Send message to Authors

Paper short abstract

In Surguja, India, women extend their agency in the family through the moral navigation of wellbeing, while also being constrained by moral assessment. Relational dynamics render moral narratives themselves flexible. The scope for and exercise of agency is deeply entwined with material factors.

Paper long abstract

The Wellbeing in Developing Countries (WeD) research programme, 2002-7, showed relationships at the centre of wellbeing. This raises two questions: what form do these relationships take, and how do we best research them?

An earlier study in Zambia suggests ‘moral navigation’ shapes the conduct of inter-household kin-based relationships (White and Jha, 2021). This paper explores moral navigation in India within the household, an arena particularly subject to moral scrutiny. In-depth qualitative research reveals how cultural scripts are made and re-made through everyday practice, revealing diverse interpretations of what constitutes the moral, and myriad ways in which women express agency. These are often couched in the conventional terms of being ideal wives and mothers, even as they extend the definitions of these ideals. The elasticity of women’s room for manoeuvre is both limited and enabled by others’ evaluation of their moral claims.

An in-depth focus on one woman and her conjugal household reveals the complexity and interactivity between different moral projects, and their implications for agency. Moral navigation is shown also to include transgression. Inability to deliver on one set of ideals may open space for an alternative moral project (Jha, 2018). One form of positionality (e.g. as mother) may be mobilised within another (e.g. as daughter-in-law, or wife). Moral projects of different family members may be complementary or contradictory, and their viability is deeply entwined with material endowments and outcomes.