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The Indian Express
Sunday, April 10, 2005
Picking up the threads
When the mills of Ahmedabad shut down in the early 1980s, thousands
of families fell apart. Megha Prasad went looking for children of
mill workers and found a generation still wearing their childhood
scars
THEY are the Lost Generation of Ahmedabad. Children of workers who
found themselves out on the street as the textile mills of the city
closed one by one in the early 1980s. They watched helplessly
Ahmedabad's claim to being the Manchester of India come apart, thread
by thread.
Most of these children were pulled out of school. They are now in
their late twenties or early thirties, but the scars of their lost
childhood still show. Perhaps they always will.
Under the shade of the only tree that escaped the liquidators' axe in
the Vivekanand Mills compound sits a drunk Ishwar Bhavani. He has no
regular job, his wife left him six years ago and one of his two
teenaged sons committed suicide last year.
His life was not always this bleak. His sister remembers him as a
diligent student. That was till their father lost his job at Raipur
Mills. Ishwar was forced to drop out after class VI and work at a
roadside tea stall. He took to drinking and has never stopped since.
"FROM the mill workers, job and dignity was taken away. But from
their children, the future was taken away,'' says Jan Breman, a
fellow of the Centre for Asian Studies, Amsterdam University, who
researched mill workers families for five years.
Breman thinks the lives that children of textile workers are leading
now is not surprising. ''These children grew up as a traumatised and
resentful lot. They grew up into embittered, disillusioned, young
people who felt betrayed,'' he says. ''It's no surprise that this
batch of enormously frustrated young people sometimes take to crime.''
People living in the eastern area of the city where most workers
live, have seen the rot set in over the last two decades. Breman
speaks of a schoolteacher who burst into tears recounting some of the
stories students from the mill compound chawls would tell her -
drunken domestic fights, beatings, families breaking up, men hanging
themselves over debts and women setting themselves ablaze.
PRAHLAM Khatik, 28, remembers the days after his father lost his job
at Nagri Mills. ''I remember one night my father and mother huddled
together, weeping quietly because there was nothing to eat,'' he
says. ''That day I decided I had to quit school and start working.''
------
Weaving facts
* Mills that closed down in Ahmedabad: 50
* Number of workers employed by each: 1,500-3,000
* Most of them closed down in the early 1980s
* Only a few of them have gone through the complete liquidation process
* Only one liquidated mill has managed to recover its deemed value in full
------
He earned Rs 20-25 daily initially and now gets Rs 45-50. Too little
for his own five children to break out of the cycle that began when
mills shut down. For some families, the closing of the mills came as
a double blow. The Durgaiyyas were one such family. The father lost
his job when Nagri Mills closed down, and then the eldest son,
Ambalal lost his when Arbuda Mills did.
These days Ambalal sports a big tika on his forehead. His neighbours
tease him about what he's been doing all these years- keeping records
at a gambling den, selling liquor and charas, going to jail.
''I've stopped doing anything illegal,'' he says. He started working
as a labourer and slowly drifted towards gambling dens, selling
charas ''only to regulars'', and then working at a liquor den.
''I didn't have a choice,'' he says. ''I was the only earning member
of my family all those years.''
Abdul Rashid Ansari has seen his younger son going the same way and
spouting the same lines. Now in his sixties, Ansari worked in
Monogram Mills. One day he found himself out of work. His house in
Juni Chawli, Rakhial, where he lives with his wife and seven
children, is now perhaps the only one in the chawl without
electricity.
The younger son, Abdul Raup, was in class V when his father lost his
job. Till recently he sold liquor from a small lane. Another son,
Abdul Nawab, is luckier, and contributes most to running the house.
Ansari's youngest child, 18-year-old Sadika Bano, washes old sarees
for a dealer in second-hand clothes. She gets Rs 2 per saree, and if
she irons it, an additional rupee.
Others like Rohini roll bidis to make money. She was three when her
father lost his job with the Nagri Mills. Now 15, she rolls bidis at
her home in Rakhial, earning about Rs 30 daily, some of which her
father takes for his drink.
For children like Rohini, school is a distant thought, earning money
a closer reality.
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