Circulating Goods, Circuits of Caste: Cargo-cycling in Urban India

Set against distinct visions of the city shaped by developmental logics of globalization, air pollution and environmental ideas, this paper explores the changing circuits of caste and the resilience of cargo-cycling in India.

People's diverse relationships with bicycles reorders caste and migration in cities. I take the movements of cargo-cyclists and the goods they circulate as a starting point to think about relationality and difference in the city of Kolkata in eastern India.

My talk will illustrate how the transformation of riverine ecologies and floodplains, the partition of the Indian subcontinent and the creation of new markets bear upon people's compulsions and capacities to cycle goods through the city.