The Moving City

Scenes from the Delhi Metro and the Social Life of Infrastructure

Rashmi Sadana

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780520383975
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

The Moving City is a rich and intimate account of urban transformation told through the story of Delhi's Metro, a massive infrastructure project that is reshaping the city's social and urban landscapes. Ethnographic vignettes introduce the feel and form of the Metro and let readers experience the city, scene by scene, stop by stop, as if they, too, have come along for the ride. Laying bare the radical possibilities and concretized inequalities of the Metro, andhow people live with and through its built environment, this is a story of women and men on the move, the nature of Indian aspiration, and what it takes morally and materially to sustain urban life. Through exquisite prose, Rashmi Sadana transports the reader to a city shaped by both its Metro and those who depend on it, revealing a perspective on Delhi unlike any other.

PART I

Crowded

Map 1. Phase 1 of the Delhi Metro opened in stages between 2002 and 2006 and consisted of three lines: Red, Yellow, and Blue. With Phase I, Dilliwalas became accustomed to torn-up streets, blocked entrances, and blue corrugated-metal boundary walls that lined city roads, especially in central Delhi (Yellow Line), northwest Delhi (Red Line), and west Delhi (Blue Line). Phase I was the opening salvo in the Metro offensive. It was the time when the interface between the Metro and the city was first felt and negotiated. City residents and business owners had been and were still being moved out of the Metro’s way. As station names and places took hold in the imagination, those displaced by the construction were permanently relocated to places far from the city (and the Metro), such as Holambi Kalan in northwest Delhi.

THE TRAIN TO DWARKA

The train to Dwarka is crowded even on an early Sunday afternoon. Central Delhi may be more still, and the road traffic-less, but inside the Metro throngs of people are going places. At times they crush into one another.

A creation of the Delhi Development Authority, the sub-city of Dwarka has risen up along the Metro corridor with hundreds of low-rise housing colonies and scores of “international” schools, business centers, sports clubs, and malls.¹

A few men in their early twenties sit cross-legged on the floor, talking and laughing. Three younger boys, thirteen or fourteen years old, stand in front of them, doing pull-ups on the high bar, joking, trying to get the attention of the other men by entertaining them with curiosities pulled from their pockets. One says he has Afghan currency and is parading it around. It is a scene you might see almost anywhere in the city, an approximation of the street below, and yet completely removed from it.

Many people are hooked up to music players or talking on their mobiles. Men carry goods in tightly packed cartons; toddlers lie on the seats or stand on them to look out the windows, delighting in their own reflections. My arms rub against the women sitting on either side of me. In the space between the coaches, a man squats talking on his mobile. People mostly sit quietly; they do not eat or drink or spit. Most noticeable is what is missing: heat, sweat, filth, food, trash, odor, aroma. The stick in the air. Inside, the elements have been reordered, enabling a different view of this city-region of thirty million. Curiously, people look but do not stare, even the multiple packs of young men in slim jeans.

At Rajiv Chowk station commuters line up in neat rows waiting for the train to Dwarka, only to dissolve into a mass once the train arrives and the doors slide open. The logic of entering and exiting the train is whichever side has more people wins, like a scrimmage. People collide head-on as they push past each other. The spoils are there for all to see: for those coming in, a shiny seat; for those going out, their destination in record time and comfort.

The Metro has no ticket collector to complain to if something goes wrong or if someone gets out of line, for this is an automated environment. Many people were shocked, when, early on, a contracted Metro worker directing people to board a train got his hand stuck in the door as it was closing and was dragged to the next station while clutching the outside of the train. Passengers on board watched in amazement and horror but didn’t know to hit the emergency bell.

As the train heads west, aboveground, the city opens up and peters out into a landscape of circling birds, low-level dwellings, institutes of knowledge, health, and beauty, and the occasional shopping mall. This east-west line is for commuters; the trains go aboveground soon after Connaught Place, and people tend to stay on for more than a few stops. There is time to relax and settle in.

A wiry young man I’m standing next to, Pranjal, is studying at the National Law University. He shares an apartment with another student near Delhi University and regularly rides the train. When I tell him I’m studying the Metro, he says, “I don’t know if you’re looking at the economics of it or issues of marketing, but I have some thoughts.” He feels the need to teach, tell, persuade, or command people to follow certain rules, he says, like the one to let other passengers off the train before boarding themselves. He describes being in the crush of the crowd one day, alongside a young mother carrying a small child. The crowd hadn’t made way for her but had pushed her aside. He couldn’t understand this, nor do anything to help her; he ended up ensnarled in her bangles and left the train with bruised arms.

On the platform people rush to the escalators, forming a wide circle at the bottom of each one. It slowly shrinks as people move up. A smaller group waits for the elevator. “Stay Fit, Use the Stairs” signs are posted at each exit, placed there, it turns out, not to keep the populace in shape but to encourage the able-bodied to leave room in the elevators for others. Once upstairs (or downstairs, if at an elevated station) everyone passes through the electronic gates once more to leave the station. Some walk, others look for a bus or an auto or cycle rickshaw.

One afternoon I wait for a train with Sunila, a commuter from Dwarka in her mid-twenties. She is going to Uttam Nagar East, on her way to work. She didn’t talk about the city in the same way when she used to ride the bus, she tells me. Then, her route was not direct and not as fast. It was not, as she says now, “Delhi up-down.”²

MANDI HOUSE

Mandi House station first rose up in 2006. It was a mirage then, stylish, compact, and somewhat disconnected from the traffic circle around it. The station’s pale gray stone façade was meant to blend into the landscape, which it eventually did; but in 2006 it still had a curb, a crumbling set of stones at its perimeter that pointed to its newness, a place, a line really, where the station and the city met. This line in the stony sand represented the city’s becomingness in the sense that the urban is always becoming, always in process. The line also made the city visible, in the sense that it came into being in a new manner, a new framing. There was more to see, to apprehend, in the new angles and fixtures.

This line demarcating the station was an invitation, or at least an announcement. It announced that there would be a before and after the Metro. It announced that people in the city would be circulated in a new way. A circulation through the crisscrossing of perpendicular lines rather than roads and roundabouts. The line demarcating the station was one of the many new visibilities that the destruction and construction of the Delhi Metro unearthed, enabled, instituted.

During the first phase of the project, numerous neighborhoods that the Metro would soon pass through first became construction zones piled high with dust, corrugated metal sheets, cement, and cranes. Traffic was rerouted and city dwellers in many areas suffered from what one urban planner called “a tidal wave of physical destruction and social disorientation.”³ Then these same areas were restored and embellished, even as dislocation became relocation for hundreds of families and businesses moved out of the Metro’s way. It will soon be hard to remember what the city was like before the Metro.⁴

In daytime the sound of traffic on Delhi’s roads is constant; it pierces, whistles, and demarcates outsideness. Sounds indicate motion in the city; they expand the space of the road and become something you not only hear but feel. Ambient sounds are everywhere, creating an “interlocking soundscape.”⁵ With sirens and the ringing of temple bells in the mix, you could be in a video arcade. Then an airplane hums overhead; you can barely hear it, but the sight of it somehow trumps the sound on the road.

Figure 4. Mandi House station, Blue Line, 2006. The area would go on to be remade again in Phase 3 of the Metro’s construction when the station became an interchange hub for the Blue and Violet Lines.

The Metro system takes people out of circulation at first, of sight and sound, then reprocesses them inside through the ticket line, security check, and platforms to join another type of circulation. Mandi House station’s sixteenth-century moniker, the Raja of Mandi, has no place or purpose in this new urban reckoning. Mandi House had already become a general urban designation for this place of establishment arts, communications, and culture. It originally referred to a building, then to a roundabout, and now to a Metro station. Names also travel in cities, they circulate and designate; they are signs, both arbitrary and meaningful, perhaps meaningful because of their arbitrariness. A name can gain momentum over time.

Kamala, who works as a beautician in south Delhi homes, first went on the Metro when her husband took her and their three children for a joyride. Her husband used to go “up-down” on the Blue Line from Mayur Vihar to Mandi House. He worked as a cook at the National School of Drama. “He cooked for those kids learning how to act,” she tells me.

Kamala’s husband died earlier in the year, making her a thirty-eight-year-old widow. “He took too many medicines from the chemist and had a bad reaction,” she explains. “His lungs failed.” The youngest of her three children thinks his father is still in the hospital and sometimes asks why he’s been there for so long. Her husband was good, she says, “he showed a lot of love.”

Kamala describes the Metro as being “andhar hee andhar”—enclosed, encompassed. When it’s hot you escape the heat, when it’s cold you escape the cold. One afternoon we ride to Mandi House together; Kamala gets in line to buy a token, and I follow suit. We take the Blue Line toward Noida. From there the train goes aboveground at Pragati Maidan. Kamala points out the window of the train to the light blue and white World Health Organization building just beneath us in the close distance and tells me that this is where they set the nutrition guidelines for India. We get down at Yamuna Bank station to meet her cousin, Alok, on the platform. He is taking her to a government office to deposit her widow’s pension papers. We take the next train and get to Mayur Vihar, and she and Alok go off to look for an auto rickshaw. Before leaving, Kamala points to the half-done Metro line overhead; “This one will come to my house,” she says, “then it will be even easier.”

VANITA

When Vanita and I meet at Dilli Haat one afternoon in 2009, she tells me that she’s had a “generally protected life.” We are sitting at a food court table in an open-air artisan market in south Delhi, but she’s describing 1960s Calcutta, where she grew up. “Someone was always taking me, I always went with someone—a grandfather, an uncle. Just to take a bus, you had to get down at the right stop.”

I got in touch with Vanita through a friend of a friend, who, on hearing about my interest in the Metro, said, “I know someone you should talk to.” I called Vanita and we arranged to meet.

Vanita is a college lecturer and came to Delhi in the 1970s when she finished her postgrad education and got married. She doesn’t tell me anything about her husband other than “he knew how to drive.” He bought a secondhand car for them, and soon she couldn’t think of being in Delhi without one. They lived in east Delhi, and after some time they got a better car. They had a traditional middle-class division of labor: she looked after the children while he focused on his profession.

“He tried teaching me how to drive, but I was a late starter, I couldn’t deal with the traffic. I became more and more dependent on him.” Then they hired a driver, which Vanita came to understand as “this other dependence.” If her husband and the driver were not around, she’d call a t...

Table of contents

• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part I: Crowded
• Part II: Expanding
• Part III: Visible
• Epilogue
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index