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Paper short abstract

I explore how, in one of the world’s most polluted capitals, life and health are made sense of and negotiated across societal and professional divides. Through ethnographic analysis, I show how these differences shape uneven experiences of polluted air in a climate where harm is normalised .

Paper long abstract

'It's like my throat is filled with something, it feels very heavy, and also water starts running from my eyes,' an autorickshaw driver recounts how he experiences air pollution in Delhi. Often described as 'toxic haze', 'thick smog', or a 'gas chamber', Delhi's air pollution has been given several names. The phenomenon seems to have become a permanent environmental condition shaping everyday life and health in the city. Based on 11 months of ethnographic fieldwork across multiple sites in the city, including sustained engagement with autorickshaw drivers, bus conductors, medical doctors, respiratory patients, students, and activists, I examine how air pollution is embodied, interpreted, and endured.

While some interlocutors articulate pollution through failures of the post-colonial state or neoliberal planning, alongside bodily symptoms like constant coughing and irritation in eyes, others frame exposure as an inevitable compromise. It is something they adapt to or get habitual of, despite bodily symptoms, which they describe as a cost of income, opportunity, or (future) mobility. These different justifications allow me to show how health in a polluted city is shaped by uneven positionalities, situated biologies, and the limits of aspiration. I further show how state responses to air pollution, including the criminalisation of protest and relativising or discrediting scientific data, contribute to a climate in which harm is normalised and responsibility diffused. By conceptualising air as both a material substance and a medium of embodied exposure, I show how living with/in environmental toxicity becomes an ordinary condition of survival rather than collective intervention.