Enormous plumes of brown, dusty smoke billow across a stubbed out field, as a man, as tiny as a duck in comparison, waddles by. The photo and its scale — still a room away, but visible through a door that lies open — catches your eye, and sets the tone for what’s to follow.
An introductory note at this narrow corridor snaps the viewer into the context of Breathless: “Here we are, in our air-cooled gallery in the capital, wondering how we came to be environmental refugees in our own cities, wondering when this came to be the new normal,” writes journalist Aruna Chandrasekhar. She and photojournalist Ishan Tankha have brought out stories of an air-pollution crisis. And this isn’t, as we’re used to hearing, just from northern India. It is from Mumbai, Ennore near Chennai, and Korba in Chhatisgarh too.
The Clean Air Collective, a collaborative network of individuals and organisations working towards our right to breathe, had reached out to Takha and Chandrasekhar around August last year, to do this series. Since then, the photos, along with the researched stories have been published in newspapers and magazines periodically.
When they’re all together now, and designed in exhibit form, they take on a new life. Already, Chandrasekhar’s aim with the original, published stories was to experiment with environmental reporting “These stories are usually done in a certain way, with debates over death tolls dominating the narrative. Ishan and I wanted to instead have a character-driven approach to it,” she says, adding how putting a face to a problem and telling compelling stories is how readers can understand its gravity.
- Write a message to your policymakers with the “air ink” markers available here. Their ink is made out of 50,000 m3 of Delhi’s air pollution by Bengaluru-based Graviky Labs. The sheets, say the organisers, will travel across India, appealing for air pollution to be declared a public health emergency.
- View the landscape of Korba in Chhatisgarh, (almost) firsthand, with one of exhibit’s characters, Nirupabai Kawar taking you around in the VR film, The Cost of Coal. There are special Oculus devices here for your phone to wedge into .
Her vignettes are short, effective spotlights on the lives of people you might ordinarily never come in contact with: a displaced adivasi woman in Korba who has fought for her right to be employed by the coal company that affected her domicile; or the Delhi-based man who never smoked a cigarette but was diagnosed with lung cancer; or a fisherman-Kabbadi coach in Ennore whose livelihood and sport are affected because of pollution.
Tankha’s frames, smart in their varied sizes, are evocative — with each, you’re walking into a scene of disaster or dystopia and the tragic beauty of it will move you.
A photo of the dusty feet of a person looking over a lorry-filled Korba coal mine on one wall of the exhibit
For the exhibit’s opening on World Environment Day on 5th June, the organisers held a panel discussion, moderated by Siddharth Singh, author of The Great Smog of India . The panellists included three political representatives, brought together to have a two-way discourse on policy-level action and awareness of air pollution. “We wanted to ask if the parties can put aside their differences to pledge to work on the issue of air pollution, and view it as a national health crisis,” says Chandrasekhar. “But the responses were wavering.”
The stories speak of the crisis as a fallout of booming industry, especially coal. To provide energy and electricity to the farthest corners of the country is not an option. “But perhaps the way forward is through decentralised renewable energy,” says Brikesh Singh of Asar, a development start-up based in Bengaluru. A part of the Clean Air Collective, Singh is also one of the organisers of Breathless .
“We are on a confusing footing,” says Chandrasekhar. “We can state geo-politics and our right as a country to develop, but we also have the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change) that’s saying we have 12 years to fundamentally change the world we live in and that needs to start now” she adds. “The lands, lungs, and livelihoods of people in India’s coal belt can’t wait.”
In 2016, when photographer and filmmaker Ronny Sen’s project on the Jharia coal mines won the Getty Images Instagram Grant, it opened us to the possibility of using the photo-blogging site for independent photojournalism from India. It’s probably been done before, but now, Breathless has opened the art gallery as a space for well-researched, and collaborative journalism, yet again.
Breathless: An Artistic Call to India’s Air Pollution Crisis, unitl June 9th 2019 Bikaner House, Pandara Road
