Growing up in Unfreedom: A Reflection on the Childhood Memories of Urban Middle-Class Women

Abstract

Unfreedom, cruelty, domination, and violence exist in disguise as ‘normal’ in our everyday life in social relations, in the process of growing up of children of all classes; their nature of manifestation and reasons, however, vary depending on economic, social and cultural conditions of the population. The middle class in India is located in a context which is fundamentally different from the context of the other classes, the poor and the rich. The Indian middle class now is educated, enjoys a degree of material affluence, lives in small and nuclear families, and is ambitious yet ridden with uncertainties and risks embedded in the neo-liberal social-economic order. The middle-class children in India thus grow up under the close care of their informed and conscious parents who operate in a narrow terrain of traditional normative patterns and the pressure of competition for career opportunities in the market economy. While bringing up their children, the parents consciously or unconsciously enforce their will in their children with authoritarian vigour in the name of care and support in making a successful career for them, without engaging their children in free dialogue. Growing up in such a conditioned terrain, the children, when they learn to live with agencies, realise that they lived a life of unfreedom.