The Politics of Home Making: Migrant journeys and water encounters in a New City Lalitha Kamath and Radhika Raj
City building and state making around water in Vasai Virar
In the early 2000s in Mumbai, imaginations and aspirations of building a world class city led to mass slum demolitions that generated an exodus of marginalised populations -- largely second and third generation migrants and religious minorities -- into the hinterland in search of new lands to settle on. Big men or ‘dadas’ in Vasai Virar, a peripheral metropolitan sub-region responded to this demand by acquiring and developing lands and colluding with land-owning castes to settle these populations in new informal settlements. They were encouraged in this by the ruling patriarch of Vasai Virar, fondly called ‘Appa’ (father) who used the opportunity to consolidate a powerful gangster-style regime that governed the area through a combination of formal state-systems and informal party networks of smugglers, contractors, builders, social workers and fixers of different sorts, and relied on a combination of surveillance, violence and promises. These burgeoning settlements, collectively referred to as the ‘city of the poor’, provided refuge to migrants banished from Mumbai while producing a flourishing economy centred around real estate and building construction. At the centre of this political economy was water.
As the informal city expanded rapidly, pressures around scarce water resources mounted, soon revealing a major faultline between the claims of ‘migrants’ to this precious resource and that of the locals or “sthanik” who claimed it as their rightful resource. Further, a thriving informal tanker economy emerged to fuel the growth of the ‘city of the poor’ in the absence of formal water networks. Controlled by Appa’s regime, it produced a parallel water economy that
substituted for and supplemented the formal hydraulic networks. The commodification of water in this manner served to bolster the ruling regime’s revenues and reinforce the regime’s control over settler groups and the city as a whole.
Water can also be said to have influenced the future course of the city. Arguably, access to state- level funds that could be pumped towards large dam and water projects was a key motivation for Appa to engineer the formation of the local government, the Vasai-Virar Municipal Corporation (VVMC) in 2009. The impetus for this was clearly to transform into a more legitimate and formal governance structure that could tap the benefits of central/state government programmes.
Based on these promises, Appa’s party, the Bahujan Vikas Aghadi (BVA), swept the VVMC’s first civic elections in 2010. Furthermore, though the party’s ideology was exemplified in the
term ‘bahujan’ to woo the host of different ‘lower caste’, ‘migrants’, and ‘religious minorities’
from Mumbai, in practice it maintained local social hierarchies by giving local leaders from land-owning castes tickets to contest municipal elections. This gave them authority in the new municipal dispensation to control building of chawls for ‘migrants’, and provision of different services, including water outflows, from their villages/territories.
A decade later, city elections are still fought and won on promises of water - but the regime represents the relationship that water shares with the city and its dwellers rather differently - from merely consuming water for survival, to seeing it as providing leisure, aesthetic value and enhancing real estate and quality of life values. Political posters assure 24-hour water supply and large dam projects take pride of place in election manifestos, but we also see representations of beautified lakes, swimming pools, and a water park as prominent instances of the ‘smart city’
that Vasai Virar is going to become. Yet the materialisation of these promises is uncertain.
“What do people want in Vasai-Virar today? Water. Who has the water? Shitti (BVA’s election symbol). They won’t release water until we vote for them.” (Interview auto driver June 11, 2015). Scarcity of water for daily needs animates the everyday routines and agency of ‘migrant’
groups and the strategies of control of local dadas and the ruling regime.
This paper follows women's laborious efforts at home and place making in one such ‘migrant’
settlement, Makarandnagar, that lies on the peripheries of the ‘city of the poor’. A central focus of the paper is seeking to understand the politics of home making that undergirds the everyday practices that women engage in and make the argument that while these maneuvers are not always planned or consciously enacted, they reveal the operation of women’s agency. Following Mahmood (2006) we conceptualize agency “not as a synonym for resistance to relations of domination, but as a capacity for action that historically specific relations of subordination enable and create.” Thus the paper closely attends to how the nature of women’s agency has been enabled and created by the nested structures of subordination that ‘migrant’ women confront at the micro (basti/gaon) and macro (city) level and how it ultimately remains limited by it. This attention also helps elucidate the discursive and practical conditions within which women ‘migrants’ in Makarandnagar arrive at various forms of aspiration and capacities for action (ibid).
We keep ‘migrant’ women at the centre of the discourse. In centering their stories, and
highlighting the manner of claim-making and its embodied consequences as different from that of ‘migrant’ men, we recognize ‘migrant’ women as active agents of social transformations, even in cases where their agency may not be as obvious or easy to locate. We locate women’s agency in the largely invisible practices and politics of home making, but expand the term ‘home’ to encompass not just the four walls of the house but places created and nurtured through the commoning of spaces in and around homes. Thus, this paper on women ‘migrants’ and their claims to making homes in the city builds on a rich tradition of feminist anthropology. It
contributes to complicating and expanding debates about gender in non-Western societies, and to restoring an important but absent voice of women to anthropological analyses of the urban everyday and incremental modes of place making.
The radical potential of women’s everyday home making
Can women’s seemingly mundane, everyday acts of home-making shape cities? Debates surrounding subaltern urbanism in the Global South have repeatedly stressed on the radical potential of everyday practices of the marginalised in building urban spaces via the politics of political society (Chatterjee 2004) or the quiet encroachment of the ordinary (Bayat 2000). Yet, the ‘urban poor’ as a collective political agent has remained a gender-neutral category. While research on marginalised urban women has focused on issues of safety, negotiated access to spaces and services, and precarious livelihoods of informal and domestic labour, conversations around women’s role in placemaking and city-building are few. In this paper we argue for making the connection between the agency of marginalised women in their private lives, through home making, as extending outward to public life and having consequence for shaping the social space of cities. Importantly, home making has emerged as a site of agency because this is socially sanctioned as the rightful domain of women and by fulfilling this role and subverting it in different ways, women reveal the operation of their agency under conditions of
subordination.
Feminist debates have repeatedly argued against the private-public binary, as a forced conceptual category claiming that the ‘personal is political’ and the ‘domestic’ can transform existing social conditions. Writing about the apartheid, bell hooks (1996), argued that “the construction of a homeplace, however, fragile and tenuous (the slave hut, the wooden shack), had a radical political dimension.” She reads the creation of a relatively safe private space -- a ‘homeplace’ -- as a public act of resistance. A homeplace she argues provided a safe haven in a hostile, racist environment, where black families could not just recover themselves, heal their wounds, and live with human dignity but also use these homeplaces to imagine protest, liberation and new ways of being in the world. But more importantly, by speaking of homeplace, hooks reiterates the often sidelined role of women’s resistance in the American civil rights movement that was rarely articulated in written discourse.
While this argument has been critiqued for reinforcing a sexist division of labour, where women are seen as home-makers and natural caregivers, homemaking in the South is rarely restricted to the physical walls of the home but flexibly extends to the common spaces of the courtyard and the neighbourhood. We see in the commoning that women engage in through everyday routines ceaseless travel between ‘private’ and ‘public’ realms of home and place that rubbish the public- private distinction and denote the making of viable homeplaces, not just homes.
Making viable homes and places under extremely harsh conditions on the margins of a city often starts with making claims for a range of basic needs, from water to voter ID cards. Building on Das’s (2011) formulation of incremental citizenship, where citizenship is read as ongoing claim making rather than a fixed status, we argue for seeing womens’ demands for basic services as building their claim to place and the city in general. Rather than seeing women purely as a
"domestic public" as Anand (2011) has characterised women's demands and entreaties for water, we argue that these are inherently political struggles through which these women craft their present belonging to the city and nurture imaginations of a more secure and hope-filled future (Hage 1997). Such acts of home making are shaped by and have to be seen within the context of the structures of control, domination and suffering women face at the hands of landlords, who seek to reinforce their role as arbiters of which groups could rightfully be deemed citizens with access to city resources.
Everyday violences and counter tactics
Structural violence has been used to describe people who experience violence arising from extreme poverty. When writing about this group of people, ethnographers have used the term,
“the violences of everyday life” to indicate the violences that structural poverty does to such populations (Kleinman 2000). In focussing on an extremely marginalised settlement of
‘migrants’ in this paper, we argue that the violences arising from preventing access to basic human rights for ‘migrant’ families, is built up out of structural violence, and in spreading from one unfolding event to another, deepens it (ibid). Thus, every effort by landlords to control
‘migrant’ women’s access to water from the gaothan tap, marks yet another event in the chain of violences that they face everyday, and this deepens the social violence that is meted out by the local state to these groups. Thus in interrogating women’s everyday negotiations around
accessing water and other services in a settlement, and the larger socio-political configurations of power that control these, we aim to understand how larger orders of social force align with micro contexts of local power to enable both social violence and suffering, as well as agency.
Within the micro context, the boundaries of fear and violence “have to be deciphered in the still waters when life seems quiescent as well as at the more dramatic moments of a crisis, for the boundaries may be drawn between communities, between localities, between members of the family, and even between different regions of the self” (Das 2007 p. 14). In this paper we identify multiple socio-spatial boundaries of oppression that women had to negotiate through their acts of home making: being ‘migrants’ and ‘bhaiyaas’ from the basti that were pitted against the ‘Marathi Manoos’ ‘sthaniks ’ living in the gaon. The violence that unjust distribution of water does to the body and to moral experience is further intensified by the violences done to
‘migrant’ women by their own community, by the patriarchal ideology at play in families, and their own inner conflicts between personal desire (for greater freedom in their new home in the
city) and familial duty (to engage in home making but within the cultural rules laid down by their husbands). The women in Makarandnagar were thus clearly embedded in a system of double- patriarchy, where they faced physical violence from the landlords and structural violence through the absence of water, but were also subject to restrictive norms, and in some cases physical violence, within the household. It is important to note, however, that these domestic violences were not named as violence by these women (Das 2010, interview1) but seen as a part of who they were and how they lived, and this understanding shaped their agency. Thus they tenaciously pursued struggle against landlords around water and other freedoms but didn’t see fit to wage similar battles with their menfolk on the home front.
Das (2007, p 7) talking about her engagement with survivors of riots argues that life was recovered “not through some grand gestures in the realm of the transcendent but through a descent into the ordinary”. She thus describes the mutual absorption of the spheres of the violent and the ordinary of everyday when those engaged in violence against each other continue to inhabit the same space. We follow her approach of interrogating what happens to the subject and world when violent events and their memories of it are folded into an ongoing relationship. The pervasive fear and violence experienced by ‘migrant’ women on a daily basis created timidity, (petty) betrayals, and deep resentment among them. Yet they had to continue living side by side with those who attacked their body and their dignity, leading to what Kleinman (2000) has called an “eating bitterness”. This has shaped their practices and the politics animating it. Operating within such a dangerous climate meant women treaded cautiously, engaging in small acts, then larger transgressions that slowly furthered their collective agency, but they also suffered setbacks due to small betrayals and in-fighting from within their own clan. Scheper-Hughes (1999) in her book set in a Brazilian shantytown starved for water, argues that it takes “selfishness” and tact to survive on the margins. Strategic, individual alliances with those in power are seen as more valuable than solidarities within the community, despite the fact that this relationship furthers hegemonic controls over the entire community. Thus women also invested in vertical
relationships with the powerful, as much as they invested in lateral support systems. This guaranteed intermittent favours for a few, sometimes at the expense of all. Women understood that these actions were shaped by landlords denying them water - as the extreme scarcity led to competition and fights among themselves. This served to reinforce their “eating bitterness”.
The city and the settlement: Structures of subordination and the shaping of agency
The women of Makarandnagar confront nested structures of subordination at the macro (city) and the micro (basti/gaon) level that both enable and create their agency. This section focuses on deconstructing both these contexts to illuminate the discursive and practical conditions which shape and create women ‘migrants’ desires and capacities for action.
1 http://www.alterites.ca/vol7no1/pdf/71_TurcotDiFruscia_Das_2010.pdf
At the macro level, the regime distributes inequality by consciously absenting itself – in the form of public services like municipal schools, local government offices, and the hydraulic network – in collusion with pre-existing socio-economic power structures. Thus Makarandnagar is not connected to the city's modern hydraulic network or the informal water tanker network, but relies on a public tap located within the gaothan and the few borewells built by the landlords that mostly cough out tepid, yellow waters. During the summers, the borewells run dry. This differentiated hydraulic network has brought into being different publics through efforts to access and enhance water (Anand 2011). The migrant’ women in Makarandnagar constitute one of the most vulnerable of these publics.
In contrast to its interrupted hydraulic network, the regime's water promises that are a central part of its claims to bringing development, are founded on the notion of a universal, undifferentiated public. Infrastructure is used here to sell promises of development (vikas) and inclusion of the bahujan and is inextricably tied to projects of state/regime formation and reform (Appel et al 2015). In the 2015 city elections, Appa travelled from chawl to chawl, promising the women that he would bring water to their bastis. He often said that he was not there to ask for votes, but to personally assure them that water was on its way. His wife, who was subsequently elected Mayor of the new city, spoke on behalf of the women during her speeches, demanding water publicly for household work from her husband who shared the dais. This reinforced the notion that water for household work is the woman’s preoccupation while the imagining and deliverance of new hydraulic networks is the man’s province. But, more importantly, these water promises served to quieten the many, fractious publics, building on their aspiration to membership of the universal, homogenous hydraulic public. Thus ‘migrant’ women in Makarandnagar coped with present difficulties in water in the hope of future receipts of regular water in the home.
Looking beyond infrastructural inequalities and aspirations to the larger socio-political
configurations of power that control these, we read Vasai Virar as a city dominated by men in public life, the economy and public spaces. Appa’s party chain of command and foot soldiers are exclusively male and he has overwhelming authority to select and elevate men to positions of power. Men are seen as crucial lynch pins in the transformation of Vasai Virar from a space of rurality to a densely built-up municipal corporation. City building and shaping is the preserve of men performing the roles of builders, contractors, big men, fixers, or social workers. Women, by contrast, are relatively absent in these or other positions of power. This gulf was claimed to be bridged during the last municipal elections when 50% of the seats were reserved for women corporators. But while a new discourse around women’s rights took prominence at election rallies (the new city of Vasai Virar is also a city for women), many tickets were strategically distributed to the wives and daughter-in-laws of local strongmen, thus re-establishing the patriarchal order under the guise of women’s empowerment. Even a woman seen as a ‘strong’
corporator revealed that she operated from the space of the home, while her husband daily took
her place in the corporator’s office. Macro structures of subordination thus firmly affixed women’s place to the home and the performance of household chores. Such a confinement however holds within it the seeds of its own destabilization. Women then focused on the realm of home making to exercise their agency as this was their legitimate preserve. Their agency was seen in numerous small acts/tactics that incrementally built place, made claims on the state and challenged its deliberate absence.
Located on the edges of an industrial zone, the ‘migrant’ settlement of Makarandnagar was developed on farm lands from Viraj Pada village and has no tar road, street lights, municipal water connection, solid waste collection or sewage management system. It remains tightly controlled by an extended family of the land-owning caste of Patils from the village. The
landlords who live across the settlement surveil the area with a keen eye and a heavy hand. They have reached mutual accommodation with members of the ruling political party, who have agreed to forget about the ‘migrants’ in Makarandnagar despite them being a core part of their constituency. Understanding the ‘migrant’ basti of Makarandnagar therefore remains incomplete without attending to Viraj Pada that is inextricably intertwined with Makarandnagar’s birth and survival. Viraj Pada possesses the hallmarks of an established gaothan – the temple, aging trees with bulbous trunks, a government school, and a gram panchayat office – but several brightly- coloured two to three-storey bungalows stand out along its winding lanes. The women in Makarandanagar often tell stories of how the ‘gaonwalas’ sold farm land and made ‘lakhs of rupees’. These multicoloured bungalows – pink, purple, orange, yellow, blue – stand testimony to their recent prosperity. In stark contrast to Makarandnagar, the village has street lights, tar roads, individual water connections, along with a single communal tap that the landlords use to ration water to the residents of Makrandnagar.
With their men at work the whole day, these women embark on numerous tactics for making viable homes as poor ‘migrant’ ‘bhaiyya’ women. Domination by the Patil landlords took the form of defending their water and their land against 'outsiders', that they variously described as 'migrants' and 'North Indian bhaiyyas’ and saw as unsafe, criminal, illegal, and immoral.
Struggles for water have therefore been the starting point, and remain the focus, of women’s actions but their agency and the politics of their home making extends well beyond the realm of water.
Narratives from three migrant women in the settlement highlighted the embodied consequences of control and suffering intrinsic to water encounters between the landlords and the ‘migrants’.
They also revealed that the water publics in Makarandnagar were constituted and marked not just by unequal distribution of water and water infrastructures, but also by xenophobic fears founded on the identities of caste, ethnicity and gender.
The municipal, communal neighbourhood tap located within old village boundaries is a key site
where the landlords asserted and reiterated their power and position as ‘original’, permanent inhabitants, and hence rightful owners of resources, and ‘migrant’ men asserted their power to remain aloof from the struggle over water by virtue of being men. Bearing the brunt of both these assertions of power shaped the ways in which women exercised their agency. Sheela, one of the oldest tenants, talked about how one woman from Makarandnagar always kept an eye on the tap so that they were ready when the water came or rather when the gaonwalas allowed them to fill water. Then the women queued up, although they got no more than two cans at a time.
“Sometimes I go three to four times a day. Our men don’t bother with this, they say it is a woman’s job -- “Ghar ka kaam hai”. Men from the ‘migrant’ community rarely interfered with water negotiations even when the women were subject to violence in the process. The act of collecting water and dealing with the bodily consequences of this was seen as the ‘woman’s job’
within the community. The women did not name the violence of inaction on the part of their men as violence just as they did not name the physical violence they might experience within the household as violence. They rather justified it as a part of their “culture”, “aadmi poora din kaam karke thakk jaate hai” (men get too tired at work all day) and developed ways of coping with this natural occurrence. This was in stark contrast to the violence faced from landlords that they explicitly named as such and revealed agency in resisting. The site of the tap thus exposed complex ways in which power, gender and subject formation in informal settlements on the periphery were closely tied to regulation of water resources (Truelove 2011) and the double patriarchy women had to suffer.
We argue for seeing the village tap as an infrastructure structuring women’s routines and agency, one that is embedded in larger networks of socio-political configurations that control water (Bjorkman 2015). Reema described how her day revolved around water. “At 8 am, I leave my husband and children to get water and very often I return without any. When women start bickering and screaming at each other at the tap the men [the landlords) turn up and pull out the tap. We are disturbing them, they say. They don’t like the “noise”. We don’t like the noise either! But there are so many women who have to get water so they can send their children to school. How will there be no fights? Women clearly cognized the internally divisive effects of denying them water and the unfairness of landlords in making their bickering the excuse for removing the tap. Once in the afternoon the women started fighting and some men came and slapped us and said, “Neend kharab kardi” (Spoilt our sleep). Now you tell me, what is more important? To let a person drink water or to let a person take his afternoon nap. But we are from Uttar Bharatiya (North India), they think they can do anything to us.”
Everyday struggles for water and other basic services reified the division between the
‘gaonwalas’ and the ‘migrants’, highlighting the contempt the ‘Marathi manoos’ had for
‘bhaiyyas’ from North India, despite the latter being responsible for their newfound riches.
Sheela powerfully captured this dynamic, saying, “If we’d go to shit in their farms, they’d hit us, but they wouldn’t bother building toilets. They sold us land and then they just wanted us to stay
put within our four walls. Then when they started developing the area, they built four toilets.
Otherwise there was just one borewell.” Karuna expressed her bodily distress at the difficulties involved in fetching water - her chest started hurting (“Seena dukhne lagtaa hai”) as she trudged down the slope with the heavy cans. She talked of the frustration she felt at seeing the
“gaonwalas” fill as much water as they wanted but refuse to distribute the rest. Shutting the taps -- even when there was enough water - was clearly used by the landlords as a means of
controlling the fast-growing ‘migrant’ population. This revealed how “gender and ethno-
religious subjectivities are interpolated and (re)produced by the practice and governance of water and sanitation” (Truelove 2011,12).
Apart from the physical beatings, the withholding of water and other humiliations meted to the women reinforced their tenuous position in the city, their complete dependence on the
‘gaonwalas’. Despite their utter helplessness the women revealed insubordination, going as a public to fight with the “gaonwalas.” Then they were told, “Boring ka piyo” (Drink the bore well water). The boring water was so bad, women said, that if you left it alone for a few hours it turned yellow, and the milk turned sour if they added this water to it to make tea. On days when the landlords refused them water, they didnt immediately give up but climbed the small hill and approached the company seths in the adjacent industrial estate. When the seths drove them away fearing that too free a distribution of water would make them turn up every day, the women had no choice but to drink the boring water. They reserved different tactics for summers when the borewell dried up and they experienced a special kind of hell in Makarandnagar. They cut deals with water-drum sellers outside their localities, paid Rs 5/ 2mins to access another village tap, but when these options turned unreliable, and when the in-fighting got too severe, they packed their bags, took their children and went back to their villages. “Garmiyon mein mela lagta hai paani ke liye.” There is no peace for women in such a situation. They saw this as a survival practice but also explained it in agentic language: they went because they had relatives there but they also went because there was no water in Makarandnagar.
For Surendra and Vasant Patil the everyday production of order was justified through the discourse of ‘safety’, the need to protect their community, honour and daughters from the criminal, migrant ‘other’. Surendra Patil’s two-storey mansion was constructed with a balcony that had a panoptic view of the rooms below. “It is easier to keep an eye on the bhaiyyas from the balcony,” he said. Further, retaining ownership and thus control over land was seen as a major source of power in the village. When Patil first built his chawls, he made the decision not to sell them but to rent them out even though this meant he did not become rich overnight, like the others who sold. He sat with his cousins and they made a conscious decision to only rent land in order to retain control over its development and use. The first set of tenants were single
migrant men, but the Patils soon realised that they felt deeply unsafe in the presence of so many bachelor “bhaiyyas” and commenced renting out only to families. This was both because married
‘migrant’ men were seen as less dangerous for their daughters, and because women were viewed
as more pliant and less capable of putting up resistance. Paradoxically, the Patils, despite
building chawls, inviting migrants to settle and making a fortune from rents, spoke of the settlers as ‘encroachers’, as a ‘nuisance’. This framing justified their constant surveillance and the poor services they offered the tenants.
Increasingly, the Patils saw their rule as unstable and vulnerable to the political shifts occurring at the municipal corporation, and blamed the ‘migrants’ for this situation. In 2009, after the municipal corporation came into being, none of the cousins were sure if the chawls they had built were legal or not. “The Municipal corporation is no longer giving permission to build more chawls, some say these chawls are illegal. … Our corporator is also a North Indian. I can feel the difference from the days we had our panchayat. We were involved in the decision making – that is no longer the case,” says Surendra Patil. The rumours of ‘migrants’ growing numbers, and the
‘sthaniks’’ fear of being overwhelmed in terms of electoral calculations and decision making has made the continued maintenance of their rule even more contingent on constant surveillance and the repeated performance of violence.
The Patils seemed to view the ‘migrants’ in Makarandnagar not so much as people with their own needs but as largely facilitating their village’s achievement of upward social mobility.
Surendra often spoke of his poverty-ridden childhood where he worked as a labourer and contrasted that with the situation of his son today. “My son is doing his engineering and he drives around in a four-wheeler,” he said. The landlords’ dream now is to turn all the informal
‘migrant’ settlements into formal building complexes for a far more upper class public. “Perhaps when my son grows up he will build towers,” says Vasant Patil. A drive towards demolishing chawls and illegal buildings (on some days up to 2-3 a day) has already begun in Vasai Virar2 -- indicating that this logic animates multiple sets of landlords in other settlements, in collusion with leaders of the ruling regime. Thus the landlords’ ‘otherizing’ of ‘migrants’ needs to be seen as an instrumental move at the micro level, one that is replicated at the city level, that enables the treatment of ‘migrants’ as collateral damage in the move to achieving a ‘smart city’. It was anger at their dehumanization that formed the core of the ‘migrant’ women’s resistance to the
landlords, we argue, strengthening their capacity to act.
If the politics of the landlords drew from their view of themselves as ‘sthaniks’ or ‘sons of the soil’ with the extra privileges that this conferred, the politics deployed by the ‘migrant’ women was rather different. Their politics was one of home making that sought to transition away from their ‘migrant’ status to that of those who have a right to make viable homes and build enduring communities/collectives in the city, to be free from their helpless dependency on their landlords
2 So far, around 4,500 vertical and horizontal structures have been brought down. "We are aiming at pulling down at least two to three vertical structure a day," said VVMC Commissioner Satish Lokhande. http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/mumbai/illegal-buildings-fall-like- house-of-cards-in-vasai-virar-demolition-drive/articleshow/56426174.cms
for all their basic needs. Notably, it sought to do this differently from the ‘sthaniks’ - while the sthaniks sought to preserve their village, way of life and their control, the women sought to re- shape the city such that it allowed their presence and accommodated their difference. They actively referred to their discomfort with living in proximity to the ‘Marathi manoos’, and their desire to live with others of their ilk - North Indian, from their villages or close by, speaking their language and knowing their culture.
In this section, we have echoed the perspective of feminist ethnographers in arguing for a closer look at the potential of everyday life as the very structures that subordinated women in the settlement and at the city, through their operation also built their identity as a public and a political agent, thereby containing within themselves the possibilities for unsettling these
relations of power. Through their daily water encounters, they demanded water as a public matter not in the offices of councilors and hydraulic engineers but in their settlement off-the-hydraulic grid, pushing back against the tyranny of the landlords, and finding alternate ways to negotiate access with different parties such as the industry owners. Their quotidian struggles over water and making a home were built on the backs of making a viable home place. It is through the agency of home making that they sought to establish their claim to be in the city.
A Place in the city? Migrant journeys, re-making home and “eating bitterness”
Reema described the journey between the two worlds of here (in the city) and there (the native village). Back in the village she described it as beautiful, streams flow everywhere, even during the summer you can just drink straight from the stream and nothing will happen. There are no worries there but she wants to come back to the city because, “Wahaan saans baithi hai” (My mother-in-law is sitting there). She explained simply that it was much better to press her
husband’s legs every night than pressing her mother-in-law’s and father-in-law’s legs because at least her husband brought money home. Here he earned Rs 8,000 every month, while in the village they had 25 bigahs of land but no money to cultivate it. In the city therefore she found money, independence, and, most importantly, “yahaan sab gaon ke log hai” (Everybody is from my village.). She described how they sat outside and chatted in the afternoons, shared stories, and took care of each other when they were ill.
To make their home in the city, women relied on the social infrastructure of their village and kinship networks and the affect that common membership in village/ethnic ties created. They also tapped new connections to the city's infrastructure: with seths and landlords for water, and with a local social worker for access to home-based work as well as pushing for some form of collectivisation. For instance, they sought the help of the social worker who was himself a
‘Marathi manoos’ but of a different caste from the Patils and relatively more sensitive to their needs, to start a ‘Self-Help Group’ (SHG), a women-led community organisation. A previous
effort towards registering a housing society by a group of ‘migrants’ had been violently
suppressed by the landlords. The women thus tactically sought to form a women-led organisation that would be seen as less threatening by the landlords. Their plan was to use the SHG to gain the recognition of the state (since it required official registration), tap into state schemes such as those for supporting micro credit via SHGs, and to procure voters’ ID cards and connect with other SHGs across settlements. Once formed, their first tactic was to obtain a voter’s ID card for a lower-caste Marathi woman, thus unsettling the boundaries of ‘sthanik’ and ‘bhaiyya’ that the landlords had cast as fixed and irrevocable. Some of these women also brewed bootleg liquor in the home during their free time for extra cash3. These examples reveal that in all cases, women’s agency was anchored in the home although their interpretation of home was a flexible one, revealing multiple subversions - those of taking up home-based work work, brewing liquor, and forming a SHG with a manifestly larger political agenda.
The resilience of women’s agency, we argue, was that it was founded upon everyday resources and constraints. The scarcity of space within the house and frequent power cuts led to them using and sustaining common spaces as they often gathered in the narrow passages outside the doors of their homes to conduct household chores - chopping vegetables, combing hair, and washing utensils and clothes. The cultural constraint of being prevented by their husbands from working outside the home also served to build community and processes of commoning space as women sat together to do home-based work of assembling “tip top clips” or filling liquid soap into cans to supplement the family income. Thus by building on the constraints faced due to the built environment and their cultural norms, they occupied and held fast to the interstitial spaces around their chawls. They also created and nurtured a secure, communal environment for themselves, and the sociality/biraadari that sprouted out of this helped dissipate the violence and fear they encountered every day. They found humour in their situation. When talking about their husbands staying on in the summer to work, being able to manage with much less water, Reema joked, “Yaahaan ke aadmi sab kale hai, naah dhoke kya kar lenge”. (All the men here are dark, what difference will all this bathing make to them). Women were thus not only at the forefront of neighbourhood struggles fighting for access to better services, they were also resourceful in leveraging their constraints to make secure public places and build bonds of friendship among themselves, making life tolerable under hostile conditions.
The city is, however, a harsh place for ‘migrant’ women such as these. Articulating her “eating bitterness”, Karuna said, “We can’t get voter’s ID cards, we can’t get ration cards, we can’t get water -- “dabaake rakhte hai hamein” (They suppress us). Their excitement at coming to the big city has been considerably tempered by the passage of time and experience. When she first heard of Mumbai, Sheela said that she was quite excited. “I thought there will be buildings and wide roads. There were. But who knew I’d have to build my own home with scraps.” She first lived in a jhopdi she and her husband built from salvaged materials in Malad (E). When she moved to
3 http://www.dnaindia.com/mumbai/report-hooch-is-a-flourishing-trade-in-vasai-virar-2097414
Makarandnagar in 2008, she remembers there being only two chawls, and the rest covered with rice fields. Each time she embarked on a new migratory journey, Sheela had to re-make a home in the city against seemingly insurmountable odds. She reveals a cynicism tinged with
resignation at the hundred problems and oppressions that people like her have to face wherever they go. “Now I am wiser -- no matter where we go, what we do, we will always get the same kind of jobs. There is nothing better than this. My relatives have started going to Dubai now -- and earlier we envied them, like people in the village envy us for coming to Mumbai. But then we found out that there most of them take care of camels! (laughs) In the village they breed cattle, in Dubai they also breed cattle!”
Despite their myriad practices resisting and setting limits to the domination they faced, the women achieved, at best, intermittent successes. Their capacity to effect significant change in their circumstance remained small against the weight of culture, tradition, and the convergence of nativist and regime politics at micro and macro scales. Within the settlement they were completely dependent on the landlords for all their basic needs. The oppressive rule of the landlords in combination with the deliberate absence of political patrons greatly reduced their options. Since any infringement was met with violence, the women had no opportunity for overt political mobilization and were left with a somewhat limited repertoire of survival practices.
Further, their husbands perceived struggles for water as women’s work, unconnected to larger struggles for building habitable places in the city. Rather than politicize their suffering rendering it open to questioning and resistance, they refused to get involved. Moreover, they continued to impose their own social sanctions on their women, disallowing them from going out to work or staying out after dark, despite very different conditions and needs faced in the city. This
seriously diminished the possibilities for women to journey from agentive actors to resistant actors, resulting in their overall efforts remaining limited.
And yet the strength of ‘migrants’’ individual and collective agency has been clearly
demonstrated in this self-same city. The evolution and explosive growth of the ‘city of the poor’
has been orchestrated by a host of ‘migrants’ - taxi drivers, auto rickshaw drivers and fruit
sellers. Their migratory journeys, which we can only allude to in this paper, are stories of success and riches beyond imagining. They are largely founded on speculation in land and (illegal) building construction. While these are crucial drivers of the city’s economy that also structure the possibilities for individuals’/settlements’ upward social mobility, they are domains in which women are given no entry. This too is a key reason why at the macro level women’s ability to effect change remains stunted. Their agency in urban transformation - geared toward making unviable homes and places viable by conjuring up the resources of the self, the community, and the everyday - seems in danger of always being named as insignificant and their labour and suffering in this regard remaining undervalued.
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