Why The Steady Disappearance Of Kolkata’s Ambassador Taxis, Relics Of A Dreary Past, Shouldn’t Be Mourned

Kolkata’s iconic yellow ambassador taxis are slowly driving off into the sunset. 

The fleet of these smoke-belching fuel guzzlers that made for a fitting symbol of a decaying and dying city will see its numbers being reduced to just about 2,500 as the city steps into 2025. 

A 2008 Calcutta High Court order that commercial vehicles more than 15 years old cannot ply on the city’s streets has led to a steady decline of Kolkata’s ambassador taxi fleet that numbered more than 18,000 at the start of the current decade. 

At the beginning of this year (2024), Kolkata had 7,000 of these bulbous contraptions that represented all that was wrong with the licence-permit raj. 

As the year (2024) draws to a close, 4,493 of them would have been decommissioned and carted off to other towns across the state. By the end of 2025, another 1,800-odd will go off the city’s roads. 

And by the end of 2029, none of these vestiges of a dim past will be left on Kolkata’s roads.

The imminent prospect of Kolkata losing a celebrated icon--the ‘celebration’, though, is misplaced--has triggered waves of nostalgia and even fond hopes that the Calcutta High Court will reverse its order and allow the yellow ambassador to continue to hurtle noisily down the city’s streets while belching noxious fumes. 

All those who celebrate the yellow ambassador taxi also celebrate Kolkata’s crumbling mansions, its hand-pulled rickshaws, its chaos and disorder, and the many visible signs of its poverty and decay. 

Consciously or otherwise, all these have come to symbolise Kolkata which, according to many, is now ‘the best city to get away from’. 

Kolkata, admittedly, had a glorious past and was once known as the ‘second city of the (British) empire’. Till the mid-1970s, it was home to many of India’s top corporates and its clubs and parties attracted the country’s swish set. 

Kolkata was a truly cosmopolitan city with Anglo-Indians, Chinese, Jews, Parsis, Armenians, Gujaratis, Marwaris and many other communities making it a happy melting pot of cultures. 

But, as is well-known, the advent of the leftists, and their ultra-leftist comrades-in-arms, on Bengal’s political horizon in the late 1960s led to the decline of the city, and the state. 

The rise of communism triggered a flight of capital, including human capital, the migration of many communities, and the closing down of many establishments which made the city what it once was. 

All that remained were the city’s crumbling buildings, its slogan-shouting trade unionists and politicians, its many signs of impoverishment and its collapsing infrastructure. 

And, of course, its yellow ambassador taxis which symbolised all that was wrong with India’s socialist past. 

The badly-engineered ambassador became an anachronism amongst the fleet of sleek, silent and speedy automobiles that liberalisation unleashed in happy droves.

That they did, and continued to rule the city’s roads when other cities of the country had moved on to swankier, faster, more fuel efficient and more comfortable cars speaks volumes about Kolkata continuing to live in its inglorious recent past. 

The ambassador taxi was introduced in Kolkata in 1962. Manufactured by the Birla-owned Hindustan Motors, the ambassador car was based on the 1956 Morris Oxford Series III and designed by British automotive designer Sir Alexander Issigonis in the early 1950s. 

The car was a status symbol as it ferried India’s rich and powerful, and the waiting period for the car under the licence-permit raj stretched to eight years! It was once said that India was ruled from the back seat of the ambassador.

The ambassador, in the heydays of socialism and even for a decade or so after licence-permit raj was dismantled, enjoyed complete monopoly of the market since the government, in its wisdom, did not allow other manufactures to set up shop. 

Also, babus sitting in the musty and dismal sarkari offices in Delhi decided how many ambassador cars Hindustan Motors could roll out in a year (24,000 a year at its peak), thus creating an artificial shortage which only encouraged malfeasance. 

The market monopoly enjoyed by Hindustan Motors, and the lack of any competition, discouraged the company from innovating and upgrading the car. 

Throughout its production run spanning 57 years--the longest in India’s automotive history--the ambassador only went through minor cosmetic changes. It remained a fuel-guzzling, ugly-looking and uncomfortable car sans even basic safety features like seat belts and air bags. 

As renowned automobile expert Hormazd Sorabjee says in this epitaph to the car penned five years ago, it was an “appalling” car.

Sorabjee wrote: “You needed really strong triceps to work the ridiculously heavy steering, the deftness of a surgeon to slot home the spindly column shifter into each gear (shifting from second to third gear was an art form) and immense strength to make the car stop — you had to nearly stand on the brakes”. 

While the handbrake “rarely worked”, the car had many idiosyncrasies like indicator controls mounted on the top of the steering hub and a button on the floor operating the headlight dipper.

Kolkata’s automobile expert Joydip Sur, who also edits Kolkata On Wheels (a magazine dedicated largely to automobiles), says that the city’s ambassador taxis suffer from an overheating of engines, leading to the passenger cabin getting very hot. 

“The ambassador taxis also lacks many features which are taken for granted in a car today. Poor suspension and shock absorbers and poor maintenance makes a ride in the ambassador taxi a very uncomfortable experience. Almost all taxis are heavy polluters and are not fuel-efficient at all,” he says. 

All these factors make the yellow ambassador taxi a vehicle that should have been sent, en masse, to the scrapyard many years ago. 

But the dowdy dowager of Kolkata’s roads continues to be celebrated by the legions of Kolkatans who also find beauty in the city’s tattered tapestry made of ramshackle trams, crumbling buildings, hand-pulled rickshaws and its many signs and sights of poverty and decay. 

Also read: The Ambassador’s dusty drive into oblivion