Micropolitics of Everyday Life and Agency in a Gendered Space: A Study of a Harijan Basti in Guwahati

Abstract

This study analyses how women in Guwahati’s historically embedded slum, a Harijan Basti, negotiate the structural and spatial limitations manifested in the intersectionality of caste, class, and femininity. The study explores how home and domestic spaces become a contested domains of power, negotiation, and agency, with a focus on the notion of micro-politics of everyday lives, documenting how women see, understand, and behave within spatial constraints that are imposed from the outside and regulated by household dynamics using the existential phenomenological approach of Merleau-Ponty (1962) with an emphasis on embodied subjectivity and intersubjective meaning.

The study attempts to frame the notion of agency of marginalised women as both situated in relationality and placed in accordance with a feminist spatial framework, which views subjectivity as continuously shaped by daily routine interactions, emotional labour, and social status in society. The paper claims that slums, which are frequently perceived in reference to precarity and hardships of everyday life, are also spaces where gendered agency is continuously engaged in symbolic production, reconstruction, and resistance.