The Contradictions of Cleanliness
One of the most acclaimed films of the year, Wim Wender’s poetically shot ‘Perfect Days’ focuses on the life of Hirayama, a public toilet cleaner in Japan’s capital, Tokyo. Over a series of repetitive gestures and daily activities, the film establishes a soothing rhythm of everydayness. This includes getting up early, driving to work while listening to yesteryear music, going for a relaxing bath, embracing silence, and engaging in artistic and leisurely pursuits, especially photography and gardening. Such doings lend a deep sense of joy and contentment to Hirayama, who dwells in a small but clean one-room flat, and whose surroundings also evoke a spotless milieu.
Despite recognising the film’s larger point of finding satisfaction in simple deeds, one feels somewhat troubled by the narrative, especially when viewed from the pressing reality of Indian toilet cleaners. It isn’t that one can’t imagine them being inclined to pursue similar hobbies. Rather, the distress springs from the complexity of systemic oppression and the shambolic predicament of public infrastructure, that in all probability only thwarts any such hope of a contended life. The powerful visual grammar of waste and filth — so pervasive across our villages, towns and cities — makes it nearly impossible to conceive a story of this nature.
Few notions come close to the concept of cleanliness in mustering a strange sense of historical pride. The frequently touted claim that it was Indians who ‘taught’ colonisers and foreigners to bathe daily may have had a kernel of truth. But the assertion is usually made in order to feel good about ourselves, instead of trying to democratically extend and extrapolate the legacies of hygiene in the world of today. And as with many such matters, at the heart of this reluctance lies a deep sense of entitlement, a general apathy towards civic matters, an aggressive individualism continuously on the rise, a lopsided understanding of purity, and the behemoth of all reasons: caste.
In her 2018 book ‘Time Pieces: A Whistlestop Tour of Ancient India’, historian Nayanjot Lahiri provocatively sheds light on this very “paradox of India’s obsession with personal cleanliness and its utter indifference to public hygiene”. She wonders whether modern India inherited this “contradictory attitude from ancient habit”, and goes on to detail how the very people who pioneered a public sewage disposal system in Harappan cities, also “put in place a social mechanism by which a class of people cleaned and turned over excrement”. Beyond archaeology, one could find several ancient Sanskrit law books and digests known as the ‘Dharamshastras’, which categorically pointed out that “the lower down you were on the caste ladder, the longer it took to shake off your state of uncleanliness”.
Indeed, until recently, Indian toilets and bathrooms would be customarily set at a distance from living areas. The spaces that were meant to relieve and clean oneself were paradoxically deemed as ‘impure’. And those who came to clean them — invariably belonging to the most marginalised sections of society — were never meant to be conversed with (recall that in Ashutosh Gowariker’s 2001 film ‘Lagaan’, the Dalit character played by Aditya Lakhia is literally named ‘Kachra’, meaning garbage).
When space started shrinking and a new architectural idiom began to emerge, toilets and bathrooms shifted inside the fold of the house proper. The discrimination of workers, however, continued; they were never truly allowed to shed the tag of untouchability.
Even the Swachh Bharat Mission, Government of India’s flagship programme for a clean India, has churned out a skewed understanding of sanitation. As Pragya Akhilesh, director of the World Sanitation Workers’ Alliance, and Dr Ajay Gudavarthy, professor of political science at JNU, write in a 2022 article, the mission has been beset by issues of fund embezzlement and data fudging. Basing their critique on extensive surveys, they also draw attention to a fundamental quandary: “why so many people are not using those toilets that actually exist”, preferring instead open defecation, and thus going against the very rationale of the mission. The reason, they discover, is simply “the non-maintenance of built toilets” as well as “the usage of substandard material for construction”. In light of the lack of accountability, cleaning toilets again becomes “the sole responsibility of sanitation workers”, keeping pre-existing hierarchies intact instead of steering a civic consciousness that helps dissolve differences.
Materially, too, the performance of cleanliness at the level of authorities is riddled with contradictions. More than a decade ago, the local establishment of Shimla came up with the idea of providing separate dustbins for biodegradable and non-biodegradable waste. Bright green and yellow plastic containers were summarily distributed across neighbourhoods. But when the municipal authorities finally sent their workers to collect the trash, the latter promptly emptied the split parts in a single can. When probed, they revealed they hadn’t been instructed about any method to maintain the separation while transporting the trash, adding nonchalantly that at the dumping site, the portions were anyway going to be mixed.
Around the same time, Shimla also witnessed the spread of another paradoxical symbol of sanitation in the form of tall cage-like structures. These new-age trash hoarders fell flat on their objectives from day one, instantly transforming into smelly exhibition arenas for rotting waste, and, in several cases, into ingenious contraptions for drying clothes as well. Such sensibility holds true for many other parts of Himachal as well, especially rural areas, where treating garbage repeatedly assumes a makeshift responsiveness. For instance, my maternal village Rait in Kangra continues to get buried and clogged under the weight of plastic for the past many years. Not falling under the remit of a municipality, there has never been a formal system of waste management in place. Nearby Shahpur, on the other hand, with an assigned municipality, at least has a garbage lorry plying regularly.
Areas like Rait have traditionally depended on burning waste in the backyard pits of homes, especially in the pre-plastic era. Alarmingly, such form of disposal continues to be adopted unapologetically, transforming piles upon piles of non-biodegradable stuff into something even more hazardous. Meanwhile, signboards evoking platitudes about a clean environment, usually in the form of a quote by Mahatma Gandhi and others (“A lavatory must be as clean as a drawing-room”, and “Cleanliness is next to godliness”) gather dust, and are often ironically found adjacent to trash heaps.
Contrast this systemic failure to a country like Germany, where I worked for over a year. There, one had to consciously set aside not two but four dustbins (at some places even more), for reusable cardboard/paper, food waste, variedly designed bottles, and more. This apportioned trash would be then disposed of in larger containers at strategic points, easing the work of official collectors. I would also occasionally encounter labourers engaged in building and repair work, and be intrigued by the knee-caps, arm-caps, bespoke gloves and masks they invariably wore as basic paraphernalia to reduce unnecessary burden or pain — something hardly observed in the Indian context.
In Cambridge, UK, I was surprised to find a junior student lending his hand to the cleaning lady in order to earn some money. Many such episodes not only taught me the importance of dignity, but also the professionalism and infrastructural requirements for such tasks. When journalist Ravish Kumar recorded an episode on Paris’ underground Sewer Museum, this was precisely the larger point he tried highlighting. He observed that while considering the life of people involved in cleaning work, it was essential that we not only paid attention to their rights, but also to the implements and devices vital for their work. As he commented, such museums prompt us to regard cleaning as professional work and not as a caste-based activity (“yeh ek peshewar kaam hai, yeh jaatigat kaam nahi hai”).
All this is not to romanticise the West or its cleaning strategies. In recent years, there have been reports on how several countries from the Anglo-American world are outsourcing large quantities of waste to non-western nations, invariably triggering debates about neo-colonialism. The question of worker rights in Europe has also come into the limelight. But when compared to India, where the largest part of the workforce belongs to the unorganised sector, and where social and personal hierarchies multiply by the dozen, the reality is far worse. Interestingly, hierarchy also enters the distribution and appeal of public toilets. Thus, while Sulabh International’s work of providing free toilets across the cities is truly commendable, people still prefer the fee-ascribed ‘deluxe’ toilets, that evidently provide ‘better’ standards of cleanliness.
Among the very few examples that paint a robust success story of cleanliness, Sikkim offers the best hope. Here visitors are actually invited to pose for photoshoots with lavatories in the background. Not only has open defecation been completely eradicated, it has also become the first 100 per cent organic state of the country. Interestingly, however, this success is not so much the result of contemporary hygiene campaigns as it is a continuation of certain practices that honour privacy, in turn inspiring villagers to use locally-made bamboo structures as toilets for decades.
The conflicted nature of hygiene also spills into the realm of celebration. In the aftermath of Diwali, what remains is not so much the spirit of cleanliness that inaugurates the ritualistic celebrations, but rather the toxic air lingering menacingly. Almost as if a tradition itself, every ban on firecrackers goes for a toss. The same holds true for Delhi’s Chhath Puja celebrations. Even as the Yamuna froths unimaginable levels of white toxic waste, videos of people using the same water for bathing and worship have gone viral.
Drawing attention to the air emergency in India, naturalist-writer Yuvan Aves observes, “Restoring Delhi’s breathability means dismantling industrial farming in Punjab-Haryana. Which means heeding to the economic demands of protesting farmers and diminishing the power agrochemical corporates have over the Indo-Gangetic plains. And they will not let that happen.” This indeed hits the bull’s eye. As Chennai-based Aves notes, “Pollution may seem due to multiple causes. But at its centre is a political structure for the ‘ease of doing business’.”
Such ironic evocations constitute the heart of Saumya Roy’s 2021 work ‘Mountain Tales: Love and Loss in the Municipality of Castaway Belongings’, where the former journalist explores the trash mountains of Mumbai’s Deonar area spread over 320 acres. As Roy captures the lives of ragpickers, she finds that many of them suffer from “mountain fever like a love affair”, wholly dependent on these toxic sites for sustenance. Like Deonar’s “noxious and wondrous world”, the larger discourse of cleanliness is also fraught with opposing forces and ideas. It is only by addressing this impulse of contradiction in all its minute, ugly details that we can aim to confront the ragged reality of our contemporary existence.
— The writer is a historian, artist and cultural critic from Shimla
