Homeward bound - cinematic take on the invisible lives of migrant workers

Geetu Mohandas’s debut feature, Liar’s Dice (2013), was dedicated to the “vast multitude of nameless people who are recognised only as a mere statistic”. One migrant worker, who goes missing from the big city, forms the subject of the search in her film. And while he is given a name, Harud, he remains faceless. Instead, Mohandas shows us the longing, uncertainty and anxiety that mark the lives of the ones he leaves behind — his wife Kamala (Geetanjali Thapa) and three-year-old daughter Manya.  

Everything that the viewer knows about Harud and his life, which amounts to very little, is pieced together from Kamala’s endeavour to retrace his steps. From their beauteous but unpromising village in Himachal Pradesh, she sets off to Shimla, where she had believed he worked, and then to Delhi, where she learns he had moved. Nothing about her rescue mission, and as such her husband’s original journey, looks easy. The burden of walking for hours makes her collapse. Every bus ride, train ticket and hotel stay is a conclusive hit to the savings.

Why do migrant workers stay hidden in plain sight? Despite moving from impoverished villages to help fulfil the cities’ ever-growing need for people who can make their buildings and roads, any real integration remains unavailable to them. How neglected the city makes its workers feel was evidenced unequivocally in their recent mass exits after pandemic-related lockdowns put them out of work. Distancing, which is inflicted on this section of people round the year in India, was expected of them even as they desperately set out homeward on foot.

 

 

In addressing the concerns of migrants, the Kerala government appeared the most active, releasing information in multiple languages and referring to them as atithi thozhilalikal or “guest workers”. The intention seems well-placed, although nobody is really a guest when the Constitution guarantees its citizens freedom of movement. The migrant question has been considered in cinema narratives of that state. Actor Mammootty, who portrayed the trials of an expatriate Keralite worker in the Gulf in Pathemari (2015), had also played an exploited Tamil migrant in Thrissur who irons clothes for a living in Karutha Pakshikal (2006). 

The same nomenclature, “guest worker” (or gastarbeiter), was used in European countries. German cinema of the 1970s has examples of films essaying the inhospitable treatment actually meted out to this workforce. There is Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974), about a Moroccan car mechanic who develops an unlikely relationship with a much older German cleaner, formerly a Nazi. Rainer Werner Fassbinder, with typical flair, makes this love story a receptacle for details about the emigrant experience — separation from home, arduous work, poor sleep, chronic stress.  

“Ali” (El Hedi ben Salem), whose real name is too long for anyone to remember, is drawn to Emmi (Brigitte Mira), who offers him room and food and warm questions. To Emmi’s neighbours and colleagues, Ali is little more than a “filthy foreigner”, and to his friends, she is nothing but an “old woman”. Yet his profound alienation rhymes perfectly with her unutterable loneliness. In a deeply racialised society, their unhesitating marriage becomes strained by the prejudice of others. “Better not think too much. Think much, cry much,” he says to her in broken German at one point.

Much less emphatic in style is Sohrab Shahid Saless, whose Far from Home, an account of migrant life, is advanced through slow, patient long shots. One shows the protagonist Hussein (the exceptional Parviz Sayyad), a Turkish worker, emerging from a rail station and walking towards the sprawling Berlin cityscape until he turns into a small speck. It establishes the city’s tendency to invisibilise the likes of Hussein. Shahid Saless, an Iranian filming in Germany on temporary work permits, began calling himself a gastarbeiter too. 

Beyond the workers’ labour, these films ventured to underline their personhood — their ideas, habits, sexual appetites, fears, and capacity for feeling. The Swiss novelist Max Frisch had told it like it is: “We asked for workers, we got people instead.” That clinical cruelty in modern societies’ behaviour with migrants continues.

ranjita.ganesan@bsmail.in