World Toilet Day: Leap of the lota
It was a letter in a language that could have forced any self-respecting Englishman to commit suicide instantly. However, the letter's hilarious content had a positive impact on the Raj official and it supposedly led to the introduction of toilets on trains. The letter, written by one Okhil Chandra Sen to the Sahibganj divisional railway office in 1909, is on display at the Railway Museum in New Delhi. It reads as following:
"I am arrive by passenger train Ahmedpur station and my belly is too much swelling with jackfruit. I am therefore went to privy. Just I doing the nuisance that guard making whistle blow for train to go off and I am running with 'lotah' in one hand and 'dhoti' in the next when I am fall over and expose all my shocking to man and female women on plateform. I am got leaved at Ahmedpur station.
"This too much bad, if passenger go to make dung that dam guard not wait train five minutes for him. I am therefore pray your honour to make big fine on that guard for public sake. Otherwise I am making big report! to papers."
India is still a young recruit to the idea of sanitation in its modern sense. Not more than a century old. We have had a very curious history of sanitation. After the decline of the Indus Valley civilisation which had elaborate sanitation integrated with its town planning as early as second-third millennia BC, use of toilets disappeared from India. It was considered taboo in the Vedic era and people got up from the bed while it was still dark and contributed generously to thick growth of vegetation by riverbanks.
"I am arrive by passenger train Ahmedpur station and my belly is too much swelling with jackfruit. I am therefore went to privy. Just I doing the nuisance that guard making whistle blow for train to go off and I am running with 'lotah' in one hand and 'dhoti' in the next when I am fall over and expose all my shocking to man and female women on plateform. I am got leaved at Ahmedpur station.
"This too much bad, if passenger go to make dung that dam guard not wait train five minutes for him. I am therefore pray your honour to make big fine on that guard for public sake. Otherwise I am making big report! to papers."
India is still a young recruit to the idea of sanitation in its modern sense. Not more than a century old. We have had a very curious history of sanitation. After the decline of the Indus Valley civilisation which had elaborate sanitation integrated with its town planning as early as second-third millennia BC, use of toilets disappeared from India. It was considered taboo in the Vedic era and people got up from the bed while it was still dark and contributed generously to thick growth of vegetation by riverbanks.
A toilet inside the house was unthinkable then. It was considered that the rivers cleaned themselves and faecal remains and the E-coli in the water were not heard of or bothered about. Even the lofty Mughals did not have toilets. At least so it seems. Delhi's Red Fort or Agra or Allahabad or any other Mughal fort does not have toilets. There are hamams though. There are various versions of how the Mughal kings relieved themselves. But nothing is certain. While it is too much to believe that the alampanah (the king of the world) would have walked around with a lota, the arrangements were certainly rudimentary.
It was only after the British came to India that Indians watched their toilet habits curiously. The next generation of English-speaking Indian gents shunned the traditional native toilet practice. Introduction of tea in India, somewhere around the turn of the 20th century, must have exerted the pressure-too much to contain-to build toilets in houses.
As early as 1907, Brooke Bond, an English tea company, had started experimenting with a fleet of horse-drawn vans for distributing tea. The British tradition of taking tea with a little milk and sugar was introduced along with the samples. In this light, India as a country is not doing bad on the sanitation front. This much said, open defecation is still widely rampant in India and brings global shame to the country.
According to a 2011 UNICEF survey, India tops the list of open defecators in the world. The survey said 58 per cent of the world's population practising open defecation lives in India while China and Indonesia come a distant second by accounting for just 5 per cent of the world numbers. Pakistan is down to third with 4.5 per cent, tied with Ethiopia.
According to an independent evaluation by the Planning Commission in 2013, nearly 73 per cent households in rural India practice open defecation despite sanitation drives launched by the government. The 'Evaluation Study on Total Sanitation Campaign', submitted in May this year, covers 122 districts, 206 blocks, 1207 gram panchayats and 11,519 beneficiary households across 27 states. The study says many government schools in Manipur, Assam, Bihar, Meghalaya, Madhya Pradesh and Jharkhand are still without any sanitation.
It was only after the British came to India that Indians watched their toilet habits curiously. The next generation of English-speaking Indian gents shunned the traditional native toilet practice. Introduction of tea in India, somewhere around the turn of the 20th century, must have exerted the pressure-too much to contain-to build toilets in houses.
As early as 1907, Brooke Bond, an English tea company, had started experimenting with a fleet of horse-drawn vans for distributing tea. The British tradition of taking tea with a little milk and sugar was introduced along with the samples. In this light, India as a country is not doing bad on the sanitation front. This much said, open defecation is still widely rampant in India and brings global shame to the country.
According to a 2011 UNICEF survey, India tops the list of open defecators in the world. The survey said 58 per cent of the world's population practising open defecation lives in India while China and Indonesia come a distant second by accounting for just 5 per cent of the world numbers. Pakistan is down to third with 4.5 per cent, tied with Ethiopia.
According to an independent evaluation by the Planning Commission in 2013, nearly 73 per cent households in rural India practice open defecation despite sanitation drives launched by the government. The 'Evaluation Study on Total Sanitation Campaign', submitted in May this year, covers 122 districts, 206 blocks, 1207 gram panchayats and 11,519 beneficiary households across 27 states. The study says many government schools in Manipur, Assam, Bihar, Meghalaya, Madhya Pradesh and Jharkhand are still without any sanitation.
