Swathi Shivanand

This Foundation Project implemented by IFA under Project 560, will undertake a research into the labour organising efforts in the garment industry in Bangalore, including interviews with feminist activists, towards the making of a digital archive and an exhibition. Swathi Shivanand is the Project Coordinator for this project. 

Swathi Shivanand is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Liberal Arts at the Manipal Academy of Higher Education in Bangalore. Swathi did her PhD in Modern History from the Centre for Historical Studies, JNU, New Delhi; her MPhil from CSSSC, Kolkata; and her MA in Development Studies from TISS, Mumbai. She also has a Post Graduate Diploma in Print Journalism from ACJ, Chennai. Swathi has published her journal articles in reputed academic journals and magazines like Urbanisation and Economic and Political Weekly and book chapters in books published by Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Taylor and Francis and University of Minnesota Press. Given her experience, Swathi is best placed to be the Project Coordinator of this Foundation Project of IFA.

The project titled Stitching an Archive Together will artistically archive the cultural artefacts in relation to organising the labourers in the garment industry in Bangalore, led by organisations like Garment and Textile Workers’ Union (GATWU) and Garment Mahila Karmikara Munnade (GMKM). These cultural artefacts include the magazine Suji-Dara (Needle-Thread), published between the years 2006 and 2019 by GMKM, scripts of street plays and songs written and performed by GATWU and GMKM, photographs of protests, summer camps, educational tours, Kannada newspaper clippings on GATWU campaigns for minimum wages, scripts of programmes aired on Akashvani’s FM Rainbow, cultural materials collected from Bangalore’s civil society about the April 2016 protests on changes to provident fund withdrawal rules, and short films and audio-visual documentations produced by other  NGOs and civil society organisations in Bangalore. The project coordinator will also record interviews with litterateurs such as Du Saraswathi (a well-known feminist Dalit writer and activist) and Vijayamma, organisers like Dr. Prathibha R (the president of GATWU), Ratna (who headed GMKM for a number of years) and feminist activists from organisations such as Hengasara Hakkina Sangha, Vimochana and Gamana Mahila Sangha. The intersectional modes of garment labour organising undertaken by GMKM and GATWU, will be reflected in the interviews, as well as the transcripts, which will become part of the archives. The multi-media exhibition will include inferences from the research as well as the spatial mapping of garment factories and their locations onto the map of the city, and the growth of garment conglomerates in Bangalore, such as Gokaldas Exports, Shahi Exports, Texport Industries among others. 

The project will undertake a significant representational intervention in linking Bangalore to the global arena, through the work and lives of garment workers, especially women. The dominant representations of Bangalore as a global city have excluded the sweatshop labour of the women in the garment industry in the city. There is a lacuna in the representational ambit of Bangalore as a global city, although the garment sector in Bangalore caters to the export market and its products travel to countries in the global north. The project will try to address this representational injustice, and at the same time, it will also attempt to help the worker to locate herself within the contemporary history of Bangalore. Dr. Prathibha R (the President of GATWU) and Aishwarya Ravikumar (filmmaker, communications specialist and an activist) will be the primary collaborators in this project. 

The outcomes of the project would be an annotated archive of digitised materials, audio-visual materials, digital interface of the archive and an exhibition. The Project Coordinator’s deliverables to IFA with the final report will be selected materials from the archive, offline version of the digital interface, audio-visual documentation of the research process, including selected interviews, and photographs of the exhibition display.

This project suitably addresses the framework of IFA’s Project 560 programme in the manner in which it will zoom into the efforts to unionise the women labourers in the garment industry in Bangalore, which has been neglected in the dominant narrative on the city, in comparison with the jingoistic story of Bangalore IT industry.  

IFA will ensure that the implementation of this project happens in a timely manner and funds expended are accounted for. IFA will also review the progress of the project at midterm and document it through an Implementation Memorandum. After the project is finished and all deliverables are submitted, IFA will put together a Final Evaluation to share with Trustees.

This project is made possible with support from BNP Paribas India Foundation.