Interview

By Padmalatha Ravi on Thursday, May 12, 2011 - 12:13

Padmalatha Ravi spoke to Shilpa Phadke, Sameera Khan and Shilpa Ranade, authors of ‘Why Loiter? Women & Risk on Mumbai Streets’ over email on why the book and who it is meant for.

While the world in general and women especially are only discussing women’s “safety” issues, you do a sort of turn around and demand the right to loiter, to have fun. Why is that?

As we argue in the book, the call against violence and the demand for pleasure cannot really be separated from each other. For us the call for fun by default includes the call for safety. What happens when we focus on ‘safety’ is that the entire debate of women and public space becomes about control and protectionism. By pushing the demand for pleasure we hope to foreground women’s right to be in public space without the ifs and buts of conditions. 

It can be argued that while there are more ‘serious issues’ the demand
to have fun is out of place. Your comments.

As we argue in the book, the women’s movement has enabled us to make significant strides in women’s right to employment and political participation but it has not really given women any rights to leisure, recreation or fun. It is now time for us to make a strong case for women’s right to have fun.

‘Why Loiter’ seeks to speak to not just our own generation of women but to feminists of the generation before us who ask, “why loiter?” and to younger women in the generation after ours who ask “why feminism?”

Fun might sound like a frivolous issue but it is not – the right to have fun especially in public space for women and other marginal populations reflects accurately our claim to public space. Fun is also important precisely because it is so threatening to a large number of people.

You have managed to cover women from wide social and economic range.
How did you choose your subjects for your study?

It was a conscious decision to cover women from as wide a socio-economic range as possible in order to have them as representative of Mumbai as possible. We studied 14 different areas in the city across geographical location, class and religious affiliations, and usage. Segments of some of these localities were architecturally mapped into drawings and ethnographic studies were conducted at suburban railway stations, public parks, shopping malls and coffee shops. We used focus group discussions, interviews , participant observation, mapping, city planning data  and secondary sources in the media and scholarly literature. 

You include men too in the book. Tell us about the thought process
behind it.

We feel that access for women cannot be possible exclusively. In particular, women’s access is often curbed citing the threat of lower-class or Muslim men. This fallacious opposition in fact makes public spaces unwelcoming not just to these men but also women. Unless all citizens: women, men, young, old, rich poor of all classes, communities, sexualities, abilities can access pubic space equally, women’s access will always remain conditional.

Our argument centrally includes men but our research focused primarily on women. There is certainly space for much more research to be done on men’s access to public space especially that of marginal men – hawkers, poor Muslim men, lower class migrants.

Generally women’s issues related books turn out to be pretty heavy, hard for non-scholarly people to read. Why loiter is an exception, was that intentional? How much does it have to do with your personalities?

Yes we intentionally worked on a format that would be accessible. As part of our research we have also written academic papers but we felt we had to take those ideas forward and reach out to a wider audience than speaking to the converts.

Our hope is that the book will be read by a wide variety of people including students of various disciplines – not just social sciences but also humanities, visual arts, architecture, planning.

What is your individual take on ‘fun’ nights or days? How similar or
different is it from the experiences described in the books?

Vis-à-vis the city we feel fun is just being able to walk the city alone, sit on the sea-side or in a park, wander the streets in the middle of the night, without been looked at in askance. Without anyone asking why we were out there or what we were doing. In that sense it is not very different from the fun we ask for in the book.

Share about your experiences on co-writing. It couldn’t have been easy to bring on three different voices into one book in a cohesive manner.

We started out trying to anchor different chapters but realized along the way that it worked much better when we sat down together and wrote. And hard as it might be to believe, although we did face writing blocks at times, co-writing itself was never a hurdle. It was rather a pleasure to be able to share the joys and challenges of writing.

This research was a wonderful experiment on how effective collaboration can be when it works.

We’re always being asked how we wrote together. The answer is sheer serendipity and a lot of hard work. We had hundreds of drafts of chapters and edited and re-edited – in this we were helped greatly by ‘track changes’. We would often voice skype three-way late into the night as we wrote. We had thousands of cups of tea and ate – a lot! By the end we were at a stage where, and we are not exaggerating, it was not unusual for us to be sitting at one desk-top computer with one of us at the keyboard, another one manipulating the mouse and a third person dictating.

What next for the three of you individually. And will there be any
follow up on ‘Why Loiter’?

The immediate year will probably be occupied by all of us trying to reach Why Loiter to a larger audience through readings, workshops and courses. Individually, we are regularly teaching, researching and writing.   

 
About the Authors

Shilpa Phadke is Assistant Professor at the Centre for Media and Cultural Studies at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), Mumbai. She conceptualised and led the Gender & Space Project at PUKAR from September 2003 to September 2006. She has published academically in journals and edited volumes as well as in popular fora such as newspapers. Her areas of concern include gender and the politics of space, the middle classes, sexuality and the body, feminist politics among young women and pedagogic practices. She loves the chaotic city of Mumbai and fantasises that it will one day have a very large park.  

Sameera Khan is a Mumbai-based independent journalist, writer, and researcher. A former assistant editor at The Times of India, she currently teaches journalism at the TISS. An active founder member of the Network of Women in Media, India, she co-authored the Global Media Monitoring Project (GMMP) India Report 2010 and contributed essays to several anthologies including ‘Bombay, meri jaan: Writings on Mumbai’ (Penguin Books 2003), ‘Missing: Half the Story, Journalism as if Gender Matters’ (Zubaan Books, 2010) and ‘Chawls of Mumbai: Galleries of Life’ (Imprint One, 2011). She is currently researching the old Muslim neighbourhoods of Mumbai.

Shilpa Ranade is a practicing architect and researcher. She is a founding partner of the design collaborative DCOOP where her portfolio includes interior, architecture and urban design projects. She has been associate editor, of the South Asian volume in the series ‘World Architecture 1900-2000: A Critical Mosaic’. Shilpa’s writing on architecture and on gendered spaces has been published in various books, academic journals and professional magazines. She has taught architecture and humanities courses at various colleges in the city.

Padmalatha Ravi, is Founder and Editor, Just Femme.