Abstract
Urban areas are long been seen as catalysts for social change not only in situ, but also in the surrounding rural areas. In general, cities are expected to rise above the regional constraints and behave independently as far as their social ambiences are concerned. They are essentially looked upon as socially modern entities allowing urbanites to escape from the shackles of traditional norms and customs. However, there are contrasting evidences and arguments suggesting that cities may not have universally applicable attributes and much depends upon their region-specific evolutionary trajectories. In India, for example, urbanization process has been quite different and is a result of historically evolved social, cultural and economic processes whereby the rural relations did not change radically enough to create an alienated uprooted peasantry that could occupy the cities. The close and dependent relation between cities and villages led to the formation of an internal organic relationship between the two entities, that is, they tend to follow the socio-cultural patterns of the social spaces in which they are situated rather than having distinct social characteristics. The present article tries to locate the cities in their regional context, with a special focus on Delhi. Delhi shares the boundary with two major states and in spite of its metropolitan culture is set in the north Indian socio-spatial space. In this sense, it is different from Kolkata and Chennai, which are more regionally rooted. In spite of sharing Delhi’s metropolitan culture, Mumbai and Bangalore are part of a different socio-spatial context. The present analysis attempts to examine Delhi’s socio-spatial embeddedness compared to those of the other metropolitan cities. The paper engages in detail with capital city of Delhi as a case for examining the social embeddedness.
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Notes
- 1.
The overlap of rural and urban ways of life is greater in Indian cities than in the West. Prevalence of joint families, strong neighbourhood relations, rootedness in social and cultural attitudes are some of the strong sociological variables that supposedly differentiates Indian cities is from the cities of the West (Ramachandran 1989).
- 2.
The villages were initially mapped around the respective cities and then grouped into different distance zones around the mega cities. The average values for child sex ratio, female literacy and work participation rates were plotted for the cities and the surrounding villages. The mean figures were then compared through the Test of Significance of Mean Values to find out whether the mean values differ significantly between the city and the respective rural hinterlands.
- 3.
In the course of analysis it emerged that cities falling in the central part i.e. Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh, and the extreme north eastern part of India do not clearly fall into any of the ‘North’ and ‘South’ categories of cities. Hence they have been kept out of the calculation that has been done in Table 2. Nevertheless, the cities of Madhya Pradesh and Gujarat have been plotted in the Maps. 2, 3 and 4.
- 4.
An attempt was made to delineate the area of the cities’ influence on their surroundings. This proved to be a challenging task and must be acknowledged as such in terms of fixing the functional centres of the cities, which may not necessarily be the geographical ones.
- 5.
An important observation made by kish around the metropolises of America that around the main city grows up residential suburbs. These areas are quite exclusive in nature and tend to have a high proportion of woman, a relatively small proportion of foreign born; while in the industrial suburbs the conditions are reversed.
- 6.
The mega cities of India are quite similar as far as their origin and growth is considered. The mega cities of today have evolved from earlier existing rural settlements. For example, Mumbai was originally a cluster of seven islands separated by tidal marshes. In less than 3 centuries of British patronage, Mumbai grew from an insignificant group of villages to the largest city in western India and a metropolis of national and international importance. Similarly Kolkata also evolved from three small villages namely Kalikata, Sutanuti, Gobindapur and rose to prominence during the British period. Delhi, Chennai have evolved to such major metropolises from small villages and hamlets.
- 7.
Pocock (1960) emphasizes on the similarity of institutions and argued that the term ‘rural’ and ‘urban’ is faulty to use to identify social categories. He is against both the concepts of rural–urban dichotomy as well as rural–urban continuum. But he nevertheless recognized certain differences between the village and the town where he stated that city was the most complete and abiding expression of the essential social values.
- 8.
Studies of neighborhood patterns in Indian cities have shown that the cities have much common with the rural social patterns. The migrants coming from the adjacent rural areas tend to build up their own enclaves within the city, and retained enough of the rural base to serve as a “resting stage” in the process of adjustment to city life and the new migrant in the city tries to seek as associates only those who come from the same kinship group, village or province. The inhabitants of rural areas and cities move from one to the other and often use resources provided by these spaces by “keeping one foot in and one foot out” (Olivieau 2005, p. 14).
- 9.
In the secondary data analysis, the mean values of child sex ratio, female literacy and female work force participation rate have been compared with those of the villages in successive distance bands. Further, for some selected indicators, the inter-locality differences have been calculated all through the analysis. The difference is further tested for determining the significance levels using the formula: \(X1 - X2/\sqrt {({\text{SD}}_{1}^{2} /n_{1} ) + ({\text{SD}}_{2}^{2} /n_{2} )}\). Here, X1 denotes mean of the first group, X2 denotes mean of the second group, SD1 denotes standard deviation of first group, SD2 denotes standard deviation of second group, n 1 denotes number of observations of the first group and n 2 denotes number of observations of the first group. The t-test, and any statistical test of this sort, consists of three steps—Define the null and alternate hypothesis, Calculate the t -statistic for the data, Compare t calc to the tabulated t-value, for the appropriate significance level and degree of freedom. If t calc > t tab, we reject the null hypothesis and accept the alternate hypothesis. Otherwise, we accept the null hypothesis.
- 10.
Delhi is the capital city of India and is the central seat of all kinds of economic, administrative functions of the country. Delhi, as the capital city of India, is also the locus and hub of economic development and global investments. For instance, the city has the Indira Gandhi International (IGI) Airport is bigger than the airports of Mumbai, Hyderabad and Bangalore put together with the Terminal 3 being the eighth largest terminal in the world. The airport is connected to the heart of the city by a high speed airport Express Metro. Further, the per capita income of Delhi is amongst the highest in the country estimated to be about Rs. 2.1 lakh in 2011–12 and it is predicted that it would be amongst the richest cities in the country. Delhi, over the years has developed as a major centre of service sector including information technology, offering large number of employment opportunities than Noida and Gurgaon.
- 11.
Ideally men should have been interviewed but when it comes to embeddedness it can be argued that Embeddedness gets best articulated through women’s viewpoints and perceptions. However, one can argue that men can give architected views; hence only women respondents were selected.
- 12.
The perceptions and attitude towards vary greatly across the regions of India. Girls studying in science institutes located in eastern region felt that there is a respectful attitude towards women, and that higher education among girls is considered desirable. Girls from the north reported a greater degree of conservatism in society (Gupta and Sharma 2003). The skilled women workers in the garment and electronic industries of Delhi and Chennai inspite of being located within the domestic sphere experienced gender friendly environs in Chennai as compared to Delhi which is more patriarchal.
- 13.
Women working in call centers for example are considered less respectable in the urban middle-class imagination. Call centre workers are consistently perceived as less educated, less family oriented and thus unable to uphold the ideals of Indian womanhood.
- 14.
Occupations such as government service and banking carry enormous social prestige for women. Mid range occupations such as teaching and secretarial work are often deemed acceptable occupations for women but other occupations such as market work and sales are often very low status occupations and are taken up out of sheer necessity. Gender based patterns are evident with women dominating fields such as food and nutrition, nursing, teaching and accountancy. In contrast, men are found in large numbers in engineering and technology, law firms and architecture. Further, in medicine women tend to specialize in ‘soft’ fields like paediatrics, gyanaecology while men go into surgery and other ‘tough’ fields.
- 15.
Kelkar also suggested that women’s lower mobility has influenced recruitment policies in the IT industry. Human resource managers reported that they preferred to hire women rather than men, as women are more dedicated are likely to remain longer in job.
- 16.
Dreze and Sen (2002, p. 234) showed, how female literacy and employment has a positive bearing in reducing child mortality inspite of having regional contrasts. They note that “regional contrasts in the extent of gender bias in chid survival are far more striking than the contrast relating to religious identity”. The southern regions of India have gender-egalitarian environment as compared to the north which leads to the higher status of women in the south. In their study, the contrasts were captured through some dummy variables used for regional location. These dummy variables compress “information about a whole range of inter-related norms and practices related to marriage, mobility and inheritance which make up gender relations (Kabeer 2000 as cited in Raju 2011, p. 39).
- 17.
Modernity or modernization is seen as a process for a total transformation of a traditional or pre-modern society with associated social organization that characterize the advanced, economically prosperous and relatively politically stable nations of the world. Pathak looks at modernity, as related to the spirit of freedom. This freedom is rooted in the critical consciousness that it generates. It means that one should not take things for granted but rather question it, verify it and subject everything to scrutiny.
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Acknowledgments
I wish to acknowledge my supervisor Prof. Saraswati Raju for helping me conceptualize the Indian cities from a socio-spatial perspective, and integrate the concept of gender with geography.
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Chatterjee, P. (2017). Embedded or Liberated? An Exploration into the Social Milieu of Delhi. In: Acharya, S., Sen, S., Punia, M., Reddy, S. (eds) Marginalization in Globalizing Delhi: Issues of Land, Livelihoods and Health. Springer, New Delhi. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-81-322-3583-5_9
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