Ghosts in the Cane

About this work

Ghosts in the Cane is the second tableau in Paths You Walk, set in a lodging house near Bartons Foundry, Walsall, in 1958 — before the wave of primary migration that would transform the Black Country through the early 1960s.

The image is a psychological portrait of memory and industrial toil. A Punjabi factory worker sits barefoot on the bare floorboards — the collarless “grandad” shirt, the blue turban, the exhaustion of a man caught between two worlds. Behind him, his youngest brother — who did not make the journey — appears as an innocent ghost, catching a shaft of golden hyper-real light in a loose white kurta pajama. In the shadows, the three farmers from the family’s village advance with steel shovels: the debt, the obligation, the weight of what was left behind.

Around the perimeter, sleeping workers lie wrapped in a mix of dark wool blankets and vibrant Phulkari quilts — the brightness of the quilts a fragment of Punjab transplanted into the soot and darkness of the Black Country.

The title

“Ghosts in the Cane” references the sugar cane fields of the Punjab — the landscape many of these men left behind. The “cane” appears not physically in the image but as a structural memory: the figures who haunt the lodging house are figures from that earlier landscape, appearing in this industrial interior through the logic of the psyche, not of the visible world.

Magic realism

The brother in white kurta pajama catches a golden light from no visible source. The farmers’ shadows fall in directions that contradict the room’s only lamp. The Phulkari quilts retain their colour at full saturation against the otherwise desaturated palette of the lodging house.

Production team

• Art Director: Adam Tomlinson (Dead Man’s Shoes, This is England)
• Producer: Deborah Aston (Small Axe, Boiling Point)

Characters

Factory Worker (Punjabi, haunted by memory); Youngest Brother (Punjabi teen, the ghost); Greedy Farmers (×3, menacing shadows); Sleeping Workers (×4, background forms).

Exhibition

Ghosts in the Cane is exhibited at The New Art Gallery Walsall (Community Gallery), 6 March – 6 July 2026, and at partner community venues.

This work is part of the Paths You Walk HLF project and is published under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). You are free to share and adapt for any purpose, including commercially, provided you credit: Billy Dosanjh / Reimagining Industrial Migratory Stories CIC. For high-resolution or print enquiries: reindmigs@gmail.com