Unlearning the City: Infrastructure in a New Optical Field

6. Auto-mobility

163 6 Auto-mobility Poetics I was stuck in traffic. A small fan pointed at me on the back seat of the car was whirring in an unsuccessful attempt to ameliorate an unseemly hot Kolkata summer . My driver in the front seat was leaning out of the window trying to gauge the depth of the traffic jam. I was late for an appointment. My eyes shifted to the bus in front of us. The following words were painted on the back of the bus: 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—jete pari kintu keno jabo (I can go but why should I?). The latter is a meditation on one’s 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. 164 Auto-mobility The writing on the bus is both a commonplace address to drivers and passengers in other vehicles and at the same time 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. Shakti’s refusal, “Why should I?,” is turned into a disavowal that mocks modernization’s 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 misquote, it throws back at me, a member of the intellectually progressive middle class, the well-known line drawn from the reservoir of Bengali poetry in a form that is distorted, tongue-in-cheek, and surely makes fun of the utter seriousness of Shakti’s line. Shakti’s verse has been appropriated more directly in another instance of vehicular art in the city. A quote 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 robo1 I can go, but why should I? I’ll remain in the service of Kolkata. The reference to disappearance here is made in the context of a plan by the Kolkata Municipality some years ago to prohibit hand-drawn rickshaws in the city. The large majority of hand-drawn rickshaw-pullers in Kolkata are immigrants to the city. They hardly make subsistence wages and have 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 reference, 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 among the population at large does not prevent the use and appropriation of literature. Knowledge of the exact provenance of the quote is not critical in this scheme of communication. Neither the identity of the author nor that of the reader is important. What matters is the reaction of the viewer to the craft of the verse, to the poetics of the unauthorized.2 There are some communicative aspects of bus art that may be useful in elaborating on the spatial logic of a whole range of related urban cultural practices that I have been discussing thus far: street cricket, wall posters, and political wall writings. We could extend these and add other physical spaces: those occupied by petty businesses, including food stalls, auto mechanic shops, Auto-mobility 165 hawkers, and performers along the main arteries and bus terminuses (Figure 6.1). The latter is an extremely variegated matrix of the informal economy in which one inhabits...