Rashmi Sadana presents ethnography of the Delhi Metro based upon years of fieldwork and plentiful interviews with passengers, architects, technocrats, politicians, and many other residents of Delhi, whether they ride the Metro. She exhibits the scenes of social life in the Delhi metropolis both brought about and reflected by the Metro. The book’s main body is divided into three parts—“crowded,” “expanding,” and “visible”—referring to chronological stages of the Metro’s development, though no part concentrates on any specific issue or argument. Rather, readers can enjoy Sadana’s lively descriptions of the Metro and the city, stories that are true to life, and interviews with insiders who contribute to the development of the Metro and the operation of the megacity. Among the dozens of stories and scenes of the Delhi Metro, readers find three issues appearing again and again: gender, class or caste, and globalization. Some stories hold only clues to revealing the social structure of this vast Indian city; some stories and formal interviews directly point out the social, cultural, and political problems around its Metro. This ethnography does not, however, argue that the system causes or solves the problems. Instead, in Sadana’s words, the Delhi Metro has become a space of social visibility (169), making people’s lives visible in the moving city.
