Writing or speaking of child labour is often such provocative and evocative business! I remember attending a consultation on child labour in the lead up to amending the 1986 Child Labour (Protection and Regulation) Act, where speaker after speaker spoke of the need for a complete prohibition of child labour in India – anything less, we were told, was a national shame, a national sin. Or, as one of them put it pithily, ​“what we need is a blanket ban [on child labour] – not a handkerchief ban!” 

I could see where they were coming from. Unlike in the 1980s, where determinations about child labour prohibitions were made on the basis of the kind of labour – in particular, whether it was hazardous or not – approaches to child labour in the 1990s increasingly shifted to focus on the ​‘child.’ Child labour, these approaches argued, should be banned because childhood was a time for play and school, not work. 

As national efforts towards universalising elementary education gained ground, these demands for prohibiting child labour were increasingly framed in terms of children’s right to education: that is, the problem with child labour, irrespective of the conditions of work, was that it kept children out of school. ​‘Handkerchief bans’ that regulated child labour – for instance, making exceptions when children worked alongside their families in traditional occupations – would still keep children out of school; and were therefore, strongly denounced.

But what happens when child labour prohibitions are unexceptionally enforced, as they were in Kanchipuram? In Kanchipuram, the famed kanjeevaram silk sari, has been woven for centuries on household-based handlooms that children have grown up working on. In the 1920s, for instance, when N G Ranga, the freedom-fighter and farmers’ leader, visited the area during his studies at Oxford, he described the neighbourhood hiring system of boys as weavers’ apprentices as a systematic (if slow) intergenerational transfer of skills. 

And in the 1970s, when Yvonne Arterburn wrote her landmark account of Kanchipuram’s silk cooperatives, she marvelled at interdependent relations that produced the kanjeevaram: not only inter-household ​‘attachments’ of production, but the intergenerational relations encapsulated by the sari’s korvai-border. It was children, plying the border-shuttle in tandem with parents or master-weavers, who produced the uniquely interlocked korvai. More children, Arterburn noted matter-of-factly, were learning to weave on loom than learning in school (Arterburn, 1982).

At the turn of the millennium, however, in response to global pressure, Kanchipuram was declared an ​‘area of high child labour concentration’ and the National Child Labour Project began using ​‘child labour raids’ to ​‘rescue’ children from looms into schools. These raids were dramatic affairs, as boys tried to outrun the posse of officials bearing down Kanchipuram’s narrow alleys or girls jumped into water-drums and cupboards to hide. Like a game of hide-and-seek, some of them laughed at the memory when I met them (in 2009), while others were still disgusted, recalling being picked up from the looms and put into vans like ​“street dogs.” These vans then deposited children at transition education centres and bridge programmes where they learnt ​‘the basics,’ before being enrolled in neighbourhood government schools.

What happened to these children who were raided and rescued by the state? If children were moved into schools, then a significant number was also driven into less visible spaces of work. In the 1990s, as agrarian distress fueled migration to Kanchipuram, many migrant children, typically from lower-caste households, entered the loom-space as helpers. 

By learning (and earning) their way to apprentices, then coolie-weavers, then independent weavers, they and their families sought the relative economic security the looms offered. When the raids began however, economic pressures pushed these children – nearly a third of those rescued, according to Project officials – into the less visible spaces of rice-mills and brick-kilns. 

Of the two-thirds who made it to bridge classes, the older children were frustrated by the classroom disciplines of sitting quietly in one place with a book in hand: a far cry from the looms where work was sound-tracked by the TV blaring in the corner and the boys, in particular, were constantly running in and out on errands for weavers. You never did anything in class – you never made anything – as Uma snorted, still pained by the ​“time-waste,” even 5 years later. For Kishore, on the other hand, school felt like too much work – but without pay, he was bitter. Running the clock down, these girls and boys had returned to the looms or joined retail silk-houses, the moment they turned 15 (and were no longer classed as children by the state). 

Most of the younger cohorts of children – about half of those rescued – made it successfully into government schools, however. I spent a significant time with some of these cohorts, observing as they navigated middle-school with varying facility. Where the girls were largely accommodated into the writing-centred life of classrooms, assiduously ​“copying” line-by-line into their notebooks – not unlike the line-upon-line laying down of the warp on the loom – most of the boys remained on the fringes. 

“Escaping” from the classroom, as they gleefully put it (using the English word), they roamed the neighbourhood, looking for work in the booming local economy of construction-sites and biriyani-shops or, during wedding and festival seasons, hawking water-packets and putting up shamiyanas. Kai-la kaas theva, Miss, they insisted – cash in hand was a must – recalling the childhood institution of inam-kaas (lit. award-money) on the looms: apprentices – in addition to their wages – were paid a small fortnightly inam by their master-weavers, which was theirs by right to spend as they pleased. From the murukku, sundal and kadala-mittai of yesteryear to the cornucopia of packaged snacks, soft-drinks and chocolates of the present – such were joys of childhood that children’s work afforded. 

Indeed, nearly everyone in the classrooms I observed participated in some or other waged-work after-school or over the weekends – reeling silk for master-weavers, but in mango orchards and sand-mining operations nearby or in local appalam companies, cell-phone shops and trades-work; their earnings, funding much-awaited lunch-break forays into the bakeries and petti-shops nearby.  Of course, given the child labour awareness campaigns frequently organised at school, teachers frequently denounced such work – chores were ok, but why do you need to work for money, they often scolded; but children persisted, often speaking in highly moral terms about refusing to trouble their poor parents for pocket-money. Work, thus, remained a regular, if now, more underground part of children’s lives in Kanchipuram’s neighbourhoods.

Given such spotty and interrupted schooling experiences – exacerbated by chronically under-resourced government systems – it was perhaps no surprise that students struggled in secondary school, when the no-detention mandate of the Right to Education Act no longer applied. By 2012, when I returned to Kanchipuram, the vast majority of these students were no longer in school, having dropped out to work as electricians, plumbers, caterers and salespeople in the informal sector or as contract labour in nearby Special Economic Zones (SEZs). Drawn to SEZs by relaxed labour laws and tax regulations, multinational companies like Nokia, Hyundai, or Renault also attracted thousands of local youth to their globally-connected assembly-lines – including those from Kanchipuram’s weaving neighbourhoods. 

Well over half the rescued children in the neighbourhood where I was living – the girls and young women, in particular – were in SEZ-companies, their school-leaving certificates serving as passports to low-paid, precarious assembly-line work. If I was dismayed that state interventions had protected 14-year-olds from working on the looms even as 16- and 17-year-olds worked on the deliberately deregulated spaces of SEZs, then the girls themselves were unfazed. It was ​“jolly,” they insisted to me; the covert chatter on the assembly-line and the much-looked-forward-to lunch-break snacks not unlike the pleasures of their erstwhile classrooms. 

What can Kanchipuram’s experience tell us this World Day Against Child Labour? Not least that unilateral and categorical understandings of and responses to children’s work – even if morally justified – may also render children even more vulnerable. Especially when the state’s meagre social spending means that economically precarious households have few social security provisions they can access; and when neighbourhood schools are bare-educational and chronically under-resourced, given the failure of successive governments to live up to their promises of 6% GDP spending on education.

Childhoods, whether on the loom or in school, are shaped not only by culture and tradition, but also by the local and global political-economic conditions within which families produce their subsistence. Indeed, the meaning and value of children’s work – whether in school or on the loom and elsewhere – is also derived from the political-economic context that shapes their present and future opportunities for the ​‘good life’ that children and families hope for. 

Perhaps it is appropriate that children have the last word. People are often surprised when I talk about working children’s unions in India and other parts of the global south, but as the Kundapur Declaration (at First International Meeting of Working Children in 1996) puts it: ​“We want respect and security for ourselves and the work that we do.” ​“We want an education system whose methodology and content are adapted to our reality.” ​“We want to be consulted in all decisions concerning us, at local, national or international level.” ​“We are against exploitation at work but we are for work with dignity with hours adapted so that we have time for education and leisure.”

References:

• Arterburn, Y. J. (1982). The Loom of interdependence: silkweaving cooperatives in Kanchipuram. Delhi: Hindustan Publishers.
• Ranga, N. G. (1930). The Economics of Handloom:(Being a Study of the Social and Economic Conditions of Handloom Weavers of South India.) (No. 3). Taraporewala sons.
• Thangaraj, M. S. (2018). Silk, Schools, Special Economic Zones: The Reconstruction of Childhood, Education and Labor in Kanchipuram, India. Doctoral dissertation, The University of Wisconsin-Madison.

About the author

Miriam Thangaraj, faculty, School of Education, researches how education and development policies construct particular spaces, persons, and trajectories in the Global South as appropriate for learning-and-living. As children, teachers, and communities encounter national and global policy approaches– from Right to Education (RTE) to quality/​​relevant education or learning objectives – what possibilities for learning-and-living emerge even as ​‘other’ ways of living and learning are erased?

Image generated by a large language model, Gemini AI