Living Like a Dalit, Living Like a Cockroach: Sewage Is My Abode

To live “like a Dalit” in a caste society has often meant being forced into a relationship with what the rest of society refuses to see. Not metaphorically, but materially—through sewage, waste, drains, and the infrastructures that carry the city’s excess. The city prides itself on cleanliness, on the smooth disappearance of filth, on the illusion that waste is managed, contained, and removed. But this disappearance is never complete. It depends on bodies—specific bodies—whose lives are tied to what is discarded.

For generations, Dalit communities have been positioned at this intersection between the city and its waste. The sewer is not just a site of labour; it becomes a condition of existence. It shapes where one lives, how one is seen, and what one is allowed to become. The proximity to sewage is not accidental—it is structurally assigned.

This assignment produces a life lived under conditions of constant exposure. The smell of drains, the texture of waste, the risk of toxic gases, the physical danger of entering confined spaces—these are not occasional encounters but recurring realities. The body learns to navigate them, but it is never untouched by them.

Yet what is most striking is not only the material condition, but the way it is translated into social meaning.

The one who works with waste is made to carry its stigma. The labour becomes identity. The person is not seen as someone who handles sewage, but as someone who belongs to it. This is how caste operates—not only by assigning work, but by attaching that work to the body in ways that cannot be easily shed.

The city depends on this arrangement while pretending it does not exist. Sewers run underground, out of sight. Cleaning happens at odd hours, away from public attention. The labour is necessary, but it must remain invisible. This invisibility allows the illusion of a clean, modern city to persist.

But invisibility is not neutrality. It is a form of erasure.

To live in such a system is to inhabit a paradox. One is essential to the functioning of the city, yet excluded from its recognition. One ensures cleanliness, yet is denied dignity. One is present everywhere, yet seen nowhere.

This condition produces not only physical strain but also a profound sense of social distance. It shapes interactions, opportunities, and aspirations. It limits movement—not always through explicit prohibition, but through subtle forms of exclusion that signal where one belongs and where one does not.

At the same time, this life is not reducible to suffering alone. It is also marked by resilience, by the ability to navigate hostile conditions, by forms of community and solidarity that emerge within shared experience. These dimensions are often overlooked, overshadowed by the dominant narrative of degradation.

But to acknowledge resilience is not to justify the condition. It is to recognize that life persists even under constraint.

The problem is not that some people work with waste. The problem is that this work is tied to caste, that it is inherited, stigmatized, and unequally distributed. It is that the burden of maintaining the city’s cleanliness falls disproportionately on those who are denied the benefits of that very cleanliness.

To describe this as “living in sewage” is not to reduce a life to filth, but to expose the conditions under which that life is forced to exist. It is to confront the uncomfortable truth that the modern city, for all its claims of progress, continues to reproduce deeply unequal relationships to space, labour, and dignity.

What is required is not sympathy, but transformation. A rethinking of how waste is managed, how labour is valued, and how dignity is distributed. A recognition that no one should be structurally bound to the most hazardous and stigmatized forms of work.

Until such a transformation occurs, the sewer will remain not just an infrastructure, but a social boundary—one that separates those who can forget about waste from those who must live with it.

And in that separation lies the enduring reality of caste.