ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the ways in which prescriptive discourses on femininity are translated into everyday domestic practices, and considers how these practices contribute to the cultural production of caste and class. The centrality of domesticity in south Indian women’s lives is reiterated in Hindu public culture. Devotional films depicting the earthly exploits of goddesses and their amelioration of the tribulations of ordinary pious women are popular across the entire caste/class spectrum. Among Tamil Brahmans, there are dense associations between women and the domestic realm, particularly the kitchen. The array of objects with which Brahman kitchens were outfitted were often part of in-marrying women’s marriage settlements. Most of the work of food preparation and service fell to the women of the house, though this was a matter involving negotiation of space, authority, and power with female servants. Knowledge about cooking, eating, and worship was reiterated in microtechniques of bodily discipline, most emphatically among adult women.
