SUNBEAM ENGINEERING CORPORATION
There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.
- Leonard Cohen, Anthem
My late maternal grandfather was a full-hearted, bindas (inherently cool, nonchalant) Punjabi gentleman, whose life remained tied to his work until the end. Sunbeam Engineering Corporation is an ongoing work, currently existing as a photobook draft drifting from images to notes, from the past to the present, from the personal to the ontological. It is perhaps best understood as my attempt to know him better, eventually realizing that the life of a single man might tell a complex story of post-industrial India.
“Pehle ghar jaisa lagta tha, ‘It used to feel like home earlier’ said one of the earliest workers while drawing a contrast between working with my grandfather and working under the new management.” The workers’ experience posed questions about the scope of personalization possible in smaller industrial setups, challenging Western and modern industrial trends encouraging standardization, formality, and neatness. Sunbeam Engineering Corporation is as much a personal inquiry as it is a documentation of a dying industrial culture—gentler and truer to everyday life in its approach. Here, the terminology of naming shifts from one rooted in kinship and care–the workers referred to my grandfather as Bauji (elder father figure) – to one bespeaking hierarchy, 'Sir' or 'Sahib'. The act of care extended beyond the human – Sunbeam Engineering Corporation was intent on the careful mending of the exhausted, of the heavy industrial motors, which belonged to power plants and refineries. To examine Sunbeam’s quotidian rhythms, the day-to-day, the shifts between my grandfather’s ownership and the new regime, is to probe a binary, the collective shift from a culture of repair to throwing away, from the personal to the standardized, from humane responsibility to industrial efficiency.
If my grandfather could see this, he would probably laugh at my search for meaning. He would empty the intellectual accumulation from my hands and bring me back to the basics, reminding me that Sunbeam will thrive till our limbs function and till others need us.