[Reader-list] On the Delhi Metro: An Ethnographic View

[anuradha mukherjee]

http://beta.epw.in/newsItem/comment/188947/
On the Delhi Metro: An Ethnographic View By: Rashmi Sadana
Vol XLV No.46 November 13, 2010
*

The idea of a “mental landscape” is associated with a spatial understanding
of modernity that has long been central to the scholarship on cities and to
urban ethnography. In this essay, the focus on space is threefold and
includes: (1) the new cultural geography that is created by the physical
imposition of the metro edifice on Delhi’s landscape; (2) the spaces created
within the metro itself (on trains and in stations) and the practices
associated with those new spaces; and (3) the spatial imaginaries
experienced by individual riders.
*

The Metro will totally transform our social culture giving us a sense of
discipline, cleanliness and enhance multifold development of this
cosmopolitan city.

– Delhi Metro Managing Director, Elattuvalapil Sreedharan (Joshi 2001).

The train to Dwarka is very crowded even on a Sunday early in the afternoon.
I stand on the platform for some time, letting trains go by, and then get
on. Central Delhi may be more still, and the road traffic less, but inside
the metro there are throngs of people going places. Sometimes they crush
into one another, as at rush hour. On any weekday at Rajiv Chowk – the metro
station and hub beneath Connaught Place – commuters line up in neat rows
waiting for the Dwarka train, only to dissolve into a mass once the train
arrives and the doors slide open. The logic of entering and exiting the
train is whichever side has more people wins, like a scrimmage. These are
head on collisions as people push past each other. The spoils are there for
all to see: for those coming in, a shiny seat; for those going out, their
destination in record time and comfort.

Inside, nothing divides the cars of the train in what resembles a long metal
centipede. I have become accustomed to watching the chrome bars align and
realign to the sinuous movements of the train, travelling 80 kilometres an
hour nearly 13 metres underground in the darkness. At Chawri Bazaar, the
deepest station, I emerge from the engineering marvel into a thick landscape
of vendors, vehicles, and crumbling facades, where electrical cords hang
from above and wires seem to be strewn across the sky.

Heading west, above ground, to Rithala or Dwarka – the new sub-cities of
Delhi – the city opens up and peters out; circling birds, low-level
dwellings, institutes, and the occasional shopping mall make up the
landscape. On the Rithala train, your eye grazes the tops of buildings as
you travel from one station to the next. On the way to Dwarka, you seem to
be even higher up and see more of the expanse. The east-west lines are for
commuters; the trains go above ground soon after Connaught Place, and people
tend to stay on for more than a few stops. There is time to relax and settle
in. On one ride, I watch a few young men in their early 20s sit cross-legged
on the floor, talking and laughing. Three younger boys, 13- or 14-year-old,
stand in front of them, doing pull-ups on the high bar, joking, trying to
get the attention of the young men by entertaining them with curiosities
pulled from their pockets. One says he has Afghan currency and is parading
it around. It is a scene you might see almost anywhere in the city, an
approximation of the street below, and yet completely removed from it.

Many people are hooked up to music players or talking on their mobiles. Men
carry goods in tightly packed cartons; toddlers lie on the seats or stand up
on them to look out the window, delighting at their own reflection. People
mostly sit quietly; they do not eat or drink or spit. Most noticeable is
what is missing: heat, sweat, food, smell, trash. The elements have been
reordered, enabling a different view of this city of 14 million. Sometimes
passengers just look around, almost as if there is not enough to notice.
Curiously, people look, but do not stare, even the multiple packs of young
men in slim jeans.

On the platform there is a rush around the escalators. A wide circle forms
at the bottom of each one. It slowly shrinks as people move up. A smaller
group waits for the elevator. “Stay Fit, Use the Stairs” signs are posted at
each exit, placed there, it turns out, not to keep the populace in shape,
but to encourage the able-bodied to leave room in the elevators for others.
And then, once upstairs (or downstairs, if at an overground station) you
pass through the electronic gates once more and are out of the station. Some
walk, others look for a bus or an auto or cycle rickshaw. Outside the
Jahangirpuri station, I walk for 45 minutes along a dusty path through
low-income housing and see nothing resembling central Delhi. This is a
working-class community that all of a sudden feels included in the city,
connected to this gleaming train. Women living here have stated that they
feel safe to venture on the metro alone, and for the first time will go to
India Gate without their husbands. And as I sit outside the station one
afternoon, I see these women coming and going, with suitcases and parcels,
or just with each other. A cycle rickshaw driver outside the station tells
me that now most of his trips involve ferrying people to and from the metro.
It has been good for his business, though he has yet to ride it himself.
Where would I leave my rickshaw, he asks?

A documentary on V S Naipaul features footage from his most recent trip to
Delhi, one that included a ride on the metro. What does the man, who was
infamous for having expounded on the filth and disorder of Indian cities,
have to say? “Very nice, very nice”, he can be heard muttering as he passes
through the electronic gate.

Naipaul’s response to the metro is akin to countless others I had heard, and
to what I myself had experienced. Who could not be impressed? The ordered
space and gleaming surfaces are nothing if not a crucible of the city’s
modernity. The metro is a marvel, something to marvel at, for anyone who
visits Delhi, but also, and especially so, for its residents. It goes
against everything they know. It is shiny, cool and clean, but it was also
built on time, within budget, and without the infamous corruption that
stalls or derails so many public and private sector projects.

When Naipaul exits the metro, chatting with the filmmaker, he remarks on the
“endless announcements” in the trains, and how people are “behaving with
great dignity”; they were “following the rules”. And then he speculates that
the experience of riding the metro will, over time, “make them more civil”.
Here he seems to be back in Naipaulian territory: to what extents do bodily
actions and repetitions make the man or woman? It was the distinction he
made long ago in An Area of Darkness (1964) on watching a sweeper at work:
there was the act of sweeping and there was the condition of being a
sweeper. In the latter, Naipaul saw the social ills of a deeply hierarchical
society, and went on to make his pronouncements about Indian stagnation
among other things. One day as I pull into Ramesh Nagar Station, a man
pushing a wide broom moves slowly across the empty platform. He is not a
sweeper, but a uniformed metro worker who works for a company to which the
Delhi Metro Rail Corporation (DMRC) has outsourced its “housekeeping”.

Of the metro Naipaul makes the following observation: The passengers are
trying to match the metro with their own behaviour (Low 2008). It is an old
postulation, and one I have continually heard in relation to the metro,
about how new forms and ways of being are taking hold in society, and how
the environment of the metro makes people “more sophisticated”. What is it
about the metro that makes people act in certain ways? Are Dilliwallas proud
of the metro and so of themselves? Are they, in fact, more civil because the
surroundings are new and clean, and full of security and CCTV cameras? And
who would be a better spokesperson for this grand neoliberal vision – of
individuals who gain autonomy as they “freely” subject themselves to new
rules and regulations – than Naipaul?

The question of behaviour in public spaces and notions of civility and
cleanliness is linked to the history of urbanisation and colonialism, most
often as articulated through issues of caste and class. In his discussion of
the colonial-era bazaars and parks of Calcutta, Dipesh Chakrabarty describes
a colonialist/nationalist “call to discipline, public health, and public
order” in public spaces that went unheeded by most Indians, spurring him to
ask: “Can one read this as a refusal to become citizens of an ideal,
bourgeois order?” (Chakrabarty 2002: 77). In the case of the metro, which is
a highly managed space, there is little scope for “refusal”.

*A New Urban Landscape*

Since the 1990s, the rise of middle class consumer culture and the dynamism
of global capital positions Delhi as a cosmopolitan city.1 Yet this image
belies a host of competing interests for resources in the city. Since Delhi
became the colonial capital in 1911, the city’s planning and architecture
have highlighted competing modernist visions, the competition for resources,
and essentially, who should live in the city (who it is made for and who it
accommodates), as well as how people should live in it. Today, it is
transportation (how people move through the city) that has become the centre
of many of those visions, narratives, and competitions.

Much attention has been paid to the fact that the Delhi metro was completed
on time and under budget (Lakshman 2007); and, like many subway systems the
world over, a narrative of optimism and achievement (Brooks 1997) has
dominated the planning and construction phases of this mega-project. Delhi’s
legendary traffic has made it infamous as a dangerous and disorderly urban
space, and it is often stated that the city has more cars than Mumbai,
Kolkata, and Chennai combined. It is also a city of great elegance and
order, with its magisterial Mughal-era monuments and gardens, leafy middle
class colonies, and broad tree-lined roads of Lutyen’s New Delhi. As a
symbol alone, the metro has already gone some way to dismantle this paradox
and is seen as unambiguous evidence of progress and development; it is seen
as proof that Delhi is indeed a “world-class” city. However, what this means
and whose world it contains is up for debate.2 Like shopping malls, Café
Coffee Days and Baristas, the Delhi metro provides a new, all-encompassing
sensory and spatial experience with its air-conditioned comfort and hi-tech
surveillance. But the metro is open to a much wider spectrum of people. It
is as much about commuting and finding new routes for a variety of
activities as it is about consuming. For some, the aspirers and admirers, it
means that you can be on the metro and imagine you are anywhere in the
world. And indeed, the metro can take you to new places; this new mental
landscape is as significant as what the metro is forging on the ground. The
idea of a “mental landscape” is associated with a spatial understanding of
modernity that has long been central to the scholarship on cities and to
urban ethnography. In this essay, my focus on space is threefold and
includes: (1) the new cultural geography that is created by the physical
imposition of the metro edifice on Delhi’s landscape; (2) the spaces created
within the metro itself (on trains and in stations) and the practices
associated with those new spaces; and (3) the spatial imaginaries
experienced by individual riders, as understood through my interviews with
riders and as represented in popular Hindi films featuring the Delhi metro.

*Delhi’s Built Environment*

Major public transit systems have long been a way not only to assess
modernity (Berman 1988), but, more specifically, to determine the “health”
of cities (Cudhay 2003). Yet, as Marc Augé (2002) has shown in his
ethnography of the Paris metro, there is an everyday life underground that
puts into relief the urban condition as much as it changes it. The metro is
seen by some as a “cure” to the urban ills of pollution, stress, accidents,
and death itself – a clean, smooth, fast, cheap, air-conditioned alternative
to hot, bumpy roads jammed with cars, mopeds, bicycles, cycle and auto
rickshaws, carts, buses, and taxis. Newspapers offer a running account of
Delhi’s traffic woes, reports of accidents on higher speed newly built
flyovers and expressways, of Blueline buses knocking over motorcyclists or
ploughing through a line of waiting passengers; of drivers absconding in the
aftermath of crashes. New campaigns on billboards and in newspaper ads warn
people not to drink and drive and to obey traffic rules, or else be
subjected to a dreaded traffic ticket or challan.

Anyone who saw Connaught Place as the metro was being built, or has
travelled through south Delhi in the last few years, knows that the
construction of the metro has depended on a lot of destruction. During the
first phase of the massive project, numerous neighbourhoods that the metro
would soon pass through first became construction zones piled high with
dust, corrugated metal sheets, cement, and cranes. Traffic was re-routed and
city-dwellers in many areas suffered from what one urban planner called “a
tidal wave of physical destruction and social disorientation” (Siemiatycki
2006: 286). Then these same areas were restored and even embellished, as
dislocation became relocation. Above ground, in the run-up to the October
2010 Commonwealth Games, thick concrete stanchions continued to rise up all
over the city as Delhi’s visual landscape was being changed forever. Soon it
will be hard to remember what the city was like before the metro.

The metro has already made a variety of architectural and environmental
marks on the city, sometimes by knocking down or obscuring other pieces of
the city’s heritage. The elevated metro line that passes near Qutub Minar
was re-routed so that it would not obstruct a view of the 12th century
monument. The Delhi Urban Art Commission (DUAC), which was set up by Indira
Gandhi in 1974 when Delhi was going “skyscraper happy”, and the
Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) appealed to the dmrc to save this view
by changing the route of the metro. It was the first time the mighty DMRC,
which had been given the green light by the Delhi government to criss-cross
neighbourhoods as it saw fit, changed their routing. The corporation, a
government entity partnered with 500 private contractors, was initially
resistant. After all it would require changing the route of the line and it
would cost an extra Rs 300 crore. Instead, the DMRC countered, wouldn’t
people be able to see the monument while on the metro? But once they were
shown a presentation of how Kolkata’s metro had messed up the historic
Chowringhee Lane, they agreed. Despite the ability to convince the DMRC to
change the line, a former DUAC member told me that ultimately the
organisation has little power vis-à-vis the powers that be, by which she
meant the city’s professional urban planners, and that there is no real
public discourse on how Delhi should urbanise. And then she added, “The DUAC
has polite interactions now with the Delhi Development Authority (dda),
whose own members”, she said, “have become more sophisticated. They have
travelled to Barcelona”. An environmental lawyer working with the Save the
Yamuna River campaign put it more bluntly: What was urban development, he
said, but a mafia of builders, bureaucrats, and politicians?3

How, then, do changes in the built environment reveal a politics of
difference among those who benefit from the metro – individuals and
communities – and those who may not? It is precisely with these questions
that issues of citizenship, or rights, become “cultural”, or based on
values, lifestyles, livelihoods, and a host of other not easily
categorisable ways of being. In this vein, James Holston and Arjun Appadurai
(1999) have written of a liberal citizenship that produces “citizens who are
predominately passive in their citizenship” and who are “for the most part,
spectators who vote”. Much of the debate about the existence or
non-existence of a “public” in Delhi who can contest or approve of the metro
revolves around this point in particular as articulated by Holston and
Appadurai: “…without active participation in the business of rule, they are
citizens whose citizenship is managed, for better or worse, by an unelected
bureaucracy” (1999: 7).

*The Delhi Metro Rail Corporation*

In promotional videos made by the DMRC, the narrative of the metro is clear:
Delhi used to be clean before Independence, but went on to become the fourth
most polluted city in the world. The need for a metro was an urgent one. One
public relations representative from the DMRC told me in no uncertain terms
that the city was “on the brink of collapse” before the metro arrived. Now
with the metro, there is a new order and discipline that is taking the city
forward. And, in this sense, the discourse around the metro highlights the
most recent narrative about the “new” India, a nation that is “rising” and
being recognised as a formidable presence on the global political, economic,
and cultural stage. Even as the major daily newspapers in India and around
the world reported the embarrassments due to the lack of preparation for the
Commonwealth Games, the metro which was hurriedly being finished and whose
Airport Line is still to open was by contrast still heralded for its
superior planning and execution.

The metro is a global venture in that it was built with Japanese loans,
South Korean technology, and partnerships with a number of countries,
including Germany and Sweden, where the first trains were built. JAICO (the
conglomerate that has given the Japanese loan to the Indian government to
make the metro) is an organisation that one outside consultant described to
me as being a combination of “touchy-feely NGO types who want to help
societies” and “bankers who want a return on their investment”. Oriental
Consultants is meant to critique the project, to show what is and what is
not happening. But they are not meant to question the viability of the metro
itself. What they may question is if “stockholders” are being served;
stockholders are the Indian public who use or are affected in any way by the
metro. Are they getting compensated if they had to move out of the metro’s
way, for instance? Is there a forum or procedure for them to air grievances?
It is in this manner that we can begin to think about how the construction
of the metro has created new publics, both real and imagined. And it is
where Delhi-based NGOs such as the Hazards Centre have stepped in to
document and address the needs of those who have been displaced by the
metro.

Despite all the foreign capital, the Delhi metro’s production is being
increasingly indigenised. Trains are now being manufactured in Bangalore and
Gujarat. And, it is the DMRC whose expertise is going global – from Ireland
to Indonesia – as it is being asked by these and other cities around the
world to consult on their metro projects. This is good news for the DMRC
since it takes Rs 100 crore on average to build a kilometre of the metro.
Many urban activists and planners not working with the DMRC have questioned
the kind of investment the metro is (Mohan 2008; Roy 2009). The
much-maligned Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) route that crosses south Delhi, by
comparison, takes Rs 15 crore a kilometre to build. But the BRT is hardly
the darling of the city the way the metro is. It is not only because of the
gleaming trains, however. The metro is part of the larger package of the
DMRC, which has been heralded for its Indian efficiency, largely due to the
management skills of its director,
E Sreedharan who has been called nothing less than a “miracle-worker”
(Lakshman 2007). Sreedharan is heralded not merely for his vision, but the
personal discipline and focus that he has been able to ingrain in the 4,000
workers of the DMRC. Most crucially, however, he is able to get things done
because he has the complete confidence and support of the DMRC Board of
Directors. Without him, I was often told, the entire project would simply
stall.

*Carefully Managed Image*

The image of the DMRC is a carefully managed one, and you only need to look
at the many interviews with Sreedharan on CNN-IBN and a host of other
television channels to see that these interviews and features are really
hagiographies. It is hard not to be swayed by Sreedharan’s discipline and
energy, as we watch him at the age of 76, in an orange vest climbing the
stairs at metro construction sites faster than the young reporters trying to
catch up to him. There is no hint of irony when the reporters talk about
Sreedharan’s ability to convince people to sell their land, and how he has
the foresight to send packers and movers to those who are moving out of the
metro’s way. In July 2009, after a dramatic accident at an overground metro
construction site in south Delhi that left six workers dead and 14 injured,
Sreedharan resigned, citing his moral responsibility for the accident.
However, the Delhi government, headed by Sheila Dixit would not accept his
resignation, and Sreedharan was back on the job within 48 hours. Most
recently, the nation watched as Sreedharan suffered a heart attack, made a
full recovery, and within two months returned to his full duties. Now he is
set to retire by the end of this year but even that date may be delayed by
at least a couple of months.

I made numerous visits over a 15-month period to the Public Relations
department at the Metro Bhavan, the DMRC’s new headquarters just off
Barakhamba Road in Connaught Place. I was always kindly greeted and offered
a number of DMRC publications to purchase. They kept asking me to give them
my survey, and I kept telling them that I wanted to talk to people instead.
I knew this might not be easy in a corporation where everyone was not only
busy but also cautious about the image being created.

Now, as the DMRC becomes a major brand in Indian efficiency, there is what
can only be called a pan-Indian desire for the metro. Numerous other Indian
cities – including Chennai and Bangalore – have begun projects; and smaller
cities, from Cochin to Ludhiana – are considering them. Everyone, it would
seem, would like to get on board. Sreedharan himself has said that any
Indian city with a population of three million or more should have a metro.
There are 30 Indian cities that would qualify on that basis alone.

The DMRC is not shy about touting its fabled work ethic in its own
promotional materials, from posters in their own workplace, to ads in the
metro, pamphlets, and hardback volumes available for purchase. Posters at
the new Metro Bhavan proclaim their professional work culture as a
combination of accountability, transparency, teamwork, and time-bound
commitments. The Metro Bhavan itself sets the tone with its vast, airy lobby
and edifice made of warm grey stone, and glass elevator shafts allowing you
to see the cables at work.

The workers – many of whom came from the Indian Railways – do yoga and value
time, we are told. The Metro Museum at Patel Chowk station features
photographs of metro workers en masse in yoga poses alongside the trains
themselves. The message throughout is that individual discipline, focus, and
transparency has made the metro. But in the Metro Museum, the most popular
display is a map of the system, illuminating the parts of the metro that are
in operation with moving coloured lights representing the yellow, blue, and
red lines. People stand transfixed in front of the display. The metro is
moving the city and being moved by it.

The new work culture and the values associated with the metro are now being
promoted more widely, even beyond the plans for metros in other cities.
Sreedharan himself has spearheaded a new group called the Foundation for the
Restoration of National Values (FRNV) based on the teachings of his guru,
Swami Bhoomananda Tirtha. The group asserts that it does not mean to promote
religious views or one religion over another, but instead has a more secular
coupling of “administrative might” with “spiritual elegance”, largely coming
from universal ethical values as described in the Bhagavad Gita. What FRNV
seeks to address is a contradiction they see between India’s “growing
economic competence” yet “failing ethical conduct”, as described in their
own brochures and website (Tirtha 2008). I attended a two-day meeting they
held in Delhi in November 2008 where the work ethic of the metro was meant
to inspire new forms of ethical practice in areas such as education,
healthcare, and the media. A roster of high-profile speakers on multiple
panels took on the issue of values and ethics in their respective fields.
The goal is nothing less than transforming Indian society and its
institutions in the image of the DMRC, one that is efficient and free of
corruption. It would seem the metro is not only a form of transport, but
also a way forward for society more generally. It has become part of a
larger platform for change as directed by the techno-managerial class. And,
it is in this respect that we may see the metro as a crucible for an
entirely new form of “cultural citizenship”, that is, the ways in which
nation-building and identity-formation intersect with day to day civic
belonging (Rosaldo 2003; Ong 1999).

Not surprisingly, the discourse on the metro has also become a referendum on
Delhi politicians. Parties and individual politicians take credit for it,
while it has also become a symbol of relating to the general public. So in
the 2009 general election, we saw politicians riding the metro in
high-profile journeys to meet constituents and give speeches. Something
similar is happening in the city of Taipei with their relatively new metro
and the government entity known as the MRT (Mass Rapid Transit) that runs
it; the metro there has come to represent a locus of feelings about the
government more generally (Lee 2007); and even in New York City, with its
100-year-old clanking subway system, the 2009 proposal to raise fares by 25%
has prompted all kind of outcries against the New York City government. Yes,
metro systems are about the health of cities, but they are also much more
than that. As Alaina Lemon has written in her study of the Moscow metro,
“Talking about transit, its practices and infrastructures, really concerns
who should be included in the city, in the nation” (Lemon 2000: 35). In this
vein, I would suggest that the Delhi metro marks the arrival not merely of a
new form of transport, but for new definitions of expertise and notions of
the civic. The metro blurs some lines of exclusion even as it solidifies
others.

*Delhi Up-Down*

The metro can seem like a great leveller, as riders of different social and
economic backgrounds sit side by side, all subject to a new transportation
regime directed by the hand of the state in the form of the DMRC. At Rs 8 to
30 a ride, riding the Delhi metro proves to be one of the cheapest metro
rides in the world, though it is still more than double the cost of riding
the bus, and I spoke with many people on buses who said they would not take
the metro because of the cost.

The lines of exclusion and inclusion on the metro have much to do with the
kinds of spatial relations created between the metro and other parts of the
city. The metro is certainly modern in David Harvey’s sense of time-space
compression (Harvey 1995).4 The space of the city has contracted as time has
speeded up; distances between opposite ends of town have shrunk to a third
or even fourth of what they once were. In the process, Delhi’s “hinterlands”
are becoming part of an ever-expanding and “mappable” city. There is a new
level of abstraction that one experiences as one looks at the city rather
than experiencing it on the ground. It allows, what Sunila, a mid-20s
commuter from Dwarka described to me as: “Delhi up-down”. I had struck up a
conversation with her one afternoon as we were waiting on the platform for a
train. She did not talk about the city in this way when she used to ride the
bus; then, her route was not direct and not as fast. It was not “Delhi
up-down”. Now she goes from Dwarka to Uttam Nagar East where she works, but
travels elsewhere on it as well.

Anyone who has taken auto rickshaws in Delhi knows that auto drivers are not
accustomed to looking at maps and often do not know how to get from one
place to another. This is partly because many drivers come from other cities
and towns and learn on the job once they arrive in Delhi. But it is also
because Delhi is not a map city – people do not imagine it as a city with
defined borders and a discernible shape. The metro is changing this, by its
very physicality, an edifice that is spreading across the city’s landscape
and in some cases creating it anew. And with the naming of each station, it
is creating a shorthand for thinking across the city. All of a sudden places
like Shadara, Jhandewalan, Dwarka, Rohini, and Rithala have become places
that exist as people are seeing those names reproduced on map after map; new
outer suburbs emerge and “old” places, such as Karol Bagh, Chawri Bazaar,
and Chandni Chowk have become new. Some were always places to go to, but now
they have been plotted out in a visual reference that is the metro map. The
outer sub-cities, made of resettlement colonies, vast tracts of apartment
buildings, schools, restaurants, and malls, meanwhile are forging the city
in new directions. The metro is augmenting Delhi’s language of urban
expansion comprised of phases, parks, sectors, pockets, apartments, camps,
vihars, nagars, settlements, flats, enclaves, and extensions. It is the
metro that is now in some sense the city’s master plan, as it demands
further densification along its lines. In some cases, the city is being
built up and around the metro lines.

*Space, Place, Gender*

The metro could be viewed as a modern disciplinary institution in that it
allows people greater autonomy and freer movement, while it also puts
citizens under more surveillance as they learn to subject themselves to new
rules. This autonomy and surveillance are both made possible by the kinds of
spaces being demarcated and created within the metro trains and at its
stations.

A new space is a new set of boundaries. The most obvious of these for riders
is the entrance to the metro – featuring the security check, ticket booth,
and automated entry. These areas are bounded by physical objects: electronic
gates and doors, uniformed security guards, metal detectors, stairwells,
potted plants, glass dividers, and metal handrails. At the Dwarka Sector 9
station, I notice a sheet of paper posted at the security-curtained area on
the side of the metal detector, listing what cannot be brought on to the
train: dried blood; human corpse; animal carcasses; any part of human
skeleton; manure. I wonder if this has something to do with this station
being at the end of the line, almost reaching out to the hinterlands. These
items are listed as being not as dangerous, but as “offensive materials”.

At Chandni Chowk Station at 3:30 in the afternoon there is always a long
line of men waiting to go through the metal detector. It is not that their
security search takes any longer, but there are just so many more of them
who are going somewhere. I know by now to cut across the line to the
“ladies” metal detector where there are never more than a few women waiting
in line. I walk through and go behind a small circular curtain to be frisked
and “wanded” by another woman in a security guard uniform and neatly braided
hair. This curtained space is a replication of many other curtained security
areas in many other places, not only airports, but also movie theatres.

Still, the metro itself is hardly a “non-place” (non-lieux), Marc Augé’s
term for the non-contiguous spaces of airports, hotel rooms, and
supermarkets. He calls these interstitial, transient places that lack
historical and relational specificity and are examples of a “supermodernity”
(Augé 1995). The metro is a space of transport that is recognisable in many
other faraway places all over the world. Yet, it is an identity marker, and
perhaps maker, for its riders, one that forges new historical and relational
connections within the city itself. These connections begin with the spaces
within the metro and the new kinds of behaviours they require and encourage.

For instance, there are new forms of security and surveillance that are now
ubiquitous precisely because there are and will be so many stations, dozens
and dozens of them all over the city. There are not only visible cameras
watching you at all of these stations (though not inside the trains
themselves), but there are signs reminding you that cameras are watching
you. To what extent has safety, and what it takes to have it, become a
public good? Are people only on their best behaviour when faced with cameras
or new technologies they might not fully comprehend?

The metro was first heralded as a safe space for women (Batra 2003); women
reported that they were not being eve-teased. Now that is starting to change
as the trains get more and more crowded during rush hours, and people may be
gaining some measure of “invisibility” among the crowds pushing into and out
of trains.

Similar codes of behaviour can be found on the city buses, but the feel of
them is quite different; they are more intimate in a physical sense, the
space is more constricted, and people routinely speak to one another, often
to cajole, scold, harass, or flirt. The key figure on the bus is the ticket
collector. He does not only take money, give out tickets, and return change;
he manages the crowd, and with a slap of his hand on the side of the bus he
cues the driver on when to start moving. He shouts at people, telling them
what to do, and how to behave, admonishing them for “acting like children”
or “holding everyone up”. He both surveys and manages the crowd. And at the
bus stops other riders give you information about which lines go where and
which are good lines; there is a continual sharing of information and
advice, as well as collective grief over late buses or non-existent ones.

On the metro there is no ticket collector to complain to if something goes
wrong or if someone gets out of line, for this is an automated environment.
Many were shocked, for instance, when a contracted metro worker was
directing people who were boarding a train got his hand stuck in the door as
it was closing and was dragged to the next station while clutching to the
outside of the train. Passengers on board watched in amazement and horror,
but did not know how to hit the emergency bell.

A law student, Suresh, told me about his experience of being in the crush of
the crowd one day, alongside a young mother carrying a small child.5 They
had not made way for her but had pushed her aside. He could not understand
this, nor could he do anything to help her, but he ended up getting
ensnarled in her bangles and left the train with bruised arms. He then told
me that he feels more comfortable when women have seats, even though he
knows that they may not always want to sit.

The long lines to enter the metro show that men predominate, as they do on
the bus. But the city’s buses feel more like male-dominated spaces. There is
a kind of gender neutrality on the metro, even though there are many more
men, and even though the security is divided on gendered lines. With the
arrival last month of a women-only coach on every train, the reaction to it
seems to be less about how women are treated on the trains and more about
women being able to find a seat amid the crush of people. Some are relieved
to have an optional, segregated space for women, while others see it as
reinforcing gender stereotypes of women needing extra protection, a step
back in what was a new kind of public space for Dilliwalas.

A little over a year ago, Vanita, a college lecturer in her mid-50s, told me
that riding the metro changed her relationship to the city and made her see
herself differently. She said that not knowing how to drive and becoming
dependent on a driver – first her husband and then a hired driver – framed
her relationship with the city for over 30 years. The idea of going anywhere
alone, without the driver, did not cross her mind. It only changed with the
rude awakening and painful experience of her husband leaving her and taking
the family car with him. She was lost at first, especially since she worked
in Pitampura in the north-east of the city, and lived in south Delhi beyond
the Outer Ring Road; and then a friend suggested she start taking the metro,
even though it required her to take an auto rickshaw until Central
Secretariat, almost half the distance. The commute did not make sense at one
level, but she did it anyway. “The metro became part of my day-to- day”, she
told me. “You have to walk fast, you can’t waddle along. You can get jostled
a bit. But within several days, riding it made me a different person. It was
a novelty, but it also took my mind off things.” She not only started taking
it to the college where she worked, but to Tis Hazari court as well, which
happened to be on the same line. By then she was involved in three court
cases against her husband and had to make regular trips to Tis Hazari for
proceedings in what had become a messy divorce. “I could see it from the
train”, she said, “It gave me a different angle on my life to see the court
from there, to be getting there by taking the metro”.

*The Metro in Hindi Films*

The image of the metro as a liberating space has become part of Indian
popular culture, even cinematic shorthand for the development of characters.
In the movie, Delhi-6 (6 is postal code for Old Delhi), the female lead,
played by Sonam Kapoor, is a young Muslim girl who lives with her family in
an old haveli. She is trying to forge her own identity, a personal journey
that is partly shown through her trips on the metro. As she moves away from
her family home and neighbourhood and makes forays into the city, she sheds
her salwar-kameez for belly button revealing tight tops. She pulls her hair
back with a bandanna and paints her lips red. We then see her at a
photographer’s studio creating a portfolio of sassy poses to send to the
judges of the television show “Indian Idol”. These scenes are framed by her
going into and out of metro stations. In the train, she looks out the
window, and we witness her aloneness in this in-between space, but then see
her sense of anticipation and defiance as she glides up an escalator into
Connaught Place. The metro allows her to get away and feel anonymous in the
city, while it also shuttles her back to her family and the old city. This
narrative of liberation does not threaten her place in her family, and so,
in good family film fashion, she does not change too much. Delhi-6 offers a
conventional story of gendered liberation. The more experimental Hindi movie
Dev D, by Anurag Kashyap, came out at the same time offering a much edgier
portrayal of the city. Abhay Deol’s title character does not always know
where he is going or what he aspires to. Seeing him on the metro symbolises
the possibility of adventure, unpredictability, and even danger, matching
the aimless wandering of his own troubled soul.

*Conclusions*

On the way to Rithala one day, a large mall comes into view from the train;
its faded colours stand out in the otherwise brownish landscape. Once
outside the station – the end of the line – cycle rickshaw drivers ferry
people between the metro and the mall. They ride up to the entrance of the
vast parking lot of the mall, but are not allowed entry beyond this point,
where a few security guards are assembled. The cycle rickshaw, with its
squeaky metal parts, and the driver in his dirty clothes, are antithetical
to the space of the mall, where heavy-set women in salwar-kameez, and young
boys and girls in jeans, come to stroll. The shops are ice-cold. And there
might be more shop assistants than customers. The mall is adjacent to an
“Adventureland” amusement park, and at first it is hard to tell where the
mall ends and the park begins. Then a narrow pedestrian bridge over a small
fake lake comes into view. Small food stalls sell popcorn and “authentic”
chaat. Mechanical rides rise up towards the horizon. On the mall side, amid
one of the concrete concourses, there is an island of short green grass, a
lawn not more than three feet by five feet, demarcated by a raised concrete
curb. An old man – the mali – sits crouched there, rubbing dirt between his
fingers as he tends to the sprouts.

When I am ready to leave the mall, I walk the length of the parking lot to
the outer entrance, past the security guards to the waiting cycle rickshaw
drivers. From here there is a direct view to the metro, a concrete edifice
extending across the skyline. Between the mall and the metro lies a large
construction site. A cycle rickshaw driver tells me, with a mixture of awe
and disdain, that the half-made structure in front of us is to be a
five-star hotel. Some of these hotels as well as IT parks are owned and
being built by the DMRC itself, which has to diversify in order to maintain
its own fiscal sustainability.

Meanwhile, this new India – the spaces of consumption of both goods and
experience – are for the moneyed classes, professionals, and aspirers. It is
true that metro stations have created desirable routes for cycle rickshaws,
and that drivers sometimes make a few rupees more per kilometre than they
are used to as they ply back and forth from the metro to the mall. And it
turns out they too are part of Delhi’s Master Plan for 2021, page 149 of the
“Reader Friendly” version; it points out that unlike other forms of
transport, they are non-polluting. But ultimately the place of cycle
rickshaw drivers is only being reinscribed on the new urban landscape as
they encircle more spaces to which they are not allowed entry.