On 4 October 2015, we visited the Khirkee extension and Urdu Park in Delhi as part of our fieldwork study. It was a sunny morning when we headed to the Khirkee extension. During our car ride we passed two of the biggest shopping malls in Delhi, MGF Metropolitan Mall and DLF Place, which are located across a small road from the Khirkee extension. When we arrived in the village, the road became rougher and dustier. What came to my first sight were the squat, old houses and muddy roads where mainly men and young boys walked along the pathways. I could hardly locate any women on our entrance, until we started walking in the village.

Fig 1. Street view in the Khirkee extension (Photo by Penn)

Khirkee extension is a village in South Delhi where lower class people live. Rapid urban development is ongoing near the village. Shopping malls and fancy hotels are built for tourists and middle class consumption. The lives of Khirkee village residents, who struggle with poverty and reside next to these newly built fancy urban spaces, viciously expose the class disparity in Indian society.

Sreejata Roy, an Indian artist from KHOJ International Artists’ Association (KHOJ), acted as our tour guide during our fieldwork on that sunny day, told us stories about the village and the lives of local people (For Sreejata’s blogs, please visit https://networksneighborhood.wordpress.com and https://axialmargins.wordpress.com/). Problems with drugs and prostitution are present in the village, as a consequence of which lives of local residents are being complicated. Furthermore, there are on-going creative projects to promote the engagement between art and public in the extension.

Fig 2. A wall-painting by Mattia Lullini (Photo by Penn)

One of the projects is Extension Khirkee, a Street-Art festival, which brought artists together to produce creative works in the village. Walls are painted by some of the artists in the neighbourhood, creating a sense of liveliness and artistic creativity (For more details, please see http://www.ficart.org/extension-khirkee).

What concerns Sreejata most is the marginalisation of women and their safety in the village. In her art project, she invited young girls to the art centre and asked them to draw maps in order to show the path they walk along from their home to other places in Khirkee extension.

Fig. 3 A young girl showing us her map (Photo by Penn)

The girls were asked to indicate whom they meet and what they do in their everyday life. How do they walk in their neighbourhood? Can they loiter? Where are the places they can safely access? What kind of people do they have connections with? In this map-drawing exercise, they were also asked to explain what they drew.

Fig. 4 A street food vendor gazing two female passers-by in Khirkee (Photo by Penn)

Seeing the cartoons the young girls drew on their maps, I noticed that this exercise was a form of art that helped to visualise the day-to-day experience of these young girls. Through where they go, the map reveals the public spaces that these young girls are barred from and the places that they unconsciously would not enter. The limitations of mobility for girls in the village were made visible without being drawn on the paper.

The young girls’ maps help not only to represent what is unspoken, but also the level of their safety in public areas in Khirkee. Sreejata shared that women in this village have to stay at home instead of loitering around. As told by Sreejata and from my own experience walking in this village, there is no doubt that public areas are male-dominated spaces. One young girl who talked with us during our walk shared that the boys do not allow girls to walk through one particular alley. If she tries to enter, they will beat her up. From what she told us, I noticed that not only men manipulate the street and public areas, but also the boys. Claiming the rights of the alley and rejecting young female’s entrance is a gesture of gendered power and is a dangerous one. How should these men be educated that women should have equal rights to access public spaces, and be treated with full respect?

Fig. 5 A wall-painting behind the wall that a cobbler usually sits (Photo by Penn)

In response to these questions, Sreejata showed us some wall-paintings made by and depicting women in the street. She explained that her group initiated an art project to paint a series of women on the walls in public spaces. These female images, showing mundane everyday activities, challenge the visibility of women in a male-dominated community. Moreover, they also illustrate women doing men’s work to help men to accept women in “male” professions. In a community where women should remain invisible in public areas, I found that these images help in carving out new spaces for them.

After walking in the Khirkee extension, Sreejata took us to Urdu Park to visit homeless women and children. Urdu Park is located near Jama Masjid, Meena Bazaar, Urdu Bazaar, the Red Fort etc. Urdu Park is promoted for tourists as a place for rest and refreshment because of its greenery. There are also a lot of body massage parlours with experts giving ear-cleaning services. However, the lives of homeless women and their children in Urdu Park are rather unpleasant and precarious.

Fig. 6 Sreejata introducing the shelter (Photo by Penn)

In the park, there is a government-run shelter for homeless women and their children, who can receive daily meals prepared by Anganwadi (Literally, courtyard shelter) (see https://axialmargins.wordpress.com). Visiting the shelter is an emotional experience. Children without clothes expose their bodies under the sun, while malnutrition can be observed through their naked forms. Hundreds of flies cover one’s view of the sky, whereas animal faeces become a challenge when walking on the dirt. This sensual observation of poverty is in extreme contrast to the experience of visiting the luxurious shopping mall, Emporio Mall, and the seven-star hospital, Cyber City Hospital.

Fig. 7 Children and a woman in Urdu Park (Photo by Penn)

Sreejata and her art group also invited these homeless women to draw maps of their own. These women were asked to draw their daily routine, as well as who they met in their everyday life. In this map-drawing exercise, the art group learned about the mobility of these women in Urdu Park. While some homeless women are migrants from other regions, their life in Urdu Park is subject to a sense of immobility because they have to take care of their young children. As Lauren Berlant writes, “At root, precarity is a condition of dependency—as a legal term, precarious describes the situation wherein your tenancy on your land is in someone else’s hands” (2011, 192). Seen the situation of these women and children, their live is doubtlessly in an emergency state of precarity.

Fig. 8 A child playing near the washrooms in the shelter (Photo by Penn)

Although I had no chance to see these women’s maps, I heartily appreciate the art projects organised by Sreejata and her team. They deeply engage with local women and reveal the gendered problems in the area. Through their engagements with the people in the Khirkee Extension and Urdu Park, mapping becomes an act of cartography that forcefully gives a voice of these women and gives them presence through lines and colours.

Reference

Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism. Durham and London: Duke UP, 2011. Print.