Lather, rinse, record: A new book traces the ancient history of the dhobis of Delhi

In a new book, social anthropologist Subhadra Mitra Channa tells the story of Delhi’s many transformations through the eyes of one of its oldest and least-studied communities: the dhobis of Old Delhi.

Channa, 73, remembers first engaging with this community in 1974, when she was pursuing a PhD in urban anthropology. Her now-late husband Vardesh Chander Channa, also an anthropologist, suggested it.

“He had conducted research of his own in Old Delhi, and had befriended a dhobi called Omi Pehlwan, who was a prominent figure in the community because he was also a bonesetter and a wrestler,” Channa says. “I was looking for a topic for my PhD and my husband pointed out that the dhobis were a small community, still engaged in an ancient occupation, and largely located within the Old City.”

Over four years, Channa visited their homes, watched them work on the banks of the Yamuna, attended festivals and birth, wedding and funerals.

Urban anthropology was a very niche field at the time. Anthropologists so overwhelmingly preferred to study “exotic” communities such as remote tribes that Francisco Benet, writing in 1963, describe them as “a notoriously agoraphobic lot, anti-urban by definition”.

Channa’s choice of subject certainly evoked scepticism. People frequently asked why she would want to spend years studying a community that was (this part went unsaid) so far down the caste and social scale.

This just made her want to explore their world in greater detail. What was it like on the other side of this divide? “One couple told me they had opened a tea stall on Hamilton Road but had to close it because people would say ‘Dhobi ki chai’ and grimace,” she says.

Long after her research ended in 1978, she kept in touch with the friends she had made. She attended their children’s weddings, then their grandchildren’s. She attended funerals and births.

Meanwhile, she took up other research, and taught, including at Delhi University. In 2016, as she neared retirement age, she began to consider returning to the field. What had changed? What hadn’t? Dhobis of Delhi: An Urban Ethnography from the Margins (Oxford University Press) explores the answers, as well as the lore, unique traditions and aspirations of this community.

Ancient history

In her book, Channa traces the origins of the washermen of Old Delhi to the founding of the Mughal capital of Shahjahanabad, in the 17th century. At the time, they formed part of the old jajmani system in which members of lower castes performed services for members of dominant castes, in exchange for payment in kind.

In this era, the dhobi wasn’t just a launderer of clothes but also of one’s soul. “[He] essentially absorbed the pollution created by the bodies of the upper-caste men and women, through sweat, semen, blood, and by menstruation and childbirth,” Channa writes.

Over time, these considerations of purity and pollution receded. The introduction of easier-to-clean synthetic fabrics, and of course washing machines, took the dhobi out of the equation in many wealthy households. Rather than recede, the community reinvented.

“During the 1970s, as the garment-export market opened up, it was the dhobis who were washing, ironing and packing the clothes before they were shipped out,” says Channa. “As the city expanded and small hotels were set up in Paharganj, Karol Bagh etc, it’s the dhobis that turned up to wash their linen.”

Even at today’s professional laundry services, the proprietor might be a businessman and the staff may be an assorted group, but the person doing the actual washing is usually a dhobi. Channa the notion of inherited skill is at least partly responsible: there is a widespread sense that traditional washermen know how to get clothes clean because they are using special techniques handed down through the generations.

The dhobis take pride in this idea, she adds. They take pride in their identity. This is something modern India doesn’t make room for, or indeed acknowledge, she adds.

Only lately has the world of academia been adjusting, with a certain measure of surprise, to the idea that one can want to hold on to aspects of identity and culture such as one’s marginalised profession and cuisine.

Pulling at a thread

Among the book’s most interesting sections is the one on dhobi society. Both men and women have important roles in the work.

Like many marginalised castes, this one draw from the Bhakti and Sufi movements. They worship deities from the Hindu pantheon alongside ones they claim as their own, such as Khatu Shyam, the grandson of Bhima via his “demoness” wife Hidimba.

Dhobis offer goats in sacrifice at the Nizamuddin dargah during weddings, and make offerings at shrines in their homes called the “ala”, dedicated to the mystic spirits Badha Miyan and Nanhe Miyan of the Sufi tradition. Hindu and Muslim washermen remain part of the same community, sharing ghats but maintaining separate living quarters.

In recent years, the community has seen young inheritors exit the traditional livelihood (a trend visible across traditional livelihoods, in India and around the world). “There is definitely a Sanskritisation of the lifestyle too. Many dhobis have become vegetarian, for example, and are adopting mainstream Hindu rituals,” Channa says. “Most continue to revere the Sufi saints, at least privately, so I’m not sure how deep this transformation goes.”

Meanwhile, the community faces new threats.

Amid random urban development and the intensifying pollution of the Yamuna, knee-jerk policies have severed the dhobis’ relationship with their river, over time. Gentrification is edging them out of the walled city.

“Our policymakers visualise Delhi as a global city, a corporate hub, and there is no place for this community in their vision,” she says. “The dhobis keep telling me their livelihood is in danger, not because the market doesn’t offer them opportunities, but because the state won’t recognise these opportunities as legitimate ones.”