No one would have believed in the last years of the twentieth century that this world would be in such tumult over so little that is understood. Unimaginable violence, most of it for triumphs that are obscure. Politics buried so deep in their actions, that the motives disappear in the flames, and the suffering itself becomes the end. Aerial bombardment of entire countries, cold-blooded massacre of citizenries. Armies set in place to hold people down, and themselves held down by their inexperience and bewilderment. Populations motivated for revenge rather than for revolution, harmed beyond belief and then diverted from their oppressors to take their justice where it comes. A cheapened world, where values are given over to pieties, and tears quickly dry into the very rage that created them in the first place. Time is circular: this is the myth of eternal return, with the avenging angel appearing once as Demon, then Angel, then Demon again. This is our cauldron.

A group of African American and Dalit scholars are at work on a project on the similarities in the histories and lives of African and Dalit peoples. Scholars such as Ivan van Sertima, Runoko Rashidi, V. T. Rajshekar, and others form this submerged network of Afro-Dalit literature. The Afro-Dalit project seeks to posit a common origin for Africans and Dalits as a means to call for political solidarity in the present. “Afro-Dalits of the Earth, Unite!” explores the framework of Afro-Dalit scholarship, critiques it, and then offers an alternative approach to the interconnections in African and Indian life. Rather than endorsing epidermal determinism, this article calls for a polycultural approach to the cosmopolitanism of our lives.

In a sub-field of Marxism, A.G. Frank and E. Laclau debated the intricate details of Frank's critique of the “dualist thesis”. That thesis argued that capitalism failed to overcome feudalism in its colonial adventure; Frank argued that to posit the duality between capital and feudal forms does violence to the structural integration of feudal forms into the logic of capital. Frank's critique, however, remained wedded to a level of abstraction which was unable to reveal the full implications of his suggestions. In this essay, I attempt to show that the logic of capital during colonial rule produced a municipal sanitation regime which relied upon the control over the labor of manual sweepers mediated through jobbers, overseers and contractors. Far from being the embodiment of “tradition”, the sweepers since colonial India bear on their bodies the marks of capital. This essay reveals those marks as well as demonstrating the integral relation between the logic of capital and barbaric colonial rule.

I. Sewage Under Capitalism

The preservation of the wealth and welfare of nations, and advances inculture and civilisation depend on how thesewage question is resolved.(von Liebig, 1850s).

Delhi is a very suggestive and moralising place—such stupendousremains of power and wealth passed and passing away—and somehow I feelthat we horrid English have just ‘gone and done it’,merchandised it, revenue it, and spoiled it all. (Emily Eden, 1838).

Veena Oldenburg argues that after the Rebellion of 1857 British colonialofficials inaugurated a process of urban reconstruction following threeimperatives: safety, sanitation and loyalty. To make the cities of Indiasafe, clean and loyal, the colonial regime exerted a measure of‘social control . . . In an era when tinkering with the structure ofsociety had been officially and unambiguously forsworn.’. If the highest officesof the colonial regime proclaimed its remove from society, she argues, the‘lowest levels of decision making and action’, intruded effectively toreconstruct the social fabric of urban life. In this essay, we will examine this lowest levelof the colonial regime in the local government of Delhi (the Delhi MunicipalCorporation [DMC], the commissioner's office, the army, the Public WorksDepartment [PWD], the railway officials) and its relations with the local nobility(the rais and amirs), the merchants, and working people.