Abstract
The chapter is an interpretation of the gendered social, spatial and temporal configurations of the North Indian city of Banaras, a renowned centre of Hindu religiosity. The analysis draws on women’s experiences to construct the ways in which women’s worlds are sites where possibilities and dangers co-exist. The paper offers the concept of patriarchal territoriality to explain how varied patriarchies in India, through numerous standpoints, culminate to produce gendered city spaces. It identifies how gendered social relations have an effect on the city’s space, destabilising the public/private binary. Even domestic spaces can be private or public, depending upon the social relations prevailing in everyday situations. In essence, the paper demonstrates the territorialisation processes, as an ideological discourse, which enable men to encroach public and domestic spheres, as autonomous structures like caste and religion bolster and uphold their claims.
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Notes
- 1.
The ancient name for Banaras is Kashi. Varanasi is the name given to Banaras after independence and is mostly used for administrative purposes. People still refer to the city as Banaras in everyday situations, and for this reason, this research also uses this name of the city.
- 2.
The construction of the Kashi Vishwanath corridor is an example of contemporary claims to affirm the dominant Hindutva religiosity of the city. Such endeavors erase the historical cosmopolitanism that once defined the city (Kumar, 2019).
- 3.
Shiva is considered one of the supreme gods in Hindu mythology and Banaras is his adobe. He is believed to protect the inhabitants of Banaras in his various avatars.
- 4.
The Brahman caste is placed at top of the order; Shudras are at the bottom and Dalits are placed outside the system of varna. The middle castes are made up of Kshatriyas and Vaishyas (see Ambedkar & Rege, 2013).
- 5.
Women marrying lower-caste men is considered a bigger taboo as it involves the ‘pollution’ of a woman’s body by lower-caste men through physical penetration, which is irreversible. Such exogamous marriages are known as pratiloma (Mitra, 2021).
- 6.
Rege (1998: 45) defines the Dalit feminist standpoint as, “A Dalit feminist standpoint is seen as emancipatory since the subject of its knowledge is embodied and visible … [the Dalit feminist standpoint] places emphasis on individual experiences within socially constructed groups and focuses on the hierarchical, multiple, changing structural power relations of caste, class, ethnic, which construct such a group … the subject of dalit feminist liberatory knowledge must also be the subject of every other liberatory project and this requires a sharp focus on the processes by which gender, race, class, caste, sexuality—all construct each other”.
- 7.
This is to reiterate it that I am not stating that other religious communities in India do not have caste hierarchies. They definitely do and there is a wide academic discussion on them (See Shaikh [2021] and Levesque [2021]). My contention is on reaching an understanding of patriarchy that encompasses women across communities.
- 8.
‘Respectable femininity’ is a discourse interpreted by feminist scholars, especially within a South Asian context, to account for the role that femininity plays in social lives of women to make them legitimate or “good” through preserving honour and virtue in the public arena. Evidence of a ‘good’ woman is materialised through the overt manifestation of femininity, that Gilbertson (2014) states is featured in purposeful movements, demure posture, modes of clothing, avoidance of lower-class men.
- 9.
Even men have inhibitions in public, especially in relation to their caste, class and religion, but the everyday fear and incessant constraint that women experience does not usually apply to men.
- 10.
I adapt the term buri nazar as used by my informants. While describing their everyday routines in public spaces, many women explained that they ignore the stares and harassment of men because they could see the buri nazar beneath it.
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Gupta, S. (2023). Patriarchal Territoriality: Women’s Worlds in the Sacred City of Banaras. In: Millie, J. (eds) The ‘Crossed-Out God’ in the Asia-Pacific. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-3354-9_7
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