This final piece of a three-part series examines the Indian psyche and how it effects society and everyday lives. It goes on to analyze how this peculiar psyche shapes social and cultural constructs. Indians are fixated with the idea of purity and pollution. As per this notion, many things from everyday life, daily habits, body parts and even people are deemed dirty and hence polluting.

THE HORROR OF SHOES ON THE TABLE

Perhaps the best example of the fear of pollution can be found in the Indian fear of shoes. Human feet are considered impure and dirty, even if they are cleaned and washed. From childhood, Indians are reminded that they should not touch books with their feet, but it is fine to touch them with soiled hands. Apparently, books form the essence of Saraswati, the goddess of knowledge and learning, and touching them with one’s feet is grave disrespect. Since feet are impure, it follows that shoes must be so as well.

The polluted nature of feet can be traced to that famous “Purush Sukta” hymn from the Rig Veda, which many consider to be the fountainhead of the caste system. As per this hymn, the Brahmin emerged from the head, the Kshatriya from the arms, the Vaishya from the thighs and the lowly Shudra from the feet of the primeval man. Since the lowest strata of Shudra comes from the feet, the feet are naturally inferior and impure. Note that the idea of inferiority and impurity of different body parts is used to provide the ideological justification for the social stratification of the caste system. This logic also worked in reverse manner, as a classic example of circular reasoning and argument of convenience.

Shoes are impure not only because we use them on our feet, but also because they are made from animal hides. Traditionally, the people engaged in leather work have been consigned to the lowest levels of the caste hierarchy and everything related to them and animal hides has become impure and polluting. Even looking at them was considered to defile an upper-caste person.

It is therefore little surprise that Indians often take off their shoes when they enter their home. Shoes are either placed outside homes or in a specified place in the house, often by the main door. One can make the argument that this is a hygienic practice. After all, the Japanese, the Thais and even many Brits follow this practice. However, to understand the Indian horror with impurity of shoes, we need to ask a more nuanced question: Would Indians be fine with placing a thoroughly washed and cleaned shoe on the dining table or the study table?

The answer is a plain and simple no. Indians find putting shoes, even when thoroughly washed, on the table deeply revulsive. To understand the Indian revulsion for shoes, please note that placing them by or bringing them near a deity is still considered blasphemous. This deeply-held belief in the inherent polluting characteristic of shoes makes Indians react with horror when even washed shoes are placed in what rituals hold to be clean and pure places.

PURITY IN FOOD, COOKING AND THE KITCHEN

The unscientific and illogical notion of purity and pollution also extends to Indian kitchens in no small way. In fact, food, food habits, cooking utensils and fire are crucial elements in Indian and Hindu social, cultural and religious practices. They affect the daily lives of Indians in so many subtle ways that it is often difficult to even discern the hidden sources of many practices, habits and prejudices that have transmitted through ages.

In most Indian households, people use separate utensils for cooking vegetarian and non-vegetarian food. They also use separate plates for eating these two types of food. Often, utensils and plates for non-vegetarian food are washed in two separate cleaning areas. Moreover, even in poorer and rural homes, it is common to have two distinct cooking stoves/furnace, if not kitchens, for vegetarian and non-vegetarian food. Such is its impurity that it can even contaminate fire, the ultimate purifying agent. Such confounded thinking and practices are widespread across caste groups in India and are followed with same enthusiasm even by lower caste groups, who are otherwise victims of various discriminations arising from ritual purity and pollution.

The question as to who can cook food in the kitchen is also of cardinal importance, especially when the wife in not doing the cooking. Increasing urbanization and rising levels of education have changed the nature of the Indian middle class. When wives work, they often hire help to do the cooking. However, caste still continues to be an important consideration during the hiring process. The person doing the cooking must be of the highest possible caste.

Ironically, the civilization that gave birth to the Kamasutra has denigrated lovemaking into a sordid activity. It is a necessary evil for begetting children, and it pollutes, not purifies.

When this author was studying at the fabled Banaras Hindu University, the cooks in the hostel mess were Brahmins. They were often called “Maharaj,” a title usually given to royalty that literally means great king. While Brahmins cooked, members of lower castes cleaned plates and utensils. They were certainly not treated half as well as their Brahmin counterparts. Slowly, such practices are changing, but that change is under compulsion, not a willing acceptance of social reform or realization of falsity and hollowness of social practices.

Thus, urban middle-class households would prefer to hire someone from a relatively higher caste to do the cooking, while they do not mind employing persons of the lowest castes to do jhadoo-pochha-burtan, the act of sweeping, mopping and washing up dishes. Ascertaining castes in urban areas is a tad difficult these days. Household maids are typically immigrants from rural and underdeveloped areas. Often, they come from far away regions. There is no way to know if they are misrepresenting their caste or even their religion. But one thing that may be easily observed is you would hardly find the same person employed for cleaning the toilet as well as cooking meals in the same urban middle-class household. At the very least, Indian middle households employ two different persons for cooking and cleaning, minimizing the possibilities of pollution.

For ages, the lowest castes suffered from the horrendous practice of untouchability. Even today, though this practice is banned by law, discrimination persists in many subtle forms. The notion of purity and impurity of birth is the fundamental bedrock for organizing Indian society into a caste-bound hierarchy. Therefore, caste as a reality will perhaps remain as long as the notion of purity and pollution holds sway in the Indian psyche.

IMPURITY OF SEX AND MENSTRUATION

The vast majority of middle-class Indians consider sexual organs, sexual activity and anything related to sex as shameful, dirty, polluting, impure and sinful. Therefore, sex education for children is conspicuous by its absence. In fact, any reference to sex is taboo, even in educated, urban and well-to-do families. It is an activity to be ashamed of, not to be enjoyed wantonly.

Ironically, the civilization that gave birth to the Kamasutra has denigrated lovemaking into a sordid activity. It is a necessary evil for begetting children, and it pollutes, not purifies. Therefore, sex is something to be engaged in the dark and in a hurry. It is better that partners do not see each other to mitigate their shame. The veneer of modernity and development has largely been successful in hiding all such obscurantist notions and practices of Indian psyche and society, but they are very much there, revealing themselves if we scratch the surface.

In their book, , Sudhir and Katharina Kakar note that a large number of Indian women do not know or pretend not to know the word for vagina in their mother tongue. In fact, many of them incongruously called a vagina “the place from where you pee.” Even when they do know the word in their mother tongue, Indian women prefer to use “vagina” instead of the vernacular word. The simple explanation for this preference is that the English word is not associated with same shame as the vernacular one.

In practice, this deep shame about sex, sexuality and sexual organs does enormous harm to women. Historically, menstruation was considered deeply polluting. Even today, it is associated with embarrassment, shame and impurity. Most adult Indians have memories from their adolescent days of their parents turning uncomfortable when advertisements for sanitary napkins appeared on television. Their parents often changed channels to get rid of this difficult situation. It is not uncommon to find adults doing exactly the same as their parents did a generation ago. Menstruation is a phenomenon that is willfully ignored even today.

This problematic attitude toward menstruation has led to a massive public hygiene and health crisis in India. A stupendously large number of women neither understand the importance of menstrual hygiene, nor the diseases or ailments caused by lack of proper hygiene. Indeed, they are ashamed to discuss the topic even with their most intimate female friends. Even today, highly educated and supposedly liberal families treat menstruation with secrecy, and any discussion of the issue is considered scandalous.

ALL ROADS LEAD TO THE CASTE SYSTEM

As alluded to earlier in this article, this peculiarly Indian notion of purity and pollution is inextricably intertwined with the exploitative caste system. This system deems castes to be pure or impure on the basis of birth. Castes are based on lineage and have strict rules of endogamy. This hereditary system transfers pollution from one generation to the next and locks people into low status, exploitative social prisons with no opportunities and little chances of escape. It allows the upper castes to control power, authority and resources, which they transfer seamlessly to their supposedly pure children.

The bedrock of the caste system was and remains the caste-endogamous marriages. That is the reason why marriage, and marrying in one’s own caste, is so paramount in Indian society even today. Indians from the middle class often claim that caste is an institution of the past, but they fail to recognize that they are almost invariably upper caste and often have a problem if their children express a desire to marry outside caste. As per a by the National Council of Applied Economic Research, only 5% of Indians marry inter-caste. In most cases, these are young people who are in love and choose to marry despite their parents’ disapproval. Inter-caste marriages that are arranged by families and gain social approval are still exceedingly rare.

Any dream of a day when Indian society will consider inter-caste marriages socially desirable and promote them actively is utopian. In the foreseeable future, matrimonial columns in newspapers and online marriage sites will continue to be classified as per caste. It remains the bedrock of Indian society and is perpetuated by the practice of endogamous marriage. Hence, caste has not and cannot vanish easily from India, despite the patently false and clearly hypocritical claims of many urban middle-class Indians about caste being a thing of the past.

The only remedy to the entrenched caste system is perhaps large numbers of inter-caste marriages. Should four generations of inter-caste marriages occur, it would be exceedingly difficult to identify a person by any particular caste. Mathematically, the person would be a mixture of 16 castes, carrying 6.25% blood of each particular caste. It would fundamentally weaken both the notion of purity and impurity as well as the caste-bound social hierarchy in India.

However, as of 2019, most Indians have pure bloodlines. Their identities are still forged by their caste despite their protestations of modernity. And these fine people are unable to explain why no Brahmin, Bania or Rajput (the supposedly pure upper castes) has ever been found to be employed as sewer and toilet cleaners, and why no Bhangi, Musahar or Chamar (the purportedly polluted lower castes) has ever been found doing god’s work as a priest in a temple.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post Purity and Pollution: From Shoes and Sex to Food and Caste appeared first on 51�Թ�.

Indians have some of the most elaborate cleaning rituals in the world. It has roots in a peculiarly Indian sense of hygiene. At the same time, public hygiene remains a challenge, which in turns affects public health. This curious contradiction is unique to India. It deserves deep examination and rigorous analysis.

POST-TOILET PROCESSES

The previous article in this three-part series examined how the Indian psyche obsesses with purity and pollution. Indians not only obsess with the right way to clean their bottoms, but also what to do after defecation.

Since the process of cleaning one’s bottom is deemed polluting, a number of questions arise. What does one do immediately afterwards? Which hand should one use for wearing pants, pajamas or shorts? Should one wash both hands, especially, the polluted left hand before touching clothes?

For more affluent Indians who have used bathrooms and toilets with handwashing facilities, the last question might not be pertinent. However, this question certainly applies to low-income households as well as semi-urban and poorer areas. In such settings, it is common to have a washbasin or hand-pump outside the toilet. So, people do not have the option to pull up their pants or shorts after washing their hands.

However, what happens when the handwashing options exist? What do Indians generally do? What should they do? We do not really have empirical data on toilet practices and the variations across regions, class or caste, but two examples gives us deep insights.

This author has seen many different types of toilets across India over the years. In one rather prosperous village in the state of Bihar, this author came across a type of toilet that is common in rural areas. It was in one corner of a closed courtyard. The house did not have piped water supply from a municipal authority. It had a hand-pump at the back of the house. The toilet measured 3×3 feet with its ceiling at 6 feet. Indian toilets can often have low ceilings because people squat instead of sit while defecating. Interestingly, the bathroom for performing ablutions was in the other corner.

This house might not have piped water coming to the property, but it had a small water tank on the roof, an electric motor and a water pump. This meant that both the toilet and the bathroom had piped water coming in from the water tank. The tiny toilet had a soap for people to wash their hands. This meant that people could wear their lower garments with clean hands.

In contrast, another rural household in the same state of Bihar did not have a soap in a similarly small toilet. People washed their hands after coming out of the toilet. This meant they pulled up their lower garments with polluted hands.

A simple question arises: Why did two tiny toilets with barely enough headroom to stand have two different practices? Could the answer be caste? One toilet was from a household, while the other was from a household. A sample size of two is not enough to make a generalization. However, the very basis of caste lies in the purity and impurity of birth. Therefore, it is quite possible that caste might have a major bearing on differential toilet practices and deserves deeper examination.

CLEANLINESS BEYOND BOTTOM CLEANING

Western and Indian practices differ not only when it comes to bottom cleaning, but also to cleaning up after vomiting. In the West, most people vomit in the commode. In India, no self-respecting member of the middle class would do so. The commode is where people defecate or urinate. It is impure. Therefore, Indians vomit in the wash basin.

Westerners seem to believe that dirty or unhygienic materials can come out not only from anal, urinary or genital orifices, but also oral and nasal ones. They are all treated similarly. Therefore, they can all be discharged in the same place — i.e., the commode. Indians view anything coming out of anal, urinary or genital orifices as impure and polluting. In contrast, anything coming out of the oral or nasal orifices is not quite impure or polluting. However, taking one’s face close to the commode might have a polluting effect and has to be scrupulously avoided.

Even touching the commode can be polluting. For centuries, those who cleaned toilets and handled excreta were deemed untouchables. In recent years, the veneer of economic development and urbanization may hide the hold of caste in India, but it reveals itself in the idea of the impurity of defecation, urination, menstruation, latrines and commodes.

The best illustration of how Indians treat body parts differently can be seen in their bathing process. When bathing, either using a shower or by pouring water using a mug from a bucket, many Indians clean their anal and genital regions first with soap and water. Often armpits will also get the same treatment. And after Indians have cleaned these polluted body parts, they will wash the soap and then use it to clean rest of their unpolluted body.

HOW DO WE EXPLAIN DEFECATION IN THE OPEN?

The post-defecation dilemmas of tiny toilets do not apply when people defecated in the open. In 2014, the estimated this number to be as high as 48%. Those who are poor and generally belong neither to the middle class or the forward castes do not have the luxury to think about the transmission of impurity from polluted hands to their lower garments. They simply do not have the option of washing their hands with soap before putting on their clothes again.

From a purely hygienic view, we can certainly argue that washing hands with soap before putting on lower garments is a good idea. Yet the focus on this benefit is marginal given the scale of dirty toilets, poor sanitation and open defecation in India. Sadly, the Indian mind focuses on cleaning the private space and neglecting public space.

One of the first things foreigners notice when they come to India is the mountain of trash that blights roadsides, villages, small towns and cities. The same people who might religiously clean their bottoms and wash their hands with soap before wearing lower garments often have no compunction throwing used water bottles by the roadside or dumping their trash right outside their home. Pollution is forced out of the private spaces of homes into the public spaces of streets, parks, ponds and rivers on a daily basis.

SWACHH BHARAT: THE CHALLENGE OF CLEANING INDIA

It turns out that widely-held beliefs of purity and pollution have important social ramifications. Hygiene and health are public goods with huge externalities. Therefore, the government is forced to make policy interventions. After all, a cleaner country leads to better health and less disease apart from improved optics.

However, policymakers rarely tend to take deep-seated Indian beliefs into account. This makes many policies and programs ineffective. This is a challenge that Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Swachh Bharat program to clean the nation is currently encountering.

One of the policy goals of the government is to make open defecation an act of the past. Yet the challenge it faces is that Indians consider defecation and toilets impure. For centuries, people walked a fair bit to relieve themselves far away from home. So, many Indians would not like the toilet to be situated within their homes.

Agra, India on 2/5/2011 © Rolf_52 / Shutterstock

It has been easier to convince Indians to defecate in toilets instead of in the open, but harder to persuade them to build toilets in their homes. Therefore, we can see small toilets constructed outside homes as stand-alone structures in rural areas. Indians are often averse to using these toilets that are often pit-toilets because the smell, sight, touch and lack of water supply to these dingy 3×3-feet structures.

For women, there is the added element of shame. They do not want to be seen going into toilets. They are used to going for open defecation before sunrise or after sunset in the dark to preserve their modesty.

Diane Coffey and Dean Spears have examined this phenomenon in their insightful , Where India Goes: Abandoned Toilets, Stunted Development and the Costs of Caste. They argue that the main hurdle to the elimination of open defecation in India is the notion of ritual purity. In rural India, 89% openly defecate and government-built latrines are often not used. In the words of , rural “Indians, irrespective of income, class, and caste, don’t want to build and use latrines because they don’t want to empty the pit/tank once it is filled with human waste and they don’t want to live in proximity to human waste.”

The reality is that notions of purity and impurity are not limited to rural Indians. Urban Indians have them too. So, how is it that they have adopted toilets in their homes? Is it because they have flush-toilets instead of pit-toilets? Is it because flush toilets take their feces and urine far away from home? Is it because by taking these polluting materials away, they leave urban homes pure?

From a public policy perspective, the fact that millions of Indians are not used to washing their hands with soap after defecating in the open is a public health hazard. In older times, soaps were not available easily. People used clay or soil to clean their hands. Today, that is no longer the case. India does not lack soap. The goal of getting Indians to wash their hands after defecation has to be a policy goal regardless of whether they do so before or after putting on their lower garments.

The current singular policy focus to construct toilets in rural India might be unwise. Perhaps it is more important to change people’s behavior. And that is only possible when deeply-held social and cultural beliefs of purity and pollution are challenged. It involves changes to the way we think as a people and to our stratified social structure where class and caste act as deep divides. Changing the way Indians think, behave and act is the big challenge not only for the government, but also everyone interested in improving the nation’s health.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post Cleaning India with the Indian Notion of Hygiene appeared first on 51�Թ�.

Understanding how Indians clean their bottoms demands a deeper examination of Indian culture. It requires an analysis of the notion of purity and pollution in the Indian mind. Such an analysis reveals how the culture views cleanliness, how it differs from the West and how it governs daily rituals of hundreds of millions of people.

PURITY AND POLLUTION IN THE INDIAN PSYCHE

The notion, the idea and the conception of purity and pollution forms one of the bedrocks of Indian thinking and psyche. Conceptualized and formulated thousands of years ago, it has been cemented over the centuries. Today, it is almost impossible for most Indians to think, formulate and analyze their worldview without the framework of purity and pollution. It turns out that this notion has nothing to do with scientific ideas of cleanliness, hygiene and health. Even so, it is not uncommon to find even highly-educated Indians justifying their cultural ideas of purity and pollution through pseudo-scientific principles.

The caste system is the most potent example of the application of this idea of purity and pollution. A convoluted hierarchy based on work, livelihood and existence has been present in Indian society for centuries. It has been cemented through caste-endogamy, blood lineage and caste-based occupational specialization. This has made caste an exploitative social structure and a brilliantly-designed stratified hierarchy that has survived centuries of changes.

Notions of purity and pollution have pervaded and seeped the daily activities, actions and interactions of Indians — of all classes and castes, of every region (and even religion) and of every economic strata. In many cases, people who are generally against the concept of caste and other exploitative structures, processes and institutions of Indian society are themselves not aware of their own blind spots. As a result, they unknowingly follow, promote and peddle primitive notions of purity and pollution in daily life.

THE ELABORATE PROCESSES FOR CLEANING BOTTOMS

The cultural obsession of Indians with “notional” purity and pollution can be best illustrated through how they perceive, act and perform the elaborate ritual of going to the toilet for defecation, washing and bathing.

Unlike Westerners, Indians use their hands and water to clean their bottoms. First, they touch the excreta with their fingers and then they clean those fingers subsequently. At one level, this highlights the particular emphasis that the Indian psyche gives to the removal of impure substances from the body. The anal orifice is rinsed thoroughly with water, which not only cleans but also purifies things.

At another level, it raises a key question: Why use fingers to clean the bottom and touch the excreta? Are there better methods? For Europeans or Americans, the use of fingers to directly touch and clean their bottom is a strict no-no. In the Western psyche, the notion of cleanliness is different. Dirty or unhygienic things should not be touched directly by hand or come in contact with the body. Therefore, Westerners use toilet paper for cleaning filth. For Westerners, the Indian insistence on cleaning their bottoms using their fingers is outrageous — how can the consciousness of cleanliness allow Indians to touch the excreta with their bare fingers?

For Indians, the use of toilet paper to clean the bottom is insufficient. It does not and cannot clean properly. Cleaning is not complete in the absence of water. Culturally, the Indian psyche does not make a clear distinction between cleaning, which is hygienic and clinical in its nature, and purifying, which is ritual and religious in its implications. So, Indians must clean their bottoms after defecation using water. To ensure the cleaning process is thorough, they must use their fingers too.

However, this process makes fingers dirty and impure. Therefore, they have to be cleaned and purified too. That is why Indians wash their hands with soap after cleaning their bottoms. Importantly, Indians use their left hand to clean themselves. They do so because the notion of pollution attaches itself to the hand that touches the feces. The fingers that have touched feces are not entirely purified even after they are washed using soap. The left hand is the impure or inauspicious one, while the right hand is the pure or auspicious one, undefiled by contact with feces.

It is this fixation with purity that has led to the innovation of using a to clean bottoms, similar to the shattaf hose in the Middle East. This might make using the left hand to clean the anal orifice redundant. However, it is quite likely that a number of people are not satisfied with the water jet alone and still use their fingers to ensure they are appropriately clean.

Indians could avoid all contact with feces by using toilet paper to wipe their bottoms clean. That is what Westerners do. However, as explained above, this neither cleans sufficiently nor purifies appropriately for the Indian mind. The sense of purity and pollution is buried deep into the Indian subconscious, and underpins even the seemingly simple task of cleaning one’s bottom.

THE BAFFLING CASE OF THE DIRTY CLEANING AGENT

It is not only hands and fingers that are unclean but also soaps. In almost all Indian households, there are separate soaps for bathing and washing hands after cleaning bottoms. Why do we see this curious phenomenon in this ancient land?

After all, a soap is a soap. It is a cleaning agent. The same soap can suffice both for bathing and for washing hands after cleaning bottoms. For the Indian psyche, the soap used to clean the unclean fingers has become a touch unclean itself. Its role in the process of purifying the impure fingers has polluted it somewhat. Therefore, it cannot be used to clean the body when taking a shower. Lest we forget, taking a shower or pouring water over one’s body by a village well is not just cleaning the body. It purifies the soul.

There are many contradictions in Indian purification rituals. The impure left hand touches the pure right hand when washing up after defecation. Yet the touch of the left hand does not make the right impure. The impure soap cleans the impure left hand as well as the pure right hand repeatedly. Yet the impure soap cannot purify the rest of the body that needs something purer. These incongruities tell us that Indian toilet habits are based more on mythical, cultural and religious principles and less on scientific or hygienic notions of germs and cleanliness.

Finally, a simple question arises. Why do Indians wash their hands with soap but not their bottoms? Surely, that is the cleanest option not only for Indians, but also for Westerners.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The World Should Learn From Poverty Alleviation in India

Overlapping Legacies: Vedic India and Ancient Greece in Conversation

Exploring the Confessions of a Modern Indian

The post How Do Indians Clean Their Bottoms? appeared first on 51�Թ�.