Where Are The Women ? — Photo Documentary on Gender And Public Space in 5 Indian Cities

Introduction — To the five part photo documentary. An edited version of this photo documentary first published on Firstpost.

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Gloria Steinem, in her 2015 Christmas wish list said,

“I’m glad we’ve begun to raise our daughters more like our sons — but it will never work until we raise our sons more like our daughters.”

To elaborate, centuries of women’s movement have secured for women, the right to vote, right to education, right to participate in workforce and several other rights that enable them to come out of their kitchens and claim equal citizenship in public life. However, we have not addressed the question ‘who legitimately owns the public domain’ and the gender based segregation of spaces as public–masculine and private–feminine has not been challenged. We encouraged and enabled our girls to step out of the kitchen, but didn’t inform and motivate the boys to step in.

The home and kitchen is still considered women’s primary domain and the world outside is of men. Women are allowed to venture out in public space but not really own it. As a result young girls in Haryana continue to drop out of school because of the sexual harassment they face on their way to school, rape victims continue to be blamed for ‘inviting trouble’ by being out at a public space at a certain time and so on.

Women are allowed access to public space only for legitimate purpose and are expected to walk the straight line between home to their place of purpose.

Women do not have the right to purposelessly loiter for fun.

The urban women seemingly have a better access to public space with millions of women participating in workforce, commuting daily using public transport or going about their economic activities etc. Yet if we observe urban spaces deeply we would realize that women have very limited access to public spaces.

In 2011, the seminal work ‘Why Loiter?’ (Phadke, Ranade, Khan, 2011) attempted to bring a paradigm shift in how women could claim full citizenship. Based upon 3 years of research work the book argues that in order to maximize their access to public space, women do not need “greater surveillance or protectionism,” but rather “the right to engage in risk.” Only by claiming the “right to risk,” they argue, can women truly claim citizenship.

This five part photo documentary attempts to build upon the above work and document urban women’s experience of accessing public space through photographs in five major cities, Delhi, Kolkata, Chennai, Bangalore and Mumbai.

How many women are there in a given space, what activity are they engaged in? What activities are they engaged in? What is their body language? Do women and men use the same space differently? Does women’s access to public space vary according to what time of the day it is? Does it vary according to caste, class and age of the woman? Thesee are some of the questions I seek to answer through this series. The idea behind the series is not to provide anecdotal evidence for or against any hypothesis, but to trigger a thought in the audience’s mind. To inspire them to observe the public space around them more closely as they go about their daily lives and find the answers themselves.

Coming up part 1 — Delhi