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OTHER LOTUS TITLES

Anil Dharker

Aitzaz Ahsan

Icons: Men & Women Who Shaped Today’s India

The Indus Saga: The Making of Pakistan

Ajay Mansingh Firaq Gorakhpuri: The Poet of Pain & Ecstasy

Anjum Altaf and Thinking with Ghalib: Poetry for a New Generation

Amit Basole

Aruna Roy

The RTI Story: Power to the People

Ashis Ray Laid to Rest: The Controversy of Subhas Chandra Bose’s Death

Bertil Falk Feroze: The Forgotten Gandhi

Harinder Baweja

Jenny Housego

Kobad Ghandy

Kunal Purandare

Lakshmi Subramanian

Maj. Gen. Ian Cardozo

Madhu Trehan

A Soldier’s Diary: Kargil – The Inside Story

A Woven Life

Fractured Freedom: A Prison Memoir A Story of Passion, Commitment and a Search for Justice and Freedom

Ramakant Achrekar: A Biography

Singing Gandhi’s India: Music and Sonic Nationalism

Param Vir: Our Heroes in Battle

The Sinking of INS Khukri: What Happened in 1971

Prism Me a Lie Tell Me A Truth: Tehelka as Metaphor

Moin Mir Surat: Fall of a Port, Rise of a Prince, Defeat of the East India Company in the House of Commons

Monisha Rajesh

Around India in 80 Trains

Munshi Faizuddin Bazm-i Aakhir: The Last Gathering A vivid portrait of life in the Red Fort

Narinder Singh Kapany

Ralph Russell

Rahul Bedi

Rasheed Kidwai

R.V. Smith

Shrabani Basu

Shahrayar Khan

S. Hussain Zaidi

The Man Who Bent Light

The Famous Ghalib: The Sound of My Moving Pen

The Last Word: Obituaries of 100 Indians Who Led Unusual Lives

The House of Scindias: A Saga of Power, Politics and Intrigue

Delhi: Unknown Tales of a City

Spy Princess: The Life of Noor Inayat Khan

Bhopal Connections: Vignettes of Royal Rule

Dongri to Dubai: Six Decades of the Mumbai Mafia

Sunetra Choudhury Behind Bars: Prison Tales of India’s Most Famous

Sunil Gupta and Black Warrant: Confessions of a Tihar Jailer

Sunetra Choudhury

Tamal Bandyopadhyay

Thomas Weber

Vaibhav Purandare

Pandemonium: The Great Indian Banking Tragedy

Going Native: Gandhi’s Relationship with Western Women

Gandhi at First Sight

Sachin Tendulkar: A Definitive Biography

Vappala Balachandran A Life in Shadow: The Secret Story of ACN Nambiar –A Forgotten Anti-Colonial Warrior

Various

Vir Sanghvi

FORTHCOMING TITLE

Dinesh C. Sharma

The Dark Hour: India Under Lockdowns

Men of Steel: India’s Business Leaders in Candid Conversation

Indian Innovation, Not Jugaad: 100 Ideas that Transformed India

Lotus Collection

First published in 2022

The Lotus Collection

An imprint of Roli Books Pvt. Ltd

M-75, Greater Kailash II Market, New Delhi 110 048

Phone: +91 (011) 40682000

E-mail: info@rolibooks.com

Website: www.rolibooks.com Also at Bengaluru, Chennai & Mumbai

Layout Design: Bhagirath Kumar

Production: Lavinia Rao

ISBN: 978-93-92130-09-0

Typeset in Minion Pro by Roli Books Pvt. Ltd

Printed at Saurabh Printers Pvt. Ltd., Greater Noida, India

For Vivek

Introduction

When you get off at the elevated Mundka station, a line of small white vans waits for passengers at the bottom of the escalator. Young men call out place-names for destinations all across the Haryana state border. Cow dung patties dry in the sun to one side of the station escalator; jagged lines of cars and buses jostle on the other. Half-built Metro stations leading to future stations rise up in the distance. Leaving Mundka, Raveena, a slim woman in her twenties, gets on the women-only coach of the Metro. We start to chat, and she tells me that her father drops her off and picks her up at the station each day. She takes the Metro a few stops eastward to Paschim Vihar to attend college. She is certain that she would not be on the Metro at all if it were not for “the ladies’ coach.”

“After Mundka, it’s good,” she says, “but before Mundka, it’s very bad, the crowd and all.” For Raveena, “crowd” is about place, about where you are from and the attitudes you may hold. It is an imagined likeness and social reality but perhaps more a public than an actual crowd. It is also, of course, a manner of speaking.

“Haryana is not good, not good for girls. Men are not good, even boys. They stare at me, sometimes they vent at me. I can’t do anything,” she explains. “Vent” is typical Delhi-speak to describe when someone lashes out in a stream of verbal abuse erupting like a volcano. On the street they see her as a species rather than a person. What are they angry about? That she is a girl in public,

that she moves with confidence, that she is protected, that she studies, that they don’t have girlfriends, that they don’t have jobs, that, ironically enough, there aren’t more women around. On the Metro, the crowd is simply more “neutral,” Raveena says, and I also see that it allows her to imagine, and perhaps enact, a future beyond it.1

Delhi has been notorious as a place where women not only get harassed on the street but also may be subjected to the grisliest of crimes. These stories and statistics feed into a larger narrative about girls’ and women’s safety and their proper place in the city (usually at home).2 The safety discourse teaches women from a young age that it is their fault if anything happens to them and that they need male protectors and guardians to get through life – and public space. And yet on the streets and lanes of Delhi, you see women everywhere; they have places to go and things to do, from moving bricks at construction sites to leading the city as top-ranking public officials. As state-sponsored infrastructure, the Delhi Metro has given women in particular a new way into the city, as a site of purpose, aspiration, and pleasure. One out of four Metro riders is female, which is similar to the percentage of women who work outside the home in India.3 As a street-level ethnographic view of the city, this book documents women and men in public places: how people flow into and out of trains and the new embodied experience of that flow; how they melt into the crowds yet emerge with individual experiences; how urban life comes to be narrated through the Metro. It recounts diverse experiences of the city and especially reveals what becomes visible through female gazes.

The arrival of the Delhi Metro – an ultra-modern, hightech, and highly surveilled urban rail system, and South Asia’s first large-scale, multiline metro – has become a touchstone for discussions of urban development, gendered social mobility, and India’s increasingly aspirational culture since its first line opened in December 2002. Over three construction phases (with a fourth

currently underway), it has become part of the lived experience of nearly three million who ride it each day. At the peripheral edges of the city, where the Metro meets more rural sensibilities, ideas of the urban are created and contested.

From 2007–2012, I was living in India, mostly in Delhi, commuting on the Metro, and teaching for two years at the Institute of Indian Technology, first in Chennai and then in Delhi. But I first took the Delhi Metro in 2006 from Central Secretariat station near India Gate, which was as far south as the Yellow Line went at the time. Seven stops later, at Civil Lines, I exited through a glass cube-like station. The trip felt more like a ride; it almost didn’t matter where I was going. I was, like so many in the city, a first timer, a joyrider.

For some Dilliwalas the novelty of riding the Metro came from the fact that it was in India, and they could compare it to what they had only ever experienced abroad, in cities like London or Singapore. For most in the city, it was their first experience of highspeed underground rail travel. For still others, it was the first time they had ridden an escalator. For all, the system had rearranged city space and their experience of time. In this solid state-of-theart structure, a new form of fleetingness took shape, a multitude of instances, a moving city.

Delhi is a desert city inside a bowl, on the vast Indo-Gangetic Plain. The Aravalli mountain range lies to the southwest of the city, gaining stature as it breaks away from the Ridge, a monkey-filled, forested area in North Delhi where people stroll in the mornings and evenings, sticks in hand. With the Ridge and the city’s many parks and green spaces, Delhi can feel both lush and dry depending on the season and where you are in the city. Delhi has the largest square acreage of any city in India, incorporating villages and wildlife, as well as diverse sensibilities, from rural mind-sets to middle-class aspirations and globalized consumerism. The Metro joins and cuts across these spaces.

Pr agati Maidan Mandi Hous e R. K. Ashram Jhandewalan Ka rol Bagh R ajendra Plac e Pa tel Naga r Shadipur Ki rt i Naga r Moti Nagar R amesh Nagar R ajouri Garden T agore Garden Subhash Naga r Ti lak Nagar Janak puri Eas t Janak pura We st Uttam Nagar East Uttam Nagar We st Nawada Dw ar ka

Shahdar a We lcome Seelampur Shastri Pa rk Ka shmere Gate Ti s Hazar i Pu l Bangas h Pr atap Nagar Shastri Nagar Inderlok K anhaiya Nagar Keshav Pu ra m Netaji Subhas h Kohat Enclav e Pi tampur a Rohini East Rohini We st Rithala Vi sh wavidyalay a V idhan Sabh a Civil Lines Chandni Chow k Chawri Bazar New Delhi R ajiv Chow k Pa tel Chow k Ce ntral Se ct Indraprastha 29 30 31 32 33 34

PART I Crowded

The Train to Dwarka

The train to Dwarka is crowded even on an early Sunday afternoon. Central Delhi may be more still, and the road traffic-less, but inside the Metro throngs of people are going places. At times they crush into one another.

A creation of the Delhi Development Authority (DDA), the sub-city of Dwarka has risen up along the Metro corridor with hundreds of low-rise housing colonies and scores of “international” schools, business centers, sports clubs, and malls.1

A few men in their early twenties sit cross-legged on the floor, talking and laughing. Three younger boys, thirteen or fourteen years old, stand in front of them, doing pull-ups on the high bar, joking, trying to get the attention of the other 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 on them to look out the windows, delighting in their own reflections. My arms rub against the women sitting on either side of me. In the space between the coaches, a man squats talking on his mobile. People mostly sit quietly; they do not eat or drink or spit. Most noticeable is what is missing: heat, sweat, filth, food, trash, odor, aroma. The stick in the air. Inside, the elements

have been reordered, enabling a different view of this city-region of thirty million. Curiously, people look but do not stare, even the multiple packs of young men in slim jeans.

At Rajiv Chowk station commuters line up in neat rows waiting for the train to Dwarka, only to dissolve into a mass once the train arrives and the doors slide open. The logic of entering and exiting the train is that whichever side has more people wins, like a scrimmage. People collide head-on as they 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.

The Metro has no ticket collector to complain to if something goes wrong or if someone gets out of line, for this is an automated environment. Many people were shocked, when, early on, a contracted Metro worker directing people to board a train got his hand stuck in the door as it was closing and was dragged to the next station while clutching the outside of the train. Passengers on board watched in amazement and horror but didn’t know to hit the emergency bell.

As the train heads west, aboveground, the city opens up and peters out into a landscape of circling birds, low-level dwellings, institutes of knowledge, health, and beauty, and the occasional shopping mall. This east-west line is for commuters; the trains go aboveground soon after Connaught Place, and people tend to stay on for more than a few stops. There is time to relax and settle in.

A wiry young man I’m standing next to, Pranjal, is studying at the National Law University. He shares an apartment with another student near Delhi University and regularly rides the train. When I tell him I’m studying the Metro, he says, “I don’t know if you’re looking at the economics of it or issues of marketing, but I have some thoughts.” He feels the need to teach, tell, persuade, or command people to follow certain rules, he says, like the one to let other passengers off the train before boarding themselves. He describes being in the crush of the crowd one day, alongside a

young mother carrying a small child. The crowd hadn’t made way for her but had pushed her aside. He couldn’t understand this, nor do anything to help her; he ended up ensnarled in her bangles and left the train with bruised arms.

On the platform people rush to the escalators, forming a wide circle 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. Once upstairs (or downstairs, if at an elevated station) everyone passes through the electronic gates once more to leave the station. Some walk, others look for a bus or an auto or cycle rickshaw.

One afternoon I wait for a train with Sunila, a commuter from Dwarka in her mid-twenties. She is going to Uttam Nagar East, on her way to work. She didn’t talk about the city in the same way when she used to ride the bus, she tells me. Then, her route was not direct and not as fast. It was not, as she says now, “Delhi updown.” 2

City Park

City Park station marks the end of the Green Line. I pass through twenty stations to get to the end of the line. At City Park, things are quieter, less crowded with people and the whir of traffic as compared to Mundka, where a couple of years ago the line used to end. I take the open-air escalator down from the station. To my surprise, the first thing I see, in a small park adjacent to the station, is a photo shoot, something I might associate with tonier areas of the city. Two young men, dressed in jeans and white shirts, are doing the posing; another man with a large, professional camera with a telephoto lens is taking the photos. I keep going down and reach street level where I see the same National Highway 10 that bypasses Mundka station. Here there are only a couple of street food vendors but no rickshaw stand; the area around the station is still being built up. I meet a lone woman who is standing by the side of the road trying to catch one of the big buses that keeps passing us by. She tells me that she usually gets picked up by car from the station but today she has to find her own way. She is headed back to Rohtak, the next major city, forty kilometers away.

I cross the road that bifurcates the Metro station and come upon two security guards sitting on plastic chairs on the edge of the station premises; they say they work for the DMRC, and I can see from the insignia on their blue uniforms that they are contract

security, not the CISF guards you see on the trains and in stations. These guys are relaxed.

A young man in faded jeans with a light blue backpack and slightly dishevelled hair comes up to the guards. His name is Gulshan; he has come from Rohtak and is headed to Ghevra station, just a few stops away on the Green Line. There is a kind of gentleness to him. He is asking the guards about job opportunities as a security guard. They start talking about when this Metro line will reach Rohtak. The guards are sure it will, it’s only a matter of time. Gulshan says, “Who knows if it will, it’s up to the government; just like this one came, we didn’t know it was coming.” The guards venture, “If Congress comes, it’ll come quickly. Congress brought the Metro in the first place; if BJP, it will take time.” I’m a little surprised to hear this assessment, since Narendra Modi’s BJP government, in power since 2014, has taken credit for the Metro through advertisements and ribbon cuttings with each new line opening and extension.

I walk with Gulshan up to the Metro station. He’s come today looking for a job and will head to Ghevra where there might be some possibilities. He tells me he is studying for the entrance exam to be a policeman in another city – Chandigarh – but he keeps having to pay for coaching for the exam. He might be a security guard until he finds something else. “Who knows, let’s see what my luck will be,” he says.

Here, an hour and a half by Metro from Central Delhi, I feel I am farther and farther away, and that the city is expanding. But as I talk to Gulshan I see that for him, coming from Rohtak and hoping to find work in Delhi’s periphery, the city is contracting. He has reached the beginning of the line.