Street Business

Street Business

Women in Mumbai are very unlikely representatives of the rest of India. Here it’s about survival and for money there is no gender bias.

Traditionally, all Indians want sons and pray for an heir though there are no kingdoms to be won or lost. However, when it comes to holding the family together, the responsibility is thrown back on women. Picture this, a 20-something young girl enters the compartment of a ‘local’ train and she has a basket full of wares balanced on her head. She has a cloth draped diagonally from her shoulder to chest and appears loaded. Its only when she rests does it strike you - it’s a 3-month old baby that she is carrying. She sees the aghast expression on your face and before you can question, promptly says: “ What can one do? God has given children but also stomachs to feed.”

Mumbai’s economy is dependent on women. Be it the regular housemaid, vendors, boutiques owners, hairdressers, mess owners, hawkers, you find more and more women coming to the fore. They have not emerged from nowhere, they are the result of Mumbai’s long struggle of moving out of the mill shadows to mall culture. They may have taken to the street to supplement family income but now it’s an inherent part of their lives.

The central area of Mumbai was called ‘Girangaon’ in Marathi language, which means ‘mill village’. It’s this area, which first made Mumbai into a cloth-manufacturing hub and now is the gold mine for real estate. In the 1980s, when the mill crisis began to hit Mumbai, women took charge of their families’ economic crises and became entrepreneurs.

According to PUKAR research scholar and activist Ajit Abhimeshi, “ These women first came from the coastal areas of Maharashtra. They were family members of the mill workers who migrated to the cities from coastal and western areas of the state. They began with providing food to the village worker in the city, first at home, then at a mess. After the mills closed down, they were forced to take their wares to the streets to provide for their families.” The Mumbai women adopted this spirit of business enterprise and today you can see young girls and mothers going about doing their business without much fuss.

However, this was the generation of the 1970s. Today, they are educating their children and sending them to offices, so you find children of mill workers as sales executives in offices, malls or working in parlours and doing other vocational jobs. The street business enterprise faces a threat from the adoption of the 9 am to 5 pm corporate culture, one that is known for living by the system without raising any questions.

In street business, these women encounter a host of issues, learn to fight back and survive whether against the system or individuals. But with the mall culture taking over, chances are likely that this spirit will lose its sheen.