Workshop: Remembering Pune’s Construction Workers



On the first day of our 3-day workshop in Wadarwadi, we focused on the history of the settlement itself, which is intricately tied to waves of labour migration to the city. Many Patharvat stoneworkers shared how their families had lived there for three generations. On a map of the city we marked the prominent building sites on which their ancestors had worked as well as temporary labour camps, very often located right next to construction sites or along the riverbanks. Some visitors remembered the names of the sahibs or thekedar their ancestors had worked for such as Kenjale, Datar, Limaye, Mehta, Kusalkar, Pawar.

The second day of our workshop in Wadarwadi focussed on how workers obtained work and the social relations on the building site. Old photographs from building sites in and around Pune were displayed on the walls and together with documentary video clips, provoked memories of times gone past. Women were typically involved in unskilled work or 'bigari kam': sieving sand, carrying materials like aggregate, brick, or a wet concrete mix. Most of the elder women, some of whom worked in construction for 70 years (!) testified how they face back problems because of those years of heavy work. Women of the younger generations commuted daily to worksites (even remote ones) from Wadarwadi. A contractor's lorry would pick them up from Deep Bangla Chowk in the early morning. During an intimate 'women only'  discussion we discussed questions of combining construction work with care, domestic violence, and work during menstruation.

Building sites are places of interaction between people from different social backgrounds and communities. They can be a melting pot of languages as quite often people borrow foreign words rather than coming up with translations. This became evident when English words such as 'lorry', 'grinder' or 'breaker' suddenly popped up in the talk of senior informants while they used Wadari and Marathi terms for older handheld tools. Similarly, colonial handbooks use 'Phaora' of 'Phowda' when referring to the ubiquitous indian hoe. 
The third day of our workshop focused on construction tools and equipment and the words that are used to describe them.