Article Manual Scavenging: Issues of Caste, Culture and Violence Mohd. Shahid 1 Abstract Manual scavenging—a despised vocation of manually sweeping household dry latrines and carrying human excreta—still exists in many parts of India. This inhuman practice has traditionally been enforced on a specific group of peo- ple labelled manual scavengers. More painful is the audacity and the deliberate dereliction of duty by the state machinery that blatantly denies the existence of inhuman practice of manual scavenging. The position of the Jajmans (patrons), rather comfortable with the fact that fellow human beings clean their excreta, is not very different. While the worst are the cultural constructions that legiti- mise this inhuman practice by changing what Galtung called moral colour from red/wrong to green/right or at least to yellow/acceptable. In the rural Indian social matrix, the task of manual scavenging has been mostly enforced on women. This article aims to map how the practice of manual scavenging sustains on the hegemonic relationship built around gender, caste and culture. Johan Galtung’s typology of violence—direct, structural and cultural—is used to demystify the issues of violence in manual scavenging. Keywords Manual scavenging, Balmiki women, cultural violence, Johan Galtung Manual Scavenging: Context and Quantum The practice of manual scavenging negates anything remotely related with the ideas of freedom, justice or even of the humanity per se. Manual scavenging exists at many sites, including in railways and municipalities, but in this article, it exclusively refers to the cleaning of household dry latrines and carrying away Social Change 45(2) 242–255 © CSD 2015 SAGE Publications sagepub.in/home.nav DOI: 10.1177/0049085715574187 http://sch.sagepub.com 1 Maulana Azad National Urdu University, Hyderabad, Telangana, India. Corresponding author: Mohd. Shahid, Professor, Department of Social Work, Maulana Azad National Urdu University, Hyderabad, Telangana, India. E-mail: shahidamu@gmail.com at HOGSKOLAN I GAVLE on June 2, 2015 sch.sagepub.com Downloaded from