Black Spot: An Account of Caste, Contract, and Discards in 21st Century Bangalore Restricted; Files Only

Abstract

This dissertation analyzes how waste ecologies mediate the assertion and contestation of caste in Bangalore, a city whose technological firms serve as signposts for a ‘modern’, ‘caste-less’ India. Through 20 months of ethnographic and collaborative research, I explore how waste infrastructures reproduce caste when urban ecologies, and the modernist ontologies that apprehend them, become unruly. I do so using the analytic of a ‘black spot’—a vernacular expression for garbage pile ups or sewage leaks that often become sites of urban untouchability. I chart how the Bangalore municipality has contracted out waste management to land owning castes who recruit Dalit (‘ex- untouchable’) workers to substitute modern disposal technologies. While this routinely exposes workers to toxic degradation, I argue that workers also use the unruliness of waste to enact an embodied contestation of caste hierarchy, premised on the redistribution of bodily toxicity, rather than ritual purity.

My research is in dialogue with the literature on infrastructure, waste, political ecology, caste and race. It also resonates with archaeologies of contemporary urban societies and investigations of emerging political ontologies. It critiques framings of caste as an archaic, ‘pre-modern’ practice, tracing its reinvention within contemporary infrastructures that seek to contain material overproduction. In doing so, the research locates itself within broader concerns of environmental racism, the politics of toxic containment, and the vitality of contemporary waste.

Table of Contents

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments......................................................2

Prologue: On Sedimented Selves................................9

Chapter 1: Once Desired Objects...............................46

Chapter 2: Numbing Machines..................................98

Chapter 3: Looking Away..........................................161

Chapter 4: Contract and Jaathi Paddhati..................229

Epilogue: On Withdrawn Entanglements.................307

Works Cited..............................................................322

About this Dissertation

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School	Laney Graduate School
Department	Anthropology
Degree	Ph.D.
Submission	Dissertation
Language	English
Research Field	South Asian Studies Anthropology, Cultural Sociology, Environmental Justice
Keyword	Toxicity Urban infrastructure Waste India Caste Ethnography Political Ecology
Committee Chair / Thesis Advisor	Peter Little, Emory University
Committee Members	David Nugent, Emory University Gyanendra Pandey, Emory University

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