The modern city promises many opportunities, but it also poses many challenges to women in public and private, including everyday violence. Through women’s own narratives, the film No City for Women: Gurgaon | Millennium City | 2023 explores their experience of living and working in the city. 

The film was produced as a part of an ESRC-funded Cambridge-Oxford collaborative research project on urban transformation and gendered violence in India. We collaborated with professional film-makers Rangan Chakravarty, Director, and Arjun Gourisaria, Editor (twice winner of the Indian National Film Award for editing). 

Women’s own narratives on gendered social worlds

Set in Gurgaon, India’s ‘millennial’ city in the Delhi National Capital Region (NCR), the film illuminates the exclusionary and oppressively gendered nature of techno-modern urbanisation. As the city becomes more modern, it also becomes aggressively masculinised and women face increasing patriarchal control. The film depicts how women themselves understand and experience violence in both public and private, not only as physical assault, but also as suffering, pain and struggles emanating from the gendered compulsion to live circumscribed and diminished lives. The film explores how women exercise their spirited agency to make the city their own, in the face of humiliation, coercion and restriction. 

We adopted the strategy of recording women’s narratives through open-ended and empathetic conversations. Eschewing a focus on much publicised overt acts of physical violence or sexual violation, particular attention was paid to the gendered social worlds that women inhabit and the banal, insidious and normalised forms of harm and abuse in public and private that are often borne in silence by women and that receive little public discussion or recognition. 

Film promotion to young urban audiences

Taking Gurgaon to be emblematic of gendered urban life in India, we are promoting the film to urban audiences to visibilise and validate women’s tacit knowledge and experience of normalised and everyday forms of violence. Our aim is to redress the ‘testimonial injustice’ of ignoring or dismissing women’s voices and narratives about such insidious, corrosive experiences. Our target audience is, in particular, young people, accessed through higher education institutions. For women, we seek to vindicate their lived realities and, for men, we hope to create awareness of ‘invisible’ gendered violence. 

The film premiered at the 4th Beyond Borders Feminist Film Festival in Delhi in December 2023 and was chosen as the Official Selection. It was subsequently screened at the International Documentary and Short Film Festival, Thiruvanthapuram, Kerala (Official Selection); Indian Documentary Film Festival, Bhuvaneswar, Orissa; India International Centre and India Habitat Centre, Delhi; Museo Camera, Gurgaon, in collaboration with the NGO Safetipin that works to create safe cities for women; and UK Development Studies Association Annual Conference, London; Cambridge and Oxford. More importantly, the film has been shown at colleges and universities in cities in India, such as Delhi NCR, Kolkata, Bangalore (around 10 screenings so far). Members of the research team have been in attendance for postscreening discussions that have been gratifyingly animated and engaging, usually extending for far longer duration than originally planned. Audiences have also submitted comments in writing at screenings and through a QR code on Google forms. 

Audience response

“The film showed what women face everyday all the time; it is overwhelming to see it all stitched together in the film, because we don’t ever get to see it that way.” 

“It’s just so shocking that all these are universal and no one would ever notice it even though it’s happening on a large scale. It’s like we know something like this is happening but we won’t take any steps towards it. People would just let it slide rather than doing anything about it …”

Audience response and comments suggest that the twin aims of affirming women’s experiences and creating awareness about normalised violence are being realised. The most frequently used term in comments was “relatable”. Below are some audience comments.

Male viewers 

“I am not a perpetrator [of violence], but I realise now how complicit I am.” 

Female viewers 

“Time didn’t feel it had passed while watching the film. With every story [more] relatable than the next.” 

“I have never before felt so seen …” 

“It made me reflect. … It felt very suffocating.” 

“I had goosebumps ...” 

“Thoroughly shook me. I would like to show this to my family. … absolutely captivating film.” 

“It was like one of the many daily reminders that how scary it is to be a woman and how deep rooted and internalized patriarchy is. I got chills during the film, some moments hitting too close to home.” 

Nishtha Jain, award-winning feminist film director 

“What kind of cities have we created for our women? … The kind of spaces women have to negotiate just on their way to work, then at work, and after-hours, and at home. Will this ever change? The film takes a deep dive into the structure of our society that perpetrates this violence. Brilliantly put together.” 

Bina Paul, National Award-winning film editor 

“It’s quite explosive. Maybe one of the most hard-hitting films I have seen on the subject. On masculinity actually. It is very moving in the attitude of the young women and what they are up against.”

Find out more about the overall project, which includes focuses on both India and South Africa, here: The GendV Project.