The Moving City: Scenes from the Delhi Metro and the Social Life of Infrastructure
The Moving City is a rich and intimate account of urban transformation told through the story of Delhi's Metro, a massive infrastructure project that is reshaping the city's social and urban landscapes. Ethnographic vignettes introduce the feel and form of the Metro and let readers experience the city, scene by scene, stop by stop, as if they, too, have come along for the ride. Laying bare the radical possibilities and concretized inequalities of the Metro, and how people live with and through its built environment, this is a story of women and men on the move, the nature of Indian aspiration, and what it takes morally and materially to sustain urban life. Through exquisite prose, Rashmi Sadana transports the reader to a city shaped by both its Metro and those who depend on it, revealing a perspective on Delhi unlike any other.
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"The vignettes captured by the author, constituting in effect a collection of ukiyo-e, 'pictures of the floating world, ' is a delightful and interesting twist on ethnographic writing and representation. . . Sadana's book offers a very special approach to the study of urban infrastructure and demonstrates how these little floating scenes of everyday life can tell us something about big and complex social issues."-- "Asian Anthropology"
"The strength of this book lies in what it has to offer as a method of encountering urban spaces. . . .This ethnography would be a welcome addition to courses in urban anthropology, anthropologies of gender, class, South Asia, and ethnographic method."-- "Anthropological Quarterly"
"Vivid and rich with detail. . . .Sadana...emphasizes the uniqueness of the Delhi Metro by centering the voices of the many people who make up its daily life."-- "Metropolitics"
"[A] beautifully crafted account of how life in Delhi becomes narrated through the Metro as it joins and cuts across disparate urban spaces."-- "Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute"
"A radical work that throws open established modes of Indian anthropological writing."-- "Biblio: A Review of Books"
