Maloca Media

Alwar is a small town in Rajasthan, well off the palaces-and-camels tourist trail. I travelled there with my friend Philip de Wit, who was at the time the South Asia correspondent for the NRC Handelsblad newspaper in the Netherlands. Philip wanted to write a story about a group of Dalit (untouchable) women, who spent their lives cleaning outdoor latrines. We passed a day doing the rounds with these women. At each house on the route we would stop, and one of the woman would bend down and reach underneath the latrine with a short broom. Using the broom, she would scrape the mixture of dust, urine and faeces into a metal tray. She would then balance the tray on her head, and walk to the dump down the street to throw it away. Most of the women in the group had been doing this same job since adolescence, and would do it until they died, as would their daughters.