#15 Public affection, morality police & gendered violence in Mumbai w/Atreyee Sen

Anthropology on Air

In this episode, the finale to season 3, we speak with Atreyee Sen, Associate Professor at the Department of Anthropology at the University of Copenhagen. Our topic of discussion is a talk Atreyee gave at our department entitled, ‘No city for lovers: Urban poverty, public romance and violent moral policing of lower-class female youth in Mumbai’, which is based on her award-winning article in the interdisciplinary journal Critical Asian Studies. In it, Atreyee explores the aggressive spatial marginalisation of and violence against lower-class, young lovers in Mumbai.

Over the course of her academic career in India, the UK and Denmark, Atreyee Sen has published extensively, and brought critical insights to studies of gender, childhoods, poverty, urban politics and South Asian cities. She is author of the critically acclaimed monograph, Shiv Sena Women: Violence and Communalism in a Bombay Slum (Indiana University Press, 2007), which challenged feminist and development critiques of right-wing women, and reviewed representations of ‘the bad poor’ in South Asia.

She is also co-editor of Global Vigilantes (Hurst, 2008) and Who’s Cashing in? Contemporary Perspectives on New Monies and Global Cashlessness (Berghahn Books, 2020). Some of her more recent publications include ‘An Economy of Lies: Informal Income, Phone-Banking and Female Migrant Workers in Kolkata, India’ in Journal of Immigrant & Refugee Studies (2022), and ‘Religious Spaces, Urban Poverty, and Interfaith Relations in India’ in Current History (2022). In 2023, Dr Sen won the inaugural prize for best journal article from the interdisciplinary journal, Critical Asian Studies, for her article ‘“No city for lovers”: anti-Romeo squads, resistance, and the micro-politics of moral policing in an Indian city’.