Twenty year-old photography student Azhar Chougle finds Mumbai's cabs and rickety rickshaws 'gaudy and rambunctious'. Why then, would he make them his muse?
Twenty year-old photography student Azhar Chougle finds Mumbai's cabs and rickety rickshaws 'gaudy and rambunctious'. Why then, would he make them his muse?
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If the city's collective angst against the paan-chewing cabbies who refuse to ferry you, was not enough, they trap you in their rusty, old jalopies on those few times that they do agree to ply.
Out with the Premier Padmini, you say. It's rickety, it's creaky and beyond gaudy. It's polluting and painful. Why then, you wonder, would a 20 year-old make the black-and-yellow vintage Padmini and the precarious Mumbai autorickshaw his muse?
"There's no experience like a nauseating ride through narrow, pothole-ridden lanes with a brave auto driver. Or trudging through the rain in a gleaming black Padmini, struggling in first gear on some of Mumbai's slopes -- with its characteristic slow hum and failing brake lights," says Azhar Chougle. The photographer has documented his many rides through Bombay Taxi, a series of pictures he has uploaded on his website. Preferring to tell his stories through pictures, Chougle captured everything -- from the garish plastered interiors of the vehicles to the men behind the wheel -- in a bid to freeze something that modernisation will soon defeat.
The rusty Premier Padmini, often called a Fiat, was manufactured in the country between 1967 and 2000. Premier Automobiles Limited (or PAL, as it is better known) was owned by the Walchand Hirachand Group, assembling the Fiat 1100 series of cars from the 1950s onwards.
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While privately-owned Fiat vehicles have more or less disappeared from Indian roads, save an occasional sighting, the ubiquitous black-and-yellow cabs are fast being phased out too. Chougle, who moved from Mumbai to New York City three years ago to pursue a photography course at the School of Visual Arts, grew even more attached to Bambaiyya taxis after journeying through plain yellow NY cabs.
"New York cabs are clinical, cold and boring. Compare them to a Bombay taxi; each so unique. When the light shines through the open windows and onto the plastered interiors, it's a trippy experience," Chougle says over the phone from New York.
His enthusiasm is infectious even in the dead of night. Didn't he ever go red with rage at having been refused a ride in the middle of a drippy day?
"Of course," he says. "But it's all a part of the game. We have to remember that these guys don't earn too much, and not all of them are a**holes."
In one of Chougle's shots, you see the driver's eyes through the rearview mirror, narrowed, in complete concentration. In another, a driver makes an attempt to smile at the camera, his shirt buttons undone.
"The one thing I noticed about most rickshawallahs was that none of them wore chappals while driving. Their footwear would lie precariously by the side, threatening to fall out of the rickshaw," he laughs.u00a0
There were several moments of d ufffdj vu as Chougle went about documenting his muse. "When you notice little quirks as you sit cocooned in transit, you realise that you probably have been here, done that. I'd often sit in a particular taxi, and feel as if I had sat in the same one before. Where else in the world would you feel that?"
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To view the full series, log on to www.azharc.com/projects/bombay-taxi
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