Untouchable Freedom: A Social History of a Dalit community (review)

Untouchable Freedom purports to be the social history of the Chuhra Sweepers of Delhi from 1860 to 1960. In many ways an excellent book, I found it very enlightening. However, I also found two problems. Let me explain the first.

In the mid-1950’s I did ethnographic fieldwork in a basti (colony) of ‘untouchable’ ( nowadays, Dalit) Chuhras in Khalapur village in Saharanpur District, Uttar Pradesh, India. All one hundred or so were lineally or affinally related to each other. Most of the adults had worked outside in various cities, mostly on sanitation crews of municipalities, railways or the military, or as cleaners in private homes and offices. Some had done other kinds of work—one oldster had once worked in coal mines; another, a handsome young man, had been a ticket-taker at the Race Course Cinema in Delhi. Most of the work-experiences the Chuhras told me about had taken place before 1947, before the British rulers had left. Indeed, they were generally of the opinion that urban sanitation jobs were more plentiful under the British than after. My unpublished data indicate that the older Chuhra men and women had all worked in several different cities. Out-migrating men often left their families in the village to clean cattle-yards and latrines for higher caste patrons (jiijmans), and when the men came back to the village, they did sweeping work, and/or share-cropping, construction work, raised animals for owners on a half-and-half basis, cut harvest wheat, worked on sugar-making teams, raised and sold pigs, etc.

All this I relay to the reader to explain why I am unconvinced by Vijay Prashad’s assessment in chapters one to three that the Delhi Municipal Corporation (DMC) had a stranglehold on the sweepers it employed. I do not dispute the fact (taken from archival records) that, as told in chapter one, the DMC in 1884 made the sweepers of Delhi their direct employees, rather than letting them continue as servants of individual households. The DMC did this because all the sweepers of a mohalla (section of town) so readily went on strike if one of the householders abused one of them. Under the DMC, the sweepers were not allowed to strike nor take private clients; they also were badly paid. Nor do I doubt Prashad’s account in chapter 2 that beginning in 1912, because the British land law for the Punjab left artisans and menial castes landless, Chuhras began migrating to Delhi where they joined the municipal sanitation crews, so that by 1921, 82.5% of DMC sweepers were Chuhras. Nor can I question Prashad’s account in Chapter 3 that the colonial sections of Delhi had better water supply, drainage and sewage than the native sections. What I doubt is Prashad’s statement that the Chuhras always migrated from villages with their families because local landlords would not allow only part of a family to serve them or to stay in the village (p.43) ; clearly that had not been the case in Khalapur, just across the river from the Punjab from where, Prashad says, the Delhi Chuhra sweepers came. The Khalapur data make me doubt the implication that DMC sweepers were all permanent residents of Delhi, or that they could not get other kinds of work than sanitation work.

Prashad says that because the Delhi British went to the summer capital, Shimla, that only 25% of the usual DMC crews were employed during the hot season (p.17). Does he mean that the other 75% remained unemployed for those months because they could not return to their villages and could not get other kinds of work? Are there DMC records on the length of employment of their Chuhra employees? Were there not temporary sanitation workers as well as permanent ones?

What I especially doubt is Prashad’s crediting the DMC and thus presumably the British with making the Chuhras into sanitation workers (sweepers...