In Srinagar, one name carries two fates — a Prime Minister's, and a sweeper's. This is the story of a caste-like hierarchy that Kashmir has often insisted it doesn't have.
Ask many Kashmiris whether their society has caste, and the answer will often be no — caste belongs to Hindu society, they will say, something Islam cured on arrival. Yet ask who cleans Srinagar's streets, who has done that work for generations, and whom people marry — and the answer becomes more complicated. One name appears again and again: Sheikh.
The word Sheikh carries more than one meaning in Kashmir. It can be a religious title, a social lineage, or, in another context, the name by which the Watal sanitation community is widely known. In Kashmir, that difference is often understood socially even when it is rarely discussed openly. One Sheikh became Jammu and Kashmir's most famous Prime Minister, a founding father whose portrait hangs in government buildings, whose name sits on a party that has returned to power. That Sheikh — Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah — traced his ancestry to a Kashmiri Brahmin family that had converted to Islam. The other usage refers to a community whose history is tied to occupations that Kashmir has long regarded as degrading: scavenging, leather work, broom-making and sweeping. One word, carrying radically different social meanings — and, in some cases, radically different social destinies.
The Sweeper's Sheikh
The community that does much of Srinagar's sanitation work is widely identified in academic and administrative literature as Watal, while many of its members prefer Sheikh and regard Watal, or Watul, as derogatory. University of Kashmir research identifies the community as being concentrated in Srinagar and elsewhere in Jammu and Kashmir, and describes three broad occupational branches: those involved in making winnowing trays, scavengers, and sweepers.
Strip away the euphemism and the structure has many features associated with caste: hereditary occupation, endogamy, social stigma, and a hierarchy reinforced by ideas about purity and pollution — enforced not simply by law but by the much more durable instruments of who you are allowed to marry, whose food you are allowed to share, and which work society expects you to inherit.
A note on terms: This piece uses "caste" in the sociological sense established by researchers like Dabla — a hereditary system of social ranking, occupation, and exclusion. Where the evidence is more limited or contested, it uses "caste-like" instead, to keep social practice distinct from the formal legal categories the state actually uses.
Kashmiri sociologist Bashir Ahmad Dabla mapped a hierarchy in Kashmiri Muslim society in which Syed lineages occupy the upper end, occupational groups occupy an intermediate position, and so-called service castes — including the Hanjis and Watal Sheikhs — occupy the bottom. This should be understood as Dabla's sociological classification, not as a universally accepted official caste ladder.
The community itself is not monolithic even within its stigma. University of Kashmir research identifies at least three occupational branches: the Supir Sheikh, associated with the making of winnowing trays; the tshi-nts, associated with scavenging; and the ka-sir Sheikh or Diwan Watal, associated with sweeping. It is worth naming plainly what the euphemisms obscure: not every Watal has ever swept a street, and not every Sheikh works in sanitation. But the sanitation worker has become the public image through which an entire community is often judged.
"Does a Sheikh have yellow blood? Doesn't he have red blood too?"
That line — attributed to a resident of one of Srinagar's Sheikh colonies in field research by scholars at O.P. Jindal Global University's Centre for New Economics Studies — captures something the statistics cannot: the contradiction between a society that denies caste and a community that continues to live its consequences. He was responding to a neighbor who used "Watal Colony" behind the community's back while never once saying it to their faces. It is perhaps the most honest question caste can be asked — not whether the hierarchy exists, but why anyone should be placed beneath another human being in the first place.
How a Valley That Calls Itself Casteless Built a Caste-Like Hierarchy
A common narrative about Kashmir holds that Islam's arrival dissolved the old Brahmanical order into a largely egalitarian Muslim society. That narrative does not fully survive contact with the historical record, or with a walk through Srinagar's old city.
Sufi missionaries did draw sections of Kashmir's population toward Islam, including people from socially disadvantaged communities, offering an explicitly egalitarian religious framework at a moment of political and economic upheaval. But conversion changed religious affiliation far more quickly than it changed social boundaries. Occupational communities remained identifiable, marriage boundaries survived, and occupations associated with impurity continued to carry stigma. The important historical point is therefore not that Islam simply reproduced Hindu caste unchanged — it did not. The point is that conversion did not automatically erase inherited social distinctions.
University of Kashmir sociologist Fayyaz Ahmed has a term for what happened instead: "partial Brahminization." According to Ahmed, the social codes associated with the old Brahmin elite continued to influence Kashmiri society even after large-scale conversion to Islam — jobs considered polluting under Brahmanical social norms, such as manual scavenging and skinning animals, continued to carry stigma. Ahmed also points to Kashmir's food culture, including the social status historically attached to beef, as an example of how some older cultural distinctions survived conversion.
Colonial administrators, when they arrived, did not invent every element of this hierarchy — but they classified and recorded communities through the categories available to colonial ethnography. One 19th-century British account described the Watals as descendants of Kashmir's "aboriginal" population, a classification modern researchers treat with caution: such descriptions reflected the classificatory language of colonial ethnography and should not be treated as neutral descriptions of the community's origins. Under Dogra rule, historical research records periods of severe deprivation among the Watal community, including accounts of some families consuming carrion — evidence that should be read in the context of poverty and social exclusion rather than as evidence of any inherent characteristic of the community.
One of the clearest documented examples of administrative intervention, however, is geographic. Archival evidence discussed in recent research indicates that the Dogra administration brought members of the Watal community from villages into Srinagar specifically to perform cleaning and scavenging work. Many residents of today's Sheikh colonies trace their families to villages elsewhere in the valley — Bandipora, among others — rather than to an ancestral urban population. They were brought into the city for this work. Over generations, the occupation became closely associated with the community, while the settlement remained.
The Promise That Built a Ghetto
Here the story acquires its sharpest and most uncomfortable irony — because the community's confinement to its present ghetto is not simply a colonial or Dogra-era relic. It also bears the memory of Kashmir's most celebrated political leader: Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah, the "Sher-e-Kashmir," the man whose surname the sanitation community also carries, though nothing else about their social histories converges.
Abdullah's land reforms in the 1950s — still remembered across the valley as a landmark transformation of agrarian relations — changed the distribution of agricultural land and weakened the old landlord system. But the Watal sanitation community's urban land insecurity remained unresolved. Residents interviewed by researchers say Sheikh Abdullah's government allowed Watal families to settle in areas near the old city wall and that promises were made concerning separate plots of land. What materialized instead, according to these oral histories, was temporary settlement in a cramped strip of land near Koh-i-Maran and surrounding neighbourhoods — housing without secure title and without the legal ownership residents say they understood themselves to have been promised. The evidence for the promise comes substantially from community testimony and subsequent scholarly interpretation, rather than from a single surviving government document establishing an unconditional grant of ownership — a distinction worth holding onto even as the residents' experience of broken faith remains undiminished.
The relationship can be read through the lens of patron-client politics — a structurally unequal arrangement in which access to housing and municipal employment could coexist with dependency and limited political power. That reading should not be confused with proof that Sheikh Abdullah personally designed the arrangement as a vote bank. But the underlying inequality is difficult to miss: the land reforms transformed agrarian relations across Kashmir, yet the Watal sanitation community's urban land insecurity survived them. The reform changed one hierarchy while another form of exclusion remained largely outside its reach.
Sheikh Abdullah's name adorns hospitals, universities, and a political dynasty that has returned to power in Jammu and Kashmir. The sanitation community that shares his surname remains concentrated in colonies where legal ownership of the land beneath their homes has stayed a central, unresolved question.
What the Ghetto Looks Like From Inside
Bachi Darwaza, Zahid Pora, the colonies pressed against the old city wall — these are not abstractions but specific, mapped places, dense with open drains, tangled wiring, potholed lanes, and homes assembled rather than built. A retired Srinagar Municipal Corporation sanitation worker, interviewed by journalist Nandini Sen in 2019, lived in a one-room shack with a brick-and-tarpaulin toilet built onto the side, surviving on a pension of four thousand rupees a month — not enough, he said, to cover an unpaid medical loan or arrange his daughter's wedding. His daughter, he added, carried a surgical scar from her own operation. In the marriage economy of the valley, he said, that combination — poverty and a scar, on top of the surname — meant "there are no takers for a poor man's daughter, a Sheikh's daughter, in Kashmir."
That sentence contains the entire mechanism of caste in one household: economic deprivation compounding into social exclusion, compounding back into economic deprivation, for a family that did nothing to deserve any link in the chain except being born into it.
The Wages of Cleaning a City
The economics of sanitation work in Srinagar reproduce a familiar two-tier structure. Recent reporting has put some permanent municipal sanitation workers at roughly thirty to forty thousand rupees a month, while some contractual and daily-wage workers have reported earnings as low as eleven thousand and nine to ten thousand rupees respectively. These are reported examples from specific workers and outlets, not an official Srinagar-wide pay scale — but the disparity they describe matters: contractual and daily-wage workers described in the reporting perform essential sanitation work while carrying far less employment security. One Srinagar sanitation worker, speaking to a reporter, estimated that a fifth to a quarter of the entire Kashmir valley's population belonged to the community. No census supports that figure, and it should be treated only as an individual's lived estimate of scale rather than a demographic statistic — but the claim itself speaks to a paradox: a population workers describe as enormous can remain almost invisible in public life.
India has legally prohibited manual scavenging and the hazardous cleaning of sewers and septic tanks, and government agencies have been conducting surveys and certification exercises intended to establish that the prohibited practice has ended; as of December 2024, only 249 of the country's 766 districts had uploaded certificates confirming that status, and whether Srinagar specifically has been certified could not be confirmed for this piece. What is documented, though, is this: field research published in 2024 recorded Sheikh/Watal residents in Srinagar describing the continued practice of manual scavenging, locally known as tchh paajun, which residents and researchers associated with caste, inherited occupation and the limited availability of alternatives. The law prohibits manual scavenging. Yet in the community's own colonies, residents reported that the practice had not disappeared at all.
Reservation, on paper: The former "Weak and Under-privileged Classes (Social Castes)" category has since been replaced by the broader Other Backward Classes (OBC) framework. Jammu and Kashmir now provides 8 percent OBC reservation in education and government employment, following the 2024 expansion of the OBC framework. That figure governs jobs and college seats. A separate, still-unresolved question — reservation for OBCs specifically within local bodies like panchayats and municipalities — is a different fight entirely, and one this piece returns to below.
Dignity, on Their Own Terms
What makes the Sheikh community's story more than a catalogue of grievance is the fluency and force with which its members refuse the story the valley tells about them. Interviewed by researchers, community members did not, for the most part, ask to be renamed out of the work. They asked to be respected within it.
"This isn't a dirty job. This is one's own job. If we don't clean, the whole city will stink."
— A resident of a Srinagar Sheikh colony, interviewed by CNES researchers
"The upper class wants to create a bad and humiliating image of our work, and we won't let them do it... We will be rewarded for this in hereafter, and we will be having fragrance in paradise."
— A Sheikh colony resident, on refusing to change caste classification
This is not resignation. It is a counter-theology — an explicit rejection of the idea, embedded in Kashmiri Muslim society for a century and more, that cleaning the city's filth makes a person unclean rather than indispensable. It is also, notably, closer to actual Islamic doctrine than the prejudice it answers: the Prophet Muhammad is recorded as having performed household chores himself and as having condemned, in the plainest terms, the scorning of anyone for their poverty. The Sheikh community, in insisting on the dignity of their labour, is not rejecting Islamic egalitarianism; it is challenging a form of social prejudice that has persisted within Kashmiri society.
That confidence coexists with real fear and real fatigue. A mother described her twelfth-grade daughter's shame at living in the colony, her wish to move elsewhere — met by her mother's weary, realistic counsel that changing address would not change the surname: "We are sheikhs, and it will remain so. We won't become Mir by migrating." Another resident, describing how the community absorbs the sting of the word "Watal" hurled at them, put it starkly: they feel the urge to confront it, and mostly, still, choose to "humbly keep ourselves shut."
Organizing Past the Silence
Silence, though, is no longer the community's only register. Academic fieldwork in Srinagar has documented two distinct organising efforts among Sheikh sanitation workers: a sanitation workers' union focused on wages and conditions, and the All Jammu and Kashmir Pasmanda Tabqajat Federation, which frames the struggle explicitly in the language of Pasmanda politics — the assertion of backward-caste Muslim identity that has gained ground elsewhere in South Asia. Researchers studying this organising note something politically inconvenient for Kashmir's dominant narrative: it complicates the image of a uniformly unified Muslim population whose only political fault line runs against Delhi. There is another fault line, running through the valley's own neighbourhoods, and it has its own organisers now.
The community has also fought, and so far largely won, a battle over land. Srinagar's Smart City Project, redeveloping the historic wall around Koh-i-Maran fort, included proposals to remove Sheikh residents from the Makhdoomi Mohalla area near the old city. Residents mobilised through their mosque committees and neighbourhood networks to resist eviction, demanding proper land allocation rather than displacement, and have held the line so far. Researchers also recorded a community allegation that politically influential figures had been approached with offers of electoral support in exchange for evicting Sheikh residents from the area — an allegation that remains part of the field testimony, not an independently established fact.
Labour unrest, meanwhile, continues to surface across the valley on a rolling basis, and it is no longer confined to Srinagar. In Handwara, sanitation workers protested in June 2026, demanding regularization and a salary hike; workers there reported monthly pay of around nine thousand three hundred rupees, which they said was nowhere near enough given rising prices. In 2025, nearly three hundred daily-wage sanitation workers undertook a five-day march from Jammu to Srinagar, demanding regularization, resolution of unpaid provident fund contributions, and accident compensation for a workforce that handles the city's waste with minimal protective equipment and no safety net. And in Doda, in June 2026, sanitation workers under the Chenab Valley Safai Karamchari Union struck again, describing a struggle stretching back to 2014 — workers with years of service, some going back over a decade, still unregularized, earning around nine thousand rupees a month despite the years behind them. "We have been staging such strikes continuously since 2014," the union's Doda chairman told reporters. "At every turn, we are merely being handed a lollipop."
This is not a community waiting quietly for reform. It is a workforce that has been organising, marching, and striking for its own dignity for years — largely without the sustained attention of a Kashmiri press and public more fluent in the vocabulary of occupation than the vocabulary of caste.
A Politics With No Room for Them
The community's formal political standing remains constrained by a wider institutional vacuum. Jammu and Kashmir's local representative institutions have been without elected bodies for years: municipalities completed their terms in October–November 2023, panchayats and Block Development Councils completed their five-year terms on January 9, 2024, and the District Development Councils' own term lapsed on February 24, 2026 — leaving all three tiers of the Panchayati Raj system without a single elected representative anywhere in the Union Territory.
The holdup is a specific, named document. A dedicated Backward Classes Commission, headed by Justice (Retd.) Janak Raj Kotwal, a former judge of the J&K High Court, submitted its recommendations on reservation for Other Backward Classes in local bodies to the government in February 2025. As of August 2026, the report remains pending with the government. The State Election Commission has twice written to the government seeking a decision, with recent reporting indicating that a decision by the end of August is necessary if Panchayat and DDC elections are to proceed in October–November 2026; otherwise, the electoral exercise could be pushed to March–April 2027, once winter makes voting impossible.
The implications for the Sheikh community are larger than the mechanics of an election calendar. OBC reservation in local bodies is not simply a question of numbers reserved in panchayats and municipal wards — it determines whether a community that has historically had almost no institutional representation can translate decades of organising and street-level struggle into institutional political representation, rather than repeated, exhausting mobilisation from entirely outside the system.
There is a bitter symmetry here with the community's origin story. In the 1950s, residents say they were promised land and received a settlement without secure ownership instead. Seven decades later, they are promised political representation and remain caught inside an unresolved reservation process. The instruments have modernised. The pattern of the promise has not.
Not the Sweeper's Story
There is a version of this story that ends in tidy uplift — resilience triumphant, dignity restored, quota expanded. That would be dishonest. The more accurate ending is this: Kashmir's dominant political narrative over the past thirty-five years has often presented the valley as one people, unified by a shared experience of occupation — yet it has struggled to look directly at the fact that some of its own children have been treated as though they were born to clean up after the rest. It has denied this so thoroughly that the community forced to live the denial had to invent a gentler word for its own name just to survive daily conversation.
The subject of this piece is therefore not simply the sweeper. It is the society that has been able to keep this community invisible while insisting that caste belongs somewhere else.
The blood, as the man in Bachi Darwaza pointed out, is red. It has always been red. The hierarchy is not in the blood. It is in the system built around it.
Tags:
Ideas & Thoughts