City of Men

Introduction and coordination by Sanjay Srivastava

A book review forum with:

Sanjay Srivastava, Masculinities in transit: a review forum on City of Men

Wangui Kimari, Friendly strangers in City of Men

Manali Desai, Multiple masculinities in City of Men

Greg Noble, Situating masculinity in the city: a response to City of Men

Colin McFarlane, Writing urban worlds in City of Men

Anna Plyushteva, Co-producing gendered mobilities in City of Men

Introduction: Masculinities in transit: a review forum on City of Men

While there is overwhelming evidence – through historiography, folklore, traditional performative forms, art, cinema – of the significance of mobility as a way of experiencing the world, scholarly approaches to Indian society have almost exclusively focussed on “relations of dwelling” as the most significant meaning-making contexts. In the subcontinent, ideas of being in the world have a strong relation to moving about: peasant-farmers in the eighteenth century traveled to become soldiers in non-farming seasons; sadhus (ascetics) wandered for a living; “women’s” songs narrated sentiments of multiple belongings resulting from dislocations through marriage (Raheja & Grodzins Gold, 1994); and the idea of journeying is perhaps the most significant motif within Hindi film songs.

Notwithstanding the significance of “relations of travel” (Clifford, 1992) – the worlds produced through not being in one place – the anthropology and sociology of India have largely refused the offer to engage with the importance of “travelling cultures” (Clifford, 1992). In part, this has to do with colonial and post-colonial knowledge-making legacies and the influence of structural-functionalist frameworks of analysis that insisted on singular modes of belonging as a mark on non-Western societies. The significance of Romit Chowdhury’s City of Men lies in the invitation to think of meanings that are made through “relations of travel”: for it is these that are the most significant in the lives of the men and the urban spaces Chowdhury’s book explores. Conditions of urban precarity are simultaneously those of enforced mobility. And, as men move from village to city and then find livelihoods as agents of urban transportation networks, their own transformation from relatively powerful rural men to subaltern urban subjects lies at the heart of the cultures of gender that the book explores. As Wangui Kimari (2024, this issue) points out in the first review in this book forum, in focusing on the “invisible” men whose livelihood activities ensure urban connectivity and sociality, Chowdhury brings together the multiple strands that produce city-ness itself: gendered privileges and precarities; the peculiarly Indian interplay of hierarchies (caste, class and religion); and the making and un-making of ideas of “respectable” domesticity in spaces of erratic publicness.

City of Men is a nuanced, theoretically ambitious and ethnographically sophisticated book whose discussion unfolds across multiple levels of analysis. It is an exploration of how cultures of masculinity are both defined by, as well as define, the urban form of livelihood-precarity par excellence: private-public transport. The book provides a narrative of the gender of the city through moving across multiple registers of analysis, including (heterosexual) domesticity, class, caste, the “everyday” state (Blom Hansen & Stepputat, 2001, p. 5), homosociality and the “morality” of competitive precarity. In this, the book joins a growing body of writing that explores the masculinity of public spaces – urban spaces – in “most of the world” (Chatterjee, 2004).

A significant focus of this body of work, as in the present book, is the relationship between precarity, masculinity and the anxieties of urban life. In Beijing, male taxi drivers from rural areas negotiate the city through the “experience of a loss of control” (Choi, 2018, p. 493) and in urban Congo, “Ongoing socioeconomic changes … make attaining male status as a married and providing housefather increasingly difficult” (Hendriks, 2016, p. 235). Indeed, it might be argued that masculinity – a relationship between men and women, men and men and those who identify neither as man nor woman – has been a fundamental aspect of the ways in which both the imagination and concreteness of post-colonial urban spaces have been produced. In India, it significantly defines how different kinds of persons access and occupy urban spaces; Dalit men may have greater privilege than many women, irrespective of caste.

Through combining insights from urban studies, feminist scholarship, and ethnographies of Indian modernity, the book also supplements the terms of understanding the post-colonial city. It situates the engagement at a genuinely intersectional space, where Urban Studies meets scholarship on caste, class and infrastructure. However, I think there is something even more significant about Chowdhury’s analytical frameworks in as much they grapple with the particular way in which his “materials” are generated. This relates to his method, an aspect that cannot be meaningfully disentangled from the politics of knowledge production. Given the growing significance of scholarship on cities in the Global South – recent OECD and World Bank reports point to the centrality of Africa and Asia (particularly South Asia) in future urban growth – how we produce knowledge about cities is just as important as what we say about them.

In this regard, City of Men is an important intervention into the nature of understanding the urban condition in societies with complex social, economic and political histories. It demonstrates the importance of intensive fieldwork. This, as the book shows, is a way of understanding how a particular city both differs from but may also have overlaps with urban contexts in other parts of the world. This stands in some contrast to two recent trends within global knowledge circuits. The first is the one where intensive fieldwork in any one place, and engagements with its history and culture, is largely eschewed in favor of globally dispersed research that involves fieldwork of surprisingly short periods. The second – which relates to the scale at which global projects are designed – concerns the deployment of “second-hand” ethnographic activity, where materials collected by local research assistants become sources of knowledge production; the latter serve mostly as providers of empirical materials to be fashioned into theoretical frameworks elsewhere. Given the emergence of “global” frameworks of research, this is an unavoidable trajectory. Variously linked to the politics of publishing (as quickly as possible) and funding strategies (the value placed on “comparability” across a global register), this has specific consequences for what is regarded as worthwhile knowledge of global urbanism.

Most specifically, it tends to place a lesser value on scholarship in cities from the Global South sources that, unable to access suitable funding sources for multi-country projects, largely relies on intensive fieldwork methods as well as first-hand fieldwork. This does not allow for the same level of “global” theorizing, though it is not divorced from engagements with writings from all parts of the world. City of Men exemplifies an approach to writing about cities that illustrates the significance of intensive – “old fashioned”? – fieldwork as both indispensable to a local-global understanding of urbanism as well as engagement with the fraught politics of knowledge production.

In different ways in their reviews, Manali Desai (2024, this issue) and Greg Noble (2024, this issue) point to the nuanced ways in which Chowdhury approaches the issue of class as an analytical context, highlighting the importance of ethnographic research as a counter to “universal” theory. This is also what Colin McFarlane (2024, this issue) refers to in his commentary as Chowdhury’s approach of taking “the mundane and fleeting” to build (more general claims through them (an example of “anecdotal theory” as McFarlane nicely puts it). Of the several instances in the book where an ethnographic approach avoids the “habitual reductivism” (Noble 2024, this issue) that class analysis falls prey to, there are two in particular that reflect the kind of understanding that deep immersion in the “field” engenders. The manner in which Chowdhury approaches the intersection of class, masculinity and the experience of city-life for his key interlocutors is first of these. “Class” is invoked in India almost as a local – non-English – word. In particular, irrespective of livelihood or income-related characteristics, almost everyone you speak to describes themselves as “middle class”. Residents of up-market localities as well as “slums” and bureaucrats as well as small-time shopkeepers invariably label themselves as middle class. City of Men provides an important direction regarding how to think of class in a post-colonial context, one that derives from a deep immersion in histories of the urban everyday. Kolkata’s “middle class women” who use autorickshaws encounter another group – the autorickshaw drivers – whose sense of the self is also derived from identification as middle class. Middle classness, in the Indian case at least, is a moral claim to a certain kind of identity: respectable, dignified and worthy of respect. It is also at the heart of “the moral value attached to the breadwinner ideal of hegemonic masculinity”. As one of Chowdhury’s interlocutors was to narrate:

Once I was waiting for passengers in a no-parking zone. A sergeant came up to me and asked for my papers. I didn’t have them right then. He said he would arrest me and lock up my car. I told him, ‘Sir, I am not a thug, I’m not a thief. I am just trying to earn some money to feed my family. I am at fault but I am not a criminal’ (twenty-eight-year-old auto driver). (Chowdhury, 2023, pp. 127–128)

This relates to the second aspect that the book’s mode of research – intensive fieldwork – powerfully brings to light. This is an aspect that also relates to the important point made by Anna Plyushteva (2024, this issue) in her commentary: that women’s voices ought to form an important context for understanding the making of the cultures of masculinities. Chowdhury achieves through building upon feminist insights, an approach that cannot but be a questioning of the idea of “male breadwinner role model” concurrently as it forms a context of ethnographic focus. So, while Chowdhury’s interlocutors may articulate the desire for achieving “breadwinner” status, their sense of “failure” is also the site of engaging with gender as a relationship: their “lack” is produced through the specter of what “their” women might think of them. Through thinking through a peculiar double bind that the role gives rise to – wanting it but also being constrained by it – the analysis gestures at the Indian career of the breadwinner role. It is a career that is fundamentally “middle class” and hence – given the wide currency this sense of the self has – carries meaning across all kinds of economic categories. At the same time, however, given the global life of “class”, the book’s discussion also makes it possible to place Indian ideas of class against those that circulate in other parts of the world.

“A proper understanding of the field of power in which women have lived their lives demands”, Rosalind O’Hanlon says, “that we look at men as gendered beings too” (O’Hanlon, 1997, p. 1). In City of Men, Romit Chowdhury has taken up this challenge, broadening the terms of reference through the capaciousness of his theoretical and analytical frameworks and the singularity of his focus on perhaps the most significant event of our epoch: city-making in the Global South.

References

Chatterjee, P. (2004). The politics of the governed. Reflections of popular politics in most of the world. Columbia University Press.

Choi, Susanne Y. P. (2018). Masculinity and precarity: Male migrant taxi drivers in South China. Work, Employment and Society, 32(3), 493–508. https://doi.org/10.1177/0950017018755652

Chowdhury, R. (2023). City of Men: Masculinities and everyday morality on public transport. Rutgers University Press.

Clifford, J. (1992). Travelling cultures. In Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, & Paula A. Treichler (Eds.), Cultural studies (pp. 96–114). Routledge.

Desai, Manali. (2024). Multiple masculinities in City of Men. Urban Geography. https://doi.org/10.1080/02723638.2024.2408314

Hansen, Thomas Blom, & Stepputat, Finn. (2001). Introduction. States of imagination. In Thomas Blom Hansen & Finn Stepputat (Eds.), States of imagination. Ethnographic explorations of the postcolonial state (pp. 1–38). Duke University Press.

Hendriks, T. (2016). Sim cards of desire: Sexual versatility and the male homoerotic economy in urban Congo. American Ethnologist, 43(2), 230–242. https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.12301

Kimari, Wangui. (2024). Friendly strangers in City of Men. Urban Geography. https://doi.org/10.1080/02723638.2024.2416206

McFarlane, Colin. (2024). Writing urban worlds in City of Men. Urban Geography. https://doi.org/10.1080/02723638.2024.2408316

Noble, Gregory. (2024). Situating masculinity in the city: A response to City of Men. Urban Geography. https://doi.org/10.1080/02723638.2024.2408294

O’Hanlon, R. (1997). Issues of masculinity in North India history. Indian Journal of Gender Studies, 4(1), 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1177/097152159700400101

Plyushteva, Anna. (2024). Co-producing gendered mobilities in the City of Men. Urban Geography. https://doi.org/10.1080/02723638.2024.2408290

Raheja, Gloria Goodwin, & Grodzins Gold, Ann. (1994). Listen to the heron’s words: Reimagining gender and kinship in North India. University of California Press.

City of Men: Masculinities and everyday morality on public transport, by Romit Chowdhury, New Brunswick, NJ, Rutgers University Press, 2023, 216 pp., 6 BW illustrations, $27.95 pb, ISBN 9781978829503