Why is My India Dirty?

[Is this a post to justify why India is dirty? Yeah, in certain ways. But more than that it is to examine the antecedents of the notion of being dirty and against what, is something dirty.]

Image Courtesy: The Hindu

 They say my birth country is dirty. Yeah, even I do, at times when after a short walk through pleasant woods, I  come into a village and find plastic bottles, rags, wrappers lying around in large piles, some flown and blown by the wind, some by animal movement, and some because it is in their very nature to scatter.

But why is my country dirty? Is it because culturally we are inadequate to maintain decent sense of cleanliness? Is it that we as a culture are way too lazy, uncaring, unbothered about how our environment looks? That therefore as a culture we need to be induced with some fresh imported belief systems to invigorate and enthuse the lackadaisical Indian mind to a state of cleanliness?

This post has four sections: 1. Ideology of cleanliness 2. Ideology of dirt  3.Sense of community 4. Possible solutions 

The ideology of cleanliness

What constitutes cleanliness? Is it when something looks white or reflects your image or shines? Like the tables in certain restaurants in United States. They sparkle and dazzle—wow, they are so clean. Until you find out through research and activism that what exists is a layer of chemical that eats and obliterates anything that would come in the way of a perfect reflection or perfect shine—“sparkling clean!”

Or is it when something looks crystal transparent? I recently heard that the oil manufacturers found that if they sold “pure” sesame oil, then the same tends to have a natural, non-harmful black residue that settles down in the bottom after a few days on shelf. This scares the consumers who consider the same as “dirty” oil. To ensure a continuous market, a certain set of chemicals is added so that the residue will not be formed and our sesame oil can look crystal transparent and eternally “pure” oil. So is that cleanliness?

Or is it when the air smells nice and fragrant? Did you notice the number of air fresheners sold in the Indian market—all so that you can only smell the ocean or a garden within your apartment, set on the 32^nd floor, in a skyscraper in Mumbai.  This way you can avoid smelling the papaya going waste or the huge McDonald burger that you chose to eat or the pizza leftover from a few days back. Should I now go into the details of what air fresheners are made up of?

Or is it cleanliness when you dispose of waste and unused materials in a proper way—for e.g. in a garbage bin? Yep, isn’t there a place for everything in this world? So do waste and materials that we don’t want or need. Their appropriate place is a garbage bin—a plastic bucket-like creation, which may, depending on the house, have a lid or not, may have a plastic garbage bag lined inside or in some cases, nice paper bags. The question is never how much of garbage you generated but rather that you managed to pick every little piece of “dirt” and “waste” and tucked it away in the garbage bin for some unknown garbage guy/gal to pick it up and dispose in God-Knows-Where place—away from your sight, from your nose, from your responsibility. Cool!! You are clean!

This, of course, includes not only the home-generated wastes, but industry-generated wastes, nuclear reactor generated wastes—for that we have even more specialized bins and specialized personal transporting your ugly, dirty things to God-Knows-Where country or reservation or poor lands.

Or is it that you are clean when your clothes are washed daily and look crisp and fresh? In a world that is edging towards a water crisis, where washing machines demand both loads of water and electricity, where the cleanliness streak has led to more clothes washed and re-washed at the smallest pretext, subjecting the fabric to rapid wear and tear, leading to an increased turnover of clothes (ahem, leading to the success of the fabric/ready-made industry). Yep, you are so clean!

Ideology of dirt

Throwing waste materials onto a roadside or flung from a car window or a train window (and if they could have, from an airplane window) is a weird Indian custom. Even amongst the educated I have noticed a sense of—“oh well, there is going to be no garbage bin, so you might as well throw the bottle here. See, others have thrown it here.”

There is this belief that somehow the thrown-out material will miraculously take care of itself. Why? My contention is that for centuries and till some decades back, the predominant material we used and threw was easily biodegradable! There was an ethic of ensuring banana peels are thrown in the fields where the cows can come and munch or leaving vegetable shavings under a tree or tea waste under a shrub. All through my childhood I watched my mom hardly waste anything.  Whatever food was leftover, she had ingenious techniques to create new recipes with them (of course, we knew and we cribbed). Every bottle was re-used. All newspapers were converted into paper bags for grocery (I always had to carry a clothes bag to bring grocery). The plastic milk packets was also washed and dried and sold to the kabadiwala by weight. And even recently when I visited a village and as usual wondered where to drop my fruit leftover, the farmer said—just throw it wherever, the cow will come.

In an eco-friendly University in South India, I noticed how students and visitors alike had to pick up their steel plates and cups, get the serving they needed and then disposed of the food in food bins, washed their plates and left. The tables were cleaned with EM solution and rags were used to wipe the table down. Same I noticed in Auroville. Zero waste, zero contamination.

Photo courtesy: Youth Ki Awaaz

Unfortunately the things we now throw are non-biodegradable or not easily biodegradable and unfortunately they do not miraculously disappear. If a cow comes by and munches, she dies the most painful death. And with the increasing number of street dogs unable to find food, they scavenge too. I am not even getting into the searing lives of young garbage sorters and collectors so well documented by Katherine Boo in her book “Behind the beautiful forevers.”

I remember reading a site-visit report by a volunteer working in reconstruction efforts in a Tsunami-affected village in South India many years back. He saw how with the influx of volunteers, there was also an infusion of certain ideas—garbage bins were placed all around the village and he remarked (and I paraphrase)—what we need to is to ensure that they live in environmentally-friendly way rather than induct new ways to collect garbage.

Sense of Community

From what I have seen, the sense of community in India is different. Neighbours may step forward to help one another in certain localities, but the sense of ownership of place is visibly missing.  My place ends within the four walls of my home—outside belongs to some non-descript, unidentifiable entity.

It is quite different from communities in United States, where it is not the neighbour as much as the system that steps into help (at times) but the sense of ownership of place is very strong. I also noticed the same in a recent visit to Auroville. The community is tight-knit and has a deep sense of pride in their commune. When one Aurovillian noticed some broken beer bottles on his walk, he immediately called others in and they set about clearing the area of the broken glass—no “call for volunteer” emails and no organization set up to do “cleanliness drive”—they just cleaned, there and then.  Yes, that sense of community is lacking.

But why indeed? Here I can only speculate—is it that years of not owning the land, of the land belonging to someone else—whether the zamindar, or the landowner, or the many invaders from other parts of Asia or the members of East India Company—wrest away our sense of “this neighborhood corner is my land, my home too?” Did we cease to be responsible to anything beyond our immediate roof because that is all that we could eventually protect and fight for?

I do not know. And for all the complex, tangled histories that we Indians have, for all the virtues and values that have become culturally coded into our social behaviours, there is something—global India with its plastics and synthetic fabrics and chemical dyes is in dire crisis—of scattering garbage, of overflowing garbage dumps, of large poorly managed dump-yards, and of an image that we as a country are dirty.

Possible solutions

•  Re-educate and regain sense of ownership of place
• Educate on decreasing use of plastic and chemically-tainted materials
•  Decrease wants and focus on needs
• Be comfortable if the table does not sparkle or the dress does not look crisp or the oil does not look transparent.

 Redefine. Re-awaken.