ABSTRACT

This chapter examines that the spaces of infrastructure where struggles are faced everyday by those who are excluded from legitimate spaces of water or sanitation. It seeks the anxieties which some participants expressed around the legitimacy of Mahila Mandal's actions as related to the anxieties over what really constitutes a viable and legitimate form of urban politics in a context of illegality. It discusses that the internalization of social differences during the struggles over water, when class-based exclusions of squatters from the urban forest was internalized through pig rearing practices of lower castes. The everyday spaces of water and sanitation in the camp worked through a range of contested boundaries that shaped their transgressions across real and imagined boundaries of legal/illegal, public/private, and inside/outside. In Indian cities, the racialization of dirt and disease has intersected with the particularly unique spaces of caste. One participant, Rajnarayan had a busy job as a driver in the nearby middle-class colony.