“I Just Do What Feels Right”: Valuing Domestic Shrine Traditions as Affective Labor and Women as Devotional Authorities

Analyzing interviews I completed with twenty-two Bengali Hindu women in Kolkata, India, this chapter argues that these women’s valuing of domestic shrine traditions as an affective labor enables them to interpret themselves as skilled ritual authorities. I suggest that by interpreting affect as a skill necessary to devotion and themselves as having unique affective capacities, the women I worked with position themselves as religious authorities. Much as Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt’s notion of affective labor (2000), and Arlie Russell Hochschild’s The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling, Updated with a New Preface, 3rd ed. Berkeley: University of California Press (2012) notion of emotional work, the women I worked with in Kolkata described their domestic shrine traditions as demanding their management of their own affect in order to create an attitude of love for and sustain a relationship with their deities. This reading of domestic worship is consistent with discourses of bhakti, or Hindu devotion, that characterize devotion as an affective endeavor. Importantly, bhakti traditions have also suggested that women have a unique capacity for devotion because they are viewed as being naturally more emotional and willing to serve than men. Notably, the women I interviewed in Kolkata explicitly professed these very gender essentialisms to frame themselves as superior devotionalists in comparison to both the men of their households and temple priests.