A woman sits in front of her shop near Aligarh. Evonne/Flickr. Some rights reserved.Every time I go back to Aligarh, my hometown in India, I see a new eating spot. McDonald’s, KFC, Domino’s and Café Coffee Day are very recent additions to the city. Aligarh, pretty much like Oxford and Cambridge, is primarily a university city although it is also known for lock making and some handicrafts. When I went to the Women’s College, Aligarh Muslim University for my Bachelor’s almost a decade ago, I hung out mostly at the canteens in the college and university and went for lunch to local restaurants. The big city offerings of coffee, fried chicken and burgers were not around then (the closest we got to international cuisine was spicy chowmein which was probably more Indian than Chinese); those were the temptations of Delhi, the metropolis nearest to us.
The question of women in public spaces in urban India has been looming large for a few years now.
On reflection, this transition from the local South Indian to American fried chicken in a small Indian city is symptomatic of wider economic, social and political changes in the country. With the country adopting neoliberal policies in the 1990s, the landscape of India changed – rapid urbanisation was touted as ‘success’ of neoliberalism. As the government projects the development of 100 smart cities in India by 2020 (incidentally, Aligarh is on that list), it is worth thinking about who belongs in these ‘world-class’ urban areas of the country.
