Tamil Nadu youngsters get Indian workers in pictures

The old woman who looked away, her hands flowed into a cigar basket, surrounded by hundreds of cigarettes she spent many hands.

The picture is a lot of student Rashmitha T in his village in Tamil Nadu, showing his neighbors who made the traditional Indian cigarettes called beedis.

“No one knows about their work. Their unspeakable stories should be said,” Rashitha told the BBC.

Her pictures were shown in a new exhibition about Indian workers titled the unseen visibility of the Egmore Museum of Chennai.

All pictures have been taken by 40 students from schools operated by Tamil Nadu’s government, which documents the lives of their own parents or other adults.

From quarry workers to weavers, welders to adapt, pictures promote different backbreaking acts made by the estimated 400 million workers in India.

Many Beedi rollers, for example, weak in lung injury and tuberculosis because of their risky work, as Rashmitita.

“Their houses returned to tobacco, you would not stay there for a long time,” he said, adding that his neighbors were sitting outside their houses for their hours around their homes.

For every 1,000 cigarettes they rolled, they only got 250 rupees ($ 2.90; £ 2.20), he told the BBC.

In the state’s erode district, Jayaraj S got a picture of his mother Pazhaniammal at work as a brick maker. She saw that pouring a clay and sand mixed with molds and shaping bricks by hand.

Jayaraj should wake up to 2am to get the picture, because his mother began working in the middle of the night.

“He had to start early to avoid Japanese day,” he said.

It was only when he started his photograph project that he truly learned the difficulties he had to endure, he added.

“My mother often complains of headaches, foot pain, hip and sometimes weak,” he said.

In the district of Madurai, Gopika Lakshmi M took his father Muthukrishnan selling things from an old van.

Her father had to get a dialysis twice a week after she lost a kidney two years ago.

“He was driving in adjacent villages to sell things in spite of dialysis,” Lakshmi said.

“We have no luxury to rest at home.”

But despite his intense circumstances, his father “like a hero” as he continued his distressed daily routine, said Gopika.

Taking pictures with a professional camera is not easy, but it’s easy after the months of training with experts, as the students.

“I know how to shoot at night, adjust the shutter speed and aperture,” says Kerthi, living in the Tenkasi district.

For his project, Keerthi chose to document his mother’s daily life, Muthulakshmi, owning a small store in front of their house.

“Dad wasn’t good, so the mum looked at the two shops and at home,” he said. “She woke up at 4am and working up to 11pm.”

His pictures depict his mother’s struggles as he traveled a long distances through public buses in the origin of things for his store.

“I want to show by pictures of what a woman is doing to improve her children’s life,” she said.

Mukesh K spends four days with his father, documenting his job in a fight.

“My father stayed here and came once a couple of weeks,” he said.

Mukesh’s father worked from 3am to noon, and after short breaks, working from 3pm to 7pm. He gets a small amount of about 500 rupees a day.

“No beds or mattresses in their room. My father went to bed with no carton cardboard boxes in the quarry box,” he said. “He suffered a sunstroke last year because he worked under hot sun.”

Students, aged 13 to 17, learned different forms of art, including photography, as part of a Tamil Nadu School Education Department initiative.

“The idea is to make responsible students,” said Muthamizh Kalaivhi, President of Police Development at Nadam Nadu Nadu Foundation.

“They write working people around them. The understanding of their lives is the beginning of social change,” he added.

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