Why all the Fuss about Purity?1: Un/Touch-abilityand the Paradox of Hygienic Bodies

Abstract

The recent criticisms against Swachh Bharat Abhiyan and its attempts to glamorize the broom has brought to attention again the recurring yet unsolved problem of the exploitation of Dalits, specifically those engaged with manual scavenging. Practicing ‘untouchability’ and casteist discrimination today may not be so direct or based on blind reliance upon ‘ancient’ religious texts. This paper, too, is not directly about Ambedkar, Swachh Bharat Abhiyan, colonial modernity and the signification of ‘ancient’ religious texts, or democratic egalitarianism and the fissures of citizenship rights, but about all of these, and more. In other words, this paper is about embodiment, entanglements, corporeal figurations and latent tendencies that enable caste to take new directions: in this case, the recent discourse of justifying untouchability via hygiene. At its most elementary level, the paper is about the idea of touch and the paradoxes of touching, however, from a reduced (or may be said, limited) perspective, i.e., normalization of hygienic bodies. Emphasizing on the idea-matter embrace that shape the sedimentation of caste, the paper, therefore, travels with various approaches, otherwise marked as sociological, historical, and philosophical, so as to establish from diverse registers the vagueness of any such attempt at justifying untouchability. The specific focus remains the same throughout, reading the contingencies and paradoxes that shape the constitutive vocabulary of caste: purity, touch and body.