Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-2brh9 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-22T08:18:02.879Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

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

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 May 2018

TARINI BEDI
TARINI BEDI*
Affiliation:
Department of Anthropology, University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, IL, United States of America Email: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

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 as chillia in 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.

Type
Research Article
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 52 , Issue 5 , September 2018 , pp. 1604 - 1638
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 The name of the Indian city of Bombay was changed to Mumbai in 1995. I refer to it as Bombay when referring to the pre-1995 era and to Mumbai in the post-1995 era.

2 Brand of car associated with Bombay's taxi industry for most of the post-colonial period.

3 Spoken in the state of Gujarat.

4 The way the city is referred to in the broader vernacular.

5 Anonymous, ‘Hackney carriages in Bombay’, The Times of India, 4 January 1897.

6 Gahrwalis from the Uttrarkhand region, Sikhs from both the Punjab and the Konkan, Christians from Mangalore, and Muslims from the Pratapgarh region of Uttar Pradesh are also communities that claim ‘originality’. What these observations illustrate is strong evidence that the taxi trade is closely linked with caste, community, region, and religion and that the claim to ‘original’ status is implicated in broader efforts of migrant communities to make claims on the city's history. Therefore, the chillia experience could illuminate these dynamics in other contexts of transport labour migration into Bombay.

7 Bear, L., Lines of the Nation: Indian Railway Workers, Bureaucracy and the Intimate Historical Self, Columbia University Press, New York, NY, 2007CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 McFarlane, C., Learning the City: Knowledge and Translocal Assemblage, Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford, 2011CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 Polanyi, K., The Great Transformation, Farrar and Rinehart, New York, NY, 1944Google Scholar.

10 Behal, R. P. and van der Linden, M. (eds), Coolies, Capital and Colonialism: Studies in Indian Labour History, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge/New York, NY, 2006Google Scholar; Gewald, J.-B., Luning, S., and van Walraven, K. (eds), The Speed of Change: Motor Vehicles and People in Africa, 1890–2000, Brill, Leiden/Boston, 2009CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hart, J., ‘Motor transportation, trade unionism, and the culture of work in colonial Ghana’, International Review of Social History, vol. 59, 2014CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 Belluci, S., Corrêa, L. R., Deutsch, J. G., and Joshi, C., ‘Introduction: labour in transport: histories from the Global South (Africa, Asia, and Latin America) C. 1750–1950’, International Review of Social History, vol. 59, no. S22, 2014Google Scholar.

12 Davies, S., Davis, C. J., de Vries, D., van Voss, L. H., Hesselink, L., and Weinhauer, K. (eds), Dock-Workers: International Explorations in Global Labour History, 1790–1970, Ashgate, Burlington, VT, 2000Google Scholar; van der Linden, M., ‘The promises and challenges of global labor history’, International Labor and Working-Class History, vol. 82, 2012CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13 Behal and van der Linden, Coolies, Capital and Colonialism; Haynes, D., ‘Just like a family? Recalling the relations of production in the textile industries of Surat and Bhiwandi, 1940–1960’, in The Worlds of Indian Industrial Labor, Parry, J. P. (ed.), Sage Publications, New Delhi, 1999Google Scholar.

14 I. J. Kerr, ‘On the move: circulating labor in pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial India’, in Behal and van der Linden, Coolies, Capital and Colonialism.

15 Ibid.; Varady, R. G., ‘North Indian Banjaras: their evolution as transporters’, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies vol. 2, no. 1–2, 1979CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16 W. van Schendel, ‘Stretching labour historiography: ideas from South Asia’, in Behal and van der Linden, Coolies, Capital and Colonialism.

17 Bedi, T., ‘Mimicry, friction and trans-urban imaginaries: Mumbai taxis/singapore-style’, Environment and Planning A, vol. 48, no. 1012–1029, 2015Google Scholar.

18 Ibid.; Chua, Beng Huat, ‘Singapore as model: planning innovations, knowledge experts’, in Worlding Cities: Asian Experiments and the Art of Being Global, Roy, A. and Ong, A. (eds), Wiley-Blackwell, Chichester, 2011Google Scholar.

19 A. D. Ghertner, ‘Rule by aesthetics: world-class city making in Delhi’, in Roy and Ong, Worlding Cities.

20 Bishop, R., Phillips, J., and Yeo, W. W. (eds), Postcolonial Urbanism: Southeast Asian Cities and Global Processes, Routledge, New York, NY, 2003Google Scholar; Sassen, S., The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 2001CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Smith, M. P., Transnational Urbanism: Locating Globalization, Blackwell, Malden, MA, 2001Google Scholar.

21 A. S. Anand, ‘Ethical selfhood and the status of the secular: Islam, modernity, and everyday life in Mumbai’, unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Arizona, 2009; Gayer, L. and Jaffrelot, C., ‘Introduction: Muslims of the Indian city: from centrality to marginality’, in Muslims in Indian Cities: Trajectories of Marginalisation, Gayer, L. and Jaffrelot, C. (eds), Hurst & Company, London, 2012Google Scholar; Seabrook, J. and Siddiqui, I. A., People without History: India's Muslim Ghettos, Navyana, New Delhi, 2011Google Scholar; Varady, D., ‘Muslim residential clustering and political radicalism’, Housing Studies, vol. 23, no. 1, 2008CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

22 Bjorkman, L., ‘“You can't buy a vote”: meanings of money in a Mumbai election’, American Ethnologist, vol. 41, no. 4, 2014CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hansen, T. B., Wages of Violence: Naming and Identity in Postcolonial Bombay, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 2001Google Scholar; Patel, S., ‘Bombay and Mumbai: identities, politics, and populism’, in Bombay and Mumbai: The City in Transition, Patel, S. and Masselos, J. (eds), Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2003Google Scholar.

23 Harriss-White, B., ‘Inequality at work in the informal economy’, International Labour Review, vol. 142, no. 4, 2003CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

24 Hansen, T. B., Saffron Wave: Democracy and Hindu Nationalism in Modern India, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1999CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hansen, Wages of Violence.

25 Gayer and Jaffrelot, Muslims in Indian Cities; Hansen, T. B., ‘Predicaments of secularism: Muslim identities and politics in Mumbai’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, vol. 6, no. 2, 2000Google Scholar; Seabrook and Siddiqui, People without History; A. Appadurai, ‘Theory in anthropology: centre and periphery’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 28, 1986.

26 Gayer and Jaffrelot, Muslims in Indian Cities; Seabrook and Siddiqui, People without History.

27 Jasani, R., ‘Violence, reconstruction and Islamic reform: stories from the Muslim “ghetto”’, Modern Asian Studies, vol. 42, no. 431–56, 2008CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Seabrook and Siddiqui, People without History; Waquant, L., Urban Outcasts: A Comparative Sociology of Advanced Marginality, Polity, Cambridge/Malden, MA, 2008Google Scholar.

28 Chakrabarty, D., Rethinking Working-Class History: Bengal, 1890–1940, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1989Google Scholar; Robb, P. (ed.), Dalit Movements and the Meaning of Labour in India, Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1993Google Scholar; van Schendel, ‘Stretching labour historiography’.

29 Sen, S., ‘Beyond the working class: women's role in Indian industrialisation’, South Asia Research, vol. 22, 1999Google Scholar.

30 Belluci et al., ‘Introduction’; de Haan, A., ‘Towards a “total history” of Bengal labour’, in Bengal: Rethinking History: Essays in Historiography, Bandyopadhyay, S. (ed.), Manohar, New Delhi, 2001Google Scholar; van Schendel, ‘Stretching labour historiography’.

31 Behal and van der Linden, Coolies, Capital and Colonialism; Chakrabarty, Rethinking Working-Class History; Sen, ‘Beyond the working class’.

32 Chakrabarty, Rethinking Working-Class History; Chandavarkar, R., ‘“The making of the working class”: E.P. Thompson and Indian history’, History Workshop Journal, vol. 43, 1997Google Scholar; Chari, S., Fraternal Capital: Peasant Workers, Self-Made Men, and Globalization in Provincial India, Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA, 2004Google Scholar; D'Monte, D., Ripping the Fabric: The Decline of Mumbai and Its Mills, 2nd edn, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2005 [2002]Google Scholar; Haynes, ‘Just like a family?’.

33 Van de Bogaert, M., Trade Unionism in Indian Ports: A Case Study at Calcutta and Bombay, Shri Ram Center for Industrial Relations, New Delhi, 1970Google Scholar; Chandavarkar, R., The Origins of Industrial Capitalism in India: Business Strategies and the Working Classes in Bombay 1900–1940, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1994CrossRefGoogle Scholar; D'Monte, Ripping the Fabric; Dwivedi, S. and Mehrotra, R., Bombay: The Cities Within, India Book House, Bombay, 1995Google Scholar; Edwardes, S. M., ‘The gazateer of Bombay city and island’, Times of India Press, 1909Google Scholar; Kosambi, M., Bombay in Transition: The Growth and Social Ecology of a Colonial City, Almqvist & Wiksell International, Stockholm, 1986Google Scholar; van Wersch, H., The Bombay Textile Strike, 1982–1983, Oxford University Press, Bombay, 1992Google Scholar.

34 de Haan, ‘Towards a “total history”’; van Schendel, ‘Stretching labour historiography’.

35 Gooptu, N., The Politics of the Urban Poor in Early Twentieth Century India, vol. 8, Cambridge Studies in Indian History and Society, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge/New York, NY, 2001CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

36 Aneesh, A., ‘Negotiating globalization: men and women of India's call centers’, Journal of Social Issues, vol. 68, no. 3, 2012CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Anjaria, J. S., ‘Street hawkers and public space in Mumbai’, Economic & Political Weekly, vol. 41, no. 21, 2006Google Scholar; Gooptu, N., ‘Neoliberal subjectivity, enterprise culture and new workplaces: organised retail and shopping malls in India’, Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 44, no. 22, 2009Google Scholar; Gooptu, The Politics of the Urban Poor, p. 8; Sanchez, A., ‘Deadwood and paternalism: rationalizing casual labour in an Indian company town’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, vol. 18, 2012CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

37 Bear, L., Navigating Austerity: Currents of Debt Along a South Asian River, Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA, 2015Google Scholar; Davies et al., Dock-Workers; Pante, M. D., ‘Rickshaws and Filipinos: transnational meanings of technology and labor in American occupied Manila’, International Review of Social History, vol. 59, 2014CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sinha, N., ‘Contract, work, and resistance: boatment in early colonial Eastern India, 1760s–1850s’, International Review of Social History, vol. 59, no. S22, 2014CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

38 Amin, S. and van der Linden, M. (eds), Peripheral Labour: Studies in the History of Partial Proletarianization, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1997Google Scholar.

39 Joshi, C., ‘Histories of Indian labour: predicaments and possibilities’, History Compass, vol. 6, no. 2, 2008CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

40 Chakrabarty, Rethinking Working-Class History.

41 Joshi, ‘Histories of Indian labour’.

42 Chakrabarty, Rethinking Working-Class History.

43 Basu, K., ‘International labour standards and child labour’, in Child Labour and the Rights to Education in South Asia: Needs vs. Rights?, Kabeer, N., Nambissan, G., and Subrahmanian, R. (eds), Sage, New Delhi, 2003Google Scholar; Baud, I., ‘Industrial subcontracting: the effects of putting-out system on poor working women in India’, in Invisible Hands: Women in Home-Based Production, Singh, A. M. and Kelles-Viitanen, A. (eds), Sage, New Delhi, 1987Google Scholar; Hensman, R., Workers, Unions and Global Capitalism: Lessons from India, Columbia University Press, New York, NY, 2011Google Scholar.

44 Chari, Fraternal Capital; Haynes, ‘Just like a family?’.

45 Chandavarkar, The Origins; Chandavarkar, R., History, Culture and the Indian City, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2009CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gooptu, The Politics of the Urban Poor, p. 8; Joshi, ‘Histories of Indian labour’.

46 Sanchez, ‘Deadwood and paternalism’; Sanchez, A., ‘Questioning success: dispossession and the criminal entrepreneur in urban India’, Critique of Anthropology, vol. 32, no. 4, 2012CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

47 Bedi, T., ‘Taxi-drivers, infrastructures, and urban change in globalizing Mumbai’, City and Society, vol. 28, no. 3, 2016CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

48 Chari, Fraternal Capital; De Neve, G., ‘“We are all sondukar (relatives)!”: kinship and its morality in an urban industy of Tamilnadu, South India’, Modern Asian Studies, vol. 42, no. 1, 2008Google Scholar; De Neve, G., The Everyday Politics of Labour: Working Lives in India's Informal Economy, Social Science Press, Delhi, 2005Google Scholar.

49 Belluci et al., ‘Introduction’.

50 Behal and van der Linden, Coolies, Capital and Colonialism; Belluci et al., ‘Introduction’.

51 Ibid.

52 Bedi, ‘Taxi-drivers’.

53 Pante, ‘Rickshaws and Filipinos’.

54 Arnold, D. and Dewald, E., ‘Cycles of empowerment? The bicycle and everyday technology in colonial India and Vietnam’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 53, no. 4, 2011CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bissell, D., ‘Passenger mobilities, affective atmospheres and the sociality of public transport’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, vol. 28, no. 2, 2010CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Pante, ‘Rickshaws and Filipinos’.

55 Belluci et al., ‘Introduction’; Hart, ‘Motor transportation’.

56 Cooper, J., Mundy, R., and Nelson, J., Taxi! Urban Economies and the Social and Transport Impacts of the Taxicab, Ashgate Publishing, Farnham, 2010Google Scholar; Hodges, G. R. G., Taxi! A Social History of the New York City Cabdriver, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 2007Google Scholar; Mathew, B., Taxi! Cabs and Capitalism in New York City, New Press, New York, 2005Google Scholar.

57 Mom, G., ‘Costs, technology and culture: propelling the early taxicab 1900–25’, Journal of Transport History, vol. 24, no. 2, 2003CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

58 Mathew, Taxi!.

59 Hodges, Taxi!.

60 Gilbert, G. and Samuels, R. F., Taxicab: A Urban Transporation Survivor, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, NC, 1982Google Scholar.

61 Belluci et al., ‘Introduction’; Cervero, R. and Golub, A., ‘Informal transport: a global perspective’, Transport Policy, vol. 14, no. 6, 2007CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hickey, M., ‘“Itsara” (freedom) to work? Neoliberalization, deregulation, and marginalized male labor in the Bangkok taxi business’, in Asia Research Institute Working Paper Series, National University of Singapore, Singapore, 2013Google Scholar; Textor, R., From Peasant to Pedicab Driver: A Social Study of Northeastern Thai Farmers Who Periodically Migrated to Bangkok and Became Pedicab Drivers, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, 1961Google Scholar.

62 Hickey, ‘“Itsara” (freedom) to work?’; de Koning, A., ‘Gender, public space and social segregation in Cairo: of taxi drivers, prostitutes and professional women’, Antipode, vol. 41, no. 3, 2009CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Notar, B. E., ‘“Coming out” to “hit the road”: temporal, spatial and affective mobilities of taxi drivers and day trippers in Kunming, China’, City and Society, vol. 24, no. 3, 2012CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sanina, A., ‘The marshrutka as a socio-cultural phenomenon of a Russian mega-city’, City, Culture,and Society, vol. 2, 2011CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sopranzetti, C., ‘Owners of the map: mobility and mobilization among motorcycle taxi drivers in Bangkok’, City and Society, vol. 26, no. 1, 2014CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

63 Adey, P., Bissell, D., Hannam, K., Merriman, P., and Sheller, M. (eds), The Routledge Handbook of Mobilities, Routeledge, London/New York, 2014CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bissell, ‘Passenger mobilities’.

64 Sopranzetti, ‘Owners of the map’.

65 Loosely calling on the cultural narrative of Hindu communities, Indian Muslim caste has a history and politics distinct from that of Hindu caste.

66 Mohiuddin, M., Muslim Communities in Medieval Konkan (610–1900 A.D.), Sundeep Prakashan, New Delhi, 2002Google Scholar.

67 Dwivedi and Mehrotra, Bombay.

68 Gayer and Jaffrelot, ‘Introduction’; A. Jalal, Self and Sovereignty: Individual and Community in South Asia Islam since 1850, Routledge, New York, 2000.

69 Green, N., Bombay Islam: The Religious Economy of the West Indian Ocean 1840–1915, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2011CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

70 Ibid.

71 Ghosh, P., Community and Nation: Essays on Identity and Politics in Eastern India, Oxford University Press, New York, 2008Google Scholar; Haynes, ‘Just like a family?’; Haynes, D. and Roy, T., ‘Conceiving mobility: weavers’ migrations in pre-colonial and colonial India’, Indian Economic and Social History Review, vol. 36, no. 1, 1999CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Pandey, G., The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India, Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1990Google Scholar.

72 Beteille, A., ‘Caste in contemporary India’, in Caste Today, Fuller, C. J. (ed.), Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1997Google Scholar.

73 Ahmad, I. (ed.), Caste and Social Stratification among the Muslims, Manohar Book Service, Delhi, 1973Google Scholar; Ali, S., ‘Collective and elective ethnicity: caste among urban Muslims in India’, Sociological Forum, vol. 17, no. 4, 2002CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

74 Sabharwal, G., Ethnicity and Class: Social Divisions in an Indian City, Oxford, New Delhi, 2006Google Scholar.

75 Ahmad, Caste and Social Stratification.

76 M. Mines, ‘Social stratification among Muslim Tamils in Tamilnadu, South India’, in Ahmad, Caste and Social Stratification; A. R. Momin, ‘Muslim castes in an industrial township of Maharashtra’, in Ahmad, Caste and Social Stratification.

77 In Mumbai, small restaurants run by the Irani community are also cases where the restaurants and the community are closely identified using the same term: ‘Irani’. See, for example, Ezekiel, N., ‘Irani restaurant instructions’, Journal of South Asian Literature, vol. 11, no. 3/4, 1976Google Scholar; Lutgendorf, P., ‘Making tea in India: Chai, capitalism and culture’, Thesis Eleven, vol. 113, no. 1, 2012CrossRefGoogle Scholar; B. Irani and V. Sharma, Aur Irani Chai, film by PUKAR Neighborhood Project, Mumbai, 2004.

78 Interview with author, Mumbai, August 2010.

79 Indian Parsis are followers of Zoroastrianism and trace their origins to Persia. Around the eighth century ad, they fled Persia seeking asylum on the Gujarat Coast of India. As Bombay developed under colonial rule, Parsis were invited to settle in the city as shipbuilders, merchants, and traders. They were given significant colonial patronage. As a result, they took on Western anglicized lifestyles and became identified as an urban elite in Bombay. See Ganesh, K., ‘Intra-community dissent and dialogue: the Bombay Parsis and the Zoroastrian Diaspora’, Sociological Bulletin, vol. 57, no. 3, 2008CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lurhmann, T. M., The Good Parsi: The Fate of a Colonial Elite in a Postcolonial Society, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1996Google Scholar.

80 Interview with author, Mumbai, August 2010.

81 Haynes and Roy, ‘Conceiving mobility’; Pandey, The Construction.

82 Momin, ‘Muslim castes’.

83 Nadri, G. A., Eighteenth Century Gujarat and the Dynamics of Its Political Economy, 1750–1800, Brill, Leiden/Boston, 2009Google Scholar.

84 Ghosh, P., Muhajirs and the Nation: Bihar in the 1940s, Routledge, New Delhi, 2010Google Scholar.

85 Green, Bombay Islam; Thompson, E. P., The Making of the English Working Class, Vintage, New York, 1963Google Scholar.

86 Ali, ‘Collective and elective ethnicity’.

87 Engineer, A. A., The Bohras, Vikas Publishing House, New Delhi, 1993Google Scholar; J. C. Masselos, ‘The Khojas of Bombay: the defining of formal membership criteria during the nineteenth century’, in Ahmad, Caste and Social Stratification.

88 Mohiuddin, Muslim Communities.

89 Fleet-taxi company.

90 Kuran, T., ‘The genesis of Islamic economics: a chapter in the politics of Muslim identity’, Social Research, vol. 64, no. 2, 1997Google Scholar; Lawal, Y. O., ‘Islamic economics: the cornerstone of Islamic banking’, Journal of Economics and Engineering, vol. 4, 2010Google Scholar.

91 Kuran, ‘The genesis’.

92 Simone, A. M., ‘Relational infrastructures in postcolonial worlds’, in Infrastructural Lives: Politics, Experience and the Urban Fabric, Graham, S. and McFarlane, C. (eds), Routledge, London, 2014Google Scholar.

93 Beckmann, J., ‘Automobility: a social problem and theoretical concept’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, vol. 19, 2001CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

94 Ahmed, W., ‘The political economy and geopolitical context of India's econonomic crisis, 1990–91’, Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography, vol. 35, no. 179–96, 2014Google Scholar.

95 Corbridge, S. and Harriss, J., Reinventing India: Liberalization, Hindu Nationalism and Popular Democracy, Polity Press, Cambridge/ Malden, MA, 2000Google Scholar; Harriss-White, B., India Working: Essays on Society and Economy, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2003Google Scholar.

96 Chatterjee, P., ‘Democracy and economic transformation in India’, Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 43, no. 16, 2008Google Scholar; Varshney, R. L., ‘Government-business relations in India’, Business History Review, vol. 38, no. 1, 1964CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

97 Ahmed, ‘The political economy’, pp. 286–7.

98 Ibid.

99 Bhayana, N., ‘Changing Mumbai's taxis, Singapore style’, Hindustan Times, 15 December, 2007Google Scholar, http://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/the-mumbai-project-changing-mumbai-s-taxis-singapore-style/article1-259219.aspx, [accessed 28 March 2018].

100 VisionMumbai, Transforming Mumbai into a World-Class City: A Summary of Recommendations, McKinsey & Co., Mumbai, 2003.

101 As of this writing, the debate over the appropriate age cut-off continues.

102 Foucault, M., Security, Territory, Population, Palgrave Macmillan, New York, NY, 2007Google Scholar.

103 ‘Roomy vehicles to replace old “yellow black” cabs in Mumbai’, The Economic Times, 16 October 2008; Y. Gharemani, ‘Grab a cab, log on and go for a hard drive’, Asiaweek, 7 June 2001; N. Kurczewski, ‘Mumbai taxis roll into retirement’, The New York Times, 5 March 2009.

104 Interview with author, Mumbai, July 2011.

105 Terra, P. C., ‘Free and unfree labour and ethnic conflicts in the Brazilian transport industry: Rio De Janeiro in the nineteenth century’, International Review of Social History, vol. 59, 2014CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

106 Belluci et al., ‘Introduction’.

107 Mitra, I. K., Samaddar, R., and Sen, S. (eds), Accumulation in Postcolonial Capitalism, Springer, New York/Singapore, 2016Google Scholar; Harriss-White, ‘Inequality at work’.

108 The author is grateful to the provocation of an anonymous reviewer to acknowledge the different ways of apprehending ghulami.

109 Masselos, J., ‘Power in the Bombay “Mohalla,” 1904–1915: an initial exploration into the world of the Indian urban Muslim’, South Asia, vol. 6, 1976CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

110 Green, Bombay Islam; Mohiuddin, Muslim Communities.

111 Momin, A. R., ‘Pluralism and multiculturalism: an Islamic perspective’, American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences, vol. 18, no. 2, 2001Google Scholar.

112 Chandavarkar, The Origins, p. 171.

113 Interview with author, Mumbai, July 2011.

114 Participant observation by author, Mumbai, August 2010.

115 Arnold, D., ‘The problem of traffic: the streetlife of modernity in late colonial India’, Modern Asian Studies, vol. 46, no. 1, 2012CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Arnold, D. and Dewald, E., ‘Everyday technology in South and Southeast Asia: an introduction’, Modern Asian Studies, vol. 46, no. 1, 2012CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sheller, M., ‘Bodies, cybercars and the mundane incorporation of automated mobilities’, Social and Cultural Geography, vol. 8, no. 2, 2007CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

116 Hodges, Taxi!; Mathew, Taxi!.

117 Haynes and Roy, ‘Conceiving mobility’; De Neve, ‘“We are all sondukar (relatives)!”’.

118 In India, older men are referred to by kinship terms to connote uncle. The term ‘real’ connotes that there might be some consanguineous relationship.

119 Malhotra, G. and Sinharary, S., ‘Maruti Suzuki—reigning emperor of Indian automobile industry’, Journal of Case Research, vol. 4, no. 1, 2013Google Scholar.

120 Control over motoring time is integral to drivers’ conceptions of their freedom as workers.

121 Barth, F., ‘Models of social organization’, Royal Anthropological Institute Occasional Paper, vol. 23, 1966Google Scholar; Thompson, The Making.

122 Staff, ‘Silicon valley start-up Uber may find India a bumpy ride’, India Business Insight, 20 July 2014.

123 Granovetter, M., ‘Economic action and social structure: the problem of embeddedness’, American Journal of Sociology, vol. 91, no. 3, 1985CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

124 Simone, ‘Relational infrastructures’; Stengers, I., Cosmopolitics 1, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN, 2010Google Scholar.