By Manasi Nene
Is there an M.G. Road in your city? Or a Jawaharlal Nehru Road, or a Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose Marg? Don’t tell me; I already know. There is probably at least one of these present, that’s just an undeniable consequence of our history.
Do you have a Rani Laxmibai Road, though? Or a Sarojini Naidu Marg, or Kasturba Gandhi Path? This new interactive map traces the roads in seven cities, colour-coding the way they’re named – pink if the street is named after a woman, blue if it is named after a man.
Studying Bengaluru, Chennai, Mumbai, New Delhi, London, Paris and San Francisco, researchers led by Aruna Sankaranarayanan found something that is surprising absolutely nobody – streets named after men are more numerous and more centrally located than streets named after women.
Bengaluru is ahead of the Indian pack, with 39 percent of its streets named after women. But on an average, only 27.5 percent of the streets that they studied were named after women. The study filtered out gender neutral names (which is needed, I guess, because India is the land of places like Snapdeal.com Nagar, and also Kala Bakra and Panauti).
Another finding of the study is usually, only minor roads were named for women – smaller roads joining two larger ones, or roads far away from the heart of the city. “Street names affect the identity of a place”, says Sankaranarayanan. They’re the indicators of social hierarchy, often associated with markers of prestige. But the data doesn’t lie – hopefully, this map will open up our eyes to the way we need to recalibrate our public spaces. If not, we might just have to draw some inspiration from these women in Paris, and do it ourselves.