Cows, Cars and Cycle-rickshaws: Bourgeois Environmentalists and the Battle for Delhi's Streets

Abstract

This chapter examines the ongoing emergence of a public sphere on Delhi’s streets, a process in which middle-class concerns about creating social and spatial order have contended with an unruly ‘republic of the streets’. This republic, which accommodates an anarchic assembly of activities by variously situated social groups and individuals, has faced ‘relentless momentum towards [transformation] as a place of passage and traffic’ all else (ibid.). In analyzing treatment of cows, cars and cycle-rickshaws in Delhi, the author seek to address two conceptual and political concerns: the production of a hegemonic notion of social and spatial order by bourgeois environmentalists through the public sphere; and the limits placed upon this project by contradictory consciousness of the middle classes. Thus, the spatial and social order that bourgeois environmentalists seek to impose is unravelled by everyday interdependencies between state agents and citizens, and by the competing claims of the public and the private that need to be reconciled within bourgeois citizen-self.