Pollution and Intimacy in a Transcendent Ethics of Care: A Case of Aged-care in India

ABSTRACT

In India, where children’s care of ageing parents is seen as practical and sacred, animated by notions of seva (selfless service), the outsourcing of elder care causes considerable concern. Meanwhile, carers’ work in old-age homes is treated as transactional, and their moral claims about this work are either overlooked or criticised. While gendered, socio-economic circumstances compel the women we discuss in this paper to care-work at an old-age home in Pune, they also understood this work as a register for the spiritual striving normally reserved for higher classes and castes. Accordingly, notions of polluting and non-polluting bodily waste inform the sense of kin-like intimacy through which they frame their labour. Attending to the institutional, spiritual, emotional and bodily registers of these carers’ work, we argue for a transcendent ethics of care, a conceptualisation that contributes to broader understandings of marginalisation and moral imagination in an ordinary ethics of care.

KEYWORDS:

• Ethics
• care work
• aged-care
• India
• pollution
• transcendence

Acknowledgements

This study would not have been possible if not for the residents, maushya, managers, volunteers and visiting relatives at Aaram, who were supportive of the strange persistent presence that is fieldwork from the start. We would especially like to thank the woman we call ‘Shilpa’, who helped smoothen out interpretation and remains a friend, and Aaram’s maushya, whose attentiveness to our learning, even as they worked, felt like a form of care. Thank you, too, to Rebecca Kunin, Laura McLauchlan, Neha Meher, Mira Taitz and Vasavdatta Velu for conversations years ago from which trains of thought leading to this paper first stemmed, and the ASAA/NZ (Association of Social Anthropologists of Aotearoa/New Zealand) Kākano Fund Award, for supporting parts of this study. Finally, we thank two anonymous reviewers for their careful and critical engagement with our thinking – this paper is strengthened by their input.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. All names, including that of the old-age home, have been changed to protect the identities of those whose lives are written about here.

2. Aaram is the Marathi word for ‘comfort’. Its caring connotations resonate with those of this old-age home's actual name.

3. ‘Middle-class’ is a relative, constantly shifting, category and identity. We use it to describe a population broadly united by shared taste, values and aspirations rather than by income-level or their footing in social strata. Penny Vera-Sanso notes that the perceived needs of Indian middle-class’ younger generation (the ‘productive’ generation) have been rising steadily and rapidly since Independence, in 1947, and the liberalisation of the economy, in 1990 (2006: 231).

4. Families who visited Aaram frequently cited the unreliability of hired help as one of the reasons care at home stopped being feasible. For Meher, whose aunt tirelessly and repeatedly stepped in as full-time caregiver for her bedridden grandmother in Mumbai, India, unable to find a reliable long-term hired carer, these families’ experiences are intimately relatable. Without diminishing these strains and sacrifices, it bears noting that the trope of unreliable domestic workers is one which can privilege the needs of employers’ families over those of carers and obviates the economic inequalities that structure the relationship (Colen 1995; Constable 2009).

5. Outside of parent–child relationships, responsibilities to provide care are delegated through male kin-ties. An old person would expect to first look to their son and daughter-in-law for care and support, and if unmarried or childless, to their brother and fraternal nephew(s).

6. In a special section of the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (Robbins et al. 2016), Joel Robbins criticises scholarship on ‘ordinary ethics’, arguing that it overlooks the place of religion in quotidian, ordinary, life. At issue for Robbins are questions about the relative conceptual scope of the ‘ordinary’, ‘transcendence’ and ‘religion’. For Das and others (Robbins et al. 2016), Robbins problematically conflates ethics with religion, and religion with transcendence, thus diminishing the possibilities that an ordinary ethics sought to illuminate.

7. Shilpa was one of a handful of volunteers who visited Aaram with varying regularity to spend time with residents. As well as chatting with residents, playing them music on her phone and bringing them reading materials, Shilpa also regularly helped us translate between more sophisticated Marathi and English.

8. These were the figures cited at the time of fieldwork in 2011, though they would have (most likely) increased since then. At that time, Rs 1000 was worth approximately USD20; Aaram therefore charged USD90 a month for its patient service, expended USD140 on each patient and at-home carers cost USD60-100 per month for 12-hour day or night shifts.

9. Though our fieldwork and this paper focus on women's spaces, there were men's wards too: set apart from the women, 19 men occupied a row of small rooms in a long, narrow, single-storey building with a shared porch. While the maushya cleaned and delivered food to these wards, too, intimate care, like bathing and feeding, was done by one maman (uncle) who was also a sweeper. He explained that maman positions were hard to fill, as most men considered it emasculating. He said he, however, took pride in it, citing seva and the closeness he felt to his ajobas (grandfathers).

10. In conversations with maushya, Sonia often gravitated towards issues surrounding bedpans; it seems that the intimacy and dirtiness they symbolised struck her as one of the most challenging aspects of care at Aaram, as she frequently attached difficulties of care to bedpans. Sonia's mother had died nearly two years before she and Meher met at Aaram. On their first meeting, Sonia recounted that she could do everything for her mother during her last months, until she began to need a bedpan, at which point, she had hired a housemaid.