Urban - Histories - of - Place - and - Labour - The - Chillia - Taximen - of - Bombay Mumbai PDF

Modern Asian Studies 52, 5 (2018) pp. 1604–1638.

C Cambridge University Press 2018
doi:10.1017/S0026749X17000191 First published online 10 May 2018
Urban Histories of Place and Labour: The

chillia taximen of Bombay/Mumbai1
TARINI BEDI
Department of Anthropology, University of Illinois at Chicago

Email: tbedi@uic.edu
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.
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.
1604
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URBAN HISTORIES OF PLACE AND LABOUR 1605
Introduction: old workers in a new city
I sat on the floor of taxi driver Rahim’s house. Rahim limped

despondently past the bright curtain that shaded the dark front room
of this two-room house in a small Mumbai settlement on a rainy July
evening. With him, a profound sadness floated in to hang heavily
over all of us—much heavier than the violent Mumbai monsoon that
battered against the tin roof. ‘Padmini2 mari gayu,’ he said softly in
Gujarati.3 ‘My Padmini has been killed.’ He lay down, closed those
sharp eyes capable of seeking out every hidden street and alley, and
spoke sadly to the dusty fan circling above his head: ‘My taxi has been
cut into many pieces, but my heart is broken into many more.’ It felt
much like we were there to offer condolences for a loss in the family.
Taxi drivers, car mechanics, and the two young boys who washed taxis
in this taxi-driving community each morning either sat solemnly on
the floor or stood in the doorway in sympathetic silence. Periodically,
they glanced sadly onto the empty sliver of pavement where Rahim
had parked his taxi for 25 years. One less car to repair, one less car
to wash for these men who relied on the daily cash that Rahim and
other drivers gave them for scrubbing, shining, and tuning the iconic
Premier Padmini taxis that had plied Bombay’s roads as taxis for
decades. Rahim was from a working-class Muslim community known
in Mumbai as chillia. His family had driven taxis in Bombay since
the early twentieth century. That evening, Rahim had returned from
Mumbai’s Motor Vehicles Department, the state’s main licensing and
regulatory body. At his annual visit to get his taxi’s license renewed,
he was forewarned that it no longer complied with new regulations
on age and would need to be handed over to the state to be destroyed.
Rahim’s youngest son, Syed, drove the same car for the evening shift
and his brother-in-law, Bilal, drove the car on Fridays when others
went to prayers at the mosque. This shared car had a long and hard-
working relationship with Mumbai’s roads, as did the men who had
driven it. Syed and Bilal sat next to Rahim and complained in anger:
All these years the RTO [Regional Transport Office] officials took our bribes
and gave a passing certificate; now all of a sudden they are trying to enforce
the law? What was the real age of this car? What is age anyway? Is it the
body of the car the inside of it? We have put in a new engine, a new taillight,
2
Brand of car associated with Bombay’s taxi industry for most of the post-colonial
period.
3
Spoken in the state of Gujarat.
1606 TARINI BEDI
new brakes, and a new CNG [compressed natural gas] tank. But they have
decided it’s too old, only because it looks old, and has no place in the new
Mumbai; they want us to either buy new cars or give up our family business
and join a fleet-taxi company. Where will we get the money to buy a new car?
After being a public servant my whole life, who wants to become a ghulam
[slave] of the private sector? What happens to workers?
To ensure that Rahim’s old vehicle would never again benefit from
upgrades or repair that had marked its life, three low-level employees
of the state government violently yanked the doors off the car before a
small crane came down to crumple its roof. Rahim, holding his head,
said softly:
My family, we were Bambai’s4 original taxi drivers but there is no place for
anything original or joona (old). The police, the RTO, this sarkar (government),
and even our own union people have decided that only what is modern can be
on the roads, never the old. We are old taxi-drivers and our taxis are old cars.
There is no place for us in this new Bombay.
Rahim, Syed, and Bilal drew an important arc between the modern
history of a particular mode of urban transport and the labouring
history of those who drive, move, and fix it. Their position as hereditary
drivers in a changing city is lens through which I explore several
questions about transport labour in cities of the non-Western world.
Rahim’s community of hereditary drivers, the chillia, has driven
taxis in Bombay since the early twentieth century and continues in
contemporary Mumbai’s taxi trade. Their working lives have been
closely connected to Bombay’s political, cultural, and economic history.
Rahim, for example, drove a Premier Padmini kaalipeeli (black and
yellow) taxi. This was among the first automobiles to be mass produced
in India, and was the icon of post-colonial Bombay’s taxi trade for
almost 35 years. His father and grandfather also drove taxis for over
five decades before returning to their native village near Palanpur,
in the neighbouring state of Gujarat, so they could die auspiciously
in their small ancestral home. His great-grandfather was the first to
migrate to the city as a teenager. He followed his maternal uncles
to colonial Bombay in the early twentieth century to drive a horse-
drawn hackney, very similar to those driven in England at the time.5
This long and hereditary association of chillia with Bombay’s taxi
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.
trade led to claims that they were Bombay’s original taximen.6 As
Syed lamented above, throughout the twentieth and early twenty-first
centuries, chillia drivers adapted to regulatory, economic, political,
and technological shifts in the taxi trade. This resilience undergirded
chillia persistence in the trade even when other ethnic communities
associated with taxis moved into other professions.
Through this community, the article asks how a focus on hereditary
transporters, taxi drivers in particular, expands our understanding
of the labour history of the city through the twentieth century.
Relatedly, it asks what a focus on the taxi industry can illuminate
about the shifting relationships between the work of motoring and
globalizing capital in the twenty-first-century cities of the Global
South. This article draws from recent scholarship on transport labour
by moving between historical archives, oral and family histories,
and lived experience7 to illuminate how the labour of transport
workers structures circulations, collective identities, and urban space.
Examining working lives of motoring labour in non-Western cities in
the context of broader urban cultures and spaces in which work takes
place, it is in conversation with scholarship in labour history and urban
anthropology. Through a focus on the chillia, and networks of work
that emerged around them, this article underscores the importance of
looking at urban transport not simply as material or mobile system, but
as social and cultural assemblage.8 It particularly illuminates how the
chillia taxi trade and circuits of obligation and reciprocity, experienced
by this community of hereditary drivers as khandaani dhandha (family
business), encompass other forms of work that arise out of kin-based
working lives. These related social circuits of mechanics, car-wash
operators, and smugglers of spare parts that emerged out of the needs
of the chillia taxi trade are all part of this embedded economy9 and deeply
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
L. Bear, Lines of the Nation: Indian Railway Workers, Bureaucracy and the Intimate
Historical Self, Columbia University Press, New York, NY, 2007.
8
C. McFarlane, Learning the City: Knowledge and Translocal Assemblage, Wiley-
Blackwell, Oxford, 2011.
9
K. Polanyi, The Great Transformation, Farrar and Rinehart, New York, NY, 1944.
1608 TARINI BEDI
intertwined with the history of chillia migration through the twentieth

century, their labour subjectivities, and relationships of their labour to
the city. This resonates with scholarship on transport workers in other
parts of the non-Western world that argues that this category of labour
is particularly useful in interrogating articulations between local and
global forms of capital. It is also a useful site from which to examine
how local livelihoods both shape and counter these articulations.10
When it comes to historical accounts of transport labour outside the
West, labour historians recently intervened to correct the paucity of
systematic scholarship in this area.11 In the case of those involved in
mobile trades in the post-colonial world, social scientists also address
gaps in this labour history.12 Located within these gaps, I am concerned
with four dimensions of transport labour. First, I am concerned
with the connection between the work of hereditary motoring and
the reconfiguration and constitution of new communal identities in
contexts of urban labour migration. Second, I am interested in the
ways that labour practices are embedded in broader social and cultural
space. In South Asia, mobile labour has created and shaped locales that
receive them.13 Mobile labour groups—what Kerr14 calls circulating
labour—have historically produced accompanying forms of mobile
work. A well-studied example is of Banjaras, who were transporters
of goods and cattle in pre-colonial and colonial India and who were
accompanied by musicians, jugglers, and other entertainers on their
10
R. P. Behal and M. van der Linden (eds), Coolies, Capital and Colonialism: Studies in
Indian Labour History, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge/New York, NY, 2006; J.-
B. Gewald, S. Luning, and K. van Walraven (eds), The Speed of Change: Motor Vehicles and
People in Africa, 1890–2000, Brill, Leiden/Boston, 2009; J. Hart, ‘Motor transportation,
trade unionism, and the culture of work in colonial Ghana’, International Review of Social
History, vol. 59, 2014.
11
S. Belluci, L. R. Corrêa, J. G. Deutsch, and C. Joshi, ‘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, 2014.
12
S. Davies, C. J. Davis, D. de Vries, L. H. van Voss, L. Hesselink, and K. Weinhauer
(eds), Dock-Workers: International Explorations in Global Labour History, 1790–1970,
Ashgate, Burlington, VT, 2000; M. van der Linden, ‘The promises and challenges
of global labor history’, International Labor and Working-Class History, vol. 82, 2012.
13
Behal and van der Linden, Coolies, Capital and Colonialism; D. Haynes, ‘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, J. P. Parry (ed.), Sage
Publications, New Delhi, 1999.
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.
long journeys.15 Chillia drivers are an interesting case because they are
mobile workers but their social lives are uncharacteristically emplaced
compared to other mobile transport workers. By locating the study
ethnographically in one residential neighbourhood of chillia drivers,
mechanics, car-wash operators, and taxi leasers in Northern Mumbai
called Pathanwadi, I approach labour practices as they are embedded
in broader urban cultural and social space. This is what Willem van
Schendel16 terms stretching of labour studies into the spaces of social
and cultural life.
Third, given that chillia have continued in the trade for over
100 years, circuits of work and labour surrounding their trade are
useful sites at which to interrogate intersections between political
and cultural shifts in the city and changing conditions of work in
contemporary contexts of globalizing capital. I entered this community
in 2010 at the height of debates over the future of the taxi trade.
Drivers like Rahim faced intersecting forms of destruction—of their
taxis, of labour structures of their trade, and, with this, of circuits of
reciprocity that characterized the trade for over a century. A large
part of this destruction began in 2006, when Mumbai’s city and state
government introduced what became known as ‘taxi modernization’.17
The initial call was for new cars to replace older kaalipeelis. This
was encouraged by car manufacturers tapping into the taxi market.
This was accompanied by encouragement of investment in taxi fleets
using Singapore’s taxi-fleet system as a model.18 Under pressure from
urban elite groups and corporate investors in taxi fleets, the state
government’s calls to ‘modernize’ cars and regulate and rationalize
roads expanded to efforts to formalize and manage motoring labour.
By encouraging drivers to learn English, receive etiquette training, and
wear standardized uniforms, it disciplined motoring labour to conform
to aesthetic dimensions of an ordered city.19 It also introduced new
pollution control and permitting mandates that steered older cars into
15
Ibid.; R. G. Varady, ‘North Indian Banjaras: their evolution as transporters’, South
Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies vol. 2, no. 1–2, 1979.
16
W. van Schendel, ‘Stretching labour historiography: ideas from South Asia’, in
Behal and van der Linden, Coolies, Capital and Colonialism.
17
T. Bedi, ‘Mimicry, friction and trans-urban imaginaries: Mumbai taxis/singapore-
style’, Environment and Planning A, vol. 48, no. 1012–1029, 2015.
18
Ibid.; Beng Huat Chua, ‘Singapore as model: planning innovations, knowledge
experts’, in Worlding Cities: Asian Experiments and the Art of Being Global, A. Roy and A.
Ong (eds), Wiley-Blackwell, Chichester, 2011.
19
A. D. Ghertner, ‘Rule by aesthetics: world-class city making in Delhi’, in Roy and
Ong, Worlding Cities.
1610 TARINI BEDI
retirement. Veteran drivers had three choices: to buy new cars in order
to keep driving, to give up their taxi permits to the state and leave the
trade, or to sell their permits to a corporate fleet who would employ
them. Each of these choices had impacts on embedded structures of
labour in the trade. This engendered vitriolic debates over the place
of taxis and drivers in the ‘global’ city of Mumbai.20 Additionally,
for chillia drivers who always pooled resources to purchase vehicles
to avoid Islamic religious restrictions against loans and interest, the
purchase of new cars was doubly complicated.
It is significant that chillia are poor Muslims in a city where Muslims
have been violently excluded, circumscribed, and policed.21 Religious,
linguistic, and ethnic divisions are important to the operation of power
and dissent in contemporary Mumbai.22 Labour practices have been
fundamentally shaped by these exclusions rooted in caste, religion,
and nativism.23 Inclusions and exclusions of labour in the taxi trade
were no exception and were vital to why different drivers were
affected differently by taxi modernization. Indeed, chillia drivers often
viewed contemporary taxi modernization as a way to disenfranchise
minorities and erase Muslim labour in a city that has seen both
spectacular anti-Muslim violence and everyday forms of exclusion of
Muslims from public life.24 Given these communal exclusions, a rich
contemporary scholarship has emerged that looks at urban Muslim
20
R. Bishop, J. Phillips, and W. W. Yeo (eds), Postcolonial Urbanism: Southeast Asian
Cities and Global Processes, Routledge, New York, NY, 2003; S. Sassen, The Global City:
New York, London, Tokyo, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 2001; M. P. Smith,
Transnational Urbanism: Locating Globalization, Blackwell, Malden, MA, 2001.
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;
L. Gayer and C. Jaffrelot, ‘Introduction: Muslims of the Indian city: from centrality to
marginality’, in Muslims in Indian Cities: Trajectories of Marginalisation, L. Gayer and C.
Jaffrelot (eds), Hurst & Company, London, 2012; J. Seabrook and I. A. Siddiqui, People
without History: India’s Muslim Ghettos, Navyana, New Delhi, 2011; D. Varady, ‘Muslim
residential clustering and political radicalism’, Housing Studies, vol. 23, no. 1, 2008.
22
L. Bjorkman, ‘“You can’t buy a vote”: meanings of money in a Mumbai election’,
American Ethnologist, vol. 41, no. 4, 2014; T. B. Hansen, Wages of Violence: Naming and
Identity in Postcolonial Bombay, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 2001; S. Patel,
‘Bombay and Mumbai: identities, politics, and populism’, in Bombay and Mumbai: The
City in Transition, S. Patel and J. Masselos (eds), Oxford University Press, New Delhi,
2003.
23
B. Harriss-White, ‘Inequality at work in the informal economy’, International
Labour Review, vol. 142, no. 4, 2003.
24
T. B. Hansen, Saffron Wave: Democracy and Hindu Nationalism in Modern India,
Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1999; Hansen, Wages of Violence.
communities in Mumbai through a focus on their (often) violent
relationships with the Hindu majority.25
Indeed, this theoretical perspective has revealed the very real
brutalities of Muslim lives in India. However, it does not fully account
for how Muslim geographical and cultural space and subjectivities
have historically been inflected through negotiations among different
castes and classes of Muslims; or how experiences of work, labour, and
migration have intersected with communal subjectivities and practices
in the working lives of minorities in the city. My research is acutely
attentive to these exclusions given its empirical location in spatial
sites that are communally segregated. However, rather than read
these spatial segregations exclusively through categories of communal
marginalization,26 I see these spatialities of Muslim working lives in a
communalized urban India as shaped through several competing social
and political registers that draw on both historical and contemporary
labour relationships to the city and city space. They also draw on
combinations of both forced residential arrangements or what some
have called ‘ghettoization’,27 as well as elective aspects of segregation
based on the demands of work and imperatives of social control of
labouring communities over their labour.
Unsettling labour studies from South Asia
Labour historians of South Asia have unsettled theoretical

underpinnings that emerged out of particular historical conditions of
Western capitalism. The broadest and most influential critiques come
from scholars who argue that universalist claims about capitalism
and labour relations are based on cultural assumptions particular to
25
Gayer and Jaffrelot, Muslims in Indian Cities; T. B. Hansen, ‘Predicaments
of secularism: Muslim identities and politics in Mumbai’, Journal of the Royal
Anthropological Institute, vol. 6, no. 2, 2000; 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
R. Jasani, ‘Violence, reconstruction and Islamic reform: stories from the Muslim
“ghetto”’, Modern Asian Studies, vol. 42, no. 431–56, 2008; Seabrook and Siddiqui,
People without History; L. Waquant, Urban Outcasts: A Comparative Sociology of Advanced
Marginality, Polity, Cambridge/Malden, MA, 2008.
1612 TARINI BEDI
the West and therefore far from universal.28 These approaches reject
seeing labour dynamics in South Asia and other parts of the South
through the lens of ‘lack’29 when compared to those that prevail under
‘advanced’ Western capitalism. There is consensus that processes
of industrialization in South Asia were predicated on historical and
empirical realities distinct from those in the West.30 Much of this
scholarship also argues that using the organized sector and proletarian
labour as yardsticks for modern labour relations or as sites for the
study of capitalism and labour identities has limited analytical utility
outside the West.31
A related challenge from South Asian labour scholarship and
pertinent here is the critique that an explicit focus on the wage worker
in industrial and organized sectors fails to capture the working lives of
most workers in the subcontinent. Undoubtedly, in South Asian labour
studies, there is rich scholarship on factory and industrial workers.32
These studies made significant contributions to knowledge about this
sector of the labour force. In the case of Bombay, industrial labour is
well studied, since the textile industry was vital to the city’s growth
from a swampy, colonial outpost for the British East India Company to
the chief international port in Western India.33 However, this does not
encompass the range of labour experience. In South Asia, historically,
28
D. Chakrabarty, Rethinking Working-Class History: Bengal, 1890–1940, Princeton
University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1989; P. Robb (ed.), Dalit Movements and the Meaning
of Labour in India, Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1993; van Schendel, ‘Stretching
labour historiography’.
29
S. Sen, ‘Beyond the working class: women’s role in Indian industrialisation’, South
Asia Research, vol. 22, 1999.
30
Belluci et al., ‘Introduction’; A. de Haan, ‘Towards a “total history” of Bengal
labour’, in Bengal: Rethinking History: Essays in Historiography, S. Bandyopadhyay (ed.),
Manohar, New Delhi, 2001; 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; R. Chandavarkar, ‘“The making of
the working class”: E.P. Thompson and Indian history’, History Workshop Journal, vol.
43, 1997; S. Chari, Fraternal Capital: Peasant Workers, Self-Made Men, and Globalization in
Provincial India, Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA, 2004; D. D’Monte, Ripping
the Fabric: The Decline of Mumbai and Its Mills, 2nd edn, Oxford University Press, New
Delhi, 2005 [2002]; Haynes, ‘Just like a family?’.
33
M. Van de Bogaert, Trade Unionism in Indian Ports: A Case Study at Calcutta and
Bombay, Shri Ram Center for Industrial Relations, New Delhi, 1970; R. Chandavarkar,
The Origins of Industrial Capitalism in India: Business Strategies and the Working Classes in
Bombay 1900–1940, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1994; D’Monte, Ripping
the Fabric; S. Dwivedi and R. Mehrotra, Bombay: The Cities Within, India Book House,
Bombay, 1995; S. M. Edwardes, ‘The gazateer of Bombay city and island’, Times of
India Press, 1909; M. Kosambi, Bombay in Transition: The Growth and Social Ecology of a
wage workers in the organized sector formed at best only about a tenth
of the working population, even in the most heavily industrialized
regions, and even less in others.34 Increasingly, these critiques urged
the study of labour and work to move beyond studies of factory labour.
In response, scholarship on labour and work in South Asia stepped
out of the factory to illustrate the variety of working lives and
precarities and potentialities of this labour.35 This has given rise to rich
scholarship on particular groups of workers, such as hawkers, artisans,
construction workers, sweepers, low-level company employees, retail
workers, and, more recently, workers in hi-tech and call-centre
industries.36 Further, an emergent focus on transport workers as a
particular labour category is useful in expanding historical, empirical,
and theoretical understandings of work in the non-factory sectors.37
Given that chillia drivers occupy a vital role in the city’s labour
economy outside the factory and have been important actors in shaping
Bombay’s modern mobility through hereditary involvement in the
transport trade, this research is in conversation with these broader
debates on non-factory and transport labour practices.
Further, modernist scholarship on industrial labour in the
Western world conventionally focused on teleological registers of
proletarianization.38 Ties of community, religion, and region were
Colonial City, Almqvist & Wiksell International, Stockholm, 1986; H. van Wersch, The
Bombay Textile Strike, 1982–1983, Oxford University Press, Bombay, 1992.
34
de Haan, ‘Towards a “total history”’; van Schendel, ‘Stretching labour
historiography’.
35
N. Gooptu, 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, 2001.
36
A. Aneesh, ‘Negotiating globalization: men and women of India’s call centers’,
Journal of Social Issues, vol. 68, no. 3, 2012; J. S. Anjaria, ‘Street hawkers and public space
in Mumbai’, Economic & Political Weekly, vol. 41, no. 21, 2006; N. Gooptu, ‘Neoliberal
subjectivity, enterprise culture and new workplaces: organised retail and shopping
malls in India’, Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 44, no. 22, 2009; Gooptu, The Politics
of the Urban Poor, p. 8; A. Sanchez, ‘Deadwood and paternalism: rationalizing casual
labour in an Indian company town’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, vol. 18,
2012.
37
L. Bear, Navigating Austerity: Currents of Debt Along a South Asian River, Stanford
University Press, Stanford, CA, 2015; Davies et al., Dock-Workers; M. D. Pante,
‘Rickshaws and Filipinos: transnational meanings of technology and labor in American
occupied Manila’, International Review of Social History, vol. 59, 2014; N. Sinha,
‘Contract, work, and resistance: boatment in early colonial Eastern India, 1760s–
1850s’, International Review of Social History, vol. 59, no. S22, 2014.
38
S. Amin and M. van der Linden (eds), Peripheral Labour: Studies in the History of
Partial Proletarianization, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1997.
1614 TARINI BEDI
assumed transitional in workers lives and signs of an ‘incomplete’

modernity. There was little effort to understand implications of
community ties in the lives of workers or how these ties expanded
markets, profits, and production.39 Chakrabarty’s40 influential work
on jute workers in Calcutta went a long way in expanding approaches
to labour subjectivities in South Asia through this ‘cultural turn’
in labour studies.41 Chakrabarty argues that a situated history of
non-Western labour is only possible if we look at labour not as a
universal analytical concept, but rather as a ‘set of activities embedded
in particular histories, in particular practices of embodiment’.42 He
also argues that cultural and social affinities are intensified rather
than weakened in contexts of urban migration and incorporation
into capitalist labour markets. This made scholarship attentive to
fragmentations of labour experiences based on differential attributes
such as gender, age, community, linguistic affiliations, and skill
within the labour economy.43 This scholarship illuminates how social,
cultural, and economic lives in South Asia are articulated through
kinship, ethnicity, religious, linguistic, and regional identifications
and how these in turn operate as resources for profits, claim-making,
and social control.44 However, while scholars agree that communal
affinities are vital in development of labour subjectivities in South
Asia, they also argue that cultural affinities are neither fixed nor
unproblematic categories. In fact, they are continuously reworked in
the context of urban migrations and through the practices of labour.45
The formation of chillia subjectivities in Bombay resonates with these
debates.
39
C. Joshi, ‘Histories of Indian labour: predicaments and possibilities’, History
Compass, vol. 6, no. 2, 2008.
40
Chakrabarty, Rethinking Working-Class History.
41
Joshi, ‘Histories of Indian labour’.
42
Chakrabarty, Rethinking Working-Class History.
43
K. Basu, ‘International labour standards and child labour’, in Child Labour and
the Rights to Education in South Asia: Needs vs. Rights?, N. Kabeer, G. Nambissan, and
R. Subrahmanian (eds), Sage, New Delhi, 2003; I. Baud, ‘Industrial subcontracting:
the effects of putting-out system on poor working women in India’, in Invisible Hands:
Women in Home-Based Production, A. M. Singh and A. Kelles-Viitanen (eds), Sage, New
Delhi, 1987; R. Hensman, Workers, Unions and Global Capitalism: Lessons from India,
Columbia University Press, New York, NY, 2011.
44
Chari, Fraternal Capital; Haynes, ‘Just like a family?’.
45
Chandavarkar, The Origins; R. Chandavarkar, History, Culture and the Indian City,
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2009; Gooptu, The Politics of the Urban Poor,
p. 8; Joshi, ‘Histories of Indian labour’.
Moreover, the rich attention to the varied textures of work and
working lives in the non-West also critiques the analytical binary
between formality and informality. It argues that, in contemporary
contexts of work, particularly under conditions of neoliberal
capitalism, the boundaries between what is experienced as formal
or informal work are bewilderingly porous.46 The work of motoring
in Mumbai’s taxi trade is experienced through what drivers refer
to as webs.47 Different positions inside and outside these webs
produce different forms of labour subjectivity. Therefore, if taxi
driving is otherwise considered work in the ‘informal’ sector, it has
not historically been experienced as such by chillia drivers. Instead,
precarity, otherwise associated with informal work, is exacerbated
for chillia drivers, as the trade is ‘formalized’. Certainly, recent
modernization of the trade mandating that drivers give up the owner-
operated trade to join corporate fleet companies is perceived as the
move to deskill, shift power from the driver to the company, and
to disrupt webs that have sustained the trade for over a century.
Therefore, one might caution against classifying taxi driving as
always and everywhere an alienated, transitional, precarious, or
‘informal’ profession. Distinctions between formal or informal are
largely incapable of capturing the various practices, articulations of
sociality, and the parallel forms of authority such as kinship, ethnicity,
and reciprocity that inflect the ways that working lives are experienced
in most parts of the world.48
When it comes to transport workers, a systematic study of labour
in the transport trades both illuminates and unsettles many of the
key issues raised in the broader labour scholarship. It is a particularly
useful site at which to investigate the trajectories and frictions of
capitalism as they are experienced by labour. It does so by moving
beyond a focus on work broadly classified as labour in the ‘spheres of
production’ to incorporate systematic studies on labour that operates
in the ‘sphere of circulation’. More precisely, this refers to those
46
Sanchez, ‘Deadwood and paternalism’; A. Sanchez, ‘Questioning success:
dispossession and the criminal entrepreneur in urban India’, Critique of Anthropology,
vol. 32, no. 4, 2012.
47
T. Bedi, ‘Taxi-drivers, infrastructures, and urban change in globalizing Mumbai’,
City and Society, vol. 28, no. 3, 2016.
48
Chari, Fraternal Capital; G. De Neve, ‘“We are all sondukar (relatives)!”: kinship
and its morality in an urban industy of Tamilnadu, South India’, Modern Asian Studies,
vol. 42, no. 1, 2008; G. De Neve, The Everyday Politics of Labour: Working Lives in India’s
Informal Economy, Social Science Press, Delhi, 2005.
1616 TARINI BEDI
involved in the work of moving people and commodities around.49

This resonates with scholarship that argues that transport labour and
its connection to circulation of goods, commodities, and people must
be seen as part of the processes of globalization, imperial expansion,
and the emergence and expansion of global capitalism.50
Further, at various historical moments, transport labour has
had different relationships with capital than industrial or
agricultural labour, since their common position as small-scale
entrepreneurs and their mobility gave them greater autonomy
and manoeuvrability.51 In early post-colonial Bombay, taxi drivers
were very significant constituents in buttressing India’s burgeoning
automobile manufacturing industry and were therefore important
to the city’s technological and manufacturing history.52 Admittedly,
mobilization of transport labour in colonial and post-colonial Bombay
was often intertwined with labour movements in the industrial sector
with overlap between leaders of industrial unions and those of
transport unions. However, at the same time, the taxi trade, based
on a structure of common ownership by particular ethnic groups and
with access to cooperative credit and owner-operated associations,
successfully resisted the shifts in resource allocation that affected the
broader dispossession of industrial labour.
The specificity of the position of transport workers is also illuminated
by their capacity to both negotiate and reject new technologies
when these technologies wrought changes to their work that were
unacceptable to them.53 Chillia see themselves as some of the
most technologically adaptable communities in the city’s transport
industry. However, the relationship between drivers and these shifts
in technology have always been contradictory. Technology is laden
with symbolic meanings.54 For taxi drivers, both defence of and
non-consent to particular forms of technological change have shaped
the direction of the industry and the working lives of taxi drivers.
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
D. Arnold and E. Dewald, ‘Cycles of empowerment? The bicycle and everyday
technology in colonial India and Vietnam’, Comparative Studies in Society and History,
vol. 53, no. 4, 2011; D. Bissell, ‘Passenger mobilities, affective atmospheres and the
sociality of public transport’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, vol. 28,
no. 2, 2010; Pante, ‘Rickshaws and Filipinos’.
For chillia drivers, the communal practices of repair and mechanics
organized around kin and ethnic networks played a significant role
in shaping the technology of the car. It gave drivers control over how
and when technological upgrades were made. Often, these upgrades
were made against government mandates. Newer cars, dependent on
computerization and specialized repair, signified disruption of this
autonomy and control over the automobile’s technology.
Further, as emerging scholarship on transport labour outside the
Western world has observed, the self-employed structure of labour that
characterizes labour formations of transport labour has constituted
notions of autonomy, dignity, and respectability that have been
important to the formations of class and collective identities.55 The
linguistic registers applied by chillia drivers to place themselves within
prevailing discursive frames of autonomy and slavery (ghulami) are
particularly illuminating here.
When it comes to taxi drivers in particular, rich attention has
been paid by both social scientists and humanists to the place of
taxis in urban history and to connections between taxis and political,
material, social, and cultural change.56 Scholarship on taxis and
taxi drivers in major Western cities illustrates how state regulation,
innovations to the vehicle, and drivers’ enterprise and activism have
intersected with technological progress,57 proliferation of capitalist
logics,58 production of new forms of sociality,59 and demands for
recognition as a public service.60 In South and Southeast Asia,
scholarship on transportation operators provides useful insights into
connections between interlinked practices of mobility such as labour
migrations and driving, and between transport operations and labour
informality.61 More recently, ethnographies of taxis and taxi drivers in
55
Belluci et al., ‘Introduction’; Hart, ‘Motor transportation’.
56
J. Cooper, R. Mundy, and J. Nelson, Taxi! Urban Economies and the Social and Transport
Impacts of the Taxicab, Ashgate Publishing, Farnham, 2010; G. R. G. Hodges, Taxi! A
Social History of the New York City Cabdriver, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore,
2007; B. Mathew, Taxi! Cabs and Capitalism in New York City, New Press, New York,
2005.
57
G. Mom, ‘Costs, technology and culture: propelling the early taxicab 1900–25’,
Journal of Transport History, vol. 24, no. 2, 2003.
58
Mathew, Taxi!.
59
Hodges, Taxi!.
60
G. Gilbert and R. F. Samuels, Taxicab: A Urban Transporation Survivor, University
of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, NC, 1982.
61
Belluci et al., ‘Introduction’; R. Cervero and A. Golub, ‘Informal transport: a
global perspective’, Transport Policy, vol. 14, no. 6, 2007; M. Hickey, ‘“Itsara” (freedom)
1618 TARINI BEDI
non-Western cities have added a great deal to this literature. This work
points to the importance of taxis in producing and reinforcing political,
public, aesthetic, and intimate forms of interaction in contexts of
political and social upheaval.62
Together, both historical and ethnographic scholarship recognizes
that transport workers are integral to urban mobility.63 Unlike other
workers, they are always in contact with other people and with the
city. This gives them the capacity to stop and slow down circulation
and to influence public opinion, to block important arteries, and to
produce conflict in urban spaces.64 This has often made transport
workers at times more vulnerable to state force and, at others, better
positioned to negotiate and often directly combat the faces of the state
such as the police and transport authorities. There is clear evidence
that Bombay’s taxi drivers throughout the twentieth and twenty-
first centuries have frequently used strategies of taxi strikes, refusal
of fares, and other forms of insubordination to protest government
policies and passenger complaints, often resulting in catastrophic
effects on commuters and trade in the city. These capacities were
enabled through the consolidation of particular ethnic, religious, and
spatial resources that have in turn provided chillia with capacities for
action and shaping of the trade.
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, 2013; R. Textor, 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, 1961.
62
Hickey, ‘“Itsara” (freedom) to work?’; A. de Koning, ‘Gender, public space and
social segregation in Cairo: of taxi drivers, prostitutes and professional women’,
Antipode, vol. 41, no. 3, 2009; B. E. Notar, ‘“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, 2012; A. Sanina, ‘The marshrutka as a socio-cultural
phenomenon of a Russian mega-city’, City, Culture,and Society, vol. 2, 2011; C.
Sopranzetti, ‘Owners of the map: mobility and mobilization among motorcycle taxi
drivers in Bangkok’, City and Society, vol. 26, no. 1, 2014.
63
P. Adey, D. Bissell, K. Hannam, P. Merriman, and M. Sheller (eds), The Routledge
Handbook of Mobilities, Routeledge, London/New York, 2014; Bissell, ‘Passenger
mobilities’.
64
Sopranzetti, ‘Owners of the map’.
Motoring, migration, and working-class identifications:
emergence of the category of ‘chillia’
Chillia identify as Sunni Muslims of the Momin caste.65 In Gujarat,

the bulk of Momins are found in Banaskantha district, in and around
the area of Palanpur, which was a former princely state of India.
By 1800, the importation of horses from the Persian Gulf became a
significant part of the maritime trade in Western India. Prominent
families, particularly princely families, kept stables as marks of their
cosmopolitanism and upper-class status.66 The stables were important
places of employment for Muslim labour otherwise employed in
marginal farming and petty trades. Many of those employed in the
stables took their knowledge of horses with them and followed other
family members into Bombay’s transport trade as drivers of horse-
drawn Victoria taxis. By around 1911, Victoria taxis began to share
the road with motorized taxis. Finally, Victorias disappeared and many
Palanpuri carriage drivers moved to the motorized taxi trade together.
The needs of the trade in colonial Bombay manifested themselves
spatially. Palanpuri drivers settled residentially in and around spaces
where they could park their Victorias and harness horses. Most lived
in and around South and Central Bombay in areas that provided
stables and water spots for their horses.67 Close spatial arrangement
where families and extended family migrated to drive horse-drawn
taxis made it desirable for men to migrate with their families.
Women and children were surrounded by extended kin and remained
integrated within networks of support and piety that carried over into
Bombay. Care and grooming of horses required several members of
the community. Drivers benefitted from assistance of close relatives
with these duties. When drivers moved to motorized cars, many
families responsible for servicing carriages and grooming horses
started small spare-parts businesses, tyre, and mechanic shops. The
social, economic, and cultural dependence on others from the same
community meant that residential communities made up entirely of
taxi labour emerged. These close spatial arrangements have persisted
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
M. Mohiuddin, Muslim Communities in Medieval Konkan (610–1900 A.D.), Sundeep
Prakashan, New Delhi, 2002.
67
Dwivedi and Mehrotra, Bombay.
1620 TARINI BEDI
throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Pathanwadi,

where I conducted my ethnographic research, is one such community.
Scholars argue that the city has a particularly strong hold
over the imagination of Indian Muslims and that the city and
urban life have historically been vital in producing new forms
of Muslim subjectivities.68 Nile Green69 illustrates that, by the
nineteenth century, Bombay was a bewilderingly rich mosaic of
Muslim communities who travelled from around the world and became
consumers in what Green calls a religious economy. Consumption in this
religious economy intersected with the rise of new Muslim working
classes and customary community boundaries. These were constituted
through diverse, localized consumption in a vast religious market that
influenced the spatial topography of the city through shrines and
religious festivals anchored in particular neighbourhoods.70 While
the later twentieth century presents different historical dynamics
within and among Muslim labouring communities, Green’s analytical
focus on cultural foundations of the labour economy among Bombay’s
Muslim communities is useful in understanding how Palanpuri
Momins came to and persisted in the taxi trade.
Momin broadly translates to mean ‘true believer’. During early
decades of the twentieth century, Muslim weavers and other similar
occupational groups in several parts of India mobilized politically
against higher-status Muslim elite under a single community that
called themselves Momins.71 For Palanpuri Momins in colonial
Bombay, this low-status position—what they see as a ‘caste’—
intersected with circumscribed possibilities of labour and work
in the city. Undoubtedly, the question of ‘caste’ among Indian
Muslims is complicated. While caste among Hindus has been studied
widely,72 systems of social stratification among South Asian Muslims
68
Gayer and Jaffrelot, ‘Introduction’; A. Jalal, Self and Sovereignty: Individual and
Community in South Asia Islam since 1850, Routledge, New York, 2000.
69
N. Green, Bombay Islam: The Religious Economy of the West Indian Ocean 1840–1915,
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2011.
70
Ibid.
71
P. Ghosh, Community and Nation: Essays on Identity and Politics in Eastern India, Oxford
University Press, New York, 2008; Haynes, ‘Just like a family?’; D. Haynes and T. Roy,
‘Conceiving mobility: weavers’ migrations in pre-colonial and colonial India’, Indian
Economic and Social History Review, vol. 36, no. 1, 1999; G. Pandey, The Construction of
Communalism in Colonial North India, Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1990.
72
A. Beteille, ‘Caste in contemporary India’, in Caste Today, C. J. Fuller (ed.), Oxford
University Press, Delhi, 1997.
have received less systematic attention.73 The most well-studied
aspect of social hierarchies among Muslims is the division between
Ashraf (high-status immigrant ruling classes) and Ajlaf (low-status
converts from mostly artisanal and trade backgrounds).74 While these
broad categories are important, Ahmad75 argues that systematic
understanding of how social hierarchies inflect Muslim social life is
only possible if we look at social worlds within which real Muslim
groups operate in local situations. Ahmad and others argue that
caste among Indian Muslims is broadly articulated through linguistic,
regional, ethnic, and class registers.76 The emergence of chillia as caste
identification for Palanpuri-Momin, Gujarati-speaking taxi drivers
seemed to operate in this way. For example, I found it particularly
telling that, when I set out to visit the Palanpur region where most of
my informants still have strong family roots, I was instructed not to
refer to the term ‘chillia’: ‘No one in Palanpur will know what you are
talking about; at home we are Momin, in Bambai we are chillia.’
I came to recognize that Palanpuri Momins who migrate elsewhere
are not known as chillia—it is only Bombay migrants who are. As
Palanpuri Momins migrated into Bombay in the early twentieth
century in search of employment, they used ethnic and kin networks
to monopolize three important trades in the city. In the words of
Yusuf, a veteran driver: ‘For chillia in Bambai, you can say our dhandha
(business) is H-M-T. Hotel-Motor-Tabela. H-M-T.’
The term ‘hotel’ in the Indian context refers to an eatery rather than
a boarding place. Many chillia men run and work in small eateries
that cater to working-class neighbourhoods. These restaurants and
the community who run them have become so closely identified with
each other that the restaurants themselves are also referred to by
patrons as chillia.77 Motor refers to the trade of taxi driving and
73
I. Ahmad (ed.), Caste and Social Stratification among the Muslims, Manohar Book
Service, Delhi, 1973; S. Ali, ‘Collective and elective ethnicity: caste among urban
Muslims in India’, Sociological Forum, vol. 17, no. 4, 2002.
74
G. Sabharwal, Ethnicity and Class: Social Divisions in an Indian City, Oxford, New
Delhi, 2006.
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, N. Ezekiel, ‘Irani restaurant instructions’, Journal of South Asian
Literature, vol. 11, no. 3/4, 1976; P. Lutgendorf, ‘Making tea in India: Chai, capitalism
1622 TARINI BEDI
auxiliary functions. Tabela is the horse-and-stable industry—more

recently, cow and buffalo stables of Mumbai’s dairy industry. From
these narratives, it appears that only Palanpuri Momins associated
with the taxi, restaurant, and stable trade may claim chillia caste
identification. This shared identification became important to gaining
entry into the trades. It set boundaries for entry. It operated as a form
of social control over those already in the trade. The historical point
at which chillia became a term of self-identification for Palanpuri taxi
drivers in Bombay is unclear; based on narratives of taxi drivers today,
it was tied to interactions Palanpuris had during the course of plying
their trade. Taxi driver Ismail offered his understanding:
In my great-grandfather’s time we chillia all drove horse buggies. During that
time, most of the buggy drivers were from our caste from Gujarat. We only
spoke in Gujarati and Gujarati has a lot of cha, cha, chi, chi in the language so
people just started to call us ‘cha, cha chillia.’ And that name has stuck.78
Yasser, Ismail’s brother-in-law, explained the genealogy of the identity
chillia somewhat differently:
The family name of people of our caste was ‘Shailiya.’ But during the British
period, there were many Parsis in Bombay who used buggies and cars driven
by the Shailiya. Mispronunciation of Parsis79 created the bastardization of
the surname and it became ‘Chiliya.’80
Another driver, Abdul, repeated the story of mispronunciation of
the family name, though, in his story, it was the British who
mispronounced the name, not Parsis. Collectively, most of these
narratives point to chillia and its associated identities as a product of
the later colonial period in urban Bombay. It is closely intertwined with
how Palanpuri Momins were urbanized through their participation
in Bombay’s labour force and with their interactions with colonial
and culture’, Thesis Eleven, vol. 113, no. 1, 2012; 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 K. Ganesh, ‘Intra-community dissent
and dialogue: the Bombay Parsis and the Zoroastrian Diaspora’, Sociological Bulletin,
vol. 57, no. 3, 2008; T. M. Lurhmann, The Good Parsi: The Fate of a Colonial Elite in a
Postcolonial Society, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1996.
80
Interview with author, Mumbai, August 2010.
Bombay’s urban elite. The identification has stuck and been co-opted
as a term of urban identity and as a way of calling on different kinds of
resources in the city than were needed in Palanpur. Chillia is therefore
a colonial formation perpetuated in the post-colonial period as ‘caste’
identification. This has produced a sense of genealogical connections
with the taxi trade. Articulated first as a labour identity, it then
began to encompass other forms of moral and cultural difference and
distance from other workers and other urban communities.
Particularly, identification as chillia was important to how chillia
differentiated themselves from other Bombay Muslims, particularly
other working-class Muslims, even other Momins from weaver or julaha
castes.81 In the context of twentieth-century Western India, A. R.
Momin82 argued that the two main ethnic divisions among Muslims
was between Kokani Muslims, who are descendants of early Arab (and
Persian) migrants and merchants along the Western coast, and Momin
Muslims from the weaver or julaha castes. As the economic influence of
Kokani Muslims grew through the Western coast of India, they used
to claim a higher social status because of their direct lineage with
Arabs. While Kokani Muslims were endogenous, they were socially
ranked according to occupation. In Western India, Momins of the
weaver castes were integral to the textile industry in eighteenth-
century Surat. They provided significant piece goods for the British and
Dutch East India companies and for local merchants who distributed
commodities for local consumption.83 It seems plausible that many
Gujarati Momins who identify as chillia in Bombay trace their
heritage back to these weaving professions in eighteenth-century
Gujarat. However, both their work and the terms used for their caste
identifications shifted by the twentieth century based on political and
social movements among non-elite Muslim groups in other parts of
India,84 as well as on migration out of Gujarat into the city of Bombay.
Arguably, for Palanpuri Momins, different kinds of work produced
different needs for resources and customary differentiation from other
working-class, Julaha castes. Green’s use of E. P. Thompson’s notion
of ‘custom’ operationalizes useful ways to think about the nexus
81
Haynes and Roy, ‘Conceiving mobility’; Pandey, The Construction.
82
Momin, ‘Muslim castes’.
83
G. A. Nadri, Eighteenth Century Gujarat and the Dynamics of Its Political Economy,
1750–1800, Brill, Leiden/Boston, 2009.
84
P. Ghosh, Muhajirs and the Nation: Bihar in the 1940s, Routledge, New Delhi, 2010.
1624 TARINI BEDI
between caste, class, and community.85 Rather than static entities,

customary idioms of labour articulated through caste provided a
‘diverse pool of resources’ that could be called on when needed. In this
sense, caste identifications operated as social, cultural, and political
connections in the labour market. Connections that provided the most
resources emerged most prominent and, when no longer useful, these
identifications either shifted or were replaced. Therefore, Ali86 argues
that caste among Indian Muslims is a related set of elective rather than
imperative resources that undergird economic and social relationships.
Differences in the labour market for Palanpuri Momins also made
chillia experience of the city distinct from that of other, Gujarati
Muslim communities (who now identify as Shia) such as Bohras, Khojas,
and Memons.87 These well-known trading groups began migrating into
Bombay in the nineteenth century from Kathiawad, Cutch, and Sind
regions of Gujarat.88 Their powerful and visible position in Bombay’s
capitalist development is significant. However, it makes invisible the
experience of other Gujarati Muslims who migrated into the city
as labour but who were nonetheless significant actors in the city’s
economy.
Further, identification as chillia was also a discursive strategy of
distancing from other taxi-driving communities who also organized
their working lives around ethnic and religious connections.
For example, by the early post-colonial period, three minority
communities dominated Bombay’s taxi trade: Palanpuri Momins,
Konkani Christians from Mangalore, and the Sikhs. By the 1960s, most
Sikh drivers moved into heavy motoring such as truck driving. Due to
different structures of migration and significantly higher literacy than
others in the taxi trade, Mangaloreans gave up on motoring and moved
into white-collar occupations. However, Mangaloreans continued to
be associated with the labour movement in the city and with the
organization of taxi labour. The primary association responsible for
negotiations on behalf of taxi drivers, the Mumbai Taximen’s Union,
was founded in 1962 by prominent Bombay trade Unionist, George
Fernandes, who is a Christian from Mangalore. Almost all the top
85
Green, Bombay Islam; E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class,
Vintage, New York, 1963.
86
Ali, ‘Collective and elective ethnicity’.
87
A. A. Engineer, The Bohras, Vikas Publishing House, New Delhi, 1993; 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.
leadership of the biggest taxi union in the city, the Mumbai Taximen’s
Union, continue to be Mangalorean Christians.
Since Mangaloreans are not drivers anymore but still hold a
prominent place as representative voices of the taxi trade, this makes
for suspicion on the part of chillia. It has intensified local, ethnic
alliances in chillia neighbourhoods and these alliances are often at
odds with actions of union and labour leaders. After a particularly
fruitless day at the union’s offices, driver Yusuf angrily said:
That [union president] is eating out of the same thali (plate) as the
government, as Meru89 and all the others. He is not working for us. He mixes
his food with theirs and gets lots to eat as a result. I have been part of the
Union since 1980. What has the union done for me? One day our leader says
this, the next day he says that. He is not interested in anything but money.
The most prominent tension between chillia drivers and the union
in the contemporary context is that the union seems to be agreeing
to the government’s demand that all drivers who want to remain in
the trade must buy new cars. The chillia suggest that this bargain
represents the union’s collusion with the state and against interests
of observant Muslims who cannot take loans for the purchase of new
cars as easily as others can without violating the Islamic rules again
riba or interest.90 As Yusuf says:
Dealing with any kind of interest payment is against our religion. If the
government asks for new cars, what they are really doing is pushing Muslims
like me out of the trade. Who will hear from us? Who will speak for us?
Chillia have to stick together against this injustice or we have to get out of
the business.
Arguably, Yusuf voices an important debate swirling around taxi

stands in this community. On one hand, this could be seen as a
debate amongst pious Muslims on how to make empowering choices
for themselves in the project of globalization and on how to remain
significant urban actors on their own terms.91 However, on the other
hand, it is also important to see these oppositional claims expressed
through religious rules and cooperative economic practices in broader
economic terms. In this sense, opposition is a broader strategy of
89
Fleet-taxi company.
90
T. Kuran, ‘The genesis of Islamic economics: a chapter in the politics of Muslim
identity’, Social Research, vol. 64, no. 2, 1997; Y. O. Lawal, ‘Islamic economics: the
cornerstone of Islamic banking’, Journal of Economics and Engineering, vol. 4, 2010.
91
Kuran, ‘The genesis’.
1626 TARINI BEDI
inhabiting entrenched practices of work by insisting on spreading the

measures of financial risk across the community. This allows everyone
in the community greater capacity to reposition themselves in relation
to future economic opportunities and other economic actors. These are
what Simone92 calls ‘manoeuvres’—actions by people in difficult urban
environments across the world to steer economic transactions into
opportunities for inclusion in other future but undefined opportunities
that are assumed to be better than what is offered in the present.
Capacity to ‘manoeuvre’ has been vital to why chillia continue to drive
on their own terms today.
Finally, customary ethnic boundaries are connected to subjectivities
produced out of a sense of enduring connections to urban mobility
and early automobility93 in the city. For most chillia, this connection
is an important part of the community’s place in Bombay’s urban
modernity. In the early days of taxi motorization, several models
of British and American cars entered the taxi market. Chillia
drivers frequently narrated family histories of motoring through the
materialities of these different models of cars. In 1956, the Indian
company, Premier Auto, tied up with Italian car maker Fiat to
manufacture the Fiat 1100 Millicento out of a suburban Bombay
plant. This was one of the first models of cars to be mass produced
in India. It was marketed as a luxury car. By the 1970s, Premier
automobiles started producing the Indian brand, Premier Padmini. Many
drivers remember that production was heavily regulated; they had to
get on waitlists to get one. This amplified its aspirational aspects.
Successful purchase of the Padmini consolidated drivers’ standing in
the community. Chillia drivers purchased Padminis either through
pooling resources of extended families or through special loans from
the Bombay Mercantile Bank—a Muslim-owned cooperative bank that
provided loans with no interest. This model of car has become the
iconic kaalipeeli that many chillia still drive. For chillia drivers, history
of its acquisition, the acceptance in the community that the purchase
conformed to Islamic rules against interest, and embeddedness of
this car in daily lives inflect their experiences as urban transporters.
Padminis were manufactured until the plant closed in 2000. By 2006,
92
A. M. Simone, ‘Relational infrastructures in postcolonial worlds’, in Infrastructural
Lives: Politics, Experience and the Urban Fabric, S. Graham and C. McFarlane (eds),
Routledge, London, 2014.
93
J. Beckmann, ‘Automobility: a social problem and theoretical concept’,
Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, vol. 19, 2001.
the city began its taxi-modernization project that mandated that
all Premier Padminis more than 20 years old must be retired. This
produced heated debates and organized efforts to stall this mandate
among chillia in Pathanwadi.
Chillia and contemporary taxi modernization
Until the late 1980s, India’s economy was a protected one. By the
mid-1980s, the Indian state began dismantling its socialist regime and
moved to a more capital-friendly form of government.94 This process
intensified by the end of the decade and, in 1991, India formally
adopted economic reforms known as liberalization. Liberalization
instigated monetary and industrial reforms that aimed to jumpstart
growth through foreign investment and opened consumer markets.95
Economic liberalization also reconfigured existing relationships
between capital, labour, and the state.96 Additionally, the Soviet
Union’s collapse led urban Indian elites to search for alternative
models of development.97 Urban planning was significantly impacted
by this shift. It spawned new urban-planning initiatives driven by
international consultants and global visions of ‘modern’ cities and
privileged stakeholders favouring neoliberal initiatives.98 Planning for
new modes of urban transport was vital here. Central to Mumbai’s
taxi-modernization project was the entrance of taxi fleets, where
drivers became employees of large companies rather than owner-
entrepreneurs like Bilal and Rahim had been for decades.
As part of taxi modernization, fleet taxis entered the market in the
mid-2000s.99 This was tied to other initiatives focused on visions for
94
W. Ahmed, ‘The political economy and geopolitical context of India’s econonomic
crisis, 1990–91’, Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography, vol. 35, no. 179–96, 2014.
95
S. Corbridge and J. Harriss, Reinventing India: Liberalization, Hindu Nationalism and
Popular Democracy, Polity Press, Cambridge/ Malden, MA, 2000; B. Harriss-White,
India Working: Essays on Society and Economy, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge,
2003.
96
P. Chatterjee, ‘Democracy and economic transformation in India’, Economic and
Political Weekly, vol. 43, no. 16, 2008; R. L. Varshney, ‘Government-business relations
in India’, Business History Review, vol. 38, no. 1, 1964.
97
Ahmed, ‘The political economy’, pp. 286–7.
98
Ibid.
99
N. Bhayana, ‘Changing Mumbai’s taxis, Singapore style’, Hindustan
Times, 15 December, 2007, http://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/the-
mumbai-project-changing-mumbai-s-taxis-singapore-style/article1-259219.aspx,
[accessed 28 March 2018].
1628 TARINI BEDI
Mumbai’s future and plans to make Bombay a ‘world-class’ city.100

The narrative was that Mumbai needed to be made anew and that
everything in it must look new in order for it to be truly transformed.
For kaalipeeli taxis, this meant continually shifting mandates on how
long an old kaalipeeli could be driven, the embargo on the issue of
new permits to individual drivers, and the insistence of control over
taxi drivers’ labour, appearance, and etiquette. Initially, the demand
was that taxis more than 15 years old must be retired. When drivers
protested, the Taximen’s Union lobbied to revise this edict to a 25-
year age limit. This remained the cut-off date until 2013, when the
age limit was lowered to 20 years.101
The modernization project had several parts: one was retirement
of older kaalipeelis; another was to mandate that drivers purchase new
cars to remain in the trade; if new cars could not be purchased, drivers
could sell their taxi permits to and seek employment with a fleet
company; another option was to sell permits to the state and leave
the trade. No new taxi permits were issued to individual drivers since
1997, when the State Transport Authority (STA) reached its limit of
63,000 taxi permits. By 2006, there were between 37,000 and 40,000
taxis on the road. Given this regulatory context, two inter-related
processes began. First, fleets entering the taxi market had to entice
independent drivers to join the fleet (with their permits) or they had
to entice drivers to sell them their permits so they could hire other
drivers. The STA, complicit in trying to regulate the market in favour
of fleets, continued the debate over new cars. Drivers with older cars,
who could not or did not want to purchase new cars, were encouraged
to sell their permits to the STA. By 2010, about 4,000 such permits
were acquired. This was when the practice of permit auctions began.
The general rule for auctions was that a minimum number of permits
(between 300 and 400) had to be purchased in blocks. Each permit was
priced at between 1.5 and 2.0 lakhs of rupees (approximately $2,500–
3,500 USD). This debarred anyone other than large investors to be
real contenders. Fleets with less capital opted out of auctions to pursue
individual drivers for permits and for labour. Richer fleets procured
permits, but they too needed drivers. Therefore, the regulatory context
significantly altered the contours of taxi driving in the city. However,
drivers continued to control how and when permits moved through
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.
the systems. The fact that drivers did not concede permits easily, held
out for the best price, refused fares at will, and went on strike when
their demands were unmet, literally bringing the city to a halt, made
them some of the most vilified workers in contemporary Mumbai.
This focus on new, modern cars was accompanied by other
disciplinary techniques focused broadly on ‘conduct’.102 The most
important were those associated with reforming the labouring body.
Fleet-taxi drivers had to wear standardized uniforms and learn English
to better serve the needs of passengers connected to the circuits of
global capitalism. They were also expected to become proficient with
the use of technologies most closely associated with modern mobility—
Global Positional Systems (GPS).103 The use of khaki uniforms for
taxi drivers had long been a way to distinguish owner-drivers (who
wore plain clothes) from lessee drivers (who wore uniforms). For most
of Bombay’s post-colonial period, taxi drivers associated uniforms as
marks of bondage to an employer and the white or plain clothes
with autonomy and a visible symbol of ownership of the means of
circulation. Therefore, the mandate for all drivers to wear uniforms
disrupted customary distinctions between owners and lessee drivers
and the embodied symbols associated with social mobility in the taxi
trade. The chillia, as owner-drivers, had always worn clothing that
marked them as chillia: distinctive, long white shirts, white pyjamas,
and a prayer cap or topi. Therefore, the requirement to discard these
markers of identity was seen as another form of control over chillia
identity.
Further, the commodification of taxi permits unleashed another
moral discourse. It created ambivalence amongst chillia, who saw
commodification in conflict with pious Sunni religious practices.
However, they also recognized that the permit was the main capital
that drivers hold. How they chose to use this capital was an important
form of non-consent to dominant notions of resource allocation. As
Rahim, another driver, indignantly said:
If I have to give up driving my taxi, I will tear up my permit and throw it away.
Why should I give it to anyone? See if I retire my taxi and give my permit to
102
M. Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, Palgrave Macmillan, New York, NY,
2007.
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.
1630 TARINI BEDI
the government, they will pay me two lac rupees for my permit and then sell
it to one of these private people for 10 lacs. Why should I do that? The permit
is our only bargaining chip right now; it is our only dhun [fortune]. They say
if we sell them our permits, we can come and drive their taxis. Do you really
think private companies are interested in drivers? They are only interested
in our permits, which are in short supply. If I sell my permit to the private
company, even if I drive his car, what do I have that is mine? He can get rid
of me whenever he wants, and he gets to keep my valuable permit. Am I mad
to become a ghulam [slave] of the private company after all these years?104
Indeed, the metaphor of ghulami (slavery) used by groups of transport

workers to denounce their working conditions has also been noted by
others.105 It arguably allows drivers to challenge the logics of discipline
that employers impose on them and, in the process, gain the support
of public opinion.106 However, this rejection of ghulami also provides
an insight into how chillia owner-drivers contrast their labouring
experiences to those who drive for fleet taxis as wage labour.107 It also
distinguishes chillia from others in the transport sector that depend
on commission-based businesses where drivers are collectively tied to
a local malik (boss) who pays them daily commissions in return for
driving one of his multiple cars. More recently, chillia also use the
metaphor of ghulami to distinguish themselves from those who drive
for platform-based taxi services such as the transnational Uber and
the local Indian company, Ola. Here, the scale of ghulami shifts from
one that is dependent on a concrete, emplaced, exploitative boss to
one that is at the mercy of abstract instantiations of global capital.108
Many among the consuming middle classes showed both
bewilderment and contempt at drivers’ non-compliance. I heard many
times: ‘If we want a modern city, we cannot have these dirty, old,
rickety cars on the road. New cars have GPS, they have everything you
need. Passengers are willing to pay, why is [the driver] not willing to
drive [the new cars]?’ This reflected the inherent tension between
many who saw their citizenship in the modern city through their
position vis-à-vis the technologies of modern capital and those who saw
104
Interview with author, Mumbai, July 2011.
105
P. C. Terra, ‘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, 2014.
106
Belluci et al., ‘Introduction’.
107
I. K. Mitra, R. Samaddar, and S. Sen (eds), Accumulation in Postcolonial Capitalism,
Springer, New York/Singapore, 2016; 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.
it through equally modern registers of skilled labour, mutuality, and
expert knowledge. The taxi was located within these two conflicting
social and spatial landscapes.
Spatialization and mutuality in the labour of motoring
Pathanwadi (place of the Pathans) is a dense residential space occupied

by a vast array of working-class Muslims from practically every part
of India. It encompasses a heterogeneous cluster of residential bastis.
Each cluster is identified by its own name. Boundaries are marked by
work and by linguistic and regional origins of residents. Within the
broader urban space is a settlement called Mehta Chawl that houses
only chillia who motor for a living.
Residential boundaries among Muslims in Bombay have a long
history. Muslim mohallas (quarters) with a quasi-physical isolation
and segregation based on ethnic and denominational differences have
been observed in Bombay since the eighteenth century.109 These
quarters, often named after distinguished families or by particular
ethnic identifications, enjoyed a shared organized religious and social
life as well as shared professional affiliations.110 These ethnically and
religiously identified spaces were a very basic form of Muslim social
organization in Bombay that invited both new migrants and older
urban settlers into these common residential spaces.111
Here in Pathanwadi, differentiation based on work and livelihood
created spatial enclaves that house only butchers, or only weavers, or
only taxi drivers. Residential settlement was implicated in complex
networks of dependence that undergird the everyday working lives
of residents. This residential arrangement was vital to inclusion and
exclusion regularly practised in contemporary Mumbai. For the chillia,
residence acted as both enablement in the taxi trade and social control.
For example, social connections and residential proximity restricted
the mobility of those embedded in the taxi trade. Chillia drivers, like
industrial and informal labour in colonial Mumbai,112 do not find it
easy to abandon the trade and move elsewhere. They also did not find
109
J. Masselos, ‘Power in the Bombay “Mohalla,” 1904–1915: an initial exploration
into the world of the Indian urban Muslim’, South Asia, vol. 6, 1976.
110
Green, Bombay Islam; Mohiuddin, Muslim Communities.
111
A. R. Momin, ‘Pluralism and multiculturalism: an Islamic perspective’, American
Journal of Islamic Social Sciences, vol. 18, no. 2, 2001.
112
Chandavarkar, The Origins, p. 171.
1632 TARINI BEDI
it easy to leave the kaalipeeli trade and join fleets, unless this move was
negotiated collectively. Drivers admitted that giving up the kaalipeeli
trade to join fleets would cause disruptions in the neighbourhood, since
they would no longer need the local auxiliary services nor would they
conform temporally to the rhythms or timings of work here.
Rafi was amongst the youngest drivers here. He leased a kaalipeeli
car from his second cousin’s husband in Pathanwadi. Rafi was to be
married in a few months to a distant relative from his village of
Badargarh. He had suffered harassment from police over his older
car and lost a lot of money in bribes. Saying he wanted to save enough
money to begin to support his new family, Rafi took permission from
his leaser to work with a fleet. A month later, Rafi was tired of taking
his car back to the fleet’s mechanic 25 kilometres away for small
repairs. Further, since he had to drive 11 hours a day in order to make
enough to pay off the higher cost of the car lease, he had missed all
the special taalim (educational) programmes at the mosque. He has
also missed preparations surrounding the all-night celebration in the
eighth month of the Islamic calendar, known here as badi raat (night of
deliverance). He no longer felt like a khandaani chillia (of the family).
Two and a half months later, Rafi gave up on the fleet and went back
to driving a kaalipeeli. He said he preferred to wait with other chillia
drivers as they navigated the most appropriate moves collectively:
If chillia drivers have to give up their kaalipeelis then we will have a meeting
of the chillia community to get agreement, to negotiate, and get the details
on the company [fleet company] that we will all support. We will not do this
alone, but collectively because that is what has kept the chillia taxi-trade fair
in the past and will in the future.113
If Rafi found it difficult to leave, other non-chillia labour in Pathanwadi

find it difficult to enter the trade here. Non-chillia Muslim migrants
mostly from the states of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar who also live in
Pathanwadi engage in more casual forms of labour. Devoid of the
long-standing webs that chillia have, they are even more precariously
positioned within the labour economy. The chillia refer to these
Muslim migrants pejoratively as mian-log (Muslim people). For chillia,
this term is applied to Muslims whom they see as less pious, rural,
or peasant-like and less urbane. While Pathanwadi has a large
mosque where different communities worship together on important
religious festivals, Mehta Chawl has its own small mosque funded
113
Interview with author, Mumbai, July 2011.
by chillia families, where the daily prayers and everyday worship
take place. Chillia see this separate space as closely connected to
a shared piety, but also to shared labour and as a space where they
separate themselves from the ‘mian-log’ Muslims whom they see as
less committed to the mosque and to the city.
On a rainy afternoon in August 2010, the azaan (Muslim call to
prayer) reverberated from a loudspeaker on the roof of the badi-masjid
(big mosque)—Allah hu Akbar (God is great). The din of bargaining
vegetable vendors in the bustling market around the mosque, horns
from passing auto-rickshaws, and screeching of chickens on the
slaughter block at the butcher shop were drowned out for a few short
minutes. Everyone was preparing for the evening meal to break the
fast on the fifteenth day of the month of Ramzaan. It was also the
fifteenth day of the taxi strike during which most chillia drivers had
kept off the roads. They were protesting the most recent mandate
that kaalipeelis more than 15 years old be retired. Ability to create
shortage by taking taxis off the road for several days has a longer
history in the city going back to the early 1920s. It is a history that
most chillia drivers in Pathanwadi are well aware of. These histories
have circulated and percolated as family narratives and through kin
networks of the taxi trade in this taxi-driving community for many
generations.
The leaders and advisers to chillia drivers in Pathanwadi, the veteran
taxi drivers Habib and Bilal sat despondently on the hoods of their
taxis.
‘Bilal bhai [brother], Habib bhai, how many more days of taxi bandh
[stoppage],’ asked one of the shopkeepers who sold straw mats outside
the mosque. ‘How are your families managing during Ramzaan?’ Bilal
shouted across:
It is not just us, it is everyone who is our chillia dhandha [trade]. There are so
many of us in the chillia community whose work is connected with the kaalipeeli
car. None of us is on the road because we are waiting for the government to
make a decision about what to do with our older [kaalipeeli] taxis: but as we
wait for some decision, it is not just the taxi drivers that are losing money,
but many others who depend on the taxi-trade for their rozi-roti [livelihood].
Everyone is going hungry for these last ten days and this too during Ramzaan.
There is the boy who washes our cars; we are not driving so there is no need
to wash. The boy who in the garage who does the work on our tires, he does
not get any jobs when we are not working; then there is the boy who does the
maintenance-check every day; and then there are the boys in the garage who
sell us the spare parts. We are not making any money so we cannot employ
1634 TARINI BEDI
him. So there are so many who are losing money, not just the drivers. That is
the web of work we have here.114
Bilal voiced how different spheres of motoring and its ancillary

functions undergirded the life of the taxi trade in this community. It
also illustrated how work and the burden of the stoppage of this work
surrounding the trade were shared amongst different generations
and different kinds of labour. Therefore, kaalipeelis exist within an
ensemble of labour: the mechanic, the storefront lubricant business,
the spare-part dealer in Mumbai’s chor-bazaar or thieves market (one of
the few places in Mumbai where Premier Padmini parts are available).
Bade Atif bhai (Atif, older brother) was a distant uncle of Bilal and
one of the first chillia to acquire a Premier Padmini in the 1960s. He
ran a shop in chor-bazaar (thieves market) where, since the closing of
the Premier automobiles plant, drivers buy cheap used parts for the
kaalipeeli. Atif allowed drivers to pay in a lump sum after Bakri Eid
when all financial obligations towards the mosque were fulfilled. In
cases where drivers availed of this scheme, in accordance with Islamic
rules, they did not have to pay interest. However, Atif confessed that
he quoted a higher price when he suspected delayed payments or if
the customer was not chillia. Atif proudly said: ‘Chillia drivers never
default on payments; other communities, yes they often do not pay up,
but chillia, they know that if there are any problems, our relations in
Badargarh will know. That is why chillia are trusted as taxi-drivers,
with money and in their business, they are never dishonest.’ In this way,
the kaalipeeli was deeply incorporated into domestic life, daily routines,
extended kin obligations, and moral discourses over honesty.115 It was
a material object, but with strong moral and affective qualities. It was
the pivot around which the web was spun.
Most chillia in Pathanwadi owned their taxis and their taxi permits.
Those who were lessee taxi drivers like Rafi leased from others in
their own neighbourhood, and always from other chillia. Therefore,
the uncertainty of being a self-employed lessee driver seen in other
contexts, such as in New York for instance,116 was largely mitigated.
114
Participant observation by author, Mumbai, August 2010.
115
D. Arnold, ‘The problem of traffic: the streetlife of modernity in late colonial
India’, Modern Asian Studies, vol. 46, no. 1, 2012; D. Arnold and E. Dewald, ‘Everyday
technology in South and Southeast Asia: an introduction’, Modern Asian Studies,
vol. 46, no. 1, 2012; M. Sheller, ‘Bodies, cybercars and the mundane incorporation of
automated mobilities’, Social and Cultural Geography, vol. 8, no. 2, 2007.
116
Hodges, Taxi!; Mathew, Taxi!.
Those who leased from other chillia spoke highly of the relationship
with their leaser. They referred to their leaser by kinship terms such as
brother, uncle, and brother-in-law. Usually, the leaser was a taximan
himself who owned more than one car—one that he drove and the
other that he leased. The centrality of kinship as a register of control
and discipline has been observed in other labour contexts in South
Asia. Kinship among urban workers is malleable, and negotiable; it is
a discursive domain as much as it is a structural one.117 It is invoked
when someone new wants to enter the community and enter the trade.
Indeed, among chillia in Pathanwadi, everyone invoked close kinship,
extended kinship, and fictive kinship ties in order to enter and remain
within the taxi trade. Kinship therefore had a moral meaning, but it
also had tactical and strategic dimensions that undergirded monetary
networks within the trade. It provided webs of social control over prices
the lessor charged his lessee, as well as over how the lessee treated
the vehicle. Bilal, for example, was powerful in Pathanwadi. Almost
all the drivers in Pathanwadi said ‘Bilal bhai [brother] is my real118
uncle’s son’. Whether Bilal actually had so many cousins was beside
the point. What is important is that cousins are obligated to each other.
Not least, they are the first and most desirable prospects for marriages
alliances for their children. This in turn strengthened economic and
social dependence.
When I returned to Pathanwadi recently, the talk was that Ismail,
one of the original drivers in the community, had retired his kaalipeeli
to buy a new car, an Eeco, manufactured by the Maruti company.119
Soon after the car came home to Pathanwadi, Ismail took his family
and the new car to their village in Badargarh for the entire month
of July. Ismail’s daughter later told me: ‘Abba [father], decided to go
away to get away from all the talk.’ This was a tactical move to avoid
the immediate aftermath of the purchase. While Ismail was away,
questions such as what kind of loan he had taken and whether he
had violated Islamic tenets to do so circulated around the taxi stand.
Once Ismail’s return from the village was imminent, the speculation
turned to sympathy with Ismail’s situation. Rahim, who was married
to Ismail’s sister, said empathetically: ‘Ismail bhai has been driving
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
G. Malhotra and S. Sinharary, ‘Maruti Suzuki—reigning emperor of Indian
automobile industry’, Journal of Case Research, vol. 4, no. 1, 2013.
1636 TARINI BEDI
all his life, so if buying a new car is the only way he can stay in
the taxi-business that is what he must do.’ Bilal also consented: ‘He
must have majboori (unavoidable circumstance). He has to support his
divorced daughter. He must have taken a loan without interest. He is
my brother so I have to understand. Now if he has bought a new car
we can learn from him.’
Ismail himself admitted that he was tired of living in a state of
uncertainty over his older kaalipeeli; he said that he had little desire to
join any of the fleets because he wanted his ‘own timetable’. He felt
strongly that ownership of his car allows him control over his time—
something that driving a fleet taxi would not.120 The previous year,
he procured a loan from a small cooperative bank close to his village
where interest payments were not required if the entire loan was paid
off within 20 months. By June of 2013, he had enough to pay off his
principal so he had returned to Badargarh with the car and paid off
the loan. He now had a new car (still a kaalipeeli but new model of car)
and, in his words, could ‘Carry on my dhandha without being forced
into being a ghulam (slave) for someone else’.
Ismail became an important adviser to other chillia drivers. He had
expanded the financial circuits by providing new avenues of financial
credit for those who wanted to remain in the trade without being
forced into the fleet business. These were new circuits between capital
in the village (other Momins in Palanpur) and chillia borrowers in the
city.
Conclusions: chillia and capacities for non-consent
In conclusion, chillia as a form of identification emerged from

emplaced experiences of urban migration, technological adaptations
to the work of motoring, and the intersections of religion, caste, and
class. Chillia as a form of self-reference emerged historically in the
Indian colonial context. It was related to drawing of new customary
and ethnic boundaries121 to mark this community’s place in the taxi
trade and in the urban labour economy of twentieth-century Bombay
more broadly. Further, historical claims to the labour of motoring and
120
Control over motoring time is integral to drivers’ conceptions of their freedom
as workers.
121
F. Barth, ‘Models of social organization’, Royal Anthropological Institute Occasional
Paper, vol. 23, 1966; Thompson, The Making.
hereditary expertise allowed Palanpuri Momins to claim a right to
the history of Bombay. It also allowed them to make contemporary
claims in the twenty-first century on both the private sector and the
state in contexts of globalizing capital. The capacities of chillia to
negotiate and present non-consenting voices to contemporary shifts
in the taxi trade are inflected through their patterns of urbanization
and migration into Bombay in the early twentieth century. Islamic
piety, entrepreneurship, urbanization, and hereditary knowledge of
the car have all been important in shaping motoring subjectivities and
political and cultural claims over time. This capacity to make collective
claims makes chillia distinct from other workers in the non-industrial
sector and indeed from many others in the more precarious transport
sectors. This is what allowed them to continue to shape Mumbai’s taxi
trade from below through various strategies of non-consent. Chillia
resisted joining the fleet-taxi companies even as they were subject, as
Rahim was, to various forms of destruction. Indeed, long after they
were all supposed to be absorbed into the corporate-owned fleets,
chillia drivers continued to drive on their own terms.
While these non-consenting strategies have been important, more
recently, they are inflected with proliferating anxieties over shrinking
consumer demand for older kaalipeelis. These anxieties are no longer
undergirded simply by the losing of their market share to fleets; they
are driven by the entry of the new technology-driven transport options
such as the transnational Uber and the local Ola. In 2006, when the
fleet-taxi model was introduced and when the debate over the ‘age’
of cars began, the city’s planners and middle classes were convinced
that transformation was within reach. Fleet taxis had some success
in recruiting recent migrants as employee-drivers. They also tried to
draw on some of the practices of the existing taxi trade, such as trying
to draw on customary notions of social cohesion and friendship among
those they recruit. However, they had little success with chillia drivers.
Uber and Ola are now shifting the landscape even further. Most
notably, these smartphone-based ‘disruptive’ technologies depend on
technological rather than social articulations.122 Chillia are watching
to see what happens—anxious, but with a singularly non-consenting
stance. Arguably, this is because the embedded economy of the chillia
trade operated not simply as a social network, but as a vital arbiter
in the allocation of human, cultural, and physical resources. Chillia
122
Staff, ‘Silicon valley start-up Uber may find India a bumpy ride’, India Business
Insight, 20 July 2014.
1638 TARINI BEDI
motoring practices do not map onto the dominant rules of anti-social,

capitalist markets.123 Their hereditary connection to the trade has
instead allowed them the capacity to sustain an ‘ecology of practices’124
over time that do not adhere to dominant prescriptions for a viable
future of the taxi trade.
123
M. Granovetter, ‘Economic action and social structure: the problem of
embeddedness’, American Journal of Sociology, vol. 91, no. 3, 1985.
124
Simone, ‘Relational infrastructures’; I. Stengers, Cosmopolitics 1, University of
Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN, 2010.

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Modern Asian Studies 52, 5 (2018) pp. 1604–1638.

Urban Histories of Place and Labour: The

Department of Anthropology, University of Illinois at Chicago

I sat on the floor of taxi driver Rahim’s house. Rahim limped

intertwined with the history of chillia migration through the twentieth

Unsettling labour studies from South Asia

Labour historians of South Asia have unsettled theoretical

assumed transitional in workers lives and signs of an ‘incomplete’

involved in the work of moving people and commodities around.49

to work? Neoliberalization, deregulation, and marginalized male labor in the Bangkok

Chillia identify as Sunni Muslims of the Momin caste.65 In Gujarat,

throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Pathanwadi,

auxiliary functions. Tabela is the horse-and-stable industry—more

between caste, class, and community.85 Rather than static entities,

Arguably, Yusuf voices an important debate swirling around taxi

inhabiting entrenched practices of work by insisting on spreading the

Chillia and contemporary taxi modernization

Mumbai’s future and plans to make Bombay a ‘world-class’ city.100

Indeed, the metaphor of ghulami (slavery) used by groups of transport

Spatialization and mutuality in the labour of motoring

Pathanwadi (place of the Pathans) is a dense residential space occupied

If Rafi found it difficult to leave, other non-chillia labour in Pathanwadi

Bilal voiced how different spheres of motoring and its ancillary

Conclusions: chillia and capacities for non-consent

In conclusion, chillia as a form of identification emerged from

motoring practices do not map onto the dominant rules of anti-social,

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