Contemporary urban woman yet to arrive

With every passing day, the need to ask this rather pertinent question becomes more than just dire. Has the contemporary urban Indian woman arrived? A section of people, chuckling to their inert guts, would still concern themselves about ‘timings’ and have everything germane to say to unwittingly add more purpose to that question.

Women (and if single, unmarried, divorced, separated, estranged or in any circumstance that rules out the legal hovering of a man) in urban India are often seen as rebel outsiders trying to ceremonialise their brand of totemism. No, they are not trying to live; never at all claiming their space. Mumbai, the country’s one of the most populous cities with an officious promise of opportunity, lacks in shelter. ‘Shelter’ — differentiated from ‘place of shelter’— also professes the ideas of acceptance and tolerance. Humans averse to noise do tolerate ‘jagratas’, don’t they?!

Women in the city are often refused accommodation based on their gender, marital status, religion, and conspicuous life choices. An apologetic smoker friend, who works at an ad agency, had to move out of her coop in Malad for setting a good example of indiscipline for the children around. The blindingly obvious dimension to this situation is, returning late from office or smoking in one’s rented space as toxic triggers to go astray, never worried parents about the child’s ‘delicate’ threshold of whatnot. Another Goregaon-based performance artist was kicked out of her apartment in a matter of six months for having “strangely dressed boys and girls over to dance with”. A print journalist, who stupidly thought that a press card assures of some privilege, was asked to leave her Borivali home for reaching home after midnight. The added cherry on the charge was having a male friend over with whom she could not “prove” her relationship. Such arbitrary evictions are mostly carried out through harassment and moral policing. Brokers and building authorities get away with hassling single women under the aegis of bylaws that differ from one cooperative housing society to the other. Shikha Makan’s documentary “Bachelor Girls” explores the problem featuring women across classes. In the film, Bollywood actor Kalki Koechlin says, “The irony is they all want to watch your films, but they don’t want you to live in their building.”

The menace of not being a man or a married woman is not city-centric. Independent women living in Bengaluru, Chennai, Delhi, and Gandhinagar share similar bitter experiences. Deepa Narayan in her book “Chup”, a compilation of over 600 interviews, tries to sift through the particularities of a culture that is so receptive to pervasive sexism. The root of the problem lies in the overshadowing universal practice of gender inequality. Limiting women, their identities, freedom, individuality, expression, and sexuality is upheld as the way forward. Being a woman can even drive a wedge between the person and the body. It might not be Honduras’ abortion ban (even in instances of rape) everywhere, but how unfamiliar is anywhere? The modern urban woman is yet to come. She still is one of the three witches in Macbeth. Like in the Elizabethan age, today’s civilised race still blames women for imaginary consequences. Ill-mannered children can only pick up bad habits from women looking to live alone, and the threat my friend, is no less than the Bubonic Plague.