As Pakistan's second largest city and the capital of its Punjab province, Lahore has been a long-standing center of social, political, and economic activity across the region. In colonial Punjab, the city was made into a provincial capital, making it a locus of governmental bureaucracies, educational institutions, and regional agricultural production and railway transport. Following independence, industries were established on its northern peripheries, and the city affirmed itself as a hub for Punjab's growing agricultural, industrial, and manufacturing sectors. In the past few decades, Lahore's economy has been reoriented toward commercial activity and services, with much of the workforce being employed in these sectors, which has expectedly drawn in migration from other areas in the Punjab, regions of Pakistan (especially Khyber Pakhtunkhwa), and even neighboring Afghanistan.
Lahore's population has now pushed past eleven million as the city has expanded into its peri-urban and rural hinterlands. This demographic and spatial growth, along with consumptive economies in which disposal commodities have become ubiquitous, has fueled municipal solid waste generation on a scale unprecedented in the city's history, which, based on conservative estimates, falls anywhere between five thousand to eight thousand tons per day.Footnote 1 This combined growth has necessitated the incremental expansion of waste infrastructures (e.g., underground sewage, mechanized disposal, and dumping grounds) through state institutions and non-state actors. Given these changes, stretching back from colonial rule through Partition and post-colonial development to contemporary urbanization and consumption, Footnote 2 this article explores a deceptively straightforward question: How and why has work in Lahore's expanding waste economy, both within the municipal department and the informal sector,Footnote 3 come to be organized across groups from low or non-caste backgrounds?Footnote 4
In an area of Lahore known as Q-Block, which lies between working-class Kot Lakhpat and upper-middle class Model Town, Khalid collects waste from approximately 100 households as an informal waste worker. One afternoon, Khalid turned to me and revealed, “I'll tell you the truth, we are nau-Muslims.” This term, nau-Muslim, refers to non-caste Hindus that converted to Islam in the years around Partition. Sanitation workers employed by the municipality in this and other localities in Lahore are Christians who converted from the chuhra caste, which were non-caste groups. Similarly, those like Khalid, who collect waste from “private” spaces and sort out valuables, such as discarded paper and plastics and scrap metal to sell to junkyards, come from a variety of similar backgrounds (e.g., changar, musali, and gagare). Though some of these groups have “moved up” in the waste economy, most junkyards or warehouses, where waste materials move through on their way to being recycled, belong to higher status groups such as jatts, maliks, and arains.Footnote 5
This article draws upon recent work that has demonstrated how caste remains a historical category through which social stratification and exclusions have taken shape across South Asia.Footnote 6 In doing so, it argues that caste has had important implications for both how waste work has been distributed among lower status groups in Lahore's waste economy and how waste workers have organized themselves as urbanization has proceeded across the country over the past several decades. Moreover, though outside the purview of the current article, this approach to studying caste highlights its potential intersection with other forms of social stratification along the lines of race, gender, and class.
The first half of the article returns to colonial Punjab to understand how lower status groups were categorized and impacted by the colonial regime that solidified connections between caste, waste work, and governance at a formative historical moment. Here, I emphasize that the constitution of these groups and the constitution of waste work emerged entangled under a colonial regime of governance and its attendant forms of knowledge.Footnote 7 The second half of the article turns its attention to how these groups, who are now placed into these categories, have organized themselves in Pakistan's waste economy, which has arisen out of the intersections of growing urban centers, bureaucratization of waste disposal, labor migration, consumptive economies, uneven spatial development, and sociopolitical relations. In doing so, these groups, I argue, have carved out a space for themselves in this urbanizing landscape, not just remaining in a zone of abjection to be disposed of, as writing on waste might suggest.Footnote 8
By highlighting how these groups have organized themselves around waste work, this article argues against a conceptualization of waste work through the idiom of abjectness and lowliness, something that displays its own caste-like structures of thought. Waste refers both to its origins, or sources (e.g., a commodity discarded by some person), and its future as potentially being worth something else and thus, other potential configurations of life. Put slightly differently, waste as discarded materials comes from somewhere and is produced by someone, even if its source or origins are not always clear,Footnote 9 and because of desires for disposing or recycling waste materials, it is simultaneously intertwined with multiple, intersecting life-making projects. Approaching waste in this way, as pointing to other possibilities and aspirations for life, allows us to rethink what the unexpected articulations of caste and waste work have for those whose own lives, for historical reasons, are entangled with waste materials.
Caste and Colonial Punjab
Caste in colonial Punjab became an elementary category of governance because it was understood as the privileged form of association within Indian society and was incorporated into the administrative apparatus of the colonial state.Footnote 10 Following its annexation (1849) and then direct rule (1857), a major imperative of the colonial state in the Punjab was revenue settlement, or the fixing of land tenure and the extraction of revenue. In order to do so, the colonial regime made incessant attempts to understand Punjabi society and the categories by which it was presumably organized. As caste as a category of governance was taken up in the administration of colonial rule, linkages were solidified between certain kinds of work, especially ones involving contact with specific kinds of materials and certain kinds of people, specifically those from lower-status groups thought to engage in “traditional” forms of work and exchange around these materials. These linkages have facilitated the occupational trajectories of these groups in Lahore's waste economy.
In one of the primary ethnological studies of the Punjab, Denzil Ibbetson, who served as census commissioner for the Punjab in 1881 and then later as its lieutenant-governor,Footnote 11 described the “scavenger castes” as one of “the lowest of the low,” and “[their] hereditary occupation is scavenging, sweeping the houses and streets, working up, carrying to the field, and distributing manure, and in cities and in village houses where the women are strictly secluded, removing nightsoil. They alone of all classes keep those impure animals, pigs and fowls; and they and the leather-workers alone eat the flesh of animals that have died of disease or by natural death.”Footnote 12 Ibbetson then went on to describe the chuhra, which was a group that would convert to Christianity en masse during this same period, as a “sweeper or scavenger, and hence the out-caste, par excellence, of the Punjab […] As a scavenger or rather as a ‘sweeper up of dust’ the Chuhrá is termed khák-rob.”Footnote 13 Ibbetson then detailed all the other names that the chuhra was thought to go by (megh, mihtar, dhed, changar, among others) and their associated occupations (weavers, “domestics,” leather workers) and described the distribution of these occupational groupings across various regions of the Punjab.
Despite recognizing considerable variations in names, occupations, and distribution, the underlying assumption was that specific groups were derivations of the chuhra, a subpopulation with a definitive rank within Punjabi society. Specifically, these groups were dependent upon other groups of higher status in the countryside for work and shares of the harvest, forming relations of exchange that made those of lower status into “customary,” or service employees, of those of higher status, even if these lower status groups exhibited a degree of mobility between settlements, households, and forms of work.Footnote 14 The ascribed status of the chuhra was thought to describe the ranked position of a group of people within Punjab's social organization, with the basis of that position being kinds of work and occupations that involved contact with certain materials such as dust, nightsoil, manure, dead animals, and leather.
Work and occupation were emphasized in these accounts because it differentiated groups in the Punjab between those “who ruled and those who were politically ‘subject,’”Footnote 15 and affirmed a logic with respect to governing and caste: within the population, certain groups were more able to govern than others. Those groups would be of higher status backgrounds associated with land ownership and agricultural work, and were the ones to be brought into the administrative apparatus of the state as intermediaries to facilitate revenue settlement.Footnote 16
Caste as a category of governance was put into practice through revenue settlement, which was accomplished by “defining a structure of individual private property rights” while at the same time “[fixing] the position of each landholder with respect to a village kinship structure by recording it bureaucratically in village records at each land settlement. Carefully recorded genealogical tables defined rights in the commons, rights of preemption, and revisionary inheritance rights to land.”Footnote 17 Settlement officials also recorded important information related to land, such as “the type of soil in the revenue circles, the average yield of land per acre, the average price of the crops, the trend of prices, gross produce, gross profits, costs of production (including menials’ dues)” and based on such information, they “calculated the net profits out of which they drew revenue.”Footnote 18 Part of this cataloging was also the “record of rights” (wajib ul-arz) that, from the perspective of colonial officials and privileged groups fluent in the language of the state, included the status, duties, and dues of “menials,” among other things.Footnote 19 Additionally, “rights of access to the commons” or “wasteland,” terms that were to incorporate a variety of “indigenous terms” referencing cultivated as opposed to uncultivated land, were also recorded in this wajib ul-arz, one of which being rents collected from kammis (village servants) who were tenants on this land.Footnote 20 Clearly, the recording of “customs,” “rights,” and “services” was one of the many ways in which the position of lower status groups came to be stabilized by the colonial state in the Punjab, something that fixed the connections between social status, occupation, and settlement.Footnote 21
While revenue and land settlement stabilized “custom,” “rights,” and “services” of these respective groups, which would locate them within the “village” social structure, these interventions and others in the Punjab and across India at the time also did much to destabilize its supposed structures and the status of these groups.Footnote 22 Vijay Prashad has described how “landless labourers, mostly dalits, fought for the right to collect fuelwood, to draw water from the wells, to take the carcasses of dead animals, to manure, to get a share of the crop, to graze cattle on the commons, to the barley sown along the watercourses, to food on workdays, to clothes, and to tobacco,” and in times of even greater scarcity, such as when large amounts of cattle perished during famine, landholders withheld the carcass and skins from chuhras and even demanded greater amounts of things such as belts or shoes for each carcass.Footnote 23 Additionally, in the early twentieth century, lower status groups in the Punjab increasingly moved away from “customary” employment to enter into wage labor, though they did circulate between both, and found employment in construction work, specifically of canal, rail, and road infrastructures, or became traders of certain goods, such as skins, leather, and furs.Footnote 24 Already excluded from ownership, lower status groups in the countryside were not unaffected by the vagaries of famine, canal colonization, agricultural commercialization, and the growth of wage labor, and thus migrated across the Punjab into its expanding urban centers.
These lower status groups came to be trapped in what has been called the caste-state nexus: agrarian labor among low or non-caste groups, usually involving varying degrees of coercion, was reproduced by the colonial state through the “mutual obligations” between these groups and landed elites.Footnote 25 From the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries, many of these groups converted to Christianity, Islam, or Sikhism in noticeable numbers while Hindu reform movements became active in retaining the groups within their fold, especially in light of the census and electoral politics. Despite changes in religious affiliation, lower status groups retained their position as landless groups whose relation to land was, for the most part, absent—this carried very different, oftentimes racialized connotations about the menial status of these groups and the privileged status of others across the countryside at the time. Even if these groups could not participate in the changes being brought to the Punjab by revenue settlement, they availed themselves of other possibilities and opportunities emerging at the time. These groups constituted a class of mobile, landless labor that would, over the subsequent decades, migrate across the Punjab and the wider region, and with growing urban centers, become increasingly involved in waste work, either in municipal governments or the informal sector. The construction of caste as a category of governance in colonial Punjab, which was a discursive practice animated by administrative imperatives around revenue settlement, facilitated the occupational trajectories of these groups into waste work by bringing together categories of persons with categories of work.
Bureaucratizing Waste and Work
Many of these lower status groups would be recruited into municipal departments dedicated to medicine, sanitation, and public health emerging in Lahore and other cities in colonial India.Footnote 26 As has been demonstrated in a variety of urban centers, those who collected different kinds of refuse—nightsoil, rubbish, discard—from both domestic and public spaces did so through what were generally known as “customary” relations.Footnote 27 Growing municipalities such as Lahore over the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries expanded their sanitation workforce, especially increasing the employment of “sweepers.” Their employment by municipalities was done, however, through combining custom and contract. The municipality would offer contracts to have wards of the city cleaned. Individuals would bid on these contracts, and the municipality, having prepared the costs of the contract, would then pay this amount out to the contractors. These contractors would then organize the labor of “sweepers” who would still engage in “customary” work relations. This mixture of customary and contractual work were the mechanisms by which attempts were made to “formalize” those “customary” relations through bureaucratization.
That process was also beset by challenges posed by sweepers who went on strikes throughout this period.Footnote 28 In the Punjab, authorities became increasingly concerned about agitations among “sweepers,” and by the late colonial period, a sweeper union had formed in Lahore and agitated for demands, such as increased wages, an eight hour working day, and representation on the municipal committee. To clarify, because of the avoidance of polluting materials by caste Hindus and others, lower status groups occupied positions of power and influence as functionaries within departments of medicine, public health, and sanitation.Footnote 29
With the partitioning of the Indian subcontinent into the sovereign states of India and Pakistan, much of Punjab's Hindu and Sikh populations were compelled to leave for India while a mass infusion of Muslim refugees arrived into the region from across India. Christians would also be affected, as it is known that low and non-caste Hindus converted to Christianity and Islam during this time to safeguard themselves from violent reprisals—a phenomenon that cut across religious groups. Outside the city, Christians that had converted in the colonial period and were in “service” relations (i.e., sepidars) to landowning Sikhs and Hindus now found themselves in similar relations to migrating Muslims, who were given land that was abandoned by populations migrating to India. In other words, Christians, and others who were from lower status backgrounds, remained in a similar position of being a landless, mobile group of labor in the countryside. The continued migration of these groups expanded and replenished the labor supply for waste work, as both bureaucratization and informalization proceeded throughout the post-colonial and up to the contemporary moment.
For instance, at the end of 1952, fifteen thousand gagare, many of whom were refugees from east Punjab and had no source of livelihood, found themselves within Lahore's rural peripheries. Gagare are a lower-status group that are placed in a similar social position as the chuhra, and a portion of them would also convert to Christianity through the late 1950s and 1960s.Footnote 30 A member of the municipality at the time observed that this group “had no source of livelihood,” and despite undersecretaries of different departments having “[abided] by government policy to employ them in existing departments,” it remained the case that “no possible arrangements have been made to assist these helpless gagare.”Footnote 31 He thus proposed “these gagare should be employed as sweepers or they should be placed in the post of assistant supervisor,” with the only objection coming from the health officer.Footnote 32 In this discussion, no mention was made about their occupation, but a missionary account from a couple decades later provides a vivid description:
They are among the most despised of the Schedule Castes because of their occupation as scavengers. They collect rags and papers, and dispose of the carcasses of dead animals, selling the hides to tanneries and the bones, horns and hooves to fertilizer factories. They also catch, keep, and apply leeches for medicinal purposes. Many still eat carrion since it is readily available to them in their occupation, and are also known for eating rats. This habit degrades them most in the eyes of all other communities. Some Gagare are nomadic, living in small quilted tents stretched over bowed branches. Their furnishing consists only of mats for sleeping. Others live in shacks or simple adobe brick homes in ghetto areas.Footnote 33
Sanitation workers employed by the municipality in Lahore are almost entirely Christian, and though the term chuhra is often used as a slur for these workers, their actual caste background—whether they are from gagare, chuhra, or other lower status groups—remains ambiguous as such backgrounds are shrouded in stigma and equivocation. In the case of Faisalabad (another city in central Punjab), Beall notes Christians employed as sanitation workers for the municipality are from the gagare, and an older study on private sweepers in Karachi describes them as Christians coming from a chuhra background.Footnote 34
Municipalities have adopted policies that allow for this occupation to be inherited across generations, something that ensures access to work and income for these groups, but this was a historical moment, when waste and the work surrounding it were becoming organized by municipal departments and expanding outside the parameters of the state. It was lower status groups that would be brought into this regime of governing waste, populations, and processes of urbanization. Even if the municipality did not employ these groups (i.e., through contractual labor), many of them still engaged in waste work through “customary” relations, which involved remuneration in different forms and intimate contact within localities. Whether within the parameters of the state or outside its boundaries, these groups mobilized a variety of relations, among themselves and within wider society, to situate themselves within urban centers across Pakistan that have expanded over the past several decades.
Waste Work(ers) in the City
During the years before and after Partition, much of Lahore's population and built environment was concentrated within the Inner City and its surrounding localities, but since the late 1970s, the city has expanded in a southernly direction. Along with this spatial growth has been the development of institutions and infrastructures, especially around waste in the form of sewage, solid waste, and recyclables. State institutions, such as the Lahore Development Authority and Lahore Cantonment Board, in conjunction with real estate markets and housing developers, have spearheaded the city's spatial growth. And with financial and technical support from the World Bank,Footnote 35 a Solid Waste Management department was formed in the early 1990s, which included the expansion of its labor force and mechanical resources. The population growth has, expectedly, involved proliferating waste generation, especially in the form of disposable commodities and recyclables. All these processes—spatial, institutional, infrastructural, and consumptive—have intersected to expand the demand for waste work, which has been filled by the migration of these lower status groups. Yet, as a mobile, landless group of labor, their access to this form of work and the attendant income that it makes possible must be placed alongside their efforts at settling within the city's urbanizing landscape.
The migration of these lower status groups to Lahore as a growing urban center and subsequent access to work and income has been facilitated by biraderi relations. Biraderi brings together patrilineal descent, or kinship, with “fraternal solidarity,” which unites members of a group that may reside within a village or be dispersed across larger geographies.Footnote 36 These relations have been mobilized by sanitation and waste workers as they migrated to Lahore over the past few decades and sought to attain employment and secure settlement within its boundaries. Though these relations are similar across these lower status groups, their distinct trajectories of migration and work are noteworthy.
Sanitation workers in Lahore who are largely Christian have come into waste work through three trajectories. First, a contingent of sanitation workers, especially those employed in the Inner City or nearby localities, inherited their position from a parent. One sanitation worker who was employed in the Inner City and inherited his position from his mother, who had inherited it from her mother, described the situation as follows: “We've been working here from generation to generation.” Alongside municipal proceedings that repeatedly mention “sweeper colonies” in the Inner City, many sanitation workers employed in the Inner City recalled how, before moving to other areas of Lahore, they or their kin resided in parts of the Inner City that were exclusively inhabited by Christians, many of whom worked for the municipality and/or privately collected waste—or what was once called “customary” work. These workers tended to situate their lineage and settlement within the city of Lahore, especially its traditional center, and not anchor themselves to other parts of central Punjab. Those who did not inherit their position and found employment in the municipality through other means migrated from other areas of central Punjab. Since central Punjab would be partitioned in 1947, some of these sanitation workers’ families came from those areas falling in east Punjab, an area that is now in India. The migration of low and non-caste Hindus was not uncommon, as illustrated in the arrival of gagare mentioned in the previous section.
Second, and related to this trajectory, are those sanitation workers who resided in Lahore's peripheries and gained employment as the city expanded over multiple decades. These workers have also at times inherited their positions from their parents (both fathers and mothers) and at other times, found employment through their own kin and sociopolitical relations within a particular locality—especially areas of the city that have developed since the 1980s. Lastly, a large cross-section of sanitation workers have migrated from other areas of central Punjab surrounding Lahore, such as Sahiwal, Okara, Pattoki, Sheikupura, and Kasur. Those who migrated to the city or were residing on its peripheries described their kin engaging in agricultural work, such as harvesting crops for landowners or tending to livestock, in rural areas. These workers came from families that did not own much land or resided on common land in rural areas that fell under the control of the government (e.g., shamlat land). Many of these workers entered this line of work in the late 1980s and early 1990s, as they either migrated to the city or their settlements were brought into Lahore's expanding boundaries. Employment was secured by mobilizing kin and other sociopolitical relations, such as a relative (an aunt, uncle, or cousin) who already was employed in this department, giving a bribe to a supervisor, or gaining the favor of a union councilor or other elected official.
While Christians have continually replenished Lahore's expanding labor supply for waste work, something facilitated by both the municipal department's recruitment and inheritance policy and kinship ties among Christians, waste workers from the informal sector, who operate separate from governance institutions, had slightly different trajectories. One of these trajectories has been by an entire group gaining and dominating access to specific types of waste materials. One such group, the odh, belonging to phakiwas or khana badosh (nomad or “gypsies”), that are considered lower status, are involved in the recycling of construction materials, especially used or broken bricks. This stems from their current and past employment as daily wage workers in construction. The narrative provided in interviews was that, as much of the Inner City and surrounding areas needed to be rebuilt in the years following Partition, the odh were employed as construction labor, which lines up with the situation of these groups in the late colonial period mentioned earlier. In doing so, they were able to exercise control and mobilize themselves over the construction waste being produced.
Other groups have had similar trajectories, though their past occupations do not necessarily match with the type of materials being accessed. For instance, in the early 1990s approximately fifteen to twenty families belonging to the changar group migrated from Okara to Lahore and have been settled on its peripheries since then. One member of this group, who eventually became a numberdar (leader), rose to prominence when he accumulated wealth by setting up a warehouse supplying cardboard for recycling purposes to manufacturers of packaging in the Punjab. As kin have migrated to Lahore since then, they have gained access to a particular kind of waste work: Many that reside in these settlements collect cardboard of different types from small and medium-sized shops in nearby residential and commercial areas and supply those materials to warehouses located in and around the settlement. Importantly, the cardboard they collect is the product of and will be reused for packaging commodities. Though these trajectories of work and migration have led to these specific groups working with specific kinds of waste, this is not always the case, as a variety of lower status groups work with a variety of kinds of waste in Lahore's informal sector.
While sanitation workers from the municipality do collect waste from households, which is considered their “private work,” a vast network of waste workers from the informal sector collect a variety of types of waste from a range of residential and commercial establishments. These waste workers come from many of the lower status groups mentioned above, such as the changar, gagare, nau-Muslim, dindar, and other kammi (“servants”) groups. These waste workers collect materials from houses, shops, and shopping centers in Lahore, and sort out what is considered garbage from what can be sold forward to other junkyard owners, waste traders, and other middlemen. In addition to waste work in Lahore, they either return to the countryside for seasonal agricultural work or intermittently travel to other urbanizing areas in Pakistan to engage in waste work. As the mentioned example of cardboard suggests, lower status groups have moved beyond waste work and become traders and suppliers of waste that are connected to more “formalized” sectors of the economy involved in commodity production, but that has also meant others from higher social status groups, with greater financial resources (i.e. land, income, etc.), have also entered the waste economy, mostly as traders, junkyard and warehouse owners, and/or middlemen.
Settling in the City
As should be clear by now, migration to Lahore is as much a matter of waste and work as it is of finding settlement in the city. Sanitation and waste workers describe the areas they found employment and work in as being sparsely populated, having undeveloped land not built upon, and lacking infrastructures for transportation, drainage, and sewerage. As many Christians, whether as sanitation workers or not, migrated to Lahore, they found settlement in different areas of the city where Christians already resided or started to settle. Many sanitation workers reside in settlements such as Badami Bagh, Youhanabad, and Greentown that have a majority or sizable Christian population. In fact, a variety of Christian organizations acquired land from governmental authorities or private owners and then sold that land in smaller allotments to Christian migrants to these areas, which is especially the case in newer settlements on the city's peripheries. Though many sanitation workers reside there, residents of these settlements come from a variety of religious and socioeconomic backgrounds. These settlements, being religiously, socially, and economically disparate, have, to a certain extent, destabilized the linkages between waste work and status.
Though similar to sanitation workers as migrants from areas in Central Punjab, waste workers from the informal sector, who are largely Muslim, have not been able to rely upon Christian organizations for securing settlement. The waste workers just mentioned involved in cardboard recycling were resettled on multiple occasions and were only settled on the current land that they reside upon, though some continue to live in semi-permanent structures, after their numberdar was able to purchase land. This numberdar, after doing so, then sold parcels of that land to others who migrated at the time or would do so in the following years. Those who purchased this land did not do so with a lump sum but through payments over many years. Other waste workers, especially those that collect waste from households, do not generally own the land they are settled on. Rather, they reside in quasi-legal settlements of hut clusters known as jhuggees that dot Lahore's landscape. These settlements have historically been on governmental land but have also been placed on privately owned land more recently, especially as the price of land has risen in light of speculative real estate markets. Some have been able to purchase land upon which they have built homes in the past decade or so, and have done so largely through their own accord or with the assistance of their immediate family. They have not relied upon their extended kin networks or wider sociopolitical relations, and access to land has been more individuated among directly related kin.
As gestured to throughout this section, these settlements have grown up on the city's peripheries since the late 1970s and early 1980s. Their growth has been entwined with the development of Lahore on multiple fronts since then. One of the starkest illustrations of these entanglements is the fact that many who reside on Lahore's peri-urban hinterlands in quasi-legal settlements take back recyclables to their huts where they are recycled and sold to junkyard owners and middlemen. It should be clear by the histories I traced out in this section and the preceding ones that those placed into categories of person based on work or occupation and their presumed caste background have organized themselves in Lahore's waste economy. In doing so, waste workers have gained access to work and income and found settlement in a highly stratified urban landscape like Lahore.
Conclusion
This article has not discussed the abjectness of waste work in South Asia, where social stigma and bodily pollution, informed by notions of caste purity, continue to be attached to persons from low or non-caste backgrounds. The continued prevalence of these practices cannot be attributed to the anachronistic influence of Hinduism in Pakistan or as evidence of caste among South Asian Muslims.Footnote 37 Rather, as this article has argued, caste is a historical category through which forms of social stratification and exclusion are organized and reproduced across Pakistan and South Asia.Footnote 38 This is why I have worked to move beyond the abject, and thus with questions of purity, stigma, and pollution: These approaches obscure, first, the historical and social conditions out of which waste work has emerged and been organized, and, second, how groups placed into the category of the “abject,” or “impure” and “unclean,” have been active participants in these very same processes.
The aspirations traced out in this article are born out of highly stratified and unequal conditions that characterize life in urban Pakistan. However, if we reduce our analyses of these uneven processes to the wasteland of modernity and contemporary capitalism, or for that matter, caste hierarchies, we also obscure the intimate tensions between contemporary forms of urban inequality and the life-making aspirations of these groups. By participating in processes of urbanization, these groups strive to realize multiple possibilities and aspirations out of waste work and find a place for themselves and their social relations in cities like Lahore in Pakistan, where urban landscapes are fraught with long-standing forms of social stratification and exclusions.
