On Sanitation: A Memory Ethnography

Upbringing and Reflexivity

When I stepped into my teens, I was deeply ashamed of the fact that the street in Old Delhi—known as Gali G. D. Joshi (Peepal Mahadev, Hauz Qazi)—where I lived with my parents and maternal grandparents did not have flush latrines. Each morning, the night soil that had accumulated over the past twenty-four hours was manually collected for disposal by a family of scavengers, locally regarded as belonging to the caste-community of the jamādār, mehtar or bhangī. ² Since I was a student of one of the best schools of those days, Anglo Sanskrit Victoria Jubilee Higher Secondary School, located in Darya Ganj (Delhi), boys from the elite colonies and upper-class families of Delhi and New Delhi were my class mates; and being a good student, I was quite friendly with them. Often I used to accompany them to their homes in posh areas, some of them being government colonies, beautifully built, open, green, clean, uncrowded, and peaceful.

Toilets in these houses impressed me—the shining pots (water closets) were installed with flush and a regular supply of water by just pulling the chain attached to the overhead cistern, and were clean, ‘unsmelly’, to use a local expression, where one was in no hurry to leave. In one of the corners of these toilets lay a couple of brushes and a bottle of acid. Each night some acid was poured into the pot to disintegrate the yellow crust of urine and faecal material that had deposited inside the pot, which was later scrubbed with the brush. The task of cleaning the toilet was given to the members of the household. The toilets were located right inside the house and because of the observance of the norms of purity and pollution in the household, the professional toilet cleaners (the erstwhile manual scavengers) were not permitted inside the residential area. Thus the task of cleaning the toilet—which in any case did not present the ungainly sight of its Old Delhi counterpart—was of the household members. Cleaning the toilet was no more a dirty job, for it did not bring one in contact with human manure. I think the dirtiness of Old Delhi was because of its unclean lavatories, which for a considerable part of the day were just heaps of body waste.

Latrines in Old Delhi

The thought of inviting my friends to my house left me numb, for my neighbourhood was crowded, dirty, with litter scattered all around, and lacked privacy. A common sight was of people carrying out many of their daily chores outside their houses in the street (such as women grooming, cleaning, and picking nit and lice from their hair; cutting vegetables; men playing cards, chaupar, chess in the open; children defecating in open drains in the street; boys sitting outside their houses and chatting, what was derogatorily called addābāzī). More than that the cause of embarrassment was the type of latrines—the ‘dry latrines’ (pāikhānā)—we had, which even after being cleaned and washed, which happened only once, in the morning, around eight or so, emitted a foul (or rather, ‘faecal’) smell, always unbearable, a type of stench that stayed permanently in the ground floor where these latrines were located.

Latrines in Old Delhi houses were invariably built on the ground floor, away from the rooms in which family members lived. ³ Generally, rooms on the ground floor, if there were any, were reserved for receiving and entertaining guests, and none of the family members ordinarily stayed there permanently. The smaller of these rooms were called baithak (the ‘place where people sit [baithnā]’), and the larger, dālān; the latter were used for the stay of the outstation guests or for feeding people on festal occasions or at the time of the life-cycle rituals. However, the important, respectful guests, in terms of kinship, were accommodated in the rooms built on the upper floors of the house, and it was then that the family members moved to the ground floor temporarily. A symbolic expression of respect accorded to a guest was when a family offered its own room for his stay whilst moving to a zone of less comfort—it meant that ‘one forsook one’s comforts for the sake of others’. If the family was large, and the members felt greatly inconvenienced, some more latrines were built on the subsequent floors of the house, but the norm of just one latrine a house, and that too situated on the ground floor, was largely followed, and I think it was primarily because of the impurity that was associated with it. And, obviously, the question of the attached bath, which included the toilet as well, was ruled out.

The latrine used to be extremely small, just enough to accommodate one person, dingy, almost like a dungeon, and poorly-lit and -ventilated, without any facility of water inside. Hurriedly white-washed annually just before the ‘festival of lights’ (Diwālī) with material of cheap quality, it was the most unaesthetic place, where one spent the least amount of one’s time. Just outside the latrine was a small tank (called haudā, haudī, hauz), built of cement, filled with water, and this water was used to fill the small-sized bucket that one carried to the toilet for filling the mug (tāmlot) kept in the toilet for ablution (‘anal cleaning’) (dhonā, dhoī-dhoī). We shall call the former ‘latrine-bucket’ and the latter ‘latrine-mug’. The former was carried to the latrine to fill its mug, but was never kept on its floor. After filling, it was kept near the tank, its usual place. The latrine-mug might be brought outside to be filled by someone else. Once the latrine-mug had been touched, one would not touch any other thing, the bucket, or the tank.

When one returned from the latrine, a family member was entreated to pour water on his hands that were washed with ash (rākh) from the hearth, or soap, in case the family could afford it. In other words, the water tank remained ‘unpolluted’; when one poured water (with the help of a bucket that was kept in the tank or on one of the ledges) in the ‘latrine-bucket’, one was ‘alright’ and one did not touch it, but on picking it up, one was rendered ‘unclean’. After coming out of the latrine, one was more ‘unclean’, for one’s fingers and palm (of the left hand) had come in touch with the faecal material and anus, and if one touched the tank or the vessels kept near it, they would all be consigned to ‘uncleanliness’, and thus the help of an ‘assistant’ was needed for washing one’s hands. The ‘assistant’ was usually a younger member of the family, a boy in most cases, and in affluent families, one of the domestic servants. Anal cleaning was always done with left hand. One of the reasons of why the left hand was regarded as impure was because of its association with faecal impurity; so left hand was not used for eating, writing, or for any ritual performance. Interestingly, although it had been washed, sometimes repeatedly, it harboured a kind of ‘permanent impurity’, therefore to be avoided forever for certain activities regarded as ‘pure’ (like ritual) or bearing semblance to purity (like eating).

Of all the body orifices, the ‘dirtiest’, the ‘impurest’, was the anus. Right from the beginning, children were taught not to thrust their fingers in any of the orifices of their bodies. They were told that besides being an example of bad manners, it was also dangerous and might cause damage to the internal organs and layers of cells. One of the verses commonly recited in this connection was: ‘nāk mein unglī kān mein tinkā mat kar mat kar mat kar; ankh mein anjan dānt mein manjan nit kar nit kar nit kar’ (‘Don’t put finger in [your] nose, don’t poke a straw in [your] ears; apply kohl in [your] eyes everyday, brush [your] teeth everyday’). This indicates that personal hygiene was given the utmost importance. One was expected to wash one’s hands even if one inadvertently put one’s fingers in his mouth, ears, nostrils, or eyes.

Anatomy of Impurity and Pollution

The water from this tank (situated near the latrine) was used for none of the other activities—such as bathing, washing of clothes—except for cleaning the latrine, the floor, and the area outside the house. Situated at the entrance of the house, with its rear opening facing outside, the toilet was the most defiled space. The latrine was used exclusively for defecation; for urination, men and male children went out to the street, relieving them in the open drains, whereas women used the bathrooms (or the ‘bathing corners’) in their houses, sluicing the urine away with mugs full of water. At night, these bathing places inside the house were used by men as well. In many traditional houses, latrines were used only once, in the morning, before a bath, and if one was constrained to use it again during the day, one was expected to bathe and change one’s clothes. My grandmothers—both paternal and maternal—had sets of different clothes that they wore on their visits to the latrine; these clothes were washed every day and kept separately from the other clothes. Similarly, there were separate pairs of footwear (or rubber slippers called chappal). Called pākhāne ke kapre (‘clothes for the latrine’) or pākhāne kī chappal (‘slippers for the latrine’), these objects carried enormous impurity even after being washed with soap. They were touched only when one was preparing to visit the latrine. If by chance, anyone touched these clothes or the slippers, or the door of the latrine, or the latrine-mug, one was expected to wash his or her hands immediately. This impurity was ‘physical’ and ‘hygienic’, and was supposed to be crucial for maintaining good health. Women, particularly elderly, observed these norms of impurity far more punctiliously than did men, and men were often castigated for being lax about these.

Children were often asked if they had washed their hands after defecation. In case of little children who could not wash their hands properly, their mothers (or some other relative) applied ash or soap on their hands and washed these. Children who could not wash them were helped by their mothers, sometimes fathers or any other member of the family. The process of learning to clean oneself passed though three stages: the first was of the parents (or any other member of the family) cleaning their children; the second was whilst the child squatted, water was poured from above and the child cleaned himself; and the third was that the child learned to clean his bottom and then wash his hands. In the first case, the child did not wash his own hands, but in the other two cases, toilet training involved washing the hands as well. Infants were free from the norms of purity and pollution, but as they grew up, they were expected to internalise these practices. The maintenance of hygiene was an essential component of the process of socialisation. Another common practice was that people washed their faces and rinsed their mouth after they had cleaned their ‘dirty’ and ‘soiled’ hands.

Rather than being dichotomised into purity and impurity, or ‘clean’ and ‘unclean’, the ethnography of lavatorial practices in Old Delhi adds to our knowledge another opposition. Whilst referring to the tank-water, the people said that it was thīk, rather than sāf (clean) or pavitra (pure), an idea that could be conveyed in English word ‘alright’; the water in the bucket, before it was taken to the latrine, was also ‘alright’, but ‘not-so-alright’ as was the water in the tank. The water in the latrine-mug was ‘not-so-alright’ as was the water in the latrine-bucket; and the water left in the latrine-mug after it had been used for cleaning was the ‘worst’, and it must be poured down the drain. If the toilet-mug was emptied in the tank, the latter would be defiled, for what defined the ‘alrightness’ of the water was the container, the context of its use, and where it was placed. Once the mug had been placed on the floor of the toilet, its water was ‘less alright’ than what it was earlier. The latrine-mug was to be emptied there because its water was at the bottom of the ‘degrees of alrightness’.

The point I wish to put forth is that the Hindus of Old Delhi think in terms of several binary oppositions and one of them is ‘what is alright’ and ‘what is not’; although this opposition has been understood here with the example of the lavatorial behaviour, it comes up in other behavioural contexts as well, overlapping with the other oppositions, such as ‘auspicious’ (shubh) and ‘inauspicious’ (ashubh), ‘pure’ (pavitra) and ‘impure’ (apavitra), ‘clean’ (sāf) and ‘unclean’ (gandā), and good (acchā) and bad (burā). As we noted earlier, for ‘what is alright’, the word used is thīk, but no single word exists for ‘what is not alright’; for this the expression used is ‘thīk nahin hai’ (‘[It is] not alright’). So, what is ‘auspicious’, ‘pure’, ‘clean’, and ‘good’ is also ‘alright’, and what is ‘inauspicious’, ‘impure’, unclean’, and ‘bad’ is also ‘not alright’. But, the idea to be noted is that ‘what is alright’ may not be ‘auspicious’, ‘pure’, ‘clean’, and ‘good’; in other words, each opposition should be understood in the context of its usage. Water in the tank is ‘alright’ but it will not be used for cooking or washing kitchen utensils, although the same water pipe line that fills the tank is also attached to the kitchen. The water tank, though a cleansing agent, is associated with a type of body emission that is regarded as ‘most defiled’, ‘most obnoxious’. Defilement is contagious; therefore, the things should not come in contact, lest they pollute the others. The latrine-mug and the hand used for cleaning are the most defiled, and therefore, they must not come in contact with ‘alright’ things. The social universe defines the status of the things in a system of relationship—one is ‘more alright’ than the other or one is ‘not-so-alright’ in comparison to the other. Both ‘alrightness’ and ‘not-so-alrightness’ are graded on a continuum, and one is understood in relation to the other. What pervades the Hindu universe is the gradation of objects, ideas, events, and thoughts on the continua of several oppositions. At the centre of the universe is the human body, interacting with the other systems of the world.

Scavenging

Latrine was busily engaged in the morning. Family members adjusted their toilet habits according to the needs of the others. For instance, the old people visited the latrine either before dawn or waited for the school- and office-goers to leave. Children, from the beginning, were trained to clear their bowels in the shortest possible time. Constipation (kabz) was the biggest ailment and social embarrassment; and so was the flatus, breaking wind (pād). If old people broke wind in public, it was more a matter of amusement, and also, not unexpected considering their age and the slackness of their digestive system (maidā); the old were often heard telling their friends and physicians that they were not able ‘to open their bowels (pet sāf honā) satisfactorily’ and were feeling gassy (hawā bharnā). However, the young were expected to be free from flatulence (bharīpan, afārā). They were expected to have evacuated their bowels in the morning. Being colicky meant ‘being dirty’. Foods were classified in terms of those which produced wind and which did not; and those expected to produce wind (such as varieties of gram, kidney bean, cauliflower) were avoided, especially at night, for they would fill the belly with gas and make one extremely uncomfortable, thus hampering one’s sleep. That gastric (particularly wind and constipation) and dermatological ailments (eczema [dād], itching [khujlī]) were quite common in India may be inferred from the fact that a number of posters pasted on the walls of the street and inside the inter-state buses provided information about the specialists that promised complete cure of these problems. A large number of preparations, ointments, and medicinal condiments were (and are) available in the market for these ailments and discomforts, and their efficacy used to spread through the word of mouth.

The family entrusted with the task of cleaning latrines and the lanes used to arrive around seven in the morning. It comprised four of them—the mother (known as Anaro), her sons (Dhammo and ‘Dhammo’s brother’), and Dhammo’s wife. We could never come to know the names of Dhammo’s brother and wife, for they were never called by their actual names but in teknonymic terms (‘so-and-so’s brother or wife’). Anaro was a widow; she wore cotton clothes, while his daughter-in-law, being married, was dressed brightly and gaudily. She also wore metal jewellery and almost half-a-dozen glass bangles in each wrist. Both these women were dressed in kurtā (shirt) and salwār (pyjama), and not in dhotī or sārī, the usual dress that women in the neighbourhood wore. Both these women covered their faces with translucent wraps, which while allowing them to see clearly and do their work, kept them concealed from the gaze of the men and women of the neighbourhood. Only when these women were in the company of the other women of the neighbourhood, did they uncover their faces, but the moment they saw a man, they veiled them. The relation of these women with the other women in the neighbourhood, notwithstanding their caste statuses, was friendly; observing the norms of keeping distance and not entering the houses beyond a certain point, in the afternoons when their stipulated work was over, they had rounds of conversation with upper caste women, sharing the gossip of the neighbourhood and the facts and truths of their lives. Such a relation did not exist between the men of the scavenging caste and those from upper castes. This would explain why upper caste women seemed to know more about scavenging castes than their men, regardless of the fact that they were stringent custodians of the norms of purity and pollution. It is interesting to note that while maintaining the ritual boundaries between communities, the women were also able to develop close interactive relations with women of lower castes, since they visited all houses in the neighbourhood.

The Family of Lavatory-Cleaners

I often wondered why Dhammo or Anaro had just one name, whereas we had two or three names. Why we had ‘surnames’ (caste/sub-caste names) attached to our names? Why we had honorific titles (like Babu, Raizada, Raibahadur, Lala, Kunwar, Master, etc.) placed before our names? My maternal grandfather was named ‘Babu Brij Lal Srivastava’, his elder brother, ‘Master Chandu Lal Srivastava’, my father ‘Bharat Bhushan Srivastava’, my mother ‘Shanti Devi Srivastava’, and I was also given three names, and so were my other siblings, including my sisters. Then why just one name for some people? I could not find a satisfactory answer to this question until I read literature on the sociology of caste system and spoke to people about the place of caste in their lives. I learned that the members of upper castes have three or more names; higher the caste, more the names. Middle castes have two names, whereas lowest castes have to be content with just one name. Names of higher castes generate ‘surnames’—for instance, the caste of the Brahmin in North India has several surnames (such as Bhardwaj, Gaur, Mishra, Pandey, etc.) and its ‘umbrella surname’ is Sharma. The same applies to the other ‘twice-born’ (dwija) castes. This, however, has not been the case with the castes at the lower rung of the hierarchy. And when members of these castes started looking for surnames, which traditionally they did not have, they either used their caste name as surname (for instance, the Meghwal), or adopted the name of Valmiki (the author of Ramayana whom they revered) as their surname, or one of the general surnames, used across castes, such as Verma, was taken. In some cases, the surnames were improvised after the name of the village of their origin, or some local god; but even today, a large number of them use two names and do not have surnames.

After their arrival to the neighbourhood, the first task the men of the scavenging caste did was to collect garbage from each house, which they did in a couple of baskets they carried from one house to the other. One of the men would go to a house, call out to the people in the household to bring their ‘waste’ (kūrā) and deposit it in the basket he carried. All this garbage would be emptied in a hand-driven wooden cart or wheelbarrow, which would be carried to the ‘garbage house’ (kūrā ghar), a huge vacant space under the local office of the electricity department, contiguous with the stand where the tongā (horse-driven carts) were parked. The ‘garbage house’ was always full to the brim; although the waste disposal department of the local municipality was supposed to empty it every alternate day, it was rarely done so. It was always a loathsome sight, and one could see people spitting as they walked on the road opposite it. A typical Indian reaction to a disgusting and repellent smell is clearing the throat to collect sputum and then spitting it. One could also see dogs, stray cows, cats, pigs, and crows eating away from the mountains of garbage the pieces of food they fancied the most; somewhere from its bottom also emerged moles, mongooses, rats, and cockroaches of various shapes and sizes. Anyone who saw this was impressed by the peaceful living of scavengers of different species, sharing the same habitat, and each picking up those morsels of food that suited it the most and leaving the rest for the others.

The process of removing the garbage from each of these houses continued for an hour and a half; in some cases the men had to visit a particular house again since on an earlier visit the family just ignored the call for bringing their garbage out for disposal. Once over, then began the task of removing the night-soil from each house and cleaning the slab with water on which it laid. Interestingly, the term used for ‘removing the night-soil’ was kamānā, which also meant ‘to earn [one’s livelihood]’. ⁴

With a scraper, both men and women collected the excreta in metal buckets and big pans, kept it out, and called out to family people to throw water in the latrine from the front so that they could broom and clean it through the opening from where they removed the excreta. It was an important duty, generally assigned to an elderly woman of the house, for she had to supervise that the latrine was cleaned well otherwise it would stink the whole day. While she would empty buckets after buckets of water in the latrine, she would, in a reprimanding tone, tell the cleaner that since the latrine was not properly cleaned the earlier day, it was full of fetid (badbū) and the entire house was stinking. The cleaner would say that he or she had always taken care to clean the latrines well and that they did not derelict their duty, but in future they would be extra careful. They knew that what they could register the maximum was mild disagreement but not an outright rebuttal of what they were being told, and that was regarded as the proper response in the structure of dominance of which they were a part, although they also knew that irrespective of the degree of the dereliction of their duty, they would not be removed. They knew the power of negotiation that came with their occupation, but the best in any situation was to accept what they were being told and promise to be vigilant in future. Once I asked my maternal grandmother as to why she said the same thing to Dhammo and his family every day, her answer was that it kept them on their toes and that their work would improve day by day. She, however, never praised the family for their good work. Perhaps, in this sub-culture, workers—whosoever they were—were not complimented for their jobs and duties; their faults were found and explicitly stated, for it was thought that it would not make them proud, as appreciation would, keep check on their work, and would resist their attempts to confront their employers or patrons. And, similar was the natural expectation of the workers that they would be taken to task, yelled at, threatened with wage cuts, looked at angrily, and ordered to work more and more, and improve upon its quality. It may be noted here that the nature of interaction between different communities reinforced inequality.

Disposal of Excreta

The faecal material collected in the buckets and pans was to be taken away to the ‘garbage house’ for disposal; so it was emptied in the cart, covered with other garbage, leaves and ash, but then the buckets and pans had to be washed. Moreover, the latrine slabs were also washed. The water coming out of latrines—foul-smelling—ran in open drains, and here also were washed the buckets and pans in which night-soil was carried to be emptied in the cart or wheelbarrow. Sometimes when all the members of the scavenging family had not come, or were too tired to drive the cart or wheelbarrow, they would also sluice the excreta away in the open drain and clean it up with the broom. The open drain was shallow and its cleaning was possible, and the dirty water could be guided to the manhole. The neighbours seriously objected to any act of throwing the excrement in the open drain. They barely tolerated the cleaning of soiled buckets and pans in it. Dhammo was scolded for this and he tendered profuse apology, often in turn he rebuked his family members, promising to the neighbourhood that such acts would never be repeated. On one occasion, he slapped his younger brother in full view of the neighbours, who also kept telling him not to beat him up, but instructed all his family members not to ever repeat this in future, for when faeces were washed in open drain the stench was overwhelming, intolerable, and lasted for longer time in the street. The neighbours said that they only tolerated the water that came out of the latrine when it was washed, but all acts of throwing excreta in the drain should be stopped. This perhaps did not include the children’s open defecation, with the faeces lying in the shallow drain, hindering the smooth flow of water that came out of the houses, and so the water ran sideways, creating mess in the street. The street dwellers did not make an effort to discourage open defecation, but on the contrary, they encouraged their children to use the open drains as lavatories as in mornings the queue outside the latrine was formidable. Once permitted, the children developed the habit of using the drains as lavatories. Not only that, they also saw adult men urinating in drains. All this developed different notions of shame, exhibiting genitalia, hygiene, and lavatorial practices. After defecation, children ran inside their houses to get cleaned, when someone would pour water and they would wash their anuses. Men would squat to relieve them; it was rarely that in public a man would urinate standing. The sacred thread, in case worn, was pulled up to encircle the right ear, so that it was not sullied by the drops of urine. Hands, sometimes the face also, were washed after urination.

When the latrines were washed and the water gushed out in the drain, and the buckets and pans used for carrying night-soil were cleaned, the entire street was stenchy. People closed windows and doors to keep the foul smell out. “It’s hell”, my grandmother would always respond in these words to the washing of latrines in the street, since one followed the other, and the process continued for quite some time. On one day, when this was going on in the street, one of my schoolmates, who lived in Lodi Road (New Delhi), arrived unexpectedly. I hurriedly took him to the roof of my house, since the evil smell was supposed to be less there. He quickly responded to this saying: ‘Doesn’t this smell sail in your mind for the whole day, perhaps forever?’ He seemed to be so awfully perturbed with this that he did not want to stay in my house for long. After that I decided not to invite any of my friends home, although I visited them, admiring their ways of living and houses, particularly their toilets.

After all the latrines had been washed, the scavenging family cleaned the entire lane, with houses supplying water for this purpose. In the mean time, the malodorous air enfeebled. The lane looked clean and we all wished it to remain as it was ‘forever’. When the work had finished, the male members of the scavenging family left for home, not less than two kilometres from the street where they worked. Although I never visited, I knew they lived outside the Walled City, the other name of Old Delhi, in a settlement of their caste persons. They walked to their respective places of work. Once, by then I had joined Hans Raj College for graduation, I asked Dhammo’s brother why they did not hire a cycle-rickshaw to reach the street, his answer was that it was an expensive proposition; but when I asked the same question to my grandfather, he said they feared that the rickshaw-puller might be unwilling to take them as his passengers for their caste status was known to everyone, and one who did not know them personally would be able to infer it from their dresses and demeanours. My grandfather was referring to what I later learned from the work of McKim Marriott (1959) as the ‘attributional theory of caste ranking’.

The Plexus of Relationships

Whilst the men went away, the women stayed in the neighbourhood for some more time. Around the lunch time, they went from one house to another, seeking a couple of ‘leavened breads’ (rotī) from each one of them. Like the round of collecting the garbage, here also the women called for the households to give them rotīs—the call used to be ‘rotī do’ (‘give bread’). With rotī, however, curry or any vegetable preparation was generally not given. The number of rotīs given by the lady of the house varied, but in any case, they were not less than two. Whilst some gave freshly baked, others those that were made the night before; whilst some rotīs were smeared with clarified butter (ghī), the others were rather dry. Whatever be the quality of the rotīs, Dhammo’s mother and wife accepted these with gratitude; when the lady of the house came with rotīs, one of them, whosoever was there at that time, would spread her wrap, giving it the shape of a well, to collect them. The rotīs would be tossed in the wrap—no physical contact between the parties. I was told that the scavenging families would simply cook vegetables and lentil, or some non-vegetarian dish, and eat rotīs with this. The women would leave for home around early afternoon. They would either stay till the evening or come again when a feast took place in the neighbourhood, where their job was to collect the left-over food, which they would take home, and the leaf-plates to be disposed at the ‘garbage house’. For this job, they also came with their young children, who would help their mothers in various ways; otherwise they did not come in the morning hours when cleaning of the human waste took place.

I think that communities are intellectually bounded units, in the sense that they have scant understanding of the others—the way they live, the kind of thoughts they hold and cultivate, how they meet their needs, the goals they set for future. In fact, they know the others in terms of a set of stereotypes, which are uncritically transmitted to posterity. The same applied to the community of scavengers—we learnt that they were non-vegetarian and addicted to spirit, had their own gods and goddesses, were knowledgeable about supernatural cures, had considerably lax sexual mores, etc. ⁵ At the same time, one was supposed to be kind towards them and extend them help whenever they needed.

My grandfather told me what he said was a true happening. His spiritual preceptor was popularly known as Borewaley Baba, for he always wore clothes (a loin cloth and a shawl) made up of jute. Sporting matted hair, he was famous for his idiosyncrasies all over the street and also in the adjoining ones. In the morning hours he sat in the larger room of our house on the ground floor, known as dālān, receiving guests, rendering spiritual advice. Although generally he did not want money from any of his visitors, he accepted it from some of them, to be eventually spent on his travel to different pilgrim centres. On one occasion, he told his visitors that he was planning to go to Rameshwaram (in Tamil Nadu); and instantly a businessperson from another street offered him several silver coins—they were in circulation at that time—to take care of the expenses. He smelled these coins and refused to accept, saying that they were earned by advancing loans on interest to lower castes (particularly the scavenging) and since it was an immoral way of earning money, he would not accept these. The man who had offered these coins left the room enraged, hurling abuses at the mendicants in general. And, then the Borewaley Baba gave a short lecture to his visitors exhorting them not to ever charge interest from the scavenging families, since they were already extremely poor, and if they had to pay interest they would be further impoverished. Any loans to them should be, he said, like ‘do good deeds and forget about them’ (nekī kar kuen may dāl). In relationships with one’s serving castes, one should never forget the values of goodness and humanity. My grandfather later learnt that the man who was earning money from usury fell ill—‘his body turned black, appetite waned, in course of time festers grew on his body, and he died soon’. All this was supposed to have resulted from the bad words he spoke against the Baba.

World Toilet Day

In addition to receiving the daily round of bread, the scavenging family was paid five rupees every month by each of the households it served. There was no separate payment for removing litter from houses. I was told that monetary payment did not exist in past and came up with the general monetisation of the economy; so from then onwards, payment in cash and kind went hand in hand. As a child, I often wondered if they were not paid in cash, how would they buy vegetables and lentils, salt and sugar, clothes, and medicines? Since I had not seen the non-monetised economy, I could not conceptualise people living without money. Perhaps, they lived without these things; or their patrons provided these—not just bread but other things as well. Clothes were also given, but I learned that people were rather reluctant to part with their clothes, since they believed that these could always be used for casting black magic on the individuals who wore them. I had seen people keeping an eye on the clothes hanging on drying poles, for they feared that their jealous relatives and neighbours might cut a little thread from the clothes (or a tassel from the sārī) and use it for magical purposes. Later, as an anthropology student, I learned that this was an example of contagious magic, based on the principle of ‘once in contact, always in contact.’

The truism is that things have not changed much and millions of people are even today engaged in cleaning latrines and carrying loads of human waste on their heads. The Census of India, 2011, recorded that not less than 750,000 families were still working as manual workers. The Live Mint and the Wall Street Journal (19 November 2013) reported the case of a woman named Saraswati, one of the manual scavengers, who along with fifty other women, leaves early morning for a village in Ghaziabad (Uttar Pradesh) called Farrukhnagar, to ‘physically remove human excrement from dry toilets of high caste families’, for which she gets fifty to sixty rupees a month, and she receives an extra amount of ten rupees for cleaning the litter. Not only that, what she gets paid for the work she does is a mere pittance, but also she suffers from many illnesses the cause of which can be traced to the kind of work she does, where she is exposed to all sorts of germs. What is particularly touching in this case is Saraswati’s image of the self: She thinks that even after multiple baths, each part of her body stinks. ‘Give me any job, but please take me out of the hell,’ is her plea to the interviewer.

The brainchild of Dr. Bindeshwar Pathak, the founder of Sulabh Sauchalaya, the World Toilet Day, designated by the United Nations General Assembly, observed on 19 November every year, is expected to draw the attention of the states and governments to the fact that 2.5 billion people do not have access to a clean and safe toilet. In India, the estimate of the World Health Organisation and the United Nations Children’s Fund is that over fifty per cent people (620 million) practice open defecation (The Times of India, 19 November 2013; The Hindu, 20 November 2013). It is well known, as has been reported by the Census, that the number of the houses with television and telephones far exceeds that with toilet facilities. Cases of newly married women who returned from their husbands’ houses, since they did not have toilets, have garnered media attention, with some of these women receiving awards for boldly walking out of the toilet-less houses, notwithstanding the damage they might have caused to their reputation as well as to the prospect of a happy matrimony; but in this way, they have drawn attention to the importance of toilet in matters of hygiene and also the fact that because of the norms of modesty, toilets are far more central to women than to men. To put differently, men can relieve them publicly, rather unabashedly, which is not the case with women. In one of the focus group discussions we conducted with women on the problems of living in a squatter in Delhi (known as Yamuna Pushta), the demand on which consensus existed was ‘toilets exclusively for women’, which should not be accessible to men, since as one woman said, ‘men dirty the toilet’. Our androcentric ways of thinking and administration are such that while distributing public facilities, we generally forget women and their specific problems.

Many suggestions have been given. For instance, there is no disagreement on the issue that manual scavenging must come to an end. Construction of dry latrines must stop. The government should build flush toilets in those settlements where people are too poor to build these with their own resources. Railways should build modern toilets where human waste could be collected and disposed of mechanically, where human intervention is only in terms of operating the machines rather than handling the waste. Needless to say, this waste could be used as manure. The former scavengers could be rehabilitated in other occupations and jobs. The fight against untouchability should be intensified. Even when legally prohibited, the scourge and stigma of untouchability continues unabated, not only in villages but also in towns and metropolises, and often its perpetrators escape punishment. On record are cases of the children of manual scavengers, particularly vulnerable to discrimination in their schools, who drop out of schools because their teachers force them to perform cleaning and scavenging tasks (The Tribune, 6 September 2009).

Mahatma Gandhi on Scavenging

The Gandhian romanticism on scavenging is retrogressive. In one of his articles in Harijan (Gandhi, 1934), Gandhi called scavenging ‘one of the most honourable occupations’. ⁶ For him, it was not an ‘unclean occupation’. The scavenger was like the Brahmin—the latter looked after ‘sanitation of the soul’, whereas the scavenger, the ‘sanitation of the body’. A mother also handled ‘dirt’ (meaning faeces)—of her child—but then no one called her occupation ‘unclean’, Gandhi said. In his other article of 1936 (titled ‘The Ideal Bhangi’, published in Harijan), Gandhi thought that the manual scavenger was a sort of ‘physician’ and a ‘warner’; he wrote:

My ideal Bhangi [the manual scavenger] would know the quality of night-soil and urine. He would keep a close watch on these and give a timely warning to the individual concerned. Thus he will give a timely notice of the results of his examination of the excreta. That presupposes a scientific knowledge of the requirements of his profession.

When I read this, the sight of an early morning dry latrine, before it is cleaned, came to my mind, and I was reminded of its description in the article, mentioned earlier in the context of the life-history of a woman from the community of manual scavengers:

Dry toilets are toilets that do not flush and have no running water. People shit, shit on it again, and the entire day’s excreta from the entire family is heaped in a plane between two cemented elevations that they call latrines.

The stench emitting from the heap of human waste, lying on the slab of the latrine for hours is so overpowering that howsoever ‘medically-oriented’ (or rather ‘pathologically-oriented’) be the scavenger, he would neither have time nor patience to examine the excreta, which in any case is not of an individual, but of the members of the household and also the visitors. And, in any case, a pathological (or rather ‘ethno-pathological’) examination of human stool is nowhere in the objectives of the scavengers. What I remember from my childhood is that Dhammo and his family people hurriedly collected the human waste with the help of a scarper (or tin plate), dumped it in the bucket, kept the bucket out, called the members of the house to pour water on the slab of the toilet, wash it, and move to the next house. Where was the time to ‘study’ the excreta? And, who wanted the advice of the scavenger on the quality of the faecal material?

By equating the work of the ‘manual scavenger’ with that of the ‘mother’, one forgets that the cultural construction of the faeces of the child is different from that of an adult. The notions of dirt and filth (which are culturally defined, interpreted, and understood) are differentially associated—the faeces of a child may not be regarded as ‘dirty’ as that of the elders. The act of a child’s urination on the clothes of an adult is taken sportingly, jokingly, and it does not incur the kind of pollution which is incurred when the drops of urine of an adult fall on one’s clothes, or even when one’s own urine drops fall.

Scavenging may be highlighted as ‘honourable’, for what the scavenger does, none would be able to do, or none would like to do. I would here like to refer to the case of Saraswati, who came from a family, which although belonging to the caste of manual scavengers did not engage itself in that occupation. The separation of caste from social function is well known—holding membership in a caste does not imply pursuing its occupation. After her marriage, Saraswati came to a house where her mother-in-law worked as a manual scavenger and wanted her to take up the caste occupation. Though reluctant, Saraswati was without option; one can imagine here what she would have passed through while handling human waste. It is not only that today she feels bodily dirty, but also stigmatised, discriminated, and polluted; and the ‘honourable’ occupation brings her a measly amount of money. The occupation consigns her to lowly social and economic position.

Designating scavenging ‘honourable’ is a reminder of how ruling classes justify the existing ideology and legitimise false consciousness so that the system continues as it is, because within its ambit, some are privileged and advantaged, whilst others are at the lower rungs. ⁷ Ruling communities, rich people, people with high status are conservative in their approach, desiring the society to remain as it is, since their privileges flow from it. Just by telling people that they respect the scavengers, or following their occupation symbolically—such as picking up brooms and tin plates—to bring an end to the inequality between castes, is an example of utopian thinking. What is required is concerted effort to stop once and for ever manual scavenging and the construction of dry toilets and the conversion of the existing dry toilets to the ones in which the flush system is fitted. We have high expectations from the Prohibition of Employment as Manual Scavengers and their Rehabilitation Act, 2013, which came into force on 6 December 2013, the day when Dr. Ambedkar left for his heavenly abode. The offences under this Act, cognizable and non-bailable, are the construction and maintenance of an insanitary latrine and engaging and employing persons to work as manual scavengers. It also prohibits engaging or employing persons for hazardous cleaning of a sewer or a septic tank.