photographs by Mayank Austen Soofi. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2015. xx, 273 pp. (B&W photos.) US$29.95, paper. ISBN 978-0-520-28482-1.
The growing scholarship on informal urban settlements in India (and also other parts of the world) clearly shows that “slums” should neither be reduced to a “housing question” nor be approached through the lens of “inadequacies.” Instead, we ought to listen, see, and map the practices and forms through which urban residents build and create lives in the informal settlements. Claire Snell-Rood’s book, No One Will Let Her Live, is a significant addition to this scholarship.
Located at the intersection of medical anthropology and gender studies, and based on fourteen months of fieldwork with ten families in the slum of Ghaziapuram in Delhi, Snell-Rood’s book is an ethnographic exploration of issues pertaining to public health in informal urban settlements. Two dominant Indian state reforms form the backdrop for the ethnography: first, the liberalization of state policies in the 1990s, which resulted in a contraction of different public resources, including housing and health. And second, the anti-poor reforms adopted by the Indian state and judiciary, which has resulted in the demolition of informal urban settlements—in this case, the demolition of slums in Delhi before the 2010 Commonwealth Games. The book approaches public health as a relational concept. Thus, the ethnography does not focus on the absence of adequate public health resources, but on how the well-being of Ghaziapuram’s women residents is intertwined with their outward relationships with family, friends, neighbours, local leaders, bureaucrats, politicians, the state, gods, as well as the environment they inhabit. The book elucidates how despite the vulnerabilities, abuses, and violence that women experience in these non-reciprocal relationships, they are unable to be independent from these relationships, since that would expose them to harsher social scrutiny. Given this impossibility, the book documents the strategies through which women in Ghaziapuram rearrange and endure their outward relationships in order to sustain their own inner well-being. Snell-Rood documents four specific strategies, which form the four chapters of the book.
The first chapter shows how women nurture familial relationships by providing selfless care (seva), despite the lack of reciprocal care from family members. This selfless care allows women to conjure and sustain the ideal of a caregiving family, but at the cost of forgoing their own physical health and detaching it from their mental health. And yet, the book shows, it is through this selfless and self-reflexive act of “living for others” that women maintain their moral inner well-being. The second chapter looks at how women in Ghaziapuram build relationships with friends, neighbours and extended family members, while simultaneously placing boundaries on them to remain detached, since relationships can become burdensome and people, above all, are never as they appear. There exists a common sense that something is always hidden, which cannot be fully known, and hence one needs to exercise control over one’s relationships and their details. Yet, the future of these relationships in which one invests can never be predetermined, and hence they are based on some form of speculation.
The third chapter elaborates on the notion of citizenship that residents of Ghaziapuram imagine and produce in a context of structural inequalities. The book shows how the women residents take citizenship neither for granted nor as a passive concept, but as a bundle of rights that are to be actively produced and achieved by them because of their absence. This active production of citizenship is based on three broad principles: a desire for mobility or getting ahead in life; moral accountability to one’s family; and asceticism—that is, accepting inequality as a divine fate, renouncing desires that might lead to jealousy, and building on given resources to move ahead. In the absence of collective and organized citizenry movements, these principles become the basis of a new form of moral citizenship and social mobility amongst women in Ghaziapuram. The fourth chapter looks at how women residents experience the microenvironments they inhabit, how they identify the potentialities for change in these microenvironments, and how they reshape them. In doing so, Snell-Rood argues, the women residents detach their microenviroments from the larger environment, which is shaped by environmental degradation, squalor, and social stigmas towards slums. The book’s concluding chapter draws out specific implications for public health policies and practices, including forming women’s collectives and listening to everyday public health issues faced by women residents to redefine public health priorities in governmental and non-governmental sectors.
No One Will Let Her Live provides significant and critical insights into how women in informal urban settlements produce new lives and meanings, despite the structural inequalities of patriarchal relations, economic liberalization, and evictions. However, the book also raises many questions that remain unattended. These questions are specifically about the limits of the insights and are meant to push them: What kind of a “public” is being constructed through the individual health practices pursued by women in Ghaziapuram? If asceticism, mobility, and moral accountability are the basic principles of citizenship amongst residents of Ghaziapuram, what happens to the experiences and pleasures of excesses that are not restricted to riches? Does the relationship with god, like most other relationships in Ghaziapuram, ever become a source of tension and force the residents to draw a boundary between themselves and god? And lastly, how are the reworked microenvironments connected to the things and people in the macroenvironments?
Prasad Khanolkar
Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati, India