Photo essay

For a researcher, I think field is almost everywhere. At times its difficult to know where it begins or ends..atleast I face this challenge all the time. So I decided to take photos, almost randomly one day, to capture my field visually..

‘The Everyday’: A photo essay from the ‘field’

It’s often difficult to know what is ‘not’ field. Often it’s difficult to draw the boundaries. When on fieldwork, everything seems to tell something, everything is interesting, and one is often tempted to capture the surroundings, to soak in. Our interests are not necessarily limited to the location or a particular place we have chosen for our research. Observing beyond the ‘field’, we often capture the mundaneness of the everyday that tells us the rhythm of the place and the larger context in which the ‘field’ is set.

Researching on ‘work’ and ‘working lives’, the field seemed vast to me. It didn’t stop with the factory and the workers working in there, but extended to the bus stops, tea stalls or standing by the roadside watching people doing all sorts of work for livelihood. The long bus rides or train journeys are great oppourtunity to observe people, to strike a random conversation with someone standing (don’t get seats so easily) next to you. People can be generous, often surprised that you are interested in their lives and their stories.

In a sub-urban train to

Singaperumal Koil (SV Koil)

from Guindy railway station.

The ‘ladies’ compartment was crowded  with office and college going women. Many were sitting on the floor. A brave young woman selling apples jostled through the crowd, at times cursed by women trying to get off the train. I was on my way to attend a trade union meeting to organize contract/migrant workers in SV Koil. These are peri-urban areas outside Chennai that has emerged as important manufacturing hubs with number of automobile and garment factories; engineering colleges and technical institutes. Interestingly, the mushrooming of the educational institutions has taken place alongwith the setting up of factories in the area in past decade or less. I stood at the corner of the compartment near the door, a coveted space in a crowded train to avoid your feet being stamped upon and watched the women of all ages getting in and out of the train at various stations. Their everyday rhythm of life.  29/9/2013.

My bus route from Adyar (Chennai) to Sriperumbadur or Kancheepuram town or at times to Thiruvallur town and surrounding villages was through one of the busiest roads going out of north of Chennai connecting to the Bangalore highway NH5. Along the highway, till Kancheepuram (about 80 kms from Chennai) are big industrial estates, warehouses, special economic zones and a booming real estate. 

Once known as the ‘lake district’ of Tamil Nadu due to abundance of natural water-bodies, Sriperumbadur-Oragadam-Kancheepuram has now been turned into an industrial and commercial hub. Multinational automobile and electronics companies have set up factories in this area. 

A common sight at the bus stops on NH5. Young men from Orissa,

Jharkhand, Bihar, Bengal, Uttar Pradesh and North Eastern states come looking for work in the area. Migration of these young men to big cities like Chennai are typically through a network of workers often from their own villages who have already arrived in the area for work. Some of the older workers or the ones who have been around for a few years double up as agents (‘mukadams’) to bring more young men from their villages. The main labour agents who liaise with the companies to supply workers are typically from Tamil Nadu and usually connected to a powerful political party. For instance, a large ‘territory’ in the Oragadam-Sriperumbadur  is marked for an agent close to the local AIDMK MLA (member of legislative assembly). 11/11/2013

Sriperumbadur-Oragadam industrial area is estimated to have 4 lakhs workers, with over a lakh migrant workers from other states. According to the trade unions working in the area, only about 40,000 workers here are part of any organized unions. Workers from other states are not part of any unions and mostly end up doing daily or contract waged work in automobile supply chains or in construction /infrastructure companies. Alongwith the factories, the area is booming with real estate business. Most of the natural lakes in the area have been landfilled to make way for high-rise apartments, ‘villas’, theme (entertainment) parks.

 “Promises Delivered!” Oragadam Villas! Dream home for Rs 18 lacs!10/11/2013

Perumal, a social worker working and living in the area for a decade and a half told me how the population has increased in Sriperumbadur and surroundings areas from 50-60,000 to over 3 lakhs. “There is no infrastructure to cater to this population, ground water has depleted. Shubhadra Nagar which was earlier a fertile agricultural land (growing groundnut, paddy, millets) is now only a real estate. NRIs (non resident Indians) have bought land here since 2004-2008 and also ‘outsiders’ from Madurai and Kanyakumari.  Residential buildings are being built for workers and also staff of these multinational companies. Panchayat presidents, local MLA, councilors, contractors now rule this place. They control all facilities including water, electricity, labour/manpower supply to companies. It is like ‘north Chennai’ (‘mafia/hooliganism’).” He warned me of doing any research in the area. He also said that the local people have not ‘benefited’. “Whoever has benefited is only for a short term, there is no long term benefit. It’s quick money”. The local youth with technical skills (trained in ITIs) have found jobs as “cleaners, housekeepers, gardeners, guards, no jobs inside the factories”. “These are rural people, not trained for factory jobs”. He said that the rural youth who were working inside the factories were not local and brought from other districts of Tamil Nadu by the companies. Workers can be “controlled by companies, contractors if they (workers) are from outside”. He talked about ‘cultural changes’ in the area due to presence of ‘foreigners’. “Its becoming western. These Korean, Japanese people stay here (Shubhadra Nagar), far away from their families, they take ‘rented wives’ while they are here, no marriage, just staying together. These women are factory workers only”.

A newly constructed worker’s dormitory in Shubhadra Nagar. Infrastructure like roads or water supply is poor in this area. These buildings are constructed by people who have bought the land from the local farmers and given out on rent to the companies or contract/service agencies who supply workers to the MNCs. Some enterprising ‘locals’ have also constructed several floors or rooms to rent to the workers. A room rent typically is between Rs 4500-5000 per month (sometimes even more) and 6-8 workers get accommodated in a room. Sodexo, a French multinational company providing canteen services to big factories, has rented several of these buildings or rooms for accommodating its workers. Most of the Sodexo workers are from other states, mainly Orissa and Bihar and some from other districts of Tamil Nadu. The workers are hired out to various companies depending on the contracts won by Sodexo for canteen services. The conditions of work differ with different companies that contracts Sodexo. Sodexo doesn’t prescribe to any labour standards for its workers. 30/10/2013.

In the larger narrative of the exploitation of the migrant work force, often what is left out are the subtle transformations that they bring to a place. The unfamiliar smell of their food being cooked in open communal kitchens, snatches of unfamiliar language as some workers walk past with their mobile phones belting out a Bhojpuri or an Assamese songs or speaking amongst themselves. Makeshift petty shops, tea stalls and eateries that line the road sides selling ‘north Indian’ food, gutka (chewing tobacco), mobile phone recharge coupons, various knick knacks for daily use. The shops have been set up mostly by the ‘locals’ who have either used their plots of land to construct a room or a thatch hut to rent out to the migrant workers or have made ramshackle roadside shops. I often wondered what will happen to this place when the migrant workforce leaves? Will these workers leave a mark of their presence behind in the place, in the memories of ‘locals’? Maybe they would. Maybe in the few words that the ‘locals’ have picked up from them, like “aye bahiya” (hey, brother), “kaam” (work), “kahan se ho” (where are you from?) or maybe in some food that the roadside eateries dish out for the migrants?  The daily rhythm of thousands of bodies that once lived and worked in the area, the friendships, sharing of small spaces, the daily encounters of the ‘local’ and migrants will surely linger on in the memories of people who stay behind.  It is often difficult to capture these subtleties of changes, slow transformations of places, people, of lives.

As I travelled in buses and trains, I randomly captured images of the everyday of people, of traffic, of movements, of stillness….

 DLF IT Park-Special Economic Zone. A block of steel and glass complex. It houses IT companies/BPOs like IBM, Cognizant, Tata Consultancy Services. My bus route from Adyar to Manapakkam – Porur in the morning, where DLF SEZ is located, would be full of young men and women smartly dressed up, carrying laptop bags, expensive mobile phones in hand and wearing their photo IDs with the name of the IT companies displayed on it. Most of them had earphones tightly plugged to their ears. Once they got off the bus, they line up at the main entrance where security guards scan their IDs before they can enter the zone. These young people are from all over India.29/8/13.

After the IT SEZ, my next busy bus stop is Poonamallee bus terminus. A bustling bus terminus at the western edge of the city linking NH5, major towns in Thiruvallur and Kancheepuram districts. The roads are choked with buses carrying people to different destinations, cars honking impatiently at the fruit vendors or flower sellers or people walking on the street or trying to cross the road and catch a bus. One doesn’t see the smartly dressed IT workers here, but workers carrying pots and pans and bags going out of Chennai to the factories or construction sites. The profile of workers completely different as is the surrounding.  The roads are lined with eateries, saree shops, tea stalls, street vendors, men and women jostling with each other to get into a bus and grab a seat.

 Poonamallee bus stop and around

18/10-31/10/13

Standing around various bus stops, train stations or walking home from work, I took these random images of everyday work

I see these women everyday around the traffic island near my house as I walk to the bus stop. They weave bamboo screens, sitting crossed legged with their hands moving in a rhythm. A man takes the orders for making the screens and these women make them, paid at piece wage rate. Aavin circle.  24/10/13

I saw these two women infront of a big shopping mall in Pondy Bazar, probably one of the most busiest shopping centres in Chennai. They were selling false hair. Every so often they would lovingly comb the hair, chasing up people walking past them to show how soft and clean the hair was…most people quickly walked past them to avoid the hair. A look of distaste on some faces at the sight of false hair. The women were quite unperturbed by those looks and tried to go behind the shoppers trying sell their product. While I stood for almost an hour for one of the factory girls to come back from her shift, I observed these two women who had not been able to sell even a single tussle. Next to them on the other side of the pavement were the eateries selling snacks and coconut. 17/10/13

Roadside eateries in Pondy bazar, 17/10/13.

At a traffic light, man painting zebra crossing on the road. 22/6/14

Flowers sellers in Sriperumbadur bus stop.

 By late morning or early afternoon the women sell all their flowers worth Rs 150-200. They come back again in the evening with more flowers. The flowers come from neighbouring villages in Thiruvallur district where there are floriculture farms. 26/11/1

A ladies ‘pay’ toilet at Thiruvallur bus stand. This is the best I could find when I went to interview a worker in a village near Thiruvallur town whose house had no toilet. While many of the houses were ‘pucca’ cemented houses with bedroom, kitchen and even a small courtyard, but the houses had no bathrooms or toilets. People use the vacant plots or dry ‘poromboke’ (common) land as toilets. Most houses have small enclosures with curtains or make shift doors for women of the household to bathe.15/3/14.

Small vegetable vendor and a tea stall near Avadi sub-urban train station.10/1/14

  

Exhausted after working 8 hours work shift. Morning shift is from 6.15 am till 2.45pm in the afternoon. For women the  morning starts much earlier, around 3-3.30 am to finish  the household chores before they can leave for work. The travel to factory takes between 1-2 hours depending on the distance. 27/9/13.

 

An old woman spinning threads in spindles in Thirumazhasai, barely making Rs 50 a day. With the disappearance of handloom weaving over the years, people in these villages are migrating to bigger cities looking for petty jobs or working as contract workers in nearby factories or warehouses.  8/4/14.

A bunch of school children curiously watched me as I walked around a village in Thiruvannamalai district to find out more about  ‘Vaazhndu Kaattuvom’ scheme funded by the World Bank for poverty alleviation. This scheme was used by the local administration to help companies recruit young people from the villages. 5/10/13.

Election time in Tamil Nadu

 

Field work continues…..

As I started by saying, field has no boundaries…nor does it end. For a curious researcher or anyone interested in the society, in human lives, the field doesn’t stop with the fieldwork. It is a continuous process. We are all the time learning, unlearning, observing. For me, I continue to do my ‘fieldwork’ even now…. capturing images, looking around, talking to people, trying to understand their everydays..