ABSTRACT
Dakxin Bajrange Chhara’s documentary video The Lost Water: A Salt Worker’s Life (2010) opens with a montage drawn from the popular internet program Google Maps. 2 The montage instructs us that during the Roman Empire soldiers were paid in salt. In ancient Greece slaves were purchased with salt to sustain the sybaritic lifestyle of the free men. During the movement for India’s independence, a march to the sea was staged by the liberator, Mahatma Gandhi, to protest the tax on salt levied by the British colonizers. India attained its freedom in 1947. Today, continues the montage, India is the world’s third-largest producer of salt, and seventy percent of that comes from the state of Gujarat. Sixty percent of that number comes from the far western districts of the Little Rann of Kutch on the Arabian Sea. “But . . . where,” asks the video, “are the salt workers? ” Some of India’s most marginalized communities continue to harvest salt under almost prehistoric conditions. In the three-thousand-year history narrated by the opening, little has changed in either the cheapness or importance of salt.
