‘THE METRO WASN’T AN INTEGRATED SYSTEM THEN’

EXCERPTS

MY INTEREST in Delhi’s Metro stems from what I saw as a seismic shift in how the city was being experienced and perceived from the late 2000s. I was living and commuting in Delhi at the time and taking the Metro most days. The Metro wasn’t an integrated system then; it was in a state of becoming. It was the recognizable high-tech system you see in other cities, just as clean and ordered, often more so, just as fast and efficient; but outside, the seams were still showing where the stations and the city met. I came to think of these seams as the interface between the city and the Metro, a system which I soon learned was built as a stand-alone artifact. To become an effective metro system, I also knew that the Metro would have to be integrated with “the city”—its roads, its people, and its other forms of transit (buses, vans, jeeps, cycle rickshaws, auto rickshaws, taxis). In a highly developed and densely populated city like Delhi, this process was both exciting and unnerving to watch. I started to contemplate the nature of “the urban” and to ask: When will these seams dissolve? And what is at stake in this transformation, this integration?

I used ethnographic research methods to study the Metro, meaning I rode the trains as much as I could, on all lines and to all stations, clocking over four thousand hours in all. I observed, interacted with, and talked to people on trains, at stations, and around stations, once I got over the strangeness of talking to strangers on public transport. Going around the city in this way helped me to focus on it as a gendered space; for instance, the way darkness signals when women should not be on the streets. In this case, the Metro’s bright lights counter this gendered assumption and practice, since it’s always daytime in the system; and in fact, many women told me that the Metro is the only form of public transport they feel is a legitimate urban space for them at night.

(Excerpted with permission from the University of California Press)