Anagha Tambe
Recent times have witnessed a peculiar invocation of home to display patriotism, for instance, through a hyper-symbolic state campaign of ‘Har Ghar Tiranga’ (hoisting of national flag, tricolour, in every home’). This campaign mobilizes home and family as a site to celebrate the nation by transporting the public official symbol of the national flag to the private personal setting of home (Islam, 2022; Ramkumar, 2023). What does this mean in the postcolonial Indian context where family has been a mainstay of culture and where women are valorized as the custodian of culture that is deemed as the essence of the Indian nation? What happens to the idea of ‘unity in diversity’ that permeates the cultural understanding in the public sphere of postcolonial India? And what is really the culture – values and practices – that is produced in the family on an everyday basis? In today's post-liberalization context, the family is glamourized and reconsolidated as the repository of cultural purity and superiority of the nation (Uberoi, 2006) amid radical transitions in the familial bonds with rising individuation and nuclearization (Bhandari and Titzmann, 2017). It has rather become a prime site of self-definition for the new urban middle class whose ‘middle-classness’ is fashioned through their peculiar lifestyle, consumption practices, and cultural values (Donner, 2017). Nevertheless, how the family transmits specific cultural meanings and practices across generations and socializes young people into it has not received sufficient attention.