By Rashmi Sadana
This is the first of our four-part series about how Delhi’s metro is changing the way people see, use, and think of the capital. Tomorrow: How the metro’s expansion has reconfigured commercial flows, and employment, in the city.
When the Mandi House metro station first opened in 2006, the stylish, compact station looked as if it had been set down on the city landscape. In those early days, the line where the station and the city met was still clearly visible in the crumbling stones at the far end of it.
Over the last decade, the Delhi Metro has physically become part of the urban landscape. It has been absorbed by it, as concrete and metal have been built into, onto, and under the asphalt. Its 142 stations and six lines intersect with many of the large roads and radials of the city. With the construction of Phase III of the metro now underway, more of this intersection and bi-section is to come, as the intertwining of the streets and the metro covers even more urban space.
There is no question that the metro is an astounding feat of engineering and everyday mass transportation for close to two million people (and counting), but it also changes the way we see things. The metro may have been built as a stand-alone system, a kind of artifact placed onto Delhi’s landscape, but it has also become a prism through which we may view the city.
Landscape, as opposed to just “land,” refers to the different components that make up our physical environment (hills, lakes, shrubs) and to the way these elements get transformed by humans, what they build and design. Sticking a shovel into a field changes the landscape, as does the growth of a tree, covering a hillside with garbage, building a road, or “resettling” a colony of people. Landscape is also power, something “constructed” or made by society’s individuals and institutions. There are few places on Earth that have not been “landscaped” in some way.
Of the Delhi metro’s 142 stations, 107 of them are above ground. It was a lot cheaper to make it this way, and unlike in Bangalore or Mumbai, where metro systems also are being constructed and designed, Delhi has wide avenues and medians that made above ground construction possible.
In the process, we’ve learned that Delhi is endless, with no natural barriers in its way. This geographic reality has had two major consequences: the metro is a concrete edifice spread over the city; and passengers can look out and survey the city in ways not possible before – new perspectives on the Yamuna, for instance, that allow you to see the shape and dwindling width of the river.
When building the metro, the Delhi Metro Rail Corporation took its design codes from the Hong Kong metro. It was a crowded Asian system and had large passenger flows, though the similarities stop there. Hong Kong’s metro is mostly underground. But even if it was largely above ground, the city, with its high-rises upon high-rises, would still tower over you. In Delhi, the metro line is often the high-point in what is predominately a low-rise city.As a result, Delhi metro platforms and lines provide a perfect, sometimes stage-like view of the landscape.
This spatial understanding of, and perspective on, the city creates a greater awareness about the city itself among a larger number of people than ever before – of its contours and borders, rooftops and highways, malls and industries, settled and unsettled dwellings.
If you climb the minaret at the Jama Masjid, you can take in a phenomenal panorama of the city. But this is not something people do everyday, and at the top only a handful of people at a time can squeeze in. What is significant about the metro, as opposed to a once-in-a-while city view, is the scale (spread across 190 kilometers of the city) and the regularity, how it becomes part of the ordinary and the everyday for so many.
Of course, you can also sit in your bedroom and look at a Google map of the city, which is arguably a more radical and new way of perceiving landscapes. But seeing these views in real time – moving through the landscape yourself – and together with the rest of the public on the metro is fundamentally different from satellite images we see individually or in groups at home or in a café or computer lab. What does this new kind of perception mean or enable us to do differently?
Writing about the advent of the railways in 19th-century Europe, Wolfgang Shivelbusch argued in his classic book, “The Railway Journey,” that the railways did not merely move people from point A to point B in record time, but introduced a new way of perceiving. Space was both diminished and expanded (faster travel times between far-flung places.) Landscapes were re-made (by the creation of cuttings and embankments in order to make the land level to lay tracks.) And communications changed forever.
Shivelbusch explains how landscapes viewed by passengers through train windows were seen behind wires and poles for the first time, hence changing the nature of nature itself. Then this experience was endlessly reproduced. Moreover, as the distance between places became traversable in much shorter times (what geographer David Harvey calls “time-space compression,”) different places lost their “aura” or uniqueness. Like that other great modern form – movies for a mass public – Shivelbusch remarks that with film as well “things” get “closer to the viewer as well as closer together.” One of the great stories of early cinema was when audiences in Paris watched a train coming toward them on screen for the first time (in the 1896 film by the Lumière brothers, “L’arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat.”) They rushed from their seats to get out of the way.
Unlike the first railways, metro systems the world over (London’s was the first, opened in 1893) connect urban landscapes, ones that have already been transformed by human intervention over long periods of time. At Chawri Bazaar, the concreteness of the metro construction has already been assimilated into the area’s landscape. On the one hand, the metro is a physical grid laid onto the city, but on the other people and things quickly encroach upon it. Soon it will be hard to see and remember what the city was like before the metro.
And yet, a different exit of the Chawri Bazaar Station highlights the city-metro interface. The station is the deepest underground station of the Delhi Metro, one that required the most sophisticated technology to build. It had to be that way in order to protect the structures above it. In its promotional literature, the DMRC calls the station a “time machine,” one where modernity presumably meets the oldness of the old city. However, Old Delhi has been modern for a long time, perhaps as early as its days as a bastion for rebel fighters in 1857, and long before the construction of “New Delhi” in any case. Instead, what is significant about the Chawri Bazaar Station is the way the urban landscape in this part of town gets “framed” anew.
It is certainly not the case that Delhi was not modern or even global before it “got” – as city residents like to say – a metro; but it is the case that Dilliwalas are seeing and experiencing their city like never before, and in a way that affords them a critical distance from it. What was once familiar looks different or new.
At Dwarka station, cycle rickshaw drivers line up outside the station as they do at so many stations all over the city. The metro may be world-class and high-tech, yet it is the cycle rickshaw driver that has become a new kind of symbol for the integration of the metro with the city.Though it was certainly not planned that way.
For transport planners, the point of a metro system is to add “capacity” (more people who can travel along transport corridors) and create “clusters” (areas where there are jobs, hospitals, services, and metro stations.) Contrary to popular expectation, metros do not really reduce road traffic or pollution. Moreover, the Delhi metro required immense amounts of global capital (from JAICA, a Japanese development bank) and, like metros the world over, it will take decades to pay off the low-interest loan. As scholar-activists Dinesh Mohan and Dunu Roy argue, metros don’t make economic sense, but they show the direction in which the powers that be want the city to move and the extent to which they will stop at nothing to move people (from slum-dwellers to shopkeepers) out of their way and use land, mostly public land, as they see fit.
What is also true is that many sectors of the public feel a greater sense of ownership over the city from riding the metro. Unlike other modernized, global spaces such as malls, airports, movie multiplexes, and corporate cafes, the metro is a modernity that a much larger and more varied swathe of people can literally “get into.”
This series of essays aims to probe these sometimes contradictory ways of seeing, focusing on the relationship between how people relate to the new landscapes and perspectives the metro has created, to the new technologies of the metro, and the way the metro is changing notions of the public (who is included in it, how it might be identified) and public space.
The point of considering the metro now, while it is still expanding and being constructed, is to raise questions about the big and small changes resulting from this new kind of structure and way of moving around before we forget what the city was like before the metro. It is also to understand these changes as they are happening and being both accepted and contested. The metro forges a future, but it also creates an arbitrary dividing line for what the city used to be. It is these visions, on and off the trains, that will be explored here.
Rashmi Sadana is the author of English Heart, Hindi Heartland: the Political Life of Literature in India and co-editor of The Cambridge Companion to Modern Indian Culture, both published this year. She is currently writing a book about the Delhi Metro.
You can follow India Real Time on Twitter @indiarealtime.