The Indian notion of dirt
This must be the rarest of paradoxes. How is it that Indians are so fastidiously clean, but India is so incredibly dirty?......It is then a question of how Hindus define dirt, or "matter out of place". Hindu conceptions of dirt draw their fundamental justifications from deeply ingrained notions of caste. According to the caste principle, all routine substances that come out of one's body, like perspiration, excreta, and menstrual blood are polluting even to oneself. By the same token, hair is also polluting which is why a ritually proper tonsure is a shaven head. The traditional roles of the barber, washerman and scavenger were precisely to absorb specific pollutants so that members of the upper castes could remain "clean"...
...It is not then that Hindus have no notion of dirt, except that it is different from the way it is viewed in the West and in medical books. Most of us do not realise that every civilisation has its own understanding of both dirt and hygiene, strange as it may sound to outsiders. As the ideology of caste runs across religious divides in the subcontinent, it is not surprising that Forbes magazine should have found so much dirt in Dhaka, Karachi and Mumbai...
Dipankar Gupta, 'We Do Things Differently'.
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