Drawing on a one-year research project, this article attempts to make a feminist appraisal of the phenomenon of men’s rights groups in contemporary India. This effort is structured in two parts. The expository section of this article addresses the following questions: who are the members of men’s rights groups and what are their social locations? What are their goals? Who are their supporters? What methods of recruitment do they employ? The latter, and longer, part of the article maps the ambient environment in which the issue of men’s rights has been framed in an organised form since the early 1990s. It asks: in what ways are these collective markings of a historically privileged masculine identity related to broader processes of cultural, social and legal change? The article suggests that the demand for men’s rights in India is to be explained by the reconstitution of patriarchy—expressed particularly in altered gender roles within the family—that has been necessitated by the dual pressures of economic change and feminist legal intervention in the previous two decades. The anxious call for men’s rights is indicative of a crisis tendency in the contemporary gender order, which has, at specific moments, undermined the legitimacy of some patriarchal arrangements. The organised form in which this collective male concern has been voiced has been facilitated by the proliferation of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and Internet technologies in India from the 1990s onwards.

Through ethnographic contact with the working lives of male autorickshaw drivers in contemporary Kolkata, India, this article unravels the gendered politics of co-presence in shared movement systems in the city. In doing so, it makes a feminist intervention in the literature on urban infrastructures by revealing precisely how ideas of masculinity operate as an invisible structuring principle of everyday mobility. The discussion foregrounds conflict, cooperation and disappointment as the key experiential axes along which male transport workers inhabit infrastructural space in the city. It argues that urban infrastructures are experienced by working-class men as a reminder of their struggle to accomplish the norm of respectable breadwinner masculinity, even as they function as a terrain which allows other expressions of masculinity – such as risk-taking, mastery over space, camaraderie – to be enacted and affirmed. Using a micro-sociological approach to understanding interactions in the spaces of commuting, this article brings into view the interface between cultures of masculinity and the social life of transport infrastructures through which gendered spatial inequalities are lived in the city.

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In the history of urban thought, density has been closely indexed to the idea of citylife. Drawing on commuters’ experiences and perceptions of crowds in and around Tokyo’s Shinjuku Station, this article offers an ethnographic perspective on the relationship between urban crowds and life in the city. We advance understandings of the relations between the crowd and citylife through three categories of ‘crowd relations’– materiality, negotiation and inclusivity – to argue that the multiplicity of meanings which accrue to people’s encounters with crowds refuses any a priori definitions of optimum levels of urban density. Rather, the crowd relations gathered here are evocations of citylife that take us beyond the tendency to represent the crowd as a particular kind of problem, be it alienation, exhaustion or a threshold for ‘good’ and ‘bad’ densities. The portraits of commuter crowds presented capture the various entanglements between human and non-human, embodiment and mobility, and multiculture and the civic, through which citylife emerges as a mode of being with oneself and others.

The exercise of social control in cities has been linked in a fundamental way to a wide variety of policing mechanisms in urban contexts. This article builds on the literature on urban policing by foregrounding 'masculinities' as a unit of analysis for understanding everyday practices of law enforcement on city streets. It describes quotidian interactions between male public transport vehicle operators and traffic police in contemporary Kolkata, India, to make a set of analytical observations about three interrelated concerns a) the gendered character of urban policing, b) the emotional and moral ethos of urban law enforcement, and c) the production of the city as a male space. Through these analyses the article develops the concept of 'homosocial trust' as an explanatory framework for understanding gendered dimensions of the everyday state, place-making, and mobility in the ordinary city. Such a heuristic draws thought to the vocabulary of masculinity used by men, who are otherwise framed in a conflictual relationship, to transact situational trust and make city streets inhabitable for themselves. The article shifts the emphasis in studies of urban policing away from conflict to mundane collaboration between law enforcement officers and urban publics to highlight the masculinities of everyday state practice through which the city is reproduced as a space of patriarchal power. The article draws on ethnographic interviews with autorickshaw drivers, taxi drivers, traffic police personnel, and participant observation at workshops conducted by the police with transport workers to sensitize them to safe road practices in Kolkata.