The Pollution Report
In late 2020, Foundation Chamar started a three-year research project looking into the state of pollution in Mumbai. After struggling to reconcile the overlapping pollution logics that shape life in South Asia, the Foundation Chamar compiled a report that considers how we might re-make pollution and waste sciences in India today, inviting us to embrace all the open-ended possibilities for matter.
Foundation Chamar is proposing to build a Sustainable Materials School in place of the neglected Government Leather Working School in Dharavi, Mumbai that is dedicated to supporting artisans, artists and designers working imaginatively with un/touch/able materials.
There is a haze that has settled over Mumbai. It is hard to breathe, to think, to work in the oxygen-depleted coastal city. Driving along the newly-constructed SeaLink highway, the metropolitan skyline is barely visible through the smog; the city looks like an impressionist painting from the late 19th century. The life expectancy for residents of Mumbai has dropped to only fifty years old partly due to all the particular matter (PM), ozone (O3) and volatile organic compounds (VOCs) now transiting within and beyond the urban atmosphere. It is the final day of 2022 and the city holds a score of 300 on the National Air Quality Index (NAQI) based on air quality data collected by the Maharashtra Pollution Control Board (MPCB); the Weather app shows an aerial sketch of the city covered in gradient sheets of yellow, orange and red to invoke a sense of emergency about these high levels of air pollution. Now often compared to the capital Delhi – where air pollution levels far surpass Mumbai and routinely break past the upper limit of the NAQI – Mumbai is on a seemingly irreversible pathway to airpocalypse.
Pollution holds a dual meaning in modern India, where the term locally denotes “ritual states of impurity, along with the contaminating substances and contacts that cause it” at the same time as it more broadly describes “the release of harmful chemical and organic substances into the environment. [1] Tracing these two seemingly-distinct itineraries of pollution politics in Mumbai backward leads us to singular origin point: the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European term “wisós” that would have been widely-used to describe the poisonous forces that heralded death such as venomous snakes, spider and scorpions across Eurasia during the Bronze Age (4500 - 2500 BCE). Language was not only a descriptive apparatus for Eurasian peoples, but one that actively transformed how they related to the many mysterious forces of the world. Words functioned as containers of feeling, abstractly gathering together disparate experiences into singular affectively-charged concepts. The fear-evoking concepts of poison, toxicity and pollution that we have inherited from this shared underlying toxic principle that was crafted at the dawn of civilization in Europe, Africa and Asia has continued to function as heuristic short-cuts for dealing with anything and everything undesirable – from venomous snakes and lust-inducing maidens in medieval India to untouchable workers and hexavalent chromium in 20th century colonial Bombay. [2] These one-size-fits-all strategies, premised on a uniformity of relation with all poisonous substances, have led to the removal, incarceration, maiming, and killing of many lifeforms and synthetic entities unfairly thrust behind the irredeemable banner of poisonous evil.
Rather than embracing the specificities and open-ended possibilities of the many particulate matters and volatile organic compounds transiting through the atmosphere, the Bombay Presidency and the State of Maharashtra have successively cathected this inherited Indo-European logic that pollution is an evil which must be contained, disposed and destroyed whenever it appears. This has been the driving force behind the war on industrial pollution and its producers that has been circumscribed into the spatial planning of the coastal city of Mumbai since the late 19th century when British officials displaced polluting industries (namely leather-working, sanitation, and landfills) to the northern suburbs of the city during the 1850s. [3] Realizing that industrial synthetic pollutants could not be contained within designated wastelands by the middle of the 20th century and were freely flowing through human and animal bodies, the war against pollution in contemporary Mumbai has turned its eye toward eliminating rather than containing polluting industries. Legal action has been steadily increasing in the State of Maharashtra since 2015, when the MPCB became more active than any other state pollution control board in prosecuting industrial violations under the 1986 Environmental Protection Act. Empowered by the political energies of the newly-elected right-wing Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government, the MPCB used its governmental powers to double-down on eliminating certain “polluting industries” over the past several years. After shutting down the last remaining Dalit and Muslim leather workshops of in the northern suburb of Dharavi in 2015 over concerns about chromium disposal in the urban waterways of Mumbai, the MPCB turned its head toward regulating the fossil fuels burned by Parsi bakeries and crematories for their contribution to airborne VOCs. [4] Rather than prosecuting industrial players based on their relative contribution to the increasing levels of PM, O3 and VOCs in the atmosphere of Mumbai, the MPCB has been targeting polluting industries in order of the existential threat that they pose to the social vision of Hindu nationalism. Many political itineraries of elimination often come together in projects of pollution control around the world. In India today, the Hindutvic project of environmental protection intentionally conflates and binds together undesirable social groups with toxic chemical pollutants, marking them both out for eradication.
If we opt to refuse the logics of containment and destruction, what other modes of relation might we champion so that all the PM, O3 and VOCs transiting through the world do not kill us? Pulling back the illusory descriptive project with its commitments to the structuring logics of toxicity, containment, and atomism, we are free to imagine and craft new relations with the synthetic chemical forces now transiting freely through our collective surround. Unafraid to work intimately, thoughtfully and creatively with un/touch/able materials such as leather, waste, dust, dead animals, synthetic chemicals, and other (polluting) matter, artists at the frontiers of caste society are best-positioned to guide Mumbai through the hazy dreamscape of capitalist techno-modernity into new economies of collective life that are premised on a more complicated and nuanced set of interpersonal and physical relations that refuse to write off anything – from venomous snakes to industrial synthetic chemistry – as evil, polluting entities that can and must be eliminated for society to continue. As Guru Ravidas would instruct us, such a project would necessarily involve the on-going and recursive practice of casting away maya – the phantasmagoric illusions produced by sensory knowledge, feelings and the habits of language – so that we might continue our transcendental quest for divine knowledge about the unknowable and unpredictable real. [5] Bridging the devotional practices of learning about the ungovernable particularities of shape-shifting materiality with the direct hands-on engagement with polluted, earthy matter like Guru Ravidas did with his leather working practice during the Bhakti movement of the 15th century, we might learn how to relate to and live collectively with the temporary haze over Mumbai with its many-headed chromium compounds and particulate rubber tire waste, without consigning the pollutants for containment and destruction.
The Hazy
Surround
When the BJP government banned the sale of beef in the summer of 2015, the MPCB tagged along for the ride; closing down the few remaining leather tanneries in Dharavi in the name of cow protection, but formally only citing concerns about the illegal disposal of chromium in urban waterways. This was not the first time that the small leather making workshops of Dharavi had drawn the ire of government officials. While chromium was initially heralded by British modernizers of the leather tanning industry as a sublime chemical commodity for its ability to quickly produce leather that was softer, more flexible and easier to dye during the colonial era, by the early 1990s, many synthetic trivalent chromium compounds (CrIII) typically used in industrial applications had largely been globally re-classified and governed as hazardous waste materials dangerous to human and animal health because they can easily oxide into the more toxic and carcinogenic airborne form of hexavalent chromium (CrVI).[6] The MPCB led its first raids on the leather industries of Dharavi in the mid 1990s under the same auspices behind the recent spade of closures in 2015, similarly noting concerns about the heavy use and unregulated disposal of chromium sulphates involved in the tanning process. Predictably, other Mumbai-based industries that are heavily dependent on chromium such as electroplating, chemical dyes and paint manufacturing, and steel alloy and glass manufacturing have continued operations uninterrupted by the MPCB or any other environmental governance agencies. Moreover, journalists have widely reported on the total lack of concern about the health and well-being of Adivasi miners from the Sukinda region of Odisha who have been hired by TATA Steel since the 1950s to extract chromite from their own lands so that the multinational conglomerate can synthesize and globally distribute chromium compounds that are used in the range of industrial applications mentioned above.[7] Not only were the tanneries unevenly targeted by the governmental crackdowns on chromium in urban centres, there is little scientific basis for regulating chromium in urban environments with high levels of particulate matter due to the propensity for hexavalent chromium to react with particulate matter once it becomes airborne and immediately return to its less toxic and more docile form of trivalent chromium.[8] While the charges led by the MCPB on the tanneries of Dharavi in the late 2010s signalled the closure of the leather industry in the city of Bombay for many, Mumbai-based artist Sudheer Rajbhar took the rising tide of cow protection and his concerns about the carcinogenic impact of airborne hexavalent chromium on the health of tannery workers (rather than speculation about its population-level effects) as an opening to search for an alternative material for the Chamar leatherworkers of Dharavi.
In 2018, Rajbhar founded Chamar Studio, a cooperative of Dalit artisans, designers and cobblers who re-design and stitch together small objects and leather goods using a politically viable alternative to chromium-tanned leather: naturally-pigmented recycled rubber made from automotive tire waste. The decision to work with reclaimed rubber waste was in direct opposition to the recent fashion trends in India to replace leather produced with animal hides with plasticized “vegan leather” that fit within the dictates of Brahmanical caste society. Despite its greenwashed name, the vegan leather used by major fashion houses in India and elsewhere are not often produced with the environmental values usually associated with veganism but made out of non-recycled plastic that is newly manufactured using the by-products of the fossil fuel industry that emit VOCs into the atmosphere. It would be better if these fashion houses used vegan leather that was produced using post-consumer recycled plastics that have undergone mechanical processes that involve returning the volatile organic compounds residing within their folds back to their earthly carbonic homes. It is this relational principle of reuniting VOCs with their parental carbon sources that lays at the heart of the experimental approach adopted by Chamar Studios who are trying to use activated carbon in the process of reclaiming rubber so that that VOCs within the plasticized rubber tire waste have somewhere like home (other than our organic human bodies) to land once they are released. This trauma-informed and anti-carceral approach to chemical materiality recognizes that the volatility of organic compounds stems from the ways that industrial capitalism alienated bitumen, rubber, carbon and other living carbonic forms from their earthly contexts, condemning them to work for modern consumer society. It is this principle of reunion and return that structures the relation to so-called “pollutants” that lies at the heart of the experimental work that Chamar Studios is conducting to shift the synthetic surround of Bombay. While industrial players have been reclaiming rubber waste since the 1960s, the density of scientific research on the process of reconstituting rubber waste has been driven by their capitalist considerations that have chiefly revolved around cost and quality. [9] It is only recently that environmental scientists around the world have prioritized the consideration of pollutants emitted from synthetic substances and developed processes for removing, containing and destroying VOCs from materials such as plastic and rubber.[10] Rather than casting off rubber waste as polluted with VOCs, Chamar Studios is opting to get its hands dirty and attempt to engage with those “volatile” displaced organic compounds precisely because we are not afraid of all the madness that stems from all the lifeforms and entities oppressed by colonial capitalism. Rather than consigning VOCs residing within rubber waste to perpetual asylum in the dumpsites of Mumbai, Chamar Studios is experimenting with techniques for relating to VOCs that start with looking past the structuring descriptor of volatility to better appreciate the stable organic origins of these chemical compounds that have been haphazardly released into the atmosphere and now end up uncomfortably settling with our bodies. Our dream for these VOCs is far from confining them to house arrest in the activated carbon homing devices that we have introduced into the process of reclaiming rubber, but one that is shaped by a hopeful conviction that they might travel and shape-shift once again, finding other places to not only build generative chemical coalitions, but to transform themselves entirely.[11]
Chamar Studios and its recently-formed charitable off-shoot Foundation Chamar have reclaimed the label of “Chamar” that has long been used to refer to the untouchable caste of leatherworkers in India and is now commonly used as a pejorative for Dalits, reconfiguring the term by infusing it with the ideals of philosophical reflection, imaginative creativity and material intimacy that lay at the heart of their artistic and scientific practices. Foundation Chamar aims to craft new economies to support artisans, designers and artists who are similarly working imaginatively with un/touch/able materials – a term that draws out the differential politics of negation, touch, and ability that shape material relations in South Asia. Drawing on the dense and eclectic tradition of anti-caste philosophy and practice, Foundation Chamar is open to anyone interested in forming better relations with the material world that struggle with and against inherited Brahmanical and colonial orderings of the world.[11] In the summer of 2019, Foundation Chamar received support from the IARTS Textiles of India Grant organized by the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) for a three-part research project involving archival research into the art history of leatherwork in modern India, workshop programming for attending the Government Leather Working School in Dharavi designed to encourage materials research, philosophical reflection and imaginative artistic experimentation, and production opportunities for cooperative members of Foundation Chamar and students attending the Government Leather Working School that is affiliated with Mumbai Polytechnic in Dharavi. Through these research activities which you can learn more in The Leather Archive of India and the Last. Saw. Workshops, Foundation Chamar learned more about the effects of dwindling state investment in the Government Leather Working School in the face of rising cow protection activities: the main building is falling apart, there are no longer any teaching staff in the department and only obsolete technology available for the students to use. Reckoning with the central place that the Government Leather Working School has occupied not only for Dharavi but for the broader Chamar community in Maharashtra since the 1940s, Foundation Chamar is looking to invest in the future of the school. With the support of the principal of the school, teaching staff in affiliated departments and the students attending the school, Foundation Chamar is proposing to re-invigorate the Leather Working School by transforming it into a more politically acceptable Sustainable Materials School. This proposed school will function as a hub for learning about, experimentally researching and reclaiming waste materials guided by the insights of physical chemistry and philosophies of the 15th century Guru Ravidas, whose portrait hangs in the main building of the school. Foundation Chamar considers the proposed Sustainable Materials School to be a natural extension of the frugal and economizing energies of Dharavi where many entrepreneurs have opened specialized waste processing facilities. Such a school would support collective-driven approaches to waste reclamation while helping the community to conduct research on the bio-physico-chemical composition of post-consumer waste materials and experiment with new strategies to build better chemical relations within and beyond the hazy city of Mumbai.
Unmaking
Volatility
It was in the midst of this flurry of industrial activity in 1860s colonial Bombay that the British first started worrying about the waste that was accumulating in the streets of the southern commercial distinct of Mumbai and established the first waste infrastructure in the coastal city by organizing the transportation of street sweepings (consisting of human and animal waste, industrial dust and debris, and tons of garbage) to the northern parts of the city that had been designated as wastelands by the British.[12] Accumulating waste laid the literal groundwork for the British to transform the swampy marshes of northern Mumbai into reclaimed and propertied land for industrial use. By the 1870s, the Bombay Municipal Corporation had relegated its polluting industries to these newly-consolidated wastelands, including all of the small-scale leather workshops, slaughterhouses, and smoke-emitting industries that had opened up in the southern commercial district of colonial Bombay during the previous decade. This spatial clustering of waste and pollution into adjacent districts laid the groundwork for the village of Dharavi to emerge not only as a hub for leather working and industrial activity during the late 19th century, but to become an important urban growth centre that was leading the recycling of plastic and metal waste by the late 20th century. During the 20th century, Indians from across the subcontinent flocked to the marshy wastelands and industrial outskirts of Mumbai in search of better futures. Refusing to cathect the spatial designations proffered by the British colonial office, they remade these districts to suit their own needs and desires producing what social scientists, urban planners, and other neo-colonial researchers have attempted to once again contain and variably described these areas as “slums” (which likely derives from the word “slump” to describe areas that fallen or slumped out of civilized society) and “informal economies” (to insinuate their inability to participate in civilized forms of economic relation).[13] Refusing to see Dharavi as a wasteland that has turned into a slumped entity or sphere of uncivilized economic action, Foundation Chamar looks toward the open-ended scientific research and experimentation that entrepreneurial residents of these areas have conducted with waste and pollution since the 19th century to see Dharavi and the Government Leather Working School as driving forces in the field of recycling, pollution and waste management sciences who have inspired our boundary crossing work with rubber tire waste, VOCs and other un/touch/able matter.
PM, O3, and VOCs move through the world without any concern for geopolitical boundaries, refusing the illusory closed-system spheric containers (such as economies, nation-states, atmospheres, ecologies, wastelands, asylums, etc.) that British officials crafted during the 19th and 20th centuries to better manage the increasing number of people and things falling within the ambit of imperial governance: colonial subjects, foreign plants and animals, industries commodities, microscopic lifeforms, and synthetic chemical waste. Informed by the Malthusian tradition of economic thought, these spheres of activity were imagined as closed systems where particular entities (such as people, animals, bacteria, chemicals, etc.) engaged in a variety of relations (based on different principles such as competition, sympathy, corporation, kinship, affinity, etc.).[14] The objective of liberal governing officials was to maintain natural balance and equity within these scalable spheres of relation by externalizing, removing and eliminating any volatile entities (such as monster-terrorist-fags, irreformable savages, lunatics, parasitic moneylenders, viruses and bacteria, and toxic chemical pollutants). While the arithmetic of closed-system thinking was productively challenged by turn of the 20th century topological and modern physical thought that emphasized the complexity and flux of the world, the fiction of spheres of activity marked by equity and balanced relationality continue to flourish into the present day and underpin contemporary sustainability practices that are premised on advocating for zero waste economies. Often termed circular waste economies, these economic models attempt to account for everything involved in (industrial) production economies to ensure that no waste is left behind that might disrupt ecological balance. When you start considering the physical chemistry of any (chemo-economic) activity, the possibilities for maintaining (ecological) balance totally dissolve because they are premised on this powerful fiction that the world is composed of closed spheres of (chemo-economic) activity. These closed-loop models for waste management are contrary to the anti-caste principles of Guru Ravidas who invites us to look at the continuities in matter beyond the affectively-charged illusions of language, compelling us to appreciate our open-ended enmeshment rather than account for our apparent differences. It is this refusal to arithmetize the world in the name of civilizational advancement that animates the metaphysical critique of caste proffered by Guru Ravidas (and other Bhakti poets in the 15th century) who sought to craft singular, open-ended, and ever-unfolding universalities that are not so different from the visions of entanglement that have been scaffolded by non-deterministic quantum physicists, feminist theorists and decolonial thinkers over the past century and a half. [15] We might be better served by situating ourselves within these overlapping traditions of struggle and jettisoning our one-size-fits-all mathematical models for the world to better appreciate the unpredictable azaadi of (colonized) people and (synthesized) matter to throw the world off balance and dream up new arrangements of collective life by embracing the mess of it all. Foundation Chamar supports research on the physical chemistry of waste because of its epistemological obligation towards all the shape-shifting matter in our universe, including all the volatile peoples and chemicals that have been estranged from the spheric bounds of society in the name of civilization. We created the icon that opens this report with this principle in mind, to appreciate all the open-ended possibilities that reside within all matter regardless of how hazardous and volatile it may become through the machinations of colonial capitalism. It is this dream for another relation to materiality, one that can never be fully graphed, modelled or grasped, that lays at the heart of our vision for a Sustainable Materials School.
Living Off
Balance
Notes & Further Reading
The scholarship on pollution and caste is widespread and expansive, crossing many languages and territories. This helpful wording is borrowed from David Arnold, Toxic histories: Poison and pollution in modern India. Cambridge University Press, 2016.
This formulation builds on scholarly work about the genealogies of terror, especially contributions from Jasbir K. Puar, Terrorist assemblages: Homonationalism in queer times, Duke University Press, 2007 and Jodi A. Byrd, The transit of empire: Indigenous critiques of colonialism, University of Minnesota Press, 2011.
There is a density of literature about the colonial history of Bombay. For more about contamination, infrastructure and urban planning in the city, read Colin McFarlane, "Governing the contaminated city: Infrastructure and sanitation in colonial and post‐colonial Bombay." International journal of urban and regional research 32, no. 2 (2008): 415-435.
For further details, see the “Revised Action Plan for Air Pollution Control” published by the MPCB in late 2019.
You can think of maya as an earlier iteration of Walter Benjamin’s Phantasmagoria. We were inspired to think about maya following incredibly engaging conversations with cultural anthropologist and philosopher Megha Sharma Sehdev whose work on history, aesthetics, and South Asia is so deeply inspiring. To read more about Guru Ravidas on maya, read: Dinesh Prasad Saklani, "Maya as Evil: From Classical Hindu Thought to Bhakti Saints and Kabir. A Historical Exploration." In Probing the Depths of Evil and Good, pp. 41-56. Brill, 2007.
For further information about the making of toxicity in the 20th century, read: Nathalie Jas and Soraya Boudia, eds. Toxicants, health and regulation since 1945. Routledge, 2015 and Nathalie Jas and Boudia Soraya, eds. Powerless science?: Science and politics in a toxic world. Vol. 2. Berghahn Books, 2014.
Sweta Dash and Abinash Dash Choudhury, “In Odisha’s Chromite Valley, Adivasis Are Paid in Poisoned Water,” The Wire, September 7, 2018 https://thewire.in/rights/odisha-chromite-valley-adivasi-tata-mine (Accessed 20 January 2023)
Mariem Nafti, Radhouane Chakroun, Chiraz Hannachi, Bechir Hamrouni, and Habib Nouaïgui. "Determination of chromium (VI) in airborne particulate matter by electrothermal atomic absorption spectrometry." Analytical Letters 50, no. 12 (2017): 2012-2022 and Dhawal Shah, Mirat Karibayev, Enoch Kwasi Adotey, and Mehdi Amouei Torkmahalleh. "Impact of volatile organic compounds on chromium containing atmospheric particulate: insights from molecular dynamics simulations." Scientific Reports 10, no. 1 (2020): 1-9.
For early work on the chemistry of reclaiming rubber, see Rodney N. Hader, and D. S. Le Beau. "Rubber Reclaiming." Industrial & Engineering Chemistry 43, no. 2 (1951): 250-263.
For an example of efforts by environmental scientists to remove VOCs from post-consumer matter, see Cabanes, Andrea, Francisco Javier Valdés, and Andres Fullana. "A review on VOCs from recycled plastics." Sustainable materials and technologies 25 (2020): e00179.
Our ideas about volatility stemmed from discussions with the Toxicity Reading/Working Group of the Technoscience Research Unit at the University of Toronto, namely with Rohini Patel, Sophia Jaworski and Vanbasten de Araújo.
This formulation of thinking a politics with and against builds on Murphy, “What Can't a Body Do?” Catalyst Vol. 3 No. 1 (2017): Science Out of Feminist Theory Part 1: Feminism's Sciences: https://catalystjournal.org/index.php/catalyst/article/view/28791 and Stefano Harney & Red Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study. Autonomedia, 2013.
For more details about the waste politics of Bombay and alternative relations to waste, we highly recommend reading Assa Doron and Robin Jeffrey, Waste of a nation: Garbage and growth in India, Harvard University Press, 2018.
We refuse to rehearse this scholarship on Dharavi.
This formulation about spheres of action and relational thinking borrows from and expands on the ideas of Murphy, The economization of life, Duke University Press, 2017; Banu Subramaniam, Ghost stories for Darwin: The science of variation and the politics of diversity, University of Illinois Press, 2014 and Peter Sloterdijk, Terror from the Air, Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2009.
V. Geetha argues that Ambedkhar’s political philosophy should productively be characterized as an experimental science. Similarly in his work on Dalit environmental thought, Mukul Sharma points to the work of Dalit political theorist Kancha Ilaiah who demands that we engage the technical knowledge infrastructures of Dalit communities and the philosophies that stem from them. Might we think of Guru Ravidas as both a scientist of leather, political philosopher of caste, and quantum physicist? See V. Geetha, Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar and the Question of Socialism in India, Springer International Publishing, 2021 and Mukul Sharma, Caste and nature: Dalits and Indian environmental policies. Oxford University Press, 2017. For more about physical thought, see Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent and Isabelle Stengers, A history of chemistry, Harvard University Press, 1996; John Law, After method: Mess in social science research, Routledge, 2004; and Karen Barad, Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning, Duke University Press, 2007.
Screenshot from the Weather App developed by Apple showing the air quality in Mumbai, India on 31 December 2022.
Photographs of leather manufacturing happening in Dharavi, Mumbai taken by Foundation Chamar in July 2022. The interviews that we conducted are available through The Leather Archive of India.
In the cover art for this 1981 album of devotional hymns by Sri Guru Ravidas Ji, the venerated poet-saint of the 15th century Bhakti movement is depicted at work, where he is busy making leather shoes. Designed by Amalesh Dev & Ramen Sarkar.
Photograph of the chromite mines in Odisha. The image is taken from “Tata Steel Mining Begins Operations At Sukinda Chromite Mine,” Odisha News Times, 22 September 2020.
Illustration that depicts the standard chemical notation for trivalent chromium. Flattened representations of chemical compounds contribute to the fiction that chemical worlds are containable and controllable.
Illustration critiquing plasticized “vegan leather” produced by Foundation Chamar.