Making paths and doing bazaar: Rhythms and techniques of walking-as-dwelling

Abstract

This article posits the concept of “walking-as-dwelling” as a critical analytical frame to counter the dominant Western conceptualization of walking as an event or novel experience that is set apart from ordinary life. Walking-as-dwelling refers to how walking is bound with routines of work, domesticity, and leisure, through which people inhabit and make places. Drawing attention to the situatedness of walking in particular places and subjectivities, the article follows the walking practices of women in the Monday bazaar of Nizamuddin Basti, a low-income neighborhood in Delhi. It examines how women's walking itineraries, rhythms, and techniques co-constitute the bazaar as a dynamic spacetime configuration, making and remaking the public and social character of the bazaar. It draws attention to the creative and political potential of ordinary practices of walking through which the Basti's women negotiate constraints of gender and class and, in the process, forge affective ties with the bazaar, perform modes of sociality, and articulate freedom and mobility.