Portrait of Manja Makers

We were in Ahmedabad shooting a Bollywood feature film with cinematographer Tanay Satam when we found them. It was December, walking back to the hotel after a day on set, when I noticed a narrow gap between two tall buildings, easy to miss if you weren’t looking. What caught us wasn’t the space itself but the colour spilling out of it. Threads strung from one end to the other, men colouring them, other men tying them off.

We didn't know what we were looking at. Turned out it was manja, the thread used for kite flying, the kind that decides who wins a kite fight and whose fingers get cut in the process. I'd flown kites as a kid the way most of us had, but I'd never once wondered how the thread itself was made.

The shoot that day got called off, which is the only reason we had the time. We rushed back to the hotel, grabbed our gear, pulled in a couple of colleagues, and went back to shoot the making of manja before we lost the light or the workers moved on.

Getting close to them wasn't easy. It's fine, exacting work, and a moment's distraction can break the thread they're working on, which costs them money they can't afford to lose. Between passes, they told us bits of their life. They travel from Lucknow to Gujarat every year, two months ahead of Makar Sankranti, and go home once the season ends. Their day starts around seven in the morning and runs to ten at night, no real break, and what they earn depends entirely on how much manja they finish. Two hundred to three hundred rupees a roll. Their income, tied directly to their hands.

Watching the process was its own kind of education. Sticky rice cooked down, colour added to the client's specification, finely ground glass worked in to give the thread its edge, butter added at the end so it doesn't cut the hands holding it. All of it rolled into a ball, then pulled thin against a tied thread, rubbed back and forth until it's sharp enough to cut a competitor's line clean in a festival where brands like Red Bull now sponsor the competitions.

What stayed with me longest wasn't the process. It was noticing that several of the workers had a visible squint, and that their children, who were also there, working alongside them, had it too. Faulty eyesight from years of close, repetitive strain, likely, though no one there had a diagnosis to offer, just the condition itself, passed down along with the trade.

There's something I still sit with about that shoot. Makar Sankranti is a festival about light, about turning away from a kind of darkness and choosing brightness instead. And here were the people who make the very thread the festival runs on, working in conditions that gave them the opposite. I didn't go there to make a point about that. I went there because I was curious about a craft I'd never thought to ask about. But once we started filming, that was the thing the camera kept finding, whether we were looking for it or not.