Women Hajj Pilgrims from India: Navigating Social, Legal, and Policy Challenges to Reclaim Public Spaces

Women’s access to and experience of public spaces plays out very differently from that of men’s access to such spaces across countries and cultures. This has been explored in great depth from various points of view, including religious and feminist ones. State policies seek to facilitate women’s access using urban planning, laws, and infrastructural measures while also addressing safety issues. This chapter explores two ideas. The first is that religious travel is one of the ways in which Indian women from various religions assert their right of access to public spaces. The lens of space and mobility places women’s experiences of external religious spaces in the context of the familial, cultural, and institutional spaces that they internally relate to. The second, connected idea is that when this right to public spaces is challenged during the course of a boarder power struggle, which is occurring simultaneously with religious authority ceding space to secular state power, it enables a renegotiation. Power here is inherent in the very act of women’s resistance to restrictions, which encroach on women’s internal spaces, or their sense of self, and limit their access to external spaces. Women emerge as key actors, first by asserting their presence in public spaces and second by opposing the mystifying restrictions imposed on them. This is examined at three levels. First, it broadly touches upon the near-universal phenomenon, citing examples of how women negotiate their presence in public spaces in various urban contexts. It then zeroes in on the Indian context, exploring how women from various religions use pilgrimage as an act of exploring and claiming public spaces. The third level considers a specific case study of Indian Muslim women travelling for hajj under the government’s quota. Women from India travel for hajj in great numbers, constituting about 45% of travellers between 2012 and 2016, despite restrictions that forced them to travel with only certain male relatives. These numbers have steadily increased since the rule was relaxed for women aged 45 years and above, in 2018. Focusing on the point of transition when the regulation changed to allow women over 45 to travel in groups with other women, instead of only with specific male relatives, enables an examination of a complex web of interconnected, often contradictory, factors that include culture, gender, age, religion, state policy, and regulation, on which the restriction relied.