TARINI BEDI, 2022, Mumbai Taximen: Autobiographies and Automobilities in India, Seattle: University of Washington Press, 248 pp., ISBN 9780295749860

In Mumbai Taximen, Tarini Bedi holds open the door for readers to hop into a kaalipeeli taxi with her. Together, in the classic “black and yellow” Padmini taxis of Mumbai, India, Bedi and readers “follow how people make lives through driving work and how they participate in a city’s economic, bureaucratic, and political shifts amid the noise, vibrations, emissions, dust, scrapes, and bumps” on the road (9). En route, readers are introduced to several main protagonists in the chillia caste, a hereditary claim to a specific Sunni Muslim Momin kin network of male taxi drivers and their families in Mumbai who have been migrating from Palanpur, Gujarat since the early twentieth century. Bedi closely relays a story of Mumbai’s world of driving work from the perspectives of these drivers and their fabled kaalipeelis. The book’s attention to chillia drivers, specifically, and to their taxis as integral extensions of them, offers a rich and sensuously curious ethnography that pushes readers beyond classical issues of the city about poverty and the politics of labor. The fluid ecology described in Mumbai Taximen draws readers into concerns and contentions of value, care, kinship, technicity (Fisch 2018), modernity, nostalgia, and knowledge production.

Mumbai Taximen is signposted by a number of orienting questions and provocations in the Introduction that re-surface throughout the following six chapters in light of specific moments in the stories and lives of her chillia interlocutors. What do taximen’s stories of driving [in Mumbai] teach us about how urban workers inhabit, debate, and refuse change, especially when change is happening everywhere? How do taxi drivers live honorable, ethical, and sensually fulfilled lives? (4). In a mobile and migrant profession like driving work, what can we learn about kinship and locality-based relationality? What do the relational networks of chillia taximen reveal about the ways labor is differentially imagined and embodied across genders? How does a road connect people to other urban ecologies to imprint itself on the senses and bodies of those who drive for a living? (13).

Addressing these questions, Bedi works through a number of nuanced arguments to ultimately develop a theorization of what she calls Indian automobility (193). Indian automobility is presented as a postcolonial phenomenon that bounds together the working-class car culture, taxi trade, and roadbuilding that emerged globally in the twentieth century with the specifically emplaced sensorial and social labors associated with automobiles in India. The global elements surrounding this automobility take a back seat, though, in the ethnography. Instead, Bedi writes that her intentional focus is to dwell with and inhabit the immediate sensory worlds of chillia taximen on the Mumbai roads, drawing on the ideas of sensuous scholarship (Stoller 1997) from a number of anthropologists (Howes 2003, Ingold 2000, Laplantine 2015, Munn 1992).

With its wonderful attention to the sensuous, Mumbai Taximen productively channels attention to competing regimes of value encountered in driving work that are expressed through the emic analytics of joona (original, old),  jaalu (web/ecology), dhandha (profession), and dhek-bhal (care), which respectively form four of the six chapters. Other Gujarati terms like dhooli (dust), ghulami