“Lakeer ka Fakeer” the title of this piece, comes from a Hindi proverb meaning ‘someone who is compliant to the rules’. I interpret this proverb through the idea of line or lines (Lakeer), as lines of the destiny of the labouring classes. The term ‘fakir’ means someone who is impoverished or poor. My work and field conversations with many workers show the palms of these workers with their ‘fate line’ highlighted. Although skilled and experienced in their line of work the working classes also believe in Hindu ideas of karma or pre-destiny, making them use everyday palmistry, in which destiny can be assessed on the basis of the lines on your hands. Here it is written on their hands, and in their fate lines, hence the belief that their life can never change. The people I spoke with often held their hands out showing me their palms, exclaiming that their fate and destiny is already predetermined by God. Audio recordings of these conversations accompany the piece.

Feet on Heat

This work is a part of my on-going project at Mirzapur, a brick kiln town located close to my university in Varanasi. I have been documenting brick workers in this area for more than two years. The bricklayers work on kilns, where moulded and dried bricks are burnt to strengthen and harden the brick. Due to working in high-temperature kilns the feet of the bricklayers become hard and stiff like fired terracotta. During the course of my work, I also collected thirty pairs of slippers worn by these workers working across different factories. In this work, I tried to represent a taxonomy of labour and its relationship with the body, here between the wooden slippers and the different kinds of feet that inhabit them. The feet show the vulnerability of the workers, their working conditions and their lives, as they are bruised and burnt and yet continue to work.

Donkey worker

Abused and exploited, the illiterate workers call themselves donkeys, enslaved animals who work with an ongoing burden of invisibility and indignity. Who failed them? Who am I in relation to them? Where does my art come from? What does it seek to capture and what does it reveal? This series is an ongoing exploration of identity, lived and erased lives and the politics and violence that is part of the everyday reality of precarious lives. It questions the imposition of mandatory biometric identity by the state on vulnerable bodies and the erasure of identity in the missing thumbprints of the brick kiln workers who must continue working for lack of viable alternatives. Through a representation of their material identity’s erasure, it seeks to capture the various forms of loss of identification, of belonging, and ultimately of hope.