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

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Moving City: Scenes from the Delhi Metro and the Social Life of Infrastructure by Rashmi Sadana Amrita Ibrahim Sadana, Rashmi. The Moving City: Scenes from the Delhi Metro and the Social Life of Infrastructure. University of California Press, 2021. 274 pp. Working from home during the pandemic, one of the things I missed most about pre-pandemic life was commuting on the metro. Only I didn't realize this until I went back to work in person a year and five months later. Though I live in Washington D.C. and not Delhi, the metro fundamentally mediated my relationship to work and the city. It allowed me a space of my own between work and home, where I could be both public and private, from where I could watch people or retreat into my own space by means of a book or headphones, even as I shared it with others. Somewhat unexpectedly, it was this network of buses, trains, and walking routes—a quintessentially urban infrastructure—that I most joyfully embraced when I returned to working in person. The significance of the metro was emphasized by the contact it afforded with other people, even when distanced and masked; the feeling of intersecting with others as we all went about our lives and work. Rashmi Sadana's new book, The Moving City: Scenes from the Delhi Metro and the Social Life of Infrastructure, captures this sense of stranger-sociality by means of a "street-level ethnographic view of the city" (2). Sadana undertakes an unconventional, and yet entirely appropriate, approach to study the relatively new, glitzy Metro in Delhi that has taken over discussions of public transportation in the past decade and a half. Interspersed with secondary research and interviews with engineers, policy makers, and politicians are vignettes—what Sadana also calls secular parables or urban chronicles—of her encounters with people taking the metro, getting on [End Page 901] and off, and navigating different stations along its many lines. "Each vignette" Sadana writes, "represents a world of its own, which connects to the Metro in some way and intersects with the city. Each vignette is a kind of magnification" (22). Through these vignettes and the interfaces or seams where the Metro meets the street, where the old meets the new, Sadana offers the reader an impressionistic experience of the city. She joins together riders, last-mile suppliers like shared taxis, auto, cycle, and e-rickshaws, engineers and planners, political leaders, and citizens separated by class, caste, and local context. The book is divided into three sections: Crowded, Expanding, and Visible, which Sadana describes as the "three principles" at work in the infrastructure, the city, and everyday life. The three-way split also mirrors the three phases of construction of the Metro; the first talks about the newness of the Metro as infrastructure and experience; the second how the Metro expanded both as an infrastructure as well as a set of possibilities for riders and the city; and third, what social mobilities, hierarchies, and experiences are made visible, even as others are obscured through the design and new normative civics that the Metro enables. The structure and tone of the book mimic, Sadana tells us, the Metro as infrastructure, as experience: "One cannot dwell anywhere for too long…The Metro is an emergent whole… that has redefined the urban landscape; yet…the Metro also signifies the fragment, the partial journey, the unexpected meeting" (22). The book takes the Metro not only as an object of study, but also as the means of ethnography. The ethnographer rides the metro, "clocking over four thousand hours in all" (7), exploring all the lines and stations along the way. Under her treatment, the Metro emerges as text, infrastructure, a space, a form of neo-liberal pedagogy, an imagination, a method, a site of ethnography, a site of movement and flow, a gendered, classed, public, shared, aloof, and yet intimate world. Each of the vignettes allows the reader to see how the Metro could be read, experienced, or imagined in these ways without having to first wade through substantial background literature that might weigh down or fix the nature of the "Metro" as...