The city of men: Masculinities and everyday morality on public transport By RomitChowdhury, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press; 2023. pp. 205. S$27.95 for paperback

Romit Chowdhury's City of Men is an ethnographic exploration of the Indian city of Kolkata through the vantage point of its transport workers and their moral and material maneuvers in the city. This highly engaging book offers a layered account of how the labor of driving people around produces and institutionalizes ideologies of masculinity and morality. In the burgeoning field of feminist urban studies, it is a meaningful intervention that persuasively and explicitly calls attention to the necessity to think about masculinity and urbanity as being co-constituted. One of the stated goals of the book as laid out in the Introduction is to identify and unpack the “interlocking of ideologies of masculinity with the making of everyday life in cities to demonstrate the manner in which the process of becoming men is simultaneous with the production of urban sociality” (p. 23). In doing so, the book asks a question that in many ways remains at the background of much argumentation and critical writing in urban studies: how is the patriarchal city reproduced in everyday life? While much scholarship seeks to show how marginalized genders navigate cities and resist “the city of men,” Chowdhury unearths the very processes that produce patriarchal power in urban India. What emerges is a textured story of how working-class men experience and grapple with danger and delight, risk and reward, conflict and cooperation, and fear and frivolity on the job—and how those urban experiences produce their identities as men. The city, in other words, becomes the arena in which men may prove their manhood and constitute their masculinities. By lending a sympathetic and sensitive ear to the desires and dejections of taxi drivers and autorickshaw drivers in Kolkata, this book offers a remarkably vivid portrayal of the laboring lives of transport workers and triumphs as a wonderful example of humanistic scholarship—one that insists we see the everyday interactional rituals of collaboration and support that keep cities moving. One of the interesting analytical tropes that emerges in the book is that of male homosociality and how certain ideologies of masculinity—say, being an able provider for the family—produce relations between transport workers and other urban actors. For instance, while documenting various instances of traffic policing as being predictably extractive when it comes to poorer denizens of the city such as transport workers, Chowdhury also shows how shared ideas around what it means to be a morally “good” man shapes cooperation and homosociality between transport workers and traffic policemen. A seemingly “private” matter such as being an able provider for the family actually come to impact how traffic policemen not just sympathize with transport workers but also work with such tropes to foster awareness about “public” issues such as road safety and law-obedience. In this way and myriad other ways that Chowdhury documents, the “private” and the “public” are not just tightly linked but actively produce one another. Another useful argument made by Chowdhury is about how shared autorickshaw drivers become infrastructures of support, sociability, and camaraderie despite instances of disrespect meted out to them on an everyday basis. As he shows, infrastructures become “sociable” in ways that go beyond simplistic ideas of risk and safety. As it turns out, I was reading some parts of this book while in Kolkata—a city not too familiar to me—on a short visit. As I traveled through the city, I indeed found myself recalling and reliving bits and pieces of what Chowdhury offered in the book. But I also found myself wishing that the book had offered a little more of a discussion on two aspects: one, age, generation, and even caste as being clearer analytics around which identities of manhood cohere; and two, the infrastructural transformations in the city, around the city, and the larger effects of—quite simply—the built environment in which gendered interactions and masculine dispositions are institutionalized. While the book does a very clear job of showing how class, migration, religion, and routes traversed in the city affect the ways in which drivers understand risk, safety, leisure, and pleasure, age, agility, and caste locations also tend to matter in producing masculine subjects. While Chowdhury does emphasize those aspects in specific examples, I was left wanting a bit more by the way of an overarching analytical argument. Relatedly, age and aging are linked to the second theme that I found a bit undercooked in the book: urban infrastructure. Transport workers, as any ethnographer of urban India knows, are moving archives of changing cities. What, then, do they make of the physical landscape of the city and of themselves—as infrastructure but also as moving, feeling urban denizens—in a city and a nation that is undergoing infrastructural transformations? Since Kolkata's urbanization story might be different from Mumbai's or New Delhi's or Bengaluru's, some more context on the changing aesthetics and state-led ideologies of the metropolis would have made “the urban” come alive. While one of the chapters does provide a sketch of the changing city in terms of its vehicular traffic, law-enforcement tactics, and demographics, I was more curious about aspirations, exasperations, and exclusions owing to infrastructural growth in the region (if any). On a final note, I want to address the book's eminent readability. Writing about the city as a space of interactional rituals, a site of surprise and shock, and a world of strangers with its concomitant moral conundrums and encounters, Chowdhury writes in a manner that is highly reminiscent of classic urban sociological writing on modern cities. It is written with an eye to surprise, amuse, engage, and draw the reader in. The dialogue brought the “city characters” (Chapter 5) alive. While conceptually sophisticated, the book was not saddled with alienating jargon. I also really appreciated Chowdhury placing himself in the text without making it about himself. The prose is elegant and economical, and it would make for an excellent text to teach both undergraduate and graduate students. City of Men would be of interest to anyone remotely curious about gender, morality, urbanity, and South Asia.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.