Gases, Cockroaches, and Bare Bodies:
Dalits and the Politics of Sanitation
in Postcolonial Delhi
Lalit Batra, Interdisciplinary Doctoral Fellow from the Department of Geography, Environment and Society
Date: Fri, 03/11/2016
Time: 12:00-1:00pm
Place: 537 Heller Hall
Series: ICGC Brown Bag (open to all and you can bring your lunch and eat)
Abstract: The universalization of modern sewerage
system, consisting of technologies such as ‘flush-and-forget’ toilets,
piped gravity-fed drainage, enclosed sewers, sewage pumping stations and
biological treatment plants, has been a key component of urban
infrastructure planning and public health policy in post-Independence
India. Faced with the ethical and political challenge posed by the
political articulation of manual scavenging as the paradigmatic case of
caste-based exploitation, the postcolonial Indian state has promoted
this particular configuration of wastewater technologies as a form of
infrastructural intervention that would liberate dalits (formerly
untouchable castes who dealt with the manual handling of human excreta)
from the indignity and occupational hazards of manual scavenging.
However, the modernization of sanitation infrastructure has produced a
perverse outcome: far from liberating dalits, it has exacerbated their
physical vulnerability and social marginalization by predominantly
employing them as sewage workers in city municipalities. Traditional
manual scavenging has arguably declined; however, manual handling of
excreta-filled sewage has proliferated - only this time in the form of a
far more dangerous work process, involving manual cleaning of deadly
gas producing enclosed sewers. Drawing on my ongoing dissertation
research into the relationship between sewerage system and sanitation
workers in Delhi, I discuss how and with what consequences the
connection between dalits and sanitation is reproduced in postcolonial
Delhi.
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