South Asia Center Speaker Series: Tarini Bedi

The Cultural Life of Motoring: Automobilities and Urban Lives in Mumbai

This lecture will focus on the history and present of a community of hereditary taxi-drivers known as chillia in the Indian city of Bombay/Mumbai. It will move between historical archives, oral history, and the lived experiences of driving and repair to explore how the labor of transport-workers in the Global South structures circulations, religious and ethnic identities, and urban space. It also explores the shifts in the changing conditions of work in contemporary contexts of globalizing capital and the emergent articulations of “non-consent” that are produced as result.   

Sponsoring Department: South Asia Center, Moynihan Institute of Global Affairs