Class, Gender and Identity --Politics of an Economic Superstructure (original) (raw)

2017, The Criterion: An International Journal in English

There have been many discussions on Western feministic theories and their chronological progress through different time epochs. It has largely meant a model for the women of the world. Given individual conditions, particular ethnic groups and national cultures, women from the other countries are urging their fellow women to not fall a prey to the western theory and instead devise one that answers their peculiar situation and is able enough to bring reform in the patriarchal structure and their respective societies. This paper has tried to analyze the anomalies in the culture with regard to economic stratification of women and its resultant effect on indigenous feministic theory. Concentrating on North Indian writers writing in three different languages, the study takes up different authors focusing on the lives of elite, middleclass or poor women. Comparing these narratives, it has been projected that women of different strata meet different treatments in their families and societies and no unanimous hypothesis or theory can be framed to include their lives. Given fourth world countries like condition in some parts of India with rapid commercialization and globalization, its uniqueness for housing secluded ethnic groups as tribals, Indian women don't have access to social security like their western counterparts and need to be studied separately in culture specific contexts. middle class and working women. Cultural conflicts and corresponding theory always emerge out of the warp and woof of complex processes that constitute a society which has always been a dystopia in terms of unequal distribution of wealth; dominance and hegemony vested with racial, linguistic, cultural or political superiority; marginal and downtrodden sections sanctified by religious preachers, historians and policy framers within patriarchy, monarchy and cultural elitedom, to inhabit the dungeons or the secluded corners of the land and above all the biological and morphic differences that form gender. The evangelicals and missionaries talk of a dreamland with no discrimination on the basis of caste, colour or creed yet that fairyland exists only in fantasy. Virginia Woolf and her contemporaries, the so-called 'daughters of educated men' strove hard against patriarchy to bring woman out of the boundaries of domesticity and age-old inhibitions making her stay within the protected four walls of the house, suppressing her from giving a free vent to her imaginative faculties, desires and emotions, denying her all rights of ownership and restricting her to household chores by building a taboo against entering professions. The indoors into sources of earning livelihood guaranteed economic freedom to a woman which was to be prohibited at all costs as it was against domestic bliss a woman could extend first to her husband and then to her children. The development in Europe and its impact on colonial India and afterwards is an issue of key concern. Given the postcolonial status of a free, progressive and developing nation, the