The Politics of Waste and Social Inequalities in Indian Cities

Waste studies is premised on the understanding that waste is not essentially dirty or invaluable, but rather an arena through which classification, social boundaries, and state-making takes place. Mary Douglas’s structural approach in Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (2002) forms the cornerstone of waste studies by seeing waste as “matter out of place.” It explores the social function of waste as posing a problem of the unknown, disorderly and disturbing. The terming of something as “disorderly,” “risky,” “insanitary,” or “polluted,” Douglas argues, constitutes dominant power structures of states and scientific and religious institutions that determine the drawing of individual, social, and cultural boundaries. Douglas’s insights are used to recognize the ways the categories of value-non-value, norm-exception, structure-deviation, nature-culture, and object-subject get made. As a constructed category, waste in the context of Indian cities is seen to exacerbate existing class inequalities as well as to express and reify caste structures, together constituting a distinct postcolonial urbanism. Urban waste practices lay bare disjunctures of India’s postcolonial modernity in the everyday functioning of the state, labor, and economy for urban sanitation, which deploy caste-community labor of the former untouchable castes for waste-work. At the same time, colonially constituted sanitary science and advanced waste technology adopted by municipalities frame a circular relationship between poverty and disease, deeming the urban poor, their dwellings in crowded slums, and the work of sanitation as the cause of filth, squalor, and the contamination of cities. The prevalence and dominance of particular cultures of sanitation can be linked to social location, including an intersection of caste, class, minority, linguistic, and gender identities, requiring a political understanding of social interests within urban governance and the science of sanitation. In describing these disjunctures at the heart of India’s urbanism, this review will outline five conceptual tropes through which waste in Indian cities has been viewed: (1) as a common resource in a fluid terrain of property rights; (2) as informal and enabling the right to the city; (3) in terms of the colonial making of waste infrastructure, as highly unequal and differentiated; (4) as socially reproducing stigmatized caste labor through a social division of purity and pollution; and (5) as involving multiple stakeholders, including private initiatives, neoliberal policies, international networks, and global circuits.