Single women in middle-class Delhi – measures of morality, class identity and 'how to be modern' in a globalising City

This paper traces women’s pursuits of independent rental accommodation in middle class neighbourhoods of South Delhi. Despite growing economic opportunities for middle class women, cultural anxieties surrounding the notion... [ view full abstract ]

This paper traces women’s pursuits of independent rental accommodation in middle class neighbourhoods of South Delhi. Despite growing economic opportunities for middle class women, cultural anxieties surrounding the notion of ‘delayed’ marriage and women living outside of their family home hamper demands for independent housing. Lacking a firmly established cultural reference, single female tenants find themselves habitually confronted with suspicion or outright hostility from homeowners, often giving way to intense supervision and disciplinary mechanisms enacted within their new neighbourhoods. Based on ethnographic data gathered over 12 months of fieldwork in different middle class South Delhi localities, the paper explores this setting, in which female individuation and mobility beyond the familial or parental home signal the need for containment and regulation. As Delhi’s urban consumerist middle class embraces imaginations of cosmopolitan urbanity, the female consumer citizen – represented as independent capable (upper) middle class woman – signals increased access to the city’s spaces for middle class and elite women. South Delhi is, moreover, described as the city’s most ‘liberal’ landscape offering a degree a freedom to move outside of normative gendered role expectations. Yet, female solitary living’s association with imaginaries of unregulated sexuality and ‘Westernized’ value systems sits uneasily with dominant gendered social codes that define middle class identity through its unwavering commitment to family values. The way single women are seen as threats to the moral equilibrium of middle class colony and the great care homeowners took to delineate coordinates of gendered propriety, suggests that efforts to localize urban modernity in times of rapid social change routinely evoke middle class women’s bodies and places them within juxtaposed visions of ‘Western’ and ‘Indian’ values (Lukose 2009). Read with a view to current discussions on the gendered constructions of urban modernity and citizenship (Phadke 2013, Srivastava 2014), daily life and socio-spatial relations within the middle class residential neighbourhood then emerge as fruitful sites in which urban change is negotiated and becomes lived experience.