In current times, violence is palpable and conspicuous in India: violence with religious undertones, caste animosities, struggles over sexual orientation, territorial disputes. But while some forms of violence are highlighted and acknowledged, others pass largely unnoticed in the routines of daily life.
The local suburban trains in Mumbai – which form the geographical and metaphorical backbone of the city – carry over four million passengers every day on the Central Railway lines, and around 3.6 million on the Western lines. An estimated 4,700 people, on average, travel in a nine-car carriage during peak hours, whereas the ideal capacity is just 1700 – claiming the dubious merit of having the highest passenger density in the world. Although primarily maintained by Indian Railways, since July 1999 Mumbai Rail Vikas Corporation (MVRC) – a public sector undertaking anchored jointly by the central Ministry of Railways and the Government of Maharashtra – has been entrusted with the responsibility of improving the infrastructure of the Mumbai suburban railway network.
When I first arrived in Mumbai, I was drawn to the locals (as the trains are popularly called), as they are a cheap and efficient means of local travel, ideal for students. But as I entered the workforce and began to use the trains for my daily commute during rush hour, more complex, conflicting feelings arose. At the time, as part of my work, I was attending the consultation meetings of the Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai (MCGM) on the issue of developing a more people-centred development agenda for the city. The MCGM was pushing for a swanky 'world class' city vision, which included multi-million rupee sea-links and expressways. It was disturbing to attend these meetings while daily enduring the local trains – being part of that greatly tormented mass that is the Mumbai 'public' who count on these trains. Electrocution from overhead lines or falling out of the overflowing trains happened too frequently, although people continued to nonchalantly hang by their fingertips from the doors, or ride on top, dangerously close to the high-voltage electricity lines. The world-class city touted in the meetings I was attending did not promise any respite for this precarious public.
At this time, I was reading Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth (first published in 1961), the great thesis on the colonial world in the context of Africa, and his suggestions of decolonisation, which most analysts understand as being overtly violent. Reading this while being hurled around in the trains, I could identify many of the loose behavioural patterns that Fanon had observed in colonised Algerians on Mumbai's local trains. I could also find similarities with the power-play within colonisation that he elaborates (highlighting the physical distancing of the colonised and the usurpation of resources by the coloniser) in the efforts to 'develop' and 'plan' the city of Mumbai. I started to see the postcolonial situation in Mumbai, and especially the institution of public transport, in light of the colonial experience, and I was drawn to explore the similarities between the strategies of the settler colonialists of the past and the present native post-colonial authorities.