Broken Lives: Politics and Affect in the Semiotics of Untouchability

In August 2019, on the occasion of Gandhi’s 150th birth anniversary, the end of “Clean India” campaign promoted by president Modi was celebrated. Over the last five years, millions of toilets have been built and sewerage networks have been expanded across the country not only to develop sanitary awareness among Indians, but also to put an end to social inequalities linked to the practice of manual scavenging by Dalits. However, are changes in the infrastructural and institutional landscape viable solutions to dismantle the structure of untouchability? Can the precarity of the untouchables’ lives, both in terms of individual safety and caste discrimination, be challenged once and for all? In my paper, I will discuss the effects of the installation of advanced sanitation technology both on the untouchables’ daily lives and the national imaginary of untouchability. Starting from a reading of Mulk Raj Anand’s novel, Untouchable (1935), through the perspective of Affect Theory, I will compare the past and present conditions of Indian sanitation workers. I will think of the new infrastructure and technology of waste as semiotic structures which are unable to act on an affective level and, consequently, inapt to cure the “wound of the soul” (Anand 1981) of “broken subjects,” the Dalits. Finally, I will argue that the irreducible otherness of the untouchables as well as the vulnerability of their condition can be revised only through a “political subjectivity” (Berlant 2011) inasmuch as the shame of discrimination is located corporeally and psychologically as much as socially. In conclusion, “salvation by machinery” (Aguiar 2011) is a much too optimistic approach to make untouchability a thing of the past. The implementation of infrastructure can lay the groundwork for a shared and inclusive idea of society, but in order to put an end to the trauma of excrementalized subjectivities, a revision of what is meant by the political is necessary, thus engaging its notion with emotional, affective, and embodied experiences.