Women and Their Everyday Objects: A Peep into the Urban Bengali Domestic Space

Abstract

Women have necessarily been located, studied and contested from the interiors of the household for a long time. It’s either the bedroom, the living room or the kitchen that echoes her production and reproduction of/for labour. Domestic space over time has seen gendered interventions in terms of utility, ritual practices (both sacred and profane), relationships (conviviality and conjugality), kinship longings and heritage maintenance, accommodating the lingering memories associated with the urban Bengali ‘Bhadrolok’ and ‘Bhadramohila’. This paper will be an attempt to locate the ‘bhadramohila’ or the Bengali woman through her everyday objects of use. In pursuing the same, the paper shall draw cues from fictions and films of Satyajit Ray of the early 20th century, cooking manuals and handbooks written by Bengali authors and advertisements hinting at the appropriate use of household objects. Besides, there shall be a quick reference to the colonial impression on material objects that have been used by women to decorate their houses and their varied implications on their lives and lifeworlds. Objects enmeshed in everydayness, ‘boti’ (wooden stand with a curved knife), ‘kulo’ (cane tray), ‘shil-nora’ (hand grinding stone), ‘haath pankha’ (hand fan) and other objects alike and a few utensils shall be referred to account for women’s fast-transforming material lives and how it weaves out their identities. In an age of ‘gated communities’ with plush residential flat apartments, urban Bengali women have found new purpose in decorating their domestic space and along with it, many old and new objects of everyday use have come to redefine the women ‘homemakers’ and their multifarious activities in ‘doing gender’ and ‘undoing gender’. Thus, the journey from buying, owning, using, exhibiting, selling and again buying back those objects (in the second-hand markets) speaks of ‘her’ negotiations and assertions in the interiors, at times transpiring beyond the household. Nevertheless, the paper will try to account for how everyday objects possibly determine women’s embodied (emotional, intellectual and aesthetic) as well as disembodied (spiritual) existences with the changing socio-political meaning of domestic space, at times questioning the masculine oversight on the household and at times accommodating the same.