For most of human history, sanitation has been a matter of survival. Long before it became a question of comfort or urban planning, the way societies dealt with waste determined population growth, public health, and life expectancy. Poor drainage, open defecation, and contaminated water were central reasons epidemics spread so quickly in early settlements, from cholera outbreaks in industrial cities to recurring plagues that wiped out entire populations. The slow, uneven development of toilets, sewers, and hygiene practices is deeply tied to how civilisation moved forward — how cities expanded, how labour systems functioned, and how bodies were controlled in public space. It is not a polite history, but it is a necessary one.

This is the terrain that the Sulabh International Museum of Toilets has highlighted for decades. Located at the Sulabh campus in New Delhi, the museum is part of Sulabh International Social Service Organisation’s larger mission to address sanitation, dignity, and public health through both infrastructure and education. The museum houses an unusual but rigorous collection of toilets, sanitation systems, commodes, bidets, chamber pots, and bathing fixtures from across centuries and geographies. Its purpose has been to document how sanitation reflects social hierarchy, technological change, and shifting ideas of cleanliness and morality.

Now, a new exhibit within the museum, 'Toilet Tales: Pits to Plumbing', curated by Cultre, extends this approach by focusing closely on the social and political histories embedded in sanitation objects. Drawing from nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain, the gallery traces how access to sanitation has been shaped by gender, race, empire, and class, connecting plumbing to power in direct and often unsettling ways.

One of its section looks at women and public toilets in Victorian England. As cities industrialised, public urinals spread rapidly, largely designed for men. Women, however, were denied access to public toilets for decades. This restriction effectively confined them to private spaces, limiting how long they could remain outside the home. Historians later described this as a “urinary leash”—a bodily constraint enforced through infrastructure. Campaigns by groups such as the Ladies’ Sanitary Association eventually pushed municipalities to recognise sanitation as a gendered issue. The gallery places these struggles within a wider story of women’s entry into public life, paid labour, and urban mobility.

Another section examines soap advertising and the role it played in reinforcing racial hierarchies during the height of British imperial expansion. Late nineteenth-century advertisements often linked cleanliness to whiteness, morality, and civilisation, presenting soap as a tool that could supposedly “improve” colonised bodies. Brands like Pears used visual narratives that equated hygiene with racial superiority, turning everyday bathing into an ideological act. By placing these advertisements alongside sanitation objects, the gallery shows how ideas of hygiene were mobilised to justify domination and cultural violence under the language of reform.

The exhibition also features a rare and unexpected object: one of the earliest bathtubs installed on a train. Commissioned during the First World War for the British Royal Train, the bathtub was installed in 1915 at the request of King George V. It reflects how sanitation and comfort were selectively distributed, even in moments of national crisis. While soldiers lived in trenches with minimal hygiene, elite mobility was supported by advanced plumbing systems. Now housed in Delhi, the bathtub becomes a reminder of how infrastructure has always mirrored social rank and class.

Through its insightful curation, Toilet Tales: Pits to Plumbing brings together objects that are usually ignored or treated as curiosities and places them back into the social conditions that produced them. By tracing who had access to toilets and how ideas of hygiene were shaped by power, the gallery shows sanitation as a practical concern with clear political consequences. Located at the Sulabh International Museum of Toilets in New Delhi, the exhibition adds context to everyday fixtures and asks visitors to see it as something shaped by policy, inequality, and social control — issues that still remain unresolved today.

Follow Cultre here and learn more about the Sulabh International Toilet Museum via their website.

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