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Economic & Political Weekly EPW january 3, 2015 vol l no 1 17

‘Drivery’ in Uttarakhand Memes of Mobility and Socio-Spatial Transformation

Bhoomika Joshi

If one were to explore the dynamics of changes in the “social” in a young state like Uttarakhand, one cannot do so without looking at the “material” and “spatial” facets. In hill societies where an ecological sense of place shapes and refl ects upon a sense of identity, the reconfi guration of place itself due to new mobilities is signifi cant for such an analysis.

Being on the move is perhaps one of the most universal experiences that individuals, societies and

nations have undergone at the turn of the last century. Both, in form and in substance, mobility has been celebrated and contested equally. Treated as a critical signifi er and capacitor for socio-spatial transformations, the materiality of such mobilities also needs to be treated as a point of enquiry for mobility is critically constitutive of the (re)imagination of people and places. This article aims to lay the ground for analysing transforma-tions across the social demography of India beyond the descriptive categories of “urban” and “rural” to include the analy tical phenomena of transitions,

intermittency and discontinuation, “to revisit our topographical imagination” (Mbembé and Nuttall 2004: 352) rather than remaining fi xed in distributive cate gories. It suggests that the “new mobi lities paradigm” (Sheller and Urry 2006) be confi gured into an analysis of socio-spatial transformations in order to deconstruct the complex changes in the material and social landscape across the country.

This article sets out to situate “drivery” and its material metonym, the “shared taxi” in Uttarakhand in the “new mobili-ties paradigm” (Sheller and Urry 2006). It seeks to explore the material culture of automobility as evinced in the socio-spatial confi guration of drivery, a new class of employment for young men in the towns and villages of Uttarakhand. Enabled by the material infrastructure of the road and the automobile, drivery has propelled “(some) people to live more mobile lives” (Elliott and Urry 2010). This new set of itinerants present themselves as interstitial subjects, who are not only agents of mobility but also “mediators of goods, images, ideas and desires through

Bhoomika Joshi ( joshibhoomika@gmail.com) studied social anthropology at Oxford, the UK and works on development and gender related issues.

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the land sca pes” (Sopranzetti 2013), the “rural cosmo politans”, “the circulating people whose social space of reproduc-tion encompasses – and disrupts – the space of the conventionally ‘urban’ and ‘rural’” (Gidwani and Sivaramakrishnan 2003: 341). It is also an exercise to defa-miliarise the discourse on mobility, espe-cially in the case of societies that have been hitherto imagined as comparatively inert to accelerated material and social change due to their unique topogra phical situation and (lack of) linkage to the metropolis (Frank 1966). For the purpose of such an exploration, this article shall concern itself with the hill districts of Uttarakhand, particularly that of Almora.

Getting Around in the Hills

D D has come to Almora in a taxi. This event is as signifi cant for the town of Almora as it is for D D…D D has come in a taxi and will return to Delhi in the same taxi after the bride’s farewell. Until now, he was called Debiya, plainly. Now a need to give him an-other name has been felt … Having arrived in Almora by a taxi and using it to move around, he shall now forever be known as Debiya ‘Taxi’ (Joshi 1992: 112).

D D “Taxi” epitomises the awe-inspiring use of a taxi and a mere association with it in the hill town of Almora. Set in the late 1960s, the Almora outlined by Joshi (1992) felt compelled to make synony-mous D D with a taxi for the use of one. If one were to go by the same proclivity of (re)naming, the taxi would be a univer-sal epithet to most names, as much as it has become a near universal form of mo-bility. However, until the 1990s, riding in a hired taxi from the Kathgodam, the nearest railway station up to Almora or other towns was an upper-middle-class privilege. The “sha red taxi” in its current avatar began to redefi ne mass mobility at the turn of the century.

Ten out of the 13 districts in Uttara-khand are hilly where access to the rail network is not dispersed; the last railhead in Kumaon is in Kathgodam in the district of Nainital and that of Dehradun and Haridwar are the primary railheads in the Garhwal region. State transport and privately owned and operated buses do not fi nd it economi-cally viable to operate in far-fl ung and scattered areas and hence make a fi xed

number of trips. Privately owned and operated taxis have, however, been successfully able to capture the need for frequent and fl exible linkage, only to be recreated anew with the increased access. Its most popular avatar, the shared taxi enables the passenger to pay his/her share of the fare on a particular route along with the fl exibility of getting on and off at chosen points. Progressing from vans and jeeps and now to sport utility vehicle-styled 10 seaters (diesel engine based) along with hatchbacks (petrol engine based) in a rapidly liberalising transport sector, the shared taxi has dramatically changed the modality of such mobility.

The change and increase in the composition of travellers is even more remarkable. Pick-up points are scat-tered along the length of the road and whoever can make it to the road, can make it to a taxi too. Travelling between towns and villages was perceived as a formidable task not so long ago, under-taken only on occasions of mirth and tragedy, other than for bureaucratic criticalities. With an increase in the number and availabi lity of taxis, the spectrum of needs that it can meet have also broadened – government school-teachers can now afford to travel to distant schools where they are posted while they continue to reside in a different town with their family and village resi-dents can now get the nearest market for daily supplies quicker and not have to carry the load on their head. At the same time, the taxis have also created new reasons – shopping has now become a legitimate activity for some young girls and women, marriages are now more doable between distant villages and travelling to areas of leisure and tourism is now more common than before.

Similarly, during elections, as India saw in April-May 2014, taxis and taxi drivers become critical functionaries for cam-paigning. In an area, where the taxi is the only way of getting to those areas after which people have to go on foot, party functionaries and campaigners have to depend upon the taxis to reach out to their constituency. The “tourist season”, as the summer months of April, May and June and the autumn ones of

October and November are popularly known, are entirely dependent upon the trade of the taxi. Tourist destina-tions can carry on their business only if the taxi can move the tourists around.

Most importantly, for migrants who come home to their families during wed-dings, festivals and busy agricultural periods, the shared taxi has a double advantage. Not only does it fray the cost of travelling from the nearest train sta-tion or the bus station, it also provides them with the fl exibility of organising the time and duration of their visit. Jee-wan, a young man who worked in Delhi for nearly fi ve years and has since re-turned to Almora, said

Initially, say 15 years before today, people who came back home found it diffi cult to get to their village conveniently. They had to spend a lot of time in Almora, sometimes even a night before they could fi nd the means get to their village. Now, everybody is connected by mobile phones and if some-one is returning home, they can easily update their local (village) taxi driver and coordinate their time of arrival for an easy commute home.

The agents of the new mobility on the ground – those of drivery – hence become the medium through which society engages and negotiates with the socio-spatial transformation, renewing horizons while on the move.

‘Drivery’: A Portrait of the Man at the Wheel

O Chandu driver, please drive slowlyThese are winding roads Chandu, please drive carefully.

Chandu is the face of the ubiquitous gadi wala (taxi driver), a rapidly growing choice of livelihood not only in Almora but also across the state. Young men between the ages of 20 and 45 fashion themselves as “drivers”, steering the taxi in and out of the town, eking not only a

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living but a lifestyle too. Driving through the winding roads, these young men and their taxis refl ect in the popular culture of the area too. As locally produced pahari pop like the one mentioned above, has the young male driver at its core, so does moving around in the hilly state.

Youth unemployment in Uttarakhand has been a consistent phenomenon, especially for educated youth. Unemploy-ment levels are staggering, especially in rural areas at 11% (third highest in the country) with women lagging behind by almost double. Abetted by a generational shift away from land-based work and a policy failure to create more opportu-nities, young men are “all dressed up with nowhere to go” (Deuchar 2014). Disenchanted with the (undelivered) promise of education leading to employ-ment, young men in the state have been eternal subjects of discipline and of ridicule, by the state and the family. Unemployment is such a mundane meta-phor for the young, especially male, that it is almost a legitimate way of being. In a regular column in a Hindi national daily in the 1990s “Nithalla Chintak” (unoccupied thinker) remarked upon the utility of unemployment – “House-holds function only because of the un-employed, if they weren’t around, who would get things done?” Like Jeffrey et al (forthcoming) state:

Over the last few decades there has been an increase in families’ and states’ invest-ment in schooling throughout the world. People have come to imagine education as a pathway to economic and social mobility and educational levels have risen rapidly. But since the 1980s economic change has typically failed to generate white-collar jobs within the manufacturing and serv-ices sectors. This shortage of salaried em-ployment has created a crisis of educated unemployment.

The crisis of educated unemployment therefore creates a prolonged sense of waiting, of deserving entitlement hav-ing waited so long. However differing from Jeffrey’s location of ethnography in western Uttar Pradesh (Jeffrey 2010), young men in Uttarakhand do not come from prosperous agricultural back-grounds and cannot fall back upon the (diminishing) prospects of agriculture

in the region. Abetted by rampant alcoholism, which also compelled a spell of prohibition in different areas between 1965 and 1971 (Kumar 1997), slogans of nasha nahin, rozgaar do (give us employ-ment, not alcohol) echoed in the social movement against alcohol in 1984 (Pathak 1995). The creation of Uttarakhand itself was justifi ed so that jobs could stay home when the erstwhile Uttar Pradesh government announced reservation for jobs for Other Backward Classes (OBCs) in 1994. Most public entrepreneurial ventures, Hindustan Mac hine Tools in Ranibagh, spinning mills in Kashipur and Jaspur, magnesite factories in Almora and Pitthoragarh, have failed due to inadequate infrastructural facilities, poor management, disrupted linkage between production and the market (Joshi 2014). The recent setting up of the State Infra-structure and Industrial Development Corporation of Uttarakhand Ltd (SIDCUL) in Rudrapur also creates a demand for only low-skilled labour within the state – the young educated workforce hence continues to fall through the gaps of these endeavours.

The business of the shared taxi has, however, created a new class of employ-ment for young men in towns and villa ges. “Drivery”, as it is popularly known is a professional calling; it becomes the means of affi rming one’s income and sense of purpose in an environment where the promise of either employment or enterprise is acutely limited. Accord-ing to Tahir, a local-resident driver in Almora who has been in the business for nearly 20 years now,

the shared taxi dhandha (business) is mushrooming. The lack of formal employ-ment coupled with the lack of capital avail-ability for other businesses makes it an attractive opportunity. The government too is happy with it; it only means a rise in its revenues.

Handling the wheel, moving between places, coming face to face with stran-gers, earning cash on a daily basis, being in control of a machine and of people’s movement – offers opportunities that both attract and entrench young mascu-linities, only reaffi rmed with a form of employment. Speaking of kombi (shared) taxis and drivers in the

township of Chatsworth near Durban, Hansen (2006) says:

The promise of earning a fast buck in a job that does not require formal training, the cool style of the drivers, and the sheer promise of a world fl ush with quick cash and potential have made the industry a highly attractive place for many young men (Hansen 2006: 187).

Drivery attracts men from both towns and villages. According to Chandan, native of Jalna village in Almora district, it is even more profi table for those who live in the village and drive to and from the towns on a regular basis. Unlike in towns, an owner-cum-driver from a village usu-ally has another source of income too – a grocery shop with limited fare, a dukaan (shop) selling tea and popular eats by the road. Such drivers have a fi xed and regular clientele of passengers – teachers travelling from towns to schools in the village, those going to the town for labour and to the bazaar. Sometimes, some of these drivers will also bring their families along and stay in the city, mostly to pro-cure English medium education for their children in private schools. A new set of itinerants is now out on the roads, in their taxis and is ferrying others along with them. Not only have they become agents of mobility, they have also become:

mediators of goods, images, ideas and de-sires through the landscapes …The drivers redefi ne what urban life is, what spaces are reachable and unreachable, as well as restructure the economic, social, legal and political relations among its dwellers (Sopranzetti 2013: 4).

Drivers, on the move, navigating land-scapes, boundaries, people and places across the terrain of the mountains are also the “rural cosmopolitans” (Gidwani and Sivaramakrishnan 2003), the “circu-lating people whose social space of reproduction encompasses – and disrupts – the space of the conventionally ‘urban’ and ‘rural’” (Gidwani and Sivarama-krishnan 2003: 341). As a process articu-lating across both disruptions and con-tinuums, mobility is reifi ed through parti cular material cultures and imagi-naries that are equally signifi cant in their capacity for social transformation. In her ethnographic monograph on pre-urbanisation in the middle hills of

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Uttarakhand, Mehta (2014) states of the current young generation:

This is a generation whose educational qualifi cations, employment trajectories and, above all, aspirations for the kinds of lives they would like to live that has moved them far out of the orbit of anything their elders might ever have envisaged (Mehta 2014: 2)

The reality of mobilities in circulation and the imagination of those waiting to happen equally circumscribe the diver-gence in the intergenerational sense of place and identity. Automobility, accor-ding to Sheller and Urry (2000: 739), “makes instantaneous time and the ne-gotiation of extensive space central to how social life is confi gured …it recon-fi gures the modes of especially urban sociality”. Such an acceleration of the pace of life in general and of hill mobility in particular is best manifested in the surge of the shared taxi.

New Mobilities, People and Places

Being in a car on the road certainly pro-vides a vantage point that reconfi gures the topographical imagination and mobility across it. The combination of the road and the taxi has reconfi gured the face of the villages, especially those along the road. Chattaraj (2010) in her analy-sis of “roadscapes” focuses on informal industry and everyday life along a high-way – the National Highway 117 – which links rural and urban spaces, and in doing so highlights how “new forms of previously city-based work have spread along highways, and rural spaces are urbanising in-situ as villagers incre-asingly shift away from agriculture towards consumer cultures”. Writing about the development of hill stations during the colonial period, as “signifi -cant entrepots”, Pradhan (2007) states that “what was previously left to chance encounters in fairs and local marts now came to be centralized in the hill stations… the hill stations were rapidly entangled in a mesh of relations that inte-grated it into a larger socio-economic whole” (Pradhan 2007: 80). Therefore as agents of circulation, the road and the taxi not only build upon the mo-mentum of such circulation; they also often propel new tangents of mobility and circulation.

Drivery, represented in the society of young male drivers and in the move-ment of the shared taxis through the physical and social landscape of the hill state, constitutes the immediate in an array of intergenerational choices of mo-bility; a choice that is reshaping the rela-tionship between people and places in Uttarakhand. In its practice, drivery cre-ates and inhabits a “metropolitan body” (Lewis 2000), removed from embodied experiences, which “cannot reassess it-self in relation to the landscape”. It lends itself as a material culture, the access to which makes one conscious of the “groundlessness” of movement and set-tlement (Lewis 2000). In the context of hill societies where a sense of place and people draws upon groundedness – con-tingent topography and the motility to negotiate it – the access to shared taxis and use of drivery provides opportuni-ties to imagine being in transit – a con-sciousness which emanates from a rup-ture between place and people.

If one were to therefore explore the dynamics of changes in the “social” in a young state like Uttarakhand, one cannot do so without looking at the “material” and “spatial” facets of such changes. In particular, in hill societies where an eco-logical sense of place shapes and refl ects upon a sense of identity, the reconfi gura-tion of place itself due to new mobilities is certainly signifi cant for such analysis. These socio-spatial transformations raise new questions for the social sciences and as Sheller (2011: 1) puts it, they are also “suggestive of new theoretical and

methodological appro aches; it calls upon a methodology that also moves along with people, ima ges or objects that are moving and being studied” (Urry 2007: 6). New social research must challenge the methodological sedentarism of fi nding people in places; people are on the move and unlike the geometrical spaces of ur-banists and archi tects, they “lack a place” and “proper meanings” (de Certeau 1998). In their semi nal essay on space and power, Gupta and Ferguson (1992) challenged the “power of topography” that can “conceal successfully the topogra-phy of power” and emphasised that

The ability of people to confound the estab-lished spatial orders, either through physical movement or through their own conceptual and political acts of reimagination, means that space and place can never be “given” (Gupta and Ferguson 1992: 17)

In the context of research in south Asia, such scholarship and suggestions in this direction are beginning to emerge (Bedi forthcoming; Chattaraj 2010; Goo ptu 2009; Jodhka 2014; Mehta 2014; Sadana 2010; Sopranzetti 2013; Stanford Uni-versity Press, forthcoming; Zhang 2009; Zhang 2001). Further and sustai ned explo-rations need to be foregrounded in the material and spatial turn in the social sciences, “tracking the power of discourses, practices and infrastructures of mobility in creating the effects of both movement and stasis” (Sheller 2011: 2). For a demo-graphic landscape marked by fl ux and friction, the memes of mobility in their varied forms are integral to any analysis of the ensuing socio-spatial transformations.

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