On Caste, Delineation of Dirt, and Sociality of Touch: Against Dharavi Redevelopment

If toilets are often used as a space where gender politics performs itself, they also embody a site of intensification of caste and class hierarchies. In this text, Shripad Sinnakaar deploys the politics of dirt and dirtification that Dalits in Dharavi (Bombay) negotiate on an everyday basis.

In slums and chawls, we scale progress by toilets – whether you have one at your house or use a common one outside. As a child when I was allowed to use the ladies common toilet, a single lavatory was allotted to three rooms of the municipal chawl I live in. We could tell piles, cancer, sickness by blood, heat, smell and other bodily traces left in the toilet; alerting us of the state of our neighbors’ ailments and conditions since the slippery tiles of public toilets were sites of frequent deaths, fits, and heart attacks.

The sharing of gents common toilets was public, not confined only to the members of the chawl but open to anyone who identified as a male. Each lavatory was marked by a long waiting line outside in an early morning rush – those already late for school and office requested people ahead in line to let them use instead, which on good days their bowel endurance was met with benevolence of the other. These toilets were often beyond management – the eye-burning disinfectant, ammonia, unflushed waste, tobacco, bleach, discarded cigarette butts and packs. Over the walls, a flashy red box installed to withdraw condoms with a little portable case containing images of sex, bright neon and pink pamphlets inscribed with advertisements of clinics for sexual health, addictions and ailments like syphilis, gonorrhea, herpes, erectile dysfunction, etc., angled slashes of dried sputum and sheets of algae.