People's art

Moving Pictures Rickshaw Art of Bangladesh (Mapin Publishing, Rs 450) is about the size of a bar of chocolate. And just as toothsome. Hardly the sort of book that adds academic heft to a subject neither vast nor novel, its power lies in its images. A series of vivid, pop/folk art visuals that wean the eye away from the text the latter almost resigned to its role as a supportive spouse. Page after page of bucolic, Bollywoodised, political, aspirational and even futuristic images that belie the life a meagre 150 taka a day can buy a rickshaw-wallah. Undiluted colloquial art that paints a beautiful swan song for the cycle-rickshaws and baby-taxis with two-stroke engines.

Soon to be taken off the arterial streets of Dhaka, allegedly under pressure from the World Bank, the Bangladeshi rickshaws share the fate of its kin, the hand-pulled rickshaws of Kolkata. So  Kuntala Lahiri-Dutt and David J. Williams, a human geographer and an air quality scientist, set out to document the dying art, using it as a keyhole to discover socioeconomic truths. Not surprisingly, there are problems. Problems not uncommon when the &lsquomundane&rsquo is eulogised as exotic &lsquosubaltern art&rsquo. What also plays out is an insider-outsider tussle, where Kuntala, who grew up in India, traces her roots to Bangladesh and in the same breath talks of being &ldquoheld up on the way by an elephant and a broken down bus.&rdquo Though wide-eyed and ambitious, they do include the crucial question of what happens to the art mistris when the rickshaws disappear.

Like the winners of Teen Chakar Taroka, an American Idol-style talent show for riders and drivers of Bangladeshi cycle- and auto-rickshaws, the images speak of hope and progress. Like the one with an embellished Tower Bridge of London with a train under it and a plane flying over it &mdash this on a rickshaw, lowest in the pecking order, powered by human will and poverty alone.