Thread by @sohinichat

As the bubonic plague gripped India, buriers in Jaola (present-day Latur) refused to dig graves. They demanded higher wages as deaths soared uncontrollably at a time when it was unknown how the disease spread so rapidly. Their salary: Rs 12 a month >>
sohinichattopadhyay.com/2020/05/the-si…

The district board conceded to their demands; their salary was increased to Rs 15. Such stories of assertion of rights by essential workers are hard to come by. Colonial archives rarely mention mortuary workers as archives contain texts that underwrite caste + class prejudices >>

The gravediggers, mostly from the Mahar community in Bombay Presidency, engaged in hereditary forms of stigmatised labour that included removing animal carcasses + the human dead. Payroll slips also mention caste names like Doms and linguistically fluid terms like 'murdafarashis'

But documents written at the time of epidemics also make it clear that mortuary workers were frontline health workers, providing vital health information and performing labour other castes would shun. The lack of media coverage on mortuary workers, thus, has historical precedence

The absence of accounts on the absolutely essential roles played by mortuary workers to maintain the public health of cities and villages can be traced back to colonial modes of bureaucratic writing, and social erasures born of caste prejudices >>

Historian Sohini Chattopadhyay is writing her dissertation on everyday technologies + mortuary work at moments of mass death like epidemics, riots, famine (working title). What are the odds that the 2 people who write on mortuary workers here are both called Sohini Chattopadhyay?

Pretty high, it seems. @popeyed is a PhD student in Columbia. I simply do not have the patience for academic writing. There, that should be confirmation enough that we're two different Sohini Cs :) She's the only one who responded to my post on morgue workers getting PPE last

In my own short post, I wrote about how mortuary workers in Bengal received PPE only in the last week of April. The situation is likely worse in other places, the Safai Karmachari Andolan told me. But these stories, these voices are missing in the media >
sohinichattopadhyay.com/2020/05/do-mor…

The handling of dead bodies, historically performed by the lowest of 'untouchable' castes like Doms, Mahars, Mathors, is invisible. They can't be seen in corridors like 'ward boys + girls'. You have to go looking for them in the morgue. Their voices are absent on social media