Paper short abstract:

As a market-orientated rhetoric takes hold in middle-class India,social relations including those constituting the ideal of the joint family are contested by middle-class couples, who have to engage with new ideas about 'possessive citizenship'.

Paper long abstract:

Economic liberalisation and the consumerist lifestyle that it has brought in its wake have affected even the most intimate relationships of the urban middle-class today. As a market-orientated rhetoric takes hold, practices change and earlier solidarities and publics dwindle as social relations including those constituting the idea of the family are contested. This includes a new focus on home ownership among middle-class couples, which often contradicts to ideologies of appropriate gender and kin relations and threatens domestic arrangements seen as traditional. Thus, the paper argues that the ideal of home ownership does not only imply middle-class citizens in processes of urban restructuring and property markets, it also changes the way the relationship between house and home is constituted and family life experienced. Based on fieldwork in Calcutta, the paper explores various genealogies of ownership as they were negotiated as part of being middle-class in the past, and suggests that whilst owning property has become an aspiration enabling 'modern' families, it causes new conflicts as the normative joint family ideal shapes the way ownership is realised. The ethnography presented here suggests that property ownership continuous to support the joint family ideology, and that member across generations may benefit from foregoing home ownership even where this may stall individual members' aspirations.