Dharma and Discomfort During Navaratri

Abstract

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.