The painted rickshaw is the most widely seen artwork in Bangladesh, yet it is rarely treated as art. Its back panels show film heroes, peacocks, mosques, aeroplanes and imagined cities, painted quickly and in bright enamel.
Critics have often called this decoration kitsch. This essay argues instead that ornament here is a choice: a way for workers to claim beauty, humour and fantasy in a city that offers them little of either.
Beauty on three wheels
A plain rickshaw is a machine. A painted rickshaw is somebody's rickshaw.
Recent bans and the rise of printed stickers have changed the trade. The essay ends with the painters themselves, and with what they say a good rickshaw should look like.
