Assa Doron and Robin Jeffrey's Waste of a Nation begins with a question that has plagued colonial administrators and Nationalist reformers alike: “Why is India so filthy?” As India's rising middle class increasingly distance themselves from dirty work and equate cleanliness with modernity, waste has once again become the target of state intervention. As Narendra Modi launches the Swachh Bharat (Clean India) Mission, a public sanitation campaign to deliver public toilets and to clean up streets, dirt and filth continue to characterize the conditions of work and living for many of the less well-off. Taking as their starting point Dipesh Chakrabarty's suggestion that cleanliness indexes a modern “civic consciousness,”1 Doron and Jeffrey argue that the solution to the challenges of waste and sanitation means first understanding waste as a “binding crisis” whose effects cross the boundaries of class and caste but that, as a result, is capable of eliciting...
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