Best Read for the General Public: IBP 2023 Accolades in the Humanities by the International Institute for Asian Studies

2nd Prize Winner of the 2022 Victor Turner Prize sponsored by the Society for Humanistic Anthropology

Brings to life the smells, sounds, vibrations, discomforts, and joys of taxi travel in India's largest city

In this first book-length study of Mumbai's taxi industry and of the livelihoods that surround it, Tarini Bedi draws from the lives and voices of chillia taxi drivers who have sustained a hereditary trade for more than a century. Bedi considers the Bombay taxi in all its forms: a material object that is driven, an economic and political connection, an expression of kinship, an embodiment of urban time and technology, and more. She illustrates how the accumulation of capital in this masculinized and mobile trade depends on forms of fixed domestic labor and an ethics of care, and how connections among these factors impact the production and reshaping of working-class personhood and laboring subjects. From beginning to end, the world of Mumbai automobility unfolds through depiction of the sensory, embodied, and political domains of taxi drivers' work.

While most understandings of automobility remain tied to Western assumptions, patterns of driving, (sub)urbanization, and engagements with the road, realities in the Global South differ. Mumbai Taximen provides a correction to this imbalance from Mumbai through a timely exploration of South Asian social, material, political, labor, and technological histories and practices of motoring and automobility.

Brings to life the smells, sounds, vibrations, discomforts, and joys of taxi travel in India's largest city

About the Author

Tarini Bedi is associate professor of anthropology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is author of The Dashing Ladies of Shiv Sena: Political Matronage in Urbanizing India.

Reviews

"A landmark book across a range of disciplines, and it makes for compelling and enjoyable reading."

* Asian Studies Review *

"Mumbai Taximen accomplishes several things. While it offers an ethnographic account of an automobility that is part of a distinctively non-Western mode of capitalism, first and foremost it constitutes an intriguing case study of how a vehicle may be appropriated as a metaphor of social identity and moral agency. . . [T]he book includes sharply drawn vignettes that bring us into the practices and concerns of daily life. These will make the volume especially useful in the classroom."

* Ethnos *

"[T]heoretically and empirically rich. . . This book is an important contribution to work on the critical occupation of taxi-driving (related to urban mobility), which is currently undergoing a rapid transformation driven by technology and the aspirations of post-colonial citizens and the state."

* Pacific Affairs *

"Mumbai Taximen's narrative genius lies in the author's "sensuous approach" which effectively transports the reader into the embodied, lived worlds of Indian automobility. . . [B]y inviting (indeed impelling) the reader into the lives of Mumbai's taximen, in all its material messiness, palpable precariousness, quiet comforts, and dignified dangers, Bedi's narrative puts up a roadblock to the charting of any easy path from social critique to straightforward solutions. This book unsettles. Which is why it needs to be read."

* Journal of Asian Studies *

"The book's attention to chillia drivers, specifically, and to their taxis as integral extensions of them, offers a rich and sensuously curious ethnography that pushes readers beyond classical issues of the city about poverty and the politics of labor."

* Anthropology Book Forum *


Awards
Runner-up for Victor Turner Prize in Ethnographic Writing 2022 (United States).



Book Information
ISBN 9780295749860
Author Tarini Bedi
Format Paperback
Page Count 248
Imprint University of Washington Press
Publisher University of Washington Press
Weight(grams) 363g