Indian Instincts

fetch a glass of water. Looking around, I saw that the house had a similar layout to the others I had visited on earlier occasions—the entrance was small and led to a narrow corridor, where shoes and slippers were removed before entering the rest of the house. A few rooms were located on both sides of the corridor, including the small living room where I sat. The kitchen was large, occupying the most prominent part of the house next to an open courtyard.

As I sat waiting for Dhoopwati to return, I noticed a 2-foot wide chamber constructed of sheets of asbestos across the courtyard.

After some polite talk about the village and her well-being, I pointed to the asbestos contraption and asked, ‘What is that?’

‘It is a toilet,’ she said.

‘Can I go and see it?’ I asked, to which she nodded her head in agreement.

Four narrow cement steps led to a door clasped with a rope to the rest of the structure. Inside the chamber, there was a hole in the floor.

‘Where is the flush?’ I asked.

‘What is a flush?’

‘How does everything get drained out?’

‘Oh, we don’t use this,’ Dhoopwati explained. ‘The government told us to make this, and gave us some money,’ she went on. ‘But in our culture, we cannot have toilets in the house. So we do not use this.’

‘Why can you not have a toilet in the house?’

‘Chhi chhi, it is dirty. It has to be far away from the house. Here we cook food that we eat,’ she said, pointing to the large, majestic kitchen of her home.

Over the next few weeks, I visited thirty more families in Dhoopwati’s village, and another fifty families in the surrounding five villages. Each time, I made the highly unusual request of investigating their toilets, if they had one at home. Maintaining a photo diary of the toilets I visited, I compared my list to the government records for toilets built under the Open Defecation Free States scheme. Many of the toilets I saw were just shanties built over a hole in the ground. I discovered several addresses mentioned in the official records that did not actually exist in the village. And in most cases, I observed, the villagers still went out of their homes to urinate and defecate. I also visited a public toilet that had to be unlocked for me, as it had not been used since its construction several years ago.

In one village, the local sarpanch, a lady, had taken an iron-fisted approach. She had laid down the rule that anyone who saw another villager defecating in the open would whistle aloud in public, and report the case in the weekly village council meetings. The offender would be fined Rs 1000. The sarpanch explained to me angrily that the non-usage of toilets at home was not so much a matter of discomfort as of culture.

By this time, I had started evaluating the benefits of using the resources of the Jindal Group to build toilets in these villages. At the time of my investigation, 45.3 per cent of rural households in India did not have toilets.⁵ It was indeed important to build them, but I realized that the hygiene challenge was not one of infrastructure alone.

I asked villagers their reasons for defecating in the open, and heard many stories about their perspective on hygiene and ‘dirt’. Bodily excreta, including hair and spit, was considered so dirty that it needed to be removed to a place outside the house. This place could even be just outside the house, but never inside. There were specific people assigned to deal with the ‘dirt’—barbers who performed tonsures and disposed of the hair somewhere far away, sweepers who cleaned the house, only to dump the waste on the street outside. How could they defecate inside the house?

I found that they applied the same principle of ‘dirt’ to people as well. Certain classes of people were considered too dirty to be in physical proximity to oneself. Each community, no matter how ‘low’ in status it was relative to other groups, found another community or person to be even lower and hence dirtier. These classifications were also reflective of a deep bias: that people of different castes and communities were ‘naturally’ different because they were made of different substances. One’s body needed to be protected from the inferior substances.

It occurred to me that even today, in urban settings, it is common for elite and even middle-class households to have separate vessels from which cleaners and maids eat and drink, and large homes definitely have a separate maid’s toilet. In many parts of India, different communities and castes eat separately. Inter-caste marriage is definitely a big taboo almost all over the country. Why? Because in all these cases, the ‘inferior’ person’s bodily substances—saliva, remains of excrement, semen—must not enter our body and ‘pollute’ us.

Eventually, the Jindal Group did start to construct toilets in Chhattisgarh, and they also conducted a large number of workshops with women so that they would take responsibility for their maintenance and use. Women, we found, were the agents of change in the families and if we put them in charge of improving hygiene and influencing beliefs, we would stand a greater chance of success in our endeavour.

Meanwhile, my observations in these villages reminded me of conversations I had had about fifteen years ago with the formidable Indian sociologist Dipankar Gupta.⁶

I got the chance to spend a few days with Gupta when he was visiting Paris, where I was studying at that time. Gupta and I were both residing at the Maison de l’Inde in Cite Universitaire, an area in the south of Paris dedicated to lodgings for students and academics. We took many memorable strolls in the campus. Gupta’s primary research had been about social stratification in India and at that time he had just released a book on India’s ‘mistaken modernity’.

Gupta said that he felt that there was a general confusion among people between ‘contemporaneity’ and ‘modernity’. Consequently, those who argued