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Current debates in the anthropology of the Indian middle classes suggest a preponderant theme of balance - between 'Indian' and 'Western'; 'traditional' and 'modern'; 'global' and 'local'. Scholars like Säävälä (2010) Nisbett (2007, 2009), and Donner (2011) demonstrate a range of practices through which the ideal of middle class life is positioned in a precarious median between the imagined decadence of the upper classes and the perceived immorality and lack of responsibility of the working classes. Sexuality and intimacy, it has been observed, are important sites, where this balancing act is played out and risks to its stability are disciplined. Young women have particularly come under a great deal of pressure to position themselves dually as modern representatives of a global nation, who are, at the same time, epitomes of a nationalised narrative of tradition. In this thesis I examine, through an ethnographic study, the ways in which young women's bodies are implicated in the normative reproduction of everyday middle class life, as well as unpacking the social meanings of youth and adulthood for women in this context. Further, locating my study in the context of women's colleges in Chennai, this thesis comments on the significance of educational spaces as sites where normative ideals of middle class life and femininity are both produced and contested. The chief arguments in this thesis are organised into five chapters that draw primarily on ethnographic material to examine categories of risk, danger and pleasure as mutually constituted in young women's lives through everyday practice, as well as the making of the everyday as a precarious and compositional event.

In this thesis, I argue that the dominant discourse on Dubai and other spectacular cities implicitly or explicitly seeks to uncover the "real" city that lies beneath the veneer of the spectacle. In doing so, the existing scholarship advances a problematic binary discourse about supposedly "authentic, local" spaces contrasted with alienating, "tourist" spaces. In these narratives, Dubai's inhabitants are often depicted as estranged from the spectacular city, eliding the meanings that inhabitants create in it. Through an urban ethnography conducted between 2017-2019 with middle-class citizens and long-term residents in Dubai, I focus on experiences of belonging and un-belonging and show that the city is a site of complex attachments for its inhabitants. I show that my middle-class interlocutors have ambivalent, complex, and contradictory relationships with the city's spectacles: they experience belonging, have cherished memories, and engage in cultural contestations within the spectacular urban landscapes. However, they also experience loss, rapid changes and other forms of un-belonging. This research begins by investigating how different actors implicitly or explicitly engage with discourses of authenticity about Dubai. It then explores experiences of belonging and exclusion at the intersections of ethnicity, class, gender and citizenship.