E-waste is toxic,but for whom? The body politics of knowing toxic flows in Delhi

Abstract

Bodily knowledge and lived experience of toxic exposures in e-waste markets are central to policies and legal frameworks that are being rolled out globally enforcing the “polluter pays” principle. Yet, the sensory experience of toxicity is far from the straightforward, narratable knowledge, which it is often made out to be. This article builds on twelve months of research into the process of establishing formal e-waste recycling channels in New Delhi, India. Environmental practitioners and e-waste workers, each in a different relation to power and toxicity, presented contradictory understandings and challenged the continuity between sensing bodies posed by environmental advocacy narratives. Acknowledging the difficulty to pin down lived experience, I compare the certainty with which employees of a producer responsibility organisation present toxicity for the purpose of spreading awareness to the ambivalence with which informal e-waste recyclers relate to the toxicity in their own environment. The paper highlights the process of turning bodily experience into knowledge and proposes that knowing toxicity is the result of socially and economically inflected relations between bodies, chemicals, forms of knowledge, and the material dismantling process. Rather than accepting the immediacy of sensory experiences, or looking to find the authentic witness, I suggest a triangulation of bodies differently positioned in relation to the processes and places in question.

Introduction

In early 2019, on my first visit to Seelampur, India’s most mediatised e-waste market, I tried to engage men hanging out on the street in conversations about the toxic harm caused by their trade. To my surprise, unlike the attitudes conveyed by the e-waste reportage of the past two decades, my enquiries were met with playful, taunting evasion and refusal. As I progressed down the lanes, I found more willing conversation partners, but they would rather talk to me about their weariness of the media. I was told that no one would talk about these issues, because they had learned to expect a police crackdown after a daytrip by the media. Prefiguring later discussions in my long-term fieldwork in another market, Kabadabad, ¹ the men I encountered rather focussed on how their business fortunes ebbed and flowed. I became puzzled as to why people daily exposed to the reportedly horrific effluents of low-tech e-waste recycling operations would go to such lengths to avoid talk about toxic harm. And how does one understand the effects of toxicity in a place where locals, supposedly its direct “victims,” deny the presence of toxicants?

Journalists have suggestively labelled Seelampur “India’s digital underbelly” and the place “where phones go to die,” (e.g. Mishra, 2016, Damage Control and Chintan, 2016). In such portrayals, workers alternately appear as unaware victims; as being aware of the harms of e-waste processing but helpless in face of the need to feed their families; or as being aware but uncaring of the health and environmental impact of their work. Heightening the alarm of readers, reports quote numbers to prove e-waste’s exponential growth: 44.7 MTs of e-waste were produced globally in 2016, (the latest figures were 53.6 million MT in 2019 (Baldé et al., 2017; Forti et al., 2020)). India is the fourth largest e-waste producer in the world, though it is expected to move up the ranking due to increasing demand from an aspirational, ever-widening global consumer base. Images of workers and accounts of bodily harm work well to complement the affective intensity evoked by these numbers. Yet, despite the well-documented effects of e-waste’s toxicity, during fieldwork I found little evidence among Delhi’s scrap dealers of toxic harm in the terms that had come to define the e-waste narrative. Similarly, geographers and anthropologists, long-term ethnographers of major e-waste sites, did not unearth vivid descriptions of the horrors of e-waste work with toxic materials and their lives in toxic places (Corwin, 2018, 2020; Lepawsky, 2018; Little, 2019, 2021; Lora-Wainwright, 2017). In contrast, these writers found reluctance and diffident silence among e-waste workers. Yet, what they left unexamined was the reasons behind the discrepancy between reportage and ethnographic encounters and the questions this raised about the politics of representing toxic bodies and the methods of getting to know toxic places. I began to wonder whose bodily sense of toxicity was the basis of reporting: those of the environmental advocates or those of the people who are breaking discarded electronics for a living?

This raises further questions about bodily knowledge and lived experience of toxicity and how these have been used as evidence in social science account of toxicity. Much of social science research on toxicity documents environmentalists’ fight against large industrial players who fudged evidence to hide the effects of industrial activities (Fortun, 2001; Murphy, 2006; Shapiro, 2014). Such accounts helped counter “regimes of (im)perceptibility,” produced by companies and governments in the pursuit of relativising harm (Murphy, 2006, 2017). The aim of activists and researchers was to establish chemical relations where large corporations and the state wielded the authority of scientific knowledge to deny evidence of harm (Harvey, 2020; Romero et al., 2017; Shapiro, 2014). The attention to bodies and lived experience has become the stock of activist writers whose aim is to document the “slow violence” of environmental breakdown—a process defined by attrition, imperceptibility, and dispersal across time and space (Nixon, 2011). However, evidence of reluctance to report such experiences in e-waste sites across the world draws attention to an unusual casting of victims and environmental investigators. The question becomes whose bodily experience contributes in what kind of representative form towards documenting lived experience of a toxic place?

The following article documenting the contrasting accounts of the e-waste markets by people placed in two extremes on Delhi’s social hierarchy helps pry open the often-assumed, common-sense associations between sensing, knowing, and representing toxicity. In Delhi’s e-waste markets, where workers deny toxic harm while middle class, upper caste outsiders, including corporate players, insist on its presence, there might be another type of bodily politics at play. Thus, I take inspiration from Vorbrugg (2022) to argue that to understand “slow violence” we should re-examine the narratives of toxicity, to highlight underlying issues of representation, epistemology, and methodology in ethnographies of toxic sites. I turn the ethnographic gaze around to focus on interlocutors’ view on the sensing bodies of those who produce environmental knowledge. These reflections are often written out of the narrative, though not entirely without trace, to produce disembodied, scientific, and transcendental truths about toxicants. Not discounting environmental knowledge producers’ experiences either, I propose the method of triangulation between differently placed bodies and their representations, environmentalists’ and e-waste workers’, to raise questions about unacknowledged social processes that contribute to the evidentiary claims of bodily knowledge. Such an approach brings into view the scalar realities of late-industrial life (Fortun, 2012), revealing the power relations that underlie knowledge claims with the aim to create the potential for toxic politics, not of large scale mobilisation (Liboiron et al., 2018) but one that includes the complex relations e-waste workers have to their labour. This becomes even more imperative as environmental narratives, rather than at political mobilisation, are increasingly aimed at the creation of new business and startup ideas and the legitimation of the green transition.

Representative certainty of toxicity and bodies

In 2019, I conducted a twelve-month-long fieldwork in New Delhi, studying the attempts to regularise e-waste recycling by implementing the 2016 E-waste (Management) Rules. Rather than seeking evidence of injustice, I was interested in tracing the effects of environmental justice as operationalised by a law that holds producers responsible for their post-consumption waste. I followed the work of the employees of Sahih Kaam, ² a producer responsibility organisation (PRO). I spent the first three-four months at the office, to become familiar with the way PRO employees represented the e-waste issue. Then, to understand the effects of the law on the company’s e-waste dealers, I spent time in an informal e-waste market, which I call Kabadabad. My knowledge of English, university education, and a life lived in apparently non-toxic environments made it easy to integrate in the PRO’s office and understand the concerns of the employees. The association with Sahih Kaam also allowed me to establish close relationship with the company’s scrap dealers, for as a white woman and a suspicious outsider, I would not have had unrestricted mobility in the market. My fluency in Hindi provided some balance to these relationships, as in exchange for allowing me to stick around in warehouses and homes I spent hours answering questions about life in Europe.

In the first part of my fieldwork, one hot summer day I accompanied Dipesh, a PRO employee, to deliver a bulk consumer awareness workshop in Noida, Delhi’s satellite town, at the head office of a global technology conglomerate. After the long, sweaty trip, we found the cool of the air conditioner inside the office building a welcome change from the gritty air outside, even if we stood the chance of catching a cold. ³ Drawing on well-regarded environmental reports, Dipesh presented the usual numbers showing the exponential growth of e-waste across the world and emphasised that they contain 70% “restricted hazardous substances.” To clinch the deal about the important compliance work of the PRO, Dipesh showed the video titled “Citizens at Risk” (Chintan et al., n.d.). ⁴

Starting with a low angle shot of one of the e-waste markets in Northeast Delhi, the camera opens on a swarm of flies sitting on the concrete, then follows the feet of a rikshaw puller. The feet are that of a child, scrawny and barefoot, picking his way through puddles to a mournful tune in unpaved, kaccha streets with computer waste piled on either side. “This poor derelict neighbourhood is a part of Delhi, but with its own direct connection to the global marketplace. […] This is where the world’s computers come to die” (Chintan et al., n.d.: 0:19). As the score becomes fast-paced, the frame cuts to offices with lines of computers and workers linking local poverty to the post-liberalisation boom in IT and customer service provision. The sequences are interspersed with images of busy servers, flashing lights, and figures of the number of computers sold in India and the US. “The more computers, the more e-waste,” goes the voiceover.

Among images of decay, the film presents Fazloor Rehman’s testimony, while a goat keeps nibbling at his ear. His words in Hindi translate to “Working with chemicals is very dangerous. I’ve got no other choice, that’s why I am doing it. Well, brother, you get a little dizzy in the head, your [blood] pressure drops, that’s it. But if the government doesn’t care, so what else are we to do?” (Chintan et al. n.d.: 4:15 my translation). ⁵ As he speaks, the camera shifts to show Fazloor Rehman stooped over a pot full of integrated circuits that he is melting with a blowtorch. But remarkably, the English subtitles have slightly mistranslated Fazloor’s description of his bodily experience, stating dramatically: “There is a burning sensation in my chest, there is a chance that my lungs could be ruined. Nobody cares for us, what can we do?”

On the face of it, Fazloor’s testimony may be a slight mistranslation. However, I argue that it offers a powerful narrative of “slow violence,” which the film-makers documented for a wider audience. In the early 2000s, a transnational advocacy movement worked hard to make the eventless processual slow violence of e-waste into a matter of environmental justice (Pellow, 2006; Agarwal and Wankhade, 2006). The admirable efforts of the social movement made links between the exploding electronics consumption in the Global North and unregulated dismantling in countries with less stringent environmental regulations. The resulting reports focused on the condition of workers and the degradation of their environments in backyard operations without protective equipment (BAN, 2002; Toxics Link, 2003). Indian advocacy groups, such as Chintan and Toxics Link, were at the vanguard of the heroic battle to establish the responsibility of electronics producer corporations reporting on Delhi’s informal e-waste markets. Through such collaborations, including this film between Chintan and Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition, the unseen suffering of waste workers could be framed and scaled up to provide powerful evidence in the fight against global electronics producer brands (Stocknicki, 2019). The quotidian practices of e-waste dismantling were portrayed through the striking images of women’s bodies picking barehanded through burnt plastic and acid filled vats, providing the imagery in aid of creating an “event out of nothing” (Ahmann, 2018). The e-waste issue was written as a case of distributed, delayed, and attritional “slow violence,” uneventful and invisible yet toxic (Nixon, 2011). Harrowing images emerged through the involvement of environmental advocates, reporters, journalists, documentary filmmakers. Such portrayals were part of a valiant effort of a global grassroots social movement to restrict the export of hazardous substances to poorer countries and introduce laws that enforced the “polluter pays” principle. The law whose effects I went to investigate in Delhi was both a direct result and an evidence of the campaign’s success.

The notion of “slow violence” highlights the importance of considering the more mundane ways in which environmental harm wears down the poor (Nixon, 2011) alongside more spectacular tragedies, the most defining one of which was the 1984 Bhopal gas leak (Fortun, 2001). The temporality of everyday environmental breakdown in Delhi has become cyclical and quotidian where levels of pollution now mark season change rather than an event. To understand “slow violence’s” effects, Davies suggests attending to the narratives of those most exposed, who had lived with pollution long term and are often at the receiving end of other forms of structural violence, inequalities, and poverty. Davies argues that such accounts of “slow violence” only remain out of sight on a global scale when these locally very apparent stories about change in landscape and flora and fauna are ignored, also an example of epistemic violence (Davies, 2022, 2023). The notion of slow violence draws attention to the different temporalities of living with, and observing toxic flows, while at the same time also throws into sharp relief the question of who is best placed to represent landscapes and people.

However imperceptible, the disjunction between the original Hindi and the subtitles in Chintan’s documentary is telling of issues that are contained in the notion of “slow violence.” It gives the sense of discontinuity between filmmakers—outsiders looking for bodies bearing the signs of injustice—and their subjects. Remarkably, Fazloor’s intonation suggests a response to a leading question while mentions of other forms of structural inequalities hinted at through the phrase “if the government doesn’t care” are written out of the subtitles. Whether it is a simple translation error, or a more deliberate fabrication of Fazloor’s testimony, it is not clear. However, the mistranslation became indicative for me of the difficulty of translating the sensory experiences of exposed bodies into compelling environmental narratives with the authority of scientific knowledge. For Fazloor's words may also have been edited thus as they do not exhibit the right kind of scientific knowledge of his own bodily processes. In the context of my wider experience of doing research in Kabadabad it is also a sign of the methodological difficulty of producing “slow violence” narratives in places where those most affected have complex relationships with the source of toxic effluent. This is not quite the fond attachment to toxic smoke as an index of progress in a Serbian industrial town (Jovanović, 2018), but rather like the complicit silence and reluctance of Lora-Wainwright’s “resigned activists” (Lora-Wainwright, 2017), and even closer is the “contrived ignorance” practiced by workers in an industrial area in China (Lou 2022). The sentiments recorded in the opening vignette of the article bear witness to a general mistrust toward outsiders, whom e-waste workers associate with the production of narratives of environmental and moral horrors in the media, eventually followed by police harassment. In such cases, the epistemic violence would be to ignore the resistance palpable in Fazloor’s spoken testimony and not ask how such a situation comes about. Even if not so extreme, the contradiction is indicative of the wider terrain of power, the relationship between outsider observers and local testimonials, that sets up places like Seelampur and Kabadabad as a node in a web of toxic flows.

The documentary proceeds smoothing over the epistemic break with a disembodied, universalising narrative of harm to workers' bodies, until it switches to relaying the experiences of the film-making crew. “The air was pungent, our eyes and noses were itching within minutes, no one else showed signs of discomfort, they had probably never had the luxury of a clean work environment” (Chintan et al., n.d.: 8:22). The bodies of the filmmakers remain invisible outside the frame, while the reels show bodies marked as that of urban poor engaged in different parts of the dismantling process, hammering away at parts, burning printed circuit boards (PCBs), picking by bare hands at PCBs soaked in acid. Camera crews demonstrate knowing sensing bodies, while the images show “morally legitimate suffering bodies” (Ticktin, 2011; Fiske, 2018). The filmmaker crew’s accounts of their bodily experience and the contrast with the lack of complaint by others—“no one else showed signs of discomfort”—aggravates the disjuncture between the portrayal of differently classed, raced, and gendered sensing bodies. This shift in whose bodily experiences are recounted emphasises further the discontinuity between bodies of workers with long term exposure and that of film-makers with a one - off experience (Fiske, 2018).

Once the film was over, Dipesh switched off the video and proclaimed, “Ab haalaat aur bhi kharab hai [the situation is even worse now],” in powerful indication that he himself had been there. To which the audience replied, “very interesting!” affirming the combined affective impact of the film and Dipesh’s witnessing.

The section shows how translating the bodily experience of those most affected for producing affective accounts of “slow violence” is not a straightforward process and it is underlined by inequalities between the bodies of those representing and those being represented. While bodies are scaled up in the heroic, grassroots fight against global corporations, they are done without examining how these images reinforce a “toxic postcolonial corporeality” (Little, 2019). About a decade or so after, when corporations are bound by EPR to raise awareness and collect e-waste for formal recycling, Fazloor’s testimony nestled in Dipesh’s awareness session becomes a means for the economisation of waste management. Environmental practitioners perpetuate a constructed sense of reality that is at odds with the lived experience of toxic flows in places like Kabadbad. In the followings, I take up Vorbrugg’s suggestion that violence is not simply a fact or reality to detect, it requires “epistemic alliances” as it is “an epistemological, representational and analytical problem to work through” (Vorbrugg, 2022: 449). Such a formulation is useful when trying to move away from the representational conundrum of “slow violence”, and the risk of imposing an outsider’s view. E-waste workers’ reluctance to comply with environmentalist narratives and their resistance to having their bodily experiences scaled up to causes unbeknownst to them needs to be examined in the context of how outsiders acquire bodily knowledge of toxic place. In the next section I explore how PRO employees’ corporeal responses and how these were transformed into embodied knowledge.

Epistemology of uneven toxic relations

I first went to Kabadabad following Sahih Kaam employees to attend a health and safety workshop organised for their scrap dealers to be delivered by the ILO (International Labour Organisation). Anjali, Dipesh’s immediate manager and the head of the awareness team, emphasised the importance of making sure that newly recruited employees get a chance to visit “the market.” On this occasion, Anjali thought that, as a new member, I should go as a representative of the awareness team, to bring back feedback and pictures for proof of evidence of the workshop and gain that first-hand experience that was so essential to working in the e-waste sphere. Such immediacy gave PRO employees greater weight in their delivery of awareness material and anchored the abstract and distant toxic e-waste market in sensory experiences. To some extent, the PRO employees’ attitudes and methods of gaining bodily knowledge about toxicity are modelled on and similar to other outsider knowledge practices from which the narrative of toxic e-waste markets has emerged in the first place.

Sharing my excitement at the prospect of visiting Kabadabad, another team member Lata warned me with a giggle. She told me to take anti-allergy pills with me, because the last time they went they had severe allergic reactions. Then the others chimed in to tell me that the ILO representative on that prior trip had such a flareup of symptoms that he had to leave. Lata and the others now wondered how he is going to deal with the visit occasioned by the latest health and safety workshop. They were also saying that Vineet, the organiser from Sahih Kaam’s side who had had a long experience of the Kabadabad market, was already taking some pills in preparation. Despite the warnings, however, on the actual visit no one exhibited any symptoms, stranger still the health and safety workshop had nothing to say about how to manage toxic harm.

Visits to “the field” or “the market” were significant though rare events for most, especially female, employees working in awareness and business development roles. In my unending discussions with employees in the months spent in the office they expressed that having an ear to the ground was what drew them to working at the PRO. They all came from the capital’s middle class broadly upper caste strata, had mostly grown up in upmarket, gated communities in and around South Delhi. With prestigious Indian and international environmental science degrees under their belt, they now wanted a hands-on experience and a sense of making a real difference. Everyone was encouraged to go for a visit at least once, but tight schedules often prevented office-based employees from making the trip more times. The sense was that going once, and spending a few hours, was more than enough to drive home the point about the environmental crisis caused by e-waste’s unregulated dismantling. The job roles which necessitated regular visits were often filled by male employees. Regular and crucial contact between “the market” and “the office” was provided by the all-male operations team, tasked with the logistics of organising e-waste purchases and collections. Satkar, the founder of the start-up, explained to me when I began preparations for the second part of my research: the gendered division of labour in the company was no accident as the market was no place for a woman. If I moved into the market, I would be taken advantage of, people could force themselves on me, and I could be cheated at every step, he continued, haven’t I see how they lived? In the absence of engagement beyond the one - off visits, for the highly educated, middle-class environmental professionals Kabadabad remained a distant place of urban wasteland and moral decrepitude.

The attention to bodies and their engagement with the toxic environment has been central to the narrative of slow violence and the harm of e-waste, as discussed in the previous section. The reflections of Sahih Kaam employees provide evidence that environmental awareness of e-waste’s toxicity is gained through the sensing body of environmentalists. While the bodies of the e-waste workers are represented as the victims of toxicity, other bodies largely unexposed become the instrument through which the toxicants’ presence is made sense of. Shapiro understands ‘bodily knowledge’ as “[t]he somatic work of the chemically concerned [which] is enmeshed with an apprehension of their own bodies that is simultaneously sensuous and epistemological” (Shapiro, 2015: 370). The visits of PRO employees to Kabadabad are considered essential for this kind of bodily knowledge. They found that their senses were assailed and overwhelmed, thus becoming indicators of toxic presence and that these bodily reasonings have led to an encounter with the “chemical sublime” (Shapiro, 2015)—an experience which is often written out of accounts for they are not the representable victims of slow violence. Still, PRO employees used their body as a meter, in a similar though less sophisticated way than Linda, the industrial hygienist in Shapiro’s account (2015). Aided by an arsenal of formaldehyde meters, Linda visits low-quality and upmarket properties and begins to associate headaches, fatigues, and vivid dreams with minutely accurate readings of contamination levels. Sahih Kaam employees similarly connected bodily irritations to their extensive knowledge of reports and studies that evidenced e-waste’s capacity to leak and cause harm.

Anthropological notions of embodiment (Lock, 1993) also highlight that sensing bodies are not biologically predetermined but are constructed in the entanglement between the environment and the social. The awareness that senses may also be the result of such entanglements, combined with the wider notion that sensory experience is an uneven, unreliable instrument of detecting toxicants, cautions against accepting bodily knowledge as uncomplicated evidentiary claims (Spackman and Burlingame, 2018; Fiske, 2018; Senanayake, 2020). It is important to recognise that PRO employees’ bodies, though inhabitants of the same highly polluted city as the e-waste workers, were accustomed to relatively less toxic middle-class environments; they were used to living and working in airconditioned office buildings. To some extent it was their previously sheltered and unexposed selves that made trips to the e-waste market essential for their job of spreading awareness of e-waste’s harm. Anjali’s insistence of sending employees to the market to acquire first-hand experience shows that there is a “peculiar social authority” of bodies (Fiske, 2018), which Dipesh duly demonstrated in his exclamation at end of the awareness session. Yet, at the same time, their limited prior exposure also made their accounts of bodily symptoms and allergic reactions less of an account of the everyday experience than that of the exceptional experience of the toxic day tripper.

In the process of developing their “body meter” (Shapiro, 2015), Kabadabad became a place where middle-class environmental practitioners located their concerns about the environment and e-waste’s toxicity. To locate toxicity in the city, Dipesh and Lata, just like other outsiders, drew on a variety of available social and visual tropes to create their awareness materials. Their prime source for this exercise were materials produced by environmental advocacy, such as the film in the previous section. But this they combined with their bodily symptoms as well as their middle-class, upper caste notions of orderly, clean, and healthy environments, which Baviskar, long-term ethnographer of Delhi’s environment, calls “bourgeois environmentalism” (2003: 2020). The sight of infrastructural breakdown, streets piling high with rubbish, the smell of open sewers, and the state of the air in the area prompted them to interpret Kabadabad market as a slum, despite having no official status as such. Akash, a young logistics guy in the operations team talked of the less-than-optimal hygienic conditions as a difficulty while visiting the company warehouse in the area. Another, male colleague took off his gold chain in anticipation of coming to an insecure part of town. In contrast, Kabadabad residents insisted that their area was defined by family values and good neighbourly relations, making it safe even for women day and night. Baviskar (2020) argues, that it was such class based value judgements that fuelled the spate of court cases that have defined environmental policies and their implementation in Delhi since the 1980s. Occasionally, “bourgeois environmentalism” has even led to actual violence in testimony to the capital’s environmental class divide, when middle-class residents beat to death a slumdweller who, for lack of toilets, defecated in a gated community park (Baviskar, 2003).

In the “epistemological alliances” that this article is making, PRO employees’ sensibilities developed in response to Kabadabad constitute a valid facet of evidence in understanding the lived experience of toxic places. Such experiences, however, are written out of accounts of “slow violence” because they do not come from bodies that are representable as “morally legitimate suffering bodies” (Ticktin, 2011; Fiske, 2018). Nevertheless, the point is to demonstrate how knowledge of toxic places arises from bodies’ “relative positions of power and proximity to pollution” (Fiske 2018: 397). This produces partial and limited accounts of the different sensory experiences which find rightful place in the epistemic alliances that help understanding slow violence.

Following on from the previous section, I emphasise the gap between bodily, sensory experience and representation, to highlight the discrepancies in the production of knowledge about e-waste markets. In accordance with Fiske, I do not take bodily knowledge as uncomplicated evidentiary claims, but keep alert to the ways in which the practice of representing bodies in the service of “[m]aking the relations of toxicity legible is always a political act” (2018: 407). She makes a similar distinction in her account of toxic tours in Ecuadorian Amazon between the bodies of unaffected outsiders and those of exposed locals. They all take part in the gesture of dirtying their hand with crude oil but their respective positions imbue it with a different meaning (Fiske, 2018). The “epistemic alliances” this article strives for involves a methodology where the experiences and representation of bodies with different relative positions to toxicity are triangulated, neither privileging one or the other as “true” representations of Kabadad. Moving on from the experiences of the PRO employees, the next section recounts a particular instance of how an informal e-waste dealer tries to avoid talking about toxicity, revealing the underlying power and politics of toxic relations in Kabadabad.

Body politics of toxic intimacy

Despite my diligent readings and ample warnings, I did not experience nor witness anyone display radical bodily discomfort or allergy in Kabadabad. Neither did I, however, ever get used to the lingering smell of burnt plastic—stronger at times, fainter at others—during the time I spent there. As I walked down the streets, I would often see people loading broken CRT monitor glass (cathode-ray tube monitors contain lead dust) or tipping lead acid batteries into the drain in broad daylight. My neighbour in Kabadabad, an out-of-work property dealer, became animated when I mentioned my research interest in the polluting effects of e-waste recycling and pointed out the places where plastic coated wire would be burned at night to evade the police. From his balcony I saw that behind the walls of an old, one-storeyed village house with an open courtyard, a CRT monitor glass processing unit was hiding, where men picked through leaded glass. In the evenings, a clay-thatched tandoor oven, fitted with a computer fan to stoke the fire, would be wheeled out from the shop in front of the building to sell hot, fluffy rotis, which I would not touch knowing what lay behind. Like my PRO employee interlocutors, and other outsiders who came before me, I found it hard to dissociate urban squalor from the “chemical sublime” (Shapiro, 2015), which gave me both the thrills of an environmental journalist on the trail of a story and a sense of disgust at the idea of buying tomatoes and potatoes off the street in this particular area. However, I found in the denial of one of my long - term interlocutors the most telling evidence of bodily knowledge politics at play in Kabadabad.

One day, in between doing the rounds of the market, I sat on a bag of printed circuit boards (PCBs) in Shaheed and Samir’s warehouse. I observed Samir as he dipped PCBs into molten solder to remove the small motor. Observing his hands move deftly, the repetitive motion numbed my consciousness, so it took a little while to notice the twitching in my face from the fumes rising from the small electric implement. The pleasantly glistening silvery blob was balanced on a small plate heated by a coil to soften the solder on the PCB. In the process, the motor was loosened to yield without yanking or breaking the plastic. At every second move the molten solder would burn just a little more than the silver lines on the back of a PCB, letting out a small cloud of plastic smell wafting towards me.

It took some time to realise the enhanced pressure on the side of my forehead. (Or was I imagining it?) “It must have led in it,” I was thinking to myself. I asked Samir, “Don’t the fumes bother you?” But my hope to elicit a straightforward response did not come to fruition. “No,” he shrugged, “I’ve gotten used to it, I’ve been doing this work since I was sixteen or seventeen.” As I sat there looking at his hands and as the pressure in my forehead intensified, I told him that the fumes did affect me. To which he replied, “That’s because you are a VIP.”

Samir’s answer was one in a long series of attempts on the part of e-waste dealers to evade or deny my probing questions about harm. I understand their effort as a moment of “ethnographic refusal” (Simpson, 2007) where, without so many words, e-waste dealers expressed a lack of desire to explore the topic. It is also a moment where an interlocutor’s response highlights the discontinuity between their own and the researchers’ experience, where self-reflexivity only goes so far to explain what is going on (Rose, 1997). Through the triangulation of bodies, represented, representing, and reflexive, I try to practice the art of noticing in the face of “contrived ignorance” (Lou, 2022). This moment when toxicity disappears from the body of someone who is supposed to be the victim triangulates well with the more explicit experiences of others. In fact, Samir’s reference to my “VIP” body brings into view the politics of toxic relations that have been woven around Delhi’s e-waste markets in the two decades since the environmental advocates pushed these markets in the limelight.

The denial of e-waste dealers, based on their lived experience and embodied sense of the e-waste work, is no proof against toxicity. Corwin (2018) found arguments during her fieldwork on e-waste repair and reuse practices in Delhi that dealers often said that toxic work no longer went on in the city. I also encountered similar views, however, I found these claims only partially true with more toxic processes having moved into hidden courtyards and further out towards the edges of the city in response to environmentalists’ campaigns and the resulting police crackdowns. Still, e-waste markets in Delhi had been subject to efforts of soil and water sample testing, even if not comparable to the flurry of activity on the part of NGOs and health practitioners in Accra, Ghana (Little, 2019, 2021). The ones carried out in the area showed elevated heavy metal content in informal markets and peri-urban e-waste processing areas in Loni and Mandoli (Toxics Link, 2014). While places like Kabadabad are known for dismantling activities, places like Loni and Mandoli beyond the border of the city are better known for burning and illegal smelters. Another, more recent study found even higher heavy metal content and acidification than any previous study (Arya et al., 2021).

The problem with biochemical research, however, is that it can only establish the elevated levels that are known to cause associated symptoms above certain thresholds. At the same time, the harm of “forever chemicals”, such as polychlorinated biphenyls or brominated flame retardants, dioxins, and furans, and other persistent organic pollutants, cannot be judged against thresholds because they bioaccumulate, disperse and settle elsewhere (Man et al., 2013; Singh et al., 2020; Singh, 2020). Some of these chemical substances may remain below the threshold that is considered harmful, and many of them are not even registered by the senses. There are further issues with toxicological predictions of harm, for most substances have not been tested in comparable environmental conditions. ⁶ In combination, thresholds provide little information on what it means to live with toxicity especially in a city with “toxic layering,” where it is hard to distinguish which component of the toxic cocktail lead to what illnesses and symptoms (Goldstein and Hall, 2015). On top of it all, even similarly situated individual bodies with apparently equal levels of exposure may be affected differently. ⁷ The threshold theory of toxicity also carries notions of available land as sinks and colonialism (Liboiron, 2021). But among Delhi’s e-waste workers the reluctance to participate also leads to a scarcity of test-based local studies compared to e-waste sites elsewhere in the world. These spaces are reportedly hard to access, and information is often gathered in short visits to the area. These points indicate the importance of long-term fieldwork to demonstrate the effects of “slow violence” and to understand what it means to live in a toxic place beyond evaluating thresholds (Davies 2022). But undue burden of gathering toxic proof from particular bodies may carry echoes of experiences of colonisation and Delhi’s e-waste workers resistance can be seen as a rejection of a “toxic postcolonial corporeality” (Little, 2019).

Samir’s bodily reasoning that the social inequalities place us in different relative positions to experiences of harm also coincides with the STS argument that harm is not located in “the wayward particle” but effluents, their uneven spread, and effects, are determined by toxic politics (Liboiron et al., 2018). Living and acting in a permanently polluted world holds a very particular kind of challenge for most of humanity in the twenty-first century (Liboiron et al., 2018; Nading, 2020). The narrative is often geared toward inciting action and to re-establish purity in the world—not only an impossible exercise, but also charged with ethical questions (Murphy, 2006; Shotwell, 2016). Here I am only partially able to address the ethical conundrum by alerting to the body politics behind chemical relations that citizens, scientists, activists, and environmentalists establish for the purposes of action. In many toxic places, toxicants are released from identifiable locations of power in the form of large-scale industrial units despite of which corporations go to great lengths at denying their culpability. In Kabadabad, however, not only there are no spectacular events but there are no large industrial units either, which would make it possible to locate the source. E-waste dealers operate out of small warehouses, hiding their activities behind walls and closed doors, anticipating police harassment, which does not solve the issue but perpetuates the structural violence of bourgeois environmentalism.

In such a situation a decolonial perspective of chemical relations (Murphy, 2017) needs to take into account the socio-economic context of Samir’s encounter with my ‘VIP’ body, and the identification of the latter as vulnerable rather than his more exposed body. All six brothers in Samir and Shaheed’s family were engaged in the e-waste business. The eldest sons in the family came into the e-waste business by way of tailoring, while Shaheed and Samir grew into it through apprenticing with their uncle. They were Maliks, belonging to the Muslim teli caste, and had migrated in the past ten years from Meerut in Western Uttar Pradesh. Their original caste occupation indicates oil pressing. ⁸ Many of the community members expressed pride in their community taking control of the e-waste business and becoming quite well to do in the process. My interlocutors would say, “Malikon ne kabade ka kaam pakad liya hai [the Maliks have captured the scrap business],” indicating a caste pride. Despite the palpable pride, Samir’s reference to the English acronym ‘VIP’ also demonstrated the Maliks’ reflection on their lower position within the city’s class hierarchy. They were acutely aware of their marginal position—as low caste Muslims, as recent migrants to the city, inhabitants of devalued neighbourhoods, as well as breakers of e-waste, a craft of disrepute. ⁹

Besides class inequalities, Samir’s emphasis on his long-term experience in this line of work highlights another important aspect of living with toxicity. The tendency to become blunt to environmental stressors as a part of environmental degradation also often remains hidden when researchers look for proof in explicit narratives of “slow violence” (Ahmann, 2018; Davies, 2022; Nixon, 2011). Over the years Samir’s body got used to the work and perhaps stopped noticing its effects. In a sense, Samir’s insistence that he was not affected by the plastic fumes was the other side of the film crew’s observation quoted above that e-waste workers appeared to be unfazed by the conditions around them, never having had the luxury of clean surroundings. This challenges Davies’ (2023) claim that “slow observation” leads to “an embodied and temporal sense of knowing, something that comes from years of immersion in a place across time” (50, emphasis in the original). Rather, long term exposure here is more akin to the “art of unnoticing” practiced in an industrial centre in China where residents “negotiated life in damaged environments by doing the opposite of what” ethnographers would be doing, rather trying to ignore the conditions around (Lou, 2022: 581). Yet, Samir’s effort to avoid the topic directs his eyes to my “VIP” body, which is perhaps vulnerable to what he does not sense exactly because it does not share the years of work and exposure. In that moment, due to my pointed question, Samir is forced to reckon with the inequalities that he wishes to unknow in a way similar to the Chinese workers (Lou, 2022). At the same time, he makes me aware of the limits to the degree to which outsiders like me can access the lived experience of those who had lived in such conditions for most of their lives. Such acts of ignoring or deflecting are, however, a powerful commentary on the politics of what it means to live in toxic environments.

In a powerful response to my questions about representation, two years after I left the field, Samir’s brother confided in me in a phone conversation. He told me that at the beginning of my stay, friends had showed him journalistic accounts and warned him against letting me into his life. He said, however, that he knew I would not write something like that, because I had witnessed first-hand that they employ no child labour in their warehouses and, more importantly, because we had developed a bond (lagaav ho gaya). This article is my attempt to honour the trust that he and a few others have placed in me by showing that e-waste workers are not the unconscious or uncaring perpetrators of environmental breakdown that accounts had made them out to be. Rather, they find their own ways to inhabit an already, irrevocably polluted world (Shotwell, 2016).

In this final section, Samir’s challenge to the continuity between his experience in life and mine highlights the lived experience of toxicity. Despite my long-term fieldwork—long-term compared to most outsiders—the above discussion revealed that my particularly classed, gendered, and racialised body was marked as unaccustomed to the everyday e-waste dismantling process in relation to Samir’s long-durée. He and I, we just didn’t have the same bodies. In the context of my long-term engagement, Samir’s statement is as equally a denial and a glimpse into the ‘alterlives’ (Murphy, 2017) unfolding in the e-waste market where the toxic environment becomes normalised. Samir’s body is adapted, though not quite a mutant to the extent of Stawkowski’s interlocutors who called themselves “radioactive mutants” (Stawkowski, 2016), but epigenetically modified in the interaction with the environment (Romero et al., 2017; Senanayake and King, 2019). The notion also finds resonance in wider South Asian notions of the permeable body, according to which the air, water, and soil from which people draw sustenance define their personalities (Daniel, 1987; Marriott, 1976, 2007). Despite the hopeful note of Doron and Jeffrey (2018), waste and air pollution do not present a case of binding crisis that forces the rich to make common cause with the poor. The discontinuity between bodies also links to the questions raised in the first section around knowledge production by outsiders whose methods involved spending a few hours in the market at a time. Yet, it is not simply long-term ethnographic fieldwork, but also the trust developed with Samir and his brother which creates space for their representation of my body to emerge as a contribution to an account of lived experience.

Conclusion

In this article I explored how narratives crafted in the fight against global electronics producer corporations played out after the success of the environmental advocacy movement. I explored the knowledge processes that underline the crafting of a toxic narrative around e-waste highlighting the resistance of e-waste workers and the difficulties outsiders face when translating workers bodily experiences for a global audience. In the process of mapping the power that underlies the chemical relations that put places like Seelampur and Kabadabad on the map as nodes in global toxic flows, I highlighted the barely perceptible way in which outsiders’ perspectives influence the representation of toxic places. Pointing out the embodied knowledge practices behind would-be impartial, scientific, environmental reports, emphasises the representational, epistemological political issues caught up in understanding the “slow violence” of everyday pollution. To put representations in context I also explored how outsiders, such as my interlocutors in the PRO, come to understand their bodily reactions as knowledge about the e-waste market. I argued that the fact that PRO employees’ do not have prior experience of toxicity make it important for them to visit in person acquiring in the process an authority of having experienced Kabadabad first hand. Yet, outsiders’ experience cannot be taken as uncomplicated evidence of the presence of toxicants, because, as Samir had pointed out, in the long-durée of living and working in contamination bodies may become altered. E-waste workers and outsiders may not have the same bodies. This would not mean that that e-waste is not toxic, but that bodies would have reactions to it based on their gender, class, and caste positions.

The article contributes to debates around the concept of “slow violence” and representation by drawing attention to the complexities of lived experience in Kabadabad. The concept of “slow violence” (Nixon, 2011) has by now become widely accepted as an analytic of attritional, dispersed, and imperceptible environmental degradation. However, my examination of the implications of one-off exposure, long - term fieldwork, and the experiential long-durée exposes the inadequacies of the methodology that has become associated with the notion. The article highlighted that calls for long-term fieldwork for studying slow violence, while useful in drawing attention to the temporality and dispersed nature of environmental breakdown, do not in fact provide an entirely satisfactory methodological answer, raising further issues of representation and knowledge. This question is even more important to examine at a time when such representations are becoming the basis of ill-fitting policies that lead to the creation of businesses such as Sahih Kaam who, inverting the power dynamics of environmental activists, carry out awareness sessions on behalf of producer corporations to convince citizens of the presence of toxicants. These attempts are in earnest hoping to create a better future, but the imperfect knowledge practices and epistemic violence that underly “bourgeois environmentalist” (Baviskar, 2003, 2020) narratives remain out of sight. For a search for particular kind of experiences may leave out the potential for documenting how inhabitants of toxic places practice “contrived ignorance” (Lou, 2022). At the same time, living with toxicity may alter bodies and their ability to sense toxicants to the extent that it becomes necessary to attend to the limits to which outsiders can understand what it means to live in toxic places in the long term. Thus, I argue, bodies placed in various “relative relations of power and proximity to toxicity” (Fiske, 2018) and their representations have to be triangulated to attend to the complexity of lived experience.

In my account, asking pointed questions and listening to the testimonies of those affected reveals unacknowledged biases on the part of observers that irons out contradictions and complexities of what it means to live with e-waste’s harm. In the process of implementing the resulting laws that enforce the “polluter pays” principle, as a collateral damage, e-waste workers have come to be understood as part of the problem. Representing unaware or uncaring workers, who are at once victims and perpetrators of environmental harm, led to a legal framework that does not recognise their contribution in dealing with electronics discards. In fact, narratives wielded by outsiders without an attachment to the place and its people result in the imperceptible, slow shifting of blame to the marginalised e-waste worker. It would be of no surprise if, over the years, they would have toughened up against the accusations, closing ranks, and learning to ignore the toll that their labour is taking on their bodies. Moreover, my account also raises the wider question whether the global environmental narrative in fact locally feeds into notions of ritual pollution and caste creating new grounds for re-establishing hierarchical relations among the inhabitants of the city. This, however, requires further scholarly exploration.