ABSTRACT
This article explores the quotidian politics of women’s virtue vigilante groups in Mumbai. It illustrates the multiple ways in which lower class “respectable women,” ranging from members of ladies’ groups to lone-wolf leaders, actively participate in cleansing the cityscape of what they believe is “sexual vulgarity” by daily surveillance over public displays of love in poor and peripheral localities. This militant scrutiny of urban public conduct is intimately related to daily security anxieties about those they label as perverts, sex addicts, and pedophiles occupying urban areas, which are still safe spaces for less affluent women and children. These women’s groups and their resilient/adaptable moral authority in the management of public space offer imperceptible and enduring challenges to the hegemony of police governance over such urban spatial orders.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank the Center for Global Criminology at the University of Copenhagen for academic support during the writing of this article. The author would also like to thank the peer reviewers and editors of Critical Asian Studies for their careful reading of my text. Finally, the author thank Professor Minna Valjakka for inviting me to join this engaging project.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 All the names of my informants and the name of the location where I conducted this fieldwork have been anonymized.
6 By resistance, I mean the active refusal of poor and lower-class women to comply with legal authority, state dictates, and wider urban disaffection.
16 Liz Bondi and Demarius Rose (Citation2003), who have researched the relationship between the divergent ways in which women feel vulnerable to crime in the city, underline the relative paucity of material concerned with the differential socio-economic impacts on women’s daily lives of recent waves of urban restructuring.
17 In my earlier research I wrote extensively about how these forms of moral policing are experienced by lovers. For example, I have examined how Hindu and Muslim women engage in inter-religious relationships and marriages and how they are victimized by Hindu nationalist organizations (Sen Citation2018). I also have written about ordinary lovers romancing in parks, on empty streets, and under commuter bridges, and highlighted the multiple ways in which they are abused and evicted by strangers, policemen, and moral patrols (Sen Citation2019).
37 For a discussion on the complexity of viewing this kind of violent action as “ethical” or “legitimate”, see Sen Citation2012.
38 Ciudad Juárez, known as the “City of Femicide” of Mexico, has seen a surge in women’s vigilantism.
39 Yadav (Serena Citation2018), notorious for keeping law enforcement officials well-bribed, had been arrested but was scheduled to be released on bail as the police refused to include women’s testimonies as evidence of his sexual crimes in court. A group of 200 angry rape victims seized him outside the court, then castrated, blinded, and killed him. When the police attempted to arrest five women for allegedly offering leadership to this raging mob, all 200 women claimed responsibility for the killing. The case was eventually dismissed in court, since neither the judge nor the police could gather substantial evidence identifying the person who delivered the fatal blow. See All India Roundup Citation2017.
40 Even though arranged marriages are still very prevalent in urban India, love marriages and pre-marital relationships had also gained currency amongst the urban poor. See Sen Citation2018.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Atreyee Sen
Atreyee Sen is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Copenhagen. She is a political anthropologist of urban South Asia.
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8052-4351
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