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Numbing Machines
Manual Scavenging’s Reconstitution in 21st-century Bengaluru
SHREYAS SREENATH

Vol. 54, Issue No. 47, 30 Nov, 2019

Shreyas Sreenath (shreyas.sreenath@emory.edu) is a PhD candidate at the Department of

Anthropology, Emory University, US.

What forms does manual scavenging take after its legal abolition? Analysing the recent
deaths in Bengaluru’s sewage treatment plants and underground drainage systems, the
understandings of manual scavenging as an “archaic” practice and opposed to the “rule of
law” are rejected. The contractualisation of sewer maintenance instrumentalises
“untouchable” bodies, making the calibration of caste power coincidental with the
calibration of urban sewerage. Urban manual scavenging is shown to be an emergent
application of caste power that resolves ecological impasses in contemporary sewerage. The
objectification of caste power in urban infrastructures nevertheless opens up new locations
for politicising normative caste embodiment.

What is shown through the organ, rapt

Is it form or formless?

Of which I learn

Is it done through the organ?

Or the self?

— Maadara Doolaiah1

I trace manual scavenging’s reconstitution in a major Indian metropolis after its legal
abolition. I do so by detailing three fatal incidents in sewage treatment plants (STPs) and
underground drainage systems (UGDs) in contemporary Bengaluru. Each case demonstrates
how recent ecological shifts have resulted in the intricate suturing of caste power into built
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systems that channel urbanisation’s surplus wastes. Far from an archaic practice, manual
scavenging now increasingly appears as a routine resolution to procedural impasses and
technical dysfunction, in mechanised systems that calibrate sewage flow under ecological
duress. Embedded within strained urban ecologies, I argue that UGDs and STPs facilitate
sewage flow by transforming caste relations into a supplement (Sarukkai 2009), into a
“second nature” (Smith 2008) at a moment when “first nature” becomes unruly, causing

systemic and unforeseen infrastructural disruptions.2 Through kin and contractual networks,
impoverished members of Dalit and other dominated caste communities are recruited to
clear excretal blockages after a monsoon deluge, a motor failure, or insufficient decantation,
by a range of actors—contractors, builders, citizens, and bureaucrats—who seek to maintain
an “aesthetics” of modern sewage, while refusing to confront its complex ecological

entanglements.3

Bengaluru’s STPs, housed in either private apartments or public facilities, regularly

malfunction due to improper construction, lack of monitoring and upkeep, and irregular
power supply while debris from erosion, makeshift connections, and shoddy, construction
cause recurring blockages in the city’s UGD network. Rather than appraise the continued
feasibility of such systems, city officials, private contractors, and residents persist in
employing manual scavengers to supplement their technical operation. In doing so, they not
only reinvent manual scavenging, but also make it second nature to practices of urban
embodiment. The conditions that reproduce the practice in urban contexts therefore exceed
legal or social injunctions. Instead, they emerge through infrastructural flows that directly
shape urban embodiment, both of manual scavengers and those who benefit from their
labours. On the one hand, the bodily organs of manual scavengers are alienated from their
selves, echoing other forms of untouchability (Geetha 2008: 97). The organs in
question—skin, nerves, lungs, and limbs—are stripped of their role in the scavenger’s
biological preservation and transformed into ancillary components of mechanised sewerage.
On the other, a separate set of organs—complex technical, legal, and bureaucratic
instruments—allow those who abet the practice to have an absent presence, augmenting
their capacities to instigate manual scavenging from afar while endlessly deferring their
culpability within an infrastructural complex. Thus, in their concrete enactments, the
technical, bureaucratic, and legal apparatuses of 21st century Indian sewerage do not
conform to axioms of modernity. Rather, they offer a sanctified refuge to the shastric
clemencies for dominant caste offences (dandaneeti) and the imputation of “innate natures”
(swabhava) to dominated caste bodies (Baxi 2008: 67; Chakravarti 1993: 582).

If Bengaluru’s UGDs and STPs numb some to the social and ecological consequences of
their defecatory practices, networks that maintain these systems routinely recruit others to
tend to them by risking a numbing death. For numbness is what one first feels when
exposed to sewer gas, a mixture of, among other things, ammonia, hydrogen sulphide, and
methane. In their higher concentrations, ammonia causes immediate respiratory burns and
blindness; hydrogen sulphide quickly paralyses the olfactory and nervous system; and
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methane, odourless and highly flammable, quickly fills up the lungs and suffocates. One or
two breaths is a lethal dose.

Registering Law

On 7 January 2018, Narayana Swamy, aged 38, Made Gowda, aged 40, and Srinivas, aged
55, asphyxiated to death attempting to clear human excreta from an STP located in
an apartment complex in south-east Bengaluru. The first man was an electrician by
profession, and tended to repairs in the apartment. The second sprayed pesticide in a
garment factory. The third was a local painter. The contract that the residents’ welfare
association issued for the maintenance of the plant was in the name of Narayana Swamy,
who had hired the other two men to assist him. The chamber where the three bodies were
found was designed to hold decanted water, separated from faecal sludge, meant to be
largely deodorised and well on its way to purification. In actuality, the chamber was filled
with faeces, with a makeshift ladder that led into it.

At around 10:30 in the morning, a resident heard Narasimha, a fourth member of the work
team, scream for help from the sewage unit and called the fire brigade. As the brigade
arrived to lift the bodies out of the chamber, one of the firemen fainted from the fumes.

Soon after, the bodies were taken to St John’s Hospital, where I, spurred by a flurry of
WhatsApp messages, joined the activists and family members who had gathered. Within one
or two hours, Bengaluru’s mayor arrived at the spot to give a televised address, in which he
promised ₹5 lakh as compensation, spots in a government housing scheme, and ₹10,000 to
each family to cover funeral expenses (Times of India 2018). According to the Prohibition of
Employment as Manual Scavengers and Their Rehabilitation Act of 2013 (MS Act of 2013),
the legally mandated compensation amount was ₹10 lakh.

In the same exchange, the mayor also revealed that the police had discovered work receipts
amounting to ₹20,000 which indicated that the men had been paid to come and clear
sewage once every two months. These receipts confirmed that at least one of the three men
had manually intervened to clear the STP multiple times, as excreta regularly clogged its
valves and pumping motors. “This is a high tech city, and there are many jetting and
sucking machines that can clear blockages,” the mayor said to a crowd of reporters and
cameras, and calling the incident a “human rights violation,” claimed to take “action if the
apartment owners are found responsible.” It was unclear as to how such surety would
translate into criminal convictions. Despite thousands of deaths since an initial 1993 ban on
manual scavenging,
and despite a 2013 law that made its abetting a non-bailable criminal offence, there had not
been one successful prosecution in the entire country.

To a great degree, the mayor had been forced to visit the hospital because of the resolve of
the families and the activists. The latter were determined to not let the bodies leave the
mortuary until they had a post-mortem report that passed a clear verdict on the cause of
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death. But just as the kin of the three men began to channel their indignation into overt
protest, a social and technological apparatus quickly moved in to diffuse the potency of their
indignation. Soon after the mayor left, newspaper and television cameras focused their
lenses on the families who grieved outside of the emergency ward, vying to capture
nameless figures wailing and weeping, transforming potent grief into a commodified
spectacle that could disseminate as filler stories in 24-hour news cycles. Local leaders from
various political outfits quickly rushed to the hospital to placate the family members and
friends of the dead, dousing their outrage with cynicism, and swiftly transforming ire into
helplessness. By 8 pm, the bodies had been evacuated from the premises and the issuance
of the post-mortem reports had been deferred indefinitely.

The next morning, I sat with an activist whom I had met at the hospital the day before, and
with whom I visited the apartment complex where the deaths had occurred. We waited for
an audience with the Karnataka State Safai Karmachari Commission, the agency tasked
with addressing human rights violations in sanitation work. The activist was part of a Dalit
organisation that monitored manual scavenging in Karnataka and had closely followed how
police handled such cases. He relayed to me an all too familiar script:

After the FIR is filed, the police spend the next few days ensuring that the families don’t
come back. Because there is no follow up, they write in their records that the investigation
is concluded and there is not enough evidence to press charges. They also want the families
to take the dead bodies as quickly as possible. They [the families] can raise a lot of noise if
bodies remain in police custody. Usually, some money exchanges hands. The contractor,
local leaders, and the police find the key decision-makers in the extended family and start
negotiations with them.

After a few hours, we finally had the opportunity to meet with one of the commission’s
representatives. He sat across the table in his newly allocated office with a copy of
Prajavani, a prominent Kannada daily, in hand. The headline report read:

The STP motor had been malfunctioning for a few days. Narayana Swamy had called
Srinivas and Made Gowda to the apartment to repair (durasthi maadalu) the motor. While
Srinivas had descended into the STP to repair the motor that morning, he inhaled poisonous
gas (visha yukta gaali) and suffocated. Unable to come up and breathe, he called for help.
Made Gowda and Narayana Swamy also descended into the STP tank … an FIR has been
filed against one of the dead … and against the apartment resident’s association. (Prajavani
2018: 1)

“It looks like we can’t even consider this as manual scavenging,” the bureaucrat said,
referring to the headline, “it says here they went in to fix the motor, not to clear sewage.
It’s an accident.”

The activist’s expression remained measured—a stoicism that he most likely cultivated after
many such interactions with bureaucrats. But his eyes belied a certain degree of disbelief.
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“Well, we have to determine that after an official spot investigation, won’t we?” he said in
response, “We can’t rely on what journalists say. The bodies were covered in sewage.” “Yes,
but how can we know one way or another from the spot check?” the bureaucrat asked,
“Besides the bodies were released and the police have filed the case already.”

The police had registered the case under “Section 304(A): causing death by negligence,”
accusing eight individuals, including members of the residents’ welfare association and
Narayana Swamy himself. Section 304(A) was a bailable offence, as the perpetrators were
thought to pose no immediate threat to society. And, because the bodies had already been
released from the mortuary, the police were under no pressure to follow up with the case.
Ninety days after filing the first information report, the police could file a “B” summary
report in court, citing lack of evidence or witnesses, to close the case.

After the meeting, the activist informed me that civil rights and Dalit organisations intended
to petition the Safai Karamchari Commission, demanding that they pressure the police to
register a new FIR under the MS Act, 2013, a non-bailable charge. And there was some
hope this could be achieved. At the time, the head of the national commission was from
Karnataka and the deaths had already gained significant public spotlight (Hindu 2018). The
activist anticipated that registering the case under the MS Act would at least allow the
families to demand the full ₹10 lakh government compensation. But he was otherwise
pessimistic. “Even if the cases are registered under the act,” he said, “they will avoid
prosecution. The manual scavenging law goes against the grain of our society (samaajada
viruddha). The police may not be able to grant bail for the accused but the magistrate most
likely will.”

“Laws such as the manual scavenging act, the SC/ST atrocities act, the domestic violence
act, they go against our sociological law, our caste law,” he said, switching to English, “they
don’t have wide acceptance in our society, that is why the conviction rates are so low. And
the affected communities do not form large constituencies.”

A shadow law that had gripped society in ways that a constitutional mandate could not; a
community that could not cohere into a large enough constituency—the activist was
struggling with a profound political impasse. As our conversation progressed, we briefly
recapitulated what we had seen the day before at the apartment. Like most STPs in the city,
the apartment unit required a consistent flow of sewage, sufficient oxygen and time for
microbial reaction, and reliable electricity, all of which it lacked. Flipping through
the logbook that Narayana Swamy kept, we had noticed how the detailed records he made
in initial months had given way to haphazard scribbles. At some point, the STP seemed to
exceed any recordable technical parameters, and “mechanised maintenance” seemed to
have become indistinguishable from
regular manual intervention.

As we recounted what we had witnessed, the activist candidly remarked on the limits the
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prohibition law faced in understanding such procedural nuances. But our conversation also
pointed to a larger limit, of understanding the deaths within parameters familiar to modern
political discourse—a society composed of discrete individuals, discernible constituencies,
and operationalisable laws. “Caste law” not only fractured the assumption of a normative
juridical subject, but did so to recede from view, assuming the guise of a dark and
subversive covenant. What “archaeological” method could foreground caste power’s
machinations, sedimented deep within urban infrastructures promising caste anonymity
(Guru 2009: 55)? Perhaps an archaeology immanent to infrastructures themselves and a
rerouting that ruptured certain modernist bifurcations—the divisions of culture and nature,
law and subject, and machine and organism—that framed them (Foucault 2002; Latour
1993). In built systems such as STPs, caste power operated at the limits of such divisions,
shifting some humans closer to one side or the other, allowing “modern” subjects to disavow
caste by marking others as irredeemably suffused by it (Pandian 2002).

Archaeology of Contemporary STPs

In Bangalore, the British laid their first overground sewers in response to an unexpected
contagion, the plague of 1896, which entered the city through a central railway line that
connected it to the Bombay ports. In addition to sewers, they laid the city’s first telephone
lines, built the first public hospital, demolished dwellings in the old city, broadened city
streets, and divided up the city into its first municipal wards, all after confronting significant
limitations in their ability to quarantine and police the population (Stephens 1922; Indian
Plague Commission 1901; Ernst et al 2017: 15). The inhabitants had not only reacted
violently to the differential treatment of the native and colonial quarters, but also to the
brasen disregard of caste, religious, and gender norms in quarantine camps, during routine
inspections in households, at transport checkpoints, and under forced inoculations (Gordon
1899; Ranganathan 2018). For the natives, it became difficult to differentiate the contagion
from its quarantine—metastasising together, both appeared to violently interrupt
established caste “sociogenies” (Fanon 2008).

The epidemic taught colonial administrators the importance of preserving caste sociogeny
for the furthering of a modern, enlightened rule. They objectified these paradoxical lessons
in infrastructural projects. For instance, new “plague-proof” neighbourhoods in
Malleshwaram, Basavanagudi, and Chamarajpet attended carefully to the concerns of
hegemonic caste groups, integrating them in planning so that segregation and its
deliberation by powerful interests found expression in built systems, rather than outright
confrontation (Nair 2005: 51). In 1922, these same neighbourhoods came to be serviced by
the city’s first underground sewers, which were further expanded in the 1950s and 1960s
(BWSSB 2019).

These sewers came to be tended by a silent army—drawn from municipal workers, night soil
removers, day labourers—who no longer traced predictable conservancy routes to haul
excreta, but descended to clear subterranean blockages dispersed in space and occurring at
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irregular intervals. And as the 20th century drew to a close, hazardous sewage work in
Bengaluru increasingly hinged on exploiting procedural loopholes in contractual and
subcontractual networks, rather than on direct patron–client relationships. Pushed by neo-
liberal initiatives such as the World Bank’s Karnataka Municipal Reform Project (KMRP),
Bangalore Water Supply and Sewerage Board (BWSSB) privatised large portions of sewer
construction and maintenance so that, by the 2010s, a majority of the BWSSB sewer
workers (300 out of 450) were hired on a contractual basis (Karthik 2017).
Contractualisation allowed for the framing of caste power within liberal discourses of
mutual obligation, where the degradations experienced by sanitation workers were framed
as a “natural” inability in fulfilling contractual obligations without extralegal coercion or
enticement. In turn, such naturalisation justified the reinvention of dominant caste
paternalism, evidenced in government’s increasing reliance on “overseers” (mesthris) and
contractors to cultivate “contractual consent” among workers through tips, alcohol, fear,
and debt dependency.

In the BWSSB, the approximately 150 “permanent” sewage workers, many who had secured
governmental posts through dominant caste networks and bribes, came to have a merely
tangential relationship to the work they were hired to do. Instead, the BWSSB engineers
tasked them with overseeing the hazardous manual cleaning performed by the contractual
workers, who were overwhelmingly Dalit (PUCL 2019: 293). When barred from protective
gear, regular pay, and avenues of redress, contractual workers unionised and had the
manual scavenging law implemented, the BWSSB ventured further into subcontracts,
recruiting labour through intricate urban–rural linkages to clear emergency blockages. The
inner workings of such a nexus was exposed in one well-publicised case in 2017, when three
subcontracted workers died attempting to clear a sewer blockage after a monsoon deluge.
Shortly after the incident, the subcontractor absconded across state lines. The BWSSB,
having privatised the construction of the sewer line under the KMRP, distanced itself by
placing the burden of proof on the contractual firm. And as soon as the case was brought to
the Karnataka High Court, the accused contractor, a prominent Reddy businessman,
produced official BWSSB work completion receipts that were dated before the event,
arguing that he could not be held liable for the deaths
(Deccan Herald 2017).

Such cases demonstrated that it was one’s location in an infrastructural complex, rather
than a detailed charting of contractual assent between individuals, that determined legal
outcomes. In each successive calibration of sewerage, caste power reconstituted itself to
exceed discursive practices between individual “abettors” and “victims,” registering its
affects on the level of “dividuals”—bodies distributed in relation to larger networks (Anand
2017: 71; MacFarlane 2008). Bengaluru’s STPs became exemplars of such a shift. From
2007 to 2010, the Karnataka State Pollution Control Board (KSPCB) began sending notices
mandating all apartment complexes over 50 units to construct STPs to supplement the
almost total lack of underground sewerage outside of the old Bangalore Mahanagara Palike
(BMP) perimeter, a boundary that Bengaluru had well crossed under the Bruhat Bengaluru
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Mahanagara Palike (BBMP). The majority of city’s sewage flowed untreated in storm water
drains (raja kaluve) that fed into the city’s rivers, tanks, and lakes (Ranganathan 2018).

New STPs

In 2015, the Bellandur and Varthur lakes started frothing and catching fire. The dumping of
untreated sewage and effluents, combined with real estate encroachment into wetland
habitats, increased levels of phosphorus, heavy metals, and waste particulates to form a
combustive cocktail. In response to public outrage over such spectacular scenes of
ecological degradation, the Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) demanded that the
KSPCB enforce its apartment STP requirements that had been gradually eroded through
protracted court battles with residents. The CPCB also pressured the state and city
governments to cut off water, sewerage, municipal services, and electricity if apartment
complexes did not install and operate STPs on their premises. The new order was even more
stringent, requiring all apartments with more than 20 units, as opposed to 50, to install
STPs. When the BWSSB attempted to enforce it, it was again met with widespread
consternation. The government soon relented, raising the limit back to 50 units and settling
to collect consent fees for new STPs, even as their continued operation went unregulated
(Hindu 2017).

Each effort to arm the governmental apparatus with an environmental mandate, both from
within and without, was undone, not by any particular actor, but a general social tendency
towards a “speculative urbanism” amid very discernible limits to growth (Goldman 2010).
The construction of new STPs, most of which utilised “activated sludge process” technology,
required careful placement to ensure flow, plenty of open air space for aeration, and a
constant supply of power for the motors. In a competitive real estate market, developers
almost always opted to construct more units with the available space and resources. Once
constructed, residents’ associations had little incentive to invest in maintenance and
upkeep. Soon, elaborate networks emerged to facilitate regular manual cleaning in lieu of
operational maintenance, such that the seeming sequestration of human excreta by
mechanised systems obscured its actual “internment within stigmatised bodies” (Gidwani
2018: 193). According to one researcher, this was the state of 80%–85% of private STPs in
Bengaluru (Rao 2018).

Disruption

In addition to STPs in private complexes, Bengaluru has 24 large-scale STPs under the
BWSSB’s auspices that aggregate and treat sewage from across the city. Of the 1,440
million litres per day (MLD) the city produces, these 24 STPs are capable of only treating
1,075 MLD, granted that all units are functioning at optimum levels, with the remaining
sewage flowing untreated into waterbodies. As drought, landlessness, and rural caste
tyranny drive young men from northern Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, and regions further
north to find work in such facilities, contractors see in their bodily degradation an
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opportunity to subsidise the costs of channelling and treating the uncertain, leaky, excretal
flows of a major metropolis.

In contradistinction to the open, often feminised, humiliation practised in small towns, old
city quarters, and rural communities, manual scavenging within such urban aggregational
treatment plants is an exercise in mechanised emasculation and bodily decay, conducted
under panoptical surveillance. It took the slow death of Imam Sab, who succumbed to
gangrene, for the inner workings of such a facility to leak out into the public (Jishnu and
Raina 2018). When I interviewed activists who had visited the K R Puram facility where he
worked, they showed photos of men shovelling out sludge from narrow sedimentation
chambers, hunched under hydraulics precariously held open by logs. Workers waded across
circular clarifiers barefoot, pants rolled up above their knees and shovels in hand,
separating liquid from particulates, so that sewage could flow into rectangular decantation
tanks. There, they used pieces of plywood, bending down to separate the finer silt from the
mixture, 10 men performing the work of 50, while the contractor funnelled the savings from
the operational costs into an elaborate nexus that included BWSSB inspectors and security
guards, who aided in concealing the derelictions within an enclosed industrial facility.
Bodily intervention featured in every part of the treatment process.

Manual scavenging in STPs is aided by the fact that certain ambiguities in the prohibition
law are exacerbated when dealing with mechanised plants. For instance, the MS Act, 2013
disallows all forms of manual scavenging but defines scavenging itself as something that
occurs in an “insanitary latrine,” “a pit,’’ an “open drain,” a “railway track,” or “other
spaces or premises” notified by the “central” and “state government” where manual
cleaning occurs “before the excreta fully decomposes.” While an STP may be declared
“insanitary” after the fact, mechanisation makes it difficult to point to the exact moment
when it becomes so. Is it when someone slacks in operating the motors according to
schedule? Or when the residents’ associations or the BWSSB do not appoint the proper
management? Or is it in those instances when the unit receives insufficient power from the
electricity grid? Or, rather, is the fault to be found in the builder’s architectural plans, the
unit’s placement and choice of technology? The more law and procedure seek to grasp all of
the actors, either through detailed investigations or preventative stipulations, the more the
“crime scene” seems to disarticulate, scrambling its coordinates and receding into disparate
technological networks.

But the very networks that distribute our embodiment also become harbingers for new
forms of struggle. The increased systemic capacities of modern sewerage can only be
leveraged by making embodiment—ways of sensing and moving, eating and defaecating,
procreating and perishing—into a distributed phenomenon, an emergent feature of wider
systems and mechanisms. Connected to sewerage, bodies become a constellation of multiple
affects, open to disruption and reassembly via a sufficient amplification of any component
part. A single worker refusing to manually clear a blocked STP or a recalcitrant body in a
hospital mortuary has the potential to not only disrupt normative flows but could, if
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sustained, intensify to pose larger systemic disruptions. In such circumstances, communities

pushed into scavenging derive their political potency not from prefigured legal or
representational claims, but from the mobilisation of their embodied capacities to disrupt
and redistribute political “sensibility” itself (Rancière 2006).

Indeed, as is demonstrated by the Savanur incident, as well as direct actions and

demolitions by ex-scavengers, such disruptions are already under way (Ravichandran 2011).
In the former, a family of manual scavengers in Savanur, Karnataka dumped human excreta
on themselves to protest their unjust eviction from land they had been occupying for
generations. The action, which the family committed after all avenues of political and legal
redress were exhausted, was brutally effective in shocking the public, baffling local
politicians, and immediately reversing the eviction, even as it perturbed activists used to
more traditional forms of petitioning and protest. In the latter case, ex-scavengers organised
under the Safai Karmachari Andolan (SKA) burned baskets, curated photographic evidence,
and directly demolished insanitary latrines after local, state, and national governments
routinely under-reported evidence in public and legal testimonies. In more ways than one,
such disruptions by the SKA were instrumental in sparking the passage of the more
stringent MS Act, 2013.

Contemporary sewerage presents us with a sprawling black box that claims to organise our
senses for us, blurring the continuum between our biological and sociotechnical organs,
augmenting the capacities of some to the detriment of others. It is precisely when such
systems force dominant castes to confront their shared embodiment with dominated
communities that caste sentiment steps in to provide a convenient map of belonging,
aversion, and revulsion, a way to frame distributed embodiment as hierarchical,
individualised subjectivity. Rather than abandoning the machine, an anti-caste politics of
disruption reroutes its circuitry, finding short circuits and amplifying them, transforming a
prohibition against odd kin into a condition for it (Haraway 2016). For even as technologies
develop powerful capacities to reassemble our embodiment, none can do so by entirely pre-
figuring one’s social position. To paraphrase B R Ambedkar (1936), one’s relation to society
is “not like that of the body and its organs, or that of the cart and its wheels.” In the last
instance, sentient bodies are irreducible to mere organisms or mechanisms.

Notes

1 Maadara Doolaiah, a leather worker by profession, was one of many Dalit vachanakaaras,
mystic poets who composed short verses (vachanas) in Kannada in the 11th and 12th
centuries CE. This vachana explores questions of distributed embodiment that very much
concern us here. I thank PUCL Karnataka, Dalit Bahujan Chaluvali, All India Central Council
of Trade Unions, Alternative Law Forum, Tamate, and two anonymous reviews for their
deep engagement with this research.

2 If “first nature” is that part of our ecology that we externalise as outside of and prior to
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human society, “second nature” is that intermediary membrane that mediates between
nature and culture, a loose composition of human–non-human interactions, naturalised
stereotypes, and landscapes significantly altered by human intervention. It is important to
note that such a distinction is itself an ideological production, manifesting differently in
specific social and historical moments. Nevertheless, it is an abstraction that has concrete
effects on how we organise social and ecological relations. In theorising caste
supplementation, Sarrukai draws on Derridean deconstruction to trace the untouchability
inflicted upon Dalit and dominated castes to the inadequacies of a Brahmin’s own ritual
purity. By relying on the “dangerous supplement” of the “untouchable,” an “upper” caste
tacitly acknowledges a lack in one’s own self-sufficient purity.

3 Performing the aesthetics of modern sewerage, even as its substantial infrastructural

promises remain unfulfilled, can be seen as yet another form of “bourgeois
environmentalism” (Baviskar 2019). But it is one primarily concerned with producing an
urbane body unmarked by caste, and only secondarily concerned with middle class activism.

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