THERE ARE contradictory narratives about the Delhi Metro and its relatively recent, but significant, place in the life of the city. Rashmi Sadana’s new book, The Moving City: Scenes from the Delhi Metro and the Social Life of Infrastructure, sheds light on this. Her interlocutors see it variously as a “manifestation of India’s image, the India shining bit;” as transportation specifically for “bade aadmi (big men)” and the public vehicle that prevented the collapse of a “city on the brink.”
The metro rail being seen as the default solution for problems of urban mobility is rarely contested. Though Kolkata was the first site of a functional city metro in India, the Delhi Metro is hailed as the shining example, garnering praise in the country and abroad, encouraging similar projects in other cities. In the recent general election, the Bhartiya Janata Party promised to “expand the metro network in major urban centres ensuring last mile connectivity,” while its ally Nitish Kumar also announced metro projects in Bihar. The public image of the city has become inextricable from the light-rail system. And, as Sadana notes, it has reshaped not just the physical but also the cultural geography of the city, with its residents often articulating it as a matter of pride.
A lot of academic literature that focusses on segregation and displacement in urban contexts has examined how caste, religion and class shape, in insidious ways, who gets to live where in Indian cities. More recently, who can travel, and where to, has also formed a considerable part of this body of work. Though Sadana’s ethnography of the Delhi Metro tracks how the transport system has become synonymous with a new form of social mobility, it is at its sharpest when it pauses to question cracks in the narrative about the metro as an unparalleled social leveller. An older work, Why Loiter? Women and Risk on Mumbai Streets, offers answers to one of Sadana’s guiding questions—“Who gets to take up more space and move faster through the city?”—as it tries visualising what Indian cities might even look like if women could claim space the way men do. Smriti Singh’s The Middle Class in Neo-Urban India: Space, Class and Distinction, meanwhile, examines the newer reconstruction of city spaces ostensibly designed to be future-facing, with an emphasis on modern “global” aesthetics tailored to the middle class and the elite, while undermining the legitimate and glaring concerns of those in the present.
BEFORE THE DELHI METRO, buses were the main form of public transport in the city. “By the 1990s, the landscape of the public transport system in Delhi had begun to change,” Sushmita Pati notes in Properties of Rent: Community, Capital and Politics in Globalising Delhi, tracing this trend back to a dramatic increase in public investment in roads in the 1970s, with retail chains for two-wheelers, buses, trucks and jeeps beginning to grow. The Delhi Transport Corporation ran its own buses but began giving permits to private companies; eventually transport was largely outsourced to the private sphere.