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Behind the Exotica

Maha Kumbh 2013
Sunandita Mehrotra

The Kumbh Mela is composed of and made by diverse groups of people coming from different places for over the period of three months. Beyond the exotica and the acclaimed efciency of the mela administration, there are tens of thousands of invisible workers who sweat to make the event function smoothly. The underside of the mela reveals the gross inequality with which amenities are distributed, with tourists and big religious groups on the one side, and the working poor on the other.

n 22 January 2013, 8,000 workers employed by the Kumbh Mela administration went on a day-long strike, taking over main mela grounds, roads and ofces. For far too many days, the administration had ignored the growing unrest and the rising anger amongst the hundreds of workers employed at the mela, with the inhuman living conditions, work times and wage rates. Some civil rights activists of Allahabad formulated a list of demands such as an increase in wages, regulation of working hours, uniforms for workers, improvement in living conditions, etc, and put it across to the magistrate and consequently, the strike was called off with the promise that these will be met by the end of January. There is a dominant image of the Maha Kumbh which consists of both the continuity of devotion and the exotic. Behind this, however, there are thousands of workers as well as those with small jobs at the mela. This side gets completely overshadowed by the glamour of the mela. It is worth understanding who these workers are and why there is a growing discontent on their part with the mela. Underside of Mela The Maha Kumbh, on the face of it, is surely a magical event; it is the largest congregation of humanity. Forty million people gathered at the mela in 2001, double that number are expected this time. It also sees the creation of an entire temporary city with water piping, electricity, roadways, hospitals, police check posts, banks and modern metro facilities. At the same time, it is the largest gathering of workers to make possible an event at such a large scale. One does not think of this at rst when one is taken in the sheer numbers thronging
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the river banks at Allahabad for worship and pleasure. However, considering the level of organisation required for the lakhs staying at the main mela grounds over two months, from 14 January to the end of February/mid-March, it becomes clear that a vast network of cleaners, scavengers, sweepers, washers, cooks and countless others are employed at menial jobs to sustain the mela. Upon this rests another layer of the service economy, that of small shops, people from neighbouring slums setting up their tea stalls, or makeshift shops for selling rewood, etc. To this we can add the vast number of boatmen and rickshaw pullers, the means of local transport within the mela. All these go into making the foundations of the mela and yet somehow the people involved have been largely overlooked and under-represented in dominant images of the mela and in the eyes of the administration. Working with a collective of activists of Allahabad, Shehri Gareeb Sangharsh Morcha and Safai Karmi Sangharsh Samiti, from December end to January end, I communicated with the people of this underside of the mela and observed all the unacknowledged work that somehow keeps the magnicence rolling over the long duration in the bitter winter months. Creation of Temporary City There are about 10-15,000 workers who have been here from December onwards. They are from Uttar Pradesh (UP), Madhya Pradesh (MP), Rajasthan, and some from as far as Gujarat and Maharashtra. Most of them have been brought by jamadars or labour contractors, who are registered with the mela administration. Some have come because they were here during the Ardh Kumbh in 2007, and a few came along with the people from around their homes as they have no other work in their villages. Usually, a jamadar goes down to the villages and recruits workers. He is responsible for 150 workers. Once they reach the mela grounds, teams of 12 would be formed, each of these headed by a mate; often of the same village. The
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Sunandita Mehrotra (mehrotra.ita24@gmail. com) is an independent artist and writer focusing on public and community art.

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jamadar, therefore, is responsible for 10 mates; more often than not these turn out to be the relatives of the jamadar. One reaches the workers camps, driving through newly constructed roads lined with hoardings and banners for the mela, both from the state government (with messages from the chief minister, telling us the river is holy and we must wash our sins here) and of individual babas looking down upon one intimidatingly with glowing halos. Some of these hoardings, placed by ambitious akhada heads, have representations of dream city plans in the shape of trishuls. These are merely promotional hoardings for the akhada and not real advertisements. There is one on saving the dying Hindu religion (Hindu dharm khatre main hai...kyun?). Even the advertisements here, like those for a local soap brands, have depictions of Parvati bowing low to Siva who is rubbing himself clean with this divine soap! Since January there has been a massive clearing of small shops or gumtis along the main roads through Allahabad on the pretext of street widening and beautication for the Kumbh. This has resulted in 500 gumti owners losing their jobs, and seeing their pan/chai gumtis reduced to rubble. Over a week before the rst major bathing day 14 January (Makar Sankranti) processions of members of the seven major akhadas and their leaders take place daily, marking their public arrival at the fair. This is a day-long affair and it makes for a stunning visual display to see the glamour and decoration with which the akhadas present themselves. Some come in Scorpios and BMWs, others riding high on elephants or camels as they pass through roads lined with bastis around the river banks. They are followed by music bands, dancers and people performing tricks like dripping melting wax on their bodies, supposedly entranced by the power of the divine. Each akhada (Agni Akhada, Juna Akhada, Ananda Akhada, etc), has its own camp site at the main ghats. These are provided almost free by the state, with makeshift furniture, water supply, lights, toilets and other facilities. These facilities are limited to the akhadas and tourist
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camps. Workers camps do not get any of these facilities. An intricate water system has been set up over the past four months across 15 sq km, as well as a thorough grid system of electrication, along roadways and inside camps. An entire temporary city has been built which can cover the area of a 100 villages put together. Inhuman Camps for Workers The workers camps are spread out wherever there is space enough for a group of workers tents to t, even if it is at the road side or at a far-off river bank from where they must trudge two kms through the sand to reach their work sites. Some spaces at the main grounds have about a 100 tents. These tents, like the ones for the tourists and babas, are mainly provided by Lalloo Ji and Sons, who have a monopoly for providing tents for all Kumbh Melas. There is, however, a shocking difference in the kind of tents and other facilities when we go into the workers camps. Each tent here looks t for two members, but houses 5-10 members. It turns out that the worker has not come alone, his wife has come to keep house, without the two of them the young and old have no home, so they come along as well! The camp sites are lled with kids of all ages playing in the ditches and lth that surround their temporary homes. The number of women employed in karamchari jobs is very low and it is children who substitute for their father, if he is sick or unable to go for work. The karamchari jobs are of sweeping roads, tents, cleaning public toilets and other public spaces within the grounds. The working hours extend through the day, sometimes into the night. The wage rate, until last year, was Rs 156 per day. With serious campaigning by the activist groups and workers it has been increased to Rs 198. The daily wage rate in the city is already Rs 250. There is no compensation for overtime work and basic amenities are rarely provided. Every camp (ranging from 100 to 1,000 each) has just one water point, and some camps had none when the workers arrived and only after demanding repeatedly was one put in place. Public toilets are there
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only around a few camps within the main grounds. There are no collective eating arrangements, nor is any rewood given. As a result, a large part of the daily earnings goes into survival costs. With the temperature dipping to below zero this year, necessities such as rewood to keep warm through the night are an added cost. We go down to one of the camp sites that is one of the furthest from the mela. This is a group from Chitrakoot, Madhya Pradesh. Here we nd ourselves face to face with the harshest of living conditions possible. There are about 20 tents around an electric pole with no basic amenities for around 2 kms no food, no shops, and no bathrooms/toilets. There are about 100 people in this camp, and there is one tap for all of them. The thin broken canvas tents do nothing to protect them from the cold, and when it gets dark, there is no electricity even though a row of street lamps have been newly set up. These, we are told, will light up at some point over the course of the night. Members of this camp plead for any improvements in their living arrangements. They say their children are really suffering here. However, they say all this very cautiously, because if an unsympathetic mate/jamadar gets a hint of an organised protest, they can be sent home any time. The lack of labour contracts and the absence of supervision by any outside body mean that the workers are at the mercy of the jamadars and the mela administration. I wonder how much worse it could be at their village, to shift their family so far from home to these inhuman camps for work. A day before the rst main bathing day or Shahi Snan on 14 January, we encounter a bizarre situation. One of our activist colleagues receive a call saying two workers have been injured. The particular tent cluster is situated under a railway bridge, beside the river Ganga. Coca Cola had hung eight 30 15 ft banners from the bridge on heavy metal armatures. These banners were hung by imsy ropes, and with the heavy wind two banners had come crashed down. We are met by angry workers, ve people have been injured and three tents have completely collapsed. Gyandev, on
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worker says, thank god it was daytime and we were all out, if it was night we along with our children would have been crushed to death, these are heavy iron rods, what were they thinking?. The magistrate of this sector promises to take down the banners or shift the camp site. But even 10 days after this incident, none of these measures have been taken. Coca Cola has signed the deal with the railways, so it is not a matter that the mela authorities want to interfere with. The administration gets away with what is clearly a violation of basic human rights in this situation: that of not giving living space for workers. The big red Coca Cola banners y high above the camps like signs of death. Camps at the Market One of the larger workers camps within the main grounds has groups of tents from different regions, all having formed their own circles Gujaratis, Marathis, those from MP and then from UP areas close-by. This camp is right next to the space allotted for markets by the mela authority. Here each shop is rented for a two-month period at rates that range from Rs 50,000 to Rs 1.5 lakh. Until a week before the mela, the market space, Meena Bazaar, had workers living there, with a roof over their heads while staying within the shops tin sheds. By 14 January, however, those without tents have to move out into the open and the shops are lled with Coke machines, jewellery, sweets and saris. There are also temporary branches of national banks next to the market area, some even with 24 hours ATM facilities. Around all these shops and construction sites, there are over a hundred tiny tents, some canvas, some plastic, and some a mix of materials. A little clay oven or chullah is installed outside each tent for cooking and keeping warm, the tent itself is stuck in place with heaps of mud so that the wind does not make it fall down at night. After all this, they can be made to move camp anytime, if the mela authorities feel that the space has better uses. Around these areas, there are small dirty lakes with heaps of plastic, and an unused rail track running through it make up the rest of the landscape.
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We talked to a family from Banda (Madhya Pradesh), who have been recruited along with 11 other families. They will stay here for three months. There are 10 people in this tent including eight children. The two older boys are employed as karamcharis along with their parents. They have already been working for 20 days, for day-long shifts, sometimes at night as well. However, none of them has received any payment yet. In fact, they do not even know what the wage rate is or whether there has been any increase this year. This family has ve bhigas of agricultural land in their village, which is sufcient for their food consumption for about seven to eight months through the year. Beyond this, there is absolutely no work available in their villages. This makes them travel far and wide half the year in search for any kind of unskilled labour employment. As a result of this unsettled lifestyle, none of the eight children has had formal education beyond class ve. Since like many others they have been employed in the mela before, they are accustomed to the goings on, they know that all they will be given is a tent so they have brought rewood, utensils, even atta-daal and as many vegetables as they could from home, apart from a large bundle of blankets. This will last only for a few weeks. After that it will be even tougher to make ends meet. They will, like others around them, have to mortgage the little gold jewellery that they have. This family from Banda like many others are of the Valmiki caste (scheduled caste), they have cleaned and swept for centuries and continue to nd themselves pushed into these jobs today. There is another large group from Varanasi, about 400 of them, who are from the Dom caste whose work is specically clearing the dead any dead people, animals, birds. Sher Singh is one such, he has arrived with his wife and three children and though he has been here for two weeks, he has no work. He says the dead pigs and dogs are now cleared by the municipal administrations machines, and thrown into the river without burning. This means that their livelihood is forsaken. Out of the 400 Doms that arrived, only 15 have
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been employed so far. Sher Singh has mortgaged his wifes gold ring and necklace for the time being; he will wait another week before moving to a different town. Mini Economies Within this vast fabric of karamcharis rests another overlapping stratum of mini economies individual sellers with all kinds of goods from plastic owers, fake jewellery, sindur powder, spices, clay deities, and several curious religious artefacts. From dawn to dusk for a month before the mela, the camps are lled with little plastic mats laid out in the sun outside the tents, women and children are busy making bright plastic owers or necklaces. In many of the karamchari families, while one or two members go off to sweep and clean, the others make extra money by selling things. They also buy these items wholesale from the city. For selling their ware most of them hang bags around their arm and walk through the grounds, though even to sell this way you have to pay a few hundreds to the mela authorities. There are other families who travel the year round to religious fairs from Amarnath in the north to Nasik in the south, selling little deities, rudraksh malas, kasturi, religious artefacts prepared from atta. A woman from Rewa, Madhya Pradesh makes malas out of rudraksh. She sits in the sun sowing in bead after bead, she laughs when I asked how much she charges for each one. She said: It depends on the customer you see, for locals maybe Rs 40-50, for the foreigners maybe Rs 200!. Ahead was a woman with her daughters making metal moulds of gods or their symbols using atta. These moulds are baked in the chulah. The families making a living at the mela complain unanimously that there is no space allocated to them to either stay or set up shop. Yet, their labour and services are indispensable at the mela. There is a demand from people for their goods and the mela would not be the same without them. One day the police allows them to come in to the grounds and sit with their goods, the next day they are chased away from the very same place. For sitting within the main grounds
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and selling goods they have to pay about Rs 500 for a licence. Even after this there is little security of being able to work. Around the rst main bathing day 14 January we witnessed police chasing away a whole row of such vendors along the mela road sides. When asked what the problem was, they said it is not an issue of authorisation, these vendors are apparently the ones who send their kids to pickpocket. This, however, seems highly unlikely as these families live under constant threat themselves and would not risk losing their livelihoods. Another popular religious item is the making of kasturi, named after a deer species found in the higher altitudes of the Himalayas, that is said to have a very fragrant scent. Here we nd fake bits of kasturi hair being meticulously prepared by rolling little tufts of goat hair over mud to make balls, wrapping these in saw dust paste adding a cheap perfume to give the scent and nally the nail of a chicken is stuck into the ball. A family from Jaipur is huddled around a small re, the children cut the goat skin to make pieces, and the mother stuffs them while the father washes the skin. This family moves throughout the year to different festivals, eking out a livelihood by selling these curios. They do not own any goats themselves, the rst place they go to when arriving in a city is to the butchers to collect discarded goat skin and chicken nails. Like the others, they too face a constant threat of being displaced and of not being able to sell. Their children will grow into the same profession; this is the only education they have. Life around Mela Grounds Apart from the thousands trooping in from villages far and near, it is the residents from bastis around the mela grounds who are hired for contract jobs such as construction, cooking in the messes (the police mess, mela administration mess, etc) or repair work. The bastis around the mela ground are all unauthorised and the land belongs to the army. In the previous Maha Kumbh, 2001, there was a major drive by the municipality to uproot the bastis. Those bastis such as Pura Parain and Sunjay Nagar were subject to road widening and beautication for the
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mela which left hundreds of families absolutely homeless. Since then there has been a sustained protest by the families and activists from Allahabad which has resulted in an order being passed in 2010 according to which no eviction can take place without prior allotment of rehabilitation sites. They continue, however, to face demolition threats, especially when the mela is nearing. There are a number of jobs repairing tent canvases, stitching tents, construction of pavements, levelling of roads, making bundles of hay stacks to t into tents for bedding, for all of which people are hired from surrounding bastis on a daily wage system by a contractor. Only the contractor communicates with the mela authorities through the sector magistrate. We met a group of four women employed by Vrindavan Tent House, sitting under the sun and stitching different parts of a large canvas. This tent company is from Agra and comes down every year, for the Magh mela (an annual fair during January-February in Allahabad). Guddi, from Takia basti, about two km from the mela grounds, tells us that she comes down here whenever the mela is on and tries to get a job. There is a big rush for these jobs and only a handful are hired, that too sometimes for a month and sometimes for just a week. When the work with one contractor nishes, they try and nd another job. The work is from 8 am to 5 pm with no breaks in-between. Women get up at 5 am, cook for the house and pack some food for themselves which they eat while working. There is no water point nearby nor is there a break for tea, with the temperatures going as low as 1-2 degrees it is very difcult to work out in the open. The wage we get at the end of each day is Rs 200, this is insufcient, for our large families, says Guddi. Going into a neighbouring basti, Pura Parayin, we meet two aged women who cook food in the women police mess at the mela. There are about 28,000 male police and 5,000 women police who have been brought in especially for the period of the mela. For them too, camps have been erected with facilities and each camp of 50 or so tents has a mess.
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Those within the basti complain bitterly that the camps take over the space where their cattle were tied and which they used as toilets. When we go anywhere near the camps, we are told to get away, but it is the camps that came into our courtyards!, says Sushma. The paradox of her situation is that she works in the police camp mess, her mess is about a kilometre into the mela grounds. There are 11 women working in this mess for about 100 police women. The main cook has come with the police. She says the working time is inhuman, she must leave at 4 am in the morning to cut and chop vegetables for the breakfast at 6.30 am, right after which they go on to prepare lunch till noon. Sometimes when there is food left over they are given a meal too, on other days they return home with a couple of rotis, to quickly cook and eat at their own homes. They return to work from 2 pm up till about 8 pm. The working hours add up to 14 hours a day! Sushma is a grandmother, she has spent her entire life struggling this way and is now hoping to get a pension card. After a month of work at the mess, her body became sore and we found her feverish and nauseous. As there is not a single day of sick leave or holiday within this contract, she has sent her daughter to work in her place, otherwise they will cut wages or employ another! There is stiff competition for this work as the payment at the end of three months is about Rs 20,000, something they will never otherwise receive. Within the bastis we also nd people engaged in making portable earthen ovens and earthen pots. Thousands of these get sold at prices as low as Rs 10-12 each, for cooking and heating by both the kalpvasis (people coming to stay for the mela as a spiritual retreat, they are mostly elderly and can afford to stay for over a month), and workers from outside. The streets are lined with chullahs and pots, made of earth collected from the riverbanks. This is done a few months prior to the mela, as when construction starts they are not allowed onto the riverbanks to collect mud. The same families also make cowdung cakes, they might not own any cattle but often are able to collect dung of nearby cattle owners.
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They sell these cakes in sacks of hundred, which sell for Rs 100. A major problem here is space for making, spreading out and drying the cakes. Life of Boatmen Over the course of the mela there are about 8,000 boatmen working at the main ghats, a stretch of 10 kms on both banks of the river. These boatmen are from the villages near the river and from as far away as Varanasi, Banda, Mirzapur, Rajapur and Chhattisgarh. They belong mostly to the Mallah and Pasi castes. These boats provide the only form of transport to reach the Sangam between the two rivers. During the mela thousands make the trip every day. The local boatmen ply the year round, but the mela is their bonus time, so just as it starts off we nd them readying their boats xing broken parts, applying melted tar coal to the base to make it water proof and painting it all in bright colours. The painting, it turns out, is also an advertorial mechanism for companies like Birla Cement they provide the colours and in return have their logos painted on the boat. This is a fair deal for men who are hardpressed for money to purchase paints! A local boatman tells us more about his livelihood and how he shapes his river life around it. He laughs when I ask him how long ago he started working on the boat. He says he was practically born on the boat! The boat he now has cost Rs 1.5 lakh, smaller boats cost between Rs 30,00040,000, all lasting about 25 years. The boat he has is made of sagun wood and can carry about 20 people. With the boat he earns as little as Rs 100 per day sometimes and as much as Rs 5,000 on good days during the mela. He says that accidents often happen when there are large crowds as at the Kumbh or Ardha Kumbh,
Its not our fault, we always tell people not to put their hands too deep in the water or their feet, but what to do! When someone tumbles over, it is we who have to dive in and save them. The police and medical patrolling boats are only in name, they move around but we end up doing all the work! And if you dont save someone and they drown, then too, we are caught by the police, some case is slapped on us and we have to pay money.

The major complaint that one comes across here is about being stopped from plying during the major mela days when they would otherwise earn the most. In 2012, a protest was organised and boatmen refused to leave the area they were meant to vacate during the period, for this they were lathicharged and some boatmen were badly injured. These problems persist, but it seems that there is not a collective strength to team up and struggle. Even this year during the Maha Kumbh Mela, something that they have been looking forward to, they do not know if they will be allowed to work for even 20 days out of the two main months. The Pasi community members who live here tell us that an alternative job on days they do not get too many tourists is to sh for coins (pandubki). Boys drop magnets attached to ropes into the river as the sun sets, older men even go diving down about 15 feet for coins. Remarkably, they are the ones who are called on when there is a dead body in the river and it needs to be retrieved. They live in slums around the riverbanks and say that the mela

leaves their colonies full of lth. They do not earn more during this time as there is a competition with boatmen coming from neighbouring states. Conclusions The Kumbh Mela is composed of and made by these diverse groups of people, coming from different states for over the period of three months. They, like the Kalpavasis, are the ones who actually stay through the entire period whereas tourists and other religious groups come and go. Beyond the exotica and the acclaimed efciency of the mela administration are these thousands who get no recognition and suffer bitterly through the festivities. There is a need to address the gross inequality with which amenities are distributed, with tourists and big religious groups on one side, and the working poor on the other. It is essential to have a mela administration, a state body to regulate the organisation and procedure of such a massive event, yet it is a must that the regulation should cover workers basic demands which are being neglected at present.

REVIEW OF URBAN AFFAIRS

December 1, 2012
Urban Poverty in India: Tools, Treatment and Politics at the Neo-liberal Turn Understanding Poverty and Inequality in Urban India since Reforms: Bringing Quantitative and Qualitative Approaches Together The Spatial Reproduction of Urban Poverty: Labour and Livelihoods in a Slum Resettlement Colony On the Sabarmati Riverfront: Urban Planning as Totalitarian Governance in Ahmedabad New Policy Paradigms and Actual Practices in Slum Housing: The Case of Housing Projects in Bengaluru Karen Coelho, Anant Maringanti

Vamsi Vakulabharanam, Sripad Motiram Karen Coelho, T Venkat, R Chandrika Navdeep Mathur Lalitha Kamath

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