'Their untold stories need to be told': Teens capture India's labourers in pictures

 

With her hands folded over a basket of tobacco, encircled by the hundreds of cigarettes she has spent hours making by hand, the elderly woman looks off into the distance with a sense of longing.
The image is one of several that student Rashmitha T took in her Tamil Nadu hamlet, showing her neighbours who produce beedis, traditional Indian cigarettes.
"No one is aware of their work. Rashmitha told the BBC, "We must tell their untold stories.
Her photographs were included in The Unseen Perspective, a recent show at Chennai's Egmore Museum about India's labourers.

Forty pupils from government-run schools in Tamil Nadu took all of the pictures, which chronicled the lives of their parents or other adults.

The images show the variety of hard tasks performed by India's estimated 400 million labourers, including quarry workers, weavers, welders, and tailors.

For example, because of their hazardous jobs, many beedi rollers are susceptible to lung damage and tuberculosis, Rashmitha explained.
She added that her neighbours spend hours rolling beedis outside their houses, saying, "Their homes reek of tobacco, you cannot stay there long."
She informed the BBC that they only make 250 rupees ($2.90; £2.20) for every 1,000 cigarettes they roll.

Jayaraj S took a picture of his mother Pazhaniammal working as a bricklayer in the state's Erode district. She can be seen manually moulding bricks and putting a mixture of clay and sand into moulds.
Since his mother starts working in the middle of the night, Jayaraj had to get up at two in the morning to take the photo.
"She has to start early to avoid the afternoon sun," he stated.
He noted that he didn't really understand the struggles she has until he started his photography project.
"My mother frequently complains of headaches, leg pain, hip pain and sometimes faints," he stated.

Gopika Lakshmi M caught her father, Muthukrishnan, peddling items out of an old van in the Madurai district.
After losing a kidney two years ago, her father is required to have dialysis twice a week.
"He drives to nearby villages to sell goods despite being on dialysis," says Lakshmi.

"We don't have the luxury of resting at home."
According to Gopika, her father "looked like a hero" as he went about his demanding daily schedule in spite of his bad illness.

 

According to the pupils, using a professional camera to take images was challenging at first but became simpler after months of instruction from professionals.
Keerthi, who resides in the Tenkasi area, stated, "I learnt how to shoot at night, adjust shutter speed and aperture,"
Keerthi decided to record her mother Muthulakshmi's everyday activities for her project. Muthulakshmi runs a tiny shopfront in front of their home.
"Dad is not well, so mum looks after both the shop and the house," she explained. "She wakes up at 4am and works until 11pm."
The hardships her mother faces while travelling great distances on public buses to procure merchandise for her store are captured in her photographs.

"I wanted to show through photographs what a woman does to improve her children's lives," she stated.

In order to film his labour at a quarry, Mukesh K spent four days with his father.
"My father stays here and comes home only once a week," he stated.
After taking a short break, Mukesh's father works from 3 p.m. to 7 p.m. His daily income is a pitiful 500 rupees.
"Their room is devoid of mattresses and beds. "In the quarry, my father sleeps on empty cardboard boxes," he remarked. "He suffered a sunstroke last year because he was working under the hot sun."

The students, aged 13 to 17, are learning various art forms, including photography, as part of an initiative by the Tamil Nadu School education department.

"The idea is to make students socially responsible," said Muthamizh Kalaivizhi, state lead of Holistic Development programme in Tamil Nadu's government schools and founder of non-government organisation Neelam Foundation.

"They documented the working people around them. Understanding their lives is the beginning of social change," he added.