Elderly single women and urban property: when a room of one’s own becomes a curse

Overview

In this article, I rely upon the case study of a single, lower-middle-class woman from Delhi, to gain understanding of the everyday experience (rather than the right) of property ownership in an urban setting. The story will show how the right to property is not an end in itself. The actual experience of exercising the right is mediated through gender and socio-cultural interactions within the local community. In a context where the legal and administrative recourse is biased against women and crime against them is quite frequent, women owning property – especially when they are elderly – makes them easy targets of brutalisation without any protection from the communities in which they live.

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