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. ‘PadminiFootnote 2 mari gayu,’ he said softly in Gujarati.Footnote 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, 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’sFootnote 4 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.Footnote 5 This long and hereditary association of chillia with Bombay's taxi trade led to claims that they were Bombay's original taximen.Footnote 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 experienceFootnote 7 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.Footnote 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 economy Footnote 9 and deeply 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 11 In the case of those involved in mobile trades in the post-colonial world, social scientists also address gaps in this labour history.Footnote 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.Footnote 13 Mobile labour groups—what KerrFootnote 14 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 long journeys.Footnote 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 SchendelFootnote 16 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’.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 19 It also introduced new pollution control and permitting mandates that steered older cars into 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 21 Religious, linguistic, and ethnic divisions are important to the operation of power and dissent in contemporary Mumbai.Footnote 22 Labour practices have been fundamentally shaped by these exclusions rooted in caste, religion, and nativism.Footnote 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.Footnote 24 Given these communal exclusions, a rich contemporary scholarship has emerged that looks at urban Muslim communities in Mumbai through a focus on their (often) violent relationships with the Hindu majority.Footnote 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,Footnote 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’,Footnote 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 the West and therefore far from universal.Footnote 28 These approaches reject seeing labour dynamics in South Asia and other parts of the South through the lens of ‘lack’Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 33 However, this does not encompass the range of labour experience. In South Asia, historically, 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 38 Ties of community, religion, and region were 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.Footnote 39 Chakrabarty'sFootnote 40 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.Footnote 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’.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 45 The formation of chillia subjectivities in Bombay resonates with these debates.
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.Footnote 46 The work of motoring in Mumbai's taxi trade is experienced through what drivers refer to as webs.Footnote 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.Footnote 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 involved in the work of moving people and commodities around.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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. 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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,Footnote 57 proliferation of capitalist logics,Footnote 58 production of new forms of sociality,Footnote 59 and demands for recognition as a public service.Footnote 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.Footnote 61 More recently, ethnographies of taxis and taxi drivers in 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.Footnote 62
Together, both historical and ethnographic scholarship recognizes that transport workers are integral to urban mobility.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.
Motoring, migration, and working-class identifications: emergence of the category of ‘chillia’
Chillia identify as Sunni Muslims of the Momin caste.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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 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.Footnote 68 Nile GreenFootnote 69 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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,Footnote 72 systems of social stratification among South Asian Muslims have received less systematic attention.Footnote 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).Footnote 74 While these broad categories are important, AhmadFootnote 75 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 77 Motor refers to the trade of taxi driving and 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.Footnote 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 ParsisFootnote 79 created the bastardization of the surname and it became ‘Chiliya.’Footnote 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 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.Footnote 81 In the context of twentieth-century Western India, A. R. MominFootnote 82 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.Footnote 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,Footnote 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 between caste, class, and community.Footnote 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, AliFootnote 86 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.Footnote 87 These well-known trading groups began migrating into Bombay in the nineteenth century from Kathiawad, Cutch, and Sind regions of Gujarat.Footnote 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 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 Meru Footnote 89 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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 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 SimoneFootnote 92 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 automobilityFootnote 93 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, 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 95 Economic liberalization also reconfigured existing relationships between capital, labour, and the state.Footnote 96 Additionally, the Soviet Union's collapse led urban Indian elites to search for alternative models of development.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 99 This was tied to other initiatives focused on visions for Mumbai's future and plans to make Bombay a ‘world-class’ city.Footnote 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.Footnote 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 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’.Footnote 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).Footnote 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 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?Footnote 104
Indeed, the metaphor of ghulami (slavery) used by groups of transport workers to denounce their working conditions has also been noted by others.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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,Footnote 112 do not find it easy to abandon the trade and move elsewhere. They also did not find 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.Footnote 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 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 him. So there are so many who are losing money, not just the drivers. That is the web of work we have here.Footnote 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.Footnote 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,Footnote 116 was largely mitigated. 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.Footnote 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 real Footnote 118 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.Footnote 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 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.Footnote 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 boundariesFootnote 121 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 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.Footnote 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 motoring practices do not map onto the dominant rules of anti-social, capitalist markets.Footnote 123 Their hereditary connection to the trade has instead allowed them the capacity to sustain an ‘ecology of practices’Footnote 124 over time that do not adhere to dominant prescriptions for a viable future of the taxi trade.
