ABSTRACT
This chapter shifts the focus from external processes, shaping gender to social processes which acted directly upon the household, as well as internal pressures which operated within the households of upper castes/classes. It outlines the contestatory nature of class formation in Maharashtra, with its double tensions between castes and between different class segments intensifying pressures on the various strata. As Sangari has argued, ‘The conflictual and uneven development of “class” did not make for cultural and ideological coherence—rather it made for a heterogeneity producing contradictory positions and multiple voices,’ sometimes even in the same person. The female world had conventionally been limited to the household, which was the focal point of female reproduction, domestic labour and of kinship relations of upper-caste women in Maharashtra as in other parts of the country. Schooling to ‘please’ men under the emergent forms of patriarchy was still tenuous and the household remained an embattled space between men, between women and between men and women.
