Untouchable Friends
Chapter 4 Toilets cleaned by sweepers
Tarat, the traditional Chelana latrine
As most jajman households did not have any latrines, the task of cleaning latrines took less time for the Bhangi women than sweeping the buvaro.
Tarat is a dry toilet where people shit on the floor. There is not pit. The sweepers remove the shit from the floor of the tarat, a small walled enclosure with no roof. In the most remote part of the house yard, the bharo. Such bharo house compounds (in Hindi ahat) are usually surrounded by a stone wall, and the tarat toilet is usually attached to that wall. Most of the tarats were in the Rajput and Charan mohallas.
The tarat latrine out in the bharo house yard was only meant for women or sick persons. By tradition it was used especially in those feudal castes, where women were in parda, the Rajput and Charan castes. Menfolk of all castes went out to the fields instead.
The urination place at Chelana homes
In most houses of Chelana there is a small place in a remote corner of the house itself used for urination, peshab, straight on the ground, in a squatting position. It is sometimes a small enclosure, but could also be an open drain. Such a place is used at night for peshab by all in the household and at daytime by the women only. Small children also poo-poo there. The shit is removed by the mother of the child. The Bhangis have nothing to do with the peshab place, in Marvaro called nardo. The peshab is absorbed in sand, but still it often smells. The penetrating smell can sometimes be felt in other parts of the house as well.
The early morning walk to the fields
Menfolk from all castes normally went out in the fields with a lotha or a small tin pot full of water. Women of castes without the parda custom did the same. They went out in the early morning at dawn, when darkness still provided some privacy for latrine. From childhood the villagers learnt to clean themselves after latrine by splashing water vigorously around the anus without touching that part. It was the common practice all over western Rajasthan. They did the washing with their left hand only.
As the anus was not touched the hand and the lotha did not get dirty, Tan Dan told. According to him, any lotha could be used for the latrine trip. But it was thoroughly washed afterwards.
To go to the fields for latrine is called jangal jano, "to go to the jungle". To the open wasteland around the village and to nearby crop fields. Nowadays there are cultivated fields almost everywhere, so wasteland patches suitable for having a shit has become scarce. There are a few bushy places here and there, but very little is left of the earlier vast extensions of desert shrub jungle with plenty of wildlife.
Although the faeces crumble after some time due to strong sunshine, it is quite unpleasant to have such unwanted leavings here and there in open areas. You have to mind your steps. A growing problem with growing village population. Some upland grounds with beautiful view and fresh air suitable for a walk have become veritable out door toilets with faeces all around.
Baniyas did not have tarat latrines
Although Baniyas was a high caste with many well-off merchant families, most of them used to do latrine in the outskirt of the village, just like other villagers. Also the Baniya women. It was their habit. Baniya women and some others used to sit in the middle of a certain village lane in the early morning, when it was still dark. It was difficult to pass there also in daytime due to the faeces and the smell. It has been like that for decades in that lane. The villagers accepted the disgusting place as something inevitable. Unfortunately, it was a busy lane used for going to and fro to the village fields. Public toilets in the village might have been useful to these Baniya ladies, but has never been seriously considered.
Baniya and Sonar families were by tradition merchants and goldsmiths, respectively. They often kept wealth which they wanted to protect and hide. Therefore, they lived in havelis, big strong stone houses with iron rods in the windows. The angan courtyard was an integrated part of the well protected house. On the top of the angan there were iron rods to keep out burglars.
Their houses were well built, but they had no need of a big bharo compound around it, so they did not have any tarat latrine either. Nor did they have any latrines inside their houses with the exception of the two richest Chelana Baniya families, who built bungalows of an urban type in the 1970s. These exceptional houses had urban type of toilets, too.
The task of removing shit
In about two hundred houses of mostly Rajputs and Charan families there were tarat toilets, which the Bhangi women used to clean in the following way:
The sweeper had a flat iron pan, the kunda, on which she spread a thick layer of ash and sand mixed. They put the excreta on it with the help of a broken clay piece called thikri. They did not bring it along. Instead they keep a thikri for each house at the latrine itself or nearby at some hidden place, out of sight of the householders and their children, so the children may not play with it. The Bhangi woman brings the thikri herself.
As the shit lies on a layer of sand and ash, the iron pan does not get dirty, when the latrine is cleaned. After every two or three tarats and houses, the sweeper dumps the shit at some place outside the mohalla of the jajman client. At some bushy dirty corner nearby, but out of sight.
Heaps and pits of human faeces
The dumping places for shit were in many cases close enough to the houses to be a health hazard. Diseases could spread through rats and flies moving around all over the area, and perhaps carrying pathogens. Most villagers did not look at it that way, though, as they believed in religious and supernatural reasons for diseases and health problems, but had never heard about bacteria and were sceptical to that kind of explanations.
Swarms of flies were a part of their daily life, and people had learnt to be patient with them. They did not bother much, except when somebody tried to kill them, thus creating himsa (violence), which is considered pap (sin). Killing rats was as much a sin as killing a fly, as the popular god Ganesh had a rat as his vehicle, and he used to be depicted together with a rat.
The heap at the old poultry house
In the 1990s Tan Dan lived in a house in the new Detha mohalla at the very edge of the settlement area of the village. He had lived there since 1973. That year he returned from Jodhpur, where he had rented a farm for a few years. In 1973 he started to live in a building, which earlier had been a godown of the Detha Brothers Farm. In the 1960s Tan Dan had started two animal husbandry ventures there, poultry and piggery, as a part of the Detha farm. It stopped after some years, partly due to the resistence from his relatives.
When Tan Dan returned from Jodhpur in 1973, he converted the room where he had kept his poultry birds into a kitchen. Outside the building, close to the old poultry room, the Bhangis used to empty their kundi iron pans full of shit from tarat latrines of Detha houses in the vicinity. It was still a fairly wild shrub jungle area outside the Detha well. Hem Dan's house was about 70 to 80 metres away from the heap of human faeces, which had piled up close to Tan Dan's former poultry house during the years he lived outside Jodhpur. Hem Dan never bothered about that possible danger to his health, though, as he did not know about bacteria. He and his wife were pious Hindus who used to sing religious songs every fullmoon night from evening to sunrise. They believed more in the power of God and demons than in bacteria. Still, when Tan Dan became their neighbour, the Bhangis had to find another place for piling up the shit they removed from their jajman houses, and that was an advantage to Hem Dan and his family, although they did not know about it.
Shit removal in towns
Removing shit from private latrines in towns and kasbas is a much heavier work than in villages, at least in western Rajasthan. In towns the Bhangis have to remove heavy loads of human excreta from the iron pans on their heads to hand-trolleys, into which they dumb the shit. Then the trolleys are pulled away to dumping places somewhere. With a lot of toil.
Tan Dan saw Bhangis moving around with their trolleys full of nightsoil in the busy streets of the Jalagarh kasba in 19
95. They went from house to house filling and emptying their kundi iron pans, which the sweeper women kept on their heads. The same way and technique that had been used for generations.
Commercial compost-making of the Chelana Bhangis
As for Chelana village, the shit removed from the jajman houses was put in out-of-sight places close to the mohallas of their jajmans. After some time these heaps decomposed, and the shit had crumbled into dry humus matter in the strong sunshine and heat.
Around 1980 Bhangi families at Chelana sold compost as fertile soil to some farmers. The sandy desert soil is deficient in organic matter, which hampers crop production, especially after the introduction of intensive agricultural techniques using chemicals and tractors. Compost out of decomposed Bhangi sweepings can be useful on irrigated patches of high value crops. In 1973 Tan Dan asked his friend Madhan Bhangi, called Madhobhai by all villagers, to make compost heaps at the Bhangi mohalla and sell the stuff as manure, khad, when it had become mature soil. Tan Dan wanted the compost for his vegetable land, especially for the cauliflowers.
For this compost work Madan used to clean extra places in the village where and when there were garbage of a nutritious kind. For example, under shady trees where animals made droppings and at the village bazaar.
Madhobhai's heap of decomposed garbage became excellent organice manure, khad, suitable for vegetables, Tan Dan told. He paid for it, and when the other families got to know that Madhobhai could earn money on the wastage, they also got interested in making compost for sale to farmers. Madan died in late 1977, but his family continued the business, as it provided the family a good supplementary income.
Making khad for sale out of the garbage from sweepings became a regular practice among all the Bhangi households, as the need of adding organic matter to the loamy desert soil increased in the 1970s, due to the expansion of mechanized irrigation cultivation from deep wells. More tractors meant less livestock. Tractors can do many things, but they can not provide dung as the oxen could.
Several farmers realized the advantage of buying organic manure, to improve the fertility of the soil. It was useful, especially for the irrigated crops in the winter season.
The need of organic manure was biggest on patches with horticultural crops. The Bhangi households sold the compost heaps in November each year, the beginning of the Rabi season. At that time time the heaps had kept accumulating since previous year. Then they started to collect garbage for a new heap. Some of the Bhangi households sold many bullock carts in a year. Around 1980 some Bhangi families earned several hundred Rupees in a year in the compost business.
Mangla Ram, the tailor who did not observe untouchability rules
Madan Ram, or Madhobhai, was a gentle person and he was a good friend of Tan Dan. Madanji was the poet among the Bhangis. Tan Dan liked his poems, which were all verbal, as Madanji like all other Bhangis of Chelana was completely illiterate.
Madanji died in autumn 1977 out of paralysis. Then he had reached old age and was one of the family heads of the Bhangi clan at Chelana.
Once he told Tan Dan about Mangla Ram, a tailor who had lived at Chelana in the 1940s, when Madanji was still a young man. Mangla Ram, the tailor, had an unusual attitude to be a villager living in such an isolated place as Chelana, because he believed in social equality between all persons and did not bother about caste and ritual prejudices. He did not like to see the humiliating work of Bhangi sweepers. He preferred to clean his house himself. Therefore, he did not have any jajman relationship with the Bhangis.
Madan Ram and the other Bhangis resented that Mangla Ram did not use their services, because they lost a client and thus a stale roti per day, the usual pay to the sweepers. They thought it was mean of Mangla Ram, and considered him a miser. They did not know his real reason for cleaning the house himself.
In those days Madanji's father Labu Ram Bhangi worked at the Thikana, where he took care of the horses in the stable. Madan was a young man who helped his father, sometimes. One day he saw a dead kitten in the stable. It was the duty of the Bhangis to remove small animals who had died within the village. When Madan's father told him to take the cat away, he thought he would teach a lesson to Mangla Ram Chinpa, the tailor. He lived at a house close to the open space outside the Thikana gate. He threw the dead kitten in the drain in front of Mangla's house. Then Mangla would have to call a Bhangi to get it removed, Madanji thought. Mangla would realize the importance of the Bhangi sweepers. Next morning he found that Mangla had picked up the cat and thrown it away himself without any hesitation. Madan Ram Bhangi could hardly believe it: "Why did you do such an unclean work", he asked. "Don't you know it has to be done by untouchables like me?"
Mangla Ram replied: "If you can throw the cadaver away, why cannot I do it myself." He did not have any feelings of pollution, he told. As for being a jajman client to a Bhangi family, he explained to Madanji, it was not because he was a miser, that he did want any Bhangi to work for him, but because he did not want anybody to work for him in such a humiliating way. He did not like a degrading jajmani relationship with somebody removing shit and dirt.
It was not his intention to create difficulties to any Bhangi in earning a livelihood, Mangla Ram told. "As I am a tailor I can stitch you a shirt, whenever you like", he promised Madanji.
"And so he did. Many times", Madanji told Tan Dan. "Free of cost."
He always respected Mangla Ram very highly after that day.