The Mahamastakabhisheka was celebrated on the shoulders of hundreds of migrant workers who cooked, cleaned and carried

In the middle of a large makeshift kitchen with at least a dozen lit stoves and several bags of flour and rice, Mukesh Narwarai, 38, has been dicing pumpkin, ridge gourd, ladies’ finger and cucumber since five in the morning.

Narwarai travelled two days by train and bus, from Alampur town in Madhya Pradesh, to make it to Shravanabelagola in Karnataka’s Hassan district, in time for the Mahamastakabhisheka, the grand anointment ceremony of the Bahubali statue held every 12 years. Narwarai is part of a 170-strong contingent of people appointed to prepare food for 10,000 Jain devotees who have come in from all over the country for the 19-day event that concludes tomorrow.

Essential services

The entourage from Alampur chops vegetables, kneads dough, cooks and washes dishes for ₹300 to ₹1,000 per day. Narwarai’s work with a catering agency means hectic travel across the country, but he earns more than the rest of his family members who are farmers in Madhya Pradesh, he tells me. In a corner of the kitchen, Gulabi Bai, 45, who has come with her daughter, has begun her eight-hour shift making chapattis; and in another nook, some 80 women are washing vessels.

Food being served to the vistors | Photo Credit: Prakash Hassan

Three kilometres away, on top of the Vindhyagiri hill, devotees — men in saffron dhotis and women in saffron saris — look on as the 58.8-foot-tall granite Bahubali statue changes hues over and over as it is drenched in water, coconut water, sugarcane juice, milk, sandalwood paste, a vermilion herbal concoction, and finally, turmeric paste.

Shravanabelagola town, consisting of about 10,000 residents, has transformed over the past couple of weeks as 35,000 visitors are pouring in every day for the ritual. Policemen are everywhere. Local residents have rented out their homes to pilgrims, and farmers have parted with their land for a few weeks so that the government can construct temporary townships for visitors.

The 12 townships accommodate some 26,000 people: Tyagi Nagar is where Jain monks and nuns stay; the devotees who anoint the statue live in Kalasha Nagar; volunteers who have come from across the country to help out at the Jain mutt are in Swayamsevak Nagar; the 3,500 policemen on duty are allotted rooms in Police Nagar. As for the media, we have been given accommodation in Madhyama Nagar.

But the visitors need more than just food and shelter. They need water (and hot water), tea and coffee, puja supplies, porters to carry their luggage and doli-bearers to carry some of them up the 640 steps to the top of the Vindhyagiri hill where the statue is.

And providing these services with extraordinary efficiency are migrant workers — from Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Jharkhand, Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra, Odisha and Bihar — who stay in workers’ colonies attached to the townships. For some of them, the day begins at two in the morning. Meghanathana Reddy, 42, a resident of Arakkonam town in Tamil Nadu, is tasked with providing pilgrims hot water to bathe in before they climb up the Vindhyagiri. “We turn on the boilers at 2 a.m. and then go from room to room to hand over the buckets to whoever wants them,” says Reddy, who carries around 20 buckets on a tricyle through Pancha Kalyana Nagar, where the devotees stay. Some 90 men have come from Arakkonam this time. “We carry luggage, we carry beds, we supply tea and coffee,” says Chandrashekhar, 39.

Special duty

This particular group is known for its hospitality services and is hired at weddings and other events where a large number of guests are involved. But Chandrashekhar will not tell me about the wages he is paid. “Here, it is a special duty. We are here to serve guests. We accept whatever we are offered,” he says.

At this township, I meet a group of 26 musicians from Maharashtra’s Sangli district, who play the tutari, a curved metal horn.

Doli-carriers take pilgrims up | Photo Credit: Prakash Hassan

They play a key role before the anointing ceremony, leading the procession. “Tutari is the pride of our community. Every family has at least one instrument in their house,” says Manik Gurav, 45. This all-male troupe plays at weddings all over the country, earning ₹2,000 for each occasion. They played their instrument when President Ram Nath Kovind inaugurated the Mahamastakabhisheka on February 7.

Senior citizens and people with disabilities can hire doli (palanquin) carriers. Some 150 doli-carriers from Jharkhand, who typically carry tourists on their shoulders for the 27-km journey up the hill to the Shikharji temple in their State, will be here for about two months.

Dilpul Saw, 70, a resident of Shikharji, is one such doli-carrier. He is paid ₹600 a day here, not very much, but he sees it as “a service to the pilgrims”. The mutt charges ₹1,525 per person for a doli. Four people carry the doli, made up of a wooden ‘chair’ tied to two poles. “I have been doing this for 50 years. Compared to what we handle at Shikharji, the job is far easier here,” he says. While the younger bearers take just about 10-15 minutes to climb the steps, it takes the older carriers 20.

Absent presence

The daunting task of cleaning — toilets and streets — predictably falls on the members of the scheduled caste, Valmiki community, from Chitrakoot in Uttar Pradesh and Chhattarpur in Madhya Pradesh. Around 1,000 workers clean hundreds of mobile toilets across the town. “We start our work early in the day and clean the toilets before the visitors come there,” says Lalloo Kumar, 58, from Chitrakoot.

He has come here with his two sons, two daughters and four grandchildren. “We do not have land to till, so we clean in our village or wherever else we are hired,” he says. His family has worked at the Kumbh Mela, Kumar adds. “We are called wherever events involving thousands of people are held.”

Women sweep the streets and collect municipal waste, checking on their children at the camp during breaks. Ramadevi and her husband Ramesh from Chhattarpur have come with their four children.

Both are paid a daily fee of ₹270. “Neither of us went to school. I hope my children do,” says Ramadevi. “But we keep moving from one place to the other and my fear is that my children will end up with the same job as mine.” This group of workers is conspicuously absent in the general dining halls, preparing their own food at their camp instead.

The event draws to a close tomorrow, but the work at Shravanabelagola is far from over. Several migrant workers will stay long after the pilgrims have returned. For the construction workers from Odisha and Bihar, who created the townships, now begins the task of dismantling them.