This volume explores a variety of everyday intimacies and estrangements in different institutional settings in the everyday lifeworlds of, mainly, the contemporary urban Indian middle class across Islamic, Christian and Hindu frames of living. It employs a wide range of analytical models like narrative analysis, deconstructions of autobiographies, novels and children’s stories, use of index numbers, ethnography, and interpretation of myths. Pratyaha is the Sanskritized Bengali word for ‘everyday’ for everybody, and the essays in this volume reflect on the neglect of everyday lifeworlds. True to the specific genre of critical everyday studies, they focus 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 in our everyday lives.
Contributors:
Debarati Bandyopadhyay • Dipankor Coondoo • Ishita Dey • Manpreet K. Janeja • Mosarrap Hossain Khan • Nandini Ghosh • Prasanta Ray • Rukmini Sen • Runa Das Chaudhuri • Samita Sen • Sudarshana Sen • Sushmita Gonsalves Mondal