Broomscapes: racial capitalism, waste, and caste in Indian Railway Stations

ABSTRACT

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with cleaning workers in the railway stations of Hyderabad, I present a “minor theory of racial capitalism” centring the humble jhadu or broom as a heuristic tool to understand how racialization and racial capitalism intersect with caste. Employing a relational approach to study how caste intersects with gender, capitalism, sanitation, and labour, I demonstrate the perpetuation of caste and gender-based practices in railway stations. I argue that racial capitalism is operationalized through management practices related to cleaning activities, differential allocation of spaces and technologies, and the purposeful absence of cleaners from policy articulations on cleaning. My research places racial capitalism in conversation with caste and extends its application beyond the Atlantic, to demonstrate that caste is instrumental in organizing space and labour within urban public infrastructure like Indian railway stations.

KEYWORDS:

• Caste
• racial capitalism
• Indian Railways
• waste
• Clean India
• sanitation and labour relations

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to all the women and men in the railway stations who shared about their work, and my collaborators for guiding me. I thank the three anonymous reviewers of Ethnic and Racial Studies for their insightful comments and feedback that helped sharpen my arguments. Thank you to the special issue editors Jesús Cháirez-Garza, Mabel Gergan, Malini Ranganathan, and Pavithra Vasudevan for the opportunity and for inviting me to the Antipode workshop on “Rethinking Difference in India: Racialization in Transnational Perspective” held in April 2019 at American University, Washington, D.C., where I presented an initial draft. I am grateful to Pavithra Vasudevan and Jesús Cháirez-Garza, for their detailed feedback. Thank you, Sara H. Smith and Sandeep Kandikuppa, for your constant support and multiple rounds of feedback on this paper; Chris Neubert and Lara Lookabaugh for your feedback on the initial draft.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 I anonymize names to maintain confidentiality of workers and contracting companies that participated in these interviews.

2 Key objectives of the mission: (i) eliminating open defecation, (ii) eradicating manual scavenging, (iii) behavioral change leading to healthy sanitation practices, (iv) awareness generation on sanitation and public health, (v) capacity building of urban local bodies, (vi) creating enabling environment for private sector participation

3 The Laws of Manu, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1886 (I am referring to Varna not Jati).

Additional information

Funding

Thank you, Humanities for the Public Good Initiative, in UNC’s College of Arts & Sciences and the UNC Graduate School’s Summer Research Fellowship.