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UnCivil Lines: Engendering Citizenship in the Postcolonial City

Author(s): Rashmi VarmaReviewed work(s):Source: NWSA Journal, Vol. 10, No. 2 (Summer, 1998), pp. 32-55Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press

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UnCivil Lines: Engendering Citizenship in thePostcolonial Cityl

RASHMI VARMA

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Abstract

This article explores the relationship between gender and urban spacewithin the context of communal and ethnic strife in Bombay. It extendsfeminist responses to the crises, as well as takes issues with these theo-ries' assumptions regardingfeminist subjectivities. Thearticle concludeswith a reading of a literary text, Shashi Deshpande's That Long Silence,as an instance of a thoughtful artistic response to the ruptures withinwomen's private and political identities precipitated by postcolonialurbanism.

The modern projects of anti-colonialism and nationalism have beenremarkablypatriarchal n orientation, in which often "the question of the'new woman' was ... formulated ... as a question of copingwith change"

(Chatterjee 1993, 135). Since mid-nineteenth century, the new require-ments of life in the Indian city, where ideas of emancipation and moder-nity were rife, and where men's own sense of self as rational and urbaneactors was tied to an ability to disentangle themselves from rural and"backward"origins, made urbanspace a concentrated site for theorizingcitizenship vis a vis the question of gender.The "promise"of Westerniza-tion and modernity, as well as nationalism and postcolonial citizenship(always in tension with the former),continues to be rewritten in contem-porary India, in which the urban woman remains a problem for therepresentation of posteolonial Indian subjectivity.

Like most ex-colonized countries, India's cities grew and expandedsimultaneously with the consolidation of British colonial rule, often atthe cost of the Indiancountryside, which witnessed a continuous declineunder British rule (that lasted until 1947), and continues to do so in

posteolonial India.Triggeredalso by events such as the partition of Indiain 1947, famines and other natural disasters, Indian cities have beenstretched to their limits in terms of population and resources, and havecome to representthe uneven development of India'spolitical economy.With economic liberalization unleashed in the 1990s after decades ofsemi-socialist, state-controlled economic policies, the unevenness hasbecome more visible than before.2The poor, women and immigrants are





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often unwelcome figures on the horizon of postcolonial cities, even as

new opportunities for upward mobility become visible for these same

groups.While their work is utilized to keepthe city clean andfunctioning,they themselves are considered unclean, forming the detritus of the citywhose parts still remain unsightly.

The consensus on the city as the culmination of postcolonial develop-ment and modernization has been eroded by critiques of the project of

development itself. These, however, are rooted in conflicting ideologiesthat challenge the hegemony of development-whether they representit

as a western and thereforeinauthentic project(Shiva1998;Mies 1993),or

point out development's absolutism and elitism. Feminist scholars, from

both standpoints, have forcefully arguedthat not only is the developmentregime based on a western world view (in which the city becomes the

concentrated site of modernization), but a masculinist one as well. Tharu

and Lalita (1993, 59) write: "Study after study has shown that the logicunderpinningdevelopment action, even when focusedon women, is state-centered .... And when the state collaborates with global frameworks of

economic, technological, and strategic growth, development programsultimately serve the metropoles." But while many progressive critics

have derided the urban bias of postcolonial planning, they have alsoacknowledged that the historical reconfigurations of class and identitiesaround such issues as housing, environment andurban planning, leadingto what arenow known as new social movements, also have taken placein the postcolonial city (Chandoke 1991).

A neo-traditional perspective has emerged simultaneously in whichthe city is rendered as a threat: the site of a contaminated postcolonialidentity in opposition to the rural, which is seen as the locus of truesubalternity.3 The city is seen as destroying the ethic of community

present in rural societies, replacing it with selfish individualism. Itspopular culture's commercialism and hybrid westernization is seen ascorroding folk culture's authenticity and innocence. For the culturalnationalists, the village is a symbol of the nation's antiquity, the site ofthe origin of Indian civilization. There is a consequent glossing over ofnew spatial forms in this discourse, in a bid to maintain a binary andabsolute distinction between the village and the city. Village folk in suchrepresentations are often mere caricatures, lacking both historicity and

agency.4Critics have argued hat such a rejectionof the city not only relieson a romanticization of the Indian village, but is linked to the ascendanceof national consciousness that emerged from a metropolitan milieu, andfor metropolitan subjects (Srivastava1996).I

Postcolonial literary discourses have seize(don the city as the meansfor theorizing the hybridity of postcolonial identity, since the city bydefinition is perceivedas heterogeneous and as a signifier of "difference."As the locus of the politics of cultural identities in contemporaryIndia, a





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new generation of Indian writers writing in English has focused on the

significance of being urban in India. Further, the metropolis is now no

longer situatable in geographic Bombay,London, or Hong Kong but in themulti-media images being purveyed through consumer shopping chan-nels, CNN, and Star TV, now traversingpostcolonial cities andspaces. Infact, the very sense of the material "placeness"of the city is broughtintoquestion in the contemporary global economy's configuration of the "glo-bal city" where the "space of places" is increasingly replaced by the"space of (informational) flows" (Castells 1994, 29). There is, thus, adelinking of the material "place"of the city from its new spatial configu-rations in a variety of postmodern discourses on cities that inform post-

colonial urban discourses.

(En)Gendering he Citizen

While literary critics and historians alike have focused some attentionon the silencing of the peasant woman, as exemplified in Gayatri Spivak's

(1988) influential formulation "can the subaltern speak?" the figure that

is subjectedto erasurewithin urban discourses in particular,as Spivaktoopoints out, is the sub-proletariat urban Indian woman. The alienated

postcolonial intellectual torn between nationalist and nativist roots and

a global and multicultural class alliance with formeroppressorshas been

consistently male in orientation, as exemplified in recent Indian film and

fiction by writers like Rushdie, Kanga,andMistry. I intend to extend thepoint further, by analyzing how middle-class women are also left out ofthe urbanproject.

The imagining of apristine ruralIndia is inherently partof apatriarchal

project since it is intimately tied to a notion of women as carriers oftradition in which rural women are the model of an oppressed citizenry.Modernurbanwomen, on the other hand, have embodied the very threatof westernization and an erosion of native patriarchy. Questions of a-u-tlhenticity invariably center around the issue of "woman" in which theurban and westernized woman in the postcolonial city appears as ananomaly since she fits neither the mold of the authentic subaltern locatedwithin rural and domestic spheres, as the West's absolute Other, nor themold of the hybridized, immigrant and/or cyborgian woman in the west-ern metropolis.

Women in the postcolonial city remain the Other of the state, consti-tuting an underclass in spite of wide-ranging class divisions betweenthem. A global economic compact, consisting of structural adjustmentdeals, weaker states, ethnic hostilities, political organizing aroundiden-tity politics, and international circuits of information and capital, is





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interpellatedinto fraternalisticnational projects, creatingnew conditionsfor the marginalization of women. So the task of a feminist critique of the

city presents the imperative of including what TharuandLalita(1993, 64)call: "Women's initiatives-their labor,their movements, and their writ-ing," and how they "shapethe picture that emerges."

Bombay

In the following discussion I focus attention on a particular "event"that has influenced recent urban discourse in India, especially in itsconstruction of the political identities of women. The "event" is theunprecedented violence against the minority Muslim community thatBombay witnessed in 1993, in which hundreds of people lost their livesand many more were injured.This violence occurred in the wake of thedemolition of the Babrimosque in the north Indiantown of Ayodhya, andin direct response to the mobilization on a national scale of Hindu senti-ments against Muslims by right-wing Hindu parties.6

Historians have pointed to Bombay's pre-eminence as a metropolis and

as India's financial capital from colonial times (Evenson 1989;Morris etal. 1986).Located on the west coast of India, Bombay providedthe Britishwith a harbor,and its ethnically mixed population lent an air of cosmo-politanism that encouraged trade and cultural exchange with the West.Today, the metropolitan Bombayite is the model national citizen inpostcolonial discourse as s/he transcends the colonial categorization asprovincial orprimitive, since s/he has had historical access to metropoli-tan norms and forms. Rao (1996, 66) claims that in fact "Bombayaids thegrowth process" by forcing the postcolonial artist to come to terms with

the practical exigencies of existence andthe metaphoric aswell as sensualplenitude of the city that opens up multiple ways of defining the nationaland urbansubject. Rushdie (1990, 16)writes of this heterogeneity as if ithas some vital link to "the nature of Bombay, a metropolis in which themultiplicity of commingled faiths and cultures curiously creates a re-markably secular ambiance."

However, Bombay's simultaneous spatialization of ethnic identitywithin different precincts, and its desire for a larger global identity thattranscendsthose spatializations within the nation state, reflects the con-tradictions undergirdingthe urban-national projectin India. Insofar as itrepresents what Arjun Appadurai (1994, 322) calls the global "ethno-scapes" in which "primordia whether of language or skin color orneigh-borhood or kinship) have become globalized" such that "locality" isturned into "astaging groundforidentity ... spreadover vast andirregularspaces as groups move," Bombay presents a distinct challenge to tradi-





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tional ways of readingpostcoloniality as communal, spatially-bound, andnationalist, for inhabiting the city are migrants of all shades who have

only a tangential claim to territory as signifier of ethnicity.The representation of Bombay as the boundless space of enthusiasm

and promise, "India's Capital of Hope" as The National Geographic(McCarry1995) puts it, is linked to Indiancapitalism. Recent free marketreforms have further enhanced its image as resister of state-directed,bureaucratizedplanning and economic control in postcolonial India. AsIndia's commercial capital, it is represented as "propelling"India intomodernityanddevelopment (McCarry1995).Analysts have tied Bombay'sethic of free market with its ethic of tolerance, relying on the assumptionof capitalism as the panacea for ethnic conflict. But recent conflicts inBombay allow one to, in fact, argue the reverse: capitalism's unevendevelopment has led to a transferenceof class conflict into ethnic conflict.Bombay'sphysical constraints, too, exacerbate capital's uneven develop-ment, such that half of the city's population lives in slums.7

But it is in Bombay that women aresaid to enjoy greatfreedom becauseof the anonymity and the indifference of others. One writer describesBombay thus: "Like the streets of New York, the streets of Bombay

abound with women ... you cangatherimpressions of the lives ofwomenover a spectrum that, in Bombay, is about as wide as it can get" (Mitter1991, 7). The imposition of genderedspatial limits in other cities seems tomagically recede in Bombay. Yet, a central question explored in thediscourse is of the possibility of gaining authentic Indiansubjectivity in ahybrid public sphere such as Bombay.The question is even more chargedsince to be a woman fromBombayis already to occupy a tenuous positionof liberation and inauthenticity.

The city is, thus, deeply enmeshed in the narratives that aim to un-

cover "difference"itself-gendered, religious, class, national within thegeneral urbangeographyof postcoloniality. One of the key contradictionsat the heart of Bombay's popular representations has been its simulta-neous presence as "the quintessential India"(Mitter 1991, x), and its veryunreal status as "more like a movie set than the real thing," perhapsreinforced by the presence of India's film industry in the city (McCarry1995, 47). Thus the challenge for a chronicler of the city involves thedifficult projectof both representingits complexity as well as taking intoaccount the impossibility of doing that.

A Rupture

The consensus on Bombayas quintessentially secularandpluralistic isreflected in the way in which the 1993 riots were represented as anaberration from its history and tradition of tolerance. It is in light of the





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discourses that construct Bombaynot merely as the paradigmaticspaceofIndia's modernity, but also as encapsulating notions of autonomy and

citizenship both national and global, that the events of 1993 emerge asmoments of extreme rupture.When riots between Hindus and Muslimsshook Bombayin early 1993, in "response"to the demolition of the Babrimosque in the north Indian town of Ayodhya by right-wingHinduparties,liberal Bombayites were horrified. Hundreds of people, mostly Muslims,were killed, andmany more were wounded with their homes andplaces ofwork left charred and ruined. As most of the victims belonged to the

minority Muslim community, some critics pointed out that in fact thesewere not "riots" but genocides carriedout against a minority community(Sarkar1993). In the resulting mayhem, Bombay suffered huge human,financial, and infra-structural losses. State forces such as the police andthe bureaucracy,meant to provide protection to citizens, receded in theface of communal frenzy and loyalty.

As I sat in Chicago and as my dossier on the Bombayriots continued tobulge all through 1993 and much of 1994, I read with dismay accounts ofwomen's participationin the post-demolition riots, and of the Shiv Sena'sopen exhortation to men and women from the Hindu community to come

out and participate in the genocide whose special target was India'sminority Muslim community.8 It was easy to recognize the toughness oflife in Chicago as an Indian woman but harder to imagine what it was forthe minority, for the outsider, for the villager, for the non-Hindu backhome. The horrorandincomprehension in the wake of the Ayodhya affairled me to examine not only my assumptions regardingwomen's relation-ships to urbanlife, but also to contextualize these theoretical endeavorswithin the framework of a very real "crisis."

Traditionally popular among the poor, migrant labor from the Maha-

rashtravalley (the state in which Bombay is situated), the Sena has grownin strength and now commands a constituency among the middle-classes.The conflict between Hindutva (an ideology that dictates the supremacyof Hindu culture andcalls for a Hindu state, andis not to be confused withHinduism) and cosmopolitanism (asboth an attribute of a class positionand of liberal political ideology) after the riots is no longer describable inclass or genderterms. Not only have India'sEnglish-speaking elites em-braced right-wing Hindutva, but also among the unusual things thatmarked the 1993 riots was women's participation. Even rich Muslimswere not spared-they were pulled out, often by women, from affluentneighborhoods andmurderedorassaulted. Thus, ethnic violence that wasearlierassociated with working-class and lower middle-class districts ofthe city, primarily with men as its perpetrators,now engulfed the wholeof the city's body.

Liberaldiscourse has typically blamed the latest round of violence ona blind adherence to stultifying tradition and unreason, whose primary





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purveyors and beneficiaries are men. But the role of women withincommunal divides has demystified the notion that women are somehow

representatives of community and social harmony. Kishwar, editor ofthe Indian feminist magazine Manushi, writes an account of the 1993mobilization: "Women and young girls avidly looting shops along withmen was a common sight in Bombay during the Januaryriots. I heardaccounts of how Hindu women draggedMuslim women and childrenand joined the men in stoning them and setting them on fire" (n.d., 23-24). Sarkarwrites:

Infact,thepoliticizationofright-wingwomen nvolvesapainful urrender fa cherishedarticle of faith about the relationshipsbetweenwomen and vio-lence. In most studies of communal violence in India women have beenpredominantly onceptualized s victims andhealers-a positionthat is gen-erallyconsideredepresentativef their roles andexperiencesn societyas awhole.... Wenow needtomodifyandenlargehepossibilitiesof thepoliticalrole of women.(1993,17)

Since in postcolonial India communal riots have become a disturbingfeature of urbanlife, whether in small townships or in big metropolitancenters, it is perhaps necessary to see how the question is one of urban

space, in which gender plays a constitutive role. Part of the actual appeal(as opposed to its rhetoric of ethnic and religious purity)of the Sena hasbeen its activism on behalf of Bombayites over issues of housing and othercivic amenities. The recent communal strife was used by this right-wingparty to offer agency to women, in an attempt to counter the argumentthat the religious right is retrogradeand chauvinistic. On my triphome toIndia a few summers ago, a relative from Bombay recounted to me howSena volunteers were providingfree daycarefor the children of workingwomen in her neighborhood. By assessing the importance of gender poli-tics, the right-wing party attempted to overshadow the fact that womenhave been the greatest victims in most riots, both in terms of physicalabuse (mass rapes of Muslim women were reported from various parts)and loss of livelihood when husbands and brothers are murdered. Onecould argue, therefore, that one of the key means by which the Sena hashad success is that it has exploited the urban crisis of space, andattemptedto mold women's needs as consumers, mothers, and citizens to gain theirsupport.

I want to suggest that while such a "misappropriation"of women bythe religious right shows the salience of women as citizens and as votebanks, it also points to the complex subjectivity of women within thepostcolonial city, who areincreasingly participating in the political realmas constituted by both the left and the right. Rather than interpretingwomen's participation in religious violence as an instance of false con-sciousness or "plain fear" as Kishwar (n.d.) suggests, I want to point towomen's complex agency in cities that leads to their political mobiliza-





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tion. Liberal discourse continues to represent women as victims anddupes of violent machismo who need to be rescued, but a materialist

readingshould involve examining the process by which women's subjec-tivity as communalists is created.Forthe Sena, Bombay has to be reclaimed from the Muslims and the

non-Maharashtrians, and women must be reclaimed from modernity.Such a project is of necessity selective in its delineation of tradition andmodernity-thus, while it is acceptable for Hindu women to go out andmobilize the community against an imagined enemy, any expression ofthe above mobility in the rhetoric of feminism is construed as a Westernimport and inauthentic. It is this uneasy duality within the discourse of

the Hindu right wing between the vision of the Indian woman as thesupreme figure of purity and sacrifice who forms the backbone of a mili-tant Hindu identity, and that of a modern and activist woman who cantake to the streets for the cause of her nation and religion, that problem-atizes issues of women's agency and their role in public space.

But it is also necessary to point to the limits of women's agency asfeminist and liberatory when it is constrained within a deeply dividedcity. Thus, feminist responses to urban violence need to be enmeshedwithin responses to the contemporary city and the possibilities of socialjustice within it. To get beyond the "false consciousness" thesis in caseswhere women have embracedright-wing agendas, I look at how progres-sive feminists have articulated their positions from materialist or class-based analyses that locate women's reactionary involvement in the riotsas a characteristic feature of the middle classes in urban India. Sarkar(1993, 21) asserts that "for a section of affluent upper-castes and middle-class urban women of northern Indian cities and small towns," theHindutva mobilization "does provide a public political identity and a

limited, yet real sense of empowerment." Their sense of upwardmobilityrelies contradictorily on the desire to maintain class and caste privileges.Further,the deployment of high-tech media to re-interpretreligion, whilestill claiming access to tradition, has also been a significant feature ofwomen's politicization in cities, allowing it to be coded as "modern."Thelarge-scale "disco garba" dances organized by communal groups on theoccasion of Hindu festivals, the adaptation of Hindu epics into televisionserials, and the use of video-cassettes and audio-cassettes by right-wingpoliticians to mobilize community women arejust afew examples. Right-

wing women have also attained a great deal of visibility andvoice in thelatest round of communal politics, andby extension, in national politics.The new cultural forms provide avenues for women to come together inurbanareas, even though the underlying ideology remains strongly capi-talist, patriarchal, and communal. Sarkar ays out the problematic thus:

Inanironic nversionofwomen'sformernvisibility n the domainofpublicviolence, large numbers of women have been extremely active andvisible, not





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only in the rallies andcampaignsbut even in the actualepisodesof violentattacks against Muslims .... The complicity has also involved an informedassent to such brutalitiesagainstMuslimwomenasgangrapes n December

'92 andJanuary93 . . . -informed, becausethese episodeshad beenwidelyreported ndpublicizedand there was no waythat these women could haveescapedknowledgeof them.(1993,17)

A significant progressive response to the current crisis has been tomake a case for radical secularism. Mazumdar(1994, 243) has questioned"whether it is possible to formulate an emancipatory and democraticdiscourse within the confines of what has come to be defined as Hindu-ism." The current wave of Hindutva motivates her argument for an

aggressively andconsciously secularpublic sphere. She finds even liberaland progressivefeminist and civil rights groupsand social movements asbeing dominated by specific "class and caste interests" that have "pre-vented the formation of any national coalitions" ready to take on thepatriarchal-communal-capitalist nexus unleashed in modern India whereviolence has erupted as an "epidemic" against women and minorities

(246). In the absence of radically secular coalitions, Mazumdar fears acontaminated public sphere that sanctions such violence. For critics likeMazumdar, the construction of a civil sphere where women have equal

rights is impossible without an accompanying criticism of India's casteand class structure and its imperfect, state-directed secularism.

However, although it is one thing to demand the absolute separationofreligion and the state, the separation of religion andidentity is impossibleto legislate. The answer must lie in strugglingforprogressive, socially justwomen's rights, while giving women the option of allying andexpressingtheir identity in various ways. Otherwise, we will continue to be shockedandunprepared or women's participation in fascist andcommunal move-

ments. Mazumdar'sanalysis describes women primarily as victims of theideology of religious supremacy. Ironically, any sort of mobilization ofwomen, even a conservative one, sometimes does lead to an, albeit unin-tended, feminist consciousness, as these women come across male vio-lence in the public realm (Sarkar1993). We need an analysis that takesinto account the complex web of gendered political identities and makesproductive use of the prevailing contradictions within women's lives,which cannot be abstracted from them.

Culturalist explanations draw upon the uses women are made of by

fundamentalists in all reactionary movements, and point to the culturaldislocation experienced in the city as the cause of identification withmovements that aim at preserving religious or regional identity. What isunique about Hindutva, though, is that in spite of its general conserva-tism on social issues and the lack of involvement of its women in politicalorganization historically, it has been able to get political mileage out offixing the Other, India'sMuslims, as the ones hampering women's mobil-ity and entry into the public realm. The right wing has appropriated he





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rhetoric of women's liberation and indigenized it, while divesting it of itspolitical efficacy for a critique of Indianpatriarchy.Within the setting of

economic liberalization in the late-twentieth century, family relation-ships have become volatile, exacerbated by the city's deterritorializingnature. In the process the locales of "home" and family are radicallyshifted. These new configurations need to be genuinely interacted with,if feminist theory is to come up with a suitable explanation of post-coloniality and the public sphere.

The city plays a crucial role in feminist politics in India, especially inhow issues of genderand community get articulated. Kumar(1994)pointsout how the agitation against the widow burning of Roop Kanwar in

September 1987 was played out as a conflict between small ruralcommu-nities fighting for tradition (spiritual, community-oriented) and urban,westernized women from New Delhi, preaching Western ideas of equal-ity. However, as Kumar(1994, 291) herself asserts, most communal mo-bilizations took place "in towns andcities which providethe site for thismobilization"-perhaps as a bid to maintain tradition in the cities. Thus,Kumarnotes that for the feminist movement in the cities, political spaceis getting "curtailed by identity politics" (ibid.). Yet again, we see that adisavowal of religious and cultural markers of women's identity is posi-tioned as an ideal condition for women's political participation.

What is the possibility of imagining a public sphere where religion isabsent? How different is it from postmodern claims for the "irrelevance"of gender difference in the public sphere?To look at the city as a site ofboth conservative andprogressivefeminist organizingseems to be a morefruitful approach in analyzing the centrality of urban space in the con-struction of women's subjectivities. Such aposition fuses materialist andculturalist explanations. Relying on the disjunctures within urban life

between the economic andthe cultural realm might enable us to come toa better understanding of women's motives and agencies in regressivemovements, as well as to help articulate a broader social agenda wheregender, class, and ethnic differences are taken into account in the con-struction of a socially just city.

A feminist reading should seek to destabilize the public-private dis-tinction upon which theories of the city rely, as well as to reveal how thisdistinction is used by various ideologies of gender oppression like reli-gious fundamentalism and racism, as well as liberal patriarchy, in at-

tempts to define the public sphere. Sahgal andYuval-Davis (1992, 1) notethat "women, their roles, and above all their control, are at the heart of thefundamentalist agenda.That they should conform to the strict confines ofwomanhood within the fundamentalist religious code is a preconditionfor maintaining and reproducingthe fundamentalist version of society."Ironically, secularist and multiculturalist ideologies have furthered thisdistinction by creating as opposite and separate a secular public sphereand an autonomous private sphere where individuals make their own





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choices regardingreligious practices (ibid., 8). City spaces need to beproblematized in light of ideologies engagedin the control of contending

spheres seeking hegemony in civil society. In the contemporary politicalcontext of fundamentalism of different types, women's identities areestablished as religious, communal, and race-oriented, and the centraldilemma being presented to women is one of self (privatized) versuscommunity (privateand public).

The disjunctions between competing feminist versions of a radicaldemocracy are revealed in the above discussion. While Mazumdar(1994)seeks the establishment of a radically secular public space uncontami-nated by class and caste interests, perhapsa more dynamic conception ofpublic space in which different identity positions compete for poweris necessary. Many readings of women's politicization, especially post-modern analyses, do not explain the situation facing the global city, forexample, the status of minorities in a theocratic state in which, as inmany postcolonial states, women's rights are constantly deferredin the"not now." Genderidentity cannot be theorizedwhile excludingmultipleways of expressing and experiencing the self and the community. Whileprogressive responses call for areassertion of genderloyalty, forrecogniz-

ing women's subordination within the family, community, economy andthe state, the right-wing attempts to locate women squarely within thecommunity. These conflicting conundrums call for a necessarily materi-alist and postcolonial readingof the contemporary city.

LiteraryBombay

In the following sections I read Shashi Deshpande's That LongSilence(1988) precisely because of its complicated attention to this theme, be-sides its providing of a literary canvas based in Bombay. One of theunderlyingthreads in the descriptionsof Bombay by writers is the irrecon-cilability of Bombay's realities and its fictions. Caught in this dialectic,Deshpande exposes modernist and nationalist tendencies that see, in thecity, a negation of tradition andauthentic subjectivity. But the novel alsodiffersfrom other postcolonial evocations of Bombayas a heady space ofdifference andexcessive postcoloniality, as we find in Rushdie's texts, for

example. Deshpande's stark narrative departs from such a treatment ofthe city and focuses on its realism and its role in constructing a feministsubjectivity. Throughthe representation of the modernurbanwoman, hernarrativeattempts to resolve the avowed dilemma of authenticity versuscontamination. Shedoes so by allowing genderdifference to provide awayof thinking throughthe postcolonial text, in orderto drawattention to theissue of how city space is gendered and imagined.





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Novels such as Deshpande's have remained largely unnoticed in theemerging canon of postcolonial writers from India. Their ostensible sub-

ject matter is a personalized renderingof an intensely private alienationwith the nation, civil society and the city, and their failure in accountingfor women's sexuality and agency. It is this framing of the text within amiddle-class woman's consciousness that has prompted a critic likeSundarRajan(1993) to criticize the novel as a mediocre, andultimately,a limited evocation of Indianfeminism, in its individualized and family-oriented solutions to the crisis of Indian womanhood. Rajansets up herargument with a negative tone: the fact of Silence having been firstpublished by a feminist press in the West, Viragoin England,leads her tocondemn the novel for its implicit claim as the representative text ofThird Worldwomen. My discussion below, while not engaging with theparticularitiesof Rajan'scritique, questions the way in which her a priorijudgment about the novel actually forecloses an engagement with thegaps and contradictions in the narratives of middle-class Indian womenthat are revealed in the novel.

Further,my readingof the novel suggests Deshpande's very consciousattempt to point to the limits of individualized solutions. A discussion of

the role played by the city in the novel provides me with instances of thevery specific ways in which the materiality of space contends with theideological divisions of it. While not denying the importance of the con-ditions of literaryproduction,Inevertheless find it to be anunsatisfactoryassumption that texts authored by middle-class women cannot offer co-gent feminist and class analyses. Finally, Deshpande's novel has notreceived any of the kind of attention focused on otherpostcolonial Indianwriters, most of them male, and therefore begs the question of post-colonial canonicity.

The novel, from the very outset, describes the writing process as anexplicitly feminist one, with its feminism located in a critique of middle-class women's subjectivities, their implication in caste and class privi-leges, and their complex negotiations with the spatiality of modern life.Deshpande recuperates the genre of realism via a combination of socialcommentary and interiorized, modernist autobiography. Her novel de-picts the ennui in the life of Jaya, an upper middle-class housewife inBombay, as she records her feelings of displacement, disorder, and quiet

insurgencyin the face of an alienating andvexing city space.9Throughout,the novel is undergirdedby the tension of genre, and the narratordevotesthe opening epilogue to this tension. She writes:

Perhapst is wrong o writefromthe inside.Perhapswhat I have to dois seenyself, us,fromadistance... TherehavebeentimeswhenI'vehad hisqueersensationof beingdetachedanddistantfrommy own self.Timeswhen I'vebeen ableto separatewodistinctstrands-my experience, ndmyawareness





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of that experience .... I had found myself agonising over what I could write,whattherewasinmylifethat meantsomething.Finally,whenIhadsiftedout

whatIhadthoughtwere rrelevantacts, onlythesehadremained: wasborn.Myfatherdiedwhen I was fifteen.Igotmarried o Mohan. have twochildrenandI did not let a third ive. (2)

Using a first personnarrativemode, Jaya,married to a company execu-tive, Mohan, sets aboutchallenging official, statist narratives on women'srelationships to public discourse, in which only the details of "Iwas born

." would find expression. The opening section also points to the

tenuousness of what might at first seem merely the narrative of a "hys-

terical" housewife, expressinga

subjective and unreliable "experience."The very genre of the diarysituates the literary projectas episodic, selec-tive and fragmentary, and engenders a space of expression where thesubject can be "true" to herself. Jayaconstantly reinforces the point thatthis is going to be a very personal story about herself and her family, buther very insistence on the personal nature of the story opens up thepossibility of reading t aschallenging anationally written patriarchalandbourgeois script for women's roles and their place in postcolonial soci-ety. 0 This negotiation between the public andthe privateself undertaken

by Jaya also connects the two parts of my essay. While the previoussections dealt with a very public crisis in the city, Deshpande's noveldeals with a series of private crises propelled by what happensin the city.Thus, while the 1993 riots brought to the fore a very public violence,Silence records the invisible violence of the postcolonial private, in itsbrutal separation from the public.

Jaya and Mohan experience their married life mediated through themetropolis of Bombay, where Mohan's thirst for middle-class comfortlands him in a corruption scandal at his company. ForJaya his "catastro-phe" that threatens to break apart the bourgeois family provides a mo-ment of looking inward, allowing a critique of bourgeois life in the city.While acknowledging the limits of the breaking of "that long silence" bya privileged urban housewife and upper class writer, I seek to locate thenovel within a complex argument linking material postcolonial spacesand the evocation of a feminist identity that remains sensitive to variousclass positions. My analysis points out that Jaya'sawakening to the silentcrises engulfing her life is heightened and enabled in large part by her

experience in Bombay. The city spatializes her desires and anxieties, herconsciousness and solidarities in very specific ways, such that the discov-ery that she is alone in the city is countered by the disjointed feministsolidarities she establishes in the alienating spaces of Bombay. Her alien-ation is from both the public and the private milieu-as she is caughtbetween the private act of creating a home, keeping up an indifferentrelationship with her husband, and the public act of writing her life storyboth in the magazine column andin this novel. She is able to question her





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given position in society through her analysis of the meanings of "good"women. Ironically, it is her own quasi-romantic liaison with Kamat (a

writer who lives in her building), that is laden with suggestions of adul-tery, impropriety, and disloyalty toward her husband. The structures ofurban spaces such as the middle-class apartment building Jaya inhabits,

enable such adulterousrelationships to crystallize, and then get cynicallyignored. Unable to cope with an undefinable relationship, Jayaabandonsthe dying Kamat in his apartment. This, too, is possible in Bombay.

The central paradox of Jaya's story is that she finds no joy and ful-fillment in her prescribed role, which culminates in the slow death andquiet hysteria of her relationship with Mohan. The salience of economic

production in the construction of masculinity is underscored throughMohan's feelings of a loss of identity due to the loss of his office work,putting Jaya'scareer as wife also in jeopardy-"wasn't he my profession,my career, my livelihood?"she asks herself (75).But alongwith this crisisof identity comes a curious sense of freedom for Jaya,from the monsters

of housekeeping, the "gadgets,glassware ... mahogany elephants" inhab-

iting their carefully furnished Churchgate home. It also signifies a rejec-tion of bourgeois familial values-just as Jaya's widowed ajji (grand-

mother) is remarkablywithout possessions, since widowhood in HinduIndia signifies the loss of membership within the reproductive realm ofthe family.

The narrative appeals to several strands of the nationalist discoursethat privilegeda negation of commercialization. Jayaderives much of her

critique of contemporaryurbanIndiafrom this discourse, though she is itsvictim in other ways. Thus, in contrast to her husband's consumeristfantasies, she recalls the slogan of the Gandhianera- "Simple living and

high thinking" (60).Now, in the 1980s, there is a distinct air of corruption

that seems to pervade the institutions of modern public life in whichsuccess proves to be a cover for a lack of ethics and a weakening civilsociety. Jaya's relative, Dilip, becomes a suave and successful Unionofficial who thrives on bribes from industrialists. His house, brand new,pink and green like all the other "bungalows that have mushroomed onthe outskirts of the city" (23),reflects his new-found money and status, aswell as new urbanformations in postcolonial India. Her younger brotherRavi is involved in a plethora of money-making projects that smack ofdishonest dealings. But most importantly, there is the shadow of corrup-tion within her own home in the figure of Mohan.

Postcolonial Urban Forms

Silence's narrative of a modern urban woman's life is intimately inter-twined with postcolonial India's urban forms, and traces Jaya's journey





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through these spaces. She first moves from the backwaters of SaptagiritoLohanagar,a steel-plant town where Mohan worked as an engineer, to

Bombay at the forefront of India's commercial capital, undergoing anupward mobility experienced by many middle-class Indians. Jaya growsup into ayoung woman on the outskirts of the town of Saptagiri, mbibingthe pastoral and seemingly complacent air, encompassing spaces not-yeturban.Alongside the relatives' shabbyhomes in Saptagiriarethe narrow

bylanes emanating a putrid odor from a clogged-up drainage systein.Towns like these have stayed forever in a gesture of in-betweenness,assuming all the demerits of urbanization,the filth, squalor, perverselackof planning, overcrowding from villages, and a failing trickle-down eco-nomic growth. These are also spaces where old feudal structures andvalues co-exist often unhappily with new classes claiming access to mo-dernity and urbanism, albeit unsure of their social benefits. In otherwords, they seem to be spaces where the metropolitan ideal is still unde-cidable.

The concentrated symbol of that undecidability of metropolitanism isthe Crossword House in Saptagiri,belonging to the town's elite family,the name itself a bizarreprotrusionof Westernization in the backwaters

of India. Yet, it hones in on the incommensurable juxtapositions of themodern and the non-modern within postcolonial urbanism. For it is herethat Mohan first encounters metropolitan modernity in the figures of theEnglish-speakingwomen who visit Crossword House (the name is itself aplay with the symbol of facility with the English language). Mohan'spreferenceforJayaas a wife is predicatedon the fact that Jayasoundedlikethose English-speakingwomen at CrosswordHouse. Hercollege degree inEnglish literature, and her cosmopolitan credentials enhanced by herknowledge of Austen and Trollope make her an attractive candidate for

marriagein Mohan's eyes. The very fact that eighteenth and nineteenthcenturyBritishwriters, especially those that evoke a dyingpastoralrealmin an earlier Britishera,providecultural capital to women like Jayapoinitsto the curious ways in which access to the English literarytradition is stillplayed out in contemporary India.

The escape from Saptagiri's provinciality finally comes to Mohanthrough a job offer as an engineer in Lohanagar literally translated intosteel town). Characterizedby its uniformly drab houses and giant-sizedindustrial plants, Lohanagarstands in for a new postcolonial Indian

mo-dernitythat is based on ideasofprogress, ndustrial growth andprosperity,balanced by socialist ideals of the welfare state providing decent wagesand creating utilitarian spaces for dwelling and recreation, factories forwork, and schools for the education of the workers' children. TheseSoviet-style urbanformations, often built with Soviet collaboration, at-tempt to mask differences of wealth, caste and religion, and provide avision for a new kind of life for the country andfor the people, in which its





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engineers would build a modern economy, and their families would be

provided with an environment where new nuclear families would be

forged. Jayarecalls Mohan's dedication to the factory there, where heworked twelve hours a day.However, a strike by lower-ranked workers inthe factory (pointingto the oppressionsof the postcolonial developmental-ist state, too), upsets his thirst for the stability of privilege andtriggershissearch for a transfer to the big metropolis (58).

Bombay, too, turns out be "nothingbut gray,uniformugliness" with its

"endless rows of looking-exactly-alike, ramshackle,drabbuildings"(54)-a huge disappointment to the provincial's dreamof the moment of actu-ally arrivingin the big city. But it is in the streets of Bombaythat there is"the magic of (their) teeming life ... the mobs, the brawls, the drunkards... processions" (54).The "diverse"sounds of Bombaylead to a "sense of

being invaded, not just by sounds, but by a multitude of people and theiremotions as well" (56). These sounds, such as the nightly thuds of awoman getting beaten up, become the means by which Jaya s sucked intootherpeoples' lives (57).Privatespaces arerenderedpermeablein the city,and the public leaks into previously compartmentalized segments ofprivacy, the supposed site of sexual and reproductive relations.

Deshpande constructs a narrative in which consciousness of space isachieved through the act of writing, enabled through the metaphor ofmapping the objects in the room, in the city and in her consciousness.Objects and things in the home become markers of where Jayais, both

temporally and spatially. These signifiers of place enable a remappingofher life in the city, concretized through her narrativesof daily life. WhenJayaand Mohan are forced to abandonliving in their more upscale homein Churchgate and move to the apartment in Dadar, a sprawling middle-class suburb, it is a clear sign of downward mobility, or at least its ever-

present threat in a new India,as opposed to the more stable social hierar-chies of the past. The flat in Dadar is laden with filthy sights as JayaandMohan climb up "the dingy stairs of a drab building in the heart ofBombay" (7). The passageways show trails of garbage, the flat itself"reekedof mildew and rot" caused by the unhappy mixing of "the fetidstench" with "the closed-in monsoon mustiness" (12).

Mohan has run away from filth all his life, developing a "passion forneatness and order"(12), symbolic of his desire for upward mobility and

metropolitanism. His obsession with order appears in ironic contrast tothe chaotic spells in his life. Jaya, too, had in the past embraced thepossibility of finding fulfillment as "a woman who had scrubbed andcleaned and taken an inordinate pride . .. even in a toilet free from stainsand smells" (13).There is a pervasive equivalence between social successand the ability to keep one's home clean-Kusum, the poor relative ofJaya's s incapable of managing a home, and the disorderly and unkempthomes of Saptagiri define a provincialism that can be transcended only





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through the abandonment of unclean spaces. Jaya's brother moves toAmerica where his wife Geeta "had tried to forget her middle-class ori-

gins, behaving as if her life hadalways been lived in bacteria-free,prosper-ous suburbs" (42). Hers is a particularly postcolonial representation ofWestern modernity that flattens America's complex spaces into a uni-form image of spotless suburbia, in which America emerges as the newheart of metropolitanism in the Indian imagination.

Threatening Classes

One way of counteringthe triviality that the novel suggests constitutesJaya's life is for her to form alliances outside her class. Mohan's uneasewith poor women (such as the servant Nayana), and with those on thestreets (such as the wives of military personnel protesting the unciviltreatment of their husbands by the state) is felt and sometimes internal-ized, though always uncomfortably, by Jaya. The city forces upon itsinhabitants encounters with women from vastly differentsocial and eco-nomic classes, and provides a context in which they (the women) seem

both intruders(threateningtheir own modesty in the processofbecomingvisible in the city), andtroublingreminders of the precariousnessof socialpositioning in the city. The novel refers to several instances of middle-class women in Bombayhaving organizedaround ssues such asanti-pricerise campaigns(120).In otherwords, the city both exaggerates differencesamong women, as well as creates spaces for feminist solidarity.

Jaya'sdays arereplete with conversations, albeit mundane, with vari-ous servant women with whom she seems to share a bond of genderedexperience. This is not to suggest that Jaya mplies actually transgressing

class boundaries. However, in contrast, her friendships with women ofher own class, like Rupa, are merely pretenses, that are never "probe[d]deeper"andconsist of exchanging the trivialities of life (48).InDadar, themore lower middle-class area of Bombay, she comes across sympatheticwomen as neighbors, who at times seem too interferingand invasive ofher privacy, but stand by her when her husband Mohan leaves homewithout telling her.

Jaya'saffinities with the domestics, the more working-class characters

around her and her widowed neighbor make Mohan suspicious, as theysymbolize for him a nightmarish future when the class divide will nolonger hold. However, it is the sordid drama of the domestics' lives thatinterests Jaya,what she considers worth re-telling through herown story,in however limited a manner. She empathizes with Jeeja who is dailybeaten up by a husbandwho once had a mill job that he lost duringa strike,and now has turned into an alcoholic. In contrast the lives of "all thosehappywomen with husbandsin good jobs,men who didn't drink andbeat





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their wives, those fortunate women. . . -they were of no use" to her (52).

Jayaherself now is a woman whose husband is without ajob,but her sense

of solidarity emerges not from any necessary self-pitying on her part,butrather that it provides her life with some dramaand enables her to elicitsolidarities with those less fortunate.

Images of Bombay "overflowing with beggars" (74), of "those sad,defeated people who poured into Bombay from the barrencountryside"and were "everywhere" (72) seem to pervade all aspects of middle-classconsciousness represented in the novel. The reliance on relief works asmeasures to stem, contain and alleviate the tide of human beings in urbanIndia is both lauded as the state's duty, but also reviled for its limits. For

Jayathese relief works seem to be no more than images in newsreels-ofroad constructions and other "works" that ultimately end in "nothingachieved but statistics in files" (74).Thus the reality of Bombaywith its

never-ending upheavals experiencedas strikes, riots, andmass influxes of

humanity stands out in stark contrast to the "works"of the state intend-ing to instill control over the chaos of postcolonial urbanism.

The failure of the state to establish control over India's civic spaces ispresented through a personal analogy. An incident with a beggar child

provides the narrativewith an important disjunctive moment, symboliz-ing an impediment to middle-class mobility and comfort. Sitting insidethe carand surroundedby loved ones, Jaya'sfamily seems threatened bythe little beggar peering in as they eat their ice creams-a threat seen asextending to all that they stood for, and underscoringthe precariousnessof all theirpossessions and familial ties. But the beggarnever speaksin thescene, only looks, recalling forreaders the images of Bombay overflowingwith urchins that have become crucial in the city's representations."1

As Jaya's story progresses, there are hints of violence breaking out in

different parts of the city, evoking other violent memories of what themiddle classes term "trouble" in the city. The unrest in Lal Bagh andParel, and the impending disturbance, makes traversing those regionsimpossible for a woman like Jaya,though she recalls how well-policedParelgenerally is.'2 Back from a tripto their previous home, she reassuresMohan: "It was all over by the time I passed through those areas. Thepolice had dispersedthe mobs and it was peaceful" (76). Jaya's dentity is,thus, constructed both in tandem with, and in opposition to, what couldbe interpreted through the lens of an urban housewife, as a potentiallyviolent mass ofpeople on the streets. The fact that Jayarealizes how thosemoments of engagement with masses of people construct her as an uppermiddle-class privilegedwoman provides the narrative with its emancipa-tory trajectory.

Public unrest constitutes an inconvenience all too common in modernIndia,involving reroutings andnecessitating new traffic arrangements. Italso reminds Jaya of being surrounded by striking workers earlier in





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Lohanagar.What is significant, however, is how Jayaand Mohan remem-ber it differently:

But I knew, when Mohan spoke of it, that in Lohanagar hat time, unless mymemory was playingme false, I had not been frightened.On the contrary,there

had been, as far as I could recall, a peculiar exhilaration. It had fascinated me,the thought that there was only a sheet of glass between me andthe shouting,gesticulating, menacing-looking men I could see through the windscreen ofthe company car.I had watched them with a curious detachment. It had beenthe C.E.'swife who hadpanickedand Mohanwho hadurgently cried, "Driver,don't stop, go on, don't slow down, go on." (76)

The image of Jaya behind a thin sheet of glass, separated from violent

bodies, is one that forms an important motif in the novel. Jaya's gender is

problematically tied to her class position that seems to promise safety

from a position of privilege and comfort. But, instead of remembering fear

and horror, Jaya recalls "detachment," thereby questioning the more

stereotypical representation of riotous crowds as images of unleashed

masculinity threatening the bourgeois woman. Jaya's narrative skillfully

places these experiences within the prevailing political and economic

order so that the crowd consists of merely the powerless.The Bombay of Silence is a simmering city-bubbling with communal

and labor unrest and threatening Bombay's representation as the space of

unencumbered freedoms. Jaya's feelings of suffocation in the city, how-

ever, are as much predicated on the masses of people who band and

disband in tumultuous ways in the city, as on the polarizing effects of

those groups: their emancipatory potential as well as their chauvinistic

and exclusivist agendas. Jaya recalls the older Hindu Mahasabha (a reac-

tionary Hindu organization) crowds in the city, thus indirectly providing

a comment upon the Shiv Sena presence in contemporary Bombay. Briefsections of the novel focus on urban dislocation and the resultant turn to

fundamentalism due to the influence of the Sena, in attempts to decon-

struct the notion that political identities are somehow outside private

identities. Jaya is just that kind of woman, urban and middle-class, who

was newly mobilized by the right-wing Hindutva forces for the 1993 riots.

At one point in the novel, Jaya'sson pointedly asks her to identify hlerstance-would she be for the Communist groups or for the right-wing

Hindu groups? The question he raises of his parents' political affiliations,

while witnessing the political processions on the streets, elicits Jaya's

reply of "nothing." She suspects later that the callousness of that answer

crystallizes her son's teenage cynicism (50). At the very moment of her

son's question, Mohan pulls Jaya away from the procession, and Jaya

writes: "we did not speak of what we had seen," of "the vague disquietude

of the afternoon," and the slogans of total revolution (55). Thus what

seemed to be a matter of the street invades Jaya's home.





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The City as Scandal

The novel skirts both the narrative of areturnto normalcy (the possiblescenario of the estrangedMohan coming back to his wife's arms), and a

narrative of total destruction (in which the female protagonist commitssuicide or faces death). Jaya's recovery from her nervous exhaustion,however imperfect and utopian, suggests a way out of her contemporaryurban predicament. She comes to terms with the city, refusing to behemmed in and afraid. She returns to the streets of Bombay for signs ofhope andregeneration, even though nothing in her situation has changedsince Mohan has walked out on her. All she has recoveredis hervoice, butit is not a singular,authentic voice of the artist triumphant over all odds.It is that of a woman who has come to some understandingof her city and

her situation, of the new maps she needs to draw in order to transcend her

limited access to social reality. ForJayaknows that in the end, it is the

servant's daughter, Manda, who emerges as the true "child of Bombay"(164), thus enabling a displacement of belonging and privileged locationfrom her middle-class consciousness to that of the poor servant girl.

Bombay thwarts any understanding of its spacein terms of nostalgia for

an unreconstructed home and nation. Profoundchanges aretransformingBombay as the quintessential space of Indian modernity. The novel'ssuppressed narrative of religious trouble in Bombay, foreshadowing thecrises of 1993blurs the distinctions between the fictitious and the real,asBombaywitnessed a total conflagration of religious identities and sociallocalities-a most uncivil drawingof boundaries between differentgroupsthat were supposedto exist in bliss in Bombay. Bombay's pluralities then

emerged as its incongruities.

Ultimately, civil society in the Bombayof this narrativeis a "scandal"

in itself, a truly inhospitable space that nevertheless has to be claimed fora politics and a narrative of difference. The doctrine of development,articulatedby the Nehruvian dream of modern institutions being the new"temples" of India,is no longer the providerof postcolonial urban"salva-tion." Silence interrogates the ways in which urban space is constitutivein literary representations of postcolonial identity and citizenship. Bystagingthe (im)possibility of community andwomen's agency in a deeplyfragmented Bombay, Deshpande has pressed the need for rethinking thecity all over again. In not ultimately necessitating the return of thepostcolonial male to the woman/home/nation that remain stable andfixed, the novel both mocks that ending as false and points to the fissuresin imagining the contemporary city as a controllable and essential spaceof masculinity and modernity. Communal trouble has thrown up newchallenges to women writers in terms of imagining personal and publicspaces, and re-evaluating public discourse about women as citizens, andDeshpande certainly provides us with a thoughtful response.





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Thematerial for this article is based upon my thesis research for a Ph.D.

at the University of Illinois at Chicago. I wish to thank Judith Kegan

Gardiner,Subir Sinha, and David Spurr or patiently reading many ver-sions of this paper, and for providing helpful comments. My gratitude toNupur Chaudhuri and Cheryl Johnson-Odim forfirst showing interest inthe subject, and to Patricinio Schweickart, MargaretMcFadden, and an

anonymous reviewer for valuable suggestions. My inspiration, of course,

comes from the many Indian feminists and activists, whose work I

admire, cherish, and am in solidarity with, in this paper and elsewhere.Correspondenceshould be addressed to Rashmi Varma, Department of

English, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, CB #3520,

Greenlaw Hall, Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3520.

Notes

1. "Civil Lines" was the name given by British colonial authorities to areas of a

particulartown or city in which British civilians and later privilegednativesresided.It marked, alongwith other Westerninstitutions, what SanjaySrivas-tava refers to as the "sign of a 'rational' Occident in the 'irrational'Orient"(403). A British observer once referred to these settlements as providing"magnificent object lessons to the native" (Rev. George Clutterbuck, inEvenson 1989, 99). The postcolonial city representsthe disjuncturesbetweenthe two notions of rational Occident and irrational Orient, and produceshybrid and new urbanforms.

2. Until well into the 1970s, the Indianeconomy was committed to a mixture ofsocialist and very limited free market ingredients. However, since the late1980s,underRajiv Gandhi's regime, the prevailingconsensus on the economy

began to erode. The beginning of the 1990s witnessed a radical opening up ofthe Indian economy to foreign investment, partly dictated by IMF'sstructuraladjustment requirements.

3. While Gayatri Spivak (1994) correctly cautions us when she points to thecurrent misidentification of immigrant/postcolonial/metropolitan, someratherculturalist and nativist responses have come from a very diversegroupof writers. Forinstance, Maria Mies (1993)groups the North, patriarchy, andthe city as oppressiveformations that dominate the South, women, and ruralareas.Ashis Nandy

(1987)argues that the recent resurgence ofHinduism as a

political and spiritual force is a response from a populace lost and withoutdirection in an alienated urban economy. Reactionary Hindu organizationssuch as the RSS and ShivSenahave justified their presence in urbanneighbor-hoods by claiming to provide people with a sense of community in alienatedsituations. In general, critics like Nandy have denigrated mass culture in thecities anddevelopment in favor of a traditionthat they see as anti-modernandresistant to modernity's individualistic and anti-nature tendencies.





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4. This is not to suggest at all that villagers in postcolonial India are not mar-ginal, but to point out the ahistorical and sentimentalized representations

that do not do justice to their agency, nor to the historical and economicprocesses through which the rural and urban sectors are constituted.

5. Dipesh Chakrabarty 1996)makes this point in his analysis of the literatureofthe Partition of India in which displacedurbancitizens often expressedtheirnationalism by evoking ties to an idyllic village of their past childhood, andareturn to which symbolised a return to their true home, snatched away by"hateful"Muslims.

6. The Hindu rightwing mobilized public opinion by arguingthat the sixteenth-

century Babrimosque had been built by the Muslim rulerafter he hadrazedtothe ground a temple that markedthe site of LordRama's birth.Itused this pasthistorical "wrong" o construct an agendaforthe ethnic cleansing of Muslimsfrom the Indian nation state. It delineated the task of the modernHindu manor woman to avenge the Muslims in contemporary India for their barbaricancestors.

7. Accordingto one theory, the 1993 riots were in fact realestate scams in whichthe mafia manipulated communal angerto raze slums that existed in prime

propertyareas in order to transformthem into more lucrative shopping andoffice districts.

8. The Shiv Sena or, Shiva's Army, a right-wing political party, is based inBombayand the state of Maharashtra.It has an exclusivist programof estab-lishing a militant Maharashtrianand nationalist Hindu identity. It has con-trolled the BombayMunicipal Corporationformore than a decade now (afterthe decline of left-wing ormore progressivetradeunions), andcame to powerin the state assembly in March 1995.

9. In India, the term "housewife" is used for middle-class women who stay athome and, though they need not identify their occupation as such (in fact theysee it as "nooccupation"),they are supposed to performthe role of supervisingthe home, family, and children.

10.Tharu and Lalita (1993) make this point very strongly about the nature ofIndian women's writing that emerges in the wake of independence. Thereseems to have been almost a kind of retreatinto the personalrealm, a notice-able departurefrom nineteenth century narrativesread by Chatterjee (1993)that were largely diariespresenting social commentary.

11. The huge international success of Mira Nair's film Salaam Bombay thatfocused on Bombay'sstreet children, and of movies that depict other Indiancities in similar ways (such as The City of Joy on Calcutta) reinforce thedominant images about postcolonial Indian cities as simply overwhelmed bypoverty and corruption.





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12. Deshpande (1988) draws upon actual events that took place in Parel, espe-

cially from 1982 onwards, when a massive textile strike was organized in

Bombay under the leadership of Dr. Datta Samant, that paralyzed Bombay forsome time. Parelhas been traditionally a labor dominated area.

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