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An ethnographic study of Brahman womens ritual practice that focuses on relations between religious practice, class and caste inequalities, and nationalist discourses.. Womanhood in the Making is an ethnographic study of Brahman womens ritual practice that focuses on relations between religious practice, class and caste inequalities, and nationalist discourses. Using analyses of both domestic ritual and womens personal narratives, the author investigates the spaces of female agency that ritual practice affords, as well as the roles that ritual practices have played in the production, objectification, and reworking of tradition and modernity in the contexts of the cultural politics of caste and class identities in India. This book challenges readers to rethink conventional notions of tradition and modernity, in South Asia and elsewhere, by showing these categories to be dynamically and dialogically producedas expressions of local cultural identity and as objects of anthropological scrutiny. }In this book, Mary Hancock challenges readers to rethink the notions of tradition and modernity that have figured centrally in anthropological discussions of social change in South Asia. She shows tradition and modernity to be categories created, deployed, and objectified by Tamil Brahmans as they produce their own class, gender, national, and sectarian identities. This highly original ethnographic analysis of Brahman womens ritualized practice demonstrates how tradition and modernityand the shifting boundaries between themare explicitly and implicitly produced and reworked on the body of the ideal, auspicious married woman. Through case studies of womens religious practices, the book reveals how female subjectivities are invented and reworked through ritually mediated relations among women and between women and the powerful goddesses to whom they are devoted. Womanhood in the Making: Domestic Ritual and Public Culture in Urban South India asks readers to rethink not only their images of Hindu women, but also the history of anthropological study of India. Hancock shows how anthropological categories of analysis are produced and deployed by both ethnographers and their informants in cultural brokerage, in elite nationalisms, and in Milton Singers foundational study of social change in South Asia.Provocative and engaging, this work will interest scholars and students of anthropology, history, cultural studies, women's studies, and religion. }