Ethnographizing traffic movement in India

Ratnakar Tripathy


'Negotiating' traffic in many parts of India [and I am sure elsewhere] is not just an idiomatic expression. You do very often end up in a mess of intricate negotiations that don't get you anywhere by way of fixed rules even if they let you reach your destination for the day.
I should know. I nearly crashed my bike into a cow goaded by the owner this morning. It is commoner for the cows and other domestic animals to occupy the central space on the thoroughfare, letting the traffic make their curving detours. This is the context for this 'traffic ethnography', which is really about movement in public spaces, one's and other's bodies, and ownership of spaces.
Much has been written about the chaos of Indian roads, both with indulgent humour and deep chagrin. But if you have to 'negotiate' the roads yourself, it is small help calling it chaotic and gnashing your teeth in road rage. You must learn the language of negotiation used on the roads. This language has dialects, varies from place to place and is tweaked by locals in villages, small towns, city roads, lanes, neighbourhoods and inner city mazeways. Here's an account of its vocabulary:
Honking on Indian roads in not noise! It's the presiding part of an unevenly visceral and multi-sensed language that includes eye contact, body language, acceleration, deceleration, lights, nods, and well filthy abuses under the breath. Honking itself has many registers ranging between a quick sharp squeak to persistent hectoring. Then of course, you have bikes fitted up with truck horns and there are also ones that sound like a train has come hurtling right behind your butt. There are honks that sound like a request and ones that intend to madden you into surrendering your space. This is a lexicon that keeps expanding like any other language.
As for the question of power, let me give you a few examples. There are roads with shops on the sides where the pedestrian is generally the king. This equanimous king doesn't react to the loudest of honks and moves gently like an overweight rhino. Especially if you are behind him! If he's in front of you, you can try eye contact and plead your way through. But there are also roads where a pedestrian gets a taste of his own medicine – these are roads you can't cross till a small traffic snag develops and you hurry across. In fact traffic snarls are not dysfunctional and play a vital role in the business of free movement. They check the accident rates on roads just like the zigzagging bicycles and absent-minded pedestrians. Allowed to speed at will, the majority of the Indian drivers may be seen as assassin + suicide by two to construct an ideal type.
A routine news item in Patna papers – 'Boy run over by a truck, roads and train tracks jammed by relatives and neighbours for five hours'. Then comes the senior police officer to argue, cajole and to promise cash compensation, never to be delivered. the crowd are suddenly reminded there is this thing called the Indian state you can go sulking to. But there is no branch of humanities looking at this aspect of our lives. I propose we start a department of Body Movement Studies, an inter-disciplinary field combining sociology, politics, ethology, socio-biology, cognitive psychology, kinetics and socio-linguistics and of course everything else. Any takers?
There are indeed city roads where the impersonal traffic rules have taken over completely and the Indian state enjoys full authority. But the majority of other spaces are constantly contested, negotiated and apportioned after tiresome rituals. As for the traffic cop, he's really a tired choreographer mimicking the passage of people, making encouraging signs towards people who are coming and making a shoving gesture towards those who are going. This makes for a very vibrant community life on the road. Does it sound sufficiently disgusting?
I get the feeling sometimes that being in public spaces of any kind in India including a lift, you have a choice between turning into a dumb bullock uncaring of other's bodies and movements, of being a frenzied predator cutting through the masses of human flesh, or a slimy fox, sidling through spaces with cunning and speed.
Life on the road in my country is thus like being in a huge overcrowded and transient temple fare. In this lemmings like stampede, you are on your own. The laws and the state come in only if you break someone's leg or have your own broken!
In brief, we write and rewrite our traffic rules every day of the year.
And well, erase it in the evening before finding our first 'eureka' axiom. Can you now please draw our learning curve?
Small populations will never understand why we are compelled to move the way we move.

Note- this is a highly limited ethnographic report based on my experience in the cities of Patna and Hyderabad. A reminder – India probably has the highest fatality rate for road mishaps in the world.