Shilpa Phadke - Why Loiter?

Imagine an Indian city with street corners full of women: chatting, laughing, breast-feeding, exchanging corporate notes or planning protest meetings. Imagine footpaths spilling over with old and young women watching the world go by as they sip tea, and discuss love, cricket and the latest blockbuster. Imagine women in saris, jeans, salwars and skirts sitting at the nukkad reflecting on world politics and dissecting the rising sensex. If you can imagine this, youre imagining a radically different city.

Its different because women dont loiter. Men hanging out are a familiar sight in the city. A man may stop for a cigarette at a paanwalla or lounge on a park bench. He may stop to stare at the sea or drink cutting chai at a tea stall. He might even wander the streets late into the night. Women may not. We argue that theres an unspoken assumption that a loitering woman is up to no good. She is either mad or bad or dangerous to society.

Of course, no one actually says this out loud. But every little girl is brought up to know that she must walk a straight line between home and school, home and office, home and her friend or relatives home, from one sheltered space to another.

This book maintains that all of us, whether were women or men, regardless of our differences, have the right to loiter. When society wants to keep a woman safe, it never chooses to make public spaces safe for her. Instead, it seeks to lock her up at home or at school or college or in the home of a friend.

In this book, we explicitly foreground the middle-class woman because although public discussions of safety might appear to be about all women, they tend to focus implicitly only on middle-class women. In the urban Indian context, this middle-class woman is further assumed to be a young, able-bodied, Hindu, upper-caste, heterosexual, married or marriageable woman. A man with her set of identities would have open, legitimate and unquestioned access to public space. The middle-class woman is then apparently privileged in every way other than gender. Focusing on this woman then allows us to unravel the implicit assumptions of gender, class, caste, community and sexuality that underlie popular notions of safety.

Though the work is based in Mumbai, we hope the ideas and debates in this book will find resonance with the experiences of women in other cities in India and the world, especially those that are re-envisioning themselves as global cities. We also engage with the common myth that feminism is pass in the twenty-first century, and show just why and how relevant feminist politics is to re-imagining a vibrant and inclusive concept of citizenship in contemporary India.

We draw on the findings of a three-year-long research project, the Gender and Space project that focused on women and public space in Mumbai to demonstrate beyond reasonable doubt that despite the apparent visibility of women, even in urban India, women do not share equal access to public space with men. Women in Mumbai have, at best, conditional access to public space. Turning the safety argument on its head, we now propose that what women need in order to maximize their access to public space as citizens is not greater surveillance or protectionism (however well meaning), but the right to take risks. For we believe that it is only by claiming the right to risk, that women can truly claim citizenship. To do this we need to redefine our understanding of violence in relation to public spaceto see not sexual assault, but the denial of access to public space as the worst possible outcome for women. Instead of safety, what women would then seek is the right to take risks, for it is only by claiming the right to risk that we can truly claim citizenship.

The early ideas for this project were born in 1997, while one of us, Shilpa Phadke, was travelling through Agra, Gwalior, Jhansi, Orccha and Datia in North India with a friend. We reproduce some edited notes from her travel diary: