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Danger, media, and the urban experience in Delhi

In the summer of 2001 there were mass disturbances in the poorer neighborhoods of East Delhi, where residents reported seeing a technologically amplified ‘monkey-man’ and many were admitted to hospital with alleged scratches. Sundaram analyses this combination of urban fear and media sensation in his essay for the Princeton University Press collection on fear. Using detailed fieldwork in hospital sites and police stations, “Danger, Media and the Urban Experience in Delhi” explores middle-class pathologies of the urban, viral media politics and discourses of animal-human misogyny, all of which came together in the event. Sundaram drew from an extensive popular media archive (print, video, pamphlets) and government enquiry reports to suggest that contemporary media experiences periodically produce sites of urban disturbance. Here, the urban archive mutates into a primarily media archive, which reassembles older debates on the city. Equally, the monkey-man fears threw into confusion older sites of sovereign urban power – the police and the liberal media. Both liberal explanation and police surveillance failed to grasp the new unspeakable evil that the event articulated. Sundaram’s essay emerged out of research conducted as a Fellow in the Shelby Cullom Davis Center on Historical Studies in Princeton University. The thematic of the Centre that year was fear, and this essay forms part of a special collection on the topic. It follows on from the arguments of ‘Imaging Urban Breakdown’ and is expected to join that essay in a forthcoming monograph that Sundaram is currently working on.