Flight from the Womb: Mothers and Daughters in Indian Chick Lit Charmaine Carvalho positions: asia critique, Volume 27, Number 4, November 2019, pp. 713-737 (Article) Published by Duke University Press For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/738893 Access provided at 22 Nov 2019 04:48 GMT from Reading University (+1 other institution account) Flight from the Womb: Mothers and Daughters in Indian Chick Lit Charmaine Carvalho Introduction In the opening section of Almost Single, a novel about a young unmarried Indian woman’s life in Mumbai, the protagonist Aisha says she finds herself “routinely suffering from umbilical cord whiplash” (Kala 2007: 4). Aisha may have escaped her small-­town beginnings for what she considers a more liberated life in the city, but her mother keeps tabs on her over the telephone, policing her lifestyle, questioning her values, and nagging her about her single status. The overbearing mother who voices her strictures from afar is a common feature of chick lit novels written by Indian women in the mid-­2000s. Epitomized by novels such as Bridget Jones’s Diary (Fielding 1996) and Sex and the City (Bushnell 2006), chick lit features young women in their twen- positions 27:4 doi 10.1215/10679847-7726955 Copyright 2019 by Duke University Press positions 27:4 November 2019 714 ties and thirties lightheartedly describing their career travails and quests for romantic partnership. The genre became a transnational phenomenon and was adapted in countries as diverse as China, Australia, and Saudi Arabia (Ommundsen 2011). Chick lit by Indian women began to appear in the early 2000s and for a decade bookstores were flooded with narratives of urban young women balancing their careers, friendships, and social lives with the expectation that they “settle down” into marriage. While chick lit is often viewed as a subset of the romance genre, the novels chart a broader journey, and I am inclined to read them as “romances of the self” (Harzewski 2011: 57). Indian chick lit novels appeared in the aftermath of the liberalization of the Indian economy and offer a lens into the emergence of a new feminine subjectivity — “the single woman in the city.” The fashioning of this identity plays out against an ever-­present “Indian tradition” often represented by mothers, making the generational divide and mother-­daughter tension an important element in the novels. Although chick lit is usually understood as underscoring a heteropatriarchal economy of desire, I shift the focus from the foregone conclusion of romantic partnership to argue that the discourse of singleness is deployed not so much to solve the problem of singleness through marriage, though this may happen in the end, but to resolve the tension between the demands of “Indian tradition” on middle-­class young women and their desire for a selfhood inflected by transnational, neoliberal discourses of autonomy. The quest in the novels could be read as not only for a romantic partner but also as an attempt to work through questions of identity and to explore ways of living that might evade the fate of the mother. I will make this argument with reference to three Indian chick lit novels. Advaita Kala’s Almost Single (2007) is widely considered a breakthrough novel in the genre, popularizing the chick lit narrative through a classic “single girl in the city” tale. Nirupama Subramanian’s Keep the Change (2010) represents a strain in the genre that focuses on the young woman’s initiation into the ways of the big city. And, finally, Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan’s You Are Here (2008) was expected to typify the genre but ended up disturbing expectations. I will assess these novels through textual analysis across three themes — singleness, food, and fashion — in which mother-­daughter interaction is at its most intense. I do not intend to produce these texts as transparent historical docu- Carvalho ∣ Mothers and Daughters in Indian Chick Lit 715 ments; rather, it is their fictional nature that is of interest as much as any of the factual data they might contain. I see these narratives as presenting an aspirational subjectivity of what it means to be single, female, Indian, and in one’s twenties living in urban postliberalization India. As Priya Joshi (2002: 66) has noted, popular fiction can “attest to ideological and cultural contestations of their time with great — sometimes greater — clarity and acuity than works that subsequently assume canonical status and stability,” representing “emerging social formations often before they assume discrete shape, to gesture toward social and ideological frictions of the time in raw and unsophisticated ways that nonetheless explain both their popularity and their historical demise.” I would like to pay attention to “the ways societies represent gender, use it to articulate rules of social relationships, or to construct the meaning of experience” (Scott 1986: 1063) and to elucidate the “psycho-­social economy that gives rise to the text” and that sets “the limits of the imaginative self images we inherit” (Tharu 1990: 256). “New Indian Women” I situate Indian chick lit in the aftermath of the conjuncture of the 1990s, which was marked by three overlapping developments that focused attention on women. The breaching of the nation’s borders by foreign capital, goods, and influences following the dramatic liberalization of the Indian economy in 1991 sparked anxieties about Indian culture that played out on the bodies of women (Oza 2006). Liberalization is said to have both benefited and expanded the middle classes, which have enjoyed increasing visibility as the face of the nation (Fernandes 2006; Varma 2007). A parallel development, fueled in part by the predominantly Hindu and upper-­caste middle class, was the rise of Hindu nationalism in the political sphere, which hardened ideas of masculinity around the idea of a virile, aggressive, Hindu male modeled on the god Ram while invoking goddess iconography to cast Hindu women as either devoted mothers who need to be protected or selfless defenders of the nation (Oza 2006). Rather than acting in opposition, liberalization and the traditionalism associated with Hindu nationalism complemented each other, with the Hindu right wing supporting economic liberalization. positions 27:4 November 2019 716 The resolution of any residual tension between liberalization and Hindu nationalism might be found in the mass media representations of the “new Indian woman” of the 1990s, who was educated, confident, career oriented, and “modern,” and who could compete in the global arena but was also seamlessly able to balance her responsibility to her family and respect traditional Indian values (Sunder Rajan 1993; Chaudhuri 2001; Oza 2006). Although the model of this woman was the upper-­caste, middle-­class Hindu woman, she was presented as unmarked except in terms of gender (Sunder Rajan 1993; Reddy 2006). One of the most recognizable embodiments of the “new Indian woman” were the Indian beauty queens of the 1990s who dispelled unease regarding the “Westernization” involved in such competitions by reassurances from both the young women themselves and significantly their parents that they remained “traditional” Indian women at heart (Munshi 2001). This “new woman” drew on configurations of Indian womanhood in the colonial period when, in response to colonialist depictions of the subjugation of Indian women that served to legitimize colonial rule, Indian nationalists harked back to a golden age of Vedic culture in which women supposedly had a high status and were revered for their spiritual and intellectual qualities (Chakravarti 1990; Mani 1990). Thus, normative Indian womanhood came to be tied to a Vedic/upper-­caste ideal. Further, Partha Chatterjee (1990) has shown how “the women’s question” was ultimately resolved by the end of the nineteenth century via the division of culture into the material/outer/public sphere, which was to be the domain of men, and the spiritual/inner/private sphere, demarcated as the inviolate essence of Indian culture and associated with women. Furthermore, the new feminine identity crystalized around middle-­class women who were differentiated from both Western women and lower-­caste and lower-­class Indian women. While this conceptualization of material/outer/male and spiritual/inner/female persisted in postcolonial India, Purnima Mankekar (1999) notes that, as the state attempted to modernize in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the women’s question was recast so that instead of being confined to the inner/private sphere, “the modern Indian woman” was now being enjoined to skillfully straddle both “home” and the “world” in order to facilitate the nation’s entry into the twenty-­first century. Carvalho ∣ Mothers and Daughters in Indian Chick Lit 717 While seemingly liberal but essentially conservative representations of women proliferated in popular media, literary representations of the “new Indian woman” displayed more complexity. Lisa Eee Jia Lau (2006: 164 – 65) shows how the “new Indian women” in Shashi Deshpande’s novels are forced to negotiate between the cultural valorization of acceptance of suffering as a sign of strength and “their own theoretical notions of equality between sexes, personal fulfillment as important, and individual happiness as a goal.” Deshpande’s narratives continue some of the themes in novels by women writers of the 1950s and 1960s such as Nayantara Sahgal, Kamala Markandaya, and Anita Desai, who explored the tensions in women’s domestic lives whether in the elite class, in rural settings, or through a focus on the psychological (Narayan and Mee 2009). These paralleled the nai kahani or “new Hindi story” of the early 1950s, which depicted the subjectivity of newly married women (Castaing 2013). In popular culture, the novels of Shobha De in the 1990s charted elite urban women’s quest for self-­determination amid familial constraints, where rebellion often came by flouting sexual norms (Dwyer 2000: 206). Representations of “the new woman” including the abovementioned texts tended to assume the woman in question to be married. Rajeswari Sunder Rajan (1993: 131) has noted that in advertisements of the 1990s, a distinction was made between the older married woman, who exercises her choice for the greater good of her family and the younger woman whose youth becomes “a sanctioned space for a last fling of rebellion” under the presumption that she will marry, a rebellion this article argues is being enacted more elaborately in chick lit. The novels under consideration in this article continue in the tradition of representing the “new Indian woman,” but update her for the millennium in which urban middle-­class women are staying single longer, migrating away from their hometowns for work, and crafting identities that revisit the need to balance the “traditional” and the “modern.” Scholars have convincingly argued that modernity forms the basis of tradition rather than being a development from it (Makdisi 2000; Grewal and Kaplan 2001) and that women are often the sites on which tradition is anchored (Mani 1990; Sangari and Vaid 1990). If the nineteenth-­century discourse on Indian womanhood was conceptualized in terms of the distinction between the inner/spiritual and outer/material with the former positions 27:4 November 2019 718 being associated with women, increasingly the binary seems to be articulated as “Indian tradition” and “global modernity.” As the economic and sociocultural impacts of liberalization have intensified, women have been called on to symbolize what Smitha Radhakrishnan (2008) has termed the “global Indian.” A useful observation in Radhakrishnan’s study of professional women in information technology is how the “global” and “Indian” are delineated: “This individual self is often understood to be ‘global’, while ‘Indianness’ is associated with collectivism and family solidarity. These aspects are sometimes seen as being in conflict with one another, but they are just as often reconciled with one another through an understanding that for Indian women, individuality must be circumscribed by the family” (12). This formulation seems to telescope theorizations on the nature of the self in South Asia (Mookherjee 2013). David Arnold and Stuart H. Blackburn (2004: 19) point to a “self-­in-­society that is more complex and subtle than a mutually exclusive opposition between an all-­subsuming collectivity on the one hand, and a rampant individuality on the other,” whereby Indians see themselves as individuals who are embedded in networks of family, kinship, caste, religion, and gender. When referring to “modernity” and “tradition” in my study of Indian chick lit, this article will reference the conceptions that emerged in Radhakrishnan’s study. “Modernity” is associated with the “global,” which is allied to a notion of individualism seen to have come from the West, while “tradition” is linked to a composite Indianness across the nation that prizes the family, community, and relational identity but is also upper-­caste and middle-­class in orientation. Henceforth, this article uses these terms without quotation marks, but the intention is to indicate the specific meanings described above. While these two impulses seem to be in tension in Indian chick lit, the novels’ resolution of the question of selfhood differs from the balance achieved by the women in Radhakrishnan’s study. Scholars have argued that neoliberalism seems to specifically speak to young women who are incited to be flexible, resilient, and self-­driven (Budgeon 2003; Harris 2004), prompting Rosalind Gill (2008: 443) to ask: “Could it be that neoliberalism is always already gendered, and that women are constructed as its ideal subjects?” The emergence of Indian chick lit following liberalization, during a period in which neoliberal ideology would have been widely dis- Carvalho ∣ Mothers and Daughters in Indian Chick Lit 719 seminated, might account for the renewed tensions that the protagonists sense between tradition and modernity. Concurrent with the emergence of the “entrepreneurial” neoliberal self, some scholars have proposed that detraditionalization in late modernity has resulted in selfhood that is characterized by reflexivity in which individuals construct their own biographies (Giddens 1991; Beck and Beck-­Gernsheim 2002). Critics of reflexive theories of selfhood point to the elision of the forces that influence and constrain the reflexive project in these accounts (Budgeon 2003; Raisborough 2011). In the Asian context, Youna Kim (2012) has argued that the process of individuation for women is particularly constrained by the need to negotiate the competing pulls of tradition and modernity and that reflexivity for Asian women plays out at the level of imagination, a process fraught with anxiety and uncertainty. Indian chick lit narratives, which are often semiautobiographical texts written in the first person, could be read as part of this process of self-­reflexive imagining. The narratives become the space for the staging of selfhood; the particular form this staging takes pits daughters against mothers. Enter the “Single Woman” Most Indian chick lit novels begin with the protagonist’s assertion of singleness — being unmarried or unattached to a man — as an essential facet of her identity and her ambivalence, if not outright angst, about this status. In a society in which marriage and motherhood are viewed as a social and familial duty, women living in Indian cities alone, that is, without the “protective” presence of their natal families or husbands, are viewed with suspicion (Puri 1999; Pinto 2014). Middle-­class young women on whose respectability some of the onus of the family’s class status falls are particularly the subject of supervision before they are married (Mankekar 1999; Donner 2016). However, as liberalization offered opportunities in education and the workplace that were claimed by urban, educated, middle-­class women (Jha and Pujari 1996; Maslak and Singhal 2008), the trend of moving away from the parental home to pursue job opportunities is opening up the possibility of “the single life” that is explored in Indian chick lit. The three novels under consideration all open with a reference to their positions 27:4 November 2019 720 protagonist’s single state and the problems this poses. Aisha in Almost Single highlights how society disparages single women of a certain age, noting, “Sometimes I think there should be support groups like the AA out there for us” (Kala 2007: 3). Arshi in You Are Here complains that both her career and her love life are unsatisfactory, the latter because her boyfriend has just broken up with her. Keep the Change opens with Damayanthi in a pall of gloom on her twenty-­sixth birthday, as her parents, particularly her mother, criticize her for being old and unmarried. The subsequent pages offer a glimpse into the relentless pressure society imposes on an unmarried woman over twenty-­five as Damayanthi’s parents desperately fix her up with (unsuitable) men, display her at social gatherings adorned in a sari and jewelry, and browbeat her into going along with their plans. Subramanian depicts this with a broad satirical brush, endowing Damayanthi with a “little voice” in her head that critiques the endless rounds of the arranged marriage circuit that she is forced to endure. For example, noticing two older women at a wedding appraising her, she writes: “Vision of myself with a large sticker on my forehead saying ‘Bride Available,’ and a cardboard sheet listing my golden virtues around my neck” (Subramanian 2010: 17). These sarcastic thoughts are rarely voiced aloud, and never to mothers or older women, who present a formidable force against which Damayanthi, despite her objections, is never quite able to openly dissent. It is also notable that fathers are passive or absent in these novels, and it is through the mother’s voice that traditional expectations are articulated. The conspicuous articulation of the mother-­daughter relationship in Indian chick lit may be seen as a reflection of the significance of the relationship itself. Sudhir Kakar (1981: 60 – 61) notes that Indian children remain undifferentiated from their mothers much longer than in the West and that despite the cultural devaluation of girl children, “a mother’s unconscious identification with her daughter is normally stronger than with her son. In her daughter, the mother can reexperience herself as a cared-­for girl.” However, Prabha Krishnan (2010: 141) observes that celebrations of the mother-­ daughter bond are absent in the great and little traditions in India, enabling “women and men alike to take a distanced view of the personhood of the daughter.” Menarche is considered a crucial time when anxieties around the young woman’s sexuality increase. On the one hand, at this stage, the Carvalho ∣ Mothers and Daughters in Indian Chick Lit 721 changes in the young woman’s body and her vulnerability to sexual threat might increase confidences between mothers and daughters. On the other hand, this is also when the mother begins to prepare her daughter for an impending marriage more forcefully, sometimes provoking tensions (Kakar 1981; Puri 1999). Krishnan (2010) notes how, in one of the rare mythological depictions of a mother-­daughter relationship, the televised epic Ramayana featured a lengthy scene in which the stepmother of the god Ram’s wife Sita urges her to pray for the perfect husband and praises her for her fidelity, sacrifice, and service. Sita is widely considered a role model for Indian women, more so since the epics were televised (Kakar 1981; Krishnan 2010). That real-­life mothers today tend to perform this role of exhorting their daughters to pay attention to traditional expectations even as they support their educational aspirations is evidenced in Mary Ann Maslak and Gayatri Singhal’s (2008) study. It is this archetype of the mother as coach in tradition that is usually adopted in Indian chick lit. The conflation of motherhood with tradition echoes the trope of “Mother India,” whereby the Indian nation was imagined as the figure of a goddess and virgin mother toward the end of the nineteenth century in the work of Bengali writers and became a pan-­Indian figure around which public imagination rallied (Ramaswamy 2001; Bagshi 2010). The model of the new mother envisaged for middle-­class colonial India was “a domestic paragon, furnished with a modern education but still retaining a modicum of religiosity, and presiding over her neat and disciplined home, and by now, her largely nuclear family” (Ramaswamy 2001: 45). In crafting his ideology of non-­violence, Gandhi also emphasized the strength of the maternal principle and “exhorted women to bring their self-­sacrificing qualities, as mothers, for the national movement” (Krishnaraj 2010: 24). For post-­Independence audiences, the mythology of mother/land/nation was reinforced and concretized in Mehboob Khan’s epic film Mother India (1957), which Sunder Rajan (1993: 109) notes, celebrates “woman in the linked roles of daughter of the soil (soil=India), and mother of her sons.” Marriage and motherhood are largely seen as inevitable and challenging milestones for Indian women. Since marriage is almost always patrilocal, it involves unsettling changes for the young woman, such as leaving her parental home and negotiating life with her in-­laws, forging a relationship positions 27:4 November 2019 722 with her husband, undertaking household responsibilities, and bearing and raising children (Kakar 1981; Puri 1999; Sandhya 2009). The chick lit protagonist’s ambivalence toward marriage and motherhood may be seen as the desire to evade being inevitably cast in the wife-­mother role, which could entail a life of subservience and service. Evading Marriage, Mothers, and Motherhood In Keep the Change, Damayanthi is not averse to marriage itself; however, her idea of what marriage might mean differs from her parents’ as does her imagination of a suitable man. She has, according to her mother, “become spoiled from all those English books you have read and the silly English movies you see” (Subramanian 2010: 12). Damayanthi’s invocation of romantic heroes such as Jane Austen’s Mr. Darcy seems to confirm her mother’s accusation, but what she and other chick lit protagonists are expressing is dissatisfaction with the current marital models around them and the desire for more equitable and companionate relationships. Studies have shown that the expectation of a companionate marriage, even when the marriage is arranged by elders, has become common among the middle class (Fuller and Narasimhan 2007; Sandhya 2009; Donner 2016). Moreover, elders, too, seem to be paying attention to the compatibility of young people when making arrangements for their marriages in large part to ensure the longevity of the marriage, but chick lit protagonists seem to question whether the elders can really achieve this when they don’t seem to completely understand their daughters. For example, Damayanthi’s fantasies reveal her to be a sexually desiring subject with a mind of her own, and she is critical of the expectation that as a wife she serve as a sexual object or cash cow for her husband. While studies have found that the distinction between “love” and “arranged” marriages is not clear cut (Puri 1999; Titzmann 2011), Damayanthi polarizes the two, making arranged marriage stand in for the parts of Indian tradition she finds threatening to her autonomy while love marriage is seen as offering the possibility of both companionship and the expression of sexual desire. Thus, while Henrike Donner’s (2016) study shows that young women are careful to exclude sexual desire as a factor in their preference for a love Carvalho ∣ Mothers and Daughters in Indian Chick Lit 723 marriage, Damayanthi voices her need for a sexually compatible union, even as she confesses to being a virgin. While the opening section of Keep the Change depicts the rounds of the arranged marriage circuit young women are often forced to make, Almost Single spends more time on Aisha’s shenanigans in the city with her friends. Aisha’s narrative of single life in the city is punctuated by calls from her mother reminding her of her unmarried status, comparing her to friends who recently wed, and bringing her proposals from prospective spouses. The frequent telephone calls from mothers in Indian chick lit could be read in the light of Donner’s (2016) observation that globalization has made middle-­class mothers extremely anxious about the negative influences on their daughters and heightened their supervision of them. While Aisha and her friends are impatient with the warnings issued by Mamma Bhatia, they are not immune to these pressures and traditions. Aisha is conscious that “We come attached with a ‘best before’ tag, and if — god forbid! — we reach the expiry date while still single, it’s downhill all the way from here” (Kala 2007: 11). So, the friends set up an online dating profile and adopt a distinctly neoliberal approach. Aisha’s friend Misha says: “We have to take being single into our own hands. There is a whole world of men out there and we have to reach them! This is the way to do it! We are too cosmopolitan for the local boys, we have to expand our horizons and harness the benefits of technology” (8). Moreover, their underlying ethic is not dissimilar to the older generation’s pragmatic approach to arranging unions. Misha has a capitalist outlook when it comes to marriage: she moved from the small town of Bhatinda to New Delhi to increase her chances of netting an Indian man living abroad and passing through the nation’s capital for work or for leisure who would provide her with a ticket to transnational mobility. While Aisha is not as frank about her ambitions and her specifications for a future mate are couched in the discourse of compatibility, the discussions between the friends over potential romantic partners reveal that they are interested in upward mobility. Unlike her mother, though, Aisha seems to be ambivalent about the desirability of marriage itself. Apart from a gay couple that is largely stable and happy, all the couples in the novel are unhappy. Aisha herself has recently had an engagement broken, her positions 27:4 November 2019 724 friend Anu is separated, there are references to cheating husbands, and even Aisha’s conservative cousin is in an unhappy marriage with an alcoholic husband. Thus, while the teleology of the novels proceeds toward heterosexual coupledom, a large part of the narratives relates to ambiguous feelings about what marriage bodes. Their contrasting views on marriage separate mothers and daughters in Indian chick lit. In both Keep the Change and Almost Single, mothers embody tradition first by invoking the importance of marriage as a prerequisite for young Indian women. They also represent the outdatedness of tradition through the unsuitable men they propose for their daughters and their focus on their daughters’ respectability. Damayanthi’s mother expects her to be “a nice, quiet girl, not like those silly modern types” (Subramanian 2010: 22), not to have premarital sex or drink alcohol, and to ensure that any potential husband is Hindu, Tamil, Brahmin, and thus vegetarian. However, apart from echoing a certain mainstream pan-­Indian idea of traditional values, which are really upper-­caste, middle-­class Hindu values, the characters of these mothers are not fleshed out at all. The novels then repeat the phallogocentric practice of reducing mothers to unidimensional characters, who are either relentlessly self-­sacrificing or echoes of patriarchal norms (Hirsch 1989). A contrast to these mothers is the depiction of Arshi’s mother, Abha, in You Are Here. Arshi’s parents are divorced, unusual for the chick lit genre, which tends to preserve the middle-­class Indian heterosexual nuclear family so as to contrast it with the protagonist’s lifestyle and aspirations. Instead of conforming to the stereotypes of the bereft leftover wife or vampish divorcee, Abha rebuilds her life with seeming ease. She acquires a respectable job as a teacher and later moves to a farmhouse on the outskirts of Delhi, where she sets up a school to teach village children. Arshi describes her as “the saving-­ the-­world type, my mom, and she has fun doing it” (Madhavan 2008: 10). Abha refuses to consider remarriage — “Once is enough for me, Arshi. . . . They breathe all over me, and besides, I don’t want any more children. Why get married?” (52) — and is uninterested in her daughter’s marital status. If she is pushy about anything it is education, and she urges Arshi to quit her dead-­end job and apply to universities abroad. Far from pulling on the apron strings, she severs them and encourages Arshi to fly. Carvalho ∣ Mothers and Daughters in Indian Chick Lit 725 The pressure to marry is displaced onto Arshi’s roommate Topsy, a Hindu from a conservative family, who lives a double life — in Delhi she is in a relationship with a Muslim man, while for her parents back in Meerut, she dons a submissive avatar and patiently fends off their attempts to get her married. One of the crises in the novel is Topsy’s parents’ arrival in Delhi, bringing “small-­town” conservative Indian values face-­to-­face with her “big-­city” single lifestyle. While the traditional mothers in You Are Here are reduced to harbingers of conservatism and patriarchy, the novel offers a vision of a different mother-­daughter duo in Arshi and Abha, who is, significantly, one of the only mothers to be referred to by name. However, Arshi recognizes that she is “not normal”: “To be ‘normal’ was to have a mother who had long hair and was mostly in a sari and called you in from the park as soon as it got dark, and a father who came home from work at a bank or government office and patted you on the head. . . . I wanted to be like the ‘normals’ because it was such a safe way to be” (49). The normal, mainstream, or traditional is invoked as the opposite of what Arshi and her mother are, making them misfits of a privileged kind. Whether supported in this “abnormality” by their mothers as Arshi is, or castigated for it as Damayanthi and Aisha are, chick lit configures its protagonists as attempting to break out of what they perceive to be stultifying expectations of traditional womanhood. Eating Well Another way in which tradition and modernity are invoked in the novels is through food. Given that food habits are a marker of caste purity (Dumont 1980), it is no surprise that food preferences come up in relation to marriage. Aisha is affronted by a call from her mother inquiring about her views on certain food items as a possible suitor is “pucca vegetarian, no garlic and onions even” (Kala 2007: 161). In response, Aisha makes demands of her own and mystifies her mother by insisting that the man be on a high-­protein and no-­carb diet, simply to level the playing field. For Aisha and her friends, food is a marker of cosmopolitan identity. This is epitomized in a scene in which the friends break the traditional karva chauth fast, a ritual in which women fast for the longevity of their hus- positions 27:4 November 2019 726 bands, with a picnic on Misha’s terrace. Karva chauth has been critiqued for its patriarchal overtones, and in the novel it is Aisha’s mother who steps out of the maternal stereotype for once and objects to it. Her skepticism is dismissed and the young women participate in a neighborhood gathering but break the fast in private with a hamper of international gourmet goodies — “Moët and Chandon, Boursin cheese, shepherd’s pie, garlic bread, a tossed salad and brownies, not to mention linen serviettes and real silverware” (119). The fast and the ensuing feast are used to demonstrate how young people are malleably adopting traditions and remaking them by merging them with cosmopolitan tastes. In Keep the Change, food becomes a marker of traditional values, and though it is not explicitly mentioned, caste. Damayanthi is an Iyer, an influential Tamil Brahmin subcaste. When she lands a job in Mumbai, her mother panics about what she will eat and immediately makes plans to send her chutneys and pickles. While Damayanthi shrugs off these admonishments, one of the conflicts with her flatmate Sonya is over food. Sonya discards Damayanthi’s tamarind paste; in retaliation, Damayanthi throws away Sonya’s chicken fillets, saying: “Can you imagine my chocolate ice cream rubbing shoulders or breast with some dead creature? What would Amma say to see my pure Brahmin kitchen turned into an animal graveyard?” (Subramanian 2010: 129). Damayanthi thus uses her mother to voice caste rules about food pollution, and the reader is expected to take this humorously. While the chick lit protagonist is assumed to be caste blind, her upper-­caste status is clear throughout. The single lifestyle is also marked by an inability or disinterest in cooking, usually seen as the province of Indian women. While some have argued that food preparation is not simply a service but can also be a source of power (Devasahayam 2005; Daya 2010), chick lit protagonists sidestep this duty as a chore. Damayanthi’s mother blames herself for letting her daughter read instead of teaching her to cook, and when Damayanthi moves to Mumbai, she orders a dabba, the city’s famous tiffin delivery service, instead of cooking herself. As Aisha in Almost Single says, tongue in cheek, “Who wants to belo rotis, so totally regressive, when you can even get dal in a can?” (Kala 2007: 162). At the beginning of You Are Here, Arshi expresses her Carvalho ∣ Mothers and Daughters in Indian Chick Lit 727 desire to be a chef and elicits amused skepticism from her flatmate, given her lack of culinary skills. In defense, Arshi lists out a recipe for “Potato Pickle Surprise,” which is a display of the kind of ad hoc cooking that upper-­middle-­class young people living alone in the city engage in as a survival mechanism. Arshi and Topsy’s trash reflects this lifestyle: “Domino’s boxes, stacked high, one on top of the other. Or aluminum foil from kebab rolls” and on the rare days that they actually cook, potato peelings in addition to alcohol bottles are ubiquitous (Madhavan 2008: 137). On the other hand, the posh couple’s trash on the ground floor prompts Arshi to fantasize about “knocking on their door, being invited to sit on a plastic-­covered sofa and being fed stir-­fried vegetables with bread from the Oberoi Charcuterie instead of the regular Harvest Gold you got in the nearby grocery store” (137). The acquisition of a cosmopolitan taste in food, patronage of restaurants, and unwillingness to cook elaborate meals for themselves marks the single lifestyle, which is contrasted with their mother’s domestic focus. However, the ability of these women to evade domestic duties is only made possible by the availability of cheap domestic help. When Damayanthi moves to Mumbai, one of her early encounters is with the local bai, the picture of brisk efficiency in the face of which Damayanthi says “all I could do was nod in a servile way” and agree to her terms of 900 rupees a month, a salary she knew her mother would be outraged at but that she pays without complaint (Subramanian 2010: 68). In her encounter with the maid, then, Damayanthi sets herself up as the opposite of her mother’s own domineering behavior with the household help. Similarly, in You Are Here, Arshi describes her first encounter with the household help as being caught on the back foot. After this first experience, she and Topsy settle into domestic harmony with their second maid, who is like a shadow presence running their household and freeing them up to eschew the domestic. In both these cases, mention of the women who in fact enable the protagonists’ lifestyles to a great degree is brief and construed as almost an equal partnership without attention to the caste and class inequalities and tendency toward exploitation that the employee-­domestic help relationship is imbricated in. positions 27:4 November 2019 728 Dressing the Part If food in Indian chick lit is used to demonstrate the protagonist’s cosmopolitan credentials and upper-­caste status and to distinguish her from her mother, dress serves this purpose more directly. Critics have commented on the centrality of fashion, shopping, and consumerism to chick lit as a genre (Van Slooten 2006; Gill 2008; Harzewski 2011). Indian chick lit does not display the obsession with brand names and frenetic pursuit of high fashion that many Western novels do. Rather, as in the case of food, chick lit protagonists signal their modernity via the ease with which they wear Western clothing, with skinny jeans, spaghetti straps, and stilettos signifying the single lifestyle. On the other hand, mothers reference tradition in encouraging their daughters to present themselves as “good Indian women” by wearing Indian clothing. Specifically, the sari in these novels comes to signify conformity to traditional Indian values. Thus, Damayanthi is paraded around a wedding dressed in a sari and wearing a significant amount of gold. Aisha’s mother too insists on her wearing a sari when she hears she is going to meet her boyfriend’s mother, and asks about her jewelry. Here, dress is used to symbolize the competing pulls of tradition and modernity rather than unfettered consumerism. The visual metaphor for this process is provided in the image of Aisha draping a sari over jeans and pairing this hybrid outfit with sneakers to meet the sartorial requirements of the hotel she works at. If Indian women have been under pressure to aver that while their exterior is Western, they remain “good Indian girls” within, Aisha’s garb effects a visual reversal — it is the Indian that remains on the surface, while arguably her inner core is Western. Similarly, in You Are Here, Arshi lives in jeans and T-­shirts and likens wearing Indian dress to being in costume: “I sway a bit when I walk, my footsteps fall closer to each other, almost like my feet have been bound. In a salwar-­kameez I feel capable of doing domestic things, like pickling a mango, perhaps, or putting the right tadka in a dal” (Madhavan 2008: 207). Indianness is thus performatively produced via dress, and while Arshi is conscious of this performative aspect, for her roommate Topsy the reiteration of Indian femininity is more compulsive. When her parents visit, Topsy “pulls out all the salwar-­kameezes her mother bought for her to wear to col- Carvalho ∣ Mothers and Daughters in Indian Chick Lit 729 lege. Godawful things they are too — all shiny and brilliantly coloured. She wears her gorgeous hair constantly in a ponytail and speaks in very soft polite tones in a mix of Hindi and English” (23). The narratives of dress in Indian chick lit highlight the performativity of Indian identity by showing that, for these young women at least, Indianness has to be “put on” via dress, and, to some extent, can be discarded by dressing differently. This process is delineated in greater detail in Keep the Change. One of the most common tropes used in chick lit is the makeover, which critics have also pointed to as a technology of neoliberalism, in that it emphasizes constant self-­surveillance in order to ensure that it is “up to standard” (Press 2011; Raisborough 2011). The outward expression of this surveillance is through body policing, fashion, and judicious consumer choices. Rather than simply becoming more fashionable as a result of her makeover, however, Damayanthi’s “change” signifies a growing confidence in Western dress that she equates with glamour, confidence, and sex appeal. Frustrated by her failure to attract the man she is interested in, Damayanthi cuts her long hair, undergoes a facial and pedicure, and purchases new clothes. While one of her conservative colleagues remarks that “these days we are not preserving our tradition and culture. So many girls are wearing Western clothes when we have such beautiful Indian attire” (Subramanian 2010: 261), the reaction is broadly positive. Her own feelings, however, are ambivalent. When she expresses that she feels inauthentic in her new look and “should oil my hair and change back to my usual self,” her friend Jimmy recommends she “keep the change” because “it suits you and you are still you, inner beauty and all” (262 – 63). Here, the inner/outer dichotomy functions in a mode similar to the one Munshi (2001) noted of the Miss Indias of the 1990s. In their dress, Damayanthi, Aisha, and Arshi could be seen as moving along a continuum whereby an Indian core is slowly exchanged for a Western one that puts on the garb of Indian identity selectively. In this sense, dress does seem to fix the characters in an inner/outer, Indian/global binary, but analysis of the novels highlights the instability of this dichotomy. Rather, “Indian” and “global” identities are deployed in various situations strategically, without consistent positioning of inner and outer. positions 27:4 November 2019 730 “Synthetic Selves” The inconsistency in her deployment of the traditional and the modern is what characterizes the single woman in chick lit. If getting married and ensuring that one stays married by being subservient to one’s husband and conjugal family is seen as a primary signifier of an Indian woman’s identity, then in their rejection of this expectation Damayanthi and Aisha seem to have embraced a “global” identity and highlight its incompatibility with traditional expectations. However, in other respects, such as food choice in the case of Damayanthi or partaking of festivals such as karva chauth in the case of Aisha, they remain traditional. If “global Indianness” as defined by Radhakrishnan (2008) involves a recognition of personal identity and autonomy within the constraints of family life, the young women in Indian chick lit appear to be struggling against the expectation that they submit to family constraints and thus seem to be reaching for something different in their self-­formation. Ashis Nandy (1983: 99) has argued that “in the chaos called India the opposite of thesis is not the antithesis because they exclude each other. The true ‘enemy’ of the thesis is seen to be in the synthesis because it includes the thesis and ends the latter’s reason for being.” The self that Aisha and Damayanthi may be groping toward — not entirely successfully — is this kind of “synthesis,” whereby one does not need to pick between tradition/ Indian/inner and modern/Western/outer but where one can embody both in various combinations, even though the narratives foreground these binaries. This would mean that the autonomy associated with the “global” is not always fated to be circumscribed by the “Indian” signified by family and community as was the case in Radhakrishnan’s (2008) study. Rather, each woman strategically deploys the various traditions, both Indian and global, available to her at different junctures, sometimes compositely. Among the protagonists under consideration, Arshi and her flatmate Topsy come closest to embodying this “synthetic self.” Arshi may be considered “Westernized” but rather than being perfectly so, she treats it as “a subtradition which, in spite of its pathology and its tragi-­comic core, is a ‘digested’ form of another civilization that had once gate-­crashed into India” (Nandy 1983: 75 – 6). Arshi can immediately recognize other members of her Carvalho ∣ Mothers and Daughters in Indian Chick Lit 731 “tribe,” people from similar backgrounds, and contrasts herself to women like the sister of a colleague who “saw no need to be friends with me either. What could I offer them? No future kitty parties, no company for jewelry shopping, no bitching about how hard it was to get a manicure appointment and no older brother that they could have a love-­arranged marriage with” (Madhavan 2008: 82). Thus, Arshi distinguishes herself from certain traditional women with whom she does not identify, but she does not uniformly scorn this tradition or see it as a monolith. She points to the positive aspects of her flatmate’s traditional upbringing such as the massage ritual where “the older women of the family use the time to gossip and oil each other’s hair while they’re at it, and the teenagers who are being massaged for the first time quickly forget their shyness in this communal nakedness”(86), practices that account for Topsy’s greater comfort with her body, or the camaraderie at the sangeet at a friend’s wedding where “the women would sit with Deeksha on the terrace getting their palms decorated with mehndi and listening to the loud Punjabi folk singer belt her way through gruesome songs about mothers-­in-­law” (249). While Topsy performs submissive Indian womanhood in front of her parents, her personality otherwise is not an outright rejection of tradition but is informed by the intimacy of joint family living and is transformed in the city into her relationships with her friends. The single woman identity in these novels reveals itself to be one in which the characters blend various traditions, even when they seem to be invoking a binary. Happy Endings If the dichotomies between tradition and modernity are implicated in the problem of singleness and personified in mothers and daughters and their viewpoints, the endings of the novels hint at how this problematic is resolved. While the common perception is that romantic partnership is the culmination of the novels, in the three novels under consideration, the finales are somewhat anticlimactic. The main crisis in Keep the Change is related to Damayanthi’s disillusionment with the corporate workplace. This provokes her into agreeing to an arranged marriage, which she finally rather abruptly reneges on when she realizes that a former colleague whom she respects positions 27:4 November 2019 732 has feelings for her. But, the real “settling down” in the novel is related to her career; she eschews the corporate ladder for a socially responsible role in microfinance working with a female boss. In Almost Single, Aisha’s ambivalence toward marriage has her turning down a proposal of marriage from the man she was pursuing throughout the novel. Rather, the novel concludes with a reverse proposal of sorts, with Aisha committing to Karan but suggesting they put off marriage and get to know one another. Neither of these endings radically challenge patriarchal structures given that the protagonists fulfill the genre’s requirements for a happy ending, but they offer only a limited form of a closure, one that their mothers would not entirely approve of. More radical, I believe, is the ending of You Are Here, which eschews romantic coupledom for its protagonist. Instead, Arshi decides to focus on her studies and vows that she was done being one of the victims “who thrive on having our minds messed with, our hearts constantly in a drum of adrenalin” (Madhavan 2008: 255). The conventional happy ending in the novel is displaced onto Topsy, who finally rebels against her family’s insistence on an arranged marriage by choosing to have sex with her Muslim boyfriend. This again is not to be interpreted as a gesture toward marriage because Topsy insists that she does not know what the future holds. The endings of the novels indicate that the resolution of the narrative does not necessarily lie in the protagonists being satisfactorily coupled. Rather, the “settling” that happens is related to achieving peace with a self-­ image that does not involve a choice between tradition and modernity. What is rejected is the all-­or-­nothing traditional that the mothers in the novels are problematically associated with. Instead, the protagonists seem to be inching toward a selfhood that is not circumscribed by family but that may autonomously select from different available traditions, a privilege to some extent of their upper-­caste, middle-­class status, and yet one that not all their peers avail of. This is not to say that this selection process is entirely unmediated by societal or discursive constraints but that the women express the desire for such agency, and to some extent embody it, even as they are constrained by the very caste and class markers that make such agency possible. Carvalho ∣ Mothers and Daughters in Indian Chick Lit 733 Conclusion I have situated Indian chick lit in the aftermath of the socioeconomic conjuncture of the 1990s and argued that the novels revisit and update “the new Indian woman” paradigm. The tradition/modernity binary is symbolized in the tension between mothers and daughters in the novels, and played out in their interactions over the problem of singleness, food choices, and dress. On the one hand, the novels configure a monolithic Indian tradition signified by mothers while seemingly crystalizing “the single woman” as the opposite of this tradition. On the other hand, the young women neither completely eschew tradition nor embrace modernity but appear to be arguing for their desire to selectively employ discourses of both in a way that does not necessarily involve modernity being circumscribed by tradition. In this sense, they diverge from earlier depictions of the “new Indian woman” in that they do not seek a balance but rather a strategic deployment that might be unbalanced and contradictory. Singleness, away from parental supervision, in these novels provides the ground for the working out of this composite identity, and while the protagonists do not achieve an ideal synthesis, they gesture toward the possibilities that middle-­class Indian women might explore. References Arnold, David, and Stuart H. Blackburn. 2004. “Introduction.” In Telling Lives in India: Biography, Autobiography, and Life History, edited by David Arnold and Stuart H. Blackburn, 1 – 28. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Bagshi, Jashodhara. 2010. “Representing Nationalism: Ideology of Motherhood in Colonial Bengal.” In Krishnaraj 2010: 158 – 85. Beck, Ulrich, and Elisabeth Beck-­Gernsheim. 2002. Individualization: Institutionalized Individualism and Its Social and Political Consequences. London: Sage. Budgeon, Shelley. 2003. Choosing a Self: Young Women and the Individualization of Identity. Westport, CT: Praeger. Bushnell, Candace. 2006. Sex and the City. New York: Grand Central. Castaing, Anne. 2013. “Gender Trouble in the New Hindi Novel: The Ambiguous Writings on Womanhood in K. B. Vaid’s Lila and Mridula Garg’s ‘Kathgulab.’ ” Archiv Orientalni 81, no. 1: 67 – 88. positions 27:4 November 2019 734 Chakravarti, Uma. 1989. “Whatever Happened to the Vedic Dasi? Orientalism, Nationalism, and a Script for the Past.” In Recasting Women: Essays in Colonial History, edited by Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid, 27–87. Chatterjee, Partha. 1990. “The Nationalist Resolution of the Women’s Question.” In Sangari and Vaid 1990: 233 – 53. Chaudhuri, Maitrayee. 2001. “Gender and Advertisements: The Rhetoric of Globalisation.” Women’s Studies International Forum 24, nos. 3 – 4: 373 – 85. Daya, Shari. 2010. “Eating, Serving, and Self-­Realisation: Food and Modern Identities in Contemporary Indian Women’s Writing.” Social and Cultural Geography 11, no. 5: 475 – 89. Devasahayam, Theresa W. 2005. “Power and Pleasure around the Stove: The Construction of Gendered Identity in Middle-­Class South Indian Hindu Households in Urban Malaysia.” Women’s Studies International Forum 28, no. 1: 1 – 20. Donner, Subramanian. 2016. “Doing It Our Way: Love and Marriage in Kolkata Middle-­ Class Families.” Modern Asian Studies 50, no. 4: 1147 – 89. Dumont, Louis. 1980. Homo Hierarchicus: The Caste System and Its Implications. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Dwyer, Rachel. 2000. All You Want Is Money, All You Need Is Love: Sexuality and Romance in Modern India. London: Cassell. Fernandes, Leela. 2006. India’s New Middle Class: Democratic Politics in an Era of Economic Reform. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Fielding, Helen. 1996. Bridget Jones’s Diary. London: Picador. Fuller, C. J., and Haripriya Narasimhan. 2007. “Information Technology Professionals and the New-­Rich Middle Class in Chennai (Madras).” Modern Asian Studies 41, no. 1: 121 – 50. Giddens, Anthony. 1991. Modernity and Self-­Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Cambridge: Polity Press. Gill, Rosalind. 2008. “Culture and Subjectivity in Neoliberal and Postfeminist Times.” Subjectivity 25, no. 1: 432 – 45. Grewal, Inderpal, and Caren Kaplan. 2001. “Global Identities: Theorizing Transnational Studies of Sexuality.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 7, no. 4: 663 – 79. Harris, Anita. 2004. Future Girl: Young Women in the Twenty-­First Century. New York: Routledge. Harzewski, Stephanie. 2011. Chick Lit and Postfeminism. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Carvalho ∣ Mothers and Daughters in Indian Chick Lit 735 Hirsch, Marianne. 1989. The Mother/Daughter Plot: Narrative, Psychoanalysis, Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Jha, Uma Shankar, and Premlata Pujari. 1996. Women Professionalism: Challenges and Prospects. Vol. 3 of Indian Women Today: Tradition, Modernity and Challenge. New Delhi: Kanishka. Joshi, Priya. 2002. In Another Country: Colonialism, Culture, and the English Novel in India. New York: Columbia University Press. Kakar, Sudhir. 1981. The Inner World: A Psycho-­analytic Study of Childhood and Society in India. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Kala, Advaita. 2007. Almost Single. New Delhi: HarperCollins. Kim, Youna. 2012. Women and the Media in Asia: The Precarious Self. Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Krishnan, Prabha. 2010. “In the Idiom of Loss: Ideology of Motherhood in Television Serials — Mahabharata and Ramayana.” In Krishnaraj 2010: 106 – 57. Krishnaraj, Maithreyi, ed. 2010. Motherhood in India: Glorification without Empowerment? New Delhi: Routledge. Lau, Lisa Eee Jia. 2006. “The New Indian Woman: Who Is She, and What Is ‘New’ about Her?” Women’s Studies International Forum 29, no. 2: 159 – 71. Madhavan, Meenakshi Reddy. 2008. You Are Here. New Delhi: Penguin. Makdisi, Saree. 2000. “Postcolonial Literature in a Neocolonial World: Modern Arabic Culture and the End of Modernity.” Boundary 2 22, no. 1: 85 – 115. Mani, Lata. 1990. “Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India.” In Sangari and Vaid 1990: 88 – 126. Mankekar, Purnima. 1999. Screening Culture, Viewing Politics: An Ethnography of Television, Womanhood, and Nation in Postcolonial India. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Maslak, Mary Ann, and Gayatri Singhal. 2008. “The Identity of Educated Women in India: Confluence or Divergence?” Gender and Education 20, no. 5: 481 – 93. Mookherjee, Nayanika. 2013. “Introduction: Self in South Asia.” Journal of Historical Sociology 26, no. 1: 1 – 18. Munshi, Shoma. 2001. “Marvelous Me: The Beauty Industry and the Construction of the ‘Modern’ Indian Woman.” In Images of the “Modern Woman” in Asia: Global Media, Local Meanings, edited by Shoma Munshi, 78 – 91. Richmond, UK: Curzon. Nandy, Ashis. 1983. The Intimate Enemy. Delhi: Oxford University Press. positions 27:4 November 2019 736 Narayan, Shyamala A., and Jon Mee. 2009. “Novelists of the 1950s and 1960s.” In A Concise History of Indian Literature in English, edited by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, 247 – 60. Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Ommundsen, Wenche. 2011. “Sex and the Global City: Chick Lit with a Difference.” Contemporary Women’s Writing 5, no. 2: 107 – 24. Oza, Rupal. 2006. The Making of Neoliberal India: Nationalism, Gender, and the Paradoxes of Globalization. New York: Routledge. Pinto, Sarah. 2014. “Drugs and the Single Woman: Pharmacy, Fashion, Desire, and Destitution in India.” Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry 38, no. 2: 237 – 54. Press, Andrea L. 2011. “ ‘Feminism? That’s So Seventies’: Girls and Young Women Discuss Femininity and Feminism in America’s Next Top Model.” In New Femininities: Postfeminism, Neoliberalism, and Subjectivity, edited by Rosalind Gill and Christina Scharff, 117 – 33. Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Puri, Jyoti. 1999. Woman, Body, Desire in Post-­colonial India: Narratives of Gender and Sexuality. New York: Routledge. Radhakrishnan, Smitha. 2008. “Examining the ‘Global’ Indian Middle Class: Gender and Culture in the Silicon Valley/Bangalore Circuit.” Journal of Intercultural Studies 29, no. 1: 7 – 20. Raisborough, Jayne. 2011. Lifestyle Media and the Formation of the Self. Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Ramaswamy, Sumathi. 2001. “Virgin Mother, Beloved Other.” In Signposts: Gender Issues in Post-­Independence India, edited by Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, 17 – 53. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Reddy, Vanita. 2006. “The Nationalization of the Global: Geographies of Beauty in Femina.” South Asian Popular Culture 4, no. 1: 61 – 85. Sandhya, Shaifali. 2009. “The Social Context of Marital Happiness in Urban Indian Couples: Interplay of Intimacy and Conflict.” Journal of Marital and Family Therapy 35, no. 1: 74 – 96. Sangari, Kumkum, and Sudesh Vaid, eds. 1990. Recasting Women: Essays in Indian Colonial History. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Scott, Joan W. 1986. “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis.” American Historical Review 91, no. 5: 1053 – 75. Subramanian, Nirupama. 2010. Keep the Change. Noida (New Okhla Industrial Development Authority), India: HarperCollins. Carvalho ∣ Mothers and Daughters in Indian Chick Lit 737 Sunder Rajan, Rajeswari. 1993. Real and Imagined Women. London: Routledge. Tharu, Susie. 1990. “Tracing Savitri’s Pedigree: Victorian Racism and the Image of Women in Indo-­Anglian Literature.” In Sangari and Vaid 1990: 254 – 68. Titzmann, Fritzi-­Marie. 2011. “Matchmaking 2.0: The Representation of Women and Female Agency in the Indian Online Matrimonial Market.” Internationales Asienforum 42, nos. 3 – 4: 239 – 56. Van Slooten, Jessica. 2006. “Fashionably Indebted: Conspicuous Consumption, Fashion, and Romance in Sophie Kinsella’s Shopaholic Trilogy.” In Chick Lit: The New Woman’s Fiction, edited by Suzanne Ferriss and Mallory Young, 219 – 38. New York: Routledge. Varma, Pavan K. 2007. The Great Indian Middle Class. New Delhi: Penguin.