Paabandi, Izzet and Galat Saubat: Negotiating Intimate Relationships and Public Spaces in a Working Class Neighbourhood
Mahuya Bandyopadhyay
Izzet jaan se bhi zyada ahmiyat rakhti hai – Honour is more important than life itself.
Jo cheez dikhayi deti hai usse izzet jati hai, jo dikhayi nahin deti usse izzet nahin jati .- When something is visible, it can lead to loss of honour, if it is not visible then there is no loss of honour.
Panch ke beech agar be izzet ho jaye toh izzet chali jati hai – If we lose our honour in front of five people then we lose our honour.
Hamare andar ki bhi ek zamir hai, hum khud ke nazron se gir jayen toh bhi izzet jati hai - There is a conscience inside each of us, when we fall in our own eyes, then also there is a loss of honour.
My discussions with young women and men, in a largely Muslim working class slum close to Kolkata, foregrounded the notion of izzet as a basic organising principle in the public and intimate spheres of their lives. These restrictive terms such as paabandi (restraint), izzet (honour) and galat saubat (wrong or bad company) surfaced repeatedly in our discussions. They appear to militate against the ideas of choice, independent decision-making, and the varied aspirations that young people in this neighbourhood had. Yet, paradoxically, the negotiations of these contexts also revealed narratives of choice, and independent decision-making in the private lives of young people. I argue that this creates a disjuncture, one that enables us to complicate a linear understanding of global inputs and local responses. It also enables a disruption of the ways in which space making practices in the city are conceived. The discourse around gender and access to city space is framed by the idea of inaccessibility, of the dangers that the city holds for women and girls, and consequently, a protectionist logic and practice is sought to be imposed in the way women and girls participate in the public domain of the city. In this paper, I argue that many of the young women and men, too, in this old, crumbling and yet resolutely present, working class Muslim neighbourhood, present narratives of choice and of the making of city spaces, of creating their own pockets of freedom in the city, despite, and at the cost of, experiencing its many apparent dangers. The tenor of academic research on gender and the city is premised largely on the following ideas: first that the gendered separation of the private and public spheres even though considerably reworked in industrial urban society, continues to shape women’s experience of the city; second, the discriminatory access that women and young girls can be addressed through gener mainstreaming and effective policy making in building inclusive city spaces and practices of use for all (Phadke and others) and also through larger movements to reclaim the city spaces. Finally there is the idea that urban spaces produce
varied re-makings of urban public space and the multi-layered nature of gendered belonging in the city. These remakings, I argue also draw on certain cultural specificities, institutions and embedded community practices.
The paper addresses the issue of young women and their relationship to their environment, specifically in the context of their intimate relationships and their desires for experiencing the joys of freedom and choice. The ethnographic instances featured here enable a rethinking of the sharp divide between public spaces and private worlds and provide a nuanced understanding of how women in a working class neighbourhood remake city spaces simply by accessing these spaces and their bodily being and expressions in these spaces. As the gender and city discourse remains framed within the arguments of controlled access, of the dangers of the city, of the need to build inclusive spaces and of the call to reclaim city spaces, the cultural nuances from a working class neighbourhood reveal deep class faultlines. The paper, implicitly, is an elaboration of these faultlines, as young women narrate their experiences of accessing city spaces as active agents, and in contradistinction to the dictates of the triumvirate of family, community and the notion of izzet. It is this triumvirate that reproduces dominant metaphors of access to the city and frames how the working class woman is to access the city.
If there has been a movement to reclaim city spaces who has led it? Who benefits? And in whose terms is this access to space being articulated? These questions indicate the relative absence of multiple narratives of how women and girls across different contexts and class backgrounds experience city spaces, remake them and use them to live lives of choice and freedom, albeit with all the perils that these spaces of new found freedom contain. The narratives presented here could fall within the realm of the everyday zig-zagging that women engage in to negotiate their access to the public spaces of the city. But they also tell other stories; those of the tremendous significance attached to choice, in matters of education and employment and everyday life, and to the freedom of sexual expressions, and how the city and the neighbourhood in the city are presented as allies in the rather private articulations of aspirations, love and desire.
I draw on the grounded notions of paabandi, izzet and galat saubat, and marzi, hakh and adhikar to focus on the dynamics of larger changes, and local responses in intimate and familial relationships in an urban neighbourhood. These changes can be seen in three interconnected realms: first, in the concrete material realm of technology and its use in people’s everyday lives;
in the context of how young people express their everyday struggles to educate themselves and find respectable employment in the global economy. In this context, young men articulate a strong desire to move away from the kind of work that their parents do. Young women resist their family’s attempts to marry them off at an early age, by finding ways to prolong their education or find some ways to enter the workforce, generally within the neighbourhood. And thirdly, at the time of fieldwork, West Bengal was in the throes of political upheaval and change, and this happened within a larger context of the need for democratisation and deep-seated anger
and frustration with its lack in more that thirty years of Left front rule. These aspects had significant implications for people’s private lives and intimate relationships and my paper draws on narratives from this realm to reveal connections between people’s private lives and public worlds in this neighbourhood.
The basti, which is the physical location of my site of ethnographic fieldwork, is more than a century old. Historically, the basti land came to be occupied in nineteenth century metropolitan Calcutta, fuelling a demand for cheap labour in the industries and jute mills in the area. This labouring population was largely, migrant population from Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. A three- tier tenurial structure emerged in order to service the housing needs of this large population. A landlord who owned the land would rent it out to intermediate agents or thika tenants, for further renting and management. These thika tenants would then build hutments, of rather poor quality with little or no regard for civic safety and hygienic conditions. ‘It was around the time of the first world war in 1914, that the jute mills in the area were doing very well and making unimaginable and unprecedented profits. In order to keep up they needed more labour than could be provided by the people of Bengal. It is around this time that recruitment from areas of North Bihar and some districts of Uttar Pradesh bordering North Bihar were tapped to bring in the additional human resource. A sardar did this work of bringing in labour. The empty lands around the jute mills were taken up by this growing labour population. When the owners realized that this was happening, they acted to save their individual property from becoming community property. These rooms were then rented out to labourers. These were called chhita byara. With civic improvements in the area and an increase in the market value of the land, the landlord would have the tenants evicted and sell the plot. The labourers had to move to another similar site. The landlord, the thika tenant, the labourer or the civic authorities – technically all were stakeholders in this land and property, yet no one had any interest in improving the civic conditions of life in these bastis. They remained as insecure, unsafe and dangerous living spaces for a migrant working class population.
Legislation in the state of West Bengal has attempted to protect the rights of both the tenant and the thika tenant. The Calcutta Thika Tenancy Act passed in 1981 and amended in 1993 and again in 2001 sought to protect the rights of the tenants who use the basti structures.
Changes in the existing structures thus could not be undertaken without ensuring the current tenants a living space in the new structure. Even though plans for basti redevelopment have been afoot and the Left front government after coming to power in 1977 took over a majority of the basti land, the Court upheld the right of the thika tenants to undertake any change or work in the existing basti structures. This acts as an impediment to the State to carry out basti redevelopment work. However, the people of these neighbourhoods tend to display lack of confidence in the state and its ability to better their lot and in this context, control of the State over basti land may not have amounted to much.
While asking questions about basic services delivery in this neighbourhood and researching networks to understand how these basic needs are procured in a context of apparent state failure, I found myself interacting intensively with many young people living in the basti, along with my research assistant. We often found ourselves talking about the lives and choices that young people, in the age group 15-20 years mostly, were making with regard to their lives, their search for paid employment, the attempts and to increase their chances of getting work and their relationships both within and outside their families. In talking about their desires for respectable work, or government jobs, for work with better pay, for securing a better education many young men and women spoke of the physical and temporal constraints on their everyday life. Women were not allowed out of their homes or outside their neighbourhood after dark.
Young men were taunted and barred from studying further, take competitive exams for jobs rather than continuing their family trade, typically of small shops or home-based businesses.
While the discussions began around issues of finding good jobs or taking tuitions to appear for competitive exams or to pass the chartered accountancy exam or their graduation degrees, they soon slipped into questions of personal freedom with regard to people’s intimate relationships.
For many, the two were intricately linked. The triad of family, community and neighbourhood appear contiguous even as they attempt to break this linkage, through their articulation of izzet and practice of paabandi on the lives of young people. At the same time, as young people negotiate these constraints they present discontinuous subjectivities.
I have struggled with the issue of what to include in this paper and how to present the very personal stories that were shared by the young women we interacted with. In retelling the stories of sexual choice and freedom, sexual exploitation within a context of a need for a better life and of the vulnerable position of young women attempting to deftly negotiate choice and freedom in and through both traditional as well as modern institutions and spaces, we were deeply aware that this can often take on a sensational character. We hope that what remains through these retellings is not the stories and their details (which we have attempted to mask and delete as far as possible), but the larger point about the reconfiguration of choice and izzet, and the reconstitution of both traditional and modern spaces and institutions that young women of the basti have to or are able to access.
Following this introduction, the paper is divided into two main sections. The first elaborates the notion of mahaul or environment through a case of everyday harassment and the subsequent violence that followed leading to the presence of the police in the basti. Through this case we see the hegemonizing influence of izzet in ordering social life in the basti. In the next section the focus is on how women maintain relationships of love and friendship, within this mahaul, brought to order through the principles of paabandi and purdah. We show that traditional institutions such as paabandi and purdah are also used as strategies by many young women to exercise choice in their relationships before marriage. This section also highlights the new kinds of vulnerabilities that women encounter as they express choice, negotiate their relationships before and outside marriage, and attempt to navigate the constraints of their
mahaul, which are related to the concerns of the community as well as the financial concerns of the family.
Theoretically I anchor this paper in Merleau-Ponty’s ideas of the body and its expressions in the phenomenology of perception. The narratives presented here speak of essences and meanings of the body and its organising social principles and governing institutional sites or practices, while rooting these in the context of the body as it exists within an urban space. How do different expressions of the body reorient urban space? How do practices around the body enable a resistant politics of space to emerge and how do these narratives shape a view of the city and the urban neighbourhood? I argue that the specifics and the nuances of young women’s engagements with the public spaces of the city, the sites they frequent and support reveals multiple narratives of being in the city; not reducible to linear ideas of lack and marginalisation.
Mahaul and private lives
The case presented here shows how an incident of street harassment of a young woman became a larger political issue in the neighbourhood and ended in violent fighting between members of two major parties – the CPM and the Trinamool. Here, we attempt to show that mahaul, literally environment, takes on new and added dimensions different from the conventional constraints or paabandi, as experienced and imagined by young women of the basti.
A school going girl, Chameli was often harassed on her way in and out of the basti, by Aslam, a boy of the neighbourhood. He stood around in the street corner and as she passed by on her way to school or tuition classes he commented, tried to engage her in conversation and blew cigarette smoke in her face. She shared this incident with an uncle, Raju. To sort the matter and warn Aslam, her uncle went looking for him. He did not find Aslam but met another young man, Hasan, a member of the CPM cadre. Hasan told Raju that if you want to protect the women of your family, just go back home without doing all this. Then Raju began arguing with him and it led to a fight between the two. In response to this, Raju wanted to go to the police but the councilor of the area was informed of this immediately and he sent his men to inform Raju that he should go to the party office (CPM) and the matter would be resolved there. Just then some young recruits of the Trinamool Party came there and insisted that Raju should go to the police.
While this was being discussed and argued, some men, relatives of the councilor, who were also members of CPM came there and started beating the Trinamool members. As word spread supporters of the individuals involved in the initial fight joined in. Raju was from a neighbouring basti. People from that basti too came in. One Trinamool member, the brother of a local leader suffered a life-threatening injury in this violent fight. In order to ensure immediate peace in the neigbourhood and to prevent further revengeful violence along party lines, a curfew was imposed for more than 12 hours. A private and personal matter became a larger party and political issue.
I use this instance as a way of elaborating the concept of mahaul. One of the ways in which the notion of mahaul is interpreted by young women is the larger community and the idea of shame and beizzeti (dishonour) arising from one’s own actions or from the actions of others. The mahaul or the environment is such that the actions of young women always face the possibility of being misunderstood and shamed and to avoid such shaming young women must desist from engaging fully in the public realm. Mahaul in this articulation is a constraint in the traditional sense of community ties, and notions of acceptable and unacceptable behaviour within the society one lives in. However, this case of the snowballing of a young girl’s public harassment into a large political issue indicates another meaning of mahaul, as a social world with an ever present potentiality of violence and the likelihood of a private matter or trouble being transformed into a public and political party issue.
In one of our group discussions with a mixed group of boys and girls, one of the girls said rather confidently: ‘99% people have relationships. Whatever they maybe at home, and whatever they may say, they do have these forbidden relationships outside’. Young women, whether in high school or college have the opportunity to meet men and women of their age group. Parents with even minimum resources send their children for tuitions, which is another space for making and meeting friends. A slightly older woman said: the mahaul in the basti is still bad, but it is not like before, I think a big change is that most parents now value education. It may not necessarily be education to get the daughters to get jobs but even to find a good husband a little bit of education is needed. Parents, even the uneducated ones, know that today. I remember when I went to school and I come from a liberal family. My father always gave us a lot of freedom and our family was more like the Bengali families and unlike the typical conservative Muslim families. So I would go to school with my dupatta not really covering my front part, but it would be neatly draped in a V shape around my neck and on my shoulders. I remember once walking to school with friends and a man from the basti seeing me and he took off his shoes and started beating me, calling me all sorts of names and abusing me. I was shaken and humiliated.
Something like that won’t happen now. And that’s a good thing. To study, to go to school, to work, I really had to struggle, with my family, once my father passed away and always with the community. My father too struggled with the community. But he taught me that there is a conscience inside each of us, when we fall in our own eyes, then there is a loss of honour’. This slightly older woman also articulated that there could be a loss of honour when one does something dishonourable in front of five people (the five people, implying samaj or society).
Access to education is then seen by many young people as providing opportunities for fun, friendships with people of the same sex as well as relationships with the opposite sex, which are otherwise forbidden. Mothers often send their young daughters out of the house after extracting a promise that they will not interact with any men. Galat kaam or galat saubat in this context is defined in terms of not covering yourself adequately or not maintaining purdah, both in a physical as well as in a symbolic sense. Galat kaam or galat saubat are defined differently by these young women and their families. The family members of these young women are clear that
they are permitting a relaxation of purdah rules for the sake of education and this is a privilege given with the trust that it won’t be misused.
Contrary to this the young women understood and articulated their loss of honour or izzet in terms of breaking the trust that their parents place on them in relaxing the rules of purdah and of their community. They do no think of talking to boys, interacting with them or even having male friends or love relationships as leading to a loss of honour. All of this is in harmony with the ‘modern’ and the new found and newly understood notions of independence, freedom of choice, and being comfortable with the articulation of the feeling of love. And the parents would construe these as a complete disregard for the norms of purdah, sharm and concomitantly, izzet. But because they are so aware that they are allowed to study, go out, given freedom on the implicit trust that they will not engage in certain kinds of behaviours in the public realm, that doing anything to break that trust results in beizzeti or loss of honour. As one young woman said: ‘isse hum apne nazar mein gir jana kehte hain’, (we call this falling in your own eyes). It is not necessarily about being discovered, but about one’s own conscience. Yet in most of our interactions young women as well as men said that they valued freedom, choice and the space to explore sexuality. And they valued these enough to access these spaces at the cost of breaking their parents’ trust and confronting both their personal guilt as well as their parents’
disappointment and ensuing problems.
Negotiating intimate relationships, remaking public spaces
The very practices that are used to control women’s lives are in fact used to negotiate not just individual choice and experimentation with desire, intimate relationships and aspirations, but also to carve out independent relationships with public spaces in the city as well as the neighbourhood.
Purdah
‘If and when we make friends with boys, then we keep this relationship in purdah’.
Keeping a relationship in hiding or in purdah is one such strategy. A young woman who regularly met her boyfriend during the day when her father and brothers were away at work found allies in her mother, sisters and in her purdah. Not only did it enable her to freely walk the streets along with her boyfriend; but she could also keep hidden, and anonymous, both literally and figuratively her use of the public spaces of the city and the neighbourhood. She said that her mother allowed her to go out during the day if she agreed to being in purdah and returning home before the men. Her mother was eager for her a find a good groom for herself as that would ease the burden of dowry in a family of three daughters of marriage age and limited resources.
Many meanings of purdah are articulated through this instance. The apparent significance lies in
familiar characteristics. Purdah helps to create the condition of anonymity, which is further used by her to become a stranger in an intensely familiar space. When we think of this young woman’s access to the public spaces of the city, clearly it is negotiated by the purdah, as a concrete garment that hides, creates anonymity and enables the young women to walk through the city streets and the neighbourhood. It is also articulated here as a mark of respect to the male elders in the family, where they were to be shielded from certain matters of the family. To keep in purdah the details of one’s intimate relationship is the strategy that makes possible all the other meanings of purdah. This young woman also articulated the sense of safety and freedom while in purdah. Here the realm family and a basic organising principle of community life is used as a subversive tool. And this has a direct bearing on women’s access to the city. So remaking city spaces through the use of purdah and its multiple meanings appear as a significant theme in understanding how young women from migrant families articulate the typical questions of gender and space.
Materiality
There are things and spaces – a material world – that makes these relationships of choice possible. For instance, the cabin restaurants, which serve as meeting spaces for young couples, access to cell phones for messaging, endless conversations and internet chats and also the multiple new entertainment options in the city – malls, and cinemas. Mobile technology has opened up access to a range of networks. It has also enabled privacy and multiple opportunities for exploring relationships, finding friends and being in constant touch with one’s network, not necessarily within the immediate interactional sphere. I will focus on the cabin restaurant as a space for the performative realm of intimate relationships and the ironic and inconsistent ways in which young women relate to this space, even as they continue to access it.
One of my informants, tells me about the local goon, Riaz, whose sister is main builder/promoter in the basti. Riaz runs a small restaurant in the neighbourhood. It is a restaurant that I see on my way into the basti each day and in my initial days of fieldwork, I had often wondered why there was no one there. Crates of cold drink bottles, sometimes all empty, fill the space that is visible to me on my way into the basti. There are few chairs and tables on the ground floor and the restaurant has a deserted, worn out look. ‘Galat jagah hai, (it’s a bad (wrong) place) my informant told me. ‘It is not a restaurant. Upstairs there are rooms for couples to sit in. They serve cold drinks and then they will draw the curtains of the cabin and won’t disturb you. You have to pay by the hour. I am ashamed that such a place exists in my basti. I have tried to tell people so that they close this down but it has the backing of influential people.
It wont happen. Because places like this exist right here in our basti, our girls are not safe. Men can take advantage of them so easily’. Riaz is a member of the ruling party and a close aide of the local leader. Ali, a young man who moved to the basti a few years ago, assists Riaz’z sister. Ali does all the electrical work for the new buildings. ‘I had learnt the electrical work from someone else, how to hook from the CESC line and now I run my own line in the basti. I also do all the
electrical work for the promoter. It brings in slightly more money’, said Ali. He was able to move from his earlier rented accommodation, into a largish room he bought in a building in the basti. I was told later by the person who introduced me to Ali that he was in a relationship with Riaz’a sister and that he would be in a favourable position till this relationship continued. Riaz, his sister, the local councillor, Ali and Riaz’s friends and aides – they constitute and control a large part of the housing economy within the basti. It is a nexus of strong ‘financial backing’, political connections that make permissions easier, violence or the threat of it through a group of young men who are friends and work as associates, and some forms of technical expertise, which someone like Ali has and is able to use. It is this nexus that makes it impossible for the residents of this neighbourhood to complain against and dislodge the cabin restaurant in their area. This nexus is also articulated as contributing to the existing mahaul in the neighbourhood, one that has the potential to produce a violent encounter in the neighbourhood. The randomness of this violence in the neighbourhood creates a sense of insecurity for many young women and a protectionist logic of how women must behave as members of this neighbourhood and by extension, as citizens of the city.
The cabin restaurant in the neighbourhood is not accessed by the young men and women of the neighbourhood. Even though it had a deserted look, I had often seen couples walk in and out of the space. But many young men and women admitted that the cabin restaurants in other parts of the city and resorts along the highway are crucial sites for them to engage in and continue their romantic relationships. So the space of the cabin restaurant, though seen as dangerous, as having the potential for ‘galat saubat’ when it is present within the neighbourhood, is viewed with liberating aspects when the same young people visit these cabin restaurants in the rest of the city. The idea of purdah pervades the perceptions and views of young men and women of these spaces. These restaurants enable both the performance and the veiling of intimate relationships;
but they are also at once public and known.
Emerging forms of danger and risk
Mobile technology, the cabin restaurants and access to a large network of friends, not strictly within a circle of support and or physically contiguous – while all these are seen as enabling for for the articulation of choice and freedom in intimate relationships but they also contribute to the production of dangerous sites and place young women in new relationships of risk with the city.
The choices of a young woman who chose to carry on a relationship with a young man from a neighbouring area in the hope that it would end in marriage reveal the production of risk and danger through these new social spaces aided by a material world. Through this case we were made aware of the new kinds of vulnerabilities that women experience as they explore sexuality through relationships of choice. Afreen is twenty years old and comes from a family with seven sisters and two brothers. Her elder brother is the only earning member. Three of her sisters are married. Afreen has been in a serious relationship for the past three years with a young man from a neighbouring basti. This case is constructed from our interactions with Afreen and
years ago Afreen was pregnant. Her boyfriend gave her a pill to abort the pregnancy. She did not share this with anyone at the time. The pill resulted in excessive bleeding and her family called on a community worker to take her to the hospital. She took her to a government hospital where the doctors refused to attend to her. The community worker who went to talk to the doctor was told to take her away as it was an abortion case of an unmarried girl and they would not do it as the condition was serious and they did not want to take responsibility. The community worker said that the doctors and nurses even used abusive language for her. The community worker then took Afreen to a local ‘parivar seva sansthan’ and requested the doctors there. She had to lie to them that Afreen had married against her family’s wishes and that the family wasn’t aware of her marriage. After many requests the abortion was done. None of this was shared with the family, as it would lead to more problems for Afreen. After this incident, Afreen continued her relationship with the young man. In her family when there was talk of her marriage she told her mother that she wanted to marry him. When the families intervened the young man said that they wanted two lakh rupees as dowry and that they would have to get the elder son married first. Afreen’s family is in no position to pay that amount so Afreen’s mother told her that she should not expect to get married to him and that she would have to get married to a man of their choice, someone who was within their family’s background and stature. Afreen continues her relationship with her boyfriend through regular phone calls, and meetings at his friend’s home and in restaurant cabins.
Afreen’s story is not an unusual one. Many young women in the basti have made similar choices, either in the hope of marrying a man of their choice, which may enable better negotiating capacity after marriage, or even to be able to explore sexual freedom and choice. But such choice is riddled with many complications. Many of these young women are blackmailed into granting sexual favours to those who make their relationships of choice possible – the friend who lends his flat for a couple of hours or the neighbour who discovers the nature of the relationship and wants to put a price on his silence.
Concluding Reflections
These ethnographic encounters show the everyday workings of the notions of mahaul, izzet, galat saubat. These are understood as constraining elements in the life-worlds of young women and as enabling a protectionist logic and controlled access to different public spaces of the city. The multi-layered articulations of these reveal them either as strategies for expressing bodily freedom and choice in intimate relationships or as justifications for their actions in emergent forms of sociality in the urban neighbourhood. Paradoxically, however, such access to choice and freedom also implies a withdrawal of the support of familial networks in the event of crises. The young women are thus exposed to multiple layers of potential risk and violence; the price to be paid for relationships of choice and an environment of freedom in personal life.
