Underpaid, Overworked: The Story of the Artisans Who Make Durga Idols

This piece was first published in The Live Wire on October 22, 2019.

By Sheikh Saqib

At Chittaranjan Park’s Kali Mandir in South Delhi – the hub of Bengali community in the national capital – a group of eleven artisans are sitting on a worn-out bedding inside a shabby tent built out of cloth and iron-poles.

The artisans are rejoicing as their three-month-long hard work is finally on display: a huge idol of goddess Durga.

Every year, a handful of artisans come to Delhi, from Kolkata, at least three months before Durga puja to make these clay figurines. Durga Puja is one of India’s most popular Hindu festivals which is celebrated with great enthusiasm. The devotees worship the idol for five days and later immerse her in the river Yamuna.

But amid celebrations, the artisans behind these life-sized Durga idols are often treated as regular labourers.

Housed in a tent, forty-eight-year old Govind Nath, who came here form Kolkata with his group comprising ten other artisans, says that the tent provides him shelter and a place to work and sleep. “I live here with my wife and kids, including other artists. We sleep, cook and work here; all at the same place,” says Govind, while others start turning to work in order to give a final touch to some of the freshly made idols.

Govind and his men have experience of over thirty years. They migrated to Delhi three months before Durga puja. “We came here three months back. Since then we are working night and day. Initially, we would start our work at around 8 in the morning till two in the evening. Then we would rest till six and from then work till 1 in the night. But as the puja came closer, we would hardly sleep,” said 38-year-old Narayan Bhatachariya, another artist who works under Govind.

Bhatachariya earns Rs 15,000 per month, which, he says, is sufficient to sustain but still less to fulfil the family’s desires. “I am proud that I do something which makes people happy. The smile on their faces when they see the newly built idols gives me immense pleasure and satisfaction. But you can’t eat satisfaction. You have to earn enough to satisfy your family which is very hard in this profession,” Bhatachariya said.

Bhattachariya has started working on a new contract of making idols which his boss and co-worker, Govind, got a few days ago. He says that the government should look into the state of artists like him.

“The kids of this generation are not ready to do this kind of job because there is more hard work and less money. We can only expect a shift in the coming times, only if the government starts investing in us,” he said adding, “If the Chittaranjan Park committee had not built this shed-like structure for accommodation, we could have been living in a much worst condition.”

The other co-workers said that a lot of people came to visit them and distributed sweets to applaud their hard work.

“Many people came and shared sweets with us just to compliment us. Most of them were young people, in their early twenties, and were shocked to see us living in a shed. They probably thought that we’d be enjoying our time in some concrete air-conditioned building,” one co-worker said.

The young people, artisans say, sat with them and praised their work.

“I could sense their empathy towards us which felt good because there is hardly anyone who cares,” another artist said.

As Bhatachariya and his co-workers settle on the dust-ridden floor to work on the new idols, Bhatachariya talks about the hard work that goes behind making Durga Idols.

“As the tradition goes, the priest of the Durga Puja has to get soil from a prostitute’s house. Some claim that the soil is considered to be the purest as men while visiting them leave their purity and virtue at her place. This symbolises the importance of woman power,” while adding: “When all these formalities are done, we then build the figurines out of straw, chaff, and clay and place them in the sun to dry.”

However, making idols of such importance, he says, in a dusty shed only to be underpaid is very disappointing.

“Sometimes, when I wake up from sleep after work, I feel like my whole body is broken, and I think of changing my profession,” Bhatachariya said while stressing how much he works hard for a small amount of money, “But then, I can only make ideals and that’s the only skill I have.”

According to official figures, artisans are the backbone of the non-farm rural Indian economy, with an estimated seven million artisans and upto 200 million artisans engaged in craft production to earn a livelihood.

According to the UN, over the past 30 years, the number of Indian artists has decreased by 30%. In a research report, Crafting a Livelihood, released by Dasra, a leading philanthropic foundation, 50% of household heads of craft producing families have no education with 90% of the women in these families being completely uneducated. It states that craft is a family activity as 76% of them attribute their professions to tradition and legacy.

The report further states, “Propelled by loss of markets, declining skills and difficulty catering to new markets, a large number of artisans have moved to urban centres in search of a low, unskilled unemployment in the industry. The Indian government, private sector and non-profits are each involved in the sector but their roles have evolved in silos with little
specialisation and much duplication.”

The fear of Being Caged and Cut off from the Rest of the World

The piece first appeared in The Inverse Journal on October 13, 2019.

By Sheikh Saqib

On the bus, I could hear an old lady imploring out loud to God, “Ya Allah Asi Pyeath Kar Raham” (Dear God, please have mercy on us). I was riding back home after spending an entire day at my college, at around 8 PM on August 3^rd. Kashmir Valley was yet again entrapped between confusion and anxiety, balancing between fear and uncertainty while holding on strong to hope and prayer. The last time I had witnessed such a situation was in the immediate aftermath of the February 14th Pulwama attack when a local rebel—what natives in Kashmir call them—rammed his explosive-filled XUV car into a convoy of the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF), resulting in an attack where more than 40 Indian CRPF personnel, including the rebel himself, lost their lives.

On August 3rd, the developments were vastly different. The fear of abrogation of Articles 370 and 35A and a full-scale war between the two nuclear powers, India and Pakistan, had been giving sleepless nights to the indigenous Kashmiri population.

The central government, earlier that week, had deployed 10,000 additional armed forces into Kashmir. Later, 25,000 more troops were stationed in the Valley (while according to new reports in the media, the exact number of troops pressed into action lately was said to be 1,80,000 exactly). This was in addition to the already 7,00,000 soldiers parked in the Valley, notoriously making Kashmir one of the world’s most militarized territories over the last three decades.

That entire day at school, before the bus ride home, when this sudden disturbance had engulfed the Valley, I was in center number 39 of Amar Singh College, glued to my seat, waiting for the question paper of my first semester examination. For the next two and half hours, I was to focus on my paper, while all sorts of big and mysterious events transpired around me and around everyone else in our community.

As I set my focus on the question paper before me, barely after an hour or so into the exam, a cavalcade of trucks and jeeps started ringing their horns in a loud and unpleasant manner from outside the examination hall. From the proximity of the sound that their horns and running engines were making, I could sense them within the college campus. It made me anxious and edgy as I was already aware of the growing uncertainty across Kashmir, particularly from Srinagar, the summer capital where news about the latest developments tended to disperse towards other districts. From the sound of the bustling engines, I knew these were armed soldiers barging in to occupy our college and our spaces of learning. The invigilators inside the classroom started exchanging whispers, and gesticulating. For a minute I forgot about my paper and started imagining the chaotic scenes that would be prevailing in the streets of the Valley while armed troopers made their way into our spaces of study. As a sudden anxiety-laced adrenaline kicked in, I panicked into thinking that I wished not to die in that confined structure of a dull exam hall, but rather on the streets of Kashmir, with everybody else.

After turning in my exam paper amid the psychological war that coursing through my brain, I hurried towards the corridor of the building and grabbed my bag in order to take out my phone and check every single notification that had been popping up on my mobile screen from the last few hours. Initially, I feared that the Internet had been shutdown, but it was still active and functional at that point. The first news item my eyes affixed onto was the advisory issued by Shaleen Kabra, the Principal Secretary (from the Home Department), to Amarnath pilgrims and tourists ordering them to curtail their stay in Kashmir and go back home immediately.

The communique stated, “Keeping in view the latest intelligence inputs of terror threats, with specific targeting of the Amarnath Yatra, and given the prevailing security situation in the Kashmir Valley, in the interest of safety and security of the tourists and Amarnath Yatris, it is advised that they may curtail their stay in the Valley immediately and take necessary measures to return as soon as possible.”

As I kept surfing the Internet for more details, whilst ambling down the way towards the main gate of the college, I could see armed soldiers with guns latched onto their shoulders, manning several doors of the college buildings. I could see them parking their vehicles, loaded with guns and other ammunition, in front of the college library. The sight sent a chill throughout my body. I tried to comprehend the whole situation, but just felt as if the war was next door and had come knocking ferociously, with armed troopers and military vehicles in close proximity, immediately on the campus of the college where I was enrolled along with hundreds of students.

Parents, relatives and close associates started calling in to advise all of us to return to our home early. “No one knows what is going to happen. It’s safer to go home early today,” one of my school teachers told me. “Take the first bus and reach home as soon as you can,” my worried mother nervously demanded over the phone, calling several times over to ensure I was on my way to her doorstep.

As I kept walking towards the bus stop, I could see the chaos spreading everywhere on roads. People, fearing a long lock-down, were by now out on streets to buy petrol, medicines, groceries and other daily essentials. I could see the disorder and stress in the streets manifest in the hectic civilian traffic and in the haste with which people were trying to gather essentials, surely preparing for, and expecting, the worst yet to come. In one of the alleys, which is on my route to the bus stop, a 16-year-old boy jokingly told his friend while both of them were saying farewell to each other, “Download everything you want to, today, there might be a month’s long Internet blockade. You can’t trust India. They can do whatever they want.”

At that time, I thought to myself, how good it is for a Kashmiri to die than to survive such extremely terrible situations. On the one hand the grownups running up and down the streets from shop to store, buying essentials and stocking up quickly as if a nuclear conflict were to unfold within hours, while an unfazed youth schemed to download entire series of TV shows and films to watch offline locked within his house, in case the state did what it had done before, disconnect the Internet and leave Kashmiris out of touch with the rest of the world. The besiegement that Kashmiris felt was a daily routine by now, and previously entire months had transpired with internet disconnection, continued curfew and a general lock-down with newspapers suspended from circulation, particularly in 2016 when the rebel leader Burhan Muzaffar Wani was killed. This new situation, exhibited the previous policy measures by the state, but also was eerily reminiscent of the 90s, when almost overnight troop deployment and brutal counter-insurgency tactics resulted in massacres ingrained in peoples’ memories ever since. This was perhaps the reason why the abounding fear had engulfed people Valley-wide while many were rushing about to stock up on petrol, food essentials and medical supplies.

In the bus when I recounted the particular incident of the boys (preparing to download TV shows and films in bulk) to an old man, he told me, “Kashmir is a prison and we don’t even have the right to proper communication, like everyone else.”

The bus was mostly filled with members of the older generation. The memories of 1990’s were being refreshed. “They did the same in nineties when Jagmohan took over as the governor of the state,” Touath explained—in Kashmir, young kids would address the eldest man in the family as Touath. This was considered a mark of respect in the use of such affectionate nicknames, a practice that has now almost vanished in the Valley. The use of such appellations, though, still continues in some households.

“Jagmohan was the key player in evacuating Kashmiri Pandits in 1990’s. He told the Pandit community that he had plans of killing half a million Kashmiri Muslims in order to overcome the uprising against New Delhi. Pandits were assured that they would be looked after well, and would be provided free relief, jobs and free accommodation. They were assured that once the massacre of the Kashmiri Muslim population was done and the movement was crushed, they would be sent back to the valley. This is how the Pandits left. And I am sensing a similar situation in the books right now,” Touath told his audience on the bus. The ones in the front seat had, by now, turned their heads over in order to catch the glimpse of the person who was sharing some credible knowledge, with which everyone seemed familiar.

I had encountered a similar kind of retelling of history in a Daaba while heading back home. I don’t know whether this was a coincidence or people were sharing a collective history with each other as there seemed to be a semblance between what transpired during 1989 and 1990 and the government’s response through mysterious policies being implemented at ground-level within a 24-hour span, all of which, in their summation, had seemed suspicious and sketchy to the local population.

“Today we are blamed for throwing out the Pandits when all of that was organized by the central government and now after another twenty to thirty odd years, our children will be blamed for throwing out tourists and Yatris, even when all of this is being done at the behest of the central government,” Touath added.

As Touath kept sharing oral history and giving predictions for the future, I reached my locality and deboarded the bus at my stop.

At home, everyone was tense and waiting for further developments on this new and unprecedented situation. The developments—a code-name for anything implemented by the government that severely impacted quotidian life in Kashmir—a day later on August 4th arrived as a major disappointment. With a telecommunications and an Internet blockade in effect, the whole state of Jammu and Kashmir was put under indefinite lock-down, which continues till today, entering its 3^rd month, and having begun with the arrest of various pro-India and pro-freedom leaders and their associates.

The next day, the fear of the people became an untamable reality. On August 5^th, the ruling Indian party, the BJP (Bhartiya Janata Party) revoked Article 370 and Article 35A from the Indian constitution that guaranteed autonomy to the Muslim-majority state of Jammu and Kashmir, through what several political commentators have called illegal and unconstitutional means, resulting in the split of the state into two union territories, namely Jammu & Kashmir, and Ladakh.

That night, amid the havoc and disorderliness, news of increasing military presence on both sides of the Line of Control (between India and Pakistan administered Kashmir), catalysed a new wave of madness and strain felt across the Valley’s homes, businesses and places of public gathering. Today, as the Valley continues to face the lock-down and communications blackout, we live in panic, terror and alarm, in a state of continued besiegement. Most of our schools and colleges are occupied by Indian armed soldiers, campuses are filled with AK-47s and war arsenal, and the economy has worsened exponentially. Food, produce, medical supplies and basic essentials, including petrol, are hard to get to during the normal work hours from early morning till late evenings. The harvest, dry fruits and nuts, grain and agricultural sectors overall have suffered severe damages. There is no access to healthcare even for newborn babies, and people who were generating employment for youth three months earlier are left with no option but to migrate and seek employment outside Kashmir. People from rural villages are seen hitchhiking on the highway trying to get to city hospitals and specialty clinics for treatment that they cannot get in their own areas. All this while there is heavy circulation of military vehicles on the roads, with troopers placed on every major intersection as drones habitually fly over villages and city areas.

The situation, presently, is worse than ever. Around eight million people are caged in the world’s most beautiful prison, Kashmir. Their crime is that they have never failed to show resistance towards those who try to overpower them by coercive and undemocratic means.