Bicycles, Cities and History: Cycling through Calcutta

Transport debate globally, has moved on from its solitary accent on highway infrastructure and development as from the late ‘90s onwards welfare, environmental and social justice concerns have begun to reconfigure the earlier conceptions of development. To effectively address problems like traffic congestions, blinding pollution and accidental road deaths, transport and developmental discourse now increasingly incorporate visions of eco-friendly and non-motorized conveyance. Cycling as an activity has immense health benefits and bicycles due to their zero pollution impact feature significantly in such visualizations. The city of Amsterdam has been long hailed as the ‘bicycle capital of the world’, her urban space being virtually owned by cyclists. However such epithet was neither earned in a day, nor without struggle. As the Dutch civil society refused to put up with increasing incidents of road rage caused by motorized traffic that affected all especially children, it put up walls of resistance. In 1971, the number of traffic casualties touched a peak of 3,300 of which more than 400 were children. This elicited several protests from civil and social activist groups, the most memorable being from the Stop de Kindermoord( “stop the child murder”)group which was at the vanguard of such resistance. In an interview with The Guardian, its first president recalled how on certain days, its members held bicycle demonstrations, closed streets to let children play safely and even put out tables and lay dinner on streets—efforts that received active police cooperation. Such efforts gradually snowballed into a momentous eco-friendly transport movement in the Dutch towns. In recent years France has also actively stood by the cause as the mayor of Paris tries to bypass the traffic congestion in the city by patronizing the idea of bicycling and doubling the number of cycle tracks. San Diego in California has embraced the notion of eco-friendly transport by supporting bicycling as a form of mobility and recreation and has a Citywide Bicycle Master Plan that promotes bicycle-friendly development projects. Atleast four such bike companies like Lime Bike, Mobike, DecoBike etc offer dock less, station-free ridesharing bicycles to move freely round the city. The rider only needs to download the app, create an online account, link credit card, scan the QR code on the bike or scooter to unlock it and then leave it at a convenient place once they have finished using. This particular transport innovation seems to have taken China by storm as reports highlight how the country is currently experiencing a crisis in the demand and supply algorithms of bicycles. With hundreds of shared bike companies contending for a space in this burgeoning bike industry, the surplus supply adds to the traffic woes of Chinese cities thus derailing chances of smoother mobility.

Notwithstanding such logistical nightmares, current literature and press clips corroborate a culture of activism across Europe, US and China that considers cycling or other forms of non-motorized traffic necessary to preserve and resuscitate the health of the cities and the city-dwellers alike. A similar policy initiative from the Indian shores is however still awaited as the subcontinent continues to peddle a non-flexible notion of modernization, hinged on increasing car ownership and car dependency. In Calcutta, once the bicycle capital of the nation, bicycling especially in the recent years, has nosedived as the legal authorities have prohibited cycling on public thoroughfares. The clamp down began in 2013 as bicycles, non-motorized rickshaws , carts and cycle vans were banned from 174 roads of the city thus jeopardizing sustenance of hundreds of itinerant small vendors like milkmen and newspapermen who traditionally cycled round the city, ferrying their goods. The measure had a spiraling economic impact, hitting the poor the hardest.

While concerns about safety of the commuters and the traffic mayhem in the city apparently dictated such official measures, the latter unwittingly ensured a sharp break with the past. Relegation of the bicycle to the by lanes thus peripheralizing its identity, ran counter to the spirit of international cycle activism as also to the place of prominence the vehicle once enjoyed vis-à-vis the city’s residents . Since colonial times and in the post independence era, bicycles have been an integral part of Calcutta’s evolution as an urban space as also a veritable tool of empowerment. After independence in 1952, the Sen-Raleigh factory was set up at Asansol in the outskirts of Calcutta which rose to be one of the earliest and largest in business. It annually produced no less than one lakh to two lakh units of cycles. Such success was organically linked to the large-scale acceptance of the vehicle among Indians at large. David Arnold and Erich De Wald argue how in the interwar period, despite being a European innovation, the simple mechanism had made it easy for the local colonized population to adapt to and appropriate the bicycle, culturally and politically. As the bicycle stamped its presence on the streets of Asia, India and Calcutta, it stood for an alternate indigenous modernity, thus challenging the prominent colonial discourse of technological domination and determination. Though initially in the early twentieth century, the bicycles and their parts were imported from Britain and Europe; by the late 1940s, bells, stands and carriers began to be manufactured locally in India, in Ludhiana. Absence of indigenous steel industries and high import duty on imported steel made it impossible for this colonized nation to manufacture a cycle in its entirety before Independence. This impediment was solved to a large extent when the Raleighs—the famous Nottingham cycle makers entered into partnership with S.K Sen of Calcutta, thus preparing the backdrop for Calcutta’ s leadership in the subsequent years in both manufacture and use of this vehicle. Acceptance of bicycles in the everyday life of Bengal however predates the Sen-Raleigh establishment as in the pre-independence era, as early as in 1920s, as many as twenty nine cycle-dealers and repair shops are found to operate from Bentinck Street, located “midway between European Chowringhee and the northern, predominantly Bengali half of the city”(Arnold & De Wald, 2011:979) which thus became an emblem of the thriving bicycle trade in Calcutta. In recent times, with the advent of motorized vehicles and newer prohibitions, the width has shrunk, the market now being restricted between Grant Street and Prinsep Street. Significance of a bicycle in the socio-cultural sensibilities of Calcutta and Bengal might be corroborated by tales of how the vehicle was an essential item of a groom’s trousseau sent by his in-laws. While this was customary in suburban and rural Calcutta, many lower middle class families of the city also considered the bicycle as a life essential, till the motor-cycle rode in to replace his poorer cousin.

Aiding fast mobility with minimum maintenance costs, the bicycle was once functional for both college goers and professionals. Contemporary Bengali films and advertisements stand witness to tales of affection between the city and this vehicle as matinee idols like Uttam Kumar was shown to ride a bicycle in the cult classic Saptāpadi–as a medical college student and later as a doctor, thus adding to its popularity. Gradually as cars came to be favoured by the affluent middle class of the city, the bicycle in Calcutta became identified as a subaltern vehicle—being preferred by the lower middle class and even white-collared populace. Post-liberalization years saw Calcutta loosing the romance of commuting, much of which was woven around the bicycle. As app cabs and cars became the chosen vehicles to ferry lovers in the city and her environs, the once familiar figures of chivalrous men double-carrying their beloved on bicycles quickly faded into oblivion. Beset by official prohibitions, Calcutta, the home of Bimal Mukherjee– the first Indian globe-trotter who set out to conquer the world in 1926 on his bicycle, now seems all set for a homogenous, motorized urban existence, sáns its unique historical past.

Somdatta Chakraborty

1st July 2018

References:

Zee, Renate van der. (May 5, 2015) How Amsterdam became the bicycle capital of the world. The Guardian.  https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/may/05/amsterdam-bicycle-capital-world-transport-cycling-kindermoord

https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2018/03/bike-share-oversupply-in-china-huge-piles-of-abandoned-and-broken-bicycles/556268/

Singh, Sukhpal.(August 1990). Bicycle Industry since Independence: Growth, Structure and Demand. EPW, 25(34),M 98-M109.

Arnold, David & De Wald, Erich(2011). Cycles of Empowerment? The Bicycle and Everyday Technology in Colonial India and Vietnam. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 53(4), 971-996.