Engaging directly with women in modern urban India, this project used film to explore and highlight how women themselves understand and experience violence in both public and private as part of daily life.
The modern city promises many opportunities, but it also poses many challenges to women in public and private, including everyday violence. Through women’s own narratives, the film No City for Women: Gurgaon | Millennium City | 2023 explores their experience of living and working in the city.
The film was produced as a part of an ESRC-funded Cambridge-Oxford collaborative research project on urban transformation and gendered violence in India. We collaborated with professional film-makers Rangan Chakravarty, Director, and Arjun Gourisaria, Editor (twice winner of the Indian National Film Award for editing).
Women’s own narratives on gendered social worlds
Set in Gurgaon, India’s ‘millennial’ city in the Delhi National Capital Region (NCR), the film illuminates the exclusionary and oppressively gendered nature of techno-modern urbanisation. As the city becomes more modern, it also becomes aggressively masculinised and women face increasing patriarchal control. The film depicts how women themselves understand and experience violence in both public and private, not only as physical assault, but also as suffering, pain and struggles emanating from the gendered compulsion to live circumscribed and diminished lives. The film explores how women exercise their spirited agency to make the city their own, in the face of humiliation, coercion and restriction.
We adopted the strategy of recording women’s narratives through open-ended and empathetic conversations. Eschewing a focus on much publicised overt acts of physical violence or sexual violation, particular attention was paid to the gendered social worlds that women inhabit and the banal, insidious and normalised forms of harm and abuse in public and private that are often borne in silence by women and that receive little public discussion or recognition.
Film promotion to young urban audiences
Taking Gurgaon to be emblematic of gendered urban life in India, we are promoting the film to urban audiences to visibilise and validate women’s tacit knowledge and experience of normalised and everyday forms of violence. Our aim is to redress the ‘testimonial injustice’ of ignoring or dismissing women’s voices and narratives about such insidious, corrosive experiences. Our target audience is, in particular, young people, accessed through higher education institutions. For women, we seek to vindicate their lived realities and, for men, we hope to create awareness of ‘invisible’ gendered violence.
The film premiered at the 4th Beyond Borders Feminist Film Festival in Delhi in December 2023 and was chosen as the Official Selection. It was subsequently screened at the International Documentary and Short Film Festival, Thiruvanthapuram, Kerala (Official Selection); Indian Documentary Film Festival, Bhuvaneswar, Orissa; India International Centre and India Habitat Centre, Delhi; Museo Camera, Gurgaon, in collaboration with the NGO Safetipin that works to create safe cities for women; and UK Development Studies Association Annual Conference, London; Cambridge and Oxford. More importantly, the film has been shown at colleges and universities in cities in India, such as Delhi NCR, Kolkata, Bangalore (around 10 screenings so far). Members of the research team have been in attendance for postscreening discussions that have been gratifyingly animated and engaging, usually extending for far longer duration than originally planned. Audiences have also submitted comments in writing at screenings and through a QR code on Google forms.
