Anthropology at the Ends of the Lines

I have been thinking about what a critical urban anthropology does and means for the last ten years or so, as I have been researching Delhi’s new and massive urban rail system. The research is over, the book – The Moving City: Scenes from the Delhi Metro and the Social Life of Infrastructure (2022) – is out, but I am realizing more and more that this work has re-wired my brain in terms of how I think about cities and how I think I will approach them from here on out. This re-wiring has chiefly to do with the critical engagement with the city that the Delhi Metro required me to have, a two-fold process of rethinking my methodologies and reckoning with what “city” meant or stood for. At first, the metro system posed a methodological challenge: How was I going to study such a vast system ethnographically? How was I going to be everywhere I needed to be? And how exactly was I to study “the mass” in mass transit?

To this end, my critical urban anthropology began with reevaluating what ethnography might mean and do in a city of 20 million. How does one approach a megacity and the myriad forms of urbanization underway in it? How does the focus on the intricate and small-scale – the hallmark of anthropological research – get squared with the bigness of cities, their growth and the forms they spawn?

The “critical” in critical urban anthropology widens our perspective by challenging normative understandings of the city and its development, and it also compels us to see things in a new light, to juxtapose what is usually not juxtaposed, because practically speaking, this is what enables us to forge a new object of research or category or line of analysis. The urban is anything but static, and the “critical” highlights this dynamism, whether the urban is a place or a process, and it is often both.

With the Delhi Metro, the “critical” became a question of space and place, of grappling with the spatial dimensions of a multiline system and the dozens and then hundreds of metro stations strewn across the urban landscape, of scaling up and then down quickly and repeatedly. I started out by meeting officials, architects, urban planners, activists, politicians, and bureaucrats, mostly in offices, learning about their plans and executions and the bumpy roads between them. This meant understanding what was “critical” from their perspectives. But then, over the years, as three Metro lines became nine, I shifted to spending most of my time riding the trains. I witnessed and often took part in thousands of interactions across the city from ends to ends. I found that despite the straight lines on the Metro map, the city was not a set of linear relationships, and its borders were not fixed or clear cut. I started to see that the real challenge was not only going to be understanding what the “city” was geographically and bureaucratically, but also, what it meant to people and how they negotiated their lives through it. And here I seemed to be back in that strangely familiar and contested anthropological territory of urban versus rural and great versus little. Did the Metro present a break between the past and future of Delhi, with the properly urban (densely built up) and more hinterland-y rural? Or was the Metro creating an urban-rural continuum itself? And what were the stakes – for issues of transport inequality, mobility, and urban development – in this boundary-making infrastructure?

I discovered that the Metro does represent a kind of break, but mostly because of the material object it is and the sensorial disruption it creates. Its size and heft are imposing, while its quietness can be alarming. It is both grounded and moving, and produces new kinds of ethnographic objects, such as new interiors in the trains and in stations and new interfaces between the Metro and the street. It also produces a new idea and hence objectification of “the city” itself: a city that is both unraveling and being built up.

As for the other break, the one implied by its central urban beginnings and out-of-town endings, it was not as clear-cut. The ends of the Metro lines mark the beginning of the city for many and an ability to specify time and place with more accuracy, as one enters the temporal schema of the system. And yet, in a more psychic sense, the ends of the lines are also where rural-ness or not-city-ness get transported and absorbed into the city. As the Metro grew, my anthropology increasingly turned to the ends of the lines, which began to get further and further from the central hubs of the system. Traversing this distance, materially and experientially, became a critical ethnographic site in my research and became symbolic of the kinds of change I was seeing in people’s lives and attitudes. At the ends of the lines, I turned my own gaze back on to the “centers” I thought I knew. My ideas about the linearity of city space or even the continuum between the urban and rural were shaken up.

Delhi is a destination for many across the hinterlands, but it is also a reflection of the region. Cities have a context, even if we have come to think of them more and more in relation to one another (e.g., the connections between global cities) than to where they are geographically. Cities might more productively be defined from the inside out, or in my case, from the ends of Metro lines in. Dwelling at the ends of the lines made me see how the urban and the rural produce each other. This insight came through people’s talk and what I observed on the trains and around stations. The talk was not so much about the land the Metro was gobbling up or even the infrastructure that was doing the “reaching out”, but rather the shift in perception people had as they entered stations and sat in trains. It is not that they abandoned themselves or their pasts when they did so, but rather that they squared those things with a new kind of structure and velocity. This squaring started quite simply by viewing the urban landscape from a new vantage point, recognizing their place in it, and reconstructing their idea of themselves. My study of the Metro had started with my keen interest in the hierarchies of transport and how they reflected urban issues and social problems, especially around gender and class. And I came to see that the Metro, with all its concreteness and mega-ness, was not a static system but one that was always changing and churning things up for people.

Since I was studying the Metro as it was being built and expanded over three construction phases and across 400 kilometers of urban space, the idea of “the moving city” was at first quite literal. The Delhi Metro was defining the city’s borders anew and with each new line and station, these borders were changing. Often, the ends of the lines were in neighboring states, and then people asked, Was the Metro really in Delhi anymore? That the “ends” were stations but also construction sites gave them a different quality than other built forms. Sometimes the endings were counter-intuitive, as in Gurgaon, which is a satellite city of Delhi across the state border of Haryana. It is a place where new elites come to live in high rise, high amenity apartment complexes, and where people across Delhi come to take up jobs in the IT sector. The “village” aspects of Gurgaon are still there but have been psychically transformed into the space for the laboring class that supports the hi-fi lives – technologically elevated, connected – in their midst. On the Metro the social reality translates into a city-to-city commute along the Yellow Line, traversing Delhi’s “farmlands”, home to big villas and sprawling suburbs, while the northern end of the line connects working class suburbs to the centers of town. Then there is the Blue Line that has no ending on one side, as it travels through the aspirational landscape of West Delhi and circles back to Delhi’s international airport. To the east the Blue Line branches out to cities in Uttar Pradesh and is met by all form of commuters from Ghaziabad and beyond.

The ends of lines that came to capture my attention most profoundly came to be the ones that seemed to embody the urban-rural continuum. As I rode these lines – Red, Violet, Green – the city seemed at once to peter out and draw in along the Metro line itself. I saw densification at work, as the Metro lines forged through the landscape but also connected these realities, which could sometimes be seen by what people were talking about on the trains, but also language, bodily comportments, and styles of dress. The Metro was a built form that people and things coalesced around.

It is true that cities are always moving; people, goods, and ideas flow into and out of them densely and quickly; things pick up pace, as do people’s desires, fears, hopes, for jobs, housing, and food; education, love, and respect. This “moving” is also about the promise of mobilities of different kinds. This is where the real meaning of the city lies, in its possibilities and in people’s beliefs in their access to them. The urban meanwhile is more prosaic – land, property, housing, transport, etc. – but lays the ground for everything else. This conceptual difference between “the city” and “urban” may help us not to get so hung up on “cityness” and see the urban-rural as more of a mix, both culturally and experientially.

Being at and thinking through the city at the ends of the lines rooted me in new places and forced me to look at the city differently. The ends of the lines made me see that “the city” was not just where the concreteness of a Metro station met the road, but that it was often a visual or aural clue, or just a feeling. This sensorial and affective dimension of the Metro and people’s interface with it was to become central to my study.

As a response to the ethnographic challenge of studying such a vast system, my ethnography became radically multi-sited within Delhi’s national capital region. It was a method that aimed to capture not only the feeling of mobility but also understand the see-saw relationship between the mobile and the stationary. I stopped looking for a community or group to focus my study on and embraced the multifarious crowd and its anonymity. I did find Metro publics, here and there, and I learned to make meaning out of short interactions, the briefest of interviews. It was a mobile ethnography to study a moving city. My ethnographic practice of continually riding the trains required me to reconsider the meaning of place in a city with increasing mobility on the one hand and feelings of being stuck on the other. The Metro is chiefly a transport system, it is moving, as the title of my ethnography asserts, but it also occupies land and is extremely expensive to run. This paradox became the critical frame of my research, which sought to expose and probe the contradictions of what has become a beloved and “freeing” form of transport, with its speed and shiny surfaces, the lightness of that, balanced by the heaviness of mega-infrastructure, a capital-intensive weight on the city that serves the growing middle classes by tying up resources and taking up space.

Through my research, I saw that my evolving understanding of “city” intersected with the infrastructural turn in our broader discipline. Infrastructure captures a certain urgency in cities – for more equity and access to resources among other things – even as we balance this urgency with the necessary slowness of our own ethnographic research methods. In the case of the Delhi Metro, it is an infrastructure that offers a glimpse of the below and beneath, of promise and disappointment, of capital expansion and marginalization, and a vehicle for “the people”. It is also a set of public spaces that are transforming the city’s geography and urban landscape. The Metro is an infrastructure that collapses “city” and “urban” and required a method to understand the “bigness” and everyday “smallness” of such a system. In this regard, I would posit infrastructure as an answer, one answer at least, to Setha Low’s early provocation when she asked why the city has been undertheorized, which was linked to the idea of whether anthropologists study cities or study in cities (1996). Infrastructure requires both, and it has become a site of critical research by looking at something obvious and every day in a new way–to study up, down, and all around. Infrastructure is a process, a set of revealings and concealings, visibilities and invisibilities, but it is also an event, albeit a contingent one.

In a recent issue of Roadsides, a peer-reviewed, open-access journal devoted to anthropological approaches to infrastructure, Christina Schwenkel (2021) expands the critical domain of infrastructure by emphasizing its multisensorial aspects. For her too, “critical” refers not only to a theoretical apparatus but also to our very methods and analysis: It means illuminating an embodied experience of infrastructure in order to understand the ways infrastructures mediate and regulate the senses, but also how people’s sensorial interactions with infrastructure make these technical domains human, meaningful, and changeable. The change part is also central to critical urban anthropology more broadly, since we are studying how things have changed, how things might change, and how we might want things to change. We are interested in the psychic, the poetic, and the political (Larkin 2013), the complex promise of infrastructure (Appel, Anand, and Gupta 2018), and the entanglements that it generates (Srivastava 2015). And as Schwenkel writes more recently, a multisensorial approach further enables a critical lens that calls for more justice and accountability (2021: 5).

My own critical urbanism is grounded in meeting people on the Metro trains over the last ten years – and their mobilities. It was their perspectives on and experiences of who sits and who stands on the Metro, and what kinds of itineraries become possible, on the trains and in their lives, that became central. How their lives moved within the stations and coaches, within the city and across urban and peri-urban spaces. And what the consequences were for their own lives, their “stations” in life, and the promise of where they might go, both transport-wise and socially.

My research has shown me that to undertake “critical urban anthropology” is to attune to the always shifting nature of urban lives and forms, institutions and ideas, in order to identify the political meanings and ramifications of those shifts; it is to search out voices and perspectives that counter hegemonic discourses; it is to dwell in a variety of spaces, those deemed marginal as well as those laden with power in order to understand the relations between them.