Year: 2024
Type: article
Abstract: This article looks at how Mumbai's suburban trains, one of the most widelyused public transport networks in the world, are repaired and maintained at a railway car shed.Following the call for this special issue of kritisk etnografi to examine the infrastructureenvironment nexus, my article pays attention to how these trains are safeguarded from unruly forms of matter that saturate Mumbai's urban coastal environment, viewed through the optics of an ethnographic study.While water, dust, and crowd pose substantial risks to vulnerable technical systems, their harmful effects are contained by both material techniques and technical upgrades.I further contextualise such reparative interventions and maintenance practices within the broader rubrics of ruination and late industrialism.Both as a built structure and bureaucratic institution, railway car sheds exemplified early 20th century infrastructural modernity.However, they are presently characterised by a form of lively ruination where material decay and technological progress coexist, although uneasily so.Sites like car sheds thus provide a vantage to examine the contemporary Indian state's infrastructural moment; wherein its policies and visions reproduce socio-economic inequalities, and in fact, incapacitate the very infrastructure of care which sustain suburban connectivity in cities like Mumbai.
DOI: 10.33063/diva-544569
Author: Proshant Chakraborty
Institution: University of Gothenburg
Language: English
Subfield: Geography, Planning and Development
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W4405571780