Or, to be more precise, no sanctioned written rules. Despite all my best efforts, I could find no such thing as an official Indian Highway Code. Initially, I began to fret: after my first few days of highly focused driving, I felt the need for relief in the form of some guidance, a document of commonly accepted rules and practice by which to measure transgression and misdeed.
I came from a place of one-way systems and yellow grids; of no-parking areas, dedicated bus and cycle lanes, and a terrifically courteous roundabout system particular to the island of Jersey called ‘Filter in Turn’. But I was not in Jersey any more. Its unhurried, polite civility was a world away from the mobocracy of India’s roads; this was a country where it seemed every man, woman and Nano had to fight for survival or risk annihilation.
I was convinced that a set of instructions had to exist somewhere, a tome that ordained correct lane driving, overtaking rules, guidelines for the interaction of animal and machine, of two-, three-, four- and eight-wheeled vehicles. Surely someone had to have sat down and created a manifesto by which all of India’s incredibly diverse road beings could live together in harmony. If there was no right, how could there be any wrong, and vice versa? World order as I knew it began to crumble as I contemplated the grim eventuality that, if it couldn’t be found on Google, it was possible that India might not have a national highway code. If it didn’t, what then?
Pulling myself together, I went to the search engine with my request: ‘Indian Driving Rules’. The results that came from more unofficial sources were mildly encouraging: the first couple sprouted from a site called indiadrivingschools.com, whose homemade list of pointers for the road was propelled by the notion that drivers ‘should primarily focus on ways to control aggressiveness’. Of the 27 commandments that followed, a surprising number were concerned with anger management: ‘Avoid creating a situation that may provoke another motorist’ instructed rule number two, while rule four ordained against ‘inappropriate facial and hand gestures’. It was a bit like reading a driving manual from Edwardian England, more concerned with manners and etiquette than actual skills. I half expected to see some pointers as to what action to take in the event of a fault with the hand crank, or a rip in the overhead canopy. Even more uncannily antiquated was the complete disregard for women’s lib demonstrated in rule 22, which was concerned with pedestrians and emphasized the need for special regard to be given to ‘senior citizens, handicapped and ladies’.
The Delhi Traffic Police’s initial approach was similar, in that its primary goal appeared to be keeping drivers calm behind the wheel. ‘Maintain your cool, even in adverse situations,’ the site read, adding rather compassionately, ‘you may be burdened with unending number of problems at the home or office, but keep them aside before you venture on to the roads’.
The following section dealt with genuine road rules and featured a couple of fuzzy directives that in my opinion wouldn’t stand up in court in the event of a collision between, say, a Nano and a lorry thundering towards it in the wrong lane. The first rule was concerned with the implementation of left-hand driving. One vestige of the Raj had been to employ British driving principles in India, so the British standard, left, also became the Indian rule of thumb. Thumb was the operative term, in particular according to the Delhi Traffic Police, which was all thumbs in its description of exactly where drivers should try to place their vehicles: ‘How far from the left side of the road you should drive depends upon the road condition and the type of traffic on it. But, as a driver you must drive sufficiently to the left.’ I reflected that from a legal point of view at least, ‘sufficiently to the left’ was painfully insufficient to cover the spectrum of eventualities. One man’s sufficiently left might be another’s way too far to the right, and the road was surely no backdrop for the volatility of such subjectivities to play themselves out against.
Another rule endorsed by the DTP was lane driving. ‘Every road has lanes, whether marked or not,’ the web page stated. So if lanes are there, you drive between them. Easy peasy. But what if they’re not? Drive sufficiently to the left? Call your local council works department and inform them of a substandard road? Choose another route? All sensible suggestions, but in fact the Delhi Traffic Police had an even more ingenious plan where absent lanes were concerned: ‘When they are not marked, divide the road mentally into appropriate lanes.’
Divide the road mentally… I lingered on this one. So what the Delhi Traffic Police was asking of the capital’s drivers was that in the absence of sanctioned road signs and signals, they insert the necessary guidelines by use of their imagination. It was a fascinating principle and one sure to shave a few rupees from the annual road maintenance budget. Indeed, why stop at lane markings? Think of all the money that could be saved by the simple act of imagining traffic lights at busy junctions. Drivers could save minutes upon minutes by imagining a red signal to be green and so zipping straight through. Or what about fantasizing the speed limit? Dreaming up warnings for slippery surfaces or impending dangerous curves in random places where they may or may not occur? It was a near-perfect plan for smoothly running roads, the only danger being that in the unlikely event of two drivers contradicting one another, overlap might occur. But, with more than 10 million vehicles on the road in the city, realistically, what would be the chances of that happening?