The immediate reason for recalling Chalam Bennurkar’s documentary on the scarred lives of the children working in the match and fireworks factories of Sivakasi, Tamil Nadu, was the grim shadow cast by two recent fire-related tragedies in South India—a massive explosion and fire at a fireworks facility in Virudhunagar, Tamil Nadu, on April 20, that claimed 23 lives and left several others injured; and a devastating blaze at a fireworks storage unit in Mundathikode, Thrissur, Kerala, on April 21, that killed 13 people and wounded many more, both highlighting safety lapses and enforcement failures.

In the 1990s, Chalam Bennurkar (died 2017) was a rage in the world of the New Indian Documentary, which may be said to have begun in right earnest with Anand Patwardhan’s Hamara Shahar (Bombay: Our City) (1985). Significantly, Anand’s pioneering film on the social politics around spaces and structures in the richest and poorest city in India spawned an entire gharana of dare-to-show, dare-to-question documentaries.

These “new” films moved away resolutely from the largely moribund tradition existing till then of using the documentary as a vehicle of government propaganda or of listless biographies of the eminent and the exalted. Even among the remarkable departures from the conventional mode, Chalam’s Kutty Japanin Kuzhandaigal (Children of Mini-Japan) stood out. The miserable plight of Sivakasi’s children, the subject of the film, deeply moved audiences wherever the film was shown in the next decade or so. Engaging artistic qualities merged with a low-key activist spirit to produce a rare cinematic vision.

But such was the quality of our friend, who had started out as a signboard painter and a trade unionist, that the enormous success of Kutty Japanin never went to his head. For the almost three decades that I knew him, he remained the same ’ol Chalam—smiling, generous to a fault to friends and strangers alike, and uncomplaining, even when the chips were down. In the months preceding his untimely death, he had been drinking a lot, against which many a well-wisher had been cautioning him, but without getting into too many words, he would make it clear that there was nothing that he could do in the matter. Chalam could be argumentative on issues of social and political significance in a certain persuasive fashion, but not on something as personal as his abiding tryst with the bottle.

When I look around me these days and find filmmakers, often of doubtful value, going on and on about the supposed excellence of their work, I wonder as to what kept Chalam from listing, even in private conversation, the heap of awards won by Kutty Japanin at distinguished festivals, from Nyon, Leipzig, and Yamagata to the Mumbai International Film Festival (MIFF) and Kalpavriksha. Chalam, who had in him sparks of both the radical of his days and the stillness of the old-world liberal, knew the worth of his Sivakasi film, and so he let others speak about it, if they wished to.

What went hand-in-hand with the awards were words of handsome praise from reputed critics. Perhaps the most enthusiastic response came from Stephen Teo of the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival: “Chalam Bennurkar has made this admirable film on a Dickensian subject by adopting a kind of Brechtian distancing effect. It works wonderfully well when one realises that the subject of child labour is exploitatively sentimental, which might lead a lesser director to milk it for all its didactic worth.”

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The Jewish American critic, Hank Heifetz, writing in Village Voice, also had favourable things to say: “Kutty Japanin Kuzhandaigal is a model of how to approach a socially charged subject without lapsing into left cheerleading. Completely avoiding voice-over and beginning-to-end BBC-style patter, Bennurkar lets the film be carried by carefully chosen characters.”

Locus of the firecrackers industry

Sivakasi is a curse, a blight, an abomination that India could do without. Here, workers, especially children, are routinely killed or scarred for life in fires and explosions while making crackers and bombs to feed the fireworks industry. A devastation in Sivakasi, 700 km from Chennai, on September 5, 2012, claimed 54 lives. Between January 2011 and September 2012, there were at least eight explosions in or near Sivakasi, and yet all that the authorities did was to provide Rs 1-2 lakh as compensation to the next of kin of those killed and warn the factory owners.

These are, at best, cosmetic measures which do nothing to remedy the situation. The curse remains as it is, thanks to the political and police patronage enjoyed by the factory owners. Public memory being proverbially short, both the government and the fireworks-industry people know that if things are “handled” properly, they are unlikely to suffer any serious damage.

The film related the stark tragedy of Sivakasi’s children without a childhood. The name “Sivakasi” is instantly recognisable to millions of people in this country. The place is synonymous with matches and fireworks and calendars advertising these products. But the question is, how many people have any idea about the lives lived by the children of Sivakasi—the young ones who are largely responsible for the production and productivity of the place.

Seventy per cent of the Sivakasi children sweating it out daily in 10- to 12-hour shifts in hellish working conditions for wages that can at best be described as beggarly are girls—girls in pigtails who should be in school learning the three R’s, laughing and running about and enjoying their childhood. Ironically, the Sivakasi film by Bennurkar was made a short while after the adult world had observed with fanfare the UN-designated “Year of the Girl Child”. What a laugh!

Sivakasi is called “Kutty Japan” or mini-Japan by the local people. Not that they have an inkling about how things are in that country. It is just that they have got used to the label dinned into their consciousness over decades together by the local Chamber of Commerce. The roughly century-old industry, founded by two Chennai brothers who had their initial training in money matters and in the manufacture of fireworks in Kolkata, has eager consumers not just throughout India but in many markets abroad as well. Sivakasi fireworks are said to light up American skies on July 4 and have delighted audiences at more than one Olympics.

Bennurkar’s film focused on the over-worked and underpaid children through a detailed inquiry into a given situation which has driven them to the factory gates. Portraying through a series of interviews with the factory owners, farmers, and workers, the film examined the pathetic existence of the child workers. The morning is still dark when company buses pick up sleepy children from the villages around Sivakasi. The daily grind begins once the buses deliver their human cargo at the factory gates. There is a short recess in the afternoon when the children wolf down the curd rice they bring with them from home. It is late in the evening when, exhausted beyond description, they return home. The film’s interviews are as important as the visuals showing the children being forced to give up their childhood so that a handful of grown-ups may enrich themselves to their heart’s content.

When some, if not many, people complain of government indifference to the plight of working children, they forget that there is no dearth of legislation on the subject of child labour—the problem lies in the authorities failing to implement the tall promises and pious resolutions that the nation has become accustomed to hearing. Legislation in the area of child labour is nothing new. In fact, it goes back to 1881 when, alarmed at the already huge number of children employed in hazardous occupations, the erstwhile British Indian government drafted its first legislation. Over the years, while the number of pieces of legislation has gone up and specific Constitutional provisions have appeared, child labour has reached a headcount of millions.

The truth is that every fourth Indian child must go to work for his own and his family’s survival; that today India has the largest number of working children in the world; and that child workers form at least a quarter of the country’s total workforce, contributing more than 25 per cent of the national family income. While official sources maintain that the total number of child workers would be in the region of 20 million, more dependable independent sources claim that 50 million would be a more accurate figure. This may read like a mere recital of statistics to people subscribing to the myth of ‘India Shining’ or ‘Achchhey Din’, but there’s no denying the fact that ground realities show how badly the Constitution of India has been betrayed by successive governments at the Centre and the States especially in the matter of guaranteeing children’s rights.

It is immaterial whether it is the DMK or the AIADMK or some other outfit in power in Tamil Nadu or whether it is the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) or the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) ruling at the Centre. The more things change, the more it remains the same. Going through the motions is the name of the game. Democracy in India is best understood by the performing parrot or the performing monkey.

Speaking on Sivakasi, let a PTI dispatch from Madurai dated July 12, 1991, be quoted to show, if anything, that despite government assurances that measures would be taken to make working conditions safer and penalties would be enforced on errant employers, nothing has really changed. The explosion at Sivakasi on September 5, 2012, was but a repetition of what had occurred two decades earlier and many times in between.

The PTI report read: “Thirty-seven persons, most of them child labourers and women, were charred to death and 70 others suffered burns in a major fire at a private cracker factory at Meenampatti, about six kilometres from Sattur in Tamil Nadu’s Kamarajar district…’ Police said 27 bodies were charred beyond recognition, while 10 bodies had been identified. They said the fire was sparked by an explosion which occurred due to friction while explosives were being pushed into tubes in one of the factory’s 32 sheds. Soon the fire spread to the other sheds… Rescue operations had been delayed as the factory was difficult to reach owing to lack of proper roads. Eyewitnesses had seen people running with their clothes on fire. No one dared to enter the premises, fearing further explosions. According to the police, the explosion was heard in villages situated over a ten-kilometre radius around the factory. Several bodies were seen plastered to the wall.”

It is said that the labour contractors supplying children to the match and fireworks factories examine the fingers of the children closely before taking them on. The girl child with nimble fingers and supple arms is preferred because such limbs make for greater output. Can people with a more diabolical turn of mind, seeking profit in poverty and human misery, be imagined? Pained parents are on record in Chalam Bennurkar’s film saying that they have no choice but to send their small ones to earn for the family.

These are farming people who are at their wits’ end when the crops fail, mainly due to scarcity of rainwater. While the adults have to go to work in nearby stone quarries, the children supplement their parents’ income by risking their lives in the factories, which are nothing but death-traps and infernos when fires break out. Each time there is an explosion, democracy and the rule of law, the twin pillars on which the Constitution of India is said to rest, take a beating. But, truth to tell, things have come to such a pass that the machinations of the political class in particular and the indifference of society at large have combined to reduce Dr Ambedkar’s vision of equality and justice to nothing.

Pan-Indian reality

Mercifully, the periodic devastations in Sivakasi are noticed by the media, but equally condemnable is the unreported plight of child workers in other industries located in other parts of the country. According to a UNICEF report from 2003, nearly 1.5 million children are employed in hazardous occupations in the glass, carpet, and lock-making industries in Uttar Pradesh which, incidentally, has the largest number of “people’s representatives" in the Houses of Parliament. The most hazardous of these is the glass-making industry, wherein more than 50,000 children below the age of 14 are employed at Firozabad. It is a fact that the efforts of groups of social workers to alleviate the working and living conditions of these child workers have come to nought as a result of the exertions of the powerful “glass lobby” in the Uttar Pradesh Legislative Assembly.

More than a quarter of a century ago, a Calcutta filmmaker had made a commissioned film on the Firozabad glass industry where the inhumanity of the glass barons towards the helpless child workers had been so diluted as to produce a document sanitised beyond belief. By his own admission, the director of the film had left out shots of small boys unable to stand still on the floor of a factory on account of extreme heat. On being asked why he had deleted such important shots, he blithely replied that the people who had financed the film would not have allowed them to be included. So much for the artistic independence and the moral strength of our creative geniuses!

But if the record of the glass goons of Firozabad is bad, that of the carpet cartels of Mirzapur is worse. According to the UNICEF report, there were at least 9,00,000 children between five and 15 years of age who were employed in the carpet-making industry, which mints hundreds of crores of rupees in profit every year from sales at home and abroad.

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The report was not certain about the number of children aged around five years employed in the industry but said it was almost certain that the figure would run into hundreds of thousands. If this is the situation in the State that has produced a succession of Prime Ministers and Presidents, and thousands of Parliamentarians of all complexions and persuasions, what must be the scenario in the far-flung corners of the country?

Bennurkar has one shot in his Sivakasi film which speaks at least a thousand words about the plight of child slaves—child “workers” or child “labourers” are but euphemisms which one’s sense of morality should prevent one from using. The shot shows a statue of Gandhi at a village crossing in the Sivakasi area, which has had to be encircled by a wall and kept locked, presumably in an effort to protect it from thieves or other malcontents. In a country where the Mahatma has to be rescued from the evil eye, what hope is there for thousands of his youngest children—many of them no higher than a hammer and no lighter than a flower—to be saved from the depredations of a system gone to seed? Sivakasi is a nightmare that is not likely to go away for a long time to come, for there are greedy, powerful people to nurse it and to perpetuate it.

Memories mattered to Chalam, who passed on nine years ago. Memories as distant as those associated with his years as a trade union activist, as a signboard painter, and as a marcher for what often turned out to be lost causes rubbed shoulders with those to do with his prematurely departed friend, the architect and environmentalist Kumar. The man’s love for, and loyalty to, those he called his friends were mixed in equal measure to form the mortar that held his memory-bricks together.

In a letter, he takes me by surprise when, out of the blue, he asks, “But what about the dignity of labour? Labour doesn’t exist in the 21st century. You don’t see them. You don’t hear them.” This is where Chalam was different from most of his artistic and intellectual fellows. Where others were adept at making neat divisions between art and life, between public protestations and private/personal actions, for Chalam, his films, poetry, other writings, drawings, and his varied interventions were all extensions of his basic social ideas and beliefs.

Till the end, in his own very distinctive way, he remained a subaltern without a price-tag around his neck. Yes, he drank inordinately, causing him to act irresponsibly at times, but he never sacrificed his principles at the altar of foreign (film) funding or political expediency. His lingering memories of his proud past would not allow him to descend into any pit of contemporary shit.

Those who knew Chalam closely will perhaps agree with me when I say that he was a very political person. He easily saw the political angle in everything—the individual, the collective, the issues and the non-issues that were being made out to be issues by interested parties. I have seen dozens of so-called documentary filmmakers in this country, especially in the last 25 years or so, making films on hard social realities (often with foreign funds) without an iota of political sense within them.

Chalam was a socialist and a liberal who took freely from Gandhi, Marx, Ambedkar, Lohia, the Cuban Revolution, Ananthamurthy, the whole Navya pantheon, and the saints and seers writing and singing about equality and brotherhood in Kannada; in fact, whatever he needed to fashion his life-affirming politics and social philosophy.

His heart bled for all those ejects and rejects of society who themselves bled for no reason other than that they belonged to the wrong class, caste, community, and what have you. When he decides to make his first film, he does it on the child labourers whose present and future are looted by the Sivakasi entrepreneurs. He sets both the Krishna and the Kaveri on fire with this burning critique on adult greed and hypocrisy; yet he does it quietly, employing an aesthetic that is more to be felt than described. Nothing changes on the ground (when has art brought the establishment to its knees?), but Chalam tries and his film passes into history of a kind.

Too many opportunities to build on that remarkable debut do not come his way, but when the chance comes, he enters the world of transgenders and paints their bedevilled lives with colours of resistance by these victims of an organised society. They cannot stop society’s beatings at every step, but they struggle not to give in without a fight. Chalam takes us by the hand and makes us enter the grand and abject world of Famila, with care and understanding.

The marginalised, it seems, held a fascination for Chalam. After Famila, he makes a film in Kannada on the Yarava tribe. It is more documentation than documentary, but you have the distinct feeling that the director has great respect for his subject. The way he dressed; the way he carried himself, whether in upper-class society or the lower depths; the discourses he strove to create around his underfed and misunderstood subjects; what he wrote or spoke in private conversations—everything convinced me till the last that Chalam was nothing if not a man of the wretched Indian earth.

Vidyarthy Chatterjee writes on cinema, society, politics.