Showers and bums

“Cool as a cucumber and not half as green.”
From Characterisations by Bachchoo 

It is, one must admit, unusual to begin a column with an allusion to bum showers. I have written about this innovative bathroom furnishing or gadget which I first came acr

oss perhaps 20 years ago and which has replaced the universal earthenware or metal lota or the tin mug one finds in railway compartment lavatories chained to the wall like a potentially fugitive pet. On the occasion of that first written observation I simply praised the innovation and noted that my grandmother, in the most delicate prose she could muster, told me that Europeans don’t use water but paper to clean themselves and that must leave something to be desired. Apart from appreciative emails, I received one from a Japanese correspondent who insisted that the bum shower had been invented by his fellow countryman.
I didn’t bother at the time to settle the matter, important though it is to ascertain who really invented this hygienic device. The question has been revived by a friend who insists that the bum shower is a Pakistani invention. The placing of a small bet led to a cursory investigation on the Internet which, I’m afraid, yielded no conclusive result.
I had no recourse but to fall back on philosophical and historical arguments. My contention was and is that the bum shower didn’t exist before 1947, the date of the Partition of India. It is nevertheless, though it has been adopted by small proportions of the population in many countries, a sub-continental fixture or luxury. That doesn’t help us conclude as to where it was invented, by whom and why it spread so rapidly to those homes and institutions which adopted it as a replacement for the mug or plastic jug, a transition of the magnitude of the replacement of the typewriter by the computer.
The late great Bengali sage Nirad Chaudhuri argued in his (overlong) book The Continent of Circe that the climate of India had challenged and enervated all the armies, races, breeds, conquerors and colonialists which sojourned or settled here. He included the earliest known invasion which was supposedly that of Aryans from the Caucasus or Central Asia who arrived on the Indo-Gangetic plains at some period in pre-history. They interacted with the races already inhabiting the land and the amalgam of “Hinduism” came about.
This religion, or as some classifiers insist, “way of life” is steeped in prescribed rituals of purification. These include personal hygiene and part of the inheritance of this ritual is strict adherence to the rule that one washes one’s posterior with the left hand and eats with the right, keeping the polluted left one firmly in one’s lap or even, it has been known, behind one’s back.
Rudyard Kipling certainly picked up on the idea that the climate of India, the heat, the monsoon, the pests, the potential for infection and festering afflictions was a prime danger faced by the British colonisers. His century saw, as any old church graveyard’s worn and time-ravaged tombstones will testify, the death of thousands of young adventurers who had succumbed to the vagaries of the Indian climate and the diseases that Indian flesh was heir to (or may have developed an immunity against). He advised the Wolf Pack, his allegorical representatives for the colonial British, to obey the law of the jungle: Keep together and observe certain strict rituals.
“Now this is the law of the jungle, as old and as true as the sky,
And the wolf that shall keep it may prosper, but the wolf that shall break it must die.
As the creeper that girdles the tree trunk, the law runneth forward and back; For the strength of the pack is the wolf, and the strength of the wolf is the pack.
Wash daily from nose tip to tail tip; drink deeply, but never too deep; And remember the night is for hunting and forget not the day is for sleep.”

The “wash daily” is the telling detail about the battle with the climate and it is Rudyard’s ritual prescription for the new rulers and inhabitants of India.
In my travels in Muslim countries, Iran in particular, I did note the plastic jugs, pastel-coloured pink, green and purple replicas of the sort of wine-dispenser that the characters of Omar Khayyam’s quatrains are sometimes pictured with on carpets under trees, standing on the toilet floors. No historical link exists to tell us whether the water-wash travelled West from Hindu India or whether it was a simultaneous habit of the Zoroastrian Empire that preceded the invasion by Arabs. I presume that desert Arabs treated their scarce water resources with great respect and consequently limited the use of water to very specific ablutions.
Being a devotee of the inductive and deductive methods of scientific conclusion, I didn’t even pretend that these, my philosophical arguments, had settled the question of the origins of the bum shower. My opponent began then to deploy the counter arguments.
How was it, if Indians invented the bum shower giving them some claim to being personally clean creatures, they throw garbage everywhere so it piles up in rotting heaps? How is it that only in the subcontinent and especially India the canals, creeks and streams that run through cities such as Mumbai and Bengaluru have been reduced to diseased gutters with noxious, pervasive stinks? It doesn’t happen in China, which is more densely populated in parts.
Comparing the relative stinkiness of Shanghai and Mumbai is what the Americans call a no-brainer, in other words, obvious and easy. Shanghai’s relative cleanliness is brought about by ordered entry of the rural population into the city and an imposed sense of communal responsibility once they are there.
In the absence of the diktat of state that keeps Shanghai clean, other states and nations have evolved a sense of communal responsibility which comes from their culture. Is it then true to say that monotheistic societies, Catholic, Protestant, Jewish or Muslim engender a sense of society in their very acts of worship? Does the individual pursuit of dharma or karma, the absence of a congregational relationship with a single God promote a tendency to seek individual salvation through personal, self-contained bhakti and leave society to come together — or not?