{"AuthorName":"Tarini Bedi","Description":"

I long for the day when we shall have India-made motor cars, locomotives, railway coaches, tramways, buses, aeroplanes, ships, electrical goods, machinery, and the thousand and one things for which we have to depend on imports.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

—Walchand Hirachand, founder of Premier Automobiles, Sholapur, 19431<\/a><\/span><\/sup><\/p>\r\n\r\n


\r\nWheeled Masculinity<\/h4>Tarini Bedi<\/span>

Fig. 01: Walchand Hirachand featured on a postage stamp, India Post, Government of India, 23 November 2004. Source: Wikimedia Commons, https:\/\/commons.wikimedia.org\/<\/a><\/p>\r\n\r\n

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 <\/p><\/h2>\">Fig. 01<\/a><\/span>     Wheeled Masculinity<\/h4>Tarini Bedi<\/span>

Fig. 02: Walchand Hirachand<\/em>, poster. Courtesy Premier Automobiles Archives, permission for use granted to author.<\/p><\/h2>\">Fig. 02<\/a><\/span><\/p>\r\n\r\n

Technology and machinery, both of which are associated with modernist progress, are generally coded as male, Western, white and middle-class.2<\/a><\/span><\/sup> Several scholars have noted this equation between technological artifacts (particularly those associated with speed and transport) and masculinity.3<\/a><\/span><\/sup> Men are assumed to have a ‘natural’ affinity for and competence in dealing with such artifacts, while women usually appear as passive spectators, rather than active users of the wheeled machinery.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

In visual culture, these affinities work in multiple ways. First, when men are depicted alongside machine objects they are to be viewed as pioneers. We see this in images of Walchand Hirachand Doshi (1882–1953), quoted above. Walchand was the founder of the company that manufactured some of India’s earliest cars and the contractor of what would become important early railway lines in Bombay. Images of him appeared with great regularity as a symbol of Indian technical and industrial progress and as a ‘true servant’ of the Indian nation (Wheeled Masculinity<\/h4>Tarini Bedi<\/span>

Fig. 01: Walchand Hirachand featured on a postage stamp, India Post, Government of India, 23 November 2004. Source: Wikimedia Commons, https:\/\/commons.wikimedia.org\/<\/a><\/p>\r\n\r\n

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 <\/p><\/h2>\">Fig. 01<\/a>, Wheeled Masculinity<\/h4>Tarini Bedi<\/span>

Fig. 02: Walchand Hirachand<\/em>, poster. Courtesy Premier Automobiles Archives, permission for use granted to author.<\/p><\/h2>\">Fig. 02<\/a>).4<\/a><\/span><\/sup>  He was also considered a pioneer in construction, shipping and aviation.5<\/a><\/span><\/sup> While the companies he founded are famous, he also has a road named after him in Mumbai, which signals recognition that he contributed to the city’s progress.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

In almost all public depictions of Walchand, however, he does not appear as a man easily associated with ‘modern’ technology. The accoutrement that provincializes both him and the technologies that appear with him is his Sholapur turban. Sholapur (now spelt Solapur), where Walchand was born and raised, is a city in southern Maharashtra close to both the Karnataka and Andhra\/Telangana borders. Present-day Solapur is intensely urbanized. However, in the early part of the 20th century, despite its prominence in the cotton, handloom and tobacco industries, businessmen from Sholapur were considered less cosmopolitan and Westernized than their compatriots in Bombay. The Sholapur turban marked Walchand as an outsider to the cosmopolitan business and industrial environment of 20th-century Bombay, and was something that he was ridiculed for by industrialists and engineers there.6<\/a><\/span><\/sup> However, even as his industrial star rose, Walchand continued to appear in public in the Sholapur turban. He reportedly kept it to mark himself as a man who was able to mediate the tensions between urbane, technological progress and sartorial rootedness in a small town.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

Images of Walchand thus present him as a man who could be surrounded by innovation, symbols of speed, wheels, highways and industry, but yet remain gentle, kind, benevolent and rooted. In these images, Walchand’s turbaned head appears disembodied, as though his own male body has become one with the industrial and technological landscape—<\/span>the viewer might imagine Walchand’s body where the machines are. This fusion between the male body and the landscape of machines imbues both human and machine with a manliness that derives from the power to move the world forward<\/em> and upward<\/em>. For example, in Wheeled Masculinity<\/h4>Tarini Bedi<\/span>

Fig. 01: Walchand Hirachand featured on a postage stamp, India Post, Government of India, 23 November 2004. Source: Wikimedia Commons, https:\/\/commons.wikimedia.org\/<\/a><\/p>\r\n\r\n

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 <\/p><\/h2>\">Fig. 01<\/a>, Walchand’s head is placed against the image of a highway and a steel bridge, suggesting forward momentum and speed. In Wheeled Masculinity<\/h4>Tarini Bedi<\/span>

Fig. 02: Walchand Hirachand<\/em>, poster. Courtesy Premier Automobiles Archives, permission for use granted to author.<\/p><\/h2>\">Fig. 02<\/a>, Walchand, known as the ‘father of the Indian automobile industry’, looms over the image with a crooked smile, surrounded by several key objects of technological progress: the wheels of industry, steel construction, hydroelectric power, ships, rockets that erupt with fiery momentum into the sky, and the automobile. Walchand was written about as clever and shrewd, but also a kind and benevolent man who ‘dreamed’ of a bright industrial and technological future for India. In the many public visual depictions of him, like those illustrated here, he appears surrounded by images of infrastructure, technology and industry. These objects, while ostensibly associated with modern, rational, scientific progress, seem to invest Walchand with a luminous presence. His own lack of facial hair, his youthful glow, his crooked and reluctant smile, his fleshy lips, along with his turban, belong in a different visual world from the one of speed, steel, wheels, fire and science that seems to sweep and swerve around and beyond him. So while he appears turbaned and youthful, these objects of high industrialism around him justify his title of father and founder of the Indian automobile industry.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

Wheeled Masculinity<\/h4>Tarini Bedi<\/span>

Fig. 03: Tector<\/em>, sample poster from Empire Calendar Manufacturing Co., Calcutta. Chromolithograph on paper, 50 x 38 cm. The Priya Paul Collection of Popular Art, New Delhi.<\/p><\/h2>\">Fig. 03<\/a><\/span>While Walchand was closely associated with automobiles, wheeled machinery like tractors stand in more broadly for the contested social and political visions of different kinds of men. In Wheeled Masculinity<\/h4>Tarini Bedi<\/span>

Fig. 03: Tector<\/em>, sample poster from Empire Calendar Manufacturing Co., Calcutta. Chromolithograph on paper, 50 x 38 cm. The Priya Paul Collection of Popular Art, New Delhi.<\/p><\/h2>\">Fig. 03<\/a>, Gandhi and Nehru appear on either side of a tractor driven by a male farmer. Another farmer seems to float with his oxen in the clouds. Gandhi’s head is turned away from the viewer, his eyes are closed and his gaze seems to be directed inwards, almost as though he is praying. Nehru’s face is turned towards the viewer, his gaze focused on something outside. It is interesting that the floating man and his oxen are visible amidst the clouds while his animal-powered plough is artfully hidden—<\/span>literally clouded <\/em>from view. It is clear that behind the clouds there is a set of archaic wheels attached to a plough between the animals and the man. However, their placement in the clouds suggests that this outmoded plough and the man who works with it have made their way into a heavenly abode—if not dead, they are definitely dying, floating above the earth. The turbaned, bare-chested and emaciated man flails his arms and seems to move his entire body to coax the plough forward. By contrast, the farmer on the tractor sits still while wheels of different sizes propel him forward. The hard and organized work that the motorized plough has already done lies behind him while he looks to the fields ahead. The systematic patterns of soil that the motorized plough leaves behind suggest a determined forward movement for the farmer on the tractor. This tension between tractor- and oxen-pulled ploughs and the different kinds of men who manoeuvre them seems to illustrate the struggle between different visions of a technological-nationalist future. At the heart of this contest are machine objects and the struggle for livelihood in the world of men. Longing for and dreams of technologically developed futures are firmly manly matters, as are the capacities to use this technology.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

These particular longings and dreams related to machine technology are embedded in a modernist, developmentalist world. However, the metaphorical and material connection between men and things that move could be looked at within a longer, historical and visual world. What is particularly striking is that, whether visual depictions of men on the move appear as historical, mythic, mediated, filmic or ethnographic, there is one fundamental component of machine technology that surrounds men and shapes their capacities for action—the wheel.7<\/a><\/span><\/sup> The history of wheeled mobility is intertwined in different ways with men’s use of wheels. On the one hand there is the modern transition from animal power to motorized transport, and on the other is the harnessing of human power represented by rickshaws and spinning wheels.8<\/a><\/span><\/sup><\/p>\r\n\r\n

In this essay, I look particularly at how and where wheels appear in the Indian visual domain and how they attune to and code male bodies. Rather than consider a single genre of visual material or focus on one form of vehicle, I read a range of images to excavate the connections between men and wheels, as these appear in different historical moments. In many of these visual depictions, men are not just surrounded by wheels and machinery but they are attuned sensorially and in bodily terms to the wheels around them. Therefore, this essay reads how male bodies in the visual archive dwell <\/em>with, and in, these worlds of wheels. This dwelling marks the connections between men and wheels as ‘natural’. The wheels here encompass a wide realm, from chariots to charkhas (spinning wheels), cycles and automobiles. Across the realm, wheels are objects that undergird and make possible men’s martiality, strength and control. Nevertheless, they are also objects of peace, cooperation, pleasure and leisure. They are symbols of technological progress but also of its rejection. Often the objects personify the constraints, political positions and the desires of the men who use them, even when the men themselves are only tangentially present. The observation that gender can be understood as a categorization not just of persons alone but also of objects, artifacts, events and sequences has long-standing roots in cultural anthropology.9<\/a><\/span><\/sup> This is the understanding that I draw from in my visual reading of the connections between men, masculinity and wheeled objects.
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Men, Women and Wheeled Mobility<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\r\n\r\n

Wheeled Masculinity<\/h4>Tarini Bedi<\/span>

Fig. 04: Calendar page sample from Oriental Calendar Manufacturing Co., Dumdum. Chromolithograph on paper, 50 x 38 cm. The Priya Paul Collection of Popular Art, New Delhi.<\/p><\/h2>\">Fig. 04<\/a><\/span>   Wheeled Masculinity<\/h4>Tarini Bedi<\/span>

Fig. 05: Service Station<\/em> by Sushil Das, calendar page sample. Chromolithograph on paper, 25 x 20 cm. The Priya Paul Collection of Popular Art, New Delhi.<\/p><\/h2>\">Fig. 05<\/a><\/span><\/p>\r\n\r\n

Wheeled Masculinity<\/h4>Tarini Bedi<\/span>

Fig. 06: Publicity still from Naya Sansar’s Aasman Mahal<\/em>, 1965. Print on paper, 20 x 30 cm. The Priya Paul Collection of Popular Art, New Delhi.<\/p><\/h2>\">Fig. 06<\/a><\/span>As we see in four images from the Priya Paul Collection of Popular Art<\/a>, there is an assumption that wheels and wheeled mobility are the domain of men. This seems to be the case for both use and repair of wheeled machinery and it appears to hold true both in the realm of bourgeois leisure (Wheeled Masculinity<\/h4>Tarini Bedi<\/span>

Fig. 04: Calendar page sample from Oriental Calendar Manufacturing Co., Dumdum. Chromolithograph on paper, 50 x 38 cm. The Priya Paul Collection of Popular Art, New Delhi.<\/p><\/h2>\">Fig. 04<\/a>, Wheeled Masculinity<\/h4>Tarini Bedi<\/span>

Fig. 05: Service Station<\/em> by Sushil Das, calendar page sample. Chromolithograph on paper, 25 x 20 cm. The Priya Paul Collection of Popular Art, New Delhi.<\/p><\/h2>\">Fig. 05<\/a>) and in the case of physical labour (Wheeled Masculinity<\/h4>Tarini Bedi<\/span>

Fig. 06: Publicity still from Naya Sansar’s Aasman Mahal<\/em>, 1965. Print on paper, 20 x 30 cm. The Priya Paul Collection of Popular Art, New Delhi.<\/p><\/h2>\">Fig. 06<\/a>, Wheeled Masculinity<\/h4>Tarini Bedi<\/span>

Fig. 07: Just by way of a Change<\/em>, picture postcard. Chromolithograph on cardboard, 12 x 7 cm. The Priya Paul Collection of Popular Art, New Delhi.<\/p><\/h2>\">Fig. 07<\/a>). Yet, these Wheeled Masculinity<\/h4>Tarini Bedi<\/span>

Fig. 07: Just by way of a Change<\/em>, picture postcard. Chromolithograph on cardboard, 12 x 7 cm. The Priya Paul Collection of Popular Art, New Delhi.<\/p><\/h2>\">Fig. 07<\/a><\/span>visual realms also allow for some disruptions of these assumptions.
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\r\nThe first two images are from a calendar sample catalogue, and the blank text box in each could potentially carry a promotional message for the brand or product. In Wheeled Masculinity<\/h4>Tarini Bedi<\/span>

Fig. 04: Calendar page sample from Oriental Calendar Manufacturing Co., Dumdum. Chromolithograph on paper, 50 x 38 cm. The Priya Paul Collection of Popular Art, New Delhi.<\/p><\/h2>\">Fig. 04<\/a>, an Indian woman in a sari and an Indian man wearing a Western suit sit on a wall enjoying the outdoors and greenery, accompanied by their pet dog and with a car in the background. The car and the leashed dog both operate here as symbols of European-style leisure practised by bourgeois, Westernized Indians. The car and the domesticated animal intertwine to illustrate a particularly gendered way of life, of class mobility and modernity for Indians. The dog’s leash is looped around the woman’s hand, which seems to signal her duties of care towards her animate companion, while the man seems to be in charge of the inanimate car that sits behind him. Their easy presence in this pristine wilderness seems clearly enabled by the car that brought them there. However, the car appears only as a partial presence, blocked by the upper half of the man’s body. The woman sits firmly on the parapet closer to the viewer and appears as a fully embodied person. The man perches more tentatively on the other side of the parapet and we see his lower body and legs only partially; but the part we do see seems closely merged with the visible part of the car, signalling a oneness of male and automobile bodies.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

In Wheeled Masculinity<\/h4>Tarini Bedi<\/span>

Fig. 05: Service Station<\/em> by Sushil Das, calendar page sample. Chromolithograph on paper, 25 x 20 cm. The Priya Paul Collection of Popular Art, New Delhi.<\/p><\/h2>\">Fig. 05<\/a>, we see a Western couple, also out in their car for leisure, as marked by their clothing. However, unlike the idyllic scene of Wheeled Masculinity<\/h4>Tarini Bedi<\/span>

Fig. 04: Calendar page sample from Oriental Calendar Manufacturing Co., Dumdum. Chromolithograph on paper, 50 x 38 cm. The Priya Paul Collection of Popular Art, New Delhi.<\/p><\/h2>\">Fig. 04<\/a>, here the couple are dealing with a breakdown caused by a flat tyre. The man rests on the bumper in the midst of changing the tyre. He wipes the sweat from his forehead and his tools are strewn all around. Despite his visible fatigue and sweaty efforts, the spare wheel still lies on the ground, detached from the automobile. Though he has been at work for a while, he has failed to fix the wheel to serve its purpose. The defective wheel, too, lies on the road, failed and forlorn, while the car, stripped naked of its left front wheel, symbolizes the failure of a Western technological artifact and of Western masculinity. Witnessing these dual failures, the woman points him towards a service station where someone else would do the work for him. From her smile, the placement of her hand on her hip and her finger pointing towards a better solution, it appears that she might be mocking him for his failures. Here, the classical assumption about men’s domination of tools and machinery sees some cracks. The solution to the breakdown offered by the woman could also suggest that while the realms of working technology undergird masculinity, issues of breakdown, repair and service <\/em>occupy the feminized realms of care. It is the woman who knows how to take control in handling the breakdown. She recognizes her companion’s inability to fix the car and seems to be pointing him towards another man, perhaps from the working class, who could assist. Therefore, the presence of masculine failure around technological artifacts and feminized directions to service seem to rupture the lines between working machinery and breakdown, and between masculinized and feminized engagements with technology. This draws attention to how the presence of women in these visual encounters can disrupt consistent ideas of masculine technological strength and expertise.10<\/a><\/span><\/sup><\/p>\r\n\r\n

Further, reading Wheeled Masculinity<\/h4>Tarini Bedi<\/span>

Fig. 04: Calendar page sample from Oriental Calendar Manufacturing Co., Dumdum. Chromolithograph on paper, 50 x 38 cm. The Priya Paul Collection of Popular Art, New Delhi.<\/p><\/h2>\">Fig. 04<\/a> and Wheeled Masculinity<\/h4>Tarini Bedi<\/span>

Fig. 05: Service Station<\/em> by Sushil Das, calendar page sample. Chromolithograph on paper, 25 x 20 cm. The Priya Paul Collection of Popular Art, New Delhi.<\/p><\/h2>\">Fig. 05<\/a> together is useful. First, cars were still associated with Western technology or seen as the domain of Westernized Indians. Second, it is useful to look at the different engagement with cars between the Westernized Indian man and the Western man. That the image of a Western man appears in this Indian sample advertisement for service stations in Wheeled Masculinity<\/h4>Tarini Bedi<\/span>

Fig. 05: Service Station<\/em> by Sushil Das, calendar page sample. Chromolithograph on paper, 25 x 20 cm. The Priya Paul Collection of Popular Art, New Delhi.<\/p><\/h2>\">Fig. 05<\/a> is interesting. The Western man is clearly bourgeois but he is also performing the (failed) labour of fixing the car. Indeed, Indian car owners of the same class might not have had the same inclination to fix their own cars as Western men did and therefore were more likely to employ a car mechanic at a ‘service’ station. In this sense, the Western woman seems aligned with the inclinations of the upper-class Indian man, i.e. disconnected from the mechanics of the automobile but connected to its affects.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

We see, therefore, that women are clearly present in the worlds of wheels. However, they often appear as passengers, as in Wheeled Masculinity<\/h4>Tarini Bedi<\/span>

Fig. 06: Publicity still from Naya Sansar’s Aasman Mahal<\/em>, 1965. Print on paper, 20 x 30 cm. The Priya Paul Collection of Popular Art, New Delhi.<\/p><\/h2>\">Fig. 06<\/a>, and as observers rather than as movers or fixers of wheeled machinery. Or else, as we see in Wheeled Masculinity<\/h4>Tarini Bedi<\/span>

Fig. 07: Just by way of a Change<\/em>, picture postcard. Chromolithograph on cardboard, 12 x 7 cm. The Priya Paul Collection of Popular Art, New Delhi.<\/p><\/h2>\">Fig. 07<\/a>, they appear to engage in the labour of driving wheeled mobility ‘Just by way of a Change’. The contrast between the engagement with the cycle-rickshaw in these two figures is interesting. In Wheeled Masculinity<\/h4>Tarini Bedi<\/span>

Fig. 06: Publicity still from Naya Sansar’s Aasman Mahal<\/em>, 1965. Print on paper, 20 x 30 cm. The Priya Paul Collection of Popular Art, New Delhi.<\/p><\/h2>\">Fig. 06<\/a>, the younger, Indian woman is pedalled by an older, avuncular rickshaw-wala while a younger man stands by to receive her. Despite the indication of some freedom of movement for the woman made possible by the rickshaw, her movement is circumscribed first by the protection of a father-figure from the working class, and then by a male companion who shares her class position.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

In Wheeled Masculinity<\/h4>Tarini Bedi<\/span>

Fig. 07: Just by way of a Change<\/em>, picture postcard. Chromolithograph on cardboard, 12 x 7 cm. The Priya Paul Collection of Popular Art, New Delhi.<\/p><\/h2>\">Fig. 07<\/a> on the other hand, a European woman in upper-class attire pedals a man dressed similarly. If the image in Wheeled Masculinity<\/h4>Tarini Bedi<\/span>

Fig. 06: Publicity still from Naya Sansar’s Aasman Mahal<\/em>, 1965. Print on paper, 20 x 30 cm. The Priya Paul Collection of Popular Art, New Delhi.<\/p><\/h2>\">Fig. 06<\/a> signals a cross-class gendered relationship of protection between the man at the wheel and the woman he transports, Wheeled Masculinity<\/h4>Tarini Bedi<\/span>

Fig. 07: Just by way of a Change<\/em>, picture postcard. Chromolithograph on cardboard, 12 x 7 cm. The Priya Paul Collection of Popular Art, New Delhi.<\/p><\/h2>\">Fig. 07<\/a> is an ironic statement on the burdens of bourgeois Western women who have to work or pedal hard for their men, ‘by way of change’.
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Chariots and Interspecies Masculinity <\/strong><\/span><\/p>\r\n\r\n

Chariots are among the most prominent forms of early, wheeled mobility that appear in the visual archive. Drawing much of its visual history from the Bhagavad Gita<\/em>, Mahabharata<\/em>, Ramayana <\/em>and Katha Upanishad<\/em>, the chariot most prominently belongs on the battlefield.11<\/a><\/span><\/sup><\/p>\r\n\r\n

Wheeled Masculinity<\/h4>Tarini Bedi<\/span>

Fig. 08: Ramayana <\/em>battle scene depicted on a textile label by Alexander Drew & Sons and Ram Chand Seal & Co. Chromolithograph on paper, 12 x 10 cm. The Priya Paul Collection of Popular Art, New Delhi.<\/p><\/h2>\">Fig. 08<\/a><\/span>In a textile label illustration of a battle from the Ramayana<\/em>, the wheeled mobility of the chariot appears along with both human men and other martial\/masculine species who fight with their hands and their bodies as much as they do with weapons such as spears, lances, and bows and arrows (Wheeled Masculinity<\/h4>Tarini Bedi<\/span>

Fig. 08: Ramayana <\/em>battle scene depicted on a textile label by Alexander Drew & Sons and Ram Chand Seal & Co. Chromolithograph on paper, 12 x 10 cm. The Priya Paul Collection of Popular Art, New Delhi.<\/p><\/h2>\">Fig. 08<\/a>). While those on the ground are non-human or partially human members of Ravana’s demon army or Rama’s monkey allies, they are still depicted as martial. Even if they are not fully men, they are fighters on behalf of the human men who command them. While the human males hold weapons and ride their chariots, it is the mixed-species fighters, the not-quite <\/em>men in form, who are ensnared in the materiality of the bloody battle. As we see in much of South Asian mythic visual culture, masculinity and martiality are interspecies matters, distributed between martial humans and the non-humans who fight for and as<\/em> men. In this image, we see the interspecies relations between those with full access to wheeled mobility and those without. Those atop the wheeled chariots appear as the commanders and the most powerful figures in the battle. This is not simply because they are in command but because the presence of the wheeled chariot seems to promise the speed and agility to navigate and leave the battlefield in ways that those on the ground do not have. In this sense, wheels are objects that distribute power and categorize hierarchies between men. Ravana with many heads and arms appears on his chariot as the manly multitude. He needs no one but his many selves. Atop his chariot, he can access multiple weapons with his many arms and look in multiple directions with his many heads. He sits on his chariot watching the battle with his weapons raised, but does not seem to be actually participating in it.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

Wheeled Masculinity<\/h4>Tarini Bedi<\/span>

Fig. 09: Sitaharan<\/em>, sample poster from Empire Calendar Manufacturing Co., Calcutta. Chromolithograph on paper, 50 x 38 cm. The Priya Paul Collection of Popular Art, New Delhi.<\/p><\/h2>\">Fig. 09<\/a><\/span>If chariots belong visually on the battlefield as they do in the battle in the Ramayana<\/em>, they also appear as vehicles of more private, even domesticated struggles in the epic. The most notable struggle is between individual men and the women they are supposed to protect. In a poster from the Empire Calendar Manufacturing Company in Calcutta (Wheeled Masculinity<\/h4>Tarini Bedi<\/span>

Fig. 09: Sitaharan<\/em>, sample poster from Empire Calendar Manufacturing Co., Calcutta. Chromolithograph on paper, 50 x 38 cm. The Priya Paul Collection of Popular Art, New Delhi.<\/p><\/h2>\">Fig. 09<\/a>), depicting Sitaharan or the abduction of Sita, Ravana appears as a singular man. Without his many heads and arms, here on the quiet and bucolic banks of the river, he is a man in disguise. We know from the well-circulated myth that he uses the power of deception to get Sita out of her house. The presence of a chariot suggests that he is depending on the power of wheels and speed to whisk her away. In the background is the humble forest dwelling of Ram, Sita and Lakshman. There is a wheel-shaped Lakshman Rekha marked prominently outside the entrance. The visuality most conjured up by the popular, storied references to the Lakshman Rekha assume a straight, vertical line. However, etymologically, rekha<\/em> most broadly refers to a mark, a lineament or a furrow of any kind.12<\/a><\/span><\/sup> Therefore, if one were to take the varied meanings of the term seriously to understand it as a metaphor rather than a strictly geometric marking, the wheel-shaped marking in this image takes on a different meaning. Lakshman himself is not present but his circular presence is. The circle appears here as his wheel to command. It was intended to keep Sita in place while he ventured away from her. However, here, in the midst of Sita’s abduction, the rekha appears as a rudimentary, fallen, defeated and immovable circle, against the upright, technologically advanced wheel of Ravana’s chariot.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

For Sita, the circle or rekha marks her emplacement rather than her mobility. In the course of the abduction, Sita has moved beyond this immovable circle into the world of Ravana’s chariot that waits at a distance from the house. While only half the chariot is visible, the presence of the wheel suggests that the vehicle will soon transport Sita far away from the house and the immobile rekha she leaves behind. Ravana places his foot authoritatively on the step of the carriage. He firmly holds on to the chariot with his right hand while his left arm encircles Sita’s form. He has pulled her close and the fingers of his left hand rest almost gently, even lovingly, on her waist. The objects that Ravana used to disguise himself as a mendicant lie in disarray behind them in a way that might indicate a struggle. Sita’s left arm flails backwards in the direction of her home while the right is positioned upwards as though rejecting Ravana’s advances, and she has a worried expression on her face. Were it not for the objects strewn across the ground and the gestures of feminine rejection, Ravana’s claim to both Sita and the chariot appear almost natural. There is a particularly confident, embodied relationship that he displays to the chariot, to Sita and to the possibility of taking her away on his wheeled vehicle. The object, the woman and the gesture all mark Ravana’s power.
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Wheeled Masculinity<\/h4>Tarini Bedi<\/span>

Fig. 10: Mahatma Gandhi in Yeroda Jail<\/em>, poster by D.B. Mahulikar, Ahmedabad, 1933[?]. Chromolithograph on paper, 30 x 40 cm. The Priya Paul Collection of Popular Art, New Delhi.<\/p><\/h2>\">Fig. 10<\/a><\/span>The Charkha<\/strong><\/span><\/span>
\r\nA visual reading of wheels in South Asia cannot ignore the most iconic of all wheels—the charkha, or spinning wheel, that was made a symbol of India’s struggle for freedom by Mahatma Gandhi (Wheeled Masculinity<\/h4>Tarini Bedi<\/span>

Fig. 10: Mahatma Gandhi in Yeroda Jail<\/em>, poster by D.B. Mahulikar, Ahmedabad, 1933[?]. Chromolithograph on paper, 30 x 40 cm. The Priya Paul Collection of Popular Art, New Delhi.<\/p><\/h2>\">Fig. 10<\/a>, Wheeled Masculinity<\/h4>Tarini Bedi<\/span>

Fig. 11: Pujya Gandhiji<\/em> by L.A. Joshi, poster published by Joshi Art Works, Joshi Bhuvan, Dakor, Karnodaya Litho Press, circa 1946. Chromolithograph on paper, 50 x 38 cm. The Priya Paul Collection of Popular Art, New Delhi.<\/p><\/h2>\">Fig. 11<\/a>). The charkha takes its name from its circular, chakra <\/em>form. Wheeled Masculinity<\/h4>Tarini Bedi<\/span>

Fig. 11: Pujya Gandhiji<\/em> by L.A. Joshi, poster published by Joshi Art Works, Joshi Bhuvan, Dakor, Karnodaya Litho Press, circa 1946. Chromolithograph on paper, 50 x 38 cm. The Priya Paul Collection of Popular Art, New Delhi.<\/p><\/h2>\">Fig. 11<\/a><\/span>This is a wheel that has come to occupy a quiet rather than blustery or martial world of wheels. The charkha is a wheel deliberately unhinged both politically and visually from the wheels of other forms of ‘modern’ technology. Because of Gandhi’s explicit resistance to Western technology, the charkha occupies a contradictory visual space to other kinds of wheels, particularly to those of cars that were proliferating across the subcontinent during the same historical period. The charkha was an artifact visually deployed to mark a particular kind of non-Western technological expertise; it was the anti-machine, even though it relied on the most fundamental component of machinery—the wheel.
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\r\nIn Wheeled Masculinity<\/h4>Tarini Bedi<\/span>

Fig. 11: Pujya Gandhiji<\/em> by L.A. Joshi, poster published by Joshi Art Works, Joshi Bhuvan, Dakor, Karnodaya Litho Press, circa 1946. Chromolithograph on paper, 50 x 38 cm. The Priya Paul Collection of Popular Art, New Delhi.<\/p><\/h2>\">Fig. 11<\/a> we see Gandhi holding a piece of paper with the drawing of a charkha and the words satya<\/em> (truth) and ahimsa<\/em> (non-violence) written below it. Even in the absence of the wheel itself, this image communicates Mahatma Gandhi’s critique that colonial modes of technology were the handmaidens of colonial domination.13<\/a><\/span><\/sup> Relevant here is Ashish Nandy’s14<\/a><\/span><\/sup> well-known argument that Gandhi’s challenge to British colonialism was undergirded by his rejection of a form of masculinity associated with rationality, science, materialism and physical strength; in this sense Gandhi pitted a Western form of masculinity against a traditional<\/em> Indian kind. He seemed to understand the signification of the wheel very well, and also how masculinity is distributed differently across different uses and engagements with this object.15<\/a><\/span><\/sup><\/p>\r\n\r\n

The charkha, which was fundamentally important to marking these differences, is a complicated object, as least as it appears in 20th-century visual culture, if read as a very particular sensorial attunement between men and their wheels. As an object, it was not just as a symbol but it also had a material and sensory life. Looking closely at how it was engaged with and used reveals what many have pointed to as Gandhi’s ambivalent relationship to masculinity.16<\/a><\/span><\/sup> Art historian Rebecca Brown illustrates how this gendered ambivalence often coalesces around the spinning wheel where the practice of spinning and the visual iconography of the wheel were rearticulated by Gandhi from a feminine sphere to a modern, masculine one.17<\/a><\/span><\/sup> If the wheels of chariots were commandeered by both men and horses, and cars were powered through the entanglement between male motor skills and combustion, the charkha was put into motion both visually and literally through the manual labour of the hands. Much like other forms of protest, spinning via the charka was a bodily experience. At the heart of this bodily experience lay the complicated sense of touch.18<\/a><\/span><\/sup> While the hands of both men and women powered the charkha, in the visual world no hand touches the charkha more than that of Gandhi himself. In these images, I look for Gandhi’s touch. While the symbolic nature of the charkha lies in how it was seen, privileging sight, how it was touched perhaps tells us other stories about men’s sensory lives.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

In the image of Gandhi in Yeroda (Yerawada) jail (Wheeled Masculinity<\/h4>Tarini Bedi<\/span>

Fig. 10: Mahatma Gandhi in Yeroda Jail<\/em>, poster by D.B. Mahulikar, Ahmedabad, 1933[?]. Chromolithograph on paper, 30 x 40 cm. The Priya Paul Collection of Popular Art, New Delhi.<\/p><\/h2>\">Fig. 10<\/a>), the charkha looms almost larger than the unobtrusive form of Gandhi himself. Gandhi’s eyes are directed frontwards but not at the viewer. Instead, they gaze into the distance even while he spins. Gandhi’s attunement to the wheel appears to be so routinized that he does not even have to look at what he is doing, his body simply knows what to do. If Rama and Ravana command their chariots in a display of martiality and strength, Gandhi’s command of his charkha displays a mundane expertise and deliberative touch. While the three male figures in the background engage in the physical labour of protection and of lifting, Gandhi’s position appears thoughtful, sensorial and non-urgent. His quiet, deliberative work at the charkha is a contrast to the background of other manly work. Here, too, the presence of the wheel serves to categorize different kinds of men and male labour.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

The fact that Gandhi sits with his charkha in prison suggests an embodied form of resistance even if he is not actually producing cloth. We see the delicate forms of Gandhi’s slim, hairless legs, fold out of his crisp white dhoti. Apart from the gently raised left hand that holds the yarn, and the delicately placed right hand on the wheel, the rest of Gandhi’s body appears settled and still. The charkha seems to be the only moving object in this image and the geometry of the thread that loops through the visual frame illustrates the deliberate precision of Gandhi’s command of his wheel. The charkha itself has a certainty and stability about it; it is a machine but one that marks a quiet, deliberative and solitary man. While Gandhi is at work here using his body, at the base of the charka lies a book that suggests that Gandhi also labours with his mind and intellect. Expertise, command and intellect, all structured around the wheel, are manly matters of a significant kind. While much of Gandhi’s antipathy to the violence of machinery is tied to his ambivalent masculinity, a closer look at how he touched objects is particularly telling.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

Wheeled Masculinity<\/h4>Tarini Bedi<\/span>

Fig. 12: Mahatma Gandhiji<\/em>, poster published by Chimanlal Chhotalal & Co., under Fernandez Bridge, Ahmedabad, circa 1949. Chromolithograph on paper, 30 x 20 cm. The Priya Paul Collection of Popular Art, New Delhi.<\/p><\/h2>\">Fig. 12<\/a><\/span>Often, visual depictions of the charkha invoke Gandhi’s presence even when the charkha is separated from Gandhi’s body itself. In a poster printed after Gandhi’s death in 1948, an older, thoughtful and distinctly wrinkled Gandhi sits against the backdrop of the Indian flag (Wheeled Masculinity<\/h4>Tarini Bedi<\/span>

Fig. 12: Mahatma Gandhiji<\/em>, poster published by Chimanlal Chhotalal & Co., under Fernandez Bridge, Ahmedabad, circa 1949. Chromolithograph on paper, 30 x 20 cm. The Priya Paul Collection of Popular Art, New Delhi.<\/p><\/h2>\">Fig. 12<\/a>). A charkha is drawn into the lower right-hand corner with the words satya and ahimsa written above it. The distinctions between the embodied expertise of Gandhi at the charkha in Yeroda jail and this poster are stark.
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\r\nHere, Gandhi is still associated with the charkha visually, but he is an older man, a man who at the time of this printing had already died a violent death through assassination. His eyes are lowered, his hair is white, his face wrinkled. He no longer dwells in the wheel as the more youthful Gandhi did but rather dwells in his own thoughts. The circular frames of his famous spectacles echo the circular wheels of the charkha. It is interesting that two objects, his glasses and his charkha, automatically speak visually for Gandhi in perpetuity. When he sits at the spinning wheel, Gandhi displays an expert sensory attunement to the wheel, to the yarn and to the movement of his arms and hands. Here, where the charkha is separated from his body but still visually associated with him, Gandhi appears as a man freed from the sensory life of touch to become one who is alone with his thoughts. He no longer has a fleshy, sensory connection to the wheel but a wholly symbolic one.
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From Charkhas to Automobiles: The Social Worlds of Men<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\r\n\r\n

The car is one of the most potent 20th-century symbols of technology and wheeled mobility. Automobiles came to the Indian subcontinent in the early 20th century. They proliferated in both official and personal use throughout the period of the independence movement. Automobiles therefore occupy a coeval historical life with charkhas. Though they symbolically occupy different technological worlds, in practice they were part of the same social world of men. As I looked at the visual archive, I was particularly struck by the material connections between Gandhi’s charkha and global automobility. Nowhere was this marked more profoundly than in the ‘bromance’19<\/a><\/span><\/sup> that developed between Henry Ford, well-known as the man who transformed the way the world thought about wheeled mobility, and Gandhi.20<\/a><\/span><\/sup> Their mutual admiration revolved around their shared, but complicated, pacificism. Ford had been selling cars in India throughout the 1930s, and during this time he had been thoroughly impressed by Gandhi’s protests and his fasts. In 1941, Ford wrote a letter of deep admiration to Gandhi.21<\/a><\/span><\/sup><\/p>\r\n\r\n

Reportedly, on receipt of this letter and on urging from the messenger Mr T.A. Raman, who was the London Editor of the United Press of India, Gandhi agreed to send a folding charkha to Ford as a gift. Indeed, the boxed charkha that is now housed in Detroit was what Gandhi actually used for his spinning, while the upright, more traditional charkha operated in the realm of iconography and symbolism.22<\/a><\/span><\/sup> In the midst of the Second World War, this boxed wheel sailed with Raman over a perilous 12,000 miles\/19,600 kilometres to the United States through waters guarded by antagonistic navies and submarines.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

Wheeled Masculinity<\/h4>Tarini Bedi<\/span>

Fig. 13: Mr T.A. Raman presents a folding portable spinning wheel to Mr Henry Ford, a gift from Mahatma Gandhi, 1942. The Henry Ford Museum Digital Collections, https:\/\/www.thehenryford.org\/collections-and-research\/digital-collections\/artifact\/370341#slide=gs-233738<\/p><\/h2>\">Fig. 13<\/a><\/span>In Wheeled Masculinity<\/h4>Tarini Bedi<\/span>

Fig. 13: Mr T.A. Raman presents a folding portable spinning wheel to Mr Henry Ford, a gift from Mahatma Gandhi, 1942. The Henry Ford Museum Digital Collections, https:\/\/www.thehenryford.org\/collections-and-research\/digital-collections\/artifact\/370341#slide=gs-233738<\/p><\/h2>\">Fig. 13<\/a> we see Raman presenting the charkha to Ford on Gandhi’s behalf on December 28, 1942. They stand side by side at the Ford Museum, suturing relations forever through the wheel that they hold between them. Gandhi himself is not present, but is represented in the object. Both Raman and Ford are dressed in suits and ties for this official gifting ceremony. Raman on the left looks straight at Ford while Ford’s gaze slants down towards the wheel. Both men handle the wheel as though it were a trophy or fetish, rather than an object of use. If Gandhi’s sensory attunement to the wheel was one of mundane and meditative expertise, Ford and Raman relate to it as an object that sutures transnational, bureaucratic, political and social relations between men. The wheel here has travelled out of the context in which it marked itself as the anti-machine and into the world of high machinery and automobility.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

Wheeled Masculinity<\/h4>Tarini Bedi<\/span>

Fig. 14: The folding portable spinning wheel used by Mahatma Gandhi. Wood, 10.2 x 25.4 x 43.2 cm. The Henry Ford Museum Digital Collections, https:\/\/www.thehenryford.org\/collections-and-research\/digital-collections\/artifact\/16348\/#slide=gs-231123<\/p><\/h2>\">Fig. 14<\/a><\/span>Today the object is housed at the Henry Ford Museum in Detroit (Wheeled Masculinity<\/h4>Tarini Bedi<\/span>

Fig. 14: The folding portable spinning wheel used by Mahatma Gandhi. Wood, 10.2 x 25.4 x 43.2 cm. The Henry Ford Museum Digital Collections, https:\/\/www.thehenryford.org\/collections-and-research\/digital-collections\/artifact\/16348\/#slide=gs-231123<\/p><\/h2>\">Fig. 14<\/a>). The yarn touched by the hands of Gandhi still dangles off the spindle. As a museum artifact, the object has moved from one sensory world into another. If the charkha operated in Gandhian politics as both a visual icon and as one that was touched, in the museum it circulates only in the world of sight. Museum patrons can see the object, but they cannot experience it in tactile terms.
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\r\nThese images of the travel of the charkha serve as a material and visual bridge to the wider relations between Indian men and the wheels of automobility. Gandhi’s staunch stance on carving out a specifically non-Western engagement with wheeled artifacts was often contradicted by his wide use of automobiles (and of railway locomotives as well). Many of these contradictions were rooted in Gandhi’s complicated and mutually supportive relationship with India’s leading industrial business enterprises such as the Birla brothers.23<\/a><\/span><\/sup> The Birlas were the founders of Hindustan Motors which, along with Premier Automobiles, manufactured the very first Indian cars. Both business houses had long-standing partnerships with European and American pioneers of automobility. It is clear that Gandhi used cars a great deal. Often these were high-end European and American cars said to be lent to him for use by the Birlas.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

In a photograph taken in 1944 (Wheeled Masculinity<\/h4>Tarini Bedi<\/span>

Fig. 15: Gandhi getting out of a car, Bombay, 1944. https:\/\/121clicks.com\/inspirations\/remembering-gandhi-portraits-of-mahatma<\/p>\r\n\r\n

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 <\/p><\/h2>\">Fig. 15<\/a>), we see Gandhi hurriedly exiting a car as a passenger. If Gandhi’s embodied relationship to the charkha is still, and non-urgent, here we see him engaging with the automobile with some urgency. Instead of yarn, his left hand holds sheaves of paper, the tools of official business and bureaucracy. Here he is seen with other men: one holds the car door open for him and the other, his driver, sits in the front seat patiently waiting for Gandhi to alight. Based on their actions and their different duties related to the car and to the passengers, they appear as subordinate men. This division of labour suggests that Gandhi accepted these hierarchies. He seems to participate in the broader practices of middle-class Indians; these are men who do not drive their own cars but who are driven by others and who depend on subordinates to open their doors. Wheeled Masculinity<\/h4>Tarini Bedi<\/span>

Fig. 15: Gandhi getting out of a car, Bombay, 1944. https:\/\/121clicks.com\/inspirations\/remembering-gandhi-portraits-of-mahatma<\/p>\r\n\r\n

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 <\/p><\/h2>\">Fig. 15<\/a><\/span>While the working-class men who enable Gandhi’s travel appear as subservient, they are also men well versed in how to handle a car. While Gandhi has an intent expression and does not acknowledge the other men here with his eyes, it is clear that these classed hierarchies produce a shared social world of men that allows Gandhi to move in and out of the different worlds of wheels. Further, the car seems to operate as an interstitial space between wheels—between Gandhi’s world of the charkha and the ‘modern’ world of automobility and political modernity.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

If Wheeled Masculinity<\/h4>Tarini Bedi<\/span>

Fig. 15: Gandhi getting out of a car, Bombay, 1944. https:\/\/121clicks.com\/inspirations\/remembering-gandhi-portraits-of-mahatma<\/p>\r\n\r\n

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 <\/p><\/h2>\">Fig. 15<\/a> is a photograph that captures an actual event of travel in Gandhi’s life, Wheeled Masculinity<\/h4>Tarini Bedi<\/span>

Fig. 16: Gandhi Irwin Sammilan: Gandhi and Irwin on Conversation<\/em> [sic], published by Shyam Sunder Lal, Kanpur, circa 1931. Print on paper, 23.5 x 17.5 cm. Collection of Erwin Neumayer and Christine Schelberger, Vienna.<\/p><\/h2>\">Fig. 16<\/a> is a print that imagines Gandhi’s entanglements between automobile travel and political obligation. Wheeled Masculinity<\/h4>Tarini Bedi<\/span>

Fig. 16: Gandhi Irwin Sammilan: Gandhi and Irwin on Conversation<\/em> [sic], published by Shyam Sunder Lal, Kanpur, circa 1931. Print on paper, 23.5 x 17.5 cm. Collection of Erwin Neumayer and Christine Schelberger, Vienna.<\/p><\/h2>\">Fig. 16<\/a><\/span>Here, we see an artistic imagination of the encounter between Gandhi and Irwin in early 1931 on the eve of the signing of the Gandhi-Irwin pact. Gandhi has just alighted from a Rolls-Royce that stands in the background. The contrast between Gandhi’s austere embodiment and the luxurious car that he came in is stark. The wheels of the car are still. While one cannot see the driver of the car, the fact that the car is parked on official <\/em>colonial property indicates that someone else drove him there. While Gandhi was brought here by the car, he does not seem to be responsible for it. If the world of the charkha is still and deliberative, the world of the automobile is surrounded by public life. It is also a space marked by colonial presence—<\/span>most notably, the Union Jack flying behind him, and the colonial architecture all around him. Gandhi walks barefoot up the steps. Viceroy Irwin walks down to greet Gandhi, raising his hat in deference. The guard at the entrance also salutes Gandhi. The image suggests that these men were expecting him. While Gandhi’s accoutrement is in stark contrast to that of the others, his connection to the luxurious wheels behind him mark him as someone who belongs in their world. In both these images of Gandhi and automobiles, he appears much as he does in the world of charkhas. He is dressed as a man who might not otherwise be in a car. He is wearing his signature dhoti and no shoes. However, it is also clear that without the automobile he might not be able to fulfil his official duties as ‘father of the nation’. The wheel appears here as part of male commitments to professional or nationalist duty.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

We could compare this official entanglement between men and their cars to the significant place that the automobile has in the world of male leisure. Western understandings of male leisure and male attunements to their wheels mark an individuated articulation of masculinity. However, in the Indian visual archive, automobility is very much about collective male sociality rather than an individuated one. While men ride around in cars a great deal for pleasure, they are rarely ever alone. Advertising, particularly of high-end automobiles and their parts, seems to rely on this assumed connection between automobiles and collective male sociality.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

Wheeled Masculinity<\/h4>Tarini Bedi<\/span>

Fig. 17: Advertisement for Rolls-Royce, circa 1937. Print on paper, 15 x 20 cm. The Priya Paul Collection of Popular Art, New Delhi.<\/p><\/h2>\">Fig. 17<\/a><\/span>It also seems to mark collective socialities between Western and Westernized Indian men and between elite Indian men and the subaltern men around them. In a Rolls-Royce advertisement (Wheeled Masculinity<\/h4>Tarini Bedi<\/span>

Fig. 17: Advertisement for Rolls-Royce, circa 1937. Print on paper, 15 x 20 cm. The Priya Paul Collection of Popular Art, New Delhi.<\/p><\/h2>\">Fig. 17<\/a>), we see the car standing against the backdrop of what looks like the outer wall of a fort. A group of turbaned men in white lungis and shawls await two men and a woman dressed in Western clothes as they walk towards the fort. Wheeled Masculinity<\/h4>Tarini Bedi<\/span>

Fig. 18: Advertisement for Dunlop Tyres, poster from a watercolour. Chromolithograph on paper, 30 x 20 cm. The Priya Paul Collection of Popular Art, New Delhi.<\/p><\/h2>\">Fig. 18<\/a><\/span>In a watercolour advertisement for Dunlop Tyres (Wheeled Masculinity<\/h4>Tarini Bedi<\/span>

Fig. 18: Advertisement for Dunlop Tyres, poster from a watercolour. Chromolithograph on paper, 30 x 20 cm. The Priya Paul Collection of Popular Art, New Delhi.<\/p><\/h2>\">Fig. 18<\/a>), we see a green Rolls-Royce convertible driving out of a city gate. A bearded and turbaned man is driving the car, and another turbaned man sits with a woman in the back. The seating arrangement marks both gender and class differentiations. These images illustrate that men are those who belong in the world of automobility. However, they almost never occupy this world as individuals but do so as part of a social relation either with other men or with women. In this sense, the automobile operates as social arrangement between and amongst the genders. While women are often present in these social worlds of men and their wheels, it is apparent that they are part of men’s worlds of leisure and consumption rather than the other way around.
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\r\nIf Gandhi used cars a great deal, we might say the same of Nehru. While there are plenty of images of Nehru entering and exiting cars on official business, he clearly also used automobiles a great deal for leisure activities and for expanding his cosmopolitan social world. For instance, in the photograph in Wheeled Masculinity<\/h4>Tarini Bedi<\/span>

Fig. 19: Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru with the Mountbattens, driving around Simla during a holiday in 1948. Photo Division, Ministry of Information & Broadcasting, Government of India. Source: Wikimedia Commons, https:\/\/commons.wikimedia.org<\/a><\/p><\/h2>\">Fig. 19<\/a>, Nehru is on holiday in Simla with Lord and Lady Mountbatten and their daughter. Wheeled Masculinity<\/h4>Tarini Bedi<\/span>

Fig. 19: Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru with the Mountbattens, driving around Simla during a holiday in 1948. Photo Division, Ministry of Information & Broadcasting, Government of India. Source: Wikimedia Commons, https:\/\/commons.wikimedia.org<\/a><\/p><\/h2>\">Fig. 19<\/a><\/span>Mountbatten is doing the driving. Edwina sits in the back seat with Nehru while her daughter sits in the passenger seat beside her father. That Lady Mountbatten sits with Nehru rather than beside her husband disrupts conjugal norms of seating in an automobile. However, given the well-known romance between Nehru and Edwina, this placement in the car seems to recognize the intimacies that the Mountbattens’ famously unconventional, polyamorous marriage allowed. Mountbatten holds the steering wheel and looks directly ahead; he commands the car while Nehru and his companion sit in the backseat enjoying the scenery around them. Unlike <\/em>Gandhi, Nehru looks like he belongs in the cosmopolitan world of cars. However, he too is driven rather than in the driver’s seat.24<\/a><\/span><\/sup> Another man stands beside the car. He appears as the man who has settled them in or who might have helped them with mechanics or other things on this journey. There is no place for him in the car, but he is connected to the car and to the social worlds that the car creates.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

Wheeled Masculinity<\/h4>Tarini Bedi<\/span>

Fig. 20: Maharaja of Narsingarh returning from a tiger hunt. From The Automobiles of the Maharajas<\/em> by Manvendra Singh Barvani and Sharada Dwivedi (Mumbai: Eminence Designs, 2003).<\/p>\r\n\r\n

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 <\/p><\/h2>\">Fig. 20<\/a><\/span>Cars were also significant objects of collective, masculine leisure and sociality for Indian royals. Royal families were well-known collectors and users of automobiles and were often photographed in and around their cars. These men had a luxurious, decadent relationship to their wheels.25<\/a><\/span><\/sup> In Wheeled Masculinity<\/h4>Tarini Bedi<\/span>

Fig. 20: Maharaja of Narsingarh returning from a tiger hunt. From The Automobiles of the Maharajas<\/em> by Manvendra Singh Barvani and Sharada Dwivedi (Mumbai: Eminence Designs, 2003).<\/p>\r\n\r\n

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 <\/p><\/h2>\">Fig. 20<\/a>, the Maharaja of Narsingarh returns from a hunt with the group of men known as the ‘pussy posse’, who acted as his helpers and beaters for the big cat hunt. The car carries the men and the spoils of the hunt, the dead tiger. The car and the tiger dominate the frame and mark the successful hunting spree of the men in the background. The image shows off both the expensive car of the maharaja and his hunting prowess as the dead tiger drips its blood onto the fender. The rifles, the expensive car and the group of men illustrate a very particular kind of male sociality articulated through the collective world of powerful men who hunt wild animals.
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Wheels and Indian Cinema <\/strong><\/span><\/p>\r\n\r\n

By the postcolonial period, automobiles were proliferating into public life more broadly. Indian cinema was an important site at which the connections between automobility and postcolonial masculinity were marked, and automobiles feature prominently in Indian films of the early postcolonial period. However, perhaps because cars were so closely tied to the nationalist and the postcolonial project, automobiles do not always function as objects of individuated male abandon as they do in Western cinema of the same period. Instead, for the most part, men command automobiles (and other wheels) as responsible individuals; they are men who labour or who responsibly manage the household unit. The automobile definitely appears as a space of some experimentation and freedom. However, women seem to feature more prominently as agents of abandon around the car, while men use the cars to rein them in.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

Cars are often sites where songs unfold and where men and women experiment with the pleasures of flirtation. Here again, the car operates as a liminal, interstitial or contact zone, a space of possibility for future entanglements and transitions. Further, there also seems to be a distinction between male attunements to open cars, mostly jeeps, and to the more enclosed, passenger cars. Jeeps (and motorcycles)26<\/a><\/span><\/sup> appear with some regularity in early postcolonial cinema perhaps largely because the early postcolonial state provided greater incentives to Indian automobile manufacturers to produce official and public service vehicles for police and official use over smaller passenger cars. Therefore, their ubiquity in cinema reflects the realities of early postcolonial industrial and manufacturing priorities. They are also always driven by men.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

In a still from the 1969 film Aradhana<\/em>, we see two men sharing the jeep along a mountain road (Wheeled Masculinity<\/h4>Tarini Bedi<\/span>

Fig. 21: Still from Aradhana<\/em>, 1969. https:\/\/i.ytimg.com\/vi\/oJAtaZxof38\/maxresdefault.jpg<\/p>\r\n\r\n

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 <\/p><\/h2>\">Fig. 21<\/a>). One drives, keeping his eye on the road and his hands firmly on the steering wheel, while the other has the freedom to enjoy the ride, and to romp around the vehicle serenading a woman riding alongside them on a train. This could be risky behaviour on a hilly road but there is a reliable man at the wheel to make sure that all goes well. The strong visual presence of the steering wheel is important since the handling of this wheel is what marks the responsible from the irresponsible man.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

Wheeled Masculinity<\/h4>Tarini Bedi<\/span>

Fig. 21: Still from Aradhana<\/em>, 1969. https:\/\/i.ytimg.com\/vi\/oJAtaZxof38\/maxresdefault.jpg<\/p>\r\n\r\n

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 <\/p><\/h2>\">Fig. 21<\/a><\/span>   Wheeled Masculinity<\/h4>Tarini Bedi<\/span>

Fig. 22: Lobby card still from Suhaag<\/em>, 1979. Chromolithograph on paper. The Priya Paul Collection of Popular Art, Delhi.<\/p><\/h2>\">Fig. 22<\/a><\/span><\/p>\r\n\r\n

A decade later, in a still from the film Suhaag<\/em> (Matrimony), Shashi Kapoor and Parveen Babi careen around what is obviously a cityscape with its bright lights behind them (Wheeled Masculinity<\/h4>Tarini Bedi<\/span>

Fig. 22: Lobby card still from Suhaag<\/em>, 1979. Chromolithograph on paper. The Priya Paul Collection of Popular Art, Delhi.<\/p><\/h2>\">Fig. 22<\/a>). There is a sense of abandon in her posture and in the way she daringly balances on the frame of an open jeep, stretching her bare feet beyond the frame and extending a hand to lovingly caress his hair. In this scene, freedom and frolic belong to the woman, while there is a commanding, composed man at the steering wheel. This scene would have been impossible without the jeep that contains them but also allows for the abandon of the woman. While Babi’s body almost takes off into the lights of the city, Kapoor is squarely at the wheel. The city gleams behind them. It is a blurry city signalling a sense of speed and of rapid movement. Kapoor’s character is in<\/em> the city, but he is also in <\/em>the jeep and oriented sensorially up<\/em> towards Babi and down<\/em> toward the steering wheel. He is clearly in charge of this machine; he has one hand on the wheel while the other holds on to the edge of Babi’s dupatta—he steers both the movement of the car and that of Babi. He looks up at her, rather than at the road, but it does not seem to matter; he knows what his car can do even if she might not. He is responsible for the car as much as he is for her. In the film, the car does not belong to Amit, the character played by Kapoor. Amit is a police officer and the car he drives is his police jeep, acquired as part of his professional life. However, he also uses the vehicle for pleasure, particularly to impress women. At the same time, he does not allow himself to be entirely carried away by the wheels at his disposal. He continues to hold on to the car, and steer it responsibly even when he is distracted by Babi’s frolicking. The steering wheel is prominent in this still. Throughout the song sequence, he is in control of the steering and manages to get her home safely.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

Wheeled Masculinity<\/h4>Tarini Bedi<\/span>

Fig. 23: Still from Pinjre Ke Panchhi<\/em>, 1966. Gelatin silver print, surface-mounted on cardboard, 20 x 25 cm. The Priya Paul Collection of Popular Art, New Delhi.<\/p><\/h2>\">Fig. 23<\/a><\/span>The strong visual presence of steering wheels is common in filmic depictions of driving. While we rarely see the wheels of the car and have to imagine that they are there, it is the steering wheel that stands in for the capacities for masculine control. In a still from the 1966 film Pinjre Ke Panchhi <\/em>(Caged Bird), the woman is at the wheel of the jeep but she does not seem to be driving (Wheeled Masculinity<\/h4>Tarini Bedi<\/span>

Fig. 23: Still from Pinjre Ke Panchhi<\/em>, 1966. Gelatin silver print, surface-mounted on cardboard, 20 x 25 cm. The Priya Paul Collection of Popular Art, New Delhi.<\/p><\/h2>\">Fig. 23<\/a>). The man is offering her a trinket of jewellery, in an effort to distract her. She is dressed in Western clothes, which could signal that she can control the machine, but one cannot tell in this still whether the car belongs to him or to her. However, here too, the automobile operates as a relational space, a space shared between the genders rather than an individuated space. While it is intended to mark a social world in which men are supposed to be central and in control, this centrality is always produced through the interdependent presence of women and women’s desires.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

Wheeled Masculinity<\/h4>Tarini Bedi<\/span>

Fig. 24: Lobby card still from Shaadi<\/em>, 1962. Gelatin silver print, 20 x 30 cm. The Priya Paul Collection of Popular Art, New Delhi.<\/p><\/h2>\">Fig. 24<\/a><\/span>Jeeps and open cars in Indian cinema seem to operate quite literally as public spaces. Men are in control but experimentation and flirtation between the genders are possible in public without seeming illicit. We see something different in the closed container of small passenger cars. A still from the film Shaadi<\/em> (Marriage, 1962) shows Saira Bano and Manoj Kumar sitting side by side in a car (Wheeled Masculinity<\/h4>Tarini Bedi<\/span>

Fig. 24: Lobby card still from Shaadi<\/em>, 1962. Gelatin silver print, 20 x 30 cm. The Priya Paul Collection of Popular Art, New Delhi.<\/p><\/h2>\">Fig. 24<\/a>). A man and a woman sitting in a car together with the title of the film Shaadi<\/em> at the bottom signals that the two are either in a conjugal relationship or about to enter one. The love story in this film begins with a marriage that gets into trouble but ends in a reunion between the married couple. Therefore, all the interactions, twists and turns of the plot unfold within the confines of the conjugal bond. Their meetings in the car are therefore respectable<\/em> ones. The man is the driver of the car as well as the respectable family man. Once again, the steering wheel is prominent as he places his hands firmly on it. The car seems to belong to him and he holds responsibly and steadfastly to the steering wheel.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

Wheeled Masculinity<\/h4>Tarini Bedi<\/span>

Fig. 25: Cover of the brochure for Taxi Driver<\/em>, 1973. Chromolithograph on paper, 22 x 17 cm. The Priya Paul Collection of Popular Art, New Delhi.<\/p><\/h2>\">Fig. 25<\/a><\/span>In the 1973 film Taxi Driver<\/em> (Wheeled Masculinity<\/h4>Tarini Bedi<\/span>

Fig. 25: Cover of the brochure for Taxi Driver<\/em>, 1973. Chromolithograph on paper, 22 x 17 cm. The Priya Paul Collection of Popular Art, New Delhi.<\/p><\/h2>\">Fig. 25<\/a>), the car symbolizes the respectability of labour. The male protagonist is a taxi driver in Bombay who is known by his friends as hero<\/em>. While the hero has a respectable profession by day, he lives a double life of hedonistic pleasure at night. He rescues a woman lost in the city and brings her home to live with him. They share the household even though they are not officially married, and she spends a great deal of time in his taxi. As in the previous image, the car seems to operate as a private, domestic space rather than a public one. The protagonists are contained in ways they would not be if they were sitting in a jeep. Yet, despite this more private encounter within the car, the protagonists do not touch, while they do so in the jeep image. But in all these examples, though the men are visually focused on the women, the sensory attunements of touch are squarely focused on the steering wheel and the interior of the car. These are contained expressions of masculinity, the masculinities of real men, who live with wheeled machines and who use them for their labour and their love. They are both intertwined with and distinct from the aspirational attunements of the men who made and built these cars and machines.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

By tracing a varied landscape in the world of wheels, I have tried to present a broad look at these objects around which the various lives of masculinity operate. To sum up, in conclusion, wheels in the visual culture are manly objects that mark the varied lives of men; they mark men’s relations with themselves, with their public aspirations and their more intimate sensory lives, with women, and with other men and other species.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

 <\/p>\r\n\r\n

Acknowledgements<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\r\n\r\n

I am truly grateful to Sumathi Ramaswamy, Christiane Brosius and Yousuf Saeed of Tasveer Ghar for their invaluable guidance and feedback on how to think visually and for pointing me towards the wealth of material in the Priya Paul Collection. I also thank all the participants of the 2019 Manly Matters workshop hosted by Tasveer Ghar and Duke University for their ideas, suggestions and camaraderie. While the essay has taken many new turns since then, this workshop is where I learned to look at material differently and carefully.
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Notes<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\r\n\r\n

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1<\/a><\/span><\/sup> Khanolkar, G.D., Walchand Hirachand: Man, His Times and His Achievements<\/em>, Bombay: Walchand and Company Private Limited, 2007 [1969].<\/span><\/p>\r\n<\/div>\r\n\r\n

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2<\/a><\/span><\/sup> Bray, Francesca, ‘Gender and Technology’, Annual Review of Anthropology<\/em>, Vol. 36, 2007, pp. 37–53; Mellstrom, Ulf, ‘Patriarchal Machines and Masculine Embodiment’, Science, Technology & Human Values<\/em>, Vol. 27, No. 4, 2002, pp. 460–78; Wajcman, Judy, Feminism Confronts Technology<\/em>, Cambridge, UK: Polity, 1991.<\/span><\/p>\r\n<\/div>\r\n\r\n

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3<\/a><\/span><\/sup> Cockburn, Cynthia, Machinery of Dominance: Women, Men and Technical Know-how<\/em>, London: Pluto, 1985; Faulkner, W., ‘The Technology Question in Feminism: A View from Feminist Technology Studies’, Women’s Studies International Forum<\/em>, Vol. 24, No. 1, 2001, pp. 79–95.<\/span><\/p>\r\n<\/div>\r\n\r\n

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4<\/a><\/span><\/sup> Staff Reporter, ‘Walchand Hirachand’s Services Praised’, The Times of India<\/em>, December 10, 1960.<\/span><\/p>\r\n<\/div>\r\n\r\n

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5<\/a><\/span><\/sup> Khanolkar, Walchand Hirachand<\/em>. <\/span>  <\/p>\r\n<\/div>\r\n\r\n

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6<\/a><\/span><\/sup> Ibid.<\/span><\/p>\r\n<\/div>\r\n\r\n

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7<\/a><\/span><\/sup> Bulliet, Richard W., The Wheel: Inventions and Reinventions<\/em>, New York: Columbia Univesity Press, 2016.<\/span><\/p>\r\n<\/div>\r\n\r\n

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8<\/a><\/span><\/sup> Ibid., p. 3.<\/span><\/p>\r\n<\/div>\r\n\r\n

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9<\/a><\/span><\/sup> Strathern, Marilyn, The Gender of the Gift<\/em>, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988.<\/span><\/p>\r\n<\/div>\r\n\r\n

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10<\/a><\/span><\/sup> Pernau, Margrit, ‘Modern Masculinity, Bought at Your Local Pharmacist: The Tonic Sanatogen in 20th-Century Indian Advertisements,’ Tasveer Ghar<\/em>, 2019, http:\/\/tasveergharindia.net\/essay\/sanatogen-masculine-advert.html<\/a><\/span><\/p>\r\n<\/div>\r\n\r\n

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11<\/a><\/span><\/sup> Narayan, R.K. and Doniger, Wendy, The Mahabharata: A Shortened Modern Prose Version of the Indian Epic<\/em>, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013.<\/span><\/p>\r\n<\/div>\r\n\r\n

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12<\/a><\/span><\/sup> Chaturvedi, Mahendra, A Practical Hindi-English Dictionary<\/em>, Delhi: National Publishing House, 1970, available in Digital Dictionaries of South Asia<\/em>, https:\/\/dsal.uchicago.edu\/dictionaries\/<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\r\n<\/div>\r\n\r\n

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13<\/a><\/span><\/sup> Gandhi, Mahatma, Hind Swaraj<\/em>, Ahmedabad: Navajivan Publishing House, 1944 1938.<\/span><\/p>\r\n<\/div>\r\n\r\n

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14<\/a><\/span><\/sup> Nandy, Ashish, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism<\/em>, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983.<\/span><\/p>\r\n<\/div>\r\n\r\n

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15<\/a><\/span><\/sup> Brown, Rebecca M., ‘Spinning without Touching the Wheel: Anticolonialism, Indian Nationalism, and the Deployment of Symbol’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East<\/em>, Vol. 29, No. 2, 2009, pp. 230–45; Brown, Rebecca M., Gandhi’s Spinning Wheel and the Making of India<\/em>, London and New York: Routledge, 2010.<\/span><\/p>\r\n<\/div>\r\n\r\n

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16<\/a><\/span><\/sup> Nandy, The Intimate Enemy<\/em>; Pandey, Gyanendra, ed., Hindus and Others: The Question of Identity in India Today<\/em>, New Delhi: Viking, 1993; Rudolph, Susanne and Rudolph, Lloyd, The Modernity of Tradition<\/em>, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967.<\/span><\/p>\r\n<\/div>\r\n\r\n

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17<\/a><\/span><\/sup> Brown, Gandhi’s Spinning Wheel<\/em>. <\/span><\/p>\r\n<\/div>\r\n\r\n

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18<\/a><\/span><\/sup> Ibid.<\/span><\/p>\r\n<\/div>\r\n\r\n

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19<\/a><\/span><\/sup> Eschner, Kat, ‘The Unlikely Bromance between Henry Ford and Mohandas Gandhi’, Smithsonian Magazine<\/em>, 2017, https:\/\/www.smithsonianmag.com\/smart-news\/unlikely-bromance-between-henry-ford-and-mohandas-gandhi-180964106\/<\/a><\/span><\/p>\r\n<\/div>\r\n\r\n

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20<\/a><\/span><\/sup> Barber, H.L., Story of the Automobile: Its History and Development from 1760 to 1917<\/em>, Chicago: A.J. Munson & Co, 1917.<\/span><\/p>\r\n<\/div>\r\n\r\n

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21<\/a><\/span><\/sup> Ford, Brian, Friends, Families & Forays: Scenes from the Life and Times of Henry Ford<\/em>, Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2002.<\/span><\/p>\r\n<\/div>\r\n\r\n

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22<\/a><\/span><\/sup> Brown, ‘Spinning without Touching the Wheel’.  <\/span><\/p>\r\n<\/div>\r\n\r\n

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23<\/a><\/span><\/sup> Chakrabarti, Atulananda, Gandhi and Birla<\/em>, Calcutta: General Printers and Publishers, 1955; Mazzarella, William, ‘Branding the Mahatma: The Untimely Provocation of Gandhian Publicity’, Cultural Anthropology<\/em>, Vol. 25, No. 1, 2010, pp. 1–39; McKean, Lise, Divine Enterprise: Gurus and the Hindu Nationalist Movement<\/em>, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.<\/span><\/p>\r\n<\/div>\r\n\r\n