Paper short abstract:

The paper argues that looking at urban spaces through the lens of paid domestic workers enables us to see Delhi in its subalternity alongside the characteristics of urban development that attempt making it a "world-city".

Paper long abstract:

The paper is an ethnographically oriented study and draws upon narratives of women domestic workers in the city of Delhi about their notions of mobility and their perceptions of everyday spaces.

The paper argues that looking at urban spaces through the lens of paid domestic workers enables us to see Delhi in its subalternity alongside the characteristics of urban development that attempt making it a "world-city". The paper locates the experiences of women domestic workers in relation to larger processes of urbanization, such as displacement and resettlement, creation of gated communities as elite neighbourhoods and informality of service provision, and tries to offer insights on how the urban - in its evolution and reproduction - is negotiated by these workers on a daily basis. The paper attempts to spatialize domestic workers' experiences, both in an external sense, of the formation and negotiation by working people of city spaces in general, as well as in the 'internal' spaces of their own and their employers' homes and interrogate into the layers of intersection inherent in such production of space.