A typical Calcutta day. Photo by author.

The city’s cobbled roads may not hear the twinkling sounds of the iconic human carriage anymore…

If a loss is just not personal, if the loss is just not about war, if the loss is historical and cultural, the abandonment of the handheld rickshaw is a loss for Kolkata. Because, with the alabaster memorial erected for a dead queen, the living, sweating rhythm of a weary rickshawallah pulling his cart through the city of joy is one of its celebrated images. And perhaps one of its deepest wounds. Here is the man with three staves, and here the Wheel, Eliot* wrote many moons ago, unaware that the epithet may resurface decades later in a different city with a different note. Kolkata’s political figurehead who doubles as its poster boy of reform, Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, wants the rickshaw out. Because he says, they are an anachronism, an aberration to its global ambition. And because the practice is inhuman. Well, Mr CM, it always was.

Kolkata’s cosmopolitanism is in the cultural and economic choices that it offers. And such multiplicity throws up a whole lot of vestiges. Cheap transport for example. So the requiem to the handheld Kolkata rickshaw is also a requiem to a city that is condemned to fight its image throughout its entry into modernity. 

In a profile of Kolkata about half a decade ago, a renowned international magazine referred to it as a city so teeming that even its concrete cardboard edifices seemed to sweat. No wonder, to the undiscerning foreign eye, the cult of an old, sweating, struggling man pulling a fat lady on a hunched wooden panel tentatively sitting on two large wooden wheels through sinewy Kolkata by-lanes became part of its quintessence. Like Mother Teresa, like the bony Bengali babu in a fish mart, like the white sweet balls they call rasagollas, the rickshaw stuck to the Kolkata image like the buzzing sound of a silent film. 

When the streets flood, when buses stand still, when taxis refuse to navigate, then that extra mile creeps from nowhere. That extra mile which our sinewy man would pull you through. To ensure you can go home for the night’s sleep. While they will hardly make a bellyful, carry celebrity diseases, sleep beside their pet-cart in deras, and fail again to save for the next day. The police love them, the local ruffian adores them. And almost all of them, who hold aloft one the city’s most enduring images, came from outside. 

New Kolkata, says noted architect Dulal Mukherjee, does not need them. Adds industrialist Harsh Neotia — like palaquins and horse carriages, rickshaws are passé — they might as well be history. Professor Sukanto Chaudhuri finds the rickshaw as an icon of the city’s squalor and poverty, untenable. Yes, it is untenable. Yes it is cruel. And to put the fact right, only a small part of the bustling metropolis actually sees them. And to remake itself, Kolkata must take the right turns so that money flows, aids rain and jobs pop up. To hell with the hoi polloi. 

Rehabilitation has been guaranteed. Rehabilitation will be. Some will go back. Some will endure. But in the Unreal City/ Under the brown fog of a winter noon* there will be no more rickshaw. And perhaps not that extra mile either. 

*TS Eliot’s Wasteland.