Book Review: Mumbai on Two Wheels
Book review of Mumbai on Two Wheels: Cycling, Urban Space, and Sustainable Mobility, by Jonathan Shapiro Anjaria (2024)
Mumbai on Two Wheels: Cycling, Urban Space, and Sustainable Mobility by Jonathan Shapiro Anjaria (2024). Seattle: University of Washington Press.
Mumbai on Two Wheels by Jonathan Shapiro Anjaria explores bicycling communities in several Indian cities—Mumbai, Bhopal, Pune, Delhi, and Bengaluru—as well as in Cambridge, Massachusetts and New York City in the United States. This compelling ethnographic study examines how riders navigate the streets of India’s megacities, where infrastructure rarely accommodates cyclists. Over time, cycling in Mumbai has evolved in two seemingly contradictory ways; on the one hand, it reflects the riders’ socioeconomic status within the transportation hierarchy, situated between two-wheeled motorbikes and four-wheeled vehicles. On the other hand, for many, cycling is simply a preferred mode of daily commuting.
Anjaria conducted his fieldwork between 2015 and 2022, during which time he explored Mumbai’s streets by bicycle to learn more about forms of sustainable mobility in urban areas. The book’s introduction opens with a comparative story of two types of bicycle locks: the Kryptonite U-lock in the United States and the cable lock commonly used in India. The Kryptonite U-lock is renowned for its strength and durability, whereas those cable locks found in India are far more fragile yet also more inclusive—which, to Anjaria, is symbolic of social unity in the country. As he explains, cable locks can secure multiple bicycles at once, unlike their Kryptonite counterparts. The author argues that this choice of locks is influenced by the “factor of sociality [in] mobility [as well as] the physical environments” in which people move (2).
More broadly, Anjaria argues that cycling is a political act that challenges the supposedly apolitical nature of sustainable street design. As such, the book examines the promotion of sustainable transportation in India, a particularly complex challenge in a rapidly developing and fast-paced city like Mumbai. Since the early 1990s, the discourse surrounding sustainable transportation in India has largely been framed by municipal planners and their technocratic design principles. Indeed, urban planners have introduced dozens of bicycle-lane projects since the late 2000s, many of which currently “lie crumbling and abandoned on street edges in cities around India” (4).
In Chapter 1, “Starting with the Surface,” Anjaria recounts his journey to researching cycling in Mumbai, which began when he met a group of riding enthusiasts in the suburb of Juhu Beach. The author elaborates on the grim street-level conditions of greater Mumbai, which included potholes, cracks, patches of sand, clumps of asphalt, and open trenches. The chapter highlights the city’s political economy of infrastructure, with projects such as the Coastal Road—which has faced criticism for disproportionately benefiting Mumbai’s small car-owning elite while overlooking the needs of the far more numerous non-car users. These larger and more technical infrastructural projects—including trains and electricity—are not only technical interventions but are also expressions of the technopolitics of infrastructure, according to Anjaria. Roads, in a similar fashion, can be articulated as a linear mode of power.
The author goes on to argue that there is an intimate relationship between road surfaces and cycling, as riders often look down in search of potential dangers—pebbles, sand, glass shards, chunks of concrete, crushed bottle caps, and nails (34). To illustrate this point, Anjaria cites the work of historian Kenneth Helphand, who links cyclists’ familiarity with road conditions to the textures, materials, and microdesign elements of roads, which shape their tactile knowledge of specific street surfaces. This familiarity, even intimacy, is critical to bicycle safety in Mumbai, emerging from the interaction between cyclists’ “intimate knowledge of streets” and the “materiality of [their bicycles]” (38). The chapter proceeds to explore various manifestations of these “bicycle intimacies,” offering vivid accounts that range from Dabbawala—India’s ubiquitous lunch-box delivery workers—to Firoza Dadan, a cycle enthusiast and founder of the Smart Commute Foundation. Dadan’s story is particularly illustrative of bicycle advocacy, revealing how cycling has provided her with a sense of purpose and a means of self-expression. Through this lens, the chapter departs from conventional approaches that analyze infrastructure as “the built environment,” instead highlighting cycling as primarily an emotional practice.
Chapter 2, “Mumbai’s Cycling Landscape,” opens with the stories of small-scale entrepreneurs Dinesh and Mohan, who deliver goods by bicycle under precarious conditions in the megacity. According to Anjaria, the cycling featured in these two vignettes blends practicality with pleasure, and compulsion with autonomy. Dinesh and Mohan both express that cycling is enjoyable and is something on which they depend to earn their living. Anjaria argues that this overlapping mix of motivations is often omitted in mainstream transportation writing.
Chapter 3, “Embodied Freedoms,” explores how many Indians’ liberty and personal choices are associated with bicycles. Bicycles have, for example, enabled women to access educational institutions and new economic opportunities without depending on men. In other words, bicycles have emerged as a source of freedom for both women and men. This “embodied freedom” associated with bicycles is at once creative, generative, and experimental (96). In this sense, the bicycle can be a potent symbol that allows people to enjoy freedom and dignity within Mumbai.
Automobile gridlock is one of the biggest challenges for cyclists in Mumbai and other cities. In Chapter 4, “Navigating Traffic,” Anjaria argues that cycling in urban spaces should not be viewed solely through a narrow policy lens, but rather from the perspective of people who navigate these streets on a daily basis. In this regard, cycling in Mumbai is a complex experience shaped by localized practices, behavioral expectations, and shared values—factors that urban planners often overlook.
Chapter 5, “Are Bicycle Lanes the Future?,” suggests that bicycle infrastructure indexes broader notions of modernity, development, and sustainable transportation (165). In major Indian cities—such as Bengaluru, Ahmedabad, Pune, Ludhiana, Chennai, Bhopal, Lucknow, and Bhubaneswar—dedicated cycling infrastructure has been introduced to support urban mobility. However, these projects have largely been abandoned by the authorities as well as by the cyclists themselves. Common reasons behind these projects’ deterioration include poor design, inaccessibility, lack of maintenance, and the absence of enforcement.
Despite the challenges that Anjaria details in his book, transportation planners and advocates in India continue to emphasize the tangible benefits of cycling, as an efficient, economical, and environmentally friendly mode of transport for people of all ages and abilities (166). Indeed, when designed inclusively and accounting for inequalities and urban challenges, bicycle infrastructure has the potential to provide a sense of freedom for all. In conclusion, Mumbai on Two Wheels provides to readers fresh qualitative perspectives on the everyday struggles of cyclists in megacities in India. In doing so, it adds to ethnographic literature on cycling, streets, infrastructure, and mobility in urban landscapes.
