Attachment and Estrangement: Women’s Embodied Placemaking in Urban Banaras

Recently, it has been further politicized by the right-wing Hindu political party, Bhartiya Janta Party (BJP), and the current Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, who is using the city as his electoral constituency. Modi’s agenda of development premised on the smart city rhetoric underpinned by divisive politics has marginalized women as belongers to the city and reproduced them as mere carriers of religion, traditions, feminine norms, and duties.    

The talk presents women’s everyday worlds by examining women’s embodied and lived experiences through their relationships with urban spaces in the unique city of Banaras. Through ethnographic anecdotes, I discuss women’s attachment and estrangement with city spaces through the phenomenon of embodied placemaking. I use Dalmandi, an everyday bazaar, as a case study as it represents the transition of an urban space from a redlight district to a market by situationally excluding women as its legitimate residents. Tracing the history and contemporary image of Dalmandi, I examine how women have reconfigured their relationship with this particular space and the city in general.

The study demonstrates intersectional embodied placemaking by women while repurposing debates on the fallacies of public/private, un/safe, and dis/reputable, among other patriarchally imposed binaries. The talk takes the audience to streets, temples, and bazaars in this extraordinarily timeless, sacred, and antique city to demonstrate how estrangement and attachment materialize for women in urban spaces. 

source: sciencespo.fr