Rickshaw Pullers on the Streets of Kolkata

Returning to Kolkata after our MCC Asia Representatives meeting in Bangkok was like stepping back in time. That morning in Bangkok, Ruth and I had taken a walk in a large immaculate park near the guesthouse where we stayed. We did some last minute shopping in a modern mall before taking a taxi to the stylish airport that would be the pride of any world-class city. It’s very different from Bangkok as I knew it twenty years ago.

Kolkata, on the other hand, feels like little has changed in the past fifty years. Its streets are full of dilapidated smoke-belching buses and sturdy old Ambassador taxis. Rickshaws ply the street outside my office window. Goats, tied to a tree on the sidewalk, wait to be butchered at the nearby market. Crumbling architecture gives much of the city an aura of past glory slowly fading away.

Such appearances can be deceiving. Kolkata is actually the hub of life for this part of Asia. In the last edition of the Atlantic Monthly, Robert Kaplan writes, “Arriving in Calcutta by bus from Dhaka, the capital of next-door Bangladesh, is like arriving in West Berlin from East Berlin during the Cold War.” Yet he finds the uniform poverty in Dhaka somehow preferable to the obscene mix of wealth and poverty in Kolkata.

Kaplan especially protests against Kolkata's rickshaws as a signature of human exploitation—one human being pulling another. I don’t agree. Unlike middle and upper class people in the West, those of us living in Kolkata constantly rub shoulders with the poor. We don’t live in gated communities or behind national borders designed to keep such people out of sight and mind.

Another take on Kolkata’s rickshaws is the photojournalism of Ami Vitale and Calvin Trillin in the last issue of the National Geographic. Vitale’s photos capture the dignity of these men. Many live in the streets, sleeping on their rickshaws and bathing at open hydrants, as they labor to support families in far away rural villages. They are the unsung heroes of improvised village families that are determined to lift themselves out of their grinding poverty.

Even so, some city officials, bent on burnishing Kolkata’s image, are determined to eradicate this potent symbol of India’s colonial past. But these rickshaw pullers (migrants from far-flung impoverished rural hinterlands in a region that stretches from Nepal to Central India to Bangladesh) are earning an honest living. The obscenity lies in taking away their livelihood—not in what they’re doing.

Tears well in the eyes of Suniti, our housekeeper and office receptionist, as I talk with her about this. "Sir," she tells me, "Yesterday some policemen confiscated a rickshaw on our street." The driver was loudly protesting and crying, “How will I now support my wife and children?” Suniti asks me, “What will be left to them other than stealing to support their children?”

Suniti knows where her sympathies lie. She comes from a family that has faced severe financial hardships and the plight of such people tugs at her heartstrings. Her job for MCC allows her to support a niece who she adopted as her own daughter. I prefer to see the rickshaw pullers and their trade through her eyes.