ABSTRACT
Apart from luncheons, social gatherings, and lavish dinners, elite housewives are often seen spending time at beauty salons. Following recommendations, I started to visit a beauty salon that is popular with the elite housewives I was spending time with. On one of my visits, quite unexpectedly I witnessed an unusual site at the parlour; I saw an elite woman who was getting a hair treatment done, sitting on a chair, with her legs crossed, chanting softly with a rudraksha mala (beaded necklace, held in hand). It was a striking site: a religious and spiritual practice in a space that is dedicated to curating an appropriate material and physical embodiment of privilege. This unexpected juxtaposition of the glamorous and the simple, the profane and the sacred, made me further dwell on the role of religion in the modern self-fashioning of these women. It pushed me to further analyse, understand, and explain the power of ‘and’ and not ‘either’, ‘or’ between religion and the modern. The sighting of this incident made me recognise that in fulfiling their roles and responsibilities with glamour, ostentation, and glitz, these elite housewives also find space to articulate or perform their spiritual selves – which in turn also constitutes their gender and culture identity. As I also explain further, this ‘bent’ towards the spiritual or religious is not necessarily solely borne from a duty towards performing their gender identity. Rather, imbued in these leanings are several expressions and desires of being elite, for example, it refers to their desire to emulate certain traditions of ‘old’ elites as giving patronage to temple arts and theatre. Equally, it alludes to the fear of loss of anxiety and status, and vulnerabilities of not being able to perform their privileged status appropriately. Furthermore, these performances are also not free from sentiments of competition and ostentations, and in this way are a means to define and shape in-group dynamics and assert ways of being elite. In this chapter, I explain the myriad affections of being elite and ways in which different elite subjectivities are constituted by focusing primarily on two strands of spiritual and religious engagements – following gurus (Godmen) and extravagant celebrations of religious festivals.
