I wrote a post on the UCL Development Planning Unit blog, which draws on my experiences of interviewing women in the old city, while doing fieldwork in Hyderabad. Positionality, or who the researcher is and how she, or in this case he, presents himself, fundamentally shapes the nature of conversations and therefore research. It can determine who you can speak to, and the kinds of answers you may expect to get, though of course these can be transcended. Unsurprisingly, I found it quite hard to get access to woman respondents, but when I did, the four women I interviewed exemplified the complex nature of gender and power relations within societies that are seen as male dominated.
Extract –
“The courtyard space seemed to be shared by all the households who live there, but Naseer’s mother possessed some subtle authority. I was to learn later that Naseer’s family were the tenants who had lived there longest, all of eight years. Naseer’s father drives an auto rickshaw, leaving the house in the morning only to return at night, and he told me he leaves the running of the house and paying of the bills to his wife. It appears that she may have some say in the running of the other households in the tenement as well, certainly as far as the use of the shared space is concerned.
I interviewed three other women living in the same tenement. The first was Naseer’s grandmother, who lives in the adjoining room. Her husband died last year and Naseer’s father decided she should move from the settlement where she and his father used to live. He felt it was not safe for a widowed woman to continue living there. She told me that she believed she would have been fine, but moved at her son’s insistence.
The second was a middle-aged women living in a two-room apartment along with her five daughters. She told me that her husband had left her some years before, and that he hadn’t provided much financial support for her or their eleven children. She has managed to marry off five of her daughters, and is now left with five more to worry about.
The last was the landlady, or as she described it, daughter of the owner of the building. She said she lives like a tenant along with the others, paying for utilities and managing the space for her mother in lieu of rent. Her husband works as a chauffer in Saudi Arabia, and visits once in two years. Unlike the other women I interviewed, she attended school and is literate in both Urdu and English.”
Read the entire blogpost here