Rajat Ubhaykar · 2019 · road

Rajat Ubhaykar's 2019 travelogue. A business journalist with no itinerary and no return date spent six months and ten thousand kilometres hitchhiking with Indian truckers - north from Mumbai to Kashmir, then the insurgent highways of Nagaland and Manipur, then the length of the south to Kanyakumari - and wrote up the country as its drivers see it.

1. 1
   Mumbai

   Ubhaykar leaves Mumbai having talked his way onto a truck bound for Delhi - a business journalist proposing to see the country from the passenger seat of the vehicles everybody else overtakes, with no plan beyond going north.

2. 2
   Bhiwandi

   Bhiwandi outside Mumbai is one of the great freight hubs of India, a town of warehouses, transport offices and booking agents - where loads are matched to trucks and the economics of the whole trade first become visible.

3. 3
   Udaipur

   Writing 'truck' as his mode of transport in a hotel ledger at Udaipur is the moment the ludicrousness of the endeavour lands - and Rajasthan brings the first encounters with opium use among long-distance drivers.

4. 4
   Jaipur

   North through Rajasthan, where the highway economy runs on dhabas, commission agents and an entirely organised system of bribes at every checkpost - which he documents as a business rather than as a scandal.

5. 5
   Sirhind

   In Punjab he finds the body-building workshops and the tradition of truck art - hand-painted panels, mirrorwork and couplets - a craft trade attached to the freight industry and understood by almost nobody outside it.

6. 6
   Chandigarh

   Punjab is the heartland of Indian trucking, and he asks why a state with such a long history of migration took so enthusiastically to a working life that is, in the end, a form of constant displacement.

7. 7
   Jammu

   The road north into Jammu climbs out of the plains and the driving changes entirely - convoys, landslides, single-track passes, and a rhythm set by the weather rather than by any schedule.

8. 8
   Srinagar

   Srinagar ends the first leg, five states and several thousand kilometres from Mumbai - and on the Kashmir roads he finds nomadic shepherds hitching rides on the same trucks that are carrying him.

9. 9
   Dimapur

   The second leg begins in the north-east at Dimapur, Nagaland's railhead and freight gateway - where crews routinely speak eleven languages between them and the trade runs on relationships rather than paperwork.

10. 10
    Kohima

    Up to Kohima on NH39, the insurgent-ridden highway through Nagaland - a road where trucks pay informal taxes to several competing authorities in succession, and everyone involved treats this as ordinary.

11. 11
    Imphal

    Through Manipur to Imphal, the far end of the north-eastern leg - and a sunrise over the hills that he says he will remember instead of the insurgency the region is usually reported for.

12. 12
    Hyderabad

    The third leg runs the length of the south. At Hyderabad the trade looks different again - other languages, other food, other arrangements - and the same drivers away from their families for months together.

13. 13
    Visakhapatnam

    Down the Andhra coast to the port at Visakhapatnam, where freight comes off ships and onto the highway - the point where the informal trade he has been travelling with meets the formal economy head on.

14. 14
    Salem

    Into Tamil Nadu for the last stretch, through a south whose trucking culture is its own world again - and where he has by now spent months as a passenger and been fed by strangers at nearly every stop.

15. 15
    Kanyakumari

    The road ends at Kanyakumari on the southern tip of India, ten thousand kilometres from Mumbai - and the book's argument is that the people ferrying the country's goods are the ones nobody thinks to ask about.