Pratyaha: Everyday Lifeworlds: Dilemmas, Contestations and Negotiations

Pratyaha is the Sanskritized Bengali word for ‘everyday’ for everybody. The neglect of everyday lifeworlds is due to a taken-for-granted belief that the realm of everyday is the site for common sense and the common place, the very well known, perhaps even the trivial. It is our sense of familiarity with routine relations and their sheer temporariness which casualizes our attitude towards our daily lived existence. True to the specific genre of critical everyday studies, the focus is on the dilemmas, contestations and negotiations between the self and the other, the ‘normal’ and the ‘unusual’, the sacral and the secular, and the explicit and the enigmatic. As usual, numerous actants play critical roles. In many of these reconstructions, women with different degrees of agency and powerlessness stand out as protagonists in the everyday dialectics, inescapably embedded in micro-structures and processes. Through a wide range of analytical modes, like narrative analysis, deconstructions of autobiographies, novels and children’s stories, use of index numbers, ethnography, and interpretation of myths, this multidisciplinary volume explores a variety of everyday intimacies and estrangements in different institutional settings in the everyday lifeworlds, mainly of the contemporary urban Indian middle class across Islamic, Christian and Hindu frames of living.