Two palanquin-bearers from Jammu and Kashmir died last week in a landslide on the rain-hit Kedarnath Yatra trek route in Uttarakhand. The pilgrim they were carrying survived with minor injuries. The debris fell on two more bearers, who escaped with injuries. The 16- km route is treacherous. Hundreds of pilgrims with comorbidities have died on this route, though porters’ fatalities are rare. However, these are two deaths too many.
Thousands of poor people in their 20s to 40s shoulder palanquins (dandi) carrying pilgrims or strap pilgrim-laden wicker litters (kandi) to their backs. It demands remarkable strength and endurance. Strained lungs, weakened spines, and feet eventually force them into painful retirement. Traditionally, the porter service is linked to godliness because it fulfils infirm pilgrims’ wish to reach their lord. The travesty of progressive India is also that it’s the only means in the hills to transport patients or pregnant women to distant health centres. The concept dates back centuries, when the influential travelled in palanquins and brides left their parents’ homes in ‘dolis’. This oppressive system is no different from the still-surviving ‘cultural tradition’ of hand-pulled rickshaw drivers of Kolkata. In our cosmopolitan society, they are a reflection of the excluded who populate the margins of modernity. They are living contradictions of social marginalisation in present-day society, proof of the uncoupling of the right to dignity and fair labour from the economically vulnerable bottom of the pyramid at the intersection of rigid hierarchies and 21st-century reform.
By rostering and licensing the dandi-kandi porters of Uttarakhand, like Kolkata’s rickshaw pullers, their indignity is both routinised and institutionalised. This archaic form of painful labour has yet to prod the government to dismantle the system. In the absence of alternative work and hunger and survival snapping at their heels, these workers plod along. When the West Bengal government decided to ban the undignified work in 2006, the rickshaw pullers resisted because the decision threatened their only means of survival. The State must ban such labour practices and offer them dignified economic rehabilitation. Their dignity is their right, not a largesse bestowed by social privilege. It is time they are offered real choices, not vague promises of progress. In her poem “Palanquin Bearers”, Sarojini Naidu may have romanticised their task, but the reality is forbidding.