India's disappearing toilet cleaners
Sociology through scatology
Bon jour Global Jigsaw community,
Two decades ago while I was fumbling around the contours of a new and surprising life in Beijing, I found a mentor in one Mythili Bhusnurmath. She was the first woman editor of one of India’s leading economic newspapers, The Financial Times, and unlike some of her male counterparts, was more interested in the stories I could write, than in trying to figure out what a young Indian girl was doing traipsing around China on her own.
It feels really special therefore, to feature a guest post by Mythili in this week’s The Global Jigsaw. And I’m even more pleased that she’s chosen to write about toilet cleaners, which is a topic I’ve written about extensively from China and elsewhere.
I think a lot about toilets, a preoccupation, I hasten to add, that is more sociological than scatological. For it is in its public toilets that a nation bares its buttocks, or the secrets it otherwise keeps under the wrap of more edifying clothing.
There was lots of comparative analysis on Indian and Chinese toilets, and toilet cleaners, in my debut book, Smoke and Mirrors, should anyone want to explore this further.
And now, on to today’s post about Bangalore’s disappearing toilet cleaners.
Oh, where have all the toilet cleaners, gone?
Some years ago, we bought a small apartment in a retirement community in Bangalore with dreams of settling down for good, once we finally hung up our boots. Needless to say, that hasn’t happened yet, though we are both in our mid-sixties; partly because I’m a journalist, and the husband is an academic. And since, as they say, no self-respecting journo or teacher ever retires, we are still peddling our wares! There’s always some publication somewhere that wants you to share your views and, in a country like India, some college somewhere that’s looking for experienced faculty.
Net result is that as a journo-teacher duo, we have so far resisted retirement; guess we’ll simply fade away!
But our commitments have come down over the years; we have more time on our hands. And so we periodically escape to a retirement community in Bangalore, whenever life in Delhi’s environs becomes unbearable, which is pretty often.
Compared to the heat, dust and pollution in the National Capital Region, life in Bangalore, with its temperate climate (it was 22 degrees centigrade this May when Delhi was 49 degrees), greenery and much lower levels of pollution, is much more inviting.
Plus, there’s the fact that the community is just 10 mins away from the international airport, so you don’t have to negotiate Bangalore’s crazy traffic, but can stay away from the ‘madding crowd.’ This makes the constant shuttling back and forth between the country’s IT capital and its political power centre seem less of a drag.
Mythili Bhusnurmath
In many ways, it’s like going back to one’s days in a college hostel. With all the amenities that condominiums seem to offer these days – club, medical centre, badminton courts, library, gym – and a common dining room facility that serves good food, its colegiate and fun. There’s plenty of good company as well, since everyone is done with the hurly-burly of bringing up kids, juggling careers, trying to find that elusive work-life balance. All in all, its a wonderful change from the days when the elderly in India had to depend on their children and could not hope to lead independent lives once they retired.
But some things never change. Not in India. Or so it seemed, going by the flurry of anguished messages in the owner/resident Whatsapp group, over an apparently insurmountable problem being faced by the community: the inability of the Residents’ Welfare Association (RWA) to locate a toilet-cleaner.
Yes, you read that right! The one toilet cleaner employed by the RWA had moved on, presumably, to a better life, and subsequent efforts to recruit another in his place had drawn a bank.
I said a silent ‘hurrah’ and ventured to point out that the Father of the Nation, Mahatma Gandhi, used to clean his own toilet. That toilet cleaners as a class have become non-existent should be a cause for celebration, not angst.
As a child growing up in Delhi in the 1960s, most households routinely employed toilet cleaners. But things have changed. Today, after 75 years of independence, you cannot find a toilet cleaner in the capital, for love or for money. That’s true for most metros and I hope, most of the country as well. The erstwhile class of toilet-cleaners has gone on to become lawyers, doctors and engineers and what have you. Thank God and economic and social progress for that!
But no, I was clearly outnumbered. An overwhelming majority of the otherwise perfectly well-meaning and educated group of residents did not share my happiness that a class of people whose vocation once was toilet cleaning had finally slipped into oblivion, to be replaced by a new class whose dreams were like those of every young Indian, aspirational.
Toilet-cleaning, I was informed, is something senior citizens cannot possibly do. What, an earnest resident asked me, if someone were to hurt himself while cleaning his toilet! And there the matter rests. Last I heard, no one had been recruited.
*****
I have to say I found this post quite cheering, given the less than edifying news from India these days on other fronts. Just what the doctor ordered. And speaking of doctors, I had the surgery last week. Pleased to say its gone swimmingly well. And thank you, again, for all your good wishes. I’ll thank you even more if you decide to be become a paid subscriber here…so do think about it :-)
Would also love to hear your toilet-related anecdotes from your own countries, so do leave a comment.
Until next week,
xo
Pallavi
Thank you for Mythili´s article. Indoia may be short on toilet cleaners, but certainly not on great english writers....
They might still exist in colonies/chawls having common toilets like the municipal scavenger workers.
(chawls of Mumbai or places where the water tap/well and toilets were commonly owned and so a source of bad relationships and gossip and disgust and in many cases unhygienic.)
Even new chawls of Mumbai might being built with toilets in house, though new chawls won't come up as easily as they did earlier as the concept is dying out.
So toilet cleaners existed in the era of toilets without flush or strong toilet cleaning liquids.
But i am surprised why family members did not do it.
Basically it was asking someone else to clean the toilets because family members won't do it !
The origin of toilet cleaners might be era of dirty "toilets outside the house" that continued till the "dirty near/inside house toilets".
Overall it is stigma whether family member does it or toilet cleaners do it.
Not sure if we should thank tap water and flush or Europeans for doing away with disgusting profession at least in some ways in India, even if centuries after the concept came up in Europe.