Look, Who’s Clean: Hygiene, India and the West
Jawhar Sircar
New
Indian Express, 4th Feb 2021
What
the British found quite disgusting during their long uninvited stay in India
was that Indians defecated in open fields, squatting. The Western world picked
up and echoed this narrative and these toilet practices were painted as
decisively inferior. A massive Swachh Bharat mission has now been launched on a
war footing and by this year its target is to make India free of this archaic
custom of open defection — which has to go, as it is anachronistic.
To appreciate our old toilet customs,
we may dabble a bit with history and geography. What lay at their root was the
Indian obsession with avoiding ‘pollution’ and ‘impurities’, the worst were
(and are) faeces of humans, including one’s own. Therefore, the farther away
from home that one disposed human excreta the better it was. This meant
defecating in the open, which was considered a very desirable cultural habit.
Using water to clean oneself thereafter was/is non negotiable and several
classes insisted on a complete bath after the unclean act was over and also
changing into fresh clothes. Till a few decades ago, relatives from villages
would be horrified to see how toilets were not far but attached to urban homes,
where everyone used the same ‘spot’. So pronounced was the revulsion of rural
guests that they would often insist on venturing out for toilet.
As MN Srinivas has stated ‘purity’ and
‘pollution’ constitute the very
principles on which Hinduism rests. In fact, Sanskritisation insists, among
other essentials, on the strict observance of standards of bodily and social
hygiene. Any culture that did not use water so passionately and did not
practice such all encompassing ritual purity was branded as barbarian or mleccha.
Contact with them was quite unpardonable.
Most western civilisations had,
however, no such fixation with touch/cleanliness or water/washing — even when
they had access to clean water. Their forbidding cold was not the only
determinant, and Europeans (and their white colonial cousins) had completely different
attitudes to cleanliness and water per se. This often rested on the
scarcest of its use. Bathing was rare and inner garments were often stitched on
to bodies, for months. This explains why flowers, perfumes and aromatics were
always in great demand. Human excreta was never liked anywhere, but it did not
meet with the same loathing as in India. Though some classes occasionally used
improvised soapy materials, regular washing of hands was considered unnecessary
there. Thus, when surgeon and obstetrician, Ignaz Semmelweis, suggested in 1847 that doctors in Vienna wash
their hands before and after operations and deliveries, he was considered a
crank. He lost his job, had a mental breakdown and died in an asylum at just
47.
Even a century after the British
made public their detestation of Indian toilet habits, late Victorian-age
British were throwing out buckets of faeces and urine straight out of their
windows. Numerous records attest that in the 19th century, when
Britain was busy ‘civilising’ India, London’s air was actually insufferably
foul and just outrageously smelly. The Thames river belched of human waste all
the time. So unbearable was it that in 1858 — the very year when the
Crown took India over from the East India Company — a national emergency called
the ‘Great Stink’ was declared. Sewerage pipes had finally to be laid as
unavoidable, and it took several years to complete installing 13,000 miles of
pipes under and from London.
Incidentally, both germs and
bacteria were virtually unknown, until Louis Pasteur could prove that ‘germs’
really existed and caused disease. The advanced west believed till the mid-19th
century that ‘miasma’ or vapours brought disease. But it took three decades
thereafter for Ferdinand Cohn and Robert Koch to discover ‘bacteria’ and its
treatment. ‘Viruses’ were discovered
another decade later. How then was it that ancient Indians linked human
excreta with disease? In their erudite research article published in June 2018 in the ‘Royal Society
Journal’, entitled The structure and function of pathogen disgust, Val Curtis and Mícheál de Barra have explained that instant
revulsion at pathogens was a genetic safeguard. They also stated that “Human excreta are both a major source
of pathogenic viruses, bacteria and helminths and an important elicitor of
disgust.” In India, this was embedded in its cultural software and hygiene was
hammered in by religion —like the repeated insistence in Puranas such as
the Vayu, Skanda and Garuda. They prescribed diets and
insisted on total hygiene to combat jwara or fevers and disease. The Garuda
Purana, for instance, is clear that illness is caused by santapa atmapacharaja
or unhygienic habits, which included toilet ones. But the Puranas offered
no empirical explanations and are not scientific.
Though the west had insisted on
its seat-toilet, its flushable version is, in fact, a recent invention. But now
after it has destroyed the healthy Indian habit of the squatting toilet by touting
that its commode is more ‘civilised’, it is discovering otherwise. It is slowly
realising the virtues of the squatting mode, both for better bowel movements
and for healthier knees. Let us hope that India’s uncompromising insistence on
using water hits them soon, where it matters, and is adopted.
(PleaseRead Here to Read the Article on New Indian Express Website)
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