Divya Jain spent four years travelling in order to take out a coffee table book on Indian truck drivers. She tells Iknoor Kaur why their community is so misunderstood
For any man who has traversed the roads of India, the truck brings back a buck load of memories. Be it the images of tacky graffiti or the calligraphic text of Ok Tata Bye Bye and Horn Ok Please — without them, these memories would be incomplete and so would we. From North to South, there is no place in the country that doesn’t have a quirky truck. “The ones down South are more vibrant. They are yellow and have palm leaves painted on them. The trucks in Rajasthan are usually red in colour and have a woman with a ghoonghat painted on them. The trucks change from place to place and so does the art and the people,” said Divya Jain who’s recently taken out a coffee table book along with Pawan Jain called Trucking in India: Horn Please that covers all aspects of truck driving in our country.
Divya along with Pawan runs a trucking business called Safexpress. According to her, the trucking community is a highly misunderstood one. She said, “Truck drivers are ill-treated and disrespected per se as a community. Their image is associated with drunken driving, accidents and rashness. However, they are not like that. Ninety per cent of the people are well-behaved and have families. While we travelled with them through different cities, we realised that issues like overloading lead to accidents. Though the one problem we noticed was of corruption. In fact, we photographed a man paying bribe to a policeman.”
Through a period of four years, Divya travelled through Jammu & Kashmir, leh, North-East, Rajasthan, Punjab, West Bengal, Bangalore, Kerala, Mumbai, Goa and Odisha, to capture the lifestyles of truck drivers. “We enrolled four international photographers for this project. Sephi Bergerson from Israel, Zackary Canepari from America, Claude Barutel from New Zealand and Thomas Pickard from France. They travelled across India in trucks to capture these images. On the other hand, I was doing all the talking. I would meet the drivers and speak to them about everything in their lives. They used to be apprehensive at first and then slowly open up,” she shared.
During her interactions with the drivers, Divya found out that the South Indian truck drivers were the finicky ones. She narrated, “They have these cooking stoves inside their trucks because most of them don’t like to eat the food up North. They actually have a gas stove in the truck next to their seat and they carry ingredients all the way from their hometowns and cook food for themselves. In sync with that, we then noticed that on most national highways there are a lot of regional dhabas that cater only to the truck drivers.”
Divya dug deep into the lifestyles of these drivers, too, and figured out that a term called Khalasi exists in their lingo. “The Khalasis are around 16-year-old kids who travel with the truck drivers everywhere. They set onto the journey with the truck driver as a way for them to go on a holiday and explore the country. But actually it is a form of an informal apprenticeship where the kid lives with the truck driver and learns his profession in order to pursue it further,” she explained.
Truck art is a very significant part of the business, added Divya. “Almost every truck is customised. They come with the engine and the chassis and then the truck driver goes to the builder’s yard, stands in front of the mechanic and gets it customised according to his tastes and whims. That is when they write these idioms behind the trucks. Common sayings then were hum do humare do, buri nazar wale tera mu kala or buri nazar wale tu chasme lagale,” she elaborated. The sayings also make a significant part of the coffee table book. The book has five leaves that read some of the best sayings that are painted behind the trucks of which one read hum do humare do, unke baad jitney bhi ho, sabko Punjab aur Haryana bhej do. “We couldn’t have taken the book out without these quotes and since all our photographers were from abroad, we didn’t get any images of the quotes. They would get us images of the back of the truck that would make no sense, whatsoever. So had a competition where people had to take pictures of their favourite quotes behind the truck and send them to us. Unfortunately the quality of the pictures was not nice enough to put in the book, so we picked our favourite five quotes instead and put that in,” she said.
Though the book sums up the life of a truck driver well enough, Divya feels that she has enough pictures and stories to take out two more books. However, “I intend to take this book forward in the form of an initiative. I want Horn Please to be a movement where we can do more for truck drivers and make their lives better. It will be my mouthpiece to spread awareness and instill better facilities for these people,” she added.