Atreyee Sen. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture & Society. Volume 44, Issue 3, Spring 2019.
In January 2013, Shiv Sena (henceforth Sena), a militant Hindu nationalist organization currently in a power alliance in Maharashtra, a state in western India, celebrated the anniversary of the birth of the late Bal Thackeray, the extremist leader who was the chief of the Sena for over fifty years. Local leaders organized informal neighborhood ceremonies, and these functions were held in community centers across the region. In many areas of Mumbai, the economic capital of Maharashtra, these celebrations centered around the distribution of knives to women members of the Mahila Aghadi (the Shiv Sena Women’s Front, henceforth Aghadi), especially those from lower-class and slum backgrounds. The party had placed an order for one hundred thousand Chinese retractable blades for this occasion, and in the ceremonies held in South Mumbai, one of which I attended, almost twenty-one thousand knives were distributed to women cadres. This gimmick, which was developed as a response to the “India rape crisis,” became newsworthy. On December 16, 2012, Jyoti Singh Pandey, a 23-year-old physiotherapy student, was brutally raped in a chartered bus by a group of inebriated men while her male friend was attacked with a metal rod (Express Web Desk 2017). Less than two weeks after the attack, Jyoti died. The attack caused massive public outrage (hence the reference to a “crisis”) at the government’s failure to protect women from rising sexual offenses in a country where one rape is reported every twenty minutes (HT correspondent 2016). In the aftermath of the rape, Raj Thackeray, the nephew of Bal Thackeray and now the leader of a party faction, Mumbai Navnirman Sena, openly stated that rural migrants from Bihar (a state in northern India stereotyped for its culture of thuggery) were responsible for women’s vulnerability in the city and blamed “outsiders” for ruining the socioeconomic fabric of India’s urban centers (Staff reporter 2013). While addressing journalists before the ceremony, the vibhag pramukh or commander of the South Mumbai constituency, Ajay Chaudhuri, was asked to defend the initiative. He argued that this was an apt tribute to Bal Thackeray, who “used to say women should prefer a Rampuri [small knife] in their purse rather than a lipstick.” The veteran leader, who later won election with a thumping majority, went on to state that the knives were for “enhancing women’s personal security” against the backdrop of recent attacks on women in a terse urban terrain (Damle 2013). During the meetings, I observed how female cadres jostled with each other to get their official party knives while male leaders reassured them that the law permitted ordinary citizens to carry a knife below a six-inch blade. Most of the Chinese knives were sharp but didn’t have a long blade. The knives also carried small key chains with a photo of Bal Thackeray. Sudhatai, my informant in the field for fifteen years, looked at her knife very closely. She concluded that these knives were designed to debilitate sexual predators, not to kill them, “unless you use them on the throat,” she added, highlighting the potential versatility of the blades.
A number of prominent national and international media channels, including Al Jazeera, Reuters, and the BBC (Preston 2013), covered the knife-distribution ceremony in Mumbai. These news networks drew attention to local right-wing groups that use publicity stunts around grave gender-related social issues in order to scramble for political power. Faced with this media critique, the Sena party spokesman issued a statement to the reporters: “This is a symbolic gesture … only to pass a signal to eve-teasers [street molesters], anti-social elements and perpetrators of crime against women, that women are empowered and they can take care of themselves” (Kulkarni 2013). While the Mumbai police claimed that they were examining the knives and deliberating over possibilities for legal action, Chaudhuri said: “We have set up a team of nine advocates to protect you from any potential court cases that may arise” (Al Jazeera 2013). The Sena top brass, in order to retain a moderate face while aspiring for office, denied any knowledge about the campaign. But this dramatic attempt to openly arm women in Mumbai (materially and symbolically) ignited a public debate among both right-wing men and women on ethical and appropriate responses to what are loosely defined as sex crimes in urban India. The Mumbai police eventually claimed that they had examined the knives and found them to be “not dangerous” (BBC News 2013a). However, during my informal exchanges with local police officers responsible for supervising areas where these ceremonies took place, they expressed concern about the increased circulation of “knives for killing men” in their localities. In some of the celebrations, women were also given small bags of chili powder to temporarily blind their attackers. “But that’s for weaker women afraid to carry knives,” said Sudhatai, establishing a clear hierarchy between women who carry knives and those who don’t. “They [those who do not carry the Sena knife] are giving the wrong message to their daughters. I would say when in Mumbai, teach your girls to stab, not sing.”
The Trump era in the United States has advanced ethical discussions on the global politics of paranoia and its potential emulation and manifestation in the context of localized brands of right-wing activism. These discussions call attention to the role of the global city as a key site for the propagation and sustenance of paranoid politics. The rhetoric of paranoid nationalism (Hage 2003) significantly highlights international concerns about the failures of state and statelike agencies to offer security to “legitimate” urban citizens. For example, since most illegal immigrants prefer to seek anonymity, shelter, and employment in urban centers, lawful urban residents are compelled to occupy the same public space as “dangerous” male Muslims, refugees, undocumented migrants, and asylum seekers. With the rise of terrorist attacks involving cars, taxis, trucks, and knives, the weaponization of everyday items by such lone migrants has been a source of sustained media attention on urban cultures (Borger and MacAskill 2016). This interdisciplinary essay investigates the political successes of fringe populist groups that rely on vengeful and highly gendered performances of this urban paranoia (which I develop here as “urbanoid enactments”). The concept refers to the creative cultivation of assertive gendered urban subjectivities and performances in response to propaganda, paranoia, phobia, and panics fashioned by populist politics in the city. While a significant number of scholars studying the relationship between urban fear and women’s mobility have argued that crime, nighttime economies, and familial resistance to risky behavior among urban women—such as using late-night public transport, stepping out after dark for leisure activities, taking up professions that involve staying late at work, sexual experimentation, and attending social events hosted in unsafe neighborhoods—have prompted poor women’s withdrawal from public spaces (England and Simon 2010; van Liempt, van Aalst, and Schwanen 2014; see also my discussion below), this article shows how the discursive politics of women’s self-defense, as described in the introductory vignette, becomes a source of public incitement, one that reinserts poor women within urban street cultures and moderates their sexual vulnerability in the city. I argue that such gendered “urbanoias,” which are usually related to challenges faced by poor women navigating public spaces, create a convoluted nationalist space for lower-class women to assert their presence in the urban public.
The study explores an initiative developed by a militant right-wing party, the Shiv Sena, to publicly distribute modified kitchen knives to less affluent women cadres who negotiate public transport amid deteriorating “street decencies” (or sadak sabhyata, as described by my informants) in Mumbai. This spectacular gimmick was developed on the anniversary of the birth of Bal Thackeray and it openly legitimized the stabbing of sexual predators in the name of urban women’s self-defense. I suggest that the desperate need to access employment, and the absence of state interventions in democratized urban spaces, leaves poor women to develop painful relationships of reciprocal alienation with the urban public.1 The streets become a space for poor women to fight it out with men who are hostile to their presence in the educational and labor markets. Right-wing politics and its legacy of violent self-defense becomes a temporary crutch for women to articulate their desire for security, and thus the exchange between poor women and a pro-poor party takes on an affective hue of gratitude and compassion. Even though the knife ceremonies in Mumbai were promoted as a response to media hype around a series of rapes that took place in Indian cities, my analysis explores the social logic of the Aghadi in seeking praise from a wider, sympathetic public supporting women’s resistance against sexual vulnerability in the city. This logic was eventually directed toward a collective imagination of marginalized women being both mobile and militant within a criminalizing urban economy. While several women loudly celebrated the party’s policy to arm ordinary women, many right-wing women developed a critique of women brandishing knives in public (though they aired their grievances informally in their local social environments). The event was openly criticized by the media as a cheap political stunt. But this urbanoid enactment shaped a controversial debate about strategic right-wing endorsements and their proximate relationships to women’s vulnerability in the commercial city.
Veena Das’s (1998) understanding of the relationship between violence and gendered subjectivities emphasizes the vitality of unfinished histories in creating such public paranoia. According to Das, “images of hate between social groups may take a volatile form when the social order is threatened by a critical event and so transform the world that the worst becomes not only possible but also probable” (1998, 126). I contend that a public paranoia around the rape of women at the hands of “others” is not only embedded in a cultural history about the incomplete sexual conquest of Hindu women in India but is related to the global Right debating and tagging the urban migrant as rapist (e.g., the case of alleged sexual assaults in a discotheque in Cologne) and representing gendered encounters with unwanted, disposable populations in the city as an indubitable terror, a “chronic crisis” (Vigh 2008, 7). I show how moral, mythological, and material cultures—harnessed by nationalist women to sustain an everyday politics of self-defense—move between global, national, and local right-wing doctrines, and eventually transect with feminist concerns about women’s mobility and labor in the modern city.
The Aghadi, pro-poor urban politics, and the Indian rape crisis
The increasing successes of virulent Hindu fundamentalism in India gave birth to a cluster of “rough” local organizations, which fostered political and religious insecurities in their regions for many years. One such organization was the Shiv Sena (Shivaji’s Army), a regional political party named after a medieval martial king of Maharashta, Shivaji, who carved out a Hindu empire during the period of Mughal rule. The Sena emerged in the 1960s as a grassroots organization and developed a notorious reputation by building a strong antimigrant; anticommunist; and eventually, an antiminority agenda. In 1966, as the Sena grew in popularity, the party was officially launched in Mumbai under the charismatic leadership of Balasaheb Thackeray (Eckert 2003). Thackeray’s party won several municipal elections and in 1995 joined forces with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), a pan-Indian Hindu fundamentalist organization now in power, to form the federal state government (Heuze 1995; Hansen 2001). Thereafter, the Sena has been in and out of office in several small, regional electorates, and the alliance yet again swept into power in the 2014 general elections.
Since its inception as an ethnocentric cultural organization, the Sena has remained in the news because of its violent political rhetoric not just in Mumbai but all over the state (Katzenstein 1979; Gupta 1982). Sena women also played an instrumental role in creating communal tensions, and the Aghadi was formally inaugurated in 1985, a year after the Sena formed an alliance with the BJP. In December 1992 and January 1993, after the destruction of a mosque in North India by Hindu nationalists, the Sena orchestrated indiscriminate attacks on Muslims, who comprised nearly 20 percent of the city’s population (Sen 2007). The Aghadi took to the streets in droves, and their open participation in the riots created public debates about violent women entering the forefront of nationalist politics in the city (Sen 2006). In 1999, I initiated research among Aghadi members in a riot-affected Mumbai slum. Since that time, I have documented poor women’s rationale for organizing themselves—socially and ideologically—around a rudimentary variety of Hindu nationalism, and I continue to explore how Aghadi women make themselves visible by sustaining a politically charged public life in Mumbai.
My fieldwork related to the Sena’s varied responses to the Delhi rape case took place December 2012–January 2013. The main site of research was the Chaturvadi slum area in eastern Mumbai. Even though the article is interdisciplinary in its analytical content, my discussions are set in relief against my ethnographic data, which was culled through participant observation, informal conversations, and semistructured interviews, mainly in Hindi, with slum women directly involved in local and citywide knife distribution ceremonies. I have anonymized the names of my informants and the slum area where I have conducted long-term research, and I have used translated versions of my interviews for the purpose of this article.
Over the years, a significant part of the Agdhai’s political agenda concerned the protection of ordinary Hindu women, as the women’s wing drew its primary membership from the expansive slums of Mumbai. The Sena women loyalists were first- or second-generation migrants from the rural parts of Maharashtra and Karnataka, and they became engaged in a variety of legal and illegal economic activities to sustain their families in the slums (Sen 2007). Most of the women, whether married, unmarried, abandoned, or widowed, had experienced poverty, displacement, class discrimination, evictions, familial and kin alienation, domestic abuse, illness and malnutrition, absence of food security at home, and sexual and financial vulnerabilities as workers within the informal/unskilled work sector in Mumbai. The women cadres continued to use their image as “bad women doing good” to gain social and economic benefits, ranging from securing material assets like illegal taps, electricity, and cable connections to more intangible advantages like ensuring women’s safety on the streets by thrashing male “predators” (Sen 2007). During my time in the field the women would use their hands and sticks to hit and slap men, but there were no cases of public stabbing.
The Aghadi retained its visibility by uncovering different ploys to mark urban public spaces as sites of women’s vulnerability, from the loss of authentic motherhood in the city (Bedi 2012) to impediments that prevented them from accessing streets, schools, and hospitals (Menon 2010). The international attention around the sexual vulnerability of women in Indian cities, including news about the assault on a young journalist in Mumbai (which I discuss below), enabled the Sena to position itself as the popular guardian of Hindu women. But, significantly, it also allowed the Aghadi to represent itself as the defender of underprivileged women while being cheered on by the majority of lower-class women negotiating the difficulties of public life in the city.
According to media scholars, the horrific “Delhi Rape” was the most extensively covered rape case in recent Indian history. The incident ignited unprecedented mass protests against weak rape laws in most major cities in India. The crisis reached a breaking point when the BBC documentary India’s Daughter (2015), now banned by the Indian state (Chakelian 2015), interviewed the young rapists, foregrounding the ways in which rural migrant men blamed the victim for the rape. Following these events, five out of the six men accused of the gang rape were tried and given the death penalty (Choudharay 2017). Numerous debates arose over the significance of these large-scale demonstrations in the cities, exposing the absence, for decades, of a response from urban communities to low-caste village women who had been raped and mutilated. However, the globalization of news gave a liminal legitimacy to the incredible public reaction against the Delhi bus rape, and it opened a narrow space to discuss collective gender justice. More urban women began to take self-defense classes, often named after the Delhi rape victim, and carried pepper spray. In response to this growing trend, a government commission revising India’s sex crime laws said women who kill an attacker during an attempted rape should be able to plead self-defense, a key criterion that was missing in rape legislation in the region (PTI 2013).
According to Tara Atluri (2013), who analyzes the unprecedented levels of protest against the gang rape case, young migrant men in urban India were demonized for the rise in sexual violence in the city. Newly expanding cities such as New Delhi and Mumbai were affected by the failures of agrarian economies, issues of rural male employability, the visibility of female workers marrying at later ages, prominent queer communities, and intensified class divisions, among other phenomena. Atluri argues that the vilification of young migrant men is intimately related to localized gendered identity crises and to global anxieties concerning migrant youth who do not physically, socially, or economically “belong” to the modern city (2013, 366). According to Atluri, “in this regard, one can ask how a similar logic was at play in the aftermath of the Delhi gang rape, with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh blaming sexual violence on what he termed ‘footloose migrants,’ from rural India and from poorer states. … The case was simultaneously read as evidence of an India that was ‘behind the times’ and an India that moved too far ahead, with young people and specifically young men being pathologized as having lost the assumed chivalry of the past” (370). The “migrant man” has been on the Sena’s political hit list for several decades. Even though the party’s original agenda was related to the economic migrant usurping employment opportunities from “legitimate” urban job seekers, the knife-distribution ceremonies, and Raj Thackeray’s open statement about uncultured Bihari villagers in the city, created a space to locally refashion a global unease around backward rural migrants and embed this paranoia within the politics of women’s bodily defense against unemployed and desperate laborers in the city.
While the debate around “wives with knives” (chori aur churi as described by my informants) was still raging, another spectacular rape case in Mumbai left the Sena women feeling vindicated. In August 2013, a 22-year-old photojournalist was gang-raped by five men after going to a deserted mill compound in South Mumbai with a male colleague. As in the Delhi case, the accused beat the victim’s colleague (BBC News 2013b). This incident, which occurred barely a few months after the sensational Delhi rape case, also caught media attention, as the victim survived and asked for severe punishment for the offenders (BBC News 2013b). As in Delhi, the Mumbai incident grew controversial as non-Sena politicians responded to the brutal rape by stating that women needed to pay attention to their clothes to avoid being violated (Siddiqui 2013). In another news report, a prominent low-caste politician questioned, “Should rape cases lead to hanging? Boys are boys, they make mistakes” (Fareed 2014). This was followed by another press release from a Muslim political leader in Mumbai who said that women who are raped should also be punished (Sanyal 2014). These statements from “backward India,” by men from rural, northern, or Muslim backgrounds, further solidified the Sena’s commitment to use the rape platform to promote its political agenda and present itself as a compassionate, progressive party devoted to safeguarding gendered economic opportunities by protecting poor women employed in the modern city.
Even though several women’s wings of Hindu nationalist organizations joined public marches against the rapes, the Aghadi remained at the forefront of protests in Mumbai. They led a drive to distribute chili powder to women commuters at bus stops, underlining the fact that women have to fall back on everyday survival strategies when left to fend for themselves. The party also launched a cell-phone application for women’s safety, “S4U” (Shiv Sena for you). With S4U, vigorously shaking the phone sends SOS messages to saved contacts, emergency numbers, and the local Sena shakha pramukh, or block chief, allowing the local politician to swing into action against urban predators. The dramatic knife distribution ceremony was the final ploy developed by the Sena to play into the emerging politics of women’s self-defense. After the Sena won a massive victory in Mumbai in the following year, the propaganda around women’s self-defense died down. The Aghadi picked up a new agenda around the moral policing of lovers and eventually toned down its public belligerence against state apathy toward vulnerable women. Now they were the state.
I argue later that these performances of paranoia appear to be dramatic and embellished; however, they rapidly gain legitimacy since the “cause” behind these spectacular displays of gendered resistances is unfeigned and is relatable to women across class, caste, and regional boundaries. Anindita Datta, while studying rising sexual violence against women in India, argues that women navigate on a daily basis what she describes as “the genderscapes of hate,” which refers to the “steady flow of violence directed at women over their life course in their everyday lifeworld and lived spaces” (2016, 179). She states that the extraordinary incidences of sexual violence, especially in public spaces, generate debate, but these debates gloss over the everyday, normative violence against women in both their domestic and public lives. I will show how the Sena forbade lower-class women from bringing up cases of domestic violence while discussing the knife ceremonies or from using the party-stamped knife during conjugal clashes with slum husbands, who themselves were once lower-class/caste migrant men in Mumbai. These performances of paranoia promoted by right-wing parties are not unique to India, as many populist organizations across the world resort to such deeply fragmented responses to sexual violence against women. In Europe, for example, nativist politics thrives on commentaries about white women’s “pseudoemancipatory” (Vieten 2016, 625) progress being diminished by the spatial/ territorial invasion of migrant men, which shrinks the space for debating domestic abuse. In the context of my research, I want to underline the importance of poor women’s “take what we can” position (jo milega, woh chalega as described by my informants), in which lower-class women often use any political platform offered by right-wing parties in order to display their rage against gendered sexual vulnerabilities in public.
Hindu nationalism and Hindu women’s self defense
Anxiety over the sexual vulnerability of Hindu women is a fairly dominant political discourse in South Asia, and it often forms the basis for women’s mobilization into violent political activism. According to Miranda Alison (2004), who researched the militaristic actions of Hindu Tamil women joining the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, a nationalist organization that instigated the prolonged civil war in Sri Lanka, a significant number of women joined the movement either after being raped by members of the Sri Lankan army or to learn armed self-defense against them. According to Gail Omvedt (1990), who studied women’s participation in peasant revolts, since women’s major productive role was in agriculture, peasant women used sickles, plows, and bows and arrows to resist class and caste-based sexual oppression in the countryside, especially in Maharashtra. In this context, Hindu nationalist women’s organizations, some of them born in the context of the anticolonial movement, have long engaged with myriad discourses around the sexual vulnerability of Hindu women and have deployed a range of tactics to harness the power of female warriorhood to contest the dishonoring of Hindu women in public.
My long-term research on the Aghadi shows that rebellious nationalisms often provided more space, ideologically and practically, for women to imagine themselves as informal combatants. Elite nationalist organizations used images of maternal yet martial armed goddesses such as Durga to inspire and empower women followers to use armed violence in defense of the Hindu nation, which remains mapped onto the Hindu female body (Lama 2001; Banerjee 2006). According to Manisha Sethi (2002), who analyzes the creation of the female militant cadre, the Rashtra Sevika Samiti (National Women Volunteers’ Organization, henceforth Samiti) and Durga Vahini (Durga’s Army) are two such organizations, both of which have consistently used the imagery of martial goddesses. Gender identities within these organizations were invented, resisted, and subverted to legitimize the role of ordinary women in violent nationalisms. For example, Anja Kovacs (2004), in her ethnographic research on these organizations in north India, shows how many nationalist women fashioned their political identities as new-age warrior goddesses. They (at times consciously) exploited these divine yet popular martial identities to resist passive and dutiful domesticated lives (see Bacchetta 2002) and unsettled local masculinities by embracing celibacy, and/or mobilizing themselves outside the home (by demonstrating on the streets, participating in riots, giving powerful public lectures, raiding the homes of minority community members, and openly partaking in various activities that supported the wider Hindu nationalist movement). Thus, the role of the female fighter remained ambiguous within both elite and rough right-wing organizations, and my ethnographic research also indicated a tension between different conceptualizations of societal security where female cadres battled against societal insecurities but contributed to gendered insecurity within their own ethnonational groups. The Shiv Sena knife-distribution ceremonies, for example, were sanctioned by a number of male senior leaders, but they also generated a high degree of paranoia among poor men about the party encouraging local women to use knives to attack male offenders (which also increased their own vulnerability on crowded public transport).
Such notions of male vulnerability, and related gaps in the practice of male protectionism in the public sphere, were also sustained in the Samiti’s discourse around the swasarankshanam nari (a woman who can protect herself ), which emphasized the benefits of a trained female body. Samiti pamphlets claimed that throughout history, women have had to guard their own chastity (Ganneri and Sen 2011). The organization cited the example of a mythological character from an Indian epic, Draupadi, who sought vengeance after being sexually humiliated in a courtroom of men in the presence of her many husbands, and Padmini, a Rajput queen who performed jauhar (suicide by selfimmolation) to safeguard her bodily purity in the face of war (Ganneri and Sen 2011). In another incident, Laxmibai Kelkar, the founding figure of the organization, was outraged when she read a newspaper article about the rape of a Hindu woman by goondas (thugs) in Bengal while the woman’s “educated” husband watched helplessly. This episode was said to have galvanized her into founding the Samiti (Ganneri and Sen 2011). This particular narrative had great resonance with the two rapes cases in Delhi and Mumbai, where the presence of male guardians proved worthless for the protection of women. Kelkar was said to have subsequently concluded that there was a need for women’s physical training for their self-protection. Hence the Samiti started paramilitary camps, which continue to be popular among middle- and upper-caste urban women (Ganneri and Sen 2011).
According to Meera Sehgal (2007), who examines the discursive and embodied processes employed at Samiti paramilitary camps for women, the Samiti use these camps to effectively manufacture a feminized siege mentality. According to this narrative, first the Muslims raped Hindu women during Mughal rule, then the Christians raped them during colonial rule, and then the Muslims raped them again during Partition. Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin’s (1996) critical narrative on the rape of women during Partition also shows how violated Hindu women caught in the exodus between India and Pakistan generated a cultural history around the paranoia of unpredictable sexual assault by the other. These legacies sustained this siege mentality, which Sehgal (2007) describes as a learned disposition in which women perceive themselves as constant prey to male outsiders. The author states that “the embodied practices include a paramilitary physical training program that masquerades as self-defense training but in fact manufactures a fear of sexual attacks by Muslim men in the public sphere, while deflecting from sources of violence within the private sphere” (2007, 165). Students were taught to stab, slice, punch, and strike at the air with no assessment of how the strike could be effective. Yet the absence of physical targets reinforced a mental paranoia of being surrounded by an army of invisible, unwanted men (2007, 178).
These paramilitary training camps were popular among middle-caste and middle-class urban nationalist women. The Aghadi, which drew its membership from lower-class women, was often dismissed by other Hindu nationalist organizations for being composed of rough and rowdy women with no ideological or material agenda. During my fieldwork, women felt sidelined by Samiti women who had the resources to hold training camps for women, teach women to kick and slice, run educational institutions, lead women’s trade unions and employment groups, and organize history reading and other academic sessions. The act of distributing chili powder and blades to women in the name of self-defense allowed the Aghadi to visibly enter this game of a feminized siege rather than the occasional thrashing of sexual predators in the street, which received little media attention. The Samiti training fell short of being an effective form of self-defense in the real world, a notion underlined by the Sena women in the context of their political agitation during the rape crisis. For example, Sudhatai pointed out that “the Samiti women wear salwar kameez [tunic and long pants] while training. But everyday women like us we wear a sari, no? How can we punch and kick, what’s the point in training in self-defense for slum women? Can you hide a real sword in your purse?” Thus a historical panic, merged with a contemporary paranoia of rape against Hindu women, created a space for the Aghadi to successfully compete with wealthier Hindu nationalist women’s groups in representing the interests of ordinary female cadres.
Das (1998), in her analysis of the social production of hate, suggests that there are usually special conditions through which everyday discourses around the fear of the other lead to the structure of paranoia. Although Das is more concerned about the role of rumors in creating that state of terror, her discussion of incomplete sexual conquests in the construction of paranoia becomes relevant for unraveling an emerging apprehension around women’s embodied fear of the urban. Vesna Kesic (2001), while using Das’s understanding of incomplete sexual conquests in analyzing rapes in former Yugoslavia, states that violent sexual inscription on the bodies of women during times of nationalist conflict creates a sadistic memory for the future of communities: that “our” women can be raped at any historical juncture. According to Das, “such transformations are bound to the conception of important past events as ‘unfinished’ and capable of moulding the present in new and unpredictable ways” (1998, 126). In case of India, since there has not been a complete annihilation of Muslims, the conquest of Hindu women by “the other” remains incomplete and a perpetual threat to Hindu society. I suggest that Hindu nationalist organizations and feminine nationalist discourses repeatedly return to mythological, historical, and public discourses around the rape of Hindu women to nurture this source of fear. From the incomplete public rape of Draupadi, to the incomplete conquest of Hindu women during the region’s long history of communal violence, to the rightwing rhetoric on urban women’s self-defense, anxiety around the unconcluded rape of the Hindu (female) body sustains contemporary and continuing urban tensions around rape by undesirable others. Thus, the city becomes what Das refers to as “the zones of emergency” that “are marked by diffused images of an unfinished past, efforts to void the other of all subjectivity, and a world increasingly peopled with a fantasmagoria of shadows” (1998, 126).
Communalism and the significance of chaku-bazi (knife power)
Media reports examining the increasingly brutal nature of communal violence have underlined the conspicuous role of the knife-carrying Hindu. This was recently highlighted by a number of knife attacks on Muslims in the name of antibeef vigilantism in India (Dayal 2017). Ward Berenschot (2009), in his study of the 2002 anti-Muslim pogrom in Gujarat, observes that Hindu nationalist politicians recruited antisocial or mentally ill people to enter Muslim neighborhoods, stab residents at close range, and thus initiate a riot. This was a standard plot to sustain communal relations and frame political opponents. Stanley J. Tambiah (2005), in his analysis of cricket and riots in India, also offers examples of young Muslims being trained to disarm knife-wielding Hindu rioters with their bare hands (Tambiah 2005, 908; see also Kakar 1995). During my fieldwork in Hyderabad, I encountered several Muslim men who had been maimed by Hindu attackers who turned ordinary kitchen knives into deadly weapons by dipping the blades in cyanide.
During the Mumbai riots in 1992–93, and the Gujarat riots a decade later, the use of costly guns was limited, as rioters used household gas cylinders as bombs and threw burning car tires at people. The nature of the violence signified the use of ordinary household objects as weapons, which would not come under the radar of the state; the latter would not recognize the hoarding of such items as hazardous. During the Gujarat riots, the act of stabbing and slicing human flesh by ordinary people horrified a nation. Knives were used to slash off women’s breasts, were held against their throats during rape, and were used to tattoo rape victims, to mutilate both male and female genitals, to behead children, and to slice open the wombs of pregnant women (Nayudu 2012). This emerging savagery showed how the use of household items, significantly the knife in acts of torture, was positioned at an intersection: between a display of communal masculinity by desecrating the female other and the potential annihilation of the enemy, by arresting the reproduction of the enemy community through the slicing of breasts, children, fetuses, and genitals (Sarkar 2002).
Women, however, within both Hindu and Muslim communalist discourses, were couriers and not carriers of knives. Swati Parashar’s (2011) study of the Dukhtaran-e-Millat, a banned women’s outfit affiliated with Lashkar-e-Taiba (the largest Islamic militant organization in South Asia), shows that women provided logistical support by acting as couriers of messages, funds, and small weapons for the militants living underground in regions under the control of the Indian Army. However, recent images of women members of Dukhtarane-Millat reveal a shift in that paradigm as ordinary women preferred to be photographed boldly holding knives even through they were clothed in traditional Islamic attire (Gulf News India 2007). Similarly, several Hindu nationalist organizations encouraged public parades exhibiting women in traditional saris carrying knives and swords. According to Sethi’s commentary on nationalist women empowered for self-defense (atmaraksha) by manifesting valor (virya), the propagandist book of the Hindu nationalist Sangathan (Union), Sangathan Ka Bigu, urges that “every sister who joins the army of this revolution called the Sangathan, should have a sharp knife with her which she can use whenever she needs. The knife should be made like household knives, which can be used immediately. … It is a prime religious duty of all the women who enter the army of Sangathan to be able to defend their chastity and honour” (quoted in Sethi 2002, 1547). The Aghadi also tried to elbow its way into this religio-political discourse by justifying the presence of women with knives in the public sphere. But the front comprised mostly semiliterate women who didn’t have the training to develop an official manifesto on the ideal armed womanhood. Hence, the transformation of an ordinary kitchen into an armory for self-defense relied on the fact that most women commuters in Mumbai already carried a kitchen knife in their purse. Over my years of fieldwork in Mumbai, it became evident that women’s long journeys in trains, buses, and shared autos were an extension of domestic kitchen work, as they would buy vegetables from street vendors and then chop food and herbs along the way. Often chopped vegetables would be marinated with chili powder en route. I would argue that the Shiv Sena built a spectacular political stunt on women workers’ everyday practical activities (which included carrying knives and chili powder) and successfully plugged these activities into a wider nationalist discourse on women’s selfdefense in the city.
The question remains what these blades signified to the Aghadi women. The knives were of a cheap Chinese make, and their large-scale acquisition didn’t involve a financial investment from the party. Since the women were considered to be deft at using knives during cooking, it would be easy for ordinary women to identify the knife as a personal weapon. While using a gun, a bomb, or a sword would require skill, and these devices could rarely be carried discreetly, using a knife allowed women to retain control over the use of the object and not accidentally inflict pain on their own bodies. The key chain attached to the knife, with a photo of Bal Thackeray, convinced women that if they simply dangled the key chain from the side of their purses, predatory men would know that they were Sena-backed knife carriers. The image was thus a preemptive strike against potential rapists. According to Sudhatai, who was a great supporter of the direct use of the knife, “if you stabbed someone, then you would know that Bal Thackeray was holding your hand and guiding it into the flesh of bad men.” Perhaps leaving the knife on the body of the imagined sexual predator would suggest that the attack was an act of self-defense and not an “ordinary” murder, speculated Sudhatai. With senior male leaders claiming to take care of criminal charges, and with a powerful nationalist hero inscribed on the knife, the women were absolved of moral and legal responsibility. During the course of my fieldwork in the slums, the Aghadi women launched into multiple conversations on women’s self-defense among themselves, and many of them had long discussions with me on the necessity, practicality, and politics of women carrying a knife. Ramatai, for example, categorically stated that nowadays women need a weapon in the city. “Men have physical strength,” she said. “Even if they don’t carry knives, they use broken bottles, belts, bricks, bags, anything they can find in a hurry. My son once pierced a guy’s hand with the frame of his spectacle. It has to be hammered into women’s heads that they can use the same kitchen knife for both cutting vegetables and chopping hands.” Since the extensive use of knives by Hindu nationalist men during recent riots was a pan-Indian phenomenon, I also suggest that the reimagination of ordinary nationalist women as knife-carriers could be interpreted as a strategy to keep Muslim and Christian men in a greater state of fear. Women with knives could easily be deployed as additional manpower during communal flare-ups, and their use of the Sena knife on “others” could be claimed as self-defense.
What were the limits of the knife? Even though the everyday weaponization of domestic objects and women’s legitimate recourse to displaying a militarized femininity in public were underlined by the political party, the use of the kitchen knife was limited to the public sphere. Women suffering from domestic abuse or marital rape could not find refuge in right-wing party politics. Even though women embraced the politics of empowerment embedded in the knife distribution ceremony, the party was anticipating only a few cases of its actual use on sexual predators. My informants didn’t report the direct use of knives during my later fieldwork, but they claimed that they did use them as threats on several occasions. The sensational display of knives was directed toward deterring men on the streets from approaching poorer women. By encouraging this use, the party would come across as gender sensitive, thereby securing the loyalty and votes of women workers. The Aghadi’s display of outrage against sex crimes elevated the women cadres to a higher sociopolitical status; as they publicly addressed a national debate about urban women using extralegal tactics to protect themselves when they don’t have the law on their side. At the same time, poor slum women who were unable to keep up with the unfettered redevelopment of Mumbai and remained anxious in the face of unemployment and demolition squads, felt safe within the familiar realm of Sena’s brand of Hindu nationalism, which continued to gain in popularity by collectively responding to a national crisis.
According to Rebecca Wood (2010, 97), who studies government responses to “knife crime epidemics,” impoverished urban dwellers who carried knives were represented as feral, and this characterization led to punitive and mis guided political climates in most countries. In the context of Mumbai, however, the lack of police and political resistance to the one hundred thousand knives distributed by the Sena inadvertently sanctioned a glorification of knife cultures. While several scholars argue that communities often return women to domestic roles to create notions of everyday security in conditions of urban conflict (Andall 2000), the weaponizaton of kitchen objects to perpetuate public paranoia has the potential to transform the culture of both domestic and public life. According to Carolyn Nordstrom (1998), who studies the war in Mozambique, one of the goals of terror warfare is to reproduce the hegemony of violence in the minutia of everyday life. The normal, the innocuous, and the inescapable are infused with associations of lethal harm. The author states: “Perpetrators do this by using common everyday items to produce terror. Kitchen items, household goods, water sources, and tools become weapons of torture and murder. Public spaces are cast as strategic battlegrounds. … Places traditionally associated with safety and items traditionally used in the production of the ordinary are recast as inhumane and lethal. When a kitchen knife is used to mutilate a family member, or a post office becomes the site of a massacre, kitchen knives and post offices become attached to the production of violence in ways that last far beyond the conclusion of the war” (1998, 108). Thus, for the Sena women who participated in these knife distribution ceremonies, the ontological security of domestic objects related to family, cooking, and familial affect was transformed to create a far more complex and enduring understanding of a paranoid urban culture. For some women, “the kitchen knife will never be ordinary (sadaharan) again,” said Sudhatai.
Women’s bodies and public honor in the city: The supporters and the skeptics
In Chaturvadi slum area where I conducted fieldwork, women workers who couldn’t attend the official Shiv Sena knife-distribution functions wanted an opportunity to be recognized as knife carriers. But the party had run out knives with the emblem of Thackeray, as they were specifically commissioned for the occasion of his birthday. Radhatai, the commander of one of the local Sena branches, decided to improvise. She asked the women to buy cheap kitchen knives with plastic handles and put them into a basket at the corner of the chawl, a decrepit laborers’ colony, in which she and her family had a home. While sipping tea with me and intently watching the basket from her window, she counted the number of women who came by and dropped off knives. “That’s it,” she said. “It’s over fifty, that is enough (kafi hain). The knife-distribution is going to happen.” Later in the evening she went off to collect the basket, which by then had over a hundred knives. She explained to me that informal knife distributions in slum areas differed from large official functions run by men. If she wanted to hold one, she would need strength in numbers. A united protest against sexual assault and a collective allocation of knives (which were now infused with new meaning and values) could mobilize more women into the pro-knife, anti-rape campaign. Also, large numbers would dissuade the small police force in the area from taking action against the women, and the cause might attract the loyalty of slum women who were not directly affiliated with the Aghadi but shared in the feeling of public vulnerability. She sent out a call to local cadres and identified an open spot in the heart of the slum where the knives would be distributed. She didn’t want the area to be too close to the main road, where commuters might be unnerved by the sight of so many knives. After a speech on the importance of the weapon in protecting women’s freedom, the knives were distributed. However, while chatting with the women during the local ceremony (which was watched by men and children from a distance), I observed that slum women both supported and resisted the use of the knife, even though they attended the ceremony to display their solidarity.
Several slum women were keen to legitimize carrying weapons as an integral part of their urban lives. While rural women, whether working in the fields or local factories, remained under the moral protectionism of village patriarchies, poor women laborers in the city were not under the direct surveillance of male guardians while traveling long distances. The scattered and stretched nature of urban spatialities and the daily negotiation of a disordered public life demanded that women display initiative and agency to maintain their bodily integrity. According to the slum women, they never ceased to discuss their experiences, and those of extended female kin, when it came to sexual vulnerability. As Amla said, “you worry about boys, because they will talk on the cell phone and cross the railway line. And come home from the hospital with one leg. Worrying about their bodies is different from worrying about the bodies of women. Men with one leg will still get married, his wife will provide for him, he will have honor. But a woman with no honor will be ‘no wife, no life.’”
While many women shared in Amla’s concern about women’s bodies, several cadres debated the actual use of the knife in countering a public assault. “It’s not a question of using the knife, it’s a question of people knowing that we own the knife and it’s for the purpose of self-defense. Why will women unnecessarily stab men if they are not threatened? It’s the threat of knifecarrying women that we want to generate in public … that men will be unsure whether a woman is carrying a knife or not, and then stay away from her just in case she does have one in her purse,” said Priya. However, Priya would have preferred to own a knife with a party tag, as flashing it in public would warn a potential rapist. The handles of the cheap kitchen knives had multiple colors, unlike the standard party knife. So if the carrier flicked it out of her purse, it would be difficult to determine whether the woman had the backing of the powerful party and its team of lawyers. Priya argued that the actual power of the knife lay not in women’s dexterity in using a knife, as a woman with a small knife could be easily disarmed. The potency of the knife lay in the photo of Bal Thackeray on the key chain: as the image of a militant political party with a reputation for killing and seeking revenge against a rapist who assaulted one of their own women was far more fearsome.
Some women worried about whether these small knives had any practical value. According to Chandra, “I think the knife will be useful if there is just one man trying to harass a woman or trying to attack her. If these knives were distributed in response to public rapes in the city, then they were gang rapes. What will a puny knife do if a woman is attacked by many men?” I asked her whether she felt that these ceremonies at least created an open debate about slum women’s honor in the city. At this point Rupa jumped in and said, “I am uncomfortable with the notion of carrying a knife as an instrument of self-defense. How is it being related to the question of honor? Usually prostitutes and women with no honor carry knives against sexual predators and pimps in Mumbai. Knife-carrying is normal in their world. It’s impossible for women like us to use knives without any training.”
There were women who were disappointed with the knife that they received during the ceremony. One of them complained she had dropped a relatively expensive kitchen knife in the basket but ended up with a cheap one. Another cadre said she had only one kitchen knife at home. She hoped to get a free knife for use by her mother-in-law and admitted that she hadn’t added a knife to the basket. Having said that, there were many women who had experienced some degree of sexual assault in their daily use of public transport, or knew of women who had been dishonored in public. Some of these women remained in favor of the use of the knife, while others were happy to keep a knife as a feeling of safety. “If you feel you are being followed, even by a group of men, just waving a Sena-tagged knife in their direction would tell them that these women are protected by nationalist connections,” said Chandra.
I suggest that this navigation of public space as a battleground, the repositioning of the kitchen as an armory, and the viewing of poor women as fighters against “the enemy” leads to a “paranoiding” of urban civil life. It blurs the boundary between the private and the public, which feminists have debated in multiple social contexts, but it also heightens the violent and transgressive agency of marginalized right-wing women. According to Stuart Kane (1996), who explores the use of the knife in early modern murder ballads, the figure of the knife as a women’s murder weapon reconstructs the imagination of an everyday feminine domestic object as a fearsome commodity hazardous to men. To an audience scrutinizing ordinary women while they brandish knives, these women can be celebrated as warriors and saviors, or they can be formulated as unnatural or murderous women in the city, consolidating the notion of public danger instead of challenging it.
The reconstructive power of urbanoid enactments
According to Rachel Pain (2001), who studies how different notions of femininity are entwined with constructions of the fear of public spaces, an emphasis on dread and distress produces and reproduces feminine weakness in public. For example, this weakness generates what Hille Koskela (1997) refers to as a tension between gendered spatial confidence and avoidance in many urban cultural contexts. Elizabeth Stanko (1996) and Ben Bradford, Jonathan Jackson, and Stanko (2009), while exploring the complex relationship between women and crime, suggest that these fears are more dramatically entrenched when working-class women identify working-class men and lowerlevel policemen in public not as protectors but as threats. According to Shilpa Phadke (2007), who studies women’s access to public spaces in Mumbai, and Jocelyn Marrow (2013), who explores sexual vulnerability among women using public space in urban India, ordinary people’s ideas of everyday risk determine women’s claim to public space. Phadke argues that safety is linked directly to the level of claim that one feels to a space. “It is more than the promise of not being physically harmed,” she states (2007, 1511); it includes the knowledge that female citizens can be incorporated into urban living to such an extent that their presence in the public space should not be looked at askance. While “paranoid parenting” of girls creates gendered and racialized geographies of risk, both pedophiles and asylum seekers are increasingly replacing “the stranger” in girls’ accounts of danger (Pain 2006). Thus, women’s sense of anxiety, risk, and mobility is being globally manufactured and managed through the fear of assault in public. I refer to this constant reproduction, regulation, and management of fear in the city as crude “urbanoias,” a rhetoric that sustains itself on anxieties around lower-class women’s need to use and occupy public space. I argue that the gendered politics of self-defense involves a particular style of urban sense making, which not only relies on a retributive model of justice but foregrounds distinct sexual discriminations that undergird activist performances. While scholars such as Wendy Brown (1995) have observed that the ascendency of women in rightwing activism, especially during the Reagan and George H. W. Bush eras in the United States, is related to the absence of political and economic change, my article shows how significant changes in the gendered dimensions of mobility in cities in the global South produce a particular brand of armed activism, which appears to have the gloss of feminist concerns related to women’s work in the city but reinscribes newer modes of orthodoxy and violence in women’s lives and labor cycles. I show how the sporadic performance of oppositional politics against certain sections of men in public increases the potential for infusing social spaces designated for the urban poor with increased gendered hostilities. These enactments are embedded in broader geopolitical realignments that have occurred during a period in which the figures of the self-defending citizen and the violent vigilante are increasingly seen as the preeminent vehicles for addressing social paranoia in many parts of the world.
Paranoid dynamics and their insular “crippled epistemologies” (van Prooijen, Krouwel, and Pollet 2015, 570) have long been the foundation of rightwing authoritarianism (see Fassin 2008; McWilliams 2010). My ethnography shows how the gendered distinction between the private and the public is redrawn, as women are seen as more entitled to public space if they participate in a brand of phobic nationalism (Yuval-Davis and Anthias 1989). I suggest that paranoia remains the primary signifier of distrust and infallibility in the logic of right-wing groups, in which visions of gendered persecution and annihilation form the crux of damaged community pride. Poor women’s urbanoid enactments with knives and chili powder may be dismissed by secular and elite communities as mass regression into terror of unknown future events. However, this form of social action stems from what some scholars call a “legitimate paranoia” (see Harper 2008), in which poor women’s daily experiences of sexual vulnerability in the city are, in Martin Heidegger’s sense, authentic. The knife-wielding, monstrous feminine (Creed 1993) with a dangerous desire to wound men can be a part of the paranoid textuality that underlines authoritarian political cultures, where the celebration of gendered spectacles determines the cultural discourses that produce paranoia. Justifying violent self-defense and flaunting knives as the consequence of such authentic paranoia allows women to temporarily position themselves as superior to men within the urban public. The conspiratorial contours of political paranoia, like Foucauldian understandings of power, move deftly across the multidiscursivity of contemporary gendered urban anxieties. I argue that poor women, by generating fear related to knife carrying, are reversing the gendered role of feeling alert in the public space and are attempting to restructure public life. Through the inscription of anxiety, wounding, and fear of death onto the lives of male migrants in the city, women are subjecting men to the chilling effect of sexual surveillance that women usually experience. Even through right-wing urbanoias are destructive and directed toward undermining dominant cultural notions of trust (Žižek 1992), I still argue that this dramatic mobilization of paranoid narratives creates new forms of urban knowledge, strategies, and gendered interpretations of an urban cosmos.
Ghassan Hage (2003), in his work Against Paranoid Nationalism, claims that with the absence of hope for a better future, the politics of right and wrong, good and evil, become dependent on the existence and successful display of human emotions in the present. In the context of the global city, these emotions create what I would call a “global urban deception complex,” where right-wing groups and communities do not wait until they are victimized by “the others.” They actively seek out conspiracies and provoke situations where they can place themselves as victims of treachery and use the democratic and free spaces created by urban politics to display their rage. For example, the Sena would deliberately mount Hindu religious processions through Muslimdominated neighborhoods in Mumbai so that any protest from the local Muslim community could be treated as a conspiracy against the religious freedom of urban Hindus. And if the Muslims did not protest, the Sena would suggest to its cadres that the Muslims were plotting bigger assaults, such as another terrorist attack on Mumbai, and did not want to engage in minor infractions. Sara Ahmed (2005) and Lauren Berlant (2002), in their studies of hurt and subjectivity within affective economies, argue that the gendered politics of this kind of paranoia relies on the ways in which the cause of women’s pain can be attributed to others. Thus, viewing the presence of others as injurious affects local and nationalist histories of violence. What remains critical in the case of the knife-distribution ceremonies in Mumbai is that women’s emotional performances, and women’s incensed posturing, help to conceal the presence and pain of select male bodies. Even though women are threatening to inflict pain, the sympathy remains with women as the inflictors of pain. Since women’s hurt is both socially and historically entrenched in a nationalist rhetoric, sympathy is not displaced onto the experiences of poor and marginalized men, who are also an integral part of the urban precariat. As a form of self-styling that involves collective negotiations with dominant cultural norms, a well-founded hysteria (Ellison 2017) thus gains enormous potency through feminine performances.
Drawing on my ethnography, I suggest that right-wing urbanoias become a social and symbolic device through which gendered anxieties are articulated. They remain alarmist, and they generate new and refreshed politics of protection. A number of scholars have returned to discussions on the co-optation of feminist discourses by the global Right and neoliberal mechanisms of governmentality (Fraser 2013; Bernstein 2014). This suggests that some communities can agree on women’s interests related to migration, labor, and security, even though they dramatically disagree on other gender issues, such as women’s morality, uncontrolled sexuality, and idealized femininity. Some scholars refer to this as a new-style moral panic (Cohen 2011), which becomes a prism through which gendered social apprehensions are refracted. According to Rosi Braidotti (2008), in her study of the postsecular turn in feminism, women’s political participation and full citizenship are still unresolved, and I would state that the absence of resolution forms the primary basis for extremist political cultures in the city. Even though women’s participation in knife-wielding ceremonies does not lead to the radical repositioning of poor women workers in cityscapes, the perverse temporality of nationalist politics does create new social horizons and new public affirmations of poor women in the city. These horizons are created through sporadic disruptions instead of sustained social movements, but they allow poor women to emerge, albeit temporarily, as moral entrepreneurs determining the control of civic space.
Concluding comments
The global politics of women’s self-defense has reached a critical juncture in recent years, with a rise in the number of women’s vigilante groups who are warding off crime, abduction, and sexual violence. The Mexican Women’s Guards taking on the drug cartels, the Red Bridage and the Pink Sari Gang fighting sexual violence in urban and rural India, and the more recent news about armed mothers repelling the Islamic group Boko Haram from claiming their daughters in rural Nigeria—these cases highlight the role of women’s armed resistance to sexual violence in the absence of state and social protection in many underdeveloped economies (Sen 2012). Given the massive publicity around the Delhi rape case and the subsequent stream of global protests against women’s vulnerability in urban spaces, women who collectively take the law into their own hands have gained a degree of sympathy from a weary urban public. Even though the Sena-sponsored knife-distribution ceremony fails to address the deeper feminist questions of gender and structural inequality among the urban poor, my analysis above suggests that it offers a reprieve to poor women workers who develop a limited sense of empowerment while negotiating quotidian life in the modern city.
Through an analysis of the legacy of sword-carrying women, the threat of incomplete sexual conquests, and the extensive visibility of blades in communal discourses, I have shown how utilizing a kitchen knife within women’s paranoid performances in the city reinvents a subversive but sufficiently legitimized urban femininity. According to Pratishka Baxi, Shirin M. Rai, and Shaheen Sardar Ali (2006), who study customary laws and patriarchal politics on shame, “crimes of honor” have become prominent in legal discourses in recent years in South Asia. The issue of honor killing, for example, shows how community governance bodies torture and kill women for transgressing codes of feminine dignity. I argue that the knife-distribution ceremony, and similar practices generated by the global Right that endorse women’s public aggression against Muslims and migrants, outsourced patriarchal protectionism to women. Customary laws legitimizing the killing of women to preempt rape, or after the pollution of rape, relied on the power of patriarchy to protect women. Against the backdrop of urban modernity, the knifedistribution ceremony represented an admission that poor men have limited patriarchal authority over working women in the city. Women’s bodies are still owned by the collective, but the responsibility to save their bodies were now handed over to individual women, through the knife passed onto them in Mumbai. This article has shown that right-wing urbanoid enactments generate a particular form of gendered moral reasoning that allows women to display their loyalty to patriarchal autocratic practices while actively engaging in a counterculture against mainstream urban citizenship, which edges out lower-class women from land, work, and public space.