Book Review

Meenakshi Thapan: Living the Body: Embodiment, Womanhood and Identity in

Contemporary India. New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2009, 190 pp., Rs. 550 (hb.),
ISBN 9788178299013
In the wake of reports of atrocities being committed on the female body as well
as an accompanying surge in public discussions regarding the comportment of
the same within the broader political context of change and resistance to a
certain ideology, Meenakshi Thapans book bears significant relevance. Even
though it is clear that the tone is a feminist one, one set to bring voices to the
center stage, it is injustice to describe it in so limiting a manner, for the
questions that it engages with and raises touch simply every aspect of what our
social sciences are about, the cultural, the economic and the political, not
because of the authors ambitions, so to speak, but because such is the nature of
the subject matter that she deals with.
In the introduction to the book, Thapan describes her sample and methods of
data collection. She draws her study on interviews with two sets of women,
educationally advantaged upper and middle class adult/young women from New
Delhi and educationally disadvantaged adolescent women and migrant adult
women living in a slum in north-western Delhi. One chapter is also devoted to
the analysis of popular womens magazines. In the first chapter, the author has
provided a basic outline of the theoretical traditions from which she draws
inspiration. Since her occupation is with womens experience with embodiment
in everyday life, she looks forward to a phenomenological tradition of looking at
bodies as communicative media, but lest it turn out only as a philosophical
exercise, Bourdieus concept of habitus is invoked which in a simple but terse
phrase is a socialized subjectivity. The author has two aims, one, to talk of
womens habitus as the site of both constitution and contestation and second, to
analyze womens performance of their identities as guided by their notions of
themselves as gendered beings (this being is not located in isolation but in the
interstices of class, caste, ethnicity, etc.). Interestingly, this already complex
picture is further made complex by invoking the processes of recolonization
following Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Mohanty, which is to situate these
constructions as consolidations of colonial processes that have not ceased to
affect the aftermath. The book is impressive once one considers how these
thoughts have been put and demonstrated in a space of 199 pages, although the
authors attempts has largely been that of fitting data within theory.
Nevertheless, the primacy of voice catches as much attention owing to the
authors veracity of presentation as to allow a glossing over of concepts like
class, caste, educational advantage, etc.
The second chapter deals with coming-of-age stories of young women from both
the groups, but in reference to their experience of sexuality, marriage and peergroup interaction. Cultures of adolescence are heterogeneous as the author
admits, and it is equally difficult to mark the transition period between childhood
and adulthood. In the high-income groups, career goals are the subject of

anxiety, also due partly to the influence of media and peer groups. For the other
group, it is about marriage, familial duties, but also about their image
management, since they are equally exposed to the world of movies and ads.
Among the former group, it was common to find young girls idolising their
fathers over their mothers, possibly due to the internalising of tensions
surrounding the womans image within the family. However, emotionally they
were more connected to their mothers. The familial concern also arises when
they have to choose for their careers. At school, it is the interaction with the
others that shape their conception about their own body. The desire to be
feminine is linked to fears of exclusion, which shows the embodied nature of the
female experience. The women from the other group shared their desire of
learning at school and about their first sexual experiences, about childbearing,
parturition, and work within the house and outside. It is through their work that
they assert their agency. Women must not only look beautiful but also be
excellent at work.
The third chapter is an assessment on materials from womens popular
magazines such as the Femina and Cosmopolitan, but mainly Femina because it
has wider readership. The trope here is that women are both consumers of
products as well there is the objectification of the woman for consumption tacts.
This chapter has to be seen as discussing the predicament of the colonial
experience in creating a tension between tradition and modernity, which
globalization ultimately subsumes. As a side remark, Tulsi Patel (1990) finds such
tensions in a study conducted by her where a respondent said that
contraceptives were a good option especially with the rising reports of rape. The
imagery of a woman clad in Indian style jewellery but in a setting of London
landscape could not have made the picture more complex had it not been for the
tagline Be what you are! The burden to be is what the mobile times have
placed on our shoulders as Beck tells us in Individualization(2002). There is a
column called Face that features young aspiring models, implicitly asking women
to aspire to such ideals. Also, there is fragmentation of the female body when it
accompanies ads for jewellery and the like.
The fourth chapter is somehow a response to the third, since it deals with
womens voices as they see their body, not infrequently differing from the
imagery painted across by social media. Although this is already influenced by
the class position, the authors contention is that the conception is not static and
it is susceptible to change. Oppression within the family involves techniques of
control over the womens bodies, such as deciding pregnancy, the use of
contraception, work load and sexual relationship(s). One counter-narrative that
comes out starkly is that of a woman called Sneha who was asked by her
mother-in-law to give birth to a girl, because the mother of a son is a very
valued and respectable member of a society....and I must not have anything
good. That is what they wanted. Ultimately it confirms the degraded position of
a mother who begets the female sex. At times it is often relations around
conjugality that influence it, such as ones sisters-in-law, brothers-in-law and
uncles. Once Sneha stopped eating for five days on the pretext of getting
everyone to talk and be done with their petty rows. This shows that the agency

of the body can also be demonstrated in its degradation, and one can wonder if
this can be connected to the famished bodies that chose to die in the streets of
Calcutta during the 1943 Bengal famine or the suicide bombers of the recent
Paris attack. The strain of work affects womens sex lives and it is both in forced
sex or deprivation of any that one feels insulted and hurt. The woman uses the
mirror to carve herself, as it were, herself the object and herself the judge.
Leena, a respondent, was afraid of getting fatter, but she liked her body in
pregnancy as she looked at it in the mirror. The awareness and challenge to
oppression and gazes that continuously seek to mould the body is certainly not
in itself a transformative action, but it surely has potentialities. However, these
voices seek expression within the habitus, so much so that women often contest
for femininity lest they become the other, the sexless eunuchs.
The fifth chapter presents the voices of women from the slums, and it is
interesting to note that the author titles this chapter The Body as Weapon,
although it engages with similar questions as in the earlier chapter. Perhaps its
the burden of poverty that these women face along with that of those already
seen above. Indeed the narratives were often about how one found happiness in
the face of oppression. Womens well-being is defined not only by her own sense
of it, by in being assured of the happiness of those she is related to. The women
would go through pregnancy several times to try to have a son, because that is
how she can enhance her status. There is a sense of disillusionment with
education and the women often display pride in their capacity to negotiate with
difficult situations which doesnt come from learning but experience. Vineeta, a
respondent asks the author, I can abuse policemen, can you? There are tales of
women who worked, earned money and got their tubectomy done. Some
expressed that they worked (they had to) despite their operation, and if men do
not get theirs done, its because mens bodies are weak. Also there are
narratives where women express their resentment with having to work with
women from lower castes. Often work was also a way to keep oneself busy, to
escape taunts and to cope with ones loneliness. There is a narration in
appreciation of the heroism of a woman in the slum who calls herself Parvati, and
finds great pride in speaking of the trails and travails she had undergone to
finally be in a position of authority where she commands the group of women in
the area. Resistance is an everyday act, a part of her being. Once a man tried to
rape her and she refused to open her clothes, saying If you want to remove
them, take them off yourself. Later she was also able to keep a policeman as her
companion. However, resistance is also acted out as a collective, and often
sisters and other matrilineal kin provide support to a woman to reclaim her
place.
The concluding chapter is a comment on the aporiai of resistance as it is already
evident in the previous chapters. Acts of resistance are not always
transformative, and often are inscribed on the body itself. It is important to
remember that conscious acknowledgement of these processes as much defines
the existence of power (since it is meaningless without resistance) as it also
opens up possibilities. This is the paradox that Thapan deems the real world of
everyday. The given is with which the woman has to make do, it is freedom

within discipline. The underlying implication is the same with which sociology
saw the light of the day in the hands of Emile Duekheim. It is the principle of
adaptation which is the first principle. There are conditions, the given, and it is in
how we adapt to them that defines the nature of the social. Our freedom is
anticipation (because it doesnt make itself the corollary of pain unless the latter
is realized along with a desire to transcend it), and Durkheim reserves this for
the individual. The question is given there is a certain condition how is it that we
wish that something were ought? Meenakshi Thapans book surely goes a long
way in trying to answer that.
A few shortcomings of the book could be one that the question of aging has not
been dealt very fairly, and a book that could contest for some appreciation in
that direction is Sarah Lambs White Sarees and Sweet Mangoes (2002), which is
an ethnography on the lives of widows in Mangaldihi, West Bengal. She has
demonstrated how gender identity is fluidly experienced by these women as they
age and gain androgynous looks, to which they adapt by being more assertive,
starting with the practice of wearing mens dhotis. Another shortcoming in terms
of presentation is that the chapter on womens magazines could have been more
appealing with the use of visuals to complement the textual description.