18 Gender in the Indian Cities

Anu Sabhlok

I.  Introduction

Let us for a moment reflect on your experiences in the city we inhabit. How often do you venture out into the public spaces of the city? What are these public spaces? Are parks, marketplaces, streets, plazas, malls, clubs, resorts public spaces? What are the constituent features of public space? Are there certain spaces where you feel more comfortable? Why? Are there certain spaces where you feel unwelcome, fearful, or out of place? Why? What kinds of activities define your interaction with these spaces? Do your interactions with public space differ when you are with a group of friends loitering on the street and when you are the solitary in the neighborhood park? Do you express yourself freely in public space or do you often put up a performance of acceptable behaviour? Your answers to these questions will most likely depend on your gender, class, race, caste, sexual, national and religious identity. In this essay, we will address these questions from the perspective of gender and reflect on the gendered experiences of people in the city. We will delve into history to see the changing relationship of women and men in cities ranging from industrial cities of the early 20th century to the globalized cities of today. We pay particular attention to the gendered experiences in Indian cities and bring in notions of safety and fear in public space. Towards the end we will engage with recent work that challenges some of the hetero-normative notions of inhabiting the city and look at subversive ways of claiming space and making it more inclusive.

One might wonder why it is important to investigate gender in the context of the city. As Lefebvre pointed our cities historically are shaped by varying ideologies and power relationships (Lefebvre, 2003). Let us take the example of one such ideological construction that has shaped our cities – the public/private binary. Feminist scholars assert that the public/private binary is not a innocent ‘natural’ division but is central to the framing of gendered roles and subsequently to the allocation of power and resources. Feminists have critiqued a simplistic binary which assigns women to the private sphere of the home and portrays the home as a safe haven not open to scrutiny (Pateman 1989). The second wave feminist slogan pointed out that the ‘personal is political’ and several studies thereafter have demonstrated how the home can be a site of violence and fear. Moreover, studies on homeless people (Klodawsky, 2006) and the political regulations of sexualities (Knopp, 1998) disrupt the simplistic understanding of public/private. Yet, cities continue to embody this ideology with the separation of the spheres of production and reproduction and with notions of a ‘proper’ place for women and men.

Several scholars have brought the understanding of the ‘production of space’ (Lefebvre, 1991) and place (Massey, 1982) to bear upon the construction of the urban. Space is seen by Lefebvre as a “product to be used, to be consumed, it is also a means of production; Networks of exchange and flows of raw materials and energy fashion space and are determined by it” (1991: 85). Drawing from Lefebvre’s work, geographers such as Massey (1982), Harvey (1984) and Soja (1989) have encouraged us to think of space as socially produced – something that acquires meaning only through human endeavor. Their project has been to formulate the theories of space and place in the context of social relations – those of gender, class, race and other categories of difference. In order to delve deeper into how cities take shape and in turn shape us, it is imperative that we investigate this mutual construction of the city and gender.

II. Gender and Space

Simone De Beavour famously proclaimed that ‘one is not born a woman but rather becomes one. She argued that “social discrimination produces in women moral and intellectual effects so profound that they appear to be caused by nature” (Beauvoir 1973: 18). Feminists used the sex/ gender distinction to discuss that while the biological differences are fixed, it is the social conditioning of appropriate behavior that produces men and women (Rubin, 1975). Subsequently, the sex/gender binary distinction too was critiqued due to its inability to take differences between women into account and the category of sex too was shown to be socially constructed (Butler, 1999). For example, Jaggar (1983) has argued that because women are seen as subordinate to men, they do not receive adequate nutrition and excessive and therefore their bodies are not as strong as men. In this way a social ideology constructs biological difference. The debate is still on about the relevance and usefulness of the sex/gender divide (Mikkola, 2012).

Gender is a social relation that is fluid over the course of one’s lifetime, historically and geographically contingent, and is produced by what we do rather than what we are. For example, we know that the manner in which women’s and men’s roles were defined in our families in the early 1900s is very different from the way they are defined today. Social relations between women and men vary significantly as we shift geographically from the matriarchal communities of North East India to the strongly patriarchal Haryana villages. Notice how the meanings attached to being a boy or a girl change as you ‘perform’ social relations with your kith and kin over the course of growing up. Judith Butler (1990) has argued that gender identity is performed and that there is nothing ‘natural’ about it. She avers that male and female bodies do not necessarily mean masculine and feminine gender identities – and that gender identity is nothing but an effect of a performance. In Butler’s words:…..gender is repeated stylisation of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory framework that congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being….The effect of gender, hence, must be understood as the mundane way in which bodily gestures, movements, and all styles of various kinds constitute the illusion of an abiding gendered self. (Butler, 1990: 33)

Understood in this way, gender relations are socially constructed and are context dependent – they vary over time and space. Despite having argued that gender identities are fluid, we also know that most people do not ascribe an element of intentionality to their gendered performances – gender does not appear to be fluid or open to choice. In fact, it appears to most as a fixed identity that enables and constrains them in different ways. Think about little girls being chastised for being

boisterous and not displaying their feminine attributes of shyness and servitude towards elders. Think about little boys being made to feel ashamed for crying. It is not that girls bodies are naturally attuned to being demure and shy or that boys do not have tear glands. However, by repeatedly reinforcing certain behaviors over others we solidify gender. These repeated gendered relations also materialize as spatial relations – such as in notions of public and private space. Space is not a neutral backdrop over which gender identities are performed but is an active component that also structures the dynamic gender enactments. It can therefore be said that both gender and space are mutually constituted i.e. they construct each other.

Every action happens somewhere at some time. It needs a space and its needs a time. Social processes then are also spatial and temporal processes. Our everyday actions and our social relations manifest themselves in certain spatial configurations and therefore ‘produce space’ (Lefebvre 1991). These places in turn play a role in shaping our identities and allow for certain social processes while inhibiting others. If spaces are so integral to the nature of our social relations then it is imperative that we understand our spaces in an attempt to understand ourselves as social beings. Transformation in economic and social lives such as the coming of industrialization, or colonialism are bound to have had a role to play in the way our gendered and spatial relations are shaped. In the next section we will attempt to understand these shifts in the context of early industrial societies, particularly cities.

III. Gender and the City

Industrial production of goods caused a major shift in the way economic and thereby social activity was organized. Factories were set up in urban areas and were surrounded by congested tenements for migrant men workers. In pre-industrial societies men, women and children had all participated in economic activity which usually took place inside the homes. A spatial segregation of economic from social activities resulted in somewhat fixed gendered roles and spheres. Women’s appropriate place was considered to be her home and her work as largely related to reproduction. Whereas men were to venture out and labour in the factories. They were seen as the producers. The spheres for home and waged work became clearly demarcated especially in urban contexts with their respective gendered connotations. If seen in public space, especially if unaccompanied by a man, women were suspected of being of loose morals. The roles of men and women and their appropriate spatial locations were strictly scripted at the turn of the twentieth century particularly for middle and upper class women in cities of the industrializing world (Rothman, 1978).

Cities in these parts of the world were also acquiring particular forms. The Chicago school of urban sociologists, in analysing urban shifts discussed the spatial segregation that was emerging in American cities of the early twentieth century. Their concentric city model marked spatial concentrations of population based on race and ethnicity and demarcated the business core from the residential peripheries. Though they did not explicitly discuss gender, the diagram showing the central productive core and domestic periphery implicitly marks out men and women’s places in the city. (Spain, 2014)

Feminist scholars view such segregated landscapes as a material manifestation of our patriarchal and capitalist societies. In Chicago too, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century such segregation of spheres and defined roles did not go unchallenged. Once women started using public transportation such as the streetcar (tram) to come into the city centre and were meeting each other in lunchrooms and theaters, they began organizing efforts for political and social action. The struggle for women’s suffrage and subsequently after WWII the ‘Equal Pay for Equal Work’ movement both began in urban contexts. Using the term ‘municipal housekeeping’ several upper class women fought for better services in the city and reorganized garbage collections, clean milk and maternal and childcare. They campaigned for women’s political rights arguing that taking care of the city was a natural extension of their roles as caretakers of the home. Women were at the forefront of the relief efforts after the great Chicago fire of 1871 and sought to recreate the city as more livable rather than more profitable (Spain, 2001). Notable in this regard are the efforts of Jane Adam’s Hull house that afforded livable housing and services such as libraries and bathhouses to recent in the city much before the city municipality gave a thought to such public services. Feminist sociologists and geographers have also discussed how the urban landscape changed after the Second World War (Mc Dowell, 1999; Spain, 2014; Hayden, 1982). It is often remarked that cities moved from being centers of production to zones of consumption and one might assume that such a shift might make the city more a women’s domain. This was the time of high modernism and centralized planning. With all political and economic power in the hands of men, the mid twentieth century city too emerged in a highly masculinized image of rational planning with strict zoning laws. Moreover the emphasis on the suburban homes and the automobile further isolated women from city centers. Early sociologists presented this as a ‘natural’ division and glorified the image of the home as safe haven and sanctuary. However, by 1980s writings emerged that critiqued the fixed land-uses as limiting to women’s options in the city. Keller (1981) in her edited volume entitled ‘Building for women’ wrote against planning ideals that locked outdated gendered stereotypes into the build environment. Dolores Hayden’s (1980) classic article, appearing around the same time asked ‘What would a non-sexist city be like?’ In answering that question, Hayden advocated cooperative housing where cooked food and childcare would be provided by a union. She called for a coming together of men and women in establishing a union that she called HOMES: Homemakers Organization for a More Egalitarian Society.

Gender like any other category of difference does not work in isolation. Other aspects of one’s identity such as class, race, ethnicity, age and so on combine to affect one’s opportunities and position in life. This concept is called intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1989). In the context of the city we see that middle and upper class women experienced the city very differently from their working-class sisters. Working-class women apart from working in the factories were also employed in the domestic spaces of upper and middle class women. So while their work was rendered invisible, the middle-class women were able to go out and participate in public life. Working class men particularly those belonging to immigrant groups, on the other hand, struggled against poverty and discrimination. In order to preserve some sense of self-respect these men held on even more strongly to notions of working-class male solidarity and hegemonic ideals of masculinity. Urban ghettos that had emerged as a result of economic and social transitions in the lives of immigrant populations also became zones in the city where these notions of masculinity translated into territoriality and gangs.

IV. The city as a space of inhibition and fear versus the city as site for liberation

Several scholars have also highlighted that women more than men are fearful of public spaces in the city. Valentine (1989) discussed this fear as a ‘spatial expression of patriarchy’ and as limiting women’s choices in their engagement with city spaces. Women are most fearful of rape and sexual assault when they are treading unknown territory in urban areas. The strict land use patterns that segregate residential from work areas, effectively emptying out large areas of city spaces in the evening hours, create isolated spaces that women (and men) are afraid to venture into.

It is paradoxical then that even though women fear being out in the public spaces, they are most vulnerable to sexual violence inside their homes. It is now widely recognized that in most incidences of violence against women, the perpetrators are either family or friends – partners, co-workers, relatives and acquaintances (Hanson and Pratt, 1988). Yet it is the fear of public spaces that is most pervasive even today and restricts women’s movements in the city (Pain, 2001; Miethe, 1995).

There is also an alternative perspective to the one that views a city as inhibiting women’s access to city spaces. In her book entitled ‘The Sphinx in the City,’ Wilson (1991) averred that the city offers a liberating potential for women. Its large spaces and the anonymity that the city offers lend itself to freedom. Women can escape the narrow confines of tight neighborhoods where their movements are monitored and experience a freer movement in the space of the city. Moreover, the city spaces create opportunities for celebration and public gatherings that enable women’s participation in urban activities. This participation however is usually only temporary and relies on a ‘masquerade of womanliness.’ Scholars have argued that such performance provides only a ‘negative freedom’ leading to invisibility and ‘social extinction.’ The anonymity that a city offers appears as freedom but takes away from the politics of identity and does not radically change oppressive social relations (Garber, 2000)

However, the politics of gendered identity emerges as a uniquely urban phenomenon especially when we look at the history of the queer movement. City spaces have created possibilities for non-hetero-normative understandings of space and gender. The gay movement gained momentum in the aftermath of the 1969 Stone Wall Inn incident in New York City where the police raided a bar downtown. Seeking recognition of their claim to public space, Gay and Lesbian activists have since then led many parades and gained favor with the public. They have played an important role in revitalizing otherwise dilapidated neighborhoods. Gay and Lesbians pioneered gentrification in the inner city areas of Chicago, New York, San Francisco, by bringing in cultural and economic activity into these spaces. The neighborhoods gained an influx of capital, while at the same time spaces of gay identity were clearly established in the city landscape. The attraction of being close to public transit, urban services (such as grocery stores and museums) and a general acceptance in these areas for non-traditional lifestyles have since led to many others such as artists, single mothers and DINKS (double income no kids) moving into these gentrified neighborhoods. Gentrification has a contradictory effect on the inclusivity of city space. On the one hand, urban landscapes for gay and lesbian communities gained a foothold in the city. At the same time, other working-class and minority ethnic particularly African-American communities were displaced and compelled by the rising rent prices to move to even more peripheral areas. In an ironic twist of fate, it is now the gay and lesbian communities that are being displaced from the same inner city neighborhoods that they helped revitalize.

V. Gender and the city: Indian Context

In December 2012, an unprecedented number of men and women in Delhi took to the streets toprotest against the lack of administration’s interest in making Delhi a safe space for women. The protests were triggered by the brutal gang rape of a young middle-class college student who was returning home after watching a movie with her male friend. The incident changed the discourse related to rape and brought a previously taboo subject in to the public space. A special commission led by Justice Verma sought public opinion on laws related to violence against women and received an overwhelming number of responses. The recommendations from this commission were with great urgency translated into law. While the protests and the actions that followed have all played a major role in initiating a discussion on women’s safety, we still have a long way to go. What has been your experience? Are cities today safer for women than they were in 2012? What else needs to be done?

Some scholars have argued that the historic cores of many of today’s cities such as Jodhpur, Banaras and Ujjain are spaces where women feel safer and more comfortable than they do in say the newly emerging urban hubs such as Gurgaon or Noida. They attribute this difference to the human scale, pedestrian distances and the dense urban environment of collective life. According to this argument, cities are safer when city streets are more than just zones of circulation and function instead as extensions of homes, shops and community spaces (Desai, 2007). However, modern cities are designed for the private automobile which most women do not own. Moreover, the inward facing and alienating built culture of these cities does not allow for free engagement with the spaces of the city. Most of the designed public spaces such as city parks, office commons and such like are single use spaces and are largely occupied by men. In contrast, women if seen “hanging around” in public spaces without a visible reason (such as grocery shopping or accompanying their children to the park) are considered as loose women. Indian law also reinforces such an understanding of appropriate and inappropriate behaviour in particular spaces. While sex work itself is not illegal,..the Immoral Traffic (Prevention) Act (1986) makes it illegal to solicit for sex work in public spaces. Thus any woman who does not subscribe to conventional notions of ‘proper’ dress or ‘appropriate’ body movements is suspect and can potentially be picked up by the police.

There is much public discussion on women’s dress, movements and activities. It often happens that even when a woman is raped or subjected to sexual harassment, she is blamed for being at the wrong place at the wrong time, of wearing wrong kind of dress or carrying the wrong kind of look or image. Such an attitude raises questions about women’s right to be in public space on her own terms. On the one hand, women in India find greater freedom and mobility in urban areas as they distance themselves from rigid caste and gender hierarchies in their home communities. On the other hand, it is the same patriarchal structures that take on a different form in the urban context.

For example, scholars have pointed to the lack of public toilets for women in urban (and rural) spaces. On surface, this might appear a trivial matter but what it does signify is the mindset that women are not meant to be occupying public space, their correct place is the home and they should stay there. By not making urban spaces well lighted, secure, accessible (through public transport) and having basic amenities (such as public toilets), urban planners have ensured that women’s access to public space will remain limited. Even where public toilets for women exist, there is a sheer disparity in the number of toilets available for women and those for men. Considering that any given time, a quarter of the women are menstruating and that women in any case need to take longer while using a toilet, it is a blatant denial of women’s rights as citizens to not have adequate infrastructure for their needs in public space. It is also a common sight in urban areas to see men urinating along a wall. Women respondents in a study on Mumbai articulated feelings of embarrassment and discomfort when passing by a man urinating in public space. Differential engagements and expectations with urban space for both men and women create an uneven access and comfort levels for both the genders. Why should both women and men not be able to participate equitably in urban activities?

Urban space is both reflective of and constitutes social relations. One’s gender along with caste, class, ethnic background amongst other social categories plays a role in shaping the urban experience. The experience of the city for a middle-class woman varies significantly from that of the working-class woman residing in a slum. Let us take the same example as in the previous paragraph of the public toilet. Women living in the slums do not have access to private toilets and therefore are dependent on the use of public toilets. In the absence of public toilets they are compelled to go outside where they are often harassed. Public toilets even where they exist are often damaged, unclean and dark. These areas too are seen as sites where women feel insecure. In the absence of infrastructure for even very private activities such as bathing, the working-class woman is many times more vulnerable to sexual advances and harassment.

The exclusion of women from public space is intimately tied to the exclusion of other marginalized groups, especially the lower caste, lower class migrant male. Certain groups are perceived as threats to (middle-class) women’s safety and therefore their presence is seen as illegitimate in urban public space. Shilpa Phadke (2013) discusses such inclusions and exclusions through a discussion on ‘unfriendly bodies.’ The discourse of the lower class migrant man (particularly if Dalit or Muslim) as potential threats to women’s safety is appropriated by the market and the State to further their agendas of consumer friendly and world-class cities. According to this new logic, women do become legitimate users of public space but only when they are consumers. How and why are certain bodies declared unfriendly and their presence discouraged in public space (such as lower class youth and neighborhood aunties)? How can cities be made safe for women while at the same time accommodate competing claims to public space?

VI. Pushing the bounderies of gender and the city Why loiter?

Observe the movement of men and women as they walk about your city. In all likelihood you will see women walking with shopping bags, college backpacks or surrounded by children. If alone, women will be usually speaking (or pretending to speak) on their cell phone thereby placing a barrier between themselves and those around. A majority will have their heads somewhat lowered and their hands criss-crossed in front of their chest. You might also notice groups of men playing cards in the open ground or standing next to a panwaala without much apparent purpose. Some of them might be sitting on park benches with their legs wide apart gazing at the women and men as they walk past. It is rare to see a woman sitting in a park playing cards with her (male and female) friends or men walking with their heads lowered and hands crisscrossed in front of their chests. Such bodily gestures reveal deep connections between gendered ways of being and the unstated expectations of behaviour in the urban public space.

As we see, much of the discourse about women and the city revolves around women’s safety often portraying women as those in need of protection and therefore as those whose presence in public space is inappropriate especially if without purpose. The articulation of women as citizens who have a legitimate right to inhabit and occupy public space is usually not heard. The women’s movement in India also has traditionally been more vocal about issues such as domestic violence, rape and dowry but largely silent on women’s right to enjoy public space. In their writings that come out of the Gender and Space project entitled ‘Why Loiter?’ Shilpa Phadke, Shilpa Ranade and Sameera Khan (2011) argue that the desire for pleasure, for enjoyment and the struggle against violence are interconnected. The quest for a violence free spaces, according to them, relies on exclusions and divisions of ‘us’ versus ‘them’, often sanctioning violence against ‘them’ in order to protect ‘us.’ Such a conceptualization is limited and inherently violent. On the other hand, quest for pleasure can be framed in a more inclusive terms and necessarily entails the right to a violence free space. They then make a case for loitering as a politics that will offer the possibilities of a more inclusive, safe and pleasurable city.

Loitering refers to being in public space without any visible purpose – also referred to as hanging-out. It is a radical idea that challenges not just societal norms but also the desired goals of the left and the right to make cities safe for women. The conceptualization of women as someone in need of protection and the discourse on women’s safety is inherently limiting. If such a goal is met through exclusions, surveillance and control over women’s engagement with urban space, then women’s right to the city is never established. The authors argue that “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” (Phadke, Khan and Ranade, 2011:

178). It is not that safety is not a desired outcome but in proposing the right to loiter the authors have conceptualized the relation between gender and urban space much more broadly. In moving from a politics of safety to a politics of pleasure, the authors implore us to interrogate the ideas around women’s respectability and sexuality and at the same time question practices of surveillance and exclusion. Loitering not only challenges patriarchal notions, but this act of pleasure without purpose, of being in the urban space without being a consumer, without cost, also unsettles the capitalist urban order. Loitering then is a claim to citizenship, a right to the city that does not rely on ownership of private property.

Expanding Gender: Queer spaces in the city

It is only recently that issues of sexuality are being studied in relation to the urban experience and that gender itself is being understood more broadly to connote not just women but also masculinity and homosexuality. Earlier studies, even if they addressed non hetero-normative contexts, they applied a moralistic and/or ‘straight’ approach. Their work focused on violence in gay ghettoes or promiscuity in gay bars often placing gay populations alongside ethnic minorities or criminals (Harry, 1974; Corzine and Kirby, 1977). Such studies, although they brought attention to different sexual identities in the urban context, are now critiqued for their implicit racism and for not including the perspectives of the queer populations.

Gays, Lesbians and transgendered people have very different experiences in the city when compared with heterosexuals (and even when compared with each other). Simple acts like using a public toilet, shopping for clothes, taking a train, can all be uncomfortable for those who do not fit neatly into the male-female binary. Transexuals and transgender people also face discrimination when looking for housing or employments which are structured according to the hetero-normative ideal of a nuclear family (Valentine, 1993).

In the Indian context also, gay and lesbian populations are discriminated against and harassed, socially and legally and are therefore not visible actors in public space. However, this is fast changing with the homosexual community in India claiming their space through gay parades and pride walks. Most metropolitan cities in India particularly Delhi, Mumbai and Kolkata have hosted these walks. Article 377 of Indian Penal Code makes homosexuality illegal and therefore the gay subculture in India is yet to make a more permanent visible presence in urban space in the way it has done in several cities of the west. On the other hand, the transexual (Hijra, Kothi ,Khusre) identity was recognized by the supreme court in 2014. Even before that, Indian cities have always seen a visible presence of transexuals mostly during weddings, birth of a boy and festivals. However, they are often feared or revered in a way that makes it impossible for them to engage with urban life without being referred to by their sexual identity.

In order for cities to be truly inclusive and for the diversity of urban life to flourish we will need to address the differential needs of all men, women, transgendered and transexual populations of various ages, castes, classes and religions. For the ‘right to city‘ to become a reality for all, we still have a long way to go.

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•     1966: Indira Gandhi becomes prime minister of India
• 1971: Indira parliament passes the Medical Termination of Pregnancy Act becoming one of the earliest nations to legalize abortion
• 1972: Women’s groups come together against the Supreme court judgement in the Mathura rape case
• 1972: Anti-price rise and anti-alcohol agitations by women in Gujarat and Maharashtra
• 1972: Establishment of SEWA
• 1974: Report published by the National committee on the status of women. Highlights invisibility of women’s work
• 1985: Shah Bano case
• 1986: Indecent representation of women act passed in India
• 1987: Roop Kanwar sati
• 1988: Benazir Bhutto becomes prime minister of Pakistan
• 2009: Delhi High Court rules in favour of decriminalizing homosexual activity (Naz foundation vs. Govt. of Delhi)
• 2012: Nirbhaya rape case
• 2013: Criminal law amendment adds offences such as acid attack, sexual harassment, voyeurism and stalking
• 2015: Rajya Sabha (India) passed ‘The Rights of Transgender Persons Bill, 2014’ guaranteeing reservation and rights to the transgender people