Capturing the grassroots: This photographer is making storytellers out of oppressed children and youth

What happens if you hand children from long-oppressed communities a professional camera? 

In 2016, Chennai-based photographer Palani Kumar was shooting filmmaker Divya Bharathi’s documentary Kakkoos—following the lives and living conditions of people engaged in manual scavenging—when he saw children bringing a refreshing curiosity to the issue in ways adults never could. 

During a government school engagement programme on manual scavenging following the film’s release, Kumar witnessed the candour and ingenuity in children that replaced the rescuer mentality and sympathy that often coloured the lens of adult storytellers and photographers—especially those outside the community.

It spurred him to wonder what it would be like if children from marginalised communities were given a chance to tell their own stories.

In 2019, he started pooling in funds from his photography projects to train fisherwomen and children across Madurai, his hometown, and from the slums of Chennai in photography to capture moments from their day-to-day lives. Many of them are first-generation school-goers and graduates training to become journalists, thanks to Kumar. 

“They were shooting celebrations at home; the way people went in large groups to invite the village for a wedding; the games children played at school; the fuchsia sunsets colouring their slums during summers,” Kumar tells SocialStory. 

“It made me realise how these children had a treasure trove of new stories waiting to be told and change the narrative around their lives.”

In 2019, Kumar opened the first photography exhibition featuring photographs by children of manual scavengers trained through his workshop. Some of them had lost their fathers to the job. 

“Many of these children couldn’t understand how their fathers could die in a sewer or a manhole, because they did not know how precarious this work was in the first place. The parents, despite working under dangerous and extremely unsanitary conditions, kept these realities from their children,” says Kumar. 

“Some of them began shooting their fathers at work after the workshop. And this instilled in them a hunger to create a different life for themselves,” he adds.

Kumar hails from a fisher family from the village of Jawaharlalpuram in the Madurai district and has found a voice and purpose in the visual medium. He was recognised as part of Top Ten Humans by Tamil magazine Anandha Vikatan for his socially impactful work in 2019, and received the Best Story of the Year award from the Public Relations Council of India in 2020.

So far, 30 young men, women and children have trained to become photographers through Kumar’s workshops.

Among them are youth from North Chennai, an area populated by industries and plagued by environmental violations, poverty, crime, and substance use. When Kumar gave children from these localities a camera and asked them to portray life in their neighbourhood, they captured poignant moments from local festivals, folk dances, sports, and mothers resting with their children, interspersed with images of landfills, funerals, occupational wounds, and box-sized homes.

The photos were compiled into an exhibition that was unveiled in North Chennai, and drew the larger art community and the public to see their work.

Nineteen-year-old Hairunisha is one of the participants of Kumar’s workshops. Having lost her father and being brought up by a single mother, Hairunisha’s days didn’t extend beyond school and home until she met Kumar a little before the 2020 lockdown. 

“We had grown up with industrial pollution in our neighbourhood. It was always difficult for us to breathe and lead a normal life, but it was normalised to the extent that we did not realise it was a problem,” says Hairunisha. 

“It was only after I began exploring more stories; the lake near our home where tribal elders fished; remote villages in Tamil Nadu where caste crimes continued; and children lost to sickness—that I understood the inequity and lack of justice that pervaded our communities,” she adds.

During the lockdown, Hairunisha’s mother used to walk eight hours everyday to bring home an income. Today, Hairunisha is a professional photographer covering weddings, festivals, and local events, including those organised by director Pa Ranjith’s cultural platform Neelam. Her job as a photographer also gave her the confidence to say no to marriage, which her family proposed after she had just turned 17. 

“I was travelling and photographing deprived communities across the state. I was going to be a part of an exhibition. And as these things were happening, I gathered the clarity and courage to stand my ground,” she says.

Today, Hairunisha is also a student journalist with the Tamil magazine Vikatan and her mother no longer has to toil at work as she is now the breadwinner of her family.

Over the years, Kumar’s workshops have reached the attention of children and youngsters from marginalised communities to take up professional photography. 

Among those who reached out to him was Ravi Kumar, a young man from the Betta Kumrumbar tribe of Nilgiris from a remote village in Masinagudi near Ooty. In September last year, Ravi reached out to Kumar on Instagram with a desire to pursue photography. He began by documenting his mother’s life as she grazed cattle, packed dung, and went farming. These photos were featured in an exhibition at the Lalit Kala Akademi in Chennai last month.

The 22-year-old is now documenting the dry season in Ooty—which he says rarely makes it into mainstream media—as part of an independent environmental project. 

“Agriculture is the main occupation for tribal communities in Ooty, and right now, there is such a dearth of water that our cattle are dying from thirst, our crops are infested and our households are bone dry,” he says.

“Most of our people are working for landowners, while some are stuck in bonded labour for generations together. These stories unveiled themselves to me once I got myself a camera and began looking for them, thanks to my training,” says Ravi, who is a graduate of history, a social worker, and now a full-time photographer—the first from his community.