Cars, like many material objects, seem to face an inherent obsolescence. We are told that they begin to lose value the minute they leave the factory. But what happens to a car that has been retired, abandoned, and rendered useless? In conducting research on Mumbai’s taxi trade, I was struck by how widely discussions of phaseout, upgrade, and replacement—of both cars and trade practices—permeated the taxi industry. I was also surprised by the unexpected afterlives of the vehicles in question. I rode around in taxis, but I also observed ruined, phased out, and dead taxis resting in place. In the 1990s the government mandated that the life of a taxi would not exceed twenty years. However, like ruins of other kinds, these phased out, obsolete vehicles didn’t simply disappear after twenty years. They fell out of use as taxis, but they remained visible, and became a useful and lively part of the landscape throughout the side streets, gullies, and junkyards of Mumbai.

Under a shroud of dust, rust, corrosion, smashed headlights, and years of accumulated pigeon droppings, this car, once a working taxi, sits alongside a busy artery in central Mumbai. Soon it will be beaten upon by monsoons. The dust will turn to slime and, perhaps, wash away to show off the colors of the kaalipeeli (black and yellow) taxi that it once was. The life of this dusty Padmini probably began in about 2000, when the last Padmini was manufactured—before the factory closed due to decades of falling sales, disputes over the government’s passenger car policies, and violent labor struggles. Probably by 2020, this Padmini was left for dead on the roadside in this busy commercial area due to government mandates restricting how long taxis can operate.

At first glance, Padminis like this one, with their massacred seats and dismembered doors, look abandoned and uncared for. Left for dead, these cars inspire spirited debates over how seemingly useless objects occupy public space, encroach on parking, attract rodent colonies, and provide a public canvas for the disclosure of neighborhood love affairs, carved into window dust—Raj ♥ Meera. And yet, the battery of formal complaints to the municipality and to neighborhood resident societies has not deterred people from salvaging parts for use elsewhere, or from resting on hoods while they wait at nearby bus stops.

Dusty Padminis are obsolete in one sense, but far from abandoned in another. To address complaints, the municipality moves discarded cars from place to place. Often, cars dumped in new places morph into other forms along the way, such as when a door is captured for sheet metal, or plastic from the seats is removed for recycling. The gradual changes in material form over time and space suggest a distinct contrast between fast and slow obsolescence. The former is led by official policies that discard taxis quickly and on mandated timelines; the latter by everyday practices of breaking, tearing, and repurposing.

The Premier Padmini was the iconic Mumbai taxi for over four decades. Manufactured by one of India’s first car companies, Premier Automobiles Limited (PAL), through a partnership with the Italian automaker Fiat, when it was introduced in 1964 it was hailed as one of the first indigenous Indian passenger cars—at once modern and definitively Indian. The smartly engineered car reflected the aspirations of India’s industrial and political elite—class mobility, industrial modernity, and professional success. It was marketed to Indian consumers as a luxury car, with early advertisements proclaiming that the car would propel ambitious go-getters into a desired future. But it also had generational flair. In the words of PAL executives, Padminis “were perceived as the differentiator between the young and cool and the old and fuddy-duddy.”¹

The once-innovative Padmini had to fight for its life as the decades passed. As sales fell in the 1960s, PAL struck deals with Mumbai’s taxi unions and associations. These agreements provided incentives for taxi permit holders and independent operators to purchase Padminis as taxis. However, once the car became a working-class vehicle, it diminished in consumer value. The aspirational public no longer thought of it as a symbol of upward mobility. Company executives attributed falling sales to state neglect of the small passenger-car industry. In the words of an executive who runs Premier today, “The government killed our car and our business.”

It is difficult to say when exactly a Padmini is born or killed. Early Indian cars were often built incomplete due to complex import duties that restricted availability of materials and parts. Local engineers and drivers adapted by using spare parts from other machines. In this sense, these cars were quintessential “fluid technologies.”² Taxi drivers developed engineering expertise as part of their trade; driving a Padmini often required fixing a Padmini. Moreover, it was common for taxi drivers to resist government efforts at phasing out their cars by pegging the age of their vehicles to certain newer parts (but not others).³ Like most urban infrastructure, cars too can be dated to several eras. As Michel Serres notes, cars draw from the obsolete, the contemporary, and the futuristic.⁴

While individual cars are discarded along Mumbai’s roads, they also gather in the compounds of government transportation and licensing institutions such as the RTO (Regional Transport Office). Transportation officials refer to these as joona (old),⁵ kabara (ruins, junk), khatara (slang for tired, but also explained to me to as an auditory feature that describes the rattling sound of old metallic objects—khat-khat-khatara). These different ways of talking about old cars suggests how obsolescence gets rendered through vernacular terms, practices, and temporalities.

Here, discarded cars sit alongside discarded trucks and cranes, paper or plastic scrap, and food or fabric waste. It’s common to see scrappers and ragpickers working through these menageries of waste. One of the reasons that cars are frequently left in public places is because there’s a collective understanding that, while obsolete, they continue to offer something of value to the public.

The discarded cars that collect at the Regional Transport Office can be read as an archive of shifts in India’s taxi trade over the past twenty-five years. Some taxis were driven off the road and landed here due to government mandates that they be phased out rather than repaired. If RTOs are where the business of transport takes place, clearly this involves more than the issuance of driving licenses, transport permits, driving tests, and approval certificates for commercial vehicles. As this rusting fleet of taxis illustrates, it is also a place of discard and demolition—a graveyard of vehicles made obsolete by policy, not because they were useless.

A young man sits in a discarded Padmini to escape the searing afternoon heat as he waits for a friend to finish his driving test. He lounges lazily in the back seat, watching YouTube videos on his mobile phone. Soon, another man comes along and uses the car’s hood to spread out and organize his licensing paperwork.

On the other side of the field lie discarded cars from the fleet company TabCab. Fleet taxis were introduced in Mumbai in the mid-2000s.⁶ They were owned by large investors who sought to replace the independent-operator taxi industry. Today, however, one finds fleet taxis discarded and abandoned collectively, the fleet industry in Mumbai having all but died at the hands of ride-share apps. Here, TabCab fleet taxis serve as dustbins where bureaucrats working at the RTO toss their garbage after lunch.

In the far corner of the field is a kaalipeeli, manufactured by Maruti, an Indian company that benefited from significant government patronage and surpassed other Indian car manufacturers in the 1980s. Maruti cars made their way into the taxi industry following the obsolescence of Padminis, but many of their models were also eventually phased out.

A young recycler scrapes around and under the kaalipeeli, looking for anything of value. He is sure he can find something there that can give life to something else. This ruined kaalipeeli has a sticker on its side window that cheerfully declares, “Chalo Haji Ali” (“Let’s go to Haji Ali”). It’s reminiscent of a more hopeful time, when the taxi probably traveled to one of the most visited tourist attractions in Mumbai, the shrine of the Sufi saint Haji Ali.

All these cars have been rendered obsolete by particular changes in the taxi industry. While they have ceased to be what they were meant to be, they have been incorporated into new social and material worlds as something else—a garbage receptacle, a washing sink, a source of raw material. More than that, they have melded into the urban landscape itself. Many become landmarks. Scrap-seekers, RTO bureaucrats, and everyday citizens looking for shade depend on these objects, use them, and orient to them.

Seen in this way, obsolescence might be a useful category for those who see these objects as only cars, but for those who use them differently, they have remained alive. The once-lauded Padmini and Mumbai’s other, less iconic taxis may have been forcibly rendered obsolete. As vehicles, they may have been left for dead. But as a part of the city, they have not entirely died. They remain integral to life in contemporary Mumbai, and they make it difficult to point to when and if a car ever dies in the city. ■

1. David Shaftel, “Shedding Door Pulls, Mumbai Taxis Rattle Into History,” New York Times, December 28, 2012, www.nytimes.com/2012/12/30/automobiles/shedding-door-pulls-mumbai-taxis-rattle-off.html. ↩︎
2. Marianne de Laet and Annemarie Mol, “The Zimbabwe Bush Pump: Mechanics of a Fluid Technology,” Social Studies of Science 30, no. 2 (2000). ↩︎
3. Tarini Bedi, “Urban Histories of Place and Labour: The Chillia Taximen of Bombay/Mumbai,” Modern Asian Studies 52, no. 5 (2018). ↩︎
4. Michel Serres, The Troubador of Knowledge (University of Michigan Press, 1997). ↩︎
5. Tarini Bedi, “Thinking Through Urban Obsolescence,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, (DOI)10.1111/1468-2427.12948 (2020). ↩︎
6. Tarini Bedi, “Mimicry, Friction and Trans-Urban Imaginaries: Mumbai Taxis/Singapore-Style,” Environment and Planning A 48, no. 6 (2015). ↩︎