South Asia Brown Bag Series Spring 2020: Righteous Householders, Jilted Lovers and Blighted Alcoholics : The Reformation of Men

In the commemorative issue for the fiftieth year of the publication of Contributions to Indian Sociology (2019), Joseph S. Alter’s essay on ‘Masculinities and Culture’ opens with an insightful retrospective. ‘If masculinity has lost its center of gravity - and the gravity of being normatively centered - that is a good thing, not only politically and morally, with respect to the realization of greater equity and justice, but also analytically’ (2019: 298). Taking a cue from Alter, my presentation will focus on what the decentering of masculinity has done analytically? Based on my dissertation fieldwork and writing about the driver in Himalayan towns between 2018 and 2019, the presentation will center the tales of the self-reformation (actualized and aspirational) of drivers, young and old. I will attend to three such sites of self-reformation - the righteous householder (with regard to cash income and savings); the jilted lover (romance and heartbreak) and the blighted alcoholic (liquor consumption and withdrawal) that de-center masculinity as we know it. As I will argue, this triangularity is crucial to understanding the (re)articulation of masculinity as a self-made man, which most drivers claim to be. This self-reformation into being self-made, I argue, is embedded in a moral reform at the center of which are substances - the substance of cash, the substances of the body and the substance of liquor. Such self-reformations include a transformation of their relationship with these substances such that it presents an opportunity for re-masculinization. The work of de-centering masculinity, therefore, may be analyzed as an occasion for re-masculinization through self-reformation and not only as a ‘crisis of masculinity’ as is widely understood.