Why Loiter?: Women and Risk on Mumbai Streets

by Shilpa Phadke

In Mumbai today, the unbelongers are the poor, cast in the role of ungracious migrants who occupy the city’s spatial assets without officially recorded remuneration; the dalits and other lower castes whose presence is barely acknowledged, except grudgingly, when they take to the streets during Ambedkar Jayanti; and the Muslims, who are increasingly stereotyped as disagreeable outsiders, criminals and potential terrorists. Then there are the couples we don’t want sullying our park benches, the non-vegetarians we don’t want residing in our building complexes, the bhaiyas we don’t want selling our fish or driving our cabs, the gays and lesbians we don’t want corrupting our young, the North-Easterners we’d rather dismiss as ‘Nepali’, the elderly folk we don’t want occupying expensive real estate, the differently abled who we’d rather just ignore than allow any access to public space in the city, and, of course, in public space, all women without legitimate purpose, who should in any case be at home as good wives and mothers.