Inside a tarpaulin tenement by the road-side, in the shadow of Powai’s posh high-rises, hang quotations from Savitribai Phule, who started India’s first school for women across caste and religious lines in Pune in the late 19th century. A group of women have gathered under the sole LED bulb which illuminates the blue walls of their makeshift ‘library’ to discuss an incident which took place last month.
On the eve of August 14, hours before India’s 77th Independence day, women from Jai Bhim Nagar basti (slum) had joined the ‘Reclaim the Night’ protest at Galleria Mall, Hiranandani. The protest was held by the residents of the Hiranandani-Powai in response to the brutal rape and murder of a young doctor at R.G. Kar Medical College and Hospital in Kolkata.
Looking back at what took place, the women discuss how they heard about the incident and why they decided to join. “Hum bhi aayenge, hum samajhte hain, hum idhar andhere me rehte hain sadak pe… raat bhar neend nahi hai, koi bhi aate jaate rehta hai (We wanted to go, we understand. We live in the darkness by the road-side, sleep evades us at night, people keep coming and going.)”
Jai Bhim Nagar residents have been waging an anti-eviction struggle since their homes were demolished in June. But their spirit was crushed when they were denied their right to protest at the protest site by women from the gated complex, saying that their issues were different from those gathered there.
When women sit together
New forms of urban untouchability and segregation stalk our cities, as more gated residences put up biometric security, surveillance and separate service elevators for those who call these high-rise homes their workplace. The discussion brings up these aspects.
The majority of women of Jai Bhim Nagar come from historically oppressed backgrounds. Many came to Mumbai after marriage for work, others grew up here. A mix of Marathi, Kannada, Vadari, Bhojpuri and other languages mixed up and served as Bambaiya Hindi can be heard in the ‘library’. These women have been living at the footpath around their basti since almost three months after their homes were illegally demolished by the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) on June 6, 2024. Several women and men suffered gruesome injuries from police weapons. Many of them, who were employed inside the Hiranandani premises, have lost their employment or have had to take up work at lower wages. Yet, braving the devastating Mumbai monsoon, they continue their protest by living on the street under extremely unhygienic and unsafe conditions. The women cannot sleep all night as they sit guarding their young children in the pitch dark as there are no street lights. Fresh on their minds is another recent incident of a four-year-old schoolgirl who was raped inside her kindergarten in nearby Badlapur, Thane.
Also read: Bahujan Women Asked to Leave ‘Reclaim the Night’ March in Mumbai
“Itna andhera me rehte hain, ladkiya rehti hain… kitna atyachaar ho raha hai idhar. Sarkaar kuch karti nahi hai, kuch toh karna chahiye (It’s so dark here, girls live here. This is unjust and the government is doing nothing about it),” said one of the women during this discussion. The state of their settlement starkly brings out how women’s safety is linked to their right to housing and safe workplaces. This is the plight of all women who are rendered homeless following demolitions which are increasing at an alarming rate in Mumbai.
Despite limitations within data itself, the 2011 census currently shows that 41% of Mumbai’s entire population (75 lakh out of 1.8 crore) lives in slums. Housing conditions in the last 13 years have only gotten worse. In a city where almost half the population lives in slums, gender violence intertwined with specific material and social configurations produce it’s ugliest forms. The everyday life of women is put under the constraint of space and basic amenities, where women are vulnerable while performing most basic personal activities such as bathing, defecating etc.
Most of these women work as domestic workers in gated communities, whose hunger for expansion is believed to be behind their displacement. When we talk about workplace safety for women, these women are often neglected. The caste and class dynamics and unorganised nature of such work leaves them exposed to various forms of abuse. In addition to being underpaid and overworked, the Indian government has not ratified the International Labour Organisation’s (ILO’s) Convention 189 which grants domestic labour recognition as statutory employment. This means women’s work in the household is not work, legally speaking. While the Maharashtra government rolled out a welfare legislation for domestic workers in 2008 that took the form of cash transfers, the law does little to recognise domestic work as ‘work’, to say nothing of workplace safety. This means there are no written contracts, arbitrary hiring and firing is the norm and there is a constant threat of being accused of ‘theft’ if one chooses to speak up. Police departments are not impartial when a complaint of sexual harassment is filed against residents of a posh Hiranandani locality by these basti-dwelling women.
If we do not rise
Women’s movements across the globe have historically linked structural issues with patriarchal domination, raising the question of women’s liberation together with land rights, climate justice, democratic reforms and so on. An instance of the same can be seen in Maharashtra’s history in the latnis (roti rolling pin) movement. From late 1960s to mid-1970s, waves of women took part in this anti-price rise agitation, when food and commodity inflation disproportionately pinched the women running households. Thousands of women self-employed, casual workers, lower middle-class housewives and even organised workers marched to Mumbai’s mantralaya and conducted a ‘kachra tula’ ,where they weighed the effigy of then chief minister Vasantrao Naik against debris found in adulterated ration supplies. The movement took on an added anti-Emergency dimension in Gujarat and Maharashtra during former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s regime.
This mass agitation after Independence harked back to the days of the Mahila Atma Raksha Samiti (MARS), a women’s self-defence organisation founded during the Great Bengal Famine of 1943. Due to British-manufactured food crisis which left over 38 lakh dead, many women who survived had been forced into prostitution or exposed to sexual violence in refugee camps. MARS rose to protect such vulnerable women, later leading agitations for war food rations and launching the Tebhaga sharecroppers’ movement for land tenancy reforms.
Similarly, in Chhattisgarh, Andhra Pradesh and other states, women led the thekabandi movement in the 1970’s. They linked domestic violence with the arrak and desi sharab cartels run by politically connected business families. Liquor bottles were smashed and alcohol shops set ablaze by militant women. They realised that the same capitalists who held back their family wages were responsible for encouraging wife beating and anti-women attitudes through the unregulated sale of illicit liquor.
From the Telangana armed struggle (1946-51) to the Dalit massacres of Kilvenmani (1968), Karamchendu (1985) and Bathani Tola (1996), women’s bodies were treated as the site of the community’s honour. Rape of women from landless and small peasants’ families was used by the landlord’s caste militias like the Ranveer Sena as a form of ‘collective punishment’ for demanding fair wages or land redistribution. This was not to be accepted meekly any longer, with women even picking up weapons when police and courts failed to deliver justice.
At the gathering, women of Jai Bhim Nagar discuss the history of women’s movement and proudly own their participation in it. They discussed with each other and reflected on their attempt to carve out a terrain where discussion on women’s safety is intertwined with material and social configuration like the question of housing. They shared their experiences of being denied the right to protest and then being shamed by distant relatives who saw their viral video where they are raising the same question. Dismissing such ridicule and sidelining, Jai Bhim Nagar’s women asserted that it is only through struggle for everyone that such rights will be achieved.
Bringing to action their resolve to continue their struggle and make their voices heard, the women organized a protest at Jai Bhim Nagar on September 4, 2024. They walked in locked step, holding posters calling for an end of Builder-Bulldozer raj that is rampant across India. They also formed a human chain that stretched across the length of their huts, along the footpath reaching all the way until Sabki Library. They remained resolute, even when the police showed up in large numbers with blaring sirens, and continued their discussion.
As the nationwide eruption to ‘Reclaim the Night’ embers, it is a moment to soberly reflect on why the women’s movement moved away from demanding such far-reaching structural changes. Calls for justice in the aftermath of gruesome violence may even lead to hanging the rapists, a call chief minister Mamata Banerjee recently espoused for the R.G. Kar incident. The women’s movement must not however lose this imagination which led to such radical changes such as land reform, abolition of landlordism, end to the Emergency and caste atrocities.
The women of Jai Bhim Nagar are burning the night oil in their makeshift library to discuss these questions. A room of their own in this city may do much more for their safety than imagined by Virginia Woolf. Their issues may have more to do with the women of Hiranandani than what meets the eye.
Huma Namal is a member of Collective Mumbai and a PhD scholar at HSS, IIT Bombay.
