Why Loiter - Shilpa Phadke, Sameera Khan, Shilpa Ranade

SHILPA PHADKE, SAMEERA KHAN AND
SHILPA RANADE
Why Loiter?
Women and Risk on Mumbai Streets
PENGUIN BOOKS
Contents
About the Authors
Prologue
CITY LIMITS
1. Why Mumbai?
2. The Unbelongers
3. Good Little Women
4. Lines of Control
5. Consuming Femininity
6. Narrating Danger
7. Courting Risk
EVERYDAY SPACES
8. Public Space
9. Commuting
10. Peeing
11. Playing
12. Designed City
IN SEARCH OF PLEASURE
13. Who’s Having Fun?
14. Can Girls Really Have Fun?
15. Do Muslim Girls Have less Fun?
16. Do Rich Girls Have more Fun?
17. How Do Slum Girls Have Fun?
18. When Do Working Girls Have Fun?
19. May Night Girls Have Fun?
20. Can Girls Buy Fun?
21. Can Different Girls Think of Fun?
22. How Do only Girls Have Fun?
23. Do Old Girls Have Fun?
24. Where Do Girls Have Fun?
25. Can Good Girls Have Fun?
IMAGINING UTOPIAS
26. Why Loiter?
Notes
References
Acknowledgements
Copyright Page
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Shilpa Phadke is a sociologist. She is Assistant Professor at the
Centre for Media and Cultural Studies at the Tata Institute of Social
Sciences, Mumbai. She has been educated at St. Xavier’s College,
Mumbai, SNDT University, Mumbai and the University of Cambridge,
UK. She conceived and led the Gender and Space project at
PUKAR. Her areas of concern include pedagogy; middle-class
sexuality and the new spaces of consumption; feminist politics
among young women; and urban transformations. She has
published widely in newspapers and magazines and in academic
journals and books. She loves the chaotic city of Mumbai and
fantasizes that it will one day have a very large park.
Sameera Khan is a Mumbai-based journalist, writer, and researcher.
A former assistant editor at the Times of India, she currently teaches
journalism at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences and is a research
associate with PUKAR, an urban research collective, where she
worked on the Gender and Space project. An active founder member
of the Network of Women in Media, India, she has contributed
essays to several anthologies including Bombay, Meri Jaan: Writings
on Mumbai and Missing: Half the Story, Journalism as if Gender
Matters. She has a BA in history and Anthropology from St. Xavier’s
College, University of Bombay, a diploma in mass communications
from Sophia Polytechnic, and an MS in journalism from Columbia
University, New York.
Shilpa Ranade is a practising architect and researcher. She trained
in architecture from CEPT, Ahmedabad and has an MA in
Comparative Cultural and Literary Studies, University of Arizona,
Tucson: her thesis examined the trope of motherhood in late
twentieth century Hindu nationalism. She has been associate editor
of the South Asian volume in the series ‘World Architecture 1900–
2000: A Critical Mosaic’ and has also published articles in various
architectural magazines. Shilpa is a founding partner of the design
collaborative DCOOP where her portfolio includes interior,
architecture, landscape and urban design projects.
Advance praise for Why Loiter?
This short, elegantly written book questions the myth that Mumbai is
a paradise for women in public. The authors show that women of
different class and cultural backgrounds in Mumbai operate under
serious social, political and infrastructural constraints, and that the
right to loiter is no more and no less than the right to everyday life in
the global city. This book will appeal to social scientists, urbanists,
gender scholars and, more generally, to all those who want to take
fun more seriously.
—Arjun Appadurai, Goddard Professor of Media, Culture and
Communication, New York University
To ask the question ‘Why loiter?’ is to place the issue of gender and
space within the right perspective. Because it goes beyond safety
and protection; it asserts women’s right to public space, to do as
they wish, instead of using it as a necessity for transiting from one
point to another. This is the best part of this eminently readable,
accessible and informative book—it meshes theory with experience,
it is written in a lively style (not always evident in academic writing)
and it recounts real-life experiences that will resonate with every
woman, regardless of her age.
—Kalpana Sharma, independent journalist, columnist, and author of
Rediscovering Dharavi: Stories from Asia’s Largest Slum
Prologue
Imagine an Indian city with street corners full of women: chatting,
laughing, breast-feeding, exchanging corporate notes or planning
protest meetings. Imagine footpaths spilling over with old and young
women watching the world go by as they sip tea, and discuss love,
cricket and the latest blockbuster. Imagine women in saris, jeans,
salwars and skirts sitting at the nukkad reflecting on world politics
and dissecting the rising sensex. If you can imagine this, you’re
imagining a radically different city.
It’s different because women don’t loiter. Men hanging out are a
familiar sight in the city. A man may stop for a cigarette at a
paanwalla or lounge on a park bench. He may stop to stare at the
sea or drink cutting chai at a tea stall. He might even wander the
streets late into the night. Women may not. We argue that there’s an
unspoken assumption that a loitering woman is up to no good. She is
either mad or bad or dangerous to society.
Of course, no one actually says this out loud. But every little girl is
brought up to know that she must walk a straight line between home
and school, home and office, home and her friend or relative’s home,
from one ‘sheltered’ space to another.
This book maintains that all of us, whether we’re women or men,
regardless of our differences, have the right to loiter. When society
wants to keep a woman safe, it never chooses to make public
spaces safe for her. Instead, it seeks to lock her up at home or at
school or college or in the home of a friend.
In this book, we explicitly foreground the middle-class woman
because although public discussions of safety might appear to be
about all women, they tend to focus implicitly only on middle-class
women. In the urban Indian context, this middle-class woman is
further assumed to be a young, able-bodied, Hindu, upper-caste,
heterosexual, married or marriageable woman. A man with her set of
identities would have open, legitimate and unquestioned access to
public space. The middle-class woman is then apparently privileged
in every way other than gender. Focusing on this woman then allows
us to unravel the implicit assumptions of gender, class, caste,
community and sexuality that underlie popular notions of safety.
Though the work is based in Mumbai, we hope the ideas and
debates in this book will find resonance with the experiences of
women in other cities in India and the world, especially those that are
re-envisioning themselves as global cities. We also engage with the
common myth that feminism is passé in the twenty-first century, and
show just why and how relevant feminist politics is to re-imagining a
vibrant and inclusive concept of citizenship in contemporary India.
We draw on the findings of a three-year-long research project, the
Gender and Space project that focused on women and public space
in Mumbai to demonstrate beyond reasonable doubt that despite the
apparent visibility of women, even in urban India, women do not
share equal access to public space with men. Women in Mumbai
have, at best, conditional access to public space. Turning the safety
argument on its head, we now propose that what women need in
order to maximize their access to public space as citizens is not
greater surveillance or protectionism (however well meaning), but
the right to take risks. For we believe that it is only by claiming the
right to risk, that women can truly claim citizenship. To do this we
need to redefine our understanding of violence in relation to public
space—to see not sexual assault, but the denial of access to public
space as the worst possible outcome for women. Instead of safety,
what women would then seek is the right to take risks, for it is only
by claiming the right to risk that we can truly claim citizenship.
The early ideas for this project were born in 1997, while one of us,
Shilpa Phadke, was travelling through Agra, Gwalior, Jhansi, Orccha
and Datia in North India with a friend. We reproduce some edited
notes from her travel diary:
As two women travellers, or ‘laydeej’, we were well aware of the
need to plan the minutest details. Our hotels and guesthouses were
booked in advance. The train tickets were reserved mindful of
delays. We could not leave before it was light or arrive after dark.
Our clothes were chosen to be as little out-of-place as possible. As
urban bal-kati auratein (short-haired women) we could not hope to
blend in completely but nor did we want to draw undue attention.
Interestingly, it was our very difference that sometimes kept us
relatively safe—for despite being Indian women, we were clearly
outsiders, not subject to the same rules as the women who lived
there.
Nonetheless this did not mean we were not harassed. In our
guesthouse in Agra, we put a chair under our door handle as we
heard repeated knocks on the door well after midnight. At the
Gwalior fort we finally succumbed and hired a guide (a man, of
course—are there any other kind?), his presence ‘protecting’ us from
many offers of guidance and other things. At the palace-fort in
Orchha we held our breath when a group of men loudly talking to
each other and verbally harassing us went by without doing more. As
they passed us, both of us saw vivid images of gang rape in our
minds. That holiday passed off without anything worse than verbal
harassment and strange and leering looks. Despite the pleasure we
found in our travels, there was a sense that as women we did not
have access to the full range of travelling pleasures.
In Mumbai I find myself back on my local train route thinking about
being back in familiar terrain. Our careful strategizing in the north
brings home to me sharply how much I actually strategize even in my
own city in order to be able to access public space.
Discussing this with other women, I realize that almost without
being aware of it, every woman reflects deeply about how to access
public space. Our safety is something that at a visceral level none of
us take for granted but strangely enough, this need to plot, plan and
strategize has come to assume the proportions of a taken-forgranted life-world for all of us. As I ask questions of them and myself,
this sense of stoic taken-for-grantedness crumbles, producing angry
and humiliated stories of harassment.
Using these stories as the starting point to query women’s access to
public space, Shilpa Phadke began writing a preliminary project
proposal and discussing it with colleagues at the urban research
collective, Partners for Urban Knowledge Action and Research
(PUKAR) in 2001. Sameera Khan and later, Shilpa Ranade, became
first important interlocutors and then integral partners to the research
project. Our multiple and cross-disciplinary dialogues sustained and
enriched the project as it grew into something larger and more
exciting than any one of us could have done on her own.
A generous grant from the Indo-Dutch Programme on Alternatives
in Development (IDPAD) allowed us to conduct extensive research
on questions of gender and public space. This book draws on this
research conducted in Mumbai from September 2003 to September
2006.
During this period, we studied fourteen different areas in the city
across geographical location, class and religious affiliations, and
usage. Segments of four of these localities were also ‘architecturally’
mapped into drawings that demonstrated women’s movements in
public space. We also conducted ethnographic observations at five
suburban railway stations, four public parks, three private shopping
malls and four coffee shops.
The methodology of the Gender and Space project was multipronged. The conventional techniques included locality studies,
ethnography and mapping, which are accepted methods from the
fields of social sciences and urban planning. These provided us with
extensive and intensive information about the city through interviews,
focus group discussions, participant observation, architecturalmapping, city planning data, secondary sources in the media and
scholarly literature on the city.
Our aim was not only to collect data for our research, but also to
engage in advocacy and to initiate a more public debate in the city.
Therefore, we deliberately chose to also engage with nonconventional research techniques such as video and audio
documentaries and photography to complement our conventional
methodologies.1 The project worked with Central Railway officials to
assess thirty-five local train stations for lighting levels. In addition, we
conducted three long courses and numerous short workshops with
undergraduate students of sociology, history, architecture, applied
arts and mass communication, and the discussions in these
pedagogic contexts are also reflected in our analysis. We also
convened three open round-table discussions on relevant themes,
organized a full-day academic seminar on gender and public space,
and participated in various advocacy/protest activities in the city.
This critical engagement with people across the spectrum added a
dimension to our research, which would not have been possible
through conventional isolated research. Thus, for us, participatory
research was part of a philosophical and ethical position of engaging
in a manner where the users of space are seen as partners in the
process.
This book is based on our research. It is as much about the city as it
is about gender. It engages with feminist ideas in the context of
twenty-first-century urban India and challenges the meanings
attached to the concepts of risk, safety, modernity and citizenship.
Our focus is on varied dimensions of class and geography as we
traverse the city, writing about various places and people. Choosing
to focus on one area meant leaving out several others. And so it is
that men’s voices tend to be few and far between in this book. Caste
is another category that we could not engage with substantively.
These are significant omissions which we hope will be filled in by
further studies. We are also aware that the section ‘In Search of
Pleasure’ might be seen as stereotyping people and places as it
attempts to provide a bird’s-eye view of the city. Some of the
nuances and subtle variations may be lost, but this choice, to
sacrifice depth to width, in covering more of the city and the women
in it, is one that we made. We feel these limitations keenly as the ink
begins to dry on our manuscript. In some cases, the women and the
locations we write of are composites derived from our research,
though our descriptions will ring a bell for most people familiar with
these spaces or similar spaces in their own cities.
Feminism in India and elsewhere in the world has often been
accused of a lack of joy—the terms of description our undergraduate
participants in workshops used were inevitably negative—manhating, anti-beauty, anti-family. While we disagree with these
negative stereotypes, it is not untrue that even after decades of
struggle, women cannot claim the right to fun. Even as many women
today compete with men in the work space, when it comes to
pleasure, the battle has barely begun. Our effort in this book is to
foreground the fact that the seeking of pleasure, the succumbing to
the seduction of risk are, when performed as acts of inclusion,
profoundly feminist acts with potentially radical implications.
Why Loiter? is written for a general reader, in the hope that
questions of women and their place in the city become central to the
complex debates on cities in general and Mumbai in particular. It is
divided into four sections, with essays that focus on different facets
of the debate, and can be read on their own. ‘City Limits’ lays out the
central arguments of the book making connections between gender
and safety, risk and citizenship, locating these against the histories
and geographies of exclusion in the city. ‘Everyday Spaces’
examines the hardware of these debates, focusing on the role of the
material infrastructure in reinforcing or undermining these structures
of exclusion. ‘In Search of Pleasure’ maps the possibilities and
impossibilities for different women in different parts of the city to seek
unconditional fun in public space. ‘Imagining Utopias’ is an extended
chapter that brings together the ideas of the preceding three sections
to make a case for loitering as a fundamental act of claiming public
space and ultimately, a more inclusive citizenship.
Co-writing is a delicate dance in whose complicated footwork we
found an unexpected pleasure. The devolution of responsibility made
the act of committing ourselves to paper (or rather computer) seem
less ‘risky’ and more pleasurable. This has been an exciting journey:
moving from a focus on the right to safety as citizens to demanding
the right to engage with risk and partake of the pleasures of the city
through loitering. This book is the result of that journey. Its premise is
feminist: the desire for gender equity in citizenship; its agenda is
inclusive: the right of all citizens to public space.
Shilpa Phadke, Sameera Khan and Shilpa Ranade
Mumbai
City Limits
1. Why Mumbai?
‘Bombay Girl’—a term that suggests a certain degree of insouciance
about the world and your place in it—is the word that has been used
to describe the Mumbai woman. She is the woman in the neatly
pinned sari that defies the pull and push of the local train crowds.
She is the one taking long strides in a nine-yard sari, carrying a
heavy basket of fresh fish on her head, ready to take on anyone who
dares come in her way. She is the one in the pin-striped suit, working
on a laptop in the air-conditioned comfort of her car oblivious to the
hooting, smoking traffic outside. She is the one in the bus on her way
to college, wearing a tight T-shirt that reads ‘Eye-Candy’. She is the
one on the Scooty expertly making her way through winding roads to
the local bazaar as her pastel ridha billows around her like a halo.1
She is the one in the little black dress lounging in the latest club
sipping a glass of Chenin Blanc, waiting for her date to show up.
So will the real Bombay Girl please stand up? Of course, Bombay
Girls are not any one thing—nor are they really girls at all. All the
images of the Bombay Girl painted above have a grain of truth in
them, but they are also incomplete. So if you go looking for Bombay
Girls, you will encounter some that remind you of these but also
some who are very different—and all of them tell you a little part of
the story that goes into creating the multiple lives and worlds of
Mumbai women.
There is Sushma Pandit, chartered accountant and thirty-year-old
mother of two, who is a regular on the 8.15 a.m. Dombivili local to
CST. And there’s another Sushma Pandit, a sixty-three-year-old
widow who cooks at five houses in Dadar Hindu Colony, determined
not to be a burden in her daughter’s family. Or take Aliya Husain, the
creative head of a television channel in Andheri, who has recently
bought a plush apartment in Lokhandwala. Her namesake has a
Master’s degree in history but would never dream of a career; she
lives in Dongri, proudly running a household which consists of her
businessman husband and two children. Sheetal Shah is a collegegoing student from Ghatkopar who has loud arguments with her
mother over the tight T-shirts with provocative slogans she wears.
The other Sheetal Shah is the same age and has just returned from
her honeymoon in Switzerland to live with her husband’s extended
family at Malabar Hill.
Neelanjana Jadhav (IAS) is a deputy secretary and works at
Mantralaya, the state secretariat. By a quirk of fate, her domestic
help is also Neelanjana Jadhav, a.k.a. Neelu, a primary school
dropout who commutes from Dharavi on the 11 Ltd. bus. Amy
Pereira is one of the most popular mathematics tuition teachers in
Bandra. Our other Amy Pereira will admit to being sixty-five, dresses
in designer sarees, and is one of the city’s leading obstetricians, who
has delivered more babies that she can count. Mehr Singh is a top
model walking the ramp across the globe and is facing stiff
opposition from her parents over her lesbian lover. The other Mehr
Singh neé Batliwala is fighting a battle to inherit her parents’
beautiful apartment in Dadar Parsi Colony. These composites reflect
the worlds of only some of the women in the city; their names are
fictitious but their lives are not.
The Mumbai woman then could be rich, poor; old, young, middleaged; a Hindu, a Muslim, Sikh, Christian, Jain or Buddhist; married,
single, divorced, lesbian, hetero-or bisexual. She might be brahmin,
dalit, bania (or anything in between) and speak Hinglish, English,
Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati, Urdu, Tamil, or Bambaiya. Each Mumbai
woman is a unique combination of these multiple identities.
Contemporary Mumbai, considered to be India’s most modern city, is
a metropolis of almost 5.5 million women and 6.5 million men.2
Mumbai has often been lauded in the media as the best city in the
country for women to live and work in. The image of the Bombay Girl
as much more assertive and independent than her sisters in other
cities still holds. She is envied and derided in turn for her famed
bindaasness, her ability to take on the world on her own terms and
for simply living in a tough, even if friendly, city. In fact, so successful
is this narrative of safety that the Mumbai woman’s access to public
space is taken for granted. By ‘narrative of safety’ we mean all the
ideas that people have, the stories they tell, and the beliefs they hold
about safety that become part of the popular public imagination.
So one might ask: why Mumbai? After all, in Mumbai, women are
visible travelling in buses and local trains, shopping in bazaars and
malls, working late in multinational offices as managers and in corner
shops as saleswomen. As a television journalist who relocated from
Delhi to Mumbai put it, ‘You girls don’t know how good you have it’.3
SO WHAT MAKES MUMBAI DIFFERENT?
Perhaps it is its history of social reform in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries. Like Bengal, the linguistic region now
called Maharashtra was deeply implicated in this movement for
change. Here women were not passive beneficiaries of the
movement; their voices were heard in public debates. Pandita
Ramabai and Rakhmabai are only two of the women whose voices
and pens expanded the spaces for women in the public domain.
Their determination to be heard played no little role in the kind of
visibility women in Maharashtra and particularly Mumbai enjoy
today.4
Perhaps, the presence of a large and visible workforce of women
across classes: white and blue collar, as well as the innumerable
informal economy workers who fuel the mythical commercial energy
of the city, also contributes to the image of Mumbai as a safe and
friendly city for women. So pervasive is the presence of the ‘working
woman’ on the city streets that it is largely unremarkable especially
during the daytime. In this city, women’s worth as participants in the
workforce is acknowledged and brings with it a certain degree of
approval. This also means that a large number of shops and
services stay open late at night, catering to the needs of these
working women and creating bright, buzzing streets that add to a
sense of comfort even after dark.
Perhaps it is Mumbai’s famed urban transport, arguably the best in
the country, that plays an important role in furthering Mumbai’s
reputation as a safe city. Women are visible as commuters on the
public buses and trains that run almost twenty-four hours a day.
Each day, the bus transport system shudders under the weight of 4.5
million people and the suburban railway network literally bulges with
6.1 million commuters. By our calculations, approximately 15 to 20
per cent of these are women.5 In addition, the city has a large fleet of
taxis and auto-rickshaws. Mumbai taxi drivers are often compared to
their counterparts in London and New York for their ability to
navigate the city, their friendliness, their loudly voiced political
opinions and also their professionalism. Of course there are the odd
instances of harassment, but these are few and far between relative
to other cities.
Perhaps, another aspect that makes Mumbai different is the fact
that the city escaped the clutches of modernist planning. In other
words, it was not imagined as a city neatly compartmentalized into
living, working and entertainment zones. As a result, for most of the
city, these functions overlap, sometimes spawning hostile battles as
when a disco is located in the basement of a residential building. But
it also means that most areas of the city are busy late into the night,
creating a sense of being occupied and crowded, which can be a
source of comfort. Certain new areas planned as business districts,
on the other hand, do empty out after working hours, making them
lonely, threatening and even eerie.
Perhaps, none of these factors on their own would mean as much,
but together they produce a sense of acceptance, even welcome, to
women when compared to other cities.
It might seem at first glance as though Bombay Girls have it all. So
then, ‘Why Mumbai’?
Because, as always, there is another side to the story. For, if
Bombay Girls apparently have unrestricted access to public space,
then why are there still so few of them as compared to men at any
given place or time? Why do their large bags often hold pepper
sprays, safety-pins, and knuckle-dusters? Why do women call home
before they leave anywhere, especially late at night? Why do women
feel the need to look like they are busy, either talking on the phone,
or listening to a walkman when taking their morning jog alone?
Look carefully and you will find that the women in the neatly
pinned saris also wear equally discreet but nonetheless visible
mangalsutras that mark them as married (and therefore spoken for).
The women on their way to college in tight t-shirts also have their
files clasped carefully to their chests in the classic posture of
defensiveness. The corporate woman keeps her cell phone close to
her, especially when she travels at night. The women in the ridha are
only allowed their Scootys on the condition that the ridha goes with
it. The women in the club have jackets tucked under their chairs that
they put on the moment they step out of the club.
Mumbai’s women too do not have uncontested access to public
space. They feel compelled to demonstrate at any given time that
they have a legitimate reason to be where they are. Commuting to
work, ferrying children to school or going shopping are seen as
acceptable reasons for women to access public space. However,
being in public space without any apparent reason is not so easy
even for the bindaas Bombay Girl. It is when women ‘get above
themselves’, that the invisible boundaries become apparent. As
every Bombay Girl knows, her freedom is subject to her knowing the
‘limits’, restrictions that often do not apply in quite the same way to
her brothers.
So although relative to their countrywomen in other cities, women
in Mumbai are privileged in their access to public space, they still
have to strategize, consciously or unconsciously, to negotiate public
space. This is precisely ‘Why Mumbai?’ For if this is the standard of
access to public space in the country, then perhaps we lack both
ambition and imagination.
2. The Unbelongers
There is a Bombay, a Bambai and a Mumbai. Just like there are
many different Bombay Girls, there are many different cities in
‘Mumbai’. There is a South Mumbai and a North Mumbai. There is
the Mumbai of high-rises and privileged wealth and the Mumbai of
shantytowns and abject poverty. There is the city of derelict mills and
the city of flashy malls. There is the city of the Marathi manoos, the
Gujarati vyapari, the North Indian bhaiya and the Tamil babu. There’s
the bania crorepati, the dalit safai karamchari, the Muslim powerloom
worker, the indispensable multi-tasking domestic worker, the
struggling actress, the Udipi restaurant waiter and the East Indian
secretary.
Each lives in his/her Mumbai, occupying anything from a few
square feet of pavement to several thousand square feet of super
built-up deluxe real estate. Each, moreover, has very different claims
to the resources and spaces of the city. This disparity is not
something new or even unique to Mumbai. Cities and definitions of
citizenship have always been based on the principle of exclusion—
on grounds of class, religion, race, age, sexual preference and
property ownership, among others. You could have lived in Socrates’
Athens and not been a citizen if you were a woman. You could have
lived in Julius Caesar’s Rome and not been a citizen if you were a
slave. You could have lived in Portia’s Venice and yet not been a
citizen if you were a Jew.
Even historically, as urban geographer Don Mitchell (1995) points
out, public spaces—whether the Greek agora (marketplace), Roman
fora, or American parks, commons, marketplaces and squares—
were premised on exclusion even as they mediated interaction
between people. For instance, in Greek democracy, an individual
was acknowledged to be a ‘citizen’ only if he fulfilled certain criteria.
Citizenship was denied to slaves, women and foreigners, and though
they may have worked in the agora, these groups were formally
excluded from the political activities of this public space. Similarly,
urban scholar Richard Sennett (1994) notes that in ancient Greece,
citizens never comprised more than 15 to 20 per cent of the total
population, which was approximately half the adult male population.6
Unlike ancient city-states, in modern politically democratic
countries, citizenship is theoretically premised on constitutional and
legal equality. However, in practice, criteria that are not very different
from those of ancient times are used to determine who are legitimate
citizens with rights to the city.
In Mumbai today, the unbelongers are the poor, cast in the role of
ungracious migrants who occupy the city’s spatial assets without
officially recorded remuneration; the dalits and other lower castes
whose presence is barely acknowledged, except grudgingly, when
they take to the streets during Ambedkar Jayanti; and the Muslims,
who are increasingly stereotyped as disagreeable outsiders,
criminals and potential terrorists. Then there are the couples we
don’t want sullying our park benches, the non-vegetarians we don’t
want residing in our building complexes, the bhaiyas we don’t want
selling our fish or driving our cabs, the gays and lesbians we don’t
want corrupting our young, the North-Easterners we’d rather dismiss
as ‘Nepali’, the elderly folk we don’t want occupying expensive real
estate, the differently abled who we’d rather just ignore than allow
any access to public space in the city, and, of course, in public
space, all women without legitimate purpose, who should in any
case be at home as good wives and mothers.
This category all women includes women whose fathers, brothers
and husbands are the undisputed belongers—middle-class, upper-
caste, Hindu, young, able, heterosexual men. This might seem like
an exaggeration since one sees these apparently privileged women
in public spaces of the city as Mumbai strives to take its place
among the global cities of the world. However, parallel to this
visibility of the ‘modern’ Indian woman is an increasing neotraditionalism that locates women back in the private space of the
home. This is buttressed by the increased reportage about public
violence against women, which furthers the narrative that women are
not safe in public spaces, sanctioning even greater restrictions on
their movements.
The increased exclusion of marginal citizens is reflected in the
increasing public violence against those seen to not belong. This
violence takes the shape of ousting people from their homes and
places of livelihood, of tolerating brutal acts committed by private
agencies and the state against certain groups and communities, and
generally ignoring the basic needs of entire sections of the city’s
population.
Interestingly, this endemic violence is treated as separate from the
violence against women and often elicits much less public outrage
even though they are in fact fundamentally connected. The
perception that these two kinds of violence are completely separate
from each other is so well entrenched, that popular rhetoric actually
places women’s access to public space in opposition to that of other
marginal citizens. It is this perception that underlies fingers being
pointed at North Indian immigrant men by some right-wing politicians
after the much-publicized molestation of two young women near
Juhu beach on New Year’s Eve 2008. Without awaiting any
evidence, ‘outsiders’ were cast as the culprits responsible for
‘disrespecting women’ and ‘giving Mumbai a bad name’. The
implication clearly was ‘remove these men from our city and our
women will be safe’. Ironically, at least half the suspects who were
apprehended turned out to be Marathi-speaking young men.7
The common belief that these two kinds of violence are separate
and disconnected phenomena then allows the city to cast all women
as potential victims and poor, dalit, Muslim and increasingly, North
Indian men as potential perpetrators of violence.8 The success of
this narrative is apparent from the fact that women themselves often
identify the lower class, and Muslims as the threat to the city. At our
focus group discussions, we often heard comments like, ‘Santa Cruz
east is close to the slums, so it’s a very bad area’ or ‘I think Dongri,
Bhendi Bazaar and Mohammed Ali Road are unsafe areas. The
names of the shops are mostly in Urdu and quite unfamiliar.’
Similarly, the slum area of Dharavi is consistently cast as the image
of what Mumbai does not want to be.
In reality, both women and ‘other’ men are outsiders to public
space, and the exclusion of women from public space is inextricably
linked to the exclusion and vilification of other marginal citizens.
However, the expressed concern for ‘women’s safety’ allows ever
more brutal exclusions from public space in the guise of the
righteous desire to protect women. This kind of unchecked violence
is a more recent development in a city that once prided itself on its
diversity and tolerance.
Bombay/ Bambai/ Mumbai, all names for the city in English, Hindi
and Marathi, respectively, became officially only Mumbai in 1995.
This change has not just been nominal but reflects an increasingly
conservative economy and polity, signalled by the communal riots
that the city witnessed in 1992–93.9 Parallel to this have been largescale socioeconomic upheavals including a shift from a
manufacturing to a service economy, most tellingly symbolized in the
conversion of its historic mills to glitzy malls. Prior to this, the working
class had a greater claim to the city than they do now. In fact, the
textile mill worker was one of the classic images of the quintessential
Mumbaikar, a claim that has been undermined by the near closure of
the textile industry in the city.10
Some commentators perceive the 1992–93 Mumbai riots to be a
watershed, shattering the vision of the city as a cosmopolitan melting
pot.11 Other scholars argue that Mumbai had always been a
fractured city, something the riots had only confirmed. These
dissenting voices suggest that ethnic and caste divisions in Mumbai
had in any case been organically linked with the economic structure
of the city.12 It is debatable whether the riots caused the demise of
the city’s cosmopolitanism or merely proved that this
cosmopolitanism had not been uniformly shared by all social groups
or classes. But what is evident is that they caused an almost
irreparable damage to the social and political fabric of Mumbai city.
Over the last decade, socio-economic changes have ossified
these divisions in the city to make it not just anti-marginal citizens,
but, more importantly, to make their exclusion more acceptable.
There was a time when Nehruvian socialism and secularism created
a national rhetoric of inclusion. Today, however, economic
liberalization, globalization and communalization of the city have
made it permissible for people to express their hostility in ways that
would have been unacceptable earlier. The blame for poverty can
now be laid at the door of the individual, absolving the state of any
responsibility. This simultaneously gives the middle and upper
classes a sense of righteous claim to what are in reality common
resources, such as water and space.
Even the dreamscape of Bollywood was more inclusive and had
room for the poor.13 We have come a long way since then to a time
when filmmakers often choose to shoot only in Switzerland or in
high-rises and against the sanitized backdrops of gated enclaves.
Today, the same Amitabh Bachchan, whose character cocked a
snook at the rich, saying ‘In zameenon ka mol ho
shaayad/Aasmaanon ka mol kya doge?’ (These lands may have a
price/But what price will you give for the skies?) in Lawaaris (1981),
is cast in an advertisement for a leading newspaper group which
suggests that there are two ‘Indias’ in this country: ‘one that is
straining at the leash’ and eager to forge ahead and take its place in
the world, and ‘the other India that is the leash’, which is holding that
self-propelling nation back. It is evident that by the latter the
advertisement refers to the poor, the illiterate and the daily-wage
workers who actually keep the city ticking.14
Mumbai then is no longer the city of dreams which welcomed
everyone but is now actively hostile to the poor and the outsider.
Mumbai’s slum-dwellers, numbering almost seven million, form more
than 50 per cent of the city’s population. Yet, slum demolition drives
are routinely undertaken, using the rhetoric of beautification.
Hawkers are moved around like pawns on a giant chessboard under
the pretext of zoning and cleaning up the streets.15 Bar dancers, and
in fact dancing in bars, has been rendered not just illegal, but is
surrounded by a problematic debate on morality and corruption of
‘Indian’ values.
Increasingly, ‘citizens’ are only those who can afford to buy a
range of goods and services from water and electricity to real estate
and toilet cleaners (which, of course, suggests the possession of a
toilet), and from credit cards and club memberships to luxury cars
and LCD television sets. The greater an individual’s capacity to
consume, the larger is ‘his’ claim to the city. As consumer citizens we
are told we have rights: the right to consume good products, the right
to legal redress when consumer products are sub-standard. The
rhetoric of consumer citizenship has all but drowned out the faint
voices that claim citizenship based on inalienable rights to public
space in the city.
This impulse to exclude the poor is reflected in the spatial
geography of the city: in the increasing security that we see, in the
high walls of gated communities, in the glass barriers of malls and
coffee shops, that repel even as they seductively beckon. As
anthropologist Arjun Appadurai (2000) puts it, ‘The rich in these
cities seek to gate as much of their lives as possible, travelling from
guarded homes to darkened cars to air-conditioned offices, moving
always in an envelope of privilege through the heat of public poverty
and the dust of dispossession.’ Nor is such a geography of exclusion
and violence unique to Mumbai. Many cities of the world, including
Sao Paulo, Los Angeles and Mexico City demonstrate high levels of
economic and political discrimination that play out spatially as well.
As Mumbai is poised on the brink of being recognized as a ‘global
city’, the demonization of the poor is increasingly reflected in public
policies that chart this new vision for the city. A classic example of
this is a 2004 report, grandiosely called ‘Vision Mumbai’, which aims
at making Mumbai a ‘world-class city’.16 It is a model built on the
idea that we must make the city inviting and seductive to capital
investors (and for this we must contain, if not entirely wipe out, the
poor). The unarticulated implication is that otherwise the city and, by
virtue of its location as India’s commercial capital, the country will fall
into a decline, conceding defeat immediately to China. This might
sound like a parody, but in the way the future of Mumbai is
represented in the media, such thinking is unfortunately all too real.
This is the city that would be Shanghai or Nanchung, anything but
friendly to its poor. The poor are then pushed away to the city
peripheries. Speaking of the situation in Los Angeles, which could
apply to Mumbai as well, Mike Davies (1992) argues that not only
are the poor increasingly sequestered in ghettos but their every
attempt to use public space for survival purposes—for instance, by
the homeless or street vendors—is criminalized. In Mumbai, this is
mirrored closely by the closure of dance bars and the removal of
hawkers that has been legitimized in the past few years.
This demonization is also reflected in the narratives on safety
articulated by combative middle-class citizens’ groups where the
poor are seen as threats to the safety of the middle classes. Safety
and order are prized in the new global city—both of which are
presented as the antithesis of what is embodied, literally and
metaphorically, by the poor: their slums are unsanitary, their homes
makeshift, their bodies unhygienic, and their very existence a source
of threat not just to the middle classes but to the city itself.
If the growing affinity towards neo-liberal economics has virtually
legitimized violence towards the poorest of the poor, then the
deepening of right-wing politics in the country, and indeed the city,
has normalized the hatred towards Muslims.
The spectre of the communal riots of 1992–93, which sought to
‘cleanse’ the city of its Muslim citizens, continues to haunt Mumbai
and shape its imagination. The Hindu right-wing garnered support
across all classes in Mumbai by playing up the stereotypical image
of the Muslim Other as a crude, Pakistan-supporting terrorist, and a
promiscuous father of umpteen children.17 All Muslims were
uniformly coloured, ignoring the reality that Muslims in Mumbai have
always been a very diverse group.18
The last two decades have communalized relations between
Muslims and other communities to such an extent that the Mumbai
Muslim is now a pariah, increasingly marginalized from the
mainstream, displaced and excluded from many of the city’s
heterogeneous spaces. In the new spatially divided city, Muslims are
progressively debarred from accessing mixed housing as well as
from doing business in the more heterogeneous areas of the city.
While Hindus continue to have the option of living in mixed areas,
this choice has been increasingly denied to Muslims. When two
reporters of a national television channel did an undercover story in
2004 pretending to be a Muslim couple looking for a flat, they were
refused flats in several localities.19 Another young Muslim couple
who looked for an apartment in Mira Road were told to go to only
certain buildings at the other end where people like them stayed.
‘There you will feel at home,’ said the real-estate broker matter-offactly. Even the 2006 Sachar Committee report that investigated the
status of Indian Muslims mentions that there is a marked reluctance
on the part of house-owners to sell or rent out houses to Muslims
and that banks discriminate against them in giving home loans. 20
So what does the exclusion of the unbelongers from city resources
have to do with the exclusion of women?
‘Safety’ is the apparent reason why women are denied access to
the public. The unarticulated reason why women are barred from
public space is not just the fear that they will be violated, but also
that they will form consenting relationships with ‘undesirable’ men.
The focus on safety is rooted in conservative class and community
structures, particularly those of ‘sexual endogamy’, which means that
sexual relationships are sought to be kept within specific defined
groups. This notion of safety encompasses not just sexual assault
but also undesirable sexual liaisons even if they are consensual. The
focus on safety rather than sexual endogamy, allows the erasure of
questions of both class safety and unwanted sexual-affiliations
across class and communal lines.
Apparently there is almost as much shame in choosing the wrong
kind of man as there is in being violated against one’s will. Women
are then carefully monitored in an effort to not just prevent them from
being assaulted but also to guard against their forming unsuitable
alliances with men of their choice. This surveillance takes many
forms—parental protection, fraternal affection, husbandly
possessiveness, neighbourly nosiness or even the more formal
strictures of the community (sharia jamaats, khap-panchayats and
jatipanchayats) and state (constitutional laws and police acts). For
women, decisions regarding their movements, partners, sexuality or
even their own bodies are often not their choice. This then is the
covert reason why women are prevented from accessing public
space: the anxieties regarding the seductive prowess of this
undesirable ‘other’, which could adversely affect not only the
reputation of the middle-class woman, but equally significantly, that
of her extended family and community.
This control of the movement of women is heightened in
communities that perceive themselves as being marginalized. This is
because women, traditionally seen as unsullied by the vagaries of
the outside world, often become the symbolic markers of a
community, the keepers of its tradition, and the bearers of its honour.
Controlling them then becomes synonymous with the protection of
the community.21
For example, the increasing exclusion and ‘ghettoization’ of
Muslims in Mumbai has had particularly adverse social,
psychological and political consequences for Muslim women. Our
research demonstrated that there are no significant differences
between the access of Muslim women and that of women of other
communities to public space. As with other communities, class, age,
education, employment, and geographical location are equally
important determinants of women’s access. Though the restrictions
on Muslim women’s access to public space are similar to other
women, the fact that their entire community is looked upon with
hostility, and lives in fear of violence, means that they not only have
decreased opportunities to venture out of community boundaries but
also that their movements and behaviour are more closely policed by
their families and community. For instance, an increased number of
women report that wearing the burkha has become a pre-condition
of their access to public space. At the same time, in a scenario
where their community is under threat, women’s demands for equal
rights are rendered secondary to proving solidarity with their
community. The anxiety that marks Muslim women’s engagement
with public space is then both the anxiety of being a woman in
public, as well as the anxiety of being a woman of a particular
minority community group in public. Thus, political and cultural safety
as a Muslim is as much of a concern to them as the issue of
everyday civic safety.
Moreover, the marginalization of the Muslim community affects not
just Muslim women. The stereotype of the aggressive Muslim male
also impacts the access of non-Muslim women to public space. It is
this fear of the imagined aggressor that women from other localities
articulate when they say that Muslim areas are unsafe. Otherwise,
going to Mohammed Ali Road to shop was something women from
all parts of the city would do regularly without marking it as a Muslim
area. Hindu right-wing agendas also consciously promote the idea
that it is the Muslim man whom Hindu women have to fear and be
protected from. This vision becomes not just the reason to exclude
Muslim men from public space, but also justifies increased policing
of all women.
Safety for women is framed through the creation of a fallacious
opposition between the middle-class respectable woman and the
vagrant male (read: lower class, often unemployed, often lower caste
or Muslim). By creating the image of certain men as the perpetrators
of violence against women, women’s access to public space is
further controlled and circumscribed and acquires an unquestionable
rationality. In an interesting sleight of hand, both the person
perceived to be the potential molester and the potential victim of the
act of molestation are denied legitimate access to public space on
these grounds.
Women, however, often perceive some of those regarded as
outsiders as representing the familiar ‘eyes’ on the street that urban
scholar Jane Jacobs alluded to in the 1960s. For instance, one
woman points out that the hawker who sold bhel across from her
apartment building had been a familiar and therefore comforting
sight for several years, unlike the security guards who changed
every month. Similarly in our interviews, women commuters who
navigated the area between the office district of Fort and Churchgate
railway station lamented that ever since the hawkers vending books
on the pavement were cleared in 2005, the area became
uncomfortable after dark inducing them to walk through it at a faster
pace.
The argument that middle-class women’s, and indeed all women’s,
access to public space will improve substantially if we remove lowerclass men from the scene is thus flawed even at the level of
rationality. This argument is used to justify and reinforce various
kinds of exclusions from public space, thus rendering both women
and other marginal citizens outsiders to public space.
Who then feels a righteous sense of entitlement to the city? The elite
by virtue of their wealth and the middle classes who define
themselves as ‘honest tax-paying citizens’ feel most entitled to the
city and its manifold resources and services. This sense of claim is
reflected in the burgeoning citizens’ groups—each seeking to ‘clean
up’ their 200 square yards of the city. The emerging fractures in the
city disturb them only so much as it upsets their sense of security
and the conditions of their pavements.
In the apparent struggle between rampant economic and cultural
globalization on the one hand and reactionary religious and cultural
fundamentalism on the other, the profile of the desirable subject of
the city is getting more narrowly defined every day. Together, these
seemingly opposite (but ironically compatible) forces are writing out
the marginalized from the narrative of the city. And, as always, when
groups are marginalized and direct or indirect forms of violence are
inflicted upon them, it is women who are pushed to its precarious
edges.22 The effect of exclusion on them is most telling, particularly
in relation to curtailed access to public space and the policing of their
everyday movements.
Today, even though various gender-related issues are taken up in
the media, the focus is on singular events and sensational stories. In
this mélange, the fact that the various events are inter-linked is often
lost. Issues like dress codes, the ban on bar dancers, the rape of a
college girl, and the violence against women on local trains, all
receive attention individually. In reality, these concerns are related
not only to each other, but also to other processes of exclusion in the
city: the demolition of slums, the attempts to clear spaces of
hawkers, the prejudice against minorities and other ‘outsiders’, and
in general the desire to erase everything that does not cohere with
the vision of the city as a global sanitized space where things are
kept safely in separate compartments.
Once one understands that these issues are inter-linked in
complex ways, it becomes clear that they stem from the same desire
to maintain the status quo. Without subscribing to conspiracy
theories, it is clear that this status quo is maintained by pitting
excluded groups against each other. The focus on safety for women
clouds the larger issue of civic safety—that is, safety for all. It not
only ignores concerns of a class-or community-based safety, but in a
bizarre twist actually presents these as the problem.
Addressing the question of women’s access to public space then
means engaging with the messy intricacies of layered exclusion. It
means confronting head-on the fact that the exclusion of the poor,
dalits or Muslims are not acts of benevolence towards women but
part of larger more complex processes where one group of the
marginalized are set against another in a battle whose strings are
pulled by forces outside them. Placing these groups as the threat to
women’s access only means that all of them and all women will
continue to remain outsiders to public space. Women’s open access
to public space then cannot be sought at the cost of the exclusion of
anyone else. While there are particularities to women’s exclusion,
women’s safety or access to public space cannot be imagined in the
absence of a more general claim to city public spaces for all citizens.
3. Good Little Women
A major Mumbai news story of 2005 was the banning of ‘ladies’ bars’
in the state by the Maharashtra government. These were ostensibly
downmarket dance bars where alcohol was served while women
danced to Bollywood film songs on a stage. The closure of these
bars was represented in the languages of morality (‘The bars are
corrupting our youth and breaking up our families’) and danger (‘The
night is a time of unbridled sexuality’). And interestingly, the debate
was chiefly centred on the figure of the bar-dancer.23
For, as we know, there are women in bars and there are barwomen. The former are consumers in upmarket nightclubs and pubs;
the latter work in bars as dancers. Society does not view them
similarly, especially not in public space. In the world of bars, the
separation between women as consumers and women as
performers or dancers reflects the divide between those defined as
‘good women’ and therefore to be protected, and those defined as
‘bad women’, from whom society needs protection.24
Narratives of safety for women in the city then, tend to focus on a
certain kind of woman. She is the woman you see in advertisements
peddling the joys of washing machines, cooking up noodles at a
moment’s notice, or looking subtly sexy in her branded business suit.
She is the woman racing to catch the 8.23 Churchgate fast train with
a file tucked under her arm, haggling over the price of oranges at the
local bazaar, or giving her children instructions on the cell phone.
She is the woman advertisers woo, multinationals employ, and
parents track down for their sons. She is the woman who can make
the habitually apathetic Mumbaikars take to the streets in outrage
when she is sexually assaulted. It is in her name that streets are
sought to be cleaned up and public spaces sanitized. This is the
woman you might imagine is the average Bombay woman.
But this is only the simple picture. The simple picture presumes an
unmarked ‘neutral’ woman in the city who must be protected from
danger. It assumes that all women are the same, ignoring the
differences that make for very distinct experiences of city spaces.
This Neutral Woman is assumed to be not-lower-class, not-dalit, notMuslim, not-lesbian, not-disabled. But if one looks closely, the
supposed average Mumbai woman is neither neutral nor unmarked.
Hence, even though public discussions of safety might appear to be
about all women, they tend to focus implicitly only on middle-class
women.25 In the urban Indian context, this middle-class woman is
further assumed to be a young, able-bodied, Hindu, upper-caste,
heterosexual, married or marriageable woman. A man with her set of
identities would have open, legitimate and unquestioned access to
public space. The middle-class woman is then apparently privileged
in every way other than gender.26
The middle-class woman is, in fact, implicitly central to ideas of
Indian womanhood as the symbolic measure of many things. It is her
education and employment that become the measure of a
family/community/nation’s progress. Her clothing and visibility in
particular places becomes a marker of desirable modernity. Her
virtue, sexual choices and matrimonial alliances are fraught with
questions of appropriateness and dogged by the assertion of caste,
community and class endogamy. Those choices perceived as wrong
or inappropriate may find sanctions ranging from ostracism to
murder (as with the so-called honour killings). She becomes the
canvas on which narratives of modernity and honour are
simultaneously written. She is the bearer of respectability—of all
moral and cultural values that define the society.
Yet, it is this very notion of respectability that provides the rationale
to foreground the figure of the middle-class woman and effectively
evades any questions that might arise about exclusion based on
grounds of class and community. This allows concerns about women
to be only about middle-class women. For instance, the kind of
attention paid and outrage expressed when a middle-class college
girl was raped by a policeman on Marine Drive in April 2005 was
missing when a teenaged rag-picker was raped, also by a policeman
only six months later.
For women, respectability is fundamentally defined by the division
between public and private spaces. Being respectable, for women,
means demonstrating linkages to private space even when they are
in public space. The public–private divide is one that dates to the
growth of the urban middle classes after the industrial revolution in
Europe, when increasing wealth made it possible for more women to
withdraw into a private domesticated world—making the privatepublic divide an aspirational value. Brought into the workplace by
economic pressures in the late nineteenth century, working-class
women were a visible presence in urban public spaces, engaging in
activities that were regarded as lowly. For this reason, in the early
twentieth century, middle-class women’s access to the outside world
made it imperative that there be ways in which these ‘respectable
women’ could be distinguished from the ‘non-respectable’—in this
case the working-class women. Feminist historians have suggested
that one of ways in which middle-class women did this was to carry
with them the private modes of being into the public—that is to
demonstrate through their body language that they belonged in the
private.27
In the Indian context, historian Partha Chatterjee (1990) has
argued that in colonial Bengal, nationalists selectively chose which
notions of western modernity espoused by the British they would
accept. While they were willing to accede to the superiority of the
‘modern’ west in relation to science and technology, the nationalists
claimed culture and cultural identity as sites to be protected from the
dominance of the colonizers. These sites became part of the private
world of the home, away from corruption by ideas of western
modernity. Women, who were the mainstay of this inner or private
sphere, thus became responsible for preserving the sanctity of
national culture.
The division of ghare-bhaire—ghare, the inner world of tradition
and continuity, which was the sanctum to be guarded by women, and
bhaire, the hurly burly of everyday life which was seen as somehow
impure and rough and had to be dealt with by men—was thus
normalized. This did not mean that the woman could not be modern;
in fact, it was important for the Bengali woman to be educated and
have an understanding of the outside world, but this did not in any
way take away from her primary feminine role within the home as
mother and wife.28
Besides demonstrating that they belong in private spaces, women
also have to indicate that their presence in public space is
necessitated by a respectable and worthy purpose. Further, this
purpose has to be visibly demonstrated to the effect that when any
woman accesses public space, she has to overtly indicate her
reason for being there. This demonstration takes many forms: for
instance when standing alone at a bus stop at night, many a woman
will accentuate her large bag, glasses or wrinkled end-of-work-day
clothes to denote that she has been at (respectable) work. By using
such performances of gender strategically and by demonstrating that
they have a reason to be in public space, women create both
respectability and simultaneously enhance their access to public
space. This performance cannot be a one-time thing, as appropriate
femininity has to be enacted again and again each time women
access public space.
The exercises we conducted during the course of our research
clearly demonstrate the need for this repetitive performance of
respectability and purpose.29 In one exercise, participants were
given a drawing representing a typical residential neighbourhood
street corner in Mumbai on a weekday evening where they were
asked to separately locate a woman and a man in their mid-twenties
(who were not from the same locality), waiting to meet a friend there,
in places that they were most likely to be found. For most
participants, locating the woman was obvious—she would usually
wait at the bus stop. Locating the man was much harder because as
they put it ‘men could be anywhere’. Discussion revealed that the
woman was placed at the bus stop because then she would appear
to be doing something, that is, waiting for a bus. So what would
happen if she stood at the street corner? She would then be ‘out of
place’, hanging around without an apparent purpose. To fail in the
demonstration of purpose might leave the woman open to conjecture
and, in some cases, the assumption that she is soliciting.
When the tyranny of manufacturing purpose and producing an
aura of privacy determines women’s access to public space, women
who are inadequately able to demonstrate this privacy are seen to
be the opposite of ‘private’ women, that is, ‘public women’ or
‘prostitutes’. This binary between the private and the public woman
defines all women’s presence in, and relationship to, public space.
The public–private division of space decrees that the rightful place
of respectable women at night is within their homes and not in public
spaces.30 This idea is used to separate ‘private’ (good) women, who
are in their homes after dark, from the sexually and socially
transgressive ‘public’ (bad) women who work at night. Ironically, in
India, while sex work is not illegal, soliciting in public places is. Sex
workers’ presence in public has always been illegitimate. Under the
provisions of the Immoral Traffic (Prevention) Act, 1988 of the Indian
Penal Code, any woman appearing to invite the gaze, or ‘gazing
back’ or even simply being in what is perceived as the wrong place,
at the wrong time, in the wrong dress, or walking in the wrong way,
could be booked for soliciting.31
For, if some women face the threat of being defiled in public
space, then some (other) women are considered capable of defiling
the ‘sacredness’ of public space by their very presence.
‘Respectable’ women could be potentially defiled in a public space
while ‘non-respectable’ women are themselves a potential source of
contamination to the ‘purity’ of public spaces and, therefore, the city.
For the so-called ‘respectable’ woman this classification is always
fraught with some amount of tension, for should she transgress the
carefully policed ‘inside–outside’ boundaries permitted to her, she
could so easily slip into becoming the ‘public’ woman—the threat to
the sacrality of public space.32
The greatest source of anxiety around public space then stems not
from the presence of sex workers or ‘unrespectable’ women in public
space but from the potential of confusion in distinguishing
respectable women from the unrespectable. For example, after
sunset, parts of Mumbai’s Dadabhai Naoroji Road, on which the old
Victoria Terminus (now renamed Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus)
railway station is located, are peopled by sex workers soliciting
business and other professionals usually on their way home from
work. Both are dressed similarly in saris, salwar-kameezes or jeans.
Both are seen to use cell phones, calling friends and family or
communicating with potential clients of whatever kind. In that twilight
time, literally and metaphorically, anyone could be anything. There is
a distinct possibility of mistaking ‘good’ middle-class women for sex
workers. The police, particularly, are very uncomfortable with this
ambiguity as it undermines any control on women’s presence in
public space.33
The public woman is not so much a direct threat to ‘good’ women as
much as an illustration of what might happen to good women should
they break the rules. Namely, if they break the rules, they are no
longer deemed worthy of ‘protection’ from society. In fact, it is society
which is perceived to be in need of protection from the risk of
contamination that sex workers present. This perception of
contamination takes many forms: the threat of sexually transmitted
diseases and the threat to public morality posed by the very
presence of the sex worker in public space. This not only justifies
denying ‘respectable’ women access to public spaces but also
serves to derecognize any violence that ‘non-respectable’ women
might face in public.
Sex workers, perceived to be engaging in work that is inherently
risky and non-respectable, are therefore seen to be outside the
purview of protection available to other women. Consider the
Abhishek Kasliwal rape case in March 2006 in Mumbai. A fifty-twoyear-old woman alleged that twenty-seven-year-old Kasliwal—
member of a wealthy business family—had raped her inside his car.
A medical examination confirmed the rape and injuries sustained by
her. The media showed great interest in the case until police
investigations suggested that the woman was probably a commercial
sex worker who was assaulted in the process of selling sex. The
tone of the reportage and investigation then quietened down and
eventually died out. Since the victim was possibly a sex worker, she
was probably seen as less worthy of protection from a violent sexual
assault and thus merited even lesser media and police attention.34
Not just sex workers, but even other women who appear to break
the rules are deemed ‘unrespectable’, the antithesis of desirable
womanhood. They are the women who defy the boundaries defined
by families and communities and are not merely content playing the
roles assigned to them. These include single, divorced and lesbian
women, as well as those heterosexual women who cross lines of
caste, community and religion for love and marriage.
In a context where the family and community are all-important,
izzat or honour begins to assume a value that supersedes safety—
that is, from the perspective of communities and families, the
preservation of women’s respectability and honour implicitly
outweighs the value placed on their actual safety. Although statistics
show that violence against women is far greater in private spaces
such as homes, ironically, it is public violence that is the cause of
greatest concern for society.35
Women then feel compelled to produce respectability and protect
the ‘honour’ of their families even at the cost of their own safety. For
instance, one young woman living in a predominantly Gujarati Jain
building on Malabar Hill in South Mumbai would always be dropped
off by her boyfriend at some distance from her building since her
family did not know of his existence. She would then walk down the
dark and deserted lane alone, however late at night. ‘Family honour’
demanded that she value her reputation over her actual safety. This
is not something out of the ordinary, but an act that many women
across the city perform without thinking twice. That this is so easily
taken for granted demonstrates beyond reasonable doubt that visible
virtue is valued over actual physical safety.
Similarly, when a woman is raped, one often finds that the concern
is less about bodily or mental harm to the woman and more about its
repercussions on her reputation and honour. Shame appears to
attach to the victim of assault rather than to the perpetrator of the
crime. The reluctance to press charges in actual incidents of assault
shows that families are more concerned with the ‘reputation’ of their
women rather than the execution of justice. In the early 1990s, when
a student was raped in Elphinstone College in South Mumbai by a
group of other students, she was whisked away and never allowed to
testify.
In 2005, more than a decade later, another young college-going
girl was raped in broad daylight by a police constable at Marine
Drive. The young woman, in this case, after being assured of
anonymity, did give evidence to the police that enabled them to
prosecute the man, but this was partly due to the huge public outcry
following the crime. What is of particular interest to us in this case is
that there was a lot of public speculation about her companion, a
young boy of the same age. While, on the one hand, the constable
had apparently used the fact of her being out with a male friend to
threaten her into the chowki; her parents almost appeared to
condone this act of moral policing when they were quoted in the
media, suggesting that their daughter did not know any boys. It
seemed more important for them to prove that their daughter’s
actions had been within limits of permissible behaviour than to
demand justice irrespective of what she had been doing.36
So it appears as though the privilege of the middle-class woman in
public space is only a veneer. The respectable middle-class woman
is central to any discussion on safety and public space in the city.
However, the demand for respectability means that she can only
have conditional access to public space. The need to demonstrate
respectability in her everyday actions and movements and the focus
on sexual safety instead of real safety, actually denies middle-class
women rights to public space. Furthermore, the insistence on
respectability excludes other women who are deemed
‘unrespectable’ from staking any claim whatsoever to public space.
For both desirable and undesirable female subjects, the insistence
on respectability actively contributes to not just reducing women’s
access to public space, but also compromises their interests when
they do access public space. The inextricable connection of safety to
respectability, then does not keep women safe in the public; it
effectively bars them from it.
4. Lines of Control
There was of course, no way of knowing whether you were being watched at
any given moment … you had to live, did live, from habit that became instinct,
in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard … every
movement scrutinized.
—George Orwell, 1984
Orwellian dystopias aside, women should come with a ‘comfortablebeing-watched’ gene encoded into their DNA. As foetuses, we are
watched carefully for the presence of a penis and some of us never
make it past that stage. As little girls growing up, we are watched as
we sit, stand, eat and move. We are constantly told how to behave,
walk and talk and as we grow older, we are ogled at by men of all
ages: uncles, neighbours and strangers alike. So much so, that we
learn to watch ourselves and internalize society’s gaze, which tells
us how we should conduct ourselves as good little women.
This act of constant self-surveillance by women produces what
French thinker Michel Foucault calls ‘disciplined bodies’. Foucault
argues that in spaces like prisons, schools, hospitals and asylums,
where people are constantly watched by those in authority, the
subjects—inmates, students, patients—no longer have to be
monitored because they begin to monitor themselves. This produces
a self-censuring gaze that Foucault calls ‘disciplining’.37
To fully understand the underlying reasons and implications of this
disciplining, we have to remind ourselves that gender is not
something we are but something that we do.38 Or, as philosopher
Simone de Beauvoir famously put it, ‘One is not born a woman, but
becomes one.’ Both men and women learn to perform their gender;
boys learn what behaviour is appropriate to them and girls learn
what constitutes feminine behaviour. As girls grow into womanhood,
the body becomes the central medium through which these unwritten
codes of behaviour are transmitted and memorized. The demure
lowered gaze fixed at some point on the floor, the acquiescent nod of
the head, the feminine swing of the hips, the closely held thighs and
the modestly drawn-in shoulders are all written into our bodies by
invisible hands and inaudible words so that we start believing that
this is the way we are supposed to be. These ideas of appropriate
gender behaviour are like mnemonics that we carry along with us
lest we forget the realities of being women.
The containment of a woman’s body is demonstrated by the very
tightness with which she holds herself and moves. The notion that
such gendered body language is ‘natural’ is reinforced by observing
other women we encounter. For example, observing men and
women in public transportation and on the streets of Mumbai, one
notices the tentative and watchful manner in which women occupy
public space. In BEST buses, the average woman will occupy the
least possible space, rendering herself as inconspicuous as she can.
This is often both a strategy to avoid groping hands and a reflection
of women’s conditional access to public space. On the other hand,
the average man will spread his legs out, occupy more than half of a
two-seater in a bus and appear to disregard the people around him.
At bus stops and railway stations, a woman will often hold a file,
folder or book close to her chest, keep her eyes averted and seem to
focus inward rather than outward. Men, on the other hand, stand in
postures of control with legs held apart, look around with apparent
ease and often occupy additional space with their arms. In every
space, except perhaps sex-segregated spaces, men demonstrate
greater levels of comfort, indicating a greater sense of belonging
than do women.
A woman’s awareness of her surroundings and other people in it,
on the other hand, is acute. Women’s body language inside sexsegregated spaces, like the ladies’ compartment in the Mumbai local
train, is different from that outside. In this ‘space’ women seem free
to be what they want, sit as they like, even with legs spread out, and
drop the masks demanded by the norms of modesty.
The very presence of women in public is seen as transgressive
and fraught with anxiety. For women, accessing public space is
rarely a simple question of get-up-and-leave. It often involves the
performance of unbelievably elaborate masquerades, undertaking
complicated subterfuges and employing a range of accessories both
consciously and subconsciously. As suggested earlier in the chapter
‘Good Little Women’, as outsiders to public space, women negotiate
access by demonstrating respectability through signs that
inextricably link them to the private space of the family and the home
and by establishing an unequivocal purpose for going out in public.
So long as women are able to convey the dominant narrative of
gender—that they belong in private and not the public—they gain
conditional access to public space. To signal refusal to adhere to
these codes often invites censure, sanctions and violence.
Prominent amongst the signs that women use to underscore their
private location are symbols of matrimony worn on the body such as
bindis, black-beaded mangalsutras around the neck, green bangles
and red sindoor in the parting of the hair for Hindu women. These
signify matrimony, perhaps, the most telling sign of respectability in
the Indian context where marriage is assumed to indicate the safe
containment of women’s sexuality. Even without the presence of a
man by her side, a mangalsutra dangling on the bosom of a woman
in the local train or bus acts as a ‘keep-off-I-am-taken’ sign in a
cultural context where such signs are easily decoded and give
women greater license in public space than they would have without
it. In fact, sometimes even women who are not married wear a
mangalsutra. As one American doctoral student told us, ‘I bought a
cheap mangalsutra to wear when I travel late at night, as people
presume I am a respectable married woman and harass me less.’
Marriage, especially coupled with appropriate gender performance,
often gives women greater access to public space. In comparison,
single women tend to be policed much more stringently.
With these symbolic markers, women attempt to construct an
image of themselves as models of ‘good’ Indian womanhood, who
are worthy of being out in public and being protected. Such markers
can create a bubble of private domestic space around women, even
as they ‘transgress’ into public space. In some ways, it is also an
attempt by women to self-police their bodies in public, or more
importantly, to ensure that their bodies are ‘read right’ as being
private bodies.
The demonstration of purpose is another way in which women
enhance access to public space while maintaining the cloak of
respectability. Women manufacture purpose through the carrying of
large bags, by walking in goal-oriented ways and by waiting in
appropriate spaces where their presence cannot be misread.
Women on their own in parks, for instance, produce a particular type
of body language of purpose. They tend to walk a linear path, do not
meet anyone’s gaze and often listen to a Walkman or talk on their
cell phones. Their attention is directed inwards and they tend not to
engage with the outside; the effort appears to be to legitimize their
presence by demonstrating that they are walking for exercise and
not for fun or social interaction. Similarly, when forced to wait in a
public place, women will be careful about the kind of place they wait
at, often choosing bus stops and railway stations as waiting points.
Tied to these spaces is a sense of legitimate purpose—that of
commuting. In other spaces, for women, the ‘act of waiting’ is fraught
with anxiety, for to wait without an obvious and visible purpose is
often perceived as soliciting.
Since it is fairly legitimate for women in Mumbai to go to school or
to work, women often use their location as students or workers to
access public space. In other ways too, women legitimize their
presence in public space by exploiting acceptable notions of
femininity such as those which connect them intrinsically to
motherhood and religion.
For instance, the study of a large public playground in Kalachowki,
a mill district in east Mumbai, shows that the low wall around the
ground is largely occupied by men, often lounging around with
friends or alone, at all times of the day, except around the time the
school flanking the playground closes for the day and mothers
coming to pick up their children take over the edge. These women
often come much before school is over and sit around talking
animatedly in groups or pairs. Many of them seem to have come
earlier just to be able to spend some ‘official’ time in public space
with friends.
Women also use religion, and more specifically, religious activities
and functions for which it is relatively easy to get family and societal
sanction, as opportunities to enhance their access to the public. The
demonstration of devotion and religiosity becomes an important
marker of respectable womanhood.
Visits to temples, dargahs and churches provide women a
legitimate and everyday access to the world outside their homes.
Sometimes, it even offers them the chance to break with protocols of
time and space—such as walking on Mumbai streets barefoot at 2
a.m. on a Tuesday morning to be at the Siddhi Vinayak temple at
Prabhadevi for the first arti at daybreak. Religious yatras and
festivals may punctuate some women’s lives in significant ways by
allowing special forms of access. This might mean a chance to beat
your chest and wail mournfully on the streets during the taziya juloos
on the tenth day of Muharram or a chance to walk uphill to Mount
Mary’s church during the week of festivity in September. Or even the
prospect of dancing with gay abandon under a starlit sky during
Navratri. Women strategically use all these opportunities to expand
their access to public space, their religious beliefs or lack thereof
notwithstanding.39
To access public space then, women are expected to conform to the
larger patriarchal order by demonstrating respectability and
legitimate purpose. If women are seen to misuse the ‘freedom’
granted to them or to inadequately perform their roles as ‘good’
women, then the weight of the watchful gaze becomes visible in the
shape of articulated codes relating to dress, norms of behaviour and
modes of acceptable conduct. The less women appear to conform to
unspoken norms of respectability, the greater appears to be the need
for explicitly articulated codes. These codes are enforced at various
levels by the family, community and even the state through implicit
and explicit boundaries that delimit women’s access to the public.
Most girls will remember the lines of control that were increasingly
put in place as they grew older—as their brothers’ worlds expanded,
theirs contracted. Daddies imposed the curfew, mummies made sure
you sat with your legs crossed, bhaiyas saw to it that you came
home straight from school, aunties commented if you romped around
like a ‘tomboy’, and uncles reported seeing you with a stranger.
Logic would suggest that women feel safest and will have most
access to public space in the spaces most familiar to them. While
women often record feeling physically safer in their own
neighbourhoods, which are known to them and where they are
known, this does not, however, translate into increased access to
public space. In fact, spaces in which women are recognized as
wives, daughters and sisters are often the most restrictive. Women
who are seen as transgressive—usually single or divorced women,
or those who openly flout social norms—are subject to hostility and
harassment much more in their own neighbourhoods than outside
where they are comparatively anonymous. Clearly, for women who
do not conform, the spaces where they ostensibly belong are the
most discomfiting.40
It is not surprising then that in our research many women from
different kinds of neighbourhoods, across class and locations, said
that they were more likely to retaliate to an act of sexual harassment
in a neighbourhood which was not their own. One woman in Andheri
said that she would ‘hesitate to make a scene in an area where I am
known because people will talk’. She articulated what many other
women across the city suggested implicitly: they feel more assertive
in spaces where they are anonymous. Thus, rather than empowering
women, the presence of insiders (and the pressure to demonstrate
respectability: ‘good women ignore sexual harassment’) can actually
prevent women from acting in their own defence. This is often tied to
the notion that women invite trouble or are in some way to blame
when harassment takes place. Creating an environment where
women are forced to manufacture respectability might actually
reduce women’s capacity to defend themselves.
It is comparatively heterogeneous spaces that engender the
greatest capacity to access public space. Single women who live on
their own in Mumbai, away from families, are often the ones who
articulate the greatest degree of unmediated access to public space.
This comes not from a sense of safety—for as women on their own
they have few support structures—but from the diminished need to
manufacture respectability. This is not intended to romanticize the
lives of single women in Mumbai who have to often negotiate
suspicious landlords and the judgemental scrutiny of neighbours and
housing colony managements who are intensely curious about
whom they meet and how late they return home from work. The
demand for women’s safety then is inevitably articulated in terms of
surveillance and protectionism and contributes to reducing rather
than expanding women’s access to public space.
Dress codes that outline what women can and cannot wear are
another example of such explicitly articulated regulatory codes of
behaviour. In fact, when there are visible public attacks on women,
the discussions inevitably focus on how the women could have
prevented it. Clothing is the first target: its length, width, cut and
even colour are debated in the blame game of national sexual
politics—many colleges and universities across the country have
instituted dress codes. In most cases, girls are prohibited from
wearing jeans and sleeveless tops. In some cases, uniforms are
prescribed for college students!41
It is a well-acknowledged fact that adhering to conservative dress
codes does not provide safety—women in saris, salwars and even
burkhas are also at the receiving end of sexual harassment on the
street. What does change, however, is the crowd’s perception of the
woman. Often, those women who are seen as respectable acquire a
greater legitimacy when they protest against sexual harassment and
tend to get sympathy and help more easily.
Articulated codes also include those from religious communities.
For instance, Muslim women have been at the receiving end of quite
a large number of such codes. These regulatory codes, called fatwas
in order to provide them with apparent religious backing, are handed
out at the whim of local priests. Increasingly, in Mumbai and areas
around, such fatwas and diktats are being issued through pamphlets
and Friday sermons by local mosques. Many of these fatwas relate
to women, specifically to their movement outside the house, such as
visiting restaurants on their own and observing purdah.42 Such
explicit codes reinforce the implicit rules and self-policing that
women practise, and further limit their mobility.
Given that the price of transgression is often violent—ranging from
social ostracism and restrictions on mobility to physical assault and
even murder—women’s apparent conformity to the codes of conduct
is strategic. Many women, however, may covertly resist these norms.
Openly challenging the lines of control would mean declaring outright
war, an action that might actually further restrict their access to
public space. When women follow the written and unwritten codes of
gendered behavioural conduct, it does facilitate a certain kind of
access to public space. For instance, playing the ‘good little woman’
often allows young women from conservative families to access
educational and work opportunities, which might not have been open
to them otherwise. These strategies then sometimes allow women to
expand the boundaries of access both geographically and
temporally.
Yet, these acts of negotiation for women are a double-edged
sword. On the one hand, they allow women to expand their access
to public space, making them more visible in public, which in turn
works towards legitimizing their presence in public. On the other
hand, this access remains circumscribed because by acting in
coherence with dominant gender structures, women reinforce them.
Wearing symbols of matrimony might allow access through
respectability, but it remains in the discourse of protectionism rather
than rights. In other words, women endorse the same structures of
discrimination that make their access fraught in the first place.
Women push the boundaries in various ways: cajoling,
threatening, inventing convoluted stories and lying in a bid to
increase their access to the public, even when they do not use
explicitly feminist language. These acts of ‘rebellion’ do contribute to
pushing women’s claims to occupy public space. At the same time,
these performances also put women into neat pigeonholes, which
might work against their making other, more radical claims to the
public. Seeking access as visibly respectable and feminine women
also excludes all those women who do not wish to be ‘feminine’ or
‘respectable’ in their dress and demeanour.
In the short term, tall tales and elaborate masquerades might allow
us to seek pleasure in public space. In the long run, however, what
we need are not covert strategies, but the demand for unconditional
access to public space so that women may walk freely any time and
anywhere in the city.
5. Consuming Femininity
If there is a space where the otherwise frustrated question, ‘Where
are the women?’ does not need to be asked, it is the modern
shopping mall. You only have to walk into a mall on a weekday
afternoon to see them. They are out there: window shopping, buying,
eating lunch, drinking coffee or just strolling around. They are in the
stores trying out clothes and making up their faces, and also in the
food courts and fancy up-market restaurants, talking, laughing and
gesticulating expansively. There are also college girls and
professional women grabbing a bite in their lunch hour or sipping
cappuccino in coffee shops, looking very much like they belong. One
finds women here at night as well, though not in the same numbers,
eating, drinking and looking very comfortable. Overall, women’s body
language in malls demonstrates a sense of belonging that is not
really visible in other kinds of public spaces.
In these new spaces of consumption that have mushroomed all
across urban India, middle-class women are not just welcomed, but
ardently wooed. Malls go out of their way to entice women
consumers—often with a designated women’s day in the week
where free makeovers and gifts are on offer. Similarly, one sees
women in discotheques and pubs, places where they are not just
tolerated, but actively desired. Many discotheques and pubs will
permit single women or all-women groups, but will not do the same
for men. In a consumption-driven economy, shopping is an act that is
both respectable and respected because consumption demonstrates
power. The buyer therefore occupies a privileged position. While
many women find pleasure in these spaces of consumption, access
to these spaces demands a demonstration of their capacity to buy.
As argued earlier, the idea of safety in the city is articulated mostly in
relation to the middle-class woman. The desire to keep middle-class
women safe in the limited public spaces that they are allowed in is
then reflected in the range of tactics to keep out those perceived to
be dangerous. Entry is regulated and concerted efforts are made to
repel the poor, men and women alike: security guards, bouncers,
high walls, glass barriers, and closed-circuit television cameras act
to either intimidate people or actively deny them access. These malls
are clearly private spaces, however much they may try to create the
illusion of being public.
The suggested safety of middle-class women in these new spaces
of consumption defines particular locations in the city as being
desirable for the middle class to live, work or be entertained in. Many
women suggest that they feel safe in these spaces, although they
too strategize in order to get home safely. The sense of apparent
safety here is linked to the numbers of people and also to the ‘kind’
of people there—people who visibly belong to a certain class. ‘I love
hanging out in the malls on my off days because here there are
people of a better social class. I don’t have to worry about bumping
into those “roadside types” so I feel more comfortable and am able to
spend more time here,’ says a twenty-four-year-old airline
stewardess.
Clear, if unspoken, codes of dress and conduct underwrite
women’s presence even in the malls.43 The performance of a ‘class
habitus’ by women is required to underscore their legitimacy in these
spaces. The term ‘habitus’ draws from the work of sociologist Pierre
Bourdieu, who used it to refer to an individual’s way of being—which
includes the way one stands, walks and inhabits space, and is
reflected in manners of speaking, both of accent and idioms, as also
in styles of dressing, eating and conversing with people. For
instance, women often dress up to go to the mall or a coffee shop. In
both these spaces, women are expected to demonstrate their class
position through their dress and demeanour. This includes not just
clothing, which shows their capacity to buy, but also body language
that suggests a sense of familiarity, even boredom, with the mall
space. There is a studied casualness in the way they carry
themselves, as if they have been there hundreds of times. They step
on and off escalators confidently, side-stepping half-fascinated, halfterrified, lower-middle-class families, who can sometimes be seen
standing hesitantly at the bottom. There is a sense of comfort, even
belonging, that women of this class demonstrate inside the mall,
which is absent when they step back out on to the street.
Moreover, the class habitus of the middle-class woman, as
demonstrated in these new spaces of consumption, is very important
in the construction of the global city.44 The logic at work here is one
of legitimacy—the presence of respectable middle-class women
provides the space with a certain aura of desirability. In the context
of public space, the visibility of desirable women is both a sign of
modernity and a marker of the ‘safety quotient’ of the space.45
Even as globalization in the shape of these new spaces of
consumption offers women some limited access to the outside, it has
also meant rising anxieties about its impact on ‘Indian culture’.46 This
places a two-fold pressure on women: one, to embody the new
vision of the modern desirable woman, well groomed and sexy; and
two, to simultaneously demonstrate adherence to the norms of
respectable Indian womanhood. For the urban Indian women, this
paradox is often presented as offering the best of both worlds—
Indian/traditional and global/modern at the same time—a tough
balancing act, but nothing that cannot be achieved with a bit of
creativity and ingenuity.
The role of the media in the creation of this new modern, yet
traditional, Indian woman cannot be underestimated. Mainstream
films, television soaps and advertisements construct protagonists
who appear to seamlessly straddle the stereotypically traditional with
the clichéd modern: sindoor with mini-skirts or domestic goddesses
with high-powered jobs. In the process, they manufacture a fictional
pan-Indian image of womanhood. An example of this is the spread
across the country of karva chauth, which is essentially a north
Indian festival made popular by the hugely successful film Dilwale
Dulhaniya Le Jayenge (1995).47
Mangalsutras, sindoor and choodas, popularized by television
soap operas, have transcended their regional and community
locations and may even be worn as accessories. It is no longer
incongruous for women to wear the latest western designs
accessorized with medallion-sized signs of Hindu matrimony. Talking
to a group of women about the contradictions that this might
suggest, one is often taken aback to hear vehement protests. ‘I am
not embarrassed about wearing my mangalsutra with my jeans,’
declared one woman. ‘I don’t see what’s so inconsistent about it,’
argued another. ‘I can wear western wear but that doesn’t mean I
have to let go of my Indian identity,’ said a third. But before one is
tempted to view these as acts of subversion, it is important to note
their role in women’s efforts towards manufacturing respectability.
Here, the tools of modernity in the shape of attire and demeanour
do not replace the traditional; they merely modify and mediate its
expression. Cosmetic changes work, in fact, towards camouflaging
structures of power that continue to determine women’s access to
public space. This reveals the new personality of global capital—it is
a chameleon that can change colours to suit local conditions. Today,
it wears a sari so that it can take over a Mumbai market. Tomorrow, it
will change into a kimono or a djellabah if it is necessary to break
into another. Thus, while on the one side women are encouraged to
participate in the new economy, they are simultaneously expected to
demonstrate their femininity and adherence to ‘Indian’ tradition. For
example, though women’s presence in these malls suggests a
spatial mobility and women in advertisements are often represented
walking on streets or driving luxury cars, the accent never shifts from
their glowing skin and deodorized bodies. In other words, the
pressure to be feminine and respectable never lets up.
In the new global spaces of consumption, there are also new norms
in relation to sexuality where the heterosexual couple is at the centre
of all consumer fantasies. Most coffee shops in the city are
dominated by young heterosexual couples. While some couples do
consciously choose the more secluded tables; many appear
unconcerned about public demonstrations of affection. The couples
sit there, eat, drink, sometimes argue or have serious conversations.
The space is clearly a private space where they are concerned. In
the new spaces of consumption, a different morality operates—one
that is removed from the dress codes of colleges and the antiromance tirades of public spaces such as parks and promenades.
As long as they dress class-appropriately and look like they belong,
the presence of couples and even their displays of affection are not
looked at askance. They actually constitute part of the message that
is sought to be conveyed: these are global spaces with global rules
where one can leave behind the city and its parochial cultural
contexts.
Women on their own, too, often feel comfortable hanging out in
coffee shops. These spaces allow them to be in ‘public’ in particular
ways that permit visibility without compromising respectability. This
place to hang out, however, comes with a price tag attached and we
are not merely referring to the cost of the coffee. The private and the
public are no longer clearly distinct, but embedded within one
another in the same space, creating a potential ambiguity and,
therefore, the need for women to continuously demonstrate their
respectability.
The fact that women’s access even to such new spaces of
consumption is fragile is demonstrated by an incident in an upmarket
neighbourhood of Mumbai. In May 2006, the local police in
Lokhandwala in the suburb of Andheri alleged that they had received
complaints that women sex workers were fixing up clients in the
open seating spaces outside some popular neighbourhood coffee
shops. As a result, the police prohibited the coffee shops from
serving customers in the open area outside their restaurants. The
connotation was clear: any woman sitting in these spaces could be
perceived as soliciting. This accusation was met with outrage, but
nonetheless many women stopped sitting outside.48 So fragile and
shifting then are women’s claims to even these supposedly friendly
spaces that they have to carefully monitor themselves even here. If
we were conspiracy theorists we would argue that the space of a
coffee shop offers the illusion of loitering while insidiously reinforcing
gender roles and normative sexuality and class codes. Since we are
not, however, we will simply say that as a step towards middle-class
women’s claim to public space, it is a remarkably small one.
It is important at this point to reiterate that new spaces of
consumption like coffee shops and malls are not public spaces, but
privatized spaces that masquerade as public spaces. Limited access
to such private–public spaces creates a veneer of access for
women, pre-empting any substantive critique of the lack of actual
access to real public space. While these spaces might give individual
women an opportunity to hang out, it does not in any significant way
change the limited nature of women’s access to public space nor
does it adequately challenge the dominant idea that women’s proper
place is in the private.
Even middle-class women who conform to normative ideas of
respectability are at best invited into the ‘privatized’ public as
consumers. Despite their desirability in these private spaces, women
continue to have only conditional access, not a claim to public space.
Privilege, then, does not bestow, on even limited numbers of women,
unlimited access to public spaces in global Mumbai.
6. Narrating Danger
Early on New Year’s day in 2008, even before the sun had dawned
on the first day of the year, women across the country were already
contending with public violence:
In Kochi, two foreign women were molested on a beach.
In Patna, more than fifteen boys from a medical college forcibly
entered the girls hostel, ransacked it, and tried to molest the girls
when the girls refused to party with them.
In Pune, some men barged into a club, ‘passed lewd comments’ at
women and got aggressive when others around them tried to
intervene.
In Kolkata, ‘groper gangs’ on motorcycles roamed Park Street and
targeted and molested women who were out for the evening.
In Mumbai, an unruly mob of almost eighty men groped and
molested two young NRI women in Juhu, an upmarket suburb.
The Mumbai incident—reminiscent of a similar incident in 2007 when
a girl was molested by New Year’s Eve revellers at the Gateway of
India—caught the public eye more keenly because a newspaper
photographer captured the assault on camera.49 According to the
news report published the next day, the women and their husbands
had just come out of a five-star hotel at 1.45 a.m. and were walking
towards Juhu beach, when a crowd of men began harassing them.
Apparently, one of the women swore loudly at the men, who then
surrounded them and molested them brutally, tearing off their clothes
in the process. At this point, a passing traffic police van stopped and
the police lathi charged the crowd to disperse it. The police took the
victims to Juhu police station, but no case was registered. It was only
two days later, after a formal complaint was recorded, that the police
registered a First Information Report, which led to the arrest of about
fourteen people.
If the police failure to register a suo moto case was not surprising,
then Mumbai Police Commissioner D.N. Jadhav’s comments the
next day certainly were. His contention was that ‘Anything can
happen anywhere,’ that ‘These small things happen in every society
…’ and that ‘The media is creating a mountain out of a molehill’. As if
this were not enough, he went on to assert, ‘Is your wife at home
safe …? That’s because of our policing …’50 Commissioner Jadhav’s
misplaced notion of what his policing duties involve apart, his
comments indicate not just police apathy, but also a larger vision of
where women really belong for, shockingly, Jadhav’s views seemed
to be mirrored by many others in the media and public.51
This vision, that women do not have the right to be in public, also
underlies the responses of both the perpetrators and the victims of
the attack. The perpetrators, once out on bail, held a press
conference where they defended their actions by saying that they
were drunk but ‘under control’ (whatever that means) and were, in
fact, being framed; it was ‘the girls who were drunk and smooching
on the road’. They claimed no one was pointing a finger at the
women. Ironically, the perpetrators were supported by middle-aged
women neighbours protesting the virtue of their boys. The young
women, both NRIs, disappeared from the public gaze after that night.
They neither spoke to the police nor to the media who tracked down
their ancestral village in search of a story. Despite the ‘boys’ claim
that no one was pointing a finger at the women, the subsequent
actions of both seem to indicate that the perpetrators felt well able to
‘show their faces’ in public while the women apparently felt
compelled, like most women victims of such crimes, to hide their
identities.
Despite their good intentions, newspapers, television channels
and radio stations over the next few days—in the name of factual
reporting—talked of what the women wore, how late they were out,
who they were out with, where they had come from, how much they
had drunk, and the fact that they retorted in response to the taunts of
their perpetrators. As a result, the message being sent to women in
the city is clear: the public wants its women safe, but it thinks that the
buck stops at the women themselves, it is up to them to know their
limits. The police think it’s not their job to make sure the streets are
safe for everyone—in fact, they believe it is the responsibility of
women (and their families) to police themselves.52
When crimes do take place, like the New Year’s Eve molestations or
the rape of a young college girl by a police constable on Marine
Drive in 2005, the public perception of safety is impacted. Narratives
of danger draw on particular ‘events’ of violence, assault and rape
which then have implications even for those women who are not
directly involved in them. When an international student was raped
by six men in Mumbai after a night out with them in April 2009,
several print publications published the victim’s FIR to the police,
including many graphic details. This not only violates the privacy of
the victim, making her vulnerable to identification, it also deters other
women victims of sexual assault in the future from ever filing an FIR.
Similarly, at a round table discussion, the Gender and Space project
organized a month after the Marine Drive rape, young women who
participated spoke of their fear that the wide publicity generated by
the crime would lead to a greater policing of their everyday
movements and decreased mobility in public space.53
However well-intentioned, media reportage of violent incidents
tends to contribute to making the predominant discourse of women
and public space one of inevitable danger. There is no denying that
violence in public is real and threatening to women and it is not our
intention to suggest otherwise. At the same time, the manner in
which stories of violence are told and hierarchies of ‘danger’ are
constructed magnifies the perception of the threat to women in
public. For instance, a fatal drunken driving incident on Marine Drive,
which also occurred on New Year’s Eve 2008, involving a few young
men, got much less media attention than the Juhu assault. Most
importantly, there were no reports or comments which even so much
as hinted that the public space or being out at night on New Year’s
Eve was unsafe for men. In comparison, the Juhu story got twelve
days of intense coverage focusing on whether public space was safe
for women in general. While it is important for public violence against
women to be reported, at the same time, the tone and focus of
media reportage may also create everyday anxieties that feed into
the general perception which casts ‘public space’ as dangerous for
women.54
The language in which public violence is described makes it sound
more threatening. Even national papers that would describe
themselves as liberal are not exempt from a certain tone of
alarmism, even sensationalism. The following are only some
examples of the headlines that proliferate in Indian newspapers: ‘For
Women, Metro Streets are a Dark Alley’55; ‘Stalked in Sleepless
City’56; ‘Fear Builds as 10 pm nears on the Railways’57; ‘BPO
Murder: Outsourced Fear, women@risk’58; and ‘Acid Attacker, Train
Vandals Still Roam Free’59.
Not just the media, but also the general discourse on public space
tends to disproportionately highlight the dangers waiting to jump out
at women who dare to cross the prescribed lines. This misplaced
focus on the dangers to women in public space contradicts two welldocumented facts: one, that more women face violence in private
spaces than in public spaces, and two, that more men than women
are attacked in public.
The spotlight on public danger, somehow, perhaps without
meaning to, underplays the seriousness of private violence. Though
there are a large number of articles on domestic and other kinds of
private violence, they somehow do not elicit the same kind of
breathless sensational headlines. But, in reality, domestic violence
and abuse of women, especially minor girls, has increased
substantially. It is interesting to note that while the idea of the home
as a space of violence and danger is still not easily accepted, the
public is easily construed as a space of unmitigated danger that
women would do well to stay clear of.60 On the other hand, though
there are a substantial number of assaults on men in public space,
they rarely elicit the kind of speculation that assaults on women
seem to bring on. Because men are a taken-for-granted presence in
public space, violence against them is represented generically. The
spotlight on sexual safety locates sexual assault as a special type of
crime, which underlines women’s particular vulnerability. The fact
that not only women, but men, too, can be raped is something that
finds little mention. Men are rarely represented as being in danger in
public space, even when they appear to be specifically targeted, as
in the case of the homicidal Mumbai serial killer dubbed ‘Beer man’
(because in some of his murders he left an empty beer can next to
the body of his victim). The killer would sodomize his victims, usually
lower-class men, before killing them. But there was very little allusion
to the murdered men’s sexual vulnerability. There were a few other
articles on this aspect after the alleged killer was caught—but those
too very guarded and circumspect. Several men were killed between
October 2006 and February 2007, but the case was never cast as
being one of ‘poor men in danger on the streets of Mumbai’.
On the other hand, random instances of violence that might not
even be targeted specifically at women often get represented as
‘women in danger’. The ‘schizophrenic’ hammer man in Mumbai who
attacked some women with a hammer in 2006 and robbed them is a
case in point. While this crime did not appear to be targeted
specifically at women, the media coverage highlighted only safety for
women to the exclusion of all other matters. For instance, issues
relating to mental illness and the state of our social and medical
facilities to treat them were ignored.
When a woman is attacked in a public space—the question of what
she was doing there in the first place is inevitably asked, along with
variations on the theme—what she was wearing and whom she was
with. Concerns about the safety of women then are essentially about
sexual safety and not safety from theft or accident or even murder.
As discussed in the chapter ‘Lines of Control’, women’s sexual
safety is connected not as much to their own sense of bodily integrity
or to their consent, but rather to ideas of izzat and honour of the
family and the community. The debates around danger and safety
are usually constructed in the language of ‘sexual danger’ and focus
on ensuring the sexual safety of women as defined by patriarchal
families, communities and the state.
Narratives of safety in the city also reflect a conservative politics
articulated in the language of morality and respectability. Women are
often blamed for violence that takes place against them, especially
by the more conservative voices of the city. For instance, following
the 2005 Marine Drive rape, one editorial read: ‘Be careful and the
world will appear to be good … But in today’s superfast world …
there are shards of glass on this modern path … we don’t see
parents telling their children to tread carefully … There seems to be
a competition among young women to show their undergarments in
the name of a ‘below-waist’ fashion … To see girls dangle a cigarette
openly is worrisome. If a man is provoked by such clothes, who can
one blame?’61
Although this quote is not representative of the general tone of the
media and is arguably its most conservative voice, media reports do
tend to underscore not just the violence that ‘bad’ women face, but
also the fact that even women who conform are not necessarily safe.
The reportage of violence against women in public suggests that
even when women conform to the rules, which demand purpose and
respectability in public space, they are still in danger. The onus of
demonstrating that they ‘did not ask for it’ continues to rest with
women.
The presence of these often apocalyptic visions of impending
disaster have the effect of making women anxious, compelling them
to strategize and negotiate every square foot of public space they
access, all the while constantly looking over their shoulders, stalked
ceaselessly by the ghost of past crimes. These accounts of danger
reinforce women’s anxieties in public, thus normalizing women’s lack
of access to public space. Furthermore, they have the added effect
of sanctioning various kinds of restrictions on women’s mobility by
rationalizing them as being for their own safety and well-being. For
instance, an attempt to regulate clothing in colleges was justified in
the name of women’s safety. One report was headlined: ‘Bombay
University says mini skirt ban helps stop rape’.62 Or one news report
citing the piece quoted earlier in this section is titled ‘Women inviting
attacks’.63 Though this article makes it clear that it does not concur
with the opinion expressed in the article, nonetheless the headline is
misleading and sensational. Similarly, the international student gang
rape story was reported explicitly on newspaper pages, including a
news report that asked, ‘Why was she with six men that night?’64
In such a context, the location of shame on the victim discourages
women from registering legal cases. This, in turn, influences the way
in which women see themselves in relation to the city, reducing the
claim they feel to public space. This affects not just the victims of
violent assault, but all women who are reminded yet again that
neither the city authorities nor the general public will protect their
right to the city. Women are inevitably cast in the role of potential
victims to be protected and the discourse becomes not about
women’s right to the city, but about risk, fear and danger.
Without putting the onus on the media to ‘change society’, what one
might seek then is media coverage of violence in public spaces that
is not skewed heavily in favour of violent incidents against women
alone. In a utopian world, one might ask that reports interrogate the
kinds of moral positions that underlie the desire for a particular brand
of safety for women, which reduces rather than expands women’s
access to public space. One might ask that stories seek to engage
with women’s everyday interactions and negotiations in public
spaces—such as streets, markets, railway stations, bus stops and
parks—and, perhaps, even seek to understand women’s
relationships with the city as processes rather than as events. One
might ask that danger not be defined just as sexual danger, but, in
fact, could be expanded to include the dangers inherent in the
general loss of public space in Mumbai. And one may ask that the
narratives of women and public space be not only about violence
against women, but also about increased access and pleasure.
In asking this, we speak not just to the media, who have
unfortunately become everyone’s favourite whipping horse, but to
the larger civil society that comprises aunts, uncles, parents and
grandparents who often represent the middle-class moral minority
which is likely to look at the headlines in shock and say, ‘But why on
earth was she there in the first place at that hour?’ Is it too much to
hope that in the foreseeable future the larger public discourse will
ask, ‘But why on earth wasn’t she safe and what can we change
about our city to make it safe for everyone?’ This is suggested not in
order to render the city uniformly sanitized or to take away from the
pleasures of urban risk, but because we believe that this change in
discourse—that puts the onus on the city to be welcoming—is also
one that will in fact allow women (and others) to court risk in the city.
7. Courting Risk
It’s not just the media that is preoccupied with the issue of violence
against women; the women’s movement in India is almost as
culpable. Violence against women was the rallying point around
which feminist political consciousness grew in the 1970s and 1980s.
It was issues related to overt violence against women—rape, dowry
murders and violent representations of women in the media—that
became successful campaigns culminating in new laws and
amendments to existing ones. It also led to structural and systemic
changes through the judicial system in the setting up of family courts,
special women’s courts, legal aid cells; and through the law
enforcement machinery in the setting up of vigilance committees, allwomen police stations, special crime against women cells, family
counselling centres, short-stay homes and awareness raising
schemes. These campaigns petitioned the state to respond to acts of
violence against women, placing women squarely in the role of
clients, even victims, in the eyes of the media as well as the legal
systems of justice.
In the late 1980s, the women’s movement was forced to contend
with issues of rising communalism (symbolized by the Shah Bano
case) and complex questions around authenticity and cultural rights
(illustrated by the mess that followed the Roop Kanwar sati).65 The
1990s brought with it more communal strife and the need to contend
with women as victims of violence where rape had been used as a
weapon against the ‘other’ community.66 Globalization has also
meant contending with questions engendered by consumerism and
the obsession with the body through beauty contests, consumer
goods and advertising, where women have been seen as victims of
a global capitalist conspiracy.
In all these cases, women have been cast as victims, a strategy
that has been successful in legitimizing women’s rights against overt
violence. Women’s movement activism has also successfully
focused on other kinds of violence against women through the denial
of access to resources and brought on to the agenda questions of
equality in education, employment, nutrition and health care.
Consequently, the focus of the women’s movement in relation to
public space has been on ensuring safety for women while
accessing these resources, rather than on access for its own sake.
Access to pleasure in public, even within women’s movements,
despite ‘Reclaim the Night’ marches, has never really occupied
centre-stage.67 It is seen as an add-on—if it happens, great, and if
not, well—there are many things that are more pressing and
important. Fun or pleasure as a reason to access public space has
therefore never been a priority. Lesbian-Gay-Bisexual-Transgender
(LGBT) activism in the late 1990s and early twenty-first century has
by default brought pleasure into the reckoning—since same-sex
desire and sexual activity can have no purpose other than pleasure.
However, this is not centre-staged as the LGBT movement has
sought greater legitimacy, focusing on questions of legality (through
Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code) and violence against
homosexual people by families, communities and the state.68
While foregrounding violence has put women’s issues on to the
national agenda, it has also meant that violence becomes the only
language in which one can engage with questions of gender in public
space. Every time a woman steps out of her home, it is the spectre
of violence that she must confront rather than any anticipation of
pleasure.
The modern imagination of city life is often about freedom and
liberation and engaging with public space for the sake of pleasure.
This has spawned a large body of literature—journalistic, fictional
and cinematic—predominantly produced by men about men, which
often idealizes an organic reciprocal engagement with the city. A
case in point is the now iconic figure of the Parisian flâneur.69
Pleasure in the urban context has often been linked to the
possibilities for taking risk, being transgressive, seeking anonymity
and stretching the boundaries. However, these pleasures of risk are
not equally available to everyone.
Risk-taking is often considered acceptable, even desirable
masculine behaviour. For women, on the other hand, it is not only
seen as unfeminine, but as potentially the behaviour of a ‘loose’
woman. These spoken and unspoken restrictions then preclude the
possibility of women seeking pleasure and thrills by accepting
enhanced ‘risk’ as a possible negative outcome. For women, the
potential negative outcome of courting risk lies not only in the threat
of physical violence, but also in the risk of being seen as
‘unrespectable’ and therefore not worthy of protection.70 As argued
in the chapter ‘Good Little Women’, the risk to women of seeking any
kind of pleasure in the city includes not just the risk of physical
assault, but also the risk to reputation if they are seen as
transgressive. Because the city is cast as dangerous and because
women are not allowed legitimately to take risks, even the simple act
of walking in the streets without purpose is not easily achieved.
Access to public space is even more fraught with anxiety after
dark. For seduction, pleasure and risk are deeply interwoven with the
night. Darkness represents the possibilities for both danger and
pleasure—a device used by various popular narratorial texts, audiovisual and written. Historian Judith Walkowitz’s enticingly titled The
City of Dreadful Delight (1992), chronicles the visual and textural
pleasures and dangers offered to men and women in late-Victorian
London. Many of these tales of murder, prostitution, theatre, clubs
and pubs are associated with the night: a time–place to be both
feared and desired. The darkness of the night presents the
possibility of meeting the proverbial stranger, a source of both
anticipation and anxiety.
Men’s presence in the public at night reflects their capacity to
enjoy the pleasures of the night even as women’s absence
demonstrates the anxiety that keeps them away. The key to
understanding this is in differing perceptions of risk. When men
engage the night, they are taking the chance that they might
experience something positive: pleasure, fun, exhilaration. They also
risk hurt, injury or death. But, for men, an assault is just an assault—
they may be injured, maimed or killed—their families will be upset,
but their social status will remain unaffected.
For women, the situation is quite different. When they do engage
the night, even when they are not assaulted, even if they actually
have fun, being seen in public space (especially while having fun) by
the wrong people could adversely affect not just their own reputation,
but also that of their families. If the spatial limits for women are
drawn out through the private–public definitions, the temporal
boundaries of a woman’s world are marked by the movement of the
sun. To be out late after dark, particularly without male companions,
is an act pregnant with fear, excitement and bravado, not short of
outright rebellion, for women.
Clearly then, courting risk is gendered—not only are men allowed
more freedom to engage with risk, including the risk of partaking
pleasure in the city at all times of the day and night, but engaging
risk also has no adverse implications for their reputation and honour.
In the preceding essays, we have argued that women in Mumbai
have at best a conditional access to public space. Turning the safety
argument on its head, we now propose that what women need in
order to maximize their access to public space as citizens is not
greater surveillance or protectionism (however well meaning), but
the right to engage risk. For we believe that it is only by claiming the
right to risk that women can truly claim citizenship.
To do this, we need to redefine our understanding of violence in
relation to public space—to see not sexual assault, but the denial of
access to public space as the worst possible outcome for women.
Instead of safety, what women would then seek is the right to take
risks, placing the claim to public space in the discourse of rights
rather than protectionism. What we might demand then is an equality
of risk—that is not that women should never be attacked, but that
when they are, they should receive a citizen’s right to redress and
their right to be in that space should remain unquestioned. Choosing
to take risks, even of possible sexual violence in public spaces,
undermines a sexist structure where women’s virtue is prized over
their desires or agency. Locating the desire for pleasure higher in the
hierarchy of demands than the avoidance of sexual violence
challenges the assumption that women’s bodies belong to their
families and communities rather than to themselves.
The desire to access the city for pleasure is not only a bourgeois
desire, though it is most immediately meaningful to middle-class
women; for lower-class women, it is often private spaces that are at
a premium, while upper-class women tend to move from one private
space to another, rarely accessing public space at all. The claim to
seek pleasure in the city is also a deeply political one that has the
potential to seriously undermine the public–private boundaries that
continue to circumscribe women’s access to and visibility in public
space. The claim to pleasure in public space as a right also implicitly
means challenging the boundaries between respectable and nonrespectable women.71
At the same time, it is important to assert that risk should be a
matter of choice and not thrust upon women through inadequate or
short-sighted planning. The right to pleasure, by default, must
include the right against violence, in the shape of infrastructure like
transport, street lighting and public toilets. It must include policies
that enable more sensitive law enforcement that recognizes people’s
fundamental right to access public space. Demanding the right to
pleasure does not absolve the city administration of the responsibility
to provide these facilities.
By our suggestion that courting risk might be a viable strategy, we
are by no means suggesting that women, or indeed any individual,
should be forced to take risks; at the same time, this should not
curtail the freedom of those who wish to court risk. At no point are
we ignoring or even minimizing the violence, both sexual and nonsexual, that might potentially take place in public. The fear of
violence in public space is real. It contains the possibility of physical
and psychological trauma. Nor is it our intention to romanticize risk
itself, for as we have suggested, ‘risk’ is a term that is already valueloaded in terms of good and bad, and desirable and undesirable
women. At the same time, the presence of violence should not
preclude the possibilities for women seeking pleasure in the city.
We also need to recognize another kind of risk—the risk, should
women choose not to access public space more than minimally, of
loss of opportunity to engage city spaces and the loss of the
experience of public spaces. It also includes the risk of accepting the
gendered status hierarchies of access to public space, and in doing
so, reinforcing them. A Bambaiya phrase that young women in
Mumbai use to describe their friends or peers who are rebellious is
‘usko bahut daring hai’ (she has guts), and its tone is admiring, not
derogatory. This suggests that young women implicitly recognize that
there is pleasure to be found in transgression. What women need
then is the right to ‘dare’, to take chosen risks in an environment
where their ‘daring’ is recognized and celebrated.72
Since the manufacture of the contraceptive pill, there has been a
slow and grudging acceptance for women’s right to sexual
pleasure.73 The question is: can we now claim the right to other
kinds of pleasure? The pleasure of sitting on an unbroken park
bench, reading a book or eating a banana (why not a banana?). The
pleasure of walking the streets at night without anxiously looking
over our shoulders. The pleasure of not having to change clothes in
a car because your family thinks they are immodest. The pleasure of
not having to hide when you enter your building at 2 a.m. in the
morning for fear of what the neighbours will say. The pleasure of
using a clean well-lit toilet at 4 a.m. in the morning on a public street
without worrying that none will be open. This kind of pleasure can
only come from the right to take risks without the fear of loss of
reputation as good girls.
Courting risk, that pleasurable dance of forward and backward, of
negotiation and choice, is something that women have the right to.
Courting involves active engagement, it implies a reciprocal
relationship with the city—a relationship in which one approaches
the city with the expectation of enjoyment. This is the right to which
we stake a claim as women. It is time we claim not just the right to
work, but also the right to play.
Everyday Spaces
8. Public Space
Public space in Mumbai is almost a contradiction in terms. In this
city, public space is not just inadequate, it is also rapidly shrinking
and increasingly being privatized. Every other footpath is being
colonized by parking lots, every other recreational ground is under
threat of being de-reserved for the benefit of the real estate mafia,
every other open maidan is in the process of being gated and fenced
in from the ‘public’. Perhaps, worse still, even the idea of public
space is shrinking.
Before going further, we should briefly clarify what we mean by
public space.1
From our perspective, public space includes ‘functional’ sites such
as streets, public toilets, bus stops, railway stations, marketplaces
and modes of public transport, such as buses and trains, as well as
recreational areas, such as parks, maidans, waterfronts and
promenades. Privatized recreational spaces such as shopping malls,
coffee shops, restaurants and cinemas are increasingly being
represented as the new public spaces of the city. Many women,
particularly middle-class women, told us repeatedly that they often
spent their leisure time in such places and viewed them as
substitutes for public spaces.2 These privatized public spaces create
the illusion of access, courting as they do middle-class consumers.
Yet, it is imperative that we distinguish these spaces from real public
spaces for in the guise of publicness, these private–public spaces
are steadily replacing public–public space, such as when spaces
ear-marked for parks and playgrounds are sold for commercial use
on the premise that even the existing parks are not being used.
Given the sheer shortage of public spaces in the city, one might
argue that the lack of access to public space is true not just for
women, but for all citizens. While this is accurate in a broad sense, it
is also true that women are particularly affected in ways often
connected to their gender. Spaces (and places) are not neutral
grounds nor are they equally designed for everybody. As social
scientists and geographers might put it, space is not a given but is
‘constructed’. Space is not a passive backdrop against which human
activities are played out but is an active participant in the making of a
particular social order. Just as much as the presence (or absence) of
people, what they do and how they do it influences the tenor of a
space; so also the kind of space and the way it is made (location,
facilities, design) affects the way people inhabit it.3 In other words,
people make space as much as space makes people.
Moreover, space is what one might call an ‘embodied experience’,
that is, it is experienced viscerally through the bodies we inhabit:
male, female, rich, poor, old, young, white, black, brown, able-bodied
and differently abled. It is not a neutral void to be filled up but is
differently defined by the various people who inhabit it. This means
that men and women experience it in different ways, making any
given space integrally gendered.4
Across geography and time, men and women do not have the
same kind of access to space, nor do they use it in quite the same
way. Further, constructions of gendered space are not the same
everywhere and they also change over time. Nonetheless, it is
possible to generalize that across locations and time, one specific
characteristic of gendered public space is that it often excludes
women. This exclusion operates in complex ways so that different
women have differential access to public space. Older women may
have greater access to public space than younger women. Women
may have access to certain public spaces in the daytime but not at
night. Restrictions may be relaxed at special times such as festivals
or become stricter in response to reports of public violence.
So far, when we have talked of the right to ‘take risks’ in public
space for women, we have interrogated social norms and ideologies
that privilege safety over access to public space. However, access to
public space is dependent not only on the ‘permission’ to be in
public, but also critically on the availability of actual material facilities,
which make it possible to use these spaces. That is, it is not just the
attitude to women in public that prevents women from accessing
public space, but also, quite literally, the availability of public space
or the lack thereof, as well as the infrastructure and design of the
city.
In this section, we look at the role of city administrations,
infrastructural facilities and design in producing public spaces that
either facilitate or prohibit risk-taking. The relevant question to ask
here in relation to risk in public space is whether these risks are
imposed or chosen. For instance, the risk of accessing public space,
in a broad sense, is chosen, but the risk associated with the lack of
infrastructure like good roads, street lighting and adequate public
transport are not a matter of individual choice and imposed through
decisions made by city planners. This significant distinction needs to
be made upfront—when we ask for the right for women to take risks
in the city, it is chosen risks we speak of, not the risks imposed by
the lack of adequate infrastructure. Our desire to court risk in the city
does not preclude the explicit understanding that the city needs to
provide its citizens with infrastructure of all kinds—including
transport, toilets and parks—to enhance access to public space.
If one were to accuse planners of not providing adequate
infrastructure for women, they might respond by saying that there
aren’t that many women in public space in the first place. In the case
of public toilets, they might argue that there are very few public
toilets open at night because there aren’t so many women out in
public at that time. However, if women were to be asked this
question, they might invert the equation and argue that the lack of
public toilets makes it even harder to access public space at night.
One might contend that changing people’s attitudes is usually a slow
process, but the provision of infrastructure can be a simple one-time
administrative policy decision.5 In other words, if public facilities were
provided 24/7 it would send the message that women are expected
to be in public space anywhere, any time. For example, in Mumbai,
the presence of reserved compartments for women in local trains
clearly enshrines their right to be in that public space.
Public spaces and infrastructure are usually designed for an
abstract ‘generic’ user. In the context of an ideology that deems
women’s proper place to be at home, this imagined ‘neutral user’ of
public facilities and infrastructure is invariably male. Not just gender,
but all manner of politics—class, caste, religious and sexual, as also
physical ability—are part of imagining this ‘neutral’ user. The
prototype user then is not just male but also middle or upper class,
Hindu, upper caste, able-bodied and heterosexual. Others who use
these spaces and infrastructure just have to adjust and make do with
what they get. So the physically challenged have to make do by not
being able to access most public transport facilities; the old have to
make do with negotiating the high steps of subways and foot-over
bridges; the poor have to adjust to paying up for public spaces they
once had for free; the lower castes and Muslims have to be content
with being allowed just the margins; the gays and lesbians have to
pretend to be invisible; and women have to learn extreme bladder
control and to negotiate dark streets and unfriendly parks.
Infrastructure that privileges the needs of one group stands to
reinforce the status quo and promotes an unfair hierarchy.
Infrastructural provisions that discriminate against some groups not
only create everyday problems of accessibility for them but also
reflect their marginalized position in society. When groups are denied
access to public space, this actually leads to a double discrimination
since rendering them invisible also reduces their opportunities to
publicly lobby for change.
There are two ways in which the problem of unequal access is
usually dealt with. One is segregation or reservation of certain areas
for the ‘marginalized’, and the other, particularly in the case of
women, is increased security. Both these methods, although
apparently benign, raise complex questions in any discussion of
infrastructural provisions.
Reservation in general is often seen as contradictory to the idea of
equality.6 If men and women are indeed equal, should they not be
treated with absolute equality? Are we not institutionalizing
difference by making such classifications? It is here that
distinguishing between ‘formal equality’ and ‘substantive equality’
might help illuminate the issue of what constitutes equality.7 Formal
equality would mean simply the constitutional right to travel by public
transport but would not address actual conditions of access, when
commuting by train for instance. Substantive equality, on the other
hand, implies a commitment to equality of access and not merely the
opportunity to do so. In other words, the question is not whether
everyone—men, women, children, the elderly and the disabled—can
theoretically travel on the 9.20 a.m. rush hour local train, but whether
all of them have an equal chance of actually getting onto the train. It
is the latter we argue that constitutes real equality in this case.
Reservation then is a proactive policy intervention to narrow the gap
between theoretical and actual equality. This means that once this
gap is closed, we would no longer need such provisional spaces of
reservation.
The second method popularly employed to facilitate the access of
women to public space is the provision of security. This brings the
double-edged debate on surveillance centre-stage. The increased
policing in the women’s compartments of suburban railway trains in
Mumbai, in response to a spate of attacks against women in the year
2000, exemplifies this conundrum. While some women commuters
did recount feeling ‘safer’, others were wary of the policemen
themselves. Interviews with policemen assigned to guard these
compartments revealed that they also had mixed feelings on the
subject. Some were affronted by a task that they saw as not being
their job and felt demeaned by the task of protecting women. Other
responses were benevolently paternalistic, suggesting that women
are vulnerable and under threat and ‘It is the duty of the government
to protect them as they are weak.’8 There also seemed to be an
unspoken sentiment that perhaps women who were out late at night
were transgressing acceptable boundaries and therefore ‘asking for
trouble’. This sentiment underscores the fact that women’s behaviour
in public is watched, further reinforcing their need to manufacture
purpose and respectability.
Safety, as we have argued, can and does easily slide into a
protectionism that restricts women’s access to public space and
does so with a rationality that is unquestioned. At the larger city level
too, while it is vital that city administration and policing is efficacious,
security that is provided with the aim of policing the behaviour of
citizens can be as problematic as inadequate policing. Women report
that lighting often adds to their sense of comfort and safety on the
streets. At the same time, lighting can also slide into becoming a
panoptic, all-seeing gaze that monitors citizens and can always be
used against them if they appear to be transgressing the parameters
of socially acceptable behaviour. This will happen when state
structures do not involve women in the solutions they create or when
they do so without addressing fundamental questions regarding
equality of access. Questions of infrastructure then need to be
examined within the framework of rights and citizenship and not
through a perspective that frames women as victims or clients.
In our fantasies, the words ‘public space’ conjure up images of open
expanses, maidans, parks and waterfront promenades where all
kinds of people can come to meet, walk, run, or play games, read
books or write, where mothers can bring children, senior citizens can
walk dogs, the differently abled can find a smooth pathway to
manoeuvre their wheelchairs, those of alternative sexuality can
express affection and everyone can just be themselves.
In the following chapters, we focus on this need for infrastructure,
drawing attention in turn to the over-loaded public transport system,
the almost invisible toilets and the dying parks of the city. In all these
spaces we also explore how design can make a difference in
shaping accessible infrastructure and public space.
Public spaces reflect the city’s attitude to its citizens. The
presence of sensitively planned infrastructure and welcoming welldesigned public spaces are a measure of its inclusiveness. We
believe that the right to the city means a right not only to inhabit
urban spaces, but also to participate in a city as an ongoing work of
creation, production and negotiation.9 The lack of infrastructure not
just amounts to a denial of access, but actively prevents people from
participating in shaping the future of the city. The real test of
successful design and planning of public space lies in how much
people are able to claim it as their own and adapt it to their individual
and collective lives.
Public space represents what the city might mean for its citizens—
the possibilities it creates for them to become part of the city, to
belong to it and have it belong to them. When we say ‘become part
of the city’, we mean in a visceral sense—where citizens can go out
there and claim the city with their bodies, walking its streets, strolling
along its edges, watching its movement and partaking of the thrills of
risking pleasure in the city.10
Taking risks is only possible, especially for women, when the
infrastructure is in place—when the streets are well-illuminated, the
public transport system runs day and night and when safe toilets for
women are accessible at all hours. These might not be adequate by
themselves, but they are essential conditions for making city public
spaces more accessible to women. These facilities are not favours
bestowed by the state but the right of all citizens.
9. Commuting
Many people, when asked to draw a map to guide a friend visiting
the city, often forget to draw the sea, but inevitably draw the railway
lines snaking across the city. The Mumbai local train network and the
red BEST (Bombay Electric and Suburban Transport) buses have by
now become iconic symbols of the city, the sheer grit and
determination of its people, their unbeatable spirit and the method
behind its madness. The three north–south railway lines that connect
the city are the lifelines that structure its citizens’ perceptual map of
the city. Similarly, the local transport buses are a ubiquitous sight in
the city, covering every nook and corner, and it’s not unusual to find
people proffering bus numbers as guides when giving directions.
Paeans have been sung to this transport system and films have
been made immortalizing the local trains in Mumbai.11 Even
academics, writers and journalists have given it the approving nod.12
Travelling with confidence on the local trains often marks a rite of
passage for those who want to belong to the city. A woman who
moved to the city for work talked about how the ability to negotiate
local trains: their timings, varied platforms and the general hurlyburly of crowds gave her a sense of confidence and self-possession.
‘There is something essentially Bombay, about local train travel,’ she
said, ‘and now that I’m part of it, I feel like I belong.’
Studies across the world the world demonstrate that access to
public transport is a significant factor in enhancing women’s access
to public space.13 The thriving public transport system of Mumbai is
a case in point. The presence of a system of usable ‘public transport’
is what substantially distinguishes Mumbai from other cities,
particularly for women. This is not meant to imply that no public
transport exists in other cities, but certainly, only in a few other Indian
cities do middle-class women continue to use public transport like
buses and trains when they can afford rickshaws, taxis or even
private cars. This for us is the true marker of good public transport—
when people begin to prefer it to other forms of commuting. In fact,
Mumbai has always had the distinction of having over 80 per cent of
its commuters use mass transportation. Local trains (on the Western,
Central and Harbour lines) and BEST buses run almost twenty-four
hours a day.14 The large workforce of women in the city, mostly
middle and lower-middle class, rely on this network as means of
access to education and employment, often travelling up to forty
kilometres to and fro every day.
Yet, the numbers of men, both commuters as well as staff, far
outnumber women. In BEST buses, the drivers and bus conductors
are largely male. In August 1998, BEST inducted seven women
conductors into the service but this experiment failed for several
reasons. From a conservative cultural perspective, their work and
the contact with unfamiliar male commuters that it entailed, was seen
as unacceptable. From an infrastructural perspective, for over six
months, the BEST failed to provide the women with separate
changing rooms or toilet facilities, making their situation extremely
uncomfortable, especially in the face of resentment and suspicion
from their male colleagues. No women have been subsequently
employed by the BEST on buses.15 A similar predominance of male
staff assails the train services as well.
In Mumbai, as in some other cities of the world like Cairo, there
are compartments and seats reserved for women in the local trains
and on buses.16 Many Mumbai women commuters will quite candidly
admit that what enables them to use local public transport services is
this gender segregation. Yet, the reservation of seats for women
remains a subject of passionate discussion. When we debate the
need for ladies’ compartments with students, there are heated
arguments on either side—those who believe that reservations are a
legitimate means of affirmative action and those who think they stink
of parochial patronizing. Whatever side of the argument students are
on, eventually, almost everyone comes around to accepting that the
existence of the ‘ladies’ compartment’ is one of the most important
reasons why local trains are used extensively by women commuters.
Without these, given the crush of male bodies in the overcrowded
general compartments, it is unlikely that many women would have
the opportunity to access public transport, and by extension, to
access the public sphere.17 The ladies’ compartment can also get
crowded beyond comfort levels during peak hours, but because all
the densely packed bodies are female, and are assumed to be
heterosexual, this is not considered threatening.18
The reserved seats on buses, however, drew a more mixed
response when they were first introduced in the late 1990s. Until
then, buses had been entirely mixed use and the introduction of
reserved seats for women was accepted grudgingly, not just by men
but also women, who saw it as demeaning and almost pre-modern.19
However, today, that these seats ‘belong’ to women is generally
taken for granted and men often either do not use these seats at all
or silently rise when they see a woman standing. Women also
continue to sit elsewhere in the bus.
The segregation of spaces based on gender in public transport
does underline and reproduce gender differences. Yet, in a context
where women are far outnumbered by men as well as socially and
politically marginalized, the provisional presence of reserved seats in
fact evens out some of the odds against women. Further, some
families would not allow women to travel without the provision of
these sex-segregated spaces. The question once again is of
articulating the difference between formal equality and substantive
equality, that is, the difference between ‘all people may get on to the
train’ and ‘all people actually get on to the train’.
In spite of its critical importance in the daily lives of many women,
the ‘ladies’ compartment’ is hardly a homogenous space of feminine
(much less, feminist) utopia; in many ways, it is also a highly
contentious space. Much has been said about the camaraderie in
these trains where women cut vegetables together, sing bhajans,
knit, sew, celebrate festivals and counsel each other. At the same
time, women commuters testify that women are not immune to the
arguments, tensions and hostility that train travel inevitably
generates in impossibly overcrowded conditions.
Beyond these everyday external pressures also operate a range of
other prejudices. Among these are the pollution taboos, which mean
that fisherwomen who try and use the ladies’ compartment at times
when the vendors’ compartment is crowded with male vendors are
met with hostile demands that they leave. Commuters in the first
class compartment are very aggressive in barring the entry of others
‘not appearing like first class pass or ticket holders’, that is, lower
class in habitus. Hijras are met with annoyance mixed with anxiety.20
Transgender people and lesbian women who dress ambiguously
face reactions ranging from confusion to hostility. Women who do not
look indisputably feminine are therefore directly or indirectly
excluded from these spaces. The ladies’ compartment then becomes
a space that can only house women who obviously look like
women!21
While Mumbai’s transport network might be regarded as the best in
the country, it is still far from satisfactory when it comes to fulfilling
the requirements of commuters. All public transport facilities of the
city, particularly the suburban train network, are stretched beyond
capacity. A suburban commuter train meant for 1,710 commuters
regularly carries up to 5,000. This situation is called Super-Dense
Crush Load, that is, with fourteen to sixteen standing passengers per
square metre of floor space.22 But numbers don’t even begin to
explain just how crowded these trains are. Sardines probably have
much more space in a tin than local train riders. Yet, so mythologized
is the city’s transport system that even this subhuman level of travel
doesn’t really rile anyone enough to do anything concrete about it.
Despite the many hardships attendant to commuting in this city,
there is certain insouciance among commuters in Mumbai, both
women and men, that has its roots variedly in optimism, resignation,
lack of choice and de-sensitization.
In addition to inadequate transportation, our extensive
ethnographic studies on public transport also revealed that the
provision of transport-related infrastructural facilities like adequate
toilets, lighting, foot-over bridges and signage is grossly lacking.23
Our research at railway stations led us to undertake a study of
lighting levels at thirty-five suburban stations along the Central
Railway—both Central (Main) and Central (Harbour). Our intention
was to study lighting not technically in terms of measurement of
lighting levels, but through a comprehensive survey based on our
own subjective perceptions. Lighting levels were assessed for
adequacy both in terms of brightness and the context. That is,
corners, staircases and foot-over bridges may need more than
average lighting as these tend to be perceived as dangerous spaces
by women. All stations were not uniformly dark, but some broad
areas of concern emerged. Toilets were often dimly lit or completely
dark; the staircases on the foot-over bridges often had only one
tube-light, which was grossly inadequate. Exits were rarely lit at all
and most illumination usually came from nearby shops. Unused
platforms at stations tended to be dark and threatening, all of which
made access more difficult.24
A more fundamental problem is that public transport in the city
gets short shrift when it comes to planning more services and
facilities as compared to private transport. Increasingly, policies tend
to focus on private transport and road infrastructure intended for
them, such as flyovers, at the cost of improving the stretched public
services. This lopsided development continues despite the fact that a
majority of Mumbai’s commuters use mass transportation.25 This
tends to affect women more because it has been observed that even
in families which own private vehicles, women are still the ones more
likely to use public transport.
The city’s mass transport system has given Mumbai women, across
all classes, an exceptional opportunity to access the public. They are
an excellent example that shows that effective infrastructural
provisions can, in fact, make a dent in pervasive ideological
structures and provide better access to public space for women.
Many women commuters acknowledge this contribution in glowing
terms. But that same system is now under strain and the focus on
private transport is not helping matters. Having recognized the
invaluable contribution of the existing public transportation to
women’s access to public space, it is still possible that an
unreflective hubris will allow these long-fought gains to slide away. It
is critical then that the existing system is augmented and loopholes
are plugged to ensure that even more women can get better access
to public space.
A high-quality, affordable, efficient and egalitarian public transport
system has the potential to transform the city, making it ‘global’ in
ways that glitzy glass and chrome buildings cannot. Such a system
has the capacity to bring on board not just women and other
marginal citizens, but also those who might currently travel by private
vehicles. Bringing together people across class on a mass
transportation system might be one way to begin imagining a city
where hierarchies are not determined by people’s inability to
commute.
10. Peeing
Scene 1: Waiting at the bus stop, she presses her thighs together
and draws in her pelvic floor muscles again. As the bus nears, she
anticipates the added torture of its swinging motion to her already
overstressed bladder. She glares with even more venom than usual
at the man relieving himself unconcernedly behind the bus stop.
Scene 2: Gingerly she steps in, pushing the dirty latchless door shut
with her foot. Noting that as usual there are no hooks, she hangs her
bag around her neck. Then lifting her clothes awkwardly around its
bulk she squats, carefully ensuring that no part of her body touches
the sides of the wall. As she relieves her bursting bladder, she
reminds herself to be grateful that there is a loo at all, whatever its
state.
If we had to pick one tangible symbol of male privilege in the city, the
winner hands-down would be the Public Toilet. Any woman who has
lived in Mumbai will testify that the number of public toilets in the city
is grossly inadequate. On many streets one comes across little
white-tiled box-like structures that are men’s urinals without any sign
of similar arrangements for women. Those toilets that do exist are
often in such a bad state that women wish they didn’t have to use
them. In any case, these existing toilets only serve to underscore the
inequities in provision. Usually just one-third is occupied by the
women’s toilet; the remaining two-thirds house the men’s urinals and
the men’s toilets. The toilets shut at night while the urinals usually
remain open round the clock. Furthermore, the urinals are free but
the toilets are usually of the pay-and-use kind.26
There is a completely unembarrassed air about this disparity. For
instance, a notice at the Bandra suburban railway station reads:
‘Men’s toilets: 2, Women’s toilets: 2, Men’s urinals: 24’. These figures
seem all the more lopsided and insensitive when we consider the
fact that women need more time than men to urinate, and need to
use toilets more often. To actually provide equally for women and
men, we would need at least twice as many toilets for women as for
men.27
Railway stations are among the few places where there are toilets
for women. However, we found that some of the women’s toilets
were actually being used by men, while others were locked or
difficult to locate. For instance, in 2004, when we studied the Andheri
station, it had four functional toilets. The first toilet on Platform 1 was
for both women and men and was open from 6 a.m. to midnight with
female attendants managing the women’s section and male
attendants in the men’s section. The second toilet, also on Platform
1, only had urinals for men, open all twenty-four hours. The third
toilet on Platform 2 had facilities for both women and men, but the
men’s urinal was open and the women’s toilet was locked. We were
told that the local shoe polishwalla on the same platform had the key.
There was no notice, however, to this effect nor was the shoe
polishwalla to be found on that day. The fourth toilet on Platform 5
was open from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. The women’s section was locked
with an almost illegible note scribbled on the door which read:
‘Ladies shauchalaya chaloo hein. Ek rupya dekar chaabi gents’
shauchalaya se lijiye’ (The ladies’ toilet is functional. Pay one rupee
and get the key from the men’s toilet). Though we hung around the
men’s toilet looking for the attendant, we did not find him. In sum, for
men, there were four possible toilets that they could use in different
locations; for women, only one. Many women interviewed at the
station did not know where any of the toilets were located.28
Elsewhere in the city as well, the toilets that do exist and are open,
are far from clean. Many middle-class women we talked to over the
course of our research said that they had never seen the inside of a
Sulabh Shauchalaya.29 The public toilets they had used, if at all,
were either ones in coffee shops, theatres or art galleries. When
caught in desperate need, many a middle-class woman would rather
pretend her way into the nearest five-star hotel’s private toilet rather
than use the Sulabh toilet right across the street. Of course, lowerclass women do not enjoy that privilege and are forced to make do
with whatever minimal facilities they can find.
For the working-class woman, the lack of toilets is an everyday
reminder of her unwantedness in the city. For women residing in
slums, for instance, toilets are often a great source of anxiety.30
These women speak of waiting for the cover of darkness in order to
relieve themselves on the open street; often not drinking fluids during
the day so as to avoid the nuisance of trying to find a toilet they
could use. Even when there are public community toilets, they are
not always safe, particularly at night when the dimly lit streets and
dark cubicles can seem forbidding. Women then make sure they go
in groups for company along the way and to keep watch. It is not
surprising then that for women in Dharavi, one of Mumbai’s largest
slum settlements, a private toilet comes right at the top of their wish
list.31
What makes the disparity in the provision of public toilets even more
outrageous is the fact that this scarcity has direct implications on the
everyday health of city women. Most of us will consciously drink less
water when outside the home and as we grow older, learn extreme
forms of bladder control that can sometimes lead to serious urinary
tract infections.
If public toilets were to be your guide to imagining the city, what
would they say about Mumbai? First, they would imply that there are
very few women in public as compared to men: for if the average
ratio of toilet seats for women and men in most public toilets blocks
is anything to go by, there is just one woman for every five men out
there. Second, they would suggest that if Mumbai women do need to
pee, they do so at home or in their school/college/office toilets rather
than use a public facility. And third, they would say, since even fewer
facilities are open after 9 p.m., respectable women have no business
being out in public after dark.
The disparity in the provision of public facilities is often justified in
terms of the disproportionate usage of public space by women
relative to men. While it may be true that there are fewer women in
public than men, it is assumed that this will always be the case.
These assumptions also seem to miss the point that not only have
there always been a large number of women in Mumbai commuting
and working outside the home, but that these numbers have only
increased.
However, the lack of public toilets for women cannot be seen in
isolation as just a matter of oversight by town planners or a simple
lack of attention to their rising numbers in public. It reflects
underlying notions of purity and pollution, particularly those
connected to the female body. In India, a hierarchical Hindu social
order structured around stringent rules of cleanliness and dirt—
exemplified in the caste system—permeates society at large.
Excretory functions of the body are high in this order of pollution and
until recently, in some parts of the country, having a toilet inside the
house was considered sacrilegious. Even today, municipal
employees who work in the lowest levels of the sanitation
department continue to be from the scheduled castes as others are
reluctant to do this job.
Since both women and toilets are seen as contaminating in
relation to public space, a language of shame pervades any
discussion of toilets for women. This adversely affects the actual
provision of toilets for them. Any discussion of women’s bodily
functions is immediately seen as linked to their sexuality and hence
to be silenced. Women’s bodies are associated with bodily
secretions—menstruation, ovulation, lactation—seen as sources of
ritual contamination at particular times of the month or year. These
notions of contamination are so much part of women’s conditioning
that women reported during our workshops that they were usually
too embarrassed to even ask for directions to a toilet. As one woman
told us, ‘I would never be able to ask for a toilet when there are men
around, I either make some other excuse or just hold it.’
As if the lack of adequate numbers of toilets in the city was not
enough, the designs of toilets that do exist also fail to provide for the
specific needs of women. In general, architects and planners have
an aversion to dwelling too much on the design of toilets (unless they
are super-luxury private bathrooms). This mindset is a reflection of
larger cultural attitudes where toilets are objects of shame, mockery
and sometimes, revulsion. This aversion to the essential ‘toiletness’
of toilets is so high that great efforts and monies are spent on
disguising public toilets to look like anything but toilets. So the public
toilet at the Gateway of India was made to look like a miniature, illproportioned Gateway, and the public facility near Churchgate
railway station is so camouflaged by plants that many daily
commuters are unaware that it is a toilet, defeating the very purpose
of its existence.
Public toilets for women, particularly, appear to have been
designed rather absent-mindedly. For example, at the time of our
research in 2005, in the aforementioned plant-camouflaged toilet
outside Churchgate station, the area provided for women was less
than one-fifth of the area provided for men.32 While the men’s
section had six toilet seats, two baths and fifteen urinals, the
women’s section had only three toilet seats, period. As compared to
the spacious men’s section, the open area in the women’s section
comprised a narrow corridor. This is not just uncomfortable and
unhygienic, it also leaves no space for other functions women might
need a public toilet for, such as checking, adjusting or changing their
clothing. There was absolutely no provision for women with children,
such as diaper-changing tables or child seats. Moreover, the design
of the toilet also created a sense of discomfort for women by
providing a window between the men’s and women’s sections.
The way women use toilets for urinating is different from the way
men use them, but this is never taken into consideration.33 A
pervasive problem women face in public toilets is the absence of
hooks for purses or bags in the WC cubicles. Women usually carry
their essential belongings in their bags and not in pockets like men
do. So, without a dry place to keep their bags, they often find
themselves forced to use the toilet in awkward positions. Given the
gymnastics they have to perform because of bad design, it is not
surprising that most women say they use public toilets ‘only in an
emergency’.
If public toilets in Mumbai suggest that women in general are not
welcome in public space, they also seem to imply that menstruating,
pregnant and lactating women simply do not exist. If discussing the
need to urinate is embarrassing for women, then menstruation is
completely taboo. In fact, advertising for sanitary towels underscores
this lack of facilities as they set out to impress you with how long you
can use their product before you simply have to change.34 For
pregnant women, the lack of toilets at a time when bladder control is
near impossible makes being out in public an unpleasant adventure.
Women with young children have to further contend with the
unfriendliness of the city’s public spaces (streets, railway stations,
parks) and semi-public spaces (restaurants, malls, department
stores) towards providing the most basic childcare amenities—
mainly a comfortable place to breastfeed, a clean spot to change the
baby’s soiled nappy, a toilet seat sized for a child’s bottom, and lowlevel wash basins positioned at a child’s height. Where facilities are
provided, they are tucked away only in the women’s toilet, assuming
that mothers carry the sole responsibility of childcare. All this then
further restricts the mobility of women with young children.35
Lack of sensitivity in designing public toilets results in not just
physical inconvenience to the users but also conveys a sense of
disrespect towards them. For women, in particular, social structures
already dictate that their bodily functions are shameful and unworthy
of public discussion. Inconsiderate toilet design underlines this
notion, making women’s access to public space even more fraught
with anxiety. What the lack of public toilets says is that women are
less equal citizens than men and don’t deserve the same
consideration.
At a time when the design of urban spaces has come to the
forefront in civic debates, the design community as well as policymakers will have to accept that toilets are an integral part of our
landscape and make toilets more user-friendly and hygienic, rather
than try to wish them away.36
It is equally critical to address the gendered social, cultural and
functional aspects of public toilets openly instead of skirting the issue
in embarrassment or ignoring it because of its apparent banality. The
provision of more public toilets for women and other marginal
groups, the disabled and children among them, is an important
statement of the recognition that they belong and have rights as
citizens. The provision of adequate and sensitively designed public
toilets has significance beyond questions of infrastructure; it has
implications for the ways in which people perceive themselves and
envision a politics of citizenship and belonging.
11. Playing
If there one thing that infuriates us, it is the appalling lack of any
public recreational space for women in the city. Sometimes, it is
simply the improbability of finding a bench in a park. First, you need
to find the elusive park, then the rapidly disappearing bench, and
having found your little haven in the city, you need to contend with
the real challenge: dealing with being stared at, commented upon
and generally made to feel uncomfortable, especially if you are
alone. If women can do it in Central Park in New York, Hyde Park in
London or even Lumbini Park in Bangkok, why can’t we do it in our
own city? Why is there no place for a woman to go to alone, and just
hang out, peacefully read a book, look at the trees and flowers, stroll
around or merely sit on a bench and watch the world go by?
Of course, in Mumbai, you might argue, it is unfair for women to
ask for space when there is hardly any public recreational space
even for others. And whatever little there is, is fast shrinking. Many
middle-class people in their thirties and forties remember idyllic
weekends as children spent at Juhu or Girgaum chowpatty, the Rani
Baug zoo, Hanging Gardens, or the local park down the lane.37
These were places our parents took us to when we were young and
which we then frequented with cousins and friends as we got older.
Yet today, when those of us with children think of places to take our
children to, these are not the places that we choose to go to. The
chowpatties and Hanging Gardens are visited only when out-of-town
guests insist on seeing their image of Mumbai.38 Family weekends
for many now means hanging out at the malls or meeting friends at
coffee shops.
Parks and promenades are the most visible public spaces in the city
and the city’s attitude to them reflects its attitude towards its citizens.
The ratio of open space per thousand residents in globally
aspirational Mumbai is a shameful 0.03 acres as against more than
three acres in New Delhi and Kolkata. The National Commission on
Urbanization (1988) suggests that the ideal ratio of open spaces is 4
acres per 1,000 persons.39 The receding public spaces in Mumbai
are a result of multiple causes which include, among others, a
warped vision for the city, poor planning, conservative ideas about
morality and control, and the increased ‘privatization’ of public
spaces.
Open spaces do not even figure at the policy level in Mumbai. In
fact, open plots with public access are de-reserved regularly to be
replaced by privately owned facilities. Even when the mill lands in
Central Mumbai became available for redevelopment, the possibility
for the city to have one large open park, accessible to all, and/or
several smaller parks, was lost because of vested real estate
interests and the lack of a comprehensive vision for open spaces in
the city.40
Where open public spaces do exist, they often tend to be badly
maintained or policed stringently—both discouraging popular use.
Most of them are not equally welcoming to all and are often
governed by an impulse not to include, but to exclude. Open spaces
like parks are frequently seen as an invitation for what is termed as
‘anti-social-activity’.41 The assumption is that if open public spaces
are provided, then people—that is, those-who-do-not-really-belongto-the-city—will somehow misuse them.42 Meanwhile, as we have
discussed in the chapter ‘Unbelongers’, the numbers of those-who-
do-not-really-belong-to-the-city keeps on increasing. If it was once
largely the vandal who was to be barred in public space, today, it
also includes among others, the hawker.
This social segregation and exclusion is reflected in the everyday
spatial practices of the city. Cases in point are the new concepts of
public space management that have emerged in the last decade or
so such as paid parks and the participation of local residents’ groups
in the upkeep of public spaces.43 While on the one hand these have
aesthetically improved the spaces under their jurisdiction, on the
other hand, they sometimes work with an implicit agenda of keeping
out those perceived as ‘undesirables’ from public space.
The concept of the ‘paid park’ was introduced in Mumbai in the
1990s.44 The apparent idea behind such a park is to charge a
nominal fee from users so that a) they have a sense of responsibility
when using the space and b) the money collected can be used for
the park’s upkeep. However, as our ethnographic research in two
such parks of the city revealed, the entrance fee does far more than
that.
Setting a fee for accessing a public space fundamentally militates
against the principle of open public space. ‘Paid parks attract wellmannered, upper-class people,’ said an eighteen-year-old girl who
regularly jogs and socializes at Joggers Park in Bandra. ‘Since
lower-class people cannot afford the daily fee, they come only on
weekends. This filters the crowd here to a large extent all week long.’
However small it may seem, a fee has the effect of fundamentally
segregating the space on the basis of class.
In City Park at the Bandra-Kurla Complex, for example, the entry
fee of Rs 10 for every person over the age of three may not be much
for middle-class people from nearby neighbourhoods who regularly
use the jogging paths for walking and running while their children
use the park’s skating rink for private roller-skating coaching. Those,
on the other hand, who cannot afford to pay the entry fee every day
—if they happen to be men, hang around outside the park, and if
they are women, wait for weekends and public holidays. These are
the special days when families from nearby slums in Dharavi, Bharat
Nagar and Behrampada come there. Ironically, our interviews show
that on these days the presence of working-class people, and
particularly Muslims, marks the space as undesirable for middleclass, local residents, especially women.45 One young woman said
she would rather take her children to the mall on holidays when the
park is full of ‘those people’.
In an attempt to control local open spaces, manage them, and
make them available for local use, residents’ associations have
sprung up all over the city. At face value, these are democratic
organizations widely held up as an example of public participation in
governance. Unfortunately, they end up representing just the middleclasses, and not all citizens who use these open spaces. Amongst
the most visible projects of residents’ associations in the city is the
upgradation of the long stretches of sea front in Bandra—the Carter
Road and Bandra Bandstand promenades.46 The promenades have
been paved, fenced, beautified and new facilities such as
amphitheatres, small parks and children’s playground equipment
have been added to them. Besides walking and sunset gazing, new
ways of using the promenade have emerged such as tai chi classes
on Thursday mornings, weekend art classes, late evening music
concerts, plays and poetry readings. While these have expanded
access for some people, the promenades are now also stringently
policed, especially against vagrants, hawkers and couples. One fiftyseven-year-old housewife who regularly uses the Bandstand
promenade feels that this policing has a purpose. ‘It is not to do with
safety but the kachara (dirt). If there are bhelwallahs, people will eat
on the promenade and then throw trash. Then the dogs and crows
will spread those thrown packets. It is quite a pain. You can’t enjoy
your walk. We want people here who can understand the value of
public property.’
Certainly, the residents’ associations here have salvaged these
areas from decay and done a more than competent job in keeping
them shipshape. The problem is that in doing so they have
overstepped their rights and also attempted to erase the presence of
several groups of people—among them the poor, the roadside
vendor, beggars, couples, cyclists, people with dogs, and so on.
Some, like the dog lovers of Carter Road, for example, have fought
many pitched battles with the residents’ association to allow their
dogs on the promenade. Eventually, they have managed to get a
green patch on the promenade reserved for dogs, close to the park
reserved for children.47 But other non-middle-class groups haven’t
found it easy to petition for their rights to the promenades, which
incidentally, are on free public land, for work or play.
Parks as open public spaces are also used to impose a specific
‘moral vision’ of order on the city. The response to the presence of
‘anti-social activity’ or vagrant ‘elements’ has been to either not have
parks at all or to turn them into spaces which are watched and
policed in order to keep them beautiful. Citizens’ groups would like
parks to comply with notions of middle-class aesthetics and morality.
Timings for opening and closing, rules about edibles, lists of dos and
don’ts in the park, and the presence of visible security signify not just
concerns of beauty and cleanliness, but also of morality.
In Mumbai, as in many cities across the country, this morality is
peculiarly directed at public displays of romantic affection, and
sometimes, even the mere presence of couples. In a city where the
private home is often a space of crowding, couples seek privacy
along the promenades or in parks across the city. In some ways, the
public offers them an anonymous sanctuary. But not for too long.
Increasingly, in city public spaces, couples are being censured for
holding hands, and ostensibly threatening the ‘moral fabric of Indian
society’. At various times, police personnel have been directed to
discourage couples from public displays of affection by shooing them
away or even arresting them. In fact, this so-called ‘moral’ policing is
also imprinted on the body of the city through the design of public
space infrastructure such as park and promenade benches with
dividing armrests and singleton seats. For instance, in Joggers Park,
there are individual seats set in singles, twos and threes, but no
benches. The manager of the park explicitly stated that this was to
prevent couples from ‘misbehaving’.48 Similarly, some years ago, in
the Five Gardens area of Dadar, park benches were made into
single-seaters by the local municipal corporator to discourage
couples from engaging in what he termed as ‘indecent behaviour’.49
The latest attempt to ‘moral’ police was the plan to install CCTVs in
private housing societies along the Bandra Bandstand seafront to
record the so-called ‘indecent behaviour’ of people on the
promenade. The footage was to be monitored by private individuals
belonging to a local resident’s association that initiated the idea.
Luckily a media outcry that highlighted the brazen flouting of privacy
norms and the grave potential to misuse the recorded footage, put a
stop to the move.50
The Mumbai police have periodically targeted courting couples in
the city on grounds of obscenity and/or immorality. In November
2004, the police arrested forty-three couples on the promenade at
Bandra Reclamation for ‘indecent behaviour’. In April 2007, the
police fined at least eighty persons in a drive against ‘indecent
behaviour’ in the same area.
In the present, such moral policing is aimed at heterosexual
couples, but this is reflective of the invisibility of same-sex couples
rather than any progressive politics. In fact, the situation as such is
worse for those expressing alternative sexualities. If heterosexual
couples find it difficult to find undisturbed spaces, for same-sex
couples, it is virtually impossible.
Women are often the prime targets in cases of culture policing.
When canoodling couples in Mumbai’s public spaces are rounded up
and taken to police stations, it is often young women who are sought
to be shamed by threats of informing their parents. For example, in
the Marine Drive rape case in 2005, a private security guard
appointed by the local residents’ association complained to a
policeman about the young woman and her male friend who were
hanging out on the open public promenade in the late afternoon. The
policeman on duty took the couple for questioning to the local police
chowki, threw the boy out, and then proceeded to rape the girl. Her
‘crime’ apparently was being out with a boy in a public place even in
broad daylight.
Certainly, the Marine Drive rape case is an extreme example. But
it is no less true that on an everyday basis, women in public are
policed on where they are hanging out, what they are wearing, who
they are with or without, what time they are out and so on. When
being in a public park or promenade poses a potential threat not just
to their physical safety but also to their respectability, women often
respond by avoiding these spaces.
The intent of inclusiveness in a public open space is both reflected in
its design and determined by it; the material design of these spaces
plays a significant role in deciding who feels safe and comfortable
using them. Simple elements like lighting, fencing, benches, and
vegetation go a long way in encouraging or discouraging people
from using them.51
Unfortunately, the recent restoration and ‘beautification’ of some
parks and maidans in the city have failed to make these spaces
more welcoming. This exclusion goes hand in hand with the
gentrification of public spaces such as in the case of the Oval
Maidan. Citing reasons of ‘anti-social’ activities and neglect, the Oval
Maidan, located along one of the busiest pedestrian corridors in
South Mumbai, was taken over and restored in the late 1990s
though the initiative of a local citizens’ group.52 The project was
successful in aestheticizing the space, cleaning up the over-growth,
keeping well-maintained grounds and adding a beautiful high fence,
a cobbled walkway, and carefully chosen light posts. Yet, the new
Oval fails to engage with the city in any manner that would befit its
scale and location.
The design of the Oval Maidan now clearly demarcates it as a
space for people with ‘a serious intent of park usage’. This mostly
includes the cricketers who occupy the north segment of the maidan,
and the joggers—many of whom live in the adjacent buildings. While
there are people, mostly men, who hang out on the lawns, both the
largeness of the space and the fact that it does not actively provide
for the ‘hang-outers’ (there are no benches in the Oval) suggests
that they are definitely not encouraged and, if at all, have a limited
claim to the space. The maidan is policed more stringently and
closed at night with the intention of keeping out ‘anti-social’
elements.53 Informed by this fear, the project succeeds in its
intention, but also manages to keep out many others, including
women.
A singular design feature determining this is its edge—the high
iron grills that restrict the movement across the maidan—separating,
rather than connecting it to the city. Many respondents in our study
of the park report that they do not always feel comfortable using the
space. ‘What is the use of a park with closed walls? It should be
open space. High fencing of the Oval prevents me from walking
through it,’ said one middle-aged person who regularly walked from
Churchgate to Backbay Reclamation along the Oval Maidan
footpath. Because of the high fencing and a single thoroughfare
across its shorter side, deep north and south corners are formed in
the maidan. As a result, although there is a visual connection (the
possibility of seeing and being seen) that will discourage assault,
there is low possibility of escape if such an assault does happen.
The lighting in the Oval Maidan, particularly on its southern end, is
also found wanting. Such a situation is a classic case that
discourages women from accessing the maidan unless in groups or
with male company. What could have become a hub of activity in the
city has been sanitized and limited to the use of a few.54
In contrast, Shivaji Park—the only large maidan in Central Mumbai
—is a very good example of inclusiveness. The maidan supports
activities ranging from intimate conversations of couples to political
rallies attended by tens of thousands. Mothers chat on its edges or
take a brisk walk while they wait for their children (there is a school
across the maidan), old people meet in informal clubs or visit the
nana-nani park located in one corner of the maidan, young boys
earnestly train in their cricket gear (the maidan is known for the
number of prominent national cricketers who have played here) and
young women bunking college often make a detour to the temple
there. The shifting activities in and around the maidan begin before
daybreak and carry on late into the night.
It is not as though Shivaji Park is equally accessible to all. When it
comes to playing in the maidan, other than the occasional women
practising the malkhamb, it is boys and young men who far
outnumber the women. Most of the time, they are found playing
cricket in the centre. Some older people and women have expressed
anxieties about being hurt during these games in our interviews. Yet,
very few of these anxieties relate to the physical design of the
maidan.
Although the maidan is located in the middle of a predominantly
upper-caste Maharashtrian residential locality, its openness gives it
the sense of belonging to the larger city. The low edge wall or katta
merely acts to demarcate the maidan from the space around it
without fully restricting access at any point. Both the wall and the
pavement running outside it are wide enough to allow enough space
for both serious walkers and random social encounters. The large
trees along the edge provide shade without blocking vision into and
from the maidan. Both the vastness of the space and the
accessibility it offers suggests that it is intended for multiple activities
and people. Moreover, the fact that the maidan is open at all times of
the day and night (it is one of the few public recreational spaces in
the city which does not—cannot be—closed at night), means that it
is active until quite late in the night. This is another factor that makes
women feel safe in and around it.
Shivaji Park, however, is a rare exception. In general, the public
open spaces in Mumbai are designed to discourage ‘vagrants’,
particularly those of the lower class, unemployed male variety, from
accessing them legitimately. The overt intent behind this impulse is
the protection of respectable citizens (particularly women) from those
who are seen as a source of danger—prostitutes, beggars,
unemployed youth, drug users and increasingly, homosexual people.
The desire to police is also justified by the fear of vandalism. Yet,
paradoxically, in setting up a variety of physical barricades against
these ‘anti-social elements’, it is women who are discouraged from
using these public spaces.
Urban designers and planners have repeatedly pointed out that the
way to make a public space safer is not by keeping out the
‘undesirables’ but by encouraging more and more ‘desirables’.55 The
irony of the matter is that in Mumbai, far more energy is spent on
keeping out people than in inviting them in. This situation that can
only be maintained through relentless policing as it is premised on
the exclusion of the majority who might be impoverished,
overwhelmingly numerous or visually unappealing. It is for this
reason that an access fundamentally dependent on surveillance
eventually remains limited. The design of public facilities determined
by an exclusionary impulse actually makes these spaces
inaccessible and sometimes even unsafe for women.
The increasing sanitization of open public spaces in the name of
beautification has its devoted fans, particularly among the middle
classes. Middle-class citizens’ participation in transforming these
spaces reinforces their sense of entitlement on the city. Ironically, the
more middle-class citizens assert their citizenship, the less these
spaces are available for ‘those others’ who can ill-afford to buy
access into private spaces of recreation.
What we would like then are open spaces that are not maintained
through the tenuous and contested division of people into ‘us’ and
‘them’, desirable and undesirable. What we want are open public
spaces in the city that are welcoming to all manner of people and
remain so because they evoke in them a sense of belonging and
responsibility, and underline their undifferentiated claim to the city.
12. Designed City
In an exercise we conducted in architecture colleges, students were
asked to trace the path they would choose while negotiating a
fictitious street. The street is edged on one side by a park; its
adjacent footpath neatly fenced on both sides and lined with trees. It
is the kind of textbook-perfect edge urban designers dream of
creating. On the other side of this hypothetical street is lower-middleclass housing—with household activities spilling out unevenly onto
the street—the nightmare of city planners. Ironically, an
overwhelming majority of the female students who took the exercise
concurred that they would choose to walk on the residential edge,
despite its messiness, because it appears friendlier and safer. A
tree-lined fenced footpath with low visibility, they argue, would make
escape difficult in case they were harassed. Besides, given that it is
primarily men who are socially sanctioned to ‘hang out’ at public
places, parks are often predominantly ‘male spaces’. So, even those
who choose to walk on the park edge prefer to do so along the road
rather than within the fenced-in footpath, lest they be heckled.
As women, it is clear that they prefer to walk on the more ‘chaotic’
edge of the street. Our question then is as architects or urban
planners, which edge would they design? And there is silence—the
beautiful silence of irony hitting home. The moral of this story is that
architects, as well as other design experts or spatial technicians,
very often design in and for an imaginary context that is determined
by aesthetic values where concerns such as safety and comfort are
not only secondary, but sometimes even irrelevant to the process of
design.
Usually, material environments in cities—which range in scale from
large buildings to details such as fencing, paved footpaths, benches,
lighting—are just considered a backdrop against which social drama
is played out, or at best, a reflection of society as it is. The proactive
role of the built environment in producing social experience is rarely
acknowledged.56 When it comes to the affective sense of safety or
comfort in a particular space then, it is most often defined in terms of
the people who occupy the space rather than a product of the
particular attributes of the space itself.
However, as much of our research has shown, this is far from true.
The students at our course in the architecture college did an
assignment that we titled ‘Safe/Unsafe Spaces’, where they were
asked to identify two spaces from their everyday experiences, one
which they would define as safe and the other as unsafe, and to map
these spaces through drawings, paying particular attention to the
physical/material aspects of the space.57 Students realized that in
spaces they used regularly, they sometimes subconsciously chose to
take detours which were many times longer—and more cumbersome
than the most convenient route from one point to another just
because the shorter route was not comfortable. And much of this
had to do with how the space was constructed in terms of its
enclosure, visibility, light and scale. In general, spaces without visual
connection (where you could not look at or be looked at by others
outside the space), narrow enclosed spaces which did not allow
escape in case you were accosted, and spaces with poor lighting
were found to cause the most anxiety amongst women users and
created a sense of unsafeness and discomfort. These street
experiences that generate feelings of safety and comfort make a
huge impact on women’s everyday relationship to public space and
the role of the material aspects in facilitating or impeding this
experience cannot be underestimated.
When it comes to women and public space, the answer to the
sceptical question ‘Can design really change society?’ must be a
qualified ‘Yes’. While ‘bad design’ of public spaces might not directly
cause verbal or sexual assault, the inverse does hold true. Design
can go a long way to make a space inviting to women and
discourage situations where women get harassed. Similarly, while
design by itself might not be able to create an equitable and
welcoming public space for women, it can create the situation for
change to happen and reinforce it when it does.58
As often happens, business practices have been quick to realize
the crucial role of design to the desirability of spaces. In a context
referred to earlier, when the two prominent coffee shops in a hip
Mumbai suburb were sought to be closed down, alleging that they
were used as places to solicit by women sex workers, one of these
coffee shops issued a statement stating that the design and
ambience of its space was such that it actively discouraged
‘sleaziness’. The statement read: ‘[as a] friendly neighbourhood café
… Our outlets are brightly lit and are designed with transparent glass
walled entrances to provide a sense of openness and security to our
guests. The ambience is far from being sleazy.’59
This claim is unanimously supported by their customers. Many
middle-class women say that they feel comfortable in these spaces
—in that here they could wait for a friend or have a solitary mug of
coffee (though usually accompanied by a book or a magazine). This
is borne out in an exercise called ‘Putting People in Place’ that we
conduct during our workshops, where participants are asked to
locate a variety of people in an ambiguously tagged neighbourhood
‘tea shop’.60 Whether participants locate women in this ‘tea shop’ or
not depends on what they imagine it to be. Those who imagine it to
be a roadside cutting-chai stall never locate women inside it; those
who perceive it to be an Irani café conditionally locate some women
inside it; but an overwhelming number of those who imagine this to
be an upmarket coffee shop unhesitatingly place women inside it.
The reasons for this are obvious. First, there is a class restriction
on who can be in the coffee shop. The bright lighting invokes the
respectability of the day (even at night, which contrasts with discos
that are dark even during afternoon jam sessions), which combined
with the innocuousness of coffee (as compared to alcohol) creates a
space that presents itself as unthreatening. Coffee shops are
respectable then in a way that bars or lounges might not be. The
expansive use of glass in the design of these spaces contributes
significantly to this sense of comfort.
Glass creates an illusion of publicness—even as the lighting inside
creates a sense of both transparency and intimacy. It creates not just
the illusion of access, it also offers up the assumption of
transparency: the illusion that whatever happens inside is an open
book. The use of glass as the defining feature ironically renders the
space of the coffee shop, simultaneously both, public enough and
private enough to be respectable.
Glass, used here to lure certain customers, particularly
respectable women, also works as an effective barrier—its very
brazen openness working to keep away the undesirables,
particularly the lower classes. Sometimes, the inhibiting presence of
the glass barrier extends to the space immediately outside it as well.
In many of these coffee shops, the seating spills outside the glass
barrier. However, though one sees poor people and sometimes
beggars on the footpaths outside, there is an invisible line that
demarcates these class-defined spaces that they do not breach.
Mall design is similarly characterized by the use of glitzy
transparent barriers that both invite some people and keep out
others. Malls, in addition, also have security guards whose very
intimidating presence regulates the kind of people who feel able to
enter such spaces. These spaces also mimic each other in design,
creating a sense of familiarity—once one is acculturated into the
codes of one mall, it is not very difficult to navigate another. They
generate a sense of familiarity that is both circumscribing and
reassuring at the same time. No wonder then that many middle-class
women we interviewed referred to the mall as a ‘public’ space where
they frequently hung out. However, as discussed earlier in the
chapter ‘Consuming Femininity’, keeping out those deemed
threatening does not take away the pressure on women to reproduce
the structures of both femininity and middle-class respectability in
these new spaces of consumption.61
One key obstacle in the good design of public spaces is the
assumption of a neutral universal user of space. More often than not,
particularly in the absence of a unique client as is the case for urbanscale projects, designers and planners assume a generic user of the
space. Unsurprisingly, as we have argued before, this ‘neutral’ user
is usually male.62
However, different bodies have different needs and experience the
same space differently, depending on their gender, class, age,
sexuality and physical ability. These different identities not only
determine how you sense the space, but they decide whether or not
you can access a space in the first place. By treating men as generic
human subjects and all others as specialized sub-groups of this
norm, design often tends to fundamentally discriminate against a
majority of its users.
The exemplification of difference-blind design is the public toilet
discussed in the chapter ‘Peeing’. The question that feminist
architects and designers constantly face is: will we be accepting and
perpetuating difference if we design differently for women? In other
words, can one design for safety without accommodating, and,
therefore, accepting the conditions that create discrimination in the
first place? And then, it is really possible to design in a way that is
sensitive to everybody—won’t some group or the other always be left
out? It’s a valid question. It may never be possible to always cater to
everybody, but perhaps, if we stop designing in a way that
consciously excludes certain people, chances are that it will make
the space more inclusive. Making the city safe for older women
would make the city safe and accessible for others too. For instance,
better street lighting, lower bus steps, paved sidewalks, broad,
unchipped steps on foot-over bridges and usable public toilets would
not just benefit children, the physically challenged and women, but
also all men. Moreover, referring to our understanding of ‘formal
equality’ versus ‘substantive equality’, one needs to also see
difference-sensitive design as a provisional step aimed at bridging
the gap between theoretical and actual equality. This requires
minimal monetary investment and importantly, a commitment to
making spaces more accessible through intent and design.
Design in urban public spaces is not just relevant at the micro level
to individual parks and toilets, but also at the macro level to the
overall planning of the city. Over the past few years, Mumbai has
been steadily undergoing a makeover into the global image of
streamlined order: gleaming steel and glass skyscrapers, airconditioned office spaces, flyovers for snazzy cars, and prepackaged recreation. These developments are constructing a new
geography of the city where streets are conduits for speedy
movement, neighbourhoods become gated communities of
contained order and public spaces merely lost opportunities for more
development. This short-sighted, bottomline-focused thinking is
slowly making the city into a cluster of islands of sanitized exclusivity.
In this situation, public space is reduced to leftover space, its value
limited to connecting private spaces or enhancing their value. As
people feel decreasing claim over public space, increasing policing is
required to maintain it.
The primary strategy for achieving this image of the global city is
that of segregating spaces for different people and activities. All
diversity is attempted to be contained into a singular image of the
built form, exemplified by vertical towers. Defining urbanity in this
one-dimensional manner ignores the inherent plurality of the city as
reflected in its diverse built environment.63 In the last few years,
moreover, critical policy decisions and amendments in development
regulations have sought to erase the existing urban fabric and
drastically reduce the quality and quantity of public space.64
This tunnel vision of the city is unfriendly to women at multiple
levels. For one, zoning spaces on the basis of use into residential
and commercial areas is detrimental to women’s mobility. Our
research shows that women have more access to public space in
mixed-use areas, where shops and business establishments are
open late into the night, ensuring activity at all times. Second,
vertical development often means a detachment from the ground. In
comparison to low-rise horizontal urban forms, the public spaces of a
vertical city are less friendly and safe, particularly for women.65 And
third, when public space falls off the agenda in planning, what is left
becomes increasing privatized, policed and often fraught with risk.
Contrary to common sense notions of urban ‘beautification’, clean
lines and peopleless streets do not equal comfort or safety for
women who often seem to prefer a degree of chaos, ambiguity and
multiplicity to univalent notions of cleanliness and order.66
The first impulse of design based on ‘rational’ modernist principles—
as is prevalent even today—is to reign in chaos and enforce a
visually clean order on the lived messiness of the city. Flexibility and
creativity in the use of public space that is a departure from its
apparent intended use—an absolute bane of planning professionals
—is actually a mark of its success.67 Unfortunately, designers see
the everyday spatial negotiations of people in the city as mundane
impediments in the path of pure design, instead of being its very
purpose. What is needed then, is not a call to sacrifice aesthetics at
the pragmatic altar of safety and accessibility, but a new aesthetics
of inclusiveness, where right of access of all defines what is good
design and what is not.
In Search of Pleasure
13. Who’s Having Fun?
For many in India, the term ‘Bombay Girl’ is evocative of a kind of
gendered modernity and liberation that is simultaneously envied and
derided. The ubiquitous image of the Mumbai woman is often that of
the bindaas Bombay Girl. She is imagined to be the one living it up—
early mornings, long afternoons and late nights—cocking a snook at
those forced-to-stay-at-home Delhiwallis, too-timid-to-move Chennai
babes, and not-so-many-places-to-go-to Kolkata dames. Some
might imagine her late on a Friday night, dozing on the local train
bound for Kandivali, returning from a raucous office party. At dawn,
she is practising tai chi at Carter Road or stretching her limbs in
yogic asanas at Shivaji Park. On a pleasant evening, she romances
her boyfriend on the Marine Drive tetrapods or hangs out with
girlfriends, checking out the latest fashion at King Circle’s Gandhi
Market. Some nights, she grabs a drink at a Colaba pub; on others,
she indulges in a spot of belly dancing at a dance studio in Sion. She
is apparently having all the fun and making few attempts to hide it.
Like all other myths, this imagined woman is part-fantasy, partfiction, part-reality. Many Mumbai women may live this imagined life
in ephemeral fragments. The air-brushed image, however, inevitably
conceals all the backstage strategizing that props up every fleeting
moment of pleasure.
Mumbai is a city where it may seem possible, if not always
comfortable or easy, for women to be out late and alone, and even
use public transport to go home from work or a night of partying. It is
partly because the city does allow access and partly because
women are very creative at accessing public space without
appearing to transgress any boundaries, so much so that one can
often forget how fragile this access actually is. We are reminded of
this whenever there are attacks on women in public space. These
incidents, ironically, never lead to a demand to enhance women’s
access to public space, but rather to calls upon women to be more
careful and not take unnecessary risks.
The definition of what constitutes an unnecessary risk is also
ambiguous. Standing at Churchgate railway station at 11 p.m.
waiting to take the train home may be classified as a necessity, while
hanging out on Marine Drive less than a kilometre away is likely to
be categorized as excessive. The fundamental reality is that women
who demonstrate respectable purpose have socially acceptable
access to public space. Although the abstract Lakshman rekhas or
boundary lines differentiating essential from avoidable ventures into
public space can never be erased, they can be pushed, bent and
twisted, depending on the woman’s geographical location, class,
caste and community position, and individual familial situation.
In this book so far, we have explored the nature of women’s basic
access to public space in the city. In this section, we push the idea
further to ask if women can also access public space for so-called
non-productive reasons—to have some fun and loiter in the city.
Keeping in mind that the Bombay Girl is far from being a singular
entity, we query whether fun means the same thing to all women or if
there are different desires and limits that define different women’s
engagement with the city. We ask how different women seek to fulfil
these desires and the intricate masquerades they are forced to enact
along the way. And then we ask what their actions might mean not
just to themselves but also to other women and to the city of
Mumbai.
Women’s tactical skills at playing with various disciplining boundaries
are really tested when they want to access public space not for any
‘necessary’ purpose but just to have some fun. And every woman
manipulates these boundaries differently as she negotiates different
parts of the city and inhabits different aspects of her own life. In
Bandra, for example, one can be a good girl in a short skirt while in
Matunga, good girls show no leg. Though, of course, a Bandra girl in
Matunga might be excused—for as an outsider, the rules don’t apply
in quite the same way. In Malabar Hill, the virtuous married woman
might wear a short skirt in the company of her husband but she must
hope that her grandmother-in-law won’t see her as she slips out of
the house. In Hiranandani, Powai, the night club is a five-minute walk
away and the short skirt is cool so long as she doesn’t plan to leave
the safety of the gated enclosure. In Chembur, if one is going to a
night club in a private car, a short skirt is acceptable, even desirable,
while good Mulund girls can wear the short skirt but not in Mulund,
please.
The short skirt, of course, is a parody, and the descriptions based
on local stereotypes, but the mental gymnastics that women perform
when thinking about what to wear, where and when, are no less
convoluted, and certainly much less amusing. Being Bombay Girls
means understanding the various unspoken codes of dress and
conduct and acting in accordance so that you can play the good girl
and still have fun. This involves elaborate strategizing to access
public space while simultaneously ensuring that you retain your
reputation as a good girl.
These tongue-in-cheek connections with regard to the codes in
different localities are based on the stereotypical ways in which
different areas in the city are seen. The shifting geographical
boundaries of perceived safety are linked inextricably to the
assumed class profile of the locality. For instance, there is a popular
perception among people that middle-or upper-class localities are
safer for women. Interestingly, in our research, we found no
evidence to suggest that this is true. Furthermore, all localities in the
city are mixed by class even though they may be seen as
predominantly being one or the other class. So for instance, though
Malabar Hill has slum settlements and some chawls as well, it is
nonetheless classified as an upper-class locality. So also with
Mulund and Chembur, both marked as middle-class suburbs that
have their share of not just slums, but very upper-class enclaves as
well. Dharavi, despite its mix of communities and varied income
levels of people, is immediately classified as lower class because it
is a slum settlement.
The idea that upper-or middle-class localities are safer for women
is not located in any objective understanding of safety. This
perception has its roots in a city that is rapidly becoming fragmented
on class and community terms in the quest for clean sanitized
environments. The real reason why they are perceived to be safer is
the strong desire among the upper and middle classes to
differentiate their own area as safe and not like lower-class spaces.
There is also another popular myth that women are safer in their
own localities. There is a sense that by drawing boundaries marking
those who belong from those who do not, women will be safer.
However, as we have argued at length earlier in this book, women
are not necessarily safer in their own localities, only more policed.
This surveillance may be seen as directly emerging out of a
conservative vision of women’s safety which is located in the
understanding of women as property rather than as citizens with
rights. On the one hand, it is true that women who have proved
themselves to be ‘good’ women might take liberties in their own
localities when it comes to having ‘fun’—but this fun is certainly not
of the variety that involves any kind of risk. ‘Good girl’ fun is highly
limited fun.
As women grow to puberty and reproductive adulthood, the
demands to produce respectability increase. Both the spaces in
which and the kinds of fun that women can have reduce after
adolescence. Interestingly, though, as one crosses menopause and
becomes visibly grandmotherly, the pressures to produce
respectability may actually reduce. While older women do not need
to guard their reputations as virtuous women, they battle the
assumption that older women don’t desire to access the city as much
as younger women or that they prefer to stay at home.
Global capital has made pleasure related to consumption
legitimate. However, this is a very limited understanding of pleasure.
As we have suggested earlier, for women, middle-and upper-class
privatized spaces might offer a kind of circumscribed and ‘protected’
fun, but this too is conditional. In this kind of fun, the risks are
corporately calculated and managed by those who run malls, night
clubs and other such spaces. And safety here has a price—the same
space will not welcome a working-class woman who does not appear
to have the means to buy commodities. It is only as a consumer, and
a conspicuous one at that, that a woman can have fun here. This
notion of fun is then inextricably tied to the act of consumption.
As recent incidents have shown, despite the circumscribed nature
of this fun, these spaces of consumption are also being increasingly
threatened by right-wing fundamentalists breathing fire and
brimstone at ‘Indian’ (middle-class) women’s increasingly western
ways. In January 2009, a self-styled moral policing group attacked
women who were lunching at a pub in Mangalore. Since then, a
number of other such incidents have been reported in the region,
including unprovoked attacks against women on the streets of
Bangalore. Though these incidents have been geographically
restricted to some parts of the country, they indicate a larger
atmosphere of cultural conservatism brought on by anxieties about
the very visibility of middle-class women without purpose, even in
privatized public spaces.1
For that matter, those who do not consider women’s desire for fun
to be immoral may still see it as frivolous or overly ambitious or risky.
In some ways, it is true that seeking pleasure, particularly in public
spaces, does come with its share of risks, chosen and otherwise.
These risks include not only the risk of possible violence, but also
the certainty of loss of reputation. However, not seeking pleasure in
public holds the risk of never being able to access public space
without purpose. None of this is intended to suggest that safety is
unimportant or irrelevant but to underline our belief that the larger
quest must be for a city where it’s safe for women to have fun.
So what do we mean when we say ‘fun’? Social scientist Asef Bayat
(2007) captures the essence of what fun might mean when he
describes it as:
… an array of ad hoc, non-routine, and joyful conducts—ranging
from playing games, joking, dancing, and social drinking, to
involvement in playful art, music, sex, and sport, to particular ways of
speaking, laughing, appearing, or carrying oneself—where
individuals break free temporarily from the disciplined constraints of
daily life, normative obligations, and organized power. Fun is a
metaphor for the expression of individuality, spontaneity, and
lightness, in which joy is the central element. While joy is neither an
equivalent nor a definition of fun, it remains a key component of it …
[F]un often points to usually improvised, spontaneous, free-form,
changeable, and thus unpredictable expressions and practices.
For us ‘fun’ is also a verbal shorthand for pleasure, a concept that
encompasses fun, but is much more than that. Pleasure itself is
highly subjective and is inextricably linked to a range of choices
including those related to sexuality, dress, matrimony (or not),
motherhood (or not), to name some. Pleasure, might be found in
solitude as much as in company; it involves the visceral body as
much as the untamed mind; and it involves activity as much as
simply doing nothing—in other words, loitering.
Pleasure is an unknown quantity, which undermines the very
possibility of order and control. This makes it potentially ominous and
even threatening to society whose ideas of propriety are often
centred on controlling women’s movements. As a woman, seeking
pleasure then is a tall order. Pleasure is a distant dream when you
are constantly being asked where you were, with whom and why, at
what time and in what attire. Most debates on public space are
disproportionately focused on danger rather than pleasure. This lopsided language of safety is often tied inextricably to respectability.
This then discourages women from taking risks and in doing so,
limits any fun that women might seek in the public. Because
women’s right to take risks is not recognized, neither is the right to
purposeless fun. A woman in search of unrestrained fun, who
transgresses socially acceptable boundaries, is perceived to be at
best stupid and at worst, morally reprehensible.
Pleasure or fun is seen as threatening because it fundamentally
questions the idea that women’s presence in public space is only
acceptable when they have a purpose. It violates the boundaries of
public and private by rendering them ever more fluid, by suggesting
that for women, recreation may be sought now, not just within the
home as members of families but as desiring individuals in the
public.
So what might a map of pleasure-seeking for women in Mumbai city
look like? Having asked this apparently simple question, we find that
there are no straightforward answers, even in this day of GPS maps.
Only conjectures—that wonderfully complicated world of ifs and buts
—that we explore more in depth in the chapters that follow.2
The use of the term ‘girls’ instead of the term ‘women’ in this
section is self-conscious and is in no way intended to infantilize
women. The intention is to reclaim the term ‘girls’ and interpret it in
the spirit of desiring fun for its own sake, as suggested in the 1980s
chart buster Girls Just Wanna Have Fun. It is this idea of fun, as
non-productive pleasure, as taking risks and loitering, that we will
explore as we traverse varied neighbourhoods and encounter
different women across class, community, profession, geographical
location, sexuality, marital status and age in Mumbai.
14. Can Girls Really Have Fun?
If Bombay Girls are having fun, then certainly the place they are
most visibly doing so is in Bandra, the queen of Mumbai suburbs.
If you tell someone who lives in South Mumbai that you live in the
suburbs, you might draw a blank. Say ‘Bandra’ and the smiles
reappear. Bandra is comfortingly familiar, it is where South
Mumbaiites sometimes go to shop, eat or otherwise entertain
themselves; and where the fashions are as hip and the lounges
more happening than in the city itself. ‘Bandra’ is also the answer
you are most likely to hear when you ask young single women
migrants to the city where they live. These women recount almost
smugly that they can come home alone late in the night or go jogging
in their shorts with little fear or discomfort. To them, this clearly
justifies paying through their noses to live in this suburb.
In that sense, Bandra is the ideal poster suburb for global Mumbai
—young, heterogeneous, hip, cosmopolitan, modern and fun. And
one can imagine if there ever is such a poster, it will be splashed
with the image of the young Bandra woman shopping in branded
stores or dining at an ‘in’ restaurant. So if this is the place where the
‘ideal desirable urban subjects’ we referred to in Consuming
Femininity live, if this is where young women of means are
apparently having fun, how much fun are they having? Does Bandra
actually provide more access to public space for all women? In other
words, can women take risks and loiter in Bandra? And
concomitantly, what does the visibility of women do for ‘Brand
Bandra’?
It is important to underscore that the hip Bandra one imagines is
usually only Bandra (West) that sits snugly between the railway line
on the east and the Arabian sea to the west. Once a smattering of
old Christian villages, today Bandra (West) boasts of several highrise buildings and some enduring old houses. It is a mix of
communities ranging from Christians, Hindus and Parsis to Muslims,
Sikhs and Jews. It also has a mixed class composition but because
of its high real estate value and the cultural capital embodied in its
schools, colleges, auditoriums, gourmet restaurants, designer
boutiques and celebrity residents, Bandra (West) is often coded as
an upper-class area in the minds of people. Bandra (East), on the
other hand, with its large middle-class population and substantial
slum population, was until recently seen as a poor cousin of the west
—a hierarchy reflected in their starkly different real estate prices.
However, with the growth of the expensive Bandra–Kurla Complex,
all this is going to change. But for the moment, let’s stick to Bandra
(West), since this is where women are said to have it all.
Bandra is certainly the young professional woman’s first choice of
suburb for reasons of safety and entertainment. ‘The reason I feel
safe in Bandra,’ says a thirty-year-old corporate executive, ‘is
because there are so many people like me living on their own here,
doing the stuff we do, coming in late and partying late.’ Restaurants
and bars in Bandra stay open late into the night and are often
patronized by all-women groups. In the expensive Pali Hill market,
women might shop for broccoli and yellow peppers in shorts and the
vendor won’t bat an eyelid. Women discuss in congratulatory tones
the ‘Bandra rickshaw driver’ who is used to seeing women out at late
hours and who will not stare at them in the mirror. While it’s unlikely
that vegetable vendors or the auto-rickshaw drivers in Bandra are
any different from others elsewhere, what is being articulated is the
sense that marks Bandra as being a space where professional
women live, where there is a greater social acceptance for the long
hours that they work, and where women are to be congratulated
rather than censured for their professionalism.
Given its predominantly Christian population, Bandra has an
interesting gender history for women from the community who
worked in the corporate sector even in the 1950s and 60s. The figure
of the English-speaking, skirt-clad Christian working woman of
Mumbai has been immortalized by Bollywood films like Junglee
(1961). Usually, they were secretaries, comparatively subordinate in
the corporate status hierarchy, but nonetheless they crossed the
boundaries of the suburb and travelled to work in spaces that were
not female dominated. The Christian history of Bandra, though much
diluted over the last twenty years, continues to influence people’s
perception of Bandra as being more liberal.
However, there are no actual indications that the Christian
community is any more gender-progressive than others. In fact,
women in Bandra who live with their families in Shirley-Rajan or
Ranwar or any of the other village enclaves have to contend with the
surveillance that demands they perform the role of ‘good Christian
girls’. For even if the rest of the city thinks they are liberal and
‘forward’, they know that sexual virtue counts (a lot) in the marriage
market, especially since marriageable ‘boys’ might live in the next
‘village’. Even as their out-of-town-sisters, possibly renting little flats
in the same villages, revel in their freedom, these young (and old)
women must learn to ignore the censorious comments of fellow
church-goers if they step out of line.3
It is the out-of-town women, originally from other (less welcoming)
cities, and who now live on their own in Mumbai, who are most
articulate about the pleasures of Bandra. ‘Even when I go with
friends to a shady-looking bar at Pali Naka past midnight, it’s
considered cool and acceptable in Bandra,’ says a twenty-something
media professional from Jamshedpur. These women experience less
of the restrictive watchful eye as compared to women who live with
their families, although they are by no means free from the
judgemental gaze of landlords and neighbours. The difference is that
many of these women in Bandra, and now increasingly in suburbs
like Andheri (West) and Versova, where many television and media
professionals reside, live far away from their own families and
relatives, and can shrug off these annoyances as the occupational
hazards of living on their own.
In one sense, women in Bandra do appear to feel a greater sense
of comfort with their bodies—the rules of decorum in clothing are
less rigid and the boundaries are wider—but the pressures to
produce respectability remain unchanged. The definitions of this
respectability, however, are specific to Bandra. Where women are
willing to play the roles they are expected to, as well dressed,
conscientious professionals and savvy slim consumers, they are
rewarded with a greater degree of comfort in the public.
So, while Bandra is an old suburb, it is also new in the ways the
suburb has been made and remade in the last fifteen years in the
image of the desired global city-suburb. The Bandra Bandstand and
the Carter Road promenades have been taken over and ‘beautified’
by middle-class citizens’ groups premised on the exclusion of those
defined as the ‘undesirables’. So while there are designated parks
for expensive pedigreed dogs, street children might be discouraged
on the promenades. Lower-class men still induce anxiety and as
elsewhere in the city, it is now difficult for Muslims to find housing
here. At the same time as the numbers of restaurants, pubs and
fashion boutiques multiply in a plethora of mind-boggling options,
more of the city’s beautiful people (read models and film stars) move
here creating more reasons to ‘Celebrate Bandra’, the suburb’s own
festival.4
In one sense, Bandra is what twenty-first-century Mumbai wishes
to be in its entirety and the presence of women is integral to this
aspiration. As much as Bandra offers women some breathing space,
so also women who access these spaces as professionals,
commuters and consumers reinforce Bandra’s reputation as a
trendy, up-market and safe suburb for women, allowing, among other
things, its real estate value to remain high. The presence of modern
and respectable women in Bandra, underscores its aura of
desirability. One might then argue that as much as the environment
of an area influences and shapes the ways in which women might
inhabit it, so also the visibility, or lack thereof, of women has
important implications for how the socio-cultural life of that area is
perceived. This is true as much for a place like Muslim-dominated
Dongri where the good woman is veiled and apparently silent as for
a place like Bandra where the desirable suburban subject is a
professional and a consumer.
By the standards of a global economy where visible consumption
is a marker of ‘fun’, Bandra girls are certainly out there. But does
being ‘out there’ indicate an unrestricted claim to public space?
Perhaps not. For, of course, there are rules and restrictions.
We can hang out in the coffee-shops and night clubs but sitting ‘on
the rocks’ at Bandra Bandstand or the Reclamation promenade with
our boyfriends is still frowned upon. We can have smoked salmon
and anchovies express delivered to our doorstep but in many cases
our bhelwallah has been booted off the streets. We can jog on the
‘citizens’-committee-beautified’ promenades but cannot bite into a
bhutta for eating is forbidden lest we dirty the place. We can have
our bit of fun if we accept the limits: we can wear short skirts but not
picket for equal rights—for surely, as many might say, what more
could women want?
15. Do Muslim Girls Have less Fun?
If we imagine Bandra girls as having the most fun in the city, the
Muslim girls of Mohammed Ali Road might appear to have the least
fun. The image of the poor little Muslim woman trapped in her burkha
with ‘fundamentalists’ and ‘criminals’ as neighbours in her crowded
mohalla dominates popular perception. Their lives are assumed to
be joyless, devoid of any pleasure or playful indulgence.5
But if we ask the girls of Dongri, Nagpada, Cheetah Camp,
Behrampada, and even Mumbra, they might not agree. Says one, a
sixteen-year-old Dawoodi Bohra girl from Bhendi Bazaar, who wears
the Bohri veil every day, ‘We can go everywhere in the ridha, I don’t
feel any different from other girls.’ Her friend concurs, ‘We go out for
movies, shopping, to restaurants, to the gym, park, do whatever
other girls are doing.’ Adds another who lives near Pydhonie, ‘We
even bunk class, eat bhelpuri outside college, or sit on Marine Drive.’
Sometimes, their dress might make them stand apart, but otherwise,
their lives cannot be distinguished from those of other teenage girls
in the city.
Yet the perception of Muslim-dominated areas of the city is that
they are dangerous and uncool (except perhaps during the fasting
month of Ramzan when the aroma of seekh kebabs and malpuas
sold on the streets late into the night attract their fair share of
gourmets). Regular media reports of the criminal gangs of Nagpada,
riot-prone Dongri and the orthodox clerics of Mumbra only add to
people’s suspicions. As discussed in detail in the chapter
‘Unbelongers’, negative feelings towards Muslims prevail across
lines of class and locality, particularly after the 1992–93 Mumbai
riots. A significant aspect of this perception is people’s ignorance
about Muslims and Muslim neighbourhoods.
In the last two decades, Mumbai, as also the rest of the country,
has become increasingly communalized and intolerant towards its
minorities, particularly Muslims. This has had an adverse impact on
Muslim women’s access to public space. In Mumbai, divisive
boundaries increasingly ghettoize Muslims by denying them access
to housing in mixed community areas. This heightens the policing of
women’s activities in public and legitimizes restrictions on their
mobility.
Educational and employment opportunities are monitored carefully
and the surveillance of leisure activities is even more stringent. Like
women in other communities, Muslim women too face fewer
restrictions in accessing places of apparent purpose, like the market
or the jamaatkhana (community hall). A lecturer at a South Mumbai
college was forbidden by her brother from walking in a park at
Mazgaon. ‘He told me to go a ladies’ gym instead,’ she said. The
anxiety was about her being seen by ‘outside men’ and the
possibility of her meeting the wrong kind of men there.
A more menacing level of policing is encouraged by
neofundamentalist groups, which in the past decade have become
more influential. Many attribute the rise in the number of women
taking to the burkha to the increased religiosity being fostered by
such groups. Schools run by these groups promote the segregation
of girls and the limitation of their activities outside the community,
including sports and music. Women’s bodies and mobility are also
policed and regulated through fatwas. And it seems as though they
are particularly intent on focusing on the fun aspects of women’s
lives—from banning women from wearing lipstick or putting flowers
in the hair to blocking cable TV access, singing and dancing at
weddings and visiting restaurants.
In Mumbai, the impact of everyday community policing, fatwas and
coerced veiling is particularly felt by those women who live in
homogenous inner-city areas such as Dongri and Bhendi Bazaar,
and more acutely by those in the ghettoized belts of Malvani in
Malad and Mumbra. ‘The focus is “aas paas ke log kya kahenge” or
what will our community people think or say when you wear such
clothes, come home late, hang out on the road,’ said a young
Nagpada resident, who finds her aunt’s family in Bandra quite
relaxed in comparison. Our research shows that Muslim women who
live in mixed community areas of the city such as Bandra and
Andheri (East) have much greater access to public space and the
public sphere.
As we well know, even in seemingly impossible situations, women
are usually able to manoeuvre and create choices for themselves.
As in other parts of the city, in the mohallas, too, it is the women who
conform or at least appear to conform to the norms who are best
able to strategize to have fun. The more intrepid ones use a mix of
practical strategy and panache to enhance fun for themselves. A
twenty-nine-year-old in Mumbai Central, who is constantly told not to
wear jeans, regularly packs them into her bag and puts them on later
at a friend’s house. Others use college restrooms and even the back
seats of cabs for a quick change of attire or a dab of make-up. The
less rebellious ones may content themselves by wearing jeans only
in the safe confines of their home, not daring to disobey familial and
community diktats.
Women who wear the burkha also use it strategically—sometimes
even jazzing it up with sequins, lace and embroidery to make it more
fashionable—in order to access public space for both work and
leisure. Others sometimes take off their burkhas where it may
hamper their movement or draw unwanted attention. For instance,
one young Muslim wife is urged by her husband not to wear the
burkha when they are out for a late night film or at a coffee shop. ‘He
feels that we can then be more intimate and draw less attention to
ourselves,’ she said. Another young Muslim woman, a medical
student, takes off her burkha in the local train on her way to college
but puts it on before she enters her mohalla.
For Dawoodi Bohra women, often being part of a maineeg, which
is an informal community-sanctioned friendship group of Bohri
women, gives them the freedom to access public spaces
legitimately. The members of such groups grow up together and
meet regularly to have fun in restaurants, malls and movie theatres.
The Muslim lunar month of Ramzan, when all Muslims are obliged to
fast from sunrise to sunset, is another time for Muslim women to stay
out late at night, mainly with family or close friends, to enjoy the iftar
feasting and shopping on the streets. Among the reasons for this is
the presence of many people and the increased street lighting (due
to all the street stalls being lit up) that facilitates women’s access to
public spaces during this month.
The access that Muslim women in community-dominated ghettos
have to fun and pleasure is very similar to women who live in other
community-dominated neighbourhoods. But while a Gujarati Jain
woman in a building or locality dominated by her own community
might feel just as restricted, Muslim women are further constrained.
They are also compelled to assume more risks, real and imagined,
simply because they live in and belong to a specific minority
community which is viewed with a high degree of suspicion. In
Muslim-dominated community areas, men are often seen as
potential terrorists and themselves experience an anxiety related to
public spaces that would be completely foreign to Hindu men like
them. Unlike Hindu men, Muslim men cannot take for granted a
sense of belonging in the public. Nor can they take the same kinds of
risks for fear of being seen as a threat. Similarly, Muslim women’s
capacity to engage risk in public is inextricably linked to their entire
community also being able to take risks. The lives of Muslim women
are not joyless because they are Muslim, but they may end up
finding less space for fun because of the intolerance faced by the
entire community. If it is external prejudice that often forces Muslims
to live in ghetto-like situations and be policed by the more
fundamentalist elements in the community, then it is the same
prejudice that also adversely hampers Muslim women’s access to
more avenues for pleasure and fun.
By the standards of the global city, Muslim women may indeed be
having less fun. Unlike the ‘ideal’ Bandra woman, who is also
simultaneously the ideal ‘global’ Mumbai woman, the apparently
ideal Muslim woman would seem to be the antithesis of the desirable
global female subject. In popular perception, they stand to subvert
the self-image of Mumbai as a contemporary modern, cosmopolitan,
global city. And as elsewhere, the atavistic image of the Muslim
locality is situated in the figure of the burkha-clad Muslim woman.
This image has implications for how fun itself is defined. Sequinned
burkhas at iftar parties might actually be as much fun as wearing
spaghetti straps at a prestigious club. However, while the latter fits
into the larger narrative of fun for the city, the former is perhaps not
just different but also not recognized by the city as being fun at all.
Thus, for Muslim women having their idea of fun acknowledged as
fun is perhaps as important as expanding the boundaries of their
access to pleasure.
Given the denial of access to public space for all Muslims, it is not
surprising that Muslim women have little claim to the city’s public
spaces. The rights of all Muslims to access public space, the rights
of all Muslim women to access public space and the rights of all
women to access public space are thus inextricably linked. When our
brothers and fathers are looked upon with suspicion in public space
and our entire community is villainized, what are the ways in which
we can claim our rights to pleasure as women?
16. Do Rich Girls Have more Fun?
If wealth equals fun, then the rich girls of Mumbai should be having
the last laugh. But that’s only one way of looking at it. Chances are
that some of them are also being shadowed quite closely by their
mummies and papas, particularly if they are single. So the cell
phones in their oversized Louis Vuitton bags ring incessantly, the
chauffeurs keep a watchful eye and friends are closely scrutinized.
For designer hipsters and halters aside, the comings and goings of
the rich girls—and here we mean the seriously wealthy business
families—are policed quite stringently.
As one woman living on Nepean Sea Road pointed out, ‘I have to
call my parents all the time to tell them where I am.’ A college
student from Malabar Hill added, ‘There’s no way any boys from my
class can call me at home.’ Wealth, and the fear that it may pass into
the wrong hands, if daughters and sisters break the iron-clad norms
of marrying within community, caste and class, generates strict
surveillance.
At one time, many elite neighbourhoods of the city, mostly consisting
of old bungalows with gardens, were relatively heterogeneous in
terms of communities, though homogenous in terms of class. That
heterogeneous mix is fast disappearing. For example, upper-class
South Mumbai areas are now largely populated by business families
who often tend to live close to their own communities.6 For an
outsider to these communities, it has become increasingly difficult to
rent or buy a place in these neighbourhoods. As argued in the
chapter ‘Good Little Women’, homogenous areas facilitate enhanced
surveillance of women. Young women living on Malabar Hill, in
buildings occupied largely by members of their own community,
record that they continuously feel the oppressive presence of their
censuring gaze. Where caste and community endogamy are strongly
practised, women’s reputations are paramount and directly affect
their future marital prospects.
For some of these women, their access to the privatized public
actually expands after they marry appropriately. The birth of children
further expands access. However, the need to reinforce one’s
respectability over and again never quite goes away. Inappropriate
marriages often extract high prices. Even when there is no overt
violence, there are covert, but no less real for that, signals that
transform insiders into outsiders. On Altamount Road, one young
Gujarati Jain woman painfully recounted how she was seen
differently by former neighbours in her parents’ all-Gujarati building
after she married a man of another community. She said, ‘Somehow,
I feel that the people in my mother’s building, whom I knew well
earlier and who treated me like their daughter, are now
uncomfortable with me.’ Sometimes, it doesn’t even have to be
another community—it could simply be a non-vegetarian from the
same religious community who is unacceptable as a marital alliance.
In our discussions, rich women from Malabar Hill, Nepean Sea Road
and Peddar Road articulated their fear of crowded local trains,
strange smells, unpredictable streets and footpaths, and of the gaze,
particularly of the lower classes. Among most women, we
encountered anxieties related to negotiating the class and
community ‘other’, but nowhere was it as heightened as among the
wealthy women of the city. What keeps them away from the public
space, or even expressing the desire to access public space, is the
fear that they have been taught not just of street sexual harassment,
but of anything unfamiliar to them. As one young woman put it, ‘I
don’t like going to unknown places in the city, it makes me very
nervous.’
In these wealthy neighbourhoods, the streets are often peopled
only by the domestic staff. One reason why rich women here
perceive even their own neighbourhoods to be unsafe at night is
because the domestic workers and chauffeurs are free from their
duties at that time and the men hang around the streets. There is an
acute awareness of the lower-class gaze, where any hint of an
interaction with the male domestic staff outside their roles as
employer and employee is a strict nono. Moreover, there is also a
fear of the gossip grapevine that circulates through the domestic
workers and finds its way back into other rich households. This
gossip has the potential to tarnish women’s reputations.
While women might be policed, wealth does provide access to
specific infrastructure that enhances women’s capacity to produce
safety for themselves, the most important of these being transport,
especially in a large city like Mumbai. In a group discussion, when
the conversation turned to commuting in the city, one woman
admitted, ‘Sometimes, when no car is available, I may take a taxi.’
For many wealthy women, occasionally taking a taxi is the extent to
which they use ‘public transport’. At all other times, they drive their
own cars or are driven around by family members or chauffeurs. As
a result, issues that other women encounter on an everyday basis,
such as not being able to wear certain types of clothes or going out
after a certain time in the night because of a fear of being verbally or
physically assaulted, do not arise for upper-class women in quite the
same way.
These privileges, however, are not without conditions.
Fundamentally, safety is bought at the cost of the prohibition of all
risks; for the entry of rich women into public space is really a
misnomer. What they actually do is move from one private space to
another, facilitated by the air-conditioned tinted private glass bubble
that is a luxury car. Rich girls might appear to be out there but
actually, they do not access public space at all.
Pleasure then is sought in private spaces: lounges, fashion shows,
private parties, boutique spas, launch parties, celebrity lunches and
increasingly, art shows and fund-raisers, which have become spaces
where they can unwind with others like themselves. If that gets
boring, it’s only a jet stop away to the beaches of Goa, Balinese
dance bars, Milanese fashion shows or New York restaurants. The
capacity to buy pleasure, in other words, may open up the world to
the woman’s discretion, but it is a world contained in private spaces.
So do rich girls have more fun? If fun is defined as consumption,
then surely they do, but if fun includes multiple choices in regard to
accessing the public, as well as meeting different kinds of people,
then the answer must be more cautious. In some sense, rich women
have access to the same privileges as rich men, but in other ways
(which sometimes even includes access to education and
employment), they have much less than their brothers.
From the perspective of the usage of public space in the global
city, rich women represent the ideal prototype of what all women
should be: seemingly visible, without actually accessing public space
at all. In fact, they remain ensconced in the privilege of the city’s
conspicuous private spaces. These spaces are hyper-visible,
appearing each morning at people’s breakfast tables on the glamour-
struck Page Three. This public visibility might make us forget that
these are, in fact, very private and protected spaces.
For rich women, the only public access they might find is when
they actually leave the country. In other world cities, where their
reputation cannot count, the neighbours aren’t watching and the
service staff are unfamiliar, they can let down their hair even in the
public. If we can stroll in Kew Gardens, picnic in Central Park and
sunbathe in the French Riviera, why shouldn’t we be able to do so in
our own city?
17. How Do Slum Girls Have Fun?
If you are poor and a resident of Slumbay—as more than 50 per cent
of Mumbai’s inhabitants are—do you even have the space to have
fun? Imagine 6.5 million slum-dwellers living on 8 per cent of the
city’s land, often forced to share a creatively pieced together house
of tin and plastic measuring no more than eighty square feet with at
least eight others; enduring several hours at the community tap
before it trickles forth a bucket of water; waiting for the cover of
darkness in order to defecate.
When the harshness of everyday life never seems too far away,
can a woman even begin to think about having fun?
The slum is imagined as a monstrosity, a space of chaos and
anarchy, of people living beyond the pale of civic life. In reality,
however, slums are ordered along a complex network of social,
economic and community relationships and are heterogeneous in
their class and communal composition. The multiple uses of space—
with homes, home-based industries as well as karkhanas (work
units), shops, schools, temples and dargahs—means that someone
is always watching the street and strangers are conspicuous. Thus,
contrary to popular perception, the slum is actually also quite safe.
The poor inhabitants of slums contribute their labour to the city, but
are not provided basic services like housing, electricity, water and
sanitation. A majority of slum-dwellers work hard in the informal
sector, disputing the image of slums as unproductive spaces. A large
part of the city functions on the basis of the cheap products and
services they provide.7
Despite their productivity, slums remain an embarrassment to the
vision of a global Mumbai, a reminder of its third worldness, a
blemish to be cleansed. The idea of contamination is transferred
from the slum to the slum-dweller, allowing active violence against
them. This violence is visible in the grossly inadequate infrastructure:
the lack of public toilets, potable water and sewage, all of which pose
a health hazard for slum-dwellers, and has particularly adverse
implications for women. For instance, in Dharavi, some women have
to walk across half the basti to get to the common public toilet, an act
which raises concerns of safety, particularly at night. Marginalized
from the city, both literally and metaphorically, what kind of access do
slum women have to pleasure?
The question of access in slums is to a large extent a question of
spatiality or the arrangement of built structures. The manner in which
individual houses are built creates narrow streets with doorways
facing each other, often not more than three feet apart. This
produces particular social uses of space, given that the house itself
is barely more than one room, it is not uncommon to find activities
spilling out into the street. Thus, the street becomes an extension of
the home. Ideas of kinship are transferred from villages and all the
boys from the same street are classified as brothers. This has dual
implications—the ‘sisters’ and ‘brothers’ are sexually off limits to
each other, and a network of protection for the sisters is established
so long as they stay within the lane and behave in accordance with
the ‘rules’ that the brothers set. It is only when one leaves the
bounds of one’s street that one actually goes into public space. On
the street itself, the distinction between the private and the public is
blurred.
Thus, in Govandi’s Bainganwadi slum, a young unmarried Muslim
girl says, ‘I feel safe in my own chali [lane]. I don’t feel the need to
wear a burkha. But I am not allowed to go to the next lane without
my veil.’ She adds that girls are also never sent to stand in the line
for tanker water, since that queue is formed on the main road where
young men who are strangers usually hang around to stare and
whistle at the girls. With spatial boundaries so clearly defined, it is
not surprising that the access of slum girls to the world outside their
homes is limited.
As elsewhere, women who go out to study or work have a certain
degree of access to public space, provided they are careful to
demonstrate that they are not abusing this ‘freedom’. The situation in
slums is, in some sense, the converse of the situation in wealthy
neighbourhoods. While in Malabar Hill, women have little or virtually
no access to public space, but plenty of access to closely monitored
privatized spaces, women in the slums of Dharavi, Behrampada and
Bainganwadi have limited access to public space, but almost no
access to private space, so much so that finding a space even to
defecate in privacy is not always easy.
Given that a woman in public is often perceived as a ‘public
woman’, in the absence of any privacy, slum women have to
viscerally underline their respectability. Where there is no clear
boundary between public and private space to speak of, the burden
of marking the private body falls on the habitus of the woman—how
she walks, what she wears, whom she talks to or even looks at.
Women have to demonstrate their private location with every
movement they make, wearing their privacy like a protective cloak.
At one of our focus group discussions, young men and women
from Dharavi debated the codes that distinguish ‘good’ girls from the
‘bad’, suggesting that there are complex and shifting rules for how
‘good’ girls should behave. For example, if a girl is caught talking too
frequently to the same boys, then she is labelled ‘chalu’ (loose) and
rumours about her morality begin to spread. In some cases, women
who reply to harassment are seen as encouraging it; in other cases,
the sternness of their tone is taken as an indicator of their lack of
tolerance for harassment and may stem it. On familiar terrain,
women who have already established virtuous reputations as ‘good
girls’ can often repudiate harassment by assuming the moral high
ground. Nonetheless, as one young woman complained, ‘There is no
foolproof way of avoiding being sexually harassed.’ In other words,
girls have to acquire the practical strategies and skills of negotiating
multiple ambiguities of tone and posture through trial and error.
The moral concerns with regard to young women in slums are the
same as elsewhere, only here, they are heightened by the proximity
in which people live and the impossibility of anything being a secret.
Whether in a large slum like Dharavi or on pavement settlements as
on P. D’Mello Road, ideas of boundaries are deeply entrenched. This
has far-reaching implications for women’s access to public space.
For instance, in Dharavi, older Maharashtrian women said that they
did not allow their daughters to go outside the community lanes
without an escort because, according to them, the ‘Madrasis’ and
‘Muslims’ would harass them. The presence of young single men
working in the neighbourhood, who are seen as predatory towards
women, exacerbates this fear. To avoid unwanted pregnancies and
elopements as much as sexual assault, young girls are often
withdrawn from school and married off early.
For slum women, their homes are filled with ailing grandfathers and
squabbling siblings, and the street is an extension of the home,
peopled by a quasi-extended family. In this context, they often
choose to access fun outside their own neighbourhoods. Pleasure
might be found in going to a film or walking along the promenades in
Bandra or Dadar. Women also say they go to parks in other areas
like the Maheshwari Udyan in Matunga or the City Park in Bandra
East. One young mother pointed out, ‘Sometimes, we feel so cooped
up that we don’t even mind paying an entry fee to get some fresh air
and space in a park.’
It is not as though slum areas are entirely devoid of public spaces,
but as happens elsewhere, these tend to be occupied largely by
men. It is only at raucous community and religious festivities or
during stolen moments of privacy that pleasure is to be found. Our
research clearly suggests that even though slum women want
private spaces, especially a toilet, they also wish to access public
space for fun and when offered opportunities to do so, grab them
with both hands. In Dharavi Koliwada, for instance, which is an old
fishing village now surrounded by the large slum settlement, in the
week preceding Holi, women take to the streets every night, singing,
dancing and playing games into the early hours of the morning. Such
events provide a space where the stringent norms of respectability
are relaxed.
As the city seeks to ‘redevelop’ these spaces, the new housing
forms replacing slums in the last few years under the various slum
redevelopment schemes may offer even fewer opportunities for
women to have fun. The debate for and against these schemes
obsessively focuses on the provision of 225 square feet of residential
space. The public discourse becomes only about this number and
ignores the other formal and informal institutional structures that are
an essential part of any neighbourhood. These include schools,
primary health centres, crèches, local clubs, and mahila mandals. It
also disregards the fact that many women in slums use their homes
as work spaces. It also ignores the existing forms of community life,
which are the prime spaces where women might find pleasure.
Studies on the resettlement of slum communities show that a
movement from horizontal structures to vertical apartment blocks
creates a greater sense of physical insecurity and often restricts
women’s mobility further, even for education or employment, much
less fun.
While the city frames our lives within the narrow contours of slum
rehabilitation schemes, often, little more than tricky number games,
might we be so audacious as to demand public spaces for pleasure?
18. When Do Working Girls Have Fun?
Ms Professional in the new global city is the white-collar worker. She
could be a CEO, personnel manager, investment banker, corporate
lawyer, executive assistant, secretary or receptionist. She might
arrive in her chauffeur-driven car, drive herself to work, use the local
train and share-a-cab or jump on to the bus from the nearest station.
She might be wearing a starched cotton saree, a designer or off-therack salwarkurta, a formal skirt and blouse, or a sharp business suit.
She will at least have a graduate degree and, in many cases, a
postgraduate or professional degree, or even a doctorate. Her
professional and class profile differs very little from her male
colleagues.
In their branded striped shirts and grey trousers, sometimes with a
jacket thrown over an arm, with a laptop bag on the shoulder and
files in their hands—these are the hard-working girls of Mumbai’s
business districts of Nariman Point, Ballard Estate, or the BandraKurla Complex. They are also found in the new office complexes of
Lower Parel, Andheri (East) and Malad. Sporting a ‘I can deal with it,
whatever it is’ attitude, these girls work around the clock and
commute at odd hours. Having any fun along the way, you may well
ask.8
In the age of double-income globalization, when ‘career’ is no
longer a dirty word, femininity can be redefined a little for
professional women. Women are allowed to be ambitious for
themselves and aspire to the corner office with the best view. It’s all
right, even commendable, to work late. In fact, during a focus group
discussion at Nariman Point, a group of women professionals
competed with each other to demonstrate how late they worked and
to suggest that, as professionals, they could handle themselves and
the city. The reputation for working hard may for these women
enhance rather than detract from their desirability in the matrimonial
market and, of course, there’s always the chance that they will find
their own well-placed professional husbands.
Nonetheless, despite these changes, the negotiations with work,
work space, colleagues, commuting and public space are not quite
the same as those of their male colleagues. In the marriage stakes,
professional careers are all well and good so long as women realize
that these are always secondary to their primary roles as wives and
mothers. The women who don’t acknowledge this often get
represented as hard-nosed and inevitably headed for the divorce
courts. An example of this is the character of Riya played by Preity
Zinta in the otherwise not-so-regressive Bollywood film Kabhi Alvida
Na Kehna (2006). A long-hours-in-the-office, upwardly mobile media
professional, she finds herself berated for being an absent mother
and wife, whose husband eventually cheats on her. In the same vein,
most advertising that uses images of professional women underlines
either their femininity (how good they smell or look) or their
mothering skills (how they cook, clean and nurture at the same time).
Even in the workplace, working long and hard is good so long as
you don’t rise too quickly or faster than your male colleagues. As a
young software professional in a multinational company told us, ‘If
you get promoted too quickly, people always make veiled comments
about how you got there and if you complain, you get labelled as
unprofessional.’ Similarly, while working late is perfectly fine, playing
late may leave one open to the worst kind of conjecturing. As one
political journalist put it, ‘Being a pal is all very well, but one needs to
be very clear about where you stand; otherwise it’s so easy to be
misunderstood by men colleagues.’ Good women don’t play unless it
is in the company of boyfriends or husbands or, occasionally, other
women. Acquiring the reputation of being a ‘good time girl’—out
every night of the week drinking with the boys—is certainly not a
good idea.
Respectability is also vested in the way professional women use
or abuse their femininity. Magazines advise them on how to dress in
a way that is ‘sexy but not provocative’: the lipstick can only be so
bright, the skirt only so short and the neckline only so deep. All of it
finely orchestrated to walk the thin line between being a feminine
woman and a gender-neutral professional. If shouting about your
sexuality is a no-no, flaunting symbols of religion is also to be
avoided. Some symbols are predictably more acceptable than others
—wearing a bindi to work might be okay, but never a burkha. Other
symbols, especially subtle matrimonial ones like a delicate
unobtrusive mangalsutra, may even help endorse respectability.
Our study of working women in Nariman Point demonstrated how
women here, like women elsewhere in the city, manufacture
respectability in the way they access public space. Following people
and mapping their routes during lunch time shows that while many
men go down to the street from their offices to eat alone at the
various food stalls in the area, and often linger around before and
after lunch, women rarely do so, usually preferring to order lunch. If
they do go downstairs, it is mostly in the company of others and
even then they usually go straight to the desired stall and head right
back up after lunch—they cannot appear to be loitering.
Business districts are particularly unfriendly to women because the
streets become empty at night. A headcount of men and women at
different times in the day showed that the streets of Nariman Point
have one of the lowest female: male ratios in the city. A comparative
count at 10 p.m. showed the percentage of women here at 8 per
cent as against 21 per cent in mixed commercial–residential areas.
Mixed-use spaces allow women to access public space more easily
so that they feel safe in them. The absence of hawkers in the
Bandra–Kurla Complex and the recent drive to remove hawkers from
the streets of Nariman Point, has meant that these streets become
even more isolated and thus feel uncomfortable even during the day.
As one corporate lawyer put it, ‘I feel safer when there are hawkers
winding up business on the road as I am leaving office late. That
way, there are people and lights, and it just feels friendlier.’
While hawkers might provide a sense of safety in these whitecollar business districts, in some other contexts, such as the
Maharashtra Industrial Development Corporation (MIDC) area in
Andheri (East), the lower-class male is often perceived as a source
of discomfort for professional women. Since the MIDC employs a
mix of white collar and blue collar workers in its jewellery, infotech
and BPO industries, it is seen as a space where ‘undesirable’ men
also work. There is an anxiety attached to this mixing of classes—
where middle-class women interact with working-class men on an
everyday basis. This anxiety is also related directly to the fact that
while professional women are desirable subjects of the global city,
lower-class men are its explicit undesirables.
The difference is that in these industrial areas, there are more
lower-class men than usual and they belong there in a way that
hawkers in the upper-class business districts do not. They work here
and cannot be ‘cleared out’ at will as the hawkers can. This space is
peopled largely by men and coded as a visibly male space. The
overwhelming presence of men creates a context in which gender,
rather than class determines power equations of the space. As
against Nariman Point or Ballard Estate, where professional women
might wield their class as a shield, the industrial area is clearly
masculine, making middle-class women even more out of place than
they would be elsewhere.
This mix of class and gender in the workplace also determines
which professions are seen as respectable and therefore desirable
for women. At the top of the heap are professions where women
don’t have to deal with men in any significant way, such as school
teaching. Close behind are those professions where women work
with men of their own class or upper classes such as white-collar
workers in white-collar-majority areas. The reason middle-class
women in working-class areas induce high levels of anxiety is not so
much the fear of assault as of consensual liaisons between women
and men across classes, that is, of middle-class women with lowerclass men. Where women work in professions or in spaces where
classes mix, they are compelled to underline their respectability even
more through symbols and body language.
Professional women are often compelled to produce performances
of gender neutrality in the workplace and super-womanhood at
home, both of which require skill, time and effort. While these women
might try hard to neutralize their gender in the workplace, this does
not mean that spatial gender restrictions do not apply to them.
Whatever rung of the corporate ladder she may occupy, this woman
must produce a carefully calibrated blend of professionalism and
respectability. To be a ‘good girl’ is not quite being one of the boys. It
helps if one has a boyfriend (or better still, a successful husband)
tucked away to produce at office parties—establishing thereby one’s
desirability and demonstrating that one is ‘spoken for’ (and therefore,
off limits) at the same time.
The good professional woman is expected not to bring gender or
any gender-related ‘excuses’ such as child care, household work,
discrimination, sexual harassment or safety concerns into the
workplace. She is required to take in her stride the absence of
working elevators in the office building after 9 p.m. and never say, ‘I
can’t walk alone down the stairwell after work at night because I’m
afraid of being grabbed and assaulted.’ This is the woman who deals
with her fear of late night commutes by holding on to her mobile
phone, ready to dial home ‘just in case …’ and the one who dons the
mantle of the ‘neutral’ worker at all times, never upsetting the veneer
of equality of the sexes in the workplace.
Pretending we are not women might get us the coveted promotion
and even the respect of our peers, but is of little use when we need
to access the stairwell at 2 a.m. in the morning or catch a late night
or early morning flight to another city. In a context where becoming
neutral professionals has failed to give us equal access to public
space, isn’t it time we leverage our identities as women and make a
political claim to public space as women who have equal citizenship
rights?
19. May Night Girls Have Fun?
Every weekday night, Richa metamorphosizes into Rebecca and
Archana becomes Amanda as they step into their brightly lit offices
that simulate daylight, ready for yet another nine-hour shift on the
phone. Taking calls that originate thousands of miles away, carefully
using ‘neutral’ accents, and assuming an alien cultural identity, these
are the new ‘voices’ of the global Indian economy.
What makes these women different is that they work mainly at
night, a time and space still largely forbidden for Indian women. For
darkness is a time when good girls are expected to be virtuously at
home; when only the bad girls are outside, engaging in ‘disreputable’
professions. So what happens when the demands placed by
globalization create a whole new industry—one that works on
Eastern Standard Time (Greenwich Mean Time +5 or Indian
Standard Time +10.5)—which seeks to employ middle-class,
English-speaking women and makes them monetary offers that are
hard to refuse? The stage is clearly set for all kinds of anxieties
about women, including, among other things, those about safety,
clothing, sexuality, morality, money and reputation.
Till recently, it was assumed that if a woman was out at night, she
was up to no good. Sex workers plied their trade after dark. Bar
dancers worked late into the night too. Others who commuted late
included those in the hotel and hospitality industry and those in
various areas of the medical profession, especially nurses working
on a rotating shift basis. With the exception of nurses, who could be
seen as nurturing Florence Nightingales, the other women
mentioned above have been looked upon as being of questionable
respectability.
In fact, good, hard-working women weren’t even legally allowed to
work at night, for according to the provisions of Article 66 (b) of the
Indian Factories Act, 1948, the night was out-of-bounds to women.
The time regulation in this Act made it illegal for women to be
employed between 7 p.m. and 6 a.m. The Act was only amended in
2005, providing more flexibility in the employment of women during
night shifts, to fit the demands of new globally linked businesses like
the Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) industry. However in
various states, provisions of the Shops and Commercial
Establishment Act, 1958, continue to be used to prevent women
from working at night and these have to be independently negotiated
by employers and employees.
Other obscure and apparently unconnected laws and clauses too
can be invoked to keep women from working at night. In Mumbai’s
Pydhonie area, for example, local police persuaded the excise
department to revoke work permits issued to women working as
waiters in bars—these permits usually allow women to work till 9.30
p.m.—on the grounds that this would prevent them from
surreptitiously working as bar dancers and also reduce crime. The
police also averred that it was dangerous for these women waiters to
make their way home after work as the area was predominantly a
business district and thus quite deserted after dark. What the police
failed to mention is how, by revoking the work permits of these
working girls, they conveniently reduced their own policing duties.9
Given this prohibitive scenario, when the ought-to-be-good-middleclass women begin working at night, it sets a very large cat among
the pigeons. As one call centre employee told us, ‘If you tell people
that you are working in a call centre, they don’t really take you
seriously because they think that it is only fun and games. And there
is this connection, the call centre-‘call girl’ thing. It comes from the
feeling that girls shouldn’t go out at night. So when they see girls
getting ready and going out, they wonder where they are going. Are
they actually going to work, at this hour?’
If good girls don’t work at night, and the girl leaving home for work
at 11 p.m. is your cousin, or niece or even your daughter, then surely
the definition of what constitutes a ‘good girl’ must expand? As the
numbers of women employed in call centres grows exponentially, the
sticky questions only multiply. The National Association of Software
and Service Companies (NASSCOM) estimates that the Indian ITBPO industry—which generates revenues worth several billion
dollars—has emerged as the largest private sector employer in the
country with a direct employment of 1.6 million professionals, of
which an increasing number are women. This growing number of
women employees, however, continues to be concentrated at the
junior levels as men still outnumber women at the higher levels.10
The safety of these new ‘night girls’ is a very real concern. In
recent times, there have been some highly publicized cases of
women being assaulted while commuting late at night, which has
created a sense of panic amongst the women employees and their
families. In December 2005, a HP Globalsoft employee in Bangalore
was raped and murdered by a man who pretended to be the
company car’s driver. In November 2007, a Wipro employee in Pune
was also raped and murdered by the driver of her vehicle. BPOs
have responded by increasing security and training women
employees in self-defence. In some cases, women employees are
now accompanied by armed guards while commuting.
In some call centres, women are not allowed to travel alone with
the driver. As Reena Patel (2006) recounts in her study of one call
centre, vehicles carrying six to eight employees were used and
where all the employees were female, a security guard would
accompany them in addition to the driver. If one of the employees
was male, then there would be no security guard, but the male
employee would be dropped off last. Interestingly, this measure was
employed not so much for safety, but because there had been
reports of the Mumbai Police stopping the vans and accusing the
women of doing sex work. Even identity cards were not deemed
adequate proof without the legitimizing presence of a male escort.
Physical safety, then, is only one concern. The other anxieties are
more palpable: how does one distinguish call centre girls from sex
workers, often colloquially referred to as call girls? And further, what
happens when women work late at night in closed confines and in
close proximity with men? Do sexual norms change? Will people
cast off their identities as good Indian men and women as easily as
they assume foreign names and accents? Will women then cast off
their Indian ‘family values’ and disregard their reputations?
These fears centred around morality in call centres abound as the
youth are perceived as being corrupted by easy money and
westernized lifestyles. A popular narrative imagines call centres as
spaces where sex and drugs are rampant and men and women
share cigarettes and bodily fluids with equal ease. One news item
reported that at a call centre office in Bangalore, the drains were
found choked with condoms.11 Several other newspaper reports
suggest that after work, the co-workers, living in their own time
zones, have wild parties with alcohol and casual sex. Doctors
interviewed in the BPO cities report an increase in the numbers of
women seeking abortions and one doctor was quoted being
sanctimoniously shocked by the fact that the women do not feel
guilty about being ‘promiscuous’ (her words, not ours).12
This doctor is not alone in her fears. What she articulates is the
more generic fear of what might happen when women are let loose
in a world where they might ostensibly claim all manner of freedoms
that they are not expressly permitted to enjoy. Many families remain
sceptical about their daughters working in BPOs—sometimes, they
do not view it as a ‘real’ job with future prospects, sometimes, they
are simply concerned about them working at night. Neighbours and
housing societies can also be prejudiced against women who work
at night, sometimes even formally objecting to their timings.
It is not surprising then that these fears often affect matrimonial
opportunities. Many of the women working in call centres are young,
usually between eighteen and thirty, and single. One woman we
interviewed, a team leader at a call centre, said, ‘I think our
matrimonial chances are affected. People who belong to other
industries do not understand BPO people at all. There are people
who marry outside the industry, but later they quit the job.’ Another
woman who works as a trainer said, ‘Call centre employees often
tend to marry each other. We understand the problems involved.’
Recognizing these fears and in an effort to counter them, some
BPOs have what they call ‘family days’ when the parents of the
‘good girls’ can come and inspect their place of work for its
worthiness.
The suggestion is that the night is a dangerous place, not only
because of the increased potential of assault, but also because
women themselves cannot handle this level of freedom without
losing their virtuous natures and spotless reputations. In addition to
accusations of sexual manipulation often levelled at ambitious and
successful professional women from all fields, all call centre workers
have to carry the burden of a suspect morality.
Women’s choices to have fun then become irrelevant to the story.
These stories tend to be about the loss of control over good women
and, to a lesser extent, men as well. When women trespass the
acceptable boundaries of time that demarcate day and night, and
public and private, and begin to work at night, all kinds of anxieties
emerge. One of the major fears associated with call centres is that
women are potentially having too much of the ‘wrong’ kind of fun—
the kind of fun that jeopardizes their reputations as good girls.
Unfortunately, nobody seems to remember how hard and long BPO
employees actually work for a living. The self-professed guardians of
morality remain fixated on the possibility that ‘good’, middle-class call
centre girls will acquire the ‘tainted reputations’ of call girls and bar
dancers.
The temporal boundaries of day and night are imposed as rigidly
as those of private–public and are irrevocably linked to the duality of
being respectable–unrespectable. Until all these boundaries are
challenged together, certain spaces, places and times will continue
to be off limits for women. Unless our effort to ‘reclaim the night’ can
include all women of the night, these efforts are doomed to remain
forever symbolic. Can we strike at the heart of middle-class morality
and respectability to assert not only that the night belongs to us but
also that we belong to the night?
20. Can Girls Buy Fun?
Inside High Street Phoenix’s Spaghetti Kitchen, which stands under
the shadow of a silent chimney of a forgotten mill, a boisterous
ladies’ kitty party is underway. Laughter rises above the clink of
glasses as iced tea and plates of mushroom risotto and pesto-stuffed
ravioli make the rounds. The party could well be a prelude to a
collective shopping spree. Outside the posh complex, merely a few
yards away, stand the dilapidated chawls housing the families of mill
workers. Some of the women from these chawls are also at the mall.
They stand on the other side of the counter.
Even as the textile mills transform into upmarket retail shops,
multinational offices and high-rise housing, the older structures
remain, ever-present reminders of a different city, another time. The
swanky new edifices of Central Mumbai cannot completely
transcend their past. Significant numbers of former mill workers still
live in the area. Both the defunct textile mills and the residential
chawls for the workers are located here.
In these areas, the city of production and the city of consumption
look each other in the face. In the master narrative of this city, malls
have replaced mills as the desired markers of modernity. Within
these spaces, it becomes possible to truly transcend the poverty, dirt
and third worldness of the city by immersing oneself in the smells,
textures and experiences of consumption that parallel those in first
world cities. The former spaces of production must now be
aestheticized, their original functions and inhabitants displaced.
Where retained, as in the High Street Phoenix mall complex in
Mumbai’s Lower Parel area, the empty shells of the original
structures—with their large skylights, nineteenth-century cast-iron
pillars, and towering chimneys—seek authenticity by invoking the
nostalgia of a glorious industrial past.
From the perspective of women’s access, one might be tempted to
assume that this change is for the better. Mind-numbing
manufacturing spaces dominated by sweaty male bodies have been
replaced by hypnotic spaces of consumption inhabited by
deodorized female bodies. So, do these seductive spaces live up to
this image of inclusion for women or do they mask underlying
inequities?
Spaces of consumption are privately owned and their owners have
the legal rights to control access. These are not public spaces.
Access depends on class—whether you can afford, or at least look
like you can afford, to consume. These spaces are thus accessible
to only a small minority of women. They render invisible a large
group of women and men, many of whom may be involved in the
production of commodities which facilitates this consumption.
During our research, we found women in the malls—strolling,
talking animatedly, watching films, shopping, dressed to accentuate
their position as early twenty-first century urban women in a global
city. Not all women, however, are here to play; for many, these are
spaces of work. If middle-and upper-middle-class women are in
these private–public spaces as consumers, lower middle-class
women enter these spaces as saleswomen and are thus introduced
to global cultural practices of consumption. In many cases, both the
shop assistants and the shoppers appear to be dressed similarly.
The fact that the shopper confides her body-shape anxieties to the
shop girl may add to this impression of equality, but the fact is that
the shop girl cannot afford the dress the shopper is trying to fit into.
The democratization of fashion begins in the dressing room, but
ends at the cash counter.
The saleswomen in the malls are inevitably dressed in western
wear and often speak to customers in English. These young women
and others like them inhabit almost schizophrenic worlds—living in
their one-room homes and working in the posh several-thousandsquare-feet malls where they are required to display an accent and
demeanour which reflects the class and status of the goods they sell.
They are typically not very well paid, but must dress as their
customers do. They must simultaneously embody an attitude of
service to potential buyers, and exude cool reserve towards those
who do not look like they can afford the goods.
Shop assistants arrive at their jobs mostly in salwar-kameezes
from which they change into the typical blouse with skirt or trousers
uniform of the store for which they work. During conversations, some
of them reveal that though their parents think it is acceptable for
them to work as saleswomen, it is still not really acceptable for them
to wear knee-length skirts outside their work (though jeans and
trousers with untucked tops are acceptable). One woman told us, ‘It
has not been easy for my parents to convince the neighbours that
the work I do is respectable given that I reach home only after 10
p.m. every day.’ For most women, the late hours they work
necessitates many negotiations.
In another vein, in these former mill areas, where the class profile of
the space is changing through gentrification, women’s movements,
clothing and demeanour provide an important marker of these
changes and the present sense of flux. In our research, women in
the chawls spoke with pride about their daughters’ education and
independence, but expressed a strong anxiety about the clothes they
wore, the influence of the changing neighbourhood mores and the
need to set boundaries. A woman in her forties argued, ‘It’s natural
for young girls to want to look good but we cannot forget the rest of
the world who love to talk.’
The malls are populated by upper-middle-class women
consumers, many of whom wore their first pair of jeans as children
and by these saleswomen, who are only just learning to wear them.
In this space, the visible markers of appropriate womanhood—
clothing, make-up, hair-styles—might appear similar, but they
heighten the anxieties on both sides of class divide. Both the
shoppers and the shop girls are at pains to distinguish themselves
from each other, the former to underline class privilege and the latter
to demonstrate that their clothing does not alter their ‘traditional’
values, most often to allay their families’ fears.
In a context where consumption and fun have become inextricably
linked, it might appear that buying is the only way to have fun.
Spaces of consumption reinforce this image. The shiny glass and
chrome interiors lend a bit of their glamour to all who tread their
vitrified floors. Whether we are shop girls or shoppers, the airconditioned first-world-smelling spaces create the illusion that
everyone can have their bit of fun. So long as the shop girl can smell
the coffee, she can forget that her mill worker father is unemployed.
So long as the shopper can shop her boredom away, she can forget
that she quit the career track for motherhood. Instead of consuming
the privatized charms of a mall, can we not imagine a city where we
might encounter each other in a park or on the beach, without the
divide of the shop counter, in quest of pleasures that cannot be
bought?
21. Can Different Girls Think of Fun?
The city is an endless obstacle course. Each disproportionately
elevated and unevenly spaced pavement poses enormous
challenges. All pot-holed streets are minefields to be negotiated.
Every place with no ramp or elevator posts a ‘No Entry’ sign. All
narrow public toilet cubicles (wherever available) are like taunting
reminders of what you cannot use.
If the city is unfriendly to its able-bodied women, it is much more
hostile to its differently abled women, who are forced to wage a daily
battle against it. Even simple acts of accessing public space for
everyday tasks, which are taken for granted by other women, pose
almost insurmountable odds for differently abled people, be they
physically, visually or audio-challenged.
A simple bus ride involves enormous strategizing for a visually
challenged young working woman who travels from Parel to Fort
every day. The lack of audio announcements in buses means she
has to mentally count every stop until she arrives at her destination.
A senior administrative officer who is wheelchair-bound finds most
shops cramped and railway platforms unreachable. Even accessing
an ATM machine to withdraw cash is often impossible. A visually
challenged advocate finds the revolving doors at malls a real
hazard.13
For a forty-something senior events manager at a city bookstore,
who has cerebral palsy which severely affects her movement and
speech, most places remain inaccessible. ‘My biggest frustration is
that I can’t ‘walk’ the streets of Mumbai on my own,’ she says. When
she visits a city like London, she can go almost everywhere—on the
bus, to the museum or a movie theatre—totally on her own, using
her motorized wheelchair. That is when she has fun, particularly
since everything is accessible and she is not dependent on someone
else being around to lift her up. ‘But I can’t do the same in Mumbai,
my own city, and that is most disappointing,’ she says. She is aware
that many other women like her do not even have access to these
occasional pleasures since they cannot afford to travel to other
differently-abled-friendlier cities.
India is home to 70 million differently abled people.14 Most of them
access public space against multiple odds. On the one hand, they
battle an ignorant public unaware of how to include the differently
abled. On the other, they confront insensitively designed spaces and
transport systems which have never kept them in mind in the first
place. It is a daily struggle to enter a building, cross a road, get onto
a train, go to the market or just to watch a movie in a cinema hall. As
one wheelchair-bound woman mentioned in an interview, ‘It’s almost
impossible for me to participate in any activities in public space. I
often find myself just being a spectator, always inside looking out.’15
While all differently abled people find accessibility to public space
arduous, differently abled women have their own set of problems.
Disabled men tend to have greater access to public space than
disabled women. Often, for women, the battle for public access
starts at home with parents and family members being overly
protective and thus placing more restrictions on their movement.
When they are out in public, they are compelled to depend on
strangers for help, a situation fraught with anxiety, especially for
women. Many differently abled women point out the discomfort in
having to hold a strange man’s hand to cross a busy street or being
carried by a man from the street level onto the high footpath, even if
they are in a wheelchair. This is not only because of the fear of
harassment, but also because physical contact with strangers is
considered taboo for respectable women. To avoid accepting such
help from strangers then, many disabled women will even avoid
coming out of their homes.
Disabled women are seen as being more vulnerable to
harassment on the streets. One visually challenged woman told us
that strangers often ask for personal details and make provocative
comments, which she has learnt to ignore. But sexual harassment
also depends on the nature of the disability. For those who are more
visibly handicapped, being ignored is more of a reality. One woman
with cerebral palsy said, ‘I am not even visible to them—people
pretend I don’t exist. They don’t even talk to me, forget harassing me
in any way.’
When every step you take has to be counted and even daily
accessibility in the public space for work, study or routine chores is in
serious question, it certainly kills any impulse to hang out in public
for pleasure. ‘Fun? Where? Even when you go out do you see
disabled peopled?’ asks an enraged thirty-two-year-old physically
challenged woman. ‘How many parks and movie theatres are
accessible to us? Even family outings become difficult if family
members feel ashamed of having a disabled woman with them.’
It is not as if they do not yearn for a place to hang out in public.
One young woman would like to go out with friends to bars in
Mumbai, but almost all of them are too dark and constricted for her
wheelchair. According to her, Mumbai’s lack of facilities for differently
abled people has certainly affected her social life. Since she cannot
navigate the city easily, she spends more time at home, mostly
surfing the worldwide web on her computer. Newer spaces of
consumption like malls and multiplexes have changed this to a
certain extent because they are more accessible as many of them
are efficaciously designed with ramps, elevators and wider
passages.
Certainly, design plays a role in improving access. The Persons with
Disabilities (Equal Opportunity, Protection of Rights and Full
Participation) Act, 1995, India, states that public buildings and
transport systems have to be disabled friendly.16 Many of the
architectural modifications required—a plank placed at an angle that
works as a ramp, slightly bigger toilets to fit in wheelchairs, and so
on—are not too expensive or difficult to implement. Still, they are
rarely put in place and when they are, they are so badly designed
that few would risk getting onto some of those ramps or using some
of the sloppily planned toilets. Everything from banks to hospitals
and transport services to hotels are built with scant regard to the
disabled even though many of these simple design changes can
benefit not just the handicapped but also older people, children and
pregnant women.
An activist with ADAPT (Able Disabled All People Together), a
rights groups for differently abled people, is all for conducting access
audits of all public spaces. She says, ‘It’s not just about adding
ramps, it’s about having an attitude as a city that says differently
abled persons belong here too.’ When she was studying in a premier
South Mumbai college, the management sensitively put in ramps
everywhere and arranged for her to use the elevator for classrooms
on a higher floor. This made her feel welcome in that environment.
Ironically, all the ramps were removed when she graduated.
When infrastructural changes do take place, they can really
change things around. In Bangalore, disability activists had an
access ramp built in a park to encourage its usage by differently
abled people. Initially, the park officials didn’t see the point of the
ramp as they didn’t see any disabled people using the park. But
once the ramp was installed and more disabled people went to the
park, officials realized that necessity of good design coming first.
Many disabled women feel most hurdles arise from biases rather
than ‘actual’ obstacles. People often behave as if the differently
abled somehow do not have the same desires for pleasure as
themselves. It is as if their disability depersonalizes them. As one
young woman put it, ‘People never think we live fully functional lives
just like them. They make a major leap from “this person cannot see”
to “this person cannot function”.’ This observation lies at the crux of
why no efforts are made to make public space more accessible to
the differently abled, especially women.
Disabled women are excluded from public space not only because
of their physical inability to access badly designed spaces, but also
because of a larger ideology that does not recognize their very
presence. Further, because they are seen as being more physically
vulnerable, they are restricted even more than other women. On the
one hand, they are seen as asexual in that their own desires are not
accounted for, but on the other, they are also seen as sexually more
vulnerable and as easy targets for public harassment and assault.
It is difference and diversity that adds humaneness and empathy
to our cities. Can we envisage a city where the differnetly abled can
‘walk’ unimpeded along with the other-abled and access the city to
just hang out?
22. How Do only Girls Have Fun?
The music is loud, the lighting dim, translucent tendrils of smoke
arise from glowing cigarette ends as fruit juice and alcohol do the
rounds, and the heady aroma of biryani spices fill the air. The party is
in full swing—in one corner, a couple cuddles, in another, a
vociferous argument on local politics breaks out; in the centre, a
group swings wildly to the beat of the music. A regular Saturday
night party in a suburban home you might think—except with one
difference—this one is all-girls’ one, and this is no schoolgirl
sleepover.
Over the past few years, lesbian women have become more
visible and articulate in the public sphere in Mumbai. This does not
mean, however, that they have become more acceptable, especially
as a group with a political agenda. For women who love women, any
political claim to space till recently was complicated by the fact that
legally Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code rendered all non-penovaginal sex illegal, both in public and in private. Although no woman
was ever prosecuted under Section 377, it was used to threaten
women in same-sex relationships. Living at the edge of the law
implies disguising one’s sexual identity or at least some subterfuge,
with the constant threat of harassment leading to a double
discrimination against lesbian women in public space; both as
women and as sexual minorities.
Same-sex love in public might be tolerated in some upmarket
spaces if it is not too overt, not too loud and if you follow the US
army rule ‘not to ask and not to tell’. Or if you don’t mind seeking
refuge in the sanctioned homo-sociality of being just good friends.
Large cities like Mumbai do offer a certain kind of freedom that
comes with anonymity—the possibility of getting lost in the crowd.
But the other side of the anonymity coin is submerging your identity
into that of the mainstream normative—in the case of lesbian
women, this generally means passing off as heterosexual. This
compulsion to be invisible and unobtrusive thus undermines lesbian
women’s ability to mount political action on the basis of their gender
and sexual identities.
Despite the fact that it is difficult for lesbian women to demand
public visibility, recently, there has been some media attention,
especially in the shape of television talk shows that attempt to
engage issues of sexual preference in a serious way. Prior to this,
discussions on lesbianism were predominantly negative. For
instance, cinema halls where the film Fire (1996), which
sympathetically portrays a lesbian relationship between two sistersin-law, was released, met with vandalism. In Mumbai, the Shiv Sena
went on the rampage, tearing down posters and threatening moviegoers. These protests received wide publicity and compelled lesbian
women and other liberals to unite and protest. Even the film
Girlfriend (2004), despite portraying the lesbian protagonist
negatively as a victim of sexual abuse with homicidal tendencies,
was subjected to acts of vandalism by right-wing groups.
While large events like the Fire controversy have the effect of
bringing the community together along with other progressive
groups, everyday harassment is something that lesbian women learn
to live with.
Ironically, lesbian women record that often, it is all-women spaces
that are the most hostile and fraught. While our research has shown
that public transport in Mumbai, particularly local trains, greatly adds
to women’s mobility and capacity to access public space, at the
same time, it is far from being a space of pure camaraderie or
freedom. Eunuchs are met with annoyance mixed with anxiety
(though, unless they receive a great deal of support from each other,
women will not actively demonstrate their hostility towards hijras
whom they also fear). Women who dress and appear non-normative
or inadequately feminine are also met with suspicion. Many women
who choose a more assertive demeanour or favour a style of
dressing perceived to be masculine are also the target of women
commuters’ aggression and disdain. Transgender people and others
who dress ambiguously are seen as a threat to the clear definition of
both people and space.
Looking different or dressing different always gets some response.
One woman academic in her forties told us, ‘If I dress in a less
feminine manner on any given day, then I have to be prepared to be
in battle mode that day. Uncomfortable situations come in the shape
of being asked to get off the ladies’ seats in buses, or being asked if
I am a boy or a girl.’ There are some women who have stopped
travelling by train because they find it too traumatic. Access for those
who refuse to conform to established gender norms is thus deeply
contested.
Like trains, public toilets too are a vexed space. During a group
discussion, one woman recounted how every time she goes into the
women’s toilet, even in a five-star hotel, other women give her
strange looks and she has to vociferously assert that, ‘I am a girl.’
Another time, she said, a woman told a group of lesbians, ‘I think
you’ve got the wrong toilets.’ She felt that their attitude seemed to
suggest, ‘How dare you masquerade, how dare you not fit in?’ Yet
another woman pointed out that they got similar responses even
from people who supported their political cause. Such people asked,
‘Why do you dress like cartoons in drag—how do you expect people
to take you seriously?’
Finding flats in the city can also be difficult if women are openly
lesbian. Given that India is a homo-social culture, women living with
other women is not a cause for comment, but should they make their
relationship clear, then landlords are not keen to have them. One
couple told us of how once their relationship became known, the
landlord threatened to lodge a complaint with the police against them
unless they vacated the apartment. Despite the fact that many more
women have come out in the open in recent years, lesbian
relationships are fraught with everyday struggles for legitimacy.
In Mumbai, like elsewhere, the internet has made it easier for lesbian
women to network. With dating sites and e-groups, they now have a
platform to communicate with each other, express their opinions,
chat, joke and flirt. There are also many private parties where
lesbian women gather to talk, connect and have a good time. Some
lesbian women told us that in a suburb of the city, a group meets on
Sundays once in three months at a lounge bar from 12 p.m. to 6 p.m.
—with the complete support of the owner. But it is only at private
parties and some private spaces of consumption that lesbian women
interact as women who love women. Despite the presence of such
spaces, they continue to find it difficult to meet others like them,
especially since many are compelled to be silent about their sexual
identity. In most other contexts, they are simply looked upon as
women who are with other women.
Often, for lesbian women too, the only ‘public’ spaces available
are the spaces where they consume, especially if they belong to a
certain class. However, there have been instances of hostility
towards lesbian women in these spaces as well. In a group
discussion, we were told of one case, where two women who were
kissing in an upmarket bar were asked to leave and never return
(though this was resolved later through negotiation). One woman
pointed out that in the same bar, heterosexual couples kiss and
make out all the time, without anyone batting an eyelid. Another
woman recounted how she and a group of friends were taunted at an
upmarket seafood restaurant while the management did little to stop
it. In contrast, a third woman recollected that in a less upmarket bar,
once a group of men who were staring and commenting loudly at
them, were asked to leave. In both cases, the unfriendly attention
they drew undermined the pleasure of the evening out.
Relative to lesbian women, gay men in the city do have more
space. The bar and cruising scene in public tends to be all-gay.
There are an increasing number of gay parties in Mumbai and there
are many celebrities who are openly out. Certain pubs and
nightclubs have had gay parties and nights in the past. Clearly, then,
even among a group of people who are all marginalized, men have
more access to public space than women do.
Many women sitting, walking, dining or dancing in a group will
recollect having been asked (often in the politest of ways), ‘So you
girls are on your own?’ This reflects a larger social attitude that
assumes that women without men, even if they are in large groups,
are ‘alone’. This is as much about the subtle imposition of the norm
of heterosexuality (women belong with men) as it is about safety
(women in public without men to legitimize them are unsafe). Are we
doomed to forever smile back vacuously and disclaim being on our
own? Will we as same-sex desiring women always have to hide our
identities and negotiate for every inch of public space we occupy? Or
can we imagine a world in which women can be in public on their
own and still be seen as being together?
23. Do Old Girls Have Fun?
O meri zohrajabeen, tujhe maloom nahi, tu abhi tak hai haseen aur
mein jawaan …
(Oh my beautiful one, you have no idea how attractive you still are,
and how young I still am …)
And so, every once in a while, an older woman is courted and
teased in Bollywood style. She is supposed to be appreciative of the
gesture, given that her grey hair doesn’t usually fetch her public
compliments, and sometimes, she may even smile. But usually, she
is just reminded of the fact that age does not bring immunity from
public harassment.
There are over six lakh senior citizens in Mumbai, about 81 million
in the whole of India, according to HelpAge India. Senior citizens,
officially persons over sixty years of age, are as much outsiders to
the global vision of the city as other marginal citizens. In newspaper
reportage, like women, older people only make news when they are
attacked, murdered, abused or commit suicide. In India, the rhetoric
around older people usually locates them in the family. The
predominant concern is whether aging parents are being looked after
by their offspring. In this process, like women, older people get
infantilized. Moreover, in the new global city, older citizens, imagined
to be unproductive, get further sidelined. This allows their everyday
concerns such as levelled footpaths to walk on, adequate
streetlights, preferential access to public transport or recreational
spaces to be ignored.
The fear many older people often have is that of losing balance
and hurting themselves, much more than that of being assaulted.
Interestingly, in the past year, disabled wheelchair access signs have
sprung up at many bus stops, but there is no sign of actual slopes
that might provide easier access for older people as well. An older
man points out, ‘In a bus, though there are seats reserved for senior
citizens, they are invariably occupied.’ One older woman adds,
‘Although there is a separate entrance for senior citizens, the bus
never stops in the same place and you are often forced to take the
back entrance.’ While buses might be difficult to negotiate, trains are
near impossible, given the crowds. Added to this, public amenities
like railway bridges and underpasses are also designed without
acknowledging the particular needs of older citizens. It is not
surprising that a city that ignores its 6 million poor has little thought
to spare for its comparatively small population of senior citizens.
Some gestures, however, have been made in the past few years
to make the city more accessible to senior citizens. For instance,
nana-nani parks were introduced in 1999 with the intention of
providing space to seniors in the city. The presence of these parks
legitimates the presence of older people and acknowledges their
claim to public space. While most nana-nani parks in Mumbai are
open to everyone, some are reserved for the use of seniors only
such as at Girgaum Chowpatty and Shivaji Park. This creates a
segregation that not all older people are comfortable with because it
tends to make them feel isolated. As one grandmother puts it, ‘These
parks are good, but I don’t go there because I don’t want to feel old. I
want to go where the young people are. I won’t go there even when I
get older.’
When boys become men, their space expands; their sphere of
access spreads further and further away from home into the larger
city, and their confidence grows simultaneously. However, when
middle-aged men become old, their space contracts; they
experience their body as less able, and their confidence diminishes.
This puts them at a disadvantage relative to older women. Middleclass older men, used to unrestricted and unthinking access to public
space when they were younger, are ill at ease in their new roles and
often express anxieties such as losing their balance and falling down
or being attacked. Older women, on the other hand, strategically
access public space with skills honed over a lifetime. Furthermore,
beyond a certain age, the fear of unsuitable alliances diminish, and
with it, the need for familial and community control of women. Hence,
for middle-aged and old women, notional access to space expands
in comparison to that of girls and younger women.
While older women acknowledge a sense of liberation from the
relentless male gaze, many are still harassed, particularly by older
men. As one sixty-something woman told us, ‘The young men often
give up their seats for me, it’s the dirty old men who still leer.’ Older
women might be nudged in a crowded bus, though they may not be
a target of catcalls and lewd songs. More significantly, the memories
of fear continue. One woman said, ‘I even dream about it. I’m out of
the house and then I forget the way back home. A man is following
me. It’s a dream that recurs.’
Moreover, age does not completely take away women’s need to
manufacture purpose or legitimacy. Although reduced familial
responsibilities facilitate greater access to public space, families still
have to grant approval. It is still most respectable to go out in the
company of one’s husband. Age does not bring freedom from the
temporal boundaries of public space visibility. As one respondent put
it, ‘The fear is that people will talk if they see me alone at this late
hour.’ Older women sometimes seek legitimacy of access through
bhajan mandalis or groups and other religious rituals. They may also
join the local laughter club which can be rationalized in the name of
health and spirituality—but this is about as far as it usually goes.
Respectability continues to be all-important and activities cannot be
articulated simply in terms of fun.
In the proliferation of images of slim young women with their
shopping bags that adorn a multitude of hoardings, older women are
rendered invisible. The predominant images of older women come
from soap operas where they are viewed in the one-dimensional
binary of scheming mother-in-law/benevolent mother-in-law.
Although there are the beginnings of a subtle pressure to look young
and attractive (witness actor Hema Malini looking thinner and more
glamourous than in her heyday), older women predominantly feel the
pressure to dress and behave their age. As a retired teacher put it,
‘Even at my age, you do get looked at. But if you dress well, you
hear comments like “Buddhi ghodi laal lagaam”, which means that
my attire is inappropriate for an older woman.’
What is needed is a paradigm shift that sees older women as equally
desirable and desiring citizens. This would mean acknowledging that
older women, as much as anyone else, might want fun and
excitement in their lives. In the popular imagination, good old girls
are either beatific grannies or crotchety crones. In either case, it is
assumed that their idea of fun is popping over to the neighbours for a
cup of tea and a chat. We may have our adorable grandchildren, the
daily soap opera and local gossip, but why should we also not ask
for the same pleasures of the public that younger people desire?
24. Where Do Girls Have Fun?
The gym is a good place to begin. You run on the state-of-the-art
treadmill in an air-conditioned room filled with other sweaty bodies.
You put your body through the paces as others do the same on
steppers, spinners and cross-trainers. For variety, you may try the
novel rock-climbing wall or the surya namaskars at the ashtanga
yoga class next door. Or, like the many others around you, you may
simply choose to plug in to your iPod and shut out the world outside.
Literally shut it out, especially if you live in ‘gated communities’ such
as Hiranandani Gardens in Powai or the Lokhandwala complex in
Andheri (West) or even Dosti Acres in Wadala.
These residential enclaves and others like them that are
increasingly colonizing Mumbai, might have been built at different
times—starting with the Lokhandwala complex in the 1980s on what
was once swamp land, to the Hiranandani Gardens, built in the
1990s—but these are no simple housing colonies. The towering
concrete and glass residential structures that crowd these enclaves,
along with multi-tiered parking facilities, assorted commercial and
entertainment establishments, and uniformed security guards at
several points, make these complexes worlds in, and of themselves.
Plenty of places then for a girl to have fun, you might think.
Particularly when you do not have to deal with the squalid slums,
mounds of garbage, the pot-holed municipality-controlled roads, the
disorderly morchas and the noisy traffic jams that lie just outside the
gates. But more than the noise and dirt, what gated residential
enclaves are most effective in keeping out are the unwanted ‘others’.
In fact, most of these enclaves are advertised precisely on these
grounds, that is: come and live with ‘people like you’ who belong to
the same class.
Though Mumbai has always been a parochial city in terms of how
people live in varied permutations and combinations of ghettos of
intersecting class and community, the residential enclave is a
completely new kind of ghetto.
At Hiranandani Gardens in Powai, all security is private and
domestic workers have entry passes. While the upper classes have
lived in networks of affluence for a long time, what is new about
these enclaves is that they are spatially laid out so that almost all
activities can be accomplished within their boundaries. Many of the
new constructions have a ‘model’ flat to show prospective buyers—
complete with various fittings and accessories including furniture,
crockery, bedspreads and curtains—to demonstrate the desired
habitus of the occupants. Here, in a sense, class comes to stand in
for community, where living with ‘others of one’s kind’ is an implicit
guarantee of safety.
But community, or at least cultural commonality, is also sometimes
underwritten in the make-up of these gated communities. While all
the gated communities might not be communally specific, it is not
unheard of for many to have rules that prevent the sale of
apartments to ‘non-vegetarians’. There are simultaneously colonies
springing up which cater specifically to Muslims. The communal
identity of the complex may not be overt, but is nonetheless marked,
through the presence of a temple, a Jain derasar or a mosque in the
premises. While no official will tell you so, housing agents will gently
discourage you from approaching certain colonies if you don’t belong
to the right community.
The effective message of the gated communities is that you can
ignore the larger city by creating your own sterilized bubble of
paradise. Increasingly, instead of staking a claim to citizenship, the
attitude is to shut out what you cannot change.
What this means for the city is the creation of a group of people
who apparently live in the city, but are impervious to many of its
facets. Their own realities are generated within these spaces filled
with consumer durables and accessories that look suspiciously alike
in an effort to achieve a version of the model home they all saw
when buying their flats. Their manufactured pleasures do not
represent acts of citizenship, but are instead, acts of secession from
it. Even if they belong to a class that often makes decisions about
the city and its ‘vision’, within their cocooned ‘neighbourhoods’, they
are consumers rather than citizens.
So what are the pleasures available to women behind the closed
gates, real or metaphorical?
Many of these residential enclaves are fitted not just with housing
units, but also schools, hospitals, hotels, landscaped gardens with
jogging tracks, cricket pitches, kiddie sandpits, club houses with
saunas, indulgent jacuzzi tubs and swimming pools, shopping
centres, a variety of restaurants, pubs and all kinds of entertainment,
including in some cases, miniature golf courses and go-karting
tracks. Some also include office complexes. Sporting competitions
are organized for residents, as are kitty clubs, special parties, fairs
and fêtes. There are enough activities to keep you occupied 24/7. In
fact, many advertisements for new housing colonies focus on the
woman, showing her where and how she can shop, play, exercise,
pray, send her kids to school, dine out—all this without stepping out
of the compound; in other words, without ever having to deal with the
messiness that is the city.
Women then are encouraged to perceive these as ideal
environments, to which they can return from work or even give up
their jobs without the fear of boredom. ‘It’s so convenient to have the
children’s school, my gym and the shopping centre in the same
enclave where we live,’ says one stay-at-home mother. ‘This way, we
don’t feel like we are always commuting. Everything we need is at
hand and there’s no need to step out at all.’ Professional women find
these spaces convenient for the services and anonymity they offer.
The enclave itself is all new and lacks a history. People may assume
a shared class, but know little of each other. The stereotypical nosy
neighbour of the Bandra village or the Malabar Hill high-rise is
unlikely to be found here, in effect almost eliminating the policing
women may experience elsewhere. ‘It’s like a separate world,’ says
one thirty-year-old woman who works in the television industry and
has just bought a house in the Lokhandwala complex.
As the numerous films that are shot here suggest, these enclaves
approximate films sets where everything is staged and each player is
acutely conscious of the need to perform her/his role. So long as one
knows the script, and listens for the prompter cues if one forgets the
lines, one can partake of the pleasures of this make-believe world.
The biggest make-believe here is the pretence of a public space. For
all the apparently public spaces here are, in effect, privatized
spaces, regulated and controlled no less than the malls. In these
spaces, one might be convinced that one may enjoy the pleasures of
the public if one is willing to let someone else design the stage. In a
world where women often perform a variety of personas—femininity,
desirability, professionalism, super-motherhood—living on a stage
where everyone is performing may even be a relief.
But, at the same time, as a gated community resident, one is lulled
into a false sense of actually having access to the public—to the
neighbourhood pool, gym, walkway, coffee shop. In actuality, the
pleasures we can partake of are quite limited. All that we do have
access to is a world created inside boundary walls—a little bigger
than our homes, a little larger than our building compounds, but
much smaller than the city that we rightfully should have access to
without restriction, and whose pleasures should be ours without
question. Is it enough that a simulated city has been brought to our
doorsteps suitably sanitized, stylized and deodorized? Or is this just
a mirage distracting us from engaging fully with the real city and its
public space?
25. Can Good Girls Have Fun?
‘I am a good girl, I am,’ says Eliza Dolittle to Henry Higgins in
George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, made even more famous by its
cinematic avatar, My Fair Lady. By which, of course, Eliza was
asserting that she was a flower girl not a sex worker, and
demonstrating a compulsion to manufacture respectability that is
universal to women across cultures and history, even though the
idea of what constitutes a ‘good’ girl changes over time, space and
culture.
The question is: can good girls, the ones who desire to retain
virtuous reputations, still have fun, take risks and perhaps even
dream of loitering? We might answer by examining Chembur, a
nondescript eastern suburb of the city. Chembur is verbal shorthand
and could stand in for many other similar areas of the city such as
Mulund or Vile Parle or Borivali or even Matunga—places that are
middle-class bastions of a kind of self-important, complacent
morality.
Chembur is a middle-class suburb (though, of course, upper-class
and lower-class people live here too) located on the Central
(Harbour) railway line. The suburb is currently seeing a real estate
boom, with a new mall and multiplex being built and is becoming
more mixed in terms of its population composition. Its predominant
populations are the Sindhis, the Punjabis, the Mangalorean
Christians and South Indians dominated by the Tamil Brahmins.
Then there are also the Gujaratis, the Maharashtrians, the Bengalis,
and the Syrian Christians who are considerably fewer in number.
Each of these communities has their own shifting definition of the
‘good girl’. At the risk of sounding simplistic and downright
stereotypical, let us try to imagine what some of the definitions of
these good girls might look like.
This good girl does engineering, endeavours to visit the temple as
regularly as possible, is firmly vegetarian and marries within her
caste and outside her gotra, the mythical ancestral group.
That good girl plays a musical instrument, preferably the piano;
volunteers at the parish; is educated, but not too much; works, but
not too late; and marries, preferably within the caste and community,
hopefully within the religion and failing that, marries an educated
man with ‘good prospects’.
A third good girl knows she must marry early; prove her fertility as
soon as possible, and live amicably and good-naturedly in a large
joint family.
A fourth good girl strives hard to meet parental expectations,
works towards the job she simply must have; if her parents are
liberal, she’s allowed to bring her boyfriends home and she can
usually marry anyone educated, anyone but a Muslim or a dalit.17
These are stereotypes of possible women in Chembur that point to
some codes of gendered conduct, but nonetheless, are as always
partial descriptions.
These are caricatures that do not always reveal the ways in which
women in Mumbai, as elsewhere, negotiate with varying degrees of
success, to redefine the term ‘good girl’ for themselves.
The mothers of the good (and not-so-good) girls from various
communities keep a watchful eye on all the would-be-good-girls. For
instance, a young woman told us how indignant her aunt was when
her male cousin’s girlfriend, a young woman from another
community, held his hand in the aunt’s presence. This indignation is
directed as much at the community, and its ‘different’ social mores,
as at the young girl herself. Another woman said she had been
attracted to the man who is now her husband under the mistaken
assumption that he belonged to the same linguistic and caste
community as she and was therefore ‘suitable’. By the time she
discovered that he belonged to another community, she was already
in love.
Then, is it possible for good girls to have fun? In middle-class
suburbs of the city, women negotiate the shifting definitions of good
and bad women as best as they can, trying to be recognized as
‘good’ girls even as they seek to maximize access to the outside
world.
In some ways, this compels women to revise their definition of
what constitutes fun. They negotiate where they can go and when.
They cover up spaghetti tops with jackets and halters with scarves
and travel in groups. Going out with other women whose parents are
known to one’s own is often a strategy women use so that parents
feel a sense of collective security in knowing their daughters are with
each other—the respectability of each family endorsing that of the
other. Instead of seeing this constant strategizing as a limitation on
her movements, however, the good middle-class girl takes pride in
her skill in ‘handling her family’, dodging the male gaze, and still
managing to have fun. As one woman in her early twenties put it,
‘What my family doesn’t know, can’t hurt them. Besides, it’s not as if
I’m doing something wrong.’
Sometimes, marriage expands access to public space since one
now has a built-in ‘escort’ to go out with while retaining the aura of
good girldom. Where couples live on their own in nuclear set-ups,
and where women are financially independent, they often feel a
sense of liberation at not being answerable to a parent.
However, it is important to remember that despite the success with
which women may or may not be able to negotiate their access to
public space, this access is always conditional on their maintaining
impeccable reputations. Such access is dependent on the largesse
of the woman’s family and may be withdrawn at any time. It is a
concession, not a right.
Is the answer then to be ‘bad’ girls? Bad girls, however, have no
protection—their families are embarrassed by them and anxious
about their reputations. To be a bad girl might mean that one has
wilful access to the public, but this also means limited capacity to
bargain or negotiate for other rights. As one woman recounted, ‘I
rebelled openly in my teens and my parents were always forbidding
me from wearing these clothes or going to that place. It was a
difficult time for them and me.’ Most women learn quickly that being
‘bad girls’ does not pay off. When it comes to accessing public
space, in the short run, it certainly appears far more profitable to
subtly manipulate the system rather than openly rebel against it.
Given the multiple anxieties spawned by the perceived materialism
and superficiality of globalization, good middle-class girls have
become symbols of the resilience of Indian culture in withstanding
the onslaught of ‘alien’ cultural ideas. Thus, despite the
mushrooming of malls and multiplexes, respectable middle-class
areas continue to bask in the image of being bastions of modesty
and decency. They exult in the fact that, unlike in Bandra, women
here do not move around the markets in shorts, sit by themselves in
bars or smoke cigarettes in public. To the outsider, this might seem
be mundane and unexceptional, but it represents the essence of
solid urban Indian middle-classness—a middle-classness still
defined by values of frugality, humility, honesty, hard work,
education, family-centredness and always, always, respectability.
And the middle-class good girl out there, but always within her limits,
is ever-present to buttress this image. Here manipulation replaces
protest, and strategizing stands in for rights. Rocking the
respectability boat is too much effort. But will we always have to
manoeuvre or wheedle our way out of the backdoor? Isn’t it time to
claim the right to access public space through the front door?
Imagining Utopias
26. Why Loiter?
As we collectively produce our cities, so we collectively produce
ourselves …. [If] we accept that ‘society is made and imagined’, then we
can also believe that it can be ‘remade and reimagined’.
—David Harvey (2000)
‘Why would you want to loiter?’ we are inevitably asked in tones that
range from incomprehension to horror.
As educated, employed, middle-class, urban Indian women (rather
like the desirable-ought-to-be-good-little-women we write about),
when we express a desire to seek pleasure in the city by loitering, it
might seem strange to some. It might seem as though (a) as
beneficiaries of the women’s movement, who have access to
education, healthcare and employment, we are asking for too much,
(b) given that most women in India don’t have access to even basic
facilities, we are being frivolous, and (c) our desire to loiter is
peculiar, for, in any case, loitering itself is an offensive activity.
For some reason, nobody likes loitering. In fact, the state
disapproves so much that it actually legislates against it. The
Bombay Police Act, 1951, has a clause that reads: ‘Whoever is
found between sunset and sunrise … laying or loitering in any street,
yard or any other place … and without being able to give a
satisfactory account of himself … shall on conviction, be punished
…’
Lukkha, lafanga, vella, tapori, bekaar are words from various
Indian languages; they are, without exception, uncomplimentary
terms used to describe the act of loitering or the lack of
demonstration of a visible purpose. When we think of people loitering
in Mumbai, the image it conjures up is of crowded, messy and
difficult-to-navigate street corners, the smell of cheap tobacco, the
sight of paan stains, the sounds of boiling tea and unmodulated male
voices. Etched into our imagination is the vision of the unwashed
male masses, unmistakably lower class in attire and demeanour.
This connection between loitering and lower-class men in some
part explains why loitering is considered an anathema, particularly
for women. Another reason, as we have argued earlier, includes the
desire to pre-empt all risk, which at its most benevolent is intended
to protect women, and at its worst, to control women’s sexuality by
restricting movement. Other reasons, as we shall argue, are linked to
the desirable image of the global city—ordered and controlled—and
the exalted position accorded to productivity in this city.
So why is it that we want to loiter and why do we think it will make
a difference? What do we mean by loitering and why do we insist
that it not be seen as an illegal act, but as something significant that
celebrates the urban experience? Why do we exult in the disorder
that loitering apparently creates and make the demand that everyone
should be able to loiter, even those perceived to be ‘dangerous’?
How will loitering through the physical occupation of space impact
our cities and make them more liveable?
In this final chapter, we will try and lay out why we think loitering
holds the possibility of not just expanding women’s access to public
space, but also of transforming women’s relationship to the city and
creating a more inclusive urban environment.1
As we have argued so far, despite the fact that in contemporary
Mumbai certain women are a desirable presence in the public,
especially in their roles as professionals and consumers, women
have only conditional access and not claim to city public spaces.
Economic and political visibility may have brought increased access
to public space, but this has not automatically translated into greater
rights to public space for women. The Mumbai woman still has to
demonstrate visible purpose and respectability each separate time
she steps outdoors. This model of respectability, framed as it is in
terms of a patriarchal sexual morality, automatically excludes those
women who are deemed ‘unrespectable’, not only from staking any
claim on public space, but also from the conditional protection
conceded to ‘respectable’ women.
Most discussions on women and public space tend to focus on
questions of safety—and specifically, sexual safety—rather than
those of access. Women’s exclusion from public space is closely
connected to the presence of undesirable ‘others’ in the city. It is
then, ostensibly, to protect women that others are barred from
accessing it freely. These supposedly ‘dangerous’ others include
lower-class and Muslim men, sex workers, hawkers and other
marginal citizens. At any given time, the claims of one group can be
held up against the other, ironically rendering both as outsiders to
public space. In this tableau, no matter how it is played out, women
always remain outsiders, cast either as vulnerable ‘good’ little
women in need of rules and boundaries or as transgressive
‘predatory’ women who threaten social order.
Across the city, different women with varied desires have to
manoeuvre their way through a minefield of dos and don’ts to access
their bit of pleasure in the public. In the long run, however, covert
strategies can only take us so far. So long as women’s presence in
the public space continues to be seen within the frame of public and
private, and within the interwoven hierarchies of class, community
and gender, an unconditional right to public space will remain a
distant dream. If what we want eventually is unconditional access to
public space based on articulated rights of citizenship, then we
cannot shy away from making a political claim.
It is to this end that we make a case for loitering as a fundamental
act of claiming public space and ultimately, a more inclusive
citizenship. We believe the right to loiter has the potential to change
the terms of negotiation in city public spaces and creating the
possibility of a radically altered city, not just for women, but for
everyone.
WHY LOITERING MIGHT WORK WHERE OTHER STRATEGIES FAIL
Our desire to have all people loiter is not rooted in any altruism, but
in the simple understanding that no one group can claim access for
itself without claiming it for all others. The competing claims to public
space of different groups are founded on the parochial and
discriminatory classification of people into ‘desirable’ and
‘undesirable’ persons, and based on their being identified as male,
female or transgender, rich or poor, upper or lower caste, young or
old, Hindu or Muslim, Christian or Sikh, Jain, Buddhist or other, ablebodied or not, heterosexual, lesbian or gay. These oppositions
underlie further divisions on the basis of occupation, geographical
location, appearance and morality. In the battle for public space,
these groups are artificially pitted against each other, cast them as
either vulnerable or dangerous. What if all these people were out
there? On the streets? Apparently doing nothing?
Loitering is significant because it blurs these boundaries—the
supposedly dangerous look less threatening, the ostensibly
vulnerable don’t look helpless enough. What if there were mass
loitering by hip collegians and sex workers, dalit professors and
lesbian lawyers, nursing mothers and taporis, Muslim journalists and
north Indian taxi drivers, visually-challenged management
professionals and street hawkers, garbage collectors and
heterosexual, brahmin bureaucrats. If these juxtapositions seem
contrived, it is only because we have grown used to the hierarchies
that divide us. They have become ‘normal’. This scenario might
seem to be anarchic, but within this apparent chaos lies the
possibility of imagining and creating a space without such
hierarchies or boundaries.2
Loitering by diverse groups then has the capacity to decisively
disrupt this taken-for-granted segregation of people into categories
and makes these divisions not just redundant, but also ridiculous. If
we accept that all people have the right to loiter, then cities will allow
for a novel diversity that might be messy in appearance, but is
actually comfortable because people’s claims to be in that space are
secure.
For women, such a space of ambiguity can be powerful. Since the
very act of being in public without purpose is seen as unfeminine,
loitering fundamentally subverts the performance of gender roles. It
thwarts societal expectations and enables new ways of imagining
our bodies in relation to public space. This can be very liberating
since any performance of femininity is otherwise inadequate to
counter their out-of-placeness.3
In a relative sense, the female body, which is expected to be
located ‘properly’ in the private space of the home, has the greatest
potential to disrupt the structures of power in public. The bubble of
private respectability that women are expected to cloak themselves
in cannot withstand the act of loitering because the two are based on
contradictory imperatives—the former, one of maintaining privacy
even in the public, and the latter, that of taking pleasure in the public,
of celebrating the very publicness of public space. When women
choose to take pleasure in public space, it challenges the division
between private and public space, and therefore, between
respectable and non-respectable women, thus undermining the
illusion of privacy that women are expected to perform.4
The loiterer maps her own path, often errant, arbitrary, and
circuitous, marking out a dynamic personal map of pleasure. The
loiterer is independent, free-spirited and carries only the
responsibility for herself. In this sense, loitering also has the potential
to create a new sense of everyday embodiment—where one might
stretch one’s body rather than contain it, where ones body language
might express pleasure in public space rather than an awareness of
its boundaries.5
This opens up a plethora of possibilities: imagine varied street
corners full of women sitting around talking, strolling, feeding
children, exchanging recipes and books, planning the neighbourhood
festival or just indulging in some ‘time pass’. Imagine street corners
full of young women watching the world go by as they sip tea and
discuss politics, soap operas and the latest financial budget. Imagine
street corners full of older women contemplating the state of the
world and reminiscing about their lives. Imagine street corners full of
female domestic workers planning their next strike for a raise in
minimum wage. If one can imagine all of this, one can imagine a
radically altered city.
WHY IT’S WORTH THE RISK
Loitering is perceived to be risky because it is often cast as
dangerous and anti-social in some way. Interestingly, it is also illegal
in many countries; good citizens are expected not to loiter, but to go
about their work in an orderly fashion. Good citizens are then
rewarded with the promise of protection in public space which is
denied to those who loiter. This is even more stringently applicable to
women who are forbidden from taking risks of any kind. When
women demand the freedom to take risks instead of the guarantee of
safety, we are implicitly rejecting this conditional protection in favour
of the unqualified right to public space.
We would like the right to choose to be able to go out at any time
of the day or night or to choose to stay in. In some ways benevolent
paternal protection is simple—it lays down the boundaries and all
one has to do is skilfully negotiate them. Losing this protection,
however conditional, will mean that one is compelled to take
decisions and make choices whose outcomes we might have little
control over. However, freedom from protection will also mean
freedom, not from the male gaze or the threat of physical assault, but
from having to consistently manufacture respectability in order to be
worthy of protection. The right to risk is unconditional. The right to
risk knows no temporality, no codes of conduct and needs no
symbolic markers to define one’s worthiness. The right to risk
chooses freedom over restrictions and seeks freedom from
restrictions.
We acknowledge explicitly that with freedom comes responsibility.
The demand for the unconditional right to take risks in lieu of
protection places the responsibility squarely on women. Our desire
then is to replace the unchosen risk to reputation and the unwanted
risk of loss of respectability with a chosen risk of engaging city
spaces on our own terms. Yes, there is street harassment, and yes,
there is violence against both women and men. The fear of violence
in public space is legitimate and cannot be merely wished away. At
no point are we ignoring or even minimizing the violence, both
sexual and non-sexual, that might potentially take place in the public
and lead to physical as well as psychological trauma. Even as we
ask for women’s right to engage risk in public space, we do not
disregard the responsibility of the state and its mechanisms of law
and order in dealing with public violence. Instead, we suggest that
they deal very firmly with the aggressors of that violence and not tie
up the victims of violence in endless blame games, inane dress
codes, and relentless moral policing. The woman who seeks the
simple pleasure of a walk by the seaside at night is in no way
responsible for an attack against her. In another world, this would not
be a risk, but given that it is a risk in Mumbai, and in several other
Indian cities, the least one can expect is unequivocal justice if one is
assaulted. The least one can expect is that the assailant be
punished without collateral emotional damage to the victim. The
least one can expect is to not be held responsible for that violence.6
The least one can expect is an acknowledgement of one’s right to
walk on the beach, stroll on the waterfront, laze in the park without
question.7
At the same time, however, we also need to recognize another
kind of risk: that of the loss of opportunity to engage city spaces and
the loss of the experience of public spaces should women choose
not to access public space more than minimally. By choosing not to
access public space without purpose, women not only accept the
gendered boundaries of public space, but actually reinforce them.
This renders women forever outsiders to public space; always
commuters, never possessors of public space.
The right to risk is not merely abstract. From the perspective of the
city, it must be mirrored in the provision of infrastructure. While the
decision to take certain risks must be chosen, risks must not be
thrust upon women by inadequate or miserly planning.
Infrastructure is central to access. The state and the city’s role in
the provision of infrastructure like public transport, public toilets and
good lighting are integral to the success of the larger claim to public
space. Public space, then, does not mean empty space devoid of
infrastructure and facilities, but a space that is thoughtfully designed
with the intention of maximizing access. Not just functional spaces
like train compartments, bus stops and toilets, but also spaces of
pleasure like parks and seaside promenades are significant to
creating accessible cities. For it is in these spaces that the joy of
being in and belonging to the city is shared and communicated.
While we must lobby for an infrastructure that will make it possible
for us to take risks as citizens, at the same time, the demand for
infrastructure that reduces risks should not provide the grounds to
indict those who choose to take other kinds of risks not dependent
on infrastructure. The presence of well-lit streets in the city should
not mean that women found in dark corners should be deemed
unrespectable or blamed if they are attacked.
Choosing to take risks in public space undermines a sexist
structure where women’s virtue is prized over their desires or
agency. Choosing risks foregrounds pleasure, making what is clearly
a feminist claim to the city.
WHY LOITERING IS FEMINIST
Pleasure, in and of itself, is low on the list of priorities of not just city
planners, but also feminists. Feminists are often wary of demanding
pleasure as it might be seen as frivolous or worse irrelevant to a
discussion on urbanism.8 Loitering then is not very likely to find a
place in a feminist list of demands. The desire for pleasure,
especially in a context where people are poor or face violence, is
often seen as suspect. In keeping with this strategy, feminist
engagements with city public spaces have focused on eliminating
the risks of violence as far as possible. Many feminists fear that if
pleasure gets on the agenda, women will lose the ground we won
with so much effort and difficulty.
However, the struggle against violence and the quest for pleasure
cannot be separate things. The quest for pleasure actually
strengthens our struggle against violence, framing it in the language
of rights rather than protection.9 The ‘right to pleasure’ must always
include the ‘right to live without violence’. The struggle against
violence as an end in itself is fundamentally premised on exclusion
and can only be maintained through violence, in that it tends to
divide people into ‘us’ and ‘them’, and actually sanctions violence
against ‘them’ in order to protect ‘us’. The quest for pleasure on the
other hand, when framed in inclusive terms, does not divide people
into aggressors and victims and is therefore non-divisive.
We believe that in the twenty-first century, the only kind of
feminism that is likely to be exciting is a feminism of inclusion. As
feminists, who have benefited from the struggles of our fore-mothers
—for the right to political representation, to education and economic
participation—we stake our claim to take the struggle further. We
seek to claim not just the right to work but the right to play—the right
to unadulterated unsanctioned pleasure.
Bringing pleasure into the centre of the discussion might also then
be a viable strategy to make feminism relevant again. In the
undergraduate courses and workshops we conduct, our final
sessions always focus on imagining a utopia. Students read Rokeya
Sakhawat Hossain’s Sultana’s Dream and are asked to imagine their
own vision of a dream world for women.10 So far, each time, we have
found ourselves facing a completely silent group. They cannot
imagine another world. This alternately bewilders and depresses us
—for being over a decade older than them, we still nurture fantasies
of a utopian city.11
There is an increasing sense among upper-middle-class young
people today that to seek utopia is naïve and unsophisticated, that in
a global world, we may simply buy our personal utopias whether
these are expensive real estate or designer shoes. Furthermore,
gender-based utopias uncomfortably conjure up that most maligned
of labels: feminist. This discomfort is rooted in a perception of
feminism as somehow joyless. The terms of definition our
undergraduate participants in workshops use are inevitably negative
—‘man-hating’, ‘anti-beauty’, and ‘anti-family’. As feminists, we know
these are simply not true. But at the same time, it is also not untrue
that after decades of struggle, while many women can today
compete with men in the workspace, when it comes to pleasure, the
battle has barely begun.
A discussion on pleasure is deeply relevant to contemporary
feminism. When in these same classrooms we mention the
possibility of loitering, the desire to hang out without purpose, the
right to take risks, the young women suddenly sit up and begin to
pay attention. They don’t think, even for a moment, that we are being
frivolous or peculiar. And they certainly don’t think we are asking for
too much.
If we recognize the desire for pleasure as legitimate, it creates a
space that is outside of consumption to discuss desire and pleasure.
If we take pleasure seriously as a component of freedom and
liberation, it allows us to engage head on with the aspirations of
young urban middle-class women, who believe that gendered
restrictions are irrelevant to them.
WHY LOITERING SHOULD MATTER EVEN TO THOSE WHO ARE NOT
FEMINISTS
Pleasure is relevant not just to feminists, but to everybody who
inhabits this city. Over the last decade, Mumbai has become a less
safe city for women in people’s perception. In reality, the city has
become unsafe not just for women, but for everyone. This loss of
safety is integrally linked as much to the urban planning policies of
the city, which exclude all those defined as outsiders, as it is to
actual instances of violence. As historical evidence shows, attempts
to cleanse and sanitize cities have often had the opposite effect, of
making cities even more fraught, violent and unsafe.12
The global claims of Mumbai are still new and fragile, and,
therefore, to be guarded zealously. One of the ways these claims are
often buttressed is by a clear definition of spaces as being inside–
outside, public–private, and recreational–commercial. Loitering
disrupts this imagined order of the global city. The act of loitering, in
its very lack of structure, renders a space simultaneously inside and
outside, public and private, and recreational and commercial,
producing a constant state of liminality or transition. The liminality
(in-betweenness) of loitering is seen as an act of contamination, an
act of defiling space. Loitering is a reminder of what is perceived as
the lowest common denominator of the local and thus is a threat to
the desired image of a global city.
Loitering as an act is about the purposeless occupation of public
space—something that precludes the possibility of creating sanitized
homogenous spaces. It is precisely this ambiguity that makes
loitering potentially liberating. Loitering mocks the authority of any
one group of people to determine the future of the city by speaking
with multiple visceral bodies and through the indeterminate nature of
the identity of the loiterer.
Loitering is also a threat to the desired visibility of capitalist
consumption in that there is no recognizable product—if a beverage
is being consumed, it is likely to be unbranded, roadside cutting chai
(three-quarters of a cup of tea). Loitering is located firmly outside the
global market of packaged consumer products. In a scenario where
all modes of recreation and fun are increasingly being privatized and
come with a price tag attached, loitering challenges the unspoken
notion that only those who are can afford it are entitled to pleasure.
Loitering also disrupts the image of the desirable productive body
—taut, vigorous, purposeful—moving precisely towards the ‘greater
global good’. In a time when the performance of a consumerist
hyper-productivity is becoming deeply significant in globalaspirational Mumbai, the choice to demonstrate non-productivity can
be profoundly unsettling. Loitering is a threat to the global order of
production in that people are visibly doing nothing.
Loitering can have no purpose other than pleasure. Since loitering
is fundamentally a voluntary act undertaken for pure selfgratification, it is not forced and has no visible productivity. Thus,
loitering as a right implicitly assumes that everyone has the right to
pleasure. The presence of the loiterer ruptures the controlled sociocultural order of the global city by refusing to conform to desired
forms of movement and location and instead, creating alternate
maps of movement, and thus, new kinds of everyday interaction. It
thwarts the desire for clean lines and structured spaces by inserting
the ostensibly private into the apparently public. Loitering as a
subversive activity, then, has the potential to raise questions not just
of ‘desirable image’, but also of citizenship: Who owns the city? Who
can access city public spaces as a right?
WHY LOITERING IS CENTRAL TO CITIZENSHIP
Access to public space often reflects a person’s location in the
hierarchy of the city. The upper-class executive in his air-conditioned
car may never actually access public space, but his right over it is
unquestioned. And then there are those like migrant labourers, who
have little choice but to be in public space, sometimes to even live in
it, whose rights are easily revoked and sacrificed at the altar of
safeguarding ‘law and order’.
Our understanding of loitering in public space is based on the right
of each individual, irrespective of their group affiliations, to take
pleasure in the city—as an act of claim and belonging. This is,
however, not a notion that is located in a crude understanding of
capitalism where each individual maximizes her pleasure in the city
leading to the greater happiness of society.
When we ask to loiter, the intent is to rehabilitate this act of
hanging out without purpose not just for women, but for all marginal
groups. The celebration of loitering envisages an inclusive city where
people have a right to city public spaces, creating the possibility for
all to stake a claim, not just to the property they own, nor to use the
ownership of property as grounds for being more equal citizens, but
to claim undifferentiated rights to public space.
From our perspective, citizenship of a city is a visceral thing—just
as adult franchise marks in one tangible sense belonging to a nation,
so we claim that the right to physically occupy city public spaces is a
tangible sign of city-citizenship. We believe that for women to truly
claim citizenship, we must be able to claim public spaces with our
bodies, by writing our claim everyday through our movements.13
For women the right to loiter represents the possibility of redefining
the terms of their access to public space, not as ‘dependents’
seeking patronage, but as citizens claiming their rights. Unlike
dependents, citizens are recognized as contributing, productive
partners and therefore, while they are subject to state law, are
nonetheless able to claim unconditional rights based purely on the
fact of their citizenship. This means that the state’s responsibility to
protect its citizens’ right to be in public space must be independent of
the individual citizen’s class, caste, religion, gender, age, sexualorientation, physical ability, clothing, behaviour and perceived
morality. It is as much the responsibility of the state to protect the
right of the streetwalker to public space as that of the upper-class
corporate executive. Similarly, it is as much the responsibility of the
state to protect the right of the migrant worker to public space as that
of the middle-class woman homemaker.
It is this unconditional access to public space that is fundamental
to changing women’s relationship to the city. This will change not just
women, but also the city transforming both in ways that we cannot
even entirely imagine.
It is only when the city belongs to everyone that it can ever belong
to all women. The unconditional claim to public space will only be
possible when all women and all men can walk the streets without
being compelled to demonstrate purpose or respectability. Women’s
access to public space is fundamentally linked to the access of all
citizens. The litmus test of this right to public space is the right to
loiter, especially for women across all classes. Loiter without purpose
and meaning. Loiter without being asked what time of the day it is,
why we are here, what we are wearing, and whom we are with. That
is when we will truly belong to the city and the city to us.
Notes
PROLOGUE
1 The project produced a video documentary on women’s hostels in the city,
titled Freedom before 11, directed by Radhika Menon and Roseanne Lobo in
2004, a documentary on public toilets titled Q2P directed by Paromita Vohra
in 2006, and an audio documentary on college dress codes titled And then
they came for my jeans … recorded by mass communications students of
SIES College in 2005 under the supervision of Sameera Khan, Shilpa
Phadke and Anita Kushwaha. The project also included a full-fledged
travelling photography exhibition on women and public space titled City
Limits, curated by Shilpa Phadke and Bishakha Datta, with four young
photographers (Karan Arora, Neelam Ayare, Roshani Jadhav and
Abhinandita Mathur) in partnership with Point of View, a women’s media
collective in Mumbai (www.pointofview.org).
CITY LIMITS
1. Why Mumbai?
1 The ridha is the distinctive style of veiling used by the Dawoodi Bohra Muslim
community—a combination of a loose, long pastel-coloured skirt, a short
frilly cape and a hood or bonnet covering the hair.
2 The population of the city under the jurisdiction of the Municipal Corporation
of Greater Mumbai (MCGM) is 11.9 million. The population of the Mumbai
Metropolitan region, which includes areas beyond Dahisar and Mulund
(which are the boundaries of the MCGM jurisdiction) is 18.7 million. (Census
of India, 2001, www.censusindia.net) For a discussion on Mumbai’s history,
see Dossal (1991), Dwivedi and Mehrotra (1995), Mehta (2004), Tindall
(1992).
3 For questions of women’s safety in public spaces of New Delhi, see
Viswanath and Tandon Mehrotra (2007) and JAGORI (2006, 2007).
4 Ramabai Dongre, a Maharashtrian Brahmin woman, excelled in the
scriptures and was the first Indian woman to be known as Pandita. She
married a Bengali man of a lower caste than hers, an act considered
sacrilegious for her time. Widowed shortly thereafter, she drew the ire of the
community, including that of the male reformers, by continuing to write and
speak in public and thus openly challenging the ideologies that would have
her live the life of a social recluse. On converting to Christianity, Ramabai
continued not only to attack patriarchal Hindu Brahmanism but also directing
her razor-sharp mind towards challenging Christianity. Her first work titled
The High Caste Hindu Woman, was published in 1888.
Rakhmabai’s refusal to honour a marriage made when she was an
adolescent and live with her husband caused no little uproar. Her husband’s
petition to the Bombay High Court, for the restitution of his marital rights,
provided fodder for a great deal of public debate on the questions of child
marriage, education of women, custom and legal reform. Rakhmabai herself
participated actively in this debate, particularly by writing two letters that
were published by the Times of India on 26 June and 19 September 1885
under the pseudonym ‘Hindu Lady’ and later, a letter to the editor published
on 9 April 1887, signed as herself. Rakhmabai signalled to the court her
willingness to go to jail rather than live with her husband, an act that even
today would be regarded as radical. Rakhmabai went on to train as a doctor
in England and returned to work in Mumbai until her death in 1955 at the
age of 91.
For more on the writings and activism that challenged the relegation of
women to the private sphere, see Chakravarti (1998), Chandra (1998),
O’Hanlon (1994), Tharu and Lalitha (1991).
5 This ball-park figure is arrived at considering that approximately 15 to 20 per
cent of the local train compartments are reserved for women and they tend
to be almost as full as the general compartments at peak hours. Further, a
small number of women also travel in the general compartment.
2. The Unbelongers
6 For a detailed discussion on cities and citizenship, see, amongst others,
Anderson (1991), Mitchell (1995), Sennett (1994).
7 These comments were reportedly made by Shiv Sena’s Uddhav Thackeray.
(‘Migrants are defaming city: Uddhav says Sena will not tolerate atrocities
against women’, Daily News and Analysis, 5 January 2008).
8 In February 2008, Raj Thackeray, estranged nephew of Shiv Sena chief Bal
Thackeray and leader of the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS) launched
a particularly virulent attack on the city’s north Indian population. North
Indian taxi drivers were physically attacked by MNS goons and their cabs
damaged. A movie theatre showing a Bhojpuri film was vandalized. The
attacks against lower-class and working-class north Indians particularly,
continued for several days in Mumbai and also spread to other towns in
Maharashtra with many north Indian migrant farm and industrial workers
fleeing in terror from the townships of Nashik and Navi Mumbai. In April
2008, Raj Thackeray played the Marathi card with greater vehemence,
asking industrialists in Maharashtra to reserve 80 per cent of jobs in their
factories and offices for bhoomiputras or sons of the soil. Earlier in January
2008, Shiv Sena leader Bal Thackeray, in a long interview to his party’s
newspaper, Saamna, had also raised the issue of a ‘permit system’ for all
outsiders to live and work in Mumbai. Sporadic incidents of abuse—verbal
as well as physical—on north Indian working-class men, recur in the city.
See ‘Battleground: North Indians face attacks for second day, Mumbai
shames nation’, Hindustan Times, Mumbai, 5 February 2008 ‘Sena wants
Mumbai permit for “outsiders”’, Hindustan Times, Mumbai, 22 January 2008;
‘Amchi manoos, tumchi jobs: Raj Thackeray wants all corporates in state to
employ 80% natives’, Times of India, Mumbai, 10 April 2008).
9 Some scholars have argued that Mumbai was a communally volatile city
even before the 1992–93 riots; see for instance, Varshney (2002). For a
detailed discussion on the impact of the 1992–93 riots on Mumbai, see
Appadurai (2000), Chandavarkar (2004), Hansen (2001), Masselos (1994)
and Robinson (2005), among others.
10 Historian Raj Chandavarkar (2004) suggests that the closure of the textile
mills and the rise of communalism are inextricably linked. He argues that the
marginalization of the poor is reflected in the ways in which the workers’
resistance was dealt with by the city’s ruling elites and points out that at the
same time, the Shiv Sena’s explicitly communal agenda actively damaged
the workers’ resistance and weakened communist trade unions. It is this
communalization and marginalization of workers, he contends, that made
the pogrom of 1992–93 against the Muslims possible.
11 As a metropolis, Bombay/Mumbai has long prided itself on its multi-ethnic
and multilingual cosmopolitanism. According to census research figures, a
significant 57.4 per cent of its 12 million inhabitants belong to non-Marathi
linguistic groups, with Gujaratis accounting for more than 18 per cent.
Further, Dalits account for little over 12 per cent and Muslims constitute
around 17 per cent of the city’s population. These figures have been
generated by the Centre for Research and Development (1995) and the
District Census Handbook Greater Bombay (1996) [quoted in Vora and
Palshikar (2003)].
It is important to note here that in such census classifications, it is normally
assumed that Marathi-and Gujarati-speaking populations are Hindu,
although there are also Marathi-and Gujarati-speaking Muslims and
Christians who then are not enumerated as such. This reflects a larger trend
where heterogeneity among the majority community is specified while
minorities are viewed as homogenous. Similarly, Dalits are also a very
heterogeneous group.
12 There has been a fair bit of scholarly research on the question of Mumbai’s
lost cosmopolitanism. For an elucidation of this debate, see Appadurai
(2000), Dossal (1991), Masselos (1991), Patel (2003) and Varma (2004).
13 Shree 420 (1955) was built around the dream of owning a small patch of the
city. In Jagte Raho (1956), Raj Kapoor spends a night thirsting for water in a
hostile city and when Nargis, in the form of a jogan, finally offers him water, it
is as if an oblation was being offered to the thirsty, as if there was still hope.
Navketan Studios crafted slick noir thrillers with its most saleable star, Dev
Anand, as a denizen of the underbelly of the city. Through the Amitabh
Bachchan-dominated 1970s, Vijay, the quintessential angry young man,
rose from the slums (Deewaar (1975), Muqaddar ka Sikandar (1978), often
falling in love with another outcaste, the dancing girl (Suhaag [1979],
Muqaddar ka Sikandar), always cocking a snook at the rich. The city’s most
famous anthem sung by Mohammed Rafi, ‘Aye dil hai mushkil jeena yahaan’
(Oh heart, how difficult it is to live here) from the Hindi movie CID (1956),
picturized on Johnny Walker, expressed this ability to critique the city
perfectly. ‘Beghar ko awaaraa yahaan kehete hans hans/Khud kaate gale
sabke kahe isko business/Ik cheez ke hain kai naam yahaan’ (Laughingly,
they call the homeless, vagrants/While themselves they cut the throats of all
and call it business/One thing has many names here). Yet few remember
that in reply to Rafi’s ‘Zara hat ke zara bach ke, yeh hai Bombay meri jaan’
(Be a little careful, this is Bombay, my dear), at the end of the song, Geeta
Dutt crooned hopefully, ‘Aye dil hai aasaa jeena yahan, Suno mister, suno
bandhu, yeh hai Bombay meri jaan’ (Oh heart, it is easy to live here, listen
mister, listen friend, this is Bombay my dear).
14 Times of India (2007) for its ‘India Poised’ campaign.
15 Sharit Bhowmik (2003) assesses that Mumbai has roughly 2.5 lakh street
hawkers, about 30 per cent of them being former workers of the erstwhile
textile mills. Jonathan Anjaria (2006) argues that since the late 1990s, elite
NGOs and residents’ associations have been actively promoting the idea
that hawkers are to be blamed for many of the city’s public problems.
16 This report was brought out by the international consulting firm McKinsey
for Bombay First, a corporate-funded lobby group.
17 This stereotype is based on the Muslim personal law in India, which allows
Muslim men to have four wives. Thus, the common misperception is that
Muslim men father many more children than Hindu men do. As per the
Census of 2001, Hindus account for 80.5 per cent of all Indians, or 828
million while India’s Muslim community stands at 138 million, or 13.4 per
cent of the total population. In recent years, Muslim fertility rates have fallen
significantly. While the Total Fertility Rate (TFR) among Hindus fell from 3.3
in 1992–93 (National Family Health Survey [NFHS] I), to 2.8 in 1998–99
(NFHS II), the fall among Muslims was even more rapid: from a TFR of 4.4
in 1992–93 (NFHS I) to 3.6 in 1998–99 (NFHS II). (‘Religion and Fertility
Behaviour: Canards and Facts’ by Rammanohar C. Reddy, Hindu, 10
November 2002).
See www.infochangeindia.org/September 2004 and www.bbcnews.com, 8
September 2004; Indian Express, 7 September 2004; Asian Age, 7
September 2004)
18 By some estimates, Mumbai has the most heterogeneous grouping of
Muslims amongst all cities in South Asia. Currently about 18.56 per cent or
2.2 million of Greater Mumbai’s nearly 12 million population is Muslim
(Census of India, 2001). See http://www.censusindia.net/. Besides, the
general doctrinal classification of Shia and Sunni (which can be further
divided by particular schools of theology), the city’s Muslims can be
categorized in several different ways by place of origin, language,
occupation, class and caste. The major groups in the city are the Dawoodi
Bohras, the Sulaimani Bohras, the Aga Khani Khojas, the Halai Memons,
the Kutchie Memons, the Konkani Muslims, the north Indian Uttar Pradesh
and Bihari Muslims, the Keralite Moplahs, the Deccanis and the Iranis.
19 In one case, the reporters Supriya Sharma and Rakesh Solanki (NDTV
24/7, 12 March 2004) were told: ‘We have decided that we will not allow
flour mills, liquor shops, Muslims and fast food outlets.’
20 Even prior to the riots, a sizeable percentage of Mumbai’s Muslims lived in
community-based enclaves in areas such as Mohammed Ali Road, Bhendi
Bazaar, Pydhonie, Dongri, Nagpada, Madanpura and Mahim. Poorer
Muslims lived in the slums of Cheetah Camp (Deonar) and Behrampada
(Bandra [East]). At the same time, many Muslims also lived in mixed areas
of the city. However, after the riots, the city’s social geography underwent a
radical change. Both Hindus and Muslims who lived in mixed areas, where
they were in a minority, moved to neighbourhoods dominated by their own
community. Many Muslims were compelled to move into the already dense
Muslim-dominated neighbourhoods of south and Central Mumbai—
Nagpada, Madanpura, Agripada and Bhendi Bazaar. Others moved
outwards to Jogeshwari, Kurla, Malvani (in Malad) and Govandi. Middleclass Muslims were attracted to the Millat Nagar complex in Andheri (West)
while poorer Muslims sought refuge in the Bharat Nagar slums in Bandra
(East). Still others went to live in the extended suburbs of Mira Road in
north-west Mumbai and Mumbra in Thane district. See Khan (2007),
Robinson (2005).
Furthermore, such community-specific ‘ghettoization’ now has legal
sanction. In 2005, the Supreme Court of India upheld the formation of
cooperative housing societies where membership is restricted to persons
from the same caste or religion. In fact, in recent years, there has been an
upsurge in exclusive community ghettos and only-vegetarian housing
societies in Mumbai. In one case, residents of an ostensibly vegetarian
building would spit at and throw pebbles on the patrons of a non-vegetarian
restaurant in the same building, forcing it to close down. (Anuj Chopra,
Tehelka, 17 September 2005, http://www.tehelka.com/story_main14.asp?
filename=hub091705noentry_we.asp, accessed in July 2009).
21 Scholarship on women and nationalism examines how women’s location as
bearers of tradition as well as primary biological and cultural reproducers of
the nation makes them doubly marked in situations of national strife. They
are simultaneously vulnerable targets for the ‘enemies’ of the nation, and
objects of heightened protection/surveillance from within the
community/nation itself. When communities are marginalized, it is women
who are subject to most violence, not only by virtue of their community
identity but also as a result of their gender. When women have to choose
between community and gender identity, it is gender that is usually
invisibilized. See the work of Enloe (1990), Kandiyoti (1991), Sarkar (2001),
Verdery (1993), Walby (1992), Yuval-Davis (1997) and Yuval-Davis and
Anthias (1989).
22 Debates on questions of gender in development point to the fact that when
communities are deprived of resources, it is women who are the worst
affected. Since women have the primary responsibility not only for domestic
work involving child care, family health and food provision, but also the
community management of housing and basic services, along with the
generation of income through productive work, it is they who bear the
burden of attempting to secure these services by other means. For an
elucidation of these concerns in relation to development, see the work of
Agarwal (1994), Kabeer (1995), Mies and Shiva (1993), Moser (1993).
3. Good Little Women
23 The complex world of these ‘ladies’ bars’ is skilfully invoked in two films,
Mira Nair’s documentary India Cabaret (1984) and Madhur Bhandarkar’s
feature film Chandni Bar (2001). In 2005, when dancing was banned in
these bars by the Maharashtra state government, there were about 1,300
such bars which employed about 75,000 dancers in Mumbai (Flavia Agnes,
India Together, 26 July 2006,
http://www.indiatogether.org/manushi/issue149/bardance.htm, accessed in
January 2007). Even before they were outlawed, several attempts had been
made to restrict and regulate them. The bars were regularly raided for
‘illegal’ activity and the arrests made (usually on charges of obscenity)
suggested that it was the bar dancers who were seen to be the morally and
sexually disruptive elements in that space and in effect, the city at large. The
dance bars and the dancers were perceived to be even more threatening
because they operated at night, a time when the need to regulate both
women and sexuality is stronger. Class politics are also obviously at play
since when the dance bars were banned, no similar ban was imposed on
dance performances in establishments of three-star and above categories,
as well as gymkhanas and clubs, where the ostensible purpose was
‘promoting culture’ and ‘boosting tourism’.
24 See Phadke (2005a, 2007a).
25 In fact, it is poor women in large cities and young Muslim women who feel
the most unsafe according to the Indian Express-CNN-IBN-CSDS State of
the Nation Survey on Indian Women. The survey interviewed about 4,000
women in 160 locations in rural and urban India across twenty states of the
country. About 68 per cent of poor women in metros and 61 per cent of
young Muslim women in addition to 58 per cent single working women were
reported as feeling most vulnerable to everyday routine violence (Indian
Express, Mumbai, 24 January 2008).
26 In the struggle for gender justice it is assumed that because middle-class
women have a comparatively good deal, they do not merit much attention.
Unlike the feminist movement in the west which was accused of being white,
middle-class and bourgeois, the women’s movement in India has always
been sensitive to issues of class. Voices from within the movement and
women’s studies have also self-consciously raised concerns about the
legitimacy of urban middle-class women speaking for the poor or rural
women. For instance, left parties have suggested that urban middle-class
women in the ‘autonomous’ women’s movement could not possibly
represent ‘Indian’ women and that the real role of feminists was to
participate and raise questions from within mass organizations. These ideas
have rendered feminist studies of middle-class women slightly suspect. See
Phadke (2003, 2005b) for more on the women’s movement. For more about
the middle-classes in India, see Varma (1998), Fernandes (2000), Phadke
(2005b).
27 See Walkowitz (1992) and Wilson (1991).
28 Hindu nationalists today similarly see the family as a location of resistance
where the woman becomes the crucial pivot that holds the family together.
By identifying the nation as a family, the role of women in the public sphere
is seen as an extension of their domestic duties. Women in the Rashtriya
Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) women’s wing, known as the Rashtriya Sevika
Samiti, continue to identify themselves with the family to the extent that the
first three heads of the Samiti (pramukh sanghchalikas) are known, not by a
professional title as the first two leaders of the RSS are—Doctorji and Guruji
(teacher)—but by names that are kinship markers: Mausiji (maternal aunt),
Taiji (elder sister/aunt) and Ushatai (elder sister). As leaders and role
models for the women of the Samiti, and the Hindu nation by extension, the
pramukh sanghchalikas embody the notions of hegemonic femininity in the
nationalist discourse.
29 These exercises titled ‘Putting People in Place’ and ‘Tracing People’s Path’
were conducted during a number of long courses and short workshops with
college students in Mumbai during the years 2004–05 as part of the
pedagogic initiatives of the Gender and Space project. The longer courses
were held at the Department of Sociology, St Xavier’s College (August–
September 2004), Sir J.J. College of Architecture (November 2004–March
2005), and the Department of History, St Xavier’s College (March–April
2005). The short workshops were conducted at Sir J.J. College of
Architecture (July 2004), Majlis Legal Centre (June 2005), J.J. School of
Applied Arts, Mumbai (August 2005), Bachelor of Mass Media, Wilson
College (August 2005), Bachelor of Mass Media, SIES College (August
2005), L.S. Raheja Applied Arts (September 2005) and Russel Square
International College (March 2006). For a detailed analysis of these
exercises, see Ranade (2007).
30 That pleasure in public, particularly at night, is out of bounds for women
unless they are willing to be branded as ‘unrespectable’ is clearly
demonstrated in a HT-C Fore survey aimed at mapping the middle-class
Indian male mindset, using a sample group of 500 men. The survey found
that almost 46 per cent of men surveyed between the ages of twenty and
forty-five, felt that women are ‘asking for trouble’ by going to a pub at night
with friends, another 46 per cent said that if a woman in public swore at
them, they would be tempted to get physical or aggressive. Two out of three
men (64 per cent) felt that if they made friends with a woman ‘in a bar, they
would think of a one-night stand’ (Hindustan Times, Mumbai, 6 January
2008).
31 A case in point is the assault on activist Madhusree Dutta by three
policemen in 1990, at 2 a.m. at Borivili station, where she was buying
biscuits and cigarettes. To begin with, the case of assault against the
policemen was registered with some difficulty. During the trial that followed,
Datta was asked what she was doing out late at night, referred to in the
court as ‘Madhuri Dixit’ (a well known film star), and bombarded with
irrelevant and humiliating questions. The farcical case and the media
attention that followed made it clear that any woman out late at night,
particularly buying cigarettes, was suspect (Vibhuti Patel, 1994). See also
Svati P. Shah (2006) for a discussion on sex work visibility in Mumbai.
32 These notions of ‘polluted’ women and their capacity to adversely influence
public spaces are neither new nor unique to the Indian context. In
nineteenth-century Britain, for instance, legal measures were undertaken to
control and police the sexual activity of ‘fallen women’, particularly in
London. In her work on late Victorian London, Judith Walkowitz (1992)
argues that by the 1840s, the streetwalker had become a source of
considerable anxiety—simultaneously a source of disease and an object of
pity. Official concern over prostitution as a dangerous sexual activity and a
potential source of physical and moral pollution led to the passage of the
first Contagious Diseases Act in 1864 (followed by the Acts of 1868 and
1869). The Act provided for the medical and police inspection of prostitutes
in garrison towns and ports. The Act was repealed in 1886.
Women’s restricted access to public space is thus connected to a notion of
‘defilability’ which suggests that women’s presence in certain privileged
spaces, usually in public, may threaten the sanctity of these spaces. At the
same time, women themselves face the threat of being defiled in public
spaces, especially at particular times of the day (Phadke 2005a). In
suggesting this we invoke the work of anthropologist Mary Douglas, Purity
and Danger, where she explores the connection between the classification
systems that structure a society and its prevalent notions of purity and
pollution. Douglas also shows how pollution taboos play an essential role in
reinscribing the defined boundaries of the community. In relation to public
space this is reflected in the taboos that dictate the location of women’s
bodies—the pure bodies of ‘good’ women, which are to be secured ‘inside’
to ensure their continued purity and the ‘polluted’ bodies of ‘bad’ women to
be policed so that they do not contaminate either space or society.
33 See Phadke (2007b).
34 As reported in Indian Express, Mumbai Newsline, 13 March 2006/14 March
2006; Times of India, Mumbai, 14 March 2006.
35 It is estimated that about 75 per cent of all rapes take place within the
family, as the then home minister Shivraj Patil told the Lok Sabha, with
parents and close relatives often being perpetrators of the heinous crime
(Times of India, 19 March 2008).
36 See Phadke (forthcoming).
4. Lines of Control
37 Foucault’s notion of ‘disciplining’ draws fundamentally on a conceptual
prison type called the panopticon, proposed by political theorist Jeremy
Bentham. The panopticon comprised a central tower and cells around it—
from where the ‘watcher’ can see all the cells but prisoners can neither see
him nor each other. Bentham argued that once the prisoners become aware
of being watched, they internalize the omniscient gaze and don’t need to be
actually watched anymore.
Foucault’s analysis has been interestingly harnessed by several feminist
scholars such as Susan Bordo, Jana Sawiki and Sandra Bartky, among
others, to examine how particularly women’s bodies are disciplined. Bartky’s
(1988) analysis of ways in which women’s bodies and faces are shaped and
ornamented, in the context of western cultures, demonstrates eloquently
how these ‘disciplines’ operate to normalize certain ways of being ‘women’
thus rendering other interpretations unviable and suspect, to say the least.
She identifies three disciplinary practices which ‘produce a body which in
gesture and appearance is recognizably feminine’. These include: those that
aim to produce a body of a singular shape and size, those that work towards
determining the gestures, postures and movements of this body, and those
that dress up the body. Bartky suggests that modern disciplinary power
regulates women without violence or public sanctions, by centring normative
femininity in a woman’s body—specifically its assumed heterosexuality and
appearance.
Iris Marion Young, in her essay ‘Throwing like a Girl’(1990) argues that ways
in which women use and look upon their bodies is distinct from the way men
use theirs. While ‘the masculine body moves fluidly and confidently’, ‘the
feminine body uses limited movements’ that is marked by an underconfidence in the capacity of her body and in an exaggerated fear of injuring
it. Young argues, ‘Not only is there a typical style of throwing like a girl, but
there is more or less a typical style of running like a girl, climbing like a girl,
swinging like a girl, hitting like a girl … For many women as they move in a
sport, a space surrounds us in imagination that we are not free to move
beyond; the space available to our movement is a constricted space’ (146).
38 This is suggested by scholar Rosa Ainley (1998) who further argues that
gendered space must be seen as a constant process of becoming. Here one
might also invoke Judith Butler’s (1990) conception of gender as being a
‘regulatory fiction’ in society (Butler 1990). ‘Feminine’ and ‘masculine’ codes
of behaviour have to then be relentlessly performed and regulated because
anybody that attempts to transgress the boundaries of appropriateness
threatens to disrupt this social order.
39 Historically, too, women have claimed public space at ritual celebrations.
For instance, see Sennet’s (1992) description of the Adonia festival and
Ehrenreich’s (2006) exploration of Maenadism, both in ancient Greece.
Closer home, in Hindu mythology, the god Krishna is reputed to have
charmed women into leaving their homes at night to find him. At the same
time it must be noted that even within these spaces of ritualized celebration,
there continues to be an insistence on women performing normative
femininity.
40 See Phadke (2007a).
41 In 2006, Tamil Nadu’s Anna University imposed a dress code on 231
engineering colleges that fall under its purview, banning jeans, sleeveless
tops, tee-shirts and tight-fitting clothes. The move was supported by players
across the political spectrum—from the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to the
Periyarist Dravidar Kazhagam (PDK), the Paattali Makkal Katchi (PMK) and
the Dalit Panthers of India (DPI). Around the same time, Orissa became the
first state in the country to introduce a ‘uniform dress code’ for college
students. Not only did the state ban college students from wearing
sleeveless tops and tight jeans but they also instituted uniforms—which
have been specified as salwar-kameez for girls and trousers and fullsleeved shirts for boys (Hindu, 6 September 2005). In Mumbai, the ViceChancellor of Mumbai University called a meeting of college principals in
July 2005 to discuss a possible dress code for colleges though eventually
nothing concrete materialized from it. For a discussion on dress codes, see
Phadke and Khan, 2006.
42 Technically, fatwas are legal opinions to be issued only by a high priest; in
reality they are being issued by all kinds of local maulvis. Women’s groups,
such as Aawaaz-e-Niswaan, report that fatwas have been issued in various
parts of Mumbai including Malvani (Malad), Jogeshwari (East) and Cheetah
Camp on shunning dancing, singing, haldi/mehendi ceremonies, video
shooting, and photography during wedding celebrations. In fact, some
fatwas dictate that priests should not solemnize such ‘joyful’ weddings. If a
family defies the fatwa then the priest is required not issue the nikahnama
(marriage certificate) and the local masjid is directed not to bury the dead
from that family.
5. Consuming Femininity
43 Discussions around consumption are often polarized between a defence of
its pleasures and a critical assessment of its capacity of co-option. Some
feminist scholars in the 1990s have focused on women’s agency and the
pleasure in consumption, a pleasure that was sometimes read to have
sexual overtones that might transgress defined boundaries of appropriate
feminine behaviour. What these arguments suggest is that women’s access
to public space and participation in consumption should be seen outside the
discourses of capitalist oppression and ‘false consciousness’. Others argue
that if these mall spaces are not spaces of false consciousness, and we do
not believe they are, nor are they spaces of unmitigated agency. For a
complex discussion of women, shopping and consumption, see Bowlby
(2001), Friedberg (1993), Domosh and Seager (2001), McRobbie (1997),
Morris (2000), Pollock (1988), Radner (1999), Walkowitz (1992), Wilson
(2001), Wolff (1985).
44 We use ‘habitus’ as suggested by Pierre Bourdieu to refer to a socialized
subjectivity, a way of theorizing the socially produced self and of
understanding how social relations become constituted within the self, but
also how the self is constitutive of social relations. Though for our purposes
we refer to ‘habitus’ in relation to the body, the term extends beyond
embodiments to include attitudes and tastes as well as often carrying with it
the weight of individual and collective history.
45 See Phadke (2005a).
46 The new spaces of consumption, while problematic in themselves, are also
not entirely unthreatened. Chennai, for instance, has seen the rise of a
debate around concerns of couples kissing on dance floors in a discotheque
and of women drinking at a fashion show. This has led to a discussion on
the purity of Tamil culture and the role of women within it. This is interesting
given that these are once again the spaces marked as transnational where
‘modernity’ is constructed and demonstrated (Swati Das, ‘The Moral of the
Policing Story’, Times of India, 7 October 2005). More recently in January
2009, women eating lunch at a pub in Mangalore were attacked and beaten
by activists belonging to the Sri Ram Sene. This was done on the grounds
that ‘pub culture’ was indecent and un-Indian and a corrupting and immoral
influence on Indian women. Undeterred by subsequent police action against
him, the Sene chief, Pramod Muthalik, announced a protest against those
celebrating Valentine’s Day, saying that boys and girls found together on that
day would be forcibly married off. (‘Will Marry-Off Dating Couples on V-Day:
Muthalik’, 5 February 2009, http://news.outlookindia.com/item.aspx?653467,
accessed in August 2009)
47 Hindi films, particularly those of the Karan Johar variety, specialize in
showing women how to play the sexy as well as virtuous game. Thus,
before marriage a heroine is often shown wearing ‘sexy’ (see-through,
halter, short, tight) western outfits but once married, in post-marriage scenes
she is likely to be seen wearing traditional Indian saris with heavy brocade
borders and pallus that can easily slip over the head. Similar is the case in
Ekta Kapoor’s ‘K’ serials. Here, the only woman who can wear daring sexy
outfits both before and after is the ‘vamp’, the house-breaker, the
‘unwomanly’ woman.
48 Daily News and Analysis, Mumbai, 31 May 2006 and June 2006
6. Narrating Danger
49 ‘Shame old story’, Hindustan Times, 2 January 2008.
50 ‘D.N. Jadhav’s faux pas’ and ‘Outrage’, Hindustan Times, Mumbai, 3
January 2008.
51 When the Times of India, Mumbai, 4 January 2008 ran a half-page story
asking if Mumbai was becoming increasingly unsafe for women, almost 85
per cent of their readers said ‘yes’ but surprisingly most readers blamed the
women for this. When women are held responsible for violence, this reduces
not just access to public space but even the potential to seek legitimate
access.
Some responses to the Times of India survey were:
‘Everything comes with a price tag. If you want to enjoy clubbing at late night
(sic) and stroll in the streets of Mumbai as if its Switzerland you can’t expect
people to welcome you with flowers on the roads. If you have guts to handle
the consequences then dare to party late nights.’
—Raj
‘Women are fighting for their freedom, what kind of freedom do they want?
They come out on the streets half dressed at midnight and they want to walk
freely. Women are equally to blame in these situations … they should bring
about changes in their lifestyle.’—Venkat ‘I am deeply saddened but how
could they be so empty-headed to go out at 1.45 am in such a crowd? Crazy
women! What were they thinking, that people would come to protect them
and bring them home safe? I must say that they paid for their foolishness
and arrogance.’
—S. Moosa
‘Not only Mumbai, other cities too are becoming unsafe. But the people
responsible for this are girls themselves. Why should they roam around at
night? Can’t they celebrate at home? And what kind of dresses were they
wearing? … I hope other girls will learn a lesson from this.’—Prakruthi
52 Women in the city are well aware of how little the police are vested in
ensuring that their right to be in public space is protected. Everyday
harassment in public space—streets, buses, trains, theatres, markets—is
rarely reported by women to the police. This is not surprising because when
women do try to report sexual harassment, they meet with little success.
The police often refuse to register cases, downplay their importance and fob
them off with complaint notes that have no legal standing.
One woman told a newspaper reporter about an incident where she was
chased by a group of men in a car from Matunga to J.J. flyover when she
was driving home alone late at night. She stopped at a police check-post for
help but the policemen on duty told her that it was not their job to help her.
Eventually, she waited at the chowki till a friend came and picked her up.
Another woman who registered a complaint about harassment by a man in
the ladies’ compartment of the local train found the perpetrator at her door.
The police had given him her address! Given these instances, it is not
surprising that for most women, going to the police is often the last resort.
Most women, when asked how they deal with sexual harassment on the
streets, responded that they fight their own battles (Hindustan Times, 4
January 2008). Interestingly, the Mumbai suburban railways received more
than 1,000 complaints of sexual harassment and molestation from women in
2007 (Hindustan Times, 5 January 2008).
This is not to suggest that the Mumbai police are incapable of providing
effective policing. Mumbai police’s strong campaign against drunk driving
that began in 2007, managed to substantially cut down on the number of
drunken driving accidents in the city. In fact, it has successfully created fear
for the law among those who drink and drive. In 2008, the Mumbai police
started a helpline for women, with the help of some women’s groups, on the
number 103. However, this effort is currently not accompanied by a strong
campaign against sexual harassment.
53 Rosa Ainley (1998) for instance points out that perceived threats to safety
are different from, although not necessarily less harmful than, real threats.
‘Safety’ debates, she argues, ‘respond to the public’s perception of danger,
rather than the likelihood of danger itself’ (94). This is the model used in
understanding danger to women—the idea that danger is out there. See
also the work of Andrews (2000), Garber (2000), Grosz (1995), McDowell
(1999), Massey (1994), Parsons (2000), Rose (1999), Walkowitz (1992) and
Wilson (1991).
54 As a somewhat tangential, but nonetheless significant aside, it is important
to note that while women appear frequently as the victims of violence in
news reports, they are conspicuously absent in other kinds of reports, sociopolitical or economic. Thornham (2007) notes that the 2005 Global Media
Monitoring Project, the third such monitoring effort, analysed and compared
data from seventy-six countries covering a total of 12,893 news stories in
newspapers, and on television and radio. The report concluded that women
are dramatically under-represented in the news. ‘In stories on politics and
government only 14 per cent of news subjects are women; and in economic
and business news only 20 per cent … As victims of war, disaster or crime
they out-number men two to one’ (86–87).
55 According to this article, 86 per cent women in Delhi don’t feel safe, and
every third woman knows at least one rape/molestation victim, according to
a recent C-voter survey conducted after the capital witnessed a spate of
rape cases in public places. According to Mumbai police records (2001 to
July 2002), the city has seen 306 cases of eve teasing, 243 cases of
molestation and 229 cases of rape. Chennai, once considered safe for
women, now records a figure of 600 cases of crime against women in the
last year. Characteristically, Delhi records the highest number of rape cases
among the metros: 447 in 2000, 380 in 2001 and 299 till July 2002 as
against Mumbai’s 124 in 2000 and 127 in 2001, which ranks second on this
list. Gang rapes accounted for 8 per cent cases in Delhi and 57 per cent
victims were in the age group of 0–16. The article goes on to suggest that
even the cities of Bangalore and Kolkata do not guarantee safety for women
(Times of India, 25 August 2002).
56 This report profiled the incident of Amin Patil shooting Muhammad Ali Umar
Sheikh for allegedly harassing his wife and sister-in-law. The report focused
on the increasing incidents of ‘eve teasing in the city that never sleeps’
(Sunday Express, 28 March 2004).
57 According to this report, a twenty-three-year-old model tried to complain to
the constable on duty only to find that he refused to take her complaint as he
was about to sign-off duty (Mumbai Newsline, Indian Express, 23 July 2004).
58 This article profiled the murder of a young BPO employee in Bangalore by
the driver of the vehicle (Times of India, 17 December 2005).
59 On 30 January 2004 at 10.05 p.m., an unidentified youth hurled acid at the
first class ladies’ compartment. Three women and a man suffered serious
burns. This was in a Malad-bound local train between Bandra and Khar
railway stations. The victims suffered about 20–25 percent burns on their
face, neck and arms (Mid-Day, 6 February 2004).
60 According to the Indian government’s National Crime Records Bureau
(NCRB), the number of crimes against women in India (or at least the
reportage of crimes against women) has increased continuously over the
last five years. In 2007, about 1,85,312 incidents of crimes against women
were reported in India compared to 1,64,765 in 2006, an increase of 12.5
per cent. Even a quick analysis of these statistics shows that crimes against
women in the private space of the home have increased the most. In 2007,
about 75,930 women became victims of torture and cruelty by their
husbands and in-laws, accounting for the highest number of crimes against
women. This was in addition to the 8,093 dowry deaths recorded nationally
in 2007.
In comparison, public violence against women in 2007 included 20,737
reported rape cases (and these included incest cases which would be
categorized as private violence) as well as 38,734 molestation cases,
10,950 cases of sexual harassment and sixty-one cases of importation of
girls. See http://ncrb.nic.in/ A news report commenting on this said, ‘As
perverse as it may sound adult women are probably safer on Mumbai’s
streets than in their homes’ (Daily News and Analysis, Mumbai, 24 March
2007).
61 Saamna, 25 April 2005.
62 This report appearing in the months following the rape of a college girl at
Marine Drive in April 2005, talks of the plan by the University of Mumbai to
institute a dress code that would ban mini-skirts, tight tops and shorts,
apparently under the assumption that this will help prevent rape (Indian
Express, 23 June 2005).
63 Indian Express, Express Newsline, 25 April 2005.
64 ‘Why was she with six men that night?’ by Divyesh Singh and Menaka Rao,
DNA, 21 April 2009 (http://www.dnaindia.com/report.asp?newsid=1249292,
accessed in April 2009). The same newspaper also had ‘Is it right to blame
rape victims for the attacks?’ as a topic of ‘debate’ for the ‘Speak Up’
column, DNA, 22 April 2009 (http://www.dnaindia.com/report.asp?
newsid=1249873, accessed in April 2009).
7. Courting Risk
65 In the 1980s, the Shah Bano court case and Roop Kanwar’s alleged sati
opened up a Pandora’s box of divisiveness in the women’s movement in
India, highlighting cultural, religious and communitarian identities. The
events of the 1980s and early 1990s saw the political rise of the Hindu rightwing and concomitantly the appropriation of apparently ‘feminist’ positions
by the Hindu right-wing. These were couched in terms of questions like: who
constitutes the ‘real’ Indian woman?
The Shah Bano case provided the first major jolt to the women’s movement.
Shah Bano, a sixty-two-year old Muslim woman, appealed to the courts to
claim maintenance from her husband, who had divorced her using the
provision of triple talaq. In April 1985, the Supreme Court ruled that Shah
Bano was entitled to maintenance by her divorced husband under Section
125 of the Criminal Procedures Code asserting that it transcended the
personal laws of any religious community. The court was also critical of the
way women have been traditionally treated unjustly and cited examples of
Manu and the Prophet and urged the government to frame a common civil
code.
While Hindu right-wing organizations celebrated the judgement, as it
seemed to endorse their position that Islam is inherently regressive,
conservative Muslim bodies argued that the judgement was an attack on
their religious rights and demanded that it be reviewed and that Muslims be
excluded from Section 125. In 1986, the Muslim Women (Protection of
Rights on Divorce) Bill was introduced in Parliament which excluded
divorced Muslim women from the purview of Section 125.
The Bill was widely protested against by various women’s groups but unlike
earlier joint campaigns against rape or dowry, this case led to a
fragmentation of the front into various autonomous or religious groups. The
issue of the Uniform Civil Code continues to be a contentious issue in the
women’s movement as feminists who demand it to ensure the rights of all
women, find themselves uncomfortably on the same side as the Hindu rightwing whose position they otherwise oppose. In September 1987, Roop
Kanwar, a young eighteen-year-old woman, was burnt to death on her
husband’s funeral pyre in Deorala, a village in Rajasthan, in the presence of
a crowd of several thousands of people. The huge public outcry that
followed this sati on the part of both those who opposed it as well as those
who supported it became an issue of tradition versus modernity and most
importantly, an issue of the cultural right of the Rajput people to preserve
their identity. Feminists protesting against sati were seen as westernized,
having lost touch and connection with their cultural roots and therefore not in
a position to mediate in the issue. The labels of ‘westernized’ and ‘elitist’
were once again revived and the notion of the real Indian woman was
created: traditional and culturally Hindu.
Complicating this, were arguments framing sati within the notion of female
subjectivity and questions of voluntary sati. Countering the fact that anti-sati
activists phrased sati squarely as murder, it was argued that to posit the sati
as inexorably a victim would only render her void of any function or agency
(Sunder Rajan, 1993). However another position suggested that the attempt
to separate and reify women’s agency and complicity and to represent
violence as female agency is central to the production and reproduction of
ideologies and beliefs glorifying and normalizing the sati (Vaid and Sangari,
1991).
66 The women’s movement has more recently also had to contend with
women’s role as perpetrators of violence in the same riots and pogroms.
Women have actively participated in riots, for instance in Bhagalpur in 1989,
in Ahmedabad in 1990, in Surat in 1992 and in the tearing down of the Babri
masjid (Tharu and Niranjana, 1999). In the Gujarat riots of 2002, the
presence of women rioters was highlighted by the media as well. See in
particular, the extensive work of historian Tanika Sarkar.
67 In a variety of places and contexts, women’s groups have sought to assert
the right to be out at night without purpose in ‘Reclaim the Night’ protest
marches. The first twentieth-century ‘Reclaim the Night’ rally took place in
Rome in 1976, as a reaction to reported rapes reaching ‘astronomical’
figures (16,000 per annum). Around 10,000 women and children marched
through the centre of the city. This was followed by similar marches in West
Germany (1977). Women there demanded, ‘The right to move freely in their
communities at day and night without harassment and sexual assault’.
‘Reclaim the Night’ marches were also initiated in England in 1977 by
women in Leeds in response to the ‘Ripper Murders’. Angry at advice to stay
indoors since the last ‘Ripper’ killing, they marched with torches through the
town. ‘Take Back the Night’ marches in the USA were first held in 1978. In
San Francisco, over 5,000 women from thirty states marched through the
red-light district. These organized protests developed into campaigns such
as ‘Women Against Violence Against Women’ (Herstory of Reclaim the
Night, www.isis.aust.com/rtn/herstory.html, accessed in August 2008).
Elizabeth Wilson (1991) argues that the goal of ‘Take back the Night’ is to
reorder the city from a place where women are compelled to face ‘danger
without pleasure, safety without stimulation, monumentality without diversity’
to one where inclusion rather than exclusion is the basic premise. Nancy
Duncan (1996) suggests that the slogan is not a call to disregard personal
safety but ‘to transform public spaces and make them safe and accessible to
everyone at night as well as during the day’ (p.132, quoted in Don Mitchell
[2000]).
68 On 2 July 2009, the Delhi High Court struck down the provision of Section
377 of the Indian Penal Code, which criminalized consensual sexual acts of
adults in private, holding that it violated the fundamental rights of life and
liberty and the right to equality as guaranteed in the Constitution. Though
celebrated by the media, the battle for equal rights of the queer community
is far from over.
69 The French word, ‘flâneur’, suggests a stroller, idler, walker. In nineteenthcentury Paris, the flâneur is assumed to be a wealthy, educated man of
leisure who could stroll the streets and arcades without being questioned; as
someone who wanders the streets as an abstract and detached observer.
He ‘looks’ at people, rather than the other way around, and assumes to
understand them and to comment on them. Several writers and thinkers
have reflected on the idea of flânerie, seeking to understand questions of
location, identity, class and gender. Walter Benjamin, reflecting on
Baudelaire, traces the flâneur from the pre-Haussmannian Paris through the
creation of Haussmann’s boulevards and the beginnings of department
stores, suggesting implicitly a linkage to an intensifying process of
commodification. Donald (1999), reflecting on Benjamin in turn, points out
that the flâneur ‘embodies a certain perspective on, or experience of, urban
space and the metropolitan crowd’. The question for us is: does the female
flâneur, the flâneuse exist? Doreen Massey (1994) suggests that the notion
of a flâneuse is impossible because of the uni-directionality of the gaze.
Flâneurs are the observers rather than the observed. It could be argued that
these new public spaces of the department store and the cinema created
possibilities for women to appear safely and respectably in public by
reconfiguring the boundaries of outside/inside and public/private (Donald,
1999, p. 49). Similarly, in Britain, by the 1860s some restaurants, tea-rooms
and department stores began to offer facilities exclusively for women, thus
transforming middle-and lower-middle class women’s experience of public
life (Wilson, 2001, p. 81). Janet Wolff (1990), however, suggests that women
were almost completely excluded from the public sphere. She writes: ‘The
public world of work, city life, bars, and cafés was barred to the respectable
woman.’ Elizabeth Wilson (2001) argues that while in some ways the flâneur
‘represents men’s visual and voyeuristic mastery over women’ (p. 78–79), at
the same time she believes that this does not completely preclude the
possibility of a female flâneur.
Linked to the questions of who can be the flâneur/flâneuse are the many
complex and pressing questions of citizenship. In this context it is important
to negotiate with the authorial dimensions of the act of flânerie and what it
may signify in terms of a ‘gaze’ that reflects and reinforces the power
structures of society, which define not only who has access to public spaces
and how, but also who is allowed to represent them and thereby shape the
discourse of urban living. For instance, Helen Scalway (2001) in a very
exciting way, attempts to explore the complexity of being a woman drifter, a
flâneuse in London. Scalway goes provides a nuanced account of a search
for a space in the city, a quest for a fuller citizenship. She writes: ‘Ultimately,
then the would-be city drifter in the feminine mode finds herself in a position
where flânerie in its inherently territorial and controlling meanings, is neither
possible nor desirable. Indeed it is only in developing practices of counterflânerie that the streets of the multi-cultural millennial city may ever hold
space for all its users. This is walking which is about negotiation and regard
for the Other: the street where relationship is possible: citizenship.’ Her
vision of ‘regard’ for the ‘Other’ is crucial to the creation of city spaces which
allow for multiple renditions and interpretations of space and flânerie and
allow for a meaningful citizenship to develop.
70 See Phadke (2007a).
71 See Phadke (forthcoming).
72 See Phadke (forthcoming).
73 In relation to questions of sexual pleasure, anthropologist Carole Vance
(1984) has argued that feminism’s success in bringing sexual violence into
the public had also had the unintended consequence of suggesting that
women are less sexually safe than ever and that ‘discussions and
explorations of pleasure are better deferred to a safer time’ (6). She
suggests that feminists were easily intimidated into believing that their own
pleasure was selfish and that it was illegitimate to talk of sexual pleasure
(until such time that sexual violence could be eliminated). She argues that
such a time will never be and that we need to talk of sexual pleasure even
as we battle against sexual violence and that these two projects are by no
means mutually exclusive. Using this line of thinking, we would argue that
we cannot postpone thinking about the pleasures of courting risk—the
pleasures of walking the streets viscerally and writing the city with our
bodies.
EVERYDAY SPACES
8. Public Space
1 It is also important to clarify that public space is only a part of the larger
construct of public sphere. Public sphere includes not only public spaces but
also public institutions, roles and positions produced over time, transforming
the economy and polity and in turn, getting transformed in significant ways.
In this study, we use public space in its narrower sense, though any
discussion of public space is intrinsically linked to the larger concept of the
public sphere. Therefore, for instance, when in the late eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries Mary Wollostonecraft, John Stuart Mill and Harriet
Taylor Mill wrote advocating the entry of women into the public sphere as
rational beings or in the 1960s, Betty Friedan encouraged women to find
employment outside the private home to seek fulfilment, they were referring
to an occupation of the public sphere as well as public space. On the other
hand, Jurgen Habermas’s understanding of the bourgeois public sphere
appears to ignore the fact that there was unequal access to public space.
2 Kroker et al, in their essay ‘Panic USA: Hypermodernism as America’s
Postmodernism’ (1990) suggest that in the absence of safe places to walk in
the USA, the shopping mall becomes the logical destination. They suggest
that this is the safe place to exercise, especially for women. For in the mall
everyone is a stranger but with an important difference: ‘Strangers in the
mall are engaged in parallel play, safe in the policed crowd from victim city
… The owners of the mall like it of course, but only up to a certain point …
they have a definite image they want to portray—up-scale—so they have
security guards to move people around and out’ (450).
3 Post-modern theorists of space suggest that social structure and space are
not mutually exclusive concepts and neither are they related to each other
causally. Rather, they are continuously interacting with each other in a
dialectical relationship. Space thus, is in a constant state of becoming, in a
radical departure from earlier ideas of a static, primordial entity, or one which
passively reflected social structures.
For French Marxist thinker Henri Lefebvre, ‘Space is not a thing but rather a
set of relations between things.’ In his book, The Production of Space
written in 1974, he outlines a theory of space in which he moves away from
the more geometric or architectural understanding of the term ‘space’, which
referred to an empty area enclosed by a material shell, towards a vision of
space as a social category and a means of production. Society here is
conceptualized as being a dynamic entity and Lefebvre censures theories
that ‘make society into the “object” of a systemization that must be “closed”
to be complete,’ bestowing ‘a cohesiveness it utterly lacks upon a totality
which is in fact decidedly open—so open, indeed, that it must rely on
violence to endure’ (11).
The focus has thus shifted from seeing space as a neutral setting—a
background for social transformation—to understanding how socio-spatial
constructs play constitutive roles in the production and reproduction of social
relations. Doreen Massey (1994) argues that the identities of ‘place’ are
seen as being always unfixed, contested and multiple. Places are also
viewed as open and porous and not defined by placing boundaries around
them.
Our own conception of space was greatly influenced by the work of both
Lefebvre and Massey. We understand space as a complex construction and
production of an environment—both real and imagined; influenced by sociopolitical processes, cultural norms and institutional arrangements, which
provoke different ways of being, belonging and inhabiting. This space
simultaneously also impacts and shapes the social relations that contributed
to its creation. The term, ‘space’ is used not as a given but as a something
which is produced and constructed through the multi-layered contexts of
perception, imagination, political economy, cultural norms, structures,
institutional arrangements and the everyday actions of each one of us. For a
discussion on the multiple concepts and constructions of space, see among
others, de Certeau (1984), Lefebvre (1991), McDowell (1999), Sennett
(1994) and Soja (1989).
4 See, for instance, Grosz (1995), Massey (1994), Rose (1993), Spain (1992)
among others.
5 However, the provision of infrastructure is not a neutral decision. Such policy
decisions are made within the same patriarchal ideologies which produce
gendered discrimination in the first place.
6 Under the provisions of the Indian Constitution, Article 15 allows for special
provisions to be made for marginalized groups where these are not seen in
violation of the principle of equality.
7 Kapur and Cossman (1996) on the subject of equality before law argue that
the formal and substantive approaches have differing outcomes. In the
formal approach, only those who are the same need to be treated as the
same, but if the individuals or groups in question are perceived to be
different, then they need not receive equal treatment. In the substantive
approach, the focus is not on sameness or difference, but rather on
questions of discrimination. In this approach, special provisions made for
disadvantaged groups are not an exception to, but rather an integral part of
the goal of equality.
8 This information is synthesized from interviews conducted with women
commuters and with policemen who were posted in the ladies’
compartments of local trains.
9 For more on this argument, see Don Mitchell (2003).
10 Perceptions of ‘who’ and ‘what’ constitute public space differ greatly, but as
Matt Vander Ploeg (2006) argues in his essay, when one group has a
decision-making power, its ideal public space is created. He refers to
Schaller and Modan’s (2005) study of how different racial/ethnic and class
groups viewed their neighbourhood of Mount Pleasant in Washington DC.
The Vietnamese and Latin groups viewed public space as ‘places “to hang
out” and “meet friends”’ and low-income groups did not think spending
money was an important part of socializing in public space (Schaller
[2005]:403). Meanwhile, European-Americans associate just ‘hanging out’ in
public space with suspicious behaviour and describe ‘people entering
stores, buying things, having a purpose as more comforting’ (403). Thus,
Schaller and Modan hardly found it surprising when the Euro-American and
business-owner-dominated Neighbourhood Business Improvement District
(NBID) has placed an emphasis on ‘an increased security force and more
stringent loitering statutes’ in Mount Pleasant’s public spaces (403)
(Schaller, Susanna, and Gabriella Modan, ‘Contesting Public Space and
Citizenship: Implications for Neighbourhood Business Improvement
Districts’, Journal of Planning Education and Research 24 (2005): 394–407,
quoted in Ploeg [2006]).
9. Commuting
11 In 2003, a film titled Ladies Special focused on the camaraderie of women
in Mumbai local trains (Ladies Special, directed by Nidhi Tuli, produced by
the Public Service Broadcasting Trust, 2003). In the same year, a national
television news channel aired a half-hour story on the Mumbai local trains,
focusing substantially on women commuters (Mumbai Locals, in the
programme 24 Hours, directed and reported by Radhika Bordia, New Delhi
Television, 2003). They received a barrage of letters from women in other
cities commenting on the almost idyllic situation of public transport for
women in Mumbai and bemoaning the lack of such infrastructure in their
own cities (Radhika Bordia, personal communication).
12 For example, writer Suketu Mehta draws a particularly evocative image of
the egalitarian and cosmopolitan Mumbai local when he describes the ‘many
hands stretching out to grab you on board, unfolding outward from the train
like petals. As you run alongside you will be picked up, and some tiny space
will be made for your feet on the edge of the open doorway’.
13 A successful example of increasing women’s access to public space
through addressing their concerns about safety in public transport is the
work done by METRAC (The Metropolitan Toronto Action Committee on
Violence Against Women and Children), a Toronto-based community
organization that works towards eliminating all forms of violence against
women and children. For more, see http://www.metrac.org.
14 Two zonal railways—the Central Railway and the Western Railway—
operate electric train services in Mumbai. The Western Railway operates the
Western Line that runs from Churchgate to Virar. The Central Railway
operates the Central (Main) Line, which runs from Chhatrapati Shivaji
Terminus (CST) (formerly Victoria Terminus) to Karjat and Kalyan (the
Mumbai Municipal Limit ends at Mulund) and the Central (Harbour) Line
which runs from CST to Panvel (the Mumbai Municipal limit ends at
Mankhurd). About 181 trains are used to run 1942 services that carry about
6 million passengers every day
(http://www.geocities.com/mumbairail/railway.html). One estimate suggests
that these services constitute 50 per cent of all train services in the country
(including long-distance trains).
At the present time, the BEST management runs 337 different routes in the
city. It has three routes that have ladies’ special buses (Route nos. 79, 606
and 259). A few routes ply at night but these night routes do not cover the
city significantly.
15 We conducted extensive interviews with women and men bus conductors in
2004. At the time, the women conductors were operating out of the SEEPZ
bus depot in Andheri (East).
16 In the local trains, some compartments are exclusively reserved for ‘ladies’
while others are ‘general’. Approximately 20 per cent of coach capacity at
peak hours and about 15 per cent in non-peak hours, is reserved for women
in separate bogies called ‘Ladies’ Compartments’. There are also ‘Ladies’
Special’ trains (a total of about eight on all the routes together), which are
reserved entirely, or extensively for women. Until 1982, there were
compartments reserved for women only during the day. After 8 p.m. at night,
they became general compartments where men could enter. In 1982,
women’s groups in Mumbai ran a successful sustained campaign to make
these into compartments reserved for women for all twenty-four hours.
There are now two first class and two second class (and some trains have
three second class) ladies’ compartments.
BEST buses have six seats reserved for women, two for senior citizens and
two for the ‘handicapped’ on single-decker buses. On the double-decker
buses, it reserves three seats each for women and handicapped persons
and two seats for senior citizens. In relation to access, physically and
mentally handicapped persons, senior citizens and pregnant women are
permitted to board the bus from the front door, except at starting point.
17 In spite of separate compartments for women, local trains continue to be
spaces fraught with some anxiety for women. There has been some debate,
for example, about the grilled partition between the general and the ladies’
compartments in some trains, where there is a window opening in the grill.
One can almost imagine that these partitions have their origins in the notion
of men ‘keeping a benevolent paternal eye’ on women. Whether or not
women want such protection is a moot point and in any case, such
benevolence is not usually forthcoming. Instead, the general compartment
with the partition grill is referred to as the ‘video-coach’ with a view of the
women in the ladies’ compartment presumably to leer at.
Further, one also finds graffiti pasted or scribbled on the inner walls of trains,
on backs of bus seats, in underpasses and bridges, and toilets. Crude
drawings of women’s breasts and vaginas and messages of lust and/or love
addressed to women in general or specifically speaking to or of one woman
in particular, constitute the large part of these. Some women find these
images disturbing, some find them offensive while still others simply shrug
them off as inconsequential. What they do point to, however, is the notion
that the very presence of women is perceived as sexual or as sexualizing
space.
18 In New Delhi’s metro rail system, inaugurated in 2002, there are some
‘women-only’ carriages, but police officers ride all the carriages, which are
equipped with emergency call boxes. Women have reported feeling safe on
the metro and that is partly due to the strong police presence. All
passengers must pass through metal detectors, manned by several
policemen, to enter the stations (AFP, 27 March 2006,
http://www.sawf.org/newedit/edit03272006/index.asp).
19 Reading between their lines, we find that the reasons for this are linked to
the presence of an authority—the bus conductor—who is on the bus, and in
Mumbai, usually helpful. We heard many stories from women about how bus
conductors would ask men to get off the bus if they harassed women. The
other reason is that because the bus travels along the road—there is always
a place they can get off at, in contrast to the trains where between stations
there is a sense of ‘lack of place’ or a sense of empty space.
20 Hijras are a gender category in India, which includes people who do not
identify as male or female. For an analysis of this community, see Gayatri
Reddy, 2005 and Serena Nanda, 1990.
21 In fact, the ‘ladies’ compartments’ in local trains are marked by a graphic
image of a woman, which varies from train to train. There are mainly three
such images, all of which show women dressed in saris. Two out of these
three images also show the women wearing a mangalsutra and a bindi—
both distinct symbols of Hindu matrimony. These images do not recognize
that in the last decade many working women have taken to wearing the
more convenient salwar-kameez or indeed allow space for those who are
non-Hindu or non-gender conforming. The abstracted image of a woman in
the bus similarly suggests a middle-aged woman in a sari with her hair
pulled back in a huge bun.
An examination of these images suggests the ways in which women users
of one form of public transport have been envisaged within the institutional
structure. While there are probably no sinister motives or conspiracy
theories behind these images, they are revealing of the dominant image of
the ‘Indian woman’ that permeates the social subconscious. Though
apparently harmless, such a mythification only serves to reproduce and
perpetuate a stereotype which, by normalizing a particular kind of woman,
marks all other women as others—incomplete, undesirable, and unworthy of
full citizenship.
Interestingly, in Haarlem, the Netherlands, and in Fuenlabrada, Spain, some
of the stick figures on the traffic signals representing the person walking on
the street have been given long hair and skirts, indicating that the presumed
user of the street is as likely to be a woman as a man arguably enshrining
women’s right to public space
(http://contexts.org/socimages/2009/08/04/does-this-sign-surprise-you,
accessed in August 2009).
22 http://www.mrvc.indianrail.gov.in/intr.htm, accessed in March 2007.
23 Transport and transport hubs like bus stops and railway stations also need
to be designed with safety considerations in mind. A British study of gender
concerns in transport found that in relation to safety, women reported a
strong dislike of waiting around at bus stops, particularly in bad weather, and
existing provision of shelters and seating was felt to be inadequate and
badly designed. Bus stations were also criticized for being bleak,
inconveniently located, lacking in facilities and for being places where
women felt unsafe in the evenings (Public transport gender audit evidence
base,
http://www.dft.gov.uk/stellent/groups/dft_mobility/documents/page/dft_mobilit
y_506790.hcsp, accessed in July 2006).
24 A report was submitted to Central Railway authorities and lighting was
augmented at these stations.
25 In fact, as the split stands now, about 46 per cent commuters use the train
services, with an average travelling distance of 27 kilometres, and 42 per
cent use the bus services, with the average trip length being 6 kilometres.
The remaining 7 per cent travel by private cars and 5 per cent by taxis and
auto-rickshaws. See Balakrishnan (2006) and Date (2010).
10. Peeing
26 The inequality in access to toilets has also been illustrated in a
documentary film, Q2P, directed by Paromita Vohra and produced by the
Gender and Space project, PUKAR, 2006.
27 Edwards and McKie (1997) point out that research shows that women on
average take twice as long as men to urinate. Research conducted in
various parts of the world between 1957 and 1991 and collated by Kira
(1994) record the time taken, measured in seconds, from entering to exiting
a toilet. There are eight studies on men’s urination times showing averages
of between 32 to 47 seconds and six studies on women showing averages
of between 80 and 97 seconds. All these studies have been conducted
largely in western countries with the exception of the inclusion of Japan.
Such data would suggest that women need more rather than less toilets
than men. As recently as December 2003, New York’s City Council
introduced a legislation to double the number of public toilets for women,
making it mandatory that large buildings and public spaces have a two-toone ratio of women’s to men’s toilets (A Reuters report cited in Times of
India, 6 December 2003).
Women take more time to urinate than men because of both biological as
well as social reasons; because of the manner in which they need to pee
and possible conditions such as pregnancy and menstruation, as well as
because of the clothes they wear, the children that often accompany them
and the bags they carry. See also Phadke (2007b).
28 Our research of illumination levels at Central Railway suburban railway
stations also found that toilets were among the worst lit—the bulbs were dim
and often did not work. In our interviews, few women commuters recounted
using the toilets at these stations.
29 The Sulabh Shauchalaya (‘easy toilet’) sanitation movement began in the
1970s out of a concern for sanitation, ecology and scavengers. On the one
hand, it aimed to make low-cost and appropriate toilets available to all
urban-dwellers, especially the poor, and on the other it wished to upgrade
the social status of scavengers by developing their capacity for alternate
occupations. Sulabh International, as it is now known, was the first in the
country to introduce the pay-per-use system by which users are charged a
nominal fee for using the public toilet and the money thus collected goes
towards maintenance of the facility. So successful has been Sulabh’s
intervention that public toilets in Mumbai are often referred to generically as
Sulabh. Women report that Sulabhs are public toilets that they don’t mind
using. The Sulabh model has subsequently been replicated by other
organizations.
30 The anxiety around toilets in poorer areas is also connected to inadequate
water supply. Bapat and Agarwal (2003) point out that according to official
data, residents of Mumbai get on an average 158 litres of water per day per
person but argue that these statistics conceal the reality of acute inequality
in the distribution of basic services (71).
31 It is for this reason that although the new apartment blocks constructed as
part of the slum rehabilitation programme have been severely criticized for
their insensitive planning, they often find favour with the residents,
particularly women, because of one design feature—the attached private
toilet.
32 This toilet was documented by fourth-year students of the Sir J.J. College of
Architecture in 2005 as part of an elective course on Gender and Space.
33 In general, it is found that in areas of high-intensity usage and low
maintenance such as railway stations and parks, the traditional
Indian/Asian/squat toilet is more hygienic to use for women (since they do
not need to sit in full contact with the pan), and easier to clean. Although at
least some western-style WCs are required for the old and disabled, the
squat WC is friendlier to a majority of women. Yet the squat toilet is a
definite no-no in global Mumbai.
34 We refer here to advertising for Whisper and Kotex sanitary towels, among
others.
35 Women in Mumbai have reported changing diapers in moving vehicles and
on the floors of trial rooms in shops. They admit to being forced to
breastfeed in musty store rooms of fancy shops, in parking lots and often, in
toilets. Some have been politely but firmly told to stop breastfeeding in
swanky restaurants as it was considered ‘inappropriate behaviour’. Here,
one needs to qualify the fact that the issue of breastfeeding in public is
nuanced by class and it is middle-class/elite women who find more censure
than poor working-class women.
Even spaces that are ostensibly meant for women (as consumers) are not
friendly to women with children. Many malls, for instance, still lack basic
facilities for breastfeeding and diaper changing; often a slab of granite
placed at a low level near a mirror doubles up as a nappy-changing facility
and a dressing table. One mall manager, who was retailing a Rs 4,000-worth
diaper-changing table but had no such provision in his toilet, defended this
in an interview by saying, ‘We don’t encourage such activities in our shop.’
In most places, there are no unisex baby-changing rooms or family toilets
where both men and women can take a child to change a diaper or to
urinate. But there is hope that some things are changing. Some Indian
airports now have a small baby room equipped with a cot, a diaperchange
table, toys and a screened-off area for breastfeeding mothers.
36 With design professionals shirking from the task of designing and building
toilets, some community organizations, particularly those of the poor, have
taken up the task with much seriousness and vigour. Since the 1990s,
grassroots organization SPARC, in association with the National Slum
Dwellers Federation (NSDF) and Mahila Milan, collectives of women slumand pavement-dwellers, has worked on designing and building community
toilet blocks in several cities in India, including Mumbai and Pune. The
women’s innovations to the toilet design include specially designed
children’s toilets, which have smaller colourful squat plates, handles to
prevent overbalancing, and smaller pit openings. Involving the community
has meant a reduction in the cost of construction per toilet seat since
community contractors take on the role of building and maintaining the
toilets. It has also meant that local communities of the poor can use this as a
tangible basis for a dialogue with national and local governments to explore
the scaling up of the sanitation model. An example of this is the ‘sandaas
mela’ (toilet festival) organized by the alliance, which involve the exhibition
of not models but functioning public toilets designed by the users. Reflecting
on these ‘sandaas melas’, anthropologist Arjun Appadurai (2002) suggests
that they may well aid a transgressive politics of ‘deep democracy’.
11. Playing
37 Chowpatty is a local term used for city beaches.
38 In a number of separate exercises of imagining the city during workshops
that we conducted, a majority of the participants did not even mark the sea
in their mental map of the city. Ironically, half the participants said they would
definitely take their visiting friends shopping to Phoenix Mills mall.
39 New York City has 6.3 acres per 1,000 residents or 25 per cent of its area
as open space.
According to the NGO, Action for Good Governance and Networking in India
(AGNI), records in the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC)’s
Development Plan Department show that the city has seen the maximum
number of de-reservations of open spaces in the last five years with a total
of 12,738 square metres, one-seventh the size of Oval Maidan, and
essentially land meant for playgrounds and gardens, were de-reserved in
that period. (Hindustan Times, 27 March 2007).
40 In the last few years, the lands of the closed and semi-functioning mills
have opened up for redevelopment. In keeping with a plan suggested by a
group led by architect Charles Correa, the Development Control Regulations
(DCR) of 1991, governing the use of realty in Mumbai, had laid down the
one-third formula. According to this, the entire mill land had to be distributed
as follows: one-third of the land was to be given to the BMC for open
spaces; one-third was to be given to Maharashtra Housing and Area
Development Authority (MHADA) for public housing and the rest was to be
used by the owner/developer for commercial development.
In 2001, the Vilasrao Deshmukh–led state government, using a loophole in
the Maharashtra Town and Planning Act, 1966, amended DCR 58 to DCR
58 (I), which stated: ‘Only land that is vacant on mill properties, that is, with
no built-up structure, would be divided by the one-third formula.’ Several
years later, the Bombay Environment and Action Group (BEAG), waking up
to the implications, belatedly filed a public interest petition in the Bombay
High Court challenging the amendment of DCR 58, which it said only
benefited mill-owners and the builders’ lobby. The High Court struck down
the sale of the five NTC (National Textile Corporation) properties and
accepted the BEAG’s plea that the modified DCR 58, 2001, was arbitrary,
illegal and unconstitutional. ‘By changing the definition of the open land, it
deprived the city of much needed green space,’ said the court.
However, subsequently, the Supreme Court not only struck down the High
Court’s progressive ruling on reverting to DCR 58, 1991, but upheld the
NTC’s sale. This essentially means that the mill-owners will not be required
to share all their land with the BMC and the MHADA, but only the existing
vacant spaces.
41 Writing about Los Angeles, Mike Davis (1990) points to the aggressive use
of outdoor sprinklers in parks. He offers the example of Skid Row Park,
where to ensure that the park could not be used by overnight campers or the
homeless, sprinklers were programmed to come on at random times during
the night. The measure was copied by stores to drive people away from the
footpaths at night. Las Vegas has now adopted an ordinance making it an
offence to feed ‘the indigent’. Many other cities in the USA have similar
regulations limiting the distribution of charitable meals in parks. At the same
time, in the last decade, the homeless population of Las Vegas has doubled.
42 For instance, one article in the Hindu said: ‘In the absence of illumination,
many of the parks are taken over by criminals and anti-social elements after
nightfall. Hordes of beggars, lepers, drug pushers and sex workers invade
the precincts. The ornamental lamps that adorned the once verdant parks in
the city have either been stolen or damaged. Burnt-out bulbs are seldom
replaced and street lamps in the vicinity do not function. Saplings planted by
Corporation gardeners are often stolen. Citizens complain that the parks
double up as operating bases for burglars’ (Hindu, 9 September 2003).
43 In the past few years, the control of public spaces has been given a new
turn by the establishment of the Advanced Locality Management (ALM)
groups. Founded in 1998, ALM is a concept of citizen’s involvement with
local governance. The equivalent of a neighbourhood association, the ALM
is however, written into the municipal governance structure. An ALM covers
a neighbourhood or street, normally about 1,000 citizens. It is registered by
the local municipal Ward Office, which appoints a Nodal Officer to attend to
citizen complaints. In Mumbai there are, as of today, about 658 registered
ALMs in all twenty-four wards of the city (www.cleanupmumbaicity.org).
Architect Neera Adarkar (2007) suggests that ALMs are a form of
‘unprecedented territorial claim made by the elite middle-class on their
respective neighbourhoods.’ These groups, which have taken it upon
themselves ‘to save their own neighbourhoods by cleansing and beautifying
them, more often than not do not represent all the voices in the locality.’
Often these groups seek to erase the presence of hawkers or slums ‘by
beautifying elements such as flower planters along the pavements and
decorative fencing around playgrounds, parks and waterfronts to keep away
the unwanted “others”.’ In their comparative study of ALMs and municipal
ward committees, Baud and Nainan (2008) note that ALMs were basically
set up in middle-class neighbourhoods of the city. Through focusing on
enhanced security, infrastructure upgradation, and ‘cleansing’ of their
neighbourhoods, these associations work towards ‘expanding rights to
public space in their own neighbourhoods, and excluding people working in
the public sector from access to such public space.’
44 Joggers Park in Bandra (West) was one the first upmarket parks in the city.
The park was opened in May 1990. This is a walking park that also has
space for children to play. It is an oval park with only one entrance/exit. It
has always been a paid park.
45 Segregation on the basis of class is however not just restricted to paid
parks. While in paid parks this is temporal—certain times of the day/week
are divided, in certain non-paid parks one observes an ongoing spatial
segregation on the basis of class. For example, in Diamond Gardens in
Chembur and Five Gardens, Dadar, it is noticed that the inside area of the
park, particularly the children’s play area, is occupied by poorer children,
especially in the afternoons—those that probably have no other access to
easy entertainment. Children from middle-class families rarely, if ever, use
these facilities. Middle-class adults, on the other hand, do use the park but
they restrict themselves to the walking/jogging tracks that usually edge the
parks.
46 This upgradation was undertaken by the Bandra West Residents’
Association and the Bandra Bandstand Residents’ Trust.
47 Any kind of ‘privatization’ of public space has implications on public usage
of that space. For example, one recreation ground on Perry Cross Road in
Bandra, which has been ‘adopted’ by a religious trust from the Municipal
Corporation for maintenance, now has a meditation centre, four toilets,
washing area and two rooms constructed on it. As a result, space for
children to play has gone down drastically. The local complaint is that
children are also being stopped from playing or running in the park. The
comment by the representative from the trust says it better: ‘Children break
benches and ruin flower beds. We just restrict football and badminton in the
park.’ (‘Meditation Centre at Bandra Park irks locals’, DNA, Mumbai, 21
November 2008).
48 These conservative agendas are imprinted on the aesthetic body of the city
in the shape of altered park benches, which have arm rests between single
seats ostensibly to cast a literal spoke in the romantic wheel. In surveillance
terms, couples in public spaces were monitored by the police in the wake of
dictats imposed by Shiv Sena leader Pramod Navalkar when the Sena was
in government in Maharashtra. These orders were, however, imprecisely
defined, leaving decisions of what was deemed to be improper to the
discretion of individual officers. For some this meant that couples could sit
on Marine Drive or Bandra Bandstand for instance, facing the road but not
facing the sea. For some it meant that they could not sit there at all. These
attempts became in many ways something of a joke but they were all too
serious. Of course, couples continue to occupy these spaces but the fact
that such policing could be undertaken without overwhelming and vocal
protest from civil society says something of potential for culture policing. For
instance, Joggers Park has signs prohibiting romantic ‘misbehaving’—
illustrated by pink lips which are crossed out.
In December 2005, in Meerut (Uttar Pradesh), the police humiliated couples,
including students and married couples in Gandhi Park in the city. A group of
women policemen slapped couples in full view of television cameras. The
crack-down called Operation Majnu, was purportedly a drive in Meerut
against eve teasing in public, but in fact targeted consenting couples.
Following this, the Uttar Pradesh government suspended the additional
superintendent of police and the circle officer of the city and ordered a highlevel inquiry into the incidents (Press Trust of India, Meerut, 21 December
2005).
49 ‘Here, Love is a Four-letter Word’, Aneesh Phadnis, Times of India,
Mumbai, 12 April 2002,
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/6609031.cms.
50 The Advance Locality Management (ALM) group of Bandra Bandstand, an
amalgam of thirty-eight housing societies, was planning to undertake the
CCTV monitoring of the Bandstand seafront at a cost of Rs 4.5 lakh. The
president of the ALM defended the idea of using seven cameras trained
onto the promenade by saying that it was to ‘make sure that couples sit in
the area decently rather than in an absurd manner that is embarrassing for
other people’. (‘Bandstand under watch: residents play judge, jury’, Mumbai
Mirror, Mumbai, 24 June 2010; ‘Cops switch off Bandstand ALM’s snoop
cameras’, Mumbai Mirror, Mumbai, 30 June 2010).
51 Dagmar Grimm-Pretner (2004) argues that when public spaces are
designed to support certain activities in exclusion of others, it is the more
physically assertive and dominant groups that tend to claim them. Women in
particular, he notes, then tend to stay away from such spaces. Design
concepts with open, versatile spaces on the other hand, allow for multiple
interpretations and thus encourage various groups to put them to differential
use (Dr Dagmar Grimm-Pretner (2004), ‘Designing Public Parks and
Squares in Viennese Urban Renewal Areas—Sites for Everyday Life’, in:
Edinburgh College of Art: Open space—People Space, an international
conference on inclusive outdoor environments, October 2004, Edinburgh,
Scotland).
52 Until 1996, the Oval was under the jurisdiction of the Maharashtra state
government. It was argued that as it was mainly used for cricket, local
residents were detached from its maintenance. Subsequently, they
petitioned the Maharashtra state government as a citizens’ group, OCRA
(Oval-Cooperage Residents’ Association). When the state government did
not respond, the citizens’ group took it to court. The High Court ruled in their
favour, directing the government to either maintain the space or hand it over
to the citizens’ group, which subsequently took over this space in 1996.
53 The Oval Maidan has a long list of rules and regulations put up in the
maidan (as defined by the Sports Department – Government of
Maharashtra). These include, among many others:
• No commercialization through ads/posters/banners or in any other manner
is permitted on the fence or inside the Maidan.
• No cattle, horses, stray dogs etc. are allowed in the Maidan.
• Anti-social activities are strictly prohibited.
• Consuming liquor or other intoxicants is strictly prohibited.
• Gates of the Maidan are closed from 10.00 p.m. to 6.00 a.m.
• No hawkers and peddlers are allowed in the Maidan.
• Littering, spitting and other acts of nuisance are prohibited in the Maidan.
• No organized activity, show or event is permitted.
• No morchas, processions or meetings are permitted.
• In general, except cricket no other organized activity is permitted.
• Users of Maidan do so at their own risk.
54 Like the Oval, the Horniman Circle Garden has also been ‘beautified’ as
part of the conservation movement in Mumbai. Similarly fenced and gated,
the garden is further densely planted with multiple kinds of shrubs and
climbing creepers along with some fine old trees. While it is an excellent
example of landscaping, it cuts complete visibility from the streets outside.
Even within the garden, plants create visual partitions between spaces.
Such a design encourages a more languorous use rather than active sports
of any kind. As such, women—whom our research has demonstrated cannot
hang-out in public space without purpose—are fundamentally discouraged
from using it. Men, on the other hand, are found making the most of what
the gardens have to offer—having lunches, chatting, playing cards and even
having their afternoon siestas. Even if women were to overcome social
stigma and access the gardens to hang out alone, the visual disconnection
of the inside with the outside and the multitude of men there makes it difficult
for them to do so.
55 Urban designer William H. Whyte notes that, ‘So-called “undesirables” are
not the problem. It is the measures taken to combat them that is the
problem. The best way to handle the problem of undesirables is to make the
place attractive to everyone else’ (quoted in the Project for Public Spaces,
http://www.pps.org/info/placemakingtools/placemakers/wwhyte, accessed in
December 2008).
An example of this in action is the Dufferin Grove Park in Toronto. Imagine
this—you step out of your door, walk to your local park, knead some fresh
dough, pop it in the communal oven, and within minutes you have freshly
baked bread or pizza ready. By installing a wood-fired community oven, this
Canadian park encouraged all kinds of people, including lower-class families
with children, to use it. By making the park a space populated by all kinds of
people, they effectively decreased the possibility of unwanted activities such
as drug use in the park
(http://www.pps.org/topics/affiliated/a_woodfired_communal). This is just one
example of how a park was creatively made more inclusive and welcoming
to the community that lives around it.
12. Designed City
56 Such a passive view of the material environment has not been consistent
through history. Historically, an articulation of the transformative potential of
material culture in general and material space in particular, began in the late
nineteenth century with the Arts and Crafts movement in reaction to the
perceived decrepitude of industrial society. In the early twentieth century, the
design of the built environment was attributed with the ability to almost
single-handedly change society. Architectural modernism in particular was
fuelled by a belief in such an achievable utopian social ideal which a socially
engaged architecture would bring about. In the 1960s, this Modernist
utopianism (best known through the work of Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius
and Mies van der Rohe) along with its companion ideals of humanism and
universal idealism were critiqued severely by emerging paradigms of
thought, for being univalent and insentient to the complexities and
contradictions of lived experience. Architecture since the Modernists has
been diffident about its larger social relevance. However, it is important to
understand that critiquing the megalomaniacal belief in the omnipotence of
the material environment does not mean that it has no power or ability
beyond reflecting/following the evolution of the social structure.
57 The elective course ‘Interrogating the City: Gender, Space and Power’ was
conducted for fourth-year students at the Sir J.J. College of Architecture,
Mumbai, from December 2004 to April 2005.
58 There exist successful examples of change brought about where cities have
taken designing for safety seriously. One such example is that of the Metro
Action Committee on Public Violence against Women (METRAC), founded
in 1984, by the council of metropolitan Toronto. Consisting of eighty allwomen members from across disciplines, METRAC has developed a
comprehensive and multi-disciplinary approach to women’s safety which has
more importantly shifted the locus of knowledge from technical specialists to
the users themselves. For example, in a study of High Park—the city’s
largest park—METRAC prepared an extensive report based on an active
engagement with women park users. Amongst the factors they considered
were lighting, sight/visibility, entrapment possibilities, ear and eye distance,
movement predictors (such as pathways and tunnels), signage information,
visibility of park staff/police, public telephones, assailants’ escape routes,
maintenance levels, parks programming officials and isolation, the most
critical single factor. See http://www.metrac.org.
59 Daily News and Analysis, 31 May 2006 and June 2006
60 Exercise designed by Shilpa Ranade. See also Ranade (2007) and Phadke,
Khan and Ranade (2005).
61 In our ethnographic studies of coffee shops, we found that women on their
own chose to sit in very specific places: usually at the edges of the shop
facing the street with their back to the wall. Women often instinctively protect
their backs and locate themselves where they can see people approaching
them. This is interesting given that all women interviewed unanimously said
that they do not feel the threat of harassment inside coffee shops though of
course ‘sometimes people stare inside as well’.
62 One of the reasons that much of our public infrastructure is designed taking
men as the universal/neutral ideal is that there are not enough women in
decision-making bodies at various levels of design, be it governmental
bodies that make city-level design decisions, architectural firms in private
practice or product designers who design street furniture/graphics. Even
women who belong to these professions often feel the pressure to underplay
their identities as women while projecting a ‘neutral’ professional front which
more often than not mirrors and reinforces the male-centric work ethic and
perspective on design. This absence and reluctance on the part of women
translates into their special needs being grossly overlooked.
Architect and teacher Neera Adarkar recounts ironically the horror her
students display at being asked to design a ladies’ compartment in a local
train. As a result, of such sentiments on the part of not just students but
urban planners and designers as well, the design of various infrastructural
facilities that do exist, fail to provide for the specific needs of women.
63 Srivastava et al (2004) contend that defining urbanity in only one form—as
multi-storeyed apartment blocks—is an impractical and unidimensional way
of understanding the city. It is rooted in the conceptual inability of planners to
accept diverse ways of being urban. They suggest that slums generate a
diversity of built form and they deserve special attention by urban planners
who should look at them more in terms of being ‘housing solutions’ rather
than just problems.
64 Examples of this are the Supreme Court judgements related to the
redevelopment of mill lands and recent amendments to Development
Control rules 33(7) and 33(9). In 2006, the Supreme Court overturned an
earlier ruling by the Bombay High Court that determined the share of the mill
lands between private and public interests. Consequently, instead of having
to share a portion of their entire parcel of land with government bodies—with
possibilities for creating open public places—the mill-owners were allowed
to retain all the built-up areas for sale, and share only the remaining open
spaces, thus drastically reducing the land available for the public. In late
2008, the Supreme Court once again overruled the Bombay High Court and
upheld amendments to the Development Control rules 33(7) and 33(9)
thereby opening up the way for the redevelopment of a substantial pool of
old cessed buildings. Environmental and planning activists argue that this
makes a virtually unlimited Floor Space Index (FSI) available to the builders
and will severely overload the existing infrastructure as well as adversely
impact the quality of living in the city by depleting its already scarce open
spaces.
65 The Centre for Enquiry Into Health and Allied Themes (CEHAT) (2006)
study of the resettlement of a slum community in Mumbai shows that even
the simple change of moving people from the horizontal structure of a slum
to the vertical structure of an apartment block redefines the public–private
dichotomy of space. The corridors and stairwells of these buildings are often
unlit and unlike the older settlement patterns discourage social interaction
and thus, reduce its sense of safety. The space beyond the building itself is
similarly an anonymous no-man’s land, making it unsafe for women. The
connection between the home and the outside world thus becomes fraught
with anxieties and fear so that women prefer to stay indoors. The study
shows that women’s access to education, work and healthcare, and their
participation in public and community life is then adversely affected by the
resettlement.
66 For instance, in the city state of Singapore we found precisely the clean
lines and well-designed spaces of policy-maker’s dreams and while public
space was relatively ‘safe’ it was also strangely sterile. As one woman we
spoke to put it, ‘Public space here is completely devoid of any erotic
possibilities.’ It was as if making the space clean and sanitized of dangers
had also erased the pleasures and risks that people may have desired.
(Research conducted during an Artist in Residency Programme under the
International Symposium on Electronic Arts, at the National University of
Singapore, Singapore.)
67 The emancipatory possibilities of everyday human actions to creatively reimagine social spaces, are alluded to most evocatively by de Certeau
(1984). ‘The goal,’ he writes, ‘is not to make clear how the violence of order
is transmuted into a disciplinary technology, but rather to bring to light the
clandestine forms taken by the dispersed, tactical and makeshift creativity of
groups or individuals already caught in the nets of “discipline”’. The
proposition of de Certeau allows us to imagine social structures ‘from below’
so to say, opening up a critical methodology for de-materializing sociospatial structures and suggesting a subversive potential of human actions.
IN SEARCH OF PLEASURE
13. Who’s Having Fun?
1 In January 2009, a Hindu right-wing group called the Sri Rama Sene barged
into a pub in Mangalore and attacked the young women and men patrons on
the grounds that the women were ‘violating traditional Indian values’.
Subsequently, in the month of February, women wearing ‘western clothes’
were attacked and abused on the streets of Bangalore.
2 In this section we often use the older names of roads and areas which have
now been changed. We use these because they continue to be used
colloquially and are more easily recognizable than the new official names.
14. Can Girls Really Have Fun?
3 Bandra is also not as liberal as it is popularly perceived. ‘Good little girls’ are
expected to be ‘good’ even if they can wear shorts in the suburb. Some
married women, particularly those who had kept their maiden name after
marriage, informed us that there were building societies in Bandra that
demanded to see their marriage certificate to ensure that the couple staying
on their building premises are legally married and not just ‘living together’.
4 ‘Celebrate Bandra’ is a local arts and culture festival organized by Bandraites
in Bandra (West)—three such festivals have been organized in 2003, 2005
and 2007.
15. Do Muslim Girls Have Less Fun?
5 For a detailed discussion of many of the ideas in this chapter, see Khan
(2007).
16. Do Rich Girls Have More Fun?
6 An example of this is Malabar Hill, an upper-class locality in South Mumbai
where high-rise buildings have over the years come to be populated
increasingly by business families of the Gujarati Jain and Marwari
communities. The Chief Minister and Governor of Maharashtra also live in
this locality, making it an area that receives more than its fair share of
resources like electricity and water supply.
It is also interesting to note how Malabar Hill continues to be marked as an
upper-class area, although it also houses a number of chawls and slum
neighbourhoods like Ramakund (near Banganga), Dhobi Ghat and Shivaji
Nagar, which service the wealthy in high-rise apartments.
17. How Do Slum Girls Have Fun?
7 There are 42.6 million slum-dwellers in India—over 4 per cent of the
country’s population lives in ‘dwellings unfit for human habitation’ according
to the most recent census figures (Census 2001). In Greater Mumbai, more
than half of the city’s 12 million population lives in informal settlements or
slums on less than 16 per cent of the city’s land. Its 6.5 million slum-dwellers
far outnumber those in any other city and account for 15 per cent of the
entire slum population of the country. About 40 per cent of all Mumbai’s slum
households have an income below the poverty line. Most slums are
characterized by inadequate physical infrastructure, illegal electricity, poor
water supply, open drains, and abysmal toilet facilities. In the heavy
monsoon months, water flooding of houses is a common occurrence.
18. When Do Working Girls Have Fun?
8 Nariman Point is a business district in South Mumbai, built on reclaimed
land. It houses several multinational corporations in high-rise buildings.
There is one high-end residential building, one five-star hotel, a theatre
complex and an MLA’s hostel in the area as well. The Vidhan Bhavan (the
lower house of the state assembly) is also located in this area, which has
high levels of security for this reason. Ballard Estate, situated in South
Mumbai, was built in the early part of the twentieth century by the British.
Though less known significant parts of this area, too, were reclaimed by the
Bombay Port Trust between 1914 and 1918.
The Bandra–Kurla Complex is a commercial zone developed by the Mumbai
Metropolitan Regional Development Authority as part of a planned series of
‘growth centres’ in order to arrest further concentration of offices and
commercial activities in South Mumbai. This complex has been built on
marshy land on either side of Mahim Creek. The commercial development in
the complex includes private and government offices (state and central),
banks and wholesale establishments.
19. May Night Girls Have fun?
9 ‘No Women, No Trouble’, Mumbai Mirror, 25 March, 2008.
10 For more information, please see www.nasscom.in—under Initiatives,
Women in IT, October 2007.
11 Telegraph, UK, 8 October 2006.
12 Telegraph, Kolkata, 14 May 2006.
21. Can Different Girls Think of Fun?
13 Interviews were conducted with visually, physically and audio-challenged
women in Mumbai. Names have been withheld to protect identities.
14 According to two reports in Me magazine of the DNA newspaper, till the
Census 2001, disabled or differently abled people were not even included in
India’s census as a separate category, according to disability rights activist
Anita Ghai. Disability scholar Renu Addlakha notes that people with
disabilities is a very heterogeneous term—it includes a wide range from
mildly visually challenged to completely blind, from hard of hearing to
completely deaf, from those with orthopaedic disabilities, to those who have
completely lost a limb, or are affected by polio or cerebral palsy. It includes
those with cognitive disabilities, autism, dyslexia, even mental illness. Javed
Abidi, chairman, National Centre for Promotion of Employment of Disabled
People, quotes government figures that say that of the 70 million disabled in
India, only 2 per cent are educated and a shocking one per cent are
employed (‘A Long Road Ahead’, Me Magazine, DNA Publications, Mumbai,
June 2008; ‘Gulf of Prejudice’, Me magazine, DNA Publications, Mumbai,
April 2008).
15 The United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, a
landmark world treaty that India has ratified, came into force in May 2008.
This treaty commits countries to acknowledge that people with disabilities
experience specific kinds of discrimination that cannot be hidden under
other social inequalities and puts disability rights on every country’s
international agenda.
16 Section 44, in chapter 8 on Non-Discrimination in The Persons With
Disabilities (Equal Opportunities, Protection of Rights and Full Participation)
Act, 1995, states that the transport sector shall, within limits of their
economic capacity and development for the benefits of PWDs (People With
Disabilities) take special measures to adapt rail compartments, buses,
vessels and aircraft to facilitate easy access, adapt toilets to allow
wheelchair users to use them conveniently. They should install auditory
signals at red lights on roads for the benefit or persons with a visual
handicap, provide curb cuts and slopes to pavements for easy access of
wheelchair users, engrave the surface of the zebra crossing and the railway
platforms for persons with visual impairment, devise appropriate symbols for
disability and provide warning signals at appropriate places. The Act also
calls upon the government and local authorities to provide ramps, Braille
symbols, and auditory signals in elevators of public buildings, hospitals,
primary health centres, and other medical and rehabilitation institutions. But,
tragically, over a decade later, we are no way close to a more accessible
public space.
25. Can Good Girls Have Fun?
17 These are stereotypes of possible women in Chembur that point to some
codes of gendered conduct, but nonetheless, are as always partial
descriptions.
IMAGINING UTOPIAS
26. Why Loiter?
1 See also Phadke, Ranade and Khan (2009).
2 This idea is not as far-fetched as it might first sound. There are some
occasions that approximate such spaces. For instance, the mixture of
crowds at a one-day cricket match or more recently, the 20/20 matches
where a large number of different people come together appear to blur class
and ethnic boundaries to some extent. This space is often more notional
than real for the stadium might not be a very friendly space to women.
Recollect, for instance, the college students who were sexually harassed in
the celebration following India’s win in the 20/20 World Cup 2007 on 26
September 2007. Unfortunately, none of the girls who were molested outside
Wankhede stadium registered a complaint and the police did not probe the
matter any further despite media pressure.
Another such space that creates a sense of connection of a notional shared
space is Bollywood, particularly in the past decade as the divide between
high culture and popular culture has dissolved to a great extent and Hindi
films have acquired a certain kind of cultural legitimacy. Of course, at this
point, one has to imagine these notional spaces being actually transformed
into real public spaces where people might find the capacity to if not share
connections, to share space based on a collective notion of collective rights.
Loitering can thus be imagined in the mode of Foucault’s notion of a
heterotopia; as a space that coexists with the space of the everyday but
where the hegemonic structures of the everyday are suspended. Loitering is
both a physical as well as a mental act, something that is not just executed
by the body but produces and is made possible through a different kind of
subjectivity.
3 ‘Gender Performativity’ is a term coined by feminist philosopher Judith Butler.
Butler argues that gender is not a fixed attribute of a person, or something
that is real in itself. Gender, rather, is created by the everyday repetitive
performance of acts that produces the effect of a stable gendered persona.
For more, see Butler (1990).
4 It is this quest for pleasure that the Consortium of Pub-going, Loose and
Forward Women, a Facebook group formed in opposition to the attacks on
women in a pub by the Sri Ram Sene in Mangalore, addressed in their
mandate when they ‘refused’ to play the role of the ‘good women’ and
claimed the right to fun for its own sake. This group at its finale numbered
over 50,000 members, and built up to almost frenzied proportions with the
media both in India and abroad giving them wide publicity. Not surprisingly,
the Facebook group was hacked into several times.
It is the same vision that propelled the irreverent campaign called the Pink
Chaddi Campaign which emanated from the Consortium of Pub-going,
Loose and Forward Women, which exhorted women to send the Sri Ram
Sene pink chaddis (underwear) for Valentine’s Day to indicate their disdain
for the brand of culture-policing they endorsed.
5 Women’s sense of frustration at having to watch themselves all the time was
reflected in an online blog campaign ‘I Wish, I Want, I Believe’ (February
2007) run by the Blank Noise project, which campaigns against sexual
harassment on Indian streets. One respondent wrote: ‘I wish to … just be
myself … not think about who’s watching me … if I want to just sing to my
heart’s content … swing about and walk the streets … laugh … express
myself … without anybody misconstruing anything I do or say!!!!!’ Another
fantasized: ‘I wish I could go to a tea/paan/cigarette stall at any time of day
or night and not have only men flock around it and make me feel like I am
intruding on their space.’
(http://blanknoiseproject.blogspot.com/2007/02/wishlist.html, accessed in
August 2007).
6 When we say ‘not to be blamed for the violence’ we include those times
when women were out to just have fun. When we say ‘not to be blamed’ we
include not just moral judgements but also those based on rationality which
say—‘but how stupid, what was she thinking of going out so late,’ or
variations on that theme. In the recent case of the sexual assault of a young
international student in Mumbai by six men (2009), the question was often
raised in conversation of the young woman’s ‘stupidity’ in going to an empty
flat with six men. Here it is important to point out that many other women
(and men) have done similar things without adverse outcomes. The problem
must be located not in the woman’s desire to have fun, but in the men’s plan
to commit a crime.
7 Given recent fears of terrorism and increased concerns relating to security in
public places (which terrorists usually target in order to create widespread
panic and to draw immediate attention to their cause), our vision to make
loitering more acceptable may seem far-fetched. The immediate response to
terrorist acts in public places (such as the November 2008 terrorist attacks
in Mumbai, chiefly targeting hotels and restaurants) is heightened security
and surveillance measures. However, it is at such times that the need to
reiterate the citizenship inherent in loitering, an act of both belonging to the
city and a celebration of the pleasures afforded by the city, is the most
important. If we choose surveillance and restrictions over access, then we
allow the forces of terror to succeed in building a city of fear.
8 The contemporary women’s movement (post-1970s) successfully focused on
issues of violence against women bringing about changes in the law. It
succeeded in bringing to the foreground issues of rape, dowry deaths,
female foeticide, among others. The anxiety with regard to pleasure is then
often related to the fear that if pleasure gets on the agenda, it might derail
the struggles and undermine the righteous and moral grounds on which the
women’s movement has fought for women’s rights. As a result, even within
the women’s movement, women do not place themselves or their desires
centre-stage because this might be tagged as selfish, self-serving and
divisive.
9 We are aware of the limitations of using the discourse of rights in this
argument given the feminist critique of rights as being individualistic, reifying
liberalism and often reflecting existing hierarchies of all kinds and thus
limiting the terms of the debate. This critique is both valid and very valuable.
At the same time, the language of rights is also a powerful tool to promote
greater inclusion and participation in quest of a more egalitarian citizenship,
not the least because it has a wide acceptability and for now is perhaps the
best way to articulate both the entitlement to be free of violence and the
claim to pleasure.
10 Sakhawat Hossain (1905) paints a world, ‘Ladyland’ where women rule in
ecologically friendly cities and men are cloistered in mardanas.
11 The only exception to this was a workshop we conducted for Muslim women
in May 2009 at a women’s library in Mumbra in Thane district, just outside
Mumbai city limits. Here the young women, many of whom wore full burkhas
were full of ideas of their utopias. One of them wanted to walk out on the
streets at 1 a.m. Another wanted to use a local park which from her
description was well designed (being open on all four sides) but was always
peopled by men and boys while her friend wanted an open sports field
where women could learn all sorts of games. One girl said she’d like to
spend time in the local market without having to run home in a hurry. And
another one emphatically declared, ‘We want to occupy as much space in
public as men do.’ These were young women between the ages of sixteen
and twenty-five who negotiate hard with their families for every extra bit of
space that they are allowed to access.
12 In City of Quartz (1990), Mike Davis paints a dystopic vision of a deeply
segregated Los Angeles, where attempts to cleanse the city of its
undesirable elements actually created insurmountable divisions between
people and spaces. The city, parcelled into privatized islands of gatedspaces, has become so alienating and violent that a semblance of urban
order could only be maintained by repressive policing and a further
reinforcement of spatial boundaries. See also the work of Appadurai (2000),
Mitchell (2003).
13 The potential in loitering might be visualized as an extension of the power of
walking itself so eloquently imagined by de Certeau (1984) whose vision of
walking as being simultaneously an organic act of belonging and a
subversive engagement with the city informs our idea of loitering. For de
Certeau, as people walk they reinscribe the city again and again, often in
defiance of established patterns of urban order, each time differently making
new meanings. Walking, according to him, is fundamentally an act of
‘enunciation’ through which the city—and, in effect, social order—is
personalized, and in the process, altered.
Besides de Certeau, ideas of the Situationist Internationale (SI) and its key
figure Guy Debord continue to influence attempts to repersonalize the urban
experience. Situationist philosophy is fundamentally rooted in a critique of
the dehumanized capitalist city and a focus on everyday acts as key
producers of urban experience. At the core of the Situationist vision of the
city is the approach to urbanism as a practice rather than a discipline.
Influenced deeply by this philosophy is the field of psychogeography, which
combines the subjective and objective knowledge of the city. A key strategy
of exploring the city for the Situationists and in psychogeography is the
dérive (drift) which Debord explains as: ‘In a dérive, one or more persons
during a certain period drop their usual motives for movement and action,
their relations, their work and leisure activities, and let themselves be drawn
by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there …’
(Knabb, 1995)
The very reality of the city then lies in its performative nature, in the random
and everyday movements of people who create it in the very process of
inhabiting it.
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Acknowledgements
This book is something of a dream come true for all three of us. And
as is with many realized dreams, it would not have been possible
without the support, encouragement and advice of innumerable
people.
The Gender and Space research project which forms the basis of
our book was conducted under the aegis of Partners for Urban
Knowledge Action and Research (PUKAR), a research collective
formed in 2001, which gave many of us an exciting space for
discussion about the city and facilitated many collaborations. It is
thanks in no small measure to PUKAR that the three of us met and
connected.
Arjun Appadurai, President of PUKAR, was a source of
encouragement particularly in the writing of the project proposal.
Carol Breckenridge was a great sounding board and inspired us with
her immense enthusiasm for new ideas and zest for life.
We would like to thank fellow-associates of PUKAR, past and
present: Rahul Srivastava (who was Director of PUKAR during the
first two years of our project), Shekhar Krishnan, Abhay Sardesai,
Quaid Doongerwala, Pankaj Joshi, Himanshu Burte, Paromita Vohra,
Nikhil Anand and Vyjayanthi Rao for discussions in the early stages
of the project.
Special thanks are also due to Anita Patil-Deshmukh, Director of
PUKAR, and PUKAR Advisors Sheela Patel, Rama Bijapurkar and
Kalpana Sharma for offering encouragement and advice at different
stages of our work. At different times, Anupamaa Joshi, Bharat
Gangurde, Freeda Miranda, Ishwar Solanki, and Narayan Patkar
offered invaluable infrastructural and administrative support at
PUKAR.
The Indo-Dutch Programme for Alternatives in Development
funded the Gender and Space project with an incredibly generous
grant, that was equally generously administered. We would like to
thank IDPAD, especially, Dr Sanchita Datta, who offered timely
advice and support.
A book like ours was bound to incur many intellectual debts along
the way.
Friends and colleagues who engaged with our ideas and
collaborated on different aspects of the project for which we are
grateful include: Bishakha Datta, Lakshmi Lingam, Nandita Gandhi,
Nandita Shah and Shilpa Gupta. We discussed our work at various
stages with many critical interlocuters: Aheli Chowdhury, Alex
Mitchell, Amrita Shah, Anita Kushwaha, Anju Saigal, Anupama Rao,
Ari Anand, Arvind Adarkar, Celine D’Cruz, Chayanika Shah, Dennis
Ong, Devika Mahadevan, Diya Mehra, Flavia Agnes, Fleur D’Souza,
Gauri Patwardhan, Geeta Seshu, George Jose, Georgina Maddox,
Hasina Khan, Jasmeen Patheja, Jateen Lad, Jonathan Shapiro
Anjaria, Kalpana Viswanath, Kamal Lala, Lysa John, Madhusree
Datta, Maithreyi Krishnaraj, Malini Chib, Manjula Padmanabhan,
Mary John, Meena Gopal, Mouleshri Vyas, Mustansir Dalvi, Nandita
Godbole, Nathan Tabor, Neela Dabir, Neera Adarkar, Neera Desai,
Nirupa Bangar, Nitya Raman, Noorjehan Safia Niaz, Poulomi Basu,
Qudsiya Contractor, Radhika Bordia, Rukmini Barua, Sandhya
Sawant, Sandhya Srinivasan, Seemanthini Dhuru, Shalini Mahajan,
Sharda Ugra, Shimul Javeri, Shireen Gandhy, Smita Dalvi, Sonal
Shukla, Sonya Gill, Sujata Khandekar, Surabhi Tandon Malhotra,
Tarini Bedi, Tejaswini Niranjana, Ujvala Rajadhyaksha, Uma Asher
and Vandana Khare. We would like to thank them for their thoughtful
and reflective inputs.
We had stimulating informal conversations, individually and
collectively, with many others including: Aditya Pant, Ajay Noronha,
Amit S. Rai, Anjali Arondekar, Anjali Monteiro, Asef Bayat, Brinda
Bose, Carole S. Vance, Caroline Andrew, Caroline Osella,
Champaka T.R., Chirodeep Chaudhuri, Dana Lam, Geeta Misra,
Gunalan Nadarajan, Humeira Iqtidar, Irina Aristarkhova, Jackie
Dugard, Janaki Abraham, Jagruti Gala, Jeroo Mulla, K.P.
Jayasankar, K.V. Nagesh, Kamran Asdar Ali, Kaumudi Marathe,
Lalita Fernandes, Lavanya Ramakrishnan, Linda Peake, Malavika
Kasturi, Malathi de Alvis, Margaret Tan, Marina de Regt, Martina
Rieker, Mary Woods, Michael Dwyer, Mukta Sharangpani, Nandita
Bhavnani, Neela Saldanha, Nihal Perera, Nina Martyris, Nivedita
Menon, Pramada Menon, P. Niranjana, Nishant Shah, Purnima
Mookerjee, Rachel Dwyer, Radhika Chandiramani, Ramola TalwarBadam, Roopal Mehta, Reena Patel, Roxanne Varzi, Rukmani
Vishwanath, Samita Sen, Sandya Hewamanne, Shaziya Khan,
Shoba Ghosh, Shohini Ghosh, Sujata Patel, Sunalini Kumar, Supriya
Mandrekar-Fadra, Surabhi Sharma, Svati Shah, Urmimala Sarkar,
and Vinod Pavarala.
Various organizations including Point of View, Aawaazi-Niswaan,
the Women’s Research and Action Group (WRAG), the Association
for Women’s Rights in Development (AWID) and the International
Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA) enabled us to explore our ideas
through their networks. We would particularly like to thank DCOOP
and the Centre for Media and Cultural Studies at the Tata Institute of
Social Sciences, our home bases, for providing us with resources we
could draw on in moments of need.
A number of people gave us an opportunity to publish our work
and share it with a wider audience. We thank: Ajay Naik, Anu Kumar,
the Art India team, C. Rammanohar Reddy, Dina Vakil, Geeta Seshu,
Kaiwan Mehta, Leela Kasturi, Madhavi Desai, Mahesh Gavaskar,
Maithreyi Krishnaraj, Melissa Butcher, Oishik Sirkar, Pankaj Joshi,
Rukmini Datta, Selvaraj Velutham, Sharmila Joshi and Sujata Patel.
Our pedagogic activities were critical to the development of our
ideas. We would like to thank the students of the following Mumbai
colleges: St. Xavier’s College, Sir J.J. College of Architecture, Sir
J.J. College of Applied Art, SIES College, L.S. Raheja College of
Arts, and the Habitat school at TISS.
We also thank students at the Periyar College of Technology for
Women at Thanjavur, the Central University of Hyderabad and the
National University of Singapore for participating in workshops. We
would like to particularly thank Amita Bhide, Anuja Ghosalkar, Fleur
D’Souza, Jyotsna Pathare, Mustansir Dalvi, S. Mitbaukar, Sam
Tareporevala, Santosh Kshirsagar, Steven Lobo, Vinay Saynekar
and Vinita Bhatia.
Many energetic young people worked with the Gender and Space
project in various capacities. We would like to acknowledge the
contributions of: Abhinandita Mathur, Anupama Jayaraman, Ateya
Khorakiwala, Buvana Murali, Devika Narayan, Divya Padmanabhan,
Girisha Keswani, Huma Khan, Karan Arora, Lakshmi Kutty,
Mokshada Patil, Neelam Ayare, Nicola D’Souza, Nidhi Mahajan,
Priyanka Shah, Rachana Agarwal, Radhika Menon, Rasika Dugal,
Roseanne Lobo, Roshani Jadhav, Shriti Khandelwal, Sonal Makhija,
Suresh Sawant and Uma Joshi.
This is a long list but not nearly long enough. There were many
other people who contributed to our research and ideas and we
would like to thank all of them.
Abhay Sardesai, Manesh Patel and Quaid Doongerwala have been
at various times willing and not-so-willing readers of the manuscript.
Their often critical comments (why did you ask if you didn’t want to
know?) have honed both the book’s arguments and our ability to
accept constructive criticism.
If this book is our baby, then Rahul Srivastava has been its
generous and brilliant midwife. He has engaged with our work, held
our hands through various crises and as with the best of midwives,
reminded us that we could do it.
If this book is more accessible to the general reader, it is due in no
small measure to the efforts of our editor Jerry Pinto for reminding us
that ‘most people do not want to know that the adjective of shadow is
tenebrous’. As with the best of editors he has been both friend (this
writing is brilliant) and adversary (this is an ugly academic word)!
We would also like to express our gratitude to Ravi Singh at
Penguin India for readily agreeing to publish this book and for
supporting it through the time it took us to put it together. We thank
our editor at Penguin, R. Sivapriya, for gently leading us through the
publication process; and Anupama Ramakrishnan and all others at
Penguin for their efficient editorial support.
Individually—
Shilpa Phadke: I thank Shama and Suhas Phadke for nurturing my
dreams and for being the kind of parents who taught me to calculate
risk rather than avoid it. Shanta and Sharad Sardesai for their
unstinting encouragement; Sidharth Phadke for sibling camaraderie
and generosity in supplying difficult-to-find books; Gokben
Yamandag and Manasi Borkar for sisterly affection and support;
Malavika Kasturi for her never-say-die attitude and for sharing the
holiday where the ideas of this project were born; Amit Rai for tea,
sympathy and intellectual camaraderie; and Rahul Srivastava for a
sustaining friendship in complicated times. Abhay Sardesai’s shared
delight in the intellectual quest makes me a better scholar—thank
you for the long challenging conversations, for hand-holding and
most of all for knowing what this book meant and reminding me
when I forgot. Aradhana, my already feisty daughter was born only
months before the publication of this book. Her birth has only made
this book and its vision that much more significant to me.
Sameera Khan: I thank Roshnak and Irfan Khan for always being
there for me and generously supporting all my initiatives big and
small; Hansa and Suryakant Patel for their constant encouragement;
Manesh Patel for gently cheering me on and always being ‘the wind
beneath my wings’; Shahid, Ruhaina, Urmi, Vinayak and Shalaka for
showing a keen interest in all I do and write; Mohini, Bharati, Fatima
Bi, Madhuri, Asha, Neelam, Rehana, Mary and Taiyab for their much
valued domestic and child-care help at different points of time; and
finally Imaane and Atiya, my dearest daughters, who have shared
most intimately my journey with the Gender and Space project and
this book. They have often competed with the project and the
computer for their mother’s attention but both have also made this
book more personally meaningful. If my girls and their friends can
enjoy more access to the city as a right, without worrying about their
safety or reputation, then the ideas that have emerged from this
project would truly be significant. Without the patient love and
sustenance of all these people, as well as many other friends, I could
never have participated in this project or book, least of all made it to
the finishing line.
Shilpa Ranade: I thank Ujjwala and Rajendra Ranade for being
proud and encouraging parents, irrespective of what I do; Mariam
and Ismail Doongerwala for their support and understanding; Rahul
Ranade, the ever-concerned sibling for being the first person to take
me seriously and also for his sharp editing of parts of the book; Jigna
Desai, my comrade-in-arms as we grew together into a feminist
consciousness; Sanjay Chikermane for his enjoyable company and
discussions over the late-night drink; Ari Anand, Madhusudhan
Chalasani and Tzu-I Chung for their unstinting belief in my abilities;
and Quaid Doongerwala for being there, in his multiple roles as
supportive colleague, intellectual sounding board and indulgent
partner. I would also like to take this opportunity to recall the memory
of my dear teacher Kurula Varkey, who brought home to me through
example, those rare values of passion, rigour and honest-togoodness idealism.
Finally, we would like to thank each other for this wonderful
introduction to the intellectual and emotional pleasures of
collaboration. We have learnt a great deal from each other both
professionally, from our varied disciplinary perspectives and,
personally from our different ways of seeing the world. We began as
colleagues with a shared vision and an ability to speak to each other;
we’ve ended up as friends who are going to feel quite bereft now that
our impassioned and engaged meetings to think, write, talk (and eat)
together are over.
The Gender and Space project and this book have been a large
part of our lives for more than half a decade. For many of these
years, the process of research and writing consumed us. We hope
we have been able to convey some of our passion with expanding
women’s access to public space in the city in this book.
Shilpa Phadke, Sameera Khan and Shilpa Ranade
October 2010
Mumbai
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This collection published 2011
Copyright © Shilpa Phadke, Sameera Khan and Shilpa Ranade, 2011
The moral right of the author has been asserted
ISBN: 978-0-143-41595-4
This digital edition published in 2012.
e-ISBN: 978-8-184-75296-0
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