India, Oct. 25 -- Birender Yadav grew up in Dhanbad, Jharkhand, where his blacksmith father and uncles worked in nearby coal mines. At his school, his classmates also had relatives working in the mines.

Yadav, now 36, grew up to be an artist, having acquired an undergraduate degree and a master's in fine arts from Banaras Hindu University and Delhi University. More than a decade of his art practice has focussed on labour and identity. He has also been regularly conducting art workshops for children of workers at brick kilns in Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh for the past eleven years.

Like Yadav, Himanshu Jamod learned about labour when, at the age of eleven, his father, a dockyard worker at Bhavnagar port in Gujarat, took him to the neighbouri...