ABSTRACT
The blurring of public and private spaces in Indian cities is in the enactment of everyday lives as there exists considerable ambiguity as to what comes under the purview of the ‘public’ and the ‘private’. Women can access public spaces ‘legitimately’ only when they can manufacture a sense of purpose for being there and adhere to ‘appropriate’ behaviour. Gendered spaces emerge as settings that are used strategically to inform identity, and produce and reproduce asymmetrical gender relations of power and authority. According to Radhakrishnan Swami, while women IT professionals work in global workplaces and embrace the consumption pattern of global middle classes, the ‘sacred’ construction of the Indian family forms the fulcrum of their cultural legitimacy in public spaces. Phadke et al. has somewhat similar observations to make on women commuting in Mumbai. Many scholars have pointed out that in the Indian context, women are expected to use public spaces in purposeful ways and not for pleasure-seeking.
