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Not-so-beautiful face of our civility

8 November 2005, 18:00 PM
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
By Adnan Hossain On e-mail
8 November 2005, 18:00 PM
Drenched in mephitic droppings Charu fluttered out of the manhole and washed him up with the water that was coming through a pipe from inside the apartment. He then went inside and came back with a glittery hundred-taka note. Few steps from where Charu was I was sitting in a tea stall with few more unknown people around me. Charu stopped by and asked the vendor to fill the pot with tea that he was carrying with him. He was waiting for his pot to be replenished while taking extra care about his being distant from the rest of the customers of the tea stall. Out of curiosity I asked about the reason for his carrying the pot. Then in broken somnolent voice Charu answered “We are Methars /sweepers and we are not allowed to sit with the Bhadrolok/ Gentlemen.

Nor are we served tea in the cups used to serve you. So I always fetch this pot.”

Such is the treatment persons scavenging the droppings and leftovers are subject to. And they are called “METHAR” in Bengali, a word the very utterance of which carries with it an obvious sense of denigration. The word is also found being used in the diurnal conversation as slang. The popular image of the society about METHARS is they are a bunch of stinky people engaged in inebriation and domestication of filthy pigs. Bangladesh being a predominantly Muslim country the act of sweepers' petting pigs further adds to this ingrained negative image.

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Sweepers working in Dhaka city hail mostly from four ethnic backgrounds. These are Telegu (Telegu-speaking Vishakapatnam district of Andhra Pradesh of South India), Kanpuri (Hindi-speaking people of Kanpur region of Uttar Pradesh), Hari/Hela (Bengali-speaking sweepers emanating mostly from Faridpur) and Bengalee sweepers coming from the wider poor populace of Bangladesh. They are concentrated in eight ghettoes spread over Dhaka city.

When asked about the history of how their older generations got into sweeping, Sharma, a Telegu sweeper leader of Mohammadpur, told me that they are a historically cheated people as they were brought from India through middlemen for the British administration in Bengal to be given menial jobs but then they were plunged into scavenging.

However, it is infinitely important to take stock of the fact that it is through interplay of the mainstream society with the sweepers that they develop this sense of fatalism and low self-esteem.