Loiter right

 Last week I had the pleasure of once again listening to the erudite, enthusiastic and eloquent Dr Shilpa Phadke, Assistant Professor, Centre for Media and Cultural Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), who, along with Sameera Kha and Shilpa Ranade, did pioneering work on women’s access to public spaces, encapsulated in the book Why Loiter (Penguin).

Alluringly titled ‘Unfriendly Bodies, Unfriendly Cities: Reflections on Loitering and Gendered Public Space’, the talk was organised as the Eighth Professor L. B. Kenny Endowment Lecture at the Darbar Hall of the Asiatic Society of Mumbai, where she unfolded the theme to a mostly greying audience, spiced with a few young students from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences.

The novelty and freshness of the theme was unchanged since I first learnt about it about a year ago. The talk highlighted the muddleheaded way in which one makes the sweeping generalisation that Mumbai offers safety and freedom to women and how academic research turns such a simplistic assumption on its head. The theme argues that “the only way in which women might find unconditional access to public space was if everyone, including those who were not necessarily friendly to women also had unconditional access.” The study questions the labelling of young men as a group, among several others, as the unfriendly bodies who intimidate women and prevent them from accessing public spaces. The study also strips the idea of ‘loitering’ of its disparaging connotation and presents it as a desirable, enjoyable and celebratory activity, creating a free and egalitarian world for women, which at the moment is a faraway dream.

At the ground level, however, unfriendly bodies lurk in unlikely places. As far as public space in local trains is concerned, women themselves advise a woman who is a disadvantaged commuter due to being old or pregnant, or with small children, to travel in the general compartment rather than in the women’s compartment, because the men not only offer her a seat, but also some private space by way of gender. Woman rarely do.

The women’s compartment, even if moderately crowded, has become not only unfriendly, but a very hostile and threatening bit of public space. Women crowd the doorway, resisting entry and exit of commuters at every station. They have devised a complicated system of booking not only seats but even standing space which ensures that a novice will remain standing till the end of her journey. They freely engage in multiple activities involving the mobile phone, eating, writing, knitting, brushing their hair or applying make-up, thrusting their elbows into the personal space of their neighbours, and causing them considerable discomfort and inconvenience. They wear clothes and ornaments that are abrasive not to themselves but to the others. They cross their legs so that the toe points offensively at the woman seated opposite. And those who are doing this are not erring in innocence, they are deliberately invasive in defiance and denial of other people’s right to equal space. Aggression and encroachment is cantankerously defended, and the aggressor wins, most of the time. Women around who are unaffected by the intrusion mostly choose to look the other way.

All these are instances of irresponsible, intrusive misuse of the scare public space in which women become hostile bodies to each other. If there is a public campaign about creating a disciplined, responsible commuting culture in the women’s compartment, it would work towards making a certain public space safe for women.