One of the easiest things to like about Mumbai is the way women are able to live here. Mumbai means a kind of liberation. It means feeling safe in public, feeling able to dress how you like – feeling welcome to go out, even after dark. But this isn’t just a natural quality the city was born with. It’s a legacy of working women – especially working-class women, most from oppressed castes or religious minorities. 

In this episode, Raghu is joined by Ramya Ramanath to understand this story better — a development and policy scholar, teaching at DePaul University in Chicago. She’s also the author of A Place to Call Home: Women as Agents of Change in Mumbai for which she did an ethnography – she talked to women of all kinds about staying on their feet as they’re displaced from their homes in a slum and resettled in flats in a high-rise. For planners and policy-makers, but also for the rest of us, there’s a lot to be surprised by.