Abstract
While metropolitan cities are framed as emancipatory spaces for women migrants, we know less about their experiences in smaller cities, which are driving urban transformation in India. Drawing on pre-pandemic fieldwork with employed youth (aged 15–29 years) in Mangalore and Kishangarh, this article investigates young women’s work, education, aspirations and mobilities in smaller cities which have relatively weak scalar positions in terms of global economic, political and social power. This article finds that small cities act as regional action spaces for women from villages and small towns to capitalise on fleeting opportunities and push against patriarchal boundaries through mobilities. It shows how women use a range of strategies from individual power tactics within households to leveraging institutional support systems to do so. The article suggests that situating migrant-friendly policy initiatives in small cities can potentially improve employment and mobility outcomes for young women.
Introduction
The widespread use of lockdowns, essentially mobility freezes, as policy instruments for arresting the spread of COVID-19 reinforced an ethnonational view of migration that prioritised national borders, while a range of mobilities related to tourism, education, family reunification and employment suffered a setback. In India, a nationwide lockdown in 2020 triggered a mass exodus of migrants, estimated officially at 11.6 million 1 and unofficially much more, from India’s urban and industrial employment centres to their home villages. This has brought considerable policy attention to the precarious lives of circular rural–urban internal migrants engaged in informal and poorly paid work. The privileging of stasis during the pandemic has been particularly worrying for youth who rely on mobilities to pursue their aspirations.
Two intriguing elements of this recent discourse around migration, labour and urbanisation have received very little attention. First, there is an inordinate focus on metropolitan urban destinations and interstate migrant labour, even though 26.3 per cent of all economic migrants moved to cities and urban agglomerations with populations of less than a million and 65.6 per cent of economic migrants moved within state boundaries, according to the Census 2011. Second, despite their prevalence in specific sectors such as domestic work, garment manufacturing, home-based industrial work, construction, brick-making and agricultural labour, women are undercounted among labour migrants, as was noticed by state governments who found large numbers of women and children among the returning migrants (Centre for Policy Research & UNICEF India, 2021).
Picking up on these two threads, in this article, I focus on the experience of young women in small cities through the lens of migration and mobility. Youth often construct their future aspirations of education, work, social relationships and lifestyle through desires for mobility, but mobilities are unevenly experienced because of various social structures (familial, cultural, religious and institutional) that govern young lives (Robertson et al., 2018). Those socially marginalised on account of their identity, whether gender, caste or class, usually have less agency during mobility. The mobility of women, particularly, is controlled by patriarchal social structures that trap them inside the home, engage them in care work and curtail opportunities to access the public sphere, including opportunities for skill enhancement, networking and employment (Massey, 1994; Phadke et al., 2011).
The metropolis has been seen as a site of emancipation and freedom for women. Migration to the metropolis has been theorised as an escape from the patriarchal trappings of small communities in the village or provincial town (Wilson, 1991; Yeoh & Ramdas, 2014). The role of small cities in migration is less clear. Small cities are often conceptualised as in-between places, caught between the cosmopolitanism of metropolitan centres and the traditionalism of rural areas (Bell & Jayne, 2006). Postcolonial urban theory has urged us to pay attention to cities that are ‘ordinary’, exhibiting diverse ways of living in cities (Robinson, 2006, p. 171), as well as ‘off the map’, linked with their hinterland and nation rather than with the global economy (Robinson, 2002). Studies on India have observed that small cities can be economically dynamic, innovative and globally interconnected, offering opportunities for non-farm work (Harriss-White, 2016; Mukhopadhyay et al., 2020). Thus, they can potentially be ‘action spaces’ for young migrants seeking economic and social mobility (Ingelaere et al., 2018).
The ordinariness of smaller cities allows for the narration of young women’s pursuits of aspirations in the context of limited economic opportunities and social constraints. In a globalised world, these depend in part on the scalar positions of these cities in economic, political and cultural terms relative to the nation, region and the globe (Schiller & Çağlar, 2009). Using ‘small city’ as a moniker for cities, not only smaller than the metropolis in demographic terms, but occupying weaker scalar positions, I ask: What sort of mobilities and freedoms do small cities enable for young women? How do they navigate opportunities towards labour market inclusion and social mobility? Can mobilities open possibilities for young women to question patriarchal boundaries in these locations?
I find that different types of mobilities are reconfiguring aspirations of young women and that small cities allow young women from a range of social and spatial locations to navigate and disrupt patriarchal structures in new and varied ways. The article seeks to draw attention to the importance of locality and scale in theorising women’s migration in the Global South, especially in the aftermath of the pandemic.
In speaking to questions of gender, mobilities and labour in ‘ordinary’ urban locations, I contrast the cases of two small cities, Kishangarh in Rajasthan and Mangalore in Karnataka, which provide very different labour market opportunities as well as patriarchal contexts for women, as I elaborate in the ‘Case Cities’ section. While both young men and women are better educated in Mangalore than those in Kishangarh, survey findings show that young women in Kishangarh are concentrated in low-skilled work in the industry, construction and services, while in Mangalore, young women are largely employed in mid-level service sector work.
Between July 2017 and November 2019, a survey of 897 employed youth (397 in Kishangarh and 500 in Mangalore) as well as 27 focus group discussions (FGDs) with youth in education and employment and 50 key informant interviews (KIIs) with government officials, employers, industry experts, union leaders, residents and civil society organisations were conducted in the two case cities. For this article, I use the survey results and qualitative data to establish context and draw heavily on the narratives offered by young women in six FGDs and seven KIIs.
The article is organised as follows. In the next section, I discuss the literature on women’s work and mobility, the role of cities in women’s mobile aspirations and the strategies of negotiation employed by women to gain freedoms and mobilities. In the third section, I introduce the two case cities focussing on their scalar positioning, locality and opportunities for women. In the fourth section, I present vignettes from my fieldwork, drawing on young women’s narratives about aspirations, mobilities and negotiations. In the fifth section, I analyse these vignettes, outlining the role of locality and scale in shaping women’s negotiating strategies and outcomes. Finally, I reflect on how COVID -19 might have impacted young women’s mobile aspirations and what this means for policy.
Literature Review
Gender, Work and Mobilities
Female migration in India has predominantly been seen through the lens of marriage migration; however, recent studies have demonstrated that women are not passive followers. A gendered division of the labour market has created specific opportunities for women migrants, for example, as domestic workers and in the textile industry, to become breadwinners and play a central role in the survival of the household in urban destinations (Neetha, 2004). Women from the Scheduled Caste (SC) and Scheduled Tribe (ST) backgrounds tend to be engaged in short-term and circulatory migration in sectors such as construction and brick-making where male–female pairs or family units are the prevalent labour configurations. Here semi-feudal bondage and patriarchal practices get tied into contractor-driven recruitment and a system of advances and long-term indebtedness (Mazumdar et al., 2013). In urban India, migrant women are also prominently seen in vending, waste-picking, sanitation, home-based work and in semi-skilled service sector jobs in education, retail and hospitality. Even as educational and awareness levels among women rise, women’s labour force participation in urban India’s workforce is worryingly low at 16.8 per cent (Roy & Mukhopadhyay, 2019), and the gender migration discourse remains linked with marriage. Young women must exert their agency and negotiate their aspirations for employment—and attainment of education, skills and networks that potentially lead to employment—amid patriarchal anxieties that restrict mobilities and seek to contain them in the private sphere.
Mobility and circulation disturb bipolar logics like global/local and mobile/immobile, introducing a more relational approach to the classic problem of agency and structure (Sheller & Urry, 2006). Feminist critiques of the fetishisation of cosmopolitan mobility point out the exclusions of those who are ‘not free in the same way’ (Ahmed, 2004, p. 152). Not just that, the ‘new mobilities paradigm’ articulates space itself as not fixed, but made up of elements which are assembling and reassembling in changing configurations (Sheller & Urry, 2006). For instance, multiple assemblages of labour, capital and infrastructure might produce entirely different results. Thus, because cities are continually reconfigured through assemblages of people, ideas and technologies that are connected to each other by networks, mobilities can potentially open up opportunities for young women to question patriarchal boundaries.
Women’s Mobile Aspirations in the City
The city has been conceptualised as an emancipatory space, where rural migrants can realise ideals of democracy, justice and tolerance. Relatively diverse and inclusive cities give space for new forms of identity to be expressed and allow certain freedoms to marginalised groups (Lees, 2004). In contrast, the village is seen as parochial and steeped in tradition. B.R. Ambedkar vilified the village as ‘a sink of localism, a den of ignorance, narrow-mindedness and communalism’. 2 During his lifetime, he exalted dalits to migrate to cities and claim new opportunities, but caste is still prevalent in cities in the form of residential segregation and everyday practices of discrimination (Kunduri, 2018; Sidhwani, 2015).
Similarly, urban life has challenged patriarchal systems, weakening the hold of village and caste hierarchies and norms and offering anonymity that makes work and public life possible (Kaur, 2006; Sharma & Kunduri, 2015). Writing in the context of Singapore, Yeoh and Ramdas (2014) note that cities offer the opportunity for immigrant women to ‘refashion themselves as “modern,” “independent” and to carve out and negotiate spaces that accommodate their desires and dreams for a different future’. But these freedoms come at the risk of being sexualised, being considered immoral and being constantly under surveillance (Phadke, 2011; Wilson, 1991). Further, despite their ability to transform social spaces through their movement, that is, by using their urban existence to negotiate rural relations and vice versa, circular migrants may end up only re-inscribing traditional arrangements instead of undermining them (Gidwani & Sivaramakrishnan, 2003).
As in-between places, small cities might offer weaker opportunities for migrants and offer women limited freedoms as compared to metropolitan cities, but this depends on locality and scalar positions of specific places. Kishangarh and Mangalore are not strongly positioned in global exchanges, but are looking to scale upwards. As low-scale cities in Schiller and Caglar’s (2009) fourfold classification, 3 they offer migrants with selective opportunities, owing to their narrow economic base and lack of corporate structures for bringing in and incorporating migrants, relative to globally interconnected and economically vibrant metropolitan centres like Bengaluru or Mumbai. Strongly interlinked with their rural hinterlands, as market towns and centres of education and employment, these cities attract migrants seeking to supplement farm incomes with non-farm work, but the extent to which they are able to meet aspirational needs is an open question.
For women, as Gidwani and Ramamurthy (2018) illustrate, different formations of ‘regional patriarchies’ result in differential experiences and outcomes for mobilities across space. North Indian patriarchy is patrilineal and patrilocal, with marriages being village exogamous and caste hypergamous. This results in restrictions on female mobility, and higher group status is strongly associated with female modesty, through practices like veiling and prohibition of activities in the public sphere, including labour. On the other hand, in south India, patriarchy is patrilineal, patrilocal and endogamous for caste and village. The restrictions on mobility and outside work are less, in relative terms, though modesty is a key expectation. Therefore, the mobile aspirations of women in specific geographical locations are negotiated against the backdrop of social status before and after marriage, caste locations and regional patriarchies.
Negotiating Patriarchy
Feminist scholarship holds that women’s negotiations are influenced by the ways in which they have internalised patriarchy, affecting their notions, self-interest and what they think is possible. French sociologist Pierre Bordieu (1977) proposed the idea of ‘habitus’, by which he meant that socialised norms or tendencies guide an individual’s thinking and behaviour. He argues that habitus generates aspirations and practices that are compatible with what is objectively possible, or rather that fall within ‘a range of possibilities available in given social contexts’; this separates the improbable from what is ‘possible, desirable or (indeed) inevitable’ (in Kabeer, 2000, p. 43).
Habitus mediates the interplay of agency and structure. In Bordieu’s framework, the alignment of individual assessments and their world of possibilities results in adherence, and it rests on consent created by an unquestioned ‘sense of limits’. Owing to women’s internalisation of patriarchal social norms, intra-household negotiations function as ‘implicit contracts’ that specify the claims and obligations of different members (Kabeer, 2000). Women negotiate by adopting strategies that lie within these constraints or possibilities. These may result in women placing their family’s wellbeing above their self-interest, in what Amartya Sen (1990) calls the ‘breakdown well-being’ response.
Deniz Kandiyoti (1988) calls this phenomenon the ‘patriarchal bargain’ where women negotiate within households and within kinship systems with the intent to maximise their own life chances without challenging the structure of patriarchy. In her work, along the lines of the regional patriarchies that Gidwani and Ramamurthy (2018) describe, she contrasts the non-corporate forms of householding prevalent in some parts of sub-Saharan Africa to the more corporate forms common in the Middle East, East and South Asia. In sub-Saharan Africa, where polygyny is common, women openly and collectively resist unfavourable labour relations, safeguard spheres of autonomy and actively seek economic opportunity because the societal responsibility on men to care for their wives is low. In contrast, in patrilocal patrilineal societies of the Middle East and parts of Asia, women’s economic and reproductive labour are entirely appropriated by men. As such, women engage in individual power tactics, like exerting control over their sons’ conjugal life to retain intra-household control.
Pierre Bordieu’s (1977) framework indicates that when objective possibilities and individual assessments do not align, and particularly when they are undermined or challenged, those entrenched beliefs (or doxa) begin to shift and give way to new discourses. This article posits mobilities as such a challenge or disruption to the doxa around women’s work and intra-household positions. As discussed earlier, mobilities include the circulation of new ideas through mobile bodies—like the narratives of migrants during their visits home—and technologies such as the internet and the smartphone (Sheller & Urry, 1996). These ideas are continually reshaping aspirations for young women and fuelling desires for new experiences, freedoms and mobilities.
When patriarchy is challenged, through the reconfiguration of aspirations, bargaining can potentially create agency by renegotiating gender relations and opening up new areas of struggle (Kandiyoti, 1988). When women step into the public sphere, they could strike passive bargains that expect certain freedoms and enhanced mobility in exchange for submissiveness or propriety, or they could actively renegotiate the division of labour within the home; a third option, a compromise, could involve outsourcing care work to an employee, usually a woman. Women often draw on local ideologies, cultural beliefs and emerging discourses around rights and empowerment during negotiations (Kandiyoti, 1998). Gender-progressive coalitions have also enhanced the collective bargaining power of women with the market, community and the state, enabling them to secure their self-interest while appearing to comply with the rules of subordination (Agarwal, 1997).
Case Cities
Both Kishangarh and Mangalore are smaller cities where migrants are a notable part of the population—41 per cent in Kishangarh and 43.8 per cent in Mangalore—and where youth aged 15–29 years are prominent within the working age population—33.7 per cent in Kishangarh and 56.7 per cent in Mangalore, according to the Census 2011 data. Their unique demographic, economic and regional contexts create particular opportunities that both attract young men and women from smaller towns and villages, as well as help acquire skills, gain employment and social capital to enable future mobilities.
Kishangarh, located in Rajasthan’s Ajmer district, has been an important hub for stone processing since the 1990s. Stone enterprises in Kishangarh import raw stone from other parts of India, as well as from international centres of stone extraction, such as Italy and Turkey, and supply processed marble and granite in India and abroad. It is also a market town, a regional logistics centre and a minor administrative town. In recent years, because of its location on a dedicated rail freight corridor that connects key ports on India’s western coast with centres of production across north and west India, the city has been the site of several infrastructure projects. These include upgradation of the railway station and bus stand and the construction of new highways, a wholesale grain market, an airport and a logistics park. Kishangarh acts as a minor hub for higher education, with government facilities as well as several colleges run by the city’s influential business community, attracting students from nearby villages.
Mangalore has been a thriving trading node since the fifteenth century, part of a linear network along India’s western coast as well as connected with international locations across the Arabian Sea. In the 1980s, the city developed into an industrial cluster, comprising petrochemical, agricultural processing and chemical industries, boosted by the construction of the New Mangalore Port in the late 1970s. However, since the 1990s, the business elite of the city have diversified into an array of services such as real estate, healthcare, education, retail and hospitality, with recent attempts to develop sectors like IT and tourism as well.
Both cities have been engaged in rebranding efforts. Kishangarh’s labelling as the Marble City of India is reflected in government documents and in conversations with local businesspeople, ordinary citizens and bureaucrats. While setting up the New Mangalore Port and the Mangalore Special Economic Zone demonstrate historic efforts to position the city as an industrial and logistics hub, in recent times, the district administration and local elites are making investments in re-inventing Mangalore as a city with a modern economy.
Unfortunately, these rescaling efforts do not meet with continuous success and these cities remain stuck in low-scale positions in the Schiller–Caglar hierarchy. Despite its economic success, Kishangarh’s economy remains dependent on the stone-processing industry, which employs 35 per cent of the sample with limited diversification to dependent sectors such as transport and hospitality. In Mangalore, despite efforts at economic diversification, the survey finds only 13.3 per cent of young workers to be employed in modern services such as IT, real estate and finance, and the majority of young workers, about 70 per cent, are employed in traditional services like retail and wholesale trade, education and healthcare in low- to mid-skilled work. Neither the city has been able to grow new economic sectors like IT and tourism. Local governments are weak, and governance is influenced by higher levels of government, usually district administrations and parastatal organisations. The business elite have a considerable voice and tend to influence major planning and policy processes in both cities.
As highlighted earlier, Kishangarh and Mangalore provide very different opportunities for women, both in terms of employment and as access to the public sphere (Table 1). According to the Census 2011, only 11.5 per cent of women in Kishangarh were in the workforce as compared to 28.7 per cent in Mangalore. Women in Kishangarh are largely concentrated in low-skilled and low-wage manufacturing and construction work (34.28 per cent) in traditional services like sanitation and domestic work and as teachers, health workers and clerks in the public or non-profit sectors (54.28 per cent). A tenth of the women surveyed in Kishangarh work in modern service jobs in finance, IT and communications as compared to nearly a quarter in Mangalore. The bulk of employed young women in Mangalore work in traditional services, not just in low-paid domestic work and sanitation work, but also in a host of mid-level jobs in retail, hospitality, education and healthcare. On average, expected monthly incomes for young women surveyed in Kishangarh are ₹4,700 (about half that of men) while in Mangalore, women expected monthly wages of ₹11,900 (only about 10 per cent less than men) (Naik & Randolph 2020). These differences enable a comparison of how women negotiate patriarchal structures in small cities to explore their mobile aspirations.
Sectoral Composition of Women’s Work
Intra-household Patriarchal Bargains in Kishangarh
On a balmy evening, we sit on the terrace of a popular restaurant in Kishangarh and chat with a group of eight well-educated young women, 4 aged between 19 and 25 years, from high-income, upper-caste backgrounds. The girls experienced strict controls over mobility and were expected to prioritise marriage and family over individual ambition as well as marry partners chosen for them by their families, within the strict bounds of caste and religion. Studying outside Kishangarh and working outside the home were issues over which they battled their families constantly. The city does not create enough job opportunities for women in professions such as teaching, community development and white-collar services sector, employment that is considered respectable. Yet, these young women expressed a keen desire to gain autonomy. They sketched a number of future scenarios—like divorce, husband’s death and domestic violence—where economic autonomy would be useful to negotiate their futures. Neelam, a Hindi literature graduate, said, ‘I want to build a career not only to earn, but to stand on my own feet … [even] when I have kids and a family, I do not need to ask anyone [for anything].’
Given this context, it is not surprising that the negotiation strategies of young women in Kishangarh are largely within the framework of the patriarchal bargain. First, they legitimise their participation in the labour market by entering into professionals that are considered suitable for women. These include: (a) government jobs which are highly desirable for the accompanying status and social security, (b) non-government organisation (NGO) jobs which are seen as social service and (c) home-based work including crafts, retailing within the community and contributing labour to the family business. Most women we spoke to negotiated for small freedoms, indicating how they had internalised patriarchy. Seema made a modest independent income by making handmade cards at home. ‘I don’t have to go anywhere outside, except to get supplies. No one has any objection and my work also happens’, she tells us.
Second, young women in Kishangarh are preoccupied with delaying and negotiating marriage. To achieve this, they place pressure on themselves to perform well in school and college, so that parents do not have the excuse of academic non-achievement to withdraw them from education. While still studying, they are able to delay marriage, and through better education, they also hope to get husbands who are well educated and with a higher social status.
Poonam, 5 an English language educator and role model for many of the young women we spoke to, returned to Kishangarh after studying and working in Jaipur for three years. She set up a successful business using capital from her parents and leveraging skills and social connections acquired in Jaipur. She touted her business achievements as a reason to delay marriage as much as possible, but at the same time took care to pursue a ‘respectable’ and ‘flexible’ career path in education and skills training that would be acceptable to her future in-laws who she assumed to be from a similar conservative background as her own family.
Poonam’s experience effectively echoes Sheller and Urry’s (2006) theorisations, showing how assemblages of mobilities, capital, skills and networks open up new work possibilities for women from low-scale cities like Kishangarh that offer very limited economic opportunities for women; at the same time, her story highlights the constraining nature of the Bourdesian ‘realm of possibilities’ that women like her imagine for themselves.
A different kind of assemblage, however, could push to unsettle patriarchal constraints. Take the case of Poonam’s protégé, Snehal,
6
who started her intra-household negotiations with the explicit intent to prolong education and delay marriage but eventually took things a step further. Snehal convinced her father to let her study in Noida, located about 400 km away in the National Capital Region, by assuring him that she would return home immediately should an appropriate marriage proposal turn up. After returning home with a postgraduate degree, she had to negotiate a little differently to gain her father’s permission to work outside the home. She chose to volunteer at a rural development NGO based in Tilonia, about an hour away from Kishangarh. By couching her ambitions in the garb of social work and using her networks to gain inroads into the NGO, she effectively presented her father with a fait accompli. In her words:
You have to take initiative and you have to be selfish to be taken seriously. I was working in my father’s office and I asked him to give me three days a week to volunteer in Tilonia. He brushed away my request. Then I applied and after my internship was processed, I told my father again. Then he took me seriously. [Emphases added]
Demonstrating unusual ambition, Snehal next sought an opportunity with her paternal uncle, suggesting that he should start a ‘paying guest’ facility—a privately run hostel with boarding and lodging—near a newly opened girls’ college in Kishangarh. By describing her own experience of living in a hostel away from home and researching the needs of young girls who come to Kishangarh aspiring to study, Snehal convinced her uncle to start the business and include her as a partner. Her initiative is a novelty in a city where women are not expected to be involved in business, let alone show entrepreneurial ambition and manage operations. Even though Snehal’s story begins with a patriarchal bargain, she leveraged the exposure to metropolitan life that she got through migration to take steps towards entrepreneurship. By doing so, she unsettled patriarchal structures, but assuaged her family’s concerns within by operating the umbrella of the family’s business interests.
A third strategy in Kishangarh is to negotiate for marriage into what they perceive as more progressive households. This came clearly through discussions with young girls from low-income, dalit and tribal backgrounds in Kotri, a village an hour away from Kishangarh. 7 By commuting to Kishangarh everyday to study, they hoped to be able to ‘marry up’ into more economically secure, often urban, households and thus escape a lifetime of farm labour and gain increased mobility.
In contrast, marriage itself can be part of the patriarchal bargain to gain certain kinds of opportunities. Eighteen-year-old Seema, teaching in a school run by an NGO, was married ‘up’ to an educated man, a graduate. Despite being a bright student, she decided to delay college by a year for two reasons. First, her in-laws’ expectation that she must wear a saree to commute to Kishangarh and attend college was a deal breaker for her. ‘If freedom comes with so many impossible conditions, is it really freedom at all?’, she asks, while complaining about the absurdity of such conditions. Seema aspires to access the city and the education it offers, but is unprepared to perform modesty in order to do so. In another unusual bargain, Seema offered to support her husband and his family through her income for a year, giving her husband time to take the requisite exams for getting a government job. In her view, once he lands the job he wants (and that also gives her higher status and economic security), she would be in a better negotiating position to study further on her terms.
Like Snehal, Seema’s intra-household bargaining incorporates ideas of self-interest, agency, aspiration and mobility and an acute understanding of power relations. Her position in the community as a teacher and her close association with a locally embedded and progressive NGO have profoundly shaped her ideas on gender relations; her experiences validate feminist theories about the role of local ideologies and gender-progressive and rights-based discourses in intra-household bargaining (Agarwal, 1997; Kandiyoti, 1998). Seema’s story is unusual in Rajasthan’s rural society, where most young women internalise patriarchy and accept their subordinate position in society, with negligible attempts even at striking patriarchal bargains.
Besides class and the nature of society (rural or urban), caste is key to shaping aspirations and enabling mobilities for youth. For women from the lower-caste Valmiki community in Kishangarh, access to the city is not as restrictive as it is for upper-caste women, and they are commonly engaged in civic sanitation and factory-cleaning work. While the withdrawal of women from non-domestic work is a marker of status for upper-caste families, dalit women have always worked alongside men and experience much less distinction between the private and public spheres. However, they do face sexual exploitation and social discrimination at the hands of the upper castes (Chatterjee, 2014). Despite experiences of patriarchal domination within their homes, in Kishangarh, dalit women’s aspirations centre around improved work and housing conditions. They partner with men from their community to negotiate with the state, politicians and civil society for increased economic opportunity and respectability. 8 While dalit women consider their economic contribution to the household as an important aspect of their identity, the oppression they experience on account of their caste assumes greater importance in their narratives of aspiration and negotiation. Like Kandiyoti (1998) observes, gender is not always useful as the primary category for examining resistance and contestation in society, which must also be examined in the context of other hegemonic power structures.
Leveraging Institutions for Mobile Aspirations in Mangalore
Mangalore presents a different context for examining women’s aspirations, mobilities and strategies to avail the opportunities the city offers. Though young women and men are generally expected to marry within their caste and religion and with parental oversight, the mobility of women is not severely restricted, and they are visible in public spaces and in employment as well. The city is diverse in religious, cultural and linguistic terms, offering a vibrant atmosphere for young people’s interactions and explorations. Mangalore’s growing service sector economy and relatively strong infrastructure and services, including transportation, offer a number of opportunities for women, especially in low- and semi-skilled work in hospitality, education and healthcare.
Migrating or commuting to Mangalore enables rural women to access education and non-farm work. Usually migrating with their husbands, women circular migrants enter into low-paid jobs like construction and manual labour at the port, but some are able to switch to better paid work over time. For instance, women domestic workers have found better paying work in commercial kitchens. Access to relatively safe public transport and pick-up and drop facilities provided by employers helped them pursue these opportunities. Though contingent on class, caste and religion, we find that mobilities make it possible for women to access work and meet aspirations related to the improvement of income and social status. This process is strongly enabled by a host of social and economic institutions, run by the state and civil society.
Among domestic workers 9 who had migrated from north Karnataka to Mangalore, we found that unionisation had helped them resolve wage disputes, access government benefits and even take up cases of caste discrimination. Unions were also active in negotiating work conditions for female anganwadi workers, 10 who also had the local identity papers to be able to access microcredit from self-help groups. Port workers and transgender sex workers had also formed informal and informal collectives to demand better facilities and protection against harassment from the administration. These unions and collectives acted as the gender progressive coalitions that Agarwal (1997) alludes to, enabling negotiations primarily with the state and at times with employers. However, recent migrants and especially those from outside the state were unable to access collectives and unions as easily.
Unlike Kishangarh, where education and skill development were leveraged by young women primarily to delay marriage, in Mangalore we see that skill development institutions open up pathways for migration and employment. Free government courses and scholarships for SCs are common reasons for young people from small towns around Mangalore to come to the city. Skill enhancement enables employment, financial and social autonomy and feeds into mobile aspirations.
Sunethra’s story illustrates this well. 11 She came to Mangalore from Mulki, a small town 30 km away, to train as a beautician. Her skills and the social networks she made in the city offered her the opportunity to work in the state capital Bengaluru for a few years, but she returned to Mangalore to work as a trainer when her mother fell ill. She did not have the confidence to avail early opportunities to work abroad. At the time, she felt Mangalore allowed her to negotiate favourable terms with employers as well as offered her the fallback option of going home. After marriage, her aspirations to move abroad were rekindled because her husband had worked in the Middle East before. For young women like Sunethra from small towns and villages, skilling institutions offer entry points, and small cities act as action spaces that permit risk-taking, intermittent mobilities and shape longer term mobile aspirations. Evening classes and caste-based scholarships are particularly important for lower-income and lower-caste youth, who must earn a living while acquiring skills. 12
Regional patriarchies in southern India also permit the entry of women into non-traditional occupations. In Mangalore, we found young women enrolled in training institutions for work related to electronics and computer operations. The head of one of these institutions clarified, ‘It is a myth that women will not be able to take up mechanical industry jobs. Since everything is automated, this is not the case …’. 13 While gender norms still exert themselves in some measure, the economic transformation of the city demands a reconfiguration of the institutional landscape of skilling. But skilling institutions are rarely able to meet the specific demands that women have. Latha, a community organiser, 14 pointed out that local women need to re-skill themselves to be able to re-enter work in their thirties when they have completed their child-rearing responsibilities, while migrant women need re-skilling to access urban jobs. But skills training available under the National Urban Livelihoods Mission and other district-level programmes are only available for local residents aged 18–35 years and thus in accessible to migrants and middle-aged women.
Despite the city’s opportunities described above, patriarchy remains a constraint for young women in Mangalore. Intra-household negotiations occur alongside women’s strategic use of institutions. Desires for mobility are often intertwined with marriage, reminding us that patriarchy shapes women’s decisions regardless of their financial autonomy. Malathi, a young dalit nurse, told us that she sees marriage and a well-paid foreign job as a way to escape the control of her parents, who have become dependent on her income. 15 Surprisingly, most of the unionised domestic workers, who were asserting themselves with employers, reported handing over their salaries to their husbands every month, demonstrating internalised patriarchy. 16
Though Mangalore offers young women access to the public sphere where they can build the social connections needed to access new economic opportunities, conservative social values continue to impact their lives. For instance, we found that it was common for young Muslim women 17 to enter into the kind of patriarchal bargains that are common in Kishangarh. Because of the community’s conservative social practices, early marriages, poor access to higher education and employment made it hard for young Muslim girls to pursue work, even if they migrated abroad with their husbands, away from the confines of their own community.
It is also not uncommon for certain political groups in Mangalore to create an atmosphere of communal tension and impose moral restrictions on young people, especially on interfaith couples. Many students we spoke with 18 reported insecurities about being seen in public with male friends and the fear of violence meant a strict imposition of curfews on young women, curtailing access to internships and work opportunities in upcoming sectors like business process outsourcing and retail. Moreover, communal sensitivities turned hostels and paying guest accommodations, otherwise institutions that enable young people’s mobile aspirations, into hostile and exclusionary spaces. Despite emerging opportunities, these experiences exacerbated the desire among youth to leave Mangalore for opportunities elsewhere in India and abroad. In interviews, 19 district administrators and police personnel downplayed these fears, indicating that the state apparatus was not actively addressing youth concerns over safety and security.
A host of social and economic institutions enable young women’s access to economic opportunities and fuel mobile aspirations in Mangalore, but these institutions do not always function well, nor do they serve all young women evenly. Schiller and Caglar (2009) outline the lack of migrant-specific social and economic institutions as a key shortcoming in cities with lower scalar positions. In Mangalore, young women from within the region are able to access opportunities through caste- and livelihood-based collectives and institutions, but these do not seem to be equally available to migrants from other parts of India who may not have strong social networks in the city. Following Ahmed (2004), we see that mobilities by themselves are not empowering but tend to offer uneven opportunities. Despite increased agency over their mobilities and increased access to education and public life, young women in Mangalore continue to negotiate within families and battle vigilante groups that police their sexual freedoms. As Kandiyoti (1998) points out, despite women’s acts of resistance, patriarchal structures remain quite tenacious and continue to impose limits on aspiration.
Analysis
While official datasets might not offer a true picture of female migration in India, it is clear that women are engaging in various mobilities in order to access education, employment and pursue their aspirations. Feminist theory has pointed out that patriarchal structures encourage stasis among women, but the pieces of evidence from small cities reveal mobile aspirations to be a prominent part of women’s pursuit of agency and freedom.
Mobilities engender the circulation of ideas which shape the aspirations of youth. The exposure to new ideas takes place through embodied experiences, during social encounters in public spaces and institutionalised arenas, like colleges and training institutes, as well as through the circulation of information, through the narratives of other migrants, through collectives and groups or through technologies like the mobile phone and the internet. For youth, desires for mobilities are intertwined with aspirations related to economic well-being, autonomy and agency. The low scalar positioning of cities like Kishangarh and Mangalore offers limited opportunities for youth to fulfil these mobile aspirations, as compared to metropolitan cities such as Bengaluru, Mumbai, Delhi and Jaipur, which are better connected with global exchanges of goods and information. Thus, it is not surprising that youth perceive small cities as ‘inferior variations of larger cities’, where they imagine more opportunities exist (Cook, 2018).
To fulfil mobile aspirations, young women living in small cities (as well as from rural areas nearby) must contend not only with the limited opportunities that these places offer, but also negotiate various constraints posed by patriarchal social structures. In this article, I show how the locality and scalar positioning of small cities as well as regional patriarchies place specific constraints on young women’s mobile aspirations and thus affect the nature of bargaining itself. I find that mobilities unlock new possibilities for young women but are highly conditional. The accounts of young women in Mangalore and Kishangarh suggest a diversity of lived experiences in small cities in India. A dissimilar case study approach using data from cities with two different forms of regional patriarchy allowed me to pay attention to these differences, within the constrained landscape of opportunities that small cities offer.
Kishangarh’s industrial economy and weak governance structure offer limited employment and education opportunities for women who also face severe mobility restrictions and are obligated to perform modesty and respectability at all times. Thus, young women in Kishangarh focus on intra-household negotiations. Most of these remain within the patriarchal bargain, where demands for mobility are made in order to ultimately fulfil patriarchal expectations, like seeking respectable employment or getting educated to marry later or marry ‘up’ into households with a better status. In rare instances, young women are able to unsettle patriarchal structures through creative bargains that leverage mobilities, assert agency and articulate aspirations in ways that demonstrate tangible benefits to their families. It is clear here that the circulation of ideas through embodied and digital mobilities introduces new notions of what is possible and redefines, to use Bordieu’s (1977) term, the ‘sense of limits’ that women perceive, offering a glimmer of hope for young women in situations of what Kandiyoti (1988) terms ‘classic patriarchy’.
Young women in Mangalore experience cultural diversity, relatively better employment opportunities, availability of safe and efficient transportation and a greater freedom to move out of the home and into the public sphere. Skill development institutions that are adapted to the needs of youth from different backgrounds (such as evening classes, scholarships and hostels) offer clear pathways to employment. A culture of collectivisation allows women to bargain for better work conditions through formal and informal unions and access microfinance through self-help groups. Even so, patriarchal structures do place constraints on mobile aspirations. Within the larger trend of out-migration for employment in Mangalore, the autonomous mobility of women is less prominent, so marriage becomes a vehicle for mobility for young women. Young women are disproportionately affected by communal tensions, losing access to public spaces and work opportunities, because otherwise enabling institutions like hostels introduce restrictive measures. Finally, internalised patriarchy persists in the behaviour of women when it comes to the control over financial resources within the family.
Overall, I find that small cities allow room for young women to leverage mobilities to bargain with patriarchy and sometimes unsettle it in order to fulfil aspirations through studying, working and strengthening social connections. They act as action spaces for young women’s mobile aspirations in a few different ways. They could be sites of restriction where few and fleeting opportunities are accessible via patriarchal bargains. Mobilities signify escape and opportunity, on the one hand, but on the other also appear risky for young women who may have less resources, agency and self-confidence. Thus, small cities can be places to test and explore mobile aspirations in familiar environments, while being able to strategically retreat and fall back into safety nets.
Impacts of COVID-19 and Future Directions
Migrants across India exercised this ability to fall back into a safety net, retreating to villages and small towns of origin, when lockdowns and stay in place restrictions triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic were put in place in March 2020. The stasis induced by the pandemic has undoubtedly dampened the mobile aspirations of youth.
For women, the pandemic has meant a setback to education, employment and intra-household agency. Women suffered more job losses owing to the pandemic than men, with a much lower likelihood of returning to work owing to care responsibilities (Abraham et al., 2021; Deshpande, 2020). A gendered digital divide, school closures and disruptions to the mid-day meal programme have likely set back girls’ school education (Kalra & Jolad, 2021). Increased social ostracisation in sectors like domestic work, owing to reinforced class and caste biases during the lockdowns, and higher levels of domestic violence posed further constraints on mobilities (Shah & Ravindran, 2020).
With mobilities so curtailed, young women in low-scale cities like Kishangarh and Mangalore likely opted to remain well within patriarchal bargains. Through interlocutors with whom I remained in touch through the pandemic, I heard news of the nuptials of some of the ambitious young women I spoke with; they had so far delayed marriage by demonstrating success in education and work. Marriage, always inevitable, was now a beacon of security for young women who had lost employment or suffered business setbacks. Others had taken up gig-based and platform work as online educators and resellers of retail products, working as much as possible from their homes. Because digital devices were less accessible to them, young women from low-income backgrounds had curtailed access to information and ideas. Many had dropped out of college to contribute to home- or farm-based income-generation activities or perform care work.
At the level of policy, the large-scale return migration during COVID-19 has refocussed attention on the importance of mobility and migration for India’s economic growth. Governments are looking to strengthen migration databases, skill development programmes, employment guarantee schemes and portability of social protection to ensure safe migration pathways; in this, there is a nascent realisation that women’s mobility needs to be better understood (Centre for Policy Research & UNICEF India, 2021). Despite the limited opportunities they offer, the policy agenda might be well served by paying attention to small cities, which play an important role as anchors for regional mobilities and as action spaces for young men and women from rural and small-town India. As the experiences from Kishangarh and Mangalore have demonstrated, with improved migrant-friendly public services and supportive social and economic institutions, these locations can potentially become launch pads for more ambitious mobile aspirations for young women in a post-Covid future.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The author would like to acknowledge the International Development Research Centre and the Think Tank Initiative for funding the research project titled ‘Role of small cities in shaping youth employment outcomes in India and Indonesia’, under which data for this article was collected. The author would like to thank Gregory Randolph, Eesha Kunduri, P. W. A. Scholten, J. Edelenbos and the editors of this journal issue for their valuable inputs to the development of this article.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received the fund from International Development Research Centre and the Think Tank Initiative for the research project titled ‘Role of small cities in shaping youth employment outcomes in India and Indonesia’, under which data for this article were collected.