Urban Histories of Place and Labour: The Chillia Taximen of Bombay/Mumbai

Abstract

When it comes to historical and ethnographic accounts of transport labour outside the West, scholars have only recently intervened to correct the paucity of systematic scholarship in this area. This article is in conversation with scholarship in both labour history and urban anthropology through which it links the modern history of a particular mode of urban transport (the taxi) and the labouring history of those who drive, move, and fix it. Through a focus on a community of hereditary taxi drivers known aschilliain the Indian city of Bombay/Mumbai, this article expands our understanding of labour experiences of the city through the twentieth century and into the present. It moves between historical archives, oral history, and lived experience to illuminate how the labour of transport workers structures circulations, collective identities, and urban space. It explores several dimensions of the history and present of transport labour in India. First, it is concerned with the connection between the work of hereditary motoring and the reconfiguration and constitution of communal identities in contexts of urban labour migration. Second, it is interested how labour practices become embedded in broader social and cultural space. Third, given that chillia have continued in the trade for over 100 years, the article explores the circuits of work and labour surrounding their trade to illuminate intersections between political and cultural shifts in Mumbai, changing conditions of work in contemporary contexts of globalizing capital, and the forms of ‘non-consent’ that emerge out of these networks.

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

“…Examining share‐driving in relation to place reveals not only the ways in which work practices are “embedded in broader urban cultural and social space” (Bedi 2018, 1609) but also detailed insight into the ways in which rationales behind existing transport systems (the bus and share‐autos) vary greatly. Central Road exemplifies the inability of existing transport policies and plans to meet the dynamic needs of its residents and commuters.…”

“…This binary characterization of formal and informal work has limited analytical purchase (Bedi 2018; Millar 2018; Roy 2005, 2011; Roy and Al Sayyad 2004). Adopting a binary approach reinforces the idea that informal work is a necessity for those who are not needed by global capital, thus effacing the generative potential of the work itself (Millar 2018, 3).…”

“…Local identity and practice emerge from their experience of urbanization, referencing new manifestations of their ties to agrarian land and life, their selfhood, and their logic of operation. Drawing on scholarship that shows how communities of drivers derive their identity through the interactions of labor practices with urbanization, only to then deploy their identity as a discursive strategy, to differentiate themselves from other ethnic driving communities (Bedi 2018), I assert that “local” also operates as a discursive strategy. It differentiates local drivers and their work from that of outsiders, their transport service from that of the bus system, and finally, establishes their work as neither “formal” nor “informal.” I read “local” as a way of co‐opting urbanization.…”

Thinking through Urban Obsolescence: Tinkering, Repair and the Politics of Joona in Bombay/Mumbai's Taxi Trade

“…Chillia are Gujarati Muslim drivers who come from the Palanpur region of Gujarat and who trace their connection to the taxi trade back to the early twentieth century. About 35 taxi‐driving families in Pathanwadi became my closest interlocutors, and their neighborhood of Pathanwadi became an important site from which I observed and participated in the broader city networks that are connected to the taxi industry (Bedi, 2018). As I was working with these communities, whose families had driven taxis since the inception of the trade in colonial Bombay, I also conducted extensive archival research on the driving, governance and manufacturing histories of the trade during the British colonial and early postcolonial periods.…”

The Weight of Waiting: Suspended Mobility and Deferred Aspirations Amongst Cab Drivers in Hyderabad

“…With migrant cab drivers, discussions of time and waiting take on an additional layer of being distanced from intimate relationships (Kwon, 2015). Myriad references to restless immobility and reluctant waiting have been a central theme in my field notes, underscoring the temporal labour of cab driving (Adavi, 2021; Bedi, 2022; Eytan, 2019; Sharma, 2014). Cab drivers were consciously thinking through and articulating the experience of waiting which, I argue, give us insights into how the uncertainties and precarities created by the pandemic have reconfigured migrants’ aspirations, their relationship to work, their imaginaries of the future and their articulation of hope and despair.…”