The Art of Aoto-Mobility, Vehicular Art and The Space of Resistance in Calcutta

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The Art of Auto-Mobility : Vehicular Art and the Space of Resistance in Calcutta
Swati Chattopadhyay Journal of Material Culture 2009 14: 107 DOI: 10.1177/1359183508100010 The online version of this article can be found at: http://mcu.sagepub.com/content/14/1/107
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T H E A RT O F AU T O - M O B I L I T Y
Vehicular Art and the Space of Resistance in Calcutta
S WAT I C H AT T O PA D H YAY
University of California, Santa Barbara, USA Abstract The article examines the images and texts on privately operated public buses in contemporary Calcutta as a form of popular culture. By situating the vehicular art within the larger socio-political milieu of the city, this paper analyzes the manner in which the artwork acts as a unique mode of communication and everyday resistance. A close reading of the relation between the images and texts enables us to grasp the spatial logic by which subaltern groups make room for themselves within the bourgeois frame of the city. Key Words Calcutta popular culture public bus subaltern vehicular art
Brilliantly painted vehicles in many third world cities jeepneys in Manila, long-distance trucks in Rawalpindi and Buenos Aires, buses in Port-auPrince and Calcutta, and baby-taxis in Dhaka are exceptional for the labor and artistic skill employed in enriching the experience of the automobile in daily life. The socio-economic and expressive concerns that animate the production of vehicular art in the Philippines, Pakistan, Argentina, Haiti, Nigeria, Bangladesh, and India are quite different from automobile culture in the USA or Europe (Bolton, 1979; Pritchett, 1979; Rich and Khan, 1980; Meez, 1988; Learmonth, 1991; Estenssor, 1992; Glassie, 1997; Lasnier, 2002). In large measure this has to do with the conditions under which the automobile as a vehicle of modernity has been adopted in these countries. In an essay on Pakistani decorated trucks, one author has argued that the new tradition of elaborately decorated trucks in Pakistan is derived from all those craft traditions that became obsolete with the advent of the modern building industry (Kazi, 2002).
Journal of Material Culture Vol. 14(1): 107139 Copyright 2009 SAGE Publications (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore and Washington DC) [DOI: 10.1177/1359183508100010]www.sagepublications.com
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J o u r n a l o f M AT E R I A L C U LT U R E 1 4 ( 1 )
Facing a livelihood crisis, artisans shifted to a new industry and created a demand for their skill. If vehicular art in the third world is a means of creating a niche in the modern economy and making automobile culture ones own, the specic conditions of production and reception in each location require in-depth exploration. The approach to such study must also be suited to the specic graphic form found in such vehicles. The graphic art on privately operated public buses and minibuses in Calcutta is characterized by a profusion of texts next to images culled from various sources placed in well-dened areas (Figures 1 and 2). It is both a means of subsistence for craftsmen who occupy a marginal economic position, and a means of communication between the bus owners/ artists/operators and the citys residents. They bring the three meanings of art aesthetics, skill, and cunning (Websters Dictionary, 1996) together to produce a remarkable structure of communication and resistance. There are at least three ways one could approach the study of Calcuttas bus art: by studying the form and lineage of the motifs and texts, focusing on the sources and precedents used by the artists to devise these images; by documenting the artists or owners intentions, analyzing their reasons for undertaking such art work; and third, by analyzing how their art works as a form of communication. Rather than emphasizing art historical provenance, which deserves separate and specialized treatment, or delving into the specic intention of the indiF I G U R E 1 Front view of privately owned vidual artist, in this article I public bus in Calcutta, 2003. emphasize the communicative potential of the graphic form. By situating the art within a larger socio-political milieu, I explore the spatial dimensions of this phenomenon. This involves the spatial arrangement of texts and images, their meaning, and the possibilities of communication inherent in their formal attributes, as well as the urban context of bus art. The latter requires an introduction to the nature of public space in the city as well as the sites of production. I am primarily concerned with the act of reading, viewing and recognizing bus art as a form of urban popular culture. In the next two sections I provide
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Chattopadhyay: T H E A R T O F A U T O - M O B I L I T Y
a methodological and theoretical explanation as a form of ground clearing to launch the material examples that are at the heart of the argument.
URBAN SUBALTERNS AND POPULAR CULTURE
The argument presented here is based on eld documentation in Calcutta and its suburbs between 2002 and 2007, as well as long acquaintance with the citys everyday life. Calcuttas bus owners, builders, artists, operators (drivers and conductors) are a varied constituency F I G U R E 2 Rear view of Calcutta cutting across a large section of the bus, 2003: Amake shei path dekhabe so-called lower and middle classes, je amake chay (The one who wants me will show me the way). The falling mostly within what the state painted shoes are meant to ward off would, for housing and welfare the evil eye. purposes, designate as the economically weaker sections of society. This is by no means a homogenous group, and there is no reason to assume that they all have the same investment in the production of bus art. In most cases, the bus operators drivers and conductors are not the owners of the bus. Bus owners and operators, therefore, are often on opposing sides of the employeremployee relationship. Some bus owners as well as builders make a good living from the business, but even here there is a large socio-economic range. The craftsmen, painters and artists work on a contract basis and earn subsistence wages. The bus operators typically work long shifts as casual labor, have no security of employment, and survive on uctuating incomes. However, they are also usually members of labor unions or cooperatives.1 Most reside in the urban fringes of the city in modest accommodation which are often within squatter settlements, or in slums within the metropolis. They all have had some access to education. Many have gone to high school and a few even have some years of college. The choice of images and texts are made by the bus owner, artist, and sometimes by the operators (if they happen to be supervising the body work) within the overall framework mandated by state authorities. They work from a cultural repertoire that is as varied as the socio-cultural make-up of bus owners and operators. The question, exactly whose voice
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the owners, builders, artists or bus operators the bus art represents is not easily resolved. It can be determined in individual cases, but such samples cannot be generalized to a larger population with any degree of cultural signicance.2 Therefore I pose the question of meaning in terms of What work does the bus art perform?, seeking possibilities of reading the vehicular art within the urban milieu. Many, though not all the texts on the buses have literary allusions. It is thus appropriate to mention at the outset that while literary sophistication may not be part of a common parcel shared by those involved in the production and operation process, they have the cultural resources and political acumen to negotiate their location in the city. The builders, drivers and conductors groups that I interviewed were extremely articulate, politically conscious, and urbane in their thinking about their own marginality and social mobilization. As such they would not t the classic denition of the subaltern, who does not have access to means of representation. In other words, they substantially differ from the image of the tribal and of the peasant, which was, until recently, cited in scholarship as the exemplary subaltern, completely cut off from channels of social mobility. They also differ from the urban subaltern in Calcutta of a century ago. Throughout this essay, however, I will refer to theories of subalternity to explain my core argument about the spatial logic of marginality as I nd the concept of subalternity useful for thinking through certain processes of marginalization. In contradistinction to the wide gulf that scholars had assumed to have existed between lower classes and the elite in 19th- and early 20th-century Calcutta (Banerjee, 1989), the culture and politics of the bus artists, builders and operators is intricately tied to middle-class and urban elite culture and politics, in both resistance and conformity, constituting in turn a new domain of the popular. I will expand upon these points later in the essay. Here, I merely want to emphasize that the typical bus artist and operator in contemporary Calcutta indeed constitutes a new gure of the unprivileged, struggling to make a living within a rapidly globalizing economy, despite having nominal access to education and a democratic polity. We may identify three factors that have contributed to the shifts in class domains and linkages in post-independence (post-1947) Bengal that have helped to establish this form of popular culture: mass-education under a state system of schooling no matter how imperfect its application; the formation of a new class among the peasantry demanding urban amenities (one result of the changes in the system of land tenure during three decades of communist rule in Bengal); and a political culture that eschews civil society in favor of what Chatterjee calls political society (Chatterjee, 2004). The boundaries of cultural institutions that the Bengali middle-class had considered peculiarly its own have been
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breached by a wider socio-economic constituency. Mass media radio, cinema, and television have performed a critical role in extending the cultural and political sphere. As a consequence, both middle class and plebeian cultures in the city have been transformed from their 19thand early 20th-century versions, mutating into new formations of the popular. We see the symptoms of this cultural transformation in spectacular form in popular dance and music shows on television, in the design of pavilions that occupy the citys public space for Hindu religious festivals (the puja pandals), and in sports venues. Bus art is among the everyday instances of this change. For the most part, bus art as popular culture remains undocumented and untheorized.3 As there is no space here to launch into a detailed discussion of popular culture in India, it will sufce to recognize the popular as carrying the sense of both widely disseminated and belonging to the people (Williams, 1983). The term people here includes the broad swathes of both the lower and the middle classes. What is useful about thinking through forms of popular culture is that they are sites where class and group boundaries are necessarily blurred. Bus art, I contend, is one such artifact that requires rethinking culture as constituted by strict class boundaries; it conveys critical elements that may help explain larger patterns of urban marginality within the bourgeois framework of the city how space and power are negotiated by people who nd themselves marginalized in the city.
THE SPATIAL LOGIC OF MARGINALITY
Discussing the political life of the great majority of the population in the world, Partha Chatterjee has mobilized the idea of political society through which the governed negotiate their rights to habitation and livelihood with the state on a political terrain:
on the one hand, governmental agencies have a public obligation to look after the poor and the underprivileged and, on the other, particular population groups receive attention from those agencies according to calculations of political expediency. (Chatterjee, 2004: 40)
Chatterjee notes that these underprivileged groups have to

pick their way through this uncertain terrain by making a large array of connections outside the group with other groups in similar situations, with more privileged and inuential groups, with government functionaries, perhaps with political parties and leaders. They often make instrumental use of the fact that they can vote in elections. (Chatterjee, 2004: 401)
Of particular relevance to this discussion are two examples from Calcutta cited by him. First is the example of residents of a squatter settlement situated yards from the railway lines on public land. Since
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the 1940s the residents have been able to hang on to their tenuous claim to the land, obtaining electricity from the State Electricity Board, water supply and public toilets from the municipality, and a governmentsponsored child-care facility, by cultivating political relationships with the ruling party and tracking the corridors of the welfare state that is obliged to extend services to the community despite its illegal status. While many settlements established by squatting on private land in the late 1940s in the wake of the partition of the country have been given legal status, the marginal socio-economic status of its residents have meant that squatter colonies next to the railway lines exist with the ever present threat of eviction. Chatterjees second example are vendors who illegally set up shop on sidewalks along the major arteries in the southern part of the city, carrying on a vibrant informal economy that provides livelihood, goods and services to a vast number of people. Repeated attempts have been made by the ruling parties and municipality to rid the sidewalks of these vendors. For example, in 1996, facing criticism from a certain section of the citys elite residents and in their desire to attract foreign investment, the communist-led state government launched Operation Sunshine that destroyed the illegal structures on sidewalks. However, after a few months of absence and negotiations the occupants managed to return. The negotiations are conducted not on the basis of rights but on the basis of entitlement and are highly contingent on the ability of the squatters to create lines of communication with middleclass residents and government functionaries, and to mobilize popular support. Chatterjee explains these processes as a constantly shifting compromise between the normative values of modernity and the moral assertion of popular demands. This conict is between the high ground of modernity (aligned with civil society and the constitutional state) and democracy on the ground, exercised as resistance and recalcitrance, by the majority of the population. There are several corollaries to these politically negotiated practices that I wish to point out. Such negotiations throw into disarray a whole set of spatial relations that were supposed to remain inviolate within modern state formation. The very idea of public and private spheres and their nominal correlation with a corresponding public space and private space collapses under the pressure of political society. What replaces this ideal is a complex spatial layering of individual, group, and state claims. What appears as confusion and incoherence, often visibly indexed in the use of public space, is largely due not simply to an inability to acknowledge the new democratic process but also to the poverty of political and urban theory that is ill equipped to discuss the spatial logic of marginality.4 Very little attention has been paid to uncovering the formal logic of such dis-order.
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Chatterjees insight is not in itself new, particularly in the study of urban social movements. Studies of urban marginality conducted since the late 1970s have raised many of the same issues (Castells, 1984). Chatterjees contribution is to shift political theorys emphasis on civil society as a mediator between the state and the family to a new constellation of the political. What is important here is the need to think of the urban process itself not from the bottom up (as did marginality studies ending up in dependency theory) or from the top down (as do the bulk of urbanization studies working within a developmental paradigm), but as a network of horizontal connections forged by subaltern groups, only intermittently connected to state and government functionaries. Chatterjee hints that these more recent processes of democratic politics are not usefully analyzed through the lens of subaltern studies because of their entangled nature: we can no longer so easily talk about a clear split between the domain of elite politics and the domain of subaltern politics as one could in the context of the anti-colonial movement, because the democratic process in India has come a long way in bringing under its inuence the lives of the subaltern classes (Chatterjee, 2004: 39). If the new entanglements (leaving aside the problem of how these entanglements are structurally different from those of pre-independence days) demand a new notion of the political, I submit that this understanding of the political must address the nebulous zone between subalternity and popular culture. I am interested in the kind of communication and space the urban subalterns establish among themselves, and between themselves and the elite on an everyday basis in the city.5 In the work of the subaltern studies collective, the term subaltern has been used to refer to peasants, tribal peoples, and those groups who are not easily assimilated within the logic of the state and capital. In Gramscis classic formulation, the subaltern does not have access to means of representation (Hoare and Smith, 1971). Ranajit Guha used the word to refer to a differential in power relationship: the elite made the subaltern aware of his place in society as a measure of a distance from themselves a distance expressed in differentials of wealth, status, and culture. His identity amounted to the sum of his subalternity (Guha, 1983: 18). Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has insisted that the term be used to refer to those who are removed from all lines of social mobility: subalternity is where social lines of mobility, being elsewhere, do not permit the formation of a recognizable basis of social action (Spivak, 2005). My use of the term takes into account two aspects of the denitions offered by Guha and Spivak. First, their understanding of subalternity as a space location within/outside the structure of domination and subordination, and second, the difculty of recognition (recognizing social action) implied in both these denitions. However, by pushing the assumption that subalterns do not have access to means of representation understood both
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in the sense of description/inscription and political participation I try to render complex the problems of location and recognition in understanding the conditions of subalternity. I begin the analysis of bus art by placing myself as a reader/viewer, consciously delineating the position I occupy in that milieu of popular culture, and to highlight the class positions of different actors in the citys public venues. In other words, my objective is to attend to both the class lines that do exist in our performance within city space and notice the occasions where they are blurred. Vehicular art is performative. My viewing of bus art brings me in dialog with the bus artists and operators independent of what they might say about the function and meaning of such art. If the ethnographers habit of citing voices from interviews conducted with builders and artists insinuates a claim to authenticity (this is what they think), it is important to remember that the problem of studying the culture of marginalized groups resides not in the absent voice of the subaltern. Voices of the marginalized have always been present in one form or another; if not in oral and written traces, then in material culture and performance. The difculty rests on the part of the authority, the scholar or social scientist. It is our inability as scholars to hear what is being said that is the crux of the problem (see also Spivak, 1988). Calcuttas bus art, with its dominant textual content, does indeed speak; it shouts out warnings, conveys messages, recites tradition, literary and otherwise, and deserves closer scrutiny to recognize its signicance. This article then is not so much an exercise in quoting interviews as audible marks of subaltern subjectivity and intention, as is the customary practice of many ethnographers; rather this is an explication of the conditions that make the voice/subjectivity in material culture recognizable to the researcher.6 Needless to say, this analysis does not exhaust the study of bus art, even its role as a form of communication.
CONTRADICTIONS OF MODERNITY
Three years ago, while stuck in trafc in Calcutta, I was confronted with vehicular arts power of communication. I was alone in the back seat of the car. A small fan pointed at me was whirring in an unsuccessful attempt to ameliorate the heat of the Calcutta summer. My driver in the front seat was leaning out of the window trying to gauge the depth of the trafc jam. I was late for an appointment. My eyes shifted to the bus in front of us. The following words were painted on its rear: jabo bolei to dnariye acchi (I am standing because I intend to go). It made me smile. At a basic level, the phrase jabo bolei to dnariye acchi is marked by an absurd (causal) inference. The fact that you are standing carries no evidence of your intention to go. But there is more to it. It is a possible take on the title of a well-known Bengali poem by Shakti Chattopadhyay
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jete pari kintu keno jabo, I can go, but why should I? The latter is a meditation on ones existential crisis, hovering on the possibility of leaving or the threat of having to leave. The poem is a critique of modernity in its insistence to carve out the power to choose when and with whom to move on. In the poem these choices are portrayed as promises that would likely not be kept: jabo, kintu ekhoni jabo na tomadero sange niye jabo ekaki jabo na ashomoye. (I will go, but not yet. I will take you along. I will not leave by myself, untimely.) The writing on the bus is both a commonplace address to drivers and passengers in other vehicles, stuck in trafc, and at the same time could be interpreted as a brilliant exposition of the contradiction of modernity, of the impossibility that resides at the very center of the values we hold dear: mobility, progress, development, and the logic of cause and effect. Shaktis refusal, why should I? is turned into a disavowal that mocks modernizations interrogative premise. This disavowal might read as acquiescence, but it turns out to be a refusal to comply with the suggestion to move on or move out. An intentional misquotation, it throws back at me (a member of the middle class) the well-known line drawn from the reservoir of Bengali intellectual thought in a form that is distorted, tongue-in-cheek, and surely makes fun of the utter seriousness of Shaktis line. Shaktis verse has been appropriated more directly in another instance of vehicular art in the city. A quotation from the same poem was used for a similar purpose on the back of a hand-drawn rickshaw in the city: jete pari kintu keno jabo, Kolkatar shebay robo, I can go, but why should I? Ill remain in the service of Kolkata (De, 2002: 105). The reference to disappearance here is made in the context of a plan by the Calcutta municipality some years ago to prohibit hand-drawn rickshaws in the city. Rickshaws, it is useful to mention here, are operated by those who are in an even weaker socio-economic position than the bus operators. A large majority of hand-drawn rickshaw pullers in Calcutta are immigrants to the city. They hardly make subsistence wages and have only a rudimentary understanding of Bengali. It perhaps did not matter to the owner/artist whether the rickshaw puller could read the verse or understand the literary allusion, even if he might favor the sentiment expressed in the text. The objective was to communicate to a larger public, only some of whom would get it. The unevenness of literary knowledge
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among the population at large does not prevent the use and appropriation of literature. Also, knowledge of the exact provenance of the quotation is not critical in this scheme of communication. There are some communicative aspects of bus art that may be useful in thinking through a whole range of related urban cultural practices such as wall posters and political wall writings, as well as the physical spaces occupied by petty businesses food stalls, auto-mechanic shops, and hawkers along the main arteries and bus termini (Figures 3 and 4). This is an extremely variegated matrix of the informal economy in which one inhabits and cultivates the unauthorized. In the eyes of planners and the state, these are the very practices that threaten the social and political order of public space (Rajagopal, 2004). The graphics and writings on buses and the activities associated with these spaces may appear to be minor, even frivolous interventions in public space, hardly political. But my objective is precisely this: to study the minor acts and signs through which a large majority of city residents navigate, occupy, make sense of, and defy their location in the city. At one level, it is the utter ordinariness and ubiquity of these acts/ signs that make them powerful modes of communication and resistance.7 At another level they are sufciently exceptional and errant (and prolic) to have become the subject of prohibition. Recently, the Calcutta municipality ruled that all public buses be uniformly colored light blue with a
FIGURE 3
Food stall on the pavement. Calcutta, 1970s.
(Source: Chitrabani, Calcutta)
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FIGURE 4
Repair shop and spare parts. Calcutta, 1970s.
plain yellow stripe running across the sides, and on the eve of the 2006 assembly elections in West Bengal, the election commission banned political writing on walls. The prescribed yellow and blue color of privately operated public buses is part of an effort by municipal and governmental bodies in metropolitan cities across the country to make the public sphere and public spaces more legible by discouraging visual heterogeneity. Specically, the uniform blue color of the buses is designed to simulate
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an integrated body panel, when in reality the sides are composed of discrete panels nailed onto aluminum strips. Such visual streamlining means that the varied colors applied to the front and back of buses deep green, dark blue and red, bright yellow, contrasted against the silver aluminum siding, as well as glitter effects with tinsel decoration will cease to be part of the artistic repertoire. The new color guidelines that enforce visual homogeneity discourage artistic ourishes and improvisation. It is useful to mention here that as the cheapest bus transportation available in the city, privately operated buses have until recently relied on relaxed government specications, inexpensive nishes, low repair costs, and cheap labor to run at a prot. They are one of the few modes of transportation (along with lorries and auto-rickshaws) that have retained the crafts approach to graphic design, as opposed to computergenerated color schemes and stenciled patterns simulating computerized designs that have become the vogue for the more expensive long-distance coaches.8 For minibuses, more expensive than the ordinary public buses, government regulations have been strict from the very beginning; the cherry color with yellow border of minibuses had been mandated when rst introduced in the early 1970s. Recently the Regional State Transportation Authority has made the color guidelines for minibuses more stringent, with a desire to enforce stricter conformity. In a wider sense, the new regulations suggest that certain forms of graphic practice have come to be viewed by the state and municipal authorities as deviant acts, incommensurable with civic virtue (Chatterjee, 2006). This is certainly true for wall writing with its explicitly political objective, which has been described as visual pollution. It is perhaps signicant that political wall writing, which began during the anti-colonial nationalist movement, matured in the politically tumultuous environment of the city in the1960s, and the writings on buses became more elaborate and challenging shortly afterwards, from the early1970s, with the proliferation of privately operated buses and minibuses to meet the paucity in state-operated public transport. This recent drive for visual homogeneity as clarity is of course, also, a wish to erase difference, those many signs of our backwardness and unmodernity. But this is clearly difference that is threatening, unsettling. The conict goes to the core of the right to representation and the modes through which such representation is concretized. There is a direct connection between the art on vehicles and political wall writing (Figure 5). Typically these are done by the same artists. The prohibitions on wall writings and new color regulation for buses would eventually mean a loss of employment for thousands (Biswas, 2006). It is perhaps ironic that contemporary artists in India have come to use the pictorial and spatial elements of vehicular art as material for their artwork at a time when these practices in reality are becoming obsolete.9
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FIGURE 5
Political wall writing. Calcutta, 1970s.
THE ARCHITECTURE OF ACCESS
Public transportation in Indian cities is more than a means of transporting goods and people from point A to point B. It provides places to sleep and eat for workers, drivers and bus conductors, most of these activities being not strictly permitted by law. These activities depend on and feed into an informal economy that gives public spaces of Indian cities a distinct form. No matter where he stays, the truck or bus driver, for example, can be sure to nd a place to eat or a repair shop at a short walking distance. These may be insubstantial and even illegal structures, but they are xtures of public space. By public space I mean not simply space outside home, but open and semi-open spaces that are subject to certain civic rules and are in turn based on certain assumptions about modern citizenship, as well as assumptions about the form and function of modern cities. Twentiethcentury modernist cities were supposed to be governed by the laws of the automobile. This implies that a certain relationship between street shape and width is worked out in advance, taking the standard automobile as a module of measurement. In modern planning a distinction is made between vehicular roads and pedestrian paths; vehicular streets are supposed to be arteries of movement and not supposed to cater to other uses; sidewalks are supposed to remain free for people to walk and
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not meant to be encumbered by shops and illegal dwellings. In other words, each is supposed to carry only one set of predetermined meaning. Most Indian cities, in fact, are ofcially planned to cater to such modernist visions of economy and efciency. Such planning intentions, however, are disobeyed, disregarded or illegally augmented on a regular basis. Multiple use of public space along vehicular arteries streets, sidewalks, street ledge and even the wall along the edge is a common occurrence in these cities (Figure 6). This involves the practice of revealing multiple meanings that these forms potentially harbor. The basic claim to space is dened by ones body and then articulated by the placement of artifacts that work as an extension to the body. It is an old technique of producing space as an extension of the self. The difference of this kind of production of space from the production of a strictly modernist vehicular artery is that the human body has not been erased or made insubstantiated in the former. The body is very much in evidence, even when mediated by the automobile. Of course, periodic drives to clear streets and sidewalks from encroachment are conducted by municipal authorities, yet, until very recently at least, the displaced groups reoccupied their space after having negotiated their claim on a political territory with city council members, politicians and the police. One could argue that what we see in the streets of the late 20th- and 21st-century city is apparently a clash of two differing points of view: one
FIGURE 6
Typewriting salesmen using a building ledge. Calcutta, 1970s.
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belonging to the upper-middle class, armed with its bourgeois consciousness, and the other belonging to the urban subaltern who is responding to the frame set by the bourgeois vision of the city (Rajagopal, 2004). Albeit simplistic, this framing is analytically helpful for understanding with some clarity the effort of the Calcutta municipality to clear streets of unauthorized occupation and the strategies of pavement dwellers and hawkers for reclaiming this public space. To the upper-middle-class resident the street is primarily a passage; to the subaltern it is primarily a place of habitation. While these uses are precipitated by need, and not always by choice, what interests me are the decisions made to make these needs bearable, almost pleasurable, a locus of creativity. The subaltern response to the bourgeois conception of the city is to turn it around, inltrate the frame, and make it its own. These choices make the relation between the subaltern and the elite middle class not simply a matter of conict, or a relationship of dener and dened, but one of a more complex engagement. The subaltern response to bourgeois modernity involves a hijacking of bourgeois values and inter-spacing these with ideas that produce a fabric of modernity and the political that calls us to rethink the popular. The performative aspect of vehicular art becomes more interesting if we recognize the various scales and kinds of spaces it potentially links. From the garage where it is assembled, to bus stops, repair shops, bus termini (in most cases this just happens to be the street space or a patch of open ground at the end of the bus route), and the food stalls and workers unions adjoining the bus terminus, they constitute a network of unauthorized or semi-authorized spatial insertions along a planned artery that is essential for providing transportation services in the city.
PRODUCTION
The buses are not manufactured in an assembly line. They are handcrafted in hundreds of small workshops in the suburbs of Calcutta and rural Bengal. Some of the oldest and most established workshops are in the neighborhoods of Chetla and Bondel Road, which, until the early 20th century, used to be part of the citys suburbs. Given that even small workshops occupy considerable space, most of the workshops, referred to as garages, are in the present suburbs, located in Shilpara, Hanspukur, Ampara and other localities on and off Diamond Harbor Road on the south, as well as in Dunlop and along B.T. Road to the north. It is a veritable cottage industry, the bodywork being done under contract for the bus owners. Individual practices of contracting vary widely depending on the volume of business and the capacity of the garage. A small workshop such as Modern Body Builder (Figure 7) in Shilpara on Diamond Harbor Road consists of a rectangular patch of dirt covering an area of about 5 katha situated in a dense urban fabric of small businesses, retail shops and residences.10 The front of the lot is
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FIGURE 7
Entrance to the garage of Modern Body Builder. Shilpara, Calcutta,
2007.
rented out to another motor repair shop while the back of the lot touches a residential property. Two small sheds with bamboo mat walls function as ofce and storeroom at the back of the lot (Figure 8). Ponds on either side of the site are reminders that these areas were agricultural and marshland not so long ago. In hot weather, fabric awnings are stretched over part of the site for protection from sun and rain (Figure 9). Established in 1980, the workshop is owned by two brothers, one of whom, popularly known as mejda in the locality, noted that not being able to pursue education beyond high school, this family-owned lot became the prime resource for starting a business. As the locality has undergone rapid urbanization in the last two decades, and land values have skyrocketed, there is considerable market pressure on small proprietors and businesses in the area. The production involves a small number of mechanics and artisans skilled in wood, aluminum, electrical, paint, and ironwork. The only mass-produced components the engine and chassis are brought to the workshop site to commence work. The type of engine is specied by the State Transport Authority, as are the number of seats, spacing between seats, and ceiling height.11 An iron frame is mounted on the chassis, which is then nished with woodwork and aluminum sheets. A ribbed
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FIGURE 8
Rear of the garage with ofce in the background, owners and customers. Calcutta, 2007.
FIGURE 9
Work space in the garage under an awning. Calcutta, 2007.
wood platform constitutes the oor of the interior. The aluminum sheeting comes in narrow panels that are nailed in with aluminum strips, making repairs more cost effective than having to replace an entire side panel of the vehicle. Minor repairs are done as patchwork. While the craftsmen aim at producing a neat assemblage of parts, there is no effort to hide the seams, to streamline the different components into an integrated whole (Figure 10). In contrast to minibuses which have front-facing seats, the interior of the larger buses are organized to maximize standing room, most of the narrow backless seats being set along the edges facing the center of the bus thus creating a spatial conguration in which one is obliged to be face to face with others (Figure 11). Typically, there are no panels on the door, suggesting that the door is not to be closed. Even in those that have door leaves, the doors are never closed during operation. The drivers compartment is completely isolated from the passenger space. After the body of the bus is assembled, a primary coat of colored paint is sprayed on the wooden window frames to act as a sealant, and then the graphic designs are hand painted from a rudimentary set of primary colors. The paintwork and artwork are done by different craftsmen, the artist often earning four times more than the painter. The artists, typically male, work with minimal resources 4 or 5 colors in small earthenware pots or tin cans, a
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F I G U R E 1 0 Interior of bus. Written on the rear panel behind the bus conductors: Bhoy kire pagol, ami to acchi. (What is your fear, crazy one, I am here). Calcutta, 2003.
F I G U R E 11
Detail of aluminum siding on a bus. Note the patchwork repair to the left. Calcutta, 2003.
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couple of brushes, and some rags. The key locations for graphics are the rear end, the center of the long sides, the doors of the drivers cabin, and the top rim of the interior. The drawing technique used on the buses reveals a certain virtuosity of quick brush strokes, and may be genealogically traced back to pat paintings12 and the decorative techniques employed in a whole range of everyday material artifacts from earthen pottery to tin trunks that have a long history going back to the 19th century. Like wall writings that are meant to be erased after a brief period, vehicular art is ephemeral. Every couple of years the drawings and writings are painted over. The artisans who do the body and art, however, often sign their work, providing the contact address and phone number. After the bus is delivered to the owner, additional decorative and religious artifacts are mounted on the interior of the bus (particularly the front top panel at the head of the bus) and in the bus-drivers cabin. Most common are framed chromolithographs or three-dimensional representations of gods and goddesses, saints, and religious monuments such as the Golden Temple at Amritsar, Kali Temple at Tarakeswar, and the Kaaba festooned with tinsel decorations. Many bus drivers and conductors are in the habit of furnishing the images daily with garlands of fresh owers, incense, and sandalwood paste. Unlike buses and trucks in much of the subcontinent (particularly trucks in Pakistan and India, and rickshaws in Bangladesh), these Calcutta buses are not fabulously and laboriously painted. What makes them interesting is the relation between words and image (Figures 12, 13, 14 and 15). The design motifs consist of oral patterns, natural landscapes, images of gods and goddesses, gures that ward off the evil eye, and topical images such as world cup soccer, or the destruction of the twin towers of the World Trade Center. The most common image is a masklike monster face: an apotropaic image, it is meant to ward off the evil eye. Often accompanied by written warnings against the jealous gaze buri nazar wale tera muh kala (shame on you who gives the evil eye) or with old shoes or brooms hanging from the rear bumper, the sign and object compel you to see, but suggest that you look away: dekhbi aar jwalbi, luchir moto phulbi (youll burn with envy and puff up like fried bread)! It is clear that artists are working from a common repertoire, but they are also innovating in line with contemporary demands and political events (Remember Kargil! was a common slogan during the Kashmir crisis of the late 1990s). These are juxtaposed next to quotations from poems and religious philosophy, mandatory messages prescribed by the State Transport Authority, cautionary notes, and patriotic as well as romantic statements. The more elaborate texts are either painted on the rear of the bus, or above the ceiling trim in the interior. Texts on the sides of the bus usually spell out the name of loved ones or hail gods and
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F I G U R E 1 2 Rear of bus: Tomar hingsha amar prashad. (Your envy is my reward). A delicately painted Danger sign, the Indian ag (India is great) and Happy New Year 2003. Mudguards with river landscape and coconut palms. Calcutta, 2003.
goddesses. The elaborate texts may be a one-liner, or up to four lines in length, variously arrayed on the backspace. Thematically they range from the frivolous to the maudlin, from the utterly banal (Dont kiss my tail) to the philosophically profound (ore pagol jabi kothay? ventriloquizing Ramkrishna Paramhansa: You crazy one, where will you go?). A fair amount of profanity (buri najarer mukhe lathi mixing languages and metaphors a kick in the face of the evil eye) is accommodated with rened literary language (simar majhe ashim tumi bajao apon sur, boundless within bounds, you play your own tune, Rabindranath Tagore). These texts differ from both bumper stickers (mass produced personal opinion), and advertisements (selling a product or service).13 Notications are minimal: Donate blood, save green, be green, sakkharatar kaje jog din (join the drive for literacy). There are, however, some texts that are recommended by the State Transport Authority and routinely employed by the owners and artists: Drive safely, Danger, Blow horn, Keep safe distance, No smoking, and My India is great remain the most common inscriptions on buses. Intentionally terse, often misspelt (DENGER!), they have become part of a common language, even among
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FIGURE 13
Rear of bus: Sthapila amare bidhi prithir lalate. (God placed me on the crown of the world). Apotropaic face on the mudguards. The boy in the foreground tends a food stall at the bus terminus. Calcutta, 2003.
F I G U R E 1 4 Rear of bus: Shomoyer cheye jibaner mulya anek beshi. (Life is more precious than time). Calcutta, 2003.
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FIGURE 15
Rear of bus: Trafc ayin mene chalun (Obey trafc rules), with inserted DENGER sign. On the bumper: Jor ka jhatka dhire se laage (The fast/hard hit sinks in slowly). Underneath the apotropaic shoe, a bon voyage sign (subho jatra) with auspicious symbols. Calcutta, 2003.
those with little or no knowledge of English. Often displayed in more than one language, they shout out warnings, advice, profanity and pledges, contributing to the multi-sensory engagement between passengers, bus conductors, pedestrians, and those in other vehicles in the busy, loud city. Notices inside the bus suggest that one is obliged to vacate seats reserved for women, children, and the disabled. The number of seats allocated for this purpose clearly suggests the restricted place of women and the disabled as minorities in public space. Disparate notes placed next to each other in a continuous sequence often produce humorous effects: Beware of pickpockets God is Everywhere (De, 2002). A signicantly large number of texts comment on the importance attributed to mobility in modern capitalism: efcient management of time, quick transportation, quest for upward social mobility, and passage between the country and the city. They are split between advocating the value of time, punctuality, hard work, and efciency (favorites are quotations from Swami Vivekananda, the founder of Ramkrishna Mission: Arise, awake, and stop not till the goal is reached), and serving as critiques of these same values, the unquestioning desire for the better, faster, and richer (Life is more precious than time). Many are direct critiques of the state ideology that
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glorify the nation: 100er madhye 99 beiman, tabu amar bharat mahan? (99 out of 100 are betrayers, and yet my India is great?) is a response to the mandated and popular slogan propagated since the 1975 emergency: My India is Great. The uniqueness and the signicance of this plebeian artwork is that it borrows equally from a craft tradition (both rural and urban) and a bourgeois literary tradition, and infuses them with new images and events to create a realm of popular existentialism, advocating ways of negotiating and dwelling in modernity. It consists of a good deal of Bengali and Urdu poetry Rabindranath Tagore, Kazi Nazrul Islam, Jibanananda Das, Dwijendralal Roy, Muhammad Iqbal and a smattering of English verse and lyrics, such as by William Shakespeare and John Keats.14 Two primary sources are Rabindranaths poetry and the sayings of the 19thcentury Bengali saint Ramkrishna Paramhansa. The former is the hallmark of Bengali high literature with its rened language and gesture towards a universal humanism. The latter is an emblem of a philosophical praxis fashioned from the everyday speech of the Bengali peasantry, one that is also radically opposed to western rationalism. Rabindranaths poetry was nurtured within the connes of one of the wealthiest families in Calcutta. Ramkrishna was a poor, illiterate man from rural Bengal, who ceaselessly impressed upon his middle-class followers the need for detachment from worldly desires, and from the bondage of service (chakri) in the colonial economy (Chatterjee, 1993). These literary and religious practices as responses to British colonialism speak of two different ways that the Bengali middle classes made themselves at home in the colonial city. Vehicular art speaks both to its own constituency, and to the middle class, sharing a common vocabulary, implying a closing of distance. The more elaborate texts are, after all, available only to those who read the language and understand its nuances. And yet they register a critical distance. As quotations, fragments of poetry or philosophy removed from its original context and placed in a new context, they are meant to do a different work than that envisioned in the original. In how many ways could you interpret the juxtaposition of Rabindranath Tagores verse next to an image intended to deter the evil eye? The elite middle-class philosophy of life now comes back to the middle class in unexpected ways, with sometimes just that much distortion to evince a response of shock or smile. There is some element of irony in this return, given that the crafting of Bengali modern literature in the 19th century was itself a process of the elites hijacking the speech culture of the Bengali peasantry (Chattopadhyay, 2005). Vehicular art as popular culture allows us to think of mobility in more nuanced ways, not just as upward mobility, but also as passage from one cultural space to another, from one historical moment to another, from one vision to another. Humor (sly civility) is the prevailing mode of communication. Improvisation is the means.
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From my conversation with the painters and builders it was obvious that a distinct scorn is reserved for the state-regulated warnings and slogans, in terms of both their ubiquity and emptiness: the speed limit of 40 km/hr, one of those mandatory texts, only works as an exception to the rule, one noted. Gate theke jhuliben na (dont hang from the doors) remains an empty prohibition when passengers hang on to the bars of the bus door during rush hours, not because they prefer to, but because they have to, given the inadequacy of public transport. The scorn expressed among the builders and artists and often articulated or implied in the art, has much to do with the fact that state agencies are seen as incorrigibly corrupt. From their point of view, state demands must be met but not accorded the respect of legitimacy. More than one builder pointed out the well-known fact that all aspects and levels of the transport business are caught up in a shadowy para-legal domain in which contracts, licenses and site inspections invariably involve bribes. The owner of Modern Body Builder, referring to a public controversy over disrespect shown to the national ag during a cricket match in 2007, noted: How is painting a ag on a bus any less disrespectful? given the dirt and abuse the buses are liable to receive on their daily passage through the city. In this context, the delineation of the state-mandated messages, as they are made to play off other texts and images invite closer examination. For example, in one of the buses the four top panels on the rear are used to provide four distinct sets of information (Figure 16). But what if they are read in relation to each other? The rst panel contains a STOP warning, which is separated by a blank space from the inscription Mera Bharat Mahan (My India is Great) accompanied by the Indian tri-color. Right next to it is the name and address of the builder: Matri Builders, followed by the license plate. The juxtaposition of the contents of the two central panels might be read as a happenstance or a suggestion of equivalence between the state propaganda and the private advertisement. Underneath it is a panel depicting tents amid a hillscape framed by soldiers with guns, referring to the war in Kashmir (or alternatively, to the war in Afghanistan). The picture is overlaid by two text segments on the top left and top right: juddho noy (no war) and shanti chai (peace now). One could contemplate what precisely is the relation between the commonplace patriotism signaled by My India is Great and the specicity of the demand or desire for an end to the Kashmir (or Afghanistan) conict. At the bottom of the panel, the warning obey trafc rules in Bengali is split by the following text churi korona sona, maliker acche anek dena (dont steal, precious, the owner has lots of debt). Two imperatives, the observance of trafc rules and the payment of ones fare, are given the same weight, albeit in different tongues. The play between the serious and the jocular, the vacuous and the meaningful, continues even further, challenging the notions of private and public
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FIGURE 16
Rear of bus. Calcutta, 2003.
space: on the mudguards at the bottom, the typical monster face or shoe that is meant to ward off the evil eye is substituted with naked male gures urinating. On top is inscribed Good Luck!
LANGUAGE, LEGIBILITY, AND SUBALTERNITY
In looking for a vocabulary to describe Calcuttas vehicular art I am struck by its spatial logic. Language, as we learnt from the works of LviStrauss, Kristeva, Barthes, Bourdieu and others, is a means of organizing social relations and locating people in subordinate positions. Drawing upon Gramscis theoretical insight and a vast anthropological literature, Guha has argued that subaltern insurgency in India was a massive and systematic violation of the words, gestures and symbols which has the relations of power in colonial society as their signicata (Guha, 1983: 39). During rebellions, subalterns inversed the codes of
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power and authority imposed upon them by the elites. Guha cites a British resident of Saharanpur, India, recalling the atmosphere on the eve of the Sepoy Mutiny:
The sepoys on duty at this station had thrown off their customary quiet and respectful behavior, and had become forward, if not insolent; they paraded the public roads in parties, scarcely deigning to move to one side for a passing carriage, and singing at the highest pitch of their unmelodious voices, heedless of who heard them. (Guha, 1983: 39)
The switching of the codes of power on and off was, however, sudden and short-lived. The subaltern was transformed into a political force that had to be reckoned with during that brief period of insurgency; the subaltern who was dened by his or her lack of identity, momentarily gained the attributes of the popular, became legible as part of a larger political whole. The switch from the subaltern to the popular rests on the problem of recognition of recognizing insurgency as insurgency. In its initial stages, at least, insurgency was understood as crime, the action of a small group of malefactors misleading a submissive peasantry. State authorities refused to acknowledge, at rst sight, the altered gure of violence (Guha, 1983: 81). The mechanisms of the state could not comprehend the peasant as having a political consciousness that would lead to rebellion. It was only when the rebel peasants could be apprehended within the discursive practices of colonial law and the colonial archive they became political subjects. The moment they burst into the colonial sign system, they were representable, fathomed within the logic of representation. It was also the moment that marked their entry into the domain of the popular. In Guhas study then, the subaltern gelled into the popular in moments of extreme crisis, and subaltern insurgency took exceptional forms, as heightened and systematic violence, in the radical upturning of the legible marks of social order. Could we translate this relation between the subaltern and the popular to everyday life by seeing the crisis not as sudden spectacular rupture but as woven into daily transactions as small disjointed events? How might Guhas formulation help us in understanding cultural processes that do not conform to recognizable forms of revolutionary practice? Guhas argument, that the colonial authorities indeed failed to read insurgency as such, but chose to read and represent it as crime or deviance, is useful here. Hebdiges study of subculture echoes some of the traits that Guha discerned in his analysis of subaltern insurgency, and provides insight for explaining the work done by vehicular art (Hebdige, 2003 [1979]). Studying cultural resistance through very different material and from another point of view, Hebdige argues that subcultural styles uproot an object in which its meaning has been naturalized and places it in another
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context where it produces a shock effect. He compares the aesthetic strategy with that of dada and surrealism dream work, collage and ready-mades that attempt to disturb the syntax of everyday life and objects (Hebdige, 2003 [1979]: 105). Examples include safety pins taken out of their domestic utility context and worn as gruesome ornaments through the cheek, ear or lip, metal combs honed to a razor-like sharpness [that] turned narcissism into an offensive weapon, and the conventional insignia of the business world the suit, collar, and tie were stripped of their original connotations efciency, ambition, compliance, and authority and transformed into empty fetishes, objects to be fondled, and valued in their own right (Hebdige, 2003 [1979]:1045). He characterizes the stylistic departures as meticulously executed studies in alienation (Hebdige, 2003 [1979]: 107). Vehicular art in Calcutta is not a study in alienation in the same sense as punk. The means in the former are subtle and tame in comparison to the latter, and there is a self-conscious mockery expressed as humor in the communication, a refusal to take itself seriously, to sanctify the communication beyond the contingent. It is also less amenable to appropriation by a culture of conspicuous consumption, because the class location of the owners and artists within capitalism has a very different history. But is it simply a matter of degree or is it a different kind of work? Let us think about the process of putting together the work/style and the difculties in reading this process. Hebdige compares the process of improvisation involved in subculture to that of a bricoleur who relocates the signicant object in a different position within that discourse or places the object within an overall different total ensemble to produce a new discourse. But as Hebdige points out, that does not explain the real import of punk as style. Despite conversing in objectness, punk was abstract, disembodied, decontextualized:
Bereft of the necessary details a name, a home, a history it refused to make sense, be grounded, read back to its origins . . . [A]lthough the punks referred continually to the realities of school, work, family, and class, these references only made sense at one remove: they were passed through the fractured circuitry of punk style and re-presented as noise, disturbance, entropy . . . punk style has made a decisive break not only with the parent culture but with its own location in experience. (Hebdige, 2003 [1979]: 121. Emphasis mine)
In other words, the dislocation and modication involved in punk style suggest a process that involves not merely a disruption of syntax, but a spatial disruption of a different order. According to Lvi-Strauss, bricolage involved creating structures out of events or from the remains of events fossilized evidence of the history of an individual or a society (LeviStrauss, 1966: 22). Event/contingency rules over structure/necessity. Punk
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may be thought of as the play of contingencies in extremis that destroys any semblance of xed reference and creates the dislocation from experience. Incidentally, Lvi-Strauss claimed that too much contingency would destroy the sense of a work as art (Lvi-Strauss, 1966: 29). Vehicular art would not easily conform to Lvi-Strausss notion of bricolage as a science of the concrete. While it is an art of making do, it deals with both objects and concepts. And one could argue that the artists universe of instruments is not closed. It has uncanny similarity with bricolage in that it treats words and concepts as if they are objects that may be cut and pasted and juxtaposed against a range of other heterogeneous images, objects or signs. Consider this working of space at the rear of a bus, during the emergency of the mid 1970s: STOP! The Nation is on the Move [image] From Jadavpur HORN to B.B.D. Bagh PLEASE
[license plate]
The slogan, The Nation is on the Move was prescribed by the state authorities to suggest that suspension of civil liberties was actually lifting the nation out of stagnation, increasing productivity, facilitating progress. However, its location beneath the usual STOP warning and above the sign From Jadavpur to B.B.D. Bagh (the bus route) made the mandatory message completely trivial, showing up its ridiculous claim. This reading is, however, utterly contingent. In the process of creating a structure of meaning it highlights the blank spaces between the words as objects, opening up a whole range of other possibilities. The possibilities are not innite. This art of putting together words and signs, however, creates structures only through a proliferation of events. The structure gets buried or hidden in the multiplication of contingencies. The original sense of the verb bricoler, applied to ball games and billiards, to hunting, shooting, and riding and always used with reference to some extraneous movement: a ball rebounding, a dog straying or a horse swerving from its direct course to avoid obstacle (Levi-Strauss, 1966: 16), perhaps has more resonance here than the way the term bricolage has been adapted in anthropology and cultural history. The spatial arrangement of vehicular art does not depend on tting in odd pieces (either through semblance or jagged contrast), but it assumes, and relies on uncertainties and deections to create a state of play.
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Such a spatial organization that appears unstructured and incoherent, and relies on multiple interpretations of space, is mirrored across a wider domain of everyday practice for subaltern groups in the city. This is the basis of a popular culture that has a contested relationship with civil society and public space produced by or in accordance with civil society. It bears traces of a long history of dislocation, of having to rely on minimal material resources, of nding devious means to access the dominant political structure. It is only when it is read through a particular alignment of contingencies that one reads the potential of this communication as resistance.
CONCLUSION
Vehicular art offers insights into a number of aspects of spatial culture that are critical to our understanding of cities such as Calcutta. First, one might argue that vehicular art as a mode of communication expresses social relations, ideals, and differences in a subtle, largely non-confrontational, and even pleasurable manner. Here we have a form of everyday resistance that enables us to think of the relation between elites and subalterns in complicated spatial terms. As I have tried to explain in this article, vehicular art on privately operated public buses constitutes one way by which the marginalized populations of the city have created their own space in the city physically, economically, culturally. The spatial logic of marginality in Calcutta in the second half of the 20th century was a product of a series of compromises between city authorities, the poor, and the middle classes, between the elite and the subaltern, between the formal and informal economy. Once such channels are obliterated (as the civic authorities seem to be moving in that direction by cleaning up nonconforming visual culture from the citys public spaces), class conict may appear in more obvious forms. What is more important, perhaps, is what we may learn by attending to the spatial logic of marginality itself from these painted buses. The spatial model enables us to comprehend a unique logic of an assemblage of fragmentary elements in space through which subaltern groups make room for themselves within a spatial structure that is not conducive to their existence. The art, although twodimensional, is understood to operate in a speech culture where the warning signs mimic that of a loud shout Danger! Stop or of an incitement to create noise: Blow Horn! Text and image attain their efcacy when set aoat in the multi-sensory public space of the city the loud verbal exchanges between bus conductors and passengers, when looking at a funny image/text from within the claustrophobic connes of a crowded bus, or when reading a verse on another vehicle when stuck in trafc, as I did. The spatial logic of marginality might also allow us to think of space and infrastructure beyond what modernist
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planning would allow. And last but not least, the spatial model might allow us to imagine the problem of political society in terms of a new conception of infrastructure, literally as those structures that remain below (infra) the radar of the state and generate conditions that keep political consciousness on the ground alive.
Acknowledgements I thank Subhendu Dasgupta and Siddhartha Mukhopadhyay for putting me in touch with bus-operators cooperatives, and Gautam Bhadra for conversation on the subject. Also, thanks to Keya Dasgupta, Barbro Klein, and Julianne Gavino for locating readings for me. I am grateful to the bus artists, owners, and operators who took the time to talk to me, and especially to the owners of Modern Body Builder for giving me the details of contracting work and their views of the texts on these buses, and to the members of the Naktala Bus Drivers Cooperative for telling me about working in the buses, their economic struggles and political mobilization. This article was rst read at the Subaltern-Popular Workshop in Santa Barbara, and then at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study, Uppsala. I thank the participants at these venues for their views and encouragement. Photocredit: Unless the source is cited, all photographs are by the author. Notes 1. While some remain with the Communist partys labor union (CITU), others have broken off from CITU, rejected their model of a labor union and formed their own cooperative to oversee collective bargaining as well as individual socio-economic needs of its members. The members of the Naktala Minibus Drivers Cooperative I interviewed have broken off from CITU and formed their own organization. They claimed that membership is not determined by afliation to political parties. The Cooperative, established in 1990, has also expanded beyond its original membership of bus drivers and conductors to include all kinds of casual laborers who do not have any union to protect their interests and survival in the city. 2. Perhaps this problem is inherent in the study of popular culture per se. For example, one may argue that the class/caste solidarity in the popular culture of 19th-century Calcutta has been overestimated. For some idea of the various conicting constituencies that contributed to this 19th-century popular culture, see Ghosh (2006). 3. The great majority of studies on popular culture in India have concerned lm and media. Useful works are De (2002), which is based on a large collection of texts on vehicles across India, and Sikdar (2002). Both authors focus on the texts, rather than the relation between image and text, and allude to the various possibilities of (mis)reading inherent in vehicular art. 4. The great strides made in the mid-1980s to understand urban marginality, exemplied by the work of Castells could not proceed beyond dependency theory, though it raised the critical point that if we have to understand urban social movements we need to move beyond the party as the channel through which resistance is mobilized. Castells was also signalling the spatial effects of what Chakrabarty (2000) more recently and more articulately has characterized as History 2 of capital. 5. In this context see Ananya Roys argument in City Requiem (2003).
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6. See Infrastructure in Swati Chattopadhyay Unlearning the City (forthcoming) for more information on my conversation with members of the bus operators cooperative about their political mobilization. 7. Several scholars including Michel de Certeau (1988) and James C. Scott (1985, 1990) have written eloquently about forms of everyday resistance. 8. At present, the texts on auto-rickshaws have taken up the graphic slack from privately operated buses, producing a wide range of texts that are most compelling. 9. For example, Archana Hande, An Epic (20004); Kaushik Mukhopadhyay, Assisted Readymades: Alternative Solutions (20034); and Mallikarjun Katakol, Auto Art Series (19956). They are included in Sambrani (2005). 10. One katha (sometimes spelt cottah) is equivalent to 80 yd2. 11. At present the state mandates the use of Mahindra & Mahindra engines for all privately owned public buses in West Bengal. 12. Pat are scroll paintings, typically depicting a narrative. 13. Even those that suggest that you pay your bus fare, do so indirectly: bolle pare hobe sona, jal chhara shabyi kena (precious, why waste words, except for the water everything else had to be bought), and alternatively: churi korona sona, maliker ache anek dena (dont steal, precious, the owner has lots of debts). 14. There are hundreds of these texts on buses. Following is a sample:
Amar ei path chalatei ananda: my pleasure is in taking the road. (Rabindranath Tagore) Chitto jetha bhoy sunyo uchho setha shir: where the mind is without fear there the head is held high (a slight modication of Rabindranath Tagores verse; the original reads: where the head is held high). Bujechhi amar nishar swapan hoyechhe bhor: I recognize that my nights dream has turned into dawn. (Rabindranath Tagore). Tomay kichhu debo bole chay je amar mon/naiba tomar thaklo proyojon: I wish to give you something, even if you have no need for it. (Rabindranath Tagore) Ei dharanir dhulimakha shab ashohay santan: the helpless dust-laden children of the earth. (Kazi Nazrul Islam) Gahi samyer gaan/manusher cheye boro kichhu noy/nahe kichhu mayhiyan: I sing the song of equality, nothing is more important than the human being, none is greater. (Kazi Nazrul Islam) Kolakata ekdin kollolini tillotwama hobe: Calcutta will one day become the perfectly exquisite and murmuring beauty. (Jibananda Das) Sare jahan se accha, Hindustan hamara: better than the world is my Hindustan. (Muhammad Iqbal) Awake, arise, and stop not till your goal is reached. (Swami Vivekananda) Whats in a name? (William Shakespeare) A thing of beauty is a joy for ever. (John Keats) Jato mat tato path: there are as many ways as there are beliefs. (Ramakrishna Paramansha) Badle jao, badle jao/badle jete jete/ami thamke dnarayi jibone hath pete: change amid change, I suddenly stall startled in the midst of change and extend my reach to life. Ore pagol ma ki tor ekar?: you crazy one, you think Mother belongs only to you? (the word pagol in Bengali, or pagal in Hindi, literally meaning mad/crazy, is used as a term of endearment and connotes ones disregard for common worldliness). Krishna bolo sange cholo: take Krishnas name and come with me.
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Sthapila amare bidhi prithhir lalate: god placed me on the crown of the world (a take on Michael Madhusudan Duttas lines from Meghnadbadh Kavya: sthapila bidhure bidhi sthanur lalate: god crowned Shiva with the moon. Lalat, literally, forehead, here also suggests fate). Shomoyer cheye jibaner mulya anek beshi: life has much more value than time. Shishire ki dhan hoy brishti na pele/dur theke ki prem hoy kacche na ele? Is it possible for rice to grow on dew alone, without rains? How can love ourish with you at a distance? Chesta koro, tomaro hobe: try and you too shall achieve. Pichhu eshona, kicchu pabena: you wont get anything by following me. Sharire na dile shay/keno kaaj koro hay: alas, why work, when your body refuses? Parashuno karlei manush hoy na: education alone does not make you a good human being. Shanibar madhubar, rabibar sukhibar, hatobhaga shombar ashe keno barbar: Saturday is a honey day, Sunday is a leisure day, why always returns the unfortunate Monday?
References Banerjee, Sumanta (1989) The Parlor and the Street. Calcutta: Seagull. Biswas, Soutik (2006) Calcuttas Colorless Campaign, BBC News, Calcutta 16 April, URL (accessed November 2008): http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/ south_asia/4909832.stm Bolton, Ralph (1979) Machismo in Motion: The Ethos of Peruvian Truckers, Ethos 7(4): 31242. Castells, Manuel (1984) The City and the Grassroots. California: University of California Press. Chakrabarty, Dipesh (2000) Provincializing Europe: Post-colonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Chatterjee, Partha (1993) The Nation and Its Fragments. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Chatterjee, Partha (2004) Politics of the Governed. New York: Columbia University Press. Chatterjee, Partha (2006) Cleaning up Democracy: Bengals Zeal to Sanitize its Public Political Arena, The Telegraph, Calcutta, 16 March. Chattopadhyay, Swati (2005) Representing Calcutta: Modernity, Nationalism, and the Colonial Uncanny. London: Routledge. Chattopadhyay, Swati (forthcoming) Unlearning the City. De Certeau, Michel (1988) The Practice of Everyday Life. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. De, Gautam Kumar (2002) Bahanlipi: Pathantarer Apacheshta, Prak-saradiya Anushtup (Bengali) 1409: 79131. Estenssor, Maria (1992) Rediscovering the Master Fileteadores of Buenos Aires, The Journal of Decorative and Propaganda Arts 18: 15469. Ghosh, Anindita (2006) Power in Print. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Glassie, Henry (1997) Art and Life in Bangladesh. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Guha, Ranajit (1983), Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hebdige, Dick (2003 [1979]) Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London: Routledge.
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Hoare, Quintin and Nowell Smith, Geoffrey, eds (1971) Antonio Gramsci: Selections from Prison Notebooks. New York: International Publishers. Kazi, Durriya (2002) The Spirited Art of Truck Decoration, City 1 (July): 6474. Lasnier, Frank (2002) Rickshaw Art in Bangladesh. Dhaka: Dhaka University Press. Learmonth, Tom (1991) Rickshaw Art in Bangladesh, Mimar 39: Architecture in Development (London: Concept Media Ltd): 769. Lvi-Strauss, Claude (1966) The Savage Mind. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Meez, Herminia Q. (1988) Jeeprox: The Art and Language of Manilas Jeepney Drivers, Western Folklore 47(1): 3847. Pritchett, Jack (1979) Nigerian Truck Art, African Arts 12(2): 2731. Rajagopal, Arvind (2004) The Menace of Hawkers: Property Forms and the Politics of Market Liberalization in Mumbai, in Katherine Verdery and Caroline Humphrey (eds) Property in Question: Value Transformation in the Global Economy. Oxford: Berg. Rich, George W. and Khan, Shahid (1980) Bedford Painting in Pakistan: the Aesthetics and Organization of an Artisan Trade, Journal of American Folklore 93(369): 25775 Roy, Ananya (2003) City Requiem, Calcutta: Gender and the Politics of Poverty. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Sambrani, Chaitanya (2005) Edge of Desire: Recent Art in India (with contributions from Kajri Jain and Ashish Rajadhyaksha). London: Philip Wilson Publishers. Scott, James C. (1985) Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Scott, James C. (1990) Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Sikdar, Sukumar (2002) Bahanlipir Anyabhashya, Prak-saradiya Anushtup (Bengali) 1409: 13241. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty (1988) Can the Subaltern Speak? in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (eds) Marxism and the Interpretation of Cultures, pp. 271316. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty (2005) Scattered Speculations on the Subaltern and the Popular, Postcolonial Studies 8(4): 4756. Websters Dictionary (1996) Websters Unabridged Encyclopedic Dictionary of the English Language. New York: Random House. Williams, Raymond (1983) Keywords. Oxford: Oxford University Press. S WAT I C H AT T O PA D H YAY is an associate professor in the Department of History of Art and Architecture at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Director of the Subaltern-Popular Workshop. She is the author of Representing Calcutta: Modernity, Nationalism, and the Colonial Uncanny (Routledge, 2005, paperback 2006), and co-editor of a special issue of PostColonial Studies (Nov 2005). She is currently completing her book on urban theory and contemporary Indian urban practices titled, Unlearning the City. Address: Department of the History of Art and Architecture, University of California, Santa Barbara, California 931067080, USA. [email: swati@arthistory.ucsb.edu]
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The Art of Aoto-Mobility, Vehicular Art and The Space of Resistance in Calcutta

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Chatterjee notes that these underprivileged groups have to

Food stall on the pavement. Calcutta, 1970s.

(Source: Chitrabani, Calcutta)

Repair shop and spare parts. Calcutta, 1970s.

(Source: Chitrabani, Calcutta)

Political wall writing. Calcutta, 1970s.

(Source: Chitrabani, Calcutta)

THE ARCHITECTURE OF ACCESS

Typewriting salesmen using a building ledge. Calcutta, 1970s.

(Source: Chitrabani, Calcutta)

Entrance to the garage of Modern Body Builder. Shilpara, Calcutta,

Work space in the garage under an awning. Calcutta, 2007.

Rear of bus. Calcutta, 2003.

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