Beyond Red Lights: Locating the Un-Homed Child

Abstract

This paper is based on the researcher’s work at a shelter home with the runaway “street child.” In the Indian subcontinent where religion, gender, family and caste dominate identity structures, within the confines of a “home” exist children unnamed, born out of the social order. Through a clinical presentation and tracing the construction of childhood in Kakar and Nandy, this paper is an attempt to figure this forgotten child in psychoanalytic thought. With this reimagination of a clinic at the gates of homeless homes, psychoanalysis is looked at anew. The aim is to note urban homelessness as not merely a systemic failure, but also an exile from western developmental theory.

Keywords:

• Psychotherapy
• culture
• childhood
• identity
• homelessness

Notes

1 Uma Chakravarti (2018) notes that a historiography of caste as an ideological system, and gender identity, in India has its linkages in class and loss of access to opportunity to move upwards in the Brahmanical social order.

2 Kaustav Chakraborty (2019) in The Politics of Belonging in Contemporary India, alludes to the challenges of intimacy and the anxiety of being as a marginalized other, and negotiating them in service of newer theories of belonging.

3 Altaf K (2008) The Hijras of India. Chay Magazine. Available at: http://www.chaymagazine.org/gender/46-the-Hijras-of-india (accessed 10 December 2011).

4 One of the many shelter homes established by Salaam Baalak Trust, across Delhi NCR. Salaam Baalak Trust is an NGO tackling the challenges of urban homlessness by providing shelter, protection, education and vocational training to street dwelling minors.

5 Derappa is one of the 11 million homeless minors/ “lost causes” who occupy the streets of the six metropolitan cities in India. These “children of the streets” are often so because they are embroiled in a pernicious cycle of abuse, abandonment, orphanhood, trafficking, or displacement due to their precarious realities in the family if they are lucky to have one, that is. India holds the infamous record for one of the highest numbers of street-dwelling, laboring children, and there are fault lines that dictate the social order acting as resistance towards resolving the condition of urban homelessness. Nearly a third of the homeless population (Census, 2011) perseveres without national identification, and this girl falls under the same categorization, along with her sheltermates, which displaces her at the origin itself.