The Women of Kallukuttai: An Urban Slum in Chennai
Located in the Kanchipuram district lies Kallukuttai, one of the largest slums in the city of Chennai, spread over 350 acres and housing almost 15,500 families. Situated in the heart of the civilization, 3 km from IIT Madras and adjacent to the prestigious buildings of the Cognizant office, is the closely knit community with limited water supply but ample TV sets, Dish TVs and smartphones.
When I visited the slum, my primary motive was to understand the gender relations that are operational in Kallukuttai. But as I walked into the slum through the narrow road which was littered on both sides, I realised that the people in the slum are too engrossed in ensuring a basic standard of living and watching television during their stinted leisure.
The abundance of litter and garbage in the area inevitably leads to unhygienic conditions of living. But what escalates poorer hygiene is the appalling absence of any water supply system.
The women in the slum have to stand in queues to collect water from the public sources and each household is entitled to a limited supply of water in the form of storage cans. The most basic amenity- drinking water- is available for Rs. 20–25 per can which is an exorbitant price levied on the poor slum-dwellers for a free resource. The onus is always on women to stand in long queues, carry the lofty drums of water to their household and rationing its use- a labour and domestic management which is, needless to say, unpaid and unrecognized by the patriarchal society.
The area also lacks a drainage system- a major reason why it was completely submerged during the 2015 Chennai floods. The rain-water in the area stagnates with nowhere to flow which leads to clogging in the monsoon months. With the intermittent pours in Chennai, water stagnation is quite common in the area.
Illamadhi, a resident of the slum, told me that menstrual hygiene suffers immensely due to the lack of water, poor sanitation and disposal clubbed with a number of social taboos which lead to unhygienic situations.
She expressed that social taboo do not allow the disposal of sanitary napkins in the household dustbins. They are to be “hidden” and “secretively” disposed in a dump outside. But when it starts to rain, the water-logging leads to these wastes floating and contaminating the water, soil and air, thereby affecting the living conditions in the slum.
The nearest hospital is almost 2–3 km away and transportation and conveyance is a huge problem amidst the narrow alleys which lead to the slum. The women I spoke to expressed how ambulance facilities are obsolete in the area and people are more often in a fix in the case of a medical emergency or premature labour during pregnancy.
There are two schools nearby in Taramani and Perungudi respectively. Most children go to school- irrespective of gender. But according to the women in the slum, higher education is mostly pursued by boys.
Noticeably there were very few middle-aged women who went out to work. Most of them were housewives and and their husbands were the sole bread-earners of the family.
The women who I spoke to were all married at a young age. Gayatri, a 28-year old housewife living in the slum, said that she got married at the age of 16.
The women of the younger generation is now more susceptible to venture into the public domain for exposure in terms of education and jobs. Illamadhi said that while her son is working in WIPRO, her daughter, although married, is pursuing her MBA now and wants to get a job later.
On being asked about the issues of safety, the women responded that a close-knit community living in the slum ensures a fairly safe environment, although there are occasional cases of internal as well as external conflicts.
The women who go out to work in the call centers and other places at night are received and escorted by an elder male in the slum from the main road where they are dropped or picked. Even though the slum dwellers have broken some barriers and are becoming more acceptable towards women roles outside the domestic sphere, male supervision cannot be done away with due to issues of women-safety that plagues the patriarchal society.
As the slum dwellers were getting ready to fill up their buckets from the common tap, a little girl peeped from a shanty courtyard of a small hut. Akhila, a standard nine student of Mandaveli School, aspires to become a police officer when she grows up but her mother sitting next to her while washing utensils is vehemently opposed to her dreams. She wants her daughter to grow up and take up a more ‘secure’ job, preferably a teacher. Whether that’s mere parental concern or a product of the rigidified gendered structure of occupation is debatable.
The women, when asked about equality and feminism, rolled their eyes and reiterated their everyday struggles with water and domestic chores. For them, the basics of getting water and food everyday would suffice and then maybe, they could think about the feminist promise of obliterating patriarchy at all levels.
The women of this urban slum struggle with the crude disparities of the urban proletariat which intersect with their gender identities- making them more vulnerable- doubling their oppression. While all the issues discussed above fall under the gambit of the intersectional approach towards feminism, the Marxist framework of primordial material conditions informing gender disparities is the reality for these women in Kallukutai.
Yet, they smirk at the term “feminism”, call it the ‘fancy’ of the elite woman of the upper classes. Faced with the brute reality of class based oppression and a struggle for primary resources, gender-equality is secondary to them. The alienation of these women from the contemporary discussions and discourses on feminism wherein they believe that the term “feminism” itself belongs to the upper classes should be an immediate concern for the post-modern, educated and cosmopolitan feminists of the upper classes in the surrounding city!
