Rear view: Indian history from the driver’s seat
Gautam Sen’s new book, The Automobile, traces India’s love affair with cars over 130 years, and explores how they helped shape a young India.
Even as a child, Gautam Sen loved cars. He just never outgrew them, he says, laughing. As an adult, he made cars his life. He made a career writing about them, as an author and journalist. He consults for car companies on design and development. He even helped design India’s first indigenous sports car, the San Storm by Bengaluru-based San Motors, in the 1990s.
Over a decade, Sen has written 10 books on automobiles. Some are biographies, others analyse aspects of automotive design. Now 62, Sen’s latest book, The Automobile: An Indian Love Affair (February 2021; Penguin), addresses a different audience. It’s for the Everyman car lover and history buff. The book traces the history of automobiles in India over 130 years, and tracks the ways in which it shaped a young India’s rapidly evolving social structures.
Sen begins with the very first automobile acquired by an Indian. It was not a car but a steam powered, two-cylinder three-wheeler, bought by Maharaja Rajinder Singh of Patiala in the early 1890s. As the automobile made inroads into India, the elite fell in love. Cars replaced their ornate carriages, and sparked a race between the royals over who could procure the most over-the-top automobile. A clear early winner was the Swan Car, originally designed for a British engineer stationed in Calcutta, Robert Mathewson. It was a 1910 Brooke with the front made to resemble a giant bird hissing steam from its nostrils.
“The car was the fancy of a wealthy British man. Perhaps the Indian sun finally got to him! It terrorised the people of Calcutta for a few years,” Sen says. It was later acquired by Maharaja Ripudaman Singh of Nabha (in present-day Punjab), and remains one of the oddest automobiles in India’s history.
A range of such unusual vehicles make it to Sen’s book. In 1923, for instance, Maharana Bhupal Singh of Mewar, paralysed from the waist down, ordered a custom-built Rolls Royce with a special hand control system that he could drive. In the late 1960s, his descendant Maharana Bhagwat Singh converted a seven-seater limousine into an eleven-seater to get his cricket team to the grounds. The book also recounts the urban legend of a maharaja from Bengal who was so enraged at being snubbed by a Rolls Royce salesperson that he ordered three cars, turned them into garbage trucks, and gifted them to Calcutta’s municipality.
“The first time automobiles became accessible to the common man was in the ’70s, when the Indian government allowed an expansion of the two-wheeler industry. The first time cars became accessible to the common man was with the launch of the Maruti, in 1983,” Sen says.
See more of India’s most unusual vintage cars here
Wheels on the ground would drive change. Cars became one of the first status symbols for the new middle class. They empowered women, and they became pivotal to every Bollywood love story. (How would the secret lovers meet, if at least one of them didn’t have a motorcar? How else would we know he was poor and she was impossibly rich, if not for her shiny four-door?)
Sen’s favourite chapter to write, he says, was the last one, The Art of the Automobile, on the intersection of automotive history with art, culture and the movies. He writes of the first known sketches of an automobile, made by Leonardo da Vinci in 1490, and of how the Hindi film Bobby (Dimple Kapadia, Rishi Kapoor; 1973) made two-wheelers seem accessible and wildly desirable to youngsters.
Sen is delighted to have been able to sneak in a couple chapters on two-wheelers. “For the majority of Indians today, cars are still not accessible,” he says. “India is the land of two-wheelers, and this is not a bad thing. Bikes provide mobility, freedom, and jobs to millions in the remotest parts of the country. They allow women to go to school and university, and commute to work and the marketplace.”
Sen, who lives in Paris with his wife and son, now has his hopes pinned on the green movement. “India is on its way to becoming the third-largest auto market in the world. We need to move towards zero-emission vehicles for more mainstream use,” he says. “With electric vehicles, hydrogen powered vehicles and nanotech-powered fuel cells, there are all kinds of possibilities as far as the technology is concerned.”