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to my Grandathers home in a wet-green village in Barisal churned passions and sentiments that Inever knew existed in me. It is a pilgrimage because he let this home and felds in a hu at parti-tion hoping or all bustle to settle down soon, but was never to go back there, and I was the frstmember in the amily to touch base. Visit to that college near the Karnaphuli river in Chittagongwhere my ather, a young postgraduate rom the Calcutta University, went to teach economics tolocal village students with my heavily pregnant mother. Ma used to say that the walk rom the bus-

stand to the village seemed interminable to her at the time and indeed, it still was, to us, travellingin an air-conditioned car rom Dhaka but held up on the way by an elephant and a broken downbus. Visit to the smoke-flled Chittagong ship-wrecking yards, which David described as techno-logical hell, where thousands o men dissect and dissemble every part o old ships brought rom allover. As we lived on, we learnt to love the country and its peoples, and began to see things with the

lens o insiders.

Whatever ones frst or later reactions are to Bangladesh, the ubiquitous rickshaws cannot butattract the attention o any new visitor to the country; and we too loved them at frst sight. I also comerom small-town India where rickshaws are still the primary mode o conveyance. Part o my grow-ing-up education was my ather t eaching me, a mere fve year old, how to hail a rickshaw: say, eirickshaw bhara jabe?, and then i he says yes, he will also ask where will you go, Khuki?. Then yousay Mincipal Gut school; remember, do not say Municipal Girls school because they wont under-

stand you... and there I was, or eleven years o school and or many more years later in lie, I took arickshaw to my school and elsewhere, alone and without any difculty whatsoever.


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APPRoAching RicKshAW ARt

Investigating rickshaw art, however, is not just because they are dazzling or even because thereare so many rickshaws all around us in Bangladesh. Rickshaws o Bangladesh are indeed an enor-mous industry i not in terms o capital accumulation then certainly or the sheer number o people

involved and also an eective mirror reecting the socio-cultural milieu in the rural and urbanparts o the country. For us, however, looking more closely at the passing rickshaw on city streetsrepresents a deeper engagement with t he context that gave rise to this exciting and diverse orm osubaltern art and with the many individuals involved in this trade. We use the term moving in the titleo this book is all three possible senses: in a physical, in a metaphorical, and in a fgurative sense.

Pictures painted on the rickshaws and their tin panels are not ully confned within that space: theyare never static, always going somewhere or waiting to go, giving us a glimpse o the busy urban olklie. Some o these pictures are rooted in the history or culture, representing lie experiences o theartists or the desires o the rickshaw owners, and the act o the numbers and labour involved movesthe heart o the observer. The pictures and their meanings, above all, are uid and in a ux, changingalong with their contexts, the artists and their intentions.

Not surprisingly, rickshaw art has been studied extensively, within Bangladesh, and by scholars

mainly rom the USA and Japan with brie appearances elsewhere. Our joint eort, o which this bookis a product, thus ollows along i not a road then a well-defned track o an increasing level o inquiryon rickshaw art. As noted, writing this book originated rom our prolonged ascination with the art and


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the artists but led to the generation o a legitimate concern in the sociology o the subject as muchas its aesthetics. However, this book diers rom its predecessors in our approach to and interpreta-tion o this art, its placement in the socio-cultural context, and the inclusion o the art on the auto-rickshaws (baby-taxis) which have now disappeared indeed there are signs o decay and neglectcreeping into the rickshaws. The now banned two-stroke baby taxis have been replaced by largelyunadorned CNG-uelled our-stroke machines (as in New Delhi), resulting in the loss o this particular

type o artists canvas or space o expression. In a ew years time, the rickshaw art may well becomeextinct unless it fnds yet another space o expression.

In this book, we see rickshaw art as one maniestation o a long tradition o art and crat in Bengalas well as one that is rooted in the contemporary and in the daily lie, as a subaltern orm o art, and

fnally, as an expression o the artists imaginations embedded in their experience o urban lie, otenas frst or second generation rural immigrants seeking a better lie in Dhaka city. Consequently, weread the art more in its context that has produced it rather than as a curiosity standing in isolation.

For this purpose, we peeped into the lives and minds o the people involved in the art and decorativesections o the rickshaw industry; spoke with the owners who are part patrons o the art, dipped into thevisions o the artists, and mingled with rickshaw-wallahs and the passengers. For us, the artistic work oncycle rickshaws and the auto-rickshaws or baby taxis that no longer exist in decorated orms, has arisen

rom the Bangladeshi social and cultural milieus: a special blend o Islamic, rural and Bengali artistictraditions, combined with pure personal pleasure achieved through decoration o a working space. Weattempt to give cross-cultural interpretations o the images based on our knowledge o Bangladeshi


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For nine months o the year, the climate o Bangladesh is either hot and humid, or not so hot butvery wet and ooded, even ravaged at times by cyclones; the other three months provide a brierespite o a pleasant and dry winter. The land itsel is undoubtedly a product o the rivers; the soilbeing replenished every year by the enormous amounts o silt brought down with their waters romthe Himalayas and other mountain ranges. Much o this land area is actually very wet, ull o waterbodies o various sorts, meaning that it is continually being silted and its river systems are gradually

being chocked, the waterways still remain the vital arteries o the country. I one ies over the countryduring the monsoon months between July and September, almost the entire land seems to be cov-ered by a thin flm o water. It is thus no wonder that or many years, water-soaking jute crop thegolden fbre was the main earner o oreign exchange needed or fnancing imports. Jute and therich agricultural harvests also brought visitors rom Dundee, Scotland, and traders rom other parts o

Europe, who brought not only their capital and trading skills but also European modes o thinking andChristianity, and set up educational institutions and churches in the urban areas.

The innumerable small and large rivers that cut through the country rom north to south make travelrom one place to another a long-winded aair dependent on erries and their timetables. Heavily de-pendent on oreign aid with bureaucratic corruption reaching a high level, the country is virtually run bythe donors agenda imported along with their our-wheel drives. Thereore, roads and bridges have beenuppermost with rural micro-fnance or women on the recent development agenda; the nearly 5 kilometres

long but quiet or lack o trafc bridge over the seasonally turbulent Jamuna River being a symbolic othat obsession with modernity. Boats o a multitude o sorts still play the major role in moving people andgoods in the countryside as do the cycle rickshaws and rickshaw-vans in the cities and towns.


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less rational, repressed level they are Bangladeshi in a sense that harks back to the pre-Aryanperiod, beore Hindu, Muslim, or Buddhist thought rames existed. At this second level, their historicmemory is a barely articulate tribal throwback to traditional nationalist loyalties o language andsoil, as well as to the natural religion o the rivers, the moon, the sun, and the gram devatas (villagedeities). Every nation has such deep wellsprings. But in Bangladesh the well has been called up inthis century as never beore. It still has not been given ull expression. It may be possible that the

street art orm that the thousands o rickshaws transport around every day is a part o this delight-ul expression.

Although the social history o Bangladesh begins in, and is synonymous with, its villages, and theurban centres had ailed to attract people o the village partly or cultural reasons and partly or lack

o employment opportunities3

, Dhaka has always been a prosperous and primate city. This prosperitywas due to a ourishing commerce, mainly carried out by boats on the innumerable rivers that actedas waterways accessing remote villages, o textiles such as its amous muslin but also products madeo shells and bamboo and agricultural produce such as jute. The richness o t he village economyand commerce attracted many European traders who contributed signifcantly to the melange ocultures in Dhaka. The capital o Bengal was shited frst to Mushidabad by Nawab Murshid KuliKhan in 1717 AD and then to Calcutta by the British East India Company ater it deeated the youngNawab Sirajuddullah at the Batt le o Plassey. The long-awaited nationhood ater 1971 meant that

Dhaka became, once again, a capital city, leading to urban growth which was initially rather compactwith narrow streets. In the past 40 years all Asian cities have experienced massive growth rom ruralmigration, but or Dhaka the population explosion has been unprecedented in the world. This urban


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explain the phenomenon o rickshaw-rides by just the existence o the urban bhadralok culture inBengal; Calcutta or example has had its own air share o the babus but rickshaws do not dominatethe cityscape there. The delightul eccentricity o the highly decorated rickshaws compared to thoseacross the border into Indian part o Bengal is almost entirely a unique eature o the urban culturallandscape. This concentration o rickshaw art in Bangladesh encourages us to trace its identity, thepeople involved in the art and the industry, and its connections with the place which has a long and

vivid history o artisans, and a context that is changing.


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the RicKshAWs of DhAKA (AnD eLseWheRe)

The Japanese invented the jin riki sha, or man-powered car, back in 1867, when a trio in Tokyodrew inspiration rom the horse and carriage. Others credit the concept to Jonathon Goble, a Baptistminister who was an American missionary in Yokohama. He is said to have devised the rickshaw

when the health o his wie deteriorated and she was unable to walk. Modest as the rickshaw maybe, it was an improvement over sedan chairs and within a decade, Japan had nearly 200,000 on itsstreets, and it exported the t echnology throughout Asia.

Whilst Japan did not persist with the rickshaws, elsewhere rickshaws are ubiquitous in almost

all Asian cities and towns surveyed insightully in the enjoyable book by Tony Wheeler and RichardIAnson4. Each Asian country has added its special and distinctive spice to the designs and the rid-ers o the rickshaws; those o urban Bangladesh are the glittering exceptions as they are the mostnumerous, brightly coloured, intricately adorned o them all. Across the border, a ew kilometers away,the rickshaws on the Indian side are plain tin boxes and unctional objects, whereas those o Bangla-desh are literally vehicles o artistic expression. This is because o the extensive use o decorative artorms, paintings on panels and on any vacant space on the vehicles that transcend the ornamentaldesigns in to artistic conceptualizations, making the rickshaw a moving space o aesthetic expression

or the onlookers to enjoy at no cost at all. The rickshaws paintings reveal a vitality and appreciationo lie that rise beyond the apparent poverty and tell us o their aspirations, loves and spirits. The art isrooted in the olk traditions o undivided Bengal, but also in an Islamic culture that has taken a singu-


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Till 1941, Dhaka had only 37 rickshaws, and when t he country became partitioned, there were only181 o them.

Ater partition, Dhaka became the provincial capital or East Pakistan triggering rapid growth. Itwas then that cycle-rickshaws, being cheap to maintain, switly replaced the horse-drawn carriage aspublic transport. Licenses were imposed by the municipalities in the 1940s, the licenses being a copy

o the old British regulations or hand-pulled rickshaws (carts) sometimes called the Hackney Car-riage Act. The regulations state that the equipment must be in good condition, itemizing or examplethe spokes o the wheels but omitting any mention o brakes as the hand-carts didnt have any! Inmany rural areas, a combined version o rickshaw and van called the rickshaw-van too is usedto carry 8 to 10 people at once. These have a at bed o wooden bars resting on the axle instead

o passenger seats and can double as goods carriers. In lesser cities and towns, the dominance othe rickshaw is ar greater; According to Banglapaedia, the authoritative publication o the AsiaticSociety o Bangladesh, 78% o Sylhets and 80% o Comillas trafc is rickshaw-borne, whereas only49% o Dhakas trafc chooses to use the rickshaws, not surprising given that the countrys wealth isconcentrated in this city.

The auto-rickshaws or baby-taxis as they are known appeared in Dhaka in the early 1980s. Theiradvantages in terms o transit times compared to cycle rickshaws were obvious; however, these three

wheelers were powered by highly polluting 2-stroke motorcycle engines and with their increasingnumbers, exhaust emissions, became a great public nuisance.


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Rickshaws, believes Islam, in Dhakas swanky art magazine Jamini8, are to Dhaka what Jeepneysare to Manila and Tuktuks are to Bangkok, eccentric orms o public transport that add colour and acertain anachronistic avour to the city trafc. But the similarities end there, or rickshaws are manu-ally driven, slow, and eatherweight vehicles that look more like some medieval contraption than amodern-day transport. The plates behind the rickshaws, the rickshaw backboards, are o more recentorigin, beginning in 1950s as a means o covering the naked visibility o the chain and the iron rame.

Since then, rickshaws have been carrying two-thirds o Dhakas burden o passengers, without asignifcant number o major accidents. The labyrinthine lanes and bye-lanes o old Dhaka, the at sur-ace on which the city spread, and above all the millions o unskilled poor migrants rom the villagesconstantly ed the rickshaw industry. A recent case study o how the rickshaw-wallahs live in chronicpoverty pointed out that although it is an unsustainable livelihood, meaning that the initial welare or

beneft tapers o with length o involvement in the activity mainly due to ill-health, it is indeed a routeo modest upward mobility or the extremely poor rural people coming to the city or work9.

Exactly how many rickshaws are there in Dhaka today? Islam supposes there might be close to100,000 rickshaws plying on Dhaka streets on any given day, whereas Gallagher10 puts the fgureat 300,000, and Lasnier11 puts the fgure at 500,000. Gallaghers is still the most detailed researchon the rickshaw industry o Bangladesh, building up on the previous research done by Rashid12 andMasum13, and adding a completeness to their work. Gallagher estimated that rickshaws accounted

or 34 per cent o total value-added in transport, and about 4.5 per cent o the national workorce de-pended on this sector or subsistence. The industry o rickshaw making, decorating and painting, r un-ning and controlling reveal intricate and complex organising structures extending into a range o sec-


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Endnotes

1. Novak, James 1994. Bangladesh: Reections

on water, Dhaka: University Press Limited.

2. Novak, James 1994. Bangladesh: Reections

on water, Dhaka: University Press Limited

3. Sirajul Islam, 1992. History o Bangladesh:

1704-1971, Volume 3 Social and Cultural His

tory, Dhaka: Asiatic Society o Bangladesh,

p. 1213.

4. Wheeler, Tony and Richard lAnson, 1998. Chas

ing Rickshaws. Australia: Lonely Planet

Publications, Pty. Ltd, Hawthorne, Victoria.

5. Roy, J.M. and K.N. Mazoomdar, 2003. Brihat

tor Dhaka Jelar Bibaransaho Dhakar Itihas (two

volumes), Kolkata: Deys Publishing.

6. Jansen, Eirik, Antony J. Dolman, Al Mortem

Jerve and Nazibor Rahman frst published

1989, third impression 1994. The Country

Boats o Bangladesh: Social and Economic

Development and Decision-making in Inland

Water Transport, Dhaka: University Press

Limited

7. The term stands or CNGs the short orm o

Compressed Natural Gas the uel which all the

baby-taxis were orced to switch to around

200203 in an air quality management drive.

These are largely unadorned, have black hoods,

and painted sporadically with religious slogans.

8. Islam, Syed Manzoorul 2003. Rickshaw Art in

Bangladesh, Jamini, August p56-65

9. Begum, Sharia and Binayak Sen (2004)

Unsustainable livelihoods, health shocks and

urban chronic poverty: Rickshaw pullers as a

case study, Programme or Research on

Chronic Poverty Working

Paper 46, Dhaka: Bangladesh Institute o

Development Studies.

10. Gallagher, Rob. 1992. The Rickshaws o

Bangladesh. Dhaka: University Press Ltd.

11. Lasnier, France. 2002. Rickshaw Art in

Bangladesh. University Press, Dhaka

12. Rashid, Selim (1978) The rickshaw industry o

Dhaka: Preliminary fndings, Research Report


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First published in India in 2008 byMapin Publishing Pvt. Ltd.

Simultaneously published in theUnited States o America in 2008 byGrantha Corporation77 Daniele Drive, Hidden MeadowsOcean Township, NJ 07712E: [email protected]

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