Our newest initiative to understand the ways in which urban spaces are gendered began to take shape during the preparations for the Midnight March in January 2013 after the brutal gang rape of Nirbhaya in Delhi in December 2012. In the discussions around the sexual assault a whole host of issues evolved around the increasing presence and mobility of young women in the urban spaces, ways in which public spaces are hospitable or conducive to such mobility, adequacy and inadequacy of public transport came up repeatedly. In the post 1990 India, the mainstream anxieties about the sexual freedom of young people in urban spaces came to the forefront at this time.
Soon after, our understanding of the issues of young women in urban spaces got deepened when Anveshi assisted the UGC Taskforce on Sexual Harassment and Gender Equality (find more here) on its visit to four universities in Hyderabad. Anveshi members collaborated with several women faculty, student unions, non-teaching staff unions and women students in arranging Open Houses in University of Hyderabad, Maulana Abdul Kalam Azad Urdu University, Osmania University and English and Foreign Languages University. These Open Houses brought different kinds of issues of the women in each university campus as well as between different campuses.
The learnings from this collaboration fed into the Anveshi Broadsheet on Sexuality and Harassment in 2014. This Broadsheet brought into focus the tensions and crosscurrents around sexuality and harassment in these campuses as well as the differences among the institutions in culture and infrastructure. Both these processes made it imperative to notice that women were increasing in higher education campuses but gender sensitivity remained a fraught issue.
In 2015 with some Anveshi members were commissioned by the Telangana Collegiate Commissionerate to prepare gender sensitization curriculum for undergraduate students, we got involved in a long process of understanding gender from the perspective of the present generation. In preparing Towards a World of Equals, the bilingual textbook on gender, we discussed issues adopting everyday examples, drew on regional histories and cultures, diverse socio-economic background while avoiding academic jargon. Several workshops with teachers and students later, a new, updated textbook is on an anvil.
Our project on City and Sexuality: A Study of Youth Living and Working in Hyderabad began in 2016 in this background. Supported by American Jewish Welfare Society, it has sought to understand the experiences, negotiations, transition and transformation in the lives of young women migrating to Hyderabad for education and work. Five researchers conducted detailed interviews with women students from different universities, women working in malls, hospitals and corporate offices about their experience of finding space to live, finding a foothold in the city, forming new networks and friendships, experience at and with-in educational institutions and workspaces as well as access to city life, through public transport or leisure activities. The team tracked their aspirations, their paths to the city, changes in their life-style, notions of career and marriage. Does migration inevitably lead to autonomy from the familial control over women’s lives and introduce elements of resistance was the question that the team pursued in the analysis of the transcribed interviews.
Research papers based on the study were presented at the Indian Association of Women’s Studies conferences, National Institute of Advanced Study, IIT Hyderabad, Critical Studies conference of the Calcutta Research Group. In 2017, we conducted a national seminar on Muffasil in Metropolis. Some of the concerns of the study were brought out in the special issue of the Anveshi Broadsheet on Metropolis as Patriarch: Feminine Experience of the City, put together by the project team in 2019.
The report brought out in 2020 can be accessed here.
Between 2018 to 2020, several members of the Anveshi general body actively participated in the debates around ‘Casting Couch in the Telugu Film Industry’, after a small time heroine Srireddy stripped in protest against sexual exploitation in the industry. Members held public discussions, participated in the debates in the news channels and wrote many op-ed pieces in newspapers to amplify the concerns of the aspirants and small time actresses in the industry. A few members joined activists who filed a Public Interest Litigation asking the government to appoint a High-Level Committee. In order to understand these concerns more thoroughly, Anveshi held a national conference on #Metoo in Our Film Industries in March 2019. Four members of the Anveshi general body got appointed to the Working group of the High-Level Committee set up by the Telangana government to look into the conditions of women in the film and television industries. Anveshi also collaborated with NALSAR University of Law in a Labour Law Clinic in 2019-2020.
Work in this initiative will continue in the coming years too!
Miscellaneous Projects
Pleasure, Conduct and Clothing: Women Clubbing in Hyderabad
Pranoo Deshiraju examined the pleasures and dangers that are associated with ‘going out’ and ‘clubbing’ for women students in Hyderabad. While conventional notions of safety portray cabs as safe form of transport and auto as not, her interviews revelaed that the women did not experience it as such. Similarly clothing was not merely a matter of choice but carefully calibrated and negotiated during the ‘going out’. While clubs were safe spaces, women had to enter them with ‘dangerous or risky’ clothing.
She wrote an essay based on this study in the Anveshi Broadsheet on Metropolis as Patriarch: Women’s Experience of the City