Challenging invisibilities: a sensorial exploration of gender and caste in waste-work

ABSTRACT

Knowledge systems characterised by classification, categorisation, and data collection underlie efforts to govern. This paper critically examines knowledge collected by central governing entities in India about waste in an urban local body – specifically through the National Cleanliness Survey or Swachh Survekshan. Relying extensively on field work in Rajpur (2018–2019), one of the highest ranked urban areas in the survey, we reflect on the process of knowledge creation. We find that, even as we come to know, understand, and treat waste, existing hierarchies of race, class, caste, and gender find ways of re-expressing themselves. Intimately tied to its preoccupation with the occupation of physical space, the state’s (and by consequence, the dominant) gaze at waste is primarily a visual one with the central project stripping the knowledge of sensory aspects in efforts to enhance claims of ‘scientific’ knowledge. Much like the mechanisms of the state, formal processes of research too have privileged ways of seeing and hearing (through photographs, writings, and presentations) as opposed to other sensory means of learning like smell and touch. Smell and touch that shape knowledge systems intimately and are the fundamental organising principle of several social norms, like caste, in South Asia are rather difficult to capture. Drawing on a bricolage of methods – including primary field work, document analysis, and visual data, this paper explores waste as entangled in gender, caste, and colonial histories. Further, it lays a pathway for a multi-sensorial understanding of (in)visibilisation.

Les systèmes de connaissances caractérisés par la classification, la catégorisation et la collecte de données sous-tendent les efforts pour gouverner (James Scott 1998). Cet article jette un regard critique sur les connaissances recueillies par des instances administratives centrales en Inde sur les déchets au sein d'un organisme local urbain - plus précisément à travers l'Enquête nationale sur la propreté, ou Swachh Survekshan. Nous nous appuyons largement sur le travail de terrain mené à Rajpur (2018-2019)^[4], l'une des zones urbaines les mieux classées par l'enquête, pour mener une réflexion sur le processus de création de connaissances. Nous constatons que, tandis nous en apprenons davantage sur les déchets et que nous les comprenons et les traitons mieux, les hiérarchies existantes de race, de classe, de caste et de genre trouvent des manières de se ré-exprimer. Le regard que porte sur les déchets l'État ^[5] (le regard par conséquent dominant), en lien intime avec sa préoccupation concernant l'occupation de l'espace physique, est principalement un regard visuel, et le projet central dépouille les connaissances d'aspects sensoriels afin de renforcer les revendications de connaissances « scientifiques ». À l'instar des mécanismes de l'État, les processus formels de recherche ont eux aussi des manières privilégiées de voir et d'entendre (à travers des photographies, des écrits et des présentations), par rapport à d'autres moyens sensoriels d'apprendre comme l'odorat (Gopal MS 2019) et le toucher (Sundar Sarukkai 2009). Il est assez difficile de décrire l'odorat et le toucher, qui façonnent intimement les systèmes de connaissances et constituent le principe organisateur fondamental de plusieurs normales sociales, comme le système de castes, en Asie du Sud. Cet article s'appuie sur un assemblage de méthodes – notamment le travail de terrain primaire, l'analyse de documents et les données visuelles – pour examiner les déchets comme question intrinsèquement liée au genre, au système de castes et aux histoires coloniales. Il met par ailleurs en place une voie permettant de comprendre de manière multisensorielle l'(in)visibilisation.

Los sistemas de conocimiento caracterizados por la clasificación, la categorización y la recopilación de datos subyacen a los esfuerzos por gobernar. Este artículo examina críticamente los conocimientos sobre los residuos compilados por las entidades centrales del gobierno de India en una entidad local urbana, empleando, concretamente, la Encuesta Nacional de Limpieza o Swachh Survekshan. Tomando como base el trabajo de campo realizado en Rajpur (2018-2019), ^[4] una de las mejores zonas urbanas según la clasificación de la encuesta, reflexionamos sobre el proceso de creación de conocimiento. Incluso, cuando llegamos a conocer, comprender y tratar los residuos, descubrimos que las jerarquías de raza, clase, casta y género existentes encuentran formas de volver a expresarse. Íntimamente ligada a su preocupación por la ocupación del espacio físico, la mirada del Estado ^[5] (esto es, la mirada dominante) sobre los residuos es sobre todo visual y el proyecto central despoja al conocimiento de sus aspectos sensoriales, en un esfuerzo por mejorar sus pretensiones de crear conocimiento “científico”. Como en el caso de los mecanismos implementados por el Estado, los procesos formales de investigación han privilegiado el ver y oír (en fotografías, escritos y presentaciones) frente a otros medios sensoriales de aprendizaje como el olfato y el tacto. El olfato y el tacto, que en el sur de Asia conforman de manera intrínseca los sistemas de conocimiento y son el principio organizador fundamental de varias normas sociales, como la casta, son bastante difíciles de captar. A partir de métodos variopintos—incluidos el trabajo de campo primario, datos visuales y el análisis de documentos—este trabajo examina los residuos como algo enredado en las historias de género, casta y colonialidad. Además, traza una vía para la comprensión multisensorial de la (in)visibilización.

KEYWORDS:

• Invisibility
• waste
• South-Asia
• senses
• caste
• gender

Introduction

[H]ere, we are not worried about dust on the street, that is not our job, we just have to remove the dry waste (kuda). (Raj,¹ 50s, male, a supervisor of sanitation work, explaining the process of cleaning the streets, 20 January 2019)

Officials and politicians alike were worried about rankings under the National Cleanliness Survey or the Swachh Survekshan (SS). Water tankers sprayed water on the sides of the roads during the evaluators’ visits. Residents did not particularly appreciate this. A resident we interviewed near the bus stand of the town exclaims on seeing the water tanker:

Here! The water tanker (Figure 1) has come out again now. Two surveys have come and gone, but this dust remains … I have heard they got a lot of money … But you can see for yourself, it is the same. (Dharam, 50s, male, resident, in an interview with him and his family, 8 November 2019)

We were worried about the dust. It gives a bad impression of our town. But the evaluators have said, dust is not solid waste. They were here to see the door-to-door collection of solid waste. We hope the residents don’t give bad feedback; they don’t understand this. (Amit, 30s, male, project implementation officer, during a conversation in his office, 24 January 2019)

Highlighted as one of the cleanest towns in India, dust was one of the most striking features of our field site, Rajpur.² Broken cemented roads on which trucks and buses run buzzing through the centre of the town made it a particularly dusty one. Not surprisingly, dust would also appear as one of the primary concerns of the residents and on-ground officials as we went around studying waste and its governance. Residents reminisced about the time when the town did not have dust. Some wondered: ‘How are we the cleanest town?’ However, the official national survey (SS) did not consider dust as ‘solid’ waste and neither did those officially tasked with governing waste.

Knowledge systems, instantiated by efforts like the National Cleanliness Survey, are constituted by systems of classification, categorisation, and data collection, and are essential requisites in governance by the state³ (Scott 1998). Despite the power the state asserts, often due to the knowledge, they are often normalised as part of the dominant discourse. However, when materials like dust resist the categories, the implicit properties and assumptions about what constitutes knowledge and processes of knowledge production start becoming explicit. Although those touching, smelling, and breathing it identified it with waste, those seeking to understand and govern it from a distance via the survey did not. The exclusions in the survey insulated these distant actors from the ire of the residents, but did not ease the on-ground implementation officer’s anxiety about how people understood and articulated their experience of waste in the city, an anxiety that represented the political potential of a material – dust – otherwise invisibilised in official registers of waste (Laszczkowski 2020).

Figure 1. Water tankers used to temporarily settle the dust at the time of surveyor visits. Photograph taken by the authors.

Waste materials, as the example of dust we began with, are not easily tractable. Semantically, the roots of the word waste lie in the Latin word vastus, meaning ‘unoccupied, uncultivated’ referring to unused land (Oxford English Dictionary). The meanings attached to waste, however, vary from a ‘resource’ to a ‘nuisance to be neutralised’ (Cavé 2017). Waste is thus often understood to be that which has been ‘discarded’ and needs to be moved away from sight of residents, and waste producers and its infrastructure often referred to it as ‘invisible’ (Bakker 2010). Not surprisingly, given the meanings attached to the material itself, waste-work is marred with historical ‘legacies’, legal denials, and bureaucratic orders that deny dignity, decent working conditions, and decent wages (Harriss-White 2020; Mander 2020; Wilson and Singh 2016).

In this paper, we elaborate on the dichotomy of a waste material – like dust – being a significant part of one’s experience of ‘living’, but not ‘governing’, and describe how knowledge systems which are meant to inform and illuminate also ‘invisibilise’. Working with examples of waste materials, infrastructure, and work, we examine elements that are invisibilised through various – formal and informal – governing mechanisms, and the knowledge they create and use. These include categorisation, classification, relabelling, ambiguities, naturalisation, ignoring, erasures, and selective celebrations (Larkin 2013; Star 1999). The (in)visibilisation, we argue, is not apolitical and not restricted to policy alone, but also includes privileged forms of academic inquiry, including our own. Drawing on a bricolage of methods, including critical reflections of our primary field work, document analysis, and visual data, we especially focus on how dominant ways of knowing are sensorily limited and gendered.

Formal processes of knowing are often privileged ways of ‘seeing and hearing’, as opposed to other sensory means of learning like smells (see Gopal 2019) and touch (see Jaaware 2019; Sarukkai 2009; Shah et. al., 2006). Historically, colonialism brought with it a value-laden understanding of ‘scientific’ and ‘scholarly’ work. It reified hierarchies of the senses, relegating touch and smell to the ‘lower’ senses, that significantly overlapped with social hierarchies of gender and caste (Classen 1998; Pink 2009). Steeped in histories of colonialism, much academic work, including this research project, focuses on one or a subset of senses. This is also reflected in the tools through which researchers gather and present the data, typically leveraging seeing (reading or observing) and hearing (lectures, presentations, interviews). For instance, biologist Merlin Sheldrake explains how a historical focus of scientific experiments on the ‘consistently and objectively observable and measurable’ undermines sensations that are difficult to observe and measure repeatedly and consistently – relegating them to being subjective and unscientific (Kahn 2023). These scientific endeavours often invariably intersect with existing sociocultural hierarchies like gender and caste (Kapoor 2021).

Like with other endeavours, the dominant gaze at waste is primarily a visual one with a central project guided by the desire to strip the knowledge of sensory aspects in attempts to claim scientific knowledge. Our academic sensibilities highlight some senses or aspects of waste and waste-work more and ignore others. However, when studying waste, it is hard to escape how other senses impinge our experience and understanding of it. Sensorial awareness, that is otherwise numbed, is essential if we are to understand mechanisms invisibilising waste materials, infrastructures, and workers that may not be politically, economically or socioculturally convenient, aesthetically pleasing, or ‘ritually pure’ (more on this later). To instigate this awareness, we elaborate on ways in which senses of touch and smell, that are otherwise devalued in formal knowledge, occupy essential roles in the daily practices and knowledge of those working directly with waste. In doing so, we hope to also bring attention to those – predominantly women and people from historically disadvantaged castes, Dalits and Adivasis⁴ – who are not only socioculturally and economically excluded, but epistemically marginalised as well.

Given the overarching objective of this paper to interrogate ways of knowing and understanding, in the next section we describe our own ways of knowing and elaborate on the methodology used for a larger research project that provides the basis for this paper.

Ways of our own knowing

Data can be ‘wondered, eaten, walked, loved, listened to, written, enacted, versed, produced, pictured, charted, drawn, and lived’ (Koro-Ljungberg and MacLure 2013, 221), rather than ‘merely found or collected’ (Ellingson and Sotirin 2020, 820).

The paper is based on a larger research project that was based on a review of policy documents and field work⁵ in a small urban local body in central India. Data, as is almost always the case, were often ‘made’ and ‘assembled’ with the help of participants,⁶ field associates, writers of government and newspaper reports, thesis advisors, and several others who were a part of regular discussions. The collective effort was to visibilise aspects of waste-work. The methods predominantly included observations, conversational interviews, semi-structured interviews, mapping, doodling, collating, and analysing government documents. Observations were conducted in spaces where waste resides – households, waste-centres, roadsides, landfills, processing centres, and governing office spaces. We interacted and learnt from several people. We had longer conversations with 197 people, including workers (65), supervisory staff (32), government officials and consultants (40), residents (51), and voluntary social workers (nine). While we do not wish to fix the participants in categories of gender and caste, and the paper explores the implications of these categories, over 70 per cent of workers and supervisory staff were Dalit and Adivasi women. The government officials and consultants and social workers were predominantly men from other dominant castes. Residents were predominantly women, due to gendered roles and us finding women at home during the day. Because we visited different localities, we interacted with residents from different caste groups (including Adivasis, Dalits, and the presumed ‘upper’ castes like Brahmins and Baniyas).

The areas of the town that were observed, or where interviews were conducted, were mapped on a map using an app, Map Marker (see Figure 2). Other than as an administrative tool of tracing and going back to places where we had visited, mapping helped recognise what official accounts tried to invisibilise. Mapping is a tool often used to make lands and populations selectively visible to governing entities (Scott 1998). However, mapping governing entities by researchers and workers can potentially reverse the gaze, making the governing entities legible and visibilising aspects that may actively be hidden or invisibilised by governing entities (Lockton 2016).

Figure 2. Example of mapping done and used on the field. The image provided is just a sample. It is not high resolution, to be able to maintain the anonymity of the location.

During the course of the research, we stumbled upon a methodological quagmire. While we continued to engage in visually and auditorily capturing the field, writing what we ‘saw’ and ‘heard’ with our trained lenses and aural abilities, the materials and people we were working with often threw up concerns and arguments that did not neatly fit into our academically trained notions of what constituted data and knowledge, and how they could be analysed and represented, including the predominance of smell in people’s experiences, workers’ experiences of untouchability, and emotions and feelings of different people. The field laid bare our limitations of being able to capture the complexities of waste and the experiences of those who worked with it, especially the biases that perhaps stemmed from our own training and privileges.

Reflections from the field: ‘uncomfortable reflexive practices’

Data were not going to be out there, waiting to be accessed. The process of data making or assembling is a nonlinear one. While we were aware of this in theoretical terms, we were surprised and often frustrated when it usually took longer to discover the waste flows that were not in official narratives, or actively hidden from official narratives. Some aspects of the study, like waste and waste-work, are stigmatised forms of work, and some conversations (e.g. around caste) are difficult and discomforting. For example, parts of waste-work and associated knowledge remained obscure from researchers because of stigma associated with the work. The research process itself then revealed existing cultural meanings that were attributed to waste. For example, workers were particularly hesitant in sharing parts of their work that were perceived as ‘dirtier’: handling human bodies, animal carcasses, human faecal material, and so on. In this section, we lay out different tensions in the field through a reflective process – subjecting the researcher also to the gaze of being researched. What happens when a researcher, with some identities ascribed and some assumed, enters an initially unfamiliar situation? We specifically reflect on the gender and caste positions of researchers and how they interact with the research itself. In earlier writing, we have also reflected on specific practices of data collection like writing on the field (Rajendra and Sarin 2022).

It might appear to be a self-indulgent endeavour, but the effort is to make the process of data collection transparent, and engage in reflexivity in its subsequent systematisation and analysis, by spelling out the experiences and emotions in this process. The reflections during the field work have arisen from continuous conversations between the authors during and after the field work. Following Wanda Pillow (2003, 175), we hope to move away from comfortable uses of reflexivity to what she terms ‘uncomfortable reflexive practices’.

Being an outsider, the power relations between the participants often had to be discovered. The nature of the setup sometimes created situations where an interview had to be in the presence of other participant(s). We often avoided interviewing participants in the presence of those ranked higher in the formal hierarchy of work. For example, we avoided interviews with workers in front of their supervisors; supervisors in front of government officials. The opposite situation did not occur often because interviews happened in official spaces where the mid-managerial staff were not present. In one case, a city engineer (man, 40s) was interviewed in the presence of a mid-management supervisory member of staff (woman, 20s). It seemed an interesting setup where the supervisor later said there were things that she came to know, like the finances of the urban local body governing (ULB), that she had not been informed about formally, even on asking.

Much has been discussed informally about women researchers, their positionality and safety concerns. These discussions are now trickling into academic writing as well (Kwak 2019). In the field, Advaita was often asked: Where are you staying? Are you married? How old are you? Questions on accommodation particularly were uneasy, because she was staying in a hostel that was known and easily identifiable. Being a woman researcher in the field enabled the development of deeper relationships with women workers which would not have been possible otherwise. She often addressed most workers as didi⁷ and they did, too. Some who were much older called Advaita beta or beti (local translation for daughter), and she reciprocated by calling them aunty. The interviewing of male participants was, however, different due to gender norms and roles. Advaita often interviewed male participants much older than her and addressed them as uncle or sir,⁸ and participants too addressed her as their daughter (beta or beti). Similarly aged men were not easy to interview. After some uncomfortable initial interviews, the later interviews were usually in the presence of the field associate or mediated by other older male participants.

In conversational interviews, often there were discussions on perceptions and thoughts about the recent happenings around the town. Some participants spoke freely on their caste biases, holding nothing back. Some expressed hatred, while others had pleasant attitudes towards disadvantaged people and minorities in the country. Should a researcher express their thoughts fully or not? In one case, a participant, who was a resident of the town, told the field associate that they (advasis) are from the ‘jungles’, that the provincial government was formed for them, and that the government is doing so much for ‘them’. The field associate for the study belonged to the Scheduled Tribe community and was visibly hurt. On responding and talking about the historical oppression of Adivasis, the researcher was immediately asked about their caste, as the participant disclosed theirs. ‘We are Rajputs,⁹ who are you?’ The curiosity about the caste of the researchers was common.

Both Ankur and Advaita have not experienced explicit caste discrimination. That the question of caste was not important for us is a sign of privilege, since little discrimination was faced based on one’s caste. Dia Da Costa (2018) encourages us to question and re-think the ‘academically transmitted caste innocence’. The field work reminded us of our caste positions very often. Questions of our caste positions were often either explicitly asked or guessed as a part of conversations. Unfamiliar second names – Sarin and Rajendra – also led to curious questioning. A conversation with an upper caste Hindu house owner ended with him changing Advaita’s full name. The conversation which had started with an innocuous question of asking her name ended with him changing it. He said: ‘If I have to call you, I will call you Advaita Prasad’, even though her government-issued documents had Rajendra. He finally took his pen and wrote down something on a piece of paper, saying ‘but I will write Advaita Prasad’ (4 December 2018).¹⁰

A few months into the field work, we felt comfortable in having open discussions around caste. We did not need to ‘ask’ the caste, but could have a ‘conversation’ on caste. Participants had much to share about castes (samaj or jaat). It opened conversations that did not happen earlier. Even so, asking the caste of government officials and others in power was very difficult (with a few exceptions). It could possibly be due to the nature of the engagement. Conversational and repeated interviews could not be conducted with many government officials. But the question remained – how was discussing the caste of officers different from discussing the caste of the workers?

Gender and caste entanglements in waste

It’s a small town with many farm fields. The hostel Advaita was living in was on the edges of the town, overlooking one such field. A wall separates the residential area from the field. It was her second week in the hostel, when she asked where one disposes of sanitary napkins. Fellow hostel mates asked her to just drop/throw the soiled sanitary napkins behind the hostel in the field across the wall. She asked the family living on the ground floor that took care of the hostel. The conversation went as follows:

Rina: Yes, we can’t use the dustbin for it. If you put it in the dustbin, who will touch the dustbin?

Advaita: Can we bring it in a polythene bag and keep it near the rest of the garbage?

Rina: (surprised and angered) No, no, I will have to wash the floor everyday then. That is not possible. (Carefully explaining now) I take care of both cleanliness (safai) and purity (shuddhata) (safayi aur shudata dono ka bohot dhyaan rakhti hun). See, I am a religious woman, and believe in both. There are two things here. I will give you another example of household help. Before she touches the broom, I get her to clean the utensils. Only after the utensils [are clean] do I ask her to sweep the house, and then she touches the dustbin. And yes, the utensils are kept outside, so. No one enters the kitchen. We have a separate person for cleaning the toilet. (25 November 2018)

The creation of boundaries within waste are critical to ‘managing’ waste. The labour of creating, maintaining, and enforcing these boundaries often lies on women – ‘housewives’ and ‘maids’ (Luthra 2021). These boundaries also regulate sensorial interactions with waste. For example, the wall in the example above regulates the sense of sight. Some boundaries attempt to regulate touch by sequencing different kinds of work, or by separating the caste-ed ‘bodies’ that handle the different types of waste. However, waste materials often disrespect some of the boundaries of (in)visibility created. For example, the boundary of the wall is often flouted through smell and mosquitoes (Figure 3).

Notions of ritual purity categorise and hierarchise waste and structure waste-work. These notions, perhaps unique or, at least, accentuated in the dominant Indian sociocultural context, go far beyond concerns around touching and handling of waste based on ideas of hygiene. As Diane Coffey and Dean Spears write:

These rules are not, however, based on the germ theory of disease; in fact, they long pre-date it. Purity and pollution rules have little to do with germs and much to do with enforcing subordination of lower-caste people. (Coffey and Dean Spears 2017, 58)

The implications are not only on the material but also on workers handling it, with the implications on the latter often being permanent, over generations as well. Workers working with materials that are or are deemed ritually polluting are also deemed ‘untouchables’.

Figure 3. The wall separating the home and the field. Photograph taken by the authors.

Workers often referred to practices of untouchability, narrating stories of households, officials who practised untouchability and did not let workers touch gates, even dustbins, did not give them water, and did not want workers in their offices or homes. However, the background of the women workers also mattered. Many of these workers were Adivasis, who were not historically associated with waste-work, as in the case of workers from Dalit backgrounds. Renu, a resident, shares how she ‘allowed’ workers to touch the gate of her house because they are Adivasi women, and not Dalits. These narratives point out that untouchability goes far beyond the idea of mere physical contact. As Sarukkai puts it: ‘[T]ouch is not about contact (which is a relation) but is a quality that inheres in the object’ (2009, 41).

Notions of purity did not go unchallenged in our field. The challenges of workers and supervisors to the notions of purity varied from requests they made to residents to not practise untouchability, to workers even refusing to collect waste from some households and office spaces to challenge these notions. Some workers also made fun of these notions. For example, in an interview with a male sanitation worker, Rajan (50s) mockingly referred to sewage water as ‘ganga’, a ‘holy’ river that flows in Northern India. He said:

How many sweeper people died working under contract basis? They did not get anything. One who entered the tunnel to clean got drowned in ganga water (laughs). Those poor people are not educated, and we don’t know the laws too. (7 November 2019)

Caste, gender, and waste are inextricably intertwined, and the flow of knowledge of skills is mediated by institutions of caste and gender (Roman 2008). The door-to-door collectors of waste were predominantly rural indigenous women. Supervisory roles, often distanced from the sensorial implications of waste, were much more cosmopolitanised, and the government officials were all men and predominantly upper caste (savarnas). Sanitation workers who swept streets, cleaned drains, loaded and unloaded waste using a belcha (shovel), cleaned toilets, or handled unclaimed human bodies were often men, but from different castes. Workers pointed to a caste hierarchy and seniority in the allotment of work.

Other than expectations of what women could do and not do, their uniforms were also governed by local culture. Culturally gendered elements, like clothing, also mediated work that men or women could do. The door-to-door collectors were given sarees as uniform (Figure 4). In one case, in the making of compost, there was a requirement for workers to climb up a ladder. Workers here complained of discomfort in being able to work. On seeing a woman’s struggle, other workers also complained in front of the supervisor, saying that salwar kameez¹¹ would be a better uniform for work. The supervisor, who is herself in a salwar kameez, gets angry. She says: ‘Culturally, this would not be acceptable to the men. Then you [the workers] will not be able to even come to work.’ She then scolds the women for various things – like attendance and not being quick (29 November 2019). Not only does this elucidate the reification of existing social norms, it speaks about how decisions of uniforms or what women wear are often made by central authorities. The distant decisions may have been made without the know-how of the kind of work, assuming the cultural appropriateness of the uniform. The example exemplifies the role that materiality of waste plays in the continued persistence of gender and caste relations at work.

Figure 4. A woman worker segregating the waste outside a house. Photograph taken by the authors.

A sensory exploration of (in)visibilisation with a focus on smell

The Indian state is not an exception in using surveys to serve as a tool to ‘see’ (and govern) waste from a distance ‘objectively’. Often relying on pre-coded classifications, the town is represented through data sheets and GIS information and at best photographs, stripped of other sensory experiences of the residents and workers. When residents expressed their unhappiness, they often complained of the ‘smell’ of a decaying dump, or of dust in the air. When workers spoke of their concerns, they often referred to their bodies being associated with the ‘smell’ of waste materials or being regarded as ‘untouchables’. However, the centralisation and standardisation of national surveys often do not allow for the capture of these sensory aspects.

While the senses of sight and touch are perhaps more easily governed and assuaged, it is far more difficult to do that with ‘the unruliness of smell’ (Pachirat 2011). Likewise, the one element that comes up salient about our field work in waste repeatedly is smell. Workers, researchers, officials, residents, and our own experiences on the field, all speak about smell. In many cases, the references are casual about how some lanes of the city give off a stench because of the presence of primary waste segregation and processing centres. At other times, some materials (like organic material) were removed from processing centres on a priority basis, and the processing of organic waste material to make compost had been completely stopped in nearby residential areas where residents had complained. Some local elected leaders also sought to remove some processing centres completely, based on complaints by residents.

Those crossing waste-carts often covered their noses and complained to the workers as they passed by. This did not remain unnoticed by workers. Workers would be irked when residents covered their faces or noses while crossing them, their centre, their cart. A worker, irritated by one such incident, exclaimed: ‘Who is smelling? Me? My cart? No, it is your waste’ (Aruna, female, 20s, 14 December 2018). This reaction serves as an example of how a sense of smell spills over from waste (generated by the residents) to the carts (physical infrastructure) and to the workers. However, the reaction of the worker represents an attempt to deepen the boundaries to distinguish and create separations between wastes, infrastructures, and people. The deepening of boundaries seeks to resist convenient spills of perceptions between waste materials, infrastructure, and people, and the role senses can play in the resistance.

Despite its pervasiveness, smell has started receiving attention by social scientists only recently (Doron 2021; Flikke 2018). Gopal (2019) records smells of Mumbai, while Ishita Dey and Mohammad Sayeed (2019) map smells of Delhi – of homes, people, streets. Dey and Sayeed (2019) set up an art exhibit at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art where they explore city smells, including smells of disintegration, repair, waste, purification, and cleaning – rusted pipes in Delhi’s buses, leaking water pipes, dust, phenyl and neem as cleaning agents, grease, the smell of repair, dhuno (frankincense), the sap of the sal tree used during some festivals (Durga Puja), and how the ‘smells of autumn are constructed by politics of caste and purification narratives around good and evil’ (Dey and Sayeed 2019). Other efforts, like Smelly Maps,¹² have mapped the smell of the cities London and Barcelona (Swanson 2015). As other researchers explain, e.g. Eswaran and Hameeda (2013) who have pointed to the salience and permeance of smell in their experiences of researching waste, we found waste asserting itself through smell (see Corbin 1986; Swanson 2015; Tan 2013).

Discussion

Recording what we experience has been as old as humanity. Historically, paintings and writings have been used to record and communicate over space and time. Current technologies also enable the ‘capture’ or recording of sensory experiences differentially. Visual senses captured through photographs, and the spoken and heard through audio recording, are possibly the most easily available. Smell and touch, which shape the experiences of residents and workers intimately, are rather difficult to capture. Dey and Sayeed (2019) used small bottles with essence to replicate the experience of smells which evades capture so readily. Urban local bodies only deal with it in the form of ad hoc complaints from residents. The sense of touch, a fundamental organising principle of several social norms in South Asia, is also difficult to reproduce, and often resorts to visual or auditory senses for recording.

Consequently, not all senses lend themselves to being muted easily. For example, invisiblisation by sight is one of the most common strategies used – taking the waste out of the town boundaries, building a wall to hide a slum (Ghertner 2010), putting huge banners to hide slums (Doron and Raja 2015, 195), division of work in ways that creates distance from some parts of manufacturing processes (Krishna 2020a, 2020b; Pachirat 2011). In contrast, the smell of waste materials is not easily muted (even as one may use air-fresheners in toilets).

Research heavily relies on ocular (visual) representations. In the conceptualisation of invisibility, we recognise and analyse the dimensions of sight, hearing, smell, and touch. Some scholars have studied governing through these different senses. For example, Daniel Paiva and Herculano Cachinho (2019) explore and record the sounds of a city and map the ‘sonic geographies’ of Lisbon. In recent literature there is a shifting focus on the role of emotions in governance. For example, Karen Coelho (2022) refers to ‘the production of indifference’, while Jayaraj Sundaresan (2020) speaks about the role of anger in participatory politics in Bangalore. This inspires us to study the emotions and affective aspects of waste, its infrastructure, and waste-work (see Durnová and Hejzlarová 2018) in the future.

The available physical infrastructure also plays an important role in this visibility. The national survey (SS), which we discussed earlier, uses self-reported data in combination with field reporting by an external agency. The self-reported data and field reporting rely on IT and communication infrastructure. For example, locations of field reporting sites were recorded live, and the data were largely collected in the form of numbers in surveys and photographs. These were made possible only because of the existing infrastructure that enabled such large amounts of data to be processed by a distant central governing agency.

The research also contributes to an understanding of the limits to the transformative politics of sight. Does seeing waste and waste-work through national surveys translate into public deliberation about working conditions, or to breaking the practices of untouchability? Discussing the politics of sight (vision), Grace Cook considers how some environmental concerns, like plastic, got more traction than the production of food because plastics could be visualised:

That’s one of the reasons that plastic has played into our minds and hearts, because people have all these visual images of non-biodegradable plastics floating in the ocean and turtles swimming in it. People just think food is biodegradable and goes back into the earth, but they’re not thinking of the impact the production of it has had. (Cook 2019)

In studying industrial slaughterhouses, Pachirat (2011) describes how activities, potentially offensive to the senses, were hidden by walls, socially hidden by delegation to ‘others’. Much like the industrial slaughterhouses, there has been a concerted effort to govern waste by primarily moving it from sight. The removal is, of course, selective, and reminiscent of colonial forms of governance, not only in terms of the material that is removed, but also from whose sight it is removed. The desire of the state to ‘solve the problem’ by this selective removal has been aided by dominant forms of knowledge production that have favoured ocular understandings and representation. In this paper, we motivate pathways for future research to understand how individual cognitive capacities, cultural mechanisms, bureaucratic processes, and political manoeuvres have been tuned to mobilise the senses differentially and selectively, mostly focusing on the visual, thus preventing an understanding of the signals received through other senses, such as smell and touch. Such an understanding, we believe, would help us move away from efforts to govern from a distance to more localised and naturalised forms of governance. Although challenging, we believe such a task is essential for marginalised communities to challenge the epistemic foundations that preserve and reinforce the status quo.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Advaita Rajendra

Advaita Rajendra is an Assistant Professor, Indian Institute of Management, Sirmaur, India. Her doctoral research focuses on the governance of waste and waste-work in India. Her earlier work includes the understanding of gender, caste, and how they manifest in skewed sex ratios and in the reproduction of social hierarchies in government-run residential schools. Her research interests lie in policy issues at the intersection of labour, social hierarchies, and the environment. Postal address: Indian Institute of Management, Sirmaur. IIM, Rampur Ghat Rd, Kunja, Paonta Sahib, Himachal Pradesh 173025. Email: [email protected]

Ankur Sarin

Ankur Sarin is an Associate Professor at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, India. His past works include investigations of the effects of social and economic inequality on welfare outcomes of children and understanding the influence of technology on the social and economic life of the marginalised. He has a PhD in Public Policy from the University of Chicago and prior to joining IIM-Ahmedabad, was a Researcher at Mathematica Policy Research, Princeton, USA. Postal address: Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad. IIM Vastrapur, Ahmedabad, Gujarat 380015. Email: [email protected]

Notes

1 The paper uses pseudonyms.

2 The name of the urban area has been kept anonymous to protect the identity of participants, especially officials and workers.

3 The nation-state is referred to as ‘state’ in the paper. The attempt is to symbolically decentre the state as an important analytical category (Truelove 2020).

4 Dalits and Adivasis caste groups are legally mentioned in the constitution of India for purposes of affirmative action as Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribes. However, the terms Dalits and Adivasis are used by several social movements as self-determined names. Dalits are a historically marginalised caste in India. However, there have been some efforts by the state to not recognise the term Dalit (Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment (MoSJE) 2018), and use the legal term Scheduled Castes.

5 The conception of the field out there where we, as researchers, could go and capture data often raised questions for us on the purpose of the research, who it would benefit, and if it was possible as an external party to truly capture the experiences of people we meet. We were external to this place, that is to say, outsiders. Even though, far from enough, we attempted to lay out our reflections from the field work based on our own position within it.

6 Researchers have reflected on how we understand the nature of engagement between researchers and those they meet, hear, and write about. Several terms are often used in research: subjects, participants, respondents, informants. Each of them has an underlying assumption of the nature of this engagement. We often try to give details of the person we spoke to, their occupation, age, and gender, and not label them as ‘participants’ or any other term. Wherever not possible, for lack of a better word, we use the term ‘participants’.

7 Commonly used in parts of central India; its strict meaning is elder sister.

8 ‘Sir’ itself has colonial roots, used as a title for a knight. In South Asia, it is commonly used to refer to a senior member, especially at workplaces.

9 Rajput is typically one of the upper caste groups in South Asia.

10 Rajendra is not a surname that gives away the caste of a person, it is the first name of Advaita’s father. Prasad on the other hand, is Advaita’s father’s middle name, and the person found it more familiar to be able to pin down to a caste. Understanding the purpose of the questioning of all second names, Advaita had been reluctant in sharing the last name of her father, Yadav. It is important not to miss the patriarchal underpinnings of this conversation. Advaita tried to distract by also talking about her mother’s name and surname, but that was of no interest to them.

11 A traditional clothing worn by women in South Asia. It may be considered in some regions as less traditional than others.

12 See http://goodcitylife.org/smellymaps/project.php.