Keshab Roy Choudhury - Week 7

In this blogpost, I shall summarise Of Rasoi Ka Kaam/Bathroom Ka Kaam by Sonal Sharma. Practices of purity and pollution have long been frameworks to analyse domestic household work, however, the author argues that such conceptions are limiting and must be reworked in order to understand caste hierarchies and the realties of domestic work better. They do so by studying the responses of different domestic workers. They challenge the traditional narrative that employers act as agents that cement such practices while the workers are merely passive to the said practice. Understandings of 'dirt' are essential to the way one studies the household space, with scholars differing on the approaches used to analyse the same. Such understandings, the author argues shapes identities within the household. The idea of social space is influenced by understandings of cleanliness, removing the distinctions between public and private and reinforcing class and caste hierarchies. The author notes, through her study, that caste is not the only determining factor of social relations within the household, but religion and region also play a role. Further, it is not only the employers who help in reproducing caste hierarchies, but workers themselves who reproduce the same. Even among workers, there are varying degrees of access to resources and what work they perform, depending on caste and religion. There are complex intersections of caste, class and religion while understanding the space of the home, which is ultimately why a binary understanding of pollution and purity cannot be sufficient to understand social relations within the home.