Kolkata locals cherish their city’s past, which is why many in the one-time Indian capital are mourning a vanishing emblem of its faded grandeur: a hulking and noisy fleet of stately yellow taxis.
The snub-nosed Hindustan Ambassador, first rolling off the assembly line in the 1950s with a design that barely changed in the decades since, once ruled India’s potholed streets.
Nowadays it is rarely spotted outside Kolkata, where it serves as the backbone of the metropolitan cab fleet and a readily recognisable symbol of the eastern city’s identity.
But numbers are dwindling fast, and a court ruling means those that remain – lumbering but still sturdy – will be forced off the roads entirely in the next three years.
“I love my car like my son,” Kailash Sahani, who has sat behind the wheel of an Ambassador cab for the past four decades, said.
“It’s a simple car – no electronics, no frills.”
The 70-year-old is among thousands of Kolkata cabbies relinquishing their vehicles in line with tough emissions standards introduced in 2009 to ease the city’s endemic smog problem.
Only around 2,500 Ambassador taxis were still working at the start of this year, according to Bengal Taxi Association figures.
“(The car’s) parts and maintenance are cheap and if it breaks down, it’s easy to find a mechanic,” said Bengal Taxi Association spokesman Sanjeeb Roy.
Their disappearance, added Sanjeeb, “represents all that’s wrong with India’s changing economy”.
The Hindustan Ambassador was the cornerstone of India’s automotive industry for decades from its 1957 debut at a factory on Kolkata’s northern outskirts.
Modelled on a similarly regal sedan car from Britain’s now long-defunct Morris Motors, the car was a triumphant achievement in the first years of India’s history as an independent nation.
A deluxe model, its windows adorned with lace curtains, was for years the main means of conveyance for government ministers and captains of industry.
Kolkata, the headquarters of Hindustan Motors, is the last place where the cars are seen in any great number – a reminder of the tethers binding the city to India’s past.
“People like me are under pressure to get with the times,” retired teacher Utpal Basu, 75, said.
“Old cars go, new ones come. But it will break my heart when the city loses another icon.” — AFP
