HETEROTOPIAS AND URBAN TRANSPORT IN INDIA

VIPUL VIVEK (M2015DS054)

Urban transport has become a teething problem for burgeoning Indian cities. This is not only because of
inadequate infrastructure (physical as well as social) and disinvestment but also because of the failure of
the Indian state, at all levels, to enforce authority and discipline, and entrench and embed the rule of law
in civic culture. This weakness has created contestations of meaning over the practice of city travel, with
modes of transport becoming spaces for activities unrelated to the orthodox meaning of those spaces and
which destabilise those meanings. This term paper uses Foucaults idea of heterotopia spaces that
distort, disrupt, challenge, recreate, displace, unbalance and unsettle designated places to understand
how Indian urban travellers in their everyday lives navigate and resist the states authority in the arena
of transport.

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I.

Introduction

In a lecture in 1967 to Circle of Architectural Studies in Paris, published only in 1984 under the
title Of Other Spaces, Foucault discussed the need for a shift of emphasis from time, which
characterised thought in the Classical age, to space, which he argued conditioned all social
existence, including the time in which that existence pervaded. Traditionally, space was taken
for granted; there was no explicit need felt of its acknowledgment as the backdrop against
which things existed and became. Space existed as an inert receptacle in analysis; waiting there
to be put to use. Foucault, by bringing space to the foreground, changed the mode of analysis
for once and all. In that lecture, he simultaneously disrupted the idea of one, unified,
homogenous, Newtonian space that created the conditions of possibility of the social world.
Through his idea of heterotopia meaning other spaces, different spaces, not-normal
spaces, deviating spaces he created a scope for understanding how everyday life contested,
resisted, blew a raspberry at and undermined meanings of orthodox spaces even as they
constructed new meanings for those spaces.
The forms and modalities of urban transport, within the generality of the city, are an important
part of this rise of space as an analytical category. Foucault wrote:
Moreover, the importance in contemporary technology of problems of emplacement1 is well known: the
storage of information or of the intermediate results of a calculation in the memory of a machine; the
circulation of discrete elements with a random output (automobile traffic is a simple case, or indeed the
sounds on a telephone line); the spotting of marked or coded elements inside a set that may be randomly
distributed, or may be arranged according to single or to multiple classifications, etc. (Foucault, Of
Other Spaces 1967, 2008)
Urban transport is not merely people moving in space but through its structuring and operation
forms of transport themselves proactively produce varied meanings of space orthodox as well

Emplacement refers to the logic of position everything has its place and every place has
its thing, as Foucault described it that characterizes the networked nature of the modern
society (Dehaene and Cauter 2008).

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heterotopic (by way of countering those orthodox meanings). As a result, there is a need to
explore what the production of urban transport entails. The wide range of modes not only
creates new socio-politico-cultural meanings but their disparate uses further produce social
space. As Cresswell has argued:
"Movement is made up of time and space.... Time and space, as Kant reminded us, are the fundamental
axes around which life revolves the most basic forms of classification. Certainly any material object has
to have coordinates in time and space. Movement, as the displacement of an object from A to B, involves a
passage of time and, simultaneously, a traversal of space. Time and space, however, cannot be simply
taken for granted in the consideration of movement. Time and space are both the context for movement ...
and a product of movement." (Cresswell 2006)
The organization, coordination and functioning of urban transport is a highly sophisticated
managerial practice that requires strict adherence to its own set of norms, practices, rules,
regulations, codes, legislations and culture. All this is not possible without a prior culture of
obedience, discipline and respect for the rule of law. For instance, a slight disruption in the
movement of trains in opposition to its time table distorts the normal space of train travel as
envisaged in the official discourse2. (Trains are themselves a highly complex space of relations3.)
Adjustments caused by such disruption create further heterotopias. The incidence of cows
disrupting or delaying road traffic, or causing suburban train accidents are instances of how
unruly behaviour counters the clinical spaces of transport in the city as imagined by their
planners and administrators.

In another context, Walter Russell Mead has compared todays hackers to the railroad age
trainspotters: The cultural triumph of developing and meeting railroad timetables
intoxicated nineteenth century; today's computer hacker is the descendant of the men and
boys of the Railroad Age who busied themselves memorizing railway timetables and
visualizing the complex process that enabled the 12:15 to leave the station on time. (Mead
1995/1996)
3
a train is an extraordinary bundle of relations because it is something through which
one passes, it is also something by means of which one can go from one point to another,
and then it is also something that passes by . (Foucault, Of Other Spaces 1967, 2008)

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This term paper uses Foucaults heterotopia to understand such counter-transformations of

urban transport in India, where the modernity of tradition4 thwarts the states endeavours to
arrange travel spaces within cities into a modern5, logical, rational order. Section II and III
outline in brief the conception of space in Marx, and his insights and shortcomings; and
Foucaults criticism of the lack of an explicit discussion of spatiality in Marx as well as his own
idea of heterotopia. Section IV presents an argument for looking at urban transport in India
through the lens of heterotopia. Finally, section V concludes with brief comments.
II.

Space in Marx

Despite its obvious importance and not only to geographers or cosmologists for a long time
until the last quarter of the last century, space did not figure as a prominent category of study
and analysis in the wider social sciences. The environments human beings and their social
relationships constructed, and the way in which human interactions among themselves and
with those environments acted on each other was largely relegated to the domain of naturalistic
explanations. But for human and social geographers (Zieleniec 2007), space would not have
become the priority it is today in the analysis of human relations as manifested in their social
complexity.
Since the space (spaces?) in which we live, work, use, imagine and perform6 everyday is (are?)
inherently social, they are influenced by forces and processes constitutive of social life. The

Stressing the variations in meaning of modernity and tradition, [the Rudolphs argued in
The Modernity of Tradition] how in India traditional structures and norms have been
adapted or transformed to serve the needs of a modernizing society. (Rudolph and Rudolph
1984)
5
For Foucault, man as the subject of knowledge is one of the most important inaugurators
of the modern age. [It is on] the threshold that constitutes our modernity that the
strange figure of knowledge called man first appeared and revealed a space proper to the
human sciences. (Foucault 1966, 1994)
6
Individuals in social settings are always performing and projecting images of themselves
which they think are in their own interest. When an individual appears before others, he
wittingly and unwittingly projects a definition of the situation, of which a conception of
himself is an important part ... the individual may deeply involve his ego in his identification
with a particular role, establishment, and group and in his self-conception as someone who
does not disrupt social interaction or let down the social units which depend upon that

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world of this social life constructs its own space spaces of work, leisure, imagination,
recreation, presentation, representation, authority, submission, obedience, defiance, etc. The
kinds of space constructed in this process impinge on how social relations are constituted:
whats allowed, whats not; whats discussed, whats not; whats acknowledged, whats
ignored; how big or small a space can be; what forms a space can or cannot take. For instance,
the idea of efficiency exists in both the meditation room and on the factory floor but in
drastically different ways. The organization, design and representation of a space decide how
that space is used. In essence, to know space is to understand the social world and ultimately
to understand ourselves (Zieleniec 2007). However, it is an interaction. As much as our space
determines, checks, limits, constrains, directs, restrains us, we still have the capacity and
capability to tweak, mould, meld, transform, challenge, redefine, undermine, undercut our
space. Therefore, space is made up of as much as order, reason, logic as it is of disruption,
emotion, passion.
In that context, the relative de-emphasis on space in Marx is, to be polite, remarkable. Time
dominates in Marx. Though modern capitalism was distinct from earlier epochs in the
construction of its space too in the arrangements of its structures, forms and organizations
space was pushed to the background in his analysis. Though Marx did not ignore space the
palimpsest that he uncovered in his analysis of industrial capitalism was given form as much by
space as time it is seldom foregrounded in the conceptual prefab. There is little analytical
clarity regarding the importance of space as a constitutive element of Marxs social, political and
economic conceptualisation.
Marx repeatedly attempts to grasp the novel social and physical landscapes created by
modernity and industrial capitalism. In this, he is also concerned about probing the favourable
as well as unfavourable consequences of the socio-politico-economic structures that arise from
movement from feudalism to capitalism in Marxs time. For a holistic comprehension of the
characteristics of this transformed society in which the capitalism of the town overshadowed
interaction ... Once we begin a performance, we are inclined to finish it ... . (Goffman
1956)

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the aristocracy of the country, it is imperative we understand the composition of the space
forged by this new economic way of life. But, more important, we also need to explain the
spatiality of the capitalism that developed in the 19th century: how the features and relations of
this new space get manifested, ordered, constrained and perceived in and through space.
However, capitalism gets explained in Marx as only a new epoch.
Clearly, a new era also engenders a transformation in the materiality, physicality and sociality
of the space in which inhere the forces, institutions and processes of modern capitalism. The
wide expanse of phenomena that industrial capitalism encompasses territoriality; mercantilist
nation-state; rapidly growing cities that absorb almost all aspects of the modern society from
government to production to recreation; division of labour beyond factories; the modern rift
between public and private; alienated labour is hard to picture without a drastic
reconfiguration of space. And yet space remains implicit in Marx.
Spatiality remains assumed in his framework, which hinges on the mode of production for
explaining the form of social relations born under capitalism. This framework is essentially
historical in nature. For instance, Capital is largely concerned with the operations of the modes
of production in different epochs and the consequences thereof. Seen through this lens, the
economic basis of the society is made up of (a) the forces of production (things required for
production of social life) and (b) the social relations of production (the organisation of society
necessary for production of the social life)7. Though Marx never makes it explicit, these two
elements of the social system make scope for a discussion of space and spatiality.
Means of production
Productive forces

Instruments of production
Raw materials

Labour power (strength, skill, knowledge, inventiveness, etc)

Figure 1: Productive forces in Marx8

7
8

Both are fundamental but only relations form part of the base (Cohen 2000).
p32, ibid.

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Who owns the raw materials and the instruments of production such as capital (financial as
well as physical)? Who organises labour? How is labour organised? Answers to these questions
necessarily depend on a discussion of space and spatiality. As Cohen argues:
"Space deserves membership in the set of productive forces. Ownership of space certainly confers a
position in the economic structure. Even when a piece of space is contentless, its control may generate
economic power, because it can be filled with something productive or because it may need to be traversed
by producers. He who owns a hole, even exclusive of its material envelope, is a man to reckon with if you
must reach the far side of the hole, and cannot feasibly tunnel beneath it, fly above it, or make your way
round it." (Cohen 2000)
The kind of space resulting from social relations arising out of a mode of production largely
characterised by agriculture, with social life limited to small circles of kinship, servitude being
the dominant manner in social interactions, is unimaginably different from that based on the
vast possibilities created by lives in towns and cities teeming with people from assorted regions,
backgrounds and histories, who remain mostly strangers to each other. Advances in
communications and transport reduce space as well as time, making the fact of being strangers
less relevant in social interactions and therefore transforming the space of social relations.
Though for Marx, it is the historical process in which society is formed and transformed again
and again, it cant be denied that the manner of the organisation and experience of space is a
necessary condition for comprehending that historical process.
For instance, labours organisation in different epochs is dependent on the agglomeration of
people in various units such as a tribe, a nation, a region, an empire, a fiefdom, etc. The area
people occupy, control, use and exploit, and how intensively is fundamental to understanding
how society is transformed in history. To quote Marx:
The most important division of material and mental labour is the separation of town and country. The
contradiction between town and country begins with the transition from barbarism to civilisation, from

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tribe to state, from locality to nation, and runs through the whole history of civilisation to the present day
. (Marx and Engels 1845, 1998)
His statement regarding the split between town and country being the primary cleavage
underlines the importance of spatiality in the analysis of capitalisms arrival on the stage of
history. Since its advent, we have been increasingly living more and more in urban collectivities
even as urban sites have become the hub for productive forces. With the rise of the city as the
dominant space, not only was its infrastructure necessary for a space that the working class
could inhabit but also to fortify its location as the site for producing and consuming as well as
for the formation of productive relations.
Nowhere is this transformation more starkly observable today than in the poorer, developing
rest playing catch-up with the richer, developed West. The laissez-faire model of markets let
loose on the developing nations to accelerate and effect this transformation of largely agrarian
countries into urbanised centres of economic activities aligned with the needs of Western
markets has given rise to large-scale urban poverty. The discussion in Marx regarding the
spatial division of town and country remains equally relevant today.
As Brenner and Theodore have argued:
"[C]ities are not merely localized arenas in which broader global or national projects of neoliberal
restructuring unfold. On the contrary, cities have become increasingly central to the reproduction,
mutation, and continual reconstitution of neoliberalism itself during the last two decades. Indeed, it
might be argued that a marked urbanization of neoliberalism has been occurring during this period, as
cities have become strategic targets for an increasingly broad range of neoliberal policy experiments,
institutional innovations, and politico-ideological projects. Under these conditions, cities have become the
incubators for many of the major political and ideological strategies through which the dominance of
neoliberalism is being maintained." (Brenner and Theodore 2013)
Evidently, spatiality as a category is not alien to Marxs analytical framework for understanding
capitalism. Yet it is not adequately articulated and applied to in his analysis of the development

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of capitalism as a mode of production and the consequent beginnings of the new epoch. The
recognition of the imperative of overcoming the limitations to the development of the
international market in Marx notwithstanding, time trumps everything else in his analysis: how
factories and workspaces organise time for their workers and how that creates the unjust
extraction of surplus values by the owners of means of production gets the pride of place in
Marx. As Foucault has pointed out, classical, 19th century theory may be said to have been
preoccupied with historical or temporal transformations:
The great haunting obsession of the nineteenth century was, as we know, history: themes of development
and stagnation, themes of crisis and cycle, themes of the accumulation of the past, the big surplus of the
dead and the menacing cooling of the world.1 It is in the second principle of thermodynamics that the
nineteenth century found its essential mythological resources.2 The present epoch would perhaps rather
be the epoch of space. (Foucault 1967, 2008)
III.

Space in Foucault

With Foucault begins, in the last quarter of the last century, one of the earliest revolts against
the obsession the last two centuries had with history and time; in his 1967 radio lecture he
claimed our age was destined to be the epoch of the near and the far, of the side-by-side, of the
dispersed. As (Zieleniec 2007) points out in a reconstructed quote from Foucault:
Space was treated as the dead, the fixed, the undialectical, the immobile. Time on the contrary, was
richness, fecundity, life, dialectic...[which led to it being]... either dismissed as belonging to nature that
is, the given, the basic conditions, physical geography, in other words a sort of prehistoric stratum; or
else it was conceived as the residential site or field of expansion of peoples, of a culture, a language or a
State.9

However, the emphasis on space for Foucault does not entail the denial of history: For all
those who confuse history with the old schemas of evolution, living continuity, organic
development, the progress of consciousness or the project of existence, the use of spatial
terms seems to have the air of an anti-history. If one started to talk in terms of space that
meant one was hostile to time. It meant, as the fools say, that one denied history, that
one was a technocrat. They didnt understand that to trace the forms of implantation,

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An important fallout of the development of cities and towns under industrial capitalism was the
rise of the need for devising ways to monitor, control and organise spaces and people using
those spaces. For Foucault, this is the real obsession that developed over the 19 th century,
beginning in the medical profession and extending to all social fields. In Discipline and Punish
Foucault gave an account of how surveillance system historically arose.
Disciplinary space tends to be divided into as many sections as there are bodies or elements to be
distributed. One must eliminate the effects of imprecise distributions Its aim was to establish presences
and absences, to know where and how to locate individuals, to set up useful communications, to interrupt
others, to be able at each moment to supervise the conduct of each individual, to asses it, to judge it, to
calculate its qualities or merits. It was a procedure, therefore, aimed at knowing, mastering and using.
(Foucault 1975, 1995)
The disciplining begins with various orderings of individuals. Then, according to the
requirement, it is either a closed space, say, in a factory, or there are rules of entry and exit. This
brings along with itself an apparatus of dissemination, training and education and another for
monitoring the obedient. The gaze of technocrats, bureaucrats and public officials covers in its
field of view all private and public spaces. However, this surveillance occurs without, largely,
recourse to physical force and coercion:

delimitation and demarcation of objects, the modes of tabulation, the organization of

domains meant the throwing into relief of processes historical ones, needless to say of
power. The spatializing decription [sic] of discursive realities gives on to the analysis of
related effects of power (Foucault 1980, 2007). What Foucault is averse to are totalising
conceptions of history that posit simplistic explanations of the world in reductionist accounts
(Zieleniec 2007). And from there follows Foucaults criticism of Marxist conceptions of
social explanations. However, in rejecting Marxist conceptions Foucault is not dismissing
the contribution of Marx: It is impossible at the present time to write history without using
a whole range of concepts directly or indirectly linked to Marxs thought and situating
oneself in a horizon of thought which has been defined and described by Marx (as quoted
in (Zieleniec 2007)). Here I place Marxist in quotes because Foucault denied the possibility
of a Marx that existed independent of the ways he was read in: As far as Im concerned,
Marx doesnt exist. I mean, the sort of entity constructed around a proper name, signifying
at once a certain individual, the totality of his writings, and an immense historical process
deriving from him ... Its always possible to make Marx into an author, localizable in terms
of a unique discursive physiognomy, subject to analysis in terms of originality or internal
coherence. After all, people are perfectly entitled to academize Marx. But that means
misconceiving the kind of break he effected (p181 in (Foucault 1980, 2007))

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There is no need for arms, physical violence, material constraints. Just a gaze. An inspecting gaze, a
gaze which each individual under its weight will end by interiorising to the point that he is his own
overseer, each individual thus exercising this surveillance over, and against, himself. (Foucault, Barou
and Perrot 1977, 1980)
In his analysis of modernity thus Foucault brings space centre stage and explores how the
production, design, construction, restructuring is under the regulation and control of
disciplinary discourses and technologies of power. The goal of these discourses is the creation
of what Foucault has called docile bodies10, which could be people as well as collections of
peoples. More powerful discourses prescribe meanings and values in an effort to limit and
check how spaces are used and by whom.
However, in their daily lives people individually as well as collectively resist those
prescriptions and come into conflict with the discourses. The space actually lived and inhabited
is used creatively to create give unorthodox meanings through social and cultural interaction
(Zieleniec 2007). In the discourses what is deemed as fit in a given space is not always what is
followed by people in their everyday practices. The meanings finally ascertained in various
spaces depend on how cultures and societies interact with these spaces the contestations,
conflicts and breaches.
There always exists a gap between the meanings powerful elites intend to invest spaces with
and the activities people actually indulge in, influenced as the latter are by local traditions and
cultures, and ways of lives.
In his 1967 radio lecture, Foucault explained heterotopia11 as a heterogeneous space

10

A body is docile that may be subjected, used, transformed and improved ... a policy of
coercions act[s] upon the body, a calculated manipulation of its elements, its gestures, its
behavior a machinery of power explores it, breaks it down and rearranges it Thus
discipline produces subjected and practised bodies, docile bodies. Discipline increases the
forces of the body (in economic terms of utility) and diminishes these same forces (in
political terms of obedience).
11
A year earlier he had used the term once, explaining it as a literary space, in the preface
to The Order of Things: Heterotopias are disturbing, probably because they secretly

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that are written into the institution of society itself, and that are a sort of counter-emplacements, a sort
of effectively realized utopias in which the real emplacements, all the other real emplacements that can be
found within culture, are simultaneously represented, contested and inverted; a kind of places that are
outside all places, even though they are actually localizable these places are absolutely other than all
the emplacements that they reflect. (Foucault 1967, 2008)
Foucault described heterotopias as following the following six principles:
1. Heterotopias exist in all cultures, though not always in the same forms.
2. As they are determined by and embedded in societies, the same heterotopias might
serve different functions at different historical junctures. For instance, Foucault gives the
example of cemeteries: before the 19th century, when people believed in resurrection and
death was not the end of the journey, cemeteries were located within the city next to
churches; since the 19th century, with death becoming dark and ill even as faith in the
immortality of the soul started withering away, cemeteries got relocated outside the
healthy city.
3. Several, incompatible spaces can be placed in a single real place in a heterotopias.
4. They create their own slices of time distinct from the time of the orthodox spaces.
Entry and exit into such inverted places are conditional.
5. They presuppose mechanisms and codes for entry and exit that makes heterotopias
isolated as well as penetrable.
6. They serve a function in relation to all the remaining space, which operates between
the extremes of either exposing the orthodox reality as more illusory than themselves or
creating a space more orderly than real life. Heterotopias undermine the normality of
regular spaces.

undermine language, because they make it impossible to name this and that, because they
shatter or tangle common names, because they destroy syntax in advance, and not only
the syntax which causes words and things (next to and also opposite one another) to hold
together (Foucault 1966, 1994).

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Thus heterotopias disrupt continuities and normalities by introducing a difference into the
tradition of a space (Dehaene and Cauter 2008). Therefore heterotopias are best used to analyse
the many faces of social spaces. This term paper attempts such an analysis of urban transport in
India.
IV.

Heterotopias of urban transport in India

Figure 2: A road in Kolkata (Chowdhuri 2015)

Heterotopias function to show up, as it were, ordinary real spaces. A Quartz.com report
described traffic in India as organised chaos, adding that the randomness you encounter on
Indian roads is primarily generated from the fact that youre not only driving among cars, but
youre also in the midst of bicycles, wandering humans, animals, and random objects like a
stray seat cushion (Basu 2015). A New York Times report about cows on Delhis roads argued
nothing exemplified the Western stereotype of India being the land of snake charmers and
elephant rides as much as a stray cow sauntering down the middle of a busy city street,
seemingly oblivious to the traffic swerving around it (Kahn 2008). (Cows are sacred to Hindus
and laws in most parts of the country ban killing cows.)

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Why isnt the Indian state able to modernise traffic behavior? Why has it failed to develop a
modern, rational, efficient traffic etiquette among the citizens? Are Indian bodies exceptionally
not docile? Modernisation in India has had a complicated relationship with tradition, to say the
least. Traditions have come to stay and in fact acquire a status on a par with the official law
(Rudolph and Rudolph 1984), as is evident from the Hindu worldview of cows becoming the
basis for anti-cow-slaughter legislation and for relaxing traffic rules. Modern and pre-modern
social structures continuously interact with each other and modify each other instead of
destroying either.
The stated official motivation behind modern transport networks12 such as roads and railways
is these increase access and create residential, occupational, educational and recreational
opportunities for citizens (MoUD 2006). However, concomitant with the increasing networks is
also displacement, which people resist: sometimes successfully, sometimes unsuccessfully.
Highways and expressways disrupt geographical relationships, cutting off people from their
neighbourhoods, open spaces such public parks and playgrounds, shops and local markets.
Besides, the expansion of infrastructure also alters the old arrangement of access by
reconfiguring the spatiality. For instance, new highways often make routes longer for
pedestrians and cyclists even as they reduce commute for car owners, truckers and heavy
vehicles. Moreover, this reconfiguration necessitates modifications in land use, further
impacting the spatiality of transport networks. Relocation due to construction of new networks
might itself be fraught with several disruptions. Local communities might be disintegrated.
Another reason why such disruptions are peculiar to India is unlike Western cities which
comprise a central business downtown, where services are concentrated and centralised,
surrounded by suburban residential uptown, Indian cities have been characterised by the
predominance of a proliferation local neighbourhood bazaars (Demographic and ecological
aspects: Introduction 1991).

12

cf. Foucaults characterisation of the modern age as being one of emplacement, that is,
things being designated a place in the network that is todays society.

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Transport networks exert influences on their environment gradually as localities transition from
the conception of a project to its final use, which could take as long as a decade or more
sometimes projects in the process from conception to use by the public, which may take more
than 10 years. Even as networks give rise to a one trend they act in opposition to another (Boer
1986).
These disruptions and subsequent resistances, successful and unsuccessful, lead to contestations
of values, with the planners and users investing transport spaces with meanings that are odds
more often than not. When a young loafer in a running train does stunts along the passing-by
railing on the tracks; when a working woman is cutting vegetables in the Mumbai local in
which she ends up spending almost a quarter of her day commuting between parts of the city
for purposes of work, family, childrens education, shopping, social obligations, etc.; when a car
owner decides to jump on to the pavement to circumvent the delaying traffic; when a jaywalker
cuts through the maze of vehicles rendered immovable by traffic; when a child running across a
busy road is hit by an oncoming auto-rickshaw and both of them are thrown away to different
ends of the road because of the collision and of course when a cow (even a buffalo in fact
though it is not sacred) in a listless mood suspends her busy day and resolves to squat in the
middle of the traffic as if decrying the futility of all that civilisations cling on to, when a locality
sets up a makeshift camp to celebrate a religious or community occasion and blocks traffic with
the permission of the police all these activities transgress the rationality of the spaces they
inhabit, contest the value systems on which those were raised and alter the spatiality of the
transport system. These then are what I characterise as heterotopias of urban transport in India.
The first principle is quite evidently at work here but my emphasis here is, as Foucault points
out, on the peculiarity of the forms heterotopic urban transport spaces take in India by melding
with breaches of official norms, bowing to religious worldviews and adjusting to the everyday
obligations of urban citizens as they go about completing daily chores.
Its not an uncommon sight in the Delhi metro to see children using the vestibule space for
recreation, people munching inside even as notices inside the compartments order them to not

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bring food inside, with sometimes conscientious, law-abiding members of the crowd objecting
to such uncivilised citizens, and adults for intimate experiences13. For a culture that still hasnt
modernised enough to allow scope for private spaces in public spheres, the Delhi metro
heterotopias reject the rationality of clinical spaces of travel that are supposed to put Delhi on
the map of world-class cities but also mock the conservatism of Indian traditions in the same
space. These two contested spaces are mutually incompatible, that is, the modern space of
official transport etiquette and the traditional space of propriety and yet inhabit the same real
place in the heterotopic Delhi metro, satisfying the third principle.
The Delhi Metro examples also instantiate the fourth principle where, as the metro expands to
connect the whole of the national capital region that is bigger than a few countries14,
increasingly longer commutes create their own slices of time and experience gets measured in
those slices. Besides, entry and exit in spaces such as the Delhi Metro is necessarily regulated.
As already argued, including in the case of the Delhi Metro exemplifying the third principle,
transgressive behaviour in various modes of transport also show up the Indian states
weaknesses in enforcing discipline and the fragility of traditional rules of public behavior, thus
illustrating the sixth principle of serving to expose the illusoriness of regular spaces.
V.

Conclusion

To sum up: this term paper attempted to show how the peculiar transgressions of the codes of
urban transport in India are analysable through Foucaults lens of heterotopias as people in
their everyday lives contest even as they adjust to the meanings of the official spaces. Even as
needs of a rapidly urbanising society constrain people to reshape their spaces according to the

13

An intimate video of a couple was reported as having tarnished the Delhi metro, with the
TV clip captioned or Blot on
national capitals pride Delhi Metro (MMS DMRC CISF (DMRC, CISF
mum on MMS scandal) 2013).
14
Delhi, the seat of the national government, is a part of the larger National Capital
Region/Territory, which has an area of 33,578 sq km (NCR Constituent Areas 2005). That
makes it bigger than 118 nations, according to the area ranking in CIAs World Factbook
(The World Factbook NA).

[16]

rationality of the modern project as reflected the systems of transport, people navigate and
restructure those spaces through cultural and traditional practices to fit themselves in.

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