mad bad girls
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For Meena, her desires and rebellious behaviour are not in pursuit of happiness but escape from familial expectations of being good, polite, amenable, obedient, which in turn derive from colonial legacies and assimilatory survival. Ahmed argues that Meena’s rejection of her family’s expectations is a move towards Englishness but in fact she is moving away from the imperialist ideal of civility imposed on and perpetuated by her family. The fact that her adult relatives all become more racuous, lively, and relaxed upon her grandmother Nanima’s arrival, a figure symbolic of their heritage, suggests that they normally repress these behaviours when less proximal to Indianness/more proximal to whiteness. Nanima brings (out) stories of Meena’s family history and home country, a country “bursting with excitement, drama and passion, history in the making” (Ysal 210-11). To me, Meena’s attachment to Anita is less so about aspiring to whiteness but rather the recognition of a fellow “mad bad girl” who is unwilling to accept/conform. This identification is demonstrated when she finds interest in her Indian background after learning that it is also riddled with misbehaviour and excitement. Perhaps this alternate image of liveliness and mess borders on yet another typified expectation, but for Meena it is liberatory. She (and her family) is entitled to the full range of feeling and behaviour without scrutiny.