Living: The jogi artisans of Hyderabad

“We live in one-room houses. Our young male members of the family and children stay and sleep on the pavement. We cannot afford three meals a day; our breakfast is simply tea and biscuits, we do not eat lunch and only cook a meal at night,” said an elderly Jogi woman.

A society that is fraught with marginality, misery and social exclusion creates socio-economic disparities and exploitation in terms of class divide. Owing to the socially non-protective nature of the state apparatus in Pakistan, minority groups and poor working classes cannot exercise their fundamental civic opportunities and basic human rights.

In Hyderabad, the Jogi, a Gujrati-speaking Hindu minority artisan community survives in miserable socio-economic conditions in a small, ghetto-like slum settlement near the central city area. Socially excluded, they live in poverty without any state support such as housing, sanitation, drainage and proper working facilities for their livelihood.

Weaving reed mats for a living, this marginalised community lives and works on pavements

In response to the continued negligence by the state and local political leadership, the community has converted their miseries into resilience and relies on self-help.

On the bustling footpath — their workplace — they put in long hours of labour to weave mats and carpets out of reed, after which, they are left with no energy or time to think about social injustice.

The day starts early for this community, which dwells near Diyal Das Club / Press Club road, in central Hyderabad. Over the generations, they have carried on with their skill and craft for survival, without paying any heed to the noise, pollution or passersby. All family members of a household, along with children and womenfolk, work together to craft durable carpets, chiks for walls, roofs, doors and windows, chairs, stools, fancy mats and show pieces out of reed for daily customers and special clients who place orders. They buy raw reed from rural hinterland, through middlemen traders.

The open footpath space of Diyal Das / Press Club road is not only the public sphere and workshop area wherein these artisans are seen busy in work, but it also serves as a ‘shelter space’ for them in the absence of proper housing and other basic facilities.

The crafted items and products are of different forms, sizes and quality. The main item crafted by them is the chattai (mat) of different sizes ranging from 3x2 ft to 10x10 ft. Three to five workers of the family including the women and children jointly work on a mat which they are likely to complete within an hour. This one-hour duration excludes the extra time spent on the selection and preparation of raw reed material, weaving ropes which is usually done by the womenfolk and minor girls. Children also appear to perform the same tasks without following any strict rules of the division of labour.

Rajesh, 20, a young artisan says, “We have no alternative other than this profession. This is our ancestral occupation, all our family members are trained workers as we learn from our childhood.”

Manoj Kumar started working as a child with his father and grandfather. Along with his three co-workers, he makes mats of different sizes and qualities which are sold at different rates ranging from Rs1,800 to Rs4,000. When I asked him why children in his community were working and not going to school, he said, “They do go to school, but this is a family occupation so everyone has to work to earn our livelihood.”

Shankar, another master artisan in his 40s, expressed the deplorable condition of the community. “Ye hamaree havaee rozee hy (ours is a non-regular livelihood), we do not get daily earnings; it depends on the orders and sale that we get from our customers. We are here working on the footpath without any support from the government, we do not own our shops and cannot afford to invest more into business and uplift ourselves. We live in katchi abadi adjacent to the High Court area and nobody bothers to solve our problems.”

Being a religious minority with a working class identity makes them marginal but, nevertheless, it draws no attention from the authorities. Their issues are of low priority on the agenda of political parties and civil society groups. Moreover, trade unions also seem disinterested in highlighting their plight.