A few metres away from my cushioned chair and clacking laptop, in a class housing Dalit Studies for three hours every week, sits an “akka,” as we respectfully call the housekeeping staff here in Bangalore, on the bathroom floor next to mops, disinfectants and the toilet stalls that we barely touch with our fingers. This is a pattern I have long observed in urban spaces, as a child at school, where the akkas would rest against the walls of the bathroom huddled together during their breaks. This is an image I have also seen in various urban spaces like malls. While the scene outside the bathroom changes, the women sitting on the cold dirty floor they are hired to clean does not change and has not changed in years since I moved out of my pigtails.
I see the same image now at a university bathroom on the corridor of the English Department, which exists to fight the very social evils that exist a few feet away from our cushioned seats of discussion. We discuss Ambedkar, and dignified labour, and then leave students to the cafeteria and teachers to their cabins in staffrooms, our break-spaces. The space the akkas receive? The bathroom floor.
Talking with a classmate who frequently interacts with the akkas, I came to know that the akkas have a designated breakroom—in the basement, far from their actual spaces of work which they need to get back to every hour. The inconvenient spacing of these break rooms, unlike the considerate accommodations students and teachers often receive, forces them to remain in the bathrooms no matter the situation. During our conversation, my classmate referred to an incident where she saw one of the akkas resting because she had a cold—by lying down on the bathroom floor.
These images, as I reflected on them, reminded me of a Dalit child made to sit on the floor while their upper-caste peers peered down at them from their benches. Space was made for individuals based on their caste. While the bathroom space of rest is not enforced the same as untouchability in schools, its logic of space has trickled down into urban institutions and spaces years after the abolition of untouchability through Article 17 in 1950.
Most of the individuals working in sanitation, and cleaning belong to the Dalit community, owing to their historic oppression and social exclusion that suppressed them into spheres of work deemed undignified or polluting for the upper class. The most adverse form of this reflected in India is manual scavenging. The workers are defined by The Prohibition of Employment as Manual Scavengers and their Rehabilitation Act, 2013 as those “engaged or employed by an individual or a local authority or an agency or a contractor for manually cleaning, carrying, disposing off, or otherwise handling in any manner human excreta…”
Despite the Prohibition of Employment as Manual Scavengers and their Rehabilitation Act, 2013, the Safai Karamchari Andolan (SKA) estimates around 1,726 worker deaths from manual scavenging since the 2013 law. The law has not prevented the continued employment of Indian citizens in such undignified jobs based on their caste. Their systematic exclusion from higher education, and jobs beyond the brooms and mops, through threats of violence, denial and lack of pay forces them back into their caste-assigned jobs. The Safai Karamchari Andolan further estimates that among the 1.2 million sanitation workers in India, over 90% of them are Dalits.
While legally and in terms of overt oppression, workers in the housekeeping force may not be the same as manual scavengers, the occupation is a sanitised offspring of the same, which many individuals of the Dalit community are a part of owing to their historic social and economic exclusion.
The logic of a lack of spatial dignity in urban spaces for the cleaning staff contains an invisible residue of these exclusionary practices that has become normalised. This exclusion might not exist out of active caste discrimination—though it is an active practice in certain spaces. We see an institutional negligence that many spaces have arrived at that mimic the logic of a historical exclusion—here the basement and the bathroom. One must question if the normalisation of this historic exclusion has contributed to the lack of creation of dignified spaces of rest for these women. A room exists, but for whose dignity and convenience?
Now, not only has it been normalised in the minds of us privileged beneficiaries of their work, but it has also been systematically normalised in the minds of the victims through repeated practice.
A video circulating on Instagram, by the creator ‘Akash_swaroopa_,’ records him bringing in two of the housekeeping staff at a school to celebrate them. Two chairs have been set up for them at the front of the room but one of the women instinctively takes a seat on the floor before they are guided to the chairs. This instinct is a corporeal manifestation of the spatial trauma that has been ingrained into the daily lives of the workers.
These workers are often thanked and even celebrated with special days at universities and other spaces to acknowledge their work. However, that celebration of the individual becomes null and hypocritical when their work environment is undignified. No number of balloons and speeches of appreciation, while they are important, can substitute for chairs, or a convenient break room that restores dignity in everyday working conditions.
I, and others, often find ourselves touching bathroom doors with tissue paper and stepping carefully on the bathroom floor. Yet, the very spot that we are loathe to stand on is the very spot where these individuals, worthy of the break-spaces we receive, sit. It is a haunting thought to think as I sit on a cushioned chair in a Dalit Studies classroom, a few metres away from a woman who sits on the bathroom floor, just next to her disinfectants.
(The author is a Masters student of English Literature focusing on dalit studies, gender, culture and media studies based in Bangalore)
Related:
One Death Every Few Days, Zero Accountability: Sanitation workers protest at Jantar Mantar
Lucknow: Caste hierarchies & contract labour exploitation among sanitation workers