Negotiating everyday gender-based violence: Reflecting on fieldwork in India and South Africa

India and South Africa are two rapidly transforming economies grappling with social and political transitions – the ongoing consolidation and contestation of Hindu nationalist populism in India and the project of post-apartheid reconstruction and transformation in South Africa. Within these contexts, violence against women remains high, despite a raft of progressive legislation aimed at tackling such violence. In this article, we offer a broad overview emerging from a joint research project involving researchers from both countries and drawing on fieldwork in two class-differentiated sites: Gurgaon (in Delhi NCR, India) and Alexandra/Sandton (in Johannesburg, South Africa). The article draws specifically on women’s narratives of violence and the discursive ambivalences, tropes, and aspirations of Indian and South African women as they negotiate everyday violence. We emphasize the importance of contextual, intersectional and granular approaches to understanding gendered violence, and of situating the social production of violence in specific spatial relations where such violence is both normalized and contested.