Hybrid Technologies and Contested Notions of ‘Dignified Labour’: The Chequered Career of the Man-Powered Rickshaw in India (c. 1880s-1980s)

After briefly dwelling on the history of hand-pulled rickshaws, this paper reconstructs the trajectories of the cycle rickshaw in India from the time when they became a popular means of transport in the late 1930s through the 1980s when the muscle powered three-wheelers were increasingly challenged by motorized vehicles. The focus lies on the protracted debates revolving around rickshaw-pulling as a means of livelihood. The popularity of the three-wheeled urban taxi created a vast army of precarious workers in South Asian cities from the 1940s to the 1980s. During these decades, the rickshaw trade represented often the only available source of income for unskilled and illiterate migrants moving from the rural hinterlands into urban environments. Already by the late 1940s, however, cycle rickshaw driving was attacked by the Indian government as an exploitative form of ‘undignified’ labour and in the subsequent three decades the iconic transport tricycles turned into the ultimate signifier of Indian ‘backwardness’. The paper explores the resulting tensions between the need of an economic safety net for India’s urban poor and the fear of being regarded as ‘underdeveloped’ and discusses various remedies proposed from the 1950s through the 1980s that were supposed to ease the plight of the rickshawallahs. Such measures ranged from the establishment of non-exploitative cycle rickshaw-cooperatives to technical ‘improvements’, such as the introduction of gears and the use of so-called ‘power packages’ (auxiliary engines).  Arguably, the latter approach was typical for early independent India, where the Nehru administration had fostered an almost unlimited trust in the capability of science and technology to remedy social problems.