Sandip Roy: Kolkata's iconic yellow taxi gets a designer touch for Durga Puja
The wheezing cab might seem an odd vehicle to mark Durga Puja, but they once were part of the celebrations, ferrying entire families and artists with equipment to the 'pandals'
I was not sure whether to be awestruck or bemused.
A yellow Kolkata taxi with interiors covered by Sabyasachi wallpapers and textiles! Sabyasachi Mukherjee, a designer famous for being lavish and ostentatious, and yellow Hindustan Ambassador taxis, infamous for wheezing and rattling, make for an odd couple. It could be seen as one Kolkata icon’s salute to another. But it could also be seen as a delusion of grandeur.
The interior of a Kolkata taxi is special. There’s no air-conditioning and on hot muggy days you can leave sweat stains on the seats. These days the seats look even sadder, sometimes ripped and patched together, the seams showing. But these taxis had rich Sabysachi wallpapers and furnishing fabrics with opulent names like “Jamshed Jamavar", recalling the prized shawls of the Bengali elite, or “Chowringhee", evoking the majestic central boulevard of colonial Calcutta.
These taxis are Durga Puja specials.
Every year, like many other companies, Asian Paints gives out Sharad Samman awards to celebrate the best of Kolkata’s Durga Pujas, and this year, to celebrate 40 years of the awards, they commissioned four artists to depict four decades of Durga Puja.
The canvas was the bodies of the yellow taxis. The artists filled that space with colourful drawings representing the changing face of Durga Puja—the woman in a white sari with red borders painting alpana or rangoli giving way to the razzmatazz of eye-popping lighting displays, traditional images turning into theme pujas. The rise of Bengali bands, celebrity theme artists and social media Reels all found place on the taxis’ exteriors.
Yellow taxis have long been symbols of the city. When Chiranjeevi came to Kolkata to shoot the Telugu film Bhola Shankar in 2023, he shot a scene wearing the grey uniform of a Kolkata taxi driver, with 30 taxis and their real-life drivers as extras. Nothing says Kolkata like its trams and yellow taxis.
They have been on the road since 1962, largely unchanged. Bright yellow and rotund, sometimes described as a bowler hat on wheels, based on the Morris Oxford Series III, these are all Hindustan Ambassador cars. And the yellow taxi was the ambassador of the city in many ways. Sometimes down to its fabled inertia.
The cabbies would routinely refuse to go anywhere you wanted. Even the rise of app taxis like Uber and Ola seemed to make little difference to them. Sometimes they have “No Refusal" written along the side, but they treat it as little more than a decorative motif. No power steering, a clunky gear shaft and a gas guzzler—this is not a car that has kept up with the times.
Recently, the government announced it was the end of the road for yellow taxis. The Kolkata high court has prohibited commercial vehicles older than 15 years on the streets. Hindustan Automobiles has anyway announced it will produce no more Ambassadors. There are plenty of other cars to choose from that are sleeker and more fuel efficient. The last Ambassador rolled off their delivery line in 2014. It’s only a matter of time before the ones still on the streets ride into the sunset one by one. This Durga Puja jaunt might well be their last hurrah.
Over a decade ago the writer and poet Jeet Thayil told me he got himself an Ambassador and jazzed it up with chintz curtains and rear view mirrors on the bonnet that did nothing. He said the person showing him the car demonstrated all the extras. And every time Thayil asked what it was for, the salesman would say, “For show" and Thayil would say, “Give it to me." His car was brand new, but it already felt like an idiosyncratic old lady, set in her ways, he told me. But he had no idea when he bought it that he might be one of the last people on earth to buy an Ambassador. The yellow taxis of Kolkata are the last public face of the vanishing breed.
Unlike the Ambassador taxi, Durga Puja has changed dramatically over the last 40 years. The more homespun pujas of old have given way to elaborate big-budget theme pujas, blessed by Unesco as part of the world’s intangible cultural heritage since 2021. Now it comes with a preview like an art exhibition. An organisation called MassArt puts together preview tours of selected pujas. I have seen Durga Pujas paying tribute to Vincent Van Gogh’s Starry Night; turning an entire neighbourhood into pages from a beloved Bengali book of nonsense verse; and taking on heavyweight issues like climate change, plastic pollution and water conservation.
Last year, one Durga Puja had as its theme Biheen (the void). It covered 35,000 sq. ft, immersing the viewer into what the artist called a “black hole". That Durga had no body, her life force represented by a flickering candle. As I walked down dark corridors towards the Durga, I felt like I was entering an after-hours club. This was like no Durga I had ever seen. The ticket checker at the entrance scanned my pass. As his scanner beeped, he waved me on. And I would have never dreamt that one day I would be scanning a QR code to enter a Durga Puja pandal.
The unchanging yellow cab might seem an odd vehicle to represent so much change. But those cabs were the everyday companions of Durga Puja. Entire families could squeeze into them to go pandal hopping. We are talking five adults, five children, and an assortment of bags. Thayil said the Ambassador was perfect for carrying his band’s equipment. The Durga Puja artists could carry their straw and equipment in them.
But the real reason the Sabyasachi-ed taxis are roaming around the streets of Kolkata is because it’s a gilded nostalgia trip. Everyone has a childhood story about yellow taxis. At the event launching the painted taxis, Bengali film stars reminisced about how when they were young, taxis were a bit of a splurge for those who did not have their own cars. Sahapedia, an online resource on art and culture, writes about the Sikh taxi drivers of yore, famous for their honesty, who always went by the meter and used the shortest route. Jagdev Singh, a taxi driver since 1970, tells Sahapedia, “Bengali housewives and young girls would prefer to ride taxis after evening only with Sikh drivers because they had impeccable trust in them."
As she reminisced about her taxi driving days at the launch, Bengali actress Sauraseni Maitra said the painted taxis had triggered so much nostalgia that she really hoped she would get hold of one during the coming Durga Pujas.
I doubt she will actually go around in one. The rattling wheezing taxis with no air-conditioning are hardly the cars a movie actor wants to be seen in despite the Sabyasachi interiors.
But I am sure this Durga Puja, those taxis, just tailor-made for Instagram Reels, will be a hot commodity. Already when I spot them on the street, they make me smile. They are like murals on wheels, a riot of colours spurring a rush of nostalgia.
Plenty of Kolkatans will be hailing them. But chances are the driver will refuse to go wherever they want to go.
Cult Friction is a fortnightly column on issues we keep rubbing up against.
Sandip Roy is a writer, journalist and radio host. He posts @sandipr
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