Bumpy Roads: global aspirations and local interruptions in Hyderabad, India

It is precisely this call to thinking about the troublesome generativity of potholes that I turn my attention towards. In this essay, I probe the several other ways in which potholes mediate infrastructural dispositions and political subjectivities in cities. Building on Jonathan Anjaria’s argument that “emphasising embodied experiences of the road allows for a critique of infrastructure that does not rely on exposing an underlying social and political system, but on seeing the potential in what is immediately ‘apprehensible’” (2020: 269), I show how the sensation of road surfaces and become, quite literally, the terrain on which citizens evaluate the unevenness of urban development, the myriad hypocrisies of political promises, and the moral legitimacy of the state to impose traffic penalties.

Rattled Bones, Resilient Suspicions

The constant invocation of bodily injury and pain with reference to bad roads was a ubiquitous trope in my interviews. Driver-workers like Naganna, who spent most of their time on the road, were particularly vocal about how a sudden bump in the road could shock the body and, further, how so much of this sensory engagement with unevenness depended on the kind of vehicle one was driving. Autorickshaw drivers like Naganna certainly felt – not just in terms of their “attitudes” towards the state but really felt – the unevenness of the roads acutely reflected the more general unevenness and inequality that attended the city’s hyper-development.  

The sensory landscape of the city also often became a matter of commenting on the unfinished business of development. For instance, travelling by the shiny new metro that snaked its way through the city sky afforded one the ability to (literally) rise above the pockmarked streets below. The metro felt smooth and seamless, while the roads remained bumpy. In the words of Aravind, a businessman in his 30s and an avid biker in the city:

Look at our shiny metro, look at our malls, look at our HiTech City, look at our Google office, Microsoft office, this and that…But then you drive, and when your body feels those jerks on the road, you realize we still have such a long way to go. Our road to development is filled with potholes, looks like. (Interview, August 2018)

The bumpy road comes to become a synecdoche of the city at large – the supposedly smooth drive towards “world-class” development being interrupted by potholes. For low-income and middle-class drivers alike, the unevenness of the roads made sense when one was cognizant of the workings of an untrustworthy state. Potholes were, in fact, a window into the treasure trove of public secrets. When I did press them for more information about these types of “public secrets,” I often heard similar stories that revealed deep-seated suspicions of the state.

For example, Arif, a taxi driver in his 30s, said: “Everyone knows that contractors build roads that get damaged easily so that they can get another contract to repair the same road. Everybody gets kickbacks. It is all a big business.”

“Why would that not be taken to task by the government?” I asked him.

He swiftly responded with a simple explanation: “Corruption.”

This lucid account circulates with startling ease amongst Hyderabadis and local media. It is not as if my interlocutors only associated roads as being the outcome of systematic political corruption. Rather, simply driving in the city becomes an experiential, everyday reminder of state corruption. Indeed, the bumpy road even validates suspicions of the state as corrupt. As Nitin, a techie who also drives for a popular food delivery service on weekends, was to tell me: “Every time one drives on the road, one is reminded of how corrupt the government is. You don’t even have to read the papers to know that! Just drive.”

Potholes as Agents of Injury

The omnipresent potholes and kharaab [i] roads were everywhere but, on some days, those same potholes turned deadly, especially for riders of two-wheelers. When I started fieldwork in January 2018, the city was reckoning with the fact that, within a span of just 20 days, three motorized two-wheeler riders had died in road accidents that were directly attributed to the existence of potholes. In the first, a pillion-rider [ii] fell off the back of a motorbike after driving over a pothole and hit his head on the road divider; in the second, a motorcyclist hit the back of a bus, which braked suddenly to avoid driving over a deep pothole; and in the third, a rider of a scooter hit a divider on the road while trying to swerve to avoid a pothole.

Over time, I realized such stories are actually quite common. In fact, a 2018 report furnished to the Supreme Court of India suggested that more than 15,000 people had died between 2013 and 2018 due to potholes, prompting a judge to remark that potholes seem to be deadlier than terrorism (Dhillon 2018). While we could debate the methods of data collection, my point is that in popular narratives and even court rhetoric, potholes caused the deaths. Fixing the blame of an accident on a pothole, however, was not that simple. From the perspective of police officials, a pothole alone seldom causes deaths. According to state officials, while potholes did cause accidents, deaths were often the result of motorists or people sitting behind them not wearing helmets, or wearing helmets that were substandard.[1] This oscillating blame-game between the state and the citizen animated discussions around pothole-accidents.