Why Loiter?: Women and Risk on Mumbai Streets

by Shilpa Phadke

For women, accessing public space is rarely a simple question of get-up-and-leave. It often involves the performance of unbelievably elaborate masquerades, undertaking complicated subterfuges and employing a range of accessories both consciously and subconsciously.

These signify matrimony, perhaps, the most telling sign of respectability in the Indian context where marriage is assumed to indicate the safe containment of women’s sexuality.

Marriage, especially coupled with appropriate gender performance, often gives women greater access to public space.

Women manufacture purpose through the carrying of large bags, by walking in goal-oriented ways and by waiting in appropriate spaces where their presence cannot be misread.

Women also use religion, and more specifically, religious activities and functions for which it is relatively easy to get family and societal sanction, as opportunities to enhance their access to the public.

The demonstration of devotion and religiosity becomes an important marker of respectable womanhood.

The less women appear to conform to unspoken norms of respectability, the greater appears to be the need for explicitly articulated codes. These codes are enforced at various levels by the family, community and even the state through implicit and explicit boundaries that delimit women’s access to the public.

Clearly, for women who do not conform, the spaces where they ostensibly belong are the most discomfiting.40

It is comparatively heterogeneous spaces that engender the greatest capacity to access public space. Single women who live on their own in Mumbai, away from families, are often the ones who articulate the greatest degree of unmediated access to public space.

Dress codes that outline what women can and cannot wear are another example of such explicitly articulated regulatory codes of behaviour. In fact, when there are visible public attacks on women, the discussions inevitably focus on how the women could have prevented it. Clothing is the first target: its length, width, cut and even colour are debated in the blame game of national sexual politics—many colleges and universities across the country have instituted dress codes.

Seeking access as visibly respectable and feminine women also excludes all those women who do not wish to be ‘feminine’ or ‘respectable’ in their dress and demeanour.

shopping is an act that is both respectable and respected because consumption demonstrates power.

access to these spaces demands a demonstration of their capacity to buy.

This places a two-fold pressure on women: one, to embody the new vision of the modern desirable woman, well groomed and sexy; and two, to simultaneously demonstrate adherence to the norms of respectable Indian womanhood.

This reveals the new personality of global capital—it is a chameleon that can change colours to suit local conditions.

So fragile and shifting then are women’s claims to even these supposedly friendly spaces that they have to carefully monitor themselves even here.

new spaces of consumption like coffee shops and malls are not public spaces, but privatized spaces that masquerade as public spaces.

Even middle-class women who conform to normative ideas of respectability are at best invited into the ‘privatized’ public as consumers. Despite their desirability in these private spaces, women continue to have only conditional access, not a claim to public space.

This vision, that women do not have the right to be in public, also underlies the responses of both the perpetrators and the victims of the attack.

the message being sent to women in the city is clear: the public wants its women safe, but it thinks that the buck stops at the women themselves, it is up to them to know their limits. The police think it’s not their job to make sure the streets are safe for everyone—in fact, they believe it is the responsibility of women (and their families) to police themselves.

However well-intentioned, media reportage of violent incidents tends to contribute to making the predominant discourse of women and public space one of inevitable danger.

the manner in which stories of violence are told and hierarchies of ‘danger’ are constructed magnifies the perception of the threat to women in public.

This misplaced focus on the dangers to women in public space contradicts two well-documented facts: one, that more women face violence in private spaces than in public spaces, and two, that more men than women are attacked in public.

Concerns about the safety of women then are essentially about sexual safety and not safety from theft or accident or even murder.

women’s sexual safety is connected not as much to their own sense of bodily integrity or to their consent, but rather to ideas of izzat and honour of the family and the community.

Without putting the onus on the media to ‘change society’, what one might seek then is media coverage of violence in public spaces that is not skewed heavily in favour of violent incidents against women alone.

Is it too much to hope that in the foreseeable future the larger public discourse will ask, ‘But why on earth wasn’t she safe and what can we change about our city to make it safe for everyone?’

For women, the potential negative outcome of courting risk lies not only in the threat of physical violence, but also in the risk of being seen as ‘unrespectable’ and therefore not worthy of protection.

Because the city is cast as dangerous and because women are not allowed legitimately to take risks, even the simple act of walking in the streets without purpose is not easily achieved.

When men engage the night, they are taking the chance that they might experience something positive: pleasure, fun, exhilaration. They also risk hurt, injury or death. But, for men, an assault is just an assault—they may be injured, maimed or killed—their families will be upset, but their social status will remain unaffected.

For women, the situation is quite different. When they do engage the night, even when they are not assaulted, even if they actually have fun, being seen in public space (especially while having fun) by the wrong people could adversely affect not just their own reputation, but also that of their families.

to see not sexual assault, but the denial of access to public space as the worst possible outcome for women.

Locating the desire for pleasure higher in the hierarchy of demands than the avoidance of sexual violence challenges the assumption that women’s bodies belong to their families and communities rather than to themselves.

At the same time, it is important to assert that risk should be a matter of choice and not thrust upon women through inadequate or short-sighted planning. The right to pleasure, by default, must include the right against violence, in the shape of infrastructure like transport, street lighting and public toilets. It must include policies that enable more sensitive law enforcement that recognizes people’s fundamental right to access public space. Demanding the right to pleasure does not absolve the city administration of the responsibility to provide these facilities.

What women need then is the right to ‘dare’, to take chosen risks in an environment where their ‘daring’ is recognized and celebrated.

can we now claim the right to other kinds of pleasure? The pleasure of sitting on an unbroken park bench, reading a book or eating a banana (why not a banana?). The pleasure of walking the streets at night without anxiously looking over our shoulders. The pleasure of not having to change clothes in a car because your family thinks they are immodest. The pleasure of not having to hide when you enter your building at 2 a.m. in the morning for fear of what the neighbours will say. The pleasure of using a clean well-lit toilet at 4 a.m. in the morning on a public street without worrying that none will be open. This kind of pleasure can only come from the right to take risks without the fear of loss of reputation as good girls.

a relationship in which one approaches the city with the expectation of enjoyment.

Public space in Mumbai is almost a contradiction in terms. In this city, public space is not just inadequate, it is also rapidly shrinking and increasingly being privatized.

From our perspective, public space includes ‘functional’ sites such as streets, public toilets, bus stops, railway stations, marketplaces and modes of public transport, such as buses and trains, as well as recreational areas, such as parks, maidans, waterfronts and promenades. Privatized recreational spaces such as shopping malls, coffee shops, restaurants and cinemas are increasingly being represented as the new public spaces of the city.

Given the sheer shortage of public spaces in the city, one might argue that the lack of access to public space is true not just for women, but for all citizens. While this is accurate in a broad sense, it is also true that women are particularly affected in ways often connected to their gender. Spaces (and places) are not neutral grounds nor are they equally designed for everybody.

space is not a given but is ‘constructed’. Space is not a passive backdrop against which human activities are played out but is an active participant in the making of a particular social order.

space is what one might call an ‘embodied experience’, that is, it is experienced viscerally through the bodies we inhabit: male, female, rich, poor, old, young, white, black, brown, able-bodied and differently abled.

Across geography and time, men and women do not have the same kind of access to space, nor do they use it in quite the same way.

access to public space is dependent not only on the ‘permission’ to be in public, but also critically on the availability of actual material facilities, which make it possible to use these spaces.

The relevant question to ask here in relation to risk in public space is whether these risks are imposed or chosen. For instance, the risk of accessing public space, in a broad sense, is chosen, but the risk associated with the lack of infrastructure like good roads, street lighting and adequate public transport are not a matter of individual choice and imposed through decisions made by city planners.

Our desire to court risk in the city does not preclude the explicit understanding that the city needs to provide its citizens with infrastructure of all kinds—including transport, toilets and parks—to enhance access to public space.

One might contend that changing people’s attitudes is usually a slow process, but the provision of infrastructure can be a simple one-time administrative policy decision.

Public spaces and infrastructure are usually designed for an abstract ‘generic’ user. In the context of an ideology that deems women’s proper place to be at home, this imagined ‘neutral user’ of public facilities and infrastructure is invariably male. Not just gender, but all manner of politics—class, caste, religious and sexual, as also physical ability—are part of imagining this ‘neutral’ user. The prototype user then is not just male but also middle or upper class, Hindu, upper caste, able-bodied and heterosexual.

Infrastructure that privileges the needs of one group stands to reinforce the status quo and promotes an unfair hierarchy.

Infrastructural provisions that discriminate against some groups not only create everyday problems of accessibility for them but also reflect their marginalized position in society.