Miles Away (Meelon Dur) is a documentary that follows the journey of three women who work at brick kilns on the outskirts of a city in North India, in the midst of unseasonable rains and the global pandemic. What unfolds is a story of mobility, debt, and the everyday lives of the caste-oppressed women, whose labour is both crucial and most often invisible in the story of a rapidly urbanizing global India. The women the film follows are from Bundelkhand, Uttar Pradesh, a region synonymous with severe drought and poverty. Each year, women and their families travel long distances to engage in this physically demanding, poorly-regulated, and low-paid work that these kilns provide against the backdrop of villages where agricultural paid labor has all but dried up. While the bricks they produce can be found in buildings all over the country, the story of these women’s lives and their working labouring conditions remains bound to the rural villages they come from and return to at the end of every brick-making season.
Our investigation of this community of migrant brick kiln workers, especially with a focus on women migrants, emerges out of five years of collaboration between North American academics Michelle Buckley (University of Toronto) and Paula Chakravartty (NYU) and two partner organizations based in India: Khabar Lahariya and Chambal Media, a “woman-run, ethical independent news platform” covering rural North India and the Building and Woodworkers International, a global trade union with a national office in Delhi, representing workers across the country in the building trades.
This website has been created as an additional resource to supplement the documentary that will revisit the voices shared in the documentary while providing a more expansive overview of brick kiln work in northern India today. We also provide information about labour and migrant worker organizing, Dalit activism, environmental activism, and the grassroots feminist movements that all continue to challenge and shape the future of the brick kiln industry.
The Documentary
Hours of interviews with brick kiln workers and their families, years of work alongside labour organizing groups, and local independent reporting have resulted in Miles Away, a documentary that tells the story of unpayable debt from the perspectives of the women migrant workers themselves.
Each page on the website explores a different site at which unpayable debt plays out in the lives of migrant workers.
Watch the Trailer
Why a documentary?
Geeta and Meera Devi served as leading journalists and editors for the project, and both have lived experience working at brick kilns with their families. Along with other essential partners in Chambal (Disha Mullick and Kavita Bundlekhandi), the team agreed that a full-length documentary film could work to highlight and make sense of the struggle of migrant women and their families.
Spending time with the brick kiln migrants both at the kiln site and in their home villages, Geeta Devi, Megha Acharya, and Priya Thuvassery worked together to identify the three key protagonists of the documentary. Led by the insights and concerns brought forward by the three women throughout filming—and with ongoing feedback from the film’s subjects and their families throughout the editing process—the documentary asks: how does the debt and credit relation created between kiln operators and migrant workers act as a register for race, caste, and gender?
Learn about the operations of brick kilns and the history of the industry →
Read about the role of rural villages in indebted labour practices →
Explore how bricks reach national and international markets →
Learn about the vital role of union organizing and advocacy underway to support freedom and fair wages in brick kilns across the region →
This Research was funded by SSHRC