The Big Necessity

by Rose George

  In the beginning, the Original Being created four varnas. From his mouth came the Brahmins, who would be the priests, teachers, and intellectuals. From the arms came the Kshatriya, the warriors and rulers. From his thighs came the Vaisya, who were the administrators, the bureaucrats, the merchants; and from his feet the Being formed the Shudra, the farmers and peasants. Inside these varnas are thousands of subgroupings, each with a traditional occupation attached. All of it makes up the Hindu caste system, still pervasive and influential in modern India. In its report Broken People, Human Rights Watch summed up caste as “the world’s longest surviving social hierarchy . . . a complex ordering of social groups on the basis of ritual purity.” It is indeed complex, changing from region to region and from one religious interpretation to another. But all over India one thing is common: beneath the castes are the outcastes, the polluted and the untouchable. They are untouchable because they handle human shit.

  They used to be known as bhangi, a word formed from the Sanskrit for “broken,” and the Hindi for “trash.” Today, official India calls them the Scheduled Castes, but activists prefer Dalits, a word that means “broken” or “oppressed” but with none of the negativity of bhangi. Most modern Indians don’t stick to their caste jobs anymore. There is more intercaste marriage, more fluidity, more freedom than ever before, but the outcastes are usually still outcastes, because they are still the ones who tan India’s animals, burn its dead, and remove its excrement. Champaben is considered untouchable by other untouchables—even the tanners of animals and the burners of corpses—because she is a safai karamchari. This literally means “sweeper” but is generally translated into English as “manual scavenger,” a term popularized by India’s British rulers, who did nothing to eradicate the practice and much to keep it going. This scavenging has none of the usefulness of its usual meaning. There is no salvaging of waste, no making good of the discarded. Champaben recycles nothing and gains nothing. She takes filth away and for this she is considered dirt.

  There are between 400,000 and 1.2 million manual scavengers in India, depending on who is compiling the figures. They are employed by private families and by municipalities, by army cantonments and railway authorities. Their job is to clean up feces wherever they present themselves: on railway tracks, in clogged sewers. Mostly, they empty India’s dry latrines. A latrine is usually defined as a receptacle in the ground that holds human excreta, but dry latrines often don’t bother with receptacles. They usually consist of two bricks, placed squatting distance apart on flat ground. There is no pit. There may be a channel or gutter nearby, but that would be luxury. The public ones usually have no doors, no stalls, and no water. There are still up to 10 million dry latrines in India, and they probably only survive because Champaben and others are still prepared to clean them.

  I meet Champaben in a village in rural Gujarat. Like every other state in India, Gujarat is bound by the 1993 Employment of Manual Scavengers and Construction of Dry Latrines (Prohibition) Act, which makes manual scavenging illegal on pain of a year’s imprisonment or a 2,000 rupee ($45) fine. On paper, Champaben doesn’t exist, and on paper, she is as free as the next villager. Untouchability has been illegal in India since 1949, when it was abolished by means of Article 17 of the Constitution of India.

  Champaben knows that. But what can she do? Scavengers have been doing their work since they were children, and they will do it until they die, and then their children will take over. Champaben’s mother-in-law, Gangaben, is seventy-five years old. She has been scavenging for fifty years. In a village nearby, I meet Hansa and her daughter, Meena, who is ten. Meena has already been introduced to her mother’s job because she has to do it when her mother is ill or pregnant or both. Most manual scavenging is done by women, because they marry into it and have no choice. Men in the manual scavenger class often hide their profession from prospective brides until it’s too late, and they can then escape their foul work in alcohol, because they have a wife to do it for them. Some scavengers work in cities as sewer cleaners and unclog blockages with their bare hands, their only protection a rope. They are regularly killed. Last year, three men died of asphyxiation, one after the other, when they entered a manhole in New Delhi.

  The women talk freely. They are chatty and assertive and pristine. I look at them and try to see the dirt on them and in them, but I can’t. They are elegant and beautiful even when they bend down to pick up the two pieces of cracked tin they use to scoop up the excrement; when they demonstrate how they sweep the filth into the basket; when they lift the basket high with arms glittering with bangles, with considerable grace. Their compound is dusty but not dirty, though they are not given soap by their employers—whom they refer to more accurately as their “owners”—and though they are not allowed to get water from the well without permission from an upper-caste villager. They offer me a tin beaker of water, and the water is yellow. “Look at it,” says Mukesh, an activist from a local Dalit organization called Navsarjan who has accompanied me. “Look at what they have to drink.” The beaker presents a quandary. I consider pathogens and fecal-oral contamination pathways, but also that they’ll expect me to refuse to take a drink from an untouchable, because many Indians would. I take a sip and hope for the best, feeling pious and foolish, imagining bugs and worms slipping down into my guts, wreaking havoc.

  Mukesh has been to this village before. Plenty of well-meaning activists have been here before. “You come here all the time, you institute people,” says Gangaben. “And what do you do? Nothing.” Gangaben is the most indignant. She disappears into the house and returns with two chappatis—flatbreads—on a plate. Look at this, she says. This is what I was paid today. Scraps. Privately employed scavengers usually get paid 5 rupees (about ten cents) per month, per house. Municipal day wages are 30 rupees (less than a dollar) a day, but scavengers are often unpaid for months on end. Who will dare to stand up to their employer? When I ask Hansa to show me where she works, she refuses. No way. “My owners would skin me alive.” She is deadly serious, and deadliness is something she has to consider.

  There are laws to protect Dalits, to criminalize untouchability, and to outlaw manual scavenging, but they are not enforced. Violence and abuse against Dalits is endemic and unceasing. Over six months in 2006, the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice surveyed the Indian media for reports of abuse against Dalits and gathered a few headlines:

  “Dalit leader abused for daring to sit on a chair”

  “Dalit lynched while gathering grain”

  “Dalit beaten for entering temple”

  “Dalit girl resists rape, loses arm as a result”

  “Dalit tries to fetch water beaten to death”

  Navsarjan calculates that three Dalits are killed each day. Police statistics from the last five years, gathered by the National Campaign on Dalit Human Rights, tell a similar tale of brutality. According to those—definitely incomplete—statistics, thirteen Dalits were murdered per week and three Dalit women were raped every day. (A human rights worker tells me with bitterness that “untouchability doesn’t apply when it comes to vaginas.”) During my most recent trip to India, I read a newspaper article of a Dalit schoolgirl who had been gang raped somewhere in provincial India, but I didn’t note the name of the village. When I looked for it later online, searching for “gang rape” and “Dalit,” I got through three pages of results before despondency made me stop, because they all related to other cases.

  A 2006 survey of 565 villages in eleven states found that Dalit children in 37.8 percent of government schools were forced to sit apart from other children during mealtimes. Part of that 37.8 percent is Hansa’s daughter, a pretty child who tells me she’s not allowed to sit with her school friends. When I ask Meena what she wants to do when she grows up, she puts her head in her hands.

  The same survey found that health workers refused to enter Dalit homes in 33 percent of villages, and in nearly a quarter of villages, postmen refused to deliver mail to Dalit houses. C
ontrol and prohibitions percolate into all aspects of Dalit life. The Indian writer Gita Ramaswamy quotes some elderly manual scavengers in Hyderabad who were reluctant to give their names. Then they explained why. “We were told very categorically by the upper castes that our names were to be self-ridiculing. If any parent or grandparent chose a fair name of the child, we were instantly abused for having lost sight of our aukath (social and moral position).” They list their names. Jhamta, Kaloo, Gobar, Ghoodo. Spade, Black, Dung, Horse.

  Champaben, Hansa, and Gangaben have no need of statistics. They only need to try to wash themselves at the village water source when they are dirty with shit. They will be turned away by the higher-caste women who are there. They need only try to enter their village temple and they will be refused access. They need only to ask for a glass of water from their employers/owners and they will have to watch as water is poured directly into their cupped hands, so that no crockery is dirtied. In times not too long gone, Dalits were made to wear bells around their necks to warn of their passage, because even their shadows are polluting. It makes sense to Gangaben: “We carry excreta on our heads. Of course we are unclean.”

  Theories about the origins of the scavenger caste vary. Perhaps they came about when the Mughal emperors used prisoners of war to clean their wives’ harems, or perhaps that’s handy anti-Muslim prejudice. One of the fifteen duties for slaves listed in the Hindu holy text Narada Samhita was the disposal of human excreta. India is not unique in treating people who work with dirt as polluted. The old gongfermors of Victorian London knew to keep to themselves. One medieval edict forbade baiting of cesspit emptiers on pain of a fine, and what would be the point of having a fine for something that never happened? In a milder version of marginalization, toilet attendants and sewage workers worldwide admit to lying about their place of work, turning themselves into “hygiene managers” or “local government workers” to avoid scrutiny or disgust. The director of a London sewage treatment works admitted to me that when he tells new acquaintances what his job is, “some people do move three feet backwards.”

  Nor is Hinduism the only religious system to set out purity rules. Deuteronomy 23 instructs Jews to “have a place outside the camp and go out there, and you shall have a spade among your tools, and it shall be when you sit down outside, you shall dig with it and shall turn to cover up your excrement.” The texts found in the Dead Sea Scrolls are more precise: proper hygiene requires Jews to defecate between 1,000 and 2,000 cubits (1,500 to 4,500 feet) away from camp, in a northwesterly direction. (Something didn’t translate to the New Testament, though, as the Tartars were reported to have a curse that exhorted enemies “to tarry so long in one place that thou mightest smell like thine own dung like the Christians do.”) One sacred Hindu text calls for Indians to fire an arrow and defecate only where it lands or farther. The Vishnu Purana, dating from the first to the third century BCE, instructs followers to defecate at least 150 feet from a source of water, and to urinate 15 feet away from habitation. The Buddhist text Vinaya Pitaka, a rulebook for monks, is expansive in its toilet provisions. Proper Buddhists should, among other things, not defecate in the toilet in order of seniority but of arrival; cough loudly upon arriving at the toilet (and if there is an occupant, he should cough in response); not defecate while chewing tooth-wood; nor grunt upon defecation; and not wipe oneself with a rough stick.

  None of this is much comfort to the scavenger women. But they don’t expect comfort. They don’t expect anything. “Our caste is written on our forehead,” says Champaben. “Ours is low and yours is high. That’s the way it is.” A young girl named Dhurmisthu is less entranced by tradition. “The caste system has nothing to do with religion. It’s a conspiracy maintained by the upper castes. We think we’re equal, but they just see brooms in our hand.”

  Young urban Indians contend that caste is irrelevant now, because India’s huge metropolises act as a mixing bowl, diluting old traditions and backward thinking. What happens to Hansa and Gangaben, they will say, is a thing of the villages, of peasants, of tradition and history. They will point to successful Dalit lawyers, politicians, academics. The current chief justice is a Dalit. Plenty of politicians in India’s upper house are Dalit. Under India’s Scheduled Castes reservations system—which is controversial but widely implemented—Dalits benefit from positive discrimination in employment and university places. But they are still Dalits, and there is still caste. Surveys show that the majority of young Indians still expect to have an arranged marriage, and 40 percent won’t marry outside their own caste or state.

  The glass ceiling pressing down upon the scavengers’ heads consists of cultural prejudices, but also of economics. When I first wrote about manual scavengers for the American magazine Jane, the first draft of my story came back punctuated with the editor’s questions. She couldn’t understand why scavengers felt obliged to do this work, and who employed them. She wrote, “Who are their bosses? Uneducated farmers? (I’m assuming that the more educated the people are, the less tolerant they are of these conditions.)” That’s a nice hope. In fact, manual scavengers continue to be employed by municipal authorities, who use them to clean sewers, and by Indian Railways. Last year, the company declined to say when it could phase out the use of manual scavengers to clean its tracks. Until fully sealed flush latrines were installed on its trains in place of the current “open discharge” ones, scavengers were the cheapest cleaning option. A high court in Nizamabad only demolished its dry latrine—cleaned by scavengers—when ordered to do so by the Supreme Court.

  For Navsarjan, the solution to manual scavenging and untouchability is loud activism and alternative employment. There are programs that provide manual scavengers with loans to set up small businesses, but only a fraction of their funds have so far been disbursed. A newer initiative will provide more loan money and skills training. It also specified 2009 as the new target for the total eradication of manual scavenging. The previous target had been 2007, and there had been others. Safai Karmachari Andolan, another noisy Dalit organization, prefers direct action over empty promises, and often demolishes dry latrines by hand (the rubble, carefully labeled, is kept in a cabinet in the SKA office). Dr. Bindeshwar Pathak, however, preferred not to destroy toilets, but to build them.

  Pathak founded the organization Sulabh International in 1970. It is now India’s largest charity, with 50,000 on its staff. Millions of Indians have installed the Sulabh Shauchalaya latrine. Of more interest to non-Indians will be the half a million public toilets that Sulabh has built all over India. Every day, ten million Indians—and plenty of relieved foreign travelers—use a Sulabh toilet, because they are in railway stations, airports, on the main streets of India’s cities. Pathak’s toilet blocks are so common, Indians now say “I’m going to the Sulabh,” and the word toilet can be left silent.

  Sulabh’s headquarters consists of a pleasant campus near Indira Gandhi International Airport in New Delhi. The campus has green lawns that refresh after the yellow brown dust and chaos outside, and signs urging visitors to smile, please, because you’re in Sulabh now.

  I have visited Sulabh twice, and each time the procedure was the same. First, assembly, held in a low hall near the kitchen that cooks with biogas, fermented from the excrement deposited in the Sulabh public toilet complex next door. To reach the meeting hall, you walk over those green lawns, which get their color from being irrigated with effluent from the same toilets, cleaned with sand filters and UV light. On the way, you will pass through part of the outdoor display of cheap latrine models, the reason Sulabh came into existence, and you might find the odd visitor or two, as I did in 104-degree Fahrenheit heat one day in May, when an artist’s assistant from London was busy gluing blocks of dried Rajasthani excrement for a show by the Spanish artist Santiago Sierra. (The blocks were shown in a plain room, simply standing, because their substance was deemed subject enough.) After one visit to Sulabh, such encounters seem normal, because this is a place that has a science lab that contain
s glass jars filled with “Balls of Dried Excrement,” and where deeply courteous scientists in white coats will express their great excitement about the sewage-cleansing properties of duckweed, or dip their hands into a box of dry, brown granulated stuff and say “Excrement! Like gravel!”

  Then you will be led into the hall, presented with a beautiful silk scarf and a garland of flowers, and you will watch while children in neat blue uniforms, the girls with red ribbons in their plaited hair, sing the Sulabh song whose lyrics exhort you to “come together and build a happy Sulabh world.” These are the children of the Sulabh school, housed in a complex on the other side of a yard of demonstration pit-latrine models. It is a unique school because two-thirds of its intake are the children of manual scavengers. The education they are given here ensures that their parents’ job will not also be theirs, one day. It is a happy scene, but it has been built on forty years of one man’s stubborn conviction that scavenging is a sickness in his culture, and that toilets can heal it.

  In the late 1960s, the young Pathak committed a grievous sin. He was studying sociology, and like many young Indians getting used to being part of a newly independent and ambitious nation, he was an idealist. His ideals were those of Mohandas K. Gandhi. The father of the modern Indian nation was one of the few political leaders in history to publicly talk about toilets. There is a scene in Richard Attenborough’s biopic film where Gandhi argues with his wife because she refuses to clean their latrine. She says it is the work of untouchables; he tells her there is no such thing.

  Gandhi also argued with everyone else. At the 1901 Congress Party convention, he told delegates it was a disgrace that manual scavengers were being used to clean the latrines. He asked delegates to clean their own latrines and when they did not, he publicly cleaned his own. The eradication of manual scavenging was a recurrent theme throughout Gandhi’s life. He called the practice “the shame of the nation.” He wrote, “Evacuation is as necessary as eating; and the best thing would be for everyone to dispose of his own waste.”