‘Do you drive a two-wheeler?' Of risk and relatability while doing ethnographic fieldwork in Chennai

Two-wheelers ie., mopeds, scooters and motorbikes in south India are heavily encoded with notions of gender, caste and class which in turn determines the spaces they are expected to occupy and the social function they fulfil. A closer engagement with this particular form of mobility and a mild subversion of its codes can thus helpfully animate urban ethnography in the region including in navigating the researcher’s own positionality in the field. It can also lay bare the relations of alterity that constitute urban space, writes Niranjana R.