Why Loiter?: Women and Risk on Mumbai Streets

by Shilpa Phadke

some women face the threat of being defiled in public space, then some (other) women are considered capable of defiling the ‘sacredness’ of public space by their very presence. ‘Respectable’ women could be potentially defiled in a public space while ‘non-respectable’ women are themselves a potential source of contamination to the ‘purity’ of public spaces and, therefore, the city. For the so-called ‘respectable’ woman this classification is always fraught with some amount of tension, for should she transgress the carefully policed ‘inside–outside’ boundaries permitted to her, she could so easily slip into becoming the ‘public’ woman—the threat to the sacrality of public space.