Gendered violence, frontline workers, and intersections of space, care and agency in Dharavi, India

Abstract

The resilience and activism of marginalised urban populations have played an important role in imagining urban politics in Indian cities. Similarly, the issue of sexual violence against women in public spaces became a significant part of urban politics in the aftermath of the 2012 Delhi gang rape and murder case. However, subsequent activism and research have paid lesser attention to other pervasive experiences of intimate violence and structural inequalities that confront marginalised urban populations, particularly poor women and children. Drawing on participatory ethnographic research with frontline workers engaged in an NGO’s violence prevention program in Dharavi, Mumbai, this paper re-inscribes ‘gender’ and ‘violence’ as experiential concepts into the urban framework. I use the term ‘intersection’ as a heuristic device to examine how frontline workers come to understand gender as a relationship of inequality that produces conditions of violence. I term this intersection ‘gender/violence’. The second intersection, ‘frontline’, further underscores how negotiations of the public–private divide in urban spaces, women’s caring labour in supporting survivors of violence and the resultant forms of gendered agency are interconnected. I argue that such a holistic understanding of women’s everyday actions of resisting and negotiating structural and gendered violence contributes to recent urban scholarship on gender and violence and furthers our understandings of agency, solidarity and resilience.

Keywords:

• Agency
• care labour
• Dharavi
• gendered violence
• frontline workers
• urban poor neighbourhoods

Acknowledgements

This paper has been presented at various conferences since 2015: Interdisciplinary Debates in Development and Culture (Leuven, December 2015); the Society for Applied Anthropology annual meeting (Santa Fe, April 2017); and the Indian Anthropology Congress (Pune University, February 2019). I owe thanks to people whose feedback helped improve my arguments: Gautam Bhan, AbdouMaliq Simone, Filip De Boeck, Ann Cassiman, Sarah Hautzinger and Subhadra Channa. Parts of this paper have also been included in my MSc. dissertation, which I wrote under the guidance of Steven Van Wolputte. I am thankful to Dr Nayreen Daruwalla and my colleagues at SNEHA for their continued support. I am grateful to Hillary Haldane, Jennifer Wies, Ketaki Hate, Nolina Minj and Srinjoy Chakraborty for their encouraging feedback on previous drafts of this paper, as well as to the three anonymous peer reviewers for their suggestion to write more openly about my positionality and its effects on my research, and for drawing my attention to the context of caste-based solidarity. Finally, I am indebted to the PVWC community team and sanginis for sharing their stories, wisdom, and the inspiration to build more just and equitable worlds.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Proshant Chakraborty

Proshant Chakraborty is an applied anthropologist and independent researcher based in Mumbai, India. He has obtained his Masters in Social and Cultural Anthropology from KU Leuven, Belgium. He has had research experience in the field of public health, HIV/AIDS intervention and advocacy, migration and prevention of violence against women and girls. Proshant is currently a research consultant associated with the Society for Nutrition, Education and Health Action (SNEHA), a secular non-governmental organisation (NGO) in Mumbai.