There is an entire semantic of respectability a woman must construct each time she leaves her home.
SUMIT DASGUPTA
I am sure we all think of ourselves as observant, vigilant, and intelligent creatures. We are on top of the proverbial food chain and we are the dominant species on this planet. We are outnumbered by ants and we are depleting this planet’s resources at an alarming rate but we are number one while this journey lasts. But I digress—this piece is not about the planet. I am sure you already know where this is going. Let’s look at the implication of my first statement and localise it. We are observant and intelligent creatures, but have you, have we, really looked and observed? Outside our own four walls? It might be difficult I admit, but humanity never thrived with blinders on. It thrives when we see, hear, and acknowledge everything around us (par-
don me for being an ableist). If we look outside, we will notice construction workers, homeless people begging, food stalls going about their daily business, people going to work, children going to school and the unlucky ones going to work (although it is outlawed). One thing that we have all noticed but seemed to have maybe never properly acknowledged is the severe lack of women walking around or going about their daily business.
The gender ratio of India, as of January 2021 according to the UN is at about 720 million males and 620 million females. The female population is at 48% while the male population is at 52%. This ratio is not bad when compared to other third-world developing countries. But when we look around, women are surprisingly missing. You can see them, walking and working but they are massively outnumbered by men. If in a metropolitan, urban city like Bengaluru it is this easily noticeable, imagine tier two and three cities. We can go one step further and include the data released by Statistia while talking about the same gender ratio in our country and it is revealed that for each 1000 males there are 1020 females. The ratio has skewed towards them
for the first time in India’s history. Yet the story remains the same. It seems that public spaces are not accessible to women.
Why Loiter? Women and Risk on Mumbai Streets by Shilpa Phadke, Sameera Khan, and Shilpa Ranade is a transformative book, to say the least. It tests the idea that Mumbai, the so-called
city of dreams, the progressive city of millions
is a safe haven for women. Lucid and compact, the book was born out of a three-year research project titled Gender and Space, undertaken by Phadke, Khan and Ranade. It cuts across location, class, and religious affiliations. Carefully dispelling the myth of Mumbai being a safe city that grants full access to its women, it proves that even in this cosmopolitan city, the access that women have to public spaces is, at best, conditional. The book challenges the idea that being benign or neutral, at least in the public realm, is actually value-laden, constantly putting its women under a panopticon of continuous surveillance that one may evade, or conform to. How easy it is to be spotted as out of the ordinary, and how difficult it is to function, once one has been perceived as such. Eyes are always on the street looking out for those ‘not like us’ and there are so many of ‘them’. The authors demonstrate the difficulty of ‘the others’ to use the city normally and freely. The list of oddballs on the street, who are whetted by the silent city every time they step out is inclusive and top-lined by one single group: ‘all women’. To conform, and so to have open access to public space, Mumbai’s every woman must be or appear to be young, able-bodied, Hindu, upper-caste, heterosexual, married, or marriageable.
The case in Bengaluru is the same even though it’s not Mumbai—it is an urban metropolitan place that boasts of progressive values and prioritises the safety of women. A recent report by the Deccan Herald stated that Karnataka has seen a rise in crimes against women as per National Family Health Survey data, UN, and other official reports. The total number of cases registered relating to crimes against women in 2019 was 13,828. In 2021, this increased to 14,468. While 2020 experienced a marginal drop in the number of cases compared to 2019, the cases of crime increased by 1,788 in the following year, 2021. The government has proposed to tighten security, install CCTV devices everywhere and ‘educate’ the citizens of the state of the evils of abuse of women. These measures are hollow
and do not do anything worthwhile. This report comes hot on the heels of the gruesome murder of Shraddha Walkar in Delhi. TV news pundits, experts, and Elon-Musk-wannabes pointed fingers at Shraddha, her parents, and Muslims but nobody questioned the very roots of the issue of gender, accessibility, and safety. There is an entire semantic of respectability a woman must construct each time she leaves her home. She must be or appear to be neutrally middle-class, not Dalit, not Muslim, not lesbian or queer in any way, and not disabled. On Bengaluru’s streets, every woman must dress modestly and preferably be escorted by an equally respectable-looking man. She must be healthy, freely mobile, sexually inert, and, most importantly, have a good reason for being out of doors. She must never ‘loiter’.
So, whose gender is it anyway? Who does
the mantle of gender belong to? Well, if you ask Judith Butler, American post-modernist philosopher, and gender and queer theorist, they will tell you it does not exist and, in its non-existence, most probably belongs to the exploitative capitalist and patriarchal machinery that benefits out of this. They said that gender roles are performative, it’s a cycle. Society prescribes gender roles long before the so-called gender is even established. People tell you that you are a woman even before you figure out you are one and therefore you perform or act as a woman and the world acknowledges it. Anything that deviates from the path will be derogatorily called ‘deviant’. Gender roles are beneficial to power dynamics because they dictate what a woman should and shouldn’t do. So, when it comes to accessibility and safety of women instead of making public spaces a better place for them it has limited them to their homes without realising that homes are not always a safe space for them.
What Why Loiter and the India Inclusion Audit 2022 is trying to point out is that we must recognise that women’s safety, accessibility, and gender are not a cosmetic issue. It is the assertion that a woman may not remain in the public realm without purpose. If spotted as such, she would be perceived as having a ‘loose’ character or would be putting herself at risk and the city would need to exert itself to keep her safe. Her risks are twofold: the first is from an assault on her modesty or respectability, and the second
is that she may do something disreputable or immodest. Every woman enters public spaces
in Bengaluru with this knowledge. The city is
not designed (nor has it grown) with enough consideration for women. Nowhere is this more visible than in the lack of public conveniences. If women from all strata can’t use a public bathroom or go to a public park without having to think thrice, then there’s no freedom nor any equality for everybody. Questioning the lack of women on the streets of Namma Bengaluru is also recognising that a fundamental right given to the people of India by the constitution is being violated in plain sight and everyone seems to be silent about it or has quietly accepted it and that should not be the norm.
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