[Reflections from the field]

By Shivani

Emergent Conversation 23

This essay is part of the series Sustainable Urban Mobility in India, PoLAR Online Emergent Conversation 23.

Go explore the core city, walk around it, experience it, feel it, get to know it. You are wearing some nice shoes, have a walk and absorb the essence of the core.

Writing these reflections long after my fieldwork feels almost strange. Memories, once vivid, have been overwritten by countless others, yet some remain etched with surprising clarity. I remember my mentor’s words as if they were spoken just yesterday. They were both an invitation and a gentle push into the unknown; an encouragement to step out of hesitation and into the messiness of the field. I first arrived in Pune in April 2022, a city unfamiliar to me yet pivotal in shaping my academic and professional trajectory toward an anthropology of urban mobility. The train ride to Pune was filled with the nervous excitement of a newcomer. Despite all the preparation, I was uncertain. Was I ready to immerse myself in fieldwork?

In Pune, on my first day at the Parisar office, in the middle of my orientation discussions, these doubts crept: could I navigate a new city, initiate conversations, and grasp its spatial narratives? The task seemed overwhelming. By the evening of 11 April 2022, the warm hues of the setting sun had nudged me out of indecision. I attempted to hail an auto-rickshaw to Laxmi Road, but after several refusals and my own unfamiliarity with fare negotiations, I gave up and booked an Uber. The driver dropped me at the Vasant Talkies-1 bus stop.

The first impression of the core city is colorful in my mind. A blur of faces in motion, roads entangling and detangling, and an overwhelming convergence of sensory inputs. Panic simmered within me, and my first thought was, “I can’t do this.”

At first glance, the core city was chaos in motion, traffic coiled in uni-directional loops, pedestrians flowed through puddled roads and cracked footpaths, and auto-rickshaws spilled into every possible gap. Near the Ganpati Mandir, the narrow street was packed with temple-goers, auto drivers, vendors, and groups of people chatting in the corners of shops. I could barely find space to walk. A woman next to me bent to avoid a food cart while holding a child on her hip. My own pace was halting, part panic, part pilgrimage.

As I walked down Laxmi Road, the infrastructure or its frayed remnants narrated its own story. A broken pavement near the bus stop forced pedestrians to step onto the road, where stagnant water added an unexpected negotiation. The footpath dissolved at several points, leaving me to weave between vendors, shoppers, and moving vehicles. At one point, I noticed “NO PARKING” scrawled in chalk on the street outside a shop. It seemed futile. Just beside it, motorbikes were packed like puzzle pieces under a sign that read “ONLY CYCLE PARKING.”

Walking thus became not just a way to get around, but a methodological engagement, a form of research and resistance. My body was constantly alert, adjusting, and stepping here and there to dodge street vendors, passers-by, stopping abruptly for a wrong-turning car at Tatyasaheb Karandikar Road, or clutching my bag tightly during sudden crowd surges. I remember trying to cross a road near Belbagh Chowk and being told by a food stall vendor, “thoda ruk jao, traffic kam hone do,” (Wait for a while, let the traffic subside), the sound of her voice calming me.

The core city’s morphologies revealed themselves through both repetition and rupture. On my second day of walking, April 14, I saw preparation for Ambedkar Jayanti [1] unfold: a rally filled Appa Balwant Chowk; police surveillance increased; loudspeakers blared music; people queued for darshan outside temples. I observed a triangular resting area near Garud Ganpati Mandir with just four benches: one of the few places to sit on an otherwise unyielding stretch of road.

But even with all the interruptions, unexpected interactions emerged. At the Van Heusen shop on Laxmi Road, I spoke with a worker who commuted daily from Hadapsar. “Yahaan parking kaafi dikkat hai,” (parking is an issue here) he said, describing how he parked near Ravivar Peth and walked 6–7 minutes daily. When I asked about pedestrianization, he warned, “Agar no-vehicle zone bana diya toh business pe asar padega. Local log kam aate hain… door se log gaadi se hi aate hain.”  (if we make the road a no-vehicle zone, it will affect the business. Here, people from far away come by car and local people visit seldomly)

These voices, vendors, workers, fellow commuters, anchored my observations. On Hanuman Jayanti [2] (April 16), the streets outside temples became pop-up public spaces. People selling garlands sat on the road outside Shani Maruti Mandir. When I asked why no one seemed to question this occupation of a vehicular space, I received shrugs, the sacred and the street coexisted without official sanction or protest.

At the Laxmi Road/Ganpati Chowk bus stop, I spoke to a woman from a nearby town visiting with her child. Her husband had been looking for bike parking for 15 minutes. They had left their car at the railway station, their landlord had warned them: “Yahaan car parking mushkil hai.” (car parking is difficult here). Another woman, a Pune local and student, casually said, “Bus system theek hai,” (bus system is good) as she waited for NDA 202, then boarded the bus before I could ask more.

These snippets of mobility, immobility, stillness and flow formed the tapestry of my fieldwork. My observations tried to keep up, but often lagged the sensory immediacy of honking, crowding, negotiating space with strangers. I noticed bollards bent to let two-wheelers enter “walking lanes.” I watched footpaths occupied with vending stalls and construction debris. The street itself became an archive of adaptation.

Walking in the field, especially in a dense, layered city like Pune, is not a passive act. It demands attentiveness to rhythms, pauses, accelerations, and detours. It forces one into constant negotiation with traffic flows, social encounters, infrastructural constraints, and one’s own internal dialogues. Each step in the field felt like both an ethnographic method and a survival tactic.

During my two-month internship with Parisar on the project “Laxmi Road: Redevelopment and Rejuvenation of Pune’s Core Area,” I learned that walking was more than a means of getting from point A to point B. It was an embodied practice of research. Through walking, I encountered the physical contours of the city and its atmospheres: the joy of spontaneous conversations, the tension in contested spaces, the quiet moments of observation, and the cacophony of urban life pressing in from all sides.

Walking in Pune’s core city wasn’t linear or neatly planned. It was full of interruptions, improvisations, and negotiations with street vendors, sudden religious processions, and construction sites carving new paths. These micro-negotiations at every turn forced me to rethink my assumptions about mobility and access. What does it mean to move in a city where movement itself is contingent upon social hierarchies, infrastructural gaps, and historical sediments?

Field notes, as detailed as they were, could never fully capture the entirety of these experiences. The city’s sensory richness often spilled over the boundaries of written words. Yet, these notes of walking, waiting, observing, and occasionally losing my way remain as fragments of a larger story about becoming an ethnographer in motion.

Looking back, my initial fears were not unfounded, but they were also necessary. They marked the beginning of an immersive process of learning to listen to the city through my feet, to read its rhythms through its pauses, and to see its life not just in destinations but in the journeys themselves. Through walking, I began to understand the city not as a static object of study but as a shifting terrain of entanglements. Through the ways of walking, the broken, the congested, and the improvised, I found not just a method but a metaphor for the kind of ethnography I do.

Shivani is an anthropologist focused on sustainable urban mobility and critical minerals supply chain. As part of India ZEV Research team at Institute of Transportation Studies, UC Davis, her work involves research and analysis on critical minerals trade and governance. As a PoLAR Digital Editorial Fellow, Shivani curated an Emergent Conversation on “Sustainable Urban Mobility in India.”

Notes

[1] Ambedkar Jayanti, observed on April 14, commemorates the birth of Dr. B.R. Ambedkar (1891-1956), a pioneering social reformer, constitutionalist, and advocate for caste equity in India. Celebrated across the country, the day honors his lifelong work in challenging Brahminical hierarchies, advancing Dalit rights, and shaping the Indian Constitution as its chief architect.

[2] Hanuman Jayanti is a Hindu festival celebrating the birth of Lord Hanuman, revered for his strength, devotion, and role in the Ramayana. The date varies by region, but it is commonly observed in the month of Chaitra (March-April).