“No visits, no drinks and home at 9”: when single women rent in India

When Ruchita Chandrashekar decided to move to Bangalore in November for a new job, she thought she had the perfect plan to avoid problems What does finding a home involve? Single woman in India. I would find an apartment with a married friend whose husband worked in Paris…e they would say they were sisters.

They were both professionals, in their thirties, with substantial budgets. Unfortunately, they were still women unattached to men.

Real estate agents asked them if they could promise they would never take men to the department, they would never drink, actually that they would never have a home of their own. Several places they thought had finally been secured they were rented out to families.

“Sometimes it’s a good life,” Chandrashekar said over a light lunch in Bangalore, also known as Bangalore, where he works in organization development for a tech company. “But then you come across all those structures, like the owners.

“There’s always something to fight for,” he added.

The situation of women in Italy

While they delay or refuse marriage and live alone single workers like Chandrashekar advocate for greater freedom against India’s conservative norms.

Although they represent a small part of the country’s total population, They are tens of millions. and their often maddening search for housing is a barometer of the country’s promises of modernization and rapid economic growth.

Indian women have been choosing higher education for years and official data for 2020 shows they are now entering university higher percentage than men. Yet India remains one of the most male-dominated economies in the world.

Just under 20 percent of Indian women have a paid job, compared with 62 percent of women in China and 55 percent of women in the United States, according to World Bank data.

Many women work in informal jobs in an economy that it failed to generate enough formal work for a growing population of 1.4 billion people.

The unemployment rate exceeds 8%, according to data released this month. But if women were equally represented in formal jobs as men, occupying some jobs and creating others, India’s economy could grow by 60% more by 2025, according to some estimates.

With this in mind, Prime Minister Narendra Modi called on state labor ministers in August to they will contribute ideas exploit the economic potential of women. A good place to start, many say, would be coping obstacle courses that women have to overcome outside the office or factory.

The fear of being raped

Independent working women in Indian cities – single, divorced, widowed or living apart from their partner – they face endless lessons from strangers. They pay more for a more limited housing supply. Worried about sexual violence, they follow each other by phone until they reach their destination.

And even so, they put up with men who show their genitals at bus stops or landlords who, if they don’t refuse them, set deadlines for them to go home and then they enter their apartments without warning.

“There is no shortage of aspirations in women, but even so, ours social and cultural constraints they are so strong that their freedom is limited,” explained Mala Bhandari, founder of the Research and Social Action and Development Group, which studies gender issues and provides training to companies.

The role of patriarchy

“Women know their rights,” she added. “But when women assert their rights, patriarchy, which is still very predominant in our society, plays its part… his presumptuous role“.

Amartya Sen, the first Indian to win the Nobel Prize in economics, called India “the country of men first”. He argues that the nation has turned successful men into a cultural obsession, at the expense of nearly everyone else.

Only recently have women entered the scene in large numbers. Economic liberalization that began in 1991 increased the number of university students and encouraged them to study away from home.

Many started living in women’s hostels, somehow linked to universities: private or public housing with shared rooms and food provided by adults considered secondary parents.

Often, women like Chandrashekar’s mother — who shelved her law degree when she graduated and got married quickly — have distanced their daughters from rigid gender ideas. As the birth rate drops to two children per woman in India, parents are also investing more in girls’ education, with a mixture of pride and fear.

In 2012, the gang rape and murder of Jyoti Singh, a 23-year-old physiotherapy student from New Delhi, led to new laws and programs to protect women.

In 2021, the latest year for which data is available, India has recorded 31,677 cases of rapecompared to 24,923 in 2012, a per capita rate lower than in some countries, although sexual assaults are rarely reported, complicating comparisons.

In interviews with more than a dozen single female workers from New Delhi, Bangalore and Mumbaisafety appears as the main concern in the choice of work and housing.

They went out of their way to reduce the distance between home and work. And they all shared their torments: getting slapped on the butt by a man on a motorcycle; running away from a drunk taxi driver; run away from men howling for attention.

“immoral”

In India, the average age for a woman to marry is around 21. Single professionals aged 23 to 53 they say they feel more vulnerable why men consider them sexually available, when they don’t immoral.

“They believe women should live a certain way,” said Nayla Khwaja, 28, who works in the communications sector in New Delhi. “And if someone does something outside those boundaries, then that’s something to watch out for.”

Many homeowners find that renting to single women or groups (and single men, to a lesser extent) is a risk: for the stability of families, for neighborhood reputation.

Dinesh Arora, 52, a middle-class real estate agent in South Delhi, says few landlords rent to single women because are against separation from the family or they fear being judged if something goes wrong.

The Indian rental market it is more personal than transactional: Landlords tend to view the property, even the apartments they have rented out, as their responsibility. Neighbors and authorities often feel the same way.

“When you live in a small community, everyone worries about what’s going on next door,” Arora explained between calls in his two-room office with the door open to the street. “When we see all the crimes being committed on the news, we get worried.”

Of those that rent to women, higher rents, vigilance and paternalism they are usually the urban norm. Even if they are promoted at work, many women end up back in paid hostels, with cut-off times of 9 or 9.30pm. ban on drinking, smoking and visiting some men. Religion, sexual orientation or the caste of the tenant can further limit the options.

Khwaja, who is Muslim, recalls one night she was out late filming an event and the hostel where she lived in Delhi. he didn’t let her back.

“It was only 10.30pm,” he said.

After 27-year-old Susmita Kandadai paid for an apartment in Pune, a city southwest of Mumbai, the landlord’s lawyers sent her a long contract in which it was held he never allowed visitorsnot even from relatives, and that at 21:00 he was always at home.

She refused and in the kitchen of the owner – who lived downstairs – he received a lecture from his wife about it your choice of clothing and values what was missing She fled days later, after the owner grabbed her by the arm during another speech.

“I got really scared,” he said. “I moved right in and slept on a friend’s couch.”

When women find a place that works, they stay and live. Meera Shankar, 59, the daughter of a novelist known as Triveni, rents rooms, without interruptions or visitation rules, in her Bangalore flat to women in finance and education who have been there for years.

Further south in Bengaluru, Chandrashekar, who worked as a therapist before turning to technology, was also lucky: he found a small one-bedroom apartment through a bricklayer who had put up a sign on a still-under-construction complex . I was about 20 and he seemed to understand the challenge that single face.

The apartment is 20 minutes from her work and a friend lives a block away. One recent Sunday, as Chandrashekar was unpacking, his face lit up at the thought of what he was going to do.

“I want to put a nice three-seater sofa in it,” she said, gesturing to a wall next to a window. “I want new lamps, maybe from Ikea.”

His gaze moved to the door as workers could be heard walking up the outside stairs, men who realized that a woman lived alone.

When the building fell silent again, she relaxed, ready to have a positive attitude.

“I still don’t know what this space will look like for me,” she said. “I’m excited”.

c.2023 The New York Times Society

Translation: Elisa Carnelli

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