"Ultimately – or at the limit," said Roland Barthes in Camera Lucida, "in order to see a photograph well, it is best to look away or close your eyes."
One of the enduring mysteries as well as appeals of a photograph is its inherent unreliability. Does it, or can it, ever tell us anything beyond what it shows? Is it only a record of the immediate moment it captures? Or is it also capable of insinuating meanings that are not apparent to the eye, but can be understood effectively in retrospect, after we have turned away from the image?
The photographs of the Chin people in this book fill the eye with these dilemmas. As ethnic minorities from Myanmar living in exile in the Indian capital, most of the men, women and children you see in these images have refugee status accorded to them by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees and live in unspeakable hardship.
But even without any knowledge of their precise circumstances, you can see them suffering from various maladies of the body and mind, perhaps from memories of the home they have been forced to leave behind.
Captured in natural light, these images seem to exude a yellow gloom, conveying the jaundiced mood of the setting.
There are pockets of darkness in these photographs, as though a metaphor for their lives. You can almost breathe in the musty air that fills the rooms. The smell of disease and decay rises up your nostrils. And the mute figures begin to tell you their stories.
The tearful face of a woman and the pensive manner of some of the young children, the tense aspect of their bodies and the grim concentration on their faces, all make you pause.
What secrets are they holding? What could make a little girl, surrounded by squalor, break into a radiant smile? What kind of identities do these boys and girls form – born in a foreign country and probably parted forever from the one to which they could have felt a sense of belonging?
The handful of families represented in this project embody the traumas and tragedies that define the lives of a majority of the Chin community in India. A large number of them were rice planters, daily wage earners and labourers in Myanmar, until the rise of the military junta and the house arrest of Aung San Suu Kyi after the general election in 1989, which turned their peaceful lives into a waking hell.
The military raided villages, as it still does, forcing men to comply with their impossible demands for extortion, and women to submit to their indignities. Referendums were thrust at them, to be signed and accepted without protest; poultry and livestock were seized; women were threatened with physical violence and in most cases, abused as often, whimsically, and brutally as the soldiers wished.
This pattern of rape, intimidation and poor labour conditions was quickly established and perpetuated over the years, forcing members of the Chin community to flee their country, mostly through India’s northeast border, with the hope of eventually moving to other, more secure, terrains.
For a majority of them, this dream has remained just that – a fantasy shattered by the cruel realities of their lives.
In India, the difficulties of the Chins continue unabated. In spite of the vastness of the country and its relative stability, it offers refugees an inhospitable welcome. The high level of poverty in India means that any non-indigenous population trying to settle here is bound to face a certain amount of resistance, or even resentment from the locals, as the Chin people do.
Having worked as farmers for generations, they find the prospect of suitable employment remote in urban India. When they do manage to acquire employable skills – from working in factories making cheap electronic goods to washing clothes or stitching them – they are easily exploited. The hours are long and the remuneration is paltry. The benefits that the Indian state gives to citizens living below the poverty line are out of bounds for the Chins, given their tenuous legal status.
Although many of them have refugee cards, they have to subsist on the little money that is doled out by the UNHCR. Those who entered the country illegally, mostly through Mizoram, are denied even that token fund. With little or no Hindi or English, their alienation from the mainstream is nearly absolute, with no hope of acceptance or integration.
Migration for the Chin refugees is thus double-edged. Hounded out of their own country by the military junta, they find themselves persecuted in their adoptive nation as well. Having suffered daily intimidation by the army in Myanmar, a familiar cycle of violence, threats, abuse, rape and extortion is repeated all over again in India.
Women – young, elderly, and even the infirm – complain of being harassed by the local civilian men, who subject them to verbal and physical abuse, including rape, on a daily basis. Most of these incidents cannot be reported to the authorities, given the sensitive legal status of the refugees. The police, in any event, are unlikely to take much action even if these offences were brought to their notice.
The Chin men have little choice but to watch these injustices in silence, having no means to seek redress. Forced to stay home for much of the day to look after their ailing wives, mothers and sisters, and to care for their children, most of them work odd jobs on the side to earn a living barely enough to keep their body and soul together. The younger men, many of them teenagers, are susceptible to drug and alcohol abuse. Depressed and unmotivated, they confess to have frequent fits of violent and suicidal rage.
In the Bodella area of west Delhi, where a large number of the Chin people live, most of the houses are in ramshackle condition. Despite such appalling states of disrepair, the rents are relatively high, and mostly beyond the means of the tenants. The landlords also tend to be abusive and exploitative, picking fights at the slightest pretext, beating up the Chin women, and cutting the water or electric supply off to teach defaulters a lesson for their delay in clearing dues. The neighbours are no less severe and intolerant towards foreigners.
Some families have been forced to move as many as ten times in the few years they have lived in Delhi. The squalid lodgings, along with the lack of nutritious diet and access to proper healthcare, leave the Chin people physically vulnerable to a range of diseases, especially to cardiac, neurological and endocrinal ailments.
They are psychologically battered, and bereft of the basic dignities that every human being is entitled to. Yet, in spite of the daily inhumanities, routine atrocities, and ceaseless intimidations, these broken spirits refuse to give up. Families are parted, and some people die on the hard journey into India.
Others come together in the foreign land, daring to get married, start families and fight back. Children are born, the sick are tended and loved ones mourned. The family albums in this book hold up a mirror to the reality of lives that most of us fail to notice or do not care enough to engage with when we encounter.
The photographs make us exercise our imagination, and test the limits of our empathy in ways we may have never done before.
Ciin Lam Vung, 44, along with her family escaped Myanmar in July 2011. Her husband had died in 2005. With the help of strangers, she crossed the border to Mizoram and arrived in Delhi along with her children: daughters, Ning Khan Lun, 23, Vum Muan Ling, 13, Huai Lam Ciang, 12 Suan Yah Hoih 10, and sons, Mung Haw Mang, 17 and Nang Sian Muang, 15.
The eldest daughter, Ning, was pregnant when she crossed the border and later gave birth to her daughter Victoria Vung Siang Siam, 3, in India. Her husband went missing in Myanmar and they have no way of finding out what happened to him or if he is still alive.
Ciin and her eldest daughter, Ning, both work at the local tailoring unit in Don Bosco, where they take little Victoria along with them every day. The other children attend an informal school run by the local church community. They have shifted five times since their arrival. Ciin and her family belong to the Tiddim community.
Biak Rem Sang, 38, fled Myanmar in 2009 after his uncle was fatally beaten up by the army. He often thinks about the life and family he left behind, including his mother. Biak arrived in India along with his wife, Suizi Sung, 32, sons, Van Lal Cung Nung, 12, John Lal Ro Pui, 8 and daughter, Esther, 6.
They were farmers in Myanmar. In Delhi, Suizi works in a factory that makes mobile phone ,chargers and Biak recently started working in a clothing factory as a tailor. The children study in a local school run by the Lai Christian Community.
They are all waiting to go abroad. Biak’s brother is now in Melbourne, Australia, where they would all like to go soon.
They belong to the Hakha Community.
Van Hup Mang, 32, fled Myanmar amid army harassment in 2009 along with his wife Hlawn Tlem, 33 and daughters, Van Khaw Mawi, 8 and Sui Zanei Cer, 6. His youngest daughter, Sarah Siang Hlei Par, who is now 3, was born in Delhi.
Initially, Van was able to work as a security guard, but he was injured on the job and has since been unable to walk properly. He now stays home and takes care of the children, while his wife works as a cleaner in the local factory.
They have shifted house five times since they arrived in Delhi. Their youngest daughter gets epileptic seizures, and the middle daughter got pneumonia in 2013 and has not recovered fully. They belong to the Falam community.
Siang Zi, 42, fled Myanmar in 2008 along with her children: sons, Vanro Hmun, 13, Bawi Bik, 11, and daughters, Salomi, 9, and Tiaw Cung Hnin, 6. She waited in Mizoram till her husband Ram Lian, 46, was able to join her a year later. They reached Delhi in 2009.
Ram works in a local dyeing unit in Vikaspuri. He was a farmer in Myanmar. The three older children go to an informal school run by the Chin Christian Fellowship, where they are taught the Hakha Langauge and a little English, but no Hindi.
They have shifted four times in the last five years. They belong to the Zophei Community.
Excerpted with permission from I Often Think of Those I Left Behind - The Chin Refugees of Delhi, by Shivani Dass, published by AuthorsUpFront earlier this year.
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One of the enduring mysteries as well as appeals of a photograph is its inherent unreliability. Does it, or can it, ever tell us anything beyond what it shows? Is it only a record of the immediate moment it captures? Or is it also capable of insinuating meanings that are not apparent to the eye, but can be understood effectively in retrospect, after we have turned away from the image?
The photographs of the Chin people in this book fill the eye with these dilemmas. As ethnic minorities from Myanmar living in exile in the Indian capital, most of the men, women and children you see in these images have refugee status accorded to them by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees and live in unspeakable hardship.
But even without any knowledge of their precise circumstances, you can see them suffering from various maladies of the body and mind, perhaps from memories of the home they have been forced to leave behind.
Captured in natural light, these images seem to exude a yellow gloom, conveying the jaundiced mood of the setting.
There are pockets of darkness in these photographs, as though a metaphor for their lives. You can almost breathe in the musty air that fills the rooms. The smell of disease and decay rises up your nostrils. And the mute figures begin to tell you their stories.
The tearful face of a woman and the pensive manner of some of the young children, the tense aspect of their bodies and the grim concentration on their faces, all make you pause.
What secrets are they holding? What could make a little girl, surrounded by squalor, break into a radiant smile? What kind of identities do these boys and girls form – born in a foreign country and probably parted forever from the one to which they could have felt a sense of belonging?
The handful of families represented in this project embody the traumas and tragedies that define the lives of a majority of the Chin community in India. A large number of them were rice planters, daily wage earners and labourers in Myanmar, until the rise of the military junta and the house arrest of Aung San Suu Kyi after the general election in 1989, which turned their peaceful lives into a waking hell.
The military raided villages, as it still does, forcing men to comply with their impossible demands for extortion, and women to submit to their indignities. Referendums were thrust at them, to be signed and accepted without protest; poultry and livestock were seized; women were threatened with physical violence and in most cases, abused as often, whimsically, and brutally as the soldiers wished.
This pattern of rape, intimidation and poor labour conditions was quickly established and perpetuated over the years, forcing members of the Chin community to flee their country, mostly through India’s northeast border, with the hope of eventually moving to other, more secure, terrains.
For a majority of them, this dream has remained just that – a fantasy shattered by the cruel realities of their lives.
In India, the difficulties of the Chins continue unabated. In spite of the vastness of the country and its relative stability, it offers refugees an inhospitable welcome. The high level of poverty in India means that any non-indigenous population trying to settle here is bound to face a certain amount of resistance, or even resentment from the locals, as the Chin people do.
Having worked as farmers for generations, they find the prospect of suitable employment remote in urban India. When they do manage to acquire employable skills – from working in factories making cheap electronic goods to washing clothes or stitching them – they are easily exploited. The hours are long and the remuneration is paltry. The benefits that the Indian state gives to citizens living below the poverty line are out of bounds for the Chins, given their tenuous legal status.
Although many of them have refugee cards, they have to subsist on the little money that is doled out by the UNHCR. Those who entered the country illegally, mostly through Mizoram, are denied even that token fund. With little or no Hindi or English, their alienation from the mainstream is nearly absolute, with no hope of acceptance or integration.
Migration for the Chin refugees is thus double-edged. Hounded out of their own country by the military junta, they find themselves persecuted in their adoptive nation as well. Having suffered daily intimidation by the army in Myanmar, a familiar cycle of violence, threats, abuse, rape and extortion is repeated all over again in India.
Women – young, elderly, and even the infirm – complain of being harassed by the local civilian men, who subject them to verbal and physical abuse, including rape, on a daily basis. Most of these incidents cannot be reported to the authorities, given the sensitive legal status of the refugees. The police, in any event, are unlikely to take much action even if these offences were brought to their notice.
The Chin men have little choice but to watch these injustices in silence, having no means to seek redress. Forced to stay home for much of the day to look after their ailing wives, mothers and sisters, and to care for their children, most of them work odd jobs on the side to earn a living barely enough to keep their body and soul together. The younger men, many of them teenagers, are susceptible to drug and alcohol abuse. Depressed and unmotivated, they confess to have frequent fits of violent and suicidal rage.
In the Bodella area of west Delhi, where a large number of the Chin people live, most of the houses are in ramshackle condition. Despite such appalling states of disrepair, the rents are relatively high, and mostly beyond the means of the tenants. The landlords also tend to be abusive and exploitative, picking fights at the slightest pretext, beating up the Chin women, and cutting the water or electric supply off to teach defaulters a lesson for their delay in clearing dues. The neighbours are no less severe and intolerant towards foreigners.
Some families have been forced to move as many as ten times in the few years they have lived in Delhi. The squalid lodgings, along with the lack of nutritious diet and access to proper healthcare, leave the Chin people physically vulnerable to a range of diseases, especially to cardiac, neurological and endocrinal ailments.
They are psychologically battered, and bereft of the basic dignities that every human being is entitled to. Yet, in spite of the daily inhumanities, routine atrocities, and ceaseless intimidations, these broken spirits refuse to give up. Families are parted, and some people die on the hard journey into India.
Others come together in the foreign land, daring to get married, start families and fight back. Children are born, the sick are tended and loved ones mourned. The family albums in this book hold up a mirror to the reality of lives that most of us fail to notice or do not care enough to engage with when we encounter.
The photographs make us exercise our imagination, and test the limits of our empathy in ways we may have never done before.
Ciin Lam Vung, 44, along with her family escaped Myanmar in July 2011. Her husband had died in 2005. With the help of strangers, she crossed the border to Mizoram and arrived in Delhi along with her children: daughters, Ning Khan Lun, 23, Vum Muan Ling, 13, Huai Lam Ciang, 12 Suan Yah Hoih 10, and sons, Mung Haw Mang, 17 and Nang Sian Muang, 15.
The eldest daughter, Ning, was pregnant when she crossed the border and later gave birth to her daughter Victoria Vung Siang Siam, 3, in India. Her husband went missing in Myanmar and they have no way of finding out what happened to him or if he is still alive.
Ciin and her eldest daughter, Ning, both work at the local tailoring unit in Don Bosco, where they take little Victoria along with them every day. The other children attend an informal school run by the local church community. They have shifted five times since their arrival. Ciin and her family belong to the Tiddim community.
Biak Rem Sang, 38, fled Myanmar in 2009 after his uncle was fatally beaten up by the army. He often thinks about the life and family he left behind, including his mother. Biak arrived in India along with his wife, Suizi Sung, 32, sons, Van Lal Cung Nung, 12, John Lal Ro Pui, 8 and daughter, Esther, 6.
They were farmers in Myanmar. In Delhi, Suizi works in a factory that makes mobile phone ,chargers and Biak recently started working in a clothing factory as a tailor. The children study in a local school run by the Lai Christian Community.
They are all waiting to go abroad. Biak’s brother is now in Melbourne, Australia, where they would all like to go soon.
They belong to the Hakha Community.
Van Hup Mang, 32, fled Myanmar amid army harassment in 2009 along with his wife Hlawn Tlem, 33 and daughters, Van Khaw Mawi, 8 and Sui Zanei Cer, 6. His youngest daughter, Sarah Siang Hlei Par, who is now 3, was born in Delhi.
Initially, Van was able to work as a security guard, but he was injured on the job and has since been unable to walk properly. He now stays home and takes care of the children, while his wife works as a cleaner in the local factory.
They have shifted house five times since they arrived in Delhi. Their youngest daughter gets epileptic seizures, and the middle daughter got pneumonia in 2013 and has not recovered fully. They belong to the Falam community.
Siang Zi, 42, fled Myanmar in 2008 along with her children: sons, Vanro Hmun, 13, Bawi Bik, 11, and daughters, Salomi, 9, and Tiaw Cung Hnin, 6. She waited in Mizoram till her husband Ram Lian, 46, was able to join her a year later. They reached Delhi in 2009.
Ram works in a local dyeing unit in Vikaspuri. He was a farmer in Myanmar. The three older children go to an informal school run by the Chin Christian Fellowship, where they are taught the Hakha Langauge and a little English, but no Hindi.
They have shifted four times in the last five years. They belong to the Zophei Community.
Excerpted with permission from I Often Think of Those I Left Behind - The Chin Refugees of Delhi, by Shivani Dass, published by AuthorsUpFront earlier this year.