Colliery Workers, Bihar, 1940s

I took this picture sometime in the nineteen-forties. A number of my classmates in Calcutta came from families which owned coal mines in Bihar, and they often took me to their villages during vacations. I think that this picture was taken somewhere between Jharia and Ondal. The camera, which might have been a box camera, was lent to me by one of my friends.

The coal was cut by maalkatas, pulled up on a crane lift, washed, sized, then piled on small cars, to be taken to the railroad yard. The colliery would have its own private track, which would join the regular railroad system for shipment out of the mine area.

When I was 14, the Calcutta newspaper Navbharat Times (a Times of India experiment to test whether they could start an edition in Calcutta, where severe competition was offered by Amrit Bazar Patrika and The Statesman), published a on the entire last page a piece written by me with a step-by-step description about how a colliery works, illustrated with about 20 photographs. The photographs and words were written in a boy's simple language. Sadly, I cannot locate that first effort; perhaps this is the only surviving photograph.

The coal mines were nationalised by Indira Gandhi in 1973, and my mine-owning friends are scattered around India in other pursuits, if they have not left this world.

I am posting this picture in the days leading up to May Day, the international Labor Day, in part because of the unprecedented revolution through which the polity of this country is passing. Some people feel good about it, some dangerously, perilously destructively, some cannot afford to care. One can wonder, do the people who work in the coal mines today have aadhaar cards, and bank accounts, and a cashless economy? And more importantly, have their lots improved since this picture was taken? Judging by the recurrent reports of mine accidents, one fears that they have not; or not enough.
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Bhashwati wrote:

What an impossibly sharp image you have posted and what acutely significant questions you have planted in the text.

From what we have found in recent years many many more have joined the ranks of those whose lots cannot improve.

Understandably.

There is a limit to the numbers that can get into the Forbes list but there can never be a limit to the numbers that get disenfranchised not only in mine fields and tea gardens but within every nook and cranny of civilised society that lies along the fault lines of progress.

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Nancy wrote:

This reminds me of a long tracking shot in Louis Malle's Phantom India, in which a man pushes a foot-pedal sewing maching on a wheeled platform down the railroad tracks from nowhere to nowhere. Heart-breaking.