What the British uncovered quite disgusting in the course of their very long uninvited keep in India was that Indians defecated in open fields, squatting. The Western entire world picked up and echoed this narrative and these toilet practices ended up painted as decisively inferior. A substantial Swachh Bharat mission has now been launched on a war footing and by this yr its concentrate on is to make India no cost of this archaic personalized of open up defecation—which has to go, as it is anachronistic.
To appreciate our old toilet customs, we could dabble a bit with heritage and geography. What lay at their root was the Indian obsession with preventing ‘pollution’ and ‘impurities’ the worst have been (and are) faeces of individuals, together with one’s very own. As a result, the farther absent from residence a person disposed of human excreta, the improved it was. This intended defecating in the open, which was thought of a pretty attractive cultural habit. Utilizing water to clear oneself thereafter was/is non-negotiable and quite a few courses insisted on a complete bathtub right after the unclean act was over and also switching into contemporary clothing.
Till a couple a long time in the past, family members from villages would be horrified to see how toilets ended up not considerably but connected to urban houses, exactly where anyone used the exact same ‘spot’. So pronounced was the revulsion of rural attendees that they would usually insist on venturing out for rest room. As M N Srinivas has said, purity and pollution are amid the quite ideas on which Hinduism rests. In point, Sanskritisation insists, among the other essentials, on the rigid observance of standards of bodily and social hygiene. Any lifestyle that did not use water so passionately and did not exercise these kinds of all encompassing ritual purity was branded as barbarian or mleccha. Call with them was fairly unpardonable.
Most Western civilisations experienced, on the other hand, no these types of fixation with contact/cleanliness or h2o/washing—even when they experienced obtain to clear h2o. Their forbidding chilly was not the only determinant and Europeans (together with their white colonial cousins) had entirely diverse attitudes to cleanliness and water for every se. Bathing was rare and internal clothes were frequently stitched on to bodies for months. This clarifies why flowers, perfumes and aromatics have been constantly in wonderful demand from customers. Human excreta was never ever appreciated any where, but it did not satisfy with the same loathing as in India.
Although some lessons often used improvised soapy components, standard washing of hands was regarded avoidable there. So, when surgeon and obstetrician Ignaz Semmelweis prompt in 1847 that physicians in Vienna clean their arms before and just after functions and deliveries, he was viewed as a crank. He shed his career, experienced a psychological breakdown and died in an asylum at just 47. Even a century soon after the British produced general public their detestation of Indian rest room routines, late Victorian-age British ended up merrily throwing out buckets of faeces and urine collected in their households straight out of their windows.
These have been typically flung out from upper flooring, with out warning, and could tumble on hapless passers-by. Going for walks around this muck was entirely unavoidable. Many documents attest that in the 19th century, when Britain was chaotic ‘civilising’ India, London’s air was really insufferably foul and just outrageously smelly. The Thames river belched of human waste all the time. So unbearable was it that in 1858—the pretty yr when the Crown took India over from the East India Company—a nationwide emergency referred to as the ‘Great Stink’ was declared. Sewerage pipes experienced eventually to be laid as this was unavoidable and it took quite a few several years to finish putting in 13,000 miles of pipes underneath and from London.
Incidentally, both germs and germs had been almost unfamiliar, until eventually Louis Pasteur could show that germs seriously existed and triggered illness. The sophisticated West considered till the mid-19th century that ‘miasma’ or vapours brought sickness. But it took a few decades thereafter for Ferdinand Cohn and Robert Koch to find out bacteria and its remedy. Viruses ended up learned another 10 years later. How, then, was it that ancient Indians connected human excreta with sickness? In their erudite study article printed in June 2018 in a Royal Society journal, entitled The construction and functionality of pathogen disgust, Val Curtis and Mícheál de Barra spelled out that quick revulsion at pathogens was a genetic safeguard. They also mentioned that “human excreta are both equally a major source of pathogenic viruses, microbes 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 this sort of as the Vayu, Skanda and Garuda. They prescribed diet programs and insisted on full hygiene to overcome jwara or fevers and ailment. The Garuda Purana, for occasion, is very clear that ailment is prompted by santapa atmapacharaja or unhygienic behaviors, which bundled toilet types. But the Puranas offered no empirical explanations and are not scientific.
However the West had insisted on its seat-toilet, its flushable model is, in actuality, a the latest invention. But now, following it has ruined the nutritious Indian practice of the squatting rest room by touting that its commode is extra civilised, it is exploring usually. It is slowly realising the virtues of the squatting manner, both for greater bowel actions and healthier knees. Let us hope that India’s uncompromising insistence on utilizing drinking water hits them in which it issues quickly and is adopted.
Jawhar Sircar (Tweets @jawharsircar)
Retired civil servant. Previous Lifestyle Secretary and ex-CEO, Prasar Bharati