Life, labour, and dreams: one woman’s life in Old Delhi

ABSTRACT

The many Muslim women who make up India’s burgeoning informal economy, challenge any attempt to reduce them to homemakers whose lives are delimited by culture and religion. An examination of their lives reveals the complex forces that shape their worlds, and illuminates how they variously negotiate landscapes of inequality in contemporary India. Here I focus on the biography of one Muslim widow to illustrate how she labours to live and dream in contemporary India as various social forces intersect to create precarity in her life. While neoliberal priorities and a shrinking social safety-net affect underprivileged women across religious lines, the intersection of gender, class, and religion in Hindu majoritarian India has made it even more challenging for low-income Muslim women like her to make ends meet. However, dominant forces are not totalising, and the biographical method reveals how one woman negotiates precarity, employing various skills as she adapts to changing conditions, juggling multiple jobs to meet expenses, and envisioning a better future. We see not just the deep inequalities that create precarity for some, but also how dreams can be a material force in the world.

KEYWORDS:

• Muslim
• women
• labour
• informal economy
• India

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research and the DePaul University Research Council for funding this research. I am also grateful to Patricia Jeffery, Kaveri Qureshi, Mark W. Hauser, Gayatri A. Menon, and three anonymous reviewers for their feedback on this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 All names used are pseudonyms to protect the identity of my interlocutors in Old Delhi. English words used by Wahida Baji are in italics.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the DePaul University Research Council and the Wenner-Gren Foundation.

Notes on contributors

Kalyani Devaki Menon

Kalyani Devaki Menon is an Associate Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at DePaul University, Chicago. Her research focuses on religious politics in contemporary India. Her book, Everyday Nationalism: Women of the Hindu Right in India, was published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2010. Her new book, Making Place for Muslims in Contemporary India, will be published by Cornell University Press in 2022.