On Three Wheels: An Anthropology of Karachi's Autorickshaw

Mobile Precarity, Masculinity, and Urban Survival

Entering the City from the Back Seat

To understand Karachi, one must first understand its noise. It is not a singular sound, but a geological layering of sonic strata: the deep bellow of the Bedford bus, the high-pitched whine of the Honda CD-70, and, bridging them both, the rhythmic, coughing staccato of the autorickshaw.

If you climb into a green-and-yellow autorickshaw, you are most likely to read: "Maa ki dua, Jannat ki hawa". "Kidhar jana hai, sahib?" the driver asks, not just to know the destination, but to calculate the moral, economic, and physical cost of the ride.

Karachi is often read through maps, flyovers, gated societies, and development plans. But another map exists — drawn not by planners but by rickshaw drivers. It is a living cartography of shortcuts, dangers, police points, rich neighborhoods, flooded streets, and invisible borders. The autorickshaw is not merely a vehicle; it is a mobile institution where economy, masculinity, class, risk, religion, humor, power, and survival meet daily.

Highly educated people usually interpret rickshaws through annoyance, pollution, informality, or urban chaos. Anthropology asks something else: What kind of life does the rickshaw make possible? What kind of city does it reveal?

The autorickshaw is not a symptom of underdevelopment but a technology of survival — one that manages contradictions the formal economy cannot resolve. It absorbs surplus labor, navigates informal governance, performs working-class masculinity, and creates micro-publics where Karachi's hierarchies are rehearsed, contested, and reproduced. To study the rickshaw is to study Pakistan's political economy from the street up.

Rickshaw as Livelihood: The Economy of the Day

Most Karachi rickshaw drivers do not speak in monthly salaries. They speak in days:

"Aaj ka din kaisa gaya?"
"Target poora hua ya nahi?"

“Abhi kitne rounds lagaane hain?”

The rickshaw economy is a daily survival economy. Many drivers rent their vehicles for Rs. 1,500–2,500 per day. Before earning for family, food, fuel, or school fees, they must first repay the machine. Only after the rickshaw owner is satisfied does the driver begin earning for himself.

This produces what anthropology calls temporal precarity: life measured not in careers but in shifts, fares, and weather. Rain can increase passengers but destroy health. Heat slows bodies but speeds desperation. Smog hurts lungs but not rent obligations.

Rickshaw driving in Karachi is often the final stop for men pushed out of:

Factory labor (deindustrialization, automation, layoffs)
Port work (casualization, containerization)
Informal retail (market saturation, evictions)
Migrant agricultural labor (drought, debt, displacement)
Unemployment after education (degree inflation, nepotism)

The rickshaw becomes a technology of last resort, absorbing surplus labor that the formal economy cannot carry. Unlike unemployment, which appears as a statistical absence, rickshaw driving is hypervisible: loud, mobile, inescapable. It is poverty performing productivity.

What educated observers miss is this:

Rickshaws are not inefficient transport; they are efficient absorbers of social failure.

They quietly manage unemployment, migration, debt, and masculine responsibility without appearing in development statistics. When the World Bank discusses "informal sector growth," it is often describing men like rickshaw drivers — not entrepreneurs, but survivors.

The Invisible Contract: Renting Manhood

Most drivers do not own their rickshaws. Ownership belongs to a patron class of small capitalists: retired drivers, shopkeepers, and landlords with excess capital. The rental arrangement is feudal in structure but industrial in rhythm.

Daily rent functions as:

Guaranteed extraction — the owner's profit is secured before the driver earns anything.
Risk transfer — accidents, fines, and repairs fall on the driver, not the owner.
Discipline mechanism — the driver cannot rest; the machine must move, or money is lost.

This is debt as governance. The rickshaw itself becomes a creditor. It demands feeding (petrol), care (repairs), and appeasement (daily rent). The driver's body becomes secondary to the vehicle's needs.

Educated critics often blame drivers for "choosing" this work. Anthropology reveals something else: choice collapses when all other doors close. The rickshaw does not represent ambition; it represents the geography of foreclosed options.

Petrol as Temporality

Drivers calculate time through fuel:

"Ek tank mein kitna chal sakta hai?"
"Abhi half tank hai, toh shaam tak manage kar lunga."

Petrol is not just energy — it is condensed time. A full tank allows strategic waiting at good locations. An empty tank forces desperate acceptance of bad fares. Running on fumes means accepting passengers who bargain hardest, go to dangerous areas, or pay late.

Fuel scarcity during political crises (strikes, protests, supply shocks) does not simply inconvenience drivers. It collapses their planning horizon to minutes. When petrol disappears, so does tomorrow.

This is fuel as social infrastructure. The state's failure to stabilize petrol supply is not a policy gap; it is violence distributed across working-class bodies as stress, hunger, and unpaid rent.

The Rickshaw as Mobile Workplace

Unlike offices, rickshaws have no fixed walls. The street becomes the office, courtroom, mosque, café, and battlefield.

Inside the rickshaw:

Negotiation replaces contracts.
Voice replaces paperwork.
Memory replaces GPS.
Reputation replaces salary slips.

Every stop is labor. Every passenger is an evaluation. Every argument over Rs. 50 is also an argument over dignity.

The Ritual of the Fare

The meter, in Karachi, is a mythological object. It exists physically, often rusted and jammed at zero, but socially, it has been dead since the 1990s. This absence necessitates the ritual of bhaao-taao (bargaining).

This interaction between Rickshaw-wala and Sawari is a momentary social contract. It is a piece of street theater. The passenger states a destination; the driver looks away, feigning disinterest, before quoting a price 40% higher than the market rate. When a passenger says, "Zyada le rahe ho," it is not only about money — it is about who controls value. The passenger scoffs, walking away. The driver calls them back.

This dance is rooted in the "Moral Economy" of the street. The driver’s price includes the "hidden costs" of Karachi: the bribe for the traffic warden at the next naka (checkpoint), the agonizing wait in the CNG line, and the wear and tear from the potholes of the industrial area. The passenger’s counteroffer reflects the crushing inflation of the urban middle class. When they agree on a price, they are not just agreeing on a number; they are acknowledging a shared struggle against the city’s economic machinery.

The market price is never neutral. It is negotiated through narratives of need, fairness, and obligation.

Educated passengers often see bargaining as an inconvenience. Drivers experience it as a constant moral trial: to prove they deserve survival.

This bargaining is also gendered and classed:

Women passengers are less likely to bargain aggressively (fear of confrontation, time pressure).
DHA residents expect deference and rarely negotiate (paying Rs. 20 extra is negligible; commanding is symbolic).
Working-class passengers bargain hardest (Rs. 20 matters; solidarity does not extend across transport).

The fare is never just money. It is a micro-drama of power.

Emotional Labor: Managing Passengers

Drivers perform constant emotional work that remains invisible:

Patience with rudeness ("Jaldi chalo!" shouted from behind).
Gratitude performance ("Shukriya sahib" even when underpaid).
Humor to defuse tension (jokes about traffic, weather, politicians).
Silence when insulted (especially by rude passengers, whose complaints drivers cannot answer without seeming threatening).

You may call this "emotional labor." Rickshaw drivers do it without scripts, training, or institutional support. Their smiles, patience, and deference are unpaid surplus extracted through social norms.

We rarely notice this because it seems natural. But nothing is natural about smiling at someone who just called you "jahil" for taking a shortcut.

Spatial Knowledge as Cultural Capital

Rickshaw Drivers do not use Google Maps. Their knowledge is:

Embodied (muscle memory of turns, bumps, slopes).
Social (knowing which neighborhoods are safe at night, which police points are active).
Temporal (knowing when Defense roads flood, when Saddar jams, when factories release workers).

This knowledge cannot be taught in classrooms or downloaded. It is accumulated through bodily exposure to the city's rhythms. When a driver says, "Main rasta jaanta hoon," he is asserting expertise against educated condescension.

This is subaltern cartography — a map made by those who cannot afford to be lost. It is more accurate than official maps because it includes what planners ignore: drainage failures, police behavior, and class borders.

Rickshaws as Micro-Public Spaces

For 10 to 30 minutes, strangers share movement. Rickshaws create temporary publics where class, language, gender, and trust are renegotiated.

A single ride may include:

Switching from Urdu to Pashto to Sindhi.
Politeness performances.
Gendered silence when women passengers sit behind.
Surveillance of bags, phones, bodies.

Rickshaws expose Karachi's hidden hierarchies. The way a DHA resident commands a driver differs from how a Saddar vendor requests service. Tone, not just money, carries power.

Rickshaws are moving theaters of class performance. Passengers rehearse dominance; drivers rehearse deference. Both know their roles but occasionally improvise.

We often miss this:

Transport is not neutral — it trains people daily in how to treat others.

The rickshaw teaches patience, dominance, submission, humor, and resistance at the same time.

Women Passengers: Mobility and Vulnerability

The rickshaw occupies a unique space in the gendered geography of Pakistan. For the solitary woman commuter, the bus is often a site of harassment and overcrowding, while a private car is an unaffordable luxury. The rickshaw offers a "middle space."

It provides a semi-private sphere within the public domain. The chadar or canvas flap used to cover the sides of the rickshaw converts the cabin into a mobile zenana (women's quarters). It allows women to traverse the public gaze of the male-dominated street while maintaining the boundaries of purdah.

For women, rickshaws are both freedom and risk. They enable movement across a city with poor public transport, but that movement is always surveilled.

Women passengers report:

Constant mirror-gazing by drivers (checking, watching, evaluating).
Silence as protection (avoid conversation to avoid misinterpretation).
Spatial vigilance (tracking routes, noting turns, ready to exit).
Fare vulnerability (overcharging is common; arguing is risky).

Yet, some women may speak of specific rickshaw drivers—often older men, or "Uncles"—as protectors, guardians who will wait until the gate is unlocked before driving away. Here, the transactional relationship is temporarily suspended in favor of a kinship-like obligation.

Rickshaws reveal Karachi's gendered geography: women can move, but never freely. Their mobility is conditional, monitored, and morally scrutinized.

This is gendered infrastructure — transport designed by and for male bodies, with women's access tolerated but not centered.

Rickshaw Art: Public Diaries on Metal

Karachi's rickshaws speak even when drivers stay silent:

"Dekh, magar pyaar se."
"Jaldi wahan, der na yahan."
“Chal Dhanno, tera aashiq aagaya.”
Images of holy places, actors, saints, flags.
Chains, mirrors, LEDs.

This is not decoration. It is working-class philosophy.

Unlike elite art that hides in galleries, rickshaw art is exposed to dust, police, ridicule, and admiration. It communicates:

Longing for protection (Khuda, Murshid, Maa ki dua) — the supernatural as insurance against structural abandonment.
Humor against suffering ("Meri rickshaw, meri marzi" = agency asserted where control is minimal).
Masculine pride (images of guns, lions, bodybuilders = compensatory symbolism).
Romantic disappointment ("Jis se mohabbat ki, us ne thukra diya" = love as another site of failure).

The back of a rickshaw is a public autobiography. It tells passengers what kind of man drives: religious, poetic, broken, hopeful, sarcastic.

The rickshaw becomes a mobile shrine, billboard, and confessional simultaneously. It announces the driver's interior life to a city that otherwise ignores him.

Aesthetic Politics

Educated observers often romanticize truck art but ignore rickshaw art because it seems smaller, poorer, less spectacular. Yet rickshaw art is more intimate. It belongs to bodies, not companies. The rickshaw owner treats the vehicle as a bride to be adorned.

Truck art is industrial aesthetics — funded by transport companies, executed by professional painters, meant to signal wealth and reliability.

Rickshaw art is vernacular aesthetics — funded by daily savings, executed by neighborhood artists, meant to signal personhood.

When a driver decorates his rickshaw, he is not optimizing brand value. He is resisting disposability. The machine may not belong to him, but its appearance can. The art says: "I exist, not just as labor, but as someone with taste, humor, and dreams."

Religious Iconography as Protection

Why do so many rickshaws display religious verses, images of the holy places, or names of saints?

We may often read this as simple piety. Anthropology sees something more complex: religion as risk management.

Drivers face:

Accidents (mechanical failure, reckless traffic).
Robbery (cash-based work, isolated routes).
Police harassment (arbitrary fines, violence).
Structural vulnerability (no insurance, no recourse).

In the absence of institutional protection, the sacred becomes infrastructure. Quranic verses are not just faith; they are hedges against uncertainty. "Nazar-e-bad" stickers are not superstition; they are acknowledgments that malice is real and protection is scarce.

When the state fails, drivers turn to Allah — not from ignorance, but from experiential realism.

Masculinity on Three Wheels

Rickshaw driving in Karachi is deeply gendered. Almost all drivers are men. But not powerful men — men under pressure.

Their masculinity is built from:

Endurance in heat (12-hour shifts, 40°C temperatures).
Exposure to abuse (passengers, police, other drivers).
Navigating danger (accidents, robberies, flooding).
Providing daily income (failure means family hunger, children out of school, wife's silent judgment).

Drivers rarely speak about fear, yet they live with:

Traffic accidents (Karachi's roads are among the world's deadliest).
Police extortion (bribes framed as "chai-pani").
Robbery (cash transactions, isolated routes, no security).
Illness without insurance (fever, back pain, lung disease ignored until collapse).

This is precarious masculinity — manhood dependent on daily earning, not inherited privilege. Unlike salaried men whose masculinity is secured by monthly income, rickshaw drivers must perform manhood daily through bodily endurance.

Speed as Masculine Performance

We often describe rickshaw drivers as reckless. But it can be something else:

Speed is not irresponsibility; it is time translated into income.

Every slow minute is lost bread. Every traffic jam is stolen food. Speed is not bravado; it is desperate efficiency.

But speed is also performance. Among drivers, reckless maneuvering signals:

Skill (navigating tight gaps, reading traffic flow).
Courage (willingness to take risks others avoid).
Vitality (physical and mental sharpness despite exhaustion).

Drivers compete silently through driving style. The man who overtakes, who finds the fastest route, who never hesitates, asserts dominance in a world where he controls almost nothing.

Flirtation and Frustration

Rickshaw drivers are often accused of staring at women passengers. Some do. Why?

Not to excuse it, but to understand it from a different perspective:

Mobility denied (drivers cannot afford to travel, date, or access spaces where romance happens).
Visual economy (the city circulates images of desirable women — billboards, dramas, passengers — but access is forbidden).

The male gaze from the driver's seat is not just sexual. It is a look born from exclusion. Women passengers represent a world that drivers can transport but never enter.

This does not justify harassment. But it locates the behavior within structures of class and gender, not individual pathology.

Educated feminism often (rightly) critiques male harassment. But we may add: harassment is also structured by economies of desire, where poor men are taught to want what they can never have, and proximity without access generates frustration.

Aging and Obsolescence

Rickshaw driving is brutal on bodies. By 50, most drivers suffer from:

Spinal damage (constant vibration, poor seating).
Hearing loss (engine noise, traffic).
Respiratory illness (pollution, dust, smog).
Vision decline (sun exposure, no eye protection).

There is no retirement. There are no pensions. Aging drivers either:

Keep working until physical collapse.
Become rickshaw owners (if they saved enough).
Return to villages (if family land remains).
Depend on children (who often resent it).

Masculinity, here, is not sustained. It is used up. The rickshaw driver's body is consumed by the city and then discarded.

"Bhai, Karachi hum ko kha gai."

Police, State, and the Street

Ask a rickshaw driver about the state, and he will not mention the constitution, parliament, or ministries. He will mention a man in uniform.

Traffic police
Excise officers
Municipal inspectors

Bribes become routine: Rs. 50, Rs. 100, Rs. 200 — framed as "chai-pani." These are not exceptions to the law. They are the law's daily performance.

Rickshaws reveal the state as encounter, not abstraction. The law becomes a relationship, not a rule.

Rickshaw drivers learn:

Where police stand (corners, flyovers, toll plazas).
Who negotiates (some officers take Rs. 50, others demand Rs. 200, some let you go if you plead correctly).
Which uniform demands what (traffic police want registration money, excise officers want fitness certificates, municipal officers want parking bribes).

Educated citizens imagine the state as a system. Drivers experience it as mood, personality, and hunger.

Thus, governance becomes personalized, not institutional. The driver does not follow "the law." He navigates officers — reading their body language, tone, and willingness to negotiate.

The Fine as Arbitrary Extraction

Official fines are rarely about safety. They are about revenue extraction at the bottom.

When a driver is fined for:

Lack of fitness certificate (expensive to obtain, renewable annually, often fake anyway).
Illegal route (routes are unregulated but selectively enforced).
Overcharging (no meter, no standard, police decide arbitrarily).

...the fine is not corrective. It is predatory.

We may call this "protection rackets": the state extracts payment in exchange for not harassing you. The difference from criminal gangs is only symbolic legitimacy.

Bureaucracy from Below

For drivers, bureaucracy is not paperwork. It is waiting.

Waiting for license renewal.
Waiting for fitness inspections.
Waiting for court dates (if challaned).
Waiting to speak to clerks who may or may not help.

This waiting is not neutral. It is time theft. Every hour spent at an excise office is an hour not earning. The state's inefficiency is not accidental; it is class-stratified. Elite citizens hire lawyers and agents. Poor citizens wait.

Urban Ecology: Bodies, Roads, Pollution

Rickshaw drivers are Karachi's environmental witnesses.

They feel:

Smog in lungs (particulate matter, diesel fumes, industrial emissions).
Heat on metal seats (extreme temperatures in summer).
Floodwater in engines (monsoons, broken drainage, climate collapse).
Broken roads in spines (potholes, craters, decades of neglect).

We may link this to political ecology: how power shapes who absorbs environmental damage.

Drivers breathe more pollution than office workers. They absorb more vibration than planners. They endure climate change not as theory but as bodily pain.

While educated environmentalists discuss carbon emissions in conferences, rickshaw drivers are already living the consequences.

Educated debates about climate often ignore this:

The environmental crisis is unevenly distributed across classed bodies.

The rickshaw driver becomes the city's shock absorber — literally. His body absorbs what the city cannot process: pollution, heat, water, and decay.

The Rickshaw as Environmental Scapegoat

Policy discourse often blames rickshaws for pollution. Two-stroke engines are inefficient, loud, and toxic. True.

But:

Rickshaws account for a small fraction of Karachi's emissions (cars, buses, trucks, factories contribute far more).
The push to ban two-stroke rickshaws often serves class displacement, not environmental goals (easier to regulate poor drivers than powerful industries).
Environmental blame shifts responsibility downward (drivers pollute to survive; corporations pollute for profit).

When the state bans old rickshaws without providing affordable alternatives, it is not environmentalism. It is ecology as policing.

Rickshaws as Political Symbols

Rickshaws appear in jokes, memes, films, and political rhetoric as symbols of chaos, noise, backwardness.

Yet the same elite depend on them for:

Domestic workers (maids, cooks, guards travel via rickshaw).
Last-mile transport (goods, children, groceries move via rickshaw).
Cheap logistics (small businesses rely on rickshaws for delivery).

This is a symbolic contradiction: mock what sustains you.

Rickshaws represent Karachi's informal soul — unruly but indispensable. To remove rickshaws would be to remove the infrastructure that makes elite life affordable. Yet admitting this dependence would threaten elite self-image as modern, independent, global.

So rickshaws are tolerated, ridiculed, and erased from visions of the future.

Rickshaws in Media

In Pakistani dramas and films, rickshaws appear as:

Comedy (the bumbling driver, the chaotic ride).
Poverty marker (characters who take rickshaws are struggling).
Nostalgia (the "authentic" Karachi, unspoiled by modernity).

Rarely do rickshaws appear as sites of labor, survival, or structural violence.

This is not accidental. Media produced by and for elites cannot represent rickshaws honestly without implicating itself in their exploitation.

What Rickshaws Teach Us About Karachi

If you want to understand Karachi, do not only read its master plans. Ride its rickshaws.

They teach:

How poverty is managed, not solved. (Rickshaws absorb unemployment without addressing its causes.)
How masculinity survives precarity. (Men endure, perform, and break under the weight of provisioning.)
How art grows in dust. (Aesthetic expression persists despite — and because of — material deprivation.)
How the state appears from below. (Governance is personalized, predatory, and unreliable.)
How the environment becomes bodily. (Pollution, heat, and infrastructure failure are absorbed by classed bodies.)
How the class performs itself daily. (Every ride rehearses dominance, deference, and dignity.)

Rickshaws are not problems to remove. They are questions the city asks about itself:

What happens to labor that the economy cannot absorb?
How do men survive when formal structures fail?
What does governance look like when the state is absent or predatory?
Who bears the cost of urban development and environmental collapse?

Conclusion: The City Between Second and Third Gear

Highly educated people look at rickshaws and see disorder. Can they see organized survival?

The rickshaw carries more than passengers. It carries:

Labor histories (migrations, deindustrialization, displacement).
Moral economies (negotiations over fairness, need, and dignity).
Masculine anxieties (fatherhood without security, manhood without power).
Environmental injustice (bodies absorbing the city's toxic externalities).
Political encounters (the state as bribe-taker, not protector).
Cultural philosophy (painted in cheap enamel, sung in broken voices).

To understand Pakistan, one does not only need archives and policy reports. Sometimes one needs a torn seat, a rattling engine, and a man who says:

"Bas sahib, rozi ka sawal hai."

Between second and third gear, Karachi explains itself. The rickshaw is not a relic or a problem. It is a mirror: it reflects what the city cannot admit about itself.

When planners envision Karachi's future — highways, metros, smart cities — they erase the rickshaw. But the rickshaw returns, because it answers a question the future has not solved:

What happens to the men the economy leaves behind?

Until that question has a better answer, the rickshaw will remain. Not as failure, but as survival. Not as chaos, but as a three-wheeled refusal to disappear.

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