“I would bend the knee before the poorest scavenger, the poorest untouchable in India, for having participated in crushing him for Centuries; I would even take the dust off his feet.”
Mahatma Gandhi
The direct, confrontational portrait series of children between the ages of 10-18 are from a community of untouchables in India. They were created in October 2010 in a village outside the city of Ahmedabad, in a sate of Gujarat, that bills itself across Indian in a campaign called “vibrant Gujarat” the growth engine of India.
The children belong to a community that work as manual scavengers. To put it bluntly, they clean public toilet and drains by hand. Human excreta is scrapped off the toilet floors, put into a container and taken out of towns and villages to be dumped into a river.
They also clean the carcasses of dead animals from residential areas populated by wealthy middle classes. They perform a public service for which the government or the community they serve does not pay them. They live on donations. They earn around $1.00 a day for this work. If they are lucky, they would receive leftover food from homes as well. Though most of this food would be unfit to eat.
By creating these images, I wanted to give “face” to the faceless; and a voice to their struggles and inspiration. All the individual were asked one simple question: “What would you like to do with your life.” Each portrait is supported by a quote from this which will be displayed with in the exhibition. I wanted to remove the individual from the distractions of the daily life, and to bring them into close focus with the viewer. I want the images to be displayed life-size as its important that the connection between the viewer and the subject is uninterrupted. Besides the face of the child, there would be nothing else that would distract the viewer’s gaze.
In 1993 the government of India banned manual scavenging and cleaning of toilets not connected to the sewer system. However the service they provide has not been replaced. Nor has there been any real attempt to recognize the service they provide and to offer they support tin term of health and safety issues or monetary compensation.
The day-to-day life of the children is a tragedy that the 9.3% growth that India has promoted globally for the past decade or so has not been able to reconcile. The children go school only to be abused by the teachers and other children. They clean the toilets and eat leftover food. They are made to sit separately from the children who belong to higher casts.
After school, they go to work to help support the parents’ income by working at manual scavenging. They step deep into running gutters, scooping the remains of the day into baskets that are carried on their heads for dumping. In the absence of an adequate economic alternative, it is often seen that manual scavengers are not able to quit this degrading work.
The Indian middle class is only focused on one goal, its own satisfaction and its own betterment. The growth the country is experience has marginalized individual communities to an even a greater extent. The concerns of the society are solely based on ensuring that the westerns ideals of lifestyle and patterns of living are replicated in their own individual arena.
I hope that by creating this project, and displaying it in public spaces, a new conversation about the community can begin. This would be just a small part but its an important aspect of the progress that India needs to realize that is not benefiting.