Zone / Area of ExpertiseI am an anthropologist interested in thinking about the intersection between society, ecology and technology. I work on the role of smell, discard and ideas of caste and contamination along a continuum that inform the design of sanitary infrastructure of Indian cities. I am interested in conceptualising alternate social relations and ideas of sanitation that can lead us to developing more equitable and ecologically responsible urban infrastructures.
In this paper, I argue that on the one hand the sociology of identities creates caste and religio... more In this paper, I argue that on the one hand the sociology of identities creates caste and religion as distinct social categories pertaining to Hindus and Muslims respectively. On the other hand, systems of capitalism and urbanization conflate practices that define caste and religion through stigmatized labor and spatial segregation. In this context, centering stigma as a category is important because it allows for studying cross-cutting structures and undoing disciplining categories with their colonial-nationalist genealogies. The paper argues that we need new categories to capture complex realities and that, through ethnography, newer categories can be forged.
Bombay is built on land reclaimed from the sea. A crucial part of this reclamation has been waste... more Bombay is built on land reclaimed from the sea. A crucial part of this reclamation has been waste that has been dumped into the creeks to produce land. Waste has produced space. Social hierarchies of caste, class, gender, and religion have defined risk and pollution. Science and technology have been brought in to control the waste, to exterminate it, and to hide it. But every day, it returns. Explore this story of life, death, and afterlife of waste through three landfills in the city: Deonar, Mulund and Malad.
Waste studies is premised on the understanding that waste is not essentially dirty or invaluable,... more 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.
Cow Politics: Spatial Shifts in the Location of Slaughterhouses in Mumbai City, 2019
This article explores the spatial politics of situating slaughterhouses at the margins of Mumbai ... more This article explores the spatial politics of situating slaughterhouses at the margins of Mumbai city enacted by the sanitary civic state and the caste labour of the butcher community. While the sanitary state mobilises colonial discourses of sanitation that deem animal slaughter unhygienic and so needing to be located at the shifting periphery of the city, an ethnography of the Muslim sub-castes of mutton and beef butchers suggests that animal slaughter is a form of caste labour that involves cultivating hereditary skills of working with flesh, bone and blood, which the Mumbai butchers refer to as ‘karigari’ (artisanship). Their caste labour is resisting the reconfiguration of the meat trade, which they view as fragmenting the community’s control over their labour. By bringing theories of urban space, state and caste among urban Muslims into the conversation, the article describes the ways in which scientific and communal ideas of sanitation are consolidated along a continuum. It also describes the ways in which caste and religion condense along an axis to form analogous structures that are deployed by the beef and mutton butchers to resist these spatial shifts.
Becoming Waste: Three Moments in the Life of a Landfill, 2019
Colonial municipal planning discourses imagined waste as infrastructure to build Bombay city by f... more Colonial municipal planning discourses imagined waste as infrastructure to build Bombay city by filling creeks and reclaiming land. Waste as land was reassembled through the judiciary’s remaking of the landfill as a zone of pollution to be “scientifically” closed through waste treatment technologies. Even as science attempts to comprehend its complexity and contain it, waste possesses an agency of its own that disrupts the social, haunting reclaimed real estate with its fugitive gaseous presence.
Cow protection groups have been reported to engage in acts of public violence against Dalit and M... more Cow protection groups have been reported to engage in acts of public violence against Dalit and Muslim caste labourers. In the context of these occurrences, this article explores the relationship between caste identity and performing " stigmatised " labour—sanitation, removing refuse, and collecting urban waste—in colonial Bombay. The idea of dirt as a cultural category is not new; it is part of a hereditary system that imprints physical and moral impurity on its actors. The attacks on select castes today are part of a Hindutva ideal to purify India and remake it as a caste Hindu nation.
This article seeks to think about decline as part of the sociology of time, by exploring ways for... more This article seeks to think about decline as part of the sociology of time, by exploring ways former politically dominant communities seek to negotiate their ritual traditions by forging newer relationships to modern time. The article offers an ethnography of decline among the Shia community of Hyderabad old city, whose weakened political status by colonial modernity speaks in different ways of the experience of the contemporary as diachronic and not in succession with the past. These perceptions of decline describe the moral loss of the Shia community through the spatial decline of Hyderabad old city, as a fallen state that has been produced by Muslim actors in time as well as located in the nature of time upon the community. The article reflects on the contradictory perceptions of decline that describes the deprivations produced by time as well as implicates community actors as offenders in time who are seen to persist with the performance of rituals as 'meaningless' actions. What are the relations to time being forged that make communities redefine culture in ways that are temporally meaningful to them, given their representation of belonging to the contemporary as implicating the decline of their civilisation?
In this paper, I argue that on the one hand the sociology of identities creates caste and religio... more In this paper, I argue that on the one hand the sociology of identities creates caste and religion as distinct social categories pertaining to Hindus and Muslims respectively. On the other hand, systems of capitalism and urbanization conflate practices that define caste and religion through stigmatized labor and spatial segregation. In this context, centering stigma as a category is important because it allows for studying cross-cutting structures and undoing disciplining categories with their colonial-nationalist genealogies. The paper argues that we need new categories to capture complex realities and that, through ethnography, newer categories can be forged.
Bombay is built on land reclaimed from the sea. A crucial part of this reclamation has been waste... more Bombay is built on land reclaimed from the sea. A crucial part of this reclamation has been waste that has been dumped into the creeks to produce land. Waste has produced space. Social hierarchies of caste, class, gender, and religion have defined risk and pollution. Science and technology have been brought in to control the waste, to exterminate it, and to hide it. But every day, it returns. Explore this story of life, death, and afterlife of waste through three landfills in the city: Deonar, Mulund and Malad.
Waste studies is premised on the understanding that waste is not essentially dirty or invaluable,... more 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.
Cow Politics: Spatial Shifts in the Location of Slaughterhouses in Mumbai City, 2019
This article explores the spatial politics of situating slaughterhouses at the margins of Mumbai ... more This article explores the spatial politics of situating slaughterhouses at the margins of Mumbai city enacted by the sanitary civic state and the caste labour of the butcher community. While the sanitary state mobilises colonial discourses of sanitation that deem animal slaughter unhygienic and so needing to be located at the shifting periphery of the city, an ethnography of the Muslim sub-castes of mutton and beef butchers suggests that animal slaughter is a form of caste labour that involves cultivating hereditary skills of working with flesh, bone and blood, which the Mumbai butchers refer to as ‘karigari’ (artisanship). Their caste labour is resisting the reconfiguration of the meat trade, which they view as fragmenting the community’s control over their labour. By bringing theories of urban space, state and caste among urban Muslims into the conversation, the article describes the ways in which scientific and communal ideas of sanitation are consolidated along a continuum. It also describes the ways in which caste and religion condense along an axis to form analogous structures that are deployed by the beef and mutton butchers to resist these spatial shifts.
Becoming Waste: Three Moments in the Life of a Landfill, 2019
Colonial municipal planning discourses imagined waste as infrastructure to build Bombay city by f... more Colonial municipal planning discourses imagined waste as infrastructure to build Bombay city by filling creeks and reclaiming land. Waste as land was reassembled through the judiciary’s remaking of the landfill as a zone of pollution to be “scientifically” closed through waste treatment technologies. Even as science attempts to comprehend its complexity and contain it, waste possesses an agency of its own that disrupts the social, haunting reclaimed real estate with its fugitive gaseous presence.
Cow protection groups have been reported to engage in acts of public violence against Dalit and M... more Cow protection groups have been reported to engage in acts of public violence against Dalit and Muslim caste labourers. In the context of these occurrences, this article explores the relationship between caste identity and performing " stigmatised " labour—sanitation, removing refuse, and collecting urban waste—in colonial Bombay. The idea of dirt as a cultural category is not new; it is part of a hereditary system that imprints physical and moral impurity on its actors. The attacks on select castes today are part of a Hindutva ideal to purify India and remake it as a caste Hindu nation.
This article seeks to think about decline as part of the sociology of time, by exploring ways for... more This article seeks to think about decline as part of the sociology of time, by exploring ways former politically dominant communities seek to negotiate their ritual traditions by forging newer relationships to modern time. The article offers an ethnography of decline among the Shia community of Hyderabad old city, whose weakened political status by colonial modernity speaks in different ways of the experience of the contemporary as diachronic and not in succession with the past. These perceptions of decline describe the moral loss of the Shia community through the spatial decline of Hyderabad old city, as a fallen state that has been produced by Muslim actors in time as well as located in the nature of time upon the community. The article reflects on the contradictory perceptions of decline that describes the deprivations produced by time as well as implicates community actors as offenders in time who are seen to persist with the performance of rituals as 'meaningless' actions. What are the relations to time being forged that make communities redefine culture in ways that are temporally meaningful to them, given their representation of belonging to the contemporary as implicating the decline of their civilisation?
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