In this short piece, Dr Pratik Mishra reflects on emerging themes from ongoing archival research on sanitation labour in colonial India and Bangladesh.

We ask the central question – do sanitation workers appear in the colonial record?

‘The most offensive and dangerous of all excrement’

‘To (its) putrefaction is due in all parts of the world the production of the most deadly diseases that afflict humanity’

‘The man who most completely and fully solves the (..) difficulty will deserve a high place among the benefactors of his race’

The above quotes are from the writings of British colonial officials posted in South Asia in the mid-nineteenth century, discussing the administrative challenge of dealing with human faeces.

The disgust towards human waste in these records is all too familiar from our ‘modern’ perspective.

But what can escape attention is how insurmountable the problem of managing tonnes of excreta daily would have been without the stigmatised, underpaid, hereditary labour of thousands of sanitation workers who performed the task of moving faeces, with basic brooms, baskets, and carts, from private or public toilets to depots, drains, incinerators, and fields.

The colonial records carry little trace of their identities and backgrounds, except generic mentions of their existence as a workforce.

This should be of little surprise given how the denial of personhood to members of society who perform the most crucial of sanitation labour continues to this day in South Asian, and to different degrees, other societies.

I am Pratik Mishra, a Post-doctoral researcher with Sally Cawood, and our ESRC project on ‘Hazardous Sanitation Labour’ (2022-25) is trying to excavate the history of sanitation workers in Bangladesh and India, their community identities and regions of origin, the labour regimes under which they worked, the infrastructure and technology (or lack of) that interfaced their handling of waste on an everyday basis.

There are however several paradoxical aspects to this project.

The processes of marginalization that I am trying to document are the very same processes that ensure that such workers do not appear with any identity and voice in the historical records.

Colonial administrative records reduced the sanitation workforce to anonymous numbers in budget calculations; systems of caste-based oppression ensured that collective resistance of sanitation workers barely appears within these documents, or its risky possibility even pondered upon.

What makes visible the persistent agency of such workers in refusing to concede to oppression are the constant complaints of officials, both British and ‘Native’, on the unreliability of groups of workers who miss workdays, drag their feet in working, demand additional money to do their job or simply do not clean in areas where they are not paid.

Finding the voice of historically oppressed workers within these misanthropic documents involves, as E.P. Thompson 4 once recorded about writing working class history from ruling class archives, recognizing that such literature “must be held up to a satanic light and read backwards”.

Much of my work right now is indeed in recording absence 5 – How can you write a 30-page scheme on overhauling the system of disposing night soil in Calcutta without mentioning once in any kind of detail the workers who are the backbone of this operation?

There is a further paradox in our efforts.

That of me, an upper-caste Indian male, and Sally, a white, middle-class British woman, working from a UK University and seeking to record the histories of oppressed communities.

By identity and ancestry, we are beneficiaries of the same system of colonial and caste-oppression we seek to examine.

My job in writing academic research is a continuation of my ‘Brahmin’ caste-defined role of producing knowledge.

Sally’s role, more so, risks perpetuating (neo)colonial hierarchies in knowledge flow.

We are aware of the structural violence we unavoidably perform within our roles, and so we are seeking within this project to highlight sanitation worker communities’ self-definition of their own histories and identities.

In my archival research, I seek to emulate Marcus Rediker’s principle of writing history from below, that the historian is not above the fray and must pick a side – it is their responsibility to show retrospective solidarity and ‘accompany’ working people through their history.

We also seek to address this head-on in the project via participatory action research, hiring researchers to gather oral histories, in their own communities.

The knowledge generated will therefore remain with them and, we hope, help to highlight the hidden, or rather unseen histories of a workforce that have played and continue to play a vital role in the making of our towns and cities.

Blog written by: Dr Pratik Mishra, Post-Doctoral Research Associate, Lancaster Environment Centre, Lancaster University, UK

Edited by: Dr Sally Cawood, Lecturer in Economic Geography, Lancaster Environment Centre,

Lancaster University, UK (Project PI).

Photo 1 - Historic image of The chowk or marketplace of Dacca (Dhaka), 1885 (Johnston & Hoffman) courtesy of the British Library.

Photo 2 - Watercolour drawing of an [unknown] person with title ‘Sweeper’, 1825-1830, courtesy of the British Library

We welcome your comments and questions.

Please reach out to us to learn more: p.mishra3@lancaster.ac.uk and s.cawood1@lancaster.ac.uk

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