Jennifer D. Ortegren

My book, Middle-Class Dharma: Women, Aspiration, and the Making of Contemporary Hinduism, draws on 15 months of ethnographic fieldwork as a Fulbright-Nehru scholar in Udaipur, Rajasthan, India. It focuses on upwardly mobile Hindu women who have relocated from rural areas of Rajasthan to one particular emerging middle-class urban neighborhood and argues for how we can understand class as a religious identity, and becoming middle class as a religious process, by analyzing class experiences in terms of dharma.

Derived from the Sanskrit root, dhṛ, meaning “to hold, support, maintain,” dharma refers to both a cosmic moral order and the particular obligations of individual Hindus to help maintain that order. Classical Sanskrit texts, namely the Dharmashastras, outline these obligations as they operate according to caste and life-stage, and gender (varnashramadharma and stridharma (woman/wife dharma), respectively). Dharma links the individual to the social and the cosmic and helps Hindus understand who they are, where they belong, and who they can or should become as Hindus.

Middle-Class Dharma emphasizes the fluidity and interplay of dharma at the local and cosmic levels and, defining dharma as "that which holds the world together," develops dharma as an analytical concept to expand what "counts" as religion to include practices such as food, fashion, and fun. It analyzes class and class practices, such as women's higher education, as forms of dharma for the ways in which they help "hold together" the rapidly shifting worlds of emerging middle-class Hindus. It argues that becoming middle-class is a religious process insofar as it requires Hindus to define and embody new understandings of who they are, can, and should be in the contemporary world.

By focusing on women, and how they strategically create aspirational spaces for themselves that bring emerging middle-class desires to overlap with more traditional obligations, I show the critical role of women's everyday and ritual lives in formulating Hindu dharma and suggest this as long been true, but we may be able to see it differently today because of the rapidity with which these norms are changing. I conclude by suggesting how this frame of dharma can be useful for scholars working outside of Hinduism and outside of Religious Studies in thinking, writing, and teaching about religion.