The Big Necessity

Varda · Oct 15, 2008

Slate showed last week a series of extracts from a book called The Big Necessity. It's about human waste.

At first I was intrigued that someone wrote a book about shit. But I started to read this and I thought it was very interesting and now I kind of want to read the book.

I thought maybe some of you will be interested in reading these extracts and then we can have some sort of discussion.

I'm posting a small piece about India here for our dear SAM. The rest can be found in the link below.

http://www.slate.com/id/2201466/entry/2201467/

It drips on her head most days, says Champaben, but in the monsoon season it's worse. In rain, worms multiply. Every day, nonetheless, she gets up and walks to her owners' house, and there she picks up their excrement with her bare hands or a piece of tin, scrapes it into a basket, puts the basket on her head or shoulders and carries it to the nearest waste dump. She has no mask, no gloves, and no protection. She is paid a pittance, if she is paid at all. She regularly gets dysentery, giardiasis, brain fever. She does this because a 3,000-year-old social hierarchy says she has to.

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 any more. There is more inter-caste 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 the 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—owned, more accurately—by private families and by municipalities, by army cantonments and railway authorities. Their job is to clean up feces wherever it presents itself: on railway tracks, in clogged sewers. Mostly, they empty India's dry latrines. A latrine is usually defined as a receptacle in the ground which holds human excreta, but dry latrines often don't bother with receptacles. They consist of two bricks, usually, placed squatting distance apart, over 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 ten 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.

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 75 years old. She has been scavenging for 50 years. In a village nearby, I meet Hansa and her daughter Meena, who is 10. 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, who 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 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 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 feces; when they demonstrate how they sweep the filth into the basket; when they lift the basket high with arms glittering with bangles and considerable grace. Their compound is dusty but not dirty, though they are not given soap by 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 yellow water. "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, and I consider 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.
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Baron Max · Oct 15, 2008

Varda said: ↑

I'm posting a small piece about India here for our dear SAM. The rest can be found in the link below.
Click to expand...

SAM will just blame it all on the British or the USA or on the Jews!
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