Caste, Leather, Pollution: A Tale of Ganga That No One Wants to Hear

You can't fix the environment without fixing society. Otherwise, it's just not fair, writes Rahul Verma.

When courts ordered tanneries in Kanpur to relocate due to environmental concerns, it was not the factory owners who suffered. The workers lost their wages, some even lost their homes.

(Photo: The Quint)

You don't see it at first. You smell it.

That chemical reek, hanging heavy in the air in Jajmau, a suburb of Kanpur It's the smell of injustice, plain and simple. This is where the tanneries are, where communities live and work, and where the cost of progress is measured in polluted water, sick lungs, and jobs that disappeared.

Kanpur's story? It's a warning: you can't fix the environment without fixing society. Otherwise, it's just not fair.

This injustice is deeply intertwined with caste. In Jajmau, it is primarily Dalit communities who bear the brunt of the pollution, a consequence of historical social hierarchies that have relegated them to the margins.

Environmental damage is not just about pollution of the air, soil, and water, or the depletion of limited natural resources. It’s also about caste and memory. In Kanpur, a city known as the Manchester of the East, it is not hard to see how caste shapes the way people live with land and water.

Along the river Ganga, stories are not just about work, they are about inheritance. Farming, fishing, and tanning are not just jobs; they are legacies passed down through caste lines. Caste is not only a social identity; it’s woven into how communities understand and manage nature itself.

Caste and Ecology

Long before the dominance of smokestacks, people's interactions with the environment were influenced by social divisions such as caste. The occupational divisions were not just about social hierarchy; they also held systems of ecological stewardship.

For example, the Chamar leatherworkers, a scheduled caste, were masters of vegetable tanning long before the introduction of modern tanning methods such as chemical tanning. Their methods, though slower, were gentler on both the skin and the soil.

Boatmen from the Mallah, Kewat, and Nishad communities had an intuitive grasp of the Ganga’s rhythms.

They did not need instruments to read the flood pulse or anticipate shifting sandbars – the knowledge was lived, tested, and passed down. And, then there were the Kurmis and Kachhis, whose farming practices nourished the Gangetic plains without ever relying on synthetic inputs. These communities knew how to work with the soil of the Gangetic plain, rotating crops in ways that nourished the land without using chemicals.

The Labour That Holds Kanpur Together

A city like Kanpur runs quietly on the shoulders of those humans who are rarely seen. At sunrise, when the streets begin to stir, sanitation workers are already at work, cleaning what others leave behind. Along the river, boatmen move in rhythm with the Ganga’s morning breath.

In the narrow lanes, waste collectors sift through what the city has discarded, while small farmers tend to the earth in spaces the city forgot. Most of them come from communities that have carried this work for generations, often without choice, and almost always without recognition.

Their presence is felt in every clean street, every boat that floats, every patch of green that still breathes, yet their names are not spoken. It’s not just neglect; it’s a silence that has been taught and repeated. Their hands shape the rhythms of the city, but their voices are rarely heard when it comes to how the environment is managed or restored. It's a kind of silence that doesn’t happen by chance.

Much of city life rests on work that rarely gets noticed. The early morning sweepers, the boatmen along the Ganga, the men and women who sort through piles of waste, and those growing vegetables on the city's fringes quietly hold the city together. The urban landscape we inhabit relies on unseen work, which silently maintains its visible order.

From those who handle sanitation and navigate waterways to the individuals who recycle waste and cultivate our food, these essential roles often go without recognition.

This lack of acknowledgement is a form of societal blindness; the city depends on their contributions yet acts as if they are not there.

Consider the industrial tapestry of Kanpur as a telling instance. The city's growth narrative is deeply woven with ecological labour, particularly its historical strength in leather production. However, the ensuing advantages did not reach all corners of its society equally. The rise of factories within Kanpur's boundaries saw traditional skills and the people who possessed them gradually displaced. What then took hold? Regrettably, processes that amplified environmental degradation demanded more resources, and led to greater social exclusion.

This is not an Indian story. In Japan, the Burakumin, traditionally assigned to leather and sanitation work, went through the same exclusion. In Egypt, the Zabaleen have created one of the most efficient waste-recycling systems, but they live at the margins. In societies where environmental knowledge is inherited, a related social stigma is often inherited as well.

Justice from Below

Kanpur brings these issues to the surface. The tanneries that replaced traditional leather work have introduced chemical runoff, particularly in the Jajmau area, where the Dalit communities live and work. I have walked through these areas; the smell of the tanneries is noticeable before they come into view.

Skin conditions, breathing issues, and toxic water are not abstract concepts; they are a reality that people experience. It’s there in their lives.

When courts ordered tanneries to relocate due to environmental concerns, it was not the factory owners who suffered. The workers lost their wages, some even lost their homes. The city lost an entire layer of ecological expertise that had once made the leather industry sustainable.

However, communities have responded. I have come across stories of workers organising for better working conditions and traditional knowledge being passed down, even as the tools have changed. The communities living along the riverbanks are now involved in restoration work. There is a sense of defiance in that, a silent refusal to be erased.

In a way, this presents a viable way forward. What if our restoration endeavours employ the very people who have always known the river better than others? What if urban planners learn and incorporate traditional knowledge into urban farming practices? What if we put to use modern tools to revive traditional and resource efficient tanning methods?

Okay, so what can be done? Forget top-down solutions for a minute. Let's talk about tapping into the knowledge that's already there in the communities themselves. The people who have lived along the Ganges for generations, who have seen its ebbs and flows, they understand things that no policy paper can capture.

What if we put them in charge of restoration projects? What if urban planning was not just about concrete and steel, but about weaving in traditional water management techniques that mimic natural cycles? Think about bandhis, small-scale check dams that have been used for centuries to conserve water.

And what about tanning? The old vegetable tanning methods are slower, sure, but they do not leave behind a trail of toxic sludge. Can we use modern science to scale those up, to make them commercially viable? Places like the Central Leather Research Institute in Chennai are exploring exactly that. It's not about romanticising the past, it's about being smart, about recognising that the solutions we need might already be within reach, if we just bother to look.

Justice begins with listening. Justice requires listening not just to policy experts, but also to those who have lived closest to the environment, often through caste-assigned roles assigned to them both a burden and valuable knowledge.

In Kanpur, environmental justice must be accompanied by social justice, or it is no justice at all. If we want to clean the Ganges river, we must also acknowledge how it became polluted, not just by the industry, but by systems that treated people's labour as disposable. We need to begin hearing from the people who were never consulted before, who possess valuable information.

(Rahul Verma teaches Sociology at SPSEC, Kanpur. He explores the intersections of, caste, gender, social ecology, and education through everyday lived experiences. This is an opinion piece. The views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)