480 Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East
feces has all but disappeared with the gradual im-
plementation of the Employment of Manual Scav-
engers and Dry Latrines Construction (Prohibi-
tion) Act of 1993,48 and the sanitation labor castes
have abandoned the village for the city at a far
higher rate than the agricultural castes. With the
manure basins gone, the Mehtar t. olās I visited with
my interlocutors, which are anyway now largely de-
populated, no longer exhale the odor of mailā.
What, though, of M. L. Singh’s Benares? What
was that smell — voh bū — of which he spoke?
Part 2: The City
Sanitation Infrastructure as Address
I was having a conversation with Ravi Kumar, a mu-
nicipal employee who was sweeping a main road
near Assi Ghat in Benares. He invited me to his
home.
“Come in the afternoon, after I inish duty and
bathe.”
“Okay, where do you live?”
“Go up this street and walk about ive minutes.
On the left after the lane next to a big yellow kot. hī
there is a kūr.ā ghar [rubbish depot]. Behind that
is a śauchālay [public toilet]. My house is between
the depot and the toilet.”
While Ravi Kumar intended no dramatic efect in
giving the coordinates of his home in this fashion—
on the contrary, as I discovered a few hours later
when I went to visit him, his directions could not
have been more straightforward, accurate, and
easy to follow — I was nonetheless startled by the
extreme degree of spatial abjection implied in
such an address. But later that day, as he and I
sat together drinking black tea and inhaling the
fumes of the municipal garbage depot and the
public toilet between which his one- room brick
home was situated, I realized that I had been here
before. Not literally in this bastī (Ravi’s was one of
ive such homes, all inhabited by his caste fellows),
but at this particular conluence of hospitality and
environmental injustice.
There was, for instance, the manganī (en-
48. This is diferent from saying that manual
scavenging has all but disappeared. The prac-
tice of cleaning dry latrines — removing the
feces — continues. What is no longer in evi-
• 37:3 • 2017
gagement) ceremony I had attended in one of
the Halalkhor bastīs of Tanda in eastern Uttar
Pradesh. I arrived with Sikandar, a railway em-
ployee living in Lucknow, and the two of us were
welcomed by his distant relative Faiz, the father of
the bride-to-be. After the main festivities in which
men partook — we smoked bīr. īs together, drank
chai, presented gifts to the fathers, and shared a
solemn meal in a repurposed storage room — Faiz
walked Sikandar and me to the place where we
would spend the night. Faiz’s two- storey house,
a feat of many years of saving, was full of guests
and relatives; Sikandar and another out- of-towner
and I, then, were to occupy the family’s previous
home, which they retained for just such occasions.
This was one of a row of small concrete structures
provided by the Tanda nagar pālikā (municipal-
ity) for its sanitation workers (which included sev-
eral members of Faiz’s family). The housing block
faced an extensive public toilet across a small lane.
There was no question of evading the smell: the
lane and the workers’ quarters were pervaded by a
pungent blend of urinous and excremental odors.
None of us mentioned it, of course, but Faiz’s smile
was pained as he showed us our cots, ofered us
yet one more round of chai before bed, and bid us
good night.
Weeks earlier, in a Dhanuk bastī near Luc-
know’s Charbagh station I spent an afternoon lis-
tening to Mosna, born around 1940, recalling her
early childhood memories of cleaning the priv-
ies of the British before independence, while her
granddaughter Kanita sat nearby half listening,
half doing her school homework. While Mosna,
her son Badlu, and Kanita and I talked for hours
that afternoon and evening, the ammoniac smell
of urine rolled in from the public latrine across
the alley from their front door, and a heavier fetor
hung in the air from one of the city’s nālās (open
drains) behind their home. The urine smell came
in waves, corresponding to the latrine’s busy peri-
ods, lulls, and periodic cleaning, whereas the nālā
odor remained more or less constant. We had chai
and biscuits, and eventually a delicious goat curry.
dence is the retaining of the feces thus re-
moved for mixing with animal manure to man-
ufacture fertilizer.
 Joel Lee • How Caste Is Inscribed in Space and Sensoria • Odor and Order 481

The aroma of all of these mixed with the scent of
the nālā and the latrine.
In Benares, then, sitting with Ravi Kumar at
his home between the kūr. ā ghar and the śauchālay,
I realized how often the fragrance of chai had, as
its olfactory accompaniment, the efusions of pre-
cisely these two features of urban infrastructure.
Until this time, in something of a willful denial, I
had not allowed myself to acknowledge how many
of the smaller urban bastīs I had visited literally
abutted either toilets or rubbish depots or both.
Now I began to notice how often sanitation infra-
structure igured in the directions with which my
interlocutors guided me to their homes. I started
noticing it in the literature, as well. The bastī in
which Owen Lynch conducted his ethnography
of Dalit politics in Agra abutted a municipal la-
trine and garbage dump,49 Ravindra Khare’s study
of Dalit ideology in Lucknow was set partly in a
neighborhood “along two sides of a 25-foot- wide
bricklined open drain,”50 and the Benares sweep-
ers of whom Mary Searle- Chatterjee writes lived
adjacent to a block of municipal latrines.51 This
was not only a matter of Uttar Pradesh. Consider,
for example, this description of a major Dalit pil-
grimage site in Rajasthan: “[The] temple of Naval
Sahib [a nineteenth-century Dalit saint] is situated
at Mokha Bhangi Bustee on Tiba near the public
latrines and dumping station.”52
I began systematically to map where the sani-
tation labor castes live in Lucknow and Benares.
Four residential patterns emerged, each with a
distinctive history. Detailing these will shed light
on the ways in which the postcolonial city both
disrupts and reinvigorates the lived experience of
caste as a spatial- sensory order. First, though, it is
necessary to understand some general features of
sanitation infrastructure in U.P. cities.
“Urban space,” writes Lefebvre, “gathers
crowds, products in the markets, acts and symbols.
It concentrates all these, and accumulates them.”53
The accumulative function of urban space applies
also to abjected matter. The city amasses moun-
tainous accumulations of rubbish; it collects and
concentrates prodigious volumes of excrement and
urine. Urban sanitation infrastructure both gath-
ers and disperses these accumulations, channel-
ing waste from nexus to node and node to nexus.
In cities like Lucknow and Benares, refuse from
streets, gutters, and homes is gathered daily by
municipal sweepers into small roadside heaps and
sludge piles; these are transported in pushcarts
to three-walled rubbish depots in every neighbor-
hood; from depots refuse is transported by truck
to landills on the outskirts and sometimes in the
interstices of the city. The system for the disposal
of human ordure has a similarly reticular-nodular
spatial pattern. Previously — before the popular-
ization of lush latrines and the illegalization of
manual scavenging — manual scavengers (“conser-
vancy workers” in colonial discourse) collected it
from dry latrines (sandās, bamplūs) in homes and
institutions, carried it by basket and cart to depots
located in each neighborhood, and then trans-
ported the contents of the depots by mule or cart
to dumping grounds outside the city. Now the old
“night soil” depots are gone, but the public latrines
that have been built in their place serve a similarly
nodular function, simultaneously accumulating
human waste and dispersing it via open drains and
enclosed culverts, leading in some cases to a sew-
age treatment plant (Benares has three; Lucknow
has two, one of which functions) but more often
directly to a river (79 percent of sewage in India
enters rivers untreated, according to a government
report 54).
From this basic sketch of the weblike pat-
tern of sanitation infrastructure it will be clear
that sanitation workers trace its reticular paths in
their daily rounds. Insofar as the sanitation labor
castes are the people performing sanitation labor
(they comprise more than 90 percent of the sani-

49. See Lynch, Politics of Untouchability, 169.
50. Khare, Untouchable as Himself, 9.
51. Searle- Chatterjee, Reversible Sex Roles, 21.
The bastīs described by Khare and Lynch are
inhabited by Chamars, which suggests that
not only the sanitation labor castes but other
urbanized Dalit castes, as well, have been sub- Singh Maharaj in the year 1947” (Shyamlal, The
jected to the same or similar histories of resi- Bhangis in Transition, 63).
dential discrimination as are under consider-
53. Lefebvre, Production of Space, 101.
ation here.
54. Sinha and Nazimuddin, “Sewage Treatment
52. The passage continues: “This temple was
Plants.”
constructed in the memory of Naval Sahib by
His Highness of Jodhpur Darbar, Late Hanwant
482 Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East
tation workforce in Benares, Lucknow, and the
other Uttar Pradesh and Bihar towns in which I
conducted research), it is they who contend on a
daily basis with the odors and toxins of landills,
rubbish depots, public latrines, and sewage drains.
The olfactory implications of the sanitation labor
caste workplace is a subject I treat elsewhere.55 The
point that I wish to make here, though, is that for
many of my interlocutors, the sensory nightmare
of the workplace accompanies the worker home.
Four Residential Patterns
To get at the spatial practices that produce bastīs
like Ravi Kumar’s, Faiz’s, or Mosna’s, I took to
mapping. It quickly became apparent that a very
large majority of sanitation labor caste homes in
cities like Lucknow and Benares fall into one of
four residential patterns. Consider Lucknow. The
oldest sanitation labor caste settlements in the city
are outgrowths of what were formerly servants’
quarters of prominent families in the nawabi and
colonial dispensation (the nawabs and their service
gentry, the British, the taluqdars of Awadh). These
are clusters of homes, usually of no more than ten
or ifteen families (though some are larger), in the
lanes behind now- crumbling kot. hīs, bungalows,
and imāmbār. ās. The Valmiki bastīs in Husseinabad
and Hazratganj are examples.
The second pattern is that of servants’ quar-
ters attached to government institutions dating
from the late colonial period onward. Lucknow
University has its sanitary staf quarters, as does
King George’s Medical College and most other
hospitals, Charbagh and other railway stations,
and so on. The municipality also provides some
housing blocks of this sort for its sweepers.
If the first and second patterns consist of
housing originally provided by employers to their
sanitation workers and their families, the third
and fourth are the consequence of sanitation
labor caste initiative, as constrained by social, eco-
nomic, and political factors. The third, which has
produced Lucknow’s most extensive and populous
bastīs (Lavkush Nagar, for example), is the result
of sanitation labor caste migrants coming to the
city and squatting on whatever land they were able
• 37:3 • 2017
to without fear of violent reprisal: land generally
perceived as undesirable.
The fourth pattern relects a peculiarity of
Lucknow as the seat of political power in Uttar
Pradesh. By 1960 the sanitation labor castes in Luc-
know had a handful of Congress MLAs and MPs
suiciently well placed that families were able in a
few cases to squat on plots of government land and
then get the arrangement regularized. The bastīs
that ultimately resulted from these maneuvers were
less precarious than other squatter settlements,
and in one case (Paper Mill Colony) involved from
the beginning pakkā houses, enclosed toilets, and
other amenities hitherto unavailable to the com-
munity. The fourth pattern, however, is basically
unknown in U.P. towns other than Lucknow.
In brief, then, in order of historical emer-
gence, we have:
1. Nawabi servants’ quarters (e.g., Husseinabad)
2. Colonial/postcolonial government (university,
railway, municipality) sweepers’ quarters (e.g.,
KGMC servants’ quarters)
3. Wasteland squatters’ colonies (e.g., Lavkush Nagar)
4. Squat- and-regularize colonies (e.g., Paper Mill
Colony)
What do these patterns mean for the spatial-
sensory- social order of the city? The first and
fourth patterns — the old nawabi servants’ quar-
ters and the relatively recent squat-and-regularize
colonies of politically canny Valmikis — have no
necessary relationship with municipal sanita-
tion infrastructure. Those who live behind the
kot. hīs of the old urban elite and those who have
land titles in Lucknow’s post-1960 Balmikipurvas
and Balmikinagars inhabit urban spaces similar
to those of other poor and working- class groups
in the city: spaces neither particularly well served
nor entirely unserved by sanitation infrastructure
(again with the exception of Paper Mill Colony,
which is well served), but not deined by sanitation
infrastructure.
Within the second and third patterns, as well,
there are instances in which the infrastructure of
waste has little bearing on sanitation labor caste
housing. Some government institutions are less
guilty of the practice of housing their sanitary staf
55. See Lee, “Recognition,” chap. 2.