One chilly winter morning in 2005, a group of us from New Delhi’s Mass Communication Research Centre in Jamia Millia Islamia set out in the suburban train to Faridabad to try to find a locality called Autopin Jhuggi.
Scouring for topics to pitch for our master’s degree film, we had come across a pamphlet online titled A Ballad Against Work, published by Majdoor Library in Autopin Jhuggi.
The pamphlet gave us a fascinating glimpse into the changing nature of employment and how the workers contended with such changes. We were sure that this would make for a great film.
It would offer a location – a factory or workshop – where we saw ourselves shooting gritty visual sequences. There would be people – the working class, the movers of history. And there would be plenty of politics – small acts of resistance against the backdrop of the dynamics of the country’s broader labour movement.
Our search took us to the office of Faridabad Majdoor Samachar, a small workers’ newspaper. It was here that we first met Sher Sing, who died on January 25.
Sher Singh received us in the tiny two-room Majdoor Library with warmth and kindness. Seeing that we were cold, he seated us around the heater and quickly made us chai.
The space, we soon learnt, was multipurpose. It had once been a library but then mainly served as a meeting space for workers and activists from Faridabad and beyond. It was also where Sher Singh lived and worked on the newspaper and other publications.
Warm and settled in, we started asking him questions about A Ballad Against Work, the Faridabad Majdoor Samachar newspaper, the team behind the publications, what kind of work they did and to what end, and so on. Sher Singh fielded all our questions with good cheer but never really answered them directly. While we were looking for brief and juicy soundbites, his responses were meandering – more in the nature of philosophical musings and cheeky provocations.
Participation in Majdoor Samachar
Share the steps you and your colleagues are taking with the larger collective.
To participate in the conversations, collect copies of the paper and distribute them.
If free, come to the Majdoor Library any Sunday to discuss life in detail.
If you feel like donating, please do so. Printing more copies will increase the capacity to spread the arguments and counterarguments. No amount is small.
Message openly on WhatsApp; we read and spread your messages.
Today, readers of Majdoor Samachar enjoy reading poetry, philosophy, literature, and informative discussions in the paper. Turn joy into exuberance.
This, as we later figured out, was how he liked engaging with impatient inquisitors. If one needed answers from Sher Singh, one needed to be still and stoic. Within the first couple hours of our discussion, we asked and answered all our questions in one way or another, with Sher Singh providing us with just enough context to keep the conversation going.
However, this approach would not work for the film, as we concluded. We imagined ourselves to be hardboiled political filmmakers who could not be bothered with self-reflexivity. We wanted someone like Sher Singh to connect the dots, explain the situation and give us a neat and powerful narrative, preferably all on camera.
But he neither wanted to do our thinking for us nor had any desire to be on the camera.
The sun came out and we moved to a small verandah outside. After another round of chai, Sher Singh gently nudged us to rethink our assumptions and think hard about what kind of film we wanted to make. Nevertheless, he shared a few fragments of stories and leads he thought we might find helpful for the film we would make with or without his participation.
He came to the Faridabad New Town station to see us off and invited us back to the Majdoor Library to hang out whenever we had free time.
Even after graduating and working in the media industry, we sometimes joined him and other volunteers in distributing free copies of Faridabad Majdoor Samachar in the Okhla Industrial Area. While distributing the paper, Sher Singh liked to gather stories from the workers for the subsequent issues. In the pages of the publication, workers from one factory, sector or region could see reflections of their experiences in the stories of fellow workers from another factory, sector, or region.
Faridabad Majdoor Samachar started in 1982 with a print run of 1,000 copies. It was distributed among the workers of industrial units in and around the Delhi-Badarpur-Faridabad area. In 2019, its circulation peaked to more than 30,000 copies. The four-page paper was being distributed in Okhla, Udyog Vihar, IMT Manesar, Noida and Faridabad. This is an astonishing feat for a scrappy publication catering to a readership ignored by both the mainstream and alternative media.
During and after the pandemic, Faridabad Majdoor Samachar moved online and was circulated primarily via WhatsApp. The paper carried anonymously contributed worker reports on working conditions in factories, underpayment and wage theft, issues related to social security and all kinds of oblique and lyrical – but always interesting – writing on topics ranging from migration, friendship, family, health, economy, politics to technology.
The paper would invite readers to visit the Majdoor Library in Autopin Jhuggi for “courteous and joyful” interactions, for conversations and arguments “free from the need to limit or conclude them”. At these Sunday meetings, conversations would range from workplace problems to religion and mythology to discussions about morally complex hypothetical situations.
For Sher Singh, Faridabad Majdoor Samachar and the library were spaces for baat-cheet (conversations) and taalmel (coordination) for the workers. Through baat-cheet and taalmel, he believed, workers could think issues through and do things by themselves. They did not need leaders or saviours.
Sher Singh was sceptical of unrepresentative and hierarchical unions, where the rank-and-file workers had no other role than to follow the diktats of the leadership. Instead, he advocated self-activity among the workers, a key theme running through the length and breadth of the Faridabad Majdoor Samachar archive.
In 2014, Sher Singh asked me to write something about the state of the news media. Workers collecting copies of the newspaper would often ask him if he could connect them to the “media”. Sher Singh, often gently but sometimes gruffly, told them that no one could save them except themselves.
I wrote a short piece titled “Media aur Mazdoor”, media and workers, arguing that manufacturing and news media workers had far too much in common. I described how the news media companies, much like the automobile or garment manufacturing companies, were profit-oriented businesses.
I discussed the stereotypical representation of workers in the news media narratives – media mein mazdoor (workers in media). I also highlighted the alarming working conditions of news media workers within the companies in which they were employed – media ke mazdoor (workers of media).
On Sher Singh’s advice, I concluded the article by providing contact details of some of the prominent media companies based in the National Capital Region, asking the workers to get in touch with them to see how they responded to their requests for coverage.
Sher Singh was happiest discussing the Faridabad Majdoor Samachar articles with everyone he met. He regularly shared material from its archives and the newer publications, asking for comments. He had immense patience even with those who did not respond to his outreach and messages. When one apologised to him, as one often did, for being out of touch, he would brush it aside, as if he was the embarrassed one, and quickly move on to ask for updates about life and work.
He would also try to make people see and experience the world like he did. These would be the most difficult of all the conversations with him. Still, if one was not very obstinate or dogmatic about their views, with Sher Singh, there was always space to hold on to an island of consensus amidst an ocean of disagreement.
Autopin Jhuggi No 4, the home of Majdoor Library and Sher Singh, did not stand out amidst the larger neighbourhood. It was small and cramped, with low ceilings. Autopin Jhuggi was just like hundreds of thousands of similar places around the country where the working poor made homes for themselves out of nowhere. Factory owners want them to work, the government wants them to work and society wants them to work, but none want to acknowledge their presence – much less share the resources of their towns and cities.
Autopin Jhuggi gets its name from Autopins India, a component manufacturer for heavy vehicles established in 1953. Workers of the company, who were earlier settled near a cremation ground, took over the company’s parking lot when their basti was displaced during the Emergency. With 1,800-2,000 families living there, Autopin Jhuggi lies between a large open drain and the perimeter wall of Autopins India. Sher Singh lived simply and fuss-free among these people.
Sher Singh did not like to make himself the subject of conversation so getting him to talk about his personal life was complicated. But he shared, in bits and pieces, information about his childhood in Hisar; his father, who served in the British Army during World War II; his experience of coping and excelling in an elite military school in Belgaum; higher education in BITS Pilani and elsewhere; entering the life of political activism during the Emergency; his inadequacy and failures of working for social and political change; and how his views and activism were moulded by agreements and disagreements with fellow travellers.
It is difficult today to imagine a person like Sher Singh working doggedly across several decades and earning immense goodwill, yet consciously avoiding publicity. Sher Singh nurtured a vast, intergenerational community of young students, scholars, journalists, artists and activists from India and around the world. After the pandemic, when the print edition of Faridabad Majdoor Samachar ceased, Sher Singh travelled through India, meeting all kinds of people and sharing his travel diaries with readers via WhatsApp.
We did not get to make the film on worker politics. And contrary to our self-avowed position, we made an intensely self-reflexive film on an entirely different topic. But we kept returning to Majdoor Library to meet Sher Singh when possible.
A short conversation with him could make one feel like a better version of themselves. He often talked about the oppressive weight of the “present conditions” and how one must try to live with lightness, connection, and joy. Anand and ullaas, joy and exuberance, were his favourite words.
Sher Singh passed away on January 25, but he is remembered by all those whose lives he touched with expressions of anand and ullaas.
Faiz Ullah researches and writes on media, labour and digital cultures
