Bengaluru, a city whose high technology firms serve as signposts of a ‘modern’, ‘caste-less’ India, is perpetually plagued by garbage pileups, clogged sewers, and leaching landfills. Vernacularly referred to as ‘black spots’, such sites of public litter contain objects city inhabitants once desired in their uncertain attempts to refine modern, urban life. But black spots are also routine locations for an ostensibly pre-modern practice—caste-based degradation. The city’s roughly 20,000 waste workers, the majority of whom are Dalit, regularly dig their hands into garbage pileups, immerse themselves in raw sewage, and sift through recyclables to restore everyday order to a metropolis of 15 million. Compelling an individual to subsist by scavenging human waste is criminalized as a form of caste humiliation under Indian law. Yet, Bengaluru’s waste workers find in black spots a collective compulsion to subsist by reworking the littered desires of caste society. 

Persisting under a legal abolition of caste untouchability, black spots are ecological ‘reflections’ of an ongoing caste apartheid in a modern Indian city, forged not through overt social sanction, but the cultivation of disposable desires. At the same time, black spots routinely disrupt everyday status quos, as strewn garbage blocks traffic, raises a neighborhood stink, and reverses sewage flow into private dwellings. In Bengaluru, such mundane interruptions open up the possibility for waste workers, peri-urban peasants, and urban activists to reflect on how public desires are conditioned by historical caste relations that some find disposable and others confront as non-degradable. Moreover, black spots reveal how the contradiction between disposability and non-degradability is displaced in contemporary capitalism, as the burden of sorting through ancestral relations becomes located in particular bodies and landscapes. 

Shreyas Sreenath
In my teaching and research, I reflect on how the environments we inhabit accumulate untimely histories of collective life in forgotten artifacts. I am interested in how such histories offer a counterpoint to our alienated present, which is marked by a dissonance between our disposable habits and their non-degradable afterlives. My fieldwork concerns people who tend to untimely things in various locales: littered streets, clogged sewers, peri-urban landfills, recycling sheds, abandoned forests, derelict libraries, old markets, medieval shrines, and agrarian landscapes. I am interested in how such neglected archives can illuminate a future life in common, as the present contradiction between disposability and non-degradability threatens to manifest as an ecological apartheid. I currently locate my fieldwork in the South Indian state of Karnataka, although it may extend elsewhere in the future.