Raising a stink

Bhasha Singh's Unseen: The Truth About India's Manual Scavengers takes a look at the age-old practice of manual scavenging through the eyes of the people who continue to perform this job till date. It is an important work since it brings to the fore issues that the government as well as people like us often choose to ignore or - excuse the terrible pun - flush away. While this is not the first book to highlight the plight of people who manually remove human waste from dry toilets across the country, it does a fair job of recording the outrage, pain and the social ostracism that manual scavengers experience on a daily basis. No wonder, then, that the book is dedicated to "…all those women who, cursed with the centuries-old burden of carrying baskets of shit, despite their string urge to fling those baskets on the face of civilised society, were not able to do so".

The central government passed the Prohibition of Employment as Manual Scavengers and their Rehabilitation Bill in 2012. However, Ms Singh avers that all this law has achieved is to make manual scavenging illegal. Consequently, today, when a man crawls into a septic tank to carry out excrement in buckets upon his head, he is actually breaking the law! Yet, the government has failed to provide alternative employment opportunities to these communities, thereby making the effort and the Bill an utter failure.

In the first section of Unseen, Ms Singh portrays the horror of this issue through the stories of the scavengers themselves. Strikingly, the stories are not from any one state alone but from across India - from Karnataka, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Kashmir, Gujarat and even Delhi, to name a few - which brings home the sheer extent of this social malaise. The author builds a sensitive picture of scavenger colonies existing cheek by jowl with rows of glitzy shopping malls in Delhi. She meets Meena, a young scavenger with a severely handicapped daughter. Meena believes that the filthy nature of her work, which she carried on doing well into her pregnancy, irreversibly damaged her unborn child. Ms Singh also visits Kashmir, where the lack of sewage network has meant that most toilets are dry or have in-built septic tanks that need periodic manual cleaning. The author evocatively brings out the oppressive lives of Kashmiri scavengers; she shows how their lifestyle perpetuates a vicious, age-old circle of poverty, illiteracy and social stigmatisation. What makes this especially poignant is that given the myriad other problems Kashmir is facing today, the voices of its manual scavengers are going unheard.

Ms Singh also brings out poignantly the plight of manual scavengers battling deep-rooted social stigmas as they try to take up other means of livelihoods. Since they are considered untouchable, finding any sort of employment is not easy. Near Patna, for instance, when a scavenger opened a tea shop, not a single customer came. About her caste and low status in society, people said, "…It is written on your forehead and you will not be able to wipe it off, at least not in this birth."

Through the stirring testimonies of women scavengers, Ms Singh has unearthed a poignant fact: that they are hugely bitter about the fact that over the centuries, they have been unseen and unheard because an ostrich-like society has buried its head in the sand, unwilling to deal with the issue. Many of the scavengers Ms Singh interviewed said that carrying excrement on one's head was so filthy and dehumanising that they could only do it when they were drunk or doped out of their minds. Yet, almost everywhere that Ms Singh went, she noted that the district administration and the government (Odisha and West Bengal are two notable examples) were unwilling to accept that manual scavenging even existed. In Delhi, the government ordered the closure of all dry toilets and brazenly declared that the capital was "manual scavenger free".

When she began her research, Ms Singh was clearly the "other"; her respondents demanded to know her caste and why she was interviewing and photographing them. But somewhere along the way, the author became what she has herself called a "manual scavenging journalist". To a large extent, her self-given epithet underscores the lack of objectivity in the book. At several junctures in the book, her outrage on behalf of this admittedly ill-treated community seems to overshadow the massive research effort that she must have undertaken for a book of this scale. In parts too, the author seems to pick up her journalist's quill, momentarily losing focus on the issue at hand. In Kashmir, she devotes what seems to be undue page space to the plight of the families of two women raped and killed by Indian security forces in Shopian. Heart-rending as the account was, it was irrelevant to the narrative.

All in all, the book is an interesting read - a refreshing change in a society that squeamishly flushes away its excreta without a thought for where it goes or who cleans the mess. It's about time someone raised a stink about manual scavenging, and that's exactly what Ms Singh has done.
UNSEEN: THE TRUTH ABOUT INDIA'S MANUAL SCAVENGERS
Bhasha Singh
Penguin
282 pages; Rs 299