Theoretical perspectives on changing agency

Before turning to the life-stories, I will discuss the theoretical and methodological underpinnings that this analysis is based on. First is a presentation of the key-concept agency, second a discussion of how to explain changing practices, and third a discussion of methodological representativeness.

As mentioned above, in very general terms, agency is about being in control of one's own life and the decisions relating to oneself, and it is something individuals and groups may have more or less of. In more concrete terms, agency is to what extent a person is in control of their own body, their movements in geographical space, and/or property. Theoretically, agency is a concept that springs out of the theoretical debate between actor-oriented and structure-oriented perspectives that both have been criticized from the opposite angle. In the context of theories that try to explain women's subordinate position in society, Lovell compares Judith Butler's post-modernist, individual-oriented approach with Bourdieu's structural perspective in his theory of masculine dominance, and brings out the shortcomings of both.Footnote ⁷ Lovell argues that whereas Butler stresses agency, fluidity and performance, Bourdieu operates with durable structures and dispositional subjects. Furthermore, it is argued that whereas ‘Butler reads at times like a voluntarist whose individuals freely don and doff their masks. . . Bourdieu reads at times like a structuralist with an “over socialized” concept of the individual, . . . one who comes to love and want his/her fate: amor fati’.Footnote ⁸

To focus on agency is a way to bridge these two opposing perspectives. Agency implies that all human beings, regardless of their class, age or gender, are viewed as acting subjects that live within durable structures that shape their lives and actions. From such a perspective all human beings are capable, in theory at least, to take some control over their own lives, but their degree of power and control will depend upon how they are placed within larger structures of class and gender.Footnote ⁹

In the analysis of the life stories below, I try both to describe the agency of each woman empirically, and to explain the causes behind changes in agency. In order to make ‘agency’ operational and comparable, it is broken down into two empirically observable factors. Firstly, because agency is closely related to control over material resources and decision-making power, focus is on to what extent the three women have been able to decide on important life-choices like education, work and marriage, and on the degree of individual control over economic resources they have had. Secondly, I look at how the women talk about their lives and the choices they have made, or that have been made for them, and consider this in terms of individuality versus family orientation. Here, I look at to what extent the women express an orientation towards the family versus the self. Included in this is the wording they use in terms of stressing the individual ‘I’ versus the collective ‘we’, and to what extent they express an orientation in their lived lives towards the family or the outside world.

In order to explain causes behind changes in agency, I draw theoretically upon Derné’sFootnote ¹⁰ model of social change. Influenced by Swidler'sFootnote ¹¹ argument about the causal priority of social structure and institutions over cultural ideologies, Derné analyses the impact of globalization, in the form of neo-liberal policies and transformation of media, on gender practices in India. According to this perspective, because people live within social structures that over time will have produced ‘stories, values, and other elements of culture that make these structures meaningful’,Footnote ¹² there will generally be a fit between social structures and hegemonic cultural meanings. At the same time, because social structures also always disadvantage some groups of individuals, there will exist alternative meanings within the same social structures.

Thus it follows that for globalization to affect individual lives and lead to changes in gender practices, changes at several levels have to take place. Firstly, local social structures that directly affect groups of individuals have to be transformed. Secondly, when local social structures are transformed, and the hegemonic cultural meanings no longer fit, a space is opened up so that new and/or alternative cultural meanings may develop. Finally, when both new social structures and new ideological norms coincide, gender practices will change.Footnote ¹³

Introducing Kamla Kapoor: modern and middle-class

Kamla Kapoor began her life story by telling me about her youth in Amritsar, Punjab, where she was born in 1908Footnote ²⁹:

After college her parents wanted her to get married, but she was picky:

After two and a half years in Burma, Kamla's husband's elder brother died and they had to go to Punjab for the funeral. Since this now made her husband the eldest son in the family he felt that he had to stay in India. He got a job with the Indian Medical Service and they moved from posting to posting in North India until the outbreak of the Second World War.

In this first part of Kamla's life-story, she focuses explicitly and implicitly on the importance of ‘being educated’. To be educated is, however, not only about education per se, in the Indian colonial context it can also be translated to mean being modern, middle-class and enlightened. As has been noted by many, the Indian colonial middle-class grew out of the need of the British colonizers for locals who could function as middlemen—contacts, agents, interpreters, brokers, money-changers and financiers—between the English rulers and the ruled Indian people.Footnote ³³ To be able to speak English and to some extent behave according to English values and customs was a necessity to succeed as a middleman, and thereby an English education with its inherent modernist values became the mark of the emerging colonial middle-class. So when Kamla Kapoor talks about the importance of ‘being educated’ she is referring to a specific colonial Indian middle-class lifestyle. This becomes evident when she talks about her early-married life at government postings in the colonies, for instance, when she emphasizes that she was taught how to ride, that she played tennis, and that in Burma she was a member of the club for foreigners. Class distinction is also expressed when she uses terms like ‘backward’, ‘dirty’, ‘in purdah’, and ‘so-called enlightened’ about people that she regards as below her in the class hierarchy.

Another interesting aspect of this first part of Kamla Kapoor's life-story is that she seems to express a strong determination with regard to decisions concerning education and marriage. How should this be interpreted in terms of agency? The first half of the twentieth century was a period in Indian history when middle-class gender hegemonies were undergoing changes that resulted in ambivalent outcomes with regard to women's agency. Together and separately, the various factors of English colonialism, the Hindu reform movements, the Indian Independence movement and the Indian Women's MovementsFootnote ³⁴ affected hegemonic views of middle-class femininity, resulting in contradictions, sudden changes, and great regional variation in policies concerning women.

This was a period when, on the one hand, women were idealized and viewed as a symbol of Hindu supremacy, and when, on the other hand, English, Victorian notions of hygiene and of women out of purdah had gained hold within the Indian women's movement and parts of the Independence movement.Footnote ³⁵ As Chatterjee has argued, the Indian Independence movement looked upon the home (ghar) as the place of Hindu tradition and the sphere where women belonged, while the outside world (bahir) was viewed as the sphere of modernity and economic progress, where men were in charge.Footnote ³⁶ From the perspective of the Independence Movement's ideology of nationalist modernity, men should act as protectors of women, who again were protectors of Indian tradition. That women belonged within the home did not, however, imply that they should not acquire an education. On the contrary, during the early twentieth century when Kamla was young, middle-class women were increasingly encouraged to become educated so that they could learn about hygiene, raising children and other issues that were considered important for the modern, yet chaste, homemaker.Footnote ³⁷

In view of this, Kamla Kapoor's seemingly strong determination to have her say in decisions concerning her own life is not so remarkable. When she says that she demanded a college education, she was only asking for what most middle-class households of the time would consider necessary in order to arrange good marriage matches for their daughters and make them into capable housewives. Her seemingly strong determination is also modified by the family-orientation in her story. Family obligations come first, as when her husband's elder brother dies they feel that they have to move back to India from Burma.

In fact, in this first part of Kamla Kapoor's life-story the position of women as belonging within the home and family comes through as an implicit backdrop that is taken for granted and that her agency is worked out from. She acknowledges and accepts the colonial middle-class, patriarchal ideology that women do not have the same options as men. She does go to college, but accepts that she is not sent to England to study as in the case of her brothers. She gets to marry an educated man of ‘her own’ choice, but she does not rebel against arranged marriage in the first place. She accepts the rather male-chauvinist view of women, that her husband has the right to leave his first wife because she is barren. And lastly, when Kamla Kapoor portrays the adventures and distinction of her early-married life to include travelling, club-life and sports, she acknowledges that this was possible only in her capacity as a companion to her husband.

In this early part of her life-story, what comes out as a strong will and adventurousness might also be viewed as a sign of Kamla Kapoor's colonial, high caste, middle-class position—with its inherently patriarchal and modern ideology—inculcated through English language education and strengthened through a colonial club-lifestyle. However, in the next section of this paper, which centres on the period of World War Two, it will be seen that this middle-class femininity provided her with the potential for being able to take charge of her life and manage on her own.

World War Two: managing on her own

With the outbreak of the Second World War a dramatic part of Kamla Kapoor's life, which would come to affect her marriage and further life-course, begins:

What I find most interesting in this dramatic part of Kamla Kapoor's life-story is when she describes how she dealt with the situation of being left in charge of her children's education and upbringing, whilst her husband was a prisoner of war. She first moved to her parents’ place in Amritsar, and then made the decision, against her parents’ wishes, to move to Shimla with her children. How should this be interpreted? To what extent was this a rebellious action and a sign of an alternative, new form of middle-class femininity?

On the one hand, it can be argued that because she stayed within the limits of what was considered proper female middle-class behaviour of the time, it was not very rebellious. With her middle-class position and its strong emphasis on being educated, moving to a place where her children could get a good education would be the mainstream logical thing to do. Furthermore, although her parents initially were ‘dead against it’, she compromised and received their approval by agreeing to let her younger bachelor brother accompany her and to be her male-protector during the first year in Shimla.

On the other hand, in the Indian upper caste context where Purdah was still practiced by many, it can be argued that to insist on moving to a place on her own was a rather unusual thing for a woman to do. The fact that her younger brother only stayed with her as a male protector for one year out of four, makes it reasonable to argue that there are signs of independence and self-confidence in this action that depart from the general portrayal of high caste, middle-class women of that place and time.

Here, it is important to understand how the war itself was an event that on many levels threw the normal out of balance. Thereby, previously latent, alternative femininities opened up new avenues for middle-class women. As noted earlier, during the first half of the twentieth century Indian middle-class femininity was undergoing ambiguous changes with regard to women's agency. Middle-class women were getting education, not for their own sake, but for the sake of the home and the family. Women were not yet perceived as free individuals, but as individuals within the patriarchal family home. With the onset of World War Two, however, men were going away to fight, leaving women not only in charge of family comfort, but often also in charge of family economy. It has been shown how the war forced many women in America and Britain to take up paid work and how this, at least temporarily, affected their femininity and had an empowering effect on the former homemakers.Footnote ³⁹

Kamla Kapoor did not have to take up paid work as she got a pension from her husband, but she had to make it without a male protector of her home. As noted earlier, her college education had already broadened her horizon, both in terms of being away from home and thereby getting other influences outside the family, and in terms of the modernity of the curricula. But it is also likely that the war affected her femininity as it forced her to manage and to take decisions on her own. One can argue that the war opened up alternative gender norms and thereby created a revised form of middle-class Indian femininity that allowed women, at least temporarily, more agency than they had experienced previously.Footnote ⁴⁰

In short, when the historical event of World War Two threw Kamla Kapoor's family-life out of balance and her capacity to take charge as a middle-class, upper caste woman was ‘tested’, she rose to the occasion and, from the way she related it to me many years later, seems to have enjoyed the opportunity of making decisions on her own. Thereby, she was on her way to becoming the tough mater familias that I got to know 50 years later.

Partition and after: settling down in New Delhi

Kamla Kapoor stated that, in the period immediately following the end of World War Two until partition and independence in 1947, ‘it was turmoil in the country’. With her husband out of hospital, but seemingly not really recovered from his war imprisonment, and with the violence around and uncertain situation for their relatives in the Punjab region, this turned out to be a very difficult period for Kamla and her husband. As an employee of the Indian Medical Service, Kamla's husband was eligible for a civilian job and was posted first to Patna and then to Lucknow. Being protected by the guards of the government and outside the areas with the most violence, they were fairly safe.

This was not the case for several of their closest family members in Punjab. Kamla Kapoor's parents were in Amritsar and had to leave everything behind and flee to safety to one of their sons in Calcutta. Her father in-law, however, was killed:

Kamla's husband, therefore, hired a plane and sent a Muslim family from India to Pakistan, thereby managing to get his own brother and his wife to safety in India on the return flight. In 1948 things were settling down and Kamla's husband decided to retire from the Indian Medical Service. Since doctors could get jobs virtually anywhere in the country, the couple could now decide where in independent India they wished to live. First they moved to Kanpur for a year, because Kamla's husband's brother had moved there, but Kamla found it dirty and did not like the place. She continues her story:

After one year Kamla's contract at the Eastern Court ended, and they had to find alternative accommodation. The Red Cross had just finished building flats for its employees, and the family were able to rent a three-bedroom flat close to Delhi Golf Club. Then, Kamla's husband suffered a heart attack, and within six months he suffered another. The doctor suggested that he should leave his job, which would leave the family without a home:

When analysing this last part of Kamla Kapoor's life-story, one can clearly see that her self-presentation has changed. She now tells the story so that one gets the impression that although her husband is back, she is the main family decision maker. This comes out, both by frequent usage of the pronoun ‘I’ when she talks about decisions in connection with the house-building processes, and by ‘reading between the lines’ when she talks about her husband.

Thus, the war seems to have had opposite effects on Kamla and her husband. Whereas Kamla has tasted the fruits of decision-making, he has become weak after four years’ imprisonment. Apparently, their marriage has become one where the husband lets the wife take charge. Maybe a little tired of her complaints about the filth and poverty of different places, he lets her decide where to move after Kanpur and she chooses Delhi because her sister lives there.

Later in time, when her husband has had his first heart attack and she starts to worry about the future, the phrases about her husband letting her decide are gone and she seems to have taken over decision-making completely. Now it is ‘I’, Kamla Kapoor, who decides to get a house built in a nice location, and who spends every day at the building site in order to get the house built on time. In the context of Norway, Nielsen and Rudberg have noted that such a switch from ‘we’ to ‘I’ reflects a change from choices made on the basis of social norms and what is good for the family collective, towards choices made on the basis of individuality and what is good for me.Footnote ⁴¹ In the case of Kamla Kapoor, she still talks about what is good for the family, and not what is good for her as an individual. But in the context of middle-class, upper-caste India, interestingly it is she, and not her husband, who makes the decisions about what is good for the family.

With this, I will leave Kamla Kapoor's life-story, and turn to the story of her daughter-in-law, Sheila Kapoor.

Sheila Kapoor: ‘I have given my children liberty and freedom’

I first met Sheila in 1994 when she moved back to New Delhi in connection with her husband's retirement from the Indian Administrative Servic. At that time her son was already living in America and her daughter, Lata, was in high school. For nine-months during 1997–1998 we were neighbours, and it was during this period that I asked Sheila about her life story. I thought that her individual story as a woman who married into the Kapoor family, and one generation younger than Kamla, would be of interest. My initial impression was that Sheila was more ‘conventional’ than Kamla, in terms of Indian femininity, and I was curious to discover if this was indeed the case. Once for instance, when I asked her how she spent her days as a housewife with adult children, she referred to herself as a ‘homely person’, and continued: ‘Since my children became adults I just prefer to relax at home’.

My interpretation of Sheila's use of the word ‘homely’ has two meanings: ‘average’ (which is the thesaurus meaning of the word); and a person oriented towards the home. She thereby conveyed that she sees herself as an average middle-class woman who likes to be at home, spending time with her family.

Sheila was born in Lahore in 1946:

She came to Delhi as a baby because of Partition:

Sheila spent her childhood in newly-independent India moving around with her parents from one army station to the next, spending only three years at each place. She expressed ambiguity with regard to her upbringing. On the one hand, the constant moving gave her broadmindedness, but on the other hand, her parents were strict and left her very little room for individual choice:

I asked her what kind of people her parents were and she replied:

I asked if she thought her parents were happy in their marriage, and she replied:

After marriage in 1966, the year that Indira Gandhi became Prime Minister, Sheila moved with her husband to Bombay where he was posted. After a couple of years their son was born, and five years later Lata was born. She told me that in the early years of their marriage, before they had children, she had worked first in a travel agency and then a couple of years in interior design. However, with her husband in the Indian Administrative Service and the moving around that went with it, she said that it was difficult for her to have a job. Inspired by her mother, she was quite active with social work during this period. In particular she helped teach literacy to the servant children on the various Indian Administrative Service housing compounds where they lived. I asked where they had lived:

Since about 1988 Sheila has lived in New Delhi. At first they stayed in housing provided by Rajiv's government job, which at the end of his career was in colonial-style bungalows, and since Rajiv retired in 1994, they have stayed in the family house in Jor Bagh.

At the end of the interview I asked her what important values from her own life she had tried to instil in her children, and she replied:

Comparing Sheila's life-story with Kamla's

There are many obvious class-related similarities between the lives of Sheila and Kamla. Apart from jewellery and expensive clothing, neither personally owns any material or economic resources. Still, because of their respective father's class positions, both have grown up in relative affluence. Both have got a college education and have had servants to do the housework all their lives. Both opposed early marriage and were allowed to wait until they had finished college, and both married men in high-ranking government service positions and moved around in India along with their husbands. Both have been homemakers and neither of them has worked for money for more than a couple of years.

In short, both women have followed the standard path of family-orientation and modernity laid out for Indian middle-class women throughout the twentieth century.Footnote ⁴⁵ As noted earlier, within this path, women were supposed to receive an education, but they were not supposed to work for money. If they did work, it should not interfere with taking care of family and home, and it had to be considered suitable for respectable girls. Being an airhostess was, according to Sheila's parents, not suitable for girls from ‘good families’. This was probably because of the independent travel involved, making it impossible for the unmarried woman's family to control her sexuality and assure her chastity.Footnote ⁴⁶

However, there are several differences in their life stories that point toward differences in agency for the two women. Firstly, there is a difference regarding at what point in life and why they took up paid work. Kamla stays at home with her husband until the historical event of World War Two/Partition throws them out of their middle-class orbit, and Kamla is induced to take up paid work in order to obtain a place to live. At this point in time Kamla is in her late thirties and her children are of school age. Kamla has not expressed a desire to get a job earlier in her life and although she says that she enjoyed making her own money, she ceases work when they get another flat. Sheila takes up paid work right after marriage whilst she is in her early twenties, before they have any children, and she stops work when their first child is born. To Kamla, taking a job provides the means towards getting her will and being able to move to New Delhi. To Sheila, having a job is about doing something interesting, and she expresses regret at having to quit.

Related to this difference regarding when and why Kamla and Sheila took up paid work and why they ceased working, is the difference of emphasis in their two stories. It is noticeable that several times Kamla expresses that she went against her parents’ wishes or that, when it came to marriage, she demanded a choice. Kamla also uses the pronoun ‘I’ several times when talking about important choices she has made. Sheila, on the other hand, gives the impression of having been overruled or ignored when it comes to important life-choices like marriage or career. She says that she dreamt of becoming an airhostess, but that her parents did not allow this. Furthermore, she says that she did not want to marry as early as she did, and did not like the man picked out for her, but that she was not given any options. In view of the topic of agency, this is an important difference. It directly concerns the extent of being in control of one's own life that the two women have experienced. Interestingly, it is Kamla, the older of the two women, who gives the impression of having had more control.

Does it follow from this that Kamla has had more autonomy and agency in her life than Sheila has had in hers? If so, does this reflect a ‘backlash’ in women's agency and autonomy from Kamla's generation to Sheila's? Since it has been shown that Indian middle-class gender hegemonies remained more or less the same from the period when Kamla was a young woman in the 1930s and throughout the period when Sheila was a young woman in the 1960s—not changing until the late 1970s—this is at first glance quite surprising.Footnote ⁴⁷

In order to explain this, I draw upon Derné's model of social change, which emphasizes the primary role of social, economic structures, but which also incorporates culture and ideologies into the analysis. Above, I showed how the historical event of World War Two forced Kamla to take control and manage on her own while her husband was away. This was also the case for many other middle-class women of her generation.Footnote ⁴⁸ World War Two can be viewed as an event that temporarily changed social and political structures and which opened up opportunities for a more outgoing and active femininity than the one prescribed by the gender hegemonic ideals of the time. But, for the women of the post-Second World War age-group like Sheila, the liberating possibilities that World War Two/Partition had to some extent opened up for their mothers were closed. Sheila and women of her generation who grew up in newly-independent India became mothers at a point in time when preservation of tradition, which was viewed as the women's domain, was still considered an important part of nation-building.Footnote ⁴⁹ In contrast with the previous generation of urban, educated, high caste, middle-class women, Sheila's generation who grew up in post-Independence India were able to live out the prescribed gender hegemonic ideals of the independence movement of helping to build the nation by staying at home to look after children, husbands and tradition. In line with this, Sheila says that she felt compelled to do what her parents and middle-class society at large expected from young women.

Given the fact that Sheila got married in 1966, the same year that Indira Gandhi became prime minister, one could have expected that a female prime minister would have had an impact on gender ideals and that Sheila, as a married woman would have been able to take more control. This was not the case. Indira Gandhi's prime minister period, until the Emergency starting in 1975, was mainly marked by her foreign policies of continuing the non-alignment track started by her father, and by the war against Pakistan ending in 1971. A female prime minister did not have a great impact on the number of women working or going into politics.Footnote ⁵⁰

From the late 1970s and onwards, a second wave of the Indian women's movement, which questioned the patriarchal family order and encouraged women to take more control over their own lives, took hold. As a consequence there was a definite shift in middle-class gender norms in India, and it became more common for middle-class women to take up white-collar paid work.Footnote ⁵¹ By this time, however, Sheila was well settled into her marriage. With two school-going children and a husband demanding her services, she was busy living out the prescribed gender ideology of being ‘homely’ and had neither any interest nor any opportunity to take part in the women's movement.

Derné's model of social change, with its emphasis on cultural ideologies in addition to social structures, is helpful for understanding this.Footnote ⁵² Although the influence of the women's movement on middle-class norms and practices came at a time when Sheila was in her thirties with a well-established marriage, it came too late to affect her possibilities for having a say in her own young adult life regarding marriage and work, and may have affected her own gender norms. In other words, the fact that the women's movement took off in India during the late 1970s and that it became more common for middle-class women to take up paid, white-collar work in consequence, might have affected Sheila's views on her own life. When she says that she has given her children ‘liberty and freedom’ as she has never experienced that, indicates that some of the ideologies of the women's movement have impacted on her own practices. Hence, it is possible that the reason why Sheila is more vocal than Kamla in describing the limits that were put on her life and her own inadequacy in taking charge and demanding her will vis-à-vis her parents, is that she sees her own life through the gender norms of the contemporary urban, educated, high caste, middle-class society of which she is a part. When looking back over her life and relating it to me, Sheila might therefore have been more aware of her limited agency than Kamla.

Such an explanation is supported if one takes a closer look at the emphasis in each life-story. In her life-story Sheila expresses a main concern with interpersonal relationships within the home, whilst Kamla expresses a main concern with achievements that count in the outside middle-class world. Sheila expresses explicit thoughts on the personalities of her parents, and on what kind of relationship she has with her own adult children. She is also self-reflexive and expresses how today she views her own unmarried self as sheltered and naïve, and how she has wanted to learn from that in terms of raising her own children. Kamla, on the other hand, does not dwell on relationships or on how other people feel. She emphasizes her own and her family's achievements in terms of the colonial middle-class norms that she grew up with, like speaking English, taking part in a sports-oriented colonial club-life and building a house in a ‘good location’.

It is possible to argue therefore that Kamla never questions the patriarchal hegemonic norms of her time, and that she stresses those aspects of her story that bring out the middle-class accomplishments from this patriarchal middle-class viewpoint. Sheila, on the other hand, questions the patriarchal middle-class values that she has grown up with, and therefore sees her own lack of accomplishments from the perspective of the gender norms of the women's movement. So, it is possible to argue that the differences between them are due both to the fact that the Second World War affected Kamla Kapoor's life in ways that gave her the opportunity to take real control over family decisions, and to the fact that Kamla and Sheila look back over their lives from different ideological standpoints.

Lata Mehta: ‘I did not want to be only a housewife’

For the sake of clarity and comparison I will present Lata Mehta's life-story differently to those of her grandmother, Kamla Kapoor, and her mother, Sheila Kapoor. I will first present a brief summary of Lata's life-story, without the use of any quotations, and will then look at what her story says about the two select topics I have chosen to focus on in order to analyse changes in her agency. The first topic is about having been in control over key life-choices like education, marriage partner and career. Linked to this (because Lata is working and has an income of her own), I will look at what these life-choices mean to her and to what extent she expresses that she has control over material resources. The second topic is about individuality versus family orientation: what Lata's story might reveal compared with the conclusions drawn so far in the cases of Kamla and Sheila. As mentioned earlier, underlying the choice of these topics is that in different ways they might say something about being in control of one's own life and, thus, about women's agency.

Lata Mehta's life-story is one of success in terms of both marriage and work, and can be summarized as follows: she was born in New Delhi in 1974, but lived in Bombay until she was in 8^th grade because her father was posted there with his government job. She attended her last two years of school in Delhi, then went on to a prestigious college in Delhi and graduated from there with a B.A. honours in sociology in the spring of 1996. Then she joined an advertising firm for one year, but soon found out that it was not for her. After taking some time off work and spending her time exercising and dieting, she started getting modelling offers. She worked as a fashion model for a couple of years and made quite a lot of money. During this period, in 1998, she met her husband, Prakash, through common friends and married him in 2000. They now live in a flat in an upper middle-class neighbourhood in New Delhi with their two small children and have three full time servants: one cook, and two ayahs (nannies) (one for each child). Because her husband is running his family business in another town and Lata wants to live in New Delhi, the couple live separately half the week. As soon as Lata married, she ceased modelling and with a female friend started her own fashion business in New Delhi. The business has been quite successful and they now have 25 employees.

Turning to the extent of control that Lata has had over key life-choices like education, work and marriage, of these three choices it was only on the issue of education that her mother and grandmother were able to exert some influence. Lata, however, has been fairly free to decide for herself also on the other two important life-choices of marriage partner and career. Looking at marriage partner first, this is how Lata described meeting her husband, Prakash:

From this story, one can see that Lata has had a love marriage in the ‘real meaning’ of the term. It was not a love-marriage arranged by family members like Sheila's parents, but one in which the couple met through friends, dated and fell in love. Here we see the contours of a real change from Sheila's generation to Lata's generation in terms of control over one's own body. Although an arranged marriage still is considered most proper within the urban, educated, upper middle-class segment, a love-marriage like the one of Lata and Prakash that does not cross any religious boundaries and stays within the boundaries of high caste and middle-class, is not unusual.

When looking at Lata's relative freedom in choosing a career, this impression of a change in women's control over their own life is strengthened. As mentioned above, after college she first joined an advertising firm for one year, but realizing it was not for her, she decided to take some time off work. She told me:

I asked how she got the funds to get started:

I find three things particularly interesting in these paragraphs about career choice. Firstly, it is interesting that Lata indeed had the possibility to choose a career, and that she is so explicit about not wanting to be ‘only a housewife’, which is what her mother and grandmother mainly were. Secondly, it is interesting that she first worked as a model, which is an occupation that makes it hard for her male relatives to control her sexuality. This is an occupation where the female body is very much on display and where Lata, because she was successful, got to travel a lot. Being a model is therefore an occupation that in many ways may be likened to being an airhostess at the time when Sheila was young. In both cases, there are strict requirements regarding the female body for entering the profession, and both occupations involve travelling without male relatives as protectors. Finally, it is interesting that it was her modelling career—an occupation not normally linked to the women's independence-movement—that enabled her to raise half of the funds needed to get her fashion business started and thereby become financially independent.

So, when it comes to work, Lata departs from the life-stories of her mother and grandmother. Her grandmother never mentions that she dreamt of achieving something she did not achieve, but is nevertheless resolutely emphasizing all her accomplishments. Probably because a career was neither considered proper nor valuable within the colonial, high caste middle-class of Kamla's youth, working is not among the things she emphasizes in her story. Lata's mother says that she wanted to work and that she dreamt of becoming an airhostess. However, she was told that being an airhostess was not a proper job for a girl from a ‘good family’, and she decided to leave the job she had in a travel agency when she had her first child.

Lata, however, seems to have been fairly free to decide both on whether to work and on what type of work she would do. When she decides that she wants to become a model, she loses weight and achieves her goal and continues doing it as long as she wants to, with no one trying to stop her. And, after marriage, when she decides that this is not something she will or can do for the rest of her life, she starts her own business. All in all, compared with her mother and grandmother, Lata has had a much larger degree of decision-making power regarding marriage partner and career, and whilst Kamla and Sheila were mainly housewives all their lives, Lata is pursuing a career.

The fact that Lata has been free to pursue the career of her choice and has chosen careers that bring in money and thus control over material assets, is another important implication for women's agency. Arguably, control over money or other material assets will always give people more control over their own lives. This has been the case for Lata, as can be seen from the following quote when she talks about why she thinks there has been an increase in the number of divorces:

Here, Lata shows a clear awareness about how earning her own money implies financial independence, which again implies bargaining power vis-à-vis her husband in discussions about who should do what, when it comes to work, and domestic tasks such as changing diapers and looking after the children. Equality within the marriage is a topic she returns to several times during the interview:

In contrast with her grandmother who never questions the patriarchal order of things, and her mother who questions it but still does not get her will, Lata says that she demands that her husband should carry out his share of the work at home. Because they have several servants, this is not really that much, but it is interesting how she compares her own marriage with that of her parents in terms of gender roles and housework. Behind Lata's assertiveness lies the financial independence that gives her the option of walking out of the marriage if her husband does not live up to her ideals and demands.

‘I'm an outgoing, totally-people person’

I now turn to the topic of individuality versus family orientation in order to compare the case of Lata with the conclusions drawn in the cases of Kamla and Sheila. Derné has argued that with the neo-liberal policies and increased globalization in India since the early 1990s, there has been a slight change towards more individualization among lower middle-class men that he has worked with.Footnote ⁵³ This change is part of a larger process of modernity and individualization, where the upper layers of the Indian middle-class are moving from a patriarchal and collectively-based view of marriage towards a more contractual and individualized view. In the interview with Lata, this came out in several ways.

Increased individualization came out in the fact that Lata and her husband live separately half of the week, and that they do this because Lata does not want to live in Agra where Prakash has his family business. This is how Lata explained the living arrangement:

In view of the hegemonic patriarchal practice of keeping upper caste women's bodies under control, discussed in the cases of Kamla and Sheila, it is actually quite surprising that Lata's husband and in-laws agreed to such separate living arrangements in the first place. From the perspective of the patriarchal gender norms that Kamla and Sheila have been raised by, the separateness of Lata and Prakash in their daily lives requires a fundamental trust in Lata by her husband. It signals a radical change in gender norms. According to Lata:

Lata's point about how she goes out (a) at night, (b) to bars and (c) without male companions, while her husband is in Agra, would have been totally unthinkable to the generations of her mother and grandmother. When they were newly married women, going out at night without a male family member as protector or going to a bar where alcoholic beverages were served were not compatible with the ideals of female respectability.

The change in gender norms that makes it possible for Lata and her husband to live separately half of the week is also a change away from a collectivist outlook towards increased individualization. If one compares the case of Sheila, who stayed behind in Delhi together with her in-laws because of her daughter's education while her husband commuted to Bombay, with the case of Lata, one sees that these are two very different situations. Sheila stayed in a joint-family arrangement, which is in line with the well-known North-Indian patriarchal and collectivist model, while Lata does not even live in a fully nuclear household. Underneath the separate living arrangement of Lata and her husband lies the fact that they view one another as two equal individuals.

This individualism is illustrated poignantly when I asked Lata to describe herself and she said: ‘I'm an outgoing, totally-people person’. This does not mean that she has a collectivist cultural understanding of herself in society, as this would have implied that she was oriented towards the family patriarchy.Footnote ⁵⁴ Rather, that Lata chooses to describe herself as ‘outgoing, totally people-person’, implies that she uses an Americanism that inherently is built upon individualism. It means that she sees herself as an individual with a lot of family and friends whom she likes to be with in a setting outside the home. As such, it is interesting to note that she chooses to use the term ‘outgoing’, since this, in fact, is the very opposite of the term ‘homely’ that her mother uses to describe herself.

The last example I will look at that illustrates the increased individualization that Lata expresses compared with her mother and grandmother is the fact that Lata has managed to start her own business and run it successfully. This shows individualization in two ways. Firstly, it would have been unthinkable in her mother's and grandmother's generation that a woman should start her own business, separately from her husband's business. It shows assertiveness and a turn from a focus on the collective ‘we’ towards a focus on the individual ‘I’. I argue above that Kamla, through her educated middle-class position and her adventurous personality, became capable of taking charge when the event of World War Two dramatically influenced her life in the sense that her husband's war experiences lastingly weakened him. But there is a major difference between Kamla and Lata in this regard since Lata, by starting her own business, is not doing it on behalf of the family-collective, but for her own good.

Secondly, the way that Lata raised money to start her own business, by borrowing half of the sum from her husband, points to the contractual element of their relationship, which is an inherent part of increased individualization. This contractual element is based on an understanding of the marriage as consisting of two equal individuals, and therefore a lot of issues in their marriage are open to negotiation. They negotiate on big issues like where they shall live and on small issues like who shall change the diapers. The contractual element of their relationship also came out when Prakash gave Lata half the sum she needed to start her own business, and the way they later on negotiated whether she should pay him back or not. Prakash, from the perspective of a patriarchal collectivist family view, where one neither separates between family and family business nor between what belongs to the husband and what belongs to the wife, said that there was no need to pay him back. Lata, on the other hand, says that she wanted to manage without his money and chooses to pay him back, apparently because she wanted to be independent, and separates between marriage and business and between what is his and what is hers.

Concluding remarks: ‘That's what it has come to’

In this paper I have recounted in detail the life stories of three women of the same New Delhi based upper middle-class family and have analysed their life stories in terms of what they might say about changes in agency. By taking the methodological view that individuals of the same generation, from the same class segment, living at the same cultural place are shaped by the same historical, economic and social structures, I have used the three individual life stories of the Kapoor women as voices that might be viewed as expressing changes within the urban, educated, high caste, upper middle-class segment at large. I have found that the overall picture is one where young women from this middle-class segment in contemporary India do have more control over their own lives than did their mothers and grandmothers. I have also found that this change of increased agency goes hand in hand with a process of more individualization within this upper middle-class segment. However, these processes are not linear. When I compared the life stories of Kamla Kapoor and her daughter in law Sheila Kapoor, I found that Kamla Kapoor, although one generation older, presented herself as having been in more control over her own life than Sheila Kapoor did. Following Derné, to account for this seemingly ‘backlash’ I have argued that one has to look at the impact of both changing socio-economical structures and cultural gender ideologies.

The event of World War Two/Partition changed socio-economic structures temporarily and directly influenced the lives of Kamla Kapoor and her husband, forcing Kamla to manage on her own whilst her husband was a prisoner of war. This experience, I have argued, had lasting effects on her agency and her relationship with her husband after the war. In addition, one has to incorporate changes in gender ideologies in the analysis. Although the normative change in gender ideologies in middle-class India only came during the late 1970s, at a time when Sheila was in her thirties and was well-established in her marriage and therefore came too late to affect her possibilities for having a say regarding her own marriage and work, it seems to have affected her own gender norms. Thereby changed gender norms might have affected Sheila's views on her own life and this helps to explain why she is more vocal than Kamla in describing the limitations that were put on her life. Sheila is definitely more concerned with her limited agency than is Kamla.

The really big change in agency of the three generations of Kapoor women comes with Lata, and again one must look at changes, both in socio-economic structures and in gender ideologies, in order to explain this. The change in socio-economic structures that has profoundly affected Lata's life course has been the introduction of neo-liberal economic policies in India since 1991. Although the introduction of neo-liberal policies has had a differential impact on women in India, and has led to increased stratification between the rich and the poor, for women of the established educated, urban middle-class segment to which Lata belongs, the economic restructuring has mainly been a blessing.Footnote ⁵⁵ Although the opening up of the markets and the increase in export and import of consumer goods have led to an increase from below in the number of people that can be defined as middle-class, this has hardly meant any real competition for the established middle-class of whom the Kapoor family is part, since they were already in control of cultural, social and economic capitals.

For Lata there are two factors that, combined, have contributed to the success of her fashion business. These are the consumerism that has come with neo-liberalism and her resourcefulness in terms of capital that again is a result of her established upper middle-class position. One effect of the neo-liberal policies in India has been a globalization of feminine beauty ideals with an inherent new type of fashion consumption, making the late 1990s and early 2000s a perfect time for starting a fashion business.Footnote ⁵⁶ In fact one could argue that, because Lata runs her own business which has profited profoundly from the neo-liberal policies, she has moved up and out of the urban, educated, high caste, middle-class of her parents and grandparents and that it is now more correct to view her as part of an upper, professional managerial class.Footnote ⁵⁷

Neo-liberalism alone cannot, however, explain why Lata was allowed by her parents to be a model in the first place. Neither can it explain why she was allowed to date men and choose her own husband. In order to explain this, one has to take ideological, normative changes into account. Here I have drawn upon DernéFootnote ⁵⁸ and Bjerrum Nielsen and RudbergFootnote ⁵⁹ who argue that it takes time—maybe one generation—before structural changes affect gender norms and actual gender practices. Such an interpretation of the material presented above was supported by Sheila's statement about having wanted her children to have more control over their lives than she was allowed to have. As she told me: ‘I have given my children liberty and freedom, as I have never been given liberty and freedom. I think they should choose what they want, both in terms of partners and career.’ Here we see that the normative change in Lata's mother's generation regarding control over women, which came too late to affect Sheila's agency as a young adult woman, directly affected the way Sheila raised her own daughter. Thereby Lata has been allowed to work as a model, to date men, and to have a love-marriage.

So does more control over one's own life lead to more happiness? That is of course a big question with no definite answer, but being rich comes with its own, new problems. I will end with a quote by Lata, where she points out, rather nostalgically, what could be termed the ‘negative effects’ of the neo-liberal reforms for the new rich professional class of which she is now a part. Here she points out what she sees as the coldness, the money-chasing, the impatience, the networking and the consumerism of her life in New Delhi, and compares it to what she sees as the positive aspects of the 1970s and 1980s; the cleanliness, the innocence, the relaxed lifestyle: