Can an individual walk anywhere and in any which way in the city?
Are public places, and their spatial orders, already given to be simply used or subverted by walking bodies?
When does walking become a mode of learning with rather than about the world?

This talk with Samprati Pani will open up these questions for discussion by drawing on her walking practices as a city dweller and an anthropologist interested in the making of public places in the city.

Her work moves beyond a focus on walking as an event or experiment to the creative and political potential of walking-as-dwelling, that is, the situatedness of walking in particular kinds of places and lives.

Through an ethnography of walking practices performed in the bazaars of Delhi, the talk will illustrate how walking in the bazaar, even for a solitary walker, is a social activity because its rhythm and pace is continuously modulated in relation to others and the materiality of the place.

‘Don’t walk to your own tune, walk carefully’ is the key to walking in the bazaar. Yet walking is also a mode of engagement that makes possible forms of affective ties and freedom.