Excrement and Waste: Examining the Ramifications of the Municipal Infrastructures and the Problem of Global Eco-Cosmopolitism in Malik Sajad’s Munnu: A Boy from Kashmir

Abstract

This essay challenges the equity of eco-cosmopolitism, which Patrick Hayden defines as a socio-political “world environmental citizenship” (2010, 368). Isabelle Stengers, among others, recommends an ecological “cosmopolitical proposal”– a global checks and balances system (2005, 1003). In response, I argue that eco-cosmopolitism merely dredges up the same criticism of inequality and social injustice already problematized against Kant’s “civil commons.” Examining Malik Sajad’s Munnu: A Boy from Kashmir (2015), I explore the cultural narrative concerning the hazardous disposal of waste in Kashmir. I suggest that eco-cosmopolitism is a neo-imperialist hegemonic construct that glosses over both the lived experiences and the complicated history of Kashmir. Ideological visions of a global environmentalism are easy to imagine when one occupies the privilege of sanitary waste management and relative political stability; however, in contested territories of violence, one’s concern for the environment is guided less by planetary liberal-universalist environmentalism than by ownership of local land. Examining Munnu’s representation of Kashmir’s sanitation infrastructure, I argue that India wrestles against its own colonial history while also employing tenets of colonialism in the eco-colonization of Kashmir, which I pair with international apathy toward Kashmir. By analyzing British blueprints of colonial latrines for South Asia, drafted in 1906, I argue that Munnu confronts global indifference to the humanitarian crisis and the environmental degradation of Kashmir’s dated concerns and municipal infrastructure.