A Heart-wrenching Dive into Taxi Driver Lives

An Urban Anthropologist Dwells Among Taxi Drivers

Tarini Bedi, author of Mumbai Taximen, starts out, as many of us do when traveling through Mumbai, feeling carsick inside a kaalipeeli. With the mélange of sounds and fumes assaulting her senses, she can sense the sweet tea she had drunk earlier rise up in a bilious reminder. She glances at the driver, the silver-bearded Rashid, who phlegmatically wipes off his sweat with a towel and lays it to rest on the velvet seat cover: “How does he do this? I think to myself.”

Her curiosity is lit by the manner in which people like Rashid, who belong to a community known as the chillia, have withstood various onslaughts on their ways of living and being. Tarini spent a decade doing research on the ways in which transporters have contended with modernity and other changes ushered by technology: taxi fleets and ride-sharing apps like Ola and Uber.

Most of the chillia live in Pathanwadi in North Mumbai. They lay claim to being the original taxi drivers of Mumbai, people with a certain joona or knowledge about the city and other expertise associated with taxis: the mechanics of cars and their repair, the politics, the associations, the body’s sensual experience of driving around the city’s bumpy roads and potholed gullies. Sometimes, the tough topography they drive over is viewed with distaste; at other times, with pride.

By imbibing all aspects of the job – the occasional joys and hardships – into the folds of their bodies and crevices of their being, they are doing what the anthropologist Timothy Ingold “calls dwelling in a city.”

While earlier, Tarini had watched Rashid guide his car with the agility of a maestro, towards the end of her study, she can spot the ravages of age and Parkinson’s, which affect the manner in which the taxi hurtles and trembles across pits and ditches. The taxi, along with Rashid, has also aged; its window handles no longer work; the seat covers have faded. Everything inside rattles, like a body being reduced to its skeletal essentials. The rides are, as a result, more memorable than ever: “Pinches, lurches, nausea and pain – the road imprints itself on both of us as sensations of the body.”

Tarini herself was never permitted to drive any car by the chillia drivers. But since she lived with many driver families over the years, she watched the manner in which women’s lives are woven into the taxi trade; sometimes as drivers, but mostly as the purveyors of dekh-bhal – as the ones who would survey, look at and care for the kin and their cars and the surrounding ecology. Some of these tasks are driven by love, others by obligation; sometimes it’s “pleasurable” and other times “burdensome.” As Joan Tronto puts it, to care is “to maintain, continue and repair” the world.

Even as the men leave Pathanwadi and inhabit a jaalu or web of relations – that can include material and spatial relations – the women buttress their existence with dekh-bhal. One gets a sense through her book of what a taxi driver’s lived life feels like at various levels; the physical environment that surrounds him – the fumes, dust, grime and sweat. The relational structures that he needs to negotiate – the apps, the police, the laws, the associations, the unions.

The Makeup of the Chillia

The chillia, who largely “identify as low-caste Muslims”, have emigrated to Mumbai from the Palanpur region in Gujarat. They are not, however, landless in their villages; they migrated to the city in order to enhance themselves culturally, socially and materially. They started out as the driver of horse-drawn carriages or gharries.

The hard work required of the chillia is in line with the Koran’s principles that “wealth should only be accepted if it comes from striving and effort.” As a community, the chillia have also built a reputation for trustworthiness or bharosa, establishing for the drivers a sort of “respectable masculinity” which also rubs off on their ethnic and religious identity.

Inside Pathanwadi, they are careful that such a reputation for integrity continues to circulate inside the city. There are stories of handbags and wallets returned to passengers. Such behaviors are also intended to counter other negative stereotypes that Muslims in the city are subjected to: for instance, of belonging to the “underworld” or of being “terrorists.” Moreover, the fact that this is a khandani dhandha bolsters a sense of meaning, because that’s a kind of effort that’s consonant with Koranic values.

With the advent of new cars and Ola/Uber apps, the old chillia drivers are feeling edged out. As one of the veteran drivers, Rahim puts it: “We are old drivers and our taxis are old cars. There is no place for us in this new Bombay.” One of the obstacles that might stop them from integrating into the new economy include Islamic tenets that prohibit the earning of riba or interest.

Environmental Onslaughts on Driver Bodies

Drivers dwell in ecologies – “dust, water, debris and other ecologies.” And ecologies also dwell in drivers.

Since the kaalipeelis don’t have any air-conditioning, drivers take in every aspect of the city – pollution, weather, heat, the rain, dust – into their cars and bodies. The anthropologist Harris Solomon (2016) calls this “porosity”; feminist theorist Tiffany Lethabo King calls this ‘fungibility” – to denote how laboring bodies suffer the environmental and political onslaught of their work.

Driving also involves “attention to textures” or what the anthropologist Jonathan Anjaria calls “surfaces.” The makeup of surfaces affects cars and driver bodies. There is not much linear driving on Indian roads. “Mumbai’s landscape is full of debris that molds itself in a variety of topographical formations.”

“The ecologies of practice of Indian automobility collide with straightforward progressive narratives of modernity and order.” Inside families, drivers try to divide the “choke” – the grimy air that settles into their lungs – among male members of the family by taking turns on the taxi.

Their job involves not only driving, but also waiting. It’s not easy waiting. In order to wait, they need to find the shade of a tree or canopy, where they can eat, pray  and read their papers. They often accede to routes based on whether they can find a shady spot at the destination: “Rest for these men is less about leisure than it is about work.”

The Merciless “Retirement” of the Padmini Car

The Premier Padmini continues to inhabit the past and present; the cars and drivers are “of the city” but also “off-modern” – they don’t belong to the manner in which the contemporary city is being reimagined by its technocrats and bigwigs. The car occupies a special place in the Indian imagination: “At different points in Indian history, it has been called iconic and dirty, technologically modern and technologically obsolete.”

Constantly shifting dates are announced with respect to the retirement of the Padminis. Moreover, there are announcements about impending announcements. Drivers get used to a “constant sense of an imminent announcement.”

Outsiders, namely the technocrats and other modernizers, cannot understand driver recalcitrance to give up their kaalipeelis. Why would they choose to subject their bodies to harder rides in old cars – without air-conditioning or advanced suspension systems? Lumped with their cars, the drivers are termed “irrelevant, obsolete, backward” men.

The drivers contest such slurs. As Habib, one driver puts it: “My car has a new body, a new engine, a new CNG gas tank. So how old is my car anyway?” Habib refuses to accept that his joona vehicle and aging body are not part of the city’s future.

These are also battles between two competing conceptions of time in the city. Of the aging driver and his “obsolete” car – a linear, progressive, modern version. Then there is a slower, sensory notion that is embedded in everyday practices of care and repair. Of driver narratives and deeply lived lives.

Also, notions of “obsolescence and decay have a deeper history.” Some of this has a colonial resonance: the Western/British “vision” for the future of the city versus the joona or off-modern. These “temporal collisions” are what “anthropologist Laura Bear (2014) calls the heterochrony of claims over modern time.”

At other moments, Habib sounds heartbreakingly resigned: “There is no place in Bambai for anything joona [old] and since I am old and do not speak English, there is no place for me either.”

Subordination of the Repair Economy

Tarini also wonders why the chillia are so attached to their Padminis. She realizes this relationship is rooted in what Fisch (2018) terms technicity. In other words, the drivers have grown to trust their cars, even as they lavish an almost human-like attention to the maintenance of these vehicles.

The cars are almost like offspring or relatives, objects that are fluid and incomplete, and in need of constant repair (or caretaking). Since the current rules require taxi drivers to retire their Padmini’s after 20 years, one driver Feroze talks about his feelings towards his soon-to-be retired car in this manner: “I am preparing myself like I would prepare for my daughter to leave me when she goes to her husband’s house.”

The drivers often talk about the hardiness and adaptability of the Padmini, of its ability to morph based on the spare parts added to it; everything inside it can be changed, and its robust body is able to withstand Mumbai’s roads like few other new cars can.

There is little attention paid to repair and maintenance of ‘obsolete’ objects in a world that favors the new. And yet, as the historians of technology Andrew Russell and Lee Vinsel (2018) suggest, “some maintainers can be innovative”. Unfortunately, those who are in “repair” are often in subordinate positions, compared with those who produce or manufacture. These people inhabit the social margins and the work itself is dirty – involving grime, dust, heat, oil and slush (Orr, 1996).

Repair and maintenance is also a multisensory experience. Drivers use touch and smell even more intensely than sight. Moreover, they relish communing in this manner with their vehicles – after carefully diagnosing a problem and then fixing it.

When other vehicles touch their taxis, their vehicles carry dents or thoks. But drivers also apply haath while driving and repairing – a word that encompasses more than its literal meaning (hand) and more than its sensory extension into the world. To have the right haath implies a multisensory ability to navigate the city with minimum thoks, or the right knowledge/expertise and bodily capacity to repair the thoks so that the car revives its bridal/new looks.

To replace such intimate touch with the alienation of the smartphone or the computerized technology used in Ola and Uber cabs is to rob the drivers of a kinship and sensorial experience that they relish. They like the fact that their cars are hailed with waves and shouts, as opposed to the impersonal summoning via a smartphone that fetches an Ola or Uber.

Who Does the City Belong To?

The question this brilliant, lyrical and also harrowing work throws up is a vital one: who really belongs to a modern city?

While driving, Rashid taps his hands to Bollywood songs, old ones sung by Mohammed Rafi and Asha Bhonsle.  Tarini also recalls the older Bombay (before it became Mumbai), wherein kaalipeelis would play Bollywood songs chosen by the driver and the windows would be rolled down so that one could smell the salty sea breezes. In current upgraded Ola or Uber taxis, the choice of music is often determined by passengers through screens accessed from the backseat; this takes away from what used to be a shared experience, across social classes in earlier times.

The urban theorist Svetlana Boym (2001) suggests that nostalgia is a complicated emotion: on the one hand, it represents a longing for a different time and place, but it is also a way of making one’s home in the new world. It harkens to the past as a means of establishing oneself in the present and in an uncertain future.

Tarini writes about how her own feelings towards Mumbai both enriched and complicated her research. For instance, Tarini’s father, who died during her study, had been a disabled man for 25 years, with half his body paralyzed by a stroke. She had witnessed how difficult it had been for him to negotiate the city with his disability and was hence compelled too by the manner in which taxi drivers withstood assaults to their masculinity – inflicted by new technologies, by decaying taxis and by their own aging bodies.

Even as Mumbai and other Indian cities flaunt their youthful contemporaneity, they cannot forget the older, even if battered and aged, claims to the city. 

References

Tarini Bedi, Mumbai Taximen: Autobiographies and Automobilities in India, University of Washington Press, 2022