Mapping the invisible

Mapping the invisible Just a short distance from the vast green airstrips of Indira Gandhi International Airport and Gurgaon’s glass-walled malls, the clusters of workers’ settlements in Kapashera have little to do with either. Branching off from the old Delhi-Gurgaon road, a narrow lane lined with bustling stalls selling everything from clothes and plastic clocks to colourful posters and vegetables leads to a no-man’s-land of tenements, separated by a plastic-clogged nullah, between the Delhi and Gurgaon border. The people who live in this largely self-contained locality are instead connected to neighbouring Udyog Vihar’s garment factories, which came up about 15 years ago.

Long-time resident Rani Devi came here with her husband from Mainpuri district in Uttar Pradesh 12 years ago. Initially, her husband worked at a garment exports company, but he’s now a supervisor at Convergys, where Devi also works as a cleaner.

Devi visits her village often, but prefers life in Kapashera. “Here, we can eat and live in peace,” she told us. “We can increase our income depending on how much we work and the expenses are in our hand too.” Such incentives have drawn lakhs of people, many of whom were employed in Mumbai, Ahmedabad or Kanpur before arriving here. For the last year, graphic novelist and artist Vishwajyoti Ghosh has been working with these migrant communities to draw connections between their past and present using hand-drawn maps. “It’s the biggest industrial settlement in Delhi,” he told us, “with almost over eight lakh workers [arriving] in the last ten years.”

Ghosh, who began visiting Kapashera in September 2011, had been developing social communication for various NGOs and did a group mapping exercise in the industrial belt in Madhya Pradesh and UP. “It was fascinating to explore Gurgaon beyond the malls or the plush houses in the SMSes we get,” he said. On Sundays, the workers’ weekly holiday, Ghosh and an assistant would ask 20 to 40 men and women to draw maps of the homes they had left behind in their villages. This was

vishwajyoti ghosh/rohan kothari

A cartography project connects urban workers on Delhi’s edges with their rural homes, finds Sonam Joshi.

followed by presentations in which the participants narrated and occasionally performed the stories embedded in their drawings.

In return, participants were given small financial remuneration (the

project is supported by the Prince Claus Fund).

The project, which now has around 500 maps, is called “Welcome to SEZ: 28.47n 77.03e”, and recasts the acronym as a “Special

Draw attention A map-making session in Naalapaar, Kapashera; one of the maps made by Padma Das from Madhubani, Bihar

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vishwajyoti ghosh/rohan Kothari vishwajyoti ghosh (2)

Notice board (above) Ghosh filming a presentation in Kapashera; (left) Ghosh was struck by the profusion of “workers wanted” notices for various jobs all over Kapashera, Manesar, Dundahera – he documented these in a photography project that was part of a Sarai fellowship last year.

Emotional Zone”. Besides Kapashera, Ghosh also held sessions in Dundahera and Manesar.

Most of the workers are from UP and Bihar, and work on an informal basis in garment factories (including those of multinational corporations like Nike and Gap) concentrated in Kapashera and Dunduhera; and industrial and

leather factories in Manesar (including Maruti and ancillary units). Ghosh sought to connect these homes to the ones the workers had left behind. “The mapmaking here deals with memory,” Ghosh said. “How does it happen in retrospective, in front of a peer and an unknown player like me?”

Nadim Khan, a facilitator from

the NGO Society of Labour and Development was Ghosh’s passport into the community. SLPD runs a programme, Tarang, to further the economic, political and social rights of workers and their families in the area. Khan, who worked in leather and garment factories before joining Tarang, has seen the area chan­ ge in the last decade. “There were just trees and shrubs here.

The construction really began from 2002-03,” he told us. In Kapashera for instance, a group of workers or families share 8 by 10 foot homes, constructed and rented out by Haryana landlords on what is legally agricultural land.

Tenants often have to accept arbitrary rent raises and the mandatory clause of buying groceries from their landlord’s shop at higher than market prices. Khan helped Ghosh build a rapport with the workers, some of whom were apprehensive about the map project being used for land acquisition or grabbing. “Everyone knows me here – from the police to the locals,” boasted the 24-yearold, who was dressed in jeans, a plaid shirt and a cowboy hat when we met him. “Where I stand, there is no fear.”

In any case, the maps don’t exactly hew to political or geographic representation; the concept of cartography was reworked

to incorporate subjective expe­ riences, and cultural and histo­ri­cal nuances. As he began the project, Ghosh found that the boundaries between the real, the remember­ ed and the imaginary, between mapmaking and scenography, were often blurred. “They had their own ways of deciding how the maps were drawn – some have gone ahead and drawn straight lines, or dotted lines. They treat a map in different ways,” Ghosh said. “It is an individual exercise, but it’s also a social collaborative process because they are sitting in one room and making it together. It’s interesting how their memory deals with the exercise and social pressures.”

Several maps were idealised representations of houses with sloping roofs next to a river or with the national flag on top, or else exaggerated the area. They also revealed how space was divided and understood. For instance, migrants from UP emphasised the baramda or open central courtyard. As much as the actual dwellings, the maps also captured the relation between homes and surrounding public spaces – a lake, a road, a temple or a cow pen.

Some of the participants simply framed the exercise as an art project. “If you go back, they’ll say ‘haan woh chitra banane aaye the’ [yes, they had come to make pictures],” Ghosh said. When we met Rani Devi at her home in Naalapar, Kapashera, she said the activity was familiar: “Oh, didn’t we draw in school? After all one had to make something in the art [class]. They gave us a sample and we made it accordingly.” More than the maps themselves, perhaps, this freewheeling exercise opened up conversations, especially among women, who often worked in groups with children assisting them. “It becomes a dialogue for cross-generations living here,” Ghosh said, adding, “it’s also about how they play around with space that is theirs in a space that is completely temporary.”

Currently, Ghosh is in the process of selecting maps – he hopes to turn “Welcome to SEZ” into a documentary film or an art project.

By allowing its participants – who exist largely outside the city’s public imagination – to express their journeys with pen and paper, the part-artistic, part-sociological project promises to yield new perspectives on migration, per­ manence and the nation’s capital.

“It has as much as to do with memory and land,” Ghosh said, “as the politics of the place they are living in right now.”

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