Un‐Fare: “Local” Share‐Auto Rickshaw Drivers and the Work of Belonging in the Midst of Urban Change in India's “IT Capital”

Abstract

In Bengaluru, India's “IT capital,” global capital and processes of world city‐making valorize specific kinds of work and workers as “formal” while categorizing others as “informal,” “chaotic” and “unregulated.” This article draws attention to the work of share‐auto rickshaw driving among local men from formerly farmland‐owning households in a rapidly urbanizing pocket in peripheral Bengaluru. Why do these drivers, whose work is situated outside of visions of world‐classness, engage in the practices that they do? How do processes of urbanization shape how they see and situate themselves and their work in the city? This article argues that the drivers construct themselves as urban laboring subjects through their deep ties with place. Their identity as “local” refers to new manifestations of their ties to agrarian land and life, their place‐based knowledge in providing transport services, their selfhood, and their logic of operation. Local is also a discursive strategy that differentiates their work from that of non‐locals (or “outsiders”), and situates their work as neither formal nor informal. In illuminating the experiences of urban transformation among members of this driving community, this article asserts that local is the drivers’ way of co‐opting the urban present.