Ashes to ashes

Hey there. Sorry for the silence.

I’ve just come back to Ahemdabad after running an eight day workshop with 50 people from four communities in Gujarat. We’re working to set up four local video units with these individuals, with the aim that each of these units would become capable of producing educational videos for use in local schools by the end of the 18 months timeframe.

There’s lots more that I can tell you on that front – stuff about the role of community-owned media, questions about how to improve teaching on core subjects like maths, science and so on through local stories and how kids in rural and urban parts of Gujarat that have and continue to be affected by religious, gender and caste problems. But rather than filling you up with all that, I thought I tell you a story about the system for washing up plates at the training centre where we were staying.

Dalit Shakti Kendra is a training centre with a difference. Its not your normal corporate hospitality joint with anonymous rooms and even more anonymous sessions. The centre was set up by a local organisation for Dalits – also known as Untouchables. The caste system determines that certain occupations are ‘reserved’ for certain groups in society. For Dalits, these are occupations from toilet cleaning, removal of dead bodies and animals from streets to sewage clearing. Its general means cleaning up after everyone else who’s higher up the caste ladder has finished making their mess. Some of you will know the sophistication of the caste system is such that even within the untouchable caste there’s a more-or-less official a pecking order!

Anyway, the training centre was set up in order to enable Dalits to break out of their traditional occupations by providing them with training and support in alternative livelihoods (Shakti means power in Hindi).

On our first day at the centre I was finishing my lunch and saw that everyone was going outside with their empty plates. Some of the others who I was with had gathered around a small table with their large metal thalis. I walked over and saw them gathering some grey powder and putting it into their dirty plates.

The use of ash as a cleaning agent is quite common across rural India and at DSK the process starts with how the food is prepared. Huge pots and pans (I’m talking vats big enough to get seriously lost in) are used to prepare the curry, rice and dhal for the people at the training centre. Local wood is used for the cooking fires. And the resulting ash is collected in small metal basins and placed on a small table outside.

After we’d had our dinner we took our greasy plates over to the washing up centre, dropped a couple of handfuls of ash into dirty thali and scrubbed out the grease with it. After this there are a series of five basins one filled with plain water for rinsing, a second filled with water with a very small amount of soap and two more for rinsing. Once we’d soaked up the grease we got rid of the ash and then dipped our way through the four basins and with a bit of elbow grease. What we each ended up with was a clean plate ready for drying. After returning the clean plates to the dinning hall, magically there are four hundred plates ready for the next meal.

I found the system interesting from an environmental point of view; with hundreds of people to cater for each dirty plate ends up using a very limited amount of water and instead of non-renewable chemical soaps and detergents it uses the by products of the fuel.

But what I found even more fascinating is the underlying questions about our ways of living together that it raised. The design seemed to be asking me about whether oppressions are perpetuated by what we do or by how we do them. There is an argument that because plates need to be washed its better to pay someone to do that for you and therefore create a job for them. But I wonder, is the situation quite different in a society where certain groups are trapped in these types of role because of the existing social norms and structures? How similar is this argument become to saying that it is okay kill someone because it creates a job for a grave digger?


rupesh