue their degrees’.Footnote 45 Education however is not perceived by women as something purely ornamental, even if it does not mean a college degree, and even if the overwhelming majority of educated women will never find employment outside their household. Unlike previous research carried out in the western region of UP showing how rural educated women considered education as useless because they are only deployed to cook and perform the household chores,Footnote 46 Manupur educated women do not consider education in the same way—despite their domestic roles within the house. Most women do not think of education as useless (bekar) for a number of reasons: first, because they will acquire ‘knowledge’ or gyan, a cultural capital that will stay with them for the rest of their lives. For instance, ‘an uneducated girl’ young women informants say, ‘does not know how to behave in public (utna-betna) and cannot tell right from wrong’. For instance, even if someone is educated up to fifth grade, ‘she will get ‘knowledge’ (informants often use the English term) and, ‘If she wants to learn sewing, she will learn it easily because she knows how to count’, says another woman in her mid-thirties. Another educated informant thinks that, ‘In case of divorce, an educated woman will be able to find employment in the city’. Educated brides’ ideas can be located within a shared rhetoric of education as having civilising properties.Footnote 47 Equally important, their narratives resonate with the seeds of the idea of women's nurturing role benefiting the family and producing good citizens. An aspiring middle-class married young woman argues in fact that ‘a woman's education is faida (benefit, advantage) which will be helpful to the whole family’.
These narratives and the author's fieldwork with women informants also pointed to a transformation of motherhood roles. Many Chamar mothers evoke the category coined by Nita Kumar of ‘non-mothers’ insofar as ‘their poverty and insecurity makes their mothering invisible, by implication deficient and unsuccessful’Footnote 48 compared with the mothers of the Indian intelligentsia, examined in the same context, the product of colonial modernity. The ‘inadequacy’ of the Chamar labourer mother is substituted in public and private spaces by the educated mother, suitable for a ‘proper’ up-bringing of children—for instance, she is able to help them with their homework. Together with the new working woman model, modern motherhood as a result of women's education is an entirely novel gender role in this Chamar community: it does not have a precedent in local history precisely because of the earlier lack of education among women.
Where motherhood is being reconfigured in the span of a few years, work prospects do not look optimistic for these women. The first wave of urban high-school educated women are not able to find suitable employment because they do not have enough educational credentials, they are still involved in childcare, so that it would often be difficult for them to leave the children behind and work in the city—even in cases where they would be allowed to. Sometimes, their willingness to educate themselves further has been severely hampered by restricting seclusion rules operating in their households. On the other hand, compared to their uneducated peers, they do not struggle for a living. Highly educated members of the second and heterogeneous wave of urban young women find themselves in a more advantageous position. Their government-employed husbands and their families have allowed them to pursue further education and seek employment.Footnote 49 They might still be deployed for cooking and cleaning activities but they have some chance to pursue their interests in the future, particularly in view of the fact that these women and their husbands have decided to have only two children. They also might start to rebel against the pattern of rural living: for example, Meera, a postgraduate young woman married to a graduate government employee, managed a rather different trajectory compared with the remainder of married women of her generation. She never moved to her in-laws’ house in Manupur, as she was involved in a professional training course in the city, and she planned to pursue further studies while she applied for jobs. She only visited the village on festivals or other occasions. When asked if she wanted to work after she had accomplished her qualifications, she replied, ‘Of course, I do not just want to give birth to children!’.
If an aspiring middle-class young woman will not be able to talk in public and openly fight with in-laws, she might on the other hand be able to turn her husband's position to her advantage and capitalise on his assets. These women's husbands might also offer protection against their in-laws. The women might also benefit from their husbands’ support for their participation in local government institutions or the Panchayati Raj system (surely only through reserved quotas for women) from which they have always been excluded. Unmarried young men also show the makings of new gender relations with their willingness to cook along with their future wives, with the rejection of customary eating practices that see women eating last in the household, and the adoption of modern rules of conjugality and ideas of the modern ‘working wife’.
Although women's futures are shaped by their husbands and families, and despite being brought into the unfavourable village environment, one of the requirements for educated women's marriage—education—will perhaps allow them to lead a different life from the rest of village women and experiment with different avenues for their self-realisation. However, these possibilities only concern a very tiny minority of young women in the community who have the highest educational credentials. At a more general level, the attainment of these credentials is linked to the socio-economic status of Chamar households which in turn appears still to be largely dependent on government employment so that any changes in its availability will ultimately affect the lives and marriage prospects of young women.
Conclusions: Movements of Women, Men and Capital
On my way to an upper caste house, I met two adult Chamar women friends by mounds of cowdung, the ‘produce’ of the cows and buffaloes belonging to the former. Their arms are deep in shit, a scene which metaphorically speaks of their conditions of poverty. At first, they seemed embarrassed by my presence but in the span of seconds, they started to crack up jokes making sexual references about me and the upper caste male cattle owner. We all laughed. To my eyes, through that gesture they had immediately symbolically ‘redeemed’ themselves from the awkwardness of their circumstances being so unceremoniously unveiled.Footnote 50
This paper has analysed the tension between the Chamar community's struggle for respectability and their middle-class formation and the consequences of underdevelopment and how this translates into contradictory outcomes for womenfolk. Ways have been singled out in which aspiring middle-class women engage with the construction of and distancing from the ‘vernacular woman other’, and how the former might manage to channel circumstances to their own advantage in a sanitised ‘agency-style’, proper to their emerging status.
A history of the power of Chamar women would contain different demands and different kinds of power on their part, as well as different ways to be vocal according to their status and the local historical phase of analysis. The success of women's agency would be measured in terms of their respective demands. With reference to the educated Chamar women analysed in this paper, women may well increase their education levels but this asset might be erased by a mismatch between educational credentials and the rural environment in which they find themselves, which does not offer suitable employment opportunities. In addition, despite both elderly and younger women's claims that pardah within the community (in the sense of daughters-in-law veiling themselves in front of elders and in-laws) has lessened, young daughters-in-law are constrained by a more conservative interpretation of gender roles in the village compared with the city and from their distance to its facilities. A combination of the education of the daughters-in-law, the assets of their families of origin, and their husbands’ roles, may allow them to cash in on the symbolic profits derived from their cultural capital over time. Still, this is a possibility only for a tiny elite of young women. In the process of converting their cultural capital into a symbolic one, women will still have to fight the stereotypes attached even to those holding a government job. In the local parlance, these women are called dudh-daru gaya (milch cow), because they provide the family with a monthly salary. So, even a high-status breadwinner role is surrounded by derogatory meanings when held by a woman. As an asset such as government employment might yield different status gains according to gender, attention should be given to what constitutes symbolic capital and recognition for women in a specific geographical context and social class, the gender roles attached to it, and the specific avenues to achieving recognition.
Along with the analysis of the historicity of women's demands for themselves, their agency styles, the potential for change, and the symbolic profits contained in women's starting economic and cultural capitals, there are a series of ‘movements’ which different sections of women are envisaging for themselves—movements which intersect with capital circulation and with the control that local gender regimes exercise on them. These movements concern the locus par excellence for respectable domesticity: the home. In Manupur, Chamar women agricultural labourers cannot wait for the city to ‘take over’ the village land so that field labour will be over and they can return to their homes. This group, as well as those women engaged in petty employment, are the ones who are forced to leave their home out of necessity. On the other hand, those few girls who are busy obtaining credentials for a good marriage attend city colleges and, therefore, spend time outside the home in order to accumulate cultural capital. They can also delay their departure to their in-laws’ homes if their marriage has taken place while they are still completing their studies. The city is also cherished by married educated young women born in urban areas so that they can take up its opportunities, escape the village environment and build a better future for their children. Therefore, they are willing to go out from their homes. While the city means the end of the labourers’ labour and plight, it simultaneously means the opening up of opportunities for the educated. In the process, in an interesting spatial reversal, the home—a middle-class site par excellence—has paradoxically become a desired place for underprivileged women and a burden for the aspiring middle-class educated. At the same time, the centrality of the city and urbanisation processes is confirmed in both groups of Chamar women while the village environment appears unable to provide employment opportunities and careers for either group. This statement also raises the question as to whether and how village development can cater to women of different class and status. On the basis of Manupur's proximity to the city and its likely inclusion within the municipal borders in the future, women might see their expectations fulfilled. But any positive consequences are unlikely to be visible any time soon.
Chamar women's imagined ‘movements’ also complicate low caste women's idea of pardah and gender regimes. As explained in the course of this paper, the number of Chamar women employed in the fields has declined over time, while the idea of high status associated to the non-work of womenfolk was present in this community amongst earlier generations of women and men. Under the imperatives of a modern middle-class lifestyle, criticisms of outside domestic and agricultural labour were advanced with an emphasis on women's izzat in defence of the community image. However, in the span of a few years following the panchayat meetings described earlier in this paper, educated women were granted the possibility of respectable work—possibly within the safe environment of a school or an office. In their case, women's izzat is predicated on different elements other than only the observance of pardah: on language, posture and education amongst other things. And on class more than on religion. The bourgeois woman and the half-naked one analysed in the course of this paper could not be further away from each other.
An analysis of married educated young women's prospects would not be complete if we did not take into account shifting masculinities amongst Chamar husbands and the young male generation. There are ethnographic examples of how the assertion of Dalit youth has led to hyper-masculine behaviour, including harassment of upper caste women and tightened control over Dalit women themselves.Footnote 51 Despite a continuing control over Chamar women, the masculinity of protest has not taken a similar path in Manupur. This paper has shown how some young men might be in a position to help towards their wives’ self-realisation. They might also be protecting their wives against their in-laws. Where young men can be seen as advocating for themselves the role of reformers of women's status, their shifting masculinities are firmly reinforced by their educational and employment assets.
To educated Chamar women, the modernity of the middle-class ideal might appear liberating from the village ways of life. As both young women and men embrace the embourgeoisement trajectory, whether contemporary Chamar middle-class imagination and formation can benefit women's status in the long term, remains an open question. Whether this will lead to a worsening of their status in what appears to be a unilinear and widespread trajectory across castes—as Kapadia has highlighted—is rather difficult to predict. Although it is amongst marginalised women like the half-naked woman, Sushila, or the other women agricultural labourers and their families—who are also furthest away from the national template of respectable wife, mother, educated subject and educator—that such a trajectory has not put down roots. However, Sushila and others are caught in-between the disadvantages of underdevelopment and the stigmatisation which descends upon them as a result of caste self-assertion and middle-class formation.
The analysis of the two groups of Chamar women leads to further reflections on their respective membership in the nation—in addition to the trope of women as ‘producers of nation’ or in the role of ‘being produced’ by it. The reflections arising from this paper suggest contradictory outcomes. On the one hand, membership into the nation for Chamar women passes through the known route of education, proper marriage and modern motherhood in ways in which this formula materialises a history of reform, modernisation and development within their lives. In this process, however, it is necessary for them to shed the semblances of their dangerous alter-ego (women like Sushila) who might only live next door to them. On the other hand, this alter-ego woman and others like her possess vernacular credentials which are a social currency no longer recognised in contemporary India. Where these women could find no place in the national bourgeois middle-class realm, paradoxically they might well find one as ‘human artefacts’ of Bhojpuri folklore on display in one of the museums or fairs of ethnic and traditional arts and crafts catering to both local and international visitors in India. Women's dances and the irreverent songs they sing at weddings—resembling the women Nita Kumar identified as the reformers’ targetFootnote 52—might well end up as part of a traditional village culture repertoire and be advertised as the ‘real India’.
Vernacular village women might be retrieved from oblivion under the nation's compulsion to preserve its traditions and exhibit them for local and global consumption. But more importantly for this group of women, the process of capital circulation, whose dynamics with regard to educated women have been examined here, lacks its quintessential raw material: capital.
