1. Batool, Syeda Adila and Nawaz, Muhammad, “Municipal Solid Waste Management in Lahore City District Pakistan” Waste Management 29 (2009): 1971–81CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed. The estimate of five thousand tons per day is conservative, as it does not take into account population growth and increased per capita waste generation, and does not consider the physical expansion of the city beyond its older administrative units. Rather than determine the accuracy of these estimates, what should be kept in mind is the growth of a waste economy in light of the city's development in demographic, spatial, institutional, and infrastructural terms.

2. Recent scholarship on South Asia has reexamined processes of urban development—space, institutions, and infrastructures—through waste, the work surrounding, and those who groups have come to perform that work. See Gidwani, Vinay, “Value Struggles: Waste Work and Urban Ecology in Delhi,” in Ecologies of Urbanism in India: Metropolitan Civility and Sustainability, ed. Rademacher, Anne and Sivaramakrishnan, K. (Hong Kong, 2013), 169–200CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gidwani, Vinay and Chaturvedi, Bharati, “Poverty as Geography: Motility, Stoppages and Circuits of Waste in Delhi,” in Urban Navigations: Politics, Space, and the City in South Asia,  ed. Anjaria, Jonathan Shapiro and McFarlane, Colin (New Delhi, 2011), 50–78Google Scholar; Gidwani, Vinay and Maringanti, Anant, “The Waste-Value Dialectic Lumpen Urbanization in Contemporary India,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 36 (2016): 112–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Reddy, Rajyashree N., “Producing Abjection: E-Waste Improvement Schemes and Informal Recyclers of Bangalore,” Geoforum 62 (2015): 166–174CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gill, Kaveri, Of Poverty and Plastic: Scavenging and Scrap Trading Entrepreneurs in India's Urban Informal Economy (Oxford, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Beall, Jo, “Dealing with Dirt and the Disorder of Development: Managing Rubbish in Urban Pakistan,” Oxford Development Studies 34 (2006): 81–97CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Moreover, state institutions, non-governmental organizations, and citizens are increasingly mobilizing to mitigate the environmental and health effects of waste generation on an unprecedented scale, and numerous development interventions, supported by a variety of state and non-state actors, have been designed to cleanse these urban environments of waste materials and the groups that perform this labor and reside on these cities’ peripheries. Amit Baviskar has described this process bourgeois environmentalism. See Baviskar, Amita, “Between Violence and Desire: Space, Power, and Identity in the Making of Metropolitan Delhi,” International Social Science Journal 55 (2003): 89–98CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3. To be clear, I use the term “informal” not as a category of analysis in this paper, but rather, as a category of practice used by many in Pakistan and elsewhere to describe a domain of activity distinct from the municipal department or private companies. Such a distinct domain does not, in fact, exist, and the activities of state and non-state institutions are deeply enmeshed with one another.

4. There are multiple terms in circulation to refer to these groups, each with their own social, political, and legal valence. Low or non-caste Hindus reference those groups who were placed either into the fourth and lowest Hindu caste (shudra) or outside of caste Hinduism. The term dalit, which has been popularized in India and started to circulate in Pakistan, references these low or non-caste groups. However, the social categories of either phakiwas / khana badosh (nomads or “gypsies”) or kammi (“village servants”) were most often used by Pakistanis to speak of those with low or non-caste backgrounds. Other important legal categories are schedule castes and schedule tribes that are still used in Pakistan. They do not legally include lower status groups from Islam or Christianity mentioned in this article. Finally, in everyday social life, another important term that is used to describe these groups is acchut, or untouchable, and placing persons into this social category means interdictions on commensality, marriage, and other intergroup interactions.

5. Another group involved in the waste economy are communities from the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province in Pakistan or other regions of Afghanistan. However, because these communities face constant harassment and violence by the Pakistani state and military and the suspicions they had about me being a US citizen, I was unable to do fieldwork with them.

6. See Subramaniam, Ajantha, “Making Merit: The Indian Institutes of Technology and the Social Life of Caste,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 57 (2015): 291–322CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Fuller, Christopher and Narasimhan, Haripriya, Tamil Brahmins: the Making of a Middle-Class Caste (Chicago, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. This position is distinct from classical sociological and anthropological literature where caste was defined as involving endogamy, occupational specialization, hierarchical ordering, and socio-religious interdictions on commensality and intergroup interactions. See Ahmad, Imtiaz, “Introduction,” in Caste and Social Stratification among Muslims in India, ed. Ahmad, Imtiaz (New Delhi, 1978), 4Google Scholar. One important theme in this literature was the regulation of coded substances, especially food, between persons within a ranked hierarchy of castes, in which Brahmanical values of purity were paramount. Such practices are not salient in this context where exchanges are not so regulated. See McKim, Marriot, Marriott, M., and Inden, Ronald, “Toward an ethnosociology of South Asian caste systems.” in The new wind: Changing identities in South Asia, ed. David, Kenneth (The Hague, 1977), 227–38Google Scholar.

7. A vast body of literature exists that has explored how caste as a social and legal category entered different domains of governance and was predicated upon forms of knowledge production about “native” society. See Dirks, Nicholas, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (Princeton, NJ, 2001)Google Scholar; Rao, Anupama, The Caste Question: Dalits and the Politics of Modern India (Berkeley, CA, 2009)Google Scholar; Cohn, Bernard, “The Census, Social Structure and Objectification in South Asia.” in An Anthropologist Among the Historians and Other Essays, ed. Cohn, Bernard (New York, 1987), 224–54Google Scholar.

8. Much of this work has drawn upon the work of Julia Kristeva whose feminist and psychoanalytic approach teased out the abject as eliciting contradictory affects of desire and repulsion. See Kristeva, Julia, Powers of Horror (New York, 1982)Google Scholar. Rajyashree N. Reddy, “Producing Abjection: E-Waste Improvement Schemes and Informal Recyclers of Bangalore.” Other approaches have seen waste and wasting as metaphors for the condition of modernity and contemporary capitalism. See, e.g., Buam, Zygmat, Wasted Lives: Modernity and Its Outcasts (Malden, MA, 2004)Google Scholar. Other studies have drawn inspiration from Mary Douglas's dictum that dirt is “matter out of place” that materials labelled waste be placed on the analytic peripheries of cultural, social, economic, and political orders. See Douglas, Mary, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (New York, 2002)Google Scholar; O'Brien, Martin, A Crisis of Waste?: Understanding the Rubbish Society (New York, 2008)Google Scholar; Hawkins, Guy, The Ethics of Waste: How We Relate to Rubbish (Lanham, MD, 2006)Google Scholar. Though these works have been insightful in many ways, especially looking at the ambivalences and marginalization that gets produced through waste, the approach in this article pushes forward analysis of waste and the work surrounding it away from the abject and peripheries and toward the aspirations and possibilities embedded in this form of work, which will be clarified as the article proceeds. In that sense, it joins a growing body of literature that has interrogated the limitations of the framing of “abject.” For instance, Kathleen M. Millar pushes us “to recognize the [garbage] dump as an assemblage of things” made up of “real and specific dangers” for catadores (“pickers”), and the “ontological experience of the abject” being materialized through storytelling and “a gradual process of transformation.” Reclaiming the Discarded: Life and Labor on Rio's Garbage Dump (Durham, NC, 2018), 59. A more recent illuminating venue has been to examine how practices of waste and citizenship are entangled under changing regimes of governance, development, and value. See Resnick, Elana, “Durable Remains: Glass Reuse, Material Citizenship and Precarity in EU-era Bulgaria,” Journal of Contemporary Archaeology 5 (2018): 103–15CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Resnick, Elana, “Discarded Europe: Money, Trash, and the Possibilities of a New Temporality,” Anthropological Journal of European Cultures 24 (2015): 123–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Fredericks, Rosalind, Garbage Citizenship: Vital Infrastructures of Labor in Dakar, Senegal (Durham, NC, 2018)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9. As I examine how waste becomes entangled with aspirations for life, my approach dovetails with that of Joshua Reno who conceptualizes waste “as signs of a living thing, one that continued to live as evidenced by its having left something behind.’ Reno, Joshua, “Toward a New Theory of Waste: From ‘Matter Out of Place’ to Signs of Life” Theory, Culture, & Society, 31 (2014): 20CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10. Caste referred to India's pre-modern form of civil society, especially in contrast to the European nation-state and market associations, and ethnographic accounts written during this period displayed an overriding “preoccupation with abstract concepts of liberty and freedom which particular people either do or do not possess.” See Dirks, Castes of Mind, 12; Bayly, Susan, “Caste and ‘race’ in the Colonial Ethnography of India,” in The Concept of Race in South Asia, ed. Robb, Peter (New Delhi, 1995), 178Google Scholar.

11. In fact, Ibbetson compiled his ethnological study Punjab Castes based on the census reports of 1882 and 1883, which was incorporated into H.A. Rose’s ethnological account. See H. A. Rose, Glossary of the Tribes and Castes of the Punjab and North-West Frontier Province, Vols. 1-3 (Lahore, 1911).

12. Denzil Ibbetson, Punjab Castes (Lahore, 1916), 290.

13. H. A. Rose, Glossary of the Tribes and Castes of the Punjab and North-West Frontier Province, vol. 2 of 3 (Lahore, 1911), 182.

14. For colonial discussions of these distinctions, see Government of Punjab, Gazetteer of the Sialkot District (Lahore, 1990 [1920]), 98; Government of Punjab, Gazetteer of the Lahore District (Lahore, 2006 [1894]), 111. These distinctions are discussed with much clarity by Christopher Harding in his account of the conversion of low and non-caste Hindus to Christianity in colonial Punjab. See Harding, Christopher, Religious Transformation in South Asia. The Meanings of Conversion in Colonial Punjab (Oxford, 2008), 31–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15. Bayly, “Caste and ‘race’ in the Colonial Ethnography of India,” 205.

16. The inclusion of landed elites affirmed that the leadership of these groups in the Punjab would endure throughout the colonial period while also ensuring the entrenchment of the state apparatus and presumed structure of Punjabi society upon which it was built. See Gilmartin, David, Empire and Islam: Punjab and the Making of Pakistan (Berkeley, CA, 1988)Google Scholar; Ali, Imran, The Punjab under Imperialism: 1885–1947 (Princeton, NJ, 1988)Google Scholar.

17. Gilmartin, , “Biraderi and Bureaucracy,” International Journal of Punjab Studies 1 (1994): 5Google Scholar.

18. Prashad, Vijay, Untouchable Freedom: a Social History of a Dalit Community (New York, 2000), 29Google Scholar.

19. Ibid.

20. Gilmartin, David, “Water and Waste: Nature, Productivity and Colonialism in the Indus Basin,” Economic and Political Weekly 38 (2003): 5052, 6062–3Google Scholar.

21. The Punjab Land Alienation Act of 1900 was the coming to fruition of hybrid notions of contract and custom and ownership and settlement. Based upon notions of work, descent, and kinship, it differentiated between groups designated agriculturalists or non-agriculturalists, thereby barring the latter from acquiring property rights, though certain exceptions did occur. See Ali, Punjab Under Imperialism, 48–9; Barrier, Norman, “The Punjab Disturbances of 1907: The Response of the British Government in India to Agrarian Unrest,” Modern Asian Studies 1 (1967): 353–83CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Fox, Richard, “Urban Class and Communal Consciousness in Colonial Punjab: The Genesis of India's Intermediate Regime,” Modern Asian Studies 18 (1984): 459–89CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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23. Prashad, Untouchable Freedom, 32.

24. Harding, Religious Transformation in South Asia, 36; Kerr, Ian, “On the Move: Circulating Labour in Pre-Colonial, Colonial, and Post-Colonial India,” in Coolies, Capital, and Colonialism: Studies in Indian Labour History, ed. Behal, Rana P. and van der Linden, Marcel (Cambridge, 2006), 101–06Google Scholar; Harding, Religious Transformation in South Asia, 37.

25. Viswanath, Rupa, The Pariah Problem: Caste, Religion, and the Social in Modern India (New York, 2014)Google Scholar.

26. Prashad, Untouchable Freedom; Khalid, Amna, “Subordinate Negotiations: Indigenous Staff, the Colonial State and Public Health,” in The Social History of Health and Medicine in Colonial India, ed. Pati, Biswamoy and Harrison, Mark (New York, 2008), 45–73Google Scholar. Masselos, Jim, “Jobs and Jobbery: The Sweeper in Bombay under the Raj,” Indian Economic & Social History Review 19 (1982): 101–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Prashad, Vijay, “Marks of Capital: Colonialism and the Sweepers of Delhi,” International Review of Social History 40 (1995): 1–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Prashad, Vijay, “The Technology of Sanitation in Colonial Delhi,” Modern Asian Studies 35 (2001): 113–55CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

27. As should be clear by my earlier discussion of revenue settlement, one way in which “custom” was utilized at this historical junction was to refer to exchanges that were not mediated by money and written contracts and were organized based on local “traditions” and forms of renumeration. Unlike contractual, free labor in which a wage in the form of money was the medium of exchange between consenting parties, forms of exchange based on “custom” were not codified in contract, mediated by other forms of value (e.g., food), and entailed varying degrees of coercion. This category of custom, as a domain of activity outside of contractual labor and thus the state, aligns with the more contemporary category of informal, as described earlier.

28. For instances from Delhi and Bombay, respectively, see Jim Masselos, “Jobs and Jobbery”; Vijay Prashad, “Marks of Capital.”

29. Arnold, David, Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth-Century India (Berkeley, CA, 1993)Google Scholar; Johnson, Ryan and Khalid, Amna, ed., Public Health in the British Empire: Intermediaries, Subordinates, and the Practice of Public Health, 1850–1960 (New York, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Khalid, Amna, “‘Unscientific and Insanitary’: Hereditary Sweepers and Customary Rights,” in Public Health in the British Empire: Intermediaries, Subordinates, and the Practice of Public Health, 1850–1960, ed. Johnson, Ryan and Khalid, Amna (New York, 2012), 59–78Google Scholar.

30. Stock, Frederick, People Movements in the Punjab with Special Reference to the United Presbyterian Church, (South Pasadena, CA, 1974), 262Google Scholar.

31. City of Lahore Corporation Office, Corporation Proceedings, From 11/25/1952 to 1/20/1953, Record No. 580.

32. Ibid.

33. Frederick Stock, People Movements in the Punjab, 205.

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35. World Bank, Project Completion Report on Pakistan: Lahore Urban Development Project (Washington, DC, 1994).

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