Todal, a toy maker, at work in his Khojwan hovel in Varanasi. Picture by Sankarshan Thakur

Varanasi, Feb. 12: A sorry tale hangs by those charming wooden baubles you might often have haggled off the platform at train halts in Varanasi or Mughalsarai — a spinning top, a miniature kitchen set, a rocking horse, the triptych of birds on a string that commenced their tuk-tuk of pecking at the slightest swing of your hands, that little vermillion chest still somewhere amid the bric-a-brac on the dresser.

They are, each of them, the work of some faceless artisan wheezing to indifferent death, at a far remove from the joy they bring their consumers, bereft of the profits they deserve, forgotten by those that routinely coast to power in their name.

This is an election story because it illustrates by ignoble example how little elections, or their consequences, can come to touch the lives of ordinary people. The past decades should have been boom time for the artisans of Khojwan, a leprous scar of a slum closed upon itself in the middle of town, a warren of putrid, narrow lanes that meander through dank hole-in-the-wall work sheds and dwellings.

Judge it by caste or by class, Khojwan is lowly subaltern, a kedgeree of Dalit and backward communities who couldn’t be faulted for believing that the triumph of the Mandal-Dalit matrix in Uttar Pradesh was the arrival, finally, of their hour of deliverance.

Government after government rode their emaciated spines to power in Lucknow, swearing service to them and their like, till their hands could serve no more. Government after government did what governments tend to do best between one election and another — forgot them in their preoccupation with minding power, made wretched playthings out of Khojwan’s toymakers. Perish the thought of government-aided boom, they are slowly and tortuously going bust.

“Neta kehte hain hamare haath mazboot karo, hamare haath mein taakat hai jo hum kisi aur ko mazboot karen? (Leaders say strengthen our hands, do we have any strength in ours that we can strengthen others?)” Todal is at work fashioning boys’ tops with a length of wood spinning on a mechanised jack. He looks up, spits his anger out, and is back working the wood.

His workplace is a low-roofed hovel, like all workplaces in Khojwan. Sawdust flies off the carving blade that he has put to a whirring piece of timber; he breathes it all the time that he works.

A mate works on another spinning jack bolted to the floor perilously close to his own. When one or the other needs to go out the machines have to be shut, but that won’t do because that means losing time and money; they end up working six or eight hours at a stretch, squatted on the floor, legs splayed. Their only relief, it would seem, is a transistor whining away somewhere on low battery.

“Hamare liye koi nahin hai sahib, na neta na aap, khudehi hai jo hai,” Todal speaks up, his tone milder, as if to apologise for sounding dismissive to begin with. (There’s no one for us, neither leaders, nor you, there’s only us.)

The cacophony of contenders soliciting this election season is quite lost in the incessant grind of Khojwan’s machine-tools. There is no time to stand and stare, this is a life of wear and tear. They are struggling to stay ahead of penury, disregarded by their avowed benefactors, heckled by the capricious demands of the market.

“Nobody wants tops and wooden birds like they used to,” says Lachchman Sau, leaning out for a break from another hellish work floor down the lane. “And since they let in Chinese toys, we just cannot keep up, not with those fancy things, not with the prices. If the Chinese government can push their goods all the way into Benaras, why can our government not give us a little help? What they do, instead, is to push us back, harass us rather than help.”

Their biggest grouse, among many, appears to be the Congress-era ban on “koiraiya”, a locally grown softwood that they say works best for toys. “It was our traditional raw material, it grew in the forests around, it was soft and it came cheap,” says Nand Lal, who has been a member of several delegations that demanded a repeal of the ban. “We are now forced to work with eucalyptus, which is much more expensive and not as good on the machines.”

Koiraiya, when it was banned, came at Rs 200 a tonne, eucalyptus can go above Rs 1,000. “Our production prices are going up, our market rates are not competitive enough, we are being cut out on both ends, and governments and parties that swear in the name of the poor couldn’t be bothered.” Ten years ago, Nand Lal says, Khojwan boasted more than 5,000 toy-making units, less than 2,000 survive today.

The story, many in Varanasi say, of dozens of traditional crafts, all vanishing in the pincer-press of falling demand and cheaper competition — stone carving, silver inlay, zari and zardozi, metal filigree, bell-metal sculpture, bead-making. “Only the toughest are able to survive,” says Ashok Gupta, owner of Benaras Beads, who counts himself a “miraculous survivor”. “A few who have the means to compete will live, most others will fall by the wayside, it is sad but that is the way it is.”

The next time your train halts at Varanasi, think about buying a wooden toy and don’t haggle the price; you’ll probably put food on a plate in Khojwan. Never mind the politicians, they do their bit feeding promises to people.