mob ility and art - Berghahn Journals

MOBILITY AND ART Life Cycle Malini Sur

Life Cycle ethnographically and visually documents the everyday use of bicycles among Kolkata’s city dwellers.1 Winding through the city’s congested thoroughfares and narrow by-lanes, we follow daily wageworkers, including migrants from eastern India, environmentalists, teachers, and activists, who cycle for a living. In this documentary (forty-two minutes) and the broader ethnographic project within which it is situated, I investigate how cycling mediates people’s changing relationships to cities in South Asia. Kolkata (formerly Calcutta), the largest city in eastern India, is the primary focus of Life Cycle. This city has 1.68 million cyclists, records 2.5 million cycle trips a day, has the least amount of road space (6 percent) in metropolitan India, and has the second highest air pollution level.2 By 2017, traffic regulations prohibited cycling on seventy city roads. In Everyday Technologies, the historian David Arnold has importantly underscored how the bicycle came to be locally manufactured in Kolkata in the 1930s, after it had made an appearance in British India around 1890 as an imported good. The Indian nationalist movement, with its emphasis on selfreliance and large-scale protests against the use of foreign goods, inspired local manufacturing of bicycles in Kolkata. Arnold further reminds us of the bicycle’s critical role in circulating labor and as well as for local elite recreation in the colonial metropolis.3 Life Cycle complements valuable archival contributions in the history of colonial transport and nationalist mobility, by ethnographically foregrounding a critical political juncture in twenty-first-century Kolkata. Cycle activists have protested against the initial traffic prohibitions on bicycle use from thirty-eight city roads in 2008 to more than a hundred in 2015. Are Kolkata’s postcolonial bicycles relics of a past to be hastily discarded, or are they viable if complicated vehicles in India’s burgeoning cities? What happens when new traffic regulations impede cyclists from riding on Kolkata’s roads? How do cyclists negotiate the old city’s congested traffic and battle with multiple forms of transport? As a departure from thinking about how old and new forms of transport shape societies, Life Cycle explores what people do with the possibilities provided by bicycles, and increasing constraints to its use in large postcolonial Transfers 7(1), Spring 2017: 130–136 doi: 10.3167/TRANS.2017.070110

© Transfers ISSN: 2045-4813 (print) 2045-4821 (online)

Life Cycle

cities. The photographs (2013–2016) that support the documentary illuminate the relationship between the cities, bicycles, and traffic (Figure 1). The hazy speeding car that whizzes past the newspaper vendor’s bicycle, rendering his face invisible, provides a critical entry point to understand how motorized and nonmotorized transport compete for space on Kolkata’s roads (Figure 2). Just a few kilometers away from this busy thoroughfare, in the late afternoon, a grocery vendor’s bicycle coexists along with parked cars and car repair shops (Figure 3). The Kolkata police, however, imagine bicycles as slow-moving transport that congests roads by slowing down traffic speed. For traffic inspectors and constables, bicyclists add to road chaos where buses, old tramcars, taxis, and jaywalking pedestrians jostle for space. Figure 4 captures a cycle prohibition sign next to a traffic police booth, while a bicycle makes a slow entry into a cycling-prohibited zone. Although the Kolkata police often overlook these entries, at other times, ad hoc and orchestrated penalty drives have resulted in fines and confiscation of bicycles and goods. A Kolkata bookstore worker and cycle activist, Kestolal Ganguly, who the Kolkata police have fined several times, has carefully compiled the informal penalty slips on placards (Figure 5). In his spare time, he gives poetic expression to injustice by penning rhymes on the troubled predicament of cyclists in Kolkata. Ganguly sticks the placard to his bicycle handle during meetings and protests that the Kolkata Cycle Samaj—a citizen’s platform—and political parties organize.

Figure 1: Everything on wheels and more (© Malini Sur). Transfers • Volume 7 Issue 1 • Spring 2017 • 131

Malini Sur

Figure 2: Work at dawn (© Malini Sur).

Figure 3: Unequal ﬁght (© Malini Sur).

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Figure 4: Down but not out (© Malini Sur).

Figure 5: Fines and protests (© Malini Sur).

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Malini Sur

The Samaj demands an end to restrictions on the use of bicycles on Kolkata’s roads, and condemns arbitrary restrictions on nonmotorized transport. Switch On, an NGO concerned with environmental issues who are a part of the Samaj have also sought inspiration from the city’s nationalist past and Gandhian nonviolence to make a case for Chakra Satyagraha—mobilizing the bicycle wheel to convey Mahatma Gandhi’s emphasis on self-reliance. They offer low-energy solutions to transport issues in Kolkata. In January 2015, Ganguly cycled his way through the city, joining the Kolkata Cycle Samaj’s annual protest rally. As the protestors pedalled away holding banners that demanded environmentally sound transport solutions and equitable access to the city’s roads, the Kolkata traffic police coordinated on wireless radios to ensure their smooth passage (Figures 6–8). Life Cycle sets into motion Kolkata’s intriguing cycle politics that these images capture. By focusing on bicycles as wheels of change, and foregrounding road battles in rapidly changing cities and uncertain times, it joins discussions on the history of mobility in British India with postcolonial visual and urban anthropology in contemporary South Asia.

Figure 6: Coming together (© Malini Sur).


Life Cycle

Figure 7: Watchful eye (© Malini Sur).

Figure 8: Survive and thrive (© Malini Sur).

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Malini Sur

Malini Sur is an anthropologist and a senior research fellow at the Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University. Her research interests address three broad areas—borders, mobility, and citizenship—with a focus on South Asia. Malini has been investigating the relationship between urban traffic, bicycling, and migration in eastern India. Life Cycle (2016) is her first ethnographic documentary film on this subject. Photographs from her fieldwork have been exhibited in Amsterdam, Berlin, Bonn, Chiang Mai, Gottingen, Heidelberg, Kathmandu, and Munich. Malini’s publications are available at https://westernsydney.academia.edu/MaliniSur. E-mail: [email protected]

Notes 1. For the trailer, see https://vimeo.com/159908467 (accessed 7 December 2016). 2. “Every Turn of the Wheel Is a Revolution,” a report on the cycle ban in Kolkata by SWITCH-ON, http://switchon.org.in/cyclesatyagraha.pdf (accessed 6 January 2017); “Citizen’s Report: Air Quality and Mobility” (New Delhi: Centre for Science and Environment, 2011), http://www.cseindia.org/userfiles/Kolkata%20Report .pdf (accessed 6 January 2017); Aparajita Chakrabartty and Sudakshina Gupta “Traffic Congestion in the Metropolitan City of Kolkata” Journal of Infrastructure and Development 6, no. 1 (2014): 43–59. 3. David Arnold, Everyday Technologies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013).
