Recently, I had the opportunity to peer-review an article on the politics of shit in
India. It was a fine contribution; I recommended that it be published, and it
will, presumably, appear in print at some point in the near future. The author
sought to make some connections between the phenomenon of outdoor defecation in
India, and the inequalities of caste, arguing, more or less, that Indian
attitudes towards shit reflect the extreme exclusions faced by communities that
have traditionally been associated with ‘unclean’ tasks. I was persuaded
by the arguments, but found myself thinking more broadly about Indian shit.
The politics of Indians’ defecation
is not only about caste; it is about
nationhood itself. Not surprisingly, when non-Indians have thought about India
in the past, they have sometimes felt compelled to talk shit: Katherine Mayo,
Günter Grass, V.S. Naipaul, and various others. Indeed, ‘where Indians defecate’ has entered
global public discourse: whenever there is a demonstration of Indian national
prowess, such as the ISRO Mars mission, the comments sections of foreign
news sites mushroom with reproaches about wasting money on rockets when half
your population shits in the open. This has become one of those things that
even (or rather, especially) people who couldn’t place India on a map are
confident about. Over the past year, the government of Prime Minister Narendra
Modi has itself played a leading role in highlighting the toilet issue,
trumpeting the cause of “Swachch Bharat” (Clean India) and urging ministers,
actors, athletes and other prominent citizens to pose with brooms before the
television cameras. These well-heeled jharuwallas
are, of course, quite aware that Swachch Bharat will not come anytime soon,
and are not overly bothered.
That leaves us with a few questions
that I would like to address very briefly. One concerns the persistent
popularity of the subject of Indian defecation. Here there is a difference
between the ‘foreign’ and ‘native’ discourses. The foreign narrative is either
aggressively colonial, or, in a variation, nervously defensive. It emerged in
the 1920s, precisely when the Montagu-Chelmsford reforms had given Indian
politicians a measure of control over the lower levels of the government of the
country. Talk of filth functioned, in this context, as a nullification of this self-government:
natives were clearly incapable of running the machinery of administration. In
the period after 1947, as Nehru and the Jadavpur/IIT generations made machinery
(literally) a new basis of Indian civilization, missing toilets became a
technological counterthrust: a way of putting upstarts in their place, and
shoring up increasingly precarious distinctions and hierarchies between the
natures of whites and natives. Dams and spacecraft swirled into the hole of the
absent toilet, giving the lie to their own existence. Just as importantly, they
left behind a moral stench, because the accusation was not simply about missing
latrines, but about deluded self-indulgence: the refusal to take care of one’s
own, preferring Martians to peasants.
The Indian narratives are more
complex and interesting. They emerged in the second half of the nineteenth
century, in two contexts that remained resolutely separate: the formulation of
the middle-class family, and municipal sanitation. In the first, the polemics
of cleanliness came largely from people who identified themselves as
conservatives, and sought to articulate a ritual purity, in the literal sense
of rituals of purity, that could be
contrasted with the impurity and unhealthiness of a colonized public sphere. This
meant elaborate instructions on how to defecate (do not linger, do not talk,
try to avoid sniffing) and how to wash up afterwards (use ashes, not soap). Some
of these same men became interested in what Benoy Kumar Sarkar later called ‘mistrification,’
or the cultivation of a mechanically adept subjectivity across the classes:
respectable men who possessed, and were not afraid to use, the tools of home
repair, and who displayed what became an elusive grail of Indian nationalism: 'scientific spirit.' The householder, conceivably, could be his own mistry, plumber and even
janitor. Such schemes enjoyed a glimmer of popularity during the National
Education project associated with the Swadeshi movement, but then faded almost entirely.
Municipal action, on the other hand,
touched upon shit only in the context of disease-control, and even then very
gingerly. Without the pressure of cholera, and sometimes even then, public shit
remained somebody else’s problem, because the public defecator was reliably
somebody else, and ‘the public’ not much more than an occasionally useful
abstraction. It was only when Gandhi began holding up latrine democracy in his
communes as the metaphor of a new public life, and pointing his finger at how the respectable continued to shit in
their own homes (not very cleanly at all), that some connecting threads began
to appear: between the communal latrine and the bathroom, between the toilet
and the temple, between caste justice and democracy. These threads were, of
course, by and large brushed away with the rest of Gandhi’s agenda of social
reorganization.
They are now, apparently, being
picked up again by the Modi regime, but these are of course not the same
threads. They are at once a charade and a distortion, first because they are
not accompanied by an agenda of economic and caste justice, second because they
constitute an empty gesture of purposeful statecraft that is itself sinister,
and third because they mistake public toilets for a public habit. An important part of the BJP’s support base,
including the prime minister himself, is openly enamored of the cleanliness of
places like Singapore and leaders like Lee Kuan Yew. This is not a new trend in
Indian nationalist discourse; the longing for a strong leader who will clean
things up in the name of the state goes back at least as far as the 1920s. Since
Indian political realities have stubbornly refused to either accommodate or legitimize
that kind of state or elite action, the interventions have typically been sporadic,
illicit or theatrical: pogroms, the Emergency, and less malignantly, Swachch
Bharat. None have solved the problem of filth in Indian society, except
in terms of providing a transient satisfaction to those who understand the
connections between cleanness and power.
One of the laudable things about the Swachch
Bharat program is that it has included the actual building of latrines: both public
facilities and home toilets. (In the later case, it has carried forward an
initiative which actually began under the previous government.) The problem, as
everyone involved in these projects knows, is not only that proudly-built sewage lines terminate in rivers and on beaches (Indian municipal sanitation is largely about moving the stink downwind), but also that even when the toilets are
made available, Indians continue to prefer the great outdoors when nature
calls. There is a practical side to this perversity. Private homes often
have a premium on space, and cannot spare a room for the bowels. Anybody who
has visited a public toilet in India – in a bus station or on a train, for
instance – knows that these are extensions of hell, best avoided. Words fail
the user; there is no need to proscribe talking. Even facilities that the
middle class (would rather not) use, such as school toilets, inspire a dread
that must be smelled to be believed; boys at the most respectable schools shit
in their pants rather than venture into the latrine. Nowhere is there an assurance of soap and water, let alone ashes. No institution, government or private, invests
anything substantial in training or compensating those who are charged with
cleaning public toilets, and such staff – where they exist – are treated with
the dual contempt that is reserved in India for the low-caste and poor, who, in
their undernourished skins and dirty uniforms, function as a race apart. For
them, indifference to their assigned tasks becomes a perfectly reasonable form
of resistance.
Practicality, however, is only part
of the problem of Indian toilets, and it is of course not distinct from
ideology and politics. It can hardly be denied that for many Indians, the toilet
itself is inherently unclean, something to avoid and banish from the home. And
even middle class householders make themselves at home with - but not in - dank, slippery,
roach-infested bathrooms that are a sort of afterthought to
domesticity. While caste prejudices have something to do with this, much of it is
connected to a compartmentalized tolerance of filth, and patterns of urban dirtiness we would
recognize in the fairly recent history of the European city, where people might
simply pitch their shit out the window with a warning shout of “Gardyloo!”
These are the habits of urban peasantry, who became ‘civilized’ in Europe partly
through the mitigation of extreme poverty, and partly through absorption into the
more or less horizontal community of the national population.
In India, where poverty remained
romanticized as ‘authentic’ but nationhood remained fundamentally vanguardist, there
was no corresponding mass de-peasantification. The most glaring failure, I would
suggest, came in the area of primary education. When Nehru and his colleagues
declined to prioritize public education, they neglected a basic function of the
nationalizing project of the modern state, which is the transformation of habit
into the stuff of historical agency. In this project, compulsion is as
automatically legitimate as nationhood itself, and the refusal of the Indian
state to enforce compulsory education was the abdication of a power that is
prized in the rhetoric of the left as well as the right. “There must be compulsion,”
Benoy Sarkar had remarked about urban governance, without feeling he was being
anti-democratic or illiberal. The modern citizen – the fascist as well as the
liberal – will shit right only if subjected to a measure of compulsion; toilet-training
is a part of what Norbert Elias saw as the civilizing process both within and
without the family. Bentham's invisible guard must of course be internalized, but the little savages must first be hauled into the circles of civilization.
Relatively few Indian children
attended school consistently. Those who did, learned to hold it in. Yet it is children
who are not afraid to shit at school that recoil from the prospect of public
defecation, and it is those who have been trained to regard brooms and plungers
as ordinary implements that do not shrink from toilets and janitors. In India, where
such people are mainly fantastic, the failure to compel children to go to school is
intertwined with the resounding refusal of the national elites to teach themselves the value of working with
tools. The Indian model of development produced, ironically, a nation of
engineers who disdain mechanical proficiency and regard mechanics as dirty, but see dirt as both normal and external to themselves. They take it for granted but refuse to own it, holding their noses, as it were. Disgust with and tolerance of
shit –the unpleasant bathroom that one uses but does not inhabit – then undergirds
a national habit, producing, among other things, a rhetoric of cleansing power
that is itself a discursive habit of ressentiment
nationalism. But development is first and foremost the building of habits that can
sustain and be sustained by infrastructure. It is, consequently, in the arena
of habit that India continues to be a grossly underdeveloped nation.
September 4, 2015
