Tanika Sarkar Speaks on Dirty Work and Labor Activism in Late Colonial Calcutta

The South Asian Studies Council welcomes Professor Tanika Sarkar to its weekly colloquium, where she will present a talk titled: “Dirty Work, Filthy Caste : Sewers and Scavengers in Late Colonial Calcutta”

4.30pm, March 28 · Room 203, Luce Hall, 34 Hillhouse Avenue
Tanika Sarkar is Professor, Modern History, at the Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi.   Her most recent monograph is titled Rebels, Wives and Saints : Designing Selves and nation in Colonial Times, Permanent Black, Delhi and Seagull: New York, 2009. She has co-edited with Sumit Sarkar, Women and Social Reform in Modern India : Permanent Black, Delhi and Indiana University Press, 2008.

Currently, she holds the position of Reeves Visiting Professor, Grinnell College, Iowa, She is about to complete a monograph titled Between Faith and Law : Rights, Culture and Community in Colonial Times. She is also working on a volume for the New Cambridge History of British India series on Gender and Sexuality in Colonial and Post-Colonial South Asia which has been commissioned by the Cambridge University Press.

The paper will begin with a brief discussion of the municipalisation of urban facilities in late colonial Calcutta and the gradual transfer of power over the Calcutta Corporation from European to Indian nationalist hands by the early 1920s. It will then move on to discuss the problems of sanitation and sewage cleaning in the city, tracking changes in forms of garbage disposal. Very often, improvement projects meant a wholesale demolition of insanitary slums, making the living space of the poor, including those who carried on the work of sanitation, extremely insecure. Their caste based untouchability and the dirty and dangerous mode of their work further rendered municipal scavengers an invisible population to the urban public. This was reflected in archival sources. Scavengers were a casual labor force and municipal rolls therefore did not record their presence and provided no data for their living and working conditions. 

Visiblity was thrust upon the city and the Corporation authorities only when scavengers went on strike in 1928. Accumulation of garbage and consequent fears of epidemic forced upon them a realization of the nature of the services they performed. This was the time when their living and working conditions came into focus and data was hastily collected about wages, expenditure, indebtedness, housing, literacy and health.  Their agitational activity - which was performed in fashionable, elite parts of the city - dramatized and spectacularized their identity and allowed some of their men and women to be seen and heard in large public gatherings. In her talk, Professor Sarkar will look closely into the different models of unionization that were at work among them and their relations with diverse political interest groups: Congress, Communist, and independent unionists, some of whom were middle class women who transgressed gender and caste barriers to mobilize them. Professor Sarkar aligns the work of these individual women unionists to the radical lifestyle experiments among a middle class avant garde group in the interwar years, and considers the ways in which different political factions in the Corporation tried to manage the strike.

In conclusion, Professor Sarkar reflects on the meaning and implications of the work scavengers did and on the problems of a precise classification of their labor form.  She reviews how work is understood and reconfigured only when it stops.