A few years back, Riyaz Tayyibji received a curious assignment – a challenge to restore Mahatma Gandhi’s bicycle and to resurrect a unique piece of history intrinsically linked to the freedom struggle! In this essay, Riyaz reflects on the process of restoration, the people involved and the symbolic significance of this unique object.
By December 2015, the bicycle had been lying in our spare bedroom for over six months. It was a special bicycle that could not be left standing in the apartment’s parking. At the time, we had a close Dutch friend staying with us, who being from a country obsessed with this form of transport could not fathom what this derelict piece was doing up here. It was the type of cycle that when we were children the ‘doodh-walas’ used. Those as they still are, were mostly made by ‘Hero Cycles’, ubiquitous in their Fordesque one colour only, black with gold pin-stripes. These were machines which at rest, had their own upright posture enabled by a rear central stand, echoing that of its rider when in motion. These are robust practical machines, none of the sleek forward leaning thrust of a racer or the naked wheels and derailleurs of a mountain bike, nor that hand in your pocket angled posture of a side stand. My childhood association of these machines was of conservative (full cover chain guards, heavily skirted mud-guards), sturdy machines for durability and labour. It would be a couple of decades later that I would experience the frenzy for such machines in Amsterdam, where these retro cycles were all the rage and much more expensive than the sexy modern things that we had longed for. But these were all we got on hire, our rupee an hour rite of passage into a world of adventure away from the mother-ship, with friends. Our first explorations of the city of adults. Our first taste of freedom.
The bicycle leaning against our bedroom wall would pretty much fit this description, except that it was a rust bucket that had been lying in a library for over sixty years. The tyres were flat, the chain solid with gunk and the seat minus the padding was exposed to the springs. The mudguards and the chain guard were warped out of shape. On closer inspection, though, one could gather that the bike was in frequent use before it had been stored. Card paper had been torn and folded into a home made gromé, to prevent an iterant bracket and the parts it held from vibrating. This kind of ‘jugaad’ abounded across the cycle. A nail had been bent to replace the brake stay fastener. Other parts had been wound to the frame with wire. This was all very familiar. Before the days of our open economy and fashion cycling, cycles were hired by us kids at neighbourhood cycle shops. If you were so lucky to own one, you could get its maintenance done here too. Often rattles and clunking were dealt with in the manner of stuffing paper and card. I recall a slightly more sophisticated version of this, when my father used the inner foil from his cigarette packet to replace a blown fuse on his motorcycle in the middle of nowhere. These ‘hacks’ as we call them today were just everyday practice that we all knew, accepted and lived with everyday. And maybe that’s why the cycle against the wall of the 9th storey bedroom looked pretty ordinary.
But things acquire an importance from people. Either those who make them or those who use them. In this case one could not be completely sure about either, but one photograph and the particular library in which the bike had stood was enough circumstantial evidence to take the importance of this particular cycle into the stratosphere. When I told our Dutch friend that this was Gandhi’s cycle, he let out a nervous snort, perhaps thinking that I was spinning another yarn without a ‘charkha’. On the other hand his disbelief may also have been cultural. Where he came from this cycle would have been restored by an ‘expert’. It would probably have been at a rarefied location for forensic study. I imagine metallurgic analysis, rubber and paint composition tests. I also imagine a think tank of historians, one on Gandhi, another on bicycles, a third on papers and the history of cigarettes in the subcontinent, a fourth on nails and other fasteners and the fifth man in the laboratory would be a theoretician on ‘jugaad’ itself. I also imagine that if Gandhi was a Dutchman this would have been a project of national importance, and not something that had transpired quietly over a cup of the finest first flush in the director’s office at the Sabarmati Ashram. And yet I think that the way this restoration did happen, organically, is closer to the rigour of Gandhi’s praxes, than the rigours of museology could be.
About six months earlier I had hurried in late for a meeting at the Ashram. At the time, I held the designation of Project Co-ordinator of a Gandhi Heritage Sites Mission (GHSM) project to document the buildings that Gandhi had built, lived in, and in which he had been incarcerated. It was a coordination meeting to review the status of the thirty four identified sites. There was always tea and banter between Dr Tridip Suhrud, (Gandhian Scholar and Director of the Ashram at the time), Prof Neelkanth Chhaya (architect to the Ashram and academic) and myself, and it was in the midst of this kind of conversation that the topic of restoring a derelict bicycle was gently thrown into the fray as a natural extension of my interest in anything that moves on two wheels. A few days later the cycle was loaded into an auto-rickshaw and delivered home.
I really did not know what to do with it. My initial response was to get together something that resemble that Dutch forensic team, a group of ‘experts’. In India, when it comes to vehicles, this usually means having a Parsi (bawa) on the team. But this was merely a cycle, not enough (internal combustion is the minimum requirement) to draw in the interest of that lot. The others were there. Dr Tridip Suhrud is already the foremost scholar on Gandhi, bicycle history is reasonably well documented and available, some recent literature on ‘Everyday Technology’ in India was relevant to the project. So the real hesitation came from the fact that I was not convinced that this restoration was about preparing this machine for the Concourse d’Elegance, to its ‘original’ status, to look as it did the day it left the show room. What if that folded card from a cigarette packet (god forbid!) had been put in by Gandhi himself. What if that nail was his ‘jugaad’? (later research suggested that this was unlikely. The great man understood material far too well and would never have stood for such shoddiness. The packing would at least have been in leather!). Were these indications of use to be considered important? Were the markings of maintenance and repair to be considered as blemishes or signs of a life well-lived?
Part of the GHSM building documentation project required a set of guideline for the upkeep, maintenance and repair of Gandhi’s buildings. For the pukka buildings this was conventional, but the earthen buildings needed a much more intimate cycle of care and involvement, a kind of constant nurture. The documentation of these raised strange questions. If the mud and cow-dung plaster was to be applied each year as part of festivities, what then should be considered as the ‘correct or accurate’ dimensions of the building? If small changes or additions had been made in the process of maintenance to replace, strengthen or add an element to the building, how should one treat these? As blemishes or signs of a life well lived? There seemed to be an uncanny resemblance to the questions being raised for the architecture and for the hobby project of the bicycle. And yet, these kinds of questions had never been bothersome before. My father had restored many an antique motorcycle and there had been no deep angst about such issues. I thought back to all the bikes and his approach. Yes, originality was important, but authenticity more so. His logic was simple; you were meant to ride the damn things!
Lulled by the thought that these were important clarifications to be made for such an important project, no progress was made for months. Friends who could have been part of the team were busy and by the new year the pressure to deliver the restored bike was increasing. A call from the director set the deadline for Republic Day 2016. The urgency put everything into focus. The cycle would be restored in a manner that it was ride-able. The parts that needed to be changed would be replaced by those easily available in the bazaar, as if MK Gandhi had taken it to his local cycle-wala to get a new chain and a set of tyres and rode it back home. For my own cycle there is a cycle-wala, Sendhaji (Thakore: his ‘attak’, I found out later), who I go to. So he was approached to come home and dismantle the special cycle. Each part was laid out and cleaned with kerosene and then a spray of WD-40 (I wonder what the great vegetarian would have thought of its rumored fish-oil origins). In the dismantling of the cycle it became clear that the rust had permeated deep into the steel of the wheels, the carrier, the handle and other smaller parts. Strangely there was little rust on the frame and only a film on the mud and chain guard. A manual cleaning process would lead to an uneven removal of the rust and a patchy residue of the old paint would likely remain over the frame. The spokes were not open able, thankfully the wheel alignment, was, amazingly, still true. The bearings were removed and later replaced. It seemed that the right thing to do was bare all the metal and then consider the issues of paint and chrome. All the parts were to be sent for sand blasting, but not before the mud guards and the chain guards had been straightened by a good ‘denter’.
The one area of the restoration which was proving to be very difficult was the metal work. ‘Denting’ as this work is colloquially referred to, is often misunderstood to only require the skill of hand. But with the ‘denting’ of curved parts, it is the eye that is much more important and so much harder to find. On receiving the bike from the Ashram, it seemed unwise to open it up until one had found someone who could do this work. I had spoken to automobile friends and it seemed that one would have to perhaps try Rajkot or Indore for this skill. My fear was that I would be asked to leave the parts and return later. This meant to risk loosing them, as is so often the story in the restoration of vintage machines.
Even before the bike was opened there were two parts on it which were truly intriguing. The first was the metal label of the monogram, which was bare. Any engraving, enamel or paint had been worn down, it was flat with no indication of the manufacturer. The second fascinating details was the pedal, whose rubber steps were embossed with the word ‘freedom’ on it. The serendipity was for the ages, Gandhi’s Bicycle and its pedal branded ‘freedom’. The mystery only deepened as Sendhaji dismantled and revealed the front sprocket (crankset) from under the chain guard. The pattern of the sprocket held the insignia of the Indian National Congress. That open upright palm centred on the hub, with a set of twelve spokes radiating out, ‘sunburst’ like, aligning with every fifth tooth of the sixty teeth of the sprocket. The fact that Gandhiji may have only borrowed this cycle from Amrutial Shelat, a student, for a ride across the Sabarmati Ashram to attend a meeting, seemed immaterial. Symbols of time and a promised nation were at the heart of this machine. There was now a physicality to the relationship between Bapu and this bike, however fleeting their real encounter may have been.
I think it was a month before the deadline when Mukeshbhai, the mechanic I go to for my Enfield motorcycle and myself were sitting drinking tea under the flyover at Gujarat College. I was bemoaning the fact that I could not find a ‘denter’ to do this small job of straightening the metal parts of a bicycle. Just down the road, right in front of the gate of the Villa Shodhan sat Nazirbhai the best known denter, ‘world famous’ in Ahmedabad as they say. But Nazirbhai had already refused me point blank. It took Mukesh six months and several cups of tea to disclose that Nazirbhai had but one student, Anis, and if there was anyone who could help me it was Anisbhai. Apart from being Nazirbhai’s student, Anisbhai’s other credential was that he was the owner of a Royal Enfield motorcycle for which he had hand-made several parts in brass, including the mudguards. The workmanship on the bike is legendary, and when I saw it parked outside his workshop, I at least knew I had found the right man.
Anisbhai has a workshop which is a hole in the wall behind the CN Vidhyalaya. As we approached I could see the fanciest cars parked together on what should have been a footpath. BMWs and what not, were masked and were being dented, repaired and repainted. All this was happening on the side of the road in the open, next to which sat a ‘Laari Bhojanalay’, where several men were taking their lunch break. Anisbhai arrived about half an hour later. Mukesh introduced us and explained to him the work that needed to be done. I added that it was ‘Bapu’s bicycle’, and in my enthusiasm to convince him to take the work, I re-iterated that it would only take a few hours but as it needed to be done with the utmost care, I had searched for nine months to find the right person.
Anisbhai is quiet at the best of times. He did not say much, saw the photographs on my mobile phone for a while and then announced that he was willing to do the work on three conditions. First that there would be no money involved, that this was for ‘Bapu’. The second, that when the cycle was displayed in public, his name and contribution should be stated in a newspaper, and third that I should not presume that I could tell him how much time the work should take or how he should do it. Anis worked 5 straight nights after his usual shift. It was not just the mud guards that he worked on. He started with the alignment of the frame, then each bracket on it was heated and straighted. He re-aligned holes, filling, re-drilling and rethreading those that needed adjustment. Once the stays were true, he then worked on the curves of the parts themselves. He was slow, careful and meticulous, but one could see why his work was so revered. It was a full week later that all the parts could together go for sandblasting.
Sandblasting as it should be is a ruthlessly abrasive process. We needed someone who would understand the nature of the project and work with us, allowing us to make suggestions and control the pressure of the blast. Ajitbhai Jain ran a sandblasting workshop not far from our office, on hearing that the effort was for ‘Bapu’s cycle’, he readily interrupted a large order to take the work in hand. He called us on a Saturday and some tests were carried out on the smaller parts. Anis was there too, so was Sendhaji, Praveen from my office was doing a lot of the coordinated running around. Everybody was chipping in with suggestions. Anis with his understanding of the metal, Sendhaji with the challenges he would face in re-assembly if the apertures were sand clogged, Praveen with common sense ideas. Suddenly this felt like a team. But a very different from the one I had first imagined, of ‘experts’.
While the dismantling of the cycle had brought the INC insignia to light and opened up possibilities for symbolic readings, the result of the sandblasting only added a new dimension to this. With all the rust and paint blown away, the bare metals showed themselves clearly. Intriguingly the joints of the frame seemed to be ‘brazed’ together by a reasonably crude form of brass welding. The work was not bad, but neither what you would expect to come out of a factory, and certainly not one in Nottingham or Birmingham with the brand of Raleigh, Hercules or BSA stamped on it. It was known that at Raleigh, by the first decade of the 20th century, frame parts were joined together by a sophisticated process using molten brass into which each joint was dipped. The roughness of this joint and the insignia on the crankset had already largely ruled out the British provenance of this machine. And yet Anisbhai was certain that the tubing of the frame was an alloy and not steel, an alloy that would have been difficult to forge in any of the indigenous workshops of Ludhiana or Bengal. His conviction came from the forensics of his welding torch and stick.
The photograph of ‘Bapu on his (borrowed) Bicycle’ at the Sabarmati Ashram is from 1928. The first Indian-owned Cycle Works was set up in Calcutta in 1903 by the polymath Hemendra Mohon Bose and his brother Jatindra H Bose & Co. exuded the excitement and entrepreneurial energy around machines that was also driven by a ‘swadeshi’ spirit. Apart from Bicycles, they were pioneers in printing, photography, gramophone manufacture and later for imported automobiles (from France) at their iconic Great Eastern Motor Works.
Though the ‘swadeshi’ movement in its initial form did not last long, and that the Bose brothers, were symptomatic of the movement’s failure as much as its euphoria, is an aside. They along with others were instrumental with that first wave of business to open the gates for Indians as dealers in foreign goods. By 1910 dealership had extended to manufacture. Two small cycle manufacturing units were established outside Calcutta and by 1920-21 the demand was sufficient for the import of, 47,000 bicycles into the country. This number would more than triple in the decade ahead, so, one can assume that at the time that Gandhi took that ride, a hundred thousand bicycles were entering the country annually. However, a large number of these did not arrive assembled, and along with these ‘kits’, imports included a considerable volume of bicycle parts. The demand for these were being fuelled by the large number of small cycle workshops that were mushrooming across the country, in towns like Malerkotla near Ludhiana. These work shops were the machine tool equivalent of the ‘chaar-aana dukaan’, street-side distributers in the bazaars across the subcontinent’s small towns and villages for the selling of this ‘iron-horse’.
Knowing our ingenuity and our ability to ‘jugaad’, one can imagine that in order to be competitive many of these workshops would have developed a supply of locally manufactured parts, copies of the British, American, German and Japanese parts made at a fraction of the cost. These would not only have made the bicycles more affordable but also fuelled that first wave of ‘Make in India’. In addition, the basic parts of the bicycle could be re-configured to perform a number of other works and to create vehicles that were local and unique. As David Arnold writes, “Bicycles were adapted by local blacksmiths to make three- or four-wheel carts for transporting and selling goods as well as to make cycle rickshaws. In the 1920s, one enterprising Calcutta firm offered for sale a “patent water cycle” whose only use appeared to be for duck shooting. The bicycle’s saddle, pedal, crank, and chain could provide the mechanism for an experimental foot-powered loom, and one can still see today, on the streets of Mumbai or Ahmedabad, a knife grinder who raises his bicycle onto its stand and then uses the pedals and crank to turn a grinding wheel attached to the frame. The bicycle became a front of further local inventiveness”.
I imagine these hybrid machines being put together with the intelligence of the likes of Anilbhai, Anis and Sendhaji. Their hands-on feel deciding which parts needed the industrial quality of the ‘videshi’ and those that were just as good from here. I have an image of these machines, starting out as ‘pure’ imports, but were slowly being ‘localised’ into a concoction of parts from across the world to build something affordable. I can also visualise a playful imagination like that of ‘Bapu’s, recognising the symbolic relationship between the freedom of movement afforded by the bicycle, and the extrapolated sense of that larger ‘freedom’ that so many at the time were fighting for. It is not difficult to see why this everyday machine would lend it self so well for the propaganda symbols of the Indian National Congress. That insignia at the centre of the pedal embossed ‘Freedom’.
The sand blasting had made the making of the bicycle visible. It seemed the most appropriate way to leave it, bare, naked not unlike the man with whom it is now forever linked. Given all the evidence, circumstantial included, one might guess that this is a ‘Hind Bicycle’, manufactured out of Bombay, this company was producing a hundred and fifty thousand bicycles a year by the late 1940s. This in spite of the severe production set backs of the war. It stressed its ‘swadeshi’ credentials, appealing to customers to buy bicycles that were “built in India, built for India, built by Indians.” However, the earliest reference I could find to its inception dates back to 1939, more than a decade after Gandhi’s ride. On the other hand this might well be a 1925 model of the American ‘Freedom’ brand of cycles that were imported from California? Perhaps an open story is more important than a conclusive history. And the story continues.
The assembly and the remaining restoration took little time and the bicycle was ready before the deadline. The Director, true to his word, energised the local press to carry a front pager on the restoration. Each of our team members, especially Anis was featured in detail. Later that October, a wooden pedestal was made for the bicycle in honour of the Prime Minister’s visit for the usual celebrations that ensue annually on the Mahatma’s birthday. The entire process of restoration had incurred a cost of Rs 13,310/-, of which the pedestal cost was Rs 7,500/-. I have a sense that MK Gandhi would not have approved, of either. Neither, I think, would he have approved of the institutional processes that had taken over the story of the bicycle. The multiple strands inclusive of the stories and intersections of so many people: Sendhaji, Pravin, Ajitbhai, Anisbhai, Dr Tridip Suhrud, Prof Neelkanth Chhaya, others at the Ashram and an architect; all flattened into a singular symbolic narrative in his name.
A year later, the bicycle would be shipped to the Netherlands to be part of an exhibition titled, ‘I have a Dream’, Gandhi, King and Mandela. Following this the cycle would once again be a part of Gandhi’s birthday celebration. 1500 people would join a ‘Gandhi March’ starting from the Grote Kerk in The Hague. Our dear Dutch friend would send me pictures of the bicycle, texting me, “Freedom Machine”⊗
RIYAZ TAYYIBJI is the Principal Architect at Anthill Design, a design partnership having a variety of architectural trajectories ranging from building projects and building documentation to research and the curation of architectural and urban exhibitions that have opened both in India and abroad. He is a former alumnus and Associate Professor at the Faculty of Architecture, CEPT University and has been a visiting instructor at the Ecolé Specialé, Paris. He continued his interest in architectural documentation as the coordinator of the Gandhi Heritage Sites Mission project initiated to document the buildings of MK Gandhi. He continues to engage with Gandhi’s Buildings as part of his reconsideration of modern architecture in India. He is presently the Project Lead at NIUA, for the preparation of a heritage conservation plan for the medieval ‘World Heritage City’ of Ahmedabad. He actively writes on a wide range of architectural subjects, though often returning to the city of Ahmedabad on which he has also authored an architectural guide.
