Pollution and Intimacy in a Transcendent Ethics of Care: A Case of Aged-care in India

In India, where children’s care of ageing parents is seen as practical and sacred, animated by notions of seva (selfless service), the outsourcing of elder care causes considerable concern. Meanwhile, carers’ work in old-age homes is treated as transactional, and their moral claims about this work are either overlooked or criticised. While gendered, socio-economic circumstances compel the women we discuss in this paper to care-work at an old-age home in Pune, they also understood this work as a register for the spiritual striving normally reserved for higher classes and castes. Accordingly, notions of polluting and non-polluting bodily waste inform the sense of kin-like intimacy through which they frame their labour. Attending to the institutional, spiritual, emotional and bodily registers of these carers’ work, we argue for a transcendent ethics of care, a conceptualisation that contributes to broader understandings of marginalisation and moral imagination in an ordinary ethics of care.