Guerrilla History - An Ethnographic & Sociological Study of the Delhi Metro w/ Rashmi Sadana

Episode Date: July 12, 2024

In this episode of Guerrilla History, we bring on the wonderful Professor Rashmi Sadana to discuss the Delhi metro system from a political economic, sociological, and ethnographic framework, based on her terrific book The Moving City: Scenes from the Delhi Metro and the Social Life of Infrastructure.  Talking about the political and sociological dimensions of infrastructure is a critically important topic for us to focus on, and one which we are trying to devote a bit more time to.  We recommend also checking out our recent conversation with Laleh Khalili on Red Sea Shipping & the Gaza Genocide to hear a bit more of our discussions on transportation infrastructure. Rashmi Sadana  is Professor of Anthropology at George Mason University and author of English Heart, Hindi Heartland: The Political Life of Literature in India.  Keep up to date with the Professor's work by checking out her faculty webpage. Help support the show by signing up to our patreon, where you also will get bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/guerrillahistory 

You remember Den Bamboo? No! The same thing happened in Algeria, in Africa. They didn't have anything but a rank. The French had all these highly mechanized instruments of warfare. But they put some guerrilla action on. Hello and welcome to Gorilla History, the podcast that acts as a reconnaissance report of global proletarian history and aims to use the lessons of history to analyze the present. I'm one of your co-hosts, Henry Huckimacki,

joined as usual by my co-host, Professor Adnan Hussain, historian and director of the School of Religion at Queen's University in Ontario, Canada. Hello, Adnan. How are you doing today? I'm doing great. It's wonderful to be with you, Henry. Yes, and we're playing where in the world is Adnan Hussein again, because you are on the road. Once again, where are you joining us from today? Istanbul, back in Istanbul. This is probably the third time in not many more episodes that he has been in a different country during the recording listeners. Adnan lives a life that we can all only aspire to. Oh, yes, international man of mystery. That's what the academic is actually all about. Yes, absolutely. I aspire to it. In any case, before we turn to our guests and the excellent

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by following us on Twitter at Gorilla underscore Pod. That's G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A-U-L-A-U-Pod. We're fortunate enough to be joined today by Professor Rashmi Sadana, who is a professor of anthropology at George Mason University, author of English-Hart Hindi Heartland. It'll be nice if I could say these words correctly during the interview today. And the book that we're going to be talking about today, The Moving City, Scenes from the Deli Metro and the social life of infrastructure. Professor Sedona, it's nice to have you on the program.

It's great to be here with you both. Thanks for inviting me. Yeah, absolutely. I'm really looking forward to this conversation. I really enjoyed the book, although I must admit that this book is not at all what I was expecting. Adnan proposed that we cover this book, and when he sent the book over, the moving city scenes from the Delhi Metro, I was under the impression that it was going to be a history of the Delhi Metro, but that is not at all what this book is.

So to open, you know, this is a sociological and ethnographic study of the Delhi Metro much more than a history. I'm wondering if you could let the listeners know a little bit more about the project that you undertook with this book, as well as your methodological and analytical framework that you utilized in the creation of this book, because I think that'll be a really good way to frame this conversation and then dig in deeper from there. Sure.

I'd be happy to do that. So this book comes out of, I think, two major sort of things in my life. One is that I had been going to Delhi since I was about two years old. So this city is a city that I've known for a long time. First, as a visitor, I went on a lot of trips over my childhood with my parents who are both from Delhi. And then sort of in my late teens and early 20s, I started to go to Delhi on my own and kind of discover the city, you know, just as an American backpacker would or, you know, going around India and that kind of thing. And then I started to have more of an intellectual interest in Delhi as I was writing my PhD

dissertation, which was about literary language in India. But really, what the process of that, of doing that dissertation, I really decided that, oh, I need to study the multilingual reality of Delhi. This is all going to lead to the metro. Don't worry. So my background had been in literature. I had done my BA in literature, and even my master's degree was still kind of more literature-oriented. But it was really ethnography and going into the discipline of anthropology that made me, that enabled me really to study literature in this more kind of everyday grounded way. So that first project was about going to publishers in different parts of the city, especially focusing on English and Hindi. That became the sort of theoretical focus of the book was really the politics of language and the relationship between English and Hindi, especially around the politics of authenticity in the post-colonial era.

But what happened was that in the process, I really became an urban ethnographer. And this was something I was not expecting. You know, now I call myself one. But at that time, when I was doing my PhD dissertation, I just thought, oh, I'm in Delhi and I'm meeting with writers. I'm meeting with translators. I'm going to the Sahithia Academy, which was the Academy of Letters. I'm, you know, getting around, usually by auto-ricksha or by bus. I like to walk.

I walked a lot in Delhi. So I was really getting to know the city. in a new way, very different than when I used to make visits as a kid or even in my teens and 20s. So a few years after that then, after I'd finished the PhD and was trying to turn it into a book and that kind of thing, I was visiting, so I was at Columbia at this point doing a postdoc and I went to India, you know, pretty much every year, often during the December break. And so I was there in, like, 2006. And I'd heard there was a new metro. I just thought, oh, I'll go check it out. And I'm sitting in that train, riding the metro, whizzing through from New Delhi to

Old Delhi. And I just had this big aha moment. And I just thought, oh, this is going to change things. This is bizarre and incredible. And, you know, to be, I mean, Delhi is, if you have not been there, it is a very, it's a densely populated, but very extravagantly built up city. It is a highly developed city. It is a city of, you know, ancient monuments, but also so many modern architectural marvels. It has, you know, a complex traffic structure. There's so much going on. And now there were these lines. At that time in 2006, there were three lines. Now there are 10. But at that time, there were three. And really what struck me first was being in this very different social space, this very different container moving through the city, right? So,

you know, like many of us, I'd been on metros in Paris and London and, you know, New York and Singapore. And so, you know, and it was on one hand just like that. But on the other hand, it was not just like that because it was in the city that I really had known in a very different way for the previous 30 years. And I had an inkling, which turned out to be right, that, you know, I was not the only one that was realizing that this was going to have a major impact, both, you know, socially, physically, economically, in all these different ways. And so I think that was really the moment also where I realized, oh, you know, I'm going to study the city, but I'm going to study it through the prism of the metro.

Some people have asked me, oh, you know, so now are you going to do, you know, I live in Washington, in D.C. so they were like, oh, are you going to write, you know, an ethnography of the D.C. Metro. And I'm like, no, I have no interest in the D.C. Metro. And I mean, D.C. is, you know, it's pleasant. It's a nice place to live. But it's, you know, it doesn't have at least what was in my brain, which is, you know, this complex city of, you know, so many histories and so many, you know, contradictory and interesting and troubling and, you know, exciting intersections that that Deli has for me. And so I knew it was going to be an urban ethnography or urban study. I knew, you know, as an anthropologist, that I wanted to, you know, understand the city in a new way.

I was interested in the social space, what this, you know, tubular, air-conditioned, well-lit structure, infrastructure that had been built to international standards. This was also something new for Delhi. It was a different kind of construction down to the way it was built and the kinds of protocols that were followed. And I write about, you know, some of that in the book. But I was also interested in the physical impact on the urban landscape. So I really wanted to understand how an object, a concrete object, like a metro, with its proliferating metro stations, was going to impact the city, you know, visually, sensorally, physically, in all these different ways. 75% of Delhi's metro is above ground. And so you really see and experience the intersection between the trains and the urban landscape in a very particular way.

If this whole system had been below ground, I mean, I may still have been interested to do the project, but maybe not as much. Maybe we'll get into more of that later about what you see from the trains. But so to answer your question, I knew that I wanted to do an ethnography. What I didn't know, and this was really the kind of conundrum, was how was I going to write an ethnography of a metro? You know, most urban ethnographers are not, it's different. It's a different method than if you're studying in a village or a small town. But in, you know, if you're in urban ethnography, you still focus on often a community. community, on a neighborhood, on, you know, some kind of containable set that you formulate,

depending on what your research questions are. But I had this kind of general interest in the city and I kind of wanted to write about all of it. So the first couple of years of the project, I was really trying to just figure out how I was going to do this. Lucky for me, I, after my postdoc at Columbia, I actually went to India. I thought just for one year. I put all my things in storage. I went to India, trying to finish that first book about language politics. And during that year, I also wrote a small grant to study the metro, just, you know, kind of throwing the initial ideas out there. And, you know, I said that my method would be, you know, interviewing metro officials, talking to people on trains,

that kind of thing. And then I got the grant. And so I came back for another year. I ended up staying for five years. And so really the core of the project, well, for one, I figured out after the first year of studying it that I was not going to, but a lot of anthropologists, you know, you study something in a place for a year, maybe two years, and then you, you know, write your ethnography or whatever. But the more I got into it, the more I just kept going with it. So the first six months, I interviewed people because I thought it's strange to talk to people on a public transit on a metro. I'm not talking to anyone. I'm just going to, you know, be in these office spaces.

And I interviewed a lot of metro officials, architects, urban planners. And I thought, you know, this is great. But of course, I was riding the metro a lot and everywhere. And it came to me pretty much by, you know, six, seven, eight months. I just thought, you know, I need to start talking to people. I need to break through this, you know, anonymity and, you know, it wasn't a fear that I had to talk to people. It was just plain awkwardness.

And so I just, I still remember the morning I just made that decision. I just went in the morning. It was like 9 a.m. And I think I got on the ladies coach. And before I could think too much, I just started talking to somebody next to me. And then I never stopped for another, like, 7. eight years. And talking to people on the trains, I mean, it was good from my research, but also as a researcher, it was good for my own stamina and my own interest in the project.

I never failed to be interested in the people I was talking about. And I really, you know, once then in, after those five years of being in India, then I moved back to the U.S. for a job. And then I was coming once or sometimes twice a year. And it was different, of course, when you come just for two months or six weeks. But the way I grounded myself every time was just, you know, I literally get down from the airport to settle in for a few hours. And I would just get on the trains. And I would just start writing and I would start talking to people. And so this really became my method. I talked to a lot of other people who do urban ethnography and, you know, I got different ideas. People said, you know, why don't you focus on three stations

and do a detailed ethnography of these three and how they relate? And so I thought about that. And I did end up studying, you know, certain stations. But there was something always propelling me to sort of somehow get to know the system as a whole. But also, of course, the ethnographer in me wanted to focus on particularity and wanted to focus on, you know, individual stories and wanted to understand all the connections. And to be honest, I think that's why I researched this project for a total of 12 years in the end. One, because every few years there was a different phase that was being constructed and developed. So I could see how the system was growing and what that meant for the urban landscape and for the imaginary of the same. city, but it also gave me time to work out my own method, to try a lot of different things,

and to, you know, in some ways, reinvent the project, you know, every few years as I was doing it. So as the metro was reinventing the city, I was also reinventing my project. So to answer your question, it never was going to be a history. That was never my intellectual impulse or, you know, my disciplinary background or anything like that. It was really a way for me to understand the social, what I wanted to understand was the social impact of the metro. And most of the book, I would say a little more than half, really is focused on those conversations and experiences I had with people on the trains. So, yes. Yes. Well, I mean, I guess I would push back against you both saying that, oh, of course, it's definitely not a history. Why would we call it a history? I mean, you just mentioned that your engagement with the city is a longstanding one. And the prism of the metro system itself is something that you've been engaging with consciously for this project for like 12 years.

And so you've seen not only the metro itself change and develop, but also I'm imagining have seen your initial sense of this is going to change the city. It's a new kind of way of experiencing the city also develop and manifest itself over time in various different ways as the whole metro system has grown and so on. So I guess I would say in some ways that there's something very historicist about capturing this moment and trying to do social analysis about a changing city. I mean, Delhi is a dynamic, like a lot of these global third world, so-called global South cities, and these massive infrastructure projects, as you clearly articulate with this book, is very much a way of kind of the city connecting to the global while also having all of these. local experiences that you explore in these discussions and conversations and and and and yet so I guess I would say maybe it's just an unorthodox historical kind of you know experience here but I definitely

got a sense of this is a very dynamic and changing city and that the metro has played a big role in that and so I want to talk I want to ask a little bit more about that I'm sure we'll talk a lot about different components but you also did divide it into three stages three parts, which relate to different phases of the metro's development and growth, right? So one is crowded, part one, part two is expanding, and part three is visible. And you consciously overlaid this on multiple structures. It worked for you in a variety of ways. But one vector of that was that these are different phases of the development of the metro system

from its beginnings to what it is now, 10 lines, from three lines to 10 lines. So I guess I would just ask you, why did you choose that kind of three-part organization? And even if there's not like a complete narrative or one overarching narrative and argument about the relationship between those three different phases, what did you want to say by kind of organizing your discussions along those three lines in those three sections. Yeah, no, thanks so much for the question, but also the observation or intervention about, you know, what is history. And yeah, I guess because I'm not, you know, a trained historian or that kind of thing as you are, I, you know, would not call it a history. But I agree with you

that, you know, obviously there are parts of it that are like oral history. But also time, the question of time was important to me. And in fact, that was one of the impulses for the project was that I knew that as the metro was unfolding onto the city over these different phases of construction, that with each phase and then over more time, people were going to actually forget this initial interaction of the metro and the city. And I was really interested in that idea, about time and about, you know, perception and about how, you know, you know, these cities like London or Paris, right, or New York, you know, we think of, we process and experience and think of these cities through the names of the metro stations and the distances between

them and what's around them. We don't even think about it because that's all we've known. And so I did want to capture this first 20-year period. The first trains in Delhi started, it was the Red Line, and it was in December 2002. And this book, my book was actually published in 2022. I didn't quite plan it that way, but that's sort of how it happened. And so as the book was coming out, I was also being asked to write op-eds and Indian newspapers about, you know, what is the 20 years of the metro done to Delhi? And I thought, oh, yes, I have bought a bunch of bad.

And so, yeah, it kind of ended up being this sort of micro history or reflection about, you know, about time and about people's perception. And do you want to know how I knew that I was done with my research? Because that was another problem, or not problem, but situation. I just could have kept going. You know, they're doing a fourth phase now. I could still be going. It's a good thing I stopped because I did my last interviews in the summer of 2019, not knowing, obviously, what was going to happen to the world a year later.

But I started to get an inkling that maybe I was at the end because of my project anyways, because I think it was in 2018. I often would ask, you know, people, oh, so what did you think of Delhi before or how, what your experience or itineraries or, you know, life experience, whatever it was in Delhi before the Metro as opposed to now. And then I started talking to people, you know, in their 20s and they would say, I've only ever known Delhi with the Metro. And I was like, yes, of course. Yeah. That makes sense. you know and so it was it had it was I feel the project got demarcated in that in that way

there was a second half to your question you have to repeat oh no just you know maybe you might say something a little bit about organizing it with these three oh yeah yeah of course okay yeah so so once the research was over really near yeah near the end between two 2018 and 19 as I was really, yeah, just wrapping up. So then I started, once I had this realization, the research was over, I realized, okay, I need to write this book now. And so again, like with the methods, I thought about different things. I thought maybe I would try to, you know, try to sketch out different chapters and thinking about it actually almost in moments like a historical ethnography or, you know, maybe I would focus on different parts of the city. But once I actually sat down to write, I realized that I was writing in these, you know, short vignettes, which I would later come to call scenes, and that there was an integrity to each scene that I wanted to preserve. It was just a writing instinct, to be honest. I, you know, I don't, at this stage, I was not really planning it out so much. But I felt, you know, because in most ethnographies, you know, you have all of your, you know, rich, vivid detail and descriptions and your quotations and, you know, all of that.

And then usually you, you know, organize it thematically or in terms of, you know, how your argument's going to unfold and each chapter is going to take. the different quotes and things and then put them together to prove your argument. And I just, I thought, you know what, that's not going to work for this. This is a book about stops and starts. It's a book about the relationship between stations, the relationship between the different parts in the city. It's very fragmentary. You know, unlike more traditional ethnography, or even in my own first book, you know, I was not meeting people again and again. and I was not getting to know them in a deep way.

I sometimes had five-minute conversations with people, depending on the length of the journey, sometimes up to half an hour. But I don't think I talked to anyone on the metro for more than a half an hour. So even the method had this fragmentary element. Now, I'd like to think that there's a lot of depth in the book because of the idea of repetition. I kept doing things over and over and over for many years. so that enabled me to, you know, juxtapose the different kinds of stories that I was getting

and the kinds of experiences I was having myself on the metro as a participant, you know, observer. So, but it was really, I realized that it was a book of fragments. And yet, I felt there is depth to this to what I've collected, to what I've been thinking about all these years. And so that was when I realized this process of the early writing in the first few months, which I was doing during a teaching semester. And I was literally going every Friday to like a faculty write out. I'd never tried one of those things. But I was like, okay, I just need to make the time and just kind of write.

And so I would be writing every Friday morning. And maybe that's also why I was writing short scenes. I don't know. I hadn't thought about that before, actually. But so what I realized was that I wanted. to write a book where the form of the book actually reflected my argument. And I wanted to write basically, I mean, I didn't think it in that moment that, oh, I would like to write an experimental ethnography. But once I gave it to a publisher, a potential reader, I actually, you know, she

was the one that said, well, this is an experimental ethnography. So in the end, I really wanted to relay these scenes one after the other, but I wanted them to interconnect in terms of the themes and sometimes in terms of the characters or the people I was writing about. So there are cases where you'll meet somebody in a scene and then you'll see them again a few scenes later. That's not in every case. I don't know the percentage of cases, but it happens. there were times where I visited the same group of people who were living near a metro station, for instance. There were other times where I met someone, we had a conversation, and I asked them if we could meet again, so we would exchange WhatsApp information, and then we'd meet it in cafe.

So there were those cases. I would say more than half were people that I never saw again, but maybe a little bit less. less than half, I don't know, maybe like a third were people that I saw, you know, more than months. But even in those instances, you know, maybe I saw them two or three times, but not more than that. So even though I wanted to tell the story of the Metro through scenes, through the idea of the fragment, I also wanted it to all hang together and bring and come together. So about the three parts, once I realized that, you know, at the beginning I thought, oh, I'll have 30 or 40 scenes. And then I was like, you know, who knows how many I'll have?

Because then I ended up writing the book for another full year. And so in the end, there are 75 scenes. I think I had like 73. And I was like, okay, I'll write two more and then I'll have 25 for each. And I knew that I wanted a trip titch because I love paintings that are triptitches. And I just thought, this is my book and I can do whatever I want. And I want to have a trip titch. And so that was how that happened.

But more seriously, I mean, that is serious. But I wanted to focus on these three themes, the idea of crowding and crowdedness. I had read Elias Kennedy's fantastic book on crowds. and that was a huge inspiration for thinking about the idea of crowds and the different ways and things that crowds do and can be. And also I, you know, people always say, oh, you know, Indian cities, they're so crowded. Well, yeah, that's true. But there's something I think also important about the crowd, you know, politically and socially.

So there are just there are many ideas about crowds. that I was engaging with. And so I thought, okay, crowded, you know, the crowded city. The next theme about expanding was really just thinking about, you know, how the metro was expanding over the urban landscape. And what was really interesting to me was, you know, how the borders of the city were changing and how, and what was happening at the ends of the lines.

So I would say in the last third of my research, I started spending a lot of time at the ends of different metro lines and really kind of exploring and thinking about the idea of the hinterland, the idea of, you know, development at the ends of the city. And then, of course, people I met at the ends of the lines, you know, they had a lot of interesting perspectives, you know, so they would come on, you know, I'd be around a station, I would start chatting, and then we'd go into the station, and, you know, people would say things like, oh, you know, I'm in Delhi now. Delhi Ponchke. I've arrived in Delhi. And in my mind, you know, we're like an hour and a half outside of Delhi. But of course, they were absolutely

right. You're on the Delhi metro. So you're in Delhi. And so this idea of expanding in a kind of urban geography way was important. And also in terms of people's understanding of the city. That was also expanding. Their own experience of the city was expanding. Their own experience about themselves and what they could be doing in the city was also expanding. This really came clear, especially talking to women, talking to people who had different kind of disabilities. The metro was a new kind of platform for their own expansion. The last theme about visibility really was, you know, of course, it was about the third phase of the, of the metro. The fact that, you know, the metro was a very known object.

It's a beloved object in Delhi, even though I, you know, obviously talk about various critiques of the metro and the project and the whole thing. if you ask any billi vala nine and a half out of ten of them will just say i love the metro it is the lifeline of the city um so there's this visibility of the metro as a social space not just by me the researcher but by everybody and what happens on the metro gets noticed more because it's happening on the metro so it becomes this social stage um so it's visible in the press. It's visible in the international press. And I, you know, write a few scenes about that of different examples of how people expect certain kinds of behavior on the metro. And so then when something goes against that, there's a big sort of social reckoning.

Visibility is also, of course, about surveillance. The metro has, you know, cameras everywhere, not in the trains, but in all the stations and around the stations. It has very strong lighting, which makes it safer, but also harder to get up to, you know, different things. So people are more visible. They're more visible to the authorities. There are a lot of CISF, the Central Indian security forces all over the city. And what was interesting about surveillance for me was, what was happening at each station, but also the idea that, you know, as the stations proliferate, these security mechanisms and apparatuses, they're proliferating along with the stations. They're also, of course, at the ends of the lines.

And so these technologies and new ways of being under surveillance become more normalized and people start to not think about it, you know. In the Deli Metro, every station has airport-like security. So you're going through a baggage scanner. You're going through a metal scanner. You're having an individual wand for each male and female passenger. There are two different lines. If you're a woman, you go behind a little curtain thing,

and then there's a female officer who wants you. So every single time. So this kind of visibility also, you know, of the citizen and the state is there. The government is also more visible. What is the government doing through the metro to the metro? When there are major protests in the city, the Pli Dele police, the first thing they do is they close affected metro stations. They literally stop the flow of, let's say, a protest or whatever it is. Yesterday, Modi was inaugurated for his third term and, you know, the immediate three stations

around that inauguration were closed. So it's a dialogue, you know, between the state and citizens as well. So there are many things that become visible. I should also say that, you know, there are vignettes and visibility in the visible that could be encrouded and vice versa. So that was also a little bit of artificial. on my part to, you know, structure the book in terms of the three phases. So you have the newer lines and newer stations going in the visibility section. But I would say that all of the three

themes are all relevant to, you know, vignettes and other categories as well. And that's why I think the triptage idea is an appropriate one because, you know, if you're in a museum and you're looking at a triptych, and the one actually that kept in my mind was one that I had seen at the Whitechapel Gallery by Lucian Freud when I was living in London during my master's. It's a very gory, bloody triptych, but that was, I think, one of the first times that I was just really struck by what a triptych was and how the different panels, the three panels, how they interrelate in kind of interesting ways. And, like, I was thinking, what would you happen if you, you know, change the order or you, you know, so I think the triptitch was good for me to think with as well in terms of thinking about the form of the book, the content of the book, and how I wanted to merge those two things.

Yeah, well, that was an incredibly expensive answer and touched on about half of the remaining questions that I have. So we'll be revisiting a lot of the themes that you talked about in that. previous answer. But I would like to turn to, I'm going to make this a two-part question, just to try to get these both in here. And as Adnan said, this is not a history book as such, but there is certainly history in this book in various ways. One of the ways certainly is the fact that this book focuses on relations and relationships, social relations and relationships throughout the book. Now, listeners, you may be familiar with a quote that says the history of all to here to existing societies, the history of class struggles. And one of the relationships

that you certainly talk about throughout this book is class struggle and class division within society. But these are not the only relationships that you talk about. You talk about relationships involving land acquisition and management and how that also relates to class divisions within society. You also describe the dialectical relationship between the metro and roads in this book, which is a very interesting and very important theme to discuss. So what I'm going to be putting forward in this question is in this discussion about relationships and relations within society and utilizing the Delhi Metro as a case study

in order to examine some of these relationships within the society and how the metro can shine light on some of these relations and how these relations also shape the metro system. Can you talk a little bit about these relations that have influenced how land acquisition has taken place for the metro project and management of the metro project? And can you also talk about the way that you thought about this question of metro versus road, that dialectical relationship that you describe within this book,

and also how that relationship itself, is a representative of this struggle between the classes that you describe in the class division within society. So a couple of related questions that are all around relations and relationships, which then also relate to other themes that you talk throughout the book about the rise of neoliberal economic policy and how that has that influences on the metro and vice versa. So this question about relations and relationship is essentially what I'm driving at. if you can talk a little bit about how the metro examines that and how those relations influence the metro. Yeah. Thank you for that question or set of questions. So this was obviously very important to the project.

And actually to go back to that original aha moment I had, I think the aha moment was such a moment because I had always experienced Delly as. as a hierarchy of transportation. This was how I engaged with the city in many ways, and I think it's how many people in Delhi engage with it. There are one urban planner once told me that there are 50 different types of vehicles from two-wheelers to three-wheelers to four-wheelers to trucks and buses and all of that. he said there are 50. I tried to count them. I never came up with 50, but there are a lot. And how do you get around really says a lot about your station in life? The number one way of

getting around Delhi is actually by foot. Most people walk. A lot of people are on bicycles, not middle class people with helmets, you know, on bikes to get exercise and, you know, all of that, not that, but people who can afford a bicycle go around on bikes, usually without hummus, almost always without helmets. And then you have, you know, the cycle rickshaw, who, you know, is one of the most backbreaking occupations, I think, on the planet. Delhi is also, as you mentioned, It is, you know, very much a neoliberal city, India, over the last 20 years or 30 years since liberalization, which happened in the late 1980s and early 90s, but which has become even more extreme in the last 10 years, you know, has a proliferation of billionaires, right? Delhi is an extremely rich city as well as being a poor one. and the, you know, extremes of wealth are there for everyone to see on the roads.

That's where you really can't hide it. You know, you can live in a gated community, which is more and more common now. You can have a, you know, mansion farmhouse on the outskirts of Delhi. But on the road, you see everything. So you have, you know, the latest Mercedes. And one of the things I noticed in the course of the research, actually, around. certain metro viaducts, you know, you'd have almost these warehousy kind of areas south of Delhi, and this is where a lot of the luxury car showrooms were. So, you know, you'll have

Aston Martin, you'll have, you know, Porsche, you'll have, you know, all of these are there. And it's a huge new market because more and more people can afford those kinds of cars. So, I mean, this kind of gets to your question about the metro and the road. You know, the metro, I mean, when I was riding it, I think that first time, I was realizing that, you know, the very rich and the very poor, like most metro systems in the world, are not going to ride it. But in Delhi, as in other cities, there's a lot in between the very rich and the very poor. And it's a very, very, it's a very agated population. It's, you know, you have domestic workers riding the metro. You have IT professionals.

You have, you know, just a real range of people. And so that was very, very interesting to me. That was really the social space kind of question. And it was really wanting to understand a kind of more equitable space or a space where, you know, you would meet all different kinds of people, which is very hard to find in Delhi. Yes, there are a lot of parks. So that would be another place. But parks, you know, people are dispersed in parks. So it's not the same thing as sitting in a crowded train day after day with people from so many different walks of life and so many different income profiles. And so this relationship between the metro and the road

was, I mean, there are different parts of the relationship, but one of them was really about how the metro kind of crystallizes the road, how it in moments negates the road. You know, the metro is air conditioned, it's well lit. People feel safe on the metro for the most part. So there's this contrast that people would tell me about as they're writing it. People feel dignity. People across classes feel dignity on the metro. You know, for the more sort of globalized consumer classes, they're like, oh, it's just like London or it's just like Hong Kong. You know, it's as good.

We have something in India that is as good. I would say better because it's a newer metro and, you know, much cleaner and all that. But at the same time, you know, the road is, or I guess in addition, the road is, is a place of danger. You know, India has one of the highest fatality rate for road accidents. And it's not a safe place for women to walk at night on the, you know, on the sides of the road. There aren't that many sidewalks.

So the metro becomes this kind of anti-road. It becomes a place, a social space where you have many different classes intersecting. Now, to get to your question about land acquisition, you know, because this was my question, one of my main research questions, you know, is the Metro an equalizer? Is it a social equalizer? It can be in some way. But as an infrastructure, it basically is rewarding the, those who already have, right? So property investors and developers. And so if you look at the, if you step, you know, when you're in the metro, you're in the metro, and writing it and talking to people, yes, I had many moments where I thought I would never be talking to this person if it weren't for the metro. You know, the metro does bring together many different swabs of society, not only in terms of class, but in terms of geography as well. But in terms of the actual infrastructure, it certainly, you know, is rewarding people who already

have property. It's rewarding people who are, you know, can profit from the densification along the metro lines. You know, it was made with 65% of it was funded by Japanese loans. So there's that whole sort of international finance capital aspect of it. Why a metro and not, you know, a world-class bus system, like a bus rapid transit, which you have, you know, in different parts of Latin America, and that would actually serve way more people than this very expensive metro system. These debates were going on, even though people in Delhi actually had no say on whether the metro would come, but the debates were still happening and people were doing their economists, transport economists were doing their studies of the metro. And it was very clear that

economically it made so much more sense to have a world-class bus. But of course, you know, why do cities make metros in this day and age, it's to attract investment. It's to attract business. It's to say that, look, we have a world-class metro. And that is really the main thrust of the system. Even if it has many, you know, byproducts, which are about equalizing, which, yes, you can have somebody who is driving a BMW and somebody who's riding a bicycle and they may be sitting next to each other on this metro. I mean, yes, that does happen. But in a larger frame and scale, it's a, you know, it's an investment project. Yeah. Well, I wanted to, you know, you mentioned a couple of times in the context of this previous discussion about the difference between roads and

metro um is that safety you know uh the consideration and that women feel safer in the metro than on the roads and this is a very big theme in your um book in fact you open your i guess your opening vignette in the introduction is talking about a woman who you know feels that she can ride the metro because they have the women only uh cars and that um the whole space of of social observation that's gendered and regarded as somewhat hostile on the roads and on the streets is solved by the kind of atmosphere of the metro. And you've been talking a little bit about how, you know, that's a very different kind of space than the rest of the city. And so I just thought it would be interesting to hear a little bit more since apparently I learned from

your book, that having women-only cars is popular in quite a number of different urban metro systems. And I'd say, especially in Global South countries, that maybe you could say something about the various levels at which gender and gendered analysis was very important for your apprehending of what was special. and dynamic and changing or transformative about the metro space in contrast. And what it tells us, what you felt it told you or brought into relief about the operations of gender in other social spaces in the city and the interaction between those two. Yeah.

No, thank you for that question. That was, the gender question was also part of the original impulse for this, for the book, for sure um because you know as a privileged you know middle upper middle class woman going around deli you know there were so many different instances where i felt you know insecure in moments going around um and you know like pretty much every woman i talked to had experienced you know sexual harassment or what they call Eve teasing. And so when I rode the metro that first time, that was, I think, probably my second thought. I just thought, oh, it's going to really change things, and especially for women.

And a lot of it, interestingly enough, I've come to see, is really about the lighting. You know, Delhi streets after 6 p.m., they just become dusky, you know, and that's partly because of the dust. in the atmosphere and the lighting is just very dim, you know, the light, and they could have better lights. They need to have better lights throughout the city. And, you know, lighting makes a big difference. So the fact that you're under this like fluorescent lighting is, I think, half of it. But, you know, there's a few things too. The process of going through the ticket, the electronic turnstile, I think psychologically that, you know, it just shifts you into this other mode. You're in this kind of government, at least surveyed space.

And, you know, so there are a lot of reasons, sort of practical reasons for the feeling of safety. But I should tell you, the first five years of the metro, five, six years, there was no ladies' coach. That's their word for it, the ladies' coach. But yes, it's a woman's car. There's one car per train. There was no ladies' coach.

And I'm really glad that I rode the metro in those early years because I, you know, you know, from my experiences and observations and I was already talking to people by then, one of the things that especially women would talk about is that, and especially younger women, like college age women, is that, wow, okay, now the men are going to learn that you can be in proximity, you can sit with women. You know, women also are working. They have places to go and you can behave. It's possible. It's, you know, it's not. like this is going to teach the men in the city, the space. There was also a class gender discourse from many women I talk to saying, well, you know,

we feel safer on the metro because only the good kind of men, you know, the dirty kind of men, you know, which was a way to talk about working class men, you know, they're not writing it as much. It's really for the middle class men, which is totally not true in terms of the actual writership, but this was, this was what people would say. So, but I have to say, I was really hopeful in those years as well. And I just thought, this is great. This is an unprecedented kind of social space. Yes, you have men and women on the buses, but, you know, this space is getting more attention. There were more, you know, people writing it now, more than before and all of that.

So the Delhi, so why then is there a ladies coach? The Delhi Metro Rail Corporation at this time was headed by E. Shreidren, who was the first project manager. He's the one that really made it happen. He's an engineer, and he really treated it as an engineering project. Once it was made, the DMRC really did not want any negative publicity about the Metro. was zero. And they really worked with the local, like the Delhi newspapers to kind of make sure that that wouldn't happen. So when there started being a few instances, maybe more than a few of, you know, disturbances, sexual harassment on the metro, pretty quickly they instituted

this lady's coach. So it was very much a top down decision. And there were a lot of women and a lot of feminists in Delhi. Delhi is like a center of, you know, world feminism, as we know, they were like, oh, no, this is not good, you know, this is just perpetuating patriarchal norms and the idea that women have to be protected and that, you know, they can't and that men, you know, it should be the men, why the women have to be separated, the problem is with the men, you know, that whole sort of discourse was happening. And I kind of, I thought that too. I thought, oh, that why are they doing that? You know, we could have like had a more forward-thinking idea about gender relations.

But then, you know, so the ladies coach was there, I started writing it. It was good for my research. It was an interesting social space because the metro is, it's similar to the one in Hong Kong in Paris where it's just one long kind of train like a snake and you can, when the train is going straight, you can just look right down to almost the end of the train. So the ladies coach was not, there was no kind of door or wall or anything. It was permeable, right? You could go back and forth.

You're not supposed to, but it's permeable. The men on the other side in the mixed coaches, men and women, but more men, they can look in, you can look out. That's how it is. So I started to think of the ladies coach as kind of a gender fluid space in a way. there was an interaction, there was a relationship between the two. So that's one thing. Another is, over then those ensuing years, as I talked to, you know, more and more women in the ladies coach, I met so many women, including Ravina, the woman who I opened the book with, who said,

my parents wouldn't let me travel in the city alone if it weren't for this ladies coach. I only started riding the metro once there was the ladies coach and this kind of thing and I heard variations of that story so often that I became, you know, I thought, okay, we need to have the lady like it's great, the ladies coach because in terms of sheer numbers, I think it does increase women's mobility. I do hope there comes a day where we don't have to have a ladies coach

in Delhi or anywhere, but, you know, I think it serves a wider function in terms of of this increase in women's mobility, which I think is more important in the moment, especially in a city where, you know, men still dominate public spaces. You see, in Delhi, you see women everywhere. It's not that. But, you know, there are always more men, more public. Men hold way more jobs. The ratio on the metro, is for every four men there is one woman. Now, interestingly, not surprisingly, what happened when there was the ladies coach is that, okay, so yes, you have this, you know, all these women in the coach or in that, you know, front end of the train. But then what happens is that the mixed coaches

become much more male. And so, you know, and so I was writing the mixed coaches a lot as well and really noticing the difference. And I thought, oh, this whole lovely experience. of like, you know, men and women together in the train. I mean, yes, you have it in pockets. But, you know, the majority of women do ride the ladies coach. It's also usually less crowded, especially during peak hours. So, you know, it's a nicer place to ride. When it's really crowded, men will try to enter from the ladies coach. Then they'll get stared down by people and then they'll kind of scurry away. So there's those kinds of things going on. But for the most part, you know, the ladies coach has people who identify as women.

And the mixed coaches are mixed, but more heavily male, even more than before. Yeah, just quick follow up on that. I mean, some women really feel like the ladies coach is what enables them to ride in the metro and travel and move in the city. Exactly. Is there a countervailing sort of sense that you shouldn't ride the mixed coaches? and what are, you know, are women who do join the mixed coaches now that the balance has been shifted very much to be more extremely, you know, male-dominated almost, you know, does it change that experience for women who don't really care about riding in the ladies' coach or not,

but now then they're being gendered and regarded in a certain way if they're willing to ride the mixed coach. So I would say that's not there so much. Like it's no deal if you're, you know, at least from the women that I talked to over the years. You know, it's often like especially college age women, they kind of, they're just like, I'm going to ride wherever. But especially, I spoke to a lot of working class women who don't want to ride the ladies coach because the ladies coach has also become this bastion of like middle classness. and everybody's looking at what you're wearing and I mean okay yeah see now that was a question that I had yeah they don't want to be under the gaze of those class and upper middle class women

and so they you know not all I've also talked to domestic workers and working class women who are in the ladies coach and who like it but I talked to a fair number who you know don't want to be under that kind of surveillance you know don't want to be thinking of about, oh, you know, my shoes are not like hers, or I'm wearing this kind of kirta and, or I have a synthetic sorry, and they have this kind, you know, that kind of stuff, especially around dress, but also hairstyle. So there are a lot of people have different reasons, you know, for writing it or not writing in it. But I would say, I mean, from what I'm getting from your question, there's, I never felt, or in people who I,

talk to that there was any kind of stigma, like, oh, you're the kind of woman that would be more comfortable in the mixed coach. What does that mean? There wasn't that. Maybe, or I was not exposed to that. I didn't see that or hear it in the people that I was talking with. Right, right. But to bring up the interesting issue that I also wanted to ask you about, since you mentioned that in some ways there are more efficient and economically appropriate methods of transport that could have been invested in in Delhi rather than the metro. But the metro is seen as, you know, a must have for a modern global city, you know, to have a sense of itself and to be participating in this kind of world of global cities

and important cities and so on. So it's very important for the self-display and the self-like. identity, and that as a result, because it is seen as somehow communicating prestige in terms of kind of development, global development terms, you know, and you've talked a little bit about the importance and significance of this as a middle, you know, how it fits in middle class discourse as something that really communicates the bourgeois aspirations of Indian middle, Delhi middle class people that it also then is a particular kind of space that you've been talking a lot and with so many interesting bignettes wondered if you could talk a little bit more

about this kind of culture of display of how it is a space for the flaneur you know getting back to the you know that that kind of sense that it reminds me the way you describe it, a little bit like some of these shopping districts that are created, new malls and things that have a lot of global kind of luxury brands. I'm thinking about the fact that I'm just like two blocks away from what I consider an absolutely hideous development that has taken place on the shoreline here in Karakui, you know with this gulletup port you know which is a fake port it's where now all of these cruise ships come and just gorge their global tourists to not actually spend very much money in the city

but create a lot of environmental devastation ruin the city harbor view and spend all of their time in this kind of fake environment of like global Western luxury brands kind of thing it seems It's like that's a space that does attract, however, people who think, wow, we've got a place that's like Shamsaulise or Fifth Avenue or, you know, whatever. And it's not quite the same level of that, but people go there to be seen on the metro, not just to do shopping. I mean, to be seen in those districts, not just to shop. Because in fact, actually, who really wants to buy these things when you can get them at the duty-free or in some other way online? cheaper, but it's about, like, somehow being there as part of your celebration of global modernity, you know, somehow. So maybe you could just tell us a little bit more about that kind of cultural aspect and it's class kind of aspirational dimensions on the metro as a unique space for that.

Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, listen, this is kind of the core of what it is, right? It's aspirational infrastructure, and, you know, people would rather take the metro than the bus for this reason. You know, of course, they take, you can take both, and often they do to get to wherever they want to go. But, you know, it's this whole idea of, you know, the shiny surfaces, and, you know, it's a modernity that people can step into. And it's a place to experience new technology, you know, like in a flannery type of way. I had many people tell me that, you know, when I would ask them about sort of the technological side of it, and they would say that for many people, the most impressive technology initially

was riding the escalators. You know, Delhi is not a city of many high rises, so you don't have many escalators. And a lot of people were coming from what they call second tier cities from, you know, just all over India, especially from Uther Pradesh and Bihar and different places where you don't have buildings that would have escalators. And so this also got me thinking about, you know, about technology and about, you know, how we, how we experience newness, you know, and what that says, because newness can be off-putting too, right? And there are many people I talked to who said, you know, at first they felt the metro was not for them. People even, riding the metro sometimes said to me, you know, this is for the Badi Admi, you know, the big people. It's not for us. I think over time that's something that's changing because the metro is there. People are riding it. It's becoming more integrated with the city in different ways and connecting to buses. Initially, it was really built as a standalone object, which also made it seem more, excuse me, more elitist. And so,

That slowly, I think, is changing. But for so many people I talk to, you know, the metro is where you want to be seen. It's where you want to go on a date. It's where you maybe even want to lock eyes with someone, especially for younger people. It's like the cool place. And metros are proliferating in India. You know, there are metros now in every other city. And it's, I mean, Shrethrin, who had been the first project manager, you know, is

the Delhi Metro was first months, the first lines were going, he said, you know, every Indian city of at least three million people should have a metro. And I just thought, oh, dear, that is really not a good idea because of the cost. But also, you know, in order to have a metro that makes sense economically, you know, you can't just have one or two lines. So a lot of the cities now in India will have one or two, maybe three lines, you know, and including cities like Bangalore, and Chennai. I'm going to, I'll be in Chennai in a couple of weeks and I'm going to be spending some time on the metro. And, you know, I was just looking at the map and I'm just like, wow, you know, yes, you can go to like 10 different places. But this is such a, you know, capital

intensive, you know, project that, you know, it takes, and it takes so much capital to maintain the metro and the stations. They're already redoing stations in Delhi 20 years later because of the climate and everything, you know, things are starting. to already fray a little bit. So to have a metro with just a few lines is 100% a vanity project and aspiration to what? I'm not exactly sure. But, you know, I think it's a symbol of modernity. I think it's a connection to global culture. You know, when I would talk to people, it's not that they would talk about, you know, their connection to global culture, but it was something. that I would sense from, you know, how they talked about other things like, oh, you know,

I saw something similar in this city or, oh, you know, I can go to these malls and get these brands now with on the metro. So it was also how these spaces, you know, kind of as you were suggesting earlier, you know, how the space of the mall relates to the metro because of course the metro goes to all the malls. And, you know, different. kinds of exclusive spaces as well. So, and this is the other side of the neoliberal city is that, you know, on one hand, the metro is for a large swath of population, but it also goes hand in hand with all of these more privatized experiences you can have in the city.

So even though that super rich class, you know, they're in their own orbit and, you know, driving around in their, you know, Aston Martins or whatever, but they also like the metro. They're not going to ride it. They're not going to sit next to people they don't know on the metro. But they like that the city has the metro. And they also like, and many people told me this, that all those people are on the metro and not on the road with them. So there are these, in a sense that original or initial kind of hierarchy

of transport on the road, you know, it gets, it doesn't go away, but it gets interpolated in a new way, sort of through the metro, even as the metro then becomes part of that hierarchy and knocks down a few, you know, echelons of it, but it's still part of the hierarchy in these different ways. Well, one other kind of component of this that follows in a way from what you've been talking about here is something that you said as a question that you posed yourself, which is when does a metro crowd come to be recognized as a public? And so I was wondering, you know, what's at stake kind of in a crowd versus a public? And also, it seems to me that the question really revolves

around the fact that it's not always clear that there are intense or dense social relations between people on the metro. I mean, and it's interesting that you mentioned that your own methodology is to do really in ethnography of the metro. You kind of had to start conversations with metro riders and people, not just the planners and workers and administrators and build builders. and so on, but actually the people riding. And that's not actually, well, I wonder how different the culture of ridership is.

I mean, in a lot of global Western kind of cities, it's a lot of people with their headphones, you know, used to be with a book and or an newspaper, but now it's headphones and looking at their phones, not interacting with one another, sharing space, being aware collectively, you know, so you do have that abstract imaginative and all the aspirational dimensions, but you don't have dense social relations because you don't have that many interactions between people. And even if you do, as you said, it was very different from doing a normal ethnography because these are chance encounters. It's, I mean, it reminded me a little bit of like what Deserreux talks about in the city is like, the city is like an adventure. You just kind of don't know

where you're going to go and you having occasions of meeting and so on but these are not predictable and that's in fact actually what's fascinating about the city is the feeling of the unpredictableness of the social scape but these aren't like dense social spaces where you'd say this is like a kind of public sphere um where politics is happening or some other social kinds of relations are are you know kind of uh you know able to be perceived in that in that sort of way so I'm wondering how you think about it. Yeah. Well, and did you come to a final sort of answer to that question?

Well, and I'm also going to piggyback on that because I have two related points that are related to that idea of it being a public and then also this idea of community. Two of the points that you raise within the book. One is that you say that the metro is a site for community education and community building. And at the same time, as Adnan is talking about, we have this. this tendency for it to just be crowds, you know, in most places. And I, like, Adnan, am curious about how the people that are taking the metro and the place of the metro in Delhi specifically would make it different, or perhaps it doesn't, in terms of trying to create some sort of community and then also being a site for community education. I know you pointed out in the book

that one of the ways of community education was just these billboards or videos like safety videos providing some sort of education without saying that it was education. But also, and something that you mentioned in your, I believe, first answer of this interview was that the Metro also is a site for accessing protests, which in many ways is a way of forming community even with people that we don't know. you know, if we have, if we share a cause, we are a community, whether we know the other people, whether we know any other people there or not. When we come together around a cause, we are constituting a community with a shared value.

But then also that there is pushback by the state. There are surveillance by the state. There are methods for repressing protests by the state in these same sites. So just to add to what Adnan was asking, you know, in terms of what the ability to create a public is in a site like a metro, what the possibility for true community education and community building are, as well as this idea, this kind of dialectical relationship between providing a site for protests and also providing a site for repression and surveillance of protest. Listen, it's all happening in different ways and different moments.

And so that, you know, I don't. I don't think I have a single sort of overall argument about, like, what, well, I mean, listen, I use the idea of the Metro public because in moments, it came to the fore. In moments, the crowd became a public. So, you know, in talking to people who did use the Metro to get to the 2011 Anna Hazari protests that were anti-corrhizabeth. protests, which is one of the scenes in the book. And I remember, and again, this was an interview I was doing with somebody at a metro station, like in a coffee shop. And he was recounting to me his experience of, you know, being on the metro and gathering more people to join this movement. Then I myself went to one of these protests and experienced it in a, you know, on my own as well. And so for me, that was definitely a moment where the crowd becomes a public because

people were identifiable. People were wearing these certain hats that said, I am Anna, to sort of like show solidarity with this figure of Anna Hazari, who was like this Gandhi-like figure, who was creating this anti-corruption campaign, or at the center of it. You know, another example was during the protests against the Modi government Citizenship Amendment Act, which is basically a veiled, not so veiled way of disenfranchising Muslim voters and Indian citizens. And there were humongous protests in Delhi during this time. This was during COVID. I was not there.

but I read enough reports and saw enough videos to see how the certain metro stations were rallying points and people were coming to the metro stations to have protests. And in my mind, this was really, you know, an example of, you know, the metro represents the state as well. It represents the people in moments, but it also represents the government and the state. And it was like a reclaiming of that metro space, but not to ride the metro, but to be at the station and to kind of occupy the station. So I think, you know, it's also about the idea of the public is also about the nature or the kind of, you know, materiality of the trains and the stations, how this, you know, becomes part of the material history, really, of the city,

and how people are engaging with the metro in new, more and new ways that are also proliferating. I mean, I'm, you know, I feel like somebody could start studying the metro from tomorrow and study it for the next 20 years, and they're going to come up with, you know, totally different things than what I came up with or what I saw. So I think, you know, the idea of the public, it comes and goes. It's not, the metro public is not a stable public. But it is also, you know, sort of Michael Warner kind of way, it is a public that gets addressed, especially through media.

So, you know, about metro riders, what they want, what they've, you know, everything from the mundane, the delays they experience to the not as mundane, you know, about issues of, you know, one of the scenes I write about is this crowd that becomes a mob and chases after and abuses these three African students who are riding the metro in a really horrible example of just like nationalist fervor. Do you mind if I, do you mind if I hop in for a second right there? That's one of the questions I want to ask is about that incident. And I might as well just hop in now to add into what we're saying.

So you mentioned in the book throughout that the metro has a lot of value in terms of what it represents. And it also has a certain image within Delhi, an image to the people within Delhi, metro users. And one of those images that you talk about is how the metro is almost separate from society. Like, it's its own little bubble that represents something different than what you would see outside of the metro within Delhi. But you talk about this incident of this racist attack against three university students from Africa and the amount of shock that was a result of this, not because there was a racist attack in Delhi, but because the racist attack happened in the metro and the idea that this metro was separate was kind of shattered in some ways. So to just add in, perhaps you can talk a little bit about what happened in this incident. Just very briefly, you know, listeners, you should check out the book for the bigger story. But describe the incident briefly.

Talk about what the metro represents and how incidents like that specifically undermine that image and kind of shatter the illusion that many Delhi residents and metro users have because I think that that's a particularly interesting, particularly interesting point of this discussion. Yeah. So basically the incident you're referring to that I write about in the book is an incident that happened where three students from two or three different African countries, one of them is the Gabon. And they were students in Delhi. And the backdrop to this story is that there are many students from. from different parts of Africa who come to Delhi to study at one of its many universities. And there's also a history of them not being treated well by people. You know, Indians in general, I'm going to make a generalization here, and especially Delhiites,

they're extremely, they are extremely color conscious, partly, well, because of colonialism, because of caste, different reasons, and they are extremely, many of them are very prejudicial against people with darker skin, sometimes even within their own families, but especially with people outside. And so there's this history of this already in the backdrop. You know, police go after African students. It's not good. So there was an incident where three African students were riding the metro, and basically there were some, you know, other people on the train with them, and they start having an altercation because one of them accuses, one of them, an Indian man accuses one of them of, I don't know, touching someone or doing something inappropriate, which was not the case. it turned out, and they had other witnesses to corroborate that. And then it just quickly turns into a shouting match and then a shoving match, and they basically

try to get away, but then they get pushed off the train at the stop. And then these guys get off and kind of go after the African students, but slowly but surely a mob developed, and they chase them in the station. I mean, there are videos of this on YouTube. And, you know, the students are like, you know, trying to climb up on fences and on different things to try to get away from them. So this is going on.

The police are not doing much. They're watching. The mob, you can kind of see where the mob, there's like a frenzied mob, there's like different layers of the crowd. And there's a kind of frenzied mob. And then it kind of peters out a little bit. And then people on the edge, and this is from different videos that I watched of the event, are taking photos, right?

So those people are, you know, not part of the mob trying to attack them with these rods and different things they've found. But they're spectating, right? And so this was an incident where, and apparently like these, not apparently, they were singing nationalist songs. So, like, Indian nationalist songs. So there was this strange, yeah, just this kind of nationalist anger and that was, you know, otherizing these students who, you know, have come to study in the country. So it was a very ugly example of, you know, how the crowd turns into a mob, but also how the mob can be a public.

They can be a Hindu public or a nationalist public or an Indian public. And again, it's in that particular, you know, moment or set of moments. But that was the kind of thing that was interesting to, I mean, this was a horrible event, but interesting in terms of to think about, you know, how things can change and turn on a dime, but also how there are different kinds of publics. You know, it's not all liberal publics. But that's why it became an international story. In the end, the three students were, they survived.

They were treated for their injuries, and then they got interviewed by the Indian press and told their side of the story and all of that. I don't think anybody was prosecuted for this, but it became international news. Listen, if it had happened, as many of these events do in a park or on the road, it would not have become international news. It was because it was on the metro, and the metro has the reputation of a, being this liberal space where you have many different walks of life, where people are sitting side by side, you know, all of these like stories of the metro, you know, are, they sort of go

against this, what happened, this kind of, you know, racist nationalist violence. So that would be an example. But one thing I'll just also say about, before you were asking about the idea of community. So I talked to a lot of people who, well, sometimes people would talk about how the metro doesn't have a sense of community as compared to the bus. That definitely was a narrative thread in my research. But then I also talked to people who created community, sometimes, which at first was surprising to me, with people that they never knew before. but that they wouldn't notice that at the same time every morning, they would be on the same platform waiting for a train.

And sometimes these people then would start riding the trains together, and they would look for each other because it was the commuting time. I'm sure COVID changed that, obviously. So there were these sort of like, you know, springing up of community in places. There were also communities of people who were living around metro stations. I mean, that's a little bit different because they weren't, in a sense, meeting people on the trains. But they had sort of community understandings or sometimes grievances with the metro as an object, you know. So that was a different kind of side to the community question.

But, yeah, I mean, that's the thing. It's, you know, whether it's community or public, it's, you know, it's evanescent. Like it'll, you know, it's there, then it goes. and then it reappears. At least that's what I found over the years that I was doing this. Well, I want to thank you now for being very generous with your time. I know we've been here for almost two hours at this point. Adnan and I each have, I'm sure, a lot more questions.

I have like five or six more big questions, but we'll each ask one to be respectful of your time. I'll take mine first. One of the things that you talk about at a couple of points, although not really in depth and passing, but I found quite interesting in the book was that you mentioned while riding the metro looking out the window and going through these illegal settlements.

I find it very interesting for several reasons. So a couple of questions arise, first of all, what are these illegal settlements? What do they look like? What makes them illegal specifically? But also, the main reason I'm asking this is not about, you know, we're not doing an analysis of illegal settlements in Delhi. What we're analyzing here is the metro. What I find particularly interesting here is how the construction

of the metro and the location that the metro is being constructed, as well as the way that it bisects certain communities and makes some of these communities visible despite their illegality. What can that be said? What can be said about that nature of visibilizing, bisecting these communities, the location of the metro cutting through these illegal settlements within Delhi? And if there was anything that struck you, as you were writing, looking out the window, as you're riding through Delhi and seeing these illegal settlements and thinking about, you know, this ethnographic analysis of the metro,

its location and the way in which it operates. Yeah, I'm glad you brought that up. So, yeah, I think in the book I refer to them as informal settlements, which is how people talk about them in Delhi. And they are settlements that are not government sanctioned, but many of them have existed for, you know, decades. And so basically they're usually lower income, but not always, because it has to do with, you know, getting permissions and riots to, you know, build in different ways in different parts of the city.

So, and this is true of many Indian cities, including Bombay, but also definitely Delhi. You know, you, there's a lot of division and segregation in the city, but you see both, you see the different sides of things. It's not that informal settlements are all hidden away. You know, the relationship between the informal settlements and what's called the colonies, which are the more middle class areas, they're often next door to each other. And often the domestic staff that is working in the middle class and upper middle class households, they're coming from these informal settlements nearby. And there's a big range.

You know, you can have some informal settlements that look more like lower middle class housing, and you can have some that really look like slums. So there's that. There is a visibility, though, on both sides. So, for instance, one of the stations that I write about in the book is called Oakla, a station. And it's in South Delhi. And South Delhi is really the wealthier part of the city and where you have a lot of upper-middle-class housing. And, you know, all of the malls and shops and, you know, the whole thing.

And so I spent time with this community in a very much lower income informal settlement that, you know, their informal settlement was really just below the metro viaduct. And so, and it was nice to be doing, you know, this kind of research because I could go, I went there dozens of times and talked to different people, sometimes talk to the same people. but I zeroed in on a few sort of characters who I think represented a lot of what people were saying. And one of them who I write about was this guy called Ram Shankar. And, you know, he gave me this whole exposition on the metro and what it meant for the community. And so he himself was a bicycle repairman, bicycle fixer. And his shop was just opposite the metro station and the viaduct. And, you know, he would say to me, he was like, you know, the metro. We were talking in these, like the metro is for the big man.

The metro is for, you know, it was made by the government for government workers so that government workers could get to work on time and this way they'd have no excuse because the metro is there. The metro is not for Chota Admi, little men like me, you know, even if some of us ride it sometimes, we don't write it regularly because we have no place to go because we don't have jobs. We don't have those government jobs that are fueling the metro. So it was a very interesting an argument and one that echoes a lot of the literature about, you know, the relationship between government and jobs and the spatiality of the city and who has somewhere to go and who doesn't.

And so that was, you know, a really interesting and important way for me to think about the metro in terms of the people who don't ride it, but who live in its midst. And this is true for a lot of people in the informal settlements. I also talk to women from that same informal settlement who love the metro. They don't ride it. But there are certain trees landscaped into the entry to the metro station. And they go there and they sit under those trees and they feel like they have this new public space where they can be away from their families. They're only about 50 feet away.

But they have this new place where they can sit and talk. I also talk to some women who do ride the metro. They can't afford to ride it very often. They don't have jobs to go to. But there was a temple nearby, just two stations or three stations away, very famous temple in Delhi. Kalkajimandir. And they would say, yes, we ride the metro. They were very sort of saying this with some pride. We ride the metro when we go to the temple. And I said, well, but you could walk and it would take you about 15 minutes or you could take the bus and it would be much less expensive. And they said,

no, but going by metro is part of the temple experience. So they would dress appropriately and that was part of the experience was to go to the temple on the metro. I talked to people in North Delhi who told me a variation, different variation of the story in a working class Muslim neighborhood in North Delhi who said, you know, now we can ride the metro and do namaz at India Gate. So not just a masjit, which also has its own metro station now, by the way, but at India Gate. which is, you know, the nationalist symbol in the center of the colonial city. So it was interesting the way people from, you know, informal settlements, they, you know, they weren't commuters in the way the IT workers were or even the domestic workers were, who were, you know, had every day to go to

their, you know, household. But they were using the metro in these social and cultural ways that was actually very meaningful to them. And this, I think, goes back to a non-year question about, you know, the aspirational infrastructure, because it was interesting to me the way, you know, religion or religious practice, not religion with a capital are, but with, you know, daily practice, how it gets imbued with this global infrastructure in these kind of, you know, what are new ways, I think. Yeah, that's amazing. I loved those little vignettes that you just shared with us from people in those informal

settlements and their relationship to the metro. This book is just filled with stunning, you know, affecting, interesting, textured stories of people and their relationship to this vast infrastructure project that is the subject of your book. And in fact, you say, you know, that these are kind of like urban chronicles or, you know, these secular parables of modern, you know, life in a global city that each of these bignettes represents a world of its own which connects to the metro in some way and intersects with the city. Each of the bignette is a kind of magnificent and we could probably talk for hours about these fascinating people. But I want to thank you for such an interesting and, you know, beautifully written books that gave a real sense

of a space that I have not had any connection with, but have been to other cities that have these metros. And I've had that same, wow, I can't believe they've got such a wonderful metro. And, you know, just the range of experiences, you know, it really evoked it in a very interesting and important way to understand, as you call it, the social life of infrastructure. And so I don't know if you have a favorite or most surprised. Vignette, you shared quite a few, but if there's one that you feel like, well, I really just haven't had a chance to say this about, you know, somebody's experience and what they had to say, you know, I wanted to give you an opportunity to do that, but also to thank you for all

of these other stories that you've shared with us and to encourage readers, listeners to become readers and check out. It's like we've only scratched the surface of like the array of experience that you've presented here of all these different voices of people. It really feels like a special kind of ethnography, you know, that we hear from a lot of different people. It's really wonderful. Well, thank you so much, Ednan, Anne Henry, for inviting me for asking such interesting and rich and provocative questions. I, yeah, I feel, maybe this is not surprising. I feel kind of close in different ways to all the vignettes, you know.

And, you know, obviously I wouldn't have put them in the book if I didn't feel that they needed to be there. And I have to say one of the most interesting things for me has been over these last two years since it was published is how people are reading. the vignettes and making their own analysis and meanings from them. And I have to say that was, I don't know if I knew it was an aim, but I think in some way it was a hope. And that's why I think, if I remember correctly, in the introduction, I suggest to readers

that they can read it in the order I've given them of the 75 vignettes in those three, you know, in that triptych. or they can hopscotch through the book. And I think from people I've talked to, it works in both ways in different ways. But I do like this idea. And I love the fact that, you know, you can relate to the book if you're in Istanbul or Cairo or New York City or wherever. And I've had people write to me who've read the book, you know, even sometimes while riding metros in other cities. And, you know, of course, there, I mean, my book is very much about, obviously, Delhi, as we've been talking, but there are so many resonances across cities through this larger prism of the metro.

So, so I'm very happy about that. I guess one one encounter that I had that has really stuck with me since, even after, you know, these years of having already. written the book and published it was one of the people that I met who I call Asif in the book who comes at the end of the book. And I met him towards the end of my research. And he was a guy I met, you know, he was, I mean, and I described this in the vignette. You know, I just saw him going in his wheelchair at like high speed down the platform. And this was, you know, usually I would be sitting on the trains and talking to people or, you know, wandering. around a bit. But this was really, like he really caught my eye, not surprisingly. Although I don't

know, actually, because I think for a lot of people, people who have some kind of disability are actually invisible. But for whatever reason, he caught my eye and I followed him. And I just wanted to ask him, you know, about his experience on the metro. I was surprised that he was on the metro. I thought, How did he get down the escalator? How did, you know, so I had questions for him, but I also didn't, you know, also didn't, I didn't want to invade his space. I didn't want to offend him. So it became kind of a slow conversation, but then we exchanged WhatsApp.

We, there's this one cafe in Delhi where we meet regularly, even after the book was out. And learning his story and how his history, um, of transport before the metro and then now, post-metro, how that intersected with his experience being in a wheelchair since being, you know, a kid. It was something he was born with. How that really changed his experience of the city and also the different kinds of marginalization that he was feeling in different ways. And so it became something much richer than I could have imagined. And I feel his story goes beyond. It includes the metro, but very much goes beyond it and connects to a lot of other issues in the city, which I touch on in the vignettes and hopefully people will pick up on. But I guess it's also a memorable

vignette because it was such a memorable research experience and it's turned into a friendship now, where, you know, you just don't know who you're going to meet in the world in general, not only if you're doing research. And also that, you know, if you just scratch the surface on anyone's lives, there is a palimcess of experience, emotion, itineraries, you know, all of it. And so it was, yeah, it was very inspiring. I mean, the research in general was inspiring. And, you know, Delhi is a city that I've always been drawn to. It can also be a very difficult city. I think that comes out in part to the book as well.

But this was a labor of love, I would say. And so I was really, yeah, I feel fortunate that I was able to do this research. I have to say, I'm particularly happy that you picked that vignette to highlight as an answer to Adnan's question, because one of the questions that I was really sad that it seemed like we were going to have to cut out was about the question of disability and accessibility, which is something that's focused on towards the end of the book. And I would have felt very, very bad if we hadn't gotten to mention it at all in the conversation. So I'm very pleased that that was one of the things that you brought up. But really, there are so many

more things that we could talk about in this book, so many thoughtful things that come up, including, again, just in passing, one of the people who you interviewed talked about the ecological impact of the metro being a negative thing because it encourages people to go to places where they otherwise wouldn't go. You know, that was just something that you threw in there towards the end. It was one of the last vignettes in the book. I think it was immediately before the epilogue of the book. This female student, if I remember correctly, says something like, you know, the fact that there's a metro there. It encourages people to go. halfway across the city when they otherwise would just walk to a store up there straight or something

along those lines. And you think to yourself... This is a transport researcher, yeah. Yeah, yeah, right. And you think to yourself, you know, I never had thought about that before. The fact that there is easily accessible and affordable public transit does increase the likelihood that people are going to go to places where they otherwise wouldn't really need to. So that was, you know, there's a lot of things like that in this book where they may not be the focus of the in yet. They may not be the focus of the particular analysis that's taking place, but there's so much going on here that really this is an incredibly thoughtful book. And I'm happy that I also is one of the people who was going through it on a metro. I am pleased to tell you, although

as you had talked about earlier with Chen, I only having one line that goes in a single straight line with about 10 stops. That's what Kazan's Metro is like. We only have one line right now, although they're putting a second one in, but I definitely want to encourage the listeners to pick up the book that we've been discussing today, The Moving City, scenes from the Delhi Metro and the social life of infrastructure, really a rich book.

And like I said, was not exactly what I was expecting when Adnan suggested that we talk about it, but it was a very enriching read and one that I'm very happy that we had the opportunity to talk with you about. Professor Rashmi Sadana is, again, a professor of anthropology at George Mason University and the author of the book that we discussed today. Can you tell the listeners how they can find more of your work?

If you have any websites or social media, you would like to direct them to. And if you have any upcoming projects that we should keep our eyes open for. Sure. So if you go to my faculty webpage, you'll see a lot of my publications. If you are in India listening to this or anywhere in South Asia, if you're in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, the book there has been published by a trade publisher, and it is called Metro Nama, scenes from the Delhi Metro. But otherwise, the book is available on Amazon, whether in, you know, India or just the other Amazon.com. But yeah, I would say my faculty web page is the best place to get more information about my research and about my publications with links and everything.

I have started two new projects. They are both very preliminary, and so I will have more to say in a few months about that. Let us know when you have more information. We'll be happy to spread the word for you. And before I turn it to Adnan, I have one, sorry, I have one small anecdote that came up today that I just had jumped to my mind and I would be remiss to not mention it while we're recording. At work today, so I know the listeners are aware. I live in Russia, but some of my best friends at work are a Brazilian couple and another is an Indian couple. And I was talking to the Indian woman that I work with today. and somehow the Delhi Metro came up in conversation with her.

And I said, you know, that interview that I had mentioned a couple of weeks ago was taking place today. She says, Henry, you know, I have to tell you, the Delhi Metro, one of the things about it just frustrates me so much. It was designed by Europeans and they didn't take into account the climate here because the building we work in is quite hot right now. like unbelievably hot. So, you know, the heat inside a building is on our mind. She goes, yeah, the infrastructure that they're building makes no sense for the climate. And then these European architects, they leave. And I said, this is one of the things that's talked about in the book, Vina.

You would really enjoy this book. So it was just really ironic that one of the things that was discussed in the book, like organically came up in conversation today with one of the two possible people that I could have had this conversation with. And usually we don't even get to talk very much at work because, you know, we're working. So I thought that that was a very funny thing that came up just today on the day of recording. So Adnan, how can, I'm glad that you found it interesting as well. Adnan, how can the listeners find you in your other podcast?

Well, they can find me on Twitter at Adnan, A. Hussein, H-U-S-A-I-N. And you can also listen to the M-H-A-L-I-S about the Middle East Islamic World, Muslim diaspora, sponsored by the Muslim Society's Global Perspectus Project at Queen's University. So do check those out. Yeah, absolutely highly recommend that. As for me, listeners, you can find me on Twitter at Huck, 1995, H-U-C-K-1-995. Out around the time this episode will be coming out, it should be close to the time that the Historic documents of the pflp book that adnan and i are writing a forward to uh will be coming out from

iskra books iscrabbooks.org that will be in addition to the historic documents of the plo book that we also wrote a forward to uh both of those books 100% of the profits go directly to the middle east children's alliance so we highly recommend if you have the financial means of doing so picking up a physical copy of those books because you directly support mecca by doing so with, again, 100% of the proceeds of those books go to that. So iscribooks.org is where you can get that. And, of course, free PDFs for all Iskra books are available. As for the show, you can help support us and allow us to continue making episodes like this

by going to patreon.com forward slash guerrilla history. That's G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A history. And you can keep up to date with everything that Adnan and I are doing individually. And the show is doing collectively by following us on Twitter at Gorilla underscore pod. That's G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A-U-L-A-U-Skore pod. And until next time, listeners, Solidarity. Thank you.