I have been sneakily meaning to disrupt Empire Week with a little meditation on walking as a mode of subaltern research for weeks now…
On second thoughts, it really isn’t that much of a disruption. after all, who defeats the Galactic Empire but Luke Sky-walker… (aaghhh! that was terrible… I think i’m going to be banned from CM for my pun-gent humour. Aaghh! again….)
To begin to get serious, however, I find walking a rather refreshing change in a city tyrannized by automobiles - Delhi. The city has changed tremendously in the seven years (aaghh! already?) since I’ve been here - and a lot of those changes have been dictated by that delhi has more cars than the other three Metros (Bombay, Calcutta, Chennai) put together. To link automobiles to Empire I leave to Sepoy and his agent to figure out in their ‘Serious Histories…’
Meanwhile I will just hit you with walking as a valid way of knowing/researching the city - and hope for some feedback.
(No, you definitely can’t invoke Michel de Certeau….)
Last year on a January day of cold freezing rain, I was stuck in a traffic jam. The bus I was sitting in came off the ITO flyover and froze, moving perhaps sixty feet in the next half an hour. There were thousands of other vehicles heading north along the Ring Road that were similarly stuck. The traffic crawled infinitesimally for the next couple of hours. It was one of the worst traffic jams ever in Delhi. At least thatís what I was told.
After half an hour I left the bus and walked. For a while I followed the footpath along the Ring Road, breathing in the fumes and the frustrations of that seemingly endless wait. Then I saw a small path to my left, crossing a garden, and I walked that way. I walked through the remains of a fourteenth century fortification, and within it, a twentieth century refugee camp turned ëpermanentí. I stopped at a chai shop to have a cup of tea, and learned something about the complicated, many layered histories of Firoz Shah Kotla from my conversation there. Then I walked out to a road parallel to the one I had left, took a bus, took an auto, took a few short cuts I know about by having walked them before, and landed up at where I wanted to be about a hour and a half before the speaker I had come to hear. Who had, of course, been stuck in the traffic jam.
The traffic jam, and the subsequent walk, have remained in my head. For by leaving the choked gridlock of that traffic jam and deciding to walk, I experienced an aspect, a history of the city I had previously known nothing about. In Delhi with its increasing amount of cars, this might soon be a truism ñ To walk is to be in another city.
I sometimes feel that I do live in another city. Because of many factors, economic and otherwise, I happen to walk the city a lot. Which is increasingly unusual for someone of my socio-economic ëclassí. In a Delhi which has more motor vehicles than the other three metros put together, the act of walking has become increasingly marginalized. pavemtns are in a constant state of disrepair. Those who walk the city for their livelihoods ñ ragpickers, thelawallahs, snakecharmers ñ find their movements increasingly circumscribed and surveilled, and increasingly, illegalised. At the same time, elites walking the city, in trying to understand and preserve its ëheritageí, is a burgeoning phenomenon. Such walks are often conducted by ëexpertsí, which lend a legitimacy and sanction to the elite act of walking.
A sanction of ‘purpose’ opposed to walking without a good enough reason.
Much of what I know about the city and its histories is through what could be characterised as ëaimlessí walking and conversations. This has led me to an ëexpertí of sorts and now I take people on historical walks to/through various parts of the city. This is not a relationship I am comfortable with.
For I see walking as two interconnected things, which I am uncomfortable about separating - walking as a vital practise of everyday life, and walking as a dynamic form of urban research. For I see walking as urban research precisely because it is a practise of everyday life.
Walking isnít about ëexpertsí. The pavements dug up for phone cables, the shifts in the script of the sign boards, the traces of the past, the shit on the footpath, the relations between the police and the patriwallahs, the alleyways secret except to those for who they are everyday, the way power relations are expressed through the built space of the city ñ for the walker these are not (necessarily) fleeting and ephemeral glimpses, but the realities that she can (and sometimes has to) slow down to witness, barriers that are negotiated, diversions that can be taken, and questions that can be asked. To walk is not just to view the city, at a remove, but to inhabit it - along with the millions of others who live the city everyday by walking it in whichever way they can. A Hindi film image comes to mind, Mazhar Khan as a legless beggar in Shaan, wheeling through the traffic on his little, handpushed trolley ñ
Ate jaate hue main sabpe nazar rakhta hoon
Naam Abdul hai mera sabki khabar rakhta hoon.
Abdul from Shaan is a strange but compelling figure to keep in mind - To walk/live in a city is to have the possibilities of asking questions at every step. And unlike archival and academic research, where restrictions of educational opportunities, if not class, restrict access, anyone can walk though, and question, the city that they live in. And with the cities we all know changing as rapidly as they are, walking is perhaps the most dynamic form of research. The city constantly reshaping itself under your feet is not an experience that can be extracted from the archives. And in my own experience, those who you meet and speak to while walking, engaging in ëordinary conversationí, give you an astoundingly clear eyed view of what is happening in the city, and its histories. After all, policy decisions and infrastructural changes often very directly influence their lives.
As the Cybermohalla Project has shown, you donít need the training of formal academia to ask questions of a space. What happens when people who ask questions of the cities they inhabit, whether as academics or not, practise walking through cities, not as the burden of not having a car, but as a valid form of research? What insights might they bring to urban studies, and to histories of the contemporary city?
This is just a tentative suggestion, in the hope of generating discussion and debate around walking as a research practise. It would be interesting if other researchers could send in their own ideas for walks they would take around the cities they live in ñ not as ëexpertsí ëleadingí a walk, but as researchers imitating a conversation with other researchers ñ and with all those who live in cities.
I can never ban you from CM. You just reminded me of Adbul from Shaan! Parveen Bobby!
On the walking the city theme. I am reminded of an old article, Man’s Movement and His City by C. A. Doxiadis, the only thing from which I remember is the cool Venn diagram. You should look that up. There are quarters of Old City Lahore that are accessible only on foot. I am sure Delhi likewise. But the key here, which you express nicely, is the human architecture that one encounters outside of those steel-and-glass coffins. A city, after all, is made up of its inhabitants.
Of course: You can start with the History of Walking:)
Oye bulleyah, I don’t know if this can really work in an a-historical city such as the one I currently live in (Atlanta), and for that matter in most cities of these United States.
Actually in some places here walking is outright dangerous - one will be road-kill. Bill Bryson, that bumbling comic, in his book “A Walk In The Woods” actually sketches one such hazardous walking expedition of his, when he gets off the Applachian Trail (a 2200 mile long wilderness path along Eastern United States) to spend a weekend in a town. He concludes that it is much better to deal with black bears in the woods than irate car drivers on the streets of Americana.
However New York (and perhaps Chicago) would be a notable exception. And I really enjoyed walking around that city when I was there a few weeks ago.
Also I noticed a most interesting thing this morning when I was doing my round of weekly book reviews, over at NYT’s Book Page: a literary map of Manhattan. Do you think something similar can be done with Delhi?
Best.
Sashi
I fully endorse all research programs that concieve of extensive walking as labor - perhaps if I take a late night stroll now (’walking after midnight’) I will somehow be less obligated to write dissertation tomorrow…
(Not quite all) kidding aside, I actually do agree that perambulation in ‘the field’ enriches both the practice of ethnography and the situating of historical research in the ethnographic present. And Sarai’s Cybermohalla Project (as well as some things going on in other post-institutional research centers in Bangalore, Calutta, Bombay, Karachi and no doubt elsewhere) certainly demonstrates the extent to which all urban dwellers engage in very complex and articulate ways with the politics and possibilities of space and place in the city. I am not sure, though, if this relationship does more to empower students/informants or professional academic researchers. Just as access to various institutions, resources and whole terrains of any given city is regulated by (usually class-defined) systems of exclusions, I think one could also say the same about knowledge and the capacity to represent the city as an object of inquiry. In a curious inversion, almost anyone can walk the walk, but few are able to talk the talk (or at least do so in a way that will hold any authority in the public sphere).
On another note entirely, I want to weigh in on Sashi’s fine anecdote of the automobilization of American cities. This is certainly a trend that has been developing for my and my parents’ whole lifetimes, and one to which I have given much thought. A most sensitive and thoughtful discussion can be found in Marshall Berman’s description of Robert Moses driving a ‘meat-axe’ through the living heart of a borough in order to construct the Cross Bronx Expressway (see the last section of All that is Solid Melts into Air).
Automobilization and the elimination of pedestrian infrastructure is very much the case with many Indian cities as well, and Delhi is certainly no exception. I think much of the power of Bulleyah’s embedded tale in this post comes from what would be seen as the sheer perversity of someone from an educated middle class choosing to walk great distances through what is still overwhelmingly a city moved by petrol (though I think a similar democratizing power resides in public transportation, but this might be a topic for another post).
US cities, and particularly the southern ones like Sashi’s Atlanta and my Miami, are certainly beyond Delhi in terms of the percentage of people who get around in their own automobiles almost exclusively. There are exceptions, however. Just as there are sections (increasingly few, no doubt) of cities such as Delhi and Lahore where one can only move by the workings of their own two, there are also parts of every US city I know of where people be walking and biking around - whether because of the culture of the ‘hood, their own personal preferences or economic straits. These are frequently parts of town that people from the educated classes avoid as if their lives depended on it, but merely walking around in such areas (a seditious act, I know) and having ‘ordinary conversations’ can reveal the same kind of histories that this post does an excellent job of gesturing towards.
I have much more to say on this (including, perhaps, an anecdote from the ATL) and I plan to cook up a post of my own on the theme soon. For now, however, I just wanted to make the point that the extinction of pedestrian culture is a global phenomenon touching both the US and India that legions of architects are trying mostly unsuccessfully to undo. The seditious and increasingly risky creative act of simply walking around both voices a subtle protest against this development and brings you onto the level with numerous urbanites excluded from the lofty heights of the flyover. US cities from LA to Houston to Orlando may have done a far better job of creating urban spaces accessible only to vehicles, but Hyderabad and Mumbai don’t even have cross walks at many of their major intersections. Walk on!