Agency in plural social fields

Understanding the potential of law to upend structural discrimination requires interrogation of competing systems of authority: on the one hand, social and economic systems that anchor discrimination and, on the other, laws and their enforcement mechanisms that may either disrupt or reinforce discriminatory paradigms. Accordingly, this article draws on socio-legal scholarship that examines how law interacts with other systems of meaning and power. The concept of semi-autonomous social fields describes the presence of multiple ordering structures within a social field (Moore Reference Moore1973) and provides a robust framework for understanding how legal norms intersect with social fields that are already structured by existing rules and customs (Moore Reference Moore1973; Merry Reference Merry1988). Internally generated practices within semi-autonomous or plural social fields may dictate compliance or noncompliance with state-made legal rules (Moore Reference Moore1973; Ellickson Reference Ellickson1991).

An understanding of the law as operating within overlapping social fields that extend beyond formal judicial and legislative institutions and negotiated by multiple social processes has been meaningfully applied to understanding political relations between state and non-state actors in contemporary India (Bornstein and Sharma Reference Bornstein and Sharma2016). Relatedly, Elizabeth Armstrong and Mary Bernstein (Reference Armstrong and Bernstein2008) describe society as composed of multiple and often contradictory institutions. This approach views institutions as overlapping and nesting. While laws may introduce systems of meaning, layered institutions anchor these systems and infuse them with material consequences (83). Reading Armstrong and Bernstein together with Sally Engle Merry (Reference Merry1988), this article marks the boundaries of social, economic, and legal institutions or structures through the processes by which they generate rules and coerce, induce, or undermine compliance (Moore Reference Moore1973). Animating this theoretical framework, the second section of this article explains how manual scavenging is anchored in social and economic structures of caste-based hierarchy and patriarchal gender relations that sustain the practice, despite constitutional and legal prohibitions that aim to eliminate caste-based discrimination and violence.

In plural social fields, law and democratic processes may be among the many forces instrumental in establishing schemas—cognitive frameworks that organize and interpret information, distinguishing permissible from impermissible action. Law and society scholars have long recognized that laws and democratic processes derive authority in social interactions both because they create instruments for state enforcement and because they provide symbolic resources by reframing practices as rights violations (Albiston Reference Albiston2005). In this regard, legal knowledge figures as both an end and means of action: it provides both normative principles and strategic resources for the conduct of social struggle (McCann Reference McCann and Sarat2004). As explained by Stuart Scheingold ([Reference Scheingold1974] 2004, 218) in the American context, claiming a right invokes a symbol of legitimacy that links personal grievances to the more profound guarantees of constitutional rights even in contexts where litigation is more likely to enforce existing social orders.

My understanding of how various actors—from government officials to activists—animate legal prohibitions on discrimination in contexts governed by competing systems of authority draws from social theory concerned with detailing the anatomy of structure. Anthony Giddens (Reference Giddens1984) and William Sewell (Reference Sewell1992) have explained social systems as being comprised of differently authoritative schemas or ordering principles that are reproduced over time. Schemas may be generalizable, inter-subjectively available, and applicable across contexts and interactions. The authoritative force of a particular schema is based on the accumulation of resources, a term that refers to anything that serves as a source of power in social interactions (Giddens Reference Giddens1984; Sewell Reference Sewell1992, 16). Individuals use resources not only in the situations in which they first encounter them but also in distinct contexts—a process that has been referred to as “transposition” (Sewell Reference Sewell1992, 19, 21; Levitsky Reference Levitsky2014).

Furthering this line of analysis, Mustafa Emirbayer and Ann Mische (Reference Emirbayer and Mische1998) provide a framework for understanding agency as it relates to structure. They disaggregate agency into three component elements: iteration, projectivity, and practical evaluation. The iteration of past thoughts and patterns, and their routine incorporation in practical activity, stabilizes structures that come to define relationships of power. Projectivity, by contrast, requires the generation of possible future trajectories of thought and action. Finally, practical evaluation is the capacity to make judgments about possible courses of action in response to evolving situations (Emirbayer and Mische Reference Emirbayer and Mische1998, 971, 979–80). Iteration, projectivity, and practical evaluation are all ways in which individuals and collectives mobilize schemas and resources within and across structures. These elements of agency provide a framework for understanding both how systems of power are reproduced and how they are contested. The fourth section of this article provides an account of how caste and gender-based discrimination and forced labor practices are reproduced and stabilized through iteration, including within communities engaged in manual scavenging. It also describes how police and panchayats (local governance institutions) tasked with implementing prohibitions on manual scavenging instead transpose manual scavenging practices within the administrative apparatus of the state. The fifth section describes how social movement actors leverage laws prohibiting manual scavenging to disrupt pervasive norms of domination, discrimination, and violence by challenging the social and cultural schema that anchor manual scavenging.

Law, Vernacularization, and discursive integration in contexts of domination

Empirical research attuned to the interaction between various structures has attended to the processes by which laws, rights, and practices of democracy are institutionalized by social actors—a process that has been referred to as “vernacularization.” Merry (Reference Merry2006) describes processes of vernacularization as falling along a continuum depending upon how extensively imported institutions are integrated into local cultural forms and practices—whether they are replicated, hybridized, rejected, or subverted. The integration of new frameworks into local cultural forms and practices may germinate at an individual level, but it must transcend the individual and become a social process in order to enact broader cultural, political, social, or economic changes. Attending to the relationship between discursive integration, vernacularization, and change, forgoing scholarship presents processes of vernacularization and discursive integration as a catalyst for activating organized political demands (Levitsky Reference Levitsky2014). My research, however, shows that such processes may be reversed in highly repressive contexts. In contexts of domination, collectivization through engagement with social movements may be instrumental and prior to the vernacularization of a rights discourse that embeds individual experiences of discrimination in collective experiences of oppression and subjects them to organized resistance.

Sandra Levitsky (Reference Levitsky2014) introduces the term “discursive integration” to describe processes of synthesizing new logics with familiar patterns of thought and action. Attending to the role of discursive integration in catalyzing political action, Levitsky provides insight into why Americans have little inclination for translating their private care problems into political demands for social policy reform. She lays out how discursive integration can activate political engagement, ranging from consciousness raising to becoming active in making organized political demands (15).Footnote ³ Levitsky’s framework includes a conceptual shift to understanding an individual experience in the context of a broader social reality as a necessary, if not sufficient, condition for public action (16).

In studies of discursive integration in the context of caste politics in India, however, caste-based collective identification precedes vernacularization and mobilization. In her political ethnography of the Yadavs, a powerful northern Indian caste, Lucia Michelutti (Reference Michelutti2007, 639) lays out what she refers to as the process of “vernacularization of democratic politics”—the ways in which values and practices of democracy become embedded in particular cultural and social practices. Michelutti traces the emergence of new dominant castes in Indian electoral politics. She focuses on how local idioms of caste, kinship, religion, and politics in northern India inform how the Yadavs navigate the political world. Also attending to the role of vernacularization in caste-based mobilization, Suryakant Waghmore (Reference Waghmore2013) has applied the concept of “vernacularization” to understand how Dalit activists come to effectively communicate their local needs to foreign donors.

While Grace Carswell and Geert De Neve (Reference Carswell and De Neve2015) do not use the term “vernacularization,” their ethnography of legal mobilization by Dalit Arunthathiyars—a group considered to be at the bottom of the caste hierarchy in Tamil Nadu, India—considers how litigation under the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes Prevention of Atrocities Act, 1989 (1989 Atrocities Act) impacts Dalit mobilization—at once institutionalizing Dalit rights and catalyzing political backlash from dominant land-owning communities.Footnote ⁴ These vernacularization studies share an interest in how social actors infuse new perspectives and practices within their social and cultural contexts. In each of these studies, shared identification on the basis of caste—whether for dominant or oppressed caste groups—serves as a collective foundation for the discursive integration of laws, rights, and practices of democracy. Studies that establish the potential for shared identification to provide a foundation for discursive integration are of course not limited to the Indian context. Lynette Chua (Reference Chua2015), for example, describes how sexual orientation and gender identity minority activists in Myanmar vernacularize human rights discourses as a strategy for cultivating oppositional consciousness, creating shared grievances, and catalyzing collective action.

This research makes two distinct contributions to forgoing scholarship on vernacularization, discursive integration, and legal mobilization. First, in Michelluti, Levitsky, and Chua’s accounts, vernacularization and discursive integration are presented as activating strategic and organized political demands. My research, however, shows that such processes may be reversed in highly repressive contexts. In contexts of domination, collectivization through engagement with social movements may be instrumental and prior to discursive integration or the practice of coming to understand individual experiences of discrimination as embedded in collective experiences of oppression that can be resisted. In these contexts, collectivization may be a condition of vernacularization, mobilization, and resistance, further underscoring the critical importance of social movements in upending discrimination and violence.

Second, this article builds upon, and contributes to, research on vernacularization and discursive integration by providing insight into these processes for groups resisting entrenched practices of domination in highly restrictive contexts for political action. Michael Collins (Reference Collins2017) has studied legal mobilization strategies by the Dalit Panther Iyakkam (DPI) (Dalit Panther Movement), and Carswell and De Neve (Reference Carswell and De Neve2015) have considered later legal mobilization of the 1989 Atrocities Act by Dalit Arunthathiyars, both in Tamil Nadu, India. My study of mobilization to end manual scavenging joins this vein of literature, lending insight into how social movements deploy legal resources to wage campaigns in contexts where government institutions not only fail to implement protections but also engage in discriminatory hiring and caste-based forced labor practices.

My focus on Dalit women once engaged in manual scavenging is particularly instructive because at the nexus of caste and gender-based hierarchy their experiences present a “systemic edge,” a site of analysis at the margins where techniques of governance are most visible and brutal (Sassen Reference Sassen2014). To explain how mobilization can occur in such a challenging context, I introduce the term “circumventive legal resistance”: the practice of bypassing barriers to enforcing the law but using the symbolic resources of the law. In this case, Dalit women leverage the cultural significance of manual scavenging being illegal to disrupt deeply entrenched collective cultural schema of caste-based discrimination and exploitation (Bourdieu Reference Bourdieu1977). This article, then, contributes to the project of understanding how the law works in India through attention to what people believe law is and what they do with this knowledge as they make decisions in their everyday lives. By studying contestations over manual scavenging in the everyday practices of local government institutions and in the mobilization of Dalit social movements, I also contribute to an understanding of the Indian state as a trans-local institution that is made visible in local practices (Gupta Reference Gupta1995, 376) and accessed through a “plurality” of various vertical and horizontal nodes (Marwah Reference Marwah2021).

Caste-based hierarchy

For centuries, civil, social, and economic life in India has been regulated by the caste system. This system of social stratification designates ranked groups defined by descent and confined to particular occupations. Caste designation impacts the ability to control land and other productive resources, establishing broad congruence between class and caste (Chakravarti Reference Chakravarti2005; Deshpande Reference Deshpande2011). At the base of India’s caste hierarchy, Dalits have historically been landless or nominal landholders and restricted to enslaved agrarian labor and stigmatized work (Mosse Reference Mosse2018), including manual scavenging, funerary work, and leather work (Thorat Reference Thorat2013). The caste-based social hierarchy is anchored through a web of discriminatory spatial, economic, and untouchability practices. Practices of restricting Dalit communities to stigmatized work reproduce an iterative script of caste-based social exclusion: engagement in forms of labor viewed as unclean renders a person untouchable, and daily practices of untouchability delineate boundaries between hierarchically designated caste groups (Silliman Bhattacharjee Reference Silliman Bhattacharjee2014). Dalit communities commonly live in segregated areas on the periphery of villages and urban areas. They are also routinely excluded from common water sources, public spaces, and temples. Spatial segregation and untouchability practices are justified by the ritualized avoidance of unclean tasks and the corresponding assignment of these tasks to “polluted castes” (Silliman Bhattacharjee Reference Silliman Bhattacharjee2014; Mosse Reference Mosse2018).

Dalits engaged as manual scavengers are usually from the Hindu Valmiki sub-caste,Footnote ⁵ held at the very bottom rung of the caste-based social hierarchy. Considered fit for only the most “polluting” labor, this caste group is tasked with manually disposing of human excrement and performing other unsanitary tasks. Upper caste households who rely on manual scavenging for sanitation historically pay meagre in-kind subsistence support rather than cash wages. In-kind payments include leftovers, grain, old clothes, and conditional access to upper caste land to collect wood and graze livestock (Silliman Bhattacharjee Reference Silliman Bhattacharjee2014). Dominant castes may impose social and economic sanctions and even threats of violence for non-compliance with caste-designated structures. Women reported that, since dry toilets must be cleaned daily, they faced pressure from the community if they missed even one day, including powerful members of the community coming to their homes and demanding they return. Women who left manual scavenging reported such harassment lasting as long as two years. Women who leave manual scavenging also reported that people from dominant castes threatened to displace them from the village or exclude them from community resources. This denial of access has devastating consequences for landless Dalit communities who rely on access to private and community land to graze livestock and collect wood. Women also reported threats of violence for leaving this work (Silliman Bhattacharjee Reference Silliman Bhattacharjee2014). Retaliation against Dalits who leave manual scavenging is consistent with broader patterns of retaliation against Dalits who resist the old system of hierarchy, ranging from social boycotts to violence (Béteille Reference Béteille2000; Shah Reference Shah2000; Jodhka Reference Jodhka2004; Gorringe Reference Gorringe2005, Reference Gorringe2012; M. Mohanty Reference Mohanty2007; Teltumbde Reference Teltumbde2010).

Scholarship on the persistence of caste has been central to studies of contemporary India across disciplines (Vaid Reference Vaid2014; Mosse Reference Mosse2018). Since the inheritance of occupations is a distinctive feature of caste (Dumont Reference Dumont1980), its endurance in socioeconomic and labor market contexts has been a robust site of inquiry. Recent studies conclude that, while groups considered higher caste have had opportunities for occupational mobility with the evolution of the Indian economy, mobility opportunities for groups considered lower caste remain largely restricted (Thorat and Attewell Reference Thorat and Attewell2007; Thorat and Newman Reference Thorat and Newman2010; Vaid and Heath Reference Vaid, Heath, Heath and Jeffery2010; Deshpande Reference Deshpande2011; Vaid Reference Vaid2012; Das Reference Das2013; Jodhka Reference Jodhka2016; Mosse Reference Mosse2018). Policy and legislative measures to promote equal rights and opportunities for Dalits in employment, including government reservations, have had only limited impact on access to the labor market. Dalit workers continue to face exclusion in hiring and remain confined to caste-designated occupations or employment in the unorganized sector where they earn low wages, experience poor working conditions, and have no employment or social security (Deshpande Reference Deshpande2011; Kompier Reference Kompier2014; Jodhka Reference Jodhka2016; Mosse Reference Mosse2018). These challenges in accessing the labor market create yet another barrier to leaving manual scavenging.

Patriarchal gender relations

Structures of caste- and gender-based subordination are intimately linked, with patriarchy intrinsic to the formation of caste categories (Chakravarti Reference Chakravarti1993, Reference Chakravarti2005; C. Mohanty Reference Mohanty2003; Shah et al. Reference Shah, Harsh Mandar, Deshpande and Baviskar2006; Deshpande Reference Deshpande2011; Still Reference Still2017; Gorringe Reference Gorringe2017). Control over women and their sexuality is integral to maintaining patrilineal caste delineation that secures control over land and other productive resources for dominant castes (Welchman and Hossain Reference Welchman and Hossain2005; Gorringe Reference Gorringe2017). Within this schema, control over all facets of a woman’s life vests in male members of the family, beginning within the natal household and continuing in the conjugal household (Chakravarti Reference Chakravarti1993). While scholarship at the intersection of gender and caste has observed that Dalit caste groups have historically been more egalitarian toward women than groups considered upper caste, researchers have also documented the undervaluing of Dalit women within the family and workplace (Deshpande Reference Deshpande2011) and practices by Dalit men of displacing ignominious caste-designated obligations onto their wives, daughters, and mothers (Mosse Reference Mosse2012, 182; Silliman Bhattacharjee Reference Silliman Bhattacharjee2014).

Women practice manual scavenging at the intersection of caste-, gender- and class-based systems of domination. Among communities who practice manual scavenging, gendered divisions of labor shift the burden of the traditional forms of manual scavenging onto women. While manual scavenging has evolved to encompass a range of remunerated and unremunerated practices, the traditionally unremunerated practice of removing human excrement from public streets and dry latrines is reserved to women. According to the International Labour Organization’s estimates, 95 percent of private and village toilets in India are cleaned by women. While men may work as day laborers, their income is unreliable. Accordingly, families rely on the food handouts that women receive daily for survival. At the intersection of gender and caste, Dalit women are also particularly restricted in job mobility, further locking them into caste-designated roles such as manual scavenging (Deshpande Reference Deshpande2007; Mosse Reference Mosse2018, 427).

Legal prohibitions on manual scavenging

Article 17 of the Constitution of India, adopted in 1950, explicitly abolishes untouchability. Its practice is forbidden in any form and punishable by law. Specific prohibitions on untouchability are set out in the Protection of Civil Rights Act, 1955 (1955 Civil Rights Act),Footnote ⁶ and the 1989 Atrocities Act.Footnote ⁷ In 1949, soon after independence, India’s central government began appointing committees to end manual scavenging.Footnote ⁸ Laws prohibiting manual scavenging include the 1976 amendments to the 1955 Civil Rights Act; the Employment of Manual Scavengers and Construction of Dry Latrines (Prohibition) Act, 1993; and the Prohibition of Employment as Manual Scavengers and Their Rehabilitation Act, 2013.Footnote ⁹ Successive legislative and policy attempts to end manual scavenging have taken two distinct approaches: a technocratic approach aimed at ending the practice by eliminating dry latrines through national sanitation schemesFootnote ¹⁰ and a civil rights approach that criminalizes hiring for manual scavenging and addresses historical injustice at the root of the practice.Footnote ¹¹

The field work for this article was conducted in 2013, immediately following the passage of the Prohibition of Employment as Manual Scavengers and Their Rehabilitation Act, 2013 (2013 Act), which outlaws all forms of manual scavenging and prescribes penalties for perpetuating the practice.Footnote ¹² Emblematic of the civil rights approach to ending manual scavenging, the 2013 Act recognizes a government obligation to correct historical injustices suffered by communities subjected to manual scavenging, including by addressing the socioeconomic context in which manual scavenging persists. Accordingly, the Act includes provisions for cash assistance, scholarships, housing, and access to alternate employment.Footnote ¹³ In rural areas, the 2013 Act assigns implementation to panchayats, the elected village-level administrative councils responsible for economic and social development initiatives.

Manual scavenging practices persist in contexts governed by competing systems of power. Entrenched caste and patriarchal hegemonies are in tension with constitutional commitments to equality and gender, caste, and religious non-discrimination. Interactive and overlaid, caste-based, patriarchal, and constitutional schemas are decisively at ideological odds. Within these plural social fields, anchored by varied institutions, the research that follows seeks to understand, first, whether and how laws prohibiting manual scavenging are operationalized by local institutions and, second, how they are mobilized by impacted communities. With this approach, this article joins a line of scholarship that situates social movements in dynamic interaction with structures of power, linking resistance to hegemonic structures and foregrounding contention (Ewick and Silbey Reference Ewick and Silbey1998; Ferree Reference Ferree2003, 308).

Symbolic configuration of manual scavenging as a legal entitlement

Under the jajmani system, a system of aristocratic patronage found in villages of the Indian subcontinent (Platteau Reference Platteau1992), lower castes perform various functions for upper castes and receive grain or other goods in return. According to this schema, Dalit dependents may have hereditary relationships with upper caste families, meaning that several generations of a Dalit family may work for corresponding generations of one or more upper caste families (Deshpande Reference Deshpande2011). This system establishes a schema of stable, hierarchical relationships rooted in servitude and coercive labor (Platteau Reference Platteau1992; Deshpande Reference Deshpande2011). For women who practice manual scavenging, the jajmani system establishes that, in exchange for living on land owned by upper caste families, they must clean toilets and perform other labor associated with “unclean” tasks. These relationships are typically passed from generation to generation, and women usually have no choice in the matter. In this way, women “inherit” the right to clean toilets in private households. When they get married, they join their mothers-in-law in daily rounds of collecting and disposing excrement to eke out a livelihood.

For women engaged in manual scavenging, the practice has historically been symbolically configured as a legal entitlement akin to a property right. Women from communities who practice manual scavenging refer to manually cleaning toilets as their jagir (estate)—terminology that evokes a grant of administrative authority and the right to collect revenue from the designated area. A jagir may vary in size, typically ranging from ten to thirty households, although one woman reported marrying into a family with a jagir that spanned one hundred families. A larger jagir increases the value of the inheritance. Describing the configuration of caste-based labor as a property holding, Kuldeep, a Rajasthan-based community organizer, explained: “In some communities, women inherit the keys to the jewelry locker. In the Valmiki community, they inherit the work of cleaning excrement from toilets.”

The configuration of a jagir as a family asset functions as a barrier to women leaving manual scavenging. Badambai, from Piplia Rao Ji, Madhya Pradesh, described taking four years to leave manual scavenging work, due in part to fear of losing her jagir: “The threat that I would be thrown out from the village and replaced made me come back to do the work. I felt ‘this is our jagir, no one else can take it.’ From 2003 to 2007 I was in and out of doing the shit-cleaning work.” As described by Badambai, her jagir granted her an entitlement to remain within the boundaries of the village. Her jagir was imbued with the status of owned property: in Badambai’s account, it was subject to alienation, theft, or loss and could be taken from her if she did not “do the work.”

Despite the degrading nature of the work, a jagir confirming the right to practice manual scavenging within the village in return for in-kind remuneration is considered an asset in a context where Dalit women face significant barriers to accessing the labor market. Bhuri from Bharatpur city in Rajasthan, for instance, described trying to learn an alternate trade but returning to manual scavenging when she was unable to get her sewing business off the ground:

Holding a jagir is not only tied to livelihood but also to social standing. Women described taking significant efforts to acquire a jagir and the social position corresponding with this holding. Tasleem, from Tirana, Madhya Pradesh, purchased a jagir and formalized her purchase with a deed of sale printed on stamped paper. She explained:

In Tasleem’s account, the jagir takes the form of property that can be purchased and sold. Their purchase confers the right to undertake gendered forms of labor: Tasleem is entitled to clean dry toilets, and her husband is entitled to do general sweeping. Her purchase of the entitlement to do manual scavenging and sweeping work is established in an agreement printed on non-judicial stamp paper—a paper with a revenue stamp that is used in non-judicial transactions between parties. The use of non-judicial stamp paper—a practice associated with sale deeds, affidavits, transfers of immovable property, agreements, and wills—symbolically configures her jagir as a transferable asset akin to property. Twenty-eight years after manual scavenging has been constitutionally prohibited, Tasleem purchased a jagir rooted in caste-based practices, symbolically securing the legal status of her purchase through the use of non-judicial stamp paper.

Put another way, in this transaction, the practice of manual scavenging becomes anchored in both the caste-based lineage of servitude represented by the jagir and the institution of property rights. Among women who practice manual scavenging, this hybrid institutional anchoring reinforces the unfaltering social and personal expectation that they undertake this dehumanizing form of caste-based labor. These practices live on as legitimate in the imaginaries of Dalit women because caste and patriarchal structures are so normalized that, left undisrupted, they can eclipse the potential for an alternative livelihood and way of life. Kiran from Bhonrasa village, Dewas district, Madhya Pradesh, a leader in the civil rights movement to end manual scavenging explained: “When we were manual scavengers, we were like the proverbial frogs in a well. We always faced discrimination, so we never really applied our brain to understanding why society is this way.”

Replication of manual scavenging by local institutions

The 2013 Act prohibiting manual scavenging assigns enforcement to government institutions at the local and state level. Rather than enforcing the prohibition, I found these institutions reproduce caste and gender-based relationships of power by exclusively hiring Dalit workers to clean dry latrines and do other sanitation tasks. Arti Valmik from Bhatiagar village, Damu district, Madhya Pradesh, was hired to clean dry toilets in the very state offices tasked with enforcing laws to end manual scavenging: “Before I left this practice, I was working in the police department where I was hired to clean the dry toilets. I also used to clean dry toilets for the Chief Executive Officer of Bhatia block. I cleaned some houses in the village but for the most part I worked for government offices.”

Law and invoking resistance

Social workers and women who have already left manual scavenging cultivate awareness that manual scavenging is an illegal form of caste-designated forced labor akin to slavery. This framing is diagnostic and prognostic (Emirbayer and Mische Reference Emirbayer and Mische1998): it challenges women who practice manual scavenging to understand that the exploitation they face is illegal and what they can do to address it. A Madhya Pradesh-based community organizer explained: “We believe that if they realize this practice is slavery, they will break their shackles and demand to be free. We help women realize that they have the power to say no to this work. People who have liberated themselves in one village motivate people in the next village to end this practice. This is a movement for liberation.”

Despite the significant barriers to implementation described in the previous section, when taken up by social movements, laws prohibiting manual scavenging play an integral role in disrupting pervasive norms of domination, discrimination, and violence by challenging the social and cultural schema that anchor manual scavenging. Community organizers work to diffuse these legal norms as a framework for resistance, and women who have left manual scavenging describe legal knowledge as instrumental in this process of shifting perception, transforming ideology, and instilling a sense of entitlement. Arti, from Batiagarh in Damoah district, Madhya Pradesh, explained: “If they threaten us now, we know that the Dalit Act [the 1989 Atrocities Act] applies. We know there is a law that says we are not allowed to do this work. We told the dominant castes that now we know these laws. Now that we know the laws, they do not pressure us.”

For Arti, laws prohibiting manual scavenging and caste-based discrimination and atrocities shift the terms of interaction between herself, other women who have left manual scavenging, and people from dominant castes that once coerced them to engage in the practice. Arti emphasizes not only that she now knows the laws that apply when she is threatened but also that she and the other women from her village are informing castes considered dominant that they understand their rights. Here, Arti’s legal knowledge provides both normative principles and strategic resources for conducting social struggle. Claiming the legal right to leave manual scavenging work invokes a symbol of legitimacy that links her resistance to the more profound guarantees of constitutional rights.

Prior to taking remedial action to give up manual scavenging, however, a violation must be perceived or named (Felstiner, Abel, and Sarat Reference Felstiner, Abel and Sarat1981). Women who leave manual scavenging redefine the practice as an illegal form of caste-based exploitation rather than a legal entitlement by understanding the impacts of the practice on their health and experiences of social discrimination. Women who have left manual scavenging reported that when they first encountered the campaign to end manual scavenging they did not understand why it was in their interest to give up their inherited practice. Laldkuwar from Chattarpur district, Madhya Pradesh, explained:

Through engagement with the campaign to end manual scavenging, Laldkuwar disrupts the iterated script of manual scavenging as a valued inheritance by understanding the health consequences of this practice, including “constant nausea and headaches, respiratory and skin diseases, anemia, diarrhea, vomiting, jaundice, trachoma, and carbon monoxide poisoning” (Silliman Bhattacharjee Reference Silliman Bhattacharjee2014).

Taslim Bi linked manual scavenging to the untouchability and discrimination her children faced in school: “At first, I did not understand why people treated us as untouchable, then by speaking with women and men from [the movement to end manual scavenging], I understood that they make us do their filthy work and then discriminate against us on this basis. It is a circle.” From this process of problematization, Laldkuwar’s and Taslim Bi’s cognizance of manual scavenging as a violation has emerged. In Laldkuwar’s account, manual scavenging has come to be dislodged from the caste-based schema in which it is scripted as an inheritance and recharacterized as a form of slavery. Taslim Bi comes to understand how manual scavenging practices anchor generational forms of discrimination, marking herself and her children as targets of discrimination. While engaging in the interactive process of naming and blaming, Laldkuwar also describes her practical evaluation of whether to leave this practice (Emirbayer and Mische Reference Emirbayer and Mische1998, 971, 979–80), deliberating over whether to leave manual scavenging over the course of two or three conversations with women who had already left the practice.

Circumventive legal resistance

For women who resist manual scavenging, reproduction of caste-based practices within state institutions limits access to formal legal relief. Laws prohibiting manual scavenging and caste-based discrimination open up a space for contestation, but, without access to legal enforcement, contestation takes alternate forms. Conditioned by institutionalized forms of caste-based domination, the change processes described in this final section, draw on law to make claims but circumvent direct legal pathways—processes I refer to as circumventive legal resistance.

Although women who leave manual scavenging evoke and even engage formal legal pathways in naming rights violations, their resistance unfolds along alternate trajectories, including collective public refusal of manual scavenging and seeking informal resolution and mediation by local authorities to address threats of displacement and violence for leaving the practice. These strategies make legal claims while circumventing the direct mechanisms for enforcing these claims, facilitating relief beyond the exclusionary parameters of law enforcement in contexts of domination.

Articulating systemic violence and projecting resistance

The emblematic, primary symbol of resistance and protest strategy among women who leave manual scavenging is public collective refusal of manual scavenging by all women engaged in the practice in a particular village. As Kiran from Bhonrasa village in Dewas district, Madhya Pradesh, described: “In our village, there were 26 women from the Hela and Valmiki community that came together on the same day to leave this work. We went to the marketplace, brought our baskets and burned them down. We started a collective to support each other, Garima Shakti Sangathan [Dignity Strength Collective].” Disrupting ongoing social practices, women refuse manual scavenging by burning the baskets once used to collect human excrement. Burning baskets symbolic of manual scavenging unsettles ritual associations and metonymically refuses the relationships of authority that belie the practice. This symbolic recomposition takes elements of meaning tied to women who practice scavenging and the baskets they use—symbols of subordination and untouchability—and brings them together in a combination that foregrounds their agency in resisting coercive labor. This solidarity is integral to resistance. Public, collective refusal of manual scavenging not only signals resistance but also projects solidarity and organizational achievement. Like Kiran, many women reported that the initial act of collectively burning their baskets prompted them to form collectives to support one another in withstanding community pressure to return to manual scavenging (see Figure 2).

Figure 2.

Women refuse manual scavenging by burning the baskets once used to collect human excrement. Credit: Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh, 2013.

Laldkuwar described how after burning their baskets she and other women from her village spread awareness about laws that prohibit manual scavenging: “We told them emphatically that we will not do this work. We told them that those who hire us to do this work will be sent to jail for six months. We also put up papers on the walls of the village so other people came to know the law.” Laldkuwar described invoking legal authority to reinforce her right to disrupt caste-based labor practices. Although local law enforcement hitherto has failed to enforce prohibitions on manual scavenging in the village, Dalit women publicize the law as a framework for resistance. Women who resist manual scavenging, both individually and collectively, reformulate past patterns of caste- and gender-based domination by projecting alternative future trajectories grounded in a consciousness of legal rights. In burning their baskets, they challenge hegemonic caste- and gender-based norms by altering their relationship to the cane basket as a symbol of the structures that define the social fields they inhabit.

Informal resolution through formal enforcement channels

In situations of unequal power, rights discourse can also be used as leverage to broker informal resolution. While this study did not uncover even one case of formal police action against individuals or institutions that perpetuate manual scavenging, I did identify cases in which police and other officials evoke the law to informally intervene on behalf of women who left manual scavenging. For instance, in November 2012, twelve Valmiki women in Parigama village, Mainpuri district, Uttar Pradesh, came together to collectively refuse manual scavenging. When they refused to clean the dry toilets in the village, they were threatened by members of the dominant Thakur caste and then threatened again in a public meeting. Guddidevi, a leader from Parigama village explained how these threats escalated in intensity. First, the women who left manual scavenging were threatened in their homes that if they did not return to manual scavenging, they would be denied grazing rights and be beaten with sticks and stones. Then, six women were called into a meeting of upper caste men and told that if they did not resume the work they would be beaten. Guddidevi recalls being told: “We will not let you live in peace.” After two weeks, the threats escalated. More than twenty upper caste men confronted not only the women who left the manual scavenging but also the Valmiki men. They demanded that the men start sending their wives and mothers to clean the village toile or they too would be beaten.

In response to these escalating threats, three women from the Valmiki community—Guddidevi, Sarojadevi, and Meenadevi—sought police intervention. First, they went to file a complaint at the local police station, five kilometers away. The police officer at the Alau Tahsil police station refused to file the complaint. Then, together with a community organizer, they traveled by bus to Mainpuri district headquarters to appeal for support to the superintendent of police. The superintendent of police not only registered their complaint on November 24, 2012, but also followed up with local police and administrative authorities. Two days after the superintendent of police intervened, community organizers persuaded government officials to call a meeting in Parigama between the Valmiki and the Thakur communities. In the meeting, the police gave verbal warnings against any further attempts to require women to return to manual scavenging. The visit had an instant impact in stopping threats of eviction and violence. Gangashri, who was at the meeting, recalled: “The police told them, ‘If you try and force them, we will put you in jail.”

Compelling women to resume manual scavenging through threats of violence constitutes a violation of the 1955 Civil Rights Act and the 1989 Atrocities Act. Rather than file criminal charges and investigate allegations—a process that could result in imprisonment of the perpetrators—the police traveled to Parigama and evoked the law as a warning without actually enforcing the law to address the rights violations at hand. In this instance, absent the prospect of winning legal enforcement on prohibitions to end manual scavenging, community organizers leveraged police presence and the threat of potential future enforcement to stop threats of eviction and violence against women leaving the practice. This approach drew upon legal and enforcement authority to resist caste-based threats and end manual scavenging in Parigama while circumventing barriers to actually enforcing the law that are rooted in unequal relationships of power within the village (see Figure 3).

Figure 3.

“We told the police, ‘We are being forced to do this illegal work and want to file a report.’ The police officer would not file the complaint. We … reached the Superintendent of Police. He did not file a complaint, but he came to our village and told the Thakurs [upper caste group] that the threats must stop.” Credit: Guddidevi, Mainpuri district, Uttar Pradesh. © Digvijay Singh, 2014.

Similarly, in Bhorasa, Madhya Pradesh, when twenty-six Valmiki and Hela women burned their baskets and left manual scavenging, community organizers called upon the district collector and police officers to come to the village to inform the community and the panchayat that manual scavenging is against the law. In Ujjain District, Madhya Pradesh, where Valmiki families were allotted land by the government that was illegally and forcefully occupied by people considered to be of a higher caste, police refused to file charges but, at the behest of community organizers, intervened informally to help them take possession. Patterns of refusal by police to formally enforce laws prohibiting manual scavenging and caste discrimination by taking action against upper caste families and government officials that perpetuate the practice; and their simultaneous willingness to informally intervene on behalf of women who resist manual scavenging, shapes strategic action by women who resist manual scavenging.

For instance, in response to the systematic exclusion of the Valmiki community from using public cremation grounds in Piplia Rao Ji on the border of Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan, Lalibai, supported by a lawyer and social worker, approached the superintendent of police with a written report explaining that exclusion from public cremation grounds violates the 1989 Atrocities Act. They called for the superintendent of police to file a first information report (FIR), initiate a formal criminal investigation, and hold a village meeting to inform the community that Valmiki families have a legal right to use the cremation grounds. Lalibai also informed the police that, if they did not take any action, she would report to the media and State Commissions on Human Rights and Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes. In her initial engagement with the police, Lalibai called for both formal and informal intervention. She also warned local authorities that she was prepared to evoke state and national-level pressure.

While the superintendent of police refused to file a FIR and initiate a criminal investigation, he did assign a head constable to hold a village meeting, including the sarpanch (village head) and other influential members of caste communities considered dominant. During the meeting, the constable went over the 1989 Atrocities Act and called for an agreement allowing the Valmiki community to use public facilities. Kranti, a lawyer who helped in guiding this case, explained the outcome of this strategy:

Lalibai agreed not to file a FIR on the grounds that she would no longer be barred from using public facilities, including public cremation grounds and the ration shop. In this case, a compromise was considered more desirable than legal action since legal action threatened to further polarize the community rather than promote dialogue. The next time that Lalibai tried to use the cremation grounds, the sarpanch accompanied her to make sure there was no problem.

Lalibai invoked her right to non-discrimination but ultimately pursued informal resolution to address not only an individual dispute but also a pattern of discrimination. This mode of legal mobilization draws upon legal norms but is open to engaging alternate processes. As a political strategy, circumventive legal resistance by Dalit women who leave manual scavenging responds to the reality that formal channels to relief may be largely foreclosed, draws upon the law to invert social scripts of subjugation, and formulates demands outside the bounds of formally prescribed enforcement.