There's a poignant scene in the 2019 blockbuster Bollywood film Gully Boy in which—after an accident leaves the father of a young college student named Murad unable to perform his regular job (as a private driver for well-off Bombay family)—the driver offers Murad's services in his stead. Murad takes his father's place at the wheel the next morning in a defeated acquiescence to the city's entrenched class and status hierarchies. The scene is moving, packed with what might seem to be universally resonant themes: a bright student's dreams of education-fueled upward mobility are dashed against the exigencies of his family's collective survival in a desperately precarious social and economic environment.
I recalled that Gully Boy scene while reading Tarini Bedi's beautiful new book, Mumbai Taximen: Autobiographies and Automobilities in India—an ethnographic account of the lives and livelihoods of the community of Gujarati-speaking, Sunni Muslim taxi drivers, known in Mumbai...
