The cultural politics of shit: class, gender and public space in India

Abstract

In this article we seek to interrogate the cultural, political and economic conditions that generate the crisis of sanitation in India, with its severe implications for the poor and the marginalized. The key question we ask is how to interpret and explain the spectre of ‘open defecation’ in India's countryside and its booming urban centres. The discussion is divided into three parts. Part one examines the cultural interpretation of ‘shitting’ as symbolic action underpinned by ideas of purity, pollution and ‘the body politic’. Part two takes the political economic approach to gain further insights into contemporary discourse, performance and cultural politics surrounding toilets and open defecation in India. Part three examines civil society activities, state campaigns and media accounts of open defecation to explore the disruptive potency of everyday toilet activities, and how these interplay with issues of class, caste, and gender. Drawing on interviews and a review of ethnographic work, we seek to interrogate the idiom of modern sanitation, with its emphasis on cleanliness, progress and dreams of technology, as a constitutive idea and an explanatory force in Indian modernity.

Notes on contributors

Assa Doron is Associate Professor in the Anthropology Department, College of Asia and the Pacific, The Australian National University.

Ira Raja teaches in the Department of English, University of Delhi. She is also an Honorary Associate of the Thesis Eleven Centre for Cultural Sociology, La Trobe University, Australia.

Notes

1 The authors are grateful to Robin Jeffrey for his generous contribution to this essay. We thank Philip Taylor for his invaluable comments and suggestions. We also thank Meera Ashar, Alex Broom, Didi Contractor, Melissa Demian, P Vijaya Kumar and Kama Maclean for their comments on earlier drafts. A version of this essay was presented at the Australian National University, and Lund University at the Swedish South Asia Network Conference. We are grateful to participants for their thoughtful suggestions in improving the paper.

2 Christine Sylvester, ‘Development Studies and Postcolonial Studies: Disparate Tales of the “Third World”’, Third World Quarterly 20(4), 1999, pp 703–721, pp 703–704.

3 http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2014-11-17/news/56174460_1_clean-india-indian-diaspora-prime-minister-narendra-modi (accessed 9 December 2014).

4 Christine Sylvester, ‘Development Studies and Postcolonial Studies: Disparate Tales of the 'Third World'’, Third World Quarterly 20(4), 1999, pp 703–721, p 705.

5 www.thehindu.com/news/national/social-sector-funds-slashed/article6637180.ece. Also see: www.thehindu.com/news/national/modi-wanted-infrastructure-funding-protected/article6637184.ece (both accessed 1 December 2014).

6 Sylvester, ‘Development Studies’, p 706.

7 www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-27639735 (accessed 1 June 2014).

8 Progress on Drinking Water and Sanitation—2014 update. www.thehindu.com/multimedia/archive/01885/Progress_on_Drinki_1885759a.pdf (accessed 24 November 2014).

9 Tulasi Srinivas, ‘Flush with Success: Bathing, Defecation, Worship, and Social Change in South India’, Space and Culture 5(4), 2002, pp 368–386, p 369.

10 www.childinfo.org/sanitation.html (accessed 22 November 2014).

11 Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger, New York: Praeger, 1966, p 29. This is also the message in the recent UNICEF video, ‘Poo2Loo’. www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Pj4L7C2twI (accessed 3 November 2014).

12 www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs330/en/ (accessed 3 November 2014).

13 Gay Hawkins, The Ethics of Waste, New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006, p 47.

14 Hawkins, Ethics, p 46.

15 For example, blocked toilets, storm water mixed with sewage appearing on the shorelines of Sydney. Hawkins, Ethics, p 46.

16 Quoted in Barbara Penner, Bathroom, London: Reaktion Books, 2013, p 14.

17 Tim Edensor, ‘The Culture of the Indian Street’, in Nicholas Fyfe (ed), Images of the Street: Planning, Identity and Control of Public Space, London: Routledge, 1998, p 204; and see Warrick Anderson, Colonial Pathologies: American Tropical Medicine, Race and Hygiene in the Philippines, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006.

18 Edensor, ‘The Culture’, p 204.

19 Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘Of Garbage, Modernity and the Citizen's Gaze’, in Habitations of Modernity: Essays in the Wake of Subaltern Studies, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002, pp 65–79, p 67.

20 V S Naipaul, An Area of Darkness, London: Penguin, 1964, p 70.

21 Douglas, Purity and Danger, p 125.

22 Chakrabarty, ‘Of Garbage’, p 71.

23 Chakrabarty, ‘Of Garbage’, p 74.

24 Chakrabarty, ‘Of Garbage’, p 76.

25 Chakrabarty, ‘Of Garbage’, p 77.

26 Chakrabarty, ‘Of Garbage’, p 77.

27 Chakrabarty, ‘Of Garbage’, pp 77–78.

28 Valerian Rodrigues, ‘Untouchability, Filth, and the Public Domain’, in Gopal Guru (ed), Humiliation: Claims and Context, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2009, pp 108–123, p 115.

29 Chakrabarty, ‘Of Garbage’, p 77.

30 Chakrabarty, ‘Of Garbage’, p 77.

31 See Amita Baviskar, ‘Cows, Cars and Cycle-Rickshaws: Bourgeois Environmentalism and the Battle for Delhi's Streets’, in Amita Baviskar and Raka Ray (eds), Elite and Everyman: The Cultural Politics of the Indian Middle Classes, New Delhi: Routledge, pp 391–418.

32 Kevin Hetherington, ‘Secondhandedness: Consumption, Disposal, and Absent Presence’, Environment and Planning D: Space and Society 22, 2004, pp 157–173, p 162.

33 Assa Doron and Robin Jeffrey, ‘Open Defecation in India’, Economic and Political Weekly 49(49), 2014, pp 72–78.

34 For example, Susan Chaplin, The Politics of Sanitation in India: Cities, Services and the State, New Delhi: Orient Blackswan, 2011; Sarah Jewitt, ‘Geographies of Shit: Spatial and Temporal Variations in Attitudes towards Human Waste’, Progress in Human Geography 35(5), 2011, pp 608–626; Colin McFarlane, ‘Sanitation in Mumbai's Informal Settlements: State, “Slum” and Infrastructure’, Environment and Planning A 40(1), 2008, pp 88–107; Colin McFarlane, ‘Governing the Contaminated City: Infrastructure and Sanitation in Colonial and Post-Colonial Bombay’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 32(2), 2008, pp 315–335.

35 Arjun Appadurai, ‘Deep Democracy: Urban Governmentality and the Horizon of Politics’, Environment and Urbanization 13(2), 2002, pp 23–44, p 37.

36 Appadurai, ‘Deep Democracy’, p 36.

37 See Judy Whitehead and Nitin Moore, ‘Revanchism in Mumbai? Political Economy of Rent Gaps and Urban Restructuring in a Global City’, Economic and Political Weekly 42(25), 2007, pp 2428–2434.

38 Bhaskar Mukhopadhyay, ‘Crossing the Howrah Bridge: Calcutta, Filth and Dwelling—Forms, Fragments, Phantasms’, Theory, Culture and Society 23(7–8), 2006, pp 221–241, p 227.

39 Mukhopadhyay, ‘Crossing the Howrah Bridge’, p 227.

40 Mukhopadhyay, ‘Crossing the Howrah Bridge’, p 227.

41 Mukhopadhyay's valuable critique could be further extended by considering an evaluative framework that draws on Hindu cosmology and transactional practices as detailed by Thomas Rosin in his study of dirt and dust in India. See Thomas Rosin, ‘Wind, Traffic and Dust: The Recycling of Wastes’, Contributions to Indian Sociology 34(3), 2000, pp 361–408.

42 See Deepa Joshi, Ben Fawcett and Fouzia Mannan, ‘Health, Hygiene and Appropriate Sanitation: Experience and Perception of the Urban Poor’, Environment and Urbanization 23(1), 2011, pp 91–111; and Katherine Boo, Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity, New York: Random House, 2012.

43 Cf McFarlane, ‘Sanitation in Mumbai's Informal Settlements’.

44 Rohinton Mistry, A Fine Balance, London: Faber & Faber, 1996, pp 168–169.

45 Martin Pops, ‘The Metamorphosis of Shit’, Salmagundi 56, 1982, pp 26–61, quoted in Joshua D Esty, ‘Excremental Postcolonialism’, Contemporary Literature 40(1), 1999, pp 22–59, p 34.

46 S Shankar, Textual Traffic: Colonialism, Modernity and the Economy of the Text, Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001, p 158.

47 See www.ircwash.org/sites/default/files/822-IN96-14708.pdf (accessed 3 November 2014).

48 See ‘One Toilet Every Second: Modi Government's 100 Day Target’. www.downtoearth.org.in/content/one-toilet-every-second-modi-government-s-100-day-target (accessed 3 November 2014).

49 http://nirmalgrampuraskar.nic.in/Home.aspx (accessed 3 November 2014).

50 www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/the-battle-for-toilets-and-minds/article6095021.ece#.U5ThwbXzcKM.email (accessed 3 November 2014).

51 Jewitt, ‘Geographies of Shit’, p 609.

52 http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Pose-with-a-toilet-to-get-hitched-in-MP-district/articleshow/20164829.cms (accessed 26 June 2014).

53 See http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/rajasthan-jairam-ramesh-women-marriage-toilets/1/225664.html; and the Great Wash Yatra was another well-funded project launched in 2012: see http://indiasanitationportal.org/5773 (both accessed 1 December 2014).

54 Shilpa Phadke, Sameera Khan and Shilpa Ranade, Why Loiter? New Delhi: Penguin, 2011, p 79.

55 www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/the-battle-for-toilets-and-minds/article6095021.ece?css=print (accessed 1 December 2014).

56 See Frontline, 26 June 2014.

57 Craig Jeffrey, Patricia Jeffery and Roger Jeffery, Degrees without Freedom? Education, Masculinities and Unemployment in North India, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008, p 135.

58 Slavoj Zizek, Sublime Object of Ideology, London: Verso, 1989. Also see Samir Dayal, ‘Constructing Nation as Family: Gandhi, Ambedkar and Postnationality’, Socialist Review 27 (1–2), 1999, pp 97–142, p 100.

59 See Doron and Jeffrey, ‘Open Defecation in India’.

60 Interview with Doron, 27 March 2014.

61 This is evident in satirical video clips that seek to capture the rural-urban migrant experience of the Bhojpuri belt: see, for example, ‘Shaher ke titelli’ (The butterfly in the city) by Manoj Tiwari. www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJ2AOgwi9sY (accessed 1 December 2014).

62 Melissa Demian, email communication, 28 May 2014.