In The Invisible Man, Thomas Ellison's narrator contends that he is ‘invisible’ and argues that his invisibility is not because of a physical condition but is the result of others refusing to see him. It is a refusal to acknowledge humanity (Nussbaum, 1999). In the novel, the narrator also contends that he has purposefully remained invisible to society as a mark of protest. Similar invisibility, though in a different context, has been portrayed by the protagonist in Mahasweta Devi's Bashai Tudu (1990) who is always killed in police encounters and yet Tudu never dies. Tudu is invisible. Ellison's narrator is a homeless black American. Tudu is a tribal. The Invisible Man and Bashai Tudu are stories of individuals. What happens when invisibility refers to the disposition of state and the affected are a group of vulnerable people? How does state structure invisibility against its own citizen? And finally, how do vulnerable people respond?

The idea of invisibility is widely discussed in social sciences. Robinson (2000) contends that there are two kinds of invisibility – invisibility of those who are on the margin and of those who are in the centre of cultural and political power. She argues that non-dominant individuals and groups are ‘hidden from history’ i.e., excluded from the narratives of history. The powerful enjoy the invisibility behind the mask of universality (Robinson, 2000), similar to the person sitting inside the light emitting central tower of the Panopticon or Bentham's idea of a jail. For the vulnerable, invisibility is both a cause and effect of social and political exclusion (Phelan, 1993). This chapter is about the homeless who are on the margins and are socio-politically excluded.

Invisibility is physical and non-physical absence. The latter may be either absence in idea or absence of stimuli, such as the silence or even absence in the ability to experience. Sen (1999) interprets physical absence as missing. He contends that discrimination against women in South Asia is responsible for low women to men ratio. Even though biology favours women, the ratio is not in their favour.