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

Abstract

W from home during the pandemic, one of the things I missed most about pre-pandemic life was commuting on the metro. Only I didn’t realize this until I went back to work in person a year and five months later. Though I live in Washington D.C. and not Delhi, the metro fundamentally mediated my relationship to work and the city. It allowed me a space of my own between work and home, where I could be both public and private, from where I could watch people or retreat into my own space by means of a book or headphones, even as I shared it with others. Somewhat unexpectedly, it was this network of buses, trains, and walking routes—a quintessentially urban infrastructure—that I most joyfully embraced when I returned to working in person. The significance of the metro was emphasized by the contact it afforded with other people, even when distanced and masked; the feeling of intersecting with others as we all went about our lives and work. Rashmi Sadana’s new book, The Moving City: Scenes from the Delhi Metro and the Social Life of Infrastructure, captures this sense of stranger-sociality by means of a “street-level ethnographic view of the city” (2). Sadana undertakes an unconventional, and yet entirely appropriate, approach to study the relatively new, glitzy Metro in Delhi that has taken over discussions of public transportation in the past decade and a half. Interspersed with secondary research and interviews with engineers, policy makers, and politicians are vignettes—what Sadana also calls secular parables or urban chronicles—of her encounters with people taking the metro, getting on