Please join the Asian Studies Program for a talk by Dr. Rashmi Sadana on her new book, The Moving City: Scenes from the Delhi Metro and the Social Life of Infrastructure.
The Moving City reveals the social impact of Delhi's new urban metro rail system, scene by scene, much like the starts and stops of the trains that are at the center of this ethnography of urban life. The book tracks how transport mobilities map onto social mobilities in a consideration of gendered and class experiences of the system and the kinds of visibilities and invisibilities that come to the fore. In so doing, it probes the contradictions of a “freeing” form of transport, with its speed and shiny surfaces, alongside a capital intensive, transnationally produced infrastructure that serves the growing middle classes by tying up resources and taking up space.
Rashmi Sadana is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at George Mason University. She is the author of The Moving City: Scenes from the Delhi Metro and the Social Life of Infrastructure (University of California Press, 2022) and English Heart, Hindi Heartland: The Political Life of Literature in India (University of California Press, 2012). She is co-editor of The Cambridge Companion to Modern Indian Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2012).
