As of January 2023, Akbar Ali has been living on the outskirts of Bangalore for over four years. He speaks a Hindi that is heavily touched by a lilting Bengali accent in a hushed tone of resignation. He has been unable to secure gainful employment, and has a severely disabled brother to take care of along with his family – his savings are fast depleting. The brother sits on a chair outside their shanty, half-muttering something, completely immobile. Ali’s wife and mother stay with him, and they politely offer me a glass of sweet lassi and a bottle of Sprite. As I tackle this strangely appealing offering, struck by the hospitality, they narrate their woes, as though I am in some position to actually help them. The thought is immensely humbling and dispiriting.
When it rains heavily, the waters of the neighbouring sewer overflow right into their homes. Bangalore recorded its highest annual rainfall ever in 2022. Akbar Ali and his family live in a sea of shanties that spreads out across waves of undeveloped tracts on the northeastern fringes of the city, where only a few apartment buildings and schools exist. It is predominantly occupied by a very specific group of people – Bengali-speaking Muslims who work as waste-pickers. A few miles south of the upmarket enclaves of Whitefield, much of the locality’s garbage comes here to be aggregated and segregated in these shacks occupied by migrant labourers. They are mostly Muslims from the state of West Bengal, as well as a few who have crossed over from Bangladesh.
Whitefield, a locality named after an Englishman called White who envisioned an exclusive community for Eurasians and Anglo-Indians in the 19th century, is better known for what Bangalore has now become synonymous with: an IT hub. Offices of Dell, IBM and Cisco operate from here, as do those of local consulting giants like Infosys and Wipro. It is also a plush residential area, where fine wining, dining and shopping opportunities are aplenty. Much of Whitefield’s garbage is packed off to this settlement of sheds, shanties and half-houses I have arrived at, where close to 40,000 Bengali Muslims are reported to live and work. Most of the area is owned by well-heeled, politically influential landlords, who rent out shacks to the workers for a few thousand rupees a month. One of the landlords, as one of the workers recounted, has a tendency to arrive drunk and spout abuses at them all, just to reinforce power over his dominion.
These migrant workers eke out an existence by bringing the garbage of the city into their very homes, to be cleaned and segregated by hand. The refuse of the metropolis travels to many of these settlements across the city’s outskirts, on agonisingly pedalled cycle rickshaws, or in a fury of autos, vans, trucks and other assorted modes of transportation. This entire enterprise – a million-dollar industry involving corporations, politicians, NGOs, environmentalists, landlords – hinges on this lowermost yet absolutely vital workforce of manual waste-pickers for whom life is immeasurably tough. They are paid no fixed salary, and must subsist only on the money they make from turning over the junk, which is abysmally low: anywhere between Rs 3 and 10 per kilo of segregated waste.
Being strangers in a strange land, Ali and his neighbours are exploited by the ruling establishment and face social isolation too. Immigrants constitute half of the city’s population, but some are treated more derisively than others. Only recently, a young Bengali man with a bodybuilder’s physique was thrown out of a city bus, even while he was ready to purchase a ticket because he was unable to speak in Kannada with the conductor. The locals who encountered the fallen man on the street advised him to take the matter no further, fearing that “they” might just bulldoze all the shanties in the settlement, purely out of spite, to show these migrants their place.
All this I have come to learn from R Kaleemullah, an activist working with the Swaraj India political party. He is the one who introduced me to Akbar Ali. He opens a rickety shack, right in the middle of the shanties, and ushers me into his makeshift office. A couple of small 7-Up bottles quickly find their way into our hands, courtesy of Kaleem’s hospitality.
Kaleem has been working for the welfare of the Bengali Muslims for many years now, and his face bristles with weary concern. “What kind of stories do you want,” he begins. “You want stories of ragpickers? Bangladesh stories? Murder? Rape? Gang stories? Police?” – trying to impress upon me the enormity of the trauma that these shanties experience. He speaks of a divide even within these shanties, between the Bengali-speaking Indians and the immigrant Bangladeshis. Though their collective fate is largely similar, the latter is loosely linked to a powerful mafia, with connections to high political positions and the local police, Kaleem claims. He says he is “on the side of the Bengalis”. Further, he alleges that the thugs belonging to this mafia are perpetrators of heinous crimes against Rohingya refugees from Myanmar (yet another “other” in this subcontinental stew of Muslim refugees), and possess a fearful reputation. A more arresting allegation he makes is that: “The Bangladeshi immigrants here have impeccable credentials – they have Aadhaar cards and Voter IDs. They form a significant vote bank, and have been surreptitiously sought out by the establishment. On the other hand, the Bengali Indian migrants are largely devoid of any identity cards. They struggle against their anonymity …”
While Kaleem’s rhetoric might imply an easy binary of internal opposition, the bigger truth remains that most of the immigrant labourers are brought here by exploitative traffickers, and are equal victims of dire circumstances. In late 2019, the BJP-led government in Karnataka announced that it would introduce the National Register of Citizens in the state, which was followed by the inevitable displays of local vigilantism and fear-mongering. Demolitions of shanties occupied by alleged Bangladeshi immigrants followed, and hundreds of workers fled the city in terror, fearing torture and imprisonment. The intrepid journalist Sudipto Mondal, who travelled with many of these immigrants on a train back to Bengal documenting the whole event, writes that “the nexus between human traffickers, the Border Security Force (BSF) and the police is an open secret”. The border-crossing is dangerous nonetheless, and there have been instances where guards on both sides have targeted migrants with equal impunity. Bangalore, for many, is a no-man’s land where the smallest homes and hopes can go up in smoke at a moment’s notice.
Kaleem takes me around the Whitefield-adjacent hovels on his motorbike, weaving through mud paths surrounded by mounds of assorted junk. I see flashes of local enterprise – tea shops, provision stores, eateries, hawkers selling vegetables at modest prices. Children play about in the muck, and men bathe by the roadside, where lines of large, blue water cans have been arranged specifically for this purpose.
Kaleem’s presence has a noticeably reassuring effect on the shanty dwellers. He is the man on whose shoulders all their worries fall. The workers pour out their grievances. Living quarters are ramshackle, every family has someone suffering from serious health conditions, and there is never any money to address anything beyond their immediate survival. They have no safety equipment, and must forage through dangerously unclean waste with naked hands. On top of it, their domestic lives are tumultuous. There is no security, of any sort. Kaleem offers consolation where he can, promises what he can afford to, and is constantly receiving calls seeking counsel on some or the other contingency.
“They were all peasants and farmers, basically,” Kaleem says, “who had to leave because the profession is completely untenable there [in the Bengal/Bangladesh region]. What I have heard is that if the Bangladeshis pay Rs 10,000 at the border, they are allowed to cross over. Then they find work as wage labourers.” The rise of a new wastepicking class across India, from Delhi to Hyderabad to Lucknow, populated largely by Bengali-speaking Muslims has been well documented. An intricate network of handlers enables this mass diffusion of itinerant labourers. All manner of extrajudicial atrocities transpire within these shanties, especially by the police. Kaleem flips out his phone and shows me a picture of a young boy, stark naked, hanging from a ceiling fan. “Does anyone hang themselves without clothes? Can’t we see the bruise marks on his body? Who do these people think they are kidding,” he cries, and I see his point. “The police is bahut ganda [really bad] in Bengaluru, really corrupt.”
Someone calls him on the phone for help, and Kaleem asks me to come along. We ride to the shed of a family in panic. The son of a migrant Bangladeshi man has eloped to Goa with a Bengali woman, leaving his own wife and child in the lurch. The woman’s family is threatening to call the police. Kaleem consoles the sobbing wife, and urges her to speak truthfully to the police – “you have not committed any mistake”. “You speak to this young man here, he’s a journalist. He will do stories on both Bangladeshi and Bengali people,” he tells them, pointing to me as though I am the universal conscience present there.
The man introduces himself as Shakir Ali, and when I offer a handshake, he gestures to the black grime on his hands and retracts them behind his back sheepishly. When I ask if he works for the BBMP, he shakes his head and says, “No. Commercial. Commercial.” He is employed by multinational companies who need his efforts in recycling their plastic waste. Only, in their eyes, he is as disposable as the waste he is recycling for them. Wages are bleak, and no safety equipment has been provided for him — housing, education and healthcare are still light years away.
These migrant waste-pickers form the very last rung of the sanitation workers’ hierarchy in Bangalore. Like Indian society in general, the sanitation workers of Bangalore are also further stratified into varying degrees of vulnerability. First come the sweepers, who scour the streets and collect garbage into large piles. Then there are the drivers, helpers and loaders, who move this to landfills and dumping spots. At the bottom of the pyramid are the invisible masses of waste-pickers who manually sort through this putrefying mass of unsegregated garbage, and perform the tasks that nobody else is willing to do.
Excerpted with permission from Rama Bhima Soma: Cultural Investigations into Modern Karnataka, Srikar Raghavan, Westland.
