What you are listening to is the sound of a walk in and around the Mandi House area in Central Delhi. Mallika Taneja, the instigator of Women Walk at Midnight, invites us to listen to the entire duration of the midnight walk she recorded on May 20, 2023. This is an invitation to journey alongside the participants who are sensing their way through a night in the city. The author shares the impulses and imagination behind the practice of Women Walk at Midnight, and its auditory chapter, «evesdropping», in the note below.
Women Walk at Midnight is a practice of walking at night, and past midnight, around different areas and neighborhoods of a city. This is a non-funded, volunteer-based practice initiated by theater artist Mallika Taneja in late 2016, in New Delhi, India. We seek no permissions and no formal securities to walk on the street at night. We walk because the streets and the night belong to us as much as to any other citizen. We take on what the night brings with it and we face it together.
For the past seven years, we have gone from a walk every few months to one walk every month in a different part of the city. The practice has expanded and has tried to stretch its definition of midnight, walking, as well as what constitutes «women». Women have walked in several cities over the years – Bangalore, Guwahati, Rishikesh, to name a few in India, and São Paulo and Brussels overseas. Over the past year, Cape Town in South Africa has developed its own chapter of Women Walk at Midnight.
Over the years, we have seen increased participation from queer, non-binary, trans, and other folx who do not adhere to normative understanding of «man» and «woman». We try, and don’t always succeed, to reach out to people who usually would not be found on such walks. We try to keep this space open to anyone who requires a space such as this to take a walk at night.
Each walk is led by a woman from the very neighborhood that we walk in that month. Cities welcome different people differently. For women, cities all over the world are known to be harsh. In New Delhi, the streets ogle at women, and don’t make much space for them. The gaze of the city pierces through – it threatens us, violates us, and the air echoes with ways and means to «be careful», shifting the onus of safety onto the shoulders of women, shirking its responsibility to treat us like equal citizens of this world.
By walking repeatedly, without permissions and in groups, we notice how, slowly but surely, it shifts how women feel and experience safety and pleasure in the city at night. Over time, cities must also learn to look at, respect, and make space for the «after hours» presence of women on the streets, and, for that matter, their every presence.
A lot happens on every walk and yet it may seem like… nothing happened at all.
We walk from point A to point B, we stroll, we listen to music, look at the sky and its few stars, we talk. At times we encounter the police – we deal with them… we eat ice-cream, befriend street dogs and sometimes get chased by them. We sing songs of the night, read poems, take pit stops at the bus stops (because our cities woefully lack public benches). We talk about the weather, and sometimes about politics. We get tired, we get excited, make friends, and become a community, albeit an ephemeral one. We walk in silence, we walk and walk and walk.
I started to make audio recordings of these walks sometime in 2022. While walking in the city over the years, I keenly noticed how the sounds of the city change as the hour changes and how within a span of two hours, we could be occupying such different sounding spaces. Cities are usually noisy, chaotic – to stumble upon quiet in them all of the sudden was precious… and to have a passing horn pierce through that quiet – a bringing back to reality of sorts. Conversations with the walkers were always rich… there was so much fun, laughter, song… and I often heard women echo each other on issues like safety, pleasure, solidarity… walk after walk, month after month. It felt almost necessary to document these occurrences. The people joining the walks come from different backgrounds and realities, so audio as a form also aided anonymity, when required.
What you are listening to is an audio recording of our walk on May 20, 2023, in and around the Mandi House area of New Delhi. The walk was led by Ujwala, a journalist originally from Bangalore, who lived in the area for about a year. It stretched slightly over two hours. The zoom recorder that captured it all stayed with me, Mallika, the entire duration of the walk.
This unedited recording, from when we start to when we stop, is an invitation for you to journey with us for the entire duration of the walk. Resisting the temptation to edit or make more «accessible» by shortening or putting together only the «relevant» parts, here you can listen to «everything» that my recorder caught that night. Over the two hours, you will hear a lot of chatter, volumes of silence, traffic, dogs, footsteps, some humming, a quietening down of the night, and us walking. Time passes as we walk, the sounds and sights of the city shift and we shift with them. As we tire over the two hours, our voices shift. For me, all of it is relevant and significant to the ways in which we sense the city and the city hears us. There is no shortcut to get an insight into Women Walk at Midnight – its texture, fatigue, sometimes boredom, its ethos and sheer necessity. And so, I ask you to give it the time it requires to get acquainted with the practice. As you let the two hours unfold, you will notice – sometimes gradually and at other times, suddenly – the shifts in the night, of the street, and in those walking. Perhaps even in you.
You can listen to this like a radio show or podcast in the background while doing house chores, while on the metro, while on your own walk… you can listen to it in bits and parts or skip forward. At many points you may ask yourself – why am I listening to this? What is going on? I ask that you keep listening. At the end of the two hours, you will have taken a journey with us and felt our fatigue, desires and fears – and perhaps, yours as well? In the midst of it all, you may hear sounds from the streets of Delhi, late into the night – for many of us, an inaccessible space, a taboo, a nervous state, an impossibility.
Perhaps this listening in – almost everdropping – is slightly demanding. But cities are demanding, the nights are demanding, and walking repeatedly over years and years is incredibly demanding. There is no real way to soften the blow. And then I also ask – why should it?
I think of the walking as riyaaz (practice/rehearsal)… the more you do it, the better you get at it…the easier you roll over the bumps and the more you own the form.
Join us for this walk, wherever you are.
