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Between Ritual and Refuse: Caste and the Sanitation of Public Life in India

Beginning on January 13, 2025, the Maha Kumbh Mela was expected to draw over 400 million pilgrims to Prayagraj, Uttar Pradesh. The Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh claimed that the turnout could reach 600 million, making it the largest gathering in human history. Pilgrims celebrated the festival by bathing in the Ganges River, hoping to absolve themselves of their ‘sins’ and free themselves from the cycle of life and death.


Men bowing in waist-deep water, performing a ritual. Background figures wade; scattered white containers float. Calm, reflective mood.
Ritual bathing during the Kumbh Mela. (Image: Wikimedia)

And yet, one should not ignore the knowledge that this ritualistic purification, performed by over 400 million people, is performed in one of the world's most polluted rivers—The Ganges. 


Ritual Purity and the Logic of Filth


Spanning 45 days and drawing record-breaking numbers of pilgrims from across the country, the Maha Kumbh has become among the largest religious gatherings in the world. With such overwhelming numbers and the extended duration of the festival, waste management within the Mela premises posed a formidable challenge. 


In response, this year saw various provisions implemented by the Prayagraj Mela authorities to ensure a “Swachh Kumbh” (Clean Kumbh)—connected to the broader Swachh Bharat initiative by the Indian government. As early as February 2024, the Mela authorities had imposed a fine on littering, spitting, and open defecation along the ‘pucca’ ghats (cemented riverfront steps) of the Ganges to prepare for the Mela. 


Other significant steps included the arrangement of 1.5 lakh temporary toilets and the employment of over 5,000 sanitation workers, primarily from the Dalit community—a community traditionally relegated to the caste-based occupation of sanitation. 


In a report by Agence France-Presse (AFP), the sanitation workers employed at the Maha Kumbh spoke of their ordeals at the festival. They described the lack of basic amenities like a regular water connection and buckets as significant hurdles for both the workers and the common pilgrims. Moreover, they reported that there have been rampant attitudes of contempt towards them from pilgrims.


The attitude of contempt primarily constituted an explicit refusal to properly clean up after themselves upon usage of the washrooms, under an assumption that someone from the ‘right caste’ will clean up after them instead. Speaking to AFP, Geeta Valmiki, one of the sanitation workers, said, “People say it’s our job to clean the toilets, so why should they bother?” 


Despite the festival’s central theme of pious ritual purity, sanitation workers struggled to maintain cleanliness. This was not only due to the reluctance of pilgrims to clean up after themselves but also their active littering—an act that reflects not just disregard for public space, but a deep-seated caste entitlement that assumes someone else, lower in the social hierarchy, will clean up after them.


On December 28, 2024, members of the Gau Raksha Dal, a cow vigilante group in India known for its repeated involvement in communal violence, raided several huts near the banks of the ‘holy’ Ganges in Haridwar, Uttarakhand. According to a report by The Observer Post, they harassed the residents for allegedly consuming chicken in their homes. 


The incident was yet another majoritarian attack on the civil liberties of people, fueled by disgust for the ‘ritually impure’ practice of consuming non-vegetarian food. This contradiction between the coexistence of both ritual purity and sewage festering at the same place reiterates a fundamental understanding that the brahmanical notions of ritual purity and pollution not only tolerate but actively promote unsanitary conditions in disguise. 


The questions of ‘purity’ and ‘pollution’ have been subjected to extensive discussion and discourse throughout the scholarship on caste, especially in sociological literature. The axis of Brahmanical caste ideology is based on the assumption that certain sorts of labor, material, and people are inherently ‘polluting’ in nature, and similarly, there exists a counterpart that is inherently ‘pure.’ 


M.N. Srinivas, a prominent Indian sociologist and social anthropologist, has written about how this purity, which is ritual, is essentially different from cleanliness. Although they can sometimes intersect, they remain fundamentally distinguished as the logic of ritual purity contradicts the scientific definition of cleanliness. 


Similarly, ‘pollution’ is also ritualistic and doesn't resonate with a medical definition of dirty or unclean. Clinical dirt has to do mostly with germs, other microbes, diseases, and the biological body, as emphasised by Subhendra Bhowmick, a scholar at Sidho Kanho Birsha University. 


Ritual pollution, however, is centered around the idea of the ‘social body’, or the collective community, which is believed to be at risk of contamination when it comes into contact with someone considered ‘impure.’ This stems from the notion that even the mere presence or proximity of an ‘impure’ person can defile the collective purity of the group. The history and widespread practice of untouchability in India were deeply rooted in such beliefs about purity and impurity being tied to entire communities and their bodies.


Caste, Blame, and the Public Space


The Brahmanical social order has dehumanized Dalits in almost every sphere of life for centuries, merely by reducing them to mere sites of pollution. Under the Peshwa rule, it manifested in Dalits being forced to tie an earthen pot to their necks so that they spit in the pot and prevent their saliva from reaching the ground. 


To add to the dehumanisation, a broom was also tied to their waists so that as they walked, their footprints would be swept off the road. Brahmanical prohibitions have somewhat categorized the Dalit community as ‘mobile dirt’—underlining that perceived impurity was not static but followed Dalit individuals wherever they went and was left behind on whatever and/or whomever they interacted with.


The role of caste in shaping public sanitation is also easily historically traced. Traditionally, the work of sanitation was assigned to the castes deemed ‘menial’ by those higher in the caste hierarchy. The colonial policies of the British further established very rigid associations of certain castes within the Dalit community to particular sorts of sanitation work as their caste occupations. 


Balmikis, one of many castes belonging to the Dalit community, erstwhile worked as landless agricultural laborers in rural Punjab, migrated to cities by the 1880s and were soon hired in the sanitation workforce and became sweepers. The sweepers and sanitation workforce today, too, is predominantly occupied by Dalit workers. The codification of caste-based occupation was intentionally enacted as the colonial perception saw caste and division of labor to be instinctive.


A cursory understanding of caste’s conceptual framework of ‘purity and pollution’ might lead one to assume that caste ideology is primarily concerned with maintaining one’s own ‘purity.’ It may then seem logical to conclude that this results in a widespread concern for cleanliness in general. However, this is not the case. 


The ideological disgust for ‘impurity’ and the urge to distance from ‘impure’ groups doesn't translate into better sanitary practices. Rather, the very ideas of purity and pollution, central to the caste-psyche, play an instrumental role in poor sanitation and not a lack of ‘civic sense' among the poor masses as popularly imagined. 


According to a report in Green Matters, the Ganges River has been widely acknowledged as the most polluted river in the world. Nevertheless, the pollution of the ‘ritually pure’ river hasn't deterred people from revering the river as sacred, holy, and capable of washing off one’s sins. It  is often noted that, despite being considered sacred, many rivers in India are in a deplorable condition, whereas countries that do not assign such sacredness to their rivers often enjoy much cleaner water bodies.


However, the ‘sacred’ character of the Ganges and other rivers bears significant responsibility for their poor condition. The ritual purity attributed to these rivers elevates them above the realm of clinical dirt. No matter how polluted they are as per scientific standards, they remain sacred and purifying in the caste-psyche. 


This perception normalizes littering and ritualistic use, perpetuating their degradation. Interestingly, anxiety over ritual pollution, such as consuming 'impure' food like chicken near the river, provokes violent reactions while ignoring clinical pollutants altogether. This dichotomy reflects the contradictions between ritualistic and scientific understandings of cleanliness.  


Nevertheless, this is not to argue that factors like industrial waste, agricultural runoff, lack of proper provisions, and poor waste management are not also behind the Ganges River’s pollution, only that the conceptions of ritualistic purity and pollution are significant contributors to it by their shaping of societal attitudes towards sanitation and cleanliness.


When talking about sanitation in public spaces, a commonplace perception holds the poor, uneducated, and marginalized sections of the populace responsible for dirtying the city because of their purported lack of ‘civic sense’ and complicity with the noble laws of modernity. 


While anti-caste scholars like Anand Teltumbde, Assa Doron, Ira Raja, and Valerian Rodriguez have all demonstrated through various analyses and observations that the caste system leads to the deplorable condition of public spaces in India, there unfortunately remain discourses parroting the same flawed common-sensical understandings of sanitation in India.


Dipesh Chakraborty, in his article ‘Of Garbage, Modernity and the Citizen's Gaze,’ posits that the unclean nature of India’s public domain is likely because the masses resist against the insinuations of modernity and have disregarded the nationalists’ call for discipline, public health and order. Much of his analysis shifts the blame on the ‘non-bourgeois peasant-citizens' as they ‘‘refuse to act as citizens of an ideal bourgeois order.’’ 


Valerian Rodriguez, in a response to Chakraborty’s deeply casteist stance, argues that the public spaces are rendered as impure certainly because they are public, fostering a mixing of different castes across the caste hierarchy in one place without restrictions. Thus, people find it acceptable to litter openly and disregard cleanliness because the place is ‘impure’ and not ‘exclusive’ to them. 


More so, it is exactly because these public spaces are considered impure that they are allowed to deteriorate, awaiting someone from the so-called ‘right caste’ to clean them up. These casteist notions are a hindrance to the much-needed realization that the cleanliness of public spaces is an equally shared responsibility of all the populace—a notion often referred to as ‘civic sense.’ 


As Doron and Raja put it: “(Filth in public spaces) ... has more to do with the neglect of spaces people share with those beneath them in the caste hierarchy.” The phenomenon is yet another manifestation of caste ideology's complex web of graded inequalities pertinent in nearly every realm of social and personal life in the Indian context. 


From manually cleaning gutters, sewers, and dry toilets to sweeping the towns, almost every sector of sanitation work is predominantly performed by different castes from within the Dalit community today. 


Despite a complete ban on manual scavenging by the Prohibition of Employment as Manual Scavengers and their Rehabilitation Act, 2013, it continues to be enforced on Dalits in contemporary times. As per a national survey report by the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment (MSJE), the number of manual scavengers in India has gone up from 13,000 in 2013 to 42,303 in 2018, despite the 2013 legislation and initiatives like Swachh Bharat Abhiyan.


In the shadows of sacred rivers and holy rituals, it is the caste-marked bodies who carry the weight of cleanliness; public filth in India is less about civic failure and more about caste-designed neglect. Thus, what appears as a sanitation crisis is not merely infrastructural but deeply ideological, where ritual purity coexists with public filth, and caste determines who cleans and who pollutes. 


In a country where ritual purity can sanctify polluted waters and stigmatize human bodies, cleanliness is a caste burden. Unless the ideological filth of caste is addressed, no amount of infrastructural reform will cleanse the public sphere.




Edited by Ananya Karthikeyan and Eshal Zahur


Vansh Yadav is a student of Sociology at Ambedkar University, Delhi, and a columnist at Political Pandora. His areas of research interests include history, fascism, urban studies, and caste.

 


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Keywords: Ganges River Pollution, Maha Kumbh Mela 2025, Caste Discrimination India, Dalit Rights, Manual Scavenging Ban, Ritual Purity India, Caste Inequality India, Swachh Bharat Failure, Dalit Sanitation Workers, Indian Pilgrimage Waste, Swachh Kumbh Campaign, Public Cleanliness India, Caste Based Exploitation, India Sacred Rivers, Sanitation Crisis India.

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