Review essay: Recent books on urban India

Sanjay Srivastava, Masculinity, Consumerism and the Post-national Indian City: Streets, Neighbourhoods, Home, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023; 210 pp.: ISBN: 9781009179867, £75.00 (hbk)

Also discussed:
Ethiraj Gabriel Dattatreyan, The Globally Familiar: Digital Hip Hop, Masculinity and Urban Space in Delhi, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020; 264 pp.: ISBN: 9781478011200, US$27.95/£23.99 (pbk); ISBN: 9781478010159, US$102.95/£95.28 (hbk)

Shannon Philip, Becoming Young Men in a New India: Masculinities, Gender Relations and Violence in the Postcolony, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022; 211 pp.: ISBN: 9781009158718, £75.00 (hbk)

Chowdhury Romit, City of Men: Masculinities and Everyday Morality on Public Transport, London and New York, NY: Rutgers University Press, 2023; 216 pp.: ISBN: 9781978829503, US$27.95/£23.99 (pbk); ISBN: 9781978829510, US$150.00/£134.00 (hbk)

Introduction

In Srivastava’s latest book Masculinity, Consumerism and the Post-national Indian City: Streets, Neighbourhoods, Home the prolific scholar offers unparalleled insight into the growth and shaping of Indian cities. Examined through the prism of masculinity and consumerism, its take on the post-colonial city traverses urban domains, stopping at the level of the street, neighbourhood and home. In doing so, the author presents not only novel understandings of developments within Indian cities but also a synthesis of some of his earlier work on the topic. Besides discussing Srivastava’s latest book, in this essay I will reflect on some of his previous publications (Srivastava, 2004, 2005, 2010, 2015) and how they have contributed to what is now a burgeoning field of research which centres its inquiry on the intersection of urban studies, men and masculinities and gender/sexuality more broadly. In particular, I will endeavour to bring Srivastava’s work into conversation with three recent ethnographies that discuss the omnipresence of men in Indian public space, and to situate their analyses within the context of a rapidly changing or new India. These include Ethiraj Gabriel Dattatreyan’s The Globally Familiar: Digital Hip Hop, Masculinity and Urban Space in Delhi (2020), Shannon Philip’s Becoming Young Men in a New India: Masculinities, Gender Relations and Violence in the Postcolony (2022) and Romit Chowdhury’s City of Men: Masculinities and Everyday Morality on Public Transport (2023).

I will argue that Srivastava’s work paved the way for these ethnographies since he was one of the first scholars to train his attention onto men and masculinities beyond immediate questions of and concern over Indian women’s safety. A central question that characterises Srivastava’s work throughout is who these Indian men are that are so unavoidably present in the country’s cities, the way they themselves understand and navigate urban space and the challenges and obstacles they face in a country characterised by rapid but decidedly uneven economic growth and social change. The opening passage of Chowdhury’s City of Men asserts something crucial here in stating that in South Asian urban landscapes men are (indeed) everywhere. However, while for men their presence is self-evident and does not demand explanation, for women this is completely different. Their visibility in and right to (access to) the city is challenged and criticised (pp. 1–2). His study captures the lives and predicaments of taxi and rickshaw drivers in Kolkata while bringing this material in conversation with ethnographic data collected among the city’s police officers. These are men whose socioeconomic position can be described as marginalised and labour class, at most lower middle class, occupying a stratum of society at a significant remove from the new middle-class men that Philip (2022) focuses on in Becoming Young Men in a New India. If not driving themselves, they are more likely passengers, making use of ride-sharing apps to get across the city, though it should be noted that Philip’s focus is on Delhi and not Kolkata. These young men stand out in a different way and make their presence felt in the city in very different terms, often seemingly oblivious of their (relatively) privileged position. As the ethnographer ‘hangs out’ with them, we get to know them as they navigate bars and clubs, gyms and cruising grounds but also trains and their homes. The question which appears to guide Philip’s exploration of how young men relate to (the idea of) a new India is who these men are, especially when among other men (of an older generation, a different upbringing or belonging to a different class position). It is a question that Dattatreyan’s The Globally Familiar also makes central with respect to his hip hop interlocutors, for whom the stage is often located in public space itself. How do these men ‘perform’ their gender and masculinity? As in Chowdhury’s study, we find that some of Dattatreyan’s interlocutors are also internal migrants and stand out in different ways, begging the question of how they manage to make the city their own.

Srivastava’s latest book takes the interplay of questions of belonging, navigating and negotiating urban space, the performance of gender/masculinity and socioeconomic difference in novel directions by continuing and expanding on conversations he started in earlier publications. To appreciate how Srivastava’s thinking has developed over time, it is useful to discuss some of his earlier work since it helps situate the three other ethnographies discussed here within what has by now become a thriving field of research. ‘Understanding’ Indian men cannot be separated from how they relate to women (meaning their wives, girlfriends, sisters, college mates or simply those they encounter on the street and elsewhere) but also who ‘they’ are among other men. Since Indian public space is still so male-dominated, Indian men are invariably among ‘other’ men. Yet, studies including the ethnographies discussed here increasingly caution against the reification of (problematic) masculine identities as a way to explain egregious and even downright violent encounters that women face in Indian public space. There may be many men but they are not one and the same, their masculine identities not interchangeable and unified in expression and determination.

The pleasure and pressure of public space

In an earlier paper titled ‘Fragmentary Pleasures: Masculinity, Urban Spaces, and Commodity Politics in Delhi’, Srivastava (2010) employs the term ‘restoration’ as an important theme in (the writing on) religious nationalism. Within religious movements, assertions of identity rely on the idea of a ‘true people’ and an ‘authentic nation’ (building on Hansen, 1999: 90). Turning to a group of men who are all members of the Hindu right movement Bajrang Dal, Srivastava invites his readers to follow these men around the city as they involve themselves in various religious-political activities. The result is an exhilarating journey across different localities during which the reader gets to see parts of the city that often seem hidden. In discussing how these men navigate the city, their socioeconomic (often backward) position, the speed of urban change and various Hindu-religious concerns, Srivastava introduces the notion of the ‘split subject’ with reference to his interlocutors. Characterised by a lack, something missing, this speaks to what these men are up to in their endeavour to make and (re)claim the city. He argues that an ethnography of ‘splitting’ may help us to interrogate a ‘context of lacks and absences’ (p. 836) which is not necessarily devoid of ‘jouissance’ and is potentially a site of great pleasure (Srivastava, 2010). We get to understand these men as in the process of ‘self-making’ whereby the ‘fragmented self’, as if scattered across a host of urban sites and ambitions, plays a central role. If ‘we’ open ourselves up to this as ethnographers we may understand how these marginalised, labour or lower middle-class men, decidedly vernacular in orientation, negotiate their urban environment.

The author revisits this paper in the fifth chapter of his latest book where its subtitle now reads ‘Masculinity, Urban Spaces and the Commodity Politics of “Religious Fundamentalists” ’. Occupying the halfway mark of the book, the chapter offers somewhat of a skeleton key to the book as a whole. It underlines the negotiation that ‘being and belonging’ to (Indian) urban space entails whereby its immediate context is characterised by constant change. This is not just about the many construction sites dotting the city and transforming its very landscape, but also about the entangled nature of economic, social and cultural change (see also Baas, 2020). In this context, women have indeed become more visible, especially as an increasing number are employed in professional careers which require them to travel to offices across the city. If we take Indian public space as categorically male-dominated, it is easy to see how so much research has focused on the experience of women’s incursions in this and the problems and dangers they face doing so, ranging from so-called ‘eve teasing’ (public sexual harassment of women) to sexual violence including (gang) rape and murder. Yet what makes recent studies on men and masculinities in India so pressingly urgent and insightful is the way they shed light on how men reflect on this themselves. It removes these men from their own masses and gives them a face, name and identity that is far more complex than they ‘simply’ appear to be.

In his thoughtful and carefully researched ethnography, Philip notes how new forms of consumption, leisure and pleasure have become important ways in which ideas of a new postcolonial modernity are expressed (p. 17). In this, socioeconomic backgrounds and ambitions for upward mobility (see also Baas, 2020) are revealing for practices of in- and exclusion within Indian society. The trajectories of the young hip hop artists at the heart of Dattatreyan’s study speak to this as well, as the author lays bare how these men relate to the public/urban space they inhabit. He notes how they ‘use imaginaries of an urban elsewhere to conceptualize and produce sonic, visual and embodied representations of themselves, the city they live and the potential futures of both’ (p. 2). Dattatreyan captures this through the notion of the ‘globally familiar’, speaking to the way these young men employ various (online) technologies to reimagine and remake themselves and, in doing so, the city itself in their own image (p. 3). It is a kind of city-making (through imaginaries and impressions) that we also encounter in Chowdhury’s captivating study on rickshaw and taxi drivers in Kolkata. Chowdhury’s research underlines that his driver-interlocutors’ aspirations and experiences are informed by their socioeconomically backward and marginalised position. While rickshaw drivers tend to be from the city itself, they reside in the city’s sprawling slums. In contrast, taxi drivers are more likely internal migrants from nearby states and share accommodation with colleagues they meet on the road. Both, however, drive around and navigate/negotiate a city which constantly reminds them of what they cannot afford, the city’s billboards advertising a gamut of services aimed at the new middle classes of which they are not part, ferrying passengers to shopping malls and picking up (female) customers from office buildings.

Class and gender/masculinity

In trying to understand what it means to live, work and consume in Indian cities, this diverse array of perspectives adds to the complexity of understanding how individual lives, and in particular those of men, take shape in relation to the opportunities brought by a so-called ‘new’ India with its rapidly growing economy. Srivastava’s commitment to tackling this through the prims of gender and masculinity helps shed light on how men of various backgrounds make sense of the city and their own positionality, and in particular in relation to each other (see Srivastava, 2005, 2010, 2015). His latest book opens with an ethnographic vignette of the annually returning kanwariya procession. The popularity of the procession has grown remarkably in recent years, and it takes over sizeable pockets of Delhi. Women have now started to take part in it, yet it remains an overwhelmingly male activity, reconfirming the way that men continue to exercise a monopoly over Indian public space (p. 3). However, even if it appears to ‘naturalise’ the very idea that men have a right to public places in a way that women do not, Srivastava’s work also shows that the men of his studies are generally not the ones who are in control of the urban space. Of a vernacular upbringing, they are low educated and low to medium skilled, and exist at a remove from the highly educated English-speaking upper middle classes who form India’s global workforce and who are catered to by high-end shopping and leisure spaces, such as the ones we meet in Philip’s work. In terms of numbers, they far outstrip the latter though. Here, gender relations remain crucial in understanding how the socioeconomic divide among Delhiites plays out, especially since increasingly highly educated women are also part of the professional workforce and thus have regained a public visibility that challenges how men may perceive their right to urban space. As Srivastava notes, ‘[g]ender continues to be a site of expression of “Indian traditions” and “morality” … and it is important to understand how these concepts play out in relation to the city and the manner in which its spaces are affected by the politics of masculinity’ (p. 9).

In the first chapter, Srivastava returns to his earliest scholarly work in which he investigated the Doon School’s role in India’s process of (postcolonial) nation-state building and the connected construction of an elite masculine identity, decidedly modern and firmly rooted in the idea of a ‘new India’ (Srivastava, 2005). More specifically, it turns to the way that India’s postcolonial future was imagined as decidedly urban, in contrast with ‘the overwhelming focus on the village as a site of a nationalist fashioning of “authentic” India’ (p. 37). It is particularly insightful in terms of the way the construction of a ‘postcolonial’ India with its elite cadre of English-speaking professionals built onto a colonial project that foresaw the need for this. In more common parlance, this gave way to what is now the (English-speaking, transnationally orientated) upper middle classes whose landed property and sociocultural capital sets them so clearly (still) apart from the ‘teeming masses’ that are Srivastava’s focus in later works. What makes his work on the Doon School so insightful is the way it sheds light on the way this (post-Independence) period cemented an ‘objectified … rural-provincial figure who was meant to provide the alternative model of the post-colonial citizen’ (p. 40). Effectively, this augmented the sense of a rural–urban divide that continues to colour the way that internal migrants and social climbers are perceived as well, as the work of the three ethnographies highlighted above underlines.

In a subsequent chapter, Srivastava turns more determinedly to questions of masculinity and sexuality as he relates them to the anxieties of male immigrants in the city. Briefly dwelling on the mass exodus from the city due to the spread of Covid-19 at the time (2020), he focuses on relationships between male immigrants’ marginal social and economic status as urban dwellers, the anxieties of threatened masculinity and how they seek to deal with them (p. 62). Srivastava suggests that the interplay of masculinity and marginality opens a window to understand these marginalised immigrant men’s place in society – such as the taxi drivers of Chowdhury’s study – as characterised by anxiety, desire and aspiration. Chowdhury himself shows how his driver-interlocutors negotiate sex and desire while away from family and home, driving female clients to work. In his own work, Srivastava turns to the many sex clinics in Delhi and Mumbai that dot the urban landscape and that cater to just such men. He treats those clinics as ‘informal sites of communication, knowledge and “treatment” for populations that belong to the informal economic and cultural worlds of the unofficial or improvised city that sprawls beyond the confines of city master plans’ (p. 64). Yet, in the end, what Chowdhury’s and Srivastava’s men appear to be after is a safal jiwan or happy married life (p. 84) which seems to be imbued with a certain rejection of urban/modern life. While the city may be full of possibilities for (sexual) adventure, in socioeconomic terms it offers these men little space for manoeuvre and opportunities and therefore threatens their sense of self which is built upon patriarchal (and more provincial/regional) notions of privilege. The city is often perceived as a threat to this and the family continues to be perceived as a ‘shelter from the storm’ (p. 101).

Consumption, leisure and the city

Meeting and following the men that populate Srivastava’s writing, or those that make their presence felt in different ways in the other studies discussed here, we encounter the (Indian) city as inherently divided along socioeconomic lines. In this, the arrival of the ‘youthful, unattached female consumer’ (p. 130) has contributed to a particular masculine anxiety that we also encounter in Philip’s work, even though in the case of the latter’s interlocutors these young men occupy far more privileged positions. And indeed, turning to Chowdhury’s work we see reconfirmed that economic difference and a lack of opportunity to better oneself cannot solely explain why masculine anxieties translate to uncouth behaviour and violence against women.

Philips employs the term ‘urban smart strivers’ for his interlocutors, who not unlike the hip hop artists and musicians in Dattatreyan’s work, partly draw upon transnational or global influences and imagery to make sense of and give shape to the world they inhabit. Occupying a decidedly ‘new’ India that differs from an older version in terms of its imagined backwardness, the world that male ‘urban smart strivers’ inhabit is distinctly prosperous, techno-friendly and characterised by consumerism and fun (p. 18). This links to what Srivastava calls the city as a technotopia, in which a firm belief in technological intervention may help resolve an array of problems that are the product of socioeconomic difference. Srivastava sees this technotopia as ‘part of a masculinist imagination of making cities’ (p. 131) but also suggests that its obsessions with surveillance and safety stigmatise parts of society and produce notions of consumer-based moralities that may further marginalise parts of society (p. 142).

In drawing attention to the ‘technological infrastructure that facilitates connection across place and time as well as the diversity of media these technologies can be made to conjure’, Dattatreyan (p. 3) also draws attention to the role of technology in mediating and shaping his interlocutors’ lifeworlds. However, in this case, the inequalities that it exposes are persistently of a transnational nature whereby interlocutors assess surroundings and opportunities through the prism of (a possible) life abroad and more specifically in the West. This adds another layer to understanding of how men relate to public space and the urban environment they inhabit, and the way that socioeconomics structures life and facilitates or restricts opportunities. While such a transnational gaze might underline the limitations of life locally, to have such a gaze or perspective itself indicates a relatively privileged position as it relies on knowledge of the English language and the time to familiarise oneself with options abroad.

Conclusion

With some 1.4 billion inhabitants but occupying about half the land mass of China, India’s presence and sense of ‘people everywhere’ is undeniable, especially in its cities. The transformation of the country’s cities makes itself felt at every turn, with flyovers under construction, new centres of shopping and leisure popping up and high-rise apartment and office complexes changing the horizon. This speaks of a ‘new’ India that politically also has a lot riding on it. In the conclusion of his book, Srivastava therefore turns to what he refers to as ‘Modi-masculinity’, taking his analysis after the multiple BJP victories of the recent decade which have resulted in a significant refashioning of India as a Hindu-majority nation. Srivastava argues that this ‘masculinity’ ‘stands at the crossroads of post-nationalism and moral consumption and, in this, combines the continuing imperatives of long-standing power structures and relations of deference with the evolving processes of capitalism’ (p. 151). He contrasts this with the figure of the Five-Year Plan hero, one who emerged during an earlier period of Congress-led postcolonial nation-state building and who exemplified the ideals that the Doon School promoted. Yet there is no denying that this English-speaking and highly educated ‘hero’ was closely associated with a socioeconomically privileged position which would make him now typically associated with the upper middle classes. As Srivastava’s own work has developed and moved beyond his initial interest in the Doon School, his scholarship has increasingly taken to the streets, which he traverses on foot, and has focused on the men he meets along the way. Masculinity, Consumerism and the Post-national Indian City allows the reader to make the same journey(s) traversing the (Indian) city, observing and experiencing the changes at the macro but also the footpath level, all the while facilitating a deeper understanding of how the field of men and masculinities itself has developed and progressed over time. The other ethnographies discussed here speak to this directly and confirm the importance of not reifying ‘Indian men’ into an easily characterisable whole but of deriving insight from ethnographic engagement with smaller groups. Dattatreyan’s intricate study with its determined focus on hip hop, Chowdhury’s exemplary study of taxi and rickshaw drivers and Philip’s illuminating interrogation of male (middle-class) urban smart strivers also lay bare the complexities of socioeconomic difference in local/regional, national but also transnational dimensions. As Srivastava’s latest book underscores once more, men’s presence and the way they make themselves felt in public space stands in relation to and is in conversation with the urban contexts they inhabit, navigate and negotiate. Only by recognising the inherent complexities and contradictions that emerge from this can we adequately capture the ‘reality’ of urban lives in India.

References

Baas M (2020) Muscular India: Masculinity, Mobility & the New Middle Class. Chennai: Context. Google Scholar

Hansen TB (1999) The Saffron Wave: Democracy and Hindu Nationalism in Modern India. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Crossref; Google Scholar

Srivastava S (2004) Sexual Sites, Seminal Attitudes: Sexualities, Masculinities and Culture in South Asia. New Delhi, Thousand Oaks, CA and London: Sage. Crossref; Google Scholar

Srivastava S (2005) Constructing Post-Colonial India: National Character and the Doon School. London and New York, NY: Routledge. Crossref; Google Scholar

Srivastava S (2010) Fragmentary pleasures: Masculinity, urban spaces, and commodity politics in Delhi. The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 16(4): 835–852. Crossref; ISI; Google Scholar

Srivastava S (2015) Entangled Urbanism: Slum, Gated Community, and Shopping Mall in Delhi and Gurgaon. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Google Scholar

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