1. In 1995, the Shiv-Sena-led Maharashtra government officially changed the name of the city from Bombay to Mumbai. Since the late nineties, several names of places, landmarks, railway stations, and government administrative buildings in the city have been altered. I have found that the inhabitants of the city, however, continue to refer to it as Mumbai, Bombay, and Bambai in different registers.

2. Elected officials of the municipal corporation are colloquially referred to as corporators in Mumbai.

3. Human Development Index is a statistic that measures the quality of life people lead by aggregating indicators of health, education and finance.

4. Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai, Human Development Report 2009 (New Delhi, 2010).

5. Kumar, Arun and Mehta, Annabel, “Life on the Margin: Charting Realities,” Apnalaya Studies, Series – I (Mumbai, 2017)Google Scholar.

6. An analogous argument is made by Keller Easterling who suggests that history fails to illuminate failures in its more mundane and persistent avatars precisely because such failures are viewed as symptomatic of large-scale developments. Easterling, Keller, “Histories of Things That Don't Happen and Shouldn't Always Work,” Social Research: An International Quarterly 83 (2016), 625–44Google Scholar.

7. A pseudonym has been used in keeping with the respondent's request.

8. I quote Munna here not to suggest that the residents of Shivaji Nagar are any more resilient that those living outside, or that their bodies are impermeable to environmental, social, and political intrusions, but to underline the tentative nature of an aspiration to futurity: any contestation that the residents are involved in through their refusal to wither away comes, paradoxically, with severely punitive and life-diminishing consequences. See Catherine's Fennell's argument about how in addition to the violence of poverty, sympathy and resilience perform an additional violence in assuming that “dogged resilience” somehow minimizes the precarity of vulnerable populations. Fennell, Catherine, “The Museum of Resilience: Raising a Sympathetic Public in Post-Welfare Chicago,” Cultural Anthropology 27 (2012): 641–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Elizabeth Roberts’ argument about the violence of entanglement in the face of toxic living conditions. Roberts, Elizabeth F. S., “What Gets Inside: Violent Entanglements and Toxic Boundaries in Mexico City,” Cultural Anthropology 32 (2017): 592–619CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9. A pseudonym has been used in keeping with the respondent's request.

10. The Deonar Municipal Slaughterhouse is popularly called the katalkhānā.

11. Dossal, Mariam, Imperial Designs and Indian Realities: The Planning of Bombay City, 1845–1875 (Bombay, 1995), 1Google Scholar.

12. One of the city's Eastern suburbs.

13. 1 lakh equals 100,000. 1 US$ equals 71.23 Indian Rupees (INR).

14. Kutchra is the word for garbage in Hindi and Marathi, and was the term the British colonial officials used to denote garbage, and city sweepings.

15. 1 crore equals 10,000,000. This was a massive project funded by the municipal corporation of the city.

16. Chandavarkar, Rajnarayan, The origins of industrial capitalism in India: business strategies and the working classes in Bombay, 1900–1940, (Cambridge and New York; 1994)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hansen, Thomas Blom, Wages of violence: naming and identity in postcolonial Bombay (Princeton, 2001)Google Scholar.

17. This statistic is an unofficial estimate that is widely accepted by academics. The official estimate of the population varies from department to department: the Mumbai Police, the Municipal Corporation's Health Department, and the Solid Waste Management Department provide different (and much lower) estimates of the population. The variation is based on what each department considers to be the boundaries of the Shivaji Nagar.

18. While the average family income in the neighborhood is INR 7,800 (≈ US$ 109), large family sizes diminish the portion of this income available to each person. According to the 2016 Household Survey on India's Citizen Environment & Consumer Economy (ICE 360° survey), covering 61,000 households in the country, the average family income in an urban metropolitan area like Mumbai is INR 29, 690 (≈ US$ 417).

19. A pseudonym has been used in keeping with the respondent's request.

20. Rina Agarwala, “Redefining Exploitation: Self-Employed Workers’ Movements in India's Garments and Trash Collection Industries,” International Labor and Working-Class History 89 (2016), 107–30.

21. This number is a conservative estimate made by a Municipal Corporation officer.

22. INR 100 ≈ US$ 1.4.

23. Scholars have explored the relationship between precarious labor and precarious life from within particular social, political and economic conditions. See Molé, Noelle J., “Precarious subjects: Anticipating neoliberalism in northern Italy's workplace,” American Anthropologist, 112 (2010): 38–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Berlant, Lauren, Cruel optimism (Durham, NC, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Muehlebach, Andrea, “On affective labor in post-Fordist Italy,” Cultural Anthropology 26 (2011): 59–82CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Allison, Anne, Precarious Japan (Durham, NC, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

24. The term emerged in the backdrop of the loss of secure employment after the initial boost in the years after WWII in advanced capitalist societies. In that context, work came to be tied to an idea of a social contract that allowed identity and work to be interlocked, and thus intimacy and capitalism to emerge woven together in the affective fiber of “the good life.” Precarity, from this historical and geographic vantage point, was tied to the loss of a particular sense of wellbeing that very few had access to, even if only in imagination, in the first place. See Bourdieu, Pierre, “Job Insecurity is Everywhere Now,” in Acts of Resistance: Against the New Myths of Our Time, trans. Nice, Richard (Oxford, 1998)Google Scholar; Castel, Robert, From manual workers to wage laborers: Transformation of the social question, trans. Boyd, Richard. (New Brunswick, 2003)Google Scholar; Kalleberg, Arne L., “Precarious Work, Insecure Workers: Employment Relations in Transition,” American Sociological Review 74 (2009), 1–22CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ross, Andrew, Nice work if you can get it: Life and labor in precarious times (New York, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Vosko, Leah, Managing the margins: Gender, citizenship, and the international regulation of precarious employment (Oxford, 2010)Google Scholar; Pedaci, Marcello, “The flexibility trap: Temporary jobs and precarity as a disciplinary mechanism,” Working USA: The Journal of Labor and Society 13 (2010): 245–62CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

25. Critiquing Guy Standing's concept of the “precariat,” a portmanteau of precarity and proletariat, Jan Breman and Ronaldo Munck question the viability of the term as a conceptual category in the Global South. Munck also offers an expansive discussion of the genealogy of the term, revealing other prior conceptualizations such as marginality, informality, and exclusion. Standing, Guy, The precariat: The new dangerous class (London, 2011)Google Scholar; Breman, Jan, “A bogus concept?” New Left Review 84 (2013): 130–38Google Scholar; Munck, Ronaldo, “The Precariat: a view from the South,” Third World Quarterly 34 (2013): 747–62CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

26. See Butler, Judith, Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? (New York, 2009)Google Scholar; Butler, Judith, Precarious life: The powers of mourning and violence (London, 2004)Google Scholar; Povinelli, Elizabeth, Economies of Abandonment: Social Belonging and Endurance in Late Liberalism (Durham, NC, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

27. Denning, Michael, “Wageless life,” New Left Review 66 (2010): 79–97Google Scholar; Franco Barchiesi, “Precarity as capture: A conceptual reconstruction and critique of the worker-slave analogy,” UniNomade October 10 (2012). Retrieved from http://www.uninomade.org/precarity-as-capture/ on December 23, 2018); Neilson, Brett and Rossiter, Ned, “Precarity as a Political Concept;” Sarah Mosoetsa, Joel Stillerman, and Chris Tilly, “Precarious Labor, South and North: An Introduction,” International Labor and Working-Class History 89 (2016), 5–19Google Scholar.

28. While this claim is by no means a novel one (see Povinelli, Butler, and Berlant), it allows me to suggest an additional layer of precarizing that goes into the labors of failure.

29. Alexander, Catherine and Reno, Josh, eds., Economies of Recycling: The Global Transformations of Materials, Values and Social Relations (London, 2010)Google Scholar; Pellow, David Naguib, Resisting Global Toxics: Transnational Movements for Environmental Justice (Cambridge, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Clapp, Jennifer, Toxic Exports: The Transfer of Hazardous Wastes from Rich to Poor Countries (Ithaca, NY, 2001)Google Scholar; Lepawsky, Josh and McNabb, Chris, “Mapping international flows of electronic waste,” The Canadian Geographer 54 (2010): 177–95CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Fredericks, Rosalind, “Devaluing the dirty work: gendered trash work in participatory Dakar” in Economies of Recycling: The Global Transformations of Materials, Values and Social Relations, eds. Alexander, and Reno, (London, 2010), 119–42Google Scholar.

30. Kalyan Sanyal suggests that the informal sector ought not to be viewed as pre-capital but rather as actively created by capital such that it resides comfortably alongside capital. Kalyan goes on to suggest that the informal sector is extruded from capital as an “outside” while being fully embedded in market relations. Sanyal, Kalyan, Rethinking capitalist development: primitive accumulation, governmentality and post-colonial capitalism (New York, 2007)Google Scholar; Also, see Gidwani, Vinay. “Waste Matters: Informal Economies and Commodity Detritus in Delhi, India,” Asia Colloquia Papers 4 (2014)Google Scholar.

31. Appadurai, Arjun, “Introduction,” Social Research: An International Quarterly 83 (2016), xx1Google Scholar.

32. Halberstam, Jack, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham, NC, and London, 2011), 2CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

33. Sandage, Scott, Born Losers: A History of Failure in America (Cambridge, 2005), 9CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

34. Providing a trenchant critique of positive thinking, Jack Halberstam suggests “while capitalism produces some people's success through other people's failures, the ideology of positive thinking insists that success depends only upon working hard and failure is always of your own doing.” Jack Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham, NC, and London, 2011), 2. In other words, it is the work of capitalism that makes failure and success appear oppositional. Appadurai suggests that failure and success must be read as “provisional containers for one another.” Arjun Appadurai, “Introduction,” Social Research: An International Quarterly 83 (2016), xxv. Other scholars have suggested that failure and success are structurally tied, and that each is constitutive of the other. See Birla, Ritu, “Failure via Schumpeter: Market Globality, Empire, and the End(s) of Capitalism,” Social Research: An International Quarterly 83 (2016), 645–71Google Scholar. Tonkinwise, Cameron, “Failing to Sense the Future: From Design to the Proactionary Test Drive” Social Research: An International Quarterly 83 (2016), 597–624Google Scholar.

35. Sassen, Saskia, “Economic Cleansing: Failure Dressed in Fine Clothes,” Social Research: An International Quarterly 83 (2016), 673–87Google Scholar.

36. Ssorin-Chaikov, Nikolai, “Soviet Debris: Failure and the Poetics of Unfinished Construction in Northern Siberia,” Social Research: An International Quarterly 83 (2016), 689–721Google Scholar.

37. Bhide, Amita, “Colonising the Slum: Changing Trajectories of State-Market Violence in Mumbai,” Economic & Political Weekly 18 (2017), 75Google Scholar.

38. Björkman, L., Pipe Politics, Contested Waters: Embedded Infrastructures of Millennial Mumbai (Durham, NC, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

39. Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure, 23.

40. Spivak, Gayatri C., “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, eds. Grossberg, Lawrence and Nelson, Cary, (Urbana and Chicago, IL, 1988)Google Scholar.

41. A pseudonym has been used in keeping with the respondent's request.

42. These fires are categorized as surface fires, and are common in landfills which do not use “daily cover” to prevent the organic waste and oxygen in the air from interacting. Daily, a layer of dry combustion-retarding material, like soil or construction debris, is supposed to be deposited upon a day's layer of waste. This technology is meant to prevent or minimize the likelihood of inflammable methane gas–generated by decomposing organic waste – from spontaneously igniting in the presence of oxygen and heat. Temperatures in Mumbai can rise up to 35 °C (95 °F) in summer and 32 °C (89.6 °F) in winter. In Deonar, truckloads of construction debris are unloaded daily from sites the city over. Yet, the systematic layering of daily cover is not a common practice in this dump.

43. A pseudonym has been used in keeping with the respondent's request.

44. First Information Report (FIR) is a document prepared by the police in India when the first information about a possible offence is brought to the notice of the police.

45. A pseudonym has been used in keeping with the respondent's request.

46. Hansen, Wages of violence; Shaban, Abdul, Mumbai: political economy of crime and space (New Delhi, 2010)Google Scholar.

47. Engineer, Asghar Ali, “Srikrishna Commission Report: Painstaking Documentation,” Economic and Political Weekly 33 (1998): 2216Google Scholar. Since the 1992–1993 riots, the residents of Shivaji Nagar have perceived the Deonar police as co-conspirators of the Shiv Sena and Hindu nationalists.

48. Foucault, Michel, On the Government of the Living: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1979–1980 (New York, 2014), 81Google Scholar.

49. Michel Foucault, Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling: The Function of Avowal in Justice (Chicago, 2014), 17.

50. Foucault, On the Government of the Living, 93.

51. Foucault, Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling, 16.

52. Renault, Matthieu, “A Decolonizing Alethurgy: Fanon After Foucault,” in Foucault and the History of the Present, eds. Fuggle, S., Lanci, Y., and Tazzioli, M., (New York, 2015), 211Google Scholar.

53. Fanon suggests that there is a double movement through which the truth of the colonized subject became illegible. First, while the Western style confessional subject was predicated on the recognition of the subject's ability to ultimately confess their truth, in a colonial set up, the structures that recognized the capability of the colonized to speak the truth about themselves did not exist. Second, the colonized offered whatever it was that was demanded out of them.

54. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 89.

55. A pseudonym has been used in keeping with the respondent's request.

56. A pseudonym has been used in keeping with the respondent's request.

57. A type of cigarette wrapped in kendu or tendu leaves; commonly smoked in South Asia.

58. The Slum Rehabilitation Act (1995) defines as “unauthorized” or “illegal” slum settlements built after 1995. In 2009, this cutoff date was extended to January 2000.

59. Bhide, “Colonising the Slum,” 75; For an illuminating discussion on how the Shivaji Nagar slum settlements came to be considered “illegal,” see Björkman, Lisa, Pipe Politics, Contested Waters: Embedded Infrastructures of Millennial Mumbai (Durham, NC, 2015), 102–22CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

60. Bhide, “Colonising the Slum,” 75.

61. Aadhar is a twelve-digit unique identifying number issued by the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIADI), and tied to both biometric and demographic data. It is available to all residents, and not just citizens, of India. Although contested, it is now tied to several government and financial services.

62. A pseudonym has been used in keeping with the respondent's request.

63. Reputation/honor in Urdu.

64. The government of India issues Ration Cards to households that qualify to receive subsidized food grains under the Public Distribution System. These cards often serve as identity cards, especially for low-income households.

65. An honorific term used to address an elderly woman.

66. A pseudonym has been used in keeping with the respondent's request.

67. A sarong-like garment tied around the waist, traditionally worn by men.

68. Chokhandre, P., Singh, S. and Kashyap, G.C., “Prevalence, Predictors and Economic Burden of Morbidities Among Waste-Pickers of Mumbai, India: A Cross-Sectional Study,” Journal of Occupational Medicine and Toxicology 12 (2017)CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Chokhandre, P., and Kashyap, G.C., “Assessment of Psychological Well-being of Waste-pickers of Mumbai, India,” Asian Journal of Epidemiology 10 (2017), 138–43Google Scholar.

69. A pseudonym has been used in keeping with the respondent's request.

70. An honorific.

71. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, Epistemology of the Closet, (Berkeley, CA, 1990), 4Google Scholar.

72. INR 10 ≈ US$ 0.14.

73. Attendance, presence in Urdu.