How The Bikerni became India's first women's motorcycle club

Who started it, and why

The Bikerni, usually described as India's first all women motorcycle club, was founded in Pune on 15 January 2011 by Urvashi Patole and Firdaus Shaikh. Patole had been riding since she was 14 and had spent years as one of the few women in local biking groups where, as she has said in interviews, women riders were rarely treated as equals. She and Shaikh started with a small online group of women who already rode motorcycles, rather than a riding school for beginners. India Together's 2014 report on the club says it grew from this small circle to more than 350 members within a few years, drawing in students, professionals and homemakers from cities as far apart as Rajkot, Guwahati and Chennai.

Membership to this day is not open to anyone who simply wants to learn to ride. Candidates need a valid licence and must already handle a motorcycle competently. New members are put through test rides on sand, cobbled stretches and city traffic alongside existing riders before they are accepted, a filter the club has kept because its founders built it as a network of riders, not a riding academy.

The ride that put it on the record books

Bikerni's clearest claim to a national record came in 2013, when the club organised what it describes as the largest all women motorcycle expedition from Delhi to Khardung La in Ladakh. The riders made the trip on Royal Enfield motorcycles, and the expedition was recognised in the Limca Book of Records, according to both India Together and Motoress's reporting on the club's fifth anniversary in 2016. That ride is the reason Bikerni is still cited in India as the template other women's riding groups measure themselves against, well before WIMA India's local chapters or newer city based groups existed in their current form.

What the network looks like now

By its fifth year in 2016, Motoress reported the club had over 400 active members across chapters in Delhi, Hyderabad, Guwahati, Kolkata, Pune, Mumbai and Chennai, with riders aged from their late teens to their fifties. Wikipedia's entry on the club, last updated with 2021 figures, puts membership at over 2,000 and lists 17 chapters operating across the country, with a Delhi chapter that Shabnam Akram started in 2012. Patole herself went on to become vice president of the India division of WIMA, the global Women's International Motorcycle Association, linking Bikerni's home grown structure to the older international network that this desk also tracks.

For Indian riders today, Bikerni's history answers a simple question: why do women's riding clubs in India tend to run their own strict induction process instead of open sign up. It traces back to how the club was built in 2011, as a vetted network of already competent riders looking for company and credibility on long rides, not a beginner's programme. That founding choice is why, more than a decade on, groups modelled on it still ask new members to prove they can ride before they ask them to join.

Sources

• Bikerni Association of Women Motorcyclists, Wikipedia
• The women who choose petrol over perfume, India Together
• India's Women's Motorcycle Association Celebrate Fifth Year, Motoress