Living on the Edge: Mapping Homeless Women’s Mobilization in Kolkata, India

Abstract

New social movements, led by civil society groups, such as Occupy Wall Street, the Arab spring or the youth unrest in Bangladesh, have been gaining ground in different parts of the world. Meanwhile successful anti-corruption and anti-rape agitations and environmental movements led by local people have been emerging in India. While the mass support for these protests seems unprecedented, Nivedita Menon has traced them to ‘a longer history of non-party activism’ that she locates in the citizen’s initiatives of the 1980s.1 At this time, disappointed with partisan politics, and governmental apathy and corruption, small groups or broad alliances of organizations took up issues of civic rights, freedom and democracy. Urbanism constituted one of these early social movements in which problems of livelihood, shelter, exploitation and police brutality affecting the urban poor — slum dwellers, homeless people, street vendors and hawkers — were highlighted. However, these issues — and particularly urban homelessness — have gathered a new momentum in the past decade.