[Reader-list] Marking and Public Spaces

[zainab at xtdnet.nl]

Dear All,
I pose some of the questions I have been encountering in my research. Also
want to say that my blog is active now and the posts you see on this list
will largely also be on my blog.
Cheers,
Zainab


4th February 2005

I am in this tremendous mood to ask many questions and that is exactly
what I am going to do today. But before that, I want to give you a peek
into this exciting interview I have just had with a Ticket Checker at a
railway station. I shall not state his name, but know for now that our man
is a Musallman and his interview is absolutely déjà vu because it leads
straight into the questions which have been plaguing my mind for sometime
now.

Let’s call our man Zubair. Zubair and me had an ‘accidental’ ‘legal’
meeting when he was checking me for tickets and I asked him if I could do
an interview with him. We sat down to chat today and here are a few
vignettes from our conversation which I want to bring in before us.

Zubair is a Ticket Checker and his job involves watching for PWTs i.e.
Passengers Without Tickets. This means marking people, watching for signs
and cues which suggest that an individual is traveling ticket-less. Zubair
tells me that he has to watch carefully. His has formed images in his head
– who is from a good family? who is educated? who is uneducated? who is
the miscreant? etc. Zubair is as much marked as he marks people. He wears
a beard and so, among his people, he is known as apnawalla (our fellow).
Zubair also marks passengers according to the area they are traveling
from. For instance, he narrated an incident he had with passengers
traveling from Mumbra station. Commuters from Mumbra are mainly Muslims.
Zubair was checking tickets in the train and a bunch of the passengers
were Muslim. When they saw him, they said, “This is apnawala (our fellow,
meaning a Muslim brother).” There were ‘other’ passengers sitting around
and Zubair knew that he could not leave apnawala passengers, else, ‘the
others’ would complain against him. While narrating this incident to me,
Zubair was talking his dilemma in situations like these. He says to me,
“Aaj kal mahaul aisa hai, kya kar sakte hai?” (These days, the atmosphere
is like that. What can we do?)

I realize that the railway station is a site of immense and intense
marking – marking by authority, marking by subjects. I have also been
thinking about Arjun bhai and my conversations with him and about the
various experiences I have in my daily life in this city. And this leads
me to my stream of questions which concern the practice of ‘marking’ which
is constantly happening in this city. And I am concerned about ‘marking’
from the perspective of ‘public spaces’.
1.	Does the practice of ‘marking’ contradict the idea of ‘public spaces”?
2.	What is a public space?
3.	Why do we ‘mark’ people in the city – marking people as Hindu, Muslim,
English-speaking, etc.?
4.	What kinds of comforts does ‘marking’ create?
5.	What kinds of spaces are generated through ‘marking’?






Zainab Bawa
Bombay
www.xanga.com/CityBytes