Kolkata's Hand-Pulled Rickshaws Are The Last Sketches Of A Colonial Hangover In India
Ramu has been pulling rickshaws for as long as he remembers. Ever since he stepped onto the platform at Howrah Station, sometime in early 1960s, in the wee hours of a winter morning – clutching his father’s hand tightly - innocence became a part of fairytales as his life got steeped into the labyrinthine lanes of Kolkata. He never met his family back home again.
Ramu started going round to the several (already old) North Kolkata houses with his father soon after he had arrived. What started off as helping passengers carry their daily bazaars or just looking at their fine clothes soon took a turn for their worse when his father could not continue pulling their only asset and livelihood earner, and Ramu had to start pulling the rickshaw to make ends meet.
Umang Sharma
“I originally am from Begusarai,” says the septuagenarian rickshaw puller, dragging a hefty puff from his bidi, “but I do not remember much of the place anymore. I think I had two younger brothers and a sister,” he goes on to add. “I used to pull her hair a lot. Don’t know if she is still alive,” he says in a matter-of-fact tone.
What will you do if hand-pulled rickshaws are banned from the city?
“This will never happen. We have our loyal customers.”
But what if it actually happens?
Ramu stares at us with a strange look in his eyes. For him, there is no other existence.
And it is not only Ramu, there are several like him in the city who face an existential crisis if the hand-pulled rickshaw is removed from the streets of Kolkata.
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If things go accordingly, hand-pulled rickshaws will soon be replaced with battery-operated modern vehicles from the streets of Kolkata as the Government of West Bengal is up with a rehabilitation plan for 6,000 rickshaw pullers. Activists and social critics have been calling for the ban of these rickshaws for years now and their demands are worthy of applause, one cannot deny that perhaps hand-pulled rickshaws are representatives of a different time when the lives of human beings were deemed important by colour rather than humanity. But then again, like tea, tram, cricket and Gothic architecture, the hand-pulled rickshaw is Kolkata’s colonial treasure.
1953, Bollywood film – Do Bigha Zameen - directed by Bimal Roy, describes the fate of an impoverished farmer who becomes a rickshaw puller in Kolkata. Is the fate of Ramu and others like him, the same?
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Lachchman (he insists that is how is name be pronounced) is one of the younger lot who are pulling rickshaws. “I came into this profession because I had no other option,” he says, going on to add, “I do not see this as a future for my children. I would rather they excel in their studies and become doctors or engineers.”
And the rickshaw? “Well, she is a part of our family but maybe I will retire it someday.”
But several other older rickshaw pullers who have gathered around us by now seem in sharp denial. They do not want to retire their rickshaws. It is the only existence and means of livelihood that they know of!
As several of them strongly start voicing their dissent, we manage to ask...
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How has rickshaw pulling changed Ramu da?
“Kahaan badla?” (It did not change) he adds, “I still have my regular customers. There are families here that have been riding my gadi (hand-pulled rickshaw) for generations. The dadajis (old aged people) would be our passengers, then their children and now we often pick up their wards on their way back home from school.”
But has not the number or rickshaws dwindled. “Yes, they have,” he agrees. “A lot of my fellow friends have left the profession and moved on. Most of them have gone back to their native villages and a few still live here, but are too old and weak to continue pulling.”
Since the end of the 19th century, hand-pulled rickshaws have been plying the streets of Kolkata. They have witnessed to and remained an integral part of Kolkata’s socio-economic evolution for over 100 years.
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Kolkata’s legacy of hand-pulled rickshaws dates back to Shimla, which was the summer capital for the officials of the East India Company in British India. The Shimla rickshaw was an iron vehicle. It was so heavy that four men were required to pull it. This medium of local transport was a favourite of the British ladies in India in the 1880s.
The rickshaw went through some modifications when it was introduced in Kolkata, but since then this relic from the past has remained largely unchanged.
By the time the wooden version of the Japanese rickshaw made its way to Calcutta, the then capital of British India, in the 1890s, the city’s aristocratic families and zamindars (landlords) used to ride palanquins. The man pulled, embellished palanquin was a symbol of the elite’s socio-economic status. Soon, hand-pulled rickshaw became the middle-class people’s (Bourgeois) answer to palanquins.
In the post-independence era of India, the hand-pulled rickshaw that the British had introduced to Calcutta to exercise their authority and establish their supremacy over the poor Indians became a means of sustenance to the immigrants from West Bengal’s neighbouring states: Bihar and Odisha. It provided the immigrants from Bangladesh with livelihood in during and after 1971’s Liberation War.
Umang Sharma
In Kolkata, a rickshaw wallah's day starts early in the morning at 5 O’clock and ends by late in the evening through a schedule of strenuous labour at daytime. They charge fixed rates on routes and manage to earn 150 to 250 rupees a day.
They deliver goods from one place to the other, carry children to schools and take them back to homes, and carry women to nearby local markets. After a short rest in the afternoon, they continue plying the streets and lanes of north and central Kolkata till late evening.
Hand-pulled rickshaws offer respite when the lanes and alleys of the old part of the city are impassable to taxis, cars and autos due to water logging in the thick of monsoon. The rickshaws keep passengers above the logged water and swim through the flooded streets of Kolkata.
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Speaking about a gradual metamorphosis of the rickshaw, Muktar Ali, vice-president of the All Bengal Rickshaw Union, says that a two-seat, battery-operated carrier will be the probable replacement and hopes it will ensure better business. He adds, “Earlier the pullers earned Rs 100-150 per day on average. Now they may earn Rs 300 because the substitute would run faster. A new, faster model would mean more passengers per day.”
He further goes on to say, “The erstwhile government wanted to obliterate the rickshaw from the Kolkata map, however, with the change of the government, when I proposed the inclusion of green rickshaws as a better alternative, our chief minister showed a keen interest in the proposition. She even went on to add that the state government would provide 90% subsidy for the change.”
The request, however, got wavered due to pending elections but is now under consideration in the current assembly.
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Muktar further says that while the Police and the KMC are the institutions that provide licenses for rickshaws, the last renewal and issue were done in 2005. If there is a paradigm shift in the rickshaw structures, then the license holders are the ones who will become beneficiaries.
Talking about the amount of hand-pulled rickshaws in the city, Mukhtar said, “there are around 6,000 hand-pulled rickshaws but only half of them are plying.”
He said generally people living below the poverty line gets into the profession of rickshaw pulling and if the day comes when these rickshaws phase out from the streets of Kolkata, they will be badly hit. Rickshaw pullers do not know much of any other profession but they do not even want any of their family members to get into this trade.
Kolkata is the only Indian city to keep up with the hand-pulled rickshaw, while this mode of transport pulled by one human being for the other has been rolled back from the rest of Asia. That is why Kolkata often draws flak from the advocates of human rights. When the Communists came to power in China, they banned this rickshaw.
The winter evening has settled in, and with it, we have sat down with our earthen tea laden cups of tea, silent mist rising from the warm milky liquid when suddenly an old lady, walking stick in hand comes up to our Ramu dada. “Ramu, you are late, we have to go to Radhamadhav temple.”
Umang Sharma
Ramu smiles meekly as he gets up, earthen tea forgotten. “Jee jee memsaab,” he manages to utter, hastily dusting his meager rickshaw for the old lady to get up.
“My father used to take her to school, he says with a smile, and then I would take her to her college. And now I take her to her daily temple darshan. Nothing much has changed babu, but we do wish things take a turn for the better for sure.” He goes on to add, “Not only her, we have several such old people who would rather come to us than board a bus or a rickshaw. To them, we are not only an easier and safer option, but we are the only thing that is still connecting them to their pasts.”
Sometimes, perhaps all changes are not for the better. Ramu and the few hundred like him who are still left in the city of joy have a bleak future for sure, but maybe we can think of a better future for them. One that does not involve them losing out on their identity.
Rickshaws are an integral part of Kolkata. They have been time and again represented in movies and documentaries that depict Kolkata as well as by artists and photographers who find in it a soul which is all but lost in other places around the world. A shadow from a distant past, the rickshaw is a gentle reminder of perhaps more genteel times.
