I had never seen a cycle-rickshaw for real before coming to New Delhi from a southern Indian State where only the three-wheeled variety plies — the sturdy, yellow autorickshaws. It took me a while to get used to the human-operated carriers, which were everywhere in the national capital.
Asking around, I soon realised that to most others these cycle-rickshaws were banal contraptions and the curiosity they evoked in me was unusual in the local context. As I’d only expected, a little bit of research exposed me to a slew of studies, essays and newspaper articles on the rickshaws, and also the rickshaw-wallahs.
I learned that since the 1940s when they were introduced in Delhi, the number of rickshaws has grown by leaps and bounds, and the current figure is apparently six lakh. I learned that the majority of rickshaw-wallahs pull for eight to 10 hours a day. But after a day’s hard toil they often have no place even to sleep, so most of them sleep on their rickshaws out of fear of it being stolen or confiscated. Also, the contractors who own many of these rickshaws exploit then in inhuman ways.
It was not the economic, social or political aspects of the lives of the rickshaw-pullers that haunted me after each ride. Strangely enough, it was a certain guilt-tainted discomfort that I experienced while riding and seeing others ride the rickshaws.
The moment of guilt and discomfort had come the first time, when at a traffic signal and gradient the rickshaw-puller got off and started pulling the vehicle forward, with me on it. His dark-tanned, sweaty hands, and every sinew in his body were straining under the weight. (Why I did not offer to get down and help him, I still cannot fathom.)
There are many instances where one sees the hard physical toil of labourers – porters in railway stations, masons and load-carriers at construction sites and other such people who are paid (or sometimes not paid) to do all the strenuous physical work. There are thousands of cases of exploitation of these labourers in India, which we directly or indirectly bear witness to every day. But why did seeing the rickshaw-wallah pull people cause in me a stronger discomfort and guilt than any other?
Perhaps it was seeing the drastic class difference between those who are carried and the rickshaw-wallahs who carry them physically: it is a dirty picture of the Indian reality. If that was the case, why hadn’t I experienced a feeling as intense when I had paid porters to carry my heavy luggage?
I think there could be another reason, one that the vehicle carries in its trail. The rickshaw ceases being just a rickshaw and turns itself into a metaphor, a moving metaphor, which evokes the collective human memory of physical labour and its exploitation. A metaphor that captures and makes visible all human suffering and its history so intensely yet so easily.
India’s feudal past is still very much present in most of our socio-political institutions, and even in our relationships with one another. This is an experienced but mostly invisible reality we have all become habituated to. In the cycle-rickshaw, this feudalistic order takes on the most abominable form as compared to any other form of exploitative hierarchy, simply because it is a human being that is carried by another. It appears as if the mere act of the rickshaw-wallah pulling another person gives the latter power and authority over the former. The impact of this metaphor becomes stronger and all the more real, coming to life on the roads where the rickshaws move in abundant numbers.
As I walk out into the street, I no longer see mere ‘frail-looking, human-run carriers’, but a powerful metaphor that silently carries a big chunk of the story of the human past.
meenakshiajaykumar@gmail.com
