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This chapter examines practices during Navaratri, a nine-day festival honoring the goddess, for which many families return to rural homes to worship localized forms of the goddess within caste-homogenous communities. It analyzes the ways in which middle-class and religious identities are mutually constructed in relationship to local communities but focuses on distinctions both within Pulan itself and between the urban neighborhood and a rural village. This chapter also investigates competing claims about the existence of two ritual sites and communities within Pulan as well as claims to feeling more “comfortable” in the village due to the caste homogeny there. These claims reveal implicit tensions and discomfort in urban areas related to the ambiguity of a shifting middle-class dharmic world and highlight a more general sense of dharmic instability within the emerging middle classes that affects their ability to comfortably and fully inhabit middle-class dharmic selfhoods.

This chapter analyzes how ritual and dharmic relationships between husbands and wives are changing in the context of emerging middle-class nuclear families in Pulan. It focuses on one married couple’s decision to take up the popular ritual practices of the Solah Somwar vrat (16 Monday fast), a four-month ritual period dedicated to the deity Shiva. Solah Somwar is increasingly observed by young married couples who perform weekly fasts and rituals together at the temple to jointly maintain the ritual purity of the home. This chapter show how these shared, public performances sanction an emerging dharma of conjugality in which husbands and wives in nuclear families become committed, and obligated, to one another as their desires for middle-class lifestyles merge. It highlights the emergence of a kind of purushadharma, or male/husband dharma, whereby men develop desires and orientations toward the home and their wives—in their capacity as husbands—that operates similarly to stridharma.

The Conclusion proposes how analyzing class in terms of dharma helps us reconsider the historical development of Hindu traditions and future studies of class and religion in and beyond South Asia. While normative forms of dharma are unique and specific to Hinduism, it suggests that ontological notions of dharma as that which “holds the world together” can be applied as a framework for defining religion beyond Hinduism. Non-Hindu communities throughout India are undergoing similar transformations to become middle class, meaning they too are involved in the processes of constructing and maintaining middle-class religious worlds. To argue for analyzing class in the analytical terms of dharma is not to exclude these communities; rather, it is a call to draw on dharma to attend to the religious elements of middle-class transitions in other religious traditions while simultaneously expanding the definition of religion within the social sciences and humanities.