Drawing from an ethnographic study of the Marwari community of Kolkata city (east India) the paper identifies and comments on the socio-cultural aspects of everyday life that the women from the Marwari community in the city have experienced amidst the many other communities living in the city. The narratives embedded both in oral history and present-day ethnographic data unravel the effects of inter-community interactions on Marwari women when contrasted to the established idea of bhodromohila (respectable women) for women from the Bengali community. The understanding of ‘self’ for the participants in the study while being shaped by their gender position also varied with their interaction with the ‘other’. Instances of marriages between the Marwari and Bengali community enables understanding the context of how a subscription to a particular cultural norm was necessitated to signify the difference from the ‘other’. The heuristic tool of ‘bindini’ (the term for a daughter-in-law in Marwari) and ‘bhodromohila’ further unearths the turmoil that such relations, in many cases, gave rise to. This suggests that the inter-community interactions translated into producing a new social consciousness and a web of emotional vulnerability for the Marwari women who grappled with the concept of bhodromohila from a unique cultural position, but in some cases, also rendered it as an aspirational category. Exploring how this category has been exercised and experienced by the participants, the discussion deciphers the social universe that they oblige to in their everyday lives in the city, while simultaneously commenting on the disciplinary aspect of community-centric approaches, as orienting and producing a distinctive gendered identity. The narratives, therefore, embed the micro-events of everydayness in the macro-moral narrative of women as bearers of culture to signify the participants understanding of belonging, being, and becoming.
