The Culture of Cleanliness
During the recent combination of flooding rains and
Eid-ul-Azha in Karachi, social media was rife with desperate requests to
dispose offal responsibly to prevent the spread of disease. Desperate because
it is assumed, quite correctly, that the plea would go unheeded - strange in
the land of the great Indus Civilization that gave the world its first planned
cities and sanitation systems.
One thinks of cleanliness as a management issue – the
responsibility of a city municipality.
However cleanliness is also an attitude with cultural, spiritual,
psychological and religious significances.
Many religions have ritualistic cleansing – tahara, wudu,
and ghusal in Islam, baptism in Christianity, mikvah in Judaism, misogi in
Shinto, bathing in sacred rivers in Hinduism. Here cleansing is not simply the
cleaning of physical dirt but entering a state of spiritual purity.
Water is also presented as a metaphysical force. Narratives
of dramatic floods washing away erring communities exist in Judaic, Christian
and Islamic texts, Native American, Eskimo, African, Central and South
American, Asian, Mesopotamian, Greek, and ancient European cultures.
The Australian artist Fiona Hall has many works in carved
soap. She sees washing with soap not only as an erasure of our natural animal odour,
but also as an instrument of deception, a metaphor for colonial guilt “washing
away the traces of their murky history”. Much as Lady Macbeth says after the
murder of the king "A little water clears us of this deed."
The Plagues, initially seen as a punishment for misdeeds,
were eventually recognized by scientists as a disease caused by bacteria. The 19 C Germ Theory was formed, first described
by Ibn Sina in the 11 C. The scientific need for cleanliness and personal
hygiene has remained a central concern of modern societies. Cleanliness is good
for business such as restaurants and hotels, real estate value, hospitals,
tourism and factories producing scientific instruments.
In her book ,The Dirt on Clean: An Unsanitized History,
Katherine Ashenburg reveals the rituals of
personal hygiene, from the Romans who steamed and scraped their bodies
everyday, the use of perfume to disguise body odours in 17 France to our
present “deodorized world” of hand sanitizers wipes and sprays.
Historically, personal hygiene was always practiced across
non-European civilizations in China, Japan, India, the Muslim world, Africa and
the tribes of the Americas. However, the emergence of modern cities created
unforeseen issues for the cleaning of public spaces. While municipalities were
in place by the 20th C in western societies, the more organic and rapid
development of non-western cities grew without well planned infrastructures and
unclear ownership of public spaces.
As world power tilted with
colonialism, cleanliness became the description of difference, where
non-western countries and non-white races were seen as dirty. Carl A. Zimring in his book, Clean and White:
A History of Environmental Racism in the United States, explores how the term
“black and polluted” came into existence.
In India and Pakistan, another contributing factor is the
caste system. Originally seen to be a division of labour, castes soon became
hereditary, with cleaning the task of the lowest class, a concept absorbed into
Pakistani society . While in Germany, residents take turns with sweeping and
picking up trash in the neighbourhood, and in Japan school children clean their
schools including toilets, this would be inconceivable in Pakistan where such
tasks are assigned to people demeaningly called “bhangis”.
Positive changes are emerging with NGOs motivating school
children to clean up beaches and parks. I met a lawyer who with his colleagues,
goes to basti homes, where they clean, wash and tidy up to inspire residents to
a better quality of life. As the Japanese monk, Matsumoto says, “we clean to
eliminate the gloom in our hearts”.
Durriya Kazi
August 16, 2019
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