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4.5
First and foremost, Rashmi Sadana’s The Moving City: Scenes from the Delhi Metro and the Social Life of Infrastructure captures the individual daily lives of a modern day city/metropolis/megalopolis. But, because it’s subject is the metro that opened in Delhi a mere twenty years ago, it becomes an exploration of the specific forces that altered the lives of individuals in significant ways, and then across the years with the accumulation of these changes in the habits and routines of its people began to reshape the life of this most expansive of urban spaces. Sadana does not shy away from raising broader social and political issues of why the subway was built, exploring other choices that might have led to greater equity and transformed a greater number of lives. Sadana’s greatest insights move naturally from the subtle transformations of individual lives — especially the lives of women — to greater truths of how hard it is to change the underlying social, political and cultural forces of a society. In vivid vignettes, we can see how the metro has changed lives, providing greater mobility and safer spaces (again especially for women) within the city. Sadana also shows how the metro physically changed parts of the city, creating a sense of the modern, both by the very fact of its architecturally striking stations and also by what these stations caused to be built up around them. For some readers the book might be a deft, humanistic, almost literary depiction of how humans exist within the flow of modern life at the certain extreme of a vast urban space, which also still possesses within itself as what is, simultaneously the city that has been and the city that is trying to become something else. For others, it may provide a social and political understanding of how and why the metro was built, that is what the people who were responsible for its creation were attempting to accomplish, showing in equal parts the sincere desire for the betterment of individual lives and the social/political shortcomings of the enterprise from the perspective of domestic and international equity, all revealed through Sadana’s careful collection of individual stories and opinions. What makes the book an extraordinary accomplishment is the fact that it does justice both to the individual lives and to the social and political forces that played a role in shaping those lives, so that those who are captured by the vivid portrayals of the experiences of individuals will also come to understand the social, political and cultural reality that shaped those experiences, while those who wish first and foremost to understand the social, political and cultural forces that led to the building of the subway will come to see, vividly and in a human way, how these forces changed the lives of individuals.
