Shilpa Ranade

Shilpa Phadke

Sameera Khan

Presenting an original take on women’s safety in the cities of twenty-first century India, Why Loiter? maps the exclusions and negotiations that women from different classes and communities encounter in the nation’s urban public spaces. Basing this book on more than three years of research in Mumbai, Shilpa Phadke, Sameera Khan and Shilpa Ranade argue that though women’s access to urban public space has increased, they still do not have an equal claim to public space in the city. And they raise the question: can women’s access to public space be viewed in isolation from that of other marginal groups? Going beyond the problem of the real and implied risks associated with women’s presence in public, they draw from feminist theory to argue that only by celebrating loitering—a radical act for most Indian women—can a truly equal, global city be created.

Women and Risk on Mumbai Streets

Why Loiter?

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 private-public 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.

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.

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.

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.

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’.

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