I grew up in a Brahmin family in Kolkata during the 1990s and 2000s. Toilets have always been a source of contention and segregation in my grandparents’ house. My inspiration for writing the article came at a time when I experienced recurrent bladder issues and the importance of women’s health in hygiene maintenance. My constant visits to the Urologist and the Gynaecologist made me realise that there is less awareness about women’s reproductive health and personal hygiene in society. The women were silently dealing with health issues when I was growing up, with discreet visits to the doctors and creating a whispering network by talking to other women about their issues, but never sharing with men so as not to overburden them. The menstrual cycle has recently gained visibility, especially on social media, which highlights that women’s bodies go through distinct physiological cycles – an understanding that was absent during the majority of my formative years and adulthood.

 One important aspect of women’s hygiene is how men in the family were and continue to use the toilet. The shrinking of space in urban areas also results in many family members using the same toilet, but caste and patriarchy shape access to toilets within these limited spaces. As a child, my parents and my sister used to visit my grandparents’ house. This was not in any village or town but right in the city of Kolkata, an apartment where my grandparents stayed with their younger son and daughter-in-law. My grandfather worked as an administrative staff member in a Private Girls’ School and often called himself progressive, where he would wear formal pants and shirts to the office while he kept a house help for his wife so as not to burden her with household chores. He also spoke in English, a skill he developed while working for many years in an English-medium school. The only thing that my grandmother had to do was to manage the routine of the house according to my grandfather’s office and leisure time. She served him food and, thereafter, a bowl of water to clean his fingers. There were two bathrooms in the apartment, where one bathroom was kept strictly for my grandfather. My grandfather was looked upon as the head of the house and was given special treatment, where food was first served to him, and one toilet was strictly kept for him. It was a western toilet, and the other one was an Indian style squat toilet that all the family members used, especially when we visited during festivals and gatherings. Even my grandmother, who had a knee problem, could never use my grandfather’s toilet. The only time she entered the toilet was to clean it for my grandmother. This also resulted in avoiding any cleaner from entering the toilet who could belong to any caste group. Once, when I entered the toilet, these was comparatively cleaner and had all the necessities that were missing from the toilets that other family members used.  The floors and walls had tiles, whereas the common toilet floor was basic. I was later chastised for violating the space reserved for my grandfather. The guests were only allowed to go to the common bathroom, which all the women in the house used.

In a recent discussion with my mother, where we opened up about our health issues and she stated that after her C-section surgery, she still uses the common toilet after her deliveries. She recalled the time when she was only allowed to use my grandfather’s toilet for two months, with complaints that she was not maintaining hygiene, which could compromise my grandfather’s health. My grandfather would often talk about his caste identity, associating it with royal blood. This often manifested in separate spaces, even in a small 2bhk (bedrooms, hall and kitchen) apartment and the services for him.  As the head of the family, he would have his single seater sofa from where he would eat and never share the table with us. In the limited urban spaces, even with the families living together, the spaces and services were segregated and could only be accessed by my grandfather and not others, for the fear of desecrating the purity of the spaces.

My grandmother and my aunt regularly took on the task of cleaning the toilets for their husbands, reflecting their commitment to ensuring a hygienic environment for their husbands. At the same time, men in the family rarely contributed or showed any interest in understanding or supporting women’s health and hygiene maintenance. Even my father was later taught to pull up the toilet seat when he uses it. Understanding Brahmanical patriarchy requires turning towards daily practices of the upper caste brahmin families and the ways spaces and services are regulated and accessed by the men in the family, where the women gain legitimacy by guarding these sacred spaces for the men. Even though the women were given education and house help, it fell upon them to preserve the cultural purity in the houses by being vigilant about guarding the spaces of their husbands and services to suit their individual needs. This intersection of caste and patriarchy is nuanced and complex which show one step forward of providing house help to my grandmother and English education to my aunt but it was two steps backward when my grandmother’s whole life became a way to cater to the needs and routine of my grandfather that included safeguarding and cleaning the sacred toilet space where he entered. My aunt’s English education was a means to secure a suitable marriage prospect.

My mother was more assertive and did not believe in the segregation, but in our house we had only a single toilet that my parents, my sister and I used. Even though my mother, as a homemaker, complained sometimes about constructing another toilet in the house, the financial constraints made it impossible. Although, as a Savarna woman, I have the required privilege of education to make my living in a private university, my father’s mental health condition and my living far away from home due to my job made me keep good relations with my relatives. This is where the caste privilege stays, especially considering that my upper caste relatives are doctors, and my parents and I could benefit from their suggestions and services even when their interpretations contradict my anti-caste position. The only change I could bring is to tell my father, much later in life, to lift the toilet seat while urinating.

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Ankita Chatterjee has completed her PhD from the Centre for the Study of Social Systems (CSSS), Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi. She has earlier taught at Christ University, Delhi NCR and Symbiosis University, Pune.