A labourer carries her child in a sling while balancing bricks on her head, while an old man sits next to her on the road, making a clay pot. A sweating auto rickshaw driver zooms past them. Two children stand listlessly on the side of the road, waving handheld fans made from recycled waste, under the scorching sun. In East Delhi’s Sunder Nagri, a packed residential locality with a mainly working-class population, this daily scene has been made into a mural by the very people facing the deleterious effects of above normal temperatures.
They hope that the mural will draw attention to the impact residents of this area, with densely packed buildings and cramped households devoid of air conditioners face, particularly during extreme heat spells like the one that large swathes of the country recently faced.
“My mother works in a factory and has blood pressure issues due to the heat, while my father works as a labourer and has severe headaches every day. I am a student and cannot study at all during the day as it is really hot, and even our school faces power cuts due to the heat,” said Abhishek (no last name) (18), a resident and a first year college student from the school of open learning. “ We are making this so that people know how difficult it is for us to even get through the day.”
The mural, whichwas made from April 28 to April 30, and unveiled on May 1 to mark Labour Day, takes up a 30-foot section of a 12-foot-tall boundary wall of a local government school.. The design was a result of discussions between three Delhi-based street artists– Harit Gulia, Shipra Rani, and Manmauji (along with his team members Ravi and Anurag Kumar) – with residents, and was facilitated by Greenpeace India, an environmental campaigning group, and BeFantastic, a techart platform for sustainability advocacy.
All three artists have a history of working with local communities in Delhi and multiple non-governmental organizations to create public art with social themes. Manmauji and Shipra Rani have also worked on multiple other Greenpeace projects. Harit Gulia has also collaborated with the Delhi Police to create public artwork for an anti-drug awareness drive.
On Tuesday, several men, women and children had picked up brushes to work on different parts of the mural.
Asha Rani (47), a homemaker, began to plant saplings in Sunder Nagri’s parks a little over a year ago hoping to make a long-term impact. “I have been planting seeds in the locality’s parks so that we get some greenery back. Many of these parks are just empty and dry (correct). The goal is that 10, 15 years down the line, the trees I have planted will provide respite from the heat to others,” she said.
Her initiative earned her a depiction on the mural, alongside daily-wage workers – such as factory workers, labourers, sanitation workers, artisans, construction workers and others – who comprise a major part of the area’s population.
Daily wage workers who live in Sunder Nagri and work in nearby construction sites said that the heat makes it nearly impossible for them to work. They wanted the mural to convey that. “Due to the current heat, any outside work takes five times longer as we have to keep stopping [for rest], or the contractor fails to show up,” said Mohammed Aarif (37). “It is also much more exhausting, and we lack adequate facilities to rest. The government should ensure that contractors provide facilities to their workers, such as a tent for resting, and allowing labourers to work in shifts.”
“It is not as if the government cannot help solve the problem, but it just refuses to do anything. I want this mural to encourage regular people like us to work together, and give back to society and nature, as many people in this locality do,” Gulia said.
The initiative is part of Greenpeace’s Delhi Rising campaign on communities taking action against the heat. “We chose a mural as it connects people, and the community can be directly involved. The government should declare heatwaves a national emergency, and create facilities to help residents during one, like benches, shaded areas, and plant more trees,” said community campaigner Deepali Tonk.
The mural will be unveiled on May 1 to mark Labour Day. It is a welcome addition to Delhi’s growing library of community-focused art, such as India’s first open-air art gallery in Lodhi Art District, where the walls of residential buildings are adorned with murals by artists from across the world, and the graffiti on the houses of Shahpur Jat village made during the St+Art Delhi street art festival in 2014. Locals from both areas would remember the residents eagerly offering to help make the artwork, and offering up their walls for the same.
“This project is unique in that it is produced by the communities that are under environmental stress for an audience that often glides by in automobiles in this terribly unequal city, without ever acknowledging the role of those whose labour makes the city function,” said JNU art history professor Shukla Sawant. “Demanding collective gazing through scale, colour and form, the images are more than acts of evidencing. They are calls for real world action instead of invisibilisation.”
