Blood and Belief: Utopias and Dystopias of Menstrual Rites and Domestic Morality Through Lived Experiences of Bengali Hindu Women in Kolkata

Menstruation, along with other domestic moral femininity, since its embodiment attains a socio-cultural meaning and symbolic significance that often tends to overshadow the scientific explanation in society. Despite being a biological phenomenon, experiences of menstruation have social overtones. This paper examines the intersections of menstruation, domestic morality, and religious ritual within Bengali Hindu middle-class households, foregrounding how the female body becomes a contested site of purity, stigma, and moral order. Drawing on ethnographic narratives and feminist theory, the study examines how rituals such as Ritu Kāla Samskār (puberty rites), Ritu Shuddhi (purification after menstruation), and practices of ashaucha (ritual impurity) translate Brahmanical ideals of paap (sin) and punya (virtue) into embodied experience. While these rituals celebrate fertility and the transition to womanhood, they also enforce forms of seclusion, food taboos, and spatial restrictions that bind women to ideals of chastity, modesty, and maternal duty. In this sense, menstrual rituals produce a paradoxical embodiment, i.e. utopian in celebrating fertility and womanhood, yet dystopian in enforcing seclusion, modesty, and self-surveillance. Yet, women are not passive subjects of these moral codes; they often negotiate ritual responsibility through selective adherence, reinterpretation, or subtle resistance, thereby reworking the meaning of religious observance in urban middle-class contexts. By framing ritual purity as both a mechanism of control and a space of desire,agency, and gender performance, this study shows how the female body embodies the paradox of reverence and restriction, utopia and dystopia, within the lived politics of belief in Bengal.