Today, May 1, is International Workers’ Day.In the gut-slicked alleys of Bengaluru’s meat markets, a brutal hierarchy dictates not only who handles the meat, but which parts of the animal are deemed worthy of touch. Beneath the surface of daily commerce, these markets operate as a political construct—a rigid, caste-based assembly line that reflects how societal systems can lead individuals into dead-end cycles of labour and poverty.While the higher-class butchers manage the primary cuts of muscle meat in the main market, the “spare parts” are sold in the Boti (offal) market by those next in the social food chain. In the shadowy depths behind these markets, the “underclass” of the carcass, considered a religious and social taboo – the hooves and heads – are fire-processed by the Dalits. In the dread-inducing darkness of the furnaces, the invisible threads of power and history that tie a society together reveal how labour and identity are structurally fused to keep certain groups marginalised. The workers in these markets are often descendants of approximately 5,000 Tamil Dalit migrants primarily from the Arunthathiyar community, brought from the Madras Presidency by the British. They were imported specifically to perform “polluting” tasks that local populations often avoided: the raw manual labour of butchery, tannery, and leatherwork. Following the 1898 Bubonic plague epidemic, the British and Mysore administrators redesigned the city’s markets with a focus on “sanitary” segregation that often mirrored existing caste-based divides. Cleanliness became a racial and social marker. Perceived as an outcast industry, meat markets, tanneries and slaughterhouses were kept at a safe distance from the posh Cantonment bungalows and colonial zones. Today, in these meat markets, Dalit and De-notified Tribes workers such as the Holeya, exist at the most violent collision of manual toil and human degradation. Funnelled by poverty and social exclusion into a single, predetermined path of survival, their life mimics the one-way nature of the slaughterhouse floor.Goat head processors don’t just work the kilns; they are consumed by them. In the time it takes a white-collar worker to reach their career peak, a Holeya man has often breathed enough carbon to collapse a lung. The hazardous environment creates a lethal inferno that ravages the body, reducing their average life expectancy to just 45 years. At the absolute base level of the meat industry are Dalit and DNT communities such as the Holeya. They are assigned the most hazardous, invisible labour in the city’s food chain. Their role—fire-processing goat heads manually to get rid of the fur before the brain is extracted by butchers in the offal market. The soot-choked primitive furnaces use the lowest grade of coking coal powered by an electric motor.The market represents a machine where value is extracted from flesh with cold efficiency. Human and animal lives are intertwined in a cycle of bleakness and economic entrapment. Their faces often mirror the blank, dead expressions of the animals they process, reflecting the physical and spiritual wearing down of these communities.The purity/pollution matrix operates as a geographic and social cage. Often considered the city’s necessary Other—expected to build and feed the city, but systematically erased from the planning grids, these workers are confined to the back-alleys of the market. They are barred from entering the slaughterhouse or meat market because their touch is considered impure and polluting by consumers.The workers toil in the choking weight and slurry of goat-hair, coal dust and kiln-smoke, a toxic veil that they wear as a second skin. Their senses have been blunted by the industrial hum of survival. Hands calloused and burned from hot metal rods and faces cloaked in soot, workers become human chimneys.Enduring 12-hour shifts hunched over crude furnaces isn’t just a trade of time for money; it is a structural placement that dictates their social standing, health, and visibility. These jobs, passed down through generations, make the struggle for dignity a permanent state of being. Processing the head and hooves of one animal is a four step task that requires four people. Each worker earns Rs 500 a day from scorching approximately 100 goats.Heads pile up amidst urban decay and drudgery. The workers are caught in a stagnant loop. There is no grand escape from the repetitive, numbing nature of poverty, only the cycles of endurance. The goat heads lying all around them are a direct reflection of their own tortuous destiny.Meat markets reveal the broken structures of the caste system, where low-value or taboo jobs are used to physically and socially categorise people. The grit of the trade is handled by those the city has historically pushed to its fringes. This is the central paradox of the system: the workers perform the most hazardous labour for a society that consumes the product but stigmatises the producer.A worker’s identity is forged in the toxic heat of crude furnaces. The very work that gives them a livelihood, purpose and identity also ensures they remain on the outer edges of society. The meat market is a microcosm of a rigid power structure that treats human life as just another byproduct of the kill.Asha Thadani is a photographic artist based in Bengaluru. All photos in the piece are by Thadani.