M

This is a city where people regularly travel in numbers of 5,000 in a suburban commuter train meant for 1,710 commuters, where it is not unheard of to have friends fall out of trains.1 It is a city where people routinely choose to cross railway lines even though statistics demonstrate that almost 10 people die in the train-related accidents everyday with an annual average of 3,500 people. Despite these statistics, a large number of the women we interviewed acknowledged that they would rather cross the railway tracks and face the hurtling trains than use the foot over-bridges which are dark, threatening and full of unknown dangers.2

This essay focuses on questions of risk in relation to women’s access to public space to ask: How is public safety defined for women in Mumbai? How is risk calculated and constructed? How are ideas about class, public space, safety and global citizenship implicated in the discussion on gendered risk?

In this paper, public space is visualised to be a deeply connected sub-section of public sphere and I am conscious that it reflects the divisions and hierarchies of the public sphere. Public space includes sites like streets, public toilets (in neighbourhoods, on streets, and railway stations), market places (‘bazaars’ and malls), recreational areas (parks, maidans, restaurants, cinema houses) and modes of public transport (which include buses, trains, taxis and rickshaws) as well as sites like bus-stops and railway stations.

This paper draws substantially on insights and findings of the research conducted by the Gender and Space project under the aegis of Partners for Urban Knowledge Action and Research (PUKAR), an urban research collective in Mumbai. This project sought to examine women’s access to public space in relation to questions of citizenship, civic safety and sexual safety, risk and respectability.

In this research, over a period of three years, we studied 14 different localities in the city across geographical locations, class, religious and linguistic affiliations, and usage. Segments of these localities were also mapped architecturally. We also conducted ethnographic observations at five suburban railway stations, four parks, three shopping malls and four coffee shops. These were studied largely through in-depth and structured interviews and focus group discussions. In addition, during this time we also conducted three long courses and a number of short workshops and the discussions in these pedagogic contexts also contributed to our research.

This paper examines the limitations of the demand for safety and extends an argument I had made in an earlier essay that what women need in order to access public space as citizens is not so much the provision of safety as the right to take risks [Phadke 2005]. It elucidates why seeking safety is an unviable feminist strategy to enhance access to public space. It self-consciously focuses on middle class women to argue that even the most desirable of urban subjects are offered only conditional access to limited spaces, not the right to engage public spaces and risk as citizens. It examines ideas of contamination of both women and spaces and argues that both are rooted in the exclusion of marginal citizens from public spaces.

Before I more fully elucidate these propositions around safety and risk I would like to contextualise the gender politics of public space in 21st century Mumbai.

If one is to query access for women in Indian cities, then beginning a study with Mumbai seems paradoxical – for in Mumbai women are visible – in buses and local trains, in bazaars and shopping malls, in multinational offices as managers and corner shops as saleswomen.4It was not until we actually began counting women on the streets of Mumbai that we realised how few women there actually are, never more than 28 per cent at any given place or time, according to our research.5 Nonetheless, despite the low ratio of women in public space, we are aware that relative to our countrywomen in other cities, we are privileged in our access to public space. This is precisely why it is important to study Mumbai

– for if this is the standard of access to public space in the country then perhaps we lack ambition or imagination, or both.

Elsewhere I have argued that for women, safety does not accrue from infrastructural or institutional factors but has to be actively produced. The production of this safety is linked to the manufacture of both purpose and respectability in order to legitimise women’s presence in public space. I also suggested that Mumbai is a relatively safer city because of its large workforce of women, its history of social reform, its relatively well developed public transport system and the lack of modernist urban planning which means that residential and commercial areas are mixed [Phadke 2005].

Here I would like to extend this argument to suggest that all these factors in one form or the other represent a claim to public space – they legitimise women’s access in public space. Safety, I argue, is linked directly to the level of claim that one feels to a space. It is more than the promise of not being physically harmed, it includes the knowledge that should one be harmed one’s presence will not be looked at askance. It is this lack of claim that contributes to women’s sense of anxiety and lack of safety in public space as much as the fear of assault. I argue that the recognition of the legitimate right to public space as citizens has the capacity to transform women’s relationship to public space.

At the present time, however, what women get are contradictory messages of danger coded in various sub and super texts that women must read and negotiate. On the one hand, the city is constructed as a space dangerous for women, who stand to be contaminated by its disorder and must therefore be protected preferably in the private spaces of the home. On the other hand, there are the parallel narratives on the modern global city, where middle class women are visualised as important actors in the roles of professionals and consumers.

At this point I would like to take a moment to reflect on the middle-class, Hindu, upper-caste, heterosexual, married or wouldbe-married woman whose presence has significantly informed our research on public space. Middle class women are central to any discussion on safety both as desirable urban subjects and also as the symbols of national honour to be protected from the potential contamination posed by others in public space. I will return in some detail to the question of who constitute these “others”.

The location of the middle class woman as the central protagonist of this essay and the focus on the middle class moral discourse of safety does not indicate a bourgeois slant but is a conscious choice intended to help expose both the inadequacy of the discourse in facilitating women’s access to public space and also its subterfuge in masking other kinds of (class) exclusions from public space. The focus on the middle class woman allows me to demonstrate that, however conformist, even the most desirable of urban female subjects is unable to engage the city and to court risk and that for women even privilege does not ensure access to public space.

I am very aware that the category, women in Mumbai, encompasses a range of diverse identities that intersect with gender – class, religion, caste, age, educational status, employment situation, and physical ability – to create very different experiences for women living in the city. I also acknowledge that the term middle class today encompasses a vast range of groups quite different from each other. However, these differences, do not change the fact that though the discourse of safety is centred on the middle class women, the normative ideals that it upholds are equally applicable to women of other classes. Its focus on middle class women rather than working class or poor women allows the discourse to be only about women and therefore about gendered safety. A discussion on working class or poor women would compel an engagement with concerns of not only gendered safety but also class safety, one that would then mean contending with the question of working class and poor men’s access to public space as well. Bringing the discussion to focus squarely on the middle class woman helps to unravel the fact that the discourse of safety is in the interests of not even the women for whom it is ostensibly meant but rather serves to reinforce the boundaries of class and gender in access to public space.

The discourse of safety is framed in relation to questions of risk and before we engage with safety it is important to situate the question of risk.

So what is risk and how does modern 21st century urban living calibrate risk? Ulrich Beck (1992) suggests that we now live in societies where risk is manufactured and managed and even deliberately undertaken for the sake of benefits conceived of in advance.Similarly, Anthony Giddens (1991) suggests that the institutionalisation of risk is a fundamental character of modern society where risks are endlessly analysed, profiled and reflected upon.

The question here is how then can one situate the precise nature of the risk question in relation to women in public space? How are different risks understood and ranked in relation to women’s access of public space. I would like to enumerate the various possible risks to women in relation to public space:

We are grateful to Shilpa Phadke for help in putting together this issue of the Review of Women’s Studies. –Ed

Women living in different kinds of neighbourhoods (distinguished by class and location) articulated that they were more likely to retaliate to an act of sexual harassment in a neighbourhood which was not their own. This seems contrary to what one might be tempted to assume – that women feel safer in their own neighbourhoods. Rather than empowering women, the presence of insiders (and the pressure to demonstrate respectability: “good women ignore sexual harassment”) actually prevents women from acting in their own defence. A woman living in the eastern suburb of Mulund said that she would often retort in response to a sexually coloured comment on an unfamiliar street but would “hesitate to make a scene in an area where I am known because people will talk”. This is often tied to the notion that women invite trouble or are in some way to blame when harassment takes place.

While women often record feeling physically safer in their own neighbourhoods, which are familiar to them and where they are known, this does not translate into increased access to public space. In fact, spaces in which women are recognised as wives, daughters and sisters often restrict access. Within these same neighbourhoods, women who were seen as transgressive: usually single or divorced women, or those who openly flouted social norms were subject to hostility and harassment – much more in their own neighbourhoods than outside – where they were comparatively anonymous.

Activist women living in Dongri, a predominantly Muslim neighbourhood, who were seen to be transgressive, articulated that they and their families faced jeers and harassment within their own neighbourhoods.8 At a focus group discussion in Kala Chowki, in a predominantly Maharashtrian chawl, women indicated that they were uncomfortable if their daughters associated with women who had “bad” reputations as they felt this might “spoil” their daughter’s reputations.9 Clearly for women who do not conform, the spaces where they ostensibly belong are the most dangerous.

It is comparatively heterogeneous spaces that engender the greatest capacity to access public space.10 For instance, single women who lived on their own in Mumbai away from families were the ones who experienced the greatest degree of unmediated access to public space. This came not from a sense of safety – for as single women they were compelled to negotiate the city entirely on its own terms and create their own support structures

– but from the diminished need to manufacture respectability. This, however, is not intended to romanticise the lives of single women in Mumbai who have to often negotiate suspicious landlords and the judgmental scrutiny of neighbours and housing colony managements who are intensely curious about whom they meet and how late they return home from work.

In an earlier essay [Phadke 2005], I had argued that, “For professional, mostly upper middle class, women, confronting ‘risk’ and ‘danger’ by negotiating public space and transport at night, especially after work, is seen as a sign of their assumption of ‘masculine’ and therefore desirable work ethics and values” (pp 46-47). Further research has only strengthened my conviction that professional women are compelled to project gender neutrality as professionals (even as they perform femininity as women). At the same time, I now realise how significant the manufacture of respectability is in all contexts. Middle class professional women working in Nariman Point are no less free of the constraints of demonstrating their respectability and protection-worthiness than saleswomen in the malls in Lower Parel.11 In separate interviews, women lawyers in Nariman Point and sales assistants at a store in the High Street Phoenix Mall in Lower Parel discussed their negotiations with their families over the late hours they worked and the need to ensure that people in the neighbourhood did not misunderstand the “nature” of their work.

By creating an environment where women are forced to manufacture respectability, neighbourhoods actually reduce women’s capacity to defend themselves lest they be seen as “loose women”. The focus on sexual safety reduces women’s capacity to negotiate public space actually placing them at even greater risk. In many ways then the diminished capacity to take risks may also mean the diminished capacity to produce safety and therefore unintentionally placing oneself at risks that are thrust upon one rather than chosen. In this sense then, conforming to ideas of sexual safety actually reduces women’s access to public space.

Giddens (1991) suggests that, “The body is in some sense perennially at risk. The possibility of bodily injury is ever-present, even in the most familiar of surroundings” (p 126). At one level this is true in the sense that risk exists both privately (where one might face domestic violence or even slip, fall and break a bone while bathing) and in the public (where one might be sexually assaulted or fall out of an over-crowded train). At the same time, when discussing risk, one must distinguish between accidental and intended violence. For women the threat of intended violence is located in a politics of morality that reframes the context of risk, seriously reducing their capacity to engage risk.

The discourse of sexual safety then is dangerous not only in an ideological sense in that it perpetuates the idea of women’s “proper place” in private spaces but also at the material level where it actively inhibits women from producing safety for themselves.

The discourse of safety is not only about sexual safety, it is also interestingly about modernity. This part of the discourse is linked to the fact that a selective visibility of women as professionals and consumers is significant to the claims of a global city.

While it is true that women are barred from public space, not all women are barred in the same way. Through their access to both economic capital through private infrastructure and cultural capital through education, middle class women have greater access to public space. In this section, I will argue that the focus on the middle class woman as symbolic effectively hides an ideology of exclusion that encompasses class and community as well.

The middle-class, Hindu, upper-caste, heterosexual, married or would-be-married woman is significant not only because her body is the canvas on which narratives of modernity, honour and nationhood are simultaneously written but also because her identities mark her as privileged in every way other than gender. She carries with her no other identity, other than being a woman that would mark her as an outsider to public space. She is not lower class, not dalit, not Muslim, not lesbian – it is clear that a man with her set of identities would have open legitimate and unquestioned access to public space.12 Relative to other women, in a hypothetical sense, she should be located in the best position to access public space.

The location of the discourse of safety on the bodies of middle class women is then able to account for the simultaneous desirability of the middle class woman in public space even as it continues to reproduce the narratives of public space as dangerous for women. When there are battle cries to make the city safer for women, it is because a middle class woman has been sexually assaulted. This bring to the fore people’s anxieties about both women’s proper place (what was she doing there in the first place) and the presence of other marginal citizens in public space (who constitute the risk).

The discourse of urban personal public safety then is one of protection of one group of people from another, both of whom are rendered illegitimate users of public space by the same discourse that seeks to establish order. These of course are not necessarily clear categories – the lower class man encompasses all those who might threaten the physical safety or reputation of middle class women, hawkers, Muslim men, bar dancers and sex workers and all men who are seen as undesirable matrimonial or sexual partners. I argue that the politics that seeks their exclusion from public is directly linked to the exclusion of women from public space.

I had earlier argued [Phadke 2005] that “respectable” women stand the “risk” of potential defilement in public space while “non-respectable” women are themselves a potential source of contamination to the purity of public spaces. Here I would like to extend this line of argument to ask who poses the threat to good women and what it means for women’s access to public space. While non-respectable women are a source of contamination to public spaces, in relation to respectable women, I argue that they merely muddy the context – they make it difficult to determine who is worthy of protection. The person(s) who are seen to pose the risk are men – of a certain class and occupation (or lack thereof). These ideas of risk make it clear that the definition of what constitutes “risk” itself is a mechanism of control that is used to define normative citizenship and to regulate access to public space.

This then sets up the central fallacious opposition around which people are excluded from public space – that between the “vagrant” man (read: lower class often unemployed male cast as migrant outsider) and our central protagonist, the middle class woman. The rationale for denying women access to public space is the danger posed by the lower class unemployed man. Both the person perceived to be the potential molester and the potential victim of the act of molestation are both denied legitimate access to public space on these grounds. This line of thinking casts both lower class men and all women as outsiders to public space and the anxieties attached to women’s presence are simultaneously expressions of the anxiety attendant upon the presence of the lower class man.25

What is at risk here is not merely women’s reputations or even sexual virtue but Mumbai’s global aspirations themselves. The global city aspires to sterile and predictable patterns of inhabitation. The global claims of Mumbai are still new and fragile and therefore to be guarded zealously. One of the ways Mumbai’s global claims can be buttressed is by clear definition of spaces as being inside-outside, public-private, recreational–commercial. The demand for both those at risk and those who are the risk to inhabit public space together offers the vision of a disorderly city rendering its spaces diverse and not open to easy interpretation. This lack of order and hierarchy is profoundly threatening to the vision of a controlled Mumbai.

The suggestion that the exclusion of women is inextricably linked to that of other marginal citizens is not a movement towards a more gender neutral stance but rather an acknowledgement that it is not only women who are barred from public space. I argue that the exclusion of women from public space cannot be viewed as separate from the exclusion of other marginal citizens from public space. While there are particularities to women’s exclusion, women’s safety or access to public space cannot be sought in the absence of a more general claim to city public spaces for all citizens. Implicit in this is the assumption that all marginal groups are not the same, and not necessarily friendly to each other. Nonetheless what we share is the experience of exclusion, overt or covert, enacted by our families, communities, the market and/or the state.

There is a public face to the insistence on sexual safety in the way in which questions of risk play out when women are actually assaulted in public space. Before we engage further in this discussion it is important to point out that the perception of risk has little to do with the actual possibility of danger. Statistics regularly show that when it comes to actual violence, women are victims of violence more in their homes than outside. Men on the other hand face far more incidents of actual violent behaviour in public space.26 Yet the narrative of danger in public space is unequivocally centred around the figure of the woman. This might have something to do with the fact that non-sexual physical violence is seen as more acceptable than sexual violence which violates the respectability of the woman and in turn brings dishonour to the community. Furthermore, the overt attention on gender-based violence in public space, actively discounts class, caste and religion-based violence that takes place simultaneously.

When a woman is raped one finds that the concern is less about bodily or mental harm to the woman and more about its repercussions on her identity and relationships. Families appear to be more concerned with the “reputation” of their women rather than justice as has been demonstrated in numerous such incidents where women (and/or their families) prefer not to press charges.

For instance, in the early 1990s there was a rape in Elphinstone college in south Mumbai of a student by other students. The young girl was whisked away and never allowed to testify. In 2005, more than a decade later, when a young college-going girl was raped in broad daylight by a police constable at Marine Drive, there was a lot of public speculation about her companion, a young boy of the same age, who had been asked to leave by the constable. While on the one hand the constable had apparently used the fact of her being out with a male friend to threaten her, into the ‘chowki’; her parents almost seemed to condone his initial behaviour of moral policing by insisting that their daughter did not know any boys. It seemed more important for them to prove that their daughter’s actions had been “within the limits” of permissible behaviour than to demand justice irrespective of what she had been doing.27, 28

The right to access public space is linked closely to the provision of public spaces. Don Mitchell (2003) argues that the right to the city and its public spaces should remain a core objective of social justice movements. From his perspective, the right to the city means a right not only to inhabit urban spaces but also to participate in a city as an ongoing work of creation, production, and negotiation. He perceives the constriction of public space as reflective of attacks on civil liberties and progressive politics of all kinds. He suggests that battles over public space reflect struggles for a just and democratic polity.

The struggle for the right to public space then is not only about individuals or even groups but also about our vision for the future of our cities and our ideas of urban democracy. A movement towards a more inclusive stance in relation to public space would not be an act of altruism but based on the understanding that homogenous and sanitised cities far from providing us with productive, and creative spaces for negotiation, in fact give rise to an environment that is deeply fissured and fraught. Public space that is based on the principle of exclusion might allow for some to enjoy gated “high security” spaces but in a larger sense do little to expand people’s access to the city as a whole.

The women’s movement in India and elsewhere in the world has always connected with other movements: the environmental movement, the movement of gay and lesbian rights, and the many human rights movements. This work follows this line of reasoning – women’s liberation can never come at the cost of the freedom of anyone else. Translated into public space terms this means that the right of every person – across class, caste, and gender, regardless of both the kinds of and the strength of religious and sexual persuasions to public space as citizens. For it is only when the city belongs to everyone, that it can ever belong to women.

EPW

Email: shilpa02@gmail.com

Notes

16 standing passengers per square metre of floor space. http://

www.mrvc.indianrail.gov.in/intr.htm accessed on March 15, 2007.

indicated that lighting was an important concern.

19 See Bedi (2007) on women in the Shiv Sena and issues of political participation.

20 Susan Faludi (1991) for instance suggests that the more visible women were in public life the more they would be undermined in various ways especially in the media.

21 The huge slum demolitions of December 2004 and January-February 2005 are testimony to this. In this period the NCP-Congress government in Maharashtra permitted a large-scale demolition of slums rendering almost

3.5 lakh people homeless. The language used to describe them is one of “encroachment” casting them immediately as less than full citizens.

22 For women, hawkers often represent friendly and familiar “eyes” on the street that urban writer Jane Jacobs alluded to in the 1960s. For instance one woman pointed out that the hawker who sold ‘bhel’, a savory snack, across from her apartment building had been there for several years unlike the security guards who changed every month. Similarly women commuters who navigated the area between the office district of Fort and the Churchgate railway station pointed out that ever since the hawkers vending books on the pavement were cleared off in 2005, that particular area in the late evening seemed unfriendly, dark and threatening.

23 The success of this narrative is apparent from our interviews with women across the city where poor men and Muslim men are viewed as the threat, despite the fact that when probed further most women admit that the sexual harassment they face is most often from men of their own class.

24 The idea of walking as potentially threatening is reflected in arguments made by Kroker et al (1990) who in the context of the US suggest that walking seen as something that only the dispossessed do. They argue that walking in America puts you in the position of Simmel’s stranger, the person who by their very presence disturbs the field, summoning forth judgments on their conduct (p 450).

25 Nivedita Menon (2004) for instance cites the guidelines from A Draft Report on Guidelines against Sexual Harassment in Delhi University (May 1999) to prevent sexual harassment which suggest that “No hawkers, shops/dhabas or rickshawwalas/autos should be allowed within 100 yards of colleges, libraries and hostels” (p 152).

26 For instance, the Personal Safety Survey conducted in Australia in 2005 demonstrated that while 40 per cent of adult women and 50 per cent of adult men have experienced at least one incident of violence since the age of 15, women were more likely to be assaulted at home and be victims of intimate partner violence while men were more likely to be assaulted in public and be victims of stranger violence.

27 The young woman did give evidence to the police that enabled them to prosecute the man but this was partly due to the involvement of a man in uniform and the large media and public outcry following the crime.

28 The fact that the discourse of safety is focused on middle class women is borne out by the fact that only some months later, the rape of a ragpicker by a police constable near the international airport received much less attention and caused much less furore.