Paper short abstract:

This paper examines how women in a slum neighbourhood are experiencing displacement/relocation one after the other, and struggling to find their home and livelihoods. It explores the complex processes of urban restructuring at the margin of a metropolitan city in terms of gender.

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines the dynamics of urban restructuring at the frontier of Kolkata, an Indian metropolitan City, through the lens of gender. It seeks to understand with ethnographic data (collected from field work in 2018) the way in which gender is shaping, on the one hand, the urban policies meant for restructuring the city at the expense of slum dwellers, and on the other, the slum dwellers’ resistance and negotiation in finding their home. Drawing on the ethnographic life-stories of maidservants who were earlier displaced by the cyclone disaster (2009) from the Sundarbans, and now located though being dislocated and relocated time and again in slum neighbourhoods beside E. M. Bypass, it explains why they rarely succeed to escape from vulnerabilities at home and work, despite being able to obtain some illegal, semi-legal and legal right to live and work in Kolkata. The paper describes in its first part the politics through which the women including their kin and family members have become displaced due to urban restructuring only to be relocated again in the same place or some other places. The second part of the paper shows the way these maidservants/kajer meye deal with the domesticity strategically both at home and workplace, and make a living, and thereby shaping the pattern of state/gender politics at the margin of Kolkata.