When the metro railway network first appeared in the country in 1984 in the form of the Calcutta Metro, it was a gleaming novelty. And as with most novelties, it harboured the risk of becoming a novelty forever – more of an experiential destination like a trip to Humayun’s Tomb or the zoo than as a regular mode of commute and transport. But over time, and with the addition and proliferation of Delhi Metro, the underground started taking a planetary character of its own.
I am a regular in India’s two biggest metro networks – Delhi and Kolkata. What is striking (if this sort of thing strikes you, that is) is how the character of people starts changing in the matter of minutes as they move from street level down the escalator, then past the turnstiles, then on to the platform, and finally into the bowels of the metro train – which has its own retro-futuristic symbolism far removed from Indian railway trains, Vande Bharats included. In a snapshot, it’s a regular journey from Trumpian ‘vickshithole’ to Bharatian ‘viksit’.
Germany, after the Nazis lost the war, was not suddenly populated by a fresh batch of Nazi-proof people. Similarly, Indian metro rail geographies are also populated by the same Indians who exist ‘above,’ with all their lack of civic sense, disdain/ignorance for personal space, and general acceptance of utter chaos. But something strange happens to them when they enter Metroland.
Over the decades, a subculture has developed down here. Younger folks are open with their PDA. More importantly, older folks on platforms or trains are absolutely peaceful about these public displays in broad tubelight. The surface on which one walks is no longer lunar. The utter noise of the streets above, awash in traffic horns, is sliced off. There is a palpable lack of dirt, grime, dust and general ‘Third Worldliness’. No Medusa-hair electric cables hiding the skyline. No slap-ups of posters and flyers and billboards that up-worlders have come to consider as part of the ‘We are like this only’ urban landscape. And no traffic.
People stand in line. They mind the signs. They give up their seats for ‘senior citizens’. Delhi has a separate carriage for women who may choose to zanana-travel. People tend to behave. They are usually kinder than when they’re ‘up there’. Early metro lines in Delhi and Kolkata were, like older metros across the world, mostly underground. More recent lines in Indian metros are now overground, making for lovely, blurry views from the windows in airconditioned coolness. But the sense is still very much ‘underground’ – in the sense of being hidden, or deviant from ‘overground’ behaviour. Sure, it’s not all beatific all the time. I find fellow commuters listening to music or videos on their phones without earphones especially enervating. The inability of people to understand the dynamics of entry and exit from trains – let people get out, then get in, rather than enact Brownian motion with elbows – is another of my grouses.
But if the metro was another country – and in the Benedict Anderson sense of a nation being a socially-constructed community, imagined by the people who perceive themselves as part of a group, the metro is another country – I would certainly consider myself to be a citizen. It is only populated by immigrants, expats, foreigners, a diaspora in constant flux from ‘above’. No one quarrels about who a genuine Metro-politan is. There is no hostile ‘Go back to the surface!’ demands from xenophobic ‘original inhabitants’ of Metroland.
So, for everyone with the best intentions of making Bharat viksit by 2047 (I’ll be 76 then, and will be checking with a notebook in my hand how reality matches up to wish), don’t go waffling about in abstractions, or give us all that GDP. There’s a Bharat that’s already viksit and it’s ‘underground’.
