Beedi workers: songs of life and labour

“My abbu [father] was a wage worker, but fishing was the love of his life. He would somehow manage the money for a kilogram of rice and then… he was gone for the day! My ammi [mother] had to deal with everything else,” says Kohinoor Begum, speaking on the terrace of her home in Beldanga’s Uttarpara locality.

“And imagine, out of that one kilo of rice, my ammi had to feed four children, our dadi [paternal grandmother], my father, an aunt and herself.” She pauses briefly and then says, “On top of that, abbu had the courage to ask her for some rice to bait fish. We were at our wit’s end with this man!”

Kohinoor aapa [sister], 55, is a mid-day meal cook at Janaki Nagar Prathamik Vidyalaya Primary School here in Bengal’s Murshidabad district. In her spare time, she rolls beedis and also campaigns for the rights of other women engaged in this work. In Murshidabad, it is the poorest of women who roll beedis — a physically punishing job. The constant exposure to tobacco from a young age puts their health at great risk too. Read: Women beedi workers’ health: up in smoke

On a December morning in 2021, Kohinoor aapa met this reporter after attending a campaign for beedi workers. Later, a more relaxed Kohinoor spoke about her childhood and even sang her own composition – a song on the arduous work and exploitative working conditions of beedi workers.

An idea struck the nine-year-old. “I ran to meet the wife of a big coal depot owner and asked the lady, ‘কাকিমা, আমাকে এক মণ করে কয়লা দেবে রোজ? [ kakima amake ek mon kore koyla debe roj? ‘Aunt, will you give me a mound of coal every day?’],” she recollects with pride. “After some persuasion, the lady agreed and I started bringing coal from their depot to our home on a rickshaw. I spent 20 paisa on the fare.”

Life continued in this way and by the time she was 14, Kohinoor was selling scrap coal in her village of Uttarpara and other close by localities; she would carry up to 20 kgs at a time on her young shoulders. “Even though I could earn very little, it helped my family with our meals,” she says.

Although happy and relieved that she could help out, Kohinoor felt she was losing out on life. “While selling coal on the road, I would notice girls going to school and women to colleges and offices with bags on their shoulders. I felt sorry for myself,” she says. Her voice starts to get heavy but she pushes back the tears and adds, “I too was meant to go somewhere with a bag on my shoulder…”

At around that time, a cousin introduced Kohinoor to local self-help groups for women, organised by the municipality. “While selling coal to various houses, I met so many women. I knew their hardships. I insisted that the municipality take me as one of the organisers.”

The problem however, as raised by her cousin, was that Kohinoor lacked formal schooling and was therefore considered unsuitable for the job that involved managing the accounting books.

“This was hardly an issue for me,” she says, “‘I am very good with counting and calculations. I learnt it while selling scrap coal.” Assuring them that she wouldn’t make mistakes, Kohinoor said her only request was that she get help from her cousin to put everything down in the diary. “I will manage the rest.”

And so she did. Working for local self-help groups gave Kohinoor the chance to get to know most of these women better — many of whom were beedi rollers. She learnt about saving, creating a corpus, borrowing from it and repaying as well.

Although money continued to be a struggle for Kohinoor, she says the work on the ground became “valuable experience” because “I was becoming politically aware. I was always arguing with people if I saw something was wrong. I forged close ties with trade union activists.”

This however did not sit well with her family and relatives. “So, they got me married.” At 16, she was married to Jamaluddin Sheikh. The couple have three children.

Fortunately marriage did not stop Kohinoor aapa from doing the work she liked: “I kept observing everything around me. I admired grassroot organisations that worked for the rights of women like me and my association with them kept growing.” While Jamaluddin works as a plastic and waste collector, Kohinoor keeps busy with work at school and with the Murshidabad District Beedi Mazdur and Packers Union, where she advocates for rights of beedi -rollers.

“Only on Sunday mornings, I manage to get some time,” she says as she pours some coconut oil from a bottle next to her onto her palm. She applies the oil on her thick hair and then combs it carefully.