Money, Culture, Class

Elite Women as Modern Subjects

Parul Bhandari

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351121613
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Sociología urbana

Based on ethnographic research, this book explores the ways in which elite women use and view money in order to construct identities – of class, status, and gender. Drawing on their everyday worlds, it tracks the intricate and contested meanings they attach to money. Focusing on weddings, travel, and spirituality, Parul Bhandari delineates the entitlements and privileges as well as the obsessions and vulnerabilities that underlie the construction of class, the shaping of elite cultures, and the curating of femininity. As such, this book offers an innovative account of the interplay between money, modernity, class, and gender.

1 Introduction

In 2007, three shopping malls were constructed on Nelson Mandela Marg, in South Delhi. One of them, the DLF Emporio, is India’s first high-end luxury mall. It houses showrooms of many international brands as well as Indian luxury designer houses. One afternoon, as I stood at its grand entrance, comprising of a large porch with glistening stone flooring, and an expensive valet parking service, I witnessed the arrival of several women, one after the other. As they stepped down from luxurious cars, it was both the idea of such a mall and the specific kind of Indian elite inhabiting this space that intrigued me. Though open to public, DLF Emporio communicates strong exclusionary boundaries. This is also obvious in the number of times my friends and colleagues have declined the invitation to accompany me to this mall. They feel awkward and ‘out of place’, they have said. This is not to say that only the super-rich visit this mall, but that the elites have an air of ease and entitlement in occupying this space.¹ Witnessing the performances of elite status in the DLF Emporio mall posed several questions for me: what are these women shopping for? Are they following or setting trends in fashion, leisure, and forms of sociability? What can be made of their all-female friendships and bonding: are they supportive, competitive, or cathartic? What do they discuss in their luncheons with friends? Are they aware of both the elite and non-elite gaze on them? What of their familial lives?

Some months later, I visited an exhibition of the works of Edgar Degas at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. Degas is famously known for his ballerinas, and this exhibition surely had a vast collection of his paintings and sculptors of ballerinas, but the curators also wanted to bring attention to Degas’ lesser talked about works, specifically ones that depict bourgeois women. The curators therefore dedicated a section at the exhibition to paintings of bourgeois women and entitled this section as ‘The Chattering Women’. Degas did something unconventional for his times: instead of capturing bourgeois women only in portraits, he depicted their lives as occupants of public spaces such as museums, exhibitions, and cafés.² They had been freed from their essence and importance as restricted to their homes. Instead of static portrayals, he painted these women in action, as it were: talking with friends, admiring art, visiting cafés, and so on. I find much to learn from Degas’ depiction of bourgeois women in Paris of late 19th and early 20th century in my bid to understand the super-rich housewives of contemporary Delhi. Put simply, I approach these women as not merely occupying the domestic realm, tethered to strict role expectations. Instead, I seek to delineate their lives in order to showcase their significant role in creating elite-ness: its cultures, subjectivities, and class dynamics.

In this book, I explore the gendered performances of being and becoming modern and elite, focusing on the wives of business tycoons in Delhi. Scholarship and general discourse has debated at length the different perspectives with which elite status can be defined – economic, social, political.³ I find Shamus Khan’s (2012) definition most appropriate, as he defines the elites as those who have a ‘vastly disproportionate control or access over resources’. The resource in question for this book (and my research) is money, begotten from business-related activities. This is not to say that the elites that form the focus of this book occupy a privileged position only with regard to money, for they do in fact convert their economically elite status to other forms of capital, including social, cultural, and political.⁴ Notwithstanding these nuanced realities of being elite, I direct my attention to the wives of business elites. I approach the lives of elite women not through ready optics of unbound opulence, conspicuous consumption, and reproduction of inequality, important as these are, but as protagonists and players shaping elite-ness, class, and culture. Based on ethnographic research conducted over a period of 18 months, which involved spending considerable periods of time with the women at social and more private events, as well as in-depth one-to-one interviews, I argue that elite housewives are not merely status enhancers and reproducers of class.⁵ Rather, they embody the spirit and substance of this class. This is to say these women are not secondary/subordinate actors that enact already established rules and expectations of class fractions and boundary maintenance. Rather they bring their own intents and energies to internal and external class dynamics. They are not passive conduits of elite cultures (styles of life, modes of behaviour, tastes and other such social and cultural insignia that define being elite) but significantly make these cultures. In taking up these tasks, I articulate the ways in which lives of elite housewives are shaped by seductions and enticements of the modern (fashion, travel), and also the manner in which they rework the processes and meanings of modernity (consumption, spirituality). These dynamics of being elite and modern do not follow a definite direction. Rather, they are contradictory and contested. In order to capture such contradictions, I suggest that it is not sufficient to simply trace the role of money in guaranteeing and procuring an elite status. Instead, the emphasis should be on the meanings attached to the different uses of money by elite housewives, including buying property, consuming culture, and organising religious practices.⁶ Here is to be found the constant interplay between interest and affect. I find the use of affect more befitting for this work (popularly beset by an ‘affective turn’ in Sociology) as it explains the social, historical, political, and institutional significance and context of emotions, attitudes, and impulses, and to that extent constitutes something ‘more’ than emotions (Clough and Halley 2007; White 2017).⁷ It explains the experiences of feelings or emotions, and in doing so combines the study of ‘body and mind’ and ‘reasons and passions’ (Clough and Halley 2007). As Mazzarella (2009) explains, affect carries ‘tactile, sensuous, and perhaps involuntary connotations’, and hence is neither about the unconscious (it is too corporeal a concept for that, he explains) nor purely about the cultural. Affect is as much about preconscious feelings as about interactions between bodies, things, and mind, which heighten or diminish through interactions and associations (Clough and Halley 2007: chapter 1). In this way, affect helps bring together the material and the immaterial, and thus, I find it most useful for understanding the lives of elite housewives: affect enables an explanation of the qualitative conditions of social interactions and relations in the elite lifeworld. In other words, my focus in this book is not so much on describing the feelings or emotions of happiness, contentment, sadness, defeat, arrogance, or pride, as it is on explaining these emotions and attitudes in their social context; one that comprises interpersonal dynamics between elites and their relations with ‘objects’ or ‘things’. This is to say, the affective world of the elites consists of money, non-money, intellectual and emotional reasonings, and corporeal reality of their existence and status, as well as desires and ambitions. I find these dynamics are best unravelled through the framework of affect and by delineating the meanings that women attach to objects of luxury, rather than simplistically explaining their world as an unmitigated pursuit of such objects. I highlight the disjuncture of this world of privilege that is marred by contradictory emotions, rationalising behaviours, and unfulfiled desires, which make, and to a certain degree unmake, the world of elites.

The elite housewives of Delhi

Whilst the category of rich housewives is in itself heterogeneous, I specifically focus on the super-rich business families of New Delhi, primarily belonging to the Punjabi community, and some from the Marwari and Sindhi community. As with every ethnographic study, it is difficult to abide by a strict definition of ‘sample population’. As such, I identified the super-rich business families as those who hold properties in posh residential areas of Delhi, have a thriving business with a large turnover, and display a penchant for lavish lifestyle involving many cars, frequent foreign travel, and hosting grand and opulent social parties. These criteria risk the exclusion of those families that might live a ‘low profile’ life or have undergone either a quick rise or sharp decline in their financial status. As a result, the financial status and capital investment of the business elites might differ, nonetheless by and large they occupy a similar economic standing. The super-rich are not as accessible as other classes of the population and fortunately my access was enabled by a few elites themselves who are either distantly related to me or attended the same high school as I did. This both had an advantage and disadvantage, as whilst I found it difficult to adhere to strict criteria of selection, I ended up interacting with a range of elites, self-identifying as ‘old’, ‘new’, ‘cultural’, or ‘moneyed’, which enabled me to highlight the importance of class fractions and shifting elite boundaries. It is also to be noted that my work focuses mainly on married women, as in fact most elite women I met were either married or were being groomed to marry. I did not encounter many single women, especially those who belonged to the ‘never married’ category. There were a few who were divorced or separated, and they too were in the processes of remarriage. This certainly reiterated the importance of marriage both in the construction of elite lifeworlds and appropriate elite femininity.

My first point of contact with the elite women was through ‘kitty parties’. A kitty party is a women’s social group – popular in India especially amongst the middle and upper classes – where a specific number of women meet regularly to partake in social and leisure activities and also to engage in chit fund savings of sorts.⁸ This is to say that each member of the group regularly contributes to a common ‘kitty’ (fund) and each month a lot is drawn, won by one kitty party member. This member can either use this money as her ‘savings’ or to organise a party or social activity for other kitty party members. A kitty party, therefore, serves multiple purposes, as of enabling female-only friendships, engaging in leisure cultures, and serving as a cathartic space where women discuss their struggles and anxieties and also as a fertile ground for competition and one-upmanship in performances of privilege and taste. I managed to make my way into four different groups of elite kitty parties. While two of these groups were of young women, aged 25–35, all married, with at least one child, the other two groups were of older women, aged 55–63, who were all grandmothers. Whilst these four groups formed my main locus of interaction, with their recommendation and in attendance to social gatherings organised by them, I also met other elite women.

Most of the elite women I interacted with self-identified themselves as ‘old’ elites. Whilst some were born and brought up in Delhi, others moved to Delhi upon marriage. Some women proudly claimed that their parents too were born and brought up in Delhi, making their families old ‘Dilliwallas’, whereas some explained that their parents migrated to Delhi in the late 1970s or early 1980s to establish businesses. They clarified that their parents belonged to landowning classes and moved to Delhi in order to change their main mode of occupation and income from agriculture to business. So, though they were new to Delhi, they too – much like the old Delhi elites – had a lineage of privilege and money, and thus considered themselves as the ‘old’ elites. The segment that claimed a Delhi lineage for several generations (particularly from the pre-partition of India era), though, labelled these migrant families as the ‘new’ rich. There was little contestation regarding status of some other women who were definitely viewed as the ‘new’ or nouveaux riche. This was so because their parents, previously small businessmen or from high professional backgrounds, had in a short time amassed much wealth due to fortuitous real estate investments or through corrupt machinations in business. Whether ‘old’ or ‘new’ elites, these women’s networks regularly overlap. One important way in which these overlaps are achieved is by building marriage alliances. Irrespective of whether they were from first- or second-generation wealth, and whether their parents were from Delhi or not, these elite women born into rich families always marry into rich families, ensuring the practice of class homogamous marriages. I also came across a few marriage alliances where the groom-to-be was not as wealthy as the bride-to-be, yet the marriage proposal was accepted because the father of the bride saw potential in the groom-to-be to elevate himself as one of the leading business houses of the country. Therefore, elite class seems to allow some level of class hypogamy (marriage of a so-called lower status man with a higher status woman) insofar as there is serious potential of the groom to translate his cultural, social, and educational capital into economic capital higher than that of the bride’s father. At times, the bride’s father also decides to nurture the groom’s career using his own networks. In that regard, the class status of a husband and his wife may not be considerably different, though their positioning within the elite class might vary. What is more given, however, is the kind of capital that the husband and the wife seek to develop – with the husband focusing more on the economical capital and the wife on the cultural and social capital, performing a division of labour, as it were, which in fact is common across all classes.

In this regard, this research can also serve as a reference point to ascertain similarities and differences across classes, especially on constructions of femininity. Though this theme is not addressed extensively in the book, there appear strong similarities across classes as, for example, elite housewives, perhaps similar to women of other classes (particularly middle class), are expected to be the locus of the domestic sphere.⁹ At the same time, there are also certain significant dissimilarities, especially with middle class women who prefer to work outside the home. Whereas elite housewives are not professionally employed, and often claim to be satisfied in their decision to not work. During our conversations they even expressed disdain towards women who decided to work outside the home, claiming that this decision was motivated by selfish interests, whereas in fact, taking care of family members is a far more demanding and difficult task.¹⁰ Still, interestingly, especially in our one-to-one interactions, these housewives – all of whom had a Bachelor’s degree and many had a Master’s degree often from a foreign university – expressed their desire to work in the family business, either of their father’s or husband’s. Some shared with me that whilst they did not get a chance to work before marriage, they will contribute to the family business once they have fewer responsibilities, especially after the marriage of their children. As such their expression towards work was rarely about a definite denouncement or endorsement, instead it oscillated between the two. Some elite housewives are attached to philanthropic works, as of education and health services, often as an extension of their family business. In this research, though, the elite housewives that I interacted with did not partake in any such philanthropic or charitable works.

Conducting research

Sociological or social anthropological research is almost impossible to conduct without some form of bias – bias of the researcher (gender, ethnicity, religion, class), of the topic (its popularity or lack of it), of the ‘data’ itself or of access to it. Founding fathers of Sociology, in particular Max Weber, explained the need for subjectivity when conducting sociological research. This particularly applies to in-depth, qualitative ethnographic research, where the researcher brings her/his subjectivity and positionality in class, religion, or ideology in not only analysing but presenting the data. One of the important ways of eliminating biases then, is to acknowledge one’s own subjectivity as a researcher, which may or may not have influenced the data. In this section, I briefly lay out my own background details and the ways in which these might have affected my understanding of the lives of elite housewives. Another way in which I ‘flag’ my bias is by adopting a conversational approach in writing this book. Every now and then, I invoke my surprise, fascination, and perplexity towards certain practices, opinions, or desire of elite housewives. The reader may or may not relate to my emotions, yet the purpose is not to impose my analyses but in fact to lay bare my own subjectivity in assessing elite women’s lives.

Let me then explain my first foray into the world of the super-rich, which started in high school. I spent my high-school years in a Roman Catholic all girls’ school in Delhi, which quite apart from being popular for its educational excellence was also known to be the favoured school for elites (business, political, royal), who hoped that a ‘good convent education’ would transform their young girls into ‘good ladies and homemakers’. As in most pedagogic cultures, pupils at this respectable convent school managed to draw boundaries amongst themselves on the basis of class status, religion, hobbies, and interests. Yet these were not always strict boundaries, and there were occasional overlaps when girls from non-elite backgrounds (such as myself) found themselves in friendship groups (however temporary) comprising of girls from largely elite backgrounds. A few of us who belonged to upper-/middle-class backgrounds spent some time with the ‘rich girls’, either organising school events (plays, dance performances) or going to their homes for birthday parties. In addition to this form of interaction in school, some of my extended family belongs to the business elite strata of Delhi. Not originally from Delhi, but Punjab, some of them converted their ‘feudal status’ – as one-time owners of vast agricultural lands – into that of a ‘neoliberal economic elite’ status through entrepreneurship. Some others migrated to Delhi more recently (in the late 1990s/early 2000s) and reaped the benefits of an economic boom, upgrading their status from middle class to ‘upper class’. With these networks of friends and family, from my early years I was exposed to the world of elites, as I attended Diwali parties, dinners, birthdays, and weddings hosted by these vast networks of elites. It was not just attending these social events but building friendships and engaging in gossip (both familial and school-based) that enabled me to engage and interact with this section of the Indian upper class. These interactions helped me see the fractures and exhaustions of being an elite woman, as ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Series editor’s foreword
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Fashion and travels
• 3 Weddings, opulence, and hospitality
• 4 Hindu glamour: of invitations, hierarchies, and snubs
• Epilogue
• Bibliography
• Index