Talk on ‘The Uneven City: potholes, pain, and politics in Hyderabad, India’

NLSIU’s Ministry of Housing and Urban Poverty Alleviation (HUPA) Chair on Urban Poor and the Law is organising a talk on the topic ‘The Uneven City: potholes, pain, and politics in Hyderabad, India’ on July 12, 2024. The event will take place at the ground floor of the NLSIU training centre at 5 pm.

Speaker:

Dr. Sneha Annavarapu, Assistant Professor of Sociology, National University of Singapore, and Assistant Professor of Urban Studies, Yale-NUS College.

Abstract:

In this paper, I draw on the embodied experience of driving into potholes and on bumpy roads in Hyderabad and show how road surfaces become the literal terrain on which political sensibilities are shaped. Drawing on ethnographic data from 2017-2022, I analyze how potholes shape driving dispositions in a city that is attempting to brand itself as a “world-class” city. I show that far from being just physical interruptions on the surface of the road, potholes engender political subjectivities in three ways: one, they generate, sustain, and institutionalize narratives of state corruption; two, through their capacity to hurt, injure, and even kill certain motoring bodies, potholes enable an experience of inequality in the register of pain and risk; and three, potholes spawn citizen engagement and claims-making. Through a discussion of these three processes, I show how and why the banal pothole becomes an aperture through which to view the desires, discomforts, and disappointments in urban India. Ultimately, I argue that taking sensation and tactility into account clarifies how social inequality operates through urban infrastructure.