Event Info NTU Seminar Series AY24/25: The Uneven City: Potholes, Pain, and Politics in Hyderabad, India Speaker: Sneha Annavarapu, Asst. Prof., NUS Format: In this talk, I draw on the embodied experience of driving into potholes and on bumpy roads in Hyderabad and show how roads become the literal terrain on which political sensibilities are shaped. Drawing on ethnographic material collected over six years, 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 of urban life in India. Sneha Annavarapu is an assistant professor of sociology at the National University of Singapore, jointly appointed with the South Asian Studies Program and Yale-NUS College. Her wide-ranging research interests centre around the politics of transportation, infrastructure, class relations, and gender in contemporary Indian cities. She is currently working on a book project titled On The Move: the politics of driving in India.
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