Middle-Class Dharma: Women, Aspiration, and the Making of Contemporary Hinduism
Jennifer D. Ortegren, "Middle-Class Dharma: Women, Aspiration, and the Making of Contemporary Hinduism"
English | ISBN: 0197530796 | 2023 | 320 pages | PDF | 33 MB
English | ISBN: 0197530796 | 2023 | 320 pages | PDF | 33 MB
Middle-Class Dharma is a contemporary ethnography of class mobility among Hindus in Udaipur, Rajasthan, India. Focusing on women in Pulan, an emerging middle-class neighborhood of Udaipur, Jennifer D. Ortegren argues that upward class mobility is not just a socio-economic process, but also a religious one.
Central to Hindu women's upward class mobility is negotiating dharma, the moral and ethical groundings of Hindu worlds. As women experiment with middle-class consumer and lifestyle practices, they navigate tensions around what is possible and what is appropriate–that is, what is dharmic–as middle-class Hindu women. Ortegren shows how these women strategically align emerging middle-class desires with more traditional religious obligations in ways that enable them to generate new
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