Article begins<\/h2>\n
Hitesh was twenty years old when he received a thick envelope at his door in a western Indian city. It was not like the official kinds from the bank but looked like a long letter from an old friend. He checked the address, the postcode, the house number. All his. But something was unfamiliar on the cover\u2014the name to which it was addressed. \u201cMadhavi.\u201d Who was Madhavi? Hitesh tried to return the envelope to the postman but the right address was all that mattered to the official\u2014the name on the cover did not share as much space in the postman\u2019s attention as the pin code did. He left for his next delivery. Hitesh stood there staring at the name, finally putting it on the kitchen table to sort it out later with his neighbors once the scorching sun set that evening.<\/p>\n
Hitesh\u2019s mother, Prabha, saw the envelope and immediately tore it open devouring every word in the letter. Hitesh, rushed to save his mother from prying open someone else\u2019s letter. Seeing her delightfully reading it, he asked a bit surprised, \u201cDo we know who Madhavi is?\u201d Prabha smiles and for the very first time in Hitesh\u2019s twenty years tells him, \u201cMadhavi was my name before I married your father. They changed my name at the wedding.\u201d Prabha was referring to the Marathi Brahmin wedding ritual called the \u201cLakshmi Poojan.\u201d In this ritual the first name of the bride is changed to a new name by her groom after their wedding. The new wife is then usually referred to by her \u201cnew\u201d name in her marital home and by all the new kinship that comes in marriage for her for the rest of her married life. Her \u201cold\u201d or \u201cnatal\u201d name is supposed to remain in her natal home and with her natal kin as she transitions into a life in marriage.<\/p>\n
When I met Hitesh during my fieldwork, he was seventy, and had retired as a teacher. The moment of knowing his mother\u2019s \u201cnatal\u201d name for the very first time was so etched in his memory that he recalled this to me with an extraordinary vividness almost fifty years after it had happened. Her new name had made him feel like a stranger to his own mother, even if just for that moment. \u201cMadhavi\u201d on the envelope was alien to him an hour ago, and now the word was to be in the grammar of his most intimate world. The suddenness of this revelation slowly brewed a question in him over the years, \u201cMy mother was someone else before she was my mother! Who was she?\u201d Prabha had long passed\u2014her picture across the wall from where I was sitting in Hitesh\u2019s living room along with her husband\u2019s, Suryakant. In a cultural context where being married is non-negotiable for women, Hitesh\u2019s questions confront this reality with a profound simplicity. His question broaches the concern of what histories of women are lost in a context where women cannot be seen beyond marriage. It raises attention to a \u201clack\u201d in articulating women, especially in the South Asian context, away from the language of heteronormative marriage.<\/p>\n
Within India and especially in the community I worked with, the language of heteronormative marriage is also the language of Brahmanical ideology. As anti-caste scholars like\u00a0Dr B.R. Ambedkar<\/a>,\u00a0Uma Chakravarti<\/a>\u00a0have shown, in this framework women are essentialized as reproducing bodies within a Brahmanical society, and thus controlling their sexuality through\u00a0\u00a0arranged marriage becomes one of the strongest means to maintain the ideological as well as material supremacy of caste hierarchies in a casteist society. Returning to Prabha\u2019s story, she had fallen in love with Suryakant and had expressed her wish to marry him to her father. Choosing your own partner was and is in many cases seen as outrageous in a caste society. Although Suryakant and Prabha came from the same Brahmin caste, they belonged to different subcastes. Prabha then was on the \u201cwrong side\u201d of the line twice: for choosing her partner and for crossing the caste line. This enraged her father and he threatened to cut all ties with her if she went ahead with her choice. She did. Thus, Prabha never had any ties with her natal kin from the moment she moved in her marital home. This meant that there was no one to call her \u201cMadhavi.\u201d This also meant that she had never spoken of herself as \u201cMadhavi\u201d in all the years in her marital home. Had the unexpected letter not arrived in her home, she would perhaps have lived her life without her son knowing the name she grew up with.\u00a0<\/p>\n The Marathi Brahmin ritual Lakshmi Poojan, or the worship of the Hindu goddess Lakshmi, replaces the name of the new wife given to her by her father (or a natal kin) with a new name given to her by her husband. It replaces the namer in her life from that moment onwards\u2014a shift in the authorial center in her life. In this ritual, then, we are able to see, in a very visceral way, what the Brahmanical ideology expects of women.<\/p>\n The ritual celebrates the Hindu goddess Lakshmi and welcomes the new wife in her marital home as the Lakshmi of the marital home. Lakshmi within the Hindu worldview is the embodiment of beauty, the bringer of good luck, wealth, and prosperity; the wife is interpellated as Lakshmi within this ritual. The new wife and husband sit on the ground across an image of Lakshmi where the pandit, or the ritual master, initiates the naming ceremony. For most women, this moment is one of utter exhaustion and nervousness\u2014both physical and emotional. They enter the house after an intense wedding ceremony and more importantly after bidding farewell to their families and friends. It is in this context that the Lakshmi Poojan is performed\u2014away from the comfort of familiar relations, faces, and space. Further, \u201cthe house\u201d itself becomes the metaphor for the husband\u2019s kin network, clan, caste line, and also the husband himself. Like Lakshmi, the wife must work towards the perpetuation (through an heir) and prosperity of all these elements that welcome her.<\/p>\n The pandit hands a plate of raw rice to the groom. The names of some of the other gods from the Hindu fold are written with vermillion on the raw rice or\u00a0akshat<\/em>\u00a0as it is ritually referred to. He writes another sentence on the rice in Sanskrit: \u201c I am establishing my wife\u2019s name as\u2026\u201d The groom takes the plate and with a gold ring forms the letters of the new name for the bride and returns the plate to the pandit. The groom declares the new name of the bride to\u00a0his<\/em>\u00a0family. The wife, no longer a bride, is from now on to be referred to as her new name, at least by her marital family. From Madhavi to Prabha. The new name is intended to loosen her ties with her natal kin and relations, if not cut them completely.<\/p>\n Sweets and congratulations are exchanged as the ritual nears its end. \u201cThe new name is written in gold\u201d as a Pandit once jokingly told me alluding to the finality of that name. The ritual is visceral in the sense that it calls attention of the bride through her (old) name and changes it to a new one passing on to her this finality of being transferred from her father to her husband, the new author of her name. However, this ritual never ends, for it lives on in every utterance of the new name for women in her life and after.<\/p>\n