Revisiting Gandhi’s Sanitation from the Perspective of Anthropology and Sociology

Abstract

India has targeted 100 percent ODF target till October 2,2019. The year 2019 is being celebrated as the 150th birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi. Gandhi is always considered as symbol of cleanliness. His sanitation movement is one of its kind and focused on inner purity too. His politics was a moral politics and can be analysed as biopolitics too. The notion of pollution and purity is also studied by anthropologists and sociologists too. The article revisits the Gandhian Sanitation work and anthropological and sociological work on sanitation and contextualise it in the present context.