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n City of Men: Masculinities and Everyday Morality on Public Transport, Romit Chowdhury offers an ethnographic analysis of public transport infrastructures in Kolkata, revealing how urban mobility, heterosexual masculinity, and spatial politics intersect in everyday urban life. Engaging with two groups of transport workers – autorickshaw and taxi operators – and their interactions with urban traffic police and passengers, the author constructs an intricate narrative of how public transportation becomes a site of both cooperation and conflict that reproduces gendered hierarchies in the city.
Chowdhury’s central questions – how do men inhabit city spaces and how do these inhabitations gender urban environments? – frame an inquiry that is both theoretically critical and empirically rigorous. His work engages with urban studies, critical masculinity studies, and feminist scholarship to illuminate how urban masculinity is performed, contested, and reshaped within the circuits of public transport. In doing so, the author challenges dominant narratives that reduce men to mere figures of disorder and hostility in cities and that neglect how men experience and navigate urban spaces, including their social interactions with women and other men. The book addresses masculine experience by portraying public transportation workers as active agents navigating complex socio-spatial landscapes.
The book chapters are organized to embrace a multi-scalar approach to examine how masculinities intersect with public transportation in Kolkata, transitioning seamlessly between theoretical frameworks and empirical narratives. The introduction establishes the interplay of gender, mobility, and urban spaces, framing the city as both a material and social construct. Each subsequent chapter explores a different scale of interaction: the neighborhood-level dynamics of autorickshaws as sociable infrastructures highlight localized gendered practices, while the city-wide geographies of migrant taxi drivers reveal complex negotiations of labor, risk, and place-making. The chapter on traffic police examines the intersections of masculinity, urban governance, and mobility by exploring how regulatory practices and the everyday interactions between traffic police, transport workers, and commuters reflect and reinforce gendered logics of authority, cooperation, and power in Kolkata's public transportation landscape. Finally, with an analysis of everyday moralities and ethical negotiations that shape interactions on Kolkata's public transport, the book ties together the micropolitics of mobility with broader gendered structures, social hierarchies, and the collaborative practices that make the city livable.
Chowdhury situates his analysis in Kolkata’s broader urban transformations, reflecting on the neoliberal remaking of the city and the rising tensions between middle-class imaginaries of order and the working-class men who labor as taxi and autorickshaw drivers. His ethnography demonstrates how public transportation functions not merely as logistical infrastructure but as a contested space where masculinity is performed, tested, and surveilled. This methodological approach effectively combines micro-level sociability with macro-level urban processes, bridging ethnographic details with broader spatial, economic, and social transformations. Chowdhury’s ability to conduct fieldwork in dynamic, often chaotic urban spaces – such as public transport routes and roadside tea stalls – enabled him to capture fleeting, everyday interactions that center the lived realities of Global South cities. His work thus exemplifies how ethnography can illuminate the interplay of gender, class, and mobility in urban life, making a compelling case for its centrality in urban and mobility studies.
Urban mobility is a gendered terrain in South Asia. In City of Men, we learn about the layered experiences of men navigating precarious labor conditions, the emotional toll of migration, and the paradoxes of masculine honor entwined with economic survival. Autorickshaw drivers, operating within restricted neighborhood routes, foster relationships of familiarity with passengers, shaping micro-geographies of trust and community. Taxi drivers, by contrast, traverse the expansive and often unpredictable terrain of the city, embodying mobility while remaining spatially rootless. Complicating the layers of masculinities even further, Chowdhury shows how, while autorickshaw drivers often resist police extortion by forming informal collectives, these same drivers also reinforce broader patriarchal and classist structures. The book also foregrounds the precarity of migrant taxi drivers, who bear a disproportionate share of economic and social risks imposed by passengers and traffic police. Such risks include driving to neighborhoods imagined unsafe, waiting for the promised payment for hours, encountering and dealing criminals needing for transportation, and facing intimidation by the police. Additionally, ethnic stereotyping among migrant Bihari drivers, framed as their ability to manage other men’s violence, becomes an exhibition of masculinity that may expose them to greater risks. Chowdhury argues that their vulnerability stems from their intersectional identities as migrant, lower-caste, and lower-class men.
As much as it is exciting to read through the findings coming out of an innovative choice of methods and a text grounded in everyday lives, as a fellow ethnographer engaged in studying urban mobilities and securitization, I wished the author had unpacked the challenges inherent in navigating urban uncertainties, responding to abrupt turns of events, and making on-the-spot decisions during fieldwork. Such reflections on how these moments may have shaped the ethnography, and how such an ethnography is central to understanding the precarities of urban workers, would not only have enriched the methodological rigor of the work but also offered invaluable insights for readers seeking to undertake similar ethnographic study of dynamic and unsettled urban settings.
One of the book’s central strengths lies in its focus on everyday moralities. Chowdhury claims that moral assessments – of appropriate behavior, trustworthiness, and gendered propriety – structure interactions within urban mobility spaces. He skillfully captures fleeting yet profound moments of solidarity, generosity, and cooperation that punctuate the otherwise conflict-ridden terrain of public transport. For instance, the narrative of an autorickshaw driver assisting a stranded family during a storm, or a taxi driver refusing payment after an incomplete journey, reveals how urban infrastructures are not only spaces of friction but also sites of deep human encounters. These moments underscore Chowdhury’s argument that the gendered moralities of urban spaces are co-constructed through both conflict and cooperation.
Scholarship on urban policing often neglects masculinity as an organizing principle, while gender-focused analyses of police work fail to account for the influence of urbanism on policing practices and interactions. Chowdhury intervenes in this gap by bridging police studies with anthropological analyses of the everyday state and masculinity, emphasizing how the everyday state's gender regime sustains the urban gender order. By unraveling the emotional and moral dynamics underpinning interactions between state functionaries and marginalized urban publics, he shows how situational trust and collaboration, as well as conflict, shape the masculinities of everyday policing practices.
The book’s conceptual framework of homosocial trust elucidates policing dynamics astutely, highlighting the tacit understandings and shared vulnerabilities between transport workers and traffic police. This framework reveals how gendered moralities are enacted and negotiated on city streets in ways that both solidify and undo police logics. As Chowdhury writes of homosocial trust:
Despite conflictual relations between transport workers and traffic police, there is a measure of reliance between these groups of men as they move through city spaces. This mutual reliance between hierarchically positioned men, who are situated variously in the state apparatus and on the urban margins, is what I am calling “homosocial trust” (p. 145).
The figure of the traffic officer emerges as both an enforcer of order and a participant in the moral economies of the street. As Chowdhury reveals, traffic police and drivers navigate shared vulnerabilities shaped by patriarchal expectations of male breadwinners, with homosocial trust producing moments of mutual recognition and moral negotiation that challenge simplistic binaries of state authority versus subaltern resistance. For example, in one ethnographic scene, a traffic officer offers didactic advice to a taxi driver about maintaining compliance with licensing rules, not simply to produce compliance, but on the basis of ensuring the driver’s family’s financial security (p. 140). While this narrative offers insight into how gendered responsibilities shape moral economies in urban contexts, Chowdhury stops short of interrogating whether homosocial trust operates differently across caste, regional, or occupational lines within the transport sector. Taxi drivers, often migrants from Bihar or Jharkhand, occupy different social and spatial positions than local autorickshaw drivers. I wonder how these differences might complicate or fragment trust-building dynamics, particularly in the context of rising ethno-nationalist tensions and anti-migrant sentiments in contemporary urban India.
Homosocial trust is positioned as a relational concept shaped by shared experiences of precarious labor and regulatory surveillance, but it remains anchored in micro-level interactions. How do these interactions respond to larger structural processes of urban governance or neoliberal state policies that create the conditions for such precarious relationships in the first place remain unaddressed.
I would argue that homosocial trust has the potential to generate comparative insights in future urban and masculinity discourses. How does this concept apply beyond public transport spaces, such as within other masculinized labor sectors? Could homosocial trust function differently in other urban or regional contexts in South Asia, where power asymmetries between workers and regulatory authorities are differently configured? How does homosocial trust influence state–urban dynamics in micro-interactions in competitive informal labor sectors when factors such as citizenship, statelessness, and legal and refugee status intersect with urban governance and everyday practices? City of Men compellingly shows how logics of policing operate through masculine relations of trust, raising questions critical to understanding urban labor markets and structures of state power more broadly.
Building on the centrality of moral responsibility, the book examines how it shapes migrant masculinities and their navigation of the city’s erotic landscapes, revealing how these dynamics reconfigure urban sexuality and masculinity. By highlighting the interplay between moral responsibility, voyeurism, and the socio-economic constraints of migrant masculinity, the book provides a nuanced account of how sexuality is regulated and negotiated in the city. The book advances a critical understanding of socio-economic pressures and spatial dynamics influencing male sexuality, highlighting the moral and emotional complexities faced by working-class men in navigating the city’s erotic landscapes. Chowdhury uses the notion of erotic urban topography, where male taxi drivers, largely migrants from rural Bihar, encounter the city's sexual provocations but often adopt an ethic of indifference as a survival mechanism. Many drivers distance themselves from the erotic possibilities of urban life, shaped by constraints such as economic precarity, familial responsibilities, and rural codes of honor. This ethic of restraint reconfigures urban masculinity, framing it within the bounds of familial and moral responsibility.
Romit Chowdhury’s City of Men closes with a call to expand the dialogue between masculinity studies and urbanization processes, pushing scholars to interrogate how masculinities are implicated in the making and remaking of cities. Indeed, a nuanced understanding of the co-constitution of urban processes and masculinities – emphasizing the pluralities on both ends rather than reducing them to binaries of conflict and disorder – offers a viable and critical path for engaging with the contemporary Global South.
Sharif Wahab is a Ph.D. candidate in Geography at Indiana University Bloomington. Trained as an ethnographer and human geographer, his work focuses on statelessness, forced migration, and uneven urbanization in the Global South. His current research examines the containment and exclusion of the Rohingya refugees across Kutupalong refugee camp, Cox's Bazar city, and Bhasan Char Island in Bangladesh. He published in Political Geography and the Annals of the American Association of Geographers.
