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

Abstract

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