Festivals on tired shoulders

Celebrations, like Pongal, for women sanitation workers are equal to tireless labour. While they demand tidying up public spaces, what awaits them is also a pile of domestic duties

- NIDHARSHANA RAJU

WHILE the city sleeps ahead of Pongal mornings every year, some women are already at work.

Through the night, they sweep roads, clear waste, and keep public spaces clean so that celebrations can unfold without disruption. By dawn, when most households begin their festive routines, these women are heading home. Not to rest, but to begin another shift. With no leave granted for the occasion, the end of paid labour marks the start of unpaid labour.

Festivals, meant to mark rest and renewal, pass them by as just another workday, one where absence means lost wages or sometimes, even the risk of replacement. Their labour is invisible, precisely during festivities, when cleanliness is celebrated the most.

This burden of gendered labour is a familiar truth for most women. But for women sanitation workers, it doubles down with particular cruelty. After nightlong shifts, they scrub their own homes, cook, and prepare for rituals on aching bodies and sleepless minds. The festival does not offer them joy or pause. It simply sharpens the inequality, revealing how those who clean the city are denied the dignity of rest in both their public and private worlds.