EXPLORING THE AGENDA OF SANITATION REFORM IN INDIA:

FROM COLONIALISM TO THE POST-COLONIAL CURRENT MOMENT

AN UNDERGRADUATE THESIS SUBMITTED TO THE DEPARTMENT OF
ARCHITECTURAL STUDIES IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT FOR THE DEGREE OF
BACHELOR OF ARTS WITH HONORS









BY
GARIMA BATRA

THESIS ADVISOR:
NAOMI DARLING
DEPARTMENT OF ARCHITECTURAL STUDIES

MAY 14, 2015
SOUTH HADLEY, MASSACHUSETTS
2015
1

Acknowledgements

This thesis was a culmination of thoughts and conversations beginning at the

Center of Science and Environment (CSE) in New Delhi, India and continuing at Mount
Holyoke College. I could not have completed it without the encouragement of my
parents for supporting my summer internship in New Delhi as well as my advisor at
CSE, Ms. Sushmita Sengupta who constantly challenged me with new perspectives on
the topic.

I would like to thank Professor Davis for helping me start my thesis work and

being a constant source of support as I often came with a new thesis idea every week.
For Professor Gabriel Arboleda, in listening to my rambling thoughts on the topic and
providing insightful critiques and suggestions. A huge thank you is also due to my 300-
level research supervisors Professor Karen Koehler and Professor Naomi Darling. I
could not have completed this task without your thorough knowledge, active support
and deadlines.

I cannot imagine this work without the help of my architecture crew Zisiga,

Bahia, Fitse, Seyiram, CJ, Sarah, you guys are my sunshine. Thank you for the constant
laughs, inspiration and the support (those long nights werent so tough without you
guys by my side). My beloved Pearsons friends thank you for giving me the
community I needed and being my pillars of strength Sadia, Bharati, Barsha, Shrishti
and Fiza. I love you all immensely!

Id also like to give a special thanks to Anusha for all the care and support you
showered me with every day. Your guidance and wisdom on all things - sanitation and
otherwise - were critical to my growth this year. You have made me a better friend and
thought partner.






2

Abstract

All over the world, sanitation is viewed as a requirement for the health of a
nation. Since its formal acceptance into the Universal Declaration of Human Rights on
28 July 2010, nations are called to provide safe, sufficient, accessible and affordable
services such as water and toilets to its citizens. Campaigns to provide such assistance
include top-down sanitation efforts such as national provisions as well as bottom-up
(grassroots) work through international and non-governmental organization (NGO)
efforts. These efforts, while substantial, employ a technocratic response that believes
that simply providing sanitary technologies is the method to solve the sanitation
problem. However, this method has its limitations due to the discourse surrounding it
one that promotes shaming and coercion. In this paper, I will challenge this method by
demonstrating how it has a colonial past whose shaming tactics are present in the post-
colonial discourse today. By employing a cultural relativist angle to a sanitation
problem that is addressed solely through urban policies, I hope to address a gap in
understanding - one that I believe can be fruitful to provide relevant, on-the-ground
support.
I started my research by analyzing the materials on sanitation from the Center of
Science and Environments archives along with published works by academics on
sanitation efforts of the British during the colonial period. I delved into this
conversation realizing the importance of the post-colonial critique. In my analysis, I
demonstrate how the colonists strove to standardize a notion of Victorian cleanliness
that was exported and adapted to the Indian colony to produce a civilized and modern
Indian state, but not necessarily actually provide these sanitary services. The British
posited their construction of sanitation in India to mark difference: the British were
civilized and in opposition to the natives who were dirty and lethargic. The intent of
the British was not to create an organic change in society but to use cleanliness as a
method of controlling their colonized. Urban infrastructure and its re-organization
thus became a site of contention, interaction and often resistance as the natives
challenged the efforts of the British who tried to provide sanitation services such as
water drainage, sewage pipelines and public toilets.
In the current moment, these colonial understandings have been internalized and
replicated by the Indian elite and government to cast the lower castes as dirty and in
need of civilizing. This is made particularly clear by national sanitation campaigns that
discuss the issue of sanitation as economic providing toilets and potty-training the
rural poor. Moreover, international organizations replicate these similar strategies to
mark a difference between the progressing, modern First-World nations and the
Third-World nations lagging behind. The effects of carving such distinctions are what
3

I wanted to challenge by showcasing the condescension and paternalistic

humanitarianism of the British during the colonial period and now, the West. What
follows is a critique of the current culture of shaming and taboo that surrounds
sanitation today, one that renders the poor voiceless and marginalized in a conversation
that tries to provide them these basic services.
The intent of this paper then, is to provide a post-colonial critique of a potent
ideology one whose repercussions are felt in its physical infrastructure: as the Toilet.




















4

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Setting the Stage- Introduction............................................................................6

1.1: Answering the Call of Nature: Why Do We Not Talk About Poop?

1.2: Personal Anecdotes and Interest

1.3: Sanitation in India A Brief Summary

1.4: Choice of Sources

Chapter 2: Sanitation in Victorian England....18

2.1: Sanitary Reform in Victorian England

2.2: The Connection between Dirt and Disease

2.3: Changes in Urban Infrastructure

2.3: How Dirt Created a Moral Standard

Chapter 3: Exporting the Sanitation Ideal Sanitation under the Raj33

3.1: Medicines Role in Mediating Morality

3.2: British Motives to use Sanitation as Strategy

3.3: Colonial Landscape Planning and Hill-Station Enclaves

3.4: Colonial Urban Planning and Sewage Politics

3.5: Cleaning the Natives: Imperial Advertising

Chapter 4: Sanitary Reform in the Postcolonial Moment..46

4.1: Community-Led Total Sanitation Practices and Ideology

4.2: Criticism for Community-Led Total Sanitation

4.3: National Efforts: Nirmal Bharat Abhiyan

Conclusion...58
Appendix..60
Bibliography....63









5

Chapter 1: Setting the Stage Introduction

A young black man growing up in the South

under segregation quipped:

All these white folks dressed so fine /
Their assholes smell just like mine.

Judith Plaskow, Foreword to Ladies and Gents1

Gershenson, Olga, and Barbara Penner, Ladies and Gents: Public Toilets and Gender, p. viii, 2009.

Sanitation, excretion, defecation, shitting - different names for a process that has
a history since humans existence itself. It is a humans most important yet trivialized
necessity to excrete - to rid oneself of their bodys rejected products. While the
elimination of our digestion process is so ritualized and so daily, public conversations
around it are shrugged under the carpet and made taboo. Academics, politicians and
designers rarely dedicate research and conversation to a habit that as Judith Plaskow
noted in the foreword of Ladies and Gents, a great leveler, linking all persons in our
common humanity2. The toilet, while being a common denominator between all
peoples, is also ironically used as the site to segregate people as well. In the quote
above, the black man emphatically reveals how he is just like the white because of the
fact that they both excrete - theyre both human at the end of the day. Here, he uses
excretion (whites assholes smell just like mine) to reveal his similarity to his
oppressor. Thus he challenges the oppressive and racist environment that he is in
because it rids him of his own humanity due to the color of his skin. The context of this
quote references the segregated South where toilets were used as a power strategy by
the white to claim the black body. By maintaining more public toilets for the white,
blacks were forced to urinate in the open, which by the lack of services marked them as
dirty.

Gershenson, Olga, and Barbara Penner, Ladies and Gents: Public Toilets and Gender, p. vi, 2009.

My research in sanitation focuses on this particular aspect of sanitation - a cross-

cultural study of how excretion and the toilet itself is used as a site for contention and
division between people of different races.

1.1: Answering the Call of Nature: Why Do We Not Talk About Shit?
Potty-training is one way through which the topic of sanitation receives cultural
and public airtime - as it is a necessary process of a childs socialization process. Potty-
training in this way is a marker of development as it allows for the child to become
independent and socialize in a manner that leads to healthy practices and prevents
illnesses associated to open defecation such as diarrhea and cholera. Once potty-trained
however, children realize the taboo status that defecation holds in society and do not
talk about defecation due to a fear of being judged and feeling embarrassed. While it is
a fundamental biological demand, publically, defecation is made invisible in
conversation. This embarrassment is made clear in speech as well as through the use of
euphemisms. As my friend recently mentioned to me, he would never tell the teacher in
class that he has to go poop but rather, that he has to use the bathroom. By
replacing pooping with bathroom it is clear that the taboo is surrounding the act
itself because the process of excretion is regarded as vile, corrupt and has connotations
of filthiness, squalor and pollution. The word bathroom in this case disguises the act
itself, by relating it to cleansing and bathing rather than excretion. As a metonym, it
8

refers to the container (the bathroom) to mean the contained and thus diffuses,
sidesteps and turns the sense, passive3. In this way, the use of the milder term
bathroom in place of pooping highlights just how vulgar bodily fluids are made to
be. In fact, in many thesauruses the word latrine is associated with words such as
uncleanliness, putrescence and badness.
It is this taboo status, a void in public conversation about excretion that first
sparked my research. I noticed in texts I was reading about the state of sanitation in
India that defecation was replaced with euphemisms such as to let oneself go, to
answer the call of nature and to freshen up. As Naomi Stead explains euphemisms
serve to avoid direct reference to, and therefore a potentially embarrassing or shameful
confrontation with, certain culturally determined taboo objects and activities4. When I
first began my research, my nave understanding of sanitation was that of a toilet as
functional amenity that also had a civic purpose (as a public toilet) but I began to
challenge this understanding as I realized how excretion was being rendered invisible
it was conspicuous by its inconspicuousness. As Sjaak Van der Geest better explains,
there exists an institutionalization of not knowing about sanitation that makes the not
knowing such an important issue in understanding its culture5.
The toilet then is placed squarely as the site of this taboo process - the object and
site - of deep cultural anxieties. Its located in an anatomy of disgust which makes
3

Gershenson, p. 129.
Gershenson, p. 126.
5
Littlewood, Roland, On Knowing and Not Knowing in the Anthropology of Medicine, p. 75, 2007.
4

talking about it difficult but also, shameful. While it is hidden from the purview of the
public, it is also used as a method of reinforcing notions of cleanliness. The real needs of
real bodies become sources of intense cultural anxieties and sites for constructing
certain hygiene ideals to maintain power relations (both gendered and cultural).

1.2: Personal Anecdotes and Interest

When thinking about defecation in the context of India and the intense cultural

anxieties I felt, I grappled with questions both personal and ideological. Beginning with
my research at the Centre for Science and Environment in New Delhi, India, I peered
over governmental reports that glorified the state of sanitation in India and the
revolutionary power of the sanitary campaigns. Here, I began to question the
bureaucratic language of achievement and the ideologies that were intricately tied to it.
When placed in Indias current moment of neo-liberalization and a status as a growing
economy: was India actually developing? What was it developing towards? And
who was defining this development?
Most importantly, how was Indias open defecation problem being seen by the
international audience?
Personally, I realized my role in this conversation was one that was entangled with
colonial attitudes that had been internalized a self-hate towards my families own
cultural practices. For example, growing up in my grandparents house in New Delhi,
10

India, I was familiar with the squat latrine toilets from a young age as it was the only
place we had to defecate. Located at the back of the house in a dark corner, and built 25
years ago, the squat latrine was a site of anxiety for me growing up. Even when we
traveled on local trains to my aunts house in central India, the open squat latrine in the
trains made me acutely guilty of the pollution my body was causing as my excretion
ended up directly on the railway tracks.
My grandmother often mentioned how squatting was good for digestion and
comfortable excretion (and scientific evidence also provides basis for this claim as
squatting allows for a fully relaxed puborectalis muscle that allows the colon to empty
completely6). Finding it uncomfortable as one had to bend down and also cleanse
oneself, I found the procedure disgusting and primitive in that it was intimately tied
to me cleaning my own bodies waste rather than simply sitting down on a Western
toilet using toilet paper. While the toilet paper acted as an intermediary, a tool to
cleanse myself of my own waste, I didnt have to be physically engaged in cleansing
myself in the same way that I did using water. In this way, Western ideals of
rationalized defecation had overshadowed my familys defecation culture and I found
myself self-aware of an exoticized third world understanding of my own
postexcretory cleansing practices. This realization is what made me self-conscious of
my own Western gaze and the assumptions I had of excretion and toilet practices as a

http://squattypotty.com. Accessed April 20, 2015.

11

sign of social progress. In this paper then, I wanted to use my self-understanding as a

launching pad for an exploration of these anxieties, thus writing a historical and critical
narrative of how excretory practices became embroiled in conversations about
development and social progress.

1.3: Sanitation in India A Brief Summary

Sanitation is one developmental measure that was proclaimed a human right

in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights very recently on 28 July 2010. While its
recognition allowed for it to garner attention in the global media, too often, the
sanitation component of water and sanitation services is referred to only in passing,
as if clean water alone will solve the personal environmental crisis of the worlds
poorest citizens7. The issue of sanitation is thus shrugged under the carpet only
addressed in terms of its easily addressed counterpart water. While water remains the
most sought after resource in the world, the realm of sanitation receives a side-eye from
many organizations because it is misunderstood as a dirty or taboo topic. While
water symbolizes a clarity and purity, defecation is ingrained in the global mental
image as something that must be flushed away and never thought of again an out of
sight, out of mind approach.

Black, Maggie, and Ben Fawcett, The Last Taboo: Opening the Door on the Global
Sanitation Crisis, p. xi, 2008.
7

12

Tendencies of disregarding the sanitation issue are also overwhelmingly visible

in policy debates around water and sanitation. These include generalized and
globalized arguments that use rhetoric of privilege to develop communities without
associating with the actual experiences of the poor the marginalized men and women.
Not only do their narratives get spoken for, but the framework used to understand their
experience also reifies the problems that it is trying to tackle. Put more clearly, the
representations of water and sanitation are at odds with the understanding of the local
users (practitioners).
Development in particular, is one of the most important objects of desire,
imagination and struggle in contemporary India. Sanitation is both affected by the
colonization of India, as many of the sewage systems laid out by the British were
channeled towards the elite sectors of the neighborhood, as well as the post-colonial
state where it is regarded as a civilizing mission. Through the provision of toilets by the
WHO and UNICEF, sanitation programs are being launched as a number counting
exercise without ensuring long-term sustainability.
This aspect particularly struck out to me, during my summer in Delhi as Prime
Minister Narendra Modi has been recently elected and began a sanitation campaign in
which he gave the task of building latrines unproportioned attention. The targets set out
by his administration declared that by August 31st, 2014, 5.2 million Individual

13

Household Units should be built within a 100 day target. This amounts to about 1 toilet
every second if begun in June, a completely unrealistic target. Moreover, it illuminates
how sanitation is used as a tool of gaining media attention (both local and global) and
garnering political social power. Journalists in India particularly highlighted this story
as a way to garner support for the BJP party (one of the biggest political parties in India
that follows Hindutva-based conservative ideology). Through placating the masses that
sanitation was now the main agenda of the prime ministers campaign, Narendra
Modi used a taboo topic to gain political momentum and amass votes. While his
focus on sanitation put an otherwise hidden issue on the forefront of public attention, it
was merely a matter of lip service to garner attention as a publically-minded
politician. During his speech in the annual commemoration of the Independence Day in
2014, Modi questioned, Has it ever pained us that our mothers and sisters have to
defecate in the open? Using a rhetoric of self-shaming, Modi reiterates tactics that
colonial administrators during the British Raj and current local bureaucrats have used
as a tactic to make India open defecation free (ODF). The gendered construction of
this sentence also adds another layer of analysis - that women seen outside of the home
and out in the open are risking their lives. It is not the systematic problems that lead
women to defecate outside that are at focus here, but rather the pain associated with the
women being victimized and pushed outside to defecate.

14

The British particularly were concerned with sanitation in India during their rule
as a method of governing the other. The anxiety over sanitary measures and health in
India stemmed from the uncertainty about life and the lack of control that they had over
understanding the Indian environment. Their fears about the unpredictability of the
native population could be handily displaced onto environment and health. By
attempting to create sanitary conditions, the British could control the use of land
without interfering with native culture. Furthermore, by characterizing Indians as
carriers of disease, the British removed the native agency. Instead, the expatriates saw
Indians as passive carriers of danger.

1.4: Explanation of Sources
My range of sources for writing this paper has been wide-ranging and eclectic.

While I tried to chart the historiography of colonial and post-colonial sanitation and
critique, I also used my own understandings of sanitation and anecdotes as a method of
revealing my own biases. In this way, I tried to show how I was also a subject of the
construction of sanitation that I was implicating. Nave and internalized understanding
of this construction play a big part in my own work - I view myself as an agent as much
as a criticizer of this ideology. Moreover, due to the nature of this topic and the little
attention it receives by academics as well as the unavailability I had to archival material,

15

my sources were limited and intentional. Local sources that I examined such as books,
brochures and videos in English and Hindi often used sources that pointed to ultimate
authorities on sanitation such as the WHO and United Nations. It becomes clear in this
way how English and international organizations play a big role in shaping this
conversation and the language of international health. My work in this way reiterates
my thesis statement - that despite the diffusion of material through online media and
research there is a clear disconnect between local political discourse and the expertise
provided by the Anglophone governments. My paper questions what these ideologies
are and to what purposes they serve.
In chapter 1, I will be focusing on the construction of the British Victorian
hygiene and what sparked the sanitary reform movement. I will be charting not only
the causes of the reform movement, but how it necessarily created class divisions and a
culture of patronizing language.
In chapter 2, I will be focusing on the British colonial period and its empire in
India called the Raj. Here, I will outline how the changing understanding of sanitation
was impacting the relations between the British and the Indian. I hope to make clear
how the fractured relations were engendered by the British self-image as a colonizer,
and the subsequent treatment of the landscape to suit these values.

16

In chapter 3, I will clarify how the colonial attitude plays itself in the post-
colonial period in very similar ways by both international organizations, local NGOs
and the Indian ruling class. Under the guise of self-helping the urban poor, lay
coercive methods that are reminiscent of the colonial setup.

















17

Chapter 2: Sanitation in Victorian England

I am suffering much more now probably in simply remembering our state than I actually
suffered then. We did not feel the dimness and squalor and foul smells the horror of the bugs
and lice and black beetles as I now, many years after feel them: we had no other life, no other
sensations and feelings. This was my life, and we knew no other to contrast it with.8
Irish immigrant to Leicester

T. Barclay, Memoirs Medley: The Autobiography of a Bottle Washer (1939).

18

In order to understand how sanitation became an ideology, the hallmark of the

Western civilization and a moral crusade to control the urban poor through cleansing
them, it is important to trace the history of sanitation to Victorian England and its refuse
problem. Sanitation came to the forefront of the populations worries as a direct
consequence of Englands industrial period a period of rapid growth in Great Britain
(as it was formerly known) during the mid-18th to 19th century when Englands
agrarian society re-focused its economy on the manufacturing of material goods and
services. While previously its agrarian society was not a source of solid waste pollution,
refuse became a large-scale issue in the urban environment, a clear urban blight9.
Along with the wide variety of material products manufactured by England as a
result of textile and factory inventions10, came the factory effuse that included dried soot
and waste matter that overflowed from cesspools11 and onto the streets, eventually
polluting the River Thames. Roads were lined with horse dung from increasing horse
traffic, overflowing dustbins and rank cart-grease12. Overall, the smell of London - the
wealthiest city in the world at the time - was a putrid one. It was an overwhelming
stench so strong that London was unofficially also considered the dirtiest city in the

Melosi, Martin, Garbage in the Cities : Refuse, Reform, and the Environment, p. 6. 2004. See
Introduction for an explanation on the refuse problem in the context of nineteenth century America
10
Here, I am referring to the inventions of weaving machines such as the flying shuttle and the power
loom as well as the steam engine that had an unprecedented affect on the English economy. From an
online textbook called Modern World History Textbook. See link:
http://webs.bcp.org/sites/vcleary/ModernWorldHistoryTextbook/IndustrialRevolution/IRbegins.html
11
Pit for retaining the sediment of a drain.
See Black, Maggie, The Last Taboo: Opening the Door on the Global Sanitation Crisis , p. 4, 2008.
12
Jackson, Lee, Dirty Old London: The Victorian Fight against Filth, p. 2, 2014.

19

world. Its inhabitants had mixed reactions to this rapid urbanization. While some
resisted the overwhelming reconstruction of the built environment, others found it a
positive goal towards a clear end a sanitary utopia rinsed clean of filth.
In this chapter I will be narrating the rise of the sanitary reform movement not
solely through the angle of the scientific but also the government and its
democratization towards providing public services to the urban inhabitants. By putting
the conversation of sanitation in dialogue with the urban poor, who were necessarily
made culprits of the filth, I hope to elaborate how potent the idea of sanitary reform
and the great unwashing13 became. The urban poor in this case were targeted as a
social threat and an anxiety that needed to be overstepped in order to reach the
sanitary ideal, a necessary ingredient to the industrial model and the processes of
modernization.
Here, it is important to note, as Lee Jackson states in Dirty Old London the
Victorians did not abruptly awaken the masses to their own filth14. While the merits of
personal cleanliness had existed from the early nineteenth century and can be traced
to the Romans and their use of sewerage and aqueduct system for carrying the
excrement15 - sanitary reform as a revolution for the masses became a public health

13

Jackson, p. 259. This phrase first appears in the dedicatory epistle to Edward Bulwer-Lyttons Paul
Clifford in 1830 and its origin is often ascribed to the author. In its most simple terms, it refers to the
working class or the majority of the population.
14
Jackson, p. 139.
15
Melosi, Martin, Garbage in the Cities : Refuse, Reform, and the Environment, p. 4. 2004. See for a
more detailed history on sanitation and its connection to sewerage.

20

fixation in the English consciousness during the industrialization period. In this way,
dirt was criminalized and seen as the price to pay for industrialization.

2.1: Sanitary Reform in Victorian England
The heightened awareness towards sanitation began in the 1800s as the
Londoners grew increasingly apprehensive of the health risks of the dirt around them.
While human waste such as excrement, mud and dust, was being emptied by night soil
men16 earlier and sold to farmers as manure, fertilizer or to make bricks, the sheer
volume of the rubbish began to weigh out the demand for it. Thus, it increasingly
became a problem to not just remove the dirt from the streets but to find demand for
farmers and dustmen to recycle it.
It was this problem of refuse management and the poor disposal practices
surrounding it that led to the sanitary revolution in England. The connection between
disease, poverty and the disposal of refuse was intimately connected as doctors began
to treat typhus in 1801. The health risks of poor water and sanitary practices of the
urban poor in the slums specifically was what led to the epidemic of typhus and doctors
at the London Fever Hospital began promoting to organize a systematic cleansing of the
slums17. The concern with slums was so great due to the proliferation of disease that
spread in these poorer neighborhoods where the death rates were naturally higher. The
16

Dustmen who collected house refuse on a horse-drawn carriage.

Jackson, Lee, Dirty Old London: The Victorian Fight against Filth, p. 7, 2014.
17
Jackson, p. 3.

21

word slums itself began to be used interchangeably with fever dens18, leading to an
understanding that poverty and the low living standard in these neighborhoods was
preventing progress that the sanitary reformers had made in many areas of preventive
medicine.
Poverty not only aggravated disease but created a vicious cycle where disease
led to poverty which led to increased vulnerability to disease. The question that
naturally arose then was whether poverty was the root cause of widespread diseases.
While this was not necessarily the case as urban growth was the main ingredient that
expedited the effluvia on the streets, the poor masses and their disease-ridden bodies
became a truism in society. As Dr. Julian Hunter, a well-established doctor in 1849
explained, If other causes have slain their thousands, poverty has slain its tens of
thousands19. A sustained belief thus began sweeping across the nation, especially in
the minds of the rich and the national press, where they blamed the poor for their
condition because they themselves were indolent, indulgent and immoral. Poverty had
not come to be understood by the complexities and causes of it in depth, but rather
through a blaming of personal failings on part of the poor. Thus, a moral rhetoric
continued up until the end of the nineteenth century and found its way into the British
imperial conquest where the British evaluated the natives in terms of their inability to
live up to the Victorian standard.
18
19

Wohl, Anthony S. Endangered Lives: Public Health in Victorian Britain, p. 47, 1983.
Wohl, p. 141.

22

There were however voices of concern that were also raised in this period of
increased fear towards public health such as that of Dr. Robert Rawlinson, the President
of the Royal Sanitary Institute of Great Britain. He told the Institute in 1884 that
preaching self-help was just as well as telling the blind to see, the deaf to hear and the
lame to walk as it is to tell these people (the poor) to be well-housed, well-clothed and
well-fed.20 The mounting fears towards diseases and alleviating the state of affairs
were thus complexly tied to self-interest, yet the discourse did begin to change by the
end of the nineteenth century. If the highest class did not begin to give some attention
to those of a lower stratum of society who were made desperate by famine and neglect,
then, a possible revolution of the masses could also occur. Fear of revolution but also a
want to correct the very real causes of these diseases made the public health movement
a challenging cause.

2.2: The Connection between Dirt and Disease
The public health movement included a scientific component: the study of the

causes of disease to prevent the increasing deaths in England. While England had seen
a spat of epidemics during the Middle Ages, it was the threating return of these
epidemics in the form of typhoid, cholera and influenza that instilled fear to the point of
mass hysteria in England. The Victorians were in this way reminded of their tragic past

20

Wohl, p. 75.

23

and their inability to escape it despite the rapid progress in their country (in the form of
urban growth, technological change and rapid industrialization). These deaths, while
tragic, also served as an alarming reminder that while economic progress was being
made in the country, the challenges of this growth were being disregarded. Hence the
role of the state in controlling the excesses of unregulated urban growth had to be called
into play: administrative changes at a bureaucratic and local level needed to be enacted
for greater oversight and control over the environment. It was not that the role of the
doctor was undermined, but rather that the epidemics spurred a state level change that
worked in tangent with the medicines being prescribed and the research being done
about the causes of the diseases.
Cholera was the most fatal diseases of this period as it roughly killed more than a
million people over the rounds of epidemics. It was also the first disease that once
striking, created frenzy in the country that led to rapid action and enthusiasm for public
cleansing. However, because of the nature of the strikes that occurred in England from
the first in 1831-32 and continuing in rounds from 1848-49 to 1853-54 and 1866-6721, that
made it difficult for the local boards of health to sustain interest in constructive public
health changes once the emergency was over22. Sanitation in this way did not become a
developed ideology immediately. For example, on its first round in 1831 it was
constructed more as an external disease from Asia that one could be protected from. As
21
22

Wohl, p. 118.
Jackson, p. 36.

24

Figure 2.1 reveals, government warnings published daily ominously warned the
citizens of the upcoming disease with graphic descriptions of the symptoms. Rather
than it being framed as a disease that could become epidemic due to the lack of
sanitation in England, it was rendered a foreign object that England was capable of
recovering from. This advertisement thus makes clear an early example of the English
insistence that it was pure and hygienic and that such diseases were foreign. While
the home of cholera was in Lower Bengal, the British stigmatized this region as being
one of the most unhealthy regions in British India. Constructions of race became
prevalent through the publications of such advertisements as they created difference
between the European cholera that was produced by an increased acrimony but
seldom by sudden weakness on the first onset as opposed to the Indian cholera that
was a disease of putrid bile and brought on a sudden prostration of strength and
spasms over the surface of the body23.
The statistical importance of the deaths were not the only idea that set up cholera
as the major scare of its time, but also the innocuous manner in which it killed victims.
Cholera could be contracted by swallowing water or food that had been infected by the
cholera vibrio. It was spread by water that could have been contaminated by other
cholera victims or by flies (the vectors) that fed upon the excrement of said victims.
Once the disease was contracted however, up to 60 percent of the victims had fatal
23

Harrison, Mark, Public Health in British India: Anglo-Indian Preventive Medicine, 1859-1914, p. 37,
1994.

25

strains and often could be dead within a few hours of the showing of symptoms. It was
this and the symptoms of vomiting, diarrhea and violent stomach pains that created a
furor and increased medical interest.
The two most well-known disease causation theories that developed as a result
of the cholera epidemic were the contagionist and the anti-contagionist view24. The
former attributed disease to a contagious agent which spread in conditions of filth. The
latter attributed disease to gases and putrefactive odors called miasmas. These odors
rose from accumulations of decaying organic matter. Other sources of miasma included
stagnant water, wet ground and smoke pollution. In the absence of accurate scientific
knowledge, miasmas were an instinct that made sense as it linked the smells and
stinks of urban life with their respective breeding grounds. In the end, while no
empirical biological research was being promoted by the anti-contagionist theory it was
able to promote a focus on the environment and the politics of the people in it.
Neither of these filth theories were reconciled and medical opinion lay divided
on the causes it was hard to pinpoint the exact causes of the disease due to its complex
nature. Moreover, as medical research on sanitation had just begun, causes and
prevention were open to interpretation. Nonetheless, the anti-contagionist view was
favored as it focused the attention on the unsanitary conditions of the urban poor rather
than the contagionist theory which focused on humans as the vector of disease instead

24

Wohl, p. 121.

26

of the sources from which they became victim. The contagionist theory was also
problematic as it implied an underlying need to quarantine those who were disease-
ridden, an approach that would only result in greater poverty and risk of spreading
disease. It becomes clear then that the state officials were unable to rely on solely
medical research to create bureaucratic change as there was a lack of consensus on
causes and methods of prevention. The only way that the state was able to take control
was then to make physical changes i.e. cleaning up the city.

2.3: Changes in Urban Infrastructure

Edwin Chadwick was a key figure in the sanitary reform movement in Britain
and was instrumental in forcing a fuller acceptance of government responsibility for
public health and sanitation in Britain. A lawyer by training, Chadwick was influenced
by Utilitarian philosophies of Jeremy Bentham who focused on accumulating facts and
statistics as a method of revealing hidden truths and a source of making change25.
Chadwick rose to prominence after his rewriting of the Poor Laws of 1834 in which he
set up the Poor Law Commission, an establishment that sought to create clarity of the
onslaught of epidemics and its effect on the poor. Run by three Commissioners, it had
authority over local parish administrators and sought to provide relief for the poor

25

Jackson, p. 69.

27

through the creation of large union workhouses where the laborer of the lowest class
could go and seek support.
Chadwicks magnum opus was the report on "The Sanitary Condition of the
Labouring Population of Britain" in 1842, a thoroughly researched reply to the report by
three doctors to the 1838 Poor Law Commission who had blamed squalid urban
conditions for the spread of disease26 and Chadwick, who subscribed to the anti-
contagionist view of disease causation, agreed. Chadwick's report had arisen out of the
controversy over whether money spent on public health precautions saved money that
would otherwise be spent on "poor relief." He stressed the importance of not blaming
the poor as the cause of disease but rather the result - as disease struck the rich and
employed as much as the poor and the unemployed. The solutions he thus proposed
were practical and informed urban change: removing miasmatic filth from the streets
through improved sewerage, providing a constant supply of water and recycling the
waterborne sewage by providing it to farmers in need in the countryside. In this way,
Chadwick sought to change legal and administrative structures which dealt with public
health matters. He was able to clarify, through his anti-contagionist view that promoted
understanding the environmental consequences of disease theory, that disease was due
to a lack of sanitation and unsanitary conditions to a decline in morality. His insistence
on making concrete changes informed the gargantuan sewerage project planned and

26

Jackson, p. 73.

28

managed by Joseph Bazelgette of the Metropolitan Board of Works in the 1860s. It laid
down much of the sewer network for central London by intercepting sewage outflows
to 82 miles of underground brick main sewers and 1100 of street sewers. The outflows
were diverted downstream, chemically treated and dumped as sludge into the River
Thames.
Thus, sanitary reformers like Edwin Chadwick and Joseph Bazelgette played a
large part in shifting the discourse around dirt. While disease was seen as inherently
connected to dirt and a cruel punishment from the heavens, the method that both used
was scientific in that they did fieldwork and collected data with surveys to showcase
how the connection between environment and health was not only important but also
proven through scientific research.

As explained before, while no general scientific claims had been made to back up

claims, the anti-contagionist theory lay proof to reality as they mapped out a series of
social consequences and costs that arose from unhealthy environments. The result of
their work was an unprecedented interest in sanitary reform that led to necessary
government intervention. While previously matters of sanitation were considered
individual responsibility, sanitary reform now came under the purview of the
government and thus gained a new vocabulary.

The middle decades of the nineteenth century were therefore remarkable for the

environmental consciousness which was aroused in influential people in many

29

industrializing countries around the world. Towards the end of the nineteenth century
scientific discoveries in the medical field produced a revolution in theories about
disease causation and reduced the focus on the environment for disease prevention27. In
the end however, water supply and sewerage were seen as the most valuable and
practical changes to save the health of the nation.

2.4: How Dirt Created a Moral Standard
Cleanliness as a result of the apprehensiveness on health and its association with
dirt became a rigorous standard through which class was differentiated. In this way,
cleanliness became to be defined as the hallmark of British civilization and so in the
context of London, the hypocrisy of not being able to live up to its own standards was
too clear.
The sanitary reform movement in Britain became a moral crusade amongst elite
groups and professionals as it focused on the inspired Evangelical concept of duty and
a concern for a functional society. The Victorian social doctrine that social progress and
morality depended on physical well-being and a pure environment was voiced by the
social reformers including Chadwick who talked of how the root of moral depravity
was in physical depravity. This ideology was iterated in British periodicals such as the
Edinburgh Review that stated how there was a most fatal and certain connection

27

Melosi, Martin, Garbage in the Cities : Refuse, Reform, and the Environment, p. 80. 2004.

30

between physical uncleanliness and moral pollution. In this way the ideology blamed
those suffering from disease as becoming morally unfit as a consequence - such as by
using drinking as a coping mechanism.
The impact of this ideology was not one that was just substantiated in the upper
strata of society, but one which had made its way into the homes of the poor as well by
the private work of the voluntary sanitary workers. Not only was there a loss of
privacy, but such interventions were coercive in nature as well. For example, the Ladies
Sanitary Association promoted their goals of sanitation through propaganda (brochures
and tracts) as well as visits to the homes of the poor with lending brooms, white-wash,
soap and disinfectants. One pamphlet explained how unwashed clothing makes the
wearers offensive to all with whom they come in contact, unless it be to those whose
habits have accustomed them to the sickening smell which it produces; and it becomes
also a cause of disease.28 Employing a rhetoric of patronization, the Association was
intent on using educational methods in the language of self-help to better families.
While it was a method to import the ideals of sanitation, the success of it is
doubtful and was met with resistance. One clergyman explained how visitors were
regarded as crochet-mongers and disturbers of peace29. The intent of the Ladies
Sanitary Association in this way was lost to many workmen as it represented surrender
to bourgeoisification (middle-class values). It was also based off of a need to be
28
29

Wohl, p. 68
Wohl, p. 69

31

superior and translating the Evangelical ideals of spiritual uplift through cleansing
and purifying the domestic sphere. This utopic ideal is made clear by Sir Benjamin
Ward Richardson who describes how one must cleanse outward garments, bodies and
minds in order to prevent disease from appearing. Ignoring the biological causes of
disease, a semi-spiritual language is employed to understand sanitation as an ideal that
one is wholly responsible of changing solely through a paradigm shift in thoughts. This
anti-intellectual pragmatism only served to nullify the contributions of English
bacteriologists and promote a nave understanding of sanitation.
Leading sanitary reformers in the United States held similar beliefs about the
connections between insanitary conditions and immorality and crime. In New York,
John Griscom and Robert Hartley were both committed to "a pietism widespread in
their generation" and their campaigns were based on their observations of the
"coincidence, or parallelism, of moral degradation and physical disease.
It has been argued that the desire to impose order went even deeper than this,
however, and it was recognized that on a more psychological level "the control of
excretory behavior furnished the most accessible approach on a mass basis to
inculcating habits of orderliness."30 Sanitary reform was therefore linked to imposing
order on the masses through a language of self-help.

30

Richard Schoenwald, Training Urban Man: A Hypothesis about the Sanitary Movement in The
Victorian City: Images and Realities, vol. 2, Routledge & Kegan Paul.

32

Chapter 3: Sanitation under the Raj

Europeans insist on measuring us with the same yardstick with which they measure
themselves, without recalling that the ravages of life are not the same for allTo interpret our
reality through schemas which are alien to us only has the effect of making us even more
unknown, even less, even more solitary.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Nobel Prize Speech

33

In India, the construction and fixation towards sanitation was directed through a
sanitation campaign by the British. As explained in Chapter 1, diseases such as cholera,
smallpox and typhoid had been claiming European bodies since the beginning of the
nineteenth century. The epidemic of these diseases, many of which were misunderstood
and had only conflicting theories relating to their origin31 sparked a sanitary revolution
which was intrinsically tied with the imperial conquest. Despite the confusion and
primitive nature of the scientific research being done, medical doctors assumed
authority on the origins and relevant cures in order to prevent the diseases from
affecting the powerful white bodies. In this way, the role of medicine took a huge role
in curing diseases and created a discourse which implicated sanitation with disease and
medicine. In this chapter, I will be analyzing the British medical encounter with India
through the British imperial conquest, how medicine was used as an instrument of
control and its role in preserving the wealth of the British nation and their health.
Overall, I will be describing how the sanitation question was resolved: by
creating a distinction between white healthy bodies and the dirty natives and
constructing a hegemonic discourse that stated how the natives were culpable for their
own dirtiness. Post-colonial academics have discussed the construction of racialized
medicine at length and its use as a tool of empire. In drawing from the works of these
academics, I will be explaining how a comprehensive construction of sanitation was
31

Typhoid fever, for example, was believed to be due to a poison of animal origin, as malarial fever is due
to a poison of vegetable origin.
Oldenburg, Veena Talwar, The Making of Colonial Lucknow: 1856-1877, p. 97, 1984.

34

used in British colonial society to urbanize it. By putting their work in conversation
with each other, I hope to describe how the sanitation reform movement of the British
was intrinsically a political ideology as much as it was a technology.

3.1: Medicines Role in Mediating Morality
When the British first came to India they sought to understand indigenous
medical practices both as an interest in the exotic Indian culture as well as a conquest
of knowledge to subject command and authority. Up until the mid-nineteenth century,
before the conception of contagionist and anti-contagionist theories of disease, Mark
Harrison explains how both Indian (ayurvedic) and European medicine had much in
common in viewing the causation of disease as complex system with rare reference to
divine intervention32.
However, as Ishita Pande explains in Medicine, Race and Liberalism in British
Bengal, the role of medicine in the late nineteenth century began to change it was
used to normalize a discourse on sanitation that merged with politics and created a
value system that could evaluate societies and people. This value system allowed the
British to code societies as healthy or sick, and decide whether races were vigorous or
degenerating33. In this way, medicine played a role as a prescriptive force that
explained the day-to-day behavior of the natives as one with moral conclusiveness. It
32

Harrison, Mark, Public Health in British India: Anglo-Indian Preventive Medicine, 1859-1914, p. 41,
1994.
33
Pande, Ishita, Medicine, Race and Liberalism in British Bengal: Symptoms of Empire, p. 1, 2010.

35

also reflected the morality of the British and the force of their values as their difference
was highlighted in medical terms: the British were more vigorous due to their
biological set-up as opposed to the sick natives. This categorization of humans was
made short-hand and implied a common sense approach that explained ones
everyday behavior. If one was not defecating at the right time or in the right place, it
was assumed that they were lethargic and dirty.
Medicine was racialized and prescribed as an agent of change to cure the human
body. It engendered power relations in the colonial countries and set up an ideology of
imperial liberalism where the British were curing the ills of their modern subjects to set
them free34. But more than just setting up a method of rationalizing the natives as sick
or healthy; medicine was able to create a colonial setup that allowed administration to
safeguard their own health while also supervising the behaviors of the natives. The
natives bodies were ones that had to be molded to fit the sanitary ideal and so their
everyday behaviors were to be watched constantly. Their supervision was implicated in
the role of the imperial administration and was seen as a reflection of the good moral
values imparted by the British. As F.L. Brayne, a member of the Indian Civil Service,
explained: The routine of defecation goes to the root of citizenship. Defecation is (or
should be) a daily function. If it can also be a daily discipline the foundation of good

34

Pande, p. 2

36

citizenship has been laid.35 Defecation was one way that the British came to
understood the lack of native discipline and made it a pre-requisite for model
citizenship values, thereby connecting sanitary habits to ones citizenship and loyalty to
their own country as well as the British administration.

3.2: British Motives to use Sanitation as Social Strategy
As Veena Oldernburg argues in The Making of Colonial Lucknow: the British
drive to make the city clean was directly related to their experience in war36. For the
British, the emphasis on the military was a necessary part of imperial policy as strategic
security was the main strategy used to retain the land that they colonized. That is why
when it was found that more men died of disease than in combat in the Crimean War,
there was a public outcry in Britain which led to the realization that military hygiene
was essential to security. Although in Britain, the solution was provided by
technological innovations - such as sewers, sewage treatment systems and garbage
trucks that would mechanize and eliminate the disease-causing refuse from the streets -
in India the issue of disease was dealt with in other ways.
The primary motive of the British in India was to retain the health of the colonial
administrators and the army. As Vijay Prashad notes, the British spent up to 42% of
their public expenditure on the military. The question of the health of the military was
35
36

Oldenburg, p. 96
Oldenburg, p. 92

37

incredibly important as the army included Indian troops who fought in imperial
campaigns such as the Afghan War (1878-80), the Sudan Expeditions, the Annexation of
Burma and the China campaigns (1900-01) to name a few37. In order for them to keep up
these missions, the sanitation of the troops was related directly to the sanitary condition
of the native populations due to the occurrence of epidemics. While the Europeans lived
in civil lines (separate from the native dwellings), they still made regular contact with
the natives as they were allowed to travel with limited restrictions in the bazaar and
surrounding areas38 as well as living alongside them when they were introduced as
troops. Thus, it became increasingly important to safeguard British military health by
supervising the sanitation habits of the natives and making necessary measures for
improvement.
The reorganization of the colonial public health administration took place in 1868
during which sanitary commissioners made regular sanitary tours to each province in
order to gather statistics on human waste, dirt accumulation and similar factors. Efforts
to take up a large sanitation effort were blamed to the lack of finances by the British
administrators. This first excuse was made possible by the notion of capitalism that did
not register sanitation reform as an effort that had commercial viability. So because it
was not considered profitable in a pecuniary point of view, the work required to make

37
38

Prashad, Vijay, "The Technology of Sanitation in Colonial Delhi.", p. 116, 2001.

Harrison, Mark, Public Health in British India: Anglo-Indian Preventive Medicine, 1859-1914, p. 9, 1994.

38

cities sanitary was not undertaken39. The Empire was solely interested in the health of
its own thereby accommodating their own interests and ambitions. While the colonial
government was wealthy enough to make the city immaculate, the existence of
technological practices were installed only in elite areas of Euro-America and in colonial
enclaves.
The second excuse the British employed of insanitation was by blaming the
backwardness of the natives. As mentioned in Chapter 1, the miasmic theory of
disease made clear a connection of dirt and disease without an understanding of how
disease spread through carriers of disease such as mosquitoes and flies. Instead, this
primitive understanding of disease led to the construction of a British prejudice that
connected natives with dirtiness. Natives were considered inherently dirty and the
ability of the Europeans to coexist with them was constantly questioned. In a Report of
the Royal Commission on the Health of the Anglo-Indian army it was mentioned that
the very habits of the natives are such that, unless they are closely watched, they cover
the whole neighboring surface with filth.40 In this way, the natives inherent dirtiness
was considered a direct health risk to the British. Moreover, by creating this
minimalistic colonial health model that contained the natives as dirty, the British were

39

Prashad, p. 116, mentions how in 1858, a committee was appointed to classify public works
expenditure and while they found that State Works such as the military were above review, Works of
Internal Improvement such as sanitation were not.
40
Oldenburg, p. 100

39

able to ensure a productivity of the labor force (as they could prevent epidemics by
keeping themselves safe from disease).

3.3: Colonial Landscape Planning and Hill-Station Enclaves

The British mapped their superiority in terms of planning their positioning in the
urban landscape as well through creating a dichotomy between hill stations as pure,
exclusive white spaces and the plains as dirty, native spaces. As health and the
safeguarding of it was a top priority, their existed a belief that the cities of the Indian
plain were not conducive to prolonged European habitation41. This was because the
Indian plains were considered the tropical disease environment one that induced both
visions of paradise and of hell, as despite its vibrant energy it was also a hot climate that
made the British vulnerable to illnesses. However, the British optimism channeled by
the Enlightenment values created a desire to inhabit every part of the world. Hence, the
British sought to be acclimatized in order to legitimize long-term stay despite the
difficulties caused by the new environment. For the British, the imperial conquest was a
reflection of their own capabilities as the new leaders of the world who were capable
of gaining immunity to the fluctuations of climate just as the natives were. An inability
to do so would reflect badly on the British self-image, a risk that they werent willing to

41

Oldenburg, p. 102

40

take. This optimism however changed to more a pessimistic attitude with time as high
mortality rates in Europeans persisted into the twentieth century.
As Veena Olderburg argues, after the Rebellion of 185642 British colonial
officials inaugurated a process of urban reconstruction following three imperatives:
safety, sanitation and loyalty43. The mutiny served as a factor to ossify colonizer-
colonized relations as the British became increasingly scared of the capabilities of the
Indians and began to view them through a contemptuous lens. At the same time, the
British medical texts and biological understanding grew, which led to the Indians being
viewed as racially inferior and fundamentally pathogenic as a result of fear and
pessimism of the colonial conquest. While in the first half of the nineteenth century, the
fact that Indian troops were less prone to enteric fever than their British counterparts,
was chalked up to different cultural practices, the contemptuous attitude of the British
now explained such difference through racial and biological explanations.
In order to protect themselves from the hot, disease-ridden climates then, the
British sought to the hill stations where a healthy, cooler life could be pursued one that
was supposedly not tropical. Due to the ideological, military and medical reasons, the
British were able to socially segregate themselves from the plains in order to create an
exclusive social space for themselves. Here, the cool breezes of the Himalayas, the lakes
and the greenery allowed the British to set up cottages and renew their health and
42

The Indian mutiny of 1856 heightened fears of the British, as their worst fear became reality: the
Indians mobilized a force large enough to escalate into civilian rebellions and protests
43
Oldenburg, Veena, The Making of Colonial Lucknow, Preface, 1989.

41

vigor. While the romanticization of the hill stations served to placate the fears of the
British in order to recruit them to India, Mark Harrison explains how the tendency to
seek refuge from the hot Indian climate reveals much about the underlying insecurities
of the British in India.44 As was explained by the Royal Sanitary Commission, a direct
correlation was made between the length of ones stay in India and the ability to
contract disease. The longer the British officials stayed in India, the more vulnerable
they had been to go through bouts of sickness that were explained by more than just
aging. By socially isolating themselves in the hill climates that were ideal for healing
the white bodies, the British were able to tackle the impediment that the climate posed
on their ability to rule well.

3.4 Colonial Urban Planning and Sewage Politics
Just as the British were able to socially exclude themselves in the tops of the
landscape through using the trope that Indians were people with degenerate lifestyles
that should be reserved to the plains, so was this exclusion mapped in the urban
planning of the cities. The reasons here included financial conservatism and the
natives putative lack of hygiene45.

44

Harrison, Mark, Public Health in British India: Anglo-Indian Preventive Medicine, 1859-1914, p. 46,
1994.
45

Prashad, Vijay, "The Technology of Sanitation in Colonial Delhi.", p. 120, 2001.

42

 In Delhi, for example, the British began repairs on the Jamuna Canal in 1820
with hopes to fix the canals that Mughal Delhi was famous for. The Mughal canal
system required the use of a subsoil drainage system with a regular supply of water
from the Jamuna that could flush the refuse from the drains. As the Jamuna dried up
however, the drains became cesspools and refuse removal became extremely difficult.
While the British heralded the British sewage network as one that able to resolve the
refuse problem, the implementation of a sewage network in India was done unevenly.
Vijay Prashad explains the British attempts to develop a colonial sanitation system as
self-servicing, since the British simply drew off more water per capita to the Civil Lines,
the British enclave in North Delhi that as a result had better sanitation. Rather than
fixing the lack of sanitation services that existed, the British preferred their own
treatment leaving the inhabitants of the walled city to use the city ditch as the
receptacle of their sewage46 an arrangement that catalyzed further disease.
Even when colonial bias was met with resistance from the local authorities such
as the Delhi Municipal Corporation, the British questioned the necessity to bring
modern inventions when the construction of these sewage system would be wasted
on the natives who would not even appreciate its economic value. Thus, the only
Indian that were able to gain access to the exemplary sanitation system of the British

46

Prashad, p. 120.

43

were those of higher class who lived in the periphery of the Civil Lines and were able to
be connected to the sewers through a water carriage system.

3.5: Cleaning the Natives: Imperial Advertising

Another instantiation of the Victorian cleaning rituals as a sign of British

superiority was done through racist advertising of commodities such as soap. As

explained earlier, just as the Ladies Sanitary Association donated resources to promote
healthy sanitary habits and self-help guidebooks, advertisements of British soap
reflected a similar moral crusade to patronize the poor and the Indians.
While advertising in Britain did not exist before 1851, soap manufacturers were
able to use it as an ideological tool and as a central part of their business venture. As
Anne McClintock argues in her chapter Soft-soaping Empire, Victorian advertising
took explicit shape around the reinvention of racial difference.47 It served as a tool of
imperial conquest, as each product from soap boxes, matchboxes to tea tins had the
stamp of British colonial superiority on it as it revealed the cleansed white man white-
washing the native. What was so powerful about its imagery was not just the radiant
halo of imperial glamor and racial potency48 as argued by McClintock but also its
ability to target the masses through using private scenes of domesticity that everyone
was able to relate to.
47
48

McClintock, Anne, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest, p. 209, 1995.
McClintock, p. 211.

44

Pears advertisements particularly, such as Figure 3.1 and Figure 3.2, were known
for their images of cleansing in that it showed the act of cleansing the working class.
Figure 3.1, reveals this transition, as a white child is shown to be cleaning a black one in
a matchbox bath tub. While surprised at first, the black child comes out dazzled at his
white body. His face still black, it shows how the soap serves as a tool to promise to
cleanse away the very stigma of racial and class degeneration by becoming the
powerful white man. However, the soap also reveals its own critique, just like the
black child who can never actually pose for white i.e. the soap cannot promise a
complete upheaval of class hierarchy. In this way, the Pears soap advertisement
mediates the ideals of Victorian hygiene as well as imperial progress.
Figure 3.2 on the other hand reveals how soap advertising functioned as a
medium capable of enforcing British power in the colonial world, even without a
rational understanding of the mesmerized Sudanese49. This advertisement reveals the
British colonials own faith in the potency of the brand names and their ability to
inculcate new ideas of sanitation.

49

McClintock, p. 225.

45

Chapter 4: Sanitary Reform in the Postcolonial Moment

While hundreds of millions in Asia and Africa welcome attempts at world cooperation and the
establishment of an international order, they nevertheless wonder and suspect if this may not be
another device for continuing the old domination.
Jawaharlal Nehru, from his book Discovery of India50, from a jail cell in Ahmadnagar jail.

50

Discovery of India, pg. 517

46

The postcolonial movement in India began with the independence movement,

where India officially became independent on August 15, 1947. It is this break from the
Raj that a reactionary discourse was claimed by the Indian nationalists such as the
prime minister of new India, Jawaharlal Nehru. In want of claiming entitlement to its
citizens and re-instating their new identity, nationalists argued that they were perfectly
capable of caring for the public health of their populations. This post-colonial narrative
worked to resist the imperial and alien British rule as well as the work of international
health organizations such as the Roosevelt Institute and the World Health Organization
who were playing a large role in spreading knowledge internationally based on the
newly discovered techniques for curing health and sickness. As Jawaharlal Nehru
stated in his book Discovery of India51, from a jail cell in Ahmadnagar jail, while
hundreds of millions in Asia and Africa welcome attempts at world cooperation and the
establishment of an international order, they nevertheless wonder and suspect if this
may not be another device for continuing the old domination. His critique of the
internationalism of public health reform in the post-colonial period was important as it
asked questions about organizations that wanted to continue the established power
networks of the British period. In this way, he draws a link between the colonial
discourse on public health and its relation in the post-colonial period. The question that

51

Discovery of India, pg. 517

47

I try to entangle in this chapter is similar: the relationships between the colonial,
national and international sanitation efforts.

It is important to note that while morality plays a key role in both the colonial

and post-colonial discourse, it is not as hegemonic as is often given importance by

scholars. As explained in the previous chapter, while the efforts of the British colonizers
made real and intense interventions during certain periods of their rule, they also
neglected the public health of the indigenous populations to a large amount. The
relationship between the colonial and post-colonial period for that reason is complex.
As explained by Sunil Amrith, On one hand, post-colonial public health can be
characterized by the self-conscious attempt by both international agencies and national
governments to break from colonial precedents, assumptions and interventions. But on
the other hand, the institutional, intellectual and epidemiological legacies of the colonial
medical past continue to shape and constrain post-colonial policies on public health52.
This complicates the relationship between colonialism and post-colonialism and defies a
simplistic understanding. In the following sections, I will be focusing on this
complication and how international organizations, national campaigns and NGOs
employ a rhetoric that disguises as breaking from colonial precedents but in nuanced
ways reveals an underlying legacy of the colonial medical past.

52

Amrith, Sunil S, Decolonizing International Health: India and Southeast Asia, 1930-65, p. 15, 2006.

48

4.1: Community-Led Total Sanitation Practices and Ideology

Non-governmental organizations play a clear role in sanitation assistance and

service deliverance in the present moment as they serve as organizations that have local
insight and active interest (purportedly due to their non-profit orientation). When the
Bangladeshi government was unable to install expensive latrines in the 1970s, Kamal
Kar, a Bangladeshi sanitation expert, encouraged a new reformation to the process.
His suggestion called for: a Community-Led Total Sanitation effort which focuses on
sanitation as an effort which is not just forced upon the citizens but one where demand
is naturally created through a participatory design process. Up until Kamal Kars
strategic vision for community intervention, the Bangladeshi government was failing in
its sanitation mission as it was providing expensive toilets through subsidized ventures
assuming that the citizens would naturally want to buy these subsidies for toilet-
making. It became clear that there was a disconnect in approach: this national top-down
approach was unable to incite interest among citizens and invoke them to get subsidies
for toilets. Without a natural local demand for toilets, the rural poor did not want to pay
money through subsidies to get an object that they would not use. It is here where
Kamal Kars method gained notoriety as the paradigm shift in sanitation discourse as
it promoted a method to create demand. His method rather than focusing on
subsidization, sought to show that the rural poor could be inspired to stop open
defecation by internalizing a rhetoric of how the hazardous filth of their community
49

was shameful and disgraceful. In this way, the CLTS focused on changing rhetoric
and inspiring disgust in oneself rather than the government-initiated technocratic
solution that focused on providing sanitation hardware (such as open pit latrine pots
and pans) in exchange for monetary repayment53.
It becomes important here to note that the CLTS approach was necessarily
complicit in reinforcing stereotypes of the British colonization period through its
process of coercion and shaming. While its brochures promote a rosy picture of
promoting collective consciousness in the community, the process itself is complicated
in its narrative as it essentializes54 the poor as dirty and in need of cleansing. This
method of essentialization is engineered into the process of the CLTS approach that
asks the poor to take responsibility for their own development. This self-help method
that seeks to end open defecation consists of four distinct steps: pre-triggering, where a
community is selected; triggering, when community appraisal and observation is done;
post-triggering, which involves the follow-up procedures with the communities and the
last, a post-open-defecation free (ODF) follow-up55. The process can take anywhere
between a year to four years, depending on the success of the program to become open-
53

97, The Last Taboo. Also refer to the CLTS brochure written by Kamal Kar in 2003 called Subsidy or
Self-respect? Particpartory Total Community Sanitation in Bangladesh.
54
Essentialization here is used as an anthropological term that means attributing natural and essential
characterics to members of specific culturally defined (gender, age, ethnic, "racial", socioeconomic,
linguistic...) groups. When we essentialize others, we assume that individual differences can be explained
by inherent, biological, "natural" characteristics shared by members of a group. Essentializing results in
thinking, speaking and acting in ways that promote stereotypical and inaccurate interpretations of
individual differences. (Armstrong, http://www.unm.edu/~jka/courses/archive/power.html) It is anchored
in dualistic modes of thoughts that identifies humans as either dirty/clean, civilized/barbaric,
modern/unmodern to name a few. I challenge this dichotomous thought in this piece.
55
Kar and Pasteur, 2005.

50

defecation free and the sustainability of this status without the supervision of the CLTS
advisors.
Once the villages are selected for participation for the project, through a
feasibility test that evaluates need and current conditions, the rural community is made
to go through the process of the CLTS. Unlike the British that did not make their
sanitation intervention to small remote communities, CLTS necessarily chooses
communities with difficult road access and no previous assistance as it is believed that
they are most in-need of assistance and more vulnerable to change through the CLTS
approach56. In this way, CLTS necessarily imposes an approach without understanding
of the local communities but rather an interest in fixing them through a self-help
procedure.
The ignition or starting event of the CLTS process is the triggering of the
community. In this event, CLTS officials raise awareness of the amount of faecal
material generated in the community by taking community members on transect walks
around their village where faecal material is left out in public spaces. As stated in the
CLTS brochure and pilot projects this event is aimed to cause disgust and
embarrassment of local practices with the assumption that the community would be
motivated into action 57. Moreover, calculations of defecation volume, visual
representation of faecal material seen by the community members and conversations on
56
57

Nov and Kelly, 2009.

Noy and Kelly, 2009.

51

how defecation is talked about in every-day language is also geared to cause

embarrassment.
The mapping process is a particularly important of the triggering process. Here,
the facilitator assists the community members local women and men to form groups
representing the welfare groups of better off, intermediate, poor and ultra poor.
Through this process, the community is supposed to divide up through the
categorization of their class position. Houses and sanitation services, such as the
location and availability of toilet and drainage are also mapped (Figure 4.1). While
houses are mapped in order to be classified as relating to its ultra-poor, poor or better
off owner, the toilet is mapped to understand its technical use. For example, if a toilet
drains into surface water then it is listed as unsanitary58.
The next step in the process is one that assumes that the community now
triggered and vulnerable, will want to develop a community action plan and think
about a trajectory of the construction of their toilets whether for public, community or
household use. While the CLTS officials educate in providing technical options for
construction, there role is seen largely as mediations to answer genuine questions as a
result of being triggered.
Overall, the aim of the CLTS is to invoke behavioral change so that education
regarding inappropriate hygiene and sanitation practices are given and there is an

58

Wells and Sijbesma, 2012, pg. 419.

52

increase in the awareness on safer and healthier practices. The practice isnt only carried
out to the general public at community meetings but personally, through house-to-
house visits to encourage progress on latrine construction59.

4.2: Criticism for Community-Led Total Sanitation

Curiously, in many of the academic works that analyze CLTS60 and their
supposed success, the methods of coercion are not talked about and are thus rendered
invisible. That is not to say they do not exist. As Deepak Sanan explains, Poor
facilitation and award schemes can easily end up only encouraging toilets and even
worse can lead to coercion and an undue burden on the poor.61 CLTS evokes
excitement by international organizations and national campaigns alike because of its
revolutionary perspective of tackling sanitation that involves contact with local
populations. This is why, in order to fast-track nation-building efforts and develop like
the modernized West, CLTS is seen as the missing piece in the sanitation discourse as it
employs a behavioral perspective. While previously, the discourse around international
health held utopic visions of success that used technology as the magic bullet to rid
nations of diseases such as malaria through mass campaigns of vaccination, the local

59

The Trigger: Community Led Total Sanitation. Youtube Video.

Noy and Kelly, 2005; Wells and Sijbesma, 2012; Gupta and Pal, 2008. Sigler, Mahmoudi and Graham,
2014.
61
Sanan, 2005. Pg. 30.
60

53

populations were avoided to the greatest extent possible. In this way, CLTS approach
of communicating with the local populations to incite self-realization is celebrated.
This self-realization however, is given kudos despite the very intrusive process
it follows of supervision and coercion. Peter Harvey, the Chief of Water, Sanitation and
Hygiene Education (WASHE) for UNICEF, while understanding the necessity for
creating shock as a part of the CLTS process explains how it should also not shame,
insult or embarrass the community in anyway62. However, shaming is an intrinsic part
of the process that has led to its supposed, however short-lasted, success.
In fact since its inception it has included a policing method that is developed by
innovative community policing and sanctioning methods. For example, Kar explains
that in Bangladesh this collective action included night patrols to catch offenders that
still used open spaces, undertook morning raids on defecation spots and used the
village watchmen to catch offenders 63. What Kar understates about the success of this
venture is whether the community actually ends up taking it seriously. In a similar
effort, for an urban community-led total sanitation effort, the brochure explains the
Seeti Bajao campaign that states how children, armed with whistles, blow a whistle
when they see someone defecating. With the intent to change the psyche of the
community, the brochure explains how the whistles continued blowing in a
concentrated manner for eight months as the community was transforming. However,
62
63

Engel and Susilo, 2014. Pg. 174.

Kar, p. 40, 2003.

54

now they only sound on a periodic basis.64 While the language used informs the
reader that the process is consensual and developed by the community as a method to
arrive at ODF, the underlying premise is clear: children are used as a tool to humanize
what is actually a patronizing act. Without replacing the shaming system with a
beneficial reward system, the Seeti Bajao campaign remains ineffective in its end goals.
While it may lead to increased hesitation to be seen defecating, it does not mean that
other outlets are found to continue doing. CLTS in this way, while employing a
rhetoric of an engaged self-driven community simply serves as a band-aid for a
systematic issue that is effected by class and caste factors65.

4.3: National Efforts: Nirmal Bharat Abhiyan

The Nirmal Bharat Abhiyan, previously the Total Sanitation Campaign, is a
government initiative that focuses on the village panchayat level to manage sanitation
services (the lowest form of governance in the governmental structure of India). The
Total Sanitation Campaign began in 1999 as a nationwide initiative to meet the ends of
India in terms of providing sanitation for all. Their target for the year 2012 was to have
provided an improved sanitation service for all citizens. Funded by the Government
of India, the campaign was trifurcated into the components:
64

Brochure from Community-led Total Sanitation website. Titled Delhi Report Plan. 2012.
http://www.communityledtotalsanitation.org/sites/communityledtotalsanitation.org/files/media/UCLTS_Del
hi_Report_Plan.pdf
65
Refer to www.pottyproject.in for a list of class and caste factors that reveal the complications of the
sanitation issue.

55

 IEC, which stands for information, education and communication, is an effort to

create awareness regarding total sanitation and thus generate demand for
citizens to loan money towards making toilets;
Rural Sanitation Marts and Production Centers are centers at district level that
support the infrastructure of said household latrines by supplying the material
(cement, bricks, foot rest);
Solid and Liquid Waste Management Centers are the management leg of the TSC
which seek to maintain and manage the cleanliness of villages.
While the TSC or as it is now known, the Nirmal Bharat Abhiyan (NBA), has seen
reasonable success it has still not seen the progress it sought and did not make the
target of 2012 for Sanitation for All. Despite it being community-led, demand-driven
and a people-centered sanitation program, its underachievement has led to the
postponing of its goal to 2017, one that critics doubt will be reached yet again. In order
to incentivize the citizens to achieve the states of open-defecation free by 2017, the
Government of India recently launched a new program called the Nirmal Gram
Puraskar that gives monetary awards and publicity for villages.
While the goal of the Nirmal Gram Puraskar is to promote healthy competition
between villages for a monetary prize, the result is a pressure to perform under the
guise of making progress. What results is coercive tactics by panchayats, schools, health

56

professionals, village health workers and NGOs such as cajoling, blackmailing and
punishing.































57

Conclusion

Through the analysis of the British colonial sanitation effort and its changing

dynamic during the Raj and the post-colonial moment, I hoped to chart how methods of
coercion and shaming were used to either create class differences or reaffirm them.
While defecation is seen as a source of disgust, and is necessarily a factor of human life
that needs to be decomposed of in a methodical manner, the focus of this paper was to
explicate what the ideological reasons were for the cultural anxiety surrounding
defecation.

It is clear that the British while beginning their colonial conquest didnt have a

conscious method of planning or policy, but developed one over time. As Deepak
Kumar explains, The colonial state definitely had an ideology, a string of institutions,
and a set of committed people to serve its ends.66 However, the dynamics between the
colonizers and colonized are not as rigid as explained in previous studies by academics.
The history of colonization cannot be pegged to a simple construction of master-slave
dialectics or cause-and-effect understandings. Rather, in this paper I viewed this
understanding to reveal the limitations of the British self-image where a lot of the
visions of reform they had were to serve their own ends. Hence, I hoped to emphasize
on specific case studies that emphasize the contradictions and inherent limitations of
the colonial rule.
66

Kumar, Deepak. "Science and Society in Colonial India: Exploring an Agenda." p. 30, 2000.

58

It is in reconstructing India in the twentieth century that the seeds of

decolonization sprouted and an intense yearning for change was felt. However,
questions were made constantly in this period what direction should reform occur in?
How much of the colonial heritage should be accepted and what should be rejected? For
many, a nostalgia for a pre-colonial identity was sought. However, the entire
development discourse was run by experts, middle class professionals who stood for
the state and made decisions in the name of the masses who entered the picture as the
ultimate abstract beneficiary67. Ultimately, questions of sanitation were spoken for and
rendered invisible by the upper echelon of society who mimicked methods of the
British in the name of change and progress.















67

Kumar, p. 37.

59

Appendix

Figure 2.1: Government warnings in 1831 for cholera

Source: Jackson, Lee. Dirty Old London: The Victorian Fight against Filth. p. 98. 2014.






60

Figure 3.1: Pears Soap advertisement on racial white-washing

Source: McClintock, Anne. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial
Contest. New York: Routledge, 1995. Print.

61


Figure 3.2: Pears Soap advertisement showing Sudanese in awe
Source: McClintock, Anne. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial
Contest. New York: Routledge, 1995. Print.

62

Figure 4.1: Household mapping by class in Sewukan, Indonesia.

Source: C. Sijbesma, IRC











63

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