8 - Plastic History, Caste and the Government of Things in Modern India

Summary

Plastic items first arrived in India in the 1940s. Nehru and others may have been dreaming of dams and nuclear power as they planned India's pathways to progress. However, over the course of the twentieth century, it was plastic – from flip-flops to kitchenware – that emerged as the accessible and affordable marker of India's everyday modern. Hygienic, durable, disposable, cheap and flexible – over the course of the twentieth century, plastic came to saturate nearly every corner of everyday life. And, by the end of the century, Indians could boast of one of the world's largest petro-plastic manufacture sectors (Edwards and Kellett, 2000, 135–39). Nevertheless, across the globe by the 1990s, plastic had lost much of its early sheen. Surveying the anthroposcenery in the twenty-first century, plastic now seems to be everywhere. Indeed at times it feels as though plastic – not people – stands as the planetary menace par excellence. Taking time off from reading scientific accounts of our oceans’ plastic ‘trash vortexes’ (or ‘plastic islands’) (McMahon, 2014), we might stumble upon the following headline from The Onion (2015): ‘Officials urge Americans to sort plastic, glass into separate oceans’. Alternatively, we might come across accounts of plastic appearing, uninvited, in the most hallowed cultural spaces. Americans now find plastic in breast milk (Williams, 2005). Germans find plastic in beer (Core, 2014). And, in India, plastic is found in cows’ stomachs (PTI, 2015). No longer a material through which to grasp a tangible modern-in-the-making, the matter of plastic is now a metonym for the end of planetary life as we know it.

Across this landscape of dread, India today stands as a global beacon of leadership for attempts to turn back the plastic tide. Since the 1990s, both state agencies and civil society organisations in India have been calling for, and enacting, bans on plastic (Soos, 2010). ‘The problem with plastic’ may today greet readers as part and parcel of an environmental common sense, hardly in need of explanation. Yet, it is precisely the self-evident nature of ‘the problem with plastic’ that invites further inquiry. This essay examines the emergence and consolidation of plastic as a problem in modern India.