ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author addresses the expression of the contradictions in the social interactions and interpenetrating narratives of some specific women, one of whom, Minakshi, was her research assistant and friend. She presents the accounts in the order of their original delivery to emphasize that the stories that these women told about themselves and each other were delivered over time. The variegated result reiterates, formally, a point having theoretical import. The author shows that the uneven, unfinished process of disclosure in which she was positioned as instigator, interlocutor, and observer. She hopes that this will provide an opportunity to conceptualize subjectivity—as negotiated by and coded in ritual—as dynamic, contingent, and intersubjective. This will further disrupt the imagery of culturally sealed personhood that anthropological studies of life cycle rituals often convey, and in so doing disrupt the tendencies to see both caste and gender as overdetermined dimensions of identity.
