Rashmi Sadana - The Moving City: Scenes from the Delhi Metro and the Social Life of Infrastructure

When you get off at the elevated Mundka station, a line of small white vans waits for passengers at the bottom of the escalator. Young men call out place-names for destinations all across the Haryana state border. Cow dung patties dry in the sun to one side of the station escalator; jagged lines of cars and buses jostle on the other. Half-built Metro stanchions leading to future stations rise up in the distance. Leaving Mundka, Raveena, a slim woman in her twenties, gets on the women-only coach of the Metro. We start to chat, and she tells me that her father drops her off and picks her up at the station each day. She takes the Metro a few stops eastward to Paschim Vihar to attend college. She is certain that she would not be on the Metro at all if it were not for the ladies coach.

After Mundka, its good, she says, but before Mundka, its very bad, the crowd and all. For Raveena, crowd is about place, about where you are from and the attitudes you may hold. It is an imagined likeness and social reality but perhaps more a public than an actual crowd. It is also, of course, a manner of speaking.

Haryana is not good, not good for girls. Men are not good, even boys. They stare at me, sometimes they vent at me. I cant do anything, she explains. Vent is typical Delhi-speak to describe when someone lashes

Delhi has been notorious as a place where women not only get harassed on the street but also may be subjected to the grisliest of crimes. These stories and statistics feed into a larger narrative about girls and womens safety and their proper place in the city (usually at home). As a street-level ethnographic view of the city, this book documents women and men in public places: how people flow into and out of trains and the new embodied experience of that flow; how they melt into the crowds yet emerge with individual experiences; how urban life comes to be narrated through the Metro. It recounts diverse experiences of the city and especially reveals what becomes visible through female gazes.

The arrival of the Delhi Metroan ultra-modern, high-tech, and highly surveilled urban rail system, and South Asias first large-scale, multiline metrohas become a touchstone for discussions of urban development, gendered social mobility, and Indias increasingly aspirational culture. The Metro is also a set of places and a facet of everyday urban life. Even though it shares many of the same features and feel of metro and subway systems around the world, the Metro is forced to take up the city as much as it overlays its own concreteness on it. Inside the trains, many of the social meanings and distinctions of Delhi society are transported and sometimes transformed. The Metro may be a highly regulated system, and its riders may have specific purposes and destinations in mind, but it is also a new concentration of strangers in an expansive social space where people are learning new things about their own desires.