Inside-Outside

In the early days of my fieldwork, I would lose my way in the serpentine alleys of Shivaji Nagar. So, when I was invited to Munna's home, his eleven-year-old son ZainFootnote ⁹ came to pick me up from the Bus Depot in Shivaji Nagar. Mutton biriyānī was being cooked at home in anticipation of my visit, so he had stayed home from school to eat that. “It took you a while to arrive! I've been waiting!” I apologized, but before I could explain further, he cut me short, “It's okay, I know you are coming from outside, and it takes time to get here!” But I was not coming from outside. I told him, I was coming from the western suburbs, and it took longer than I had expected to transfer from the metro to the suburban train, and finally, to the bus. “Yeah, I know! That's what I said,” Zain said impatiently. “Kutchrē kē liyē yēh Bambai hai, nahī toh nahī (For the sake of dumping garbage, this area is Mumbai, otherwise not).”

The area where Shivaji Nagar now stands was conceived as peripheral from as early as the 1880s. Yet, with its incorporation into Bombay in the 1970s, it could no longer be outside Mumbai. The histories of Shivaji Nagar, the katalkhānā (slaughterhouse),Footnote ¹⁰ and the garbage dump are inextricably, and quite uncannily, entwined. A careful immersion into a physical space reveals not only the social relations that inhabit the geographical space,Footnote ¹¹ but also those that provide the conditions of possibility of the space in the first place. In the case of Shivaji Nagar what is concealed is that not only the garbage dump but also its surroundings are created from garbage collected from all over the city. That the garbage bubbles out of the ground during the monsoon is a reminder that it is constitutive of this neighborhood, and not neatly enclosed in the dump, nor is it limited to leachate or more contemporary spilling.

In the late 1960s, the Bombay Municipal Corporation filled up large tracts of marshy lands in ChemburFootnote ¹² using dry waste discarded by homes and industrial establishments in the city. Through several rounds of waste collection and dumping, this time not in the Deonar Garbage Dump but in the areas immediately adjacent, the civic administration was able to reclaim 187 hectares of land in the Chembur and Kurla creek areas. The corporation reportedly spent only a couple of lakh rupeesFootnote ¹³ to reclaim this land, and immediately began earning a revenue. Around 125 hectares were leased out for vegetable cultivation. This area was to be later known as Bainganwadi, where eventually a portion of Shivaji Nagar would be. The multi-million rupees Deonar Municipal katalkhānā was erected on the remaining reclaimed land.

Although the current location of the Deonar Garbage Dump was officially sealed in 1927, it was imagined, and slowly constructed, as the preferred destination for the city's kutchrā (garbage) as early as the 1880s.Footnote ¹⁴ By the 1910s, the Kutchra Line, a refuse train, was run on dedicated rail sidings parallel to the main train tracks to transport garbage from various parts of Bombay to Deonar. By the 1920s, roughly contemporaneous with the first demands of the slaughterhouse relocation, Deonar became the primary home of the colonial city's refuse.

In a parallel historical temporality, the municipal slaughterhouse was relocated from Crawford Market in south Bombay to Bandra in 1857, and then again to its current location in Deonar in 1971. Proposals to move the slaughterhouse to Deonar were made as early as the 1920s by British colonial officials. These demands again surfaced in the early 1960s when the municipal corporation of the city proposed to construct Asia's then largest slaughterhouse in Deonar, and simultaneously close the Bandra operations. The relocation of the slaughterhouse was an intensely contested process, involving Jain communities of Deonar, as well as butchers of Bandra. These contestations were made visible both through media coverage, as well as through the multi-staged architectural planning of the slaughterhouse with a budget of 4 crore rupees.Footnote ¹⁵ It took more than a decade for the slaughterhouse to begin operations in 1971, with a concurrent closing down of the Bandra slaughterhouse. By this time, Shivaji Nagar in Deonar was incorporated into Bombay, assuming this inside-outside designation.

In the early 1970s, the city's insides were being churned outside. The early residents of Shivaji Nagar were resettled in the area as part of state-driven efforts to purge the city center of so-called pockets of poverty, crime, and disease. Cotton mills that had employed cheap labor, mostly Muslim,Footnote ¹⁶ from the city's slums had begun to crumble, and that culminated in mass evictions of slum populations during the Emergency in 1975–1977. As this process was contemporaneous with the relocation of the katalkhānā to Deonar, one of the first quarters to be resettled was one of butchers employed by the municipal corporation. This population, living adjacent to the Bandra slaughterhouse, had been evicted and resettled next to the new location of the slaughterhouse to facilitate the construction of a highway connecting the city's western suburbs. Newer residents of Shivaji Nagar, however, were Muslims who had migrated from the northern Indian states of Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, or Madhya Pradesh in the last couple of decades.

Residents as well as municipal officials, nongovernmental actors, and academics informally identify the neighborhood as a slum cluster, with a population of roughly 600,000.Footnote ¹⁷ More than half of this population subsists on 52 rupees (18 US cents) per day.Footnote ¹⁸ Nearly 80 percent of the residents are Muslims, while the rest are Christians, Dalits, and Hindus. While the slaughterhouse and the garbage dump have, in the past, provided two prominent sources of livelihood, the neighborhood is home to various small entrepreneurs and skilled workers, including construction workers, house painters, plumbers, tailors, carpenters, embroiderers, drivers, hospital staff, IT professionals, cooks, and domestic servants.

Laboring in Shivaji Nagar

“Have you seen the movie Godzilla?” JunaidFootnote ¹⁹ asked me, as he covered his canvas shoes with blue tarp before he began his night shift at the dumping ground. I nodded yes. “Just like Godzilla, there are these deadly man-eating dogs on the dump,” he continued. “I know so many who were eaten alive at night by one of these dogs.” During the night shift on the garbage dump, many ragpickers had been bitten by snakes, scorpions, and dogs, a few had drowned in the sludgy parts of the dump, many had been cut by glass and metal pieces sticking out of the garbage mounds, and many had lost their way in the dump in the absence of any lighting guiding their way. The perils of the night shift had prompted these legends about radioactive monster dogs that fed on the toxic sludge and rampaged about the dump at night searching for their next human victim. “But don't think the day shift is easy! I wear this bright cap, not to brighten my day, but to make it dimmer, you know,” Junaid said, as he put on a faded yellow baseball cap he found on the dump a couple of months ago. “Bright things reflect light away and keep you cool.” In the day, the dump is ablaze with sunlight, and there are no trees under which one can hide for a few minutes. Like several others living in Shivaji Nagar, Junaid works the morning and the night shifts on the dumping ground. He has been a ragpicker since he was a boy. But laboring for two shifts on the garbage dump is not enough to support his entire family. So, his wife and three children work the morning shift on the dump. Junaid had moved into the neighborhood as a child in the 1970s. He had never considered leaving Shivaji Nagar. “Believe it or not, there is enough garbage in the dump to bankroll us for our entire lives,” Junaid said, only half joking.

Mumbai generates more than nine thousand metric tons of garbage every day, according to the Solid Waste Management Department of the MCGM. The municipal corporation collects this unsegregated waste from around the city and dumps it in three open garbage dumps, namely those in Mulund, Kanjurmarg, and Deonar. The Deonar Garbage Dump is the oldest of the three operational dumps, and receives more than three thousand metric tons of waste every day. More than five thousand waste workers from Shivaji Nagar perform the hazardous task of segregating recyclable waste on the dumping ground. Until 2016, the MCGM tacitly allowed these waste workers, also called “ragpickers,” to perform this task without offering them training, protection, or wages. In the post-Independence era, while many Indian urban municipal corporations formalized waste collection in the cities by employing municipal waste collectors, they continued to rely on the segregation work performed informally by self-employed, unpaid ragpickers.Footnote ²⁰ Ragpickers began to operate furtively in landfills and garbage dumps without explicit permission from, but with the tacit approval of, the municipal corporations. This way, the labor of waste segregation is performed by ragpickers for a tiny sum of money rather than by the corporation or individual households all over the city. The waste workers in Shivaji Nagar belong to this category of precarious labor. In this neighborhood, ragpickers, including children under sixteen, routinely collect and segregate waste. The official narrative has been that these are “leaky people” who slip into the dump, and do this hazardous job without the explicit permission of the corporation. But at the same time, the corporation does not have an alternative method of waste segregation and recycling.

An estimated 4.5 billion rupees ($67 million) is generated by this economy of waste segregation and recycling operating citywide.Footnote ²¹ There are several players clamoring for a share of this economy, including ragpickers, truck drivers, security men, local scrap dealers (bhangārs/ kāntāwālās), local gangs and gang leaders, local politicians, policemen, and municipal officers. Until 2016, ragpickers in Shivaji Nagar worked in eight-hour shifts during the day starting before the crack of dawn. Some also worked the dreaded night shift, which while being riskier than the day or evening shifts, allowed ragpickers to collect more recyclables in fewer hours, as there were fewer ragpickers with whom to compete. After the 2016 fires when the municipal corporation posted security guards on the perimeter during the day prohibiting entry into the now-walled dumping ground, the night shift became the only shift many ragpickers were willing to risk.

Ragpickers collect hard and soft plastic, rubber, glass, metal, and even cloth and paper to sell to the kāntāwālās, who pay the ragpickers 50–200 rupeesFootnote ²² for an eight-hour shift on the dump. The wages are dependent not on the hours spent collecting and segregating recyclables on the dump, but on the particular items collected. For instance, soft plastic bags fetch a lower price than any object made of hard plastic. The kāntāwālās themselves earn a margin of 3–5 rupees per kilo of items collected by the ragpickers, and have to pay a gang leader nearly a third of their earnings. There is much competition amongst the numerous gang leaders in Shivaji Nagar, who negotiate their own turf and pick ragpickers and kāntāwālās to work specific parts of the dumping ground. Gang leaders are most interested in high value items such as discarded metal parts and medical waste, which may be flipped for quicker and higher profits. Once the ragpickers have segregated the dry waste, the kāntāwālās weigh and sell it to wholesale recycling companies based in Malegaon in Maharashtra, or Ahmedabad in Gujarat.

The ragpickers of Shivaji Nagar negotiate an economy that straddles both formalized (municipal corporation, local police, local elected officials) and informalized (gang leaders, money lenders, kāntāwālās) arrangements. Accordingly, the ragpickers navigate each day through multi-layered marginalization and precarity in response to the histories of land tenure and resettlement, housing insecurity, strained relations with law and order, environmental toxicity, and medical care practices in the area. While the neighborhood is home to various occupations, I focus on ragpickers in this article because they bear a disproportionate burden of the labors of failure. As the executive engineer quoted above indicated, the judgment of failure bestowed upon the neighborhood is derived, in large part, from the existence of the dumping ground and the waste work that it supports.

In this article, I am concerned with the relationship between precarious labor and precarity through the material and affective labors of failure.Footnote ²³ Before getting into what I mean by labors of failure in the next section, I want to note briefly here that while the conception of precarious labor has come to name post-Fordist vulnerable labor in advanced industrialized economies, and precarity a description of the erosion of work as the central structuring affiliation, I am using the terms in a broader sense.Footnote ²⁴ Keeping in mind the complex genealogy of the terms precarious labor, precarity, and the precariat,Footnote ²⁵ I use precarious labor to refer to intermittent and insecure labor that is also often locally characterized as illicit, and precarity to refer to the politically produced existential condition that exposes certain populations to increased vulnerability to death, violence, disease, and starvation with limited alternatives.Footnote ²⁶ I also want to note that while traditionally in the global south, vulnerable, flexible, and insecure labor has largely been associated with the informal sector, I refrain from characterizing as informal the economies of waste that permeate Shivaji Nagar. My research suggests that waste economies are structurally integrated into the formal economy in ways that render them indispensable to the functioning of the various governmental and non-governmental institutions. I avoid these characterizations for several reasons: first, precarious labor, while historically and geographically differentiated, is not a condition of post-Fordist economies alone. Scholars have long suggested that from the point of view of the worker, work has been precarious as a rule.Footnote ²⁷ In that sense, precarity is endemic to capitalist formations. Second, precarity as a sociological category derived from the notion of loss of secure employment reproduces the primacy of economic factors in determining social life. Instead, I address the ways in which precarity leaks from one domain to another and is an existential state.Footnote ²⁸ Third, the categories of developing and developed economies are reinforced when informality is reserved for the former and precarity for the latter. Apart from assuming a normative and teleological path to development, such a formulation disregards the connections between the developed and developing economies, especially in the manner in which waste is produced, dumped, collected, segregated, and treated. As is becoming apparent, the lines of waste production and processing follow imperial and colonial routes whereby the global south becomes the receptacle for the world's discard.Footnote ²⁹ Thus, not only is precarity geographically differentiated, but also it is so along the lines of the international division of labor. Fourth, these characterizations disregard how the informal sector is enmeshed in capital.Footnote ³⁰ The intricate ways in which the formal and the informal sectors overlap and interact become starkly apparent in Shivaji Nagar. While the ragpickers receive neither any formal training nor protection from the municipal corporation in the tasks of waste processing, there is no other formal mechanism for waste segregation in a city the size of Mumbai.

Labors of Failure

Failure is not an easy concept to pin down. However, every society has its notion of failure that incorporates shame, stigma, and disappointment, and that stands in opposition to the pride, desirability and contentment of success. In scholarly literature, failure has been conceptualized as a culturally specific judgment measured against a set of norms.Footnote ³¹ But, owing to its close relationship to norms, failure may be viewed as a “desire to live life otherwise.”Footnote ³² While the glory of success is repeated over and over again, failure leaves no record.Footnote ³³ In Shivaji Nagar, failure leaves no record not by invisibility, but rather by repeated visibility. Here, failure is enacted over and over again, and in that repetition a desire for futurity is sustained that continues to be thwarted all the same. From this local context, failure emerges not only as a judgment but also the condition of possibility of futurity.

For my interlocutors in Shivaji Nagar, failure is enlisted to be the antidote for their precarity while also intensifying the same. During my fieldwork, municipal officers, researchers, and Shivaji Nagar residents used failure, both in English and in Urdu, to describe the neighborhood. What did Munna mean when he suggested that the city of Mumbai needed Shivaji Nagar to fail? If success is the currency of megacities like Mumbai, then failure works as the currency of neighborhoods like Shivaji Nagar. “In exchange for our failure, we are promised wages, subsidies, rations, opportunities,” Munna explained to me. He presented failure as an ever-present condition of existence in Shivaji Nagar, one that could not be separated from what he perceived as the success of Mumbai at large, and one that was essential to receiving entitlements from the state to make life endurable in this neighborhood. His insight implores us to consider the violence embedded in projects of value-production in mega urban spaces like Mumbai, which are predicated upon the simultaneous devaluation of already marginalized people, and their ways of living. He draws our attention to the structural connection between failure and success that several scholars have pointed out.Footnote ³⁴ The Urdu word for failure that my interlocutors in Shivaji Nagar use, nāqāmiyābi, exposes this structural connection between the supposed binaries of failure and success: qāmiyābi (success) is folded into nāqāmiyābi (failure). Failure is a re-presentation of success. It is significant that my interlocutors identified nāqāmiyābi as the condition of possibility for futurity in Shivaji Nagar. Here, nāqāmiyābi folds in a different kind of success: a medium of exchange that allows the residents to endure the precarious living and working conditions of this neighborhood. While the labors of failure in Shivaji Nagar may provide alternative claims of belonging and futurity, as Munna suggested, they do not provide any straightforward exit from capital or its regulatory structures. Instead, they offer fragile strategies to whittle those regulatory structures. For instance, while access to subsidies and entitlements is essential for survival in Shivaji Nagar, it masks the acute privation prevalent in the neighborhood despite such state assistance, and simultaneously submits its residents to multiple regulatory structures. I want to emphasize that failure as a medium of exchange in Shivaji Nagar, as Munna described it, is emancipatory only in a limited sense, for laboring toward failure is an enactment of possibilities that insinuates the neighborhood's residents ever more forcefully into its ground.

While capitalism produces social dislocation, environmental damage, and indebtedness, organizations such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) represent these not as failures of capitalist growth and development policies, but rather a consequence of the failures of the target growing economies.Footnote ³⁵ In a similar vein, the executive engineer of M-East ward had quickly pointed toward the “attitudes of the people living there” as being one of the generators of “problems” in Shivaji Nagar. In effect, in his estimation, Shivaji Nagar did not warrant the allocation of more resources, presumably because the neighborhood would somehow surpass its growing pains. Then, failure becomes negatively valuable as the price to be paid for technological development, economic growth, and social progress. Failure appears as a foundation upon which the story of success may be forged.Footnote ³⁶

As mentioned earlier, Deonar, where Shivaji Nagar is located, has been constructed as the city's periphery. Through popular, official, and scholarly narratives, the spatial exteriorization of Deonar has sedimented into an iconic picture of failure, waste, and death. In media, images of its hyperbolized squalor, its mapped and planned by-lanes, and iconic toxicity abound. In scholarly construction, the extreme economic precarity of Shivaji Nagar has been analyzed through the lens of inadequate housingFootnote ³⁷ and insufficient infrastructure.Footnote ³⁸ Judged a failure by governmental and non-governmental agencies, especially on account of the garbage dump, Shivaji Nagar is far from abandoned by the municipal corporation in charge of the area. But the corporation's engagement with the residents of the neighborhood is calibrated to a specific degree such that the judgment of failure holds in perpetuity, while at the same time the charge of complete abandonment is circumvented. Toward such a balancing act, the needs of the people of Shivaji Nagar—citizens of India—“especially during the municipal corporation elections,” as Munna reminded me, ought to be addressed. But in order to be addressed as a community in need of the state's assistance, the people of this neighborhood must enact failure in specific ways, namely, through truth-telling methods. That is, in addition to the labors of working on the garbage dump, an ethical enactment of failure is demanded of this neighborhood in return for state benefits, and the method of this enactment is truth telling. Failure in Shivaji Nagar is not a one-time judgment, but one that is produced again and again in service of the aspired good life. So, although culturally inflected, failure assumes the concreteness of a thing and coheres into an artifact that cannot be materially elided by the residents of Shivaji Nagar in any straightforward manner.

The labors of failure in Shivaji Nagar assume a broad spectrum: the labor involved in staking claims of belonging to a land that not only does not belong to the residents, and is instead, “government land,” but is also toxic land; the labors of making medically legible symptoms of ill health that may not have names; the labors of telling the stories the local residents have to tell as evidence of their whereabouts on the days of the fires; the labors of skirting the watchful eyes of the municipal corporation, while at the same time eking a livelihood out of laboring on the garbage dump; and the labors of saving the various forms of identification documents from frequent fires and floods. Failures to belong, be sick, give evidence, eke out a living, and provide identification documents are also preconditions for these very possibilities. Truth-telling procedures lace the labors of these failures to elicit an ethical response to unlivable conditions, which ultimately ground people into a relentless state of precarious living. Failure in this neighborhood is produced by diligent labor, as Munna asserted, but it is not to be understood as an elective critique, resistive strategy, or even an unconstrained choice. It would be politically reckless to suggest that precarious labor, precarity, and failure, while offering limited strategies of response, offer a stance of refusing the normalization of precarization. In Shivaji Nagar, adopting failure as “a way of life”Footnote ³⁹ is not emancipatory or productive in any straightforward way. Heeding Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's warning,Footnote ⁴⁰ I argue that such an understanding of failure risks assuming subaltern subjects’ existence outside of regulatory structures while at the same time overemphasizing their world-making capacities.

We Didn't Start the Fire

Early one morning in January 2016, as plumes of smoke filled Shamim'sFootnote ⁴¹ corrugated hut in the Shanti Nagar cluster of Shivaji Nagar, she and her husband rushed toward the garbage dump from where the smoke was emanating. They had both concluded an arduous night-shift the previous night. The truck that was to ferry the jute sacks they had filled with plastic and glass recyclables to the scrap-dealer had not arrived that night. So, they had left the sacks gathered on the edge of the dumping ground. Few were willing to labor on the dumping ground after sunset. The only thought on Shamim's mind when she awoke that morning was that her jute sacks were in danger. She dropped everything and rushed to the dumping ground:

Early in 2016, two successive methane-stoked fires raged uncontrollably for days at the Deonar Garbage Dump. Central Pollution Control Board data revealed dangerously high levels of formaldehyde, carbon monoxide, ammonia, and other noxious gases in a 10-kilometer radius of the dump. Small, intermittent fires are not unusual in this particular dump. Fires in prior years routinely developed more or less localized in one area of the dump, and flickered on and off for a few hours at the most.Footnote ⁴² These were easily contained by a combination of effort from the residents of the nearby slums and the firefighters from the Mumbai Fire Brigade. But the 2016 fires were singular in their location in the dump, their duration, and, ultimately, their scale. Each time in 2016, the fires were capacious and protracted. Images captured by NASA satellites evinced the scale of the fires, and were broadcast on twenty-four-hour prime news channels repeatedly. After the second fire, outraged citizens from affluent neighborhoods affected by the fires called for the urgent relocation of the dump to the outskirts of the city. They decried the failure of the civic administration to control the fires. At a protest march, Shashi,Footnote ⁴³ a doctor and a long-time resident of a high-rise in neighboring Chembur, burst out in anger and shame,

The rhetoric of these accusations reveal several assumptions: the fires were deliberately started by “criminal elements and miscreants;” presumably, these arsonists were identifiable as a group, even if not as individuals; the arsonists had failed to be “citizens of Mumbai;” and the government had largely failed the citizens of Mumbai. The failure of the MCGM to scientifically manage the disposal of waste in the Deonar Garbage Dump had taken on the form of the failure of Shivaji Nagar residents to become conscientious citizens of Mumbai. What was left unsaid but implied was that Shivaji Nagar, a Muslim mohallā (neighborhood), was presumed to house criminal elements, miscreants, and the guilty who had no stake in the city's future. Community leaders of Shivaji Nagar argued that while the dump was lit into visibility by the fires for the rest of Mumbai, the neighborhood's residents were no strangers to its toxic exhalations. The residents had literally inhaled the toxic emanations of the garbage dump for years, toiling on it, so that the city's other residents could be rid of the same. The city's future was predicated upon their own future. The Mumbai Police and the municipal corporation, for their part, were under immense public pressure to supplant their perceived failure onto easily culpable others. After the first fire, the Mumbai Police, conducting its investigation, hinted that the garbage mafia was responsible for the fires, and yet began arresting ragpickers and small-time scrap dealers.

Temporarily, following the first surface fire in January, and at the request of three NGOs (Apnalaya, Stree Mukti Sangathana, and FORCE), the MCGM had begun issuing RFID identity cards to nearly a thousand ragpickers. The NGOs, which had been active in the neighborhood in helping organize waste workers, pushed for the identity cards as a move toward greater security for the ragpickers. In the waste workers’ unions, many had hoped that the issuance of the identity cards was a signal of the municipal corporation's recognition of the ragpickers’ labor in the city's solid waste management. However, for the municipal corporation, the idea was to monitor the movement of the ragpickers around the dumping ground. An assistant municipal commissioner was careful to point out to me that the RFID cards were not meant to provide any rights or protection to the ragpickers:

Undoubtedly, no identity cards were needed to scale the dumping ground walls. Indeed, they were routinely breached by ragpickers who did not have any identity cards. The fire inaugurated a novel mode of regulation that intensified the ragpickers’ precarity through intensified surveillance.

Meanwhile, the Mumbai Police had begun investigating the cause of the fires, and there were already murmurs that the garbage mafia had set the dump on fire. However, in February 2016, the Divisional Fire Officer of Deonar stated in a First Information Report (FIR)Footnote ⁴⁴ that three minors between the ages of ten and twelve were responsible for the fire. In the days following this, several young boys were brought to the Shivaji Nagar Police Station and detained until a fine was paid. No formal charges were registered against these boys, but they were picked up merely under the suspicion of lighting the dump on fire. Afzal,Footnote ⁴⁵ one of the boys detained, said he was asked repeatedly if he belonged to a gang of ragpickers, and who his gang leader was. He later told me that he had heard there were a few gangs in the area, but he did not tell the police that:

Afzal and the seventeen other young boys who were detained were ultimately released because there was no evidence pointing to their involvement in the fire. An NGO worker told me that in this neighborhood, young boys are often rounded up on suspicions of terror attacks in the city, and after much effort from pro bono lawyers working for a few NGOs they are released. “These boys are used to this, and know what to say and what not to” the NGO worker reiterated, “This place is considered a Muslim mohallā (neighborhood). Muslim, young, and poor! These boys are vulnerable to being arrested.” The Hindu nationalist narrative of the ruling coalition of the Shiv Sena and the Bharatiya Janata Party has exacerbated the criminalization and ghettoization of Muslim mohallās in Mumbai.Footnote ⁴⁶ Relations between the neighborhood's residents and the police have been strained since the 1992–1993 Bombay communal riots. According to the Srikrishna Commission Report, the police had opened fire at a gathering of Muslim residents of Shivaji Nagar protesting the demolition of Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, following which a violent conflict ensued. Two police constables and thirteen Muslim residents were killed during the skirmish. The commission's report had observed that citywide the police had either actively participated in the violence siding with Hindu nationalists, or had stood passively while Muslims were attacked.Footnote ⁴⁷

The failure to provide any documentary evidence to add content to their stories about their whereabouts on the day of the fire meant each of those that were arrested after the fire had to pay a fine. Afzal like others arrested hastily after the fire was goaded into speaking the truth about his whereabouts. Each time Afzal professed his truth to the policemen interrogating him, it failed to establish his whereabouts. He was required to repeatedly confess and avow the “truth,” only to be told that there was not enough content in the truth to count as such. These truth-telling procedures give us a sense of how the regulatory structures operating within Shivaji Nagar wither away the world-making capacities of waste workers.

Scholars have stressed, through the notion of “truth acts,” the work of power in implicating Western subjects in the regimes of truth-telling. In his lectures at College de France, Michel Foucault presented the notion of “truth-acts” by which the Western subject becomes the operator, spectator, and the object of the manifestation of truth.Footnote ⁴⁸ The notion of avowal by which a subject “binds himself to this truth”Footnote ⁴⁹ suggests that even though truth-telling is a technique of power, it is through this mechanism that the subject attaches himself to the truth articulated. In doing so, the subject constitutes himself as a specific subject within a specific regime of truth.Footnote ⁵⁰ The regime of truth, fragile and contingent, nevertheless constrains the subject whom it coerces to be free.Footnote ⁵¹ However, the injunction to avow the truth about oneself is articulated differently in colonial and postcolonial contexts. As Matthieu Renault reminds us, understanding the politics of confession and avowal in the postcolonial context requires us to decolonize the production of truth.Footnote ⁵² The Mumbai Police had a version of the truth, and those arrested in Shivaji Nagar were being compelled to produce that truth. In colonized societies, Frantz Fanon reminds us that the subject was not considered capable of articulating the truth. The language of the colonizer did not allow for an avowal of the “truth,” and the colonized did not confess their “truth.” So, their truth was an impossibility.Footnote ⁵³

For both Foucault and Fanon, the manifestation of truth is intricately tied to the production of discourses about the self, and the production of the self through interpellation. However, for Foucault, the Western subject is required to inscribe themself within a regime of truth via truth acts, while for Fanon, the subject refuses to tell the truth which in itself is an impossibility. Thus, for Foucault, the avowal of truth and for Fanon, the disavowal of the colonial truth, produces a subject. In Shivaji Nagar we are neither confronted with the Western, nor the colonial subject. Afzal is repeatedly made to confess the truth about his whereabouts but upon doing so, he is repeatedly told the truth was something else. Unlike the colonial subject, he is thought capable of articulating the truth and actively encouraged to do so, yet when he does articulate it, unlike the Western subject, he is told that his version is not the entire truth. So he must avow his truth in the hopes of being believed, and yet fails to be believed. Here, the subject, if there is one, thus fails to be a subject. The incommensurable regimes of truth operating in Shivaji Nagar that require residents to fail, while not failing enough, make “any ontology impossible,”Footnote ⁵⁴ to use Fanon's formulation. So, it is this failure to achieve subjecthood that the Shivaji Nagar residents must maneuver through. In Shivaji Nagar, this impossibility is brought about not by the presumed deceitful nature or untruthful conducts of the residents, but by an arbitrarily assigned benchmark of success. The truth is assumed to lie elsewhere.

In March 2016, another fire started at the dump, this time not as large in scale as the one preceding it in January. Once that fire was contained, the Shivaji Nagar Police rounded up thirteen kāntāwaālaās on six counts under the Indian Penal Code, including “negligent act likely to spread infection of disease dangerous to life,” “negligent conduct with respect to fire or combustible matter,” “mischief by fire or explosive substance with intent to cause damage,” “mischief by fire or explosive substance with intent to destroy house,” “act endangering life or personal safety of others,” and “common intention.” The charges, if proven, could warrant a maximum sentence of a life term. None of the forty-nine eyewitnesses named in the original charge sheet had accused any of the thirteen. Further, these thirteen were taken to the police station initially under false pretenses. One of the accused, Baba,Footnote ⁵⁵ told me later when he was let out on bail, that the police promised to take him to a dispensary for a blood test to check if there were any indications that he was adversely affected by the noxious fumes let loose by the fire. Baba said he was relieved to be chosen for the blood tests, at the first, but by the time he was in the police station, he became suspicious:

Of the thirteen that were arrested, seven said they were not ragpickers or scrap dealers and had never been involved in waste work. Saeed,Footnote ⁵⁶ one of the accused men, later told me that he was a coconut pulp seller:

Although a Deputy Commissioner of Police had claimed at a press conference held on April 16, 2016, that nine of those arrested were scrap dealers, he later explained that those arrested were not necessarily scrap dealers or regular ragpickers. A few had been hired specifically to set fire in certain parts of the dumping ground, in order to separate metal scrap from the rest.

Later, the police also arrested two brothers, who were notorious in Shivaji Nagar for drug peddling, extortion, smuggling, and murder, on a more serious charge of the Maharashtra Control of Organised Crime Act (MCOCA). However, supplanting the blame for its failure to manage the dump scientifically onto the ragpickers, the MCGM ensured that the repercussions of the fires were borne largely by the ragpickers. Not only were they called upon repeatedly to confess their involvement in the fires by the city's law enforcement, they were also denied access to the dumping ground by the MCGM as punishment for their failure to avow their presumed crimes. In March 2016, Mumbai's Municipal Commissioner Ajoy Mehta barred all ragpickers from entering the dumping ground. But a few days after his announcement, the Chief Minister of Maharashtra Devendra Fadnavis declared that ragpickers could enter the dumping ground. On the ground, however, since the MCGM operated the dumping ground, it was maintained that ragpickers were strictly prohibited from entering the dumping ground. This uncertainty as to whether ragpickers were allowed to enter the dumping ground or not brought them back to the pre-RFID cards era. Once again, the ragpickers did not have permission to enter the dumping ground and could only do so at their peril, with the additional threat of imprisonment this time.

“This is Government Land”

Another domain of precarity in Shivaji Nagar is inadequate and insecure housing, as scholars have noted. In this section I will describe the ways in which the labors of failure are delineated and expanded in this domain.

In February 2016, following the first fire that year, the municipal corporation undertook a demotion drive to weed out “illegal settlements”Footnote ⁵⁸ encroaching on the dumping ground. After a week of demolitions, nearly five hundred hutments were razed to the ground to clear out 2.5 acres of land. The rationale behind leveling these hutments in the Adarsh Nagar slum settlement adjacent to the dumping ground was purportedly to make way for fire brigades in the event of another fire. However, a few of the hutments that were demolished had been standing there for nearly a decade and a select few since 2000. Parts of Shivaji Nagar have been under the constant threat of evictions and demolitions. In the neighborhood, many have hinted that the frequent threat of demolitions have to do with the fact that their locality, considered a “Muslim area,” is presumed to be replete with criminal activity. The assistant municipal commissioner of M-East ward contended that demolitions were necessary in order to break the nexus between “the illegals,” the waste mafia, and the land mafia that the MCGM suspected had colluded to set the dumping ground on fire:

The regimes of zoning and land use in Shivaji Nagar are ambiguous and complex in a manner that renders the categories of legal and illegal highly fluid. Footnote ⁵⁹ While demolition drives enact direct violence in the already precarious lives of slum residents, the insecurity arising from the uncertainty regarding the legal status of their residence authorizes another level of intense everyday violence.Footnote ⁶⁰ The labors of failure include those involved in staking one's claims of belonging to a land to which one cannot legally belong. The “photopass” mentioned above by the municipal official is one of the documents that lends a limited amount of security to those in Shivaji Nagar that possess it. Those families that can prove that their residential structures meet a particular cutoff date stipulated by the Maharashtra State government under the Slum Rehabilitation Scheme may be rehoused should the government require the land for infrastructure development purposes. The proof, the “photopass,” comes in the form of a photograph of the members of the family in front of their residential structure. The cutoff date had been extended several times, and finally, it was decided that those who were in the area in 2000 would be eligible for the photopass. The failure to produce documents, such as the photopass, that demonstrate the graded legality of families’ residence in Shivaji Nagar, forces these families to furnish documents that evince their residence in the neighborhood. Thus, in repeatedly attempting and failing to prove the land they live on is theirs, the residents get embroiled in producing documents like the ration card, the Aadhar card,Footnote ⁶¹ the Voter ID card, and the photopass, which evince their domicile. Although very few have documents that directly locate them in Shivaji Nagar, they try to acquire and accumulate auxiliary documents to evince their residential status.

The municipal officer described the land in Shivaji Nagar as “government land.” Yet, as was mentioned earlier, the land where Shivaji Nagar stands today was reclaimed from a creek by dumping dry waste collected from all over the city in the 1970s. Many who were resettled in the area were allotted plots by the municipal corporation, in what is now called the Lotus Colony in Shivaji Nagar, and continue to pay a nominal rent to the corporation. The more precarious residents, such as those with photopasses, were also resettled by the corporation, but were not formally allotted plots. It is these residents whose legal dwelling is routinely called into question, either during demolition drives, or for access to government subsidies and entitlements.

Asghari'sFootnote ⁶² hut was demolished by the MCGM after the first fire. Her family had been living in that hut since 1998. She emphasized that she was in Shivaji Nagar before the extended cutoff date of 2000. But she did not have a photopass.

A couple of days after the demolition, Asghari went to the municipal dispensary in Shivaji Nagar to get a cough syrup. In those days, to assuage the irritation from smoke-inhalation, cough syrups and eye-drops were being distributed free of cost at the dispensary. The residents, however, had to produce a document that showed they were residents of Shivaji Nagar. Asghari stood in the serpentine cue at the dispensary for the cough medicine. However, once she reached the medical assistant distributing the medicine, she was repeatedly asked to furnish identification:

The medical assistant smiled at Asghari, and gave her the cough syrup, but not before she had rehearsed every argument she could think of, staking a claim to a land where she cannot legally belong.

What am I?

“There is a drum beating near my eyes and it is just out of my sight. But it is blowing wind near my eyes. Like this,” HalimaFootnote ⁶⁶ said with her palms fluttering near her ears like elephant ears.

Halima had first described this predicament to her husband a few weeks ago. At the time he had dismissed her by simply saying that if it was not a headache that she was describing, then she must seize the drumbeat and dance to its rhythm. Then, a few days later when a surface fire on the garbage dump had brought Shivaji Nagar into the spotlight, she had described to a journalist the difficulty she had concentrating because she was constantly distracted by the wind blowing near her ears and eyes.

Halima's description, although unusual, was by no means an unfamiliar one. Shivaji Nagar residents are routinely subjected to a series of truth-telling procedures in order to properly diagnose their condition, and offer requisite medical care or governmental subsidies and entitlements. However, structural and systemic apparatuses belie their everyday experience of toxicity because they are unable to produce documents that evince their exposure, the duration of exposure, the legality of their residence or even their identity, and narratives that are legible within a medical lexicon. So, they must repeatedly produce their injured and laboring bodies as the ground of evidence, all the while failing repeatedly to become enshrined as documentary “truths.” In turn, they become unworthy of care, not by invisibility but repetitive visibility. A focus on the practices of truth telling, and failing, in which this neighborhood's residents are involved, will require us to be sensitive to processes of laboring, which enmesh desires, fears, ethical lives, and attachments with the various disciplinary measures put in place by municipal officers, politicians, medical professionals, and NGO professionals. These practices of truth-telling reveal the ability of precarious people to refuse, accept, or transform mechanisms of power mobilized to shape their survival.

Waste workers in Shivaji Nagar cannot afford any protective gear, so they often fashion a lungi Footnote ⁶⁷ out of blue tarpaulin recycled from the dump, and wear it as a layer of protection between their lower bodies and the toxic sludge on the dump. That takes care of the “yuck factor,” as one waste worker suggested, but not much else. “There are insects, snakes, and chemicals crawling all around us. We use tarps, and even though it doesn't protect us in any way, somehow it feels like protection,” explained Shamim. Waste workers routinely develop illnesses that include acute respiratory ailments like tuberculosis and various cancers.Footnote ⁶⁸ In addition, they live and work with mild but debilitating symptoms, such as easy bruising, fuzzy thinking, dizziness, insomnia, frequent headaches, dulled senses, and perpetual skin and eye irritations. Despite their ongoing exposure to toxic working and living environments, their injuries are rendered illegible because they are not acute enough to fit within medicalized diagnoses.

As Halima repeated her concerns to Doctor Sujata,Footnote ⁶⁹ yet another time, Halima resisted calling what she was experiencing a “headache,” once again, forsaking a medicalized register. Doctor Sujata gave me and her assistant an exasperated look. “Take off your burqa, Halima, otherwise I won't treat you,” Doctor Sujata said while checking her blood pressure, and without addressing Halima's symptoms:

Halima's insistence that it was a drum-beating near her ears was indicative of the failures of the medicalized language to register experiences and symptoms for which there are no medical names or frames. Although she had been experiencing her particular symptoms for years, and had incurred a heavy medical bill over the years, there had been no diagnosis of what she was suffering from. Each time she visited the doctor, she said, no medicines were prescribed for her because there was no diagnosis of any illness. Doctor Sujata explained to me:

Halima's non-answers to the doctor's repeated questions about the entire truth of her symptoms indicate the failure of the diagnostic gaze to define “what Halima is.” In order to uncover the truth of her condition, the patient must physically endure and transpose that corporeal experience onto her discursive avowal of who she is. Only when the truth of her condition is avowed can the patient be reflexively cured of her illness. It is because Halima does not possess the medical terms for what she is experiencing that she is represented as ignorant here. “So, what am I? I don't know, but, I do know what I am going through,” Halima told me later. As Eve Sedgwick reminds us, “ignorance” can be “as potent and multiple a thing as knowledge.”Footnote ⁷¹ After a week, Halima went back to the doctor, again with the same set of complaints, refusing to simply designate her condition as a headache. This time, Doctor Sujata told her to stop going to the dump for work. The doctor explained to me that for years she has had some patients in the neighborhood describe pounding headaches along with persistent coughs, and sometimes, skin rashes. Increasingly, she suspects these clusters of symptoms can together be categorized as toxic headaches:

Halima collected lightweight plastic, mainly milk pouches, at the garbage dump. “You need delicate hands to fish out such plastic,” she reasoned. For 5 kilograms of lightweight plastic sheets, she would receive 10 rupees from the local scrapdealer.Footnote ⁷² It would take her an entire day to make 50 rupees. Halima began her day at six every morning, rushing to the dumping ground. She would follow her pre-charted loop and collect milk pouches for about eight hours. Once the collection ended, she would sort and tear pouches into sheets until three in the afternoon. That is when the fill-up trucks arrived that would carry sorted recyclables collected from her and other ragpickers to local scrap dealers. The private contractor who supplied these trucks had to be paid 300–500 rupees per day, depending on the weight of the recyclables to be transported. Usually, six ragpickers would pool their money to pay the contractor. The guards who have been placed by the municipal corporation at several key points on the perimeter of the dumping ground have to be paid 10 rupees per day per ragpicker for each entry into the ground. “How can I possibly stop going to the dumping ground? Even to come see Doctor sahiba I have to miss an entire day's earnings. But I have to give hāziri Footnote ⁷³ to the doctors, to speak about my condition,” Halima said.

When I met Halima, she speculated she was about fifty. She did not know for sure. Halima had worked on the dumping ground since she was about ten. But when she was about thirty, she had a heart attack. She had been breathless ever since. She had been instructed to see the doctor every fifteen days, but she only made it to the clinic once every month. Halima went on:

Halima reassured the doctor that she had narrated whatever she could think of to her. There was nothing more. Doctor Sujata shook her head in resignation, pumped her hand sanitizer, rubbed her hands clean, and said, “You seem fine, Halima. Come back after fifteen days. Next patient.”