Modernity for Urban Millenial Women in India: A Multiple Viewpoints Construct

Abstract

This study involves interviewing twenty urban middle and upper-middle class millennial women from tier-2 and tier-3 cities in India. Each interviewee defined the concept of modernity in her own terms and assessed herself as a woman who could claim to be modern, not modern or somewhere in-between. The second and seventh questions of the interview sought the same answer in different words: whether the participants viewed themselves as modern Indian women or not. While the second question, which came early in the interview, was almost inevitably answered affirmatively, the seventh question, which appeared at the end of the interview, witnessed a shift in opinion, where the participants only aligned themselves with the socially positive connotations of the term ‘modern’, such as free will, self-reliance and individuality of thoughts, but distanced themselves from the socially tabooed connotations of a defiant woman representing uninhibited action, ultramodernism and its cosmetic overdoing. This involves the decompression of the concept of ‘modern Indian woman’ into two competing construals - the independent self-reliant woman versus the uninhibited woman - and their re-compression into the narrative structure of the same individual. This affirms Dancygier’s concept of multiple viewpoints in the narrative structure of the same individual, where one construal is privileged over the other. Ultimately, through their narratives, these women emerge as their chosen version of modern Indian women—the ones who blend autonomy with social acceptance and assert their femininity within the bounds of Indian society, family structure and gender expectations.