Women, Wellbeing, and the Ethics of Domesticity in an Odia Hindu Temple Town

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xix

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2. Women, Wellbeing, and the Ethics of Domesticity: An Introduction

   • Usha Menon

   Pages 1-25

3. Entering the Temple Town of Bhubaneswar

   • Usha Menon

   Pages 27-56

4. Odia Hindu Ways of Thinking

   • Usha Menon

   Pages 57-75

5. Perceptions of Femaleness

   • Usha Menon

   Pages 77-100

6. Images of the Life Course

   • Usha Menon

   Pages 101-122

7. Managing the Household: Achieving Control, Being Productive, Distributing Resources

   • Usha Menon

   Pages 123-150

8. The Auspicious Heart: Influence, Productivity, and Coherence

   • Usha Menon

   Pages 151-173

9. Managing Life and Its Processes

   • Usha Menon

   Pages 175-194

10. An Alternate Moral Order

    • Usha Menon

    Pages 195-217

11. Conclusions

    • Usha Menon

    Pages 219-228

12. Back Matter

    Pages 229-244

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This book is a detailed ethnography of traditional, predominantly upper-caste, sequestered Hindu women in the temple town of Bhubaneswar in Odisha, a state in eastern India. It elaborates on a distinctive paradigm of domesticity and explicates a particular model of human wellbeing among this category. Part of the growing literature in “third wave” or “multicultural feminism”, it seeks to broaden the parameters of feminist discourse by going beyond questions of individual liberty or gender equality to examine the potential for female empowerment that exists in the context of these women’s lives. Its aims are twofold: first, to represent these women in ways that they themselves would recognize; and, second, to interpret, rather than merely “translate”, the beliefs and practices of the temple town such that their underlying logic becomes readily accessible to readers, even those unfamiliar with the Hindu world.

• Ethics of domesticity
• Goddess worship
• Hindu women in temple town
• Odia/Oriya Hindu women
• Orissa/Odisha ethnography
• Women and subjective wellbeing in India

• , Department of Culture and Communication, Drexel University, Philadelphia, USA

  Usha Menon

Usha Menon received her Ph. D. (with Honors) in Human Development from the University of Chicago in 1995. She has done fieldwork in the temple town of Bhubaneswar in Odisha, as well as in the northern Indian city of Meerut. She has written extensively on different aspects of Hindu society and civilization, in particular on goddess worship, family dynamics, gender relations, Hindu morality, Hindu women and liberal feminism, and Hindu–Muslim religious violence.

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