Voices, positions and empowerment: Women in the Kolkata urban context

Abstract

Interest in the urban space as distinct from the rural is an offshoot of the continuing concern with the city, as a necessary corollary of the postmodern debates. However the question has the city attaining to its exclusivity, or its distinctness, which it was supposed to attain still remains a problematic area, the argument has to be addressed anew from the perspective of various socio-political and geo-specific contexts. It is with this concern that we reflect upon the gendered being in the urban space; has the gendered subject been able to reflect any traces of this exclusivity, which the modernity coterminous with the urban space is supposed to project? By referring to exclusivity, we mainly refer to the acceptable indicators of modernity/urbanity, requisite amounts of empowerment, visible through physical representation and oral/written communication. It was Manuel Castells who demolished such assumptions, way back in the seventies of the twentieth century,that the ‘exclusive’ urban phenomena was merely an expression of the ‘capitalist domination’ ensuing from the mode of production. In other words, he sees an essentialist connection between the two spaces, the urban and the rural, existing and substantiating each other. The article enters into this urban–rural continuum, and examines how far the urban by adopting its exclusivity empowers the gendered subject. We are encounteringthree problematic issues, when we talk in terms of gender, (the first issue), in the urbanspace (the second issue), and we locate both into a specific geo-physical space of Kolkata(the third issue). Discussions on the gendered subject became fashionable since the twentieth century; however, its contextualization in the urban space as a distinct spatial concern is distinctly a very recent phenomenon. The city of Kolkata, on the other hand, draws attention because despite its history of liberal democratic reforms, on analysis however, much of its liberality is subsumed under an all pervasive bounded rational space. Each of the three issues therefore has possibilities of positive or even subversive impact.An interface between the three issues, therefore, offers interesting insights for study. Key words: Empowerment, women, Kolkata, urban, rural.