Middle-Class Dharma

What comes to mind when we think of religion? Does it chiefly consist of a fixed sense of morality inscribed in the scriptures, or is it something more malleable? Can the everyday lived-practices of believers constantly create and recreate religion? If yes, then are these practices only sacred in nature, or can they also be drawn from the position one occupies in the class hierarchy? Most interestingly, can the performance of class itself then be a sacred act?

Seeking to answer these questions, Jennifer D. Ortegren’s Middle-Class Dharma: Women, Aspiration, and the Making of Contemporary Hinduism takes us through a fascinating ethnographic account of the lifeworlds of women residing in the upwardly middle-class neighborhood of Pulan in Udaipur, India. Being Hindu, these women need to fulfill certain obligations in order to be considered good wives, mothers, and good women. These duties and practices are termed streedharma and include serving the family by doing household chores, being loyal to one’s husbands, and maintaining the utmost modesty through practices like veiling. Though these obligations of streedharma are ascribed in the scriptures, these women are faced with another set of obligations arising from their status as middle-class individuals. This new set of obligations involves the need to have aspirations and desires that set one apart as belonging to the middle-class. These include the desire (and obligation) for new consumption patterns, fluency in English and Hindi, education in private schools, and overall, a new sense of being. Ortegren links being middle class to ideals about what a woman should be as an autonomous agent capable of having her own desires. These desires include donning Western outfits, stepping outside of their homes for college degrees and jobs, and having a say in deciding their future husband.

Stuck between their middle-class status (characterized by aspirations of autonomy), and their dharmic selves (characterized by obligations to family and society), these women are constantly trudging through in-between spaces of simultaneous possibilities and obligations, Ortegren argues. On the one hand, the desire for education requires them to move outside of their home, on the other, streedharma requires them to fulfill their duties at home by being an obedient wife and a mother. Adopting a middle-class status thus involves experimenting with ideals of what it means to be a Hindu woman. By analyzing the shifting ritual practices of these women in festival settings across six chapters, Ortegren outlines the difficulties and possibilities, as well as the “pleasures and anxieties of being in the middle” (a phrase I draw from Sara Dickey).

This maneuvering has  brought about a shift in the meaning of dharma itself. In order to enable women to choose their own spouse, “like marriages” have become a legitimate mode of finding a husband, while love marriages continue to be relatively taboo, Ortegren writes. Love marriages continue to be unacceptable owing to the fact they harbor the possibilities of inter-caste marriage—a practice that transgresses the rules of an appropriate Hindu marriage. Newly emerging middle-class women instead have found an in-between space wherein they now have the flexibility of choosing employment opportunities while still concurrently embracing marriages arranged by parents, reflecting a dynamic shift in their dharmic identity. While they may not engage in household tasks directly, they are increasingly taking charge of household management by hiring and overseeing domestic help. These dharmic identities are created by the women themselves, through embodied practices of middle-classness. Anxieties arise from the women’s inability to adjust their pre-existing dharmic selves with new modes of dharma

It is important to note here that Ortegren’s understanding of the concept of dharma is two-fold. It is both an ontological as well as a normative category. While ontological dharma includes the fixed cosmic morality of the scriptures, normative dharma includes the everyday practices that help to maintain the former. Through everyday ritual and non-ritual acts of being Hindu middle-class women, they are changing the larger ontology of what dharma actually means for Hinduism as a religion.

By doing so, Ortegren shows how religion doesn’t consist merely of the fixed and of the male, but also of women who were formerly seen as largely lacking in agency in this regard. She seeks to expand the understanding of religion by using the concept of dharma, which she defines as “that which holds the world together”(3). By using dharma as an analytical category, she seeks to understand not just Hinduism, but other religions of the world as well. Similarly, Ortegren also expands the idea of class by viewing it not just as a socio-economic, but also as a dharmic process. Neither religion nor class can hence be understood without looking at the intertwined nature of the two. Just as there are different classes, each class also has a disparate understanding of what it means to be a Hindu. Hence, middle-class dharma is distinctly different from elite-class dharma.

Though the book is chiefly about women, class, and dharma, we mustn't neglect the fact that it is also about neighborhoods, selfhood, and embodiment. Choosing to undergo fasts or vrats is linked to women’s desire for assertion, as well as a desire to form neighborly connections with other women undertaking the same fast. Neighborhoods themselves are sites through which dharma is constantly created, much like class. The book touches several other registers as well through its lucid examples, which can only be fully grasped through a thorough reading of the text. In essence, this is an intriguing book that traverses diverse terrains that are often overlooked by scholars focusing on the areas of class and religion.

Dorothy Kalita is a PhD candidate in the department of sociology at Jawaharlal Nehru University.

Dorothy Kalita

Date Of Review:

March 19, 2024