This project was done in collaboration with Aditya Mehta, Chaitra Vartak, and Monaz Katila. The objective of this project was to focus on an element in our immediate environment - people, services, activations, transport, commodities; and to document their stories using visual elements inspired by their lives. Our goal was to explore the different ways to describe unseen stories of mundane lives visually.
We decided to work with street hawkers in Mumbai. A hawker is a vendor of merchandise that can be easily transported; the term is roughly synonymous with a peddler. In most places where the term is used in India, a hawker sells inexpensive goods, handicrafts, or food items.
We wanted to hear stories of hawkers we interact with on a daily basis; where the conversation never went beyond a transaction. We used this opportunity to spend time with them, to understand their aspirations, what drives them, what makes them happy, and collected visual cues and representative elements to create portraits of these people. For this project, we picked five hawkers offering five different products or services; to realise that each story has a voice, energy, and takeaway of its own.
The project is titled 'Mera Wala Mumbai' - which roughly translates to 'My Mumbai' or my version of Mumbai. 'Wala' is a common suffix added to each hawker's product; to denote what they sell or have to offer. For example, someone selling bread becomes a 'breadwala'. This is a common practice in India, and can be heard on a day to day basis for all kinds of people we come across on the street. For the logo, we mixed two scripts to represent the spirit of our city.
Meet our Vendors
Puja is a prayer service ritual done by Hindus. The word 'puja' comes from Sanskrit, and means reverence, honor and worship.
Puja is done to offer devotional homage and prayer to one or more deities, to host and honour a guest, or pray for someone's well-being and memories after they die, or to spiritually celebrate an event.
The steps to prepare items for a puja vary depending on the deities worshipped, and the individual's choice. The ritual includes items such as sacred water or milk, uncooked rice mixed with turmeric, fresh stemless blooms or loose flower petals, and sacraments of one's traditions such as red powder, sandalwood paste, or holy ash.
The 'pujawala' is a vendor who sells all items related to these rituals.
Mochis are cobblers who make and repair leather footwear. They also make leather handbags, suitcases, saddles, harnesses and leather aprons. They sell from shops in markets, from a pavement, or from under a tree. They also polish shoes and sell shoelaces and upper soles with their portable shoeshine boxes in busy public places like railway stations, bus stations, market squares and busy street pavements.
'Istri' is a Hindi word for an iron. The term 'istriwala' is given to a laundryman, who collects clothes from people; either from their homes or at his shop and irons them. An istriwala also uses different techniques to wash and dry fabrics and materials of various colors, materials and sizes. They may also mark, sort, hang, or fold articles before or after washing and drying.
Ice apples are very similar to litchi fruit in texture and taste like a slightly sweeter version of a tender coconut. The fruit is called 'tadgola' in Hindi, 'nungu' in Tamil, 'taati munjalu' in Telugu.
Our 'tadgolawala', was a street hawker selling seasonal fruits throughout the year. He sold ice apples during the summer and sold whatever fresh produce he had access to during the rest of the year. He moved his cart to different spots daily, to keep himself from getting bored.
'Anda' is a Hindi word for an egg. The term 'andawala' is given to hawkers who sell eggs; they either only sell eggs or sell other items alongside such as bread, baked goods, snacks, and some times, even milk.
We collected materials from each hawker to juxtapose and create an individual story for each one of them. We physically laid out the elements on paper to try different layouts for our portraits. We wanted to create a mixed media poster that encompassed the mood around each person.
Creating Flat Lays
The 'Pujawala' Flatlay
The 'Tadgolawala' Flatlay
The 'Andawala' Flatlay
The Portraits
The Vendor Infographic
The infographic presents some key statistics around the street hawkers we interviewed. It spans over this profession, or way of running a livelihood in Mumbai, the capital of Maharashtra; where about 2% of the state's population are street hawkers.
This project was done under the mentorship of Ruchi Shah at Ecole Intuit.Lab, Mumbai.
