Pulled Rickshaw - Books, Films, Television, Music and Modern Art

Books, Films, Television, Music and Modern Art

• An early Rudyard Kipling story has the title The Phantom Rickshaw (1885). In it a young Englishman has a romance aboard a ship bound for India. He ends the affair and becomes engaged to another woman, causing his original love to die of a broken heart. After that, on excursions around the city of Simla, he frequently sees the ghost of the deceased driving around in her yellow-panelled rickshaw, though nobody else seems to notice the phenomenon.

• The 1936 novel Rickshaw Boy is a novel by the Chinese author Lao She about the life of a fictional Beijing rickshaw man. The English version Rickshaw Boy became a U.S. bestseller in 1945. It was an unauthorized translation that added a happy ending to the story. In 1982, the original version was made into a film of the same title.

• In the 1940s, Eddy Howard recorded a song called The Rickety Rickshaw Man.

• The 1958 Japanese movie Muhomatsu no issho (Rickshaw Man) by Hiroshi Inagaki tells the story of a Matsugoro, a rickshaw man who becomes a surrogate father to the child of a recently widowed woman.

• The 1953 Bollywood film Do Bigha Zameen, directed by Bimal Roy, describes the fate of an impoverished farmer who becomes a rickshaw puller in Kolkata.

• In the 1992 film City of Joy (whose title refers to Kolkata), Om Puri plays a rickshaw puller, revealing the economic and emotional hardship that these underpaid workers face on a day-to-day basis.

• In the episode The Bookstore of the American sitcom Seinfeld, Kramer and Newman import rickshaws to New York City, for the purpose of running a business. They intend to employ members of the city's homeless population; however, one steals their rickshaw. The two recover the rickshaw, and Newman forces Kramer to transport him uphill, a voyage Kramer is unable to make.

• In Pearl S. Buck's 1931 novel The Good Earth, hero Wang Lung leaves his land to travel southward during a drought. He ends up in the city of Kiangsu, where he becomes a rickshaw puller in order to support his family.

• The 2006 documentary film Men of burden Pedaling towards a Horizon, set in the city of Pondicherry, a Union Territory in southeast India, uncovers the story of disappearing cycle rickshaw drivers living in abject poverty.

• English graffiti artist and activist Banksy portrays a modernised representation of a rickshaw in a piece where an overweight rich couple with a mobile phone (in colour) are being ferried by a young black boy and his rickshaw (in black and white).

• That 70's Show season 3 episode 24 "Backstage Pass" Kelso and Jackie mention a rickshaw in which their friend Fez has to pull.