Priti David & Jaideep Hardikar
What constitutes labour — and who gets to define it? Labour takes many forms, yet documentation has long been shaped by those with the privilege to record, which means it has also long been shaped by what they choose to overlook. The everyday work of women in the home, the intricate skill behind craft processes, the invisible hands in agriculture, these rarely make it into the frame.
How do we gather information that doesn’t default to the most visible, the most legible, the most convenient?
Caste is perhaps the sharpest example of this blind spot. The labour it assigns is among the most physically demanding and socially stigmatising, and yet it remains among the most systematically erased from memory, archive, and public acknowledgement.
To truly account for labour is to reckon with who has been seen, and who has been made invisible, and by whom.
This event is part of programming around Beneath the Turning Sky in collaboration with People’s Archives of Rural India (PARI)