This article examines the historical processes by which low or non-caste groups have situated themselves in Pakistan's waste economy. Adopting caste as a category of governance, the colonial regime implemented policies and interventions that not only impacted these groups in the Punjab, but also cemented enduring connections between caste, waste work, and governance, which have subsequently shaped the trajectories of waste work in cities like Lahore. Moving beyond the framework of the “abject,” this article emphasizes caste as a historical category through which social stratification and exclusions have materialized across South Asia, and examines how low or non-caste groups have organized themselves in Pakistan's waste economy, which has resulted from rapid urbanization, bureaucratization and informalization, regional labor migration, consumptive economies, urban development, and sociopolitical relations. Rather than inhabiting the abjectness of capitalism, modernity, or caste hierarchy, this article argues that these groups have carved out a space for themselves and their wider social relations in cities like Lahore in Pakistan, where social inequalities and stratification are undeniable facets of urban life.
In cities around the world, the removal of waste materials is a critical part of everyday life. Workers, both formal and informal, engage in intimate forms of labor that separate these materials from those who produce them. In Lahore, Pakistan, such waste intimacies are fraught by inequalities, which are discernible in affective, material, and spatial relations stretching across an uneven urban landscape. Waste work in urban Pakistan is a social relationship formed along the lines of caste, class, and religion; both municipal sanitation workers who are Christian and informal waste workers who are Muslim come from low-or noncaste backgrounds. Waste intimacies foreground those forms of work, relationships, and affects that, in distributing waste across individuals and social groups, reproduce a shared though unequal world. [waste, work, labor, intimacy, caste,
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