Historicising sanitation work: Value, infrastructural labour and representation in colonial Bengal

In this paper, we examine how caste and coloniality intersect to render Dalit sanitation workers central to but actively overlooked and overburdened in the making and maintenance of ‘sanitary’ towns and cities in colonial Bengal. Bringing existing scholarship into conversation with archival material, we make three key conceptual, methodological and empirical contributions to waste/discard studies, infrastructural geographies and urban political ecology. First, we nuance debate on waste, value and infrastructural labour by demonstrating how Dalits were central to metabolising value from human waste and formed an essential yet unseen workforce to manage ‘unruly filth’ in growing towns and cities. Whilst caste fundamentally shapes who handles nightsoil, we show how colonial-era sanitary reforms dispossessed workers of income accrued from nightsoil sale and intensified the labour regime, with sanitary workers becoming infrastructure in the case of non-existent, newly constructed or faltering sanitary systems. Second, we highlight the value of historicising sanitation work via critical engagement with colonial archives. We argue that these resources, though presenting a paradox of absence and selective presence, help us better understand the centrality of human labour to nightsoil management across different scales, how and why such work has evolved, and in what forms and why it persists today. Third, we address a vital knowledge gap on the shifting nature of sanitation work in East Bengal (now Bangladesh), including the ‘import’ of landless Dalits by British administrators for ‘dirty work’, and call for further research to understand the particularities of manual scavenging in this context. We ultimately argue that a lens on human waste, and those forced to handle it, offers nuanced insights into the reproduction of social and spatial order historically and today.