At the heart of this paper is the—arguably avoidable—suffering and death of Jamlo Makdam, a twelve year old migrant labourer from the tribal village of Aaded in Chhattisgarh, India. Jamlo’s collapse and death due to exhaustion during her long trudge home from the chilli fields of Telangana (where she worked as a child labourer), was reported in some of the national dailies at the time of her death during India’s initial COVID-19 Lockdown. Jamlo's is one of few stories that emerged out of the statistical morass marking the early days of lockdown in India. She was constructed, in death and in memoriam, as the face of India's abject: a digital exile trapped in virtual amber on the way home.
Jamlo's vulnerabilities are cumulative and intersectional: a child in a world designed for adults; poverty-stricken; Dalit-tribal; female; injured. Newspaper reports of her gruelling journey towards home and death arguably abjectify her, thereby adding epistemic violence to the systemic violence of state negligence resulting in her death. Stuart Hall describes representation as an act of meaning-making that both reiterates an existing meaning, even as it creates a new, stand-alone iteration of it. Seen in this way, Jamlo, her life, and especially her death, as discursively constructed by these narratives, are textbook examples of Hall’s understanding of representation. One in thousands of tales of migrant labourers’ arduous trek home in the first lockdown, one of the most self-evident ways to unpack the discursive construction of Jamlo’s life and death as representation is through the filter of biopolitics and thanatopolitics. Storytelling frames how events are mediated, and the politics of mourning—especially for Jamlo, whose entry into mainstream discourse is predicated on her death—is crucial to study our post-pandemic sensibilities regarding violence and loss.
This paper seeks to examine the representational politics of Samina Mishra and Tarique Aziz’s Jamlo Walks: An Illustrated Book about Life During Lockdown (Penguin: 2021) vis-a-vis existing digital reports from mainstream Indian newspapers like India Today, and the digital article published by People’s Archive of Rural India (PARI) to examine the implicit gaze, framing and questions of accessibility around these narratives. It compares them to Jamlo Walks and asks whether the text succeeds as a successful piece of children’s literature, in terms of both having a child protagonist and allowing for its targeted child or Young Adult reader to interpellate themselves with the characters in the tale. Jamlo’s story is an important one, not just as an embodiment of victimisation in a surge of alienating panicked responses and marginalisation along the axes of income and location meted out to migrant labourers, but also because it renders intimate, familiar, and therefore validates accounts of suffering, grief, and implicit neglect at a moment of crisis. Further, Jamlo stands at the intersections of caste, class, (perhaps gendered), age, and locational disenfranchisement. It is crucial to examine whether representations of her life and her trials alienate and abjectify her, or grant her agency and relatability, even—especially—in death.
While critical making was first coined as a design (especially architectural) term, it has since been extrapolated across multiple domains, including new media studies and digital humanities. Across its different usages/applications, there is a shared emphasis on promoting access to resources, problem solving in innovative-creative ways (often at local levels) that resist mass homogenization, and critiquing neoliberal practices through hands-on, do-it-yourself practices. And, as is already evident, a lot of localised, often low cost interventions, especially in marginalised, disenfranchised locations and communities is made possible in the way in which the concept of critical thinking decenters and attempts dehierarchising knowledge and its access points. This paper asks how a notion like critical making applies to a site where most of us won’t think resource generation is critical/crucial: public grieving and loss.
Especially in post-pandemic conditions, a lot of critique has looked at how COVID-19 made it impossible for us to ignore or occlude existing faultlines of social inequities. In spaces like India, the exodus of migrant labour from urban centres raised biopolitical concerns around the violence implicit in the lack of infrastructural support, and the economic and social devastation experienced. Jamlo Makdam’s story made headlines within this, but is now largely forgotten. It is terrible that the entry of her subjectivity/selfhood into mainstream discourses is predicated upon her death due to negligence. This is followed by what one may call an act of epistemic violence, whereby any account of her can only be accessed through a relatively minimal digital footprint. (hardly any non-digital resources are currently available regarding Jamlo). Given this, Sameera Mishra and Tarique Aziz’s Jamlo Walks may be seen as an act of critical making in the way in which the text decentralises, intervenes and renders visible the conflations and contrasts in situations like the one experienced by Jamlo in the final days of her life. However, it is just as important (if not more) to still draw attention to the fact that critical making practices also need critique and cannot be accepted as unequivocally unproblematic. While we don’t want to promote polarisation and insularity, weighing the proceeds of particular acts of critical making like this text is even more crucial for the ambivalences they create. In promoting/participating in critique of neoliberal practices—like other, assumed-to-be neutral or objective elements like design and programming—the book may end up endorsing/falling in the very traps it seeks to radically resist. Critical making also needs context-sensitive criticism, and a close reading and discussion of Jamlo Walks allows us to locate it in the extremely intersectional, heterogeneous, digitally disenfranchised, yet agentive knowledge systems of the Global South.Jamlo's vulnerabilities are cumulative and intersectional: a child in a world designed for adults; poverty-stricken; Dalit-tribal; female; injured. Newspaper reports of her gruelling journey towards home and death arguably abjectify her, thereby adding epistemic violence to the systemic violence of state negligence resulting in her death. Stuart Hall describes representation as an act of meaning-making that both reiterates an existing meaning, even as it creates a new, stand-alone iteration of it. Seen in this way, Jamlo, her life, and especially her death, as discursively constructed by these narratives, are textbook examples of Hall’s understanding of representation. One in thousands of tales of migrant labourers’ arduous trek home in the first lockdown, one of the most self-evident ways to unpack the discursive construction of Jamlo’s life and death as representation is through the filter of biopolitics and thanatopolitics. Storytelling frames how events are mediated, and the politics of mourning—especially for Jamlo, whose entry into mainstream discourse is predicated on her death—is crucial to study our post-pandemic sensibilities regarding violence and loss.
