ABSTRACT
In this chapter, we will examine the abjection of the informal waste picker whose caste-based profession in India situates them not only on the peripheries of urban geographies but also on the threshold of the ‘upper’ caste household and imagination. Waste picking is a caste-based profession, and waste pickers today continue to come from marginal castes. Their existence on the peripheries of our cities and urban planning practices and policy frameworks is, we argue, refracted through social logics of older agrarian formations. Caste identity not only structures who can participate in, or prosper from, the processes of urbanisation, it is also refashioned and recycled in new ways, in the precarious informal economy. These participants of the informal or infra-economy are critical to the “production of the urban space” even while being outside capitalistic gains.
Tracing the journey a waste picker traverses across the urban landscape, to the threshold of the ‘upper’ caste household, inside and outside at the same time, the abject body of the waste picker exposes the porosity of these borders, always threatening yet always 233abject. Existing at the borders of inside-outside, pure-impure, safe-dangerous, waste pickers performed essential services during the COVID-19 pandemic; work that not only constitutes the ritual dirt and filth but also compounds the already extant precarities due to exposure to household and medical waste without safety implements to protect and encase their own selves and bodies. It is due to their existence on the borderlands that the waste picker has remained outside the realm of representation; their “precarity of existence” at the borders has marked their very unrepresentability (Butler, 953). This chapter aims to understand this precarity and exclusion of the waste pickers in Delhi to examine its impact in policy frameworks and urban planning practices. The article will argue that COVID-19 is both a health emergency and a cultural challenge as it triggers the processes of abjection and re-establishes and reinscribes caste-based exclusionary social hierarchies and practices in cities. This reiteration of caste-based regimes of touchability and untouchability is “the non-biodegradability of caste”. (Jaaware. 188)
