TheDaak review

Book: City of Men: Masculinities and Everyday Morality on Public Transport, by Romit Chowdhury, Rutgers University Press, 2023; pp: 216. ISBN: 9781978829503, US$27.95.

By Ankush Pal

A plethora of feminist scholarship since the 1990s has looked at and studied gender and space, arguing for the necessity of women being able to access public space in the same way that men do. Romit Chouwdhury’s City of Men: Masculinities and Everyday Morality on Public Transport is an addition to the existing academic literature, but instead of looking at how women inhabit space, he looks at how men inhabit space. Thus, his investigation of the construction of masculinity follows in the work of Sanjay Srivastava (2010, 2022) to study the omnipresence of men in Indian spaces. Chowdhury zeroes in on the transport labour of Kolkata and looks at auto drivers and cab drivers. He makes additional distinctions between the auto and the cab drivers to bring to light the nuanced ways in which masculinity operates; while the former are usually living with their families in Kolkata in urban slums, the latter are generally first-generation migrants from the states of Bihar, Chhattisgarh, and Jharkhand. Chowdhury employs an interdisciplinary perspective, adding to the existing academic literature in the fields of gender studies, sociology, and urban studies. The book draws from ethnographic accounts of transport workers and traffic policemen to answer two major questions. First, how do men inhabit public spaces? and second, “how do men’s inhabitations of public spaces produce the city as gendered?” (Chowdhury 2023, p. 2). The book is divided into seven chapters, including the introduction and conclusion, with the former situating the book’s principal occupations and the latter summarising the way in which the book adds to the existing feminist scholarship on space as well as masculinity studies.

The second chapter introduces us to the field, i.e., the city of Kolkata,  the public transportation available, such as auto-rickshaws and taxis, and the Kolkata traffic police. In this essence, the book emphasises the masculine omnipresence yet opposes a monolithic conceptualisation of masculinity by pointing out the differences between the three categories. However, the concluding chapter of the book warns against the “pitfall of this otherwise productive conceptual development that refuses a singular notion of masculinity has been that it has produced essentialist views of subcategories” (Flood 2002, as cited in Chowdhury 2023, p. 168). While the second chapter is focused on auto drivers, the third chapter takes a look at the taxi drivers vis-a-vis their engagement with the city and its people, particularly how their position differs from that of the auto drivers who usually operate in fixed locations and take up multiple passengers at once contrary to taxis which move all around the city. Thus, the chapter also presents us with vignettes of the anxieties of rural-to-urban migration and the repressed sexual desires of the men who are away from their families in the city. Chowdhury also highlights how a majority of the taxi drivers are lower-caste Hindus who migrated from rural Bihar due to a lack of land reforms. Further, he highlights how the urban elite’s “tremendous loathing directed at Bihari taxi drivers comes from an intense desire to be at many removes from a culture that is ethnically stereotyped as backward, boorish, and likely criminal” (Chowdhury 2023, p. 12). There is a notion of backwardness attached to migrants from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, which has often translated into violence, such as in Mumbai. The men from working-class backgrounds migrate out due to a lack of opportunities in their home states and work in the informal sector, leaving them vulnerable to economic and social insecurities, which, added to the biases against them, often pit them as naturally predisposed to deviance. However, the book brings out the nuances and how in some cases, the auto drivers tend to form a sense of comfort with the customers and, on the other hand, how some transport workers maintain a distance instead of being helpful.

The fourth chapter focuses on the Kolkata traffic police, which the auto and cab drivers routinely encounter, and the “transport workers cannot take for granted a right to labour in the city; instead, they have to seize that right through repeated confrontations with traffic law enforcement officers” (ibid., 121). The prevalent stream of thought in urban studies has seen the relationship between marginalised groups and the police through the lens of conflict, where the latter enforces, rather disproportionately in most cases, the law against the marginalised. However, the fourth chapter provides us with accounts of not just conflict but also cooperation between the transport labourers and the traffic policemen, and thus, the title of the chapter: Homosocial Trust. Choudhury elaborates on the cooperation between the marginalised and State actors by pointing out that the latter often position themselves as friends of the drivers, cabs and autos both. The chapter also elaborates on the religious differences among men who provide transport labour and offers an account of a Hindu auto driver who held the belief that the traffic police did not bother much with reckless driving in the Park Circus route, which he calls a Mohammedan area with suggesting that Muslim masculinity was allegedly prone to violence. On the other hand, many Muslim drivers complain how they are not able to adhere to offering prayers or fasting during the month of Ramadan as the nature of their profession requires them to be mobile, and not “following religious tenets often incites feelings of guilt” (Chowdhury 2023, p. 131). The notion of acceptable masculinity in the Indian context, particularly in the last few years, has been of constructing an other out of Muslims, where men from the community are perceived as a threat, as explained above, we see friction between the transportation workers, even when they belong to the same class. The chapter also provides us with an account of a Muslim auto driver who narrated his experience of how the police are more likely to fine a Muslim driver and, in fact, a higher amount than they would demand from a driver of any other faith. Lastly, the chapter also points out how the traffic police harbour a discriminatory view of Muslim masculinity, that of having a natural penchant for lawlessness and thus a threat to public order. While only a few officers admitted this openly, others implied it through their conversations. However, while one’s religious identity shaped their experience with the law, some “may indeed use the legal establishment selectively to manufacture prestige among other men within their community” (ibid., p. 132). An example given in the book is of a Muslim auto-operator who had reported an auto from outside the area to the police, which put him in the good books of the police, in similar tones to that of the Good Muslim/Bad Muslim dichotomy (Jamil 2017). Similarly, one’s ethnic identity also differentiates the encounters of the transport labour with the police officers, making Bihari migrants more prone to harassment on account of being immigrants, which, according to many, was due to having lower literacy than Bengali drivers, opening them up to exploitation at the hands of officials as they had little understanding of documents.

The fifth chapter, City Characters: Morality, notes how the transport labourers practise morality with their passengers, yet, owing to the image of the working-class men in the minds of the middle-class passengers, they are viewed with a lens of suspicion or misconstrued as exploitative. As it has been argued by Annavarapu (2021), the transport worker is generally a working-class man from a lower caste or a Muslim background who is treated with perpetual suspicion and “positioned as a source of risk to women” (p. 2). Transport workers often expect their acts of kindness to be acknowledged and not misinterpreted, and with a consistent occurrence of the latter, “drivers become reluctant to do good” (Chowdhury 2023, p. 151). The morality of the working-class men is not questioned merely by the middle-class commuters but also extends to the state and the law enforcement, for which the book provides an account of a taxi driver questioning a drunk man with a young girl of 8 or 9 who then abandoned the child. At the police station, where the driver took the girl and informed the officers about the incident, they interrogated him for what they deemed as a failed attempt at kidnapping.

The book is replete with ethnographic accounts and vignettes, crafting a vivid image of Kolkata and its transport geography. Romit Chowdhury’s academic training in Sociology and his methodological approach provide a much-needed intervention in masculinity and urban studies, highlighting the nuances of masculinity and the interaction of working-class men. City of Men is an addition to a plethora of research that has been undertaken on studying cities in the context of class, gender, and mobility, carving a niche for itself by looking at transport workers and their interaction with the passengers as well as state actors, something that is generally overlooked. The text relies upon enthralling vignettes, putting the readers right in the middle of Kolkata, reliving the same streets and stories which Chowdhury has built upon for this book.

References

Annavarapu, Sneha. 2021. “Risky Routes, Safe Suspicions: Gender, Class, and Cabs in Hyderabad, India.” Social Problems 69, no. 3 (April): 761–780. https://doi.org/10.1093/socpro/spab008.

Chowdhury, Romit. 2023. City of Men: Masculinities and Everyday Morality on Public Transport. N.p.: Rutgers University Press.

Flood, Michael. 2002. “Between Men and Masculinity: An Assessment of the Term ‘Masculinity’ in Recent Scholarship on Men.” In Manning the Next Millennium: Studies in Masculinities, edited by Sharyn Pearce and Vivienne Muller, 203–213. N.p.: Black Swan Press.

Phadke, Shilpa, Sameera Khan, and Shilpa Ranade. 2011. Why Loiter? Women and Risk on Mumbai Streets. N.p.: Penguin Books.

Srivastava, Sanjay. 2010. “Fragmentary pleasures: masculinity, urban spaces, and commodity politics in Delhi.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 16 (4): 835-852. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9655.2010.01656.x.

Srivastava, Sanjay. 2022. Masculinity, Consumerism and the Post-National Indian City: Streets, Neighbourhoods, Home. N.p.: Cambridge University Press.