ABSTRACT
In the anticolonial nationalisms authored initially by elite men, an idealized womanhood—modest, self-sacrificing, patient, and chaste—came to be associated, intimately and inextricably, with what was deemed authentic Indian tradition, and elite women were taken to be its embodiments. Women’s ritual and body signs were valued as features of authenticating traditions, but at the same time women were expected to ensure the transmission of modernity by rationalized home management and by undergoing educational and social reform. Navarattiri is the nine-night festival honoring the goddesses Lakshmi, Durga, and Saraswati; women create elaborate displays comprising miniature figures, pommai. Women’s work gendered the spaces of modernity and tradition while being the catalyst for imagining possible lives, themselves mediated by consumption and by print and electronic capitalism. The pursuit of questions dealing with the differential and contingent meanings of womanhood and women’s experiences grounds feminist ethnography and suggests how ethnographic work might contribute methodologically and theoretically to feminist inquiry.
