Rashmi Sadana delivered a lecture on ‘Delhi’s Metromobilities’ on 10 August 2022 at Seminar Room and Zoom. It was chaired by Ananya Vajpeyi.
Metronama is an intimate account of urban transformation told through the story of Delhi’s Metro, laying bare the radical possibilities and concretized inequalities of mega infrastructure, its ironies and contradictions, connections and disconnections in a new social world. Presented as a series of ethnographic vignettes or “scenes”, the book is a novelistic rendering of Delhi that looks into people’s daily experiences, thoughts, and itineraries. The lecture will focus on the book’s key themes of urban development, class and gendered sociality, and how ideas of the inside and outside get incorporated in a hyper-modern mega-infrastructure.
Rashmi Sadana is 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 (2022), published in South Asia as Metronama (2022); English Heart, Hindi Heartland: The Political Life of Literature in India (2012); and is co-editor (with Vasudha Dalmia) of The Cambridge Companion to Modern Indian Culture (2012).
Ananya Vajpeyi is Associate Professor at Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi.
Wednesday, 10 August 2022, 4.30 pm, Seminar Room and Zoom https://bit.ly/3otnn6H
