unfriendly bodies, hostile cities: reflections on loitering and gendered public space

7/27/2019 Unfriendly Bodies, Hostile Cities: Reflections on Loitering and Gendered Public Space

1/10

SPECIAL ARTICLE

septem ber 28, 2013 vol xlviii no 39 EPW Economic & Political Weekly50

Unfriendly Bodies, Hostile CitiesReflections on Loitering and Gendered Public Space

Shilpa Phadke

Versions of this paper were presented at the L B Kenny Endowment

Lecture at the Asiatic Society, Mumbai, March 2012; Subaltern

Urbanism, Columbia University, Mumbai, January 2013; Inequality,

Mobility and Sociality in Contemporary India, Yale University, the

US, April 2013; Wellesley College, the US, Apri l 2013; and Brandeis

University, the US, May 2013. The author would like to thank the

participants at all of these for their engaged and thoughtful comments.

Thanks especially to Abhay Sardesai, Amit S Rai, Sameera Khan and

Shilpa Ranade who commented on this paper at various stages.

Shilpa Phadke (shilpa@tis s.edu) teaches at the School of Media and

Cultural Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai.

Following sexual assaults on women in public spaces in

cities, discussions tend to frame the issue in terms of

womens safety in the streets rather than their right to

access public space. The overarching narrative appears

to be that cities are violent spaces that women are better

off not accessing at all. This paper attempts to make a

case for women and others accessing a city which is

perceived as hostile, and to do so without being

censured. It argues that loitering offers the possibility of

rewriting the city as a more inclusive, diverse and

pleasurable one.

On 22 August 2013 five men gang-raped a young photo-

journalist in the dilapidated Shakti Mills premises in

Mumbai. It immediately set off discussions in news

features, blogs and broadcast news about how dangerous the

city had become and how womens mobility was going to be

further restricted. The question of unfriendly space assumed

centre stage when in New Delhi five men brutally raped and

assaulted a young physiotherapy student in a bus and beat up

her male friend before throwing them off the vehicle on16 December last year. Thousands protested against the inci-

dent on the streets of Delhi and other cities. These protesters

demanded better infrastructure, more efficient policing, and

more stringent punishment for the rapists. It is the question of

womens safety on the streets that frames this discussion rather

than any concern with womens right to access public space.

The question of making streets safer for women is not an

easy one, because the discourse of safety is not an inclusive

one and tends to divide people into us and them tacitly

sanctioning violence against them in order to protect us

(Phadke et al 2009). This is endorsed by the wide reportage of

any sexual assault that involves lower class men attacking

middle class women.1 In comparison, upper and middle classperpetrators of sexual violence get off easily.2 So also when

lower class, dalit or tribal women are sexually assaulted the

media barely covers these attacks and there is little or no

public outrage.

The overarching narrative appears to be that cities are

violent spaces that women are better off not accessing at all.

An examination of responses by the state and its functionaries

to the attacks on women is telling. Following the Mumbai

attack, Maharashtras Home Minister R R Patil offered police

protection to women journalists on assignments. In response

to the sexual assault of a young woman who worked in a Gur-

gaon mall on 12 March 2012, the Gurgaon police and adminis-

tration passed an order that malls and other similar establish-

ments in the city should not permit women to work after 8 pm,

without permission from the labour commissioner. In response

to the Park Street rape in Kolkata on the night of 5 February

2012, West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee suggested

that the rape victim was part of a conspiracy to defame her

government. The West Bengal government suggested that

pubs should not stay open after 11 pm. In reaction to the mur-

der of journalist Sowmya Vishwanathan in 2008, Delhi chief

minister, Sheila Dikshit suggested that one should not be so

adventurous.3 Even after the December 2012 attack, her first

The web version of this article corrects a few errors that

appeared in the print edition.


2/10

SPECIAL ARTICLE

Economic & Political Weekly EPW septem ber 28, 2013 vol xlviii no 39 51

response was to evade responsibility by claiming that the bus

service was a private one.

These responses suggest that large cities and particularly

public spaces are unfriendly, even hostile spaces for women.

The state and its functionaries appear to believe that given this

hostility, women might be better off avoiding these spaces

altogether. Thus, not only do the former not just abdicate their

responsibilities to facilitate access and provide justice, if not

safety, but they also assume that nobody would want to access

unfriendly spaces.4

If the discourse on safety is inadequate to further womens

claims to public space, how might we strategise to push for

womens rights to public space? It is imperative to engage with

the question of womens rights to public space as citizens, posing

a counter voice to not just the voices of moral policing but also

to challenge the centrality of the discourse of safety even among

those protesting government inaction. I have argued earlier that

what women need in order to access public space is not

conditional safety but the right to take risks (Phadke 2005).

While I was researching womens access to public space inthe early 2000s, two aspects became quickly apparent. One,

that most respondents agreed that women must be safe in pub-

lic space, and two, that the women they were referring to were

inevitably middle class, usually Hindu upper caste, mostly

heterosexual and always respectable women. Written not too

subtly in the subtext was the assumption that women were

unsafe due to the presence of two categories of people: first,

that of a certain kind of man usually lower class, mostly

migrant, often unemployed and sometimes uncomfortably

Muslim; second, that of the un-respectable woman: the street

walker, the bar dancer. The first group was perceived to be a

threat to womens physical safety, the second and by no means

less important group was perceived to produce a threat to thereputation of even respectable women.

In this paper, I focus on the lower-class male, asking ques-

tions around the access of different groups of people who

might not be friendly to each other. My colleagues and I

suggested that the celebration of loitering was an important

way of claiming city public spaces in defiance of laws against

loitering after sunset and before sunrise. We argued that the

only way in which women might find unconditional access

to public space was if everyone, including those who were not

necessarily friendly to women also had unconditional access

(Phadke et al 2011). Subsequently in conversations with

feminist activists, particularly those who work with young

women, we have been challenged several times on the grounds

that everyone loitering includes even those others (often

young men) who intimidate young women and inhibit their

access, thus in fact restricting their mobility.

In this paper I attempt to think through questions of justice

in access to public space. It is unnecessary to point out that

men have more access than women, the rich have more access

than the poor or indeed that the very aspiration of becoming a

global city is based on the exclusion of those who do not fit

in. I will attempt both to respond to the very real questions

raised by feminist activists in relation to loitering as well as

locate them in a context where public spaces are shrinking

for everyone.

The first section traces competing claims to public space in

cities. The second section focuses on the idea of the unfriendly

body asking why some bodies are considered more unfriendly

than others. The third section asks the question: what makes

for friendly/unfriendly cities? Using the illustrative cases of

Singapore and Mumbai it reflects on the trade-off between

safety and loitering. The fourth section engages the desire to

access the city despite its hostility.

This paper engages multiple questions: What does it mean

to stake an equal claim for all to loiter in public space? How

does one engage with the threat posed by one group of such

loiterers to another potential group of loiterers? How does one

understand claim staking in a context where city public spaces

are surveillanced and policed? What are the claims of differ-

ent kinds of bodies and how can we arrive at an idea of justice

that at least attempts to address the claims of as many dif fer-

ent groups as possible? In thinking through the notion of

unfriendliness of bodies, spaces and cities, I attempt to makea case for women and others to make choices to access a city

which is perceived as hostile without being censured for it

and to continue an argument on why loitering offers the

possibility of rewriting the city as a more inclusive, diverse

and pleasurable city.

1 Competing Claims to Public Space

The post-16 December Delhi protests focused on young men

and one saw a number of posters which exhorted us to teach

men not to rape. The fact that the perpetrators of the brutal

sexual assault leading to the death of the victim were a bus

driver, two cleaners, a fruit vendor and an assistant gym

instructor drew attention to lower class men in cities markingthem for surveillance. The unemployed status of the per-

petrators of the Mumbai attack will only endorse the need for

such surveillance.

Even as the protests raged, prime minister, Manmohan

Singh urged the police to increase surveillance of footloose

migrants.5 In Mumbai, migrants have long been seen as perpe-

trators of violence.6 Parochial politicians have already raised

the outsiders bogey in response to the 22 August attack. This

kind of prejudiced representation is not new and is not re-

stricted to media reports. For instance, there is a particular

way in which lower class women and men are cast in particu-

larly development discourse since the 1970s the former as

potentially ideal subjects of development aid and the latter as

almost lost causes, men who are often violent, unemployed

and dominate women, reflective of everything that is wrong

with developing countries. In these narratives of develop-

ment, almost unvaryingly men are cast as the problem and

women as the v ictims. These are also seen in the context of

narratives around microfinance where women are seen as

good borrowers that is a good risk as opposed to men. This is

true not only in India but across the world.7

This vision of the lower-class man as an obstacle to

progress is one that is reflected in the media as well.


3/10

SPECIAL ARTICLE

septembe r 28, 2013 vol xlviii no 39 EPW Economic & Political Weekly52

Uma Chakravarti (2000) analyses a television serial titled

Naya Zamana (New World):

we have the full assemblage of stereotypes: the central character

naturally is a bai who is upright and tries to live honestly. Her hus-

band is a brutal male we have seen no poor upright men in a long time

who whiles away his time in a drunken stupor when he is not engaged

in beating his wife, or harassing his stepdaughter. ...Such images then

feed into middle class perspectives on poverty and morality which aredistributed in inverse proportion among the different classes; if the

poor are poor it is because the lower class male is so irresponsible

(p WS15).

As I have argued elsewhere, the exclusion of women from

public space cannot be seen in isolation but is linked critically

to the exclusion of other marginal citizens. The person(s) who

are seen to pose the risk are men of a certain class and occu-

pation (or lack thereof). Safety for women then has become

increasingly about emptying the streets of other marginal citi-

zens deemed to be a threat to women. At the top of this list is

the lower-class male (also often unemployed, often lower caste

or Muslim), but sex workers, bar dancers and others seen to be

in need of surveillance also quali fy. In this politics, both thoseseen as the threat and those perceived to be in danger are ren-

dered illegitimate users of public space. I have argued that

their claims to public space are not competing but rather need

to be coterminous if they are to be successful (Phadke 2007).

This is not to suggest however, that we need a collective multi-

movement for access to public space but that each act of

claiming of public space must acknowledge the rights of

others to that space.

When we engage with violence in relation to claims on the

city, it is important to see violence against women in public as

being located alongside violence against the poor, Muslims,

dalits, hawkers, sex workers and bar dancers. Addressing the

question of womens access to public space then means engag-ing with realities of layered exclusion and multiple margi-

nalisations: the exclusion of the poor, dalits, Muslims, or

indeed hawkers and sex workers are not acts of benevolence

towards women but part of larger more complex processes

where one group of the marginalised is set against another

(Phadke et al 2011).

How does one understand the complex politics of gender in

these situations when it intersects with the reality that today,

the middle classes are even more privileged in access to public

space and other resources than ever before, and this includes

middle-class women, however limited their access might be.

Feminist and other gender-based responses to womens res-

tricted access to public space have also often identified men as

the source of threat in the public. The presence of middle-class

women as vocal advocates of womens right to public space,

has acquired some visibility in the last two years buttressed by

the processes of globalisation where women especially as con-

sumers and professionals are an extremely desirable part of

the cityscape.

In the Indian context, initiatives like the Blank Noise project,

the Pink Chaddi campaign, Hollaback Mumbai, Hollaback

Chennai and the Slutwalks in some cities have raised impor-

tant questions from the perspective of competing access to

public space. The Blank Noise project initiated first as a stu-

dent project which grew into a much larger artist-activist

endeavour encouraging women to talk back by claiming I

never ask for it, or to participate in street performances has

been critiqued by some as being located in a gaze where

middle-class women accuse lower-class men of sexual harass-

ment. Similarly, the Pink Chaddi campaign and the Slutwalk

have been accused of being elitist and relevant only to a small

minority of urban women.

I would argue that feminism has space for all kinds of pro-

tests and claim staking and the question of relevance itself is

an irrelevant one. One does not have to point out that women

across classes have very different access to space and spatial

resources. The question is, how do these initiatives resonate

with women from different classes who may have very differ-

ent senses of entitlement. Who can talk back to whom and

when? Who can take photographs of whom? What are the

politics of legitimacy and rightful citizenship that operate in

this claim staking?

2 Unfriendly Bodies and Hostile Cities

It is villages and the countryside which are invoked in images

of tranquillity. Cities are often seen as spaces of noise, dust,

speed and worse, as locations of vice and violence. The city

then is the space of excitement rather than calmness, of risk

rather than safety.

In recent years cities across the world have developed poli-

cies and committees in an attempt to protect themselves from

natural disasters and acts of human violence. In acknowledge-

ment of an ever present terror threat, in some cities there is a

constant assessment of risk and danger levels, especially at

airports and other such sites.8 This apparent danger, often

perceived as a danger to life, does not prevent people fromventuring out into public space in cities. In Mumbai, the rela-

tively high attendance at workplaces following terror attacks

or natural disasters has often been lauded and seen as a measure

of its resilience. So why is it that any perception of threat, even

unfriendliness, produces a range of effects that suggest women

should stay away from public space?9,10

Given that public space is classed, communalised and

caste(d) along with being gendered, how can we understand

the different modes of speech and the possibility of this being

seen (whether intended or unintended) as unfriendly

speech? At the same time, it is also worth reflecting on young

men who are often seen in the discourse on safety as merely

undesirable bodies. What is it about unfriendly bodies that

makes it impossible for women to co-inhabit space with them?

Do women then never access spaces where there are un-

friendly bodies present?

What does it mean to be loitering or to even desire to loiter

in hostile cities with unfriendly speech/bodies present? What

are the consequences of suggesting those unfriendly bodies

should not be there? In this section I use the prism of the no-

tion of unfriendly bodies as a way of looking at questions of

hostility in public space. How does one understand the notion

of the unfriendly body? What are unfriendly bodies and to


4/10

SPECIAL ARTICLE


whom are they unfriendly? What are the risks posed by a vari-

ety of unfriendly bodies to each other and to the body of the

city itself? Who are the bodies who are a threat to the city-

body? And most relevantly in this case, does public space hold

the possibility for unfriendly bodies to coexist?

Multiple Bodies in Public Space

I would like to mention here the idea that part of the problem

of multiple bodies in public space is about the possibilities it

creates for the mixing of ought-to-be-unmixable bodies

across caste, class or religion; the anxiety of bodies that ought

to be unfriendly, becoming friendly or worse, intimate.11

If we were to locate this understanding within the context of

risk, one might say that many women are horribly unsafe at

home, a space often of unfriendly bodies and speech and yet we

do not stop women from being there. In fact we urge them to be

in that very space. What if we were to cast the presence of un-

friendly bodies in this same light? Is it possible for us to think of

unfriendly bodies as being a hazard of public space rather than

a deterrent? It is also important to notice that cities are not re-lentlessly unfriendly but rather move from being friendly to un-

friendly depending on various contextual and situational

factors, including among other things, temporality, crowds,

lighting, and availability of infrastructure and amenities such

as transport and toilets. Is it possible to conceive of the city as

an intermittently unfriendly space to be negotiated? What if

antagonism in public space were naturalised? What if women

were to desire to access city public spaces, despite their hostility?

For women, particularly young women, sexual harassment

is a form of unfriendliness different from other kinds of hostil-

ity, and has the power to generate extreme anxiety. It is impor-

tant, however, to note that there is also an acute awareness

among women that this harassment is not only about themoment of harassment but about how they are perceived in

a more complex way as being good or bad girls. One dis-

cussion we had with a group of young men and women from a

non-governmental organisation (NGO) near Dharavi suggested

that a set of arbitrary codes distinguish good girls from bad

girls which inflects who gets harassed and how much. There

were loud disagreements which suggested that there is no con-

sensus on this. Responding to sexual harassment verbally may

stem the harassment or escalate it. Reusing a street on which

one had been harassed might be taken to mean a tolerance of

or even desire for such verbal harassment. There was no fool-

proof way for women to convey that they did not enjoy the

attention (Phadke 2005).

When one talks to young women about their fears of sexual

harassment in public space, they tellingly articulate less a fear

of physical harm than the anxiety that by continuing to access

these spaces where they are sexually harassed, they are in fact

courting a risk to their reputations. That their presence on

streets where sexual harassment is likely reflects a certain

kind of unbecoming boldness which indicates their unsuita-

bility for an arranged marriage. They fear partly the young

men but also the community who will talk thus cementing

their reputations, or more accurately, lack thereof.

When we raised the question of unfriendly bodies at a work-

shop in Pune in August 2011, and talked about the dilemmas

posed by pitting the rights of young men against those of

young women in public space, one group articulated the argu-

ment that unfriendly bodies include not just the young men

who might pass comments but also neighbourhood aunties

who would pass other kinds of, equally discomfiting com-

ments.12 This immediately complicates our understanding of

who constitute unfriendly bodies in public space, as also our

perception of deterrents to loitering.

Here it is worth reflecting on the smooth elision whereby

the young men who are admittedly a source of discomfort to

the young women are sought to be taken off the streets while

the aunties and their equally threatening presence (certainly

to reputation) and therefore to womens access to the public

only acquire more legitimacy.

This argument, while it does not offer any solutions, does

allow us to reflect on the notion that it is only some unfriendly

bodies that are rendered illegitimate and not others which

ironically acquire even greater legitimacy as the upholders ofmorality or are at the very least seen as benign (if gossipy)

presences. Their very real role in actually restricting young

womens mobility in and access to the public is rarely the sub-

ject of debate. Here one might be tempted to argue that the

sexualised gaze may be perceived, even experienced, as more

immediately threatening than the moral-policing of the aunt-

ies and this may well be the case. This does not, however, in

any way undermine the argument that there are different

kinds of unfriendly bodies who contribute to womens restricted

access to public space.

The social figure of the perpetrator of sexual harassment is

layered and complicated by a film produced by Askhara (a

womens resource centre) titledJor Se Bol, an anti-street-sexual-harassment film.13 The documentary subverts the process of

othering since the filmmakers knew some of the men seen

hanging out at street corners in the documentary. This not only

immeasurably complicates our understanding of the male un-

friendly body but also places him firmly as an agential subject.

In a thoughtful blogpost on the Delhi gang rape, Kamayani

Sharma (2012) points out that as a middle-class young woman

who has migrated to one of the metropolises, she has had to

rely on strangers, men to help me find accommodation in the

least shady neighbourhoods, move into said accommodation,

repair my lavatory, fix sockets and bring me home in their rick-

shaws and taxis at odd hours. She points out that all of these

men were working class and less educated. From the train

driver who scared off a drunken beggar hauling himself next

to me on the last Churchgate-Virar, the rickshaw driver who

asked me if I was sure about going alone down the dark path

that led to my room or the tempowala-turned-friend who

helped me bring home my refrigerator from the station after

midnight for free.14 This layered narrative complicates our

understanding of the urban lower-class male.

Another figure, strangely a figure of authority, the police-

man is also seen as an unfriendly body, especially after dark.

Young women often recount that they have been instructed


5/10

SPECIAL ARTICLE


not to approach policemen on the street to ask for directions or

any other kind of help. One young woman was told by her

father as she was learning to drive to never stop even if a cop

flagged her down. She was instructed that they would deal

with whatever problem it was later on but as a lone woman

driver, she should simply drive on. Stories of violence commit-

ted by the police only buttress these narratives.

There are multiple ways of complicating the discussion on

unfriendly bodies. One is to think through the range of bodies

in public space that might be constructed as unfriendly so that

the discussion is more complex and nuanced rather than iden-

tifying the lower-class male as the single villain of the piece.

Another is to think through the possibility of populating public

space with friendly bodies whose presence might counter the

threat perceived to be emanating from unfriendly bodies. This

of course is a partly academic exercise but might also hold pos-

sibilities for thinking about how we might envisage an ideal

composition of public space such that it will be inclusive in a

general sense and more particularly gender friendly and wel-

coming to women across class, caste, community and ability.It is also important to record that it is not only individuals

who render spaces unfriendly contexts such as empty streets,

design factors such as enclosed footpaths which have no escape

route and the lack of infrastructural facilities like transport,

toilets, adequate street lighting but also contribute to the

creation of unfriendly spaces. Cities need not, and should not,

be hostile and unfriendly spaces because of a lack of infra-

structural facilities. Good public transport, for instance, is

central to facilitating access to the city and the provision of 24-

hour public transport would go a long way in making cities

friendlier (Phadke 2012). I would argue that the sexual assault

that took place in the privately run Whiteline bus could not

have happened in a BEST bus in Mumbai because the checksand balances that operate in a public sector company would make

it virtually impossible to take a BEST bus out for a joyride.15

Also contrary to popular assumption, shutting bars and restau-

rants early do not make cities safer. The more the number of

people out on the streets at night the safer the streets.16

Can we begin to think about street violence in more compre-

hensive and complex ways not only as something men do to

women but also as emanating from the structures of power itself

as well as operating on multiple axes gender, class, caste and

religion, as also infrastructure (or lack thereof) and design?

3 Friendly Cities, Unfriendly Cities

In 2008, along with my colleagues Shilpa Ranade and

Sameera Khan, I was invited to participate in the International

Symposium of Electronic Arts that was held in Singapore as

part of an artists-in-residence programme.17 In this section, I

reflect on four short but intense weeks of living in and think-

ing about loitering in Singapore in 2008 and juxtapose these

thoughts with our research in Mumbai.

As someone who grew up in a city that wanted to be Singa-

pore, the idea of the super clean city-state was part of my im-

agined cityscape of the world. Arriving in Singapore, Ranade

and I were taken aback to arrive at a degree of comfort in

navigating and negotiating the city, its transport and its

idiosyncrasies within two days. Within another two days we

had our work in place. We were aided in the creation of part of

our installation by a group of students at the National Univer-

sity of Singapore.18

Our media installation titled Gendered Strategies for

Loitering, aimed to question some of the underlying assumptions

about public space and gender in both Singapore and Mumbai,

raising questions about the possibilities for loitering. Both

cities have similar colonial throwback legislation allowing the

police to arrest suspicious loiterers after sunset and before

sunrise. Through the idea of loitering, the installation attempted

to ask questions about pleasure, risk, and citizenship. The

work included a new-media game inviting the audience to

loiter in a street in Mumbai. This was complemented by

time-lapse video footage of three locations each in Mumbai

and Singapore and an audio commentary that engaged with

the gendered inhabitation of public spaces in the two cities.

In the time-lapse videos, a camera placed on tripod shot half

a second every 30 seconds creating an audiovisual documentthat attempted to map the movements of people in that space.

In Mumbai we shot at the Holi Maidan in Dharavi, Shivaji Park

in Dadar and Carter Road in Bandra. In Singapore, we shot at

the Padang, an open playing field in central Singapore some-

times used for National Day parades, in an open square in an

Housing Development Board (HDB) complex in China town,

and in an open space, near the Jurong East Mass Rapid Transit

(MRT) railway station that many people used to walk through.

In Mumbai, the Holi Maidan was occupied mostly by young

boys playing while older men stood aroud a liquor bar at the

edge of the ground. The Shivaji Park was full of different

groups of boys playing cricket, other people including women

and college girls walking through and often heading towards atemple at the edge of the park while varied others were seen

walking along the periphery of the park or sitt ing on the low

wall which marks its boundary.19 We shot a section of Carter

Road from a high-rise building finding that often people

walked along this road but rarely paused to loiter.

In Singapore, there was a football game going on in the

Padang, and many different groups of tourists came in to pho-

tograph themselves against the backdrop. In the HDB in China-

town once again people moved in and out of the square we

were shooting and only twice did anyone stop to chat. Along

the path in Jurong East, people moved with the rapidity of

commuters heading home after work. In this fairly large

maidan, nobody loitered.

While shooting in Mumbai we inevitably encountered a

crowd following us with a dozen questions. In Singapore, where

both of us were obviously foreigners, we expected more ques-

tions, only to be completely flummoxed when none, absolutely

none, were forthcoming. It seemed to us as if their lack of

curiosity held within it a sense of lack of claim. This strange city

baffled us even as it offered us an experience of previously un-

matched efficiency and productivity. This was a city where as a

woman one felt a sense of comfort, where one did not have to

plan ones clothing (in an effort to avoid sexual harassment)


6/10

SPECIAL ARTICLE


and one could wander around at night without needing to strat-

egise about how to get back home. The public toilets got us to

pull out our cameras, so beautiful and well designed were they.

Singapore baffled us, because despite its safety and comfort,

nobody loitered. The women were out there as much as the

men, in their short-shorts, head-scarves and salwar-kameezes,

often late into the night. Yet, if we looked carefully, nobody

loitered. Not the women, not the men. Nobody loitered outside

the segregated spaces for loitering the void decks, the hawk-

ers centres, and of course needless to say, the malls. Even the

loitering behaviour of the foreigners appeared segregated and

contained and most migrant workers would head for one or

another mall on their Sundays off.20

People might walk in defiance of the demarcated pathways,

as Gunalan Nadarajan, non-resident Singaporean and curator

of the exhibition pointed out to us,21 or use complaint and hu-

mour as a form of articulating dissent, especially in the anony-

mous space of the internet as Selvaraj Veluthan (2004) has

argued; but any subversion appeared to end there. The city

was not anonymous enough to allow for more. The gloriouslighting that made it so much safer for people to use the streets

also had the effect of rendering everyone visible.

In Mumbai, at least some men loiter. They stand at corner tea

stalls sipping cutting-chai (a half-glass of strong tea) and relax

indolently at paan-shops, smoking. Often many marginal men:

manual workers, taxi and rickshaw drivers and those we call

taporis in Mumbai (people who have no apparent work/

employment) and occasionally students too are part of this group.

Women, with the exception of students in the vicinity of their

college campuses, are discouraged from loitering on the streets.

However, because men loiter and because the streets are

complex mazes of people and objects and often because the

energies of the city public spaces are dispersed confusinglyand unpredictably, it is actually possible for women to imagine

loitering. To imagine slipping into the interstices of public

spaces unnoticed and unremarked; left to forge ones own con-

nection however tenuous with the city. To subvert the desires

of the city for regulation and order and to know that one is safe

from recognition in the amorphous, anarchic city. Though this

possibility of anonymously slipping into the city falls very short

of any kind of political claim, it nonetheless is significant in its

approximation of the pleasures of loitering in city public space.

If at all one sees women obviously hanging out in Mumbai, it

is only in the new spaces of consumption that one sees them

performing masquerades of flanerie and loitering; window

shopping and strolling along the gleaming vitrified floors

enjoying the illusion of the pleasure of the public. The malling

behaviour of middle-class women might provide a clue to under-

standing why nobody loiters in Singapore. As we walked down

Orchard Road in Singapore, the undisputed queen of retail

districts, it felt like the entire city seemed to draw on the tex-

ture of this mall-dotted road. Orchard Road symbolises the life

and pleasures of the city, and most people whom we asked

what we should do in Singapore pointed us in its direction.

It seemed to us then that in some ways the entire city had

been rendered private. One might conjecture that the safety

we felt in Singapore could be compared to the sense of safety

the consumer citizen felt in a mall in Mumbai, for instance.22

The lack of claim staking we sensed in people might be attrib-

uted to this the notion that it all belonged to the privatised

state that was responsible for its upkeep. Citizens were merely

users/consumers, not co-owners. One might argue that like in

the malls the illusion of public space is performed repetitively

so that the lines between public and private appear to blur

without affecting the reality that these are private spaces, con-

trolled and under surveillance.23

In one sense Singapore is the culmination of everything

Mumbai city planners want, both rhetorically and literally: a

city of clean lines, sparkling buildings where people usually

stay in the areas they are supposed to, conforming to the

omniscient vision of the planners. In Mumbai, the thrust of all

new development is towards cleansing the city, of removing

the undesirables from the visible body of the city. Womens

safety, or to be more specific, middle- and upper-class womens

safety, is similarly premised on the removal of lower-class and

minority men from public spaces.In another, more tentative vein, I would like to reflect briefly

on the responses of two expatriate women who had been liv-

ing in Singapore for some years when we met them. They sep-

arately pointed out that while Singapore is largely free of street

sexual harassment, it was also devoid of sexual possibilities in

public. A part of the excitement of public spaces is the anticipa-

tion of meeting someone interesting, of a flirtation or just the

thrill of that momentary frisson one feels exchanging glances

of mutual attraction without necessarily acting on it. The loss

of such sexual possibilities is difficult to quantify and only two

women expressed this sentiment without prompting, though

several others concurred when asked. While this is far from a

representative sample it is nonetheless important to ask, whatare the various possibilities that are lost when public space is

devoid of surprise, excitement, and yes, even risk.24

When one thinks of safety in a city and the idea of a friendly

city, Singapore qualifies. However, the unanswerable question

that we are faced with is one that we have read in the subtext

of many of the conversations we have had with women in

Singapore and Mumbai how does one speak to the choice

between personal freedom and safety?

Loitering and Safety

In public space terms, how do we weigh the uncertain pleas-

ures of loitering against the certainty of safety? What is the

trade-off between street pleasures and the seated comfort of a

hawkers centre? To what extent would we be willing to trade

the pleasure of unexpected discoveries of the new hawker

round the street, the anarchic street life, the spaces that

nobody can see, for the monitored guarantee of safety? What

are the relative values of freedom and comfort? The choice

between freedom and comfort is a complicated one, especially

when it comes to safety.

What does it mean to desire to access spaces that may be

hostile? What does this mean for risk and strategising? Of

course we cannot wait until all streets are safe but do we


7/10

SPECIAL ARTICLE


even imagine they will ever be safe, given that not even our

homes are safe. If they are to be safe then does this mean they

will also inevitably be sanitised?

Are there other possibilities that we might consider other

than one where the city becomes an extension of the mall? A

space perhaps not as seductively friendly, but a space that

might offer both the possibility of coexistence as well the pos-

sibility of articulating not just dissent but also staking a claim

to city public spaces?

4 Friendliness and the Street

Streets are spaces where people make claims. Streets are also

spaces where these claims are shot down. Streets are spaces of

surveillance and spaces of fear. They are also spaces of excite-

ment and thrills. How might one imagine a street utopia, if

indeed such a thing exists? Or in other words, how might one

mobilise the varied dynamics of the street in the quest of a

more liberatory politics.

In the early 1960s urban writer Jane Jacobs wrote:

The tolerance, the room for great differences among neighbours dif-ferences that often go far deeper than differences of colour are pos-

sible and normal in intensely urban life, streets of great cities have

built-in equipment allowing strangers to dwell in peace together on

civilised but essentially dignified and reserved terms, lowly, unpur-

poseful and random as they may appear, sidewalk contacts are the

small change from which a citys wealth of public life may grow

(Jacobs 1961).

The question then is how can one foster tolerance and co-

existence even in the presence of such hostility or fear? Would

the presence of (other) friendly or even neutral bodies allow

for a mutual coexistence? What kinds of spaces would enable

friendly bodies to act in solidarity? One of the factors that set

Mumbai apart from other megacities in India is the lack of

planning and concomitant separation of function. The lack offormal order which often emanates from zoning is what allows

for a more varied interaction in public space. This means that

there are different kinds of bodies inhabiting public space and

the likelihood is that not all of these will be perceived as hos-

tile. The presence of the others friendly or neutral I would

like to suggest, creates greater possibilities for those who are

perceived to be hostile to each other to coexist.

Before going further it is important to ask the question:

What are friendly bodies? In my understanding, friendly bod-

ies would render a space more accessible generally making it

easier to inhabit public space. In interviews, women articu-

lated certain kinds of people as friendly presences on the

street. These included other women in general, college

students, pedestrians going about their business. Our research

suggests that the presence of hawkers often renders streets

friendlier. For instance, the roads alongside the Hutatma

Chowk in Fort used to have many street booksellers. In 2005,

the booksellers were removed and only a few remained at one

corner. This transformed what was a friendly street for women

commuters to walk down even after dark into one which was

much less so. Not only does the presence of hawkers contribute

to womens access by bringing people onto the streets, adding

the street lighting and providing eyes in the street but in a

more general way is reflective of the right to be in public. The

recent efforts to boot hawkers off the streets in Mumbai are

therefore also counterproductive for women.25

Often young women pointed to Bandra as the suburb of

Mumbai that they would all want to live in for its acknowl-

edgement of the professional woman, but also for its busy

crowded streets even late into the night. Two women, by no

means a statistically significant number, but nonetheless worth

recounting, made the observation, that in Bandra even the

presence of the sex worker is not anxiety inducing. They are

simply co-users of the street. I am interested in thinking through

what makes this coexistence possible. Does the sex worker not

sexualise these particular streets? What makes the streets im-

pervious to such sexualisation? Alternatively, what might

make such sexualisation acceptable? Are there multiple layers

of sexualisation on some of these streets? I would like to risk

suggesting here that the more complex and multidimensional a

space, the more comfortable it is likely to be for women.

Another interesting narrative came from a young under-

graduate student at a book reading. She identified herself as asportsperson, and said that in the neighbourhood where she

lives in Vashi there are women hanging out, even loitering

rather late into the night. Young women and young men are

out on the streets, sometimes together but also separately and

there are a fair number of them. The number of young women

allowed out at night is growing. While she suggests a specific

sense of her own identity of that as a woman and a sports-

person which perhaps had implications for how she experienced

and inhabited her own body and its capacities, it is nonetheless

interesting to reflect on the possibilities such narratives have

for thinking about friendlier, more accessible public spaces.

The Blank Noise projects recent initiative, Talk to Me, reflects

on the question of how to make cities friendlier. One eveningthey set up five tables and two chairs on a street in Bangalore

where sexual harassment often takes place. Volunteers sat at

these tables and invited strangers to talk with them.26 The idea

was to build a dialogue across gender and class divides. This

initiative offers one way of thinking about the politics of public

space. Such initiatives valuable though they are in furthering

our engagement with the ideologies of space cannot but be

occasional performances and are thus out of the everyday.

However the idea of setting up sitting spaces is one that has

been proved to invite more people to hang out in public space.

What if more streets had such spaces inviting all kinds of

people to sit, chat and hang out? I would argue that the creation

of more spaces to hang out, thus legitimising this loitering

would transform streets making them busier, occupied by a

variety of different groups and therefore friendlier.

In our research on womens access to public space in Mum-

bai, a number of people suggested that among the factors that

contributed to making a space safe were a certain level of

crowds, open shops and in general a sense of activity. Women

often pointed out that there is an optimum level of people or

crowds in real sense strangers, who best facilitate access.

Too few people would make the streets appear deserted and

therefore not very safe. Too many people (think rush hour at


8/10

SPECIAL ARTICLE


Churchgate station in Mumbai) would provide more opportu-

nities for sneaking in a pinch or a grab of valuables without

being caught and so one has to be careful. To my mind this

notion of the optimum suggests that there are enough people

to make you feel comfortable but not so many that it makes

you uncomfortable. If one thinks through this idea of the opti-

mum number of people one might be closer to understanding

the notion of mutual coexistence in public space with stran-

gers who are perceived as being a mixture of friendly, neutral

and unfriendly. I use the verb perceived to underscore that

the categorisation of bodies into friendly and unfriendly has

more to do with us and the way we see than with any objec-

tive reality or fact.

Reflecting on these cases, it becomes increasingly clear that

the solution to the restrictions on the loitering of young women

is not to restrict the loitering by young men, or indeed anyone

else. However, conditions must be facilitated within which

more friendly bodies can be part of these public spaces.

While some bodies may be perceived as unfriendly, their

right to space needs to be acknowledged, without them becom-ing the reason why young women cannot be in public space.

The idea of strangers friendly, neutral and even unfriendly

peopling ones landscape is not a new one. Georg Simmel

(1908) in his seminal essay on the stranger suggested that most

forms of social interaction involve engaging with strange-

ness. The stranger for Simmel is not the unknown outsider

from another planet (as it were) but someone who though he

does not belong to the group is known to it. The stranger, like

the poor and like sundry inner enemies, is an element of the

group itself. His position as a full-fledged member involves

both being outside it and confronting it. The stranger then in

Simmels understanding is a part of our world. He suggests

that the stranger who is really strange has to be rendered not-quite-human so not to be regarded as part of the group at all.

Michael Warner (2002) reflects on stranger-sociability

arguing that

In modern society, a stranger is not as marvelously exotic as the wan-

dering outsider would have been in an ancient, medieval, or early

modern town. In that earlier social order, or in contemporary analogues,

a stranger is mysterious, a disturbing presence requiring resolution. In

the context of a public, however, strangers can be treated as already

belonging to our world.

In April 2009 a young international female student in Mumbai

was drugged and sexually assaulted by six acquaintances. She

had gone out with the accused youth, whom she had met once

before as her friends friends, and another female friend to a

suburban bar. After the female friend left, the woman student

continued to hang out with the male friends at the bar and at

their insistence drank alcohol. Later she accompanied them to

the apartment of another of their male friend where she was

assaulted while she was unconscious.27 This young woman

was sometimes cast as stupid for going out late at night with

these strangers.

How does one categorise people as friends and strangers?

When asked whether they would categorise the accused as

friends or strangers in relation to the young woman and

her acquaintance with them, many undergraduate students in

a workshop in Mumbai in 2011 said friends. This categorisa-

tion is important in framing our understanding of the stranger

on the street and to thinking through the ways in which we

engage with people locating them in categories based often

not on our own experience with them, but where they stand in

our larger constellation of social contracts.28

Here it might be relevant to engage with the work of femi-

nist philosopher, Iris Marion Young. Young (1995) suggests

that the ideal of city life is not communities, for communities

by their very nature are exclusive, but a vision of social rela-

tions as affirming group difference which would allow for dif-

ferent groups to dwell together in the city without forming a

community. She argues that reactions to city life that call for

local, decentralised, autonomous communities reproduce the

problems of exclusion. Instead, Young imagines a city life

premised on difference that allows groups and individuals to

overlap without becoming homogeneous.

Young uses the term heterogeneous public life engaging in

a debate on justice, community life and the politics of differ-ence. She argues that justice in a group-differentiated society

demands social equality of groups, and mutual recognition

and affirmation of group differences (p 191, 1990 quoted in

Callard 2011: 485). Youngs arguments displace the idea of

community with the ideal of (c)ity life as an openness to unas-

similated otherness (p 227, 1990 quoted in Callard 2011: 485).

If following Young, we were to construct public space as

more generally unfriendly, a space to be negotiated rather

than welcomed into, would competing claims to public space

look different? If we give up our warm and fuzzy notions of the

public, would young womens access to public space be built on

different assumptions? If we stopped accepting sanitised, deo-

dorised spaces as a substitute, would our claim to public spacebe articulated differently? If we claim not the right to safe pub-

lic spaces but the right to negotiate violence in public space in

the same way that we do in other spaces such as the home,

how would this transform our engagement with public space?

Imagining (Unconventional) Utopias

We are sometimes asked so how will you operationalise loi-

tering? How indeed? It is important that we keep on asserting

and reasserting the value of wandering aimlessly and hanging

out on the streets without purpose as a means of claiming not

just citizenship but the right to fun.

Can we imagine a city that allows the people, the public to

find their/our own public to create our own spaces to hang

out as we please, where we please without the threat of being

on the wrong side of the law. It is ironic to be in a city where

globalisation has made some kinds of risks such as those re-

lated to international finance legitimate while rendering the

everyday risks of hanging out on the streets questionable.

I conclude with the image of a loitering space that I am

familiar with. Near the campus where I teach in an unremark-

able eastern suburb of Mumbai is a space where diverse people

appear to loiter. There are a number of shops ranging from a

chemist, to a clothing boutique to a hardware shop, a car rental


9/10

SPECIAL ARTICLE


service and several closed shops that once housed groceries,

ATMs and the like. Rumour has it that only the chemist makes

money the other shop spaces are supposedly unlucky. The

shops are at an elevation of about four or five feet which means

a long ledge of steps ideal for people to sit on. There is a taxi

stand and an awning under a peepal tree where the taxi drivers

sit and play cards, and in my personal though certainly not

representative experience they often refuse fares and prefer to

continue their card game. There is a bus depot across the road

and bus conductors and drivers frequent this space and can often

be seen laughing and back-slapping each other. Students and

faculty hang out here at odd hours often (though not neces-

sarily) escaping from the no smoking zone of the campus. There

is a chai stall, avada pav (a snack popular in Mumbai) stall and a

paan-shop at the edges of a nalla that is currently being built over.

In fact, usually, there is some digging or filling activity sponsored

variously by the electricity, telephone, cooking gas or internet

cable companies or the water and sanitation departments.

Students, faculty, taxi drivers, bus and other drivers, bus

conductors, construction workers engaged in digging the

roads all frequent this space. Friends, romantic couples,

colleagues, and strangers smoke, drink cutting chai and chew

tobacco as they sit or stand and chat animating this space long

after it is dark. They move in an intricate layered dance and

rarely interact with each other. But day after day in the kind of

visceral everyday practice that Michel de Certeau wrote of and

the kind of implicit treating of strangers as already belonging

to a larger cityscape that Michael Warner suggested, these

different kinds of people co-inhabit this space.

I do not want to exoticise or romanticise this space, though

perhaps it may appear as if I am doing exactly that. I am acutely

aware that a large number of the middle and upper-middle

class bodies inhabiting this space belong to my workplace and

these bodies transform the space as only a space outside a

campus may be transformed. Interestingly, it is hardly an

aesthetically welcoming space it is often dusty, noisy and one

is frequently in danger of being run over. Yet this space of

transient strangers offers a strange kind of hope that friendly

and unfriendly cities are not really binaries and it is possible to

imagine new ways of engaging both.

Notes

1 There are several examples that make this case.One is the Marine Drive rape case in 2005 wherea constable raped a college student. Another isthe New Years Eve 2008 incident where a mobof men molested two women in Juhu. A third isthe December 2012 Delhi gang rape and mostrecently the Mumbai attack. All of these re-ceived wide press coverage for several days andwere accompanied by public outrage.

2 For instance, in the 2006 case involvingAbhishek Kasliwal was fol lowed by the media

until it appeared that the victim was a sexworker, after which the coverage died down asdid the case itself. Most recently the policehave thus far failed to arrest Asaraam Bapuwho has been accused of raping a minor girl.

3 Soumya Murder: Sheila in Dock over Remarks,TheIndian Express, New Delhi, 2 October 2008,http://www.indianexpress.com/news/soumya-murder-sheila-in-dock-over-remarks/368692/accessed on 12 January 2013.

4 The Delhi and National Capital Region police inparticular have been quoted as saying women

should stay home and that they are only asking fortrouble. (Abhishek Bhalla and G Vishnu (2012),The Rapes Will Go On, Tehelka Magazine,Vol 9, Issue 15, 14 April, http://archive.tehelka.com/story_main52.asp?filename =Ne140412Coverstory.asp, accessed on 1 March 2013).

5 PM Warns of Footloose Migrants from RuralAreas,Hindustan Times, New Delhi, 27 Decem-ber 2012. (http://www.hindustantimes.com/India-news/NewDelhi/PM-warns-of-footloose-migrants-from-rural-areas/Article1-981257.aspx,accessed on 14 January 2013.)

Women and Work

Edited by

PADMINI SWAMINATHAN

The notion of work and employment for women is complex. In India, fewer women participate in employment compared

to men. While economic factors determine mens participation in employment, womens participation depends on

diverse reasons and is often rooted in a complex interplay of economic, cultural, social and personal factors.

The introduction talks of the oppression faced by wage-earning women due to patriarchal norms and capitalist relations

of production, while demonstrating how policies and programmes based on national income accounts and labour force

surveys seriously disadvantage women.

This volume analyses the concept of work, the economic contribution of women, and the consequences of gendering

of work, while focusing on women engaged in varied work in different parts of India, living and working in dismal

conditions, and earning paltry incomes.

Authors:Maithreyi Krishnaraj Maria Mies Bina Agarwal Prem Chowdhry Ujvala Rajadhyak sha, Swati Smita Joan P Mencher, K Saradamoni Devaki

Jain Indira Hirway Deepita Chakravarty, Ishita Chakravarty Uma Kothari J Jeyaranjan, Padmini Swaminathan Meena Gopal Millie Nihila

Forum against Oppression of Women Srilatha Batliwala Miriam Sharma, Urmila Vanjani J Jeyaranjan

Pp xii + 394 ISBN 978-81-250-4777-3 2012 Rs 645

Orient Blackswan Pvt Ltdwww.orientblackswan.com

MumbaiChennai New Delhi KolkataBangalore BhubaneshwarErnakulamGuwahatiJaipurLucknowPatna Chandigarh HyderabadContact: [email protected]


10/10

SPECIAL ARTICLE


6 After the incident on New Years Eve 2008, dis-cussed earlier, without awaiting any evidence,outsiders, specifically north Indian men werecast as t he culprits responsible for disrespect-ing women and giving Mumbai a bad nameby the Shiv Sena. The implication clearly wasremove these men from our city and ourwomen will be safe. Ironically, at least half thesuspects who were apprehended turned out tobe Marathi-speaking young men. MigrantsAre Defaming Cit y: Uddhav Says Sena WillNot Tolerate Atrocities against Women,DailyNews & Analysis, 5 January 2008, http://www.dnaindia.com/mumbai/1143275/report-migrants-are-defaming-city-uddhav, accessed on 2 Janu-ary 2013).

7 Similar analyses in the African contexts pointout that While research on women sincethe 1970s accumulated deep insights into theimplications of socio-economic change, povertyand increasing workloads for African women,similar insights on men were not documented.In attempts to make African womens workvisible some analyses slipped into representingAfr ican rura l men as not doing very much atall (Whitehead 2000).

8 Saskia Sassen (2010) argues that unlike earlierwhen countr ies go to wa r today, cities become

a key frontline space (p 34). This takes placeeven outside of wars in the form of bombingsand other kinds of attacks. She suggests thatasymmetric war, that is war between a con-ventional army and armed insurgents havelocated cities as sites of the theatre of war. Sassenquotes the US Department of States Annual Re-port on Global Terrorism which suggests thatfrom 1993 to 2000, cities accounted for 94%of the injuries resulting from all terrorist at-tacks, and for 61% of the deaths (p 36).

9 Nor is it just violence that makes us uncomfort-able. As I have argued elsewhere, it is only un-structured violence by strangers that raises allkinds of anxieties. Violence at home is perva-sive but women are rarely warned about thedangers of the home. Further, violence enactedin the name of preventing public attack is ar ti-culated as family honour, protection, and even

love. What we need to claim then is the equalright to negotiate violence in public as we do inprivate (Phadke 2010).

10 Sometimes, it is womens families who placeobstacles to loitering, deeming them too risky.One blogger talks about one endeavour amonga group of professional women to loiter on astreet in Hyderabad and the kinds of restrictionsthat came up (Bolar, Suman, The Importanceof Loitering, http://www.talkingcranes.com/In%20the%20news/the-importance-of-loitering,accessed on 15 May 2013).

11 The large numbers of cases of honour killings,various diktats by community groups againstjeans, mobi le phones and even headgear wornon two-wheelers bear this out.

12 Interest ingly in the wake of the 16 December2012 Delhi gang rape, an article on the internetaddressed the neighbourhood Aunty exhorting

them not to moralise or pass judgment onGirls of These Days. (Shridhar Sadasivan,A Letter to the Neighbourhood Aunty from theGirls of These Days , 30 December 2012,http://www.womensweb.in/2012/12/girls-of-these-days/, accessed on 15 January 2013.)

13 Here is a link to an excerpt from the film,Jor SeBol: http://www.youtube.com/watch? v=EOM6M9uUYy8

14 Sharma Kamayani (2012),Not Your Ma Behen:A Nation of Victims , 27 December http://ultra-violet.in/2012/12/27/not-your-maa-behen-a-nation-of-victims/ accessed on 2 January 2013.

15 Of course assaults of various kinds have takenplace on the surburban railway networkin Mumbai.

16 See for instance this news item on shuttingdown of such spaces: http://indiatoday.into-day.in/story/verify-all-school-buses-close-dis-cotheques-by-1-am-in-delhi-government-panel/1/241512.html, accessed on 1 April 2013.

17 More information on this work is availablehere: http://www.isea2008singapore.org/exhibitions/air_gendered.html

18 This group of students were guided by a very

engaged faculty, Alex Mitchell and we aregrateful to him and his students.

19 Our research on parks in Mumbai suggested thatShivaji Park was one of the most friendly andaccessible parks for its lower wall, its hawkersat the edges and the fact that it was populatedlate into the night (Phadke et al 2011).

20 In the few weeks that we were there in 2008,different groups could be found in specificmalls. For instance, Filipina maids congregatedin Lucky Plaza on Orchard Road; Bangaldeshiconstruction workers tended to occupy thestreet and the open ground on SerangoonRoad near Mustafa; the Chinese migrantsheaded to Chinatown; the Indonesians occu-pied City Plaza in Katong; the Thai peoplewent to Golden Mile near Beac h Road; and theMyanmar migrants could be found in PeninsulaPlaza in City Hall.

21 Persona l conversation, July 2008.22 In a recent piece, Yamini Vasudevan (2012)

writes about how safe she felt growing up inSingapore, compared to her life in Chennai.She writes, What would make me safer wouldbe conscientious policemen and women, andall those in power, who would wield theirauthority in the right way. In Singapore, therewas always the confidence that if anyone mis-behaved with me, at any time, all I had to dowas to hail a policeman nearby or rush to thenearest police station. Something would bedone I knew that much. And it wouldnt mat-ter whether I was dressed in jeans or shorts. If acomplaint was made, action would be taken.And it wasnt just the police bus drivers wouldstop the bus if someone raised an alarm. I couldhop off at train stations and report to the per-son at the control station. But there was never

such a need not in the 16-plus years I livedthere. This suggests to me certainly that it isauthoritarian structures that are perceived toprovide this safety again not unlike in a mallYamini Vasudevan (2012) Im Envious of TheirFreedom, Hindu Busines s Line, 26 December2012, http://www.thehindubusinessline.com on-campus/ i-am-envious-of-their-freedom/arti-cle4241751.ece, accessed on 26 December 2012.

23 If as Selvaraj Veluthan (2004) suggests Singa-pore is a state that gives its people the gift ofmaterial comfort, it then demands a quid proquo, in the shape of the disciplined modern cit-izen; then one might suggest that Mumbai is acity that gives its citizens very little, often noteven the certainty of citizenship. This lack ofgiving and the common acknowledgement ofthe lack allow people to act in defiance of thedemands of law and order. For if the state can

renege on its promises, what binds the citizens?24 See Phadke (2007) for an engagement on the

desirability of negotiating risk.

25 This has been widely reported in the media.See one such feature article. Arefa Johari,Stalled, Hindustan Times, !3 February 2013,http://www.inclusivecities.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/Hindustan_Times_Mumbai2013-02-03_page13.pdf, accessed on 1 March2013. See this link for more articles on theissue: http://www.inclusivecities.org/blog/mu mbai-hawker-evictions/

26 Sarah Goodyear, Can a Couple of TablesMake Bangalores Rapist Lane Safe Again?,3 July 2013, http://www.theatlanticcities.com/neighborhoods/2013/07/can-couple-tables-

make-bangalores-rapist-lane-safe-again/6094/,accessed on 8 July 2013.

27 On 6 October 2010 the Sewri Sessions Court inMumbai acquitted all six accused in the case,citing lack of evidence and the unreliable testi-mony of the victim. On 29 June 2011, the BombayHigh Court upheld acquittal by dismissing theappeal filed by the Maharashtra governmentchallenging the earlier verdict of a trial court

in the case, citing lack of evidence and the un-reliable testimony of the victim.

28 Further, though it is well documented, it isworth reiterating that the largest number ofattacks are committed by people known to thevictim/surv ivor.

References

Agnes, Flavia (1992): Protecting Women againstViolence-Rev iew of a Decade of Legislation,1980-89,Economic & Political Weekly,Vol 27,No 17, 25 April.

Callard, Felicity (2011): Iris Marion Young in PhilHubbard and Rob Kitchin (ed.),Key Thinkers onSpace and Place (London: Sage).

Chakravarti, Uma (2000): State, Market and Freedomof Expression in EPW, Vol 35, No 18, 29 April.

Jacobs, Jane (1993 (1961)): The Death and Life of Great

American Cities (New York: Random House).Phadke, Shilpa (2005): You Can Be Lonely in a

Crowd: The Production of Safety in Mumbai,Indian Journal of Gender Studies, Vol 12, No 1,41-62.

(2007): Dangerous Liaisons: Women and Men;Risk and Reputation in Mumbai in Review ofWomens Studies,Economic & Polit ical Weekly,Vol 42, No 17, 1510-18.

(2010): If Women Could Risk Pleasure: Re-interpreting Violence in Public Space in BishakhaDatta (ed.), Nine Degrees of Justice: NewPerspective s on Violence against Women in India(New Delhi: Zubaan).

(2012): Traversing the City: Some GenderedQuestions of Access in Mumbai in Nihal Pereraand Wing-Shing Tang (ed.),Transforming AsianCities: Intellectual Impasse, Asianizing Space,and Emerging Translocalities, Routledge.

Phadke, Shilpa, Shilpa Ranade and Sameera Khan(2009): Why Loiter? Radical Possibilities forGendered Dissent in Melissa Butcher andSelvaraj Velayutham (ed.),Dissent and CulturalResistance in Asias Cities (London: Routledge),pp 185-203.

Phadke, Shilpa, Sameera Khan and Shilpa Ranade(2011): Why Loiter? Women and Risk on MumbaiStreets (New Delhi: Penguin).

Sassen, Saskia (2010): When the City ItselfBecomes a Technology of War, Theory, Culture& Society (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi,and Singapore: Sage), Vol 27(6): 33-50.

Simmel, Georg (1908) (1976 edition):The Stranger inThe Sociology of Georg Simmel (New York:Free Press). Also http://www.infoamerica.org/documentos_pdf/simmel01.pdf, accessed on2 April 2012.

Veluthan, Selvaraj (2004): Affect, Materia lity, andthe Gift of Social Life in Singapore inSOJOURN:Journal of Social Issues in SoutheastAsia, Vol 19, No 1.

Warner, Michael (2002): Publics and CounterPublics, Quarterly Journal of Speech, Vol 88,No 4: 413-25.

Whitehead, A (2000): Continuities and Disconti-nuities in Political Constructions of the Work-ing Man in Rural Sub-Saharan Africa: the LazyMan in African Agriculture,European Journalof Development Research,Vol 12, pp 23-52.

Young, Iris Marion (1995): City Life and Differencein Phillip Kasinitz (ed), Metropolis: Center andSymbol of Our Times (New York: New YorkUniversity Press), 250-70.

unfriendly bodies, hostile cities: reflections on loitering and gendered public space

Documents