Littering and class/culture/ethnicity

Great Debates
61

Saintly_Loser, your first cite is about the fact that only lowest-caste and Dalit people in India are employed to clean other people’s toilets.

So is your second cite.

Your third cite is about caste prohibitions causing problems with lower-caste workers not being allowed to use their employers’ toilets.

So is your fourth cite.

None of those is a rebuttal to am77494’s claim that the majority of Indians, including non-Dalit and non-low-caste ones, clean their own toilets. I don’t know how true that claim is, but none of your cites disprove it.

62

My claim was only that upper-caste Indians don’t clean toilets. So I don’t think that’s contradicted by am77494’s claim that the majority of Indians clean their own toilets.

63

I think the issue here is that you and am77494 may be using different definitions of “upper-caste”. If it’s just used to mean “non-SC-ST” or “non-Dalit”—i.e., people who are not in the lowest groups with “untouchability” stigma, who make up nearly one-quarter of Indians—then yes, that encompasses the majority of Indians.

If it means specifically the “HHC” or “Hindu High Caste” group, who are also nearly a quarter of the Indian population, then sure, many of those people have probably never cleaned their own toilets, or for that matter swept their own floors or prepared their own food.

64

I did mean that. And I think it’s also true that, for such Indians, there’s a cultural taboo against dealing with waste in any way. Which precludes cleaning toilets.

65

Exactly my point. Thank you Kinstu.

66

Just something you are making up without cites. It’s a tropical country and if people didn’t take care of garbage, they would have perished long back.

Whether high caste or low caste, people cleaned up their own garbage in old times and nowadays too.

67

Something I’m making up? You’re putting words in my mouth. You’re refuting a straw man of your own creation.

There exists, in the Indian caste system, the belief that certain tasks are reserved for those of the lowest castes (or of no caste – “outcastes”). This is factually true. I did not make this up. Nor did I claim that India, as whole, did not “take care of garbage.”

68

As a non-Indian who’s lived and worked in India for a few weeks or months several times in the past couple decades, ISTM from my limited knowledge that aspects of both positions are valid.

I’ve certainly encountered middle-class Indians who think that cleaning their toilets is “servants’ work” and wouldn’t do it themselves if they could help it. But I’ve also read that many middle-class families in the recent COVID lockdown, when their maids weren’t allowed to come to their houses, were doing all the housework themselves, including the scrubbing. So clearly it’s not some kind of insurmountable non-negotiable taboo against the very act of cleaning a toilet that’s operating here.

Just to throw in another data point for comparison, I’ve also spent some time living and working in the Netherlands, where I encountered the Dutch office toilet. IME, a fair number of non-Dutch people, especially Americans, are kind of grossed out by the Dutch expectation that you should clean your office toilet after you use it, if your use left any visible marks.

The typical American expectation of a shared restroom in a business establishment is that you use the toilet as necessary, flush whatever you put into the toilet, and try not to befoul the touchable parts of the fixture. But it’s not your job actually to scrub the thing, even if you left a couple smears in the bowl after flushing. Nor are you required to pick up and dispose of, say, a scrap of clean toilet paper that you accidentally let fall on the floor. It’s the janitor’s job to take care of any cleaning that involves touching anything in the restroom beyond the bare minimum required for your own use of it.

This attitude is widespread even among Americans who routinely clean their own toilets at home. But the Dutch in general have little sympathy with such squeamishness. If you left a mark in a Dutch office toilet detectable with the naked eye, then by golly, you better grab the toilet brush thoughtfully supplied by the management and get rid of it. You are supposed to leave a shared restroom after use not merely in a marginally tolerable state, but actually clean.

From a Dutch viewpoint, American resistance to performing cleaning tasks in shared toilets makes no more sense than some high-caste Indians’ resistance to cleaning their own toilets. Sure, in both cases it can be argued that you can get away with not doing it because it’ll be done by somebody else whose job it is to do it. But from the perspective of people who think it’s a normal thing to do, the resistance to doing it seems kind of dysfunctional.

69

True; but those middens usually reached a point at which they weren’t any longer a hazard or a nuisance to human groups later returning to the area, and were probably not a problem to other species in the area, either.

That’s not an either-or; that’s both.

Yes, the end users are at fault. But if nearly everything they bought didn’t come encased in rubbish in the first place, they wouldn’t have nearly so much rubbish to throw away.

70

So no cites ?

71

Please. Scroll up.

72

Please provide a cite that the caste system does not reserve certain tasks, such as the disposal of human waste, for particular castes.

Please provide a cite that the caste system, if it ever did set aside certain tasks for certain castes (or outcastes), no longer does, and is actually obsolete and dormant in India.

Please provide a cite that upper-caste Indians (Brahmins, for example) have no objection whatsoever to cleaning toilets, and do so on a regular basis.

73

Cites you provided do not address your assertion “

So provide a cite that upper-caste Indians don’t clean their own toilets.

74

So first you will say that a certain race resembles monkeys and are therefore not intelligent. Next it will be up to that race to prove that they are intelligent ? I see how this is going.

Let me remind you Sir, that you made an extraordinary claim, and as they say - the burden of extraordinary proof is on you.

75

For pete’s sake. I expressed my point, which you are taking far too personally, somewhat facetiously. That said, I stand by my point that there is a cultural bar to a certain segment of Indian society cleaning toilets that’s more than the upper-class reliance on servants that exists all over the world, in every society. I don’t think this is a controversial position.

This is getting ridiculous.

Are you serious? I said nothing of the sort. I implied nothing of the sort. You are now literally making stuff up. You’re writing fiction.

To say that India has a caste system, and that tasks involving waste disposal figure into that system, is very much not an extraordinary claim.

76

ISTM that this is misleadingly conflating official caste prohibitions with general “that’s icky and it’s not my job” attitudes. Just because a lot of rich Indians have never cleaned their own toilets doesn’t mean that they’re directly motivated by a religious conviction of a divine prohibition against their cleaning their own toilets.

Similarly, American culture has a long history of class and race prejudice, often associated with hygiene taboos. But that doesn’t mean that the average white American who won’t pick up a piece of trash they drop on a restroom floor, although they expect the nonwhite janitor to get the trash cleaned up, is doing it to be racist.

AFAICT am77494 never made any such claim, and yeah, you can’t really “cancel” his complaint about your lack of cites by demanding that he should provide a cite for a different assertion.

But again, to say that the existence of the caste system is the explanation of modern Indian attitudes toward toilet cleaning is a different claim.

77

I know. That was a somewhat sarcastic response to his/her demand that I produce cites for claims I never made.

I’ll quote myself:

I stand by my point that there is a cultural bar to a certain segment of Indian society cleaning toilets that’s more than the upper-class reliance on servants that exists all over the world, in every society. I don’t think this is a controversial position.

All over the world, people who can afford to do so hire servants for cleaning and cooking tasks (and please don’t demand a cite for that proposition). There’s a bit of an extra cultural kick to that in India, because certain tasks have been traditionally reserved for certain castes or outcastes.

From one of the articles I linked to above:

. . . one morning late in June three young men in jeans forced themselves into Chacko’s office, introducing themselves as members of organisations representing Brahmins and Rajput Kshatriyas, and challenged him: “Do you believe that Brahmins and Kshatriyas should clean toilets? Don’t you know what responsibilities are assigned to us by tradition?”

The next day, more men gathered, and when they could not meet Chacko, they smashed windows and flower pots outside the office.

Again, I say that to say that there is a cultural prejudice against certain tasks involving waste disposal among the highest castes in India is hard a controversial assertion.

78

The new consciousness:

The verb to throw away is meaningless, you cannot throw anything away, because there is no such place as “away”; everywhere is somewhere.

79

It was put there by a man.

…

… an Australian man, presumably.

(this American is sticking with glass bottles)

80

This is a tired old stereotype, crassly untruthful, and a perpetuation of a racist Western view of Indian culture. I am not only from India, I am from the so-called “upper caste”, and I categorically call out the bullshit in your post. We never employed domestic helps for any purpose, always cleaned our homes and toilets, and never littered anywhere. We cooked and cleaned up without the benefit of dishwashers. (We made our own beds, too.)

Seriously? You must think folks on this forum are fools. OTOH, I have typically only noticed white Americans departing the restroom in a hurry after doing their business and NOT washing their hands. (I hope they at least wipe their butts.)

The entire Dalit narrative is a media-manufacture falsehood. The so-called “Dalits” are usually extremely poor and will do whatever it takes for survival, including cleaning toilets and sewers. Economics and the struggle for survival alone explain why marginalized communities will take up jobs others won’t; there is no need to invoke a fictitious caste or class divide.