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TARINI BEDI, 2022, Mumbai Taximen: Autobiographies and Automobilities in India, Seattle: 

University of Washington Press, 248 pp., ISBN 9780295749860 

 

In Mumbai Taximen, Tarini Bedi holds open the door for readers to hop into a kaalipeeli taxi with 

her. Together, in the classic “black and yellow” Padmini taxis of Mumbai, India, Bedi and readers 

“follow how people make lives through driving work and how they participate in a city’s 

economic, bureaucratic, and political shifts amid the noise, vibrations, emissions, dust, scrapes, 

and bumps” on the road (9). En route, readers are introduced to several main protagonists in the 

chillia caste, a hereditary claim to a specific Sunni Muslim Momin kin network of male taxi drivers 

and their families in Mumbai who have been migrating from Palanpur, Gujarat since the early 

twentieth century. Bedi closely relays a story of Mumbai’s world of driving work from the 

perspectives of these drivers and their fabled kaalipeelis. 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. The fluid ecology described in Mumbai Taximen draws readers into concerns and 

contentions of value, care, kinship, technicity (Fisch 2018), modernity, nostalgia, and knowledge 

production. 

 Mumbai Taximen is signposted by a number of orienting questions and provocations in the 

Introduction that re-surface throughout the following six chapters in light of specific moments in 

the stories and lives of her chillia interlocutors. What do taximen’s stories of driving [in Mumbai] 

teach us about how urban workers inhabit, debate, and refuse change, especially when change is 

happening everywhere? How do taxi drivers live honorable, ethical, and sensually fulfilled lives? 

(4). In a mobile and migrant profession like driving work, what can we learn about kinship and 

locality-based relationality? What do the relational networks of chillia taximen reveal about the 

ways labor is differentially imagined and embodied across genders? How does a road connect 



 

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people to other urban ecologies to imprint itself on the senses and bodies of those who drive for a 

living? (13). 

 Addressing these questions, Bedi works through a number of nuanced arguments to 

ultimately develop a theorization of what she calls Indian automobility (193). Indian automobility 

is presented as a postcolonial phenomenon that bounds together the working-class car culture, taxi 

trade, and roadbuilding that emerged globally in the twentieth century with the specifically 

emplaced sensorial and social labors associated with automobiles in India. The global elements 

surrounding this automobility take a back seat, though, in the ethnography. Instead, Bedi writes 

that her intentional focus is to dwell with and inhabit the immediate sensory worlds of chillia 

taximen on the Mumbai roads, drawing on the ideas of sensuous scholarship (Stoller 1997) from 

a number of anthropologists (Howes 2003, Ingold 2000, Laplantine 2015, Munn 1992).  

 With its wonderful attention to the sensuous, Mumbai Taximen productively channels 

attention to competing regimes of value encountered in driving work that are expressed through 

the emic analytics of joona (original, old),  jaalu (web/ecology), dhandha (profession), and dhek-

bhal (care), which respectively form four of the six chapters. Other Gujarati terms like dhooli 

(dust), ghulami (slavery), naka (crossroads), and maal (commodity) also play important roles in 

revealing chillia commitments and the author’s analysis of value and automobility. The glosses 

here offer some orientation to the terms’ meanings but a review cannot do justice to how the book 

closely inhabits the semiotic layers and embodied entanglements of their concepts across drivers, 

family members, mechanics, passengers, police officers, bureaucrats, cars, and the road. For those 

unfamiliar with South Asia and the polysemous usages of terms across languages, some readers 

may find the many terms distracting. Readers will quickly recognize, though, that Bedi’s reliance 

on these terms in the ethnographic writing is inspired by, if not to say accountable to, the language 

necessitated in her ethnographic practice attending to the open edges and ambiguities taximen 

shape in their daily navigations of the road.   

 A key anchor to Mumbai Taximen’s ecology is joona (Chapter 3), which encapsulates ideas 

and connotations about older people or objects. Debates around joona between taximen and police 

officers or bureaucrats hinge on anxieties of originality and obsolescence. Joona taximen claim 

their rights to the city through generations of embodied road knowledge as original drivers of the 

taxi trade, their service-orientation, and responsibility for the roads and its passengers as they drive 

their classic kaalipeelis. Officials, on the other hand, often accuse joona taximen as being stuck in 



 

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the past, driving their outmoded taxis that don’t satisfy modern technological and pollution 

regulations mandated by the city and so-called global standards of modernity. Bedi and her 

interlocutors shuttle readers through the ways these tensions jam and viciously entangle questions 

and ambivalences of morality, subjectivity, capital, and technology.     

 The intricacies of the taxi dhandha (Chapter 1) and the chillia jaalu (Chapter 4) emerge 

out of these tangles. The profession of driving work (dhandha) occupied by chillia, Bedi shows, 

relies on a tightly knit, socially regulated and distributed kinship network of responsibilities and 

obligations (jaalu) that includes sharing cars, re/selling permits, car maintenance, loans, marriage 

arrangements, housing, and other forms of aid and care (dekh-bhal) for people and cars. The jaalu 

network of chillia connects drivers, their families, and mechanics, such that drivers are not 

positioned as masculine subjects individuated professionally and physically away from everyone 

else, but instead as one among many interdependent agents operating within the collective kinship 

network. In turn, jaalu offers interesting insights into gendered labor and economic opportunities, 

cultivations of pious chillia Muslim subjectivity, and the mutual dependence between human 

bodies and machine bodies, all of which would not be as evident without Bedi’s attention to the 

sensuous relationalities of the taxi trade.  

 Mumbai Taximen’s attention to joona, jaalu, dhandha, and dekh-bhal is a welcome move 

in a growing body of decolonial and feminist literature that thinks and feels with local knowledges 

and practices on their own linguistic and sensory terms. Thus, the work is an excellent example to 

ethnographers of one way to bridge the gap often felt between the immediacies and aliveness in 

the happening of research and the temporal and energetic delay of reconstructing that research 

through writing. 

 Furthermore, the book is a wonderful addition to extended studies of Mumbai’s social and 

material infrastructural worlds, as well as for researchers of urban labor across the globe. Of special 

note, with its close following of the main protagonists, the book’s storytelling is reminiscent of the 

microcosmic grittiness and detail of the documentary stories in Bombay Brokers (2021), edited by 

Lisa Björkman. Since the chapters are hyper-focused to the specific experiences of chillia drivers 

in Mumbai, one might be left wanting more extended engagement with other studies of neoliberal 

infrastructure and modern subjectivity within India and elsewhere. With acknowledgment of this 

opening, though, Bedi’s study is an invitation to comparative research on especially auto-rickshaw 

drivers’ worlds in Mumbai and other cities of South and Southeast Asia, passengers’ experiences 



 

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of driving work, app-based rideshare and delivery drivers, other spaces of Muslim labor, and 

generally hereditary labor. 

 What goes unstated in the book’s introductory reflections about nostalgia is that Bedi’s 

account herein may very well be one of historical significance, documenting the possibly final 

generation of such hereditary drivers. Since the book’s publication in 2022, the joona Padmini 

kaalipeelis met their official, legal phasing out in October 2023. 

 

 

Works Cited: 

 

Björkman, Lisa, ed. Bombay Brokers. Durham: Duke University Press, 2021. 

 

Fisch, Michael. An Anthropology of the Machine: Tokyo's Commuter Train Network. Chicago: 

University of Chicago Press, 2018.  

 

Howes, David. Sensual Relations: Engaging the Senses in Culture and Social Theory. Ann 

Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003. 

 

Ingold, Tim. The Perception of the Environment Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. 

London: Routledge, 2000. 

 

Laplantine, François. The Life of the Senses: Introduction to a Modal Anthropology. London: 

Bloomsbury, 2015. 

 

Munn, Nancy D. The Fame of Gawa: A Symbolic Study of Value Transformation in Massim 

(Papua New Guinea Society). Durham: Duke University Press, 1992. 

 

Stoller, Paul. Sensuous Scholarship. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997. 

 

 

Drew Kerr is a PhD candidate in Anthropology at the University of California, San Diego. His 

research worlds revolve around cultural production (primarily poetry), the politics of feeling, 

senses of collectivity, and semiotics. To explore these topics, his dissertation research dwells 

with the contemporary social lives of Urdu poetry in urban North India. 

 

 

 

© 2024 Drew Kerr 


