The term ‘front-line’ encapsulates that grounding for me. In this post, I want to demonstrate what the term signifies about the work done by the front-line workers in Dharavi themselves, and then conclude by reflecting on what it means to do ethnography in such front-lines (or, alternatively, front-line ethnography).

When I first began working on the pilot study for the NGO, the term ‘front-line’ featured in a rather banal way. The ‘sanginis’ – Hindi for female companions – we worked with were simply described as ‘front-line workers.’ These women are recruited by the NGO from the bastis (communities) during intervention and advocacy sessions by the Prevention of Violence against Women and Children (PVWC) team. As work continued, however, I realized that front-lines signify more than just a neutral description. In fact, I felt it should better describe the work of the sanginis and the PVWC team.

In this sense, ‘front-lines’ denote the spatiality, or spatialization, of everyday violence and gendered violence in the bastis of Dharavi. I initially described it as a ‘spatial proximity’ to case of violence, but that was erroneous since it is difficult to demarcate sites of violence from sites where there is none. Certainly there are certain spaces in bastis where there are more regular occurrences of violence, like public toilets or small, dimly lit streets. But violence is also something that happens in the home, behind closed doors. In several interviews and community sessions, the sanginis spoke about the sensorial aspect of violence: hearing screams or cries from their neighbor’s houses; sounds of pots and pans being thrown around; or in some cases, when the woman was thrown out of the house after being physically assaulted. The ‘private’ violence would, literally, spill out into the ‘public.’

This is perhaps the most important aspect of the term ‘front-line’: that it blurs the line between private and public forms of gendered violence.

Indeed, there are difficulties in pinning down exactly what violence, or hinsa, means for the women and the community. The women – and the front-line workers – would instead talk about abuse (atyachar), exploitation (shoshan), or ‘torture’ (in English). Many would deny that a husband beating his wife was ‘violence’ (hinsa) – it was disciplining the wife, the husband loves her, after all; or, very simply, the woman would have nowhere to go, so she had to suffer (sehna).

The sanginis and the PVWC team, thus, have to continually negotiate these multiple meanings and values attached to violence, and in some cases impose certain categories or ideas (also for legal reasons). Front-line work recognizes and negotiates the multiplicity of everyday social violence. I say ‘everyday social violence’ because they also intervene in cases of structural violence of the state and bureaucracy. Although Dharavi is described as a ‘good basti’ by its residents – which it certainly is, in terms of services, infrastructure and employment, at least,  compared to bastis in several parts in Eastern Mumbai, like Govandi and Deonar – everyday life is marked by structural violence that manifests itself as bureaucratic neglect (the police or municipality refusing to file complaints), or as social violence by political actors and big-men, the looming threat of redevelopment and displacement, and of course, gender-based and domestic violence.

As a concept, then, front-lines demonstrate that it is untenable to talk about violence in the singular; instead we need to speak about the ‘violences of everyday life’ (Kleinman, 2000). But apart from the spatialization of everyday violences, the term ‘front-line’ also signifies the specific kind of labor the sanginis are engaged in. Here, I find Jennifer Wies and Hillary Haldane’s edited volume Anthropology at the Front-Line of Gender-Based Violence (2011) to be extremely relevant. The text offered an exciting reflection of both my topic and work – gender-based violence and ethnography. They write:

Frontline workers can tell hundreds of stories of victimhood and survival. They can map the scope and scale of violence in their communities…They are the barometer of violence… (2011: 2; emphasis added)

In a similar context, Susan Clisby and Julia Holdsworth (2014) talk about women community workers, and their work, as a form of embodied infrastructure. They refer to

[T]he ways that women’s bodies and material actions themselves become the vehicles, the catalysts, the embodied infrastructure, facilitating access to services and enabling change and support through women’s networks…that serve to provide a framework, an infrastructure of support for women. (2014: 7; emphasis added)

What I add to the interventions above, are the specific gendered and feminized logics that the sanginis use in their everyday work in the bastis. In other words, the way in which violence is defined as an object of intervention, and the methods or tactics used to act upon it. The most important one, I think, is the statement, ‘We want to join families, not break them’ (Parivaar jodhna, todhna nahin), which is how the sanginis and community organizers (COs) usually describe their work. This helps them gain credibility with the women, men and other community institutions, who often accuse the mahila mandals (women’s groups) of ‘breaking families’ by instigating the women to file complaints. Instead, the COs and sanginis focus on things like ‘building a healthy relationship’ between family members. In a community session, Bhavanaben,^* a program officer (PO), suggested that a husband ought to love and care for his wife, and while the wife should also respect him, she has the right to be free from violence.

As a feminist, when I heard this, I was left with a sense of unease, wondering whether these statements essentialize femininity as docile. But as an ethnographer, I had to pay attention to the nuances of such articulations. Most marriages in Dharavi are relations of dependency, since women lack resources, education and support networks (which is also prevalent in other situations across class and geographical contexts). This is often why they continue to suffer in violent relationships (along with a host of other structural factors like poor implementation of gender laws, discriminatory community rules, etc.)

But within these unequal relationships, there is also hope for change (badlaav). In another session on ‘Women’s Unpaid Work,’ Bhavanaben said something that, at the moment, seemed to contradict her previous statement. ‘It is your [women’s] unpaid work,’ she said, ‘that maintains the basti! Men go out to work, but they return home and eat the food you cook for them. You take care of the children and the elderly – jobs you would get paid for if you worked for someone else’ (which is what many women do as they are engaged as domestic workers). After the session I asked her if she had read anything about socialist feminism that informed her views. Bhavanaben said no, that she developed this ‘module’ on the basis of her own experiences and observations. But she seemed very excited by the fact that other ‘thinkers’ had written about it as well!

I think Bhavanaben’s statements can be thought of as a part of a continuum of feminized (and indeed feminist) logics, which critique structural patriarchy on the one hand, and on the other talk about domesticity, desire and happiness as pragmatic conditions. I must reiterate that these logics of care work and unpaid labor do not essentialize femininity and womanhood; indeed, many front-line workers, especially the community organizers, see gender itself as an unequal relationship between women and men (stree-purush asamanta). These feminized and gendered logics respond to the material, experiential and phenomenological conditions of the women in Dharavi. (I use the term gendered because I briefly interacted with a few transgender activists whose experiences of violence and notions of gender identity are different than that of other women. So I do wish to keep open the possibilities of a kind of queering of front-line work, for the lack of a better term).

As an ethnographer, the term front-line signified a specific way of doing ethnography with my colleagues in Dharavi: of being able to understand, interpret and analyze their techniques of intervention and the kind of embodied knowledges they produced. I contrast this to the more ‘sanitized’ and ‘objective’ – and very often, depoliticized, forms of knowledge that NGOs normally produce, like quantitative/qualitative analyses, metrics, outcomes, and so on (which is how one could describe my report to the NGO).

In this space, ethnography could take seriously the nuances and messy contradictions, and follow the attempt of the sanginis to make sense of the violences of everyday life in their own terms, and the ways in which to negotiate, if not overtly resist, them. This also involved helping the PVWC team improve their ‘modules,’ give feedback to their presentations, collect relevant and accessible documents on the prevalence of domestic violence, which I would translate and share with them (becoming a partial social worker, perhaps?). There were awkward encounters, too, where my erroneous assumptions about the community would clash with theirs; or when I would be asked to speak to a meeting of Dharavi residents, breaking the imagined pact of ‘objectivity’ that binds researchers.

There is still, however, a sense of confusion whether I should describe this as ‘ethnography in front-line spaces’ or as ‘front-line ethnography’ (or both?) – I invite the readers to share their perspectives and experiences.

The latter would indicate a kind of ethnography that goes beyond the academic convention – indeed, it can and should be used to describe the work done by the sanginis and COs, which I consider ethnographic in its own right. Further, this raises important questions of doing ethnography among/with NGOs and social movements. There are real risks of the depoliticization of critical anthropological perspectives, as there are of dismissing such work as unscholarly, mere activism, or as ‘public ethnography.’ The answer, I suspect, is somewhere in the middle. And these challenges, I believe, should inspire new forms of ethnographic engagement and commitments with people like Bhavanaben and the sanginis.

* I have changed the names of my colleagues

References

Clisby, S. & Holdsworth, J. (2014). Gendering Women: Identity and Mental Wellbeing Through the Lifecourse. Bristol: Policy Press

Kleinman, A. (2000). The Violence of Everyday Life: The Multiple Forms and Dynamics of Social Violence. In Das, V., Kleinman, A., Ramphele, M., and Reynolds, P. (Eds.) Violence and Subjectivity. Berkeley: University of California Press

Weis, J. & Haldane, H. (2011). Anthropology at the Frontlines of Gender-Based Violence. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press

Over the last year or so, I have found that nearly every academic essay I have written for my courses contains a section titled ‘Context & Positions,’ or some such variant.

The first reason for this is obvious – my undergraduate and graduate classes in anthropology focused on reflexivity to a very large extent. We were initiated into the discipline with an emphasis on the fact that our data is ‘co-produced’ with our informants; that there is no such thing as a ‘neutral’ observation, nor are there any ‘Universal Truths’ out there.

The purpose of anthropology – and critical social sciences – one of my professors in my undergraduate class explained, is to ‘problematize the obvious.’ In my MA program, my professor and thesis supervisor underscored that anthropology is a ‘particularistic’ discipline.

That is perhaps why I consciously decided to title this post as ‘Groundings’ – but there is a second reason for it, which is more personal and intuitive, arising from my own engagement with ethnography. It is what I describe as ‘seeing one’s feet’ (which is, of course, a nod to Scheper-Hughes’ idea of ‘anthropology with feet-on-the-ground,’ and ‘barefoot anthropology.’ I will return to this theme in the next few posts).

‘Grounding,’ thus, does not only convey a disciplinary or methodological concern with reflexivity, or the situatedness and particularizing imperatives of ethnography, it also concerns a relationship with a particular field site, a set of social issues, and a network of people with whom I have engaged in ethnographic research and participation.

My first engagement with the ‘field’ happened at the end of my first year in my BA (summer of 2011), when I worked as a junior field researcher – that’s a fancy title for someone who administered surveys as a part of a larger qualitative communications study. That experience also got me addicted, in a sense, to doing fieldwork (since this didn’t strictly count as ‘ethnography’).

Over the next two years (till 2013), as I continued working part-time, my field encounters made reading ethnographic texts in class much more enjoyable and intriguing; I began wondering about the ethics of research and the politics of representation in AIDS advocacy in India (since that was the broad field/issue I worked on. This resulted in my BA dissertation on the need to rethink ‘risks’ and ‘vulnerabilities’ in the AIDS epidemic in India).

This particular context would be one within which I would work for the next couple of years – NGOs, social activists, social workers, researchers, and urban spaces like slums and construction sites. In my gap year (2013-14), I worked with civil society activists, migrant construction workers, and women front-line workers – slowly sketching out research networks in Mumbai.

This is yet another form of ‘grounding,’ albeit a relatively unexperienced one. My engagement in, and with, ethnography has always been carried out in these ‘NGO spaces’ (I did not necessarily see this as ‘applied research’ – I think all field-based research, like ethnography, is by definition ‘applied’ in one way or another. But more on this later).

I realized the potential for ethnographic observation in these contexts. Yes, I had to produce ‘deliverables’ (to use jargon from professional research work) like reports, briefings, and the likes, but my ‘grounding’ in academic anthropology allowed me to see such research work as the object of ethnographic analysis itself. If bureaucratization of research constrained creativity and independence, such networks also open up possibilities for future ethnographic engagements, which is how I ended up working in Dharavi as a consultant in 2014.

I never intended to do research work in Dharavi, which is by all means a media-saturated space – from its representation in Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire, the history of communal violence in 1992-93, the overwhelming academic and popular focus on its ‘informal economy,’ to its centrality in the debates on urban ‘redevelopment’ in cities in the third world. Yet, working on an ethnographic pilot study on women front-line workers engaged in the prevention of domestic violence showed how the experiences and narratives of such violence tend to be invisiblized in popular writings on Dharavi.

The basti, or informal community as it is known in Hindi and Marathi, is seen overwhelmingly as a ‘CitySystem’ made by ‘migrant labor’ (Brugmann, 2011); as Mumbai’s ‘shadow city’ (Jacobson, 2007); or a ‘special economic zone for the poor’ (2011). (As an exception to most popular narratives, I find Liza Weinstein’s ethnography of redevelopment politics in Dharavi to be refreshing and nuanced, including her focus on women’s political engagement. The writings of Kalpana Sharma, Roma Chatterji and Deepak Mehta, on Dharavi have been particularly inspiring as well). Yet, Dharavi is a space where domestic violence is highly prevalent; in fact it shapes, and is folded into, the very spatiality, materiality and the everyday experiences of the basti. Countless women experienced it – women who, as a program coordinator from the NGO explained, are engaged in the emotional and unpaid labor of maintaining the basti.

This is what I felt my ethnography could do – bring these narratives of violence, negotiations, and gendered experiences to the fore in writing about urban spaces and bastis, even a ‘world famous’ one like Dharavi. And it had to do so in a situation where it had to actively collaborate with the people being studied.

It has to be situated between contexts and nuances – two terms that I have, since then, used increasingly to describe ethnography and anthropology (perhaps as an addition to my professors’ formulations). This became for me the basis of what I describe as ‘front-line’ ethnography – the topic for my next post.

‘Grounding(s)’ – to return to the metaphor I started this post with – signifies, firstly, a conscious positioning in relation to our stances during fieldwork but also beyond it (a complain I have about certain anthropologists is that I ‘cannot see their feet,’ meaning there is relative ambiguity about the terms of their engagement with the field). And secondly, following Scheper-Hughes (1992, 1995), it is also a plea for a sort of ‘barefoot anthropology,’ as a form of praxis (i.e., doing ethnography), but also moral, political and ethical commitments to the people we work with. Groundings, in this sense, refer not to stationary stances, but to how we continually get our feet muddied while doing ethnography.

The upcoming posts engage more concretely with such ‘groundings,’ where I hope to outline more political and epistemological questions of ethnographic fieldwork in front-line spaces, and with NGO actors. Here, my concern is with how epistemology, power and ethics come to be intertwined in such encounters, and how ethnography, rather than disentangling or simplifying them, should instead focus on enhancing our understanding of such complexities, whilst also focusing on ‘solutions’ for our activist and social worker colleagues, even as we attempt to theorize the ambiguities and contradictions in such encounters.

My engagements are by no means exhaustive; they are more illustrative, based on my limited experiences and readings. But I do hope they open up the space to think about the practice of ethnography both within and outside academia, and the questions that come along with it.

References

Brugmann, J. (2011). The Making of Dharavi’s ‘CitySystem,’ in Campana, J. (Ed.), Dharavi: The City Within (pp. 41-54). New Delhi: Harper Collins.

Chatterji, R., & Mehta, D. (2007). Living With Violence: An Anthropology of Events and Everyday Life. New Delhi: Routledge.

Jacobson, M. (2007). Dharavi, Mumbai’s Shadow City. National Geographic Magazine (May), 211(5). Link: http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/print/2007/05/dharavi-mumbai-slum/jacobson-text

Scheper-Hughes, N. (1992). Death Without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Scheper-Hughes, N. (1995). Primacy of the Ethical: Propositions for a Militant Anthropology. Current Anthropology (June), 36(3), pp. 409-440.

Sharma, K. (2000). Rediscovering Dharavi: Stories from Asia’s Largest Slum. New Delhi: Penguin.

Weinstein, L. (2014). The Durable Slum: Dharavi and the Right to Stay Put in Globalizing Mumbai. New Delhi: Orient Blackswan.

Yardley, J. (2011). In One Slum, Misery, Work, Politics and Hope. The New York Times (December 28).  Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/29/world/asia/in-indian-slum-misery-work-politics-and-hope.html?_r=0