Security and Purity: Female Surveillance, Child Vigilantism, and the Moral Policing of Deviant Women in Two Radicalized Indian Slums

This article explores the quotidian politics of community vigilantism over women involved in interreligious love affairs in two radicalized Indian slums. Using a Hindu nationalist slum in Mumbai and a communally sensitive Muslim-dominated slum in Hyderabad as ethnographic landscapes, I show how wome...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Current anthropology 2018-10, Vol.59 (5), p.549-571
Main Authors: Sen, Atreyee, Bedi, Tarini, Datta, Ankur, Krishnamurthy, Mathangi, Macdonald, Helen, Osella, Filippo, Simpson, Edward
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Children
Corporal punishment
Deviance
Discourses
Ethics
Ethnography
Females
Ghettos
Interfaith relationships
Landscape
Low income groups
Loyalty
Mothers
Nationalism
Police
Policing
Politics
Poverty
Punishment
Purity
Radicalism
Religious rituals
Rituals
Security
Sexual permissiveness
Shanty towns
Slums
Surveillance
Urban areas
Urban poverty
Victims
Vigilantes
Vigilantism
Women
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Summary:This article explores the quotidian politics of community vigilantism over women involved in interreligious love affairs in two radicalized Indian slums. Using a Hindu nationalist slum in Mumbai and a communally sensitive Muslim-dominated slum in Hyderabad as ethnographic landscapes, I show how women and children (and peripheral state actors) used secret surveillance, exclusionary party politics, public shaming rituals, and physical punishment to rein in poor women’s sexual permissiveness. Some women in deviant relationships displayed excessive loyalty to their community to compensate for their transgressions. Some others legitimized their radical position by branding honor policing as primitive and unfit for an urban citizenry. By advancing an analytical discussion on this bargaining space between vigilantes and their victims, I argue that women and children in slums, ghettos, and shantytowns play a central role in producing, managing, and violently enforcing uncertainties related to poverty and urban security, even if they are recast through religiopolitical discourses of female honor and religious purity.
ISSN:0011-3204
1537-5382
DOI:10.1086/699898