Abraham 2010

Indian Journal of Gender
Studies
http://ijg.sagepub.com/
Veiling and the Production of Gender and Space in a Town in North

India : A Critique of the Public/Private Dichotomy
Janaki Abraham
Indian Journal of Gender Studies 2010 17: 191
DOI: 10.1177/097152151001700201
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What is This?

Articles
Veiling and the Production of

Gender and Space in a Town
in North India: A Critique of
the Public/Private Dichotomy
JANAKI ABRAHAM
This article explores the way gender and space are produced in everyday life in a
town in Rajasthan, India. The article argues that an a priori categorisation of spaces
as ‘public’ and ‘private’ has not only prevented an exploration of the ways in which
these categories are socially and culturally defined but has also hindered an under-
standing of the production of space in everyday life especially in relation to social
relationships, hierarchies and power. This argument emerges from a focus on two
aspects of urban life—the organisation of spaces in the town, and practices of veiling
by Hindu and Muslim women. The article argues that while veiling practices of
Acknowledgements: This article is an outcome of a project on Gender and Space

done at the Women’s Studies Programme, JNU, New Delhi. UGC funding for the
programme enabled this fieldwork, and I am grateful for this and for the support
of my colleagues at WSP, JNU. I would like to acknowledge comments at the
seminars I have presented this at: the National workshop on Gender and Space
organised at JNU as part of this project, the Silver Jubilee Conference of the Indian
Association of Women’s Studies conference, Lucknow, the School of Sociology
and Social Policy, University of Nottingham, UK and the Department of Sociology,
University of Delhi. I would also like to thank Radhika Chopra, Rajni Palriwala,
Ravinder Kaur, Vijay Shanker Vyas and Sumandro Chattapadhyay for comments
on earlier versions of the article. I am particularly grateful to people in Bikaner,
and those outside, who welcomed me into their homes and supported this research
in a range of ways.
Janaki Abraham is Reader in the Department of Sociology, Delhi School of

Economics, University of Delhi, Delhi. E-mail: janaki.abraham@gmail.com
Indian Journal of Gender Studies, 17:2 (2010): 191–222

SAGE Publications Los Angeles/London/New Delhi/Singapore/Washington DC
DOI: 10.1177/097152151001700201

192 • Janaki Abraham
Hindu and Muslim women differ across community, caste and class, they also vary
across neighbourhoods, based on the culture of the neighbourhood. Further, the kinship
relationship that a particular married woman has with those who occupy a space,
especially whether it is an affinal or natal relationship, is crucial in understanding
women’s veiling and how spaces are subjectively experienced by women. Thus, a
gendered geography of a town would also need to be conceptualised and mapped in
terms of this subjective experience of women.
In India in the last decade or so, the chain of branches that a retail
shop or brand boasts of includes a list of towns and not just large
metros. To the list of Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore, Calcutta then (now
Kolkata), has been added Ludhiana, Meerut, Udaipur, to name
just a few. Consumers in towns are not only being targeted with a
range of consumer goods but also with what are seen as ‘modern’
places to live in—high-rise apartment blocks fitted with ‘modern’
conveniences and means of security and surveillance. Global-
isation and liberalisation and most of all aspirations for newness
(often expressed in Hindi films such as Bunty Aur Babli [2005])
have brought dramatic changes not just in consumer culture but
also in the nature of social relationships in towns. However, urban
studies in India have tended to focus on large cities.1 The town, a
site of dramatic transformation in contemporary India, has re-
ceived little attention.2 This is true for urban studies in general, in
which large cities such as Los Angeles, Cairo and London have
been the focus.
This article is based on preliminary fieldwork done in the town
of Bikaner, Rajasthan in western India, for a study that seeks to
explore how spaces in a town are gendered and how space and
gender are mutually produced in everyday life. While focusing
on everyday practices of veiling, it critiques assumptions made in
so many urban studies of the primary division of urban spaces
into ‘public’ and ‘private’.
For a long time, approaches to the study of space saw physical
space as reflecting social structure and conceptualised space as
given and fixed in time. Thus, M.N. Srinivas’ work (1952) on the
Okka saw space as a reflection of social relations. Pierre Bourdieu’s
(1977, 2003) work on the Kabyle house in Algeria presented a de-
parture from this approach in that he saw space as having meaning

Veiling and the Production of Gender and Space in North India • 193
in relation to everyday practices, and not merely reflecting relation-

ships. The understanding of space as being socially produced
rather than a given, was made popular by Marxist philosopher
Henri Lefebvre (1991) who saw the social production of urban
space as fundamental to the reproduction of society. Every mode
of production he argued produced its own spaces. This idea of the
way in which social space constitutes or produces social relations
has been powerfully described by Michel Foucault in Discipline
and Punish (1975) and particularly his view of the panopticon-like
design of prisons and schools. The work of de Certeau (1984)
equally has made clear that space and spatial practices produce
social relations and cannot be seen as merely reflecting them. Each
of these theorists and others such as geographer Edward Soja
(1989) and Doreen Massey (1994) have been concerned with mak-
ing central the category of space and exploring the relationship
between spatial relations and the production of power.
In the last couple of decades, there has been a growing body of
work that focuses in particular on the relationship between gender
and space. These studies have similarly argued for the need to
look at how space and gender are mutually constituted.3 In doing
this, neither space nor gender is seen as being fixed or ‘given’.
Seemanthini Niranjana,4 who was one of the first few sociologists
in India to write on gender and space, explains how ‘a spatial per-
spective must attempt to make clear how spatiality itself partici-
pates in the production of gendered bodies while also straddling
its flip-side, namely, how such embodied persons negotiate their
very social spaces’ (2001: 39).5
However, long before scholarship on space became popular,
feminists and feminist scholars had engaged with these issues
through the debate on the public/private dichotomy.6 The public/
private dichotomy was one frame through which feminists in the
1970s and 1980s explained what they saw then as the ‘universal
subordination of women’. They thus explained that the sub-
ordination of women was linked to men and women occupying
separate spheres, the public and the private, respectively.7 This
position gave way to one in which feminists challenged the idea
of the universal subordination of women and turned to looking at
socially, culturally and historically specific understandings of the

‘public’ or ‘private’ that changed over time.8 This shift was articu-
lated in an article written in 1980 by Michelle Rosaldo in which
she altered her position of 1974, where she had argued that the
public/private dichotomy provided a universal framework for
conceptualising the activities of the sexes (Rosaldo 1980). Instead,
she later felt that women reshaped this dichotomy and called for
looking at the permeability of the boundaries. Scholars stressed
that this understanding needed to be grounded in the material
realities of class, race, caste and sexuality. One of the critiques of
the older articulation, for example, was that not all women were
relegated to the ‘private’. Black women in the UK and the USA for
example, argued that they had to work outside the house and did
not have the ‘privilege’ of staying in the ‘private’ (Hooks 1984).
Simultaneously, feminists argued that so much of the cultural con-
struction of gender was and is tied to the assumption of separate
spheres and argued that the categorisation of the public and private
was a means of circumscribing women’s actions and an explana-
tion for the social control of women.
Despite this reformulation of the public and private, the modern-
ist preoccupation with this binary has fed into an articulation of
clear, distinct and fixed ‘public’ and ‘private’ spaces in many stud-
ies of urban life. Thus, kinship and family and the realm of the
home have been seen as separate from the spaces of the street and
market. When I started this project, its focus was to study the ways
in which urban public spaces were gendered in a town like Bikaner,
and to understand how space and gender, caste and class are mu-
tually produced. I started off by thinking about different ‘public’
spaces—the street and chowk,9 the cinema hall, places of worship
and so on. These different spaces would express the ways in which
‘public’ spaces were differentiated both in terms of how women’s
presence in them was seen differently, and how women negotiated
each of these spaces. However, soon after I started the fieldwork,
and particularly with the realisation that neighbourhood spaces
in Bikaner were sharply organised on the basis of caste, class and
religion, it became clear that beginning with a study of the neigh-
bourhood would enable a more complex understanding of spaces
in the town. The trajectory of the research thus needed to be
changed.

This article chronicles these changes while arguing that the a

priori categorisation of spaces as ‘public’ and ‘private’ has pre-
vented not only a full exploration of the ways in which these
categories are socially and culturally defined, but also a fuller
understanding of the production of space in everyday life, espe-
cially in relation to social relationships, hierarchies and power.
This then means that we need to look ‘in the round’ at the contexts
in which some spaces are seen as ‘public’ and some as ‘private’,
and in relation to whom these categories relate. In this article,
I focus on two aspects of urban life—the organisation of spaces in
the town, and practices of veiling such as gunghat and purdah.10
Through these, I seek to look at the ways in which space and also
gender, caste and class are mutually produced in everyday life.
The Production of Space and

Identities in Bikaner Town
Bikaner is a medium-sized town located in the western part of
Rajasthan. In the 2001 census its population was enumerated as
roughly half a million (529,006). Since then it has grown substan-
tially. The town is roughly 500 years old, having been established
(formally) in 1492 by a royal prince named Rao Bikaji. Since the
time when the walled city came into existence and the palace in
the Junagarh fort was built, the city has, of course, expanded con-
siderably. After independence, new colonies have been formed,
erstwhile panchayat areas have become part of the municipality,
and the latest are large complexes of apartment buildings outside
the city modelled on global apartments and marketed as Bikaner’s
biggest Life Style Township.
The space of Bikaner’s walled city is organised on the basis of
caste and religion. Most mohallas (neighbourhoods) are named by
their caste or their occupational group. Of the Hindu castes,
Brahmins and Baniyas (traders), including Jains, live in the walled
city, and the mohallas are named by their caste names so that
Mohatta Chowk is of the Hindu trading caste, the Mohattas, while
Acharyon Ki Chowk is of the Brahmin caste group, the Acharyas.
Muslim mohallas are named after occupational groups. Thus,

Choongaron Mohalla is a predominantly Muslim mohalla com-

prising those whose ‘traditional occupation’ used to be to prepare
the lime or choona used in building houses, and Chimpo Ka
Mohalla refers to those who print/printed on cloth. Of course,
not everyone in these neighbourhoods is or has been engaged with
these occupations, rather the names indicate biradiri (extended kin)
or jati (caste) groups among Muslims.
Bikaner, like other walled cities, has a number of gates and areas
adjacent to these have the same names as those of the gates.11 Dalits
or former untouchables live just outside the walled city in different
settlements, as do the Rajputs who live outside the walled city in
and around the fort where the Rajput Maharaja lived and where
his family continues to live. Jats, a caste group that worked pri-
marily in agriculture, lived outside the walled city too in what
used to be panchayat areas. Some of these areas are now incor-
porated into the expanding municipal area. New colonies (most
often named after individuals) came into existence around the time
of independence and are far more mixed in social composition.
The different colonies however, are considerably differentiated by
class and a degree of cosmopolitanism.
People I spoke to pointed out that mohallas in the walled city
are far more mixed in caste composition than they used to be. How-
ever, they still have a primary identity of the caste or occupational
group that the neighbourhood is named after or at least associated
with, and this identity is reasserted on different occasions. For
example, on one of my field trips to Bikaner in 2007, I heard on
the local FM radio that in the Goswami12 mohalla young men were
gathered and had been praying for the Indian team to win the
final of the 20–20 cricket match in South Africa. I went immediately
to the area and saw the young men sitting in an enclosure around
a statue of Bhairoji (a local deity found in many of the mohallas)
decorated with lights and marigold garlands. Along with the offer-
ing of a coconut and sweets was a cricket bat that was decorated
with a garland! Some of the young men were holding up large
posters of cricketer Mahendra Singh Dhoni and of the whole cricket
team. When I spoke to these young men, one of the first things
they said with considerable pride was that they were all
Goswamis—(hum sab goswami samaj ke hai). That they were doing

this was presented as a matter of considerable pride for the caste

and the caste-based neighbourhood. Similarly, the winner of Indian
Pop Idol on television,13 Sandeep Acharya, is said to have managed
this through the huge support in Bikaner, especially from the
Acharyon Ki Chowk (the chowk of the Acharya caste) where on
the night of the contest, provision was made to SMS and recharge
mobiles, and people sat all evening SMS-ing from the chowk! Other
chowks did not organise similar facilities for him even though
after the event there was considerable pride in his achievement.
These are illustrations of the ways in which caste-based neigh-
bourhoods simultaneously reproduce caste and caste identity and
the association of a neighbourhood space with a caste.
However, neighbourhoods are not always organised along caste
or religious lines. On a subsequent visit in September 2007, I heard
that there had been considerable support and similar facilities
organised for Raja—a Muslim boy from Bikaner who had become
a finalist in the television programme Sa Re Ga Ma.14 I was told
that a youth group—headed by a Brahmin— had organised SMS-
ing in a number of different chowks—both Hindu and Muslim.
Posters of Raja and members of the youth group supporting him
dotted the town. However, even while Raja was presented as the
pride of Bikaner, schisms were evident in the comments I heard
from a few people on how without their support (here meaning
the support of Hindus) he would not have won. Assertions such
as this one express the fragility of the cooperation and are re-
minders of the ways in which segregated neighbourhoods repro-
duce caste and religious difference.
The diversity of neighbourhoods in the town and the ways in
which these spaces are in themselves and in relation to other neigh-
bourhoods reproduced, suggests that a methodology for study
must start by considering different kinds of neighbourhoods—
upper caste and lower caste, Hindu and Muslim, neighbourhoods
within the walled city and those outside, new colonies and wards
formed of former panchayat areas and so on. At the same time,
while social and economic processes of liberalisation and global-
isation have brought considerable changes, it is important to re-
member that Bikaner has had a long and interesting history of
migration. Many people went to work in what is now Pakistan,

and to Afghanistan, Myanmar and Malaysia. Within India, there

has been migration to large metros like Kolkata, Mumbai and
Chennai or to smaller towns all over the country. This long history
of migration and trade is seen in the material culture of houses—
in Chinese and Italian tiles that line the interiors of rooms, very
large mirrors imported from Italy and stained glass windows.
This material culture is of course not evenly distributed among
neighbourhoods. The affluence of some neighbourhoods (and cor-
respondingly some caste groups) clearly stands out. Those commu-
nities that traded were the ones who tended to have the affluent
houses. The Rampuria Havelis in the Rampuria Chowk area for
example, have ornately carved stone facades, stained glass win-
dows and picture tiles that would suggest a Victorian origin and
the interiors have chandeliers, mirrors and tiles indicative of strong
trade links across the world. The history of geographical mobility
is often stated on plaques on houses that mention against a name
the place the person worked in. They sometimes state the profes-
sion of a person as well. Though I will not go further into this
interesting dimension here, the questions that need to be explored
are: How did migration to these places change the gender equa-
tions in the town? What are the ways in which the Bikaner diaspora
(within and outside the country) transforms and has transformed
gendered spaces in the town?
Let me consider one neighbourhood to raise some issues linked
to so-called public and private spaces in order to show the fluidity
of spaces. I will argue that labelling spaces as ‘private’ and ‘public’
prevents a nuanced understanding of spaces produced through
everyday practices. In Acharyon Ki Chowk as in many other Hindu
chowks in Bikaner’s walled city, there are patas—raised wooden
platforms in the centre of the square. People can be seen sitting on
these patas in the evenings and at night till quite late15 but also
through the day if the weather permits. People say the pata culture
is unique to Bikaner.
These platforms are exclusively available to men.16 Thus, they
mark out the chowk as a predominantly male space. The patas are
governed by rules, of who can sit on them and where. Access to
the pata is based not only on gender, but also on caste and age.
Men from the dominant caste of the mohalla and other equivalent

castes and of equivalent status sit on the pata. It would be seen as

an act of defiance if a man of a caste not considered equal in status
sat on the pata. In addition, where a person sits on the pata is also
based on status. I was told that those of a higher age and status sit
at the centre of the pata, while younger people generally sit on the
periphery and only over a period of several years begin to move
closer in. Sometimes younger men can be seen sitting on the peri-
phery of the chowk on a platform in front of a house playing cards
or a dice game. However, it is clear that the system of the pata is
undergoing considerable changes. Older people complain that the
respect for elders is diminishing and with it, considerable changes
have come about in the culture of patas.
The pata acts as a multi-purpose space in the middle of the chowk.
Men can be seen sitting and talking about politics—local or inter-
national events—of the day, news of the town, as they watch people
walking through the chowk. Sometimes they can be seen eating
street food sold in the chowk or in an adjacent chowk. It is not uncom-
mon to see a man eating his dinner on the pata (his food having
arrived from his house on a large thali—a flat plate made of metal).
Men also sleep on the pata particularly during the warm months
of the year. Many spoke about enjoying doing this, and some men
said how they had spent most of their time in the chowk and had
slept on the pata, when there was little space in their houses. Thus
the pata and the chowk in general are in some respects, an extension
of the house and accessible only to some and hierarchised in its
access along lines similar (although not identical) to that of a home.
Understanding the street as public and the home as private, places
them in opposition to each other and prevents an understanding
of the continuities between the two.
Some houses have a pata outside the house. This is considered a
symbol of status. In some contexts, the pata becomes an extension
of the house, particularly useful given that houses in the walled
city have limited space accessible to people visiting.17 Thus, for
example, at the time of a marriage or death, the pata becomes such
an extension. When a death occurs in the house or in that of a
family member,18 men who visit generally sit on the pata outside
while the women go inside the house. The space of the pata is here
‘public’ in that it is open to view by those passing by on the road,

while also being part of the house and therefore not open to every-
one to sit on. In other situations, the pata in front of a house acts
like a threshold space—as neither road nor house. For example,
I was told that when someone drops by from the family of an in-
marrying woman and is not supposed to drink even water in the
house, he may sit on the pata and talk, but refuse to eat or drink
anything as though he were on the street and had not entered the
house.19
The front room or rooms of a house (called the donkhé in
Marwadi) have large windows that look out to the road, so that a
person sitting at the window is visible to all on the street and can
engage people in conversation. Being at the window is like being
on the street, while being in the house. If the pata (for those houses
that have one) is one kind of threshold, the donkhé or front room(s)
is another. This room is considered a threshold in which people
are entertained within the house but without them entering the
rest of the house. This room is associated with men, and women
speak of a time when they would not sit in that room. A married
woman observing gunghat makes sure that her head is properly
covered when she sits at the window, that is, it is like being on the
street in her husband’s mohalla. (This is often true for the terrace
as well). Thus, the continuities between the house and the street/
chowk and the problem in naming these as either ‘private’ or ‘pub-
lic’ is apparent.
At the same time, the house as a space, distinct from the pave-
ment and the road, is evident from who cleans these spaces. A
woman from the Harijan basti (tenement colony), just outside the
walled city, comes to clean the pavement and the road.20 However,
she does not enter the house, and ideas of caste pollution are seen
enacted both in the way she stands on the pavement and shouts
out for the rotis21 she is to receive every day, as well as in the way
rotis22 are thrown from a distance into her hands or her basket. In
houses that have a woman to clean the house, her caste is con-
sidered very important. When women spoke of who worked in
their houses, they always mentioned the caste of the woman. If
she was not of the same caste, they pointed out that she was not
allowed to enter the kitchen nor to touch the drinking water ves-
sel.23 Further, the woman or man who comes to clean the street

from the Harijan basti does not sit on the pata—they are not allowed
to. This is another instance that indicates that the pata is not ‘public’,
that is, not for public use. The idea of ‘public’ then is constituted
on the basis of caste, religion, age and gender.24 And the meaning
of spaces is produced through these everyday practices that
reproduce hierarchies.
These continuities (and breaks) between the spaces of a house
and mohalla or chowk are also seen sharply in practices of veiling.
In turn, practices of Hindu and Muslim veiling—referred to as
gunghat and purdah, respectively—produce spaces of the house
and the mohalla in distinct ways.
Spatialised Veiling and the

Production of Gender and Space
Although in this section, I consider instances of Hindu and Muslim
veiling of women and girls in which the head and/or face and
body are covered, it is important to see these within a broader
understanding of seclusion. While the terms gunghat and purdah
are used specifically for the covering of the body, they also imply
the effacement of the woman through the veiling of the voice and
the eyes—ankhe ka purdah (the purdah of the eyes) and awaz ka
purdah (the purdah of the voice), and seclusion more generally. This
extends to other ideas of what constitutes the ‘modesty’ of a girl
or woman or in turn the ‘honour’ of a family or community. Deci-
sions to withdraw a girl from school or from some forms of work
outside the house may be informed by these ideas of maintaining
‘honour’. These ideas of ‘modesty’ and ‘honour’ as I discuss later
are a masquerade for the larger complex of veiling that controls a
woman’s ability to participate equally in political life, limits her
ability to claim her right to resources (Chowdhry 1994) or prevents
the exercise of her own volition, especially in matters of sexuality.
At the same time, it is important to recognise that girls and women
learn how to produce ‘respectability’ (Phadke 2007) through their
use of spaces and clothing, while simultaneously testing the boun-
daries of this control.
While I look exclusively at veiling by women in this article, it is
worth briefly discussing male veiling and particularly the covering

of the head by men. The practice of a man lowering his eyes when
speaking to someone (nazar ka purdah), not speaking loudly (awaz
ka purdah) or expressing a particular body language (Chopra 2006)
when in the company of a man or woman who is hierarchically
placed in relation to caste and class status is visible in everyday
life in Bikaner. This norm of interaction that serves to reproduce
hierarchies is in some ways similar to veiling norms of women in
front of caste superiors and in their conjugal home and neigh-
bourhood. However, the meaning of men covering their head with
a safa or a pagadi (different kinds of turban) has a very different
meaning than it has for women. In Bikaner, there are many different
kinds of headgear for men. The kind worn depends on community,
region and the occasion. Covering the head with a pagadi gives
pride and status. Removing the pagadi and putting it at someone’s
feet is an act of surrender, or rendering oneself powerless—it is
the inverse of the gunghat, which through covering communicates
respect and subservience. The covering of the head among Hindus
is different from that of Muslim men. Muslim men when they wear
a white knitted prayer cap, are veiling in relation to God. It is the
expression of subservience in front of God. In a mosque, both men
and women cover their heads.25
In the two subsections that follow, I argue for the need to nuance
our understandings of both practices of veiling and space through
a consideration of the neighbourhood, a space hardly studied in
the social sciences. Although, the sections are broadly separated
into a discussion of Hindu gunghat and Muslim purdah, the argu-
ment I make in each holds good for the other. I would also like to
clarify that the discussion that follows does not claim to be an
exhaustive exposition of veiling practices of women of all commu-
nities, but is rather an attempt to explore some aspects of spatial-
ised veiling in a particular town.
Veiling and the Spaces

of the Sasural and Pihir
Both in social science scholarship and in popular discourse,26 much
of the focus on veiling has tended to be on practices of purdah
among Muslims. In particular, veiling practices among Hindus

has been a somewhat neglected area in social science literature.27

Hindu purdah in north India is so taken for granted that rarely, if
ever, is there any discussion about women in public life who appear
in the ‘respectable’ image with their heads covered.28
The first principle of veiling of Hindu women in north India is
that only married women practice gunghat—this may range from
covering the face down to the chin, or just covering the head. Dress
expectations vary across caste groups as does the clothing married
women are expected to veil with. For example, married upper-
caste Hindu women in the walled city are expected to wear saris
and use the end of the sari (pallu) as gunghat. The traditional ghagra
(skirt), blouse-like items29 and odhni (shawl) draped on the head
and shoulder and tucked into the skirt at one end may be worn by
Brahmin women on occasions, but is more strongly associated with
Rajput women who wear it everyday or at least, used to. Dalit
women in Bikaner most often wear the ghagra.
Married women observe gunghat in their husband’s house, and
in front of older male and female relatives of their husband. Thus,
a newly married woman is to cover her face in front of her mother-
in-law and father-in-law, her older sisters-in-law and older
brothers-in-law as well as in front of all older kin and non-kin.
This veiling often extends from the gunghat to not being seen at
all—so that the daughter-in-law hides behind a door or a wall in
the presence of those she is expected to veil in front of. While she
speaks in a hushed voice with her mother-in-law, she may not
speak directly to her father-in-law at all. Gunghat then entails not
only covering the body but also effacing the self in other ways30—
by not being seen at all in some contexts, by not making eye contact
(ankhe ka purdah or ankh ki sharam—veiling of the eyes) or through
the veiling of the voice (awaz ka purdah), including sounds such as
that of laughter and even those made by her slippers as she
walks.31 That her voice should not be heard means that she is not
expected to express her opinion. Gunghat or the covering of the
head and/or face is thus part of a larger complex of veiling. Veiling
here symbolises the deference and respect32 (izzat) a woman is to
show to her in-laws. Rules of veiling are one way in which familial
hierarchy is enforced. The idea of ‘modesty’ (sharam), which is
how gunghat is often explained, thus, is linked to the expression

of her subordination in her marital home and kin group. This is in

fact very similar to the idea of hasham (modesty) among the
Bedouins described by Lila Abu-Lughod: ‘[T]he denial of sexuality
that is a mark of hasham is a symbolic means of communicating
deference’(Abu-Lughod 1986: 119). Gunghat and the idea of
‘modesty’ is linked to the denial of sexuality so that a couple are
not expected to be seen speaking to each other in front of older in-
laws and earlier could not be seen leaving the house together,
walking together in the chowk of a woman’s sasural or driving
together on a scooter.33 As mentioned earlier, this idea of ‘modesty’
also often acts as a pretext for the larger complex of veiling which
limits a woman’s ability to participate equally in political life or to
claim her right to resources in her conjugal home.34 As Sharma
argues, gunghat is best understood as a ‘means of controlling the
behaviour of in-marrying women’ (Sharma 1978: 219).
Practices of veiling are however always negotiated by women.
Radha for example is 35 and lives with her parents-in-law, husband
and two children in the Acharyon Ki Chowk. Acharya is a Brahmin
sub-caste, her affinal caste; Radha’s natal caste is Purohit, another
Brahmin sub-caste. She got married 10 years ago, and in her initial
years of marriage, Radha would cover her face in front of her
mother-in-law—although she would speak to her. She explained
to me that since women need to learn the work of the house from
their mothers-in-law, it was necessary to speak, even if this would
most often be in a hushed voice. After Radha gave birth to her
first child, a son, she pulled her gunghat back to cover only her
head in front of her mother-in-law. Some years later, she stopped
doing this as well. However, in front of her father-in-law she still
covers her head and, often her face, and does not speak to him
directly.35 Not unusually, she would stand behind a wall or a door
when her father-in-law entered that area. She would never be part
of a conversation when he was present and would speak in
whispers with me if he was even near. Practices of veiling are part
of a public performance and while a woman negotiates the every-
day practice, this practice is also critically tied to whoever else is
present. Thus, while in everyday life a woman may negotiate how
much of her face her gunghat covers, in front of other people she

may ensure that her practice of gunghat conforms to what is ex-

pected or what is considered ‘proper’.36 The idea expressed here
then of ‘public’ and ‘private’ is less tied to the nature of the space—
the domestic or outside but more to the presence of others who
are witness to the interaction.
The place of a woman’s sasural (husband’s parents’ house and
neighbourhood) extends beyond the house to the whole mohalla
or neighbourhood. People in the mohalla are the fictive kin of her
husband’s family. This practice of gunghat with neighbours may
extend also to non-Hindu neighbours and to those of castes con-
sidered as ‘inferior’. In fact, people say that at one time a new
bahu (bride) would observe gunghat in front of the Dalit woman
who swept the street outside the house. So, when the bahu went
out to give the Dalit woman rotis she would cover her face. A
woman then had to veil in front of all male and female elders in
her sasural irrespective of caste, class or religion. Women were also
meant to wear an odhni—a kind of shawl made with 1.5–2 m of
cloth worn over the sari—whenever they stepped outdoors. Older
women still wear an odhni, while others do only after a death in
the family.37
Practices of veiling have changed dramatically in Bikaner. Men
often say that the gunghat hardly remains; they gesture with their
hands that the gunghat has moved from being worn coming down
below the chin to above the forehead now. However, the dramatic
change was most often illustrated through the changes in veiling
practices in the chowk. As described earlier, at the centre of the
upper-caste Hindu mohallas are patas on which men, mostly elderly
sit. There was a time when married woman would have to cover
their faces with the end of their sari (the pallu), wear an odhni,38
pick up their slippers and walk barefoot past the chowk where men
were sitting on the pata. They would walk in a way that made
them as invisible as possible, walking close to the buildings and
exiting into a bylane as quickly as possible.
The idea that these practices were exclusively expected of a mar-
ried woman in relation to the house and neighbourhood of her
in-laws came home to me through a story told to me by a Bikaneri
in Delhi. When talking about the rules of gunghat in the mohalla39
in the 1950s, he said his brother and his son, son’s wife and child

were in Bikaner for a ceremony (in which the child’s head is

shaved). His brother’s daughter-in-law who had grown up outside
Bikaner in Delhi and Lucknow and lived in Mumbai after getting
married40 did not observe the rules of gunghat—she walked across
the chowk without covering her head or picking up her slippers. A
man from the mohalla sitting on the pata in the chowk told another
man that this woman was so-and-so’s son’s wife. In response, the
other man replied—vo bahu nahi, beti lag rahi hai! (She looks like a
daughter not a daughter-in-law!).
Thus, the relationship that a woman has to the space of a neigh-
bourhood or to the street is linked by her kinship relationship to
others in that neighbourhood. ‘Public’ spaces, and women’s pres-
ence in them, I argue, need to be seen in relation to each woman’s
kinship relationship to those in the space. This relationship, or
complex of relationships is what produces the space. While, map-
ping of women in different places and at different times of the
day reveals interesting conclusions, such as in the Pukar Project
for Mumbai (see Ranade 2007), such a mapping does not tell us
about the quality of women’s interactions with others in these
spaces.
While walking with a woman through the walled city, one can
observe the shifting relationship that she has with different ‘public’
spaces. On a number of occasions, when walking with Radha for
example, I observed this. She would ensure that her head was
well covered when she stepped out of her husband’s house, and
constantly re-covered her head when her sari pallu slipped off.41
But I noticed on more than one occasion that when we entered the
mohalla of her pihir (or her parent’s house42) she did not bother to
pull the sari pallu back up to cover her head. Not only this, her
whole persona seemed to change43—she talked openly and ani-
matedly with people she met on the road including men, both
younger and older. In this neighbourhood, she was the daughter,
the sister—fictive or otherwise. The only situation in which a
woman observes gunghat in her parents’ house is when her hus-
band or an older in-law is with her. Her covering her head in this
context is a sign of deference to her husband. Further, the space of
a woman’s parental home as characterised by ‘warmth, freedom
and comfort’ (Vatuk 1972: 114) is transferred to her children who

see the naniyal (the house of their maternal grandmother) as a place

where they are showered with affection and pampered.
Age does not necessarily blunt the relationship a woman has
with her sasural’s mohalla. While walking one day with a woman
in her seventies, a widow dressed in a white sari and carrying a
white odhni, I noticed that just before we entered a particular
mohalla she opened up the white odhni and wrapped it around
herself and pulled her sari pallu over her head and eyes. When
I asked her why she was doing so, she explained that this was the
mohalla of her sasural. Fifteen years after her husband’s death, this
relationship with her husband’s neighbourhood persisted.
While a woman may let her sari pallu slip off her head when in
a market some distance from the neighbourhood of her husband’s
home, the space of the market is also inflected by the particular
individuals in it and their relationship with the woman. When
walking in the market with Radha, I would notice that she would
suddenly pull her sari pallu over her head. For example, she did
this just before entering a shop run by a relative of her husband.
Thus, even spaces that are comparatively anonymous in a town
are inflected by the presence of individuals and the particular
relationship a woman may have with them. This then means that
market spaces are produced in unique ways for different women.
This distinction between the affinal neighbourhood and the natal
neighbourhood is particularly sharp in the walled city of a town
like Bikaner where women often marry within the town and where
their parental home and neighbourhood (pihir or maika) are at
walking distance from their sasural. In such a situation, a woman
may visit her parental home everyday.44 For a woman whose natal
home is outside Bikaner, while the entire town becomes her sasural,
it is the personalised space of the mohalla where veiling regimes
are the most stringent.
How do women experience practices of gunghat (and purdah)
and in turn experience different spaces? Many of the women
I interviewed used the term ghutan (suffocation) to describe the
experience of the gunghat (and purdah) in the sasural. ‘Ghutan si
lagti hai’ (I feel suffocated), one woman said while explaining that
she had stopped observing gunghat in front of her mother-in-law
and only covers her eyes (rather than her whole face) in front of

her father-in-law. However, the word ghutan is sometimes used

more generally for the space of the sasural—the place where a
woman has to veil, and where she is constrained and subordinated.
I met Ayesha, a Muslim woman in her mid-twenties at an NGO in
Bikaner a few days after she had joined. When I asked her if she
liked being there, she said, ‘bahut achha—aisa lagta hai ki me apne
maike aa gai hoo... sasural ki ghutan se nikal ke’ (Very nice—I feel like
I am in my natal home—that I have come out of the suffocation of
the house and neighbourhood of my in-laws). For women then,
different spaces may not be seen within the frame of what is ‘pub-
lic’ or ‘private’ but instead may be articulated through the
categories of the natal and the conjugal houses and neighbour-
hoods. Ayesha’s words also indicate the similarity in this respect
between Hindu and Muslim veiling regimes. In fact, Ayesha indi-
cated the stricter veiling regime in her sasural by pointing out that
she had never owned a burqa—a black two-piece garment that
covers the whole body and the head and face—nor worn one before
she got married. However, cousin marriage among Muslims con-
siderably diminishes this experience in the sasural, although
women will often follow normative practices of veiling in the pres-
ence of outsiders.
On looking at how women negotiate the veil, it is important to
consider also how women use the practice of the veil to their ad-
vantage. Scholars have explored the positive side of what women
associate with the experience of veiling.45 I am interested in ex-
ploring what kind of space the veil creates for women within a
context that is seen as necessitating veiling. What are the tactics
(to use de Certeau’s term) used by women in a context of con-
straint? On talking about the gunghat, Radha explained that it is
very useful on specific occasions. When a death occurs in a family,
it is customary to sit in mourning for 7 or 11 days. And, every time
someone comes in, women have to cry out loudly. This perform-
ance, Radha said, is enabled through veiling, whereby no one can
see the face and the dramatic change of emotion reflected on it!
She also tells me that observing gunghat (veil drawn down to the
chin) communicates on the one hand respect and at the same time
has enabled her to say exactly what she wanted, to an elder in her

husband’s family.46 Both examples show the ways in which veiling

may be seen as enabling a subversion of normative regimes and
actually opening up spaces, in a context of constraint.
Looking at practices of veiling in everyday life indicates the
ways in which women negotiate rules of veiling. The space in
which a woman has to negotiate these rules depends on a complex
set of factors—the social environment she lives in, the bargaining
power she feels she has, her level of education,47 the status of her
natal family in relation to her husband’s, the number of children
she has, whether or not she has a son, her relationship with her in-
laws, the views of her husband and the family on veiling and so
on. While some women spoke about the ghutan (suffocation) they
feel when they wear their gunghat down to their chins, and pre-
sented this as the reason why they slowly stopped observing
gunghat, others did not mention the reason explicitly but spoke
about the time when the shift was achieved. For instance, this time
is often marked by the birth of a child48 or the arrival of a younger
daughter-in-law who did not observe gunghat.
The nature of the neighbourhood of the sasural is also crucial to
understanding veiling practices and the space for negotiation. For
example, the newer spaces of the colonies in Bikaner are a contrast
to the walled city in relation to practices of gunghat and ideas about
the neighbourhood.49 Within the colonies there are distinctions—
a colony like Murli Dar Colony is said to consist of people who
moved out from the walled city when numbers grew and is spoken
of by women as a ‘replica’ of the walled city in terms of it being as
conservative. J.N. Vyas Colony, which was built after independ-
ence, is seen as more cosmopolitan as it has residents from various
Indian states. It is marked out by new places of interaction between
men and women, boys and girls, such as the internet café, the ice
cream parlour and restaurants. This difference between neigh-
bourhoods is further explored in the next section.
However, I must clarify that my intention is not to suggest that
the parental house is for daughters a place of freedom or privilege.
Instead, in this section, I have tried to show that marriage pat-
terns and kinship relationships are critical to understanding how
spaces are gendered and how both gender and space are produced

through veiling practices in everyday life. Given the dramatic dif-

ference in the ways in which a woman relates to her mohalla in
contrast to her husband’s, a mapping of women (and men) in ‘pub-
lic’ spaces will not express the sharp differences in her interactions
with people in different spaces and her experience of each space.
Considering married women in Bikaner thus points to the limita-
tion of the ‘public/private’ division50 as an analytical category and
indicates instead the need to consider the kinship relationship that
a particular woman has with those who occupy the space, espe-
cially whether it is an affinal or natal relationship. Thus, contrary
to studies that have pointed to the ‘veiling regimes’ in a city that
are fixed (see for example, Secor 2002 on veiling in Istanbul), I argue
that a gendered geography of a town needs to be conceptualised
also in terms of the subjective mapping of women with respect to
her veiling, and linked to this the quality of her interactions with
people.
Veiling and the Culture of Neighbourhoods

In Bikaner veiling practices differ between neighbourhoods. Dif-
ferent communities and caste groups have different regimes of
veiling—garments used for veiling may have different names (see
Palriwala 1990), and different conventions to indicate respect and
sharm or ‘modesty’. For example, in the Dalit basti just outside the
walled city, veiling regimes seemed stricter than in other mohallas.
Young women would wear their gunghat down to their chins in
front of their mothers-in-law and would not speak in their pres-
ence. Further, certain caste groups and corresponding neighbour-
hoods were pointed out as having relaxed veiling regimes because
of the large number of people who have migrated out of the town.
Neighbourhoods also differ on the basis of their being old or com-
paratively new spaces of residence. Thus, the mohallas in the walled
city differ from the new colonies. They differ on the basis of the
degree of anonymity, although colonies themselves are differ-
entiated and heterogenous. Further, residence in these areas is
relatively new and often the same sense of relatedness in the neigh-
bourhood does not exit. This lack of relatedness is of course also
because the colonies are far more heterogeneous in caste and

religious composition in comparison with the mohallas in the walled

city. Additionally, household composition is an important feature
that marks out the difference. Many houses in colonies are nuclear
families whereby a couple have built their own house and moved
out of the walled city.
The importance of considering the culture of the neighbourhood
in understanding different spatial practices of veiling became clear
through the consideration of different mohallas in the walled city
that are predominantly Muslim. In the discussion of practices of
the purdah, variations based on the different sects and regional
communities of those who follow Islam have been pointed out
(Jeffery 1979; Khan 2007), but the differences based on the history
and culture of a neighbourhood have received insufficient atten-
tion. I seek to throw some light on this by focusing on two predom-
inantly Muslim51 mohallas in the walled city in Bikaner.
The Choongara Mohalla in Bikaner is known for its very high
level of literacy, particularly among women. Women are not only
literate but they also are well educated, with many having teacher’s
training certificates or degrees. Many women work as school teach-
ers, and this in turn is seen as what has altered the culture of purdah,
both practised as seclusion and clothing. As one woman said, ‘Is
mohalla me kareb kareb burqa ut gaya hai’ (Save a few exceptions no
one wears the burqa here anymore). This culture of the mohalla is
seen as resulting from a stress on education in the mohalla. An
environment that stresses education for women is traced back to
two women known to have been the first Muslim girls to go to
school in Bikaner and then, as adults, were the first to get jobs as
teachers. Their example was followed by many women in the
mohalla.
Sakina Begum, born in the late 1920s, recalled how her mother
fought opposition to ensure that she went to school and continued
to study at a time when Muslim girls were not encouraged to go
to school. She said that her mother would tell her that she should
cover her head so that ‘no one will speak’. Her mother would send
her to school through the bylanes so that few people would see
her going. Sakina Begum said she has always covered her head—
as a student and a teacher. It was a strategy to open up spaces to

study and work while preventing people from talking. However,

she told me more than once that neither her daughters nor
daughters-in-law were ever made to cover their head.
Sakina Begum passed her matriculation examination in 1945
and got a job in one of the best schools in Bikaner soon after. Later,
in the 1950s, she went on one year’s paid leave to the state capital,
Jaipur, to obtain the Senior Teaching Certificate (STC). In the later
years while teaching at the school, she simultaneously did her B.A.
in English literature and then her M.A. In the 1950s, Sakina Begum
was involved with adult education in Bikaner. She conducted vol-
untary literacy classes at night in the mohalla and encouraged and
helped many girls and women to be educated and get jobs as teach-
ers. Some of the women she taught were young Hindu widows in
the mohalla who were struggling to bring up their children with
no independent income. She tells me that the women’s lives were
transformed through education and subsequent employment.
Amina Begum, a year younger than Sakina Begum, recalled
seeing Sakina Begum go to school and decided that she wanted to
go as well. She was around 7 or 8 years old at the time—a little
older than others in her class. Sakina and she would go together
to school and then other girls joined in. Amina was married the
year she passed Class 8. Her husband’s family was quite poor
and since she was educated, someone known to her encouraged
her to get a job as a teacher. She recalled that on the 1 April 1948
she became school teacher in Bikaner. At the same time, she started
tutoring young children in her house. Many young girls would
stay with her while they studied. In 1953, Amina went with Sakina
Begum to Jaipur to obtain the STC. Ten years after she got her job,
Amina passed the Class 10 examination as a private student.
Amina Begum encouraged her children and many other young
girls and women to study; she supported her grand-daughter’s
education and when the girl got a job as a teacher, she even trav-
elled with her to the places where she was posted.
Both Sakina Begum and Amina Begum became active role
models for many in the mohalla.52 Their getting an education and
employment opened up this possibility for many women. Women
and their families saw that with education a woman could get a

‘good’ and ‘respectable’ job as a teacher. This then caused the snow-
ball effect that has contributed to a mohalla culture in which
women’s education is now the norm as is also women being em-
ployed as teachers in schools. This mohalla stands out as a contrast
to other mohallas (both Hindu and Muslim), not only in the edu-
cation and employment of women but also in the culture of purdah.
This is visible in everyday life where one can see women going to
work in a school in the morning and returning in the evening.
By contrast, in another mohalla in the walled city, young girls
often do not study beyond Class 8, and the two young women
I have come to know well were both engaged to be married fairly
young (17 and 20 years) and did not go out of the house often. In
fact, they rarely visited their aunt’s house across the main square
near the mohalla, and, only once a year before Eid, did they go to
Bada Bazaar in Bikaner. When I spoke to Sara Bano, then 20 years
old, and her mother about Choongaron Mohalla and the large
number of women teachers there, they said, ‘Is mohalla me log jalil
hai, unpad hai’ (this mohalla is full of uneducated people). For them
clearly the lack of ‘educated people’ in their mohalla meant that
education, especially for women, was not something encouraged
there. The neighbourhood was clearly seen as constraining choices
and of setting a culture of what women could do and linked to
this how purdah was practiced.
Thus, while neighbourhoods may be divided by caste and
religion, they are further differentiated by their particular culture.
While this differentiation may be seen between the walled city
and the more cosmopolitan ‘colonies’, here I argue that different
mohallas in the walled city are differentiated on the basis of their
history and the culture of women’s education and, linked to this,
of purdah. Correspondingly, while veiling practices differ across
community, caste and class, they also vary across neighbourhoods.
Therefore, the ways in which spaces in a town are gendered is cri-
tically tied to the culture of the neighbourhoods. This presents us
with a radical potential for transformation at the local level. What
needs to be understood in greater depth are the processes of trans-
formation and the ways in which multiple influences—local,
national and global—intersect and are negotiated and articulated

in rules and in everyday practices, what Arjun Appadurai (1997)

refers to as the ‘production of locality’.
Conclusion
I began this article by focusing on a town, and it would only be
appropriate to conclude by returning to the question of town spaces
and reflecting on whether a focus on veiling points to distinctive
features of urban town spaces. One of the features that differ-
entiates the town from the village is that, in contrast to the marriage
rule of village exogamy, women often marry within the town,
although outside their mohalla. This then means that in Bikaner a
woman may visit her pihir (parental home) everyday and hence
will move between different veiling regimes everyday. While this
is so in a city, the size of a city distinguishes it out and may prevent
this easy movement between a woman’s pihir and her sasural. Fur-
thermore, neighbourhoods in a city are often far more impersonal
and differ in the nature of relatedness between residents of a
mohalla. What may differentiate particular city spaces from town
spaces is the degree of anonymity and the corresponding difference
in the practice and experience of veiling. While the lack of anonym-
ity in a town may be binding in terms of the expectations of veiling
for a woman, the fact that people can be recognised on the street
means that women often view neighbourhoods around where they
and their parents’ live as comparatively safe.
Further, the various kinds of spaces and neighbourhoods in a
town—especially the distinction between the walled city, the Dalit
basti and the new colonies—differ from cities with a walled city
minimally by scale. At the same time, what is significant is that a
town such as Bikaner is distinct from other towns because of its
social history, especially the presence of a walled city, a fort and
palace.53
This article has been informed by the idea that everyday prac-
tices constitute both space and gender. I have argued that everyday
practices of veiling, for example, enable an understanding of how
space needs to be conceptualised as being ‘produced’ or ‘created’
rather than being ‘fixed’ and ‘given’. Methodologically then, this
article seeks to explicate the importance of privileging practice

(de Certeau 1984) rather than a priori assuming a fixed nature of

spaces such as in discussions that use the public/private binary
as the primary descriptive or analytical feature of spaces.
In her article ‘Femininity, Space and the Female Body’,
Seemanthini (1997: 119), while arguing for ‘recasting space (and
its negotiation) as multiple and relational’, looks at the shifting
boundaries of olage/horage (inside/outside) according to the context
and time. In this article, I take this argument further to suggest
that not only are ideas of ‘inside’ or ‘outside’ or ‘public’ or ’private’
spaces contextual and shifting but also that this division may not
always help us understand how spaces are differentiated and how
they are gendered. Thus, by focusing on practices of veiling among
both Hindus and Muslims in Bikaner, I argue that other axes of
differentiation, such as that for a woman between her sasural and
her pihir, are important for our understanding. Thus, a woman’s
relationship with people in a space is crucial to her experience of
that space and to understanding how space and gender are pro-
duced in everyday life.
Understanding the neighbourhood as relational (McDowell
1999) is therefore critical to appreciating how gender is produced
differently across spaces in a town. The experience of a woman
varies not only on the basis of her kinship relationship with people
in that space at different times, but is also based on the history
and culture of the neighbourhood. Thus, as argued in this article,
veiling practices vary not only by religion and community, but also
by the culture of neighbourhoods. Consequently, moving out of a
categorisation of space as ‘public’ or ‘private’ can enable a more
nuanced understanding of a feminist geography of a town.
Notes
1. See for example, Sujata Patel and Jim Masselos (2003), Janaki Nair (2006),
The Pukar project—Shilpa Phadke (2007), Shilpa Ranade (2007), Sameera Khan
(2007) and Ananya Roy (2003).
2. There are of course exceptions to this neglect. See, for example, essays by
Richard Fox and Harish Doshi in Rao et al. (1991) and more recently essays
by Geert De Neve, Jeffery et al., Edward Simpson, Kathinka Frøystad in Geert
De Neve and Henrike Donner (2006). One focus of studies on the town looked

at implications of the shift from village to town (see, for example, Slyvia Vatuk
1972). Others that have focused on the town have been concerned with its
history and social life and less on space and the nature of place-making (see,
for example, Owen Lynch’s (1969) study of untouchability in Agra, and Nita
Kumar’s (1988) study on artisans in Banaras). It is worth mentioning a popular
novel on the town Butter Chicken in Ludhiana: Travels in Small Town India by
Pankaj Mishra.
3. See for example, the work of Shirley Ardener (1993), Henrietta Moore (1986),
Doreen Massey (1994), Gillian Rose (1993), Linda McDowell (1999). Rose (1993)
also points to the marginalisation of women geographers and the issue of
gender within the space of the discipline of geography.
4. I dedicate this article to the memory of Seemanthini Niranjana (1964–2008)
whom I unfortunately did not know personally but whose work on gender
and space was one of the first among sociologists in India.
5. This idea of the mutual constitution of gender and space has also informed
the Pukar Gender and Space Project that has produced important work in the
area in the last decade (Phadke 2007, Ranade 2007, Khan 2007).
6. The public/private dichotomy has a long history in social science scholarship.
While I cannot detail here the complex genealogy of this dichotomy, I would
like to mention that the use of these terms can be traced back to the ancient
Greek writers such as Socrates, Plato and Aristotle whose ideas were organised
on the basis of a division between what was common or public and that which
was domestic or individual. This distinction is fundamental to much political
theory written in the west, especially liberal political thinkers concerned to
protect some part of social life from government state intrusion.
7. See, for example, articles in two pioneering edited books of the time: Rosaldo
and Lamphere 1974, Reiter 1975.
8. A more recent articulation of this is, for example, Meera Kosambi (2007).
9. Neighbourhood square.
10. Terms that I use here to differentiate Hindu and Muslim forms of veiling,
respectively.
11. Thus, areas around the gates—Kot Gate, Seetala Gate, Jassusar Gate, Nathusar
Gate, Goga Gate follow the names of the gates rather than a caste or occupa-
tional group. However, some smaller gates are named after the occupational
group in the area. (e.g., Uston Ki Bari, or Hamalon Ki Bari; bari means window
or small door, uston are those who do fine painting in gold—generally on the
ceiling or walls of houses and now on decorative marble work, while hamalon
refers to butchers).
12. A Brahmin caste.
13. The fate of contestants in this programme was dependant on the number of
SMSes received in their support.
14. A talent search programme similar to the Indian Idol on a different television
channel.
15. In fact the practices of the pata both produce and are produced by what people
identify as the work culture of Bikaner. When I asked how people could afford

to sit on the pata on week days till 3 a.m. playing cards or just chatting and then
be at work in the morning, people said that a predominant practice is that
those with government jobs go to the office in the morning and sign in, and
then return home to catch up on their sleep!
16. The only exception to this I have seen is of labouring women sitting on the
pata with their children during the day in between work. These women were
clearly from outside the town and did not know the conventions of the place.
17. A pata may be borrowed by another house on the street in the case of death or
marriage.
18. Mourning is also observed in the house when a married daughter dies in her
marital house.
19. A daughter-in-law’s family is not supposed to drink even water in her hus-
band’s joint family house. If the person does so, then he or she most often
pays a token amount of money for the tea or meal eaten.
20. The woman is paid a nominal amount each month by every household, espe-
cially when she is not employed by the municipality.
21. Flat, round unleavened bread.
22. In Bikaner, people explained that the first few rotis made in a house are for
the dalit woman. However, in practice it seemed that many houses gave the
woman left over rotis.
23. A woman or girl who is menstruating in the house is also forbidden from en-
tering the kitchen or touching the drinking water vessel.
24. It is important to note the distinctions between the pata in front of a house
and the patas in the chowk. While a woman, especially an older woman may
sit on the pata in front of her house, she will almost never sit on the pata in the
chowk.
25. In Christianity, women veil in the church, men do not. Sikh men cover their
head all the time while women do so only at certain times.
26. In recent years for example, in Europe there has been so much discussion on
the veil. Banning of the veil in schools in France and whether teachers should
be ‘allowed’ to wear the hijab in England are two examples of policy decisions
being debated. Here, as in other instances, the veil is seen as a sign of the ‘op-
pression’ of women among Muslims.
27. Some exceptions to this are the work of Ursula Sharma (1978), Hanna Papanek
(1982), Rama Mehta (1982), Sylvia Vatuk (1982), Doranne Jacobson (1982) and
Prem Chowdhry (1994).
28. While women in public life often appear in public with their heads covered,
visual representation of them on billboards and election posters almost always
represent them with their head covered.
29. The traditional dress includes a kurti (a long loose blouse) and the kanchli (a
short tight blouse).
30. As Ursula Sharma says ‘Gunghat is a means of rendering a woman socially
invisible’ (1978: 223).

31. A daughter-in-law is expected to walk without letting her slippers be heard.

I was told that the sound of a daughter-in-law’s rubber slippers going flip-
flop as she climbs the stairs may ‘provoke’ her mother-in-law to comment
that the bahu or daughter-in-law’s slippers are slapping her!
32. Vatuk (1972) also makes this point in relation to gunghat in Meerut. She writes,
‘Within the extended family this form of avoidance . . . is said be primarily a
way of preventing disrespect by a young wife to male elders’ (p. 113).
33. If a woman were to go out with her husband on his scooter, she would not
get onto it outside the house. She would walk past the chowk and get on in a
small lane so that her in-laws and elders in the chowk would not see her riding
on the scooter with her husband.
34. Chowdhry (1994) argues powerfully that regimes of gunghat in Haryana avert
what would be considered a potential threat from a married woman to stake
claims over economic resources and decision making in her affinal house
(p. 289). This argument has also been made by Sharma (1978) for Himachal.
35. There is a saying in Marwadi that would translate as: ‘The daughter-in-law
speaks to the wall and it is heard by the father-in-law’. If a woman is alone all
day with only the father-in-law in the house and she is not allowed to speak
to her father-in-law directly, she speaks to the wall telling the wall what she
wants to communicate to her father-in-law.
36. A woman from the same mohalla who has lived all her married life outside
Bikaner said that when her parents-in-law visited her in their house in a North
Indian town, it was very difficult to not speak in front of her father-in-law be-
cause her husband was rarely at home and she had to answer the door and
attend to all the matters of the house. She said her father-in-law told her that
she could speak to him, but in Bikaner even if he spoke to her by mistake, she
should not reply. Thus, in his home town, he did not want to appear as though
there was a break with custom, a break that would be interpreted as his
daughter-in-law’s disrespect.
37. A practice that expresses a woman’s state of mourning.
38. In the summer the odhni is cotton, in the winter it may be woollen.
39. Although he was talking about a mohalla of Jains, this practice was true for all
Hindu mohallas.
40. The man telling me this story also mentioned that she was the daughter of a
senior bureaucrat. This status is seen as enabling the space to negotiate rules
of veiling.
41. The gesture of constantly adjusting the pallu to cover the head is one that can
be observed often. Both synthetic saris and well-starched cotton saris tend to
slip off the head easily and are therefore constantly being adjusted so that the
head is kept covered.
42. In North India also referred to as the maika.
43. Vatuk (1972) refers to the contrast between the behaviour of a woman in her
natal home and her husband’s village as ‘a marked double standard of be-
haviour’ (p. 112).

44. This depends among other things on how many women there are in her con-
jugal home. When she can, a woman may pick up her children from the bus
stop and take them to her mother’s house, feed them there and only return to
her conjugal home in the evening. When a woman is the only daughter-in-
law in her conjugal home and she is responsible for all the housework, in-
cluding the care of her ailing in-laws, she may not be able to return to her
natal house for months together. Vatuk (1972) argues that this frequent move-
ment of a woman between her natal house and her conjugal or affinal home
is characteristic of the difference between village and town living. She engages
with the argument that ‘bilateralism is characteristic of urbanising societies
which have traditionally been strongly patrilateral in emphasis’ (148) and
argues that while the change will be slow, the direction of change is clear,
and the trend will be firmly embedded as neolocal residence—living inde-
pendently from either the maika or sasural—becomes increasingly normal for
the educated middle class. This is an optimistic view that has not played out
especially given that many middle class women, not only in Bikaner but also
elsewhere, still do not inherit property in their natal homes and do not feel
they can return to live in their natal homes.
45. For example, Sameera Khan (2007) in her article outlines how some Muslim
women she interviewed in Mumbai spoke about the advantages of being in-
visible in public spaces.
46. While Radha does not speak to her father-in-law directly, with other elder
members of the family, she often observes the gunghat but speaks through it.
This is not uncommon and indicates the ways in which different kinds of
veiling are negotiated.
47. The importance of education in negotiating purdah has been stressed by
scholars such as Vatuk (1972), Sharma (1978) and Chowdhry (1994). Chowdhry
(1994) points out that although an educated and urban based woman may
not be expected to observe purdah, observing it evokes ‘the highest praise
from all’ (p. 285). Women in fact constantly negotiate creatively these expecta-
tions and ideals.
48. The birth of a child, often a male child is seen as an event that may make a
woman claim a greater space for bargaining.
49. In her study that focuses on the implications of urbanisation for kinship prac-
tices, Vatuk (1972) argues that changes in urban residence brings changes in
the spatial organisation of kinship and in turn brings changes in the way kin-
ship roles are played. As discussed in this article, this implies changes in not
only practices of gunghat but also in the social construction of gender.
50. Donner (2006) in her work on the neighbourhood in Kolkata critiques the
public–private division and instead argues that ‘it is the role of married women
as mothers and homemakers that determines how a woman relates to the
neighbourhood and describes her involvement with different groups’ (p. 150).
In Bikaner, it is a woman’s relationship with the neighbourhood as a wife or
married woman that is critical.
51. The majority of Muslims in Bikaner are Sunni.

52. In discussing the ‘educational environment’ in the town of Bijnor, Jeffery

et al. mention ‘reliable electricity to let children study in the evenings, good
tutors to supplement what is learnt at school, as well as the more diffuse
effects produced when all the neighbours’ children regularly attend school’
(2006: 116). It is the latter that I believe has been far from diffused—instead
this culture has had a far reaching and tangible impact on the mohalla.
53. Thus, a town like Bhilai in Chhattisgarh started around a steel plant would
not be marked by the specificities of these space categories. Conversely, a
number of towns are marked by the spatial separation between the walled
city and the newer colonies (see for example, Vatuk 1972 for Meerut; Jeffery
et al. [2006] for Bijnor). This spatial separation is predominantly North Indian.
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Indian Journal of Gender

Veiling and the Production of Gender and Space in a Town in North

The online version of this article can be found at:

Centre for Women's Development Studies

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Veiling and the Production of

Acknowledgements: This article is an outcome of a project on Gender and Space

Janaki Abraham is Reader in the Department of Sociology, Delhi School of

Indian Journal of Gender Studies, 17:2 (2010): 191–222

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Indian Journal of Gender Studies, 17:2 (2010): 191–222

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in relation to everyday practices, and not merely reflecting relation-

Indian Journal of Gender Studies, 17:2 (2010): 191–222

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Indian Journal of Gender Studies, 17:2 (2010): 191–222

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This article chronicles these changes while arguing that the a

The Production of Space and

Indian Journal of Gender Studies, 17:2 (2010): 191–222

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Choongaron Mohalla is a predominantly Muslim mohalla com-

Indian Journal of Gender Studies, 17:2 (2010): 191–222

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this was presented as a matter of considerable pride for the caste

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and to Afghanistan, Myanmar and Malaysia. Within India, there

Indian Journal of Gender Studies, 17:2 (2010): 191–222

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castes and of equivalent status sit on the pata. It would be seen as

Indian Journal of Gender Studies, 17:2 (2010): 191–222

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Indian Journal of Gender Studies, 17:2 (2010): 191–222

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Spatialised Veiling and the

Indian Journal of Gender Studies, 17:2 (2010): 191–222

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Veiling and the Spaces

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has been a somewhat neglected area in social science literature.27

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of her subordination in her marital home and kin group. This is in

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may ensure that her practice of gunghat conforms to what is ex-

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were in Bikaner for a ceremony (in which the child’s head is

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see the naniyal (the house of their maternal grandmother) as a place

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her father-in-law. However, the word ghutan is sometimes used

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husband’s family.46 Both examples show the ways in which veiling

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