Abstract
In this ethnographic account, Manisha Anantharaman brings out the nuances of Bengaluru’s battle with waste and the role of different actors invested in tackling it. The author’s decade-long engagement as a participant observer and interviewer in the field makes the work methodologically rigorous and qualitatively rich. Bengaluru is an important and critical urban site that offers insights for multiple reasons. As an entrepreneurial, start-up and ‘hyper-neoliberal’ city in the global South with a growing middle class, it is still hierarchically stratified along the lines of caste, class and gender, with notions of purity and pollution directly impacting those who deal with waste. These aspects of urban sustainability and environmentalism become more pronounced in this global city. Recycling Class is about communities at the margins navigating their right to the city despite their weakened collective bargaining power. We are compelled to ponder over the use of the term ‘sustainability’ in the current neoliberal era, which favours privatisation, monetisation and marketisation. This is made visible through the elite middle class that transfers the responsibility of sustainability to personal choices and actions that have classist and casteist connotations.
The monograph is divided into five chapters, bookended by an Introduction and a Conclusion. The reader is systematically taken through the specificities of waste in Bengaluru and the various efforts that individuals as well as collectives have taken to address it, coming together formally and informally. The chapters are approached through different ways of thinking about citizenship—such as propertied citizenship (Baviskar, 2011) and ecological citizenship (Dobson, 2006)—and I strongly feel that these can be extended to apply to other indices like entrepreneurial citizenship (Gooptu, 2013; Irani, 2019). The book also addresses the role of the state and how different classes negotiate it through words and actions.
In the first chapter, the author works with the concept of ‘performative environmentalism to understand the cultural politics of everyday environmentalism’ (p. 31), bringing attention to the ‘eco-lifestyle’ choices of individuals, such as switching to green transport like bicycles, growing organic food on rooftops and balconies, and composting and recycling. These choices are as performative as they are well intended. These are validated only for the social groups situated in a particular class and caste position, offering them moral high ground by way of their daily choices, displaying a certain aesthetic and discursive language. By taking attention away from the state and large corporations, these individualistic actions reinforce the status quo by deepening the boundaries built over economic and symbolic capitals and overlook larger social problems afflicting the city and society. While the choices of the middle-class individual are ecologically conscious and well-meaning, these choices often tend to be anti-poor. This is exacerbated by the presence of caste, furthering the marginalisation, stigmatisation and oppression of those from communities that have historically handled waste. The gated apartment complexes that the middle class inhabits become sites of such contestation and performance. The author coins the term ‘communal sustainability’ to describe bottom-up initiatives located in apartments and neighbourhoods that are aimed at dealing with waste. The social infrastructure needed for these initiatives to succeed relies on gendered, caste- and class-based roles and is monitored through affect and emotions. Towards this, Anantharaman notes that ‘inducing feeling of shame, anxiety or blame has been used to maintain social control over how practices [around household discards] are reproduced’ (p. 72). Communities are ‘hierarchical, exclusionary and oppressive’, and these intersect to determine the socially reproduced roles of actors in determining who handles waste and how. There is much fanfare around the individual volunteer efforts to manage waste, without actually handling waste, and their scale, both numeric and political, is minuscule to bring real change. While the informed and ecologically conscious middle class is moved to work towards sustainability, leveraging their various capitals, what they lack is the knowledge of waste outside of their homes or political influence. This creates a divide between those who do and those who get things done by relying on others’ labour. However, communal sustainability does open avenues for political participation and activism to those who would otherwise not get involved. This differs from elite performative environmentalism in its acknowledgment of the role of the waste pickers. Another neoliberal feature is that entrepreneurship is given importance in every initiative, waste pickers’ work included. Celebrating the entrepreneurial streak in individuals and groups reveals the commodification of waste and privatisation of waste management. Those who are enterprising are deemed worthy and given access to waste and its ‘management’. Those who demonstrate skills are included and the state’s welfare role is reduced to that of regulating the market.
Can the neoliberal take on waste and waste management be subverted? Parisara Tanda (meaning green force/team in Kannada) is a case in point here. This organisation, with waste pickers in its ranks, has made a case for waste pickers by using the environmental and neoliberal discursive language of the middle class. Adopting the strategy of relational organising, it has formed alliances between the middle-class green crusaders and the waste pickers in order to further the interests of the latter. Parisara Tanda effectively portrays waste pickers as ‘silent environmentalists’ with ‘entrepreneurial abilities’ who add value to the city. Machinery and equipment are deployed to deal with waste, but it has its limitations and cannot replace the tacit knowledge of the waste pickers, who have a sensory and embodied understanding of the categories and handling of waste. However, what is desirable of infrastructures are their ethical and equitable impacts and here again, the ethnographic method is useful in bringing out the nuances and complexities by focusing on the everyday practices over a period of time. Circular economies bring all the environmental actors together—the state, big corporations, the middle-class crusader and the waste picker—towards a mutually beneficial partnership (pp. 139–140). The case of Bengaluru points to something contrary where this leads to the reproduction of inequities. The proposed inclusivity may come at the cost of dispossession (of material and of collective action) and precarity of the waste pickers. Some of the waste pickers may be included in this circular economy, but the majority get left behind. While inclusivity is desirable, it tends to come at the cost of maintaining a status quo that reinforces existing divisions and conflates seemingly similar concepts that do not address the issue at hand. As becomes evident in the book, alliances and partnerships across classes tend to take away more than give to the oppressed classes. Alternatively, through imbalanced/imperfect alliances, not all is lost as the author sees latent undercurrents of change and political action. What also becomes apparent is that infrastructures are not just physical provisions but also include social relations and practices. What, then, is an ethical way out of the environmental and sustainability conundrum? The book emphatically states that the core of any desirable change is social reform, without which no consequential change will follow. Anantharaman points out in the conclusion that ‘we need a fundamental shift in thinking and action beyond inclusion’ by recognising mutual dependence and vulnerability (p. 178). However, as a necessary first step to initiate this shift, the author proposes ‘reparation by inclusion’, and in India (Bengaluru), this comes down to caste and its annihilation. Anantharaman situates her arguments by drawing from a comprehensive set of literature that finds applicability across continents and cultures. Using sociology, feminist geography and urban political ecology, she breaks down the concepts and analysis of ethnographic data and applies them to Bengaluru. The author’s interdisciplinary training locates her in a position to address diverse audiences, bringing us closer to the materiality, politics and sociality of waste. The book will be useful to the disciplines of sociology, environmental justice and urban studies and is well suited to inform policymakers.