THE YOUNG WOMEN LINED UP in an awkward half circle, six of them pulling
at their long tunics, fidgeting with their scarves. For pants, they’d cho-
sen jeans over the baggy shalwar trousers favored by India’s traditional
society—a tiny rebellion. But it mattered, for girls who’d come of age in
a southeast Delhi slum. As a journalist, I’d been following their progress
in a program that was supposed to raise awareness of women’s safety in
urban India, and now, in early 2019, I’d brought some foreign visitors to
see what these Gendering the Smart Safe City participants had to say.
“Can we sing our song?” one asked.
Of course, we said. We watched as their stance changed—feet apart,
faces lifted, no pretense at smiles. They stared right at us. They made
their own hip-hop beat, with knuckle beats, claps, finger snaps—and they
started to rap. Rapping in Hindi sounds extra tough:
Say it aloud once with me.
This city is for you and me.
This city is not anyone’s property.
Did the foreigners see me trying not to cry? I am 42, with a family of
my own. I’ve crisscrossed India, usually alone, for nearly 20 years. The
stories women tell me, and the daily stories of my own life, are of a society
in which public space has been marked as the territory of men.
I remember being a teenager, trying to make myself invisible inside
oversize clothes, hiding from catcallers on the street. Two decades later, as
a working professional, I was still hiding away, slipping low in the driver’s
seat of my car to avoid the intrusive eyes of men.
For women in India, the safety statistics are grim. The National Crime
Records Bureau in 2011 reported 228,650 crimes against women, includ-
ing murder, rape, kidnapping, and sexual harassment. That year an
T
PREVIOUS PHOTO
A woman walks across
a street in New Delhi,
near where the gang
rape of a woman on
a bus in 2012 sparked
protests nationwide.
In response the fed-
eral government fast-
tracked court hearings
for accused assailants
and set up a fund for
safety initiatives.100 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC