I Will Speak Out: Narratives of Resistance in Contemporary Indian Women's Discourses in Hindu Arranged Marriages: WLChawla, Devika. Women and Language 30.   1 (Spring 2007): 5-19. Turn on hit highlighting for speaking browsersHide highlighting

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Much has been written about the importance of recognizing and understanding resistance as it is experienced by members of Other and/or marginalized worlds. In this essay, I discuss resistance as enacted by middle-class women of a Punjabi community in contemporary Hindu arranged marriages who live in South Delhi, India. Accessing life-history narratives of women currently involved in these marriages, I argue that the structure of the Hindu marriage creates a constraining framework of power within which women are placed in disadvantaged positions. It is within and from these positions that women resist filial relationships in structural, relational, and interactional ways. I explore two emergent forms of resistance - Marital Self-definitions and Addressing the Mother-in-law. I explore these forms as truncated resistances because my participants resisted 'what they could' within the constraints of a filial reality. Finally, I conclude by merging my voice with contemporary transnational conversations about the problematics of interpretation and naming resistance. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]

Abstract:

Much has been written about the importance of recognizing and understanding resistance as it is experienced by members of Other and/or marginalized worlds. In this essay, I discuss resistance as enacted by middle-class women of a Punjabi community in contemporary Hindu arranged marriages who live in South Delhi, India. Accessing life-history narratives of women currently involved in these marriages, I argue that the structure of the Hindu marriage creates a constraining framework of power within which women are placed in disadvantaged positions. It is within and from these positions that women resist filial relationships in structural, relational, and interactional ways. I explore two emergent forms of resistance - Marital Self-definitions and Addressing the Mother-in-law. I explore these forms as truncated resistances because my participants resisted 'what they could' within the constraints of a filial reality. Finally, I conclude by merging my voice with contemporary transnational conversations about the problematics of interpretation and naming resistance.

Introduction

Arranged marriages continue to be normative in many Asian cultures, such as Japan, India, Korea, and so on (Applbaum, 1995). Specifically, among Hindus in India, they continue to be the most popular form of organizing a marital relationship (Mullatti, 1995). Despite globalization, modernization, and urbanization, the number of arranged marriages continues to outnumber 'love' or 'self-arranged' marriages. In fact, an estimated 95% of all Hindu marriages in India are still arranged marriages (Bumiller, 1990; Chawla, 2004; Kapadia, 1958; Kapur, 1970; Mullatti, 1995).

Research on the arranged marriage in the humanities and social sciences has been limited to historical and comparative sociological analyses. Historical literature has generally emphasized the structure of the family, Hindu norms, traditions, caste, and so on. Social-scientific work on the arranged marriage in the last five decades includes socio-psychological surveys that focus upon comparisons between 'arranged' and 'self-arranged' marriages in India (see Chandak & Sprecher, 1992; Dhyani & Kumar, 1996; Kapadia, 1958; Kapur,

1970; Rao & Rao, 1975; Ross, 1961). More recently, sociologists and historians at the University of Delhi have explored issues surrounding kinship, sexuality, same-sex marriages, marital laws, and the state (Uberoi, 1993, 1996).

Within sociological research, a few seminal studies examined urbanization and Hindu family life. In 1958, Kapadia traced the history of the marriage up to the early 1950s (the study was first published in 1955), and concluded that although there were changes in marital trends with industrialization and urbanization, marriage among Hindus remained a holy sacrament, an obligation and a duty that went beyond industrial progress. A decade later, Gore (1968) looked at urbanization and family change, and found that Hindu traditions won over forces of urbanization and industrialization in both rural and urban areas (see Ross, 1961 and Kapur, 1970 for similar findings). These studies are invaluable because they explore change and also because they describe Hindu family structure and member roles. I rely upon these, among others, in a subsequent section to explore the structure and role distribution of a typical Hindu family.

Other social scientific research on Hindu arranged marriage has dealt with marital satisfaction, adjustment, attitude change of college students about the arranged marriage, and more comparisons between love and arranged marriages. The results, based on urban samples, are often contradictory. For instance, in a study about attitudes toward the arranged marriage, Rao & Rao (1975) found that 91% of the college student sample (n=182, evenly distributed by gender) disapproved of the traditional form of 'arranged' marriage, and the high 'disapproval' rate was attributed to factors such as modernization, industrialization, education and the breakdown of the joint family system. A similar study conducted almost two decades later by Chandak & Sprecher (1992) found that in a survey sample of 66 respondents (n=66, 48 women and 18 men) over half approved of traditional system. This study, conducted two decades after the Rao & Rao (1975) study, points to a reversal in the modernization trend. It has an unevenly distributed sample with three times more women, but that is left unexplored and unexplained.

At the same time, studies on marital adjustment and satisfaction display some consistent results. Sociologist Promilla Kapur's (1970) socio-psychological survey entitled, Marriage and the Working Woman in India, investigated marital adjustment among Indian urban working women (n=300), and concluded that women in self-arranged marriages did not adjust better or worse than those in arranged marriages. Kapur's study remains the most descriptive document available as she used a combination of qualitative and quantitative data in presenting her conclusions. However, her qualitative data is merely used to support her findings, and is not analyzed per se. Moreover, Kapur's study, though seminal, is now over three decades old. A more recent study by Dhyani & Kumar (1992) also examined the relationship between type of marriage, marital duration, sexual satisfaction, and adjustment (n=240, urban women married for at least one year). They found that type of marriage and marital duration had no significant relationship with marital adjustment. In sum, while these studies offer valuable insights into the socio-psychological processes that factor into an arranged marriage, less attention has been given to women's contextual experiences in these marriages.

This paper contributes to contextual research about family experiences of contemporary Indian women in Hindu arranged marriages. In examining narratives of resistance which emerged in my ethnographic life history study of 20 urban women in a South Delhi Punjabi community in India, I show how my participants accessed different marital self-definitions, silence, and an embodied material resistance against the central figure of the mother-in-law in their marital homes. The significance of this essay lies in its addition to literature on gender, marriage, and family in some crucial ways.

First and broadly, I provide discussions about a highly understudied context in marriage and family life-the Hindu arranged marriage. The study answers Turner & West's (2006) recent and urgent call for expanding the contexts of the study of family life in their new Family Communication Sourcebook. Much family research has assumed that family communication issues are similar across groups thereby overlooking unique issues, and glazing over religious contexts (Galvin, 2004). This study undoubtedly expands the context of family research, alongside it unravels the intricacies of Hindu marriages arranged by kin. For instance, the notion of women self-

defining marriage within arranged marriages problematizes the idea of arranged marriages as a structural continuity in this community. In redefining their marriages, these women dislocate as well as reinvent common perceptions about such family systems.

More specifically, this study is significant because it also dislocates the notion of family conflict which has for the last thirty years focused upon spousal, parent-child, and sibling conflict (see Roloff & Miller (2006) for an overview of family conflict research). Even though mother-in-law and daughter-in-law relationships have been studied, conflict between these family members is generally used to predict low or high marital satisfaction (see Bryant, Conger, & Meehan, 2001; Turner, Young, & Black, 2006). My study, however, shows how such conflicts are a product of the structural/historical context and are fundamental to understanding women's experiences and marital interactions in these contexts. Moreover, in showing conflict and resistance as symbiotically linked, this essay moves us beyond a study of family conflict styles (such as avoidance and engagement) and power into addressing resistance as a means to live 'with' the conflict or to help bring out a 'new' resolution. Finally, this resistance is framed as discursive thereby contributing to Third World feminist sensibilities that privilege the local means/actions/ practices un/consciously employed by women to cope in their daily lives.

In the following sections, I highlight the history of Hindu marriage and structure of the Hindu family before proceeding to describe my fieldwork which took place in Delhi, India. Following this, I explore in-depth two forms of resistance that emerged in the stories narrated to me in the field. I conclude my essay with a discussion about how my study merges with contemporary transnational conversation/s about the problematics of interpreting and representing resistance.

Hindu Marriage in History

The Hindu arranged marriage and family are a case in point for looking at the family as ideology and a site in which power relations are structured and distributed in constraining ways. Historically, all Hindu marriages were premised upon similarity of social standing, which often included the caste, class, religion, and education of the prospective couple. Despite forces of modernization, urbanization, and liberalization, the number of arranged marriages in India far outnumbers 'love' or 'self-arranged' marriages (Chawla 2004; Bumiller, 1990). In this section, I rely on historical literature, to explore the roots of the Hindu marriage. Further, I describe the basic construction of the Hindu family to explain the context in which the narratives in my study emerged.

In a simple understanding, arranged marriages among Hindus were marriages generally organized by parents and elderly kin (Sur, 1973). In earlier times, intermediaries called sambhalas, or traditional matchmakers, were employed to keep the genealogical history of each family, and ensure that the bride and groom were not related from five to seven generations (Sur, 1973). In more recent times, these criteria have stretched. For example, Mullatti (1995) outlines seven criteria that are currently followed by matchmakers: kin; parents and relatives; caste; social structure; moral value compatibility; academic compatibility; occupational compatibility; the family's moral history; and horoscope compatibility (though not necessarily in this order). In the past two decades, parents have begun seeking matches for their children through matrimonial columns in newspapers, magazines, and now even via internet (Mullatti, 1995; see also "Rearranging Marriage" in the weekly magazine India Today, 2004). The criteria, rules, and other norms for arranging Hindu marriages differ from region to region within India. So, for instance, in urban areas such as Delhi, young men and women have begun meeting via internet matrimonial websites. These sites match people using some of the basic criteria explored above. However, it is important to note that these are not dating websites, and parents/kin have a say in the meetings that occur through these mechanisms. As any social phenomenon, Hindu marriage has evolved over time and it is important to examine its socio-historic construction to comprehend the distribution of power in the home.

Hindu marriage is said to be derived from laws interpreted in the Dharmashastras which in turn have their roots in the 3000-year-old hyms called Vedas and Smritis. The Vedas and the Smritis are considered the oldest surviving documents from the Vedic and Epic age (what are considered the first recorded periods of Indian

civilization from 4000B.C. - 1200 A.D; see Kapadia, 1958; Shattuck, 1999; Lipner, 1994; Zysk, 1989). These texts tell us that Hindu marriage dates as far back as 4000 B.C1. Written by holy men of the time period, these scriptures (as are scriptures across most religions) are a collection of rules and conducts for society at the time (Zysk, 1989).

A general theme across these scriptures was that marriage was a duty and a religious sacrament that was required of all human beings for the well being of the community. Through different periods of Indian history, these texts underwent various interpretations. All predominant interpretations (which were male until very recently) outlined four main aims of life for Hindus (tailored for men). These were: dharma, artha, kama and moksha (Kapadia, 1958; Lipner, 1994). Kama represented the instinctive, and was connected with satisfying the emotional, sexual, and aesthetic urges of man. Artha referred to the acquisitive instinct, and signified man's enjoyment of wealth. Dharma was of primary concern because it aimed to balance the instinctive and acquisitive. Dharma was achieved by gaining the knowledge that artha and kama were means, not ends. Dharma represented the harmony between "temporal interests and spiritual freedom" and is a key element in Hindu life (Kapadia, 1958, p.27). Moksha represented the end of life and the realization of an inner spirituality in man.

The four aims of life were to be accomplished by conducting life in four stages which were - bhramacharya, grahastha, vanaspratha and samnyasa. The second stage, grahastha, dealt with marriage and included the goals of dharma, progeny, and sex. Even though marriage was required of all Hindus, its advantages were enjoyed by men, who benefited both spiritually and economically (Mukherjee, 1978). Men were spiritual beneficiaries because they married in order to beget sons who would light their funeral pyre. In ancient Hindu philosophy, having one's pyre lit by a son ensures the male line a place in heaven, and more importantly rebirth in the next life as a human being (said to liberate future generations of the family). A male heir was also an economic necessity - he was desired because he alone could continue the family line and inherit ancestral property (see footnote 2 for the revised laws on property). Therefore, historically, the Hindu marriage was, according to Mukherjee (1978), 'male-emphasized.' In fact, the word 'wife' was often used interchangeably with 'household' (see also Shastri, 1969). In fact, the Sanskrit word for marriage - vivaha - translates into procuring/abducting a maiden from the house of her father to the house of her husband.

This objectified and prescribed role for women can be more contextually understood by looking at the forms of Hindu marriage. Marriage was divided into eight forms, those that were 'righteous' (dharma or acceptable), and those that were 'non-righteous' (adharma or unacceptable; Mukherjee, 1978). Of these eight, the first four forms of marriage were considered righteous. These were - brahma, prajapatya, arsa, daiva. Even though they differed in degree, these four forms were organized by the bride and groom's father and paid for by the bride's family. The bride's family received a negotiated 'bride-price' from the groom's parents, but her personal wealth or stridhana (a material bridal gift given to her by her parents at the time of marriage) was inherited by the grooms' family. With the material bounty shared by parents from each side, the bride was ultimately left economically impoverished and at the mercy of her in-law family. These four righteous forms of marriage, beneficial to the male line, evolved into what we consider to be Hindu 'arranged marriages.'

When kin and family were not involved in marital negotiations, and marriages were self-arranged by the bride and groom, they were considered non-righteous (adharma). These forms - gandharva, asura, rakshasa, paisaca - were considered 'female-emphasized' due to economic, social, and spiritual reasons. First, at the level of status, the marriage was not arranged by kin, and thus frowned upon. Second, on the economic level, the bride and her family benefited from the union because the bride kept her stridhana, her parents did not bear the economic burden of the marriage, and the bride had independent resources because it was she, and not her parents who received the 'bride-price.' It has been speculated that these forms of marriage not arranged by kin came to be later called, 'love marriages' (I have used the terms love-marriage and self-arranged marriage to mean the same thing in this essay). Finally, on the spiritual level, while the first four righteous forms of marriage (also male-emphasized) were supposed to spiritually liberate future generations of the groom's family, the next four did not do so (Mukherjee, 1978).

Structurally, these eight forms of marriages have numerous implications. First, they clearly show mat marriage was organized around inheritance and there was a need to protect sons. Second, because marital forms were given value, women within each form began to be treated accordingly. Women in the righteous (arranged) forms of marriage were treated with more respect than women in the non-righteous (self-arranged) forms (Mukherjee, 1978). The Hindu woman who had never been attributed much status and authority in the scriptures eventually experienced a more devalued status in the non-righteous form of marriage mainly because she was held responsible for having drained the family of economic resources (ironically, she was not responsible because property laws favored men, her husband would eventually inherit her wealth). At the same time, in the righteous forms of marriage, the women did not have any economic status at all. Men, on the other hand, were the clear beneficiaries of both forms of marriage, spiritually as well as economically2. Therefore, on every level, men's roles and treatment in the family were advantaged. To better understand this, I turn now to the previously mentioned sociological literature to explore roles, authority, and the internal relational structure of a Hindu family.

The Hindu Family: Structure and Power

In his study, Urbanization and Family Change, Gore (1968) tells us that an ideal Hindu family in contemporary India consists of a man and wife, their adult sons, their wives and children, and younger children of the parental couple (see also Sharma, 1997). A 'joint family' is generally a multiplicity of genealogically related nuclear families living under the same roof, sharing in worship, food, and property. It has been described as a group of adult male coparceners and their dependents - the dependents being wives and children (Gore, 1968; Ross, 1961). A coparcener is a joint heir. For instance, if a father has two sons and one daughter, the sons would be considered joint heirs; but, a daughter would not inherit property. According to Hindu Law, an adult male and his sons were coparceners in ancestral property (Gore, 1968; see also footnote 2).

Hindu women were not entitled to any property rights until 1956, and therefore were economically dependent on their fathers, husbands, and later on their sons if they were lucky to have male progeny (Gore, 1968; Kapur, 1970). With the amendment of Hindu property laws in 1956 allowing for female inheritance, and given increased levels of women entering the workforce 'by choice' in the latter half of the 20th century, there has been tremendous change in gendered roles within families (Gore, 1968; Indian National Commission Report for Women, 2001; Kapadia, 1958; Kapur, 1970). Further, in the 1980s and 1990s, the liberalization of developing world economies created new jobs for women throughout the world, including India (Indian National Commission Report for Women). In particular, the last two decades saw an upsurge of women in the both the urban and rural work forces. Of the 314 million Indians currently in the work force, 89 million are women (Indian National Commission Report for Women, 2001). Despite the promise and arrival of economic independence and changes in property laws many urban Hindu women continue to accept and choose arranged marriages. It would seem that the breakdown of economic disparities would lead to an increase in 'self-arranged' or 'love' marriages; yet that has not been the case (Bumiller, 1990). Speculatively, this can be attributed to the structural continuity of Hindu family life.

Historically, the structure of the Hindu family (traditionally a joint family3) contributed to an overall disadvantaged status of women. Formal authority was always centered on the oldest male and thereby hierarchically bound by age making it a 'vertically extended family.' This hierarchy occurred on many levels. Women were (and are) expected to move into a new family which consisted of men who are all related by blood. Therefore, women were always outsiders because they did not share any biology with their new legal family. Their status was somewhat elevated if they gave birth to a son because doing so ensured their economic status in the family. Once a son was born, a woman would feel more included in the family because she had been instrumental in producing an heir who would provide spiritual continuity to the family and economic stability to herself. In the event a male-child was not born, a new wife could be brought in (this changed with the Hindu Divorce Bill in 1952 and women achieving a right to property in 1956; see Derrett,1976; Kapadia, 1958; Uberoi, 1993, 1996; see footnote 2).

Once married, the 'conjugal relationship' between couples was discouraged from becoming too romanticized and strong because the emphasis was on the socioeconomic welfare of the family. This, according to Gore (1968), was a major cause of the degradation of women's status in the family, which in turn was supported by denial of property rights to women and by women's inability to achieve economic independence. In fact, role and authority segregation of men and women was essential to the well-being of a joint Hindu family. The goal was the economic well-being of the family and the discouragement of individualism.

What we have here is robust asymmetry. If one were to look at this social field in terms of power distribution and power relations, we can see that there are two concentric circles of power in the household, distributed relationally. The outer, more powerful circle is the circle of male relatives who are biologically and economically bound, and so obligated to each other. The second circle of power is the inner-circle which consists of women who are not biologically related, have negligible economic rights, and thus have few obligations to each other. They find themselves thrown into the inner-circle with little or no say in the goings-on of the outer circle. They are aware that they are largely an instrument of procreation in the Hindu marriage system. By being relegated to the 'inside' their only connection to the outside is their husband on whom they have little influence. As a result, power and resistance as they experience it is 'bound' within a structural framework, specifically the inner-circle.

Such an understanding of the power dynamics in the home became more and more relevant to my study as I began to access the life-histories of women from one community in South Delhi. In the following section, I discuss the field practices that enabled these narratives. I describe, in fair detail, the multiple methodological tools which allowed me to interpret my participants' experiences.

Research Practices

My fieldwork was conducted in New Delhi, India where I traveled a few years ago to participate in an ethnographic life history study of urban Indian women involved in arranged marriages. My research practices broadly centered around an ethnographic interviewing framework because such approaches are especially sensitive to context, dynamic processes, and subjective perspectives (Denzin & Lincoln, 2005; Patton, 2000; Strauss & Corbin, 1998). They allow us to understand and articulate experiences that are inaccessible from observation and survey methods (Denzin & Lincoln, 2005). Qualitative ethnographic research necessarily positions the researcher as a part of the research process in various roles such as interviewer, observer, coparticipant, participant, and the researcher is often known as a bricoleur (Agar, 1996; Briggs, 1986; Denzin & Lincoln, 2005). In this study, I wore the garb of the bricoleur because I used a variety of tools, methodologies and strategies to explore the experiences of my participants. I developed a set of research practices that formally involved interviewing and participant observation. While these were 'methods' that I had 'set' in advance, an 'informal,' yet significant methodological tool was my own evolving subjectivity that re/shaped the research process and become a necessary lens in my interpretations and observations.

I am both native and other to Delhi and a member of the Punjabi community to which my participants belonged. I was born and raised in India, thus my status in the study can be considered that of an insider. However, since I have been away from home/my field for eight years, I was also a literal outsider. On the other hand, I was a 'partial insider' since I grew up surrounded in similar histories and marital narratives (Chawla 2003). Yet, I was on the outside as I have chosen to by-pass this form of marital arrangement. My positional displacements remain deeply intertwined with my interpretations and representations for the study as a whole (see Chawla 2003). A reflection about my own subjectivities throughout the research process was a set of practices that were integral to my interpretations and later representations. Even though these quandaries are not a primary focus of this essay, they emerge in my writing as I engage with my interpretations of resistance in the narratives.

The formal research practices I employed were a combination of retrospective life-history interviewing and ethnography. My participants included 20, urban, working and non-working, middle-class women from the Punjabi community in South Delhi. They ranged in age from 27-44, and were married in the early 80s, 90s and

2000s4. I accessed the groups using a word of mouth and 'snowball' strategy. A majority of the women were referred to me by families in the community where I reside in Delhi, and all were previously unknown to me. Their occupations ranged from homemaker to corporate executives, medical doctors, teachers, special education counselors, a sexual activist, journalists, day care workers and private entrepreneurs. All participants had undergone same-caste arranged marriages, thus discussions about caste conflict did not emerge in the narratives. By limiting my participants to urban, Punjabi, middle class, working and non-working women in one community in South Delhi, I 'bound' my participant group so that I was able to seek 'saturation' (Bertaux, 1981). It follows then, that the narratives presented in this essay are not representative of the experiences of 'all' Hindu women in arranged marriages, and therefore cannot be universalized to represent an essential picture of a married Indian woman or victim (see Hegde, 1996; Mohanty, 1988). Thus the discussion provided here is one set of interpretations about my participants, and must be understood within those boundaries. These narratives may be read as cases among cases of marital experiences that have the potential to evoke moments of similarity and difference with women in other contexts.

My interviews were audio-taped and conducted predominantly in English, but when my participants slipped into Hindi (the most commonly spoken north Indian language as well as the national language, which I also speak), it was easy for me to translate. Specifically, the interview protocol included 25 broad, open-ended and conversational questions that were chronologically written (see Chawla, 2004). I conducted the interviews in sites chosen by the participants. In addition, I spent a few days immersed in each woman's life. Such immersion involved participating in the everyday activities of the woman I was interviewing. This could involve a variety of tasks such as traveling with some women to pick up their children from school, talking with them about parenting teenage children, eating dinner with their families, going shopping with them if they asked me to, and sometimes even talking with their mother-in-laws and other extended family members while I waited for them. Every night I wrote field notes about each woman's activities and daily life. These notes along with the audiotaped 'formal' interview enabled broader access to experiences.

The formal interview sites were usually necessitated by the emotional status of my participants, and some women specifically chose 'external' sites (not home) for the main interview events. I interviewed Anita in a hotel lobby because she wanted to narrate her story away from the extended family household, which in her case included about 15 members. Geeta chose to be interviewed in her offices. As most of these women lived in joint or semi-joint families, they asked me to interview them during times when their homes were empty of the extended family unit. Radhika asked me to come by her home for the interview in the early evenings when most of the family members were away.

Therefore, for some women, choosing to do the interview was an act of resistance because they risked incurring their extended family's disapproval or wrath. The very act of 'speaking' and voicing the 'unsaid' is often been considered a form of resistance especially among populations and peoples that are disenfranchised, colonized, and marginalized (Geiger, 1986; Gluck & Patai, 1991; Riessman, 1993; Romero & Stewart, 1999). So, on a meta-level the life-histories shared with me can be considered 'resistances' in the very act of being 'narrated.'

My interviews followed the format of 'life-history' narratives, an approach to interviewing women that is increasingly being discussed by feminist researchers and anthropologists as, "a feminist method for the broader and deeper understanding of women's consciousness, historically and in the present" (Geiger, 1986, p. 35; see also Gluck & Patai, 1991; Menon & Bhasin, 1998; Personal Narratives Group, 1989). This approach to interviewing facilitates detailed descriptions and narratives about individual life experiences and enables both individual and group analysis (Bengston & Allen, 1993). A unique characteristic of this practice lies in its foregrounding of the experiences and requirements of individuals. In other words, the focus is on how the individual copes with society rather than how society copes with groups of individuals, particularly women (Geiger, 1986; Menon & Bhasin, 1998).

In the study of women's lives, life-histories are considered exceptional resources because they allow access to, "women's lives at different points in their life cycles in specific cultural and historical settings" (Geiger, 1986, p.

338). Life-histories "illuminate the course of a life over time and allow for its interpretation in its historical and cultural context" (Personal Narratives Group, 1989, p. 4). Giving form to a life, or a portion of it, requires looking into the meaning of individual and social dynamics that may have been most significant in shaping a life. In the stories they told me, my participants presented me with ways and forms in which they were negotiating their filial and marital relationships.

Emergent in these life-histories were forms of resistances against filial structures that my participants were narratively negotiating as they talked. Two of these - Marital Self-Definitions and Addressing the Mother-in-law - were interpreted by me inductively as a result of a layered thematic analysis of my field notes and transcripts. The first form of resistance - Marital Self-Definitions - was intertwined with a traditional understanding of the Hindu marriage. I discuss it in the following section relying primarily upon the words of my participants.

Marital Self-Definitions: Romance Comfort, Playing Wife, Romance

Comfort, Play, and Romance are certainly not words that one associates with arranged marriages (Nussbaum, 2000). Rather, for non-Indians and indeed many young Indians, the arranged marriage invokes ideas of imposition and constraint. On my own end, at the start of my fieldwork, I broadly explored two understandings of marriage - those that were self-arranged (love) by the bride and the groom, and those that were family-arranged. My interview protocol included questions that asked my participants to describe how they were experiencing their marriages. I encouraged them to remember pre-marital days, specifically the period preceding their marriage because I wanted to get a sense of their life before they were married (Chawla, 2004).

In recollecting these experiences, my participants articulated an understanding of marriage that was rooted neither in arranged or self-arranged marriages. I found that all of them had defined marriage for themselves by outlining for their parents, distinct criteria for a groom. Each woman had agreed to have an arranged marriage, and was aware of the reality she would enter - a marital system which necessarily located her as an outsider in the interior circle of home-life. Despite this, each woman had put conditions to her consent to the arranged marriage.

As an interpreter, I experienced the process of self-defining marriage as a form of resistance, albeit a local and everyday one. That is, even though these women were aware that 'taking charge' of their marital life was restricted, by outlining criteria for a husband they were transforming this constrained reality. This, in my view, was agentic, and therefore a resistant act. By defining marriage as Comfort, by placing themselves in the role of Playing Wife, and by associating marriage with Romance, my participants had reframed their view of their marriages, and their roles within it.

Comfort and Playing Wife emerged at a point in my protocol when I urged my participants to describe if they had envisioned any criteria for a husband before their marriages. Interestingly, yet not surprisingly, material wealth, good jobs, and higher education emerged as prerequisites for their future husbands. Each woman expressed a desire to be comfortable. In fact, I have used their own words - Comfort and Playing Wife - because these were semantic and symbolic redundancies in the transcripts and my field experiences.

My own response to these desires is important because it sheds light on the process of interpretation and my own engagement with the stories. I experienced annoyance when my participants listed overt 'material' demands. This emotional response was rooted in my own subjectivity and, perhaps, Western trained academic status. As a researcher from India who is now situated in the West, a middle-class Indian women who is economically independent, and woman who has bypassed such a form of marriage, these criteria seemed too manipulative. I became reacquainted with my outsider status in the study. I began by acknowledging my anger, knowing that while I could not move into my participants' frames, I had to examine the locations from which they were speaking. Belonging to a similar community, I wondered why some of these women were uninterested in becoming financially independent on their own. Geographic distance from the field upon the

completion of my field work and a temporal distance from the narratives, accorded me time and space to reflect upon and re-frame my annoyance.

A shift occurred in my own interpretations because I began to perceive Comfort as not a shying away from work, but as a striving to own a marital story. My participants were using the need for Comfort to redefine the meaning of marriage from 'work' to 'play.' Incidently, marriage and family as 'work' is a cross-cultural concept that has been explored elsewhere among different people and societies (see Bateson, 1990; Gluck & Patai, 1991; Lorber, 1994; Risman, 1998; Williams, 2000).

So, for instance, Jhumpa5, a 28 year old journalist told me that she had insisted on marrying someone with a professional degree. Expanding this further, she claimed that in her profession there were very few men in her age range who earned handsome salaries. Given this, through her parents, she chose a man who was her age, but in a higher position in the corporate world. His salary would allow her to live in the manner to which she was accustomed in her natal home. Other women told similar stories:

I wanted to marry someone from a good background. It did not matter whether the family was very wealthy or not, but the guy should have a good education and should be holding a good post. (Jhumpa)

I wanted a comfortable house, a room of my own, you know? And I mean if I am cooking then I should not be the only one cooking. Work in the morning and cook in the evening then back to office, back to cooking, back to cleaning - that was not something that I could have done. So, I expected all these things when I married. (Geeta)

If someone used to ask me what kind of a boy I wanted, I would say, "Someone who had a nice kitchen, who had a good bathroom, who was smart and handsome." My husband's salary did matter to me. It had to be good, so that I could have a luxurious and comfortable life. And he had to be educated - this was my first preference. Education is very important. I thought even if he lost his job, if he has good qualifications, he could always look for something. That is what I liked about my husband ~ he had studied in a very good institute and his salary was also very good at that time. (Meena)

Jhumpa, Geeta, and Meena negotiated the terms and conditions of the matchmaking to make sure that they would not find themselves in 'discomfort' and this bargaining occurred much before their marriages. Having succeeded in this negotiation with their parents, they performed their marital stories as women who were Playing Wife because bargaining out of the work elements of marriage made wifely chores seem more playful. Through this narrative maneuver they were showing me how they had skipped themselves perceptively (and literally) out of the structural constraints of marriage. Defining Comfort as a condition to marriage 'bought' them out of the role of the being the traditional 'householder' - a structural reality in the Hindu marriage.

Playing Wife as play state was keenly evident in 30 year old Radhika's story. A practicing anesthesiologist, upon marriage Radhika had quit professional work for some time because her husband's medical education was in process in another town. Radhika laughingly described those times:

He had long hours of working, but I just loved being the housewife. Generally, you know? I picked up a lot of cooking and I used to try out my cooking on him.

Similarly, Jhumpa explored her own 'wifely' role in amusement:

I had a very good time in Chennai. I had a cookbook and all and I used to, (I was not working at the time), experiment in the kitchen and stuff like that. I used to play housewife. I used to go out and buy potatoes and things like that. There was also help at home - a cook and a person who could also chop vegetables.

Comfort and Playing Wife were intertwined as resistance because requiring Comfort allowed my participants to re-name their wifely status as playful. In short, Comfort allowed my participants to play wife. Comfort was a desired permanent state, and Playing Wife a temporary state occasioned by Comfort.

Additionally, Comfort and Playing wife were intertwined with defining marriage as Romance. Romance was a particularly intriguing way to define marriage, especially since Hindu marriages have almost negligible associations with romantic emotions6. Historically, there were eight forms of Hindu marriage of which four that were considered dharma or holy were necessarily arranged by kin; the other four, considered unholy were self-arranged by the bride and groom and involved love, elopement, and abduction. It is speculated that what has evolved into the arranged marriage are the four types of 'holy' unions negotiated by family (Kapur, 1970; Sastri, 1972, 1974).

Contemporary writings and studies have reinforced the non-romantic nature of these marriages. For instance, Bumiller (1990) explains that for middle-class contemporary Indian women 'falling' in love is a concept entertained by teenagers and Hindi romance films. Echoing this understanding in Women and Human Development: A Capabilities Approach, Martha Nussbaum (2000) writes that marriages are more of a norm in middle-class India and that "love is potentially understood as a threat to rather than a goal of marriage" (p. 259). While a majority of women in the contemporary West are socialized with the idea that the meaning of their life is to be found primarily in a relationship of romantic love, such a goal is uncommon among Indian women. Nussbaum writes that, "even though marriage is prized, its raison d'etre is not taken to be romance" (p. 259). In fact, closely aligned with historical understandings of Hindu marriage, middle-class India defines love as commitment and devotion to family.

However, my participants repeatedly expressed a desire for romance. This longing was well illustrated in the descriptions of their 'first meetings' with their husbands. Within the middle class Punjabi community, a 'first meeting,' in general, involves a meeting between two sets of parents and the potential bride and groom in a public area such as a restaurant, country club, or a common friend's home. This meeting is not a 'date' between prospective bride and groom rather, it is the first time the two families meet each other.

Given the significance of the 'first meeting' as a punctuated event in one's life-cycle, it was not unsurprising that all my participants recollected it with an intimacy of detail. These details were embellished by romantic overtones suggesting that they were re-storying this meeting for their own as well as my benefit. Owing to the obvious asymmetry of our positions, I have wondered if this romantic detail was exaggerated. I am left feeling that these detailed descriptions functioned as resistance against their own stories and my own outsider status. This speculation notwithstanding, romance remained a key element in all stories. Geeta described the first meeting in curiously romantic detail:

So, I went to this Avon office (my sister-in-law) works there, and I entered the office and there was this sweet little thing I saw and she was so sweet to us. It was apparent to me that she is a very nice person. I really fell in love with the girl, so the next day when the brother walked in. It's unbelievable even after three years that it was "love at first sight." I peeped from the window for something and they were walking in and my nephew came in and said, "My God, he is so good-looking." I said, "Shut up, your expert comments are not required." I saw my husband and I was like completely floored. He's not very good-looking, but he has a very honest face. He's got big and beautiful eyes. So I think I was completely head over heels in love with him. I could see that. So, I tried not to show it.

Geeta's story re-narrativized a family-arranged event into a romantic event, by re-plotting the 'first meeting' story into a 'love at first sight story.' Such shifts were expressed in various ways in other narratives. Thirty-seven-year old Reema's entire marital narrative was centered on romance. She explored this by describing to me what was important to her in a husband:

See first time you see only physically. You want a loving, caring and smart boy. Mainly, he should be caring, he should listen to you, and he should be loving. He should understand you. It used to feel good that not only will I have so many clothes to wear and jewelry, but that we will go out and there will be someone to love me and care for me.

Reema recalled with fondness the one month of courtship preceding her marriage. Her memories were mostly of romantic moments shared with her fiancé. As their marriage progressed, this romance diminished because her husband was too loyal to his mother who lived with them. Describing this tug and pull, Reema said:

Oh, that was very bad. Then you see these actions (him siding with his mother) and you can't love the person. And the wife's thing is that she wants him to be hers alone and nobody should share your husband. That he should be listening to you alone.

This strain took a toll on Reema's marriage, but she and her husband were trying to salvage it by taking one vacation every year as a couple:

We go out every year on our anniversary. We don't take our kids. We go out and that is a good change and we can discuss all our problems. You have all the time. It gives you a break from work and household tensions. You can discuss problems and say what things should not happen. Like I tell him, 'you should not scold me, you should not say this in front of everybody.'

Romance in Reema's story migrated from a longing, to a loss, and then a replenishment. It remained centrifugal and intricately linked with her experience and definition of her marriage.

I believe Romance provided my participants with 'alternative' understandings of the arranged marriage by helping them cope with structural controls and, in some cases, an interfering mother-in-law who invariably emerged as a pivotal character in all the marital narratives. So much so that in addressing her as a site of conflict my participants performed what I have interpreted as the second form of narrative resistance - Addressing the Mother-in-law.

Addressing the Mother-in-Law: Material Embodied Resistance and Silence

As explored in the previous section, Reema's desire for Romance in her marriage was curtailed because of interference from her mother-in-law. Seventeen of my twenty participants emphasized the mother-in-law's persisting presence in their marital lives. They placed her as a focal point in the interior world, and positioned her as the first power-authority figure that they encountered upon marriage. The first signs of marital conflict originated in their interactions with this figure. Addressing the Mother-in-Law as a conflict figure was a form of narrative resistance which my participants enacted via the strategies of Silence and Material Embodied Resistance.

Twenty-nine-year-old Anita's narrative well captured this strain. Anita was married into a traditional joint family comprising 15 members. From the very beginning, Anita's parents-in-law had disapproved of her preference for wearing western clothes. While her mother-in-law never verbalized her disapproval, Anita sensed it in her silence:

She doesn't say anything, but you can make out. Because my mom-in-law is like that, no? She doesn't say anything. I don't know sometimes I feel that she doesn't say anything, because I feel that she knows that I will not take any nonsense. That's why she doesn't speak up. But, it's okay because I don't like to cross her. If I cross her I cross him (husband) and I don't want to do that. Because his whole happiness is connected with the parents. If I keep his parents happy he is very happy, you know?

In the preceding exchange, Anita illustrated the importance of her mother-in-law's presence in her marriage. As the interview progressed this relationship began to take more narrative space than Anita's own marital relationship.

A similar experience was related by Reema who recollected multiple episodes about her mother-in-law's interference in her daily life. For Reema, the troubles seemed to be rooted in the early years of her marriage, which was now 15 years old:

Maybe because my husband is the only son (male) as my father-in-law expired very early. My mother-in-law must have been very attached to him or something. Then after the marriage the husband looks after more about the wife, that is there among newly weds anyway. So she must be feeling left out. Maybe the problem started that way.

Describing her verbal altercations with her mother-in-law, Reema implied that the arguments were associated with power struggles in the home:

There are many. It's always a little thing, of no consequence. The fight starts about just anything. If I reply back then it becomes big. Then she says, "She doesn't listen to anyone, she doesn't agree with anything." Then they call up (my parents) and say, "She replied back and she did this." So they (my parents) would say, "We will make her understand, we can take her home for a while." Even now it's still there, but very less. I keep myself very busy. Now I don't involve in these things. I make it a point to go out, have my kitty parties, and all that. Otherwise I go to the Avon store. I do this to make myself busy even though there is not much money in it. You don't have any earning, but it keeps you very occupied.

Reema's mother-in-law was a discipliner in the home, and if Reema 'behaved badly' her 'misdeeds' were reported to her parents. Whether the conflict was verbal or non-verbal there was a sense of foreboding about this matriarchal presence. While some participants, like Reema, had carved spaces for themselves - by working part time and keeping busy - others remained bitter about their continuing struggles with this figure.

This bitterness shadowed Suparna's story. She was married to her husband for spiritual reasons. Her mother's spiritual guru had suggested a match with a man who was one social class lower than Suparna's natal family, but belonged to the Punjabi community. Blindly believing the spiritual consul, Suparna's mother hastily arranged the marriage not worrying that her daughter was unaccustomed to working in the home. Suparna's mother-in-law, on the other hand, expected her to manage the household. Describing her ineptness about such work, Suparna related early altercations with her mother-in-law:

My mother-in-law would say: "Why don't you work in the kitchen? Did your parents not see initially that we don't have a servant?" Did they not prepare you for this? I would get up at eight and I would have those scary eyes looking at me. The whole family focused upon me. I had to get up early in the morning. Like they would get up at five, so I was expected to do the same. Things like that, you know? Keep working. My husband would not say anything, and ours was not a very pleasant relationship. We used to have a lot of fights because of my in-laws. That is because he would not accept his parents' mistakes.

Suparna's argued with her mother-in-law over chores, space, and even her husband's attention. Eventually, this led to a property split in the family, leading to the literal emergence of two spatial units as they each moved into different family homes. Despite this, even now the mother-in-law would live with them for a part of the year. As our interview concluded, Suparna's narrative continued to be liberally peppered with more bitter details about her mother-in-law's behavior towards her.

Anita's, Reema's, and Suparna's experiences illustrate that the mother-in-law functioned as a site of conflict and as a conduit to the rest of the family. The ability to 'address' her with much directness is akin to resistance. However, this was merely the first step in a more multi-layered form of resistance. In their stories, my

participants addressed and then isolated the strategies of Material Embodied Resistance and Silence to show how they countered her presence, and in so doing displaced the relational symmetry in the home.

Material Embodied Resistance

In my interpretation, Material Embodied Resistance implies a reliance on external objects to perform resistance. In my participants' narratives these involved clothes and food. Anita had been discouraged from wearing western clothes such as jeans, skirts or dresses. She was encouraged to wear the North Indian traditional dress, such as a sari or the salwar kameez. On occasion, she would slip outside unnoticed in her jeans - an overt rebellion that was unfortunately discovered by her father-in-law who then complained to her mother-in-law and her husband. Revealing her response to this episode, Anita forcefully told me:

I didn't say anything, but I told my husband, look I am married to you, I'm not married to them. I will wear what I want, what I like. He said, "Okay agreed." He was agreeable to that. That a human being should be able to wear clothes of their choice.

By asserting her right to clothing of her choice, Anita was resisting her husband's family. Even though this resistance is truncated, and may seem a small victory, it was integral to Anita's narrative because she continued to revisit it all through the interview.

Later on, Anita spoke of other restrictions that had been imposed upon her by her mother-in-law. In her natal home, Anita enjoyed dining-out, and had looked forward to this activity with her husband after she was married. But, after marriage she found out that she was required to dine in with the extended family. Anita's response was to begin a bodily rebellion against this norm by refusing to eat, thus losing weight, thereby making her husband notice her distress. She was able to negotiate new rules for dining-out by doing this. In this rebellion, she was able to signal her priorities and emphasize to her husband that 'their' time was more important than family time. Describing the bodily rebellion, Anita said:

I just kept losing weight. There was a time when I was 38 kilograms (84 lbs) because I stopped eating at home. One thing, I don't like eating at home, on top of it, it was a sort of rebellion which I was trying to show him (her husband) that I will not eat at all.

Resistance as a material act was also evident in Meena, a 27-year-old doctor's marital narrative. When Meena was married, she lived in a semi-joint family which included her in-laws, a sister-in-law, and her husband. At the time of the interview, she was living alone with her husband, but her in-laws lived with them for part of the year. Meena's mother-in-law disapproved of her wearing sleeveless blouses, which showed off her bare arms. For a while Meena had adhered to these rules, but later began wearing what she wanted in her home. She had, however, made some concessions:

My own father never stopped me from wearing any type of dresses, even without sleeves. My mother-in-law had this thing in mind that girls shouldn't wear, you know, jeans and sleeveless. Once I shifted to my own home, I started wearing my normal clothes. I also love wearing shorts, but when they are here - to not make them unhappy - I wear a nightgown over it. Initially when they asked me not to wear these clothes, I asked my husband, "So what should I do?" He said, "You wear whatever you want, don't worry, I'll talk to them." So this was a very supportive of him. He could have said, "No, my parents don't like it, so you shouldn't wear it." But he was saying, "No I like it and you should wear what everyone is wearing nowadays."

There were two factors that influenced Meena's resistance. The first was gaining support from her husband, and the second was her decision to live away from her in-laws. Therefore, while the first factor was an interactional achievement, the second was a material move outside of the family home. While Anita did not move away, she 'shifted' her 'body' to bring about a change. Both Anita and Meena consciously involved their husbands in their resistant acts. Ironically, it was conflict that brought them closer to their husbands. Their stories can be seen as

'victory tales' in which a protagonist encounters and names hurdles, takes the listener (us) through their struggles, and eventually achieves success. The other form of addressing the mother-in-law emerged through Silence.

Silence

Neeta's, a 44-year-old woman entrepreneur was married into a joint family in which she was required to live not only with a mother-in-law, but also a grandmother-in-law. Her personal history of her unmarried life was a source of conflict with her mother-in-law. As an unmarried woman, Neeta had been fussy about whom she would marry. Word of this had reached her husband's home. Her grandmother-in-law and mother-in-law were aware that she was 'outspoken,' because they knew that she had rejected many men before she chose to marry their son. When Neeta began living with them after marriage they proceeded to discipline her by imposing rules which required her to cook, not answer back, and learn other household chores. Neeta followed these rules in Silence:

I already knew that my reputation was that 'she is very outspoken.' I did not want to do anything that would aggravate that. I did not know what to do. I was not happy, so I went home for a little while. When I returned my grandmother-in-law came to stay with us and this became a major adjustment point because she was very clever. She had heard that I was sharp, so from the beginning she knew that if they don't keep me suppressed then / will speak out1 (italics mine). The initial years were very difficult. I would cry sometimes, in hiding.

For one year, Neeta spent her time in her new home in Silence. Ironically, this moved her closer to her husband thus shifting the focus of her relationship from the family to her marriage. Neeta began helping her husband out in his business, which was undergoing a rough patch. During all this time, she carried on working in the household and also took over the reins of the business. Alongside, she continued her household work. Silence worked as her resistance in a twofold ways - it pushed her to learn to work inside as well as outside her home, all along allowing her to create a closer marital relationship with her husband. Exploring this self and marital transformation, she told me:

I think after marriage for a few years I really tried hard to be like a typical wife, be everything that was acceptable. I tried to be that. And later I was just trying to survive. You know, survive in the sense that I had no time to think. I was busy with my house, my work, my children and I was trying to run the whole show. Today I think I was trying to be a superwoman, but then that time I was trying to be the best at whatever I was doing. My children had to be the best. In my work whatever I could do, even at home I tried you know that do all the work that I can do, you know. I can wash clothes, I can cook food.

Along similar lines, 44-year-old Naina, an economically independent corporate executive married into a joint family. Her mother-in-law too tried to discipline her. Unlike Neeta for whom Silence was imposed, Naina accessed Silence as a narrative strategy in dealing with the mother-in-law.

Naina story focused on her self-transformations and she began by telling me that she started in her marriage as a confident and financially independent woman. However, she soon began to be harassed by her husband's family because they expected her to be a housekeeper. At first, she had argued with them, and when this proved futile she turned to her husband for support seeking help from him against his family thus shifting the locus of her life from family to her marriage. She handed over the conflict to her husband and embraced Silence:

He took over and that was the only way I think we saved our sanity because whenever I tried doing things on my own it never used to work. His family used to outplay me completely, they are much sharper, more politically minded, I think and more wiser. These silly games that women can play. I think he latched on to the fact that I was cracking up. That's this was beyond me and I couldn't handle it and he told me, "You may be a communications expert, but you don't know how to communicate with this clan and I know how to

communicate with them, so now you stay out, if they ask you anything just keep quiet and either you say we'll talk in front of Mahesh or don't say anything, just keep quiet."

In the stories they told Anita, Meena, Neeta and Naina spoke of using Material Embodied Resistance and Silence with the goal of addressing conflict with the mother-in-law. These strategies allowed them to redirect their marital focus from family to the relationship with their husbands. Their narratives show that they were able to navigate and then convert conflict to their advantage by accessing whatever resistance that they found available in their everyday lives.

Problematizing Resistance

Even though I have closely bound resistance to two broad forms, they are certainly open to further interpretation by readers. I believe that my interpretations are ultimately 'constricting' because there may be many forms of resistances that are beyond my own reading, capability, experience, or imagination. Therefore, the narrative forms of resistance discussed in this paper present themselves as a challenge to be theorized because problematic questions such as the following persist: Who resists? Who decides (the participant or the researcher) what constitutes resistance? And then who goes about naming it? Moreover, is it possible or even desirable to frame resistance?

Interpretive and representative dilemmas such as these questions have been at the heart of ethnographic, postmodern, post-colonial/transnational feminist research for numerous years. Within feminist research, even though the goals are to empower and bring about social change, feminists have been intensely self-reflexive about the privilege and authorial power that we bring into our fields. The problematics of interpretation and representation are continuously debated by scholars who critique the inherent 'colonial' nature of the ethnographic process whether it be conducted by insiders, partial-insiders, or outsiders (Agar, 1996; Clifford & Marcus, 1986; Clair, 2003; Van Maanen, 1988). Along these lines, feminist scholarship has continuously problematized ethnographic representation as a necessarily intrusive process in which the relationship of the researcher to the researched is inevitably unequal. In her 1988 lecture to the New York Academy of Sciences, "Can There Be a Feminist Ethnography?" Lila Abu-Lughod asserts that feminist ethnographies must take the commonalities and differences between researcher and subjects into account, and that such an acknowledgement itself is feminist praxis (as summarized in Menon & Bhasin, 1998; also see a similarly titled essay by Judith Stacey entitled, "Can there be a feminist Ethnography?" in Women's Words: The Feminist Practice of Oral History, 1991 ).

Speaking to similar matters in their essay, "Interviewing Women," Reinharz and Chase (2001) point out, "Interpreting any woman's silence or speech is a complex task that requires a strong understanding of her social location, including her place within her community and society, the cultural constraints and resources shaping her everyday life, and her particular circumstances" (p. 225). Thus, my tentativeness with claiming resistance in these narratives is deeply embedded in feminist concerns with representation and theorizing about women's lives8. Even though, I was a 'partial-insider' in this life-history study, my locations and those of every participant were various and distinct. Although we shared class and community, I was privileged (in my eyes) because I had chosen to by-pass the arranged marriage. So, perhaps I was seeking to find some resistance to a marital institution that I had myself resisted. Without doubt, the interpretations are very much subject to my own position in the study. Were I married at the time of this study, were I living in India, and were I non-Indian, the narrative interpretations would be remarkably different from those presented here. For example, the theme of Silence which I speak of as an empowering resistant frame could very well be construed as a compromising and acquiescing stance taken by women in my study, a convergence so to speak with Hindu marriage. Silence, has been defined in various ways by women who are involved in the study of Third world women's lives. Hegde (1996), in a study entitled, "Narratives of Silence: Rethinking Gender, Agency, and Power from the Communication Experiences of Battered Women in Southern India," shows us how silence is imposed on battered women and how it leads women to an "existential impasse - a total disenchantment with self (p. 312). In Hegde's understanding, silence is a tool that controls, reprimands, and makes invisible (i.e. her analysis is

concerned with exploring silence as power). My understanding of Silence as resistance in this study is very different from these conclusions - it reinvents, reconfigures, and empowers, when co-opted by the subject.

Thus the explorations of resistance that I offer are my own, registered in my voice, experienced from my position in the interviews (Stacey, 1991; Patai, 1991). The danger of such representational control is that research that wants to transform and reveal inequalities may reproduce other forms of control and hierarchy, or it may reproduce hierarchy (such as my 'authoring' resistance in particular ways in this case). Moreover, the problem of interpretation and representation becomes more complex in the portrayal of "subaltern subjectivities from the perspective of Western locations" (Hegde, 1996, p. 314; see also Mohanty, 1988, 2003; Sunder Rajan, 1993)

Recognition of these interpretive and representational dilemmas and attempts to address them are being robustly debated among transnational scholars who want to imagine newer ways of addressing and exploring resistance as it is enacted by women in their everyday lives. For a few decades now there has been a 'resistance' to the knowledge/s we have about resistance, and how we choose to represent it. As already mentioned issues of representation are an ongoing conversation in ethnographic work especially that which is with and about women. The work of those that identify as post-colonial and transnational scholars falls in line with a 'resistance' to the dominant understandings of resistance (Anzaldua; 1987; Gluck & Patai, 1991; Jayawardhane, 1986; Menon & Bhasin, 1998; Mohanty, 1988, 2003; Narayan, 1997; Said, 2003; Sunder Rajan, 1993). Dominant poststructuralist understandings of resistance focus upon an "undifferentiated" power that is "unremitting and unstoppable" and is meted out by administrators, managers and technocrats (Said, 2002, p. 240). In an attempt to privilege participants, transnational scholars focus on the everyday practices of resistance in the daily lives (in this case, family life) of subjects/participants as a locally emergent phenomenon that cannot be bound to frameworks. So, while popular imaginations of power and resistance are concerned with power from the standpoint of its realization, rather than opposition to it, recent examinations delve more into the 'subject' who resists (Said, 2002). This 'new resistance,' both divergent and multiple, is concerned with the subject who speaks, 'to whom' one speaks, and 'where' one speaks rather than merely 'what' is said. In a recent essay that theorizes resistance, Mumby (2005), a post-strucuturalist scholar himself, leans on the side of local discursive resistance because he believes that it is important, "to counteract the impression that power... is a force from which there is no escape" (p. 32).

Resistance under such an understanding takes various forms because the challenge for feminist scholars is to show how the "the everyday lives of women are constituted in the interstices between being victims of oppression and agents of resistance" (Hegde, 1996, p. 310). Across disciplines, there has been an emphases on resistance as a "routine yet complex, embedded social process" the meaning of which is largely contingent upon the relational context that one is enmeshed in (Mumby, p. 32, 2005), and one that emerges out of the "multiple interpretations of both workplace actors and academic researchers" (Prasad & Prasad, 1998, p. 251; see also Prasad & Prasad, 2003). At the same time, researchers caution against essentializing routine resistance and treating it as a stable set of behaviors, actions, or performances. For instance, Jermier et al. (1994) critique the "tendency of researchers to impose, rather than investigate" (pp. 10-11) the nuances and meanings of resistance. Most of these scholars encourage studies where the spoken and the said of participants is taken into account to assess and explore the significance of local resistances.

There has been an outpouring of studies (across fields, contexts, and disciplines) that explore localized resistances in multiple ways. These studies explore resistance as a socially constituted 'discursive tactic' with an emphasis on the enactment and embodiment of - material, corporeal, interactional, narrative - resistant acts (Mumby 2005). This understanding of resistance aligns well also with de Certeau's (1984) classic study of everyday life in which he proposes that individuals ingenuously create their own responses to power and constraints imposed upon them in their daily lives. De Certeau tells us that in order to subvert, cope with, or challenge constraints, people are able to utilizes 'tactics' - which are an opportunistic manipulation (temporally contingent and in the moment) of a constraint at a given point of time, one that converts constraint into opportunity.

A plethora of studies explicate the idea of resistance as a 'discursive tactic' Tretheway (1997, 1999), for instance, explored 'irony' as a narrative resistance tactic used by employees in a human service organization. Sotirin & Gottfried (1999) explore local resistance in the form of "bitching" and gossip (see also Sotirin 2000 for a discussion of women's office talk). Material forms of resistance such as office graffiti, mimicry, and modes of dress have been investigated as resistant tactics (see Bell & Forbes, 1994; Bhabha, 1994; Gottfried, 1994). In her feminist ethnography of a Japanese confectionary factory, Kondo (1990) unveils how discourses of resistance are closely tied to conceptions of work, self, family, and the public-private relationships that operate in Japanese society.

In life history work on women's lives, testimonials have often been treated as 'counter-narratives' that resist dominant understandings of one's identity. In their essay, "Millie's Story: Motherhood, Heroine, and Methadone," anthropologists Alicea & Friedman (1999) present the testimonial of a Puerto Rican drug addict and mother, Millie, and examine how her told story counteracts the dominant meta-narrative of the drug abuser. In a similar and more nuanced vein, Schulz, Knoki, & Knoki- Wilson (1999), examined the personal narratives of two Navajo women, Faye and Ursula, who, in telling their stories, discursively create counter-identity/s which challenge the master-narrative of assimilation and civilization imposed upon indigenous American women. To take it a step further, the two Navajo women, Faye Knoki and Ursula Knoki-Wilson co-authored the essay about themselves along with the researcher thereby confronting and embracing the crisis of representation in telling their story. They are able to make representation a resistant act.

My own interpretation of resistance aligns with the above discursive understandings of resistance as socially embedded, temporally and locally emergent, and deeply contextual (italics mine) and my hope has been to investigate rather than impose (Jermier et al., 1994). My concern is with the enactment of resistance and to show the local, unorganized, relational, material, and even invisible ways in which women in some communities might resist filial, work, and institutional relationships and structures. The stories of my participants illustrate that not only is it possible to oppose power, it is also possible to realign power structures, albeit in small degrees. For instance, the notion of Self-defining the Marriage may be read as an attempt to create a counter-narrative. Silence can be seen as a narrative strategy that may reconfigure intimate relationships. Addressing the Mother-in-Law is a direct attempt to resist structure in order to realign it and redefine an intimate relationship. For transnational feminists like myself, these maneuvers constitute not only resistance, but also feminist practice at the level of identity and relational communities. In her most recent collection of essays, Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity, Mohanty (2003) emphasizes this point by exploring her understanding of feminist practice:

Feminist practice as I understand it operates at a number of levels: at the level of everyday life through the everyday acts that constitute our identities and relational communities; at the level of collective action in groups, networks, and movements constituted around feminist visions of social transformation; at the level of theory, pedagogy, and textual creativity in the scholarly and writing practices of feminists engaged in the production of knowledge (p. 5).

I believe that my own empirical contribution fits well into these conversations as my goal is to emphasize everyday practices of resistance and not bind the stories of my participants to preexisting knowledge frames. My hope is that the narratives represented here expand our idea of everyday practices of resistance by qualitatively and descriptively showing embedded complexities. The analysis here addresses and privileges 'who' speaks and 'to whom' one addresses what is spoken. Instead of focusing upon power structures encountered by my participants, I show their discursive, material, and corporeal 'opposition' to it.