Pleasure, Pain, and Profits How Women Vendors Live and Thrive in Mumbai’s Locals

In this dissertation, I study the sensual and material worlds built by women vendors, like Savita maushi, who have been variably successful in becoming financially and socially independent and sometimes economically mobile through their trades. I call the network of interactions constituted by women vendors, daily commuters, suppliers of goods, railway station shops, and local trains the train market. I argue that the train market is a critical site within the urban public economy where vendor women create fun, build social relations, and strategically deploy charm and anger. My primary intervention is that creating fun and pleasure in public economies within a dangerous and shifting urban metropolis is strategic, necessary, and politically significant. Fun is imagined to be a rare entity to come by for residents of cities in South Asia, where construction of massive infrastructures and climate disasters are constantly disrupting and delaying everyday routines (Benjamin 2008; Dalsgaard 2010; Davis 2006). Especially for women, being in public is always seen as being fraught with dangers that are usually the basis of moral strictures used to curtail their movement. My ethnography explores the ways that meaning is produced and values emerge for women as they interact in public spaces, both as individual entrepreneurs and as collectives. Drawing on ideas from economic anthropology (Gibson-Graham 1997; Zelizer 2010), feminist studies of work (Weeks 2011), and studies of public transport (Bear 2007; Khullar 2008; Prasad 2012, 2015), I develop the argument that an important value for women in public is the ability to wield their joy and anger safely as they adapt public spaces to their needs and desires. Sustaining these values is hard work, and therefore, my intervention also contends that women vendors work individually and in community with other women to preserve these spaces and keep fun alive.