Mumbai
Past Perfect: Present Imperfect
Visiting the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalay (formerly known as Prince of Wales Museum) was a long time dream of mine, which I fulfilled some months back. Though I made a quick round, I noticed some things which I can never forget:
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1. The wonderfully planned Drains and Sanitation system during the Harappan civilisation were amazing. Harappan or Indus Valley Civilization came around 2600 years Before Christ. The cities at that time were very well planned, with wide streets, public and private wells, drains, bathing platforms and reservoirs. One of its most well-known structures found was the Great Bath of Mohenjo Daro. This made me wonder why and how we Indians are now considered a dirty lot :).
2. The stories of Panchatantra were written about 200 years Before Christ! Not to forget, we had our own way of learning and education which was very effective. And think about the mess that we have made today with our education system and how grateful we are to the Christian Missionaries for opening up their schools in all over India. The fact is that there is no reason why we can’t run our own great learning centres which teach moral values and Indian philosophies alongside the latest sciences. But we can do only if we want to do.
3. I read one notice that King Ashoka had issued for Sopara in Maharastra, 300 years Before Christ. In that notice, he was asking people to take care of customs, and to respect and take care of their mothers, wives, and also addressed many contemporary issues! So when the world is rising now about the issues of importance like gender equality, we were practicing it hundreds of years Before Christ! And think the way we Indians behave now, it seems we have been learning all the bad habits and soaking in all corrupt practices from all the other countries across the years…
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Here is an article which points out both the good and bad things about our Indian concept of hygiene. Please read the lines criticizing us, but also appreciate the areas where we Indians are much more superior in maintaining personal hygiene. (PS: Made some sentences are in red to highlighted) .
A very learned and balanced analysis: [Link]
Contradictions in the Indian concept of hygiene
Namita Bhandare
For those of you old enough to remember the film, there is a telling piece of dialogue in Junoon, Shyam Benegal's 1978 movie in which Nafisa Ali made her stunning debut. The plot is set in the background of the 1857 war of independence and Ali plays the role of a young English girl with whom Shashi Kapoor?a married Indian nationalist?becomes completely obsessed.
The line, which has stayed with me through these years, is spoken by Kapoor's aunt, who disapproves of her nephew's infatuation. It goes something like this: "These English! They use toilet paper."
The wipers and the washers marked an ideological divide between the British and the Indians?with each side convinced of their own cultural superiority.
For the Indians, the wipers or the English, were the ultimate infidels, uncaring of personal hygiene. For the washers, cleanliness is next to godliness. No worship?Hindu or Muslim?begins without some form of ablution. And personal cleanliness is the key to salvation.
The dialogue from Junoon came back to me after reading Winifred Gallagher's review of two books on personal hygiene?Clean: A History of Personal Hygiene and Purity by Virginia Smith (Oxford University Press) and The Dirt on Clean: An Unsanitized History by Katherine Ashenburg (North Point Press) in the winter 2008 issue of The Wilson Quarterly.
The books document the West's discovery of personal hygiene and the dark ages between the 16th and the 19th centuries when bathing was an anathema, with doctors declaring that it caused sickness and disease.
Even today, the French apparently continue to be careless about their daily bath?something that could explain the evolution of the country's perfume industry.
As Indians, we are fond of talking about our cultural advancement by pointing to the Great Bath at Mohenjo-Daro as evidence. While our people were bathing and had evolved a sophisticated sanitation system in our earliest cities, Europeans were (and are) still to discover the rudiments of personal hygiene.
Yet, I can't help but wonder at our laxity where public hygiene is concerned. We wash our hands before and after every meal.
We have concepts that are entirely alien to much of the world: concepts such as jootha, which cannot really be translated into English (when I drink water directly from a bottle, I make sure my lips don't touch the rim, otherwise it will become jootha and no one else will be able to drink from the same bottle).
When we take off our slippers at the entrance to our homes, we do so out of a sense of not wanting to drag the dirt from the streets outside within the sanctum of our dwelling spaces.
But let's face it, our streets are filthy. Over 40 years since V.S. Naipaul noted in An Area of Darkness that "Indians defecate everywhere", little seems to have changed.
Part of the problem, of course, is that we simply don't have enough toilets, despite Bindeshwar Pathak's pioneering efforts with Sulabh Shauchalaya, whose mission is as much to provide public toilets as it is to liberate human "scavengers" from manually lifting and disposing of human excreta.
According to Sulabh's own website, even today 110 million Indian houses have no toilets while another 10 million make do with bucket toilets that cause disease. But that's only half the story. You have only to visit a public toilet at one of our swanky new airports to see the whole picture. We continue to squat on the floor, we forget to flush and the people employed to keep our loos clean are very often too busy chatting or taking a tea break instead of doing their job.
And it's not just toilets. Is there any other nation that is as obsessed with spitting as ours? We step into the streets and are immediately racked with alarming coughs that seem to obligate us to immediately deposit our phlegm in public spaces.
I could go on. In Mumbai, our most cosmopolitan city, local millionaires appoint their homes with imported Italian marble, but wouldn't dream of chipping in to get their grime-encrusted buildings a coat of fresh paint (that is the landlord's job; but since many of the apartments are under rent control, can you seriously expect the landlord to bother about keeping his property ship-shape?).
The stairwells of our magnificent glass and steel office buildings are blotched with paan stains. And although we scrub our apartments clean before such major festivals as Diwali, we think nothing of throwing the dirty water and rubbish down into our neighbours' homes.
In June this year, we saw a full-blown controversy erupt over the location of Gandhiji's statue next to a dustbin at Madame Tussauds wax museum in London. But, for Gandhiji, public hygiene was inextricably linked to human dignity. Taking up sanitation works, including the cleaning of public toilets, was the key to a larger social revolution.
We talk of India as the next global superpower and we point to our sense of personal hygiene as evidence of our cultural superiority. But unless we are as fastidious about our sense of public hygiene, the wipers will continue to still steal a march over us.
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Picture: BBC hosts this picture [Link] and puts a comment: “In Mohenjo-Daro, archaeologists discovered a mysterious building they named the Great Bath. They’re not sure what the building was really used for.” The second sentence is a typical cynic Western view of looking at the Indian or non-White supremacies and positives.
