The Misrecognition of Misrecognition: Caste, Recognition and the Politics of Waste Work in Urban India
Wednesday, 19 November 2025 | 3:00 p.m. to 4:30 p.m. | Room 305, Third Floor, York Lanes, Keele Campus, York University
With Harsha Anantharaman, York Centre for Asian Research
Despite their essential role in sustaining urban waste infrastructures, the labour of informal waste-pickers in India remain socially adjected and economically devalued due to the caste-based stigmatization of waste work in South Asia. Recent state and civil society efforts to “recognize” and “formalize” this labour—championed by both progressive activists and technocratic reformers—claim to address this marginalization.
Yet, I argue these initiatives reproduce rather than undo the caste-coding of waste work through what I call the misrecognition of misrecognition: a dynamic whereby recognition itself re-inscribes humiliation and caste hierarchies. Three tendencies structure this dynamic—the caste-coding of the recognition encounter between seemingly well=meaning elites and waste-workers by a logic of humiliation, the re-elaboration of untouchability through labour formalization, and the ongoing reconfiguration of the caste-coding of waste work itself. The paper concludes by highlighting moments where waste-pickers assert representational agency against caste-coded recognition. The paper draws on ethnographic research in the Indian cities of Chennai, Indore, Delhi and Pune.
Harsha Anantharaman (He/Him) recently joined the York Centre for Asian Researchas a Postdoctoral Fellow. His doctoral research at the University of Minnesota examines how economic formalization and social recognition policies in urban India—aimed at integrating informal waste-pickers—have paradoxically deepened precarity and reproduced caste hierarchies. Drawing on multi-sited ethnographic research, his work traces the confluence of caste and capital logics: showing how garbage is transformed into private property through assetization and how caste-coded recognition reconfigures labour relations. Prior to academia, Harsha worked in action-research organizations focused on labour, housing, and infrastructural services in Chennai, India.
This is the third event in Demos, Democracy, Democratization: South Asia Lecture Series 2025–26. Learn more at this link.
