Familiar domesticity, unfamiliar homes: ethnography among the homeless homemakers of Ahmedabad

Abstract

This chapter engages with the concept of 'home' through an ethnographic study of the homeless women pavement dwellers in the Indian city of Ahmedabad, whom I call 'homeless homemakers'. I note the crucial role that cultural constructs, family structures, and peculiar notions of belonging to the city have in the discursive formations of their marginalized citizenship. Through specific case studies, I emphasize the role of the women homeless pavement dwellers in fostering 'sister neighborhoods' where they fortify and perpetuate their everyday lives by keeping themselves in sync with the religious, ritualistic, and cultural constructs. I argue that by doing so, these women sustain a parallel system and create a communal network within the structures of hegemonic sociocultural narrative. This also facilitates effective strategies for sociocultural survival and a sense of identity that emerges within the disruptive discourses of inconclusive citizenship.