No, this is not a clarion call, but an observation very thinly veiled as a rhetorical question. I have been a student of political science for the larger part of my adult life. If there is any identity of mine which has remained a constant, it has been my engagement with the discipline. In these bittersweet eight years, I have been preoccupied with the question of gender. It does not take a genius to guess why. I am a woman, growing into adulthood in the shadow of Nirbhaya, I was born and raised in North India within an aspirational class where ambition for growth and development necessarily comes with uprooting. I am socially aware, and I pride myself on the ability to have a moral compass.
Though there was one question that has always lingered in my mind: why I hated returning to Chandigarh, from any corner of the world? I was quick to attribute it to a patriarchal house, the nosy Indian neighbourhood, the restrictions imposed by living within the fold of a familial household, or uneven restrictions imposed on me because of my gender. While all these factors hold a ring of truth for all of us, this was not all. It was something inherent about Chandigarh itself as a city–it took away the ability from me to be in public places.
Stay with me, don’t be quick to dismiss. The city is beautiful in its own rite. The most well-planned city of the country with wide roads, access to water and electricity, clean parks, the public amenity perks are unmatched to any other. But that planning and that administration has come with its own cost. It was only on my return to the city after eight years to call it home again, did that cost strike me!
Picture 1 and 2: The busiest road of Chandigarh: The City Beautiful (Source: clicked by Sakshi Sharda)
Chandigarh has the most beautiful and organised cycling routes, beautiful footpaths to navigate the small city. It is so small that a resident hailing from Chandigarh finds a half an hour drive a taxing commute. In this city, access to these spaces remain very class differentiated like most cities in our country. Lodhi garden in Delhi is accessed differently by a hawker, a tourist, a college student and for the regular evening stroll. The association each of these people will have to the same garden is different: for one, it is their place of work, while for another, a novelty; for some, a respite and for others, a part of their routine. However in Chandigarh, this conversation changes further, where public places do remain class coded but using public amenities in itself is contrary to the bourgeois lifestyle of the city.
While you do have the rich elite of the city traversing the Sukhna lake in the evening and huffing and puffing at the new pilates and yoga studios or gyms in the city, navigating the city on foot is completely absent. It is acceptable to move for an evening walk, or to loiter around college spaces, but to walk from point A to point B in the city without work or for leisure is not done. Simply because walking adds to the time of commuting, which translates into the human being having leisure in their time and their access to a public space. At the same time, the class distinction of not accessing public amenities becomes even more stark when those lanes are then used by high-headed drivers to scare the off-chance one man on a bicycle moving about the city for work.
Picture 3: A road not so traversed in the city beautiful (Source: Picture clicked by Sakshi Sharda)
While this class distinction might be universal to other cities, who am I to really know what is happening in all Indian cities with public amenities? I do know that Delhi Metro also has a station in Khan Market, Chanakyapuri and Vasant Vihar. Jokes aside, on one of my strolls from the hairdresser back home on a nice warm winter morning, I realised that there was a greater nuance to the problem of not accessing public amenities, that women were an anomaly on the road.
It is not that women are absent from public places in Chandigarh, rather it is that they access public spaces only in vehicles that they can afford based on their class position. Women traverse the public either in groups, where you have dancing troupes in Sector 17, or a group of female friends clicking pictures for each other in the various picturesque parks of the cities. Or you will find solo women bustling to a location. No one seems to be alone and comfortable. You will see women in parks with the earphones on completing their power walks, but it is the leisure of accessing the public which is absent.
Picture 04: A not so busy road in the city beautiful (Source: Picture clicked by Sakshi Sharda)
A passing thought for me was that maybe this is not a city that enjoys leisure. Though I find it hard to believe this given that old people find this city the best place to retire, most people enjoy their rides in the city in their expensive cars, there is bustling café and brewery culture, and then how can we forget the original leisure hangout the gedhi. The gedhi culture obviously does not help the safety and security concerns of human beings. To all the readers who are not aware of this cultural mating ritual of Chandigarh: a leisure drive across selected sectors becomes a social call for harassing women walking on the road, a specific horn indicates a specific demand. While I am outside the colloquial structure to now be able to decode this da vincian key, there is a unique pride that the city dwellers seem to hold in this disgrace. So, Chandigarh is clearly not a city which is advocating for 90 hour workweeks, rather it is a city that lives to the fullest. Then, why is it that in this full lifestyle women are not accessing leisure in public? Why is sitting on a park bench and reading a rare sight? Why do people come to coffee shops only in groups- even ‘the work from’ kind? Why is the only purpose of solitary travel for women to reach from point A to point B? Why is the only public solo activity present in the city the evening power walk? Why are more people not walking on pleasant winter days in the city? Why are women on foot such a rare sight in the city?
Coming back to the very personal question that I began with, the reason I hated coming to Chandigarh was because I could not be my own person. With all the reasons that I mentioned above, it was the added absence of an unshackled leisure where I could be in public without being an eyesore. This realization dawned on me when I tried to live my life on my terms for a considerable duration in the city. I realized my parents had grown up with me, that the familial restrictions were not the same anymore, the nosy neighbourhood let me be because I was a ‘foreign return’- from managing and disciplining my day, it was now more intrigued by my very presence in the city. Patriarchy is here, was here…but so were these problems in other parts of the world. It was the leisure with which I was able to access my day in a public setting that not only gave me agency but helped me be my person. I could click the blooming bougainvillea, the lazing dog, or strain my eyes in the sun, or could even complain about my tan–I could find my peace and myself on my terms. Two roads diverged in a city, and I wanted to WALK both. And that made all the difference.
Sakshi Sharda is a doctoral candidate at SOAS and researches on Gender, Law and State.
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