1

Everyday geographies of sanitation: politics and experience in Mumbai’s informal settlements Colin McFarlane, Renu Desai, and Stephen Graham Paper in revision for resubmission to Annals of the Association of American Geographers Abstract Inadequate sanitation constitutes a global crisis, but how is sanitation produced and sustained in informal settlements? While there is data available on aggregate statistics around sanitation, relatively little is known about how sanitation is created, maintained, threatened and contested within informal settlements. This paper seeks to make two key contributions to debates in geography, urban studies, and development studies on informal urban sanitation. First, it offers a conceptual approach to understanding everyday sanitation within informal settlements. This focuses on gendered metabolisms in and beyond ‘political society’, drawing together critical debates on urban infrastructure, feminist approaches to sanitation and the body, and Partha Chatterjee's (2004) influential development of political society. Second, drawing on an ethnography of two very different informal settlements in Mumbai, the paper identifies key ways in which sanitation is produced, rendered vulnerable and politicised. In particular, four strategies of sustaining informal sanitation are highlighted: self-built latrines and drainage maintenance; forms of patronage in political society; political practices and exclusions that exist beyond political society; and open defecation. It concludes with a discussion of possible ways forward. 1: Introduction Sanitation is both one of the most important and neglected areas of human development. In 1990, 2.5 billion people, out of a global total of 5.3 billion, lacked access to adequate sanitation. By 2008, this figure had grown to 2.6 billion from 6.7 billion (Lane 2012). One fifth of the world’s population is forced to defecate in the open (Mara, 2012: 89). The human cost is as staggering and tragic as it is unnecessary: diarrhoea, usually the result of food or water contaminated with fecal matter, kills a child every fifteen seconds, and in each decade that passes the number killed exceeds all Second World War fatalities (George, 2008: 3). In India, 42 children die each hour due to inadequate sanitation (Kar, 2012), yet the central Indian state spends only 0.2% of GDP on it, and India is second only to China in numbers of people lacking access (728 million people, Water Aid, 2007; UN Millennium Project, 2005). It is now accepted that the ‘Millennium Development Goal’ to halve the number of people without access to adequate sanitation – i.e. to allow for the other half that don’t have adequate sanitation to maintain, if they can, without - will be not be achieved. One emerging but still profoundly neglected focus of the sanitation crisis is the nature of everyday experience in informal settlements. Given that one third of the world’s urbanites live in some form of informal settlement, and that the rate of urbanization in informal settlements is faster than in cities in general, it is critical for sanitation and urban research, as well as policy and practice, that everyday experiences are better understood (UN Habitat, 2003). Contributions on everyday sanitation arise from a variety of contexts, including development studies (e.g. special issue of the Institute for Development Studies Bulletin, 2012; Mehta and Movik, 2012; Black and Fawcett, 2008), sociology (e.g. Molotch and Norén, 2010), postcolonial studies (e.g. Chakrabarty, 2002), and, increasingly, geography too (Truelove, 2011; Jewitt, 2011; O’Reilly, 2010; McFarlane, 2008a, 2008b, forthcoming). Our intention is to contribute to this by identifying specific conditions and strategies through which sanitation is sustained in informal settlements.

2

The paper examines some of the ways in which sanitation is produced, sustained and contested in two informal settlements in Mumbai: Rafinagar (split into Parts I and II) in east Mumbai, and Khotwadi, a very different neighbourhood in the west of the city. Through comparison between these two neighbourhoods, we argue that the struggle to sustain sanitation depends in part on four important processes: self-build, political society, forms of protest and exclusion that exceed political society and open defecation. Mumbai is an important choice for this study given the vast inequalities in water and sanitation. Only 62% of the city is covered by sewer lines, and the area serviced varies tremendously from 98% in the historically wealthy southern wards (such as B, C and D in the historic tip of the island) to 37% in the generally poorer northeast (such as M/E) (HDR, 2009). In the city’s informal neighbourhoods, 47% have access to toilet facilities (compared to 83% for the city as a whole), but many of these are dysfunctional, only occasionally usable, often lacking water, sewer and electricity connections, and are often very unclean and poorly maintained (HDR, 2009). For example, only 14% of toilet blocks in informal neighbourhoods have access to water (ibid). The ratio of toilet seats to people varies across the city from 58:1 to 273:1 (ibid). Just 18.5% of residents in these neighbourhoods have access to individual water connections and 49% rely on sometimes vigorously contested standpipes, and the quantity and quality of water is often unreliable and more expensive than in middle class neighbourhoods (HDR, 2009; Zérah, 2008). But while there is data available – albeit often patchy and out of date - on aggregate sanitation statistics in Mumbai, there is comparatively less understanding of the everyday practices, experiences and perceptions of sanitation. This a gap identified in our interviews with progressive municipal staff as well as in the academic debates (e.g. Bapat and Agarwal, 2003). In Mumbai, the production and experience of infrastructure includes – as we demonstrate in what follows – processes of demolition, changing forms of land use, reciprocal relations between neighbours and complex forms of community and urban governance, the labour of women and girls, land erosion and monsoon influences, contestation around the changing tariffs of toilets, and identity politics linked closely to political parties. We hope to show how diverse sanitation practices become invested with different levels of collaboration, resource, expectation, gendered labour, fear, anxiety, and identity politics. Khotwadi is an authorised, established settlement in west Mumbai, while Rafinagar is an unauthorised, poorer settlement in east Mumbai (Figure 1). Rafinagar comprises two parts: Part 1, which has been provided with some basic urban services, and Part 2, a more recent development – since the mid-1990s –with almost no urban services. Figure 1: Mumbai, showing Khotwadi and Rafinagar

3

Tulsi

Lake

Vihar

Lake

Arabian Sea

Arabian Sea

PowaiLake

N

50 kilometres

RN

RS

PN

ME

PS

D

GS FN

E

C

B

A

GN

FS

HWHE

MW

NL

S

NAVI MUMBAI

BHAYANDAR

DAHISAR

WORLI

COLABA

T

KE

KW

GOVANDI

KURLA

BANDRA

SANTA CRUZ

GOREGAON

THANE

BORIVALI

MIRA

BHANDUP

Dharavi

Rafinagar

Shivajinagar

Khotwadi

ME

Ward boundary

Municipal ward

Slum areas

CHEMBUR

ANDHERI

Khotwadi (Figure 2), with a population of approximately 2000 households, has 24 toilet blocks and a total of 180 seats, whereas Rafinagar (Figure 3), with approximately 4000 households, has 6 toilet blocks with a total of 76 seats. Rafinagar, then, has twice the population and half the number of toilet seats. Moreover, these are unevenly distributed. Rafinagar Part 2 has only one toilet block that was provided by the Maharashtra Housing and Area Development Authority (MHADA) in 2011, although there are often temporary hanging latrines. While the majority of residents in Khotwadi have a degree of secure water access through unmetered municipal standposts, metered group connections and wells, the majority of Rafinagar’s residents face profound difficulties and are forced to incur high expenditures for water and/or time and effort in collecting water. The condition of solid waste management in the two settlements is also uneven. Rafinagar in particular, partly due to its illegality and partly due to its marginal status as a predominantly Muslim settlement, suffers from highly infrequent instances of municipal cleaning of drains and collection and disposal of garbage. The neighbourhood, given its ‘illegality’, also suffers from frequent demolition and infrastructure removal by the ‘bulldozer state’ (Anand and Rademacher, 2011). A key moment here was the cutting of water pipes in Rafinagar during

4

the BrihanMumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) water raids in the winter of 2009-10. The BMC used the so-called city-wide ‘water shortage’ to justify a violent clampdown on illegal water connections (Graham, Desai and McFarlane, 2012). In Rafinagar, this culminated in the systematic cutting, in full public view, of a great deal of the neighbourhood’s water infrastructure. The health toll of inadequate sanitation and water has been far higher in Rafinagar than in Khotwadi. In 2010, twenty children under the age of five in Rafinagar Part II died from the combination of malnutrition and poor sanitation (Menon, 2012). The malnourishment of many children means they are more likely to be killed from entirely preventable sanitation related illness and disease than in Khotwadi. There is a severe lack of health services in the neighbourhood to diagnose and treat problems, although there are a fair number of bogus doctors (Mili, 2011). The Mumbai Human Development Report points out that this northeast region of the city has Mumbai’s highest infant mortality rate (HDI, 2009). 26% of children in Mumbai are underweight, and families often lack ration cards for subsidised food or kerosene (Meenon, 2012). Many of the women and children in Rafinagar Part II make a living from the city garbage ground that juts up against the neighbourhood. The combination of poor sanitation, the presence of the garbage ground, and malnutrition has created a high number of respiratory disorders, skin and gastro-intestinal infections, frequent fevers, and in some cases tuberculosis and hypertension (Mili, 2011), as well as occasional localised outbreaks of typhoid, hepatitis and cholera. The comparative focus was adopted in order to get closer to the diversity of sanitation conditions and the extent of its inadequacy in Mumbai. We chose these neighbourhoods because of differences in key variables: legality, religion, politics, income, and areas of the city (the relatively wealthy west against the relatively poorer east). We conducted pilot research identifying possible case studies to compare and worked through a long list before and in the early stage of the research. While we settled on these two neighbourhoods, given that 60% of Mumbaikers live in some form of informal settlements, there are likely to have been any number of possible useful comparisons based on a range of potential variables. Figure 2: Khotwadi. Brick-and-concrete (pukka) housing surrounding a well

Figure 3: Rafinagar Part 2. Sackcloth (kutcha) housing and absence of basic services

5

A nine-month ethnography was conducted, consisting of 4.5 months in both neighbourhoods, as well as interviews with key policy officials, civil society groups and activists before, during and after the ethnography. We particularly sought to examine the labour of sanitation and the personal experiences of sanitation. This involved both observation and repeated interviews, although there are important limits methodologically here. It is not possible or ethical to observe private practices that take place behind closed doors, and there are many issues that people would rather not talk about. We found, for example, that women – and most of the interviews are with women, given that they bear the majority of labour and hardship of sanitation inadequacies – were often more comfortable talking about water access and quality than about bodily sanitation experiences, whether through embarrassment or a sense that water is more important than sanitation. The interview transcripts have little to say about certain crucial sanitation experiences, including menstruation, coping with diarrhoea, or the practice of waiting until cover of darkness, which can cause bladder and urinary tract infections as well as psychological distress (George, 2008: 197). Our own positionalities are important here. The vast majority of the fieldwork was conducted by Renu, who as an Indian woman was on the one hand able to develop conversations around sensitive themes with other Indian women in ways that both Colin and Steve could never achieve as white British men. On the other hand, the familiarity of an Indian woman as someone ‘closer to home’ can create its own tensions and silences, and people are sometimes more prepared to share information with someone who is obviously an outsider. Equally, policy officials can sometimes appear be more open to talking to foreign academics than to academics perceived as ‘local’. The paper is structured as follows. First, we review conceptual and theoretical debates that provide important resources for an understanding of informal sanitation infrastructure. This discussion draws together sanitation research, the politics of urban infrastructure, the gendered nature of sanitation, and on political society into a framework for researching everyday sanitation. Second, we move on to the empirical material in the ‘Informal Sanitation Strategies’ section. Here we focus on four strategies we identified in the production, maintenance, politicisation and experience of sanitation: self-built latrines and drainage, the relations between political society and sanitation, protest and exclusion beyond political society, and open defecation. We then conclude by outlining ways forward for improved sanitation. 2: Everyday sanitation: towards an understanding of informal sanitation infrastructure In recent years there has been an increase in the number of high-profile and wide-ranging books on sanitation which demonstrate its centrality to different aspects of everyday life (e.g.

6

Black and Fawcett, 2008; Mehta and Movik, 2012; George, 2008; Molotch and Norén, 2010). Black and Fawcett’s (2008) exploration of sanitation and development in the global South includes important lessons based on everyday sanitation usage, arguing for instance that the number of toilets is often not the most important factor in health improvements. Much also depends on factors including the precise location of toilets, the reliability of toilets, existing patterns of open defecation at home and workplaces, and class inequalities that include some and exclude others (Mukherjee, 2001). Their work shows in relation to several places – Yongning County in China, or Toamasina in Madagascar, for example – that keeping human waste in homes or compounds is culturally objectionable, especially if there is a bad odour (which can be reduced by application of, for instance, a pour-flush water seal). In relation to dense informal areas, Black and Fawcett argue for the need to look beyond expensive conventional sewerage to consider, for example, the potential of ‘simplified sewerage’, which is cheaper, smaller sewerage systems developed. In contrast, Molotch and Norén’s (2010) collection, Toilet: Public Restrooms and the Politics of Sharing, focuses mainly on the global North and examines on how notions of privacy, dirt, concealment, separation, sexuality, gender, and activism relate public toilets as the ultimate ‘backstage’ of life, in Erving Goffman’s famous term (Molotch, 2010: 2). These themes are echoed in Cox et al’s (2011) engaging Dirt: The Filthy Reality of Everyday Life, which focuses short essays on the social construction of ‘dirt’ in relation to bodies, communities, cities, and environments, and Ashenburg’s (2007) Clean: An Unsanitary History of Washing, which examines changing constructions of ‘cleanliness’, particularly in cities. There is also an historical literature on urban sanitation in India specifically that shares a critical focus on the social construction of ‘dirt’ and on mechanisms of exclusion. This work has linked urban sanitation to discourses of ‘pollution’ and ‘contamination’ in public space, especially in postcolonial studies. As Chakrabarty (2002) has argued, conceptions of ‘dirt’ in public spaces have been historically connected to the constitution of ‘sanitary practice’ and ‘sanitary spaces’ (see Anderson, 2006; Chaplin, 1999, 2011; Sharan, 2007; Joyce, 2002; Legg, 2007; Kooy and Bakker, 2008; McFarlane, 2008b). In India these histories are influenced by distinctive constructions of communal space and caste, underpinned by notions of purity and pollution (e.g. Hosagrahar, 2006). Both the historical and contemporary literatures show that a focus on how sanitation is made and sustained reveals different ways in which sanitation connects public and private space through unequal relations of labour, gender, class and caste. In different ways, this disparate collection of texts draw on and represents a rich vein of case studies and literatures from social and physical sciences and from policy and the lived realities of sanitation. They reveal the centrality of sanitation broadly cast to public health, equality, dignity, education, social order and disorder, and constructions of self and environment. Sanitation is not simply plumbing for the home or the city; it in plays a crucial role in quality of life, opportunity, social development, the stigmatisation of bodies, and urban modernity. A key feature of these texts, and indeed of the global sanitation policy debates (e.g. UN Habitat, 2003; Glass, 2012), is an increasing awareness of the need to understand everyday patterns of sanitation. For example, the increasingly popular Community-Led Total Sanitation (CLTS) approach shifts the focus from engineering solutions to communities. CLTS involves participatory mapping of neighbourhoods in order to understand current practices of open defecation and sanitation more broadly, and then organising communities into self-help groups to build and maintain toilets. A key strength of CLTS is precisely its

7

concern with building sanitation solutions directly from everyday experience (see Mehta and Movik, 2012; Kar, 2012). CLTS is part of a growing focus on ‘participatory’ approaches to sanitation that react to a previous period of predominantly top-down engineering-based solutions (Black and Fawcett, 2008). In Mumbai, for example, the controversial Slum Sanitation Programme emerged in the mid-1990s through state and World Bank funding to deliver sanitation to informal settlements through nongovernmental (NGO) and community-based (CBO) organisations. The evidence here though is mixed: while the scheme has provided some real benefits and has involved communities in different parts of the city, the ways in which people use infrastructure and the desires people have are often marginalised in favour of building large public toilet blocks as a one-size-fits-all approach (Sharma and Bhide, 2005; McFarlane, 2008a). In this section, we develop a conceptual framework suitable for a more sustained focus on the everyday experience of sanitation. We highlight three debates that, in addition to the more populist, expansive and historical literatures cited above, represent key reference points for this paper and debates on sanitation more generally: urban infrastructure, especially on metabolisms, feminist approaches to sanitation, and – in an attempt to situate the politics of informality more centrally in the conceptual discussion – political society. We highlight these perspectives for three reasons. First, debates on urban infrastructure offer a critical perspective on the unequal ways in which sanitation is metabolised over time. While these debates, drawing on a multi-faceted urban political ecology approach (e.g. Heynen et al, 2006; Loftus, 2012; Swyngedouw, 2004), have focussed more on water than sanitation, the emphasis on infrastructure not as a set of static technologies but as a metabolic process - where metabolism is a transformation in relations between bodies, social relations, environment and political economy - is useful for a critical approach to urban sanitation in informal settlements. However, in these debates the gendered nature of urban metabolisation has been given little attention. In contrast, we bring research on gender and sanitation centrally into our approach. In doing so, we echo Truelove’s (2011: 145) argument that while urban political ecology is very useful for grasping the unequal nature of sociomaterial political economies, it sometimes sidelines “how informal everyday water activities forge subjectivities and additional dimensions of inequality, such as unequal bodily experiences, access to rights and critical life opportunities within (and through) specific urban spaces”. Truelove (2011) instead draws on feminist political ecologies to as a basis for charting how the unequal micropoltics of everyday life are shaped by and in turn reshape dominant political economic and state forces (drawing, in particular, on Cameron and Gibson-Graham, 2003; Nagar et al., 2002; Mohanty, 2003). But the foci on urban metabolism and gendered sanitation do not speak directly to the specific context and conditions of infrastructure in informal settlements. For that reason, we turn to the instructive and influential conception of ‘political society’. Gendered metabolisms in political society: the politics of sanitation infrastructure

8

There is now a rich and varied literature on the importance of urban infrastructure to urban politics, economies, cultures, and ecologies1. Of particular relevance to sanitation infrastructure is the literature on urban metabolism. Focussing on sanitation in informal settlements reveals the hidden labour of precarious and improvised infrastructure systems (and see Graham and Thrift, 2007, on infrastructure more generally). Here, infrastructure is constituted through sometimes unpredictable rhythms, fluid social and technical improvisations, complex and often hidden labour practices, and multiple temporalities. Infrastructure is often highly prescribed, and open defecation is common. Narrating these processes using ethnographic approaches reveals a politics of and beyond infrastructure that far exceeds the tendency in Western debates to focus on infrastructural privatization, or the top-down imposition of neoliberal governance paradigms, as the political moments of urban infrastructure. Metabolic infrastructure This literature has concentrated on how nature is metabolised through capitalist social relations. The metabolisation of water and waste through urban and rural space, bodies and materials is structured by the power relations and political economies that constitute the city (Giglioli and Swyngedouw, 2008; Swyngedouw, 2004). Swyngedouw (2006), in his critical elucidation of urbanization as the de-territorialization and re-territorialization of metabolic flows, argues that unequal relations of power allow particular actors to defend and create their own urban environments along lines of class, ethnicity, race, and gender, a process that is reproduced through capitalism’s translocal operations across the globe, which “turn the city into a metabolic socio-environmental process that stretches from the immediate environment to the remotest corners of the globe” (2006: 106). But there is little work exploring urban metabolisms in everyday contexts, especially in relation to informal settlements. As we shall see, the articulation of sanitation in Rafinagar and Khotwadi is a process of creating or maintaining sanitation in the present and immediate future; rarely do residents see the possibility of long-term fixed and rigid infrastructures, especially in Rafinagar. The articulation of sanitation can act either to maintain the social order – e.g. to keep toilets well maintained through voting for a particular party, or keeping costs stable by protesting a pay-per-use increase - or to introduce a change in existing relations. But as with many cities in the majority world, the debate on the politics, experience and labour of infrastructure has focussed, for good reasons, on water (e.g. Anand 2011; Singh, 2006; Gandy, 2008). For example, There have been important ethnographies of state engineers that have revealed the patchy, segmented and shifting nature of water

1 This includes: the emergence of privatised infrastructures (Graham and Marvin, 2001; Page, 2005; Shove et al,

2007); the role of large technical systems in urban and regional development (Dupuy, 2008; Coutard, 1999; Hughes, 1998); the growing importance of automated and ‘smart’ infrastructures that enable particular forms of mutual user-infrastructure relations (Kitchen and Dodge, 2011; Thrift and French, 2002; Furlong, 2012); urban ecological debates (Hodson and Marvin, 2009; Monstadt, 2009; Bulkeley and Caston-Broto, 2012); the politics of what Young and Keil (2009) call the ‘in-between city’ that’s neither city nor suburb; the removal of infrastructure through urban demolition or militarization (Coward, 2008; Graham, 2010; McFarlane, 2008); the mutual imbrications of technology and urban experience as manifestations of ‘cyborg urbanism’ (Gandy, 2005); or the metabolic transformation of urban life through changing alignments of bodies, physical networks, social systems, and commodification (Loftus, 2012; Heynen et al, 2006; Gandy, 2004; Swyngedouw, 2004; Luke, 2003; Medd and Marvin, 2008) - for reviews, see Coutard (2008), Furlong (2011), and McFarlane and Rutherford (2008).

9

infrastructures as they are manipulated through changing political, economic, ecological and social relations (e.g. Coelho, 2006; Bjorkman, dates). This water-focussed research has argued for, in part, as Nikhil Anand (2011: 558) puts it, “an attention to the quotidian practices of settlers and engineers in Mumbai as they make and respond to difficulties with water pressure” (see also Bjorkman, dates; Coelho, 2006; Truelove, 2011). Karen Coelho (2006: 499) details water distribution grid in Chennai is actively shaped by geographies of power and influence as “bypass connections were effected, valves were manipulated, furtive handpumps were installed, pipes were raised or lowered” in response to the demands of local councillors and relations between engineers and the public. The water grid is an outcome of constant manipulation and compromise, trial and error and experimentation as engineers react to political and economic interests. Through the analytic lens of ‘pressure’, Anand discloses the ways in which politics, technology and physics interweave to configure Mumbai’s water supply. Drawing on ethnographic work in informal settlements, he demonstrates the different ways in which ‘pressure’ in the water system is made and mobilised technically, via the work of engineers and the functioning of the water system, politically, via the influence of politicians, charismatic individuals and neighbourhood collectives, and geophysically, through the ‘natural’ terrain of the city. Anand discusses the neighbourhood of Premnagar – located on a hill, populated by Muslims and with an opposition party member as their local councillor – and shows how the coalescing of these contextual circumstances results in low water pressure as an outcome of both low political and infrastructural (technological) pressure. These literatures demonstrate the critical importance of thinking infrastructure as an unequal, political and changing articulation of materials, bodies, politics, water, social relations including class, gender and caste, and knowledge. Gendered sanitation Alongside these debates, there is a critical research agenda on the gendered inequities in the production and experience of water and sanitation as it links body, ecology, political economy and cultural politics in urban India, and the critical role of gender ideologies in shaping rural sanitation (see, for example, Truelove, 2011; Truelove and Mawdsley, 2011; Bapat and Agarwal, 2003; O’Reilly, 2010; Zerah, 2000). Writing about Delhi, Truelove (2011: 145) uses feminist political ecology to chart inter-connections between bodies, households, places of work and city to understand everyday practices of social differentiation around class and gender. She shows, for example, how providing ‘legalised’ water pipes can exclude poorer women due to the quality and peripheral location of the water, and how particular forms of state capitalism can impact on and become reshaped through everyday life. Cultural taboos play an important role in shaping the gendered experience of sanitation. In rural India, the norms against women defecating in open space can lead to taunts and harassment. In Madagascar, transgression of rules for men and women can lead to fines, the maximum of which is to forfeit a cow, while in southern Ethiopia women are often barred from using household toilets if they are installed (Black and Fawcett, 2008: 84-85). The lack of provision of toilets has a huge impact on schooling, especially for girls, and there is evidence of exponential increases in school attendance following the delivery of toilets (George, 2008: 206). Many efforts to address inadequate sanitation focus on women and girls. For example, the CLTS approach is often based around a small group of local women

10

who act as community facilitators, although that fact alone, as Mehta and Movik (2012: 10) argue, does not mean that local gender relations have been made more equal. CLTS for instance “does not explicitly mention menstrual hygiene or separate bathing places for women”, and has “failed to address gender inequalities explicitly enough” (ibid). Feminist literature on the body has also demonstrated how the ‘leakiness’ of bodies positions space not as bounded and self-contained but as the unequal merging of fluid body/space relations structured by power and inequality. For example, Robyn Longhurst shows how the Cartesian ontology of the self-contained/controlled male and the fluid/uncontrolled female is ‘messed up’ by the permeability of toilet activities. She describes toilets as “sites where bodily boundaries are broken. The insides of bodies make their way to the outside (for example, urination, excretion, vomiting, squeezing pimples) and what is outside the body may make its way to the inside (for example, the naked body may feel vulnerable to penetration)” (2001: 132). This fluidity between body/space, as we shall see in relation to open defecation in particular, becomes crucially important in poorly serviced informal settlements. These are practices shaped by relations of power between space and bodies that operate differently across societies. For example, Emily Martin (1992: 94), in The Woman in the Body, examines efforts mainly in the global North to conceal “bodily functions in institutions whose organization of time and space take little cognizance of them”. This includes, perhaps most importantly, institutionalised attempts to contain menstruation in realms outside the home such as work and school. Bathrooms are important here as spaces that allow for privacy and autonomy. These include forms of resistance, from moments like the 1968 Memphis Sanitation workers’ struggle, which was pivotal for the civil rights movement, and struggles in South America against privatization, to workers using bathrooms to take breaks and transgender activism around unisex bathrooms (Gersheron, 2010): “If private spaces must be provided to take care of what is [constructed as] shameful and disgusting, then those private places can be used in subversive ways” (Martin, 1992: 95). Toilets are parts of the spatial architecture of regulation, but can also become sites of contestation and politicisation of gender and sexuality. The debates on infrastructure metabolism and gendered sanitation are only rarely brought together (Truelove, 2011, is an importance exception), but it is useful to approach sanitation as an unequally gendered metabolic process. Sanitation is metabolised differently for different groups spatially, and those relations can change significantly over time. For our focus on informal and often precarious neighbourhoods, we take from these literatures the importance of understanding the making and sustaining of sanitation as a set of power-laden processes that differently align bodies, subjectivities, materials, politics, economy and environment. Feminist approaches bring an important focus on the embodied and gendered experience of sanitation, while the literature on water draws attention to the different forms of political and economic power that structure metabolic conditions. While our examples are necessarily specific and selective, we attempt to run these important signposts through the paper by examining the articulation of informal sanitation in Rafinagar and Khotwadi as different forms of metabolisation shaped through social relations within the neighbourhoods and across the city.

11

However, with the exception of Anand and Truleove who focus on informal settlements, these literatures offer only limited purchase on the specific context of infrastructure in informal settlements. To contextualise the politics of sanitation in informal neighbourhoods, it is important to consider the sorts of conditions that give rise to infrastructure provision and negotiation. A very useful conceptual supplement here, but not one without its limits, is Partha Chatterjee’s (2004) ‘political society’. Political society and informality In Politics of the Governed, Partha Chatterjee (2004) influentially argued that understanding politics in India depends on making sense of practices that exceed the domain of formal urban citizenship. For Chatterjee, these are practices that involve and give rise to populations rather than citizens, characterised by an uncertain terrain of negotiation and violence where political expediency sometimes meshes with the field of citizenship – for example in the form of vote-bank regimes - but only as part of a strategic instrumental moment. Here, people seek rights, but the state cannot view these rights as citizenship rights because to do so would threaten the apparatus of property and civic law. For Chatterjee, these formations are “irreducibly political” because they can only exist in a terrain where the “rules may be bent or stretched, and not on the terrain of established law or administrative procedure” (2004: 60), meaning political society is “ill-defined and contingently activated” (2008: 57). As he puts it in a later essay: “These people do, of course, [often] have the formal status of citizens and can exercise their franchise as an instrument of political bargaining...[But unlike the middle classes, they make claims] through temporary, contextual and unstable arrangements arrived at through direct political negotiations” (ibid). Political society is a domain in which individuals become part of population groupings through recognition as a governmental category. Chaterjee (2004) gives an example from a Calcutta informal settlement where a group formed a community association. The association, because it inhabits illegal land, cannot be recognised by the state as legitimate, but it nonetheless makes claims to habitation and livelihood as a matter of right and does so by constituting demographic categories of governmentality – including households, labourers, landless people, and people below-the-poverty-line, all official state categories. This involves a moral construction of a community tied by often nothing other than common occupation of land under threat. These categories can in turn by used by state officials to expand or secure their political base. The terrain of political society has given rise to a range of paralegal arrangements through which street vendors or illegal squatters, for instance, are both governed as populations – given entitlements which never quite become sedimented as rights – and negotiate with states or private actors for government programs, services, housing and infrastructures. Through these routes, the urban masterplan and state planning codes are subverted through what Benjamin (2008) calls ‘occupancy urbanism’, a set of subtle, ordinary and sometimes stealth-like practices that politicise land in unexpected ways (and see Anand, 2011, on hydraulic infrapolitics in Mumbai). In Mumbai, patronage is central to political society. The most prominent form of ‘patronage democracy’ (Chandra, 2007) is the delivery of services in exchange for votes, although we might also consider the more routine ways in which people buy services informally through brokers, or use their ethnic and religious links to develop relations of mutual benefit with local intermediaries. Indeed, we might see what De Wit and Berner (2009: 930) call

12

‘progressive patronage’ as at least one outlet through which services are delivered to the very poor. A focus on political society as the context for informality is useful in situating sanitation provision and politics in relation to mainstream narratives of planning and citizenship. In many informal settlements, sanitation is not provided through the conventional tools of modernist planning. As a result, the metabolisation of sanitation takes place in an often unreliable and fluid context where the power relations are extremely unequal, and where party political patronage can be the crucial variable. As we will see, however, the nature of political society varies significantly in the two neighbourhoods, and there are important limits in how far it can help explain different articulations of the gendered metabolisation of sanitation. 3: Informal sanitation strategies We begin the empirical discussion in Rafinagar, with one of the key ways in which sanitation is produced: the construction of precarious hanging latrines, and the maintenance of drainage. Self-build: latrines and drainage The first strategy we identified as important to the production and maintenance of sanitation was self-built latrines and the maintenance of drainage. The making of rudimentary latrines is one key way in which sanitation is metabolised. In Rafinagar Part-2, at the edge of the large stormwater drain (nallah) that runs on the west side of the settlement, residents have built makeshift toilets out of cloth, timber, jute and iron sheets bought, found or salvaged from waste (Figure 4). Each toilet is used by the 15-25 households living in each lane. There is a rhythm to this metabolic infrastructure through the year. During the monsoon, using the nearby city Deonar garbage ground for open defecation requires wading knee-deep through mud and waste (on wastewater, see Karpouzoglou and Zimmer, 2012). While people do struggle to make these trips on a daily basis, in such conditions it becomes important to build a toilet closer by. Some have been constructed through residents paying and/or contributing labour, others by people paid by residents. In these lanes, each family typically contributes between Rs.100-200 towards construction (a total of Rs.3000-5000). These hanging latrines’ are often located in areas where people are highly vulnerable to illness and disease (Black and Fawcett, 2008; UN Habitat, 2003; Satterthwaite et al, 2005). Figure 4: Makeshift toilets built in Rafinagar Part-2 over the large stormwater drain (nallah). Source: Renu Desai. Regular incremental improvements are required. For example, when they are damaged by the high and low tides in the large stormwater drain which not only washes away the waste but also gradually rots, damages, and washes away the structure or parts of it, residents once again contribute their money and/or time and/or labour to repairing or reconstructing the toilet. Mainly, it is men who contributed construction labour and women who contribute maintenance labour, although in other lanes residents contributed money and employed a (male) labourer to build the toilet. In some cases the toilet is rebuilt once per year, displacing the routine of incremental improvements through a more focussed period of construction. In other cases, demolitions carried out in Rafinagar Part-2 by the BMC bulldozers – these structure are deemed ‘illegal’ - have loosened the earth that keep these structures stable, destroying not only people’s houses but also the toilets built over the nearby stormwater drain. State demolition does not have a predictable rhythm: some parts of Rafinagar Part-2 had been subjected to demolitions as recently as a year ago, while other parts had not been

13

demolished for several years now. Residents in the lanes in these latter areas no longer felt an acute threat of demolition and had built more stable and lasting toilet structures (see Figure 5), sometimes building two cubicles adjacent to each other so that men and women of the lane could have their own toilet. The investments that residents made in the makeshift toilets are linked not only to the resources they have but to the sense of impending demolition they feel. People’s investment in incremental improvements is partly a function of being able to anticipate a relatively secure future for the infrastructure. Figure 5: Stabilising latrines While we see a broad trajectory of incremental improvement and maintenance here, often interrupted by moments of rebuilding, in practice there are several metabolic rhythms wrapped up in the construction and maintenance of toilets, including the daily and monthly rhythm of the tides that eat away at these structures and the unpredictable rhythms of urban demolition. The toilets are not understood simply as infrastructures. They are about providing some measure of privacy, dignity and safety for women in particular. In one of the lanes where a makeshift toilet had been constructed predominantly for use by women, one woman said: “Where will women go in the day? In the dark women sometimes go [to the garbage ground nearby the settlement]. But a young girl cannot go [to the garbage ground] even in the dark.” But the toilets are vulnerable, and residents often attach anxiety and fear to them. Nasreen complained: “What cleanliness can be kept [at the makeshift toilet]? We use it out of helplessness… If there is high tide then it is not fit to use. The water rises and covers the planks.” Another woman added: “There is a world of difference between this and a pukka [brick-built] toilet. This one remains a bit open, there is a fear of children falling, there is fear that it will get washed away in the high tide, there is a fear that it will break.” When the makeshift toilets rot and get washed away in the high tides, women often resort to open defecation or they use a private toilet in Rafinagar Part 1 for Rs.1-2, until the improvised block is rebuilt. There are more mundane, but also important, examples of self-built infrastructure. For example, residents in Rafinagar Part-1 have created improvised systems for maintaining drainage infrastructures. Some residents add grates along the drain in order to demarcate responsibility amongst households for keeping sections of the drain clean (Figure 6). While residents sometimes collaborate by using several grates to distribute the responsibility of tending to different drain sections, grates are also used by residents to protect their own homes, sometimes displacing waste towards other homes. Sameera said: People should come to clean the gutters. Unsanitary conditions are not nice to see. The residents here don’t pick anything up. And there are fights. No one pays any attention to the gutters. They let it be. We face difficulties because near the [water] drum, there is a grate (jaali) so [waste] accumulates there… The one who lives on the other side has put it so that the waste doesn’t go to their side. But it creates difficulties for us because the waste accumulates near our house. Figure 6: Residents’ improvisations to the open drains, Rafinagar. Given that grates can be both features of collaboration and a source of tension, the capacities of infrastructure materialities emerge less as pre-given properties but as effects of metabolising sanitation as people attempt to secure local conditions and relations.

14

The daily life of sanitation in Khotwadi is generally more secure and predictable, mainly as a result of political party relations (see next section). In Khotwadi, metabolic incrementalism takes a different shape, such as in the lock-and-key arrangements on toilet blocks used by some residents, where a small group of residents have keys to a locked toilet and pay for its maintenance and exclude poorer residents and workers from outside the settlement (some from other informal settlements, some from outside Mumbai). The next section examines a second key way in which sanitation is constituted by considering the operation of patronage, a process that takes quite different forms in the two neighbourhoods. Heterogeneous political society How does political society operate in Khotwadi and Rafinagar? In Khotwadi, the politicisation of sanitation proceeds largely through patronage by the Shiv Sena, a regional ethno-religious Hindu dominant party that currently runs the municipality and represents the neighbourhood. Through the Shiv Sena shakha (office), residents have daily access to a ‘complaint space’. Through a system of written complaint-making, the councilor uses various municipal programmes and departments to provide for work needing done, from blocked drains to accumulated waste or dysfunctional toilets. The local Shiv Sena councillor computerized the shakha when he was elected – earlier a complaint had to be typed and sent to a BMC department, incurring a Rs.100 fee from the typist employed by the councillor; now the shakha itself offers to type the letter for free. Going through the Sena party office will generally result in a complaint being dealt with faster than if a resident approaches the relevant municipal department on her or his own. One local man said: “[The shakha] is an office to buy votes”, adding that the party treats Khotwadi as a series of opportunities to make money though “political adjustment [siphoning off money from development projects]” rather than a neighbourhood where people’s lives might be improved. Certainly, close links to the party can be beneficial for some. One woman explained that she did not pay anything to the informal caretaker of one toilet block because of her husband’s links to the Shiv Sena councillor, and added that she sometimes used nearby blocks reserved for others, given that access would not be denied to her because of her husband’s political links. Figure 7 shows a toilet block in Khotwadi decorated with political banners of the party. This is also the only toilet block in Khotwadi with a dedicated sanitation worker from the BMC, whose comings and goings were monitored by the Shiv Sena shakha. The councillor has a staff member who explains through which clause a complaint should be made. There are 15 workers and two supervisors for cleaning the drains, allocated under the Dattak Vasti Yojana (Slum Adoption Scheme, SAP), a BMC programme which sub-contracts the cleaning and maintenance of sanitation infrastructures to CBOs. The SAP scheme has been appropriated by the Shiv Sena councillor, who uses the workers to clean the drains of settlements in the councillor’s constituency2. If a complaint is not resolved residents can return to the office and file a ‘rejoinder’, but this form of political society does not always work. Not every complaint is dealt with. One resident in Tiwari Chawl, for instance, said that he and his neighbours are occasionally so

2 Commenting on the informal dominance of councillors over the SAP based on research on the scheme in different Indian cities, De Wit (2010: 775) argues: “It [the SAP] fails in a general way to achieve its objective of cleaner slums plus increased mobilisation for awareness and self-help. In fact, it would be cheaper and more honest (not raising expectations as regards awareness and empowerment) to simply employ more municipal sweepers to enter the SAP slums to bring together the solid waste at collection points”.

15

frustrated waiting for the toilet drain to be cleaned that they contributed their own money to pay the Rs.1500-2000. Some residents found the regularity of having to go to the shakha with complaints tiresome, particularly in relation to the cleaning of toilet blocks which requires an intensive and consistent labour. Most residents in Tiwari Chawl are garment workers living in rental houses, and it is likely that one reason for the councillor’s reticence to attend to the chawl is that the garment workers and workshop owners do not constitute his vote-bank since they come from outside the neighbourhood, i.e. there aren’t relations of political society at work here. In Samata Chawl, the toilet block was not regularly cleaned and repeated complaints to the shakha did not lead to a response, apparently because their relations with the shakha were weaker than in other parts of Khotwadi. Residents had found it difficult to pay for a cleaner on their own. One resident referred to this block as “anaath” (‘orphan’), pointing out that the municipal cleaner tends to it only infrequently, that residents themselves were not prepared to improve it, and that the local councilor was non-responsive to requests to maintain the block. Others were referred to as lawaris (‘abandoned’), including those where unsuccessful attempts had been made by local residents to raise money for maintenance. The politics of sanitation is contingent on both a territorial geography and good relations with the Shiv Sena shakha. The political role of regularized requests and complaints of residents through the shakha is clear: the routinised role of the shakha in the maintenance of infrastructure made it, and the councillor, indispensible, and indeed makes a conceptual distinction between the shakha and the infrastructure untenable. This is a key articulation of sanitation in Khotwadi, metabolised through the power of the Sena. In maintaining loyalty through the soft power of infrastructure maintenance, the party maintains a political collective in the neighbourhood which is exclusive on grounds of voting, literacy, and personal background, and dominated on the whole by politically networked men (on the use of Shiv Sena offices to gain access to water in Mumbai, see Anand, 2011). Figure 7: Toilet block mounted with political banners of the Shiv Sena, Khotwadi Political society in Rafinagar takes a different form and is less reliable. The politics of sanitation occurs less through political parties – though the Samajwadi Party (Socialist Party) sometimes plays a role – and more through community groups linked to the NGO, Coro for Literacy. Residents in Rafingar often use community groups, usually of residents rather than ethnically or religiously defined groups, as mediators with the BMC. One woman, Rukkaya, used her membership of the Samajwadi Party to get drains cleaned through the Samajwadi Party office. She built up a range of networks over time that increased her capacity to get work done in the neighbourhood, including through joining CORO, through which she started her own mahila mandal (women’s group). But it was the Samajwadi Party link that has brought impact for Rukkaya. For instance, she developed a good relationship with the president of the Mahila Samajwadi Party, the women’s wing of the Samajwadi Party. Through this link, Rukkaya had a position in the Mahila Welfare Society and had managed to get the BMC not just to clean the drains in her neighbourhood (in Rafinagar Part 1), but to begin consideration of replacing an existing toilet block with a larger two-storey block. This too is an instance of political patronage, but of a less predictable kind than that in Khotwadi. Political society here is constituted through active slum leaders who operate as key nodes within local networks (and see De Wit and Berner, 2009), and creates a greater space of influence for well-connected women. Over time, influential and connected local women like Rukkaya sometimes reduced participation in

16

CORO itself, stating that this work had not been productive. Saiyyada, for example, continued to run her Mahila Mandal but increasingly used it to cultivate relations with local political representatives. The key point here is that the gendered metabolising of political society for most people here is less stable than in Khotwadi, and far more laborious. However, political society, as Chatterjee conceives it, leaves aside a wide range of formations and practices that exist outside of it but which are important in the production and maintenance of everyday sanitation geographies. Beyond political society In his 2004 formulations, Chatterjee confines political society to a category for identifying both how populations are managed through governmental regulation, and for how marginalised groups access services and infrastructures. Later, in an essay in 2008, Chatterjee expands this realm to include “the peasantry, artisans and petty producers in the informal sector”, who make their moral claims on the state through “temporary, contextual and unstable arrangements arrived at through direct political negotiations” (p. 57). But even in this more expansive description of the realm of political society, Chatterjee defines it as constituted by “organisations” that embark on “direct political negotiations” over time, where organisations are a kind of connective tissue, “the means to make effective claims on governmentality” (2008: 58, 61). This makes it difficult to locate different practices as in or out of political society. In particular, temporary, small acts that do not coalese into community organisations or longer term struggles appear not to qualify for political society. As Anand (2011: 546) argues in relation to water politics in Mumbai’s informal settlements, not all residents are able to “constitute themselves as a deserving political society”, and depend instead on what Asef Bayat (1997) calls the ‘quiet encroachment of the ordinary’ (and see Nigam, 2008). These include, for Anand, political relations between residents, engineers, politicians and plumbers that allows residents to draw extra water through pipes using illegal booster pumps, well-placed valves, and new connections further down the pipe (and see Truelove and Mawdsley, 2011). Chatterjee (2008: 61) is, of course, aware that political society has its limit points: “In every region of India, there exist marginal groups of people who are unable to gain access to the mechanisms of political society... that do not even have the strategic leverage of electoral mobilisation”. In this section we highlight two metabolisations of sanitation that exceed political society: protest in Rafinagar, and the exclusion of garment workers in Khotwadi. The first example is temporary protests over sanitation in Rafinagar. If political society doesn’t work or is unreliable, then sustaining or improving sanitation conditions requires alternative mechanisms. For example, at a privately-run toilet block in Rafinagar Part-1, the caretaker doubled the price from Rs.1 to Rs.2. A group of residents began to protest, as Naina related: The public created a scene. They went and sat down [to defecate] anywhere, in the maidan [open ground], the garden, on the road, near the clinic…So that he [the toilet block caretaker] will also not be able to sit there, he will also get the stink, no? Tomorrow he can even say it is Rs.3. Should we drink water from his hands?... Meaning if he keeps increasing the money, should the public keep giving?...He made it Rs.1. This was a rare form of protest (we didn’t hear of others like it) in which an urban collective temporarily constitutes a political moment that dramatises the limited options available to the poor, forced here to use their own bodies as metabolic political agents in their own neighbourhoods. Naina positions smell, not organisational pressure, as key to this political

17

act. These are temporary conflicts that exceed political society, even if these same residents may pursue political society at other times in the form of vote-bank patronage. They resonate more strongly with accounts of lower key contentious politics, where urban public spaces become particularly important for pursuing and registering grievances (e.g. Bayat, 2010). The second example is the exclusion of migrant workers from toilet blocks in Khotwadi. Khotwadi is well known in Mumbai for clothing factories. There is a common perception in the neighbourhod that the toilets are harder to keep clean due to the increasing number of garment workers in the area. A moral economy of cleanliness was often levelled at the garment workers. One man commented: “This is a municipality toilet but we have made it private so that it doesn’t get dirty. Many labourers come and put cloth inside and make it dirty.” Another woman – a caretaker of the same block - added: “Diseases spread from the toilets. Jaundice, diarrhoea, and many others. Those in the [garment] workshops also put cloth into it. That is why we say no to the workshops.” The garment workers themselves often complained of abuse from residents. One woman said that residents would shout at her, “you come here to work and you make it filthy before you leave.” She narrated the story of one woman resident who had even slapped a garment worker, a young girl around 18 years old. The girl had come out of one of the cubicles and the women had just entered the block. When the woman went into the cubicle she saw it was dirty and, thinking that the girl was responsible, walked out and slapped her. The girl left her employment soon after. The blame and exclusion of migrant workers is important to the metabolisation of sanitation in Khotwadi and works to reinforce the dominant social order. It is a form of identity politics that exceeds the realm of political society. For many residents in the city’s informal settlements, especially those in Rafinagar Part-2, the only option available is open defecation. It is in these instances where we see in particularly sharp relief the limit points of the forms of metabolic articulation we have so far been describing (self-building, political society, and protest and exclusion beyond political society). Open defecation: delimited necessity Rafinagar Part 2 has only one state-provided toilet. This came through state – not municipal – funds in 2010 following the campaigning of the CORO Mahila Mandals in particular. The hanging latrines do not serve everyone, and the nearest toilet blocks in Part 1 are a walk away for are often temporary or too unclean or precarious to use (Figure 8). As a result, people have established over time a gendered metabolic geography and rhythm of open defecation. This geography has an important temporal dimension. As Naina said of toilets in Rafinagar Part 1, “if the line is long, if it is urgent, if there is no time, then [one can] immediately go there” - add the time of the distance to the toilet block in Rafinagar Part 1, plus long queues, especially early in the morning, plus the urgency with which people may have to go. The geography of open defecation is at once spatial and temporal, and generally structured in this way: children will use the lane outside houses or the roadside, a dangerous space that sometimes leads to injury by reversing municipal garbage trucks on the main road, men will use the kabrastan (graveyard) or maidan (open ground) nearby the neighbourhood, and women – sometimes with children and often in groups – will go further afield and use the garbage ground. Men too sometimes use the garbage ground, although they tend to use the lower edges that run along the large open stormwater drain, while women climb the garbage

18

heap that stretches a few stories high. For Baviskar (2011), writing about open defecation around the Yamuna river, Delhi, this kind of agreed upon geography is an informally demarcated ‘urban commons’. However, the BMC has decided to close the city garbage ground and the result has been a significant rupture in the temporalisation of this routine. This closure is a result of the ground become filled, and not the commodified real estate vision driving the displacement on the Yamuna – Rafinagar, for now, lies far beyond the orbit of real estate commodification.

Figure 8: Toilets in Rafinagar Part 1 and 2

The company paid to level and close the garbage ground has its construction workers on the site for most of the day. Salma described the disruption that accompanies the potential of being visible: The vehicles start to run at 6-7 a.m. They run the entire day. Till seven in the evening. Even at night sometimes… The road [on which the vehicles run] is high. Everything can be seen from above if someone is sitting below… First the [garbage] trucks used to come time to time. Ever since it has become private there is more harassment. No matter where you look there is a vehicle. In these situations, women effectively shift the space-times of their own metabolisation: they often wait long into the night to use open space or toilets when the queues are lighter, resulting in a range of health problems and anxieties. Here, actions by the BMC have

19

drastically altered the metabolic rhythm of sanitation, disrupted its collective organisation, and created new hazards for collectives, especially some of the poorest women and children in Rafinagar Part 2. More than disruption, there have been reports of women being abused. Salma said: “Our sons and husbands understand that our mothers and sisters go [to the garbage ground]. But [men] come from outside and harass us…They [drink] alcohol; they do charas, ganja, solution… Many rapes have happened. Some parents don’t bring it out in the open to protect their honour; they are scared.” With the option of open defecation significantly reduced, a range of coping practices become even more important than usual, including women and girls drinking less to avoid having to go, or waiting for longer periods of time, or having added health difficulties during menstruation, or being forced to use indoor household bathing areas - mori’s - as toilets. The geographies of open defecation are themselves vulnerable and risky social sanitation infrastructures, and echo findings on other cities. In her study of women and water in Delhi, Truelove (2011: 148; and see Baviskar, 2011) discusses the precarity of daily rhythms of open defecation: [W]omen recount stories of harassment, abduction, and rape, while traveling to closer (but less protected) sanitation points...Because stomach illnesses are quite common (one woman estimated that most adults in the slum get diarrhea once a month), these women must discipline their bodies around a lack of accessible and private sanitation, or face public shame, humiliation and embarrassment. At night, women cannot risk the long journey to the jungle, even in groups, and thus have no place in which to have privacy. As Truelove (ibid) shows, women rely on open fields nearby for sanitation and often travel to a dangerous canal area to find water for washing, leaving their bodies “caught in the nexus of local cultural relations (which ascribe a sense of shame to the visibility of women’s sanitation practices) as well as local political tensions, which are making women’s ventures into nearby fields and canal areas more dangerous”, including through humiliation, abuse and rape. Other shifts operating at different temporalities can effect different sorts of bodily implications for women and children. Truelove (2011: 147) shows how a wide array of bodily experiences emerge from different conditions, including “the wear and tear of water labor, water-related health problems, the physical experience of criminalization for illegal practices and the disciplining required for water-related health issues (including diarrhoea and menstruation for example)”. The various forms of abandonment, violence and exclusion that constitute the geographies of sanitation reflect a wider set of shifts in urban India that designate some bodies and spaces as of ‘value’ and others as ‘wasteful’. Gidwani and Reddy (2011: 1640) describe these processes of valuation in terms of ‘eviscerating urbanism’, which includes – amongst other processes - a techno-ecological urbanization that is “producing two sets of urban ecologies and populations—one, the ecology set of an urban bourgeoisie actively tied into global circuits of capital, whose lives are considered worthy of caring by the state; the other, the ecology set of an urban underclass living off the commodity detritus of these global circuits, whose lives are of indifference to the state” (and see Baviskar, 2011, on ‘bourgeois environmentalism’). 4: Conclusions As the world becomes increasingly urbanised, and as the rate of urbanization continues to take place faster through informal settlements than cities more generally, it is crucial that researchers develop a better understanding of the everyday geographies of sanitation. We have sought to examine just some of the important ways in which sanitation is created, maintained, rendered vulnerable, and contested through two informal settlements in Mumbai.

20

In particular, we have focussed on self-build, political society, protest and exclusion beyond political society, and, particularly important in Rafinagar, the ongoing practice of open defecation. These are key processes in the daily struggle of the gendered metabolisation of sanitation in India’s richest city, where often severe poverty leads to the entirely preventable death of many people, especially children, every year, and an untold level of suffering and labour. We have done this by bringing accounts of urban metabolism, gendered sanitation and political society together to produce a framework that we hope is useful for research on everyday sanitation in informal settlements. The uncertain rhythm and politics of infrastructure are predicated on a series of changing conditions and catalysts, from demolition, land erosion and changing land use, to reciprocal relations, changing tariffs of toilets, and the identity politics around political parties. The contrasting metabolic conditions in Rafinagar and Khotwadi reflect not just different urban histories, social composition, and state-based or legal (dis)connections, but two quite different Mumbais, with distinct forms of infrastructure production, experience and politics. The presence of the Shiv Sena in Khotwadi is critical, as is the illegal and predominantly Muslim nature of Rafinagar. Infrastructure, from this perspective, is not a rigid or obdurate set of materials, but a labour-intensive, heavily gendered, unpredictable and often desperate attempt to create or maintain metabolic safety and dignity. The politics of infrastructure is not contained in moments of privatization alone, but in a far more plural set of articulations ranging from party politics to moments of protest and exclusion to the work of NGOs and Mahila Mandals. The differences between different informal settlements – even within the same city –necessitate quite different kinds of interventions. But it is clear, nonetheless, that long-term and universal provisions are required. These entail both substantial investment in infrastructure and maintenance work and a radical shift towards providing sanitation and water as a right regardless of status. Whatever the different mechanisms and contexts might be, there is a need to place centrally on the political agenda the potential of urban infrastructure as a modernising and socially binding force that enables circulations of waste, water, and daily life. The sanitation infrastructures of informal settlements in Mumbai need to be seen as part of large, city-wide technical systems rather than ad hoc rudimentary connections illegally tacked onto the rest of the infrastructural city. However, the prospects of urban modernism in sanitation in Mumbai are curtailed in three important ways. First, a demand-based rather than supply-based approach to sanitation programmes, such as the controversial Slum Sanitation Programme in Mumbai (McFarlane, 2008; Sharma and Bhide, 2005), through which more organised community organisations tend to benefit. Second, by the relative lack of public health threat from sanitation to the middle classes, who can medicalise and immunise themselves from it (Chaplin, 2011). And third, by the de-linking of urban spaces of poverty and marginalisation from imaginaries of large, public infrastructure projects, and their replacement with a focus on more elite aesthetics of urban development, based on high-end infrastructure through Information Communication Technologies, private transport, and residential, commercial and tourist enclaves (Roy and Ong, 2011; Gidwani and Reddy, 2011). The best hope lies in Mumbai’s vibrant social activism. Yet the discourse of infrastructure rights in Mumbai and in India more generally tends to fixate, understandably, on water. Jockin Arputham, the leader of the influential Mumbai-based movement the National Federation of Slum Dwellers, put it this way: “How many

21

people in Bombay NGOs are interested in getting a toilet done? Can you show me? I am ready to debate with anybody… how many people are looking to get sanitation done for other people. Not even 0.1%. Any NGO. I have been begging a number of NGOs please do some toilets. No. They are not interested…there has not been a debate for a… healthy city”. As Ash Amin (forthcoming) argues, elites need to be implicated in the politics of social provisioning for the very groups whose labour they depend on for cooking, cleaning, running errands, providing street food, and performing the wider infrastructure of everyday life. Redistributive taxes are clearly key, but so is a radical holding to account, and it is here that urban movements in Mumbai often fail to articulate a powerful discourse of a more just ‘hydraulic citizenship’ (Anand, 2011). Indeed, some of the more powerful civil society groups in the city have abandoned a politics that holds elites to account, and instead have concentrated on carving out whatever political space for poverty alleviation they can. And yet there are important exceptions here. The Ghar Bachao Ghar Banao Andolan (a housing rights movement), for instance, articulates a powerful rights-based discourse of access to housing, water, and sanitation and a concomitant acknowledgement of the flouting of developing rights and regulations through the illegal encroachment of elites in the form of new shopping malls and developments (see Ghertner, 2008, on Delhi). Another example is the ‘Right to Pee’ movement, a collection over 30 groups in the city campaigning for more public toilets and, especially, for free use of toilets for women and for provisions for menstruation. The movement has found that women have to pay more to use public toilets, and evidence of widespread corruption by those who run blocks. In 2012, the movement pressured the BMC into constructing 500 public toilets across the city. But ‘illegal’ and post-2000 slums do not get water or sanitation facilities, and this is one of the issues that any sanitation movement needs to tackle head on. A sanitation movement would advocate a political project for the urban metabolic commons that is rooted first and foremost in infrastructural rights, foregrounds a politics of gender, implicates elites and the state in the ongoing sanitation crisis, and that campaigns for a thoroughly modern civic extension of basic amenities to all urbanites regardless of background and legalities. References Alimuddin S., Hasan A, and Sadiq, A. (2004) ‘The Work of the Anjuman Samaji Behbood in Faisalabad, Pakistan’. In Miltin D. and Satterthwaite D., Empowering Squatter Citizen: Local Government, Civil Society and Urban Poverty Reduction. Earthscan: London. Amin, A. (unpublished paper) ‘Telescopic urbanism and the poor’. Anand N (2011): ‘PRESSURE: The PoliTechnics of Water Supply in Mumbai’. Cultural Anthropology. 26 (4): 542-564. Anderson, W. (2006) Colonial Pathologies: American Tropical Medicine, Race, and Hygiene in the Philippines, Duke University Press: Durham NC Bakker, K. (2003) ‘From archipelago to network: Urbanization and water privatization in the South’ The Geographical Journal 169:4, 328 - 341.

22

Bapat M. and Agarwal I. (2003) ‘Our needs, our priorities; women and men from the slums in Mumbai and Pune talk about their needs for water and sanitation’. Environment and Urbanization. 15:2, 71-86.

Bayat, A. (1997) ‘Un-Civil society: The Politics of the Informal People’. Third World Quarterly. 18:53–72. Baviskar, A. (2011) ‘What the eye does not see: the Yamuna in the imagination of Delhi’. Economic and Political Weekly, XLVI: 50, 45-53. Benjamin, S. (2008) ‘Occupancy Urbanism: Radicalizing Politics and Economy beyond Policy and Programs’. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 32.3: 719–29 Black, M. and Fawcett, B. (2008) The Last Taboo: Opening the Door on the Global Sanitation Crisis. Earthscan: London. Burra S., Patel S. and Kerr T. (2003) ‘Community-designed, built and managed toilet blocks in Indian cities’. Environment and Urbanization, 15: 2, 11-32. Castro, J.E. (2007) ‘Poverty and citizenship: Sociological Perspectives on Water Services and Public-Private Participation’. Geoforum 38:5, 756-771. Chakrabarty D. (2002) Habitations of Modernity: Essays in the Wake of the Subaltern Studies. University of Chicago Press: Chicago Chaplin, S. (1999) ‘Cities, sewers and poverty: India’s politics of sanitation’. Environment and Urbanization 11, 145-58 Chatterjee P. (2004) The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World. Permanent Black: Delhi Chatterjee, P. (2008) ‘Democracy and Economic Transformation in India’. Economic and Political Weekly, April 19th, 53-62.

Coelho K (2006): ‘Tapping In: Leaky Sovereignties and Engineered (Dis)Order in an Urban Water System’. In: ‘Sarai Reader 06: Turbulence’. Sarai. Delhi. Coutard, O. (2008) ‘Placing splintering urbanism: Introduction’. Geoforum, 1815-1820 Coutard, O. (1999) (Ed) The governance of large technical systems. London: Routledge Coward, M. (2008) Urbicide: The Politics of Urban Destruction. London: Routledge. Davis M. (2006) Planet of Slums. Verso: New York Dupuy, G. (2008) Urban networks, network urbanism. Amsterdam: Techne Press. Furlong K (2011): ‘Small Technologies, Big Change: Rethinking Infrastructure through STS and Geography’. Progress in Human Geography, 35:4, 460-482.

23

Gidwani, V. and Reddy, R.N. (2011) ‘The afterlives of ‘waste’: notes from India for a minor history of capitalist surplus’. Antipode, 43:4, 1625-1658. Hobson J. (2000) ‘Sustainable sanitation: experiences in Pune with a municipal-NGO-community partnership’. Environment and Urbanization. 12:2, 53-62. Hosagrahar, J. (2006) Indigenous Modernities: Negotiating Architecture and Urbanism. Routledge: London. Hughes, T.P. (1998) Rescuing Prometheus: Four Monumental Projects That Changed the Modern World. New York: Pantheon Books. Gandy, M. (2008) ‘Landscapes of Disaster: Water, Modernity, and Urban Fragmentation in Mumbai’. Environment and Planning A, 40: 108-130. Gandy, M. (2005) Cyborg urbanization: complexity and monstrosity in the contemporary city. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 29.1, 26-49. Ghertner, D. Asher (2008) ‘Analysis of new legal discourse behind Delhi's slum demolitions’. Economic and Political Weekly, 43, 20: 57-66. GLASS (2012) UN-Water Global Analysis and Assessment of Sanitation and Drinking-Water: The Challenge of Extending and Sustaining Services. World Health Organization: Switzerland. Graham, S. (2010) Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism. London: Verso. Graham, S. and Marvin, S. (2001) Splintering Urbanism: Networked Infrastructures, Technological Mobilities and the Urban Condition. London: Routledge. HDR (2009) Mumbai Human Development Report, 2009. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Heynen N, Kaika M, and Swyngedouw E (eds) (2006) In the Nature of Cities: Urban Political Ecology and the Politics of Urban Metabolism. Abingdon: Routledge. Hodson, M. and Marvin, S. (2009) ‘’Urban Ecological Security’: A New Urban Paradigm?’. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 33:1, 193-215. Jewitt, S. (2011) ‘Geographies of shit: spatial and temporal variations in attitudes towards human waste’. Progress in Human Geography, 35:5, 608-626. Kaika, M. (2005) City of Flows: Modernity, Nature and the City. London: Routledge. Kamdar S. (2005) ‘Why is the state not at the top?’ Economic Digest, XXXIV: 13, 28-30. Maharashtra Economic Development Council: Mumbai. Kar, K. (2012) ‘Why not basics for all? Scopes and challenges for Community-Led Total Sanitation’. IDS Bulletin, 43:2, 93-96.

24

Karpouzoglou, T. and Zimmer, A. (2012) ‘Closing the gap between ‘expert’ and ‘lay’ knowledge in the governance of wastewater: lessons and reflections from New Delhi’. IDS Bulletin, 43:2, 59-68

Khunu G (2002): ‘”Massive Cutoffs” Cost Recovery and Electricity Service in Diepkloof, Soweto’. In: McDonald D and Pape J (Eds): ‘Cost Recovery and the Crisis of Service Delivery in South Africa’. Zed Books; London.

Loftus A (2007): ‘Working the Socio-Natural Relations of the Urban Waterscape in South Africa’. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research. 31(1): 41-59 Luke, T. W. (2003) ‘Global cities vs. ‘global cities’’, Studies in Political Economy, 7:1, 11–22. McFarlane, C. and Rutherford, J. (2008) ‘Guest Editorial: Political Infrastructures - Governing and Experiencing the Fabric of the City’. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research (forthcoming). McFarlane, C. (2004) ‘Geographical imaginations and spaces of political engagement: examples from the Indian Alliance’ Antipode 36:5, 890-916. McFarlane, C. (2008) ‘Sanitation in Mumbai's informal settlements: state, 'slum' and infrastructure’. Environment and Planning A, 40:1, 88–107 McFarlane, C. (2008) ‘Governing the contaminated city: sanitation in colonial and postcolonial Bombay’. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research (forthcoming). McFarlane, C. (forthcoming) ‘From sanitation inequality to malevolent urbanism: the normalization of suffering in Mumbai’. Geoforum. Mukherjee, N. (2001) Achieving sustained sanitation for the poor: policy and strategy lessons from participatory assessments in Cambodia, Indonesia and Vietnam. Water and Sanitation Program: East Asia. http://docs.watsan.net/Downloaded_Files/PDF/Mukherjee-2001-Achieving.pdf (last accessed September 2012). Mukhija V. (2003) Squatters as Developers? Slum Redevelopment in Mumbai. Ashgate: Alderhot, UK. MW-YUVA (2001) Slum Sanitation Project: Final Report. Municipal Corporation of Brihan Mumbai: Mumbai. Neuwirth, R. (2006) Shadow Cities: A Billion Squatters, A New Urban World. Routledge: New York. O’Reilly, K., (2010) ‘Combining sanitation and women’s participation in water supply: an example from Rajasthan’. Development in Practice 20 (1), 45–56.

25

Page, B. (2005). Paying for water and the geography of commodities. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 30(3), 293-306 Patel, S. and Deb, K. (2006) (eds) Urban Studies. Oxford University Press: New Delhi. Rajeev R.A. (2005) ‘Policy Alternatives for Urban Renewal in Mumbai’. Economic Digest, XXXIV: 10, 27-28. Maharashtra Economic Development Council: Mumbai. Rao V (2006) ‘Slum as theory’. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 30: 1, 225-232. Rigg, J. (2008) An Everyday Geography of the Global South. Routledge: London. Robinson, J. (2006). Ordinary cities: between modernity and development. Routledge: London. Satterthwaite D., McGranahan G., and Mitlin D. (2005) Community-driven development for water and sanitation in urban areas: its contribution to meeting the Millennium Development Goals. Water Supply and Sanitation Collaborative Council (WSSCC): Geneva. Sharma R.N., and Bhide A (2005) ‘World Bank Funded Slum Sanitation Programme in Mumbai: Participatory Approach and Lessons Learnt’. Economic and Political Weekly, April 23rd, 1784-1789. Shove, E. Watson, M., Hand M., and Ingram, J. (2007) The Design of Everyday Life. Berg: Oxford. Singh, A. K. (2006) Privatization of Water Supply: A Study of Processes of Privatization of Water Suppply in K (East) Ward, Mumbai. Vikas Adhyayan Kendra: Mumbai Solo, T.M. (1999) ‘Small-scale entrepreneurs in the urban water and sanitation market’. Environment and Urbanization, 11, 1, 117-132 Swaminathan M. (2003) ‘Aspects of Poverty and Living Standards’, in Patel S. and Masselos J. (eds) Bombay to Mumbai: the city in transition. Oxford University Press: New Delhi, 81-110. Swyngedouw E. (2004) Social Power and the Urbanization of Water: Flows of Power. Oxford University Press: Oxford. Swyngedouw E. (2006) ‘Circulations and Metabolisms: (Hybrid) Natures and (Cyborg) Cities’. Science as Culture, 15: 2, 105-121. Thrift, N. and French, S. (2002) The automatic production of space. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 27: 309-335. Truelove J (2011): ‘(Re-)Conceptualising Water Inequality in Delhi, India through a Feminist Political Ecology Framework’. Geoforum. 42: 143-152

26

Truelove, Y., Mawdsley, E., (2011) ‘Class and criminality: discourses of water and citizenship in clean, green Delhi’. In: Clark-Deces, I. (Ed.), A Companion to the Anthropology of India. Wiley-Blackwell, Malden, pp. 407–425. UN Habitat (2003) Water and Sanitation in the World’s Cities: Local Action for Global Goals. Earthscan: London. UN Millennium Project (2005) Health, Dignity and Development: What will it Take? The Report of the Millennium Taskforce on Water and Sanitation. Earthscan: London. Wagh V. (2004) ‘Mumbai Chak-a-Chak: MEDC’s Initiative in City Cleanliness’. Economic Digest XXXIII: 9, 41. Water Aid (2007) The State of the World’s Toilets, 2007. Water Aid, available at www.wateraid.org/documents/the_state_of_the_worlds_toilets_2007_1.pdf- (May, 2008). Worldwatch Institute (2007) State of the World: Our Urban Future. Earthscan: London. Young, D. and Keil, R. (2010) ‘Reconnecting the disconnected: the politics of infrastructure in the in-between city’. Cities, 27:2, 87-95 Zerah, M., (2000) Water: Unreliable Supply in Delhi. Manohar, Delhi.