Manual Scavenging in Tamil Nadu: Palani Kumar’s Documentation of the Practice

Chennai-based photographer M. Palani Kumar’s work with manual scavengers began when he was the cinematographer (2015–17) for Kakkoos (Toilet, 2017), a documentary film by the activist and filmmaker Divya Bharathi. The film followed the deaths of two Dalit manual scavengers named G. Muniyandi and D. Viswanathan while cleaning an underground sewage line in Madurai. During the making of this film, at least eighteen more manual scavengers succumbed to death.

“I felt responsible to carry forward my work, so I continued to work on this subject even after the film,” said Kumar in an article. The photographer has since travelled across several districts in Tamil Nadu, documenting the lives and working conditions of manual scavengers in the state. There are images of the lives of manual scavengers on the job, but Kumar also enters their personal spaces with photographs taken inside homes, of families, and of death and funerals—on which Kumar lays a special emphasis. The recurring theme of death in Kumar’s series Out of Breath indicates the constant reoccurrence of these incidents.

When not photographing the community himself, Kumar also organises photography workshops with the children of manual scavengers. With cameras borrowed from Kumar’s friends and some lent by organisations such as PARI and pepcollective, these children go back home and photograph and document the lives of their parents. Kumar notes how the photographs made by the children look beyond the jobs their parents do and emphasise the lives they lead at home. In Kumar’s series of photographs too, the focus is on the community and those who are left behind when a member is lost on the job. In an article from the Caravan, Kumar comments,

“I want to show not only the trauma of working in inhumane conditions but expose the system that perpetuates it, through the lives of the manual scavengers. Inherited inequality is not confined to an incident or work. It manifests in all spaces, clearly distinguishing between the ones with power and the ones without. This deep-rooted inequality follows manual scavenging communities even after death.”

To read more about Kumar's work, please click here.

All images by M. Palani Kumar. From the series Out of Breath. Images courtesy of the artist.

Click on the image to view the album