About the Exhibition

Stitching Lives: Garment Workers and Activism in Bengaluru is a bilingual exhibition based on the archival collections of the Bengaluru-based Garment and Textile Workers Union (GATWU).

Bengaluru is home to over five lakh garment workers. Most of them are women. Yet they find little to no space in public imagination or in the narratives about the city. The remarkable efforts to organise and mobilise these workers and to advocate with the state for dignified forms of work have also remained unheeded.

Stitching Lives: Garment Workers and Activism in Bengaluru seeks to challenge this dominant representation of Bengaluru as a middle-class IT city and the IT employee as the ubiquitous worker by showcasing garment work, its political economy and the collectivisation and unionisation work undertaken by Garment Mahila Karmikara Munnade and Garment and Textile Workers Union over the last 20 years.

The exhibition will be inaugurated on Friday, 3 October at 5:30 PM and followed by a panel discussion at 6:30 PM at the Kashyapa auditorium.

Hosted by IHA in collaboration with Azim Premji University.

About the panel discussion

The panel discussion will cover the process of organising women workers, the need for archiving movements and the process of archiving and exhibiting materials related to this.

The discussion will be led by Swathi Shivanand, Faculty, Manipal Academy of Higher Education, Bangalore and Prathibha R, President of GATWU.

About the speakers

Swathi Shivanand

Dr Swathi is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Liberal Arts at the Manipal Academy of Higher Education, Bangalore. Trained as a Historian, Swathi received her PhD from the Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Her doctoral thesis explored the ideas of region-making and development through a study of the twentieth-century history of Kalyana-Karnataka, formerly known as Hyderabad-Karnataka, located in northeast Karnataka.

Dr Shivanand has several years of experience in research and has previously worked with Alternative Law Forum, Indian Institute of Human Settlements, Centre for Policy Research and The Hindu. Her areas of interest include urban and regional histories, particularly through the prisms of development, labour and gender.

More details are here.

Prathibha R

Dr Prathibha R is the President of the Garment and Textile Workers’ Union (GATWU) in Bengaluru. Her doctoral thesis was focused on women’s labour in the globalised garment industry. As the union president, she advocates for strengthening labour laws and the improving working conditions for the predominantly female workforce.

More details of the exhibition are here.