Newswallah: To Learn About the Poor, Live With Them

Katherine Boo’s recently published “Behind the Beautiful Forevers” is the latest in a series of narrative non-fiction books coming out of India. The book is set in Annawadi, a slum located near Mumbai’s international airport. Its central characters include Abdul, a garbage sorter, members of his family and neighbors.

Ms. Boo’s book includes meticulous descriptions and observations that she gathered during the four years she spent in Annawadi. Though she worked with a translator, she managed to blend into the background. Ms. Boo has said that she “aspires to invisibility” – a feat she manages until the author’s note at the end.
Ms. Boo is not alone in capturing the hardship of the destitute in India by embedding herself with her subjects. Over the years many journalists, economists, sociologists, anthropologists and writers have tried to understand poverty by thrusting themselves into the lives and circumstances that they are writing about, either through a lengthy stay or multiple long visits. The tradition goes back more than a century. Journalist Upton Sinclair Jr., who exposed the horrific conditions of the American meatpacking industry, is considered a pioneer. For his 1906 book, “The Jungle,” Sinclair spent seven weeks working in a meatpacking plant in a Chicago stockyard.
Verrier Elwin, an English ethnographer and activist, who came to India in the early 20^th century as a Christian missionary, was one of the first people to study India’s tribal customs. Ramachandra Guha’s biography “Savaging the Civilized: Verrier Elwin, His Tribals, and India,” sheds light on his work on the Baigas and Gonds of central India, where he lived and married into one of the communities.
In recent times, there have been many writers have attempted to bring “the other India” to the fore. Aman Sethi, a correspondent for The Hindu newspaper, spent five years tracking daily-wage workers in Delhi’s Sadar Bazaar area. His book, “A Free Man,” dispels conventional notions about the working poor, replacing it with a more nuanced consideration. “I want to understand the mazdoor ki zindagi (the workers’ life),” Sethi tells Mohammad Ashraf, a painter who becomes the central character in his narrative.
Read more :  http://vinatv.org/asia-news/newswallah-to-learn-about-the-poor-live-with-them.html