The Bunker Broom

To India's 56 million untouchables, the badge of their social inferiority is often the implement of their trade--a handleless broom made by binding together a bundle of twigs. Stooped over this broom, the lowly outcast daily sweeps India's streets and village squares, its courtyards and bedrooms. Not only does this lead to agonizing backaches, spinal curvature and a characteristic cringing posture, but also years of inhaling the clouds of dust stirred up contribute to an alarming pulmonary tuberculosis rate. Yet generations of foreign travelers, "asking why India's sweepers do not use a stand-up broom with a handle, have invariably been answered with a shrug: "It's cheaper to hire another sweeper when the old one dies than pay the few annas for a broom handle."

Fiction--& Fact. This answer did not satisfy Mrs. Harriet Bunker, wife of able U.S. Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker. Soon after arriving in New Delhi three years ago, she noticed that even when she was in another part of the embassy with the doors closed, she began coughing when an embassy servant began sweeping. She reasoned that the sweeper himself must be inhaling a lethal quantity of dust--and could not be doing a very good cleaning job besides. Grabbing a long-handled, American-made broom, the ambassador's wife showed the sweeper how to use it so that the dust, instead of flying into the air, stayed in a tidy pile. Then, discovering that such brooms were not available in India, Mrs. Bunker marched off to an Indian handicraft cooperative, displayed her broom and urged them to turn out a sample line using native materials. To push the project along, she paid much of the cost herself.

Up to this point, Harriet Bunker's activities had neatly paralleled the fictional behavior of Emma Atkins, wife of the hero of The Ugly American, who taught the natives of the imaginary Asian village of Chang 'Dong to manufacture long-handled brooms using local reeds, and for her good deed was honored with a village shrine. But Harriet Bunker's housewifely crusade received real support from high quarters.

Putting aside the cares of state, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru addressed an extraordinary letter to his chief ministers. "I am writing you about the humble broom," he began. "The normal Indian broom can be used only if one bends down to it or sits. A broom or brush with a long handle, which can be used while a person is standing, is far more effective and less tiring. All over the world these standing brooms are used. Why then do we carry on with a primitive method which is inefficient and psychologically wrong? Bending down to sweep in this way encourages subservience in mind."

And Another Thing. To get a national reform rolling, Nehru urged states and municipalities to supply long-handled brooms to their sweepers, even if the tradition-bound sweepers might in some instances object. Then he went Harriet Bunker one better: besides cleaning India's streets, untouchables must also empty India's privies, carrying away the night soil uncovered in open wheelbarrows or loosely woven baskets or pans borne, coolie-fashion, on the head. Such a practice, said Nehru, is a "disgusting sight. Every sweeper should be given a proper container with a lid."

Given the stubborn resistance of caste to the most enlightened attempts at reform, few foreigners or Indians looked for an overnight revolution. But the Calcutta Municipal Corp. promised to equip its 2,000 sweepers with the new brooms, and New Delhi's Chief Sanitary Inspector Partap Singh personally called at the U.S. embassy to borrow a sample broom to be used in inviting bids from manufacturers.

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