Art Must Provoke And Not Praise: Bearing Witness To Labour, Caste, & Inequality

Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2025. Faces hidden behind soot and grime, eyes dimmed—what you notice are the calloused hands of the labourers of India. I cringe at the sight of dirt-filled nails on hands opened out like a beggar asking for a share of freedom. Do I feel guilt? The answer is no. I know I wasn’t born into poverty.

So I look away from their crushed dreams. I can clearly see the disillusionment of a better future in this capitalist system that rewards them pitiably, only when their blood-soaked eyes can chisel the instruments around them for monstrous skyscrapers from hell. It must be claustrophobic and crushing, I think.

Over time, they have obediently accepted the will of the universe. It was their bad luck to be born into a lower caste, but after all, they are human. Their hearts do carry hope and the promise of finding meaning in life and work, fed by political slogans and promises.

They have signed their fate with fragments of their grandfathers’ bones—left behind in brick kilns and mining areas—strewn around like coiffured, shiny pieces of their organs in homes of abject poverty. There is no window there to escape impoverishment or squalor. 

They will be born there through generations and also perish in their homes of darkness.

What makes me sick in the pit of my stomach is their futile hope that their work will maybe one day be rewarded.

The Cost of Looking Away

I sit and watch their crushed souls while I drink my cold brew. I can taste the putrid flavour of inequality in my cup of abundance.

Like tiny bits of dried menstrual blood, strewn around as a reminder that once this vessel carried me into the world of being a woman, yet beside me, in these self-deprecating thoughts.

I know the woman at the construction site is, right now, bleeding between her legs—carrying kilograms of cement, desperation, and a prophecy that maybe this work will lift her out of her sordid life.

Over the years, the ropes resemble their spinal cords—bent, broken, malleable, and without structure. Some bones are like chains tied to the feet of their little children, controlled, like the insane found in a medieval asylum.

I stand soaked in sweat in my white mulmul organic kurta while the weaver mixes cement on the casket, as if he is brushing cobwebs off his unused loom back home in West Bengal.

I am guilty of not telling him that work won’t reward him with the worthiness of his labour. He will live side by side with the strays and open drains, like an insect whose absence we won’t mourn.

Mohua Chinappa is a poet, author and runs two podcasts, The Mohua Show and The Literature Lounge.
Views expressed by the author are their own.