Visible Work and Invisible Bodies: P. Sainath and the People’s Archive of Rural India
Sainath’s archive of photos depicts the everyday work routines of rural women and girls. As Shukla Sawant once wrote, “Every encounter with this archive, with its incessant reappearance in different venues, in railway stations, in bus shelters, on factory gates, as well as the unlikely space of the gallery, highlights the deep effectiveness and virtue of the multiple in its ability to have several simultaneous lives.”
Palagummi Sainath’s continuing engagement with a specialised language of photographic practice—where the artist effaces himself by submitting to the expression of an eloquent but invisible world of work—drives the project of People’s Archive of Rural India (PARI). Following the popular exhibition mounted by Sainath, titled Visible Work, Invisible Women: Women and Work in Rural India, PARI privileges the rural participants in their image-making process. Their practice involves frequently using the participants’ photographs of themselves to frame an alternative vision for a more inclusive and representative Indian media. For example, in PARI’s latest project, titled Faces, or #projectunselfie, they attempt to bring “More diversity to the Indian media landscape” by aiming to crowd-source portraits of men, women and children from each district of India.
Rural women’s work has been mythified and tied to the imagination of nationalism (think of Mother India) such that their work, the rural landscape and their struggle become an allegory for national sentiment. The PARI archive seeks instead to foreground the everyday narratives of labour, leisure and movement, explored in these photographs.
The Visible Work, Invisible Women exhibition, however, featured a series of photographs taken by Sainath himself, covering an arc produced by the years between India’s economic liberalisation in the early 1990s and 2002. This period—ending three years before the passage of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) into a bill—encapsulates an era of success and excessive visibility for India’s middle-class, urban residents as a result of liberalisation. Their success came at the cost of increasing stress on the labour and livelihoods of the country’s rural citizens. While the NREGA ushered in a new, more grim reality of the anxious workfarist state looking to distribute the largesse of urban prosperity to rural workers; the body of images that Sainath constructed bears witness to their labour and the silencing of their economic rights during that fateful decade. As we move further into the depths of a post-workfarist state, rural workers are being subjected to fresh modes of alienation—even hostility—due to the expectations of their urban counterparts. This has resulted in greater disintegration between the contexts of their work and their livelihoods (In an increasingly post-work scenario, more rural workers are likely to fail at finding steady wage-labour work—rendering them to states of semi-permanent migrancy, if not vagrancy). PARI takes it upon itself to deconstruct these new forms of distortion or distancing adopted by the mainstream media of India. Their work confirms the solitude of the rural citizen, especially the more vulnerable ones like lower caste residents, or women and children, who seek work and recognition—both political and social—in the rural landscapes of the country.
PARI’s #Projectunselfie attempts to emphasise the journalistic aspect of their image-making practice. Bringing new faces into the ecology of mainstream media, the project critiques the monad of self-worth that the selfie usually accrues for the urban photographer. (Image courtesy of PARI, Instagram.)
PARI’s posts frequently resort to direct critiques of how national spaces are easily substituted by the imagination of urban spaces with their proximity to power and easier modes of (crowd) control. One rarely sees a Republic Day parade rejecting the homely certainties of an urban terrain. PARI calls it out as “…a tragic, vicious charade”—a false image of public unity, collaboratively asserted by the state and its media. They are engaged in a perpetual critique of the state’s “Theatre of the Optics” through their own archives, often sourced collectively rather than authorially produced. (Image courtesy of PARI, Instagram.)
All images courtesy of PARI.
