Assa Doron - Waste of a Nation: Garbage and Growth in India

This book began one day in 2012 when Doron took a taxi to Seelampur. We were interested in mobile phones and were curious about what happened to them when they died. Seelampur is a neighborhood in the northeast of New Delhi that specializes in electronic waste. Dorons visit made a big impression on him. The immense volume of thrown-away electronic gadgetry and the peoplewomen and children, old and youngengaged in breaking it down and segregating materials provoked nagging questions. Doron returned from his visit declaring, Weve got to do a book about garbage.

To our eyes, what Doron had seen was garbage. But Seelampur does not deal in garbage; it deals in thrown-away things that can be turned into something elserecycling. We soon began to realize that waste was a little complicated, a phrase that keeps cropping up in this book. We found ourselves trying to understand the complications and then articulate our understanding to ourselves and others. In the course of the four years that we have grappled with garbage, we have realized how much other people know about the many dimensions of waste and how much has been written about it. We have incurred debts to many people who have shared their experience and detailed knowledge to try to improve ours. The Acknowledgments at the end of the book recognize some of those debts. In the book, we occasionally use pseudonyms when there is a possibility that an informant might be embarrassed to be identified.

If there are, as the Paul Simon song says, fifty ways to leave your lover, there are almost as many ways to study waste in India. You could focus on a particular commodity, as Kaveri Gill focuses on plastic. You could study a single city, as Urvashi Dhamija studies New Delhi. You could take your cue from the powerful work of Bhasha Singh and write about the occupation of a single groupthe lowest-status Dalits, locked into collecting human excrement. As a passionate activist, you could produce an evocative photo study of a single landfill and its residents, as Dhrubajyoti Ghosh did by photographing the Dhapa site in Kolkata, or as Sudharak Olwe and Atul Deulgaonkar did when they recorded the activities of sewer workers of Mumbai. You could, like Diane Coffey and Dean Spear, focus on toilets and defecation and the effects on public health, or trace the development of national policy about waste and sanitation, as Susan Chaplin has done. You could follow the lives of a few families who draw livelihoods from waste in a single locality, as Katherine Boo did. Or like the scholars, journalists, and activists of the Centre for Science and Environment, you could prepare a report that takes a snapshot of waste in India at a particular moment.

Among scholars, problems of waste have attracted geographers particularly, such as Vinay Gidwani and Colin McFarlane, who have written with energy and insight for many years about the people who make waste, those who recover it, and the social structures that sustain those roles. Historians such as David Arnold, Mark Harrison, Sandhyal Polu, and Mridula Ramana have traced public health and sanitation from British times. Scholars of citiessociologists and economists, such as Isher Judge Ahluwalia and Asher Ghertnerhave viewed waste in the context of urbanization and the contests between middle-class aesthetics and survival strategies of the poor. Less often, policy makers like the late K. C. Sivaramakrishnan have treated public sanitation as a central element in attempts to improve urbanization processes.

The authorship of the book is as joint as such a project, we think, can be. One of us starts a chapter, sends it to the other one, who adds, subtracts, multiplies, and divides, and sends it back. In such prose ping-pong, it becomes difficult sometimes to know whose words were originally whose. And of course it doesnt matter, but readers may wish to know that Doron is a card-carrying anthropologist and Jeffrey began working life as a sports writer. We have an implicit intellectual debt to D. A. Low, whom we both knew quite well, and B. S. Cohn, whom neither of us ever met. They both liked the idea of bringing together the techniques of anthropology and history. So do we, although we cant claim to have done so as elegantly and diligently as they.

Minnie, Itai, and Tomer tolerated Dorons infatuation with waste, and his fondness for stories from landfills, open dumps, and recycling sheds. He could not have done it without them. Lesley Jeffrey endured another scholarly folly of the kind she has had to put up with over the past forty years, for which her devoted folly-ista thanks her.

Doron is grateful to the Australian Research Council for supporting his Future Fellowship and for the encouragement of colleagues in the College of Asia and the Pacific and elsewhere at the Australian National University. Jeffrey has been fortunate to have had regular periods at the Institute of South Asian Studies at the National University of Singapore, and he greatly benefited from the institutes support and the companionship of its scholars.

We have not used diacritical marks for Indian words. We show long vowels by repeating the letter (for example, aa), except at the end of words, in which case they are simply a. For widely used words, we follow common spellings. A wala (or wallah) remains a wala, although a more pedantic transliteration would have vaala. Direct quotations retain original spellings. We do not differentiate between retroflex and dental sounds, although in Hindi, for example, thela, a cart, has a retroflex th and thali, a plate, has a dental th.

Map I.1India

A SSA D ORON KNOWS A YOUNG MAN in Varanasi whose name is Mallu. Mal in Hindi means feces or excrement. Doron once asked Mallus mother how he got such a name. She explained that by the time Mallu was born, all three of her older children had died from disease. None had lived past the age of three. When her fourth child was born, elders advised her to place the child briefly in the open drain that ran beside their hamlet. By doing so, she would be acknowledging that this child was no better than excrement and therefore of no interest or value to the gods. Repelled by this repugnant child, the deities would leave him with her. From that day, he was known as Mallu, a name he still carries as an adult with three children of his own.