Visible Cleanliness / Invisible Cleaners: Examining Gender, Caste, Waste, and Space in Railway Stations and Urban Public Infrastructure In India

Cleanliness makes difference. It is gendered, caste-based, and tied to nation-making. Cleaning labor structures social relations of caste. Building on the understanding that caste is reproduced through cleanliness labor which advances racial capitalism, and drawing on transnational connections of laboring workers, I contribute to theoretical frameworks of racial capitalism, Black Studies, Dalit Studies, infrastructure, and Waste Studies. Through an interdisciplinary lens and using ethnographic data collected through semi-structured interviews with cleaning staff in two railway stations and a railway marshalling yard in the city of Hyderabad, India, my dissertation analyzes the gendered and caste-based nature of cleaning work and its intersection with waste and space within urban public infrastructure in urban India, particularly within the context of railways stations and sewage cleaning work.Cleanliness rose to the top of the Indian policy agenda with the launch of the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan (Clean India Campaign-CIC) in August 2014. Since then, the Indian government has spent billions of rupees on CIC. Yet, amidst the euphoria about Clean India, there has been little discussion about cleaners. Centering the experiences of cleaning workers, this dissertation examines how the fetishization of cleanliness reinforces gender and caste-based hierarchies of bodies within the context of public infrastructure. Given the increasing demand for ‘clean spaces,’ and the invisibility associated with cleaning labor, along with indices of caste, gender, waste, and space, my project insists that to unpack the politics of cleanliness is to reckon with the workings of labor relations that are underpinned by capitalism, and caste-based discrimination. In this way, my project makes visible the paradox of cleanliness as being essential yet peripheral; invisible yet central to the functioning of urban spaces and key public infrastructure, like railway stations, that are also centers of financialized capitalism. I argue that gender and caste-based fault lines have been co-opted by the cleanliness project wherein cleanliness is fetishized and commodified. Such co-optation has both deepened and masked gender and caste-based differences within labor. Therefore, my dissertation contributes to this broader scholarship on geographies of cleanliness, and helps rethink the significance of cleaning and cleaning workers within urban imaginaries, and within waste and infrastructural studies.